The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas
The Time of Troubles for New York City in 1857 gives some backstory perspective on the draft riots to come less than 10 years from now.
The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas
The following has absolutely nothing to do with the Civil War, but as a musicology instructor I have to comment, because in an odd way it relates to President Trump.
The allegretto is the second movement of the symphony. It is, among people who listen to classical music, generally considered one of the most beautiful symphonic pieces ever composed. (See more on this here.) But among the classical music intelligentsia, it is considered one of the most boorish symphonic pieces ever composed.
I remember reading the review of the first time the symphony was ever played in London (the review was in the magazine Atheneum, but I can't find it online), which I read when I was researching in music college. The reviewer disliked the symphony in general, but I distinctly remember how he sniffed that the allegretto was actually played twice "for the benefit of the dilettanti." The writer in the above quote evidently thought the same way.
This is the way Trump is experienced today: those who are fond of America consider him the best political leader of our era, while those who are political intelligentsia consider him the most boorish political leader of our era.
A common belief of the time, and very wrong. The writer, not being able to see the future of course, does not know two things. First, without the "Celtic fellow citizens" there would not have been enough cannon fodder in the Union Army to win the war. It was a common practice for the Army to have a recruitment table where the Irishmen came off the ships to America, and many were enlisted into the Army there. My own gggrandfather, James McGinley, came to the US three years after this in 1860, and immediately enlisted as a private.
Second, within a generation, the Irish had gone from good-Lord-how-did-they-ever-get-in-this-country! to being considered highly patriotic, hard-working, and maybe a bit weird but just as American as the rest of us--unlike, say, the Italians, about whom the general attitude was, well, good-Lord-how-did-they-ever-get-in-this-country!, including my own ggrandfather James DiLisi, who came in the early 1880s.
When we finally get control of the illegal immigration and return to the ideals of Emma Lazarus' The New Colossus, we'll see the same evolution happen among Latinos--indeed, among those who are legal we are seeing it already.