When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  By all outward appearances, O’Neill was fixated on his future in Nebraska. In actuality, though, he remained consumed by his obsession from the past.

  * * *

  The general called his colonization work “the next best thing to fighting for Ireland,” and while he thought it noble work, it wasn’t his true calling. “I shall continue at it despite every obstacle until called upon for sterner work when I will be found where an O’Neill properly belongs,” he wrote, “which is not so much in talking about Ireland’s wrongs, as in fighting for Ireland’s rights.”

  O’Neill cryptically mandated that one-eighth of the land for each of his colonies be “devoted to the cause of Ireland,” and by the end of 1876 the general viewed his burgeoning colonies as bases of operation from which he could amass an army to rise against the British and possibly return to Canada. The profile of the typical pioneer—young, male, and daring—made for an ideal soldier. Plus, his secluded towns were away from the prying eyes of federal authorities and British spies.

  “I had a double object in encouraging our people to emigrate from the overcrowded cities and states of the east to settle upon the cheap and free lands of the west,” O’Neill admitted. “The first was that they might better their own condition and that of their families and the second that they might be in a position, from their improved circumstances and their nearness to the contemplated field of future operations, to assist the cause of Irish liberty. I think I can safely promise from the colonies which I have already established at least some of the young men to assist on the battle field while the older ones are raising corn, flour, potatoes to help sustain them.”

  The general received a report from the Black Hills that the Irishmen there were ready to follow his command to the battlefield whenever ordered. Until O’Neill was ready to move, they would bide their time and hone their skills.*1

  “The prairies are wide, and there is plenty of room for drill and instruction,” O’Neill wrote, “and there is no law against shooting deer and antelope, in season which will be very good practice—until we can find other game.” There was little doubt that the game O’Neill coveted roamed north of the border and across the ocean.

  * * *

  The movement that O’Neill had helped give rise to fed off the fervor of its participants. But without Anglophobia, fresh memories of the Great Hunger, and nativism to fuel it, the Fenian Brotherhood had become a spent force by the time O’Neill settled in Nebraska. Forever mired in its foibles, it had become eclipsed, in the republican movement, by Clan na Gael (Irish for “Family of the Gaels”), which had been launched in 1867 as a haven for Fenians who had had enough of the organization’s dysfunction and lack of secrecy. The upstart organization raised funds and procured arms to free Ireland by physical force. But it forswore any raids on Canada. In 1876, Clan na Gael*2 staged the most electrifying moment for the Irish republican movement in America since the Battle of Ridgeway when it purchased the whaling bark Catalpa, sailed it halfway around the world, and rescued six Fenians held captive in the British penal colony of Western Australia.

  The Fenian Brotherhood was a shadow of its former self. So was John O’Mahony, who had returned to lead the organization he founded after being elected head center in 1872. The Young Irelander was now anything but young. Years of stress and poverty had aged him beyond his years. The luster had evaporated from his deep-sunken eyes, leaving him “the mere framework of a mighty man,” according to John Boyle O’Reilly.

  The Fenian Brotherhood survived until 1887, but O’Mahony wouldn’t last that long. With Bernard Doran Killian, who had directed the first Fenian raid from Eastport, at his side, the “Father of Fenianism” died inside a spartan fourth-floor garret atop a dingy New York tenement house on February 6, 1877, at the age of sixty-two.

  “He was not merely the guide or fabricator of Fenianism. He, more than any man alive or dead, was the spirit and subtending principle of the movement,” O’Reilly wrote. “His whole life and aspirations were bound up in one word—Fenianism.”

  The Fenian Brotherhood decided to honor O’Mahony by re-creating one of his greatest triumphs, the transatlantic farewell for his fellow Young Irelander Terence Bellew MacManus in 1861. The Fenians embalmed O’Mahony’s body in preparation for a send-off worthy of a head of state. After a solemn requiem funeral Mass celebrated by three Jesuit priests who ignored the Vatican decrees about the Fenian Brotherhood, thousands of Irishmen accompanied a plate-glass hearse that bore O’Mahony’s body up Fifth Avenue and down Broadway to a waiting steamship that bore the child of Erin back to mother Ireland.

  Following torchlight processions through the streets of Queenstown and Cork, O’Mahony’s coffin arrived in Dublin, where Cardinal Paul Cullen shuttered the doors of the city’s churches to the Fenian founder. Cullen’s decision only strengthened the resolve of the Fenians to turn O’Mahony’s funeral into a political protest. On Sunday, March 4, 250,000 people participated in one of the biggest public demonstrations seen in Dublin since the mock funeral for the Manchester Martyrs as O’Mahony’s funeral cortege rolled through the city’s muddy lanes to Glasnevin Cemetery.

  Fenian hands lowered O’Mahony into the same grave containing the bones of MacManus. After mourners showered flowers on the lid of his casket, they shoveled the Irish earth on its native son. “Outlaws and felons according to English law but true soldiers of Irish liberty,” read the inscription on the monument eventually erected over the grave of O’Mahony, MacManus, and four other Fenians. “Their lives thus prove that every generation produces patriots who were willing to face the gibbet, the cell, and exile to procure the liberty of their nation and afford perpetual proof that in the Irish heart faith in Irish nationality is indestructible.”

  * * *

  Back in the United States, O’Neill continued his fight. He split his time between growing his colonies in Nebraska and touring the country in search of more recruits who might eventually join his next army. The workload took a toll on his health, and when the general returned home after delivering a lecture in Little Rock, Arkansas, in November 1877, Mary Ann O’Neill could see that her husband was not well.

  A cold he had developed on the five-day journey home exacerbated his chronic asthma. Then, on his first night home, he suffered a slight stroke. After he recovered for a few weeks at home, Mary Ann, pregnant once again with their daughter Genevieve, took him on the long trip to St. Joseph Hospital in Omaha for further treatment. As her husband’s condition improved, Mary Ann felt confident enough that he was on the road to recovery to return home to their three children. Following Mary Ann’s departure, however, O’Neill contracted pneumonia after falling and spending hours on a cold floor before anyone discovered him there.

  He passed away during the final hour of January 7, four thousand miles from home.

  Unlike O’Mahony, the forty-three-year-old O’Neill was buried in American soil, but not in the town that bore his name. Too many of the Irish colonists there remained bitter toward the general, believing him a swindler who had falsely represented Nebraska as an Eden for the Irish. The hard feelings remained even a decade after his death, when a proposal was made to rebury O’Neill in the town. “Leave him in Omaha,” said a town spokesman. “He led the Irish astray, and was the cause of their suffering tragic hardships.”

  He might have had detractors, but the Irish would remember O’Neill as the dashing hero of Ridgeway, a soldier who defeated the British on their own soil. Some wished that the climactic moment of his life had come at the end, rather than at the beginning, of his Fenian career. “In our short-sighted human judgement we cannot help wishing rather that, ere errors of head, not of heart, diverted him from the path of true patriotism, he had fallen, in the flush of victory, at Ridgeway, like so many of his race with the old flag over head, and the charging cry of Ireland ringing in his ear,” declared The Irish-American.

  Perhaps the Fenian general felt t
he same way. John O’Neill had been born to fight the British and die on the battlefield for Ireland. He managed to fulfill half of his destiny.

  *1 Decades later, the Nebraska newspaperman John G. Maher, a purveyor of tall tales, printed stories that the British sought revenge for attacks on Canada and planned to dispatch warships up the Mississippi, Missouri, and Niobrara Rivers to capture the city bearing O’Neill’s name.

  *2 Dispatched once again in service of his native Great Britain, the secret agent Henri Le Caron infiltrated Clan na Gael as he did the Fenian Brotherhood. Le Caron managed to maintain his alias—and his secret—for more than a quarter century until he revealed his true identity in 1889 before a special parliamentary committee investigating the connections between the Irish constitutional nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell and Clan na Gael.

  EPILOGUE

  JAMES STEPHENS WAS dead again.

  For the second time in fifty-three years, the ink-stained fingers of Kilkenny’s pressmen laid the type for the obituary of their native son. Unlike the death notice from 1848, the words printed in the spring of 1901 conveyed the truth.

  With the Union Jack still flying over Ireland, the British government had finally permitted Stephens to return to his homeland in 1891 under one condition—no public demonstrations against the Crown. A quarter century after the Irish Republican Brotherhood founder struck terror in British hearts and escaped Ireland as the most wanted man in the empire, Stephens returned to Dublin an impoverished old man, more pitied than feared.

  On Palm Sunday, two days after his death, the Fenian chief’s oak and mahogany coffin—draped in the Irish republican tricolor of green, white, and orange—was lifted into a hearse and drawn by six horses on a five-hour procession through Dublin.

  In fading daylight, the cortege squeezed through the gates of Glasnevin Cemetery and rolled through a dense forest of Celtic crosses to the hallowed “republican plot,” which housed Ireland’s most precious relics—the bones of its heroic patriots who fought British tyranny. The hearse stopped just steps away from the final resting place of John O’Mahony. The two Fenian giants who had fought the British—and each other—were now reunited in death.

  For decades, Stephens had carried the republican movement on his shoulders. Now it was time for those he inspired to return the favor. Veterans of the 1867 Fenian Rising placed the coffin of the Fenian chief on their shoulders and lowered it into the ground next to his wife.

  Critics said Stephens failed in his life’s work because free Irish soil was not shoveled on his grave, but what they didn’t understand was that true failure would have been to do nothing at all.

  “If we ever hope to see Ireland free, we must honor the attempt as well as the triumph,” Dr. Denis Dowling Mulcahy said after O’Mahony’s funeral. The leading IRB member knew the island would be forever British if fear of failure deterred Ireland’s patriots from attempting the fight. The Irish might have been subjugated, but they couldn’t be conquered as long as they resisted, just as Stephens had.

  The arrogance, insecurity, and dictatorial tendencies of Stephens undeniably infected the IRB and its relationship with the Fenian Brotherhood in the United States. Yet Stephens had awakened Ireland from its national stupor after the trauma of the Great Hunger and the failure of the 1848 rebellion. With his death, he joined the legends in the mists of Irish history. The Irish placed his picture on their walls next to those of Theobald Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, and the other rebels whom the IRB founder had heard about as a child.

  A fresh crop of curious Irish children who gathered around fireplaces heard their parents tell the tales of the ghost of a man thought to be dead who walked the length of Ireland and prophesied that one day they would be free. They heard the stories of the old days when young men and martyrs rose up against the British in 1848 and 1867. This new generation weaned on the legends of Stephens and his fellow Fenians would ultimately seize the opportunity to evict the British after centuries of tyrannical rule.

  * * *

  “Ireland’s opportunity will come when England is engaged in a desperate struggle with some great European power or European combination,” the Fenian John Devoy predicted in 1881. That time finally came more than thirty years later when a gunshot on a Sarajevo street tore through the jugular of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and launched World War I.

  With Great Britain consumed by the horror of the grinding trench warfare on the western front, a fresh crop of IRB leaders such as Tom Clarke, who had worked as an assistant editor on Devoy’s newspaper during a nearly ten-year stint in the United States, believed their moment had arrived. While the IRB’s military council continued its secret planning for another rising, Clarke received a telegram from his old friend Devoy on June 29, 1915: “Rossa dead. What shall we do?” Devoy’s fellow member of the Cuba Five Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa had passed away earlier that day at the age of eighty-three. Eager to repeat the transatlantic funerals of O’Mahony and Terence Bellew MacManus and stage a Fenian pageant that would greatly assist with recruitment, Clarke wasted little time in sending his response.

  “Send his body home at once.”

  On the first day of August in 1915, hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets of Dublin to honor the Fenian firebrand who took the violent fight for Ireland’s independence to the very heart of the country he believed responsible for the suffering he had witnessed during the Great Hunger. After assuming the leadership of the Fenian Brotherhood, Rossa employed a relatively new technology capable of inflicting mass casualties—dynamite.

  Following the blueprint established by O’Mahony and Stephens of using the United States as his base of operations, he oversaw the building of explosives in Brooklyn and dispatched operatives to Great Britain throughout the first half of the 1880s to carry out a terrifying bombing campaign that struck not only British military and commercial targets, such as arsenals and gasworks, but also iconic London landmarks including Victoria Station and the Tower of London. The Fenians bombed a pub next to Scotland Yard, which resulted in the destruction of police records on them, and even the inner sanctum of the British government, the chamber of the House of Commons.

  The Fenian whom the newspapers began to call “O’Dynamite Rossa” even took credit for mayhem with which he had no connection. When Queen Victoria injured herself slipping on a step at Windsor Castle, Rossa said it was his agents who applied the lard to grease the stairs.

  Rossa’s “dynamite campaign” came to an end in 1885, the same year an Englishwoman shot him in the back on a Manhattan street in a failed assassination attempt. He endured for another three decades before his death on Staten Island and the return of his body to Ireland.

  The Fenian’s funeral procession took hours to pass spots along the route to Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, where Rossa’s grave awaited inside the republican plot. The political theater orchestrated by the IRB had a stirring finale, as Padraig Pearse, a little-known school headmaster and member of the IRB’s secret military council, stepped forward in his Irish Volunteer uniform to deliver the graveside oration, which he said was “on behalf of a new generation that has been re-baptized in the Fenian faith….

  “The seeds sown by the young men of ’65 and ’67 are coming to their miraculous ripening today,” Pearse said in homage to the previous generation. “They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead, and, while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.”

  The speech was followed by three volleys over the grave of Rossa. In hindsight they had the ring of revolution.

  * * *

  The day after commemorating Christ’s resurrection in the pews of Ireland, the IRB rose anew on Easter Monday 1916. Nearly fifty
years after John O’Neill led the Irish Republican Army charging across the Niagara Peninsula to strike a blow for Ireland, another group of young Irishmen grabbed their guns to undertake what most of their countrymen thought to be a folly.

  Less than a year after delivering the oration over Rossa’s grave, Pearse and more than one thousand latter-day Fenians seized buildings in downtown Dublin and launched an armed insurrection. At four minutes past noon on April 24, 1916, as the final peals of the Angelus bells dissolved over Dublin, Pearse stood under the massive pillars of the General Post Office with Clarke and other IRB members to read a formal proclamation declaring the establishment of the Irish Republic.

  “In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom,” shouted Pearse. “She now seizes that moment, and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory.”

  Her exiled children in America. The prominent place given to the diaspora in the United States in the foundation document of the Irish Republic acknowledged that the Easter Rising would not have been possible without the transatlantic partnership first established by Stephens and O’Mahony. Devoy estimated that Clan na Gael supplied the IRB with nearly $100,000 in the years preceding the Easter Rising. In addition, five of the seven signatories of the Irish Proclamation had spent considerable time in the United States. Clarke had even become a naturalized American citizen.