In 1845, before Irish history
was changed forever, 3 million of Ireland's 8 million people depended on
the potato for their daily existence. They ate potatoes with every meal,
pounds of potatoes every day. In the poorest regions of the country, in
the west and southwest, there simply was no other food because everything
else was used to pay the rent. Ireland was a country of landless peasants
and farm laborers who worked fields they did not own and raised crops they
could not eat. Midsummer was a time of hunger every year, for it was
during those long weeks that the previous harvest's supply of
potatoes ran out and the new harvest was not quite ready to be
eaten. When the potato failed, the poor of Ireland starved. And from 1845
to 1851, the crop failed repeatedly; disastrously, and fatally.
Meanwhile, the bounty of Ireland -- the barley and the oats and the wheat and the livestock -- was transported on the same roads that brought the starving poor to Ireland's seaports, once places of color and excitement but now as gray and brooding as the Irish sky. In accordance with the belief, held with religious fervor among Ireland's rulers in Great Britain, that there could be no interference with the workings of free trade and the free market, the food grown in Ireland fields was designated for export. The British journalist and historian Robert Kee compiled a list of food shipped out of Cork on a single day, November 18, 1848:147 bales of bacon, 120 casks and 135 barrels of pork, 5 casks of hams, 300 bags of flour; 300 head of cattle, 239 sheep, and 542 boxes of eggs.
Years later, when they were safely across the water in America, Ireland's exiles would tell their children born in New York and Boston and Chicago and San Francisco of the sight of food convoys under armed guard making their way past hollow-eyed men, women, and children whose mouths were green from eating grass. Such stories were the foundation upon which the American Irish built their narrative of forced exile and heartrending loss. Their critique of America, of life itself was rooted in the blasted potato fields of their ancestral homeland. So was their determination to do what they could to make Ireland master of its own land.
The departure of the Irish from their stricken land was a mass migration on an epic scale, and in the villages and towns of Ireland a way of life, a communal culture, and an ancient language were wiped out. At the same time, the arrival of the Famine Irish in America transformed the young republic so profoundly that the flight of the hungry from Ireland became a milepost in U.S. history. The Famine Irish immigrants were the original huddled masses. They came not with dreams and plans, but with the modest goal of staying alive. Most were unskilled and poorly educated, a rural people whom the established Americans soon came to regard as dangerous aliens. ...
