When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  Sweeny anticipated that the center wing’s advance on Toronto would force the British to move defense forces from Montreal—leaving the Fenians’ true target exposed for the main attack of seventeen thousand men under Brigadier General Samuel Perkins Spear, a Boston-born veteran of the Mexican-American War who served with the Second U.S. Cavalry and the Eleventh Pennsylvania Cavalry during the Civil War. While Lynch made his diversionary attack, the “Right Wing of the Army of Ireland” would advance with seventeen infantry and five cavalry regiments from northern Vermont and upstate New York in order to capture Canada’s liquid lifeline—the St. Lawrence River.

  Following the well-trodden path of the Continental army in 1775 and American forces in 1812, a Fenian force, under Brigadier General Michael C. Murphy, would march straight up the Lake Champlain valley in two columns flanking the Richelieu River and seize garrisons in Quebec before capturing the Great Victoria Bridge, which connected to the island of Montreal. One unit would continue north to the Canadian capital of Ottawa and seize government buildings and ministers who would serve as hostages to ransom for Fenian prisoners in England.

  While a small expedition would prevent the arrival of reinforcements from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Murphy’s men would move east along the Grand Trunk Railway toward Quebec City in order to control the lucrative shipping lanes of the St. Lawrence River. “With the revenues of the Canadas to pay our expenses,” Sweeny predicted, “we can confidently look forward to the realization of our dreams.” If Spear could not reach Quebec City or Montreal, he was to concentrate his force in the corridor bounded by the St. Francis and Richelieu Rivers and establish the capital of the Irish government in exile in the city of Sherbrooke.

  In addition to the three thousand sworn Fenians in Canada, dozens of operatives north of the border provided intelligence back to the headquarters in New York City. Once the invasion was launched, these agents would destroy bridges to cut off communication and transportation between Ontario and Quebec.

  Sweeny didn’t believe the Fenians would be fighting alone once they breached the border. He expected that most of Canada’s quarter million Irish Catholics would greet the Fenians as liberators and join in the fight. He believed that the ten thousand members of the Canadian military who were Irish by birth or descent would refuse British orders to repel the attack. Based on reports from Fenian agents, Sweeny also felt confident that Quebec’s French Canadians—fellow Catholics with similar grievances against British imperialism—would, if not assist, at least remain neutral, as they had done during the American invasions of 1775 and 1812.

  It was an audacious plan, fantastical even. A private army without uniforms or a commissariat—let alone a country—would strike the world’s most powerful empire and make it bend to its will. The odds of success were undeniably long, but so were the litany of outrages suffered by the Irish.

  Sweeny knew, however, that his plan had no chance to succeed if his men didn’t carry modern weapons into battle. History had shown that pikes and pitchforks would not free Ireland. They needed guns. Luckily for the Fenians, there was a supply to match their demand.

  * * *

  The Civil War had been good for the killing business. The smokestacks of weapon factories and federal arsenals worked around the clock to fulfill orders for ammunition and arms on both sides of the conflict. When the guns finally fell silent, the Union army had more than one million surplus muzzle-loading rifles, which were rapidly becoming outdated with the advent of breech-loading rifles that allowed for quicker shots.

  Fenian operatives could purchase surplus equipment such as uniforms and knapsacks at government auctions. They needed to be more circumspect, however, in the acquisition of arms and ammunition for the self-proclaimed Irish Republican Army. While many of the Fenian Brotherhood members who served in the Civil War took advantage of the Union army’s offer to demobilized soldiers to purchase their rifles and gear for $6, Sweeny also dispatched Tevis to Philadelphia to buy Springfield rifles, many rebuilt from mix-and-match parts. The Fenians ultimately acquired more than four thousand muskets produced at the Bridesburg Armory and shipped them to twenty-two contacts in locations from East St. Louis, Illinois, to Watertown, Massachusetts.

  Sweeny did not acquire artillery or naval vessels, though not for a lack of interest. The Fenian war secretary even went down to the depths of Manhattan’s East River in pursuit of a secret weapon. Twice he participated in the successful testing of an experimental, hand-cranked submarine that was dubbed the Intelligent Whale. According to one account, Sweeny even left the submerged craft, outfitted in a diving suit, to plant a twenty-five-pound explosive beneath a test target. Sweeny, however, had enough difficulty paying for the outfitting of an army, let alone a navy. His original plan called for an outlay of at least $450,000, but due to the schedule acceleration he had only $100,000.

  For weeks leading up to the planned attack, Sweeny stealthily distributed the guns and ammunition to locations along the Canadian border, where the Fenian army would await the invaders. He feared that because of the compressed time frame and a lack of promised funds, his arsenal was wholly inadequate for the job. Still, the time had come for the commander in chief to summon the Irish Republican Army to the front.

  * * *

  Among those called to invade Canada was John Charles O’Neill. He had been born eight days before St. Patrick’s Day in 1834 in the small Ulster parish of Clontibret, where the bad blood ran deep. Straddling the fault line between Protestant loyalists to the north and Catholic republicans such as the O’Neill family to the south, the surrounding hills and vales of rural County Monaghan remained a “bandit country” that regularly required the British military to intervene in sectarian clashes.

  O’Neill’s father died of scarlet fever five weeks before the boy’s birth, and his single mother, Catherine, left him and his two older siblings behind in Ireland when she moved to the United States in 1840. Three years later, O’Neill’s mother sent for his older brother and sister, leaving the youngest in the care of his grandparents.

  Catherine’s devoutly republican father, George Macklin, instilled in his grandson a strong devotion to the Roman Catholic Church and an even fiercer fidelity to hating the British. O’Neill learned the Irish language and studied the history of his native land and its folk heroes who dared to pick up the sword. “I wept over the speeches of her orators, and asked myself whom of the Irish patriots I would seek to emulate. I decided that eloquence will not do unless it be that which flashes from the cannon’s mouth,” O’Neill recalled of his childhood.

  O’Neill’s grandfather stirred his soul with epic tales of two of Ireland’s most revered rebels with whom he shared a last name and bloodline. The young boy listened intently to the story of Hugh O’Neill, the Irish chieftain who in 1595 routed the troops of Queen Elizabeth I in the hills and bogs not too far from his front door at the Battle of Clontibret, although his rebellion ended with a devastating defeat in the 1601 Battle of Kinsale. A generation later, the vanquished chieftain’s nephew, Owen Roe O’Neill, led another Catholic revolt against English rule.

  Young John O’Neill worshipped his ancestors and rebel leaders, who sacrificed themselves on the altar of Irish freedom. That they all failed to achieve their goal of Irish independence didn’t matter. O’Neill learned from his grandfather that the mere act of fighting the English rendered them heroes. Their glorious failures had transformed them into immortals who fulfilled the words of Emmet on the eve of his execution: “The man dies, but his memory lives.”

  Just after O’Neill’s eleventh birthday, he watched his village wilt along with its harvest. O’Neill’s family owned a farm of about three acres and struggled along with everyone else as the pastoral landscape morphed into a wasteland of abandoned cottages, desolate potato ridges, and crumbling stone walls. The Great Hunger struck with particular virulence in south Ulster. At least thirteen thousand people died from
starvation and disease in County Monaghan between 1847 and 1850 alone. Clontibret lost over 17 percent of its population between 1841 and 1851, and O’Neill was among those forced to flee.

  After five years apart from his mother and siblings, the fourteen-year-old O’Neill reunited with his family when he immigrated to the United States in 1848. He worked as a clerk in the family’s Elizabeth, New Jersey, grocery business and then as a traveling sales agent for a publishing house. After struggling as a Catholic bookstore owner in Richmond, Virginia, the impulsive O’Neill suddenly enlisted in the U.S. Cavalry in 1857 and headed west to Utah to serve in a standoff with Mormon settlers.

  For a young soldier in search of battlefield glory like that of Hugh or Owen Roe O’Neill, the Mormon War proved a bitter disappointment. The impatient Irishman craved combat but grew so frustrated at the lack of action that he deserted to San Francisco to pursue riches. There the twenty-five-year-old O’Neill began a romance with Mary Ann Crowe, an Australian girl ten years his junior whose Irish parents had chased the promise of wealth in the California gold rush. The young girl persuaded the stubborn O’Neill to return to the U.S. Army in July 1860 after a two-year absence. His reputation as a solid soldier—and probably more so the army’s need for manpower in the West—saved him from a court-martial, and the military restored him to duty without trial.

  After the United States turned on itself in 1861, O’Neill returned east to join the Union army’s First U.S. Cavalry as a sergeant. No longer would he complain about a lack of battle action. He had a horse shot out from underneath him during the Peninsular Campaign, and in December 1863 he sustained severe injuries during the siege of Knoxville as a first lieutenant with the Fifth Indiana Cavalry.

  John O’Neill, who immigrated to the United States during the Great Hunger, thought it his life’s purpose to lead an Irish army against the British Empire.

  Although the Irishman could endure wounds to his flesh on the battlefield, he was far more vulnerable to bruises to his ego. After being bypassed—unfairly in his estimation—for a promotion to colonel, the thin-skinned O’Neill resigned his commission in November 1864 and quickly settled into domestic life. He opened a real estate and claims office in Nashville, where he had last been detailed, and married Mary Ann, who had spent the war working as a servant in a San Francisco mansion.

  Given his upbringing, O’Neill was a natural recruit for the Fenian Brotherhood. But it was not until the Roberts wing proposed the attack on Canada that he paid his $1 initiation fee and quickly rose to become the organizer of Nashville’s circle. His military experience proved valuable in drilling the men of his private militia, the Thirteenth Tennessee Regiment.

  O’Neill had had enough of the ceaseless proclamations and speeches by some Fenian leaders, who used their gifts of gab but little else. “If resolutions could give liberty to a people, the Senate of the F.B. [Fenian Brotherhood] would long ago have made Ireland the freest nation on the globe,” O’Neill groused. Body counts—not word counts—would liberate Ireland from its oppressor. “A firm believer in steel as the cure of Irish grievances, I was attracted to the ranks of the organization for no other reason than it proposed such a remedy,” O’Neill wrote.

  He believed that remedy best administered in Canada. “There is no spot of earth on the habitable globe where I would rather fight England than on Irish soil, but if it is not practicable to fight her there then I am in favor of fighting her wherever we can reach her.”

  So militant had O’Neill become from his boyhood experiences that when a secret telegram arrived ordering him to take up arms against the British Empire at the end of May 1866, he did not waver at leaving behind a budding business, which he estimated to be worth $50,000, as well as his new wife and two-month-old son. Although the odds were against him, previous generations of O’Neill warriors had demonstrated that no glory could ever be found in doing nothing at all. Striking a losing blow was better than striking no blow at all.

  * * *

  Along with the 115 men of his Thirteenth Tennessee Regiment, Colonel O’Neill collected his belongings and marched to Nashville’s railroad station. The Irish soldiers proceeded north to Cleveland, the staging point for an amphibious invasion of Canada across Lake Erie.

  Similar scenes played out across America as Fenians left their homes, their families, and their jobs for assigned locations along the border, including Port Huron, Michigan; Toledo, Ohio; Sandusky, Ohio; Erie, Pennsylvania; Buffalo, New York; and Dunkirk, New York.

  On the plains of Nebraska, John O’Keeffe received his order from O’Neill: “Come at once the hour for action has arrived.” The second lieutenant with the Second U.S. Cavalry asked for a sixty-day leave of absence, which was given only reluctantly because, as he wrote, “the Indians were gathering for the war path.” Riding for five days on horseback through a country occupied only by “wild animals and wild men” to the nearest Union Pacific Railroad station, O’Keeffe traveled more than one thousand miles to report for duty.

  In Anderson, Indiana, Father John McMahon paid little heed to the Vatican preachings against the Fenians and boarded a train with members from the local circle, including the parochial school teacher John Finley. Born in Clontibret like O’Neill, the pioneer priest had arrived in the United States in 1840 and supervised the construction of Anderson’s first church. Knowing their pastor had limited means and wanted to travel to Montreal to check on business affairs left behind by a late brother, his parishioners offered him free railroad passage as far as Buffalo, as well as a chance to serve them as a spiritual adviser.

  As O’Neill rode north from the heart of Dixie, each stop along the way added more Fenians to the cause. In Louisville, Colonel Owen Starr and 144 men of his Seventeenth Regiment boarded the train carrying their furled banners. At Indianapolis, another 100 soldiers under Captain James Haggerty joined the convoy.

  Line officers donned military overcoats and carried swords, but most Fenians wore their everyday working clothes in order to reduce suspicion. It was impossible, however, for such a large collection of Irishmen to escape prying eyes and probing questions. When asked where they were going, the Fenians parroted the cover story that they were soldiers en route to California, even if the fact that they were traveling due east at the moment suggested otherwise. “Everything in connection with them is veiled in mystery,” reported a Cleveland newspaper. On the night of May 28, four hundred soldiers arrived at the rendezvous point in Cleveland, where they planned to cross Lake Erie as part of Lynch’s five-thousand-man force.

  The following day, Sweeny’s orders arrived. He instructed Lynch to commence his attack. The Fenians, however, lacked three key elements to carry out Sweeny’s plan—five thousand men, boats, and even Lynch himself.

  In response, Sweeny ordered the Fenians to abandon Cleveland for Buffalo, where his assistant adjutant general, Captain William J. Hynes, had been dispatched with instructions. Tevis, who had proceeded to Chicago to organize troops from surrounding states in the Midwest, reported back that he was short by two thousand muskets. Sweeny could only wonder if his war plan was breaking down before it even had a chance to begin.

  * * *

  Among the most Irish patches of turf in the United States, the working-class Irish Catholic neighborhood of the First Ward offered the Fenians the perfect sanctuary. Home to most of Buffalo’s ten thousand Irishmen, the south-side neighborhood could easily absorb hundreds more without attracting suspicion or causing alarm. The Irish brogues that lilted out of the neighborhood’s open windows carried a familiar tune. Home amid the Whalens, Ryans, and McNamaras, the Fenians found that family, faith, and work tightly knit the enclave together.

  After the Civil War, many of Buffalo’s Irish American veterans formed the Seventh Regiment of the Irish Army of Liberation and for months prepared for an attack against the British. Little did they expect that they would be able to walk to the battlefront.

&
nbsp; The women of the First Ward supported the cause as well. Wives, daughters, and sweethearts raised money with balls, bazaars, and picnics. The Celtic versions of Clara Barton and Betsy Ross in the Buffalo chapter of the Fenian Sisterhood collected medicines, bandages, and nursing supplies necessary for the battlefield and wielded their needles to hand sew silk battle flags. To the Seventh Regiment, they presented a dark green silk flag nine feet long and six feet wide with heavy gold fringe and a golden sunburst painted in the upper left-hand corner.

  The torrent of cargo that regularly flowed through Buffalo by sea and rail made it easier for the Fenians to ship weapons into the city. Fenian sympathizers who worked for the New York Central Railroad packed and labeled crates of the organization’s guns and ammunition simply as “merchandise”—which was true, but not true enough—and stored them in their warehouse.

  Many of the crates of firearms ended up in the crowded Pearl Street warehouse of the auctioneer Patrick O’Day, a fat, fussy man and leader of Buffalo’s Fenian circle. O’Day’s business offered a splendid cover for the Fenians to stash away their guns. Week after week, cases of muskets, pistols, and other war equipment arrived at his warehouse and were lowered into the cellar under the guise of being stored for a forthcoming auction.

  Unbeknownst to O’Day, however, his every move was being monitored by the enemy. His bookkeeper, Alexander McLeod, was a British spy who kept the Canadian government apprised of the activities inside the auction room. From a desk outside O’Day’s office, McLeod overheard his boss concocting secret plans. He described watching the “ignorant little Irishman” as he converted his cellar into a drill room where two hundred men at a time could practice. “I was astonished to see those men go through their drill as easy as if they were drinking a glass, their double quick and charge brought applause,” McLeod informed his superiors. “It seems the whole city encourages them on.”