The Fenian invasion of Canada was a militaristic fantasy, chaotically executed by Civil War veterans eager to strike a blow for Irish independence. The scheme was conceived in the Anglophobic underworld of Famine immigrants and hatched at the Philadelphia convention of the Fenian Brotherhood in October 1865.
The American conflict had ended and a desire for action against British North America was strengthened by news from Ireland, where arrests diminished prospects of an early insurrection. Although living outside Ireland, American Fenians still had a sense of participating in Irish politics. During the Civil War (1861-65), about 150,000 Irish-born men served in the Union forces, while 40,000 had fought for the Confederacy.
William R. Roberts, an ambitious Cork-born politician who was to split the Brotherhood, told 600 delegates the US government would countenance the seizure of Canadian territory. Gen T.W. ("Fighting Tom") Sweeny said he could take Canada with 10,000 men. He was given $55,000 to purchase arms.
The Civil War enabled Fenianism to achieve international prominence. The Brotherhood flourished briefly because the generals needed fighting men and the politicians needed Irish votes. Fenian agents were allowed to recruit in the Union army. Strained Anglo-US relations at the end of the war and turbulent political conditions in the first years of Reconstruction provided fertile ground for the heated Fenian imagination.
President Andrew Johnson - Lincoln's successor - and Secretary of State William Seward gave Fenian representatives to understand they would "acknowledge accomplished facts". The venture may not have been considered seriously by Washington, but the idea of annexing Canada was popular - particularly among military men - in New England at the time.
While "desirous of avoiding if possible any collision with the popular sentiment of the Irish masses", the administration secretly assured Canada that in the event of an attack on the provinces the US would "be prepared at once to fulfil all obligations as a friendly neutral power".
When the Brotherhood split, the Fenian "senate" deposed its Head Centre, John O'Mahony, and installed Roberts as president. A race then began between the rival wings to gain the support of rank-and-file Fenians. O'Mahony reverted to his basic position that Ireland was the place in which to fight, while the Roberts-Sweeny faction went ahead with elaborate plans to invade Canada.
O'Mahony attempted to regain the initiative by sanctioning an expedition to Campobello, a British-held island off Maine. If the island was captured, it would forestall the Canadian wing, provide a base for sending help to Ireland, and might even provoke the hoped for Anglo-American crisis.
However, the British authorities, briefed by an informer, "Red Jim" McDermott, dispatched six warships to fortify Campobello. British resolve ended American ambiguity. On April 19th, 1866, Gen George Meade, the hero of Gettysburg, was sent to Eastport where hundreds of Fenians had assembled. He impounded their guns and prevented them from engaging in any more serious hostilities than seizing a British flag.
While the Anglo-Saxon press ridiculed the "Campobello fizzle", the Canadians were placed off guard. Rumours of Fenian incursions had been circulating in Toronto since 1864, when 60 members of the Hibernian Benevolent Society, armed with pikes and revolvers, marched in reaction to Orange provocation.
But militant nationalism gained little support in Canada, where Irish Catholics were generally content and influenced by leaders such as Thomas d'Arcy McGee, the former Young Irelander, and Bishop John Lynch, who looked on Fenianism as "the suppuration of a deep chronic wound inflicted on Ireland".
Nonetheless, on June 1st, 1866, Col John O'Neill led 800 Fenians across the Niagara river and raised the green flag on British soil. O'Neill, a Monaghan man commissioned in the Union army during the Civil War, issued a proclamation signed by Gen Sweeny, which declared they had no quarrel with the people of the Canadian provinces: "We come among you as the foes of British rule in Ireland . . . We are here as the Irish army of liberation."
Next day the Fenian veterans defeated a force of 900 Canadian volunteers at the battle of Ridgeway. Nevertheless, with 3,000 imperial troops closing in and reinforcements stopped, O'Neill evacuated his men on June 3rd. They were arrested midstream by Gen Meade aboard the USS Michigan.
On the Quebec border, the US authorities detained Sweeny and his staff and intercepted vast quantities of arms. Only one Fenian general, appropriately named Speer, eluded US marshals to enter the province with 1,000 poorly-armed men. He remained long enough to issue a dispatch on behalf of the "IRA", probably the first use of this acronym.
The governor-general, Lord Monck, acknowledged that a potentially formidable movement had collapsed "mainly due to the energetic proceedings of the US government". The first prime minister of the Dominion of Canada, Sir John A. Macdonald, thanked the Catholic clergy: ". . . it is due to their influence and exertions that the nefarious conspiracy made but little headway among us".
Gen Sweeny, who had purchased 10,000 muskets and 21/2 million cartridges, concluded: "The US government, in selling these stores to my agents, was perfectly well aware of the purposes for which they were intended, and their willingness in allowing these sales to be made, together with the sympathy expressed for us by individuals in eminent positions at Washington, caused me to be totally unprepared for the treacherous seizure of our arms and ammunition, which rendered a successful movement into Canada hopeless at this time."
The administration tried to placate the Irish vote by paying the return train fares of 7,000 Fenians.
The raid heightened sectarian tension in Ontario, where the Stratford Beacon commented: "With some narrow-minded people the idea appears to prevail that if a person is a Catholic, he must necessarily be a Fenian."
In October the trial of 56 Fenian prisoners opened in Toronto. The raid had cost the Canadians nine dead and dozens seriously wounded; O'Neill put his casualties at eight killed and 15 wounded. One of the first to be sentenced to hang was a Catholic priest. The US government appealed for clemency. Britain, unwilling to complicate further its sensitive relations with Washington, intervened and the death sentence imposed on 25 prisoners was commuted to 20 years' hard labour. All were released by 1872.
South of the border, the Fenian leaders had been freed and guns returned in time for the congressional elections of 1866.
NONE emerged from the debacle with less discredit than Col O'Neill, who was appointed "inspector general of the Irish Republican Army". Like O'Mahony, however, he relied on a spy as trusted aide. Thomas Beach, masquerading under the name of le Caron, pretended to be a French sympathiser with Ireland.
He enabled the Canadian government to overshadow preparations for another raid. O'Neill, having quarrelled with his senate, crossed the Vermont border with only 200 men in April 1870. They fled before the Canadian militia, which now numbered 13,000. Another group was repulsed at Huntingdon, Quebec. This effectively ended the Canadian diversion and marked Clan na Gael's emergence as the dominant Irish-American revolutionary body.
The Fenian raids on Canada form a postscript to Irish involvement in the American Civil War. Given the level of Fenian incompetence, the pragmatic Yankees enforced the neutrality laws. The only positive outcome of this Fenian folly was the impetus given to Canadian confederation.
The Toronto Irish Canadian pointed out that, even if the Fenians had succeeded, the possession of Canada "could not advance an iota the cause of Ireland's freedom from misrule". James Stephens, too, denounced the Roberts faction; if Ireland had the measure of self-government enjoyed by Canada, the IRB leader asserted, he would never have lifted his voice against the British government.
John Devoy described Roberts as "a successful dry-goods merchant, who was vain and shallow but showy". He became a millionaire while his rival, John O'Mahony, a Gaelic chief and scholar, died in poverty in New York. O'Mahony's body was brought back to Ireland, however, for as John Boyle O'Reilly wrote in Boston, "a dreamer lives forever and a toiler dies in a day".