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Take it away, Karen. Since the formation of the United States, the nation was never a perfect union. During the Revolutionary War, approximately 20% of the white population remained loyal to the British crown. Families were divided, friendships dissolved. After the war, when former loyalists attempted to reestablish their lives within the new republic, they occasionally met violent verbal and physical resistance, grounded in the allegation that they were not real Americans. In addition to internal tensions, foreign enemies tried to exploit fractures that had existed since the colonial period, hoping for the collapse of the infant nation.
These were uncertain and often dangerous times, characterized by shrill accusations against political opponents and fears that foreign intrigue might cause the downfall of American government and culture. The founders believed that, if representative democracy was to prevail, their new republic needed to be nurtured by a vigilant and virtuous citizenry, but how could they galvanize a populace divided by geography, religion, ethnic heritage, and material wealth within a common cause so that the early republic would not only endure, but also become a beacon of democracy to the rest of the world? Their 1776 Declaration of Independence, while lacking legal authority, nonetheless laid the foundation of those ideals, pointing to equality or fairness to all people. And while most current Americans probably can recite the ideal of their unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it's fair to wonder whether they are also aware of what the founders promised to one another to ensure the preservation of those rights.
Do they know that the last line of the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor? Honor. Some people might question, what did the founders know of honor? When approximately 700,000 slaves were held in bondage in 1776, women for the most part were excluded from the public arena, and Native Americans lost their homelands to make way for the burgeoning nation. But despite their grave shortcomings, is it advisable to remove them from the historical record?
The founding generation was situated in a time that was very different from the 21st century, but what they created was a remarkably forward-thinking, malleable republic within which future generations could sort out the issues they were unable to solve during their lifetimes. When 24-year-old Matthew Carey arrived in Philadelphia in 1784, the young Irishman was running from a conviction of seditious libel for publishing essays condemning the subjugation of his fellow Catholics, alone, and with only 12 guineas in his pocket, Carey, like so many of his generation, was deeply motivated by the ideals of the American Revolution, which fostered his rise to become early America's most influential and commercially successful publisher. But Carey's path to advance America's high calling was far from smooth. Despite securing influential benefactors to support his vocational aims and drive for prosperity, there were other powerful people who sought to derail his career because of his allegedly inferior ethnic heritage and Catholicism.
A permanent, disabling limp from a childhood accident also rendered him open to cruel ridicule. When a jealous publishing rival began to taunt him in the press because of his religion as well as his disability, insinuating that Matthew Carey would never become a real American, the two men agreed to meet at an undisclosed dueling field in New Jersey over the insults Carey suffered. In an attempt to prove that his love of America was as true as anyone else's, Carey almost bled to death from the wound he sustained from his opponent's bullet.
During the 16 months he needed to heal, Carey decided to create a magazine, the American Museum, which is often remembered as the first literary vehicle which attempted to link all of America's diverse geographical regions with a national literature. As the worst known yellow fever epidemic until that time swept through the nation's capital, claiming the lives of nearly one-tenth of Philadelphia's population of 50,000, he benefited from citizens' curiosity about the plague and earned a fortune from the brisk sale of his work. While his popular narrative provided gruesome details of the widespread sickness and death, it also proclaimed that the city was saved by the compassionate care from citizens, especially recent immigrants like himself, who selflessly chose to remain and serve others in the midst of the deadly chaos. But his work also included portrayals of abominable African-American behavior during the epidemic, especially on the part of black women whom he accused of stealing from dying victims. His claim displayed his assumption that persons of color never would develop into equal partners in nurturing a flourishing republic.
He would never see any correlation between the bigoted ways some Americans treated him and his people and how he similarly dealt with African-Americans. But while Carey was prospering, a new wave of Irish immigrants who arrived in the first decades of the 19th century was struggling. Forced to seek their livelihoods within a strained economy that had never fully recovered from the panic of 1819, many new Irish Catholic immigrants had to accept employment at the lowest levels and barely could support their families.
Whenever there was an Irish Catholic neighborhood, it was usually adjacent to an African-American community. And by 1832, a race riot in Philadelphia broke out between African-Americans and Irish men over competition for menial jobs. Amidst the increasing violence, many native-born Americans came to fear that these poor Irish papists were unfit for citizenship.
Surely, they thought, the Irish would never develop into real Americans. Fearing that the discord of heightened immigration might destroy America, Matthew Carey was not content to simply sit back and enjoy the wealth and acclaim he had earned. Until his death, he worked to ensure his adopted homeland's prosperity by inspiring citizens to achieve the honor described in the Declaration of Independence. Convinced that other ethnic, religious, and economic outsiders like himself could indeed contribute to America's high calling, he published numerous essays to proclaim their worthiness. Urging all Americans to maintain a devotion to the democratic principles of the Revolution and sympathetic Christian compassion, he especially devoted his later years as a champion for thousands of female widowed garment workers and their children, many of whom died each year due to their poverty because they were not paid a living wage. Through dozens of pamphlets and newspaper articles, Carey demanded economic justice for the female workers, claiming, if the democratic soul of America was to survive and become a light to guide the rest of the world to freedom, the nation needed to care more compassionately for its marginalized citizens. Matthew Carey contributed to America's ongoing democratic revolution by attempting to improve the lives of white, disadvantaged outsiders by pushing the definition of what constituted a real American, but he also remained in step with the virulent racism of the period. In the 1820s and 1830s, he became an advocate to send free African Americans back to Africa. When Matthew Carey died in 1839, this less-than-perfect man left a nation that was not a perfect union just as some claim that it is still not a perfect union, but the pliant governmental and legal structures the founders created endure and continue to offer current citizens, just as they did for Matthew Carey centuries ago, tremendous opportunities to try to make it so.
And a terrific job by the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to Karen Kaufman, who's affiliated with the Jack Miller Center. And they're a nationwide network of scholars and teachers dedicated to educating the next generation about America's founding principles and history. And right from the start, Karen lays the claim to rest that America's never been more divided, indeed, right from our start, even those in America who were against and for the Declaration were bitterly divided. And there was that discrimination against the Irish, but the glue that kept it together for them was, of course, the Constitution itself, the founding principles and ideals of the country.
And though not perfect, the man was a racist at the time, and so many Americans were racist at the time, but the Constitution itself had an answer for that too. The story of Matthew Carey, the story of Irish Americans, and their beginnings here in this country, here on Our American Stories. Traveling is one of life's greatest joys. Honestly, can anything be more exhilarating?
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