During the famine when many Irish were evicted from their land and country they were sent in coffin ships to America however, ,the Irish faced another major challenges in the United States - racism. Much of the same prejudices against the Irish, for their race and their religion, followed them to the New World. American politicians, fearing the Irish, marginalized them and created a political party, the Know-Nothing Party, whose major focus was anti-immigration xenophobia. This party believed that the Irish could not be trusted because of their allegiance to the Pope in Rome and because of their insular clannish tendencies to look after each other. While thousands of Irish were looking for work, many places would put up signs looking for help that read Help Wanted. No Irish Need Apply. This, coupled with the religious persecution on the part of their Protestant neighbors, made the Irish community more insular. As a new political powerhouse of Irish voters began to coalesce around the machinery of Tammany Hall, many Irishmen looked for another path to acceptance in their new country - military service. Men from Ireland looking for work often joined the U.S. Army, for income and in order to find acceptance amongst Americans. Recruiters waited outside Castle Clinton, an immigrant processing center, and offered bounties to immigrants for their service. Many potential soldiers hoped to send money back to their families in Ireland, and so signed the recruitment papers and entered military service. America of the 1840s an anti-Catholic, anti-foreigner movement called “Nativism” raged. Nowhere did it thrive more harshly than in the U.S. Army, in which Irish immigrants fleeing famine and political oppression in their homeland enlisted “to soldier” out of desperation for employment of any sort. With the combination of many Nativist officers and thousands of Irish-born and German recruits, trouble beckoned. The bloody anti-Irish Philadelphia Riots in 1844, infected many U.S. Army officers. They applied iron-fisted discipline throughout the ranks, but “the foreign-born soldier, especially if he happened to be Irish or German, automatically received a harsher sentence than a native American would for the same offense.” A dreaded punishment was “bucking and gagging,” in which a soldier was trussed and gagged for hours of joint-searing agony. In the artillery, the guilty person might be tied to the spare wheel on the back of a caisson. (Punishments for offences for the non Irish or non German recruits, were usually treated with extra duties such as digging latrines, chopping wood, or standing extra hours on guard duty ) Of those brutal practices, an immigrant soldier wrote: “The various degrading modes of punishment often inflicted by young, headstrong, and inconsiderate officers…for the most unimportant offenses, were exceeding galling to…the sons of the Green Isle.” An Irish Catholic artilleryman lamented: “If a poor devil wants to be ever so religious, it’s no use of trying it here [in the Army]. I suppose that’s what you call liberty of conscience in this blessed free republic of ours.”
Posted on: Mon, 26 May 2014 11:27:54 +0000
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