February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
It represented but one of the many initiatives in America — by Irish and non-Irish alike — to help the Irish people in these years. Unfortunately, while they certainly saved many lives, all such efforts were not enough to prevent the deaths of more than one million people between 1845 and 1850.
The Famine had begun some 19 months earlier when the first evidence of a devastating blight appeared in the potato crop. What started as a natural disaster, however, soon evolved into one of the most harrowing chapters in modern European history. The British government, suffused with anti-Irish bigotry and wedded to a conservative political ideology that decried public assistance, provided only minimal aid. As a result, more than one million perished of starvation and disease and another 1.5 million fled to England, Canada, and the U.S.
Trans-Atlantic communication was still quite primitive in the 1840s and so the Famine’s devastation was well under way before the people in America fully realized what was happening. Early reports of crop failure and hunger, in 1845-1846, elicited a few efforts to raise relief funds, but these were limited to the Irish community and were rather small in scale. The reason is quite simple: crop failures had been reported in American newspapers for years. In each case the suffering had been limited to a few regions of Ireland and lasted only a season or two. Not surprisingly, most people in America thought the early reports of agricultural distress marked little more than a new chapter in Ireland’s centuries of suffering.
That perception changed in January 1847 when the steamship Hibernia pulled into Boston harbor — the first from Ireland in months — bearing detailed accounts of the unfolding calamity. Word spread and soon there were signs that a large-scale relief effort was under way. The citizens of New Orleans, the southern city with the largest Irish population, held a mass rally on Feb. 4, 1847 to announce the establishment of a relief fund. Days later, a similar proclamation was issued from a rally held in Washington, D.C., and attended by many prominent officials, including members of Congress and the Supreme Court. The goal, noted Rep. William B. MacClay of New York, was for “a voice to go out from this hall tonight with the power to awaken the sympathies of the whole nation.”
It did, even in Boston, a city that greeted Irish immigrants with the most virulent bigotry. First to respond was the Catholic community. On Feb. 7, Bishop John Fitzpatrick issued a pastoral letter calling upon Catholics to help their Irish brethren in the hour of need. “A voice comes to us from across the ocean,” he wrote, “the loud cry of her anguish has gone throughout the world.” In a few weeks a Catholic relief committee raised $20,000. Over the next four years it would raise a total of $150,000.
Boston’s non-Irish soon pitched in as well. On Feb. 18, 1847, many of the city’s leading citizens, among them Mayor Josiah Quincy Jr., held a public meeting at Faneuil Hall. Resolutions approved that evening created the Boston Relief Committee and drafted a petition to the U.S. Congress requesting a naval vessel to bring food and supplies to Ireland. The request arrived as Congress was debating several proposals to allocate $500,000 for Irish relief. None were approved, for in that era there was no precedent for this kind of foreign aid and many lawmakers were leery of establishing one. In this context, the request for a ship by the Boston Relief Committee seemed quite reasonable. Congress soon approved a bill authorizing the use of the USS Jamestown, a vessel then docked in the Charlestown Navy Yard.
Soon funds and supplies were pouring in. Fittingly, the Boston Laborers Aid Society, an Irish workers charity organization, commenced loading the Jamestown on St. Patrick’s Day. Ten days later, with a volunteer crew of Irish and non-Irish aboard and 800 tons of relief supplies in the hold, the Jamestown sailed for Ireland.
The Jamestown arrived on April 12. The following day the unloading began. A Quaker relief committee took charge of he distribution of the supplies, a fact that highlights the extraordinary role played by Irish Quakers in caring for victims of the Famine.
More American relief ships arrived in the coming months. The Macedonian, a second U.S. Navy vessel, arrived in mid-June 1847. From Philadelphia came the private ships John Walsh, Lydia Anne, and the St. George. Still more relief came in the form of millions of dollars in cash and tickets sent by Irish immigrants to distressed friends and family in Ireland.
These efforts saved countless lives but were unable to appreciably diminish the overall impact of the Famine. A great deal more might have been done by the British government, but political ideology and bigotry prevented this and thus brought on an extraordinary level of human suffering.
(See www.edwardtodonnell.com/irish.htm.)
HIBERNIAN HISTORY WEEK
April 7, 1917: Hours after the U.S. declares war on Germany, George M. Cohan composes “Over There!” a rousing patriotic song that becomes an anthem of sorts for the war effort.
April 9, 1838: Fr. Theobold Mathew, Ireland’s famed temperance priest, begins his campaign against alcohol abuse.
HIBERNIAN BIRTHDATES
April 6, 1884: Academy Award winning actor Walter Huston is born in Toronto.
April 6, 1927: Jazz legend Gerry Mulligan is born in New York City.