Fiddles and song carry out the door of the house as neighbors slip inside to pay their respects.
It's a wake. Two sisters,
girls the town has known their whole lives, will never more be among them
The neighbors approach the girls, shake their hands, and kiss them. For these girls are still alive.
Yet, by tomorrow they may as well be in their graves. They've saved enough for the Atlantic passage and tomorrow
will leave the town that until now has made up their whole world.
This goodbye party is what's known as an American wake. Their mother cradles them, sobbing,
knowing that when they disappeared down the bend, she'll never again see them. In a time before
photographs and telephones, she will have nothing of them except perhaps a lock of hair and a fading scent on empty bed sheets.
But still they must go.
(intro)
Irish immigration became a fact of life over a century before the great famine, but amid the horrors of
1847, it reached a fever pitch. That year, a stunning
214 thousand people out of a population of 8 million left in search of a new life where they could escape the hunger disease
poverty and surging violence.
1847 would prove the worst year of the famine
The British goverment had stepped up food aid
and private charities had tried to fill the needs,
but it was too late.
Disease had taken hold, the economy collapsed, and the cities filled with starving refugees
coalescing around food distribution hubs.
The old bonds of Irish life, the family and communal village, were tearing apart as people sought a way out,
even if it meant to parting with those they loved.
Irish living abroad in Canada,
Australia, Britain, and the United States urged their families to come join them.
Travel books began appearing in Dublin, laying out the different areas of Canada, where to settle, and how to get there. And people went.
But the people who left were by and large not those suffering the worst of the famine.
Ship passage across the Atlantic was expensive and prices could fluctuate every hour.
Generally, a ticket to the United States cost about five pounds, while passage to Canada cost three. These were high sums
completely unattainable for those economically ruined or working for sustenance on the famine roads.
Therefore, it was not the poorest who emigrated, but rather those who still had some means,
small farmers who could sell land and equipment, for example.
Immigrants tended to come from communities that were hard hit by the famine, but not so desolated as Skibbereen or other areas in the West.
There were of course other ways.
Some landlords considered voluntary emigration the cheapest and most humane way to clear their land. One that as a bonus wouldn't put them under the threat of assassination
in retaliation for evictions. They offered to pay a certain number of tenants to sail to Canada and found themselves
inundated with applications. The truly desperate, though, found an innovative solution.
They would commit a crime in front of a police officer, hoping that the sentencing judge would transport them to Australia.
Actually, when a sympathetic judge moved to acquit a pair of women after one of these crimes,
they just threatened to simply walk out of the courthouse and do it again.
So, they got what they wanted: seven years at a penal colony in Tasmania.
But even for those lucky enough to get to a port, the danger wasn't past.
Dockside con men fleeced the new arrivals, charging huge commissions for buying tickets or provisions. Some sold expired tickets or
provided ludicrous currency exchange rates and then a ship's departure might even be delayed, forcing prospective travelers to rent rooms
they couldn't afford. As a result, many who made it to the Port of Liverpool
found themselves unable to afford passage and melted into the city's underclass.
And all of this for space on a ship not meant to carry passengers.
For the ships that plied the routes from Canada to Ireland were actually cargo vessels. They'd arrived in Cork or Liverpool,
discharged their holds full of timber, and were hastily refit to carry Irish immigrants on the return voyage.
And outdated British passenger laws mandated only 10 feet of space per passenger and
seven pounds of bread per week. The government knew these deficiencies were dangerous,
but they wanted to encourage settlement in Canada.
Tighter regulations would raise ticket prices, making Canada less attractive in comparison with the United States.
The vessels on the Canada route quickly gained a dark nickname: "coffin ships."
The diseases festering in Ireland hitchhiked aboard, ravaging the passengers in the unventilated decks.
Ships crews, fearing disease, might keep the passengers as virtual prisoners below decks and even refused to collect the dead.
One ship, the Agnes, left Liverpool with
427 Irish passengers. It arrived in Quebec with a hundred and fifty. That was extreme.
But in the 1847 sailing season,
it was not unusual for between 15 and 20 percent of Irish immigrants to die during the crossing.
Those that survived languished on quarantine islands, unable to set foot ashore while the disease spread further in the tent cities.
Conditions were so bad that the Bishop of Quebec sent a letter to the Catholic Church in Ireland begging them to preach against immigration.
Yet, they came anyway
And they made it. Thousands of Irish settled in Canada with others walking south towards the border and crossing into the United States.
Down the East Coast, things were no better despite the higher ticket prices.
It had taken many Irish refugees all they had in order to afford passage to the United States and
few had the funds to move inland once they reached a port.
So people who had dreamt of farming in the West ended up clustering in cities like Boston,
Philadelphia, and New York.
And though generations of Irish immigrants had arrived before the so called "famine Irish,"
the newly arrived often found that their predecessors did not welcome them. Those earlier waves of immigrants skewed wealthier and
Protestant and old sectarian tensions continued to simmer in the New World.
Canadian cities in particular were known for brawls and riots around sensitive dates like
St. Patrick's Day and the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. And in both Canada and the United States,
Irish immigrants, mostly Protestant, began referring to themselves as "Ulster Irish" or
"Scots-Irish" to differentiate themselves from the new underclass.
In America, nativist societies sprang up,
pressuring the government to cut immigration and contain the new Irish immigrants that they considered both racially inferior and religiously subversive.
A fringe political
organization called the American Party, widely known as the know-nothing movement, arose to oppose immigration.
And spinning conspiracy theories about Catholic plots to take over the United States,
nativist groups formed criminal gangs like the Bowery Boys that harassed immigrants.
Doctors, hard air quotes there, measured the heads and faces of incoming Irish immigrants using pseudoscience to declare them racially inferior.
Newspapers breathlessly reported on the crime, hopelessness, and squalor of New York's largely Irish American Five Points neighborhood,
making it America's most famous slum. And, look, the Five Points was horrible. Stately hotels became crowded tenements,
their hall floors sitting uncleaned for so long that trash hardened and became part of the floor. In the 1850s,
55% of arrests in New York were Irish and Irish women made up a quarter of the city's sex workers.
Irish gangs like the Dead Rabbits clashed with the nativist groups like the Bowery Boys.
In 1849, a dispute during a performance of Macbeth caused the state militia to open fire on the crowd
killing around 30 people. And in
1857, the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys fought a citywide gang war that raged for two days.
But...
Recently, historians have found another side to the infamous Five Points. A new study of records at a New York immigrant bank
discovered that a sizable number of residents had six months to a year's
worth of salary saved: a rainy day fund to get them through a crisis.
Therefore, it appears that some stayed in the Five Points not because there was no other option
but because the cheap housing allowed them to save more, send money home to family, and stay a part of an Irish community.
And crucially, in New York, the Irish had a champion that would fight for them.
John Joseph Hughes had been born in Ulster and found his calling in the church.
Not particularly spiritual, but aware of the political power
the church wielded, Hughes used his position as bishop and later Archbishop of New York to protect Irish immigrants and culture.
In New York, Hugh saw a chance to rebuild Irish Catholicism,
which was in ruins after centuries of religious oppression at home. And he began using the First Amendment as a cudgel,
demolishing architectural laws that forced Catholic churches to look like Protestant ones and argued against the Protestant King James Bible in schools.
He founded Irish Catholic schools and newspapers and during and after Mass,
he ran classes on how to assimilate to American culture. And when he had to, he played rough.
In 1844, a nativist rally in Philadelphia turned into a riot,
with nativists flooding out to beat immigrants and burn Catholic churches. Shortly afterward,
the nativists scheduled a rally in New York. Hughes visited the mayor and delivered a clear message:
If one Catholic Church was touched, the Irish were prepared to burn New York to the ground.
The mayor canceled the rally. Other Irish moved West into the coal mines of Pennsylvania and the gold fields of California.
They worked construction, digging canals and laying railroad tracks, gaining a reputation for doing hard work
well, finding their place in these new lands. And they kept coming,
because in Ireland blight had returned. The country they escaped would not see a full potato harvest until
1849.