Immigrant Impact on the U.S. Abolitionist movement

SIGNIFICANCE: Debates over slavery touched every aspect of American life during the decades leading up to the US Civil War (1861–5). As was the case with Americans in general, immigrants could be found on all sides of the issue. Some immigrants became active abolitionists, but ethnic, political, and economic issues often kept recent immigrants from playing a major role in the efforts to end slavery. Abolitionism was strongest in the Whig Party, and later in the Republican Party. However, because immigrants generally did not find these parties congenial, only a small number of recent immigrants played a significant role in the antislavery movement.

Between 1800 and 1860, nearly five million immigrants came to the United States, mostly from Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia. Most of these immigrants settled in northern states, and those who went to the South tended to settle in cities, where they became laborers, artisans, or small business owners. Few recent immigrants had the money to become enslavers, but some immigrants did participate in the slave trade. There were also others who defended slavery although they were not directly involved with it, and still others who were active in the antislavery movement.

Abolitionism was strongest in the Whig Party, and later in the new Republican Party that emerged during the mid-1850s. Before the Civil War, most immigrants joined the Democratic Party, because the Whig and the Republican parties had many evangelical Protestant members, and their reformist platforms were perceived as anti-immigrant. This connection of ethnicity and religion with party affiliation meant that recent immigrants generally did not become part of the political parties in which abolitionism flourished. Therefore, relatively few immigrants were prominent abolitionists.

Immigrant Opposition to Abolitionism

Often on the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, immigrant laborers—like their American-born counterparts—were generally not supportive of the abolitionist movement. Many feared that freed slaves would compete with them for employment. However, just as relatively few immigrants were actively involved in the abolitionist movement, few were active defenders of slavery or outspoken critics of the abolitionist movement. Nevertheless, there were exceptions. For example, John Mitchel, who had been banished from Ireland for his revolutionary activities, eventually became a slave-holding farmer in Tennessee and a vocal defender of slavery. When Tennessee was being occupied by Union forces during the Civil War, Mitchel spent four months in prison for his outspoken support of the Confederacy.

The German immigrant Francis Lieber is a good example of the ambiguous position on slavery that many immigrants held. Lieber was a liberal activist in Germany before migrating to the United States in 1827. Although he had often spoken out against slavery, when he moved to Columbia, South Carolina, he bought two enslaved people to serve as family servants. He justified this by saying he would treat them better than others might, and that they would be educated and uplifted by contact with his family. Nevertheless, he continued publicly to maintain that American slavery was “a great evil and misery.”

Immigrant Support of Abolitionism

Economic concerns led some immigrants to fear competition for jobs from freed slaves, but other immigrants came to believe that they shared common class interests with enslaved people. Immigrants who had risen above the lowest levels of the working-class poor often did not feel they were in competition with free Black people for employment and were often more sympathetic toward the condition of those remaining in slavery. Many German immigrants, who tended to be artisans, skilled workers, or small businessmen, were more actively antislavery. The Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass saw poor Irish immigrants as “a great obstacle” to the efforts to end slavery, but he considered German immigrants to be “our active allies” in the struggle.

After the failure of the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, many politically radical Germans came to America, where many of them become outspoken critics of slavery. Immigrants who had been active in the effort to end slavery in the British Empire also became abolitionists in the United States. For example, the Reverend George Bourne was a British Presbyterian minister who became a pastor in a Virginia church around 1815. However, he was fired by this church soon after he published The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable (1816), which argued that slavery violated biblical principles. Bourne then moved to the North and became an active abolitionist. He was on the board of the American Anti-Slavery Society when it was founded in 1833.

In general, immigrants were not unlike native-born Americans in the antebellum era in their attitudes toward the abolition of slavery. They were found on every side of the debate, and they based their positions on economic interests, philosophical or theological principles, or general humanitarian ideals.

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