Shovelling Out

Abstract

Abstract This chapter analyzes the people who emigrated from Ireland to North America in the first half of the nineteenth century, with a focus on their material conditions. Until the early nineteenth century Irish emigrants chiefly consisted of Protestants, especially Presbyterians. By the 1830s Catholics, who were markedly poorer than their Protestant predecessors, had become the dominant group among Irish emigrants. The chapter examines in depth the schemes by local landlords and Irish workhouses to finance the passage to North America of destitute tenants and workhouse inmates during the famine in the 1840s and 1850s. In the mid-nineteenth century, a growing number of Irish emigrants to North America either appeared outstandingly wretched or were unable to support themselves without becoming public charges. The poverty of the Catholic Irish, along their religious faith, stimulated anti-Irish nativism and played a critical role in the development of immigration control policy in antebellum America.