When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  From his perch on the bluff known as Limestone Ridge, O’Neill overlooked the surrounding fields. He could see troop movements for miles. The Fenians saw the familiar, hated red coats on the backs of the Thirteenth Infantry, but the green uniforms worn by the Queen’s Own Rifles presented a jarring target for the Irishmen. Around 8:00 a.m., O’Neill watched the Queen’s Own Rifles march north on Ridge Road at the head of a column trailed by the Thirteenth Infantry and the York and Caledonia Rifle Companies. The enemy force was at least three times the size of his army. The odds were against the Irish once again.

  Booker’s men approached a crossroads populated by a tavern and a few scattered buildings. He placed Company Five of the Queen’s Own Rifles in the lead because they carried the most state-of-the-art weaponry. Their Spencer seven-shot repeating rifles allowed for quicker shots than the muzzle-loading Springfield rifles carried by the Fenians and the muzzle-loading British Enfield rifles used by the rest of the Canadian forces. The men of Company Five, however, had received the unfamiliar firearms only the previous day, along with just twenty-eight rounds of ammunition per man.

  O’Neill advanced two companies in skirmishing formation along the ridge. They formed a battle line behind a temporary breastwork, constructed with pieces harvested from the split-rail fences that dissected the fields parallel to the enemy line and the road to Fort Erie. As the enemy skirmishers came into view, sharp fire cracked the air. O’Neill watched as the white puffs of smoke from his forward skirmishers blossomed, followed a split second later by the reverberation of their gunshots. Biting into the end of their cartridges, the battle-hardened Irishmen would once again taste that familiar acrid gunpowder before loading the shot into their rifles.

  Officers with swords raised in the air shouted orders to fire over the din. Junor heard the command: “With ball cartridge, load.” With every gunshot they heard, the inexperienced Canadians instinctively ducked. Although more than a year removed from the Civil War, the Union and Confederate veterans were used to the whistle of bullets flying over their heads. “To most of us who had been in the war, it was soon evident that fighting was new to our opponents,” O’Keeffe recalled.

  The Canadian skirmishers advanced through fields of young wheat and tree stumps. They dashed from stump to stump, throwing themselves flat on the ground still wet with morning dew as a deluge of bullets struck the stumps and rattled the orchards, sending a shower of apple blossoms down upon the heads of the Canadians. Once the Fenians had emptied their single shots and worked to reload, the Canadians rose to fire their repeating rifles. The Canadian skirmishers advanced so far in front of their main body that they began taking on gunshots from both the front and the rear.

  As they progressed through the fields toward the Fenian lines, the Canadians had to climb over or through a new fence every fifteen or twenty yards. With loaded rifles and bayonets at their sides, this took considerable effort and left them exposed. Not only did the terrain prove an obstacle course for the advancing Canadians, but Booker’s men also started to run out of their limited ammunition.

  The Canadians, however, maintained a steady advance to dislodge the Fenians from the thick timber that protected the center of their line. O’Neill feared that the enemy flanks had become so prolonged that his men could be enveloped. Knowing that he was outmanned, the Fenian colonel decided to undertake a risky maneuver, one that could be tried only with experienced troops. O’Neill ordered his men to slowly fall back a few hundred yards to coax the Canadian center and form a new line. They acted, and believing the Irish in retreat due to the relatively small size of their force, the Canadians became bold with their attack. They charged ahead until they found themselves practically in a valley at the base of Limestone Ridge.

  With their center uncovered, O’Neill waited until the Canadians were within one hundred yards. “Charge!” he suddenly shouted. The Fenians took the Canadians by surprise, unleashing a terrific volley. They sounded a chorus of wild Irish whoops as they advanced behind the green flag given to them by the Fenian Sisterhood, the brunt of their attack falling upon the University Rifles.

  On their horses, O’Neill and Starr appeared in the rear of the center of their line. Whether Booker saw those officers or other horsemen cresting Limestone Ridge, the inexperienced commander panicked. “The cavalry are coming!” came the cry from the Canadians. Bugles ordered the Canadian militiamen to form a square, a textbook defensive position against a cavalry attack, which the militia had drilled on the practice ground.

  There was no cavalry, however, and even if the Irishmen had one, the battlefield terrain with its obstacles was hardly conducive to a charge of horsemen. All the maneuver did was leave the Canadians exposed to withering fire because the Fenian infantry had a target on which to focus. A succession of soldiers fell to the ground with bullet wounds. “We were all called to form [a] square—that awful square,” lamented the Canadian A. G. Gilbert. “No cavalry came, for there was none to come.”

  Once Booker realized there was no cavalry, the Canadians tried to form a line, but the fire was just too much. Officers made futile attempts to rally their forces until the bugle sounded their retreat. After nearly two hours of fighting, the Canadians ran for their lives, throwing aside muskets, overcoats, knapsacks, and anything that could slow them down. Lying in the dirt by the roadside was the flag of the Queen’s Own Rifles.*

  Junor ran along the crossroad as he joined in the sprint to safety. He heard a dull, heavy blow as his twenty-one-year-old fellow student William Tempest fell face-first into the road. The tall, promising medical student was in his final year of studies, preparing to join his father’s medical practice. Junor knelt over his fallen colleague for a moment and saw the bullet wound to the head. There was nothing he could do. Tempest was dead. Moments later, the Fenians took Junor prisoner.

  At the same time, Edward Lonergan, a ship carpenter and lieutenant with the Seventh Regiment, came upon Private R. W. Hines of the Queen’s Own Rifles. He declared him, too, a prisoner. The Irish soldier seized the Canadian’s rifle and swore it would never shoot another Fenian. But when he smashed the rifle butt of the weapon on a stone in an attempt to destroy it, the impact released the rifle’s hammer, which fired. The bullet pierced Lonergan’s throat and exited the back of his head, killing him immediately on his twenty-first birthday.

  The Irish kept the enemy on the run through the town of Ridgeway until O’Neill called off the pursuit after a mile on the other side of the village. The Irishmen collected as many of their wounded as could fit in their wagons. They left the rest in the care of local civilians, who also promised to bury the Fenian dead. Some of those wounded and left behind would eventually be arrested by British authorities.

  This lithograph dramatizes the Irish Republican Army’s advance during the Battle of Ridgeway while Canadian defense forces retreat.

  On the Canadian side, seven of the Queen’s Own Rifles died in action. Three more succumbed to wounds received in battle, and six would die of disease contracted in service. Twenty-eight Canadians were wounded at Limestone Ridge. Between six and eight died on the Fenian side, including the spy Canty.

  For the first time since the 1745 Battle of Fontenoy, an Irish army had emerged victorious against forces of the British Empire. News of the Battle of Ridgeway consumed citizens on both sides of the international border. Toronto newspapers issued extra editions hourly, while The Boston Herald sold more copies of its edition covering the Fenian raid than it had after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

  O’Neill’s victory incited joy among the Irish diaspora and in Ireland itself. The Nation in Dublin exulted in the news that “the red flag of England has gone down before the Irish green” and reported that the news “fills our people with tumultuous emotions impossible to describe, impossible to conceal.” The Detroit Free Press shook its head. “It is difficult to believe that any body of men who are not insane, have from this co
untry invaded and committed acts of depredation or war against a nation with which we are at peace.”

  The news stirred Irishmen across the United States, who now saw the Fenian Brotherhood was more than just bluster. From Louisiana to Maine, hundreds grabbed their rifles and boarded trains to Buffalo to join in the fight. Momentum was finally on their side.

  * * *

  O’Neill took no time to bask in the glow of his historic victory. He knew his position remained precarious, given the small size of his army and the advance of Peacocke’s force, which remained nearby. He wondered where his reinforcements were—both those from the United States and those from Canada. The Fenians had expected Canadians to join them in casting off the British, not take up arms against them. They assumed any colony of Great Britain sought liberation as they did. Plus, the Irishmen in Canada had yet to accept their “hand of brotherhood in the holy cause of fatherland” that was offered in their proclamation.

  “I decided that my best policy was to return to Fort Erie, and ascertain if crossings had been made at other points,” O’Neill recalled, “and if so, I was willing to sacrifice myself and my noble little command for the sake of leaving the way open.”

  In the wake of their victory, O’Neill maintained order among his men. The Irishmen shared pipes with their newly captured prisoners and requested water for them from passing houses on their march to Fort Erie. They even purchased glasses of beer for their captives at a roadside tavern.

  The Irishmen arrived back at the village around 4:00 p.m. In absence of the Fenians, Canadians had repossessed Old Fort Erie, capturing Irishmen as they returned from Ridgeway, some fifty in all.

  When the Fenian captain Rudolph Fitzpatrick galloped into Fort Erie on his stolen steed, a gunshot rang out from the upper window of a dwelling house. Fitzpatrick drew his pistol and returned fire. The Fenian infantry rushed to join the fight. This time, it was the Canadians who were outnumbered. They held the Fenians at bay for about twenty minutes but no longer. The Canadians took shelter in any house where they found an open door. They hid behind piles of cordwood and fences. The twenty-five village blocks of Fort Erie became the scene of street fighting as gunfire emanated from the collection of two-story frame houses, stores, hotels, taverns, and boardinghouses. This was house-to-house guerrilla combat. O’Neill ordered his men to break down the doors of houses containing the enemy and smoke them out with burning straw thrown into broken windows. As many as thirty of the Canadian troops fled into the house of the postmaster George Lewis and fired from its windows. Bullets pierced the home’s clapboard exterior and plaster walls until the Fenians set the building ablaze, forcing a quick surrender.

  The skirmish had an international audience. Gathered on the banks of the opposite shore, curious Buffalo residents watched the gunfight unfold from Squaw Island. Not only could they hear the staccato of gunfire, but eyewitnesses also reported bullets whistling over their heads and puncturing the walls of the island’s flour mills. One Irishman with a long gray beard danced in frantic excitement with his revolver, which he fired at the enemy across the river. “Give it to them, give it to them,” he shouted, cheering on the Irish Republican Army.

  With his men pushed back to the waterfront, Dennis ordered a steamship boarded with his Irish prisoners to cast off into the Niagara River and sounded the retreat—every man for himself. For his part, he took shelter in a friend’s house, shaved off his distinctive whiskers, donned a disguise, and escaped.

  The only escape route for Captain Richard King of the Welland Canal Field Battery was to swim to the steamship before it departed. He ran to the dock and jumped into the water, but a Fenian gunshot shattered his leg in the process. The wounded captain would survive, though his leg would be amputated.

  O’Neill emerged victorious on enemy soil once again, with the Fenians taking forty-five of the enemy prisoner. O’Neill dispatched one hundred men to guard the road to Chippawa and took the rest of his command to the old fort. He had triumphed, but the colonel knew his situation was growing direr by the minute.

  * * *

  At 6:00 p.m., O’Neill sent word to Captain William J. Hynes and the other Fenians in Buffalo that an enemy force of five thousand men remained on the Niagara Peninsula and could have them surrounded by the following morning. After fighting two battles and marching nearly forty miles in less than twenty-four hours, the Irish Republican Army now grappled with hunger and fatigue.

  The Fenian colonel was still willing to fight if reinforcements were on the way. However, the disappointing word arrived from Buffalo that no other Fenians had been able to cross over, due to the USS Michigan and federal revenue cutters keeping a constant vigil on the Niagara River. The Fenians might have been advancing on Canada, but it was the United States by which they were now stymied.

  Without Canadian support, the Irish Republican Army had no options. Around 10:00 p.m., Hynes rowed across the Niagara to order O’Neill to retreat while he worked to furnish transportation as soon as he could to take the Fenians back to the United States. Although weary, the Irishmen had remained jovial. They danced to keep warm as the temperature began to drop and even cracked jokes with their prisoners, tearing into biscuits and raw pork. O’Neill approached O’Keeffe, pulled him aside, and broke the disappointing news: “Johnny, I have orders to evacuate.”

  Around 2:00 a.m., Junor and the rest of the prisoners were roused from their sleep and ordered to form a line. The thought crossed a few Canadian minds that they were about to be shot. Instead, they were placed into marching order and then taken to the bank of the Niagara River. O’Neill directed his men to board a waiting barge tied to a tugboat as he began the river evacuation.

  A number of Fenians didn’t return with their comrades. Thirteen were killed or died of wounds received at Ridgeway and Fort Erie, while another twenty-eight were wounded. Some of the most seriously injured had to be left behind in the houses of sympathizers in Fort Erie.

  After the last of his able-bodied men embarked, O’Neill proceeded down the line of the nearly two dozen Canadian prisoners, shaking hands with each of them. He said his good-byes, informed them that they were again free men, and promised to return to Canada soon—this time with a larger force.

  * * *

  A tug hauled the barge with its disappointed Fenian cargo back across the river they had crossed in the other direction just forty-eight hours earlier. Once the tug reached American waters, the J. C. Harrison, a steam launch for the USS Michigan, fired its twelve-pound pivot gun across the bow of the tugboat and threatened to sink it unless the Irish Republican Army surrendered. Behind the steam launch lurked the USS Michigan with extra maritime muscle. Its captain, Andrew Bryson, wasn’t about to let the Fenians elude him a second time.

  As a Union army veteran, O’Neill strictly followed orders from the U.S. government and offered no resistance. “We would have as readily surrendered to an infant bearing the authority of the United States,” he wrote.

  The thirteen Fenian officers were taken to relatively comfortable quarters aboard the USS Michigan, but the 367 rank-and-file soldiers remained confined to the barge. When daylight arrived, curious men and women came by the thousands to the Black Rock waterfront to gawk at the Irish Republican Army floating in the Niagara River.

  On the opposite riverbank, the Fenians watched as the redcoats reclaimed the village of Fort Erie. A detachment of Tenth Royals found Fenian stragglers in the woods and their dead and wounded hidden in the homes of sympathizers.

  When the British troops searched the late Canty’s hilltop residence, they discovered Father John McMahon hiding in a cupboard dressed in his Roman collar, long black coat, and well-worn plug hat. Inside his carpetbag, the troops found Holy Eucharist and consecrated oils for administering last rites to dying soldiers, but no weapons. McMahon claimed that he was on his way to visit the bishop of Montreal and denied that there were Fenians on the premises. However, the British f
ound two wounded Irishmen elsewhere in the house and more out back in the barn and a nearby haystack. Inside the barn they also found the body of Lonergan, dead from his self-inflicted wound and taken from Ridgeway by his fellow soldiers.

  In all, the British captured fifty-eight Fenians in Fort Erie, including fourteen Protestants, one German, and seven Canadians. A third of them were under the age of twenty-one. They then took a tug to the USS Michigan and demanded that the Americans turn over the hundreds of Fenians detained on the barge. Bryson refused. They would remain in American custody.

  * * *

  Just weeks after he had departed Eastport, Maine, Major General George Meade had once again been summoned to prevent any further incursions over the Canadian border. With his recommendation to impose martial law in states along the border rejected, Meade instead ordered Major General William F. Barry to prevent any further border incursions and seize all Fenian weapons he believed would be used in an attack on Canada.

  With reports arriving of Irishmen amassing in both northern Vermont and upstate New York, Meade posted nine companies along the border from Buffalo to St. Albans, Vermont. Satisfied that O’Neill’s brief invasion had been a feint, Meade departed on June 3 to Ogdensburg in upstate New York, having spent only a few hours on the ground in Buffalo.

  Inside the White House, Andrew Johnson wavered about what to do with the ship-bound Irish Americans. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles had grown frustrated with the reluctance of anyone inside the administration to take action because Johnson and his cabinet knew that any measures taken against the Fenians would anger the Irish vote. Meanwhile, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Radical Republican sympathizer who often clashed with the Democratic president, remained passive in the hopes that Johnson would be forced to take unpopular action.