The single biggest wave of immigration in the period came between 1845 and 1849, when Ireland endured a potato famine. One million people died, and one and a half million left, most for the United States, where they landed in Eastern Seaboard cities, and settled there, having no money to pay their way to travel inland. … They lived in all-Irish neighborhoods, generally in tenements, and worked for abysmal wages. New York lawyer George Templeton Strong, writing in his diary, lamented their foreignness: “Our Celtic fellow citizens are almost as remote from us in temperament and constitution as the Chinese.” The Irish, keen to preserve their religion and their communities, built Catholic churches and parochial schools and mutual aid societies. They also turned to the Democratic Party to defend those institutions. By 1850, one in every four people in Boston was Irish. Signs at shops began to read, “No Irish Need Apply.”
Germans, who came to the United States in greater numbers than the Irish, suffered considerably less prejudice. They usually arrived less destitute, and could afford to move inland and become farmers. They tended to settle in the Mississippi or Ohio Valleys, where they bought land from earlier German settlers and sent their children to German schools and German churches. The insularity of both Irish and German communities contributed to a growing movement to establish tax-supported public elementary schools, known as “common schools,” meant to provide a common academic and civic education to all classes of Americans. Like the extension of suffrage to all white men, this element of the American experiment propelled the United States ahead of European nations. Much of the movement’s strength came from the fervor of revivalists. They hoped that these new schools would assimilate a diverse population of native-born and foreign-born citizens by introducing them to the traditions of American culture and government, so that boys, once men, would vote wisely, and girls, once women, would raise virtuous children. “It is our duty to make men moral,” read one popular teachers’ manual, published in 1830. Other advocates hoped that a shared education would diminish partisanship. Whatever the motives of its advocates, the common school movement emerged out of, and nurtured, a strong civic culture.
Yet for all the abiding democratic idealism of the common school movement, it was animated, as well, by nativism. One New York state assemblyman warned: “We must decompose and cleanse the impurities which rush into our midst. There is but one rectifying agent—one infallible filter— the SCHOOL.” And critics suggested that common schools, vaunted as moral education, provided, instead, instruction in regimentation. Common schools emphasized industry—working by the clock. This curriculum led workingmen to voice doubts about the purpose of such an education, with Mechanics Magazine asking in 1834: “What is the education of a common school? Is there a syllable of science taught in one, beyond the rudiments of mathematics? No.”
Black children were excluded from common schools, leading one Philadelphia woman to point out the hypocrisy of defenders of slavery who based their argument on the ignorance of Americans of African descent: “Conscious of the unequal advantages enjoyed by our children, we feel indignant against those who are continually vituperating us for the ignorance and degradation of our people.” Free black families supported their own schools, like the African Free School in New York, which, by the 1820s, had more than six hundred students. In other cities, black families fought for integration of the common schools and won. In 1855, the Massachusetts legislature, urged on by Charles Sumner, made integration mandatory. This occasioned an outcry. The New York Herald warned: “The North is to be Africanized. Amalgamation has commenced. New England heads the column. God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!” No other state followed. Instead, many specifically passed laws making integration illegal.
These Truths pages 209-10