The first thing the farmer notices is the smell:
an earthy rot in the fields.
The Irishman walks into his potato field, to find the plants turning brown and wilting.
He digs up a tuber and finds it slimy, like a bar of soap.
When he slices it open, brown mucus oozes out.
The whole crop is the same.
It'll be a hungry year, but he will survive.
Because this isn't Ireland in the famine year of 1845;
it's the United States, two years earlier.
And this man has no idea how this blight will devastate the country of his birth.
The Irish potato famine ranks as one of Europe's worst agricultural disasters.
An event so momentous, that it not only defined a generation,
it scattered a people to the winds.
When the blight arrived in 1845, Ireland had a population of 8.2 million.
Within a decade, though, a third of it was gone.
Around 1.1 million died from starvation and disease, while two million emigrated abroad.
Actually, you know what, strike that!
Immigration isn't the right word.
It was flight, plain and simple,
an evacuation.
During the height of the famine years, when children's mouths were stained green from eating grass,
and dogs scavenged graveyards, people brawled on the docks for space aboard the overcrowded vessels.
Most didn't even care where the ship was headed, as long as it wasn't Ireland.
Yet Ireland was not the only country, or, even the first, to experience the blight.
The fungus responsible emerged in the United States in 1843, hitching a ride to Europe in cargo holds.
Farmers attempting to strengthen European potato strains
may have even accidentally imported it when they crossbred their potatoes with American stock.
And strengthened by a rainy summer, and carried by the wind, the fungus stormed the continent.
During the summer of 1845, news of the blight filled European newspapers.
Belgium had lost 87% of its potato crop,
Flanders 92%.
Holland lost 70%.
Germany and France got off relatively light, only losing 1/5 of their harvest.
Rumors of starvation leaked out of Russia and Poland, while English farmers saw similar devastation.
Governments prepared for a season of hunger and instability.
The potato, after all, was the staple diet of Europe's emerging industrial working class.
This miracle plant, imported from Peru, could produce two to four times more calories per acre than grain.
Cheap and easy to prepare, it allowed Europe's shrinking agricultural sector to feed its booming manufacturing workforce.
And between 1750 and 1850, the European population nearly doubled,
partially due to the potato.
Any threat to the potato crop was a serious problem.
In fact, these crop failures would help spur the wave of revolutions that racked Europe in 1848.
But here, the story of Ireland diverges, because while all these countries experienced economic hardship and social change,
Ireland alone starved.
The reasons for that are complicated, but they boiled down to two factors:
The first was a land system that made Ireland uniquely vulnerable to a crop failure,
and the second factor was human:
a group of British leaders, governing from London,
who saw the famine relief as a vehicle for reforming the Irish economy and instructing the people's "moral character."
Throughout the crisis, British policymakers would make economic reform their primary objective,
with saving lives as a distant secondary goal.
"The blight indeed was," as British politicians argued,
"An act of God:
unstoppable and inevitable."
The famine, by contrast, was the work of men.
But that was still to come. In the summer of 1845,
British prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, was tracking reports of blight.
He worried about its striking England, of course,
but he knew that if it took hold in Ireland, the result would be catastrophic.
Technically, Ireland had been a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland since 1801.
But in a practical sense, it had been the very first step in the British colonial empire.
The English had ruled it, directly or indirectly, for centuries.
In that time, the British crown had gradually dispossessed native Irish Catholic families, confiscating their land,
and gifting it to English and Scots Protestants, who were considered more reliably loyal.
While Catholic countries sponsored a series of Irish revolts against the Protestant English.
And tensions grew.
The climax came when Oliver Cromwell reconquered Ireland after a rebellion,
completing the process of land confiscation, and totally replacing Irish landowners with English and Scots,
the so-called "Anglo Irish,"
and it was bloody.
Conservative estimates suggest that Cromwell's invasion, along with the famine it caused, may have killed 10% of the Irish population.
To prevent another uprising, Cromwell and later British governments passed a series of penal laws restricting Catholic rights.
Catholics could not hold public office, own firearms, or be admitted to the bar as lawyers.
They couldn't own a horse worth over five pounds, vote, teach school, or marry a Protestant.
There were restrictions on how they could own land, and when willing land to children,
they couldn't give it intact to the eldest, and had to break it up equally among all their children.
Churches couldn't be built of stone, and had to sit far from roads, and they couldn't attend universities at home or abroad.
And 80% of the Irish population was Catholic.
These laws were designed to bar Irish Catholics from all forms of political and economic advancement,
and while they were gradually repealed, the last vanishing in 1829,
It would take generations for the Irish to recover economically.
And on top of that, these landlords charged astronomical rent on the land,
barely allowing the native Irish farmers to survive.
And the whole thing took place in a system of middlemen so convoluted that-
Okay. Okay. Here's an analogy.
Imagine someone owns an apartment building today: that's the landowner.
They don't want to manage it, so they pass it off to a middle person to manage.
Now the middle person wants to make a profit, and knows there's a lot of demand, so they jack up the rent,
and to make more profits, they subdivide some of the larger apartments into smaller ones.
Now, under the pressure of making this exorbitant rent, some of the buildings tenants start to get roommates,
or rent some of their bedrooms on Airbnb, further subdividing their own apartment.
Wow, this sounds really familiar-
Oh, hi NYC, I didn't see you in this analogy.
(AHEM)
Anyway, that's basically what happened to Irish farmers.
In fact, some of the landowners, known as absentee landlords, hadn't even lived in Ireland for generations.
The trend was bad, then events made it worse.
During the Napoleonic Wars, Irish goods suddenly became a major part of British imports,
as the war cut off suppliers in France.
Things improved for the Irish, with many turning to new manufacturing jobs.
But then, Napoleon was defeated,
French goods returned, and the burgeoning industrial sector collapsed.
Out-of-work weavers and tradesmen flooded the countryside,
engaging in ludicrous bidding wars for small plots of farmland,
promising to pay rents the land could never sustain.
Irish farmers began cultivating land that had never been farmed before:
rocky hillsides, beaches, and bogs.
The land, subdivided already through the inheritance laws and the greed of landowners, got subdivided further,
and middlemen for those landlords, increasingly disappointed with returns from potato farmers,
evicted whole villages to use the land for cattle raising, which squeezed the farmers even further.
By 1841, 45% of all agricultural holdings were under five acres,
a consequence of population explosion, paired with the land system that depended on chains of landlords,
often three or four deep, leading back to England.
Only one thing allowed people to survive:
you guessed it, the potato!
A single acre of potato plants could produce six tons of crop per year, enough to feed a family of six.
No other crop provided such a yield.
But, many Irish families were larger than that, and the rent still had to be paid.
In the decades leading up to the famine, the shrinking plots of land gave most no more than a subsistence living.
Ireland was already the poorest country in Europe. Before the subdivision, most families at least had a cow.
But in the decades before the famine, the more expensive cow disappeared replaced by a pig.
Milk, butter, eggs, and herring disappeared from the peasants’ diets.
Cash crops like barley and oats vanished, replaced by more potatoes.
Visitors were shocked at the depth of Irish poverty.
The majority of the country went shoeless, and many in the countryside wore literal rags.
In towns, landless workers lived by the pawnshop, pawning their Sunday clothes after attending church,
buying them back on Friday payday,
wearing them to church again, and then repeating the cycle.
But, those same visitors were often astounded by the peasants’ hardiness.
Irish peasants were strong, and often good looking.
Scientific testing, so popular in the Victorian age,
found that the average Irish peasant was both taller and stronger than both English and Belgian ones.
and it was due to their diet: eating nutritious, vitamin-filled potatoes three meals a day.
But in August of 1845, Irish farmers walked into their fields, and smelled rot.
The blight was in Ireland.
But, London had a plan to use this crisis: to remake Ireland.
A plan that would bring down Prime Minister Peel.