The Irish in America Long Journey Home the Great Hunger Review

The refugees seeking haven in America were poor and disease-ridden. They threatened to take jobs abroad from Americans and strain welfare budgets. They practiced an alien religion and pledged allegiance to a foreign leader. They were bringing with them crime. They were accused of being rapists. And, worst of all, these undesirables were Irish.

A Famine Forces an Unprecedented Migration.

Fragment of the Irish Dearth Memorial in Boston. (Credit: mtraveler/iStockphoto.com)

Fleeing a shipwreck of an island, well-nigh ii million refugees from Republic of ireland crossed the Atlantic to the United states of america in the dismal wake of the Great Hunger. Beginning in 1845, the fortunes of the Irish gaelic began to sag forth with the withering leaves of the country'due south potato plants. Below the auld sod, festering potatoes bled a putrid ruby-red-brown mucus every bit a virulent pathogen scorched Ireland'due south staple crop and rendered it inedible.

While the potato blight struck across Europe, no corner of the continent was as dependent on tubers for survival equally Ireland, which was mired in farthermost poverty equally a result of centuries of British rule. Packed with nutrition and easy to grow, potatoes were the just practical ingather that could flourish on the minuscule plots doled out by wealthy British Protestant landowners. The Irish consumed 7 million tons of potatoes each year. They ate potatoes for dinner. They ate them for luncheon. They even ate them for breakfast. According to "Irish Famine Facts" by John Keating, the boilerplate developed working male person in Ireland consumed a staggering 14 pounds of potatoes per twenty-four hour period, while the average adult Irish adult female ate xi.2 pounds.

VIDEO — Deconstructing History: Republic of ireland. Become the facts on the Emerald Island.

Through seven terrible years of dearth, Ireland's poetic landscape authored tales of the macabre. Barefoot mothers with clothes dripping from their bodies clutched dead infants in their arms equally they begged for nutrient. Wild dogs searching for food fed on human corpses. The country's legendary 40 shades of green stained the lips of the starving who fed on tufts of grass in a futile endeavour for survival. Desperate farmers sprinkled their crops with holy water, and hollow figures with eyes equally empty as their stomach scraped Ireland's stubbled fields with calloused hands searching for one, merely one, healthy potato. Typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis and cholera tore through the countryside as horses maintained a constant march carting spent bodies to mass graves.

British Neglect Exacerbates the Irish Plight

Illustration depicting a funeral at Skibbereen, County Cork, during The Great Famine. (Credit: Hulton Annal/Illustrated London News/Getty Images)

More than just the pestilence was responsible for the Slap-up Hunger. A political system ruled by London and an economic organisation dominated by British absentee landlords were co-conspirators. For centuries British laws had deprived Ireland's Catholics of their rights to worship, vote, speak their language and own land, horses and guns. At present, with a famine raging, the Irish were denied food. Under armed guard, food convoys continued to export wheat, oats and barley to England while Republic of ireland starved.

British lawmakers were such adherents to laissez-faire capitalism that they were reluctant to provide government aid, lest information technology interfere with the natural course of gratuitous markets to solve the humanitarian crunch. "Great Britain cannot continue to throw her hard-won millions into the bottomless pit of Celtic pauperism," sneered the Illustrated London News in March 1849. Charles East. Trevelyan, the British civil servant in charge of the apathetic relief efforts, fifty-fifty viewed the famine equally a divine solution to Hibernian overpopulation as he declared, "The judgement of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that cataclysm must non be too much mitigated."

Ireland's population was nearly halved by the time the tater blight abated in 1852. While approximately 1 million perished, another two million abandoned the land that had abandoned them in the largest-single population movement of the 19th century. Nigh of the exiles—nearly a quarter of the Irish nation—done up on the shores of the U.s.a.. They knew lilliputian well-nigh America except one matter: It had to be better than the hell that was searing Republic of ireland.

READ MORE: When Irish gaelic-Americans Attacked Canada—With the White House's Blessing

A Mass Exodus Begins

Illustration of a dearth-era "coffin ship" carrying passengers. (Credit: Illustrated London News/Hulton Annal/Getty Images)

A flotilla of 5,000 boats transported the pitiable castaways from the wasteland. Nearly of the refugees boarded minimally converted cargo ships—some had been used in the by to send slaves from Africa—and the hungry, sick passengers, many of whom spent their last pennies for transit, were treated petty better than freight on a iii,000-mile journeying that lasted at least iv weeks.

Herded similar livestock in dark, cramped quarters, the Irish passengers lacked sufficient food and clean water. They choked on fetid air. They were showered by excrement and vomit. Each adult was apportioned just 18 inches of bed space—children half that. Disease and death clung to the rancid vessels similar barnacles, and nearly a quarter of the 85,000 passengers who sailed to N America aboard the aptly nicknamed "bury ships" in 1847 never reached their destinations. Their bodies were wrapped in cloths, weighed down with stones and tossed overboard to sleep forever on the bed of the ocean floor.

Although most certainly tired and poor, the Irish gaelic did not get in in America yearning to breathe costless; they but hungered to swallow. Largely destitute, many exiles could progress no farther than within walking altitude of the city docks where they disembarked. While some had spent all of their meager savings to pay for passage across the Atlantic, others had their voyages funded by British landlords who institute it a cheaper solution to dispatch their tenants to some other continent, rather than pay for their charity at abode.

And in the opinion of many Americans, those British landlords were not sending their all-time people. These people were not similar the industrious, Protestant Scotch-Irish immigrants who came to America in large numbers during the colonial era, fought in the Continental Army and tamed the borderland. These people were non just poor, unskilled refugees huddled in rickety tenements. Even worse, they were Catholic.

The influx heightens religious tensions.

Thomas Nast drawing depicting tearing Irish gaelic mobs attacking law officers. (Credit: The New York Historical Society/Getty Images)

Conflict between Protestants and Catholics in the United States had already broken out in violence before the get-go tater establish wilted in Ireland. Anti-Catholic, anti-Irish mobs in Philadelphia destroyed houses and torched churches in the deadly Bible Riots of 1844. New York Archbishop John Hughes responded by edifice a wall of his own around Sometime St. Patrick's Cathedral in society to protect it from the native-built-in population, and he stationed musket-wielding members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians to guard the metropolis'south churches. Wild conspiracy theories took root that women were held against their volition in Catholic convents and that priests systematically raped nuns and then strangled any children born every bit a result of their union.

The maltreatment of newcomers to the United States was, of course, hardly a cantankerous for the Irish to acquit on their ain. Nevertheless, while the number of German immigrants entering the Us nearly matched that of the Irish gaelic during the 1850s, the Irish were specially vilified past the country's Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose ancestors had explicitly made their exodus across the bounding main to observe a refuge from papism and ensure their worship was cleansed of whatsoever remaining Catholic vestiges. Feelings toward the Vatican had softened footling in the two centuries following the sailing of the Mayflower. The country's oldest citizens could still personally remember when America was an English colony and papal effigies were burned in urban center streets during annual Guy Fawkes Day celebrations.

Certainly, many Protestants reacted with Christian charity to the refugees. It was a Boston Brahman—Captain Robert Bennet Forbes—who spearheaded America'south first major foreign disaster relief effort past delivering food and supplies to Republic of ireland aboard a government warship during "Blackness '47." In the new Irish exiles, however, many Protestants saw a papal plot at work. Co-ordinate to "Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia," some Protestants feared the pope and his army would land in the United States, overthrow the regime and establish a new Vatican in Cincinnati. They believed the Irish would impose the Cosmic canon equally the law of the state.

With clearing controls left primarily to the states and cities, the Irish poured through a porous edge. In Boston, a city of a niggling more than 100,000 people saw 37,000 Irish gaelic arrive in the matter of a few years. Naturally, it was difficult to integrate the newcomers in such sheer numbers. The Irish gaelic in Boston were for a long time "fated to remain a massive lump in the community, undigested, undigestible," according to historian Oscar Handlin, author of "Boston'due south Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation."

The Irish gaelic filled the nigh menial and dangerous jobs, often at low pay. They cut canals. They dug trenches for water and sewer pipes. They laid rail lines. They cleaned houses. They slaved in textile mills. They worked as stevedores, stable workers and blacksmiths. Not only did working-class Americans come across the cheaper laborers taking their jobs, some of the Irish refugees even took upwardly arms confronting their new homeland during the Mexican-American State of war. Fatigued in office past higher wages and a common organized religion with the Mexicans, some members of the St. Patrick'south Battalion had deserted the U.S. Ground forces after encountering ill-treatment by their bigoted commanders and fought with the enemy. Later on their capture, 50 members of the "San Patricios" were executed past the U.S. Army for their treasonous decisions.

Scroll to Proceed

A nativist backlash begins.

A Know-Nothing Party flag.

The discrimination faced by the famine refugees was not subtle or insidious. It was right there in black and white, in newspaper classified advertisements that blared "No Irish Need Utilize." The paradigm of the simian Irishman, imported from Victorian England, was given new life by the pens of illustrators such as Thomas Nast that dripped with prejudice as they sketched Celtic ape-men with sloping foreheads and monstrous appearances.

In 1849, a undercover fraternal society of native-born Protestant men called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner formed in New York. Bound by sacred oaths and hush-hush passwords, its members wanted a return to the America they once knew, a land of "Temperance, Liberty and Protestantism." Similar hole-and-corner societies with menacing names like the Black Snakes and Rough and Readies sprouted beyond the state.

1880 map depicting increase in Irish gaelic immigration to the United States.

Within a few years, these societies coalesced around the anti-Cosmic, anti-immigrant American Party, whose members were chosen the "Know-Nothings" because they claimed to "know nothing" when questioned almost their politics. Party members vowed to elect just native-born citizens—simply merely if they weren't Roman Catholic. "Know-Nothings believed that Protestantism defined American guild. From this flowed their fundamental conventionalities that Catholicism was incompatible with basic American values," writes Jay P. Dolan in "The Irish Americans: A History."

Buoyed past the state of war-weep "Americans must rule America!", the Know-Nothings elected 8 governors, more than than 100 congressmen and mayors of cities including Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago in the mid-1850s. They found their greatest success in Massachusetts where in 1854 the American Party captured all country offices, the entire Country Senate and all but a handful of seats in the Business firm chamber. According to Dolan, one time in ability in Massachusetts the Know-Nothings mandated the reading of the Rex James Bible in public schools, disbanded Irish militia units while confiscating their weapons and deported nearly 300 poor Irish back to Liverpool because they were a drain on the public treasury. They also barred naturalized citizens from voting unless they had spent 21 years in the U.s..

President Millard Fillmore

Millard Fillmore, the erstwhile president almost notable for being un-notable, ran on the American Political party's 1856 presidential ticket. Throughout his political career, the 13th president had persistently courted the votes of nativist Yankees fearful of the changes brought by the Nifty Hunger refugees, and he blamed "foreign Catholics" for his defeat in the 1844 New York gubernatorial election. Although Fillmore finished tertiary backside Democrat James Buchanan and Republican John C. Fremont, who had to swat down rumors that he was both a Catholic and a cannibal, the American Political party received more than than xx percent of the popular vote and eight electoral votes.

Nativists Apply violence to farther an agenda.

The "American Citizen," a Know-Nothing newspaper.

In 1854, an anti-Catholic mob in Ellsworth, Maine, dragged Jesuit priest John Bapst—who had circulated a petition denouncing the use of the Rex James Bible in local schools—into the streets where they stripped him and sheltered his body in hot tar and feathers. That same year, the Know-Nothings in Bath, Maine, smashed the pews of a church recently purchased past Irish Catholics before hoisting an American flag from the belfry and setting the building ablaze. When the bishop of Portland returned to the city a twelvemonth later to lay a cornerstone for the church'south replacement, some other mob chased him away and trounce him.

The violence turned deadly in Louisville, Kentucky, in Baronial 1855 when armed Know-Zip members guarding polling stations on an election day launched street fights against German language and Irish Catholics. Immigrant homes were ransacked and torched. Betwixt xx and 100 people, including a High german priest fatally attacked while attempting to visit a dying parishioner, were killed. Thousands of Catholics fled the city in the anarchism'due south backwash, simply no i was ever prosecuted for crimes committed on "Encarmine Monday."

A Know-Nothing mob even seized a marble cake gifted by Pope Pius IX for construction of the Washington Monument and tossed it in the Potomac River. A pamphlet published past Baltimore's John F. Weishampel suggested that the stone could be used every bit a signal from the pope to launch an immigrant uprising to take over America. "The furnishings of this cake, if placed in the monument, will be a mortification to nearly every American Protestant who looks upon it," he warned, "and its influence upon the zealous supporters of the Roman bureaucracy will be tremendous—especially with foreigners."

Painting depicting the burning of an Irish gaelic Catholic church in Maine. (Credit: National Gallery of Fine art)

Abraham Lincoln was among the many Americans disturbed at the ascension of the nativist movement as he explained in an 1855 letter: "Every bit a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read information technology 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, information technology will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they brand no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

The good news for Lincoln and those Americans with similar views is that the Know-Nothing Party cratered rapidly after reaching its high-water marking, although nativism has proven to be stubbornly persistent. The political party splintered as the slavery question superseded the immigrant menace with flashpoints such as the Kansas-Nebraska Deed, the Dred Scott conclusion and the insurgence at Harper's Ferry steering the state to armed conflict.

Monument to the Irish famine in Boston, Massachusetts. (Photo by Paul Marotta/Getty Images)

Although stereotyped as ignorant bogtrotters loyal simply to the pope and ill-suited for republic, and only recently given political rights past the British in their former domicile after centuries of deprival, the Irish were deeply engaged in the political process in their new domicile. They voted in higher proportions than other ethnic groups. Their sheer numbers helped to propel William R. Grace to become the beginning Irish-Catholic mayor of New York City in 1880 and Hugh O'Brien the kickoff Irish gaelic-Cosmic mayor of Boston four years afterwards.

A generation after the Great Hunger, the Irish gaelic controlled powerful political machines in cities across the United states and were moving up the social ladder into the center class as an influx of immigrants from China and Southern and Eastern Europe took hold in the 1880s and 1890s. "Being from the British Isles, the Irish were now considered adequate and assimilable to the American style of life," Dolan writes.

No longer embedded on the everyman rung of American gild, the Irish unfortunately gained acceptance in the mainstream past dishing out the same bigotry toward newcomers that they had experienced. County Cork native and Workingmen's Party leader Denis Kearney, for example, closed his speeches to American laborers with his rhetorical signature: "Whatever happens, the Chinese must get."

Kearney and the other Irish failed to acquire the lesson of their ain story. Yes, the Irish gaelic transformed the United States, simply as the Usa transformed the Irish. But the worst fears of the nativists were not fulfilled. The refugees from the Bang-up Hunger and the 32 million Americans with predominantly Irish roots today strengthened the United States, not destroyed it. A country that once reviled the Irish now wears dark-green on St. Patrick's Day. That's something to raise a glass to.

America: Promised State The 2-part special premieres Memorial Day at 9/8c on HISTORY.

lopezeaddelartion.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.history.com/news/when-america-despised-the-irish-the-19th-centurys-refugee-crisis

Share this post