Between 1830 and 1840, 424,936 immigrants arrived in New York, and the Irish made up a majority of them. The numbers were so high that panic ensued surrounding the theory that European principalities were sending their rejected members of society to America.  Irish immigrants composed a disproportionate number of inmates of institutions and were demonized by nativist employers who were looking to appeal to native-born workers. Ireland’s population grew to twice its previous size, while poverty and sub-division of land increased.  This forced peasants to flee Ireland in massive numbers, and once they arrived in a foreign land, the hardships they continued to face bonded them together even further.   In the midst of such turmoil, the Irishmen of New York formed an Irish Emigration Society in 1839.  The society offered new immigrants advice and support concerning employment, travel, etc.  Assistance was provided to immigrants in many different departments, as Richard Purcell writes,

“An employment bureau was established; efforts were made to prevent child-snatching; frauds were exposed; certain named boarding establishments where immigrants were being robbed were cited; and with the assistance of the clergy employment was found for several hundred persons.”¹ 

Irish immigrants clearly had a bleak existence before moving to the United States to begin their new lives, as they were treated unfairly in America and yet it was still an improvement. The hope of a better life made their long, hard journey worth it.  An account of Irish immigrants aboard a ship traveling to the United States remarked,

“They appear to me to be the most miserable objects in human form that I have ever seen…I never saw, even among these, any victims of poverty and wretchedness, who could bear a just comparison with these wretched white people, particularly the Irish portion of them…”² 

The period between 1845-1855 was known as the Great Starvation and though Irish immigrants were already pouring into the United States in large numbers before this, the immigrants who came during the Great Starvation likely had no choice but to leave Ireland.  They were largely from the west and southwest of Ireland, and with the failure of the potato crop they were facing starvation and the collapse of their social structure. An estimated ½ to 2 million people died in this famine.³  It’s no wonder that they fled their home country en masse during this period of disaster. 

Sources:

1. Purcell, Richard J. "The Irish Emigrant Society of New York." Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 27, no. 108 (1938): 583-99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30097644.

2. "[Surprised; Immigrants; Germany; Ireland; England; Scotland; Wales; Quebec]." Commercial Advertiser(New York, New York), August 17, 1837: 2. Readex: America's Historical Newspapers. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANX&docref=image/v2:104….

3. Metress, Seamus P., and Eileen K. Metress. "Irish Emigration to America." In Irish in Michigan, 1-12. Michigan State University Press, 2006. http://0-www.jstor.org.library.stlawu.edu/stable/10.14321/j.ctt7zt5jv.3.