Thesis advisor: Kevin Kenny / This dissertation examines the origins of American immigration policy. Without denying the importance of anti-Asian racism, it locates the roots of federal immigration policy in nativism and economics in nineteenth-century Massachusetts. The influx of poor Irish immigrants over the first half of the nineteenth century provoked anti-Irish nativism, or intense hostility toward foreigners, in Massachusetts. Building upon colonial laws for banishing paupers, nativists in Massachusetts developed policies for prohibiting the entry of destitute alien passengers by ship and railroad and for deporting immigrant paupers in the state to Ireland, Liverpool, British North America, or other American states where they resided before coming to Massachusetts. Prior to the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, citizenship and its attendant rights remained inchoate, allowing anti-Irish nativism to override certain rights and liberties that were later taken for granted. Nativist officials seized and banished paupers of Irish descent, including some who were born or naturalized in America. Historians have long seen anti-Irish nativism as a set of prejudiced ideas that generated few consequences at the level of law and policy, and have identified late-nineteenth-century federal Chinese exclusion laws as the beginnings of American immigration control. This dissertation argues that anti-Irish nativism in Massachusetts had a significant practical impact on Irish immigrants in the form of state deportation policies, and demonstrates that Massachusetts' policies, which were driven by a poisonous combination of prejudice against the Irish and economic concerns, helped lay the foundations for later federal restriction policies that applied to all immigrants. The argument unfolds in a transnational context, examining the migration of paupers from Ireland, their expulsion from America, and their post-deportation experiences in Britain and Ireland. In this way, deportation from the United States can be seen as part of a wider system of pauper restriction and forcible removal operating in the Atlantic world. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History.

On December 20, 1860, South Carolinians voted to abandon the Union and sparked the deadliest war in American history. Led by a proslavery movement that viewed Abraham Lincoln’s place at the helm of the federal government as a real and present danger to the security of the South's system of slavery, southerners—both slaveholders and nonslaveholders—willingly risked civil war by seceding from the United States. Rather than staying within the fold of the Union and awaiting the new president’s conduct regarding slavery in the territories and in the slave states, secessionists took bold action to change their destiny. By acting on their expectations of what the new president would do instead of waiting for his actual policy initiatives, they wagered on the possibility of a different future. This dissertation contends that the southern fear of slave insurrection, which was influenced by the Haitian Revolution, and the belief that northern antislavery forces would use violent uprising to end southern slavery shaped the planter ethos over the arc of the antebellum period, affecting national politics. Furthermore, this project explains why secessionists viewed Abraham Lincoln's support of the Wilmot Proviso as a valid reason for disunion.

abstract: This dissertation focuses on the development of two communities of women religious beginning in the early nineteenth century: the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth, founded in 1812, and the Sisters of Charity of Cincinnati, who arrived in Ohio in 1829 and became a diocesan community in 1852. Although administratively separate, these two apostolic communities shared a charism of service to the poor in the tradition of St. Vincent de Paul. The history of these two communities demonstrates the overlapping worlds women religious inhabited: their personal faith, their community life, their place in the Catholic Church, and their place in the regions where they lived. These women were often met with admiration as they formed necessary social institutions such as schools, hospitals, and orphanages that provided services to all religious denominations. Sisters’ active engagement with their local communities defied anti-Catholic stereotypes at the time and created significant public roles for women. The skills needed to create and maintain successful social institutions demonstrate that these women were well-educated, largely self-sufficient, competent fundraisers, and well-liked by the Catholics and Protestants alike that they served. This dissertation argues for the importance of acknowledging and analyzing this tension: as celibate, educated women who used their skills for lifelong public service, the Sisters of Charity were clearly exceptional figures among nineteenth century women, though they did not challenge the gendered hierarchies of their church or American society. To further understand this tension, this dissertation utilizes several cases studies of conflicts between sisters and their superiors in each community to examine the extent of their influence in deciding their community’s current priorities and planning for the future. These case studies demonstrate that obedience did not have a fixed definition but is better understood instead as dynamic and situational between multiple locations and circumstances. These findings concerning gender, labor, institution and community building, and the growth of American Catholicism highlight the integral role that women and religion played in the antebellum era. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation History 2019

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