When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  Indeed, after looking over its collective shoulder in fear of Confederate raiders descending from Canada during the Civil War, Buffalo delighted in delivering a fright of its own to those on the other side of the Niagara River. “We don’t wish them any ill,” reported the Buffalo Courier, “but a little healthy scaring won’t do them any harm. So soon does time make all things even.”

  As the date for the attack approached, the Buffalo Courier carried an advertisement announcing O’Day’s preemptory sale of surplus army supplies—muskets, rifles, swords, knapsacks, tents, blankets, and overcoats. The advertisement, however, was only a cover to minimize suspicion surrounding his stockpiling of arms. The auctioneer had no intention of staging the sale. Those guns were due to be carried onto Canadian shores in the hands of the Fenian army.

  * * *

  Until midnight on May 30 in Buffalo, hundreds of insurgents gathered inside the Fenian Brotherhood’s local headquarters, Townsend Hall.

  Buffalo’s anti-Irish mayor, Chandler J. Wells, telegraphed the mayors of both Toronto and Hamilton in Ontario and warned them that six hundred Fenians had left Cleveland for his city. “This town is full of Fenians,” an alarmed H. W. Hemans, the British consul in Buffalo, informed the Canadian spymaster Gilbert McMicken.

  Still, Canada left its border with the United States unguarded. No Canadian or British forces were positioned within fifty miles of the Niagara River. The false alarm that had sounded on St. Patrick’s Day had wasted both the money and the goodwill of Canada’s volunteer infantrymen. Government officials disbelieved the latest fevered reports of an imminent attack. “I cannot conceive it within the bounds of a reasonable probability that Sweeny will attempt any demonstration upon Canada now,” McMicken reported.

  For its part, the United States was reluctant to intervene, fearing that by doing so, it might inflame the situation. The U.S. attorney William A. Dart told Hemans that his government “looked upon the Fenian project as so wild and absurd that it preferred leaving it to die a natural death, rather than give its dishonest originators the power of ascribing their failure to official interference.”

  Back in New York, on May 31, Sweeny grew frenzied. Tevis had sent word from the left flank that no boats could be secured in either Chicago or Milwaukee and only half of the promised three thousand men had shown up. While another two hundred Fenians arrived in Buffalo, the fighting force for the central flank was still only about one thousand men—well short of the five thousand for which Sweeny had planned.

  Even worse, illness and cowardice had sidelined the Irish Republican Army’s expected leaders. With the planned invasion only hours away, O’Neill returned to headquarters after a fruitless search for Lynch and reported to Hynes that the commander who had been absent in Cleveland could not be found in Buffalo either.

  Hynes held in his hands an urgent telegram from Sweeny telling him to find the most senior officer in Buffalo and give him command of the expedition. Hynes looked at O’Neill and knew his new “Commander of the Armies of the Irish Republic in Canada” was standing in front of him. Given only hours to prepare for the invasion planned for that night, the descendant of Hugh and Owen Roe O’Neill would be the man to lead the Irish Republican Army into Canada.

  * * *

  As speculation grew among newspaper reporters and government officials that the still-unarmed Fenians might board a midnight train either east or west to the true invasion point where weapons awaited, John McLaughlin, one of McMicken’s detectives, suspected otherwise. He hurried to O’Day’s auction house and watched as the Fenians secretly loaded crates of ammunition and rifles onto nine large furniture wagons and began to march north through the streets of Buffalo.

  Word of the Irish Republican Army’s mobilization flew across the city and landed at the foot of Ferry Street, where Captain Andrew Bryson ordered the USS Michigan to raise anchor and patrol the Niagara River separating the United States and Canada and stop any Fenian incursion. When the sailors swarmed the deck of the U.S. Navy gunboat, however, the one indispensable man could not be found.

  Unbeknownst to Bryson, the Irishmen had infiltrated his vessel. Mate William Leonard had recruited seventeen crew members whom he reported to be “good and true to the cause” of Ireland. Leonard and his fellow sailors knew the ship could safely navigate the Niagara River’s tricky shoals in the dark only with the steady hand of its experienced pilot, Patrick Murphy.

  No man, not even Bryson, knew the old paddle steamer better than the forty-three-year-old career sailor, who not only worked as an original crew member when the USS Michigan was first commissioned in 1844 but also helped build the boat with his own hands. The Waterford-born Murphy was certainly a proper Irishman—a Patrick married to a Bridget no less—but he was no rebel. In fact, he had spent his teenage years faithfully serving in the Royal Navy.

  Knowing that appeals to the pilot’s Irish roots would prove fruitless, the insurgents turned to sabotage. While the Irish Republican Army mobilized, the USS Michigan’s assistant engineer James Kelley introduced Murphy to the attractions of Buffalo’s waterfront. Fueled by cigars, liquor, and the company of a “lady friend,” the pair indulged in debauchery inside a string of seedy saloons. As Kelley and Murphy staggered down Main Street singing “The Wearing of the Green,” the powerless Bryson stewed as his warship remained tethered to the dock.

  * * *

  With the only potential obstacle in their path removed, the Irish Republican Army paraded northward to Canada. As clock hands slipped past midnight, the soldiers marched by the brick mansion of Millard Fillmore, no friend of the Irish. Throughout his political career, the former president had doggedly courted nativists, who blamed the Great Hunger refugees for importing poverty, crime, disease, and a strange religion to the United States. Fillmore accused “foreign Catholics” of engineering his defeat in the 1844 New York gubernatorial election, and a dozen years later he accepted the presidential nomination of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings in an unsuccessful bid to reclaim the White House.

  After their two-hour trek through Buffalo, the Irish Republican Army arrived at its rendezvous point in the suburban neighborhood of Black Rock. O’Neill received the count that only six hundred men had made it to the end of the six-mile march. Two hundred Irishmen had vanished into the Buffalo night, some dissuaded by second thoughts, others lured into passing saloons by the gratification awaiting at the bottom of a whiskey bottle.

  O’Neill looked out upon his motley army. Starr’s Seventeenth Infantry wore blue Union army jackets with green facings. The New Orleans company of the “Louisiana Tigers” were clad in gray military caps and Confederate tunics as well as belt plates emblazoned with the initials “C.S.A.” The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Ohio Regiments from Cincinnati and Cleveland sported green shirts and caps. Most, however, were dressed like their leader in civilian clothes.

  Although an accidental commander, O’Neill had supreme confidence in his pedigree and ability to lead the largest independent Irish army into combat since 1798. Over the span of seven centuries, the Irish who had challenged the British had repeatedly achieved immortality but never independence. By daring to fight, O’Neill knew—win or lose—greatness would be his. He gave the order for Starr to make the first crossing of the Niagara River.

  A native of County Tyrone and a veteran of the Second Kentucky Cavalry, the twenty-eight-year-old Starr urged his men from Kentucky and Indiana across the river, where they landed on Canada’s Niagara Peninsula. To a chorus of cheers, the color-bearers of the Seventeenth Infantry scrambled up the riverbank and pierced the British soil with three green Fenian battle flags, marking the one tiny corner of the British Empire that was now controlled by the Irish.

  7

  A Lawless and Piratical Band

  ON THE NIGHT of May 31, 1866, the University of Toronto undergraduate David Junor was studying for his final examinations when a knock at his door brought the welc
ome news that he would be allowed to pass his remaining tests without having to take them. Any relief, however, was tempered by the news that he might have to sacrifice his life in return.

  As a member of the Queen’s Own Rifles volunteer militia, Junor received orders to report for active service at the regiment’s drill shed by 4:30 a.m. The private was among the dozens of students who enlisted in the University Rifles company, which had been formed by professors when war with the United States beckoned during the Trent affair. The University Rifles had been called upon to help defend Canada from the Fenians in March, and there was nothing to dissuade Junor from thinking that this was yet another false alarm. He packed more for a holiday than a battle, stuffing his satchel with clothes, photographs, and letters that he planned to drop off at his home before returning to Toronto to graduate with the class of 1866.

  With his heavy baggage in tow, the young man discovered the streets outside the drill hall teeming with anxious Toronto residents. The burden of defending Canada fell squarely upon volunteer militias like Junor’s, soldiers perhaps more poorly provisioned than the Irish Republican Army. Although many militiamen brought their personal luggage to the drill shed, they lacked food, blankets, tents, medical provisions, and even canteens. Some received only five rounds of ammunition.

  The volunteers also lacked the Irishmen’s military experience. Some had never even fired a gun. The new commander of the Queen’s Own Rifles, Lieutenant Colonel John Stoughton Dennis, was a forty-five-year-old wealthy land surveyor who had never so much as drilled with his battalion on a parade ground, let alone led it into battle.

  What the young men of the Queen’s Own Rifles lacked in training, they had in enthusiasm. They sang songs as they marched from the drill shed to the wharf at the foot of Yonge Street. Boisterous cheers accompanied Junor and the twenty-seven other volunteers of the University Rifles as they boarded the steamer City of Toronto for a three-hour trip across Lake Ontario to Port Dalhousie. There, they boarded a train to Port Colborne to protect the Lake Erie entrance to the Welland Canal, knowing that would be the Fenians’ likely target.

  While the volunteers mobilized to the border, British troops remained in their barracks. Not until 2:00 p.m. did the professional British army officer in command of the operation against the Fenians, Lieutenant Colonel George Peacocke, board a train from Hamilton, Ontario, toward Niagara Falls, with seventeen hundred troops from the Sixteenth and Forty-Seventh Regiments of Foot and a six-gun field battery.

  When news of the Fenian breach of the border reached Ottawa during the day on June 1, Governor-General Lord Charles Monck sounded incredulous in his call for all volunteers west of Toronto to repel the enemy. “The soil of Canada has been invaded, not in the practice of legitimate warfare, but by a lawless and piratical band in defiance of all moral right, and in utter disregard of all the obligations which civilization enforces on mankind.” The assault on Canada would not go undefended.

  * * *

  After making the first landing, Colonel Owen Starr left a small unit to hold the dock for the arrival of the rest of the Irish Republican Army and marched the bulk of his men three miles south to the ruins of Old Fort Erie—hallowed ground for the British, who lost more than one thousand men there during the War of 1812 in a series of battles with American forces. Above the moss-grown rubble of the fortress, which had absorbed the most blood ever spilled on Canadian soil, Starr’s Indiana and Kentucky troops hoisted an Irish flag where the Union Jack once waved.

  Two hours after Starr’s crossing of the Niagara River, John O’Neill stepped ashore around 3:30 a.m. in the village of Waterloo. The Fenian colonel might have lacked food, horses, artillery, and even a map, but he had plenty of self-confidence. As his first order, O’Neill directed one party of men to pull up tracks and burn a railway bridge to Port Colborne, while he marched south to the town of Fort Erie and directed his troops to cut the telegraph wires connecting it to the rest of Canada while keeping those in communication with Buffalo intact. Using axes stolen from a barn, the Irishmen chopped the village’s forest of telegraph poles to the ground.

  O’Neill summoned Fort Erie’s mayor, Peter Kempson, and requested food for his men. The villagers quickly offered the Irishmen not just food to break their fast but plenty of flasks filled with good cheer, perhaps as an enticement to impair the invaders. The Fenian John O’Keeffe turned away the free-flowing liquor. “I prevailed on the mayor to tell his people to give no man a flask,” he wrote. “Knowing what was coming I wanted sober men.”

  Gathering together all the adult men in the village, O’Neill ordered the reading of a proclamation that had been penned and distributed to the press by General Thomas Sweeny to assure Canadians that the Fenians had come to evict the British, not pillage their homes. “We have no issue with the people of these provinces, and wish to have none but the most friendly relations,” read the document. “Our weapons are for the oppressors of Ireland. Our blows shall be directed only against the power of England; her privileges alone shall we invade, not yours.” Sweeny’s proclamation also called upon Irishmen, his “countrymen,” throughout Canada “to stretch forth the hand of brotherhood in the holy cause of fatherland.” O’Neill pledged that his men would behave honorably, and he threatened to shoot a soldier who stole a woolen shawl from an inn. The Irish Republican Army did seize food and tools necessary for their campaign, along with upwards of fifty horses. However, they didn’t take any saddles or stirrups and instead rode bareback. They offered Fenian bonds or scrip notes in return for the property taken, a proposal that, unsurprisingly, had no appeal to the Canadians.

  Around 10:00 a.m., the Irish Republican Army made its camp amid an apple orchard four miles north of Fort Erie. The Fenian-contracted tugs ferried provisions across the Niagara River throughout the morning, but by 11:00 a.m. the USS Michigan had steamed out of Buffalo, shutting down the supply line.

  As the sun set on the Irishmen’s first day in enemy territory, O’Neill received reports that five thousand troops were advancing on him in two columns—one from Chippawa, fifteen miles to the north, and one from Port Colborne, fifteen miles to the west. The Fenian colonel ordered his camp broken. When he mustered his men around 10:00 p.m., however, he found a smaller army than he had arrived with hours earlier. Scores of soldiers who thought O’Neill too green to lead them into battle deserted the army, hiding in friends’ houses in Fort Erie or rowing back to the United States in stolen boats.

  Left with three hundred surplus muskets, O’Neill ordered them destroyed so they didn’t fall into enemy hands. The Irishmen burned their extra rifles and smashed them against apple trees. They marched north along the Niagara River before turning inland, in hopes of intercepting one of the two advancing columns before they had a chance to unite.

  The march proved difficult—even for the many Civil War veterans among the Irishmen. Recent rainstorms had turned the roads into mud. The more grizzled soldiers took off their sodden stockings and shoes, tied the laces over the barrels of their guns, and walked barefoot.

  O’Neill’s men were weary and famished. They couldn’t forget, however, the suffering they or their forebears had endured during the Great Hunger.

  “Terance, I’m awful hungry,” groused one soldier to another.

  “Shut up, man, you don’t know what hunger is!”

  * * *

  By 7:00 a.m. on June 2, the sun’s rays alighted on Starr’s advance guard, promising a hot day to come for the men as they marched toward the village of Ridgeway. For Junor, too, who was then disembarking from his train in the same village, with the Queen’s Own Rifles. The university student and the rest of his company had arrived only hours earlier in Port Colborne, where they found the rest of the regiment on a freight train eating a frugal breakfast of bread and red herring.

  Already, the Canadians had shown their inexperience. Without Peacocke’s approval, Dennis and seventy-two artillerymen and sa
ilors of the volunteer Welland Canal Field Battery and Dunnville Naval Brigade had departed Port Colborne at 4:00 a.m. in an armed tugboat bound for Fort Erie to cut off Fenian supply lines and prevent their retreat. Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Booker, an English-born auctioneer who headed the volunteer Thirteenth Infantry Battalion that had traveled south from Hamilton to Port Colborne, assumed command as the ranking officer. Booker had no battle experience, and his men were perhaps even more untried than the Queen’s Own Rifles. Sixty percent of his 250 men were under the age of twenty. Seventy of his men had never fired live ammunition.

  Shortly after Dennis’s departure, Peacocke ordered Booker to meet him in Stevensville, halfway between Chippawa and Port Colborne. Booker planned to make the thirty-minute train ride to Ridgeway, running along the north shore of Lake Erie, before marching north for the four and a half miles to Stevensville.

  As the Canadian volunteers disembarked from the Buffalo and Lake Huron Railway in Ridgeway, Booker could not locate any wagons to transport their stores, including their ammunition, so he sent the supplies back to Port Colborne. Junor and his fellow students piled their baggage in a heap at the station, “expecting to return and get it after we had annihilated the Fenians,” he wrote.

  While the Irish Republican Army might have been foreign invaders, O’Neill arguably had more local knowledge than his Canadian rivals, thanks to the information supplied by Fenian intelligence officers such as Major John C. Canty, who had spent six months living in Fort Erie performing reconnaissance work. The Irishmen took a position on a long ridge of limestone three miles north of Ridgeway. O’Neill made his headquarters in the house of seventy-three-year-old Henry Angur, a veteran of the War of 1812 and of the Patriot War of 1837 who refused to leave his house, declaring that he had survived two wars and liked his chances in a third.