Irish Migrants, Antebellum American Slavery, and Southern Nationalism

In the four and a half decades that preceded 1860, roughly 2.5 million men, women, and children migrated from Ireland to the United States. These antebellum Irish immigrants had a complex and contradictory relationship with U.S. southern slavery. On one hand, even as the Irish were stereotyped as ‘Paddies’ in American public discourse, they mostly imbibed the racism toward African Americans that was prevalent throughout the United States and came to oppose the abolition of the South’s ‘peculiar institution.’ Furthermore, through their mutual support for the Democratic Party, naturalized Irish immigrants effectively entered into a de facto political alliance with southern slaveholders—an alliance that the Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison once referred to as “a union most unnatural and horrible.”

On the other hand, by overwhelmingly settling in the urban centres of the U.S. northeast and midwest, antebellum Irish immigrants contributed to the relative increase in the political and economic power of the ‘free North’ vis-á-vis the ‘slave South.’ In response to this loss of power and influence, increasing numbers of slaveholders embraced southern nationalism during the course of the antebellum era. Arguably, therefore, Irish immigration played an important role in fomenting the secession crisis of 1860-61. Focusing on the links between Ireland’s diaspora, American racial slavery, and southern nationalism, this paper explores the impact of Irish migration on the antebellum sectional crisis that ultimately led to the outbreak of the American Civil War and the consequent abolition of the South’s ‘peculiar institution.’