The Irish Famine and the Atlantic Migration to Canada
The Great Irish Famine of 1847 and the Atlantic Migration which it set in motion mark a turning point of paramount importance in the history of the Catholic Church in Canada. The distinguished historian J. H. Hammond in his monumental work, 'Gladstone and the Irish Nation,' quotes one of Mr. Gladstone's letters which serves as a fitting introduction to this historical survey of Irish Catholicism in Canada in the middle decades of the last century. In 1845 W.E. Gladstone wrote in a prophetic mood to his wife: 'Ireland, Ireland! that a cloud in the west, that coming storm, the minister of God's retribution upon cruel and inveterate but half-atoned injustice! Ireland forces upon us these great social and religious questions - God grant that we may have the courage to look them in the face and to work through them. 'It was not difficult for the future protagonist of Home Rule to read the signs of the times. In fact it is no understatement to say that they were obvious. From the beginning of the eighteenth century the Apocalyptic horsemen, Famine, Pestilence and Death rode with monotonous regularity across the impoverished land of Eire. The causes of the Great Irish Famine are rooted deeply in Irish history. War, confiscation of land, penal laws and coercion bills reduced the Irish people to economic slavery. They were forced to live on a slender diet of potatoes while the wealth that should have been theirs was siphoned off to England and into the pockets of landlords. In the century and a half previous to the famine Ireland lived on the very border of starvation and not unfrequently this border was crossed. When the great famine came Irishmen who knew their country's history were not surprised; the wonder was that it had not come much earlier. During the first weeks of the great famine, Daniel O'Connell, Father Theobald Mathew and other Irish leaders implored the Government to close the ports to keep the food in the country and to shut down the distilleries. The Parliament at Westminster, which, since the Act of Union, was also the Irish Parliament, refused to enforce these obvious and elementary measures. The callous mentality of the British Cabinet is reflected in the attitude of Sir Robert Peel, who, at the beginning of the Famine imposed a new coercion law on Ireland: 'I have no confidence in such remedies as the prohibition of export or the stoppage of the distilleries. The removal of the impediment to imports is the only effectual remedy.' Irish landlords and government officials believed that the economic theories of Adam Smith and Thomas Robert Malthus not only were right but also immutable. Inspired by a vicious philosophy of life that money was more important than human lives, they rejected every programme of relief which interfered in the slightest way with the course of profitable commerce. Consequently, they imposed upon the Irish people an artificial famine which, in turn, led to the Atlantic Migration. During the most critical years of the famine, Ireland exported, at their insistence, corn, barley, oats, and cattle in quantities that would have sufficed to feed the famine-stricken population. On the other hand, the suffering Irish people had no means to buy the imports which Sir Robert Peel considered the only effective remedy. The relief-works sponsored by Peel and Russell were carefully designed to be of no permanent benefit to Ireland not a finger was moved to reclaim the 3,755,000 acres of waste land improvable for tillage and pasture. No thought was given to the land question or to the fact that Irish industries, suppressed in their early development could be revived. On the contrary, more than £10,000,000 were squandered on useless works such as the canal joining Lough Mask and Lough Corrib in Galway, built of porous limestone which could not hold water! Direct relief in shelter food and clothing saved thousands of lives, but nothing had been done to prevent future famines. In 1847 the economic ills of Ireland real and artificial, which took over a million lives, were the cause of another national disaster - the Atlantic Migration. The British Government and the Irish landlords, influenced by Malthus, were obsessed by the erroneous idea that the country was over-populated. Mass murder by artificial famine provided only a partial solution to the problem.' The time was never more opportune to force the impoverished populace from the country. Conditions were deliberately worsened by legal means. The repeal of the Corn Laws as Professor George O'Brien has pointed out, deprived Ireland of her last means by which she could support her population. Landlords converted their farms into pasture. The evicted tenants had the choice of death from starvation or joining the great exodus. The Gregory clause of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1847 provided that no person in possession of more than a quarter of an acre of land could be deemed destitute and that it was unlawful to assist such persons. 'A more complete engine,' wrote Father John O'Rourke, the historian of the great famine, 'for the slaughter and degradation of a people was never designed. The previous clause offered facilities for emigrating to those who would give up their land; the quarter acre clause compelled them to give it up or die of hunger.' In face of death or economic slavery there arose throughout the land a disconsolate cry: 'Ireland is doomed.' Scores of sailing vessels which had brought relief supplies to Irish ports and lumber to England were ready to transport the destitute across the ocean. Thousands of Irish prepared to leave their native land for ever. Life in the Canadian backwoods could not be harder than perennial poverty in Ireland. For the optimistic, Canada would be a new Jerusalem. During the darkest months of the great Famine the Irish people were well aware that Canadians had strained their resources to succour them in their need. They had every reason to hope that the same munificent hand would be extended to them when they arrived on Canadian shores. The appeal of Pope Pius ix met with a generous response from Canadian Catholics. The Catholics of the city of Montreal alone contributed $8676. Dr. William Dollard, first Bishop of the diocese of New Brunswick, raised £80 in his sparsely settled diocese. Monsignor Ignace Bourget Bishop of Montreal, and Dr. Michael Power, first Bishop of Toronto who witnessed the ravages of the famine on a visit to Ireland in 1846, were indefatigable in their efforts to help the stricken. In response to the appeal of the British Association for the Relief of Extreme Distress in Ireland and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, the House of Assembly for Nova Scotia voted £2,250 and an additional gift of £665 came from other sources. The subscriptions for the Irish Relief Association in British North America amounted to £2,821; of this amount £1,165 came from Quebec. British North America likewise raised for the General Central Relief Committee for all Ireland £12,463 including £5,873 from Montreal, £1571 from Quebec, and £3,472 from Toronto. In addition there were large donations of grain food and clothing. Irish settlers in British North America sent all the money that they could raise to enable their relatives in Ireland to follow them. While exact figures are not available this mounted to several thousand pounds. The Canadian people did not fail in their generosity and heroic charity when the impoverished and typhus-stricken Irish arrived by the thousands on their shores. Nevertheless, in the late summer of 1847, a justifiable murmur arose among the people, directed not against the helpless immigrants but the British Government. French Canadians, recalling the choleric plagues of 1832 and 1834 brought into Lower Canada by Irish Settlers, felt that a new long-range plan of extermination was being directed against them from London. Citizens in every part of British North America condemned the revolting conditions under which immigrants were sent to Canadian ports. Since money was scarce in the colonies and their trade was paralysed by imperial restrictions the British Government was warned that it must pay the enormous cost of unrestricted Irish immigration. A year later, 1848, the Government did pay; Lord Elgin's advice left no choice in the matter. Throughout the grim and eventful year of 1847 Canadian settlers, from the Atlantic seaboard to the remotest parts of Upper Canada, saw with their own eyes the cruelty and suffering of the Irish famine and the Atlantic Migration. Here, indeed was visible evidence of man's inhumanity to man. Passenger-lists, preserved in the public archives of Canada, show that in 1847 by way of the St. Lawrence River route 90,409 immigrants from Great Britain and Ireland entered Lower and Upper Canada. Of these not less than 75,000 were Irish. From Irish ports there sailed 211 boats with 54,329 refugees. Since this fleet was insufficient to accommodate the exodus thousands crossed over to Liverpool in search of passage. From England came 140 boats carrying 32,328 immigrants. Forty-two ships sailed from Scottish harbours with 3,752 passengers, most of whom were Irish. Of the 90409 immigrants who embarked for the St. Lawrence ports of Canada 5,293 died at sea. Of the 7074 headed for St. John, New Brunswick,823 perished. The mortality at sea amounted to approximately six percent. Death and burial at sea broke the spirit of even the most optimistic among the survivors. Their blasted hopes are expressed in the comment of one of the sufferers: 'We thought we could not be worse off than we were; but now to our sorrow we know the difference. At home we had the chance of a doctors care and the certainty of the spiritual administration of a priest. Should death overtake us there we would be buried beside our beloved dead, in consecrated Irish ground, with the prayers and last blessing of our church.' What were the causes of this enormously high death-rate? In his contemporary account, 'The Irish Crises' published in The Edinburgh Review, January 1848, Sir Charles E. Trevelyan, who was a relief officer in Ireland during the famine, wrote: 'Early in the year 1847 the roads to the Irish seaports were thronged with families hastening to escape the evils which impended over their native land.' The complaint in Ireland at the time, was that those who went belonged to the best and most substantial class of the agricultural population. The complaint afterwards in Canada was that those who came were the helpless and destitute. The fact was that the emigrants generally belonged to that class of small holders who, being somewhat above the level of the prevailing destitution, had sufficient resources left to enable them to make the effort required to effect their removal to a foreign land; and the steps taken by them to convert their property into an available [farm or form?] had for months before been the subject of observation. This statement does not contradict the evidence of Canadian priests and government officials that the Irish immigrants arrived in the worst possible condition of disease, ill-health and poverty. One has, only to remember that Irish labourers and cottiers, whose standard of living was 'somewhat above the prevailing level of destitution,' rarely, if ever, knew the taste of meat, milk and vegetables other than the potato. Not even the strongest of those who possessed a little money escaped the ravages of fever and hunger during the darkest months of the famine. Unlike the United States, the colonies in British North America could not restrict or control immigration. Taking advantage of this situation, Irish land-lords [landlords?] in co-operation wth greedy and unscrupulous shipowners cleared off their estates hundreds of sick and exhausted men, women and children whose faces were marked with the shadow of early and inevitable death. In April, 1847, Stephen E.De Vere travelled as an emigrant to Canada in a converted lumber and cargo boat. His description of his experience must be accepted as characteristic of the conditions prevalent throughout the whole ship-fever fleet. It requires a strong stomach to read his detailed account of the transatlantic crossing; 'Before the emigrant has been a week at sea he is an altered man. How could it be otherwise? Hundreds of poor people men, women, and children of all ages from the drivelling idiot of ninety to the babe just born, huddled together without light, without air, wallowing in filth and breathing a fetid atmosphere, sick in body, dispirited in heart, the fever patients lying between the sound, in sleeping places so narrow as almost to deny them the power of indulging, by a change of position, the natural restlessness of the disease.' The food supply was of the poorest quality. Drinking water was mixed with vinegar to kill the stench. Conditions were so bad that 'The Times,' London, which had viewed the flight of the Irish with ghoulish satisfaction, was forced to admit: 'the Black-Hole of Calcutta was mercy compared to the holds of these vessels.' Thirty miles east of the historic City of Quebec lies Grosse Isle - a misleading name, for it is only three miles long and a mile wide. Here in 1832, the British Government opened a quarantine station, a natural site, for it was directly in the path of incoming vessels. Unlike the neighbouring Isle d'Orleans with its fine parishes and rich farms, Grosse Isle was barren. It was unpopulated before the arrival of the small staff of health authorities. Supplies were brought from Quebec or Montreal; delays were long and frequent. Forewarned that the immigration for 1847 would be larger than that in the previous year, accommodation was provided for two hundred patients. The tide of the great migration flowed in and tragedy followed. On 28th May, thirty ships were awaiting quarantine inspection. From the first week in May to the close of navigation 439 boats, including eighty four from Germany with a clean bill of health, anchored off Grosse Isle. By midsummer the situation was appalling. The brig Larch from Sligo, which left with 440 passengers, arrived with 150 typhus patients; it had buried 108 victims at sea. The Lord Ashburton, from Liverpool, with 475 passengers, reported 107 dead, 60 sick with fever or dysentery; the 'Sir Henry Pottinger,' from Cork, 399 pasengers,98 dead,112 sick. The Virginius, which sailed with 596 emigrants, buried 158 during passage, 186 landed in a dying condition, the remainder including the crew, were feeble and tottering. These were typical conditions. Soldiers with army tents and supplies, additional priests and doctors, were brought in to cope with a hopeless situation. In the July and August heat typhus raged among the stranded victims. Whole families were wiped out. Relatives became separated; the number of orphans mounted to the hundreds. Since the authorities were more disposed to hide the facts than to reveal them, it is greatly to the credit of the Quebec Chronicle that it carried the names and ages of those who died at Grosse Isle. From this source it was possible for hundreds of families in Ireland and in Canada to trace the fate of their loved ones. On leaving the quarantine station at Grosse Isle the fever ships proceeded up the St Lawrence River into Lake Ontario. Whenever they stopped to unload their passengers, typhus and dysentery appeared in alarming proportions. It is true to say that not a single rural district, village, farm or city in Upper and Lower Canada escaped the ravages. Deaths in Quebec City numbered 1,137, including many of the inhabitants. Through the zeal of the local clergy, Fathers McMahon, Cazeau and Baillaragean, later Archbishop of Quebec, homes were found for 800 orphans. Some were placed in St. Brigid's Home which for more than a century has been a haven for the indigent. Montreal was a second Grosse Isle. Here, at Point St. Charles, 11,000 lay sick with fever. Terror spread throughout the populace. At Bytown, now Ottawa, 1,000 were stricken; of these 200 died. At Kingston, 4,326 were admitted to the hospitals and feversheds; of these 1,400 died. At Toronto, where the authorities had time to make preparations, the sick received better care. Nevertheless, 863 died from the epidemic. At Hamilton, and at St Catherines in the Niagara Peninsula, at London and Sarnia in western Ontario, events followed the same course, though numbers were smaller. Partridge Island, at the entrance to the harbour of St. John, New Brunswick was a third Grosse Isle but with a much lower death-rate. Of the 17,074 immigrants who entered here, including 2,000 from Lord Palmerston's estates, 600 died on the Island and 595 died in the city s fever-sheds. In 1847 a magnificent chapter was added to the voluminous history of Christian charity by the clergy and laity of British North America. The total cost for relief charged to the British Government was £150,000. To this must be added the large sums contributed from private sources. Catholic priests and Protestant ministers, Catholic nuns and lay nurses, doctors and government officials, and the hundreds of Samaritans from the ranks of the laity risked their lives to care for the sick. Many gave their lives for a cause that could not be greater. On 1st October, 1847, Dr. Michael Power, Bishop of Toronto, the first Canadian of Irish parentage to be elevated to the episcopate, died a victim of his zeal. Of the fifty-one priests who attended the sick at Quebec and Grosse Isle twenty five contracted the fever; of these five died. Among those who survived were the Abbe E.A. Taschereau later Archbishop of Quebec and Canada's first Cardinal, Father E. Horan, later Bishop of Kingston, Monsignor Bernard O'Reilly, the Biographer of Pope Leo xiii, and the Abbe J.B. Ferland, historian of distinction. To this list must be added the name of the indefatigable and heroic Irish pastor of Quebec city, Father P. McMahon, who with the alms of the Irish faithful built to the memory of St. Patrick a church of cathedral proportions. In Montreal and nearby towns fifty-six priests - diocesan clergy, Sulpicians and Jesuits - attended the sick; of these, nineteen contracted the fever and nine died - five Sulpicians and four of the diocesan clergy. Here too one must mention the pastor of the Irish in Montreal, Rev. Richard Jackson, P, SS., who gave his life for his flock, 21st July 1847. Forty years earlier he came to Montreal a young and zealous Episcopalian minister from Virginia with a special 'call' to save the Sulpician Fathers from the road to perdition! His mission failed. As a convert he joined the community of St. Sulpice, whose history and work he had long admired. Monsignor Ignace Bourget, Bishop of Montreal, and the auxiliary Bishop of the diocese, Monsignor Jean-Charles Prince, both contracted the fever, as did two future Canadian bishops, Armand de [Charbonnel?] of Toronto and Joseph la Rocque of St. Hyacinthe. A similar story of sacrifice and devotion was written by the Irish and French priests of Upper Canada, in Bytown, Kingston, and Toronto, and in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. In Quebec the cloistered nuns of the Hotel-Dieu ministered with unfailing charity to the afflicted immigrants. The Ursulines of the historic old monastery opened a school for Irish children. In Montreal where the majority of the religious communities were uncloistered, the sisters left their convents to nurse the sick in the tents and sheds at Point St.Charles. Little did they count the cost or the fear of death. Early in July 1847, there were no less than forty eight Sisters at the point of death from fever and exhaustion. Seven Grey Nuns, three Sisters of Providence, and three nuns of the Hotel-Dieu de St. Joseph made the supreme sacrifice. With a similar devotion to duty the Grey Nuns of Ottawa and the nuns of the Hotel-Dieu at Kingston worked until they collapsed at the bedsides of their patients. Over the thousands of unmarked graves of Irish dead on Grosse Isle, at Kingston and on Partridge Island, devoted hands have reared to their memory Celtic crosses of finest craftmanship, the symbol of resurrection. The remains of the immigrants who died at Point St. Charles were interred not far from the place where the army tents and sheds stood during the epidemic. An enormous block of stone, erected by labourers with reverence and undimmed faith, bears the following inscription: TO PRESERVE FROM DESECRATION THE REMAINS OF 6000 IMMIGRANTS WHO DIED OF SHIP FEVER A.D. 1847-1848 THIS STONE IS ERECTED BY THE WORKMEN OF MESSERS.PETO, BRASSEY AND BETTS EMPLOYED IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE VICTORIA BRIDGE A.D.1859 page 11 Here one is confronted with official and unofficial statistics. The official count of deaths for Montreal is 3,862, which is 2,138 short of 6,000. Toward the end of 1847 Dr. Douglas, medical superintendent at Grosse Isle, and the doctors who assisted him, erected in the middle of the cemetery on the island a monument with the following inscription: IN THIS SECLUDED SPOT LIE THE MORTAL REMAINS OF 5424 PERSONS WHO, FLYING FROM PESTILENCE AND FAMINE IN IRELAND,IN THE YEAR 1847 FOUND IN AMERICA,BUT A GRAVE Years later, 15th August, 1909, when the Ancient Order of Hibernians erected the Celtic Cross on the south side of the island, the popular estimate of the dead had risen to 20,000. The inscription on this monument is written with caution: SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF THOUSANDS OF IRISH IMMIGRANTS WHO TO PRESERVE THE FAITH SUFFERED HUNGER AND EXILE IN 1847-1848 AND STRICKEN WITH FEVER ENDED HERE THEIR SORROWFUL PILGRIMAGE Official figures are without a doubt too low; the traditional estimates are exaggerated. From the confused statistics one may accept this statement as approximately correct; Out of the 107,483 emigrants, mostly Irish, who came to British North America in 1847, 30,265 were stricken with typhus; 6,116 died at sea; 11,047 after debarkation. There is an inspiring sequel to the tragedy of the Alantic Migration. Having buried their dead the Irish immigrants turned to the arduous task of building their homes in the new country. Their resources were meagre; their faith was great. Hundreds went to the wide spaces of the country to clear their farms in the untouched forests. Hundreds more worked as labourers building the roads, bridges, canals and railways of Ontario, and Eastern Canada. Conscious of the rights of labour, they found their leaders among their own countrymen. Forty years ago the Right Honourable W. L. Mackenzie King, now Prime Minister of Canada, wrote of Daniel John O'Donoghue, a son of Tralee; 'perhaps no other man is worthy of being called the father of the labour movement in Canada. 'In every Irish community there arose a church and a school. Hospitals, orphanages and homes were built for the sick and the indigent. The cathedrals of the Maritime Province and Ontario, including Ottawa, were made possible by the donations of Irish labourers and servant girls. In September, 1847, five Irish nuns from Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnum, came to Toronto to establish the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary in North America. Scores of Irish girls entered the French-Canadian convents. Older communities, like the Ursulines, the Grey Nuns, and the Congregation de Notre-Dame, and the new orders like the Sisters of Charity (founded by Mother Seton), the Sisters St. Joseph, and the sisters of St. Ann, entered new fields of work with the enrichment of Irish vocations. The depleted ranks of the diocesan and regular clergy were filled with Irish priests from Ireland and the sons of Irish immigrants. Ireland gave to the church in Canada prelates of uncommon distinction. Dr. Thomas L. Connolly, Archbishop of Halifax, has been placed by a great historian among the ten greatest theologians at the Vatican Council. For years the [Mestor?] of the Canadian hierarchy, Dr. John Joseph Lynch, first Archbishop of Toronto, exercised a wide influence in Canadian public life. His correspondence with Sir John A. MacDonald, a stout bound volume, reveals the breadth of his interests. Dr. James Vincent Cleary, first Archbishop of Kingston, had no rival in America and few in Europe as a master of Latin. He loved the beauty of God's house, and the churches built under his direction by the great Irish architect, Joseph Connolly R.C.A. are to-day among the finest in the Dominion of Canada. Twenty years before the Irish famine two Irish medical doctors in Montreal, Daniel Tracey and Edmund Bailey O'Callaghan, page 13 pioneer workers for responsible government, set a high standard for the Irish press in Canada. Later as historian of New York State Dr. O'Callaghan gave invaluable help to the historian of [New?] France, and to Francois-Xavier Garneau, author of the History of Canada. In the years following the Atlantic Migration the influence of the Irish press greatly increased. Leaders of Irish birth took their place in the business world, in the professions, and in every department of civic life. Thomas d'Arcy McGee, Archbishop Connelly, and Edward Whelan rank with the chief promoters and makers of the Dominion of Canada. If in the course of a century Canada has grown from the restricted life of a colony to a stature of a nation, it is due in no small measure to the influence of Irish immigrants. The Atlantic Migration did not settle the Irish question. On the contrary it became an international question, and in a particular sense a Canadian question. Each year the Irish in Canada sent thousands of pounds to Ireland to support their relatives who had been robbed of their lands. The voice of the press in Ireland was heard in every part of Canada. Interest in Home Rule and in the land question was quickened with the visits of Irish leaders like Parnell and Timothy Healy. For two years as pastor of the Irish Parish of Sillery, near Quebec City, the ubiquitous Monsiguer Persico learned at first hand the sufferings of the evicted immigrants and some elementary facts of Irish history. The history of the Catholic Church in Canada, with the rich contribution of the Irish immigrants, has never been written. The reasons: impoverishment of historical scholarship, studied neglect, and frozen assets. Should it ever be written 'in extenso,' a magnificent volume will be entitled 'The Irish Famine and the Atlantic Migration.' John B. O'Reilly. Transcribed by Jim BuchananClose