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The Story without a Source

A Tale of Irish Death in New Orleans

Nancy McKenzie Dupont

Memories bind communities together, but the accuracy of those memories matter less than stories recounted, especially if the stories are told over and over again. “Memory, being a phenomenon of motion and magic, accommodates only those facts that suit it.”¹

When communities preserve the memory, perhaps even add to it, they bring memories into the present.² In New Orleans, one such communal memory is the fate of Irish immigrant laborers who dug the New Basin Canal. Theirs is a story, a memory, of disease and death, numbers of deaths that seem—and perhaps are—unreal. But communal memory in New Orleans says otherwise. Indeed, the story has been told so often, in novels, newspapers, and song, that it scarcely matters whether it is true or what its source might have been.

In the early nineteenth century, New Orleans was on the verge of being the largest city in the southern United States and the third largest city in the nation. People were drawn to New Orleans because of its port, which allowed access from the lower Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans had distinct disadvantages, too. Surrounded by water, it was prone to disease—cholera, which thrives in wet climates, and mosquito-borne diseases such as yellow fever were the most common.

Epidemics ravaged the city’s population every few years during the 1800s, and the inadequate medical system was unable to do anything to stop the outbreaks. Living in close quarters in unsanitary conditions rendered people susceptible.

Irish immigrants fleeing political persecution and famine made their way to New Orleans even before the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The Irish took up several occupations, such as running shops, restaurants and bars, banking, journalism, and teaching. A few became wealthy, among them Maunsell White, who arrived penniless in New Orleans in 1801 from County Tipperary. White went into buying and selling commodities and soon owned his own business. He fought at the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, establishing himself as a military hero as well as a business leader, and he was wealthy enough to build a mansion in the 1820s. He was part of the group that organized the first New Orleans St. Patrick’s Day celebration in 1809, and he became first lieutenant of the Hibernian Society. Though the Irish were not part of the group that had achieved hegemony in New Orleans, like the French-speaking Creoles who descended from the original French and Spanish settlers, they mingled among them and encountered no social stigma because of their Irish heritage.³

Maunsell White would figure into a renowned New Orleans myth regarding the city’s Irish American population, one that became so pervasive and so much a part of the city’s fabric, that when historians researched the story and found it to be implausible, New Orleanians had a hard time coming to terms with the findings. In the 1830s White was one of the owners of a company that built a second New Orleans canal. This one ran from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain, a distance of six miles. The canal came to be known as the New Basin Canal. In the days before power tools and pumps, the workers had to dig painstakingly through the swamps with hand shovels, which was backbreaking work.

The freshly dug areas were continuously pumped throughout the process to keep them from refilling with water. Pilings were driven to support the sides by placing large rocks on top of them until they sank into the muck.⁴

According to the legend, White’s company used Irish workers for the canal construction because slaves were too valuable; if a slave was killed or died of disease, the owner stood lose a healthy amount of money. Poor Irish immigrants were expendable and replaceable.⁵

Sometime in the twentieth century, the legend intensified as new claims arose that between eight thousand and thirty thousand Irish workers had died of disease during the construction and were buried near where they fell on the banks of the canal. Journalists, some of them very well respected, perpetuated the story. A prolific New Orleans writer told the story often, as did members of the New Orleans Irish Cultural Society and two Irish folk song composers.

While there is documentation of the brutality of the company employing the immigrants and a few newspaper articles about complaints of the workers, little information exists about the actual digging of the canal. Laura D. Kelley, who wrote The Irish in New Orleans, is one of the historians who considers the story implausible.

If we consider what we know about Irish immigrants, submissive behavior was not part of their collective character. Images of men dropping like flies, their bodies left rotting alongside the canal, don’t follow the Irish’s history of action.⁶

The Story

Classifying the story within the realm of narrative theory is difficult. The story has some characteristics of a myth, which, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is defined as a “widely held but false belief or idea.” A myth may be exaggerated or fictitious, but it generally has a purpose in the culture and some relation to the truth, even if only peripheral. The Irish have a rich tradition of folk tales, legends, and myths passed orally and aurally through the generations. Any purpose to the story of the New Basin Canal would have to be mere speculation. For the story to be a legend, it would have to have details not outside of the possible and never really doubted. At a certain point, the story of the New Basin Canal tragedy was doubted, so much so that it changed a campaign by the New Orleans Irish Cultural Society.

The story of the tragedy of the New Basin Canal likely began within this oral tradition among the New Orleans Irish community. By then, the tale had been memorialized not only in myth but also in song. It would also become part of the printed record, which gave the story more permanence.

5.1. The New Basin Canal in 1915. Wikimedia Commons/Library of Congress.

There are few records of the beginning of the New Basin Canal project, and it was rarely mentioned in New Orleans newspapers. What is known is that prominent businessmen, White among them, formed the New Orleans Canal and Banking Company in 1831. These men had the idea that a second canal from the Mississippi River to the south and Lake Pontchartrain to the north would break the monopoly of the company that owned the original canal that was built in 1794. These canals were valuable to shipping; vessels anchored in the lake, accessible from the Gulf of Mexico, waited for flatboats to bring goods from the Port of New Orleans, eliminating the need to navigate the Mississippi River. The new company hired Simon Cameron of Philadelphia as engineer. Cameron, who would become a member of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, recruited 136 Philadelphia Irish to travel to New Orleans to work on the canal; Cameron offered them room and board, passage to and from New Orleans, and twenty dollars salary a month.⁷

Many more men would be needed to build the canal, and historians estimate that Irish immigration to New Orleans was robust from 1830 through 1860. However, these new arrivals faced discrimination early Irish immigrants had not endured. The newer immigrants were considered less intelligent and less educated than those who arrived in the early nineteenth century. “The Irish of the present day, whom we see landing on our levees seem to be a different race of the Irish of ten, 15, or 20 years since,” according to one New Orleans newspaper.⁸

Almost immediately, the Irish laborers Cameron brought from Pennsylvania became discontent. The Louisiana Advertiser noted that, among other things, they had been sold as indentured servants, the company store prices were too high, and they had no medical care. They claimed that when they refused to work under unacceptable conditions, the company boarded their sleeping rooms and stopped feeding them.⁹ These 136 were the only workers complaining about conditions on the New Basin Canal in 1830, but there would be more objections later.

The Irish stage actor Tyrone Power, an ancestor to the twentieth-century American film actor by the same name, made a tour of America in the 1830s and observed the digging of the New Basin Canal. He described the Irish laborers as industrious, civil, and courteous, but their job was unimaginably difficult.

[They labored] amidst a pestilent swamp whose exhalations were fetid to a degree scarcely endurable even for a few moments; wading amongst stumps of trees, mid-deep in black mud, clearing the spaces pumped out by the powerful steam-engines; wheeling, digging, hewing, or bearing burdens it made one’s shoulders ache to look upon.¹⁰

Power described the lives of the laborers as mere existence, nothing more.

[They are] holding life as a tenure as uncertain as does the leader of a forlorn hope; excluded from all the advantages of civilization, often at the mercy of a hard contractor, who wrings his profits from their blood; and all this for a pittance that merely enables them to exist, with little power to save, or a hope beyond the continuance of the like exertion.¹¹

He described the Irish immigrant, just landed in the “long-sighed-for-shores,” only to have his spirit broken by the “spirit-sinking” labor he’d have to do. Power described disease and the incredible toll it took on the laborers, but he made no mention of epidemics or where the victims would be buried. “They are worse lodged than the cattle of the field,” Power wrote, and the priest was the only comfort for the men, the only one who told them that they had not been forgotten.¹²

Power had nothing but contempt for the New Basin Canal project financiers. He observed that

Christian charity and justice alike suggest that the labourers ought to be provided with decent quarters, the [sic] sufficient medical aid should always be at hand, and above all, that the brutalizing, accursed practice of extorting extra labour by the stimulus off corn spirit should be wholly forbidden.¹³

It should not have been surprising, then, that harsh conditions and extremely hard labor should create such frustration that it boiled over into violence. In early 1834 a sugar refinery wanted a canal dug and encouraged underbidding by groups of Irish diggers. A riot broke out when Irish laborers from the New Basin Canal attacked another Irish labor group; four men were killed.¹⁴ New Orleans newspapers called for swift police action. Another newspaper condemned the violence, but pleaded for mercy for the Irishmen. “Have we the peculiar right to hunt down these men, because indeed they crave our hospitality, because they are poor and ignorant, because oppression has made them wild—are these reasons to track them down as the fallow beast? Certainly not,” the editors wrote.¹⁵

The Epidemic of 1833

In the fall of 1833, New Orleans experienced its worst yellow fever epidemic in recorded history. Every summer, mosquitos bore the disease through the population (though doctors did not yet realize that mosquitos were the cause). Edward H. Barton, MD, made the official report to the Charity Hospital of New Orleans of how the disease spread and intensified through the year. Barton noted that there had been a cholera outbreak in the winter months of 1833, but as the temperatures turned warmer, yellow fever became the scourge. The treatment for yellow fever was painful and ineffective; leeches would be placed on the patient or cuts to the veins would be made. Barton reported that the total mortality of the epidemic was 2,631 persons, roughly 5 percent of the city’s population. Barton reported burials in the city’s Catholic and Protestant cemeteries, with breakdowns by gender and race, but nowhere in his report does he mention those who died from disease being buried outside cemeteries.¹⁶

Origins of the Tragedy Story

More than a hundred years after the New Basin Canal opened to barge traffic, newspapers began printing the story of the Irish immigrant diggers and their sacrifices. On July 18, 1937, Meigs O. Frost, with a Pulitzer Prize under his belt, published an article in the New Orleans Times-Picayune with the headline, “Deaths of 10,000 Irishmen Digging New Basin Canal is Recalled by Refilling Ditch.” The story was a report on the partial closing of the canal to prepare it for being filled with dirt and bricks.¹⁷ Most notable in the article were the lyrics to a song that were to be cited over and over again for the next fifty years.

Ten thousand Micks, they swung their picks,

To dig th’ New Canawl.

But the choreray was stronger’n they,

An’ twice it killed them awl.¹⁸

Frost made no reference to when the song or poem was written. The remainder of the article was as poorly referenced as the ditty, with Frost claiming that the construction company’s records had been burned. He detailed the horrible existence that the Irish diggers had endured, which was supported by Power’s diary, but he added a new detail: that the bodies of the workers were buried in the canal.

Hopes of a free life in a New World that ended in tragic death for thousands of sweating human beings rest buried in the mud and water of that New Basin canal. . . . Craft and greed and written Records mysteriously destroyed are part of the canal’s story.¹⁹

Frost accurately described the work and conditions the Irish laborers endured; they worked in waist-deep water under a hot sun, they ate poor food, all the while living in overcrowded construction camps. Then, admitting that the story was amazing, he described the burials of the men.

Some 20,000 Irishmen died of the cholera that broke out among them, and . . . some 8000 survived who drove that ditch through the muck amid the dying, and buried the dead in the “back dumps” by covering them with the wheelbarrow loads of muck they shoved up slanting planks out of the big ditch.²⁰

Frost claimed that the owners of the canal company were watching international affairs and picked Ireland as a place to recruit workers.

Ireland and hell were synonymous in those times. Irishmen were fighting mad over what they called the oppression of absentee British landlords, who milked their Irish properties of the last farthing agents could squeeze from them, and lived in London or abroad. Family stalked the fields of Erin, with a black blight on the potato crop. And the only answer England knew to “Irish malcontents” was the noose . . . or the cell.²¹

In 1950 reporter Diane Farrell wrote a story on the city’s disappearing canals: “New Orleans’ Canals Go Underground.” She repeated the lyrics of the song published in 1937, claiming the Irish diggers sang the refrain as they worked. She also wrote, without citing a reference, that workers were buried on the banks of the canal: “The greatest mass of human life ever swallowed by a New Orleans canal at any one period was gulped down by the New Basin project in the 1830s. Over 10,000 immigrants died of cholera while digging it.”²²

Frost had actually claimed that twenty thousand had died of disease while digging the canal, though the headline on his story claimed the number was ten thousand. Farrell claimed the number was ten thousand, even though she reprinted the lyrics that claimed ten thousand workers were twice killed by disease, making the number twenty thousand.

For a time the Times-Picayune newspaper settled on ten thousand as to the number of Irish workers felled by disease but did not include the details of the grizzly burial that had been chronicled in the past. In 1950 the Union Passenger Terminal was built over the filled-in New Basin Canal, and as part of a report of the new facility, the writer crafted a ghost story. He painted a picture of elegant trains riding over the ghosts of the New Basin Canal.

The route of the canal was swampland, and swampland meant unhealthy working conditions. . . . So the immigrants—most of them Irish—signed up as laborers, came to New Orleans and early in 1832 took pick and shovel in hand and set to work in the stumps, until cholera and yellow fever struck the city, claiming the lives of 10,000 immigrant laborers.²³

The estimated number of the Irish laborers who died digging New Basin remained at ten thousand in a report of the New Orleans government taking over what was left of the filled-in canal belonging to the state. The writer assumed local residents did not remember what the canal had been, much less its history.

In terms of human life, it was probably the most Expensive public project ever completed in the Crescent City. . . . The route of the New Basin Canal was swampland and this meant unhealthy working conditions . . . more than 10,000 immigrant laborers, mostly Irish, were claimed by cholera and yellow fever.²⁴

Excavators found bodies and coffins at the six-to-eight-foot level at Canal Street and Claiborne Avenue in 1967. At first the city believed the remains were from the St. Louis Cemetery number 2 in a little-used part of the graveyard that was owned by the city, not the Catholic Church. The discovery led the Times-Picayune to speculate that there were hastily buried yellow fever and cholera victims among the dead, and perhaps some Irish immigrants. “Who knows but that some of the remains are those of the immigrant excavators of the vanished New Basin Canal, who fell in the great cholera epidemic of 1832–33?”²⁵ the newspaper asked. There was no speculation in this article as to how many Irish workers died.

The number did not stay at ten thousand; soon it doubled again. A report by United Press International done in advance of a 1979 visit to New Orleans by Irish prime minister Jack Lynch claimed that twenty thousand Irish ditchdiggers were buried in the banks of the New Basin Canal.²⁶ The reporter did not mention what the laborers died from, only that they died at their shovels and were promptly buried, and their widows were given fifty cents for their husbands’ working a half day. The descendants of those immigrants were preparing to show the prime minister an out-of-season St. Patrick’s Day parade in the Irish Channel, the neighborhood where immigrants made their first homes.²⁷

Suddenly, the newspaper estimates of the number who died of disease digging the canal fell to eight thousand and stayed there, largely, throughout a campaign to memorialize the workers. A genealogy column printed in the Times-Picayune in 1983 lowered the estimate, but the writer made a curious claim. The reporter wrote that, “Records show that they worked for $1 a day, and slave owners preferred that the Irish do the job since they were worth less than slaves.”²⁸ The writer also noted that construction of the New Basin Canal was the magnet that drew the Irish to New Orleans.

For fifty years the Times-Picayune, New Orleans’s newspaper of record, reported various versions of the tragedy that befell the Irish laborers working on the New Basin Canal. Sourcing was always flimsy. The inability to present a consistent set of facts may signal that the story entered an oral tradition, where information gets reported with no respect for facts. It is significant that the story survived as a tragedy for more than 150 years.

Mary Lou Widmer

No author has written more about the Irish immigrants who came to New Orleans than historian Mary Lou Widmer who, through a series of novels and nonfiction books, has chronicled the first Irish citizens of the city. In 1988 the Irish Cultural Society of New Orleans gave Widmer the Caomhnoir (Preserver) Award for making a significant contribution to “fostering of traditional Irish culture”²⁹ in the city. Just two weeks before she was honored, Widmer wrote an article in an American magazine with new details of how the disease victims of the New Basin Canal were buried.

Men began falling dead with yellow fever as they dug the canal, and as the months went on, the numbers multiplied. Each day, the death wagons passed to pick up bodies of whose who died during the night.³⁰

She claimed most of the victims were buried in a potters’ field near the canal, and she wrote that some bodies had been found.

A year ago, when Canal Boulevard was being widened, many bones of Irishmen who had been buried in common graves were found, reminding New Orleanians once again of the tragedy of the 1830s.³¹

Three years earlier Widmer had written Lace Curtain, a fictional account of an Irish immigrant family from Skibbereen in County Cork, with two brothers who worked on the New Basin Canal. She chose as the name of her central character Danny Callahan; the only person ever named by the newspapers in the 1834 Irish violence was “Allahan,” probably Callahan.³² Included in the novel is at least one nonfictional character, Maunsell White, who improbably becomes a friend of the immigrant family, helping them to achieve the status of “lace curtain” Irish; that is, more affluent and respectable—able to afford lace curtains for their windows. In the book Callahan leads the New Basin Canal laborers in a strike, finds charity for them when their huts are burned, takes their case to White, and wins concessions. He goes into business with White and is elected to the city council. In negotiating for better conditions for the laborers, Callahan explains to the company why digging the canal is taking so long.

They did not count on the heat an’ the faever takin’ its toll, an’ the water running up to our ankles after every shovelful of mud. . . . More pumps are needed. More men are needed. The work is harder. It takes longer. And it’s going t’get worse as we go along. I think you’ll do well t’face the fact that the canal is goin’ to cost a whole lot more than you thought.³³

While campaigning for office, Callahan makes the claim that ten thousand died and were buried where they fell.

Fer six long years an’ six endless summers, hundreds of men braved the heat and the yellow faever to shovel dirt from the belly of that canal. Ten thousand men died of the cholera and yellow fever epidemics of ’32 and ’33, and were buried on the banks of the canal.³⁴

In a curious narrative, Widmer has Callahan make a hopeful campaign speech, reminding the Irish immigrants that their lives were better after the work on the New Basin Canal was finished. “Silence fell and the faces looking up at Danny became confused and disgruntled. They didn’t know if they liked the prosperity Danny had just imposed on them. They loved suffering and having the world to know about it.”³⁵ Widmer may have presented a theory about why the story of the suffering in the New Basin Canal has endured for so long.

Widmer continued the story of the Callahans with the novel Twin Oaks in 2012, following Danny’s daughter through marriage and the Civil War.

The Story in Song

Danny O’Flaherty grew up on the Aran Islands off the coast of County Galway. The son of accomplished musicians, he learned the songs of his native land early in life. His first language was Irish Gaelic, learned in his parents’ cottage on Inis Mhór. In 1968 he left Ireland for Chicago. In 1989 he and his brother established O’Flaherty’s Irish Channel Pub in the French Quarter of New Orleans; Danny and other performers played Celtic music and shared the history of the Celtic nations every evening. As happened with many New Orleans businesses, the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 closed the pub for good.³⁶

An Evening at O’Flaherty’s, an album released in 1991, contained a song called “New Basin Canal.” The lyrics tell the story of ten thousand Irish immigrants who went to New Orleans in 1832 to dig a canal. The chorus is, “There was nothing for him at home / Only a dream across the sea / But the Irish Navvy’s labor / Made that dream come true for me.” By the end of the song, the canal is gone but “St. Patrick’s Church still proudly stands to remind us of those navvies’ lives.”

“This is a story of both sides of the ocean,” O’Flaherty said. “The Irish were skinned to the bone (by the British agents). There were smaller famines before the Great Famine in 1845, and the penal laws were so severe that there were no options to feed a family. . . . When you tell a whole tribe that they’re inferior, they begin to believe that ‘they are my masters’ and it gets in the DNA to accept any treatment.”³⁷ O’Flaherty believes the history of Ireland is important to the understanding of the New Basin Canal and the Irish in America. “This mistreatment in Ireland happened in the 1830s, the 1730s, the 1630s, the 1530s; it happened again and again.”³⁸

To O’Flaherty, it does not matter how many Irish died digging the New Basin Canal; that even one laborer died is an outrage to him. The lyrics of his song recall how the Irish were picked to be the diggers.

The bayou heat and steaming rain

Were much too risky for their slaves

So the city fathers send abroad

For Erin’s sons to dig their graves . . .

They dug with only pick and spade

The fever felled them in their tracks

They worked in hell and died in pain

Yet this canal got built on Irish backs.

“How many died? Why go there?” O’Flaherty asked. “If eight thousand died, or eight hundred, or eight, or even one, it shouldn’t have happened. Humanity shouldn’t do that to humanity.” In the end, O’Flaherty said he believes the song is a story of Irish resilience. “How did they survive? The accomplishments of the Irish, the spirit of the Irish, are just remarkable.”

Tributes

In the late 1980s, the New Orleans Irish Cultural Society began raising money for a memorial to the Irishmen who died digging the canal—at least, that was what supporters talked about when they spoke about the proposed monument. The memorial was to be a Celtic cross made in Ireland with an inscription in English and Irish Gaelic. It was to be erected over the neutral ground (a term New Orleanians use for a street median). There was a fundraising event and a poster was created, a limited edition silkscreen scene of Ireland that sold for forty dollars. Stephen Dooley, a descendant of an Irish immigrant to Canada, was the artist.³⁹

Dooley told the Times-Picayune that he understood the neutral ground to be a cemetery because many of the Irish laborers who died were buried on the banks of the canal. “No one knows the exact number—records were not kept—but over eight thousand Irish immigrants died digging the New Basin Canal,” Dooley told the newspaper. The president of the Irish Cultural Society, Dr. Rodney Jung said, “We need a monument in honor of those who sacrificed their lives digging that canal.”⁴⁰ The newspaper supported the fundraising effort with an editorial.

Historians’ estimates of the number of diggers who died of the yellow fever and cholera outbreaks common in that day vary from 3,000 to 30,000. For a day of primitive medicine, lack of sanitation and a pestilential tropical climate, the larger figure is quite credible.⁴¹

The editorial writer praised the project for its contribution to the prosperity of the city, and likewise praised the Irish descendants who contributed to the wealth of New Orleans.

But the prosperous results and the financial cost [of the canal] pale against its human cost, and the nameless, vanished thousands who died building this now vanished canal should be given an honored place among the others we hold in our collective memory.⁴²

On November 4, 1990, Padraic N. MacKernan, the Irish ambassador to the United States, was among those gathered to witness the dedication of the monument in the green space that is known locally as New Basin Canal Park. The more than seven-foot-tall Celtic cross had been made in Ireland—just as the Irish Cultural Society promised—of Kilkenny stone. And as the Irish Cultural Society had also promised, it contains a plaque in both English and Irish Gaelic.⁴³ The plaque read:

IN MEMORY OF THE IRISH IMMIGRANTS WHO DUG THE NEW BASIN CANAL 1832–1838 THIS CELTIC CROSS CARVED IN IRELAND HAS BEEN ERECTED BY THE IRISH CULTURAL SOCIETY OF NEW ORLEANS, DEDICATED NOV. 4, 1990.⁴⁴

There was no mention of disease, no mention of the number of men who allegedly died, no mention of the men being buried underneath on the banks of the canal. The Irish Cultural Society has never made a public statement about the wording of the plaque, but one must conclude that there is no conclusion on the facts of the story.

Members of the Irish Cultural Society, however, remember it as a memorial to the Irish immigrants who died and were buried below the monument. Hurricane Katrina caused several levees to fail in New Orleans, causing flooding and devastation. The US Federal Emergency Management Agency used the New Basin Canal Park as a dumping ground for debris, but an unidentified person roped off the memorial before it could be crushed. An article published in Irish America in 2007 recounted the saving of the monument and repeated an estimate of the number of workers who died:

A mere stone’s throw from one of the major levee failures in the Lakeview neighborhood rests a monument erected by the Irish Cultural Society. . . . it was built to honor the estimated 8,000 to 20,000 Irish immigrants who died during the construction of the New Basin Canal beginning in 1832.⁴⁵

The article included a quote from a wife of a late president of the Irish Cultural Society, who repeated the story of the workers being buried on the canal banks.

These men who were working for an incredibly low wage and maybe a shot of whiskey, would die and then were simply and unceremoniously buried in the levees along the banks of the canal they were building.⁴⁶

The Republic of Ireland sets its annual commemoration of the Great Famine at different locations every year, and in 2014 it had international locations in Atlanta, Georgia, and New Orleans. During the visit of Heather Humphreys, the minister of arts, heritage and Gaeltacht, both the Irish Times newspaper and a news release from the Irish government called the monument a memorial to Irish immigrants who died building the canal. The news release called them “many Irish emigrants”⁴⁷ and the newspaper referred to the deaths in the “thousands.”⁴⁸ Humphreys honored the Irish immigrants to New Orleans, saying that by 1860 the Irish were one-sixth of the city’s population. The minister led the blessing of the neutral ground space known as the New Basin Canal Park, now renamed Hibernian Park, dedicating it to Irish immigrants. The now four-acre park contains the Celtic cross memorial.

Faubourg St. Mary, 1830s

While the New Basin Canal was being built, New Orleans was split into three municipalities, each with its own laws and taxes. They were the Vieux Carré (French Quarter), the Faubourg Marigny, and the Faubourg St. Marie (Faubourg is the French word meaning “suburb”). Many of the Irish immigrants working on the New Basin Canal were housed in a strip of land by the Mississippi River which came to be known as the Irish Channel. During 1833 St. Patrick’s Catholic Church was built on Camp Street in the Faubourg St. Marie, primarily to serve Irish immigrants.⁴⁹ And in 1836, the woman who would become New Orleans’s most influential Irish immigrant arrived in town with a life of tragedy and service in front of her. When she died, she would be given a state funeral, and a statue would be erected to her memory just a few years later.

Margaret Gaffney came as child with her family to the United States from Ireland. Both of her parents and her youngest sister died in a yellow fever epidemic in Baltimore when she was nine. She lost track of a brother when he was taken in by a Protestant woman, and she never learned to read and write. She married another Irish immigrant, Charles Haughery, but he became sick, and a doctor suggested they move to New Orleans, a warmer climate. The couple had a baby girl named Frances. As Charles grew even sicker, he wanted to return to Ireland. Charles survived the trip but died in Ireland. Most tragically, Frances died when she was less than a year old. A priest suggested that Margaret find a job and volunteer at an orphanage.⁵⁰

Margaret took a job as a laundress and began to volunteer. She eventually established a dairy and a bakery, turning over her profits to the orphanage. Before her death, she established four orphanages. Her funeral in 1882 was attended by the New Orleans mayor, the governor of Louisiana, a former governor, a former mayor, and all city councilmen. Stores and city offices were closed all day.⁵¹ A statue to Margaret was dedicated two years later, the second statue of a woman in the United States.⁵² It still stands today on Camp Street, down the street from St. Patrick’s Church.

Today, just like most American cities, the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New Orleans draws hundreds of marchers and thousands of spectators. The Irish Channel is filled that day with people celebrating. St. Patrick’s Catholic Church is considered one of the most beautiful churches in New Orleans for its stained glass and interior design. The Margaret statue still stands and is a tourist attraction. Irish heritage is on display around the city, especially in the historical sections.

But the story of the Irish men who died in New Basin Canal, a story without an obvious source, endures also. Since it is part of the cultural heritage of New Orleans, it may never be disputed, even if people are presented with the fact that no one can prove that ten thousand to thirty thousand died. It may be that it tells the story of immigrant hardship so the descendants can feel proud of what their forebears did. As O’Flaherty’s song says, “But the Irish Navvy’s labor / Made that dream come true for me.”

Conclusion

In her ongoing research, Janice Hume has examined how newspaper reports encouraged Americans to identify with their new county after the revolution. In much the same way, newspapers could have helped Irish immigrants think of New Orleans as their new home. There is no evidence that happened. So it’s curious that beginning in the 1950s, the stories about the New Basin Canal causing so many Irish deaths began appearing in newspaper accounts, which led to the story being retold in novels and folk songs. Hume argues that some newspaper accounts were meant to be inspirational, becoming both journalism and history.⁵³ There are those who argue for the story of the New Basin Canal, as well as those who argue against its truthfulness, and both are involved in the memory of the Irish immigrants who came in the early nineteenth century to New Orleans.