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  Statistics in North America were little better. By the end of May 1847, epidemics had also been reported from Nova Scotia all the way down the eastern seaboard. Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore all witnessed massive outbreaks; the city of New Orleans reported over a thousand cases within a month. New York was hit hardest of all. Famine immigration numbers had already doubled in the city from this time the previous year. Staten Island—New York’s traditional landing place for immigrant ships—had long since overflowed the temporary buildings erected to house patients. Newspapers reported that “every corner” of the island was filled with Irish refugees, many of them sick and dying. Desperate for more space and unwilling to allow infected individuals to land in the city proper, officials began diverting affected immigrants to the lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island. But the hospital there was already overcrowded, and its meager staff attempted to find supplemental help by enlisting inmates from the adjoining state penitentiary. Neither option lent itself to effective medical care, and the death rate rose steadily, from 10 to 30 percent. Those immigrants already in Manhattan were faring little better. It was not uncommon for forty or more individuals, penniless and desperate for lodging, to pile into single boardinghouse rooms lined only with dirty straw. At one such place, police discovered thirty-five mortally ill immigrants so incapacitated they were unable to rise off the floor. Those well enough for transport soon filled the city’s hospitals, including the already notorious Bellevue. Approximately eighty individuals were admitted to the facility each day, joining the hundreds of infected individuals—most of them recently relocated from the city’s almshouses—already languishing in overcrowded rooms and soiled beds.

  Bellevue doctors were at a loss to make sense of this growing affliction; aside from the fever, rash, and tremors, there was little to unite the victims of the disease. Autopsies revealed severe inflammation and ulcers of the intestines in some patients, while the digestive tracts of others appeared perfectly healthy. Some patients suffered from intense diarrhea and a disruptive “gurgling” of the bowels, while others did not. Just as mystifying for the medical establishment was any consensus about effective treatment. Doctors soon determined that “brandy and milk and plenty of ice” seemed to work as well as anything else.6 Perhaps not surprisingly, the hospital’s death rate soon topped 40 percent.

  Public concern about the epidemic was mitigated until people other than Irish immigrants began to fall ill. In New Orleans, residents became alarmed when the spread of ship’s fever became unstoppable in the city’s largest charity hospital; this alarm only intensified when it became known that employees of the treatment center were becoming ill and dying alongside their patients.7 Meanwhile newspapers across the country memorialized Bellevue’s assistant physician, Dr. Augustus Van Buren, who died while tending to the hospital’s fever patients. Twenty-three years old, engaged to be married, and described by his peers as a “devoted” physician showing “more than ordinary promise,” Van Buren represented the shocking new reality: well-educated, morally upright, and otherwise hale individuals in the prime of life were not immune to what had become known as the Irish affliction.8

  A similar story in Baltimore sent more ripples of concern up and down the coast. The city’s noted former mayor, Major James Law, succumbed to ship’s fever, despite never having set foot on an immigrant vessel. “Let it be remembered,” warned the editor of the Southern Patriot of Charleston, South Carolina, that this disease “makes no distinction between the native and the stranger. It is to be remembered too that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”9 Such warnings soon pervaded other publications. When a Quaker family in Pennsylvania took in a destitute Irish family and then contracted the fever themselves and perished, fear of Irish immigrants grew to something close to hysteria.10

  New York City officials responded to this growing concern by trying to quarantine Irish immigrants away from Manhattan. But with Black-well’s and Staten Island still well over capacity, they were hard-pressed to find the space. Officials eventually settled on the Farm on Long Island, an almshouse residence for nine hundred children. These young residents were soon dispatched to nearby Randall’s Island, and renovation was begun to convert the Farm into a medical facility.11 The outcry against this plan among Long Island residents was fierce; they objected in a series of increasingly inflammatory public hearings on the subject. When their objections appeared to go unnoticed by government officials, homeowners took matters into their own hands. Just before the stroke of midnight on May 30, a mob formed outside the Farm and set fire to the buildings, burning them all to the ground.12

  Within a week, the Long Island mob and resultant arson became the top story of most major newspapers in North America. In many circles, the coverage valorized the participants, encouraging similar violence in other afflicted towns. So effective was this rallying cry, in fact, that the destruction of the Long Island Farm became the very emblem of direct citizen action. In Boston, residents inspired by the Long Island action attempted to summon their own mob after officials announced plans to build additional housing for fever victims on Deer Island. Within twenty-four hours of this declaration, handbills appeared throughout the city rallying people to come together to stop the plan from proceeding.

  The creators of these handbills were as detailed as they were driven. Each of the posters included the precise meeting time and place for the mob, thereby assuring it would be disbanded by city police. But while law enforcement officials were able to prevent the angry group from succeeding in their plans for arson, they could do little to quell the growing collective ire. Officials in Baltimore found themselves similarly impotent against public sentiment, and thousands of people streamed into public meetings demanding that no person aboard an infected immigrant vessel be allowed entrance to the city. Clearly something needed to be done. And fast.

  7

  Discord on Downing Street

  HENRY GREY read each report on Americans’ hysteria with a detached coolness. It was unfortunate, of course, that the United States was encountering such difficulty, but that had little impact on his Irish relocation plan. If anything, Americans’ resistance only abetted his project by making it that much more difficult for immigrants to land anywhere other than the timber camps and farmsteads of Canada. Quiet prudence may have been in short supply across the Atlantic, but in the British Colonial Office it remained the rule. On that its secretary insisted.

  From the security of Downing Street, surrounded by the civility of tea and long lunches, anything seemed possible. Grey penned a jaunty letter to Lord Elgin, governor general of Canada, proposing that the colony take a more active role in situating the Irish now pouring into North America. Perhaps, Grey wrote, Elgin could create little settlements capable of accommodating entire Irish parishes. They could even replicate the villages in Ireland, save, of course, for the poverty and subsistence farming. And if clergymen could be induced to join the community, order and respectability would be ensured. Incentives, Grey added, would be quick in coming to those colonial officials and communities willing to take up the charge:

  Her Majesty’s Government have thought that they might confer much benefit on some portion of the persons who are desirous to emigrate, as well as upon the districts where they are to be settled, if they could devise the means of offering to parties proceeding from the same village or parish in this country, especially if accompanied by their clergyman or priest, the prospect of finding ready for them an opportunity of establishing themselves in a body.

  Grey was quick to add that it was not in his power to convey “more than very general instructions upon the subject,” but he did suggest that Elgin construct log houses “of the cheapest and simplest kind” for each of the families, along with gardens “sufficient to occupy the tenant’s spare time, but insufficient solely to provide for his subsistence, or make it unnecessary that he should also work for wages.” A cottage “of a somewhat better description” would be needed for the clergyme
n, along with a “plain and inexpensive building to serve as a school and a church.” The remaining details he was delighted to cede to Elgin.1

  Colonial officials stationed in Canada met Grey’s assessment with little enthusiasm. The last thing North America needed was a torrent of immigration. Did Grey intend to offer assistance to these famine refugees once they arrived on colonial shores? Certainly, replied Grey. The British government, he wrote, would “be able to do much for the emigrant when once landed on the other side. True, they could not find him employment, but they undertook to give him full information as to where employment was to be found, and to put him in the way of getting in the cheapest manner to the market for his labour. Under this system, at a small expense, they would be able to show that emigration had proceeded most satisfactorily.”2

  The reality of Grey’s program, however, was failing to inspire satisfaction, let alone confidence, in British North American officials. Continuing past practice, nearly half of the new arrivals snuck illegally into the United States rather than remaining in the Ottawa Valley, where they were supposed to be cutting timber and growing food for their mother country. Many of those who tried a life in the timber belt quickly abandoned it after it proved too brutish, mean, and short. Of these, some attempted to join the border hoppers, risking their lives in rowboats on the Great Lakes or in the deep forests of Vermont; others took up residence in the cellars and alleyways of cities like Quebec.

  Not to worry, replied Grey calmly. Canadian officials would surely find solutions to these little problems.

  Grey’s aplomb quickly evaporated, however, each time he stepped into Westminster. There temperatures were rising as members of Parliament argued with increasing hostility the question of what should be done in Ireland. As predicted, the potato blight had returned for the third year in a row. This time the scourge made its appearance both earlier and with greater vengeance than before. Even skeptics in Parliament were forced to concede that at least three-fourths of Ireland’s potato crop would soon be lost. Reports from the constabulary there suggested that even this dire prediction was too conservative; by their estimates, the blight had so insinuated itself that the very same acre once capable of producing ton upon ton of potatoes would, at best, yield one-third of a ton—barely enough to feed an individual for a month, let alone a family for a year.3

  What should be done about the failure remained to be determined. There were those in Parliament advocating—and advocating strongly—a return to the aid policies of Peel. Others were outwardly critical of the modified system Trevelyan now shepherded, and they took to the floor of Parliament with examples aplenty. In Tralee, James Prendergast, Daniel Reilly’s cousin and the man who hung his hopes on governmental intervention, discovered that his daughter-in-law was not eligible for relief since her husband had emigrated to America.4 Nearby, a man was refused assistance “on account of his respectable appearance.” He was found dead not far from the workhouse less than an hour later. His official cause of death? Starvation.

  Many in Parliament were now calling for Trevelyan’s removal. It didn’t help that the assistant of the Treasury was unpopular among his subordinates, who were bitter about his inability to delegate meaningful work for them to do. Grey and Russell had emboldened Trevelyan to act on their behalf, and he had every intention of doing so. Trevelyan, after all, was nothing if not driven. Friends and foes alike repeatedly used words like “fervor” and “zeal” when describing his approach to just about everything. He was known on multiple continents as someone whose moral certitude was rivaled only by his reluctance to acknowledge opposition and offense in others. Arrogant, steadfast, and prone to narcissism, Charles Trevelyan was certain about the order of things in the world.

  Trevelyan found ready support for his views in the offices of Earl Grey and Prime Minister Russell, both of whom looked to the young civil servant for guidance in dealing with the Irish crisis. They listened when he told them stories about his own encounter with Ireland—how he had visited the west of Ireland on the eve of the famine, when a sense of familial responsibility to a young cousin in Limerick prompted a tour in search of opportunities for the boy. Trevelyan found few and left the island alarmed by the condition of its residents, most notably the laboring population, whose lack of decency and respect for hierarchy galled him. At no time during his tenure in India did he ever feel as threatened as he did in Ireland. He resented that, deeply. Still, he reserved his greatest ire for the landlords there, whom he saw as fundamentally responsible for the colony’s gross inequities.

  That year alone, more than three million Irish were receiving government aid, especially in County Kerry, where indolent behavior and Catholic beliefs concerning procreation had produced an excessive population—and not just too many people, but people who, inexplicably, assumed that the potato alone would support them. The situation was unyielding: either the people had to find a way to enter the new world order or they would be destroyed by it. The famine and its blight were a local problem. The solution ought to be as well.

  And so Trevelyan was soon summoned to the ramshackle building at the end of Downing Street. Once inside, he was charged with the task that would soon convert the famine from a political crisis to one of the world’s most notorious genocides. Trevelyan’s mandate was clear: immediately cut 20 percent of all persons receiving aid in Ireland, and phase out the system entirely within the year. In its place, Ireland would be managed not by London but by its own taxpayers. Grey and Trevelyan drew a map dividing the island into unions; each would have a board of town leaders who could raise and disperse aid at their own discretion. If they wanted soup kitchens, that was the board’s decision. If they wanted to take other action or even none at all, then so be it.

  To ensure that this new system would be administered properly, Grey appointed Edward Twisleton as its chief commissioner. Twisleton would serve under Trevelyan, who immediately charged his new subordinate with the task of creating temporary relief programs until the local poor unions could establish their own footing. The commissioner set to work at once, designing work-for-food schemes that had famine victims breaking stones or draining peat bogs twelve hours a day. Such projects, he wrote to Trevelyan, were designed “to be as repulsive as possible consistent with humanity.”5

  Content that his new subordinate had the Ireland crisis under control, Trevelyan took his family on an extended vacation in France.

  • • •

  While the Trevelyans toured the French countryside, Henry Grey stormed Parliament. The new relief scheme was not received well there, and more than ever, Grey was piqued by his peers. He accused some of trying to exacerbate the crisis; he admonished others for not “taking the trouble” to read his reports on Ireland. Had they bothered, they would have read his patronizing account of the failures of the Irish people to solve their own famine—failures Grey insisted were further evidence of the island’s parochialism: “There had been much inexperience and want of knowledge—a failure on the part of all ranks in Ireland to assist and cooperate with the Government, as they ought to have done, in endeavouring to surmount this period of severe affliction.” Surely, then, it was not his fault that people continued to die there. Nor, he insisted, was it the British people’s responsibility. If Grey knew anything, it was that Ireland

  could not remain for any considerable time in a situation dependent upon the assistance of England; that she must help herself; that she must put forth her own strength and energies; and that she must not look constantly to this country; for if she did so, the time would come, and speedily, when public opinion in England would be far too strong for any Ministry, no matter of whom it was composed, and when this system must cease. In many instances, the proprietors of Ireland had nobly done their duty; but he must repeat, what he had before stated, that this was by no means uniformly the case. This was a truth of which he was painfully convinced, and, entertaining such a conviction, he deemed it his duty to avow it.6

  Although Grey’s
stance was met with opposition on the floor of Parliament, it was shared by a growing number of English people. The country was beginning to show clear signs of compassion fatigue. Two years had passed since the first failure of the potato crop, and still Ireland’s difficulties showed no signs of abating. Newspaper editorials complained loudly about hard-earned English wages being sent across the Irish Sea. Political cartoons depicted the Irish as oafish and incapable of helping themselves. It was all the justification Grey needed.

  Besides, the colonial secretary had little interest in dithering over how aid was administered on an island of little value to the empire. His real concern was for establishing the kind of commercial presence that would ensure Britain’s place on the world stage. That was proving difficult in an age when slave labor no longer defrayed costs. So far, his best plan had been population redistribution. Each day, thousands of indigent people from the Far East—known as coolies—were being shipped to the Caribbean and South America to labor as indentured workers in the sugarcane fields. That the rates of mortality rivaled—and sometimes even surpassed—those of the previous generation’s slave ships was of little consequence to him. As far as cheap labor was concerned, the plan was clearly working.

  Despite growing insistence to the contrary, he was more convinced than ever that a similar plan could work in Canada. He increased his efforts to encourage Irish immigration there, even after members of the Canadian Colonial Office sent multiple petitions asking for an immediate halt, citing too great a strain on resources. But Grey remained steadfast. He had a feeling the North American staff were being unnecessarily shrill, no doubt influenced by the hysteria gripping their U.S. neighbors. What they needed, he decided, was a bit more time—just enough to gain a proper perspective and the opportunity to rely on their own resourcefulness. So he wrote a tepid response to the complaints, assuring Elgin that he would give the objections “serious consideration” at his first available moment. “I have to direct Your Lordship’s attention to the importance of enforcing the strictest economy in affording such assistance to the immigrants as may be absolutely necessary,” wrote Grey, “and of not losing sight of the danger that the grant of such assistance, if not strictly guarded, may have the effect of inducing the emigrants to relax their exertions to provide for themselves.”7 When that moment finally arrived several months later, North American officials were more than a little disappointed with the response.