Life in Mid-19th Century Five Points

Historical Understandings:

• Thousands of Irish men and women fled the Great Potato Famine in the 1840s and 1850s and settled in urban communities in the U.S., including New York City's notorious slum, Five Points.

• Five Points was afflicted by poverty, disease, and violence, but was also a working-class community where thousands of Irish, Germans, and African Americans worked, raised families, built churches, and established social and political institutions.

• Because middle-class Protestants saw only corruption, vice, filth, extreme poverty, and intemperance in Five Points, they established missions to convert Irish Catholics, "improve" moral education, and ameliorate the conditions of the working poor.

• The Irish were often depicted in mid-nineteenth century popular media using physical stereotypes that rationalized discrimination and were similar to racist caricatures of African Americans.

The potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s spurred the migration of thousands of impoverished Irish to the United States. The new immigrants—rural, Catholic, and starving—settled in the poorest districts of large cities in the East, including in New York’s Five Points neighborhood in downtown Manhattan. Below you will find primary documents, teaching activities, and other resources to help understand and teach Five Points.

Teaching the story of Five Points allows you to explore a number of themes with your students. First, it is a window into a period—the 1850s—that marked the start of rapid change in American society, as the country became more urban, more industrialized, and, because of changes in transportation and communication technologies, more connected. Immigration is an important part of this story, both because immigrants contributed to the growing urban population and because their cheap labor fueled the factories and built the roads, canals, tunnels, and rail lines of the emerging industrial order.

Exploring the Five Points experience is also a way to identify the many strategies that immigrant groups use to survive in new homes and to challenge discrimination. Five Pointers were destitute when they arrived and settled in one of New York’s poorest and most run-down neighborhoods. On top of this, Irish Five Pointers worked for some of the lowest wages in the most dangerous and unstable jobs in the city. Statistics, like those included in this collection, attest to the dire and exceptional conditions of the neighborhood: 66% of patients being treated for bone fractures in one downtown hospital were Irish, a third of children in the neighborhood did not live past their fifth birthday, and, because Irish men worked in such dangerous occupations, nearly one out of every five households in Five Points was headed by a woman. Irish immigrants arrived in the United States in an era before formal governmental aid, when private charities provided the primary—and inadequate—relief funds, meals, and training. Yet Five Pointers built strong community institutions, such as churches, saloons, and fire companies, to support each other, gain some say in local government, and shield themselves from prejudice and poverty. They created a vibrant working-class culture that helped them survive and eventually helped shape American culture as a whole.

A recurrent theme in U.S. history is the tension between Americans’ need for labor and their anxiety about new immigrant groups. Nativists in the 1840s and 1850s feared that Irish Catholics could not be assimilated. They believed immigrant culture, religion, and social customs degraded “real” American society and feared immigrants’ growing political power. Political cartoonists often expressed this fear by depicting the Irish in demeaning, stereotypical, and sub-human caricatures, similar to those that portrayed African Americans. While the Irish had more political power than other poor ethnic groups in the 1850s (African Americans were subject to property requirements in order to vote in New York) they were victims of discrimination, prejudice, and violence.

Over the last two generations, social historians have worked to uncover the stories of ordinary people. Since working people seldom left behind the same types of written records as the middle and upper classes, historians have turned to other sources such as census records and artifacts recovered from archaeological digs. These types of primary documents are part of this collection. Social historians also ask different types of questions of written documents such as newspaper reports or middle-class reformers’ letters to better understand the experiences of working people in the past. Such questions are modeled in the teaching activities and focus questions paired with documents in this collection.