A hundred plus years ago, New York’s tens of thousands of Irish emigrants seemed a lost community, ensnared in poverty and ignorance, destroying themselves through drink, idleness, violence, criminality, and illegitimacy.
However, within a generation, New York’s Irish flooded into to the American mainstream. The sons of criminals were now the policemen; the daughter of illiterates had become the city’s schoolteacher; those who had been outcasts of society now ran its political machinery. No job training program or welfare system brought about so sweeping a change. What accomplished such a feat was a clergyman. He was the catalyst for the culture change that liberated New York’s Irish from their underclass behavior. He was John “Dagger” Hughes, an Irish emigrant gardener, who became the first Catholic Archbishop of New York.
John Hughes was born on June 24, 1797, in Annaloghan, Co. Tyrone, the son of a poor farmer. When John was 15 years of age, the stigma of inferiority would be impressed on his mind. His younger sister had passed away, but English law barred the priest from entering the cemetery to preside at the burial. The best the priest could do was to scoop a handful of earth, bless it and hand it to Hughes to sprinkle on the grave.
Like many Irish families during the period, the Hughes family emigrated to America. The year was 1817 and John was in his 20th year. Arriving in Emmitsburg, Maryland, he was employed as a gardener and stonemason at St. Mary’s College and seminary.
By overcoming many hurdles, John was to fulfill his childhood dream of becoming a priest, when he was admitted to St. Mary’s Seminery, Emmittsburg, Maryland, September 1820. He graduated and was ordained a priest in 1826. His first assignment was the diocese of Philadelphia.
On January 7th, 1838, Father John Hughes was consecrated co-adjutant bishop of New York in the old St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mott Street, with the right to succession. Six years later and following the death of Bishop Dubois in 1842, John Hughes was installed as Bishop of New York.
With regards to the early period of the 19th century in America, one cannot mention bigotry and hatred without including the Irish catholic community.
Now, and with more fury, Bishop Hughes made it his crusade to reverse the attitude of the bigots. He passionately believed that the future of the Irish in America depended on education. Hughes threw his energies into building a Catholic school system that would educate catholic children the way he thought they should be educated. N need was more urgent, in his view, expressing his feelings by stating, “we shall have to build the schoolhouse first and the church afterward.” He continued, “in our age the question of education is the question of the church.”
Not content to build primary and secondary schools, he founded or helped to found Fordham University, Manhattan and Mount St. Vincent Colleges.
Hughes’ teaching had a special message for and about women. Women outnumbered men by 20 percent in New York’s Irish population partly because of emigration patterns and partly because many Irish immigrant men went west from New York to work on building railroads and canals. Irish women could find work in New York more easily than men could, and the work they found, usually as domestics, was steadier. The nuns in his diocese became employment agencies for Irish domestics: rich families knew that a maid or cook recommended by the nuns would be honest and reliable.
John Hughes encouraged the formation of the Irish Emigrant Society, out of which the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank later grew. His own account number was nine. The society helped find people jobs in sail making, construction, carriage repair and maintenance, and grocery stores.
On July 19th, 1850, New York was made an archdiocese and Bishop John Joseph “Dagger” Hughes was to become New York’s first Archbishop.
The crowning achievement of his life was laying the corner stone of the new St. Patrick’s Cathedral on 5th Avenue, August 15th, 1858. The people present on that day, an estimated 100,000, all bore witness to the new sense of pride and purpose, which John Joseph Hughes brought them as Catholics and Americans.
John Hughes won the nickname of “Dagger” John,” a reference not only to the shape of the cross that accompanied his printed signature but also to his being a man not to be trifled with or double-crossed.