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“The Balance of Trade with Great Britain Seems to be Still Against Us”
650 Paupers arrived at Boston in the Steamship Nestoria, April 15th, from Galway, Ireland, shipped by the British Government.
Cartoonist W. A. Rogers uses the language of
debates in the early 1880s over
tariff policy and "the balance of trade with Great Britain" as
a vehicle to criticize the British government's policy of paying for the
transport of impoverished Irish to the United States.
The Irish have been one of the largest immigrant groups in American
history, with Americans of Irish descent constituting today 10 times the
population of Ireland. During the potato famine years of the
1840s, the Irish were by far the most numerous immigrant class arriving
in the United States. Although the stream of emigration continued
to flow from Ireland in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries, from 1871 to 1880, the Irish totals dropped to third place
with 436,871, just behind the English (the "silent" immigrants
of the period) and almost 300,000 below the number of Germans.
The Irish moved to the United States for a variety of reasons, but
economic and political factors were especially important in the 1870s
and 1880s. It was a period of poor harvests and famines in
Ireland, which hit
the western and southwestern regions particularly hard. The
floating poorhouse in this cartoon is from Galway in western
Ireland. It was also a time of the political unrest of the Land
War of 1879-1882 which was fought over the eviction of tenant
farmers. (For more on the famines and Land War, see the archive
for the cartoon of February 28, 1880, "The Herald of Relief from
America.")
Shortly after this cartoon appeared, Harper's Weekly reported
(May 12) that the steamship Catalonia arrived in Boston Harbor
bearing 1200 Irish paupers "sent at the expense of the British
government." The newspaper complained that they were without
money, and that most would be on the dole at least temporarily.
The news item unfavorably contrasted the open-door policy toward the
destitute Irish with the closed-door policy which Congress implemented
against the industrious and law-abiding Chinese immigrants under the
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Harper's Weekly was also concerned about the Irish support of
political violence against the British. Over the years,
Irish-Americans had supported a variety of political organizations which
agitated for Irish home rule or independence. Leaders in America
were divided over methods and goals, but there was a faction which
condoned violence. In the early 1880s, some Irish arrested by the
British as dynamiters claimed American citizenship, which provoked
tensions in diplomatic relations between Great Britain and the United
States. (In the cartoon, the poorhouse ship is met by a New York
political hack in a boat called "The Dynamite.")
In the same issue as this cartoon (April 28), an editorial urged the
Irish-American National Convention meeting in Philadelphia to denounce
"unequivocally and completely ... all sympathy with murder as a
means of [political] agitation ..." Particularly at issue was
the assassination on May 6, 1882, of Britain's chief secretary of
Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his under secretary, T. H. Burke,
in Dublin's Phoenix Park. Editor George William Curtis contended that other Americans
would be receptive to constitutional change for more just and equitable
laws in Ireland, home rule, or even independence, if only terrorism were
rejected. The next week, Curtis expressed disappointment in the
convention's resolution which blamed the British government as the
source of violence, without condemning the "Phoenix Park
murders" explicitly.
Robert C. Kennedy
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