In 1846 came an awful calamity, to impart to the movement an impetus of which no one could have dreamed, and which went very far to realize what M. de Beaumont had a few years before declared to be an impossibility—the almost sudden transportation of millions of starving Irish. This was the great famine, still so fresh in memory, and now appearing to those who witnessed its effects like that terrible passage of the destroying angel in the night.
There is no better mode of accounting for this visitation than that given by T. D. McGee, in his "Irish Settlers in America:"
"The famine (of 1846) is to be thus accounted for: The act of Union in 1800 deprived Ireland of a native legislature. Her aristocracy emigrated to London. Her tariff expired in 1826, and, of course, was not renewed. Her merchants and manufacturers withdrew their capital from trade and invested it in land. The land! the land! was the object of universal, unlimitable competition. In the first twenty years of the century, the farmers, if rack-rented, had still the war prices. After the peace, they had the monopoly of the English provision and produce markets. But in 1846 Sir Robert Peel successfully struck at the old laws imposing duties on foreign corn, and let in Baltic wheat and American provisions of every kind, to compete with and undersell the Irish rack-rented farmers.
"High rents had produced hardness of heart in the 'middleman,' extravagance in the land-owner, and extreme poverty in the peasant. The poor-law commission of 1839 reported that two million three hundred thousand of the agricultural laborers of Ireland were 'paupers;' that those immediately above the lowest rank were ' the worst-clad, worst-fed, and worst-lodged ' peasantry in Europe. True indeed! They were lodged in styes, clothed in rags, and fed on the poorest quality of potato.
"Partial failures of this crop had taken place for a succession of seasons. So regularly did those failures occur, that William Cobbett and other skilful agriculturists had foretold their final destruction years before. Still, the crops of the summer of 1846 looked fair and sound to the eye. The dark-green, crispy leaves, and yellow-and-purple blossoms of the potato-fields, were a cheerful feature in every landscape. By July, however, the terrible fact became but too certain. From every town-land within the four seas tidings came to the capital that the people's food was blasted—utterly, hopelessly blasted. Incredulity gave way to panic, panic to demands on the Imperial Government to stop the export of grain, to establish public granaries, and to give the peasantry such productive employment as would enable them to purchase food enough to keep soul and body together. By a report of the ordnance-captain, Larcom, it appeared there were grain-crops more than sufficient to support the whole population —a cereal harvest estimated at four hundred millions of dollars, as prices were. But to all remonstrances, petitions, and proposals, the imperial economists had but one answer: 'They could not interfere with the ordinary currents of trade.' O'Connell's proposal, Lord Georga Bentinck's, O'Brien's, the proposals of the society called 'The Irish Council,' all received the same answer. Fortunes were made and lost in gambling over this sudden trade in human subsistence, and ships laden to the gunwales sailed out of Irish ports, while the charities of the world were coming in.
"In August, authentic cases of death by famine, with the verdict, 'starvation,' were reported. The first authentic case thrilled the country, like an ill wind. From twos and threes they rose to tens, and, in September, such inquests were held, and the same sad verdict repeated, twenty times in a day. Then Ireland, the hospitable among the nations, smitten with famine, deserted by her imperial masters, lifted up her voice, and uttered that cry of awful anguish which shook the ends of the earth.
"The Czar, the Sultan, and the Pope, sent their rubles and their pauls. The Pacha of Egypt, the Shah of Persia, the Emperor of China, the Rajahs of India, conspired to do for Ireland what her so-styled rulers refused to do—to keep her young and old people living in the land. America did more in this work of mercy than all the rest of the world."
The sudden effect of this fearful trial was to increase the total emigration from the British Isles from ninety-three thousand in 1845 to one hundred and thirty thousand in 1846; to three hundred thousand in 1849; to nearly four hundred thousand in 1852. In ten years from 1846, two million eight hundred thousand had fled in horror from the country once so dear to them. From May, 1847, to the close of 1866, the number of passengers discharged at New York alone amounted to three million six hundred and fifty-nine thousand!
Those immense fleets of transports, which M. de Beaumont thought necessary, but not to be found, were found. On such a sudden emergency, every kind of tub afloat was thought suitable for the purpose; and, all being sailing-vessels, the voyage was proportionately long, the provision made for such numbers insufficient, and the emigrants, already weakened by privations, were fit subjects for the plague which, under the form of ship- fever, rapidly spread among those receptacles of human misery, so that, when the great caravan arrived in the St. Lawrence, whither that first year all seemed to tend, the following was the picture presented:
"On the 8th of May, 1847, the Urania, from Cork, with several hundred immigrants on board, a large proportion of them sick and dying of the ship-fever, was put into quarantine at Grosse Isle, thirty miles below Quebec. This was the first of the plague- smitten ships of Ireland which that year sailed up the St. Lawrence. But, before the first week of June, as many as eighty- four ships, of various tonnage, were driven in by an easterly wind; and of that enormous number of vessels there was not one free from the taint of malignant typhus, the offspring of famine and of the foul ship-hold."