The Kennedys

by Thomas Maier

  Patrick’s life as a farmer in Dunganstown consisted mainly of cutting and tying bundles of grain by hand, and planting and tilling potatoes for his family’s own consumption. This routine varied only when he ventured into New Ross with supplies of barley, and when the family attended Sunday Mass about a mile away. Life was often sheer drudgery for tenant farmers like Patrick. When they could, local townspeople gathered for regular evenings of music and dance—called a ceilidhe in Gaelic—where young people mingled and flirted, and the older ones engaged in storytelling by the fire. On long summer evenings, the men competed in great hurling matches, a passion among the Irish. The young women arrived at gathering places, located at every major crossroad, where dancing, music and skittles filled the air with laughter. One of the liveliest places was called The Hand, less than a mile from the Kennedy farm. “Romances made and broken there are still talked about in the district,” Irish chronicler Tim Pat Coogan later explained. Yet, with each passing day in Ireland, the prospects for happiness dimmed.

  Rebellion, once again, was in the air. Daniel O’Connell, Dublin’s Lord Mayor, often known as The Liberator, slowly managed to achieve the first genuine political freedoms in centuries for Irish Catholics. Driven by a deep faith in democracy and nonviolent agitation, O’Connell galvanized the Irish to his cause. His followers organized huge but well-behaved rallies at what O’Connell called his “Monster Meetings.” One of these gatherings attracted many thousands of people on the royal Hill of Tara, north of Dublin, the venerated place where, legend holds, the earliest Irish kings once ruled. The Liberator seemed destined to transform Ireland into a free republic. Unfortunately, O’Connell died in 1847, before his dream could be realized. His cause was taken up by a more confrontational group, known as Young Irelanders, who had far less success.

  They gave voice to the Irish unrest coming from the farmlands. On “Gale Day,” the Kennedys and other tenant farmers were expected to pay their British landlords ever-higher rents without any chance of ownership. When tenants were unable to keep up with these payments, many were evicted and thrown into poverty, a situation that lead to the murders of several British property owners. A commission investigating these killings concluded that “the motive for all was the wild justice of revenge” by ousted farmers against their landlords. But a wary government in England perceived this violence as a sign of political rebellion against which immediate steps had to be taken. The object of British wrath became the Young Irelanders, who refused the pledge against violence or armed rebellion that O’Connell and his “Old Ireland” group had made. The Young Irelanders were led by William Smith O’Brien, a Protestant patriot who claimed to be a direct descendent of Brian Boru;Thomas Francis Meagher, a Catholic son of Waterford’s mayor, who preached a fiery call for armed rebellion; and John Mitchel, an inspirational writer for the Nation, a pro-independence publication. In 1848, on hearing news of a popular uprising against France’s king, the Young Irelanders burned with desire for independence on their own native soil. Bonfires were lit in Wexford, and a banner calling for freedom waved in Waterford. Word of such excitement undoubtedly reached Patrick Kennedy’s ears outside New Ross.

  Unlike the revered Daniel O’Connell, the Young Irelanders didn’t enjoy the clergy’s support. Pope Pius IX specifically instructed the Irish priests to avoid political ties “and in no way to mix themselves up with worldly affairs.”The British rushed in troops to quell whatever chance of rebellion might exist and arrested the three Young Irelanders leaders, forcing them to leave the country like “wild geese,” as they had become known. Meagher was shipped to Australia, but then found his way to America, where he became the distinguished leader of an Irish Brigade fighting for the Union during the Civil War. Mitchel went to New England, where he later wrote about the Catholic bigotry of the Know-Nothing Party and the tar-and-feathering of a Jesuit priest in Maine. William Smith O’Brien tried to rally support for rebellion in Wexford and other southern counties, but he failed in this region, which still remembered the cruelty of the British sword in ’98.

  In Dunganstown, Patrick Kennedy, upset about his family’s fate under the control of British landlords, was most likely sympathetic to calls for rebellion, though there’s no evidence that he took part in political activity. By 1848, whatever hope existed for Irish independence had faded with O’Connell’s death and the crushed dreams of the Young Irelanders. Yet most devastating of all was the insidious arrival of a potato blight and, accompanying it, starvation.

  BARLEY AND MALT were the grains by which the Kennedys paid the rent, but potatoes were the daily staple of their diet, the staff of life for untold thousands in Wexford and throughout Ireland. Potatoes had been introduced to the nation by Sir Walter Raleigh, who brought the vegetable back with him after discovering its use by natives in the New World. Potatoes were consumed at nearly every meal. Breakfast might consist of potatoes with milk; and dinner, potatoes with perhaps some goose or mutton. In Wexford before the famine, a cartload of potatoes cost only a shilling, making the foodstuff affordable to even the most modest homesteaders. Potatoes became central to Ireland’s agrarian economy, employing thousands. When the blight came, a telltale spot on the leaf of the potato plant formed a white moldy substance that crept into the potato buried in the soil. Ripe edible spuds turned into rotten pulp encased in black. Carried by wind, rain and insects, the mold spores soon infected entire crops. Large expanses of healthy farmland turned into a putrid mess. No one knew what caused it— frost, summer thunderstorms, even the moon were suggested as culprits— though the killer was later identified as a fungus called phytophthora infestans.

  Death and illness soon consumed the countryside. In Dungarvan, some thirty miles down the coastline, starvation and extreme poverty left many dead, their bodies scattered on the ground or in their homes, sometimes pulled apart by starving dogs. Within a few years, the population of Dunganstown sank by 21 percent. Similarly, in the parish where the Kennedys lived, the number of baptisms plummeted, a sad testament to the preponderance of death and lack of births. In the 1830s, baptisms averaged about 115 a year, records show, and went up to 133 in the early 1840s. But as the famine took hold, baptisms in the parish dropped to around 70 in the 1850s and even lower, about 47 a year, during the 1860s, the same records show.

  “Deaths from famine had been numerous . . . caused by the utter want of food,” reported theWexford Independent in January 1847.The next month, a Board of Works inspector for County Wexford wrote in his journal that farmers on plots of land the size that the Kennedys tended were “very badly off,” and some were forced to leave their farms and seek employment with public works projects to avoid starvation. By February 1847, more than twenty thousand people in Wexford relied on public works to earn their daily bread. The local curate for the region, including the Kennedys’ hometown, estimated that in his district there were “2,500 human beings without a morsel to put in their mouths unless they obtain[ed] from the public works.” The number of paupers in the New Ross workhouse, a place known for its hellish conditions, rose to 1,006, including women and children; because most suffered from famine-related disease, the death toll reached eighty-two in one week. Suffering in Wexford became widespread and prompted one writer in the Independent to observe:

  The numbers of unfortunate creatures begging relief are surprising and many a dishevelled form, the emaciated face, the tottering step which tells a tale of poverty, misery and hunger indescribable by words, with cheeks like scorched leather, eyes sunken and a voice sounding as if from a tomb, beseech you, in accents almost inaudible from weakness, for relief for God’s sake.

  Famine caused great desperation throughout Wexford. Shocked and numbed by so many destitute people, so many starving in the streets, one contemporary physician described the agonizing process of watching a human die from starvation—first the headaches, bloody noses and pain in the limbs; then the “delirium and raving” convulsions of the face muscles; and finally, “the entire body changed to a de
ep livid or black colour as if scorched by gun-powder.”With the rotting of the potato crops, and constant searching for anything to eat, some suggested a halt to malting in Wexford—a move that would still further reduce the meager income the Kennedys made from barley. With typhus, cholera and other diseases running rampant, New Ross authorities considered closing off the bridge across the Barrow to stave off the spread of illnesses from neighboring County Kilkenney. Undoubtedly, illness weighed heavily on Patrick Kennedy’s thinking about the future, perhaps as much as famine itself.

  The Famine posed a crushing blow to the Kennedys, as it did to many Irish farmers, and changed the composition of their family forever. No longer would all their children remain on the farm, succeeding one generation after the next. Nor would their prayers for freedom be answered any time soon. Once the Kennedys, some of whom fought with the Boys of Wexford in 1798, had dreamed of Irish independence and political and social equality for Catholics. Those days were now gone, effectively starved to death. Some histories suggest that the Kennedys in Dunganstown were more prosperous than most dirt-poor tenant farmers and that their region of Ireland was not much affected by the Famine. However, local newspaper accounts chronicling the Famine’s devastating impact in Wexford, as well as a review of records in Ireland that document the Kennedy family’s meager finances, suggest otherwise. In her well-documented history of the famine years in County Wexford, Irish historian Anna Kinsella wrote: “The spirit of a people, which forty years earlier had set up the Wexford Republic,was broken. The county was destitute and depopulated. Here, as elsewhere in Ireland, death and emigration had taken its toll.”

  At age twenty-six, Patrick Kennedy had few options before him. Whether for reasons of starvation or illness or because he knew that a third-born son had virtually no hope of running his family’s small, failing farm— nor any other parcel of land for that matter—Kennedy decided to leave. Ireland could no longer sustain his hopes for the future. His good friend at Cherry Bros. Brewery in New Ross, Patrick Barron, who taught Kennedy the skills of coopering, had come to that conclusion months earlier and left on a ship bound for America. In October 1848, in love with Barron’s cousin and with a plan to wed, Patrick Kennedy decided to follow.

  Chapter Four

  American Wake

  “They are going, going, going and we cannot bid them stay,

  Their fields are now the stranger’s, where the stranger’s cattle stray.”

  —ETHNA CARBERY, “THE PASSING OF THE GAEL”

  ON THE NIGHT BEFORE Patrick Kennedy’s departure, his family and friends likely held an “American wake” for him at the family homestead in Dunganstown to wish him farewell.

  Wakes for the dead were all too plentiful in Ireland during the Famine, so much so that coffins were in short supply. Emaciated corpses were often buried in unmarked graves or, in some cases, with makeshift wooden burial boxes with hinges on the bottom for multiple use. Traditionally, Irish wakes, rooted in old pagan customs, were frolicking affairs, the shock of death defied by the living with acts of drunkenness and sex. But the so-called “American wakes” were different. The dearly departed were very much alive—emigrants leaving behind the only life they had ever known and being kissed and hugged goodbye by family and friends who would stay behind. These wakes were for those trying to avoid the death and destruction wrought by Ireland’s famine. Despite this understandable attempt at self-preservation, there was much to mourn. No longer would Patrick Kennedy work with his two brothers in the fields, tending the crops and feeding the cattle together, nor would he share another laugh or meal with them. His departure, and the departures of all those who fled the Famine, carried the implicit message that Ireland was a dying nation, and that those left behind were the doomed—too old or too young to start a new life in America.

  As part of this wake, Patrick Kennedy would seek the emigrant’s blessing from his local priest, Father Michael Mitten, whose parish’s thatched-roof chapel had burned down in the ’98 rebellion. At the quay on his day of departure, Patrick stood dressed in warm clothes and waited with a crowd of emigrants for their ship to begin boarding. It is likely that he heard the emigrant’s prayer repeated by his loved ones: Go dtuga Dia slan sibh, they’d wish in Gaelic. The literal translation, “May God bring you safely,” only hinted at the true danger and uncertainty of crossing the Atlantic. In leaving his homeland, they were probably the last words Patrick Kennedy heard. Go dtuga Dia slan sibh.

  NO ONE IS QUITE SURE of Patrick Kennedy’s exact route from Ireland. Some early Kennedy histories suggest that Patrick left New Ross directly for Boston (a claim repeated by the White House press corps during JFK’s 1963 visit); but the manifest for the ship that arrived in Boston in April 1849 with Patrick Kennedy aboard shows he left from Liverpool, England. Interviews with Kennedy relatives, and more recent accounts by Irish historians, indicate that Kennedy took the more complicated route to America, one that mirrored the common experience of many other poor tenant farmers from Ireland.

  Nearly six months passed from the time Patrick Kennedy left Irish soil to the day he set foot in Boston. Though some suggest he departed from Cobh, the port of County Cork frequently used by emigrants, more convincing evidence suggests he left from New Ross, closer to his family’s farm, where he knew the condition and cost of ships entering this harbor. Although he might have hopped aboard a barge to nearby Waterford before traveling across the Irish Sea to Liverpool, it appears more likely that Patrick went directly to England on a cross-channel boat, one of many using New Ross as a home port. The flow of emigrants from New Ross was nearly as great as it was from Dublin and nearby Wexford Town. Watching their young people leave in such droves caused remorse and bitterness among the Irish.“The landlords of Ireland, taken as a body, have, in their mad career of spoilation and oppression, left the people without confidence or hope,” editorialized the Wexford Independent. “They are, therefore, flying from the land, even to commit themselves to chance upon other shores.” If Patrick Kennedy thought he was leaving a land of misery, he soon learned that even tougher days lay ahead.

  The ten-shilling ride to Liverpool could be brutal. In the cold, snappish winds of October 1848, hundreds of Irish emigrants—sometimes as many as a thousand—were packed into the upper deck of these transport ships, their main mission being to carry produce to England. One of the bitterest ironies of the Famine was that these ships bearing the masses of Irish fleeing starvation also carried tons of foodstuffs from Ireland—sacks of wheat and oats, firkins of butter, bales of bacon, boxes of eggs, as well as dozens of live lambs, cattle and pigs—more than enough to feed the native Irish population and relieve their suffering. Ireland was the breadbasket for Great Britain, and the empire’s needs were not to be denied. In just one month, from late May to early June 1847, 163 tons of wheat, 570 shiploads of oatmeal, 481 sacks of flour and a cornucopia of other produce arrived in Liverpool on these ships.

  On these trips, the Irish were “unwanted produce,” extra money to be earned by the steamer companies. They remained in a standing-room-only section, exposed to the elements for from thirty to thirty-six hours, yet pigs and other livestock were sheltered on the decks below. The Irish passengers were often seasick, stuffed together so tightly that they could barely reach the sides of the boat to vomit. Official complaints about the conditions on these Liverpool steamers went unheeded, and the passengers were in no position to seek redress. Upon arriving in Liverpool, the Irish often waited weeks, sometimes months, for passage to America. Huddled in decrepit lodging houses, they became the targets of swindlers intent on stealing their victims’ last sums of money; sometimes the emigrants resorted to begging on the streets. In the British House of Lords, a petition from Liverpool complained that, out of the some 150,000 destitute Irish deposited in the city, only 40,000 had moved on to the New World; the rest were lingering on their streets, ridden with crime, poverty and disease.

  In this sea of misery, young Patrick Kennedy roamed the neighborhoods
of Liverpool, living by his wits, until he could secure passage to Boston. More than a million Irish emigrated during the Famine years. Although many Irish headed for America, others took ships to Quebec, often with calamitous results. Cramped inside windowless decks, with little food and almost nonexistent hygiene, passengers quickly fell victim to rampant disease and death. On the Virginius, for instance, 158 of its 476 passengers on the voyage from Liverpool to Quebec died during its nine weeks at sea. Overall, an estimated eight to nine thousand people died en route to America, and many more on the way to Canada. Nevertheless, the business of transporting human cargo became quite competitive. In Boston, the Shawmut Bank of Boston negotiated with Sir Samuel Cunard to make the Massachusetts port city into the terminus for his Liverpool-based fleet of packet ships. By 1840, the first ships were crossing the Atlantic, offering a fare of twenty dollars.

  On the morning of March 20, 1849, Patrick Kennedy stepped onto the Washington Irving, a nine-hundred-ton packet ship, after buying his ticket at the offices of Train & Co.’s on Waterloo Road in Liverpool. Nearly six months had passed since he left Dunganstown. It was common for Irish emigrants, many of whom still spoke Gaelic, to be mislead or hoodwinked by unscrupulous passenger ship companies. Kennedy couldn’t have known much about the operators of this ship. “Important to Emigrants!” proclaimed the company’s advertisement, calling itself “the only established line” between Boston and Liverpool. The same ad, however, disclosed that the previous operator of this line, Messrs. Harden & Co., had “ceased” running their agency on January 1, three months earlier, for unknown reasons.