When the Irish arrived on the 'sinful shores of Amerikay' they had but two ways to power within
the Republic's Protestant political and religious circles. Neither of them was available to the rising 'Paddy' until after the Great Hunger of dubh
'47 swelled the Irish immigrant population with millions fleeing Death's halo. The first was the Catholic Church, which until the arrival of these
slavish papists, was of little significance within the confines of the great Masonic experiment. It is Archbishop 'Dagger' John Hughes who
represents this path when he threatens the mayor of New York in 1844, that if one of his churches bum, "New York will become a second
Moscow." The second path is represented by 'old Smoke' Morrissey, scion of the House of Morrissey, the brute force behind the political
corruption of Tammany Hall chiefs. His were the strong-arm tactics used on the recalcitrant to provide the Democratic machine of New York
with all the votes they could muster. So efficient at the job, Tammany could even expect support from the bed-ridden and infirm.
It seems inevitable that even though the Republic guarantees the freedom of worship, the papist Irish would suffer at the heel of the Protestant
Ascendancy in America as they had in Ireland. Fleeing from religious oppression did little to instill the need for forgiveness or dialogue, in
either the Protestant or the Catholic. In New York the battle raged between the True Americans of the OSSB (Order of the Star-Spangled Banner,
or as 'Paddy' saw it Old Stupid Sons of Bitches) and the various Irish gangs, the Dead Rabbits, the Plug-Uglies, and the Bowery Boys. The
cause for Dagger John's comment to the Mayor in '44 was the burning of two churches in Philadelphia riots, where twenty died (only one a
Catholic) in sectarian battles. As in O'Caaey's plays, Quinne gives us in Banished Children of Eve a view of both sides of this Cromwellian
If curse through different characters. To represent the Protestants we have Alexander Stewart daydreaming of his youth in Ulster and the
thirteen apprentices who stole the North when they closed the Derry gates on James a caca. While on the other side of the sectarian fence, in a
shanty on the night before, a circle of Drunken Paddies, to work their papistmojoinumbojumbo on the draft, burned the skull of one of George III's
redcoat loses. It worked. The day after Orangemen's day, June 13th the draft riots of 1863 engulfed New York City.
America was a different order altogether. New York City itself was probably at the same time the greatest shock as well as wonder to the newly
arrived Irish immigrant. Where they had lived in cohesive, nigh communal, rural communities, they were now in a teeming metropolis as full of
the horror and poverty they had just fled from, as it was full of promise. Of course a majority of the promise, the fortunes to be had in the 'green
fields of Amerikay', were set aside for the 'rat-noses'. Even the charity was meted out in an attempt to displace that Roman loyalty of the devout
'Paddy'. Ward makes a comment on the speed with which the citizenry of New York attend to their driving, "Smashed and ruined vehicles ... the
addiction to velocity seems to become more severe with each passing day." This contrasts in a tangible sense the way in which the Irish viewed
life and why the Protestants saw the Irish as lazy. To the Yankee moneywastimewasmoney and even though men like Stark and Bedford could
use patience 'to put the odds in one's favor', progress or modernity had taken center stage. It can be summed up in the warning, "Get a move on,
the world won't wait for you."
It is hard to recognize in all the racist and religious rhetoric that gets spewed around where to draw lines of guilt and innocence. This boundary
is mighty thin indeed, thinner then the veil between the worlds at Samhain or the flowered ribbons and the maypole at Beltain.
Having survived the Great Hunger and the emigration over in 'coffin ships', it is no wonder 'Paddy' was so intent to hold on to what job security
he had. In the end it was the economic lessons that Truvellyan (sp) taught the Irish in the Great Hunger which pushed them to savage acts of
brutality and racism. Once they had climbed up a few of those rungs from caca Irish to shanty Irish they weren't about to let a newly freed
African population threaten their economic livelihood. Again it is O'Casey who has cracked the door with The Plough and the Stars, so
Starkey can shout "Boys you got it half right. It's 'down with Niggerdom', not 'down with Niggers.' Down with the system that makes one man a
serf and the other a slave, then sets them at each other's throat."
The Protestant Ascendancy embittered the Irish population of New York into riot, not because they were against Lincoln and the Union, and
certainly not because it was about abolition, for they saw emancipation only as a threat to their financial well being (an oxymoron). No, it was
because of the exclusions; the substitution and the $300 purchase-a-proxy clauses that guaranteed it would be the poor Irish who got drafted
and not the 'rat-noses'. Conscripted into an Army at the hands of another Judas this one named Noonan, to fight for another's freedom, a freedom
that would inevitably threaten their own survival, they saw but one choice rebellion. It so enraged them that they were being used once again
by the Ascendancy as pawns they turned not only on the Blacks of New York, but on the city itself, creating one of the largest insurrections in
the history of the Republic. In a word 'Anarchy'.