In 1845, something strange started happening in Ireland. Potato plants were suddenly dying. Their leaves and stems turned black and shriveled up as if scorched. Terrified farmers began digging up potatoes from the ground, their hearts pounding in their chests, knowing full well the devastation that would ensue if the crops failed. They sighed with relief as they pulled the soil caked lumpers from the Earth. They were fine. The potatoes were fine. For a day or two. Then, without explanation, they began to rot, turning slimy and black, putrid, inedible. Potatoes that were supposed to feed their families for months were no longer fit to feed the livestock. Over the next 7 years, an estimated one million people would die in Ireland, victims of a blight that wreaked havoc on an already impoverished country. But did you know, the Irish potato famine or “The Great Hunger,” as it’s called by the Irish, was less a natural disaster than it was the consequence of centuries long oppression and poor governance by its overbearing neighbor? That, if different choices had been made, history remembered, the outcome may have been much less deadly? Let’s fix that. 

 

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Saint Patrick’s day is coming up so we’re going to Ireland today. I’ll also be unpacking just exactly who Saint Patrick was and what the deal is with that weird holiday next week, don’t worry. And yes I know it’s women’s history month, we will be hearing more women stories later in the month. March is an exceptionally long month you guys, relax. Plus like every month is women’s history month on History Fix. So we’re taking a little detour into Ireland for a couple of weeks. 

 

The thing about the Irish potato famine is… that sounded like the start of a terrible stand up joke. No joke, I’m being serious. This is very serious. Actually, for real though, this is pretty heavy and there's going to be some disturbing stuff. I’ll try to warn you ahead of anything particularly scarring. But the thing about the Irish potato famine is that it was much less a natural disaster than it was the consequence of Ireland's centuries long toxic relationship with England. The blight, the disease that actually killed the potatoes - that was a natural disaster. The famine that ensued, the people starving because of the blight - that was all England’s fault. It was though. It was. So to explain how this all went down, how one million Irish people died and two million fled the country in the span of just 7 years, I have to take it way back to explain the complicated relationship that Ireland had with England. And kind of still does TBH. And oh my goodness British history is so overwhelming. I remember taking AP US history in high school. It was a very intimidating class. It was a hard class. It would basically make or break your GPA which, within the narrow lens of a bookish 17 year old high schooler, would make or break the future of your whole life. But looking back, US history is pretty brief. Were talking a few hundred years of people and events that you have to learn about. British history goes back so much farther. So many more people and events and it’s just so much more complicated in general. A lot more interaction with other countries and problems. So many problems. Was there ever not a problem in British history? Was there like one year somewhere with no problems? I don’t know man, I don’t know how you UK folks did it. How did you learn it all? Do you learn it all? Or is it like a divide and conquer thing like “oh yeah this designated group of scholars knows about the Battle of Hastings and these guys do War of Roses, they just do War of Roses, so, you know I don’t have to worry about those.” I just, wow. 

 

Anyway, that being said, I’m going to try my best to brief you on the twisted history between England and Ireland. And, you know, I’m American so I really have no hope of untangling this. Please be merciful. Before the protestant reformation started in the early 1500s, all of Europe was Catholic. That’s just that it was. If you were a Christian, you were Catholic. It was the only church. So until then, there was no real religious strife between Ireland and England. They were all Catholic. But even so, the first English invasion of Ireland happened well before this split all the way back in 1169. See what I’m saying? So many more centuries of history to learn! It’s bananas! In 1169 some English guys wandered over into Ireland. According to professor Sean Duffy at Trinity College in Dublin quote “Within two years of the arrival of this small group Anglo-Norman adventurers Henry II would become the first reigning English monarch to set foot on Irish soil. In what was arguably the single most formative event in Irish history, King Henry formally brought the island under the lordship of the English Crown, a constitutional relationship that endures to the present day in the case of Northern Ireland. It is no exaggeration to say that the central dynamic of Irish history, and Ireland’s complicated connection with England, over the course of the last eight and a half centuries originates in the 1169 Invasion. This was also a significant moment in world history—the beginning of European expansion and colonization which eventually spread across the world” end quote. Like I said, they go way back. 

 

But, also like I said, there wasn’t that much beef for a while because they were all Catholic. That would all change with the rise of the Tudor dynasty. Let’s jump forward roughly 300 years. By the mid 1400s England was in essentially a state of civil war. I talked about this in episode 11 about Mad Kings and again in episode 19 about Henry VIII. Basically England’s King Henry VI was insane and therefore not doing a great job ruling the country. This led to the War of Roses in which various factions were trying to claim the throne and fill the power vacuum left by the inept king. Henry Tudor was one of these factions. Henry would win the throne and become King Henry VII but he was only distantly related to Henry VI, not like his son. They’re just both named Henry so that’s why one’s the sixth and one’s the seventh. And really, Henry VII has very little claim to the throne at all; he just won it in battle, basically. 

 

So leading up to the rise of the Tudor dynasty with Henry VII, England has been in a rough patch. They have a crazy king and they are embroiled in a civil war. They begin to look at Ireland as a possible Achilles heel, worried that rival powers like France or Spain could take control of and use it as a launch pad, basically, to invade England. So once Henry VII gains power and things simmer down a bit, he’s like, “yeah we really gotta get a handle on that Achilles heel, launch pad, Ireland situation.” At this point, there is a very small English presence in Ireland in an area known as “The Pale” which was basically Dublin. The rest of Ireland is controlled by local lords and chieftains. So Henry puts this guy Lord Deputy Sir Edward Poynings in charge of Ireland. Which Lord Deputy Sir geez with the titles. In 1494 Poynings gets the Irish parliament to agree to more English control. So now they need the King’s approval to pass any future laws and any laws passed in England also automatically apply to Ireland too. Now you may wonder why the Irish went along with this. Well, because was just as beneficial to them as it was to the English. The Irish aristocracy got to keep doing their thing without having to worry about an Irish activist reformer type king rising up and taking power, threatening their privileged way of life. It was a win win for England and Ireland. I mean, if you were rich, I guess. 

 

Henry VII died in 1509 and his son, Henry VIII took the throne. This is where everything gets crazy. Henry breaks with the Catholic church after the Pope refuses to grant him a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. He establishes the Church of England, of which he is the head, a protestant church all so that he can divorce Catherine and marry his mistress Anne Boleyn all so that she will give him a son (which, spoiler alert, she doesn’t). And so England becomes a protestant country while Ireland remains mostly Catholic. And this is where the real problems begin. Henry VIII man, this guy just messed everything up. In 1541, Henry was given the title King of Ireland with the support of the Irish parliament for the same reasons as before - Henry let them go about their privileged lives, acknowledged their titles, and put them in charge of ruling Ireland. Now, he did dissolve the monasteries though, which they weren’t too happy about. But Henry’s attack on Catholicism wasn’t as bad in Ireland as it was in England. However, it was the beginning of a division based on religious differences, a crack that would widen and widen. 

 

After Henry VIII died, his son Edward took the throne for a hot minute but was a sickly child, then his daughter Mary but she was Catholic so that was fine, then Elizabeth. Queen Elizabeth I who was extremely protestant and anti-Catholic. Her mother was Anne Boleyn - the woman for whom Henry had broken with the Catholic church. Elizabeth only exists because of this split. So she, obviously backs it. So England is Protestant and Ireland is Catholic and Elizabeth starts to get a little paranoid. She starts thinking that having this Catholic neighbor so close was a threat to Protestant England. She starts sending troops over to secure and subdue Ireland which only riles them up. It’s kind of like, if she had just left them alone, it all would have been fine. But she got all paranoid and tried to fix a problem that wasn’t actually a problem yet which is what made it become a problem - a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because she’s interfering in their deal now, these aristocrats aren’t being pampered like they had been by her father and grandfather. It’s no longer a win win for them and the Irish start to resent the English presence. 

 

That simmers for a bit and then some whack stuff goes down in the 1640s when there is essentially another Civil War. So after Elizabeth died, she didn’t have any children, so the Tudor line switches to the Stuart line with James I. He’s the king who established Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in the Americas, hence the name Jamestown, James. Then his son, Charles I took the throne when James died. And Charles really got screwed over as far as English monarchs go. He happened to be king during a brief blip in history when the monarchy was dissolved and parliament took over. Charles was executed, the Commonwealth of England was formed, there was no king anymore, and Oliver Cromwell was made Lord Protector of England, Ireland, and Scotland. So Cromwell is now in charge after an expensive uprising, a civil war basically. So after that, all these guys who helped parliament gain power expect to get something in return. They had been promised land and such. But parliament is having a hard time raising enough money in England to pay these dudes. So, they go to Ireland. Cromwell takes land from the Irish and gives it to the guys who helped parliament overthrow the monarchy. He just gives it to these rich British guys, just, “here it’s yours now.” Now, this little blip only lasted 11 years. By 1660, the monarchy was restored and Charles II, Charles I son was put on the throne. Which like, really? You’re going to execute the king and then a decade later be like “woops, nevermind, you can have it back, sorry we chopped your dad’’s head off.” Part of that was because Cromwell died in 1658 and his son basically ruined everything but anyway, that’s how English guys ended up owning most of the land in Ireland. 

 

Now let’s go to 1845. Because of all this land grabbing and anti-Catholic sentiment in England (Which is now the United Kingdom), Ireland is in rough shape. They had officially been part of England since the British Act of Union in 1800 which formed the UK. Under this act, Ireland had representation in Parliament, but not Catholics. Catholics could not be members of parliament until 1829, even though most people in Ireland were Catholics. So there’s a power imbalance there affecting the common man. Catholics were also restricted in other ways. For example, they couldn’t own land or have jobs. A lot of this stems from that anti-Catholic sentiment. They’ve been dealing with this mess now for hundreds of years. Thanks a lot Henry. 

 

Most people living in Ireland in 1845 were incredibly impoverished subsistence farmers. Only ¼ of the population could read and write. They live in small, windowless mud cabins on tiny plots of land they rent from middlemen who rent it from rich English landowners who live over in the UK. I’m assuming many of these landowners were descendants of those who got the land from Cromwell 200 years ago. Because of this middleman system, the price of renting these plots of land was severely inflated. The middlemen rented a bunch of acres from the landowner. Then, they divided it up into tiny plots, most of them 5 acres or less, which they rented to Irish subsistence farmers for more and more money. And to think this was land that these Irish people had once owned themselves, land that had been taken away from them. 

 

So they have 5 acres of land max, which is like nothing for a farm. Most of that is used to raise livestock and grow crops that they sell for money just to pay the rent on the land. They save one acre to grow potatoes. The average Irish family could survive for a year on one acre of potatoes. According to the book Irish Famine Facts by John Keating, the Irish consumed 7 million tons of potatoes each year. The average adult working male ate 14 pounds of potatoes in a single day while women ate 11.2 pounds. Which, wow, but keep in mind, they are just eating potatoes. Potatoes for breakfast, potatoes for lunch, potatoes for dinner. And that’s because potatoes are a much higher yield crop than grain. It would take 3 acres of grain to provide as much sustenance as one acre of potatoes. And with only 5 acres of land, that’s just not an option. How can you pay your rent if you’re eating all your crops. 

 

So by 1845, potatoes made up 60% of Ireland’s food supply and the poorest Irish people were pretty much exclusively eating potatoes. The same variety of potato at that called lumper potatoes. Potatoes are a pretty low maintenance crop. You plant them in March-ish and you harvest them in September or October. The potatoes were buried underground where they would keep until July of the following year and people just ate on that supply all year long, feeding the scraps to their livestock. So the way potato farming goes, there’s a lot of work to be done during planting and harvesting, but otherwise, you just kind of waited for the potatoes to grow. There wasn’t much else to be done in the meantime. This led to a way of life that included a lot of leisure time, interspersed with these periods of heavy labor. I mean, “leisure” in quotes because they had a bunch of kids. There’s no real leisure with kids. But, you know, they weren’t working 10 plus hours a day in factories so I guess that’s leisure. But those outside of that world of Irish potato farmers, the British and the Americans, viewed this lifestyle as lazy. They thought the Irish were just lazy and had too many kids and that’s why they were poor, nevermind centuries of systemic oppression and prejudice. But this flawed thinking, this cultural difference, really, influenced the way the British would react to the famine. We’ll come back to that. 

 

1845 is when the blight began. And it wasn’t until 2013 actually that we figured out exactly what was causing the potatoes to rot. Molecular biologists examined DNA taken from potato samples from 1845 that had been kept in musuems. They found a previously unknown strain of Phytophthora infestans called HERB-1, which is like a type of fungus that came from the Americas, most likely Mexico. Scientists think this strain is now extinct thanks to improvements in crop breeding that led to HERB-1 resistant potatoes. But in 1845, everyone is planting these lumper potatoes and they are not resistant. So the blight hit Ireland hard, mostly because of their dependence on potatoes as the main food source. And they have no idea why. They have no concept of fungal microorganisms. They blame excessive moisture, static electricity, smoke from trains, and vapors rising from underground volcanoes. They have no freaking idea what’s causing the blight. 

 

UK prime minister Sir Robert Peel sends a commission to Ireland to figure out what’s going on. Because, remember Ireland is part of the UK as of 1800. They estimate that Ireland is probably going to lose half of its 1845 potato crop to the blight but it’s fine, they’ll bounce back. So they don’t do a whole lot to help at first. But it’s so much worse than that. Potato crops had failed in Ireland before but never on this scale. And it’s not just the 1845 crop. The 1846 crop is hit even harder. They had used diseased potatoes from the 1845 harvest as seed to plant the 1846 crop so the blight spread even more. By 1846, things are getting dire. Malnourishment from lack of food is leading to all kinds of diseases - cholera, dysentery, scurvy, and typhus - spread throughout the Irish countryside. This is where it gets a bit disturbing if you want to skip forward 30 seconds. Witnesses report seeing children crying with pain and looking quote “like skeletons, their features sharpened with hunger and their limbs wasted, so that there was little left but bones." People begin dying, mostly from disease. History author Christopher Klein summed it up in an article for History.com when he wrote quote “Through seven terrible years of famine, Ireland’s poetic landscape authored tales of the macabre. Barefoot mothers with clothes dripping from their bodies clutched dead infants in their arms as they begged for food. Wild dogs searching for food fed on human corpses. The country’s legendary 40 shades of green stained the lips of the starving who fed on tufts of grass in a futile attempt for survival. Desperate farmers sprinkled their crops with holy water, and hollow figures with eyes as empty as their stomach scraped Ireland’s stubbled fields with calloused hands searching for one, just one, healthy potato. Typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis and cholera tore through the countryside as horses maintained a constant march carting spent bodies to mass graves.” end quote. 

 

Peel realizes this is worse than they initially thought and finally decides to act by repealing the corn laws. So, to clarify, because this confused me, “corn” just refers to all grain in the UK apparently. Not just corn. It’s wheat and barley and whatever, it’s all called corn. Weird, but okay. So the corn laws had been put in place to keep the price of grain artificially inflated. Basically, it put high tariffs on any grain imported from abroad and this allowed grain grown locally in the UK to be sold at higher prices. It was supposed to help the British grain growers out. Peel does away with this in order to bring the price of grain back down so that, hopefully, the Irish can just start eating grain instead of potatoes. But they still didn’t have enough money to buy the grain, even at cheaper prices so that fails. Then he starts importing Indian sweet corn from the United States into Ireland. He doesn’t run this one past Parliament though. He’s just like “executive decision, we’re doing it, people are starving.” But there are a few problems with this. First, corn is much tougher than grain and has to be processed for much longer before it’s edible. There aren’t enough mills in Ireland to handle this. Then, once it is processed, ground into corn meal, they sell it for a penny a pound and the Irish poor, the ones who are starving still can't afford to buy it - at a penny a pound. This is like next level poverty. Those who can afford the corn meal end up with diarrhea and scurvy. It’s hard to digest and less nutritious than potatoes which were their only source of vitamin C. So Peel is trying, he really is, but it’s just not helping much. 

 

On top of that, folks in the British grain industry are furious that he’s repealed the corn laws because it’s hurting their profits. Nevermind that people are starving to death in Ireland, how dare he mess with grain prices. This reaches such a boiling point that Peel actually resigns from office in June of 1846 and the conservative government is taken over by the liberal whig party. The whig party takes the stance of “we’ll just leave it alone and it’ll sort itself out” and they basically decide to do nothing to help Ireland. The new Prime minister John Russell puts assistant secretary to the treasury Charles Edward Trevelyan in charge of relief efforts. And this guy couldn’t have been a worse choice for this. He stops the importation of corn from the Americas. He actually goes as far as to turn away a ship as it arrived full of corn. Trevelyan claimed he was trying to prevent the Irish from becoming dependent on government handouts. He believed in divine providence. So he thought all of this was happening to the Irish for a reason saying quote “the judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson.” end quote. This guy. So that’s who is in charge of helping the Irish. Great. 

 

There is actually some relief from abroad though, mostly from big cities in the US and India. The Quakers in the US sent donations as did the Choctaw people. The Choctaw sent Ireland $170 in 1847 to help during the famine. And this, I just have chills thinking about this. The Choctaw had been forcibly removed from their ancestral lands by the US government in 1831 thanks to Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. They were part of the Trail of Tears. This just happened to them. They were barely surviving and yet they took it upon themselves to gather this money - around $6,300 today - all they could spare I’m sure to help the Irish people - across an ocean, people they had never met. What a beautiful show of compassion and altruism. It makes me want to be a better person. And Ireland repaid this favor by the way, during the Covid-19 pandemic, sending 1.8 million dollars to help the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Reservation in the US which had both been hit hard by Covid. That money helped supply clean water, food, and health supplies to these two tribes. And Ireland cited the generosity of the Choctaw in 1847 as their reason for doing this. Just beautiful. 

 

Meanwhile Trevelyan is kicked back claiming divine providence and just letting people die. Supposedly the British government even asked the Sultan of Turkey to reduce his donation from 10,000 pounds to 1,000 pounds in order to not embarrass Queen Victoria who had only given 1,000 pounds to Irish relief efforts. Yikes. Because remember that British perception of the Irish as lazy, slovenly bums? Many really and truly believed that the Irish had brought this on themselves. An 1849 edition of the Illustrated London News reported quote “Great Britain cannot continue to throw her hard-won millions into the bottomless pit of Celtic pauperism,” end quote. And, okay I get it a little bit. You see a homeless person on the street and you don’t necessarily give him all your cash because you think “well, this guy got himself in this situation and its probably because of drugs and alcohol and if I give him money he’ll probably just buy more drugs and alcohol and make everything worse.” So the British are similarly thinking “they’re in this situation because they're lazy and if we give them money they’ll just continue being lazy because they’ll have money and then they really won’t have to work…” But this is so far past that. We’re talking about starving children and dead babies and bodies piling up in the streets. 

 

So you may be thinking, “well why don’t they just eat some of the other crops they’re growing to sell?” Because if they have nothing to sell, they can’t pay rent on the land. And if they can’t pay rent on the land, they get evicted. And then they’re really and truly screwed. So during all of this, Ireland continues to export food like grain, rabbits, butter, fish, onions, and honey to England And the government does nothing to stop this. They just keep accepting shipments of Irish food while doing nothing to stop the famine. And this is a bad look. There are actually riots in port cities in response to shiploads of food leaving Ireland. But who’s to say if this food would have been enough to even make a difference. Potatoes were such a vast majority of the food supply. But the continued export of food out of Ireland was definitely damaging to the already strained relationship between Ireland and Britain.   

 

1847 was better. The potato crop was healthy but not enough had been planted. People either ate the potatoes they normally would have saved for planting or were too sick and weak to plant that year. So it was a small but healthy harvest. This slight improvement in the potato situation and a banking crisis that hurt the British economy led to the passing of the Irish poor law extension act in June of 1847. This was a final nail in the Irish coffin. It made it so that it was up to Irish landlords to provide relief to their tenants, not the British government. It shut down soup kitchens which had only been operating for around 6 months and had done a lot to bring down the death toll. But those get shut down. It also made it harder for Irish people to enter British workhouses which was basically a last resort for those who had become homeless and starving. There were around 130 of these workhouses which could accommodate a combined 100,000 people. But they were basically prisons. Families who entered workhouses out of necessity were separated. They wore uniforms, they couldn’t leave, and they worked 10 hour days. Not at all unlike prison except probably with more working involved. Workhouses were dirty and crowded and diseases spread like wildfire. 2.6 million Irish people went into workhouses during the famine where an estimated 200,000 died. 

 

These new poor laws made it harder for Irish people to enter workhouses. So they didn’t even have that horrible option. Now it was up to the landlords to provide relief and they were like “um, no,” and many opted to evict their tenants and be done with it. Half a million Irish people were evicted during the famine. The male heads of household were often sent to jail for not paying rent which left their wives and children homeless, just starving in the streets. 

 

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, the blight returned in 1848 destroying that year’s potato crop. In response, the British actually increased taxes on farmers and landlords? Just to add insult to injury I guess? I can’t even begin to make sense of that one. At this point a mass exodus out of Ireland has begun. Around a million Irish had already emigrated to America between 1815 and 1845 but that number doubled over the 7 year period of the famine. 2 million left Ireland in just 7 years, mostly for England, Canada, and the United States. And considering there were only 8.5 million people living in Ireland before the famine, that’s a substantial number. 2 million left and 1 million died, out of 8.5 million. 

 

England was close, it was a short trip, but it wasn’t very welcoming. Irish immigrants soon overwhelmed British cities. They doubled the population in Liverpool alone prompting the British government to pass a law allowing for the deportation of Irish immigrants. They just hauled them back to Ireland, leaving them on the docks with nothing like “nice try, see ya, good luck.” 

 

Many went to Quebec in Canada. Actually a lot of landlords chose to send their tenants to Canada rather than provide relief in Ireland. The passage was much cheaper than a passage to America. And that’s because there were much fewer restrictions on ships headed for Canada. These ships were often referred to as “coffin ships” because they were so overcrowded and full of disease. The journey took around 3 months and when they arrived, the sick were sent to quarantine facilities. But when those ran out of room, they just left the sick on the ship which would just be stuck at port, unable to leave, and unable to disembark its sick and dying passengers. Eventually this got so bad that Canada was like “whatever, just let um in,” and this led to a pretty bad typhus epidemic in Canada that had come directly from ships carrying Irish immigrants. An estimated 20% of these immigrants died on the voyage from Ireland to Canada. 

 

And then there was America. Ships of Irish immigrants poured into major ports like New York City, Boston, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans. But it was more expensive to emigrate to America. The ships were less crowded but the passage was more expensive. And that was intentional. The US did not want all these sick, poor Irish people flooding into the country so they put regulations in place to make it more difficult, putting a cap on the number of people a ship coming in could hold and requiring the ship captains to pay bonds guaranteeing that the passengers would not become dependent on the US government for survival. That didn’t stop around 1.5 million Irish immigrants from flooding into the US during the famine years. 

 

And they were not well received. They filled the bottom rung of society along with enslaved African Americans and free people of color because this is pre-civil war. But honestly, they were almost even more disliked at first as foreign invaders coming to take American jobs. And these weren’t glamorous jobs either. They took the most dangerous jobs with the lowest pay - they dug sewers and laid railroads, worked long hours in factories in terrible conditions. They were actually used to keep working conditions terrible in the US. If workers threatened to strike or demanded higher pay or safer working conditions, their bosses would replace them with Irish immigrant workers who were so desperate they would take whatever they could get. They faced a lot of discrimination for being Catholic as well. America proudly saw itself as descendants of protestant English colonists and there was a lot of anti-Catholic sentiment here as well because of that. 

 

According to Christopher Klein, quote “In 1849, a clandestine fraternal society of native-born Protestant men called the Order of the Star Spangled Banner formed in New York. Bound by sacred oaths and secret passwords, its members wanted a return to the America they once knew, a land of “Temperance, Liberty and Protestantism.” Similar secret societies with menacing names like the Black Snakes and Rough and Readies sprouted across the country.

Within a few years, these societies coalesced around the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American Party, whose members were called the “Know-Nothings” because they claimed to “know nothing” when questioned about their politics. Party members vowed to elect only native-born citizens—but only if they weren’t Roman Catholic.” end quote 

 

These jerks in the so called American party basically just ran around preventing Catholic immigrants from voting, tarring and feathering Catholic priests (yes, for real), burning down Catholic churches, and starting riots, one of which led to the deaths of up to 100 people Louisville Kentucky. And all of this in response to the influx of Catholic Irish immigrants during the famine. They even seized a marble block gifted by Pope Pius IX for the Washington Monument and threw it into the Potomac River. This bunch of men acting like violent children became known as the nativist movement which many found disturbing. Soon to be president Abraham Lincoln wrote in an 1855 letter quote “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” end quote. Which, ouch Abe, huge diss to Russia, although probably warranted. 

 

What helped fix the situation for the Irish immigrants though, was actually the Civil War and the end of slavery. There were suddenly much bigger problems at hand. A marble monument stone from the pope just didn’t seem worth the fuss anymore. Plus the Irish proved themselves as valuable soldiers during the war which helped to repair their reputation in the eyes of Protestant native born Americans. They had finally proven their worth, earned their keep, so to speak. Irish Catholics would eventually make their way into government and help pass policies that further improved the lives of Irish immigrants living in America. According to Klein, quote “Yes, the Irish transformed the United States, just as the United States transformed the Irish. But the worst fears of the nativists were not fulfilled. The refugees from the Great Hunger and the 32 million Americans with predominantly Irish roots today strengthened the United States, not destroyed it. A country that once reviled the Irish now wears green on St. Patrick’s Day. That’s something to raise a glass to.” end quote. 

 

Even after the blight ended in Ireland, it took a long time for any sort of stability to return. There was a massive drop in population by as much as 25 percent during that 7 year period. Those that were left were battered and traumatized. The landowners hadn’t been able to collect rent on their land. They’re now in debt. Most of them sold the land leaving tenant farmers homeless even after the potato crops returned. It doesn’t even matter. They have no where to plant potatoes anyway. The population continued to drop after the famine was over as desperate and now homeless farmers continued to leave Ireland. By the time Ireland gained its independence from the UK in 1921, its population was half of what it had been before the famine. 

 

So what’s the takeaway from this? Is it that we shouldn’t rely too much on one food source? Shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket. I mean yeah but really the takeaway, I think, is that we shouldn’t remove people from the context of their situation. We can’t judge people in a vacuum without considering what led to the predicament they’re in. And part of understanding that predicament comes down to knowing the history. It’s easy to look at the Irish in 1845 and say, well this is happening to them because they’re lazy and uneducated and they have too many kids and they shouldn’t have just been eating potatoes, they should have planted other stuff, had a back up plan. This is all their fault. We shouldn’t have to burden ourselves to help them. But if you look at the history that led to that. Why are they just eating potatoes? Why don’t they own land? Why can’t they read? Why don’t they have any money? Oh, well, is it because you took their land from them? Did you make it illegal for them to own land? Did you prevent them from getting jobs? Working for money? Yeah? Okay, well then that changes things doesn’t it. Perhaps, it wasn’t all their fault? Perhaps you should be doing something to help? When you consider the historical context, it changes everything. 

 

And this is not the only example of this, it’s an extreme example with devastating consequences, but it’s not that dissimilar to the perception white Americans had of formerly enslaved Black Americans after slavery. If they just worked harder, if they just got a job, got some land, if they tried harder they would have a better life. They could live the American Dream too. But once again… why do they have no money? Why do they have no land? Why don’t they have a job? Did you make it illegal for them to own land? To vote? To work for money? Did you take them from their homeland? Did you enslave them for hundreds of years? Same with Indigenous Americans. As heartwarming as it is, why did the Irish need to send 1.8 million dollars to the Navajo and the Hopi people during the pandemic? Why weren’t we, as a nation, taking care of them after what we did to their people? The context matters. There’s a reason these people are the way that they are. There’s a reason they’re in the predicaments they’re in. And it’s not all their fault. And by refusing to help them, to provide any aid, any relief, you’re basically making your bed and then refusing to lie in it. 

 

That’s what Britain did during the Great Hunger. They ignored the past and overlooked all that they had done to Ireland during much of the last millennium that led to their subsisting on small plots of rented land, one acre of potatoes, and no money to spare. They overlooked their own actions that led to that scenario. In 1997 British Prime Minister Tony Blair publicly apologized for doing too little in response to the famine. But really, when considering the historical context, really they did too much. They meddled too much, they took too much land, they imposed too many restrictions, they judged too harshly based on cultural and religious differences and then they sat back and blamed the Irish for their own misfortune, claimed divine providence. It’s not just that they did too little during the famine. It’s that they did way too much in the centuries leading up to it and then conveniently forgot their own actions. This is why history is so important. I will preach it all day long. It provides context for the modern world. And judging modern problems, people, and situations out of that context is going to have devastating consequences. The Great Hunger was unfortunately an extreme example of just how devastating those consequences can be. 

 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix, I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow History Fix on whatever app you’re using to listen, and help me spread the word by telling a few friends about it. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.  

 

Information used in this episode was sourced from Trinity College Dublin, History.com, The New York Times, Digital History, parliament.uk, Mises Institute, The State Historical Society of Iowa,  britishempire.co.uk, and a Stuff You Missed In History Class podcast episode. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.