The Divide Between Blacks and the Irish

From our archives: A St. Patrick's Day primer on how two groups of Americans who were once close parted over slavery.

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St. Patrick's Day is not usually associated with African Americans. In fact, to African Americans it has often been a reminder of the great political divide between themselves and the refugees from the Irish potato famine who came to the United States. What explains the divide between two groups that were once in very similar circumstances?

The Irish who immigrated to America in the 18th and 19th centuries were fleeing caste oppression and a system of landlordism that made the material conditions of the Irish peasant comparable to those of an American slave. The Penal Laws regulated every aspect of Irish life and established Irish Catholics as an oppressed race. Anticipating Judge Roger B. Taney's famous dictum in the Dred Scott decision, on two occasions officials with judiciary authority in Ireland declared that "the law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic."




What explains the attitude of people whose experience in Ireland and the United States one might have thought would predispose them to sympathy with all victims of slavery and racial oppression? It was not the inevitable consequence of blind historic forces, still less of biology, but of choices made among available alternatives.

In 1834 a mostly Irish mob in Philadelphia rampaged through the black district. By the time they subsided, two black people were killed and many beaten. Two churches and upwards of 20 homes were laid waste, their contents looted or destroyed. A committee appointed to investigate the riot identified as a principal cause the belief that some employers were hiring black workers over whites.

Such events were common at the time. No less a witness than Abraham Lincoln warned in 1837 that "accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times."

Black workers had traditionally been an important part of the waterfront workforce in New York, Philadelphia and other northern cities, as well as Baltimore, Charleston, New Orleans and other Southern ports. In 1850, Irish laborers in New York demanded the dismissal of a black laborer who was working alongside them.

During the strike of 1852 and again in 1855, 1862 and 1863, Irish longshoremen battled black workers who had been brought in to take their places. The underlying cause of the New York Riot of 1863, misnamed the Draft Riot, was the employment of black workers on the docks. According to one historian, in Philadelphia, as in New York, "Irish gangs not only drove blacks out of jobs, they also served as surrogate unions." There, the race riot of 1849 and the longshore strike of 1851 were simply different tactical phases of the same struggle.