In the mid-19th century, North Americans sent millions of dollars of aid to Ireland to help those suffering from the Great Famine, a blight which devastated Ireland’s potato crops leading to more than one million deaths and many more leaving the country. Those who gave money included Native Americans and enslaved people in Alabama. That’s among the findings of Anelise Shrout, a historian at Bates College. For this St. Patrick’s Day, WBHM’s Andrew Gelderman spoke with Shrout about her research.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about your research. What interested you about these donations from North America?
I started this project because I know people who work in philanthropy and in the nonprofit sector who will be the first to tell you that it's actually really hard to get people to donate money to a cause, even a cause that everyone agrees is a worthwhile and important one. Then I was reading about donations to Ireland during the famine, specifically from the Cherokee and Choctaw in what is now called the state of Oklahoma. I started to try to find out more about the Cherokee and Choctaw donations and, as I did that, I kept learning about these other really surprising groups who also sent money to Ireland during the famine. These were people who had no personal connection to Ireland, but nevertheless in the face of this terrible famine thought this is the thing that I want to send my hard-earned money to. A lot of these people also had never participated in philanthropy beyond their immediate social networks before. They were novice philanthropists with no connection to Ireland. The story that I am the most compelled by is the story of enslaved people from Lowndesboro, Alabama.
Give me a little bit more information about the specific story with Alabama. Tell me about the Alabama of it all.
In spring of 1847, a guy named Morgan Smith, who was an enslaver and plantation owner in Lowndesboro, Alabama, called together the people who labored on his plantation. He says he's going to read to them of the terrible distress prevailing in Ireland, and then he asks them if they would do anything to aid those who were perishing for want of food. He doesn't suggest that they give money. He suggests that they give up one meal a day to aid the starving Irish. These enslaved people go away and confer with one another and they come back and they say, “No, we're not gonna give up one meal a day, but what we will do is give you this $50 that we have.”
This is surprising for a number of reasons. Morgan Smith, even by the standards of his time, was an incredibly brutal man. He was known locally for abusing, assaulting and even killing the people he enslaved. His wife was actually in the process of divorcing him in this period, so we know a lot about what was going on in his house. One of his preferred obsessions was, according to his wife, administering medicine to the slaves until they died. He was violent, and the people he enslaved would have known that he was violent. It's surprising to me that they said no to him, that they were not gonna do this thing that you suggest, we're gonna do this other thing.
The second thing that's surprising is that they had money at all and that they were willing to give it up. In Alabama in the middle of the 19th century, it was illegal for enslaved people to sell their labor without the consent of the people who enslaved them. For most enslaved people, what that meant was that they were working to make money clandestinely. Then finally, this was actually a pretty considerable amount of money at the time. The most conservative estimate places it at about $2,000 today in terms of purchasing power. For all of those reasons, it’s incredibly surprising that they would say “We're not willing to give up one meal a day. We are willing to give you money.”
What makes this more of a complicated sort of story when we're looking back at it?
I think for a lot of the people who sent money to Ireland during the famine, who weren't themselves Irish, they did so out of a sense of solidarity with the Irish. The Cherokee and Choctaw described what they were doing as sort of an act of anti-imperial solidarity. I don't think that's what's happening with this donation in Lowndesboro. I don't think that they're approaching this as an act of solidarity, because in this very period, white newspapers, and particularly the newspapers of the slavocracy in the U.S. South, were really keen to use the example of Irish peasants to explain that enslaved people were actually relatively well off. There's article after article after article in newspapers across the U.S. South that say basically, “Abolitionists say that slavery is inhumane, but our people, the people we enslaved, they're fed and they're clothed. Look at the Irish. They are dying in the street and they have nothing to eat.”
This is a period where abolitionists are working really, really hard to tell the world that slavery as practiced in the United States is violent and brutal and fundamentally inhumane and that anyone who is practicing it is fundamentally violent and brutal and inhumane. So when slaveholders raise money and send it to Ireland, which they do in large numbers, they say, “How could we be inhumane? We are sending money to people who are suffering.”
The donation from the enslaved people in Lowndesboro is much more likely to be about sort of saying to the white world, “You say that philanthropy is the way to demonstrate humanity. Here we are doing exactly this thing that you say is exemplary humanity.”
So I think it's sort of taking white Southern conventions of charity and claiming them for themselves.
For folks listening to this today, hearing this story for the first time, what would you have them take away from all of this? What can we learn about this?
I actually would really like to just do away with this distinction between true altruistic philanthropy and self-serving philanthropy. But rather to say when we're thinking about why people give to particular causes, we need to pay attention to how they see themselves in the people who are suffering. We need to pay attention to how people are seeing themselves as actors in solidarity and also what philanthropy and charity does for people as individuals. How it makes them about themselves, and how it makes them seen in their communities. None of that, I think, undermines the incredible importance and significance of charity and philanthropy.
