Narrative of the North fighting for Equality.
Small groups of Northerners fought for equality and dragged the rest of the Northerners with them...
Irish refugees were voluntary escapees vs. abductees
Something to add... How has the Irish kept their hands clean about their behavior towards Free Blacks and Slavery in the 19th century... if you are going to hold the Southerners accountable then the Irish need to be held accountable... along with Southern Jews that owned slaves... soiled hands are soiled hands...
Link:
https://www.irishtimes.com/blogs/ge...came-white-immigrants-in-mid-19th-century-us/
In those days, the Irish immigrants had much in common with African-Americans; they might be nicknamed
“Negroes turned inside out” while African-Americans would
be “smoked Irish”. A quip, attributed to an African-American, went something like this: “My master is a great tyrant, he treats me like a common Irishman.”
In the census of 1850, the term “mulatto” appears for the first time, due primarily to inter-marriage between Irish and African-Americans.
However this
“alliance of the oppressed” did not happen.
The Irish supported the continuance of slavery, turning their backs on the Abolitionist cause, “while Irish American repealers maintained a pride and love for their homeland,
they acted unabashedly American in the way they dealt with the slavery controversy”
For the poor, Black or White, Italian or Chinese, the equation was simple: “work or starve”. Men fought each other, physically, for jobs, driving a wedge between their cultural communities.
For the Irish in this “dog-eat-dog” job market, support of abolition would not have been a high priority.
Snip... wonder if true...this whine about 1790 law... how would poor Irish even know about the law...
Another
deterrent to Irish support of abolition may have been the United States Naturalization Law of 1790 that restricted naturalization to “free white persons” and of “good moral character”. The aspiring citizen pledged to support the Constitution of the United States. Therefore
the Irish may have hesitated to support Abolition, seeing it as a threat to the Constitution.
Unfortunately, the Irish went beyond passive support of slavery: “that the democratic party, and particularly the poorer class of Irish immigrants in America, are greater enemies to the Negro population, and greater advocates for the continuance of Negro slavery, than any portion of the population in the free States.”