SOURCE: "The Black Forty-Seven," in New Ireland, Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1877, pp. 121-43.

The following essay is taken from Sullivan's New Ireland, which was published just thirty years after the Famine of 1847. In the essay Sullivan attempts not a "formal history" of the Famine, but a history based on his own "personal observation," describing the political, social, and economic forces that contributed to the great tragedy.

There is probably no subject on which such painful misunderstanding and bitter recrimination have prevailed between the peoples of England and Ireland as the Irish famine. The enmities and antagonisms arising out of other historical events were at all events comprehensible. The havoc and devastation which ensued upon the Royalist-Cromwellian war of 1641-1650, the confiscations and proscriptions which followed the Stuart struggle in 1690, the insurrection of 1798, and the overthrow of the Irish constitution in 1800, were causes of ire, on the...