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William Scully, an Irishman who was a member of the lesser landed gentry, put his life’s energy into the accumulation of high-quality, low-cost land. He carefully husbanded his inheritance, and in 1850 he traveled to the United States and purchased with personal savings more than 8,000 acres in central Illinois. In 1851 he acquired another 30,000 acres of swampy virgin land. He added to his holdings until, by the late nineteenth century, he had amassed almost 225,000 acres of fertile farm land in Illinois, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska, and had become an absentee, alien landlord to some 1,500 tenants. Meanwhile, Scully was involved in lawsuits and violent landlord-tenant confrontations over his Irish holdings, which exceeded 2,000 acres. In one skirmish with his tenants Scully was severely wounded and two of his party were killed. Public remonstrance against Scully’s actions brought his name into notoriety throughout Great Britain. To handle his huge estate in America, Scully employed agents who were strategically located near his land. He inaugurated formal leasing procedures, insisting on elaborate controls: cash rentals, one-year leases, tenant-owned improvements, and soil conservation measures—all unusual for the time. Agitation against his practices as an absentee landlord in the 1880s and 1890s was widely covered in newspapers of the times. Because Scully used crop liens and court action to protect his rights, he was widely denounced for his disregard for his tenants’ welfare. State legislation designed to limit acquisition and inheritance of land by aliens finally forced Scully to gain American citizenship in 1900, six years before his death. Homer Socolofsky’s biography of Scully, the product of more than thirty years of research, provides a narrative and analysis of Scully’s activities as an investor in both Ireland and the United States. It is based on numerous archival and newspaper sources never before analyzed in published works, including private business records of the Scully estate, as well as Socolofsky’s interviews with Scully tenants. Socolofsky traces the acquisitions that led to Scully’s vast wealth, stressing the landlord’s strong will and determination and his unique methods of management. He looks closely at the charges against Scully on both sides of the Atlantic and describes Scully’s court fights and other confrontations with his tenants. Finally, he follows the inheritance of Scully’s multi-million dollar estate from Scully’s death to the present. Scully’s colorful career provides a unique opportunity for studying the economics and politics of land use in this country during the nineteenth century. This volume moves beyond biography to encompass an important segment of the business and agricultural history of the American Midwest.
R. Douglas Hurt recounts the settlement of the U.S. Midwest between 1815 and the turn of the twentieth century, arguing that this region proved to be the country's garden spot of the country and the nation's heart of agricultural production.
"An ocean of consolation" was what one young Irish emigrant in rural Australia called a letter from his father in County Clare in 1855. Similar strength of feeling is often found in the intriguing letters that David Fitzpatrick has unearthed for this extraordinary collection. Oceans of Consolation offers historians and family researchers novel and sophisticated ways of reading old letters. It opens to us the daily preoccupations of ordinary women and men with little education and fewer material possessions, as they try to overcome the separation from family and friends created by emigration. Fitzpatrick includes the personal correspondence of fourteen families of Irish emigrants in the Australian colonies, giving equal attention to letters to and from Australia. He reproduces in full more than one hundred letters dating from 1843 to 1906, and includes a generous selection of contemporary engravings and photographs. Fitzpatrick's detailed commentaries offer biographical narratives for all of these emigrants, tracing their Irish backgrounds and Australian careers. Parting company with editors of comparable collections, he pays special attention to the words and idiom by which letterwriters expressed their everyday concerns and sought or offered reassurance and advice. He believes that personal letters provide not only unique evidence of the hopes and fears of emigrants but also an important avenue for exploring popular Irish culture.
The story of the British political system's reaction to the Irish unrest is told, and an important episode in Mr Gladstone's career fully revealed. The agrarian reform of 1870 was not only `the beginning of the undoing of the conquest', it was also a point of departure for British legislation generally. A great deal of evidence is marshalled in the book to support its argument that the Act undermined the conception of property-rights which was central to the self-confidence of the rulers of mid-Victorian Britain. Dr Steele draws on the relatively neglected mass of evidence about the Irish peasantry, their customs and aspirations, collected and printed by British Parliamentary and official investigations during the nineteenth century. He has been able to exploit a wealth of material in the private pipers of Mr Gladstone, his cabinet colleagues and other leading political figures. Selective use has been made of the British and Irish press, to illustrate and emphasize all that was at stake.