Charleston's Irish labourers and their move into the Confederacy

Abstract

In 1861, thousands of recently arrived Irish immigrants marched off to battlefields like Petersburg, Sharpsburg, and Cold Harbor carrying Confederate flags and Irish banners. Most, like those from Charleston, South Carolina, were not slave holders but young, impoverished, unskilled workers. Their motives remain shrouded in mystery. Were they hapless pawns of the powerful slave-owning elite? What were they fighting for? What was it in their view of the world that brought them to the decision to join the Confederate forces? The answer is embedded in their past experiences, current social relations, and sense of identity. In part, Charleston's Irish workers brought the memory of social exclusion with them to America and struggled to write a different history on Southern soil. Their position as free, white workers in a slave society and their constructed and publicly reinforced identity as exiled patriots and dutiful sons of their new homeland influenced their actions on the eve of the Civil War. In this essay, Irish workers' motivations and sense of identity are revealed through an analysis of the toasts and charters of Charleston's Irish fraternal organisations, the doctrines of the Southern Catholic Church, and the characters and songs of the theatre.

Keywords:

• Charleston, South Carolina
• ante-bellum South
• Irish
• working class
• identity construction

Notes

 1. ‘Irish Volunteers Memorial Meeting 1878’, 24–5, in The Irish Volunteers Memorial Meeting and Military Hall Festival, October–November, 1877, Together with a Brief Sketch of the Company, 1801–1878. Charleston, South Carolina: News and Courier Book and Job Presses. On file College of Charleston Library, Charleston, SC.

 2. Clark, Hibernia America; O'Grady, Clear the Confederate Way!

 3. Fields, ‘Ideology and Race in American History’, 143–77.

 4. Roediger, Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, 186.

 5. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 82, emphasis in original.

 6. Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery; Crowson, ‘Southern Port City Politics and the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s’.

 7. Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery; Crowson, ‘Southern Port City Politics and the Know Nothing Party in the 1850s’

 8. Silver, ‘A New Look at Old South Urbanization’, 146.

 9. Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815–1877, 37.

10. Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815–1877, 35; Fraser, Charleston! Charleston!.

11. Silver, ‘Immigration and the Antebellum Southern City’, 22.

12. Silver, ‘Immigration and the Antebellum Southern City’, 22

13. Bellows, Benevolence among Slaveholders, 130.

14. Newly arrived Irish and German immigrants were the primary victims of yellow fever epidemics that hit the city in 1849, 1851, 1854, and 1858. Between August and November 1858, 645 whites died of the disease, and five out of six were newcomers. Only thirty-one blacks died during the entire three months. The 1858 epidemic may have added increased tension in the already turbulent relationship between Irish workers and blacks in the late 1850s. Self-help among poor immigrants ‘fostered a mutual awareness of the interdependence of white mechanics’, and ‘as hundreds of poor white laborers lay sick and dying, their jobs were filled by blacks, who were almost immune to yellow fever’. Johnson and Roark, Black Masters, 180.

15. Based on statistical analysis of occupations listed in the 1860 Federal Census for Ward Five in Charleston, South Carolina.

16. Bellows, Benevolence among Slaveholders, 163.

17. Gleeson, The Irish in the South, 1815–1877, 46.

18. The majority of the city's labouring male population was enslaved; many were either hired out or labouring in industrial settings. Owners of the West Point Rice Mills on the Ashley River owned 160 male slaves and the South Carolina Railroad Company owned over 100 slaves under the age of 40 and housed them in large barracks and tenements in Charleston's upper wards. Many employers hired slaves from other owners for short-term and long-term periods. Although the practice was illegal, some slaves hired themselves out, paying a portion of their wages to their owners or even hiring other slaves to do their work. For more on this pattern, see Singleton, ‘The Slave Tag’, 48; Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South.

19. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South, 222–3.

20. Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 112.

21. Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic; Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness.

22. Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, 112.

23. Silver, ‘A New Look at Old South Urbanization’, 156.

24. Quoted in ibid.; 156.

25. Quoted in ibid, 157.

26. Johnson and Roark, Black Masters, 179.

27. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis .

28. The percentage of Irish voters is unknown; however, if the numbers paralleled those in Savannah, the Irish influence would have been significant. In Savannah in 1860, ‘foreigners accounted for 51.2 percent of white adult males in the city and 48.8 percent of registered voters’ (Rousey, ‘From Whence They Came to Savannah’, 327).

29. Johnson and Roark, No Chariot Let Down, 7.

30. Rousey, ‘“Hibernian Leatherheads”’, 80.

31. Silver, ‘Immigration and the Antebellum Southern City’, 98; Silver, ‘A New Look at Old South Urbanization’, 159.

32. Moss, ‘St. Patrick's Day Celebrations and the Formation of Irish-American Identity, 1845–1875’, 130.

33. Mitchell, The History of the Hibernian Society of Charleston, South Carolina, 1799–1981, 14.

34. Charleston Daily Courier, 18 March 1858.

35. Charleston Daily Courier, 18 March 1858

36. Charleston Daily Courier, 18 March 1859.

37. Charleston Mercury, 17 March 1857.

38. Moss, ‘St. Patrick's Day Celebrations and the Formation of Irish-American Identity, 1845–1875’, 137.

39. Moss, ‘St. Patrick's Day Celebrations and the Formation of Irish-American Identity, 1845–1875’, 137

40. Moss, ‘St. Patrick's Day Celebrations and the Formation of Irish-American Identity, 1845–1875’, 137, 139.

41. Moss, ‘St. Patrick's Day Celebrations and the Formation of Irish-American Identity, 1845–1875’, 137, 136.

42. Moss, ‘St. Patrick's Day Celebrations and the Formation of Irish-American Identity, 1845–1875’, 137

43. As quoted in Moss, ‘St. Patrick's Day Celebrations and the Formation of Irish-American Identity, 1845–1875’, 137, 137.

44. Charleston Daily Courier, 17 September 1861; Madden, Catholics in South Carolina, 81.

45. Charleston Courier, 17 September 1861.

46. Charleston Daily Courier, 17 September 1861.

47. Miller, ‘A Church in Cultural Captivity’, 30.

48. Miller, ‘A Church in Cultural Captivity’, 30

49. Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland, 35; see also Arensberg, The Irish Countryman, 60ff.

50. Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland, 35.

51. King, Roman Catholic Deaths in Charleston, South Carolina, 1800–1860; Madden, Catholics in South Carolina, 64.

52. Bellows, Benevolence among Slaveholders.

53. Bellows, Benevolence among Slaveholders

54. Saunders and Rogers, ‘Bishop John England of Charleston’, 310.

55. Madden, Catholics in South Carolina.

56. Saunders and Rogers, ‘Bishop John England of Charleston’, 318.

57. Saunders and Rogers, ‘Bishop John England of Charleston’, 318

58. Saunders and Rogers, ‘Bishop John England of Charleston’, 318, 317.

59. Saunders and Rogers, ‘Bishop John England of Charleston’, 318, 318.

60. Heisser, ‘Bishop Lynch's Civil War Pamphlet on Slavery’, 686; Heisser, ‘A Few Words on the Domestic Slavery in the Confederate States of America by Bishop Patrick N. Lynch’, 66.

61. Heisser, ‘Bishop Lynch's Civil War Pamphlet on Slavery’, 686; Heisser, ‘A Few Words on the Domestic Slavery in the Confederate States of America by Bishop Patrick N. Lynch’, 66

62. Lynch was not opposed to the slave hire system, but to the fact that slave owners were allowing slaves to arrange their own hiring-out contracts. For more, see Heisser, ‘A Few Words on the Domestic Slavery in the Confederate States of America by Bishop Patrick N. Lynch’, 89, 94.

63. Lott, Love and Theft.

64. Fraser, Charleston! Charleston!; Hoole, The Ante-bellum Charleston Theatre.

65. Silver, ‘A New Look at Old South Urbanization’, 158.

66. Van Deburg, Slavery & Race in American Popular Culture, 43.

67. Lott, Love and Theft; Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness.

68. Lott, Love and Theft, 96.

69. Van Deburg, Slavery & Race in American Popular Culture.

70. Hoole, The Ante-bellum Charleston Theatre.

71. Hoole, The Ante-bellum Charleston Theatre; Robinson, ‘Dr. Irving's Reminiscences of the Charleston Stage’.

72. Lott, Love and Theft, 87.

73. Lott, Love and Theft, 80.

74. Dormon, Theater in the Ante Bellum South, 1815–1861, 247.

75. Dormon, Theater in the Ante Bellum South, 1815–1861, 247

76. Hoole, The Ante-bellum Charleston Theatre, 151.

77. January 1859; qtd in Robinson, ‘Dr. Irving's Reminiscences of the Charleston Stage’, 105–6.

78. Lived experiences alter social memories, views of identity, and thus social actions. Four years of civil war had a profound effect on Charleston's Irish, and when victorious Union soldiers marched through the streets of the city, the Irish were there to welcome them. See Gleeson, this issue, for Southern Irish views of the Civil War and Union victory.