3
The Civil War
THE FIRST BLOODSHED in the Civil War was Irish.
While the Union soldiers stationed at Fort Sumter all survived the thunderstorm of Confederate mortar shells and cannonballs that marked the start of the Civil War on April 12, 1861, they didn’t emerge from the surrender ceremony unscathed. An accidental explosion during the firing of a one-hundred-gun salute to the Stars and Stripes killed two Irishmen.
The cause of death might have been a fluke, but the fatalities of two Irishmen in a Union outpost were not just some stroke of bad luck. Irish natives not only accounted for half of the sixteen-thousand-man regular army but outnumbered American-born soldiers inside Fort Sumter.
The fatalities reinforced John O’Mahony’s worst fears that the Irish would perish while battling both fellow Americans and fellow Irishmen, instead of their true enemy, a concern shared by one Dublin newspaper. “Ireland will be more deeply, more mournfully, affected by the disasters in America, than any other country in the world. The lives of her exiled children will be offered in thousands,” predicted The Nation.
Feeling a kinship with fellow rebels, approximately 20,000 Irish Americans joined the Confederate forces, while according to some estimates more than 200,000 Irishmen fought for the United States when factoring in volunteers in American territories, the Union army, and the Union navy—in which as many as 20 percent of the sailors were Irish-born.
Irish on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line enlisted not just out of a sense of duty to the new land that took them in but to silence nativists who questioned their patriotism. For many, though, hungry stomachs and empty pockets offered the only necessary motivation. The Irish still struggled at the bottom of the American economy with unemployment among Irish males 25 percent higher in 1861 than during the panic of 1857. Sure, the job could bring death, but at least it paid.
To many Fenians and Irish republicans, enlistment offered the opportunity to gain valuable training for the eventual revolution they planned to launch in Ireland. The County Kilkenny native John O’Keeffe wrote that he joined the Union army to “learn the soldier trade in the hope that the knowledge we acquired might, in the future, be of service to the old land.”
The Young Ireland veteran Thomas Francis Meagher echoed the sentiment. “It is a moral certainty that many of our countrymen who enlist in this struggle for the maintenance of the Union will fall in the contest. But, even so; I hold that if only one in ten of us come back when this war is over, the military experience gained by that one will be of more service in the fight for Ireland’s freedom than would that of the entire ten as they are now.”
O’Mahony, however, could be excused if he didn’t quite see the long-term benefit of the Civil War as a proving ground for an Irish revolutionary army—not if it wiped out all of Ireland’s Celtic warriors. Membership in both the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Fenian Brotherhood had already stagnated, and now war pitted Irishman against Irishman. Fenianism appeared to teeter—until a dead man arose from the grave to give it new life.
Even those who loathed the Irish could grudgingly admit one thing: They sure knew how to throw a funeral. Few good-byes in Irish history, however, rivaled the one the Fenians gave to Terence Bellew MacManus, the Young Irelander who fought alongside James Stephens in Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch.
MacManus had also escaped from his captivity in Tasmania, having settled in San Francisco. There, the fifty-year-old bachelor died in poverty on January 15, 1861. Although his passing drew little notice outside Irish American newspapers, MacManus would not be permitted to rest in peace in San Francisco’s Calvary Cemetery. The Fenian Brotherhood circle in San Francisco decided that the Irish patriot should be buried in native soil, and O’Mahony and Stephens foresaw the propaganda benefits of staging a transatlantic funeral procession with MacManus as the lifeless star of a Fenian pageant.
On August 19, 1861, seven months after the exile’s burial, they excavated his grave and placed his remains inside a lavish rosewood coffin. Following a funeral Mass and a procession through the streets of San Francisco lined with many of the city’s ten thousand Irish-born residents, the patriot’s body sailed to New York City. On September 16, Archbishop John Joseph Hughes—in spite of past run-ins with Young Irelanders such as Meagher and John Mitchel—delivered remarks at a funeral Mass inside old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a task he was willing to undertake because MacManus never swore an oath to join the Fenian Brotherhood.
A month later, the corpse of MacManus sailed home to Ireland. On the cold, wet Sunday morning of November 10, Dubliners who knelt to their God in the morning stood for hours to venerate an Irish rebel’s bones in the afternoon. According to Stephens, 150,000 people watched the massive funeral procession slog through ankle-deep mud along the seven-mile route to Glasnevin Cemetery, the vast necropolis on Dublin’s northern outskirts where the city’s Catholics had finally found the freedom and dignity in death that the British had so long denied them in life. In enveloping darkness, one of history’s longest Irish wakes finally ended with the burial of MacManus beneath the gaze of the 160-foot-tall traditional Irish round tower that soared above the tomb of Daniel O’Connell, the great nationalist leader at whose behest the burial ground was established in 1832, at a time when the city’s Catholics had no cemeteries in which their graveside services were permitted.
The Fenians basked in the largest outpouring of Irish nationalism since O’Connell’s funeral fourteen years earlier. “The facecloth is removed from the dead nation, and lo! instead of a dead face the living lines of strength and resolve are seen! It was a great triumph,” an ebullient Stephens wrote to O’Mahony.
While the MacManus funeral invigorated IRB membership abroad, it had less of an impact in the United States, where Irish pocketbooks were understandably consumed by the Civil War. Unaware of the full extent of the difficulties confronting O’Mahony, Stephens continually ridiculed his American counterpart and demanded more money. “One hundred and thirteen pounds from the whole American organization in a whole year! I should look on this as a small sum monthly,” Stephens castigated O’Mahony in April 1862. “It would pain you to hear all that is said about the American branch, and to know that I cannot conscientiously defend the conduct of our brothers yonder, especially since the funeral.”
The conspiratorial mind that proved so adept in organizing a secret society failed Stephens in his relationships with American Fenians. Like a jealous lover, Stephens grew paranoid at what he considered long periods between the Fenian leader’s communications. “No other living man would bear what I am bearing,” he once complained about O’Mahony’s infrequent letters.
Stephens grew so disgusted at the slow fund-raising pace that he took an unusual step for a secret society: He launched a newspaper. Hardly bothering to hide the enterprise, Stephens opened its offices mere steps away from Dublin Castle, the center of British power in Ireland. Stephens expected the newspaper to generate £5,000* a year. If it couldn’t, he warned with typical bombast that the whole IRB could collapse. “The establishment of the paper had become a necessity—a matter of life or death to the organization,” he later wrote.
The Irish People debuted on November 28, 1863, and all ten thousand copies sold out quickly. It was the IRB leader’s second major undertaking that month. On November 11, he got married, shocking his followers who thought that Ireland was his only true love, remembering his discouragements of nuptials or even lovemaking until the establishment of the Irish Republic.
Marriage proved an easier go than the newspaper business as The Irish People struggled to make money. The anticlerical tone of the sixteen-page newspaper caused the clergy to pressure parishioners not to sell copies in their retail establishments. Oftentimes, it lost money, forcing Stephens to tap his meager private funds to keep the printing press going.
Although Stephens had stayed true to his demand to be a “provisional dictator” when the Fenians launched their transatlantic structure five years earlier, O’Mahony chafed at his subservient role. He wanted the Fenian Brotherhood to be more than simply the arsenal and money box for Ireland. He wanted a greater say in formulating policy.
Unwilling to submit to the “dictatorial arrogance” of Stephens any longer, O’Mahony decided to liberate himself and the Fenian Brotherhood. “As chief officer of the American organization, my powers must be put upon an even level with his authority over the Irish,” he wrote of Stephens. “I will no longer consent to be accountable to him for my official conduct. We must treat as equal to equal, when it is necessary for us to treat at all.” On October 19, 1863, O’Mahony resigned his position as supreme organizer and director of the IRB in America.
“I am sick—almost to death—of the man and his ways,” Stephens wrote of O’Mahony. He complained that the Fenian Brotherhood leader had become a “standing drag-chain and stumbling-block” to the revolutionary efforts, and a growing number of Irish Americans agreed with him. A group of impatient Fenians, including James Gibbons of Philadelphia and Michael Scanlan of Chicago, who called themselves “men of action,” forced O’Mahony to call the Fenians’ first general convention.
On November 3, 1863, eighty-two delegates from twelve states and the District of Columbia, including a soldier who had recently lost a limb at the Battle of Gettysburg, gathered inside Chicago’s Fenian Hall and proclaimed “the Republic of Ireland to be virtually established.” Accordingly, the Fenian Brotherhood reorganized itself along the lines of a proper republican government by drafting a constitution that made several structural changes. The head center would now be an elected position and the executive and financial departments separated. Delegates unanimously returned O’Mahony to the head center position and approved his nominations of Gibbons, Scanlan, and three others to a new central council.
The Fenian Brotherhood also agreed to abandon its semisecret status. O’Mahony hoped the decision would put the Fenian Brotherhood “beyond the reach of hostile churchmen,” but the changes did not appease the archbishops of Chicago and Philadelphia, who continued to condemn the Fenian Brotherhood as a secret society afoul of Catholic doctrine. Archbishop Peter Richard Kenrick of St. Louis reinforced to his flock that any members of the Fenian Brotherhood would be barred from receiving the sacraments of the church.
The structural changes did not satisfy these “men of action,” either. Still frustrated at the slow pace of activity and fund-raising in the United States, they organized the Irish National Fair in Chicago in the early spring of 1864 without consulting O’Mahony. The two-week fair raised $54,000 for the purchase of weapons through the sale of handmade Irish goods—from blackthorn walking sticks to carved bog art—as well as Irish republican relics such as a window shutter handle from Theobald Wolfe Tone’s Dublin residence and the silver crucifix placed on the coffin of MacManus when it lay in state.
The success of the fair bolstered the spirits of Stephens, who had accepted a personal invitation to attend. Departing Chicago, the IRB leader maintained a grueling recruiting and fund-raising schedule, with a new city each night—Milwaukee, Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo. Buoyed by the support he encountered on his tour, the Irishman felt confident enough to repeatedly declare to his American audiences, “Next year will be the year of action.” Under the code name Captain James Daly, he visited Union army camps and, like many Fenian organizers, found them to be fertile recruiting grounds.
Fenian circles arose in the Armies of the Potomac, Tennessee, and Cumberland and on the decks of the navy steamers USS Port Royal and USS Brooklyn as well as the frigates USS New Ironsides and USS Huntsville. Soldiers dropped their spare change into Fenian cash boxes nailed to trees, and the Union army even permitted Fenians to lay down their arms to attend their conventions.
While the Army of the Potomac made its winter quarters in Falmouth, Virginia, during the winter of 1863, an Irish newspaper editor serving as an emissary of Stephens—presumably Thomas Clarke Luby—rowed across the Rappahannock River from a Confederate camp and wandered into the Union camp with the permission of both Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and the Confederate secretary of state, Judah Benjamin. Several nights later, members of the Potomac circle were ushered from camp to a nearby ravine guarded by a Union sentry at one end, a Confederate sentinel at the other. Men in both blue and gray who had shot at each other a few weeks earlier during the fierce Battle of Fredericksburg now shook hands, pledged not to mention the Civil War, and listened to the emissary discuss where they could act in unison to strike the British.
As the war progressed, however, Irish Americans who buried their brethren by the thousands became increasingly disenchanted in its aims. The 1863 enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation had altered the stated goal of the conflict to include the liberation of the slaves, an unwelcome prospect for many poor Irish who feared that millions of African Americans would flood the labor market and take their unskilled jobs. Rather than empathize with another oppressed people, too many Irish let their fears blind them to the irony of their opposition to emancipation. After the institution of conscription in 1863, which allowed the wealthy to buy their way out of military service for $300, Irish frustrations with the war and their economic status boiled over in the New York City draft riots.
Through their sacrifice and service, the Irish demonstrated their patriotism to Americans. They just didn’t expect to have to die in such numbers to do so. Even in a holocaust of unthinkable losses, the Irish suffered disproportionally terrible casualty rates, placed on the front lines to serve often as little more than cannon fodder. Much as it had in South Carolina at the start of the Civil War and on battlefields across the continent for four years, Celtic blood also soaked the Virginia soil at the war’s conclusion, with an Irishman being the last Union general killed in the war.
Five days after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender, General Francis Frederick Millen boarded the steamship Etna on a mission to Ireland. The “year of action” promised by Stephens had now entered its spring, and the IRB head continued to insist he would launch the rebellion in Ireland by the end of 1865. O’Mahony and the Fenian Brotherhood’s central council, however, remained skeptical of his claims to have 100,000 men ready to take the field within twenty-four hours.
O’Mahony dispatched three different soldiers to report on the IRB’s true state of affairs. The arrival of the American inquisitors enraged Stephens, who told the Fenian Brotherhood leaders that he considered it “the deadliest blow ever aimed against us.”
Stephens wrote that the choice facing the IRB was either war with the British in 1865 or dissolution. “The pledge given to the people must be redeemed. Else the movement is lost and with it, I am convinced, the cause of our race for ever.” On the other side of the Atlantic, the Irish who fought for both the Union and the Confederacy also looked ahead to the next war, the one they truly wanted to wage. And as the Civil War drew to its conclusion, the Irish were not the only ones eager to point their guns at the British.
The United States had contracted a severe case of Anglophobia as a result of the tacit support given by Great Britain to the Confederacy. Relations first soured in May 1861, when the British declared their neutrality during the Civil War, which granted belligerent rights to the Confederacy. Six months later, war nearly broke out between the United States and Great Britain after an American frigate seized two Confederate envoys from the unarmed British mail steamer Trent while in international waters.
In spite of their professed neutrality, the British built blockade runners that kept Southern ports supplied and forged Armstrong guns that mowed down Union troops. Shipyards in Liverpool built, equipped, and armed Confederate warships that seized American goods and burned their whalers. British crews sporting fake Southern accents even manned the vessels.
British hands had built the most fearsome ship afloat, the CSS Alabama. For nearly two years, the Confederate warship had prowled the seven seas in search of nautical prey. As part of a guerrilla war against Union merchant shipping, the commerce raider flying both the Confederate Stars and Bars and an English flag terrorized Union shipping lanes from Newfoundland to Sumatra until it sank in a June 1864 naval battle outside Cherbourg, France. The half-Confederate, half-English crew captured or destroyed more than sixty American ships and inflicted more than $5 million worth of losses. By the end of the Civil War, the United States demanded millions of dollars in reparations from Great Britain—the so-called Alabama claims—for the damage inflicted by the Confederate warships built in their ports.
Further inflaming Americans’ attitudes toward their former motherland, the British colony of Canada harbored not only Union draft dodgers but also Confederate spies and operatives who exported terror across the border. From their safe haven in Canada, Confederates launched raids on border towns in Maine and Vermont. They carried out a failed attack by arson squads to set New York City aflame, and some suspected their involvement in President Abraham Lincoln’s murder. Eyewitnesses claimed to have seen the assassin John Wilkes Booth in Montreal days before he shot the American president, and authorities found a bank receipt from the Royal Ontario Bank in his possession after the assassination. In the days following the shooting, the conspirator John Surratt Jr. fled north, where a Catholic priest in southern Quebec gave him sanctuary before he absconded to Liverpool.
By the end of the Civil War, Anglo-American relations were at their worst since the redcoats torched the nation’s capital half a century earlier. When Queen Victoria sat down to her diary on February 12, 1865, she noted that during the day she had discussed “America and the danger, which seems approaching, of our having a war with her as soon as she makes peace; of the impossibility of our being able to hold Canada.”
Much of the Union sought to engage with the British. But the United States was exhausted after four years of war, and it faced the daunting job of healing wounds and reintegrating the South. In the Fenians, however, America had a perfect vessel through which it could outsource its revenge. The British Empire had a debt to pay, and the Americans weren’t above using the Fenians as leverage in order to collect it.