When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  Back in Washington, D.C., Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant had been monitoring the Fenian buildup along the border. They decided to move American forces into Passamaquoddy Bay, in order to enforce American neutrality laws. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles dispatched the side-wheel gunboat USS Winooski, and the revenue steamer Ashuelot also sailed into the bay to monitor the situation. In addition to the naval power, it had come time to dispatch the hero of Gettysburg to keep the peace.

  * * *

  Less than a year earlier, Major General George Meade had been consumed by thoughts of the Confederacy. Now, improbably, the commander of the Military Division of the Atlantic was being asked to concentrate his attention on a bunch of unruly men up north.

  On April 16, Meade received a telegram from Stanton instructing him to leave his Philadelphia home and proceed to Eastport and prevent any incursion onto British territory. The “Old Snapping Turtle” might not have inspired enthusiasm, but he commanded respect, and Stanton hoped the presence of the great-grandson of an Irish immigrant might deter the Fenians from doing anything rash.

  As Meade traveled north from Philadelphia the following day, the telegrams continued to arrive in Washington, D.C., at a steady clip. On the evening of April 17, Secretary of the Navy Welles received a message informing him that the Fenian-chartered schooner E. H. Pray had arrived at Eastport from Portland and was being detained.* Aboard were 129 cases of arms containing fifteen hundred Springfield and Enfield muskets, carbines, knapsacks, canteens, and 100,000 ball cartridges.

  Five minutes later, Secretary of State Seward’s son arrived and handed Welles an envelope of papers forwarded by his father, including telegrams from Sir Frederick Bruce, Britain’s minister to the United States, “urging that the arms and the Fenians should not be permitted to meet.”

  Welles couldn’t help but notice that Seward and Stanton appeared more concerned about alienating the increasingly powerful bloc of Irish voters than enforcing American neutrality laws. Welles was also content to do nothing. He left the matter in the hands of the commander of the USS Winooski and the local authorities—at least until Meade showed up in Eastport.

  Although dressed in civilian clothes rather than his Union blues, Meade commanded a presence when he arrived on April 19 in Eastport, where he found four hundred Fenians, as well as an equal number in Calais and surrounding towns. The general immediately ordered his soldiers to seize the arms aboard the E. H. Pray and remove them to Fort Sullivan, situated on the hill above Eastport, where they would be under guard. He also told the leaders of the Fenian expedition in no uncertain terms that any violation of the neutrality laws would result in their immediate arrest.

  Killian told Meade an unlikely tale: His fellow Irishmen, he said, were there on a fishing expedition and had brought their rifles in light of the run-ins between American and Canadian fishermen. The explanation was laughable, but Meade still vowed to “prevent the departure of any armed fishing party.”

  Without any weapons and short on money, Killian made one last appeal for resources from Fenian headquarters. The reply was terse: “Requisition cannot be filled.” Hours later, he departed Eastport on a boat bound for Portland. He later admitted that he had “considered the chance of a successful movement over” more than a week earlier.

  * * *

  Abandoned by their leader, the Fenians who remained in Eastport were desperate to attempt some sort of maneuver across the border to justify their expedition. On the night of April 20, they landed once again on Indian Island, which remained unguarded, and lit up the night by torching four stores, including a British customs warehouse.

  Their victims were not all British subjects, however. Reflecting the interconnected commerce on the border, a pair of Americans bore the brunt of the attack. The Fenian inferno charred one store owned by Eastport’s Robert Burns and spread to an adjoining cooperage and wholesale liquor and grocery store leased by another Eastport resident, John Shiels. The fire destroyed scores of fish barrels and casks of whiskey, gin, brandy, and port wine—a total loss calculated by Shiels to be $2,315.25.

  Two nights after the raid on Indian Island, approximately fifty Fenians decided to finally make an attempt on their original target—Campobello Island. Carrying several cases of muskets, they boarded the schooner Two Friends, which Killian had arranged to lease for $10 a day. When the schooner’s captain refused to transport a squad of armed men, the Fenians put a pistol to his head, causing him to reconsider.

  After loading the weapons and provisions, the Fenians set sail. They soon found British warships in pursuit. After rounding one of the islands, they approached another schooner, which the revolver-wielding Fenians captured “in the name of the Irish Republic.” They then sank the Two Friends in order to throw the British off the chase, before retreating to safety again on the American mainland.

  Making one last attempt to retrieve their guns, now in government custody, Colonel James Kerrigan called upon Meade. A former congressman, Kerrigan had fought in the Mexican-American War and filibustered with William Walker in Nicaragua before serving with the Twenty-Fifth New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. In spite of his political and military résumé and affiliation with the Fenians, the former congressman claimed to be just a New York merchant, and he protested the government seizure of his private property.

  Meade reported to Grant that Kerrigan disclaimed any Fenian connection or intent to violate the neutrality laws, but the Irishman couldn’t “explain grounds on which he, a stranger, expected to find a market in Eastport for such articles—nor the coincidence of his arrival with his goods simultaneously with the concentration here of the Fenians.” Meade agreed to return the arms to Kerrigan if he provided a $10,000 bond pledging that they would never be used to violate the country’s neutrality laws.

  With Passamaquoddy Bay locked down by both American and British forces, the discouraged rank-and-file Fenians were left with no choice but to follow Killian’s lead. They set sail for home. As it turned out, the only successful armed invasion launched by the Fenians occurred on their return trip home from Eastport, aboard the crowded steam packet New Brunswick. Upset that they could only find seats in steerage after paying for more expensive cabin tickets, 170 disgruntled Fenians drew their revolvers and annexed the most comfortable accommodations aboard the ship.

  By early May, most of the Fenians had departed from Passamaquoddy Bay. General Meade, who had caught a severe cold and was confined for several weeks by the threat of pneumonia, finally left on May 2.

  The whole episode crushed O’Mahony’s reputation. He had gone against his long-held belief and now had nothing to show for it except ridicule. Newspapers lambasted the “Moffat Mansion farce,” while members of the Roberts wing chortled at the “Eastport fizzle.”

  * * *

  Killian had claimed that the Fenians traveled to the New Brunswick border in order to help defeat the plans for Canadian confederation, but their Down East fiasco had exactly the opposite effect. It caused some Canadians to reconsider the benefits of confederation. The Irish menace showed if anything that union was necessary for the region’s defense. The Nova Scotia assembly, which had previously opposed confederation, overwhelmingly adopted a resolution in favor of it on April 17. In New Brunswick, pro-confederation forces won decisively at the polls, just weeks after the last of the Fenians returned home.

  Thomas D’Arcy McGee couldn’t help but be thrilled by the simultaneous advancement of confederation and the weakening of the Fenian Brotherhood. It was so effective, in fact, that to some it reeked of conspiracy. “The failure of this project has been so complete and so ruinous to O’Mahony as well as disgusting to his supporters and dupes, that it appears difficult not to believe that Killian deliberately played the part of a traitor in order to break up the organization,” Britain’s consul in New York wrote to the Earl of Clarendon, secretar
y of state for foreign affairs.

  Alas, they gave O’Mahony, Killian, and their men too much credit. With the collapse of the Campobello venture, the Fenians returned to the fighting they did best—among themselves.

  * * *

  Many of the disappointed and embarrassed Fenian fighters who returned from Eastport shared the sentiment of William H. Grace, an organizer from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and expedition captain who denounced O’Mahony as “an imbecile and a fraud on the public.” Grace blamed the head center for not delivering the resources he had promised and instructed his circle to switch its allegiance and send no more money to Moffat Mansion. “Let us unite under the leadership of General Sweeny, and carry out the pledge that we have taken before God and man,” he urged.

  New York Fenians returning from Maine carried their frustrations with them. Two leaders of the Eastport foray stormed into the Fenian White House on April 28 and demanded compensation from O’Mahony for their loss of employment—not to mention their transportation costs—due to the futile expedition. When the head center refused any payment, the soldiers locked the doors of Moffat Mansion to prevent his escape and pointed their pistols at his head until he handed over $30 to each man.

  The following day, the district center of Manhattan called together 132 of his circles inside their headquarters at 814 Broadway. The irate Fenians demanded to examine the accounts of Moffat Mansion and appointed a select committee to interrogate O’Mahony about the Eastport debacle.

  O’Mahony heard every taunt as he entered the room to answer questions. “Imbecile!” “Killian’s dupe!” “Where is the invasion of Ireland now?” For nearly two hours, he subjected himself to a rigid cross-examination. He grew increasingly exasperated. He was the one who had founded this organization and tended to its growth. Who were these people to question his commitment to do what he thought best for the liberation of Ireland? O’Mahony asked his fellow Fenians to judge his entire record. “Am I to be destroyed for this, the one great mistake of my life?”

  The shout from the gallery, however, reflected the lack of mercy in the room: “You are a servant of the Fenian Brotherhood, not the master any longer!”

  The tribunal discovered that the Campobello expedition had cost the Fenian Brotherhood $26,000, and the only thing they had to show for it was one captured Union Jack. It found O’Mahony guilty of gross mismanagement in financial and military affairs and incompetent leadership and concluded that “nearly all—if not all—the frauds thus perpetrated on the Brotherhood by the various officials at Headquarters were indirectly, if not directly, the result of this incapacity, imbecility, and total unfitness of the Head Center.” In addition, even without proof of a conspiracy with McGee, the Fenian investigators tried Killian on the charge and found him guilty.

  Before he could be expelled from the organization he had founded, however, O’Mahony played his last card. He showed his fellow Fenians a letter he had received from Stephens announcing that he had departed France and was due to arrive shortly in New York. With this news, the tribunal granted him a last-minute reprieve. Stephens would be allowed to determine O’Mahony’s fate.

  * Welles in his diary refers to the ship as the Ocean Spray. Meade and other communications refer to it as E. H. Pray.

  6

  Erin’s Boys

  ON THE NIGHT of James Stephens’s return to New York, well-wishers filled an entire city block of Broadway outside his quarters at the Metropolitan Hotel. Although the press believed him to be in Paris for the five months since his prison break, Stephens had been in the heart of Dublin the entire time.

  Since Eastport, John O’Mahony had been just as besieged as Stephens, but instead by irate Irishmen who demanded their contributions back. Donations to Moffat Mansion had dropped 70 percent, and bond sales had stopped. The sullen O’Mahony exchanged a cordial greeting with Stephens when they saw each other that night, but he said little before the strains of “Hail to the Chief” filled the room as a band outside delivered an impromptu serenade. Stephens appeared on the hotel’s balcony as women yelled and men flung hats into the air. In a brief address, he assured them that he intended to unite the Irish in America. He offered no words of support for his fellow Young Irelander.

  O’Mahony read the writing on the wall. He resigned as head center of the Fenian Brotherhood the following day. “In consenting to the recent disastrous attempt to capture Campo Bello, I violated my duty, not alone to the Fenian Brotherhood and the Irish Republic, but to the best interests of the Irish race, as also to my previous unvaried policy,” he wrote in his resignation letter.

  Stephens made no attempt to change O’Mahony’s mind. “In sanctioning this divergence from the true path you not only gave a proof of weakness, but committed a crime less excusable in you than in any other man; for you should have known that your project would have resulted in our ruin,” he asserted.

  It was a brutal blow for the man who had invited Stephens to lead the Irish republicans in the first place. After eight years of disagreements with his fellow Young Irelander, it was an invasion of Canada, a strategy he didn’t even believe in, that brought about his downfall. O’Mahony remained a part of the Fenian Brotherhood, but he would never regain the same level of influence.

  * * *

  Stephens selected himself as O’Mahony’s replacement. The “provisional dictator” now ruled directly over the Irish republican movement in the United States—or at least half of it. To make the Fenian Brotherhood whole once again, Stephens would have to reach an agreement with William Roberts, whom he met face-to-face for the first time on the same day as O’Mahony’s departure. Dictators, however, make poor negotiators. Stephens wanted unity with the Roberts wing, as long as the Roberts wing changed its position to agree with him. “The objective point is Ireland, not Canada, Japan, or any of those distant regions that do not concern Irishmen,” Stephens insisted. He called any raid on Canada a “suicidal movement,” something he believed the “mad and most inglorious fiasco” at Eastport had proven. The failure of the O’Mahony wing, however, had not deterred the Roberts wing. It only made them redouble their efforts, in the hopes of reclaiming the good name of the Fenian Brotherhood.

  Reunification prospects further dimmed upon the release of a letter in which Stephens had urged O’Mahony to jettison the Roberts wing and “cut and hack the rotten branches around you without pity.” Only four days after meeting Roberts, Stephens called on him to follow O’Mahony’s lead and resign. For his part, Roberts accused the IRB leader of being on the payroll of the British government.

  Stephens found Moffat Mansion to be about as empty as the Fenian Brotherhood’s coffers. The twenty-eight clerks working in the headquarters had dwindled to only a straggler or two. Layers of dust coated the chandeliers that remained unlit over empty desks. With circles no longer sending money, only $500 remained in the treasury. Stephens moved the Fenian headquarters back downtown into the Daily News headquarters on Chatham Street and allowed financial vultures to pick through the carcass of the O’Mahony wing, auctioning off its lavish furniture.

  * * *

  After hearing news of the O’Mahony wing’s expedition to Maine, the Fenian senate unanimously passed a resolution on April 16 ordering Sweeny to take “immediate action.” The Fenian secretary of war, who favored a wintertime attack when ice would hamper British gunboats and allow the Irishmen to cross rivers on foot, registered his objection to an accelerated timetable that he thought reckless. Senators, however, told him that if he didn’t invade at once, the Fenian Brotherhood would collapse. Sweeny wrote that he “reluctantly yielded, preferring the chances of an honorable failure in the field, to the disintegration of the organization.”

  So, with the burden of the Fenian Brotherhood’s survival on his shoulders, Sweeny studied the war plans employed against Canada during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. He envisioned a three-pronged attack.

 
To the west, he placed a left wing of three thousand Fenians, under Brigadier General Charles Carroll Tevis, an 1849 West Point graduate with Irish roots who fought as a soldier of fortune in the Turkish, Egyptian, and French armies before serving in the Civil War. The left wing would sail across the Great Lakes from Chicago and Milwaukee and advance directly on to London, Ontario. The Fenians would then occupy Port Stanley on Lake Erie to provide an entry point for receiving supplies and reinforcements.

  A center wing made up of upwards of five thousand men would cross Lake Erie from Cleveland and attack the Niagara Peninsula near Port Colborne, Ontario, under Brigadier General William Francis Lynch, a trusted confidant who led the Fifty-Eighth Illinois Volunteer Infantry Regiment as part of Sweeny’s brigade at the Battle of Shiloh. They would march toward Hamilton and seize the Welland Canal, the vital connection between Lakes Erie and Ontario, in order to disrupt British troop movements and cripple trade between eastern and western Canada.