When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  The captives taken to the Montreal Prison—the majority of whom were from Massachusetts—worked as shoemakers, curriers, boot makers, tailors, clerks, and spoon makers. They included four Methodists, an Episcopalian, and the New-York Tribune reporter Joseph Kelly, a County Tipperary native who had left St. Albans on a horse belonging to a Welden House employee before being taken prisoner just north of the border.

  Secretary of State William Seward expressed his hope to Britain’s envoy to the United States, Sir Frederick Bruce, that “all of the misguided men” would be treated with leniency. But many Canadians believed the sacrifice of their young men at Ridgeway required a vigorous response, particularly toward those Irish-born fighters who could be tried as British subjects.

  Thomas D’Arcy McGee, the former Young Irelander, wanted no quarter given to the Irish revolutionaries who followed in his footsteps. The fury of Canadian public opinion spilled from his pen in response to a request by Father T. F. Hendricken for clemency toward the prisoner Terence McDonnell of Waterbury, Connecticut. “This thing you ask can not be done,” he wrote on June 14, “for this Fenian filibustering was murder, not war. What had Canada or Canadians done to deserve such an assault?…

  “McDonnell and all the Fenians will have every justice done to them, publicly, in the broad light of day,” McGee continued, “but to whatever punishment the law hands him over, no word of mine can ever be spoken in mitigation; not even, under these circumstances, if he were my own brother.”

  British authorities, however, feared that the execution of any Fenians, particularly American citizens, would result in diplomatic blowback from the United States and breathe new life into the Fenian movement. “The future relations of Canada [with the United States] and its deliverance from any chance of becoming a battlefield of Fenianism will depend in a great measure on the tact and temper with which this question of the prisoners is managed,” Bruce wrote to Governor-General Lord Charles Monck.

  The British government had learned from centuries of past experience that the execution of the leaders of Irish uprisings could do nothing to douse the fires of revolution. It could indeed feed the flames.

  * * *

  British and Canadian officials weren’t the only ones celebrating the failure of the Fenian raids. Feeling validated by the defeat of the Roberts wing’s forces, Stephens continued his money-raising tour of the United States. Stephens tried little to conceal his delight at the failure of the Irish rebels. He promised war in Ireland by the end of the year and a shift away from its Canadian diversion to a singular focus on the “men in the gap.”

  Seeing how Roberts and Sweeny had discredited themselves, Stephens expected them to be shunned and scorned. Instead, music stores hawked sheet music for patriotic Irish marches with the images of the Fenian leaders on the cover. A copy of the “Irish Marseillaise” bearing the likeness of Roberts sold for fifty cents, “General Sweeny’s Grand March” for thirty. New Fenian circles that formed across the United States in the wake of the Canadian invasion were named in honor of Sweeny, Roberts, and John O’Neill, but not Stephens.

  Again he misjudged the American affinity with men of action. No matter how foolhardy, the bold Fenian foray kindled imaginations. In comparing Sweeny with Stephens, the Hartford Courant editorialized, “One has certainly done his best to make good his promises by his acts, while the others have done nothing. Of the two give us the soldier Sweeny.”

  The Fenian founder thought that the prodigal Irish sons would return to his flock; instead, the supporters of the Roberts wing hardened their opinions of him. Many still questioned his loyalties, believing that he was secretly a British spy. They harbored suspicions that he colluded with the White House to ensure their failure.

  They reserved particular loathing, though, not for one of their own but for the wily Seward. “If the attempts of the Fenians to obtain a foothold in Canada have been temporarily postponed, thanks are due therefore less to the conduct of the English troops than to the treacherous attitude so suddenly taken by our Secretary of State,” editorialized The Irish-American. Stephens did little, then, to heal internal divisions by meeting in person with the secretary of state.

  * * *

  Just days after walking out of a New York courtroom, Roberts strode up the steps of the U.S. Capitol, its massive dome finally completed after eleven years of construction. He still seethed at President Andrew Johnson and Seward, believing that the Irish Republican Army had failed “not through any efforts of English armed minions, but because the Administration of a great free country chose to exercise its fullest limits, and even beyond it the odious and tyrannic provisions of an obsolete law.”

  With the Roberts wing blaming the Democratic president for the fizzle of their Canadian invasion, the Radical Republicans who controlled Congress saw a political opportunity. Bitterly opposed to Johnson’s approach to Reconstruction, which they believed to be too lenient, the Radical Republicans held a sizable majority on Capitol Hill, which they used months earlier to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over Johnson’s veto. Relations with the White House were so poor that talk of impeachment had already begun to rumble inside the capital city.

  Prior to the Civil War, the Irish who had fled to America after the Great Hunger had been as Democratic as they were Catholic. The Irish saw the Republican Party as a haven for two groups that threatened their livelihood—Know-Nothings and abolitionists. With congressional elections approaching in the fall of 1866 and former Confederate states about to begin the process of being formally readmitted to the Union, the Radicals saw in the Fenians a cudgel with which to break up Johnson and the long-standing party allegiance of the Irish.

  In New York City, Republicans distributed handbills to the Irish that read, “Queen Victoria thanks President Johnson for his Interference in your Patriotic Movements,” and linked John Hoffman, the city’s mayor and Democratic candidate for governor, with the president’s proclamation. “A Fenian vote for Hoffman is an endorsement of Johnson’s interference,” read the campaign propaganda.

  Roberts feared he might be shunned in Washington, D.C., as a criminal who violated the Neutrality Act. Instead, the Radical Republicans treated him as a guest of honor and lauded him as a freedom fighter. Only three days after his release from jail, the leader of the “men of action” received a reception worthy of a returning war hero. The Massachusetts senator and future vice president Henry Wilson introduced Roberts on the Senate floor, and he shook hands on the House floor with prominent Republicans including Representative Nathaniel Banks, a former nativist who had been no friend of the Irish in the past. That evening, Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax introduced Roberts at a speech at the Orphans’ Fair.

  It was not only Republicans who rallied around the Roberts wing. Just forty-eight hours after Brigadier General Samuel Spear retreated from Quebec, the Democratic representative Sydenham E. Ancona of Pennsylvania, also a Johnson detractor, introduced a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives to repeal or amend the Neutrality Act, which he said compelled the president to “discriminate most harshly” against the Fenians. Representative Robert C. Schenck, an Ohio Republican and former Union army general, also proposed a resolution of censure against the Johnson administration for its suppression of the Fenian raids.

  Even though the Johnson administration had used the Fenians for its own leverage against Great Britain over the Alabama claims before betraying them, Roberts showed little reluctance about rushing into a relationship with new political bedfellows, whom he called “the only true and consistent party in the country.”

  Making his own visit to Washington, D.C., the chronically bitter Stephens resented the attention showered upon Roberts. When Stephens learned of Colfax’s planned introduction of Roberts at the Orphans’ Fair, he turned down the Speaker’s offer to introduce him to the House as well. On the evening of June 19, he spoke before several hundred Fenian leaders at Odd Fell
ows Hall and repudiated any connection with the Canadian foray.

  The audience escorted Stephens to the Metropolitan Hotel, where he appeared on a balcony and continued to fire barbs at Roberts. Stephens proclaimed his allegiance to the Democrats as the internal Fenian split now broke along party lines as well. The rhetorical firefight between Roberts and Stephens had grown so fierce that newspapers printed rumors that the two men had agreed to settle their dispute with pistols in a duel.

  The Capitol Hill embrace of the Fenians who had attacked Canada angered not only Stephens but the British as well. “I fear it augurs badly for the termination of this Fenian agitation,” Bruce wrote to Lord Clarendon after Colfax’s introduction of Roberts in Washington. “It is a proof of the great influence the Irish vote will exercise in the elections, and I am much afraid that the wish to conciliate it may lead to some violent report, if not resolution on the Neutrality Laws as affecting this question.”

  * * *

  The Fenians might not have held on to any of their territory, but they still thoroughly occupied the minds of Canadians as spring blossomed into summer. Canada had reason to feel on edge beyond just the attacks by the Irish Republican Army. Radical Republicans saw an opportunity to use the Fenians not only to erode political support for Johnson but also to fulfill the Manifest Destiny of the United States. American politicians who cast lustful eyes to the north believed that fears of another Fenian raid could drive up the cost of British defenses and Canadian taxes, producing a financial crisis that could lead to the success of annexationists within the country.

  Many Americans believed it only a matter of time before the United States would swallow Canada, just as it had vast swaths of territory west of the Mississippi River throughout the century. The idea even had the imprimatur of God. “The United States should take Canada and incorporate it into the American Union,” Pope Pius IX had told Rufus King, U.S. minister in Rome, in November 1865, “rather than allow the Fenians to possess themselves of it. Better that it should be done by a regularly constituted government than by a revolutionary, irresponsible government, subject to no control and liable to every excess.”

  There was nothing clandestine about American aspirations. In fact, on July 2, Representative Banks introduced a bill to the Committee on Foreign Affairs that put into writing the plan for the incorporation of Canada into the United States. The legislation called for the admission of four new states—Nova Scotia (including Prince Edward Island), New Brunswick, Canada East (Newfoundland and Quebec), and Canada West—and the territories of Selkirk, Saskatchewan, and Columbia.

  The bill even assigned twelve congressmen to Canada West, eleven to Canada East, four to Nova Scotia, and two to New Brunswick. The legislation set aside $85.7 million to pay for the new northern states plus $10 million for the Hudson’s Bay Company, as well as funds to build a transcontinental railroad across Canada and expand the canal system along the St. Lawrence River.

  While Americans believed the Fenian raids might drive Canada into American arms, just the opposite was happening. The British provinces grew more united, more open to the idea of forming a confederation. The speaker of the Legislative Assembly told Lord Monck in August of “the gradual but decided change of public opinion in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia on behalf of a closer alliance with Canada” as a result of “the outrages which had been committed upon the soil of Canada by a lawless band of marauders.”

  As rumors of another Fenian raid continued to spread, a new Canadian nationalism began to sprout. “The covenant of our nationality has been sealed with blood,” proclaimed the Toronto Daily Telegraph. As some Canadians wondered whether they could depend on Great Britain to defend them, the British statesman Benjamin Disraeli mused about whether to let its province go. “If the colonists can’t, as a general rule, defend themselves against the Fenians, they can do nothing,” he wrote. “What is the use of these colonial dead weights which we do not govern?”

  11

  Political Blarney

  THE IRISH REPUBLICAN Army had the Queen’s Own Rifles and the Tenth Royals on the run once again. A staccato of musket fire punctuated a sustained chorus of feral Fenian yells as General John O’Neill’s men charged across the smoke-shrouded battlefield. Enduring withering fire, the Irish soldiers pushed the redcoats back at the points of their bayonets.

  Fenian hands that weren’t locked in combat with the enemy tore the Union Jack away from its standard-bearer, while Fenian boots trampled the hated emblem into the ground. Believing the cause to be lost, the Canadian forces broke into a panicked retreat as Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Booker failed once again to maintain the discipline of his men.

  As soon as the Fenians drove the royal soldiers through a gate in a fence like sheep into a pen, thousands of spectators burst into applause. Lowering their firearms loaded with blank cartridges, the combatants exchanged friendly handshakes with their erstwhile foes. It was another successful reenactment of the Battle of Ridgeway.

  The four hundred participants in the mock battle all had Fenian allegiances; some even had firsthand experience fighting at Limestone Ridge. Organizers of the reenactment might have had an easier time raising a private army to attack Canada once again than to recruit Irishmen to don red coats—even in jest—but the First Company of Veterans and members of the Emmet Guards agreed to assume the uncomfortable role of the enemy. The Corcoran Guards had the honor of playing the victorious Irish, with Captain John C. Nial portraying O’Neill as the general himself watched from the sidelines.

  The sham battle was among the highlights during a day of Irish songs, dances, sports, and speeches at Clinton Grove outside Buffalo on August 21, 1866, which raised $10,000 for the cause of Irish freedom. Held on a Tuesday afternoon, the grand Fenian picnic drew upwards of twenty thousand people, including Irishmen from Cleveland to Boston and beyond.

  From across the Niagara River at Fort Erie, the real soldiers of the Tenth Royals remained vigilant as they listened to the crackle of the faux musket fire. A British gunboat lurked along the international border, ports open and guns trained on Fenian excursion boats while watching every movement with unease.

  Fenians might have chuckled at their paranoia, but the Canadians on the Niagara Peninsula had good reason to be on edge. O’Neill’s victory at Ridgeway had ignited a Fenian fever throughout western New York. Cities with one Fenian circle now had three or four. “Localities where it was thought the old fire was dead, and nothing but the ashes left, have burst anew into flame,” reported one Fenian in a letter to The Irish-American.

  With the outpouring of Irish sentiment in upstate New York and the warm political embrace of the Fenians by the Radical Republicans, Canadians believed another invasion was imminent. The spymaster Gilbert McMicken’s detectives reported in July and August that the Fenians were regrouping, and he worried that the Irish Republican Army would launch a “second and more serious invasion of Canada” in advance of that fall’s congressional elections. As a precaution in the days leading up to the grand picnic in Buffalo, two thousand Canadian troops had been shifted east across Ontario from Stratford and Grimsby to Thorold, just miles from Niagara Falls.

  The Roberts wing lacked the money and equipment necessary to launch yet another attack on Canada, but throughout the summer of 1866 the Fenian Brotherhood replenished its coffers with grand picnics similar to the one in Buffalo. Few speakers on the fund-raising circuit proved to be as popular as O’Neill.

  The unassuming general had emerged from the Battle of Ridgeway as the Fenians’ rising star and the vessel for all their hopes, having delivered the first military victory by the Irish on British soil in 150 years. Blame for the retreat of his forces from the Niagara Peninsula never stained O’Neill. That blight fell on the White House, James Stephens, and, even in some corners, General Thomas Sweeny for devising the failed war plan.

  O’Neill, however, would have sooner stared down bullets on the battlefield
than an audience from behind a lectern. He had little use for words, believing the gift of gab an endemic fault of his people, who talked “too much and acted too little.”

  O’Neill proved a quick study, however. After posting bail at the end of June, following his indictment for violating the Neutrality Act, the general departed Buffalo to return home to Nashville. Stopping in Louisville, O’Neill was the featured speaker at the annual Fenian Brotherhood picnic on the Fourth of July. The Irishmen who paid their $1 admissions witnessed not only a grand display of fireworks but also a rhetorical flourish from O’Neill, who demonstrated a knack for oration that belied his own modest claims.

  “The campaign has only commenced,” the general shouted, and “though it may have received a temporary check it will ere long burst forth in all its fury.” O’Neill pledged that “the green flag, so long trampled in the dust by a hated oppressor, will wave once again over our lovely little island home.” He elicited cheers so loud that the crowd had difficulty hearing him above all the commotion.

  Later that night, O’Neill arrived home in Nashville after more than a month away, returning to his wife and young child. Back at his Cedar Street claims agency, O’Neill resumed his work of challenging authority. He continued to fight the federal government for back pay, bounties, and pensions owed to soldiers and represented slave owners who he said were due $300 compensation for each of their slaves who enlisted in the U.S. Army. As a sign of O’Neill’s growing fame, his newspaper advertisements now announced that while he could give references, “I take it that I am well enough known in this state.”

  Prior to the Battle of Ridgeway, he had little use for politics. But he began to have a political awakening after the White House inserted itself into the Fenian raids. “I never voted in all my life,” he confessed to an audience in Nashville, “but henceforth my policy will be to adhere to that party which is in favor of Irish independence.”