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. . . .”¹ Two years later another New Englander, Asenath Nicholson, would publish what Frank O’Connor called “a Protestant love song to a Catholic people,” 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 considerable 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 Irishmen 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 characteristics only by rubbing against the ineluctable realities of existence in Boston.”⁴ Patrick Ford’s later political radicalism, for example, was not part of his makeup 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 England. 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 antebellum Catholic-Protestant conflict, for instance, that while it manifested countrywide, 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 Studies, 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 area’s WASP culture, however, tends to be looked at as almost entirely antagonistic in the popular Irish-American narrative—the Yankees viewed merely as the Irish bête noire—with the result that Irish-American memory itself sometimes suffers from a lack of contextual richness and from too many trips over the same confirming ground.⁸

In the course of charting this presumed interethnic enmity, Yankee conversation 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—condescending.⁹And 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 railroad 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...