Delanceyplace.com 7/30/08-A Nation of Immigrants

In today's excerpt--by 1850, the population of the United States had increased six-fold since George Washington was first sworn in as President. It was the period of the greatest population growth and wealth creation in America's history, and was fueled by immigration, especially the influx of the hated Irish, whose conflict with England had lasted centuries. With immigrants totaling thirty percent of its population, Philadelphia was representative of the country as a whole:

"Between 1815 and 1860, Philadelphians experienced dizzying growth. ... Though stripped of its federal and state capital status, the relatively contained city of just under one hundred thousand grew into a sprawling metropolis of more than half a million. ... With growth and manufacturing in the nation's second largest city came unheard of opportunities for some ... [but] historians now believe this was the most violent period of the city's history. ...

"The new manufacturing city demanded workers. From the hinterlands came young rural men and women seeking new opportunities in the city. From the South came thousands of African Americans, free or fleeing slavery. And from abroad came the English, the Scots, the Germans, and especially the Irish. Rapid industrial expansion and heavy immigration proved an explosive mix, so filling the city with political, religious, racial, and economic strife that the old concept of brotherly love seemed a lost and distant memory.

"A year [almost] never passed during the antebellum era without dozens of immigrant ships arriving at Philadelphia. ... Famine in Ireland and revolution in Germany brought especially heavy immigration from the late 1840s to the eve of the Civil War. By 1850, when the city and county of Philadelphia had 409,000 residents, nearly 30 percent were foreign-born, whereas census takers twenty years before had found that only ten of every hundred Philadelphians were born abroad. Almost 60 percent of all the new immigrants were from Ireland, with Germans (19 percent) and English and Scottish (17 percent) contributing smaller numbers to the ethnic melange."

Gary B. Nash, First City, Penn, Copyright 2002 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 144.