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 patriotism 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.
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 Grant.
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.