A Renegade History of the United States Read online

  to his Excellency but just

  as they were descending the

  hill to the house an Aid

  met them and informd

  them that the Genl was

  Indisposd and desird them

  to retire which they did

  with the greatest decency

  and regularity—

  Even commissioned officers in Washington’s army were known to break the new rules. A group of high-ranking officers who occupied a loyalist’s mansion in New Jersey was seen “dancing reels with some tawdry dressed females.” But when patriotic Americans danced in any way that exhibited an earthy sensuality, they did so knowing that it was against the national interest. This may account for why so many patriots danced so poorly.

  By the nineteenth century, as we have seen, some slaves expressed pity for white people’s lack of rhythm. Others were amused. There are several accounts of slaves mocking the movements of whites, such as a newspaper report on a party held by slaves near Charleston in 1772. The entertainment at the event was “men copying (or taking off) the manner of their masters, and the women those of their mistresses, and relating some highly curious anecdotes, to the inexpressible diversion of the company.” One ex-slave recalled, “Us slaves watched white folks’ parties, where the guests danced a minuet and then paraded in a grand march, with the ladies and gentlemen going different ways and then meeting again, arm in arm, and marching down the center together. Then we’d do it too, but we used to mock ’em every step. Sometimes the white folks noticed it, but they seemed to like it; I guess they thought we couldn’t dance any better.”

  6

  FROM WHITE CHIMPS TO YANKEE DOODLES: THE IRISH

  In the nineteenth century, large numbers of white-looking people who were wickedly good dancers came to America.

  First came the Irish, a notoriously funky people. Long before they arrived in America, the Irish were known as “a filthy people, wallowing in vice,” as a twelfth-century English writer put it. They “live like beasts,” “do not avoid incest,” and “have not progressed at all from the habits of pastoral living.” The poet Edmund Spenser wrote in 1596 that the Irish lived in “the most barbaric and loathy conditions of any people (I think) under heaven… . They do use all the beastly behaviour that may be, they oppress all men, they spoil as well the subject, as the enemy; they steal, they are cruel and bloody, full of revenge, and delighting in deadly execution, licentious, swearers and blasphemers, common ravishers of women, and murderers of children.” British historian Thomas Carlyle visited Ireland in 1849 and found a “drunk country fallen down to sleep in the mud.” The Irish, he wrote, were a “brawling unreasonable people,” a “human swinery,” and “a black howling Babel of superstitious savages.” Clergyman Charles Kingsley was similarly shaken by his travels in Ireland. In 1860 he wrote to his wife, “I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along that hundred miles of horrible country … to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not see it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.” Two years later, the British magazine Punch proclaimed the Irish as the “missing link” between man and simian:

  A gulf certainly, does appear to yawn between the Gorilla and the Negro. The woods and wilds of Africa do not exhibit an example of any intermediate animal. But in this, as in many other cases, philosophers go vainly searching abroad for that which they could readily find if they sought for it at home. A creature manifestly between the Gorilla and the Negro is to be met with in some of the lowest districts of London and Liverpool by adventurous explorers. It comes from Ireland, whence it has contrived to migrate; it belongs in fact to a tribe of Irish savages: the lowest species of Irish Yahoo. When conversing with its kind it talks a sort of gibberish. It is, moreover, a climbing animal, and may sometimes be seen ascending a ladder laden with a hod of bricks.

  Also in 1862, the ethnologist John Beddoe published his “Index of Negrescence,” which measured the blackness of Europeans. Scoring lowest were the industrious, restrained, and “superior” Anglo-Saxons. Those with the highest scores were the Celts of Ireland, who Beddoe described in bodily, sensual, and animalistic terms. The Celtic “[l]eg and foot [is] usually well-developed, thigh long in proportion, instep high, ankle well-shapen and of moderate size; the step is very elastic, and rather springing.” In the minds of some Americans, the Irish replaced African Americans at the bottom of the racial order. The famed diarist George Templeton Strong, for example, wrote that “the gorilla is superior to the Celtic in muscle and hardly their inferior in a moral sense.” Harper’s magazine in 1851 described the “Celtic physiognomy” as “simian-like, with protruding teeth and short upturned noses.” Similarly, the 1871 book New Physiognomy, written by the American phrenologist Samuel Roberts Wells, described the Irish woman as being governed “by the lower or animal passions,” “seeking her chief pleasure from things physical and animal,” and unable to see “beauty in that which can not be eaten or used for the gratification of the bodily appetites or passions.” She “is rude, rough, unpolished, ignorant, and brutish.” Another proponent of the theory of natural Irish inferiority was James Anthony Froude, a professor of history at Oxford University. He described the Irish country folk as “more like squalid apes than human beings.” The “wild Irish” were “unstable as water,” while the English exemplified order and self-control.

  The Irish were shiftless, too. Widely considered too stupid and lazy for skilled labor, most of the first large wave of Irish immigrants were hired to dig the canals that underlay the Industrial Revolution. Between 1827 and 1853, when Irish workers dominated the canal workforce, there were 57 strikes on U.S. and Canadian canals, as well as 93 incidents of labor rioting. Irish workers were known to sabotage equipment or even dynamite canals when they were dissatisfied with their wages or working conditions. In 1842, when Irish workers found none of the jobs that were promised them on the Welland Canal connecting Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, they took matters into their own hands. An estimated one thousand rioters looted stores, took flour from a local mill, and seized pork from a passing ship. Historians have noted that most of the strikes and rioting by early Irish American workers were spontaneous and, most importantly, outside the means of respectable, American, and “white” protest. “More than anything else,” writes the historian Noel Ignatiev, “they resembled the strikes or rebellions of plantation slaves.”

  There was also widespread reporting by employers of Irish “malingering.” One American philanthropist claimed that Irish immigrants “are content to live together in filth and disorder, and enjoy their balls and wakes and frolics without molestation.” After visiting a work camp on the Illinois & Michigan Canal, the English traveler and author James Silk Buckingham concluded that the Irish “are not merely ignorant and poor—which might be their misfortune rather than their fault—but they are drunken, dirty, indolent, and riotous, so as to be the objects of dislike and fear to all in whose neighbourhood they congregate in large numbers.” John MacTaggart, a manager of the Rideau Canal, declared the Irish incapable of becoming “useful labourers.” They were too lazy to make themselves respectable. “You cannot get the low Irish to wash their faces, even were you to lay before them ewers of crystal water and scented soap; you cannot get them to dress decently, although you supply them with ready-made clothes.” Instead “they will smoke, drink, eat murphies, brawl, box, and set the house on fire about their ears, even though you had a sentinel standing over with a fixed gun and bayonet to prevent them.”

  Most canal employers could not keep their Irish workers on the job if they did not supply them with a steady stream of alcohol. On average, Irish canal workers consumed three to four “gills” of alcohol during the workday—a total of twelve to twenty ounces. Even many Irish immigrants blamed the “poor drunken Irish” for their condition. Andrew Leary O’Brien, an Irishman trained for the priesthood who spent time working on the canals, found a great need for missionary work
on the Pennsylvania Canal: “There was plenty of liquor on the works … At night you could hear these wild Irish in their Bacchanalian revels fighting, singing, dancing, &c., all hours of the night.” This, according to the historian Kerby Miller, was due to the fact that the early Irish immigrants were simply “unaccustomed to work practices in their adopted country.”

  Most of the Irish who weren’t digging ditches were living in slums. Missionaries who went into the Five Points, the poorest neighborhood in New York City, believed the Irish there to be so degraded that they dragged down the African Americans around them. When in the presence of Irish, blacks wallowed in filth and idleness but “where the blacks were found by themselves, we generally encountered tidiness, and some sincere attempt at industry and honest self-support.” One missionary claimed, “The Negroes of the Five Points are fifty per cent in advance of the Irish as to sobriety and decency.” In 1857 a government investigating committee learned from landlords in the Five Points that “in some of the better class of houses built for the tenantry, Negroes have been preferred as occupants to Irish or German poor; the incentive of possessing comparatively decent quarters appearing to inspire the colored residents with more desire for personal cleanliness and regard for property than is impressed upon the whites of their own condition.” Given the status of African Americans in the minds of most whites, this was saying something.

  Largely in response to the great waves of hard-drinking Irish immigrants, the American temperance movement grew exponentially in the 1840s and 1850s. Temperance halls were established in every major city, and reformers marched through immigrant neighborhoods shouting at the newcomers to put down their cups. But the Irish were not ready to be good Americans. Temperance halls were set ablaze, sometimes by lone arsonists but often by volunteer Irish “fire companies.” These fire companies were often simply fronts for Irish gangs who fought with each other over control of the slums. In Philadelphia, a government investigation of the Irish fire companies reported in 1853, “There is scarcely a single case of riot brought before the courts that has not its origin in the fire companies, their members, or adherents.” A few years earlier, the United States Gazette had denounced the fire companies that “hinder the city of gains from the residence of capitalists who seek comfort and ease.” But more than just wreaking criminal mayhem, the fire companies also defended Irish immigrants from attacks by anti-immigrant gangs and from intrusions by moral reformers. Antidrink marchers were assaulted in the streets by Irish gangs who were affiliated with or aided by the companies. Asked why the Irish rioted against the temperance movement, one man fresh from a grog shop said, “in this land of liberty, they expected to do as they liked.”

  Between the 1810s and 1850s, when more than one million Irish fled poverty and famine and came to the United States, they were frequently referred to as “niggers turned inside out” or simply as “white niggers.” American observers found the cultural similarities between the two groups so strong that even blacks were sometimes called “smoked Irish.” And in 1864, a Democratic Party campaign document warned, “There is the strongest reason for believing that the first movement toward amalgamation in this country will take place between Irish and Negroes.” Indeed, the movement had already begun.

  Cohabitation with blacks began immediately upon arrival, as the Irish were forced into the poorest neighborhoods in American cities. And there is abundant evidence that cohabitation frequently turned into something more intimate. In New York City in 1834, throngs of native-born whites responded to reports of rampant interracial sex by rampaging through the Sixth Ward, attacking blacks and Irish on the streets, demolishing the St. Philip’s African Episcopal Church, and setting fire to black homes, Irish homes, and Irish taverns. A similar pattern of mixing and outrage in Philadelphia caused one missionary to complain of how common it was for an Irishwoman to be “living with some dirty Negro.” In 1847 a census taker among the African American population in Philadelphia expressed his shock at this phenomenon: “My heart is sick, my soul is horror-stricken at what my eyes behold… . The greater part of these people live in with the Irish.” A Philadelphia grand jury reported in 1853 on the great amount of mixing among Irish and African Americans in the city’s poorest district, including in one tavern and lodging house where “men and women—blacks and whites by dozens—were huddled together promiscuously, squatting or lying upon the bare floors.” In their study of black Bostonians before the Civil War, Lois Horton and James Horton found a substantial number of whites who lived in black neighborhoods or married across the color line, and that most were Irish: “The residential patterns of Boston facilitated personal contact between the poorest, most oppressed groups, increasing the likelihood of both friction and more amiable relationships among individuals.” The World, one of New York City’s major newspapers, reported in 1867 that “no spectacle in our city is more common than the sight of the lower classes of blacks and of whites living together in union, if not in miscegenation… . It is a somewhat remarkable fact that, although between an Irishman and a black man an antipathy is presumed to exist, yet between the Irish woman and the Negro there exists a decided affinity. In the majority of cases of miscegenation, the parties are black on one side and Irish on the other.”

  This commingling was most evident in the Five Points area of the Sixth Ward. According to journalist Herbert Asbury, the author of Gangs of New York, the district was occupied “for the most part, by freed Negro slaves and low-class Irish” who “crowded indiscriminately into the old rookeries of the Points.” A missionary who visited a tenement in the Five Points reported coming across an “old Sambo over his brazier of coals.” In the same room, from under:

  a long pile of rags … an Irish woman lift[ed] her tangled mop of a head … “Look here, gentlemen, look at this little codfish”; and with this she lift[ed] out from beneath the rags a diminutive mulatto child of a few weeks old, to the great delight of Sambo, who reveal[ed] all his ivory.

  According to the missionary, the fate of the black-Irish child would be to have “rum its first medicine, theft its first lesson, a prison its first house, and the Potter’s Field its final resting place.” The largest tenement in the Five Points, a building known as the “Old Brewery,” was a virtual temple of miscegenation. “During the period of its greatest renown,” writes Asbury, “the building housed more than 1,000 men, women and children, almost equally divided between Irish and Negroes.” Most of the rooms in the cellar “were occupied by Negroes, many of whom had white wives” but throughout the Old Brewery, “miscegenation was an accepted fact.” The journalist George Foster, whose New York by Gas-Light provided a first-person account of the Five Points, noted not only the frequency of black-Irish romantic relations but also that the Irish women he observed regarded black men as “desirable companions and lovers.” Once again, America’s racial renegades came from the bottom of society.

  There was some violence between blacks and Irish before the Civil War, but pleasurable activities in addition to sex appear to have been much more common. According to historian Graham Hodges, “strikingly little violence occurred between Irish and blacks” when the two groups dominated the Sixth Ward. “Even though interracial lovers, black churches, and abolitionists remained in the ward amidst an escalating Irish population, its residents did not participate in future riots against blacks … Dancing was the principal diversion during the early days of the Five Points, and scores of dance houses soon appeared on the streets surrounding Paradise Square.” The most popular dance hall in the neighborhood was owned by Pete Williams, described as a “well-to-do, coal-black Negro, who has made an immense amount of money from the profits of his dance-house.” An upper-class visitor to Williams’s dance hall was shocked to see that “several very handsome mulatto women were in the crowd, and a few ‘young men about town,’ mixed up with the blacks; and altogether it was a picture of ‘amalgamation,’ such I had never before seen.” A reporter from the New York Clipper agreed that “amalgama
tion” at the Orange Street establishment “reigned predominant, if we may judge from appearances.” The dancing at places like this was, according to middle-class reporters and missionaries in the Five Points, nearly as bad as sex. Reverend Lewis Pease of the Five Points House of Industry orphanage saw this when a band played fast:

  The spirit of the dance is fully aroused. On flies the fiddle-bow, faster and faster; on jingles tambourine ’gainst head and heels, knee and elbow, and on smash the dancers. The excitement becomes general. Every foot, leg, arm, head, lip, body, all are in motion. Sweat, swear, fiddle, dance, shout, and stamp, underground in smoke, and dust, and putrid air!

  At times, according to George Foster, the dancing was downright orgasmic:

  All observance of the figure [dance pattern] is forgotten and every one leaps, stamps, screams and hurras on his or her own hook… . The dancers, now wild with excitement … leap frantically about like howling dervishes, clasp their partners in their arms, and at length conclude the dance in hot confusion and disorder.

  Many of the men who first imitated blacks on stage were Irish American, including such minstrel stars as Dan Emmett, Dan Bryant, Joel Walker Sweeney, and E. P. Christy; and Stephen Foster, the most prominent author of minstrel songs, was the grandson of immigrants from Derry. “There were thousands of Irish and Irish American performers” of blackface minstrelsy, writes historian Mick Moloney. “The list of Irish Americans on the minstrel stage goes on and on.” To Noel Ignatiev, “it is surely no coincidence that so many of the pioneers of blackface minstrelsy were of Irish descent, for the Irish came disproportionately into contact with the people whose speech, music, and dance furnished the basis, however distorted, for the minstrel’s art.”

  It is also perhaps no coincidence that, as historian Constance Rourke puts it, “the Negro seemed to pick up the Irish musical idiom with facility.” One visitor to a black tavern in the Five Points heard a hybrid music: “In the Negro melodies you catch a strain of what has been metamorphosed from such Scotch or Irish tune, into somewhat of a chiming jiggish air.” The scholar Eric Lott has noted, “The very instrumentation of minstrel bands followed this pattern: the banjo and jawbone were black, while the fiddle, bones, and tambourine (derived perhaps from an instrument called the bodhran) were Irish.” Some of the most frequently performed minstrel songs overtly compared Irish and black experiences, such as “Tis Sad to Leabe Our Tater Land,” an ode to Ireland in mock-black dialect, “Ireland and Virginia,” and several Irish nationalist songs sung by Irishmen pretending to be slaves. Moreover, according to Lott, many minstrel skits “portrayed the Irish in terms identical to those in which they portrayed blacks.” One of the more popular minstrel songs, “The Darkey’s Lament,” was written as a parody of “The Irish Emigrant’s Lament.”