Beyond the Gate: Hannah Welsh

During the mid-19^th century, over 2 million men, women, and children left Ireland due to the potato blight, a bacterial virus which shriveled the plant and left it completely inedible. The potato was the main food staple and source of income for Irish families ever since it was introduced by the British. The rural poor relied almost exclusively on the potato for food because it was affordable, high in nutrients, stored well during the winter.  When the potato crop failed, millions of men, women, and children died from starvation. With little aid from the British government, many Irish left their rural lives to emigrate and settle in large U.S. cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.

The Potato Famine was not the only reason for Irish immigration to the United States. Centuries of religious and class discrimination in Great Britain left Irish nationals in subservient positions often without diverse sources of income. Strict penal codes denied Catholic tenant farmers the right to own land, thus restricting their financial stability and social mobility. The majority of Irish farmland was dedicated to raising expensive grain and livestock to be exported to England at prices that most Irish workers could not afford. As in most colonized countries, the colonizers built infrastructure to extract natural resources to benefit themselves rather than the native people.*