“Health”
Immigration, Urban Life, and Social Reform in the Free Labor North, 1838–1860
Early in 1849, two Irish travelers, Bridget Murphy and Patrick Kennedy, landed in Boston harbor after a storm-tossed Atlantic crossing. They had met on the ship bringing them to America, and a few months after their arrival they were married. Both were fleeing the potato blight that had devastated Irish agriculture and had left millions of men, women, and children in a state of starvation. The young couple settled into a corrugated metal shack on Noddle’s Island in Boston Harbor. They had few resources, but they were willing to work hard, which meant a good deal in a country that was eager for labor. Patrick found a job as a cooper, crafting wooden barrels and Conestoga wagon wheels. Like many newly arrived Irish women, Bridget may have sewed or performed domestic work to help build a nest egg.
The Irish seeking refuge from the famine constituted the young nation’s first large-scale wave of immigration, and the Boston Irish formed the first immigrant ghetto in the United States. They coped with overcrowded and dilapidated housing, epidemics of cholera and consumption, inadequate water supplies and abundant raw sewage, and the suspicion and prejudice that New England’s more prosperous Protestant majority heaped on impoverished Catholic newcomers.
A decade after their arrival, Patrick’s skill as a cooper sustained them economically, and Bridget was pregnant with their first child. Then catastrophe struck. Shortly after his son P. J. was born in 1858, Patrick Kennedy, then in his early thirties, died, probably of cholera or consumption. In 1860, the widowed Bridget was eking out a living for herself and P. J. by running a notions shop.
Although P. J. Kennedy would eventually become the patriarch of a wealthy and powerful political clan that, two generations hence, would produce a president of the United States, his humble origins reflected the circumstances of millions of immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century. Forming a massive movement from western and northern Europe, these immigrants were pushed out of their homelands by famine, political upheaval, and economic crisis. They were drawn to the United States by the availability of land, the promise of a better life, and the high demand for labor.
That demand for labor was fueled by the growth of American cities, new technologies and western settlements, a boom in commerce and industry, and rapid increases in agricultural production. Daniel Webster, the senator from Massachusetts, declared, “It is an extraordinary era in which we live, remarkable for scientific research into the heavens, the earth, and what is beneath the earth” and its application “to the pursuits of life.” But the economic and technological transformations that Webster exulted required a radical reorganization of the relations between labor and capital. A smaller and smaller percentage of people were able to rise from common laborers to skilled artisans to master craftsmen, or from agricultural workers to land owners. Instead, more and more American workers, whether immigrant or native-born, spent their lives earning a wage.
The term “free labor” was used in this period to distinguish workers in the North from the brutalities of legalized slave labor in the South. Still, free laborers were no longer independent in the sense that Thomas Jefferson or even Alexander Hamilton had intended when the nation was new. Free labor still included independent farmers, shopkeepers, and artisans, but also growing numbers of people who contracted with employers to work for wages. In prosperous times, such as the late 1840s, jobs were relatively plentiful and wages generally sufficient to support a family. But in periods of economic crisis, such as the depressions that hit in the 1830s and the 1850s, unemployment skyrocketed, wages plummeted, workers struggled to survive, and once-affluent businessmen went bankrupt. Some merchants, industrialists, professionals, and commercial farmers, however, were able to turn depressions to their advantage, buying land, labor, and goods at low prices, then consolidating their capital until good times returned. Such shrewd business deals spawned a widening gap between rich and poor in American society, a gap that was exacerbated by the massive influx of impoverished immigrants.
Immigration transformed the meaning of race as well as class in the United States. Some native-born white Protestants viewed Irish Catholics in particular as racially inferior and religiously threatening. Lumping them together with African Americans at the bottom of the social hierarchy and suspicious of their loyalty to the Catholic Church and the Pope in Rome, they forged nativist societies to defend the white, Protestant world they valued. Some employers took similar measures. Relegated to the least skilled jobs and the least desirable neighborhoods, many Irish immigrants found themselves in fierce competition with African Americans.
The growth of cities and industry, the periodic upheavals created by financial panics, and the development of immigrant and poor communities challenged old values and ways of life. For many Americans, the transformations of the 1830s and 1840s fostered a moral crisis. The North was characterized not only by changes in the relations between workers and employers, blacks and whites, and native-born and immigrant residents, but also by increases in poverty and crime; resistance to religious and familial authority; and the spread of prostitution, alcohol use, and disease.
Many Americans, including some moved by the spiritual revivals of the Second Great Awakening and members of the growing middle class, believed that these social ills had to be addressed and joined charitable and missionary efforts. By the 1840s, smaller groups of Americans advocated more dramatic changes in society, such as land reform, utopian communities, racial equality, and the rights of workers and women. These movements for social change brought new groups of Americans into the public sphere and reshaped the meaning and structure of politics.
Additional Readings
For more on the changes experienced by northern working people in the antebellum decades, see Hal S. Barron, Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England (1984); Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860 (1990); David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (1984); Paul Johnson, Sam Patch: The Famous Jumper (2003); Bruce Laurie, The Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (1980); Steven J. Ross, Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788–1890 (1985); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (1991); Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1917-1862 (1996); Peter Way, Common Labor: Workers and the Digging of North American Canals, 1780-1860 (1993) and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (1984).
For more on mid-nineteenth century immigration, see Kathleen Conzen, Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836–1860: Accommodation and Community in a Frontier City (1976); Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (1983); Jay P. Dolan, The Immigrant Church: New York’s German and Irish Catholics, 1815–1865 (1975); Maurice Lee Hansen, The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860 (1961); Bruce Levine, The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War (1992); Kirby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (1985); and Gerald Rosenblum, Immigrant Workers: Their Impact on American Labor Radicalism (1973).
For more on urban life and culture, see Edwin Burroughs and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (1999); Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (1998); Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power: Street Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (1986); Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (2002); Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century American (2000); David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theatre and Culture, 1800–1850 (1968); David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861 (1998); Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (1998); David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (1998); Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (2002); Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988); Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (1992).
For more on free African Americans in the antebellum North, see William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (1986); James Oliver Horton and Lois Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (1979); Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (1961); Nell Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (1996); Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (2002); Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (1984); James B. Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (1997); and Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (1998).
For more on women’s work and reform activism, see Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth Century New York (1982); Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (1990); Ann Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism: New York and Boston, 1797-1840 (2002); Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (1977); Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (1994); Faye Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (1983); Lori D. Ginzberg, Women in Antebellum Reform (2000); Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (1998); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (1986); and Judith Wellman, The Road to Seneca Falls: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman’s Rights Convention (2004).
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.