African slaves and Irish peasants

A little something for St. Patrick's Day:

Nineteenth-century Ireland--from which the ancestors of present-day Irish Americans fled in boatloads--was a remarkably dismal place even before the Great Potato Famine. As Gustave de Beaumont, traveling companion to Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote in the 1830s:

"I have seen the Indian in his forests and the Negro in his chains, and thought, as I contemplated their pitiable condition, that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness; but I did not know then the condition of unfortunate Ireland."

The evidence seems to bear him out. At 19 years, the Irish peasant's life expectancy was less than the American slave's 36 years (which was not a great deal less than that of other Americans). While the American slave lived in crude log cabins, the Irish peasant lived in even cruder mud huts. And while the American slave ate only small amounts of meat and the meat was of poor quality, the Irish peasant, like peasants across Europe, often had none at all. The world of the 19th century was still a grim place nearly everywhere, but the Irish peasant's world was extraordinarily grim.

With the famine, things took an almost unimaginable turn for the worse. In a remarkably short period of time, the potato, Ireland's staple crop, essentially disappeared. One and a half million, half-starved souls were cast on American shores in the years between 1845 and 1855. And these were the lucky ones. One million out of Ireland's population of eight million died.

Apparently African slaves did not have a monopoly on human suffering.