James Huston, Bandon, County Cork, to his uncle, Robert Eedy, New Bandon, Chaleur Bay, New Brunswick, 24 March 1826
Description
Very good letter, from a member of the southern Irish Protestant manufacturing community, illustrating terrible economic distress for cotton weavers in southern Ireland. Huston details high unemployment, low wages, and high food prices, all partly due to the 1826 merger of the Irish and British currencies, but more broadly representative of the severe economic depression, which largely destroyed southern Irish cotton and other manufactories. Huston reports that many are emigrating to Canada and the US. Huston had considered doing the same or migrating to England, but the English economic was also depressed and he has been promised a schoolmaster post by one of the local Protestant clergymen. This and most of Huston's letters are replete with evangelical Methodist piety and moral admonitions.