Bryan Giemza - Turned Inside Out: Black, White, and Irish in the South

Southern Cultures 2012 Center for the Study of the American South

Published by the University of North Carolina Press

Black, White, and Irish in the South

Noel Ignatievs How the Irish Became White, a book graced by a pithy name that summarizes its provocative thesis, has generated volumes of response. But relatively little of this body of criticism bears on the South, even though Ignatiev expressly invokes the region in one of the most quoted passages of his study:

The Irish who emigrated to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were fleeing caste oppression and a system of landlordism that made the material conditions of the Irish peasant comparable to those of an American slave... On the rail beds and canals they labored for low wages under dangerous conditions; in the South they were occasionally employed where it did not make sense to risk the life of a slave. As they came to the cities, they were crowded into districts that became centers of crime, vice and disease.2

Ignatievs study, like most treatments of the American Irish, focuses largely on the Northeast, with special focus on Philadelphia. It is worth asking if his observations hold up as well to southern experience. How were the southern Irish identified, in a racial sense, and how did they identify themselves? Did they, in the mode of Ignatiev, whiten as well? In a society that came to be seen as rigidly stratified by race, were the Irish in the South commingled in a common culture of the lowly?3

As if in reply, historians Peter D. ONeill and David Lloyd write, The Irish, it has been shown, became white in the United States precisely to the extent that both slaves and free Blacks were denied full citizenship, even humanity. And to some extent, this holds for the South, as the case of Charlestons Irish-born bishop and slavery apologist, John England, illustrates. Some southern Irish found themselves supporting the regional racial orders, willingly or not. There is an attendant sense of disappointment that the Irish did not always seek solidarity with the oppressed: as ONeill and Lloyd put it, All too often, the query is posed within a somewhat sentimental framework, one shaped by a weak ethical desire that the Irish should have identified with another people who were undergoing dispossession, exploitation or racismor, indeed, shown solidarity with oppressed people in general.4

We might call this the Montserrat Problem, in reference to Donald Akensons If the Irish Ran the World, which observes that Irish slaveholders in Montserrat rivaled any colonial power in cruelty. Even Irish nationalist hero Wolfe Tone dreamed of an Ireland that might become a colonial power in the Sandwich Islands, and instances where the Irish played the colonial game to their favor, or the ends against the middle, are not counterfactual fancy, but are exampled in history.5 Now, as the whiteness studies paradigm begins to recede, scholars are more interested in framing the discussion in terms of movement and contact. Because the Atlantic slave trade ended (in principle if not in fact) in 18071808a period when Irish immigration was on the riseit is indeed useful to think about the loops of these currents, and the continuing contact they established. Such a framework for interpretation offers a built-in, if circular, defense: if a moving target is what is described, it shall be very difficult to qualify those relationships except to say that they were changing. Local conditions are variable, and so are local customs; as befits a journal called Southern Cultures, it is granted that there are many Souths, many Irish cultures, many black cultures, and so on.

This analysis takes a second look at the origins of black and Irish interchangeability in the South. Its approach to the Ignatiev question is a literary one, and its scope is a centuries-spanning trip through cultural history. Its sources are limited by a literary record that is fleeting, fragmentary, and diffuse, a record created by outsiders, black and white, who wanted to say something about how the Irish fit into ideas of what the South should beor should not. And the same might be said of what these accounts imply black southerners should or should not be, and what the Irish thought they should beturtles all the way down, so to speak. Thus, the conclusions here do not seek to answer Ignatievs question so much as demonstrate its persistence and the interest it held for scattered southern writers, black and white.

Judging from the literary record, the conclusion is that the changeable estates of southern blacks and southern Irish, grounded in bondage, were probably overstated, whereas the role of the southern Irish in shaping the regions racial dialogue has probably been understated. Both northern and southern perceptions were likely warped by overheated political rhetoric, with breezy comparisons between Irish and African enslavement, political and literal. Racial progress was not a question of the limited good, so it did not follow that the Irish would prosper to the extent that southern blacks were hobbled, or vice versa. Rather, both groups struggled to assert their legitimacy within southern society, at times joining company, and at other times, eager to distinguish their superiority. In fine, the literary record leaves little doubt of the basic soundness of Ignatievs instincts: as a place where Black and Green were in perpetual contact, the Atlantic South furnishes an ideal case study in how these peoples moved with, against, and around one another. And going by the literary record, the American South, too, was a place where the perceived status of the Irish was deeply entwined with, and inextricably related to, that of blacks.

It might be helpful to begin by differentiating these southern Irish from their better-known counterparts in the Northeast. The southern Irish, too, were primarily (but not exclusively) city dwellers as they tended to cluster in southern seaport cities. Unlike many of their northern counterparts, however, David Gleeson and other historians have suggested that the Irish got a fairly warm reception in the South. If Irish immigrants were well received in the region, observes Kerby Miller, they might thank the general tendency of all southern whites to downplay internal differences for the sake of solidarity against the regions large and potentially rebellious black populationfor slaves outnumbered whites by a ratio of 3:2 in South Carolina and by 9:1 in the coastal districts around Charleston and Savannah.6 Certainly it is not easy to know what the prevailing attitudes of southerners, black and white, were toward the Irish, who, in stark contrast to their more numerous relatives in the North, by 1860 comprised little more than 2 percent of the white populace. To these southern distinctions one must add the complicated regional overlay of black and Irish labor proximities, including the legacies of indenture.