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IRISH IMMIGRATION TO NORTH AMERICA.   Term Paper ID:29074 Click to get this paper

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Paper Abstract: Reasons for massive immigration. Political relationship of Ireland and Great Britain. Early 17th century migration of Irish people to America as indentured servants. Massive migration of the 19th century caused by British public policy and the potato famine. The terrible conditions crossing the ocean. American negative reaction of the Irish immigrants. Paper Introduction: The story of the massive Irish immigration to North America between 1820 and 1924 has its roots in the nature of the relationship between Ireland and Great Britain after 1800, when the Act of Union, creating the United Kingdom, was instituted by the English Parliament and ratified by an almost entirely bought-off Irish Parliament ("Act"). The Union, as far as Ireland was concerned, was rescinded in 1922, by the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which created the Irish Free State and which reserved Ulster Province, or Northern Ireland, for the UK (Boland and Ranelagh). The years between the two treaties were marked by almost unrelieved contentiousness over the status of the Irish. The Act of Union, designed to assert the legality of British supremacy forever, had the effect of causing Catholics to agitate for "Irish civic and religious freedom and for separ Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. Prod. In that same year, an editorial in Blackwood'sMagazine "complained of the expense being incurred to help the Irish. Certain patterns of settlement,however, had begun to emerge. The whole matter was complicated inNew Orleans in 1853, where a yellow fever epidemic claimed 2 % of all Irishin the region (Lennon). They worked for themselves and to provide for family members back in Ireland, often paying their way to the New World. Between 1843and 1846, the annual number of Irish migrants increased nationally from23, to 7 , . Within five years the potatofamine had claimed almost a million Irish lives, over twenty thousand ofthem dropping in the fields from starvation" (Cooke 274). What public funding trickled down tothe general population "was paid in half wages to starving men for doingwork that was unprofitable." MacManus continues: This latter was a specific Government condition embodied in the Act. Thisdoes not mean that opinions were not strongly held. In case of either transportation or voluntarymigration, the fact of the famine and its attendant conditions--starvation,disease, poverty--meant that the conditions aboard ship were profoundlyunsanitary. For some 3 years, a series of armed revoltsoccurred, but by 1829, Irish Catholics were allowed religious freedom andultimately to sit in Parliament. Works Cited"Act of Union." Britannica 2 1 Deluxe Edition CD-ROM. The story of the massive Irish immigration to North America between182 and 1924 has its roots in the nature of the relationship betweenIreland and Great Britain after 18 , when the Act of Union, creating theUnited Kingdom, was instituted by the English Parliament and ratified by analmost entirely bought-off Irish Parliament ("Act"). New York: Fox, Duffield, 19 4."Ireland." Funk & Wagnalls New Encyclopedia. He cites figures showingthat more than 16% of all New Yorkers as of 1851 were impoverished and thatmost of the 113, people receiving public- or private-sector charity orconfined to jails, workhouses, hospitals, or asylums were Irish. MacManus (6 3) describes Victoria's solicitousness over the"unfortunate conditions prevailing in Ireland" as her concern, andParliament's, that Ireland's English landlords might lose money orproductivity on their estates. Old Greenwich, Conn.: Devin-Adair, 1921."Molly Maguires." Britannica 2 1 Deluxe Edition CD-ROM. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1924. of ||Name |Migrants |Deaths ||Larch |44 |1 8 ||Queen |493 |137 ||Avon |552 |236 ||Virginius |476 |267 ||Unnamed |6 |< 1 |One reason that so many Irish wound up in Canada in the 184 s was that theUS Congress, as well as the states of New York and Massachusetts, enactedstiffer regulations on passenger ships and on the entry of impoverishedindividuals. The Union, as far asIreland was concerned, was rescinded in 1922, by the Anglo-Irish Treaty,which created the Irish Free State and which reserved Ulster Province, orNorthern Ireland, for the UK (Boland and Ranelagh). In Boston over the course of one year, 3 , Irisharrived, bringing the city's population to 1 , (Lennon). MacManus says that of some 9 , Irish emigrants to Canada in 1847,6,1 died at sea, 4,1 on arrival, 5,2 in hospitals, and 1,9 at theirfinal destination. He also cites records of individual ships, as follows(61 ):|Ship |No. . Irish needs would be met out of Irish resources (Quinn 41).Trevelyan had been suspicious of the famine relief efforts from the outsetowing to the anticipation that fraud and dependency would be rampant inIreland (Lennon). What was over, rather quickly, was government enthusiasm to provide asafety valve for those affected by the famine. MacManus comments that the same yearParliament voted £2 , "to beautify London's Battersea Park" it voted£1 , "for the relief of the two million Irish people (out of a total ofeight million) who were suffering keen distress" (6 2-3). Ireland | | | ||Irish Free State|28,567 |Italy |3,845 ||Norway |6,453 |Poland |5,982 ||Russia |2,248 |Sweden |5,982 ||Switzerland |2, 81 |Yugoslavia |671 | These figures indicate that the 1824 act had the effect of privilegingthe immigration position of the Irish vis-à-vis other countries (US Bureau,24ff). Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration. "The Tragedy of Bridget Such-a-One." American Heritage 48 (December 1997): 36-49.The Irish in America: The Long Voyage Home. The fact that famine relief was a success promptedBritish officials to pronounce the famine over, although that was not thecase. The MollyMaguires, formed in Ireland in the 184 s, was a secret society made up ofantilandlord activists, and Lennon says that they were responsible for theassassination, in Ireland, of Major Denis Mahon, of Virginius infamy. By 1855, 43members of Congress were admitted Know-Nothings ("Know-Nothing"). Many moved on. The Act of Union, designed to assert the legality ofBritish supremacy forever, had the effect of causing Catholics to agitatefor "Irish civic and religious freedom and for separation from GreatBritain" ("Ireland" 414). John. Certain other features of Irish culture alsoappear to have been transported from Ireland to the US, however. They married late, if at all, knowing that with marriage came an end to the security and comforts of the "big house." Their savings not only brought new immigrants into the community, but also built the country's Catholic churches (Lennon). The momentum for the migration beganin the mid-184 s, when Ireland's staple potato crop failed three years in arow. 2 ed.Boland, Frederick Henry, and Ranelagh, John O'Beirne. It could not be used either for seeding the lands, or reclaiming the millions of acres of bog--because that would be giving the Irish farmer an unfair advantage over his English brother, and might enable hi to undersell the latter in the market (MacManus 6 4-5). Thousands died during the voyage and were buried at sea. Meanwhile,foodstuffs continued to be exported from Ireland, to maintain the "naturalcourse of trade" (MacManus 6 5). Letters From an American Farmer. 2 ed.Quinn, Peter. MacManus quotes from a report by theMontreal Emigrant Society: From Grosse Island, the great charnel-house of victimized humanity, up to Port Sarnia, and along the borders of our magnificent river, upon the shores of Lake Ontario and Erie--wherever the tide of emigration has extended--are to be found the final resting places of the sons and daughters of Erin . That potato blight"crossed the Atlantic from America in 1845. The major North American ports of call were New York, Boston, andGrosse Ile, Quebec. That attitude was adopted by Charles Trevelyan, at the time AssistantSecretary of the Treasury in Britain, who began to withdraw publicly fundedsupport for those affected by the famine: [Trevelyan was] convinced that Ireland's problem wasn't inadequate food supplies but "the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people," pronounced the famine over. . Meanwhile, a"Coercion Bill" provision put strict limits on the movement of indigenousIrish, whether tenant or freehold farmers, such as a dusk-to-dawn curfew.Violation was punished by 14 years of transportation. To relieve the British exchequer fromfinancial responsibility for the Irish, an amendment to the Irish PoorLaws, called the Labor Rate Act, enabled Anglo-Irish landlords to tax theirtenant farmers directly. The money . Otherthousands who made it alive to America aboard the "coffin ships" (MacManus6 9) died while in quarantine, awaiting government disposition, and wereburied in open trenches. The Story of the Irish Race: A Popular History of Ireland. The origin of the failure was in America, where in 1843 on the easternseaboard a blight destroyed the potato crop (Quinn 37). While in 1845 and 1846 the UK government attempted to provide socialservices, such as soup kitchens and work houses, to those whom the faminehad dispossessed, public opinion in England began to shift in a way thatblamed the Irish for their plight. . Ed. The sentence of the court was received by each prisoner with apparent satisfaction. In 1921, Congress formally stemmedthe tide of "new immigration" with a quota system that reacted against theinflux of huddled (and dark-complexioned) masses. By 1886, a bill calling for Irish homerule had been introduced, but it was defeated by British and IrishProtestant opposition. Queen Victoria made a royal visit to Ireland upon being warned that"the state of Ireland was 'alarming' and that the country was so full of'inflammable matter' that it could explode in rebellion" (Cooke 275).Victoria's reaction included a comment about "more ragged and wretchedpeople here than I ever saw anywhere else," but an attitude of pity gaveway to a political interpretation of the state of Ireland. Butthis did not have the effect of creating a national Irish subculture.Rather, it affected the structure of domestic experience of the Irish inAmerica. The dock was crowded with the prisoners, not one of whom, when called up for trial, was able to support himself in front of the dock. The Irishwere also clannish, insular, and by and large concentrated in Boston andNew York, all of which contributed to the perception that they were athreat to the livelihood of American-born whites. According to Lennon, Irish workmen moved intothe labor pool of the Industrial Revolution and westward expansion. MacManus cites a historian to theeffect that that "some of these gentlemen . . of |No. got more pay than anAmerican Secretary of State" (6 4). Over the course of the 19th century, massive numbers of Irish, mainlyCatholics, left Ireland permanently. 2 ed.Cooke, Alistair. In 1854--the same yearthat the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise of 182 ,sanctioning a theory of nationwide slavery and leading to the formation ofthe Republican Party--the newly formed American Party, also called the Know-Nothing party on account of the tendency of adherents to deny that nativismdrove their political views, was already in control of the legislature ofMassachusetts and other New England states, plus Maryland, Delaware,Kentucky, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and California (Quinn 47). The work must be unprofitable, non-productive. . The initialpolicy response was to increase imports of Indian corn from America forfamine relief (Lennon). PBS Documentary. And so they were evicted andsent to Quebec aboard The Virginius, one of the countless 'coffin ships'"that made its way to America (Lennon). New York: Alfred A. Even transportation appeared to many to be a relaxation from their sufferings (MacManus 6 4). By 1847, the sufferings had reached a significant peak, with reportsof "the uncoffined dead" being buried in trenches (MacManus 6 7). 26-28 January 1998. MacManus quotes fromthe Cork Examiner the effect of this provision in the law: Our town presents nothing but a moving mass of military and police, conveying to and from the court-house crowds of famine culprits. Bureau of Immigration. American reaction to the wave of Irish immigration was initiallyindifferent but became suspicious, hostile, and increasingly organized.American Protestant Nativism asserted itself against the influx ofimpoverished Roman Catholics, although as a practical matter the vastnessof the US seems to have been able to absorb Catholic-Protestant rivalriesin a way that the more confined spaces of the British isles could not. The soup kitchens that had been opened after 1845 wereclosed down by 1847, even though famine relief aid was sent to Ireland fromother countries, including Turkey. 2 ed.MacManus, Seumas. New immigration quotas were established under theImmigration Act of 1924. . Thomas Lennon. An IrishBrigade led by regiments affiliated with Lafayette during the AmericanRevolution reportedly "demanded the right o be the first o the Frenchservice to strike Britain on American soil" (MacManus 482). Listed below are selected representativecountries:|Armenia |124 |Bulgaria |1 ||Czechoslovakia |3, 75 |Esthonia |124 ||France |3,954 |Germany |51,227 ||Great Britain, |34, 7 |Greece |1 ||N. By 1855, more than 12% of Ireland's poplation had "landedon the wharves and piers around Manhattan. MacManus acidlycalculates that this worked out to twelve pence per capita. . Lennon explains: The women did not follow: Irish women took over two-thirds of the domestic jobs in America's cities. Quinn (39) citesan 1847 editorial in the London Times that unfavorably compared theindolent and lazy Celts to the more hardy and industrious Saxons comprisingthe population of England. The Catholic Church, indeed, seems to have become a significantAmerican institution in part because of the structure of Irish migrant lifehere (Quinn 48), though it did not achieve the civil force that it hadachieved in Latin America . . Meanwhile, Trevelyan and other Britishpoliticians became enthusiastic for the legislation that ensued. Meanwhile, in NewOrleans, the unskilled labor pool of Irish migrants competed with the laborof free and slave blacks, a competition that sometimes degenerated intosomething like interethnic violence. About a million Irish sailed for America within fiveyears (Quinn passim; MacManus passim). W.P. I attended the court for a few hours this day. According to Quinn, the perception of the Irish immigrants as a massof ignorant paupers was not necessarily wrong. However, unwilling toremain under British rule, some 5, migrants made their way down fromQuebec to the US. There would be no more extraordinary measures by the Treasury, not even when the potato failed again in 1848, 1849, and into the early 185 s. It is difficult to see how that fact could have been remotelypredictable as of 1824. Thefamine was not an English problem . Lennon cites theemergence of a whole range of other Irish politicians, including Al Smith,who rose from poverty to the governorship of the state of New York, andcolorful Jimmy Walker, who was mayor of New York during the 192 s--and whoretreated from public life in the wake of myriad scandals (Lennon).Earlier waves of immigration had originated from northern and westernEurope, but the new wave was coming from southern and eastern Europe--especially Poland, Russia, and Italy. Crevecoeur's 177 description of Americans as a "promiscuous new breed" comprising "English,Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes" positions the Irish asan integral part of the growing population of the New World. One important feature of transportation of the famine-plagued Irish isthat the UK government or the Anglo-Irish landlords bore the expense of thevoyage, essentially subsidizing migration to Australia or Canada. The years between thetwo treaties were marked by almost unrelieved contentiousness over thestatus of the Irish. U.S. But many stayed,helping swell the city's population from 37 , to 63 , in a singledecade" (Quinn, 47). Thesociety of "Mollies" was reconstituted in the Pennsylvania and WestVirginia coal fields. Both Massachusetts and New York made shippers post a bond forevery passenger and taxed them for those who "became public charges," whichincreased the tide of migrants for Canada (Quinn 46). Cooke cites the success of one Patrick Kennedy, an 184 smigrant and ancestor of a later US president (275). Knopf, 1974.Crevecoeur, Hector St. Somemigrants boarded "cotton ships" bound for the port of New Orleans (Lennon).For other, voluntary, migrants, the steerage fare to America cost £4, andships of varying degrees of seaworthiness responded to the demand to makethe seven-week voyage. After the mid-185 s and during the Civil War, the tide of massiveIrish migration to the US declined. That was the same yearthat the Anglo-Irish Treaty formally provided for the formation of theIrish Free State ("Act"). 1978 ed."Know-Nothing Party." Britannica 2 1 Deluxe Edition CD-ROM. When after 188 nativist Americans as well as more recent arrivalsbegan to see that the nature and complexion of immigration had changed, theIrish as a group seem to have become more assimilated into the USmainstream. Trent. On the other hand, the Imperial Exchequer providedsalaries to the Anglo-Irish as civil servants--so-called commissioners,superintendents, and inspectors of work. Twenty thousand and upwards thus went down to their graves (MacManus 6 9-1 ). Alistair Cooke's America. While the potato famine can be pointed to as a reason for massmigrations out of Ireland and toward the alleviation of hunger, Britishpublic policy aggravated the situation in a variety of ways. "Ireland." Britannica 2 1 Deluxe Edition CD-ROM. Irish people had migrated from Ireland to America before theRevolutionary war, often as indentured servants (Lennon). Theresponse of the British government, according to Quinn and MacManus, was toprevent farmers farming more than a quarter acre from benefiting fromfamine relief, which "left many tenants with the choice of abandoning theirholdings or condemning their families to starvation," and which had theeffect of clearing or "tumbling" the land and consolidating control of itwith the capital-rich Anglo-Irish landlords (Quinn 42). Between 1875 and 1877,McParlan testified in various trials that convicted and condemned 1 menfor murder. Irish migration to the US peaked in 1851, at 219, , andin the years following began to decline (Quinn, 47). and there was no need for wastinganother shilling on a disaster 'which the heedlessness and indolence of theIrish had brought upon themselves'" (Quinn 39-4 ). There, between 1862 and 1876, in the context ofunsafe working conditions and employment discrimination, sabotage andassassination were attributed to Irish-American workers: "The Ancient Orderof Hibernians, a local Irish fraternal association, was thought to be afront for the terrorists, and mine owners hired James McParlan, adetective, to infiltrate the group" ("Molly"). At least one Anglo-Irish landlord, Major DenisMahon, "decided that it would be more profitable to ship his tenants abroadthan to pay to keep them in the workhouses. could not be used to build Irish railways--because that would be a discrimination against English railway builders. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.