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IMMIGRATION

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Immigration became a major factor in American life in the antebellum period, and the influence of the many cultures represented by the growing tide of newcomers changed American culture itself. During the period from the American Revolution through the Napoleonic Wars in Europe (1776–1815), immigration from Europe to America had fallen to low levels. This began to change in the period around 1820. Restrictions upon emigration from Europe were lessened with the end of the Napoleonic Wars; American expansion after the War of 1812, fought with Great Britain, promised land and jobs to the immigrants.

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL CAUSES

The general forces driving immigration to the United States during the period 1820–1870 are seen in the interactions between social and economic conditions in Europe and those in the United States. Europe saw unprecedented population growth during the nineteenth century. This created pressure upon the existing land, and young people unable to inherit land were obliged to move away. At the same time, the Industrial Revolution, begun in the British Isles in the eighteenth century, was now being felt elsewhere in western Europe. The rise of the factories began to drive the old-fashioned artisans and craftspeople out of business. The movement of European population was therefore out of the countryside and small towns and toward the industrial cities and foreign places. America was by far the favored goal of the nineteenth-century European migrants.

America held out attractive possibilities to newcomers. There land was available much more cheaply than in Europe. Labor also brought greater rewards in America. Both the rapid expansion of the country to the west and the development of the new factory system created a demand for labor. All that was needed to stimulate migration was information about American conditions. A growing list of guidebooks and travelers' accounts told of the opportunities offered by migration, and letters from immigrants in America to friends and relatives in the old country spread the news about the New World.

The flow of migrants responded to these conditions. Deterred somewhat by a depressed economy in the United States after the panic of 1819, migration increased steadily from about six thousand in 1823 to about seventy-nine thousand in 1837. The panic of 1837 set off another decline, but immigration revived again in the early 1840s, reaching 154,000 in 1846. Then began one of the largest waves of migration in American history, lasting until 1854, in which year 428,000 immigrants arrived. After that wartime conditions in Europe and a slow economy in the United States slowed the flow of migrants. Immigration remained below 200,000 annually during the upheaval of the Civil War (1861–1865), then began to revive once more as postwar expansion opened new areas to settlement and the Industrial Revolution began to reach its peak. In 1870 about 387,000 immigrants arrived, and the census of that year showed that 5.5 million people (about 14.4 percent of the U.S. population) were foreign-born.

Region of birth of foreign-born population of the United States, 1850–1870

Region	1850		1860		1870
Note: Numbers in parentheses represent percentage of total foreign-born residents with region of origin reported; (–) rounds to zero.
SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of the Census.
Europe	2,031,867	(92.2)	3,807,062	(92.1)	4,941,049	(88.8)
Asia	1,135	(0.1)	36,796	(0.9)	64,565	(1.2)
Africa	551	(–)	526	(–)	2,657	(0.1)
Oceania	588	(–)	2,140	(0.1)	4,028	(0.1)
Latin America	20,773	(0.9)	38,315	(0.9)	57,871	(1.0)
Northern America	147,711	(6.7)	249,970	(6.0)	493,467	(8.9)
Not reported	41,977		3,888		3,592
Total foreign-born population	2,244,602		4,138,697		5,567,229

The largest components of the immigrant flow during this half century were from Ireland, Germany, and England (including Scotland and Wales), in that order. These were followed by smaller groups from the Scandinavian countries, from French Canada, and from other mostly western European countries. The gold rush in California beginning in 1849 brought America its first sizable influx of Chinese; they came as temporary workers, but many of them stayed to form the core of future Asian settlements. While the same general conditions involving land, labor, and population growth were at work among all of these groups, each had its own particular story.

IMMIGRANTS FROM IRELAND

Ireland in the early years of the nineteenth century had experienced a rapid growth of population, but the country had little in the way of industry to draw off the surplus population. Much of the land was held by tenants of larger landlords, and the typical plots of land were very small, so that a drought or famine might create immediate havoc. This became most evident in the years of the Great Famine following the failure of the potato crop in 1845. Over the next decade about 1.3 million Irish fled to the United States. Driven by near-starvation, they reached America by the cheapest way possible, often in empty lumber ships. The trip in sailing ships normally took five to six weeks but might take three months in adverse weather. Many of these immigrants left the ships penniless and had to find jobs immediately. The pre-famine Irish had already become the primary source of common labor in America, being frequently recruited to dig the canals, build the railroads, and tend the infrastructure of the growing cities. Irish women were the most readily available domestic servants; women with families often became the stereotypical "Irish washerwoman" or turned their houses into boardinghouses to eke out some additional income for the family. The largely working-class Irish were dependent on two main sources for cohesion: the church and the saloon. The predominantly Catholic population, stiffened by their long experience struggling against a hostile Protestant England, rallied around their priests and based much of their social organization in the church. In the saloons the Irish also learned the value of forming a united political bloc, led by immigrant politicians who urged them to become naturalized as quickly as possible and consistently delivered Irish votes for the Democratic Party. That political power would eventually earn them political office and patronage. The Irish became perhaps the most successful ethnic group in American politics. The Irish were the foreign-born element most frequently encountered by most Americans; they were spread out across the ever-extending transportation network and concentrated in the cities and towns.

IMMIGRANTS FROM GERMANY

By 1870 the German-born segment of the population (about 1.7 million) was about 90 percent of the total Irish-born (about 1.85 million). The Irish had produced more immigrants during the years from 1820 through the Great Famine, but after 1855 the Germans tended to come in greater numbers. The German immigrants had a more complex social structure than did the Irish, because their background in Europe was much more varied. Most immigrants of the early nineteenth century came from the western parts of Germany, which at the time was still a patchwork of small states and principalities. The country was not united until 1871. It was in the western regions that both the conditions of land scarcity and the effects of the Industrial Revolution were first being felt. Later in the nineteenth century eastern Germany would be affected by the same conditions. Young Germans began to feel the lack of opportunity when they could not inherit sufficient land or find any employment outside the factory towns. Others who tried their hand at industrial employment decided their skills would be more profitable in America. The pressures to leave became particularly strong when crop failures raised the price of food, harming producers and consumers alike. Political conditions in the German states were not always stable; the failed republican revolutions in both 1830 and 1848 propelled many out of the region. These included refugees who took part in the revolutions but also others who simply hoped for a more stable society in the United States.

Many factors contributed to the great diversity of the German immigrants. Their varying provincial backgrounds in Germany and Austria meant much to them. Religion, which was a unifying factor among the Irish, was a divisive factor among the Germans. They were divided roughly equally among Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists, with some Jews and a significant number of "freethinkers" as well. Friction among the various religious persuasions made it difficult to get Germans together on political or social issues. Fewer Germans were of the working class than was true of the Irish; many more were middle class and arrived with some degree of monetary resources. Some, such as business-people, lawyers, journalists, and other professionals, were better positioned to offer political leadership. The Germans took up farming much more often than did the Irish; some came to America with the proceeds from land sold in Germany, which would buy larger quantities of land in the expanding West. The ironic result of this diversity among the group was that the Germans, with a greater array of talent and resources, ended up wielding much less political power than did the Irish because of their inability to unite as a bloc. Germans gravitated toward the cities along the East Coast and toward the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. New York had the largest number of German-born, but other cities, such as Cincinnati and Baltimore, had a larger proportion of Germans in their populations. Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Pittsburgh also attracted German immigrants, and by 1850 Milwaukee, Chicago, and Cleveland became destinations. More Germans than Irish achieved their goal of acquiring land, forming German communities in the farmlands of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Iowa. After 1850 railroads began to obtain government land grants for their construction and used those properties to develop immigrant communities along their lines. The rural communities were relatively homogeneous compared to the varied and diverse communities of Germans in the cities.

OTHER EUROPEAN IMMIGRANTS

Another element, less noticeable in the American social fabric, was the migration from England, Scotland, and Wales. Britain had been in the forefront of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, and British technology was well advanced by 1820, when the American industrial expansion was in its infancy. Emigrants included the usual groups of artisans such as weavers, whose skills had been rendered less useful by the machinery of the textile mills. They also included factory workers in England who hoped for better conditions of employment in America. Among them was a small but important group who knew the more advanced technology of English industry well enough to replicate it in the United States. And they included as well the landless farmers seeking employment and the landed farmers seeking to trade their holdings for better lands in America. In a survey of 1851 English immigrants, about a quarter were farmers by occupation, another quarter were laborers, and the remaining half were spread among the crafts, indus-try, commerce, and the professions. British migrants reached a peak in the early 1850s, averaging around fifty thousand yearly, then declined through the Civil War. At the end of the war the numbers of migrants increased sharply, reaching a new peak of 104,000 in the year 1870. The census of that year showed over half a million English-born within the United States. In the early nineteenth century Britons settled more often in the urban areas of the Middle Atlantic states and New England, but the farmers and others followed the opening of new land in the Midwest and were found particularly in regions adjacent to the Great Lakes. The similarities of language and culture between Britain and America helped these immigrants merge more quickly into American society and assimilate more easily than other immigrants.

Most of the other immigrants before 1870 came from northwestern Europe, but their numbers seem small when compared to the Irish, Germans, and English. Migration from Scandinavia occurred at low levels after 1820 but began to rise in the 1850s and 1860s with the exception of the Civil War years. By 1870 the census found 114,000 Norwegians, 97,000 Swedes, and 30,000 Danes among the American population. Most of these had come from rural regions in their native lands and sought out farms in the upper Midwest. The same census counted 116,000 from France, 75,000 from Switzerland, and about 65,000 from the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg.

PEAK YEARS OF IMMIGRATION

During the large wave of immigration of 1846–1854, nearly three million new immigrants reached American shores. European problems such as the Irish famine and other crop failures, revolutions, and political unrest combined with an American economy rising to boom proportions to draw many across the Atlantic. Some of the boom was caused by the California gold rush of 1849, which pumped new wealth into the economy and drew both American-born and foreign-born gold seekers into the state. The gold rush also was the lure that drew many Chinese across the Pacific, the vanguard of the country's first sizable Asian migration. Many came to "Gold Mountain" (the Chinese name for California) with borrowed money and owed much of their earnings to Chinese lenders. Most came as sojourners, most of them male; many stayed on, if not as miners then as construction workers or farm laborers. By 1870 there were sixty-three thousand Chinese-born in the United States, the majority of them in California.

IMMIGRANTS AND AMERICAN POLITICS

As newcomers, the immigrants conditioned their political attachments largely on the basis of "friends" and "enemies." As the Jacksonian Democratic Party formed during the 1820s and 1830s, it cultivated the immigrants' support, warning them of the hostile forces within the opposition party, later known as the Whigs. That opposition included various reformers who attacked the immigrant culture with ideas like temperance and Sabbatarianism (enforcement of strict Sunday observance). These reforms of course clashed with the customs of drinking and Sunday celebration practiced by many immigrants from Europe. The reformers also included nativists—those openly opposing the presence of the foreign-born in the society. Drawing on English Protestant traditions dating back to the English Reformation, nativists particularly targeted Catholic immigrants, especially the Irish. The nativist movement grew as immigration grew from 1830 to the 1850s, sometimes taking on aspects of violence, like the bloody Philadelphia riots of 1844.

Fear of nativism, along with continuing patronage from the Democratic Party, kept most immigrants tied to that party until the early 1850s, when the nativist movement began to take organized political shape in the "American" or "Know-Nothing" Party. But about the same time the issue of the expansion of slavery into the West began to disturb existing political alignments. During the 1850s a considerable portion of the Germans, often led by new leaders who were refugees of the 1848 revolution, began to attach themselves to the "free-soil" movement, opposing the further extension of slavery into the West, which took concrete shape in the new Republican Party. By the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, perhaps half the Germans were Republicans, but the rest of the Germans and nearly all the Irish retained their Democratic allegiances.

CIVIL WAR ERA

The Civil War years brought great changes in the lives of American immigrants, as with other Americans. Young immigrants responded to the call for arms, sometimes in special ethnic regiments with their own officers. Other new immigrants were recruited directly off the immigrant ships. Others, however, resisted involvement in the war and especially opposed the call for a draft. The draft law passed in 1863 brought about immigrant protests, the most serious of which were the New York draft riots, which particularly involved Irish workers. Working-class immigrants particularly feared the implications of the abolition of slavery and the competition from the labor of freed slaves that might follow in consequence of abolition. The war years also tore many immigrants away from their ethnic communities and thus sped the assimilation of many. Immigrants served in the Confederate forces as well as the Union forces. In the years after the war the tide of immigration renewed, and many immigrants, including some of the second generation, were moving toward the western frontier regions now being opened up by the railroads.

IMMIGRANT CULTURE AND LITERATURE

The immigrants brought their own cultures with them, including traditions of music, theater, and literature. Although the Irish immigrants to America were in the majority illiterate, nevertheless they had their journalists and novelists and poets. The prolific Philadelphia publisher Matthew Carey wrote his own defenses of the Irish and published the work of many others. The editor and poet Thomas D'Arcy McGee championed other Irish American writers and wrote the first history of Irish American immigration (1850). By the 1850s novels on themes of Irish nationalism and migration were common in the literary marketplace.

The Germans, with a much higher literacy rate, supported a much more developed culture, including music, theater, literature, and a prolific system of German-language newspapers (estimated at 144 in 1860). The advent of German intellectuals and activists following the revolutions of 1848 greatly enlivened the German cultural scene and introduced much ideological controversy. The famed German Turner societies sponsored not only gymnastics but also libraries and literary societies. Both German-language materials and literature translated from other languages were commonly found in German libraries. German newspapers and literary journals published serialized fiction, and in the 1850s there was a craze of Geheimnisse (secrecy) novels, usually revealing dark mysteries of the urban environment.

American treatments of the immigrant were much dominated in the 1830s and 1840s by negative stereotypes in the nativist literature. These tracts and sensational novels characterized the Irish as priest-ridden, brutish, ignorant, prone to violent brawls and heavy drinking, and politically servile. The Germans were also caricatured as given to wild celebration, addicted to beer, clannish, possibly inclined to radicalism, and resistant to assimilation. The stereotypical nativist portrayals were carried over in a usually milder form into the popular literature of the day. The early-nineteenth-century theater was already developing the "stage Irishman" and the "stage German." The German and Scandinavian stereotypes were generally less disparaging than those portraying the Irish. The Chinese stereotype was still that of the immoral "coolie," as the movement to forbid by law all Chinese immigration continued to gain strength in the years following the Civil War. Literary representations, while often recognizing the immigrants for their hard work and desire to succeed, nevertheless usually consigned them implicitly to a lower rank in American society.

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century immigrants had become an inescapable factor in American life. In every region except the more remote parts of the Southeast, Americans regularly encountered different ethnic cultures. Despite many frictions among American cultural groups, immigrants, especially the second generation, increasingly adopted new American ways of life. And American cultural ways themselves began to change under the influence of the many immigrant cultures.

See also Agrarianism; California Gold Rush; Catholics; Chinese; Civil War; Ethnology; Foreigners; Irish; Labor; Political Parties

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Secondary Works

Billington, Ray Allen. The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism. 1938. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1963.

Coleman, Terry. Going to America. New York: Pantheon, 1972.

Conzen, Kathleen. Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836–1860: Accommodation and Community in a Frontier City. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Daniels, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. 2nd ed. New York: Perennial, 2002.

Fanning, Charles. The Irish Voice in America: 250 Years of Irish-American Fiction. 2nd ed. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000.

Kamphoefner, Walter D., Wolfgang Helbich, and Ulrike Sommer, eds. News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home. Translated by Susan Carter Vogel. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Knobel, Dale T. Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986.

Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Möller, Herbert, ed. Population Movements in Modern European History. New York: Macmillan, 1964.

Trommler, Frank, and Joseph McVeigh, eds. America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History. Vol. 1, Immigration, Language, Ethnicity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.

Van Vugt, William E. Britain to America: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Immigrants to the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Walker, Mack. Germany and the Emigration, 1816–1885. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964.

James M. Bergquist