Why Must Read Paddy's Lament, Ireland 1846-1847: Prelude to Hatred?

PART I: The Doomed Country Chapter One In 1845, a fungus had destroyed almost half the potato crop in Ireland. In 1846, near the end of July, almost two million acres of the dark green leaves and purple blossoms were attacked again, producing an intolerable, sulfurous, sewer-like stench. Brown spots covered the leaves, and canker sores the stalks. An entire year's food supply was destroyed. No one knew that the deadly fungus, Phytophthora infestans, had actually come from America by ship (Through DNA analysis, it has since been identified as a strain called HERB-1 which originated most likely in Mexico's Toluca Valley). Chapter Two Potato prices rose to famine levels from two shillings a hundredweight to seven shillings to an unheard-of twelve shillings. Not able to afford these prices, the poor began eating turnips and mangel-wurzel, a large, coarse, reddish-orange beet grown as fodder for cattle. At night men would raid these fields, not using metal spades for fear of making scraping noises, but digging by hand under the stalks, pulling out the tubers, and leaving the stalks so the theft would go unnoticed until the stalks withered. Some farmers allowed the poor to pick through their putrid crop. Partly rotten potatoes were scraped and reduced to pulp ("boxty"), placed in a cloth, squeezed dry, then flattened into cakes and baked over the coals. They were as hard and dry as a cookie. Oatmeal cakes were made with water or milk, placed between cabbage leaves, and then on the coals. Farmers either killed their cattle one by one or extracted the blood from them to feed their families. Some made "relish cakes" with it by mixing it with mushrooms and cabbage, then making patties to be baked over the peat fire. Others boiled it with milk, oats, herbs, meal, or vegetables. Fields were searched for chickweed, sorrel, pignuts, and dandelion and fern roots. These were crushed and added to meal to make bread. Watercress and mushrooms were found in the woods, berries were found in the bogs and mountains. Families ate the leaves and barks of certain trees, and the fruits of holly, beech, crab apple, and laurel trees. Along the coast, seabirds and their eggs, shellfish, sand eels, periwinkles, limpets and seaweed were devoured, sometimes with fatal results. Chapter Three Three-fourths of Ireland's cultivable land was used to grow wheat, oats, barley, which were shipped to England. Likewise the cattle, sheep and pigs were sent to Britain. The six to eight million Irish people lived off one-fourth of their arable land. The dunghill beside the cottage fertilized the potato garden. The pigs were not consumed but fattened for "gale day" which came in May and November to pay half the year's rent. Anything left over was needed for the tithe (one-tenth the value of his produce) to the Anglican Church, to which they did not belong. The potato is rich in nutrients -- protein, amino acids, nitrogen, iron, calcium, magnesium, sulphur, chlorine, potassium, copper, boron, silicon, manganese, flourine, and iodine. A peck of peeled potatoes with skins was boiled for half an hour. With a little salt, crushed mustard seed, and buttermilk, it was capable of preventing scurvy, building sound teeth, and providing all the energy for the day's work. On larger farms, onions, fresh milk, and a pound of butter were added to make "mashed potatoes." A person needed an average of eight pounds of potatoes each day, or 280 pounds weekly for a family of five. During normal years the poor lived exclusively on potatoes. They were neither counted nor locked away. With always more about ready to be cooked, the family atmosphere was relaxed, hearty, and cheerful. Children going to school filled their pockets with cold lunch potatoes. Field workers ate them at noon roasted over an open fire. Donegal fishermen had their wives weave special woolen stocking bags to carry mashed potatoes at sea. Many now believed God was punishing them for their gluttonous consumption of potatoes during the carefree years. When the potatoes ran out, they slaughtered the pigs and chickens to feed their families. When these were gone, they pawned their clothing, furniture, utensils, agricultural, and fishing equipment to buy more food. Finally, they went into the fields for herbs. Graveyards were frequented because nettles grew well there. The Irish were naturally gregarious and seldom wanted to be alone. But now young mothers who had pawned their cloaks could not venture out to beg for bread. People could not dress for Mass. They turned inward and lost their sympathy for one another. Sport and pastimes disappeared. Poetry, music and dancing stopped. The famine killed everything. Landlords prevented the keeping of greyhounds, which would kill hares. Only landlords and their guests were allowed to shoot game and fish for salmon. Chapter Four The son of a County Mayo farmer exchanged his father's last pig for gunpowder so he could shoot wild ducks. Thieves waited in caves until nightfall to steal sheep. They used a sharp knife to dispatch the animal and silence its bell. They left the sheep's head, so the farmer would know it did not run away. The meat was divided and hidden in different places. It was cooked in remote places, then taken back home and devoured, with whatever wild herbs the children had gathered. Horses and cows were killed. Rats were chopped up, out of sight of the children, and the white, rabbit-like meat added to the pot. During starvation, the body loses excess fat. Bones protruded and become brittle. Eyes recede into their sockets. Their necks appear too little to support their heads. The hair thins. Children grew a thick down on their faces from their forehead to temple. They just stared with a gaunt vacancy. During winter 1846-47, while over 400,000 Irish people were starving, their grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry were shipped to England, enough to feed twice the six million Irish men, women, and children. The British policy, was to carry on business as usual, that is, as if no was starving in Ireland, so traders and speculators could realize a profit, landlords could be paid their rents, and agents paid their commissions. Lord George Bentinck spoke in the House of Lords on March 22, 1847 to rally support for the starving Irish. "At this moment, we know that there are between 300,000 and 400,000 quarters of corn in stock on hand in English ports. What prevented ministers from sending part or all of this food to the west of Ireland?" In Galway, at Licknafon, Mary Driscoll's father, Jeremiah Hegarty, died of starvation in a nearby ditch. The landlord had put a cross on the barley bin, meaning it was to pay for their rent, and rather than risk eviction for failure to pay the rent, Hegarty had resisted taking any more barley. Ireland had the acreage to regenerate herself. But the money appropriated by the English government for Ireland's public works (money paid in Irish taxes to England) was not used to reclaim this land. Instead it was spent on labor that the law decreed had to be unproductive, that is, on bridges where no rivers flowed, roads that went nowhere, and piers that never docked a ship! Chapter Five After the blight set in, farmers could not pay their rents. In December 1846, absentee landlords began using a nationwide system of ousting the peasantry (most resident landlords who saw the famine's ravages refused to evict their tenants). The agent arrived on horseback, along with the sheriff and local constabulatory and some Irish housewreckers. Occupants' names are called out and offered work in the workhouse, most of whom refuse. The people are reluctant to leave their homes, their families having lived there for many generations. After they are dragged out, the Irish housewreckers jump up on the thatched roof and tie a rope around the supporting beam to pull it down. The roof collapses into the house. The tenants are told they can have the thatch and wood. Some use it to build a lean-to in the fields. Some crawl back into their homes to die or be forced out again. The absentee landlords put these famine-encumbered estates up for sale to the highest bidder, which usually was another Englishman. Now the land would be used for cattle and sheep, not potatoes. It was religious antagonism that separated landlord and tenant. The laws were made by and for Protestants, enforced by a Protestant constabulatory, and carried out by Protestants in Irish courts. The magistrates, lawyers, and most of the jurors were Protestants. During the years leading up to the Act of Union of 1800, members of the Irish Parliament were bribed to vote for union, about one and a quarter million pounds worth. Years later, William Gladstone, Prime Minister of England, and who advocated Home Rule for Ireland, called the union of 1800 "a paper union obtained by force and fraud, never accepted by the Irish people." Chapter Six Without the potato, scurvy set in, caused by a lack of Vitamin C. The gums turned purple and swelled. Teeth loosened. Internal bleeding caused the legs to turn black ("black leg" disease). Dropsy swelled the victim with fluid until their skin burst, forming a glazed puddle at their feet. Dysentery produced highly infectious, uncontrollable bowel discharges (ten to twenty per hour) of clots of blood and mucus. Typhus spread by rats infested with lice. The lice carried Rickettsia. Victims became infected when lice sucked in the bacteria from infected blood and passed it out through their feces. The infected feces would then make contact with the next victim's blood through abrasions made by the coarse frieze material of their clothing, and by their skin cracked and sore from unwashed bodies and unchanged clothing. During the fourteen days of racking pain and fever, over seventy percent of typhus victims died. Doctors did not know what caused typhus, nor that soap, boiling clothes, and disinfecting the cabins would have saved thousands of lives. Chapter Seven The London Times constantly vilified the Irish, calling them "men of idle hands and nerveless purpose" accusing them of "a fatal lethargy" brought on by living on public money. The Irish Cork Examiner, however, told the truth. "Apathy" was brought on by "starvation. Death is in every hovel. Whole families lie together on the damp floor, devoured by fever, dropping one by one into the arms of death." The weekly English magazine Punch portrayed the Irishman as a dumb brute, a lazy lout, a liar, a filthy beggar who spent any money he had on weapons with which to assassinate the British. But the Tables of Death in the 1851 Census of Ireland said, "No such amount of suffering and misery has been chronicled in Irish history...and yet, through all, the forbearance of the Irish peasantry, and the calm submission with which they bore the deadliest ills that can fall on man, can scarcely be paralleled in the annals of any people." Money that England could have spent to relieve the starving Irish was spent studying the problem, generating endless reports for the Scientific Commission, the Dublin Castle Commission, the Poor Relief Commission, the Police Inquiry. The British government could have bought Ireland's wheat and oats and stored them in Ireland to be used during the famine. The landlords would therefore have received their rents and the people kept alive for the next harvest. But instead of keeping Irish-grown grains in Ireland, they were sent to England. Chapter Eight When America heard of the Irish famine, meetings were held in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Railroads carried free of charge all packages marked IRELAND. The U.S. government removed guns from its warships to make more room for supplies. In 1847 alone, 114 ships carried twenty thousand tons of clothing, flour, meal, and Indian corn to Irish ports. Everything was put at the disposal of the Society of Friends, the great Quaker organization in Ireland whose only aim centered on helping the starving. Visiting Ireland, William Bennett observed, "We entered a cabin. Stretched in one dark corner, under smoke-covered rags, were three children huddled together, too weak to rise, pale and ghastly, their little limbs emaciated, eyes sunk, voice gone, in the last stage of starvation." Catholics were compelled to pay a tithe that paid for the salaries of Anglican churchmen. No Protestant bishop in Ireland received less than four thousand pounds a year. Some received fifteen thousand. John Mitchel, editorial writer for The Nation in Dublin, called it "the wealthiest church in the world quartered upon the poorest people, who abhor its doctrines." Protestant ministers preached that the famine was a punishment from God for the Catholics' idolatry of following the pope. However, the Irish never forgot that in 1666, after the Great Fire of London, when the city was almost destroyed, the Irish contributed twenty thousand fat cattle for the distressed Londoners. Chapter Nine Appearing to bend to worldwide criticism of its treatment of Ireland, England passed the Poor Relief Bill. Starving men and women walked barefoot five to ten miles a day for tenpence. They worked on projects that British law decreed had to be unproductive, in keeping with laissez-faire doctrine which prevented the government from interfering in economic affairs. Women with infant children broke stones for roads that went nowhere. Men were prohibited from reclaiming thousands of acres of wasteland or building piers, harbors, and curing houses along the coast, where the waters contained an abundant supply of fish. The Bill gave money to those Irish that wanted to emigrate, with just a few shillings left over, so they would arrive virtually penniless. It also stipulated that any farmer wanting relief food for his family had to surrender "all rights to any land over and above one quarter of a statue acre." This British system of relief led to neither an increase in food nor to goods that could be exchanged for food. Instead, under the guise of helping the Irish, it was paying them to leave their country. Lord Bentinck in the House of Commons attacked the Bill: "Never before was there an instance of a Christian government allowing so many people to perish without interfering." A new Irish Relief Act became law on February 26, 1847, establishing soup kitchens serving one meal per day. Each serving contained the essence of one-half ounce of meat. The Lancet, England's famous medical journal, declared the soup worthless. "The given portions of beef, fat, flour, sugar, and water provided less than three ounces of solid nutriment per quart of soup." It was the Indian meal from America that was capable of preserving life and health. It was boiled in a cauldron of salted water, sometimes with rice, and stirred until it thickened. The Irish called it "stirabout." In 1850, in the House of Commons, Benjamin Disraeli offered this opinion of British-ruled Ireland: "A starving population, an absentee aristocracy, an alien church, and the weakest executive in the world." Chapter Ten Before the famine, the Irish buried their dead with large, well-conducted funerals: a coffin, a wake, professional keeners, and a horse-drawn hearse that hundreds would follow to the gravesite. The coffin was essential. It was the dearly departed's final private room. During the famine, when wood became scarce, coffins were made from dismantling old family chests, tables, boats, and even warped coffin boards taken from graveyards. When wood ran out, bodies were sown up in a sack. Funerals went unnoticed and seldom attended. People despised the hardened men who, in horse-drawn carts, were paid to carry the sick to the hospital or workhouse, and the dead to the cemetery. PART II: Escape Chapter Eleven An Irish immigrant from Chicago wrote home to Ireland, "The labourer can earn as much in one day as will support him for a week. The richest land in the world is here or in Wisconsin for $1.25 an acre, pure alluvial soil." If a family could raise enough money for one ticket to America, the eldest son or daughter would go. After getting a job, they would send money back to help pay the rent and buy a ticket for a younger sibling. During the week before his departure, the emigrant would call on friends and neighbors throughout the parish, inviting people to his home the night before boarding ship to a "farewell supper," or "feast of departure" or a "live wake." That night, stories would be told and gifts given to the emigrant: a box of hard-boiled eggs, some crocked butter, or some rye or oatmeal patties. The emigrant and his father would dance, the father saying it will "likely be the last step ever we'll dance." There was not a dry eye in the house. The American wake combined the pleasures of song, dance, and melancholy which is nowhere more appreciated than in Ireland. Embracing his father and kissing his mother, the son had to pull himself away. With tears streaming down his face, he turned and ran out, the mother running after him and embracing him once more. Irish emigrants to America viewed the United States as a place where they would pay no tax to an alien church, cultivate the soil without paying rent, earn high wages without being servants, and have a stake as voting citizens. Chapter Twelve In Ireland money was a possession always hidden and never talked about. It was mostly coffin and burial money. But now it was used for the price of a ticket to America. Shipping agents stood to profit more from jamming their ships with emigrants instead of crates and bales. Landlords called the emigration "voluntary", but the alternative was starvation. The truth was, the landlords wanted to rid Ireland of the poorest, weakest, and least skilled workers and use the land to raise cattle, providing meat for the industrial workers of England and Scotland. Fewer mouths to fed in Ireland meant more meat to send to England. In 1847, there was still enough wheat, oats, barley, butter, eggs, beef, pork, and lamb in Ireland to feed for a year four times as many people as were leaving the country. But all this produce was still being sent to Liverpool on the very ships that carried the emigrants. On one journey to England, the steamer Ajax carried 1,514 firkins of butter, 102 casks of pork, 44 hogsheads of whiskey, 844 sacks of oats, 247 sacks of porter, 12 sacks of fodder, 28 bales of feathers, 8 sacks of lard, 296 boxes of eggs, 30 head of cattle, 90 pigs, 220 lambs, and 34 calves. About twenty vessels sailed every day from Ireland with similar cargo. In crossing over to England, the Irish were jammed tightly on the upper deck. They were completely exposed to waves washing over them during the 36-hour trip, while the pigs were comfortably lodged between decks. An observer watching them disembark said, "The people were positively prostrated from the sea and rain, seasick all the way, suffering from cold at night, scarcely able to walk. It was disgraceful and inhuman." At some point, the emigrants' sentiments coalesced into a profound loathing, a savage hatred, of Great Britain. Chapter Thirteen Irish ports were now crammed with emigrants. Lodging houses, for passengers waiting for delayed ships, slept several to a room in filthy conditions. Men who had taken Father Mathew's pledge to avoid liquor were now told that whiskey prevented seasickness. Chicory worth threepence was sold as coffee for two shillings, sevenpence. Unscrupulous agents warned them that they would not be allowed to board without liquor, pistols, telescopes, bowie knives, and fishing tackle. So great was the desire to get out of Ireland that men would hide in an overstuffed mattress or packed up to the chin in a salt barrel with a small air hole. One stowaway hid so successfully that on arrival in Boston he had to have his mortified legs amputated. PART III: The Voyage Chapter Fourteen Conditions in steerage (below deck) were dark, cramped, and unventilated. Sleeping births were pine boards 18 inches wide fastened to the wall (three to four inches less than the average width of a man's back). There was no privacy. Women and girls had to undress and sleep next to strange men. However, their faith in God did sustain them, saying "It's the mercy of God that kept us alive long enough to board this ship," or "With the help of God, we'll reach America before our food runs out." Chapter Fifteen The sailing vessels ranged from four hundred to six hundred tons and carried between three and five hundred Irish. Their above-deck movements were limited to the waist of the ship. They could not go aft where the captain and cabin passengers lived, and were forbidden on the quarter-deck. They washed their clothes in sea water and dried them on ropes strung between the masts. When dried, they shook out the salt so it would not itch or burn their skin. They caught "lucky water" (rainwater) in pots and pans. In steerage, they played cards, told stories, sang songs, and read books. The women sewed and knitted. Tradesmen made money repairing shoes and clothes. Children danced to the Irish fiddlers and melodeon players. Bets were placed on the day and hour when land would be sighted, the winner receiving the entire amount collected. Bets were paid in cash, rum, flour, meal, salted fish, meat, or lemonade. Chapter Sixteen On the foredeck was a fireplace, called a caboose, where the emigrants cooked their food. The hot coals were contained in a metal cage bordered on three sides by a large wooden case lined with bricks. Some baked oatmeal cakes, others made stirabouts in pots with meal, vegetables, and salted fish, and some made porridge with molasses. At seven o'clock cooking ended when a seaman emptied a bucket of sea water on the coals. The movement of the sea caused great seasickness below decks. Many were weakened by dehydration and the inability to eat. Chapter Seventeen Great suffering was produced by the British ships only having two water closets for 350 people. They were placed in the very bowsprit of the ship, constantly exposed to wind and spray. During a storm, no one could use them, everyone relieved themselves wherever possible below. Some went down to the orlop deck where the cargo was stored below the steerage deck. A stench arose from the accumulated waste through the uncaulked ceiling and permeated everyone's clothes. A simple solution to this problem would have been passengers having their own chamber pot. The waste matter could have been deposited below in a tightly covered barrel. When the weather cleared, the barrel could have been dumped overboard. Emigrants were called filthy, but they were not provided any accommodations for washing their hands or taking baths. This was in contrast to the Mayflower 200 years before, when 101 passengers arrived clean and healthy. The horrendous conditions aboard British ships earned them the name "coffin ships." Of 100,000 emigrants carried aboard British ships to Canada in 1847, 25,000 died en route or within six months after arrival. Chapter Eighteen When a passenger died, the ship's mate would go down and wrap his body in an old piece of canvas sailcoth. At least thirty pounds of stone were tucked in at the feet. The ship's bells tolled the beginning of the funeral service. Four seamen acted as pallbearers and lifted the corpse through the hatch to the main deck. The body was draped with the flag of Great Britain. The captain, dressed in his best uniform, read from the Book of Common Prayer, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? (I Corinthians 15:55) With the full hope of a glorious resurrection we commit this body to the deep." The pallbearers then tilted the plank seaward and the body slid feet first into the water. Chapter Nineteen After six weeks at sea, passengers became lifeless and indifferent. They were weak from dehydration and malnutrition. and suffering from diarrhea, dysentery, and typhus. There were burials at sea every day now. PART IV: Through the Golden Door Chapter Twenty Seaweed was sighted in the ninth week. Land, therefore, was about one week away. Then passengers fell to their knees and thanked God for His mercy to them when Staten Island appeared. When the ship was two hours away from New York harbour, an order came that every mattress, bolster, pillow, and blanket in steerage had to be thrown overboard. Otherwise, they would have to spend weeks in quarantine when a medical officer came aboard and found anything capable of spreading disease. Also, they needed to scour and scrub their steerage quarters with sand and sea water. American ships practiced weekly if not daily scrubbings. But the British, viewing the Irish as dregs of an overpopulated country, did not see fit to practice sanitary measures that would have saved their lives, but waited until land was sighted to clean the steerage. Chapter Twenty-One Upon anchoring, a medical officer boarded selected sick passengers to be taken to the Quarantine Hospital on Staten Island. This was heart-wrenching as family members who were healthy could not go with them even if they wanted to. The dead boarded a different boat to be buried on Staten Island. At the dock, the Irish were besieged by tavern and boardinghouse runners who came to coerce families toward their establishments, for extortionist rates, of course. All this happened to the disembarking passengers, who did not know that within walking distance of their ship were many tavern and boardinghouse owners who did not hire dishonest runners to cheat the new arrivals. Chapter Twenty-Two Staten Island's population had grown from 22,000 in 1777 to 500,000 in 1847. Wealthy neighborhoods were within walking distance of the slums. It was not unusual for a judge to live only a block away from the chimney sweep who cleaned his chimney. Irish servant girls, attending the wealthy in their townhouses, would bring home good things to eat to their mothers and fathers. Chapter Twenty-Three The tenements awaiting the Irish in New York in 1847 only had plumbing on the ground level. Their privies overflowed with what was called "night soil." It was carted away twice a week by street department personnel who shoveled it into horse-drawn wagons and dumped it into the river. When the night-soil man failed to come by, human excrement was carried down in buckets from the tenements and emptied into the street. The streets of New York also were used as a depository for people's garbage. Peddlers used the gutters to throw away fish heads and the viscera and trimmings of butchered animals. Pigs were allowed to roam free to eat what they could. There were over 60,000 horses who pulled all the private and public transportation. Annually, they produced well over 309,000 tons of manure between The Battery and Canal Street. In other cities like Pittsburgh and Hartford, outlying farmers came in and hauled away what they needed. But New York had to load it onto tugs and barges and scows to ship it to the farms. The nearest farms could not use all of it, so there was too much of a surplus, producing a perpetual stench and filthy sanitary conditions. The Irish had arrived in the nick of time. Given their familiarity with animals and piles of manure on their farms, they began lucrative manure-removal companies. In time, they also dug the Erie Canal, built the embankment for the Chesapeake railroad, laid the first railway line from Boston to Providence, and extended the railroads into Pennsylvania coal regions. They worked their way up from laborer and cartman to fireman, policeman, and salonkeeper; butcher, blacksmith, and bricklayer; lumberman, ironworker, and leatherworker. Beneath the streets of New York they laid both the gas lines that lighted the streets and the pipes that carried drinking water into the buildings. Soon the American theater would be graced with Helen Hayes, Spencer Tracy, Barry Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly, Art Carney and Jackie Gleason. The Irish contributed playwrights (Eugene O'Neill), painters (Georgia O'Keefe), sculptors (Augustus Saint-Gaudens), novelists (F. Scott Fitzgerald), psychiatrists (Harry Stack Sullivan), and a president (John F. Kennedy), to name just a few.