Emigrants to North America were mostly Catholic; their median age was twenty-four and nearly half spoke the Irish language (Gaelic) only. In pre-famine decades, their motivation was independence and economic improvement but most sought merely survival after 1845. Most were paupers, having abandon- ed or sold everything to make the voyage. What they left behind traveled in their collective memories – “...the farm, the old people, the Church, the fair, the raising of potatoes, hay and cattle, the cutting of turf, the talk of going to America and of those who had gone, the talk of fairies and magic, the inadequate school and the hardness of life”

Few left Ireland by choice, driven out by circumstances they neither understood nor controlled, they abandoned everything they held dear for a chance of finding renewed hope. Emigration began long before the famine and continued long after. Gambling on the hope of a farm or a husband and family Ireland could not give them, young men and women began to emigrate. Families found themselves packed together in increasingly smaller dwellings by eviction decided to risk all and leave. Regardless of the emotional attachment to the land, religious and family bonds, many decided there was no future in Ireland.

The Irish of the mid-18^th century were rural people, used to the rocky soil, sights, sounds and smells of the Irish countryside. “Celtic culture was egalitarian and highly developed. Men and women were equal. Personal Sovereignty and Free Will (as opposed to the concept of Original Sin) were the foundations of Celtic Law. The individual was important and was expected to unfold the possibility of godhood on earth. For them, the veil between the worlds was penetrable by the sensitive spirit.”

William Shannon describes in The American Irish, what he describes as a “Good peasant”, one who “shared what little he had with his neighbor in time of need ... helped relatives and neighbors bring in their hay before the rains came ... knew his appointed place in the community and kept it. He respected his fellows who did likewise.”

North America offered them urban landscapes and fifteen-hour days. America was an individualistic, capitalist society: “to succeed in America in American terms, an Irish Countryman learned he would have to alter his values and turn his personality inside out.  He saw that it was the pushy, aggressive, fast-talking individual that who got along best in the seaport, on the boat and with the immigration officials."

The newcomers rapidly adjusted by creating inner-city communities of fellow-Irish where they could practice and sustain their own values. Home, church and saloon was where immigrants anchored their life in America. Places populated by their new neighbors from their old villages.

Although urged by Irish-American priests and politicians to move west and settle on farms, few newcomers had the capital or the skills to do so. Many found work on the bottom of the American economy as laborers. The women worked in mills and private homes as servants and cooks. Men found work in factories, mines, and on the docks. The Irish built America’s buildings, roads, canals and railroads. The work was brutally hard, the hours were long and the wages were low.

Their first home in America was too often a shack in a decaying slum on the edge of town or on the waterfront called “Paddytown” or “Little Dublin”. “In the predominantly Irish Fifth Ward of Providence, Rhode Island, in 1850 an average of nearly nine persons, 1.82 families were packed into one or two room dwellings; in New York City almost 30,000 people, primarily Irish, lived below ground level in cellars often flooded with rainwater and raw sewage.”

Immigrants were exploited by everyone from “Yankee Tricksters” who often inhabited the wharves and docks of large cities in search of “Greenhorns” to dupe them out of whatever meager possessions they had to employers who lured them to worksites with unfulfilled promises of high wages. America, they discovered, was a land of sweat where they were required to work much harder than they did at home.

Many of the new Irish-Americans were disillusioned with their new land. Prejudice against both their Irishness and their Catholicism was rampant and blatant. Aside from being poor and unskilled, the newcomers had committed the unpardonable sin (in the eyes of most Yankees) of being both Irish and Catholic in a world of Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The common belief was the Irish were lazy, immoral, superstitious and ignorant and that the Catholic Church was the enemy of Democracy. They feared the Irish were an advance guard bent on Papal aggression.

These beliefs lead to newspapers depicting the Irish as violent and drunken semi-humans more related to apes than to Americans. Employers refused to hire Catholics and the warning “No Irish need apply” appeared in advertisements and storefronts. Anti-Irish Catholic prejudices exploded into violence in 1837 when a Catholic Convent was burned to the ground in Boston by an angry mob of Protestant Workers, and again in Philadelphia in 1844 when rioters burned Catholic Churches and destroyed much of an Irish neighborhood, killing twelve immigrants.

Nativism surfaced in the 1850’s in the guise of the “Know-Nothing” Party that controlled several state governments and managed to pass punitive anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant laws. The Know-Nothing movement was short lived and despite an attempt to win control of Congress and the White House, faded by the end of the decade with the election of James Buchanan.

The American Civil War saw great enthusiasm from Irish-Americans eager to fight to save the Union. Enlisting and fighting served several purposes for Irish immigrants; it freed them from the grinding poverty they found in eastern cities and it helped to prove their worth as Americans.

Exclusively Irish regiments were formed in many states and twelve Irishmen rose to the rank of General including, Ulysses S. Grant, Philip Sheridan and Thomas Francis Meagher. One hundred and fifty thousand Irishmen served in the US army, most notably with the Irish Brigade, and some 50,000 more wore the grey of the Confederacy. Fifty three percent of the 600 Nuns who served as nurses during the War were born in Ireland, and no doubt, many more were Irish-American.

 After the conscription Law of 1863, a disproportionate number of Irish-Americans were being forcibly recruited causing the New York City Draft riots of that year. During and after the war, many units of the Union Army moved westward, at first to engage the Confederates and later during the Indian war on the Great Plains.