Some recent writers on immigration to the United States from Ireland have very materially underestimated the numbers of the Irish who came here even since 1790, and it seems proper now to call attention to some important facts which throw light on the matter, and endeavor to correct the erroneous impressions produced by misleading statements.
It will not be difficult to show that the Irish have come to this country since 1790 in much greater numbers than available records, statistics, or estimates show, and that their descendants are much more numerous than many suppose them to be. The same might be said of the Irish who arrived here before the period just referred to, and particularly before the Revolution—a fact to which I briefly called attention in a little work written several years ago. In this paper, however, consideration will be confined to the Irish who arrived here since 1790 and their descendants.
Until September, 1819, there was no supervision of immigration by the national government, and no records were kept by federal officers of the arrival of immigrants. For the numbers, therefore, of those who came here from 1790 to 1820 we are practically left without official or positive information, and the statements or conjectures of the writers who have dealt with this subject not only betray their imperfect knowledge, but show that they failed to take into consideration some weighty facts essential to the formation of correct estimates.
Thomas Cooper, an Englishman who visited this country in 1794, tells us that “emigration of all kinds from Europe to the United States amounted at that time to about 10,000 a year.” Samuel Blodgett, Jr., however, writing in 1810, assumed that the number of immigrants did not average more than 4,000 a year for the previous ten years, but he gave a table of the population, in one column of which the number of “freemen and slaves” who entered the United States in 1804 was put down at 9,500. Blodgett says that he relies on “the best records and estimates at present attainable,” but he fails to tell us where those records were to be found, or by whom they were kept. A. Seybert, an ex-member of congress, who wrote in 1818, says that the statements in Blodgett’s work “are deficient in details; they consist chiefly of general results and the estimates of the author. Though many of his tables are ingeniously constructed, they do not furnish sufficient data for legislators.” Seybert, while admitting the correctness of Cooper’s estimate of 10,000 arrivals during the year 1794, differs from him with regard to the immigration for the following years up to 1817, and assumes that 6,000 persons only, on the average, arrived here annually from 1790 to 1810. He, however, furnishes us with a statement of the number of passengers who arrived at ten of the principal ports of the United States in 1817, which shows the entrance in that year of 22,240 immigrants, of whom 11,977 came from Britain and Ireland; 4,169 from Germany; 1,245 from France, and 2,901 from British America.
Professor Tucker, another ex-congressman, in a work published in 1843, says, commenting on Seybert’s estimate, “Since an account has been taken of the foreign immigrants who arrive in our seaports as well as from the intrinsic evidence afforded by the enumerations themselves, we must regard his estimate as much too low.” Tucker admits that “our estimates of the whites who migrated hither before 1819 are purely conjectural,” but yet he adopts Seybert’s estimate of 6,000 a year from 1790 to 1810—a total of 120,000—and assumes that from the last named year until 1820, 114,000 immigrants arrived, thus making the total number who came here between 1790 and 1820, 234,000.
He, however, remarks in a note that he could not go beyond this estimate “on account of his respect for Dr. Seybert’s opinion,” but he “could not give a less number because of his regard for the progressive increase of immigration before and after the three years of the war of 1812–1815.” J. D. B. DeBow, superintendent of the census of 1850, in one of his volumes published in 1854, relies on Prof. Tucker’s estimates for the number of those who arrived here during the thirty years preceding 1820, while W. J. Bromwell of the state department, writing in 1856, raises the number to 250,000.
It will be observed that these “estimates” are in fact merely conjectures, and that in the only year (1817) during the entire period from 1790 to 1820 for which actual figures are given, the returns from only ten ports show the arrival of more than twice the average annual number of immigrants estimated by the writers above referred to. It seems, then, evident that the immigrants from 1790 to 1820, and particularly those of Irish birth or blood, were much more numerous than the writers quoted seem willing to admit, and we are amply justified in coming to this conclusion by several substantial reasons.
Professor Tucker, who estimates the number of immigrants between 1790 and 1820 at 234,000, “calculated after a very laborious analysis the number of foreigners and their descendants to be above 1,000,000 in 1840.” Now, according to his own tables, the total number of immigrants who came here between 1790 and 1840 amounted to 949,346, and yet of all these people—over seventy-five per cent. of whom were adults—and their descendants, he would have us believe that there could only be found alive in 1840 the number just given. The total population had increased, within the period named, from 3,929,827 to 17,069,453—more than four hundred per cent.—while the descendants of the immigrants increased, according to him, only five per cent.
We shall see later that, even after the passage of the act of Congress of 1819—which directed the collectors of customs at the seaports of the United States to forward quarter-yearly lists of all the passengers arriving at their respective ports to the state department at Washington—the number of immigrants reported was for many years very considerably less than that of those who actually came here. One careful and reliable writer, Dr. Chickering, estimates the number of those not accounted for at fifty per cent. of those reported. Bearing this in mind it will seem almost certain that, before the time when returns of immigrants were required by law, their numbers were underestimated in a far greater proportion.
Large numbers of people left Ireland for America between 1790 and the beginning of the War of 1812. During the century preceding the year first named half a million of Irishmen—more than the number of Huguenots who left France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes—went to that country and joined her armies to escape the English penal laws and avenge the violation of the Treaty of Limerick. This fact is attested by the French military records. But after the outbreak of the Revolution in France the flight of the “Wild Geese” was checked, and comparatively few entered the Revolutionary or Imperial armies.