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98 d av i d T. g l e e s o n Proving Their Loyalty to the Republic English Immigrants and the American Civil War On April 23, 1861, the members of the long-established St. George’s Society of New York City were holding their annual banquet in honor of their patron, St. George, at the St. Nicholas Hotel. The society represented the elite of their immigrant community in New York, and the distinguished guests included Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s consul and the Episcopal (Anglican) vicar of Trinity Church in Manhattan (where founding father George Washington had worshipped ). As usual, toasts were made to the day they celebrated, to Queen Victoria , and to their homeland across the Atlantic Ocean. Despite the title of the article covering this event, “The English Feeling,” this year it had more of an American tone. The Reverend Alexander Hamilton Vinton of Trinity Church gave a hint of the difference by arriving at the dinner with, “like many others, the badge of the Union” on his lapel.1 The banquet was taking place less than two weeks after the firing on Fort Sumter, and the English attendees were keen to show their loyalty to the Union in its hour of need. The normally perfunctory toast to the president of the United States was made extraordinary this time. There were “nine cheers” in response to the toast to Lincoln, “our illustrious President.” The chairman of ceremonies recognized that the president was taking “office in no times of ordinary difficulties” but added that “every American and loyal British heart will be with him in this crisis.” In response to the toast, the Reverend Vinton went further, stating that the “present contest” was a “conflict of civilizations; the one the travail of generations that had come before us, coming from England in revolutionary times, and transmitted by the ancestors of the Queen, whose image we have before us . . . transmitted again by our fathers in the constitution of the United States of America.” The division was deeper than American and English heritage, however. Vinton continued: “The Word of God had proclaimed to man that by the sweat of his brow he should eat bread; but the inauguration of the present rebellion Proving Their Loyalty to the Republic • 99 which was threatening the Union was based on the notion instigated by the Prince of Darkness, that man should not eat bread by the sweat of his own brow, but by the sweat of others.” Southerners thus had “no power to sustain their mechanical arts”; they would have “to look abroad for support and could get it only by piracy at sea and fraud on land.” Vinton concluded: “All Europe would join in the toast to President Lincoln” and oppose “secession as a demoniac idea which should be overthrown at once.” Vinton’s reply, according to the correspondent recording the meeting, was met with “immense applause,” and the band struck up “Yankee Doodle.”2 There was one discordant note, however, when a former president of the society, one Dr. Beale, while “agreeing heartily with all the sentiments of the previous speakers on the crisis,” also “condemned the introduction of political matter [to] the festive board” and noted that in “thirty years he had never heard American politics discussed at the St. George’s dinner.” Beale’s intervention caused some debate, with some supporting but others “hissing” his comments . The sitting president and the first vice president of the society attacked Beale’s negativity, pointing out that “no Englishman with his inherent love of liberty could sit tamely still and not allude to a subject so vital to their interests as American residents.”3 The situation was too serious to sit on the fence. Despite Beale’s protest, American politics had always been a part of English lives in America. The United States had defined itself in opposition to Great Britain from its founding. The attack on the early Federalists, for example, and what eventually destroyed them was their perceived closeness to Britain and British values.4 Later, during the Jacksonian period, the president for whom the era was named had entered the national scene after “killing 2,500 Englishmen” at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815. His anti-English feeling ran deep, as his Irish mother (according to his official campaign biographers) regaled him with stories of Britain’s poor treatment of Ireland, including the sufferings of his “grandfather, at the siege of Carrickfergus [County Antrim], and...

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