Coarse cloth and clerical tailoring: negotiating Boston-Irish cultural imperatives in the Famine era

Abstract

Recent calls for updated approaches to the Irish-American historical experience recommend more systematic attention to complexities inherent in Irish immigration and settlement. They also seek further contextualisation of the history of the Irish in the USA within broader North American, transatlantic and global frameworks. The need to review and potentially reappraise longstanding, essentialist perspectives on Irish arrival and assimilation is equally evident. This article expands on foundational narrative histories of the Boston Irish to re-examine Famine-era settlement and contending agendas within spheres of religious affiliation and political activism. The character and evolution of Irish-American ethnic identity, and the tragic imprint of the Famine under consideration here pave the way for new readings of traditional orthodoxies. Collectively, they reveal Boston's Irish historical terrain to be more complex than the record currently suggests.

Keywords::

• Boston Irish
• Irish-American history
• Irish-American identity
• Bishop Fitzpatrick
• Irish Catholic
• Irish immigration
• Irish-American nationalism
• Irish Famine
• nineteenth-century Irish settlement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. For a broader consideration of this argument see Carroll, “Last Act in an Irish Tragedy,” also cited in Doolin, “Irish American Transnational Revolutionaries,” 26; Kelly, Ireland's Great Famine.

^2.Barrett, Irish Way, 62–3; Greene, American Immigrant Leaders; quotation, 32.

^3.Eley, Crooked Line, 183. Lawrence W. Kennedy and Brian Kelly have recently expanded on the pioneering scholarship of Thomas H. O'Connor on Boston's Irish and Catholic culture.

^4. Hall frames a need to “expose the complexities of a text or set of ideas” in “Backwards to the Future,” 181.

^5. Greene, American Immigrant Leaders, 33; O'Connor, Fitzpatrick's Boston, 33.

^6. affirmed his findings on ethnic stereotyping in Paddy and the Republic and in his “‘Celtic Exodus,’” 3–25.

^7.Hale, Christian Duty to Emigrants, 6.

^8. Still-useful directives are set out in “The Dual Construction of Ethnicity in Nineteenth-century America,” in Conzen et al., “Invention of Ethnicity,” 3–41; see 6–11 in particular.

^9.Walsh, “Boston Pilot,” 2.

^10.Kennedy, “Young Patrick A. Collins,” 38–59, 41. For additional insights, see O'Connor, Boston Irish; Ryan, Beyond the Ballot Box; O'Neill, “Transatlantic Irish,” 188–9.

^11.Shannon, “‘With Good Will Doing Service,’” 116–44. See also Burke, “Silver Key.”

^12.Lord, Sexton, and Harrington, History of the Archdiocese of Boston, 442–69; particularly, 447.

^13.Hale, Christian Duty to Emigrants, 21.

^14. The Know-Nothing movement, briefly coalescing under the American Party banner, constituted a primary political outlet for anti-Catholic and nativist expressions in the 1850s.

^15.Burke, “Silver Key,” 42. See Howes, “Discipline, Sentiment,” 140–69, on Sadlier's efforts to mainstream Irish ethnicity in post-Famine years.

^16.McCaffrey has written on these interconnections; see, in particular, his “Irish-American Politics,” 169–90, 173–4.

^17.Hale, Christian Duty to Emigrants, 9.

^18. Issues such as the organisation and distribution of Church finances, congregational attrition-rates on both parish and diocesan levels, street-level interaction between Catholics and other denominational congregants, and ecclesiastical attitudes to nationalist expressions, for example, call for further exploration. Although much progress is evident since Oscar Handlin raised these issues in a 1944 New England Quarterly review of Lord, Sexton, and Harrington's History of the Archdiocese of Boston (606–9), most of these considerations still warrant attention.

^19. “Boston Friends of Ireland,” Boston Pilot, January 3, 1846, 3.

^20.Taylor, “Squaring the Circles,” 3–23, 9.

^21. The term “Boston Brahmin” is attributed to Holmes in Elsie Venner. O'Connor, Eminent Bostonians, 111.

^22. Bishop Fitzpatrick did not merit a mention in Ellis's foundational American Catholicism, although Patrick Donohoe did (94).

^23. O'Connor, Eminent Bostonians, chapter 1 passim.

^24.Beatty, “Whose City, Whose Hill?,” 109–20; quotation, 114.

^25.Grozier, “Life and Times of John Bernard Fitzpatrick,” 30. Grozier commences with a caution that a lack of surviving personal papers prohibits extended historical engagement with Bishop Fitzpatrick's life and legacy.

^26. Ibid., 4, 14.

^27. Numerous articles appeared in the 1840s, such as “The Spirit of the Exile,” Boston Pilot, February 3, 1844, 36, and “The Irish Exiles Reply,” October 31, 1846, front page.

^28.Walsh, “Who Spoke for Boston's Irish?,” 21–36, 24.

^29.Boston Pilot, November 8, 1845.

^30. See Repeal-related articles in the Pilot, such as “Americans and Repeal,” Boston Pilot, September 18, 1845, 294.

^31. Memoranda of the Diocese of Boston, vol. 3; from August 31, 1842; entries: June 11, 16, 1847, Archdiocese of Boston, 273.

^32.Hale, Christian Duty to Emigrants, 20–1.

^33.Grozier, “Life and Times,” 11–12.

^34. O'Connor, Eminent Bostonians, 111.

^35. The Society sustained its Protestant character for some decades following the admittance of Catholic Irish members by the 1800s. For Society information, see “Presidents of the Charitable Irish Society,” 23. See also Shannon, “‘With Good Will Doing Service,’” 116–44; Lord, Sexton, and Harrington, History of the Archdiocese, 390.

^36. The provocatively-titled Jesuit, or Catholic Sentinel (given 1820s anti-Romanism) operated from 1829 to 1831, and continued as The United States Catholic Intelligencer (1831–33), and the Literary and Catholic Sentinel (1835). Handlin, Boston's Immigrants, 172–3.

^37. O'Connor, Boston Irish, 37; O'Connor, Fitzpatrick's Boston, 34; Grozier, “Life and Times,” 206.

^38. O'Connor, Eminent Bostonians, 88–9; quotation, 89.

^39.Walsh, “Who Spoke for Boston's Irish?,” 22; “A Brief History of the Boston Pilot”, http://infowanted.bc.edu/history/briefhistory/ (accessed October 3, 2012).

^40.Grozier, “Life and Times,” 46.

^41. Greene, American Immigrant Leaders, 33–4.

^42.Walsh, “Boston Pilot,” vii.

^43. Handlin, Boston's Immigrants, 173. See also Murphy, American Slavery.

^44. “Boston Friends of Ireland,” Boston Pilot, January 3, 1846, 3.

^45. Greene, American Immigrant Leaders, 34.

^46.Walsh, “Boston Pilot”; quotation, 9; 52, 57. These tenets are also cited in Walsh, “Who Spoke for Boston's Irish?,” 26.

^47. O'Connor, Fitzpatrick's Boston, 47–8, 55–8.

^48. Abbé M. Carrière, SS to Bishop Fitzpatrick, May 16, 1846, Fitzpatrick Papers, Archives, Archdiocese of Boston, 1: 24.

^49. Lord, Sexton, and Harrington, History of the Archdiocese of Boston, 418–19.

^50. “Valedictory” and D'Arcy McGee's short missive: “To the Patrons of the ‘Boston Pilot,’” Boston Pilot, October 11, 1845, 326.

^51. All covered in Fitzpatrick Papers.

^52. “What's to be Done for Ireland?,” Boston Pilot, June 12, 1847, 16 (author's emphasis).

^53. O'Connor, Fitzpatrick's Boston, 47–8, 55–8; Fitzpatrick Papers, 1840–1866, Record Group I.05.01; Calendar, 3.

^54.O'Connor, Boston Catholics, 142.

^55.Independent Irishman, Familiar Letters to John B. Fitzpatrick, 22.

^56. Handlin, Boston's Immigrants, 173–4.

^57. Lord, Sexton, and Harrington, History of the Archdiocese, 412–13; Greene, American Immigrant Leaders, 34–5; Grozier, “Life and Times,” 217–21.

^58. Unlike Donohoe, who expressed antipathy to the institution, the Pilot's new editors grew conservative on the subject of slavery, a direction that was in line with the Church's position that the slave trade must cease but the system ought to be permitted to diminish over time. For more, see Handlin, Boston's Immigrants, 173–4; Grozier, “Life and Times,” 232; O'Connor, Fitzpatrick's Boston, 91, 96. Fitzpatrick's endorsement of the bi-racial priest and later Bishop of Portland, Reverend James Healy (and two of his brothers who were also in the priesthood), and Fitzpatrick's collegial relationship with abolitionist Charles Sumner, complicate contemporary Church attitudes to race. Fitzpatrick's failure to publicly endorse abolitionism should also be mentioned. See Leonard, “Black and Irish Relations,” 64–85, particularly 79–80.

^59.Hale, Letters on Irish Emigration; 33; material published in the Boston Daily Advertiser in 1851–52.

^60.O'Connor, “Irish Votes and Yankee Cotton,” 88–99, 90.

^61.BostonPilot, June 12, 1847, 6.

^62. Record Group I.05.01; Calendar, 1840–66, Fitzpatrick Papers.

^63. O'Connor, Fitzpatrick's Boston, 197–9.

^64. Fitzpatrick to C.C. Felton, Harvard University President, n.d., Fitzpatrick Papers, Box 1.

^65. See, for example, Kelly, “Ambiguous Loyalties,” 165–204.

^66. Memoranda of the Diocese of Boston, vol. 4, November 1849; entry April 12, 1852, Archdiocese of Boston: 76.

^67.McCaffrey articulates these arguments in “Ireland and Irish America,” 1–18; see particularly 17–18.

^68.Hale, Letters on Irish Emigration, 37.

^69.Patkus argues that Fitzpatrick lessened tensions between hierarchy and congregation; see “Conflict in the Church and the City,” 53–76.

^70. Fitzpatrick to P. Murray, January 13, 1851, Fitzpatrick Papers, Box 2; 2: 57.

^71. Francis Godfrey and Committee to Bishop Fitzpatrick, Boston, December 10, 1860. “Report all control of the ‘Catholic Friends Society’ has been relinquished and given to F in accordance with F's request.” Fitzpatrick Papers, 2.4, Box 2.

^72. Memoranda of the Diocese of Boston, vol. 4, November 1849; entry January 1859, Archdiocese of Boston: 219.

^73.Grozier, “Life and Times,” 246–9; quotation, 249.

^74.Seward, “‘Exiled Irish Patriots,’” 1–7, 1–2, 7.

^75. Memoranda of the Diocese of Boston, vol. 4, November 1849; entry May 18, 1859, Archdiocese of Boston: 231.

^76. Kennedy, “Young Patrick A. Collins,” 44.

^77.Grozier, “Life and Times,” 216.

^78.Martin, “Fenian Fever,” 20–32; see 21–2 in particular. Ó Broin, Fenian Fever; Jenkins, in Irish Nationalism, discusses Church leaders, Fenians and the National Brotherhood of St Patrick.

^79. See the list of Massachusetts-based circles and association information in Proceedings of the Second National Congress, 16.

^80. Kennedy cites Know-Nothing melees in these years in “Young Patrick A. Collins,” 42–3; for more on Collins' Fenian membership, see 46.

^81. Cardinal Alexander Barnabo to Fitzpatrick, July 13, 1865, Fitzpatrick Papers, 1.6.6.

^82.Doolin, “Irish American Transnational Revolutionaries,” 36, 67, 243. Contemporary insight is useful, despite its hagiographical quality; see An Irishman, Fenian Brotherhood; Tuttle, “Fenian Campaign,” 208–14; Rossa, “Fenian Movement”; O'Leary, Recollections of Fenians; Kiernan, Ireland and America; and the Catholic University of America's Fenian Brotherhood holdings.

^83.Wilson, “Thomas D'Arcy McGee's Wexford Speech of 1865,” 9–24, 15. On the D'Arcy McGee–Donohoe dispute, see Wilson, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, 120–2, 281–2.

^84.Wilson is instructive on Canadian-Irish ambivalence towards ethnic labelling in “Rooted Horror,” 45–51; see 48–9 in particular.

^85.“Review of the Week,” 216.

^86. Handlin, Boston's Immigrants, 205–6.

^87.Bendroth, “Rum, Romanism, and Evangelism,” 627–48, 631.

^88.Manfra referenced what she called “larger, more impersonal developments” over Fitzpatrick's influence as factors in Irish Catholic advancement in the city in her review of O'Connor's Fitzpatrick's Boston, 149–50.