To elucidate the question of equal rights for “foreigners,” this essay considers anti-Irish and anti-foreign prejudice in Massachusetts criminal proceedings in the early republic. The trial of Daley and Halligan, long remembered as an example of anti-Irish Catholic prejudice, is examined in the context of other criminal trials of the period.

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© 2011 by The New England Quarterly
2011

Supplementary data

Supplement 1

Bill Fowler, member of the editorial board of The New England Quarterly, Professor Dick Brown, and Governor Michael Dukakis discuss Brown's recent NEQ article, “'Tried, Convicted, and Condemned, in Almost Every Bar-room and Barber's Shop': Anti-Irish Prejudice in the Trial of Dominic Daley and James Halligan, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1806". Our panel touches on the evolution of our judicial system, the responsibility of the policy maker in correcting errors of our past, and the role of the historian in presenting and explaining these errors to the public.

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