When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  The one-armed general Thomas Sweeny left the U.S. Army to serve as the Fenian Brotherhood’s secretary of war and draw up plans for the invasion of Canada.

  The career officer joined the Fenian Brotherhood while on garrison duty in Nashville. He wrote that his military service was “a school for the ultimate realization of the darling object of his heart”—Irish independence.

  When he entered the convention hall in Philadelphia in the middle of October, Sweeny was the highest-profile Civil War general to align himself with the Fenian Brotherhood. Assembling just blocks away from where the Founding Fathers drafted the Declaration of Independence ninety years earlier, he and his fellow Fenians hoped for inspiration in their efforts to cast off the same tyrannical government across the ocean.

  The convention’s record attendance testified to a surge of interest in the Fenian cause after the Civil War’s conclusion, particularly among those like Sweeny who were drawn to the more militant “men of action” and who sought democratic reforms to check O’Mahony’s power. In addition to approving a new constitution with a familiar-sounding preamble, “We, the Fenians of the United States,” the congress replaced the central council, whose members had been nominated by the executive, with an unpaid fifteen-person senate elected by the delegates. To curb the power of the executive, whose title changed from head center to president, the senate was given the ability to approve cabinet nominations and overrule presidential decisions with a two-thirds vote.

  Delegates reelected O’Mahony as their executive. In case of his death, impeachment, or resignation, power would now fall to the president of the senate, a role filled by William Roberts, a splendid orator and one of the “men of action.” The thirty-five-year-old had arrived in New York in 1849. After working for nearly a decade for A. T. Stewart’s dry-goods emporium, Roberts launched his own successful store. His Crystal Palace Emporium on the Bowery advertised “cheap goods, at the real cost price, and no humbug.”

  As he filled out his cabinet, O’Mahony appointed Sweeny his secretary of war and general commanding the “Army of the Irish Republic.” He was relieved to have an experienced hand to pull together the plan for the invasion of Ireland, which might have to be implemented soon if the British tracked down Stephens.

  For his part, Sweeny asserted his belief in striking where the enemy “was most vulnerable and where victory would give us the most real positive advantage,” a notion with which O’Mahony could hardly disagree. However, unlike his fellow Fenian, Sweeny wasn’t referring to Ireland.

  * * *

  Sweeny believed the idea of launching a transatlantic operation to support an uprising in Ireland would be logistically impossible, particularly because the Fenians lacked a navy.

  So why not strike the British where they were closer, more vulnerable, and more easily attacked? “The Canadian frontier, extending from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River to Lake Huron, a distance of more than 1,300 miles, is assailable at all points,” Sweeny wrote. The lightly defended border with Canada, which had only one-tenth of the population of the United States, was a lawless no-man’s-land frequented by counterfeiters, transnational criminals, and outlaw gangs smuggling alcohol, produce, opium, and even livestock by wagons, boats, and sleighs. The migration of fugitive slaves, draft dodgers, and Confederate agents to Canada during the Civil War proved just how porous it was.

  Sweeny’s idea, backed by Roberts and the “men of action,” called for the Fenians to establish a foothold in Canada that would allow it to be granted belligerent rights by the United States, and to issue letters of marque to privateers to attack British merchant ships. They could then use Canada as a base of operations to launch a naval program that could be successful in attacking the British overseas.

  The Canadian plan offered several scenarios that could result in Ireland’s independence. An attack could divert British army troops from Ireland, increasing the chances of a successful IRB uprising. It could perhaps even trigger a war between Great Britain and the United States, which had cast its land-hungry eyes northward after having expanded west and south in the prior three decades. Under another scenario, the Fenians could seize Canada and trade the colony back to the British in return for Ireland. In essence, a geopolitical kidnapping of Canada, with its ransom being Ireland’s independence.

  Even the plan’s proponents understood that the chances of success weren’t in their favor. But the odds would be against the Irish no matter what they did. A slim chance is all Ireland ever faced when challenging the British over the past seven centuries. The likelihood of failure might have been high, but it was guaranteed if they did nothing at all.

  * * *

  Invading Canada might have sounded outrageous to some, but it followed a long American tradition of attacking the British colony. In fact, the United States had yet to even declare its independence from Great Britain when the Continental army attacked Canada in the late summer of 1775.

  After marching north from Lake Champlain and seizing Montreal, the Dublin-born general Richard Montgomery continued on to the outskirts of Quebec City, where in December 1775 he united with Colonel Benedict Arnold, who had marched north through Maine. With the enlistments of many soldiers expiring the next day, the Continental army attacked during a New Year’s Eve blizzard and suffered a terrible defeat, failing to gain a stronghold on the St. Lawrence River to control the movement of goods and troops. The patriots erroneously expected to receive the support of the French Canadians in their operation, a mistake that Americans would often repeat.

  After declaring war on Great Britain in 1812, the United States planned a three-pronged invasion of Canada in which it expected to be greeted as liberators, not marauders. “The acquisition of Canada…will be a mere matter of marching,” promised the former president Thomas Jefferson. It wasn’t.

  The U.S. general William Hull’s attack across the Detroit River in the first weeks of the War of 1812 proved disastrous, and he surrendered his entire army without firing a single shot. General Henry Dearborn abandoned his plans to strike Montreal before the attack could even be launched, while General Stephen Van Rensselaer’s attack across the Niagara River ended in defeat at the Battle of Queenston Heights.

  A quarter century later, Americans became involved in a series of failed populist uprisings that killed hundreds in Canada in the Patriot War of 1837 and 1838. In Quebec, Francophones excluded from power rebelled against English-speaking elites, while reformers in Ontario rebelled against the aristocracy over political patronage and corruption.

  Rebel leaders who fled to the United States during the Patriot War found considerable support for their democratic aspirations. Secret “Hunters’ Lodges” dedicated to liberating Canada from British rule sprouted along the northern border of the United States, causing President Martin Van Buren to warn American sympathizers to obey the country’s neutrality laws. In November 1838, approximately three hundred “Hunter Patriot” insurgents, soldiers originally from both sides of the border, crossed the St. Lawrence River, only to be defeated at the Battle of the Windmill.

  In the ensuing years, farcical disputes with equally ridiculous names flared along the border. In the final days of 1838, American lumberjacks spotted their Canadian counterparts chopping down trees in disputed territories of Maine and New Brunswick near the Aroostook River, setting off the bloodless Pork and Beans War (named for the lumberjacks’ meal of choice). Both Maine and New Brunswick sent militias to the border region, followed by the arrival of British forces from the Caribbean and congressional authorization for the dispatch of a fifty-thousand-man force. The arrival of Brigadier General Winfield Scott finally defused the tension, but the dispute led to a negotiated settlement of the border between the United States and Great Britain under the 1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty.

  Farther west, other portions of the boundary between Canada and the United States remained in dispute. The war cry “Fifty-four
forty or fight” carried James Polk to the White House in 1844 as expansionists sought a far-northern latitude for the Oregon Territory. The subsequent Oregon Treaty settled on the 49th parallel as the international boundary, but it did not address the status of the San Juan Islands between Seattle and Vancouver, which continued to be claimed by both Great Britain and the United States.

  In June 1859 on San Juan Island, the American Lyman Cutlar shot dead a pig dining on the potatoes in his garden that belonged to a ranch manager for the Canadian Hudson’s Bay Company. The situation quickly escalated. British authorities threatened Cutlar with arrest and evicted seventeen of his countrymen from the island. President James Buchanan sent troops in response. The British retaliated; their arms race continued until five hundred American troops and two thousand British aboard five warships kept watch over San Juan Island.

  While the British governor of Vancouver Island urged an attack, the British rear admiral Robert L. Baynes refused to “involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig.” And once again, General Scott was dispatched to calm the situation, serving as a military sedative to soothe the frayed nerves. Great Britain and the United States eventually agreed to a joint occupation of the island until the settlement of the water boundary.

  At the close of the Civil War, the Fenians weren’t the only Americans thinking about an attack on Canada. After Appomattox, Senator Zach Chandler of Michigan developed a plan to dispatch 200,000 Civil War veterans—100,000 each from Grant’s and Lee’s armies—to confiscate Canada as compensation for the Alabama claims.

  “If we could march into Canada an army composed of men who have worn the gray side by side with the men who have worn the blue to fight against a common hereditary enemy,” Chandler said, “it would do much to heal the wounds of the war, hasten reconstruction, and weld the North and South together by a bond of friendship.” Thirty senators signed off on the plan, but it derailed after Lincoln’s assassination.

  This is all to say that in the 1860s an American invasion of Canada might not have sounded as ridiculous to American ears as it does to those today. It would receive a further shot in the arm from an unlikely and influential source.

  * * *

  The Civil War had decimated John Mitchel, much as it had his newly beloved South. He lost two sons in 1863, one at Fort Sumter and the other at Gettysburg. A third boy lost his arm in the war. The news, however, could not dampen his fiery rhetoric toward the American government, which arrested him in June 1865 on the vague charge of “aiding the rebellion” and consigned him to Virginia’s Fortress Monroe, where he was jailed with his friend the former Confederate president Jefferson Davis, whom he had visited frequently at the Confederate White House.

  Even those who vehemently disagreed with the Irishman’s slavery stance had to wonder why General Lee remained free while Mitchel languished behind bars. Having gained O’Mahony’s approval, the St. Louis Fenian Bernard Doran Killian traveled to the nation’s capital to personally lobby President Andrew Johnson and the U.S. secretary of state William Seward for his release.

  During his White House audience on October 13, Killian raised the prospect of a hypothetical Fenian invasion of Canada and seizure of Canadian territory south of the St. Lawrence River, in order to gauge the potential reaction of the American government. According to Killian’s account (the only one that exists), the pair told him that they would “acknowledge accomplished facts,” in spite of American neutrality laws. In other words, they wouldn’t endorse a Canadian invasion per se, but they wouldn’t interfere with one either.

  For its part, the Johnson administration saw value in a Fenian invasion. It could be used to pressure Great Britain in the government’s quest to extract millions of dollars in reparations for the Alabama claims. Plus, with the future of Reconstruction at stake, Johnson saw a chance to earn the goodwill of the country’s 1.6 million Irish voters.

  The Fenians would hang their expectation of American support on Killian’s account of the White House meeting, which he brought back to the Philadelphia convention along with news of Johnson’s agreement to release Mitchel, who subsequently spent a year in Paris as a financial agent funneling money from the Fenian Brotherhood to the IRB. Their nascent idea was gaining life.

  * * *

  The most wanted man in the British Empire slumbered as a posse of policemen surrounded his hideout around 6:00 a.m. on November 11. A suspicious neighbor had noticed that “Mr. Herbert,” said to be a well-to-do gentleman of private fortune and a son of a Kilkenny reverend, made only nocturnal excursions, while numerous parcels arrived for him every day. When police began to monitor the house, they saw the fugitive’s wife, Jane Stephens, entering and exiting the villa.

  Scaling the high wall surrounding the property, the police closed in as Inspector Hughes rapped on the door. Eventually, they heard the voice of Stephens from the other side of the door asking if it was the gardener. When he heard that it was the police, Stephens ran to a front window and saw the house surrounded. With no escape, he opened the door and was taken into custody. Mrs. Stephens asked her husband whether she could visit him in prison, which he quickly dismissed. “You cannot visit me in prison without asking permission of British officials,” he barked, “and I do not think it becoming in one so near to me as you are to ask favors of British dogs. You must not do it—I forbid it.”

  The police loaded Stephens and three Fenians sleeping in adjacent rooms into a police van and galloped away to Dublin Castle before the IRB leader’s transfer to Richmond Bridewell Prison. While past political prisoners such as William Smith O’Brien, Thomas Francis Meagher, and Daniel O’Connell resided in the governor’s residence at Richmond Bridewell Prison, Stephens received no such privilege. He remained with the general population, which was subjected to the particularly cruel Victorian punishment of the treadwheel, a contraption on which prisoners walked in place on the planks of a large paddle wheel that turned gears pumping water or crushing grain. Over the course of a monotonous eight-hour shift, a prisoner could scale the equivalent of seventy-two hundred feet, twice the height of Ireland’s tallest peak.

  Two weeks after his arrest, Stephens heard a key rattling in his cell door. John Breslin, an orderly in the prison hospital and brother of an IRB member, entered and handed Stephens a six-chambered revolver. Along with the prison turnkey and IRB member Daniel Byrne, Breslin had taken beeswax impressions of the six keys needed to get Stephens outside and given them to an optician to manufacture duplicates, which he filed down until they worked.

  Fleeing through the prison yard, Stephens scaled the prison wall, using a knotted rope that had been thrown over by a nine-man rescue team led by Kelly, the American envoy who had become a Stephens confidant. Stephens hauled his body up and saw the drop on the other side. Although he was nervous, the rescue team told him to jump, so Stephens fell into the arms of his fellow Fenians.

  It was a daring and effective escape, but Stephens’s comportment affected at least one of its participants. He “shook like a dog in a wet sack,” reported John Devoy, a twenty-three-year-old IRB operative who had recruited the rescue team. It was in that moment he began to question the IRB leader’s nerve.

  * * *

  The news of Stephens’s escape shook the British Isles. Not only was the man who promised a rebellion by the end of the year free once again, but the authorities wondered if there was any place in Ireland that the Fenians had not infiltrated.

  The authorities offered a £2,000 reward for the Irishman’s capture. They papered Dublin with his description, oddly citing his twitching left eye, as well as that his hands and feet were “remarkably small and well formed.” Just as in 1848, Stephens was a fugitive.

  He didn’t take flight into the Irish countryside this time. Far from it. In fact, not only did he remain in Dublin, but he could see the prison from which he had just escaped from the chamber window of his temporary hideout.

/>   Stephens’s top advisers, especially the Fenians who had traveled to Ireland from the United States, implored him that this was the moment to fight. But the IRB leader stalled. Just like when he stood on the barricade in 1848 with a rifle in his hand, just as he had the night of the Irish People raid, Stephens didn’t take the shot.

  The Fenians, particularly those who had come from America, felt betrayed. “I do not know him to be a liar at all, though I do not take him to be very scrupulous about the truth,” wrote John O’Leary. “I’d believe little he said on his mere word, but that is because I believe he very easily deceives himself.”

  The decision not to fight sparked not just incredulity among some Fenians but also the rumor that Stephens must be a British spy who was given his freedom in return for becoming a double agent. It was, many felt, the most plausible explanation for how he managed to break out of Ireland’s most secure prison and elude arrest.

  Stephens alone had pledged that 1865 would be the year of action. Instead, Irish republicans resigned themselves to yet another year chained to the British. In Ireland and abroad, a restlessness began to grow.

  * * *

  Like a lodestar at night, a green Fenian banner emblazoned with a golden sunburst whipped in the November sky from atop a four-story brownstone. It guided O’Mahony to his organization’s palatial new headquarters at 32 East Seventeenth Street on the northern edge of Manhattan’s Union Square.

  Tasked by the Fenian senate with leasing a new headquarters commensurate with its self-importance, Roberts, Sweeny, and Killian chose Moffat Mansion, one of New York’s plushest properties. In mid-November, the Fenians moved uptown from their cramped Duane Street quarters, huddled among saloons, tattoo parlors, and boardinghouses. Now they rubbed shoulders with the elegant Everett House hotel.