�
The British Passenger Acts attempted to
deflect immigration from the British Isles to Canada rather than the
United States by making it much more expensive to travel to the latter.
Instead of the four or five pounds a fare to New York would cost in those
years, the rate to the Canadian Maritime Provinces was sometimes� as
low as fifteen shillings (there were twenty shillings to the pound). In
addition, Canada-bound ships left from every seaport in Ireland and were
both much more convenient for Irish immigrants and much cheaper than
making the twelve - to fourteen-hour crossing of the Irish Sea to
Liverpool,� the chief port of the immigrant trade proper. But there
were few economic opportunities in Canada and the curious combination of
patterns of trade and anti-American British legislation produced what
Marcus Lee Hansen called "the second colonization of New England," a
colonization that was largely Irish. Immigrants quickly discovered that
they could get cheap transportation south from Canadian ports or, if they
lacked money as was often the case, they could walk. This became well
known to both captains and emigrants.�When the master of the ship
Ocean, sailing from Galway to New Brunswick in 1835 advertised for
immigrant passengers, he pointed this out, adding (with a bit of Blarney)
that "those living on that line of road being very kind to Strangers as
they pass."� Although the road led to Boston, many Irish found work
and settled along the way, and Hansen pointed out that one can trace the
Irish migration route by the pioneer Catholic churches established in
Maine in those years.�
Hansen also argues that, because of the section's need for labor,� New England would have attracted immigrants in any event but since there was little direct trade between Boston and Britain, those immigrants would have been funneled through New York and have been varied.� It was according to Hansen, the prosaic timber trade that made New England so heavily Irish and- we might add-that eventually produced the line of Irish American politicians whose most illustrious scions have been the Kennedy brothers. The facts of growing Irish predominance� in New England's population are undisputable. New England, which had been the most homogenous of American regions had become by the 1840s� heavily foreign born. It contained more than a fifth of all the Irish born in the country in 1850 --the first� year for which we have such data -- but only 2 percent of the German born, the only other foreign group of comparable size.
***�
Most of the half million Irish who migrated to the United States
between the War of 1812 and the famine did not come in family groups.
Before 1820 at least three thousand Irishmen were employed in digging the
Erie Canal in New York State, ...�
By 1845 Irish immigration was growing and would undoubtedly have continued to grow at a quickening pace in normal circumstances. But the great famine which began in that year and its aftermath influenced not only Irish immigration, but also the whole Irish American community, for decades to come.
