More than one million Irish fled their country. More Catholic peasantry of Ireland stayed and clung tenaciously to their own hearths and hovels than any other group. No matter what their degree of misery they had shown little disposition to leave their native land. Fearing the effects of the absorption of their religious beliefs into the Anglo-Saxon and Protestant world of America the Catholic Church had also discouraged emigration to the New World (Costigan, 1969). Nearly two million Irish died of starvation and fever within five years. Another million fled bearing disease to Liverpool and the New World. Most who emigrated did so at their own expense and sent money back to their relatives to follow them. Some went to English manufacturing towns or London (Taylor, 1962). Thousands of fleeing Irish carried their fever aboard on ships or developed fever on the voyage. Many never saw the land and died on the ship or died when they reached their destination (MacManus, 1944).
       Hundreds were rushing from their homes and country, not with the idea of making fortunes in other lands, but to fly from a scene of suffering and death. Within five years, through death and emigration Ireland lost more than two million people. By 1900, two-and-a-half million more left Irish ports to cross the Atlantic. When they emigrated they had a period of intense homesickness, loneliness, and humiliation. Emigrants were generally employed as menials. Boys and men did the hardest manual labor and girls and women did domestic services. They gradually recoiled themselves to life abroad and found opportunities for success that in their own homeland they had never known. Henry Ford was the grandson on one such emigrant from Ireland. The great grandfather of President Kennedy was another emigrant. Some emigrants found in America, Australia, and Canada only a grave, but other rose to positions of power and influence. Some large-scale emigration predated the famine in the 1840's, but the peak rate of emigration was in 1851 at 250,000 Irish (Foster, 1988).