While the shattered Fenians lumbered back to Malone, three hundred reinforcements at last arrived in the upstate New York town, looking to join the fight. Among those pulling in to the train station was Pittsburgh’s Fenian leader, Dr. Edward Donnelly. When Donnelly asked where the commanding officer was, he received an unexpected reply: “He is lying drunk in the hotel.”
General John Gleason, a thirty-two-year-old County Tipperary native who liked “a battle better than his breakfast,” according to one reporter, stepped into the void left by Starr. He tried to rally his reluctant troops to launch a second attack. The arrival of the reinforcements had brought the size of the Irish Republican Army in the vicinity to upwards of thirteen hundred men. The math, he argued, was on their side.
The general found support in Dr. Donnelly, as well as Father John McMahon, the Indiana priest who had recently been released after spending more than three years in a Canadian prison after the Battle of Ridgeway. The two civilians made for an unlikely pair of war hawks as they attempted to whip up the troops that had encamped at the fairground in Malone.
With their speechifying complete, a color-bearer unfurled an Irish flag and called on the men to fall in. Only thirty did so. The disheartened Fenians might have hungered for Ireland’s independence, but after the previous day’s humiliations they couldn’t stomach another raid.
This latest attempt on Canada was officially put to rest that night when a familiar face, General George Meade, arrived by train from St. Albans along with General Irvin McDowell, the onetime commander of the Army of the Potomac, and upwards of five hundred U.S. soldiers. Meade once again arrived to snuff out the last chance of any Fenian raid. His forces seized twenty-three boxes of weapons and arrested Gleason, Donnelly, Mannix, and four other Fenian leaders on Sunday morning, before sending them to Canandaigua, where they would be tried for violating the Neutrality Act. The rest of the Irish Republican Army, however, remained stranded in Malone.
When President Grant received news of the Battle of Eccles Hill, he muttered that it was “one of the most ludicrous things he ever knew.” He was in no mood for charity; Meade received orders not to pay for transportation home for the Fenians remaining in Malone and St. Albans. So, broke and disappointed, hundreds of Fenians loitered on Malone’s street corners and inside its hotel barrooms until the authorities prohibited the sale of liquor of any sort to the Irishmen. With stomachs rumbling, they banged on doors in search of food. The overtaxed residents of Malone wanted the Fenians to go home just as badly as the Irishmen did.
Grant was no more generous toward the citizens of Malone. “The people along the frontier have been sympathizing with these movements and aiding these people,” he groused, “and if it is annoying to them both, it is well that they should sweat a while.” If the local and state authorities “wished to rid themselves of the invaders,” they could foot the bill.
On May 30, the railway company stepped in, agreeing to transport the Fenians at half price. A member of New York governor John Hoffman’s office came with offers from both the state’s chief executive and Tammany Hall’s William “Boss” Tweed to cover the remainder, and at last the six hundred Fenians still stranded in Malone finally departed, a week after the ignominious Battle of Trout River.
* * *
Six days after the Fenians spoiled his mother’s birthday party in Montreal, Prince Arthur came to Eccles Hill to personally thank the Canadian volunteers and Red Sashes who had repelled the Irish Republican Army. Queen Victoria’s third son was presented with a Fenian uniform and cap—a trophy of war that according to some newspaper accounts had been stripped from the corpse of John Rowe, still buried in a shallow grave on the promontory.
The day following the royal visit, Lieutenant Colonel William Osborne Smith gave his assent for Rowe’s body to be removed by his brethren—as long as no Fenian crossed the border in the process. The task fell to a St. Albans undertaker, who exhumed Rowe’s body and placed it in a coffin to be escorted back to his hometown of Burlington, Vermont, by his commander, Captain William Cronan.
On June 2, a merciful priest, ignoring the Roman Catholic Church’s condemnation of the Fenian Brotherhood, held a joint funeral inside Burlington’s St. Mary’s Cathedral for the two fallen privates from the Battle of Eccles Hill, Rowe and William O’Brien. The decomposed state of the Fenians’ bodies, coupled with a heat wave that sent temperatures scraping one hundred degrees, required that their bodies be kept across the street on the porch of St. Mary’s Hall while the mourners celebrated the requiem Mass.
As their bodies were laid to rest, many silently delivered last rites for the Fenian Brotherhood as well. “The entire Fenian movement is now practically at an end, for the failures at St. Albans and here, kill the whole thing,” The New York Times reported from Malone. Most of America’s newspapers echoed these sentiments, castigating the Irish immigrants who seemed to remain more preoccupied with the land of their birth than with their adopted home. The most severe lashing, however, would come from one of their own.
* * *
O’Reilly had arrived at the Canadian border ready to pen an ode to a new generation of Celtic warriors. Instead, he scripted its obituary. The journalist told the readers of The Pilot that the Fenian soldiers, confronted with proof of their failure, returned “sadder and wiser men.” That included O’Reilly.
He recounted that Fenians he interviewed at Trout River “burst into tears at what they termed their disgrace.” The Pilot reporter blamed their leadership. “Judging from the military physique of the greater number, there can be no doubt that, with qualified officers, these men would prove that they did not merit the name they now feared—cowards.”
The Pilot was only more critical in its next edition, criticizing the “mad foray” by “criminally incompetent” Fenian leaders. “Fenianism, so far as relates to the invasion of Canada, ceases to exist, but it has done all the evil it could do. It has torn thousands of men away from their homes and their employment in a wild and futile enterprise. It has caused the deaths of several brave men and the imprisonment, perhaps death, of many others, and it has given occasion to the enemies of the Irish people to renew the slurs which such enterprises have given birth to before now.”
Eccles Hill and Trout River did something to O’Reilly that not even solitary confinement in Millbank Prison or banishment to Australia could do: It tempered his patriotic fervor. It stripped some of the romantic veneer off those poems and songs he had heard as a boy that first compelled him to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Disillusioned, O’Reilly doubted that the Fenian Brotherhood would ever be able to deliver independence for Ireland.
During O’Reilly’s short time in the United States, he had come to see the way many Irish had remained stubbornly separated from mainstream American life. But the Fenian raids of 1870 marked a turning point. He would become an impassioned advocate not for Irish independence but rather for assimilation into American society—for the Irish to break out of their enclaves, reach beyond their clans, and stop undertaking these forays that caused the rest of America to question their true allegiance.
* * *
The debacle at Trout River marked the end of the Second Fenian War, as it was known. It could be viewed as nothing more than a complete failure. This time there were no Ridgeways, no moral victories to claim. Unlike 1866, the Fenians couldn’t fault their preparation. The failure of 1870 was that of execution. One could question O’Neill’s wisdom in recycling much of General Thomas Sweeny’s plan of attack—down to the use of the same gateways from St. Albans and Malone—but O’Neill managed to both secure sufficient weapons and supplies and transport them to the front without alerting federal authorities to their presence.
While newspapers in the past had “laughed at the Fenians as an army without a commissariat,” the Huntingdon Gleaner noted, “the truth is, it was a splendid commissariat without an army worthy of it.” O’Neill
simply didn’t have the men to engineer a victory. This was in part a result of the division that had torn the Fenian Brotherhood apart in the previous five years.
And while O’Neill might have managed to organize the raid without his plans spilling onto the front pages of newspapers, he failed to notice the enormous breach that stood by his side. In Le Caron, Canadian and British authorities had an incalculably valuable asset. Faced with the inherent difficulty of having to launch a sneak attack, with forces mobilized from hundreds of miles away, and having to surprise not one but two governments, O’Neill was always up against long odds.
Complicating matters for the Fenians, the political landscape had turned against them in the intervening four years. Feelings toward Great Britain were not nearly as raw as they were in the aftermath of the Civil War, and Canada was no longer a British colony but a fledgling country. British troops might have been lackluster in their response in 1866, but the homegrown militias that confronted the Fenians proved fierce and quick in defense of their homes and farms.
The Irishmen who had picked up their rifles at Eccles Hill and Trout River longed to be bathed in glory. Instead, they departed from the Canadian border in a shower of ridicule. Newspapers giddily printed the joke that the “I.R.A.” emblazoned on the buttons of the Fenians’ green jackets stood, not for the “Irish Republican Army,” but for their new motto—“I Ran Away.”
19
The Fenians Behind Bars
THE THICK STONE walls of the Burlington, Vermont, jail that kept the summer heat at bay did little to shield John O’Neill from the scorn fired in his direction after the debacles at Eccles Hill and Trout River. The Fenian general graced the cover of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, but unfortunately for him the illustration depicted his battlefield arrest. The Canadian Illustrated News also printed a drawing of Marshal George Perkins Foster loading the Fenian general into a waiting coach, but added further insult by portraying O’Neill as a short, winking Irishman with simian features, a ridiculously ostentatious uniform, and a jug of liquor at his feet. He was part leprechaun, part gorilla.
Instead of leading an Irish army into glory like his forebears, O’Neill had become an object of derision. Deprived of nearly everything but free time, the stubborn Irishman had plenty of idle moments to reflect on the fiasco and ultimately concluded that he wasn’t to blame. In a rebuttal to his critics, O’Neill wrote, in a lengthy jailhouse missive, that he “had the arms and war material in the proper place at the proper time” and the hundreds of Fenians who failed to report for duty as he ordered “were the chief authors of disaster by their criminal inactivity.” The repeated delays and false alarms, he said, had conditioned the Fenian soldiers to disbelieve the call to arms when it came. “The people, so often deceived and disappointed in the past, could not believe that we were in earnest, and thousands of good men who were anxious to be with us, kept indulging their doubts and fears until too late to be of service,” O’Neill wrote.
After being abandoned by his men on the battlefield, O’Neill felt the Fenians were deserting him now in jail. Even after the court reduced the general’s bail from $20,000 to $15,000, none of his friends or colleagues arrived with the money. It wasn’t just antipathy toward him, though. Fenian coffers were so empty that the secretary of war couldn’t even scrape together enough spare change to pay for a telegram from Vermont, let alone post his leader’s bail.
* * *
The Irish-American predictably criticized O’Neill’s “unauthorized and unjustifiable” raid as “a crime against the cause of Ireland and liberty” and “one of the most idiotic on record.” The resentment toward the Fenian general ran so high that Vice President James Gibbons wrote to the Fenian senator Frank Gallagher, “O’Neill would not be safe anywhere, what a mercy it was for him that the government took him in charge.”
In Philadelphia, Gibbons made sure to distance himself and the senate wing from O’Neill’s actions, which he denounced to the press as “merely a personal enterprise by irresponsible persons” that wasted “valuable war material” and “years of patient toil and preparation.” American newspapers were confounded as to what would provoke O’Neill to launch such an apparently absurd enterprise. Perhaps underestimating the trauma inflicted by the Great Hunger and generations of British rule, they decided the motive must have been monetary, a publicity stunt to keep the contributions that paid O’Neill’s presidential salary flowing.
Newspapers once again portrayed the Fenians who donated money not as Irish patriots but as poor, ignorant dupes fleeced by the smooth-talking charlatans. “Even if they were able to conquer Canada, nobody believes it would produce the liberation of Ireland from British rule,” editorialized The New York Times. “It would be just as sensible to expect Russia to liberate Poland if she heard that our Polish fellow-citizens had overpowered the garrison of Alaska.”
For weeks following the attacks, O’Neill and his officers were vilified in the press and condemned by their fellow Fenians. Until now they had avoided the judgment of the U.S. government. Their time of impunity was now up.
* * *
Every July, the easy breezes and cool waters of the Finger Lakes lured city dwellers to Canandaigua, New York. Owen Starr, however, had no desire to spend another summer in the small town between Buffalo and Syracuse.
Four years earlier, the Fenian general sat inside a Canandaigua courtroom to face charges of violating the Neutrality Act of 1818 after the Battles of Ridgeway and Fort Erie. Now Starr returned to the hamlet perched on the northern tip of Lake Canandaigua to face the same charges for his role in the Battle of Trout River. He walked away a free man in 1866; federal authorities felt less forgiving when he stood before the U.S. Circuit Court on July 12, 1870.
Following the latest Fenian raids, President Ulysses S. Grant expressed his frustration at the dual allegiances proclaimed by Irish Americans. “This thing of being a citizen of the U.S. for the purpose of voting, and being protected by this government and then claiming to be citizens of another government must be stopped,” he thundered to his cabinet. Fenians needed to choose: Were they Irishmen or Americans? Hoping to deter any further attacks on Canada, the president ordered the Fenian officers prosecuted.
In addition to raising the president’s ire, Starr and the other Fenian officers arrested in upstate New York had the misfortune of standing trial on the same day that centuries-old animosities imported by the Irish brought even more violence to America. To commemorate the anniversary of William of Orange’s 1690 victory at the Battle of the Boyne, which ensured Protestant rule of Ireland for centuries to come, three thousand Protestant Orangemen paraded through Manhattan on July 12 chanting, “To hell with the pope,” and singing provocative anti-Catholic tunes such as “Croppies Lie Down,” which celebrated the brutal repression of the United Irishmen in the 1798 rebellion.
With animosities as raw as the day “King Billy” triumphed nearly two centuries earlier, the Protestants proved to be bad winners, and the Catholics even worse losers. Orangemen marching up Broadway taunted Catholic laborers digging ditches for the Croton Aqueduct and carving Central Park out of the heart of the island. Wielding picks and shovels as well as pistols and knives, the outraged workmen attacked anyone wearing an orange scarf, sash, or bow as a bloody factional fight erupted on the streets of New York around Elm Park. Eight Irishmen died* in the religious feud.
The New York Times and other newspapers blamed Fenians for firing the first shots in the Orange Riot, though they offered no proof that those involved were members of the Fenian Brotherhood. “Events have at intervals occurred in the history of this country which have justly called up a blush of shame on the faces of patriotic Irishmen; but we doubt if they ever have received so great a reason for deep humiliation,” wrote John Boyle O’Reilly, who castigated both sides in The Pilot. “What are we today in the eyes of Americans? Aliens from a petty island in the Atlantic, boasting of our pa
triotism and fraternity, and showing at the same moment the deadly hatred that rankles against our brethren and fellow countrymen. Why must we carry, wherever we go, those accursed and contemptible island feuds?” To many Americans, the Orange Riot was one more bloody example of the violence brought to their country by these hordes of impoverished foreigners who practiced a strange religion.
After the selection of a mostly Anglo-Saxon jury, Starr knew the news couldn’t possibly help his fate.
* * *
Just as he had done four years earlier when he took on Starr and his fellow Fenians as pro bono clients following their arrests in the wake of the Battle of Ridgeway, the noted Buffalo attorney Grover Cleveland came to the aid of the Irishmen. Although work on a case forced the future president to remain in Buffalo, Cleveland arranged for a friend to defend the Fenian raiders at no charge.
The prosecution called the raid a criminal act, and the jury agreed, finding Starr and two of his compatriots guilty. The U.S. Circuit Court judge Lewis B. Woodruff sentenced Starr and William Thompson to two years in prison and fined them $10. Edward J. Mannix received a one-year prison sentence and a $10 fine. The trio were transported to the state prison in Auburn, where, unlike other felons, the political prisoners were spared not only hard labor but the barber’s shears, allowing them to maintain their flowing hair and fashionable facial whiskers.
When the Irish Invaded Canada Page 26
