[1]“Testbook” entries for accounts 617, 2581, and 15839, Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank Collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, New York Public Library; manifest of the West Point, March 29, 1851, New York Ship Manifest Collection, National Archives, Washington; Jonathan Binns, The Miseries and Beauties of Ireland, 2 vols. (London, 1837), 2:336 (“naked”); Thomas Campbell Foster, Letters on the Condition of the People of Ireland(London, 1846), 389 (“globe”). In the notes that follow, all biographical information about immigrants from the Emigrant Bank records come from its “test books” (so-called because they were used to test the identity of those seeking to withdraw money), while information on bank balances and transactions comes from the bank’s “deposit ledgers.” These records, as well as all the census records and ship manifests cited below, are available on Ancestry.com.
[2] William Bennett, Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland (London, 1847), 128; O’Sullivan Diary, c. Mar. 1847, quoted in Gerard Lyne, “William Steuart Trench and the Post-Famine Emigration from Kenmare to America, 1850-1855,” Journal of the Kerry Archaeological and Historical Society 25 (1992): 125; O’Sullivan to Charles Trevelyan, “February 1847,” in House of Commons, Correspondence Relating to the Measures Adopted for the Relief of the Distress in Ireland. Commissariat Series [Second Part] (London, 1847), 166; Tralee Chronicle, January 16, 1847.
[3] W. Steuart Trench, Realities of Irish Life (London, 1869), 111-127; Lyne, “Emigration from Kenmare,” 89-137; Tyler Anbinder, “From Famine to Five Points: Lord Lansdowne's Irish Tenants Encounter North America's Most Notorious Slum,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 358-62.
[4] “Pauper Emigrants,” New York Evening Post, February 21, 1851, 2;“Destitute Emigrants,” New York Evening Post, March 18, 1851, 2 (quotation);“Irish Emigrants,” New York Herald, March 18, 1851, 2; New York Sun quoted in “The Landlord Vagabonds of Ireland,” New York Irish-American, March 29, 1851, 2; “Emigrant Lodgers,” New York Spectator, June 9, 1851, 1; test book entry, account 617, Emigrant Bank Collection. All subsequent newspaper citations refer to papers published in New York unless otherwise specified.
[5] The modern “purchasing power” of dollar amounts comes from https://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/and is used for all such estimations.
[6] Deposit ledger and test book entries for account 617, Emigrant Bank Collection; Bonnie Ruberg, “What Is Your Mother’s Maiden Name? A Feminist History of Online Security Questions,” Feminist Media Histories 3, no. 3 (2017): 57.
[7] Deposit ledgers and test book entries for accounts 617 and 2581, Emigrant Bank Collection; Anbinder, “From Famine to Five Points,” 368-371.
[8]Accounts 2581 and 15839, Emigrant Bank Collection; entry for Cornelius and Honora O’Sullivan, family 354, third district, Ward Six, 1855 New York State census (hereafter “1855 census”), New York City Municipal Archives; entry for Cornelius and Honora Sullivan, family 1346, dwelling 271, second district, Ward Six, 1860 United States census (hereafter “1860 census”), National Archives. All census citations that follow refer to New York County and state unless otherwise noted.
[9] This literature is voluminous, but notable examples include John and Leatrice MacDonald, “Chain Migration, Ethnic Neighborhood Formation, and Social Networks,” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly42 (1964): 82-97; L. A. Fallers, ed., Immigrants and Associations(The Hague, 1967);Mildred B. Levy and Walter J. Wadycki, “The Influence of Family and Friends on Geographic Mobility: An International Comparison,” Review of Economics and Statistics55 (1973): 198-203; Douglas Massey, “The Settlement Process of Mexican Migrants to the United States,” American Sociological Review51 (1986): 670-685; Monica Boyd, “Family and Personal Networks in International Migration: Recent Developments and New Agendas,” International Migration Review 233 (1989): 638-680; Sara Curran, and Estela Rivero-Fuentes, “Engendering Migrant Networks: The Case of Mexican Migration,” Demography40 (2003): 289-307; Fred Krissman, “Sin Coyote Ni Patrón: Why the ‘Migrant Network’ Fails to Explain International Migration,” International Migration Review39 (2005): 4-44;Marlou Schrover, Joanne van der Leun, and Chris Quispel,“Niches, Labour Market Segregation, Ethnicity and Gender,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33 (2007): 529-40; Chipo Hungwe, “The Uses of Social Capital Among Zimbabwean Migrants in Johannesburg,” Africa Review(2015): 121-133; Filiz Gazrip and Asad Asad, “Network Effects in Mexico-U.S. Migration: Disentangling the Underlying Social Mechanisms,” American Behavioral Scientist60 (2016): 168-193; Masato Hiwatari, “Social Networks and Migration Decisions: The Influence of Peer Effects in Rural Households in Central Asia,” Journal of Comparative Economics 44 (2016): 115-131.
[10] Simone Wegge, “Chain Migration and Information Networks: Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Hesse-Cassel,” Journal of Economic History58 (1998): 957-86; Leslie Page Moch, “Networks Among Bretons? The Evidence for Paris, 1875-1925,” Continuity and Change18 (2003): 431-455; Clé Lesger, “Is There Life Outside the Migrant Network? German Immigrants in XIXth Century Netherlands and the Need for a More Balanced Migration Typology,” Annales de Démographie Historique 104, no. 2 (2002): 29-50; Hillel Eyal, “Beyond Networks: Transatlantic Immigration and Wealth in Late Colonial Mexico City,” Journal of Latin American Studies47 (2015): 317-348; David Holland, “The Social Networks of South Asian Migrants to the Sheffield Area During the Early Twentieth Century,” Past and Present, 236 (2017): 243-79. Calvin Schermerhorn likewise emphasizes the importance of Chesapeake slaves’ skills as “networkers” in shaping their lives in Money Over Mastery, Family Over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South (Baltimore, 2011), 22-62.
[11] Jacob Riis, “Feast-Days in Little Italy,” The Century Magazine58 (August 1899): 494; Jane Addams, “Immigration: A Field Neglected by the Scholar,”The Commons 10 (January 1905): 16. For campanilismo, see Alberto Pecorini, “The Italians in the United States,” Forum45 (Jan. 1911): 17;John Horace Mariano, The Italian Contribution to American Democracy (Boston, 1921), 19-22; Richard Gambino, Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of Italian-Americans (1974; repr. ed., Toronto, 2003),110; Rudolph Vecoli, “The Formation of Chicago’s ‘Little Italies,’” Journal of American Ethnic History 2 (1982): 5-20; Donna Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1880-1930 (Albany, 1984),78-9.For Jewish landsman networking, see The Jewish Communal Register of New York City, 1917–1918 (New York, 1918), 735–864; The Jewish Landsmanschaften of New York (New York, 1938), 27–32, 150, 378–97; Sidney Sorkin, Bridges to an American City: Chicago’s Lansmanshaften, 1870-1990 (New York, 1993); Daniel Soyer, Jewish Immigrant Associations and Identity in New York, 1880-1939 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).
[12] David Gleeson and Brendan Buttimer, “‘We Are Irish Everywhere’: Irish Immigrant Networks in Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia,” Immigrants and Minorities 23 (2005): 183-205; William Jenkins, “Deconstructing Diasporas: Networks and Identities among the Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1870-1910,” Immigrants and Minorities 23 (2005): 359-398; John Belchem, “Priests, Publicans, and the Irish Power: Ethnic Enterprise and Migrant Networks in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Liverpool,” in Donald McRaild and Enda Delaney, eds.,Irish Migration, Networks, and Ethnic Identities Since 1750(New York, 2007), 62-86; Tyler Anbinder, “Irish Origins and the Shaping of Immigrant Life in Savannah on the Eve of the Civil War,” Journal of American Ethnic History 35 (Fall 2015): 5-37.
[13] Tyler Anbinder, “Moving Beyond ‘Rags to Riches’: New York’s Irish Famine Immigrants and Their Surprising Savings Accounts,” Journal of American History (2012): 741-70. For previous scholarship utilizing the Emigrant Bank’s records, see Cormac Ó Gráda, “The Famine, the New York Irish and Their Bank,” in Contributions to the History of Economic Thought: Essays in Honour of R. D. C. Black, Antoin Murphy and Renee Prendergast, eds. (London, 2000), 227-48; Ó Gráda and Eugene White, “The Panics of 1854 and 1857: A View from the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank,” Journal of Economic History63 (2003): 213-240; Marion Casey, “Refractive History: Memory and the Founders of the Emigrant Savings Bank,” in Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States, Marion Casey and J. J. Lee, eds. (New York, 2006), 302-31; Meaghan Casey, “From Irish Rags to American Riches?” The Recorder: The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society 19-20 (2007): 104-28; Marion Casey, “Emigrant as Historian: Records, Banking, and Irish-American Scholarship,” American Journal of Irish Studies10 (2013): 145-63. The relationship of banking to the Famine has also been addressed in Tyler Beck Goodspeed, Famine and Finance: Credit and the Great Famine of Ireland (Oxford, 2017).
[14] Various iterations of the database, in Excel format, can be accessed at both https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/anbinder and http://beyondragstoriches.org/data. It is hereafter cited as “Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database.”
[15] Throughout this essay, when the term “Famine immigrants” is used, it refers to those who left Ireland from 1846 to 1858. While starvation in Ireland came to end by the early 1850s, much of the emigration that continued through the decade was funded by the earlier Famine emigrants. So while some refer to the emigration of the mid-1850s as “post-Famine,” we refer to all emigrants from 1846 to 1858 as “Famine emigrants.” Eighty-one percent of the “Famine” depositors in our database left Ireland from 1846 to 1852.
[16] There are fewer customers than accounts because some customers opened more than one account. They would typically close their first account before opening a second, perhaps doing so because they feared losing their money during the decade’s periodic financial “panics.” Of these 15,700 depositors, 10,800 were Irish immigrants, 1,200 were German immigrants, 550 were English, 250 were Scottish, 400 were born in other countries, and no birthplace is listed for 1,650 depositors. The remaining 850 depositors were native-born Americans.
[17] For further details on how the data was collected, organized, and “cleaned,” see Simone Wegge, Tyler Anbinder, and Cormac Ó Gráda,“Immigrants and Savers: A Rich New Database on the Irish in 1850s New York,” Historical Methods 50 (July-Sept. 2017): 144-55. The next biggest longitudinal database of Irish Famine immigrants is that created by William J. Collins and Ariell Simran, who located nearly 1,500 sons of Famine immigrants (not the immigrants themselves) in the 1880 census. See Collins and Zimran, “The Economic Assimilation of Irish Famine Migrants to the United States,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 25287(2018), 38. Another longitudinal study with a much smaller number of Famine immigrants is Joseph Ferrie’s Yankeys Now: Immigrants in the Antebellum U.S., 1840–1860(New York, 1999).
[18] Date of arrival of all Irish-born New Yorkers who were age eighteen or older in 1855 based on the authors’ sample of all New York City wards taken from the 1855 New York State Census. This census asked residents how long they had lived in New York, which we used as a proxy for years since immigration.
[19] Occupations that comprise each occupational category can be found at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/file.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/HNOCZB/5QNJ2R&version=1.0.
[20] Percentage of married Irish immigrants based on Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database. Number of adult Irish immigrants living in New York was calculated by multiplying total number of Irish-born inhabitants in New York City in 1855 by the proportion of Irish immigrants who were adults, as identified in the authors’ 1855 New York State Census sample.
[21] Number of depositors is from “Report of the Committee on Banks in Relation to Savings Banks,” Documents of the Senate of the State of New Yorkfor 1856(Albany, 1856), document 107, p. 7; Alan Olmstead, New York City Mutual Savings Banks, 1819-1861 (Chapel Hill, 1976), 157-61. More on the demographics of New York’s savings bank customers can be found in “The Commercial Revulsion: Our Savings Banks,”Herald,October 31, 1857, 2. Here we are specifically referring to “savings banks,” whose rules—such as the ones limiting the amount a customer could keep on deposit—insured that those of modest means were the primary customers. See Olmstead, Savings Banks, 59.
[22] Percentage of joint accounts based on Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database. Proportion of adult New Yorkers who were married is based on authors’ 1855 census sample.
[23] See George Alter, Claudia Goldin, and Elyce Rotella, “The Savings of Ordinary Americans: The Philadelphia Saving Fund Society in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History54 (1994), 747. The Philadelphia Savings Fund had more depositors than all other Philadelphia savings banks combined and did not cater to a certain facet of the city’s population as did the Emigrant Bank.
[24] A good introduction to the field of social network analysis is John Scott and Peter Carrington, eds., The SAGE Handbook of Social Network Analysis (London, 2011). The scholarship on historicalnetworks is already voluminous even though most of it dates to the Twenty-first Century. An excellent, constantly updated bibliography can be found at http://historicalnetworkresearch.org/bibliography/.
[25] David Noel Doyle, “The Remaking of Irish America, 1845–1880,” in Lee and Casey, Making the Irish American, 219–21, 245 n. 21; Anbinder, “Irish Origins,” 8.
S. H. Cousens, “The Regional Pattern of Emigration during the Great Irish Famine, 1846–1851,” Transactions and Papers of the Institute of British Geographers, 28 (1960): 119–34. Most subsequent examinations of Famine-era emigration have relied on Cousens’s work. See Cormac Ó Gráda, “A Note on Nineteenth-Century Irish Emigration Statistics,” Population Studies29 (1975): 143–9; Oliver MacDonagh, “The Irish Famine emigration to the United States,” Perspectives in American History10 (1976): 419–21; Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America(New York, 1985), 297; David Fitzpatrick, “Emigration, 1801–70,” in W. E. Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland, v- Ireland Under the Union, I, 1801–70(Oxford, 1989), 620; William J. Smyth, “Exodus from Ireland – Patterns of Emigration,” in John Crowley, William J. Smyth, and Mike Murphy, eds., Atlas of the Great Irish Famine(New York, 2012), 496–7. A different approach was taken by Tyler Anbinder and Hope McCaffrey, “Which Irish Men and Women Immigrated to the United States during the Great Famine Migration of 1846–54?” Irish Historical Studies39 (2015): 627, 629. While the Emigrant Bank data is the best source yet found for determining the geographic origins of New York Famine immigrants, its depositors are not a perfect cross-section of all Famine emigrants. We know, for example, that emigrants from northeast Ulster preferred Philadelphia to New York, that those from west Donegal tended to settle in the coal mining region of Pennsylvania, those from Wexford preferred Savannah, and emigrants from Mayo gravitated to Cleveland, and there is a dearth of all these groups in the bank’s customer rolls. Furthermore, because the bank was located in lower Manhattan, it attracted a relatively small number of customers from the northern part of town, who were more likely to be from south Ulster and north midlands counties such as Cavan, Meath, Monaghan, and Tyrone.
[27] All references to “parishes” are to “civil parishes,” not Roman Catholic parishes. Civil parishes were formalized as territorial divisions in the wake of the Cromwellian plantations of the seventeenth century.
[28] Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database.
[29] Per capita emigration rate for each parish calculated from Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database and the population of each parish in 1841 as reported in Census for Ireland for the Year 1851: Part I, Showing the Area, Population, and Number of Houses by Townlands and Electoral Divisions (Dublin: 1852).
[30] Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database. For a study of Irish county concentrations within New York, focusing on the late-nineteenth century and based on press accounts and memoirs, see John Ridge, “Irish County Colonies in New York City (Part I),” New York Irish History 25 (2011): 58–68; Ridge, “Irish County Colonies in New York City (Part II),” New York Irish History 26 (2012): 47–55; Ridge, “Irish County Colonies in New York City (Part III),” New York Irish History 27 (2013): 46-58.
[31] Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database.
[32] Ibid.The bank records and other sourcesconfirm that the Irish did not concentrate by birthplace to the extent that Riis claimed that Italian immigrants did. For example, combining the bank data with that from the marriage register of the Church of the Transfiguration in the Five Points neighborhood, which lists the birthplace of all brides and grooms married there from 1854 to 1859, shows that while certain buildings did have high concentrations of Irish immigrants from certain counties, no Irish contingent (with the exception of the Lansdowne immigrants) came remotely close to comprising a majority of the Irish (much less all residents) of any block. Marriage Register, Church of the Transfiguration, 29 Mott Street, New York.
[33] Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database. Because the Emigrant Bank did not record depositors’ religious affiliation, we cannot determine if it attracted the business of a disproportionately high or low percentage of Irish Protestants. The Irish Emigrant Society, whose officers spearheaded the founding of the bank, were drawn from both the Catholic and Protestant immigrant communities. If Protestants are underrepresented, it is likely because the bank was located downtown where the poor Irish Catholics tended to concentrate, while more well-to-do Protestant Irish immigrants living uptown would have been more likely to patronize a bank located there.
[34] Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database. For a study of New York’s Killybegs peddlers, see Angela Carothers, “From Killybegs to Mulberry Street,”http://www.nyuirish.net/ethnicvillage/mulberry-street/donegal_in_new_york/from-killybegs-to-mulberry-street/. Social scientists recognize the interplay between immigrant residential enclaves and the newcomers’ entrepreneurial success among today’s immigrants. See John Logan, Richard Alba, and Brian Stults, “Enclaves and Entrepreneurs: Assessing the Payoff for Immigrants and Minorities,” International Migration Review 37 (2003): 344-88.
[35] Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database.
[36] Ibid.; Seymour Durst, “Gas Illumination in New York City, 1823-1863” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1970), 38-50.
[37] Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database.
[38] Ibid. For the lives of New York’s printers, see Richard Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca, 1990), 48-55.
[39] Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database.
[40] For the role of networks and immigrant savings in a later period, see Rohit Wadhwani, “Banking from the Bottom Up: The Case of Migrant Savers at the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society During the Late Nineteenth Century,” Financial History Review 9 (2002): 62.
[41] It is notable that the blossoming historical scholarship on American capitalism has focused largely on the wealthiest Americans (bankers, planters, industrialists, railroad magnates) while ignoring the stories of ordinary entrepreneurs. And while there is significant scholarship on modern immigrant entrepreneurship, there is very little historical work on this subject. A good overview on contemporary immigrant entrepreneurship is Robert Fairlie and Magnus Lofstrom, “Immigration and Entrepreneurship,” in Barry Chiswick and Paul W. Miller, eds., Handbook of the Economics of International Migration, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 2015),1B: 877-911.
[42] Accounts 8502, 12661, 44393, 69023, Emigrant Bank Collection; entry for Thomas Finton, family 100, dwelling 71, district 18, Ward Twelve, 1870 U.S. census (hereafter “1870 census”); The New York Supplement, Volume 71 (New York State Reporter, Vol. 105) Containing the Decisions of the Supreme and Lower Courts of Record of New York State, July 18—October 10, 1901 (St. Paul, 1901),1083-8.
[43] Account 10141, Emigrant Bank Collection; Lynn Hollen Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Ithaca, 1979), 97 (quotation), 100. Labor historians, who have devoted much attention to the lives of artisans and industrial workers, have given hardly any to peddlers and other petty entrepreneurs, and none at all to Irish peddlers. See Joseph Rainer, “The ‘Sharper’ Image: Yankee Peddlers, Southern Consumers, and the Market Revolution,” in Scott Martin, ed., Change and the Market Revolution in America, 1789-1860 (Lanham, Md., 2005), 89-110; Danielle van den Heuvel, Women and Entrepreneurship: Female Traders in the Northern Netherlands, c. 1580-1815 (Amsterdam, 2007); Hasia Diner, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World ad the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (New Haven, 2015); Melissa Calaresu and Danielle van den Heuvel, eds., Food Hawkers: Selling in the Streets from Antiquity to the Present (New York, 2016). The role of self-employment in contemporary immigrant life has been examined in Jimy Sanders and Victor Nee, “Immigrant Self-Employment: The Family as Social Capital and the Value of Human Capital,” American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 231-49; Magnus Lofstrum, “Labor Market Assimilation and the Self-Employment Decisions of Immigrant Entrepreneurs,” Journal of Population Economics 15 (2002): 83-114; Don Bradley, “A Second Look at Self-Employment and the Earnings of Immigrants,” International Migration Review 38 (2004): 547-83; Magnus Lofstrum, “Low-Skilled Immigrant Entrepreneurship,” Review of Economics of the Household 9 (2011): 25-44; Maude Toussaint-Comeau, “Ethnic Social Networks and Self-Employment of Immigrant Men in the US,” Eastern Economic Journal 38 (2012): 74-98.
[44] Economic historians have noted that the gap between the income of skilled and unskilled workers was rapidly shrinking in this era. See Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality Since 1700 (Princeton, 2016), 126, 132-4.
[45] Accounts 11849, 15794, Emigrant Bank Collection; entry for Patrick Barry, family 475, first district, Ward Six, 1855 census; entry for Patrick Barry, family 184, dwelling 57, district 2, Ward Six, 1860 census; entry for Patrick Barry, family 149, dwelling 43, district 3, Ward Six, 1870 census; “Barry” [death notice], Herald, December 15, 1871. For the benefits of self-employment, see “Self-Employment, Again,” Tribune, April 29, 1853. The work lives of cartmen are explored in Graham Hodges, New York City Cartmen, 1667-1850 (New York, 1986).
[46] New York’s Irish day laborers remain virtually unstudied, but see Stott, Workers, 58-61 and Anbinder, Five Points, 120-2.
[47] This difference was not the result of laborers being younger and therefore having more opportunity to change occupations later on before marrying and having kids. The Emigrant Bank’s Famine-emigrant artisans were significantly younger than the day laborers. Thirty-seven percent of the bank’s Irish Famine artisans were born after 1825, versus only 26 percent of laborers. Conversely, 18 percent of laborers were born in 1810 or earlier, while only 10 percent of artisans were born in those years. Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database.
[48] Accounts 11842, 16104, 65666, and 65667, Emigrant Bank Collection; census entries for Edmund Butler, family 47, dwelling 15, second district, Ward One, 1860 census, and family 492, dwelling 138, Ward One, Kings County, 1870 census; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 23, 1894 (Butler obituary).
[49] Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database.
[50] Account 17539, Emigrant Bank Collection; entry for Peter Faye, family 1, dwelling 1, eastern division, Ward One, 1850 census; entry for Peter Faye, family 10, dwelling 5, district 1, Ward Two, 1855 census; “Old Peter Faye,”Herald, May 30, 1884, quoted in Buffalo Commercial, June 2, 1884 (quotations); “Brokers at Peter Faye’s Funeral,” Times, June 2, 1884.
[51] Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database. The towns with 10,000 or more inhabitants in 1841 were, from largest to smallest, Dublin, Cork, Belfast, Limerick, Waterford, Kilkenny, Galway, Drogheda, Derry, Clonmel, Dundalk, Wexford, Ennis, Sligo, Youghal, Nenagh, Athlone, Tralee, Navan, Mitchelstown, and Carlow. See The Census of Ireland for 1851, Part VI: General Report (Dublin, 1856), xv.
[52] Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database. If more than 50 percent of immigrants from a parish lived in three or fewer of New York’s twenty-two wards, we designated them as living in a residential “cluster” or enclave. Emigrants from only four of the twenty-one Irish towns with more than 10,000 inhabitants (Athlone, Galway, Sligo, and Tralee) clustered tightly in New York. In contrast, emigrants from eighteen of the twenty-nine predominantly rural parishes with the most Emigrant Bank depositors clustered tightly in New York.
[53] Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database. There was also a significant correlation, .41, between high savings and emigrating from a parish that had a high per capita emigration rate, but this correlation was not as strong as that for residential clustering in New York.
[54] Economists and sociologists vigorously debate the impact of modern immigrant enclaves on the earnings potential of their residents. See H. E. Aldrich et al., “Ethnic Residential Concentration and the Protected Market Hypothesis, Social Forces 63 (1985): 996-1009; Jimy Sanders and Victor Nee, “Limits of Ethnic Solidarity in the Enclave Economy,” American Sociological Review 52 (1987): 745-67; Greta Gilbertson and Douglas Gurak, “Broadening the Enclave Debate: The Labor Market Experiences of Dominican and Columbian Men in New York City,” Sociological Forum 8 (1993): 205-20; Ivan Light, Georges Sabagh, Mehdi Bozorgmehr, and Claudia Der-Martirosian, “Beyond the Ethnic Enclave Economy,” Sociological Problems 41 (1994): 65-80; George Borjas, “To Ghetto or Not to Ghetto: Ethnicity and Residential Segregation,” Journal of Urban Economics 44 (1998): 228-53; John Logan, Wenquan Zhang, and Robert Alba, “Immigrant Enclaves and Ethnic Communities in New York and Los Angeles,” American Sociological Review 67 (2002): 299-322; Barry Chiswick and Paul Miller, “Do Enclaves Matter in Immigrant Adjustment?” City and Community4 (2005): 5-35; Mark Ellis, Richard Wright, and Virginia Parks, “Geography and the Immigrant Division of Labor,” Economic Geography83 (2007): 255-81; Yu Xie and Margaret Gough, “Ethnic Enclaves and the Earnings of Immigrants,” Demography 48 (2011): 1293-1315; Sarah Bohn and Sarah Pearlman, “Ethnic Concentration and Bank Use in Immigrant Communities,” Southern Economic Journal79 (2013): 864-885; Roberto Pedace and Stephanie Rohn Kumar, “A Warm Embrace or the Cold Shoulder: Wage and Employment Outcomes in Ethnic Enclaves,” Contemporary Economic Policy 32 (2014): 93-110; Harriet Duleep, “The Adjustment of Immigrants in the Labor Market,” Handbook of the Economics of International Migration,1A:143-6.
[55] The median peak balance achieved by Killybegs/Kilcar peddlers was $571, versus $210 for all other Famine peddlers. The median for Stranorlar morocco dressers was $515, versus $325 for all other morocco dressers. The median for gas workers from Castlegregory was $229, versus $155 for others. The median for day laborers from the Lansdowne estate was $267 versus $160 for all other Famine laborers. There were not enough depositors working in the charcoal trade from places other than Bodoney Lower to make a meaningful comparison. To qualify as having a “concentration” in an occupation, a group had to have at least five times the typical percentage of Irish workers in a given field, and those workers had to comprise at least 20 percent of all male workers from that parish or town. The only exception was day labor. Because a quarter of all male Famine immigrants were day laborers, we defined a concentration in that occupation as double the normal percentage.
[56] Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation(1941; Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 69, 55; Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America(New York, 1985), 314–16, 321–22; Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City(Cambridge, Mass., 1964), 58–59, 132, 163, 251–52; Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970(Cambridge, Mass., 1973); Jo Ellen McNergney Vinyard, The Irish on the Urban Frontier: Nineteenth-Century Detroit, 1850–1880(New York, 1976); Clyde Griffen and Sally Griffen, Natives and Newcomers: The Ordering of Opportunity in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Poughkeepsie(Cambridge, Mass., 1978); James Henretta, “The Study of Social Mobility: Ideological Assumptions and Conceptual Bias,” Labor History18 (1977), 165–78; Richard Steckel, “Poverty and Prosperity: A Longitudinal Study of Wealth Accumulation, 1850–1860,” Review of Economics and Statistics72 (1990), 275–85; David Galenson, “Economic Opportunity on the Urban Frontier: Nativity, Work, and Wealth in Early Chicago,” Journal of Economic History51 (1991), 581–603; Ferrie, Yankeys Now, 128; Kevin Kenny, “Twenty Years of Irish American Historiography,” Journal of American Ethnic History28 (2009), 67–69; Kenneth Scherzer, “Immigrant Social Mobility and the Historian,” in A Companion to American Immigration, ed. Reed Ueda (Malden, 2006), 374 (quotation).
[57] Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database.
[58] Previous research has found a link between geographic mobility and increased wealth accumulation. See Ferrie, Yankeys Now, 110-16.
[59] Accounts 579, 11612, 16199, 19066, 26044 (Gilmartin), 4987 (Twiggs), Emigrant Bank Collection; entry for Thomas Gilmartin, family 1359, dwelling 454, Ward Six, Jersey City, Hudson County, New Jersey, 1870 census; entry for Patrick and Bridget Twigg, family 1803, dwelling 982, Ward Six, Newark, Essex County, New Jersey, 1860 census.
[60] Emigrant Savings Bank Depositor Database.
[61] Accounts 2797, 2798, 3576, 8852, 11674, 14200 (Lynches), 11131, 13156 (Strain), Emigrant Bank Collection; entry for Peter Lynch, family 877, dwelling 877, Faxon Township, Sibley County, Minnesota, 1860 census; entries for Peter and James Lynch, family 83, dwelling 83, Faxon Township, Sibley County, Minnesota, 1880 U.S. census; entry for Ann, James, Jane, and Peter Lynch, family 66, Faxon Township, Sibley County, Minnesota, 1885 Minnesota census; entries for Adam Strain, family 1276, dwelling 1497, Westfield, Marquette County, Wisconsin, 1860 census, family 33, dwelling 33, Oxford, Marquette County, 1870 census; “Death of Adam STRAIN,” Montello-Marquette Sun, March 4, 1882.
[62] Accounts 6832, 9402, 9404, 41701 (accounts of Catherine Dean Dowd), Emigrant Bank Collection; entry for Matthew and Catherine Dowd, family 1, dwelling 1, city of Hasting, Dakota County, 1857 Minnesota territorial census; entry for Matthew and Catherine Dowd, family 39, dwelling 30, Ward One, city of Hasting, Dakota County, Minnesota, 1860 census; J. Fletcher Williams, History of Dakota County and the City of Hastings (Minneapolis, 1881), 304.
[63] Entry for Bartholomew Finn, family 624, dwelling 582, Greencastle Township, Putnam County, Indiana, 1870 census; entry for John Forhan, family 649, dwelling 608, Greencastle Township, Putnam County, Indiana, 1870 census; entry for James Moriarty, family 490, dwelling 453, Greencastle Township, Putnam County, Indiana, 1870 census; accounts 8162, 9797, 17009 (Finn), 9512, 15884 (Forhan), 14149, 30497 (Moriarty), Emigrant Bank Collection; “James Moriarty,” Greencastle Banner, July 5, 1877;untitled account of Finn funeral, Greencastle Herald-Democrat, July 16, 1915.
[64] “Living Paycheck to Paycheck Is Disturbingly Common,” Washington Post, December 29, 2018. On the decline in the American savings rate since 1950, see Megan McArdle, “Why Has the Personal Savings Rate Declined So Dramatically?” Washington Post, May 22, 2018.
[65] Peter Gray, The Irish Famine (London, 1995), 68; William Henry, Famine: Galway’s Darkest Years (Cork, 2011), 176-77; Gerard MacAtasney, The Dead Buried by the Dying: The Great Famine in Leitrim (Sallins, Ireland, 2014), 258; Cormac Ó Gráda,Ireland’s Great Famine: Interdisciplinary Perspectives(Dublin, 2006), 123, 133; Ó Gráda, Black ’47 and Beyond: The Great Irish Famine in History, Economy, and Memory (Princeton, 1999), 116; “Liberty and a Welcome for the Exil[e] of Ireland,” New York Irish-American,August 26, 1849, p. 2.
[66] Abraham Lincoln, “Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Roy P. Basler, ed., 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953), 3:478-479.
[67] For the origins and use of the concept of “social capital,” see Alejandro Portes, “Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology24 (1998): 1-24; Nan Lin, Karen Cook, and Ronald Burt, eds. Social Capital: Theory and Research(New Brunswick, N.J., 2001); Ted Mouw, “Estimating the Causal Effect of Social Capital: A Review of Recent Research,” Annual Review of Sociology32 (2006): 79-102.
[68] For two examples of how the Irish boasted of their success in America, see Michael Coogan to the Editor, Irish-American, July 30, 1853, p. 4, and Francis Walsh, “Lace Curtain Literature: Changing Perceptions of Irish American Success,” Journal of American Culture2 (1979):139-46. Immigrant remittances have not received much attention from historians, but see Gary Magee and Andrew Thomson, “The Global and Local: Explaining Migrant Remittance Flows in the English-Speaking World,” Journal of Economic History 66 (2006): 177-202; Barbara Posadas and Roland Guyotte, “Sending Money ‘Home’: Toward a Transnational History of Migrant Remittances,” in Between the Old and the New World: Studies in the History of Overseas Migrations, Agnieszka Małek and Dorota Praszałowicz, eds. (Frankfurt am Main, 2012),11-26; for Irish-American remittances, see Robert Doan, “Green Gold to the Emerald Shores: Irish Immigration to the United States and Transatlantic Monetary Aid, 1854-1923” (Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 1999), 273-371.
[69] Alter, Goldin, and Rotella, “Savings of Ordinary Americans,” 747; Ferrie, Yankeys Now, 128; Scherzer, “Immigrant Social Mobility and the Historian,” 374; Galenson, “Economic Opportunity,” 583; Steckel, “Poverty and Prosperity,” 282.
[70] Marcus Allen, “Cautiously Capitalistic: Black Economic Agency at the Savings Bank of Baltimore, 1850-1900 (Ph.D. diss., Morgan State University, 2013), 49-91. Also see Walter Fleming,The Freedmen’s Savings Bank: A Chapter in the Economic History of the Negro Race (Chapel Hill, 1927); Carl Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud: A History of the Freedmen’s Savings Bank (Urbana, 1976); Barbara Josiah, “Providing for the Future: The World of African American Depositors of Washington, DC’s Freedmen’s Savings Bank, 1865-1874,” Journal of African American History 89 (2004): 1-16; Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (Cambridge, Mass., 2017).
[71] Good summaries of the state of research on contemporary American immigrant economic mobility can be found in George Borjas, “Making It in America: Social Mobility in the Immigrant Population,” Future of Children 16 (Fall 2006): 55-71, and Brian Duncan and Stephen Trejo, “Assessing the Socioeconomic Mobility and Integration of U.S. Immigrants and Their Descendants,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science657 (2017): 108-35. On socio-economic mobility throughout the world, see Ambar Narayan et al., Fair Progress? Economic Mobility Across Generations Around the World (Washington, 2018); on economic mobility today for all Americans, native as well as foreign born, good starting points are Susan Urahn et al., Pursuing the America Dream: Economic Mobility Across Generations (Washington, 2012); Raj Chetty et al., “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility Since 1940,” Science 356 (2017): 398-406 (and Chetty’s ongoing work on this subject, found at https://opportunityinsights.org/). Historical context on these issues can be found in Lawrence R. Samuel, The American Dream: A Cultural History (Syracuse, 2012).