Irish farmers started to dig up their potatoes in August 1845, many weeks earlier than usual. Potatoes are hardy, but experience had taught the farmers that when an individual plant was diseased, the sickness could spread very quickly. The blight that had struck North American fields the year before and had flattened the Belgian and Dutch harvests through the summer was spreading in Ireland. The disease proliferated astonishingly quickly, turning potato stalks “black as ink.” The smell in stricken fields was overwhelming, “unusual, close, malarious.”1
The blight was dire and unwelcome, but not a surprise. A potato disease was spreading in Europe, and many expected it would reach Ireland. Furthermore, potato crops were fickle. Irish potatoes had failed in 1817, 1822, 1831, 1839, and 1842, causing localised famine and precipitating outbreaks of typhus and other epidemic fevers. In response to these repeated crises, the government had developed a template for famine relief, based on the principle that a well-calibrated market would allow the Irish poor to survive until the next harvest. First, to secure the food supply, the government proposed to buy, import, and sell either cheap food or seed potatoes. Second, to provide work for the unemployed, the Irish Board of Works was given permission to invite county and barony committees of landlords, professionals, and clergy to propose public works projects to the Treasury, and the Treasury was given the power to loan and grant money to the Board of Works to pay wages at emergency worksites.
In 1845, Ireland was not unique in Europe in its dependence on intensively planted potatoes, a vulnerable agricultural ecology. And yet, though blight destroyed nearly all the 1845 potato crop across the Low Countries and a large proportion of the crop in Germany and the Baltic, far more people died or were displaced in Ireland than in any other blight-stricken European country. Political history, not natural history, turned a potato failure into a famine. Outside Ireland, there were other crops for the poor to eat—and there were governments less fearful that generous relief would turn the poor into paupers.2
The first wave of the blight, in 1845–1846, overlapped with one of the most important transformations in British politics since the Union. In 1845, Prime Minister Robert Peel broke with many members of his own party and moved to repeal the Corn Laws. The laws, passed at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, protected the price of British grain from foreign competition and shored up the economic and political power of aristocratic landlords. After repeal, Peel’s followers broke with the rest of the Conservatives and eventually joined the Whigs and Radicals in a new, free-trading Liberal Party. More cautious Whigs allied with protectionists to reconstruct the Conservatives. Although Peel claimed that the Irish crisis was the reason for his decision to tack from protectionism to free trade, the drama that filled the House in the spring of 1846 muffled reports of mounting chaos and panic from Ireland.
We now know that Phytophthora infestans, the cause of late blight, is not a fungus but a fungus-like oomycete, a relative of fungi and algae, that favours wet conditions. Oomycetes cause other serious plant diseases, such as sudden oak death, which threatens old-growth oak in California, Oregon, and elsewhere. Oomycetes are often known as water moulds, although many species (unlike P. infestans) do not prefer wet conditions. All oomycetes are rugged and can survive shocks that would easily kill their host plants. P. infestans spores, for example, can survive freezing and drying and can remain dormant for years. Late blight can easily spread from stored potatoes, or even from infected soil or the seeds of other crops that happen to carry spores.3
In ideal conditions, the blight oomycete’s entire reproductive cycle takes less than five days, and each lesion on an affected leaf can release up to three hundred thousand spores per day. Most ecological invasions require multiple introductions of the new species. However, samples from European potatoes preserved from the 1840s show that every sample’s genetic code contains a distinctive haplotype—an inheritable and distinct group of chromosomes, used by geneticists to trace lineages—tracked to the Toluca Valley in Mexico, where potatoes grow wild. Incredibly, this means that the European late-blight pandemic might have been caused by the arrival of a single blighted cargo of potatoes, or even just one blighted potato or preserved spore that then cloned itself by the quadrillions.4
The names of several cultivars of potato introduced to Europe in the early 1840s by Belgian farmers looking for varieties resistant to dry rot, another potato disease, make allusions to Peru and the Andean cordillera. From this, some experts have inferred that the blight arrived in Europe via Mexico from a beachhead in Peru, either on potatoes or in shipments of guano. There is plenty of circumstantial evidence in the historical record to support this theory. An oral history of the famine blames guano, “imported for the first time from South America,” for the blight’s arrival. A history of the famine published in 1875 speculates that the blight in Ireland was most virulent in fields that had been previously planted with wheat and fertilised with imported guano. If guano was indeed the source of blight, it would be a cruel irony if Ireland, one of the only potato-growing regions in Europe generally too poor to import fertiliser, was the place where the blight proved most devastating.5
Although it appeared to be an act of God, a disaster as unavoidable and unstoppable as an earthquake, the late-blight pandemic was an unintended consequence of the increasing integration of global commerce. Potatoes kept as food for sailors and seed potatoes of new varieties ordered by farmers were stored in the holds of newer, larger, and faster steamships. Fertiliser mined by indentured Chinese contract labourers on arid islands off the coast of Peru—islands that had been visited for millennia by seabirds, which deposited phosphate-rich guano in layers many metres deep—allowed farmers across North America and Europe to increase yields. Farms separated by oceans became ecological neighbours. In these globalising conditions, P. infestans arrived in Ireland, where the agricultural ecosystem might just as well have been designed for its comfort. Storage of potatoes in dirt pits allowed a few spores settled on a potato to colonise an entire season’s supply. The economic structure of Irish agriculture made it impossible to create firebreaks against the disease by replanting potato fields with other crops. The pathogen thrived everyplace in Europe where poverty encouraged intensive potato planting. In Belgium the blight was worst in poor and densely populated Flanders, where 25 percent of rural households were landless and where the average family farm was too small for subsistence.6
Blight was reported in New England and eastern Canada in 1844. Belgian farmers first noticed widespread blight in mid-July 1845, near Courtrai. A few days later, farms across the border in the Netherlands reported cases. Belgian and Dutch authorities panicked. Blight destroyed 71 percent of the Dutch and 88 percent of the Belgian potato crop in 1845. An estimated three hundred thousand people died of starvation and hunger-related illness across the Netherlands, Belgium, and Prussia. The blight spread across the European potato belt, from the UK to European Russia. London newspapers reported on food riots in Prussia and Poland, and on emergency restrictions of grain exports in the Ottoman Empire. Potatoes shipped from England to Belgium went into steamships healthy and sound and rotted before the end of the short voyage. Authorities feared that consumption of diseased potatoes would lead to cholera outbreaks, or worse.7
In England, farmers in Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire, and elsewhere reported that the blight struck potato stalks that grew in clay and prime soil alike, and in well-drained as well as boggy fields. The disease appeared to spread from the leaves, down the stem, and into the tuber. Some speculated that potatoes had somehow been infected with a cattle disease. Others thought the blight was a “gangrene” or “cholera” of the plant, because the stricken potatoes smelled putridly sweet and fecal.
The Gardener’s Chronicle reported the appearance of the blight in Ireland in August 1845. By this time, in London’s Covent Garden, every greengrocer found that at least some of their inventory had been reduced to a pulp by black mould. Within a few weeks, naturalists had isolated the organism consuming potatoes. It looked like a fungus. Most botanists and mycologists assumed that something in the climate had killed the potato, and that the “fungus” they found growing throughout was an opportunistic organism that decomposed plants that were already dying or dead. Although under a microscope the pathogen seemed to have “an appalling character,” astonishing scientists with “the fecundity and power of so small and apparently weak an object,” it was considered the consequence, not the cause, of the disease.8
Decades before the germ theory of disease became widely accepted, in the 1840s most infectious diseases were thought to be caused by climate. Diseases like malaria (“bad air”) were blamed on miasmas of rotting animal and vegetable matter. Some scientists blamed the blight on static electricity, generated by steam locomotives pulling trains across Britain; others blamed emissions of toxic gases from hidden volcanoes, venting into the soil from deep beneath the earth. Perhaps tiny insects were eating the crops, or imported fertilisers had poisoned the soil. One researcher argued that weather conditions caused the juices of the potato plant to curdle into a thick, proteinaceous “vegetable casein” similar to the additives used to coagulate milk for cheese-making.9
The most sophisticated climatic theories presumed that the cause of the blight was excess water. When the blight appeared in Europe, although biologists and chemists had not yet fully explained photosynthesis, it was common knowledge that plants exchanged water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide when exposed to sunlight. A prizewinning essay noted that a potato plant in full flower had a root system whose length totaled nearly a third of a mile and that contained at least twenty-four thousand filaments and pores for taking in water. It was reasonable to conclude that lots of rain and little sunlight would be “unfavorable to the motions of the fluids or to the action of the cells” of the potato plant. Among the major contributors to the debate, only M. J. Berkeley, an Anglican priest and mycologist who later wrote an important textbook on British fungi, hypothesised that the fungus was actually killing potatoes itself.10
Robert Peel, following the Belgian, Dutch, and other governments, organised a scientific commission to report on the disease and to scour scientific journals for potential treatments. Peel’s commissioners estimated that at least half the Irish crop was lost. They also discovered something worse: potatoes stored in pits were also susceptible to blight. In previous potato failures, there might not have been a large quantity of harvested potatoes, but those that were harvested remained edible. In 1845, every new pit broken open might prove to be rotten—causing scenes of incomprehension and mourning dramatised in one of the most famous paintings to depict the Great Famine, Daniel Macdonald’s An Irish Peasant Family Discovering the Blight of Their Store (1847). Since the blight could affect stored potatoes, it was impossible to predict how much food Ireland would need to survive until the next harvest. Some landlords criticised the commissioners as alarmist, but most understood the threat. “When the evil day of scarcity does come,” Lord Heytesbury, the lord lieutenant, wrote, “it will probably come with fearful rapidity.”11
With the blight accelerating, and based on the vague consensus that the cause of the disease was excess moisture, the commission published its official advice to farmers in late October. Above all, farmers were told to keep their potatoes dry. Potatoes should be harvested in dry weather. Blighted potatoes needed to be sorted and separated. The commission recommended that blighted potatoes be set aside to make starch for glue and shirt collars. Sound potatoes, in turn, should be stored not in pits but in pyramidal piles, with flat layers of potatoes insulated by layers of ash, lime, or dried turf, and the pyramid’s sloping sides structured “like the roof of a cottage cut into steps.” Potatoes should be kept in these mounds until it was time to eat them. “Recollect,” the commission warned, “that if they get damp nothing can make them keep.” It is not clear how many Irish labourers, especially those who spoke only Irish, heard the recommendations. The pamphlets were distributed through the Royal Irish Constabulary’s field offices—there were only so many constables, and the report was only published in English. Punch teased the commission for its “speculative wisdom” and for preaching “in an unknown tongue… fifty impossible remedies to the wondering peasant.”12
The commission’s public reports were sober but reassuring; privately, the commissioners were alarmed. One suggested to Peel that the government secretly arrange with British consular staff to purchase seed potatoes in the drier parts of the potato belt, like northern Spain and Portugal. “The case is much worse than the public supposes,” he wrote. In Schull, County Cork, and even on the small islands off the southern coast, all stored potatoes “without one single exception” were beginning to rot. A priest in Kells, County Meath, estimated that one in twenty families would be out of potatoes by Christmas. And yet even as the crisis deepened, the priest noted, exports kept moving out of the county. He saw at least fifty dray carts full of grain on the road to Drogheda, “thence to feed the foreigner.”13
Robert Peel had spent his adult life in Parliament. The son of a wealthy family in the textile trade, he became an MP in 1809, at twenty-one years old—“nursed in the House of Commons,” sniped an enemy. Peel was considered “an adopted member of the aristocratic commonwealth,” a manufacturer’s son consistently on the side of the landed. To critics, Peel was two-faced and amoral, always “willing to give what it costs nothing to withhold.” To supporters, he was pragmatic. Sir Lawrence Peel, in an admiring biography of his grandfather, described him as a careful reformer, “fearful, lest the new wine should burst the old bottles… proud to be of the people, their friend, and never their flatterer.”14
Peel recognised the arrival of the blight in Ireland as a very serious crisis that would require a coordinated national response to prevent a famine. However, for Peel and his cabinet, discussion of relief policies was shaped by other controversial issues, including the mounting Irish campaign to repeal the Acts of Union and the prospect of ending the Corn Laws in favour of free trade in grain. These issues, intertwined historically and politically, formed a tangle that could easily bring down a government.
During the era of the Acts of Union, William Pitt the Younger had sold the prospect of a United Kingdom by promoting the mutual benefits of open trade between Britain and Ireland. Pitt had also favoured free trade more broadly. Lowering tariffs would reduce prices for consumers, and suited an expanding commercial empire defended by a mighty navy. During the Napoleonic Wars, wealthy landowners benefited from high prices for their produce regardless of tariffs. But when the wars ended, the coalition of landlords that had prospered during the conflicts was exposed by a sudden fall in commodity prices, especially grain. In 1815, Lord Liverpool’s Tory government passed the Corn Laws to shore its aristocratic political base and to preserve the wartime unity of Irish and British landholders.
After Pitt, although the Tories had strongly supported the Union, the party divided on Catholic civil rights. However, overwhelming pressure from the Catholic League pushed the prime minister, the Duke of Wellington, to pass Catholic Emancipation in 1829 (with Peel’s help managing the House of Commons). In November 1830, Wellington resigned, facing demands for the reform of Parliament and bringing the Whigs, under Earl Grey and Lord Melbourne, into power. The Whigs passed a suite of reforms, including the 1832 Representation of the People Act (the so-called Great Reform Act), which redistributed parliamentary constituencies to better reflect the distribution of the UK’s population, shuttered “rotten” and “pocket” boroughs controlled by small numbers of voters, and introduced modest increases in the franchise.
The Whigs had their own Irish problems. After Catholic Emancipation, Irish rate-paying tenants, supported in the House by a group of Irish MPs dedicated to the repeal of the Acts of Union, resisted the tithes demanded by the UK government to support the Anglican church of Ireland, sometimes with violence. In 1834, as the tithe war grew, Lord Stanley, then colonial secretary, urged Grey to pass a Coercion Act. The lord lieutenant, Lord Anglesey, preferred a compromise that would preserve the tithe but share it between Anglicans and Catholics. When this cabinet dispute was leaked to Parliament, Stanley resigned, followed by Grey. Robert Peel briefly became prime minister, leading a short minority government supported by Whigs loyal to Stanley. When the Tories failed to gain a majority in a general election, Lord Melbourne, the home secretary during Grey’s premiership, became prime minister. But the Whigs, shaken, had lost cohesion and momentum. And then Melbourne, too, was defeated by free trade. In 1841, his government was overturned on a proposal to lower duties on foreign sugar and timber, and to change the duty on foreign grain by setting it at a fixed rate that would in practice be a discount. Melbourne resigned, and Peel became prime minister.
Peel’s administration, like every administration since the Battle of Waterloo, needed to navigate a safe path through both free trade and Irish issues, each with its own pitfalls and powerful constituencies. Peel was vulnerable to both protectionists and so-called Ultra-Tories within his own party, who vehemently opposed Catholic Emancipation. On free trade, Peel preached protectionism while making incremental changes to grain and sugar tariffs. Supporters praised him for doing more to “free trade from the fetters which shackled it” than any prime minister in a century. Peel was deft at adapting his opponent’s policies to his own purposes. He had opposed Catholic civil rights when his rival, George Canning, supported them, and then he carried the 1829 Catholic Relief Act himself. Now he promoted a trademark Whig policy from the Conservative benches. Peel, some said, had “caught the Whigs bathing and walked away with their clothes.”15
The future of the Union itself was also on the parliamentary agenda. As chief secretary for Ireland under Lord Liverpool, Peel had created the Peace Preservation Force, the paramilitary group that enforced the law in Ireland before the creation of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Now, in the 1840s, the Repeal Association was organising “monster meetings,” usually held in the open air and attended by many thousands of people. Daniel O’Connell and the other leaders of Repeal were committed to promoting Irish national autonomy and legislative independence under the Crown, and to agrarian and constitutional reform, not revolution. But despite—or perhaps because of—these relatively conservative political ambitions, O’Connell enjoyed mass support. And so, although Repeal was officially nonviolent, the monster meetings were spectacles, featuring music and quasi-military parades, shows of Irish unity that hinted at the potential for rebellion. Without amplification, most people attending the meetings would have had very little idea what was being said—but the meetings themselves were an argument, and a threat.16
Peel let them happen. On August 15, 1843, at the Hill of Tara, the old seat of the High Kings of Ireland, O’Connell led his largest meeting yet. The Times estimated that more than a hundred thousand people attended (a number impossible to verify). The speakers from the provincial chapters of the Repeal Association arrived in procession, led by trumpeters on horseback, a harpist in an open horse-drawn carriage, and a full marching band supervised by mounted parade marshals wearing white rosettes. The meeting had been advertised with placards bearing the Repeal slogans: “Hurrah for Repeal—Victoria our Queen—our watchword ‘Liberty’ and Ireland for the Irish.” The Times warned that the meetings would lead to insurrection. If they were not stopped, the Irish might support “a system which, they argue, cannot be illegal, because it is not checked by authority, and cannot be dangerous, because it is not opposed by force.” Did O’Connell think he was the High King of Ireland?17
O’Connell and other leading Repealers planned another meeting, for October 8, at Clontarf, a suburb of Dublin. O’Connell’s rhetoric had grown increasingly vehement. He argued that Parliament’s right to sit derived from the ancient witan, the Saxon council of nobles and bishops that had advised the English Crown for centuries before the Norman Conquest. Queen Victoria, by this logic, could call an Irish Parliament without consulting Westminster. Moreover, if O’Connell was right, the Act of Union would have to be considered unconstitutional under the “real” Saxon principles of English government. Peel called O’Connell’s bluff: the Clontarf meeting was banned as seditious, and crowds were warned to stay away by bills and placards around the city. Curious Dubliners crowded newspaper offices and the government’s printshop. O’Connell had no appetite for armed rebellion. He called off the meeting, although he considered the threat to send in the army a “base or imbecile step” on the part of the lord lieutenant. Meanwhile, when rowdy Repeal supporters assembled at Clontarf, ready for a riot, they found an empty field.18
Peel had set a clever trap. O’Connell looked weak. In early 1844, however, the government, eager for a final defeat and humiliation of Repeal, pressed its attack too far. O’Connell and his son John were arrested and convicted on charges of conspiracy. The men were sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, but released on appeal to the House of Lords. O’Connell was paraded through the streets of Dublin, his reputation repaired. However, the unity of Repeal was fractured. Now even the Repealers faced an “Irish question.” Conservative Catholics distanced themselves from more militant, secular, and nationalist activists. Peel exploited this fissure. In 1845, in an ambitious plan for the legislative session, he proposed to increase government funding to Saint Patrick’s College, the Catholic seminary founded in 1795 in Maynooth, and to establish secular Queen’s Colleges to provide nondenominational higher education in Ireland’s three largest towns outside Dublin (the colleges opened in 1849 and 1850, in Belfast, Cork, and Galway). O’Connell bitterly opposed the Queen’s Colleges as threats to Catholic higher learning. His rivals supported them in order to build a more inclusive Irishness on the model of European Romantic nationalism. O’Connell called his Irish critics from within Repeal “Young Ireland,” an allusion to Giuseppe Mazzini’s republican “Young Italy.” The nickname, meant as an insult, was adopted as a badge of honour.
Peel’s biographers often debate when and how he decided to abandon protectionism in favor of free trade, as well as the extent to which Irish affairs influenced his conversion. Regardless of the specific proportions in the mixture, Peel was mindful of both and triangulated his policy between the two explosive political issues. The Duke of Wellington told a friend that “rotten potatoes have done it all, they put Peel in his damned fright, and both for the cause and the effect he seems to feel equal contempt.” But Peel’s mind had changed apace with the prevailing opinion in the House of Commons. Every year from 1837, Charles Pelham Villiers, a Whig MP and a member of the Anti–Corn Law League, proposed a new motion for repeal of the Corn Laws, and every year the majority opposed to repeal got smaller, falling from more than 300 in 1842 to 132 by 1845. Free traders, one of Peel’s biographers wrote, “were weak in the House but they felt themselves strong in the empire.” As Britain consolidated its place as the centre of a global network of settlement and trade, it followed that free trade and liberal commercial policy would only become more popular, even at the expense of the traditional aristocracy.19
As the summer ended, reports from Ireland confirmed a growing subsistence crisis. Much of the potato harvest was lost. The government would need to do something about the failure, Peel insisted: “Letting things take their own course seems to me impossible.” Relief, Peel reckoned, would probably fall to the government to finance. Peel did not expect much private charity to be forthcoming. The British public, he believed, had soured on Ireland after Clontarf. Relief would need to be local to Ireland and publicly funded—ideally by Irish taxes.
Initially, the government rebuilt a familiar system on a much larger scale. A central Relief Commission, to be based in Dublin, would coordinate with parish and county relief committees, distributing food to be sold and reviewing requests to fund public works projects. Peel summoned the cabinet on October 30, 1845, to explain his plan, which overlapped with a play against the Corn Laws. Russia, Belgium, and the Netherlands, he pointed out, had already opened their ports to imported grain, waiving or reducing tariffs. The Corn Laws, he argued, would need to be temporarily suspended to lower the price of grain across the United Kingdom. On November 6, Peel proposed an order-in-council to open ports to grain at a much lower duty, to be followed shortly after by measures to allow maize into the UK virtually duty-free, part of a schedule of lower duties on all other grains. Peel next asked the Baring brothers’ banking firm to open secret negotiations to purchase £160,000 of maize from the United States, to be sold in Ireland.20
In early November, a delegation led by O’Connell presented an alternative plan, backed by the Dublin Corporation, to the lord lieutenant in Dublin. The corporation proposed that the government halt all grain exports from Ireland and prohibit distilling and brewing for the duration of the crisis, while also opening Irish ports to duty-free imports of colonial grain. They also proposed relief committees in every county to organise public works and maintain stores of food. The plan would be paid for with a 10 percent tax on residents, increased to up to 50 percent on absentees, along with a loan of £1.5 million, borrowed with the rent from Irish forests—owned almost entirely by the aristocracy—as collateral. The lord lieutenant, Lord Heytesbury, demurred—as O’Connell must have known he would. On December 8, at a meeting of the Repeal Association, O’Connell declared that if the Irish Parliament were to be restored, “the abundant crops with which Heaven has blessed” Ireland would be “kept for the people of Ireland” and the Irish Parliament would provide ample food and employment. These proposals were met with indifference or derision in Britain. Punch drew O’Connell as a giant potato, “the real potato blight of Ireland.”21
Peel continued to press his cabinet to at least temporarily suspend the Corn Laws. On November 22, however, Lord John Russell, the former home secretary and now the leader of the Whig party, forced the issue, publishing a letter from Edinburgh declaring his support for free trade in grain. Peel found himself in a very difficult position. Rather than surprising the Whigs with a proposal to wind down the Corn Laws, which would have forced Russell to support the government, Peel would now seem as if he were taking policy advice from the Leader of the Opposition. The threat of being embarrassed by the Whigs outweighed other considerations and may have pushed Peel to introduce his plans as quickly as possible.22
Only two days before Russell’s letter forced Peel’s hand, the Irish Relief Commission opened. The government planned to establish depots to sell imported food beginning in May 1846. Local committees were expected to buy maize from the depots in bulk and sell the grain to the poor in increments of up to seven pounds. In the end, the UK government spent more than £185,000 buying maize, with the expectation that about £130,000 would eventually be repaid. The money purchased more than forty-four million pounds of maize, which was reckoned to be enough to feed about 490,000 people for three months. On public works, the government spent £452,727, of which it expected £226,363 to be repaid through taxes on Irish land. The government also issued an additional loan of £133,536, to be repaid in full. Surveying for Board of Works projects cost another £7,840.23
Peel’s Relief Commission, a product of mainstream British politics and political economy, offered a chance to prove the superiority both of free trade over protection and of British management of Irish affairs. Relief, at first, was an argument for the Union, a large-scale project meant to show British compassion and to educate the Irish poor in civilisation. In February 1846, Punch adapted a nursery rhyme to Irish circumstances: “The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker / All jumped out of a rotten potato”—a playful adaptation of the sentiment among some in the United Kingdom that a widespread potato failure might be good for Ireland. The “rotten potato” might force the Irish to abandon their staple and begin a new era. If that happened, Punch predicted, “Paddy shall enjoy his own pork.… Let the little children of Ireland be taught the above-named doggerel as a household song of comfort and thanksgiving.”24
Opening a free trade in grain to Ireland would allow the government to follow the orthodoxies of political economy and expand Irish markets. Although Peel admitted that “there is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting upon them is always desirable,” the news from Ireland seemed very bad. “The removal of impediments to import,” Peel wrote, “is the effectual remedy.” But Peel’s ambitions risked scuppering his government. Charles Greville wrote in February 1846 that despite Peel’s small movements toward free trade, and despite having “the potato famine as a base for his operation, he cannot do what he does now without entirely breaking up his party.”25
The most novel part of Peel’s plan, the bulk purchase of maize, often known as “Indian corn,” “Indian meal,” or cornmeal, shows how ideas about labour and political economy and free trade overlapped in relief policies, and how relief was meant not only to halt starvation but to reform Irish economic life. Maize, crucially, was not grown in Britain. No one in Parliament had much to lose from the opening of a market for a new grain compared with the competition with foreign importers that would follow a reduction in tariffs on wheat or oats. Even better, maize might persuade Irish labourers to abandon potatoes as subsistence, a change that political economists predicted would encourage the Irish poor to buy grain instead, civilising Ireland through the opening of a new market for British grain. Maize would also open a new trade with the United States, “another ligament for uniting the two countries.” Maize was a critical rotation crop in the southern US, generally tended, like cotton, by enslaved labourers and poor sharecroppers. Intensive cropping of cotton followed by maize consumed and depleted the soil but produced two very saleable harvests. Antislavery Britain bought a lion’s share of American cotton; why not maize as well? Maize, boosters argued, might also independently improve the work ethic of Irish consumers. Enslaved workers in the United States and the Caribbean, a pamphlet crowed, believed “rice turns to water in their bellies and runs off, but Indian Corn stays with them and makes [them] strong to work.”26
Neither Peel nor any of his enemies imagined that the blight would last longer than a season. Some traditionalist Tories even considered the blight to be a hoax, perpetrated by Whigs and Repealers to discredit or destroy the Union. The Dublin Evening Mail declared in November 1845 that the potato shortage had been exaggerated to intimidate landlords out of collecting rent. The Duke of Wellington considered the blight an instance of an old problem. When potatoes failed, Irish labourers had to work for rent, but they weren’t used to spending cash for food, and so needed to be paid in rations: “This is the real difficulty in Ireland.” Other Tories were sceptical of the reported extent of the crop failure, but hopeful that Irish estates could be converted from potatoes to pasturage or grain. John Wilson Croker, an Anglo-Irish writer and former lord of the admiralty, proffered an arch quotation from Virgil’s Georgics: “The great Father himself has willed that the path of husbandry should not run smooth.” The blight was a challenge to improve Irish agriculture and teach the Irish to make bread that required “the plough, the harrow, the reaper, the carter, the bailiff, the salesman, the miller,” and to banish “single-handed Paddy who makes a hole in the ground to receive half a potato.”27
On December 4, 1845, as leading Tories publicly doubted the depth of the crisis in Ireland, the Times made known that when Parliament returned in January, the members would be asked to consider the repeal of the Corn Laws, with immediate effect. The report hinted that the cabinet was unanimous. The Times piece, perhaps placed by Peel, warned Tories that if they did not support a Tory move toward free trade, they would find John Russell in power. Furious at the leak, Stanley resigned. On December 11, Peel also resigned. However, Russell could not persuade the new Earl Grey, son of the former prime minister, to join a cabinet and was unable to form a government.28
Amidst this political intrigue, the question of whether free trade in grain would actually benefit Ireland had all but disappeared, a casualty of intense public interest in the backroom drama surrounding the Corn Laws. Rising prices for food in England after a year of poor grain further tipped the political balance, as cheaper imports would lower prices for English consumers. But there was very little infrastructure to import grain to Ireland—Irish farms exported wheat and oats, and rural Ireland had limited facilities for marketing grain directly to consumers. Even with lower prices wholesale, it would be expensive to transport grain to the parts of Ireland that needed it most. A flood of grain could not feed all of Ireland if there was no way of distributing it. Protectionist Conservatives fell in behind Lord George Bentinck. Before 1846 he had been mostly silent in the House, preferring to manage his stable of racehorses. Now, inflamed, Bentinck rallied Tories with claims that Peel was exaggerating the extent of the potato crisis. One Irish Tory agreed, scoffing that “fever, dysentery, and death” were “a kind of normal state” in Ireland.29
“Peel’s famine,” as Bentinck called it, was “an enormous lie” to force free trade through the House. Through the winter and into the spring, the protectionist Conservatives, especially Bentinck and the young Benjamin Disraeli, recognised that the balance of votes in the House of Commons meant that repeal of the Corn Laws was inevitable, and they used the debates to grandstand and to promote their own careers. In the meantime, crime associated with famine conditions was increasing in Ireland, and the lord lieutenant requested the power to declare martial law in districts with high rates of outrage. Coercion Acts and protectionism to keep grain prices high had once unified the Conservatives. As a pamphleteer quipped, “Shooting men in Ireland seems indeed the inseparable corollary to starving them in England.” But in 1846, although an unusually punitive Coercion Bill easily passed the Lords (among other provisions, it called for a curfew that only applied to tenants and labourers, on pain of seven years’ penal transportation), Peel’s enemies among the Whigs, Repealers, and protectionist Conservatives in the Commons introduced amendments and procedural motions to slow its progress and embarrass the prime minister.30
Peel was tied to the Coercion Bill, and it began to pull him under. The protectionists threw their arms around Peel in support, the better to stab him in the back. Well aware that Peel’s majority was fragile, they needled the prime minister for a vote on the legislation, and asserted that any outrages that happened while the bill was under debate would be blood on Peel’s hands. “From never having spoken,” a colleague remarked of Bentinck, “he never now does anything else.” Even if he had a majority to pass the bill, Peel knew that the protectionists and Whigs had every reason to draw out the process, further humiliating the government. In April, Daniel O’Connell gave a long speech, from the usual place occupied by the Leader of the Opposition. Disraeli wrote that O’Connell looked sick and was nearly inaudible, except to the front benches. “It was a strange and touching spectacle,” Disraeli commented. Most of the House saw a “feeble old man muttering before a table” and pretended to listen only out of respect for O’Connell’s decades of service in the House.31
Peel was reeling. The fox-hunting protectionist Tories were “eager to run him down and kill him in the open.” Finally, on June 25, Charles Buller, a liberal Whig and barrister with close connections to the British administration in Canada, gave a speech opposing coercion and the structure of the Relief Commission. He reminded the House of the £20 million raised as compensation for former slaveholders after the abolition of colonial slavery in 1834, and offered that “if a grant of money was required to put down Irish misery, the House would not hesitate in voting it… to a nation to whom they had behaved worse than even to the Africans.” But as he paused, messengers from the Lords entered the House; the Corn Laws had been repealed, pending royal assent. Buller kept speaking, but no one listened. The House, exhilarated, called for a vote on a reading of the Coercion Bill. The motion failed. A few days later, Peel resigned.32
The debates over the Union, the Corn Laws, and the Coercion Bill wove in and out of the question of how to address the blight in Ireland. Moreover, the debates took place according to the rhythms of the UK legislative calendar, not the Irish agricultural calendar. In consequence, Parliament debated measures to respond to developments in Ireland that had happened months before, and then made plans based on guesses about crop yields that could only be verified months later. Parliament’s sittings, alliances, and preoccupations left legislators perpetually lagging behind the crisis, while market ideology limited the options available for relief. The debates might have focused on Irish affairs, but on the ground in Ireland, Peel’s Relief Commission proceeded unsteadily, out of step with events in Westminster.
On October 14 and 15, 1843, about a week after Peel rooked O’Connell at Clontarf, two letters from Ireland written by “Philalethes” appeared in the Morning Chronicle, a London paper. Philalethes (“lover of truth,” a common literary alias at the time) had spent six weeks in Ireland following the progress of the Repeal campaign. Although he had left Ireland before the monster meeting, which had ended with confusion but no violence, the letters described an explosive, seditious, and revolutionary undercurrent to Repeal. The letters reappeared in other British and colonial newspapers—they were quoted in full, for example, in an April 1844 edition of the South Australian, published in Adelaide.
Philalethes argued that for Daniel O’Connell, the monster meetings were mostly self-promotional bluster. However, for the Irish Catholic majority and the people whom Philalethes considered to be their real leaders—a cadre of fanatical Catholic priests—Repeal was a call to arms. Philalethes described his sense of isolation in Ireland, where “English travellers have been as rarely seen… this year as white men in Timbuctoo.” He was convinced that farmers were stockpiling weapons. Poems published by Catholic intellectuals and ballads sung by labourers presaged war. The United Irish rebellion would repeat itself. Noticing an absence of public drunkenness at country fairs, Philalethes reminded readers, “The same untoward quiet preceded the breaking out of the last rebellion.” Drunkenness was a vice, but so was sobriety when practiced by the Irish. Philalethes predicted a civil war, in which “one or two millions might be spared with advantage… the country would be for the survivors.”33
These letters, by the standards of the British writing about the Irish, were unremarkable. What was remarkable, however, was that Philalethes was Charles Trevelyan, the senior Treasury bureaucrat who would preside over the implementation of Peel’s famine-relief program—and every other phase of famine relief from 1845 until the end of the crisis. When the letters appeared, O’Connell had just been arrested, and the government was anxious about the consequences. When Trevelyan had returned from Ireland, he reported to Robert Peel and the home secretary, James Graham. Trevelyan’s motivation for publishing his letters seemed to be to shame the government for not doing more than disrupting the mass meeting. The letters implied that Catholic priests ought to have been rounded up and arrested. Regardless of Trevelyan’s intent, Graham and Peel were livid. “He must be a consummate fool,” Peel wrote.34
Trevelyan almost certainly embroidered the letters. He may have been misled by the people he met in Ireland, who might have been happy to tease and mislead a sanctimonious Englishman. “We are not without our suspicions,” the editors of the Morning Chronicle wrote, “that ‘Philalethes’… afforded his share of amusement to ‘the boys.’” Or like a present-day newspaper columnist who voices his beliefs through an invented person—a taxi driver, a newsagent—Trevelyan may have invented the conversations he reported. What is eerie, however, is Trevelyan’s willingness to find comfort in the possibility that mass death might cure Ireland’s economic and political ills.35
In many histories of the Great Famine, Charles Trevelyan is the villain, the “virtual dictator” of the relief program, “the personification of free-market economics as a mask for colonial genocide,” a tight-fisted hand to the grindstone who considered the blight a divine punishment. That reputation is bolstered in popular culture. In the song “Fields of Athenry,” written by Pete St. John in 1979 and likely to be sung whenever Ireland plays England at anything, the hero is sent to an Australian prison colony because he “stole Trevelyan’s corn.” But Charles Trevelyan was not a Napoleonic figure, bending the Treasury around his ambition and will to power. He was a skilled bureaucrat whose faith in liberal political economy and laissez-faire, individual discipline and prudence was consistent with his devout Protestantism and faith in the “natural” laws of the market.36
Trevelyan served at the government’s pleasure but had powerful patrons—it is remarkable that he wasn’t sacked or demoted after his 1843 letters embarrassed both the prime minister and the home secretary. Trevelyan was a protégé of the great liberal writer, legislator, and lawyer Thomas Babington Macaulay, and also his brother-in-law. Trevelyan had started his career in the empire. His father was an archdeacon in Taunton, from an old Cornish gentry family, and his mother the third daughter of a baronet, and the Trevelyans had claimed to own hundreds of enslaved people in Grenada. His widowed mother received a share of nearly £27,000 in compensation under the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act. Educated at a grammar school and at Charterhouse, Trevelyan finished his education at the East India Company’s college, Haileybury, and entered company service in Bengal in 1826 as a clerk and translator.
In India he acquired a reputation for aggression and self-righteousness. Posted to Delhi, he attracted attention for publicly condemning the corruption of his boss, Sir Edward Colebrooke, which led to Colebrooke’s dismissal from the company. Trevelyan was only in his early twenties when he caught the attention of T. B. Macaulay, the law member of the Governor-General’s Council and the architect of English-language education in India. T. B. Macaulay was the son of Zachary Macaulay, the former governor of Sierra Leone and a leading figure in the antislavery movement. Trevelyan courted and married Macaulay’s sister, Hannah More Macaulay (named after the Evangelical reformer and abolitionist Hannah More, a close friend of Zachary Macaulay’s—there was room in an antislavery dynasty for the son of a slaveholding family). Trevelyan was known as a “stormy reformer” and sportsman, fond of the perilous blood sport of hunting wild boar with a spear from horseback. Macaulay was amused by Trevelyan’s intensity. “He has no small talk,” Macaulay wrote. “His topics, even in courtship, are steam navigation, the education of the natives, the equalization of the sugar duties, [and] the substitution of the Roman for the Arabic alphabet in the Oriental languages.”37
In 1840, at age thirty-two, Trevelyan was appointed assistant secretary of the treasury, a senior non-ministerial position. The promotion may have been made at Macaulay’s recommendation. Macaulay had returned from India in 1838 to serve as MP for Edinburgh, had been appointed to the Privy Council, and was secretary at war in Lord Melbourne’s cabinet. In addition to his work at the Treasury, Trevelyan wrote pseudonymous letters on many subjects as both “Philalethes” and “Indophilus.” He did not fear reprisal from his political bosses, because of either his patron Macaulay or his oblivious self-confidence—or both.38
In Ireland, Trevelyan, a gifted writer, coordinated the famine-relief effort through thousands of letters, overseeing the bureaucratic design and execution of the plans developed first by Peel and then by John Russell’s ministers. However, save a brief trip to Dublin, Trevelyan never visited Ireland during the famine. He managed the crisis as though it were a tabletop game, conducted by correspondence. This distance and confidence in the minutiae of Irish affairs were not unusual among British administrators. Ireland was an uncommon destination for British tourists, but readers could be forgiven for assuming that every person who visited Ireland after the Union wrote a book about their journey. In addition to the many works of travel literature penned between the Union and the famine, Parliament published reports and evidence from no fewer than 114 commissions, and 61 special committees struck to report on conditions in Ireland. All these printed words, one scholar observes, were a “paper landscape” that for many Britons was more real than actual Irish soil.39
Trevelyan held the views typical of a British liberal in the early Victorian era, and especially those of the pious and reform-minded Evangelical Anglican liberals predominant in antislavery and missionary organisations. Governments existed, Trevelyan wrote, to allow private individuals to live and work “with freedom and safety,” and little else. A government, he continued, should not do the work of “the land-owner, merchant, money-lender, or any other function of social life.” In his 1848 memoir of the famine, Trevelyan recognised it as a “sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure” of Irish backwardness would be accomplished. “God grant,” he wrote, that the promise of the Union might be fulfilled by “the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered.”40
For most of the Great Famine, government relief programs were administered by the Treasury and the Commissariat Department. In 1845–1846, the Relief Commission was an umbrella over these institutions as well as over the Coast Guard, the Royal Corps of Engineers, and other government departments. Trevelyan liaised between these agencies and the Treasury, which oversaw and audited spending. The Commissariat, a branch of the Treasury usually responsible for supplying imperial garrisons, supervised the distribution of food by a network of depots overseen by the Coast Guard. The Commissariat also oversaw the public works programs operated by the Irish Board of Works. True to the laissez-faire ethos, markets, not communities or individuals, were the primary object of relief. When the price of potatoes or oatmeal rose too high, relief officers would release funds or maize, in doses titrated to protect merchants from government competition and Irish labourers from the temptation to idle on the government dole. In principle, if the markets for food and labour were correctly managed, individual families would be able to find their own work and food.
At the beginning of the crisis, Trevelyan sent the leading commissary officers copies of Edmund Burke’s Thoughts and Details on Scarcity, written in 1795 and published posthumously in 1800. Burke wrote the pamphlet after a crop failure in Ireland, to persuade William Pitt to refrain from interfering with the markets for grain by capping prices or restricting trade. It wasn’t government’s job to directly feed the hungry, Burke wrote. To “provide for us in our necessities is not in the power of Government.” Agriculture, Burke argued, was no different than any other branch of commerce, and supporting agricultural prices or wages would be a disaster. “The whole of agriculture,” he wrote, “is a natural and just order.” Several officers commented on Burke’s pamphlet in their letters to the Treasury, although they might have been humouring or flattering Trevelyan. “Mr. Burke’s remarks you sent me are most just and statesmanlike,” one officer wrote. “But I will not write more on the subject, or I will never finish”—a terrific excuse for a student who has not done the required reading.41
Long after the famine, an enemy described Trevelyan as “trained to vigilance and circumspection among a dangerous population in India.” Although he worked for a domestic ministry, Trevelyan saw Ireland through a colonial lens, as an alien, uncivilised Celtic fringe of the United Kingdom. The Treasury’s partner, the Commissariat, organised into military ranks, was responsible for paying, lodging, and provisioning troops across the empire. It was primarily a colonial organisation, supporting British garrisons. In 1824, commissary officers who would later be assigned to Ireland served in Barbados, the Cape Colony, Bermuda, and Canada. Many had served in the Napoleonic Wars, when military logistics were stretched to the limit.42
The Irish headquarters of relief were in the Custom House in Dublin, the Georgian architectural masterpiece on the banks of the Liffey. The logistics of the relief effort were demanding. The Commissariat corresponded with more than a thousand individual relief committees, managing both orders for maize and requests for public works. With regard to the latter, the officers were inundated with applications—for bridges, roads, church repairs, new locks and canals on the Shannon, and more. With regard to the former, to distribute maize the commissary established a network of depots, each one under the supervision of a commissary-general or deputy commissary-general. The central depot, in Cork, established on the premises of a Royal Navy magazine, received unground maize from America, to be parched and ground in Cork’s industrial mills.43
From Cork, steamships delivered corn to depots at Limerick, Dublin, Westport, Sligo, and elsewhere, each of which was responsible for selling wholesale maize to local relief committees, in quantities up to twenty tons. The depots, supervised and guarded by Coast Guard officers, also sold packages of up to seven pounds of maize to individuals and families. “The multitude and eagerness of the parties crowding round the doors,” one officer wrote, “are difficult to describe.” The staff of the Irish Constabulary, with its eleven thousand officers, were given additional pay to work for the Relief Commission in distributing maize, and the Royal Corps of Engineers supervised many public works sites. Depots began opening in April and May 1846, first in Limerick, Cork, Galway, and Westport, followed in May and June by openings in Dublin and Dundalk, and then in Waterford. Only Sligo remained closed until later in the summer. The depots processed more than 67,000 pounds of unground maize, 26 million pounds of cornmeal, 1.18 million pounds of oatmeal, and nearly 14,000 pounds of ship’s biscuit.44
As the plan rolled out, commissary officers struggled with the relief committees. The first deliveries of maize arrived in February 1846, but the supplies were put in storage in the government’s network of depots. Commissariat officers complained that the committees refused to believe that the supply was finite and that the government intended to hold back grain until they considered distributing it to be absolutely necessary. Although commissary officers wrote more than fifty letters to local committees to explain the rules of the system, one officer reported that many continued to send carts to the shuttered grain depot.45
The relief committees themselves varied widely, from effective and decisive to inept and grasping. Generally, they represented the landowning and professional classes of the baronies. They included ex officio the lieutenant or deputy lieutenant of the county, the officer of the Board of Works, Catholic and Protestant clergy, the chair and guardians of the local Poor Law union, Coast Guard officers, and magistrates. The lord lieutenant was also allowed to appoint anyone he chose to a relief committee. In towns, they included mayors and aldermen, clergy, Poor Law officials, and magistrates.
Relief officers complained that local relief committees did not know, and refused to learn, the rules governing the food and work programs. But many also struggled with their own conscience; some violated commission rules out of compassion. Trained to haggle with purveyors and contractors and to provision armies on a tight budget, the Commissariat officers were professionals in austerity. But refusing soldiers and officers was easier than refusing starving or typhus-stricken families. They stood between the starving and food, and some gave it away. Trevelyan reminded them in letters that their quotidian work of making inventories, corresponding with local committees, paying out grants for public works, and selling meal in bulk had a grand purpose. The Irish poor needed to be led away from potatoes.46
When one officer gave away a few bags of meal, Trevelyan fired off a message to Randolph Routh, one of the commissaries-general leading the administration of the relief program, reminding him to keep his men in line. “Our plan,” he wrote to Routh, “is, not to give the meal away, but to sell it.” If the Irish came to depend on free corn, the plan would fail. In June 1846, a request to distribute free food was denied: “Gratuitous relief demoralizes the people.” It was maddening, heartbreaking work. One officer, working in King’s County (County Offaly) in April 1846, was confounded by the command to separate “normal” hunger and desperation from hunger and desperation caused by the failure of the potato.47
Maize recommended itself to Peel and others because it was a grain abundant in the Americas and rare in the United Kingdom. But what made maize appealing to politicians designing a relief program—its price, its connection to the markets of the United States, its scarcity in British and Irish markets—were precisely the things that made it alien to the Irish, who had little idea how to cook or eat it. A few of the commissary officers who had worked in Canada and traveled in the United States had eaten cornbread or grits and understood how to prepare cornmeal, but they were a small minority in a populous country. Trevelyan sent out copies of pamphlets with instructions on how to parch and grind kernels into meal, but his instructions were secondhand. Some of the Irish called maize “Peel’s brimstone” because of its yellow colour and infernal British origins.48
For Irish consumers, the problem with cornmeal was that it was prepared almost like oatmeal, but not quite—and small differences in preparation made cornmeal cooked like oatmeal inedible. Oatmeal made into oatcakes would adhere on a griddle after being mixed in cold water, but cornmeal cakes prepared this way would fall apart. Cooking cornmeal, like oatmeal, into “stirabout” porridge by steeping it in cold water, then bringing it to a boil would create a yellow paste with the consistency of mortar.
In short, maize was presented as a gift from Britain that the Irish were expected to buy—a gift that looked like sulphur and turned into thick, disgusting glop in water. It was an alien food chosen because it was alien. The government and local authorities did offer incentives to use maize—a baker in Dublin was awarded a medal for baking cornbread. But prisoners in a Limerick gaol rioted when offered cornmeal. Routh hopefully noted that at least some of the Irish believed it prevented fever and that it was “a good working food, and not accompanied by heart-burn.” Rough and ill-prepared cornmeal scoured the intestines of many who ate it. Some feared it; some imagined it had been sent as a joke or as a killing blow. But “when hunger had progressed a little,” as Asenath Nicholson wrote, “these fears subsided, and they cared neither what they ate, or who sent it to them.”49
The government’s plan to import maize had always been intended to prime the ignition of private trade that, eventually, would take over and replace government trade. Later in the famine, the disconnect between the immediacy of the crisis and the British government’s preoccupation with protecting the future of Irish markets and preserving the work ethic of starving recipients of relief would become grimly risible. But in 1845–1846, few imagined the blight would come back at all, much less come back the next season, and worse. In principle, it made sense for the government to open a trade in cornmeal for a season and attract other importers, while remaining in the market to prevent profiteering during the potato failure. Then, when the crisis passed, the government could withdraw and count on the laws of political economy to regulate the market fairly and profitably for both importers and consumers.
And the plan worked, up to a point. Following the government, private merchants began importing their own maize. There were fairly minor logistical struggles; for example, both private and government buyers complained about the fragile barrels American merchants used to pack the grain, with thin staves and loose hoops. If a stevedore stumbled with a barrel, the “eggshell packages” would spill out their contents. Irish consumers reportedly preferred the cornmeal sold by the government, which was packed in sacks stamped with the royal coat of arms. Despite these issues—the kind that the Commissariat’s officers were trained to resolve—relief officers overall were pleased with the effects of the initial distribution of maize in the countryside. Some believed that the corn had persuaded Irish farmers of the government’s compassion and support: “They have seen, and are not slow in declaring, that in a great emergency they are not neglected.”50
In the first wave of the blight, in short, the gulf between the laws of economic life and government faith in them, and inchoate, unpredictable reality was only beginning to open. The first wave was not as severe as the waves that followed, and Peel’s relief measures worked reasonably well to prevent mass death (especially by comparison with the winter of 1846–1847). Across Ireland’s 2,056 administrative divisions, only a few divisions in Ulster and Munster did not report any blight. Seventy-two percent of divisions reported crop loss of at least 30 percent, 14 percent reported crop loss of over 50 percent, but only 5 percent reported crop loss of 70 percent or more. Counties including Antrim, Clare, Kilkenny, Monaghan, and Waterford lost about 40 percent of the crop, while in Armagh and Wicklow, almost no potatoes were lost.51
The death toll in the first wave of the blight was significant, but small by comparison with subsequent years. Overall, it is not clear exactly how many people died in the Irish Great Famine; scholars agree that at least one million people died by starvation and hunger-related diseases between 1845 and 1851. It is clear from partial demographic evidence, and a wealth of anecdotal evidence, that 1846–1847 and 1848–1849 were especially deadly. Consequently, because proportionally more people died in later waves of blight, many historians consider Peel’s relief plan to have been at least a qualified success. Local relief committees, for the most part, were satisfied with the government’s plan, and said so in letters. Folk histories of the famine suggest that many believed that the meal had been sent from the United States by Irish immigrants and other Americans as donations, and that relief committees had seized these gifts to sell to the poor. “Sad to say a ship load of American corn coming to Ireland,” one oral history explained, “would pass ship-load of Irish corn going out of the Irish port to England.” Other folk histories claimed the “English Government bought all the grain of the country for a very small price” and then sold it back to Irish farmers at extortionate rates. What looked like successes in letters from relief committees in making a market and winning the hearts and minds of the Irish poor was likely much more complicated in reality.52
The first wave of the blight was incomplete and uneven—and in areas where it was intense, the countryside was volatile. In many parts of Ireland, stores of Indian meal were full, and the 1845 harvest had been a vintage year for oats. But prices were rising. In Drogheda, even skilled workers earning six shillings a week found themselves spending all their wages on rent, turf, oatmeal, cornmeal, and milk. Potatoes were unaffordable, even where they were available. In one jurisdiction 1,250 people requested workhouse relief, more than three times the capacity of a midsize Irish workhouse. There was heavy pressure on the government to permit outdoor relief under the Irish Poor Law. The Relief Commission refused, demurring until Parliament could decide the questions when “its judgment will not be influenced by the contemplation of peculiar and unusual distress among the poorer classes of the country.”53
Food riots broke out. A mob attacked ships carrying grain down the Suir from Clonmel to Waterford at a bend in the river near the village of Kilsheelan, in Tipperary. A terrified magistrate aboard a grain barge leapt into the river and swam to safety. About fifteen kilometres from Kilsheelan, in Fethard, government stores were looted by rioters.54 Afterward, barges on the route were escorted along the banks by horse-drawn cannon, fifty cavalry, and eighty infantry. A drove of pigs seized during the Clonmel riot was held hostage; the mayor of Clonmel was offered the pigs in exchange for prisoners. Commissary officers were angry. “If there were a doubt in any reflecting man’s mind,” one wrote, referring to Trevelyan’s recommended reading, “on the correctness of ‘Burke’s Thoughts and Details on Scarcity’, he need only come to Ireland.” Army officers were loath to guard the government’s warehouses without additional hazard pay.55
Each layer of the Relief Commission had a different perspective on what it was expected to prevent. In England, Trevelyan and other Treasury officers worried that the plan for Ireland would fall apart. In 11 Downing Street, the office and London residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, relief was meant to be a temporary therapy, a means to forestall starvation and encourage reform. In Dublin, at the Custom House, Routh and other Commissariat officers worried about maintaining fiscal and logistical discipline in correspondence with many hundreds of often unruly and spendthrift relief committees. Individual relief officers, in turn, worried about what would happen if they ran out of meal or money. Some worried that society would collapse, that “there would not have been an animal left alive in the country, nor a mill nor a store unpillaged.” They also occasionally worried that the Irish poor were too far outside “the circle in which commerce revolves” to benefit from relief, that they might “starve in the midst of plenty.” Trevelyan acknowledged the need to make exceptions to his rules “where it is evident that the consequence of our insisting on the strict execution of our rule would be that the people would starve.” Whatever it cost, he wrote in another letter, “the people must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to starve.” Trevelyan did not clarify how officers could determine when the line between ideological discipline and human decency had been crossed.56
Public works programs ran parallel to the distribution of meal. The free trade in American grain was to be bolstered by a program that would put the Irish to work. Free trade, within the moral universe of political economy, was natural and improving. Opening grain markets would encourage Irish labourers to buy their food—an engine of civilisation. Labour, in turn, was also considered civilising. A working person, after all, could not be truly poor; only a dependent pauper could be. If opening the grain trade could permanently transform Irish trade, perhaps a program of labour for cash wages could permanently alter the Irish work ethic.
The Board of Works, a long-standing Irish government department, gained a new file under the Relief Commission. Like the meal program, public works were intended to prevent graft and self-dealing by the wealthy in famine-struck districts. Local relief committees, under the auspices of the Board of Works, were permitted to hold presentment sessions to hear bids for projects that could employ the indigent. The projects would then be forwarded to the lord lieutenant’s office for preliminary approval, then forwarded to the Relief Commission in the Custom House for a second signature, then forwarded to the office of the Board of Works (also housed in the Custom House), then approved by a military or civil engineer. The commissioners of public works were besieged with letters complaining about the process, as well as petitions from landowners “objecting to the lines in which the roads are proposed to be made, as destroying ornamental or highly-cultivated land.”57
Presentment sessions were meant to be organised at the barony level, but many parishes held their own competing sessions. Landowners and prominent tenants used the sessions to try to fund projects to increase the value of their land; they made presentments “conducted more with a view to private, than public interests.” Local feuds spilled over into debates about which projects to propose and which to fund. The Treasury sent angry letters to remind local committees and engineers that any public works were for the relief of distress caused by the failure of the potatoes. But as one of the officers explained to Trevelyan, “Farmer, priest, landlord, and tenant all make strong attempts to squeeze something out of the Government purse. It is very difficult for the Lord Lieutenant, under the applications and statements made to him, to resist ordering works.” Most of the relief-era public works projects were known as “jobs”—graft or pork, roads either to nowhere or to the doors of the local landlord’s or agent’s house.58
In April, a mob in Carrick attacked the people selected by the Board of Works, smashing their tools and complaining about the low rate of wages, tenpence per day. At Clonmel, the army was called in; the Cork relief committee imported corn directly from Liverpool after the relief board refused to sell them more than fifty sacks of twenty stone each. The workers at Carrick wanted to be paid at least 1s. 6d. per day. Strikes on the relief works were common. The daily average of workers steadily grew from 36,308 in the week ending July 4, to 83,781 in the week ending July 25. Predictably, public works peaked in July along with the sale of maize. In June and July 1846, the government issued as much as 233 tons of meal per week; some subdepots sold as much as 20 tons in a single day. In the end, the 1845–1846 works cost Parliament £733,372, half given as a grant and the other half as a loan, supported by £98,000 in donations. Each local relief committee had its own agenda for spending the money, and the Relief Commission complained that the rapid growth of public works was “not an index to the state of distress, or to the amount of employment necessary to be given to afford relief.”59
To get a job on the public works, a worker needed a ticket from the relief committee. Work tickets were valuable assets and quickly became a medium of exchange. “Employment,” an officer wrote, “cannot be found for the numbers that will require it.” Unscrupulous relief committees distributed tickets to favoured tenants or sold them to middlemen. Just as police and army officers guarded maize stores, they also guarded cash—locked boxes of silver coins holding up to £1,000—which had to be sent with clerks to pay the public works wages in more remote Irish regions that lacked banking facilities. But like the spread of the blight itself, the 1845–1846 public works program was regional. Nearly a fifth of the work took place in County Clare, and another fifth in Counties Limerick and Galway. In comparison, fewer than two hundred people were on the payroll in Dublin, and fewer still in County Donegal.60
The public works program ran far ahead of the Treasury’s hopes for an orderly labour market. If the concern of the commissary was to use “the market” to the benefit of the Irish, the Board of Works was supposed to prevent landlords from improving their land for free or cheaply. “The scarcity is so extensive,” Trevelyan wrote, “and the habits of the country are so peculiar, that our plan of relief, whatever it may be, ought to be such as will admit of a clear and easy distinction being made between what is indispensably required for the relief of the people suffering from scarcity, and what is demanded under the pretext of that scarcity, in order to forward the interested views of various parties.”61
The clash between the pragmatic needs of the Irish poor and the settled ideology of poor relief put relief officers’ efforts in knots. The closer officers got to Irish rural poverty, the more complicated and impossible the situation seemed, and the less it resembled the clean logic of political economy. Presentment sessions seemed to show an Irish gentry eager to enrich itself at the government’s expense and abdicate its responsibility to employ the poor. The labour market, in turn, seemed to show that Irish workers would take the path of least resistance, choosing low-paid public work over better-paying private employment.
The Relief Commission also faced an unexpected new problem. The usual flow of migrant agricultural labourers to England had stopped. English farmers complained, and the commissioners in Dublin and London assumed that “every labouring man in the country was directed to look to the Board of Works for employment.” The Lords of the Treasury concluded that “people employed on the Relief Works have indulged in habits of indolence, preferring the receipt of an eleemosynary allowance under the name of wages” to better wages for private work in either Ireland or England. The Treasury demanded that relief officers inspect local public works projects, and that local committees only dispense tickets to workers with no other means of support; the tickets had to be signed by two members of the committee and issued only by the secretary of the relief committees.62
The gulf between the idea, or ideal, of what relief was meant to do and what the potato failure had done grew wider month after month. The relief system was elaborate and bureaucratic—an impressive example of Victorian administrative energy and acumen. But Ireland was too big and populous and the Relief Commission too small by comparison to survey or relieve the entire country, even during this first, partial wave of the blight. In Limerick and County Clare, as much as one-third of the population was estimated to have neither food nor money. Smaller farmers, those holding under fifteen acres, could not afford to employ labourers. Without wages, and out of fear of blight, the number of people taking conacre had fallen 75 percent. A Mayo newspaper wrote, “We have heard of the appointment of commissioners—of the renting of stores—of the arrival of Indian corn and American flour, but we cannot discover a single instance of any starving family being relieved.”63
Villages and towns fell through the cracks. In Claggar, a village in County Meath, deliveries of meal were infrequent, and the meal that was delivered was wet and mouldy. Workers who ate the mouldy meal became violently ill.64 As in previous food shortages, epidemics broke out among the hungry, tired, and filthy. Many workers suffered from diarrhea and dysentery, “painful and violent griping, with other violent symptoms” in acute twelve-hour bursts, which officials blamed on eating blighted potatoes. In Glownton, County Cork, medical officers noticed a 40 percent increase in dysentery. Some officials observed an unusual “gastric fever,” and many were struck both by terrible gastrointestinal distress and by colds and flus, which circulated readily. As during the 1817 typhus epidemic, whole sick families crowded into beds. In County Wexford, in addition to diarrhea, skin diseases increased as much as a hundredfold. There was a spike in petty crime, especially theft and intimidation.65
In 1846, the price of potatoes climbed beyond what many Irish families could afford. In some markets the price of Lumpers had increased as much as 350 percent to the hundredweight. But the hungry still wanted potatoes, and many could not afford or could not acquire meal. In March 1846, in Cork, in the Fermoy Poor Law Union, dozens of women and children followed behind the plows, “quarrelling for the rotten potatoes” that had been left in the ground at the harvest. In Tyrone, the last potatoes went into the ground as seed. In Wicklow, a local committee reported that the majority of the people kept eating “food totally unfit for use.” In Galway, people had begun to starve to death. In Limerick, committees heard reports of cattle poaching. In Mountmellick, County Laois, families were seen eating the foul runoff from a starch yard.66
In England, as the first season of the blight came to an end, English workers were growing resentful of the attention paid to Ireland and Irish questions. The blight had devastated English potato fields as well, and the combination of expensive food and sagging industrial productivity squeezed the English working class. A Newcastle paper inveighed, “Already villages are sickening with the attempt to use the tainted wreck of the crop. Already cholera and typhus are the fearful companions of want.” If grain and work were scarce in England, how were industrial labourers “to feed the Irish millions, when they cannot get bread for themselves? Is it just that they should be the victims of so absurd and cruel an experiment?”67
Perhaps under pressure to declare victory, Trevelyan assured the government that the north of Ireland was virtually secure, thanks to government control of prices through cornmeal distribution. The south had also been saved, he continued, by “the assistance afforded by the Government, either directly, or by means of money, meal, or employment; or indirectly, by the stimulus and organization which has been given to private effort.” But Routh, on the ground in Ireland, worried that the celebration might be premature. July had been worse than June, he wrote. The pressure on the government depots was enormous and growing. If the public learned that the government was finished, prices would quickly rise. It wasn’t the end of the struggle, he wrote; it was “the crisis of the struggle.”68
From the outset, famine-relief policies were woven on a framework of contradictory principles. Officials were wary of any intervention that might directly relieve the suffering of Irish individuals or communities. Irish civilisation—reckoned as market participation and disciplined labour—seemed too flimsy to allow for the provision of food or money to the starving without asking for work in exchange. Markets, however, required extensive husbandry and intervention—paradoxically, to safeguard laissez-faire principles from the hazards posed by the Irish poor, who were left to find a “natural” path back from starvation. Famine-relief policy was designed to create conditions that would, in theory, impel the Irish to use the market to help themselves. Ecological crises are almost always enmeshed in a complex web of man-made social, economic, environmental, and technological forces. The famine had its natural causes, but it was neither wholly “natural” nor inevitable. The depth of British faith in the market, however, meant that the politics of famine relief had been wholly naturalised. Moreover, long-standing and bitter controversies in Parliament over the Acts of Union and free trade shaped Peel’s famine-relief policies in predictable ways. Ironically and tragically, it was the government response to the arrival of the blight that proved to be, in a sense, inevitable.69
Peel’s plan had its virtues, but it was designed to work for one season of crop failure, not longer. Moreover, as a letter to the Cork relief committee explained, relief had prevented starvation but might have set the stage for sequelae of multiplying crises. Workers whose potatoes failed were still bound to work for their landlords, but now they had no potatoes to offset low wages or to account for the many days’ labour they owed in place of cash. They bought their meal, but “whatever money they raised by the sale of their pigs, sheep, and by pawning their bed and body clothes, except the squalid rags they now wear, is exhausted.” Workers had no money for food, and their employers had no money to pay them with even if they had work to offer—which they didn’t. They “must either starve or rob.” When seed potatoes were imported to Wexford and Sligo, no one would buy them. Farmers were reluctant to plant potatoes, and even more reluctant to offer conacre. Rent evaporated. Far, far more terrifying, however, were the rumours that the new crop of potatoes was already blighted in the ground. In mid-August 1846, amid those ominous signs, the first Relief Commission concluded its business. Things were about to get far worse.70