Never had so many Irish come ashore than the year leading up to Meagher’s first day in America’s biggest city. They were rural peasants, mostly, without skills or trades, illiterate, swept across an ocean by catastrophe, the first big wave of the largest transfer of people the world had yet experienced in so short a time. They left more than 20,000 tiny villages to press into one large village of wretchedness in lower Manhattan. Between 1847 and 1851, about 1.8 million immigrants landed in New York City, of which 848,000 were Irish.
