Background Essay on Life in Mid-19th Century Five PointsThis essay introduces Manhattan's Five Points neighborhood and the people who lived there. Show The potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s spurred the migration of thousands of impoverished Irish to the United States. The new immigrants—rural, Catholic, and starving—settled in the poorest districts of large cities in the East, including in New York’s Five Points neighborhood in downtown Manhattan. The story of Five Points sheds light on a number of important themes in nineteenth-century U.S. history. It is a window into a period—the 1850s—that marked the start of rapid change in American society, as the country became more urban, more industrialized, and, because of changes in transportation and communication technologies, more connected. Immigration is an important part of this story, both because immigrants contributed to the growing urban population and because their cheap labor fueled the factories and built the roads, canals, tunnels, and rail lines of the emerging industrial order. Immigrant groups employed a number of strategies to survive in new homes and to challenge discrimination. Five Pointers were destitute when they arrived and settled in one of New York’s poorest and most run-down neighborhoods. On top of this, Irish Five Pointers worked for some of the lowest wages in the most dangerous and unstable jobs in the city. Statistics attest to the dire and exceptional conditions of the neighborhood: 66% of patients being treated for bone fractures in one downtown hospital were Irish, a third of children in the neighborhood did not live past their fifth birthday, and, because Irish men worked in such dangerous occupations, nearly one out of every five households in Five Points was headed by a woman. Irish immigrants arrived in the United States in an era before formal governmental aid, when private charities provided the primary—and inadequate—relief funds, meals, and training. Yet Five Pointers built strong community institutions, such as churches, saloons, and fire companies, to support each other, gain some say in local government, and shield themselves from prejudice and poverty. They created a vibrant working-class culture that helped them survive and eventually helped shape American culture as a whole. A recurrent theme in U.S. history is the tension between Americans’ need for labor and their anxiety about new immigrant groups. Nativists in the 1840s and 1850s feared that Irish Catholics could not be assimilated. They believed immigrant culture, religion, and social customs degraded “real” American society and feared immigrants’ growing political power. Political cartoonists often expressed this fear by depicting the Irish in demeaning, stereotypical, and sub-human caricatures, similar to those that portrayed African Americans. While the Irish had more political power than other poor ethnic groups in the 1850s (African Americans were subject to property requirements in order to vote in New York) they were victims of discrimination, prejudice, and violence. Creator | American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning  European Emigration to the U.S. 1851 - 1860
Although the Irish potato blight receded in 1850, the effects of the famine continued to spur Irish emigration into the 20th century.
Still facing poverty and disease, the Irish set out for America where they reunited with relatives who had fled at the height of the famine.
The "Famine Irish" represented the first major influx of Irish immigration into America. Source: Destination America by Charles A. Wills Where did most immigrants come from in the 1840 1850?The majority of these newcomers hailed from Northern and Western Europe. Approximately one-third came from Ireland, which experienced a massive famine in the mid-19th century. In the 1840s, almost half of America's immigrants were from Ireland alone.
Why did the Irish immigrate to the US in the 1840s?Suddenly, in the mid-1840s, the size and nature of Irish immigration changed drastically. The potato blight which destroyed the staple of the Irish diet produced famine. Hundreds of thousands of peasants were driven from their cottages and forced to emigrate -- most often to North America.
Why did immigration increase in the 1840s?The initial increase in immigration during the 1830s and 1840s was caused by improvements in shipping, more rapid population growth in Europe, and the potato famine in the latter part of the 1840s, which affected not only Ireland but also much of northwest Europe.
Which nationality immigrated to the US because of the great Potato Famine?Between 1845 and 1855 more than 1.5 million adults and children left Ireland to seek refuge in America. Most were desperately poor, and many were suffering from starvation and disease. They left because disease had devastated Ireland's potato crops, leaving millions without food.
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During the 1840s, a famine led to increased immigration to the u.s. from which country?
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