The Potato Famine and Irish Immigration to America
Between 1845 and 1855 more than 1.5 million adults and children left Ireland to seek refuge in America. Most
were desperately poor, and many were suffering from starvation and disease. They left because disease had
devastated Ireland's potato crops, leaving millions without food. They reached America settled in Boston, or
New York.
In most of Ireland, housing conditions were terrible. Nearly half the families in rural areas lived in windowless mud
cabins, most with no fumiture other than a stool. Boys and girls married young, with no money and almost no
possessions.
A major cause of Irish poverty was that more and more people were competing for land. Ireland was not industrialized.
The few industries that had been established were failing. And there was no agricultural industry. Most of the large and
productive farms were owned by English who collected rents and lived abroad. By 1835, three quarters of Irish
laborers had no regular employment of any kind. With no employment available, the only way that a laborer could live
and support a family was to get a patch of land and grow potatoes.
Potatoes were unique in many ways. Large numbers of them could be grown on small plots of land. Potatoes were
nutritious and easy to cook, and they could be fed to pigs and cattle and fowl.
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More than half of the Irish people depended on the potato as the main part of their diet, with some milk or fish as the
only other source of nourishment.
The Famine
More than 1 million people died between 1846 and 1851 as a result of the Potato Famine. Many of these died from
starvation. Many more died from diseases that preyed on people weakened by loss of food. People streamed into towns,
begging for food and crowding the workhouses and soup kitchens.
Leaving for America
Driven by panic and desperation, a flood of emigrants left Ireland in 1847. Many left dressed in rags Some went to
Great Britain and to Australia, but most intended to go to America. The conditions on the ships were horrible. Stephen
de Vere, traveled as a passenger in the spring of 1847 and described the suffering he saw:
Hundreds of poor people, men, women and children of all ages, huddled together without air, dying
without voice of spiritual consolation, and buried in the deep without the rites of the church."
Some were already suffering from fever and were kept in quarantine on Staten Island. But the vast majority of
Immigrants who came between 1845 and 1855 survived the journey.
From the Ghetto to the White House
As America became more industrialized after the Civil War, Irish laborers found new, and better-paid, work. Many
worked building railroads and in factories and mines. Many became involved in local political machines and began to
play a role in city and state politics.
The Irish rose out of the ghetto not only because of politics, but also because of education. By 1900, only 15 percent of
Irish-American men were still unskilled workers. By the 1920s, the Irish had spread into all spheres of American life.
And in 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the great-grandson of a famine immigrant, was elected president of the United
States.