The 1844 Philadelphia Bible Riots and the American Irish Catholic Press
This article analyses the development of an American Irish Catholic identity following the 1844 Philadelphia Nativist riots, as perpetuated in New York's The Truth Teller, and the Boston Pilot. The journalists of these two papers espoused that Irish Catholics had experienced unimaginable horrors at the hands of the British state and the system of Protestant Ascendancy that Britain instituted. For them, the 1844 Nativist riots were a manifestation of Protestant Ascendancy on American soil, instigated by Irish Protestant infiltrators of the Orange Order. These journalists used the experiences of 1844 to differentiate themselves from Irish Protestants, whom they derided as Orangemen. They challenged the rise of Nativism and Whig Anglo-Saxonism, which they believed had been corrupted by a clandestine Orange movement operating in the United States. The specific Irish Catholic response of these papers deserves attention from historians.
Catholicism, Irish immigration, Nativism, Orangeism, journalism
In A History of the Irish Settlers in North America, published in 1850, Thomas D'Arcy McGee reflected upon the years 1840–45 as a period of American Protestant hostility to the Irish Catholic immigrant population. McGee concluded that "whosoever wants to disarm foreign emigration of its anti-American tendencies, let him naturalize the emigrant," gloating that "former candidates of that faction have paid for their fatal success, by utter extinction."1 Such triumphalism would have been unheard of six years earlier. In May and July 1844, blood from Protestant Nativists and Irish Catholic immigrants stained Philadelphia streets. Protestant Irish migration defined the city's immigration history before the 1820s. Philadelphia's resident population willingly accepted as diligent, industrious, and assimilatory [End Page 194] additions to the community. However, Philadelphians perceived the surge of Catholic migration beginning around 1820 as a threat to the city's security and mores, and responded with hostility. In 1844 this culminated in violence. In response, Irish American Catholic journalists, including McGee, provided extensive commentaries on the roots, course, and consequences of these riots. Irish Catholic newspapers informed their readers that the violence was a consequence of the infiltration into American society of Orangemen, the supporters of the Protestant Orange Order.
The order had originated in the north of Ireland in the 1790s, in response to the emergence of Catholic popular politics. The Catholic press found the ideal foil in Orangeism, defined by exclusionary Protestantism, support for Ireland's Protestant Ascendancy and British rule, and a hostility toward Catholicism. Conflict between Orangemen and Catholics had been sporadic but considerable in Ireland, and for the Irish Catholic press it made sense to assume that "Ireland's polarised religious and cultural politics had seeped across the Atlantic."2 This selective reading of the causes of Nativist violence in 1844 allowed Irish Catholic journalists to incorporate the events of that year into a worldview where "no class of men under heaven are more continually or wantonly calumnised and oppressed than Irishmen and Catholics."3
This article expands on current scholarship on the consolidation of American Irish Catholic identity.4 It complements scholarship that emphasizes the centrality of religious influences on this identity in the nineteenth century.5 It focuses on how the two leading newspapers of the Irish Catholic community, New York's The Truth Teller and the Boston Pilot, used the trauma of these Nativist riots to their advantage, to delineate the construction of Irish American Catholic identity.6 These papers were second only to the impact of the Catholic Church itself, and were the central sources of information on Ireland for their readers. For Irish Catholics who sought to influence the developments of Irishness in the United States, these papers were an ideal venue. By 1844 they had a developed subculture of explicitly Irish Catholic polemical journalism. Their commentaries utilized a collective historical narrative of British persecution since the sixteenth century.7 The editors saw in these riots the opportunity, indeed the necessity, to instill among their readership the belief that the predominant markers of American Irish Catholic collective identity were hostility to England, Protestantism, and Orangeism, and a rejection of stereotypes of Irish Catholics as barbaric inferiors. [End Page 195]
The Truth Teller and the Boston Pilot's idealized form of Catholic Irish American identity served as a counterpoint to the perceived Northern Orangemen lurking within American society. It was these Orangemen, the journalists of the Irish Catholic press argued, who had instigated the violence of 1844 in Philadelphia. Those two papers framed the 1844 Nativist riots as a conflict between Irish Catholics and an Irish Protestant community in the United States and presented both as clandestine and threatening. Writers for these publications presented the Protestant Irish community as ardent Orangemen who intended to hold Irish Catholics to the same state of inferiority as they had been when in Ireland. They depicted this Orange threat as a subversive presence, manipulating American Protestant popular opinion against Irish Catholics.
The 1844 riots reveal the distinctiveness of the Irish Catholic immigrant press's interpretation of contemporary events. The arguments of the Truth Teller and Pilot diverged from the official line of the American Catholic hierarchy. For the Catholic hierarchy, as Amanda Beyer-Purvis has noted, the riots "were about religion. They were about immigration, political participation and education, and Bibles. But behind these issues was the question of status."8 For Irish Catholic newspapers the 1844 riots were primarily conflicts between two polarized visions of Irishness: between Catholics who understood Protestant Ascendancy and British rule as an incomparable undeserved cruelty; and the Orangemen who supported and celebrated the subjugation of the Catholics in Ireland. The papers rationalized Nativist hostility and American anti-Catholicism by suggesting that a clandestine Irish Protestant presence was primarily responsible. In this interpretation, Orangemen were attempting to institute similar subjugation within America and remove the principles of religious liberty and free expression from the United States.
To the Truth Teller and Boston Pilot, the riots were evidence that Irish Catholics should bind together as a coherent community. They needed to keep their history and their faith central to their worldview and hold prominent the belief that their Catholic community had suffered unparalleled atrocities. Despite this, it was incomparably virtuous for staying strong. The riots represented a moment for Irish Catholic journalists to serve as cultural influences over the broader Irish immigrant communities and centralize to their readers the memory of Protestant persecutions, including the Cromwellian and Williamite conquests. The two newspapers turned the trauma of the 1844 event into a means to ensure that a particular [End Page 196] understanding of Irish history became central to their readership's understandings of their new American home. A sense of historical grievance structured their discourse around 1844 and, in turn, underscored how the popular political press intended their readers to articulate and internalize a sense of belonging within the United States.
the irish american press
The importance of Irish Catholic editors and journalists in directing the collective identity of the wider community is a central aspect of Irish American scholarship.9 However, the importance to the pre-famine period has not received sufficient attention.10 The central Irish Catholic paper in New York by 1844 was the Truth Teller, which incorporated Catholic nationalism and frequent criticism of Britain, Orangeism, and Irish Protestants. The newspaper, founded in 1825 by clergyman John Power, supported the ambitions and outlooks of the American Catholic Church.11 The paper's central appeal was its analysis of a Manichean world of religious and cultural oppression where the British Protestant and Orange establishment repressed virtuous Irish Catholics. Tyler Anbinder has noted that the Truth Teller "gained a place in the hearts of the Irish Catholic community in New York and elsewhere for its anti-English, anti-Protestant zeal."12 The Truth Teller connected its reporting with Ireland's struggle, framing its conclusions through this prism.13 The 1844 riot provided the perfect opportunity.
The paper was "virulently anti-British and unashamedly pro-Catholic," and focused on endorsing the interests of the Irish Catholic immigrants of the United States.14 The Truth Teller commenced when "a public journal principally devoted to the affairs of Ireland" was "needed in this city, and when the Catholic portion of the community required some organ to express their sentiments and protect their creed." Plus, the "crimes of her plunderers have been imputed to her" by "her invaders and her plunderers, to justify their ruthless and faithless massacres."15 Anglophobic Irish Catholics embraced the paper's "devoutly Catholic" and "passionately Irish" contents, and vindication of their interpretation of Irish history against Protestant derision, written to "edify" rather than just "entertain."16 Circulation is difficult to assess, as reading practices and literacy rates for Irish Catholic immigrants cannot be accurately stated before the post-famine decades, but estimates place the circulation of the Truth Teller at above 3,000 by the end of the [End Page 197] 1830s. This was, as suggested in 1853, "sufficient to do a vast deal of mischief" to non-Catholics.17
In the late 1830s Patrick Donahoe's Boston Pilot emerged on the scene with Thomas D'Arcy McGee as the editor. Named after the Dublin Pilot, the Boston Pilot insisted "our paper is emphatically an Irish and Catholic journal," a "staunch defender and exponent of Irish and Catholic sentiment, and a regular medium of Irish and Catholic intelligence." Circulation expanded from 680 in December 1838 to 7,000 by 1844. The paper relished in the "reputation which it has attained as an authentic gazette of Irish and Catholic affairs."18 In sample copies from May 18, 1844, both the Truth Teller and Pilot averaged approximately eight pages per issue, of which every page concerned either Irish domestic news, or the experiences and expectations for Irish Catholics in the United States. These two papers were the most Irish of all the Catholic papers in the United States in the 1840s; Ireland loomed large on every page.19 David Wilson's first volume of his two-volume biography of Thomas D'Arcy McGee explored the Pilot's response to the riots under McGee's editorship.20 However, analysis of the Pilot's coverage is enriched when coupled with the Truth Teller. This article complements Wilson's analysis by assessing McGee's response as a manifestation of a larger phenomenon of Irish Catholic journalists making sense of the violence by reaching into the Irish past, to homogenize their readership into a single community unified by their faith and shared narrative of historical oppression. The Irish Catholic press, in the aftermath of the 1844 riots, claimed that Irish Catholics were worthy of American citizenship and deserved to live in the United States in peace, emphasizing their history and religion as a defining reason for their worthiness as American citizens.
These newspapers had a receptive readership who demanded a clear articulation of a worldview they instinctively felt, especially so in the aftermath of the 1844 riots. As Kevin Kenny has written, "thousands of Irishmen arrived in America nursing a terrible sense of grievance" and "were more than ready to embrace the notion that they had been driven from their native land by the pernicious forces of English Protestant tyranny."21 The regularity of articles that articulated a specific historical worldview suggests that their editors were addressing a particular demand. The papers did not create an interpretation of Irishness autochthonously, they gave voice to an exile motif implicit in the popular discourse of Irish immigrants, a dialectical, two-way process of identity formation. [End Page 198]
the riots and nativism
The Philadelphia riots marked the culmination of over a decade of rising Nativist sentiment. McGee noted in A History of the Irish Settlers that Nativism "reached its acme at the beginning of the year 1844."
[The] Boston riots of 1834, the New York "school question," (as to whether the Protestant Scriptures should be used as a public school-book,) the increase of emigration, had all been artfully seized upon by the local speculators in excitement, who hoped to fish up civic honors from the troubled waters of discord.22
Anti-Catholic hostility had been a fact of life for Catholic immigrants for decades and was particularly acute following the 1834 Ursuline Convent riots in Massachusetts.23 Then, in 1840, following a New York policy that made the Church of England—sponsored King James Bible mandatory in public schooling, Catholics began campaigning to be allowed to use the Douay-Rheims Bible, approved for use by the Catholic Church, as an alternative.24 This sparked a Protestant backlash. In 1842, threatened by this demonstration of Catholic mobilization, Protestants founded the American Protestant Association (APA) in Philadelphia.25 By 1844 Nativists had assimilated within the American Republican Party, also known as the Native American Party, with branches in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.26
On May 6, 1844, members of the Philadelphia Native American Party held a rally near Kensington's Catholic school, in a predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhood. The key attendee was Lewis C. Levin, editor of the Philadelphia Daily Sun, a Nativist newspaper, and a founder and congressional candidate for the Native American Party who spoke before 3,000 attendees. When it began to rain, the rally relocated to a nearby marketplace where Protestants clashed with Irish Catholics. One Nativist was killed and others, incensed, attempted to burn down the nearby convent of the Sisters of Charity. An armed Irish Catholic mob narrowly repelled the Nativists.27 The next day, several thousand Nativists gathered outside Independence Hall, before marching on Kensington, eventually setting St. Michael's Church afire. On May 8 Mayor John Morin Scott, the Whig Party mayor from 1841 to 1844, pleaded with the Nativists to cease, but to no avail. By May 9 they had also destroyed St. Augustine's Church.28 [End Page 199]
Declaring martial law to prevent further outbreaks of violence, Pennsylvania governor David R. Porter ordered two companies of soldiers from Harrisburg to bolster the city's defenses.29 The bishop of the Philadelphia diocese, Francis P. Kenrick, along with several priests, evacuated the city and urged his congregation to avoid public worship that Sunday.30 The riots left sixteen dead, fifty wounded, hundreds homeless, and over $250,000 worth of property destroyed.31 The following July 4, over 5,000 Nativists marched through the city under a banner of "figures of an open Bible and a dead serpent." For Catholics, "this symbolized the power of the Roman Catholic Church, now utterly extinct."32 On July 6 violence between Irish Catholics and Nativists again came to a head at the church of St. Philip Neri, where Catholics had stored munitions. Native American Party members gathered there and provoked Catholic militiamen to fire into the crowd, which left twelve dead and over forty wounded.33 The church remained standing, despite the best Nativist efforts.34 The riots were the worst instance of anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Nativist violence that Irish immigrants had experienced. It was therefore a priority for the editors and journalists of the Truth Teller and Boston Pilot to report the horrors and find a way to turn the crisis to their advantage, binding their readership together in a common cause.
Michael Feldberg wrote that the riots were a response to an increasingly industrial urban economic landscape, as a growing Irish Catholic immigrant population precipitated ethnic and religious tensions among Philadelphia's Native-born and increasingly economically anxious population.35 For Alexandra Griswold, Bruce Dorsey and Katie Oxx, religious tensions following the evangelical Protestant fervor of the Second Great Awakening were to blame. Keith Milano's work stressed the importance of contemporary anxieties over the political impact of immigration on the growing city of Philadelphia.36 Amanda Beyer-Purvis and Anne Dolan have investigated the language and arguments of American Catholics in Philadelphia concerning the origins and aftermath of the riots.37
This article adds to this work by examining the responses of the editors and journalists of the Truth Teller and the Pilot. These papers were doctrinal, aligned with the interests of the Catholic Church in the United States, and regularly informed the readership about Irish history, especially the legacy of Cromwellian and Williamite subjugation. They contributed directly to the construction of a distinctly American form of Irish Catholic identity, working in tandem with, and occasionally at odds with, the American Catholic hierarchy.38 The Boston Pilot and Truth Teller transmitted a clear message: to [End Page 200] be an American Irish Catholic was to be Anglophobic, Catholic, and conscious that Irish Catholic history was a panorama of unparalleled victimhood and suffering. It was supportive of American republicanism, endlessly grateful to the founding generation for breaking free from British oppression and providing a haven for opponents of British imperialism across the Atlantic.39 Theirs was a vision of Irish Catholics as the ideal citizens of the American Republic. This was a republic defined by a modern, liberal republicanism that combined "traditional republican principles with a much more democratic trust in the people at large."40 In this reading of American republicanism, it was the Orangemen, not the Catholics, who could never truly belong.
The significance of the Irish Catholic press's response to the riots can only be gauged when one situates the 1844 riots within the historical context of Irish political and confessional tensions, dating back to the plantations of Ulster, and the subsequent history of Irish migration to Pennsylvania. From 1609 King James VI and I's government began the settlement of Protestants colonists in the Irish province of Ulster. The English Plantation policy uprooted thousands of Protestants from the Scottish Lowlands across the seventeenth century.41 Over 100,000 migrated between 1650 and 1700. By 1715 Scots and their descendants made up one-third of the total population of Ulster. However, Protestants began migrating en masse by this point, driven by economic precarity and confessional persecution of Nonconformist Protestant denominations, including dissenters and Quakers. Pennsylvania experienced a marked surge in migration from Ulster, in two waves, between 1710 and 1776, and between 1780 and 1820. By 1790 approximately 15 percent of Pennsylvania's population and 25 percent of Philadelphia's Protestant population hailed from Ireland, as Philadelphia was a major port city with no official church and was welcoming of Presbyterians.42 Jedidiah Morse, in 1792, wrote that in Pennsylvania, "the Irish are mostly Presbyterians. Their ancestors came from the north of Ireland, which was originally settled from Scotland."43
Therefore, the American "Irish-Protestants," whom the Irish Catholic press blamed for the violence of 1844, were not a single, monolithic group.44 Some were indeed Orangemen.45 However, by some calculations, as many as 70 percent of Irish emigrants to North America before 1776 were Presbyterians from the north of Ireland, victims of discriminatory legislation under the penal laws.46 However, for the Irish Catholic press, such distinctions were irrelevant, and rejected any discrepancies between "Orange" and "Irish-Protestant." Contributors to these newspapers infused a historically [End Page 201] inflected confessional form of Irishness into the community. Rejecting the claims of Irish Protestants to the mantle of Irishness in 1844 was a deliberate attempt by the Catholic journalists to provide a binding force for newly settled Catholics. They colored all alternatives Orange to suggest Irish Catholics faced a single, hostile force. Constructing an American Irish Catholic identity necessitated the ignoring, even the erasure, of Irish Protestants' contributions to Irish American life.47 In 1844 the Truth Teller and Pilot promoted unity among the American Irish Catholic population by directing their attention to an adversarial, privileged external "other": the Irish Protestant beneficiaries of Protestant Ascendancy and British tyranny.
This pre-revolutionary and early national context of a city of respectable Protestant Irish immigrants, who diligently integrated into respectable American society, goes some way in explaining why after 1820 Nativism became such a phenomenon in Philadelphia. By 1845 between 800,000 and one million Irish had migrated to the United States, and from the 1830ss the majority were Catholic; 93,000 immigrated in 1842 alone.48 This sudden surge exacerbated the appeal of Nativism for Protestant Americans and centered around an emerging national identity of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and democratic republicanism.49 Catholic immigration exposed the inherent contradictions between the United States's Anglo-Saxon, Protestant cultural hegemony and the US Constitution's commitment to religious freedom.50 As John Higham noted, Nativism was defined by an "intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign (i.e., "un-American") connections."51 For Nativists, Irish Catholics kept "alive their foreign feelings, their foreign associations, habits, and manners" by keeping "themselves distinct from the American family."52 Lyman Beecher, cofounder of the American Temperance Society, criticized Catholics as "the class least enlightened, and most implicit in their religious subjection to the priesthood," and unfit to exercise suffrage.53 Samuel Morse lamented how "American character has within a short time been sadly degraded by numerous instances of riot and lawless violence in action, and a dangerous spirit of licentiousness in discussion."54 According to Ray Allen Billington, Nativism had roots in colonial American hostility to "the antinational character" of Catholicism; anti-Catholicism had a long history of being a "patriotic as well as religious concern."55 This was easily transferred to the new republic.
Nativists were also concerned with the loose morality, poverty, and social disorder which they considered to be endemic to the new Irish immigrant population. These new migrants brought with them drunkenness and disorderly [End Page 202] behaviour, including a marked rise in out-of-wedlock births, family breakdown and juvenile crime. This was a distinct departure from the previous image of Irish immigrants in Philadelphia. Non-Irish Americans perceived them as exemplars of assimilation, upward mobility, and economic success. According to Judith Ridner, less than 20 percent of Ulster migrants arrived as bound laborers.56 Furthermore, Ulster Protestants had been central to Pennsylvania's educational establishments, with Rev. Francis Alison (1705–79) serving as vice provost of the College of Philadelphia, and Presbyterians helping to found Dickinson, Wilson, Waynesburg, and Westminster colleges. Nativists, by contrast, quite accurately associated Catholic immigrants with poverty and limited education. As Hidetaka Hirota has shown, the perceived threat of pauperism in the 1830s drove many states, including Pennsylvania, to consider tightening restrictions on immigration. In Philadelphia "foreigners accounted for about half the people admitted to the city's alms house in 1836, and 70 percent of the alien inmates were born in Ireland, making the Irish proportion more than six times larger than that of the English, the second biggest immigrant inmate group."57
According to Protestant Nativists, Catholicism, poverty, and violence went hand in hand. In 1844 the Native American, a Nativist newspaper published in Philadelphia, declared that "these paupers, beggars and naked starvelings have in their hands deadly weapons," and that "Another St. Bartholomew's day" was "begun on the streets of Philadelphia."58 David Montgomery wrote that "at the close of a decade and a half of hotly-contested strikes and severe economic hardship, climaxed by the bitter depression of 1837–43, working-men had divided their votes along ethnic lines." He noted, "the greater part of them were swept up into an enthusiastic political movement whose negative reference group was not the capitalists, but Roman Catholics."59 The Irish Protestants who supported American Nativism were responding to rising social disorder, economic competition, wage underbidding, and confessional incompatibility.60 They endorsed Pennsylvania's embrace of religious freedom for themselves but were not prepared to stretch this to Catholics.
To dissociate themselves from Catholic immigrants, Irish Protestants increasingly embraced an alternative: a hybrid immigrant identity. As Irishness became inherently associated with Catholicism in the collective perception of American Nativists, a phenomenon criticized by many Irish Protestants as the unfortunate "prejudice, which regards all Irishmen as Catholics," Protestant Irishmen came to self-identify as "Scots Irish."61 This was a specific commitment to a loyalist ethnic identity, tied inherently to [End Page 203] the plantations of Ulster and Scottish Lowland origin. According to Tom Devine, for emigrants from Ulster, "an integral factor in their distinctive subculture was their Scottish roots."62 The Scots Irish embraced Ireland's history of Protestant conquest, defining themselves by the geographic origin of most of Ireland's Protestants, and by a commitment to the principles of the 1801 Act of Union. They celebrated Ireland's connection to the Scottish and English components of the United Kingdom.63
By 1840 Daniel O'Connell's campaign for Repeal of the British Union became a cause célèbre for American Irish Catholics. By December 1840 Repeal organizations had been founded across Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Baltimore, Charleston, Cincinnati, Natchez, New Orleans, Savannah, and St. Louis.64 The prominence of Repeal on the American domestic agenda, and the Catholic nationalism of O'Connell and his proponents exacerbated both non-Irish Nativist hostility and Scots Irish alienation. Nativists understood Repeal as a conspiracy that sought to place a foreign cause above American concerns, to exacerbate tensions between the United States and Great Britain. Lewis C. Levin saw a "conspiracy behind the mask of Repeal to fix absolutism on the United States," denouncing the "fallacies of Irish Repeal," and claimed O'Connell had "made Repeal of the Irish Union, the means of concentrating a religious and political power, unsurpassed in the history of the world."65 This in turn increased the Irish Catholic press's willingness to inculcate a virulent narrative of persecution and the righteousness of their centuries-long struggle against British and Protestant injustice. Much to the chagrin of American Nativists, 405 delegates from thirteen states attended the second National Repeal Convention, which met in the Broadway Tabernacle in September 1843.
American Nativism and anti-Catholicism developed in parallel with the increasing prominence of abolitionism in the United States. As William J. Wallace's work has demonstrated, American abolitionism was dominated by Evangelical Protestants, who were hostile to Catholicism and paralleled "the immoral authoritarianism of the Catholic priest to the immoral authoritarianism of the slaveholder."66 With the idea of what it meant to be an American increasingly splitting along sectional lines (a situation exacerbated by the prospect of acquiring new territories in the 1840s, alongside abolitionism's obvious anti-Catholic spine), Irish Catholics en bloc chose to reject abolitionist arguments and align with the pro—Southern Democratic party. [End Page 204]
However, this did little to assuage Nativist hostility. In 1839 Pope Gregory XVI (1831–46) condemned the Atlantic slave trade and American domestic slavery. This forced American Catholic bishops, including John England and Francis Patrick Kenrick, to interpret the pope's words as a condemnation of the slave trade rather than American domestic slavery.67 Then, in 1843, O'Connell condemned American slavery and told his American Irish audience that if they would "dare countenance the system of slavery that is supported there, we will recognize you as Irishmen no longer."68 Nativists took advantage. In January 1844 Lewis Levin, in the Daily Sun, wrote that "Boston has set the Pope's ball in motion in the hope that it will roll towards the South and explode in the slave States." America had "now reached a crisis in this foreign interference in our domestic institutions and civil rights that must be met with a manly front and settled forever." An "organized conspiracy of Papal abolitionists under the title of 'Repeal Associations' is scattered through the land, receiving their 'orders' from his holiness."69 The irony of condemning Irish Catholics for threatening the South's peculiar institution, when in fact the Irish Catholic community was almost universally hostile to American abolitionism, was lost on the Nativist mainstream.70
In the collective perceptions of Irish Catholic journalists, this all combined to suggest that hostile forces on all sides threatened the Irish Catholic population of the United States. These forces sought to subject Catholics to the level of discrimination they knew from Ireland. Rather than acknowledge any of the Nativist complaints as a homegrown phenomenon, a reaction to the socioeconomic and political challenge of Irish Catholic migration, the Irish Catholic press dislocated Nativism from the American nation. The Truth Teller and Boston Pilot embraced the argument that a hostile, foreign presence infiltrated American Protestants and that Irish Catholics could not be blamed in any way, because an uncompromising, unjust menace, Orangeism, was the true reason for hostility toward Irish Catholics.
orangemen as instigators
Irish Catholic editors incorporated the rise of both Nativism and sectional tensions into a schema of Irish Protestant internal subversion. They perpetuated the belief that Irish Protestants dominated the abolitionist and Nativist movements, that both were insidious attempts to prevent Irish Catholics from embracing the benefits of American liberty, to further the interests of [End Page 205] Britain and oppress Irish Catholics within the United States. A Pilot editorial argued that abolitionism was "thronged with bigoted and persecuting religionists" who "desire the extermination of Catholics by fire and sword." A later edition asked, "can the exiled victims of British oppression relinquish the hate they bear the oppressor and lend their influence for the furtherance of his subtle schemes?"71 The press emphasized that Irish Catholics were the true patriots, and abolitionists and Orangemen the corrupters of America. The Truth Teller castigated the "abolitionists and the Orangemen, and the Niggers, and the Natives, and the Agrarian Chartists, and the British Whigs, and the other charming allies of England," as all sought to deliver "the freedom of the United States" to "their good little Queen."72
In alleging that their opponents served the interests of the British monarchy, these journalists stressed their own comparative, unquestionable Americanism. The Truth Teller published articles claiming that the Catholic experience of oppression under the British empire meant they would appreciate the liberties of America more than any other people and show greater loyalty. Irish Catholics promoted the United States's mission and values, staking a claim to its benefits as a free community. In doing so, they built upon decades of hyper-patriotic sentiment. From its inception, the Truth Teller had promoted the agenda of Irish American patriotism; one article declared that Irish Catholics' "love of liberty is exalted by their experience of Oppression; disinherited in their native land, their adopted land has a double claim on their affections." The Irish American newspaper industry had, from its earliest stages, embraced a vision of American exceptionalism that depicted the United States as a limitless source of inspiration. The "flame that will yet light Ireland to peace and freedom will be lit at the unquenchable altar of liberty, and Catholics will be emancipated through the voice of America."73 This hyper-American patriotism opened a space for Irish Catholics to emphasize their heritage and Catholicism, justify their place within the United States, their suitability to go Westward, in rejection of Nativist fears that "Romanists are spreading themselves like locusts, over our whole territory."74 This demonstrated their suitability and receptivity to everything that America represented.
This established how the Irish Catholic journalists depicted the 1844 riots. For the Truth Teller and the Pilot, the horrors of Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, as represented by the Orangemen of the North, had infiltrated America.75 According to this narrative, the APA and the Native American Party were fronts for the Orangemen, and American Protestant Nativists [End Page 206] were the dupes of a more clandestine, dangerous presence lurking beneath. On May 11 a Truth Teller article stated that "among the most active of the rioters were Irish-Protestants," and "the unhappy differences which England has so craftily perpetuated among the Irish people in their own country, and by which England has enslaved the people of Ireland, had more to do in originating these riots than anything else." In this explanation, "these differences and jealousies are now transferred to America." The Irish Catholic press explained to their readers that ordinary Americans were not irreversibly hostile to Irish Catholics. Instead, "that rank spirit of religious persecution which was rocked in the cradle of the Protestant Reformation," perpetuated by Irish Protestant infiltrators, was truly to blame, as "it galls the Orangemen of this country to see the Catholics placed on a footing of equality with other denominations."76
The Truth Teller's writers utilized American Nativism to inform the readership of the history and characteristics of Orangeism, and that American Nativism was not an inherent dimension of American culture but was instead a corrupted result of Orange subversion. For the American Irish Catholic press, "Orangeism and Nativism are synonymous," defined by "intolerance, monopoly, injustice, pillage, murder." The educative process of understanding Nativism involved a reflective mapping of Irish history onto Nativism. The Truth Teller claimed that Levin himself was an Orangeman, deriding him as "the Irish Orange Editor of the Sun."77 The presence of a hostile Nativist threat gave the Irish Catholic press a chance to educate their readership on Irish history. The press informed new arrivals, including those from areas in Ireland that had an almost negligible Orange presence, that the root of their suffering in Ireland had in fact been Orangeism and British imperialism. Furthermore, they had not managed to escape these hostile forces. The process of becoming Irish American, as perpetuated through the articles of the Irish Catholic press before and during 1844, involved encouraging the immigrant population to become more explicitly Irish. The formation of an Irish Catholic identity in the United States required learning about Irish history and its Catholic legacy and applying this historical narrative to the domestic realities of the United States.
This was an attempt to dissociate Irish Protestants from American Protestantism, to reassure the readership that the American people could be better if freed from their Orange influences. The papers aimed to demonstrate the civic worth of Irish Catholics, to assure non-Irish Americans that Irish Catholics had nothing but unbounded respect for American Protestants; [End Page 207] it was Orangeism they opposed, not Protestantism. The Truth Teller's writers found it more comforting to subscribe to a collective narrative of Orange conspiracy than to acknowledge Protestant America's increasing Nativist hostility. Tying domestic events to an increasingly established Catholic interpretation of Irish history became a means of rejecting the divergence between the promise and reality of America.78 For the cultural brokers of Irish Catholic America, the riots demonstrated the need to attribute American anti-Catholicism to British influence and a powerful Orange presence, rather than recognize anti-Catholicism as a homegrown American phenomenon. This required the refusal to acknowledge any residual anti-Catholicism in the United States, from colonial era hostility to the French presence in Canada and former North American territories, and the Spanish presence in the South. In framing anti-Catholicism because of British imperialism and Irish Protestant infiltration, Irish Catholic journalists intentionally overlooked and de-emphasized the autochthonous anti-Catholicism of American civic culture. They did so to further discredit their perceived Orange enemies for bringing a degrading prejudice into a nation that proclaimed religious liberty as a founding principle.
the long history of orange oppression
In ascribing the reasons for violence to a pervasive, sinister Orange presence, Irish Catholic journalists tied the experiences of 1844 to a longue durée history of conflict between Orangemen and Irish Catholics in Ireland, but also in the previous two decades in the United States. On July 12, 1824, Irish historical conflict had been "re-enacted" in New York, between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, in a street riot in Greenwich Village. Authorities convicted four Protestants and five Catholics in two different trials.79 In 1831 a second riot occurred in Philadelphia. Four Protestants and sixteen Catholics were tried together for "multiple counts for riot, assault, and disturbing the peace."80 Unlike the 1844 riots, these examples were direct conflicts between two distinct Irish communities over the Protestant Commemorations of the 1690 Battle of the Boyne. Irish Catholics justified their violent response as a natural reaction to "this revival of proceedings that recalled the dreadful inflictions of terror and torture from which they had fled from their native land." For these Irish Catholics, it was an "incontrovertible fact, that the Battle of the Boyne and the triumph of the parricidal Dutchman, overwhelmed Ireland, [End Page 208] persecuted—long persecuted Ireland, with everything horrid, oppressive and disastrous."81 When Irish Catholic commentators condemned the 1844 riots as a manifestation of Orangeism on American soil, they did so knowing that previous instances of sectarian, confessional violence over the true meaning of Irishness remained prominent in the Irish Catholic immigrant collective memory. The Irish Catholic press incorporated 1844 into a self-constructed teleologic narrative of Irish Protestant resistance to the increasing presence and integration of Catholic Irish immigrants within the United States.
In 1844 Irish Catholics were not simply "fighting against all Protestants, Irish or otherwise."82 They specifically singled out Irish Protestants, claiming they were antithetical to American values, and that Irish Catholics were the true Irish American citizens. Nativists saw the riots as a conflict between republican freedom and the "slavery" of "a foreign band" of Irish Catholics seeking to infiltrate America and cultivate tyranny.83 The Truth Teller and Pilot argued that Irish Catholics possessed greater capacity to belong in America than Irish Protestants. The Truth Teller claimed "take away the Irish Catholics from America, and one year more will ruin the constitution. They are the guard that watch the lamp of liberty!"84 The Pilot and the Truth Teller ridiculed Nativist arguments that Catholicism was antithetical to democracy, depicting Orangemen as the true foreigners, the servants of British monarchy.
This accompanied a parallel criticism that Irish Protestants were false Irishmen as well as false Americans. In July 1844 the Truth Teller printed a speech that claimed no true Irishmen could celebrate a battle between "two foreigners—men indifferent to the sufferings, the ruin, and the degradation of Ireland, which they made the bloody stage of their ambitions." Irish Protestants "still exult in victories wherein your ancestors were the allies of foreigners and you still drink to the memory of the man who ruined one great branch of Irish manufacture," a reference to William of Orange, who "sacrificed one great source of industry to England's insatiable thirst of gain, and left no blessing identified with his name to entitle him to your enthusiasm."85 To be Orange was to support Ireland's enslavement; emigrating to the United States had provided Irish Protestants the opportunity to renounce their sectarian past, yet in the judgment of the Catholic press, they had universally failed to do so. The Truth Teller and Pilot both framed their resistance to Orangeism in 1844 within an explanation that they had no choice but to embrace a sectarian and hostile identity in retaliation to American Orangeism, as their opponents intentionally remained loyal to outdated, unworthy ideals. [End Page 209]
Irish Catholic journalists depicted Irish Protestants as the tools of an alien British conspiracy, heirs of a historical tradition of tyranny opposed to America's founding principles, undeserving of a place within the United States. Irish Catholics conversely appropriated the language of American republicanism to claim that the American experiment necessitated an acceptance of their community.86 Anne Morgan has noted that, in response to Nativist derision and insults, American Catholics incorporated a language of liberal republicanism to claim that they were deserving citizens of the United States and to challenge Nativist accusations that foreigners had a natural aversion to American values.87 For example, Philadelphia's Irish Catholic laity declared that they were an embattled religious "minority," and it was for them that "the Constitution exist[ed]."88 In 1844 Irish Catholics demanded that "the exclamation, 'i am an american citizen,' shall continue to be the protection of our rights, and the guarantee of our freedom."89 This invocation of the language of citizenship and republicanism was a direct challenge to Nativist accusations that Irish Catholics were defined by "a vindictive, anti-republican spirit" and that "the alien population" of Kensington were by nature opposed to the civic republicanism of the United States.90
The assessments of the Truth Teller and Pilot demonstrate that Irish Catholic commentators embraced, incorporated, and molded the rhetoric and imagery of American republicanism. They argued that Irish Catholic experience of historical oppression demonstrated their suitability for the United States, that Irish Catholics had been supporters and allies of the American republic from the beginning, whereas Irish Protestants were unworthy of membership. This involved committing to an exceptional reading of the Founding Era as one of world-changing significance, where the new republic irrevocably split from the principles and corrupted values of the Old World. According to the press, this was due to the Irish immigrant presence in the American colonies, a people who despised the British imperial values that had driven them from their home and imbued the American founders with a love of liberty.
The centrality of the role of Irish Catholics in the emergence and consolidation of American republicanism was a central motif. As Thomas D'Arcy McGee put it a few months after the 1844 riots, the outrages of the Orangemen and the response of the Irish Catholics was further evidence that "the more truly Irish or Celtic we are, the more truly republican we must be, and consequently the more American." Therefore, the United States would benefit from rapid naturalization. The newspapers presented Ireland's history [End Page 210] as proof that those of Celtic heritage were inherently antimonarchical; whereas the Anglo-Saxon oppressors were the proud lovers of monarchy, the Celts were "too proud, restless and intelligent in the masses, to bear witness the rule of kings."91 This understanding of citizenship and naturalization was dichotomous with the Nativist perspective. Irish Catholic journalists articulated an alternative notion of citizenship based on commitment to American ideals; they attempted to situate their community as the race of men who had begun the challenge to British oppression before passing the baton of liberty to the United States.
For the Irish Catholic press, a vision of citizenship and loyalty to the United States was the only legitimate manifestation of naturalization. Whereas their naturalization would benefit the United States, Irish Protestantism involved Orangeist loyalty to the trappings and symbolism of the British monarchy, and therefore their ideals belonged in neither America nor Ireland. The horror of 1844 was proof of that. The Catholic Herald, the official paper of the Philadelphia diocese, first published in 1833, echoed this perspective. According to a declaration in the Herald, "when young America sent forth to the nations of Europe a statement of her grievances and sufferings, whose was the address that first greeted her? History answers, Catholic Ireland."92 Therefore, the Irish reimagined themselves as the oldest and truest allies of the United States. By this logic, it followed that the right course was to naturalize Irish Catholics as quickly as possible, rather than acquiesce to the un-American attempts of the Nativists to restrict naturalization. After the riots the Philadelphia laity declared that Irish Catholics would "yield to none of our fellow-citizens in attachment to republican institutions, we owe no allegiance whatever to foreign prince or potentate." Without protections for the rights of minorities, "this government would be a despotism, for the governing power would be uncontrolled."93
Journalists from the Truth Teller and Boston Pilot added to this image of the virtuous, freedom-loving Irish immigrant, worthy of American citizenship. In these papers' interpretations, the Irish experience of imperial subjugation under the British empire made Irish Catholics the ideal republicans, and the most virulent opponents of the methods of British imperial rule, of which the United States was the dichotomy. This was a value-based understanding of citizenship and belonging, where immigrants deserved to be naturalized because they were fleeing from the very empire that had oppressed the American colonies before the revolutionary war. [End Page 211]
For Irish Catholic journalists, it was disturbing to witness that the American people did not, en masse, actively welcome them, and that the Democratic party's rivals were unwilling to embrace them as worthy citizens. Therefore, for the Irish Catholic press, the Whig Party was just as bad as the Native American party, both part of the same Orange conspiracy. Loyalty to the Democratic party had allowed Irish Catholics to offset Nativist criticism, as they were a steadfast component of a hegemonic political party that had dominated the executive office since Andrew Jackson's presidency. However, in 1840, the Whig party's electoral victory with William Henry Harrison galvanized Irish Catholic identification as an embattled minority community. Irish Catholic journalists depicted the Whigs as tools of Protestant Ascendancy, committed to ensuring Irish Protestant power in America. For Irish Catholics, accustomed to "religious distinctions and political disqualifications on the other side of the Atlantic," it was apparent that "as Irish Protestants are very generally found nestling under the wings of Orange Ascendency at home," naturally they would "cling to the party in this country most congenial to their former predilections."94
The Whig Party represented Irish Catholic journalists' most pressing fear, that "the curse of Cromwell's light" would now corrupt and poison the American political experiment and enforce the legislative restrictions of Protestant Ascendancy in the United States.95 Whiggism was therefore one further means, acting in parallel with the Nativist rabble, for "that blood dripping monster, Irish Orangeism, in all its naked abominations and diabolical deformities," to corrupt American voters.96 An alliance with the Whig Party had allowed the Philadelphia Native Americans to win three out of four of Philadelphia's congressional seats in 1844. The Whigs won the governorship, a congressional seat, and most local offices. When that happened, the Irish Catholic press believed itself confirmed in its fears of a Nativist establishment built to oppress Irish Catholics.
One Truth Teller article entitled "Orangeism and Clayism—One and the Same Thing," was a reference to Henry Clay, the preeminent Whig politician. It argued that American Orangemen recognized "in Mr Clay and the Whig party, principles analogous to all those civil disqualifications, and encroachments upon the natural rights of man, which have ever characterised the Irish Orangemen." It was "not to be wondered at then, when we see the Irish Orangeman, uniting with his American ally, in the unholy work of persecuting and oppressing his fellow-man."97 After all, [End Page 212]
what is Orangeism? Religious bigotry and civil proscription and persecution, for opinion's sake. And what is Native Americanism—Clayism—Whiggism? Political bigotry, and civil proscription and persecution, for the crime of being born in any other country, than the United States of America.98
It suited these journalists to convince their readers that Orangemen allegedly saw the Whigs "with the best feelings of brotherhood. That faction which has deluged its native land in blood, is evidently in league with our Whig cohorts of the present day."99 This perspective was so pervasive that it was also found in the New York Freeman's Journal, which claimed "almost every Protestant Irishman" voted Whig.100 The Irish Catholic press aimed to shape political allegiance and their aspirations for what it meant to be an Irish Catholic in 1844 by promoting a perception of an internationalist conspiracy of Orangemen. Their sense of America was galvanized by, and in turn galvanized a confessionally shaped identity of embattled Irish Catholics struggling against a corrupt Orange establishment. Such perspectives were necessary for them to continually uphold the United States as a virtuous alternative to Protestant Ascendancy.101
Thomas D'Arcy McGee, echoing the Truth Teller, virulently embraced the argument that Nativists were "the spurious offspring of some of our recreant countrymen from the North of Ireland."102 This perspective, as David Wilson has noted, "retained the image of America as the land of liberty while blaming anti-Catholic prejudice on un-American outsiders."103 According to McGee, a minor group of "Ministers of the Gospel" had allied themselves with "a small number of Native bigots" to perpetuate "enormous falsehoods" about Catholicism and the Irish, as a community that endorsed the "Inquisition and its tortures." This was a perspective with which Protestant editors had corrupted the "poorer classes of the population" by taking advantage of their "low state of intelligence, and absence of all moral feeling." For McGee, if America succumbed to this Orange agenda, then it would be "better for every Emigrant to return to the darkness of European despotism, where, at least, there will be a singleness and nobility about the tyrant," than "remain in a land mocked by the fruits of liberty." The Boston Pilot promoted a dichotomous image of the Old World and the New, where "the true American spirit, as we have felt it in social life, in our laws, and Institutions" was the polar opposite of "Calvinistic intolerance, Orange despotism and a prejudiced press."104 [End Page 213]
The Truth Teller and the Pilot argued that Orangemen "injected foreign prejudice into America, were loyal to a foreign monarch, and generally refused to take the oath of naturalization; as such, they were the very antithesis of Americanism." Thus, they framed the values of the American Republic, from its founding, as inclusive and open to Celtic influences.105 For McGee, the "Celtic spirit," of the "unanimous rising of the Irish emigrants of the country," during the Revolutionary War was responsible for the American victory.106
Cian McMahon has noted how the generation of Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States after 1845 "in denying that the legal code, customs, and language of the United States were an Anglo-Saxon inheritance." He further argued that "America's republicanism was a Celtic inheritance, born of the immemorial struggle between freedom and tyranny."107 In doing so, they built upon a precedent set in the pre-famine decades, one that found explicit articulation in 1844. Irish immigrants
expanded the boundaries of American citizenship by depicting themselves as members of what one exile termed a proud and noble "world-wide race" of Celts. The Celts' democratic impulses were, they claimed, locked in a timeless transnational struggle with the same oligarchic Anglo-Saxons who had opposed the American War of Independence.108
The commentaries of 1844 show that even before 1845 Irish Catholic journalists endorsed a vision of transnational struggle. For the editors and journalists of the Truth Teller and the Pilot, the greatest threat to Irish Catholics in the United States in 1844 was hostile Nativists who believed the United States was an Anglo-Saxon nation. This Anglo-Saxonism was fundamentally an Orange construction, a consequence of centuries of Orange corruption in Ireland, an attempt to graft onto the United States the insidious practices of Ireland's Protestant oppressors.
Irish Catholic newspapers blamed the violence of 1844 on Irish Protestant infiltration, rather than an Anglo-Saxonist demonstration of American exclusion. The Truth Teller's perspective was infectious in May 1844, for a Freeman's Journal correspondent wrote that "the present movement is but a British attempt to engraft insidiously on the hated stock of American Republicanism, the principles of the Irish Orangemen." Irish Catholic journalists, the cultural brokers of the Irish immigrant communities, would [End Page 214] repeatedly attempt to convince their wider readership that "the most active" of "the Native Americans in New York, and probably in Philadelphia also, have been Irish Orangemen. They alone have been capable of furnishing the anti-social views with which our young Natives have been inoculated."109
An article in the Truth Teller asked, "call you this Native Americanism? It is a libel upon all the great and good that have ever lived in America, and a reproach to the present age and generation." A true American, in the tradition of the founding generation idealized by the Pilot and Truth Teller, could never act in the way these Orangemen had acted. According to the Truth Teller, "all the recent massacres and Church burnings were perpetrated by British hirelings aided by the low rabble, sent here to disturb us, and finally, to subvert our constitution." In depicting Philadelphia as "the last triumph" of Orangeism, "the gall bladder of Protestantism" and "the source of ruin to every country it ever spread its baleful darkness over," the writers of the Truth Teller urged the readership to draw closer ties with one another. They wanted them to recognize that their opponents' cruelty was now comparable to "the savage joy of Cromwell, over the ruins of Drogheda." Incorporating the horrors of 1844 into a historical framework allowed Irish Catholics to come to terms with the extensive anti-Catholicism they had experienced, and enhance their own sense of victimhood, as "in depth of infamy our Orange Natives surpass" all previous atrocities.110
However, whereas the Truth Teller consistently maintained a distinction between the Orangemen who were manipulating the riots, and Native-born American Protestants, Thomas D'Arcy McGee went beyond this. Responding to a Nativist criticism of the "physical inferiority" of Irish Catholics in Philadelphia, he condemned the "native sons of America" as "cowards and sons of cowards." For McGee, "it ill becomes any American to taunt Irishmen on the score of bravery," when "as soldiers, every native ought to belong to the Peace Society."111 This terrified the moderate majority of Irish Catholics in the United States. Bishop Fenwick of Boston, who had preached a peaceful, Americanizing agenda to his congregation, withdrew his subscription to the Boston Pilot in disgust; this withdrawal was especially significant, as Fenwick himself had founded the paper in 1829.112 For McGee's critics, such incendiary commentary would only push most Americans to the Native American party. Bishop Kenrick in Philadelphia had preached in a sermon on "Charity Towards Enemies" that "if these deluded men can succeed in disturbing the peace of society, by their combined attack on their unoffending fellow-citizens, worshipping God according to the dictates of [End Page 215] their conscience, let no portion of the blame rest with us." For Kenrick, "whilst they may fancy that they do God and the country service in pointing you out as enemies of the Constitution and Laws," Catholics had a duty to "sustain the characters of peaceable and good citizens."113
The rhetoric of the Boston Pilot threatened the accommodationist approach the American Catholic Church intended to pursue immediately after 1844. McGee later remembered that he alone had "dared to defend the church, or to stigmatize, as they deserved, the church-burglars and women-assaulters of Philadelphia."114 For his detractors, the Pilot had gone too far and failed to keep the necessary distinction of Americans and Orangemen. This demonstrates the spectrum of Irish Catholic journalistic responses to the 1844 riots. It also shows that despite their differences, the editors of 1844 all operated within, and contributed to, a historically inflected discourse of Manichean conflict between Catholics and Orangemen. Perceptions of a specific narrative of Irish Catholic suffering at the hands of the Orange establishment shaped not only the commonalities, but also the divergences, of Irish Catholic journalistic responses to the 1844 riots.
conclusion
In April 1825, at the annual meeting of the Irish Charitable Society of Boston, a speaker had declared that "the venomous reptiles of Ireland," driven "from the Emerald Isle" by "our Patron Saint," had now reasserted themselves in Ireland, having "found a home in the British Cabinet."115 By 1844 Irish Catholic commentators asserted that the venom of Protestant Orangemen had now infiltrated the United States. Irish Catholics, through the popular press, presented themselves as closely tied to their past, but nevertheless, through their religious beliefs and their history, more deserving of acceptance within the teleology of American liberty than their Protestant opponents. The 1844 riots put their community to the test and threatened their security and viability in the United States. However, the 1844 riots also galvanized the editors of the papers here considered, allowing them to propose to their readers that to be truly Irish in the United States meant one must be Catholic and aware that Irish history provided a panorama of unparalleled suffering. In responding to the riots, the Irish Catholic press drew not only on "Scripture and the Constitution," but also on a specific narrative of Irish history.116 They framed the 1844 riots as yet another example to count within [End Page 216] the plethora of Irish Catholic persecution, an example of Irish Catholic virtue and endurance. Furthermore, their commentaries were an attempt to dislocate Protestantism from republicanism and American identity, to argue that one did not need to be of Anglo-Saxon or Protestant heritage to form a part of America's providential destiny; that in fact, Irish Catholics were at the vanguard of this destiny, whereas Orangemen were at the rear-guard of a backward-looking exclusionary politics.
The Truth Teller and the Boston Pilot interpreted the 1844 riots within their pages as confirmation of a worldview that Irish Catholics in New York and Boston had been developing since the press's inchoate roots in the 1820s. This was that the Catholics of Ireland had endured a "suffering in degree and duration, unparalleled in history of civilized man."117 A hostile perception of Irish Protestants residing both in the United States and in Ireland provided a force for communal integration among Irish Catholics during, and directly after, the 1844 riots. Irish Catholic identity was neither fixed nor monadic; it developed through the sociohistorical and cultural contexts of Irish history, as told through the opinionizing of the Irish Catholic press. They confirmed Irish Catholicism as a form of politico-cultural nationalism, relying on "the overarching feature of commonality shared by the majority, their confessional identity."118 The press's reception of 1844 was an exacerbation and culmination of decades of press agency.
The 1844 riots allowed editorial and authorial cultural brokers in the North American Irish Catholic press to articulate a collective Irish Catholic communal identity. This dark narrative of Irish suffering, so present throughout these articles, served to present Protestant rule in Ireland as a tyranny unparalleled in history. These examples of the past, drawn upon by these journalists to explain the suffering of Catholics in Ireland and the United States, would soon be overshadowed by famine, mass immigration, and the horrors of Black 47. The 1844 riots serve as a unique insight into the emergence of an Irish Catholic identity in the United States, when Irish Catholic journalists could not have known that their worldview would soon find horrific corroboration in an imminent time of destitution, famine, and immigration. [End Page 217]
robert o'sullivan is a historian of nineteenth-century American, European, Atlantic, and comparative history, and the history of the Irish diaspora in the United States. He is currently working on a PhD at the University of Cambridge that focuses on the construction of Irish Catholic ethnic identity in the United States throughout the nineteenth century and concerns how the Irish Catholic press used commentaries on international events to shape that identity. He obtained his BA from the University of Cambridge in 2019, graduating with a Double First with Distinction. He was the recipient of the Gladstone Memorial Prize and Junior Sarah Norton Prize in 2019. He then acquired an MPhil from the University of Cambridge in 2020.
notes
1. Thomas D'Arcy McGee, A History of the Irish Settlers in North America: From the Earliest Period to the Census of 1850 (Boston: P. Donahoe, 1852), 148. This triumphant commentary broadly reflected the state of Irish America by 1851. At the onset of the second half of the century, Philadelphia was experiencing an influx of famine-era immigration that would come to define the popular image of the Irish in the United States thereafter. Philadelphia had raised thousands of dollars in humanitarian relief for the Irish Famine, was the second-largest port for the export of aid to Ireland, organized by cross-confessional, mostly Protestant charities. McGee had survived both the Famine and the abortive 1848 Irish uprising and had established himself as a prominent controversialist in the United States on matters related to Ireland and the Irish. Nativist resistance to Irish immigration would continue to be a major impediment for Irish Catholics in the United States, especially with the rise of the Know Nothing party in 1853–55. Also, the growing number of Irish immigrants galvanized a level of communal solidarity in the face of Nativist hostility unprecedented for the previous decades: Harvey Strum, "Pennsylvania and Irish Famine Relief, 1846–1847," Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 81, no. 3 (2014): 277–99; David A. Wilson, Thomas D'Arcy McGee: Passion, Reason, and Politics, 1825–1857, vol. 1 (Montreal: McGill–Queen's Press–MQUP, 2008); Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
2. Walter J. Walsh, "William Sampson, a Republican Constitution, and the Conundrum of Orangeism on American Soil, 1824–1831," Radharc: A Journal of Irish and Irish-American Studies 5 (2004): 1–32.
3. Truth Teller, January 4, 1840.
4. This article is cognizant that Irish Catholic identity was directly influenced by multiple factors, especially the growing Catholic Church in the United States, at a national, state, and regional level; and by Irish immigrant societies, which included the Societies for Catholic Emancipation before 1829, and Repeal from 1840. For these processes, see Kevin Kenny, The American Irish: A History (Harlow: Longman Books, 2000).
5. C. Barr, '"Imperium in Imperio': Irish Episcopal Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century," English Historical Review 123, no. 502 (2008): 611–50; C. Barr and H. M. Carey, eds., Religion and Greater Ireland: Christianity and Irish Global Networks, 1750–1950 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2015); C. Barr, Ireland's Empire: The Roman Catholic Church in the English-Speaking World, 1829–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).
6. These two papers were the dominant contributors to Irish Catholic nationalist print culture before 1845 and, unless specified otherwise, references to "the Irish Catholic press" are primarily references to the two major papers. This article does not attempt to provide a comprehensive account of the development of Irish Catholic identity in the United States before 1845, which would be beyond the scope of a single article. This article does not make use of the United States documents in the Propaganda Fide Historical Archives, nor will it touch in any detail on the opinions or responses of the leading figures of the Catholic Church in the United States, such as John Hughes or John England. The author is working on a larger project that will integrate the Irish Catholic press with the wider influences on Irish Catholic identity in the United States.
7. This article concerns the intentions and ambitions of the editors and journalists of the Irish Catholic newspapers. It is not a study of their critical reception or their impact on the Irish Catholic immigrant communities, which would be beyond its scope.
8. Amanda Beyer-Purvis, "The Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844: Contest Over the Rights of Citizens," Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 83, no. 3 (2016): 366–93.
9. Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1988); Cian T. McMahon, The Global Dimensions of Irish Identity: Race, Nation, and the Popular Press, 1840–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Eileen P. Sullivan, The Shamrock and the Cross: Irish American Novelists Shape American Catholicism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016); Brian Shott, Mediating America: Black and Irish Press and the Struggle for Citizenship, 1870–1914 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019).
10. Kevin Kenny, "Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study," Journal of American History 90, no. 1 (2003): 134–62; Timothy J. Meagher, The Columbia Guide to Irish American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).
11. Thomas Francis Moriarty, " The Truth Teller and Irish Americans of the 1820's," American Catholic Historical Society Records 75 (1964): 39–52.
12. Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 118.
13. From January 1830, the paper's chief editor was William Denman, a Catholic of Scottish origin, who took an active interest in and oversaw the content of the Truth Teller. One could be forgiven for questioning, because Denman was not himself an Irish Catholic, whether one can accurately call the Truth Teller an Irish Catholic newspaper. Cian McMahon's article on the birth of the Irish American press does not give much attention to the Truth Teller, suggesting that he believes Denman's editorship limits the applicability of it as an Irish paper: Cian T. McMahon, "Ireland and the Birth of the Irish-American Press, 1842–61," American Periodicals 19, no. 1 (2009): 5–20.
14. Kevin Kenny, "Religion and Immigration: The Irish Community in N.Y.C, 1815 to 1840," The Recorder: A Journal of the American Irish Historical Society 3, no. 2 (1989): 14.
15. Truth Teller, January 4, 1840, and August 5, 1826.
16. Dan Milner, The Unstoppable Irish: Songs and Integration of the New York Irish, 1783–1883 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), 60.
17. New York Herald, December 12, 1853.
18. Boston Pilot, December 18, 1841, and December 25, 1841.
19. A complete account of American Catholic responses to the 1844 riots is beyond the scope of this article. For the sake of continuity, and to bring to the fore sources and interpretations that have received inadequate scholarly attention, this article will primarily use source material from the Truth Teller and the Boston Pilot. Other sources' material will be provided to contextualize these papers, but this article is principally focused on the papers that used the riots to articulate an explicitly Irish Catholic interpretation.
20. Wilson, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, vol. 1.
21. Kenny, "Religion and Immigration," 30.
22. McGee, A History of the Irish Settlers, 142.
23. Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Fire and Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
24. The Douay-Rheims Bible was a Catholic translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate, composed by members of the English College, Douai. The translation of the New Testament was published in Reims, France, in 1582, and the Old Testament was published in two volumes twenty-seven years later in 1609 and 1610, by Catholics at the University of Douai. The first American edition was published by Mathew Carey on December 1, 1790, through his firm Carey, Stewart, and Company. Bishop John Carroll supported Carey, and Carey counted Benjamin Rush and Charles Carroll among his subscribers: M. S. Carter, "Under the benign sun of toleration: Mathew Carey, the Douai Bible, and Catholic Print Culture, 1789-1791," Journal of the Early Republic 27, no. 3 (2007): 437–69. For the Protestant response in the 1840s to the Douay-Rheims Bible, see The Truth Unveiled, or, A Calm and Impartial Exposition of the Origin and Immediate Cause of the Terrible Riots in Philadelphia on May 6th, 7th, and 8th, A.D. 1844 (Philadelphia: M. Fithian, 1844), 20–21.
25. Michael Feldberg, The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 9–18.
26. The founders included Peter Sken Smith, Lewis Levin, and John Gitron. For details, see Angela Murphy, "Abolition, Irish Freedom, and Immigrant Citizenship: The Rise and Fall of the American Associations for Irish Repeal" (unpublished Ph.D. diss., University of Houston, 2006), 266–96.
27. Feldberg, Turbulent Era, 19–20; Michael Feldberg, The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: A Study in Ethnic Conflict (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975), 102–7
28. Joseph George Jr., "Very Rev. Dr. Patrick E. Moriarty: Philadelphia's Fenian Spokesman," Pennsylvania History 48 (1981): 222–23.
29. Feldberg, Turbulent Era, 21–23.
30. Thoughts for the People," Spirit of the Times, May 12, 1844.
31. Dennis Clark, The Irish in Philadelphia: Ten Generations of the Urban Experience (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973), 21.
32. "Diary of Bishop Francis Patrick Kenrick, July 4, 1844," quoted in Raymond H. Schmandt, "A Selection of Sources Dealing with the Nativist Riots of 1844," Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 80, nos. 2/3 (1969): 68–113.
33. Feldberg, Turbulent Era, 28–32.
34. Pennsylvania Freeman, July 18, 1844.
35. Feldberg, Philadelphia Riots of 1844; Feldberg, The Turbulent Era.
36. Alexandra F. Griswold, "An Open Bible and Burning Churches: Authority, Truth, and Folk Belief in Protestant-Catholics Conflict—Philadelphia, 1844" (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1997), 8; Bruce Dorsey, "Freedom of Religion: Bibles, Public Schools, and Philadelphia's Bloody Riots of 1844," Philadelphia Legacies 8, no. 1 (2008): 12–17; Katie Oxx, The Nativist Movement in America: Religious Conflict in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Routledge Press, 2013); Kenneth Milano, The Philadelphia Nativist Riots: Irish Kensington Erupts (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2013).
37. Beyer-Purvis, "The Philadelphia Bible Riots of 1844"; Anne Morgan, "The Philadelphia Riots of 1844: Republican Catholicism and Irish Catholic Apologetics," Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 86, no. 1 (2019): 86–102.
38. Kenny, "Religion and Immigration."
39. With "anglophobic," this article implies and understands hostility to English politics, government, and administration, along with aversion to English cultural values and rejection of the legitimacy of an Anglo-Saxon civilizing agenda.
40. Mark A. Noll, America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 565.
41. Jane Ohlmeyer, Making Ireland English (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).
42. For a history of the Scots Irish in Philadelphia, see Judith Ridner, The Scots Irish of Early Pennsylvania: A Varied People (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2018). For further work, see Dennis Clark, The Irish in Philadelphia: Ten Generations of Urban Experience (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973); Benjamin Bankhurst, Ulster Presbyterians and the Scots Irish Diaspora, 1750–1764 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood Jr., Ulster and North America: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Scotch Irish (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997); Maurice J. Bric, Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re-Invention of America, 1760–1800 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2008); David Noel Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen and Revolutionary America, 1760–1820 (Dublin: The Mercier Press, 1981); Judith A. Ridner, A Town In-Between: Carlisle, Pennsylvania and the Early Mid-Atlantic Interior (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
43. Jedidiah Morse, The American Geography, or, a View of the Present Situation of the United States of America (London, 1792), 313.
44. Marianne S. Wokeck, "Irish Immigration to the Delaware Valley before the American Revolution," Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy: Archaeology, Culture, History, Literature 96C:5 (1996): 103–35; Kenny, The American Irish; Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland's Ulster Scots, America's Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World, 1689–1764 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Kerby A. Miller; Arnold Schrier; Bruce D. Bolling, and David Noel Doyle, Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Kevin Kenny, Peaceable Kingdom Lost: The Paxton Boys and the Destruction of William Penn's Holy Experiment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Ric Berman, "'Over the Hills and Far Away'—Irish and Antients Freemasonry in Eighteenth-Century Middle America," Quatuor Coronati Lodge 2076 (2018): 1–21.
45. For example, the Philadelphia's Gideonite Society was an Irish Protestant society of Orangemen in Philadelphia, responsible for several provocative speeches. There are limited records of this society beyond the reports of Catholic responses, and little is known of their composition, but they possessed real estate on the east side of Twelfth Street, between High and Filbert Street. Laws of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, passed at the session of 1835–1836, in the Sixtieth year of independence (Harrisburg, 1836), 200–201.
46. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 149; D. N. Doyle, Ireland, Irishmen, and Revolutionary America, 1760–1820 (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1981), 70–71.
47. This could be more malleable in practice than in principle; the Irish Protestants of 1798, alongside those who had fought for the American cause in the Revolutionary War, were occasionally accepted as "card-carrying Celts." However, the papers explicitly downplayed the Protestantism of these figures, to avoid addressing the contradictions in their worldview. For the complexities of "Celtic" as a malleable framework for Irishness in the pre- and post-1845 period, see Wilson, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, 1:26–36.
48. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 195–201, 254–60.
49. Kenny, "Religion and Immigration," 40.
50. Jon Gjerde, Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 220–56.
51. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 4–5.
52. Samuel Morse, Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States: The Numbers of Brutus, Originally Published in the New-York Observer (New York: Leavitt, Lord, 1835), xxvi.
53. Lyman Beecher, A Plea for the West (Cincinnati, OH: Truman and Smith, 1835), 138.
54. Samuel Morse, Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions of the United States Through Foreign Immigration and the Present State of the Naturalization Laws (New York: E. B. Clayton, printer, 1835), i.
55. Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964). For a longer-term history of anti-Catholicism, see Maura Jane Farrelly, Anti-Catholicism in America, 1620–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
56. Ridner, The Scots Irish, 31–32.
57. Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 57.
58. The Native American, May 7, 1844.
59. David Montgomery, "The Shuttle and the Cross: Weavers and Artisans in the Kensington Riots of 1844," Journal of Social History 5, no. 4 (1972): 411–46.
60. Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980); Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).
61. Boston Recorder, May 29, 1835.
62. T. M. Devine, Scotland's Empire and the Shaping of the Americas, 1600–1815 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 142–49.
63. Griffin, The People with No Name; Warren R. Hofstra, ed., Ulster to America: The Scots-Irish Migration Experience, 1680–1830 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2011). Much more work is needed on the Irish Protestant response to Repeal.
64. Angela Murphy, American Slavery, Irish Freedom: Abolition, Immigrant Citizenship, and the Transatlantic Movement for Irish Repeal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 54–72.
65. Lewis C. Levin, A Lecture on Irish Repeal, in Elucidation of the Fallacy of Its Principles, and in Proof of Its Pernicious Tendency, in Its Moral, Religious, and Political Aspects (Philadelphia, 1844), 7.
66. W. Jason Wallace, Catholics, Slaveholders, and the Dilemma of American Evangelicalism, 1835–1860 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 4.
67. For example, in his Theologia Moralis, Kenrick argued that slave ownership was consistent with the Catholic faith. See Gilbert Osofsky, "Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants, and the Dilemmas of Romantic Nationalism," American Historical Review 80, no. 4 (1975): 889–912; John Francis Maxwell, Slavery and the Catholic Church: The History of Catholic Teaching Concerning the Moral Legitimacy of the Institution of Slavery (Chichester: Barry Rose, 1975); Joel S. Panzer, The Popes and Slavery (New York: Alba House, 1996); Ignatius A. Reynolds, ed., The Works of the Rt. Rev. John England, First Bishop of Charleston (Baltimore: John Murphy and Co., 1849), 106–91; Joseph D. Brockage, Francis Patrick Kenrick's Opinion on Slavery (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1955), 102–23.
68. The Liberator, June 9, 1843.
69. Philadelphia Daily Sun in The Liberator, January 1, 1844.
70. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Routledge, 1991); Theodore Allen, Invention of the White Race (New York: Verso, 1994); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (London: Routledge, 1995); Murphy; American Slavery, Irish Freedom.
71. Boston Pilot, September 23, 1839, and February 12, 1842.
72. Truth Teller, September 28, 1844.
73. Truth Teller, March 24, 1827, and July 2, 1825.
74. American Protestant, July 10, 1844.
75. According to Michael Feldberg, "the crowds of nativists were too big, and too many persons voted for the American Republican ticket, to explain satisfactorily Philadelphia nativism simply as an Orange-based movement," Feldberg, Philadelphia Riots of 1844, 118–19.
76. Truth Teller, May 11, 1844, and May 18, 1844.
77. Truth Teller, July 27, 1844.
78. Certainly, the Nativist mainstream was happy to accept Irish Protestants within their ranks; The American Protestant in 1844 claimed "the "Orangeman, the Irish Protestant, wherever found, is distinguished by his Saxon qualities of all the patience, industry and moderation that can consist with a proper ambition." American Protestant, July 10, 1844.
79. People v. Moore and People v. M'Evoy, in Wheeler, Reports of Criminal Law Cases, 3:93–97, 417–22.
80. Henry Darley, A Full and Accurate Report of the Trial for Riot before the Mayor's Court of Philadelphia, On the 13th day of October, 1831, Arising out of a Protestant Procession (Philadelphia, 1831), 3.
81. Truth Teller, November 5, 1831, and August 5, 1826.
82. Timothy J. Meagher, The Columbia Guide to Irish American History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 57.
83. Six Months Ago; or, That Eventful Friday and its Consequences (Philadelphia: J. F. M'Elroy, 1844), 1, 3–5, 9.
84. Truth Teller, August 3, 1844.
85. Truth Teller, July 20, 1844.
86. Nativist accusations of anti-republicanism were not limited to Philadelphia. In Boston the American Republican Party responded to Irish Catholic immigration by linking the American Revolution with the war for independence from "Papal power," where Boston would be a cradle of liberty once again. Molding the Declaration of Independence to a new purpose, Boston's Nativists declared that the pope "keeps among us, in time of peace, standing armies of the Church," an army of priests and Catholic immigrants, "the sworn subjects of a foreign prince," under the pope's "absolute control": J. T. Buckingham, Golden Sentiments: Being an Address to the Native Americans of New York . . . Together with the Declaration of Sentiments of the Native Americans of Boston (Boston: H. B. Skinner, 1844), 8–12.
87. Morgan, "Philadelphia Riots."
88. Address of the Catholic Lay Citizens, of the City and County of Philadelphia, to their Fellow-Citizens, In Reply to the Presentment of the Grand Jury of the Court of Quarter Sessions of May Term 1844, In Regard to the Causes of the Late Riots in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: M. Fithian, 1844), 6.
89. Address of the Catholic Lay Citizens, of the City and County of Philadelphia, to their Fellow-Citizens, In Reply to the Presentment of the Grand Jury of the Court of Quarter Sessions of May Term 1844, In Regard to the Causes of the Late Riots in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: M. Fithian, 1844), 6, 10.
90. The Full Particulars of the Late Riots with a View of the Burning of the Catholic Churches (Philadelphia: n.p., 1844), found in Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 80 (1969): 116.
91. Boston Pilot, February 8, 1845.
92. Catholic Herald, June 20, 1844.
93. Address of the Catholic Lay Citizens, 6–8
94. Truth Teller, June 20, 1840.
95. Native American, November 21, 1840.
96. Truth Teller, October 24, 1840.
97. Truth Teller, September 21, 1844.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid.
100. Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 167.
101. Feldberg, Philadelphia Riots of 1844, 118–19.
102. Boston Pilot, April 27, 1844.
103. Wilson, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, 1:77.
104. Boston Pilot, May 18, 1844.
105. Wilson, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, 80.
106. Boston Pilot, February 8, 1845.
107. McMahon, Global Dimensions, 78, 95.
108. Ibid., 78, 95.
109. Freeman's Journal, May 11, 1844.
110. Truth Teller, August 3, 1844.
111. Boston Pilot, 22 June 1844.
112. The Jesuit was founded as the official newspaper of the Boston diocese, but Fenwick relinquished his ownership in 1832 to Donahoe, when the paper failed to make a profit. In 1832 the newspaper publisher Henry L. Devereaux and Patrick Donahoe refounded the paper as the Literary and Catholic Sentinel. Then, in 1836 Donahoe, now with complete ownership, renamed the publication the Boston Pilot.
113. Catholic Herald, June 20, 1844.
114. McGee, A History of the Irish Settlers in North America, 146.
115. Truth Teller, April 7, 1825.
116. Morgan, "Philadelphia Riots," 98.
117. Report of the Proceedings of the National Repeal Convention of the Friends of Ireland in the United States of America, Held in the City of Philadelphia, February 22nd and 23rd, 1842 (Philadelphia, 1842), 9.
118. William O'Reilly, "Ireland in the Atlantic World: Migration and Cultural Transfer," Cambridge History of Ireland, vol. 2, 1550–1730, ed., Jane Ohlmeyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 387.
