‘Parade’ of the Irish Began as Flight From Famine, Oppression

On the eve of St. Patrick’s Day, as the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty nears, let us be mindful that New York’s longest and greatest Irish parade came right up the bay.

More than 4 million strong they came--4,212,216 to cite the official count--on a proud, sad march away from famine and religious oppression. Rank after rank of them paraded onto the shores of the “best poor man’s country on Earth” and up the streets of that dream city “where every day is like Christmas for the meat.”

Wherever the Irish parade in America this St. Patrick’s Day, a bagpipe band is sure to skirl: “It’s not leaving of Liverpool that grieves me, it’s my darlin’ when I think of you.”

What a melancholy experience that was 100 or more years ago: the leaving of Liverpool. Some days, 30 ships left the Albert docks on the same tide, bound for America with a thousand or more Irish carried as ballast in steerage. In 1851, the high tide of the famine exodus, 1,712 emigrant ships came up the Narrows into New York harbor.

Liverpool, which already had grown rich on the slave trade, was filling the holds of ships that arrived from America with cotton, tobacco and timber with Irish ballast, at $12.50 a head ($17.50 on steamships), for the westbound voyage.

As early as 1816, Secretary of State James Monroe told President James Madison “the principal freight from Ireland to the United States consists of passengers.”

But the real parade began to form on that September morning in 1845 when Irish farmers sniffed “a dampish, putrid” odor coming from their fields. By nightfall, the potato stalks were “black as your shoe and burned to the clay.”

In five years, what Benjamin Disraeli called “the single root that changed the history of the world,” deprived Ireland of one quarter of her population: a million dead, a million and a half gone to America.

“The hunger is upon us,” a common refrain, was spelled out in the verdicts at coroner inquests: “died of famine,” “hunger and cold” “starvation.” A newspaper in Limerick, where 2,513 famine victims crowded the workhouse, urged the coroner to give up holding more inquests. “It is mere nonsense. The number of deaths is beyond counting.”

In 1847, when typhoid followed in the wake of the potato blight, 1,879 Irish emigrants died on voyages to New York, and 534 babies were born.

The journey to “the land of hope and freedom,” as advertised by shipping agents on posters at country crossroads, on church porches and on the sides of sheds, began with a wake--the so-called “American wake.”

On the morning of the leave-taking, friends and neighbors would gather in the glen with the sorrowing family to escort the emigrant to the main road. A horse-drawn cart stood waiting to take him, sometimes her, to the port. Like all Irish wakes, this was a time for tears and prayers and laughter and “heart-scalding” memories ever after.

The boys would be passing around a jug of poteen, intoning the lilting farewell toasts: “May the road rise with you and the wind be always at your back, and may the Lord hold you in the hollow of his hand.” The parish priest, in cassock and surplice, would be on hand, with a freckle-faced altar boy holding the holy water bucket, for the goodby and Godspeed blessing. A tearful mother would be pressing a supply of oaten “journey cakes” on the traveler, baked hard as “a slate, and as good when they got there as when they left.”

Oftentimes the emigrant tucked a bit of turf into his slender luggage.

The emigrant got a sample of the horrors that lay ahead when he crossed the Irish Sea on the open deck of a crowded steamer, exposed to the elements for 22 to 36 hours, lashed by the sea spray, packed in with cattle and swine bound for the English market.

“The parties who take them over get 10 shillings a head,” observed John Besnard, who at the time was weigh master on the docks of Cork. “They do not get half that money for pigs, and yet the pigs are comfortably lodged between decks, because they are of value to somebody.”

The Dublin & Liverpool Co.’s steam packet Princess carried 200 of its 350 passengers in the wooden stalls erected on deck for Queen Victoria’s horses when she visited Ireland in 1849. The “Forty Thieves,” as the dockside porters were known, extended Liverpool’s infamous welcome by wresting sea chests and suitcases from the naive emigrants, charging exorbitant fees and delivering them to vermin-ridden boarding houses where they were overcharged, fed rancid food and often robbed of their money and belongings.

Money changers grossly cheated them. Shipping agents along the Waterloo road worked all kinds of swindles, selling passages to Quebec instead of New York, telling them “ST” on a ticket stood for stateroom rather than steerage, leading them to provisioners who conned them into buying elaborate cooking gear and a chamber pot for the voyage .

Of all the ports in the world, wrote Herman Melville, who sailed before the mast in an emigrant ship, “Liverpool abounds in all variety of land-sharks, land-rats and other vermin.”

For the most part, the ships were old, under-crewed, ill-provisioned, badly overcrowded and barely seaworthy. They called them “coffin ships,” because four passengers, men and women together, slept in a space six by six feet.

The average crossing was five weeks, but it could take as long as 160 days until the advent of steam cut the time to two weeks. The 3,O43-mile voyage to New York often began with Irish fiddlers coaxing the shy lads and colleens to wipe away their tears at the last sight of old Erin and join in the reels, jigs and hornpipes. The merry music soon gave way to the moans of the seasick as the ship rolled and pitched with the ocean swells.

Gingerbread, oranges, raw onions, toasted bacon fat, essence of peppermint on a lump of sugar, “a sachet of opium on the stomach” were all recommended for a queasy stomach, but nothing seemed to work. In heavy weather, the hatches were closed and the air became stifling.

“We had not been at sea one week,” Melville wrote, “when to hold your head down the fore hatchway was like holding it down a suddenly opened cesspool.”

Corrupt masters sold spoiled food in short weight at extortion prices. Often the supply of fresh water ran out half-way across. Even fresh air was at a premium. The biggest ships carried 1,000 steerage passengers, but promenading on the open decks was reserved for the few in cabin class.

On some ships, emigrants shared cargo space with the iron rails they were to meet again in laying tracks for the subways and the railroads west of Buffalo.

Outbreaks of cholera and typhoid were common. Some ships never arrived at all. The City of Glasgow, with 480 on board, was lost at sea. The Ocean Monarch burned and sank in the Mersey river, within sight of Liverpool, with a loss of 186 lives. The City of Philadelphia was lost off Newfoundland.

For a mostly rural people who had no cities until the Danes invaded, the Irish looked upon New York as “heaven’s front parlor” and soon brought it a bigger Irish population than Dublin.

There was no Statue of Liberty holding her lamp beside the Golden Door for the wretched refuse of Ireland’s depleted shore. Bedloe’s Island, as it was then known, was a dumping ground amid the ruins of an abandoned hospital, a pest house and a military prison with a still-standing gallows. Rising from the weeds was the star-shaped ramparts of Ft. Wood, a leftover from the War of l812 that would serve as the base for Lady Liberty’s pedestal.

Staten Island Woods

Their first view of New York was heavily wooded Staten Island and the spire of Trinity Episcopal Church. Horse-drawn street cars moved up Fifth Avenue to 34th Street where “the sticks” began. Harlem was a country town. At the height of the famine influx, New York was a city of 630,000 people, “half of them foreigners,” as the increasingly powerful Know-Nothing Party loudly complained.

Right off, the emigrant was in for three disappointments. First, he found the streets weren’t paved with gold. Next, that they weren’t paved at all. And thirdly, he would be expected to pave them.

New York, according to an 1855 census, counted 1,112 lawyers, 2,563 laundresses, 1,268 teachers, 979 brewers, distillers and wine merchants, 565 bar owners and 19,748 laborers.

The statistics failed to mention “shoulder hitters” or baggage forwarders, as they called themselves when accused in court of doing grievous bodily harm. These dockside racketeers were far more brutal and rapacious than the thugs working the quays of Liverpool. Led by prizefighters and tavern brawlers like Big Tom Burns, Awful Gardner and “General” Billy Wilson, gangs of runners met the ships, or boarded them in quarantine, with the intent of reducing the hapless passengers to utter destitution by a series of scams.

Outrageous Fees

They stole baggage or smashed it if not paid an outrageous portage fee. Emigrants were delivered to shabby boarding houses, where the girls were forced into prostitution to pay their bills. The gullible were sold bogus or overpriced railway tickets. The fare to Buffalo was $2.50. The runners got $7.

For a fee of $300, crooked captains gave runners a monopoly of their passenger lists. Customs agents could be bribed to allow them aboard when the ship came up the bay into quarantine.

“It is not uncommon for eight to 10 boatloads of runners to surround a ship in quarantine,” testified health officer Dr. Henry Van Hovenburghat at a hearing on dock rackets. “They are desperate men and can only be kept off by armed force.”

Most of the dock goons were Irish, beating up on their most recently arrived countrymen. Perhaps the toughest of the runners, John Morrisey, went on to become heavyweight champion of the illegal bare fisted fight world, owner of a gambling casino at Saratoga, state senator and congressman.

Reviewing Stand

Today, at the bottom of Manhattan, Msgr. James Wilders’ Our Lady of the Rosary church rises as a reviewing stand to New York’s greatest Irish parade. His Federal-style brick church and rectory was once the home of Elizabeth Ann Seton, America’s first canonized saint. Her father, Dr. Richard Bayley, was the city’s health officer, and the plight of Irish immigrants coming into his quarantine station stirred her to a life of helping the helpless.

For nearly half a century, the building served as a “Mission for the Protection of Irish Immigrant Girls.” It gave shelter to more than 170,000 Irish girls, sometimes 350 a night, and found jobs for 12,000.

In his study overlooking the harbor, Wilders keeps the faded ledgers listing the date and ship they arrived on, where they came from and which relatives awaited them:

“SS Astoria. July 5, 1905. Jennie McKinney, age 16. Derry. To Sarah McKinney, sister, 529 west 20th street.”

“SS Oceanic. Oct 2, 1906. Alice 19, Eileen 16 and Rose McCoy 22. Armagh. To Gerald McCoy, uncle, Morristown, N.J.”

Immigration Center

Across Battery Park from his window looms the yellow-brown circular shell of Castle Garden, which had been a War of 1812 fort and an auditorium before it became an immigration center to curb the worst abuses of the runners.

Before Ellis Island opened in 1892, more than 2 million Irish passed through Castle Garden, bathing 50 at a time in its great trough, buying food and rail tickets at honest prices, sleeping on the gallery floor until relatives came to collect them.

Here the Irish were recruited for jobs in the Navy yard at $1.12 a day, or building the Croton Reservoir at 75 cents a day, and the girls went “into service” as housemaids at $1.25 a week.

The newcomers demonstrated incredible generosity and filial love in saving up to bring over a brother or sister, aunts, uncles and the parents. In Ireland they were great hoarders of small coins, hiding out coppers in the thatched roofs or burying them in a field for the trip to America. Over here, their frugality became a banking legend.

‘Letters From America’

In the 15 years after the famine the Irish sent home $65 million in “Letters from America,” as remittances were called. New York’s Emigrant Industrial Bank, founded in 1851 to protect the savings of Irish laborers, remitted $30 million to Ireland in its first three decades.

“Such a beautiful story of unforgotten affection is unmatched in the world records of human attachment,” said Robert Murrray, an unsentimental Scot who was chief officer of the Provincial Bank, on the receiving end in Ireland.

They were equally generous with their church.

“It was the Irish girls themselves who supported the mission here,” Wilders says. “Nothing came from the city or the state or the big philanthropies. And it was the pennies of the Irish serving girls that built St. Patrick’s Cathedral.”

And it is on the steps of the cathedral, begun in the decade after the famine, that Cardinal John O’Conner, whose grandparents came through Castle Garden from County Roscommon, will review the grand parade of Irish that keeps coming and coming.