September 6, 1845
“We shall be about a month in Ireland, and on our way back I shall visit our slate quarry, which is going on well. We are gradually paying off our heavy debt, and in two years from this time I hope we shall be thinking of some sort of dividend.
On the whole, we shall have a plentiful harvest. In some places in England the potatoes have been blighted, but in Ireland they have been abundant and good.
Yours affectionately,
Palmerston
The immediate cause of events, however, which came so suddenly on the political world, was a scarcity of the Irish potato crop). The population of Ireland had to be provided for; and afte two or three meetings with his Cabinet, and propositions made by him and rejected by Lord Stanley, the Prime Minister declared that he saw no satisfactory course to adopt, short of the total abolition of the Corn Laws. (1846)The Life of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston: with selections from his diaries and correspondence by Dalling and Bulwer, Henry Lytton Bulwer, Baron, 1801-1872; Ashley, Evelyn, 1836-1907 (p184)
VISIT SLIGO HERITAGE TO read about Lord Palmerston and the Conquest, Colonisation and Evolution of Mullaghmore, Co. Sligo
Dublin Evening Post – Tuesday 04 May 1847
EMIGRATION
Sligo, May I. —From the 5th of January to the present date, 3,239 persons left this port direct for America. Of this number 176 went in the Carricks which was chartered by Lord Palmerston. —Sligo Champion.
EXPLORE THE LIFE ofViscount Palmerston
Discover the personal side of Viscount Palmerston, his estates in Ireland and his illustrious career in British imperial statesman and visit the links below.
University of Southampton Library Palmerston Papers Database
Covering the whole of his ministerial career from 1809 until his death as Prime Minister in 1865, the semi-official correspondence and papers of the third Viscount Palmerston totals some 40,000 items.
The papers of Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston, form part of University of Southampton Library MS 62, the Broadlands archives.
Broadlands archives (BR137-152)
- BR 145 Correspondence concerning Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston’s Sligo estates 1828-38
- BR 146 Correspondence concerning Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston’s Sligo and Dublin estates 1813-58
- BR 147 Sligo Correspondence 1778-1820
Palmerston & the Irish FamineDIT
Recommended reading:
Norton, Desmond : On Lord Palmerston and the Irish famine emigration by Tyler Anbinder. University College Dublin. School of Economics, 2001-09. (working paper)
Lord Palmerston and the Irish Famine Emigration by Tyler Anbinder (2001, GWU)
The Historical Journal, 44, 2 (zoor), pp. 441-469 (2001 Cambridge University Press)
From Abstract featured on AcademicRoom.com
“The career of the third Viscount Palmerston as foreign secretary and prime minister has been thoroughly studied, but few are aware that he was one of the first Irish landlords to finance the emigration of starving tenants during the great Irish famine. Although the first boatloads of emigrants were well outfitted, by the end of 1847 Palmerston stood accused of cruelly mistreating his departing tenants.
One Canadian official compared conditions on the vessels he chartered to those of the slave trade. Given the tremendous detail with which historians have scrutinized Palmerston’s long career, it is surprising that no thorough account of either the management of his Irish estate or of his emigration scheme has ever been written.
An examination of the programme under which 2,000 residents of Palmerston’s Sligo estate fled to America in 1847 adds significantly to our understanding of the career of one of Britain’s most important nineteenth-century statesmen, the complicated motives driving landlords to ‘shovel out’ their impoverished tenants, and an often forgotten means by which thousands of the most destitute famine-era immigrants made their way to America.”