From 1820 to 1920, over four and a quarter million Irish immigrants came to the United States. One cause for this extraordinarily heavy emigration, was the constant pressure of population on the resources of the Emerald Isle, for in Ireland the density of population was greater than in any other country of Western Europe.
The dominant industry of Ireland was agriculture. It was under the control of an aristocracy, many of whom were absentee landlords who rented their land to scores of small farmers or cotters; who, in turn, farmed with the most antiquated implements and backward methods.
Economists are agreed that Ireland witnessed a progressive deterioration of its farming class, from 1815, to well past the middle of the century. Taxation, finance, and the courts were under the control of the landed aristocracy. The normal wage in Ireland was sixpence a day, including one meal; and eightpence a day without food. The food of the peasant, in his happiest and most prosperous times, consisted of nothing more than potatoes, a little milk, and occasionally, fish.
Meat was so scarce that many families never saw it from one year to the next. The peasant’s hut, in which he usually reared a large brood of children, was filthy, damp, cold, and smoky. It had but one room to house the whole family; which, at least in some instances, included the family pig.
Education, even of the most rudimentary sort, was impossible for hundreds of families. Drinking, and its natural accompaniment, rioting, constituted the prevailing curse of the Irish people. The slums of Dublin were notorious for poverty, disease, and filth in the early decades of the nineteenth century. If one adds to these distressing conditions, exploitation by a foreign power, England; and the denial of political privileges to the native Irish; and the burden of paying tithes for the support of a Church establishment which Irish Catholics hated, it is obvious why Ireland was a fertile recruiting ground for immigrants in the nineteenth century, and why the immigrant tide to the United States could not be stopped once it had begun to flow. Between 1815 and 1830, the more substantial farmers constituted the bulk of the Irish immigration to America. After that date, the flood gates were open to all.
Ireland, in the nineteenth century, was conquered territory. Every rebellion against English authority had been ruthlessly suppressed. Repressive measures did not make the Irish less bellicose. A foreign Church weighed on a population that was intensely Catholic, and that suffered under discrimination and repressive legislation directed against the adherents of that faith.
The British commercial system was repressive also, and continued to be applied in the old spirit of eighteenth century mercantilism. Absentee landlords milked the country of its wealth, robbed their tenantry of every incentive to make permanent improvements, and often brutally evicted renters who failed to meet their obligations promptly. The British Government usually favored Irish emigration as good riddance to a troublesome population. A part of the London press heaped reproaches upon the departing Irish, and described them as "departing marauders whose lives were profitably occupied in shooting Protestants from behind a hedge", "demons of assassination", "vermin", "snakes", and the "scum" that flows across the Atlantic.
The Irish emigrant trade really began in the years 1816 and 1817. From 6,000 to 9,000 Irish sailed for America in each of these years. In 1818, the number more than doubled. Vessels began to be chartered for the specific purpose of transporting emigrants; although, as a general practice, vessels that had brought American cargoes of cotton or timber to Ireland, departed with human cargoes for the return voyage. As the emigrant trade grew, evils of the emigrant traffic made their appearance. Although these abuses may have been exaggerated during the years when traffic was fairly normal, there can be no question of what occurred when, for special reasons, it was extraordinarily heavy.
In 1827, the Irish immigration to America reached 20,000. By 1831 and 1832, it exceeded 65,000. After 1835, with the exception of 1838, there were never less than 30,000 Irish crossing the Atlantic in any one year. In 1842, the total reached 92,000.
This movement across the sea was aided and abetted by the desire of contractors for cheap labor to build the internal improvement projects that were sweeping the United States like a mania in the decades before the Civil War. As early as 1818, 3,000 Irish were employed on the Erie Canal alone. There was hardly a canal built anywhere in the United States before the Civil War, without Irish labor. By 1826, 5,000 were at work on four canal projects. Roadwork was equally alluring, as was railroad building. Many employers sent money to Ireland to pay for the passage of the cheap labor they desired; others found employment for the Irish in the mill towns springing up in New England. Thus was begun that "Roman Conquest" of New England, which has essentially modified its English and Protestant characteristics, and which has made a state like Massachusetts --- next to one or two of the mountain states --- the strongest Catholic State in the nation, in proportion to its population. Thus, "solid groups of Irish of the lowest class, were thrown as cohesive masses, into the melting pot." The majority was illiterate, and thousands knew no English.
Potato famines had always meant disaster for a population such as Ireland’s, which constantly bordered so close on starvation. There had been famines before 1845, but that year marked the beginning of a succession of cold, damp summers; with the resultant potato rot; a plant disease which destroyed practically the whole crop. Pestilence, fever, starvation and death descended upon the Irish countryside, and nearly one fourth of the population succumbed. Relief ships from America provided little aid. Fortunate was the man or woman whose friends in the United States could send the passage money promptly!
The figures for the period of the Irish famine immigration mounted to startling totals: 1846= 92,484; 1847= 196,224; 1848= 173,744; 1849= 204,771; 1850= 206,041.
The census of 1850 reported 961,719 Irish in the United States; by 1860, the total had reached 1,611,304. These were to be found in greatest numbers in New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Illinois, Ohio, and New Jersey. The character of Irish immigrants changed under the pressure of intolerable suffering and famine. The poor, small farmer, who had constituted the bulk of the migration up to 1835; who knew English, had sufficient energy to be proud of his independence, and was determined to rise, gave way to a new type --- namely the laborer --- with little background, aside from his potato patch; who was ignorant of the English language; of a mercurial temperament; and likely to find life and progress in the United States very difficult.
Early in 1847, the roads to Irish ports were literally thronged with immigrant families. Sometimes, strong men actually battled with each other at the ports of embarkation to secure passage on ships entirely inadequate to provide transportation for all who wished to go to America. The descriptions of the ravages of the Irish famine tax the reader’s imagination. Children and women were described as "too weak to stand." The livestock had perished; people were eating carrion; and "the weekly returns of the dead, were like the bulletin of a fierce campaign."
Beggars crowded the roads and city streets. People huddled half-naked in fireless and foodless hovels. Thousands crossed to Liverpool, and demanded transportation to the United States on crowded and filthy emigrant ships whose resources were taxed to the utmost. In 1847, a young English Quaker reported that the town of Westport as "itself a strange and fearful sight; like what we read of in beleaguered cities; its streets crowded with gaunt wanderers, sauntering to and for with hopeless air hunger-struck look; a mob of staved, almost naked women, clamoring around the poor-house for soup tickets…."
An organization in Philadelphia, in six months, collected $48,000 in cash, and $20,000 worth of articles; and sent seven relief ships to Ireland. American Protestant churches appealed for aid for the stricken Irish. At the same time, those interested in promoting immigration, circulated handbills, and maintained agents in the principal towns of Ireland. The Irish needed little encouragement, for they remembered the letters written home by Irishmen, as early as 1830, emphasizing that in America, meat, flour, and gin are cheap; that "there is no complaining on our streets", and that "if a man like work, he need not want for victuals."
The Irish temperament is noted for its buoyancy and optimism; for its ability to extract the maximum satisfaction from whatever joys life has to offer.
A poet of the 1850’s wrote:
"But though her sons in exile roam,
they sleep on freedom’s pillow.
And Erin’s daughters find a home,
Beyond the western billow."
Hope inspired the voyagers across the Atlantic, but for many, it vanished like the rainbow, when the actual conditions of life in America had to be faced. Almost all Irish immigrants had to begin in the United States as unskilled laborers, and many got no farther.
Year after year, the Irish Emigrant Society of New York, advised immigrants to shun the cities of the Atlantic seaboard, and to scatter throughout the United States, particularly into the West.
"Thousands continually land entirely penniless, and are at once in a state of destitution," the warning continued, "whereas such person should have at least five pounds on his arrival, to enable him to prosecute his journey to the interior." The advice was sound, but thousands found it impossible to follow; for all their earthly possessions had been used up during the voyage. They arrived in the New Canaan with their pockets empty. The almshouses and hospitals were filled to overflowing; and beggars wandered about aimlessly through the st5reets. Men and women accustomed to no other existence than eking out a living from the soil, were suddenly left stranded in congested cities. They had no trade, and no particular skills. Many did not even know the language. They were destined to become the unskilled, marginal workers of the America of the middle nineteenth century, with all that that implies. Many lurid accounts of Irish "shanty towns" are available to the historian of Irish immigration. Some are descriptions obviously colored by a deep hatred for the newcomer, but there is enough in the comments of friendly critics, to indicate that conditions were deplorable, to say the least. Indeed, one who is familiar only with the Irish-Americans of the 20th century, may find it hard to credit the tales about their ancestors of several generations ago.
The Irish, as a class, came to America with less means than many other immigrant groups. The majority was poverty-stricken. Having no money to proceed westward on their own account, they usually got out of the cities only when contractors for internal improvement projects recruited them in the labor markets of the east, and transported them to the west and south. On their arrival in the port towns and larger cities, the Irish crowded the tenements; sometimes twenty or more families living in one house. These Irish tenements were hardly more than "human rookeries."
What a difference it might have made, and what an excellent investment it might have turned out to be, had the government used its funds to transport the Irish into the west, and helped them to become established as farmers on the public lands!
There are many unnamed graves of Irishmen along the canal and railroad routes which they helped to build.
In South Boston in 1850, the Irish slums were buildings from three to six stories high, with whole families living in one room; without light or ventilation; and even the cellars crowded with families.
Saloons were the curse of the neighborhood, and police records abundantly reflected this unhealthy condition. The death rate among the children of the Irish poor was alarmingly high. Disease, particularly during cholera epidemics, always ravaged the immigrants living in hovels in the western and eastern sections of New York City, worse than in other communities. Secret societies arose in the shantytowns among Irish laborers, with such names as "The Corkonians", "The Connaughtmen", and "The Far Downs", who engaged in bloody brawls and riots; which even the repeated denunciations of the Church authorities, seemed powerless to stop. In some of the "better class" tenement houses in New York, Negroes were preferred as tenants, to the poor Irish and Germans. (There was a row of tenements in New York called "Ragpicker’s Paradise", inhabited entirely by Germans with their dogs; who collected and sold rags, paper, and bones.)
Misery enjoys company, especially among the Irish; and the Irish are a congenial people. Unfortunately, the drink evil, already acute in Ireland, became a positive menace in America. Large numbers of Irish rushed into the saloon business. Whiskey often was a part of the contract by which Irish laborers were employed in construction gangs. The saloon influence quickly led to a connection with machine politics. Laborers on canals and railroads in the west, as well as workers in the cities, were organized into clubs under the leadership of saloon keepers, in order to exploit them politically, and to provide greater profits for the liquor business.
Here may be found at least one answer to the query raised by the Chicago Tribune, in its issue of December 23, 1853:
"Why do our police reports always average two representatives from ‘Erin, the soft, green isle of the ocean,’ to one from almost any other inhabitable land of the earth?….Why are the instigators and ringleaders of our riots and tumults, in nine cases out of ten, Irishmen?"
The Irish immigrant boarding house was particularly notorious, and worse by far than the German Gasthaus that developed in the port towns. It has frequently been described as little better than a "sty." Usually, it was a brick building with a grog shop on the first floor, full of runners and loafers of all kinds. A saucer full of free tobacco stood on the counter, to satisfy the taste for nicotine of the runners and "shoulder-hitters," who got through life largely on their brawn and muscle. The baggage room for immigrants was in the cellar. The upstairs rooms were overcrowded and distinguished by their lack of cleanliness. It was to such a place that a Paddy, just arrived in New York, in his caped and high-waisted coat; brimless caubeens; knee breeches; woolen stockings; and rusty brogues, was likely to be taken.
And it was here that he was likely to be exploited by his own countrymen, through fraud and exorbitant charges enforced by ruffianism. Sympathetic critics like Thomas D’Arcy McGee, one of the most distinguished Irishmen in the history of the United States and Canada, deplored the effect of this overcrowding of the larger cities on the Irish character. Family ties were being weakened and broken in the United States, and McGee saw the second generation of Irishmen becoming less faithful in their allegiance to the Church. "That abstract Irish reverence for old age," which had always been one of the finest traits of the Irish, was being lost. "We meet every day," wrote McGee, "the apostate children of Irish parents, sons of emigrants, and themselves the worst enemies of emigrants, ……afraid to profess their religion,…….ashamed of their origin."
Orestes A. Brownson, who had been a Calvinist, transcendentalist, universalist, socialist, and skeptic, but concluded his career as a devout member of the Roman Catholic Church, believed that the Irish held fast to their orthodox faith, but could by no stretch of the imagination, be called an "advance guard of humanity," as far as their level of civilization was concerned. Year in and year out, the Boston Pilot, a leading paper among the Irish, which was under the direct influence of the Catholic hierarchy, pleaded with the Irish to regard America as their home, and to recognize the responsibilities and obligations of their new citizenship. Jeremiah O’Donovan, in 1864, put his description of the Irish in Albany, into verse; and was satisfied that they were on the high road to successful Americanization:
"The Irish there, are worthy of applause,
They help to make and regulate the laws.
To what I say, exceptions may be few,
That all are moral, honest, faithful, true.
They love the Isle had given them their birth,
The greenest Isle that can be found on earth.
Though hard it be to split true love in two,
They love the land of their adoption, too."