“The Voice of Benevolence”

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Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Joanne Freeman: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

Brian Balogh: I’m Brian Bellow.

Nathan Connolly: And I’m Nathan Connolly.

Joanne Freeman: If you’re new to the podcast each week, along with our colleague Ed Ayers, we explore a different aspect of American history.

Brian Balogh: Hi, yes, the sweet sound of a beloved American pastime, shopping.

Nathan Connolly: Around this time, most of the shopping Americans are doing, whether it’s online or in stores, is an anticipation of the holiday season.

Joanne Freeman: That’s because for many Americans, December is a time for gift giving. A chance to find that special, something to show someone how much you appreciate them, or to donate to those who are less fortunate.

Brian Balogh: According to the 2016 survey, more than 60% of Americans donate to a charitable cause, throughout the month of December.

Nathan Connolly: But throughout American history, gift-giving has taken on many different forms, and the act of giving and receiving has allowed bonds to form across social, political, and cultural divides.

Joanne Freeman: So on this episode of BackStory, we’re going to bring you two very different stories of giving and receiving.

Brian Balogh: The first crosses the Atlantic Ocean and we used together two different groups with very similar struggles.

Nathan Connolly: And the other looks at a time when lending a hand actually stirred up more harm than good.

Brian Balogh: Our first story comes to you from BackStory producer Melissa Gismondi. It’s a segment we’re calling the voice of benevolence.

Melissa G.: This story starts in Ireland. It’s the mid 1840s, and across the British colony, Irish people are starving to death. The accounts which reach us from many quarters of the country of the progress of the disease which threatens the destruction of the whole of the potato crop are deplorable in the extreme. The streets were thronged with poor half starved creatures, who had come in from the country hoping to obtain some relief for their famishing families.

Turtle Bunbury: What was going on was that the population of Ireland for starters was growing astronomically. I think in the first decades of the 19th century.

Melissa G.: Turtle Bunbury is a historian based and County Carlow Ireland.

Turtle Bunbury: It quadrupled to 8.5 million, between 1800 an 1845, which is an enormous increase. So 1845 you’ve got eight and a half million people in the country, at least two million of them are reckoned to be living in extreme poverty. Landowners and farmers they start exerting massive pressure on the peasantry, the working class, as it were. They start raising the rents, terminating leases, they’re forcing evictions. And so then you end up with all these people trying to figure where are they going to go.

Turtle Bunbury: Then of course you have the fact that they are notoriously dependent on potatoes for their subsistence. It’s what everybody… Well, not everybody, but a huge number of the percentage of the population live on. So inevitably, if there’s a failure of that crop, that’s going to have disastrous effects.

Turtle Bunbury: So when the potato blight arrives in 1845, that’s the first year and it’s quite bad in 1845, and it’s worse than 1846, and it’s terrible in 1847. And it completely kills the crops throughout Ireland in 1847, it’s known as Black 47 in Ireland. And it continues through 1848, 1849. So first of all you’ve got no potatoes. What happens then is where do you go?

Turtle Bunbury: A lot of people start piling into the work houses, and they became rife with cholera. What you end up with is this intense starvation and starvation killed a lot of people. I mean during the winter of 1846 and 1847 we are talking about maybe 400,000 people dying due to a lack of food. By the end of the famine, it is generally stated that up to one and a half million people would have died on account of that, of starvation and disease.

Turtle Bunbury: In Ireland. It’s quite often known as the great hunger because when you look at it, there was food in Ireland, there was lots of food, but the laws of the free market meant that grain, which was the main food, could be exported during that time. There was no obligation to distribute amongst your poor and hungry, but you have the grain merchants, especially in Britain and in Ireland, they’re a very powerful lobby.

Turtle Bunbury: They’re supplying enough grain from Ireland to feed a couple of million British mouths every year. So what you end up with is in 1847 you have this absurd situation of about 4,000 vessels leaving Ireland carrying food. That’s why it’s known as the great hunger because there was food, it just wasn’t going into Irish mouths.

Melissa G.: By 1847 news of the famine had crossed the Atlantic. Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, the Irish story of struggle and starvation resonated with one community in particular.

Garry Batton: My name is Gary Batton, I’m the chief of the Choctaw nation of Oklahoma.

Melissa G.: Today, the Choctaw nation resides in Southeastern Oklahoma, but before the 1830s the Choctaw people occupied large parts of modern day Mississippi. At that time, white settlers were eager to claim these lands, and they found an ally in President Andrew Jackson. In 1830, he signed into law the notorious Indian removal act. This act built upon earlier campaigns of dispossession.

Melissa G.: The Choctaw were one of the first nations to relocate under the terms of the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. Their journey westward was one several nations took during the 1830s, that have become known as the Trail of Tears, and it was one as chief Batton explains.

Garry Batton: Where we lost a third of our people along the way and where diseases killed a lot of our people. Of course, we traveled during the harsh cold winter. So I mean literally we had people that was losing grandma, grandpa, they were losing young children, babies. It was really a major critical time for us in regards to survival as a people, that were are we going to be able to endure this trail to get to a place of hope?

Garry Batton: Thank God or our forefathers that we made it to where we are today, and to give us, to me what always calls the values that we have today in the Choctaw nation of servant leadership and being that tushka, that warrior, spirit that is still lives in breathes in our culture today.

Melissa G.: We’ll come back to those values of service and leadership in just a bit, but first you’re probably wondering what the Trail of Tears, and the great hunger have in common.

Garry Batton: It was right after we came across the trail of tears, and then going through all the travesties that our tribal members had to deal with and it was the soldier that actually helped, lack of better word, guide our people over here, and was talking about the Irish Potato Famine.

Turtle Bunbury: Two of the principle government figures during that whole Trail of Tears episodes were two brothers, Frank and William Armstrong, and they were Scots Irish stock. A huge number of the people who came from Ireland to America in the 18th century would have been Scots-Irish, and among them was their father. This guy, Colonel James Armstrong, who was from a place called Enniskillen in County Fermanagh in Ireland.

Turtle Bunbury: Anyway, he then later settled in Knoxville and that’s where his boys were raised. And this is Frank William and their older brother Robert. They were Jackson’s man and when Jackson became president in 1830 you know the Armstrong’s were part of his gang. Frank Armstrong, he was sent off in 1831. He was dispatched to the Mississippi to take a census of the Choctaw, which meant basically surveying their farms, before their departure because they were about to set off on that episode that would become the Trail of Tears.

Turtle Bunbury: And Frank ends up becoming agent to the Choctaw and he’s in charge of basically receiving the Choctaw as they crossed the Mississippi. And to do that, he persuades Washington to send the army over to build a new wagon road, so they can get them all across. But then of course you tumble into the Trail of Tears and he was appalled by what happened that awful winter and all the horror.

Turtle Bunbury: I mean he was definitely… Their Choctaw were very fond of Frank Armstrong. And there was a crop failure in 1834, and he did what he could to try, and source extra bushels of corn, to bring in extra corn for the Choctaw, they were starving. And he was going full steam ahead when he was hit by an unidentified disease, we don’t know what it was and he died in 1835.

Turtle Bunbury: So when Frank died, his brother William was brought across to become the new superintendent for Indian affairs. By early 1847 America was becoming more and more aware of what was going on in Ireland. There were lots of ships that were piling into place like Boston and New York with huge numbers of people telling of the horror back home. And that story spread very quickly.

Turtle Bunbury: When you look at contemporary newspapers all across the U.S. people are actually starting to get very concerned about what is going on in Ireland and starting to raise big money and sending ships laden with provisions back across the Atlantic over to Ireland. So Major Armstrong having… Well certainly his father, being an Irish man, he would have always had one eye on and one ear on Irish affairs.

Turtle Bunbury: So I assume that he was aware of that. And in any event, just after St. Patrick’s Day in 1847 a week after, he gathers a group of people in Scottsville in that, in the agency building as it’s called. And the purpose as he summons them for is to raise money for the relief of the starving poor of Ireland. Lots of people came, there were missionaries and all the traders and loads of other people who all came from around and about.

Turtle Bunbury: And the Choctaw… Yeah, I mean the chiefs of the Choctaw when they subscribed their $170 that was obviously taken up very quickly as the most remarkable of all the donations.

Garry Batton: back in that time there was no governmental dollars like there is today. So they literally had to take money out of their pocket and, they wanted to help the people of Ireland, because they did know what it felt like to go through this travesty and to lose language, to lose culture, to lose your homes. All those types of things.

Garry Batton: They felt compelled to make sure and reach out and do what they could to help that situation. Even though they were dealing with their own situation at the time.

Turtle Bunbury: As to why they made that donation, is it for some sort of respect for the Armstrong’s were from Ireland, or was it an empathy for people whose circumstances must’ve sounded very familiar? Maybe the Irish were blighted by color epidemics and malnutrition, all of which Choctaw would have dealt with in the appalling Trail of Tears 10, 12 years earlier. So I think that must’ve been an important part of it.

Garry Batton: Well, I know just personally, and I know of course I wasn’t there at the time, but I always say there’s hope in agony. And so what I mean by that, when you can relate to somebody that has gone through the same experience that you have, you know, the old saying, you walk a mile in that person’s moccasins, then you can truly know how that person feels. We knew what they were going through.

Garry Batton: Like I said, they were losing, like I said, language, they were losing family, children, grandparents, all those types of things. We related so well to the travesties that they were going through. And I think that’s the reason why our people reached out, because they wanted to make sure that the Irish people knew that somebody cared about them.

Turtle Bunbury: After Major Armstrong gathered up that money, he forwarded it on to the Memphis Irish relief committee, and they then send it on to the society of friends in Ireland, the Quakers who were organizing this massive relief campaign in Ireland. And when they got it, the society of friends, they immediately referred to it as the voice of benevolence from the Western wilderness of the Western hemisphere. So it instantly singled out as something quite remarkable.

Turtle Bunbury: It’s important to say that the $170 raised in SchuylerVille was not the only money raised by the Choctaw because there’s a place called Doaksville, which was the largest town in Indian territory. It’s about 50 miles South of SchuylerVille. And there they gathered $153, another $153 but for some reason, I don’t know why there is no record of that contribution in the accounts of the general Irish relief committee, which was the society of friends. It was collected, but maybe it never got there. I don’t know.

Melissa G.: In Oklahoma, Major Armstrong lived just long enough to see the donation he’d collected reach the Irish relief committee in Memphis, he died in June, 1847. Meanwhile, the Choctaw Nation maintain their struggle to make Oklahoma home. Turtle Bunbury says that in 1860 they found themselves on the verge of famine, after the region was hit by a terrible drought that ruined many crops.

Melissa G.: Back in Ireland, 1847 marked one of the worst years of the great hunger. The situation improved slowly, but Ireland was forever changed.

Turtle Bunbury: What you end up with after the great hunger, as I said the population change in Ireland was absolutely massive and you get conversely in North America they suddenly got Irish people like they’ve never ever had before. Meanwhile, in Ireland, by 1858 and 51 the country starts to recover. It’s got a lot less people, but the agricultural side of things actually picks up, and I think the 1850s, I mean it’s certainly not a prosperous country, but it’s not the worst decade for Ireland.

Turtle Bunbury: I think the story would have fitted into a book called Ireland’s forgotten history until about 20 years ago when things started to change. Mary Robinson, who is the President of Ireland for two terms for 14 years, became a great friend of the Choctaw Nation. I think she might even be an honoree Choctaw, because she became aware of this story.

Turtle Bunbury: I can’t remember exactly how, but she ended up going over and meeting the heads of the Choctaw nation and talking about it, and that gave it a bit of coverage. And then the Choctaw would come across to Mayo, in the West of Ireland, where there was this awful event where a lot of people went for a walk at the height of the famine in order to get some relief, and it ended up being an awful tragedy as they all died.

Turtle Bunbury: So a 150 years on from that event, there was a sort of Trail of Tears in Mayo, if you like, in honor of these people. And the Choctaw, the head of the Choctaw Nation, at the Chief Choctaw Nation at that time came over for that. So suddenly you start having this bonding, and the press, the media in Ireland start picking up on it. It’s an attractive story for school teachers to suddenly frame.

Garry Batton: I get letters just about every year from a sixth grade class, that sends thank you notes, because they’re teaching about the gift.

Turtle Bunbury: I mean it’s a pretty hard story to take when you’re a kid. You’re trying to get your head around the fact that everybody ate potatoes, that they lived on them. That it was this mammoth event in our past that killed quite some… Those figures are unbelievable. The numbers of people who died and emigrated.

Turtle Bunbury: So if you can get a positive story, which is what it is now and was then, and particularly from something that’s kind of so extraordinary as the Choctaw Nation, I think that’s why a lot of people have warmed to it. And I mean even in 2018, Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach, the Irish prime minister, he also went over to Oklahoma and met with the chiefs of Choctaw Nation.

Speaker 6: Part of the St. Patrick’s Tour around the U.S. Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar made a pit stop in Duran to visit the Choctaw Nation.

Speaker 7: The Irish people were oppressed, abused, neglected, degraded and starving, [inaudible 00:18:42] your spirits generosity was at its highest.

Speaker 6: The prime minister is referring to-

Turtle Bunbury: So it’s very much part of our conscious now, and Alex Pentek’s beautiful sculpture done in Middleton and County Cork again is putting it into our conscious. So I think a lot more people in Ireland are aware of the story now than ever before.

Melissa G.: Alex Pentek sculpture is called Kindred Spirits. When I reached him in between meetings at a hotel lobby, he told me he had a very specific goal in mind.

Alex Pentek: I depicted a fusion of ideas to try to communicate the horror of both histories of Ireland, and also of the Choctaw Trail of Tears, only a few years previous. I took the symbolic image of an empty bowl, and I made that from a series of nine round tipped Eagle feathers, which are used in Choctaw ceremonial dress. So the nine feathers are sort of creating a bowl shaped form, to create a permeable sculpture that is a sort of a mix of ideas to visually try to communicate the story.

Melissa G.: Alex’s sculpture was unveiled at a commemoration ceremony in 2017. He remembers meeting Chief Batton at the event, and how much he appreciated Alex’s vision for the sculpture.

Turtle Bunbury: And he really understood the message that I was trying to sort of put forward in the world, and that I was remembering the history of the 1847 donation. But also I think speaking beyond the history with the image of these uplifting feathers in the humanity, and I suppose really the notion of solidarity and standing together against adversity.

Turtle Bunbury: And he really understood that and mentioned that in his opening speech that the piece of work communicated visually, our shared history, but also spoke out to present day meaning where we have numerous tales of oppression, around the world and that we have to stand together against adversity and that’s what the piece is about.

Garry Batton: I was very humbled by the gratitude of the Irish people. I think they understood the significance of being a tribal member even as being a chief, as growing up as always be in Choctaw. I mean, I don’t know that I really understood the, I don’t want to say understood the significance of that, because people just by mere being Choctaw held you in such great esteem of giving this gift of hope, and I think it even made me even embrace that we are.

Garry Batton: I mean I’ve always embraced that we are a nation, but when another nation says thank you nation for helping us remain as a nation, as a country, my brain really just kind of exploded in regards to how significant our people are to the world.

Turtle Bunbury: I think one of the things about when you look at the famine and try, and see some sort of light in amongst all that darkness. It comes from the unusual people who are bringing forward relief, and there were some really, truly extraordinary people. There was Captain Forbes bringing his warship across the Atlantic.

Turtle Bunbury: There were fishermen from Cape Cod who sailed across the sea with provisions in their schooners to bring to the starving Irish. There was unusual stories like the Sultan of the Ottoman empire who contributed money towards the relief. But the Choctaw stands out because it was an extraordinary… Sort of in those times with so many thousands and thousands of miles between Ireland and Oklahoma, that sort of hand of friendship really went across the latitudes and the longitudes.

Turtle Bunbury: It was really extraordinary. I can understand why it must’ve sent a shiver up the spine of the people when they were working with the relief committee in Dublin to realize where it had come from. And I think it still does to this day.

Garry Batton: I always say that history always tells whether you make a great decision or not. So I don’t know that the people of Ireland, or the people of the Choctaw, our tribal members knew the significance, the impact that that would make. But it’s later, like now people violences, you helped us remain who we are as the people of Ireland.

Garry Batton: It was because that gift, a hope, that helped us stay true to our values, to our culture, to our language. You know, when you initially hear about it, you think $170 is that that big of an impact? But the spirit of the gift is what made the impact.

Announcer: That was chief Gary Batton of the Choctaw nation of Oklahoma. You also heard from Turtle Bunbury, author of 1847 a Chronicle of Genius, Generosity and Savagery, and from sculptor Alex Pentek.