Five Points

by Tyler Anbinder

  In a surprising number of cases, husband and wife emigrated together and left the children behind. Michael and Bridget Conway left their four-year-old daughter Catharine in Ireland when they emigrated in 1850. She rejoined her parents two years later. John and Mary Hughes left four children—ranging in age from nine to one—in Ireland when they departed for America in 1850. They brought the middle children over a year later and the other two only in 1853. Their youngest child, Ann, by then four, undoubtedly had no memory whatsoever of her parents when they met her in New York. Even widows sometimes left children behind. When widow Margret McHugh embarked for America in 1849, she left five children ranging in age from twelve to two. She became a washerwomen in New York, and brought her twelve-year-old daughter Mary over in 1850, then two sons in 1852, and finally the two youngest girls, who she had not seen for four years, in 1853. It did not take most families this long to reunite completely, but even a relatively short period of separation brought anxiety to all involved and guilt to the immigrant who could not pay for the reuniting of the family as quickly as promised.13

  The names of these immigrants reflect the Irish domination of Five Points. But other ethnic groups constituted nearly a quarter of the neighborhood’s adult population. Most numerous after the Irish were natives of the German states. The important distinction within this group was religion. The German community in Five Points was almost evenly divided between Jews and Christians. The Jews in Five Points may not have considered themselves “German”; they emigrated from what was then often referred to as “Prussian Poland,” the region of Poland annexed by Prussia in the eighteenth century. Yet if these Jews are counted as Prussian and therefore German, Jewish German families made up 53 percent of the neighborhood’s German population.14

  One might imagine that these Christian and Jewish “Germans” would have too little in common to consider themselves a “community.” They do not, for example, seem to have come from the same regions of Germany. Most German states were represented in the Five Points population. But it appears that slightly more than half of the Christians were natives of two areas, Baden-Württemberg in the southwest and Hanover in the north. The remainder came mostly from Bavaria, Saxony, and Westphalia.15 In contrast, the Jews in Five Points came overwhelmingly from a single place: Poznan. Referred to in the nineteenth century as “Posen” and located midway between Berlin and Warsaw, Poznan was a Polish duchy that Prussia had occupied since the eighteenth century. At least 70 percent of the Jews living in antebellum Five Points were natives of this single Polish region.16

  After the Irish and the Germans, no other ethnic or racial group made up more than 3 percent of the Five Points population in 1855. The size of the Italian contingent is somewhat surprising, even at 3 percent, given that large numbers of Italians did not begin immigrating to New York until the late nineteenth century. At this point they were concentrated almost exclusively on two blocks—Anthony Street east of Centre and Orange Street north of the Five Points intersection. A final group of Five Pointers—African Americans—merits discussion because their presence in the neighborhood was declining rapidly in these years. In 1825, African Americans constituted 14 percent of the Sixth Ward’s population. In 1855, however, only 4 percent of the ward’s residents were black, and they made up only 3 percent of the neighborhood’s population in that year. It is possible that the 1855 census undercounted the black populace. The 1855 census taker, for example, does not seem to have ventured into many of the infamous tenements in the part of Little Water Street known as “Cow Bay” (so called because the street was supposedly laid out over a path that stockmen once used to reach the Collect to water their cattle). As recently as 1849, one news report had claimed that six hundred blacks lived in Cow Bay, more than the census recorded in the entire ward in 1855. On the other hand, a black exodus had begun in the late 1830s after the anti-abolition riot. Observers noted blacks moving from Five Points to the West Side of Manhattan throughout the antebellum period. Those African Americans who remained had one thing in common with their white neighbors: few had been born in New York. Seventy-one percent of Five Points blacks were not native New Yorkers. Yet only a few—21 percent—were natives of slave states or island slave territories. Most had been born free in other mid-Atlantic states. So while Five Points still had “a full sprinkling of blacks” in the 1850s, it was no longer a focal point of the city’s African-American community.17

  IT IS POSSIBLE to re-create block-by-block, even house-by-house, an ethnic map of the neighborhood. Ethnic and racial groups concentrated on certain blocks, and sometimes even in certain buildings. Germans were especially numerous on Centre Street at the western edge of the district and on Mott and Elizabeth Streets in the northeast corner of the neighborhood. Jews congregated at the foot of Orange Street and on upper Mott Street. Although most of the African-American strongholds in the ward had become Irish by 1855, several large clusters still existed on Cross Street between Orange and Mott and on Little Water Street. The Irish lived everywhere in the neighborhood, but especially dominated Orange Street above the Five Points intersection and Mulberry Street from Chatham Square all the way to Canal Street.18

  Irish-Born Five Pointers Married at Transfiguration Roman Catholic Church, 1853–60

  Source: Marriage Register, Church of the Transfiguration, 29 Mott Street, New York.

  Immigrants from every part of Ireland lived in Five Points, but those from certain Irish regions settled there more often than others. More than three-quarters of the Irish Catholics, for example, came from the western half of Ireland, where the potato blight was especially severe. More surprising is that so large a proportion—44 percent of the Irish Catholic immigrants—came from just three of Ireland’s thirty-two counties: Sligo, Cork, and Kerry. The presence of many Cork natives at Five Points is understandable. County Cork was the most populous in Ireland—its pre-famine population of 854,000 was almost twice that of the next most populous county, and its rate of emigration, even on a per capita basis, outpaced that from most Irish counties.19

  Why natives of relatively tiny County Sligo—on the northwest coast of Ireland—significantly outnumbered the Cork immigrants in Five Points demands an explanation. Immigrants from Sligo seem to have congregated in the northern section of the neighborhood long before the Great Famine. Many Sligo natives had lived in New York since the 1810s and 1820s and had resided in Five Points since the 1830s. No other Irish Five Pointers had such long-standing ties to the United States. These connections had two consequences. First, because so many Sligo natives were already in North America when the famine struck, they could send money back to help during the crisis. Some of this money bought food, but County Sligo residents also used it to pay for tickets to America. And when these immigrants arrived in New York, many sought out their countrymen and settled with or near them in Five Points.20

  Records kept by the neighborhood’s Roman Catholic Church of the Transfiguration reveal that half the Sligo immigrants were natives of just two of the county’s forty-one Roman Catholic parishes. These same records indicate that more than three-quarters of the other unusually large Irish contingent in Five Points—that from County Kerry—came from just three out of eighty-six parishes. It turns out that so many Irish men, women, and children emigrated from these five Sligo and Kerry parishes because the three landlords who owned them (Lord Palmerston and Sir Robert Gore Booth in Sligo and the third marquis of Lansdowne in Kerry) paid for six thousand five hundred of their starving tenants to go to America. In fact, even though these three estates occupied only one-half of 1 percent of the Irish landmass, by 1855 nearly one in five Irish Catholic Five Points immigrants was a native of one of these three properties.21

  Most Irish immigrants did not receive emigration assistance from their landlords; only about 6 percent in the famine years received such aid.22 Yet the Irish experiences of these Five Points immigrants are unusually well documented. Estate records for the three properties, used together with government do
cuments, allow us to re-create in remarkable detail the tenants’ often miserable pre-famine lives and their struggles simply to survive once the “Great Hunger” began. As with Nelly Holland, it is vital to appreciate the immigrants’ experiences before they arrived in the United States to understand the world they made in Five Points.

  “THE MOST WRETCHED PEOPLE UPON THE FACE OF THE GLOBE”

  By the 1820s and ’30s, overpopulation, a dearth of affordable land, and a lack of economic development made conditions for the small farmers and laborers on the Palmerston and Lansdowne estates truly miserable. Like those all over western Ireland, these workers could not find nearly enough employment to support their families comfortably. A Protestant minister on Palmerston’s Ahamlish estate testified before the Irish “Poor Inquiry” of 1836* that the average unskilled workman there could find only three months of employment each year. “Fourteen years ago I could get as much work in the fields as would maintain me and my family, without land,” laborer Owen Casey told the same committee. By 1836, he could only find work breaking stones on a road crew at a penny per barrel. Another laborer remembered the days of constant employment, but “it now often happens that I don’t get more than a day in the week.” Unemployment was just as prevalent on the Lansdowne estate in County Kerry.23

  As work became increasingly scarce, wages fell to incredibly low levels. The most a laborer could expect to earn annually in wages was £1 10s. or perhaps £2 5s. in a very good year. This was the equivalent, in 1845, of about $8 to $13 per annum. Given their meager incomes, impoverished laborers tried to conserve their cash by growing their own food (usually potatoes) on small rented plots, but the scarcity of arable land and overpopulation drove rents to astronomical levels.

  There were a number of ways a poor Irishman might pay for this land. He might use a large portion of the rented land to grow corn or oats, which he could sell to pay the rental fee. Or he could pay the rent in labor rather than cash, although he probably already worked three days per week to pay for his family’s one-room cabin and an accompanying bit of land (or one day per week for a cabin without land). Selling pigs, butter, or eggs might also help to make ends meet. A laborer might, for example, buy a piglet for five shillings, feed it the family’s “waste potatoes” (those unfit for human consumption), and then sell it fully grown for eighteen shillings, netting a significant sum. Butter production required the capital to acquire both a cow and grazing land. Eggs necessitated a smaller initial investment for the poultry, but also brought smaller returns. Women could generate a bit of income for the family through spinning.24

  As rents increased and wages fell over the first half of the nineteenth century, the Irish were forced to alter their diets to glean the largest quantity of food from their meager resources. Though the potato had occupied a central role in the diet of the laborer and small farmer for generations even before low wages and high rents became so burdensome, the Irish had eaten other vegetables and grains as well. “But as rents got high, and the price of labour fell,” explained one North Sligo farmer, “they gradually were compelled to reserve the grain” to pay their rent. On the tiny bit of land left for growing food, small farmers had little choice but to plant only potatoes because, as this farmer explained, “an acre of potatoes will feed at least five times as many people as an acre of corn.” As a result, said another area farmer, “a very large proportion of the labouring classes never take any other food than potatoes.”25

  This was no exaggeration. Most residents of the Palmerston and Gore Booth estates ate nothing but potatoes for breakfast, potatoes for dinner (the midday meal), and potatoes for supper. Sometimes they prepared their potatoes with skimmed milk or a bit of butter, “but often salt is their only kitchen.” The poor ate no other vegetables, no fruit, no bread or grain, and no meat, testified a North Sligo resident, “unless they make a struggle to procure a bit [of meat] on one or two set nights in the year,” usually Christmas and Easter. A report from the Lansdowne estate concurred that “no groceries are used in a labourer’s family except a very little at Christmas.” Although many impoverished families had chickens that laid eggs, they never ate them, selling them instead to pay for tobacco. Given their proximity to the sea, one might imagine that these Irishmen could have eaten fish. But fishing required expertise and equipment that few laborers possessed. Professional fishermen caught plenty of seafood, but they sold it at prices far beyond the reach of the typical Irish peasant.26

  While the diet of the average Palmerston or Lansdowne laborer may have been monotonous, it was at least filling. An adult laborer typically ate fourteen pounds of potatoes per day! As incredible as this may seem, contemporaries unanimously asserted that this was the daily diet of a workingman. When a laborer’s wages included food, one testified in 1836, “a stone [fourteen pounds] of potatoes is laid out for each man.” All agreed, noted an official of the Poor Inquiry, “that a man could not subsist upon less than one stone of potatoes in the day, and some thought that quantity would be hardly sufficient.” Other family members ate less, but their consumption was still impressive. A North Sligo laborer stated that he, his wife, and four children consumed 2.5 stone (35 pounds) of potatoes each day.27

  For all that, hunger was a fact of life in the west of Ireland before the famine. Escalating rental fees forced the poor to grow more and more corn and grains that they sold to pay their rent. Using more land for such cash crops left very little on which to sow potatoes to feed one’s family. In order to stretch their food supplies to last the whole year, a Sligo laborer and his family typically ate only two meals a day during the first two summer months as they waited to harvest the new potato crop. Even if one managed to grow enough potatoes to last the whole year, midsummer was still a season of suffering, because “from the middle of July to the latter end of August, the [old] potatoes are unfit for use.” Even though the potatoes were stored in pits in order to preserve them as long as possible, they usually became rotten and inedible before the new crop matured. “The interval between the old crop becoming unfit, and the new crop becoming fit for food is often a season of great distress,” stated one North Sligo farmer. According to George Dodwell, Gore Booth’s Sligo estate agent, this hunger gap lasted at least two weeks each year, but “with many it extends to two months; and in proportion to its length is the distress that prevails.” Lansdowne’s tenants dreaded “Hungry July” as well.28

  Many residents of western Ireland lived lives similar to those of the Palmerston and Lansdowne tenants. But Lansdowne’s tenants were so desperately poor that they often nailed their cabins shut during the summer and walked one hundred miles or more through Counties Cork, Limerick, and Tipperary in search of work. “In autumn they go to the low country during the harvest,” noted a Kerry resident, “and their wives then often shut up their houses and go begging with their families until their husbands come home” in time to harvest their potatoes. After digging up the tubers, some again went inland to find work before returning home for Christmas. Not all Lansdowne laborers needed to roam the countryside in search of work, but those who lived on mountainsides in the remote parishes of Tuosist and Bonane could rarely rent enough potato land to feed their families, and thus had no choice but to join in this migratory ritual.29

  The cabins these migrant laborers returned home to were small, dark, and uncomfortable, and those in North Sligo were not much better. According to the testimony of one resident to the 1836 Poor Inquiry, “nine-tenths of the ordinary cabins are under 21 feet in length, and . . . none exceed 13 feet in breadth.” The largest were divided into two rooms, “but the number of them, too small to be divided, is by far the greater. They are nearly all constructed of walls of loose stones, coated outside with a mixture of clay and mortar. . . . The roof is formed of branches of trees laid across the rafters and covered with ‘scraws,’ i.e., sods of turf, over which is laid a very thin and imperfect thatching of straw. None have ceilings, and the dirt and cobwebs which fall from the exposed and damp roof�
�� constantly annoyed the inhabitants. Cabins had “no other flooring than the earth. The floor is generally uneven, and, being too often below the level of the external soil,” puddles sometimes formed inside when it rained, an almost daily occurrence in western Ireland. “There are more cabins without chimneys than with them, and in many where they were originally constructed . . . the sides have subsided, and no longer permit the passage of smoke, which may be seen rolling in volumes through the door.” Smoke could not escape through the single window in the typical cabin because the pane of glass—stuck directly into the wall during construction—did not open. Cabins generally had no well for water and no stove or even grate over which to cook one’s food. Sligo housewives placed their potato pot directly on top of the burning turf they used for fuel. Such cabins had neither toilets nor outhouses of any kind. “Privies are absolutely unknown,” another resident told investigators. The cabin dweller simply found a secluded spot at which to relieve himself. In short, Sligo cabins were dirty, damp, crowded, dark, smoke-filled, primitive dwellings.30

  Cabins on the Lansdowne estate were apparently even more wretched than those in North Sligo. Until the mid-1830s, Lansdowne’s tenants reputedly lived in some of the worst dwellings in all of Ireland. One visitor who traveled throughout Ireland in 1834 called these “as miserable cabins as I ever beheld.” With walls made of dried mud, they were “beyond description, wretched abodes.” Apparently embarrassed, Lord Lansdowne began financing the construction of stone homes to replace the mud hovels. By the eve of the famine, stone cabins predominated, but revolutionary Michael Doheny, who hid in Tuosist cabins after a failed uprising against the British in 1848, insisted that in many cases their “showy exterior is sadly belied by the filth and discomfort of the inside.”31