Were the Irish the First Slaves in America?

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Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories. And as you know, we love telling immigrant stories, and today we bring you an epic one about a man who would help some of the most persecuted immigrants of his time pursuing their own American Dream. Here’s our own Joey Cortes with the story.

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Speaker 2: Richard McCann is the author of the book, John Hughes: Lion of American Catholicism.

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Speaker 3: Imagine a young man arriving from a foreign country to the United States in the year of eighteen hundred and nineteen. It’s November, it’s the beginning of winter time. It’s cold. He’s just come from his native County Tyrone in Ireland. A young man in a new country, a strange country, but in his taught, in his soul, with a burning desire to find a life for himself in a place that obviously he wasn’t able to find in his own.

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Speaker 2: Country because he was born a Catholic, and Protestant English controlled Ireland. John Hughes famously noted that for the first five days of his life he enjoyed social and civil equality with the most favored subjects in the British Empire, but that ended on the day of his baptism. Here’s Bill Duggan on the backstory of Catholic persecution in Ireland.

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Speaker 4: Most of England, Ireland, in Scotland was Catholic, and when Henry the Eighth wanted to divorce his wife and Mary Anne Boleyn, he did not get a dispensation from Rome, and thereby he founded the Church of England. And so from then on, the Catholic religion itself was persecuted, and then it was heavily persecuted. Most of the Scotland converted to the Protestant religion, the Church of England, as crossed the English England converted to the Church of England, but the Irish people wouldn’t in general, and this created such a hatred against the Irish Catholic at the time. So when you look at all of this, the discrimination, the hatred of the English over the Irish, one could only say, you know, that it was an extremely difficult place to live.

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Speaker 3: At the time that John News was growing up in County Tyrone, it was still an age that was fraught with a lot of religious dissension and religious animosity between Catholics and Protestants. The Us family was a Catholic family. They lived in a largely Protestant area in County Tyrone, in a place called Analogan, and there were a number of Protestant families around the Ues family, and there were various groups and various factions that were constantly warning with each other on a sectarian basis. Now, John Hughes’s father was a man of tremendous integrity, a man who was upright and respected in the communities of both the Catholic as well as Protestant peoples. And in one instance, John was coming back from school one day and he was stopped on the road by a group of men who were on with muskets and bayonets. And what they were going to do to the youngster, one can only speculate, but one of the men in the party—this was a Protestant group—they recognized him as being the son of John Hughes Senior, and as a result they let him go because they all agreed that the father was an upright man and not a man that was the focus of any animosity on their part. And as a result, he was spared and he was allowed to continue on his way. In another instance in his youth, one that really colored his perceptions of the world he was leaving. Occurred when his younger sister died and was being buried, and the Catholic priest was not allowed to enter into the cemetery area because of the prohibitions in place, because of the Penal Laws that still existed. Some dirt was scooped up and it was given to a person who scattered it over the corpse, or over the coffin, rather, before it was lowered in the ground. And this left a terrible burning resentment in the heart of John News about the fact that his people were second-class citizens in Ireland and that his own sister couldn’t be buried by a priest of their own faith in the proper fashion.

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Speaker 2: And so John and his family moved to America to seek a better life. But little did they know America had been wrought with nativist anti-Catholic bigotry.

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Speaker 3: For some time, Roman Catholicism was a religion that was virtually under prohibition in every colony of the Old Thirteen Colonies. The oldest prohibitions were in Virginia, where as early as sixteen forty-two they will laways pass saying that anybody who ordained by the Pope of Rome, or any deacon, or any person associated with that religious sect would be subject to persecution, and I mean persecution of the sense that they would be hung, where they would be in some way put to death. Massachusetts was not very far off from them. The Puritans of Massachuse It’s had a particular distain for Roman Catholicism, and even though there were no known Catholics in the colony of the Massachusetts Baphas some twenty years after its founding, it still did not prevent them from passing a series of laws directed against the practice of Roman Catholicism and prohibitions against its clergy. This was true throughout all the colonies, and it was a very bad situation. So Catholics were a small minority, but they were a persecutive minority. As long as they basically remained out of sight, they would not proment the kind of turbulence around them that, you know, was associated with the kind of overt bigotry that we would see later on with church burnings and attacks against the clergy. And so John Ewes came into an environment in the United States where Roman Catholicism was sort of like, you know, America’s best-kept secret. It was there. It was quietly tolerated, but if it became too vocal, or if it became too big and too present, it would sort of engender the most serious kind of reaction by Protestants against its exists.

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Speaker 4: The onset of the famine came while he was here in the U.S. Father Hughes started to receive in famine Irish in his ministry and started to understand just how much hatred was out there. So as we move forward. He was promoted Archbishop by Pope Gregory in eighteen thirty-seven, which was pretty remarkable since he was ordained priest in eighteen twenty-six, becoming a Bishop in eighteen thirty-seven at Old Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, which is where he had moved to from Philadelphia because of the emerging growth of the Irish Catholic that had been coming in on famine ships. They call them coffin ships. But, you know, the Irish were just getting off the land. And the reason they were getting off the land is the landowners were the English aristocracy. They were forcing them off. They were, you know, paying their passage just to get them out of Ireland. The food was not there and they were starving, so they put them on the cheapest passage they could find to get them out of the country, and they started to land in places like Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, all the way down the coast, and many of them even walked across borders from Canada into the U.S. because that was the cheapest passage. But then you had Boston, and you had New York and Philadelphia and Baltimore and on down to Savannah as well. These Irish coffin ships would come in and just unload the cargo of people, people with nothing more than the rags on their back. A lot of them died on the voyage. The journey across where I grew up. There’s a cemetery from the Irish Famine that housed seven thousand, five hundred famine Irish that died on the coffin ships coming over on Statenell. They buried them on a potter’s field, which happens to now be a golf course called Silver Lake Golf Course, and they’re buried on the eighteenth fairway. John Joseph Use, then Bishop Use, was made Archbishop, but he then had to find a solution to this crisis. So he started very strong to support the Irish Catholic emergence into New York. And at one time the Irish made up more than half of the city of New York in population. That’s how many tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands eventually had been deported into New York. And New York became just a robust area of Irish Catholics coming in, just destitute and starving, and Hughes had an enormous challenge to try and help the people find a way and be somewhat housed and fed and all that, and of course, being so devoutly Catholic the Irish are at the time, and still are, they always turned to the Church. So it came on to Hughes’s shoulders to try and help and find ways to support them.

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Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Richard McCann and Bill Duggan tell the story of John Hughes and the bigger story of the Irish immigration into this country in nineteenth century, and my goodness, the numbers are staggering. Over fifty percent of the citizens of the folks who lived in New York City, Irish, and of course Catholic, and the clash that continued here. When we come back, more of this remarkable story, the story of Archbishop John Hughes and the larger story of the Irish immigration story here on our American Stories. And we’re back with our American Stories that we continue with the story of Archbishop John Hughes, an Irish immigrant who stood toe-to-toe with anti-Catholic nativists in this country. Let’s returned to Richard McCann with the story in New York.

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Speaker 3: As Bishop, he fought nativism and bigotry, literally toe-to-toe and nails and nail with some of the greatest bigots of the time.

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Speaker 4: So Hughes is an enormous presence in New York at the time. He was fiery, he was tough. Some called him an Irish chieftain at the time, but he had to be. He had to stand up to so many things.

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Speaker 3: He engaged in the series of debates with the Reverend John Breckenrich, who was a noted Presbyterian minister. John Breckenridge had graduated from Yale. His father had been Attorney General of the United States under Thomas Jefferson. He was a noted Presbyterian theologian, and he was sort of watching this emerging Catholic priest, this young John Us, and he wanted to have a shot at him in terms of debating the various points of Catholicism and Protestantism. And so when a series of debates that lasted from eighteen thirty-three into eighteen thirty-six, both in written as well as oral form, Ughes and Breckenriche argued a number of points about the differences of the two religious beliefs. The first set of debates, which took place starting in eighteen thirty-three, was over the rule of faith, a debate about the rule of faith, which rule of faith was more valid, that of the Catholic Church or that of Protestantism. And from eighteen thirty-five into l eighteen thirty-six, a number of oral debates they conducted was on the issue as to whether or not the Catholic Church, in any of its principles, was inimicable to civil or religious liberty. It was those debates that made John Hughes sort of a national figure in the Catholic Church in the United States. Be four had debased if this type taken place, never before had a Catholic clerics to toe-to-toe with a member of the Protestant clergy, and in this case, a member of the clergy as prominent as Breckinridge was. John News was trying to, in the process of the debate, show that the entire Protestant movement was invalid because the rule of faith, according to Us, was something that had come into creation after the Reformation started. Christ had established his church. Christ never told Noney of the Apostles to write the Scriptures. The Scriptures were written, that the canonical books were set back in the first century of the Christian Era, and that was, you know, in addition to what the sayings of councils were and Papal decrees, and so that formed the basis for the rule of faith, which was followed pretty much by the Catholic Church, by the Universal Church until the time of the Reformation. Once the Reformation began, there was a new rule of faith that broke completely from that past. And so John Us maintained that the Protestant rule of faith could not have existed from the beginning of Christ or the Christian Church, because it had only come into existence since the beginning of the Reformation. So there was a period that was a complete break from what the traditions of the past had been. From the standpoint of Breckenrich, Breck and Rich attacked the Catholic Church from the position of its idolatry, its worship of the Pope, kind of viewing the Pope as a dictator, the Pope not being in any way the creature of Scripture, or the product of Scripture, or the product of anything about the Church itself. From the standpoint of Protestants, the Bible, the Word, is the very essence of Protestant belief. Catholics, on the other hand, the fonts of revelation for Catholics derive from Scripture, but they also derive from tradition, and tradition being councils, decrees, various pronunciations of Popes’ regarding articles of faith and so forth. So for Protestants, if it’s not a part of the Word, if it’s not a part of Scripture, part of the Bible itself, it doesn’t exist. It’s not valid. His response was was that the whole idea of Scripture evolved over a period of time. All of the books of the Bible, the accepted books of the Bible, the New Testament, the counter of the New Testament was something which didn’t just happen overnight. It happened over a period of many, many, many years. Christ himself didn’t make that determination. Those works were inspired. They were written by the Gospel writers and so forth, and so according to use, the Protestant view of the Word only, the Bible only, was not a valid point because the Bible as they accepted it, as they regarded it from the standpoint of it being the firm basis of their beliefs, didn’t exist at that particular time. It took a number of years before all of those his books came together and were accepted as the basis for faith. And that’s what used was attacking Breck and Rich. His only compelling response was to resort to a lot of the age-old tactics of being critical of. I’ll give you an example of one of the line of attacks that Breckinridge used. He criticized the Pope for setting aside a day for blessing all of the animals in the Vatican, all the donkeys and all of the animals. And yet at the same time he was condemning Bible societies as being, you know, the spreaders of heresy, and Breck and Rich condemned the Pope for establishing a sort of a precedence of beasts of burden over what the Word of God was. But those were typical types of tactics that we used to attack Catholicism at that particular time. A number of conversions took place during the period of the debates in question. Catholics and Props were very interested in these debates, and the reason they were interested was because nothing of the type had have it taken place in the past, and so a number of Protestants won. The Reverend of Mcalla, who was a noted Presbyterian minister, he approached Bishop Use. Rather, he approached Father us. At that time he wasn’t a, he wasn’t yet a Bishop, he was still a priest. He approached Father Ughes with the idea of trying to obtain from Use a book or a source of books where he could read and study the things in support of the arguments that Use was making to show where McCalla was wrong in his thinking and where he might be enlightened. And there were a number of people who approached Us as a result of that. In the wake of the debates and in the wake of the exchanges between Breck and Rich and Use, the Catholic Church, and Use, well. Ughes acquitted the Catholic Church and himself very well in the face of Breckenridge, so much so that there was grumbling a mon a number of Protestants, mostly Presbyterian leaders, that Breckenrich was not the person who should have been the one representing the Protestant point of view. So actually Breckenrich came down somewhat in the estimate of some of his own people because he was not forceful enough in showing up the Catholic Church as some kind of a Charlotte and religious experience and making more of the fact that it was a religion based on superstition and idolatry. Us kind of destroyed that entire concept, and as a result, Breckenridge sort of suffered from the standpoint of reduced esteem in the eyes of his own people. And what those debates achieved was, it did a few things. First of all, Roman Catholicism, which up until that time was still largely a persecuted and minority religious faith in the United States, suddenly emerged from the shadows. It suddenly acquired recognition as a legitimate faith. Its clergy were now looked upon, not as, you know, the superstition his minions of a Pope in Rome, but rather an educated, intelligent clergy. Because Hughes defended himself and acquitted himself quite admirably against, Frankly, the better speaker, who was Breckenrich, the better educated, who was Breckinrich, but use acquitted himself in a marvelously wonderful way, in a way that gave new legitimacy to Catholicism, and in a way that made Roman Catholics feel as if they had a solid leader to express their particular point of view. You see, up until that time, there was a great reluctance for Catholics to become involved in any controversies with Protestants. Even the Catholic clergy advised their people to be passive in the face of attacks by Protestants, so as to not rock the boat, not to stir the pot. And Hughes changed all that because, first of all, his personality was sucks that he was always gained for a fight, and secondly, because he felt that it was his obligation to defend and to protect his faith against the onslaught of the kinds of bigotry that was so prevalent at that time against Catholicism in the United States.

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Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Richard McCann tell a heck of a story. When we come back, more of this remarkable story of the story in a way of Irish American immigrants as captured by the story of Archbishop John Hughes. Here on our American Stories. And we continue with our American Stories, and we return to the final portion of Archbishop John Hughes’s story.