In the mid 19th century, millions of immigrants poured into America, fleeing literal starvation. As is often the case, Americans then bemoaned the massive influx of foreigners, who they labeled as criminals and rapists. It’s an often-repeated story that polarizes citizens who either want to help “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and those concerned with their way of life becoming upended by so many refugees.
In the 1840s, nearly two million Irish people migrated to the United States. (getty)
In this case, it was the Irish escaping their British overlords. Boxed into tiny plots and forced to live off a diet of potatoes, potatoes, and more potatoes, the Irish looked for greener pastures and moved en masse to the land of opportunity.
The potato famine forced the hand of millions of Irish.
The Potato Blight
Around 1845, life in Ireland really started to take a drastic turn for the worse. When a virulent pathogen laid waste to potato crops across Europe, no country took a more savage beating than Ireland. According to John Keating’s “Irish Famine Facts” the average working male in the old country ate an astounding 14 pounds of potatoes daily. If you’re wondering, the average woman packed in 11.2 pounds as well. When essentially all of the potato plants died, that left the Irish in a life or death bind.
These boats of the early 20th century looked like luxury yachts compared to the transport of the 1800s. (familysearch)
Why Potatoes?
At that time, no country relied on potatoes to the same degree as the Irish. That’s because wealthy British Protestant landowners only allowed their serfs tiny plots to grow whatever food they chose to subsist on. With such diminutive space to grow crops, the Irish had little choice on what crops to plant. Only potatoes could yield enough nutrition in so little space. Therefore, when potatoes across the continent died, the Irish faced starvation.
Between 1820 to 1860, the Irish alone made up one-third of America’s immigrants
Mass Starvation
Over seven years of debilitating famine, the Irish wilted. Dogs began to eat corpses, women begged for food, clutching dead infants in their arms, and people desperately ate grass in futile attempts to fill their stomachs. Typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis, and cholera ripped through the country, leading to piles of mass graves. To make matters worse, the English continued to export food from Ireland under the supervision of armed guards while over a million Irish citizens starved. As the English put it, “Great Britain cannot continue to throw her hard-won millions into the bottomless pit of Celtic pauperism. The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated.”
The Irish coming to America. (irishcentral)
Mass Exodus
Obviously, if your options rest between starvation or taking a rickety, hastily converted cargo ship 3,000 miles to an unknown land, there’s not much of a choice. Packed on the ships like sardines, adults were given 18 inches of bed space, children half that. Nicknamed “coffin ships”, nearly 5,000 of them departed Ireland on a dilapidated flotilla of sickness and misery. Nearly a quarter of these refugees never made their destination. Bodies were dumped overboard. Upon arriving destitute in America, most faced further hardships.
Eventually, New York had more Irish than Dublin!
Religious Tension
Even before the Irish arrived, America lay embroiled in religious strife as Protestants and Catholics fought thanks to theological zeal. Many “native” Protestants feared that the influx of Irish Catholics would lead to the establishment of Catholic rule as the dominant form of religion in America. In Boston, historian Oscar Handlin wrote that the Irish are “fated to remain a massive lump in the community, undigested, undigestible.” When the Irish began filling degrading and dangerous jobs like digging trenches, laying rail lines, and stable workers for lower pay, tensions really began to rise.
Irish American jumped at any job available especially dangerous and low paying jobs like coal mining. (shorpy)
Discrimination Rises
Of course, back then no one hid their discrimination. “No Irish Need Apply” littered the classified ads. Illustrations of Celtic ape-men with grotesque features emblazoned in every newspaper. Secret societies who yearned for the old America before the Irish arrival sprouted up like the “Order of the Star Spangled Banner,” the “Black Snakes,” and the “Rough and Readies.”
As Jay P. Dolan wrote in “The Irish Americans: A History,” these groups “believed that Protestantism defined American society. From this flowed their fundamental belief that Catholicism was incompatible with basic American values.” In Massachusetts, they enforced the teaching of the King James Bible in public schools, disbanded the Irish militia, barred anyone from voting unless you spent 21 years in America, and deported 300 or so poor Irish people because they represented a drain on society.
Many store windows placed huge placards saying “NINA†(No Irish Need Apply). That forced the Irish to take whatever jobs available even if it could kill them.
Democracy Reigns
Across the country, mobs looted, destroyed, and burned the homes of immigrants without any repercussions. Abraham Lincoln as well as other prominent Americans began speaking out against the growing “native movement. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it 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 make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”
Eventually, the Irish found strength at the voting booths. Deeply invested in the politics of their newfound country, the Irish began electing their own thanks to their voting turnout. As immigrants of China, Southern and Eastern Europe began arriving, the Irish were eventually seen as acceptable members of American society.
