38 KEYWORDS: Immigration history, Irish American history, entrepreneurship DOI: https://doi.org/10.4079/2578-9201.1(2022).08
The Forgotten Entrepreneurs: New York City’s Irish Immigrant Peddlers in the Nineteenth Century KAIFENG DENG
ECONOMICS & HISTORY, CCAS ‘22, kfdeng28@gwu.edu
ABSTRACT How should we view the Irish who emigrated to America in the nineteenth century, and what can they tell us about immigrant entrepreneurship? Historians have traditionally viewed the transplants from Ireland as beggarly and desperate, but recent scholarships challenge this claim by looking at these immigrants’ deposit records. Although new studies reveal the surprisingly large savings of Irish-born manual laborers, they largely overlook the experience of immigrant peddlers. This paper traces the business activities of New York City’s Irish hawkers by examining banking data, census records, and newspaper accounts from the 1840s to the 1870s. It finds that the peddlers from Ireland were savvy entrepreneurs who enjoyed financial success and upward mobility. They developed creative ways to build inventories and sell goods across the city and the US. Some of them also accumulated handsome sums in the bank and moved on to more rewarding and respectable careers. The forgotten saga of the hawkers affirms that America was a land of opportunities for many Irish, but it also highlights how the country’s immigration policy, as well as the possibilities for immigrants, has changed since the nineteenth century.
• For Hugh Torpey, the year 1845 was full of misery and uncertainty. Famine, sickness, and death ravaged Mitchelstown, the small town in County Cork, Ireland he called home. After two years of hunger and hardship, he decided to emigrate to America, hoping to find relief and embrace new possibilities. A young man with no trade, Torpey became a peddler in New York City, hawking “port-monnaie” (small pocketbooks and wallets) and perfume for a living in the 1850s. By no means was it a glamorous job, but it was better than digging foundations and hauling bricks, which were common occupations for Irish immigrants. Keeping track of inventories and managing expenses might not have been easy for a street salesman, let alone becoming successful. Yet Torpey accomplished exactly that. In 1864, he held $2,216, the equivalent of $36,500 today, in his bank account (Account 10919).1 In fact, Irish immigrant peddlers, who only made up 1% of the Irish-born population in New York in the 1850s, generally did quite well. Male peddlers who emigrated during
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the Great Famine secured a median savings of $251. Though a modest sum compared to Torpey’s, it was twice as much as what Irish skilled artisans and clerks in New York saved. With a median savings of $100, female Irish peddlers also accumulated more wealth than their peers who engaged in needle trades and nursing. How did some Irish immigrants become successful entrepreneurs after coming to America? The Irish immigrants of New York City, especially those who emigrated during the Great Famine, have traditionally been seen as beggarly and desperate. The pioneering study on Irish immigration by Oscar Handlin concludes that the famine-era immigrants were “unemployed, resourceless proletariat” (1991), while the influential work by Kerby Miller paints “a gloomy picture of Irish-American deprivation” (1985). Recent studies on the subject, though, have challenged these pessimistic narratives. Tyler Anbinder, along with Cormac Ó Gráda and Simone Wegge, has used the deposit records from
The account number for each bank user comes from the Depositor Database curated by Anbinder, O Gráda, and Wegge. The Depositor Database is available at http://beyondragstoriches.org/the-depositor-database.
