Another cause which helped to swell the Catholic census about the same time was the annexation of Texas, which eventually led to the acquisition of New Mexico and California. The population of those Territories could have scarcely numbered less than two hundred thousand, nearly all of whom were Catholics. By a strange coincidence the sons of the Puritans, who claimed the land and the fulness thereof as theirs, were brought into the same fold and under the same jurisdiction simultaneously with the native Mexican, whose ancestors were Catholics before the keel of the Mayflower was laid.
German immigration, also, had assumed large proportions. From 1840 to 1850 the arrivals were 440,000, of whom it may be safely said one-fourth, or 110,000, were Catholics. This stalwart element sought what was then considered the far West-Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Territories—where to-day we find them and their descendants among the most devoted children of the church.
But all these influences combined did not equal in effect that produced by the tremendous exodus of the Irish people—a spontaneous movement of population unexampled in modern times. Though immigration from Ireland had steadily increased from the beginning of the century, it was only during the latter half of the decade of 1840-50 that it assumed its phenomenal proportions. Notwithstanding its political servitude, that remarkable island in 1845 presented the spectacle of a population as happy, moral, and law-abiding as any in Christendom. Her people had increased from year to year in a ratio unknown to less
virtuous and more pampered lands. The voice of her great leader could at any time call together hundreds of thousands of her enthusiastic sons to listen to the story of their wrongs or to descant on the near approach of legislative independence, and dismiss them to their homes with the promptitude of a general and the authority of a parent. Father Mathew, of blessed memory, had exorcised the demon of intemperance, and counted his followers by millions. Agrarian crime and faction fights, those twin children of misgovernment, were almost unknown, and the soil, as if in unison with the general spirit of peace and harmony, never put forth such an abundance of agricultural wealth. In one night, it may be said, a blight came over all those fond hopes and bright anticipations. The food upon which three-fourths of the people mainly subsisted was destroyed, and Famine, gaunt and lean, suddenly usurped the place of generous abundance.
The destruction of the potato crop of Ireland in 1846-7-8 was undoubtedly the act of an inscrutable Providence; the misery, suffering, and wholesale sacrifice of human life which followed were the work of man. At the worst times of the famine there was always more than enough cattle and grain in the country to feed the entire population. Under a wise or just government a sufficiency of these would have been retained to supply the primary wants of the people; as it was, they were exported and sold in foreign markets to satisfy that most insensate and insatiable of all human beings, the Irish landlord.
Appalled by the suddenness and
extent of the calamity, the peasantry at first stood mute, and before assistance could reach them many hundreds had actually lain down and died of starvation. Then, when public and private charity was exhausted; when pestilence was superadded to want, and all earthly succor seemed to have failed; when nothing but death or the poorhouse threatened even the best of the middle class, the people, with, it would appear, one accord, resolved to give up home and kindred, rushed like a broken and routed army to the nearest sea-ports, and abandoned a country apparently doomed to destruction. Many crossed to England and Scotland, others fled even to the Antipodes, but the great mass looked to the United States as their haven of refuge. Thenceforth every day witnessed the arrival of crowded immigrant ships in our harbors, while the streets of our large cities were literally thronged with swarms of strange and emaciated figures. From 1840 to 1850 over one million Irish immigrants arrived in the United States, one-fourth of whom landed at New York during the last three years of that period.
Never were a people less prepared to encounter the difficulties and dangers which necessarily beset strangers coming into a strange land and among a community so different from themselves in manners, habits, and methods of living. Unlike the Germans and other Europeans, who had had leisure and means to organize emigration, the Irish of that memorable epoch acted without concert and without forethought. They had fled precipitately from worse than death, and brought with them little save the imperishable jewel of their
faith. Fortunately, this proved to be for them even better than worldly store; it was their bond of unity and best solace in the hour of trial and disappointment which awaits most of those who come among us with exaggerated ideas of the wealth and resources of this country. Numbers of those helpless strangers paused upon the threshold of their new home, and helped materially to swell the already overcrowded population of the large towns and cities; but very many, the majority perhaps, sought the manufacturing villages of New England, the mineral regions of Pennsylvania, and the Western prairies.
Then began in earnest the labors of the resident priesthood, which, though reinforced by numbers of their brethren from abroad, were still hardly equal to the herculean task of providing for the spiritual wants of so vast a mass of people scattered in every direction. Some means, however, had to be found to reach and minister to those faithful though helpless outcasts; some roof under which the holy sacrifice of the Mass might be occasionally offered up and the essential sacraments of the church administered. The churches already built scarcely sufficed for the Catholics settled in the country, yet here was a new congregation arriving in every ship. In the large centres of population the difficulty was not so great; for with the increase of priests the number of Masses said in each church was multiplied, while the sick and the penitent seldom went unattended or unshriven. In the smaller towns and remote settlements the case was far different. Private houses, “shanties,” barns, ball-rooms, court-houses, lecture-halls, markets, and even sectarian