The infamous Potato Famine in Ireland in the mid-19th century was an almost apocalyptic experience for the Emerald Isle. The famine was so severe that newspaper photographers covering the event found some families were resorting to eating the bodies of other family members who had died of starvation. The bodies of children were not immune to this treatment, either, often set upon by desperately hungry parents and their ravenous siblings. People were being literally driven mad with hunger. It is no wonder then that so many people chose to escape this horror by fleeing the country.
While a lot of Irish Potato Famine refugees went to England and other places in Europe, millions of them crossed the sea to come to America. It was, after all, fabled to be a land of plenty. Starving immigrants, who often sold everything they had to make the voyage (and frequently left other suffering family members behind to secure safety for themselves), filled American shores in droves from the 1840’s through the 1860’s. This caused no small degree of resentment among Americans who were already here.
