Westward Cork Migration by Sail 1815-1860 by John Sutton

PART II EMIGRANT PERSPECTIVE

The demographics of British North America were as dynamic in the second quarter of the century as they would be in the years between 1891 and 1914. The population was more diverse and sometimes conflicted. Issues of who belonged and how to treat those who did not arose in different venues and with varying degrees of force. Irish and Chinese alike would feel the limits of British North America and welcome (ibid). The Irish saga in Canada climaxed in 1847, with extraordinary death rates among Irish emigrants travelling from Liverpool and Ireland to Quebec. Familiar factors combined to produce the catastrophe, long-term British Government mismanagement, poverty, starvation, disease, coffin ships; all culminating in 1847 with the frantic exodus and massive bottleneck of disease-ridden ships that overwhelmed the Quebec quarantine station at Grosse Île where, despite valiant efforts by the expanded medical team, support staff and local citizenry, care could not meet the challenge and ships were incapable of safely discharging passengers. The trail of death extended from the ships to Quebec City and towns and hinterlands along the St Lawrence River and Lake Ontario, to Toronto and beyond. The Quebec community deserved praise for their bravery, charity and generosity during that dreadful year. However, Irish emigrants (mostly Catholic) henceforth abandoned BNA in favor of the USA. The strife between the Protestant and Catholic factions declined with reduced Irish Catholic arrivals, replaced at the lower end of the socio-economic scale by new minority groups on whom to blame society’s ills. Hatred between the religious factions diminished to the degree that Cupid intervened, as Irish Protestants and Catholics were often intermarrying by the end of the century (McGowan 2015). The precise number of the 750,000 Irish emigrants in Canada (1815-60) that moved to the US is not clear - some have speculated up to one–third (250,000). Those that remained contributed to the Canadian cultural and political milieu. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Catholic, Young Irelander, born in Carlingford (1825), emigrated to America, eventually moved to the Province of Canada in 1857 and became a politician and Father of Canadian Confederation for his role in founding the Dominion of Canada. Many Irish Canadians joined the 19 th century westward drift to the Prairie Provinces and British Columbia, mostly at the expense of the Province of Quebec; hence Irish heritage is now celebrated in festivals from Vancouver Newfoundland. Irish emigrant contribution to British North America after the 1861-65 American Civil War was replaced largely by eastern European migrants, many of whom would also participate in the westerly expansion of the Dominion of Canada upon acquisition of Rupert’s Land in 1870. CHAPTER 5B THE AFTERMATH IN THE USA “The Irish immigrants who entered the United States from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries were changed by America and also changed this nation. They and their descendants made incalculable contributions in politics, industry, organized labor, religion, literature, music, and art” (Library of Congress). The population of the USA grew from 7,239,881 in 1810 to 31,443,321 in 1860, during which time the British Emigration Commission indicated 3,048,206 emigrants voyaged from Britain. German immigrants arrived largely from the continent. The US 1860 Census of all

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