July, 1846.
Ireland's early summer harvest is starting to come in.
Reports of blight circulate, but in the east, summer has been temperate.
The hunger might be over.
Lightning rends the sky. Water drops like a guillotine.
An unhealthy fog blankets the land,
and upon seeing it, one fisherman tells a newspaper that it's "the wrath of the fairies."
"I knew it by the signs they were coming."
And perhaps he's not far off...
because a tiny malicious organism is riding the rain.
The water washes fungus spores off the infected leaves,
carrying it to the ground.
And under the soil, the 1846 potato crop begins to decay.
In January 1846,
Daniel O'Connell had stood in Parliament, and warned that Peel was not doing enough to fight the famine.
"There are 5 million people on the verge of starvation," he warned,
"and I'm speaking from the depth of my conviction when I say,"
"I believe the result of neglect will be death to an enormous amount."
Now, eight months later...
Peel was gone, and the government was doing even less.
Hunger began pulling Ireland apart.
Mothers starved until their milk gave out and their babies died.
Men who had survived off food depots and public work projects found succor in neither.
Orders had been given to food depots to preserve their grain until December.
It didn't matter.
People arrived at the depots on foot, shoeless, having not eaten in days.
Depots relented and passed out cornmeal, but their reserves were getting low.
Gangs of men, carrying shovels, marched into market towns, demanding work.
Food availability was not the problem.
Amid the famine, bread sat in shop windows,
and Irish merchants exported tons of beef, grain and oats to England.
The government refused to intervene,
so, across the island, starving peasants did instead.
In County Waterford, an armed militia blocked two barges that were transporting Irish grain for export.
That done, they moved into the town,
beating merchants, stealing bread, and lighting buildings afire.
A unit of dragoons ordered them to disperse. When they didn't, the soldiers opened fire.
Six bodies lay in the street.
Yet as Ireland reeled towards famine,
in London, Sir Charles Trevelyan was retooling his relief plan to be less generous.
Trevelyan was a legend in the civil service:
incorruptible, pious, and hard-working.
But he was also a workaholic micromanager,
steeped in the Victorian belief that poverty was the sign of moral failure.
To Trevelyan, the "Irish problem,"
the fact that Ireland remained trapped in a cycle of poverty, violence, and rebellion,
lay in the Irish character.
"They were lazy, rebellious, and took no initiative," he thought.
Potato cultivation was too easy, only requiring a few months labor a year, breeding idleness.
And, it was prone to failure.
And when it failed, the Irish turned to government to feed them.
Absent or neglectful Irish landowners shouldered little of the cost,
and London feared that the Irish were becoming habitually dependent on government aid.
"To save Ireland," he thought, "it needed modernization and agricultural reform."
He dreamed of an anglicized Ireland, like the one that existed in its cities and market towns,
one with English style capitalism and a market economy, like theirs, to serve as a trade partner.
He wanted to sweep out Ireland's communal village life and barter system,
replacing it with a workforce that worked for wages rather than potatoes.
One where they earned money to buy food.
Trevelyan saw this blight, not as a disaster, but a god-sent opportunity to remake Irish society.
And he was determined to make the most of it, no matter how much suffering he had to inflict.
Great guy. *sarcasm*
In fact, Trevelyan had studied under the economist Thomas Malthus,
who argued that when a population outstripped food production,
starvation and death was a natural and proper correction.
When Malthus put forth the theory, he was thinking of Ireland,
and Trevelyan agreed.
That belief in Malthusian principles,
alongside a commitment to non intervention in the free market,
would plunge Ireland deep into famine.
So when Trevelyan rolled out his reformed relief plan,
it was no surprise that its primary mission was not to feed the starving,
but instead to protect the free market, prevent abuse, and teach economic lessons.
When food depots reopened, the poor found that the cornmeal was no longer sold at cost.
That, argued Trevelyan, undercut local merchants.
Now, it was market price.
All food depots would close, except those in the west,
and Trevelyan insisted that any maize purchased come from British merchants, not American ones.
When the public works began again, job seekers discovered their new wages were based on performance rather than a flat daily fee,
and even the highest wages couldn't feed a family.
The wages themselves were supposedly funded via attacks on Irish landlords,
but many landlords had little to spare.
And due to multiple levels of bureaucracy, meant to prevent fraud,
the road crews’ wages often took weeks to arrive.
And finally, there would be no intervention in food prices.
Laissez-faire economics would rule.
High prices, Trevelyan argued, would attract food imports.
But, you guessed it, they didn't.
In fact, food prices had soared higher than ever.
It had been a bad year for agriculture, and not just in Ireland.
Crops failed across Europe.
Countries scrambled to import extra food, and Trevelyan was late to refill his cornmeal.
So by the time he, grudgingly, started looking, there was little to be had.
And in Ireland, potato and cornmeal prices doubled.
At government food depots, hungry people arrived from miles away,
only to find the maize unaffordable.
Across the island, small farmers and landless agricultural workers were plunged into immediate destitution.
They surged into market towns to beg for food at depots,
and they even began entering the hated workhouses,
a government poor-relief program best described as a prison for the poor,
where they lived while performing mindless work in exchange for two meals a day.
And workhouses were abusive and inhumane by design,
so the poor would only enter as a last resort.
Yet even they were over capacity.
Despite the people's desperation,
landlords upped the eviction rate,
calling in police and soldiers to throw families out,
and demolish their homes with the sledgehammer and crowbar.
Tenants killed livestock in retribution, and on occasion, ambushed and murdered landlords.
Evicted families wandered the roads, pitching tents in ditches.
Crime rates doubled.
This was the season of the gunman.
And it wasn't just the small tenant farmers and landless laborers showing up at the food depots.
Managers reported small landowners, 10 to 15 acre men, approaching them to request aid,
fine clothes hanging off their skeletal frames.
One had even walked 12 miles to an unfamiliar town,
rather than reveal to his neighbors that he'd gone bankrupt.
Blight compounded everything.
In small farms, barley rotted in the field.
Usually, farmers paid laborers to harvest, but they had neither money nor potatoes to offer.
And as if that wasn't enough, that winter, a series of blizzards ravaged the island,
snow stacking to the rooftops, entombing whole villages.
Soon, the New Year dawned on what would be known as Black '47.
January brought a strange frenzy:
families, hollowed eyed and losing hair,
stumbled to the shore to eat seaweed and oysters.
They scaled 300-foot cliffs just to steal bird eggs.
They could have survived off fish,
but they had neither the equipment, boats, nor skill for deepwater fishing.
And by that time, most of the fishermen had pawned their nets for cornmeal.
Armed gangs ambushed government food convoys and butchered stolen cattle to survive.
By the end of January,
700,000 had turned to working on public works.
These "famine roads" were often a waste: they started nowhere and went nowhere.
Malnourished work gangs broke rocks in freezing temperatures,
their shoes and coats long ago lost to the pawnshop.
And, they died there, in great numbers, collapsing beside the roads from exhaustion.
Violence against public works managers became so pervasive, that many deserted their posts,
while others, laden with guilt, ended their own lives.
In a famine, it's not the starvation that kills you. It's the diseases that follow:
typhus, dysentery, fever, and the famine dropsy.
Peasants fleeing the countryside carried them into cities.
And infection ran so rampant in work. houses, the staff began to quit.
Visitors and officials reported seeing villages where the want was so extreme,
that families lacked the energy to even bury their dead.
The Irish funeral, so embodied in the culture, disappeared piece by piece.
No one wanted to gather, for fear of the fevers.
None could afford a coffin, and eventually,
even individual graves were dispensed with.
Dogs scavenged the burial fields.
Amid that landscape of horror, one place stood out as particularly destitute:
Skibbereen, in County Cork, became internationally famous for its deplorable conditions.
Drought exacerbated the famine,
and after a few months, the frantic scramble to survive had passed,
leaving only a lethargic wait for the grave.
Families crawled across their cabins, too weak to even walk,
and a visiting American found himself in a surreal conversation with two young women,
as they casually calculated how many days they had left to live.
Fourteen, they agreed.
Accounts from Skibbereen made the village internationally famous,
the face of the great hunger, and its ghoulish tales, repeated in newspapers,
inspired people around the globe to raise money for famine relief.
Donations came from as far away as Australia,
and in the United States, even enslaved people and Native Americans raised funds for Ireland.
The international outcry finally pushed Trevelyan to act.
For months, he’d downplayed the increasingly urgent and alarming reports from his own officers on the ground,
even when they'd rebelled against his policies, selling cornmeal at cost or serving free meals at workhouses.
He relented. The British government would support outdoor relief,
the opening of soup kitchens, and free meal distribution.
But, it was too little, too late:
deep famine had already affected the planting season, and the next crop would be poor.
Many Irish decided they only had two options: either fight for Ireland, or leave it.