Irish Potato Famine
1845 to 1852
An estimated one million Irish died and another one million emigrated- mostly to America with New York City as their point of entry
I have read numerous books on the impact and causes of The Irish Potato Famine. By far the best account I have read is in Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York on their occupational development, how they made a living and supported their families.
Migration to America was not cheap. First one had to book passage to England and then buy a ticket to America. This meant the poorest Irish could not leave. (About five percent of Emirates had their trips paid for by absentee landlords.)
There were several classes of tickets, most travelled in steerage. The trip could take 30 days food had to be brought for the passengers trip unless they were in first class. Upon arrival a job and a place to live were of highest priority.
Anbinder explains the concept of "chain migration".. As soon as they could an emigrate,often a man, would send money back to his family for others to emigrate. An older arrival would help new arrivals find jobs. Some had valuable job skills , money to start a business and some nothing
Anbinder details how the records of Emigrate Savings Bank allowed him to follow the working and personal lives of famine era Irish emigrants.
The bank was founded in 1850 by 18 members of the Irish Emigrant Society, with the support of Archbishop John Hughes, purposed of the goal of serving the needs of the Irish community in New York City. The headquarters was located at on 49 Chambers Street in Manhattan.
Emigrant Savings collected extensive records of the arriving Irish immigrants to America, which were later donated to the New York Public Library and serve as valuable genealogical resources that are the core resource for Anbinder.
To open an account you had to supply your current address, your time of arrival in New York City, where you were from in Ireland, list your current occupation, any relatives you have living in New York or back in Ireland, your children and full data on any spouse you might have, Every time you made a deposit the bank updated your records. Most Irish lived in tenements without locked doors so they wanted bank accounts. Emigrate savings had only largely Irish employees and was very conservatively managed.
From the Publisher
"A breathtaking new history of the Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States during the Great Potato Famine, showing how their strivings in and beyond New York exemplify the astonishing tenacity and improbable triumph of Irish America.
In 1845, a fungus began to destroy Ireland’s potato crop, triggering a famine that would kill one million Irish men, women, and children—and drive over one million more to flee for America. Ten years later, the United States had been transformed by this stupendous migration, nowhere more than New York: by 1855, roughly a third of all adults living in Manhattan were immigrants who had escaped the hunger in Ireland. These so-called “Famine Irish” were the forebears of four U.S. presidents (including Joe Biden) yet when they arrived in America they were consigned to the lowest-paying jobs and subjected to discrimination and ridicule by their new countrymen. Even today, the popular perception of these immigrants is one of destitution and despair. But when we let the Famine Irish narrate their own stories, they paint a far different picture.
In this magisterial work of storytelling and scholarship, acclaimed historian Tyler Anbinder presents for the first time the Famine generation’s individual and collective tales of struggle, perseverance, and triumph. Drawing on newly available records and a ten-year research initiative, Anbinder reclaims the narratives of the refugees who settled in New York City and helped reshape the entire nation. Plentiful Country is a tour de force—a book that rescues the Famine immigrants from the margins of history and restores them to their rightful place at the center of the American story. "
Using data from the records of The Emirate Bank, Anbinder follows the life histories of numerous Famine Emirates. Many prospered others struggled to get along. Most no matter what way preferred America to Ireland. Anbinder traces the spread of the Irish through out the country,
From Anbinder's conclusion
"How had the Famine immigrants achieved this improbable success? First, notwithstanding the assertions of native-born Americans then and historians ever since, the Famine Irish were not overwhelmingly forced into menial day labor upon arrival. Only about half of the male Famine immigrants began their lives in America in these low-paying, perilous positions. For every Famine immigrant who had to take day labor or similar work upon landing in New York, there was another who arrived with desirable vocational experience—training as a craftsman, or experience operating a small business, or a background working as a clerk behind a desk or counter—that allowed them to find comparable jobs in Manhattan. Then, as now, Americans assumed that the immigrants who arrived on America’s shores must have been penniless paupers, the dregs of their homelands, when in fact such migrants have never made up a very large proportion of those who move to the United States. That is the case today, and that was the case for the Famine Irish, even though contemporaries failed to recognize that fact. Second, those who did start out as day laborers were hardly trapped in those positions. Forty-one percent of men whose first American jobs are best described as unskilled and who were still alive ten years later ended their careers higher up the socioeconomic ladder than where they began, and three-quarters of these social climbers finished their working days in white-collar occupations. Some became clerks, salesmen, or civil servants, but the vast majority (three out of four) opened their own business, running a saloon, grocery, or other retail enterprise. Skilled craftsmen were not trapped in their occupations either—thousands of them opened retail establishments like saloons and groceries, and still more started businesses related to their artisanal trade. To say that unskilled and artisan Famine immigrants “seldom rose from the bottom of American urban society,” as prominent scholars of the Irish experience in America have suggested for generations, is simply not true. Further evidence that the Famine immigrants had more control over their fates than previously understood is found in their savings accounts. The Famine refugees saved a lot more in those accounts than their native-born neighbors imagined. Leaving aside those who emigrated as children (and therefore had the advantages of an American education) as well as those who died before living for a decade in the United States, we find that male Famine immigrants living in New York or Brooklyn saved, on average, $463 in their accounts, equal to about $17,000 today (the median high balance was $291). Even if we take only the immigrants who started at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder and never climbed any higher, the level of savings is still impressive."
Tyler Anbinder is an emeritus professor of history at George Washington University, where he taught courses on the history of American immigration and the American Civil War era. He is the author of three award-winning books: "Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s" (1992); "Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum" (2001); and "City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York." Anbinder has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and served as the Fulbright Thomas Jefferson Distinguished professor of History at the University of Utrecht. His fourth book, Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York was published last month
I hope to read his other books soon.
Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York is a wonderful book.
Mel Ulm
