They were thrown out of their homes, off their lands – starved out, beaten out. For many, it was leave or die and those healthy enough and brave enough made the journey to America. The Irish.

In the middle to latter decades of the 19th century and the first few of the 20th, more than 7 million Irish came to American. Their descendants number more than 40 million.

The coffee table book “Out of Ireland – The Story of Irish Emigration to America,” by Kerby Miller and Paul Wagner, published by Elliott and Clark, tells the story. The authors rely on letters sent back home to Ireland for much of their material.

More than any other immigrant group, the Irish saw their coming to America as an “exile” forced upon them by the British, Wagner said in an interview. It was this sense of exile that produced a body of Irish-American songs, such as “I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen.”

“No other group was obsessed to the degree the Irish were about this notion of exile – that they didn’t choose, that they were forced out. That shows up so clearly in the letters,” Wagner says. The letters in the book reveal twin themes of gratitude for opportunities in America and intense longing for Ireland. They were culled from thousands in the collection of the book’s co-author, historian Kerby Miller.

The similarity of experiences recounted in the book and my own family’s is striking. My great-great grandfather Stephen Cooke and his family, who lived in the town of Galmoy in County Kilkenny, were among those millions who came to American in the mid-19th century. It was 1847, the Great Famine had struck. Stephen was teaching catechism to children of the town. “Such teaching was forbidden by law. In fact, it was punishable by death,” wrote my cousin Leona Garrity in the family history she published.

Catechism classes were conducted clandestinely, behind the hedgerows, with one of the children standing guard to warn of British constables or informers. “Besides teaching catechism,” Leona Garrity writes, “Stephen taught his children to read and write (also forbidden by British law). Someone informed on him, reported his illegal hedgerow teaching and activities to the British, who dispatched soldiers to enforce discipline. 

“However, the Cookes were warned of the approach of the soldiers. Leaving land and house, pig and cow, Stephen fled at night with his family…When the British soldiers arrived and discovered that the family had gone, they burned the house to the ground and killed the pig and the cow.”

The Cookes, like many emigrants, went first to England, where they worked – including my great-grandfather, Michael, a boy of 7 or so – in the cotton mills. About five years later, the family came to America in three contingents. Two Cooke sons were shipwrecked aboard one of the leaky Irish immigration boats, called “coffin ships,” but survived and later made a successful crossing.

This kind of story was repeated again and again as the Irish streamed into America, an adolescent country growing to adulthood and needing the brawn, brains and imagination the immigrants brought.

In Ireland, the Irish had faced the hatred and cruelty of the British and their inhumane Penal Law. As newcomers to a largely Protestant America, they faced religious bigotry and “No Irish need apply” signs. Still, they built railroads, dug canals, mined coal, and fueled the engine of the growing industrial giant, America. Irish women were readily hired as cooks, housekeepers and nannies. The labor often was back-breaking, hours long (16 not uncommon) and wages slavish. Some Irish entrepreneurs became wealthy industrialists – banker Thomas Mellon and mine owner Marcus Daly, for examples. 

As more and more Irish came to America, there was increasing incentive for those left behind to follow. As their numbers increased, the Irish helped build the union movement, established a strong American Catholic church and shaped the politics of cities. And they sent money back home to bring mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters here. Eked out of cooks’ and nannies’ wages, small paychecks of longshoremen, textile workers and miners, a king’s ransom poured over the ocean. Some $250 million was sent from America back to Ireland, “the largest transatlantic philanthropy of the 19th century,” Wagner said. But even as they prospered in America, the Irish mourned for their homeland. Here is an excerpt from a letter in the book, written in 1870 by Maurice Woulfe, an Army soldier in Wyoming territory, to his brother in the town of Cratloe, County Limerick.

“I have everything that would tend to make life comfortable. But still at night when I lay in bed, my mind wanders off across the continent and over the Atlantic to the hills of Cratloe… every stone, gap and field.”

Ireland never replenished its population after the losses from famine and emigration. Irish immigrants continue to come to America. They come for economic opportunity – and to join their 40 million relatives.

*Excerpts from a story that appeared, in its original form, in The Cincinnati Post Newspaper.