Poor, 'ignorant children': 'a great resource' : the Saint John Emigrant Orphan Asylum admittance ledger in context

Abstract

Between 1815 and 1867, more than 150 000 Irish immigrants passed through the port of Saint John, New Brunswick. Initially and as long as the economy flourished, the Irish were received with open arms. However, as the century wore on, Britain began to dismantle the complex system of colonial preferences on which Saint John's prosperity, and the traditional Loyalist hegemony, depended. Eventually, poor Irish Catholics came to be looked on with aversion both by resentful New Brunswick-born Protestants and those established Catholics who enjoyed a hard-won, but now increasingly tenuous, hold on "respectability." In 1847 more than 15 000 Irish immigrants arrived, many of them diseased paupers "shoveled" out of Ireland by their Landlords. Eventually, 1847 came to regard as "something of a genesis" for the Irish in New Brunswick. Recently however, the Famine period, including 1847, has occupied an ambiguous place in the consciousness of New Brunswickers as historians, frustrated with the paucity of documentation for the period, have turned their attention to earlier immigration.

This thesis presents the previously unexamined admittance ledger of Saint John's Famine "Emigrant Orphan Asylum," "as it is." In concert with extensive notes from other privately held and previously inaccessible Famine documents, the ledger presents a compelling portrait of human suffering and degradation. Borne out of economic necessity, and in a climate of escalating anti-Catholic sentiment, the Saint John Emigrant Orphan Asylum functioned as a vehicle of religious and cultural assimilation and a clearing house for domestic servants and farm labourers. In context, the Asylum Ledger reveals the polarizing process which ultimately made poor "ignorant" children into a "good resource" and in so doing points to a new understanding of the broader Famine experience.