THE FENIAN MOVEMENT 



By Clyde L. King 



To understand the Fenian movement we must understand the Ameri- 

 can Irish of the sixties and to understand these we must go back to the 

 conditions in Ireland in 1846-48. These were the years of the famine. 

 On every hand there was social, economic, and industrial distress. 

 Thousands starved and thousands more were on the verge of starvation. 

 How to maintain life itself was the one pressing problem with all the 

 peasantry. Their crops had failed. Evictions followed. Employ- 

 ment at any wage, there was none. Thousands of these poor, ignorant, 

 unskilled peasants 1 sought refuge from starvation by emigrating to 

 the United States. 2 Half of them, it would seem, had their passage 

 paid by friends, being too poor to pay for it themselves. 3 



By 1850 i,3oo,ooo 4 of these Irish had landed in the United States. 

 They knew nothing of the West with its cheap lands and its great oppor- 

 tunities. Even had they known of it, they would have had neither 

 the money nor the courage to go there. Therefore, the greater portion 

 of them remained in or near Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. 5 

 In i860, 6 there were 1,611,304 natives of Ireland in the United States, 7 

 and 885,445 of them were still in the three states in which the above- 

 named ports are situated. By the census of 1870, 1,217,496 of the 1,855,- 

 827 Ireland-born people in the United States were in the six New Eng- 

 land States. 8 



Unskilled in the trades, these peasants could find employment only 

 by doing the drudgery of the cities in which they congregated, 9 or by 



1 Byrne, Irish Emigration, p. 42. 



' Bagenal, The American Irish, p. 74. 



3 Niles Register, 67, 80. 



4 Bagenal, The American Irish, p. 127; notes E. E. Hales, "Letters of Irish Emigration." 

 s Edinburg Reiiew, p. 261, April, 1868; Bagenal, The American Irish, p. 65. 



6 Census of 1866, pp. 621-23. 



1 The total foreign born was 4,136,175. The Germans were next to the Irish with 1,302,382. 



8 In New York City there were 202,000 (21 per cent, of its population); 96,698 were in Philadelphia, and 

 56,000 in Boston. 



' Of those engaged in the severest and worst paid drudgery in New York City in 1876, 50 per cent, were 

 Irish; 20 per cent, native Americans; and 16 per cent. Germans. Comparative death rate for quarter ending 

 March 31, 1877; Irish 24.5; Germans 15. 7. Infant death rate: Irish 83 per cent.; Germans 35 per cent. — 

 Bagenal, The American Irish, pp. 69 ff. 



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