Among Cromwell's Children: The Irish and Yankee New England

University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)

Among Cromwell's Children: The Irish and Yankee New EnglandAuthor(s): Jack MorganSource: New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, Vol. 13, No. 3 (FÓMHAR / AUTUMN2009), pp. 89-107Published by: University of St. Thomas (Center for Irish Studies)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25660901 .

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Jack Morgan

Among Cromwell's Children: The Irish and Yankee New England

Despite the notorious maltreatment of the nineteenth-century Irish in New

England, Margaret Fuller wrote of them in 1845 that "They are at bottom one of

the best nations of the world. Would they were welcomed here not to work

merely... "l Two years later another New Englander, Asenath Nicholson, would

publish what Frank O'Connor called "a Protestant love song to a Catholic peo

ple," her distinguished famine account, Ireland's Welcome to the Stranger.2 Nicholson's book and Fuller's New York newspaper articles titled "The Irish

Character" exhibit a genial disposition at variance with the prevalent reaction

of New Englanders to the Irish; still, by later in the century, their attitude was no

longer unique, and later nineteenth-century decades were marked by consider

able attention to Ireland and the New World Irish in New England literature, as

well as by increasing social interaction between the immigrant Irish and the

native Yankee population, which led to changes in self-perception and Other

perception for both groups.3 Sarah Orne Jewett, for instance, would question rhetorically in the 1890s, "Who of us has made enough kindly allowance for the homesick quick-witted ambitious Irish men and women who have landed every year with such high hopes on our shores."3

Ethnicity is, of course, always also interethnicity and, as Oscar Handlin observed regarding Boston Irish Americans, "the group discovered its coherent

identity, tested its cohesiveness, and apperceived its distinguishing characteris tics only by rubbing against the ineluctable realities of existence in Boston."4

1. "The Irish Character," in Margaret Fuller's New York Journalism: A Biographical Essay and Key

Writings, ed. Catherine C. Mitchell (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), P-166. 2. Quoted in Editor's Introduction, Ireland's Welcome to the Stranger, ed. Maureen Murphy (Dublin: Lilliput, 2002), p. vii.

3. For instance, the decidely Yankee poet Wallace Stevens would ultimately be writing of the Irish

roots of the imagination in such poems as "Our Stars Come from Ireland" and "The Cliffs of

Moher,"; on the other hand, the "style" for which John F. Kennedy was so renowned would contain

more than a few Yankee elements.

4. Oscar Handlin, Boston Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 154. Perhaps suggesting the now quasi-mythic quality of the New England WASP/

NEW HIBERNIA REVIEW / IRIS EIREANNACH NUA, 13:3 (AUTUMN / FOMHAR, 2009), 89-IO7



The Irish and Yankee New England

Patrick Ford s later political radicalism, for example, was not part of his make

up when he came to Boston from Galway at eight. "I might as well have been

born in Boston," he recalled, noting "I brought nothing with me from Ireland,

nothing tangible to make me what I am."5 It was his encounters with the biases

of daily life in the nativist atmosphere of a Yankee city that brought him to an

awareness of his political situation and that of his neighbors, and ultimately, to

that of Ireland itself.6

A generation of community and regional studies has made us aware that the

story of the Irish diaspora in America does not begin and end with New Eng land. But it is true that the region tended, early on at least, to define the nature

of the interethnic relations in question. Jenny Franchot observes of the ante

bellum Catholic-Protestant conflict, for instance, that while it manifested coun

trywide, it "received its determining shape from the culture of the Northeast."7

Though New York experienced numerically greater Irish immigration, New

England has provided an especially compelling focus for Irish-American Stud

ies, as have, temporally, the years roughly 1820-1920. Boston especially presents a clearly drawn divide between Irish and Yankee populations, between Fort

Hill and Beacon Hill, as it were. The areas WASP culture, however, tends to be

looked at as almost entirely antagonistic in the popular Irish-American narra

tive?the Yankees viewed merely as the Irish bete noire?with the result that

Irish-American memory itself sometimes suffers from a lack of contextual rich

ness and from too many trips over the same confirming ground.8

Irish Catholic encounter, Myla Goldberg's recent novel Wickett's Remedy (New York: Anchor, 2005)

involves the meeting of a South Boston Irish girl and a Boston Brahmin young man in the early

twentieth century as the two groups continued to interact in an unconscious or subconscious

process of self-definition. The Yankee Henry Wickett is sickly and uncertain until he meets Lydia

Kilkenny, a vigorous Irish-American girl, who sparks his latent talents.

5. Quoted in Thomas N. Brown, "The Origins and Character of Irish-American Nationalism,"

Review of Politics, 18,3 (July, 1956), 331.

6. My own family provides an illustrative anecdote regarding interethnicity in New England. I

recall my mother one day saying good-bye to visitors to our flat, and the visitors, Americans, com

menting, as people often did, on her "wonderful Irish cooking." When they had left, she remarked

to me, "You know, its mostly not Irish cooking at all?it's New England. I learned to cook after I

came here?from your father's aunt Mary. She cooked in wealthy Yankee homes."

7. Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berke

ley: University of California Press, 1994), p. xix.

8. Assumptions and reiterations regarding the extent to which "No Irish Need Apply" signs, for

example, were prevalent in nineteenth-century New England want ads were insufficiently examined

until brought into question in recent years beginning with Richard Jensen's article, "No Irish Need

Apply: A Myth of Victimization," Journal of Social History, 36,2 (December, 2002), 405-29. The cur

rent consensus would seem to be that these signs were much less frequent than formerly thought.

90




In the course of charting this presumed interethnic enmity, Yankee conver

sation is often too intensively parsed in search of bias or bad intent. Some,

including the editor of her New York newspaper work, find even Fuller's "Irish

Character" articles?which are on the whole strikingly hospitable?conde

scending.9 And Benjamin Goluboff, for example, cites an 1852 letter from Emily Dickinson to her brother Austin?letter 72 in the Johnson edition?in which

she expresses her great excitement that the Boston railroad will soon be coming to Amherst and remarks of the Irish, at the time the blue-collar signature of rail

road expansion: "I verily believe we shall fall down and worship the first 'Son of

Erin' that comes, and the first sod he turns will be preserved as an emblem of the

struggles and victory of our heroic fathers."10 Goluboff considers this passage in

terms of whether the New England fathers are the butt of a joke referring to

their dependence on Irish labor, or are the Irish the butt of a joke for not being the heroic fathers, the real "agents of victory."11 The idea that there is no par ticular joke set forth at the expense of either group, that the light-hearted friendliness Dickinson expresses toward the Irish workers in the first part of the

compound sentence may be simple and genuine and not negatively inflected by the following part, is not entertained. Neither the Irish nor the Yankees had one

another constantly in mind, of course, nor did every Yankee utterance regard

ing the Irish involve some unsavory imputation. Protestant New England had

worries besides the Irish to consider?one of which was its own complex situ

ation, which bore upon the nature of the reception the group would afford when "relentless historic forces ... eventually swept thousands of immigrants into a startled and scarcely prepared Boston."12

The New Englander's intrepid ancestors had dared the Atlantic of the seven teenth century, had cleared the forest, and set their city, Boston, upon a hill. Their world?in which they were the apple of God's eye, the typological exten sion of the children of Israel?was highly intense and romantic, however stark.

9. See Mitchell, Margaret Fullers New York Journalism, pp. 163-64. Sarah Orne Jewett has likewise

been subjected to a strained critical demand for political and moral perfection and, her Irish sto

ries aside, has been found wanting by many critics who cite her general affirmation of middle-class

Yankee values. For a somewhat corrective discussion of this see Karen L. Kilcup and Thomas S.

Edwards, "Confronting Time and Change: Jewett, Her Contemporaries, and Her Critics" in Jewett and Her Contemporaries: Reshaping the Canon (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999),

pp. 1-27.

10. The Letters of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge: Belnap, 1965), p. 173. 11. Benjamin Goluboff, "'If Madonna Be': Emily Dickinson and Roman Catholicism," New England

Quarterly, 73,3 (September, 2000), 358-59. 12. Handlin, p. 38.

91




They had settled the Connecticut River valley, constructing well-built houses, some of which still stand, when conditions might have excused mere lean-tos.

In a few decades they had what would soon be world-class universities up and

running, a maritime industry that circled the globe, and, by the early nineteenth

century, clipper ship fleets that plied the China trade. But midcentury, concur

rent with the arrival of the Famine Irish, was marked by a diminishing Yankee

cultural conviction; it was a time of waning certitude in a weary New England Protestant world where, Thoreau asserted, a Christians prayers now all began with "Now I lay me down to sleep."13 In the same essay Thoreau compared the

retrospective, nostalgic New Englanders of 1859 unfavorably to their own ances

tors who "were a class that did something else than celebrate their forefather 's

day and eat parched corn in remembrance of that time."14 Thirty years later, and

for some decades following that, other New England literature would likewise

be reflecting, to use Van Wyck Brook's phrase, "the desolation of the Yankee

ebb-tide."15

Antebellum New Englanders believed the progress their culture represent ed "depended on a sustained rearguard action against a European past con

ceived of as contaminated by monarchism, aristocracy, and Roman Catholi

cism."16 The Irish connection to Catholicism?the two terms having become all

but interchangeable?could be exploited later as Calvinist orthodoxy continued

to erode and traditional New England Protestant culture in the Puritan line

began to appear fragile. Signs of a beginning sea change were evident in 1805 with Henry Wares election to the Hollis Divinity Professorship at Harvard, which made it clear that Unitarianism was making significant inroads at New

England's foremost university.17 The Unitarian, Methodist, Baptist, and prolif

erating independent churches later arguably represented as great a threat to the

old Congregational-Presbyterian status quo in New England as did Catholicism, if not greater; but the challenge from within Protestantism was less easy to

image and demonize, whereas a full complement of anti-Catholic values were

part of an ingrained, established Puritan tradition.18 The American Home Mis

sionary Society was formed in 1826 by Presbyterian-Congregational and Dutch

13- Henry David Thoreau "A Plea for Captain John Brown "

in Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems,

ed. Elizabeth H. Witherall (New York: Library of America, 2001), p. 402.

14. Thoreau, p. 398.

15. Van Wyck Brooks, New England Indian Summer 1865-1915 (New York: Dutton, 1940), p. 465.

16. Franchot, p. 3.

17. Colin Goodykoontz, Home Missions on the American Frontier: With Particular Reference to the

American Home Missionary Society (Calwell, Idaho: Caxton, 1939), p. 176.

18. The evangelical churches were, of course, anti-Catholic in their own right, often outdoing the

mainstream churches in that regard.

92




Reformed churches concerned with losses to newer evangelical groups, but

such societies were mainly motivated by an anti-Catholic inspiration of longer

standing.19 Irene Whelan, among many others, suggests that the conservative

New England imagination employed anti-Catholicism as a crucial element in its own self-definition. "Catholicism . . . served as an opposition against which

Protestants could muster themselves in a time of uncertainty: Catholics were

everything Protestants were not?disloyal, slovenly, untrustworthy, sexually licentious, ignorant... unworthy of participation in the public sphere."20

One reason the Yankee community felt the need to make such assertions was

a fear that the developing American frontier might lead to Catholic domination

of the Mississippi valley, an outcome the Home Mission Society and similar

organizations were determined to prevent.21 Henry Clarke Wright expressed his concern that "the enemies of free institutions in Europe are trying to over

throw the institutions of this country through the means of the Catholic reli

gion. If they get the ascendancy in the Western Valley they will rule the Coun

try."22 The perceived need for a Protestant offensive, or counteroffensive, was

perhaps heightened as well by the fact that during the Civil War years New Eng land was less than center stage in the conflict. While the region had long cher

ished the belief it would provide the template for an emerging national culture,

during the war, despite New England's abolitionist history, the president had

been from Illinois as was General Grant; Grants predecessor, McClellan, was

from Pennsylvania, and General Sherman was from Ohio. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were part of an Illinois senatorial election. The perception that an inor

dinate degree of battlefield duty had fallen to Irish and German immigrant troops may have further led New England to question whether it was measur

ing up in terms of noblesse oblige. The only iconic New England Civil War fig ure to achieve national fame or notoriety was arguably "weird John Brown" to use Melville's characterization, precisely the New England stereotype?thin, adamant, cold-blooded, and obsessed, quintessentially a loner.23

19- Goodykoontz, p. 31. 20. Irene Whelan, "Religious Rivalry and the Making of Irish-American Identity," in Making the

Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States, ed. Marion Casey and Joseph Lee (New York: New York University Press, 2006), p. 273. 21. By the 1840s Catholic schools often represented the best educational possibilities in western

cities, and some Protestant parents were therefore sending their children to these schools. One his

torian notes that "More than half the students at the College of St. Francis Xavier in Cincinnati in

1843 were of Protestant parentage." Goodykoontz, p. 362. 22. Quoted in Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: Woman s Sphere in New England 1780-1835

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 95, n. 54.

23. Colonel Shaw's fame was rather localized until recent times, though New England did have a

hero of national fame in the early months of the war?Connecticut's General Nathaniel Lyon, who

93




In the lead-up to the Civil War, Yankees were having to adjust to the drastic

cultural change from a rural-agrarian to an urban-industrial, market-based

economic system. At the same time Boston, which had been accepting fewer

than 4,000 foreigners per year prior to 1840, would be faced with an influx of

28,917, mostly Irish, in 1849 alone.24 Nor did it lessen nativist anxieties that

1849 marked as well the arrival of an historic cholera epidemic to North Amer

ica from Europe, one that ravaged eastern cities and from which one-tenth the

population of St. Louis would die.25 As the Irish began getting their bearings,

rolling up their sleeves and, with some difficulty, earning a living, the New

England upper class was arguably losing its own bearings. Caught in a com

paratively effete, un-Jacksonian circumstance, no matter how they tried to

glamorize it they were all too often engaged in managing ancestral wealth they had not themselves earned, or at least were viewed in that light. The Yankee aris

tocracy's "old money" and old New England family identity, highly respected

among their kind, ran counter to the prevailing American democratic bias that

as Werner Sollors observes, has always favored "achieved rather than ascribed

identity... "26 It worried Margaret Fuller, for example, that "by their ready ser

vice to do the hard work [the Irish] make it easier for the rest of the population to grow effeminate."27

Notwithstanding the unpromising circumstances of their arrival as well as

violent nativist offensives along the way, by the last two decades of the nine

teenth century some Irish had been accepted even into the very center of Boston

literary and artistic life?part of the cultural alteration occurring after the war

as the old Yankee hegemony began giving way. Perhaps due in part to Irish ser

vice in the Civil War, the kind of virulent anti-Catholic initiatives seen in the two

decades before the war showed signs of subsiding. The presence of Irish domes

tics in wealthy New England homes arguably helped too, over time, to dimin

ish New England high cultures sense of the Irish as strange Others. A shift in

viewpoint regarding the Irish had been evident, however, as early as the 1854 edi

tion of the widely disseminated New England schoolbook Practical System of Modern Geography by J. Olney, the 1834 edition of which characterized the Irish

as "quick of apprehension, active, brave and hospitable; but passionate, igno

was mainly responsible for preventing a Confederate seizure of Missouri. The first general to die in

action in the conflict when killed in the Battle of Wilson's Creek, he tended to be forgotten as the

war wore on. See Christopher Phillip Lyon, Damned Yankee: The Life of General Nathaniel Lyon

(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990).

24. Handlin, pp. 51-52.

25. St. Louis Genealogical Society Quarterly, 11,3 (Fall, 1978), 67-68.

26. Werner Solors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1986), p. 37.

27. Fuller, p. 166.

94




rant, vain and superstitious."28 While this gives with one hand and takes away with the other, for a document of the 1830s, it is fairly generous. A significant

suggestion that the image of the Irish in New England was improving is found

in the Modern Geography edition of 1854, which, despite the Famines having occurred in the meantime, revised the profile, eliminating the "ignorant, vain

and superstitious" slur and replacing it with the judgment that the Irish "are dis

tinguished for benevolence and politeness."29

By the 1870s John Boyle O'Reilly, the erstwhile Fenian exile who had become

editor of the Boston Pilot, had assumed a conspicuous role in the city's political and cultural life and was treated pretty much as to-the-manor-born by literary Boston: elected an honorary member of Dartmouth's Phi Beta Kappa chapter in 1881 and in 1889, and chosen in 1889 as well to write and deliver the dedica

tion poem for the Pilgrim monument at Plymouth Rock.30 He served as an

accomplished intermediary between the Irish and Yankee communities, and was

part of the Boston circle of Thomas Bailey Aldridge, editor of the Atlantic

Monthly.51 O'Reilly's commemorative Plymouth Rock poem, "The Pilgrim Fathers," celebrated the Puritan virtues enthusiastically and touched rather gen

tly on their vices, allowing that

They feared too much some sins men ought to fear:

The lordly arrogance and avarice,

And vain frivolity's besotting vice;

Impelled too far, they weighed poor nature down; They missed God's smile perhaps, to watch His frown.32

Well-received too was Louise Imogen Guiney, a convent-educated Catholic,

daughter of the Tipperary-born General Patrick Robert Guiney, and one of the

leading figures in the literary Boston of the 1880s and 1890s?a friend of Annie

Fields, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harold Frederic, and numer ous other literary notables of the period. While exceptional, such examples as

Guiney and O'Reilly cannot be viewed as "tokens," as tokenism played no part in a period or a society in which lack of diversity was a not a concern. And the trend toward successful political cooperation that they represented continued

28. J. Olney, Practical System of Modern Geography (Hartford: Robinson: 1834), p. 183. 29. Olney, Practical System (New York: Pratt, 1854), p. 185.

30. Thomas H. O'Connor, The Boston Irish: A Political History (Old Saybrook, CT: Konicky, 1995),

p. 136.

31. Less prominent, but still a member of that circle, was the Irish-American journalist and poet Katherine Conway (1853-1927), who for a few years was editor of the Boston Pilot, having first been

brought aboard by O'Reilly. Aldridge himself yielded to nativist anger later in life, however, after

being mugged in New York. He authored the anti-immigration poem "Unguarded Gates" in 1895. 32. James Jeffrey Roche, John Boyle O'Reilly: His Life, Poems and Speeches (New York: Cassell, 1891),

p. 403.

95




and grew. O'Reillys close friend Patrick C. Collins was elected major of Boston

in 1901 and 1903, for example, with support from Yankees as well as from the

Irish.

When Guiney was nominated and then elected postmistress in the Boston

suburb of Auburndale in 1895, however, she came across a less hospitable stra

ta of society than the patrician one she had known in Boston and Cambridge. She had been delighted with her postal assignment as it would give her a steady income of $1,200 a year and permit her time for her literary work. But the res

idents of Auburndale began boycotting her office, at least to the extent of not

buying stamps. The support for her candidacy had been from liberal Boston

newspapers and from public figures who respected her literary talents and her

father's Civil War career. Many in Auburndale, in contrast, were members of the

American Protective Association, founded in the Midwest in 1887, and were

decidedly unhappy with an Irish Catholic in the postmaster position. Stamp revenues soon dipped markedly, so much so that Guiney's pay had to be cut. She

was experiencing what the Boston Pilot once called "the icicles of Yankee land," which could often be worse outside Boston itself.33 In a letter to an Irish friend, she noted that "Auburndale is a town populated with retired missionaries, and

bigots of small intellectual caliber." To another friend she wrote, "Folk at large hereabouts are not especially friendly."34

Guiney's friends launched a countermovement and began to make a point of

buying all their stamps from the Auburndale office, and, as word spread of the

treatment she was receiving, outrage mounted. Oliver Wendell Holmes, T. W.

Higginson, Annie Fields, and Sarah Orne Jewett supported and encouraged her.35 The MIT professor Arlo Bates came to Guiney's defense, writing that she

was "being hounded out of her means of livelihood by a company of narrow

minded and violent fanatics, simply on account of her faith."36 Guiney survived

in her position, though the battle permanently affected her health.37 Sarah Orne

Jewett later got her a job in the Boston Public Library, but Guiney stayed there

only briefly before departing for England in 1901, drawn by her love of seven

teenth-century British poetry and perhaps as well by the remarkable interest in

Roman Catholicism still ongoing in the Anglican Communion.38

33- Quoted in George Potter, To the Golden Door: The Story of Ireland and the Irish in America

(Boston: Little, i960), p. 277.

34. Quoted in Patricia Fanning, "Boycott!: Louise Imogen Guiney and the American Protective

Association," Historical Journal of Massachusetts, 28 (Summer, 1999), 172.

35. Paula Blanchard, Sarah Orne Jewett: Her Life and Her Work (New York: Addison, 1994)* p- 317.

36. Quoted in Fanning, 173.

37. Both Guiney and O'Reilly seem to have suffered health problems related to their lives between

cultures in Boston?evidence of the stress involved.

38. Blanchard, pp. 317-18.

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It is hard to imagine how New England would have been able to absorb the wave

of immigration it did, had industrialization not taken hold north and south of

Boston. Even with the new mill towns flourishing, a long depression stretched

from the panic of 1873 through the 1890s. New England would not have been the most welcoming of places for the Irish in the best of times, as the area was seed

ed with Cromwell's children?Protestants descended from the sternest Puritan

tradition and reared in an atmosphere in which an ideology of determined anti

Romanism prevailed. Like many other contemporary New Englanders, Thoreau was a great admirer of the Lord Protector, and in "A Plea for Captain John Brown," for instance, can think of no more complimentary comparison to Brown

than Cromwell, whom Brown himself hero-worshipped; Joel Tyler Headly's The

Life of Oliver Cromwell was Brown's favorite book.39 Thoreau viewed Brown as

made of the sterner Cromwellian stuff the Puritan settlers were made of as

opposed to their degraded New England descendants. In an earlier essay, "Thomas Carlyle and His Works," Thoreau was even more unstinting in his

praise of Cromwell. That essay's conclusion affirmed?it would seem with the

butchery of Ireland in mind?that if Cromwell's "actions were not always what

Christianity or the truest philosophy teaches, still they never fail to impress us as

noble, and, however violent, will always be pardoned."40 As George Potter observed, given their heritage, "it would have been a coun

sel of perfection to expect that the New England Yankees, traditionally content to live among themselves without the presence of strangers, would take these

[Irish] foreigners to their breasts."41 With western expansion, however, New

England had become less special, and soon the country at large was as likely to think of Boston as the home of John L. Sullivan, born there in 1853, as of aris tocratic Peabodys and Adamses. For some decades post-war the Irish became an

increasingly significant presence in the cultural life of the nineteenth-century American Northeast; they seemed to be everywhere. Dublin-born Augustus Saint-Gauden was New England's preeminent sculptor. Irish-born E. L. Godkin founded and edited the Nation which, although published in New York, was ide

ologically as much grounded in Boston where Parkman, Lowell, and Norton, were Godkin's close advisors.42 The "father of American architecture," Louis

Sullivan, was born in Boston in 1856 of an Irish immigrant father, and Matthew

39- David S. Reynolds, John Brown Abolitionist (New York: Vintage, 2006), p. 274. 40. Thoreau, "A Plea . . .", pp. 398-99; "Thomas Carlyle and His Works," in Thoreau: Collected

Essays and Poems, p. 197.

41. Potter, p. 273.

42. Brooks, p. 115

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Brady?arguably the father of American photography?was born two years earlier in New York of Irish immigrant parents. Eugene O'Neill, born in 1886, would win a Nobel Prize for literature. James B. Connolly, a member of the first

American Olympic team, would become the preeminent writer of sea stories of

Gloucester, Massachusetts?later so acclaimed by both T. S. Eliot and Charles

Olson. Many of his stories were written, for better or worse, in what purported to be Irish dialect.43 Farther north in Maine, near Portland, John Ford was

born in 1894 of Galway-born parents, growing up to become, in the opinion of

many, the greatest of American film directors.

In the received Irish-American perception, as noted earlier, the Yankees are

often simply viewed as an historical impediment to this rise of the Irish in

America, and the "host" Yankee culture is often framed almost as if it were

without a plebian element, made up of uniformly privileged, secure individu

als from old wealth 44 This may be an inevitable oversimplification whenever an

immigrant population is considered vis-a-vis a comparatively settled and stable

ascendant one. Even Derrida, in theorizing hospitality, tends to treat host cul

tures as if they held all the cards and had not their own existential instability which would bear on their hospitality or lack of it toward the stranger at any

given time.45 The anxieties abroad in New England at midcentury as its econ

omy shifted to an urban, manufacturing paradigm, exemplify such instability. There are often many Yankee Protestants among the laborers in the documen

tary photographs of workers in stark rows in the mills of early industrial Maine,

Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. In fiction, the exploited, enfee

bled women mill workers in Melville's "The Tarturus of Maids" are local New

Englanders, not immigrants, Irish or otherwise. Sarah Orne Jewett, in "The

Gray Mills of Farley," notes the usual process whereby the New England mill's

"operatives" were at first young men and women from the nearby farms, New

England natives, followed by waves of immigrant workers?British, Irish, then

French-Canadian.46

43- "'I Know Men to Whom Everything Matters': Charles Olson in Conversation with Herbert A.

Kenny in Conversation," Olson, 1 (Spring, 1974), 26.

44. Martin Scorcese's film Gangs of New York (2002) was unusual in focusing upon lower-class anti

Irish nativism.

45. See Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality (Cultural Memory in the Present)

(Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000).

46. Jewett, p. 72. It is true, however, that mill conditions in the 1820s and 1830s when Yankee work

ers predominated were not as bad as in later decades. Early on there was an effort toward an

enlightened capitalist model, but in the 1840s new and harsher management models came to the fore

in the mills of Lowell and other cities. See, for example, David R. Kasserman, Fall River Outrage: Life,

Murder, and Justice in Early Industrial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

1986), pp. 45-46.

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The Irish, however, seem to have been the most intractable and assertive of

the newcomers and, as Guiney's postal experience suggests, nativist ire could

often be greater among the WASP middle and lower classes than among an

ascendancy who were at least likely to be more respectful of artistic merit in

people. As Derrida remarks, a foreigner who shares one's class and values may well seem less foreign to one than a fellow citizen of a different class.47 The New

England intellectual element of the mid- to late-nineteenth century was liber

alized and comparatively cosmopolitan, laced with Unitarian, Transcendental

ism Christian Science, Episcopal, Quaker, Deist, and even Buddhist influences.

However, the Calvinist core of New England culture?struck by the kind of

flame-out that would afflict the American Catholic church a century later, and

perceptibly losing adherents to aggressive evangelical Christianity?did not

welcome the further challenge of a fervent Roman Catholicism embraced by the new Irish who attended Sunday Mass in droves while attendance in traditional

Calvinist churches had long been dropping off precipitously.48 Nor was a con

version the likes of Orestes Brownson's in 1844 reassuring; this prominent New

England intellectual of Yankee Protestant roots now turned to writing prolific Catholic apologetics.

Still, as early as 1834, the most forceful Protestant support in favor of indem

nifying the Catholic church for the nativist burning of the Ursuline convent in

the Charlestown area was organized by the Massachusetts Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier and the eminent Boston Brahmin Abbott Lawrence. George Ticknor Curtis, brother of supreme court justice James R. Curtis, was an espe

cially outspoken advocate for indemnification in the Ursuline case, and it cost

him politically. The Christian Examiner, a Unitarian publication, argued the convent should be rebuilt before any further work was done on the Bunker Hill

monument already under construction. Abbot Lawrence forged and circulated an indemnification petition signed by numerous prominent Bostonians includ

ing Charles Sumner, James Russell Lowell, Charles Francis Adams, Wendell

Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison. The Rev. George Bradburn from Nan

tucket, for another, "never failed once, by word or deed, to struggle for fair play for the convent and the Catholic minority."49 The petitions were for naught in

47- Derrida, p. 133.

48. Even Presbyterians from Ulster, who might have been expected to provide a firewall against the

newer Protestant forms in America, yielded early to one or another tide of evangelical fervor.

According to Kerby Miller, by 1800 "only 15,000 adult Americans were members of Presbyterian churches, although during the preceding century twenty times that number had emigrated from Ire

land alone." Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 165.

49. Potter, pp. 306-07. See also Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Fire and Roses: the Burning of the

Charlestown Convent, 1834 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000). Lyman Beecher had

99




the end, however, as the nativists, enjoying much support among the ordinary Protestant citizenry, won the day. Indeed, Ichabod Lindsey, from Charlestown

where the terrorism had occurred, compared the arsonists to the heroes of the

Revolutionary War.50

The Irish, however, had the benefit of counterbalancing and humanizing

popular images?something the Yankees did not have to any significant degree? to set against the negative ones fostered by nativist firebrands like Lindsey and

Lyman Beecher. Romantic Celticism suggested that the Irish stemmed from a

poetic, musical race long antithetical to the philistine drift much of the rest of the

world had been caught in, and this mythopoetic notion?a trope that endures

into the present century?evoked a certain amount of good will. Thomas

Moore's ballads, the eloquence of Robert Emmett's speech from the dock, and

the romantic poetry of James Clarence Mangan, were known in New England intellectual circles after midcentury, and their popularity and effect was rein

forced when Matthew Arnolds Celtic Literature appeared in 1891. Louise Guiney was the American editor of the poems of Mangan, to which she introduced

Sarah Orne Jewett and others.51 Celticism provided a favorable backdrop for the

Irish, at least in learned Boston circles, during a time when a perhaps not unre

lated romantic Orientalism was likewise in vogue thanks to Emerson, Percival

Lowell, Henry Adams, and Ernest Fennolosa, and others.52

preached three anti-Catholic sermons in Boston the day previous to the arson, sermons addressed

to the Catholic threat in the American West. He was concerned as well with raising money for his

Lane Seminary, designed to produce missionaries to counter Catholic inroads in the western states

and territories. Schultz, pp. 164-65.

50. Ray Allen Billington notes that the lower-class population of Boston did not share the shock and

outrage at the Charlestown arson expressed by most of their political leaders. "The lower classes,

believing they had struck a decisive blow at Rome ... would willingly have repeated their destruc

tive tactics at the expense of Irish homes and Catholic churches." Ray Allen Billington, The Protes

tant Crusade 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964),

p. 76. Charlestown was a hub of anti-Catholic bigotry. Samuel F. B. Morse, an energetic conspiracy

theorist regarding Rome, was from there; his father, likewise anti-Catholic and given to cultivating

conspiracy theories, was pastor of the First Congregational Church in Charlestown. Goodykoontz,

pp. 224-25.

51. Jewett could thus put together the influence of Mangan's poetry, her closeness to the Irish

domestics in her father's and uncle's houses, and, in addition, her town's memory of an Irish hero

of the Revolutionary War period. She recalled that "the Berwick people were great patriots and were

naturally very proud of the famous Sullivans." One of the founders of Berwick, John Sullivan,

born and raised in Ireland, came to America with his wife and purchased a farm in Maine around

1740. One of his sons was a general in the Revolutionary War and later governor of New Hampshire.

Another son was governor of Massachusetts. Jewett, "The Old Town of Berwick" ed. Marion Rust,

New England Quarterly 73 (March, 2000), 122-58.

52. On Celticism as Orientalism, see Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual

History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004).

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That the sharp edge of nativist sentiment was honed more by anti

Catholic than anti-Irish hostility per se is impossible to establish clearly, given the difficulty of extricating one from the other. Hawthorne, for instance,

opposed Irish immigration but was not anti-Catholic, while Margaret Fuller

was rather the opposite. In the Imogen Guiney case, anti-Catholicism, the

APA's main cause, was the overt bone of contention as she herself suggests in a letter where she judges her "rough sailing" to be "thanks purely to my being a Catholic."53 And, at least among New England abolitionists, there was some

justification for reservations about Catholicism. Whereas Protestant churches

wrestled frankly and sometimes at great cost to their unity with the issue of

slavery, the Catholic church's stand on the issue?Daniel O'ConnelPs contrary view notwithstanding?often amounted to an apology for slavery. Not a sin

gle Catholic bishop in the pre-Civil War era spoke out on behalf of abolition; as Kevin Kenny notes, "the American hierarchy was not only opposed to abo

litionism, but openly supported the status quo on slavery."54

Though William Lloyd Garrison and Frederic Douglass were both vocal

admirers of Irish nationalist efforts, and Patrick Ford's early journalistic expe rience, for instance, was with the abolitionist press, the American Irish were

inclined to view New England abolitionism as "a Protestant moral crusade which... had anti-Catholic implications as well as anti-slavery purposes... ."55

The Irish tended even to oppose less fervid, mainstream anti-slavery projects as

well, the rhetoric of the whole anti-slavery movement being, as Kenny observes, "shot through with the language of Protestant evangelical reform, rendering it

highly suspicious to Irish immigrants."56 On the other hand, as time went on, Irish Catholics were not faced with an

absolute wall of opposition to their religion, and particularly not from New

England high culture. Through European travel New Englanders, including writers, became exposed to a stunning Catholic iconography that coupled spir ituality and the physical body?vivid, agonic crucifixions and martyrdoms for

example?which moved some of them to consider reconnoitering, however

tentatively, "the space of the Catholic sacred."57 The situation thus had some

thing in common with the Oxford Movement then underway in England. Other American Protestants were openly impressed by such actions as the work done

by the Sisters of Charity in the streets and hospital wards combating the cholera

epidemic in the period around 1849, behavior at odds with the often-advanced

53- Fanning, 172.

54. Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (London: Longman, 2000), p. 85.

55. Potter, p. 384.

56. Kenny, p. 85.

57. Franchot, p. 237.

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image of the Catholic clergy as useless, sheltered, contemplatives. In August of

that cholera year Richard Henry Dana, for example, wrote his wife, whose opin ions were nativist, that "In spite of all you say, I believe if anybody goes to heav en from Boston it will be the Sisters of Charity and the Roman Catholic

clergy."58

Hawthorne was impressed with such things as the hospitality of Catholic

churches, with their doors open all day every day to whomever should care to

enter?unlike the New England Protestant churches that stood grimly closed

most of the time.59 He developed a keen interest in Catholicism, most evident

in The Marble Faun (i860), and his daughter Rose converted and founded an

order of nuns. The Catholicism to which he was attracted tended to be a Euro

pean, cosmopolitan variety, not that of the local Irish-American parish; but still, were it to thrive, such cultivation of Catholic sympathies in New England cul

ture would represent the neutralization of a major element of anti-Irish bigotry and one less objection that might be raised to Irish immigration.60 Longfellow also had a "complicated love affair with Catholicism."61 His sympathetic attitude

shows forth in his travel book Outre-Mer (1835), his compassionate portrayal of

the Catholic Acadians in Evangeline, and his translation of The Divine Comedy.62 As Catholicism served to revitalize the religious and artistic imagination for

some New England intellectuals disenchanted with their Calvinist tradition, Irish immigration itself began to be viewed by some the way Fuller had viewed

it in the 1840s?as a potentially refreshing addition to a society whose spirits had

been lately flagging. Suggesting a potential Irish contribution to the reinvigo ration of the American experiment, Fuller observed that "We must regard [the

Irish] as a valuable element in the new race."63 Jewett referred to "the fierce ener

gy of the Celtic race in America."64 The Irish immigrant girl in her story "Where's Nora" (1898), for instance, epitomizes that fierce energy, a sense of

Irish enthusiasm for American turf. The mood of the story is spirited and opti

58. Quted in Charles E. Rosenburg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 139.

59. Gilbert P. Voigt, "Hawthorne and the Roman Catholic Church," New England Quarterly, 19,3

(September, 1946), 394-97.

60. Franchot, p. xviii, notes that one of the contributing factors to Catholicism being an increas

ing worry in New England was tourism to Catholic Europe facilitated by the new steamship travel.

61. Christoph Irmscher, Longfellow Redux (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 178.

62. Besides Hawthorne and Longfellow, Stowe, Lowell, and Dickinson may be numbered among

those who were to some degree taken with the "charismatic aesthetic" of Catholicism and who

"practiced an ambivalent strategy of partial appreciation and conversion of this aesthetic into lit

erary form." Franchot, p. 197.

63. Fuller, p. 166.

64. Jewett, The Irish Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Jack Morgan and Louis A. Renza (Carbondale:

Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), p. 8.

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mistic. Jewett's title refers to Nora's animation and the joy she takes in her new

world. Lively, bright, and enterprising, she is so consistently on the go, so much

a will-o-the-wisp, that "Where's Nora?" is a frequent query among her relatives, one of whom says of her one morning, "Tis only four o'clock. . . and that

grasshopper greenhorn can't wait for broad daylight till she'll go out and see the

whole of Americky."65 Such enthusiasm stood in contrast to the pervading New England melan

choly, which seemed to grow worse as Yankee religious conviction weakened.

Hawthorne remarked to William Dean Howells that "the apparent coldness of

the Yankees was real, that the suppression of emotion for long generations would extinguish emotion at last in the soul of New England."66 This drift

toward emotional dysfunction was enhanced by the economic transition the

culture had experienced.67 The Yankee village in Mary Wilkins Freeman's 1891

story "New England Nun" situates this quasi-institutionalized depression, con

trasting markedly with the optimism of Jewett's "Where's Nora." Whereas the

spirited Nora is surrounded by a supportive Irish community, Louisa Ellis, the

'nun" of the title, lives alone in her small inherited house and does her best to

make do. There is no religion mentioned, no church attendance or church

community. Louisa's betrothed, whom she does not finally marry, has been

away in Australia for fourteen of the fifteen years they have been engaged. Her

days are devoted to her small garden, to sewing, making tea, and the mainte nance of her cottage. Freeman, given Louisa's monastic habits, describes her

path in life in Catholic terms?she is a nun, uncloistered, prayerfully number

ing the days before her "strung together like pearls in a rosary."68 Freeman's Catholic framing may evidence the absence of a vital Protestantism in what had once been the Puritan heartland, and a subtle instance of the "complex move

ment of sympathy toward the Catholic church" among New England literary figures dating back to before the Civil War.69 Jewett's writing too, provides a

paucity of reference to traditional Protestant practice, and she includes as many priests as ministers among her characters, if not more. Her Irish priests fur

thermore, as in "Between Mass and Vespers," and "The Luck of the Bogans" are

65. Jewett, Irish Stories, pp. 94-95. 66. Brooks, p. 411.

67. Barbara Ehrenreich, for example, makes this Weberian argument regarding the psychological effects of the Protestant ethos and its mercantile connections: "Urbanization and the rise of a mar

ket based economy favored a more anxious and isolated sort of person?potentially both prone to

depression and distrustful of communal pleasures. Calvinism provided a transcendent rationale for

this shift, intensifying the isolation and practically institutionalizing depression...." Barbara Ehren

reich, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (New York: Holt, 2006), p. 147. 68. Mary Eleanor Wilkins, A New England Nun and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 33.

69. Franchot, p. 197.

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sometimes major figures. Emily Dickinson too, some years previously, had

written in a somtimes Catholicized idiom, as in the lines, "Oh Sacrament of

summer days, / Oh last communion in the haze .. ."70

It is questionable whether the Protestant New England polity ever recovered

from the witchcraft debacle of 1692; certainly, it remained the defining detail of

Yankee character for those not disposed to be fond of them. New England writ

ers themselves late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth portray a world on the wane, a played-out, joyless culture?Henry Adams brooded

about entropy, and the works of Wilkins Freeman, Edward Arlington Robinson, and the young Robert Frost are typically lonesome and brooding as well. Even

T. S. Eliot's modernist European despair may be informed by his seventeenth

century Puritan New England heritage. What he writes of the Atlantic off Cape Ann, could serve as an elegiac image of a faltered Yankee culture. The sea "toss

es up our losses, the torn seine, the shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar... "And

later in the same quartet: "Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage?"71 Edward Arlington Robinson would later write in a poem titled "New England" that "Passion is here a soilure of the wits, / we re told... / Joy shivers in the cor

ner where she knits."72

The Yankees, like the Irish, were as aware of their faults as their enemies

were, and like the Irish they could be unsparing of themselves in their own lit

erature; they were relentlessly self-critical from Hawthorne on. Thoreau's work

particularly constitutes a sustained assault on New England culture, or on what

it had become. Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867), who was justly one of the most

highly regarded American poets of his day, was a descendant of the earliest Puri

tan stock including John Eliot, the first person to print a bible in America and

the famous evangelist to the Indians. Yet Halleck s long poem "Connecticut"?

unlike John Boyle O'Reillys "The Pilgrim Fathers"?is a bitter indictment of his

forebears. In this remarkable poem, written circa 1826, Halleck describes Cotton

Mather, "New England's chaplain, and her history's father," who

... wove his forest dreams into quaint prose,

Our sires his heroes, where, in holy strife,

They treacherously war with friends and foes;

Where meek religion wears the assassin's knife,

And 'bids the desert bloom like the rose,'

70. Emily Dickinson, "These are the Day When Birds Come Back," The Complete Poems of Emily

Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little Brown, i960), p. 61.

71. TS. Eliot "Four Quartets," in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York: Harcourt, 1962), p. 130.

72. Collected Poems of Edward Arlington Robinson (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 900.

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By sprinkling earth with the blood of Indian life, And rears her altars o'er the indignant bones

Of murdered maidens, wives, and little ones.73

Even in popular doggerel, non-Yankees, including the Irish, began to have fun at

the expense of their Brahmin neighbors. A famous verse satirizing Yankee exclu

siveness describes Boston as "the home of the bean and the cod, / Where the Low

ells talk only to the Cabots, / And the Cabots talk only to God." The lines speak to more than exclusiveness; they point to an unhealthy isolation as well. The verse

was authored by John Collins Bossidy and read as part of a 1910 alumni dinner

in Boston held by an Irish Catholic bastion, Holy Cross College.74 This sense of desolate seclusion and cultural deterioration had long since

found its way into the traditional regional fiction wherein New England came

to be drawn as having lost its conviction, as emotionally dysfunctional, odd,

secretive, insular, and moribund. Such images as that of Ethan Frome, lonely

through the cold, rural Massachusetts winters would become typical. Caricature New Englanders had emerged in fiction as early as Washington Irving's comic

portrayal of the eccentric Connecticut bachelor Ichabod Crane, and in her only

slightly fictionalized memoir Transcendental Wild Oats (1873), Louisa May Alcott portrayed her likewise eccentric father, Amos Bronson Alcott, as an image of New England's destabilized patriarchy. He and his cohorts at the Fruitland commune are pathetically bent on finding a counter-cultural, vegetarian Utopia?perhaps in search of something corresponding to the intensely wrought Puritan life their grandfathers had known.75 Other latter-day New

England patriarchs in later literature were less comically and more morbidly crazy than Amos Alcott.76 And generally, daughters like Mary Baker Eddy and

Emily Dickinson late in the century merely deferred a bit to their patriarchal fathers as Louisa May Alcott had done, for love or appearances sake, and went their own way philosophically.

The close of the nineteenth century saw attempts to shore up the Yankee her

itage through such groups as the Colonial Dames and the Daughters of the American Revolution, organized in the 1890s "to restore the fading racial faith and to assert the prestige of the original stock, threatened by... immigration."77

73- American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, vol. 1, ed. John Hollander (New York: Library of

America, 1993), p. 109.

74. "John Collis Bossidy," http://en.wiliquote.org/wiki/John_Collins_Bossidy. 75. Louisa May Akott, Transcendental Wild Oats (New York: Kessinger, 2005).

76. Eugene O'Neill, for instance, who self-identified as both Irish and a New Englander, would cap ture Yankee decline and depression well in Desire Under the Elms (1924) in which Yankee patriarch Ephraim Cabot and his family disintegrate on a remote New England farm, entangled in avarice, lust, and infanticide.

77. Brooks, p. 425n.

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Some of this may be accounted for as a passing cultural paranoia, but Harvard

professor Barrett Wendell wrote in 1893?surely mindful of the burgeoning Irish

America that had grown up around him?"I feel that we Yankees are as much a

thing of the past as any race can be.... America has swept from our grasp."78

Unwed men, and especially women, caught in this ossified social tradition, sur

viving on dwindling finances in houses their grandparents had built, likewise

were defined within New England's attenuated popular image. "There was an old

maid from Cape Cod," or "there was an old man from Nantucket," became typ ical first lines for off-color limericks. The Yankee caricature became as recogniz able as the Irish one, and discerning critics have never quite succeeded in pre

venting the majestic genius of Emily Dickinson from being drawn in accord with

the popular Yankee old-maid stereotype. Classic Yankee identity is equated with a stifled, shallow propriety in E. E.

Cummings's poem on "The Cambridge Ladies who Live in Furnished Souls."

And Mary E. Wilkins [Freeman] "was only one of a number of Yankee writers

whose minds were preoccupied with the ends of things, family lines running out, forlorn old women, ramshackle dwellings, lone eccentrics."79 This view

point prevails in Frost's bleak sequence "The Hill Wife," or Robinson's "The

Dead Village." The tenor of Frost's "Ghost House" is that of much nineteenth

and early twentieth-century New England literature: "I dwell with a strangely

aching heart / In that vanished abode there far apart / On the disused and for

gotten road... ,"80 Rudyard Kipling, who lived in Vermont in the 1890s, offered

a similar, virtually Gothic picture of rural Yankee life, noting that its loneliness

and sterility would be hard to exaggerate: "The land was denuding itself of its

accustomed inhabitants_What might have become characters, powers and

attributes, perverted themselves in that desolation as cankered trees throw out

branches akimbo, and strange faiths and cruelties, born of solitude to the edge of insanity, flourished like lichen on sick bark."81 Horror and Gothic modes in

fact began to prevail; a large portion of Freeman's best tales were Gothic. H. R

Lovecraft would cast fictional north-of-Boston towns like Innsmouth and

Arkham as moldering and sinister. As a figure of New England deterioration

and xenophobic bitterness, the nativist Lovecraft, born in Rhode Island in 1890,

could be said to represent the height of the Yankee decadent period as it reached

into the twentieth century.

78. Quoted in Brooks, pp. 408,41m.

79. Brooks, p. 411.

80. Robert Frost's Poems, ed. Louis Untermeyer (New York: St Martin's, 1970), pp. 46-47

81. Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself An Autobiography, (1937; London, Hesperus, 2007), pp.

80-81.

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The Irish famine refugees and their children were on the whole less likely to

be prone to the lingering fin de siecle gloom of Lovecraft or Barrett Wendell, or

Henry Adams, or to the crisis in religious conviction that afflicted a compara

tively long settled people. "The Boston mind by the 1880s and 90s had lost its

force," wrote Van Wyck Brooks. It "was yielding, inch by inch, to the Catholic

Irish." The situation had its compensations, however; the Irish had made sig nificant contributions to the region s culture, "and the Yankees were not

ungrateful to them_It was in the nature of things that the Yankees resented

the Irish, but they resented their own impuissance more. They could present no

equal counterforce_They saw their glory vanishing before the invader."82

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82. Brooks, pp. 412-13.

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Among Cromwell's Children: The Irish and Yankee New England

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