Core Question:
Did people who emigrated from Ireland to the United States as a result of
the potato famine find a better life?
Author: Robin Thomson
School: Amity Middle School Orange
District: Amity Region 5
Overview:
From 1845 through 1850 the potato crops in Ireland were infected by a fungus from Mexico. This
was devastating because potatoes were a main crop and food source in Ireland. As a result, many
people left Ireland to escape the famine. Some left by choice while entire families were shipped away
by their landlords against their will. The overseas journey was treacherous and even if one arrived
safely, the possibly still existed to die of diseases contracted on the ship. Working conditions in the
United States were harsh and much discrimination against immigrants existed.
Document Summary:
Document 1 offers background information on the Irish Potato Famine. Students will read about the
conditions present in Ireland as a result of “famine fever.” This document begins to discuss the
relationship between landlords and tenant farmers. Also briefly discussed is the economic politics at
play between Britain and Ireland.
Document 2 uses descriptive language and imagery to invoke emotions. Students will read about
disease, poor traveling conditions and be given statistics about survival during the journey away from
the horrible conditions that existed in Ireland.
Procedure:
Select the way your lesson will “open up the textbook”:
1. Comparison (comparing two textbook accounts, e.g., U.S. to non-U.S.; old to new)
2. Direct Challenge (using primary documents to challenge textbook facts or interpretation)
3. Narrativization (where does a textbook begin to tell the story, where does it end it?)
4. Articulating Silences (who is left out of the textbook's narrative; bringing in voices of the silenced;
bringing to the surface issues of narrative choice)
5. Vivification (breathing life into a text that only mentions, or omits)
6. Close reading (careful, attentive focus on word choice, including adjectives, titles, and the like)
TEXTBOOK SELECTION
Immigration
Immigration to the United States increased dramatically between 1840
and 1860. The largest groups of immigrants to the United States at that
time were from Ireland. Between 1846 and 1860, more than 1.5 million Irish
immigrants arrived in the country. They came to the United States because
of a potato blight that destroyed most of the Irish potato crops in the 1840’s.
A famine, an extreme shortage of food, struck Ireland. More than a million
people died.
Mostly farmers, the Irish immigrants were too poor to buy land. For this
reason many settled in the Northeast and took low-paying factory jobs in the
cities. Many of the Irish men also worked on the railroad. Accounting for
nearly half of the immigrants, Irish women became servants and factory
workers in the Northern cities.
Source: Appleby, Joyce, Brinkley, Alan, Broussard, Albert, McPherson,
James, Ritchie, Donald, The American Journey: Early Years. Columbus,
Ohio: Glencoe, 2009. p398.
DOCUMENT PACKET
Document 1
The Irish potato famine began with the introduction of a disease from
Mexico that destroyed the potato crops. This was significant in that
potatoes were a major source of food. The problem was seen as political,
leading to the mass exodus of people from Ireland to Great Britain, Canada
and the United States.
Vocabulary
Blight – a disease or injury of plants
Mortiferous – deadly, fatal
Scurvy – a disease caused by a deficiency of vitamin C
Subsistence – the condition of remaining in existence
Repeal – to take back a law
Legacy – something handed down from an ancestor
The Irish Potato Famine
During the summer of 1845, a "blight of unusual character" devastated
Ireland's potato crop, the basic staple in the Irish diet. A few days after
potatoes were dug from the ground, they began to turn into a slimy,
decaying, blackish "mass of rottenness." Expert panels convened to
investigate the blight's cause suggested that it was the result of "static
electricity" or the smoke that billowed from railroad locomotives or the
"mortiferous vapours" rising from underground volcanoes. In fact, the cause
was a fungus that had traveled from Mexico to Ireland.
"Famine fever"--cholera, dysentery, scurvy, typhus, and infestations of lice-soon spread through the Irish countryside. Observers reported seeing
children crying with pain and looking "like skeletons, their features
sharpened with hunger and their limbs wasted, so that there was little left
but bones." Masses of bodies were buried without coffins, a few inches
below the soil.
Over the next ten years, more than 750,000 Irish died and another 2 million
left their homeland for Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. Within
five years, the Irish population was reduced by a quarter.
The Irish potato famine was not simply a natural disaster. It was a product of
social causes. Under British rule, Irish Catholics were prohibited from
entering the professions or even purchasing land. Instead, many rented
small plots of land from absentee British Protestant landlords. Half of all
landholdings were less than 5 acres in 1845.
Irish peasants subsisted on a diet consisting largely of potatoes, since a
farmer could grow triple the amount of potatoes as grain on the same plot of
land. A single acre of potatoes could support a family for a year. About half
of Ireland's population depended on potatoes for subsistence.
The inadequacy of relief efforts by the British Government worsened the
horrors of the potato famine. Initially, England believed that the free market
would end the famine. In 1846, in a victory for advocates of free trade,
Britain repealed the Corn Laws, which protected domestic grain producers
from foreign competition. The repeal of the Corn Laws failed to end the
crisis since the Irish lacked sufficient money to purchase foreign grain.
In the spring of 1847, Britain adopted other measures to cope with the
famine, setting up soup kitchens and programs of emergency work relief.
But many of these programs ended when a banking crisis hit Britain. In the
end, Britain relied largely on a system of work houses, which had originally
been established in 1838, to cope with the famine. But these grim
institutions had never been intended to deal with a crisis of such sweeping
scope. Some 2.6 million Irish entered overcrowded workhouses, where
more than 200,000 people died.
The Irish Potato Famine left as its legacy deep and lasting feelings of
bitterness and distrust toward the British. Far from being a natural disaster,
many Irish were convinced that the famine was a direct outgrowth of British
colonial policies. In support of this contention, they noted that during the
famine's worst years, many Anglo-Irish estates continued to export grain
and livestock to England.
This site was updated on 29-Apr-13.
Source: www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/irish_potato_famine.cfm
Document 2
During the famine period over half-million Irish were evicted from their
cottages and shipped to British North America under unsanitary, unhealthy
conditions.
But in the spring of 1847, shipload after shipload of fevered Irish arrived,
quickly overwhelming the small medical inspection facility, which only had
150 beds. By June, 40 vessels containing 14,000 Irish immigrants waited in
a line extending two miles down the St. Lawrence. It took up to five days to
see a doctor, many of whom were becoming ill from contact with the typhusinfected passengers. By the summer, the line of ships had grown several
miles long. A fifteen-day general quarantine was then imposed for all of the
waiting ships. Many healthy Irish thus succumbed to typhus as they were
forced to remain in their lice-infested holds. With so many dead on board
the waiting ships, hundreds of bodies were simply dumped overboard into
the St. Lawrence.
Others, half-alive, were placed in small boats and then deposited on the
beach at Grosse Isle, left to crawl to the hospital on their hands and knees if
they could manage. Thousands of Irish, ill with typhus and dysentery,
eventually wound up in hastily constructed wooden fever sheds. These
makeshift hospitals, badly understaffed and unsanitary, simply became
places to die, with corpses piled "like cordwood" in nearby mass graves.
Those who couldn't get into the hospital died along the roadsides. In one
case, an orphaned Irish boy walking along the road with other boys sat
down for a moment under a tree to rest and promptly died on the spot.
The quarantine efforts were soon abandoned and the Irish were sent on to
their next destination without any medical inspection or treatment. From
Grosse Isle, the Irish were given free passage up the St. Lawrence to
Montreal and cities such as Kingston and Toronto. The crowded open-aired
river barges used to transport them exposed the fair-skinned Irish to all-daylong summer sun causing many bad sunburns. At night, they laid down
close to each other to ward off the chilly air, spreading more lice and fever.
Many pauper families had been told by their landlords that once they arrived
in Canada, an agent would meet them and pay out between two and five
pounds depending on the size of the family. But no agents were ever found.
Promises of money, food and clothing had been utterly false. Landlords
knew that once the paupers arrived in Canada there was virtually no way for
them to ever return to Ireland and make a claim. Thus they had promised
them anything just to get them out of the country.
Vocabulary
Pauper - a very poor person
Succumbed – gave in to
Quarantine – a strict isolation to
prevent spread of disease
Source:
Exerpt from “Coffin Ships”
www.historyplace.com/worldhistory/famine/coffin.htm
Document 3
Students may infer that although the time of the Great Hunger brought much
heartache and loss, eventually the Irish acclimated and became an
important part of American culture, making great contributions in the fields
of religion, education, and construction. The Irish-Americans also
demonstrate a deep connection to their heritage that is a model for other
immigrant groups.
IRISH-AMERICAN DIASPORA
As a result of The Great Hunger, the Irish became a large and important
part of American society. Those who came to the United States during and
following The Great Hunger played a major role in the development of this
country, and today more than 40 million Americans, or roughly 15 percent of
the population in the United States, claim Irish ancestry. Irish immigrants
were substantially involved in the early labor union movement in the United
States, and the history of 20th-century urban American politics is
inextricably linked to the development of Irish-American politics.
The Catholic Church was relatively small and a minor institution in America
until Irish immigrants, following The Great Hunger, swelled its ranks and
helped develop it into one of the largest and most influential religious
institutions in the country. Irish immigrants of the post-Great Hunger period
also were instrumental in building the country’s infrastructure and in
developing the parochial school system, which stands today as a model for
education.
“Fleeing starvation with few or no material possessions, they brought their
music and song and tales of home as they spread out across the land, until
there was not a corner they didn’t touch or leave their mark upon,” writes
Patricia Harty in the introduction to her collection, the book Greatest Irish
Americans of the 20th Century. “They became American. And, yet, despite
their identification with the American way of life, they continue to have an
interest in their Irish heritage, and a sometimes poignant emotional
connection to the land of their ancestors.”
Among her first acts as Ireland’s first female President, Mary Robinson
instituted a perennially lit candle in a window of her official residence, Áras
an Uachtaráin, to honor the Irish Diaspora worldwide.
Vocabulary
Diaspora – the spreading out of a group of people
Parochial – restricted by religion
Perennially – continuing without interruption
Infrastructure – system of public works for a city
Source: Ireland’s Great Hunger Museum
Excerpt from article - About the Great Hunger
http://ighm.nfshost.com/learn/about-the-great-hunger/
Document 4
This list is from an article in the Anti- Catholic Press, convincing citizen to
disallow Irish from participating in government. This exemplifies the
discrimination and hatred faced by many immigrant groups. Students will
notice discrepancies between this and the previous article.
THINGS WHICH ROMAN CATHOLIC PRIESTS AND ALL TRUE ROMAN
CATHOLICS HATE
Providence, July 22, 1854
1. They HATE our Republic, and are trying to overthrow it.
2. They HATE the American Eagle, and it offends them beyond endurance
to see it worn as an ornament by Americans.
3. They HATE our Flag, as it manifest by their grossly insulting it.
4. They HATE the liberty of conscience.
5. They HATE the liberty of the Press.
6. They HATE the liberty of speech.
7. They HATE our Common School system.
8. They HATE the Bible, and would blot it out of existence if they could!
9. The Priests HATE married life, and yet by them is fulfilled the Scripture, to
wit: 'more are the children of the desolate, than the children of the married
wife.'
10. They HATE Protestants, and are sworn to exterminate them from our
country and the earth.
11. They HATE the name of WASHINGTON, because he was a Republican
and Protestant.
12. They HATE all rulers that do not swear allegiance to the Pope of Rome.
13. They HATE to be ruled by Americans, and say 'WE WILL NOT BE
RULED BY THEM!'
14. They HATE to support their own paupers and they are left to be
supported by the tax paying Americans.
15. They HATE, above all, the 'Know-Nothings,' who are determined to rid
this country from their accursed power.
—UNCLE SAM
Vocabulary
“Know-Nothings” – anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic political party
Accursed – being under a curse
Desolate – in a bleak state of emptiness
Manifest - obvious
Source: Excerpt from, The Know-Nothing: An American Crusader
Exploring Diversity in Pennsylvania History www.hsp.org
Some of the language and phrasing in these documents have been
modified from the originals.
CAPTURE SHEET
Did people who emigrated from Ireland to America find a better life?
As you study the documents provided, please complete one “written document analysis
worksheet” for each of the documents.
1. TYPE OF DOCUMENT (Check one):
Newspaper
Letter
Patent
Memorandum
Map
Telegram
Press Release
Report
Advertisement
Congressional Record
Census Report
Other
2. UNIQUE PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DOCUMENT (Check one or
more):
Interesting Letterhead
Handwritten
Typed
Seals
Notations
"RECEIVED" stamp
Other
3.DATE(S) OF DOCUMENT:
4.AUTHOR (OR CREATOR) OF THE DOCUMENT:
POSITION (TITLE):
5. FOR WHAT AUDIENCE WAS THE DOCUMENT WRITTEN?
6. DOCUMENT INFORMATION (There are many possible ways to answer A-E.)
A. List three things the author said that you think are important:
B. Why do you think this document was written?
C. What evidence in the document helps you know why it was written? Quote from the
document.
D. List two things the document tells you about life in the United States at the time it was
written.
Utilizing the information you have gathered, draw your own conclusion about life for Irish
immigrants both before they left Ireland and after arriving in the United States. Rewrite
the textbook section with a more detailed account that supports your claim.
www.archives.gov/education/lessons/worksheets