The First Kennedys

The Humble Roots of an American Dynasty

Neal Thompson

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780063268593
• eBook ISBN: 9780358438724
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

“Here is that rare thing: an untold chapter in the Kennedy saga. . .Compelling and illuminating.”—Jon Meacham

Based on genealogical breakthroughs and previously unreleased records, this is the first book to explore the inspiring story of the poor Irish refugee couple who escaped famine; created a life together in a city hostile to Irish, immigrants, and Catholics; and launched the Kennedy dynasty in America.

Their Irish ancestry was a hallmark of the Kennedys’ initial political profile, as JFK leveraged his working-class roots to connect with blue-collar voters. Today, we remember this iconic American family as the vanguard of wealth, power, and style rather than as the descendants of poor immigrants. Here at last, we meet the first American Kennedys, Patrick and Bridget, who arrived as many thousands of others did following the Great Famine—penniless and hungry. Less than a decade after their marriage in Boston, Patrick’s sudden death left Bridget to raise their children single-handedly. Her rise from housemaid to shop owner in the face of rampant poverty and discrimination kept her family intact, allowing her only son P.J. to become a successful saloon owner and businessman. P.J. went on to become the first American Kennedy elected to public office—the first of many.

Written by the grandson of an Irish immigrant couple and based on first-ever access to P.J. Kennedy’s private papers, The First Kennedys is a story of sacrifice and survival, resistance and reinvention: an American story.

Part I

Bridget the Refugee

Escape marks the first day of a refugee’s life . . . You never forget the moment you were part of a shivering horde.

—DINA NAYERI, The Ungrateful Refugee

1

Bridget’s Escape

SHE STEPPED ONTO a mossy gangplank, looked back at her parents, sisters, cousins, and friends, a small herd of them. She knew she wouldn’t return. Might never see them again. But she’d made her decision, and now it was time. What’s done is done. Carrying all she owned, some food and supplies for the journey, she walked on up.

Unlike many others on board—and those on the hundreds of ships steadily draining Ireland of its stricken citizens—Bridget Murphy was not leaving home to escape starvation. The Great Irish Potato Famine, those dark years of hunger, evictions, and disease, had struck harder and deeper to the west. And though County Wexford was hardly spared, its crops often wrecked and its poorhouses always full, Bridget was no emaciated shell of a person in rags, subsisting on foraged nettles and donated grains. She was healthy and hopeful, a plucky twenty-something on the verge of a new life.

She was driven to this moment by a different kind of hunger, a craving to leave the safety of habit and family and fling herself among strangers toward a strange new land. Rather than be held down by the laws of a foreign oppressor (England), by the male-dominated norms of her peasant society, by the dour strictures of her religion, all of which had governed her life up to this point, she chose “a leap into the unknown,” as her great-grandson would later put it. She joined a ship full of political refugees and other risk-takers “who dared to explore new frontiers.”

The ship delivered her first to a port city doubled in population by flocks of Irish fugitives. Bridget’s arrival in Liverpool, a hundred miles from Wexford as the crow flies but a days-long sail across the roiling Irish Sea and down the River Mersey, was like entering a manmade Mordor, a churning and raucous place spiked by smokestacks and ship masts. A middle ground between home and her destination, a type of purgatory, gloomy and dangerous, in the land of a queen, Victoria, who’d lorded over Ireland from afar, whose lawmakers dithered as Ireland went hungry.

Three out of four Irish Famine escapees will pass through this ashy industrial metropolis, more than 300,000 of them in 1847 alone, before boarding ships for America and Canada. Unprepared for its role as a human stockyard, the clotted burg became host to typhus and cholera, to lice and rats that invaded its squalid cellars and boardinghouses, to deaths by the thousands in its hospital wards.

Once one of the world’s busiest slave-trading ports, Liverpool now traded in a new kind of human cargo. Famine victims arrived by steamer and packet ship from Cork, Wexford, New Ross, and Dublin, many looking every bit the part of the feared and reviled refugee: “half naked and starving,” said one witness, “huddled together in a most disgraceful manner . . . covered with the dirt and filth of each other.” Lives that had been full of hope were lost even before reaching Liverpool. One crowded steamer carried seventy-two dead—the captain had closed off the hatches during a storm and they’d suffocated. One little girl escaped through an opening, but her mother and five siblings perished. As one witness observed, “The pigs are looked after because they have some value, but not the emigrants.”

Irish potato fields had rotted into sickening wastelands, and the mass emigration that started with a surge in 1846 had, by 1847, reached a full house-on-fire, run-for-your-lives stampede. Men and women who’d never ventured beyond the next town, who rarely saw more than a hundred humans together at church or the county fair, had flooded into the cauldron of Liverpool, desperate for a ship to Boston, New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Quebec, anywhere.

After the simple life back home, hardly changed since medieval times, Bridget would have experienced a shock and a thrill at her first glimpse of Liverpool’s hulking modernity. A thousand times larger than any village she’d known, the city hummed. A center of industry and technology, it teemed with a kaleidoscope of people from other lands, speaking in strange tongues. And it forced Bridget to confront a harsh revelation: other parts of the world had progressed while Ireland languished. There was so much she’d need to learn about the modern world.

For now, she had to focus on navigating Liverpool’s dangerous lanes and staying safe for the few long days before her ship departed. Pamphlets like Guide to Emigrants Going to U.S.A. and The Female Emigrant’s Guide offered advice and warnings: how to seek lodging and food, how to buy tickets, how to avoid the sleazy ship brokers and dock runners who preyed on naive or illiterate refugees, trying to sell them expired passage tickets or fleecing them of their meager savings.

Bridget witnessed the vile conditions facing tens of thousands of her fellow Irish. They crammed together, dozens to a room, in Liverpool’s notoriously filthy subterranean dwellings, awaiting the next ship or begging for money to buy passage. The unlucky found themselves stuck in a Liverpool limbo, sick or penniless, wishing they’d stayed in Ireland. Hundreds of women were forced into prostitution.

In his semi-autobiographical 1849 novel, Redburn: His First Voyage, about a novice merchant seaman, Herman Melville described Liverpool’s streets filled with hollow-eyed men and boys, starving and mummified-looking old women, and “young girls, incurably sick.” Wrote Melville: “It seemed hard to believe that such an array of misery could be furnished by any town in the world.”

Compared to Melville’s sad yet sympathetic depiction, the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne—who lived in Liverpool, serving as US consul—was disgusted by the scene, referring to the desperate Irish “as numerous as maggots in cheese.” Thomas Carlyle, the revered English author and historian who’d visited Ireland and witnessed streets filled with beggars and “human swinery,” called the Irish of Liverpool “the sorest evil this country has to strive with.”

The Liverpool Mail placed the blame at Queen Victoria’s feet, acknowledging that “the scum of Ireland come to Liverpool and die in thousands . . . but whose fault is that?”

At the appointed hour, clutching a carryall containing her few possessions, Bridget joined the urgent crowds at the docks on the River Mersey. She walked up another gangplank, longer and steeper than the last, onto the slick passenger deck. After a frantic series of preparations—roll calls, checks for stowaways, families desperately searching the docks for last-minute arrivals—the ship lumbered down the river, the start of a dreary, dirty, deadly month at sea.

The crossing would be the boldest, riskiest thing Bridget had ever done. She had read in the papers about ships sinking, the sickness and death at sea, the odds of reaching America at all. Still, crossing an ocean seemed no more dangerous than staying on an island of putrid black fields.

Handbills at church and placards in the village had practically pushed her to make an escape. Time to admit defeat, they suggested—defeat to the English, to the Famine. Just leave. Newspaper ads—“Important to Emigrants for Boston!”—had listed dates of departure to Liverpool and a menu of “fast-sailing Packets” leaving from there to US cities.

And here she was, aboard one of those escape vessels, sailing west. She watched the land of her oppressors disappear, preferring this fragile wooden barrel and its watery arc to the life she would have faced, had she stayed in Ireland: at best, a farm wife; at worst, a victim and a statistic. Bridget, like other women, knew her country didn’t want or need her, could barely feed and keep her, could promise her only a difficult, dreary existence. Accepting this sad truth fueled her flight.

As James Joyce would later put it, in terms applicable to generations of Irish but especially refugees like Bridget, “No one who has any self respect stays in Ireland.” Self-respecting women escaped in greater numbers than the men, sometimes with sisters or cousins but often alone.

Many adventurous single women took advantage of the national tragedy to get out. Opportunities in mid-1800s Ireland were finite. Even without the Famine, farm life still promised tedium. Milk the cows. Feed the pigs. Sow the fields. Reap the harvest. Make the babies. Repeat and repeat. Bridget might’ve hoped to catch a good man’s eye, ideally an older son who might inherit his father’s farm. But then she’d need her parents’ help to arrange the marriage, provide a dowry. Under the best of circumstances, she’d become only a tenant farmer’s wife, tending to the hearth, the sheep, her children, and her man, the same as it had been for centuries.

But in America? In the land of freedom, whose eccentric founders had somehow managed to snub and trounce England, the enemy of Ireland? Whose revolutionaries had created a remarkable style of government called democracy—no kings or queens, lords or ladies, no ancient animosities? In this feisty and progressive country, activist women were now rallying for the right to vote and fighting slavery, agitating for workers’ rights; they could now go to college, become teachers. In fact, some schools existed just for women, and an immigrant woman would soon graduate at the top of her medical school class to become the nation’s first female MD. In a land like that, a refugee might just start over, reinvent herself, throw off her peasant cloak and customs to become someone wholly new.

Lady Jane Francesca Elgee, the fiery Irish nationalist poet (and later the mother of Oscar Wilde) who went by the pen name Speranza, taunted the British as “our murderers, the spoilers of our land” and described women like Bridget as Irish souls awakening. “Spread your broad wings brave and proudly,” she wrote. “Arise, the dawn is breaking.”

A generation of Bridgets chose to take a chance on a new dawn rather than wait for marriage in an ancient land run by church and queen. Many left home, wings wide, with a sense of adventure, optimism, and purpose, believing they could accomplish things in America that Ireland would surely have quashed. In Ireland, a woman was powerless, voiceless. In the United States of America, perhaps she’d find independence and a chance to speak her mind. Better to start anew, and afar.

If she could just survive the three thousand miles of open ocean.

Leaving Ireland, of course, was just the first step. As Bridget well knew.

2

Bridget at Sea

SHE WAS SQUEEZED with hundreds into a ship built for half as many. The crew allowed her out onto the top deck only during milder weather, so she spent most days below on the cramped steerage deck, stifling and dark. There, she found herself surrounded by sick and frightened strangers.

The Irish exodus had prompted the passage of new laws intended to protect the basic rights of overseas travelers. A ship was required to provide six pints of water a day per person, for drinking, washing and cooking, and a pound of food, which might consist of bread, rice, oatmeal, or perhaps just moldy biscuits; tea and sugar were doled out twice a week. For sleeping, there was a wooden bunk six feet long and less than two feet wide, which often had to be shared with another. But there was no guarantee that the crew would distribute water and food according to the requirements of the Passenger Acts. British ships were notorious for mistreating Irish passengers.

Many of Bridget’s fellow travelers had been ill even before boarding; weak from hunger, they’d become infected with disease in Liverpool. Doctors tasked with inspecting passengers were sloppy or perfunctory in their duties, and the sick could easily hide their afflictions and slip onto the vessel. At sea, conditions were ideal for the spread of every disease—stagnant air due to the lack of ventilation, vomit and diarrhea soaking into the soggy wooden planks belowdecks because there were too few privies. Crewmen’s reports described what Bridget saw for herself: bedraggled and “ghastly yellow looking spectres.” Some did not have enough clothing to cover themselves.

Nothing could have prepared her for the horrors of the weeks-long wintertime crossing. Confined inside by the cold, she was forced to breathe fetid air, thick with the effluvia of hundreds of unwashed refugees, the rotting dregs of their meals, and their uncollected waste. Said a farmer leaving from Liverpool: “We thought we couldn’t be worse off than we were. But now to our sorrow we know the differ.”

Before reaching the open ocean, the ship passed near Ireland once more. A spell of cooperative weather might’ve allowed Bridget a brief pause at the rail for one last look north toward her homeland, her final glimpse of its browns and greens. Some passengers wailed as they watched their country disappear, while others wept for joy as they rounded the southern coast of Wexford, passing Hook Head lighthouse, sliding below the yawning bays leading north to Waterford and Cork, and finally past Cape Clear Island and out to the icy North Atlantic. How must Bridget have felt at this no-turning-back moment? Given her virtual anonymity among two million evacuees and the inconsistencies and imperfections of record keeping, in which the chronicles of men overshadow those of the women, the contours of her undoubtedly difficult crossing remain maddeningly faint, lost to the stony snub of history.

Bridge...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Map
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Prologue
• Part I: Bridget the Refugee
• Part II: Bridget and Patrick
• Part III: Bridget: Alone
• Part IV: Bridget and P.J.
• Part V: P.J.
• Epilogue: Joe and John
• Family Tree
• Acknowledgments and Author’s Note
• Select Bibliography
• Notes and Sources
• Index
• About the Author
• Praise
• Also by Neal Thompson
• Copyright
• About the Publisher