Migration, Immigration & Growing Towns · Grade 7 Social Studies

Chapter: Early Republic, Markets & Migration

Migration, Immigration & Growing Towns

Learning goals

Before this unit

Locate the period and region using the supplied background and timeline. Define unfamiliar terms and distinguish a document’s assertion from an established outcome.

Use three flexible 40–45-minute sessions: background and Parts 1–2 with checks; Parts 3–4 and the worked evidence case; then remaining practice, a timeline or labeled model, revision, and the exit check. Complete one short part at a time. Embedded checks count toward the practice set, rather than duplicate homework. Workshop, review, quiz, exams, and flexible support have separate time.

Two movements of people ran at once in these decades, and keeping them apart makes the period much clearer. People arrived from overseas, and people already in the United States moved internally — west onto new land, and off farms into towns.

The overseas flow was unprecedented. Roughly 1.5 million people left Ireland for the United States between 1845 and 1855 as the potato blight destroyed the crop that had fed them, and a comparable number came from the German states, many after the failed revolutions of 1848.

The internal flow was quieter and just as large in its effects. Cheap western grain, carried on the canal of two units ago, made marginal New England farms unprofitable, and their children went to the mills and the cities rather than inheriting ground that would not pay.

Build your understanding

Where this fits

The canal made goods move cheaply and the factory gave people a reason to leave the farm. This unit is about the people themselves — where they came from, what they found, and how those already here reacted. It closes the chapter on markets and movement, and the next chapter turns west and south, to expansion and the reform movements that grew in these same crowded towns.

Use three flexible 40–45-minute sessions: the two kinds of movement and what drove each; arrival, work and the nativist reaction; then the practice set, separating overseas from internal growth, revision and the exit check. Workshop, review, quiz and exams have separate time.

Part 1 · Leaving Ireland

The potato had allowed Ireland's population to roughly double in the decades before 1845, because an acre of potatoes fed a family where an acre of grain could not. When a water mould destroyed the crop in successive years from 1845, the result was catastrophic: around a million people died, and a million more emigrated, from a population of about eight million.

They arrived with nothing. Most Irish famine migrants had no capital, no land to buy and often no trade, so they stayed in the port cities where the ships landed — New York, Boston, Philadelphia — and took the work nobody else wanted: digging, dock work, domestic service. Irish women went into other people's houses in enormous numbers, which was poorly paid and comparatively steady.

The crossing itself killed people. Emigrants travelled in the holds of ships carrying timber the other way, in spaces fitted with temporary bunks, and in the worst year of the famine the vessels became known as coffin ships; on some crossings a fifth or more of those aboard died of typhus before landing. Families sold everything for a passage with those odds, which is the clearest measure of what they were leaving.

By 1860 the Irish-born were roughly a quarter of New York City's population, and the city they entered was not ready for them. Neighbourhoods like the Five Points became bywords for overcrowding and disease; cholera swept the tenements repeatedly. Much of what later became public health and housing regulation in American cities was written in response to these years.

Pause and explain

Why did Irish famine migrants concentrate in eastern cities rather than moving west to land?

Check your reasoning after answering

Because land cost money they did not have. They arrived destitute after a famine, often without a trade, so they stopped where the ship stopped and took whatever work was available. Moving west required capital for passage, tools, seed and a year of food before the first harvest, which almost none of them could raise.

Part 2 · The Germans, and why their story differs

German migration in the same decades was similar in size and very different in shape. Many Germans came with some money, trades or farming experience, and a substantial number were political refugees after the revolutions of 1848 failed — educated, often radical, and prominent later in American reform and in the anti-slavery movement.

Because they could pay for the journey inland, Germans spread across the Midwest, into Wisconsin, Missouri, Ohio and the Texas hill country, buying farms and founding towns. They also built an unusually complete separate civic life: German-language newspapers, singing societies, gymnastic clubs, breweries, and schools in which children were taught in German.

Scandinavians followed the same pattern a little later and for the same reasons, settling Minnesota and the Dakotas in large numbers from the 1860s. The Homestead Act of 1862 then formalised what the Germans had done privately, offering 160 acres to anyone who would farm it for five years — which was generous to those who could reach it with tools and a year’s provisions, and irrelevant to anyone who could not.

The comparison matters because it shows that outcomes followed resources, not character. Two groups arriving in the same decade in similar numbers ended in very different places, largely because one had passage money to go further and the other did not. Explanations for immigrant poverty that reach for culture should be measured against that.

Pause and explain

Two large migrations arrived in the same decade. Why did one settle in cities and the other on farms?

Check your reasoning after answering

Resources at arrival. Many Germans had savings, trades or farming capital and could pay to travel inland and buy land; most Irish famine migrants had nothing and stopped at the port. The difference in where they ended up is largely a difference in what they could afford when they stepped off the ship.

Part 3 · The reaction

Large, fast, visible migration produced a political backlash, and its objection was principally religious. Most Irish and many Germans were Catholic, in a country whose institutions were overwhelmingly Protestant, and nativists argued that Catholics owed allegiance to the Pope and could not be loyal republicans.

The movement turned into a party. The American Party, universally called the Know-Nothings because members were told to say they knew nothing about it, swept state elections in the mid-1850s, carried Massachusetts, and ran a former president for the presidency in 1856. Their programme was to extend the waiting period for citizenship to twenty-one years and to bar the foreign-born from office.

Violence came with it. A convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, was burned by a mob in 1834; riots between nativists and Irish Catholics in Philadelphia in 1844 left more than a dozen dead and two churches destroyed; and in Louisville in 1855 an election-day riot killed around twenty immigrants. Nativism was not only a voting bloc, and the people it targeted knew that before they knew the party’s name.

It collapsed almost as fast, and the reason is instructive: slavery split it, as it split everything else. Northern and southern Know-Nothings could not agree about the territories, and the anti-immigrant cause could not hold a national party together against that question. Most northern members went into the new Republican Party.

Pause and explain

The Know-Nothings won major elections and then vanished. What destroyed them?

Check your reasoning after answering

Slavery. The party was built on opposition to immigration, which both sections could share, but its northern and southern members could not agree about slavery in the territories. By the late 1850s that question overrode everything else, the party split, and most northern members joined the Republicans.

Part 4 · What the newcomers built

The institutions immigrants created to survive became permanent features of American cities. Mutual aid societies collected pennies against a funeral or an injury; parishes ran schools and orphanages; fire companies and militia units organised by nationality. The Catholic parochial school system in the United States was built largely because public schools of the period used a Protestant Bible and immigrant parents objected.

Politics was the other route. City machines, Tammany Hall in New York above all, offered immigrants what no government then provided: a job, coal in a hard winter, help with a landlord or a court, in exchange for a vote. It was corrupt and it was also the only social service available, and the historian's job is to hold both of those at once rather than choosing the comfortable one.

The second generation is where the change shows. Children born in these tenements went to school in English, entered the police forces, the building trades and city government in large numbers, and by the end of the century the Irish ran several of the cities their parents had arrived in destitute. That took about forty years and a great deal of organising, and it is the usual shape of these stories rather than an exception.

Castle Garden opened at the tip of Manhattan in 1855 as the first official immigrant receiving station in the country, intended partly to protect arrivals from the swindlers who met the ships. It processed millions before Ellis Island replaced it in 1892 — a reminder that the famous gateway was the second one, and that this earlier wave was large enough to require building a system from nothing.

Pause and explain

Why did city machines succeed with immigrant voters despite being corrupt?

Check your reasoning after answering

Because they delivered what nothing else did. There was no public unemployment relief, no housing assistance and no legal aid, and a machine offered a job, winter fuel or help with a court in exchange for a vote. Judging the exchange requires noticing that the alternative was not honest government assistance but no assistance at all.

Apply the whole unit · Separate the two kinds of growth

A city grows by 200 people in a year. Records show that 120 of them arrived from overseas and the rest moved in from elsewhere in the United States. In the same year 40 residents left for the west.

Your task

Work out the shares, calculate net growth, and explain what each flow tells you about conditions.

What your response should show

  • Calculates 80 internal arrivals and the 60/40 split
  • Gives net growth of 160, accounting for departures
  • Reads the overseas share as a push factor abroad rather than a pull
  • Explains arrivals and departures as different groups with different resources
Response guidance — after your attempt

  1. Calculate how many arrived from within the country, and give each group as a percentage of arrivals.

  2. Work out the net change in population once departures are counted.

  3. Say what a large overseas share suggests about conditions abroad, and what internal arrivals suggest about the countryside.

  4. Explain why a city can grow quickly and still have people leaving it.

If 200 arrived and 120 came from overseas, then 80 came from within the country — 60% from abroad and 40% internal. With 40 residents leaving for the west, net growth is 200 minus 40, or 160. A large overseas share points to conditions abroad bad enough to push people out, such as the famine that sent roughly 1.5 million from Ireland after 1845, rather than to anything the city did to attract them. The internal arrivals point the other way, to farms that could no longer pay once western grain reached eastern markets cheaply. And a growing city can still lose people because the two flows are different populations: newcomers without capital stop at the port, while established residents with savings can afford to go west for land.

Read the records yourself

Parent / teacher teaching notes

Ask for one because-statement, a dated connection, and a source limitation. Give specific feedback and time to revise. Allow notes, a glossary, oral explanations, or a labeled timeline. Evaluate context, evidence, and reasoning rather than the learner’s politics, religion, cultural identity, or agreement with the model wording. Do not require family disclosure or role-play of slavery or persecution.

The key idea

New York City held about 60,000 people in 1800 and more than 800,000 by 1860. That growth was not births: it was the Irish famine, German political exile and New England farms that could no longer compete with western grain, all arriving in the same streets at the same time.

Worked examples

Example 1 · Worked evidence case

Find the ending count and explain why it does not establish twenty overseas immigrants.
  1. Add births and arrivals.
  2. Subtract deaths and departures.
  3. Distinguish inward movement from overseas immigration.
Answer: The ending count is 100+12−5+20−7=120. Net growth is 20, while arrivals are also 20 only by coincidence in this example. The record does not specify where arrivals came from, so they cannot all be classified as overseas immigrants. Actual census interpretation also needs definitions and recording limits.

Example 2 · Compare a second claim after your attempt

A later song describes migration. Is it necessarily a firsthand account of every traveler?
  1. Identify the relevant period, institution, or evidence category.
  2. No. Identify creator, date, genre, and purpose. It may reveal representation or feeling without directly documenting each traveler’s decision or experience.
  3. State the narrower conclusion the supplied information can support.
Answer: No. Identify creator, date, genre, and purpose. It may reveal representation or feeling without directly documenting each traveler’s decision or experience.

Avoid these mistakes

Check your understanding

Why is one national label insufficient to explain a migrant’s decision?

Discuss the answer

People within a country have different circumstances, resources, beliefs, relationships, and aims. A particular decision needs particular evidence.

Does arrival in New York prove permanent residence there?

Discuss the answer

No. The port can be an entry point. Later household, travel, work, and community records are needed to establish residence and movement.

Words to know

context
The time, place, institutions, and conditions surrounding an event.
primary source
Evidence created in the period or activity being investigated; its form does not automatically guarantee accuracy.
interpretation
An explanation of evidence that can be compared with context and other records.
migration
Movement between places; circumstances range from voluntary choices to severe constraint or force.
nativism
Political or social opposition to immigrants framed around preferential belonging, often using prejudiced claims.

Extend the historical inquiry

If you use a linked record, identify creator, date, audience, purpose, form, and a specific claim it supports. Keep original wording separate from course paraphrase. Seek a different independently produced record that would test an inference.

In the real world

Trace a dated claim to its evidence and distinguish stated aims, institutions, and actual access. Describe people and communities without universal stereotypes.

Exit check

How should a prejudiced pamphlet be used?

Check your explanation after answering

It can show a dated argument and mobilization. Evaluate its factual claims separately and avoid repeat stereotypes as established descriptions of the targeted group.

Explain your reasoning without notes. If a key idea is missing, revisit the lesson and try again.

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