Book Review

Canada and the United States

Of the nearly two million Irish who immigrated to America in the forty years before the Civil War, only about seven percent settled below the Potomac River. In 1860, there were about 85,000 persons of Irish origin in the eleven states that would shortly form the Confederacy. Despite their meager numbers, David T. Gleeson makes a convincing case that the southern Irish represent an important untold story of the Irish in America and within the South itself constitute "The Forgotten People of the Old South," who were a significant religious and ethnic minority within the region. Like their northern counterparts, the southern Irish settled primarily in urban areas; in the major southern cities, the Irish constituted a sizable minority, ranging from nearly a quarter of Savannah's and Memphis's populations to seventeen percent of that of New Orleans. Indeed, it was the economic opportunities of the burgeoning urban development of the South that drew the Irish, Gleeson found, often from earlier points of settlement in northern states or Canada. Once there, chances for economic success and mobility were greater than they had known in Ireland or even in the North. Slavery spelled economic opportunity for the Irish, even though few managed to be slaveholders. The reluctance of slaveholders to put their valuable slave property at risk in constructing the canals and railroads that were vital to economic development gave the Irish an advantage in getting the most for their unskilled labor, as Frederick L. Olmstead discovered in his tour of the South, when he found Irish railroad workers in Mississippi earning twice the wages they could have commanded in the North. Within the cities, Gleeson concludes, from apparently meager evidence, "many Irish immigrants ... showed a rational upward mobility that any native-born American would have been proud of" (p. 51).

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