When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

* * *

  During the summer of 1868, the American government suspected that the Fenians might again be up to something closer to the border. Fearing that some Irish Catholic government agents were sympathetic to the Fenian cause, the U.S. War Department contracted with a private detective company newly founded by the Chicago police detective and native Scotsman Allan Pinkerton to investigate the Fenians in the Midwest. Pinkerton assured government officials that “the detectives detailed upon the operation were Protestant Irishmen” and “thoroughly to be relied upon.”

  Pinkerton’s detectives unearthed little evidence of an imminent attack and discovered no weapons out of the ordinary around Chicago. What they did find, however, was growing discord among the Fenian leadership over the organization’s treasury.

  In spite of O’Neill’s tireless fund-raising efforts, money problems derailed his hopes to have troops stationed in Canada by the end of 1868. Only one-third of the $167,450 pledged for the next Fenian raid at the Cleveland congress in September 1867 ever made its way into the organization’s treasury over the ensuing nine months.

  O’Neill and the senate began to clash over who was responsible for the depleted budget. Irishmen who had donated their hard-earned money criticized the organization’s profligate spending, and some scrutinized the mounting expense account that accompanied O’Neill’s frequent travels. “General O’Neill moves through the country with a staff larger than the King of Dahomy,” groused The Irish Republic.

  O’Neill conceded his expenses were high because of his considerable travel. “I have never believed, nor do I now, in what some are pleased to term ‘economy,’ in conducting the affairs of the Brotherhood, too much economy would kill it. Our people must have excitement and are willing to pay for it,” he asserted to Senator Frank Gallagher.

  The Fenian president knew that the real budget buster was Patrick J. Meehan’s rifle conversion project, which nearly bankrupted the Fenian treasury and far exceeded the projected $25,000 cost. The final total climbed to $68,040. In order to cover the cost overrun, Meehan and other senators paid $7,500 out of their own pockets.

  In April 1869, O’Neill and James Gibbons, who served as vice president and senate leader, announced that they were reducing the size of the headquarters staff and jettisoning its organizing corps in order to funnel as much money as possible into breechloaders and ammunition.

  In fact, the only Fenian making hay in the spring of 1869 was eating it as well. On the opening day of the spring meeting at Jerome Park Racetrack outside New York City, a chestnut stallion named Fenian, bred by the investment banker August Belmont, ran away from an eight-horse field to capture the race named in honor of his owner—the Belmont Stakes. (The silver figure of Fenian still graces the top of the Tiffany trophy that has been given to subsequent winners of the Belmont Stakes.) After that one victorious burst of speed, however, Fenian never saw the winners’ circle again.*2

  * * *

  American and Canadian authorities detected little Fenian activity on either side of the border during the summer of 1869. “Were it not for the almost insane enthusiasm of O’Neill himself, I should consider the affair almost at an end,” the new British minister to the United States, Edward Thornton, wrote to Secretary of State Hamilton Fish at the end of August.

  The Fenian president, though, had become fed up with the ceaseless solicitation he needed to perform in order to stay solvent and the painfully slow progress of accumulating the war fund. “I am sick and tired of traveling from point to point, begging money, and will only continue as long as it is absolutely necessary,” O’Neill wrote to Gallagher. Given his lineage, O’Neill wanted to shake the British Empire, not the money trees of America. Warriors, not fund-raisers, became Irish legends.

  The Fenian president was determined to fight—no matter the size of the bankroll. He felt confident that the money would flow once he crossed the border and created a sensation. An impatient O’Neill told Gibbons that he could no longer delay the attack, but the senate president protested that given their lack of men and money another Canadian foray would be doomed to fail. Where Gibbons saw prudence, O’Neill saw cowardice.

  The tensions between the Fenian president and senate grew increasingly bitter. O’Neill’s critics accused him of embezzling money from the Fenian treasury and living comfortably on the donations of poor Irishmen. Flashing back to 1865, senators believed it a repeat of the extravagant spending by O’Mahony and his cronies inside Moffat Mansion.

  In truth, the only people the Fenian president robbed were his wife and children—depriving them of family time and attention while he pursued his Canadian obsession—and his personal debts continued to mount, forcing him to even borrow $364.41 from his underling Henri Le Caron. As O’Neill and Meehan pointed fingers at each other for the budget-busting armory project, their friendship fell apart. The pages of The Irish-American began to direct their editorial barbs at the Fenian president.

  * * *

  Even without the backing of the senate, O’Neill proceeded with his preparations for a Canadian invasion. The Fenian president knew firsthand that a lack of weapons and supplies, more than a dearth of manpower, crippled his invasion in 1866 and hastened his withdrawal from the Niagara Peninsula. As a result, he vowed that every soldier who participated in the next Fenian raid would have a gun in his hands and all the provisions necessary.

  The Fenians had accumulated a sizable arsenal under O’Neill’s leadership. According to the Canadian spymaster Gilbert McMicken, by the end of 1869 they had amassed more than five thousand breech-loading rifles, eighteen thousand muzzle-loading rifles, twenty thousand uniforms, four hundred saddles, and more than seven hundred sabers. All that O’Neill believed the Irish Republican Army still required to complete its preparations was breech-loading ammunition. “It should not be forgotten that an arm which discharges twenty shots per minute is an extravagant weapon and that the supply of ammunition to meet its requirements must be proportionately great,” O’Neill wrote in a circular to members.

  In early November, O’Neill began to deploy the Fenian war stores to secret locations along the Canadian border. He summoned Le Caron, whom he had promoted to lieutenant colonel and acting adjutant general of the Irish Republican Army, to New York. The Parisian left behind his family and medical practice in Illinois, which was more lucrative than the $100-per-month salary that O’Neill offered, to direct the movement of arms and supplies to towns in upstate New York and Vermont that hugged the Canadian frontier. The Fenian president then traveled to Buffalo and recruited Colonel William Clingen to oversee the movement of arms hidden in Pittsburgh to cities on the Great Lakes, including Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit.

  Le Caron and Clingen relied on a network of Fenian agents along the border—such as railroad company employees, hardware merchants, and grocers—who would not arouse suspicions by receiving large volumes of crates and barrels. Once shipped to border towns, the guns and supplies were hidden in the sprawling barns and outbuildings of Irish farmers in the countryside.

  In spite of their efforts at subterfuge, the British and Canadian governments still had considerable intelligence about where Le Caron and Clingen stashed arms along the international boundary. Edward Archibald, the British consul in New York, had received such detailed information from his country’s spies that he was even able to hand sketch maps of the country roads around St. Albans, Vermont, and Potsdam, New York, with the locations of the stashes. Although the British and Canadians might have known where the arms were, Archibald believed there was little they could do about it. He estimated that one thousand troops would be required to seize the vast arsenal, and he doubted, given the number of Irishmen in the U.S. Army, that the secrecy of such a vast operation could be maintained.

  * * *

  The Fenian president never wavered in his belief that Ireland could be freed only by the rifle and saber, and he remained more determined than ever to wash aw
ay the wrongs of Ireland in the blood of its enemy. It was the Roberts wing’s strategy of freeing Ireland by attacking Canada that had originally drawn him to the Fenian Brotherhood four years earlier, and his victory at Ridgeway only solidified his opinion that the only practical way to liberate his homeland was to invade America’s northern neighbor.

  Like the newly elected president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, O’Neill was a soldier at heart, which made him exasperated at the senate’s slavish devotion to deliberation at the price of actually getting something done. Didn’t the senators remember they had broken away from John O’Mahony in 1865 because of his excessive passivity and refusal to strike Canada? They were supposed to be the “men of action,” but nearly four years had slipped away since the last Fenian raid as the senate held meeting after meeting. O’Neill knew that Fenianism, like any revolutionary movement, required action to justify its existence and keep money flowing into its coffers. He saw inaction as the root cause of the Fenian Brotherhood’s declining membership and financial difficulties.

  “I was painfully aware that the longer we waited, the less confidence would the Organization and the Irish people generally have in our ability to succeed,” the Fenian president recalled. “And besides, the thousands of our countrymen who participated in the late war were fast settling down in life, and if we deferred matters much longer, it would be almost impossible to secure a sufficient number of veteran soldiers for the proper inauguration of the movement.” While O’Neill hoped to repeat his military triumph at Ridgeway, he also knew from Irish history that choosing to fight the British could be enough in itself to declare victory. A respectable effort could reenergize the Fenian Brotherhood and flood its coffers.

  O’Neill ignored the report from Senator Richard McCloud, who served as treasury secretary, that the Fenians lacked enough money to pay their clerks, let alone attack a sovereign nation. He believed himself destined to lead an Irish army to a battlefield victory over the British, and he was no longer willing to let the senate dictate whether or not he could fulfill his life’s mission. “The right to fight for Ireland I ask of no man living,” O’Neill wrote. “I inherit that right from my fathers, it being the only legacy left me, and I will exercise it, I trust, before England becomes much older in crime, or Ireland more decrepit in her misfortune.”

  *1 McGee remains the only Canadian federal politician ever assassinated.

  *2 Perhaps prompted by the news from the track, John O’Mahony filed a lawsuit against August Belmont & Co. days after the Belmont Stakes to recover $20,000 in gold that the Fenian Brotherhood had deposited with the investment firm in 1865 to bankroll the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which used money orders to withdraw funds in Dublin from the American account. After the raid on The Irish People, the Dublin Metropolitan Police discovered money orders traced back to the Fenian Fund account, which was then frozen. The case dragged on for seven years, but O’Mahony never received a dime.

  15

  One Ridgeway Would Never Be Enough

  WHILE PRIESTS IN Ireland and the United States regularly castigated the Fenians from their pulpits, Ireland’s first-ever cardinal, Paul Cullen of Dublin, wanted the condemnation in writing as well. Although the pontiff had issued a papal bull on October 29, 1868, excommunicating “those who become members of the Masonic sect, of the Carbonari, or of other similar sects that plot either openly or secretly against the Church or legitimate authorities,” there had been debate in rectories and pews about whether or not the decree included the Fenian Brotherhood. Anyone with a rudimentary awareness of the Fenians knew, of course, that secrecy was not exactly their forte. What actually made Cullen and other clergy members nervous was that the Fenians represented a threat to the status quo.

  All but two Irish bishops joined Cullen and British bishops in appealing to Pope Pius IX, who eliminated any ambiguity when, on January 12, 1870, he “decreed and declared that the American or Irish society called Fenian is comprised among the societies forbidden and condemned.” According to the church, it was incompatible for Fenians to also be Catholics, and now they faced the penalty of excommunication for their patriotism.

  Fenians couldn’t help but wonder why the Holy Father denounced them while staying silent about their oppressor—a Protestant one at that. It also seemed duplicitous that a pope who didn’t want the Irish to take up arms to liberate their island had no qualms about their doing so when it came to his territory. They remembered how the call for money and soldiers had emanated from Ireland’s pulpits in 1860 as the forces of Victor Emmanuel threatened the Papal States. Upwards of one thousand men joined the Irish Papal Brigade, and many of those battle-hardened mercenaries subsequently became Fenians.

  Catholic Fenians questioned why fighting for country, but not for God, was a sin so venal that they must be banished. Thanks to Cullen, who crafted the dogma of papal infallibility that was adopted by the First Vatican Council, they couldn’t even question the wisdom of the pope’s decision.

  The Irish viewed the edict as another backroom deal between the English government and the Holy See—just like the blessing Pope Adrian IV supposedly bestowed upon his fellow Englishman King Henry II that began the seven-century occupation of their island. “What England failed to accomplish through the agency of pliant judges, packed juries, [and] paid informers, she now seeks to effect by the cunning diplomacy of a few English and some Irish bishops of British proclivities,” The Irish People editorialized.

  When a New York City priest read the papal bull from his pulpit, half of his congregation stood up and abruptly left Mass. “The Irish people, thanks to the Fenian Brotherhood, have learned to discriminate between matters spiritual and temporal,” commented The Irish People in an editorial likely written by John O’Mahony. “If love of country be such a heinous sin, the bulk of Irish Catholics have been outside the pale of the Church for the last seven hundred years.”

  * * *

  John O’Neill wasn’t about to let anyone—even the pope—deter him from his singular goal. Colonels Henri Le Caron and William Clingen continued the work they had started in the fall of 1869 to ship several tons of arms, munitions, and uniforms to northern Vermont and upstate New York in cases marked “Bristol brick” and “Blacksmiths’ coal.”

  Unlike most generals, O’Neill needed to worry about not just one national government but two, which meant that he needed to move a vast arsenal to the border without the knowledge of the American government. “It was as much our object to evade the United States authorities as it was to battle with the Canadians,” he later recounted.

  Registering in hotels under the code name McClelland, the Fenian president traveled incognito with Le Caron, who used the alias G. R. Smith, to supervise the attack preparations. Wherever they traveled along the border, Fenian leaders remained vigilant for any spies in their midst. On a visit to Malone, New York, they noticed a man named John C. Rose who stayed in the same hotel as Le Caron and constantly followed him from place to place. A Fenian sympathizer in town from Ottawa recognized Rose and told Edward J. Mannix, the Fenian head center in Malone, that he suspected the man shadowing Le Caron was a Canadian police agent. Administering their own justice, the Fenians beat Rose up so badly that he was laid up for months. The Irishmen had their own informers, too, feeding them information. When New York’s governor, John Hoffman, learned that Generals George Meade and William Tecumseh Sherman knew the whereabouts of the stockpiled Fenian weapons, he tipped off the Fenians, and Le Caron moved the materials to new locations.

  * * *

  By February 1870, the relationship between the cocksure O’Neill and the cautious senate became so frayed that the Fenian Brotherhood, already broken in two, split once more into the senate and O’Neill wings. In 1865, the senate broke with O’Mahony because it thought his pace too slow. Now it severed ties with O’Neill because it thought his pace too fast.

  The withering attacks on the Fenian pr
esident proved too much for James Keenan, O’Neill’s newly appointed secretary of civil affairs. A trained physician who had arrived from Ireland six months earlier, Keenan wrote occasional pieces for The Irish-American, and in a February 21 letter he directed his pen at the newspaper’s publisher, Senator Patrick J. Meehan, who increasingly sided with his fellow senators against the Fenian president. A painful rift had opened between O’Neill and Meehan, who had been so close to the Fenian president that he was the godfather of his daughter, Mary Ella.

  In a staunch defense of the Fenian president’s war plan, Keenan castigated senators who questioned whether the organization had enough money in the treasury or sufficient weaponry to launch an attack. The mistrust between O’Neill’s men and the senate only grew when they met on February 27 inside the Fenian Brotherhood’s Manhattan headquarters. The treasury secretary, Richard McCloud, removed the organization’s financial records to his apartment for an examination, and the following night’s meeting proved a stormy affair. Senators made plans to hold their own convention in the Midwest, where they had a greater base of support, and they rejected Keenan’s appointment to the Fenian leadership, believing him too much of an O’Neill crony.

  Listening from another room, Keenan heard the biting words directed at him by Meehan. When the contentious meeting adjourned a little before 11:00 p.m., he watched closely as Meehan and a pack of his fellow senators descended the staircase to West Fourth Street and stopped on the sidewalk on Broadway. The Irishman crept up behind Meehan, pulling his hand out of his inner coat pocket. Pointing a five-barrel Colt revolver at the back of the publisher’s neck, Keenan fired a single shot and watched as Meehan crumpled to the sidewalk.