The Irishman Who Was Denied The Right To Vote

by Robert Hanaford Smith, Sr.
Weirs Times Contributing Writer

His name was Samuel S. Lowery. He was a resident of Manchester New Hampshire, but when he went to register to vote in that city early in the year of 1854 he was allegedly denied the right to register as a citizen of Manchester and thus be entitled to vote. The whole story went beyond questions about voting privileges to the issues of discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and race, abolition, slander, and peace. A statement, allegedly issued by Mr. Lowery, said: “On yesterday afternoon (Monday) Mr. Samuel S. Lowery, a well known and highly esteemed citizen of this city, was refused his right to vote, by B.F. Ayer and the Selectmen of Ward 5, and was not allowed to take his oath that he was a citizen of Manchester; on which occasion the noble! B.F. Ayer used the following language:‘Half the Irishmen in this city would take a false oath.’”
A long letter to the editor in response to the statement above was printed in the April 5, 1854 issue of The Union Democrat, a newspaper published in Manchester, New Hampshire. The column in which the letter was printed had the headline “That Abolition Calumny – Again.”

So it was immediately evident to the readers that the newspaper was making this event as having a bearing on the dispute over slavery of African-Americans as well as a question of voting privileges. Calumny is making false statements against someone with the purpose of damaging their reputation, or in one similar word, slander.
When Mr. Ayer denied that he made the statement detrimental to Irishmen, he also took advantage of the opportunity to refer to affidavits that Mr. Lowery brought forward by individuals supporting his claim as “his four abolition affidavits.” Mr. Benjamin Ayer explained in his letter that the statement of Mr. Lowery was false in three areas. First, he says, that the selectmen, exclusively, were the ones who questioned and made the decisions relative to eligible voters, and that they did their duty in rejecting his application. Secondly, it was untrue that Mr. Lowery was denied the opportunity to take his oath as a citizen of Manchester. He offered the sworn testimony of the selectmen as proof: ‘It is also entirely untrue that Mr. Lowery was not allowed to take his oath that he was a voter. On the contrary we requested him to be sworn, which he at first declined. He was afterwards sworn, but his statements not being deemed sufficient to establish the fact that he was a naturalized citizen, we declined to put his name upon the list.”
As to the third accusation by Mr. Lowery, that Mr. Ayers asserted that “half the Irishmen of this city would take a false oath,”, Mr. Ayer refers “to my own solemn disavowal of any such language or sentiment” and “the testimony of eight respectable and perfectly credible witnesses, including the three selectmen and the Chairman of the Whig Committee upon the check-list…”. He contrasts his eight with the affidavit of Lowery and of “four other equally bitter and rancorous abolitionists,” and the testimony of Mr. Topliff, the Chairman of the Whig checklist Committee who had said he didn’t understand Mr. Ayer to make any such statement as the one charged against him, but afterwards indicated that he may not have been paying attention to the conversation. According to Ayer no one at the Ward 5 room suspected that Lowery was a “foreigner” until the time he agreed to be sworn in. Ayer: “I certainly had no such suspicion. I had never seen him before that I know of, nor was there anything in his speech or appearance to indicate that he was a foreigner.” Lowery was said to have said that he was from New York. Ayer wrote that until he was asked if he was a native of this country “…no one, so far as I know, had the remotest suspicion that he was an Irishman.”
Apparently being an Irishman in New Hampshire in those days was considered the same as being an abolitionist. At the Democratic National Convention some resolutions were made relative to slavery. One of them read: “All efforts of Abolitionists, or others, made to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery,or to take incipient steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences; and that such efforts have an inevitable tendency to diminish the happiness of the people, and endanger the stability and permanency of the Union.” The position of The Union Democrat was that previous compromises had been final agreements concerning slavery in the nation and the hope was “that the slavery question was forever excluded from national politics.” The sentiment was “to leave well enough alone” and apparently to leave the matter of slavery for the individual states to decide.

The election of New Hampshire’s Franklin Pierce to be the nation’s President was applauded. One can thus see how the extension of the discussion in Manchester in 1854 about the truthfulness of Irishmen was tied to the goal of abolitionists.
After a strong and detailed denial that he ever said that half of the Irishmen in the city of Manchester would take a false oath Mr. Ayer offered a statement by a Dustin Marshall in which Mr. Marshall said that he had met with Mr. John H. Goodale, Esq., the editor of the Manchester Democrat.
In the course of their conversation, Marshall said that Mr. Goodale observed that if Mr. Ayer did say that “half of the Irishmen in this city would take a false oath,” he thought it not far from the truth, and asked if Marshal thought so also. Marshall claimed that he did not agree with the editor’s statement.
Let me just add what Mr. Ayer did write about those whom he claimed were slandering him by misquoting him. He said “…I do not flatter myself that the vile harpies who have attempted to give currency to this infamous calumny will yet cease from their detraction and scurrility. It is their vocation. If they gain anything, however, in the end by these miserable falsehoods I shall be very much mistaken. I fear none of their abuse. I defy their malice. “Vipers, you bite a file.”
In today’s world, fairly recent United States census reports indicate that Manchester, New Hampshire is the city with the highest percentage of residents who claim some Irish descent in the country at somewhat over 19%. Early Protestant Irish immigrants in the early 1700s who weren’t welcome in Massachusetts moved to New Hampshire.
In the mid-1800’s many Irish immigrants came to New Hampshire and faced the prevalent prejudice against immigrants and Irish Catholics in particular. This led to riots in Manchester in July of 1854. Things changed, though, and Manchester elected its first Mayor of Irish descent in the year 1859.

Robert Hanaford Smith, Sr., welcomes your comments at danahillsmiths@yahoo.com