The Dire Fate of the Famine Irish Immigrant
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Patrick Laherty was a tenant farmer in County Kilkenny who leased a small stone cottage on a 960 square yard parcel that he cultivated for food to eat, sell, or barter to pay rent to his absentee English landlord, Stephen Cassin. He was also required to tithe to support the Church of England. In these circumstances, he struggled to feed and clothe his wife and four children.
In 1831, Laherty was listed among the “Tithe Defaulters” indicted during the “Tithe Wars” (1830-1836) The tithes went uncollected that year because the families in Laherty’s rural village organized so effectively that “it was impossible in a country so remote” to find “any person to serve legal notices or processes without endangering their lives … and exposing them to almost certain murder.”
In December 1831, desperate Kilkenny farmers in nearby Carrickshock, ambushed and killed 13 constables, “most from shattered skulls and appalling stab wounds. Another 14 officers suffered severe injuries; …of the crowd, three were killed and an unknown number injured.”
Even though the most severe Penal Laws had been lifted by 1831 -- such as those preventing Catholics from practicing their religion, owning property, attending college, marrying Protestants, voting in elections, teaching in private homes or public schools, or even “to own a horse worth more than five pounds”-- naked prejudice against the Irish peasants persisted. They were considered, savage, ignorant, and lazy, thus deserving of their miserable plight.
Their vulnerability made them all the more despised.
When the “Great Hunger” came, fifteen years later, Kilkenny, like all of Ireland, was ravaged: thousands died of starvation or disease. Too beaten down to work, many were driven from their homes and were forced to live in the Work Houses under prison-like conditions where chronic overcrowding encouraged infectious diseases like cholera, tuberculosis, and typhus.
Typhus, in particular, struck the Kilkenny Work House population at the peak of the Famine in 1847. Since paupers were banned from burial in the local cemeteries, the Kilkenny Work House began burying its dead within its own walls. (In 2005, ground breaking for a new mall next to the walls of the old Work House unearthed 960 stacked coffins, more than half of them contained the skeletons of children.)
From Current Archeology, April 4, 2014
1847 was also the year Patrick Laherty bid farewell to his children: William (22), Philip (23), Mary (26), and Thomas (16). Desperate to escape Kilkenny’s deteriorating conditions, the Laherty children sailed from Liverpool, England on the “Edgar” and arrived at New York harbor on December 7, 1847. They were among the lucky ones travelling that year. Nearly a quarter of the 85,000 passengers who sailed to North America aboard the aptly nicknamed “coffin ships” in 1847 never reached their destinations. Their bodies were weighted down and unceremoniously tossed overboard.
On American soil, the Laherty family confronted new challenges: lack of money, no job prospects, and most of all -- they were “different.” Their “Papist” religion, their shabby appearance, their odd language and speech patterns stigmatized them. Native-born citizens reviled them, often ridiculing them as sub-human.
In When America Despised the Irish: The19th Century Refugee Crisis, Christopher Klein writes that: “The discrimination faced by the famine refugees was not subtle or insidious. It was right there in black and white, in classified ads that blared ‘No Irish Need Apply.’ The image of the simian Irishman was given new life by the pens of illustrators such as Thomas Nast that dripped with prejudice as they sketched Celtic ape-men with sloping foreheads and monstrous appearances.”
The Laherty family retreated to New York’s Irish ghetto – “Hell’s Kitchen” -- where several generations languished for the next fifty plus years. Leaving the lush green fields of Kilkenny for the crime- and disease-ridden tenements of the West Side of Manhattan provided refuge from the ravages of the Famine, but it was a grim refuge.
Tyler Anbinder’s “City of Dreams” mentions that “…the famine Irish did not thrive in New York but instead lived a life of ‘poverty and hardship’.” He states that the average length of life of the famine emigrant after landing in New York was six years or less.
William Laherty is my great-great grandfather. He worked as a gardener for many years, dying in 1892 of “consumption-exhaustion.” He never returned to Ireland and never again saw his father, Patrick, who died in a Work House in Thomastown, Kilkenny in 1880.
Reflecting on my ancestors’ immigrant experience forces me to reconsider the Lady Liberty Myth enshrined in Emma Lazarus’ passionate poem -- that America was a “welcoming” nation. I suppose it was true if the immigrant had money and status, a Protestant religion, and marketable skills. Many immigrants, did in fact, find freedom and success in America. But, in truth, the “tired, poor, wretched, homeless and tempest-tossed,” though admitted, were never truly welcomed.
“The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, Statue of Liberty poem - Bing video