Ireland's New Worlds: Immigrants, Politics, and Society in the United States and Australia, 1815–1922

2. Crisis and Despair: The Famine and Its Aftermath

Crisis and Despair The Famine and Its Aftermath B      ,  crucial outlines of the Irish immigrant experience in the United States and Australia were set in place. In America, the profound economic and ideological transformations that accompanied the market revolution struck the post-  Irish arrivals with peculiar severity, so that by the time of the “Great Hunger” their economic standing and social reputation were inferior to those of any other major European immigrant group. The Irish were concentrated most heavily in poorly remunerated laboring work, and the increasing proportion of Roman Catholics within the Irish immigrant stream were subject to virulent religious bigotry. Admittedly, within the vast and dynamic landscapes of nineteenth-century America, there were diverse local experiences. In cities such as New Orleans and Saint Louis, where a Roman Catholic presence had long been significant, middle-class Irish communities enjoyed the benefits of more tolerant host communities and more open economic structures than those found along the northeast coast. In the towns and farmlands of the Upper Mississippi Valley, too, conditions were more benign. California, following the discovery of gold, would provide the Irish with another, more liberating, American experience. But in the areas of greatest concentration—New England and the mid-Atlantic states—the realities of mid-nineteenth-century life were grim and disheartening. Imposed upon this foundation, the mass emigration of the famine years proved a heavy burden for Irish America. The arrival of more than one million immigrants from Ireland in the period – aggravated the position of the Irish in the labor market in America’s major East Coast cities and exacerbated nativist fears of the consequences of unrestrained immigration.  2 In contrast, the Irish position in Australia half a century after European occupation was a curiously strong and influential one. In the decades after the Napoleonic wars, Irish ex-convicts and free settlers had carved a satisfying niche in colonial life, beneficiaries of the liberal political and religious policies of successive colonial administrations and the colonies’ insatiable demand for labor. Though economic hardship in the early s dealt a blow to antipodean confidence, the longer-term prospects for the Irish in Australia remained positive. Furthermore, Australia remained relatively untouched by Irish emigration during the worst of the famine years. It was simply too distant, too expensive, and too complex a destination for emigrants to reach during the headlong flight of the late s. Fast relief was then necessary, and Australia’s colonies provided no analgesic to the famine’s distress. The most traveled route to salvation was to go quickly to Liverpool, in all its chaos and complexity, then onward across the Atlantic.1 There were exceptions to the rule. Between  and  some , “orphan girls,” women selected from workhouses and charitable institutions across Ireland, were provided with clothing and provisions and a passage to the Australian colonies. There they met a mixed response, welcomed by employers eager for servants and more so by single men desperate for wives, but disdained by Protestant clergymen and politicians whose voices of fearful outrage drowned out the cool headed. Amidst this din, and an accompanying level of opposition within Ireland, the scheme was terminated.2 Emigrants were also assisted under an old scheme, temporarily revived—that of reuniting convicts with their families. Between  and  the imperial government funded the migration of over six hundred Irish women and children to Sydney under such auspices. Small numbers of other Irish men and women came, too, their emigration sponsored by landlords concerned with their tenants’ welfare and eager to clear the land.3 Yet, as important as these various schemes were in their intimate, human terms, they stood minute and insignificant against the Atlantic emigrant tide. Only with the discovery of gold in  would Australia achieve greater prominence as a destination for the Irish. Just as the vast torrent of emigration during the famine years impacted upon Ireland’s new worlds in different ways, so the political turbulence in Ireland in the late s affected its emigrant communities with different force and different consequences. The rise of Young Ireland, set within the broader context of the dramatic rise of European nationalism, aroused great excitement among the Irish in the United States, their reaction intensified by America’s own revolutionary heritage. Ireland’s plight and America’s examCrisis and Despair  ple constituted a potent mix of idealism and emotion, one into which more than one million new Irish men and women...