Hibernia

In 1863 President Lincoln proclaimed the first national designation of a date for Thanksgiving. He named the fourth Thursday in November and Lincoln’s choice remained undisturbed for 75 years. In 1938 President Roosevelt essayed moving the day back a few weeks. He gave as his reason the complaints of merchants that Christmas and Thanksgiving were too close and the public spent so much on the first holiday that their Yuletide squandering was greatly diminished.

Enormous agitation followed this change and the protests were so vehement that the date was returned to traditional the next year.

But, as a spin-off of the exercise, the attention of scholars and the public was drawn to Thanksgiving and its history. The items that surfaced included the fact that the feast at Plymouth in the Autumn of 1621 was not the first celebration of gratitude to the Almighty by the Pilgrims.

The Boston Post in the ‘20s and ’30s had the largest circulation of any of the New England newspapers. Every day there ran down the center of the editorial page an unsigned column labeled, “The Observant Citizen.” It was a potpourri of assorted items of varying degrees of interest. At the height of the furor about the change of date the column contained a statement that the first time the Pilgrims proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving was not in the Fall of 1621, but on February 22 of that year. The item told that the arrival of a ship laden with food on the previous day was the reason for the proclamation.

Close to starvation during their first winter, the Pilgrims faced the very probable termination of their project — either from hunger, disease or hostile natives. The ship’s cargo saved the tiny colony and the day after its arrival was designated as a Day of Thanksgiving; the first. 

The manner in which “The Observant Citizen” worded the item caused almost as much acrimony locally as did the original change of date. The column stated, “A ship arrived from overseas bearing the much needed food.” To the vast majority of readers “overseas” would mean England, or possibly Holland; but someone familiar with the pertinent archives knew that the vessel was the Lyon and its provenance, and that of the food, was Dublin, Ireland.

The news spread rapidly through the large number of people of Irish extraction in Massachusetts and tempers soared. It was obvious that the compiler of the column had couched the phrase in a style that would obfuscate. The local Irish believed that they were being denied the satisfaction of spreading the knowledge that persons of their race had saved the Pilgrims from oblivion.

They also maintained that the writer deliberately omitted a most important point. The archives of the Massachusetts Historical Society yielded also the information that the wife of one of the prominent Plymouth brethren was the daughter of a Dublin merchant. He and some colleagues heard that the colony was starving and they chartered a small vessel, loaded it with food and dispatched it to Plymouth.

A committee of an umbrella group of Irish organizations around Boston attacked “The Observant Citizen,” maintaining, among other gravamina, that they were being shortchanged by historians of the then dominant George Bancroft school. Followers of his theories held that the number of Irish in this country before the Famine of the 1840s were miniscule.

The committee claimed that a large number of their fellow Gaels were in the 13 colonies before the Revolution and incontrovertible proof of this was in the muster-rolls of Washington’s armies, now in the Library of Congress. A very large proportion of the lists, in both the Officer Corps and the enlisted ranks, were Irish.

The committee waited for the perpetrator of the offending phrase, horsewhips (figuratively) at the ready. The writer admitted knowing about the origin of the ship involved but held that the omission had been an accident. He refused to print a correction at that time but agreed to make amends at the next Thanksgiving season. He did not; but tempers cooled and the event joined the nine-day-wonders of journalism.

“I saw sights that will never wholly leave the eyes that beheld them. Cowering wretches, almost naked in savage weather, prowling in turnip fields, and endeavoring to grub up roots. Little children, their limbs flesh-less, their faces both bloated yet wrinkled, and of a pale, greenish hue, who would never, it was claimed, grow up to become men and women.” — A visitor to Connaught in 1847, quoted by Prof. Kerby Miller

How does one convey the horrors of the Great Hunger of 1846-50 to a group of middle-class Irish Americans, most of them well-heeled, well-fed and enjoying most of the benefits of the American Dream? Would a slide show and a film do? A few lectures? Or a series of dramatic readings based on eyewitness testimony and official reports?

The California Irish American Historical Society used all those means recently to recall an event some experts call the greatest catastrophe to hit western Europe in the 19th century. The October 2 conference at Loyola Marymount University titled The Great Famine, 1845-1850; A Commemoration,” drew a capacity crowd and won praise from several participants.

It was clear that many who expected a few dry lectures came away with an emotionally charged experience that led them to question their identity as Irish Americans in a world where famine, violence and human need are commonplace.

No one seemed to evoke those feelings more than Don Mullan, director of the relief AFRI (Action from Ireland). Mullan, a Derry native, reminded his listeners that what caused Ireland’s suffering was not the failure of the potato but deliberate government policy rooted in injustice and human rights violations. “Food was abundant in Ireland,” said Mullan.

“The potato failed, but wheat, oats and beef were leaving the country in abundance.” Mullan displayed a cross from a Presentation Sister’s convent in Maynooth made from the wood of a “sliding coffin” used to transport hundreds of famine victims to a common grave.

Mullan urged his audience to follow the example of Ireland’s President Mary Robinson and to relate folk memories of the Great Famine to today’s world by fostering social development at home and abroad. He also praised the Choctaw Indians who in 1847 sent $710 to Ireland for famine relief. “You can imagine what a sacrifice it was for them, since only 16 years earlier they had been forced to re-locate from Mississippi to Oklahoma, ” Mullan said.

Folk Memories

Folk memories of the famine were the focus of a talk given by Professor Patricia Lysaght of University College, Dublin.

She told the conference that despite historians’ views that the famine period witnessed a social and moral breakdown, vivid memories of compassionate behavior have been handed down to the present generation.

To those who maintain that the famine dead have been forgotten, Lysaght pointed out numerous examples of informal monuments constructed to honor them throughout the Irish countryside, especially in the west. “Perhaps the dead are not as forgotten as we might think,” she said.

While stories of mothers drowning their children are verifiable, Lysaght said that acts of kindness and altruism also abounded. She told of a neighbor helping a woman who had fainted from hunger while carrying a load of seaweed to her hut, of her children “whose faces spoke of starvation and hard-ship.” She described mothers carrying dead children on their backs to graveyards, and of fathers carrying their dead wives and children in baskets. She spoke of courageous farm women like Mrs. Ned Fitzgerald who liberally gave milk and bread to starving peasants over the protests of her husband.

“We have to go to the local situation. It’s there that the people tried to maintain levels of decency,” said Lysaght.

The Causes

Historians today are still arguing about the causes and the culpability associated with the Great Famine. University of Missouri Professor Kerby Miller, a lecturer at the conference, told Irish America that three schools of thought have predominated in recent decades. Miller, author of Emigrants and Exiles, said the first is the Irish nationalist interpretation that the famine was caused by the deliberate genocidal intentions and misgovernment of British authorities. In the words of John Mitchell, a nationalist writer, “God sent the potato blight, but the English sent the famine.” Next, said Miller, came the revisionist point of view predominant in the 1950s and the 1960s. This school downplayed the importance of the famine and sought to diminish British guilt, focusing instead on structural problems that caused the potato blight. This view, said Miller, tended to blame the victims themselves.

Finally, there are newer trends known as neo-revisionism or anti-revisionism espoused by both Miller and Professor James Donnelly of the University of Wisconsin, also a conference lecturer. 

Said Miller, “Ours is an altempt to put the blame where it should lie—with those who had the power to make decisions and who condemned hundreds of thousands of Irish people to their deaths wittingly or unwittingly.”

In that group Miller included the British government, the landlord class and also many influential Catholics (some of them head-tenants) who he considers as “unfeeling toward their social inferiors as the Protestant landlords.” In his own lecture, Professor Donnelly pursued the theme of culpability, but stopped short of labeling Britain’s negligence as deliberately genocidal.

Nevertheless, he said, by its sins of omission and commission, the Whig government was responsible for many thousands of unnecessary deaths for allowing the grain harvest of 1846 to be exported in spite of the total failure of the potato crop.

(When the blight struck the potato was responsible for 60 percent of the nation’s food supply and it was the exclusive diet of 3.3 million people.)

As a result, said Donnelly, food prices shot up, wages plunged, and public works programs were insufficient to prevent widespread starvation and disease. Later, soup kitchens were introduced, and for a while they curbed hunger, “but the Whig cabinet considered them ideologically distasteful and in violation of laissez faire capitalism so they closed them.” Several references were made at the conference about the excessive and hate-filled rhetoric of Irish nationalists such as John Mitchell who had a profound influence on generations of irish American immigrants. But even the harshest critics of the nationalist position believe the nationalist rage was often justifiable. Professor Donnelly, for example, quoted an agent at Lord Landsdowne’s estate as saying, “Nothing but successive failures of the potato crop could have produced emigration which will give us room, in Ireland, to become civilized.” This theme also pervaded a series of dramatic readings that concluded the day long conference at Loyola Marymount.

The presentation, directed by Irish actress Fionnula Flanagan, underscored layers of insensitivity and greed at the heart of British policy toward Ireland as well as the supercilious and uncaring attitude of the Anglo-Irish gentry toward the suffering masses. At one point an actress rendered an hilarious impression of Queen Victoria’s visit to the port of Cobh in County Cork. As a backdrop to the queen’s superficial comments about the weather, another reader explained that the city was the focus of starvation, disease and social upheaval.

The day-long conference, which drew praise from most participants, was the brainchild of Mary Ferguson, president of the California Irish American Historical Society, and Arthur Gribbon, a society board member. Ferguson, a native of Ireland, said other board members expressed a desire to hold three such conferences, culminating in 1995 with the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine.

Ferguson said a growing number of Irish Americans are interested in exploring their roots in a serious way. “One friend told me, ‘You know, Mary, it’s time that we put the shamrocks and shillelaghs behind us? I think that’s true. We need to get ourselves more involved in these kinds of discussions.” 

Famine Facts

“In a few years more a Celtic Irishman will be as rare in Connemara as the Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan.” – The London Times, 1847.

The Great Famine in Ireland, which hit hardest in 1846-1847, claimed one million lives. If averted births are included, the death toll reached 1.4 million.

Because of the famine and related causes, 2.1 million people emigrated from Ireland between 1845 and 1855, 1.9 million of this number to North America. It is estimated that 40,000 died aboard coffin ships or in American and Canadian quarantine hospitals.

Between 1845 and 1851 at least a half a million people were evicted from their homes by landlords and farmers, and three million people. about 40 percent of the Irish population, lived on some form of official relief. More than one million were crammed into poor houses designed to hold only a fraction of that number, As a result of the famine, evictions and emigration, Ireland’s population declined from eight million in 1841 to 6.6 million in 1851.

 

 

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the November December 1993 issue of Irish America. ♦