Real Lace Read Online Free Page A

process did not work. Nothing did, not even a proposal that the potatoes should be sliced and soaked in bog water, spread with lime or salt, or else treated with chlorine gas—“easily” made by cottagers by mixing vitriol, manganese dioxide, and salt. If tried, this method would have had the peasants manufacturing poison gas.
    And the disease could not be stopped. The terrible winter of 1845 grew into a worse year in 1846. The potato blight would continue, unstopped and unstoppable, for a full ten years. At the end of this period, the Irish population, with normal growth, should have stood at about 9,000,000. Instead, it had dropped to 6,552,385. With terrible slowness, relief funds trickled in from Britain and across the Atlantic. One of the first groups to help was the Society of Friends, or Quakers. Soup kitchens were set up. But still, over the ten-year period, more than a million Irish died, and more than a million others fled to other lands. In 1845, 50,000 came to America. The following year, it was 68,000. A year later, the figure climbed to 117,000, and continued to climb until the peak year of the famine, 1851, when 216,000 Irish souls made their way, in steerage, into New York Harbor. The immigration continued heavily through 1854, and then dropped to about what it had been in 1845, or 57,000. Peter McDonnell was one of this vast and hungry horde.
    The situation that greeted the arriving Irishman in New York—where most immigrants disembarked—was not much better than the one he had left in Ireland. New York was already a city of great wealth, the money capital of the United States, with huge mansions parading up Fifth Avenue and across Murray Hill. But it was also a tough, rough-hewn, and competitive town whose leading men were entrepreneurs and, in many cases, outrightscoundrels. For all its fine trappings, New York had a coarse underbelly. Vagrant pigs acted as scavengers, and garbage thrown in the street was dealt with in this manner. On August 20, 1847, the New York Sun complained of “pigs dangerous as hyenas.” An angry citizen wrote a letter to the editor about the pigs he met “lounging up Broadway.” A “Quaker lady” was charged by a pig, knocked down and bitten right on Fifth Avenue, and in another part of the city a pig attacked a child that was sitting on a stoop, and snatched a piece of bread from her hand. Other animals roamed freely about the city, and newspapers of the period carried advertisements for lost cattle and horses, including one for a “large, fat ox, red with a white face,” last seen strolling up Third Avenue. Manhattan’s side streets were rutted mud tracks, unsafe to walk in, and packs of wild dogs, many of them rabid, patrolled the town at night. New Yorkers today who complain of danger and violence in their city might well be grateful that they are not living in the mid-nineteenth century.
    In her book The Great Hunger , an account of the Irish migration to America, Cecil Woodham-Smith has said, “The story of the Irish in the New World is not a romantic story of liberty and success, but the history of a bitter struggle, as bitter, as painful, though not as long-drawn-out, as the struggle by which the Irish at last won the right to be a nation.” Certainly the arriving Irish in New York found conditions much worse than those of the native New Yorker. There had been, to begin with, the six-to-eight-week journey in steerage across the Atlantic. Steerage passage cost between twelve and twenty-five dollars, depending upon the cupidity of the ship’s captain (the fare was sometimes paid by the British landlord, not out of charity but out of eagerness to clear his land of starving and dying people who could no longer pay their rents), and passengers were crowded belowdecks, seldom permitted to go above for fresh air, and the standard food ration was a bowl of pork and beans and a cup of water a day. Steerage was ahotbed