In 1844, on the eve of the Great Famine, 8.5 million people lived in Ireland. In the next ten years, nearly 2 million emigrated and a further 1 million died as a result of this catastrophe.  The Great Famine opened the floodgates of out-migration from Ireland to countries around the world. By 1911, sixty years after the Famine, the population of Ireland was only 4.39 million, a little over half of its 1841 base. Even today, the combined population of the Republic of Ireland (4.5 million) and Northern Ireland (1.8 million) totals only 6.3 million – still 25% less than before the Great Hunger took its toll.

 

Before the Famine, Ireland was composed primarily of rural communities, but it was also a densely populated place. In the west of Ireland, for example, the average population density was 1000 people per square mile, whereas for the rest of the island an average of 700 people per square mile lived on cultivated land.  Moreover, by 1845, due in part to the Penal Laws, the practice of subdividing land had forced the vast majority of Irish Catholics to survive on tiny portions of land. Illustrative of the increasingly smaller and smaller plots were the names given to these landholdings. The original plot, called acow’s grass (described as enough land to feed one cow) was divided among the children and then divided again among the grandchildren. The first division was referred to as acow’s foot and the second division as a cow’s toe. A cow’s toe was only one-quarter the size of a cow’s grass. This subdivision continued with each generation of children. Over time, it forced increasingly more people to rely upon smaller and smaller patches of land.  This dependency on arable land barely large enough to provide even the most basic subsistence, made those who had to live off the products of these tiny plots much more susceptible to natural catastrophes. Furthermore, politics and prejudice compounded this precarious situation and helped set the stage for one of the greatest famines in modern history and one that fundamentally changed the history and demographics of the island.

 

On these small bits of land, sometimes no larger than a quarter acre, the Irish produced food for home consumption. Since the mid-1700s, the cultivation of potatoes had increased dramatically in Ireland for several reasons. For one, the potato root proved to be useful for breaking up the land in preparation for sowing grain, Ireland’s primary export. For another reason, a large number of potatoes can be grown on very small plots of land and still be able to sustain a fairly sizeable family. Moreover, the potato was also a reliable food source and quite nutritious. Therefore, the number of childhood diseases and related infant deaths decreased while health in general improved among the Irish in the century before the Great Famine.

 

Thus, by a combination of government policy (Penal Laws), economics (international trade) and common sense (more nutritious and reliable food source), a vast and growing portion of the Irish population had by 1845 become dependent on the potato as its primary food source.  In fact, some 40 percent of the Irish population (more than three million people) relied on the potato as its main source of nourishment. In places like Galway, the percentage was even higher: nearly 60 percent of the people in that county lived off potatoes.  Unimaginable by modern standards of nutrition, the average Irish adult male ate upwards of fourteen pounds of potatoes daily, whereas women andchildren over the age of ten consumed around ten to twelve pounds and younger children five pounds a day.  While the potato provided a reliable food source -more reliable than grain, for example- poverty in Ireland was widespread and extreme.

 

Such was the state of Ireland on the eve of the Great Famine: densely populated by predominantly poor, but large, families that depended for their survival to an extreme degree on the amount of potatoes they could grow on tiny patches of land.  Consequently, when the blight struck in 1845, it had catastrophic effects. When it continued to return in successive years, the Irish had fewer and fewer resources upon which to rely with each passing year.   English policy and prejudice also contributed to the wretchedness of the situation.

 

Numerous other factors, beyond the destruction of the potato crop, compounded the devastation wrought by the Great Famine. Among them were the laissez faire economic policies of the British government and the moralism of Sir Charles Trevelyan.  As John Mitchel famously said “The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.”  Trevelyan, as assistant secretary to the Treasury, was in charge of administering relief during the Great Famine. He insisted that “The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson, that calamity must not be too much mitigated. …The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the Famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”

 

Other accounts described appalling conditions, and these observers, while sympathetic, felt powerless to help those so desperately in need.  Cork magistrate, Mr Nicholas Cummins in 1846 described one such scene.  “I entered some of the hovels to ascertain the cause, and the scenes which presented themselves were such as no tongue or pen can convey the slightest idea of. In the first, six famished and ghastly skeletons, to all appearances dead, were huddled in a corner on some filthy straw, their sole covering what seemed a ragged horsecloth, their wretched legs hanging about, naked above the knees. I approached with horror, and found by a low moaning they were alive - they were in fever, four children, a woman and what had once been a man. It is impossible to go through the detail. Suffice it to say, that in a few minutes I was surrounded by at least 200 such phantoms, such frightful spectres . . .”

 

Given these conditions, it is no wonder that thousands upon thousands, when possible, left Ireland for foreign shores.  However, this raises the question of who had the resources to emigrate?  Obviously not the very poor in these first years of the Famine, as is so often assumed. Not only did the poor lack the money to pay for the cost of the journey, but their extreme poverty made them particularly vulnerable victims of this great tragedy.  Rather it was Ireland’s middling crowd who left and initiated an outward chain migration that would continue for over fifty years.  “Those who were best off, at once sold what they had, and emigrated, leaving the poorest behind,” one observer wrote in 1847.  Another account notes that “large farmers . . . are hoarding up their money . . . withholding their due from the impoverished landlord, in order that they may on the first opportunity escape from the famine-stricken island to the unblighted harvests of America.”  

 

Many who left Ireland chose New Orleans to make a new home - and for good reason. New Orleans in the 1840s and until the beginning of the Civil War was the second largest port in American (behind only New York which had just eclipsed the city for this position in the late 1830s) and the fourth largest port in the world. A tremendous volume of goods constantly needed to be moved from one point to another for the port, the economic engine of the entire area, to run smoothly.  In 1855, for example, a year when 2266 vessels carrying nearly a million tons of cargo entered New Orleans, drays alone moved nearly one and a half million bales of cottons, 94,000 hogsheads of tobacco, and 18,300,000 gallons of molasses. The Irish monopolized this field.  As one contemporary visitor noted, the merchandise had “scarce[ly] . . . touched the levee, when swarms of Irish” loaded the items onto their drays and charged off to their respective destinations.

 

Irish immigrants consciously pursued those jobs that offered opportunity and the chance to earn decent wages. As a group, the Irish were particularly skillful in appropriating and using to their advantage the economic opportunities offered in New Orleans even to the extent of entirely controlling important sectors of the city’s commerce and industry.  Contrary to popular opinion, the Irish of New Orleans were much more than just laborers or ditch diggers.  In fact, among the Irish men who came here, nearly every field from doctors to druggists, professors to undertakers was represented.

 

The history of the Irish who emigrated to, and lived in, New Orleans was not, as some historians have claimed mistakenly, the history of a people “undetermined and afraid to act.”  Their actions, be they in protest of poor work conditions, in picket lines for higher wages or the appropriation of an entire, vital sector of the port economy show a strong, proactive and dynamic community in the process of carving out a space for itself in a new home.

 

 

To learn more about this topic please see Laura D. Kelley’s new book  The Irish in New Orleans, available at ULpress.org or wherever books are sold.