Category: Immigrants
How Successful Were Southern States at Encouraging Chinese Immigrants to Move to the Region?
During the Reconstruction Era there were a number of schemes hatched by white plantation owners and industrialists to increase immigration to the region. The attempts…
White Immigrants Needed to Replace the Dying Black Race Alabama January 1869
Many Southern newspapers, which had once mocked the Union army as filled with immigrants, came out in favor of encouraging immigration to the South after…
“Irishmen And Germans Read This” The Mongrel Party’s Attack on Immigrants June, 1868
With the election of 1868, Democratic propaganda combined immigrant fears of the latent Know Nothingism of some Republicans and white immigrants’ concerns about their own…
The Memphis Massacre of 1866: A Race Riot Pits Immigrants Against Freed Slaves
John C. Creighton had emerged as an important figure in Irish American politics in Memphis in 1866. He was elected recorder for the city and…
Prelude to a Reconstruction Riot: Irish and Blacks in Memphis in 1866
Immigrants lived in much of the United States at the start of the Civil War, but their numbers were not evenly distributed. Roughly 90% of…
Map Shows Where Reconstruction Era Irish Immigrants Lived in U.S.
My friend Damian Shiels at Irish in the American Civil War posted this fascinating map from the Census Bureau based on the 1880 enumeration. It…
Virginia: Failed Attempt to Replace “Worthless Negroes” with Immigrant Laborers in 1868
After the Civil War, there were various unsuccessful schemes to import European immigrants to the South. White employers hoped to fill labor shortages created when…
When a Ban on Chinese Immigration Was Proposed in 1867 Frederick Douglass Stood Up in Opposition
Americans’ fear of non-white, non-Christian immigrants began in 1848 with the arrival of the first ship full of Chinese in San Francisco Bay. The Chinese…
Carl Schurz Warned That a “System of Terrorism” Was Taking Hold in the Post-War South in 1865
Carl Schurz arrived in South Carolina in the middle of July, 1865. He had been sent by new president Andrew Johnson to investigate the condition…