7
A Lawless and Piratical Band
ON THE NIGHT of May 31, 1866, the University of Toronto undergraduate David Junor was studying for his final examinations when a knock at his door brought the welcome news that he would be allowed to pass his remaining tests without having to take them. Any relief, however, was tempered by the news that he might have to sacrifice his life in return.
As a member of the Queen’s Own Rifles volunteer militia, Junor received orders to report for active service at the regiment’s drill shed by 4:30 a.m. The private was among the dozens of students who enlisted in the University Rifles company, which had been formed by professors when war with the United States beckoned during the Trent affair. The University Rifles had been called upon to help defend Canada from the Fenians in March, and there was nothing to dissuade Junor from thinking that this was yet another false alarm. He packed more for a holiday than a battle, stuffing his satchel with clothes, photographs, and letters that he planned to drop off at his home before returning to Toronto to graduate with the class of 1866.
With his heavy baggage in tow, the young man discovered the streets outside the drill hall teeming with anxious Toronto residents. The burden of defending Canada fell squarely upon volunteer militias like Junor’s, soldiers perhaps more poorly provisioned than the Irish Republican Army. Although many militiamen brought their personal luggage to the drill shed, they lacked food, blankets, tents, medical provisions, and even canteens. Some received only five rounds of ammunition.
The volunteers also lacked the Irishmen’s military experience. Some had never even fired a gun. The new commander of the Queen’s Own Rifles, Lieutenant Colonel John Stoughton Dennis, was a forty-five-year-old wealthy land surveyor who had never so much as drilled with his battalion on a parade ground, let alone led it into battle.
What the young men of the Queen’s Own Rifles lacked in training, they had in enthusiasm. They sang songs as they marched from the drill shed to the wharf at the foot of Yonge Street. Boisterous cheers accompanied Junor and the twenty-seven other volunteers of the University Rifles as they boarded the steamer City of Toronto for a three-hour trip across Lake Ontario to Port Dalhousie. There, they boarded a train to Port Colborne to protect the Lake Erie entrance to the Welland Canal, knowing that would be the Fenians’ likely target.
While the volunteers mobilized to the border, British troops remained in their barracks. Not until 2:00 p.m. did the professional British army officer in command of the operation against the Fenians, Lieutenant Colonel George Peacocke, board a train from Hamilton, Ontario, toward Niagara Falls, with seventeen hundred troops from the Sixteenth and Forty-Seventh Regiments of Foot and a six-gun field battery.
When news of the Fenian breach of the border reached Ottawa during the day on June 1, Governor-General Lord Charles Monck sounded incredulous in his call for all volunteers west of Toronto to repel the enemy. “The soil of Canada has been invaded, not in the practice of legitimate warfare, but by a lawless and piratical band in defiance of all moral right, and in utter disregard of all the obligations which civilization enforces on mankind.” The assault on Canada would not go undefended.
After making the first landing, Colonel Owen Starr left a small unit to hold the dock for the arrival of the rest of the Irish Republican Army and marched the bulk of his men three miles south to the ruins of Old Fort Erie—hallowed ground for the British, who lost more than one thousand men there during the War of 1812 in a series of battles with American forces. Above the moss-grown rubble of the fortress, which had absorbed the most blood ever spilled on Canadian soil, Starr’s Indiana and Kentucky troops hoisted an Irish flag where the Union Jack once waved.
Two hours after Starr’s crossing of the Niagara River, John O’Neill stepped ashore around 3:30 a.m. in the village of Waterloo. The Fenian colonel might have lacked food, horses, artillery, and even a map, but he had plenty of self-confidence. As his first order, O’Neill directed one party of men to pull up tracks and burn a railway bridge to Port Colborne, while he marched south to the town of Fort Erie and directed his troops to cut the telegraph wires connecting it to the rest of Canada while keeping those in communication with Buffalo intact. Using axes stolen from a barn, the Irishmen chopped the village’s forest of telegraph poles to the ground.
O’Neill summoned Fort Erie’s mayor, Peter Kempson, and requested food for his men. The villagers quickly offered the Irishmen not just food to break their fast but plenty of flasks filled with good cheer, perhaps as an enticement to impair the invaders. The Fenian John O’Keeffe turned away the free-flowing liquor. “I prevailed on the mayor to tell his people to give no man a flask,” he wrote. “Knowing what was coming I wanted sober men.”
Gathering together all the adult men in the village, O’Neill ordered the reading of a proclamation that had been penned and distributed to the press by General Thomas Sweeny to assure Canadians that the Fenians had come to evict the British, not pillage their homes. “We have no issue with the people of these provinces, and wish to have none but the most friendly relations,” read the document. “Our weapons are for the oppressors of Ireland. Our blows shall be directed only against the power of England; her privileges alone shall we invade, not yours.” Sweeny’s proclamation also called upon Irishmen, his “countrymen,” throughout Canada “to stretch forth the hand of brotherhood in the holy cause of fatherland.” O’Neill pledged that his men would behave honorably, and he threatened to shoot a soldier who stole a woolen shawl from an inn. The Irish Republican Army did seize food and tools necessary for their campaign, along with upwards of fifty horses. However, they didn’t take any saddles or stirrups and instead rode bareback. They offered Fenian bonds or scrip notes in return for the property taken, a proposal that, unsurprisingly, had no appeal to the Canadians.
Around 10:00 a.m., the Irish Republican Army made its camp amid an apple orchard four miles north of Fort Erie. The Fenian-contracted tugs ferried provisions across the Niagara River throughout the morning, but by 11:00 a.m. the USS Michigan had steamed out of Buffalo, shutting down the supply line.
As the sun set on the Irishmen’s first day in enemy territory, O’Neill received reports that five thousand troops were advancing on him in two columns—one from Chippawa, fifteen miles to the north, and one from Port Colborne, fifteen miles to the west. The Fenian colonel ordered his camp broken. When he mustered his men around 10:00 p.m., however, he found a smaller army than he had arrived with hours earlier. Scores of soldiers who thought O’Neill too green to lead them into battle deserted the army, hiding in friends’ houses in Fort Erie or rowing back to the United States in stolen boats.
Left with three hundred surplus muskets, O’Neill ordered them destroyed so they didn’t fall into enemy hands. The Irishmen burned their extra rifles and smashed them against apple trees. They marched north along the Niagara River before turning inland, in hopes of intercepting one of the two advancing columns before they had a chance to unite.
The march proved difficult—even for the many Civil War veterans among the Irishmen. Recent rainstorms had turned the roads into mud. The more grizzled soldiers took off their sodden stockings and shoes, tied the laces over the barrels of their guns, and walked barefoot.
O’Neill’s men were weary and famished. They couldn’t forget, however, the suffering they or their forebears had endured during the Great Hunger.
“Terance, I’m awful hungry,” groused one soldier to another.
“Shut up, man, you don’t know what hunger is!”
By 7:00 a.m. on June 2, the sun’s rays alighted on Starr’s advance guard, promising a hot day to come for the men as they marched toward the village of Ridgeway. For Junor, too, who was then disembarking from his train in the same village, with the Queen’s Own Rifles. The university student and the rest of his company had arrived only hours earlier in Port Colborne, where they found the rest of the regiment on a freight train eating a frugal breakfast of bread and red herring.
Already, the Canadians had shown their inexperience. Without Peacocke’s approval, Dennis and seventy-two artillerymen and sailors of the volunteer Welland Canal Field Battery and Dunnville Naval Brigade had departed Port Colborne at 4:00 a.m. in an armed tugboat bound for Fort Erie to cut off Fenian supply lines and prevent their retreat. Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Booker, an English-born auctioneer who headed the volunteer Thirteenth Infantry Battalion that had traveled south from Hamilton to Port Colborne, assumed command as the ranking officer. Booker had no battle experience, and his men were perhaps even more untried than the Queen’s Own Rifles. Sixty percent of his 250 men were under the age of twenty. Seventy of his men had never fired live ammunition.
Shortly after Dennis’s departure, Peacocke ordered Booker to meet him in Stevensville, halfway between Chippawa and Port Colborne. Booker planned to make the thirty-minute train ride to Ridgeway, running along the north shore of Lake Erie, before marching north for the four and a half miles to Stevensville.
As the Canadian volunteers disembarked from the Buffalo and Lake Huron Railway in Ridgeway, Booker could not locate any wagons to transport their stores, including their ammunition, so he sent the supplies back to Port Colborne. Junor and his fellow students piled their baggage in a heap at the station, “expecting to return and get it after we had annihilated the Fenians,” he wrote.
While the Irish Republican Army might have been foreign invaders, O’Neill arguably had more local knowledge than his Canadian rivals, thanks to the information supplied by Fenian intelligence officers such as Major John C. Canty, who had spent six months living in Fort Erie performing reconnaissance work. The Irishmen took a position on a long ridge of limestone three miles north of Ridgeway. O’Neill made his headquarters in the house of seventy-three-year-old Henry Angur, a veteran of the War of 1812 and of the Patriot War of 1837 who refused to leave his house, declaring that he had survived two wars and liked his chances in a third.
From his perch on the bluff known as Limestone Ridge, O’Neill overlooked the surrounding fields. He could see troop movements for miles. The Fenians saw the familiar, hated red coats on the backs of the Thirteenth Infantry, but the green uniforms worn by the Queen’s Own Rifles presented a jarring target for the Irishmen. Around 8:00 a.m., O’Neill watched the Queen’s Own Rifles march north on Ridge Road at the head of a column trailed by the Thirteenth Infantry and the York and Caledonia Rifle Companies. The enemy force was at least three times the size of his army. The odds were against the Irish once again.
Booker’s men approached a crossroads populated by a tavern and a few scattered buildings. He placed Company Five of the Queen’s Own Rifles in the lead because they carried the most state-of-the-art weaponry. Their Spencer seven-shot repeating rifles allowed for quicker shots than the muzzle-loading Springfield rifles carried by the Fenians and the muzzle-loading British Enfield rifles used by the rest of the Canadian forces. The men of Company Five, however, had received the unfamiliar firearms only the previous day, along with just twenty-eight rounds of ammunition per man.
O’Neill advanced two companies in skirmishing formation along the ridge. They formed a battle line behind a temporary breastwork, constructed with pieces harvested from the split-rail fences that dissected the fields parallel to the enemy line and the road to Fort Erie. As the enemy skirmishers came into view, sharp fire cracked the air. O’Neill watched as the white puffs of smoke from his forward skirmishers blossomed, followed a split second later by the reverberation of their gunshots. Biting into the end of their cartridges, the battle-hardened Irishmen would once again taste that familiar acrid gunpowder before loading the shot into their rifles.
Officers with swords raised in the air shouted orders to fire over the din. Junor heard the command: “With ball cartridge, load.” With every gunshot they heard, the inexperienced Canadians instinctively ducked. Although more than a year removed from the Civil War, the Union and Confederate veterans were used to the whistle of bullets flying over their heads. “To most of us who had been in the war, it was soon evident that fighting was new to our opponents,” O’Keeffe recalled.
The Canadian skirmishers advanced through fields of young wheat and tree stumps. They dashed from stump to stump, throwing themselves flat on the ground still wet with morning dew as a deluge of bullets struck the stumps and rattled the orchards, sending a shower of apple blossoms down upon the heads of the Canadians. Once the Fenians had emptied their single shots and worked to reload, the Canadians rose to fire their repeating rifles. The Canadian skirmishers advanced so far in front of their main body that they began taking on gunshots from both the front and the rear.
As they progressed through the fields toward the Fenian lines, the Canadians had to climb over or through a new fence every fifteen or twenty yards. With loaded rifles and bayonets at their sides, this took considerable effort and left them exposed. Not only did the terrain prove an obstacle course for the advancing Canadians, but Booker’s men also started to run out of their limited ammunition.
The Canadians, however, maintained a steady advance to dislodge the Fenians from the thick timber that protected the center of their line. O’Neill feared that the enemy flanks had become so prolonged that his men could be enveloped. Knowing that he was outmanned, the Fenian colonel decided to undertake a risky maneuver, one that could be tried only with experienced troops. O’Neill ordered his men to slowly fall back a few hundred yards to coax the Canadian center and form a new line. They acted, and believing the Irish in retreat due to the relatively small size of their force, the Canadians became bold with their attack. They charged ahead until they found themselves practically in a valley at the base of Limestone Ridge.
With their center uncovered, O’Neill waited until the Canadians were within one hundred yards. “Charge!” he suddenly shouted. The Fenians took the Canadians by surprise, unleashing a terrific volley. They sounded a chorus of wild Irish whoops as they advanced behind the green flag given to them by the Fenian Sisterhood, the brunt of their attack falling upon the University Rifles.
On their horses, O’Neill and Starr appeared in the rear of the center of their line. Whether Booker saw those officers or other horsemen cresting Limestone Ridge, the inexperienced commander panicked. “The cavalry are coming!” came the cry from the Canadians. Bugles ordered the Canadian militiamen to form a square, a textbook defensive position against a cavalry attack, which the militia had drilled on the practice ground.
There was no cavalry, however, and even if the Irishmen had one, the battlefield terrain with its obstacles was hardly conducive to a charge of horsemen. All the maneuver did was leave the Canadians exposed to withering fire because the Fenian infantry had a target on which to focus. A succession of soldiers fell to the ground with bullet wounds. “We were all called to form [a] square—that awful square,” lamented the Canadian A. G. Gilbert. “No cavalry came, for there was none to come.”
Once Booker realized there was no cavalry, the Canadians tried to form a line, but the fire was just too much. Officers made futile attempts to rally their forces until the bugle sounded their retreat. After nearly two hours of fighting, the Canadians ran for their lives, throwing aside muskets, overcoats, knapsacks, and anything that could slow them down. Lying in the dirt by the roadside was the flag of the Queen’s Own Rifles.*
Junor ran along the crossroad as he joined in the sprint to safety. He heard a dull, heavy blow as his twenty-one-year-old fellow student William Tempest fell face-first into the road. The tall, promising medical student was in his final year of studies, preparing to join his father’s medical practice. Junor knelt over his fallen colleague for a moment and saw the bullet wound to the head. There was nothing he could do. Tempest was dead. Moments later, the Fenians took Junor prisoner.
At the same time, Edward Lonergan, a ship carpenter and lieutenant with the Seventh Regiment, came upon Private R. W. Hines of the Queen’s Own Rifles. He declared him, too, a prisoner. The Irish soldier seized the Canadian’s rifle and swore it would never shoot another Fenian. But when he smashed the rifle butt of the weapon on a stone in an attempt to destroy it, the impact released the rifle’s hammer, which fired. The bullet pierced Lonergan’s throat and exited the back of his head, killing him immediately on his twenty-first birthday.
The Irish kept the enemy on the run through the town of Ridgeway until O’Neill called off the pursuit after a mile on the other side of the village. The Irishmen collected as many of their wounded as could fit in their wagons. They left the rest in the care of local civilians, who also promised to bury the Fenian dead. Some of those wounded and left behind would eventually be arrested by British authorities.
This lithograph dramatizes the Irish Republican Army’s advance during the Battle of Ridgeway while Canadian defense forces retreat.
On the Canadian side, seven of the Queen’s Own Rifles died in action. Three more succumbed to wounds received in battle, and six would die of disease contracted in service. Twenty-eight Canadians were wounded at Limestone Ridge. Between six and eight died on the Fenian side, including the spy Canty.
For the first time since the 1745 Battle of Fontenoy, an Irish army had emerged victorious against forces of the British Empire. News of the Battle of Ridgeway consumed citizens on both sides of the international border. Toronto newspapers issued extra editions hourly, while The Boston Herald sold more copies of its edition covering the Fenian raid than it had after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
O’Neill’s victory incited joy among the Irish diaspora and in Ireland itself. The Nation in Dublin exulted in the news that “the red flag of England has gone down before the Irish green” and reported that the news “fills our people with tumultuous emotions impossible to describe, impossible to conceal.” The Detroit Free Press shook its head. “It is difficult to believe that any body of men who are not insane, have from this country invaded and committed acts of depredation or war against a nation with which we are at peace.”
The news stirred Irishmen across the United States, who now saw the Fenian Brotherhood was more than just bluster. From Louisiana to Maine, hundreds grabbed their rifles and boarded trains to Buffalo to join in the fight. Momentum was finally on their side.
O’Neill took no time to bask in the glow of his historic victory. He knew his position remained precarious, given the small size of his army and the advance of Peacocke’s force, which remained nearby. He wondered where his reinforcements were—both those from the United States and those from Canada. The Fenians had expected Canadians to join them in casting off the British, not take up arms against them. They assumed any colony of Great Britain sought liberation as they did. Plus, the Irishmen in Canada had yet to accept their “hand of brotherhood in the holy cause of fatherland” that was offered in their proclamation.
“I decided that my best policy was to return to Fort Erie, and ascertain if crossings had been made at other points,” O’Neill recalled, “and if so, I was willing to sacrifice myself and my noble little command for the sake of leaving the way open.”
In the wake of their victory, O’Neill maintained order among his men. The Irishmen shared pipes with their newly captured prisoners and requested water for them from passing houses on their march to Fort Erie. They even purchased glasses of beer for their captives at a roadside tavern.
The Irishmen arrived back at the village around 4:00 p.m. In absence of the Fenians, Canadians had repossessed Old Fort Erie, capturing Irishmen as they returned from Ridgeway, some fifty in all.
When the Fenian captain Rudolph Fitzpatrick galloped into Fort Erie on his stolen steed, a gunshot rang out from the upper window of a dwelling house. Fitzpatrick drew his pistol and returned fire. The Fenian infantry rushed to join the fight. This time, it was the Canadians who were outnumbered. They held the Fenians at bay for about twenty minutes but no longer. The Canadians took shelter in any house where they found an open door. They hid behind piles of cordwood and fences. The twenty-five village blocks of Fort Erie became the scene of street fighting as gunfire emanated from the collection of two-story frame houses, stores, hotels, taverns, and boardinghouses. This was house-to-house guerrilla combat. O’Neill ordered his men to break down the doors of houses containing the enemy and smoke them out with burning straw thrown into broken windows. As many as thirty of the Canadian troops fled into the house of the postmaster George Lewis and fired from its windows. Bullets pierced the home’s clapboard exterior and plaster walls until the Fenians set the building ablaze, forcing a quick surrender.
The skirmish had an international audience. Gathered on the banks of the opposite shore, curious Buffalo residents watched the gunfight unfold from Squaw Island. Not only could they hear the staccato of gunfire, but eyewitnesses also reported bullets whistling over their heads and puncturing the walls of the island’s flour mills. One Irishman with a long gray beard danced in frantic excitement with his revolver, which he fired at the enemy across the river. “Give it to them, give it to them,” he shouted, cheering on the Irish Republican Army.
With his men pushed back to the waterfront, Dennis ordered a steamship boarded with his Irish prisoners to cast off into the Niagara River and sounded the retreat—every man for himself. For his part, he took shelter in a friend’s house, shaved off his distinctive whiskers, donned a disguise, and escaped.
The only escape route for Captain Richard King of the Welland Canal Field Battery was to swim to the steamship before it departed. He ran to the dock and jumped into the water, but a Fenian gunshot shattered his leg in the process. The wounded captain would survive, though his leg would be amputated.
O’Neill emerged victorious on enemy soil once again, with the Fenians taking forty-five of the enemy prisoner. O’Neill dispatched one hundred men to guard the road to Chippawa and took the rest of his command to the old fort. He had triumphed, but the colonel knew his situation was growing direr by the minute.
At 6:00 p.m., O’Neill sent word to Captain William J. Hynes and the other Fenians in Buffalo that an enemy force of five thousand men remained on the Niagara Peninsula and could have them surrounded by the following morning. After fighting two battles and marching nearly forty miles in less than twenty-four hours, the Irish Republican Army now grappled with hunger and fatigue.
The Fenian colonel was still willing to fight if reinforcements were on the way. However, the disappointing word arrived from Buffalo that no other Fenians had been able to cross over, due to the USS Michigan and federal revenue cutters keeping a constant vigil on the Niagara River. The Fenians might have been advancing on Canada, but it was the United States by which they were now stymied.
Without Canadian support, the Irish Republican Army had no options. Around 10:00 p.m., Hynes rowed across the Niagara to order O’Neill to retreat while he worked to furnish transportation as soon as he could to take the Fenians back to the United States. Although weary, the Irishmen had remained jovial. They danced to keep warm as the temperature began to drop and even cracked jokes with their prisoners, tearing into biscuits and raw pork. O’Neill approached O’Keeffe, pulled him aside, and broke the disappointing news: “Johnny, I have orders to evacuate.”
Around 2:00 a.m., Junor and the rest of the prisoners were roused from their sleep and ordered to form a line. The thought crossed a few Canadian minds that they were about to be shot. Instead, they were placed into marching order and then taken to the bank of the Niagara River. O’Neill directed his men to board a waiting barge tied to a tugboat as he began the river evacuation.
A number of Fenians didn’t return with their comrades. Thirteen were killed or died of wounds received at Ridgeway and Fort Erie, while another twenty-eight were wounded. Some of the most seriously injured had to be left behind in the houses of sympathizers in Fort Erie.
After the last of his able-bodied men embarked, O’Neill proceeded down the line of the nearly two dozen Canadian prisoners, shaking hands with each of them. He said his good-byes, informed them that they were again free men, and promised to return to Canada soon—this time with a larger force.
A tug hauled the barge with its disappointed Fenian cargo back across the river they had crossed in the other direction just forty-eight hours earlier. Once the tug reached American waters, the J. C. Harrison, a steam launch for the USS Michigan, fired its twelve-pound pivot gun across the bow of the tugboat and threatened to sink it unless the Irish Republican Army surrendered. Behind the steam launch lurked the USS Michigan with extra maritime muscle. Its captain, Andrew Bryson, wasn’t about to let the Fenians elude him a second time.
As a Union army veteran, O’Neill strictly followed orders from the U.S. government and offered no resistance. “We would have as readily surrendered to an infant bearing the authority of the United States,” he wrote.
The thirteen Fenian officers were taken to relatively comfortable quarters aboard the USS Michigan, but the 367 rank-and-file soldiers remained confined to the barge. When daylight arrived, curious men and women came by the thousands to the Black Rock waterfront to gawk at the Irish Republican Army floating in the Niagara River.
On the opposite riverbank, the Fenians watched as the redcoats reclaimed the village of Fort Erie. A detachment of Tenth Royals found Fenian stragglers in the woods and their dead and wounded hidden in the homes of sympathizers.
When the British troops searched the late Canty’s hilltop residence, they discovered Father John McMahon hiding in a cupboard dressed in his Roman collar, long black coat, and well-worn plug hat. Inside his carpetbag, the troops found Holy Eucharist and consecrated oils for administering last rites to dying soldiers, but no weapons. McMahon claimed that he was on his way to visit the bishop of Montreal and denied that there were Fenians on the premises. However, the British found two wounded Irishmen elsewhere in the house and more out back in the barn and a nearby haystack. Inside the barn they also found the body of Lonergan, dead from his self-inflicted wound and taken from Ridgeway by his fellow soldiers.
In all, the British captured fifty-eight Fenians in Fort Erie, including fourteen Protestants, one German, and seven Canadians. A third of them were under the age of twenty-one. They then took a tug to the USS Michigan and demanded that the Americans turn over the hundreds of Fenians detained on the barge. Bryson refused. They would remain in American custody.
Just weeks after he had departed Eastport, Maine, Major General George Meade had once again been summoned to prevent any further incursions over the Canadian border. With his recommendation to impose martial law in states along the border rejected, Meade instead ordered Major General William F. Barry to prevent any further border incursions and seize all Fenian weapons he believed would be used in an attack on Canada.
With reports arriving of Irishmen amassing in both northern Vermont and upstate New York, Meade posted nine companies along the border from Buffalo to St. Albans, Vermont. Satisfied that O’Neill’s brief invasion had been a feint, Meade departed on June 3 to Ogdensburg in upstate New York, having spent only a few hours on the ground in Buffalo.
Inside the White House, Andrew Johnson wavered about what to do with the ship-bound Irish Americans. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles had grown frustrated with the reluctance of anyone inside the administration to take action because Johnson and his cabinet knew that any measures taken against the Fenians would anger the Irish vote. Meanwhile, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, a Radical Republican sympathizer who often clashed with the Democratic president, remained passive in the hopes that Johnson would be forced to take unpopular action.
However, days had passed without any word from the president, who hoped a military man would put an end to the Fenian uprising so that he could be absolved from blame. “This is a war on the Irish in which he, Stanton, and Grant fear to do their duty,” Welles wrote of Johnson.
Just four days after the bells of Toronto had pealed to summon volunteers to battle, they now tolled in mourning on June 5. Inside the undergraduate lounge at the University of Toronto, students had filed past the open caskets containing the bodies of their classmates, still in their muddy, bloodstained uniforms. Now the Queen’s Own Rifles assembled once again in its drill shed as the city gathered to bury five of its heroes killed at the Battle of Ridgeway.
City businesses, banks, and public buildings shuttered early, while flags drooped at half-mast. The Union Jack and other flags adorned the rough pine coffins that were processed to St. James Cemetery for burial. In a city raw with grief, six Fenian prisoners captured at Fort Erie had the unfortunate timing of being paraded through the streets of Toronto on the same afternoon as the funeral. Sorrow turned to anger as the handcuffed prisoners were marched up Parliament Street under heavy guard. Crowds returning from the funerals rushed the captives. “Lynch them!” they hollered. “Give us back our dead!” they cried. A Canadian cavalry dashed to drive the crowd back and escort the prisoners safely to jail. Eventually, sixty-five Fenian prisoners would be held behind bars in Toronto.
The Toronto Globe reported that the deaths of the province’s young men at Ridgeway bound Canadians closer together with resolve not to join the Fenians or the Americans. “The autonomy of British America, its independence of all control save that to which its people willingly submit, is cemented by the bloodshed in the battle on the 2nd of June.”
While the White House dithered, the captured Fenians continued to suffer. With barely enough room to turn around, the Irishmen stood on the open deck of the squalid barge, where they were alternately blistered by the sun and doused by heavy rains. Still, they found exposure to the elements preferable to the terrible odor and filth that lingered in the hold.
After visiting the prisoners, Dr. Edward Donnelly, a surgeon and zealous Fenian supporter, expressed his fear that an outbreak of disease was imminent. The situation grew so desperate that dozens dove into the water at night to swim ashore and make the barge’s deck a little more comfortable.
Some prisoners cussed out Sweeny for their predicament, but all cursed Johnson for betraying them, cutting their supply lines in spite of his pledge to “acknowledge accomplished facts.” The Irish Republican Army believed it could have, with reinforcements, seized the Welland Canal and advanced toward Toronto, particularly because every railway train arriving in Buffalo from the West deposited hundreds of Irishmen per day, some from as far away as Nebraska and Kansas.
At the end of their third day confined to the barge, the prisoners watched as a tug rounded the stern of the floating prison and sidled up to the USS Michigan. Aboard the boat, two American commissioners bore an order that the prisoners be released on their own recognizance. The Fenians launched their hats skyward and embraced each other at the prospects of being free men once again.
O’Neill and his fellow officers, however, were not so fortunate: They would be charged with violation of American neutrality laws. Three companies of U.S. artillery troops and large crowds of spectators escorted them to a nearby jail. The officers lacked money for a proper legal defense, but one of Buffalo’s most eminent attorneys agreed to help. Having recently lost his first run for elected office, the attorney Grover Cleveland, after visiting with the Irishmen, agreed to take their case pro bono, even refusing the purse collected by Fenian supporters.
After appearing in court on June 6, O’Neill and Starr were released on $6,000 bail each, ordered to appear at the U.S. Circuit Court in Canandaigua, New York, on June 19. An estimated six thousand Fenians remained in Buffalo, many of whom escorted the Irish patriots to the Mansion House, clamoring to see and hear from O’Neill. The hero of Ridgeway stepped onto a balcony above Main Street, looked out over the crowd, and kept his remarks brief. “Gentlemen, you may not be aware that I am no speechmaker,” he said. “The only kind of speeches I am accustomed to are such as are made from the cannon’s mouth. Situated as I am at present, I can only advise you to retire to your homes, peacefully and in an orderly manner. Good-bye.”
A modest proclamation, but all the same O’Neill had proven himself a born leader and an able tactician after being unexpectedly thrust into the role of commander. While detained on the USS Michigan, he received a promotion to brigadier general “for the gallant and able manner in which he handled the forces under his command, and for routing double the number of British troops at the battle of Limestone Ridge.” He learned something about his fellow Fenians as well. “I saw at that time that Irish troops on Canadian soil would fight with desperation and courage, and that carefully organized and properly disciplined, they would prove valiant soldiers,” he said.
O’Keeffe saw the change in his commander. After the successes at Ridgeway and Fort Erie, he wrote of O’Neill, “the re-invasion of Canada was his day vision and his night dream.”