What you Sometimes Forget Living in the Northeast: The Amazing “East-West Crisscross”

Traveling east from Branson along iconic US 60 in Missouri, sprawling farms line the landscape.  For mile after mile, cotton, corn, and cattle serve as a reminder of the vital importance of the nation’s interior in feeding and clothing the rest of us.  The feeling is similar riding along I-40 in Arkansas, where soybean, wheat, and alfalfa are as much a part of the region’s culture as razorback hogs and great barbecue.

This fall, my wife Kate and I went on a long and wonderful driving trip – seventeen states and nearly 4,000 miles in all – that took us along the Western spine of Virginia and North Carolina, over the haunting Blue Ridge range and the forest-covered Great Smoky Mountains into Tennessee, across the Volunteer State from Chattanooga to Memphis, before traversing the Mississippi River into western Arkansas, and then turning northward through the beautiful Ozarks into Missouri.  We then returned eastward through southern Missouri’s long and flat farmland region, crossed into and drove through the bluegrass and horse country of Kentucky, crossed the Alleghenies into the spectacular hills of West Virginia, before making a stop in Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow (Tarrytown), New York, and finally, home to Weymouth, MA.

It was an amazing sojourn that encompassed rich history, breathtaking hikes, resplendent nature, delicious food, wonderful people, and a constant and powerful reminder that so much goes on in the center of the country that we in the northeast often take for granted – specifically, the extraordinary production of food and the efficient transporting of goods.  

I refer to the latter as the “Great East-West Crisscross” – or West-East if you prefer – the broad network of roads, rivers, and railroads that make it possible to move tons of food, clothing, fuel, lumber, medicines, machinery, heavy equipment, supplies, and goods of all types across the American continent in a way that is the envy of the world and a feat that takes your breath away just thinking about it – but especially witnessing it.  The phrase “supply chain” that we have all become familiar with in the last months comes alive in the upper South and the lower Midwest in a way we simply don’t see at the “end of the line” in the Northeast.

The East-West / West-East movement simply never stops, whether it’s the staggering volume of goods that float on barges along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the 100+ – car freight trains that snake through the West Virginia mountains, or the thousands of 18-wheelers, flatbeds, auto-carriers, and trucks of every imaginable type that rumble across Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and West Virginia.

It’s a sight to behold.

It’s not that we don’t have rivers, roads, and railroads in the Northeast – of course we do.  Plenty of trucks, too, and some farms. We certainly witness logging trucks rumbling through northern New Hampshire and Maine, watch ships laden with cargo containers departing from Boston and New York harbors, and see Amazon vans zipping around making deliveries at all hours throughout the region – all of which keep our commerce humming.

But the scale is so vastly different as you head South and West, and because we’re tucked in the upper corner of the country, it’s easy to overlook the irrepressible and seemingly inexhaustible engines of production and transportation that flourish in the nation’s midsection.  The farms are enormous, the rivers are true waterways of commerce, the freight trains stretch on forever, and it’s not unusual to see fifty 18-wheelers parked in an all-purpose truck stop that includes restaurants, showers, and convenience shops for the drivers who are trekking across the country to deliver their loads on time.  

An added bonus was that our road-trip also conjured up links to some of my books.  We drove past the Fort Knox exit on US 60 in Kentucky, and I thought of the Baltimore & Ohio train that transported the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and other precious documents out of Washington D.C. to the impenetrable fortress in late 1941, to protect them after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a story I chronicle in American Treasures.  And the barges on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers were a satisfying reminder of the way in which Americans of all backgrounds transported food eastward to the large port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore en route to Ireland, during America’s first and historic 1847 humanitarian mission, a story I told in full for the first time in Voyage of Mercy.

Several times on our drive, Kate and I gave thanks to farmers, ship captains and crews, railroad engineers and workers, and of course, truckers. We came away from this eye-opening trip with many memories and thoughts – and most of all felt enormously blessed to live in our great country.  

For that reason and a slew of others, I’d recommend such a journey to anyone, anytime.

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Keep Those Questions Coming

I’ve made more than 630 appearances as an author, and by far the most enjoyable part of those events for me are the questions I receive from attendees.  It’s a chance for me to hear from the audience (most of whom are my wonderful and loyal readers!), to interact with them, to broaden the discussion into other areas beyond the book topic we’re discussing, and – in general – to keep me connected to readers and what they care about most.

There are many common questions, of course, those that come up at almost every presentation.  Most of these relate to the research / writing process (which I love talking about!).  For those of you who can’t make it to an appearance, I thought I’d share some of them here.  I’d still encourage you to attend an event when you can – the energy in the room is impossible to replicate, either on Zoom or in writing – and you can always ask me more specific questions (as many readers do) by emailing me at spuleo@aol.com.

Meanwhile, here are a few of the most frequent questions I receive:

  • Do you do all of your own research? (or, alternatively, Do you have a “team” of researchers?) – My “team” is small, but mighty.  I do about 90-95 percent of my own research.  For my last several books, I have been blessed to have a very able research assistant help me on each one, which has been a real bonus for me.  I direct all the research, and for the small percentage of it that I ask an assistant to handle, I am very closely involved with it.  I’m also responsible for all of it – if there’s a research mistake in any of my books, it is mine alone.  As you might expect, I love history, so perhaps by extension, I love research.  I never view it as a chore, and always feel that it helps me immerse myself in the era about which I’m writing.  It’s a very different process than writing, and it’s one I truly enjoy.
  • Do you have a particular time of day that you prefer to write? – My reflexive answer to this question is the early morning.  I believe I do my best writing in the quietest part of the day (no surprise).  However, I write at all times of day, including sometimes when I get a second wind late at night.  I also (literally) keep a notepad on my nightstand; I can’t count the number of times I’ve awakened from a deep sleep, and scrawled a quick note about a chapter or scene I’m working on.  It’s usually all I need to jumpstart me the next morning.
  • Do you do the research and writing simultaneously?  Separately?  Do you do some writing and some research?  In general what process do you use to mesh the two? – Different nonfiction authors handle this in different ways.  For me, I’ve found the most productive to be 1.) complete my research first; and 2.) write.  I always find it helpful to “know what I have” in terms of documents, records, diaries, letters, etc., before I begin to write.  It helps me think “several chapters ahead’ since I know what supporting documentation I’ll have to work with.  Also, I almost never have writer’s block (frantically looking for some wood to “knock on” here), but even if I’m a little stuck on how to start a scene or a chapter, sometimes I’ll recall a letter or diary entry that lights a fire, or produces an “aha!” moment.  There is a danger to waiting for the “end of research” to begin writing, and that’s the temptation to “never end the research.”  Indeed, there is always another letter to find, or another court transcript to pore over.  What saves me then is the sheer contractual-obligation terror on when my manuscript is due (OK, not literal “terror,” but certainly pressure!).  I need to estimate how long it will take me to write the book, and work backwards from the due date.  So, in a sense, this deadline almost forces me to say, “I have enough,” and stop the research.  One caveat: of course, if I come across a “Eureka” document after writing begins, I’ll most definitely add it to my research cache!
  • How do you decide on your book topics? – I’ll start with the blindingly obvious: the topic has to interest me.  If you’re going to spend 2-3 years researching and writing a book, my advice to any author or would-be author is to make sure you like your topic!  If you get bored as you’re working on a book, it will show (negatively) either with sloppy research or less-than-inspiring writing.  Assuming that I’m excited about a topic, I use a few criteria to determine whether it’s a candidate for a full-fledged book: 
    • 1.) How often the topic has been “done” – Not every topic has to fall into the “never-before-written-about” category, but for me it certainly helps if the surface has barely been scratched.  The less written about an event, the more fertile the ground.  Put the opposite way, if you’re planning to write a biography about Abraham Lincoln, you had better have a truly unique perspective or “first time ever” material to take to a publisher.
    • 2.) The event has to fit into a “big historical picture” – A particular event can’t stand by itself – if that’s all there is, better to write a magazine article or a blog.  The event needs to fit into context – not only into the timeframe in which it occurs, but have ramifications far into the future, maybe even to the present day.  For this category, I always start with: Why is this event important beyond the event itself?
    • 3.) Compelling real-life characters are a must – History and nonfiction have “characters” in the same way fiction does.  The difference is – I can’t make them up.  I have to build my real-life characters according to the historical record that is available.  Characters – real people – drive nonfiction in the same way they drive fiction.  Readers need to care about characters, regardless of the genre.
    • 4.)  Primary sources are essential – You can’t write great history without great primary sources.  As I mentioned above, good sources place you back in the time period, and provide you with the foundation you need upon which to rest your story.  A strong foundation allows me to construct a book almost any way I choose, and that freedom almost always improves creativity, pacing, and the story arc in general.

So those are a few questions readers ask me at virtually every presentation.  It’s always gratifying for me to see such interest.  People who care so much about good writing make the best readers, and I’m thrilled so many of them read my books!

 Many thanks – and keep those questions coming.

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The History Puzzle: Never Finished, but Always Clearer with Time

“The cadets lost no time in getting into the ruins, scouring every corner and pile for dead and injured…the prompt action of the ship’s medical officer resulted in the saving of human life…”

John W. Thompson, navigator, USS Nantucket, January 18, 1919, report on crew members assisting in the aftermath of the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

The history puzzle is never finished – but its image almost always becomes sharper with the passage of time.

I learned this lesson (again) recently when I visited Massachusetts Maritime Academy (MMA) to discuss a fantastic new program the college is launching for students in grades 5-12 related to the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, part of its renowned Sea, Science, & Leadership Program (SSLP).  I’m honored that high-achieving high school students will be reading Dark Tide when the program is held for the first time this summer, and excited that the school has invited me to participate in preparation activities and the SSLP graduation on August 3.

The historical connection between MMA and the flood is rich and compelling: cadets aboard the MMA’s USS Nantucket training ship (MMA was called the Massachusetts Nautical School at the time), docked in Boston Harbor on January 15, 1919 when the molasses tank collapsed, were first on the scene to rescue survivors, gather the dead, and maintain order on Boston’s waterfront.  The ship was under the command of Superintendent Charles Nelson Atwater, and among the brave cadets on board were three men shown here – 1919 MMA graduates Guy McKinny Hanna from Waltham, MA; Carl William Holmes from North Easton, MA: and Ronald J. Macintyre from Fall River, MA.

 

Now here’s where the history puzzle becomes clearer:  Dark Tide was published almost nineteen years ago, and I examined thousands of pages of primary source documents to provide the underpinning for the book – court transcripts, damage awards, letters, government records, etc.  I believe I know as much or more about the topic as anyone.  Dark Tide continues to be the only adult nonfiction book on the subject. If you had asked me whether any primary source material existed that I hadn’t at least seen, let alone studied, I would have answered with an unequivocal “no.”

And I would have been wrong.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the good people at MMA let me know that, as part of preparing for the SSLP program, they had discovered a scrapbook of letters, reports, and newspaper clippings compiled by Atwater. Would I be interested in examining it?

Would I?  Of course!  I was stunned such a report existed!

Atwater’s Report of the Superintendent and Clippings Regarding the Accident Occurring near North End Park, Boston, January 15, 1919, contains some rich and important details that I wish I had known about when writing Dark Tide.  Consider some of the information from the report:

  • From Watch Officer N. Silversteen – “I ran all the way to the wreckage, wading in molasses from 4”-12” deep. I first came across cadets carrying a stretcher with a body all covered with molasses. [Then] we heard moaning from under a pile of debris, and with several cadets, found a man lying there.  We extricated him with all possible speed and carried him in a stretcher to the ambulance.”
  • Atwater’s report to Board of Commissioners – “I heard a deep, rumbling, crashing roar of sustained duration, and saw, two hundred yards away…billowing movement and collapse of a line of buildings. Roofs, sides, and partitions moved into the North End Park like the…pushing over of a house of cards.”
  • Atwater again – “In a short time, cadets dripping molasses from the waist down came running back for supplies of oilskins and rubber boots, and others came for overcoats for the policing sentries…some of the cadets had varnished faces and dripping garments that looked as if they had been swimming in molasses…the cadets behaved admirably, and the commissioners may well take pride, as I do, in their work.”
  • Atwater – “By posting cadets with fixed bayonets at the street ends, [we] kept open North End Park and Commercial Street for the coming of fire trucks and ambulances. The police officials thanked us for this…other officer formed squads of cadets and from various points waded into the molasses of the wrecked area to rescue the injured and bring out the dead.”

The vivid writing certainly surpasses the bureaucratic report-writing of today, and offers much more than a glimpse into the “first responders” of 1919 – the cadets aboard the USS Nantucket.  I wish I had access to this – or even knew about it – when I was writing Dark Tide.

The MMA scrapbook illustrates the dilemma for historians and narrative nonfiction writers: at some point, the research has to stop and the writing must begin, or else the story might never get told.

And it highlights the fact that there are always new puzzle pieces that emerge on any historical topic, and no matter when that is, they enrich our understanding and cause us to take another look – and that’s a good thing.

I eagerly await the next primary source that I don’t know about to bubble to the surface about the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919.

Meantime, my thanks to Mass Maritime Academy for sharing this gem with me.

Click here for more information on Mass Maritime’s Sea, Science, & Leadership Program (SSLP), and to sign up for this summer’s molasses flood program!

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America’s Remarkable First Humanitarian Mission: Widespread Aid to Ireland During the Great Famine

I originally wrote this summary of Voyage of Mercy for “The History Reader,” the history website hosted by St. Martin’s Press, publisher of Voyage. Enjoy!

By Stephen Puleo

I describe my book, Voyage of Mercy: The USS Jamestown, the Irish Famine, and the Remarkable Story of America’s First Humanitarian Mission as a story about hope, generosity, and soaring goodwill against a backdrop of nearly unfathomable despair. And like any story with such powerful themes, its lessons run deep and its ramifications are measured in decades rather than days.

Voyage of Mercy recounts for the first time the remarkable and unprecedented relief effort by the government and citizens of the United States to assist Ireland during the terrible famine year of 1847; remarkable because the mission undertaken by Captain Robert Bennet Forbes and the crew of the USS Jamestown to deliver tons of donated food to Ireland was the first step in a monumental effort that involved contributions from citizens of virtually every community in the United States, and the official imprimatur of the U.S. government; unprecedented not only for the size and scope of American participation, but [create a callout of this phrase: because it was the first time the United States—or any nation, for that matter—extended its hand to a foreign neighbor] in such a broad and all-encompassing way for purely humanitarian reasons.

Prior to 1847, the bulk of interaction between nation-states consisted mainly of warfare and other hostilities, mixed with occasional trade; the entire concept of international charity existed neither in the moral consciousness nor as part of the political strategy of monarchs or elected leaders. If anything, such a gesture toward a foreign nation would likely have been viewed as a sign of weakness.

The Jamestown mission was, in modern parlance, the “tip of the spear,” the most visible and most celebrated component of America’s first full-blown charitable mission. The U.S. relief effort encompassed far more than Jamestown, but it was the historic voyage of a retrofitted warship embarking on a mission of peace that most visibly symbolized the widespread willingness of the American people to offer up enormous stores of food and provisions to assist victims of the Irish famine. More than 5,000 ships left Ireland during the great potato famine in the late 1840s, transporting the starving and the destitute away from their stricken homeland. The first vessel to sail in the other direction, to help the millions unable to escape, was the USS Jamestown, a converted warship, which left Boston in March 1847 loaded with precious food for Ireland.

In an unprecedented move by Congress, the warship had been placed in civilian hands, stripped of its guns, and committed to the peaceful delivery of food, clothing, and supplies in a mission that would launch America’s first full-blown humanitarian relief effort.

The voyage itself and the subsequent outpouring of charitable relief captured hearts and minds on both sides of the Atlantic. In addition, the events of 1847 have served as the blueprint and inspiration for hundreds of American charitable relief efforts since, philanthropic endeavors that have established the United States as the leader in international aid in total dollars and enabled it to assist millions of people around the world victimized by famine, war, and catastrophic natural disasters.

________

Two compelling individuals occupy the center of this story.
Sea captain Robert Bennet Forbes of Boston was one of the most dynamic, determined, resilient, adventurous, well-traveled, generous, and interesting men of his age—or any age, for that matter—and until now, his story has never been fully told. I am grateful that he was also an excellent, frequent, and descriptive writer, able to relate both meaningful context and colorful details, understand the nuances of human nature as well as his own virtues and shortcomings, and express himself with passion, pathos, drama, and humor. In addition, he was the consummate collector and keeper of documents—a bit of a hoarder, actually—which has provided us with a rich trove of what others thought about him, his mission, and his world.

The Reverend Theobald Mathew, known best as Ireland’s “Temperance Priest,” was the heroic and indomitable figure on the Irish side of the Atlantic, fighting—though mostly in vain—to save the lives of his starving countrymen and convince British authorities of the speed of the famine’s onslaught, the extent of its horrors, and the desperate need for additional relief. In the decade before the famine, Father Mathew had achieved fame on both sides of the Atlantic for his efforts to convince hundreds of thousands of Irish to sign his temperance pledge; in fact, history records his crusade against drinking and alcoholism as his signature achievement. But his work in the trenches during the worst of the famine—offering food, shelter, medical care, and comfort to those suffering from near-starvation and debilitating disease—would forever endear him to the Irish people, especially those from his home parish in Cork city. Still revered in his native country today, Father Mathew, like Forbes, is little known in the United States, despite a lengthy and controversial visit to America shortly after the famine.

What truly inspired me about this story were the actions of what I’ll call thousands of other real-life characters, who together make up a single collective character of sorts: the American people. I had known something about the Jamestown voyage before researching this book, but I was completely unaware of the enormous scope of U.S. relief effort to Ireland in 1847–48, the widespread generosity of Americans from all walks of life during a time when the very act of survival and supporting one’s own family presented a grueling daily challenge and was far from guaranteed.

That Americans from across the United States contributed to Irish relief was extraordinary enough, but it was the nature of most of their donations that was most impressive. This was not a matter of entering credit card information or dropping off a bag of canned goods, though these are certainly generous acts in their own right. While many people sent small amounts of money, most donated food that otherwise would have been used to sustain their loved ones. Farmers furrowed the ground, laid the seed, nurtured the plants, and harvested the crops—beans, corn, barley, wheat and much more. Then they took a portion of those goods, packaged them in burlap sacks or wooden kegs, and delivered them by horse-drawn wagon to river ports, where rafts and small boats carried them to larger ships that navigated broader rivers and the Erie Canal. From there, the food made its way to major Atlantic ports like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, where dockworkers loaded it upon ocean-sailing vessels bound for England and Ireland.

Farmers and planters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Tennessee, Maryland, Virginia, western New York, and western Massachusetts, in the mid-Atlantic states, across the South and along the Mississippi—all of them literally took food out of the mouths of their own family members, or food they would normally sell at market to buy goods for their cabins and farms, and shipped it to strangers thousands of miles away.

It was as though Americans looked at their own children and felt the pain of Irish parents who were watching their own youngsters starve. Or perhaps Americans appreciated the poetic, if mournful, symmetry of sharing the abundant bounty produced by their fertile fields with people whose land was blackened by blight and whose major crop rotted with disease. Whatever the exact reason, such sacrifice and generosity were breathtaking to me, and I’ve thought about this often, especially when I walk into a supermarket and, almost without giving it a second thought, reach for virtually any food item I choose to buy. How much food would we give to strangers today if our survival, our families’ survival, depended on planting, growing, cultivating, and harvesting everything we needed?

And maybe because Americans knew they were part of something much larger than themselves in 1847, the widespread desire to provide relief to Ireland also unified the United States—for a short time at least—in a way it hadn’t been since the adoption of the Constitution sixty years earlier, and probably not again until the attack on Pearl Harbor nearly a century later drew the United States into World War II.

Charitable contributions of any kind at any time are worthy and noble; the American humanitarian mission to Ireland during the 1847 potato famine was something special altogether. The Jamestown voyage not only represented a spark of color across the bleak grayness of Ireland’s landscape, but was part of a larger national charitable tapestry that would signal a seismic shift in international relations. Beyond Ireland and outside of the United States, the American “warship of peace” had delivered—along with precious food and supplies—a message of fellowship to the rest of the world. Wars and hostilities continued between countries, and will continue always, but the Jamestown and the United States’ response demonstrated that it was acceptable, appropriate, and—as unlikely as it seemed before the voyage—perhaps even obligatory for countries to assist each other for purely humanitarian reasons.

Not only did the Jamestown mission and the widespread U.S. relief effort define the country’s generosity and establish its emergence on the world stage, not only did it cement bonds between Ireland and the United States that remain strong to this day, it also signaled a sea change in the affairs of nations, advancing the notion that gestures of philanthropy and brotherhood, rather than signs of a nation’s weakness, were displays of quiet strength and moral certitude.

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The Jamestown departs Boston for Ireland

March 28, 1847 – The Jamestown departs Boston for Ireland

(modified excerpt from Voyage of Mercy)

On March 28, a Sunday, from the top floor of his house in Boston’s Pemberton Square, Robert Bennet Forbes gazed upon a morning that had broken bright and clear. A cold steady wind from the northwest had blown a stubborn three-day storm out to sea; the late March day was ideal for the Jamestown to embark.

Since St. Patrick’s Day, when workers began loading provisions onto the ship, Forbes had engaged in a flurry of last-minute preparations – penning letters to England, assembling a crew, seeking assistance from groups to help assist and provision his men.

And of course, he marveled at the food!  Contributions had arrived from all over New England, most of them from within Boston city limits, but many from elsewhere—towns, societies, individuals—transported free of charge on several railroads that also joined the wave of generosity that the mission engendered. Local Irish immigrants even hand-carried sacks of potatoes and flour to the dock for workers to load.

From gardens and farms in and around Boston, from the hills and hollows of northern Vermont, from the Rhode Island coast and the wheat fields of Connecticut, from the mountains of New Hampshire and Western Massachusetts, generous deliveries arrived in Charlestown with remarkable speed for loading aboard the Jamestown: meal, corn, bread, beans, beef, pork, peas, hams, oatmeal, dried apples, flour, potatoes, rice, rye, wheat, fish, clothing, and other supplies. Committees around New England wrote letters of support to Forbes even as they announced their contributions. “Our committee is free to forward about twenty-five hundred bushels of corn and other grain,” reported the Portland, Maine, relief committee, and was pleased to do so “with sentiments of high respect for the truly philanthropic and generous course taken by yourself on this mission.”

Forbes was astounded at the level of generosity. “Every sort of facility, wharfage, dockage, labor, pilotage, storage, chronometers, stores, and last, not least, sympathy and approbation have been offered most abundantly,” he wrote. Further, any expenses incurred “will be of no consequence compared to the good feeling which will fill the hearts of our brothers in other lands.”

He had no doubt that in years to come, he would look back on the mission as “the most prominent event of my life.”

At 7:30 a.m., Forbes hugged his wife, Rose, and said good-bye to their three “chicks”—ten-year-old Bob, four-year-old Edith, and two-year-old James Murray.

An hour later, standing at the helm of the Jamestown, cap pulled low, his face already reddened by the bright morning sun and raw northwest wind, Robert Bennet Forbes surveyed the vessel that would transport him, his crew, and 8,000 barrels of food to Ireland.

At exactly 8:30 a.m., the ship pulled away from the pier. Forbes dutifully recorded her dramatic departure: “All things being ready, sails set, the fasts single, the breeze fresh, the ship struggling to be free . . . I cried ‘let go!’ and off she went.”

Amid the hearty cheers of hundreds of people lining the wharves, Forbes guided the Jamestown out of Navy Yard waters, her stores laden with cargo and her three topsails unfurled. From her mizzen peak flew the Stars and Stripes, and from her magnificent royal mast snapped a white flag emblazoned with a wreath of shamrocks encircling a thistle. The revenue cutter Hamilton lowered its flag in salute as the Jamestown passed, and as the ship cleared Long Wharf, the towboat R. B. Forbes joined the ship, carrying cheering members of the New England relief committee.

Now the Jamestown sped down the harbor “like a racehorse,” clearing wharves and moored ships and small boats at nine knots, the tug hugging her starboard side astern. About an hour later, the R. B. Forbes fell away from the Jamestown amid roars of approval from committee members on board. After measuring wind and swells, and conducting one final inspection of the ship, Forbes finally signaled to his crew that the Jamestown would take its leave from Highland Lighthouse on Cape Cod.

Without escort and under way, Forbes “launched our gallant bark on the broad Atlantic” toward Cork, Ireland, a “voyage full of hope and pleasure, and blessed with the appropriation of many kind hearts at home.”

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Loading the USS Jamestown with food for Ireland

March 17, 1847 – Loading the USS Jamestown with food for Ireland

(modified excerpt from Voyage of Mercy)

As dusk crept across the piers and a chill wind blew from the harbor, Robert Bennet Forbes marveled at the first-day progress of the longshoremen who had spent hours bowing their backs and loading food and provisions aboard the Jamestown.

It was a “happy coincidence,” Forbes noted, that the men—members of the Boston Laborers’ Aid Society—were almost entirely of Irish descent and that their work commenced on St. Patrick’s Day. In a letter of thanks to the society for offering its workers’ services free of charge, Forbes had wished “that all good saints may bless the enterprise and quicken your exertions,” and on this day the saints had obliged.

The crews had stowed more than 1,000 barrels of food, one-eighth of Jamestown’s full load, as well as more than twenty barrels of clothing. Working for no wages, the men nonetheless were toiling without delay, knowing full well that speed and efficiency in Charlestown could save lives in their beloved Ireland.

 While Forbes admired the first-day progress, he was not surprised by it. This whole endeavor had occurred with whirlwind speed: securing congressional and White House approval for an unprecedented mission; his agreeing to lead it; notifying Irish and British government officials and receiving their endorsement; finding and retrofitting a ship and enlisting a crew; obtaining contributions and now loading cargo aboard a warship about to embark on a mission of peace.

For the past eight weeks, since the first ships of 1847 had arrived in the United States from Great Britain and passengers and crews revealed the full horror of the hunger besetting Ireland, Boston and America could not have moved with greater swiftness and urgency if their own country had been imperiled.

Forbes, whose life credo was defined by doing his duty, often in the toughest of circumstances, summed up the gravity of the emergency that had prompted such a rapid response: “It is not an everyday matter,” he wrote, “to see a nation starving.”

_________

Surveying activity around the Navy Yard, Forbes again was reminded of the improbability of assuming command of an American warship for humanitarian purposes while his country was at war. Every place he looked reminded him that the navy was on a war footing; sailors, stevedores, dockworkers, and tradesmen were busy improving and enlarging the Navy Yard or ensuring the seaworthiness of the warships moored there. Workers had completed a new wharf and pier on the west side of the yard, and crews were readying the grounds for construction of another wharf, a brick barn, a plumbers’ shop, and a carpentry shop, and were planning to reconstruct a third wharf in need of repairs—all authorized by a recent Naval Appropriations Act and overseen by Commodore Foxhall A. Parker, who had become the Navy Yard’s commandant just two years earlier.

The warship USS Vermont, still in dry dock, finally was nearing completion thirty years after it had been laid down, and the USS Constitution—“Old Ironsides”—was undergoing minor repairs after a long stint at sea; Forbes had actually inspected the Constitution for the mission to Ireland but found she could not be “made ready to sail” within the quick time frame he envisioned.

The Charlestown yard, more than forty years old, was now a jewel in the navy’s crown—President James K. Polk was scheduled to visit in June to inspect the progress and improvements—and its strategic importance as a wartime base had grown after Congress declared war on Mexico on April 23, 1846.

And yet it was the Jamestown—carrying “corn not cannon,” in the words of one Irish newspaper after twenty of her twenty-two deck guns were removed to make room for food—that was the talk of the Navy Yard, New England, and much of the United States. The enthusiasm among Americans for her peaceful mission was the capstone of nearly two months of national support for Ireland that was nothing short of extraordinary; it seemed people were anxious to rally around a cause that transcended both politics and U.S. borders. Many Americans were frustrated by the polarizing Mexican War and the ongoing acerbic North-South debates about slavery, and perhaps found in Ireland’s woes both a cause for unity and a release of tensions. Some said assistance to Ireland would improve long-strained Anglo-American relations, easing acrimony left over from both the American Revolution and the War of 1812.

Others—and Forbes was among these—expressed the belief that God had bestowed great abundance and blessings upon the United States that should be shared with the less fortunate.

 

 

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The Irish-American Story: From immigration to discrimination to assimilation to celebration

The first day of Irish Heritage Month seems like a good time to recognize the remarkable story of Irish-Americans – from the humblest of beginnings upon their arrival on America’s shores, to the vitriolic discrimination they faced and overcame, to their rapid assimilation in a new country, to a celebration of their lofty and innumerable contributions even as they maintain a deep pride in their heritage and ethnicity.

What an incredible story it is!

I’ve had the opportunity to research and write about the Irish experience in two of my books, A City So Grand (2010), which details their arrival in Boston in great numbers between 1847-1860; and in my most recent book, Voyage of Mercy (2020), which chronicles the brutality of the Irish famine of 1846-47 and the unprecedented and beneficent humanitarian response from American citizens to the suffering of the Irish people.

I’ve also been blessed to have married into a large Irish family, of which I’ve been a part for more than forty years. My wife, Kate, her twelve siblings, her legion of cousins, her dear late parents and their siblings, all trace their ancestry with pride back to the Old Sod. 

So I feel like I know as much about the Irish-American experience as any Italian-American guy can — their story is not so different from the saga of my own people.

To use Boston as an example, thousands of Irish, who had witnessed such devastation in their own country – who saw it transformed from a nation of bucolic splendor to a blight-infested isle of death – arrived in their adopted city to find not succor but prejudice, not welcome but suspicion and contempt. Boston’s close Yankee society, its deep anti-Catholicism, its often condescending intellectualism, its insistence that “Irish need not apply” – all of these were completely foreign to, and conspired against, the bedraggled Irish who stepped weakly off the coffin ships and sought refuge among her narrow streets. It rocked the Irish and left them disillusioned and dispirited.

But not broken – far from it.

Boston’s Irish had survived the destruction wrought by the famine, survived the deadly Atlantic passage, and they would survive – and soon thrive! – in Boston by virtue of their resilience, faith, family bonds, hard work, and perseverance that kept them going through the darkest of times. They overcame poverty and discrimination, took any work they could find – cleaning stables, unloading ships, digging trenches, laying foundations, working as domestic help – to earn money, save money, buy homes, and become citizens. They fought bravely for the Union in the Civil War, returned, built communities, voted, and ran for office.

By 1880, more than 70,000 Irish lived in the city. By 1882, Boston elected its first Irish-born representative to Congress; and the first Irish born mayor took office in 1885. By this time, Boston had undergone a stunning conversion in an amazingly short time – about 30 years; it was clearly becoming an Irish and a Catholic city. The Irish domination of the city – in politics, in public service, in the cultural influence of music, pubs, and literature – continued for well over a century. President John F. Kennedy, a descendant of post-famine immigrants, was only exaggerating a little when he made his highly celebrated 1961 visit to Ireland, the first ever by a sitting president. He said: “Nearly everyone in Boston is from Galway.”

It’s easy today to think the success of the Irish, or any group that begins its journey in abject poverty, was somehow preordained. But of course, nothing could be further from the truth. The Irish were among the first European immigrants to arrive in the United States on such a broad scale – and the odds were stacked against them in almost too many ways to count. Their rapid assimilation and their meteoric upward mobility, were far from foregone conclusions.

So this month, whether you’re Irish or not, celebrate the spirit of the Irish and the Irish-American story. Both were forged amid terrible hardship, strengthened by an irrepressible character to overcome them, and burnished by loyalty, resilience, perseverance, and love of family and friends.

Characteristics we should all tip our hat to – and all emulate.

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Dad, There’s No Need to Worry

I taught my World War II class at UMass-Boston in the Fall of 2021 and emerged with a sense of optimism and hope.

First, a little background.

Many of you who have been loyal and kind enough to follow my “author life” know that I’m proud of my dad’s service as a World War II Army veteran.  Tony Puleo was a Purple Heart recipient who served in both the European and Pacific theaters.  He was also immensely (albeit quietly) proud of his service, and in the late 1990s, when I was interviewing him and preparing to write his war memoirs for the family, he said to me more than once:  “Please make sure young people remember the Second World War, the sacrifices, the heroism, and what it meant to the world.  As time goes by, people tend to forget their history.  I’m worried that young people will forget.”

Dad died in January of 2009.  I spent the next several months designing from scratch a college-level World War II course, in his honor, that I taught at Suffolk University in the fall of that year.  After teaching at Suffolk for several semesters, I moved to UMass-Boston, where I’ve been thrilled to teach the course at my alma mater.  “World War II: The Global War” is an upper-level elective, attended mostly by juniors and seniors, but I’ve had numerous freshmen and sophomores in the class and they’ve done remarkably well.

And that brings me to the hope and optimism part.  You’ve read and heard about the surveys as I have:  college students don’t know anything about history; ask them who fought in World War II and on which side, and you get blank stares; kids aren’t interested in anything that happened before they were born.

And on and on.

This past fall, my students debunked all of these canards.

I had a class full of engaged, interested students who worked hard, expressed thoughtful curiosity during discussions and demonstrated shrewd analysis in their papers and in-class exams.  These young people were truly interested in the Second World War.  It’s true that many had never studied it in high school – someday I’ll write a blog about that! – yet all of them knew the war’s scope on some level, that it was perhaps the largest and most all-consuming event in history, and each student wanted to know more.

I was also impressed all semester with their dedication and responsibility.  My class began at 8:00 a.m., a difficult time for college students to be sure.  UMass-Boston is still largely a commuter school, so for most students, arriving on time for an early-morning class is more than a matter of rolling out of bed a few minutes before class begins.  There’s perhaps an hour or more of commuting time, driving or riding the “T,” before these students arrive on campus.  And yet, their attendance was outstanding (I had several students with perfect attendance).

Great attendance.  Hard work.  A passion for learning.  I was proud of my students – they taught me something.

As a teacher, I couldn’t have asked for more.

And dad, don’t worry:  I think the future is in good hands.

 

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