Westward Cork Migration by Sail 1815-1860 by John Sutton

PART II EMIGRANT PERSPECTIVE

Pennsylvania: – to Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa. Massachusetts: – to New York, New Hampshire, Illinois, and Ohio. Maryland: – to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and District of Columbia, Louisiana: – to Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, and California.

At a more micro-level within the states, Ireland’s sons and daughters predominated in cities and towns. Kerby Miller wrote of Irish settlement in 1850, 1860 and 1870 – “By 1850, the broad parameters of the shape of Irish settlement in the United States had been established and these patterns were consolidated geographically and socially rather than extended during the 1860s and 1870s. Usually poor and unskilled, the Irish congregated in the most urban and industrialized states in the northeast of the union although as the 1860 pattern shows there was significant if exceptional rural settlement by Irish settlers in the midwestern states of Wisconsin and Minnesota. Apart from settling in the cities of New Orleans, Mobile, Savannah and Charleston, the southern states – more rural and less industrialized – were not so attractive to Irish migrants, whereas California leaped into importance during the 1850s and became a major focus of migration by the 1860s and 1870s. Overall, Irish settlement was focused on some of America’s greatest cities, particularly Boston, New York and Philadelphia – and, by 1870, on Chicago. By 1870, Chicago contained over one-third of the population of the state of Illinois – and by 1900 Chicago’s Irish population had risen to two- thirds. Yet Irish Migration was very city selective – Detroit in Michigan, Cleveland in Ohio and, for many years, Wisconsin’s Milwaukee were not so favoured. In contrast, by 1870 Irish-born populations constituted over 20% of the total city populations of Boston, Lawrence, Lowell and Worcester in Massachusetts, New York City and Jersey City, as well as Troy (in upstate New York) and Scranton and Pittsburgh further west. In many other cities and boroughs including Albany, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Cambridge (Mass), Hartford, Lynn, New Haven and Providence, Irish immigrant populations constituted at least 15% of total city population while there were many other cities in 1870 – Buffalo, Chicago, Newark, Philadelphia, Rochester, St Louis, Syracuse, Utica, and Wilmington – where the Irish contributed more than 10% to each city’s total population. And in sharp contrast to many other European immigrant groups, almost half the Irish Immigrants were women” (Miller, 2012, 216). The role of Irish women in America is often overlooked. “The large proportion of single women among the Famine emigrants promoted the elaboration of the American middle class, through the provision of cheap domestic servants, as well as the expansion of low-cost factory production in New England and elsewhere”. (Miller, 2012) The educational curriculum of domestic skills taught to young girls in Ireland throughout these decades was especially geared toward preparing them to emigrate, a factor that enabled many to enter domestic service upon their arrival in American cities. In 1850, the Boston Pilot reported that 2,227 Irish girls were working as domestic servants in the Boston area (Shannon, 2019). In New York, the 1855 Census for the notorious 6 th Ward of New York (Five Points) documented the occupations attracting Irish females in that urban setting – 25.7% specializing in sewing and dressmaking trades, 36.3% in domestic service, and 31.9% running boarding houses (Ó Gráda, 1999, 114-121). Irish women emigrated in comparable numbers to Irish men during the 19 th century and were not only gainfully employed, but also commonly married to Irish men, often from the same counties or regions of Ireland. Irish male emigrants staying alone, with a life expectancy generally quoted at that time of fourteen years, would have had but a limited and

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