How Famine migration changed Boston

How Famine migration changed Boston shows most clearly in three measures: a foreign-born population that roughly quadrupled inside 15 years, cheap housing that filled faster than the city could build it, and a political shift hard enough that an anti-immigrant party swept every state office within a decade of the first mass arrivals. Boston in 1845 was a Yankee port of about 93,000 people with a small Irish minority. By 1855 it was a different city, and the census, the church rolls, and the state election returns all measured the same change from different angles.

How Famine migration changed Boston’s population

Before the blight, Boston’s Irish community was modest. The federal census counted roughly 4,000 Irish-born residents in the city in 1840, a fraction of a total population of 93,383. That balance did not survive the decade that followed.

Between 1841 and 1851, 121,381 passengers arrived in Boston directly from Irish ports, with a further 22,777 landing from Liverpool and Glasgow, many of whom were Irish emigrants who had crossed the Irish Sea first to book a cheaper Atlantic passage. The single worst year was 1847, when more than 37,000 Irish immigrants arrived in the city, the peak of what became known in Ireland as Black ‘47. By 1855 the Irish-born population of Boston had passed 50,000, and by the middle of the decade Irish natives made up between 25 and 27% of the city’s residents, roughly 85% of everyone in Boston who had been born outside the United States.

The city around them was growing too, from 93,383 residents in 1840 to 136,881 in 1850 and 177,840 by 1860, but the Irish share of that growth was disproportionate. In 1850 about 35,000 of Boston’s 136,000 people, close to a quarter of the city, were Irish-born. Individual neighbourhoods show the pattern even more sharply: the 1855 state census recorded 3,498 Irish-born residents in East Boston alone, 23% of that district’s population, in a neighbourhood that had barely had an Irish presence 15 years earlier.

Where the new arrivals settled, and why so few moved on

Boston was not, for most of the 19th century, the preferred destination for Irish emigrants. New York took a far larger share of Atlantic arrivals, and many who landed in Boston intended to move on to relatives, work, or cheaper land further inland. Famine migration changed that calculation for a large number of them. Passage across the Atlantic, and the coastal fare from Liverpool before it, had already used most of what a family had, and the onward journey by rail or canal cost money that new arrivals in 1847 or 1848 frequently did not have. Boston kept people it had never been built to house, because they could not afford to leave it.

The earliest and poorest arrivals crowded into the North End and Fort Hill, districts close to the wharves where they landed and where rents were lowest. Landlords in both districts subdivided older merchant houses and warehouses built for a fraction of the number of people now living in them, and new arrivals with almost no capital took whatever space they could find, including cellar rooms with no light or drainage of their own. As the 1850s went on and the Irish population kept growing, settlement spread to South Boston, Charlestown, the West End, and South Cove, and later to East Boston, Dorchester, Roxbury, and across the river into Cambridge, following the docks, the railroads, and the mills where the work was. The housing conditions in the oldest of these districts, and what a public health investigation eventually found there, are covered in more detail in the 1849 cholera outbreak that struck Boston’s Irish tenements.

None of this settlement pattern was neutral. Where a family could afford to live in Boston in 1850 tracked closely with how recently they had arrived and how much of their passage money they had left over once they reached the wharf. A household that had been in the city since the early 1840s, before the worst famine years, had a better chance of having moved into steadier housing than a family that stepped off a ship in 1847 or 1848 with nothing left to spend.

Boston before and after the famine: work and wages

Before 1845, Boston was still primarily a commercial and shipping city. Cheap Irish labour, arriving faster than the economy could easily absorb it, helped push the city toward industrial production through the 1850s. Irish men worked the docks, dug canals, laid railroad track, carried hods on building sites, and drove teams, while Irish women went overwhelmingly into domestic service in the households of the same Boston families whose wealth the new labour supply was helping build. Irish labourers did the physical work behind the filling of the Back Bay and the South Cove, two of the largest engineering projects to reshape the city’s map in this period.

The wages that came with this work were low, and the demand for it was not always matched by an employer’s willingness to hire the people offering it. Newspaper advertisements and shop-window notices from the period carried a phrase that became notorious on its own terms, a hostility documented directly in Boston’s “No Irish need apply” hiring notices. Low, uncertain wages combined with a shortage of decent low-cost housing to keep most Famine-era Irish arrivals in the city’s first tenement districts for a generation, rather than in the kind of housing that wage growth might otherwise have bought them.

Domestic service deserves its own note in this picture, because it employed so many Irish-born women in these years and because it placed them, unlike the men working the docks or the rail lines, inside the households of the same Boston families whose fortunes the wider labour market was helping to build. A servant’s wage was low and her hours were long, but it was also one of the few forms of Famine-era Irish work that came with a roof already included, which for a woman with no other family in the city could be the difference between shelter and the street.

Deer Island and the cost of arrival

Boston Harbor’s quarantine station on Deer Island opened in 1847 specifically to receive the sick among the year’s Famine arrivals, many of them carrying typhus, described at the time as ship fever, after crossings in crowded, badly provisioned vessels. From its opening in June 1847 to 1 January 1850, the island’s hospital admitted 4,816 people, of whom 4,069 arrived already ill. At least 759 of those admitted, close to 16%, died there. Estimates of how many were buried on the island during those years range from about 721 to as many as 1,000, interred in what became known as Rest Haven Cemetery.

Deer Island was one entry point into a city where death did not wait politely for the sick to reach dry land. Two years later, cholera moved through the tenements the survivors of that crossing had crowded into, an outbreak that killed more than 500 Boston Irish in a single summer and is documented on its own terms in the piece linked above.

City politics: the Know-Nothing backlash

The scale of Famine migration did not go unanswered in Massachusetts politics. By 1854 the nativist American Party, popularly called the Know-Nothings, had built a coalition large enough to win the Massachusetts governorship for Henry J. Gardner and to take control of Boston’s city government in the same year. The scale of the victory was unusual even by the standards of a volatile decade: after the 1854 election, the governor, every state constitutional officer, the entire state senate, and all but 3 seats in the state house of representatives belonged to the Know-Nothing party.

Once in office, the party moved directly against Irish Catholic institutions, and this is covered at greater length in our piece on the Know-Nothing party and Boston’s Irish Catholics. In outline: the Massachusetts legislature passed a constitutional amendment barring state funds from going to any school outside the public system, a measure aimed squarely at the Catholic parish schools the city’s Irish congregations were building. Separately, the state had already begun expanding its power to expel foreign-born paupers. Laws passed in 1850 and 1851 let Massachusetts officials, first a Superintendent and later a board called the Commissioners of Alien Passengers and Foreign Paupers, send destitute immigrants back across the Atlantic at state expense. Enforcement intensified once Know-Nothings held the legislature, and agents were documented removing people directly from public almshouses. Historians estimate that around 50,000 people were expelled from Massachusetts under this policy between the 1840s and the 1870s, a figure that by contemporary accounts included some naturalised citizens and American-born children of Irish parents caught up in an enforcement effort that did not always stay inside its own legal limits.

What historians cannot know

The population figures repeated in study after study, 4,000 Irish-born Bostonians in 1840, more than 50,000 by 1855, come from federal and state censuses that were themselves imperfect instruments. Seasonal labourers, lodgers moving between cheap rooms, and anyone who passed through Boston without registering a fixed address were undercounted by design, and a census taken once every ten years cannot capture how many people arrived, left, and arrived again within that decade. The passenger figures have a similar problem in reverse: someone who sailed Ireland to Liverpool to Boston might appear once in the Liverpool tally and once in the Boston one, or not at all if the crossing was informal.

The human cost is harder still to pin down. Deer Island’s death toll is recorded with unusual precision for the period, but it counts only those who reached the hospital. Nobody kept a comparable register of deaths at sea on the crossing itself, and the youngest children, who died in the highest numbers in Boston’s tenements in these years, often did not live long enough to appear in any civil record at all. Almost everything written down about how these arrivals experienced the crossing and the years that followed was recorded by officials, investigators, and newspapermen who were not themselves living through it, which is part of why the record can state a Deer Island mortality rate to the decimal point while saying almost nothing in the arrivals’ own words about what those numbers felt like from inside them.

Sources and further reading

• Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth, Commonwealth Museum, “Irish Immigration and the Know-Nothings” (online exhibit).
• Global Boston, Boston College, “Irish” (immigrant ethnic group history and neighbourhood settlement data).
• Encyclopedia of American Immigration, “Boston” entry (immigrationtounitedstates.org), summarising Oscar Handlin’s demographic findings.
• Oscar Handlin, “Boston’s Immigrants, 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation” (Harvard University Press, revised edition 1991).
• Peter F. Stevens, “For Many Famine Irish, Deer Island Proved Their Only Glimpse of America,” Boston Irish Magazine, 1 March 2013.
• Boston Planning & Redevelopment Agency, “Historic Trends: Boston’s Population” (city population series, 1840 to 1860).

The Boston this migration built kept changing long after 1857, through further waves of Irish arrivals and through the rise of Irish influence in city politics in the decades that followed. The population figures, the quarantine records, and the election returns are the parts of that decade the archive can still measure with confidence.