When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  * * *

  Stephens had met John O’Mahony at a war council the night before the shoot-out at the Widow McCormack’s. With handsomely chiseled features and shaggy dark brown hair flowing toward his broad shoulders, the thirty-three-year-old O’Mahony was an athletic man and an excellent horseman. His admirers still told the tale of the time many years earlier when he wrestled a bull to the ground with his bare hands. He was descended from the chieftain of the O’Mahony clan, and the peasants in the mountainous region on the border of County Cork and County Tipperary still considered him “Chief of the Comeraghs.”

  Following the example of his grandfather, father, and uncle who were local leaders of Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen in 1798, O’Mahony supported the Repeal Association and then Young Ireland after it broke apart. The Great Hunger had further hardened him against British rule. While O’Mahony subscribed to The Nation, like Stephens, he had not been active in Young Ireland until recent weeks. “I kept away from any public adhesion to the party,” O’Mahony recalled. “I wished to wait until the time for action had come.”

  That time had now arrived. When Stephens limped to the door of his Ballyneale farmhouse, O’Mahony’s most immediate concern was getting him to safety. The pair spent the night in the house of one of O’Mahony’s plowmen before venturing to the cabin hideout of the Young Ireland compatriot Doheny. The three rebels ventured to greater safety in the more remote Comeragh Mountains, where most of the population was loyal to O’Mahony. There they would make a vow.

  While Stephens, O’Mahony, and Doheny remained on the run, the Crown arrested O’Brien and other Young Irelanders. Their rebellion quickly petered out. In the midst of starvation, Ireland was simply too weak to rise up against the British. It would take years before the spirit of Ireland’s discouraged people could be rekindled, but the three fugitives pledged to devote their lives to the expulsion of the British from their land.

  * * *

  By August 13, with arrests continuing, O’Mahony determined it was no longer safe for Doheny and Stephens to remain in the mountains. The pair left O’Mahony and began a journey on foot across the south of Ireland as Stephens’s friends spread the erroneous news of his death. The rebels spent nights sleeping in haystacks, churchyards, and rude mountain cabins. They begged for food and a place to dry out their sodden clothes and warm themselves around a fire.

  Although two decades separated them in age, Stephens and Doheny forged a bond on their trek. Stephens lifted the older man’s spirits by singing tunes as they hiked west from the Irish Sea in County Waterford to the Atlantic Ocean in County Kerry. Faced with the threat of execution, the two realized that their journey might be their last in Ireland, so they soaked in the beauty of the island, from the Lakes of Killarney to the peaks of Macgillycuddy’s Reeks.

  Finding shelter in Kenmare with a sympathetic attorney after nearly a month battling storms, mosquitoes, and hunger, Stephens finally found a means to escape Ireland. He would disguise himself as a servant boy and accompany to London the lawyer’s sister-in-law, the popular poet Mary Downing, who signed her works as “Christabel.” (Stephens rejected a notion that he dress up as a maidservant, although Doheny wrote that “he was well fitted for such disguise, being extremely young and having very delicate features.”)

  On September 12, Stephens ascended the plank to a waiting ship in Cork Harbor. He had cause to worry. His twitching left eye could quickly arouse suspicion. In addition, two weeks earlier, MacManus had been snatched off the deck of an American ship in Cobh just as he was ready to escape Ireland, leading to a conviction for high treason and banishment to Tasmania.

  Assuming the identity of Mr. Thomas Cussens from Tralee, Stephens carried a little boy in his arms, looking as best he could like a doting father, although he couldn’t help but monitor the policemen eyeing every passenger boarding the vessel. “All the time that I appeared so much taken up with the child, my eye continued to watch the movements of these beasts of prey,” he wrote. Safely aboard the ship, he watched Ireland fade from view.

  * * *

  After traveling across England, Stephens arrived in Paris on the night of September 16. Paris became a home in exile for Stephens, who still suffered from his wounds and feared his foot might need amputation. He immersed himself in books and culture during his seven-year stay in France. He learned French and attended logic and metaphysics lectures at the Sorbonne. He wandered the galleries of the Louvre and the gardens of Versailles. He imbibed Kant and Descartes. He taught English and found work as a translator and journalist.

  Several months following Stephens’s arrival, he was reunited with O’Mahony, who took refuge in Paris after leading an unsuccessful guerrilla campaign against police barracks and military posts in Tipperary, Waterford, and Kilkenny. In August 1849, O’Mahony and Stephens became roommates in a rickety boardinghouse on Rue Lacépède, a narrow, crooked street in the Latin Quarter. Inside their derelict room, two broken stools flanked the ends of a three-legged table, propped against a plaster wall covered with charcoal diagrams. They slept on straw woven into a rug. They lived in poverty, but they consumed the riches of knowledge evidenced by the books and piles of paper littering a corner of the apartment.

  Following the political upheaval that engulfed Europe in 1848, the French capital teemed with revolutionary groups that, according to Stephens, offered him a useful education in plotting his next rebellion. “Once I resolved that armed insurrection was the only course for Ireland,” he recalled, “I commenced a particular study of continental secret societies.” Whether or not the Irishmen mounted the barricades to prevent the fall of the Second Republic in Louis-Napoleon’s 1851 coup d’état, they witnessed the activity as bullets flew.

  For his portion, O’Mahony scratched out a living teaching Irish, Latin, Greek, and English and occasionally contributing to French newspapers. Four years of a Parisian exile, however, did nothing to banish the misery of the Great Hunger from his mind, and once Louis-Napoleon proclaimed himself emperor of France, Paris was no longer so hospitable to democrats and revolutionaries such as O’Mahony.

  By the end of 1853, the Irishman wanted to shift his exile elsewhere. O’Mahony packed up his few belongings and set sail for the most Irish metropolis in the world outside Dublin.

  2

  Bold Fenian Men

  JOHN O’MAHONY FOLLOWED in the wake of one million Irishmen who washed up on North American shorelines during the years of the Great Hunger in one of the largest migrations in human history. Many of the castaways sailed aboard former slave ships and hastily converted cargo vessels. The hunger and disease that they thought they had left behind in Ireland clung to them like the lice that spread cholera below deck. Mortality rates soared as high as 30 percent aboard these aptly nicknamed “coffin ships.” Along with the pails of garbage and excrement, crews tossed overboard dead bodies, wrapped in cloths and weighted down by rocks. Some emigrants reported that so many corpses splashed into the ocean that sharks stalked their ships, awaiting their next meals.

  After recruiting his fellow Young Irelander James Stephens to lead the Irish Republican Brotherhood, John O’Mahony became the head of the Fenian Brotherhood in the United States.

  Upon landing in New York City in January 1854, O’Mahony was greeted by a cacophony of noise and a hash of foreign languages. Manhattan might have been a Babel of an island, with the majority of its denizens foreign-born, but the arrival of every ship laden with poor, hungry Irishmen made it increasingly an emerald isle. By the 1850s, more than a quarter of the city’s residents had been born in Ireland.

  Too destitute to venture any farther than their feet would take them, the Irish who arrived in New York huddled inside rickety, disease-riddled tenements in neighborhoods such as the notorious Five Points. They lived in unventilated attics where they suffocated in the summer and froze in the winter. They lived belowground in dark cellars that routinely flooded wi
th sewage and rainwater. Breathing putrid air, lacking running water, and still suffering the ill effects of the Great Hunger and their voyage, the Irish died at a rate of seven times their fellow New Yorkers. A rural people now found themselves in the midst of one of the world’s most densely populated cities. Their farming skills rendered useless, they took low-paying, manual labor jobs. They dug ditches. They unloaded ships. They cooked and sewed.

  The winter of 1854 was a uniquely bad time to be an immigrant, a Catholic, and an Irishman in America. The year ahead would be only worse.

  * * *

  With immigration controls left primarily to the states and cities, more than 1.4 million foreigners poured through U.S. borders in the 1840s, a figure that doubled in the 1850s. Native-born Americans feared the torrent of foreigners would dilute their culture and pilfer their jobs. The cry of “America for Americans!” echoed across the country.

  A secret society of native-born Protestants coalesced in the 1850s to form the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American Party, whose members were dubbed Know-Nothings for their parroted response, “I know nothing,” when questioned about their activities. Know-Nothings advocated an increase in the waiting period for American citizenship from five to twenty-one years and sought to restrict eligibility for elective offices to native-born Americans—as long as they weren’t also Catholic.

  Although hostile toward most immigrants, the Know-Nothings reserved their worst scorn for the Irish, who not only came in unprecedented numbers but were unlike any newcomers that the United States had seen before. They were not immigrants seeking political or religious freedom but refugees of a humanitarian disaster. Although most certainly tired and poor, the Irish did not arrive in America yearning to breathe free; they merely wanted to eat.

  To nativist eyes, these immigrants had no love of American culture, no respect for its laws. They had no intention of becoming productive members of society. They came only for the handouts and then ungratefully complained about their mistreatment. They were desperately poor and sickly, uneducated and unskilled. They brought crime and disease.

  Many didn’t even speak English. According to some scholars, more than a quarter of the Great Hunger exiles arriving in the 1850s spoke Irish, and the majority of them were illiterate. They exhausted the capacities of jails, asylums, and orphanages and strained welfare budgets. Even worse, they imported their strange religion.

  Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose ancestors explicitly crossed the ocean to escape papism and ensure their worship was cleansed of any remaining Catholic vestiges feared that the Irish would impose the Catholic canon as the law of the land. Rumors even spread that the pope and his army planned to overthrow the U.S. government and establish a new Vatican in Cincinnati.

  The religious tension boiled over just weeks after O’Mahony’s arrival. In March 1854, Know-Nothings seized a marble block gifted by Pope Pius IX for construction of the Washington Monument and threw it into the Potomac River, suspecting it was a signal from the pontiff to launch an immigrant uprising in the United States. That summer, anti-Catholic rioters in Bath, Maine, smashed the pews of a local church recently purchased by Irish Catholics before setting it ablaze. Farther up the Maine coast in Ellsworth, a Protestant mob blew up a Catholic chapel with gunpowder before tarring and feathering the Jesuit priest John Bapst because he denounced the use of the King James Bible in local schools.

  That fall, the Know-Nothings scored major victories at the ballot box, in particular in Massachusetts, where they captured every statewide office and all but three of the 380 seats in the legislature. They mandated the reading of the King James Bible in public schools, prohibited the teaching of foreign languages, and systematically deported thousands of destitute Irish back to the British Isles. They disbanded Irish American militia units and launched surprise inspections of Catholic convents and schools amid rumors of lascivious sexual behavior by clerics. Know-Nothings also won the governorships in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire as well as legislative majorities in Indiana and Maine.

  O’Mahony could encounter signs of the discrimination against his kind all around New York, including in the help-wanted advertisements in the city’s newspapers that stipulated “Irish need not apply” or “any country or color except Irish.” In popular magazines such as Punch, cartoonists sketched the Irish as simian creatures with monstrous countenances and jugs of alcohol tethered to their sides. In the city’s theaters, audiences howled at depictions of the Irish as drunken, pipe-smoking buffoons with overwrought brogues.

  After spending seven centuries under the thumb of the British, the Irish who came to America found themselves again subservient to an Anglo-Protestant ruling class. “This is an English colony and its people inherit from their ancestors the true Saxon contempt for everything Irish,” said one disappointed exile.

  The more threatened the Irish felt, the more they turned inward, like a snake coiling itself for protection. Always a tribal people, they grew fiercely communal in their urban enclaves. They clung together in church parishes and fraternal organizations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians.

  The Irish had never assimilated with the English. That’s how their culture had survived centuries of colonization. Why should they behave differently in the United States?

  * * *

  In some respects, the diaspora who crossed the Atlantic became even more radical than those who stayed in Ireland. They bore not only the scars of the Great Hunger but the disdain of the Know-Nothings. Plus, they enjoyed the protections of the U.S. Constitution, which gave them a haven from which they could operate beyond the reach of British laws. In America, they had the freedom to assemble, bear arms, and speak out against their enemy.

  No Irish revolutionary in America exercised his newfound freedom of speech more vigorously than John Mitchel, the incendiary onetime publisher of The United Irishman. While imprisoned in Tasmania for his role in the uprising, Mitchel engineered an escape, fleeing to New York City in November 1853 in the footsteps of his fellow convict Thomas Francis Meagher, who had done the same a year earlier.

  Banishment to Australia had done nothing to douse Mitchel’s fiery rhetoric about the British government and its role in the Great Hunger. In the pages of his newly established weekly newspaper, The Citizen, he printed the accounts of his years as a political prisoner, continuing to accuse the British of genocide.

  Mitchel’s fire-breathing pen, however, began to set collateral targets ablaze. Still smarting from what he saw as the clergy’s betrayal of Young Ireland, he clashed with New York’s archbishop, John Joseph Hughes, a County Tyrone native. Mitchel’s broadsides against hypocritical abolitionists—such as Theodore Parker, who wrote that the Irish had “bad habits, bad religion, and worst of all, a bad nature”—turned into vehement defenses of slavery. Shortly after, in 1855, Mitchel abruptly shuttered his newspaper and moved to Tennessee, where his pro-slavery views found a more welcoming audience.

  This left O’Mahony abandoned. It had been Mitchel’s arrival in New York that had spurred his resettlement. He joined with Michael Doheny, his compatriot in exile years earlier in the mountains of Ireland. Doheny had resumed practicing law after his own arrival in New York in 1849. Together with fellow Young Irelanders, they formed the Emmet Monument Association. Its moniker alluded to Robert Emmet’s famous speech in the dock before his hanging. The Irish rebel leader implored, “When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.”

  The men took practical steps toward the liberation of Ireland. Members drilled weekly with an Irish regiment that Doheny organized as part of the New York State Militia. Their activities in New York drew the concern of the British ambassador to the United States, who complained to the U.S. secretary of state, William Marcy, about “the existence of clubs composed of the Irish population in that city for the purpose of enlisting and drilling volunt
eers to effect an insurrection in Ireland.”

  British unease grew when authorities arrested twenty Irish Americans in Cincinnati in 1856 and charged them with plotting an assault in Ireland, in violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act of 1818. The court acquitted the Irishmen, but not before Judge Humphrey Howe Leavitt warned the exiles that they were first and foremost Americans. “There can be no such thing as a divided national allegiance,” he said. “The foreigner who takes the oath of fidelity to our government necessarily renounces his allegiance to all others.”

  The Irishmen could be forgiven if they thought that launching operations against foreign governments was a quintessential American activity. Two decades earlier, Americans poured across the border of the Mexican province of Texas and eventually declared it an independent republic. They did the same in California in 1846. During the 1850s, “filibusters” launched expeditions to Central and South America with the intent of adding more slave states to the Union and lining the pockets of multinational corporations. The Venezuelan-born Narciso López used New Orleans as a base for attacking Spanish-controlled Cuba, while the American William Walker captured the Mexican city of La Paz in Baja California and later conquered Nicaragua, reinstituted slavery, and named himself president, a move recognized by President Franklin Pierce.

  Through the efforts of O’Mahony and his fellow exiles, the transplanted Irish revolutionary movement took root in American soil. Back in Ireland, however, its prospects were as dim as ever.

  * * *

  Residents of Ireland spotted a dead man walking the island’s roads in 1856. Eight years after the Kilkenny Moderator printed his obituary, James Stephens quietly returned home from the European continent. A year earlier, the Young Ireland veteran Charles Gavan Duffy had reported, “There seems to me no more hope for the Irish cause than for the corpse on the dissecting-table.” Stephens chose to judge for himself.