He had lost hair and gained weight during his eight-year exile. Some doubted he was who he claimed to be. Even his local Catholic priest did not recognize him.
Out of touch with his family since taking flight from Ireland, Stephens learned the devastating news that his father and sister had died shortly after his departure.
Further disheartening the rebel, support for Irish independence appeared to have likewise perished. With its people still processing their trauma and survivors’ guilt, Stephens wrote of his fear that Ireland “had given up the ghost, and was at last, to all intents and purposes, one of England’s reconquered provinces.”
To get a better sense of whether the same attitude permeated the rest of the island, Stephens embarked on what he later claimed to have been a three-thousand-mile ramble, in a circuit of Ireland. Smoking his pipe and leaning on his walking stick, he spoke with farmers, peasants, and laborers. He slept in their homes and supped around their tables. He learned about their hardships—low pay, landlord oppression, rising rents, and high taxes to support a government and a church in which they had no faith.
But he detected a faint nationalist pulse among poor Catholic farmers and laborers, in particular the Ribbonmen, a secret agrarian society that terrorized landlords by burning barns, damaging property, and harming livestock. “The cause is not dead but sleeping,” he reported.
Stephens warned, however, that “if another decade was allowed to pass without an endeavor of some kind or another to shake off an unjust yoke, the Irish people would sink into a lethargy from which it would be impossible for any patriot, however Titanic in genius, or, for any body of patriots, however sincere and zealous, to arouse them into anything like a healthy existence.”
On the other side of the Atlantic, O’Mahony felt the same urgency to act. He wrote to Stephens that he had grown “sick of Young Ireland and its theatrical leaders” who did little more than bloviate about the British colonization of Ireland. Unlike the “tinsel patriots” he derided, O’Mahony set about to forge a new Irish republican movement, one that would be as revolutionary in its structure as it would be in its mission.
* * *
At the close of December 1857, a young Irishman named Owen Considine called on Stephens at his Dublin residence. He bore a letter from the United States signed by four exiles, including O’Mahony and Doheny. It called upon him to form an organization in Ireland that would work in conjunction with them to secure independence. It would be a transatlantic effort, unlike previous movements. The Irish would take advantage of the revolutionary zeal and freedoms of the United States to raise money, ship arms, and plot military operations, while kindred rebels in Ireland would supply manpower and coordinate logistics.
Stephens dispatched Joseph Denieffe as a messenger to the United States with his enthusiastic agreement to take on the task—but on two conditions that reflected his growing arrogance. In addition to £80 to £100 per month, he demanded to be “perfectly unshackled; in other words, a provisional dictator. On this point I can conscientiously concede nothing.” For his part, Stephens vowed within three months to recruit ten thousand men, fifteen hundred armed with guns and the rest with pikes.
Stephens couldn’t take it as anything but an encouraging sign that Denieffe returned to Dublin on March 17, 1858, with the first monetary installment and an agreement to his terms. As Ireland commemorated its patron saint, Stephens read the document signed by Doheny, O’Mahony, and fourteen other Irish American leaders, appointing him “Chief Executive of the Irish Revolutionary movement” and granting him “supreme control and absolute authority over that movement in Ireland.”
That night, Stephens gathered with his fellow nationalists Considine, Denieffe, Peter Langan, Garrett O’Shaughnessy, and Thomas Clarke Luby to inaugurate the secret revolutionary organization that would come to be known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). As the head of the conspiracy, he was first to take the oath drawn up by Luby.
To maintain secrecy, Stephens organized the IRB into cells known as “circles.” A “head center,” referred to as an “A” and equal in rank to a colonel, was to lead each circle. Head centers selected nine B-level members, equivalent to captains, who each selected nine C-level personnel, equivalent to sergeants, who each selected nine D-level members, equivalent to privates. A fully staffed circle would include 820 members. In theory, members would know only the identities of those directly above or below them in the organization, with only captains knowing the identity of the head center.
Stephens and Luby went right to work traveling south of Dublin to recruit members for their new organization. Stephens excelled as an organizer, combining his mind for numbers with his vision of a free Ireland. “He seemed to have me under a spell,” Denieffe recalled. “There was earnestness in his every move.”
In the United States, the venture did not get off to as smooth a start. With America deep in the throes of the financial panic of 1857, fund-raising proved difficult, and most of April’s £90 payment to Ireland had to be shaken out of the personal pockets of the Emmet Monument Association’s leaders.
In spite of a promise that the second installment would reach Ireland in April, summer arrived without any money from America, forcing Stephens and Luby to abandon their recruiting only shortly after it had begun.
Stephens again dispatched Denieffe to the United States, but he returned with only £40 this time, along with an ominous warning. “The Irish-Americans will not subscribe until they are obliged to,” he said. “They have been humbugged so often that they have lost confidence, and at present have no faith in attempts for the regeneration of Ireland.” Disappointed at his lack of support from the United States, Stephens took matters into his own hands. He decided to cross the Atlantic himself, to prime the cash flow and lobby fellow Young Ireland veterans to join the new organization.
* * *
When Stephens arrived on American soil for the first time, on October 13, 1858, his legs buckled and his stomach churned from his time at sea. It was only the start of the Irishman’s relentless litany of complaints, about both his health and the United States itself, during his five-month stay. In his diary, Stephens described a “land of self, greed, and grab” that abounded with “debasing influences.” He found a country putting on a facade as grotesque as the “dirt-colored stone and piss-streaked marble” facings that covered up the slender brick walls of the mansions he passed on Fifth Avenue. Even the brightly colored autumn leaves he found to be “tiresomely monotonous.”
During his tour of America’s Irish enclaves, Stephens traveled to the nation’s capital and met President James Buchanan. Stephens was not any more impressed with Buchanan than with the country he governed. He wrote that “Old Buck” had “the expression of a philandering tom-cat” and was little better than “a Yankee development of the Artful Dodger.”
Upon their reunion, Doheny found little evidence of the young man who sang tunes and quietly endured his gunshot wounds while on the run in Ireland in 1848. Embracing the role of the “provisional dictator,” Stephens had grown condescending. His relationship with Doheny cooled, but Stephens found much to admire in O’Mahony, whom he called “far and away the first patriot of the Irish race.”
“In loving Ireland he loves more than a principle of justice,” Stephens wrote. “Intensely, passionately he loves the Irish race. The memories of times gone by and hallowed by the deeds of the men of his blood, the language, the literature, the monuments, speak to him as to no other.”
At a meeting inside New York’s Tammany Hall, Stephens officially appointed O’Mahony the head of the IRB’s branch in the United States, designating him the “supreme organizer and director of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood in America.” In early 1859, O’Mahony would dub the American counterpart to the IRB the Fenian Brotherhood, a name that harked back to the legendary Celtic warriors with whom the Gaelic scholar had spent long days and
nights in 1857 as he translated Geoffrey Keating’s History of Ireland from Irish into English. The word “Fenian”* was an Anglicized version of the Irish word Fianna, the band of mythical Gaelic heroes from pre-Christian times commanded by Finn McCool. Although members of the IRB were distinct from those in the Fenian Brotherhood, the term “Fenian” would come to refer to both groups, and eventually Irish republicans in general.
Similar to the IRB, the oath-bound Fenian Brotherhood adopted a military-style organizational structure. The group started with approximately forty members, all of them in New York. (Significantly, their ranks didn’t include two prominent Young Irelanders—Mitchel and Meagher.)
Stephens returned to Ireland in March 1859 with £600 and, according to a document drafted by the Irish Americans, a further assurance of “supreme control and absolute authority over that movement at home and abroad.” He also left with growing concerns about whether O’Mahony was the right man to lead the American operation. “Should I perish, the cause is lost,” he wrote. “For I fear that even he lacks many of the essentials of a leader.”
* * *
As a new decade dawned, membership in both the IRB and the Fenian Brotherhood grew more slowly than Stephens or O’Mahony had hoped. A major obstacle to recruiting Irish Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic was their fear not so much of dying at the hands of the British as of the eternal damnation that would follow. Although most Americans believed the Fenian Brotherhood was a papist organization, clergy across the United States railed against its members from their pulpits. Secret societies—particularly those willing to use violence—ran afoul of church teaching, and priests threatened to withhold sacraments from anyone who recited the Fenian oath. American bishops also accused the Fenians of preying on the gullible Irish.
The Vatican might have cloaked its stance toward the Fenians in its opposition to clandestine societies, but it had little affinity with those preaching the gospel of popular uprising, particularly when it was itself at war with Italian revolutionaries. Pope Pius IX appealed to his Irish subjects to join the fight for the Papal States against Italy’s rebels. He had no use for those doing the same for their homeland.
The opposition of Dublin’s powerful archbishop, Paul Cullen, and other clerical leaders in Ireland slowed the growth of the IRB, particularly in rural areas of Ireland where the church was most powerful. Even though its parishioners were treated as second-class citizens, the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland was comfortable with its position in relation to the Crown. It was the Fenians who threatened its status in their espousal of the separation of church and state.
Stephens and O’Mahony believed the clergy had overstepped their bounds by becoming involved in political matters during the Young Irelander Rebellion, and they vowed not to let it happen again. “Those who denounce us go beyond their duty as clergymen,” O’Mahony wrote.
Stephens urged his followers to obey the clergy on spiritual matters, but when it came to other subjects, to treat them as fellow citizens. “It was necessary to get the people, in my mind, to distinguish between the twofold character of the priest,” he wrote, “to distinguish between their temporal and spiritual character.”
* * *
While generations of rebels in Ireland had been forced to drill with pikes and pitchforks by the light of the moon, the Fenians in America gained valuable military training with firearms. They served in volunteer militias, which became prevalent in the United States after the Mexican-American War. Irish American militia groups sprouted across the country.
By November 1859, O’Mahony had organized forty military regiments and companies with connections to the Fenian Brotherhood. However, he was no evangelizer. He rarely traveled from New York City to recruit new members, which led to growing tensions between him and Stephens. Meanwhile, Stephens boasted so often of his superior organizing efforts in Ireland that O’Mahony grew distrustful of the IRB leader’s accounts.
O’Mahony traveled to Ireland at the end of 1860 to check on the rebellion’s progress himself. After welcoming his counterpart to Dublin, Stephens immediately “reproached him in words of the most cutting sarcasm, telling him of his shortcomings, feebleness and insincerity,” according to Denieffe. He capped the tirade with a reminder of how he “had dragged him out of obscurity and put him in a position he never dreamed of.” The solidarity between the two men shaken, O’Mahony sailed for home in March 1861. He returned to a nation that had been divided in two.
* To this day, the term “Fenian” is wielded as both a derogatory term of sectarian abuse and a badge of honor by both sides of the divide in Northern Ireland.
3
The Civil War
THE FIRST BLOODSHED in the Civil War was Irish.
While the Union soldiers stationed at Fort Sumter all survived the thunderstorm of Confederate mortar shells and cannonballs that marked the start of the Civil War on April 12, 1861, they didn’t emerge from the surrender ceremony unscathed. An accidental explosion during the firing of a one-hundred-gun salute to the Stars and Stripes killed two Irishmen.
The cause of death might have been a fluke, but the fatalities of two Irishmen in a Union outpost were not just some stroke of bad luck. Irish natives not only accounted for half of the sixteen-thousand-man regular army but outnumbered American-born soldiers inside Fort Sumter.
The fatalities reinforced John O’Mahony’s worst fears that the Irish would perish while battling both fellow Americans and fellow Irishmen, instead of their true enemy, a concern shared by one Dublin newspaper. “Ireland will be more deeply, more mournfully, affected by the disasters in America, than any other country in the world. The lives of her exiled children will be offered in thousands,” predicted The Nation.
Feeling a kinship with fellow rebels, approximately 20,000 Irish Americans joined the Confederate forces, while according to some estimates more than 200,000 Irishmen fought for the United States when factoring in volunteers in American territories, the Union army, and the Union navy—in which as many as 20 percent of the sailors were Irish-born.
Irish on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line enlisted not just out of a sense of duty to the new land that took them in but to silence nativists who questioned their patriotism. For many, though, hungry stomachs and empty pockets offered the only necessary motivation. The Irish still struggled at the bottom of the American economy with unemployment among Irish males 25 percent higher in 1861 than during the panic of 1857. Sure, the job could bring death, but at least it paid.
To many Fenians and Irish republicans, enlistment offered the opportunity to gain valuable training for the eventual revolution they planned to launch in Ireland. The County Kilkenny native John O’Keeffe wrote that he joined the Union army to “learn the soldier trade in the hope that the knowledge we acquired might, in the future, be of service to the old land.”
The Young Ireland veteran Thomas Francis Meagher echoed the sentiment. “It is a moral certainty that many of our countrymen who enlist in this struggle for the maintenance of the Union will fall in the contest. But, even so; I hold that if only one in ten of us come back when this war is over, the military experience gained by that one will be of more service in the fight for Ireland’s freedom than would that of the entire ten as they are now.”
O’Mahony, however, could be excused if he didn’t quite see the long-term benefit of the Civil War as a proving ground for an Irish revolutionary army—not if it wiped out all of Ireland’s Celtic warriors. Membership in both the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Fenian Brotherhood had already stagnated, and now war pitted Irishman against Irishman. Fenianism appeared to teeter—until a dead man arose from the grave to give it new life.
* * *
Even those who loathed the Irish could grudgingly admit one thing: They sure knew how to throw a funeral. Few good-byes in Irish history, however, rivaled the one the Fenians gave to Terence Bellew MacManus, the Young Irelander who foug
ht alongside James Stephens in Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch.
MacManus had also escaped from his captivity in Tasmania, having settled in San Francisco. There, the fifty-year-old bachelor died in poverty on January 15, 1861. Although his passing drew little notice outside Irish American newspapers, MacManus would not be permitted to rest in peace in San Francisco’s Calvary Cemetery. The Fenian Brotherhood circle in San Francisco decided that the Irish patriot should be buried in native soil, and O’Mahony and Stephens foresaw the propaganda benefits of staging a transatlantic funeral procession with MacManus as the lifeless star of a Fenian pageant.
On August 19, 1861, seven months after the exile’s burial, they excavated his grave and placed his remains inside a lavish rosewood coffin. Following a funeral Mass and a procession through the streets of San Francisco lined with many of the city’s ten thousand Irish-born residents, the patriot’s body sailed to New York City. On September 16, Archbishop John Joseph Hughes—in spite of past run-ins with Young Irelanders such as Meagher and John Mitchel—delivered remarks at a funeral Mass inside old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a task he was willing to undertake because MacManus never swore an oath to join the Fenian Brotherhood.
A month later, the corpse of MacManus sailed home to Ireland. On the cold, wet Sunday morning of November 10, Dubliners who knelt to their God in the morning stood for hours to venerate an Irish rebel’s bones in the afternoon. According to Stephens, 150,000 people watched the massive funeral procession slog through ankle-deep mud along the seven-mile route to Glasnevin Cemetery, the vast necropolis on Dublin’s northern outskirts where the city’s Catholics had finally found the freedom and dignity in death that the British had so long denied them in life. In enveloping darkness, one of history’s longest Irish wakes finally ended with the burial of MacManus beneath the gaze of the 160-foot-tall traditional Irish round tower that soared above the tomb of Daniel O’Connell, the great nationalist leader at whose behest the burial ground was established in 1832, at a time when the city’s Catholics had no cemeteries in which their graveside services were permitted.
When the Irish Invaded Canada Page 4
