When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  Sunlight poured through Moffat Mansion’s stained-glass windows, casting colorful rays on the frescoes, sculptures, paintings, and coats of arms adorning the walls. Behind the great glass folding door of the reception room sat cabinet secretaries and senators eager for an audience with the president. In adjoining rooms, treasury department clerks counted incoming donations and paid bills.

  The Fenians thought their opulent accommodations were symbolic of their emergence on the world stage. Respectability came at a price, however. They leased the “Fenian White House” for eighteen months at a cost of $18,000 paid in advance. They also emptied the treasury of $5,000 to be placed as a security against damages. On top of the rent, the Fenians spent several thousand dollars to purchase rosewood desks, luxurious carpets, and armchairs upholstered in green and gold.

  For a man comfortable wearing threadbare clothing and living in rude apartments like the one he shared with Stephens in Paris, O’Mahony could only shake his head at the lavish expense and mutter to a friend that he feared “it might prove the tomb of the Fenian movement.” On the second floor, O’Mahony navigated his way through the traffic of scurrying clerks filing correspondence and transmitting presidential orders and entered his private office. While Sweeny and the ordnance bureau, corps of engineers, and rest of the war department on the third floor pored over maps, organized a secret service corps in Canada, and crafted the plan for attacking America’s northern neighbor, O’Mahony followed the directive that Stephens issued two months earlier to gather all the fighting men he could and sail for Ireland as soon as he learned of his capture.

  In November 1865, the Fenian Brotherhood moved its headquarters into the plush Moffat Mansion on the north side of Manhattan’s Union Square.

  Like any self-respecting government, the provisional government of the Irish Republic in exile now had its own declaration of independence, its own constitution, its own president and senate, its own army, and now its own grand capitol. The Fenians even issued their own bond notes in denominations of $10, $20, $50, $100, and $500. Printed in green and black, the bonds featured patriotic symbols including a harp, an Irish round tower, and portraits of Irish nationalist heroes such as Robert Emmet and Theobald Wolfe Tone. In the center of the bond, a woman representing Erin, with an Irish wolfhound at her feet, pointed with her left hand to a distant sunburst rising over Ireland and with her right to an unsheathed sword on the ground, about to be grasped by an Irish soldier. The bonds could be redeemed six months after the establishment of the Irish Republic with interest at 6 percent a year.*

  Despite its grand appearances, all was not well at Moffat Mansion, which was rife with tension from the day the Fenians first arrived. O’Mahony continued to feud with the senate over its war strategy. Stephens learned of the estrangement, and he threw his backing behind his fellow Young Irelander, no matter what grievances he might have had with him. Stephens condemned Sweeny’s proposed Canadian foray as a “traitorous diversion from the right path.”

  The division erupted into an irreparable schism over the issue of the Fenian bonds. After O’Mahony ordered Killian, the Fenian treasurer, to deny Sweeny’s request for money to purchase guns for a Canadian attack, the Fenian bond agent, Patrick Keenan, resigned his position at the senate’s behest, meaning that no further bonds could be issued.

  Believing the situation in Ireland to be an emergency, O’Mahony proceeded to issue bonds with his signature on them, although he lacked the constitutional authority to do so. The senate drew up articles of impeachment against O’Mahony in response, charging him with violating the Fenian constitution, engaging in financial irregularities, and lining his own pockets by drawing the $1,200 annual salary of the bond agent in addition to the president’s $2,000 yearly payment. The senators accused O’Mahony of extravagant spending, pointing to Moffat Mansion as the prime example (although the decision to rent the property was clearly more theirs than his).

  The Fenian Brotherhood had managed to survive the Civil War intact, only to now tear itself apart. Meeting in special session, the senate removed O’Mahony from the presidency for eleven specific violations of his oath of office and replaced him with Roberts, the senate president. Having shepherded the Fenian Brotherhood since its inception, O’Mahony was hardly about to step aside without a fight. He retaliated by expelling Roberts and Keenan from the Fenian Brotherhood, seizing control of the treasury and the keys to Moffat Mansion. The so-called Roberts wing formed its own competing Irish Republic government in exile, with headquarters on Broadway, just around the corner from Moffat Mansion.

  The Irish Republic might not have had land of its own, but it now had two headquarters, two presidents, and two divergent plans for freeing Ireland.

  * * *

  Across North America, the Fenian movement cleaved into competing circles: those loyal to Roberts or O’Mahony. While East Coast Fenians tended to remain with O’Mahony, the Roberts wing found its base of support in the Midwest. For some, the decision was not easy. F. B. McNamee reported that his circle in Montreal was “ready to ‘go in,’ for which ever party is in the field first.”

  Although the Fenian movement was pulling itself apart, the British remained concerned with the American government’s coddling of the Irishmen, in particular the War Department’s decision to grant Sweeny a leave of absence from the military to plot an attack against them. “It seems to me that he ought to be called to choose between the North American and the Irish Republic,” Sir Frederick Bruce, the British minister to Washington, D.C., complained to Seward. “The effect of his acting as Secretary of War is to confirm the Fenian dupes in the belief that the Government of the United States favors the movement.”

  The British protest might have been what led to the denial of Sweeny’s request for a six-month leave of absence and his dismissal from the Union army on Christmas Day. Sweeny had given twenty years of his life—and one limb—in service of the United States, but the call of his homeland was powerful enough that he was willing to walk away.

  One day after celebrating the arrival of the new year of 1866, six hundred delegates of the O’Mahony wing congregated in New York’s Clinton Hall. The convention rescinded the Fenian constitution, which had been agreed to in Philadelphia just four months earlier, and reverted to the prior one drafted at the 1863 convention in Chicago. This meant that O’Mahony would be reinstated as head center, advised by a five-man council elected by the congress. The convention also approved a resolution endorsing war in Ireland—and only Ireland.

  * * *

  Sweeny and Roberts—both Protestants—captured headlines as they visited Irish enclaves from New York to Illinois to Tennessee, loudly pronouncing their intention to attack Canada by July. The duo relished these public events. Sweeny’s charisma combined with Roberts’s oratorical skills generated excitement and sold out theaters.

  By the time the Roberts wing held its own convention behind the closed doors of Pittsburgh’s Masonic Hall in February, it had stolen the headlines from the O’Mahony wing. Many Irish Americans agreed with Sweeny that the Roberts wing had “the only feasible plan to the liberation of Ireland.” Sweeny there unveiled his war plan to attack Canada. The measure was overwhelmingly adopted. “We promise that before the summer sun kisses the hilltops of Ireland,” Sweeny thundered, “a ray of hope will gladden every true Irish heart, for by that time we shall have conquered and got hostages for our brave patriots at home.”

  A native of Ireland, the dry-goods magnate William Roberts favored an invasion of Canada and led the senate wing after its break with John O’Mahony, who advocated a Fenian uprising in Ireland.

  Following the convention, the Roberts wing grew its membership through a network of salaried recruiters and organizers who evangelized for the Fenian cause in hopes of getting the Irish to open their wallets and establish new circles. These “missionaries” visited mining towns and mill cities for weeks at a time, traveling by
train to a different locale each night. They tugged on the emotional strings of the Irish in events that mirrored revival meetings, with brass bands and Irish jigs as entertainment.

  The Fenian Brotherhood held a particular appeal to Irish immigrants in rural areas of the Midwest and the West that lacked the political machines, parishes, and immigrant aid societies that bound the Irish together in the big cities of the East. Like other Irish fraternal organizations, the Fenian Brotherhood offered a sense of community. While some joined out of a desire to free their homeland, others did so primarily to maintain their ethnic identity and meet fellow Irishmen.

  Fenian organizers, though, continued to battle clerical opposition. In Sharon, Pennsylvania, fifteen young men had been ready to start a circle until, as one Irishman reported, “Father O’Keefe spoke of the Fenians last Sunday and call[ed] us children of hell and said that he was ordered by the Bishop of Erie to stop our progress.”

  Thanks to the work of the organizers, the momentum in the Irish republican movement resided with the Roberts wing in early 1866. Events in Ireland, however, would give both American factions a jolt of energy.

  * * *

  Nearly three months after his prison escape, Stephens remained on the loose, hundreds of Civil War veterans from America loitered about Ireland, and the British government remained fearful of a possible uprising. On February 17, 1866, the British government suspended habeas corpus in Ireland, allowing suspicious persons to be detained without reason. The British prime minister, Lord John Russell, told Parliament the move was necessary to address the threat of violence being imported from the United States.

  The following morning, a squad of nearly fifty detectives met at dawn and fanned out around Dublin rounding up Irish Americans, many of whom had no apparent employment yet never seemed to lack for money as they stayed at respectable hotels. Colonel John W. Byron was even arrested at a Lower Gloucester Street brothel. In Dublin alone, authorities locked up 150 Irishmen, one-third of them natural-born or naturalized American citizens suspected of Fenian activity. Similar scenes occurred in Tipperary, Limerick, Cork, Belfast, and Sligo.

  The crackdown further inflamed anti-British passions among Americans, causing Seward to lodge a protest about the treatment of his fellow citizens. O’Mahony called on all Irishmen in the New York area to attend a massive protest at the Jones’s Wood estate, a popular Manhattan picnic ground along the East River, on the Sunday afternoon of March 4. That morning, New York’s archbishop, John McCloskey, had denounced the Fenians from the pulpit of old St. Patrick’s Cathedral and called on all God-fearing Catholics to stay away from the afternoon’s event, which he called “a profanation of the Lord’s Day.” He warned that attendance would provoke “the anger of God.”

  If he was right, the Almighty would have been quite upset that afternoon. Even on a wintry day, 100,000 Fenians—most of them members of the Catholic flock—gathered in the pastures of Jones’s Wood. “When the priests descend into the arena of worldly politics they throw off their sacred robes,” O’Mahony had asserted. The turnout showed that the Fenians had succeeded in training many Catholics to disregard the clergy in political matters.

  As snowflakes began to fall and the wind grew more biting, Fenians reached into their pockets, purchasing bond after bond to fund the establishment of the Irish Republic. Mass meetings were held in many other American cities, and for days afterward money poured into Moffat Mansion.

  * * *

  Nothing happened along Canada’s frontier with the United States without Gilbert McMicken knowing about it. During the Civil War, he had organized Canada’s first secret service to monitor Confederate activities along the frontier. Now the spymaster had been directed by John A. Macdonald, the province’s joint premier, to keep a close surveillance of all Fenian activities.

  Having dispatched agents to infiltrate Fenian circles—and even going undercover himself to a Fenian congress—McMicken had received reports of suspicious-looking Irishmen crossing the border in advance of an imminent invasion. One of his agents monitoring the Fenians said that they planned to attack on March 17—St. Patrick’s Day.

  Rumors flew that the Fenians planned to dispatch three ironclads to Halifax, poison the reservoirs of Montreal, and infect Canadian hogs with trichinosis. President Johnson had been less than transparent when he assured Bruce in January 1866 that the Fenians “met with no sympathy on the part of the Government, which on the contrary was anxious to discourage it.” Canadians were skeptical of such claims. In response to the reports, authorities called out ten thousand volunteers, and civic authorities in Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal canceled their official St. Patrick’s Day parades.

  At the White House, the cabinet debated how to handle the situation. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton advocated for Johnson to issue a presidential proclamation warning citizens against violations of the neutrality laws, much as President Martin Van Buren had done during the Patriot War of 1837. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles argued that Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant should instead be consulted and sent to the Canadian frontier.

  Welles had his way and the task fell to Grant, who ordered Major General George Meade, the hero of Gettysburg who now served as commander of the Military Division of the Atlantic, to “use all vigilance to prevent armed or hostile forces or organizations from leaving the United States” and attacking Canada. Not that Grant was enthusiastic about the mission. “During our late troubles neither the British Government or the Canadian officials gave themselves much trouble to prevent hostilities being organized against the United States from their possessions,” Grant wrote to Meade. “But two wrongs never make a right and it is our duty to prevent wrong on the part of our people.”

  Meade directed Major General Joseph Hooker to seize arms, munitions, and contraband of war that could be found along the frontier, though he didn’t see how he could stop an Irish invasion without very considerable reinforcements, because there were fewer than four hundred soldiers along the border in New York and none in New England.

  When St. Patrick’s Day arrived, America’s northern border remained quiet. The only Irishmen marching through the streets of Montreal did so to greet the governor-general, the queen’s representative in Canada, with cheers. Canadians breathed a sigh of relief as the Fenian threat appeared to pass. “I do not think Sweeny will trouble you for some time to come. Your preparations have evidently dampened the Fenian ardor,” wrote Edward Archibald, the British consul in New York, to a Canadian official.

  Canada might have remained quiet on March 17, but the Irish celebrated loudly on the streets of New York. The first St. Patrick’s Day since the end of the Civil War slaughter always promised to be enthusiastic, but the British suspension of habeas corpus in the homeland had put an extra determination in the steps of the thirty thousand Celtic marchers. It appeared that every Irishman in New York was joining in the celebration—except for one notable Fenian.

  * Following the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, there were bondholders who unsuccessfully lobbied the new government to honor the bonds issued by the Fenian treasury.

  5

  The Eastport Fizzle

  FEW IRISHMEN IN New York were having a less enjoyable St. Patrick’s Day than John O’Mahony. While the cheers of revelers and the melodies of military bands fluttered through Moffat Mansion, the Fenian head center remained sequestered inside, engaged in a tortured grapple with his soul.

  On front pages and on balance sheets, O’Mahony’s faction had been eclipsed by the Roberts wing, which offered the Irish a more immediate return on their investments with its plan to attack Canada. Around the corner from Moffat Mansion, the Broadway headquarters of William Roberts and his radical upstarts remained open eighteen hours a day, money gushing through the door. Just the day before, a New York Herald reporter watched as $3,000 in donations arrived in just twenty minutes.

  O’Mahony had heard
the complaints from impatient members who warned that his lack of action could doom their wing of the Fenian Brotherhood. He felt his movement slipping away.

  In no mood to parade along with his fellow members of the Ninety-Ninth New York Regiment, O’Mahony chaired an emergency meeting of the central council to figure out how to regain the upper hand. The head center’s closest adviser told him he had a solution, but it meant doing the one thing he pledged never to do.

  Behind the doors of the Fenian White House, O’Mahony listened as Bernard Doran Killian proposed a drastic change in strategy. The portly treasury secretary told the Fenians they should seize Campobello Island, which sat in Canadian waters across a narrow channel from the far-northeastern corner of Maine. During the American Revolution, the island provided a sanctuary for British Loyalists, and after betraying his country, the traitor Benedict Arnold oversaw a vast smuggling operation from its shores.

  Killian argued that the Fenians could use the island of fifteen hundred people as a base from which to launch an invasion of Ireland. It could allow them to gain belligerent status, just as the Confederacy had, to issue letters of marque to privateers without violating international law or the U.S. Neutrality Act. By moving first, a successful venture would preempt the Canadian plan of Thomas Sweeny and Roberts and allow the O’Mahony wing to regain its place at the vanguard of the revolutionary movement.

  Killian reportedly assured the central council that Campobello Island was “neutral territory, claimed alike by Great Britain and the United States, while no clear title to its ownership had been established by either.” (Little research would have been necessary to confirm that this was incorrect. It most definitely belonged to the British.)