This is not the first time America’s two parties have been contentious. The government shutdown, coupled with the controversy over illegal aliens, brings to mind the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Federalists tried to silence the Democratic-Republicans. Mathew Carey was part of the struggle. The conflict marked the beginning of the end of the Federalist Party.
The Quasi-War, the XYZ Affair, and the rebellion in Ireland in 1798, abetted by the French, combined to create a climate of public distrust in Irish and French immigrants. The Federalists took full advantage of the situation. What the Democratic-Republicans dubbed the “Reign of Terror” began.
Irish immigrants had been coming to Pennsylvania through the port of Philadelphia for years before and after the American Revolution. Carey reported to John Chambers, his friend in Dublin, that between 3,000 and 4,000 Irish had arrived in Philadelphia in the summer of 1791. Carey was in a good position to be aware of the growing number of immigrants. He was the driving force behind the formation of the Hibernian Society in 1790. He met passengers arriving from Ireland, determining their numbers aboard ship. He and his brother James Carey estimated that approximately 27,000 immigrants from Ireland came to Philadelphia and its vicinity during the 1790s.[1]
At first, the majority of passengers were Ulster Presbyterians, but Roman Catholics immigrated to the United States in greater numbers as the decade wore on. At first they favored the Constitution and Hamilton’s economic policies. As politics became more radical in Ireland under the United Irishmen, the immigrants joined the Democratic-Republican Party. They opposed British oppression. The rebellion brewing in Ireland depended on the French. Mathew Carey and his fellow Democratic-Republicans, Tench Coxe, William Duane, of the Democratic-Republican newspaper the Aurora, and John Beckley, a leading Democratic-Republican in Pennsylvania, were able to recruit growing numbers of Irish to the Jeffersonian camp. As a result, in the election of 1796, Irish voters in large cities went Democratic-Republican.[2]
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“In my very lengthy journey through [Pennsylvania]…I have seen many, very many Irishmen, and with a very few exceptions, they are United Irishmen, Free Masons, and the most God-provoking Democrats on this side of Hell.”[3]
Uriah Tracy
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The Federalists, alarmed by the election results, were concerned that something needed to be done to stem the rising tide of Democratic-Republicanism among the Irish and foreign-born. In 1797, they proposed a twenty-dollar tax on naturalization certificates, a move designed to limit the number of poorer immigrants, a prime source of recruits to the Democratic-Republican Party. Federalist Harrison Gray Otis led the charge. He was member of the House of Representatives from Massachusetts, who delivered his “Wild Irish” speech to Congress. He defended the naturalization tax arguing that “[the Naturalization Tax would keep] the mass of vicious and disorganizing characters who can not live peaceably at home, and who, after unfurling the standard of rebellion in their own countries, may come hither to revolutionize ours.”[4]
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“[I do] not wish to invite hoards of wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly of all parts of the world, to come here with a view to disturb our tranquility, after having succeeded in the overthrow of their own government.”[5]
Harrison Gray Otis
Next: Roger Griswold and the “Spitting Lyon.”
Look for it Monday, October 14
[1] Edward Carter, “A ‘Wild Irishman’ Under Every Federalist’s Bed: Naturalization in Philadelphia, 1789-1806,” 331, 343.
[2] Carter , “ ‘Wild Irishman’,” 333.
[3] Uriah Tracey to Oliver Wolcott, August 7, 1800, in Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, Edited from the Papers of Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury, ed. George Gibbs (1846; New York, 1971) v. 2, 399, quoted in David A. Wilson, United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998) 1.
[4] Carter “ ‘Wild Irishman’,” 334.
[5] Annals of Congress, 5th Cong. V. 7. 430.
