During the period from 1830 to 1860, America’s population was expanding at a rapid rate due in part to the immigration of Europeans. Especially prevalent amongst these immigrants were some two million Irish and nearly one and a half million Germans. The Irish had left their green isle due to the potato famine and the oppressive poverty that the British government wrought. Similarly, the Germans had left their lands partially due to famine. However, they had also decided to leave because the democratic revolutions that many of them supported had ended in 1848. Despite having like reasons for leaving their homes behind, the Irish and Germans had very different experiences when they started over in America, with few similarities between them. …show more content…
The Irish, who struggled to find jobs in the cities due to the discrimination of employers, hated the blacks because they saw them as competition in the already scarce job market. The Irish knew that if slavery were abolished, they would have and even harder time surviving in the inescapable cities. The Germans however, as a whole, supported abolition. Since many of them were liberals who left after the failure of democracy in their country, they supported the freedom of other individuals, as such is true of the German abolitionist Carl Schurz. Another reason that they supported the abolition of slavery was that they did not need to directly compete against the for jobs. The lack of competition caused them to have few worries over supporting the emancipation of …show more content…
The Know-Nothing Party and the Nativists associated with it hated the Irish mainly because the Irish were Catholic, and they were Protestant. Their mutual animosity brings up the ever-present feud of which religion is the right one; since neither wants to admit that they’re wrong, they go at each other’s throats. A prime example of the anti-Catholic sentiment expressed during this time is Maria Monk’s novel, Awful Disclosures. The book entails a less than glamorous account of a nun in a Catholic convent who is forced to have sex with a Catholic priest. The novel, though probably untrue, dealt a great blow to the Irish’s already poor reputation. However, the Germans did not fare much better either. Most North Germans were Lutheran while most South Germans were Catholic, and both were despised by the bigoted Protestants in America. German immigrants were especially resented for the fact that during the Sabbath, instead of going to church and praying, they drank large quantities of