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Archiver > IRISH-AMERICAN > 2008-12 > 1230465199
From: "Jean R." <>
Subject: [IRISH-AMER] Irish Canal Diggers,America (1817-1830s) - Irish vs. Irish - Secret Societies
Date: Sun, 28 Dec 2008 03:53:19 -0800
SNIPPET: Many of the poor and unskilled Irish who arrived before the Famine
found work building the earliest links in the emerging American
transportation network. The greatest of these projects the Erie Canal
(itself the brainchild of De Witt CLINTON, a descendant of Longford
immigrants), was constructed largely using Irish labor between 1817 and
1825. It was a stupendous undertaking for any era - a massive trench 363
miles long across upstate NY connecting the Hudson River with Lake Erie. As
this was the era before steam power, all of it was dug using manual and
animal labor. The work was dangerous and poorly paid and conditions in the
camps along the canal zone atrocious. One English visitor to the canal camps
near Troy, NY, wrote that the shacks of the diggers were "more like
dog-kennels than the habitations of men." Hundreds died from injury or
disease in the making of the Erie and other canals such as Chesapeake and
Ohio and the Illinois and Michigan, giving rise to the oft-repeated
statement that the banks of America's canals are lined with the bones of
stricken Irishmen.
Perhaps the most extreme evidence of this raw exploitation occurred in New
Orleans in the 1830s. There, the builders of the city's New Basin Canal
expressed a preference for Irish over slave labor for the simple reason that
a dead Irishman could be replaced in minutes at no cost while a dead slave
resulted in the loss of more than one thousand dollars. An old song, likely
exaggerating, put the death toll at twenty thousand: "Ten thousand Micks,
they swung their picks/To dig the New Canal/But the choleray was stronger 'n
they/An' twice it killed them all."
Together, canal and road building, like the later railroad construction,
explain why the Irish spread out so quickly across the country.
Because few unions existed in the 1830s and none for unskilled construction
workers, Irish immigrants often formed secret fraternal societies to
militantly protest their welfare. Along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in MD,
for example, Irish laborers from Co. Cork drove away workers who refused to
join their association. When Co. Longford workers were brought in to
undercut the Corkmen, fierce battles broke out and President Andrew JACKSON
sent in the army to restore order. Years later when the company refused to
pay them, they destroyed their work!
In the long run this spirit of collective action and solidarity among Irish
worker in the 1830s provided the foundation for their successful efforts to
organize into unions in the decades to come. In the short term, however, it
usually did little to relieve the world of hard and poorly paid work.
-- Excerpts, "1001 Things Everyone Should Know About Irish American
History," Edward T. O'Donnell (2002)
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