Anti-Irish Nativism and the 1837 St. Patrick’s Day Riot in Troy, New York

By Harvey Strum, Russell Sage College Copyright ©2026 All rights reserved by the author

Riot.

To understand the sudden burst of anti-Irish violence on St. Patrick’s Day in Troy, New York, in 1837, the reader needs to understand that it fits into the context of the upsurge in anti-Irish and anti-Catholic nativism in the United States in the 1830s. It occurred as the Irish immigrant population increased in the Capital District of New York. By 1860, Irish Catholics made up sixty percent of the population of Albany, and forty percent of Troy’s population. In neighboring Cohoes, Irish immigrants dominated the cotton mills by 1860. Women made up most of the workers in the cotton mills. Widows made up a higher percentage of workers, twice the percentage of Americans or other immigrants. Also, there is a greater percentage of one-parent families in Cohoes compared to Troy or Albany. Mills, like Harmony Mills, hired widows and their children. The Irish section of Cohoes became known as Leitrim City because of the concentration of residents from Leitrim County, Ireland.

Irish immigrants coming down from Quebec found work in the ironworks in Troy. The poorest Irish laborers settled in the sixth ward in south Troy. Unskilled ironworkers lived in the second and third wards near the Hudson River and the iron mills. Skilled workers, puddlers, and molders lived closer to downtown. Molders cast pig iron into nails, stoves, bells, etc. Iron Molders Union #2 became one of the strongest unions in Troy. The Troy local “was one of the strongest in the Iron Molders International Union, which was one of the nation’s most prominent unions.” (Turbin, 1984, 2). Puddlers removed carbon to make wrought iron, and if carbon was added, puddlers produced steel. Skilled foundry workers lived in the city’s northern wards. Irish women found work in the shirt, cuff, and collar industry, the second major industry in the city, later called Collar City. Other immigrant groups arriving in Troy were Scots, Scots-Irish, French Canadians, English, Germans, and German Jews.

Irish immigrants arrived in Troy just as hostility to Irish Catholics increased in American society. Protestant religious revivalism, anti-Popery sermons and tracts. Protestant Associations, and a new anti-Catholic literature fostered the growth of nativism. Nativists primarily but not exclusively targeted Irish Catholics, but found time to attack German, French Canadians, and Jews. Conflicts over common schools, trustee control of Catholic churches, violence, alcohol abuse, and the disproportionate numbers of Irish in prisons and almshouses added to the tensions and encouraged the belief in the 1820s and 1830s that Catholics could not adapt to the American political, social, and religious environment. As early as the 1790s, Irish immigrants made up 44% of the residents of New York City’s almshouse. As the New York Morning Chronicle argued in 1807: “What nation flocks to our state prison with convicts---The Irish.” The editor added: “Who are the men who we constantly witness staggering about our streets brutalized with liquor---The Irish.” (April 28-30) Nativists believed the Irish immigrants were the chief source of violence, criminality, poverty, and social tensions in antebellum America. According to historian Louis Scisco: Irish “clannishness caused them to be looked upon as people who were not only strangers to American society but were determined to remain so.” (Scisco 1901, 20) Conflicts over access to common school money in the 1830s and 1840s led local officials and school boards to avoid giving money to support Catholic schools for the poor. Battles between Catholic Church trustees and the Roman Catholic Church leadership over control of church property and the influence of the laity in the 1820s and 1830s convinced American Protestants that Catholicism was undemocratic and hostile to American republicanism. Nativist conviction that the Irish preferred violence and drunkenness on the Christian Sabbath got confirmed by the 1835 Irish assault on Alderman Lewis Allen in Buffalo when he tried to stop excessive drinking and fighting by Irish on Sunday afternoon---suggesting the Irish opposed temperance, Sabbatarianism, and public order.

Furthermore, between 1815 and 1830, thirty anti-Catholic Protestant newspapers and magazines appeared and promoted the evils of Catholicism, like the New York Observer, founded in 1823, and The Protestant in 1830. Protestant organizations adopted an anti-Catholic emphasis, as did the New York Protestant Association, founded in 1831. Influential and popular anti-Catholic books found a ready audience, including Rebecca Reed’s 1835 Six Months in a Convent; Maria Monk’s 1836 Awful Disclosures; Lyman Beecher’s 1835 A Plea for the West; and Samuel Morse’s 1835 Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States. These best-selling exposes of alleged Catholic misdeeds and conspiracies reinforced Protestant Americans' distrust of Catholics and encouraged the growth of nativism. Maria Monk’s alleged account of sexual transgressions by priests and nuns in a Montreal convent “with its lurid descriptions of illicit sexual practices, sold more copies in America than any other book until publication of  Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (Anbinder 1992, 9), reinforcing negative stereotypes of Catholicism. Americans took these charges seriously as the Albany Daily Advertiser illustrated: “Much discussion has been had lately of the truth or falsehood of the book known as “Awful Disclosures, by Maria Monk.”  (March 23, 1837) The continued flow of Irish Catholic immigrants and Catholics from Germany and Quebec added to nativist fears about the changing American population.

Nativists responded by organizing politically into separate political movements or forming alliances of convenience with local Whigs. Political nativism appeared as early as the 1790s in New York City, and in the 1807 local and state elections, Federalists and factions of the Republican Party stressed anti-Irish nativism. The major issue in the 1807 state gubernatorial and legislative elections was hostility to the Irish. Anti-Irish nativism became the major theme of the Federalists, Tammany, Lewis, and Burrite Republicans in opposition to the Clintonian faction of Republicans. Mayor De Witt Clinton became the first American political leader to appreciate the importance of the Irish Catholics as new voters, successfully assimilating them into the political process and winning their loyalty. Political nativism resurfaced in the mid-1830s when two wards in New York City nominated nativist candidates in the 1835 elections, and Whigs quietly worked with the nativists. A Whig Nativist fusion in ward tickets allowed this union ticket to gain control of the city’s Common Council in 1836.

In July 1835, nativists in New York organized the Native American Democratic Association (NADA), started a nativist paper, Spirit of 76, and nominated a nativist slate in October, headed by James Monroe, nephew of former president James Monroe. Nativists joined with Whigs in 1837 to elect a nativist as mayor, Aaron Clark. Nativists in NADA would reach their peak strength from 1835-1838. Chapters of Native Americans appeared in Albany, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Paterson, and Camden. They also appeared in Germantown, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Washington, New Orleans, and other towns. They formed a national organization in 1837 in Washington. In 1838, the New York City chapter petitioned the state legislature for a registry of voters to make sure no aliens voted in state elections. NADA wanted to extend the naturalization period to twenty-one years instead of five, bar aliens or naturalized citizens from political office and government jobs, and limit the admission of Catholics to the United States. In 1838 James Miller and ninety-six citizens in Washington County, just north of Troy, probably members of a local chapter of NADA, petitioned the House of Representatives to extend naturalization to twenty-one years and  limit Catholic immigration since Catholics supported the “subversion of our civil and religious liberties.” (Billington 1963, 130; Knobel 1986, 220)

Several forms of violence involving the Irish occurred during the 19^th Century; Irish Catholics frequently fought other Irish Catholics, like riots between Irish from Cork and Longford over jobs on railroads, tunnels, and canals. In work environments, Irish remained loyal to landsmen from the same district or county in Ireland, joining together to drive out Irishmen from other counties. Newspapers in Albany, for example, from the 1830s to 1850s would sporadically report on Irish from different counties fighting each other at railroad worksites. At times, Irish immigrants fought other ethnic groups, like Irish attacks on German workers in Maryland in 1839 resulting in the deaths of ten rioters. Irishmen attacked African Americans in seaport cities, like New York and New Orleans, for jobs on the docks. Conflict between American Protestant nativists and Irish Catholics became common. Prior to the Civil War, Irish immigrants fought Germans, Chinese, and African Americans over jobs. After the Civil War, the Irish had conflicts with Italians and Jews.

 As early as 1799, “enraged Irish Catholics on the Lower East Side attacked native born Americans who had paraded through the neighborhood on St. Patrick’s Day bearing insulting effigies of the glorious saint which were dubbed ‘Paddies’” ( Gordon 1993, 10). Similar use of offensive effigies on St. Patrick’s Day 1802 led to another riot when Irishmen beat the nativists in retaliation. New York’s Common Council banned the use of effigies to prevent future riots, but it failed to stop the violence. In 1806, on Christmas Eve and Christmas Night, confrontations broke out in New York City between nativist Highbinders and Irish Catholics when nativists attempted to storm St. Peter’s Catholic Church. When the Irish responded on Christmas night, a larger riot occurred, a watchman died, and nativists threatened to burn down the homes of the Irish until Mayor De Witt Clinton intervened. (Strum, 1981, 2026; Gilje, 1987, 130-31) Republican Party nativists in the Tammany Society and Irish fought in New York in 1817 when Tammany banned the nomination of Irish Catholics. “Eyes were blackened, noses and heads battered freely” in this exchange.( Strum 2026, 24; Muskat 1971, 58) Nativists burned St. Mary’s Church in 1831. During a meeting of the nativist American Protestant Association in March 1835, two hundred Irishmen forced their way in and attacked the nativists. Women in the audience screamed, and several were injured as the men fought each other. (Weinbaum 1979, 63) On June 21, 1835, nativists fought the Irish in Chatham Square, New York City, and nativists attacked the Irish throughout the city. This riot spread, and over five hundred nativists and Irish participated in the Five Points Riot. (New York Evening Post, June 22, 1835;  New York Commercial Advertiser, June 22-24, 1835)  This was “the biggest New York riot.” (Weinbaum, 1979, 55) A brawl failed to materialize in 1836 because New York City Irish learned of a possible attack on St. Patrick’s and, partially armed with cobblestones and other objects as weapons, successfully intimidated nativists coming from the Bowery to back off. (Warren, 2021) .Nativist-Irish riots broke out in 1834 and 1835 in Buffalo and Newburgh. Outside of New York, nativists torched the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in August 1834 and attempted to destroy the Carmelite Convent in Baltimore in August 1839.

Clashes between Irish Catholics and Scots Irish Protestants became common. In the eighteenth century, Irish Protestants and Catholics were often members of the same ethnic associations. After the failure of the Rising of 1798 against British rule in Ireland, Scots Irish Presbyterians drifted away from Irish Catholics and adopted a more positive view of their role in the British Empire. In the nineteenth century, Scots-Irish increasingly preferred to immigrate to British North America, while Irish Catholics preferred the United States. As part of this separation from Catholic Irish, Scots-Irish immigrants from Ulster established the Orange Order in New York in 1820 and the Irish Protestant Association in Boston in 1835. Distancing between the two groups accelerated when Scots Irish emphasized commemorations of the Protestant victory over the Catholics at the Battle of the Boyne in July 1689. On July 12, 1824, enraged Irish Catholics living in Greenwich Village fumed over Scots Irish celebrating the Battle of the Boyne by marching in a heavily Irish Catholic neighborhood. During the day, peace prevailed; at the two sides raised the colors of Orange for Protestants and Green for Catholics. As the sun set, fifty Catholics and Protestants attacked each other, resulting in "sundry broken heads and bloody noses " (Gilje 1987, 134). Irish nationalist politician and United Irishmen leader Thomas Addis Emmett “successfully defended the Irish Catholic attackers by demonstrating the long history of anti-Catholicism in the city.”(Gordon 1993.22) Over the remainder of the 19^th century, conflicts between Scots-Irish Protestants and Irish Catholics became common in New York, New Jersey, and other northeastern states.

Irish immigrants and Irish Americans attempted to find their place in American society and still identify as Irish. Protestant New York City Mayor De Witt Clinton, of Scots-Irish descent, belonged to the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick chapter in New York City. The organization included Catholics and Protestants. Many years later, Irish Americans formed a chapter in Troy. In 1802, members of the militant nationalist United Irish Society created the Hibernian Provident Society, ostensibly a mutual aid society, but it supported Irish political refugees, Irish independence, and American politicians favorable to Irish causes. A variant, the Hibernian Benevolent Society, formed in Troy on March 7, 1834, as a benevolent association. According to its charter, its objects are charitable and to afford relief to its members in cases of sickness or infirmity.” (Doyle 2006, 196) Similar chapters were established as far south as New Orleans, and in the 1830s in upstate New York in Albany, Utica, and Rochester. In Troy, members of the Hibernians celebrated St. Patrick’s Day and marched in Fourth of July celebrations. At the 1835 celebration at Riley’s Tavern, members ate a “sumptuous dinner” and raised their glasses in forty toasts enjoying the festivities until as “the Troy Daily Whig reported. “At an early hour they all separated and returned to their respective homes.’” (Warren, 2021) Later, Irish in Troy formed chapters of the Shamrock Benevolent Society, the Friendly Sons of Erin Association, Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the Irish Genealogical Society. Societies like the Hibernians helped Irish immigrants adjust to their new urban American environment, since most came from rural agricultural communities in Ireland, and preserved their identity as Irish in America. St. Patrick’s Day festivities preserved Irish identity, and participation in Fourth of July marches, like those in 1835, reassured the Irish of acceptance into American society.

Increasing Irish immigration to Troy upset a segment of native-born Americans, and this Catholic population also created hostility from Scots Irish Presbyterians settling in Troy. In some neighborhoods, Protestant Scots and Scots Irish lived near Irish Catholics and competed with them for jobs. As St. Patrick’s Day dawned on Friday, March 17. 1837, Irish Catholics prepared to celebrate the holiday. However, some young boys in different parts of the city suspended by cords stuffed rag effigies of St. Patrick on trees and buildings to ridicule the saint and the Irish. Some of the boys also paraded through the streets with effigies to antagonize Irish residents. Responding to seeing these scurrilous effigies, one angry Irishman, a laborer,  at ten o’clock, attempted to tear down one of the effigies at foot of Ferry Street, but a group of boys and older men, acting as guards of these anti-Catholic symbols chased the lone Irishman away. “telling him to return to his part of town.” (Weise 1876, 183; Troy Daily Whig, March 18, 1837: Casey Troy Record). News spread of these effigies and Irish residents became “highly indignant  at what they considered to be an act of ridicule and insult leveled at them and their religion.” (Whig, March 18, 1837) As one Troy newspaper argued, the men behind the effigies “were guilty of an inexcusable and fatal act of folly and outrage.” (Troy New York State Journal, March 22, 1837) This act of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic nativism produced violent and fatal consequences.

Irish residents could not tolerate this provocation. Apparently, some of the poorer Irishmen attempted to tear down the effigies. Newspaper descriptions of  Irishmen as poor and ignorant reflected the poverty of many of the Irish living in certain Irish neighborhoods and stereotypes about the Irish shared by newspaper editors. Members of the Hibernian Society joined them. Troy nativists resisted, and the Irish and nativists engaged in fights throughout the streets of Troy. Hundreds of men supporting the nativists and Irishmen showed up to engage in combat. A melee started on Ferry and River streets and spread from there, and as local historian  Arthur Weise concluded, “the widest disorder prevailed for a time.” (Weise, 1891, 140) Stones, brickbats, and fists served as weapons. Property got damaged as the rioters destroyed doors and windows. Combatants on both sides suffered cuts, bruises, and severe beatings. During the fracas, John P. Cole was severely wounded. Several citizens on both sides and bystanders were injured by flying objects used as weapons. Besides Cole, several other residents “were severely wounded.” (Schenectady Cabinet, March 22, 1837) Irish members of the mobs shared in the violence, leading to injuries of nativists and other residents caught as bystanders in the furious brawling between the nativists and the Irish. Nativist rioters did substantial damage to the stores of Amory Felton and Theodorus Valleau. Some of the rioters broke into the stores and took away whatever they could carry. Some nativists marched in the direction of one of the city’s Irish neighborhoods, planning to do damage to the persons and homes of the Irish. At this point, Mayor Richard Hart, other city officials, and Police intervened and ordered the rioters to cease and desist. Initially, the rioters resisted the Mayor’s orders, receiving “jeers and catcalls for his answer.” (Casey, Troy Record)  Hart also ordered the Citizens Corps, a local militia unit armed with muskets, to disperse the rioting mobs. Due to continued rioting on Ferry and Fifth streets, members of the Citizens Corps helped city officials arrest more recalcitrant rioters and take them to jail. Then, Rev. John Shanahan of St. Peter’s Catholic Church arrived and urged Irish rioters to go home. Rev. Shanahan’s appearance calmed the Irish rioters. Peace appeared to return to the city. Mayor Hart told the Citizens Corps to stand down at 1:30, but to be prepared if needed again.(Warren, 2021) However, peace prevailed only temporarily as nativists wanted to teach the Irish a lesson. As the Troy Daily Whig observed: “a feeling of indignation and anger on the part of some of the native citizens which gathered strength during the day, and sought to vent itself upon the Irish, indiscriminately, should the opportunity offer,” (March 18, 1837)

Sunset provided the opportunity to resume the war between Troy’s nativists and the Irish. Nativists turned on the Irish, creating a more dangerous riot than existed in the morning. As one periodical later concluded: the evening rioting “assumed a somewhat serious aspect, and considerable damage was done to persons and property.” (New York Evangelist, April 22, 1837, 67)  This proved a conservative understatement of the evening’s events. Nativists gathered on lower Fifth Street, below Ferry, and began to assault the homes of the Irish. Rioters broke into the homes of Irish residents, destroying doors and windows and damaging the furniture. They beat the Irish residents of those homes; “several of the Irish were severely bruised and handled,” but survived. (Troy Daily Whig, March 18. 1837) Some of the nativists appeared with arms and began shooting indiscriminately into the houses of the Irish, while others used stones to injure Irish residents. Nativists fired a shot through a window that hit a young girl, Eliza Clohesy, in the eye, costing her the sight in that eye. (Weise, 1876, 184) While eating supper with his sister, William Wallace, a leader of the Hibernians, got shot in the face, and the papers assumed he would die, but he recovered with a scar on his face to mark the occasion. Gunshots by nativists wounded several other Irishmen. Another man, Joseph Grimes (also spelled Grymes in the press), standing on Hill Street, and after receiving a wound by buckshot in the groin, died shortly afterward. At this point, Mayor Hart, other city officials, all the city’s Police, watchmen, aldermen, several judges, and Citizens’ Corps arrived to stop the rioting. Armed with loaded muskets, members of the Citizens’ Corps received orders from Mayor Hart to open fire if the rioters refused to disperse. By 9:00, the presence of the armed Citizens’ Corps dispersed the crowds of rioters; “the disturbance was quelled and order restored.”  (Albany Daily Advertiser, March 30, 1837) City officials, Police, and watchmen arrested about twenty of the rioters and jailed them as the riots ended. Members of the militia and a double watch kept guard through the rest of the night so “quiet was maintained.” Albany Evening Journal, March 18, 1837)

In the wake of the riot, William Wilson, Coroner, held an inquest for Joseph Grimes. The victim, aged twenty, worked for a Mr. Bingham for the past four years, and his employer commended him as a good worker. Two men acted as witnesses to the killing of Grimes but could not identify the shooter, but indicated the time and place of the shooting. The post-mortem by three physicians confirmed death by buckshot entering his bowels. Members of the jury brought a verdict that Grimes died of his wounds fired by an unknown assailant. (Troy Budget, March 19, 1837). His assailant was never revealed. As a result of the rioting, the severe injuries to Wallace, Clohesy, and the death of Grimes, Mayor Hart issued a proclamation on March 20, 1837, requesting citizens with knowledge of the riots to provide evidence to the Grand Jury. (Proclamation, Troy Daily Whig, March 21, 1837). Newspaper editors in Troy, Schenectady, and Albany condemned the violence and disorder of the riots. As the Albany Evening Journal lamented: “Thus closed another disgraceful scene of tumult, terror, and bloodshed, with the loss of life and limb…and a resort to arms for that protection…against the fury of the mob.” (March 18, 1837) To prevent a repeat of this disturbance, the Common Council of Troy passed a resolution restricting the use of effigies before public events like St. Patrick’s Day. A Brooklyn newspaper, Brooklyn Citizen, noted a similar recent riot on St. Patrick’s Day in Brooklyn and urged citizens to refrain from “wounding the pride or prejudices of any class of foreigners.” (Troy Budget, March 18, 1837). Of course, nativists did not pay attention to this concern as ethnic and religious conflicts continued throughout the remainder of the century in New York and other states. One question the local press did not press was the nationality of the anti-Irish rioters. Limited evidence suggests that the rioters consisted of a combination of native-born residents of Troy and more recent Scots-Irish immigrants, setting the pattern of similar clashes during the nineteenth century.

About the author: Harvey Strum was awarded the Susan Beatty Faculty Research Award by Russell Sage College for 2025-26.  His most recent publication is “Aid from the Palmetto State to Ireland, 1880.” In Saber and Scroll. Published in June 2026. He has been a frequent contributor to the New York History Review.

References:

Primary:

Albany Daily Advertiser, March 1837

Albany Evening Journal, March 1837

New York  Commercial Advertiser, June 1835.

New York Evangelist, April 1837

New York Evening Post, June 1835.

New York Morning Chronicle, April 1807

Schenectady Cabinet, March 1837

Troy Budget, March 1837

Troy Daily Whig, March 1837

Troy New York State Journal, March 1837

Secondary:

Anbinder, Tyler. 1992. Nativism and Slavery. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Anderson, George. 1897. Landmarks of Rensselaer County. Syracuse: D. Mason & Co.

Billington, Ray Allen.1938. 1952, 1963. The Protestant Crusade, Gloucester, MA.: Peter Smith.

Casey, Jack. “St. Patrick’s Day Riot in Troy---1837.” Troy Record. Undated copy, Rensselaer County Historical Society, Troy, New York. 

Doyle, David. 2006. “The Irish in North America, 1776-1845,” 171-212, in J.J. Lee and Marion Casey, eds. Making the Irish American. New York and London: New York University Press.

Gilje, Paul. 1987. The Road to Mobocracy. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

Gordon, Michael. 1993. The Orange Riots. New York, Cornell University Press.

Knobel, Dale. 1986. Paddy and the Republic. Middletown, CT.: Wesleyan University Press.

Muskat, Jerome. 1971. Tammany. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Scisco, Louis Dow. 1901. Political Nativism in New York. New York: Columbia University Press.

Strum, Harvey. 1981. “Federalist Hibernaphobes in New York, 1807.” Eire-Ireland. Winter 1981: 7-13.

Strum, Harvey. 2026. “Nativism in Early New York Politics, 1790-1817.” Unpublished manuscript.

Turbin, Carole. 1984. “Reconceptualizing Family, Work, and Labor Organizing; Working Women in Troy, 1860-1890.” Review of Radical Political Economics. 16:1 (Spring 1984):1-16.

Warren, John. 2021. “Monkish Traditions: 1830s Hatred of Irish Immigrants.” New York Almanack. January 11, 2021. www.newyorkalmanack,com

Warren, John, 2021. “Troy/s Anti-Irish St. Patrick’s Day Riot of 1837.” New York Almanack. January 25, 2021. www.newyorkalmanack.com

Weinbaum, Paul, 1977, 1979. Mobs and Demagogues. Ann Arbor, MI.: University of Michigan Research Press,

Weise, A.J. 1876. History of the City of Troy. Troy: William Young.