BRIA 26 2 The Potato Famine and Irish Immigration to America - Constitutional Rights Foundation

BRIA 26 2 The Potato Famine and Irish Immigration to America - Constitutional Rights Foundation

The Potato Famine and Irish Immigration to America
Between 1845 and 1855 more than 1.5 million adults and children left Ireland to seek refuge in America. Most were desperately poor, and many were suffering from starvation and disease. They left because disease had devastated Ireland’s potato crops, leaving millions without food. The Potato Famine killed more than 1 million people in five years and generated great bitterness and anger at the British for providing too little help to their Irish subjects. The immigrants who reached America settled in Boston, New York, and other cities where they lived in difficult conditions. But most managed to survive, and their descendants have become a vibrant part of American culture.
Even before the famine, Ireland was a country of extreme poverty. A Frenchman named Gustave de Beaumont traveled the country in the 1830s and wrote about his travels. He compared the conditions of the Irish to those of “the Indian in his forest and the Negro in chains. . . . In all countries, . . . paupers may be discovered, but an entire nation of paupers is what was never seen until it was shown in Ireland.”
In most of Ireland, housing conditions were terrible. A census report in 1841 found that nearly half the families in rural areas lived in windowless mud cabins, most with no furniture other than a stool. Pigs slept with their owners and heaps of manure lay by the doors. Boys and girls married young, with no money and almost no possessions. They would build a mud hut, and move in with no more than a pot and a stool. When asked why they married so young, the Bishop of Raphoe (a town in Ireland) replied: “They cannot be worse off than they are and . . . they may help each other.”