When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  After sending the three Trout River raiders to their relatively comfortable quarters, Judge Woodruff continued on his circuit to Windsor, Vermont, to preside over the trials of O’Neill and his fellow Fenians arrested at the Battle of Eccles Hill. The courtroom in the small central Vermont town was filled to capacity on July 29 as O’Neill stood before the bench and was asked whether he was guilty or not guilty. The Fenian general smiled as he delivered his pronouncement: “Guilty!”

  Eager to rehabilitate his wounded image, O’Neill knew he would have an opportunity to address the court prior to his sentencing, and the following day he seized his chance to star in a bit of Irish political theater. Carrying on a hallowed tradition of patriotic courtroom rhetoric, O’Neill rose to his feet and delivered an impassioned speech from the dock.

  The general told the court that he had learned a lesson from the latest raid—that defeating the British lion in its Canadian lair was impossible. “There is not the remotest chance of success,” O’Neill proclaimed. “If there were, though I might go to the gallows tomorrow, I would tell my countrymen to go on; but I now believe that there is not, and I shall therefore advise them to desist; and so far as my influence will go, I will use it to convince the Irish people in America that any farther attempt in that direction would be futile.”

  O’Neill then continued, “I cannot, and I never shall forget the land of my birth. I could not, while fighting in the armies of the United States, when face to face with those who would haul down and trample beneath their feet the flag of freedom, and baring my bosom to their bullets—I could not forget that I was born in another land—a land oppressed and tyrannized over. I cannot now forget it; I never shall forget it. No matter what may be my fate here—I am still an Irishman, and while I have tried to be a faithful citizen of America, I am still an Irishman, with all the instincts of an Irishman.”

  O’Neill’s oration moved many Irish eyes in the courtroom to tears, but it engendered little sympathy from Woodruff, who noted that the general was a repeat offender who expressed regret only for the failure of his fruitless enterprise, not his violation of American law. “Any real or supposed wrong of your country or your countrymen furnishes no just vindication, though it may in a sort explain the insane folly and wickedness of making that the occasion of suffering and wrong to a people who are innocent of any share in the infliction of which you suppose that you and your people had cause to complain,” reprimanded the judge.

  Woodruff rejected O’Neill’s appeal for a lighter punishment due to his Civil War service and sentenced him to two years in prison and, in light of his destitution, a nominal $10 fine. The Fenian general greeted his fate with a calm smile.

  As soon as court adjourned, local Fenians took up a subscription for the benefit of O’Neill’s wife and children. William Maxwell Evarts, the former attorney general under President Andrew Johnson and a future secretary of state who was in Windsor on court business, led the contributions with a $50 gift. Donations arrived from quarters ranging from employees of the Vermont Central Railroad to the U.S. representative Benjamin Butler, the Civil War major general and friend of the Irish. Contributions even came from as far away as the Wyoming Territory, where the Allen, Larkin & O’Brien circle contributed $26.

  The four Fenians sentenced to the Windsor State Prison along with O’Neill received similar penal accommodations to their counterparts in New York. They were given their own rooms, their own meal table, and the same fare as the superintendent and his family. They were not required to labor or wear prison clothes and could receive callers whenever they pleased. One of those calling on O’Neill in Windsor would turn out to be a quite unexpected visitor, a longtime foe who hoped unity might save the organization he founded.

  * * *

  Believing that the failure of the latest Canadian raid presented a chance for reconciliation, the senate wing gathered inside Cincinnati’s Mozart Hall on August 24. The object of their convention, they declared, “was to give effect to the desire of the Irish people for an united National Organization for Ireland’s independence.”

  Seeking a fresh start and a way to cleanse the Irish republican movement of the memory of O’Neill’s latest foray, the convention abandoned the name of the Fenian Brotherhood and, tapping into the spirit of Theobald Wolfe Tone and the 1798 rebellion, rechristened themselves the United Irishmen. The changes made by the senate wing were more than cosmetic, though. They abolished the presidency held by O’Neill along with all paid officials and a central treasury, relying instead on numerous district treasuries.

  The Cincinnati convention voted to act in concert with the Irish National Brotherhood, a new organization based in St. Louis that sought to supplant the Fenian Brotherhood. The United Irishmen proposed the creation of a seven-person directory—three members of the United Irishmen, three members of the old O’Mahony wing led by John Savage, and one member of the Irish National Brotherhood—to guide the Irish republican movement in the United States.

  The dream of a United Irishmen, however lofty the thought, never came to fruition. When the Savage wing communed for its convention in New York on August 30, it summarily rejected the overture.

  Savage, though, was interested in a much more surprising merger, given his renunciation of any further Canadian raids—one with O’Neill. The New York convention tasked three members, including the Fenian Brotherhood founder John O’Mahony, with visiting O’Neill in prison and consulting “on the feasibility of a Union of all Irish nationalists claiming the name of Fenians.”

  O’Mahony had seen his organization broken in two by men such as O’Neill who had taken what he saw as an ill-decided path. Only months earlier, he had written in The Irish People that O’Neill and the other ringleaders of the latest Canadian raid “had no more right to use the word Fenian, as properly applied to them than the inhabitants of Timbuctoo would have to proclaim themselves Yankees.” The old Fenian, however, was willing to put aside his prior differences if it might revive the brotherhood.

  O’Neill remained so upset at what he perceived as a betrayal by the senate wing that he was willing to join forces with Savage’s organization, even though it had always opposed the ventures into Canada that he had led. He affixed his signature to a three-point, hand-scrawled agreement in which he pledged to accept “the constitution of the Fenian Brotherhood as presided over by Chief Executive John Savage, as the constitution of the United Fenian Brotherhood.”

  * * *

  The Fenian prisoners had barely settled into their new quarters when a groundswell movement calling for their clemency gained momentum. In addition to the Irish who were sympathetic to the Fenian cause—if not their methods—Republican politicians who craved their votes to maintain their majority in Congress lent their voices to the cause. With a fellow Republican in the White House, prominent party members called on Grant to release the Irishmen. After all, if the Union could pardon those Confederates who took up arms against their own countrymen, why lock up these men who had an adventure that took no lives but their own?

  Although he had pressed for the prosecution of the Fenians, Grant remained cognizant of the Democratic Party’s choke hold on the Irish vote as the midterm elections approached. With several corruption scandals beginning to plague his administration, the Republican president felt the temptation to release the Fenians from prison and ingratiate his party with the Irish.

  When the commander in chief informed Hamilton Fish in August 1870 that he was considering a pardon of the Fenian prisoners, the secretary of state sympathized with the president’s plight. “Purely political prisoners are the worst kind of birds to keep caged,” he wrote to the president. However, Fish persuaded Grant to delay his decision for at least a few weeks until the end of the fishing season because he feared Canada might retaliate by closing its fisheries to American ships. “It will do no great harm to O’Neill to spend a few weeks in the cool climate of Vermont,” he told G
rant.

  The lure of the Irish vote ultimately proved too powerful for Grant. With midterm elections already under way in several states, the president on October 12 issued unconditional pardons for nine Fenians and remitted their fines.

  The Canadians protested the clemency, but Fish defended the action. He told Edward Thornton, the British minister to the United States, that as long as the Fenians remained incarcerated, a large segment of the Irish population would maintain a constant agitation. “Their prolonged imprisonment would give them the honors of martyrs,” Fish said.

  Although Grant also issued a proclamation promising that future violators of neutrality laws would be “rigorously prosecuted” and exempt from clemency, the pardon and the president’s eagerness to appease the Fenians reflected the political clout that had been achieved by the Irish two decades after the Great Hunger drove them into exile in the United States. In the midterm election of 1870, William Roberts, the former president of the Fenian Brotherhood who had embraced the Republicans in previous campaigns, won election to Congress from New York as part of the Tammany Hall Democratic machine. The Fenians helped to establish Irish Americans as power players in the political system that would see them rise from city halls to the White House over the ensuing century.

  * * *

  As winter descended in Vermont, O’Neill left Windsor State Prison a free man. Struggling to scratch out a living now that his claims agency was in tatters and he no longer drew an income as president of the Fenian Brotherhood, O’Neill published a pamphlet, which sold for thirty cents, that detailed his latest attempt to invade Canada and included a brief reminiscence of the Battle of Ridgeway for those Irishmen seeking a happier ending.

  As part of his pardon agreement, the Fenian general pledged to Grant that his days of attacking Canada were over, and he didn’t hesitate to put it into writing. The only policy for the Fenian Brotherhood going forward, he insisted, was to fight for Ireland on Irish soil. O’Neill wrote that his experience had proven that it was logistically impossible to get enough men and arms across the border while eluding both the American and the Canadian authorities.

  “That we have been a source of trouble and expense to you for nearly five years I need not tell you,” he wrote in a message to all Canadians, “but your trouble is now at an end.” In spite of his pledge, O’Neill continued to face recurring questions about whether he would ever invade Canada again. Didn’t they know he was a reformed man? His answer was clear: “No! Emphatically no.”

  Perhaps he actually believed it.

  * More than sixty would die in a reprisal of the violence during the following year’s July 12 march by the Orangemen in New York.

  20

  Losing Their Lifeblood

  WILLIAM GLADSTONE TOOK off his coat to better wield his ax. As he awaited the results of the recent parliamentary election, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Liberal Party passed the time on the first day of December 1868 felling trees on his country estate in the north of Wales. The chaos of 1867—with the Fenian Rising, the Manchester Martyrs, and the Clerkenwell prison explosion—had shaken the country, and Gladstone promised he would deliver answers to the “Irish question.”

  The cadence of Gladstone’s repeated hatchet blows ceased when a messenger arrived and handed him a telegram. The fifty-eight-year-old politician read the missive and coolly muttered, “Very significant.” Infused with the knowledge that he had been elected prime minister, Gladstone resumed his grounds-keeping work for a few minutes before resting on his ax handle. “My mission is to pacify Ireland,” he declared to a colleague. The newly elected prime minister then resumed his strenuous task in silence and didn’t loosen his grip on the hatchet until the tree smashed to the ground. A more arduous task awaited.

  Years of pressure from Fenians on both sides of the Atlantic had finally persuaded the British government to implement structural reforms in Ireland, and Gladstone made good on his campaign promises. In the summer of 1870, the British Parliament passed a historical land reform law that prevented the eviction of tenants who paid their rent on time and required landlords to compensate tenants for property improvements at the end of their leases.

  As the calendar passed into 1871, the Irish Church Act disestablished the Protestant Church of Ireland and repealed the law requiring the Irish to pay tithes to it. “One of the triumphs conceded to your power has been the demolition of her State Church in Ireland, and this triumph alone is worth one thousand defeats,” James Gibbons declared to his fellow Fenians.

  Emboldened by their progress in the halls of Westminster, the Irish grew more outspoken in their calls for Gladstone to pardon the Fenian political prisoners still held in British jails, especially after the United States had freed O’Neill and his fellow officers.

  The conditions endured by the Fenians held in British jails were far more brutal than anything experienced by their counterparts in America or Canada. The British had condemned the Fenians to their harshest prisons, hoping to crush the spirits of the men they believed to be terrorists. They stuffed nine men into cells fourteen by seven feet in size. They cut them off from all communication with their families. They censored their letters to remove any mention of their poor health. Guards with swords and heavy clubs escorted the Fenians to Communion inside prison chapels.

  The Irish rebels naturally resisted their captors. Their people had been doing that for seven centuries, after all. British wardens coped with many defiant Fenians, but then there was Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa.

  * * *

  Few Fenians were as unrepentant or suffered more for the cause of Ireland’s freedom than Rossa. Born into an Irish-speaking household in 1831, the County Cork native learned English as a second language. Even before he could read, the young boy listened as his father told tales of English soldiers ripping open Irish women with their bayonets and smashing Irish infants against walls. He had just become a teenager when the Great Hunger descended upon County Cork, tearing his family apart. He watched friends die and witnessed the living do unthinkable things to survive, such as the family taken in by his father who killed their donkey in order to have something to eat. He buried a friend’s dead mother in a shallow grave, placing a pillow under her head and an apron over her face so the dirt would not touch it.

  When Black ’47 arrived, Rossa’s potato crop died, and then so did his father. Creditors seized the family’s furniture from the widowed mother of four. Their landlords evicted them from their home. The family scattered, and Rossa’s mother and siblings sailed for the United States in hopes of anything better, leaving him alone in Ireland. The loss of his father and his family, by death and exile, radicalized Rossa. While other Irishmen claimed the Great Hunger was an act of God, Rossa blamed the British for starving Ireland and taking away his family.

  “There was no ‘famine’ in Ireland,” he wrote. “There is no famine in any country that will produce in any one year as much food as will feed the people who live in that country during that year.”

  Rossa’s childhood experiences transformed the Irish lad into a Fenian rebel. “If the operation of English rule in Ireland abases the nature of the Irishman,” he wrote, “the Irishman ought to fight the harder and fight the longer, and fight every way and every time, and fight all the time to destroy that rule.”

  One of the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s earliest recruits, Rossa founded the secret Phoenix National and Literary Society after meeting with James Stephens. He was arrested in 1858 and again after the 1865 raid on The Irish People, where Rossa worked as the business manager. A British court sentenced him to penal servitude for life. He disobeyed his British wardens and guards at every turn. Hoping to tame the unruly Fenian, British authorities sent him to the dreaded Millbank Prison. They didn’t realize, however, that there was no taming Rossa.

  * * *

  In his virtual dungeon at Millbank, Rossa slept in a hammock bed that he compar
ed to a coffin. He bathed every two weeks in a trough along with three other prisoners. Forbidden to speak with his fellow inmates, he tapped out prayers to his fellow Fenian John Devoy on Christmas Eve. He wasn’t even allowed to walk because of the noise it would make—not that there was much room to maneuver in a cell seven feet by four feet.

  Rossa spent his days sitting on a bucket and tediously “picking oakum,” tearing apart and unraveling old tar ropes into flossy strands with his blistered fingers. Failure to pick his daily quota of three pounds was punished with a twenty-four-hour diet of one pound of dry bread and two pints of water. It was a diet he was quite familiar with. By his own estimation, Rossa spent nearly an entire year punished with just bread and water.

  After flinging his filled chamber pot at a prison governor, he spent thirty-five consecutive days in solitary confinement with his hands bound behind his back, even during meals (prison laws permitted such a penalty for a maximum of three days). For more than five years, Rossa did not experience a full stomach or a restful night of sleep.

  Still he refused to let the British extinguish his patriotic fire. In fact, the confinement only intensified it. Many Fenian political prisoners were held in similar conditions in British jails, and Irish voices around the world protested their treatment and called for their release. More than one million people took to the streets in demonstrations organized by the Amnesty Association in the first months of 1869, and when that failed to persuade British authorities, voters in Tipperary elected Rossa to the House of Commons in a true protest vote.