Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: Famine, Emigration and the New Irish

Foreword

The ‘long nineteenth century’ refers to the immense impact and lasting legacy of the key events spanning from the French Revolution in 1789 until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. This era has proven to be one of the most influential periods of revolutionary change in modern history: the creation of the modern nation state, the birth of modern human rights discourse, and the rise and fall of colonial empires that drew much of the world map as we know it today. This series will be a comprehensive guide to Ireland’s place in this pivotal period. By using the experience of one nation as a guiding principle, we can examine the progression of key historical themes of the era, including nationalism, colonialism, industrialisation and revolution. Through 8 episodes, we will establish the influence of tumultuous world events on Irish social, political and artistic movements, as well as exploring the many contributions made by Irish men and women to the era.

This 101 Series is divided into eight articles including:

1. Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: Flags of Freedom

2. Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: Famine, Emigration and the New Irish

3. Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: The Same Sea of Struggle

4. Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: Revolution, Religion, Reunion

5. Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: Citizens, Not Slaves

6. Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: Ireland and the Age of Empire

7. Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: The Ink of Green and Orange

8. Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: The Great War at Home and Abroad

Ireland in the Long Nineteenth Century 101: Famine, Emigration and the New Irish

In the period 1845-1852, Ireland underwent a traumatic and devastating famine. The event proved to be a defining moment in the nation’s history, directly affecting the course of its culture, development and its relationship to the outside world to this very day. One of the worst humanitarian crises to strike a European nation in the last two centuries, the 'Great Famine' ('an Gorta Mór' in Irish) was a major catalyst for emigration. With devastating impacts on the rural poor, the famine instigated an Irish diaspora which has become a mainstay of nations across the globe,. This worldwide community would have significant effects in years to come, both on domestic policy and also on the political landscape in great world powers, particularly in the United States of America and the UK. Beyond its effects on emigration, the Irish Famine was also an essential component of the increasingly fractured relationship between Ireland and Great Britain as the modern world began to take shape. This relationship would prove pivotal in shaping the course of nineteenth-century European imperialism. The famine highlighted not only the inadequacies of British policy but also the deep-seated tensions between the two nations, setting the stage for Ireland's long and tumultuous struggle for independence in the years that followed.

Ireland’s population in 1845 was approximately eight million people. This figure alone was a growth of more than three million (or close to 40%) from 1790. Despite a modest level of industrialisation, the island was sustaining a consistent and heavy population boom (Mulhall, 2018). The majority of Ireland’s labour at this point was concentrated in agricultural production, processes which provided not only the chief exports to foreign markets but also the sustenance for the population at large. As discussed in the previous chapter, the early-nineteenth century was a period where land-ownership in Ireland was concentrated in the hands of the Anglo-Irish minority. The business interests of many of these landlords was the supply of grain and other agricultural produce to the British market. Much of the Irish farming population existed at a subsistence level. There existed an overwhelming dependence among this large subset of the population on the potato crop, given that it was easy to grow in Irish soil and cheap to procure.

Figure 1: Daniel O'Connell addressing a Dublin court on behalf of Irish Catholics (Daniels, 1850).

British rule forced the Catholic peasants to replace their own subsistence farming with the potato cash crop to be sent to England, under penalty of criminal convictions. Catholic tenant farmers relied almost solely on the potato for subsistence. The mandatory use of the land for potatoes depleted nutrients from the previously rich soils in Ireland, leading to potato rot and eventual mass starvations of the Catholic poor. (Rahman, Clarke & Byrne, 2017, p. 20)

Political reformer Daniel O'Connell led a successful campaign in the 1820s for Catholic Emancipation, i.e. a limited form of freedom from the prohibitive Penal Laws that forbade full Catholic participation in the political process. The repeal of these laws in 1829 permitted Catholics to hold full rights to their own land, albeit in most cases the financial reality meant this remained out of reach for the majority of the population. Nonetheless it is important to establish that the conditions of the agrarian labouring class in Ireland was a source of great animating power in the decades even before the Famine: crowds in the tens of thousands would gather to hear O'Connell's public speeches (O'Gráda, 2000). Much like Theobald Wolfe Tone in the previous chapter, O'Connell (known as 'The Liberator') became a significant symbolic figure in the development of Catholic Irish identity.

The summer and autumn of 1845 saw a failure of many crops across Europe. This failure arose from a combination of a particularly cool annual temperature and the arrival of ‘blight’, the colloquial name given to the water mould Phytophthora infestans. This mould infestation caused the rotting of root plants and vegetables, and across the continent many populations suffered great agricultural losses, from France and Belgium in Western Europe to Prussia, Denmark and Sweden in the East and North. The Scottish Highlands also underwent a particularly tough 1845. Yet, whilst the food production in all of these countries suffered, nowhere was the population so consistently dependent on the cheap potato crop as the agricultural labouring class in Ireland (Ó’Gráda, Paping & Vanhaute, 2006, p. 9). Whilst in most other countries the grain harvest was impacted, pushing political unrest and movements for reform, ‘failure of the grain harvest alone rarely resulted in a subsistence crisis, but the combination of poor potato and grain harvests in a single place was a lethal one’ (Ó’Gráda, Paping & Vanhaute, 2006, p. 1).

Because of its rather small share in the average diet, the failure of the potato harvest in 1845, though causing hardship, could quite easily be overcome in most of continental Western Europe… In Ireland (where the blight showed up only in September and October) and in France (the south remained untouched in 1845) the loss of potatoes in 1845 was—about 30% and 20%, respectively—significant, but still not dramatic. (O’Grada, Paping & Vanhaute 2006, p. 11)

Figure 2: A scene of eviction as the effects of the Famine take hold (Illustrated London News, 1848).

The impact of one year’s lost harvest of the staple crop was impactful, but even in Ireland the situation would have remained salvageable had this been the extent of the issue. The ultimate trouble of the spreading blight was the cumulative effect of year-on-year failure. After 1846 produced an even worse crop than the year before, the loss of income and the ability to produce food even for themselves left the rural poor in Ireland in an impossible situation (Ó'Gráda, 2000).

The immediate and obvious effect of the famine was a rapid and severe decline in population. Close to one million people died of starvation between 1845-1852, while a further one million emigrated in the same period. A trend of depopulation began that would not stop until 1951 (Guinnane, 1994). The effect was most stark in the west of the country, far from the largest urban centres like Dublin, Belfast and Cork. Each year between 1846-1850 saw a 4% decline in the total population of Ireland (O’Grada, Paping & Vanhaute, 2006, p. 13).

6 million people left between 1841 and 1900. This figure exceeded the total population of Ireland at the beginning of the 19th century. By 1901, Ireland's population had been cut in half, to just 4.4 million. Indeed, the population of the island, although it has been on the rise since the early 1960s, is still short of 7 million. This makes Ireland one of the few countries in the world to suffer population decline over the past 170 years when the world’s population has increased more than six fold. (Mullhall, 2018)

Figures for deaths caused directly by starvation are difficult to quantify, with a large number of deaths stemming from hunger-related diseases, e.g. Typhoid, typhus and dysentery, which only multiplied in severity and spread with ease in a weakened population (Ó’Gráda, 2000).

Figure 3: A map showing the percentage of population lost to death and emigration by county in Ireland in the Famine Years (Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d.).

Kitchens offering soup to the starving were set up throughout the country, albeit the quality of the food was often extremely poor and was entirely insufficient to meet the demand they were tasked with quelling. Public work systems were initiated, such as the construction of railworks. These offered minimal relief at best, with poor wages and disorganised planning offering little substantial impact for the most desperate (Ó'Gráda, 2000). The most infamous of the British solutions however was the system of workhouses established. The workhouses had been in place since the British Poor Laws of 1838 as a place for the destitute to go as a last resort for food and menial manual labour, and they became a desperate solution for the Irish population once the Famine began to reach its apex in 1847. The workhouses separated men and boys from women and children, meaning that families who were forced to enter often did so under the belief that they may never see one another again. Food was poor, working hours took up the majority of the day, and living quarters were cramped, dirty and furthered the spread of disease. Over one quarter of all those who entered the workhouse system between 1845 and 1855 died without ever leaving (Ó'Gráda, 2000).

Dispute about the causes of the Famine has had a long afterlife. From the word go, Irish nationalists laid the blame squarely at the feet of the British Government and saw it as an invincible argument in favour of self-government. Historians tend to be more understanding of the undoubted inadequacies of the Famine relief effort on account of the unprecedented scale of the tragedy that beset Ireland. (Mulhall, 2018)

Figure 4: Anti-British sentiment in the wake of the Famine inspired a new generation of land activists like Charles Stewart Parnell (National Library of Ireland, 1880).

The inadequacy of these efforts became the inspiration for mass anti-British sentiment in the native population. "For centuries" writes historian Christopher Klein, "British laws had deprived Ireland’s Catholics of their rights to worship, vote, speak their language" or to own anything—property, horses, weaponry—that might assert their independence or allow them to flourish in their own right. As the Famine raged, food convoys continued to export wheat, oats and barley to England under armed protection facilitated by the Anglo-Irish business owners (Klein, 2023). The demographic impact of the Famine is the most easily quantifiable legacy. Given its integral role in the creation of an Irish diaspora that has embedded itself throughout the world, it can be linked to the cultural development of countries throughout the world. In its domestic form, however, the Famine legacy proceeded toward a growing definition of Irish identity as being one utterly dependent on securing independence from its ruling power.

A recurring theme throughout historiography of the Famine has been the extent to which the governing British establishment was culpable, and whether this culpability pointed even to an intentional infliction on the Irish population. The million deaths in the years 1845-1850 are attributable to ‘a combination of British laissez-faire, anti-Irish bias, rigidity, poor planning, inadequate solutions and providentialism’ (Falc’Her-Poyroux, 2014, p. 1). Historians have argued that the British government's response to the Famine is indicative of how many of the tenets that would go on to become hallmarks of colonial suppression were formed in the British experience with the native Irish: 'Ireland was the British Empire's first colony', and in subsequent years its 'colonisation pattern' would be extrapolated and industrialised in other British territories in India, Canada and Australia (Rahman, Clarke & Byrne, 2017, p. 15). These processes include 'Britain's divide and rule policy, control over land, religious and cultural subjugation, use of the Penal Laws and the Indian Act, and economic and political exploitation' (Rahman, Clarke & Byrne, 2017, p. 16). This was not lost on other victims of such institutions: many Native American and Canadian tribes, themselves undergoing conditions of extreme persecution and poverty, made donations to the struggling Irish (Ó'Gráda, 2000).

Figure 5: The crowded, dark conditions on 'coffin ships' exacerbated the danger to Irish emigrants (Charman, 1970).

The Famine era therefore marked one of the most defining moments in Anglo-Irish relations. Jane Elgee (later Jane Wilde, mother of famed playwright Oscar Wilde) was a Protestant poet from a wealthy Ascendancy family. Yet this class distinction did not shield her from the horrors taking place in the country around her. In 1847 Elgee published her poem ‘The Stricken Land’ in The Nation:

Weary men, what reap ye? – Golden corn for the stranger.

What sow ye? – Human corses that wait for the avenger.

Fainting forms, hunger-stricken, what see you in the offing?

Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger’s scoffing…

From the cabins and the ditches, in their charred, uncoffin’d masses,

For the Angel of the Trumpet will know them as he passes.

A ghastly, spectral army, before the great God we’ll stand,

And arraign ye as our murderers, the spoilers of our land (Elgee, 1847).

The effect of the British response to the Famine would not be immediate. The concerns over land ownership that had coalesced in O'Connell earlier in the century would go on to become the primary point of political capital in Ireland, becoming the vectors by which later reformers Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell would rise to national prominence in the latter half of the 1800s. The Literary Revival movement of the 1880s onwards would find in the Famine an iconic setting of struggle and a physical manifestation of the loss suffered via foreign suppression.

Figure 6 : The 'Kindred Spirits' monument in Midleton, Co. Cork honours the donations of Choctaw Native Americans toward Famine relief (Minihane, 2017).

This point in Irish history marks a demarcation point in the country’s modernisation. The nineteenth century was the beginning of modernisation, with the fruition of the Industrial Revolution becoming increasingly visible throughout Europe and the US. The Famine saw a definitive end of a way of life that Irish cultural and nationalist movements have been attempting to reinvigorate ever since. The foremost example of this is the decline of the Irish language. The areas worst affected by the Famine were predominantly in the West and South-West of the country, areas where Irish was the principal language. Locals in this area would often speak little to no English whatsoever, despite the longevity of English influence in the country. The English language was typically more fixated in urban centres, e.g. Dublin and Belfast (De Barra, 2019). While the first language of respondents was included in an Irish census for the first time in 1851, estimates for Irish speakers in 1845 vary between 3-4 million people (over 400,000 of which spoke Irish exclusively) with over 3 million bilingual speakers (Falc’Her-Poyroux, 2014, p. 2). Through the combination of death and emigration that disproportionately affected the population of these areas, the Irish language was consequently decimated by the Famine. Emigrants to the UK and the USA were required to adapt to English in order to find work, and even in Ireland the language quickly became associated with poverty and struggle (O’Grada, Paping & Vanhaute, 2006). To the nationalist movements animated by the Famine, this loss of language and culture was solely the responsibility of the British government.

At the same time, the crisis was a ‘modern’ one in that it took place in a context of considerable market integration and food movements across national borders. In Ireland the crisis prompted the opening up of the country to foreign grain, and prompted mass long-distance migration on an unprecedented scale. Indeed, without such migration the crisis would have been even worse. (O’Grada, Paping & Vanhaute, 2006, p. 27)

The process of emigration was a painful one that affected the entire cross-section of Irish society. Contrary to popular conception, the majority of those who emigrated did not originate in the poorest strata of rural subsistence farmers. The trans-Atlantic journey to America from Liverpool generally took up to 30 days to complete, and voyagers had to take thirty days of supplies for themselves for the trip (Hatton & Williamson, 1993). The poorest of the Irish farmers simply did not have the ability to afford this, if they could even pay for the ticket itself. The unfortunate reality was that some level of financial security was necessary even to consider the dangerous choice to emigrate. The desperation of the situation in the West did drive many to accept places on ‘coffin ships’, voyages for the UK or America at the lowest available price where crowded, desperate conditions facilitated the rampant spread of disease. Close to one quarter of the c. 100,000 people who sailed to America directly from Ireland in 1847 alone died mid-journey (Klein, 2023). The poorest of the Irish population often had not even the opportunity to escape, and were powerless but to die in the face of the devastation.

Figure 7: Illustration showing the desperate Irish experience of emigration and pleas for foreign aid (Nast, 1880).

Whilst the departing population relocated across the globe, the vast majority of Irish emigrants found themselves in the United States of America. The mid-nineteenth century was a period of rapid growth in the United States. This period of expansion set the preconditions for the country to replace the United Kingdom as the global superpower by the end of the century. The country was still undergoing the process of its westward expansion, and the seemingly endless opportunity for work in factories and the construction of buildings, railroads and other forms of infrastructure made it the most likely destination for emigrants from across the world: between 1840 and 1860, over 4.5 million Europeans arrived in America, the vast majority coming from Ireland, Germany and the Scandinavian states. This influx of arrivals represented an enormous demographic shift in the US, where the total population in 1840 was only 17 million people (US Census Bureau).

Unlike the emigrant populations of other nationalities that made the move to America in the same period, the Irish community had a remarkably low rate of return. Italians, Swedes, and Greeks returned to their homelands in vastly greater numbers than their Irish counterparts. The overwhelming majority of the Irish arrivals settled largely in urban centres on the eastern coast, notably in Boston, Philadelphia, and especially in New York. Boston alone saw nearly 40,000 people arrive from Ireland, at a time when its existing population totalled only 100,000 (Klein, 2023). The mass immigration provided a steady workforce for the construction of New York’s nascent skyline. As the young United States industrialised and rushed towards being an economic superpower, the near two million Irish who arrived formed a significant subculture in American society (Mulhall, 2018).

Figure 8: Map showing the global diaspora of Irish emigrants instigated by the Great Famine (Department of Foreign Affairs, n.d.).

Despite the great numbers in which they came and the integral part they played in the formation of the workforce during America's acceleration during the mid-1800s, the Irish emigrants were not favourably received in the US. The influx of mass numbers of foreigners into American society was met with intense resistance by groups seeking to maintain the predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon, and fundamentally Protestant base of American society.

These people were not like 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 frontier. These people were not only poor, unskilled refugees huddled in rickety tenements. Even worse, they were Catholic. (Klein, 2023)

The Irish population was a major driver of 'Nativism' in America. The ability of the Irish to truly integrate with American society was questioned largely on the basis of their overwhelming Catholicism. Fears spread that, distinct from the German or Scandinavian immigrants, the Irish Catholic community would always harbour an allegiance to the pope as a spiritual leader above loyalty to the United States. Newspaper adverts for work routinely featured addenda stating 'Irish need not apply'. Irish immigrants were often barred entry to certain bars and restaurants along with African-Americans and dogs. Multiple communities sprung up among the existing population to counter Catholic influence, with the belief among them being that Catholic ideology was fundamentally at odds with American beliefs (Klein, 2023). This wave of Protestant fervour (so reminiscent of exactly the persecutory society that many Irish emigrants had fled) resulted in intensified religious divisions and the further separation of immigrant communities from potential integration: the ability to vote now became restricted to those who had lived in America for a minimum of twenty-one years (Klein, 2023). Catholic churches in Maine were burned to the ground, and a Catholic priest who has spoken against the mandatory use of the King James Bible in public schools was dragged from his home and killed in a 'tarring and feathering' as practiced during the early stages of the American Revolution on British soldiers (Klein, 2023).

Figure 9: A wanted paper in the New York Times makes clear the anti-Irish sentiment in the American population (New York Times, 1854).

This resurgent populism was not a minor factor in American public life. Millard Fillmore, the 13th President of the United States, ran for re-election in 1856 on the ticket of the American Party, a political group organised precisely to counter foreign immigration. Fillmore won 20% of the popular vote and eight seats in the Electoral College (Klein, 2023). Although the gathering problem of the impending Civil War ultimately superseded the immigration question, the divisions between the Irish and the dominant Protestant ethos was rigidly set in place. Consequently, for much of the first generation of Irish emigrants to the US, there existed a distinct separation from public life at large, and the 'voluntary' segregation of communities in New York, Boston , and Philadelphia gave rise to a distinct diaspora culture in which a dual identity was entrenched for decades to come. Subsequent generations became increasingly involved and influential in political life in America yet the cultural identity formed by emigration and exclusion remained deeply a part of Irish-American life.

In later decades the children and grandchildren of Irish Famine immigrants established themselves on the political ladder in America. Often this success came due to an ugly aspect of assimilation, with the arrival of other immigrant populations allowing the Irish to position themselves as ethnically and culturally closer to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment than incoming Chinese or Eastern European groups. Certain elements of the Irish population took advantage of the same racism that had previously excluded them as a gateway into the mainstream of white America: Denis Kearney, an immigrant from Cork, established himself as a populist politician famed for anti-Chinese rhetoric in the 1870s and 1880s:

The father of a family is met by them at every turn. Would he get work for himself? Ah! A stout Chinaman does it cheaper. Will he get a place for his oldest boy? He can not. His girl? Why, the Chinaman is in her place too! Every door is closed. He can only go to crime or suicide, his wife and daughter to prostitution, and his boys to hoodlumism and the penitentiary... we know how false, how inhuman, our adversaries are. We know that if gold, if fraud, if force can defeat us, they will all be used. And we have resolved that they shall not defeat us. We shall arm. We shall meet fraud and falsehood with defiance, and force with force, if need be. (Kearney, 1878)

Kearney's position has obvious echoes of the anti-Catholic bias experienced by his own immediate Irish predecessors, and unfortunately mirrors anti-immigrant rhetoric that continues to present itself in America today. What is undeniable is how the immense surge of Irish immigration in the Famine era was a fundamental component in the development of American nationalism.

Figure 10: John FitzGerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States (White House Archive, 1963).

The Irish population has gone on to leave an immense legacy on American public life in the almost two centuries since the beginning of the Famine. Even as far as 1960 much of the discourse surrounding John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign centred on the implications of Kennedy’s Catholicism, questioning the same points as Nativist rhetoric in the 1850s. Namely, critics cited the potential conflict of interest in a President answerable to the Pope instead of the American people, while those supporting Kennedy claimed Catholicism as proof of anti-Communist credentials at the height of the Cold War. Such were the strength of these associations that ‘the Roman Catholic Church’s dogmatic approach to anti-Communism appeared to protect the Catholic candidate from those who would question his national security policy’ (Carty, 2004, p. 113). Kennedy's great-grandparents had emigrated from New Ross, co. Wexford during the Famine.

However, the greatest impact of the Irish diaspora to America would be the seeds sown for support of later Irish independence movements in the 1910s. Later episodes of this series will examine this process in greater detail, but it bears mentioning—at the genesis of the Irish-American community—how this contingent would contribute funds, diplomacy and mass public support for Irish independence during the visits of Éamonn De Valera in 1919 (Hannigan, 2010). The British response to the Famine in Ireland engendered a deep sense of resentment in the Irish at home. The Irish-American community harboured a similar sense of patriotism to their homeland, and this loyalty would bear fruit in generations to come. The mass emigration instigated by the Great Famine established an Irish-American population which would be integral to winning popular support for independence almost a century later.

The Great Famine has become one of the most integral experiences in Irish history and the formation of Irish cultural identity. It created a cultural trauma that has resonated for close to 180 years, and is still referenced freely in Republican songs, writings and commemorations. What was once an insular island limited largely to Western Europe, hindered by its relative poverty and unique language, has become spread to each corner of the globe via emigration and the adoption of the English language, bringing its now-defined culture to a global audience and prominence in some of the most powerful states on the global stage, particularly the United States of America.

Bibliographical References

Carty, T. (2004). A Catholic in the White House?: Religion, Politics, and John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Campaign. Palgrave Macmillan.

De Barra, C. (2019). Gaeilge: A Radical Revolution. Currach Press.

Elgee, J. (1847). The Stricken Land. The Nation.

Falc’Her-Poyroux, E. (2014). The Great Famine in Ireland: a Linguistic and Cultural Disruption. Yann Bevant. pp. 2-15

Hatton, T. & Williamson, J.G. (1993). After the Famine: Emigration from Ireland, 1850-1913. The Journal of Economic History. Cambridge University Press. (Vol. 53, No.3). Cambridge University Press.

Hannigan, D. (2010). De Valera in America: The Rebel President and the Making of Irish Independence. St. Martin’s Press.

Gershon, L. (2022). Britain’s Blueprint for Colonialism: Made in Ireland. JSTOR Daily.

Guinnane, T.W. (1994). The Great Irish Famine and Population: The Long View. The American Economic Review. (Vol. 84, No.2). pp. 303-308

Kearney, D. (1878) Appeal From California: The Chinese Invasion. Indianapolis Times

Kenny, K. (2005). Ireland and the British Empire. Oxford University Press

Klein, C. (2023). When America Despised the Irish: The Nineteenth Century's Refugee Crisis. History Ireland.

Merriman, J. (2009). A History of Modern Europe: From the French Revolution to the Present. W.M. Norton & Company.

Mulhall, D. (2018). Black ‘47: Ireland’s Great Famine and its After-Effects. Department of Foreign Affairs.

https://www.dfa.ie/irish-embassy/usa/about-us/ambassador/ambassadors-blog/black47irelandsgreatfamineanditsafter-effects/

Ó’Gráda, C. (2000). Black ‘47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy and Memory. Princeton University Press.

Ó’Gráda, C., Paping, R., and Vanhaute, E. (2006). The European Subsistence Crisis of 1845-1850: A Comparative Perspective. International Economic History Congress. Session 123. pp. 1-13

Rahman, A., Clarke, M.A., Byrne, S. (2017). The Art of Breaking People Down: The British Colonial Model in Ireland and Canada. Peace Research. (Vol. 49, No. 2). pp. 15-38

US Census Bureau. (n.d.) 1840 Overview. U.S. Department of Commerce.

Visual Sources