Land! Irish Pioneers in Mexican and Revolutionary Texas (review)

Graham Davis has given us an engaging look at the Irish immigrants who entered Mexican Texas to settle in the colonies of two Irish empresarios. Land, as his title suggests, drives his story. Raised in a country short of land, Irish immigrants found themselves drawn to a country of abundant real estate. They arrived in Texas, however, at an inopportune moment. Swept up in the struggle over Texas independence, they lost their homes and possessions, and many lost their lives. Nonetheless, some of the survivors went on to reach a level of prosperity in Texas that they could not have attained in Ireland.

Davis, who professes history at Bath Spa University College in England, aims to avoid the oversimplifications of earlier studies, which he characterizes as "victim history," "contribution history," or both. He tells us that Irishmen who came to the Americas prior to the great Irish famine of 1845-52 have been falsely portrayed as victims of oppression and hunger. The truly oppressed, however, lacked the energy to organize their escape and those who could not afford food could not pay for a costly trans-Atlantic voyage. They needed passage for themselves and the price of shipping furniture and farm implements. Pre-famine Irish immigrants, then, tended to come from families of prosperous small and middling farmers who were frustrated by high rents and low prices for their produce. Like the Spanish conquistadors, many were second and third sons denied access to land by the laws of primogeniture. Boosters, who portrayed Texas as a paradise on earth where labor was richly rewarded, drew them toward greener pastures. Irish immigrants were not victims, then, but calculating entrepreneurs. So, too, the Irish-born empresarios, whose success, Davis tells us in a particularly hard-headed bit of analysis, had less to do with their Irish upbringing than to the fact that they had become acculturated into Mexican society.

When war broke out in Texas in 1835, the Irish colonies of San Patricio and Refugio stood in the path of the Mexican army and were destroyed. Earlier historians have chronicled the colonists' hardships and celebrated the contributions of individual Irishmen to Texas independence. Davis takes us beyond these victim/contributor typologies. Building on the work of historian Paul Lack and others, he emphasizes the Irishmens' ambivalence. Some sided with the rebels while others sympathized with Mexican neighbors and co-religionists who remained loyal to Mexico. Like other Texans, the Irishmen also changed sides as events unfolded.

Irish immigrants to Texas, Davis suggests, built more prosperous lives than those who settled in the Eastern United States before the famine. In the tradition of Frederick Jackson Turner he attributes their upward mobility in Texas to the opportunities afforded by abundant land on a fluid frontier, but he also sees these successful Irishmen as exemplifying several characteristics of frontier life that the New Western historians have identified. For Davis, immigrants had a greater chance of success if they landed in a propitious place at a propitious moment, and a greater likelihood of failure if they did not.

Without robbing them of their humanity—their aspirations, achievements, shattered dreams, and tragic ends—Davis analyzes rather than celebrates his subjects. He concludes with the little known story of Thomas O'Connor, which he puts forth as a spectacular example of an Irishman who prospered in Texas after 1836. O'Connor, like other Irish colonists in Texas, owed some of his success to Mexicans who taught him how to raise cattle on harsh South Texas land that bore little resemblance to paradise. Davis, then, refutes the notion that Irish Catholicism handicapped Irishmen who sought to compete in individualistic, entrepreneurial societies, and by implication suggests the reverse—that Irish culture itself did nothing to promote the success of Irish immigrants. For Davis, skills, capital, and good luck transcend nationality.