Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  Poor laborers and farmers could afford few possessions to add comfort to these miserable abodes. A North Sligo resident told the parliamentary inquiry that “a majority of cabins possessed nothing beyond a table, a few stools, and a large chest.” Laborers did not have beds or mattresses either. At best they owned “rude bedsteads, but very frequently no other bedding than straw and hay, and a single quilt, or sheet, made of coarse sacking, in a condition of great filth.” Many children lacked even these comforts, sleeping instead on “a litter of old hay, which during the day-time, was collected in a corner, and had been in use for months.” North Sligo laborers slept in their clothes, but because they were “clothed very poorly and insufficiently,” they were seldom warm at night. The few men who did “possess a good suit [did] not wear it except on Sundays, and on a few other occasions; the women and children are still worse off than the men, especially the latter, who are at all times in rags.” Many, especially women and children, had neither socks nor shoes. Identical conditions prevailed on the Lansdowne estate. “Furniture miserable; bedding wretched,” was how the recording secretary summed up testimony concerning the Lansdowne tenants.32

  Who was to blame for this situation? Some faulted the landlords and their agents. But Kenmare archdeacon John O’Sullivan, who was no admirer of Lansdowne, admitted the marquis charged very reasonable rents and did not evict tenants even when they fell years behind in their payments. Those in North Sligo generally said the same for Palmerston and Gore Booth. The landlords’ agents tended to blame the poor tenants for their own plight, insisting that they married too young, had too many children, and subdivided their land too frequently among their offspring. No matter who one faulted, all observers agreed that living conditions for most tenants were truly pitiful. “The tenantry are extremely wretched,” said a North Sligo resident in summing up his testimony concerning the Palmerston and Gore Booth estates. Irish Poor Inquiry official Jonathan Binns concluded that Lansdowne’s “poor cottagers are in a very distressed condition. . . . They are nearly half naked, and are but half fed. This is indeed a wretched state of things.” Lansdowne’s isolated tenants were even worse off than those in North Sligo, living in smaller cabins with less arable land and fewer personal possessions. The Lansdowne tenants, O’Sullivan asserted in 1844, were “the most wretched people upon the face of the globe.”33

  “FAMISHED AND SPECTRAL HUMAN BEINGS”

  Given their precarious circumstances in 1844, it was no surprise that Lansdowne’s tenants were devastated by the famine that began after a fungus infested and almost completely destroyed potato crops in 1845, 1846, and 1847. During the first year after the blight struck, from mid-1845 to mid-1846, the distress was relatively mild.34 But with the second, more complete failure of the potato crop in the summer of 1846, the situation became dire. “I see nothing within the bounds of possibility that can save the people,” wrote a relief official responsible for setting up public works projects on the Lansdowne estate in February 1847:

  On one road, on which I have 300 men employed, the deaths are three each day. This is in the parish of Tuosist. The people are buried without coffins, frequently in the next field. No noise or sign of grief for the dead; every thought is selfish and unfeeling. . . . I daily witness the most terrible spectacles. Men and women are discolored with dropsy, attacked with dysentary, or mad with fever, on the works—driven there by the terrible necessity of trying to get as much as would purchase a meal. . . . With most of these working is a mockery; they can scarcely walk to and from the roads, and how can they work! . . . When a respectable person passes the houses of these poor people, the saddest sights present themselves; women, children, and old men crawling out on all fours, perhaps from beside a corpse, to crave a morsel of any kind of food.

  Conditions in Tuosist, agreed visitor William Bennett, were “utterly past the powers of description, or even of imagination, without witnessing.”35

  The situation in the town of Kenmare was hardly better than in the countryside. Archdeacon O’Sullivan recorded in his diary in early 1847 that there was “nothing more usual than to find four or five bodies in the street every morning.” The suffering of the living was almost as difficult to bear as the sight of the dead. “The swollen limbs, emaciated countenances, and other hideous forms of disease . . . were innumerable,” wrote the appalled Bennett. “In no other part of Ireland had I seen people falling on their knees to beg. It was difficult to sit over breakfast after this.” O’Sullivan wrote directly to Charles Trevelyan, permanent secretary at the Treasury in London and the man who single-handedly controlled most relief expenditures, hoping that if Trevelyan understood the extent of the suffering, he might make more aid available. “The cries of starving hundreds that besiege me from morning until night actually ring in my ears during the night,” O’Sullivan reported. “I attended myself a poor woman, whose infant, dead two days, lay at the foot of the bed, and four others nearly dead in the same bed; and, horrible to relate, a famished cat got up on the corpse of the poor infant and was about to gnaw it, but for my interference. I could tell you such tales of woe without end.”36

  Similarly horrifying conditions prevailed in North Sligo. “On the Ahamlish Estate the [potato] disease was late in appearing,” reported Palmerston’s agents to the foreign secretary in February 1846, “but in some parts of the parish it has committed dreadful ravages. . . . [N]o doubt the labouring class will be very badly off.” No one appears to have perished from hunger in late 1845 or early 1846, even though food was in very short supply and hundreds went hungry. But many refused to pay their rents, the agents noted, “under the plea of starvation & the failure of the Potato Crop.”37

  As in South Kerry, it was only in late 1846 with the second consecutive failure of the potato crop—“utterly and completely destroyed,” said one Sligo newspaper—that Palmerston and Gore Booth’s already reeling tenants began to succumb to starvation. Victims often perished due to famine-related illnesses rather than actual hunger. An Ahamlish doctor reported that “a dreadful disease is breaking out amongst them. I allude to Dysentry with discharge of blood from the bowels.” Another ailment, “sore mouth,” appeared as well, “which I think has been produced by the unwholesome food the poor were obliged to use in the early part of the season and which so injured the coat of their stomachs and bowels, that now they are not in a state to bear strong food and the consequence is the living membrane of the intestine is coming away.” As in southwestern Kerry, a relief official in North Sligo wrote directly to Trevelyan to ensure that he understood the magnitude of the suffering. “I assure you that unless something is immediately done the people must die. . . . Pray do something for them. Let me beg of you to attend to this. I cannot express their condition.”38

  Gore Booth labored tirelessly to compensate for the lack of governmental assistance to the starving. He imported large quantities of corn to his Drumcliff estate, which he sold to his tenants below cost. He also sold bread at less than half the market price and set up kitchens that distributed free soup. In addition, reported a local newspaper, Gore Booth provided “employment on an extensive scale,” doling out jobs on his estate for as many as the government employed under the local public works program. Gore Booth was forced to mortgage his property in Lancashire to finance these expenditures, which amounted to thousands of pounds. These laudable efforts reduced but could not eliminate starvation in Drumcliff. “It is no exaggeration to affirm that . . . the people are dying from starvation by dozens daily,” reported a relief official there in March 1847. “But for Sir Robert Booth they would be dying by scores—by fifties.”39

  Despite these efforts, conditions on the Gore Booth estate continued to deteriorate. A relief official reported pitiable scenes, even among those who had recently been well off:

  The first place I visited, was a wretched hamlet of three cottages, with outhouses, containing three families, numbering in all 32 persons, belonging to three brothers; the whole having lived on 12 acres for a peri
od of [years]. . . . Last year, they thought themselves so well off, they refused to take £60 to give up the lease and depart. Now they are starving. . . . One of the brothers, and three others of the families, had died during the previous week. The widow was lying on the ground in fever, and unable to move. The children were bloated in their faces and bodies, their limbs were withered to bones and sinews, with rags on them which scarcely preserved decency, and assuredly afforded no protection from the weather. They had been found that day, gnawing the flesh from the bones of a pig which had died in an out-house. . . . I saw the pig, I believe the fact.

  The situation in Ahamlish, where Palmerston provided far less private relief to his tenants than did Gore Booth, was even more dire. Ahamlish is “barren and [has] now almost become a waste,” reported the press. Of 1,800 Ahamlish families, stated another eyewitness, 1,700 were utterly “destitute,” with “8500 individuals actually starving.” The death rate in County Sligo during the famine years outpaced that of virtually every other county in Ireland.40

  “I MAKE THIS RECOMMENDATION ON THE PRINCIPLE OF PROFIT AND ECONOMY”

  Despite the thousands Gore Booth spent on relief for the suffering, his poor tenants were not much better off in early 1847 than Palmerston’s “neglected” ones. Even had they been able to afford seed potatoes in the spring of 1847, most North Sligo farmers would have been too weak to sow them. “Pen cannot dictate the poverty of this country, at present, the potato crop is quite done away all over Ireland,” wrote two County Sligo residents to relatives in Canada. “. . . Now, my dear parents, pity our hard case, and do not leave us on the number of the starving poor . . . if you knew what hunger we and our fellow-countrymen are suffering, if you were ever so much distressed, you would take us out of this poverty Isle.” As if they had not made their desperation clear enough, the children added a postscript: “For God’s sake take us out of poverty, and don’t let us die with the hunger.” But most of the starving in North Sligo did not have loved ones in America who could relieve their suffering.41

  Unable to conceive how the crisis might be brought to an end, Gore Booth and Palmerston eventually began to consider mass emigration. The landlords were inspired to initiate a program of assisted emigration partly out of humanitarian motives and partly out of economic calculation. Under a new relief program to take effect in early 1847, landlords would have to pay a much larger share of the famine relief costs than they had before. Palmerston’s estate agent, Joseph Kincaid, informed the foreign minister that his tax bill under the new law “cannot fall much short of £10,000 [roughly equivalent to $900,000 today] for the next seven months. . . . This is awful to contemplate.” Kincaid’s employees had polled Palmerston’s destitute tenants and found that hundreds would give up their leases and emigrate if they had the means. Considering how much Palmerston would have to spend in taxes should his starving tenants stay in Ahamlish, Kincaid advised Palmerston to send out all those willing to take passage to America. “I make this recommendation on the principle of profit and economy,” Kincaid admitted, arguing that “your estate will be of more value in the course of a year or two with the population reduced by 1000 than if they remained[.] The cost of supporting these 150 families for the next 7 months would be at least £1500 and at the end of that time they are still upon the property as dead weights.” Kincaid argued that Palmerston would more than recoup the costs of emigration in reduced poor taxes and be left with a “better class of tenants” as well. The emigrants, on the other hand, would make new, prosperous lives for themselves in North America. Everyone, concluded Kincaid, would benefit from assisted emigration.42

  Palmerston saw the logic behind Kincaid’s reasoning and by the end of 1847 had underwritten the emigration to Canada of about two thousand of his starving tenants. Gore Booth, who seems to have been motivated more by humanitarian impulses, sponsored the voyages of fifteen hundred destitute Drumcliff residents. The landlords chose Canada in part because passage there was a bit cheaper at that point than a ticket to the United States, but primarily because they did not want to be accused of depopulating the British Empire. Yet most of the Palmerston and Gore Booth immigrants moved to the United States soon after their arrival in Canada, and hundreds eventually settled in Five Points.

  Although the first ship carrying Palmerston’s assisted emigrants wrecked off the coast of Canada (killing three-quarters of the passengers), most of the early trans-Atlantic voyages went smoothly. The two landlords provided their passengers with generous allotments of food and water to supplement the daily pound of flour or meal and thirteen ounces of water they received from the ship’s crew. But by summertime, conditions began to deteriorate. Contagious diseases—especially typhus, known popularly as “ship fever”—began to ravage whole shiploads of weary travelers. Because they were well provisioned and inspected by Gore Booth’s private physician before boarding the ship, the death rate on the Palmerston and Gore Booth vessels (7.5%) was less than half that for other immigrants to Québec and St. John, New Brunswick (the two ports at which most of their emigrants landed), in 1847. Nonetheless, one in nine passengers from the Numa and one in eleven from the Marchioness Breadalbane (both chartered by Palmerston) perished during their midsummer voyages or soon after landing.43

  To that point, there had been little if any criticism of Palmerston or Gore Booth for sending their tenants to America. That began to change by September. Because so many tenants wanted to emigrate, the landlords had trouble securing enough berths for all of them. Many of those promised passage in the spring only left Ireland in August or September, arriving in Canada when the weather was turning cold and jobs were very scarce in North America’s seasonal labor market. And as the emigration bills mounted, Palmerston’s agents began to skimp on supplies for the travelers, especially clothing.

  Canadians noticed these changes. “This is the fifth season in which I have boarded vessels with emigrants arriving at this port,” noted an immigration official in St. John after inspecting a shipload of Palmerston’s immigrants, “but I have never yet seen such abject misery, destitution and helplessness as was exhibited yesterday on the decks of the ‘Lady Sale.’” A story in the New Brunswick Courier called the passengers on a subsequent Palmerston vessel “a destitute and helpless set. . . . They are penniless and in rags, without shoes or stockings and lying upon the bare boards, not having even straw! Some of the men’s attire were little more than shreds tied together with cords. Not one of them owned even a box.” A Canadian politician equated conditions on the final Palmerston ships to those in the slave trade. Once lauded for his particularly humane treatment of his tenants, Palmerston was now accused in the press and by Canadian officials of cruelty bordering on murder.44

  How could the assisted emigration from North Sligo, which just months earlier had seemed to be a winning proposition for tenant and landlord alike, have ended so badly? Palmerston’s agents—and Gore Booth himself—were forced to appear before the House of Lords to answer the charges. Indeed, the landlords and their agents deserved some reproach. Rather than selecting for emigration those whose health and age made it most likely that they could endure the rigors of a five-week trans-Atlantic crossing, they tended to choose the weakest and most dependent. “I preferred to send out what might be termed the bad Characters,” admitted Gore Booth—those who brewed illegal whiskey, caused trouble, or never paid their rents. Kincaid and his partner, James R. Stewart, likewise conceded that those chosen for emigration “were of the poorest class of farmers and their families, very little better than paupers.” In letters to Palmerston, both Stewart and Kincaid insisted they had done nothing wrong, but between themselves they were more honest. “I dont know what to think of the St Johns Emigrants,” Stewart confided to Kincaid. “I fear we did not inform ourselves enough of the circumstances of the place they were sent to & the suitable seasons.”45

  Palmerston must have found it ironic that his huge expenditures on behalf of his tenants prompted such scorn and censure, especiall
y since the emigrants themselves seemed profoundly grateful. A committee of passengers from the Aeolus thanked Stewart, Kincaid, and Palmerston “for engaging such a fine ship as the above for our countrymen to America. The provisions, water and medicines were good and plentiful, and the Captain, his officers, and crew, treated us kindly and with every attention to our wants, for which we shall ever feel thankful.” Gore Booth’s emigrants wrote similarly grateful words of thanks to their landlord.46

  “SPECTRES FROM THE GRAVE COULD NOT PRESENT A MORE GHASTLY, UNEARTHLY APPEARANCE”

  While Palmerston’s and Gore Booth’s tenants were sailing to America in 1847, Lansdowne’s continued to languish and die in southwest Kerry. With the death toll mounting, one wonders why the marquis did not follow the example of his political confidant Palmerston. Instead, most of Lansdowne’s tenants were still in Kerry receiving meager relief rations paid for primarily by Lansdowne himself. Perhaps Lansdowne believed that his tenants could survive the blight without his having to expend such huge sums on emigration. If so, reports from Kenmare in the spring of 1848 must have pleased the marquis immensely. All signs indicated that suffering and privation were on the wane, and the potatoes his tenants planted in 1848 initially showed no signs of blight.47

  But either because of illness or lack of seed potatoes, Lansdowne’s leaseholders had not planted nearly enough to feed themselves for a whole year, and by February 1849 gruesome reports of starvation again began emanating from Kenmare. “I was shocked in Skibbereen, Dunmanway, [and] Bantry,” wrote a visitor to Kenmare who had just come from those infamously destitute West Cork towns, “but they were as nothing to what was now before me. . . . Bad as the Bantry paupers were they were ‘pampered rogues’ in comparison to these poor creatures. . . . Spectres from the grave could not present a more ghastly, unearthly appearance. . . . The very thought of them to this moment sickens me.” The emaciated once again crowded into Kenmare, “dying by the dozens in the streets.” According to O’Sullivan, “theft and robbery and plunder became . . . universal” as some resorted to these desperate measures to stave off starvation. However obtained, food alone did not necessarily ensure survival. The cholera epidemic sweeping Europe and North America in the spring of 1849 also struck Kenmare, and due to the overcrowding in the workhouse, its inmates were particularly susceptible. Dysentery afflicted many as well, observed O’Sullivan, its victims so thirsty that they would barter their weekly one pound relief ration of cornmeal “for a half noggin of new milk to try and quench the burning thirst which invariably follows them.” Despite government declarations that the famine was over, the death toll in southwest Kerry climbed steadily higher in early 1849. By the end of that year, after the blight again destroyed the 1849 crop, at least 1,000 (and perhaps as many as 1,700) of Lansdowne’s 12,000 tenants had succumbed to the famine and the diseases spread in its wake.48