When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  “The result of O’Neill’s visit to Chicago has been to strengthen the Fenian cause fifty fold,” one Canadian spy reported. “Many who were formerly adherents of the O’Mahony party, and had thrown up the cause as hopeless, are now its strongest supporters and are ready for any movement no matter how unlawful or rash it may be.”

  As O’Neill continued to energize Fenian audiences, he remained bitter toward the man he still blamed for thwarting his takeover of Canada two years earlier. With his power increasing, O’Neill traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet him in person—president to president.

  * * *

  Washington, D.C., had truly become a federal city during the Civil War as the American government swelled to an unprecedented level. The newly constructed dome of the U.S. Capitol loomed over the cityscape, a powerful symbol of the Union, but the granite stump of the unfinished Washington Monument—its construction halted fourteen years earlier due to a lack of money—served as a reminder of the hard work that remained in building a more perfect union.

  Seeking an audience with President Johnson, O’Neill stepped through the doors of the White House, which still bore burn marks on its walls from the British visit during the War of 1812, and joined the callers who flocked outside the president’s office every day in search of a moment with the commander in chief to lobby for a patronage job or a pet project.

  Accompanying the Fenian president on the trip was one of his closest confidants, Major Henri Le Caron. A slender, refined figure with a military mustache, Le Caron was described as having “one of the boniest faces in or out of the New World, a death’s head with a tight skin of yellow parchment.” A human chimney who consumed as many as sixteen cigars a day, Le Caron watched life through a haze of smoke. Beneath his lofty forehead and neatly combed black hair, his beady eyes remained on constant alert, continually darting around his surroundings.

  In search of adventure, Le Caron had come to the United States from Paris at the outbreak of the Civil War. He served as a private and bugler with the Fifteenth Pennsylvania Cavalry before becoming a lieutenant in the Thirteenth U.S. Colored Cavalry. Fellow soldiers found something just a little odd about Le Caron but chalked it up to his being a Frenchman. Rumors circulated around the campfires that Le Caron was related to the princes of Orléans, although he had a strange tendency at times to slip into an English Cockney accent.

  While stationed in Nashville, Le Caron became acquaintances with O’Neill, who was serving with the Seventeenth U.S. Colored Cavalry. O’Neill found himself drawn to the Parisian, who entertained him with tall tales and claimed Hibernian roots on his mother’s side. It was in Nashville that Le Caron, like O’Neill, joined the Fenian Brotherhood.

  Following the war, Le Caron moved to Illinois and pursued a career in medicine. He took classes at the Chicago Medical College and worked as a surgical assistant inside the Illinois State Penitentiary in Joliet until adventure beckoned once again a few months after O’Neill took leadership of the Fenians. “Come at once, you are needed for work,” the Fenian president telegrammed Le Caron.

  Summoned to Fenian headquarters in New York, Le Caron quit his job and left his family behind. O’Neill commissioned him a major and military organizer for the Irish Republican Army at a salary of $60 a month plus $7 a day for expenses. He tasked Le Caron with inspecting and reorganizing the organization’s military units in the East, and now he brought him along to join in the audience with President Johnson, who had served as Tennessee’s military governor at the same time both men were stationed in Nashville.

  Johnson limped into 1868 as the lamest of lame ducks—even before his impeachment by the Republican-dominated House of Representatives and acquittal by a single vote following his trial by the Senate. The American president had heard the enduring criticism from Irish Americans about his actions during the Fenian raid of 1866 and thought it unjust. “They don’t take into account that we can’t do just what we want in these things,” he told The Cincinnati Commercial. “As Andrew Johnson, I have always sympathized with this movement, but a man can’t always do officially what he feels unofficially. We must obey certain laws of nations—we must obey the neutrality laws.”

  Johnson sat down with Le Caron and O’Neill, and he reiterated his support of the Fenian cause. “General, your people unfairly blame me a good deal for the part I took in stopping your first movement,” the president said, according to Le Caron’s account. “Now I want you to understand that my sympathies are entirely with you, and anything which lies in my power I am willing to do to assist you. But you must remember that I gave you five full days before issuing any proclamation stopping you. What, in God’s name, more did you want? If you could not get there in five days, by God, you could never get there.”

  If Le Caron’s report of the White House meeting was accurate, Johnson had once again signaled the support of the American government for the Fenian cause. The unresolved Alabama claims and cases of American citizens incarcerated in British prisons continued to divide the United States and Great Britain, and O’Neill intended to take full advantage of the split to strike Canada once again.

  * * *

  Among O’Neill’s first actions as president of the Fenian Brotherhood had been distancing the organization from the Clerkenwell prison explosion as well as from the reports arriving from overseas that Fenians had sent explosive letters addressed to prominent British officials in Dublin and thrown bottles of incendiary Greek fire, now being called “Fenian fire” by the British press, through the windows of London homes in hopes of setting them ablaze. The violent episodes caused Charles Dickens to feel uneasy about his safety as he embarked on a reading tour of the United States. “I have an opinion myself that the Irish element in New York is dangerous for the reason that the Fenians would be glad to damage a conspicuous Englishman,” he wrote.

  O’Neill had no interest in such an enterprise, however. Having become comfortable in his role as Fenian president and bolstered by the tacit support of the White House, O’Neill fixated on fulfilling the pledge that he had made to Canadian soldiers while departing Fort Erie in June 1866 to return soon with an even larger army. That Canada had cut some of its ties to Great Britain through confederation mattered not to the Fenian president. Any territory that was partly British was still British.

  To its moral credit but military disadvantage, the Fenian Brotherhood clung to its dubious strategy of winning Ireland’s freedom by challenging the British on the battlefield. For O’Neill, there was nothing gallant in bombing civilians, murdering political leaders, or perpetrating attacks through the postal service. An O’Neill could only find glory confronting the enemy soldier to soldier.

  “The Fenian organization will not fight their battles by assassination of individuals,” O’Neill told an audience in Buffalo in February 1868. Events in the coming weeks, however, would cause many to question the honesty of that pledge.

  14

  Blood in the Street

  IN THE YEARS following the Civil War, people, money, information, and ideologies traveled faster than ever before. Steamships delivered quicker trips across the oceans. Telegraphs slashed the time it took for news to spread from days to hours. The unprecedented advances in communications and technology blurred international borders and allowed for the globalization of Ireland’s political problems.

  Leaders at the highest level of the British Empire worried about the possibility of a transborder conspiracy among the Fenians and the exportation of Irish political violence from nearby England to faraway Australia. Their worst fears appeared to be realized when an orderly room clerk to William Roberts reported to the Canadian prime minister, John A. Macdonald, that a thirty-man Fenian assassination squad had departed the United States for England with plans to kill Queen Victoria, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the British prime minister.

  Then, on March 9, 1868, a Canadian double agent reported directly to Macdonald that Fenians in Ch
icago had plotted to dispatch three hired assassins to England to murder the Prince of Wales by poison or dagger. Three days later, an Irishman indeed tried to murder one of Queen Victoria’s sons, but it was her second-eldest son, Prince Alfred. The favorite son of the “Famine Queen” was attending a picnic in a suburb north of Sydney, Australia, during the first royal tour of Britain’s antipodal colony when the Irish Catholic immigrant Henry O’Farrell approached from behind and fired a pistol at close range into his back. “I’m a bloody Fenian and will die for my country!” yelled the Irishman. Fortuitously, the royal’s India rubber braces slowed the velocity of the bullet, which miraculously missed his vital organs, allowing him to survive. O’Farrell was not in fact part of a conspiratorial network but a loner drawn to the Fenian ideology. In spite of a request from the prince himself to spare his shooter’s life, the Irishman went to the gallows on April 21, 1868. By the time the news of Prince Alfred’s shooting crossed from Australia to North America, another pro-British political figure had been shot by an Irishman—this time fatally.

  * * *

  For most of the winter, illness exacerbated by chronic alcoholism had confined Thomas D’Arcy McGee to his house in Montreal, where many of his former Irish friends now shunned him. McGee’s harsh words toward the Fenian cause had earned him an expulsion from the St. Patrick’s Society of Montreal in November 1867, and he continued to antagonize the Irish by vilifying the Manchester Martyrs.

  A leader of the Young Irelander Rebellion in 1848, Thomas D’Arcy McGee earned the wrath of the Fenians when he became an outspoken supporter of the British Crown as a member of the Canadian Parliament.

  With his health at last improving, McGee returned to Ottawa. He took to the floor of the House of Commons in the early morning hours of April 7 during a late-night session where he stood by his principles, even if it came at a price. “I hope that in this House mere temporary or local popularity will never be made the test by which to measure the worth or efficiency of a public servant. He, sir, who builds upon popularity builds upon a shifting sand,” he said to applause. McGee told the chamber that a true leader was someone “ready to meet and stem the tide of temporary unpopularity, who is prepared, if needs be, to sacrifice himself in defense of the principles which he has adopted as those of truth—who shows us that he is ready not only to triumph with his principles, but even to suffer for his principles.”

  McGee closed his speech with a rhetorical flourish in which he declared himself “not as the representative of any race, or of any Province, but as thoroughly and emphatically a Canadian.” It was one of the finest speeches he had ever delivered and well received by his fellow parliamentarians.

  Buoyed by the address and his steadily improving health, McGee was in a celebratory mood once debate ended around 2:00 a.m. Sober for several months, he sidled up to the bar inside the House of Commons and purchased three cigars. He joined Prime Minister Macdonald for a smoke and then began to walk home.

  Under the light of a full moon, he approached the Toronto House, where he had been boarding for nearly a month. Still suffering from an ulcerated leg, McGee limped and fumbled with his key as a figure approached from behind. Mary Ann Trotter, the boardinghouse’s owner, sat awake within, awaiting not just McGee’s return but that of her thirteen-year-old son, Willie, a page in the House of Commons.

  That is my boy coming home, Trotter thought to herself as she heard the footsteps outside the dining room window, followed by the muffled tap on the door like the one she had instructed Willie to use when out late so as not to disturb any guests sleeping inside.

  Trotter turned the knob and opened the door. A sudden flash blinded her, and a loud crack echoed through the empty street as she inhaled gunpowder. She saw a man in a white top hat slumped on the ground. Trotter closed the door. She grabbed a lamp, which illuminated the blood splattered on the foyer floor and on her nightgown. She opened the door again and found the figure slumped even further to the ground against the stone doorpost.

  Trotter called for her other boarders, who approached the lifeless body and identified it as McGee’s. The parliamentarian had been shot in the back of the neck. The .32-caliber bullet that passed through his mouth was so powerful that it blasted his false teeth into the Toronto House foyer. McGee’s glove and cigar lay in the street a few feet away as his blood pooled on the sidewalk and trickled into the gutter. The onetime Young Ireland member and fierce supporter of confederation was dead. The young Canadian nation now had its own martyr.*1

  * * *

  Even before the crime scene had been cleaned, Canadian leaders inside the House of Commons believed they knew the culprit: Fenianism. “If Thomas D’Arcy McGee had not taken the patriotic stand which he took before and during the Fenian invasion of this country,” George-Étienne Cartier, minister of militia and defense, told a quiet chamber, “he would not be lying a corpse this morning.”

  The anguished prime minister rose to address the chamber. “He who was with us last night, no, this morning, is no more,” Macdonald said as eyes naturally drifted to McGee’s empty seat. “He has been slain, and I fear slain because he preferred the path of duty.”

  McGee’s face had been so severely mutilated by the bullet that the traditional Victorian death mask was replaced by a plaster cast of his right hand, a more appropriate memorial of the poet, journalist, and man of words. Authorities plastered posters across Ottawa that offered a $2,000 reward for the apprehension of the killer. With habeas corpus still suspended in Canada, police rounded up forty Irishmen suspected of Fenian sympathies. Less than twenty-four hours after the assassination, police believed they had the murderer—Patrick James Whelan, who had been seen lurking about Parliament during McGee’s final hours.

  Born around 1840 in County Galway, the red-bearded Whelan had arrived in Canada a few years earlier. A tailor by trade, he had joined the Volunteer Cavalry in Quebec City, where he was arrested on suspicion of being a Fenian but released because of a lack of evidence. After marrying a woman thirty years his senior in Montreal, Whelan moved to Ottawa in November 1867 to work for the tailor Peter Eagleson, a Fenian supporter.

  When the police entered Whelan’s hotel room, they discovered several issues of The Irish-American and blank membership cards from Irish nationalist organizations, which suggested he had been a Fenian recruiter. Although all six chambers of his Smith and Wesson revolver were loaded, the gun appeared to have been recently fired and its bullets matched that of the one fired at McGee. As detectives looked for proof of a larger Fenian conspiracy, Canada united in grief.

  * * *

  An estimated 80,000 people—in a city of barely more than 100,000—lined the streets of Montreal on Easter Monday to honor one of the Fathers of Confederation and to send a defiant message to the gun-toting Fenians who threatened their country. While the organization’s president, John O’Neill, condemned “the dastardly, cowardly assassination of McGee,” other American Fenians were less forgiving, such as the one who told a New York World reporter, “McGee did as much as he could to disgrace our people by his double dealing and treachery, and we cannot feel very sorry for him. Some of us looked upon him as we would upon a poisonous rattlesnake.”

  Nearly eighty thousand people lined the streets of Montreal to pay their respects to Thomas D’Arcy McGee during his funeral procession.

  On what would have been McGee’s forty-third birthday, six gray horses draped in black velvet drew his hearse through the streets of Montreal. Spectators kept McGee close to their hearts, wearing black silk mourning badges that featured his photograph pinned to their chests. Fifteen thousand mourners joined in the massive procession accompanying the hearse. During the solemn funeral Mass in St. Patrick’s Basilica, the vicar-general closed his eulogy with a denunciation of the Fenians that provoked a spontaneous burst of applause, the heartiest coming from many Irish hands, until the priest reminded the congregation they were in a house of God.


  While Macdonald said he believed the shooting of his friend to be “a deliberate decision of the Fenian Organization” and “not the act of one individual only,” investigators could find no evidence of conspiracy.

  At Whelan’s trial, the evidence against him was circumstantial at best. Still, his lack of an alibi, and the discovery of his boot prints in the snow opposite the Toronto House, were enough to seal his fate. They were bolstered by detectives who, hiding near Whelan’s cell, testified that they heard him brag to a fellow inmate, “I shot that fellow like a dog.”

  After an eight-day trial, the jury delivered the verdict: guilty, sentenced to death. “I am here standing on the brink of my grave,” Whelan told the court after the verdict, “and I wish to declare to you and to my God that I am innocent, that I never committed this deed, and that, I know in my heart and soul. In the next place I have been charged with being a Fenian. I assure you and every living soul that I never was so at any time—at home or abroad.”

  In his last hours on death row, Whelan penned a three-page letter to the prime minister in which he admitted to being present at the scene of the shooting and to knowing who pulled the trigger. If true, Whelan chose a trip to the gallows over being an informant. Whelan’s execution the following year would be Canada’s last public hanging.