America's First Humanitarian Mission: The Irish Famine

More than 5,000 ships would leave Ireland during the famine era carrying passengers who were fleeing utter destitution in their home country.  The USS Jamestown was the first to travel in the opposite direction, laden with food and supplies for Ireland, and its celebrated mission provided the catalyst, the symbolic and physical impetus, that injected further momentum into the nationwide American famine-aid movement that had begun in February.  

As spring bloomed and temperatures warmed, as frozen canals thawed and snow drifts melted from rutted wagon trails and dirt-packed roadways and clogged railroad beds, most communities in the United States, large cities and tiny frontier towns, shifted their plans into action.  

Famine in Ireland evoked a spirit of brotherhood across America.

They set aside religious, racial, social, economic, and political differences to collaborate on an unprecedented countrywide demonstration of voluntary philanthropy on behalf of Ireland.  The plight of a ravaged foreign country and its desperate people pierced America’s hardest hearts and opened its most obdurate minds; the desire to relieve Ireland’s suffering touched Americans of every stripe—rich and poor, men and women, from all backgrounds and religions and ages and races, from north and south, from the coast and the interior.  

Not in the sixty years since the U.S. Constitution was adopted and the United States was established as a republic had the country expressed, or acted upon, near unanimity on any topic, let alone a peacetime endeavor that involved aid to a foreign country.  When Americans turned their attention to Irish assistance in the spring and summer of 1847, the contentiousness that had permeated the national debate for decades – on issues such as slavery, the War of 1812, sectionalism, government policy toward Native Americans, the Mexican War—dissipated like morning fog. 

It was a universal tenet, a spiritual one for certain, one that political opponents found impossible to argue with.

Time and again, political and community leaders, journalists and clergy, farmers and bankers cited a similar theme as they collected and shipped...

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