Irish Immigrants In America

“One thing I think is certain that if the emigrants knew before hand what they have to suffer for about the first six months after leaving home in every respect they would never come here.”

-John Doyle, letter to wife (1818)

John Doyle wrote of the struggles that the Irish immigrants have to face in America for their first six months in the new world. Little did he know that in a couple of decades, the Irish population of America would increase almost fivefold. The story that he would tell of his immigration would be strikingly different than the stories of the nearly 700,000 refugees that would make the voyage across the Atlantic thirty years after he did. The conditions for the Irish Catholics in America would all but get better.

Irish

Americans helped build America’s economy and culture, but many of their contributions go unnoticed in today’s world, even though they had a substantial impact on America as compared to the other immigrant groups that have come to America in her 240 years as a country. Through cultural exchange, exploring ideas, and cross-cultural encounters, Irish men, women, and children would change the American way of life forever.

Immigration has been the foundation for our country. It created a melting pot of cultures. The immigration in early colonial times brought ethnic and cultural diversity to the burgeoning civilization. One of the largest groups of immigrants came in 1847, when a great famine drove the Irish from their homeland to find a new start in America. This wave of Irish immigration brought the first peasant immigrants to America.

Emigration from Ireland had been steady, yet saw a sharp increase in the mid-1800’s in proportion with the severity of the Irish potato famine. Reduced to the deepest depths of poverty by the famine and other harsh conditions, Irish Catholics in Ireland were evicted from homes and denied basic human rights. Laws were passed so they did not have a political voice, and could not own land. During the potato famine, any crop that didn’t fail went to the rich English Protestant landowners in Ireland and England, while the Irish tenants only got higher rent and inhumane treatment. When rent got too high, and they were evicted, the Irish Catholics were cast out to the edges of society and civilization. These poor Irish people’s only hope was the chance at a new start along the “gold paved roads” of America.

The ships that went to America were almost always understocked, unseaworthy, and often times the captain and crew were under trained and didn’t care about the poverty-stricken passengers they were taking to America and Canada. Most of the time, these wretched voyages took weeks longer than the two week journey that was promised to the Irish. Water ran short, food went stale, and people were crammed together. Disease ran rampant under the decks, storms ravaged the ships and tore holes in the hulls. All ships coming into New York had to be stopped for medical inspection. Passengers with any disease were immediately removed and taken to the quarantine station on Staten Island, just five miles out of Manhattan, and ships were often quarantined for 30 days.

Immediately upon stepping foot on American soil, Irish natives were victims to Irishmen called runners. The seemingly friendly, Gaelic speaking runners promised them a boarding house that would provide them with fresh meals and comfortable housing, but these boarding houses were actually filthy hell-holes in lower Manhattan. They would also give their Irish victims phony train tickets to places out west that promised jobs and good money.

Many poor newcomers stayed in and around the docks in New York and Boston. The migrants would cram themselves into small basements and alleyways often with previous displaced persons. Being a newcomer meant being on the bottom of the social ladder. Irish men and women could only get the worst jobs and worst living conditions. These poor refugees couldn’t get out of poverty until they had a political voice. Until then, they were stuck doing America’s manual labor.

This huge flock of people was America’s first encounter with poor outsiders, and the American people didn’t know how to treat them. The American people spat upon the Irish greenhorns. As the Irish left the ships, Americans saw their poverty in their ripped clothing, minimal possessions, and stench. The Americans despised the peasants that had come from Ireland. The Americans couldn’t trust these new citizens because of their Catholic religion. In America, people in the south were used to using slaves and in New England were used to having poorly paid servants for their worst and lowest paying work. In Ireland, the people were used to giving to the community and doing their part in everyday life. In the communities, specific people played specific roles. There were the farmers, shoemakers, entertainers, cooks, and storytellers. Everyone played their part, and played it well. These two very different cultures set up for the treatment of Irish in America.

The Irish paved the road to industrial America, both literally and figuratively.

The Irish people did the most amount of work for the least amount of pay. They would build canals, roads, train tracks, and worked mines and quarries. They worked under the worst conditions, and many died during work. The women worked as house servants, in laundries, and factories. Many of the Irishmen went from job to job, not being able to keep one for long. Letters that they wrote home expressed their experiences and what America was really like, as demonstrated in the poem ‘I Am the Little Irish Boy’ by Henry David Thoreau. I am the little Irish boy; That lives in the shanty; I am four years old today; And shall soon be one and twenty; I shall grow up; And be a great man; And shovel all day; As hard as I can. Down in the deep cut; Where the men lived; Who made the Railroad. For supper; I have some potato; And sometimes some bread; And then if it’s cold; I go right to bed. I lie on some straw; Under my father’s coat; My mother does not cry; And my father does not scold; For I am a little Irish Boy; And I’m four years old. The poem puts in words what the Irish Americans experienced every day. The everyday struggle for life affected families, and everyone worked no matter their

age.

They had thought America to be a place where the streets were paved of gold, but really it was the Irishman's job to pave the streets. Yet, more and more Irish kept coming over to America. Refugees sent their families in Ireland money to buy passage tickets to America, despite what the immigrants had described America to be. The Irish natives that came to America with money from their relatives experienced and did the same things that their relatives did in America. It was a vicious cycle of people coming over, job hopping, and giving money to relatives so that they could come over to do the same.

As more immigrants came over to America, the contributions of the Irish to American society grew, and soon became a long list of assets, without which America would have had much delayed growth. The canals that the Irishmen dug allowed the American people to ship goods throughout the United States, and settle the midwest. The railroads also allowed for further transportation and transcontinental migration westward. The metals and minerals that Irish Americans mined became material for technological advancements and lead America into the industrial age. Logging supplied wood to America for the pioneers settle the Great Plains region.

Many of the Irish contributions are still impacting us today. The Irish contribution is one of the greatest achievements any immigrant group has done for America. The industrial period made way for even more technological advancements in America. Cell phones, computers, and televisions might not not be here if the Irish didn’t work the way they did. The Irish also brought a lot to America with them. They brought culture, spirit, and passion.

Yet, the Irish contributions to America are not widely known today. Most textbooks have little in them about Irish Americans building Industrial America. All the immigration that is talked about in textbooks today is general immigration through Ellis Island, but nothing about the poor Irish naturalized citizens.

Americans had never before seen a wave of immigrants this large and this poor.

Americans encountered large numbers of poor Irish, which might have prepared them a little bit more for the upcoming influx of settlers through Ellis Island a couple decades later. Without this Irish encounter, later immigrants wouldn’t have had the same impact on America. The cultural exchange of the Irish and American benefitted the American people and the Irish immigrants. For example, the building of the majestic St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City that still stands today as a testimony to the shaping of the Catholic American population and Irishmen that worked so hard in America. Many of the Irish became more sophisticated and educated after coming to America. The American’s gained a sense of appreciation for different cultures and treated later immigrants much better than the poor peasants that came from Ireland. The Irish explored America. They came in on ravaged ships, thinking they would step onto gold roads when they got off. In reality, the conditions in America were no better than those on the ships. The Irish had to explore the true America. They discovered how the American people treated foreigners. Americans, I think, explored their communal self also. This is both negative and positive. They got to see how much better they were than other people and other cultures. American’s also saw how terrible and tyrannical they were to these cultures, who they thought inferior to

themselves. Was this supposedly democracy really a democracy if they didn’t treat the newcomers right? The migrants came to America for refuge from England’s tyranny and misuse of power. Instead, they got the same treatment, but they had enough food, a chance to own their own land, and no fear of a landlord in America, making immigration a better option.

In conclusion, the Irish left a big impact on America, even though it is disregarded today. The Irish Americans helped push America into the industrial age and technological advancements by providing raw material and manual labor. Most of this hard work goes unnoticed by people today even though without the Irish immigrants, America wouldn’t be the same.