How Dagger John Saved New York's Irish

by William J.
Stern

We are not the first generation of New Yorkers puzzled by
what to do about the underclass. A hundred years ago and
more, Manhattan's tens of thousands of Irish seemed a
lost community, mired in poverty and ignorance,
destroying themselves through drink, idleness, violence,
criminality, and illegitimacy. What made the Irish such
miscreants?  Their neighbors weren't sure: perhaps
because they were an inferior race, many suggested; you
could see it in the shape of their heads, writers and
cartoonists often emphasized. In any event, they were
surely incorrigible.

But within a generation, New York's Irish flooded into
the American mainstream. The sons of criminals were now
the policemen; the daughters of illiterates had become
the city's schoolteachers; those who'd been the outcasts
of society now ran its political machinery. No job
training program or welfare system brought about so
sweeping a change. What accomplished it, instead, was a
moral transformation, a revolution in values. And just as
John Wesley, the founder of Methodism in the late
eighteenth century, had sparked a change in the culture
of the English working class that made it unusually
industrious and virtuous, so too a clergyman was the
catalyst for the cultural change that liberated New
York's Irish from their underclass behavior. He was John
Joseph Hughes, an Irish immigrant gardener who became the
first Catholic archbishop of New York. How he
accomplished his task can teach us volumes about the
solution to our own end-of-the-millennium social
problems.
John Hughes's personal history embodied all the virtues
he tried so successfully to inculcate in his flock. They
were very much the energetic rather than the
contemplative virtues: as a newspaper reporter of the
time remarked of him, he was "more a Roman gladiator than
a devout follower of the meek founder of Christianity."
He was born on June 24, 1797, in Annaloghan, County
Tyrone, the son of a poor farmer. As a Catholic in
English-ruled Ireland, he was, he said, truly a
second-class citizen from the day he was baptized, barred
from ever owning a house worth more than five pounds or
holding a commission in the army or navy. Catholics could
neither run schools nor give their children a Catholic
education. Priests had to be licensed by the government,
which allowed only a few in the country. Any Catholic son
could seize his father's property by becoming a
Protestant.
When Hughes was 15, an event he was never to forget
crystallized for him the injustice of English domination.
His younger sister, Mary, died. English law barred the
local Catholic priest from entering the cemetery gates to
preside at her burial; the best he could do was to scoop
up a handful of dirt, bless it, and hand it to Hughes to
sprinkle on the grave. From early on, Hughes said, he had
dreamed of "a country in which no stigma of inferiority
would be impressed on my brow, simply because I professed
one creed or another."

Fleeing poverty and persecution, Hughes's father brought
the family to America in 1817. The 20-year-old Hughes
went to work as a gardener and stonemason at Mount St.
Mary's college and seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland.
Working there rekindled in him a childhood dream of
becoming a priest, and he asked the head of the seminary,
John Dubois, if he could enroll as a student. Dubois, a
French priest who had fled Paris during the French
Revolution armed with a letter of recommendation from
Lafayette, turned him down, unable to see past his lack
of education to the qualities of mind and character that
lay within. This was no ordinary gardener, Dubois should
have recognized; indeed, as he went back to his gardening
chores, Hughes wrote a bitter poem on the shamefulness of
slavery and its betrayal of America's promise of freedom.
Not one to forget a slight, Hughes harshly froze Dubois
out of his life when he became prominent and powerful.
Indeed, in later years, Hughes won the nickname of
"Dagger John," a reference not only to the shape of the
cross that accompanied his printed signature but also to
his being a man not to be trifled with or double-crossed.

With the good luck that marked his career, Hughes met
Mother Elizabeth Bayley Seton, who visited Mount St.
Mary's from time to time, and impressed her deeply with
all those talents that Dubois had failed to see. A
Protestant convert to Rome who had become a nun after her
New York blueblood husband died, Mother Seton was a
powerful influence on American Catholicism and was
canonized as America's first and only native-born saint
after her death. When she wrote to Dubois, recommending
the un- educated immigrant laborer for admission to the
seminary, her prestige carried the day. Ad-mitted in
September 1820, Hughes graduated and was ordained a
priest in 1826. His first assignment: the diocese of
Philadelphia.

Recognized as a born leader from his early seminary days,
he first came to prominence in Philadelphia as an
eloquent and courageous crusader against bigotry. Between
1820 and 1830, immigration had swelled the U.S. Catholic
population 60 percent to 600,000, with no end in sight.
The new immigrants were mostly Irish-impoverished,
ignorant, unskilled country folk, with nothing in their
experience to prepare them for success in the urban
environs to which they were flocking. Hughes believed
that the relentless barrage of anti-Catholic prejudice
that greeted them in their new land was demoralizing the
already disadvantaged immigrants and holding back their
progress.

The "nativists," as the highly organized anti-Catholics
were called, included Protestant fundamentalists who saw
the Catholic Church as the handiwork of Satan and
superstition, intellectuals who considered Catholicism
incompatible with democracy, ethnocentric cultural
purists who believed the United States should be a land
for Anglo-Saxons, and pragmatic citizens who thought it
not worth the trouble to integrate so many culturally
different immigrants. The nativists counted among their
number many of America's elite, including John Jay, John
Quincy Adams, John Calhoun, Stephen Douglas, and P. T.
Barnum, all of whom spoke publicly against the Catholic
Church and the threat to liberty that allowing Catholics
into the country would create. In Boston a mob led by
Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher, the father of
Harriet Beecher Stowe, burned a convent to the ground;
church burnings were common. Samuel Morse tapped out
rumors of Catholic conspiracies against liberty on his
Atlantic cable long before such trash circulated on the
Internet. Books depicting concupiscence in convents and
sex in seminaries were everywhere.

Hughes was outraged. He didn't want Catholics to be
second-class citizens in America as they had been in
Ireland, and he thought he had a duty not to repeat the
mistakes of the clergy in Ireland, who in his view had
been remiss in not speaking out more forcefully against
English oppression. Resistance was imperative. He began a
letter-writing campaign to the newspapers, decrying what
he saw as a tendency toward chauvinistic nationalism in
his new country. In 1829, for instance, outraged by an
editorial in a Protestant religious newspaper about
"traitorous popery," he fired off a missive to its
editorial board of Protestant ministers, calling them
"the clerical scum of the Country." During the 1834
cholera epidemic in Philadelphia, which nativists blamed
on Irish immigrants, Hughes worked tirelessly among the
sick and dying, while many Protestant ministers fled the
city to escape infection. After the disease subsided,
Hughes wrote the U.S. Gazette that Protestant ministers
were "remarkable for their pastoral solicitude, so long
as the flock is healthy, the pastures pleasant, and the
fleece lubricant, abandoning their post when disease
begins to spread dissolution in the fold." He pointed to
the work of the Catholic Sisters of Charity, who had
cared for cholera victims without regard for their own
safety, and wondered where all the people who spoke about
perversion in the convents had gone during the epidemic.

The next year he became a national celebrity when a
prominent and well-born Protestant clergyman from New
York named John Breckenridge challenged him to a debate.
The American aristocrat and the articulate, combative
priest, who had developed a large following among
Philadelphia's Irish immigrants, did not disappoint their
fans. Breckenridge luridly conjured up the Catholic
Church's Inquisition in Spain, tyranny in Italy, and
repression of liberty in France. Americans, he said,
wanted no popery, no loss of individual liberty. Hughes
countered by describing Protestant tyranny over Catholic
Ireland. He related what had happened at his sister's
grave. "I am an American by choice, not by chance," he
said. "I was born under the scourge of Protestant
persecution, of which my fathers in common with our
Catholic countrymen have been the victim for ages. I know
the value of that civil and religious liberty, which our
happy government secures for all." Regardless of what had
happened in Europe, he said, he was committed to American
tolerance.

Hughes's performance against a man of Breckenridge's
stature made him a hero with America's Irish. Not long
thereafter, when John Dubois, Hughes's former teacher and
now bishop of New York, grew sick and frail, Rome
appointed Hughes, just over 40 years of age,
coadjutor-bishop of the New York diocese, which then
included all of New York State and part of New Jersey. He
was consecrated a bishop in the old St. Patrick's
Cathedral-still standing on Mott Street-on January 7,
1838. James Gordon Bennett, the famous Scottish-born
editor and publisher of the New York Herald, was one of
the rare souls among New York's 60,000 Cath-olics (out of
a total population of 300,000) who weren't Irish. He
harrumphed that Catholic rituals were pure poetry,
especially episcopal consecrations, but to hold such a
ceremony before the "general run of New York Irish was
like putting gold rings through a pig's nose."

After the consecration, John Hughes was ready to lead.
Unsystematic, disorganized, impulsively charitable,
unable to keep his checkbook balanced, vain enough to
wear a toupee over his baldness and combative enough to
have to apologize to a valued colleague for "a certain
pungency of style" in argument, Hughes was also, in the
words of future president James Buchanan, "one of the
ablest and most accomplished and energetic men I had ever
known." Hughes's first New York crusade was to get his
flock educated, so that they could benefit from the new
nation's almost limitless opportunity. He passionately
believed that the future of the Irish in America depended
upon education: indeed, he knew it firsthand from his
own experience.

He immediately stirred up a war over the city's schools,
then run by the Public School Society. Though the society
received state funding, it was essentially a private
Protestant organization that taught Protestantism and
used the Prot-estant Bible. Worse, from Hughes's point of
view, it had pupils read such books as The Irish Heart,
which taught that "the emigration from Ireland to America
of annually increasing numbers, extremely needy, and in
many cases drunken and depraved, has become a subject for
all our grave and fearful reflection." Hughes (with the
support of New York's 12,000 Jews) wanted an end to such
sectarian education, and he wanted, above all, state aid
for Catholic schools, just as the state had funded
denominational schools before 1826 (with no one dreaming
of calling such aid unconstitutional). The outcome of the
struggle pleased no one: the Maclay Bill of 1842 barred
all religious instruction from public schools and
provided no state money to denominational schools. On the
night the bill was passed, a nativist mob ransacked
Hughes's residence, and the authorities had to call out
the militia to protect the city's Catholic churches.

Having at least partly reformed the public schools to
help those Catholic children who attended them, Hughes
threw his energies into building a Catholic school system
that would educate Catholic children the way he thought
they should be educated. No need was more urgent, in his
view. He did not believe that a society hostile to the
Irish and certain they were incapable of accomplishment
would produce schoolteachers and administrators
interested in and good at teaching Irish children. "We
shall have to build the schoolhouse first and the church
afterward," he said. "In our age the question of
education is the question of the church."

Hughes's schools emphasized not just the three Rs but
also a faith-based code of personal conduct that demanded
respect for teachers and fellow students. Parents had to
attend meetings with teachers and do repair work and
cleaning in the schools. These schools then, as now,
produced children capable of functioning in the
mainstream of American life. By the end of his tenure,
the original boundaries of Hughes's dio-cese contained
over 100 such schools. Not content to build just primary
and secondary schools, he founded or helped to found
Fordham University and Manhattan, Manhattanville, and
Mount St. Vincent colleges.

In 1845 Hughes began to face his greatest challenge. That
year the potato crop failed completely in Ireland, and
the Great Famine struck, lasting until 1849. The worst
famine in the history of Western Europe, it brought
complete social collapse to Ireland and caused some 2
million Irish to flee to the United States between 1845
and 1860, not primarily for religious freedom and
economic opportunity but to reach a place where they
might eat. Most arrived at the port of New York after
crossing the Atlantic on what they called "the coffin
ships." As Thomas Sowell so vividly describes this
journey in Ethnic America, the Irish packed into the
holds of cargo ships, with no toilet facilities; filth
and disease were rampant. They slept on narrow, closely
stacked shelves. Women were so vulnerable to molestation
that they slept sitting up. In 1847 about 40,000 died
making the voyage, a mortality rate much higher than that
of slaves transported from Africa in British vessels of
the same period.

In New York they took up residence in homes intended for
single families, which were subdivided into tiny
apartments. Cellars became dwell-ings, as did attics
three feet high, without sunlight or ventilation, where
whole families slept in one bed. Shanties sprang up in
alleys. Without running water, cleanliness was
impossible; sewage piled up in backyard privies, and rats
abounded. Cholera broke out constantly in Irish wards.
Observers have noted that no Americans before or since
have lived in worse conditions than the New York Irish of
the mid-nineteenth century.
Hughes harbored no illusions about the newcomers. "Most
move on across the country-those who have some means,
those who have industrious habits," he observed; "on the
other hand, the destitute, the disabled, the broken down,
the very young, and the very old, having reached New
York, stay. Those who stay are predominantly the
scattered debris of the Irish nation." Lost in a land
where many didn't want them, violent, without skills, the
Irish were in need of rescue. This was Hughes's flock,
and he was prepared to be their rescuer.

New York's Irish truly formed an underclass; every
variety of social pathology flourished luxuriantly among
them. Family life had disintegrated. Thomas D'Arcy McGee,
an exiled Irish political radical, wrote in The Nation in
1850: "In Ireland every son was a boy and a daughter a
girl till he or she was married. They were considered
subjects to their parents till they became parents
themselves. In America boys are men at sixteen. . . . If
[the] family tie is snapped, our children become our
opponents and sometimes our worst enemies." McGee saw
that the lack of stable family relationships was fatally
undermining the Irish community.

The immigrants crowded into neighborhoods like Sweeney's
Shambles in the city's fourth ward and Five Points in the
sixth ward (called the "bloody sixth" for its violence),
which Charles Dickens toured in the forties and
pronounced "loathsome, drooping, and decayed." In The New
York Irish, Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher report that
besides rampant alcoholism, addiction to opium and
laudanum was epidemic in these neighborhoods in the 1840s
and 1850s. Many Irish immigrants communicated in their
own profanity-filled street slang called "flash talk": a
multi-day drinking spree was "going on a bender,"
"cracking a can" was robbing a house. Literate English
practically disappeared from ordinary conversation.

An estimated 50,000 Irish prostitutes, known in flash
talk as "nymphs of the pave," worked the city in 1850,
and Five Points alone had as many as 17 brothels.
Illegitimacy reached strato-spheric heights-and tens of
thousands of abandoned Irish kids roamed, or prowled, the
city's streets. Violent Irish gangs, with names like the
Forty Thieves, the B'boys, the Roach Guards, and the
Chichesters, brought havoc to their neighborhoods. The
gangs fought one another and the nativists-but primarily
they robbed houses and small businesses, and trafficked
in stolen property. Over half the people arrested in New
York in the 1840s and 1850s were Irish, so that police
vans were dubbed "paddy wagons" and episodes of mob
violence in the streets were called "donnybrooks," after
a town in Ireland.

Death was everywhere. In 1854 one out of every 17 people
in the sixth ward died. In Sweeney's Shambles the rate
was one out of five in a 22-month period. The death rate
among Irish families in New York in the 1850s was 21
percent, while among non-Irish it was 3 percent. Life
expectancy for New York's Irish averaged under 40 years.
Tuberculosis, which Bishop Hughes called the "natural
death of the Irish immigrants," was the leading cause of
death, along with drink and violence.

Inflamed by this spectacle of social ruin, nativist
sentiment grew and took a nastier, racist turn, no longer
attacking primarily the superstition and priestcraft of
the Catholic religion but rather the genetic inferiority
of the Irish people. Gifted diarist and former mayor
George Templeton Strong, for example, wrote that "the
gorilla is superior to the Celtic in muscle and hardly
their inferior in a moral sense." In the same vein,
Harper's in 1851 described the "Celtic physiognomy" as
"simian-like, with protruding teeth and short upturned
noses." Cel-ebrated cartoonist Thomas Nast constantly
depicted the Irish as closely related to apes, while
Orson and Lorenzo Fowler's New Illustrated
Self-Instructor in Phrenology and James Redfield's
Outline of a New System of Physiognomy gave such ideas
the color of science.

By 1850 the New York City lunatic asylum on Blackwell's
Island (now Roosevelt Island) was filled with Irish, most
of them probably hallucinating alcoholics. Doctors of the
day had a different view, speculating that insanity grew
from degeneracy and violation of the moral law.
Compounding the problem, according to Ralph Parsons,
superintendent of the asylum, the Irish were people of
exceptionally bad habits. They were, he said, of "a low
order of intelligence, and very many of them have
imperfectly developed brains. When such persons become
insane, the prognosis is unfavorable."

Hughes's solution for his flock's social ills was to
re-spiritualize them. He wanted to bring about an inner,
moral transformation in them, which he believed would
solve their social problems in the end. He put the
ultimate blame for their condition squarely on the
historical oppression they had suffered at the hands of
the English, which he said had caused them "to pass away
from the faith of their ancestors," robbing them of the
cultural heritage that should have guided their behavior.
But that was in the past: now it was time for them to
regain what they had lost. So he bought abandoned
Protestant church buildings in Irish wards, formed parish
churches, and sent in parish priests on a mission of
urban evangelization aimed at giving the immigrants a
faith-based system of values.

With unerring psychological insight, Hughes had his
priests emphasize religious teachings perfectly attuned
to re-socializing the Irish and helping them succeed in
their new lives. It was a religion of personal
responsibility that they taught, stressing the importance
of confession, a sacrament not widely popular today-and
unknown to many of the Irish who emigrated during the
famine, most of whom had never received any religious
education. The practice had powerful psychological
consequences. You cannot send a friend to confess for
you, nor can you bring an advocate into the confessional.
Once inside the confessional, you cannot discuss what
others have done to you but must clearly state what you
yourself have done wrong. It is the ultimate taking of
responsibility for one's actions; and it taught the Irish
to focus on their own role in creating their misfortune.
Hughes once remarked that "the Catholic Church is a
church of discipline," and Father Richard Shaw, Hughes's
most recent biographer, believes that the comment gives a
glimpse into the inner core of his beliefs. Self-control
and high personal standards were the key-and Hughes's own
disciplined labors to improve himself and all those
around him, despite constant ill health, embodied this
ethic monumentally. Hughes proclaimed the need to avoid
sin. His clergy stated clearly that certain conduct was
right and other conduct was wrong. People must not govern
their lives according to momentary feelings or the desire
for instant gratification: they had to live up to a code
of behavior that had been developed over thousands of
years. This teaching produced communities where ethical
standards mattered and severe stigma attached to those
who misbehaved.

The priests stressed the virtue of purity, loudly and
unambiguously, to both young and old. Sex was sinful
outside marriage, no exceptions. Packed together in
apartments with sometimes two or three families in a
single room, the Irish lived in conditions that did not
encourage chastity or even basic modesty. Women working
in the low-paid drudgery of domestic service were tempted
to work instead in the saloons of Five Points, which
often led to a life of promiscuity or prostitution. The
Church's fierce exhortations against promiscuity, with
its accompanying evils of out-of-wedlock births and
venereal disease, took hold. In time, most Irish began to
understand that personal responsibility was an important
component of sexual conduct.

Since alcohol was such a major problem for his flock,
Hughes-though no teetotaler himself-promoted the
formation of a Catholic abstinence society. In 1849 he
accompanied the famous Irish Capuchin priest, Father
Theobald Mathew, the "apostle of temperance," all around
the city as he gave the abstinence pledge to 20,000 New
Yorkers.

A religion of discipline, stressing conduct and the
avoidance of sin, can be a pinched and gloomy affair, but
Hughes's teaching had a very different inflection. His
priests mitigated the harshness with the encouraging
Doctrine of the Sacred Heart, which declares that if you
keep the commandments, God will be your protector,
healer, advisor, and perfect personal friend. To a people
despised by many, living in desperate circumstances, with
narrow economic possibilities, such a teaching was a
bulwark against anger, despair, and fear. Hughes's
Catholicism was upbeat and encouraging: if God Almighty
was your personal friend, you could overcome.

Hughes's teaching had a special message for and about
women. Women outnumbered men by 20 percent in New York's
Irish population partly because of famine-induced
emigration patterns and partly because many Irish
immigrant men went west from New York to work on building
railways and canals. Irish women could find work in New
York more easily than men could, and the work they found,
usually as domestics, was steadier. Given the demographic
facts, along with the high illegitimacy rate and the
degree of family disintegration, Hughes clearly saw the
need to teach men respect for women, and women
self-respect.
He did this by putting Catholicism's Marian Doctrine
right at the center of his message. Irish women would
hear from the priests and nuns that Mary was Queen of
Peace, Queen of Prophets, and Queen of Heaven, and that
women were important. The "ladies of New York," Hughes
told them, were "the children, the daughters of Mary."
The Marian teaching encouraged women to take
responsibility for their own lives, to inspire their men
and their children to good conduct, to keep their
families together, and to become forces for upright
behavior in their neighborhoods. The nuns, especially,
encouraged women to become community leaders and play
major roles in church fund-raising activities-radical
notions for a male-dominated society where women did not
yet have the right to vote. In addition, Irish men and
women saw nuns in major executive positions, managing
hospitals, schools, orphanages, and church
societies-sending another highly unusual message for the
day. Irish women became important allies in Hughes's war
for values; by the 1850s they began to be major forces
for moral rectitude, stability, and progress in the Irish
neighborhoods of the city.

When Hughes went beyond spiritual uplift to the material
and institutional needs of New York's Irish, he always
focused sharply on self-help and mutual aid. On the
simplest level, in all parishes he encouraged the
formation of church societies-support groups, like
today's women's groups or Alcoholics Anonymous, to help
people deal with neighborhood concerns or personal and
family problems, such as alcoholism or finding
employment. In these groups, people at the local level
could exchange information and advice, and offer one
another encouragement and constructive criticism.

Hughes worked hard to get jobs for his flock. The nuns in
his diocese became employment agencies for Irish
domestics: rich families knew that a maid or cook
recommended by the nuns would be honest and reliable. The
nuns encouraged Irish women to run boarding houses for
new immigrants and to become fruit and vegetable vendors.
Irish women came to dominate the city's produce business,
and some went on to succeed with their own grocery
stores.

Hughes encouraged the formation of the Irish Emigrant
Society, out of which the Emigrant Industrial Savings
Bank later grew. The society helped find people jobs in
sail making, construction, carriage repair and
maintenance, and grocery stores. The society expected
those it sponsored to behave properly on the job and work
conscientiously, so as to reflect credit upon their
patron. Those who misbehaved in-curred the wrath not only
of their employers but of the Emigrant Society and the
parish priest, both unembarrassed about using shame to
encourage good behavior.
When it came to charity, Hughes had nothing but contempt
for the way New York officials went about it, warehousing
the poor in the municipal almshouse and giving them
subsistence levels of food, shelter, and clothing until
they died, usually of typhus, ty-phoid fever,
consumption, or cholera. Hughes dismissed this approach,
which made no effort to re-moralize the demoralized poor,
as "soupery."

By contrast, Hughes imported church groups that had shown
elsewhere in the world that they could help solve tough
social problems. The most famous was the St. Vincent de
Paul Society, a group of laymen who gave personal service
to the poor. They visited prisons, organized youth
groups, and taught reading and writing. Whenever they
provided food, clothing, or shelter, they required the
recipients, when possible, to work in return. An order of
nuns, the Sisters of Mercy, worked closely with the St.
Vincent de Paul Society, visiting the city's almshouses
and prisons and urging the women in them to find work and
to conduct themselves according to Church teachings. They
founded their own home for immigrant girls, a halfway
house between dependency and work, where they provided
spiritual guidance, taught such basic skills as cooking
and cleaning, and helped women find jobs, usually as
domestics.

Faced with perhaps as many as 60,000 Irish children
wandering in packs around New York City-not attending
school, not working, not under any adult
supervision-Hughes encouraged the formation of the
Society for the Protection of Destitute Catholic
Children, known as the Catholic Protectory, which was in
a sense the forerunner of Boys Town. To rescue these
children, who in the words of the Protectory's head, Dr.
Levi Ives, were "exposed to all the horrors of hopeless
poverty, to the allurements of vice and crime in every
disgusting and debasing form, bringing ruin on themselves
and disgrace and obloquy," the Protectory purchased a
114-acre farm near Westchester and erected buildings for
boys and girls. The mission was clear: the Protectory
staff believed that, in Ives's words, "by proper
religious instruction and the teaching of useful trades
they could raise the children above their slum
environment." Ives had no doubt that the children had to
be taught sound values before they would have a chance at
a productive life.

Though the Protectory received some city and state money,
the Irish themselves provided its main support with
enthusiastic private contributions. Hughes and Ives made
it clear that these children were the community's
responsibility: their own Irish parents-not the nativists
or the unfeeling city-had abandoned them to their plight.
The Irish, as Hughes and his priests and nuns tirelessly
taught, had a moral responsibility to give money to this
cause, as well as to the Church and all its other
charitable organizations. For Hughes, such community
self-help and personal responsibility were the essence of
Christian charity.
By 1850 the city's Catholics had become so numerous that
Rome made New York an archdiocese and Hughes an
archbishop. He received the pallium, the woolen band that
was the symbol of his new authority, directly from Pope
Pius IX, a sign of the growing importance within the
Church of American Catholics in general, of New York's
Catholics in particular, and of Hughes himself. As the
1850s wore on, the archbishop began to conceive a plan
that would give magnificent, concrete expression to the
rise of New York's Catholics. He would build a great
cathedral, financed by the Catholics themselves, as proof
to the Protestant elites that the Irish, too, knew how to
make New York the premier city of the world. More
important, such an accomplishment would give
an enormous boost to the morale of the Irish community
itself-which, however poor, was not too poor to achieve
something grand.

Hughes laid the cornerstone on August 15, 1858, before a
crowd of over 100,000, their imaginations fired by the
hugely ambitious project. He had raised only $73,000 of
the project's estimated $1.5 million cost (a figure that
ultimately rose to over $4 million, a staggering sum for
the nineteenth century). But Hughes believed that if you
took on a challenge, you would perforce rise to meet it.
St. Patrick's was finished in 1879 by his successor, John
McCloskey, who raised the final $172,000 by holding a
giant fair in the nave of the new cathedral for 42 days.

In 1863, with construction of the cathedral suspended be-
cause of the Civil War, the worst urban rioting in United
States history broke out among the Irish in New York.
Over 1,000 people were killed in three days. The Irish
were enraged that the Union army was drafting them in
disproportionate numbers because they could not afford
the then legal practice of buying their way out of
military service. Irish boys, who made up about 15
percent of the Union army, were suffering horrific
casualty rates since they were commonly used as frontline
troops against better-trained and better-led Confederate
soldiers. In addition, rumors spread that once the slaves
were freed, they would take Irish jobs or live off taxes
on the Irish. The rioting Irish attacked blacks,
nativists, and, on the third day, anybody who was around.

A then-dying Archbishop Hughes summoned the leaders of
the rebellion to meet with him. However disturbed he
might have been that the Irish were being called on to do
so much of the dying in the struggle against the South,
he supported the war and was totally opposed to slavery,
having preached against it since his ordination as a
priest in 1826. He told the riot leaders that "no blood
of innocent martyrs, shed by Irish Catholics, has ever
stained the soil of Ireland" and that they were
dishonoring that impeccable history.

The riot leaders went back to their neighborhoods, and
the violence melted away. The riot saddened the dying
archbishop: he felt he had failed as a prelate. His
friend and loyal subordinate, Bishop McCloskey, was
saying the prayers for the dying when the end came for
Hughes on January 3, 1864.

He had not failed, of course. The Draft Riots of 1863
were the death rattle of a destructive culture that was
giving way to something constructive and edifying.

Though just 30 or 40 years before, New Yorkers had viewed
the Irish as their criminal class, by the 1880s and 1890s
the Irish proportion of arrests for violent crime had
dropped from 60 percent to less than 10 percent. The
Irish were the pillars of the criminal justice system.
Three-quarters of the police force was Irish. The Irish
were the prosecutors, the judges, and the jailers.
Alcoholism and drug addiction withered away. By the 1880s
an estimated 60 percent of Irish women, and almost a
third of the men, totally abstained from alcohol. Many
Irish sections in the city became known for their
peacefulness, order, and cleanliness-a far cry from the
filth, violence, and disease of the Five Points and
Sweeney's Shambles of mid-century. Gone, too, was the
notorious Irish promiscuity of those years; New York's
Irish became known by the latter part of the nineteenth
century as a churched people, often chided by the press
for their "puritanical" attitudes. Irish prostitutes
virtually disappeared in the city, as did the army of
Irish youths wandering the streets without adult
supervision. Irish family life, formerly so frayed and
chaotic, became strong and nourishing. Irish children
entered the priesthood or the convent, the professions,
politics, professional sports, show business, and
commerce. In 1890 some 30 percent of New York City's
teachers were Irish women, and the Irish literacy rate
exceeded 90 percent. In 1871 reformer "Honest" John Kelly
became the leader of Tam-many Hall, and with the election
in 1880 of shipping magnate William Grace as mayor, the
Irish assumed control of city politics.

How important a figure was John Hughes in American
history? Suppose the mass immigration from Ireland of the
mid-nineteenth century had turned into a disaster for the
country.  How likely is it that the open immigration of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would
have been permitted?  Nativism would have won, and
America would be an unrecognizably different country
today-and an immeasurably poorer one.

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   Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.'' - Padraig Pearse

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