by Thomas Maier
Day and night, the Washington Irving’s sails remained up, fully extended by the ocean breezes, as was the custom for American packet ships. The company and its captain, Daniel P. Upton, wanted to complete their voyage to Boston as quickly as possible, in about thirty-one days. On board were scores of passengers, but their experiences vastly differed. Those in cabin class— British or Scottish passengers for whom the company’s “personal attention” was undoubtedly directed—dined in the ship’s saloon, white linen, fine china and silvery cutlery adorning the tables. In steerage, located in the crowded, airless bowels of the boat, Irish emigrants were squeezed in like the animals accompanying them on their voyage. At best, an emigrant might get to eat a salt herring, a piece of moldy cheese and a stale biscuit. On the voyage carrying Patrick Kennedy, records show that one woman gave birth to a child. Another forty-year-old woman died and was buried at sea. The conditions on Kennedy’s voyage are not clear from these records, but the following year,Vere Foster, an Irishman who spent most of his life abroad, complained bitterly about the horrendous treatment of Irish emigrants he had witnessed on the Washington Irving. When he gathered 128 signatures from passengers attesting to the abuse from the ship’s crew, his plea drew attention from the press and the British government.
SQUALID CONDITIONS on these vessels—known as “coffin ships,” from which dozens of dead bodies were thrown into the ocean like refuse— underlined for the world the awful consequences of England’s callous indifference to its Irish subjects. No longer were the British guilty of merely suppressing a people, the quelling of insurgents seeking independence. Increasingly, in the eyes of their contemporaries and the judgment of history, the British policy toward Ireland amounted to genocide by starvation— an indictment still strongly contested today.
At the outset of the potato blight, British Prime Minister Robert Peel thought Irish farmers like the Kennedys might be exaggerating their plight and appointed a government commission to study the worsening crisis. To his credit, Peel allowed the shipment of Indian corn from America and set up a system of public works so the Irish might be able to pay for their food. But the crisis became deadly when Prime Minister John Russell took over the British government in June 1846. Russell and Charles Trevelyan, England’s head of the treasury, both believed the Irish should not be subsidized by the British coffers, and that free-market forces would eventually straighten the economy’s course without their intervention. Sharing many prejudices, both men feared government handouts would only make the Irish lazy and dependent. As soon as Russell took office,Trevelyan cancelled a shipment of Indian corn bound for Ireland. In closing down the public works program, the British effectively stole the life raft from a drowning citizenry. “These things should be stopped now, or you run the risk of paralyzing all private enterprise and having this country on you for an indefinite number of years,” lectured Trevelyan. Whatever legal obligations England had to its Irish subjects were ignored.
The Times (London), after first rejoicing that the Irish had “gone with a vengeance” to the New World, realized the horrors wrought by the Famine and began criticizing the government’s monstrous response to the death toll. Though the newspaper carried its fair share of vitriol against the Irish, its opinion makers still could not justify in their Victorian hearts the visions of coffins ships and mass starvation reported by its correspondents. In an editorial in September 1847, the Times described the vastness of the Irish tragedy:
More than a hundred thousand souls flying from the very midst of the calamity into insufficient vessels, scrambling for a footing on a deck and a berth in a hold, committing themselves to these worse than prisons, while their frames were wasted with ill-fare and their blood infected with disease, fighting for months of unutterable wretchedness against the elements without and pestilence within, giving almost hourly victims to the deep, landing at length onshore already terrified and diseased, consigned to encampments of the dying and of the dead, spreading death wherever they roam, and having no other prospect before them than a long continuance of these horrors.
TALES OF EXTRAORDINARY DESPERATION—such as the Times’s account of a starving man extracting the heart and liver of a shipwrecked human body “that was the maddening feast on which he regaled himself and his perishing family”—only perpetuated the image of the Irish as something subhuman.
“It will be difficult for most of our readers to feel near akin with a class which at best wallows in pigsties and hugs the most brutish degradation,” sniffed the Times in one editorial. The distrust and racism toward the Irish, so rampant in British public opinion, were implicit in the Times’s warning about their mass emigration to the United States.“If this [exodus] goes on, as it is likely to go on . . . the United States will become very Irish. . . . So an Ireland there will still be, but on a colossal scale, and in a new world. We shall only have pushed the Celt westwards. Then, no longer cooped up between the Liffey and the Shannon, he will spread from New York to San Francisco, and keep up the ancient feud at an unforeseen advantage.”
Historians still debate whether Britain’s intent was genocidal or simply misguided, though for the Irish, the intent of Lord Russell and his Whig government in denying an adequate food supply for the Irish poor couldn’t have been clearer. As one writer observed in the Galway Mercury, “Almost the entire rural population . . . believe that the Government are determined to systematically put to death one half of the people.” Before the Famine, Ireland had 9 million people and was one of Europe’s most densely populated nations; but as starvation, illness and massive emigration claimed an entire generation, the population eventually dwindled to 2.8 million, the only nation in Europe during that period to see a decline.“Can we wonder if the Irish people believe—and believe it they do—that the lives of those who perished, and who will perish, have been sacrificed by a deliberate compact to the gains of English merchants,” the Dublin University Magazine asked in April 1847.“Britain is now branded as the only civilized nation which would permit her subjects to perish of famine, without making a national effort to supply them with food.”Watching from America as these events unfolded, New York’s Roman Catholic Bishop John Hughes railed against the immorality of the British government for employing “famine as their most effectual instrument and ally in the work of subjugation.” In a long lecture in 1847 about the causes of the Irish famine, Hughes recited a history of Irish troubles at the hands of the British, pointing to the long-running penal laws that outlawed generations because of their Catholicism. The New York bishop expressed outrage at Lord Russell’s determination not to provide emergency food supplies to Ireland’s starving masses. In particular, he took issue with the suggestion that the famine was God’s retribution against the Irish people for their perceived sins. “It has attracted the attention of the whole world, and yet they call it God’s famine, No! no!” Hughes thundered.“God’s famine is known by the general scarcity of food. There has been no scarcity of food in Ireland, either the present, or the past year, except in one species of vegetable.” Instead, Hughes charged that England “multiplies deposits of idle money in the banks on one side of that channel, and multiplies dead and coffinless bodies in the cabins, and along the highways, on the other.”
What had happened could not be forgotten. The historic oppression of their religion, the mass starvation of people and their flight from their own homeland became ingrained in the works and letters of Irish Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean—what James Joyce described as a “bowl of bitter tears.” In his 1963 trip to Ireland, President Kennedy repeated Joyce’s description and imagined the conflicting emotions for immigrants, including his great-grandfather, Patrick Kennedy, in making such a journey. “They came to our shores in a mixture of hope and agony,” explained JFK. “They left behind hearts, fields and a nation yearning to be free.”
It is impossible to fathom what lingered in the heart and mind of Patrick Kennedy as he left Ireland. Generations later, the lessons out of Irela
nd were still recalled by his family and became part of their lore. “Political passion came naturally to a deeply religious race for whom the distinction between political and religious martyrdom had blurred during eight hundred years of British occupation,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. observed near the millenium’s end.“From their arrival in America, the Irish took to politics as starving men to food; stifled for centuries, as they were by rules that forbade them from participating in the political destiny of their nation.” Patrick Kennedy’s own destiny in America would be both tragic and sweet, though his hardships would never end.
AFTER A MONTH on the ocean, the packet ship carrying Patrick Kennedy and hundreds of other Irish immigrants neared Boston’s harbor. The brisk April air in New England still held the harshness of winter. The barren trees and grassy hillsides were dormant and gray. After being slowly pulled into the wharf, the ship allowed its cabin-class passengers to walk out first onto the docks before unloading the rest of its human cargo. Several passengers, sick and emaciated from the journey, were likely stopped and quarantined. Inspectors found the young man from New Ross healthy enough to enter. Several passengers from Ireland told the port authorities that they possessed the needed skills for such jobs as mason, blacksmith, painter, butcher,“rope-maker” and “engineer.”All forty-nine women, in a way that belied their status, were listed as “servants.”When asked, Kennedy stated his occupation as “labourer”—the most common, least skilled and lowest-paid job possible for the Irish.
Kennedy biographies often claim that Patrick Kennedy and Bridget Murphy met aboard their Boston-bound ship and fell in love during the voyage. This romantic notion was part of the family legend which JFK’s aunt and family historian, Loretta Connelly, helped perpetuate when speaking to interviewers. But the reality was probably a bit more complicated. There are no indications that Bridget Murphy sailed on the same ship as Patrick Kennedy. The manifest filed by the ship’s captain spells out Kennedy’s complete name, but not hers. The passenger list also carried the surnames of two young female passengers called “Barron,” but their ages were not the same as Bridget’s. More probable, say relatives in Ireland and local historians, the couple met in County Wexford and carefully planned their migration to Boston with the intent of marrying soon after they arrived.“It is unlikely that he married his best friend’s cousin in six months (after arriving in Boston),” explains Patrick Grennan, the cousin who today operates the family’s farm in Dunganstown.“It’s more likely [Barron] introduced Patrick to his cousin before he left for Boston.”
Maybe at a social at the crossroads near the Kennedy farm, or perhaps one day at Cherry Bros. Brewery while with his friend Patrick Barron, Patrick Kennedy met Barron’s cousin, Bridget Murphy, and soon began courting her. By the mid-1840s, both Patrick and Bridget, a year younger, were of the age when young people thought of getting married and starting families of their own. Bridget grew up on a farm about eight miles southeast of the Kennedy home, near an area called Gusserane, where the Barron family maintained a farm. Patrick could read and write, but Bridget could only read. Between the Barron place and the Kennedy Homestead lay Sliabh Coillte, a densely wooded hillside, not easily traversed, so it is likely that the lovers met at some formal event. In a similar way, Bridget’s own mother, Mary Barron, met her future husband, Philip Murphy, at a local fair while selling pigs. The Famine, however, dictated that nothing would be normal for this generation of Irish young people. And so the courtship of Bridget and Patrick Kennedy didn’t come to fruition until they reached Boston.
For most Irish immigrants, walking down the gangplank to the dirty, crowded docks at Noddle’s Island provided the first vista of the New World. These so-called greenhorns found work as carpenters, laborers and stevedores, many of them with the Cunard Line, the shipping company building piers and warehouses on this largest of five islands in Boston’s harbor. Many immigrants from Irish farms, unaccustomed to America’s language and customs, were duped by con artists or exploited in backbreaking jobs by American employers who paid one dollar for a fourteen-hour workday. The Famine created a new kind of immigrant, different from those who sought religious freedom or economic opportunity, the traditional magnet for American immigration. The waves of Irish flooding the ports of Boston, New York and other North American cities became a new kind of refugee, a generation of “wild geese,” forced to flee their homes against their will. As historian Kerby Miller pointed out, the Irish farmers—many of whom spoke Gaelic as their primary tongue—were unprepared for the rigors of New England life, and felt themselves to be “homesick, involuntary exiles.” Alone, desperate for work, vulnerable and constantly searching for “missing friends” and relatives, the Irish congregated in the ghettos of Boston. To some degree, their clannishness reflected a sense of loss, the feeling of being unfairly pushed out of their homeland by circumstances they couldn’t control, as well as the desire to remain with those like themselves. Emigrants from Ireland often felt guilty about the breakup of their families—the determination of who would go to America and who would stay in the starvation-stricken land. Many in America contributed money and actively engaged in the political push for a free and independent Ireland, as if somehow trying to rectify the root causes for their departure. To other Americans, this Irish clannishness became a defining trait.
In East Boston, Patrick Kennedy found shelter in a cheap boardinghouse near the terminus where the steam ferry carried people across the harbor for two-cent fares. Probably with Barron’s help, Patrick Kennedy soon began work as a cooper at Daniel Francis’s cooperage and brass foundry on Sumner Street on Noddle’s Island, which made mostly beer, water barrels and some ship castings. Considerable skills were needed to make a barrel airtight, and Kennedy’s training in Ireland served him well. Working twelve-hour days, seven days a week, Kennedy soon managed to earn enough to proceed with his plans of marrying Bridget.
On September 26, 1849, five months after arriving in America, Patrick Kennedy took the ferry to the mainland with his fiancée, Bridget Murphy, and they were married in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, the grandest Catholic church in Boston. There wasn’t a crowd of friends and family. Most of them still lived in Ireland. Besides the newlyweds, the only two attending the ceremony were Bridget’s cousin, Patrick Barron, and another friend, Ann McGowan. The nuptial Mass was performed by a young serious-minded priest named John L.Williams, who later became bishop of Boston’s diocese.
After their marriage, the Kennedys set up home on Sumner Street, not far from the shipyard where the Washington Irving had been built. Life in Boston for the young couple wasn’t much better than it had been in impoverished New Ross. Patrick worked many hours at the cooperage, and Bridget earned extra money in various menial jobs. Dutifully, they started a family, the children arriving in rapid succession. As the church instructed, marital relations were a necessary obligation, not necessarily a means for pleasure or joy. A Catholic guide of the time advised wives to engage in sex with their husbands in a quick and purposeful way so as “to lessen its keenness, destroy its power, and to render it disgusting.”The couple’s first child, a daughter they named Mary,was born in 1851; the next year, another girl, Johanna, arrived. Their first son, John—named in honor of Patrick’s oldest brother—was born in early 1854, and a third daughter, Margaret, arrived in July 1855.
By that summer, the immigrants’ dream of Patrick and Bridget Kennedy appeared to be coming true. To survive the journey out of Ireland, find work in Boston and support a brood of children must have been an accomplishment of considerable pride to both parents. But two months later, their eighteen-month-old son, John Kennedy, died of cholera. This highly infectious disease struck many immigrant children living in the vermin-infested confines of East Boston. In the city, Irish Catholic children suffered by far the highest rate of illness and death. Once one child was infected, parents feared that all their children would die.
There was not another child for Bridget and Patrick until nearly three years later
. On January 14, 1858,Patrick Joseph Kennedy was born at home. The family now lived on Liverpool Street, a marked improvement from their tiny tenement apartment. They called the baby boy P. J. to distinguish him from his namesake father. The family baptized the new infant at the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer in East Boston, the religious and social center for Irish immigrants in their community. Patrick Kennedy, almost thirty-five years old, wrote to his family in Dunganstown to let them know his good news.
Before the end of 1858, however, Patrick’s vibrant strength—the same quality that had survived the long journey to America—suddenly fell apart, weakened by a raging fever and nausea. Illness couldn’t have come at a worse time. That same year, Boston’s economy was deteriorating, causing wide-scale unemployment that may have eliminated Patrick’s job as a cooper. One indicator of the Kennedys’ declining fortunes was the assessor’s report for Ward Two in East Boston showing that the family income, reported as $300 in 1852, had dropped in 1856 to only $100. In a cruel twist, the American dream of greater opportunity and more prosperity eluded Patrick Kennedy. With a wife and four young children, Patrick couldn’t afford to be sick. He had no steady job and little money. Kennedy had somehow contracted cholera, the same disease that took his first son’s life and claimed hundreds of others in East Boston. Illness gripped his body, turning his skin dark and clammy. There would be no escape, no way out from this fate. Virtually penniless, the immigrant from Dunganstown died on November 22, 1858—a date that would bring somber resonance in the years to come.
Less than a decade after arriving in America, Patrick Kennedy’s journey had come to a heartbreaking end, boding ominously for his family’s future. The average Irishman who immigrated to America survived only fourteen years after arrival. Patrick died even sooner—nine years after he came ashore. Most immigrant Irish families suffering these hardships never recovered. They became another anonymous statistic in Boston’s annual census of the dead. As winter descended in 1858, there was little reason to believe that widow Bridget Kennedy and her destitute children, alone in the New World, wouldn’t suffer the same fate.