Difficulties faced by Settlers
Difficulties faced by Settlers
In New York City in 1850, 30,000 people, most of them Irish, were living below ground level in cellars often flooded by rainwater or sewage. By 1860 one quarter of the population of New York and Boston were Irish born.
The Irish were the poorest of the poor. They lived in shanty houses, without electricity, plumbing, water or heat. Charles Dickens wrote that the notorious Irish slum at Five Points in New York was the home of
“everything loathsome, drooping and decayed"
A visual record of conditions at Five Points can be seen in Martin Scorcese’s film Gangs of New York.
The following is an extract from Irish in America, written in 1868 by the Irish MP John Francis Maguire, in which he outlines the policies adopted by New York to deal with the influx of immigrants:
Private hospitals, or poor-houses, were established by the brokers on the outskirts of New York and Brooklyn; and from the results of an inquiry instituted by the Board of Aldermen of New York in the year 1846, an idea may be formed of the treatment received by the wretched emigrants whose hard fate drove them into those institutions. The Committee discovered in one apartment, 50 feet square, 100 sick and dying emigrants lying on straw; and among them, in their midst, the bodies of two who had died four or five days before, but who had been left for that time without burial! They found, in the course of their inquiry, that decayed vegetables, bad flour and putrid meat were specially purchased and provided for the use of the strangers! Such as had strength to escape from these slaughter-houses fled from them as from a plague, and roamed through the city, exciting the compassion, perhaps the horror, of the passers-by; those who were too ill to escape had to take their chance - such chance as poisonous food, infected air, and bad treatment afforded them of ultimate recovery.
Letter writers made it clear that America was no idle paradise. The letters paint a picture of a hard-driving business country where rewards only come to those who work hard. As historian Arnold Schrier notes, the phrase “hard work” runs like a refrain through practically all of the letters. They often stress that America is a country for young people, particularly unmarried people, who are capable of hard work. Writers, while praising the higher wages than at home, also pointed out the high cost of living. Some writers advised those intending to travel to avoid the crowed eastern cities and travel to the interior or the west. A few advised young people not to emigrate at all but Schrier observes that these seem to have been (from) either older less successful emigrants or those who wrote during periods of depression in America”.
Extract from letter by Margaret McCarthy to her parents, 22 September 1850
(18) QRO file 11821, PRO, Dublin
Of course the disparate opinions of the new country were dependent on the social standing of the writer. While a wealthy lawyer sees New York as a cosmopolitan city with endless opportunities, for a peasant working as a labourer in America, life was very different. A letter in the Cork Examiner of August 10th 1860 from a MJ Adams described life in mid-century America as “despicable, humiliating, slavish”. Of the Irish labourers he wrote that there "was no love for him - no protection of life - (he) can be shot down, run through, kicked, cuffed, spat on – and no redress but a redress of “served the damn son of an Irish b right, damn him”
Some letter writers warned against drunkenness and stressed the importance of temperance in America. Patrick McKeowan wrote to his nephew from Philadelphia in 1889 advising him that he be “strictly temperate, bright… and have a knowledge of some trade” .
Not all shared this conviction and one young girl, Anne Heggerty, who had just arrived in Ottumwa, Iowa in 1884 to take up duty as a domestic servant complained to her friends in Donegal,
“Dear mr. and miss this country is not as good as it was, they are not aloud to sell no more liquor in the state of Iowa, they are allowed to make it but cannot sell it”.
Another problem for some was the isolation caused by the vastness of the country they now found themselves in. Before emigrating from Ireland, regretted a prosperous farmer in Missouri:
"I could then go to a fair, or a wake, or a dance, or I could spend the winter nights in a neighbour's house cracking the jokes by the turf fire. If I had there but a sore head I would have a neighbour within every hundred yards of me that would run to see me". However, in America the farms were so far apart that "they calls them neighbours that lives two or three miles off - och! the sorra take such neighbours"
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