The Irish.
A blight caused by a mold destroyed the leaves and edible roots of the potato plant in Ireland in the mid-1840s.
The result was a famine which lasted seven years.
During this time, from 1845 until 1852, starvation, disease, and evictions from leased farmland drove two million people to North America.
Among them were all eight of President Kennedy’s great-grandparents.
“When my great grandfather left [County Wexford in 1848] to become a [barrel maker] in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except two things: a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty.” — JFK in Ireland, June 27, 1963
Most Irish emigrants departed from Liverpool, where thieves and swindlers lurked, eager to take away what little they had brought for their journey.
The Irish traveled in good ships and bad, in voyages which could last for two months.
The worst of these immigrant ships were the cargo vessels which had been hastily retrofitted with passenger bunks.
Into these vessels the sick and starving immigrants came.
And many died pitiful deaths in their dark, damp holds.
Sanitation was nonexistent in these ships and disease sickened even those who had come aboard healthy.
They came to be known as the “coffin ships.”
The dead, including hundreds of babies born during the voyages, were buried at sea.
Sharks would trail these ships, feasting on the corpses.
Once these ships arrived at their ports, most were made to wait in quarantine for two weeks while the ships were inspected for disease.
More died then, within sight of their new home, but unable to reach it.
And like all transatlantic voyages, the threat of a nor’easter, as a ship approached the North American coastline, loomed.
The worst wreck befell the St. John, which crashed in a gale on rocks off Cape Cod in October 1849 with 120 people aboard.
Ninety-nine were lost.
Author Henry David Thoreau traveled to the scene:
“There were eighteen or twenty of the same large [coffin] boxes… lying on a green hill-side, a few rods from the water, and surrounded by a crowd.
“The bodies which had been recovered… had been collected there.
“Some [people] were rapidly nailing down the [coffin] lids, others were carting the boxes away, and others were lifting the lids, which were yet loose, and peeping under the cloths…
“Sometimes there were two or more children, or a parent and child, in the same box.
“I have since heard, from one who lives by this beach, that a woman who had come over [to America] before, but had left her infant behind for her sister to bring, came and looked into these boxes,
“and saw in one her child in her sister's arms, as if the sister had meant to be found thus;
“and within three days after, the mother died from the effect of that sight.”
And still they came, braving the hazards of the journey in hopes of living out their lives as Americans.
It is our duty to see America through their eyes, with its promise of liberty derived from a democratic government and reject any effort to diminish this promise.
******************************
I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
Share this post