Letters from America: ‘I would not advise anyone to come here that can live comfortable at home’

Hartford, Connecticut, July 1882. Maggie Hennessy, a 24-year-old emigrant from Wexford, wrote home to her uncle, a shopkeeper and farmer, in New Ross. She first told him how she and her siblings were getting on, mentioning their good jobs, healthy children and the like. And then she moved on to news that would more interest him – the carry-on of his old neighbours:Dear uncle, the Doyles are a awful set. They are fighting like tomcats. They took the shirt off Peter and they tore the coat off Larry, and Tom was arrested and taken to the station house and his wife, too. They were fined $50 and cost. Three police took him. They had to take the wife in a wagon and sit down on her to keep her in it. Two years earlier, Maggie had been a live-in servant in the house of William Dodd, a wealthy lithographer, and his wife, Mary, cleaning and cooking for the couple and their two sons. And it is possible she was working there in 1882. Wherever she was working, her gleeful gossiping seems an assertion of “respectability”. Yes, she was an emigrant in service, but she was better than the Doyles.Hennessy’s letter is one of more than 60 in A Letter Home, compiled by Kerby A Miller, author of the landmark Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (1985). Most are letters sent home by emigrants, but included too are a few sent to them. The first dates from 1818, the last from 1972. Each is prefaced by a short introduction by Miller that lights, as if from below, the history of Irish emigration.READ MOREThere is great diversity here. Writing from Ohio, in 1819, Neal Campbell of Coalisland complains of the “boldness” of American women. Sending money to Cork in 1850, to bring her siblings to New York, Margaret McCarthy expresses relief at having escaped a famine-stricken country. And in 1856 Armagh man Bill Williamson gives an epic account of travelling from Chicago to California in a wagon train. There are letters from southern plantations, the great plains, gold rush towns in the west, and most especially the great industrial cities of the north. Some of those who wrote lived in shacks, others in servants’ quarters in fine houses, others in crowded tenements. They wrote of their joys and sorrows, their children, their prospects and their memories. Some advised friends to come to America. Others told them to stay at home.And their emigrant lives would break your heart, whether they wrote aching for the homeplace or cursing – as they did into the 1980s – “the land that made us refugees” or both.Kerby Miller started reading emigrant letters as a graduate student in Berkeley in the early 1970s. His concern was to tease out how Irish people themselves understood emigration. He found letters in archives and libraries and some great scholars – Bruce Boling, David Doyle, Rodney Green, Arnold Schrier, and others – generously shared troves of material with him.But suspecting that there was more material out there, he wrote to newspapers across Ireland asking people to send emigrant letters to him. Knowing such items were treasured heirlooms, he promised to copy and return the originals. People responded. By the time he had finished Emigrants and Exiles, he had read some 5,000 emigrant letters. And people have continued to share material with him in the four decades since. Hennessy’s public house, New Ross, Co Wexford, the address to which Maggie Hennessy's letter was sent. Photograph: Courtesy Kerby A Miller Collection, University of Galway For sure, many of the letters in A Letter Home tell intensely personal stories, some poignant and others, like that of Maggie Hennessy, amusing. But common economic and, ultimately, political circumstances, which forced or “encouraged” the Irish to leave their homes, shaped the lives of those who wrote them.Daniel Polin, in 1818 an emigrant schoolmaster from Co Down, knew this well, and, writing to William Bennett, a family friend who had fled to the United States after the United Irishmen’s defeat in 1798, he explained how British policies had created the essential conditions for the emigration that would follow in the next century:My dear sir, as to Ireland, it is in a most wretched state. The resources the people had for making money are completely extinct. The farming interest has undergone a great change for the worse, and there is no hope of any alteration or relief except in case of revolution. ... It will, however, take a long time to unite Ireland or to make them behold their grievances through one focus, in consequence of the narrow system of party which prevails there. The government have connived at a disunion of the people, and they have succeeded to the full extent of their wishes.Polin understood himself to be in a “land of liberty”, but a deep ambivalence about North America runs through Irish emigrant letters. For many, it was a “land of sweat” or “the land of the snakes” – an epithet that referred as often to Irish American foremen and machine politicians as to actual reptiles encountered in mining and lumber camps.Certainly, the “independence” that emigration offered, especially in the early 1800s – the chance to be “your own master”, as Kildare man Bartholomew Colgan, a farmer near Peoria, Illinois, put it in 1854 – contrasted favourably with Ireland. “Sooner than I would work for a farmer in Ireland”, John Costello, a labourer from Croagh, Co Limerick, wrote from the Pacific northwest in 1883, “I would cut off my good right hand.” News from America (1875) by James Brenan. Photograph: Crawford Art Gallery, Cork But notwithstanding that advantage, America was not home, and it was the capacity to make a living at home that was key. “I would not advise any one to come here that can live comfortable at home,” Ellen Rountree wrote from Philadelphia to Dublin in 1851, but then continued, “yet there is work for every person. No female that can handle a needle may be idle.”Conspicuous too is an ambivalence about Ireland. Fond memories of the homeplace were braided with an understanding that social and political systems had driven the Irish abroad in their millions. Imploring a cousin in Ireland to come out to Kilkenny Township, Minnesota, in 1880, Lewis Doyle, by then 40 years in America, condemned “the system” that had made “exiles” of the Irish: Well John, I am sorry enough to cry when I read about the condition of poor old Ireland. … Why don’t you in the name of God even at this late day just pull up and bring your wife and little ones, and when you get to the nearest port just shake the dust from your feet and leave your curse upon the system that exiled you and all other good, honest and faithful Irishmen from their native land? Brooklyn, May 1972. John and Helen Lenehan, then both in their 60s, wrote home to Paddy Connolly, a long-time resident of the Bronx, who had retired to a house he called “Dunroamin” (Done Roaming) in Enniscrone, Sligo. The couple had left Roscommon in youth – John (born in 1903), the son of a publican-farmer in Elphin, in 1924 and Helen (née Kielty; born in 1906), a farmer’s daughter from Culleenatreen, in 1927. John got work on the heavily Irish subway system while Helen, after a time in service, became a nurse. And they married in the 1930s and raised a daughter.The 1920s had witnessed mass migration from Ireland. Indeed, John’s only brother and all four of his sisters had joined him in Brooklyn by 1930. All five found work in hospitals and only one would return to live in Ireland. Helen Kielty’s declaration of intention to apply for US citizenship, 1930. Photograph: US National Archives and Records Administration New York was then teeming with Irish people. But the Depression and the war and changes in emigration law staunched the flow to the States. By 1970, there were 251,000 Irish-born people in the US, down from almost 600,000 in 1940, and almost one-in-three of them were over 70 years of age. Hence, when they wrote home in 1972, John and Helen had a strong sense of decline. Admittedly, John had a good pension – secured by Mike Quill, the Kerry-born leader of the Transport Workers Union – as too did Helen and both were receiving social security cheques, the great gift, in 1935, of the New Deal. But their American dream was no more. [ The Kerryman who brought New York City to a standstillOpens in new window ]Giving their address as “Sewer City”, they raged against the demise of New York:The old city is going down. Hotels (2,000 rooms) closing up, means 500 jobs lost when such hotels close. … Business moving out every day. WELFARE and the frauds on welfare, some of them with good city jobs, murdered this city, and the lousy POLITICIANS giving the city money away. … Times Square is an awful place: filthy movie houses all sex; junkies waiting for the doors to open at 8:30 AM; pornographic magazines (naked women) on display; HOOKERS, “WHORES,” and the PIMPS CRAWLING ALONG THE STREETS. John died aged 73 in 1976, but Helen lived to be 90, dying in 1996. And so she saw the last great wave of Irish emigrants to the US, when in the 1980s and early 1990s more than 100,000 Irish people, many of them graduates, preferred the precarity of undocumented employment in construction and landscaping, nannying and waitressing in America to the certainty of unemployment at home. In economic history, 1996, the year Helen died, is notable for the Republic experiencing positive net migration for the first time, that is, more people coming into the State than leaving it. The financial crash of 2008 reversed that trend, but since 2014 positive net migration has been the norm; and while the North, with a less dynamic economy, has offered fewer opportunities to immigrants, it has been the norm there too since just after the crash, with the exception of the first year of Covid. Strikingly, North and South, many of Ireland’s immigrants now work in health and public transport, the sectors in which John and Helen established themselves in New York.[ From the archive: Walking away from the dead: what the Famine did to IrelandOpens in new window ]It is apposite, then, that their letter to Dunroamin closes A Letter Home – their emigrant lives are a reminder that Irish people long did in other places what people from other places now do in Ireland. In 2020, Kerby Miller and his south Derry-born wife Patricia donated his vast collection of transcripts of emigrant letters and memoirs to the University of Galway; they donated too his research materials on the lives of those who wrote them. In receiving this extraordinary gift, the university established Imirce, a project that makes those transcripts accessible online and continues the work of collection through regular appeals for letters and memoirs to be digitised. Since its launch in 2024, Imirce has connected historians and genealogists, artists and creative writers across time with generations of emigrants. And it has connected the descendants of those emigrants across the broad Atlantic with the homes that they left behind. A Letter Home by Kerby A Miller and Breandán Mac Suibhne is published by Gill Books