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By Root 7996 0

city was chosen to be an archdiocese, and Hughes was appointed its first archbishop. For all this, the Irish did not unreservedly accept Hughes as their chieftain. Hughes was certainly a hero to many working-class Irishmen—he had arrived a penniless laborer like themselves and yet achieved great things—and many in the Irish middle class, who saw him as savior and sponsor, snapped up busts of the Bishop turned out by a Greenpoint porcelain factory. Yet the majority of his parishioners were still only nominally in the fold. In the 1850s at least half the Sixth Ward Irish rarely attended Mass. Many parents were reluctant to send their children to parochial schools, fearing this would hamper their futures in the wider city. Substantial numbers preferred the public schools, which had also expanded vigorously and were now ward controlled, hence, in Irish neighborhoods, no longer a threat to their faith. Hughes also met resistance when he moved to seize power from the lay trustees who by custom and state law controlled church property. Their insistence on maintaining a democratic pattern of church governance left him at odds with many professionals, small businessmen, and skilled artisans, key elements of the fledgling Irish middle class.

The bishop also faced considerable opposition to his political stance on international issues. New York’s hierarchy had already assumed the conservative cast that would characterize it for the next century, in part because the clergy had to compete with arriving radicals for the loyalty of the immigrant masses. In 1848 a group known as Young Ireland, impatient with Daniel O’Connell’s failure to end English rule, seized on news of the revolution in France to organize for a rising. In New York City radical nationalists held rallies, raised money, purchased arms, and formed militia companies for anticipated action overseas.

New York’s Irish-American republicans emerged as an alternative and at times oppositional voice. In 1849 Patrick Lynch launched the Irish-American, a moderate nationalist weekly. Its circulation soared from twenty thousand in 1854 to forty thousand by decade’s end, and it was widely read aloud in Irish taverns. Lynch maintained an uneasy truce with Hughes, but he insisted that Irish-Americans believed firmly in the separation of church and state, and he grew incensed when nativists characterized Irish republicans as tools of an autocratic church. Hughes managed for a time to isolate those who advocated armed struggle against the British, but in 1858 militants formed the Fenian Brotherhood, a transatlantic underground organization devoted to raising money, arms, and soldiers for a future rebellion. The Fenians’ numbers were small, and their attention was focused primarily on exile politics, but they would yet play a major part in the affairs of New York City.

RUDE B’HOYS

These divisions within the Catholic community were largely lost on nativists, from whose perspective it seemed that Hughes had constructed a monstrous phalanx and become its spiritual and temporal dictator. Their anxieties were further fueled by New York’s newfound favor with the Vatican and by some intemperate remarks Hughes made in November 1850 before leaving for Rome to receive the pallium of office from the pope. In a sermon at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, “The Decline of Protestantism and Its Causes,” Hughes announced the coming triumph of Rome over Protestant nations everywhere, including America. Such missionary fervor confirmed many nativists’ worst fears.

Beleaguered white artisans, in particular, facing an avalanche of immigrants and speeded-up proletarianization, reacted with hostility. Some organized the American Laboring Confederacy, whose paper, the Champion of American Labor, spoke out bitterly against the “swarms of needy adventurers, cut-throats and paupers of European jails and poor-houses, that, like the locusts of Egypt,” were ravaging the New York labor market. In trade after trade, an 1847 petition argued, employers had beaten down wages “by reason of their having the cheap pauper labor