Author: Dr. Shrout

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The Irish, the whitest non-white people in the world. Funny to think that these pale skinned red haired people were once seen as anything but white, but it was a way of making less of a group of people who valued their religion just as much as their culture. Chapter 2 “Irrepressible Conflicts: Systems of Slavery in the Civil War Era” first starts out by mentioning the formation of nation states, a nation being an area in which a group of people with similar customs and language live together. These nations soon branched out creating Empires the most successful of all being the British Empire which at one point controlled 1/4 of the world. The British viewed themselves as Protestant and took their religion where ever they went, in graving their beliefs in the minds of the people they conquered. Such as when they colonized the United States, the United States viewed itself as highly Protestant and held onto many English customs despite attempts to distance themselves from all things British after the revolutionary war. The British however ran into a brick wall when they conquered the Irish, a stubborn people by nature the Irish resisted against their oppressors who not only conquered their lands but their language renaming said conquered lands in a form of linguistic conquest. This form of conquest forced the Irish to attempt to resist British culture drawing them closer and closer into Catholicism to the point where to be Irish was to be Catholic, their culture revolved around Their religion. So naturally when many left their homes during the great hunger (the Irish potato famine) and reached the shores of America were met with racist comments and maltreatment from Protestant America. They we’re shove into unsafe factories, forced to work for a pittance making less than what was needed even make a living. When the Civil War broke out they were conscripted to fight and die for a government that oppressed them to stop an institution that they themselves were confined to. The institution of slavery, in Ireland they were “slaves with no masters obliged to law, self-interest, or domestic affections to provide for them.” In America things were the same they were slaves to industrialization, slaves to a system that forced them to fend for themselves and when slavery was eradicated with the victory of the Union they did not revive any of the reform the blacks were promised. All the emancipation proclamation do was to make “white and blacks equal to To-day in industrial servitude.” The free immigration of Irish was basically a reopening of the slave trade but this time the slaves had to pay to travel across the Atlantic to be slaves. In order to completely understand this reading we could look back to the previous post of my classmate Robert Deleon which help illustrate the change within the economy during the industrial revolution that would make white men slaves to the current “system”. he

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Chapter 2 of David M. Emmons’ Irrepressible Conflicts: Systems of Slavery in the Civil War Era examines the religious conflicts that surround Protestant Britain’s animosity towards Catholicism. Emma’s explains how beginning in the sixteenth century, Europe’s classes identified themselves based on their loyalty to their nations and institutions. Protestantism as a result held Britain together with a strong intensity that also ignited a deep hatred for Catholics. Hatred of Catholics did not stop in England, however. The social, religious, and ethnic inferiority of Irish Catholics was also prominent component of American culture during the 19th century.

Emmons argues that racism and discrimination against Irish Catholics in America was so rampant, that they were treated like second African Americans: “Their unrestricted immigration must have appeared somewhat like the equivalent of the reopening of the African slave trade” (Emmerson, 61). This argument was interesting to me, because here, Emmons states that the status of Irish Americans was as lowly as that of African Americans. Even though Irish immigrants had white skin, Eurocentric appearances, and Christian backgrounds, they were still of extremely low social, racial, religious, and economic backing.

In her blog post, Viktoriya Shalunova discusses how the treatment of Irish immigrants is reminiscent of the treatment Native Americans: “They [Native Americans] also became cultural immigrants in their own land, when Europeans came and drew new territory lines, introduced a new religion, new language, and new names for places that had already existed for the Native Americans.” Shalunova makes an interesting which that I strongly support: The migration of Irish Catholics to America represents another example of racism against foreigners. Native Americans are seen as foreign even though they were in North America before European countries arrived. In order to fully grasp the amount of racism that played into forming America today, one must analyze the numerous amounts of marginalization, racism, sexism, and discrimination that played into America’s discovery and success. It is crucial that the labor of minorities and slaves and indentured servants be respected, because without respect for Native education and land, the Irish American story must be a narrated as one of social and racial discrimination.

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The main idea of this chapter is the abolition of slavery. The author shows that the abolition of slavery was a gradual process. Abolition was fueled by free and enslaved people. For some, their motives in pursuing abolition was religious, while others ethical and/or philosophical. At the same time, those who supported slavery also used religious reasons to justify themselves. Those who wanted to abolish slavery went about it in different ways, some approached it through government, and some through revolution. Surprisingly, not very many of the esteemed Enlightenment philosophers with their ideas of freedom and equality, supported the abolition of slavery. Among elites who profited off of slavery, there was often resistance to abolition, often painting abolition-inspired revolutions as the result of anarchists. Because slavery was so intertwined with the economy, especially in the production of goods like sugar, many European powers were reluctant to wean off of their reliance on slavery. While many supported abolition, racist perspectives still permeated the thinking of many whites. Within the United States, abolition was a process. First the slave trade was outlawed, then certain states abolished slavery, and eventually complete abolition that came with the Emancipation Proclamation.

Classmate Shreshta relates the reading to an image that depicts justifications of slavery, which is entirely appropriate for this chapter. Slavery had roots in the economy as well as a way of life developed over the centuries.

I find the authors arguments to be agreeable. The struggle to end slavery in the Atlantic world were not immediate. Even today, slavery is still a problem in the world. Slavery did have a large impact on the economy, but awareness of it and moral convictions proved to be a greater force than its economic benefits in the end.

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David Emmons’s work Beyond the American Pale explores how the average Anglo- American defines what it means to be a real American. He focuses in on the Irish population scattered throughout the U.S and how the Anglo American population perceived them. They were labeled as inferior or fraudulent because of their heritage and faith, and as my peer Tram pointed out were only tolerated because the economy was in need of cheap labor. Though to be totally honest I struggle to define their attitude as tolerance because of the obvious persecution present.

This work doesn’t remind me of any previous readings we had this semester but it does reminds me of an idea I ran across in previous history/ ethnic studies courses I have taken. Bigotry and hatred are often the result of proximity. It is hard to think of someone who lives on the other side of the planet let alone come up with reasons to hate them, but if they live next door hated becomes easier to accomplish. You see them every day and they act different from you, look different than you and speak differently from you and soon you just label them as different. This “othering” of a person is often what leads to hatred and persecution because; someone who is set in their ways and fears change does not want this “other” invading their personal space. I can see a lot of this happening in this book. (Side note I probably should have started reading this before 1030 pm I did not know this was going to be 60 pgs)

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In “Pages from Beyond the American Pale,” David Emmons makes the interesting if unoriginal argument that Protestant Christianity functioned as the locomotive that spurred the United States’s development. This contention begs comparison to the work of scholars such as Max Weber, famous for his concept of the “Protestant work ethic,” and Ronald Takaki, an American Studies academic known for his research on America’s Protestant underpinnings (and how the colonization of Ireland by the British served as a model for their colonization of North America).

As my colleague Danny Alvarez states in his own blog post, Britain “sought to subjugate whoever it globally came in contact with through reflecting on the inverse effects of things not in correlation with Protestant thought, therefore not suitable among civilized society.” This analysis ties in very well with a central tenet of Emmons’s argument, which is that Britain’s fervent Protestantism and adamant anti-Catholicism greatly impacted the Thirteen Colonies (7). Indeed, our Founding Fathers themselves levied a cautious eye on developments in Catholic Quebec, as the British formally granted its Catholic majority the freedom to practice their religion as they pleased (8). In a glaring bout of hypocrisy, Thomas Jefferson decried this mere toleration of Catholicism as tantamount to abandonment of English common law (itself providing a basis for the American legal system) (8). Catholicism came to be seen by many American Protestants as “squarely antithetical to American ideals,” and this reflected in the nativist prejudices against Irish immigration in the mid-19th century.

Although the United States is rightly touted as a melting pot (or salad bowl for the pedantic), it is worth noting much of its early history and foundation retained a profound “Britishness,” encapsulated by a Protestant identity, that deeply influenced its emergence as an independent nation. This reflects greatly in its institutions, from its republicanism down to its legal system, and of course, its work ethic. David Emmons rightly and persuasively argues this.

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Religions have always been a huge part in history. It is ironic how most religions teaches peace, good morals, salvation,etc… yet so much blood had shed over religious conflicts throughout history. At the beginning of this chapter Emmons wrote, “Nations had a distinct cultural identity; they did not create that identity but were created by it (Emmons 2)” This was as true to England/Britain as it was America who’s once a colony of Britain. Britain defined themselves as Protestants. Yet, Emmons argued that what really held Britain together was not Protestantism but the abiding hatred of Catholicism (Emmons 3). At some point the Irish and Catholic became one and thus received the tremendously amount of hatred and discrimination for it.

The Irish also received the similar hatred across the ocean in America, who’s inherited Protestant ideology from Britain. Early America had little tolerance for Catholics, but they are the “necessary evils” because America need more labor to build it new nation. An interesting parallel that Viktoriya Shalunova said on her blog about how Native Americans were discriminated against yet used by Americans for their knowledge of the land and nature.

Protestant Americans to believe that Republicanism and Catholicism could not coexist. “Many Americans saw the Catholic Church in the same way they saw chattel slavery…,and they used the same language in their attacks on both. (Emmons 15)” Scholars had pointed out that there is a correlation between slavery and Catholicism; the Civil War crisis between the North and the South emerged as the same time as the overwhelming number of Irish immigration to the United States (Emmons 17).

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David M. Emmons in chapter 2 of Beyond the American Pale is addressing the ethnic narrowness of Anglo-Americans based on their religious beliefs and geography of origin. Many white Americans during the mid-nineteenth century would constantly promulgate among themselves as to how Protestant they valued themselves as. The colonial boss at the time, Britain, sought to subjugate whoever it globally came in contact with through reflecting on the inverse effects of things not in correlation with Protestant thought, therefore not suitable among civilized society. As it is, Protestantism began as a revolting response to authoritative Catholic views on religious freedom, and upon this ended up hating Catholicism itself and all of its followers. The cultural divide between the English and the Irish explained in this scenario is a very religious-rooted one, following various internal crusades within England’s customary dissolution from the Catholic faith.

Irish Catholic got reaffirmed as a distinctive identity to place among the inclusive Irish peoples, just in particular response to the misconceiving Protestant label the British preferred in categorizing all members of Great Britain. For one, the Irish spoke (and still speak) their own native language inherited by their Gaelic and Celtic ancestors long since the early Roman republic. Their accents allowed their Anglo spectators in the United States to make Irish people fall within a disadvantageous catalogue of illiterate and dumb people. The pride of the Irish is not one to diminish so thoroughly if you ask me, like what Allison Roberts says in her post. In the occasional cases where anti-slavery abolitionists during the Civil War wished to accomplish their goals, the Irish Catholic minority served as an auxiliary to anti-British, if not anti-monarchical, assertions on the Atlantic slave trade that correlated more with religious freedom and love.

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In Chapter 2 of David M. Emmons’s “Irrepressible Conflicts” Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, religious conflicts seem to show a main theme. The chapter discusses that a unified protestant religion held the British together, and even more so, their hate for Catholicism. They created for themselves an identity, and those of a different identity were outsiders, flawed, and even defective. The xenophobia was strong. The Irish Catholics received the brunt of this hatred and discrimination. At some point, the author explains that the British remapped and renamed Ireland and everything in it. This left the Irish confused and lost in a place that was so familiar to them. The Irish can be referred to as cultural immigrants in this instance because their physical surrounding are similar, but unidentifiable to the histories of their people. All I could think about when reading this was the Native Americans. They also became cultural immigrants in their own land when Europeans came and drew new territory lines, introduced a new religion, new language, and new names for places that had already existed for the Native Americans. To make matters worse, the Europeans used Natives in order to familiarize themselves with this strange land, just to familiarize the Natives with it in the near future.

Americans who came from Britain to the United States held onto their protestant beliefs and hate for Catholicism. According to Parker, Europeans believed the Celtics possessed a defective gene that predestined them for Catholic beliefs. This type of pseudoscience has been used for centuries as an attempt for imperial powers to explain their superiority. Another example would be the pseudoscience that revolved around the inferiority of African Americans in the late 1800’s. The Irish Catholics had a difficult time in America because of the strong beliefs brought from Britain. Yet, they were accepted in the United States because it proved socially and economically beneficial for Europeans. The Irish laborers were seen as god’s gift to America because their apparent inferiority as a race elevated the status of European men in America. This was also true for African slaves, who were also an inferior race, giving even the poorest white man a higher status than a black man in the period of slavery in the Americas. David Zamarripa-Shippey says that, “The central thesis in Atlantic History, Chapter 14 is that economic factors ultimately proved decisive in the abolition of slavery in the 19th century”. One of these economic factors was the proof that slaves were not actually essential to cotton production globally as previously thought. It was economic factor too, that largely determined the outcome of Irish immigrants. It was the economic need for them that allowed them to slowly move upward in American society. Civil tolerance and change in equalities has often come out of economic necessity or of lack to prove economic necessity.

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This article was very interesting particularly in what it had to say concerning religion. It is so interesting that religion had such a profound effect on the forming of countries. First in that to be British you needed to be protestant and dislike all things catholic. This was interesting because it resulted in the Irish, who felt they had been oppressed by the British, to form a culture within the Catholic religion and rebel against what it was to be British. This later translate over to the Americas, which was a predominately protestant country as well. When the Irish catholic came to the Americas for refuge the Americans would discriminate against them based on their religion. During this time there was a push to get rid of slavery from a lot of northerners, parts of this article reminded me of what Shreshta had to say in her post. She talked about abolition at this time and how it was a process and there are many components that have to be unraveled to understand slavery in America. This article brings up an interesting point on that has to do with what Shreshta was saying slavery was complicated and also intermingled into religion and the prejudice against catholics. For many northerners they say catholicism and slavery as being the same thing, stripping people of their human rights. I think this is an interesting example of the complexities of the feelings going on towards slavery at this time. This idea of religion forming identities and forcing opinions is not new, this has been a common theme throughout this course. Many of the colonies formed in the early days of atlantic imperialism were driven by a heavy religious force, for example the Spanish and there need to convert all people to catholicism. Religion plays a huge part in out history.

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