The Fenians basked in the largest outpouring of Irish nationalism since O’Connell’s funeral fourteen years earlier. “The facecloth is removed from the dead nation, and lo! instead of a dead face the living lines of strength and resolve are seen! It was a great triumph,” an ebullient Stephens wrote to O’Mahony.
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While the MacManus funeral invigorated IRB membership abroad, it had less of an impact in the United States, where Irish pocketbooks were understandably consumed by the Civil War. Unaware of the full extent of the difficulties confronting O’Mahony, Stephens continually ridiculed his American counterpart and demanded more money. “One hundred and thirteen pounds from the whole American organization in a whole year! I should look on this as a small sum monthly,” Stephens castigated O’Mahony in April 1862. “It would pain you to hear all that is said about the American branch, and to know that I cannot conscientiously defend the conduct of our brothers yonder, especially since the funeral.”
The conspiratorial mind that proved so adept in organizing a secret society failed Stephens in his relationships with American Fenians. Like a jealous lover, Stephens grew paranoid at what he considered long periods between the Fenian leader’s communications. “No other living man would bear what I am bearing,” he once complained about O’Mahony’s infrequent letters.
Stephens grew so disgusted at the slow fund-raising pace that he took an unusual step for a secret society: He launched a newspaper. Hardly bothering to hide the enterprise, Stephens opened its offices mere steps away from Dublin Castle, the center of British power in Ireland. Stephens expected the newspaper to generate £5,000* a year. If it couldn’t, he warned with typical bombast that the whole IRB could collapse. “The establishment of the paper had become a necessity—a matter of life or death to the organization,” he later wrote.
The Irish People debuted on November 28, 1863, and all ten thousand copies sold out quickly. It was the IRB leader’s second major undertaking that month. On November 11, he got married, shocking his followers who thought that Ireland was his only true love, remembering his discouragements of nuptials or even lovemaking until the establishment of the Irish Republic.
Marriage proved an easier go than the newspaper business as The Irish People struggled to make money. The anticlerical tone of the sixteen-page newspaper caused the clergy to pressure parishioners not to sell copies in their retail establishments. Oftentimes, it lost money, forcing Stephens to tap his meager private funds to keep the printing press going.
* * *
Although Stephens had stayed true to his demand to be a “provisional dictator” when the Fenians launched their transatlantic structure five years earlier, O’Mahony chafed at his subservient role. He wanted the Fenian Brotherhood to be more than simply the arsenal and money box for Ireland. He wanted a greater say in formulating policy.
Unwilling to submit to the “dictatorial arrogance” of Stephens any longer, O’Mahony decided to liberate himself and the Fenian Brotherhood. “As chief officer of the American organization, my powers must be put upon an even level with his authority over the Irish,” he wrote of Stephens. “I will no longer consent to be accountable to him for my official conduct. We must treat as equal to equal, when it is necessary for us to treat at all.” On October 19, 1863, O’Mahony resigned his position as supreme organizer and director of the IRB in America.
“I am sick—almost to death—of the man and his ways,” Stephens wrote of O’Mahony. He complained that the Fenian Brotherhood leader had become a “standing drag-chain and stumbling-block” to the revolutionary efforts, and a growing number of Irish Americans agreed with him. A group of impatient Fenians, including James Gibbons of Philadelphia and Michael Scanlan of Chicago, who called themselves “men of action,” forced O’Mahony to call the Fenians’ first general convention.
On November 3, 1863, eighty-two delegates from twelve states and the District of Columbia, including a soldier who had recently lost a limb at the Battle of Gettysburg, gathered inside Chicago’s Fenian Hall and proclaimed “the Republic of Ireland to be virtually established.” Accordingly, the Fenian Brotherhood reorganized itself along the lines of a proper republican government by drafting a constitution that made several structural changes. The head center would now be an elected position and the executive and financial departments separated. Delegates unanimously returned O’Mahony to the head center position and approved his nominations of Gibbons, Scanlan, and three others to a new central council.
The Fenian Brotherhood also agreed to abandon its semisecret status. O’Mahony hoped the decision would put the Fenian Brotherhood “beyond the reach of hostile churchmen,” but the changes did not appease the archbishops of Chicago and Philadelphia, who continued to condemn the Fenian Brotherhood as a secret society afoul of Catholic doctrine. Archbishop Peter Richard Kenrick of St. Louis reinforced to his flock that any members of the Fenian Brotherhood would be barred from receiving the sacraments of the church.
The structural changes did not satisfy these “men of action,” either. Still frustrated at the slow pace of activity and fund-raising in the United States, they organized the Irish National Fair in Chicago in the early spring of 1864 without consulting O’Mahony. The two-week fair raised $54,000 for the purchase of weapons through the sale of handmade Irish goods—from blackthorn walking sticks to carved bog art—as well as Irish republican relics such as a window shutter handle from Theobald Wolfe Tone’s Dublin residence and the silver crucifix placed on the coffin of MacManus when it lay in state.
The success of the fair bolstered the spirits of Stephens, who had accepted a personal invitation to attend. Departing Chicago, the IRB leader maintained a grueling recruiting and fund-raising schedule, with a new city each night—Milwaukee, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo. Buoyed by the support he encountered on his tour, the Irishman felt confident enough to repeatedly declare to his American audiences, “Next year will be the year of action.” Under the code name Captain James Daly, he visited Union army camps and, like many Fenian organizers, found them to be fertile recruiting grounds.
* * *
Fenian circles arose in the Armies of the Potomac, Tennessee, and Cumberland and on the decks of the navy steamers USS Port Royal and USS Brooklyn as well as the frigates USS New Ironsides and USS Huntsville. Soldiers dropped their spare change into Fenian cash boxes nailed to trees, and the Union army even permitted Fenians to lay down their arms to attend their conventions.
While the Army of the Potomac made its winter quarters in Falmouth, Virginia, during the winter of 1863, an Irish newspaper editor serving as an emissary of Stephens—presumably Thomas Clarke Luby—rowed across the Rappahannock River from a Confederate camp and wandered into the Union camp with the permission of both Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and the Confederate secretary of state, Judah Benjamin. Several nights later, members of the Potomac circle were ushered from camp to a nearby ravine guarded by a Union sentry at one end, a Confederate sentinel at the other. Men in both blue and gray who had shot at each other a few weeks earlier during the fierce Battle of Fredericksburg now shook hands, pledged not to mention the Civil War, and listened to the emissary discuss where they could act in unison to strike the British.
As the war progressed, however, Irish Americans who buried their brethren by the thousands became increasingly disenchanted in its aims. The 1863 enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation had altered the stated goal of the conflict to include the liberation of the slaves, an unwelcome prospect for many poor Irish who feared that millions of African Americans would flood the labor market and take their unskilled jobs. Rather than empathize with another oppressed people, too many Irish let their fears blind them to the irony of their opposition to emancipation. After the institution of conscription in 1863, which allowed the wealthy to buy their way out of military service for $300, Irish frustrations with the war and their economic status boiled over in the New York City draf
t riots.
Through their sacrifice and service, the Irish demonstrated their patriotism to Americans. They just didn’t expect to have to die in such numbers to do so. Even in a holocaust of unthinkable losses, the Irish suffered disproportionally terrible casualty rates, placed on the front lines to serve often as little more than cannon fodder. Much as it had in South Carolina at the start of the Civil War and on battlefields across the continent for four years, Celtic blood also soaked the Virginia soil at the war’s conclusion, with an Irishman being the last Union general killed in the war.
* * *
Five days after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender, General Francis Frederick Millen boarded the steamship Etna on a mission to Ireland. The “year of action” promised by Stephens had now entered its spring, and the IRB head continued to insist he would launch the rebellion in Ireland by the end of 1865. O’Mahony and the Fenian Brotherhood’s central council, however, remained skeptical of his claims to have 100,000 men ready to take the field within twenty-four hours.
O’Mahony dispatched three different soldiers to report on the IRB’s true state of affairs. The arrival of the American inquisitors enraged Stephens, who told the Fenian Brotherhood leaders that he considered it “the deadliest blow ever aimed against us.”
Stephens wrote that the choice facing the IRB was either war with the British in 1865 or dissolution. “The pledge given to the people must be redeemed. Else the movement is lost and with it, I am convinced, the cause of our race for ever.” On the other side of the Atlantic, the Irish who fought for both the Union and the Confederacy also looked ahead to the next war, the one they truly wanted to wage. And as the Civil War drew to its conclusion, the Irish were not the only ones eager to point their guns at the British.
* * *
The United States had contracted a severe case of Anglophobia as a result of the tacit support given by Great Britain to the Confederacy. Relations first soured in May 1861, when the British declared their neutrality during the Civil War, which granted belligerent rights to the Confederacy. Six months later, war nearly broke out between the United States and Great Britain after an American frigate seized two Confederate envoys from the unarmed British mail steamer Trent while in international waters.
In spite of their professed neutrality, the British built blockade runners that kept Southern ports supplied and forged Armstrong guns that mowed down Union troops. Shipyards in Liverpool built, equipped, and armed Confederate warships that seized American goods and burned their whalers. British crews sporting fake Southern accents even manned the vessels.
British hands had built the most fearsome ship afloat, the CSS Alabama. For nearly two years, the Confederate warship had prowled the seven seas in search of nautical prey. As part of a guerrilla war against Union merchant shipping, the commerce raider flying both the Confederate Stars and Bars and an English flag terrorized Union shipping lanes from Newfoundland to Sumatra until it sank in a June 1864 naval battle outside Cherbourg, France. The half-Confederate, half-English crew captured or destroyed more than sixty American ships and inflicted more than $5 million worth of losses. By the end of the Civil War, the United States demanded millions of dollars in reparations from Great Britain—the so-called Alabama claims—for the damage inflicted by the Confederate warships built in their ports.
Further inflaming Americans’ attitudes toward their former motherland, the British colony of Canada harbored not only Union draft dodgers but also Confederate spies and operatives who exported terror across the border. From their safe haven in Canada, Confederates launched raids on border towns in Maine and Vermont. They carried out a failed attack by arson squads to set New York City aflame, and some suspected their involvement in President Abraham Lincoln’s murder. Eyewitnesses claimed to have seen the assassin John Wilkes Booth in Montreal days before he shot the American president, and authorities found a bank receipt from the Royal Ontario Bank in his possession after the assassination. In the days following the shooting, the conspirator John Surratt Jr. fled north, where a Catholic priest in southern Quebec gave him sanctuary before he absconded to Liverpool.
By the end of the Civil War, Anglo-American relations were at their worst since the redcoats torched the nation’s capital half a century earlier. When Queen Victoria sat down to her diary on February 12, 1865, she noted that during the day she had discussed “America and the danger, which seems approaching, of our having a war with her as soon as she makes peace; of the impossibility of our being able to hold Canada.”
Much of the Union sought to engage with the British. But the United States was exhausted after four years of war, and it faced the daunting job of healing wounds and reintegrating the South. In the Fenians, however, America had a perfect vessel through which it could outsource its revenge. The British Empire had a debt to pay, and the Americans weren’t above using the Fenians as leverage in order to collect it.
* The sum of £5,000 in 1863 is equivalent to more than $580,000 today. See www.uwyo.edu.
4
Torn Between Brothers
AS JAMES STEPHENS continued to promise “war or dissolution in 1865,” General Francis Frederick Millen reported to John O’Mahony that “between June and September barely a steamer arrived” in Ireland “that did not bring fifteen of these fighting Irishmen.” According to Millen, some of the Civil War veterans were experienced officers; “others had lived loafing round the bar-rooms and engine-houses of New York—equally ready to cut a pack of cards or a throat.”
When the British government became aware of the influx of Fenians, it began to screen Irish-looking passengers arriving on steamers from the United States. If their accents didn’t betray the Fenians, their fashion often did. British authorities kept such watchful eyes for the double-breasted vests, felt hats, and square-toed shoes so popular in America that Colonel Thomas Kelly urged Fenians to leave those items at home to avoid suspicion.
On September 15, the police stormed through the front door of The Irish People, seizing books and ledgers. Across Dublin, the authorities arrested more than a dozen Irish People staffers and Irish Republican Brotherhood leaders, including Thomas Clarke Luby. In a drawer of Luby’s nightstand, police found an envelope of incriminating IRB documents that would lead to several convictions, including his own. The authorities charged the Fenians with treason felony and attempting to levy war upon the Crown, which was later increased to high treason, punishable by death. In addition to decapitating the IRB leadership, the authorities seized £5,000 of the Fenians’ money and froze the IRB’s bank account.
Stephens managed to evade capture, fleeing to a safe house in the Dublin suburbs. His advisers urged him to launch his uprising before the British could cripple the entire organization, but Stephens decided now was not the time for action. “Had we been prepared,” he wrote to O’Mahony the day after the raid, “last night would have marked an epoch in our history. But we were not prepared; and so I had to issue an order that all should go home.”
With a £2,300 reward for his capture, Stephens went into hiding. He had given clear instructions to O’Mahony in the event of his taking. “Once you hear of my arrest, only a single course remains to you,” he wrote. “Gather all the fighting men you [can] about you, and then sail for Ireland.”
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General Thomas William Sweeny picked up his pen with his left hand (his only hand), dated his letter October 12, 1865, and requested a twenty-day leave of absence from the Union army to attend to private business in New York. After the granting of his petition, the veteran of two American wars departed Nashville to attend to his affairs, which were hardly private and not in New York but in Philadelphia, where more than six hundred delegates assembled for the Fenian Brotherhood’s third general convention.
Few Americans embodied the spirit of the “fighting Irish” more than Sweeny. Leaving Ireland as an eleven-year-old, he survived thirty minutes in the Atlantic Ocean after bein
g washed overboard during a storm on his voyage to the United States. After joining the nearly five thousand Irish-born soldiers who fought for the U.S. Army in the Mexican-American War, “Fightin’ Tom” rose to the rank of second lieutenant. During the 1847 Battle of Churubusco, Sweeny took a bullet to the groin, but still he refused to abandon his men. Minutes later, a ball pierced his right arm so completely that it had to be amputated.
Rather than wallow in self-pity, Sweeny simply folded over the empty right sleeve of his uniform jacket and continued to serve in the Second U.S. Infantry, even whipping his commanding officer in a fistfight with just his one good arm. During the Civil War, Sweeny rose to the rank of brigadier general and, according to General William Tecumseh Sherman, “saved the day” commanding a brigade at the 1862 Battle of Shiloh in spite of taking two gunshots to his remaining arm and one to the leg.
When the Irish Invaded Canada Page 5
