Westward Cork Migration by Sail 1815-1860 by John Sutton

PART II EMIGRANT PERSPECTIVE

Focusing on US immigration from the United Kingdom: for the twenty-one consecutive years up to the Famine, 1825-46, 70% of the UK total came from Ireland in each of those years (Cohn, 2009, 26). Cohn’s ‘70% Irish’ every year was made up from emigrant ships to the US from Liverpool and Ireland, with lesser contributions from Greenock, Glasgow, and London. Cohn’s review of migrant arrivals from all European ports 1815-60 concluded that 69% of all US immigration came from Ireland and Germany combined. These claims are backed by the 1860 US Census data for all European-born citizens, with the Irish comprising 42%, Germans 34%, English 11% and British (BNA) comprising 15%. The French made up only 3% while the Netherlands and Scandinavia combined for just 2.5% (ibid). Just as Quebec was the major BNA port of entry for Irish emigrants, so too was New York the great funnel for passage of Irish immigrants into the US, and many stepped off their ship directly into the squalid tenement milieu of lower Manhattan, where tricksters readily preyed on the uninitiated. Fortunately, by 1840 a New York Irish support system was well- established, and the Nation, first published in 1842 in Dublin, spread information from the Irish Emigrant Aid Society, which was founded in 1841 and whose agents met all arriving ships. “In its office in Lower Manhattan, immigrants could seek advice on jobs and lodging, and report swindlers and unjust captains. Through the society, they could also send passage money back to Ireland, and valid pre-paid tickets. The Emigrant Society offered the Irish arrivals their first tentative gestures of leverage and power, so that they felt for the first time that they had indeed entered a new world” (Keneally, 2000, 137). The Society influenced the 1847 establishment of the Board of Commissioners of Emigration of the State of New York, which put in place protections for immigrants, and later opened the nation’s first immigration depot, Castle Garden at the tip of Manhattan Island in 1855. The Society also, with assistance from Archbishop John Hughes of New York, organized the foundation of the Irish Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank in 1850 to help protect emigrant savings from financial frauds. (This bank’s records provided some of the emigrant ship data for this study) Observations from New York Passenger arrivals (M 237) Yet again many Irish emigrants entered the USA from Canada in the 1820s and 1830s at the ports of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, commonly on small schooners from St John, Halifax, and St Andrews. Lest it seem that Canada largely provided a one-way route to the USA, emigrant arrivals in New York in the late 1820s and early 1830s document a significant number of British passengers intending to proceed onward to Upper Canada. The opening of the Erie Canal greatly facilitated the route from New York to Upper Canada and points west. New York ship arrival manifests in the late 1820s and in the decade prior to the Great Famine clearly defined Liverpool as the dominant embarkation port to New York for ‘British’ migrants, of which the Irish were the largest group. And Liverpool ships were well advertised for their service and qualities in Cork newspapers. New York arrival records for 1830 and 1831 were fewer, and often in poor condition. German emigrants, who arrived mostly from Bremen, Hamburg and Havre (port name as recorded) started to appear on Liverpool ship manifests in the late 1830s and a German flood of emigrants in 1840s continued not only from the ports of Bremen, Hamburg, and Havre, but also from Antwerp and Rotterdam. The German population in 1846 was 29 million yet the Irish, with a population of just over 8 million, remained the leading New York immigrant group. European passenger ship arrivals indicated Baltimore to have been the preferred

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