Hartford Courant from Hartford, Connecticut • Page 70

no mt mmkii-uku CUUKANT Wednesday, April 8, 1998 Own A Piece Of History To purchase a reprint of today's historic page or any others in The Courant's 233-year history, call our Company Store at (860) 241-3912. Wk Wrelhere. February 13. 1847 When Irish Eyes Were Dying This editorial Illustration from The Illustrated London News portrayed "Bridget O'Donnell and Her Children, Famine Beggars." THE GREAT FAMINE 'tradition, possibly tinged with Irish romanticism and spirituality, holds that an ominous mist rose up from the sea and lay on the land for three days or more. When it withdrew, the potatoes were blighted, and the Great Famine began.

The Courant page from this day gives Connecticut readers one of their first glimpses of the enormity of a holocaust that would eventually transform the face of Ireland and the United States. 7 i One mm Kw.t 3' 7 ffmm-mm wuamu -at WMWiAezBHiBMiu. THE NUMBERS Nobody knows how many died, because the records were poorly kept, because the dead fell in such numbers, because so many people fled their homes and scoured the countryside for food, because so many died far from home or emigrated. The most conservative figure is 775,000 "excess deaths" from 1846 to 1851. Other estimates range as high as 1.5 million.

It is even more difficult to divide the starvation deaths from those caused by typhus, cholera and other diseases that ripped through the weakened bodies of the Irish. This year, known as Black '47, was thought to be the worst, "when skeletal armies milled at hospital doors and in the west whole families walled themselves into their cabins and died," writes historian R.F. Foster. When there was nothing else, the starving ate grass and died with mouths stained green. Likewise, the emigration numbers for this time are all over the chart.

Certainly, at least 1.5 million Irish emigrated during the famine years, and probably more. Most people think of the Great Famine as the reason for Irish settling in America, but that overstates the case. In 1776, for example, at least 10 percent of the people in the 13 colonies were Irish, and a big wave of emigration began shortly after 1815, when the end of the Napoleonic Wars drove down food prices and triggered a depression in Ireland. There was a failure, too, of the potato crop in 1821 and 1822. There were few opportunities for advancement and enormous pressure to emigrate long before the famine.

In the first half of 1841, well before the potato blight in 1845, roughly 65,000 Irish emigrated. In the heaviest year of famine-driven emigration (1851), roughly 250,000 left. When you look at it that way, the famine intensified a movement already under way. The people leaving were often young, vigorous problem-solvers, which meant they weren't around when catastrophe struck. FOR A FULL-SIZE REPRODUCTION OF THE FRONT PAGE, PLEASE SEE PRECEDING PAGE.

i i 3 1 r'l 1 THE POPULATION The population of Ireland crested at 8.2 million just as the famine began. From 1845 to 1851, it dropped by 2 million or more, from death and departure. By 1911, the population was 4.4 million. (Demographic studies reveal that the population was on the verge of stabilizing and perhaps even shrinking before the famine ever struck.) Emigration to America usually posed its own set of life-threatening horrors in the so-called "coffin ships," with inadequate space (two square feet per person in the holds), medicine, food and water. Death during passage was common.

THE POTATO What happened? The simple answer is that a fungus, phytophthora infestans, struck the potato crop in 1845. The damp climate made it especially easy for a fungus to spread, but the Irish didn't recognize the problem for what it was, Which made finding a remedy unlikely. The infection worsened in 1846, which hampered the sowing of a new crop for '47. That year, though, the ment that diet with the requisite milk and bit of fish, so the poorer Irish were imperfectly nourished when the blight struck. In the hardest-hit parts of Ireland, when the potato died, there truly was no backup plan.

Those areas whose economies had diversified and industrialized (even a bit) survived the blight with only mild misfortune. blight fell back a bit and then returned in the next two years. The poor of Ireland, multiplying too rapidly and subdividing their farms onto ever-smaller patches of land, came to over-rely on the potato a relatively complete source of nutrition that can be grown on small farms to feed the people who live there. In the poverty after 1815, there were fewer opportunities to supple RELIEF GRISLY PARALLEL As this edition was being printed, the world was only days away from discovering a horrifying starvation-related story in America. On Feb.

19, rescuers reached the party of pioneers led by Jacob and George Donner. Trapped by snow on the Sierra NevaSa, members of the group engaged in cannibalism to survive. THE MISSES DRAPER, ETC. This is a boom period for the education of young women. Sarah Porter started her Farmington School in 1843.

Catherine Beecher's Hartford Female Seminary was started somewhat earlier, in 1823. Emma Haret Willard, born in Berlin, started her famous school in Troy, N.Y., in 1821. THE COURANT AND THE IRISH Under owner John Boswell, the Courant was a solid Whig newspaper, which meant it was passionately anti-slavery but suspicious of immigrants and immigration. (Boswell's Courant opposed the annexation of Texas in 1845 and the Mexican-American War as an expansion of slaveholding areas by Southern landowners.) Prejudice against the Irish deepened everywhere in the 1850s, as the famine-driven immigrants poured into the cities. The Courant in the early part of the decade, under its new Know Nothing owner Thomas Day, engaged in some notably vicious Irish bashing.

(The Democrat paper, the Hartford Times, tended to be open-minded and charitable toward immigrants but favored appeasemenet toward the slaveholding South.) Private relief from British and American sources especially the British Quakers was often generous. Government aid was more problematic. The British government tried several strategies: public-works jobs and importation of Indian corn, the cheapest possible alternative food, from the United States as a way of depressing food prices. Individual (mainly Protestant) landlords behaved in a variety of ways. Some risked (and in a few cases lost) their holdings to feed their tenants.

Others hardheartedly exported Irish food in a time of famine. The adequacy of British relief during the Great Famine is a sore and disputed subject even today. The Tory and Whig leaders of the time didn't have much use for handouts to any body and had almost no use at all for the Irish. Sir Charles Trevelyan, the director of Irish relief for the British government, spoke for most of the British ruling class in his famously contemptuous attitude toward the "selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the Irish people." The British relief policies early on focused on providing work for pay that could be used to buy cheaper food. When Irish leaders pressed for some form of dole that would allow farmers to stay on their lands instead of coming into cities to build piers and roads, Trevelyan Limbaugh-esquely dismissed the idea as "the masterpiece of that system of social economy according to which the machine of society should be worked backwards, and the government should be made to sup port the people, instead of the people the government." By late 1847, the government was dispensing food from soup kitchens, but by then disease had become the bigger problem.

Some Irish historians have, after a century's reflection, softened their views of British relief and have even argued that the free distribution of every available scrap of food in Ireland would not have stopped the famine and that the early efforts by Prime Minister Robert Peel were consistent with the prevailing ideology for any British holding. But still more see in the meager relief efforts, in the evictions of tenant farmers and in the public declarations of leaders such as Trevelyan a cold and terrible willingness to let famine thin the herd of the Irish people. The United States is a "Melting Pot" a blending of many different peoples and cultures. Immigrants from many countries built this nation into what it is today. Discuss the pluses and minuses of opening the doors to immigrants.

Find examples of U.S. immigration policies in today's Sources "Modern Ireland, 1600-1972," by R.F. Foster, 1988, Penguin Press. "The Irish in Ireland," by Constantine FitzGibbon, 1983, Norton. "Out of Ireland" by Kerby Miller and Paul Wagner, 1997, Roberts Rinehart.

STUDENT ACTIVITIES At least 1.5 million Irish people came to America during the Great Famine, with an estimated 250,000 arriving in 1851. What percentage of the total immigrated here that year? Using today's Courant or your knowledge of recent events, compare the way the federal government helps victims of natural disasters with the way the British government dealt with victims of the famine. The influx of Irish immigrants into American cities increased the level of prejudice against the Irish. Using today's Courant, find other examples of ethnic or racial groups who are victims of prejudice. How are today's situations similar to the way the Irish were treatecf nearly 150 years ago? The "Weekly Almanac" on today's historic page was that era's version of our weather page.

Compare the information given in the almanac with that provided by today's weather page. Was any information included in 1847 that's not given today? NEWSPAPER IN EDUCATION WRITTEN BY COLIN McENROE SPECIAL TO THE COURANT jC3 SNAPSHOTS Of mWCAH HISTOM rj, I flPsKS, I I HENCE THE NAME, I I ft I insurance demanp I yJy i A r'Brm IS fc increased, and while 1 i VjHv JWw 3 VT Hi ffl TRAVELERS PRODUCTS I I FiJSW'f i JJI fcTf fefFiFWcr EXPANDED, THEIR 1 L2l a Ll P1 f- leadership. -rn hW -i "WMteidift among rsogy MA a. O'r V- liiUilHfrt TRAVELED" HWVtt -Z i STiV WOULD NEVER SO WHEN J.5. BATTERSON INTRODUCED ffi'T 1 iimm jM' "jT INSURANCE COMPANY TO AMERICA IN 1864, f-cvp 1 pa SiAN HE DID IT WITH THE TRAVELER IN MIND.

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