Mar 16, 2018
The Abuse of History
Jason L. Riley’s co-option of Irish history in an attempt to gird his political and personal ideology is an abuse of history
If you wish to support my work, you can make a donation here.
This week a conservative writer at the Wall Street Journal named Jason L. Riley once again promoted his fantasy of a unique black pathology of victimhood and dependency, but this time he did so by favourably comparing African American “history” to Irish “history”. Riley is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think-tank whose stated mission is to “develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic and individual responsibility.” This helps to explain why Riley’s underlying message is essentially the “Irish slaves” meme (“the Irish were treated worse and got over it, why can’t you?”) in op-ed form. The only difference here is that he implies that it was Irish immigrants, rather than “Irish slaves”, who had it worse than chattel slaves and their descendants.
The deceptions, inaccuracies and decontextualised content littered throughout this piece are not my primary objection, although I do take some of them apart below. My concern is that this op-ed amounts to an abuse of Irish American and African American history, nay it is an abuse of history itself, as it wilfully pits these diasporas and their tragic histories against one another to score political points.
Not only is this sort of inane and simplistic analogy a category error comparison and thus worthless (“The Black experience in this country has been a phenomenon without analog” — Genovese) it is made in the name of same free market ideology which exacerbated the effects of the cataclysmic series of subsistence crop failures in mid-nineteenth Ireland. Two years ago Riley took aim at the federal food-stamp program in the U.S. which he regrets was “saved” during a round of welfare reforms in 1996. Riley wants it “reformed”, meaning drastically cut, as “its work requirements are weak”. Like Paul Ryan, Riley’s moralising about work ethic and poverty echoes those who believed in the righteousness of laissez-faire economics and argued for minimal government intervention while Irish people died in their thousands. During the Great Famine the Economist urged ministers to err in the direction of economy as “it [was] no man’s business to provide for another”, and redistribution would only shift resources from “the more meritorious to the less” (Ó’Gráda, 2004)
Likewise The London Times
“…continually [complained] of the financial burdens forced on British workers for the sake of the starving Irish…[they] used the announcement of new relief measures as an opportunity to provoke resentment among their readers, noting that aid was received with ingratitude or that English labourers were suffering under increased taxes. […] These editorials contributed to British alienation and reinforced other views of the famine that called for letting the Irish shift for themselves…[their] overall objective was to ensure that the Imperial Exchequer would no longer provide any money for Irish relief.” (De Nie, 2004)
As Riley commodifies our ancestors into a rhetorical currency in order to attack the welfare state and “dependency”, it is worth keeping in mind the words of Cormac Ó’Gráda
“Who dies during famines? Karl Marx’s quip in Das Kapital that the Great Irish Famine killed ‘poor devils only’ holds for all famines: mortality has always varied inversely with socio-economic status, but especially so during famines. In Ireland, the first to die were destitute vagrants who lacked family support to fall back on, and who were at greatest risk from the elements and from disease.”
On the surface level it looks as if Riley’s op-ed has sympathy for the tragedy that befell Ireland and admiration for how the Irish diaspora in the U.S. adapted to their new life. But the way he uses their suffering as a “lesson” means that I all hear is “maybe if these hundreds and thousands of destitute people buried in unmarked graves across Ireland had taken some responsibility for their lives and stop playing the victim they would not have been at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder and most at risk of perishing?” Free market ideologues like Riley are binary thinkers, if you’re wealthy you deserve it, if you’re poor you deserve it.
Riley’s free-market absolutism also includes the denial of the endurance and relevance of anti-black racism in the present-day U.S. and the role racism and racial exclusion have played in determining the socio-economic position of the African American community. His belief that that Black Lives Matters movement is based on “a lie…to [scapegoat] the police in particular, and white America in general, for antisocial ghetto behaviour” was lauded by Breitbart as being “properly dismissive of the group’s message”. His neo-liberal ideology also leads him into other even more absurd positions. He has compared favourably to the present, if not romanticised, the Jim Crow period when thousands of African Americans were lynched by white mobs. That’s not an exaggeration. In 2015 Riley wrote that “History shows that faster black progress was occurring at a time when whites were still lynching blacks, not merely singing about it.”
Riley: “The peasants fleeing Ireland had a shorter life expectancy than slaves in the U.S., many of whom enjoyed healthier diets and better living quarters.”
Most who fled the famine were not “peasants”. It was the poorest who died in their tens of thousands in the diseased workhouses and in their homes, for the most part unable to afford to escape. It is an immoral equivalence to directly compare a catastrophe that led to approximately one million deaths in the space of a few years to centuries of racial slavery in the Americas. I’m not even going to bother unpacking the life expectancy claim as he offers no supporting evidence. Both, being poor and marginalised, had basic living quarters and generally narrow diets.
Riley: “Most slaves slept on mattresses, while most poor Irish peasants slept on piles of straw.”
This is a purposefully deceptive comparison which serves to diminish the lives of millions of enslaved Americans who endured miserable conditions in slave cabins across the Antebellum South. To be sure, many Irish peasants slept on beds of straw but this could equally mean that a bag or sack was filled with straw and used as a mattress, a practice that goes back at least as far as the Middle Ages. Maria Edgeworth mentions this with regard to the “lower orders” in the glossary of her famous novel Castle Rackrent (1800)
And what exactly were these “mattresses” that Riley claims “most slaves slept on”? The answer, Riley carefully omits, is wheat-straw or hay that had been placed in a sack or bag. Some slept on pallets. Both had similar bedding and the barest of living necessities yet Riley is using one to goad the other. Mr. Riley, we do not appreciate our Irish ancestors being used to play down the historical sufferings of others.
Here are some quotes from the Slave Narratives taken in Georgia (1937)
“The mattresses were large ausenberg bags stuffed to capacity with hay,
straw, or leaves. Uncle Mose told about one of the slaves, named Ike,
whose entire family slept on bare pine straw.”
“De cloth what dey made the ticks of dem old hay mattresses and pillows out of was so coarse dat it scratched us little chillun most to death, it seemed lak
to us dem days. I kin still feel dem old hay mattresses under me now.”
“On this framework was placed a mattress of wheat straw.”
“Dey put straw an’ old quilts on ’em, an’ called ’em beds.”
“Beds was made out of pine poles put together wid cords. Dem
wheat-straw mattresses was for grown folkses mostly ’cause nigh all de
chillun slept on pallets. How-some-ever, dere was some few slave chillun
what had beds to sleep on. Pillows! Dem days us never knowed what
pillows was. Gals slept on one side of de room and boys on de other in
de chilluns room”
“The mattress was made of straw or hay.”
“The mattresses on which they slept were made from hay, grass or straw.”
“Our mattresses was made outen cotton bagging stuffed with wheat straw.”
“Mattresses were made by filling a tick with wheatstraw.”
“De mattresses wuz filled wid wheat straw.”
“Bedticks was made out of homespun cloth stuffed wid wheatstraw, and sometimes dey slept on rye or oatstraw. Pillows was stuffed wid hay what had a little cotton mixed in it sometimes. Atter a long day of wuk in de fields, nobody bothered ’bout what was inside dem pillows.”
“The mattresses were merely large bags that had been stuffed to capacity with hay, wheat straw, or leaves.”
“Dey warn’t no floors in dese rooms and neither no beds. Us made beds out of dry grass, but us had cover ’cause de real old people, who couldn’t do nothin’
else, made plenty of it.”
“Mattresses were not much; they were made of suggin sacks filled with straw. They called that straw ‘Georgia feathers.’”
Riley: The black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that freed slaves were poor by American standards, “but not as poor as the Irish peasants.”
I sincerely regret that Du Bois is not here to expose this abuse of his work. He would no doubt have enjoyed putting the record straight. You see, not only has Riley taken this out of context, but he dishonestly uses this decontextualised fragment of a sentence to argue against the very thing that Du Bois is describing; the central role of anti-black racism in preventing racial equality and progress. Here’s the fragment in context.
We grant full citizenship in the World Commonwealth to the “Anglo-Saxon” (whatever that may mean), the Teuton and the Latin; then with just a shade of reluctance we extend it to the Celt and Slav. We half deny it to the yellow races of Asia, admit the brown Indians to an ante-room only on the strength of an undeniable past; but with the Negroes of Africa we come to a full stop, and in its heart the civilized world with one accord denies that these come within the pale of nineteenth-century Humanity. This feeling, widespread and deep-seated, is, in America, the vastest of the Negro problems; we have, to be sure, a threatening problem of ignorance but the ancestors of most Americans were far more ignorant than the freedmen’s sons; these ex-slaves are poor but not as poor as the Irish peasants used to be; crime is rampant but not more so, if as much, as in Italy; but the difference is that the ancestors of the English and the Irish and the Italians were felt to be worth educating, helping and guiding because they were men and brothers, while in America a census which gives a slight indication of the utter disappearance of the American Negro from the earth is greeted with ill-concealed delight. — W.E.B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro; a social study (1899), p. 387
In 1847, 19% of the Irish emigrants died on their way to the U.S. or shortly after arriving. By comparison, the average mortality rate on British slave ships of the period was 9%. Slave-owners had an economic incentive to keep slaves alive. No one had such an interest in the Irish.
I have nothing but contempt for this disgraceful point of comparison which Riley has cribbed from Thomas Sowell’s Ethnic America (1981). What sort of mind puts the unprecedented level of crisis migration from Ireland during a single year alongside three centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, which left approximately two million African souls at the bottom of the ocean? What sort of warped ideology leads one to try to belittle a crime against humanity to make a point about political economy to play down the legacy of slavery? What sort of editor allows this to go to print? Riley refers to 1847 and then to a British slave trade “of the period” which of course makes no sense since the British abolished their slave trade in 1807. According to historian David Eltis “throughout the slave trade era, filthy conditions ensured endemic gastro-intestinal diseases, and a range of epidemic pathogens that, together with periodic breakouts of violent resistance, meant that between 12 and 13 percent of those embarked did not survive the voyage…some 12.5 million slaves had been shipped from Africa, and 10.7 million had arrived in the Americas, likely the most costly in human life of all of long-distance global migrations.”
Riley writes that “Slave-owners had an economic incentive to keep slaves alive. No one had such an interest in the Irish.” What on earth can we say about this, an argument which on the face of it is in favour of enslaving people for their own good? Does no one have any interest in the lives or well-being of others because one is not legally their slave? Is that how self-interested neo-liberal realpolitik is? Such framing is based on the popular pro-slavery lie that the enslaved were better cared for by their masters than the free labourers in the North. Riley, whether he is aware of it or not, is channelling Calhoun’s maxim that slavery was a “positive good.”
Of course the British government failed to respond to the crisis in Ireland effectively, they spent ten times more fighting the Crimean war, and to say that some of their policies actually worsened the problem is an understatement — Ó’Gráda: “the [British] government’s obsession with parsimony and its determination to make the Irish pay for ‘their’ crisis cannot but have increased the death rate” — but we can’t erase from history that it spent £7 million on famine relief, that 700,000 were employed on public relief schemes, or that in 1847 three million people were being fed daily in emergency soup kitchens across Ireland. Nor can we erase from history the amount of private relief that was sent from all over the world, and which included around $2,000,000 from the U.S. alone. People had an interest in the Irish. It is somewhat ironic then that Riley, so quick to play down anti-black racism in the present, puts forward such a singular vision of pure Irish victimhood.
In the antebellum South, the Irish took jobs — mining coal, building canals and railroads — considered too hazardous even for slaves.
More ahistorical and generalising bluster about centuries of labour practices based on a few anecdotes. This is the Dinesh D’Souza approach to history. Slaves mined coal, built canals and railroads. Irish people mined coal, built canals and railroads. The difference is the Irish volunteered to do the work, were paid for it, could strike for higher wages, and could leave the job if they wanted to. Slaves were used to mine coal in Virginia going back to the eighteenth century and in 1839 around 40 people (mostly enslaved workers) were killed in the Black Heath disaster. The Irish were also among the white coal miners who unionised and excluded all black labour, whether free or enslaved.
In Virginia and other southern states, the canals were largely were dug by slaves. Canal building made slavery more profitable for slave owners as they could lease their slaves out to canal building companies and profit from their labour. According to Langhorne Gibson Jr., a historian of the James River and Kanawha Canal, “it was the greatest deal in the world for plantation owners. The agricultural economy was stagnant, and Virginia was really in a bad way in the 1830s and 1840s. Renting out your slaves was cash income.”
Canal companies had a preference for leased slaves as they could be worked longer and harder, and there was no need to negotiate pay, food or shelter. When canal improvements were made in the mid-1830s the workforce expanded, most of whom were now Irish immigrants. These Irish workers subsequently went on strike for higher wages and then when some of their number died from heat stroke, they downed tools and left, something a slave could never do. According to Wayland Fuller Dunaway
“The total force on the new improvements rose from 1,400 in 1836 to 3,300 in 1837. About two-thirds of the labourers were white, mostly Irish immigrants. In May 1838, they struck for higher wages with demonstrations of force and again in June, but returned to work the second time on promise of a 20 percent raise for those who…completed the work. The summer of 1838 was particularly hot, and some of the Irish died of prostration. At this point a panic seized them and 200 quit and migrated North. In the autumn, the force became more stable and manageable, two-thirds of them now being tractable Negroes.”
An official of the Kanawha River Improvement wrote about the advantage of using slaves over free workers: “The negroes being your own (or hired) you can command their service when you please — when your work is completed, if you have not further occasion for them, they can be sold for nearly as much, or probably more than they cost you.” As David S. Cecelski explains, despite attempts to use poor immigrant labourers, mostly Irish or Slavic, to dig the canals in the South “free labor never took hold…Free men, white and black, widely recognised the health risks of canal building. Without exception, canal digging projects that depended on free workers sooner or later faced labour shortages. Even if they could be recruited initially, free labourers quickly abandoned canals and dredging projects.”
Cecelski also describes the horrific conditions of canal digging that enslaved workers had to endure near the Great Dismal Swamp, North Carolina in The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (2001), 109–113
As for the railroads, slaves were used to build nearly all of the railway network in the South by 1860. According to the University of Nebraska’s overview of Slavery and Southern Railroads
“Southern railroad companies began buying slaves as early as the 1840s and used enslaved labor almost exclusively to construct their lines. Thousands of African Americans worked on the southern railroads in the 1850s. For African Americans the work was often the hardest, most difficult, and dangerous they were forced to undertake. Although historians, such as Allen Trelease, Robert Starobin, and Walter Licht, have acknowledged the presence of slave labor on Southern railroads, we have little sense of its overall dimensions or its relationship to the southern expansionism of the 1850s. Each of these historians has found slave labor on southern railroads; more recently, Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., has documented the use of enslaved labor on 85 of 113 railroads in the Confederate states.
By 1860 the South was the third leading railroad nation in the world, trailing only the northern United States and the United Kingdom in total miles constructed. It contained 33 percent of the nation’s railroad mileage and 40 percent of its population, and southern states were aggressively promoting railroad development throughout the 1850s. Indeed, southern railroads built and maintained their roads with enslaved labor, orchestrating contracts for hire on a scale of complexity and cost that seemed logical and consistent with their purposes but far in excess of any other institutions. Railroads began buying hundreds of male slaves between the ages of 16 and 35 as early as 1841, and in the 1850s were either renting or buying “hands” in groups of hundreds. One president of the Mississippi Central Railroad explained to his stockholders in 1855, “I am led to the irresistible conclusion, that in ease of management, in economy of maintenance, in certainty of execution of work & in amount of labor performed & in absence of disturbance of riotous outbreaks, the slave is preferable to free labor, and far better adapted to the construction of railways in the south.”
Jason L. Riley is thus repeating, rather than contextualising, the rhetoric used by white labourers in the mid-1800s who claimed that slaves received better treatment than they did. Amazingly none ever suggested that they swap positions.
We also cannot let this political abuse of history stand without mentioning how some Irish immigrants used anti-blackness to consolidate their position. What follows is an excerpt from an essay I wrote in 2016.
Despite facing Nativist discrimination, Irish immigrants and Irish Americans, on a number of occasions, used the leeway afforded to them in a white supremacist society to participate in (and sometimes lead) acts of collective violence and pogroms against African American communities.
The Cincinnati Anti-Black Pogrom of 1829 saw hundreds of whites attack blacks, destroy their homes and property, with the primary aim of pushing them out of the city. Among the white rioters were working class Irish. The black population in Cincinnati had increased from 700 in 1826 to over 2000 in 1829 and all classes of whites united to “cleanse” the city of its black population. They proposed the strict enforcement of the racist Black Laws of 1807. These laws were an early attempt by whites in Ohio to prohibit African Americans and “mulattos” from entering the State. They forbid blacks from enlisting in the militia, forbid them from educating their children in schools, and serving as witnesses against their white neighbours in court. The revival of these laws persuaded many African Americans to settle elsewhere if they wished to live free and in peace. But many did not want to leave their homes. White mobs thus attacked the black community for over two months, while the police and the city’s political leaders looked on. When it finally ended the black population in Cincinnati had almost halved.
Many of the black families that left established the short-lived Wilberforce colony in Canada. This colony diminished after internal strife, difficulties adapting to agrarian life, and the fact that the Canada Company ceased selling land to blacks after being pressurised by white settlers. In 1849 the property belonging to some of the remaining Wilberforce settlers was destroyed after an arson attack. Irish migrants and refugees fleeing the Great Famine settled in the area from the 1840s on and by 1860 they renamed the area Lucan.
Some Irish, keen to show their loyalty towards their adopted home in the face of Nativist suspicion, were also active in disrupting the activities of the Underground Railroad and enforcing the infamous Fugitive Slave Law. See the famous case of the self-emancipated slave Anthony Burns who was arrested under this law in 1854 and held in custody in Boston. When a group of African Americans and white anti-slavery activists attempted to rescue him by force, it was an Irish militia which suppressed their advances. One of their deputised number was stabbed and killed during the altercation. When African Americans held a vigil before Burns was sent back to his owners they were subjected to the “jeers and insults of pro-slavery Irishmen.” Sojourner Truth witnessed how Burns was marched on to the ship, a solitary figure, under the armed guard of two thousand armed white men. Some of those in the crowd, likely to be Irish-Americans, cheered at this pathetic procession. They also pointed at prominent abolitionists in the crowd, shouting “there go [the] murderers” of an Irish labourer. Noel Ignatiev described the actions of the Boston Irish militia as being evidence that the Irish were “the Swiss Guards of the Slave Power.”
The most famous anti-black pogrom involving Irish immigrants were the New York Draft Riots of 1863. After reviewing who the Irish community in New York looked to for leadership at this time, it’s not difficult to see why they led the racist violence. One of these men was Charles O’Conor, an Irish-American lawyer, and the son of a United Irishman. He said the following in 1859
And what of the exiled Irish patriots in the U.S. who once spoke of Irish Freedom with such longing? Richard O’Gorman, a former Young Irelander and later the Governor of Newfoundland, stated that he was completely opposed to the abolition of slavery. He said “By freedom, the abolitionists mean, no freedom for the white but for the black man.” (1862) He believed that the Emancipation Proclamation was “a barbarous, disgraceful, hideous violation of the morality of Christendom.” The media also played on their prejudices. In the lead up to the pogrom one Irish-American newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register said that blacks “that float hither from the South” should be
“…driven out again, imprisoned or exterminated.”
This disgraceful editorial was at the extreme end of Copperhead rhetoric which for the past years had increased the level of hysteria by warning white labourers in New York that free blacks would “stream North” and “take their jobs”. Thus the white rioters lynched blacks, hung them from lampposts, mutilated their bodies, burned down black homes, the homes of white abolitionists and destroyed the Colored Orphan Asylum. This anti-black pogrom was successful. The black population in Manhattan plummeted by 20% between 1860 and 1865.
Among those attempting to suppress the Draft Riots were many Irishmen serving as police officers and soldiers (some of whom survived Gettysburg) who undoubtedly shot and killed many of their rioting countrymen. Irish fire-fighters worked hard to put out the flames across the city and most famously, one group of Irish street-car drivers, led by a Paddy McCaffrey, helped to secure an isolated group of black children who escaped the burning Colored Orphanage.
Sadly the Draft Riots were but the worst incidence of anti-black violence perpetrated by a predominately Irish mob in New York in 1863. Just weeks before a large mob of mostly Irish longshoremen had attacked African American workers.
“On Monday last an effort was made by four or five hundred ‘longshoremen, most of whom are Irishmen, to prevent negroes from working on the docks, or in the First Ward, which comprises the lower part of the city. Several disturbances had previously occurred, without important results; but on this occasion it was determined that not only the negroes should not work, but that they should be punished for working hitherto.”
— Irishmen Assaulting Negroes, Douglass’ Monthly (June, 1863)
Memphis Massacre of 1866
This was most significant anti-black massacre committed by a mainly Irish mob in the United States. Unlike Cincinnati and New York, the vicious level of racial violence ranged against the black community in Memphis cannot be explained in part by immediate labour competition or a misguided rage due to the imposition of Draft Laws. It is a horrific example of race hatred.
The Irish population in Memphis increased from 876 in 1850 to 5,242 in 1860. Many of those who came to Memphis in this time period were from the Irish Catholic labouring class and they had migrated from Northern cities in search of work and a better life. In an inverse situation to Cincinnati, where a growing black population were attacked repeatedly by white mobs, the Irish used their growing population to secure their position via the ballot and use their power to become the main belligerents against the black Memphian community. By 1865, the Mayor, 86% of the city’s firefighters, 67% of the city’s officials and 91% of city’s police force were Irish. They used this position to commit one of the most violent anti-black massacres in the history of the United States. This crime against humanity should not mistaken for anything other than a mostly Irish mob murdering innocent black people in the name of White Supremacy.
Socio-Economic Background
Walker explains “most of the Irish engaged in this riot were not members of the degraded labouring classes, but from a cross-section of socioeconomic strata consisting of Irish business and civil leaders…” and that “over 90 per cent of the rioters were from the ranks of privileged workers; 16 percent of the rioters were policemen, 10 percent were firemen, 17 percent were clerks and artisans, 19 percent were grocery saloon keepers, and 28 percent were from the ranks of small entrepreneurs. Only 9 percent of the rioters were labourers.”
The Massacre
After an altercation on the street between some black Union soldiers stationed in Memphis and some of the Irish-dominated police force, an attempt was made by a white mob (mostly made up of Irish-Americans) to kill, rob, rape, terrorise and drive from the city the entire black population and their supporters. Many police, firemen and even some officials, participated in or endorsed the massacre.
According to the Freedmen’s Bureau Report, “The conduct of a great number of the city police, who are generally composed of the lowest class of whites selected without reference to their qualifications for the position, was brutal in the extreme. Instead of protecting the rights of persons and property as is their duty, they were chiefly concerned as murderers, incendiaries and robbers. At times they even protected the rest of the mob in their acts of violence.”
Patrick Winters, an Irishman and Sheriff of the County “endeavoured to oppose the mob on the evening of the 1st of May, but his good intentions were thwarted by a violent speech” which was delivered by another Irishman, John C. Creighton. Creighton was the City Recorder and he “urged and directed the arming of the whites and the wholesale slaughter of blacks.”
His speech was delivered on the evening of the 1st of May to a large crowd of police and citizens on the corner of Vance and Causey streets, and to it can be attributed in a great measure the continuance of the disturbances.
“That everyone of the citizens should get arms, organize and go through the Negro districts,” and that he “was in favor of killing every God damned n****r…”
“We are not prepared now, but let us prepare and clean out every damned son of a bitch of a n****r out of town…”
”Boys, I want you to go ahead and kill every damned one of the n****r race and burn up the cradle…”
What also rankled them was that Freedmen were gaining in confidence and naturally hoping and advocating to be treated as equals in the post-antebellum period. This drove the white supremacists crazy. They wanted the former slaves to submit to their will completely. To be docile and to serve. One Irish policeman during the massacre longed for Samuel Cooper to be murdered, as he was a man who “gets up and talks to the colored people, and tells them that they are as good as white men.” Another section of the mob wanted to ensure the subjugation of the black community by destroying “every n****r building, every n****r church, and every God damn son of a bitch that [teaches] a n*****r.”
When the terrorists were finished, forty six African Americans had been murdered. Seventy five were wounded. Five African American women had been raped. One hundred African Americans were robbed. Ninety one African American homes had been destroyed. Four African American churches were demolished. Twelve African American schools had been burned to the ground. The damage to their community and some Federal property amounted to over $120,000. No one was indicted. Walker highlights the words of David Roach, “an Irish police officer and one of the chief ringleaders of the mob, who was witnessed by ex-slave Hannah Robinson while he organised a posse on the third day of rioting. Roach was heard to have said…
“Close up, close up; right shoulder shift. This is the white man’s day now.”
And afterwards…
“No public meeting has been held by the citizens, although three weeks have now elapsed since the riot, thus by their silence appearing to approve of the conduct of the mob. The only regrets that are expressed by the mass of the people are purely financial.”
Irish Americans were involved elsewhere in the racial oppression that followed the Civil War. A famous Confederate was Father Abram Joseph Ryan, the “Poet-Priest of the South”, both of his parents were from Co. Tipperary. After the war he openly supported the White League’s paramilitary campaign to reassert white supremacy which included the Coushatta Massacre. Then there is Walter Lane from Co. Cork. He was a Confederate general and after the Civil War he set up the first White Citizens Party in Texas which used terrorism to run Republicans and African Americans out of Marshall thus brutally reestablishing white hegemony.
If you wish to support my work, you can make a donation here.
