A Letter Home: Irish Correspondence from America, 1818-1972
Author: Kerby A. Miller & Breandán Mac Suibhne
ISBN-13: 9781804585467
Publisher: Gill
Guideline Price: €29.99; 288pp
“I suppose ye thought I had forgotten ye altogether,” wrote Mary Anne Rowe from Massachusetts to a friend in Co Kilkenny in 1888, “but my dear friend, it is not through any lack of friendship that I stayed so long without writing to ye. I do feel so bad when I go to write to home … that I scarcely know what to do.”
For generations of Irish people, letters across the Atlantic were the only thread connecting their new world to an Ireland lost and left behind. Their correspondence recorded not just their experiences in America, but also their memories and feelings about the place they almost always called “home”.
Nobody has done more for the preservation of these letters than historian Kerby Miller, whose landmark 1985 book Emigrants and Exiles used them to argue that many saw emigration not just as seeking a new life across the ocean, but as a collective tragedy of deoraíocht (exile).
More than 7,000 letters collected and transcribed by Miller form the Imirce Collection at the University of Galway, and this new selection of 62 letters shows the enormous emotional range of emigrant experience. Coming from all corners of Ireland, all confessional and class backgrounds, they complicate narratives of both national loss and American opportunity. Letters home were not just communication and news, but personal and collective narratives often trying to explain, encourage, self-justify or lament.
Emigration was a defining feature of Irish life, and the “successive waves of departures from Ireland constitute”, Breandán Mac Suibhne writes in an excellent introduction, “one of the largest population movements in the modern era”, one with important echoes in Ireland today. That mass movement was “at once coincident with and commanded by” the emergence of global capitalism and imperialism. For the Irish in the United States, whose numbers are hard to fathom, that movement was only ever one-way: of those in the early 1900s, just 10 per cent ever went home, compared with more than half of Italians.
Sooner than I would work for a farmer in Ireland, I would cut off my good right hand … Homesickness is something that’s natural. I often get a relapse of it, but somehow there seems to be no cure only to stand it
— John F Costello in a letter to his family in Croagh in 1883
Many looked back with bitterness even when missing home. Neal Campbell wrote from Ohio to Tyrone in 1819 lamenting “the systematic tyranny, distress and oppression” at home. “I am proud to be away,” Margaret McCarthy wrote to her family on the Cork-Kerry border in 1850, from a country where a landlord or tax collector “would have the satisfaction of once impounding my cow”. Though she fondly remembered the “innocent amusement” of home, she saw Ireland now as “the gulf of misery, oppression, degradation and ruin of every description”.
The greatest contrast between America and Ireland was the promise of “independence”. “After the Famine,” Miller writes, “most Irish emigrants were the sons and daughters of landless agricultural labourers, who often had been more exploited by their farmer-employers than were the latter by their landlords”. “Sooner than I would work for a farmer in Ireland,” wrote John F Costello to his family in Croagh in 1883, “I would cut off my good right hand.”
America was, Costello wrote, “as good a country as there is in the world today for a poor man. The majority of what men is in the country have risen from their own industry. Any man here that will work and save his earnings, and make use of his brains can grow rich.” “You can be,” Bartholomew Colgan wrote in 1854, “your own master.”
Miller’s introductions to each letter show not just his vast knowledge of the sources but also vital contextual information. He notes, for example, the Presbyterian and United Irishman family of William Hill, who wrote home to Antrim from South Carolina that he had enslaved “property” worth $6000. “Isn’t this horrid? say you,” he added, anticipating the condemnation of his republican religious relatives, one of many examples of values and politics diverging across the Atlantic, even if a commitment to Irish independence was near universal.
Letters were often clear-eyed about the inequalities and exploitation that coloured the American dream. “The name of America at home sounds extra,” explained James Chamberlain in 1889, “but when people get there, they find it a different world. Any person who can make a fair living at home are better stay there,” rather than compete with the endless supply of immigrant labour “from all nations”. Yet even when they lament their challenges and misfortune, emigrants show a striking confidence in opportunity. “I would not advise any one to come here that can live comfortable at home,” wrote Ellen Rountree back to Dublin in 1851, “yet there is work for every person.”
People would bear a lot in America given what they were leaving behind, the horrors of which were difficult to describe during the Famine. An illiterate Irish-speaking Mrs Nolan from near Kilkenny dictated a letter to her son in Rhode Island in 1850, saying “on my two bended knees fresh and fasting, I pray to God that you nor one of you may never know nor suffer what we are suffering at the present”. “We will all die of famine,” wrote John Nowlan from Bunclody in 1847; “the people the young and old are dying as fast as they can bury them.”
Such letters show how distance rarely severed family ties and obligations. Nowlan and many others begged for money or tickets across the ocean. Mary Rush from Sligo pleaded with her father in Quebec that “if you knew what hunger we and our fellow-countrymen are suffering, if you were ever so much distressed, you would take us out of this poverty isle … for God’s sake take us out of poverty and don’t let us die with the hunger”.
Remittances often did come, in their millions, vital lifelines for families to be “able to pay our debts and raise our heads”, as Miller notes a grateful Donegal man saying. “I hope you do not think it is degrading you I am by offering you money,” wrote Colgan to his brother. Miller recounts one Roscommon man commenting that his relatives need not send pictures of themselves (“for we know well what they look like”), as the “pictures that I would like to see are a few of Abraham Lincoln’s” from $5 bills.
News was often as eagerly sought as money. “Write to me about all the folks, what has become of them, etc”, wrote Rose McCormick Williams back to Westmeath in 1879; “inform me all about Ireland, as I have but little recollection of it”. Many feared forgetting, and never escaped the longing. “Homesickness is something that’s natural. I often get a relapse of it,” wrote Costello, “but somehow there seems to be no cure only to stand it.”
On both sides of the Atlantic people yearned for letters, often with endless gossip about people from home and questions about those still there. Mac Suibhne notes how the 19th-century Donegal diarist Hugh Dorian wrote that an American letter was always “anxiously awaited and as joyously received”. “You would often write,” James Nowan wrote to his brother in Nova Scotia of their father, “if you witnessed the poor old man striving to open and read your letters when he receives them. He would almost be beside himself from ecstasy of joy.”
Perhaps what comes across most from Miller’s selection is what Mac Suibhne calls the “deep ambivalence” many show to both Ireland and the United States. “Things are the same as in Ireland,” wrote James McFadden from Iowa to Donegal in 1897, “every year something new comes up to make the rich man richer and the poor man poorer.”
“When you have money, it is all right,” wrote Alexander Wilson from Brooklyn to Ballymena in 1899, “but when you have none, you are not wanted.” Thomas McIntyre wrote from Boston to his sister in Tyrone in August 1855 saying that “as I sit here alone” they all back home would be at the local fair: “but as Robert said one time there are no Donemana fairs here. There is nothing here but work hard today and go to bed at night and rise and work harder tomorrow. Nothing but work, work away.”
For millions the journey was into the future, one they often struggled to explain to the isle they left behind. “You see, in this country,” Margaret McNally Keefe wrote home to Armagh in 1933, “the working class of people have everything in their homes … electric lights, bathtubs, gas stoves, and about every family has an automobile.” Agnes Kelly wrote home to Roscommon in 1967 that by contrast “Ireland is a sort of fairy tale. We have never told [our children] of the realities of life or living over there and would not encourage any of them to visit there. When we left there, we left the old world behind; we are all American citizens and proud of it.”
No amount of correspondence could stop the Atlantic widening, but millions of Irish-Americans have of course come to visit their ancestral homeland, at times with views and expectations that seem foreign to Ireland today. Hundreds of thousands of emigrants and exiles have also come to our shores seeking opportunity and prosperity in an Ireland our ancestors could only dream of abroad. This rich collection reminds us of the diversity and complexity of the migrant experience, and of our shared history as a migration nation.
Christopher Kissane is a historian and the host of Ireland’s Edge.
Further ReadingImirce: The Kerby A Miller Collection is available at imirce.universityofgalway.ie
Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (Oxford, 1985) by Kerby A Miller
Miller’s book remains seminal for exploring the Irish emigrant experience in America.
Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York (Eriu, 2024) by Tyler Anbinder
By analysing emigrant savings, Anbinder shows how Famine emigrants fared surprisingly well.
The End of Outrage: Post-Famine Adjustment in Rural Ireland (Oxford, 2017) by Breandán Mac Suibhne
Through the story of one small Donegal village, Mac Suibhne reveals the revolutionary social upheaval of post-Famine Ireland.
Source: The Irish Times · Christopher Kissane
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