Chapter Eight
The Immigrant Peoples: The Irish
By contemporary standards, mid-nineteenth-century Canada was a remarkably homogenous society. While today, most people who trace their heritage back to the United Kingdom would likely refer to their ancestry as British, the very first set of census takers scrupulously recorded anglophone national origins as being English, Scottish, and Irish.* As we’ve seen, these earliest census takers muddied the demographic waters by refusing to acknowledge that “American” was a distinct culture. They recorded the growing number of American settlers by referencing their more distant national origins. When Canada’s first national census was undertaken in 1871, the process had evolved considerably and this deficiency was fixed.
The 1871 census provided a thorough reckoning of the new country. It asked 211 questions ranging over a wide variety of topics. The four provinces were subdivided into 1,701 sub-districts, and information was collected on 3,485,761 people. We now have a statistical understanding of much of the minutiae of national life: how many horned cattle the country had, how many yards of homemade linen were spun, and how many barrels of medicinal cod liver oil were produced. A staff of under fifty people collated the final report, and two years later produced a bilingual, hard-bound, three-volume record of the nation’s statistics. In 1879, Parliament tasked the Census Bureau to increase the scope of its efforts, to include any territories that might be added, as well as to conduct “collection, abstraction, tabulation and publication of vital agricultural, commercial, criminal and other statistics.”1
Immigration to Canada from 1760 until 1812 was mostly from the United States. During and after the American Revolutionary War, United Empire Loyalists came to Canada in their tens of thousands. At the time, it was very dangerous to remain loyal to Britain in many parts of America. Loyalty to the Crown was frequently viewed as treason, and confiscation of one’s land, vigilante justice, and the practice of smearing “Tories” with boiling tar and feathers was not uncommon. However, contrary to popular notions, not all Loyalists were of British background, and not all came to Canada because they had an abiding and fervent loyalty to the British Crown. Some were seeking religious freedom, some were First Nations who had allied themselves with Britain, some were recent black slaves promised their freedom, and some came for the promise of free land. Nevertheless, they were all gratefully accepted by colonial governments anxious to develop their territories.
The welcome reception of American immigrants ended promptly with the War of 1812. With the outbreak of war, American settlers were viewed with suspicion, and immigration from Britain quickly replaced the settlers streaming into Canada from the United States.
Although there was Loyalist emigration to the Atlantic provinces, British settlement had been well-established there for many years. Four years before creating the Red River settlement, in P.E.I., Lord Selkirk established his first immigrant farming communities of Highland Scots who had been evicted from their small acreages to make room for sheep in the clearances. Shortly after, waves of Irish immigrants followed.
Prior to the Confederation era, Canada had seen relatively small-scale and sporadic Irish immigration. The Irish had been amongst the very first to settle in Atlantic Canada. Newfoundland had the first recorded Irish settlements as early 1675. In the 1830s, several hundred Irish settlers homesteaded in coastal villages in the Maritimes, but later in the decade many moved to more fertile areas in the interior river valleys. Most of the Irish in these initial waves were Protestants from Ulster who were escaping the rising cost of land, crowded rural conditions, and declining employment opportunities. By the end of the 1830s, a large proportion of these Irish immigrants migrated to cities and towns — almost certainly because they did not want to go back to farming after their harsh and unprofitable experiences as farmers back in Ireland. As a result, by the mid-1840s, cities like Halifax had large Irish populations. By comparison with later waves of Irish immigration, these initial arrivals were reasonably prosperous. Things were soon to change drastically. By 1845, Ireland was to experience the first of six seasons of a devastating potato blight, massive starvation, and a tidal wave of migration that saw the country’s population plunge by almost 25 percent.
The Great Famine in Ireland was the result of a nationwide potato blight. The crop failure was caused by a mold that attacked the leaves and edible roots of the potato plant. It was a catastrophe that grew into a disaster of biblical proportions. For over a hundred years, Irish farmers had raised only two different strains of potatoes. They were simple to grow, nourishing, and could regularly produce yields capable of feeding a large family on Ireland’s tiny farm plots, most of which were less than six acres. Shortly after the potato’s introduction to Ireland, it became the nation’s most important crop, with more than half the country depending exclusively on potatoes as a dietary staple. The crop failed for six consecutive years.
Within weeks of the potato blight’s first appearance, crops across the country began to wilt and rot in the fields. No one was prepared for such a disaster. Ireland had few reserves of food, and famine quickly set in. Instead of relief, the government in London initially established hard-labour, public works projects, and imported limited amounts of corn from North America. These programs were abandoned as too costly in 1847, and three million Irish, almost all of them Catholic peasant farmers, became dependent on an entirely inadequate program of soup kitchens funded by the government in London. By the autumn of 1847, people were dying in droves from starvation. The soup kitchen program was then closed and replaced with a program set up under locally administered “Poor Laws.”
The program of Poor Laws was established to remove the burden of providing for famine relief from the government in London. The new scheme transferred responsibility for feeding the starving Irish population to local landowners. Under these new laws, to be eligible for relief, hungry Irish families had to abandon their farms and live in squalid workhouses. There were not enough workhouses to meet the demand, however, and many of those that were opened had to close for lack of funding. In addition to the famine, related diseases took a huge toll. Dysentery, cholera, smallpox, influenza, typhoid, and what was generically called “fever” killed thousands.
Despite the utter destitution in Ireland, wealthy absentee Irish landlords were shipping surplus produce to mainland Britain, and Britain was, in turn, exporting food to mainland Europe. The British public knew of the catastrophe taking place fifty miles across the Irish Sea, yet there was remarkably little sympathy or outcry anywhere in Britain for their plight. The government, professing an unshakeable belief in free trade, refused to spend money on the problem, as the very thought of public charity ran contrary to its absolutist views on placing undue restraints on either government or commerce.
The acting treasury minister, Sir Charles Trevelyan, who was responsible for handling the Irish famine, proclaimed that the “problem of Irish overpopulation being altogether beyond the power of man, the cure had been supplied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence.”2 Under his watch, a million men, women, and children starved to death, and almost two million people emigrated to England, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Trevelyan was knighted in 1848 for his services to government.
Those who were lucky enough to escape to Canada faced several appalling sets of difficulties. The landowners, unwilling to spend money on poor houses, instead chose the least expensive route and simply evicted the farmers for failure to pay their rent, or, in many cases, paid the fares to ship starving peasant families to Canada. More often than not, desperate Irish farmers would be told that upon arrival in Canada they would be welcomed as valued immigrants and provided an allowance as well as shelter, food, and clothing. It was a cruel fraud. Distressed and starving, they believed the tale. The landowners were confident in knowing that should their former tenants survive the three-thousand-mile ocean voyage, they would have no means of ever returning to make a claim against them.
Thousands of Irish migrated to Canada in unmodified “coffin ships” like these.
By early June 1847, fourteen thousand Irish immigrants arrived in Quebec. It was the largest and easily the most dramatic migration ever to reach Canada. They were the first of the famine migrants and were crammed into the holds of forty hastily converted timber ships. The ships rode at anchor in a two-mile line down the St. Lawrence, thirty miles downstream from Quebec City, all waiting to disembark their passengers at Grosse Isle for a medical inspection.
In getting to Grosse Isle, the surviving passengers endured a horrific journey. The average sea voyage took two to three months, with families stuffed together in dank, dark, rolling, unheated timber holds with no semblance of comfort or privacy. Food and fresh water were revolting and inadequate. Toilets were wooden buckets. Two Canadian priests, who visited one “coffin ship” after it docked, described walking in holds that left them up to their ankles in human filth. There was no means of keeping clean and medical facilities or assistance was non-existent. No one was enforcing the existing regulations, so even the crudest standards of hygiene and safety were ignored. As a result, the mortality rate on the voyage, depending on the ship, was between 30 and 40 percent.
The voyage of the Virginius from Liverpool was not unusual for the ships making that journey during those early years of the famine. After leaving Ireland in 1847 with 476 passengers on board, 158 (including 9 crew members) died in transit. Arriving at Grosse Isle, a further 106 were diagnosed with fever. People died most frequently of typhus, but dysentery and cholera were also widespread. For the next five years, lines of ships, all with similar tales and comparable statistics, would queue up off Grosse Isle, waiting to disembark their passengers at Canada’s entry point quarantine station.
Once ashore at Grosse Isle, immigrants would almost always find the primitive medical facilities overwhelmed. The survivors of the ocean voyage were invariably sick and weakened. Five thousand Irish are buried on the island.
The few temporary wooden sheds at Grosse Isle were quickly filled to overflowing with the people from the first ship. For the next several months, the island’s staff tried to house sick refugees on the dirt floors of tents, but as the tents soon filled, people were stretched out on the open ground. Meals were worse than aboard the coffin ships: tea, porridge, or a weak broth served three times a day. New sheds were eventually built, but in insufficient numbers, with no proper beds and no ventilation or toilet facilities. The sick were bedded down regardless of sex or age, with two people head to foot on boards. Exhausted nursing staff, whose numbers were greatly reduced by contracted illness, were at one point relieved by prisoners who had been pressed into service. The convicts were worse than useless; they stole the personal effects of the dying.
However, it was by no means all sordid. There was conspicuous heroism. Nurses, doctors, orderlies, clergy, and volunteers often worked themselves to the point of collapse, dozens of them, including the mayor of Montreal, dying beside their patients.3
When refugee numbers became too great, harried doctors, many often mortally sick themselves, did the most cursory of inspections onboard ship. Striding past lines of bedraggled men, women, and children, they would direct that those who showed no obvious signs of fever be allowed to carry on to Montreal or points west.4
From Grosse Isle, the refugees were sent on, usually by barge, to Montreal. Thousands, carrying latent infections, would fall ill within two weeks. Near what is now the neighborhood of Pointe-Saint-Charles in Montreal, several thousand more refugees died of typhus in the fever sheds. Nobody is certain of the exact numbers. With orphaned children and illiterate, undocumented adults dying in their scores each day, record keeping was not a priority. The dead were hastily buried with little ceremony in mass graves. The area in Pointe-Saint-Charles was cordoned off by the militia to prevent unauthorized access, or the escape of infected patients. Many of the refugees who showed no symptoms in Montreal were crammed onto open barges, shivering in their rags at night, blistered by the sun and soaked by the rains as they slowly made their way further upstream to Kingston and Toronto. For thousands more, the same fate awaited them in hastily built fever sheds along the shores of Lake Ontario.
Of those who survived the ordeal of their voyage, more than half moved on to the United States as soon as they possibly could. Anxious to leave behind any ties to the British Crown, and urged on by reports of easy employment and security, many of these migrants found themselves discriminated against and marginalized by a hostile Protestant culture.
Things were no better in Canada. Many Irish Protestants who had emigrated years earlier were deeply antagonistic to their fellow countrymen, and the arrival of large numbers of Irish Catholics gave a huge boost to the formation of Orange Lodges across English Canada.5 In the English community, the feelings of cultural superiority and racial animosity so prevalent back in Britain, were displayed in an only slightly muted version in Canada. It was not uncommon to see signs in shop windows and newspapers that read, Help Wanted — No Irish Need Apply.
A typical Irish working man, Ontario, 1860s.
The Irish, like so many immigrant groups, tended to settle near others from similar backgrounds. Large Irish Catholic communities rapidly sprang up in Montreal, Quebec City, Kingston, Toronto, and dozens of smaller villages and towns. A sizeable percentage of Irish Catholics, for the same reasons as their fellow Protestant countrymen, preferred to settle in urban areas. For many, bitter memories of hard-scrabble farming and hunger were all too vivid. With little education and few marketable skills, they found employment as labourers in the mills and in the timber and construction trades.
Those who chose to, and those with no other alternatives, went back to farming, some working initially as hired hands while some, thoroughly hardened by their background, chose to carve out their future as homesteaders.
Like so many of Canada’s resilient immigrant groups, the Irish have had a hugely positive influence on Canada. Theirs was not an easy path. They had to overcome the period’s vicious caricatures of them as violent, disloyal, prone to drunkenness, and indolent. But over the course of a few decades, as religious tolerance grew and the Irish repeatedly proved their worth, the bigotry, exclusion, and marginalization decreased, and they took their rightful place as a vigorous and essential part of the Canadian mosaic.
* The Welsh, being a small and presumably affable minority, were often lumped in statistically with the English.