• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7958 0

at home had never been particularly race-conscious, and some of their greatest champions, like Daniel O’Connell, would strongly support the abolitionist cause. But evangelicals and employers condemned the Irish for drinking, brawling, and irregular work habits in much the same way they condemned black behavior, labeling both groups alike lazy, improvident, and irresponsible. Some New York gentry placed ads in the Herald for cooks, washers, and ironers that specified “any color or country except Irish.” Anti-Tammany nativists challenged the immigrants’ right to citizenship, which, given the new-forged connections between race and nationality, was tantamount to questioning their whiteness. And just as the English had long characterized their neighboring islanders more harshly than they had Africans, plenty of Anglo New Yorkers routinely used adjectives like low-browed, savage, bestial, wild, and simian to describe the Catholic Irish “race.” More disturbingly, the Irish were sometimes referred to as “niggers turned inside out,” as, conversely, blacks were occasionally termed “smoked Irish.”

One way to avoid the taint of blackness was to loudly assert whiteness, and the Irish quickly learned that in New York City blacks could be despised with impunity. Another route to permanent certification as members of an Anglo-Celtic racial majority was through affiliation with Tammany Hall. Northern Democrats had bonded with southern planters in a common negrophobia; now racism would do similar duty on the home front, smoothing divisions between New York’s Angles and Celts, allowing the party to swell its ranks from both sides. The theater, too, allowed white working people of all backgrounds to come together as an audience to laugh at derogatory representations of black “others.” Not surprisingly, minstrel songs singled out abolitionists—particularly Arthur Tappan—for merciless ridicule. Indeed abolitionism and blackface ascended the political stage arm in arm.

“HE CALLED MY SAVIOUR A NIGGER!”

In May and June of 1834, Arthur and Lewis Tappan stepped up their abolitionist drive. Among other initiatives, they underwrote formation of a Female Anti-Slavery Society. The participation of white ladies in a mixed-race movement jangled the nerves of New York racists—which were soon further tautened by pronouncements from the Rev. Samuel Cox, the antislavery (and anti-Catholic) cleric.

Arthur Tappan was a pewholder in Cox’s Laight Street Church. One Sunday morning on his way to church, Tappan encountered Samuel Cornish on the street. As Cox’s institution was nearby—two miles closer to Cornish’s home than where the black clergyman usually worshiped—Tappan invited him in, and the two sat together in Tappan’s pew. This led to a tremendous row, with some church members threatening to resign and the elders insisting that Tappan not repeat the offense. (Arthur would never again be seen in public with any of his African-American associates, even one as light-skinned as Cornish.) Cox, however, chided his congregation for its intolerance. Arguing that as Christ was probably of a dark Syrian hue, he might well have been ejected along with Cornish, Cox denounced “nigger pews” and called for church integration. He was instantly subjected to city wide attack. As one merchant spluttered, “And would you believe it? he called my Saviour a nigger! God damn him!”

By June lurid rumors were flying around town (recycled by colonizationalist champion James Watson Webb in his Courier and Enquirer). The abolitionists—so the stories went—had told their daughters to marry blacks. Arthur Tappan had divorced his wife and married a Negress. Presbyterian minister Henry Ludlow was conducting interracial marriages. Abolitionists were encouraging black dandies to parade up and down Broadway on horseback to seek white wives. William Leete Stone, secretary of the New York Colonization Society and editor of the Commercial Advertiser, joined in stoking popular fury, assuring his readers that amalgamation appealed only to those of “morbid or vicious tastes.” A startled English