When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  Kelly, McCafferty, and other Fenian military leaders set sail from New York on January 12, but Stephens missed the boat. The Fenian chief claimed that he had been a victim of a “deplorable trick” because the ship departed two hours earlier than he had been told, although a wounded ego and an empty wallet were more likely to blame. It took Stephens several weeks to raise the money to pay for passage to Paris, but he could not afford transit on to England or Ireland. So he remained in France.

  Stephens would no longer play a central role in the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The grizzled patriot who had rekindled Irish nationalism and erected the transatlantic partnership with the diaspora had spent nearly a decade leading the Irish revolutionary movement. Such longevity in office testified to his leadership skills, but of course it also reflected his inability to achieve his goal of overthrowing British rule on the island of his birth. The IRB leader ultimately proved too cautious for his followers. They wanted a man of action. Stephens wasn’t one of them.

  * * *

  Kelly pressed ahead with plans from his new operational base in London, where he established the “Provisional Government of the Irish Republic” and assumed the role of chief executive. On March 5, 1867, he launched the long-awaited Fenian Rising. A messenger delivered the Fenians’ proclamation of the Irish Republic, which had been drafted by Kelly and his fellow officers, to The Times in London. The manifesto was a radical, republican, and secular document that called for the separation of church and state, universal suffrage, and absolute liberty of conscience.

  “We have suffered centuries of outrage, enforced poverty, and bitter misery,” read the document. “Our rights and liberties have been trampled on by an alien aristocracy, who treating us as foes, usurped our lands, and drew away from our unfortunate country all material riches. The real owners of the soil were removed to make room for cattle, and driven across the ocean to seek the means of living, and the political rights denied to them at home, while our men of thought and action were condemned to loss of life and liberty.”

  That night, republicans sought to repossess what rightly belonged to them. The rebels launched scattered attacks on coast guard posts, police stations, and military barracks. In Cork, over one thousand Irishmen marched into the countryside to confront the British. The most serious fighting occurred in the village of Tallaght, southwest of Dublin, where a few hundred Fenians exchanged gunfire with a small force of constables, resulting in the deaths of two rebels.

  It turned out to be a terrible night to schedule a revolution, because a winter storm unlike any seen in Ireland in half a century swept across the island. A tempest of snow fell for five straight days, leaving roads impassable. The Fenian Rising, which took twelve lives, proved a dismal military failure. Even without the meteorological hardship, the Irishmen lacked weapons, organization, and a cohesive military strategy. Spies and informers had infiltrated the operation, and the British were able, due to the suspension of habeas corpus, to detain ringleaders such as McCafferty in the days before the rebellion.

  “It was as pitiful and silly a farce as ever ignorant fellows were seduced into,” reported Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. “There appeared to be no plan, no organization, no head. Simply irregular bodies of poor, unarmed men, wandering about objectless.” Stephens might have been too cautious for the liking of Kelly and other military leaders, but at least in this instance he had been correct: The Fenian Rising wasn’t ready.

  Sporadic skirmishes flared for several weeks after March 5. American Fenians grew discouraged at the newspaper reports from Ireland, but Kelly assured them the papers were filled with falsehoods. “Don’t believe a tenth of the vile newspaper reports about complete suppression—utter routs—overwhelming defeats,” wrote Kelly, who beseeched Irish Americans to keep sending money and supplies. “In heaven’s name don’t stop at anything until I proclaim hostilities ceased.” It was not too late for the patriots to send help across the Atlantic, and he had a specific operation in mind: “A landing in Sligo at the present time would be of infinite service.”

  * * *

  In packs of twos and threes, some forty Irishmen, most of them Civil War veterans, arrived at the foot of Manhattan’s Canal Street on April 12 and boarded a small steamer for a pleasure cruise of New York Harbor. It seemed curious, though, that some of the men carried aboard luggage for the day trip.

  The steamer returned to the dock devoid of passengers the following day, having deposited them aboard the Jacmel Packet, a two-masted brigantine that had plied the trade routes from the United States to Australia before it fell into the custody of New York City’s customs collector in February 1867 and eventually became available to the Fenians two months later.

  Captain John F. Kavanagh, a prominent Fenian who served as a naval lieutenant during the Civil War, took the wheel of the vessel on which he had never before set foot, and the Jacmel Packet spread its sails with an American flag flapping in the wind. Below deck, there was cargo marked as sewing machines and casks of wine consigned to merchants in Cuba. Their actual contents included five thousand stands of arms, three artillery batteries, one thousand sabers, and more than a million rounds of ammunition.

  Kavanagh turned right out of New York Harbor toward the West Indies so as not to arouse suspicion, but after two days at sea he abruptly pointed the ship toward Ireland. Shortly before noon on April 21, Easter Sunday, the Fenians gathered on deck. Lowering the Stars and Stripes, the Irishmen raised a green flag with a sunburst into the sky while they unleashed a thirty-two-gun salute—one shot for each county in Ireland—before letting loose with wild cheers and handshakes. Kavanagh rechristened the ship Erin’s Hope and read orders to land the guns in the northwest Irish city of Sligo with James Kerrigan, the former congressman who participated in the Eastport expedition, commanding the military expedition.

  After thirty-three days at sea, the Irishmen caught their first glimpses of the homeland. Based on Kelly’s reports, they expected to see green-and-gold flags waving over the wild Atlantic coast and boatloads of rebels rowing out to welcome them and their guns. For six days, however, Erin’s Hope lurked along the shore, receiving no reply to their signal.

  Finally, on May 25, Colonel Ricard O’Sullivan Burke approached in a cutter-rigged vessel on Sligo Bay and shouted the Fenian countersign from the deck. Posing as an English tourist, the County Cork native had managed to charm the locals in Sligo, who took him into their homes. One of Kelly’s closest advisers, Burke had traveled the world before enlisting in the Fifteenth Regiment New York Volunteers at the outbreak of the Civil War and serving from Bull Run to Appomattox. A trained engineer, he worked as a Fenian agent purchasing arms in Great Britain and managed the Fenian Rising activities around Waterford.

  Boarding Erin’s Hope, Burke delivered unexpected news: The rebellion had petered out back in March. They were too late—two months too late. In truth, the time had been ripe two years earlier, when the IRB’s power was at its peak, American anger toward the British at its height, and the Fenian Brotherhood unified. Thanks to dithering and division, the fruitful moment had spoiled.

  With provisions running low on Erin’s Hope, Kavanagh could not simply turn around and return to the United States. The guns could stay, but he needed to off-load some Fenians to ensure everyone’s survival. Burke instructed Kavanagh to sail to the rebel stronghold of Cork in the southeast of Ireland in hopes of finding a safe harbor for the men to put ashore.

  Dodging British cruisers, Kavanagh circled the southern half of Ireland. Under the cloak of a thick mist, on the morning of June 1, thirty-two Fenians led by Colonel William Nagle boarded a fishing boat and cruised into Dungarvan Bay on the coast of County Waterford, disregarding Kavanagh’s warning not to land in daylight. Alerted by a member of the coast guard, police arrested the Fenians as they wandered country roads, their wet trousers from wading ashore betraying any possible alibis.

  Erin’s Hope
returned to New York on August 1 after its nine-thousand-mile, one-hundred-day cruise. Meanwhile, three American citizens and expedition leaders—Nagle, Colonel John Warren, and Captain Augustine Costello—sat in Dublin’s Kilmainham Jail. The British eventually released Nagle, who was born in the United States, along with most of the rebels who arrived aboard Erin’s Hope. However, they tried the Irish-born Warren and Costello as British citizens in spite of their naturalized citizenship in the United States. The pair did not commit any actual crimes on British soil, had no weapons in their possession when arrested, and were American citizens, yet they were convicted of treason felony—in essence for words spoken in the United States that were heard by the arch informer John Joseph Corydon. Warren received a fifteen-year sentence, Costello twelve. The two Americans were sent to some of the most brutal of British prisons, where they were placed in solitary confinement, chained, and put to work picking apart strands of old tar ropes.

  On top of the still-simmering tensions over the Alabama claims, the imprisonment of Warren and Costello flared as another flash point between the United States and Great Britain. The British government rejected the claim that anyone born in Great Britain had the right to renounce his or her British citizenship and pledge allegiance to another country. Once a subject of the Crown, forever a subject of the Crown. The idea particularly galled the majority of the Irish, who were born on British soil through no desire of their own.

  The issue of citizenship had been a point of contention between the United States and Great Britain during the War of 1812, when the British pulled Irish sailors off American ships and treated them not as prisoners of war but as British deserters. More than half a century later, Irish Americans protesting the treatment of Warren and Costello lobbied President Andrew Johnson and his successor, Ulysses S. Grant, for their release.

  Their efforts resulted in the congressional passage of the Expatriation Act of 1868, which rejected the principle of perpetual allegiance and asserted, “The right of expatriation is a natural and inherent right of all people.” The United States began to renegotiate naturalization treaties with European countries that had the same policy as Great Britain.

  Under international pressure, the British government released Warren and Costello in March 1869, and the following year the British Parliament passed legislation, dubbed the Warren and Costello Act, that acknowledged the right of a British citizen to renounce citizenship and become naturalized to a foreign country.

  * * *

  Following the disappointment of the Fenian Rising, Kelly shifted his operational base from London to Manchester, a city where 15 percent of the population was born in Ireland. There, he blended into Manchester’s Celtic enclaves and directed activities from a secondhand clothes shop that served as the IRB’s secret headquarters. In August 1867, three hundred Fenians surreptitiously convened in Manchester and elected Kelly chief organizer of the Irish Republic, officially marking the end of Stephens’s tenure.

  In the early morning hours of September 11, Kelly loitered outside his secret headquarters with Timothy Deasy—an Irish-born Civil War veteran from Lawrence, Massachusetts—following a late-night meeting chaired by Burke. Given the hour, a Manchester policeman suspected the pair might be plotting a robbery. When the officer searched the two Irishmen, he discovered they were carrying loaded revolvers and arrested the pair for vagrancy. While Kelly told police he was a hatter named John White and Deasy claimed to be the bookbinder Martin Williams, Corydon informed the authorities of their true identities.

  Immediately, Burke and other IRB members in Manchester plotted the rescue of the two Irishmen, who themselves had helped to spring Stephens from a Dublin prison two years earlier. Following a September 18 court appearance, police officers loaded Kelly and Deasy into a Black Maria for the three-mile journey to Belle Vue Jail.

  Two miles from the courthouse, thirty to forty Irishmen who had been lying in wait ambushed the police van as it passed under a railway arch traversing Hyde Road. The twelve unarmed policemen guarding the Black Maria attempted to beat back the Irishmen with their clubs, but they were no match for the revolvers and axes wielded by the mob. Climbing atop the van, the Fenians attempted to smash a hole in the roof with boulders and large pieces of wood harvested from the roadside. When those attempts failed, one frustrated Fenian fired his revolver at the lock on the van’s rear door. The bullet pierced the eye of a police sergeant who was unknowingly looking through the keyhole at the disturbance outside.

  Finally able to open the door, the Fenians rushed into the van and freed Kelly and Deasy as the dead policeman’s body fell to the ground. Still handcuffed, the prisoners fled out of sight. After being secreted away in the safe havens of the local Irish enclave, Kelly and Deasy arrived back in the United States at the end of October.

  In what became known as the “Smashing of the Van,” Fenians ambushed a police van traveling through the streets of Manchester, England, on September 18, 1867, and freed the Fenian leaders Thomas Kelly and Timothy Deasy.

  The news set off jubilation in Ireland. The Irish People praised the audacious rescue of “a well beloved and trusted Fenian chief from the very jaws of the British Lion.” The English public, however, was so outraged at the violent murder of a police officer that it demanded a blood sacrifice of its own in return.

  * * *

  In the wake of what became known as the “Smashing of the Van,” an anti-Irish hysteria swept across Manchester. Police arrested sixty-two Irishmen they suspected of participating in the ambush, and twenty-three faced trials that began just weeks after the attack, leaving little time for heads to cool or defenses to be prepared.

  Under the 1848 Treason Felony Act, anyone guilty of involvement in planning an offense was as guilty as those who executed it, which made it immaterial that the prosecution couldn’t prove which man fired the shot that killed the police officer. After a sixteen-day trial, the jury returned guilty verdicts for five men, whom the court sentenced to die.

  The condemned Irishmen included Michael Larkin, a thirty-two-year-old tailor and father of four; Thomas Maguire, a royal marine visiting his sister while on leave from a stint in India; and William Allen, a nineteen-year-old carpenter. The death row prisoners also included a pair of American citizens. Michael O’Brien, a thirty-one-year-old draper’s assistant from County Cork who used the alias William Gould, served as a lieutenant with a New Jersey regiment during the Civil War. Edward O’Meagher Condon, also a native of County Cork, served as a sergeant in the Irish Legion and was wounded in the Battle of Nashville.

  Following his sentencing, Condon delivered an inspiring address punctuated by three words that would become an enduring rallying cry for generations of Irish republicans. “You will soon send us before God, and I am perfectly prepared to go,” he told the court. “I have nothing to regret, or to retract, or take back. I can only say, God Save Ireland!”

  Days after the death sentences, British authorities discharged Maguire, whose innocence was so clear that court reporters lobbied for his release. Condon’s American citizenship saved him from the gallows after the American minister to the United Kingdom, Charles Francis Adams, lobbied the British government to commute his sentence. The U.S. secretary of state, William Seward, also ordered Adams, whose father and grandfather (John Quincy and John) served as American presidents, to seek clemency for the other condemned American, O’Brien. The ambassador, however, disregarded the order because he had already asked the British to save one American life, and two years earlier he had stepped in to spare O’Brien after he was caught buying rifles in Liverpool with Burke. “The charges brought of so purely a criminal nature, and sustained by such strong evidence,” Adams wrote to Seward, “did not seem to me to be a proper case to attempt to interfere with the usual course of law.” The remaining three men would not be spared.

  * * *

  In the early morning hours of November 23, a yellow, murky fog
blanketed the gallows like a funeral shroud as thousands gathered outside New Bailey Prison sang and shouted in anticipation of the spectacle. Despite the early hour, nearby gin palaces did a brisk business lubricating spectators, while street vendors peddled coffee and potatoes roasted on little stoves. With rumors that the Fenians would try to shoot the hangman, William Calcraft, an assistant remained on standby to ensure that the executions would continue, should the executioner be gunned down.

  Shortly after the prison clock struck 8:00 a.m., Calcraft placed the three fatal cords dripping from the crossbar of the gallows around the necks of Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien. He then pulled the bolt, and the men plummeted from view.

  “If you reflect on it, it is nothing, I am dying an honorable death, I am dying for the fatherland, dying for the land that gave me birth, dying for the island of Saints, and dying for liberty,” the teenage Allen wrote in a gallant missive to his aunt and uncle hours before he mounted the scaffold clutching a crucifix. “It is sad to be parting you all at my early age, but we must all die someday or another, a few hours more and I will breathe my last on English soil. Oh, that I could be buried in Ireland.”

  Prison officials, however, covered the bodies of the three Irishmen in quicklime to prevent a Catholic burial and interred them in unmarked graves inside the penitentiary. From that foggy morning on the gallows, the first political revolutionaries hanged in the United Kingdom since Robert Emmet in 1803 passed into the mists of Irish history. While the English considered the trio the “Manchester Murderers,” Irish newspapers called them the “Manchester Martyrs.”