They threatened to take jobs away from Americans and strain welfare budgets. They practiced an alien religion and pledged allegiance to a foreign leader. They were bringing with them crime. They were accused of More than , Irishmen, most of whom were recent immigrants and many of whom were not yet U. Some joined out of loyalty to their new home. Others hoped that such a conspicuous display of patriotism might put a stop to The discrimination that Irish immigrants encountered in their new home was hardly subtle.
Instead, it was as plain as the black-and-white print that On Easter Monday, April 24, , a group of Irish nationalists proclaimed the establishment of the Irish Republic and, along with some 1, followers, staged a rebellion against the British government in Ireland. The rebels seized prominent buildings in Dublin and clashed with In the spring of , a band of Irish-Americans who fought on both sides of the Civil War united to undertake one of the most fantastical missions in military history: invade the British province of Canada, seize the territory and ransom it back to the British for Ireland's Ellis Island is a historical site that opened in as an immigration station, a purpose it served for more than 60 years until it closed in Scientific commissions were set up to investigate the problem and recommend ways to prevent the decay.
Farmers were told to try drying the potatoes in ovens or to treat them with lime and salt or with chlorine gas. But nothing worked. People ate anything they could find, including the leaves and bark of trees and even grass. The blight did not go away. In , the whole potato crop was wiped out. In , a shortage of seeds led to fewer crops, as only about a quarter of the land was planted compared to the year before.
The crop flourished, but not enough food was produced, and the famine continued. By this time, the mass emigration abroad had begun. The flight to America and Canada continued in when the blight struck again. In , the famine was officially at an end, but suffering continued throughout Ireland. More than 1 million people died between and as a result of the Potato Famine. Many of these died from starvation.
Many more died from diseases that preyed on people weakened by loss of food. People streamed into towns, begging for food and crowding the workhouses and soup kitchens.
Little, if any, medical care was available for the sick. Many of those who tried to help died too. In one province, 48 medical men died of fever, and many clergymen died as well. Many Irish believe that the British government should have done more to help Ireland during the famine. Ireland had become part of Great Britain in , and the British Parliament, sitting in London, knew about the horrors being suffered. But while the potato crop failed and most Irish were starving, many wealthy landlords who owned large farms had large crops of oats and grain that they were exporting to England.
Meanwhile, the poor in Ireland could not afford to buy food and were starving. Many believe that large numbers of lives would have been saved if the British had banned those exports and kept the crops in Ireland.
But stopping food exports was not acceptable to the Whig Party, which had taken control of the British Parliament in Instead, the government should interfere as little as possible in the economy. Because of their belief in laissez-faire economics, members of the Whig government refused to stop landlords from exporting oats and grain while the poor were starving. The Whig Party also shut down food depots that had been set up and stocked with Indian corn.
The British government did take some steps to help the poor. Before the famine, in , the government had passed a Poor Law Act. It established workhouses for the poor around the country, funded by taxes collected from local landlords and farmers.
Conditions in the workhouses were grim. Families lived in crowded and miserable conditions, and men were forced to work 10 hours a day cutting stone. Many people avoided workhouses if they could because moving in meant almost certain illness and likely death. The government also established a public-works program. The program was supposed to be run by local committees that would employ laborers to build railroads and other public-works projects.
The British government advanced money for the projects, but the local committee members had to sign a contract promising to repay the British government in two years plus interest. But in , the potato crop not only failed again, but failed much more severely, with very few healthy potatoes being harvested that autumn. This time the food crisis was much more severe as most poor tenant farmer families now had nothing to fall back on and marked the start of mass starvation and death, made even worse by an unusually cold winter.
Eyewitnesses began to report whole villages lying in their cabins, dying of the fever. The potato crop did not fail that year, but most potato farmers had either not sown seeds in expectation that the potato crop would fail again, did not have any more seeds or had been evicted for failure to pay rent.
The result was that hardly any potatoes were harvested for the second year in a row. Large bands of hungry people began to be noticed wandering countryside and towns, begging for food. Many flocked to the workhouses — where the destitute were granted food and shelter in exchange for work — but due to insanitary conditions, many died there. The figures for deaths in workhouses spiraled uncontrollably in the famine years, rising from 6, in to over 66, in and remaining in the tens of thousands until early s.
There was a poor potato crop again in , but it picked up in the years afterwards, leading to a gradual fall off in famine deaths by about The peak of the death toll occurred in the winter of , where in some districts up to a quarter or the population perished due to hunger, cold and disease.
One of the most high profile cases was that of Major Dennis Mahon, of the Strokestown estate in county Roscommon, who cleared 1, families off his land during the famine. Mahon was later murdered by his vengeful tenants. In all over 70, evictions took place during the famine, displacing up to , people.
Being evicted often meant that Bailiffs and the Sheriff, usually with a police or military escort, not only ejected tenants from their homes but also commonly burned the cabins to prevent their reoccupation. Losing a house and shelter in midst of the famine greatly increased the chances of dying.
Though some landlords went to great lengths to set up charities and soup kitchens, the popular memory of the famine years was of the tyranny of cruel landlords backed by the British state.
Requiring calorie-heavy diets to carry out their punishing workloads, they were soon consuming between 40 and 60 potatoes every day. By the early 19th century, however, the potato had begun to show a tendency toward crop failure, with Ireland and much of northern Europe experience smaller blights in the decades leading up to the Great Famine. While the effects of these failures were largely ameliorated in many countries thanks to their cultivation of a wide variety of different potatoes, Ireland was left vulnerable to these blights due to its dependence on just one type, the Irish Lumper.
When HERB-1, which had already wreaked havoc on crops in Mexico and the United States, made its way across the Atlantic sometime in , its effect was immediate—and devastating. By 1 million Irish—nearly one-eight of the population—were dead from starvation or disease. Emigration from the country, which had steadily increased in the years leading up to the famine, ballooned, and by 2 million people had fled, swelling the immigrant Irish populations of Canada, the United States, Australia and elsewhere.
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