The worst of the suffering might have been avoided had British authorities been more attentive or compassionate. But Parliament’s response was piecemeal and inadequate, confirming for many Irish what they could expect from their alien oppressors across the Irish Sea. For centuries the English had exploited them, maltreated them; why should it be any different now? Many London observers believed that the famine was God’s work and endorsed the view of Charles Trevelyan, the director of government relief, that Ireland’s “great evil” was not famine but “the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.”8 In the summer of 1847, an officially sanctioned soup kitchen program fed almost three million people, suggesting what kind of relief could be mobilized by the British state, but the program was shut down that fall. Under an Irish Poor Law Extension Act, Parliament shifted the burden of famine relief away from central government to local Irish communities, who would ostensibly raise their own tax funds for poor relief. A clause in the law stipulated that any head of household renting more than a tenth of a hectare of land would be ineligible for public assistance. Some tenants starved to death rather than give up land to their landlord; many others abandoned their farms, accepted relief, and, faced with extreme poverty, chose the route of emigration. All told, two million Irish men and women, the majority of them Catholic and from the south and west of the country, fled for points overseas during the decade following the famine’s outbreak. The vast majority ended up in the United States.9

The less fortunate were the first to leave, but they were not the least fortunate in most cases, because the journey required some savings or other assets that could be converted into cash. In the words of economic historian Cormac Ó Gráda, “In the hierarchy of suffering the poorest of the poor emigrated to the next world; those who emigrated to the New World had the resources to escape.”10

Twenty-six-year-old Patrick Kennedy was among the latter. His exact reasons for leaving remain a mystery, but as the third-born son he knew that even if conditions improved, he would have little chance of inheriting the family farm—or of gaining access to any other parcel of land, for that matter. True, the Kennedys were comparatively well-off in Dunganstown, and had been spared the worst of the famine, but even so, the future for someone in Pat’s position was bleak. So he set his sights on the far side of the Atlantic, on “the States,” that strange and wondrous place so often discussed at family gatherings. America offered hope to people like him, and, what’s more, there were already substantial numbers of Irish in the United States to welcome the newcomers to its shores. Pat surely knew as well that conditions on the ships to New York or Boston or Philadelphia were less brutal than on those bound for Quebec, a destination that, moreover, had the disadvantage of being under British rule. (In 1847, an estimated 30 percent of those bound for British North America perished on board or shortly after their arrival in Quebec.) A ticket to Australia, also under British dominion, was too pricey to consider.11

Still, the voyage to America, typically lasting a month and costing $17 to $20 (the equivalent of $550 to $650 today), including provisions, was arduous enough. Often, the ships were barely seaworthy; always, they were dangerously overcrowded. Only in fair weather were passengers allowed on deck, and often not even then. The steerage below was cramped—a grown man could not stand without stooping—and unsanitary, and in short order the illnesses that the Irish had fled were sweeping through the crammed holds. Typhus was especially pervasive. Water soon turned foul and could be forced down only with the addition of plentiful amounts of vinegar. Food supplies dwindled, and the stench from the privies became overpowering. Day after day the misery raged on, often in rough weather that created its own misery and stress. Mortality rates were high. As nerves frayed and tempers flared, fights broke out, sometimes leaving the combatants a bloodied mess. Single women faced their own agony: the threat of assault by rapacious sailors.12

It took a healthy disposition and a dose of good luck to survive the passage on these “coffin ships” with mind and body intact. Patrick did. Even upon arrival at port in East Boston (or Noddle’s Island, as it was known, which was still accessible from the mainland only by ferry), his challenges were just beginning. Immigrant Boston was a forbidding land. As he emerged from the shadowy steerage, blinking in the daylight, then crossed over the gangplank onto the brimming dock, Pat would have been met by a motley mix of hucksters and con men, eager to take advantage of the disoriented newcomers by promising pleasant lodgings that often turned out to be squalid and windowless, or well-paying jobs that in reality were backbreaking and might pay one dollar for a fourteen-hour workday.

But at least there were jobs to be had, and in Boston no one, not even the most destitute, starved to death. Indeed, East Boston at midcentury was experiencing a boom of sorts, largely because of the shipbuilding that went on there and because it provided transatlantic shipping companies with a deepwater port. One of these companies, the Cunard Line, employed many of the new arrivals as carpenters and dockhands as it built piers and warehouses on the waterfront. Others found work in Donald McKay’s shipyard, maker of the world’s finest clipper ships, beautifully finished and furnished and built for speed. (In 1854, the Flying Cloud, at seventeen hundred tons, made the trip from New York to San Francisco, by way of Cape Horn, in eighty-nine days, eight hours, the fastest on record.^*1) Pat Kennedy, having learned the skills of coopering (barrel and cask making) in Wexford, found work at Daniel Francis’s cooperage and brass foundry on Sumner Street, which made mostly shop castings and whiskey barrels, the latter destined for the taverns that were popping up like mushrooms all over Irish Boston. Soon he was working twelve-hour days, seven days a week. (Like other immigrants, he quickly discovered that in America the workday was longer than anything he had experienced in Ireland.)13

He also found time to marry. Bridget Murphy, another recent arrival from County Wexford, became Pat’s wife in September 1849, in a ceremony at Holy Redeemer Church.14 They bought a modest house on Sumner Street, proof positive that Patrick had established genuine job security and a decent wage. Their first child, Mary, was born in 1851, followed by Joanna in 1852, John in 1854 (who died of cholera before his second birthday), Margaret in 1855, and Patrick Joseph, called “P. J.” so as not to be confused with his father, in early 1858.

All the while, Pat Kennedy maintained his grueling work schedule until, one autumn day, he could do it no more. In November 1858, ten months after the birth of P. J. and nine years after stepping ashore in Boston, Pat died, at age thirty-five, with a wife and four young children, leaving behind no documents or portraits. The immediate cause was either cholera or consumption, but years of punishing work, every day of the week, surely took their toll on his immune system, made him susceptible to infection and then unable to fight it off. The first of this clan of Kennedy men to set foot in America, he was the last to die in anonymity.15