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Bold Fenian Men
JOHN O’MAHONY FOLLOWED in the wake of one million Irishmen who washed up on North American shorelines during the years of the Great Hunger in one of the largest migrations in human history. Many of the castaways sailed aboard former slave ships and hastily converted cargo vessels. The hunger and disease that they thought they had left behind in Ireland clung to them like the lice that spread cholera below deck. Mortality rates soared as high as 30 percent aboard these aptly nicknamed “coffin ships.” Along with the pails of garbage and excrement, crews tossed overboard dead bodies, wrapped in cloths and weighted down by rocks. Some emigrants reported that so many corpses splashed into the ocean that sharks stalked their ships, awaiting their next meals.
After recruiting his fellow Young Irelander James Stephens to lead the Irish Republican Brotherhood, John O’Mahony became the head of the Fenian Brotherhood in the United States.
Upon landing in New York City in January 1854, O’Mahony was greeted by a cacophony of noise and a hash of foreign languages. Manhattan might have been a Babel of an island, with the majority of its denizens foreign-born, but the arrival of every ship laden with poor, hungry Irishmen made it increasingly an emerald isle. By the 1850s, more than a quarter of the city’s residents had been born in Ireland.
Too destitute to venture any farther than their feet would take them, the Irish who arrived in New York huddled inside rickety, disease-riddled tenements in neighborhoods such as the notorious Five Points. They lived in unventilated attics where they suffocated in the summer and froze in the winter. They lived belowground in dark cellars that routinely flooded with sewage and rainwater. Breathing putrid air, lacking running water, and still suffering the ill effects of the Great Hunger and their voyage, the Irish died at a rate of seven times their fellow New Yorkers. A rural people now found themselves in the midst of one of the world’s most densely populated cities. Their farming skills rendered useless, they took low-paying, manual labor jobs. They dug ditches. They unloaded ships. They cooked and sewed.
The winter of 1854 was a uniquely bad time to be an immigrant, a Catholic, and an Irishman in America. The year ahead would be only worse.
With immigration controls left primarily to the states and cities, more than 1.4 million foreigners poured through U.S. borders in the 1840s, a figure that doubled in the 1850s. Native-born Americans feared the torrent of foreigners would dilute their culture and pilfer their jobs. The cry of “America for Americans!” echoed across the country.
A secret society of native-born Protestants coalesced in the 1850s to form the anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American Party, whose members were dubbed Know-Nothings for their parroted response, “I know nothing,” when questioned about their activities. Know-Nothings advocated an increase in the waiting period for American citizenship from five to twenty-one years and sought to restrict eligibility for elective offices to native-born Americans—as long as they weren’t also Catholic.
Although hostile toward most immigrants, the Know-Nothings reserved their worst scorn for the Irish, who not only came in unprecedented numbers but were unlike any newcomers that the United States had seen before. They were not immigrants seeking political or religious freedom but refugees of a humanitarian disaster. Although most certainly tired and poor, the Irish did not arrive in America yearning to breathe free; they merely wanted to eat.
To nativist eyes, these immigrants had no love of American culture, no respect for its laws. They had no intention of becoming productive members of society. They came only for the handouts and then ungratefully complained about their mistreatment. They were desperately poor and sickly, uneducated and unskilled. They brought crime and disease.
Many didn’t even speak English. According to some scholars, more than a quarter of the Great Hunger exiles arriving in the 1850s spoke Irish, and the majority of them were illiterate. They exhausted the capacities of jails, asylums, and orphanages and strained welfare budgets. Even worse, they imported their strange religion.
Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose ancestors explicitly crossed the ocean to escape papism and ensure their worship was cleansed of any remaining Catholic vestiges feared that the Irish would impose the Catholic canon as the law of the land. Rumors even spread that the pope and his army planned to overthrow the U.S. government and establish a new Vatican in Cincinnati.
The religious tension boiled over just weeks after O’Mahony’s arrival. In March 1854, Know-Nothings seized a marble block gifted by Pope Pius IX for construction of the Washington Monument and threw it into the Potomac River, suspecting it was a signal from the pontiff to launch an immigrant uprising in the United States. That summer, anti-Catholic rioters in Bath, Maine, smashed the pews of a local church recently purchased by Irish Catholics before setting it ablaze. Farther up the Maine coast in Ellsworth, a Protestant mob blew up a Catholic chapel with gunpowder before tarring and feathering the Jesuit priest John Bapst because he denounced the use of the King James Bible in local schools.
That fall, the Know-Nothings scored major victories at the ballot box, in particular in Massachusetts, where they captured every statewide office and all but three of the 380 seats in the legislature. They mandated the reading of the King James Bible in public schools, prohibited the teaching of foreign languages, and systematically deported thousands of destitute Irish back to the British Isles. They disbanded Irish American militia units and launched surprise inspections of Catholic convents and schools amid rumors of lascivious sexual behavior by clerics. Know-Nothings also won the governorships in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire as well as legislative majorities in Indiana and Maine.
O’Mahony could encounter signs of the discrimination against his kind all around New York, including in the help-wanted advertisements in the city’s newspapers that stipulated “Irish need not apply” or “any country or color except Irish.” In popular magazines such as Punch, cartoonists sketched the Irish as simian creatures with monstrous countenances and jugs of alcohol tethered to their sides. In the city’s theaters, audiences howled at depictions of the Irish as drunken, pipe-smoking buffoons with overwrought brogues.
After spending seven centuries under the thumb of the British, the Irish who came to America found themselves again subservient to an Anglo-Protestant ruling class. “This is an English colony and its people inherit from their ancestors the true Saxon contempt for everything Irish,” said one disappointed exile.
The more threatened the Irish felt, the more they turned inward, like a snake coiling itself for protection. Always a tribal people, they grew fiercely communal in their urban enclaves. They clung together in church parishes and fraternal organizations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians.
The Irish had never assimilated with the English. That’s how their culture had survived centuries of colonization. Why should they behave differently in the United States?
In some respects, the diaspora who crossed the Atlantic became even more radical than those who stayed in Ireland. They bore not only the scars of the Great Hunger but the disdain of the Know-Nothings. Plus, they enjoyed the protections of the U.S. Constitution, which gave them a haven from which they could operate beyond the reach of British laws. In America, they had the freedom to assemble, bear arms, and speak out against their enemy.
No Irish revolutionary in America exercised his newfound freedom of speech more vigorously than John Mitchel, the incendiary onetime publisher of The United Irishman. While imprisoned in Tasmania for his role in the uprising, Mitchel engineered an escape, fleeing to New York City in November 1853 in the footsteps of his fellow convict Thomas Francis Meagher, who had done the same a year earlier.
Banishment to Australia had done nothing to douse Mitchel’s fiery rhetoric about the British government and its role in the Great Hunger. In the pages of his newly established weekly newspaper, The Citizen, he printed the accounts of his years as a political prisoner, continuing to accuse the British of genocide.
Mitchel’s fire-breathing pen, however, began to set collateral targets ablaze. Still smarting from what he saw as the clergy’s betrayal of Young Ireland, he clashed with New York’s archbishop, John Joseph Hughes, a County Tyrone native. Mitchel’s broadsides against hypocritical abolitionists—such as Theodore Parker, who wrote that the Irish had “bad habits, bad religion, and worst of all, a bad nature”—turned into vehement defenses of slavery. Shortly after, in 1855, Mitchel abruptly shuttered his newspaper and moved to Tennessee, where his pro-slavery views found a more welcoming audience.
This left O’Mahony abandoned. It had been Mitchel’s arrival in New York that had spurred his resettlement. He joined with Michael Doheny, his compatriot in exile years earlier in the mountains of Ireland. Doheny had resumed practicing law after his own arrival in New York in 1849. Together with fellow Young Irelanders, they formed the Emmet Monument Association. Its moniker alluded to Robert Emmet’s famous speech in the dock before his hanging. The Irish rebel leader implored, “When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written.”
The men took practical steps toward the liberation of Ireland. Members drilled weekly with an Irish regiment that Doheny organized as part of the New York State Militia. Their activities in New York drew the concern of the British ambassador to the United States, who complained to the U.S. secretary of state, William Marcy, about “the existence of clubs composed of the Irish population in that city for the purpose of enlisting and drilling volunteers to effect an insurrection in Ireland.”
British unease grew when authorities arrested twenty Irish Americans in Cincinnati in 1856 and charged them with plotting an assault in Ireland, in violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act of 1818. The court acquitted the Irishmen, but not before Judge Humphrey Howe Leavitt warned the exiles that they were first and foremost Americans. “There can be no such thing as a divided national allegiance,” he said. “The foreigner who takes the oath of fidelity to our government necessarily renounces his allegiance to all others.”
The Irishmen could be forgiven if they thought that launching operations against foreign governments was a quintessential American activity. Two decades earlier, Americans poured across the border of the Mexican province of Texas and eventually declared it an independent republic. They did the same in California in 1846. During the 1850s, “filibusters” launched expeditions to Central and South America with the intent of adding more slave states to the Union and lining the pockets of multinational corporations. The Venezuelan-born Narciso López used New Orleans as a base for attacking Spanish-controlled Cuba, while the American William Walker captured the Mexican city of La Paz in Baja California and later conquered Nicaragua, reinstituted slavery, and named himself president, a move recognized by President Franklin Pierce.
Through the efforts of O’Mahony and his fellow exiles, the transplanted Irish revolutionary movement took root in American soil. Back in Ireland, however, its prospects were as dim as ever.
Residents of Ireland spotted a dead man walking the island’s roads in 1856. Eight years after the Kilkenny Moderator printed his obituary, James Stephens quietly returned home from the European continent. A year earlier, the Young Ireland veteran Charles Gavan Duffy had reported, “There seems to me no more hope for the Irish cause than for the corpse on the dissecting-table.” Stephens chose to judge for himself.
He had lost hair and gained weight during his eight-year exile. Some doubted he was who he claimed to be. Even his local Catholic priest did not recognize him.
Out of touch with his family since taking flight from Ireland, Stephens learned the devastating news that his father and sister had died shortly after his departure.
Further disheartening the rebel, support for Irish independence appeared to have likewise perished. With its people still processing their trauma and survivors’ guilt, Stephens wrote of his fear that Ireland “had given up the ghost, and was at last, to all intents and purposes, one of England’s reconquered provinces.”
To get a better sense of whether the same attitude permeated the rest of the island, Stephens embarked on what he later claimed to have been a three-thousand-mile ramble, in a circuit of Ireland. Smoking his pipe and leaning on his walking stick, he spoke with farmers, peasants, and laborers. He slept in their homes and supped around their tables. He learned about their hardships—low pay, landlord oppression, rising rents, and high taxes to support a government and a church in which they had no faith.
But he detected a faint nationalist pulse among poor Catholic farmers and laborers, in particular the Ribbonmen, a secret agrarian society that terrorized landlords by burning barns, damaging property, and harming livestock. “The cause is not dead but sleeping,” he reported.
Stephens warned, however, that “if another decade was allowed to pass without an endeavor of some kind or another to shake off an unjust yoke, the Irish people would sink into a lethargy from which it would be impossible for any patriot, however Titanic in genius, or, for any body of patriots, however sincere and zealous, to arouse them into anything like a healthy existence.”
On the other side of the Atlantic, O’Mahony felt the same urgency to act. He wrote to Stephens that he had grown “sick of Young Ireland and its theatrical leaders” who did little more than bloviate about the British colonization of Ireland. Unlike the “tinsel patriots” he derided, O’Mahony set about to forge a new Irish republican movement, one that would be as revolutionary in its structure as it would be in its mission.
At the close of December 1857, a young Irishman named Owen Considine called on Stephens at his Dublin residence. He bore a letter from the United States signed by four exiles, including O’Mahony and Doheny. It called upon him to form an organization in Ireland that would work in conjunction with them to secure independence. It would be a transatlantic effort, unlike previous movements. The Irish would take advantage of the revolutionary zeal and freedoms of the United States to raise money, ship arms, and plot military operations, while kindred rebels in Ireland would supply manpower and coordinate logistics.
Stephens dispatched Joseph Denieffe as a messenger to the United States with his enthusiastic agreement to take on the task—but on two conditions that reflected his growing arrogance. In addition to £80 to £100 per month, he demanded to be “perfectly unshackled; in other words, a provisional dictator. On this point I can conscientiously concede nothing.” For his part, Stephens vowed within three months to recruit ten thousand men, fifteen hundred armed with guns and the rest with pikes.
Stephens couldn’t take it as anything but an encouraging sign that Denieffe returned to Dublin on March 17, 1858, with the first monetary installment and an agreement to his terms. As Ireland commemorated its patron saint, Stephens read the document signed by Doheny, O’Mahony, and fourteen other Irish American leaders, appointing him “Chief Executive of the Irish Revolutionary movement” and granting him “supreme control and absolute authority over that movement in Ireland.”
That night, Stephens gathered with his fellow nationalists Considine, Denieffe, Peter Langan, Garrett O’Shaughnessy, and Thomas Clarke Luby to inaugurate the secret revolutionary organization that would come to be known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). As the head of the conspiracy, he was first to take the oath drawn up by Luby.
To maintain secrecy, Stephens organized the IRB into cells known as “circles.” A “head center,” referred to as an “A” and equal in rank to a colonel, was to lead each circle. Head centers selected nine B-level members, equivalent to captains, who each selected nine C-level personnel, equivalent to sergeants, who each selected nine D-level members, equivalent to privates. A fully staffed circle would include 820 members. In theory, members would know only the identities of those directly above or below them in the organization, with only captains knowing the identity of the head center.
Stephens and Luby went right to work traveling south of Dublin to recruit members for their new organization. Stephens excelled as an organizer, combining his mind for numbers with his vision of a free Ireland. “He seemed to have me under a spell,” Denieffe recalled. “There was earnestness in his every move.”
In the United States, the venture did not get off to as smooth a start. With America deep in the throes of the financial panic of 1857, fund-raising proved difficult, and most of April’s £90 payment to Ireland had to be shaken out of the personal pockets of the Emmet Monument Association’s leaders.
In spite of a promise that the second installment would reach Ireland in April, summer arrived without any money from America, forcing Stephens and Luby to abandon their recruiting only shortly after it had begun.
Stephens again dispatched Denieffe to the United States, but he returned with only £40 this time, along with an ominous warning. “The Irish-Americans will not subscribe until they are obliged to,” he said. “They have been humbugged so often that they have lost confidence, and at present have no faith in attempts for the regeneration of Ireland.” Disappointed at his lack of support from the United States, Stephens took matters into his own hands. He decided to cross the Atlantic himself, to prime the cash flow and lobby fellow Young Ireland veterans to join the new organization.
When Stephens arrived on American soil for the first time, on October 13, 1858, his legs buckled and his stomach churned from his time at sea. It was only the start of the Irishman’s relentless litany of complaints, about both his health and the United States itself, during his five-month stay. In his diary, Stephens described a “land of self, greed, and grab” that abounded with “debasing influences.” He found a country putting on a facade as grotesque as the “dirt-colored stone and piss-streaked marble” facings that covered up the slender brick walls of the mansions he passed on Fifth Avenue. Even the brightly colored autumn leaves he found to be “tiresomely monotonous.”
During his tour of America’s Irish enclaves, Stephens traveled to the nation’s capital and met President James Buchanan. Stephens was not any more impressed with Buchanan than with the country he governed. He wrote that “Old Buck” had “the expression of a philandering tom-cat” and was little better than “a Yankee development of the Artful Dodger.”
Upon their reunion, Doheny found little evidence of the young man who sang tunes and quietly endured his gunshot wounds while on the run in Ireland in 1848. Embracing the role of the “provisional dictator,” Stephens had grown condescending. His relationship with Doheny cooled, but Stephens found much to admire in O’Mahony, whom he called “far and away the first patriot of the Irish race.”
“In loving Ireland he loves more than a principle of justice,” Stephens wrote. “Intensely, passionately he loves the Irish race. The memories of times gone by and hallowed by the deeds of the men of his blood, the language, the literature, the monuments, speak to him as to no other.”
At a meeting inside New York’s Tammany Hall, Stephens officially appointed O’Mahony the head of the IRB’s branch in the United States, designating him the “supreme organizer and director of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood in America.” In early 1859, O’Mahony would dub the American counterpart to the IRB the Fenian Brotherhood, a name that harked back to the legendary Celtic warriors with whom the Gaelic scholar had spent long days and nights in 1857 as he translated Geoffrey Keating’s History of Ireland from Irish into English. The word “Fenian”* was an Anglicized version of the Irish word Fianna, the band of mythical Gaelic heroes from pre-Christian times commanded by Finn McCool. Although members of the IRB were distinct from those in the Fenian Brotherhood, the term “Fenian” would come to refer to both groups, and eventually Irish republicans in general.
Similar to the IRB, the oath-bound Fenian Brotherhood adopted a military-style organizational structure. The group started with approximately forty members, all of them in New York. (Significantly, their ranks didn’t include two prominent Young Irelanders—Mitchel and Meagher.)
Stephens returned to Ireland in March 1859 with £600 and, according to a document drafted by the Irish Americans, a further assurance of “supreme control and absolute authority over that movement at home and abroad.” He also left with growing concerns about whether O’Mahony was the right man to lead the American operation. “Should I perish, the cause is lost,” he wrote. “For I fear that even he lacks many of the essentials of a leader.”
As a new decade dawned, membership in both the IRB and the Fenian Brotherhood grew more slowly than Stephens or O’Mahony had hoped. A major obstacle to recruiting Irish Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic was their fear not so much of dying at the hands of the British as of the eternal damnation that would follow. Although most Americans believed the Fenian Brotherhood was a papist organization, clergy across the United States railed against its members from their pulpits. Secret societies—particularly those willing to use violence—ran afoul of church teaching, and priests threatened to withhold sacraments from anyone who recited the Fenian oath. American bishops also accused the Fenians of preying on the gullible Irish.
The Vatican might have cloaked its stance toward the Fenians in its opposition to clandestine societies, but it had little affinity with those preaching the gospel of popular uprising, particularly when it was itself at war with Italian revolutionaries. Pope Pius IX appealed to his Irish subjects to join the fight for the Papal States against Italy’s rebels. He had no use for those doing the same for their homeland.
The opposition of Dublin’s powerful archbishop, Paul Cullen, and other clerical leaders in Ireland slowed the growth of the IRB, particularly in rural areas of Ireland where the church was most powerful. Even though its parishioners were treated as second-class citizens, the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland was comfortable with its position in relation to the Crown. It was the Fenians who threatened its status in their espousal of the separation of church and state.
Stephens and O’Mahony believed the clergy had overstepped their bounds by becoming involved in political matters during the Young Irelander Rebellion, and they vowed not to let it happen again. “Those who denounce us go beyond their duty as clergymen,” O’Mahony wrote.
Stephens urged his followers to obey the clergy on spiritual matters, but when it came to other subjects, to treat them as fellow citizens. “It was necessary to get the people, in my mind, to distinguish between the twofold character of the priest,” he wrote, “to distinguish between their temporal and spiritual character.”
While generations of rebels in Ireland had been forced to drill with pikes and pitchforks by the light of the moon, the Fenians in America gained valuable military training with firearms. They served in volunteer militias, which became prevalent in the United States after the Mexican-American War. Irish American militia groups sprouted across the country.
By November 1859, O’Mahony had organized forty military regiments and companies with connections to the Fenian Brotherhood. However, he was no evangelizer. He rarely traveled from New York City to recruit new members, which led to growing tensions between him and Stephens. Meanwhile, Stephens boasted so often of his superior organizing efforts in Ireland that O’Mahony grew distrustful of the IRB leader’s accounts.
O’Mahony traveled to Ireland at the end of 1860 to check on the rebellion’s progress himself. After welcoming his counterpart to Dublin, Stephens immediately “reproached him in words of the most cutting sarcasm, telling him of his shortcomings, feebleness and insincerity,” according to Denieffe. He capped the tirade with a reminder of how he “had dragged him out of obscurity and put him in a position he never dreamed of.” The solidarity between the two men shaken, O’Mahony sailed for home in March 1861. He returned to a nation that had been divided in two.