The Response to the Irish Immigrants

 

Prof. Fitzgerald’s note: in assessing how native-born Americans responded to the influx of Irish immigration, one sometimes comes across evidence in out of the way places.  Elizabeth Cady Stanton would become one of the nation’s leading women’s rights and suffrage advocates.  Her background was that of a privileged Yankee family.  In the mid-1840s, she was a somewhat unhappy housewife and mother, living in a small town in upstate New York.  In her autobiography, Eighty Years and More, she provided this commentary about the Irish immigrants.

 

 

“In Seneca Falls my life was comparatively solitary, and the change from Boston was somewhat depressing. There, all my immediate friends were reformers, I had near neighbors, a new home with all the modern con­veniences, and well-trained servants. Here our resi­dence was on the outskirts of the town, roads very often muddy and no sidewalks most of the way, Mr. Stanton was frequently from home, I had poor servants, and an increasing number of children. To keep a house and grounds in good order, purchase every article for daily use, keep the wardrobes of half a dozen human beings in proper trim, take the children to dentists, shoemakers, and different schools, or find teachers at home, altogether made sufficient work to keep one brain busy, as well as all the hands I could impress into the service. Then, too, the novelty of housekeeping had passed away, and much that was once attractive in domestic life was now irksome.  I had so many cares that the company I needed for intellectual stimulus was a trial rather than a pleasure.

 

There was quite an Irish settlement at a short distance, and continual complaints were coming to me that my boys threw stones at their pigs, cows, and the roofs of their houses. This involved constant diplomatic relations in the settlement of various difficulties, in which I was so successful that, at length, they constituted me a kind of umpire in all their own quarrels. If a drunken husband was pounding his wife, the children would run for me. Hastening to the scene of action, I would take Patrick by the collar, and, much to his surprise and shame, make him sit down and promise to behave himself. I never had one of them offer the least re­sistance, and in time they all came to regard me as one having authority. I strengthened my influ­ence by cultivating good feeling. I lent the men papers to read, and invited their children into our grounds; giving them fruit, of which we had abundance, and my children's old clothes, books, and toys. I was their physician, also-with my box of homeopathic medicines I took charge of the men, women, and chil­dren in sickness. Thus the most amicable relations were established, and, in any emergency, these poor neighbors were good friends and always ready to serve me.

 

But I found police duty rather irksome, especially when called out dark nights to prevent drunken fathers from disturbing their sleeping children, or to minister to poor mothers in the pangs of maternity. Alas! Alas! who can measure the mountains of sorrow and suffering endured in unwelcome motherhood in the abodes of ignorance, poverty, and vice, where terror-stricken women and children are the victims of strong men frenzied with passion and intoxication drink?”