London. September 12th ,1845.
The press operator runs off issues of "The Gardeners Chronicle,"
over 6,000 copies fresh and ready for tomorrow.
The editor bursts in, waving a piece of paper.
They must stop the presses and insert a front page notice.
No, it can't wait until next week.
"The potato blight has reached Ireland," the notice reads.
Crops around Dublin are perishing.
It ends with a question:
Where will Ireland be in the event of a universal potato rot?
But everyone knows where it will be:
in the embrace of hunger.
♪ "Birth of the People" by Demetori ♪
Two months later...
The Gardener's Chronicle was in the minority when it predicted agricultural disaster.
Over the past two months, the press sent mixed signals.
Some said the potato crop was fine; others, that the blight only affected a few counties.
So to get a sense of the problem,
Prime Minister Robert Peel sent a scientific Commission to get solid numbers.
(RECORD SCRATCH)
Wait, pause the history for just a second.
The Prime Minister's name during the potato famine was Peel...
No one else thinks that's a little...funny?
No. No, I know. It's a serious story. Come on,
Stop looking at me like, fine, you know what? It's fine. It's fine. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
His name's Peel though...
Now that commission was in the House of Commons,
telling Parliament to expect 80% mortality in the potato crop.
They'd devised methods for keeping the blight away from harvested potatoes,
but these proved ineffective.
The news troubled Peel.
In the summer, there had been hints of crop loss, but that was nothing new.
Irish potatoes were unreliable;
there'd been 16 potato failures since 1800,
and when crops failed tenants couldn't pay their rent.
When tenants didn't pay,
landlords brought police and troops to throw them off their land.
That meant riots and retaliatory livestock killings.
It would also mean secret societies, like the Molly Maguires and Whiteboys,
ambushing landlords and middlemen in their carriages.
And those previous potato losses were only regional...
This was the whole island.
Instability worried Peel.
A few years before, the Irish Member of Parliament Daniel O'Connell,
who had campaigned successfully against anti-Catholic laws,
had set his sights on repealing the Act of Union.
O'Connell's outdoor meetings had attracted half a million people,
and the government had to threaten force to disperse them.
Since then, Peel had taken a more conciliatory approach,
but famine could upend everything,
and the reports were bad.
Now that it was November, and the full harvests were coming in,
the scope of the problem was becoming clear.
Not even harvested potatoes were safe.
In western Ireland, a poor farmer had buried his harvested potatoes in a pit,
muttering a prayer at how lucky he'd been: no blight.
But a few days later, he opened the pit to check them.
Half were totally rotten.
Panic struck the whole west of Ireland
where the climate was too wet for grain or oats.
"I cannot describe in language strong enough," read one account,
"the frightful and awful alarm of the poor people."
"May God, in His bountiful mercy, avert such a disastrous calamity."
Peel had his faults,
but inaction was not one of them.
The son of a textile industrialist,
he was the first Prime Minister to come from business rather than the aristocracy.
He'd risen through the civil service with sheer hard work, and a few big gambles.
And he was about to gamble again.
Ireland would need food, but Peel would have to walk a fine line.
He was a Tory,
and his Conservative Party were hardcore trade protectionists,
particularly due to support from grain merchants.
Whatever he did, it couldn't undercut or upset the grain market.
And then there was the opposition, the liberal Whigs.
They were similarly hardcore when it came to free-trade economics.
They hated any government intervention in the market.
So in other words, the Tories wouldn't support bringing in foreign grain
because it would cut local merchants' profits,
and the Whigs would shoot down any intervention on price.
Meanwhile, Daniel O'Connell and a Dublin group proposed their own measures:
forbid turning grain into whiskey,
bring in foreign grains,
institute public works,
and stop exporting Irish grain, beef, and oats to England.
Neither party, Peel knew, would stand for that.
After all, grain imports were already a sensitive split,
as the two parties consistently brawled over the Corn Laws,
a series of protectionist measures meant to keep cheap American grain out of the UK.
Oh, by the way, in Britain "corn" means "grain." Got it? Cool.
Peel had a plan to thread the needle, but it had to stay a secret.
He sent an agent to Boston, on a mission to buy
a hundred thousand pounds worth of maize or cornmeal.
Peel's agents then started shipping it to Ireland on the quiet.
His bet was this:
since maize didn't grow in Britain, and no British merchants traded in it,
this wouldn't be a direct intervention in the market.
But the shipments still had to be kept secret,
or British merchants might freak out about the competition,
and withhold their shipments to Ireland
The plan wasn't to feed Ireland with cornmeal,
it was that cheap cornmeal would keep food prices low.
Maize would not be given away,
but sold at cost to counties, and paid for by landlords
who would fundraise through their own poor-relief organizations.
The government would then match those funds,
and deliver the cornmeal from regional food depots.
Peel also instituted road building projects, where people
could earn a wage to buy the cornmeal.
It would be revenue-neutral.
"Ireland," he said, "must feed Ireland."
If that sounds like a convoluted bureaucratic nightmare to you,
you are correct.
The idea of fundraising was a particularly terrible one.
It meant that the poorest counties got less food aid than the richer ones.
Parish priests complained that no one in their county had anything to donate-
if they could, they would have already bought food.
Irish farmers ended up pawning their few possessions to buy cornmeal.
Others had no choice but to sign up for the hard labor of working on the roads.
There were logistical hurdles, too:
Irish infrastructure was dismal, with a minuscule railway network, and roads that deteriorated outside major cities.
Maize shipments had to navigate those rocky networks to reach rural areas,
but, even before that, the maize had to be ground into cornmeal,
and Ireland only had two mills that could accomplish that.
And even when people got the cornmeal,
they had to learn to cook it properly, or else it made them sick.
Scurvy, previously unknown due to the potato's
high vitamin C content, started cropping up.
So people who couldn't get the relief food went hungry,
and people who could plunged deeper into poverty keeping themselves fed.
Some even subsisted on spoiled potatoes.
There were food riots, and a few high-profile attacks on wealthy citizens.
In one county, 1500 Irish farmers turned up, all armed,
when a group of British troops arrived to enforce an eviction.
But overall, there was no major risings and no mass death. People survived.
Peel, however, would not -
because his maize and work programs were not the end of his plans.
Though a Tory, he'd come around to the free trade views of the liberal Whigs.
He disliked the Corn Laws, which kept cheap American grain off the British market,
artificially inflating bread prices,
and saw in the Irish crisis an opportunity to push for repeal.
Now, if it helped Ireland, so much the better. But that was secondary.
He would use this famine as a cudgel to beat his opponents with.
He took on the Corn Laws,
decrying how high tariffs contributed to starvation in Ireland,
and he argued that greed, as much as blight, was starving the Irish farmer.
And this was explosive.
In 1845, The Corn Laws conjured up the same emotional weight
that surrounds issues like health care and fuel taxes today.
Champions of the law predicted that repeal would collapse the agricultural sector,
while the repeal camp cast images of a starving British public unable to afford bread.
This move pushed Peel out as Prime Minister,
but he was back two weeks later when the opposition failed to form a government.
Long term, repealing the Corn Laws would prove good for Britain;
cheap food helped fuel the expansion of its industrial base and build its empire.
But it did nothing to help Ireland.
In fact, by tying famine relief to the Corn Laws,
he'd thrown the Irish poor into a partisan crossfire.
Now, members of the pro-Corn Law camp doubted there even was a famine in Ireland.
They spun conspiracy theories
that Peel had embellished reports of blight in order to galvanize the repeal effort.
And this theory gained credence when news emerged
that the scientific commission had overestimated the 1845 crop loss.
They had predicted an 80% mortality for the potato,
but actually the figure ended up being about half that.
It was still a dire situation, sure,
but not the agricultural apocalypse the scientists had sold Parliament.
This ugly partisan warfare meant two things.
First, an entrenched block in Parliament now saw famine relief as a partisan issue, tied to the Corn Laws.
And second, it created an impression that reports of crop loss in Ireland were always exaggerated.
But the truth boiled down to this:
in the future, families would die with empty bellies in Ireland, while in London,
politicians would dismiss reports of famine as alarmist.
Peel won in the end.
On June 29th, 1846,
as his cornmeal deliveries were finally in full swing,
He crossed the aisle and voted with the opposition, repealing the Corn Laws once and for all.
But he got to enjoy his victory for less than 24 hours,
because the next day, both parties revolted and threw him out of power.
The Whigs took over, high on their victory,
and Peel's relief program, which had let the Irish poor barely scrape by through the first year of the crisis,
came under the full control of a civil servant named Sir Charles Trevelyan.
His first act was to cancel the food shipments.
After all, the task was done. Next year's crop was about to come in.
But the 1846 crop was a total failure,
and the bad times, The Great Hunger, were about to begin.
♪ "A Warmer Place/Rowan's Jig" by Tiffany Román ♪