Sick and Tired of Witnessing Pain

As a Buffalo kid educated in a parochial school, I was exposed to considerable history of the building of the Erie Canal, perhaps more than students in Billings, Montana, or Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We were proud of the Canal. The Erie Canal, in its original routing, ran through the Buffalo city limits. [Today the “official route” runs north of Buffalo and ends at the Niagara River in Tonawanda—at a swell breakfast restaurant on your way to Niagara Falls, about six miles downriver.] The Canal was the first mega-project of the United States. Completed in 1825, it was the first water route from the Midwest to New York City.
 
The New York City to Albany stretch was already cut by nature, the Hudson River. It was the 360-mile segment from Albany to Buffalo/Lake Erie that faced planners. Carol Sheriff’s The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862, is a captivating description of the obstacles facing construction: swamps, rocky escarpments, lakes along the route, rattlesnakes, and malaria. The route was broken into fifteen segments, and private companies bid on each leg of the project. Each of these companies faced a massive problem: manpower.
 
It is possibly a measure of conditions in Ireland that thousands of its sons made their way to New York to build the canal with all its dangers and hardships. I attempted to find “immigration procedures” for 1817 at the Port of New York, but there was nothing I could nail down. The Canal Project was approved by the State of New York, the bonds and loans arranged, and the Governor of New York, DeWitt Clinton, was enthusiastically waiting for the first shovel. I have a suspicion that “not too many questions were asked” regarding custom status and paperwork.
 
The Irish worked their way across the state for eight years—on schedule--to complete a project that would prove to be a financial windfall for the empire state, notably the port cities of New York and Buffalo [the latter becoming the tenth largest city in the United States.] Much of the construction connected farm communities; the canal would reduce shipping costs 90%. One would have thought that the upstate citizenry would have welcomed the canal and the men who labored to complete it. But the truth was quite the opposite. Historian Sheriff describes the construction march as a pitched battle between local farmers and the Irish laborers. Irish workers were killed in the line of duty.
 
The Irish had a grim time in America. President John Adams attempted to expel those Irish living in the United States because they tended to vote for his opposition. [Adams is remembered for his “Alien and Sedition Acts” of 1798 which some present-day politicians would like to restore with greater vigor. Thomas Jefferson allowed three of the four acts to lapse.] But the bigger issues, as most readers might suspect, were immigration and Catholicism. To an extent, Americans might be forgiven at the turn of the nineteenth century of fear of recent arrivals from overseas, given the excesses of the French Revolution, Napoleon, and general turmoil in Europe. Many of today’s immigrants have fled to our shores to avoid chaos and disorder in their own countries. Curiously, the reactions of fear experienced by many Americans was not so terribly different from several of the popes of the nineteenth century, notably Pius IX [r. 1846-1878] and his Syllabus of Errors, in which he condemns democracy, science, and freedom of thought, pillars upon which the American experiment was built.
 
Irish came to be seen as disrupters of the status quo in the U.S., a predominantly English-Protestant nation. There is irony in that these “foreigners” built the waterway that would eventually strengthen the American unity. But this reality was lost upon Americans, and later the “Know Nothing Party” of hatred of immigrants and Catholics would become a significant political force through the 1850’s when Abraham Lincoln began his run for the White House. In an 1855 letter to a friend, Lincoln muses:
 
I am not a Know-Nothing– That is certain– How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid– As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal" We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics". When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty– to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
 
When I was in Ireland last year, at the Museum of the Potato Famine in Dublin, I came across a remarkable event in time: when the Irish were starving to death in 1847 in an engineered genocide by the British, an outpouring of cash aid came from the United States, specifically from the Choctaw and the Cherokee Tribes. These were the same tribes that Andrew Jackson in 1830 removed militarily from their homes in Mississippi in the infamous “trail of tears” to the far and unsettled reaches of present-day Oklahoma; 6,000 of the tribes died on that forced march.
 
Like many of you, I am distressed daily by governmental and grassroots attitudes and actions toward vulnerable persons. We live in a time where there is infectious fear. I look at myself and say, courage. The line that keeps coming to me is Jesus’ command to keep the lamp burning bright: that we are open in sharing our inner joy, loving in our charity, wise in our judgments and strategies, peaceful in sharing our truth. What will save our country is what will save our Church.