American Money: How Remittances Kept Ireland Alive

For the better part of a century, the steadiest stream of money into the west of Ireland came not from a bank, a landlord or any government scheme. It came through the post. Inside the American letters that arrived in kitchens from Donegal down to Kerry travelled the earnings of sons and daughters an ocean away: a few dollar bills folded into the page, a money order, a draft drawn on an emigrant bank in New York. People called it American money, and the history of emigrant remittances to Ireland is the quiet, practical story of how whole townlands stayed alive on it.

Mayo knew that envelope as well as any county in Ireland. The land was poor, the holdings were small, and the leaving was heavier there than almost anywhere. By the 1860s the American letter had become part of the farm economy itself, counted on the way a crop is counted on, and watched for with the same anxiety as the weather.

What American money meant on a small farm

A small farm in the west ran close to the edge in the best of years. Rent fell due twice a year on the gale days whether the harvest had come good or not. The shop in town carried a family through the hungry months on credit, and the book had to be cleared. One wet season, one failed potato pit, one dead cow could tip a household from getting by into real trouble, and behind every reckoning, still within living memory, stood the Famine.

American money was the margin. A five-dollar note, worth roughly a pound in the money of the day, could meet a gale day or clear the worst of the shop debt. It bought meal in a bad spring, boots before winter, the makings of a roof. Shopkeepers in the market towns knew the rhythm of it and gave credit against a letter expected before Christmas. So, it was often said, did the landlords’ agents, who understood where the rent was coming from as well as anyone.

It needs saying plainly: this was not spare money for small comforts. In the poorest parishes of Mayo and along the western seaboard, remittances were regularly the difference between holding a farm and losing it, between a hard year and the workhouse. The dollars were love in their most practical form, and they carried obligation with them too, because everyone at home understood what they had cost to earn.

How emigrant remittances travelled

The earliest method was the simplest: banknotes folded inside the letter and trusted to the mail. It worked more often than not, but money went astray that way, so as the traffic grew, safer channels grew with it. Emigrants bought drafts and orders from banks and passage brokers in the American cities, made out in sterling and cashable at a bank or post office in Ireland. In New York, the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, founded by the Irish Emigrant Society in 1850 with exactly this traffic in mind, handled the business at scale: in 1860 alone it dealt with more than 600,000 dollars in remittances. From the early 1870s the international post office money order made the whole thing routine, an ordinary transaction between any American post office and the one in Ballina or Killala.

Counted across the century, the sums are startling. The historian Arnold Schrier, who made the closest study of the subject, put the total sent home from America between the Famine and 1900 at more than 260 million dollars. In the single decade from 1845 to 1854, when the need was most desperate, some 19 million dollars crossed the Atlantic. Almost all of it moved a few dollars at a time, which is the fact worth sitting with: behind those totals lie millions of separate acts of remembering.

Passage money: the ticket in the envelope

A great share of American money never arrived as cash at all. In the second half of the nineteenth century, more than four remittance dollars in every ten came as a prepaid passage ticket, bought from a shipping agent in America in a brother’s or a sister’s name and posted home. By the estimates historians most often cite, as much as three quarters of all Irish emigration in those decades was paid for from the American side.

This is the machinery that scholars call chain migration, though no family ever felt it as machinery. It moved one link at a time. The strongest or the eldest went first, took a place in service in Boston or work on the railways out of New York, and within a year or two the ticket came back for the next. The fare that could never have been raised from the farm was earned in months abroad. A single departure, mourned at an American wake as if at a funeral, quietly paid for four or five departures more.

That is the hard double edge of the remittance story, and there is no honest way to blunt it. The same envelopes that kept the small farms of the west alive also, ticket by ticket, emptied the parishes around them. The money held families together across an ocean, and it drew them across the ocean, both at once, and the people posting it and the people opening it understood both meanings perfectly well.

Who sent it, and what the sending cost

It is worth remembering whose wages these were. A remarkable share of Irish remittances was earned by young women, the servants, cooks and housemaids of the American cities. Board and lodging came with the situation, which left wages free to save, and contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic remarked on the discipline with which they saved them. The servant girl’s money order home became almost proverbial. Men on the railways, in the quarries and on the docks sent their share too, but any honest account of American money has to give the daughters of the house their full due.

What the letters rarely carried was any word of what the money had cost. Failure could not easily be written home, and neither could need; the few dollars folded in at Christmas said what neither side would put down in words. Read at this distance, the remittance is as eloquent as anything written on the page around it: proof, posted year after year, that distance had not loosened the knot.

The envelope that held both

None of this money ever travelled alone. Every draft and every ticket came wrapped in news, in questions, in the names of neighbours and the prices at the fair, all the ordinary freight of the American letters that held families together. The remittance and the letter were two halves of one object. The money was spent within the week. The letter, very often, was kept for a lifetime.

The habit itself outlasted the century. American money went on arriving in the west of Ireland deep into the twentieth century, through wars and slumps, for as long as there were kitchens waiting on it.

That is the world our own series lives in. In Yours, From Ireland, the first American money reaches Brigid O’Donnell in Ballycastle in August 1850, nearly three years after her son sailed, and from there the envelope from New York becomes part of the family’s year, with all the relief and all the cost described above. You can follow the family in the remittance years in Book Two, one of the eight Books that follow one family from 1847 to the 1940s.