Message: 1 Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2007 00:03:51 -0700 From: "Jean R." <jeanrice@cet.com> Subject: [IRELAND] Irish Canal Diggers, America (1817-1830s) - Irish vs. Irish - Secret Societies To: <IRELAND-L@rootsweb.com> 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)

How very true Ray. I live in Ottawa, Illinois a few blocks from the Illinois-Michigan Canal and some of my ancestors ended up here as canal workers. The government was no better then now in managing money and soon ran out of funds. They then decided to pay the local workers in Canal Script. Save enough and you could buy canal land or use in local businesses for food and refreshment. But that meant no cash to send back home. It didn't take long before the workers had a bellful of this nonsense and a mob was formed with a fellow named Sweeney from County Kerry leading the pack. A local posse was formed by the Sheriff where they trapped them outside this town and unloaded their guns into them. Those that survived returned to work but it caught the governments attention. Margaret

I've heard that those Sweeneys have always been rabble-rousers, Margaret. Some of them are even interested in sailboats, I hear. Ray -----Original Message----- From: irl-kerry-bounces@rootsweb.com [mailto:irl-kerry-bounces@rootsweb.com]On Behalf Of mrcarmean@sbcglobal.net Sent: Sunday, July 15, 2007 6:59 PM To: IRL-KERRY-L@rootsweb.com Subject: Re: [IRL-KERRY] IRELAND Digest, Vol 2, Issue 273 How very true Ray. I live in Ottawa, Illinois a few blocks from the Illinois-Michigan Canal and some of my ancestors ended up here as canal workers. The government was no better then now in managing money and soon ran out of funds. They then decided to pay the local workers in Canal Script. Save enough and you could buy canal land or use in local businesses for food and refreshment. But that meant no cash to send back home. It didn't take long before the workers had a bellful of this nonsense and a mob was formed with a fellow named Sweeney from County Kerry leading the pack. A local posse was formed by the Sheriff where they trapped them outside this town and unloaded their guns into them. Those that survived returned to work but it caught the governments attention. Margaret ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to IRL-KERRY-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.5.476 / Virus Database: 269.10.6/900 - Release Date: 7/14/2007 3:36 PM

Good Evening All: About to go to bed this night and there's a message from the guy in MN that just HAS to be responded to. Perhaps a clarification is in order to settle this matter; the Sweeney's are not rabble-rousers, they are rabble. I.e. no reason to rouse anybody, they [the Sweeney's] are already there, just doing what they are paid to do, "rouse!". Sorry for the fate of that Sweeney in Illinois, but, he was the only one of us in the bunch that caused any difficulty for the "powers that be". They were not only outnumbered considerably but there were none of them bearing any relationship with "Sweeney's". Pity that. Love, Jack Sweeney, Palmer, Pennsylvania.