“The Noblest Offering that Nation Ever Made to Nation”: American Philanthropy and the Great Famine in Ireland

“The citizens of the United States have saved millions from the most horrible of deaths. May the great God confer on them a reward far, far superior to all human approbation.”²

“No imagination can conceive what the misery of our wretched population would be were it not for the charity of the glorious States of America.”³

“Terrible have been the sufferings through which this country has passed, and trying may be the ordeal which Ireland may have to endure before the evils of centuries are remedied and her race to greatness and prosperity begun.”⁴

On Monday, 12 April 1847, the U.S. warship Jamestown, under the command of Captain Robert Bennet Forbes (1804–89), a Boston merchant and mariner of Scottish descent, anchored off the lighthouse in Whitebay, at the entrance to Cork Harbour, after a somewhat boisterous but otherwise uneventful passage. The vessel had departed from the Charlestown Navy Yard in Massachusetts on 28 March, carrying a capacity cargo of some 800 tons of Irish famine-relief supplies valued at $40,000. The provisions and clothing had been donated or purchased with money raised among people in Boston, the state of Massachusetts, and parts of New England.

The American philanthropic intervention was prompted by a growing awareness in late 1846 and early 1847 of the rapidly deteriorating famine situation in Ireland, partly fostered by increased and more reliable coverage of the unfolding tragedy in the American press, which had hitherto been overly reliant for copy on incomplete and sometimes inaccurate British newspaper accounts.⁵ A more immediate mobilizing agency, certainly among the wider, nonimmigrant Irish population in the United States, appears to have been a circular appeal for assistance that was issued by the Central Relief Committee of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, in Dublin at the end of November 1846. The Central Relief Committee claimed that potato blight had reduced multitudes in Ireland “to a condition of sore and pressing want,” and expressed their concerns for the future.⁶

On 3 December 1846 a copy of the Central Relief Committee’s address, “just out of the printers’ hands,” was sent directly to Jacob Harvey, an Irish-born Friend, in New York, with a request that he issue a general appeal for assistance. Harvey received the communication on 18 December and arranged immediately to have the address printed and circulated among members of the Society of Friends in the United States. In addition, he requested newspaper editors throughout the country to insert an appeal for charitable assistance, headed “Distress in Ireland,” in their journals, announcing that donations could be sent to the president of the Merchants’ Bank or, in the case of Irish immigrants scattered throughout the United States, to Bishop John Hughes of New York, who had agreed to forward them to Ireland. At Harvey’s prompting Hughes instructed his clergy to encourage those attending Sunday mass to send whatever aid they could to Ireland.⁷

In January 1847 Harvey circulated a detailed and harrowing account which Jonathan Pim, one of two secretaries of the Central Relief Committee in Dublin, had sent of a visit that he had recently made to the west of Ireland, in which he catalogued deaths from starvation and disease, especially dysentery, commented on the broader social consequences of famine, and concluded with a very bleak prognosis. The publication of this document had an immediate impact: “Many who doubted the newspaper accounts believe yours,” Harvey informed Pim on 8 February; he added a fortnight later that it had contributed greatly to arousing “a general feeling of commiseration all over the country.”⁸ A Boston correspondent, writing to the Society of Friends in Dublin shortly afterward, corroborated this growing awareness of the situation in Ireland: “From one end of this vast country to the other, the people are now pretty well informed as to the famine; for there is not a newspaper, whether religious or political, whether literary or scientific, among the multitude printed among us, which has not communicated to its readers...