ABSTRACT
In Race Adjustment, his landmark 1909 assessment of the so-called “negro question,” African American social critic Kelly Miller cites British historian Edward A. Freeman’s comment that in the “Aryan country” he saw about him, “very many approved when I suggested that the best remedy for whatever was amiss would be if every Irishman should kill a negro and be hanged for it” (139). Freeman recorded this in his 1883 travel narrative, Some Impressions of the United States, and the genocidal logic of his witticism registers in race-national terms Freeman’s antipathy toward the rebellious Irish under British colonial rule. Freeman’s comment is a fair sample of the white nativism that confronted both African and Irish Americans as the groups vied for employment, housing, and other resources made scarce by economic competition and racial-ethnic discrimination. By the time Miller and Freeman wrote, the precedent of Irish American violence against African Americans was tragically well established.1 Competitors for economic and social status throughout the nineteenth century, African and Irish Americans were famously hostile to one another, vying perhaps as trenchantly for the rhetorical resources of characterological virtue within the processes of race and class distinction. Inciting riot mobs and racial exclusion in the labor market, Irish American workers policed the color line claiming white privilege and racial superiority For their own part, African American rhetors defamed Celtic character in the most disparaging terms.
