The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  To D’Arcy McGee, who had been until recently President of the Council in John Sandfield Macdonald’s reformist Canadian Cabinet, these bellicose noises from the United States were a potent reason for a Canadian Confederation. But since some of McGee’s Irish constituency would have welcomed an invasion, McGee lost the ability to deliver the Irish vote of Montreal en bloc. Dumped by his leader, McGee was forced to run in his old ward, St Anne’s, Montreal, with two Conservatives. Elected, he moved up the hill to a house provided by his new allies and became Conservative Minister for Immigration under Alexander Macdonald. Nearly everything McGee did in office was motivated by the fear of American invasion. Confederate, McGee warned the provinces, or be infiltrated one at a time!

  For it was obvious now that amongst American Fenians, General Sweeny’s idea of a Canadian invasion was attracting young veterans of the Civil War. Some of those who stayed with O’Mahony were anxious to win back the mass of Fenians, and were themselves discontented with the lack of action in Ireland. One such man was O’Mahony’s treasurer, a St Louis Fenian named B. Doran Killian, who had campaigned hard for Mitchel’s release from Fortress Monroe. He argued at a meeting in New York on St Patrick’s Day 1866 that the O’Mahony wing of Fenianism should retrieve credibility by occupying Campobello Island, claimed by both Great Britain and the United States, close to the coastlines of Maine and of New Brunswick. A Campobello stronghold could serve as a base for the dispatch of Fenian troops to Ireland and for privateers to attack British shipping. Killian had bought a small Confederate ship at a government sale and wanted to deploy it.

  James Stephens, President of the Irish Republic and resident of a Paris hotel, was already on his way to New York in the China to attempt to restore peace between the two factions, and knew nothing of the hastily conceived and embraced Campobello Island scheme. O’Mahony Fenians, veterans of the war, began to gather on the north coast of Maine at Eastport and Calais about 9 April. The Toronto Fenian Michael Murphy, innkeeper and enemy of McGee, was dragged off a train in Cornwall, Ontario along with several of his followers, while en route to join Killian.

  Killian’s Fenian steamer Ocean Spray, manned by navy veterans, was in place by 14 April, but spotted a British man-of-war patrolling off the border. Some armed Irishmen from Ocean Spray captured the British flag on Indian Island. At Calais, Maine, an exchange of fire developed between Fenians and British soldiers from St Stephens, New Brunswick. US citizens joined with the Fenians in the fight and drove the redcoats back over the bridge to Canada. There were to be no other Fenian triumphs. The US government was reacting slowly to Britain’s anger, but decided at last to prevent an international incident by sending three ships north. The ‘Border Scare’ ended on 19 April, with the arrival of Union General Meade in Eastport. The next day 200 disappointed Fenians, their arms confiscated by details of the United States army, departed the invasion scene aboard the steamer New Brunswick. ‘Hundreds of fine young fellows,’ said the Tribune, ‘left their homes, threw up their situations, gave up everything to join, heart and soul, in this movement, and it was truly a melancholy sight to see them leave by the boat.’

  The Campobello Island enterprise was a disaster for O’Mahony and made Fenianism a laughing-stock in the press. But in early June, other and more serious rumours of Canadian invasion began to be heard, this time to do with the Roberts wing of the movement. There were straws in the wind: a 1,000-stand of Fenian arms was seized by Federal marshals at St Albans, Vermont; 500 unarmed Fenians had already been noted to have left Fitchburg depot in Boston to take part in a Fenian invasion via Buffalo; a thousand Irishmen—bound for California—interrupted their journey to present themselves at Buffalo for the invasion. One-armed Fenian General Thomas Sweeny, War Secretary of the Roberts wing, who had commanded a Union division in Sherman’s campaign against Atlanta, had developed a grand strategy against Canada, involving four simultaneous onslaughts, in the early days of June 1866. On the extreme left a small feinting force was to start from Chicago, land ultimately at Goderich on Lake Huron, and so draw off thousands of British regulars and Canadian militiamen from the Niagara and Vermont borders. A second feinting movement of 5,000 men was to cross Lake Erie and threaten London and Stratford, astride the road to Toronto. Meanwhile, on Sweeny’s inner-right wing at Buffalo, Fenians were to be towed across the Niagara River to attack the Niagara Peninsula and the crucial Welland Canal; and a massive outer-right wing was to follow the old route through Vermont, as used by the Americans in the Revolutionary War, and seize Montreal and Quebec. If this were done quickly, the United States would recognise it as a fait accompli and give the Fenians official belligerent status. General Sweeny composed an Address to the People of British Canada: ‘We come among you as foes of British rule in Ireland … We have no issue with the people of these provinces … Our weapons are for the oppressors of Ireland.’

  An invasion anthem had been written:

  We are the Fenian Brotherhood, skilled in the arts of war,

  And we’re going to fight for Ireland, the land that we adore,

  Many battles we have won, along with the boys in blue,

  And we’ll go and capture Canada for we’ve nothing else to do.

  In reality, only one of Sweeny’s four attacks was properly developed—the one across the Niagara River from Buffalo. This Buffalo assault was led by a brave young man in his early thirties, red-haired John O’Neill. O’Neill had been commissioned during the Civil War, and had campaigned with the 15th US Colored Infantry and the 7th Michigan Cavalry. His job was to take a Fenian brigade across the river from Buffalo and attack the Niagara Peninsula, an objective so near that from its shore, the lights of Buffalo could be seen.

  O’Neill and his fellow invaders were towed by tugs at night across the Niagara to a point near Fort Erie on the Canadian side, and landed in the pre-dawn of 1 June 1866. O’Neill sent one of his battalions west along the railway towards Port Colborne, on the Lake Erie shore and at the mouth of the Welland Canal. These Irishmen overran the small detachment of Canadian militia in Fort Erie. Canadian prisoners taken by the Fenians at Fort Erie were aware they had been dealt with by a professional force.

  O’Neill’s main Fenian body marched north along the river to Frenchman’s Creek, where they built breastworks of fence rails. Though popular Canadian history depicted O’Neill’s men as drunken excursionists, in fact they applied all the skills of campaigning acquired in the Civil War. Small parties went out seizing horses. Others cut down all telegraph wires. Looting was proscribed. O’Neill threatened to shoot one of his men who confiscated a woollen shawl from an inn.

  A Fenian Head Centre back in Buffalo told the press that from 2,000 to 3,000 men had crossed into Canada and were ‘very active.’ Although O’Neill’s force was in fact an under-strength brigade of barely more than 1,000, potential reinforcements were numerous: 5,000 other Fenians under the command of a veteran named Sherwin were ready to cross. But there would soon be logistical problems. The anti-Fenian mayor of Buffalo had ensured that the cross-Niagara ferry stayed on the Canadian side and could therefore not be of use in ferrying Fenians. Although President Johnson had not yet enforced the Neutrality Act, the USS Michigan and Harrison patrolled the river under orders to prevent crossings if possible. General Grant, not as tolerant of Fenianism as his President, was on his way to Buffalo.

  A British regular, Colonel Peacocke of the 16th Regiment of Foot, was in command on the Niagara front. De-training with men of the Royal Artillery and members of two infantry regiments at St Catherine’s, 25 or so miles north of O’Neill’s landing place, he travelled by rail and road southwards, past the Suspension Bridge to the United States. His plan was to move diagonally across the peninsula for an ultimate link-up with the militia regiments from Fort Colborne, in the western lower corner of the peninsula. The place he chose for the rendezvous between his redcoats and the militia was the village of Stevensville, which lay in a landscape of gentle farmland and fringes of forest. From there he int
ended to drive the Fenians back into the toe of the peninsula at Fort Erie and destroy them.

  But the senior officer in Port Colborne, Lieutenant-Colonel Dennis, a Canadian surveyor, had already left the town at four o’clock that morning in an armed tug to go to Fort Erie. His next-in-command, Alfred Booker, an English merchant from Hamilton, Ontario, left in charge of some 900 men, received a telegram from Colonel Peacocke directing him to meet up at Stevensville that morning. Booker decided to take the railway about 10 miles east as far as the village of Ridgeway, and it was claimed that by the time his men de-trained at Ridgeway that morning, they were well liquored. O’Neill’s scouts heard them forming up in the rustic stillness to shouts, laughter and bugle calls. Booker’s Canadians set off up Ridge Road, named for a long limestone ridge running parallel to it. Along this ridge Fenian skirmishers formed up and then descended to the crossroads ahead of Booker’s column. The Canadians, as O’Neill expected, lined out enthusiastically and rushed them. The Fenian skirmishers retreated, tempting the Canadians on to the next intersection. Here, and on the ridge, the main force of Fenians waited in the cover of woods.

  Intense firing now came from both parties, and though Booker’s men soon ran short of ammunition—supplies had not yet been unloaded from the train—his regiments began to put pressure on the Fenians along the crossroads. Booker, however, saw some horsemen on the ridge: they were probably either Canadian onlookers or Fenian scouts, but they caused him to order his 13th Regiment to form into a traditional British infantry square. On both sides of the road, the bugle calls dragged Canadian militiamen back from their assault and into the square. When Booker realised there was no massed Fenian cavalry on the ridge, he gave the order to create a line again. But as the men tried to do so, they were hit by heavy Fenian fire and began to retreat. The Highland Company and the University Rifles, far out on the right, found out too late that the withdrawal had been ordered. The University Rifles withdrew across the front of the Fenians, and suffered many losses. The Fenians came on down either side of the road, maintaining a hard fire, and chased the brave rearguard a quarter of a mile beyond Ridgeway.

  It was about nine o’clock in the morning, and O’Neill was told by his scouts that there was a greater force of 1,200 regulars behind him. He decided to call the pursuit off. In the next hour or so, the Fenians had efficiently quartered out with farmers the battle’s wounded of both sides, and appointed two doctors to tend them. The Canadian volunteers had suffered from fifteen to twenty dead. The Irish dead were few but included an Ed Scully from Cincinnati and a Union veteran named James Geraghty.

  Alfred Booker, exonerated by a later military enquiry, would be hounded by the Canadian press for the ineptitude at Ridgeway. Meantime, the far from speedy Colonel Peacocke made his men rest in the fields north of Stevensville. Here at mid-afternoon he got the news from Ridgeway. He advanced warily south, expecting ambush. There had indeed been a second tragedy for the Canadians. Canadian Colonel Dennis, with more than seventy artillerymen and sailors, had landed near Fort Erie and taken receipt of Fenians captured by local farmers. Dennis, who would be tried for and acquitted of cowardice, headed now by road back to Fort Colborne, to receive further information, and the men he had abandoned were soon joined by parties of rattled militia turning up at Fort Erie with news that the Fenians were coming in full force from the west. The Fenians marched into town, and Canadians took cover behind piles of cordwood and fences and in the house of the postmaster, from which they inflicted heavy loss upon the Fenians. One Fenian was killed by a bayonet thrust received while he tried to enter the postmaster’s clapboard house. Colonel O’Bailey, one of the Fenian leaders commanding a party who were attacking the tug, with its little force of fifteen artillerymen, was shot through the body while riding at the head of his men. ‘He was the only Fenian officer of rank wounded in the raid,’ said Major Denison of the Canadian militia, who wished to counter wild stories about mass graves filled with Fenian dead.

  Outside Fort Erie, Peacocke’s men camped rough for the night. But O’Neill had not received reinforcements. When 700 Fenians tried to cross from Buffalo to Fort Erie in a scow, they were arrested by the USS Michigan. O’Neill withdrew all his forces in excellent order and good spirits towards Fort Erie. One of his battalions—Starr’s—pulled up the track of the Grand Truck Railway as they went. Canadian householders who saw some of them pass later reported O’Neill’s men to have been in exuberant mood. But O’Neill got reports that night that more and more British and Canadian regiments, including artillery, had arrived from Hamilton. He sent a message via one man in a small boat across to Buffalo that he needed the main force now. The Fenian command in Buffalo told him that for transport reasons only one full-strength regiment could be crossed. O’Neill refused the offer as inadequate. But, he said, in his innocence of the fact that his would be the only true invasion, if the western feints and the other eastern invasion from Vermont had begun, he was willing to sacrifice his command to tie down substantial British forces. In fact, Fenian General Lynch watched his men sitting in open scows along the shores of Lake Erie near Cleveland waiting for transportation promised by General Tevis, who would later be found guilty of cowardice by a Fenian court martial.

  General Grant, passing through Buffalo, ordered General Meade to ensure no more Fenians crossed into Canada. On the morning of 3 June, with Peacocke’s regulars and militia closing on them, O’Neill’s men destroyed their ammunition dumps, and returned to the United States. Thirty of their pickets were captured by the Anglo-Canadians. The US army intercepted the vast majority of O’Neill’s Fenians as they re-crossed the Niagara in small craft. They were all taken aboard the USS Michigan, and would be demoralised only when they discovered that General Sweeny was not marching on Toronto. But as O’Neill said, ‘Our people are glad they didn’t fall into the hands of the Canadians.’

  Fenians from Chicago now turned up in Buffalo 1,200 strong but could not cross. They told anyone they met, including sympathetic US soldiers, ‘We will have the place yet.’ On 6 and 7 June, General Spear’s Fenians crossed the Vermont border briefly and raised the green flag at Pigeon Hill. Spear had little more than $20 in his pocket, so his men had to plunder, in contrast to the good behaviour of O’Neill’s men. A strong force of British and militia drove them back over the border by 8 June, and by then President Johnson, too late to appease the British and too early to satisfy Fenian opinion, had sent troops to shut the Vermont border. At the Philadelphia Conference of the Fenian Brotherhood, Stephens denounced the raids. He did not approve ‘any breach of the Neutrality Laws by which this country might be compromised, and the cause of Ireland ruined past redemption.’

  The New York Tribune remarked, ‘The most suggestive fact of the movement is that it required the presence of Grant in Buffalo and Meade at Eastport. To be defeated by these two warriors is a significant, if not an unusual, compliment and may be considered the chief glory of the Fenian campaign.

  But in fact the chief glory of the Fenian campaign may have been that it made apparent to Canadians the urgent need for confederation. D’Arcy McGee declared, ‘This filibustering is murder, not war.’ He thought no mercy should be shown to either American or Canadian Fenians. But he did not want death penalties, since executions would rally American support again behind Fenianism. As, in October 1866, the Canadians began trying Fenians held in Toronto and Sweetsburg, in New York State the Rochester Union remarked, ‘The execution of the first man now under arrest in Canada for Fenianism will be the signal for a movement here that will wrest Canada from the men who now control it, and make it part of the American Union.’

  Fenian captives who were American citizens were charged not with treason, but with having feloniously entered Canada and having been found in arms against Her Majesty. One Fenian colonel claimed to have been in the area purely as a journalist for the Louisville Courier. John McMahon, a priest from Anderson, Indiana, declared he had been on his way to Montreal to collect a small legacy left by h
is brother when the Fenians forced him to act as their chaplain. He had administered last rites to combatants. In late October, he was sentenced to death with six others.

  As New Yorkers discussed lynching the British consul, Secretary of State Seward wrote to Sir Frederick Bruce, British ambassador in Washington, asking him to intercede. Seven men, including McMahon and Lynch, were due to hang on 13 December, but twenty-six had been acquitted, taken to the Suspension Bridge on the Niagara River, and given $5 to get home. The executions were ultimately commuted to twenty years’ penal servitude. William Roberts of the Senate wing wrote an apparently barbaric letter to one prisoner. It fell into the hands of the Toronto Globe. ‘I regret to tell you that you are not going to be hanged. So great a crime upon a non-combatant like yourself would make every Irishman in America a Fenian.’

  Thirty more Fenian prisoners, captured either in Fort Erie or on the Vermont border, and tried in Sweetsburg, Quebec and Toronto, were found guilty. All were pardoned by the summer of 1872 and returned home to the USA, except Thomas Maxwell, a young man in his early twenties, who had died in prison on Christmas Eve, 1869.

  The Fenian raid helped Mitchel in his post in Paris finally lose faith. He resigned as financial officer of the Irish Republican Brotherhood on 22 June, and told Stephens, ‘I need assign no reason further than I have now lost all hope of being enabled to communicate with the French government and that I do not think it right to continue, with a considerable salary, to merely receive and pay over sums of money.’ He visited his daughter Henrietta’s grave at Montparnesse cemetery and placed there a large pot of laurustinus; and so he packed: ‘one cannot live forever astride upon the Atlantic Ocean.’ He carried with him the manuscript of his History of Ireland from the Treaty of Limerick, a revised and newly edited version of a history he had written for Duffy years before. His plan had been to write in a composed and neutral style, but the tone was scathing.