11
Political Blarney
THE IRISH REPUBLICAN Army had the Queen’s Own Rifles and the Tenth Royals on the run once again. A staccato of musket fire punctuated a sustained chorus of feral Fenian yells as General John O’Neill’s men charged across the smoke-shrouded battlefield. Enduring withering fire, the Irish soldiers pushed the redcoats back at the points of their bayonets.
Fenian hands that weren’t locked in combat with the enemy tore the Union Jack away from its standard-bearer, while Fenian boots trampled the hated emblem into the ground. Believing the cause to be lost, the Canadian forces broke into a panicked retreat as Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Booker failed once again to maintain the discipline of his men.
As soon as the Fenians drove the royal soldiers through a gate in a fence like sheep into a pen, thousands of spectators burst into applause. Lowering their firearms loaded with blank cartridges, the combatants exchanged friendly handshakes with their erstwhile foes. It was another successful reenactment of the Battle of Ridgeway.
The four hundred participants in the mock battle all had Fenian allegiances; some even had firsthand experience fighting at Limestone Ridge. Organizers of the reenactment might have had an easier time raising a private army to attack Canada once again than to recruit Irishmen to don red coats—even in jest—but the First Company of Veterans and members of the Emmet Guards agreed to assume the uncomfortable role of the enemy. The Corcoran Guards had the honor of playing the victorious Irish, with Captain John C. Nial portraying O’Neill as the general himself watched from the sidelines.
The sham battle was among the highlights during a day of Irish songs, dances, sports, and speeches at Clinton Grove outside Buffalo on August 21, 1866, which raised $10,000 for the cause of Irish freedom. Held on a Tuesday afternoon, the grand Fenian picnic drew upwards of twenty thousand people, including Irishmen from Cleveland to Boston and beyond.
From across the Niagara River at Fort Erie, the real soldiers of the Tenth Royals remained vigilant as they listened to the crackle of the faux musket fire. A British gunboat lurked along the international border, ports open and guns trained on Fenian excursion boats while watching every movement with unease.
Fenians might have chuckled at their paranoia, but the Canadians on the Niagara Peninsula had good reason to be on edge. O’Neill’s victory at Ridgeway had ignited a Fenian fever throughout western New York. Cities with one Fenian circle now had three or four. “Localities where it was thought the old fire was dead, and nothing but the ashes left, have burst anew into flame,” reported one Fenian in a letter to The Irish-American.
With the outpouring of Irish sentiment in upstate New York and the warm political embrace of the Fenians by the Radical Republicans, Canadians believed another invasion was imminent. The spymaster Gilbert McMicken’s detectives reported in July and August that the Fenians were regrouping, and he worried that the Irish Republican Army would launch a “second and more serious invasion of Canada” in advance of that fall’s congressional elections. As a precaution in the days leading up to the grand picnic in Buffalo, two thousand Canadian troops had been shifted east across Ontario from Stratford and Grimsby to Thorold, just miles from Niagara Falls.
The Roberts wing lacked the money and equipment necessary to launch yet another attack on Canada, but throughout the summer of 1866 the Fenian Brotherhood replenished its coffers with grand picnics similar to the one in Buffalo. Few speakers on the fund-raising circuit proved to be as popular as O’Neill.
The unassuming general had emerged from the Battle of Ridgeway as the Fenians’ rising star and the vessel for all their hopes, having delivered the first military victory by the Irish on British soil in 150 years. Blame for the retreat of his forces from the Niagara Peninsula never stained O’Neill. That blight fell on the White House, James Stephens, and, even in some corners, General Thomas Sweeny for devising the failed war plan.
O’Neill, however, would have sooner stared down bullets on the battlefield than an audience from behind a lectern. He had little use for words, believing the gift of gab an endemic fault of his people, who talked “too much and acted too little.”
O’Neill proved a quick study, however. After posting bail at the end of June, following his indictment for violating the Neutrality Act, the general departed Buffalo to return home to Nashville. Stopping in Louisville, O’Neill was the featured speaker at the annual Fenian Brotherhood picnic on the Fourth of July. The Irishmen who paid their $1 admissions witnessed not only a grand display of fireworks but also a rhetorical flourish from O’Neill, who demonstrated a knack for oration that belied his own modest claims.
“The campaign has only commenced,” the general shouted, and “though it may have received a temporary check it will ere long burst forth in all its fury.” O’Neill pledged that “the green flag, so long trampled in the dust by a hated oppressor, will wave once again over our lovely little island home.” He elicited cheers so loud that the crowd had difficulty hearing him above all the commotion.
Later that night, O’Neill arrived home in Nashville after more than a month away, returning to his wife and young child. Back at his Cedar Street claims agency, O’Neill resumed his work of challenging authority. He continued to fight the federal government for back pay, bounties, and pensions owed to soldiers and represented slave owners who he said were due $300 compensation for each of their slaves who enlisted in the U.S. Army. As a sign of O’Neill’s growing fame, his newspaper advertisements now announced that while he could give references, “I take it that I am well enough known in this state.”
Prior to the Battle of Ridgeway, he had little use for politics. But he began to have a political awakening after the White House inserted itself into the Fenian raids. “I never voted in all my life,” he confessed to an audience in Nashville, “but henceforth my policy will be to adhere to that party which is in favor of Irish independence.”
To O’Neill, the Republicans were that party. At an enormous Fenian picnic outside Chicago on August 15, the general appeared on the podium along with the Radical Republican Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax and the Republican governor of Illinois, Richard Oglesby. They learned quickly that castigating President Andrew Johnson, linking him to Jefferson Davis and Queen Victoria, garnered surefire applause. Colfax played to the audience, saying he was “unutterably humiliated” by the president’s proclamation.
O’Neill piled on Johnson for betraying the Irish and crushing their dream “when the freedom of their land was within their grasp.” It was a defiant act to stand against a fellow son of Nashville. His friends pleaded with him not to assail the president; the man had been a forceful voice against the Know-Nothings in the 1850s, after all. O’Neill, however, was tiring of voices. He reiterated that he “intended hereafter to vote for the party and the men who by their deeds and not words had shown their sympathy for Irishmen.”
The Buffalo Commercial denounced the “political blarney” on display by both the politicians and the Fenians. “Ambitious local politicians who have for years been constant in their abuse of Irishmen, and who have been pummeled by them at almost every poll in the city, now hang around Fenian meetings, and stultify themselves with pretended sympathy and friendship,” the newspaper pronounced.
Still O’Neill’s tour resumed. Even before he attended the grand Fenian picnic in Buffalo, August 21 had been a grand day for him. That morning inside the U.S. District Court, the assistant district attorney Charles O. Tappan, following orders handed down from Johnson, entered a nolle prosequi against O’Neill; his second-in-command, Colonel Owen Starr; and eleven other officers. Prosecution was abandoned. O’Neill would remain a free man. Under pressure from aspiring Democratic officeholders to make amends with Irish voters, Johnson halted the prosecutions of all Fenian leaders for violating the Neutrality Act and agreed to return the arms seized from the Fenians on the condition that they not be used again for violating the neutrality laws.
O’Neill exited the courthouse for the greener pastures of Clinton Grove. All of Buffalo, in fact, was awash in green. Irish flags fluttered beside the Stars and Stripes from the housetops of the city’s prominent Fenian Brotherhood members. Rifle-toting Fenians wearing green shirts, green caps, and green bows of ribbon marched through the First Ward under the direction of Buffalo’s head center, Patrick O’Day.
O’Neill could not be faulted if he flashed back to the night of May 31, when he marched with hundreds of other Fenians through the dark streets of Buffalo to launch the invasion of the Niagara Peninsula. This time, however, the Irish emerged in full daylight and by the thousands upon thousands.
With marching bands providing a soundtrack, a grand military parade of seven thousand people thronged Niagara Street and progressed the two miles to Clinton Grove. Fenian regiments marched alongside Civil War veterans and workers’ associations from thirteen of Buffalo’s grain elevator companies. The Irish enjoyed their big day out, in particular the Ridgeway reenactment. After the routing of the British, O’Neill ascended the speaker’s platform. “I hope that all friends of Irish liberty will speak as we did at Limestone Ridge. We had our fight at Fort Erie and Ridgeway, but there was an enemy in our rear we did not anticipate,” O’Neill bellowed. He told the Irish that the land across the river would have been theirs—if only Johnson and William Seward had not meddled.
The general had watched the Fenian Brotherhood fray over whether to participate in the Civil War and split once again over whether to target the British in Canada or Ireland. Much as he might have hoped that his success at Ridgeway might spur greater unification now, the Fenians faced yet another divide over party allegiance.
As 150 Fenians convened in Troy, New York, for their Fifth National Congress on September 4, the Fenian president, William Roberts, hoped that the convention’s venue, Harmony Hall, would prove aptly named as the leaders responsible for the Fenian raids gathered together for the first time since the attacks. In case the delegates required any more encouragement, banners mounted around the elegantly decorated hall were inscribed with inspirational quotations such as “Let us be friends to the men that are friends to us.”
In order to discourage internal arguments, Roberts prohibited delegates from discussing the neutrality laws or debating politics, and to maintain operational secrecy, he also barred the press from reporting on its sessions. Unbeknownst to the Fenians, however, three British spies had infiltrated the convention from the inside and were reporting back to Ottawa—specifically on their covert military plans in the run-up to the November elections.
As the Roberts wing plotted its next incursion, Sweeny presented his official report on the Fenian raids to the convention. He blamed the failure of the attack on the U.S. government’s seizure of their weapons and the inability of regimental colonels to accurately report and deliver their forces. The military committee, however, placed the blame for the performance of the colonels on the man who chose them in the first place, censuring Sweeny for appointing incompetent officers. Even Sweeny’s supporters among the Fenian leadership acknowledged that while “Fightin’ Tom” could command an army in the field, he was not as well suited to handle logistics.
The rebuke stung Sweeny, who couldn’t help but remember that he had warned the Fenian political leaders of the pitfalls of pushing forward his desired timetable. While delegates reelected Roberts as president, Sweeny was forced to resign as Fenian secretary of war. When Roberts was unable to persuade General Philip Sheridan to become Sweeny’s successor, he named General Samuel Spear, who had led the incursion into Quebec, as the new war secretary. Before the month was out, Sweeny had returned to service with the U.S. Army.
Stepping into a packed Toronto courtroom on October 24, Robert Blosse Lynch was the first prisoner taken captive in Canada to stand trial. That he had found himself involved with the Fenian raids was perhaps no surprise. The County Galway native and Dublin University graduate had lived a life of adventure after emigrating from Ireland in 1842. Lynch had struck it rich in the California gold rush, divorced his wife after living together for one entire day, and narrowly escaped a lynching after being arrested for embezzlement as the city clerk in Milwaukee.
The Canadians accused Lynch of serving as a colonel in O’Neill’s force. While residents of Fort Erie testified that they had seen Lynch commanding Fenian troops, the defendant argued that he was the victim of mistaken identity. He had been reporting for the Louisville Courier and was, he claimed, being confused with Brigadier General William Francis Lynch, the no-show Illinois native whom Sweeny had tasked with attacking the Niagara Peninsula by boat from Cleveland. When testimony concluded on the trial’s second day, the jury took barely more than an hour to decide on its verdict—guilty.
“By the statute the crime of which you have been found guilty is punishable with death, and I can exercise no discretion,” the judge intoned. “You [will] be hanged by the neck till you are dead,” John Wilson promised, “and may God have mercy on your soul!”
The next day, the most high profile of the Fenian prisoners entered the courtroom for his own trial. The incarceration of Father John McMahon had stirred controversy in the United States—even among those who decried the Fenians. The priest from Anderson, Indiana, said he was in Buffalo en route to Montreal to tie up the affairs of the estate of his brother, who had died four years earlier without a will, when the Fenians forced him to cross to Canada with them so that he could provide spiritual comfort to the wounded warriors on the battlefield.
“They took my traveling bag from me, my vestments and cloak, and I was waiting to get them back, when they compelled me to act as chaplain,” he had told a reporter from the Toronto Leader. “When the battle was over, I was called upon to hear the confession of the dying men and administer the rites to them.”
Although McMahon insisted that he, like most priests, had “always opposed and preached against” the Fenians, he was forced to stand trial. After hearing from numerous witnesses who placed him in Fort Erie with the Fenians, the jury deliberated for forty-five minutes before returning with their verdict. Before Wilson announced the sentence, McMahon’s voice cracked as he told the judge, “I am innocent, my lord. I cannot plead guilty. I am innocent.” The crier of the court asked for silence as the judge spoke.
“John McMahon, the jury have found you guilty on evidence, which, I think, admits of no doubt,” Wilson said. “I have indeed a very painful duty to perform—one that I would gladly avoid if I could; but, I have no alternative, no discretion in the matter. The doom of the law is death for the crime of which you have been found guilty, and I but sit here humbly to carry out that law and to pronounce its penalties….
“You will have time and opportunity also,” the judge intoned, “before your sentence is carried out, to apply to your Maker for the forgiveness of your sins.”
Outrage at McMahon’s sentence intensified a few days later when the jury acquitted the Reverend David Lumsden—an Episcopal minister from Nunda, New York—on similar charges, although the evidence against him was stronger than that delivered against McMahon. Catholics on both sides of the border saw in the verdicts Protestant bias at work.
Seward ordered the American consul in Toronto to procure the trial records for examination as he lobbied the British for clemency for the Americans in custody. As the British took Seward’s request under consideration, the court condemned to death five more Americans. The White House lobbied for leniency. Downing Street sought to avoid a diplomatic incident. Canadian authorities also faced internal pressure to make an example of the Fenian prisoners. In particular, the militias who had watched their comrades die wanted justice delivered with Irish blood.
Catholic French Canadians, however, were uneasy at the thought of a man of the cloth dangling from a noose. They feared that the executions could spark another raid. Newspapers reported, hyperbolically, that a twelve-thousand-man group that called itself the Fenian Avengers stood at the ready to storm Canada and prevent any of their comrades from being sent to the gallows. Many Canadians rightfully also worried that executions could transform the men into martyrs. “If the British Government dares to hang the Irish-Americans now in their power,” O’Neill pledged to a standing-room-only crowd in Nashville, “the Fenians will, before the winter snows disappear from the hills of Canada, hang ten British subjects for each Fenian sacrificed.”
For his part, O’Neill could only dream of a Fenian martyr—as long as it wasn’t him. He castigated Lynch for being a coward—for continuing to protest that he was a newspaper reporter and not a soldier of war. (Lynch saw rank hypocrisy in this, considering O’Neill wasn’t willing to risk arrest in Canada to testify in his defense.) The death sentences proved a propaganda boon, proof of the British “thirst for Irish blood,” according to an advertisement for one Fenian rally. As Irishmen channeled their outrage into donations to the Fenian Brotherhood, Roberts dreamed of the money that would pour into his coffers if a single Fenian was put to death.
On November 24, the Earl of Carnarvon, British secretary of state for the colonies, informed the Canadian governor-general, Lord Charles Monck, from Downing Street of his intention to commute the sentences of Lynch and McMahon. Sir Frederick Bruce, British minister to the United States, told Seward that others who were subsequently condemned to death would be spared as well once all the Fenian trials were completed. “The sentence of death will certainly not be executed,” Bruce wrote to Seward on December 8. “I need not add how desirable it is that nothing should take place on the Canadian frontier to interfere with the disposition to lenity which I know is entertained by Her Majesty’s Government.”
Bruce’s communication came at a particularly sensitive time, just two days after the trials of the Fenians who attacked from Vermont began in Sweetsburg, Quebec. Fears ran high that the Fenians might attempt a raid on the small village in the Eastern Townships, just eighteen miles north of the American border. Special units of government police escorted the prisoners in and out of the courthouse.
The first trial was that of Thomas Madden for “feloniously joining himself to persons who had entered Lower Canada with intent to levy war against Her Majesty.” A British subject by virtue of his birth in Ireland, Madden was “taken with arms in his hands” and accused of firing on the Canadian forces who were endeavoring to arrest him. The court found Madden guilty and condemned him to hang. The Fenians Thomas Smith and Michael Crowley, also recognized as British citizens, received the same sentence.
The last of the Toronto trials finished on January 29, and the following day eleven convicted prisoners who had not been sentenced were placed in the dock and sentenced to hang, with all appeals disallowed.
With the fate of twenty-one Fenians now in hand, Lieutenant General Sir John Michel, commander of the British troops in Canada, followed the orders of the British government and commuted their sentences to twenty years’ imprisonment with hard labor.
Thomas D’Arcy McGee conceded that the commutation of the sentences was the right decision, but he wasn’t happy about it. “Those men deserve death,” he said, “but, I will add, that the spirit of our times is opposed to the infliction of capital punishment where any other punishment can reach the case, and in these cases I hope it may be possible to temper justice with mercy.”
Perhaps no one took the news of the commutations harder than Roberts, who had held out hope that the names of Lynch, McMahon, Madden, and the others would join the ranks of Irish martyrs to be remembered from generation to generation—and, importantly, spur the recruitment of soldiers and money.
“I regret to tell you that you are not going to be hanged,” Roberts wrote to Lynch in one of the strangest letters of lament ever penned. “So great a crime upon a non-combatant like yourself would make every Irishman in America a Fenian, and furnish our exchequer with the necessary means to clear Canada of English authority in short order.”
As one Ohio newspaper noted, the Fenian president’s letter was “carrying patriotism to an excess.” Roberts, though, knew that the men who stood up to the British and paid for it with their lives became the subjects of songs and verses. “A life that would otherwise pass away unknown, in a few years, at most, would become an honored portion of the history of our race and of the times,” Roberts told Lynch. “It would be a glorious death for you.”