13
The Call of Duty
CHURCH BELLS AND cannon fire echoed through the Ottawa night. Patriotic revelers gathered around towering bonfires that lit up the early morning hours of July 1, 1867, to celebrate the advent of the Dominion of Canada—a confederation of the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.
Dawn revealed a city that looked—and smelled—more like a rough-edged frontier backwater than a cosmopolitan capital. Diplomats used to the refined metropolises of Europe kept their heads down as they dodged a shotgun splatter of spittle and tobacco juice staining the wooden plank sidewalks. Steps away from Parliament Hill, pigs wallowing in mud and manure held their own congresses in the middle of Ottawa’s intersections.
Canada’s creation was a civilized affair, negotiated over cigars and brandy in dark-paneled conference rooms with British officials, who supported a semiautonomous confederation as a way to reduce military commitments and expenses. Not all Canadians were happy with the new confederation. While Ottawa celebrated, flags in Halifax, Nova Scotia, sagged at half-mast and shopkeepers shuttered their doors in mourning instead of celebration. Even in Canadian cities that wholeheartedly supported the confederation, jubilation intermingled with apprehension. Much as the new nation was inspired by incursions from the south, angst about whether the newborn country could survive to maturity lurked as its American neighbor was poised, ready to consume it whole.
Fear of the United States contributed to Queen Victoria’s selection of the logging town perched above the Ottawa River as the nation’s capital. Along with its location, straddling Canada’s English-speaking and French-speaking regions, Ottawa was considered a safe enough distance inland to be protected from a possible invasion by the United States. Those with long memories in Ontario could recall that prior to the redcoats torching the White House, Americans had burned down the provincial assembly building in Toronto. Americans still possessed the province’s parliamentary mace as a war trophy.
The United States continued to cast its land-hungry eyes north, ready to annex its neighbor. After all, Secretary of State William Seward had just months before signed a treaty to acquire Alaska from Russia for two cents an acre. Many Americans expected confederation to quickly end in failure, with Canada’s eventual incorporation into the United States. “When the experiment of the ‘Dominion’ shall have failed, as fail it must, a process of peaceful absorption will give Canada her proper place in the Great North American republic,” predicted The New York Times.
Thomas D’Arcy McGee recognized the American threat to his fledgling nation. He envisioned a country that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and he urged the incorporation of British Columbia into the union as quickly as possible in order to outflank the Americans on North America’s geopolitical chessboard. As a further deterrent to the giant to the south, which had ten times Canada’s population, he proposed that the entire population of Canada be armed. Most of all, he believed that Canadians needed to unify against the threat and that could be done only by rejecting sectarian ideologies, such as the Fenianism that sought to appeal to its Irish constituents.
Ironically, however, Canada might not have been a nation at all without the Fenians. Just as the Eastport fizzle had spurred pro-confederation forces to an electoral victory in New Brunswick a year earlier, the subsequent Fenian raids into Ontario and Quebec and the enduring threat of another attack alarmed many residents along the American border, convincing them that a union was necessary in order to protect their families and property.
McGee’s escalating rhetoric against the Fenians eroded his support among the predominantly Irish Catholic constituents in Montreal, and his political star faded. Although McGee was considered one of the “Fathers of Confederation” who played a vital role in the early negotiations of the political union, he was excluded from the delegation sent to London to draft the British North America Act, which formally established the confederation. Then he was excluded from Prime Minister John A. Macdonald’s inaugural cabinet, in order to allow greater religious and geographic balance in its composition.
Two days after the national celebration of the confederation, McGee returned to Montreal as campaigning began for Canada’s first federal parliament. With the Irish turning even further against the perceived traitor, McGee faced the toughest campaign of his political career, which he won by fewer than three hundred votes.
In shambles after the failure of the Fenian Rising in Ireland, the old Stephens-O’Mahony wing of the Fenian Brotherhood gathered in August 1867 and elected John Savage—a veteran of the 1848 rebellion, journalist, and author—as its leader. Meanwhile, the ascendant Roberts wing met in Cleveland the following month.
Although armed soldiers guarded the doors and delegates were sworn to secrecy, the details of the convention spilled onto the pages of the Cleveland Herald, which reported, with no apparent irony, that the Irishmen rejected a proposal to admit women into circles “because of their inability to keep a secret.” William Roberts castigated Stephens and his followers for the failure of the Fenian Rising in Ireland and accused them of lavish spending on “fast horses and faster women.”
In addition to electing General John O’Neill to the senate, convention delegates unanimously reelected Roberts, who agreed to serve only on the condition that the convention pledge $167,450 for another Canadian invasion. The Roberts wing would have to work hard, however, to amass that amount of money. It had raised more than $79,000 in the previous year but spent more than $87,000. Plus, the Irish Republic bonds were earning only $0.20 on the dollar. Roberts urged delegates to waste no more money on flags and other accoutrements. He wanted every dollar dedicated to arms and armaments.
General Samuel Spear, the acting secretary of war, had worked throughout 1867 to hone the Irish Republican Army into a sharper fighting force, organizing it into twenty-one regiments and even making sure it was better dressed with the development of regulation uniforms. The Fenian cavalry jacket, modeled after the U.S. Cavalry shell jacket, was bright green trimmed with yellow, while the infantry sported blue shell jackets with light blue or yellow trim. Brass buttons featured the raised letters “IRA” surrounded by a wreath of shamrocks, and brass belt plates bore the same three letters. Blue trousers with a green cord down the outside seam resembled those worn by the U.S. Army. Overcoats and blue kepis with green bands, which were sometimes worn with brass harp pins, completed the ensemble.
The Fenians also established regulations for commissioned officer uniforms that included a dark green frock coat, black trousers, a black hat, and a green silk sash. Major generals were permitted two silver sunbursts on their shoulder straps, brigadier generals one sunburst, colonels a silver phoenix, lieutenant colonels a silver shamrock, and majors a gold shamrock. The Irish Republican Army might have been able to compete sartorially with the redcoats, but it would never succeed if it couldn’t match the modernity of the enemy’s weapons.
In spite of his earlier pledge to return the guns seized from the Irish Republican Army during the prior year’s raids, President Andrew Johnson had yet to fulfill his promise by September 1867, when the Fenian senators Frank Gallagher and James Gibbons traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby for the return of the confiscated material. Johnson agreed as long as the Fenians vowed not to use them unlawfully. He directed Attorney General Henry Stanbery to oversee the return of approximately forty thousand weapons. The cache included hundreds upon hundreds of muskets, Smith carbines, bayonets, sabers, and even a pair of crutches and a bugle.
In just the short time since their manufacture, however, the Fenian stock of muzzle-loading Springfield rifles had become outdated by the advent of breech-loading rifles, which were being carried by American, British, and Canadian forces. Although breech-loading rifles still fired one shot at a time, soldiers could load their ammunition much more quickly by feeding a cartridge into a chamber in the rear of the barrel rather than having to pour the powder charge into the muzzle and ramrodding it into the barrel. An expert marksman could fire muzzle-loading rifles three times a minute, while breechloaders could shoot off twenty rounds in the same time.
The Fenian muzzle-loading Springfield rifles would be no match for the Snider conversions of the P1853 Enfield rifles carried by British troops. However, the Fenians were able to convert their muzzleloaders into state-of-the-art breechloaders, thanks to a method in which a breech was cut into the original sealed chamber and the rifle stocks reused. By converting their rifles, the Fenians could also keep their pledge not to use the weapons given back to them against Canada. They were, technically speaking, no longer the same guns.
In order to keep pace in the arms race, the Irish-American editor Patrick J. Meehan, who served as the Fenian secretary of military affairs, visited the Springfield Armory and contacted the Colt’s Manufacturing Company to explore options. Meehan ultimately decided to rent space in a former factory of the Trenton Locomotive Works and hire gunsmiths to perform the conversions on more than five thousand Springfield rifles. The Fenians, uncharacteristically, managed to maintain such secrecy around the Trenton, New Jersey, operation that few in the city had any idea that they had erected a makeshift armory. While new modern breech-loading Spencers cost $6 apiece and other gunsmiths quoted prices of $7 per rifle, the Fenian conversions cost $12 per gun, a decision that made financial sense for Meehan only because he had a personal stake in the Trenton operation.
With new uniforms and modernized weapons, the Irish Republican Army looked to the future with hopes of becoming a more professional fighting force. As a new year dawned, it turned to the leader of its greatest triumph to once again lead it into Canada.
As New Yorkers prepared to flood Wall Street and the byways of lower Manhattan to listen to the bells of Trinity Church ring in the new year of 1868, Roberts convened the senate inside the Fenians’ new headquarters, dubbed the Green House by the press, for an important New Year’s Eve announcement. The Fenian president informed the senators gathered inside the Greenwich Village town house at 10 West Fourth Street that the closing moments of 1867 would also bring with them the end of his tenure.
Roberts, who had not drawn a single dollar in salary or expenses while serving as president, resigned not only to return to his lucrative dry-goods business but to clear the way for a reunion with the O’Mahony faction after two years of separation. Weeks earlier, Roberts and Savage had signed a tentative agreement to merge into the United Brotherhood, with the two factions nominating seven people each to serve on a governing council and both men resigning their positions in order, they said, to tender the reunified organization’s presidency to John Mitchel.
The Irish nationalist firebrand had spent a year in Paris funneling money from the Fenian Brotherhood in the United States to Ireland. Although outspoken, Mitchel remained a respected figure among both Fenian Brotherhood and IRB leaders because he had little involvement in either organization, believing both to be engaging in foolhardy military schemes.
In the interim, the Fenians needed to replace Roberts. Meehan and his fellow senators sought someone vigorous and famous, and so, on New Year’s Day, the fifteen-man senate unanimously elected the war hero O’Neill.
Meehan’s Irish-American newspaper reveled in the ascension of a member of the rebellious O’Neill clan. “The Irish heart leaps fondly towards the historic name and the proud recollection of the days when Hugh and Owen stood for the rights of their people and native land, and dealt the assailants of both those sturdy blows.”
O’Neill, who had resigned as inspector general a few months earlier to devote more time to his real estate and claims business, said he must answer the call of duty like a loyal soldier. There was one condition—that the senate unite behind him in preparing for another attack on Canada before the close of 1868.
O’Neill had fame, but he lacked a fortune like Roberts’s. He had just paid a Washington, D.C., lawyer $6,000 to put the affairs of his lackluster business in order and would now have to forsake his enterprise once again. He did so only because he expected his tenure to be a short one.
But not long after O’Neill’s ascension, word arrived from Paris that Mitchel, who thought a Canadian invasion and a transatlantic attack on Ireland during peacetime equally delusional, had no interest in returning to the United States to lead the revolutionary movement. Perhaps inevitably, the two rival clans returned to their sniping. The deal signed by Roberts and Savage fell apart. The Fenian movement remained, as ever, hopelessly divided.
With his presidential stint more than just an interim role, O’Neill threw his energy into fulfilling the pledge taken by the Fenian senate on New Year’s Day “to go to work at once to put the national organization on a war footing.” He attended state conventions from Maine to Minnesota and wrote as many as thirty letters a day to leaders of Fenian circles. The large, enthusiastic crowds that greeted O’Neill in city after city testified to his enduring popularity.
In a return to Buffalo, the launching point for O’Neill’s greatest triumph, Colonel William Clingen led the Seventh Regiment of the Irish Republican Army as it escorted the Fenian president through the city to St. James Hall, where six thousand people squeezed inside to hear him speak. Hundreds more who could not gain admittance spilled onto the street outside.
“Your presence here in such vast numbers tonight will convince the most skeptical that the Fenian cause is not dead,” O’Neill told his fellow Irishmen. “The men that crossed with me at Fort Erie are ready to fight again. You need no better proof of the fact than that they stand at my back here tonight.” After the stirring oratory, more than one hundred men rushed the stage to enroll in the Irish Republican Army.
“The result of O’Neill’s visit to Chicago has been to strengthen the Fenian cause fifty fold,” one Canadian spy reported. “Many who were formerly adherents of the O’Mahony party, and had thrown up the cause as hopeless, are now its strongest supporters and are ready for any movement no matter how unlawful or rash it may be.”
As O’Neill continued to energize Fenian audiences, he remained bitter toward the man he still blamed for thwarting his takeover of Canada two years earlier. With his power increasing, O’Neill traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet him in person—president to president.
Washington, D.C., had truly become a federal city during the Civil War as the American government swelled to an unprecedented level. The newly constructed dome of the U.S. Capitol loomed over the cityscape, a powerful symbol of the Union, but the granite stump of the unfinished Washington Monument—its construction halted fourteen years earlier due to a lack of money—served as a reminder of the hard work that remained in building a more perfect union.
Seeking an audience with President Johnson, O’Neill stepped through the doors of the White House, which still bore burn marks on its walls from the British visit during the War of 1812, and joined the callers who flocked outside the president’s office every day in search of a moment with the commander in chief to lobby for a patronage job or a pet project.
Accompanying the Fenian president on the trip was one of his closest confidants, Major Henri Le Caron. A slender, refined figure with a military mustache, Le Caron was described as having “one of the boniest faces in or out of the New World, a death’s head with a tight skin of yellow parchment.” A human chimney who consumed as many as sixteen cigars a day, Le Caron watched life through a haze of smoke. Beneath his lofty forehead and neatly combed black hair, his beady eyes remained on constant alert, continually darting around his surroundings.
In search of adventure, Le Caron had come to the United States from Paris at the outbreak of the Civil War. He served as a private and bugler with the Fifteenth Pennsylvania Cavalry before becoming a lieutenant in the Thirteenth U.S. Colored Cavalry. Fellow soldiers found something just a little odd about Le Caron but chalked it up to his being a Frenchman. Rumors circulated around the campfires that Le Caron was related to the princes of Orléans, although he had a strange tendency at times to slip into an English Cockney accent.
While stationed in Nashville, Le Caron became acquaintances with O’Neill, who was serving with the Seventeenth U.S. Colored Cavalry. O’Neill found himself drawn to the Parisian, who entertained him with tall tales and claimed Hibernian roots on his mother’s side. It was in Nashville that Le Caron, like O’Neill, joined the Fenian Brotherhood.
Following the war, Le Caron moved to Illinois and pursued a career in medicine. He took classes at the Chicago Medical College and worked as a surgical assistant inside the Illinois State Penitentiary in Joliet until adventure beckoned once again a few months after O’Neill took leadership of the Fenians. “Come at once, you are needed for work,” the Fenian president telegrammed Le Caron.
Summoned to Fenian headquarters in New York, Le Caron quit his job and left his family behind. O’Neill commissioned him a major and military organizer for the Irish Republican Army at a salary of $60 a month plus $7 a day for expenses. He tasked Le Caron with inspecting and reorganizing the organization’s military units in the East, and now he brought him along to join in the audience with President Johnson, who had served as Tennessee’s military governor at the same time both men were stationed in Nashville.
Johnson limped into 1868 as the lamest of lame ducks—even before his impeachment by the Republican-dominated House of Representatives and acquittal by a single vote following his trial by the Senate. The American president had heard the enduring criticism from Irish Americans about his actions during the Fenian raid of 1866 and thought it unjust. “They don’t take into account that we can’t do just what we want in these things,” he told The Cincinnati Commercial. “As Andrew Johnson, I have always sympathized with this movement, but a man can’t always do officially what he feels unofficially. We must obey certain laws of nations—we must obey the neutrality laws.”
Johnson sat down with Le Caron and O’Neill, and he reiterated his support of the Fenian cause. “General, your people unfairly blame me a good deal for the part I took in stopping your first movement,” the president said, according to Le Caron’s account. “Now I want you to understand that my sympathies are entirely with you, and anything which lies in my power I am willing to do to assist you. But you must remember that I gave you five full days before issuing any proclamation stopping you. What, in God’s name, more did you want? If you could not get there in five days, by God, you could never get there.”
If Le Caron’s report of the White House meeting was accurate, Johnson had once again signaled the support of the American government for the Fenian cause. The unresolved Alabama claims and cases of American citizens incarcerated in British prisons continued to divide the United States and Great Britain, and O’Neill intended to take full advantage of the split to strike Canada once again.
Among O’Neill’s first actions as president of the Fenian Brotherhood had been distancing the organization from the Clerkenwell prison explosion as well as from the reports arriving from overseas that Fenians had sent explosive letters addressed to prominent British officials in Dublin and thrown bottles of incendiary Greek fire, now being called “Fenian fire” by the British press, through the windows of London homes in hopes of setting them ablaze. The violent episodes caused Charles Dickens to feel uneasy about his safety as he embarked on a reading tour of the United States. “I have an opinion myself that the Irish element in New York is dangerous for the reason that the Fenians would be glad to damage a conspicuous Englishman,” he wrote.
O’Neill had no interest in such an enterprise, however. Having become comfortable in his role as Fenian president and bolstered by the tacit support of the White House, O’Neill fixated on fulfilling the pledge that he had made to Canadian soldiers while departing Fort Erie in June 1866 to return soon with an even larger army. That Canada had cut some of its ties to Great Britain through confederation mattered not to the Fenian president. Any territory that was partly British was still British.
To its moral credit but military disadvantage, the Fenian Brotherhood clung to its dubious strategy of winning Ireland’s freedom by challenging the British on the battlefield. For O’Neill, there was nothing gallant in bombing civilians, murdering political leaders, or perpetrating attacks through the postal service. An O’Neill could only find glory confronting the enemy soldier to soldier.
“The Fenian organization will not fight their battles by assassination of individuals,” O’Neill told an audience in Buffalo in February 1868. Events in the coming weeks, however, would cause many to question the honesty of that pledge.