The Story of Ireland by Neil Hegarty

Author:Neil Hegarty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2011-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

I have seen the Indian in his forests, and the negro in his chains and thought, as I contemplated their pitiable condition, that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness, but I did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland…. In all countries, more or less paupers may be discovered but an entire nation of paupers is what was never seen until it was shown in Ireland. 20

Ireland was indeed increasingly marked by sharp divisions between wealth and poverty, stagnation and energy. Nor was economic distress to be found only in the countryside: a profound agrarian depression was mirrored in, for example, the continuing economic decline of Galway; and the legislation of 1824 that created a United Kingdom-wide free trade area resulted in the abrupt failure of many of the country’s industries. One answer that presented itself was emigration: to leave behind the privations of the Old World and strike out to embrace the possibilities of the New. Successive waves of Atlantic migrants had up to this point been predominantly Presbyterian: in the years 1769–74 alone, some forty thousand individuals had set sail from Ulster for a new life and a new experience of religious freedom on the other side of the Atlantic.* This flow of emigrants continued into the nineteenth century; and the newcomers would leave a deep cultural imprint on both the United States and Canada. This Presbyterian migration, however, became but one element in a much larger phenomenon: over a million Irish departed for North America in the period from the Act of Union to 1845. Such migrants tended now to be Catholic and unskilled; they tended too to leave on their own account, rather than as part of a move sponsored by either state or private agencies.

Many of these early nineteenth-century Catholic migrants – unlike later arrivals – tended not to settle principally in large communities on the eastern seaboard. Although the later Irish centres of Boston, New York and Philadelphia were inevitably among their first ports of call, many newcomers moved west and south as the United States itself expanded towards the Pacific; and as they did so, they assimilated into wider American society in a manner that became less common later in the century. Their swelling numbers began to bring political clout: Irish Catholics naturally gravitated towards the new Democratic Party; and the presidency in particular of Andrew Jackson (1829–37) – though he was himself of Ulster Presbyterian stock – was notable for its effective harnessing of Irish political energies. This contributed to the rise of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment in North America: newspapers and pamphlets, for example, alleging the existence of Catholic political conspiracies and secret societies now began to circulate. For these new waves of immigrants, such accusations proved difficult to counter: acclimatization to their new lives was indeed accompanied, in general terms, by a consistently strong emotional bond with the land they had left behind, the affairs of which they continued to follow closely – and this continuing attachment would leave them open to accusations of divided loyalties.

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