Irish-African American Dynamics

Savannah, Chatham County, Georgia • Late 19th Century

A Couple of Examples

Introduction

By 1854, the year of a major yellow fever epidemic and a direct hit by a hurricane, 51% of Savannah’s residents were foreign-born. Remarkably, Irish immigrants constituted 63.3% of that total. During the prior half-dozen years, the city’s native-Irish population had doubled, with children, women, and men from County Wexford accounting for 56.2% of the newcomers (thanks to non-stop winter sailings from New Ross and Wexford Town).

The majority of immigrant Irish resided in three neighbors: Old Fort, by the river, on the east side of today’s Historic District; Yamacraw, also by the river, but on the west side; and Frogtown, contiguous with Yamacraw. The Central of Georgia rail depot, which employed many Irish, constituted the de facto boundary between Yamacraw and Frogtown. Performed at multiple mid-February through mid-March events each year, Aloysius J. Handiboe’s 1952 song, “It’s St. Patrick’s Day in Savannah,” concludes with the lines, “From Old Frogtown to the Old Fort \ And don't forget Old Yamacraw \ They have always sung the praises \ Of Erin Go Bragh.”

A highly salient fact about Frogtown, Yamacraw, and Old Fort (which contains Trustees’ Garden) is their endurance as multi-ethnic neighborhoods until after World War II, when non-African Americans began relocating to new suburbs on Savannah’s Southside. In reporting on post-Civil War politics in the three neighborhoods, late-nineteenth-century Savannah newspapers identified the following five voting blocks: Native American (i.e., American-born whites); Negro (African Americans); Irish; German; and Hebrew (Jews).

Noting that “throughout the 1860s and 1870s black and white laborers tended to reside in the same areas [of Savannah],” one scholar has characterized Yamacraw as exhibiting “a relatively open housing pattern” (John W. Blassingame, “Before the Ghetto: The Making of the Black Community in Savannah, Georgia, 1865-1880,” Journal of Social History, vol. 6, no.4 [Summer 1973] pp. 463-488).

With input from such entities as the African American Irish Diaspora Network, Irish Research and Teaching at Georgia Southern University is pursuing a major faculty-student research project designed to document and share the history of Frogtown, Yamacraw, and Old Fort as neighborhoods in which the Irish interacted with other ethnic groups, especially African Americans. Many and various important narratives obtain, and we look forward to communicating those stories in compelling ways that excite both known and new friends, including schoolchildren and those who identify as Ireland’s affinity diaspora.

One crucial element of the project is oral-history interviews with individuals whose life experiences are intimately associated with one or more of the neighborhoods. The current Chatham County Commissioner, Chester A. Ellis, is an African American who recalls “playing half-rubber with the Irish” as he grew up, first in “the Fort” (Old Fort) and then in Frogtown. (Perhaps invented in Savannah in the 1890s, half-rubber is a stick-and-ball game that uses a baseball-sized rubber ball that has been sawed in half.)

Below, please find two examples of the Irish-African American dynamic in late-nineteenth-century Savannah: the first in the domain of dock labor; the second in that of public health. Other narratives could be adduced, such as how The Savannah Tribune, a black Savannah newspaper established in 1876, regularly covered Ireland’s domestic politics (e.g., the Land War) and, in addition, featured advertisements by Savannah businesses with Irish-born owners (e.g., P. O’Connell, sharpener of “Scissors, Saws and Razors” and repairer of “Parasols and Umbrellas”).

Labor Cooperation on the Savannah Docks

Throughout the nineteenth century, city-specific militias, often reflective of ethnic groups, were common in urban America as a front-line defense for the citizenry. Before the Civil War (which lasted from April 1861 to April 1865) , many Irish immigrants in Savannah joined one of the local Irish militias, such as the Irish Jasper Greens (established in 1842).

When the war started, the Confederate army absorbed Savannah’s Irish militias. (For example: The Irish Jasper Greens became Companies A and B of the Confederate Army’s 1st Georgia Regiment of Volunteers.) After the conflict, members of those military units returned to Savannah, where numerous among them would engage in initiatives predicated on cooperation with African Americans. While in 1860, there were 8,417 African Americans and 13,875 whites in Savannah, just a decade later the African American population had risen by 55.3% (the result of an influx of emancipated slaves). By contrast, the white population had risen by only 9.3%, although the city remained majority-white.

Among the most striking cooperative Irish-African American enterprises was a mutual alliance on Savannah’s docks between the Irish-founded and -dominated Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (whose membership averaged over 300) and the black Workingmen’s Union Association. The latter was established by a combination of free blacks (many of whom had never been enslaved) and emancipated slaves. Both organizations represented longshoremen, who (excluding a one-our lunch break) worked nine-hour days, loading maritime vessels with cotton, rice, lumber, rosin, turpentine, and other Georgia-produced goods. Over the half-decade beginning in 1867, Savannah saw a 64.3% increase in the value of its imports and exports.

Three Irish immigrants — one of whom was Patrick Rossiter from County Wexford — established the Workingmen’s Benevolent Association (WBA), probably in 1858. And credible evidence points to 1866 as the year in which the Workingmen’s Union Association (WUA) debuted. While not technically trade unions, that term could justifiably be applied to both entities, especially in regards to their having to negotiate terms and condition of employment with the stevedores (the middleman on the docks), where the ultimate employer was the Central of Georgia Railway.

Aware of the possibility of being undercut by Quebec-based, winter-migrant Irish-Canadian longshoremen and/or other non-union workers, the WBA and the WUA adopted a strength-in-unity strategy when seeking stable port-of-Savannah employment for their respective memberships. In January 1880, they staged a joint protest against non-union workers who were loading the Ocean, a Norwegian vessel. Subsequent joint protests, including strikes, characterized the scene until 1888, when the WBA and the WUA negotiated a color-blind, equal-pay, fixed-hours regime that would prove unique among Southern US ports (New Orleans, LA; Mobile, AL; Pensacola, FL; Charleston, SC; Port Royal, SC, etc.). Just a few years later, in 1894, Irish members of the WBA and African American members of the WUA marched together in Savannah’s Labor Day parade!

Images above (courtesy of Menapia RED) • In an article titled “Among the Stevedores,” page 8 of the April 24, 1888, edition of Savannah’s Morning News, a daily newspaper, reported on the color-blind, equal-pay, fixed-hours agreement reached with the stevedores by a coalition of the Irish-dominated Workingmen’s Benevolent Association and the African American Workingmen’s Union Association.

Under the agreement’s groundbreaking terms, Savannah longshoremen would henceforth configure as six-man units, with each unit consisting of a three-man white (generally Irish) “gang” and a three-man black “gang.”

In the case of each unit, should the overall assignment be “loading rosin or turpentine,” a white and a black man would perform together the highest-paid task, “stow[ing],” at $3.80/day; another white-black pair would perform together the intermediate task, “roll[ing] up,” at $3.40/day; and the remaining white-black pair would perform together the lowest-paid task, “unhook[ing]’” at $2.80/day. Similarly conceived “half and half labor” arrangements would apply to other loading and unloading assignments.

Image above (courtesy of Menapia RED) • Savannah’s Morning News of September 12, 1894, devoted almost four columns to the history and the continuation of a months-long dispute between several Savannah-based cotton-brokerage firms (“the brokers”) and, acting together, the white (mainly Irish) Workingmen’s Benevolent Association and the black Workingmen’s Union Association. Each of the two longshoreman entities had contributed a half-dozen or so members to a committee that they had jointly established to review a variety of proposals from the brokers, not least the removal of a 75 bale/day limit on the amount of cotton a six-person (half white; half black) longshoreman unit could handle.

To provide relevant background data, the newspaper invoked a very brief December 14, 1893, letter, sent on behalf of the longshoreman associations to the Chair of the Savannah Cotton Exchange’s Committee on Transportation. The letter rejected the brokers’ proposals. Notably, the document was signed by the WBA’s president, John Driscoll (son of Irish-born parents), and the WUA’s president, Sawney A. Wilson (who, in the 1920 Federal Census, would appear as a 76-year-old “Boat Loader”).

Elsewhere, the newspaper article quoted Sandy Rhett, a black member on the joint WBA-WUA committee, as declaring, “There is nobody anywhere can beat a Savannah cotton hoosier stowing cotton.” Rhett was elaborating on his view that “it would take him five years to teach a non-union man how to stow cotton.”

Image above (courtesy of the Georgia Historical Society, Savannah) • Cataloged as “Naval Stores on Wharf,” the photograph — believed to have been captured around 1883 by William E. Wilson — shows two Irish and several African American longshoremen with rosin barrels, dockside in Savannah.

Dr. R.J. Nunn’s Public-Health Advocacy

As Irish Research and Teaching, Georgia Southern University, continues to develop its Savannah’s Irish Neighborhoods project, the unit is focusing on Richard Joseph Nunn’s public health advocacy on behalf of Savannah’s African American community. A Protestant, Nunn (1831-1910) was a member of the largely Catholic County Wexford diaspora that established itself in Savannah, the so-called Hostess City, between 1848 and 1856. His father, Richard Maddox Nunn, was a physician whose posts included apothecary at the Wexford County Infirmary in Wexford Town.

On October 7, 1851, the 19-year-old Richard Joseph Nunn sailed non-stop from New Ross to Savannah on the Graves & Son vessel Glenlyon. Efectively debunking the trope of “No Irish Need Apply,” a Savannah newspaper wrote of the Glenlyon’s 220 steerage-class passengers, Nunn among them, “We have never seen a finer body of people from the old country [Ireland] …. They are all healthy looking and well clad, having the air and manners of worthy and industrious people.”

Nunn had begun medical training in Ireland, but he would complete the MD degree as a member of the initial class of the Savannah Medical College (established in 1853). An address delivered at the College’s opening had argued, “A Medical School, more than any other [type of higher-educational establishment], requires to be local. … I should rather [that] one of the fevers of our climate [e.g., yellow fever] be in the hands of a [local] Physician … than under the skill of the most renounced practitioner to whom the particular type of fever was unknown.”

In 1876, Savannah experienced its worst yellow fever outbreak of the nineteenth century. During that disaster, Nunn’s selflessness and fortitude were broadly noted. A motion of thanks passed by the Georgia Medical Association noted that despite being already “worn out and debilitated by incessant labor, extending over many years,” Nunn would not stay away from Savannah once he learned that the “deadly pestilence” of yellow fever was “raging.” The motion continued, “[Nunn] at once sacrificed his own pleasure” and “worked with untiring energy” in the midst of “the epidemic.”

Image above (courtesy of Georgia Southern University) • An extract form an entry about Richard Joseph Nunn that appeared in the 1906 publication, Georgia: Comprising Sketches of Counties, Towns, Events, Institutions, and Persons Arranged in Cyclopedic Form (Volume 2). The editors were Allen D. Candler and Clement A. Evans; and the publisher was the Atlanta-based State Historical Association.

After the 1876 yellow fever epidemic, Nunn made a major turn to activist public-health reform, especially on behalf of African Americans. Savannah had also endured a severe epidemic in 1854; however, just 0.2% of the city’s black population was recorded as perishing from the disease that year. In a paper he delivered to the International Medical Congress in Washington, DC, in 1887, Nunn acknowledged, “Up to 1854 … negroes [in Savannah] were known to be proof against yellow fever, but in the epidemic of 1876 many of them died with that affliction”

Nunn might seem positioned not to particularly care about African-American wellbeing. An obituary in Transactions of the American Microscopical Society explained, “He was a captain of Artillery [specifically, Company D, 22nd Battalion, Georgia Heavy Artillery] in the Confederate Army during the war between the States, but later on account of ill health he retired from command tho[ugh] he remained on duty in the hospitals.”

On the last day of April 1879, Nunn launched the first of several major public-health campaigns, seeking radical changes in his adopted city. He used the vehicle of a publicly distributed letter, addressed to “the Honorable Mayor and Aldermen of the City of Savannah.” The letter contended, “Probably no city of equal size in the United States has done less or as little for its sick poor as … Savannah.”

Using statistics that excluded “the exceptional year of [yellow fever] epidemic, 1876,” Nunn emphasized that in Savannah — a majority white city — post-Civil War black mortality had been averaging 12 for every six white deaths, whereas the average during the pre-War decade had been four for every six white deaths. Even with the significant post-War increase in Savannah’s African American population, the statistics pointed to a civic crisis with fundamental moral dimensions.

Nunn continued, “This is a most damning record of the utter inefficiency of the present system. To what is this terrible mortality attributable? In my opinion, to the want of proper food, proper nursing, proper shelter — in one word, proper hospital accommodation” (emphasis original).

Nunn proposed a city-funded initiative that would fully fund healthcare for “paupers” (individuals “absolutely without means”) and partially fund healthcare for “the poor” (individuals “willing and able to pay something”).

For “those confined to bed,” he proposed “reception” into and “treatment” in hospital. For those able to walk, he proposed “the establishment [by the city] of polyclinics” that provided services “in medicine, surgery, dentistry, etc.” As to supplying pharmaceutical drugs, he proposed that the city “make an arrangement with the druggists to fill prescriptions at a uniform minimum rate.”

In forwarding his scheme, Nunn obtained an endorsement from the Georgia Medical Society (whose presidency he would hold in 1888). Opposition to Nunn’s radical plan included an argument that access to healthcare was tough because of “the exorbitant fees demanded” by physicians, such as Nunn. One letter, printed on the front page of the May 13, 1879, issue of the Savannah Daily Evening Recorder newspaper claimed that doctors’ fees fleeced “respectable mechanics, hard-working laborers, small shop-keepers, ill-paid clerks, struggling widows, and industrious colored people”

In the end, the City of Savannah’s Committee on Health and Cemetery instructed that an advertisement be placed to secure “two [city-funded] physicians to attend to the sick poor … at a salary not to exceed seventy-five dollars per month”

In 1881, Nunn made a play on the national stage by bringing the ninth annual meeting of the American Public Health Association to Savannah, a city he claimed could not be “exceeded by any” for the “warmth, cordiality, [and] genuineness of the welcome.” Nunn’s Address of Welcome to the delegates is noteworthy. Calling the “science of sanitation” a hallmark of “civilization,” he asserted that “no caste, no creed … no color” should be denied the right to sanitary living conditions.

Another phase of Nunn’s public-health advocacy occurred in the spring of 1893, when, by means of a printed pamphlet, he warned the mayor and aldermen that “the persistent negligence of sanitation on the part of the authorities [was] gradually intensifying the virulence of filth diseases,” such as “[t]yphoid fever, scarlet fever and diphtheria.” He especially identified the “numbers of innocent children made victims” by filth diseases

Acknowledging that Nunn’s campaigning pamphlet “attract[ed] much attention,” a contemporary observer deemed it “one of the many valuable contributions” the “thorough sanitarian” Nunn had made “on sanitary questions.” The pamphlet revealed the existence in Savannah of “nearly 4,500 privy vaults [outhouses]” and “in the neighborhood of 1,300 dry wells.” In addition, it underscored the crucial connection between environmental health and human health by criticizing “the march to improvement” (i.e. industrialization and urbanization) for causing the disappearance of shade trees and streets made of porous sand.

More could be shared about Nunn’s public health campaigning, but the above should give a flavor of his focus on Savannah’s African American residents. In his will he left books to the Savannah Public Colored Library, which would later receive funding from Andrew Carnegie.

Memorialized as “a man of broad scientific and philosophic culture,” Nunn was also praised as an individual who, by both “his skill and his purse,” was “ever ready” to help “suffering humanity.”

In the latter years of his life, Nunn, an enthusiastic Freemason, engaged in fundraising to build a Scottish Rite Masonic Temple, the cornerstone of which would be laid in 1913. The structure remains an iconic within Savannah’s architectural heritage. Imaging how it should be, Nunn offered an opinion that well encapsulates the man and, in addition, constitutes excellent advice for all of us: “Life is short, and we are building for the future. We ought to plan broadly.”