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From Famine to Five Points: Lord Lansdowne's Irish Tenants Encounter North America's Most Notorious Slum
TYLER ANBINDER
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From Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
(March 13, 1880), p. 29: "New York City.Irish depositors
of the Emigrant Savings Bank withdrawing money to send to
their suffering relatives in the old country." Courtesy
of the Library of Congress. |
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As New Yorker Ellen Holland
looked back over her first forty-seven years of life in 1860, she
must have wondered whether she was blessed or cursed. "Nelly" had
been born and raised in southwestern Ireland in the County Kerry
parish of Kenmare. There she grew up surrounded by jagged mountain
peaks and lush green hills that sloped dramatically to the wide,
majestic Kenmare River. Nelly and her family were tenants of the
marquis of Lansdowne, whose estate was home to 13,000 of the most
impoverished residents of nineteenth-century Ireland. Visitors to
the huge property commonly chose terms such as "wretched," "miserable,"
"half naked," and "half fed" to describe the poor farmers and laborers
who dominated its population.1
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Observers invoked such descriptions
of Nelly's birthplace even before 1845, when a mysterious
potato blight began to wreak havoc on the meager food supply. By
late 1846, Kenmare residents began to succumb to starvation and
malnutrition-related diseases. As conditions continued to deteriorate
in early 1847, the death toll multiplied. An Englishman who visited
the town of Kenmare at this time wrote that "the sounds of woe and
wailing resounded in the streets throughout the night." In the morning,
nine corpses were found in the village streets. "The poor people
came in from the rural districts" in such numbers, wrote this observer,
"it was utterly impossible to meet their most urgent exigencies,
and therefore they came in literally to die." Tens of thousands
fled Ireland in 1847, but almost none of the Lansdowne tenants could
afford to emigrate. Relatively few had journeyed from this isolated
estate to America in the pre-famine years, so they did not receive
the remittances from abroad that financed the voyages of many famine
emigrants leaving other parts of Ireland.2
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Although an abatement of the potato
fungus in 1848 led British officials to declare the emergency over,
such decrees meant nothing to Holland and others suffering in Kenmare.
Most of Lansdowne's tenants were too weak to work or plant and too
destitute to buy seed potatoes. And what few tubers they did cultivate
in 1849 were again ravaged by the dreaded fungus. Kenmare once more
became the center of suffering in the region, with people "dying
by the dozens in the streets." Those on the brink of death crowded
into the village workhouse, where, in return for giving up all of
their worldly possessions, the starving received just barely enough
food to keep them alive. By April 1849, the institution held 1,800
souls "in a house built for 500without shoes, without clothes,
in filth, rags and misery," wrote Kenmare's Roman Catholic archdeacon,
John O'Sullivan. "The women squatted on the ground, on the bare
cold clay floor and [were] so imprisoned for months . . .
without as much as a stool to sit on." One of these poor souls was
Ellen Holland. She and her three sons, thirteen-year-old James,
nine-year-old Thomas, and four-year-old George, were almost certainly
among the institution's inmates by that point. Her husband Richard
remained outside the workhouse hoping to find employment. Or he
may have been one of the hundreds of men authorities turned away,
both for want of space and on the theory that men could more readily
find paying work than women.3
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Securing one of the coveted places
in the Kenmare workhouse did not ensure survival.
Hundreds died there during the famine from diseases that spread
rapidly in the crowded, unsanitary institution. The food supply
was so meager that some inmates died of starvation-related illnesses
just hours after leaving the facility. Holland likely remained in
the workhouse throughout 1849 and 1850, wondering how her life might
ever return to normal, or if she and her sons would also fall victim
to the unending cycle of disease and death. Nelly must have been
elated, then, when Lansdowne's estate agent announced in December
1850 that the marquis would finance the emigration of all his workhouse
tenants who wished to depart. Holland and her sons were among the
first to take advantage of the offer. |
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Her jubilation soon became tinged
with despair, however, as the difficulties of the journey for such
emaciated, ill-equipped voyagers became more apparent. Sailors were
horrified when they first encountered the Lansdowne emigrants, reporting
that in the half-decade since the onset of the famine they had never
laid eyes on such wretched beings. The emigrants continued to suffer
as they made their way across the Atlantic. The rags they wore provided
woefully inadequate protection from the elements aboard a North
Atlantic sailing ship in the dead of winter. Holland's vessel, the
Montezuma, had to detour around an iceberg and huge swaths
of "field ice" during its voyage, giving some indication of the
frigid conditions she and her shipmates endured. And although Lansdowne's
agent had paid for the emigrants' tickets, he did not supply his
charges with the foodstuffs that the typical Irish emigrant brought
on a transatlantic voyage. Subsisting on just one pound of flour
or meal and thirteen ounces of water each day during thirty-nine
days at sea compounded the suffering that Holland and her Lansdowne
shipmates had already endured at home.4
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But Nelly was a strong woman, determined
to build a better life for her family. Like most of the Lansdowne
immigrants, she settled in New York's "Five Points" neighborhood,
the most infamously decrepit slum in North America. There, surrounded
by drunks, brothels, and other Irish immigrants, and living in one
of the most squalid blocks of tenements in the world, Holland and
her family set to work rebuilding their lives. After years of unemployment,
they must have been eager and delighted to take even the lowly jobs
available to them. Her husband Richard found work as a menial day
laborer. Ellen became a washerwoman. The boys undoubtedly pitched
in as well, for when Ellen opened an account at the Emigrant Savings
Bank in September 1853, thirty months after her arrival in New York,
she was able to deposit a substantial sum, $110, equivalent to about
$2,350 today.5
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Despite having accrued this significant
nest egg in a relatively short period, Holland's struggles continued.
By July 1855, both her husband and eldest son were dead. One might
have expected her to dip into her savings to help make ends meet
during such trying times, but Nelly did no such thing. In fact,
despite losing her family's two primary breadwinners, by 1860 she
had increased her bank balance to $201.20 (more than $4,200 today),
a real feat for a widow who, just eight years earlier, had been
on the brink of starvation and had lived the first thirty-eight
years of her life in a land of chronic underemployment and hunger.
More surprising still, among the hundreds of Lansdowne immigrants
who came to New Yorkmost, like Holland, arriving utterly destitutesuch
relative financial success was not all that unusual.6
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Hundreds of thousands of men and women
like Ellen Holland emigrated from Ireland to North America during
the famine years. Yet, dramatic as her story may be, few such tales
can be found in the historiography of the famine immigration to
America. This has resulted to a large extent from the divided nature
of Irish studies, as the best works in the field treat either the
Irish or the American story but rarely follow the emigrants from
Europe to America. A number of fine books have examined the conditions
that drove about 2 million Irishmen to flee the Emerald Isle in
the famine years, but these studies do not offer detailed accounts
of their subjects' fates in America.7
The best works on the Irish in the United States likewise devote
relatively little attention to Irish Americans' lives before they
immigrated. David M. Emmons in The Butte Irish and Kevin
Kenny in Making Sense of the Molly Maguires trace their protagonists
to West Cork and West Donegal respectively, but the reader gets
little sense of how individual lives changed.8
Studies of famine-era Irish immigration to Canada and England have
followed the same historiographic pattern.9
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Given the current trend toward "internationalizing"
our study of history (both the American Historical Review
and the Journal of American History have recently focused
attention on this subject), one might imagine that studies of the
Irish diaspora would have begun to compare their subjects' pre-
and post-emigration lives more fully. Those who study the seventeenth
and eighteenth-century "Atlantic World," for example, have produced
a number of sophisticated and influential monographs that cross
national boundaries, but this trend has had little impact on historians
of immigration, the vast majority of whom study the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.10
Most sociologists, in contrast, have warmly embraced the concept
of "transnationalism," arguing that modern means of communications
and transportation have created a new breed of immigrant who simultaneously
maintains strong ties to two lands.11
Historians, justifiably skeptical about claims that contemporary
immigrants are so different from their predecessors, have been reluctant
to jump onto the transnational bandwagon. Those interested in immigration
and ethnicity have instead focused on issues such as "whiteness"
(exemplified by Noel Ignatiev's provocative How the Irish Became
White), nativism, and other aspects of cultural history.12
Research on the Irish elsewhere has followed the same trends, although
a recent survey of the field in England lamented that "the academic
study of the Irish in Britain continues to lag far behind its counterpart
in the United States." Even the appearance of a six-book series
entitled "The Irish World Wide," while significant, did not portend
any sea change in Irish historiography, as virtually every essay
in the collection looked at the Irish in a single town or city.
The 150th anniversary of the famine did produce a surge in publications
on that subject, but little that would help explain whether the
relative financial success of Ellen Holland and her friends was
typical or exceptional.13
And there are no signs of a revival in the kinds of "mobility studies,"
pioneered more than thirty years ago by Stephan Thernstrom, which
might enable us to put the financial achievements of someone like
Ellen Holland into context.14
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Those familiar with Irish and Irish-American
historiography would certainly suppose that Ellen Holland's story
must be unusual. A deep pessimism has pervaded this literature,
assuming that the famine immigrants were a kind of lost generation
fated to be victims of disease, nativism, low-paying jobs, and overcrowded
tenements in North America or England. Any significant improvement
in their circumstances, such studies imply, came in the lives of
their assimilated children. There are exceptions, but most scholars
continue to believe, as Oscar Handlin put it more than fifty years
ago in Boston's Immigrants, that the famine Irish were both
economically and socially "fated to remain a massive lump in the
community, undigested, undigestible."
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When I began investigating the history
of Five Points, I assumed that the prevailing, gloomy picture of
the famine-era immigrants would be borne out on its mean streets.
Given that Five Points' residents were the most impoverished in
antebellum New York, I expected to find them barely scraping by
from payday to payday. I was especially sure that the Lansdowne
immigrants would fit this stereotype. They made up about one in
nine of Five Points' Irish-Catholic inhabitants in the 1850s and
were concentrated overwhelmingly in the most squalid tenements in
the neighborhood's most decrepit and crime-ridden blocks. But the
bank balances of Ellen Holland and her fellow Lansdowne immigrants
force us to reconsider such long-held preconceptions.16
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It was an English nobleman
, the third marquis of Lansdowne, who, by deciding to finance a
massive Irish emigration program, made it possible for Ellen Holland
and about a thousand of her friends, family members, and neighbors
to move to Five Points. Born Henry Petty in about 1780, Lansdowne
from an early age took an interest in British politics. He considered
himself an "independent Whig" and as a young man entered the Cabinet,
serving as chancellor of the Exchequer at twenty-six as a result
of his expertise in political economy and financial and administrative
theory. At a time when English aristocrats commonly supported artists
by allowing them to live on their estates and paint at their leisure,
Lansdowne did the same for economists, specifically those of a classically
liberal bent. So many of them lived at or visited Bowood House,
his Wiltshire mansion, that the leading economists of the era who
espoused free trade and complete laissez faire became known as the
"Bowood set." Though a failure as chancellor of the Exchequer, Lansdowne
remained an influential figure in English politics throughout his
life, serving in various Whig cabinets and for many years as Lord
President of Her Majesty's Council.17
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Lansdowne owned 95,000 statute acres
in various parts of west Kerry, but the bulk of his holdings (and
those from which all of his assisted emigrants originated) was in
the southwest corner of the county in the barony of Glanarought.
Consisting of about 67,000 statute acres (105 square miles), Lansdowne's
Glanarought estate spanned nearly three civil parishesall
of Tuosist, the Kerry portion of Kilcascan, and more than half of
Kenmare. This vast property, one of the dozen largest estates in
nineteenth-century Ireland, had been a mid-seventeenth-century gift
to Sir William Petty for his role in subduing the Irish "rebels"
who had resisted England's conquest of the island. Petty's descendants
eventually received peerages, becoming the marquises of Lansdowne.18
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Lansdowne's Irish estate (this and
all subsequent references to the "Landsdowne estate" refer to the
Glanarought portion of his holdings) was "a very rocky and mountainous
country." A topographical guide to Ireland described Tuosist, the
largest of the three parishes, as "one of the wildest and most irreclaimable
districts in the county; it is separated on the south-east from
the county of Cork by a range of lofty and almost impassable mountains."
Kilcascan was still more remote than Tuosist, for while the latter
parish included a long stretch of the south shore of the Kenmare
River (really a bay at this point), Kilcascan sat entirely within
the mountains, and as late as 1837 neither of the two main roads
in "this wild and mountainous district" was passable by carriage.
Residents usually referred to this isolated area as "Bonane" (the
name of the Catholic parish it encompassed) rather than by the civil
classification of Kilcascan. "Rocky mountain and bog" characterized
Kenmare parish as well, although it did contain the estate's one
sizable villagethe town of Kenmarewith a population
of 1,300 in 1841. The large majority of the estate that lay south
of the wide river was thoroughly isolated from Kenmare until 1842,
just before the famine, when a suspension bridge was completed to
link "the wilds of Tuosist" and Bonane to Kenmare town and the roads
to Cork and Killarney.19
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Only a tiny fraction of this vast
district was arable. "The portions of land reclaimed from the rocky
mountains . . . are so small," wrote the Lansdowne agent
in 1869, "that they are barely sufficient to grow potatoes and turnips
enough for the consumption of the people." Most of the Lansdowne
property was instead used as pasture for cows and sheep. As a result,
the estate's population on the eve of the famine was relatively
modestonly about 12,800 peopleof which 7,500 lived in
Tuosist, 3,900 in Kenmare parish, and 1,400 in Bonane. Yet despite
being spread out over a wide area, Lansdowne's tenants were a close-knit
bunch. Tuosist priest Callaghan McCarthy told a visitor that "there
existed considerable remains of clanship among these mountaineers.
He described them as highly moral, a careless, but a peaceable and
contented race, with great kindness and simple hospitality, and
strong family attachments."
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These "mountaineers" were among the
most destitute inhabitants of Ireland. Laborers were lucky to find
more than a day or two of paid work in a week, and with such an
oversupply of unskilled workers, wages fell to incredibly low levels.
With so little arable land available, rents for potato land skyrocketed,
meaning that most small-scale, impoverished farmers and laborers
could neither grow nor buy enough food for their families. James
Hickson, the Lansdowne agent until mid-century, testified that the
typical poor man's diet consisted entirely of either "potatoes and
milk, or potatoes and fish; some are so poor as to use [only] potatoes
and salt." Another source confirmed that "no groceries are used
in a labourer's family except a very little at Christmas." Many
impoverished families had chickens that laid eggs, but they never
ate them, selling them instead to pay for tobacco. Summer months
were particularly difficult, as the previous year's potato supply
ran out or spoiled weeks or months before the new crop was ready
for harvest. "Hungry July" was a common phenomenon throughout western
Ireland, but especially so on the Lansdowne estate.21
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Lansdowne
tenants were so desperately poor that they would often nail shut
their cabins during the summer and walk a hundred miles or more
through the counties of Cork, Limerick, or Tipperary in search of
work. "In autumn they go to the low country during the harvest,"
noted a Kerry resident, "and their wives then often shut up their
houses and go begging with their families until their husbands come
home with their earnings" in time to harvest their own potatoes.
After digging up the tubers, some again went inland to find work
before returning home for Christmas. Not all Lansdowne laborers
needed to roam the countryside in search of work, but those who
lived on remote mountainsides in Tuosist and Bonane could rarely
rent enough potato land to feed their families, and thus had no
choice but to partake of this migratory ritual.22
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Figure 1: Map of Ireland, with the
parishes of the Lansdowne estate highlighted. Inset
shows location of Kenmare. Tuosist, and Bonane parishes
within the estate. Mapmaker Chris Robinson.
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During the portions of the year when
they inhabited them, and especially until the mid-1830s, Lansdowne's
tenants lived in some of the worst dwellings in all of Ireland.
Their cottages usually measured "13 feet long by 10 broad" and were
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built of stone and mud. It contains generally but one apartment.
The roof is merely thatch . . . of straw, heath, or
potato stalks . . . The floor is made of beaten earth;
it is commonly damp, being below the level of the surrounding
ground, and below the water contained in the manure holes outside
the door . . . There are no chimneys in general . . .
Cabins never contain [cooking] grates; there is no glass in the
windows . . . Many of the worst cabins have no wooden
door but a kind of hurdle with heather or long grass woven among
the sticks.
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One visitor who traveled throughout Ireland in 1834 called these
"as miserable cabins as I ever beheld." They were "beyond description,
wretched abodes." Apparently embarrassed, Lansdowne began financing
the construction of stone homes to replace the mud hovels. By the
eve of the famine, stone cabins predominated, but the revolutionary
Michael Doheny, who hid in Tuosist cabins after the failed uprising
of 1848, insisted that in many cases their "showy exterior is sadly
belied by the filth and discomfort of the inside." Such cabins were
almost devoid of furniture, and the occupants (especially women
and children) often had no clothing other than the tatters on their
backs.23
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Who was to blame for this situation?
Doheny faulted Lansdowne. William Steuart Trench, the marquis's
agent beginning at mid-century, blamed his predecessor as well as
the tenants themselves. Father O'Sullivan, who was no admirer of
Lansdowne, nonetheless admitted that the marquis charged very reasonable
rents and did not evict tenants even when they fell years behind
in their payments. No matter whom one faulted, all observers agreed
with Irish Poor Inquiry official Jonathan Binns that Lansdowne's
"poor cottagers are in a very distressed condition . . .
They are nearly half naked, and are but half fed. This is indeed
a wretched state of things." O'Sullivan was even more blunt. Laborers
on the Lansdowne estate, he asserted in 1844, were "the most wretched
people upon the face of the globe."
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Given their precarious position
, it should come as no surprise that Lansdowne's tenants were devastated
by the famine that commenced after a fungus began to destroy potato
crops in the summer of 1845. "Kenmare was completely paralysed,"
asserted Trench, who recalled that "famine stalked unmolested through
the glens and mountains." During the first year after the blight
struck, from mid-1845 to mid-1846, the distress was relatively mild.
Many, in fact, refused to eat the "Indian corn meal" imported from
North America by Lansdowne and the Kenmare Relief Committee. With
the complete failure of the potato crop in 1846, however, attitudes
changed rapidly. The hungry now demanded cornmeal, noted the committee
in August, while also reporting that "dysentery and the common cholera
are already beginning to make their appearance to a frightful extent."
Committee members warned that starvation would be inevitable unless
the government spent more on relief efforts.25
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Instead, expenditures on aid were
cut back, and even those who did receive assistance did not get
enough. By February 1847, deaths from starvation were common. "This
neighbourhood is becoming depopulated with railway speed," wrote
one relief official from Kenmare, describing the public works projects
set up to employ the starving laborers and cottiers (those who subsisted
by renting tiny parcels of farm land):
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I see nothing within the bounds of possibility that can save the
people. On one road, on which I have 300 men employed, the deaths
are three each day. This is in the parish of Tuosist. The people
are buried without coffins, frequently in the next field. No noise
or sign of grief for the dead; every thought is selfish and unfeeling
. . . I daily witness the most terrible spectacles.
Men and women are discolored with dropsy, attacked with dysentery,
or mad with fever, on the worksdriven there by the terrible
necessity of trying to get as much as would purchase a meal . . .
With most of these working is a mockery; they can scarcely walk
to and from the roads, and how can they work! . . .
When a respectable person passes the houses of these poor people,
the saddest sights present themselves; women, children, and old
men crawling out on all fours, perhaps from beside a corpse, to
crave a morsel of any kind of food.
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Men predominated among the dead because they were forced to toil
on such road crews, even though the small allotments of food they
received as payment could not sustain them.26
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Conditions
in the town of Kenmare were hardly better than those in the countryside.
O'Sullivan recorded in his diary in early 1847 that there was "nothing
more usual than to find four or five bodies in the street every
morning." The suffering of the living was almost as difficult to
bear as the sight of the dead. "The swollen limbs, emaciated countenances,
and other hideous forms of disease . . . were innumerable,"
gasped visitor William Bennett. "In no other part of Ireland had
I seen people falling on their knees to beg. It was difficult to
sit over breakfast after this." O'Sullivan wrote directly to Charles
Trevelyan, permanent secretary at the Treasury in London and the
man who singlehandedly controlled most relief expenditures, hoping
that if Trevelyan understood the extent of the suffering he might
make more aid available. "The cries of starving hundreds that besiege
me from morning until night actually ring in my ears during the
night," O'Sullivan reported. "I attended myself a poor woman, whose
infant, dead two days, lay at the foot of the bed, and four others
nearly dead in the same bed; and, horrible to relate, a famished
cat got up on the corpse of the poor infant and was about to gnaw
it, but for my interference. I could tell you such tales of woe
without end."27
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Conditions in Tuosist were especially
bad. "It is a wild alpine region; the inhabitants being mostly self-dependent,
and in ordinary times holding very little communication with the
rest of the world," Bennett explained. A clergyman there told him
that one-third of the inhabitants "had no other means of subsistence,
at the present moment, than sea-weed and shell-fish from the rocks."
Part of the problem, according to Captain Erasmus Ommanney, head
of the Kenmare relief district, was that his subordinates in Tuosist
were sometimes "exercising undue severity on the applicants for
relief." Hundreds who could not gain admission to the already full
poorhouse in Kenmare were starving to death in Tuosist, but the
local poor law guardians followed the letter of the law and refused
to grant relief to those living outside the workhouse. |
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Even
when such rules were eventually waived, relief officials' hardheartedness
often led to tragic results. In December 1847, Honora Connolly and
her five daughters left the Kenmare poorhouse after receiving assurances
that they would be eligible for food back home in Tuosist. When
she arrived there, however, agents refused to provide her with food,
insisting she was not on their list. "Norry" walked back to Kenmare
to investigate the problem, leaving four of her five daughters behind,
but by the time she returned to Tuosist the following day, all four
lay dead. An investigation eventually revealed that the relief officials
had mistakenly recorded Connolly's name on their list as Norry Harrington.
Her four children were a few of the "thousands in Tuosist sunk beneath
the sudden loss of the potatoe." Conditions there, concluded Bennett,
were "utterly past the powers of description, or even of imagination,
without witnessing."28
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With the death toll mounting, one
wonders why Lansdowne did not consider financing the emigration
of his tenants as a means to relieve both their suffering and his
obligation to feed them (the government had shifted most of the
burden for relief efforts to wealthy Irish landlords such as Lansdowne).
By the end of 1847, his political confidante, Lord Palmerston, had
already sent 2,000 of his starving County Sligo tenants to Canada.
A few other prominent landlords had followed suit. Very few Lansdowne
tenants could afford to emigrate on their own, and few had relatives
in the United States who could finance their emigration. At the
end of 1847, most of Lansdowne's tenants were still in Kerry receiving
relief rations paid for primarily by the marquis himself.29
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Perhaps Lansdowne believed that his
Kerry tenants could survive the blight without his having to expend
the huge sums on emigration laid out by Palmerston. If so, reports
from Kenmare in the spring of 1848 must have pleased the marquis
immensely. All signs indicated that suffering and privation were
on the wane, and the potatoes his tenants planted in 1848 initially
showed no signs of blight.30
But either because of illness or lack of seed potatoes, Lansdowne's
leaseholders had not planted nearly enough potatoes to feed themselves
for a whole year, and by February 1849 gruesome reports of starvation
again began emanating from Kenmare. "I was shocked in Skibbereen,
Dunmanway, [and] Bantry," wrote a visitor to Kenmare who had just
come from those infamously destitute west Cork towns, "but they
were as nothing to what was now before me . . . Bad as
the Bantry paupers were they were 'pampered rogues' in comparison
to these poor creatures . . . Spectres from the grave
could not present a more ghastly, unearthly appearance . . .
The very thought of them to this moment sickens me." The emaciated
once again crowded into Kenmare, "dying by the dozens in the streets."
According to O'Sullivan, "theft and robbery and plunder became . . .
universal" as others used any available means to stave off starvation.
However obtained, food alone did not necessarily ensure survival.
The cholera epidemic sweeping Europe and North America in the spring
of 1849 also struck Kenmare, and due to the overcrowding in the
workhouse, its inmates were particularly susceptible. Dysentery
afflicted many as well, observed O'Sullivan, its victims so thirsty
that they would barter their weekly one pound relief ration of cornmeal
"for a half noggin of new milk to try and quench the burning thirst
which invariably follows them." Despite government declarations
that the famine was over, the death toll in southwest Kerry climbed
steadily higher in 1849. By the end of that year, after the blight
again destroyed the 1849 crop, at least 1,000 (and perhaps as many
as 1,700) of Lansdowne's 12,000 tenants had succumbed to the famine
and the diseases spread in its wake. Many others were barely hanging
on.31
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In 1850, Lansdowne hired a new estate
agent, William Trench, in hopes that he might better administer
relief to the suffering tenants. Trench decided that only radical
measures could both feed Lansdowne's tenants and make the estate
profitable in the foreseeable future. In November, the agent sailed
for England to describe his plan to Lansdowne in person at Bowood.
As Trench recalled the discussion in his memoirs,
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I showed him by the poor-house returns, that the number of paupers
off his estate and receiving relief in the workhouse amounted
to about three thousand. That I was wholly unable to undertake
the employment of these people in their present condition, on
reproductive works; and that if left in the workhouse, the smallest
amount they could possibly cost would be £5 per head per
annum, and thus that the poor rates must necessarily amount, for
some years to come, to £15,000 per annum, unless these people
died or leftand the latter was not probable . . .
I explained to him further, that . . . inasmuch as the
poor rates were a charge prior to the rent, it would be impossible
for his lordship to expect any rent whatever out of his estate
for many years to come. The remedy I proposed was as follows.
That he should forthwith offer free emigration to every
man, woman, and child now in the poor-house and chargeable
to his estate . . . That even supposing they all
accepted this offer, the total, together with a small sum per
head for outfit and a few shillings on landing, would not exceed
from £13,000 to £14,000, a sum less than it would
cost to support them in the workhouse for a single year . . .
I plainly proved that it would be cheaper to him, and better
for them, to pay for their emigration at once, than to continue
to support them at home.
|
Lansdowne must have been predisposed to accept Trench's reasoning,
writing him a check on the spot for £8,000 (equivalent to
about $850,000 today) to be used to initiate the project. By the
end of 1851, Lansdowne had spent £9,500 (slightly more than
$1 million today) on emigration.32
|
30
|
Trench later recalled that when he
returned to the estate and announced the emigration offer, "it was
considered by the paupers to be too good news to be true. But when
it began to be believed and appreciated, . . . they
rushed from the country like a panic-stricken throng, each only
fearing that the funds at my disposal might fail before he and his
family could get their passage." Each week, Trench wrote, he chose
from the poorhouse population 200 "of those apparently most suited
for emigration; and having arranged their slender outfit," put them
in the hands of an employee who led them on the sixty-mile journey
to Cork, with orders "not to leave them nor allow them to scatter,
until he saw them safely on board the emigrant ship . . .
Week after week, to the astonishment of the good people of Cork,
and sometimes not a little to their dismay, a batch of two hundred
paupers appeared on the quays of Cork, bound for the Far West . . .
And thus, two hundred after two hundred, week after week, departed
for Cork, until the poor-house was nearly emptied of paupers chargeable
to the Lansdowne estate; and in little more than a year 3,500 paupers
had left Kenmare for America, all free emigrants, without . . .
the slightest pressure put upon them to go." Only fifty or so of
the Lansdowne tenants in the workhouse chose to forgo the emigration
offer.33
|
31
|
|
Trench boasted in his memoirs
that he allowed each emigrant "to select what port in America he
pleasedwhether Boston, New York, New Orleans, or Quebec."
Nearly all chose New York. Estate records indicate that 1,700 Lansdowne
tenants left Kenmare for New York from December 1850 through March
1851. From that point, perhaps in an effort to save money, Trench
no longer offered the emigrants their choice of destination, instead
requiring them all to sail to Quebec. By the end of 1851, another
1,300 had departed for that port, although most of these emigrants
eventually made their way to Manhattan as well.34
|
32
|
Even in a huge metropolis such as
New York, where more than 250,000 immigrants landed in 1851, the
unprecedented poverty and raggedness of Lansdowne's former tenants
evoked an immediate public reaction. On March 19, the New York
Tribune reported that "several destitute emigrants who arrived
in this city a few days ago by the ship Montezuma [Ellen
Holland's vessel], from Liverpool, were found Monday afternoon in
the streets, in a starving condition. They were taken to the Fourth
Ward [Police] Station, where they were provided with food, after
which they were sent to the Commissioners of Emigration," who were
responsible for assisting indigent immigrants. "These emigrants,
it appears, were taken out of the poorhouses in Ireland, by Lord
Lansdowne." A few days after the Tribune story appeared,
the Sir Robert Peel arrived in New York Harbor from London.
The Lansdowne emigrants disembarking from that ship presented such
a spectacle of wretchedness that it prompted an entire editorial
in the Herald:
|
33
|
Irish Emigrants
.It is really lamentable to see the vast number of unfortunate
creatures that are almost daily cast on our shores, penniless
and without physical energy to earn a day's living. Yesterday,
groups of these hapless beings were to be seen congregated about
the [City Hall] Park and in Broadway, looking the very picture
of despair, misery, disease and want. On enquiry, we ascertained
that they had arrived here by the ship Sir Robert Peel, and that
they had been, for the most part, tenants of the Marquis of Lansdowne,
on his county Kerry estateejected without mercy by him,
and "shipped" for America in this wholesale way. Among them were
gray haired and aged men and women, who had spent the heyday of
their life as tillers of their native soil, and are now sent to
this country to find a grave. This is too badit is inhuman;
and yet it is an act of indiscriminate and wholesale expatriation
committed by the "liberal" President of the Council of her Majesty
Queen Victoria's "liberal" ministry.
|
In the space of only a few days, the two most influential newspapers
in the United States had taken the highly unusual step of singling
out the Lansdowne immigrants for comment and condemnation, indicating
that their condition upon arrival must have been extraordinarily
bad.
Even in a city teeming with impoverished newcomers, the plight of
the Lansdowne emigrants aroused special indignation.35
|
34
|
The
charge that the Lansdowne immigrants were disproportionately "gray
haired and aged" deserves attention. At first glance, the charge
seems unfounded, as the average age of the Lansdowne immigrants22.1
yearswas slightly lower than that of the average Irish
immigrant (22.3 years) arriving in New York at that time. But an
analysis of the age distribution of the assisted emigrants bears
out the Americans' complaints. The average Irish immigrant was twice
as likely to be in his or her prime work yearsages seventeen
to thirty-fiveas was a Lansdowne immigrant. Although the majority
were far from "gray haired and aged," the Lansdowne immigrants were
four times more likely to have surpassed their fiftieth birthday
than the typical Irish immigrant. Assisted emigrants also brought
with them many more dependents (young children and aged parents)
than did the average Irish immigrant. On the American Eagle,
a ship probably made up entirely of Lansdowne tenants, 98 percent
of the emigrants traveled with another family member. In contrast,
only 55 percent of Irish immigrants traveled with one or more family
members on the typical immigrant ship arriving in New York in this
period. Because the marquis paid for entire families to emigrate,
women were unusually numerous on the Lansdowne vessels, composing
49 percent of the adults versus only 31 percent on the average Irish
immigrant ship. Thus, while the Lansdowne immigrants were hardly
all superannuated, many fewer of them were the vigorous young men
Americans perceived to be the ideal, self-supporting immigrant.36
TABLE 1
Age Distribution of Irish Immigrants Arriving in New York
in 1851
|
|
|
Age
16 or younger |
Age 17
to 35 |
Age
36 or older |
Lansdowne
Immigrants |
43% |
37% |
20% |
|
|
|
|
Random Irish Immigrants |
22% |
74% |
4% |
Source:
See n. 36.
|
|
|
|
35 |
By April, the Irish press had reprinted
the New York news stories concerning the Lansdowne emigrants, condemning
the marquis and Trench for mistreating their helpless tenants. Trench
defended himself, insisting in a letter that many of the emigrants
supplied with clothes had asked to keep their old rags. "They wanted
them as convenient garments to put on and beg with in New York,"
Trench insisted, a charge he repeated in his memoirs more than fifteen
years later.37
|
36
|
Even if some immigrants did hide their
new clothes in order to better plead for assistance, Trench himself
deserves full blame for putting them in a position to have to ask
for handouts at all. Estate records show that of the 1,700 emigrants
sent to New York in 1851, Trench supplied clothing to at most 226.
In addition, 1,350 of Lansdowne's New Yorkbound emigrants
received no food whatsoever for the voyage. They were, in the words
of one Irish journal, "obliged to subsist on the ship's allowancean
allowance which is scarcely sufficient to keep a full grown person
from starvation. God help them!" This was no exaggeration, as the
"ship's ration" consisted each day of just one pound of bread, meal,
biscuits, or flour and only thirteen ounces of water. Each of Palmerston's
assisted emigrants, in contrast, received each week, in addition
to the ship's allowance, six pounds of biscuits, three-and-a-half
pounds of flour, one pound of pork or beef, one pound of sugar,
one pound of rice, eight ounces of treacle, four ounces of coffee,
and two ounces of tea. To the charge that he had not properly supplied
the emigrants, Trench admitted privately that "this is to a certain
extent true but it would have cost thousands more to do it otherwise."
Trench likewise justified his failure to give each emigrant the
promised "few shillings" each to help with settlement in America
on the grounds that most already owed the estate two to four years'
back rent. Despite his public insistence that he had done nothing
wrong, Trench began spending significantly more outfitting each
emigrant after the press complained about his parsimony. Beginning
in mid-April, when the Tribune and Herald reports
reached Ireland, spending on supplies per emigrant increased more
than twenty-fold, from about 9 pence (about $4 today) per emigrant
to about 17 shillings ($90 today). Despite the increased outlay
on supplies, Lansdowne quickly recouped his expenditures in reduced
poor taxes. The Kenmare workhouse, which in 1850 had housed 2,500
Tuosist and Bonane paupers chargeable to Lansdowne, contained by
1853 only fourteen inhabitants from those parishes.38
|
37
|
Trench argued that his employer was
not the only one to benefit from the emigration program. "The most
cheering accounts are daily reaching us of their success in New
York," Trench informed Lansdowne in mid-April, by which point news
from none but the very first emigrants could have reached Kenmare.
"Considerable sums of money have been already sent over in very
small remittances of 20s[hillings] or 30s each, and every letter
which arrives brings new accounts of how well they fare and urging
others to come over if they can." Two years later, Trench sounded
the same refrain, bragging that "large sums are . . .
coming over from America." Later, he reported that some emigrants
had returned to Kerry sporting gold chains. "Others are receiving
money to pay their rents," Trench insisted, "and we are certainly
receiving back good interest at least for the money expended
on emigration." Whether or not the Lansdowne emigrants wrote glowing
accounts of their new homes cannot be verified, as none of their
correspondence is known to have survived. Father O'Sullivan later
complained that Trench should have been "ashamed" at the way he
exaggerated the success of "the victims of your ill-advised extermination."
On the other hand, it would have been wholly in keeping with the
tenor of emigrants' typically boastful letters for them to write,
as Trench claimed, that they were "now living as well as Father
McCarthy himself."
39
|
38
|
|
Thanks to a number of fortuitous circumstances
, we can reconstruct the New York lives of the Lansdowne immigrants
with a degree of precision and detail unprecedented in the literature
on Irish famine-era migration. Because the secretary of Five Points'
Roman Catholic church recorded unusually detailed biographical information
in the parish's marriage register, one can identify the concentration
of Lansdowne immigrants in the neighborhood and pinpoint their residential
patterns to a remarkable extent. The recent opening of records from
the Emigrant Savings Bank allows the historian to recreate the Lansdowne
immigrants' occupational and financial status with equal accuracy.
And because these immigrants chose to settle in such a notorious
district, descriptions of their tenements abound as well.
|
39
|
Why the Lansdowne emigrants chose
to concentrate in Five Points is not known. No longstanding Kerry
enclave attracted these immigrants to the neighborhood. Kerry natives
may have chosen to live there because, as the most destitute of
immigrants (even by Irish famine standards), they gravitated to
the cheapest housing in the city, much of which was in Five Points.
Whatever their impetus for settling there, by 1860 about one in
seven Five Points Irish Catholics was a Kerry native. More than
75 percent of these Kerry immigrants had once lived on the Lansdowne
estate. Given that about two-thirds of the neighborhood's 14,000
residents in 1855 were Irish natives or their children, one can
estimate that roughly 1,000 Five Points inhabitants were former
Lansdowne tenants or their offspring. This sizable population resulted
not merely from the massive emigration program of 1851 but also
from the subsequent immigration underwritten by friends and relatives
in New York, as well as occasional passages financed by Lansdowne
after 1851. Of the 1,000 or so Lansdowne immigrants living in Five
Points in 1855, approximately 500 had arrived in New York as part
of the main Lansdowne flotilla in early 1851, while most of the
remainder had emigrated later.40
|
40
|
Neither the first Lansdowne immigrants
nor those who joined them later chose haphazardly where within Five
Points to reside. Each of the dominant Irish sub-groups in the neighborhoodthose
from counties Sligo, Cork, and Kerrycreated enclaves to some
degree. But the Kerry immigrants were by far the most clannish of
the three, with 84 percent of them crowded into just two of the
neighborhood's twenty or so blocks. These two blocks, Orange Street
from Anthony to Leonard and Anthony Street from Centre to Orange,
were two of the five blocks whose confluence gave Five Points its
name.41
Kerry immigrants dominated those blocks, which were among the most
notoriously squalid and crime-ridden in Five Points and all New
York. Sixty-four percent of the Irish Catholic residents identified
on those two blocks were Kerry natives. Seventy-nine percent of
those Kerry natives had emigrated from the Lansdowne estate. Lansdowne
immigrants often took over whole buildings within this zone. Eighty-six
percent of the Irish Americans in the five-story building at 31
Orange Street, for example, had emigrated from Kerry. Of those Kerry
natives, 88 percent were Lansdowne emigrants. Sligo and Cork natives
never concentrated together to the degree that the Lansdowne immigrants
did in their enclave.42
|
41
|
|
|
|
Figure 2: Map of the Five Points
neighborhood in Manhattan, 1851. Mapmaker Chris Robinson.
|
|
|
|
|
We know from various newspaper exposés
and legislative investigations that the tenements in which the Lansdowne
immigrants clustered were Five Points' very worst. The northernmost
address in the Lansdowne enclave, for instance, was 39 Orange Street.
Less than two years before the Lansdowne immigrants arrived, 106
hogs had been kept at this address along with the human inhabitants.
In 1856, investigators sent by the state legislature found no more
swine, but they were still astounded by the filth and crowding.
As was the case at most of the addresses in this part of Five Points,
each lot held both a front and rear tenement. Rear tenements were
the most notorious abodes in the neighborhood. These small, ramshackle
buildings were usually trapped in perpetual shadow as the larger
surrounding structures blocked virtually all direct sunlight. In
most cases, the only windows on rear tenement buildings faced the
noxious outhouses in the yard between the front and rear structures,
meaning that the stench from the privies permeated the rear buildings. |
42
|
At 39 Orange, the alley leading from
the street to the rear tenement measured only nineteen inches wide
in some places, and only two feet at its widest.
Squeezing through to the rear building, the legislative committee
discovered fifteen people living in a single room measuring fifteen
by fourteen feet. This was probably the household of Tuosist native
Barbara Sullivan. A year earlier, the 1855 state census enumerator
had found the widowed fifty-year-old living there with her six children
(ranging in age from four to sixteen) and six lodgers. Sullivan
had arrived in New York in September 1851 just after the main Lansdowne
flotilla. At the time of the census taker's visit, Sullivan lodged
a forty-year-old widowed rag picker and her fifteen-year-old newsboy
son, as well as a forty-year-old widowed "hawker" and her three
children, the eldest of whom worked as a household servant. Ellen
Holland also lived at this address from at least 1853 through 1855,
though whether in the front or rear tenement is not known. While
the legislators made no other comments about this residence, its
inclusion in their report indicates that it must have been one of
the worst in this miserable district.43
|
43
|
|
|
|
Figure 3: Map of Lansdowne enclave
within Five Points, showing concentration of Lansdowne
immigrants by building. Mapmaker Chris Robinson. Each
dot represents one Lansdowne immigrant who was either
married at the Church of the Transfiguration from 1853
to 1860 or who opened a bank account at the Emigrant
Savings Bank from June 1851 to August 1856. Transfiguration
Church Marriage Register, 29 Mott Street, New York;
Emigrant Savings Bank Collection, Test Books and Account
Ledgers, New York Public Library. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Figure 4: Lithograph showing the
Five Points intersection, 1860. The left side of this
print depicts one of the blocks on which the Lansdowne
immigrants concentrated, the stretch of Orange Street
(later renamed Baxter) that ran north from the Five
Points intersection. The large five-story building at
the center is 31 Orange Street, whose three-room apartments
housed dozens of Lansdowne immigrants during the 1850s.
The small run-down buildings to the left, which also
housed many Lansdowne immigrants, were the most notorious
on the block. D. T. Valentine, ed., Manual of the
Corporation of the City of New York for 1860 (New
York, 1860). |
|
|
|
|
As one moved south from 39 Orange
toward the Five Points intersection, the frightful living conditions
continued. Next door, 37 ½ Orange was also dominated by Lansdowne
immigrants. The legislative inspectors found that as in most other
parts of the neighborhood, the vast majority of the inhabitants
spent the night in "sleeping closets," tiny windowless bedrooms
that rarely measured more than six by eight feet.
Among the residents at this address, one widowed "old dame of sixty"
and her two daughters "supported themselves by picking curled hair
sixteen hours a day, the three earning five dollars per week." The
"old dame" was probably Honora Moriarty, who the 1855 census taker
had found at this address along with twenty-year-old Margaret and
sixteen-year-old Mary Moriarty. These three women and a fourth lodger
shared an apartment with Denis Shea, his two young children, and
his wife Mary and her brother Michael. Mary and Michael were themselves
Moriartys, though not directly related to the boarders. Such arrangements
indicated the continuing strength of "clanship" noted by Tuosist's
Father McCarthy.44
Lansdowne immigrants took in far more boarders than the typical
Five Points family. The majority of Five Points households did not
take in any lodgers at all, and those that did typically took in
only one or two. The Lansdowne immigrants' propensity to take in
large numbers of boarders in 1855, four years after most had arrived
in the United States, indicates that they were still anxious to
supplement their work-related income.45
|
44
|
While most Lansdowne immigrants rented
space in their own homes to a few lodgers, some became full-time
boardinghouse keepers, outfitting a basement or series of apartments
with bunks to accommodate as many lodgers as possible. Such was
the case at 35 Orange Street, another Lansdowne-dominated building,
whose basement boarding establishment was referred to sarcastically
by the New York Illustrated News as "Mrs. Sandy Sullivan's
Genteel Lodging-House," operated by Lansdowne immigrants Sandy and
Kate Sullivan from Tuosist. The Sullivans had arrived in New York
with the main Lansdowne flotilla in March 1851. A Times reporter,
stopping at their boardinghouse during a tour of Five Points in
1859, called it "one of the filthiest, blackest holes we had yet
seen." The proprietor of this "damp and filthy cellar . . .
with much loquacity, assured [us] that the bed-clothes were all
'clane and dacent sure,' that they were washed 'onst a week,' every
Thursday, and that the place was quite sweet." Around the main room,
the reporters saw
|
45
|
a number of wretched bunks, similar to those on shipboard, only
not half as convenient, ranged around an apartment about ten feet
square. Nearly every one of the half-dozen beds was occupied by
one or more persons. No regard was paid to age or sex; but man,
woman, and child were huddled up in one undistinguishable mass
. . . The most fetid odors were emitted, and the floor
and the walls were damp with pestiferous exhalations. But this
was not all. There were two inner apartments, each of which was
crowded to the same capacity as the outer one. Not the slightest
breath of air reached these infernal holes, which were absolutely
stifling with heat.
|
Inquiring about two small children sleeping soundly in one of the
"hideous beds," the manager told the reporters that their older
sister, who cared for them, "was out begging, even at this hour."
Hard as it may be to believe, this lodging house must have been
superior to many others in the neighborhoodto stay there cost
six cents a night, far more than the worst dives. Sandy Sullivan
told the Times that he "lodged none under any circumstances
but honest hardworking peoplewhich statement the police received
with smiles and without contradiction." "To do them justice," agreed
an Express reporter accompanying the journalist from the
Times, "such as were awake seemed to be quite sober."
46
|
46
|
Continuing southward from the Sullivans'
lodging house toward the Five Points intersection, one reached 31
Orange Street.
The five-story brick tenement at this address, one of the first
residential structures of its size in the neighborhood, towered
over the wooden hovels just described. Conditions in this building
did not attract the attention of investigators in the antebellum
period, perhaps because as a relatively new building it had not
had much time to deteriorate. Yet the terrible crowding in its three-room
(325-square-foot) apartments boggles the mind. Cornelius Shea and
his wife Ellen, Lansdowne emigrants from Kenmare parish who had
arrived in New York in April 1851, shared their apartment with three
children and four lodgers. Widow Johanna McCarty squeezed her four
children (ranging in age from six to twenty) and eight lodgers into
her three-room flat. Three other dwellings held nine persons each,
including that of Tuosist native Daniel Haley, another 1851 Lansdowne
emigrant. Poverty did not push all Kerry natives to take in so many
lodgers. Mary Shea of Kenmare and her husband Jeremiah, a Cork native,
who had immigrated together in 1852, lived at 31 Orange with their
twenty-three-year-old daughter Margaret (a servant) and just a single
lodger. The combined incomes of father and daughter, plus the profit
from the lodger, allowed them to forgo the intense crowding endured
by their neighbors. Laborer Daniel Hagerty, another 1851 Lansdowne
emigrant from Kenmare, also lived at 31 Orange in 1855 with his
wife Mary and his younger brother Patrick, also a laborer. Their
incomes enabled them to dispense with boarders altogether. Thus,
while the relatively large apartments at 31 Orange (two-room, 225-square-foot
abodes were more typical) provided more spacious accommodations
for families with dual incomes, their size merely encouraged many
renters to cram even more lodgers than usual into the still crowded
spaces.47
|
47
|
|
|
|
Figure 5. Woodcut of "Sandy
Sullivan's Lodging House," 1860. Probably the establishment
toured by the New York Times and New York
Express reporters in 1859. Most Lansdowne immigrants
took in borders informally to supplement their incomes,
but some, like Sullivan, eventually expanded the practice
into a full-time occupation. New York Illustrated
News (February 18, 1860): 216. |
|
|
|
|
Genteel Americans wondered how and
why immigrants tolerated such miserable conditions. Compared to
their Irish cabins, however, Five Pointers may have perceived their
tenements, at least initially, as somewhat pleasant. Five Pointers
had wooden instead of dirt floors, typically with "bits of carpits"
on them. Immigrants also undoubtedly preferred their plaster ceilings
to the insect-filled thatch roofs that they had known in Kerry,
and in winter a tenement's warm stove was far preferable to the
open fire typically found in smoke-filled Irish cabins. Two large
windows per dwelling did not seem like many to American natives,
but to an Irish immigrant whose home had never before held more
than a tiny pane or two, Five Points apartments must have seemed
almost bright. And given that they had generally lived in Ireland
in a single ten-by-thirteen-foot room, the typical two-room, 225-square-foot
Five Points apartment might have seemed spacious, at least to those
who did not take in many boarders. So while conditions in the Lansdowne
immigrants' tenements were bad, they were really no worse, and in
some ways were actually much better, than their living conditions
in Ireland. This undoubtedly explains why even Five Points immigrants
could write glowing, boastful letters to loved ones back in Ireland.48
|
48
|
|
One would imagine that Lansdowne immigrants
chose to live in such dilapidated, overcrowded tenements because
they could afford nothing else. In fact, male Lansdowne immigrants
did hold the city's lowest-paying, least desirable jobs. Lansdowne
immigrants were much more likely than the typical Irish Five Pointer
to toil as a menial day laborer, the job held by the overwhelming
majority of the neighborhood's unskilled workers (see Table 2).
Conversely, natives of the Lansdowne estate were
significantly less likely to own their own businesses or hold lower-status
"white-collar" jobs and were ten times less likely than the typical
Five Pointers to work as skilled artisans.49
TABLE 2
Irish Men's Employment by Occupational Category, 18501855
|
|
|
Lansdowne Five Points
Bank Depositors |
All Irish-Born Five
Points Bank Depositors |
All Irish-Born Five
Points Residents |
Professionals |
0% |
0% |
.4% |
Business Owners |
0% |
6% |
3% |
Peddlers and
Street Vendors |
5% |
10% |
1% |
Lower-Status
White-Collar |
0% |
9% |
3% |
Skilled Manual Workers |
3% |
30% |
34% |
Unskilled Workers |
90% |
43% |
58% |
Difficult to Classify |
2% |
1% |
1% |
|
|
Notes: All percentages rounded to nearest
whole number except those smaller than one, which are
rounded to nearest tenth of a percent. "All Irish-Born
Five Points Residents" category is based on a random
sample taken from the 1855 state census. Other categories
based on information in the Emigrant Savings Bank Collection,
Test Books and Ledgers, New York Public Library. The
"All Irish-Born Five Points Bank Depositors" category
is composed of all 192 Five Points Irish men and women
who opened accounts among the bank's first 5,000 depositors.
These accounts were opened from September 1850 to July
1853. The "Lansdowne" category includes information
from all Lansdowne immigrants who opened accounts from
1851 through May 1855. For the vocations that comprise
each occupational category, see n. 49.
|
|
49 |
Frustratingly little is known about
the lives of nineteenth-century America's day laborers. Construction
jobs probably provided most of such workers' employment. Day laborers
could dig foundations, carry heavy hods full of bricks and mortar
to the masons, and haul away the work-related debris. Municipal
projects also employed many laborers, especially to dig sewer lines
and pave streets. When outdoor work slowed in mid-summer, a laborer
might find a job along the waterfront, loading or unloading sacks
and crates from the hundreds of ships that plied New York City's
waterways each week. Laborers' work was often very dangerous, and
newspapers overflowed with reports of hod carriers killed in falls
from ladders, longshoremen crushed by cargo, and laborers buried
by the collapsing walls of unfinished buildings. A fair share of
these work-related fatalities must have befallen Lansdowne families.50
|
50
|
Dangerous as a laborer's work might
be, his greatest fear was probably not death but unemployment. On
days too cold or wet to work, the laborer did not get paid. Some
might find steady employment at a single construction site; others
had to look for a new position each day. Sudden sickness or a job-related
injury could also throw one out of work at any time, since no position
was held open for a laborer while he recuperated. Even in perfect
health, observed the New York Tribune at this time, only
"an energetic and lucky man . . . can make more than two
hundred and fifty days' work as an out-door laborer in the course
of a year, while the larger number will not average two hundred."
During recessions, many laborers could not secure more than one
or two days of paid work in a week. Such unemployment wreaked havoc
on family finances. "A month's idleness, or a fortnight's sickness,
and what misery!" observed an Irish journalist. Some Lansdowne immigrants
left New York City permanently to search for steadier work. Upstate
New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, and (to a lesser extent) Virginia
were their favorite destinations.51
Many others undoubtedly made seasonal journeys to seek employment,
especially in the winter, when there was little work for the city's
laborers, a practice the Lansdowne immigrants would have found familiar.
The laborer's life was thus one of the hardest, most dangerous,
and most financially precarious in Five Points, and for at least
his first few years in New York, nearly every adult male Lansdowne
immigrant found himself forced to take such work.52
|
51
|
Children contributed significantly
to the family coffers in the Lansdowne enclave, either to supplement
their parents' unreliable incomes or to replace it in the case of
households headed by widows. Many youngsters worked as newsboys.
Tim Sullivan, the son of Lansdowne emigrants Daniel Sullivan and
Catherine Connelly, lived at 25 Baxter (formerly Orange) Street
in 1870 when at age seven he began hawking newspapers. The other
trade most popular with Five Points boys was shoe shining. Sullivan,
in fact, had shined shoes outside a police stationhouse before peddling
newspapers. Bootblacks typically ranged in age from ten to sixteen,
although some (such as Sullivan) started work much younger. Other
boys earned money in more unusual ways. Many Five Points saloons
featured bowling alleys, where Charles Dickens observed that young
lads "wait upon the players, setting up the pins, returning the
balls, fetching a light for their segars, supplying them with liquor
when thirsty," and receiving in return a small wage from the saloonkeeper
and tips from the bowlers. One such "pin boy" was Timothy Harrington,
a Lansdowne immigrant who had left Kerry in the summer of 1851 with
a brother and three sisters. When the fourteen-year-old opened a
savings account in 1853 with an initial deposit of $30 (about $640
today), he was living with his seventeen-year-old brother John in
the heart of the Lansdowne enclave at 155 Anthony Street. Girls
had fewer opportunities to earn cash than did their brothers. Some
made significant sums sweeping the mud away from street corners
on rainy days, receiving tips in return from passersby. In the late
summer and early fall, they might sell hot corn from steaming buckets.
But girls were more likely to contribute to the family economy in
other ways, especially scavenging coal or kindling from waterfront
docks. Such work sustained many an impoverished Five Points family.53
|
52
|
Lansdowne
women also contributed to their families' incomes, and in the cases
of widows and unmarried women sometimes supported their dependents
singlehandedly (see Table 3). The employment figures
for Lansdowne women, however, are somewhat misleading. Most Lansdowne
immigrants earned extra income taking in boarders, an enterprise
usually supervised by the female head of household, yet of the twenty-nine
Lansdowne women who listed occupations when they opened bank accounts,
none described themselves as boardinghouse keepers. Perhaps taking
in boarders was so common in the Lansdowne enclave that neither
the Lansdowne women nor the bank secretary considered it an "occupation."
54
Nor do the bank records reflect the full range
of work Lansdowne women engaged in outside the home, for we know
from other sources that some of them (usually widows or their children)
turned to one of the most degrading of nineteenth-century occupationsragpicking.
Ragpickers scavenged the city's ash bins and rubbish barrels looking
for rags, bones, scrap meat, and metal or glass that could be sold
to paper producers, fat renderers, candle and soap makers, and other
manufacturers.
TABLE 3
Women's Employment by Occupational Category, 18511856
|
|
|
Female Five Points
Lansdowne Immigrants'
with Bank Accounts |
All Five Points
Irishwomen |
Needle Trades |
7% |
48% |
Household Servants |
52% |
25% |
Laundresses |
28% |
8% |
Boardinghouse Keepers |
not available
|
13% |
Miscellaneous |
14% |
6% |
|
|
Notes: All percentages rounded to
nearest whole number. The "Lansdowne" category includes
all Lansdowne immigrants who opened accounts at the
Emigrant Savings Bank until August 1856. The "All
Five Points Irishwomen" category is based on a random
sample taken from the 1855 state census. The bank
secretary failed to record the occupations of many
women who did work for pay; see n. 54.
|
|
53 |
One can only speculate on the extent
to which Lansdowne women participated in the female trade most associated
with Five Pointsprostitution. Writing in 1849, just before
the Lansdowne immigrants arrived, New York journalist George Foster
said of Five Points that "nearly every house and cellar is a groggery
below and a brothel above." A minister who worked with the neighborhood's
most impoverished residents remembered that on his arrival there
in 1850 "every house was a brothel, and every brothel a hell."
55
|
54
|
Could such accounts of the ubiquity
of Five Points prostitution have been true, or were they merely
the exaggerated fantasies of imaginative or bigoted writers? At
first glance, the claim that "every house was a brothel" seems ridiculous.
Yet a review of the New York district attorney's indictment records
reveals that for the two blocks that composed the Lansdowne enclave,
such allegations were essentially accurate. Twenty of the twenty-five
dwellings on Anthony Street between Centre and Orange housed prostitutes
at some point during the 1850s. Brothel proprietors were likewise
prosecuted in thirteen of the seventeen residences on Orange Street
just north of the Five Points intersection in the same period. Five
Points policemen were actually renowned for ignoring the neighborhood
vice trade. Prosecutions usually ensued only when neighbors repeatedly
complained about persistently raucous behavior. Thus it seems likely
that brothels were found in most Lansdowne tenement buildings during
the early 1850s.56
|
55
|
There is no evidence, however, that
Lansdowne immigrants themselves were particularly active in the
Five Points sex trade.
Their common surnamesSullivan, Shea, Sheehan, and Harringtonare
noticeably absent from the Five Points indictment records. Census
records also indicate that Lansdowne immigrants did not rent their
tenements' commercial spaces, where most brothels operated under
the guise of saloons and dance halls. Most indicted Five Points
brothel keepers had lived in New York far longer than the typical
Lansdowne immigrant. It is possible that Lansdowne women worked
as prostitutes in brothels run by others, because it was the brothel
keepers rather than their courtesans who were typically prosecuted.
Yet while some Lansdowne immigrants may have worked as prostitutes,
the evidence suggests that most lived among the neighborhood's brothels
rather than working in them. Most Irish-American women who resorted
to prostitution lived by themselvesmost had emigrated on their
own to work as domestics and had no family members to turn to for
help when their financial circumstances became dire. Because almost
all the Lansdowne immigrants had arrived in the United States with
other family members, they had friends or kinsmen who could assist
them in desperate times and were therefore less likely than other
Five Pointers to become prostitutes. The Lansdowne immigrants, especially
those with children, must have nevertheless found it embarrassing
and humiliating to have to live in tenements where the sex trade
was so brazenly and noisily carried on.
|
|
|
Figure 6: Infamous for its brothels,
Anthony Street (renamed Worth in 1854), is shown here
in the mid-1860s from the Five Points intersection facing
west. This block, between Orange and Centre streets,
was one of the two on which the majority of Lansdowne
immigrants settled. In the building at the corner on
the left, Bridget Mangin operated a well-known bordello.
Andrew Crown's grocery and saloon occupied the ground
floor. Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society.
|
|
|
|
|
56
|
From all appearances, then
, the Lansdowne immigrants must have been some of the most impoverished
residents of Five Points, a neighborhood renowned for its destitution.
After all, the Lansdowne men were especially likely to be lowly
paid menial laborers, and they lived with their families in the
district's most rundown tenements. The Lansdowne immigrants' propensity
to open accounts at the Emigrant Savings Bank makes it possible
to compare these appearances with reality. Of the 12,500 accounts
opened at the bank in its first six years of operation (from September
1850 to August 1856), 153 were opened by Five Points Lansdowne immigrants.
Although it is difficult to determine what proportion of Lansdowne
immigrants had accounts, it appears that about 50 percent of the
Lansdowne families living in Five Points had opened one by mid-1855.
These account holders are not necessarily a representative sample,
of course. It may be that only those who had found financial success
bothered to open them. Even so, the bank records provide a rare
glimpse into the economic fortunes of a very significant number
of the Lansdowne immigrants.57
|
57
|
The bank ledgers suggest that, even
while living in Five Points, the Lansdowne immigrants saved far
more money than one would have imagined given their wretched surroundings
and low-paying jobs. Take the case of the three Tuosist natives
who, on July 2, 1853, walked the half mile from Five Points to the
bank's Chambers Street office to open accounts. The first, Honora
Shea, had been one of the earliest Lansdowne-assisted immigrants
to arrive in New York, disembarking from the American Eagle
in mid-March 1851 with her daughter Ellen Harrington, who the bank
secretary described as "an illegitimate child, aged 14 yrs." Although
Honora apparently did not live with a male breadwinner, and rented
quarters in the decrepit tenement at 35 Orange Street, she was able
to open her account with an initial deposit of $160, the equivalent
of more than $3,400 today. The next account was assigned to laborer
Patrick Murphy and his wife Mary, who lived next door to Shea at
33 ½ Orange and had also arrived in New York from Tuosist
in March 1851. They made an initial deposit of $250, a sum worth
roughly $5,300 in contemporary terms. Bank officials gave the subsequent
account to "washer" Barbara Sullivan, whose cramped apartment, filled
with her six children, son-in-law, and six boarders, was described
earlier. Sullivan, who at this point also lived at 33 ½ Orange
but had arrived in New York in September 1851, made the smallest
opening deposit of the three, $135 (or about $2,900 today). Later
in the day, a fourth Tuosist native, forty-two-year-old Judy O'Neill,
opened a joint account with her nineteen-year-old daughter Catherine
(Judy was either widowed or never married). The O'Neills lived at
33 ½ Orange as well and had arrived in New York at the end
of the initial Lansdowne flotilla in May 1851. Judy told the bank
secretary that she was not employed outside the home but that her
daughter worked in a tobacco factory. They made an initial deposit
of $148 (about $3,100 today). These four Lansdowne families, who
had probably arrived in New York virtually penniless, had managed
despite their meager incomes to squirrel away very substantial
sums.58
|
58
|
These depositors opened their accounts
with more money than the average Lansdowne immigrant, but not a
lot more. The median initial bank deposit of the Lansdowne Five
Points immigrants was $100, while the average was $102. This was
slightly more than the $96 initial deposit made by the average Five
Pointer. Many Lansdowne immigrants, of course, started their accounts
with just a few dollars and closed them a few weeks later, either
because they needed the money or because they did not believe that
their savings were safe in a bank. Only about half the depositors
made significant additions to their accounts before closing themjust
51 percent of the Lansdowne immigrants ever managed to increase
their initial balance by 50 percent or more. Many of the accounts
were closed during the financial panics of 1854 and 1857. The Lansdowne
immigrants' rush to withdraw all their money at once indicates that
their runs on the bank were inspired by fear of the institution's
failure rather than poverty brought on by these severe recessions. |
59
|
It appears that most Lansdowne immigrants
saw the bank as a place to safely keep (and draw interest on) nest
eggs they had already managed to accumulate before opening their
accounts. This would explain why so many Lansdowne immigrants did
not add substantially to their initial deposits, even when they
kept their accounts open for extended periods. Bonane native Mary
Flynn, for example, was in her early sixties when she opened an
account in August 1853. Although she was married, her husband was
not listed as a joint account holder. Mary, who told the bank secretary
that she had no occupation, opened her account with $45, and in
less than a year she had doubled her money. During the recession
winters of 1855 and 1858, she withdrew as much as half her savings
but always worked her way back to the $90 level within a year. That
was the balance, give or take five dollars, at which her account
remained into the late 1860s. Flynn undoubtedly saw $90 as the appropriate
size for her family's emergency fund.59
|
60
|
In 28 percent of the Lansdowne accounts,
the immigrants accrued $250 or more$5,300 in modern termssubstantial
financial resources for famine-era immigrants. (Only 22 percent
of non-Lansdowne Five Pointers ever reached a balance of $250 or
more in their accounts.)
60
Laborer Dennis Sullivan, for instance, a widower with three children
and a native of Cloonee townland in Tuosist, opened an account in
February 1854 with a $98 deposit. Despite the two intervening recessions,
Sullivan had increased his savings to more than $300 ($6,400 today)
by 1858. Laborer Murty Sullivan, born just a mile or two down the
road from Dennis in the Tuosist townland of Ardea, was also an avid
saver. Murty arrived in New York in April 1852, opened his bank
account in February 1853, and when the panic of 1857 induced him
to close it, he had amassed $367.90 ($7,800 today). Bonane native
Daniel O'Connor and his wife Honora opened their account in May
1853. When the couple's balance peaked in 1860, it had reached nearly
$450 (about $9,600 today). Laborer Timothy Shea and his wife Johanna
resided with their four children on Anthony Street when he opened
his account in December 1852 with $112. By the time the Sheas closed
it in July 1860, the Kenmare natives had accumulated $495 (more
than $10,500 today). A second Timothy and Johanna Shea from Kenmare,
who arrived in New York in 1853, had amassed $592 (nearly $12,600
in contemporary terms) by July 1857. A third Timothy Shea (sometimes
called "O'Shea"), this one a "bill carrier" who had emigrated from
Tuosist at age forty-eight in 1851, managed along with his wife
Honora to save $658 (about $14,000 today) in three accounts by July
1857, the highest sum attained by any of the Lansdowne immigrants
among the bank's first 12,500 depositors. The three Tim Sheas and
their spouses had fared amazingly well for men and women who had
been on the brink of starvation at the beginning of the decade.61
|
61
|
What explains the Lansdowne immigrants'
surprising ability to save? Perhaps the privation they had experienced
in County Kerry enabled them to limit expenditures to the bare minimum
in the years immediately after their arrival. Living in Five Points,
they could pay among the lowest rents in New York (from $4.50 to
$6 per month for a two-room dwelling), and taking in their countrymen
as lodgers enabled the Lansdowne immigrants to recoup a significant
proportion of their housing expenses. Having so many of their kinsmen
and former neighbors with them in New York also undoubtedly helped
the immigrants. Virtually overnight, they created a large, intricate
network that could be used to help find jobs, housing, and even
spouses. And if someone through sickness, injury, or death became
unable to work, there were plenty of relatives around to help out.
There were many Lansdowne immigrants who did not fare as well as
the three Tim Sheas. For widows with young children, life was particularly
hard. But the noticeable absence of Lansdowne surnames in the relief
records of the Five Points Mission (where hundreds of desperate
Five Points Catholics turned for help despite the institution's
Methodist affiliation) suggests that the Lansdowne immigrants took
care of each otherhelping widows find new mates and unemployed
men and women new jobs. |
62
|
But what explains the apparent anomaly
of the Lansdowne immigrants' menial jobs and poor living conditions
on the one hand and their substantial bank balances on the other?
It appears that, once they got settled and found work, the Lansdowne
immigrants focused all their energies on saving money to establish
nest eggs for their families, choosing to stay in Five Points even
after they could afford to move to more spacious apartments in cleaner
and safer neighborhoods. Inasmuch as many of them were also sending
money to loved ones in Ireland, either to help support aged parents
or to pay for relatives' emigration, the typical Lansdowne immigrant's
ability to squirrel away $100 or more in just a few years is truly
remarkable. Some undoubtedly moved out of Five Points or to less
squalid blocks within the neighborhood once they had established
these competencies. But many, despite their substantial savings,
decided to stay in the Lansdowne enclave, either because they enjoyed
being surrounded by so many fellow Kerry natives, or because they
sought to continue saving as much money as possible by paying low
Five Points rents. That so many of the Lansdowne immigrants' account
balances remained relatively constant indicates that once they reached
their savings goal, they began to raise their standard of living
by spending more of their income. Through a concerted scheme of
self-sacrifice, then, most of the Lansdowne immigrants in Five Points
managed to improve their lives significantly, from both the misery
of County Kerry and the initial privations of Five Points. |
63
|
|
Eventually, the Lansdowne immigrants
did begin to move out of Five Points, but it is impossible to determine
exactly how long they remained in the district or where they went
once they left. There were simply too many Sheas and Sullivans (and
even Ellen Hollands) in New York to allow the tracking of the Lansdowne
immigrants after they moved out of the neighborhood. That young
bootblack and newsboy Tim Sullivan was living in Five Points in
1870 demonstrates that some of them still resided there, but by
then Italian immigrants occupied the vast majority of the apartments
in the buildings that Lansdowne immigrants had once dominated. At
that point, most Lansdowne immigrants had probably moved further
uptown to other, more prosperous Irish enclaves. |
64
|
We do know that the Lansdowne immigrants
had undergone a remarkable transformation in a few short years from
destitute Irish peasants to moderately successful New Yorkers. In
Ireland, they had been among the most wretched of that nation's
inhabitants. The Lansdowne tenants survived six years of unrelenting
hardship in Ireland during the famine, a period of privation far
longer than that of the typical famine-era emigrant. In a period
when hundreds of thousands of desperate and impoverished Irish men,
women, and children fled to North America, the Lansdowne immigrants
were singled out by observers on both sides of the Atlantic for
their particularly dire circumstances. Many apparently perished
in the "Lansdowne Ward" of New York Hospital, so-called because
many of the marquis's former tenants died there soon after their
arrival.62
Yet while these immigrants may have first settled in Five Points
because they could afford nothing else, they chose to stay even
after they could have easily moved to more respectable neighborhoods.
In just a few years in New York, many of these once "unfortunate
creatures" achieved a modicum of financial security. While Trench
may have exaggerated the immigrants' fortunes when he talked of
them returning with chains of gold, by 1860 a large number
of the immigrants had in fact saved enough to purchase such baubles
had they chosen to do so. |
65
|
The fate of young Tim Sullivan, the
bootblack and newsboy, reflects the myriad opportunities that New
York offered to the Lansdowne immigrants and their children. In
his various jobs delivering newspapers, Sullivan developed a network
of contacts among the city's newsboys and periodical dealers. Even
though by his teenage years he worked in the news plants themselves,
he simultaneously became a newspaper distributor, because the distribution
managers knew that Sullivan, through his web of newsboys, could
guarantee that their papers would be sold throughout the city. "Every
new newspaper that come out, I obtained employment on, on account
of my connection with the news-dealers all over the City of New
York," Sullivan recalled in 1902. His income from these operations
must have been significant, because by his late teens he was ready
to open his first saloon, and by his early twenties he purportedly
had interests in three or four. Sullivan was also very popular,
and at twenty-three, without any prior legislative experience, he
was elected to the New York state assembly. Although first chosen
for office as an insurgent running against the city's "Tammany Hall"
Democratic organization, "Five Points Sullivan" soon began cooperating
with Tammany and quickly moved up through the ranks. He eventually
served in the state senate and the United States House of Representatives.
By the turn of the century, this child of Lansdowne immigrants had
become "Big Tim" Sullivan, "the political ruler of down-town New
York." Some observers considered him the second most powerful politician
in the city, after Tammany "boss" Richard Croker. Sullivan also
became quite wealthy. Critics charged that his fortune had been
built from payoffs exacted from gambling and prostitution syndicates
in his district. But "Big Tim" insisted that he had never taken
a bribe in his life and that his substantial income derived from
shrewd investments in vaudeville theaters and other legitimate businesses.
No matter what the origin of his fortune may have been, Sullivan
remembered his humble origins and shared his wealth with his less
prosperous constituents, giving away thousands of pairs of shoes
and Christmas dinners each year.63
|
66
|
Sullivan's allies also remembered
their leader's roots. When the city decided to cut a new street
through a tenement district about a mile north of Five Points to
ease the flow of traffic to the recently opened Williamsburg Bridge,
the Board of Aldermen voted to name the new thoroughfare Kenmare
Street. The lawmaker who proposed the name told the press in 1911
that he had chosen it in honor of Sullivan's mother, a Kenmare native,
because she had "exercised a motherly care over me as she did over
hundreds of boys on the east side."
64
It is impossible to determine if the alderman in question truly
owed this debt of gratitude to Mrs. Sullivan or merely sought to
curry favor with his principal political patron. Whatever the case,
Kenmare Street was christened in the very week that, exactly sixty
years earlier, Ellen Holland had first set foot in New York. |
67
|
In that span of time, the Kenmare
immigrants had risen from civic embarrassments to city leaders.
Whether the Lansdowne immigrants' bank accounts were typical, and
to what extent their particularly harrowing pre-migration experiences
affected their ability to save, is a matter of conjecture. Only
when historians have analyzed both the financial and biographical
data in the thousands of non-Lansdowne Emigrant Savings Bank accounts
will we be able to grasp the full significance of Ellen Holland's
story. Yet whatever such future studies may reveal, a few things
are certain. First, the degree of financial success achieved by
the Lansdowne immigrants despite their decrepit surroundings suggests
that the famine immigrants adapted to their surroundings far better
and more quickly than we have previously imagined. After the initial
year or so of adjustment, the Lansdowne immigrants stayed in Five
Points not because they had to but because they chose to. In addition,
the Lansdowne immigrants' story demonstrates the value of tracing
the lives of famine-era immigrants back to Ireland, adding a transatlantic
perspective that has generally been lacking in the field of immigration
history. That Five Pointers from the Lansdowne estate achieved their
modicum of financial security despite the extraordinary hardships
(even by Irish standards) that they faced before, during, and immediately
after their arrival in New York makes those monetary accomplishments
all the more remarkable. Their saga demonstrates that we still have
a lot to learn about how nineteenth-century immigrants adjusted
toand were transformed bylife in modern America. |
68
|
Tyler Anbinder is an associate professor
of history at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
He specializes in American history, especially nineteenth-century
politics and immigration. His first book, Nativism and Slavery:
The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (1992),
was awarded the Avery O. Craven Prize by the Organization of American
Historians. His latest book, Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century
New York Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections,
and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum (2001), was published
last September. Anbinder discovered the Lansdowne immigrants'
story while researching that book. It was his desire to explore
their saga more fully, and to highlight its implications for the
study of American immigration and the Atlantic world, that led
him to submit this article to the AHR.
Notes
I would like to thank Cormac O'Grada, Gerard J. Lyne, Richard
Stott, Kevin Kenny, and Patrick Williams for commenting on earlier
drafts of this essay.
1 For the source of
these quotations, see nn. 23 and 24 below.
2 William Bennett,
Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland (London,
1847), 12729. For the low emigration rate from Kerry during
the famine, see S. H. Cousens, "The Regional Pattern of Emigration
during the Great Irish Famine, 18461851," Institute of
British Geographers Transactions and Papers, no. 28 (1960):
121.
3 Gerard J. Lyne,
"William Steuart Trench and the Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare
to America, 18501855," Journal of the Kerry Archaeological
and Historical Society 25 (1992): 72, 97. The composition
of Holland's family is based on the passenger manifest of the
vessel that carried them to the United States. See Ira A. Glazier,
ed., The Famine Immigrants: Lists of Irish Immigrants Arriving
at the Port of New York, 18461851, 7 vols. (Baltimore,
198386), 6: 629. My belief that Holland must have been in
the workhouse by late 1849 is based on the Lansdowne agent's later
statement that he chose as the first emigrants those who had been
in the workhouse the longest. Because Holland was one of the first
to leave under Lansdowne's emigration program, she was probably
in the workhouse by late 1849.
4 New York Herald,
March 17, 1851 (report of the Montezuma's voyage and arrival).
5
My calculation of the current value of Holland's savings is based
on the multiplier suggested by the U.S. Department of Labor's
Handbook of Labor Statistics, available on the World Wide
Web at http://minneapolisfed.org/economy/calc/hist1800.html,
which suggests a multiplier of 21.34 to convert 1850 dollars into
2001 dollars. According to the Department of Labor's statistics,
a dollar in 1860 was worth about the same amount in real terms
as a dollar in 1850, due to the deflationary effects of the panics
of 1854 and 1857. The department's figures are borne out by John
J. McCusker, "How Much Is That in Real Money?" Proceedings
of the American Antiquarian Society 101 (1991): 32732,
which suggests a multiplier of 16 to convert dollar amounts from
the 1850s into 1991 dollars. Adjusting McCusker's figure to take
into account inflation since 1991 (using the Consumer Price Index
calculator at http://minneapolisfed.org/economy/calc/cpihome.html)
brings virtually the identical result. All subsequent estimates
of the current value of nineteenth-century monetary figures are
based on the Department of Labor's conversion program. It is,
I admit, very difficult to know whether or not to trust
these conversion systems. They do not produce consistently satisfactory
results. Nonetheless, I feel it is important to offer estimates,
because without them, the monetary figures from the nineteenth
century are meaningless to most modern readers. These estimates
of the modern value of the Emigrant Savings Bank account balances
are different from (and should be used in place of) those appearing
in my book Five Points (New York, 2001). At the time Five
Points went to press, I did not fully appreciate the impact
of 1990s inflation on the Emigrant Savings Bank account information.
6 Accounts 5479 and
9445, Test Books and Account Ledgers, Emigrant Savings Bank Collection,
New York Public Library. The bank collected genealogical information
in its "test books" because a person wishing to make a withdrawal
had to pass a biographical test in order to prove that he or she
was truly the account holder.
7 Kerby A. Miller,
Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North
America (New York, 1985); James S. Donnelly, Jr., The Land
and the People of Nineteenth-Century Cork (London, 1975);
Robert J. Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine,
and Emigration (New York, 1995); Ciarán Ó Murchadha,
Sable Wings over the Land: Ennis, County Clare, and Its Wider
Community during the Great Famine (Ennis, Ireland, 1998).
8 David M. Emmons,
The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining
Town, 18751925 (Urbana, Ill., 1989); Kevin Kenny, Making
Sense of the Molly Maguires (New York, 1998).
9 For Canada, see
Cecil J. Houston and William J. Smyth, Irish Emigration and
Canadian Settlement: Patterns, Links, and Letters (Toronto,
1990); Donald McKay, Flight from Famine: The Coming of the
Irish to Canada (Toronto, 1990); Thomas P. Power, ed., The
Irish in Atlantic Canada, 17801900 (Fredericton, New
Brunswick, 1991); Robert J. Grace, The Irish in Quebec: An
Introduction to the Historiography (Sainte-Foy, Quebec, 1997).
The literature on the Irish in England is far more vast. Among
the best works are Lynn Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish
Migrants in Victorian London (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979); Frances
Finnegan, Poverty and Prejudice: A Study of Irish Immigrants
in York, 18401875 (Cork, 1982); Roger Swift and Sheridan
Gilley, eds., The Irish in the Victorian City (London,
1985); Swift and Gilley, eds., The Irish in Britain, 18151939
(London, 1989); Swift and Gilley, eds., The Irish in Victorian
Britain: The Local Dimension (Dublin, 1999); W. J. Lowe,
The Irish in Mid-Victorian Lancashire: The Shaping of a Working-Class
Community (New York, 1989); Donald MacRaild, Culture, Conflict,
and Migration: The Irish in Victorian Cumbria (Liverpool,
1998).
10 AHR Forum:
"Crossing Slavery's Boundaries," AHR 105 (April 2000):
45184; "The Nation and Beyond," a special issue on "transnational
history," Journal of American History 86 (1999): 965 and
following. The best-known practitioner of Atlantic history is
Bernard Bailyn, both through his book Voyagers to the West:
A Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution
(New York, 1986) and through his long-running seminar on the Atlantic
world. See Bailyn, "The Idea of Atlantic History," Working Paper
9601, International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic
World, 15001800. See also David Hancock, Citizens of
the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British
Atlantic Community, 17351785 (New York, 1995); W. Jeffrey
Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of
Sail (Cambridge, 1997); Alison Games, Migration and the
Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, 1999); and
one study related to Ireland, Nicholas P. Canny, Kingdom and
Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, 15601800 (Baltimore,
1988).
11 A concise introduction
to the concept of transnationalism is Alejandro Portes, "Global
Villagers: The Rise of Transnational Communities," The American
Prospect 25 (MarchApril 1996): 7477. The literature
in this field is voluminous, but for a representative sample see
Luis Guarnizo and Michael P. Smith, eds., Transnationalism
from Below (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997); Nancy Foner, "What's
New about Transnationalism? New York Immigrants Today and at the
Turn of the Century," Diaspora 6 (1997): 35575; Eduardo
Guarnizo, et al., "Mistrust, Fragmented Society, and Transnational
Migration: Colombians in New York City and Los Angeles," Ethnic
and Racial Studies (United Kingdom) 22 (March 1999): 36796.
12 Noel Ignatiev,
How the Irish Became White (New York, 1995); David R. Roediger,
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class (New York, 1991); Eric Lott, Love and Theft:
Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York,
1993).
13 Swift and Gilley,
Irish in Victorian Britain, 13 (quotation); Patrick O'Sullivan,
ed., The Irish World Wide, 6 vols. (London, 199296).
Among the best of the recent books on the famine are Christine
Kinealy, This Great Calamity: The Irish Famine, 18451852
(Dublin, 1994); Cormac O'Grada, Black '47 and Beyond: The Great
Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (Princeton, N.J.,
1999); and Peter Gray, Famine, Land, and Politics: British
Government and Irish Society, 18431850 (Dublin, 1999).
14 Stephan Thernstrom,
Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century
City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964); Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians:
Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 18801970
(Cambridge, Mass., 1973); Peter R. Knights, Plain People of
Boston: A Study in City Growth, 18301860 (New York,
1971); Clyde and Sally Griffen, Natives and Newcomers: The
Ordering of Opportunity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Poughkeepsie
(Cambridge, Mass., 1978); Thomas Kessner, The Golden Door:
Italian and Jewish Immigrant Mobility in New York City, 18801915
(New York, 1977). Little mobility work has focused on the antebellum
Irish, but in addition to the work by Knights and the Griffens,
see Jo Ellen McNergney Vinyard, The Irish on the Urban Frontier:
Nineteenth-Century Detroit, 185080 (New York, 1976);
and Dale Light, "Class, Ethnicity, and the Urban Ecology: Philadelphia's
Irish, 18301880" (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania,
1979).
15 Oscar Handlin,
Boston's Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation, rev. edn.
(Cambridge, Mass., 1959), 55. Two notable exceptions to the pessimistic
tenor of famine-era Irish-American historiography are Hasia R.
Diner, Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in
the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, 1984), who emphasizes women's
success (primarily as live-in domestic servants) at earning money
to send to their families in Ireland; and Joseph P. Ferrie, Yankeys
Now: Immigrants in the Antebellum United States, 18401860
(New York, 1999), who finds significant upward mobility for antebellum
immigrants. For an optimistic portrayal of the Irish who settled
in England, see Donald M. MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Modern
Britain, 17501922 (London, 1999).
16 Irish immigrants
made up 66 percent of the adult Five Points population in 1855,
according to the state census of that year. The marriage records
of the neighborhood's Roman Catholic church, the Church of the
Transfiguration, whose secretary noted the county and parish of
birth of nearly every person married there from 1853 to 1859,
indicate that 14 percent of Irish-Catholic immigrant Five Pointers
were natives of County Kerry. Those records show that 79 percent
of the neighborhood's Kerry residents were natives of the Lansdowne
estate, leading to my assertion that one in nine Irish-Catholic
Five Points adults in the mid-1850s was a Lansdowne immigrant.
My figures probably approximate the county origins of all Five
Points Irish immigrants fairly accurately, because although there
were some Irish Protestants in the neighborhood, there were not
many. This is confirmed by an analysis of the Emigrant Savings
Bank Test Books, which also listed place of birth and whose depositors
included Protestants and Jews as well. Of the Five Pointers in
the Transfiguration register, 173 were from Sligo, 142 from Cork,
141 from Kerry, 59 from Galway, 56 from Limerick, 52 from Tipperary,
42 from Mayo, 36 from Leitrim, 40 from Roscommon, 30 from Waterford,
27 from Kilkenny, 19 from Dublin (city and county), 17 from Tyrone,
16 from Donegal, 15 from Fermanagh, 15 from Clare, 15 from Longford,
14 from Meath, 14 from Louth, 13 from Queen's (now Laois), 12
from Westmeath, 12 from King's (now Offaly), 12 from Cavan, 10
from Monaghan, 9 from Wexford, 9 from Armagh, 9 from Derry, 8
from Kildare, 7 from Carlow, 3 from Down, 3 from Wicklow, and
none from Antrim. See Marriage Register, Church of the Transfiguration,
29 Mott Street, New York.
17 Harriet Martineau,
Biographical Sketches (New York, 1869), 32937; Peter
Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs
and Liberals, 18301852 (London, 1990), 2835, 10104,
17374. The first modern biographical study of Lansdowne,
by Professor John Powell of Cumberland College, will be published
in 2003 in Parliamentary History.
18 On the history
and extent of Lansdowne's holdings, see Gerard J. Lyne, The
Lansdowne Estate in Kerry under the Agency of William Steuart
Trench, 184972 (Dublin, 2001), xviixxii, xxxxxxviii,
lviiilxii; W[illiam] G. Carroll, The Lansdowne Irish
Estates and Sir William Petty, 2d edn. (Dublin, 1881), 4,
911, 21; Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of
Ireland, 3 vols. (1837; rpt. edn., Port Washington, N.Y.,
1970), 1: 23031, 2: 3738, 661; The Times (London),
January 7, 1881 (for its status as one of the largest estates
in Ireland); Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Take
the Census of Ireland for the Year 1841 (Dublin, 1843), 198.
19 House of Commons,
Evidence Taken . . . in Respect to the Occupation
of Land in Ireland, 1845 [616], 20: 910; Lewis, Topographical
Dictionary of Ireland, 1: 23031, 2: 3738, 661;
[Sixth] Marquis of Lansdowne, Glanerought and the Petty-Fitzmaurices
(London, 1937), 12526 (suspension bridge); Lyne, "Post-Famine
Emigration from Kenmare," 133 ("wilds of Tuosist").
20 Report of
the . . . Census of Ireland for the Year 1841, 198;
Bennett, Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland,
12930; William S. Trench, Realities of Irish Life
(London, 1868), 11213.
21 House of Commons,
"Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix E, Containing Baronial Examinations
Relative to Food, Cottages and Cabins, Clothing and Furniture,
Pawnbroking and Savings Banks, Drinking," Sessional Papers,
Reports from Commissioners, 1836, 32: 58, 106 (alcohol),
supplement p. 213 (Hickson); "Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix
D, Containing Baronial Examinations Relative to Earnings of Labourers,
Cottier Tenants, Employment of Women and Children, Expenditure,"
Sessional Papers, Reports from Commissioners, 1836,
31: 81, 89, 108; "Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix F, Containing
Baronial Examinations Relative to Con Acre, Quarter or Score Ground,
Small Tenantry, Consolidation of Farms and Dislodged Tenantry,
Emigration," Sessional Papers, Reports from Commissioners,
1836, 33: 22; Evidence Taken . . . in Respect to
the Occupation of Land in Ireland, 1845 [616], 20: 91012,
91819; Jonathan Binns, The Miseries and Beauties of Ireland
(London, 1837), 2: 33334; Kevin Danaher, The Year in
Ireland (Cork, 1972), 16366.
22 Trench, Realities
of Irish Life, 11213 (quotation); Archdeacon John O'Sullivan
in Tralee Chronicle, February 9, 1850, in Lyne, "Post-Famine
Emigration from Kenmare," 66; House of Commons, "Poor Inquiry
(Ireland), Appendix D," 52; Henry D. Inglis, Ireland in 1834:
A Journey throughout Ireland during the Spring, Summer, and Autumn
of 1834, 2d edn. (London, 1835), 1: 20913.
23 House of Commons,
"Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix E," 58, 90, supplement p. 213;
Binns, Miseries and Beauties of Ireland, 2: 33334;
Inglis, Ireland in 1834, 20913; Michael Doheny, The
Felon's Tracks (1849; rpt. edn., Dublin, 1951), 244.
24 Trench, Realities
of Irish Life, 11213; Evidence Taken . . .
in Respect to the Occupation of Land in Ireland, 1845 [616],
20: 912, 919; Binns, Miseries and Beauties of Ireland,
2: 33637; Doheny, Felon's Tracks, 244.
25 Lansdowne, Glanerought
and the Petty-Fitzmaurices, 127; Trench, Realities of Irish
Life, 11314; Kenmare Relief Committee to the Lord Commissioners
of Her Majesty's Treasury, August 22, 1846, in "Correspondence
Relating to the Measures Adopted for the Relief of Distress in
Ireland (Board of Works Series) First Part," 1847 [764], 50: 6263,
in Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers,
"Famine" series (Shannon, 1970), 6: 9495 (hereafter, IUP-BPP,
Famine).
26 Mr. Gill to Mr.
Russell, February 25, 1847, in House of Commons, "Correspondence
Relating to the Measures Adopted for the Relief of Distress in
Ireland (Commissariat Series) Second Part," 1847 [796], 52: 192,
in IUP-BPP, Famine, 7: 550.
27 O'Sullivan to
Trevelyan, "February, 1847," in House of Commons, "Correspondence
Relating to the Measures adopted for the Relief of Distress in
Ireland (Commissariat Series) Second Part," 1847 [796], 52: 192,
166, in IUP-BPP, Famine, 7: 550, 524; Bennett, Narrative
of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland, 12729;
O'Sullivan Diary, c. March 1847, in Lyne, "Post-Famine Emigration
from Kenmare," 125.
28 Bennett, Narrative
of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland, 12930,
132; Captain Erasmus Ommanney to the Commissioners, March 12,
1848, in House of Commons, "Papers Relating to Proceedings for
the Relief of the Distress and State of the Unions and Workhouses
in Ireland; Sixth Series," Sessional Papers, 1848 [955],
56: 336, in IUP-BPP, Famine, 3: 336; Ommanney to
the Commissioners, November 28, December 12 (quotation), 1847,
January 8, 1848, in House of Commons, "Papers Relating to Proceedings
for the Relief of . . . Ireland; Fifth Series," 184748
[919], 60: 511, 514, 51926, in IUP-BPP, Famine,
2: 835, 838, 84350, 852; Trench ("sunk beneath") quoted
in Lyne, "Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare," 12425.
29 Lansdowne, Glanerought
and the Petty-Fitzmaurices, 127; Ommanney to the Commissioners,
March 5, 1848, in House of Commons, "Papers Relating to Proceedings
for the Relief of . . . Ireland; Sixth Series," 1848
[955], 335, in IUP-BPP, Famine, 3: 335. For the
Palmerston emigration program, see Tyler Anbinder, "Lord Palmerston
and the Irish Famine Emigration," The Historical Journal
(Cambridge) 44 (2001): 44169.
30 Ommanney to the
Commissioners, March 26, April 1, 1848, in House of Commons, "Papers
Relating to Proceedings for the Relief of . . . Ireland;
Sixth Series" [955], 33940, in IUP-BPP, Famine,
3: 33940.
31 Unknown writer
to "My dear William," February 27, 1849; copies of O'Sullivan
to [Poulett Scrope?], April 16, 1849 (on cholera, not quoted);
and O'Sullivan to Poulett Scrope, April 30, 1849; The Nation,
December 12, 1857, all in Lyne, "Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare,"
97, 72, 10001. The mortality figure is based on Lansdowne,
Glanerought and the Petty-Fitzmaurices, 12829, which
cites Trench as saying that 5,000 had died in the Kenmare "union"
(relief district) by the time he became agent in early 1850. The
Lansdowne estate made up about one-third of the Kenmare union,
thus my upper estimate that about one-third of that figure had
died. O'Sullivan, in his critique of Trench's memoir, insisted
that the actual figure was far lower. Given the numbers dying
in the workhouse and on works projects described in the contemporary
reports, it is hard to imagine that fewer than 1,000 died on the
estate.
32 Trench, Realities
of Irish Life, 12224. Lansdowne had previously expressed
fears that poor relief taxes would ruin those in his position.
When Parliament enacted legislation in 1849 forcing Irish landlords
to pay an even larger proportion of famine relief, Lansdowne had
condemned it as "nothing less than a scheme of confiscation, by
which the weak would not be saved, but the strong be involved
in general ruin." Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland,
18451849 (1962; rpt. edn., New York, 1991), 379.
33 Trench, Realities
of Irish Life, 12425.
34 Lansdowne estate
records in Lyne, "Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare," 13637.
For some of the Lansdowne ships, see Glazier, Famine Immigrants,
6: 61920, 62627, 66263, 64449, 7: 1619,
8485. Although most of the Lansdowne Papers were recently
sold to the British Library, the papers relating to his Irish
estate are still in the possession of his descendants, who now
charge £100 per day to anyone wishing to examine them. Before
these fees were put in place, Irish historian Gerard Lyne was
given free access to these papers, and I decided to rely on his
very thorough analysis of those records in this and subsequent
paragraphs.
35 New York Tribune,
March 19, 1851; New York Herald, March 22 (the Sir Robert
Peel's arrival), 23 (editorial), 1851.
36 Lansdowne sample
based on entire passenger list of the American Eagle. "Random
Irish" based on a random sample of ships that arrived in New York
from the same ports as the Lansdowne vessels (London and Liverpool)
and in the same months of 1851. See Glazier, Famine Immigrants,
6: 435, 61518, 65256, 66263, 7: 3435.
37 Trench to Henry
A. Herbert, [April 1851], Bowood Papers, Bowood House, quoted
in Lyne, "Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare," 111; Trench, Realities
of Irish Life, 12526.
38 "Return of Emigration
off the Estate of the Marquis of Lansdowne from 1 Dec. 1850 to
1 Feb. 1852," in 1852 Trench annual report, Derreen Estate Papers;
Waterford Chronicle in Kerry Evening Post, April
26, 1851; Trench to Herbert, April 18, 1851; Trench to Lansdowne,
September 16, 1853, Bowood Papers, all in Lyne, "Post-Famine Emigration
from Kenmare," 89, 104, 110, 11213, 13637. The food
Palmerston supplied to his emigrants is described in S. Maxwell
to Messrs. Stewart and Kincaid, November 27, 1847, in Irish
University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers, "Colonies,
Canada" series (Shannon, 1969), 17: 35354.
39 Trench to Lansdowne,
April 15, 1851, September 16, 1853, Bowood Papers; O'Sullivan
to Trench, February 12, 1869, in Tralee Chronicle, February
16, 1869; Trench annual report of 1851, p. 6, Derreen Estate Papers,
all in Lyne, "Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare," 9294;
Trench, Realities of Irish Life, 12627.
40 For the source
of my figures on Kerry natives in Five Points, see n. 16 above.
My estimate that 500 of the Five Points Lansdowne immigrants came
with the bulk of the assisted emigrants in early 1851 is based
on the Emigrant Savings Bank records. Of the 81 former Lansdowne
tenants who opened bank accounts by mid-1855 when the census was
taken, 52 (64 percent) had arrived in New York by May 1851 when
the last of the 1,700 emigrants sent directly to New York arrived
there. Yet many post-1851 immigrants did not open accounts until
after mid-1855, so I have estimated that about half the Lansdowne
Five Points population in 1855 had arrived with the main flotilla.
Accounts 110,000, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books.
41 At the end of
1854, Orange Street was renamed Baxter, and Anthony Street became
Worth. To avoid confusion, I have referred to them by their original
names throughout this article, even though some of the quotations
below are from the period after the names had changed.
42 Some 119 of the
185 residents identified on these blocks in the Transfiguration
marriage records were natives of Kerry. Of those 119, 94 had been
born on the Lansdowne estate. Note that at 31 Orange Street, Irish
families occupied only 63 percent of the apartments according
to the 1855 state census. The remaining residents were mostly
Italians.
43 New York Evening
Post, May 17, 1849; "Report of the Select Committee Appointed
to Examine into the Condition of Tenant Houses in New-York and
Brooklyn," Documents of the Assembly of the State of New-York,
80th Session1857 (Albany, N.Y., 1857), doc. 205, p.
18.
44 I cannot document
that these two families were former Lansdowne tenants, but their
surnames and residence in a building particularly dominated by
such tenants makes it likely that my identification is accurate.
45 Twenty-eight
percent of Five Points families rented space to boarders. Two-thirds
of these families took in only one or two non-family members.
These figures based on my analysis of Districts Three, Four, Five,
and Six, Sixth Ward, 1855 New York State manuscript census returns,
Old Records Division, New York County Clerk's Office. (I consulted
a microfilm copy made by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints Family History Library.)
46 New York Times,
July 1, 1859; New York Express quoted in Samuel B. Halliday,
The Lost and Found: or, Life among the Poor (New York,
1859), 20708; New York Illustrated News (February
18, 1860): 216. I have identified this boardinghouse as the one
portrayed in the Illustrated News because the only "Sandy"
Sullivan I came across out of the hundred or so Sullivans in the
various Five Points records is the Sandy Sullivan listed as living
at 35 Orange by his daughter Mary when she opened a savings account
in March 1854. See Account 6524, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books;
Glazier, Famine Immigrants, 6: 647. Sandy and Catharine
Sullivan (both age 45), with their four children (aged 4 to 22)
and eight boarders, are listed in the 1860 census, apparently
at that same address. See Family 227, p. 136, Second District,
Sixth Ward, 1860 United States manuscript census, National Archives.
47 Dwelling 31,
Second Division, Third Electoral District, Sixth Ward, 1855 New
York Census; Accounts 4983, 5800, 6773, and 7504, Emigrant Savings
Bank Test Books; wedding of Daniel Haley, October 14, 1857, Marriage
Register, Church of the Transfiguration, 29 Mott Street, New York.
The other block dominated by Lansdowne immigrants, Anthony Street
from the Five Points intersection to Centre Street, was virtually
as squalid as Orange Street. Its most notorious stretch, a cul-de-sac
jutting off to the north known officially as Little Water Street
but popularly referred to as Cow Bay, was renowned for "the extreme
wretchedness which abounds on every hand." Experts called Cow
Bay "the very lowest and worst place in New-York." By 1857, New
Yorkers associated Cow Bay with Kerry immigrants, but because
of the imprecise numbering of its houses, it is impossible to
determine with certainty if any Lansdowne immigrants lived there.
The Old Brewery and the New Mission House at the Five Points,
by the Ladies of the Mission (New York, 1854), 104 ("extreme
wretchedness"); Monthly Record of the Five Points House of
Industry 1 (January 1858): 219 ("very lowest"); Solon Robinson,
Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated (New York,
1854), 209, 307; "
eye witness
" to the Editor, New York Times, July 7, 1857. Overcrowding
was a problem for the Irish who settled in England as well. See
John Haslett and W. J. Lowe, "Household Structure and Overcrowding
among the Lancashire Irish, 18511871," Histoire sociale
10 (May 1977): 4558; and Enid Gauldie, Cruel Habitations:
A History of Working-Class Housing, 17801918 (London,
1974).
48 [James D. Burn],
Three Years among the Working-Classes in the United States
during the War (London, 1865), 1415 (quotation). Although
few letters written by Five Points immigrants survive, see "Eliza
Quin" to "Dear Parents," January 22, 1848, in House of Commons,
"Colonisation from Ireland: Select Committee, House of Commons,
Third Report with Appendix," Sessional Papers, 1849 (86),
11: 128, in Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary
Papers, "Emigration" series (Shannon, 1969), 5: 128.
49 For the occupational
comparisons in this paragraph and in Table 2, I grouped Five Pointers'
vocations into the following categories: The single Irish-born
professional in my Five Points sample was a physician. "Business
owners" include shopkeepers, grocers, and food and liquor dealers.
It is impossible, through the census, to determine if a "grocer"
actually owned his or her own business or merely worked as a clerk
for someone else. For the sake of consistency, all grocers have
been placed in the "business owners" category. Lower-status white-collar
workers were overwhelmingly clerks, but this category also includes
a few non-clerical government employees who were neither skilled
craftsmen nor menial laborers. The skilled manual workers category
is composed of bedstead makers, blacksmiths, brass workers, bricklayers,
cabinetmakers, cap makers, carpenters, carpet weavers, confectioners,
coopers, hatters, locksmiths, machinists, masons, millers, musicians,
plasterers, painters, plumbers, printers, shoemakers, silver and
tin smiths, tailors, umbrella makers, and varnishers. Unskilled
workers include laborers, cartmen, expressmen, porters, sailors,
hostlers and grooms, waiters, watchmen, and policemen (so classified
because people from any occupational category took these jobs
when offered). Finally, "difficult to classify" includes occupations
such as gentleman, speculator, "flayer," farmer, and a "pocket
book manufactory" worker.
50 For neighborhood
construction accidents, see New York Tribune, December
4, 1850; New York Herald, November 5, 1853. The best work
on laborers, although it does not consider them in the urban context,
is Peter Way, Common Labour: Workers and the Digging of the
North American Canals, 17801860 (New York, 1993).
51 The dispersion
of the Lansdowne immigrants can be followed to some extent by
the advertisements they placed in the missing persons column of
the Boston Pilot. See, for example, the ads of February
28, April 3, June 19, August 28, October 2, 16, 1852, April 9,
30, August 6, September 3, 10, October 1, 29, 1853. I am grateful
to Ruth-Ann Harris of Boston College, who has indexed these advertisements
by Irish parish of origin, for bringing them to my attention.
52 New York Tribune,
May 8, 13, 14 (quotation), 1850; John F. Maguire, The Irish
in America (London, 1868), 23233.
53 Edward W. Martin
[James D. McCabe], The Secrets of the Great City (Philadelphia,
1868), 26164; Owen Kildare, My Mamie Rose (New York,
1903), 4551; "C. L. B." in New York Times,
March 12, 1853; John Morrow, A Voice from the Newsboys
(New York, 1860), 12832; Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper
(December 29, 1855): 43; New York Times, October 16, 1902;
Family 79, Sixth Election District, Sixth Ward, 1870 United States
manuscript census (identified as Sullivan in Daniel Czitrom, "Underworlds
and Underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and Metropolitan Politics in New
York, 18891913," Journal of American History 78 [1991]:
53940); Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842; rpt.
edn., London, 1985), 79; Account 5735, Emigrant Savings Bank Test
Books. Harrington managed to add only $5 more to his account before
closing it in March 1854, just five months after he had opened
it.
54 Women were listed
as account holders on 105 of the 153 Lansdowne accounts. Of these,
48 were joint accounts opened by married couples, 11 were opened
by married women who did not list their husbands as joint account
holders, 5 were joint accounts with children rather than a husband,
and 21 were opened by women who were widows or had never been
married. The remaining 20 were second or third accounts opened
by the same depositors. In all but one case, the bank secretary
recorded employment information for women only when there was
no husband or working-age son serving as a joint account holder.
Of the 47 accounts opened by women that did not list male breadwinners
as joint account holders, the bank secretary recorded occupations
for 28 of them, wrote "none" for the occupation for 12 of them,
and left the remainder blank.
55 [George G. Foster],
New York in Slices: by an Experienced Carver, Being the Original
Slices Published in the N.Y. Tribune (New York, 1849), 23;
letter of L. M. Pease in New York Times, November
19, 1852.
56 In other sections
of the Five Points neighborhood, prostitution was far less pervasive.
In the same two decades, there were only two prosecutions for
commercial sex in the eighty or so buildings on Mulberry Street
below Bayard, only two indictments in the sixty buildings on Bayard
Street from the Bowery to Orange, and none on Mott Street below
Bayard. Prostitution in the Lansdowne enclave had decreased significantly
by the mid-1850s due to the efforts of Protestant ministers who
set up missions at the Five Points intersection. Brothel locations
are based on a list compiled by Professor Timothy Gilfoyle, Loyola
University of Chicago, in the possession of the author. Gilfoyle's
inventory is based primarily on criminal indictments. I have examined
most but not all of these records relating to Five Points. For
prosecutions involving the Lansdowne enclave, see, for example,
indictments of May 23, 1851 (151 Anthony and 6 Little Water Streets),
January 23, 1852 (145 Anthony), April 22, 1852 (163 Anthony and
33, 35, 36 ½, 40, and 41 Orange), and April 23, 1852 (143,
149, and 157 Anthony), New York County District Attorney's Indictment
Papers, New York Municipal Archives. These records must be used
with some caution. While some of those arrested may have been
innocent, notations on the indictment papers indicate that the
overwhelming majority were convicted, pled guilty, or promised
to abandon the premises (thus implying guilt). In addition, it
was possible to be charged with conducting a "disorderly house"
that was merely a raucous saloon rather than a brothel. After
examining the indictments and the accompanying affidavits, however,
I accept Gilfoyle's contention that the vast majority charged
with this offense probably promoted prostitution.
57 Fully 152 of
the 153 Lansdowne accounts were opened by immigrants who had arrived
in New York by the time the state census was taken in June 1855.
If we conservatively estimate the size of the average Lansdowne
nuclear family to be four persons, then these 152 accounts may
represent nearly 60 percent of the 1,000 Lansdowne immigrants
in Five Points as of that date. (Some opened more than one account,
however, which is why I put the figure at 50 rather than 60 percent.)
That this estimate is fairly accurate is confirmed by a survey
of the Lansdowne immigrants listed in the 1855 census as living
on Orange Street above the Five Points intersection. Sixty percent
of the Lansdowne households on this block had accounts at the
Emigrant Savings Bank.
58 Accounts 4737,
4738, 4739, and 4745, Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books and Account
Ledgers; Glazier, Famine Immigrants, 7: 84 (where the O'Neills
are listed as "Jude" and "Cath." Corkery).
59 Account 5155,
Emigrant Savings Bank Test Books and Account Ledgers.
60 The highest balance
achieved by Lansdowne immigrants was, on average, exactly $200.
The highest balance reached by non-Lansdowne Five Pointers was,
on average, $234.
61 For a list of
all the accounts opened by Lansdowne immigrants during the bank's
first six years of operation, see Anbinder, Five Points: The
Nineteenth-Century New York Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance,
Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum
(New York, 2001), 465. The accounts described in this paragraph
are 1235, 3424, 3735, 4409, 6473, 7464, 12046, and 12419. Occupations
are based on information given at the time an account was opened.
By the time the high balance was achieved, the account holders
may have moved on to more lucrative employment.
62 For the Lansdowne
Ward, see Dublin Review, n.s., 12 (JanuaryApril 1869):
417; Tralee Chronicle, February 26, 1869; and Freeman's
Journal, November 20, 1880, all quoted in Lyne, Lansdowne
Estate, 9294; Charles Russell, "New Views on Ireland,"
or, Irish Land: Grievances: Remedies, 3d edn. (London, 1880),
47; Lansdowne, Glanerought and the Petty-Fitzmaurices,
129.
63 New York Sun
(April 18, 1889): 5; New York Herald (October 16, 1902):
5; (May 19, 1907), magazine sect., part 1, pp. 12; New
York Times (April 30, 1887); (October 16, 1902): 3; Czitrom,
"Underworlds and Underdogs," 54142.
64 New York Times
(March 2, 1911): 2.
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