Having spent months concocting his plan, Killian assured his fellow Fenians they would find sympathetic allies in New Brunswick, where one-third of the province’s residents had Irish roots. Many of them had fled from the north of Ireland during the Great Hunger and still carried bitter memories of the British. Killian also believed they could expect help from those who opposed a growing movement to unite the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia in a semiautonomous confederation and instead favored annexation by the United States. Killian also reminded his colleagues that no less than President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward had signaled their support at their White House meeting in the fall by saying they would “acknowledge accomplished facts.”
The head center hesitated. O’Mahony was a scholar, not a soldier. He acted on reason, not emotion, and this plan appeared to go against his better thinking. The Fenian Brotherhood had just paid $30,000 for a former Confederate ship auctioned by the U.S. Customs Service with plans to sail it to Ireland once it was repaired. Only a week earlier in Lowell, Massachusetts, he had told his fellow Irishmen that “the men who propose to invade Canada have no right to call themselves Fenians.” How could he now order a raid across the northern border without losing all credibility?
Killian argued that the political reality was exactly the opposite. Given that the suspension of habeas corpus foreclosed any imminent invasion of Ireland, O’Mahony would lose credibility if he didn’t fight in North America. “In my opinion, the real reputation of the F.B. [Fenian Brotherhood] in America can be revived only by striking a blow and making a fight,” Killian asserted.
According to O’Mahony, he reluctantly approved the plan, but only if it was part of a larger movement on Ireland and not an isolated expedition. The head center tried to convince himself that he had found a workable compromise between his sound judgment and the fervor of the “men of action.” Revolutions are rarely won, however, by choosing the middle ground.
* * *
General Bernard F. Mullen couldn’t believe his ears when he learned of O’Mahony’s decision. It was bad enough that the Fenian secretary of military and naval affairs, who replaced Sweeny inside Moffat Mansion, had not been asked for his input on the plan, but O’Mahony gave command of the expedition to Killian instead of him. The war secretary had served in the Mexican-American and Civil Wars; the treasury secretary had hardly any military experience at all outside an eighteen-month stint with the Missouri militia during the Civil War.
Mullen protested to O’Mahony that the one-ship “navy” he was so eager to employ was barely seaworthy. The rigging was in miserable condition, its sails even worse. The ship lacked hammocks, cooking utensils, and coal supplies but had its fill of seawater that had seeped inside. “A target for artillery practice could not be more successfully painted—black hull and straw-colored wheel-house,” he informed O’Mahony. The head center was unmoved.
Killian supervised the loading of the Fenian arms onto their dilapidated naval vessel. He sealed the sailing papers with his own hand on April 4, before departing New York separately with just short of one hundred men. He planned to reunite with the weapons upon his arrival in Eastport, Maine, and attack Campobello Island the following day.
When readers of New York’s newspapers awoke the next morning, they might have been confused as to Killian’s destination. Fed wild counterintelligence from Moffat Mansion, The New York Herald told its readers that an enormous Fenian force had left the city to capture not Campobello but another British island—Bermuda. The Herald reported that Killian departed with three thousand desperadoes, all army veterans, on three iron steamers, while Colonel Patrick J. Downing led another twenty-five hundred on two other ships. In other newspapers, the Fenians planted the even more absurd claim that seven warships carrying a ten-thousand-man army were en route from California to Bermuda.
The New York World, however, had it correct: Killian and five to six hundred Fenians in small squads were en route to strike Campobello Island. But even that report became grossly inflated. According to The World, the Fenians would establish a provisional government on the island, elect O’Mahony president, and use it as a base to launch an army of twenty-five thousand men to conquer New Brunswick and rechristen it the “Republic of Emmetta” in honor of the Irish patriot Robert Emmet. Even the most romantic of Fenians, however, failed to conjure such a glorious dream.
* * *
On April 6, “General” Killian and the first wave of Fenian soldiers arrived in Eastport. The fishing port of thirty-seven hundred people at the mouth of the St. Croix River was the nearest American city to Ireland, and there was much to remind Killian of his homeland. The British had dubbed this northeast corner of Maine “New Ireland” when they conquered it during the American Revolution and the War of 1812, and it featured its own collection of emerald isles sprinkled on the sapphire waters of Passamaquoddy Bay.
Killian had no time for soaking in the views because he immediately encountered a problem upon disembarking in Eastport. The Fenian naval vessel laden with his supplies hadn’t arrived, but the British had.
Within days of O’Mahony’s approval of the Campobello venture, British authorities knew all about it. Rumors of a possible Fenian raid on New Brunswick had circulated as early as December 1864, and when Canada called out its volunteers in early March, Canadians assumed Campobello Island among the probable targets.
By March 20, the lieutenant governor of New Brunswick and his counterpart in adjacent Nova Scotia had been informed of the Fenian invasion plan, given that each Canadian province was responsible for its own defense, and six days later the entire volunteer force of New Brunswick was ordered to report to the border town of St. Stephen, twenty-five miles upriver from Eastport, “armed and equipped for active service.”
Canadian journalists reported that someone inside Moffat Mansion had been spilling secrets to the British. O’Mahony suspected that Killian himself might have been the mole, particularly after the New York World revealed that a high official of the O’Mahony government was a close friend of one of the most singular and significant Irish voices in all of Canada.
* * *
Even by the standards of Young Ireland, Thomas D’Arcy McGee had been a wunderkind. Born north of Dublin in the village of Carlingford in 1825, McGee might have been the most intellectually gifted of the Young Ireland rebels. A brilliant orator and a gifted poet and journalist, he had spoken forcefully against the British occupation of Ireland, signing his letters “Thomas D’Arcy McGee (A traitor to the British Government).”
During the Great Hunger, he accused the British government of two million “ministerial murders” and argued that the Irish were being “exterminated as a people.” After the failed uprising in 1848, McGee fled to Philadelphia and founded a string of Irish American newspapers. He grew disenchanted with the United States, however. In addition to the Know-Nothing scourge, he saw something amiss in the poverty, corruption, and intemperance in American cities that he believed was destroying Irish faith and families.
McGee believed his countrymen were no better off in the United States than they had been in Ireland. He came to see a better future for the diaspora instead in Canada, where he believed minorities found greater liberty and tolerance under the British parliamentary system. In 1857, he joined the sizable Irish community in Montreal and launched a newspaper, The New Era, as well as a political career, being elected to the provincial assembly.
In his rhetoric, McGee grew more conservative and conciliatory to Great Britain. Although he once called upon the United States to annex Canada, he became a vocal supporter of Canadian confederation—to defend itself from the threat from south of the border. He called Fenianism “a foreign disease” and “political leprosy,” a movement that was too secular and too republican. They were, he said, a secret society, no better than the despised Know-Nothings
.
To the Fenians, he was a traitor who had abandoned all his previous ideas for political expediency. They wouldn’t have been shocked if it was true that McGee was colluding with Killian, an old newspaper colleague, to merely pretend that a Fenian invasion was imminent in order to force the United States to enforce its neutrality laws and sabotage Sweeny’s plan to strike Canada.
The head center ordered Downing to keep a close watch on Killian. Unfortunately for him, O’Mahony harbored no suspicions about the true double-dealer in his midst.
* * *
James McDermott might have been named to the Order of St. Sylvester by Pope Pius IX for his heroism while serving the Papal Brigade, but he was no angel. Nicknamed “Red Jim” for his crimson hair, he was described by the Fenian John Devoy as “a handsome fellow, glib-tongued and ready-witted, but wholly without principle, moral sense or moral scruples.” Born illegitimately in Ireland, McDermott blackmailed his biological father, a prominent Dublin attorney who lived on St. Stephen’s Green, threatening to reveal the man’s secret.
James Stephens and other Fenians who knew the blustery McDermott in Ireland warned O’Mahony about him before his arrival in the United States in 1863. Still the Fenian head center made him an organizer and took him in as one of his closest confidants. “He became O’Mahony’s evil genius and acquired a strange influence over him,” Devoy wrote. O’Mahony lacked a skeptic’s eye, perhaps an admirable quality for leading daily life but not for leading a paramilitary organization. “I notice you seem not to examine into character closely,” Downing warned O’Mahony. “This trusting disposition will create a thousand vexations for you.”
He was right. McDermott was selling Fenian secrets to Britain’s consul in New York, Edward Archibald.
Indeed it was hardly just McDermott who had infiltrated the Fenians. The American, Canadian, and British governments all had informants inside the organization. “Wherever there are three Fenians there are two informers,” an Irishman quipped to a New York Times correspondent. So many double agents prowled Moffat Mansion that spies were reporting on the activities of other spies, unaware of their informant status. In some cases, the British government had more knowledge of Fenian plans than the Fenians themselves.
Being on the British payroll, McDermott was truly a professional troublemaker. Devoy thought him more responsible for the split in the Fenian Brotherhood than any other person. “He was constantly fomenting trouble by lying stories which he put in circulation or told ‘confidentially’ to numbers of people.” He would heckle Sweeny at rallies one day and then plant lies about O’Mahony the next.
McDermott had accompanied Killian to Eastport as adjutant general of the expedition, where he continued to show his true colors. One editor of a St. Stephen newspaper described him as a “rough Irish lad, evidently lacking in brains, judgment and experience, as quiet as a mouse in the presence of his master, but garrulous and bombastic when the latter is out of sight.”
For a group condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as a secret society, the Fenians weren’t particularly adept at keeping secrets. The British didn’t need spies, just a newspaper subscription. The Fenians regularly announced their intentions at public meetings and in interviews with reporters. “No news travels so freely or so fast as the ‘secret’ doings of the Fenian Brotherhood,” quipped Mark Twain. “In solemn whisperings at dead of night they secretly plan a Canadian raid, and publish it in the ‘World’ next morning.”
* * *
When it became clear that the secrecy of the Campobello expedition had been compromised, O’Mahony recalled the naval ship and stopped several hundred Fenians in Boston from going to the border. Left without a portion of his arsenal and his army, Killian discovered that the $10,000 O’Mahony had promised to forward was not waiting for him in Eastport either.
Meanwhile, packs of Irishmen who left their jobs and families continued to arrive in Eastport and the surrounding towns. The St. Croix Courier reported that they appeared to be “the most villainous cut throat individuals we ever laid eyes on—men who would be in their native element in the midst of rapine and murder.”
In a city of fewer than four thousand people, the four hundred Fenians filled every vacancy in Eastport’s hotels and rooming houses. While some stayed with local Irish families or camped on the banks of the St. Croix River, Killian and his officers shared the same lodgings as the British consul, British detectives, and the U.S. marshal, which made for tense interactions.
As Killian waited for his cases of arms to arrive, he tried to sow dissension north of the border. He hired Eastport’s Trescott Hall and announced that the Fenians had come there to stage a convention to rally against Canadian confederation. Although dwarfed by Ontario and Quebec, New Brunswick was the keystone of confederation. Without its inclusion, Nova Scotia would be severed from the other provinces, and the entire enterprise might not be viable. So, with two printing presses he’d brought to Maine, Killian published a proclamation offering Fenian support to the citizens of New Brunswick, who remained lukewarm about the idea of confederation.
While Killian tried to whip up public sentiment against the British in New Brunswick, he did the same with the edgy fishermen of Maine. The most senior of Eastport’s citizens could remember that the War of 1812 lasted until 1818 in their city, because the British occupied the border community they believed to be theirs for an extra three years after the signing of the Treaty of Ghent. More recently, Confederates had used New Brunswick as a haven to attempt a raid on a bank in the border town of Calais, Maine.
Some Mainers enjoyed seeing Canadians panic for a change. “The Provincials are terribly frightened,” the Machias Republican reported, “which is pleasant for us to contemplate. They are now reaping what they sowed a little time ago.” However, many in Eastport were tired of Irishmen armed with revolvers and bowie knives loitering around their waterfront. The St. John Telegraph reported that a decent portion of the city was “much opposed” to the Fenians because “the whole summer’s trade would be ruined if they remained much longer.”
* * *
Every day seemed to bring a new obstacle to Killian’s plans. On April 9, eighty Fenians left Portland aboard the steamer New Brunswick, but the steamship company said it lacked the space to haul dozens of cases of rifles and boxes of ammunition. Killian chartered a schooner and dispatched it to Portland to retrieve the weapons from the company’s warehouse. The following day, Michael Murphy, founder of the Hibernian Benevolent Society of Canada, and six fellow Fenian sympathizers were arrested by Canadian authorities en route to Eastport.
The delays had given the British navy time to make a show of force in Passamaquoddy Bay. By April 11, two British warships guarded the waters between Eastport and Campobello Island. The military buildup continued over the next week until there were five British ships and five thousand British and New Brunswick troops in the vicinity.
The Fenians did not let the British warships deter them. On April 13, two boatloads of Fenians, led by the Calais head center Dennis Doyle, attempted a nighttime landing a mile below St. Stephen, before retreating when townspeople spotted them and sounded an alarm. In the spirit of Paul Revere, “Old Joe” Young mounted his horse and rode up and down the road flanking the St. Croix River, pounding on front doors, rousing people from their sleep, and yelling, “Arm yourselves! The Fenians are upon you!” As Young’s hoofbeats receded in the distance, some of the panicked Canadians hid their valuables, packed their belongings, and fled to the American side of the border.
Doyle caused further mischief on another night when he stacked piles of wood along a four-mile stretch of the St. Croix River between Calais and Milltown, then set them ablaze under the cover of darkness and fired shots into the air to give the appearance of a large Fenian army amassing around a string of campfires. Confusion tore through St. Stephen as nervous residents kept watch for the invaders until daylight revealed the ruse.<
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Killian’s men, however, grew impatient. They were ready to finally plant their boots on British soil.
* * *
Near midnight on April 14, James Dixon heard a violent rap on the front door of the customhouse on New Brunswick’s Indian Island, sandwiched between Eastport and Campobello Island in the middle of Passamaquoddy Bay. The deputy customs collector had spent the day much more consumed with thoughts about his sick wife than any looming Fenian threat. One of the two women attending to Mrs. Dixon went to the door and, without opening it, asked who was on the other side.
“We want that English flag!” came the shout on the other side. “Give it quickly, or we will burn down the house!”
In a panic, the unarmed Dixon threw on his clothes and darted down the stairs. He opened the door to be greeted by the barrels of pistols pointed squarely in his direction and the sound of a pack of men attempting to tear off his window shutters. Nine Irishmen had come ashore on the unguarded island after being lowered in a boat from a Fenian privateer and rowing with muffled oars right beneath the nose of the HMS Pylades. The frightened Dixon readily surrendered the Union Jack waving over the customhouse. Satisfied with their war trophy, the Fenians departed the island in triumph, causing no damage nor firing a single shot.
Aside from the midnight game of capture the flag, Killian made no move toward Campobello Island. He continued to rattle nerves, though. One thousand people, many of them curious Canadians, packed St. Croix Hall in Calais on the evening of April 16 to listen to Killian deliver a one-hour address in which he claimed the Fenians had no thoughts of invading New Brunswick and would respect American neutrality laws. However, he also said that the Fenians had no intention of leaving. He vowed that the “convention” would remain in session on the border until the idea of Canadian confederation died, pledging that the Irishmen would save the residents of New Brunswick from having Great Britain “force” confederation upon them. “If the people of the Provinces wish, the Fenian Brotherhood stand ready to help them resist England,” Killian told his audience. “We are ready to establish an Irish Republic in New Brunswick.”
When the Irish Invaded Canada Page 8
