14
Blood in the Street
IN THE YEARS following the Civil War, people, money, information, and ideologies traveled faster than ever before. Steamships delivered quicker trips across the oceans. Telegraphs slashed the time it took for news to spread from days to hours. The unprecedented advances in communications and technology blurred international borders and allowed for the globalization of Ireland’s political problems.
Leaders at the highest level of the British Empire worried about the possibility of a transborder conspiracy among the Fenians and the exportation of Irish political violence from nearby England to faraway Australia. Their worst fears appeared to be realized when an orderly room clerk to William Roberts reported to the Canadian prime minister, John A. Macdonald, that a thirty-man Fenian assassination squad had departed the United States for England with plans to kill Queen Victoria, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the British prime minister.
Then, on March 9, 1868, a Canadian double agent reported directly to Macdonald that Fenians in Chicago had plotted to dispatch three hired assassins to England to murder the Prince of Wales by poison or dagger. Three days later, an Irishman indeed tried to murder one of Queen Victoria’s sons, but it was her second-eldest son, Prince Alfred. The favorite son of the “Famine Queen” was attending a picnic in a suburb north of Sydney, Australia, during the first royal tour of Britain’s antipodal colony when the Irish Catholic immigrant Henry O’Farrell approached from behind and fired a pistol at close range into his back. “I’m a bloody Fenian and will die for my country!” yelled the Irishman. Fortuitously, the royal’s India rubber braces slowed the velocity of the bullet, which miraculously missed his vital organs, allowing him to survive. O’Farrell was not in fact part of a conspiratorial network but a loner drawn to the Fenian ideology. In spite of a request from the prince himself to spare his shooter’s life, the Irishman went to the gallows on April 21, 1868. By the time the news of Prince Alfred’s shooting crossed from Australia to North America, another pro-British political figure had been shot by an Irishman—this time fatally.
For most of the winter, illness exacerbated by chronic alcoholism had confined Thomas D’Arcy McGee to his house in Montreal, where many of his former Irish friends now shunned him. McGee’s harsh words toward the Fenian cause had earned him an expulsion from the St. Patrick’s Society of Montreal in November 1867, and he continued to antagonize the Irish by vilifying the Manchester Martyrs.
A leader of the Young Irelander Rebellion in 1848, Thomas D’Arcy McGee earned the wrath of the Fenians when he became an outspoken supporter of the British Crown as a member of the Canadian Parliament.
With his health at last improving, McGee returned to Ottawa. He took to the floor of the House of Commons in the early morning hours of April 7 during a late-night session where he stood by his principles, even if it came at a price. “I hope that in this House mere temporary or local popularity will never be made the test by which to measure the worth or efficiency of a public servant. He, sir, who builds upon popularity builds upon a shifting sand,” he said to applause. McGee told the chamber that a true leader was someone “ready to meet and stem the tide of temporary unpopularity, who is prepared, if needs be, to sacrifice himself in defense of the principles which he has adopted as those of truth—who shows us that he is ready not only to triumph with his principles, but even to suffer for his principles.”
McGee closed his speech with a rhetorical flourish in which he declared himself “not as the representative of any race, or of any Province, but as thoroughly and emphatically a Canadian.” It was one of the finest speeches he had ever delivered and well received by his fellow parliamentarians.
Buoyed by the address and his steadily improving health, McGee was in a celebratory mood once debate ended around 2:00 a.m. Sober for several months, he sidled up to the bar inside the House of Commons and purchased three cigars. He joined Prime Minister Macdonald for a smoke and then began to walk home.
Under the light of a full moon, he approached the Toronto House, where he had been boarding for nearly a month. Still suffering from an ulcerated leg, McGee limped and fumbled with his key as a figure approached from behind. Mary Ann Trotter, the boardinghouse’s owner, sat awake within, awaiting not just McGee’s return but that of her thirteen-year-old son, Willie, a page in the House of Commons.
That is my boy coming home, Trotter thought to herself as she heard the footsteps outside the dining room window, followed by the muffled tap on the door like the one she had instructed Willie to use when out late so as not to disturb any guests sleeping inside.
Trotter turned the knob and opened the door. A sudden flash blinded her, and a loud crack echoed through the empty street as she inhaled gunpowder. She saw a man in a white top hat slumped on the ground. Trotter closed the door. She grabbed a lamp, which illuminated the blood splattered on the foyer floor and on her nightgown. She opened the door again and found the figure slumped even further to the ground against the stone doorpost.
Trotter called for her other boarders, who approached the lifeless body and identified it as McGee’s. The parliamentarian had been shot in the back of the neck. The .32-caliber bullet that passed through his mouth was so powerful that it blasted his false teeth into the Toronto House foyer. McGee’s glove and cigar lay in the street a few feet away as his blood pooled on the sidewalk and trickled into the gutter. The onetime Young Ireland member and fierce supporter of confederation was dead. The young Canadian nation now had its own martyr.*1
Even before the crime scene had been cleaned, Canadian leaders inside the House of Commons believed they knew the culprit: Fenianism. “If Thomas D’Arcy McGee had not taken the patriotic stand which he took before and during the Fenian invasion of this country,” George-Étienne Cartier, minister of militia and defense, told a quiet chamber, “he would not be lying a corpse this morning.”
The anguished prime minister rose to address the chamber. “He who was with us last night, no, this morning, is no more,” Macdonald said as eyes naturally drifted to McGee’s empty seat. “He has been slain, and I fear slain because he preferred the path of duty.”
McGee’s face had been so severely mutilated by the bullet that the traditional Victorian death mask was replaced by a plaster cast of his right hand, a more appropriate memorial of the poet, journalist, and man of words. Authorities plastered posters across Ottawa that offered a $2,000 reward for the apprehension of the killer. With habeas corpus still suspended in Canada, police rounded up forty Irishmen suspected of Fenian sympathies. Less than twenty-four hours after the assassination, police believed they had the murderer—Patrick James Whelan, who had been seen lurking about Parliament during McGee’s final hours.
Born around 1840 in County Galway, the red-bearded Whelan had arrived in Canada a few years earlier. A tailor by trade, he had joined the Volunteer Cavalry in Quebec City, where he was arrested on suspicion of being a Fenian but released because of a lack of evidence. After marrying a woman thirty years his senior in Montreal, Whelan moved to Ottawa in November 1867 to work for the tailor Peter Eagleson, a Fenian supporter.
When the police entered Whelan’s hotel room, they discovered several issues of The Irish-American and blank membership cards from Irish nationalist organizations, which suggested he had been a Fenian recruiter. Although all six chambers of his Smith and Wesson revolver were loaded, the gun appeared to have been recently fired and its bullets matched that of the one fired at McGee. As detectives looked for proof of a larger Fenian conspiracy, Canada united in grief.
An estimated 80,000 people—in a city of barely more than 100,000—lined the streets of Montreal on Easter Monday to honor one of the Fathers of Confederation and to send a defiant message to the gun-toting Fenians who threatened their country. While the organization’s president, John O’Neill, condemned “the dastardly, cowardly assassination of McGee,” other American Fenians were less forgiving, such as the one who told a New York World reporter, “McGee did as much as he could to disgrace our people by his double dealing and treachery, and we cannot feel very sorry for him. Some of us looked upon him as we would upon a poisonous rattlesnake.”
Nearly eighty thousand people lined the streets of Montreal to pay their respects to Thomas D’Arcy McGee during his funeral procession.
On what would have been McGee’s forty-third birthday, six gray horses draped in black velvet drew his hearse through the streets of Montreal. Spectators kept McGee close to their hearts, wearing black silk mourning badges that featured his photograph pinned to their chests. Fifteen thousand mourners joined in the massive procession accompanying the hearse. During the solemn funeral Mass in St. Patrick’s Basilica, the vicar-general closed his eulogy with a denunciation of the Fenians that provoked a spontaneous burst of applause, the heartiest coming from many Irish hands, until the priest reminded the congregation they were in a house of God.
While Macdonald said he believed the shooting of his friend to be “a deliberate decision of the Fenian Organization” and “not the act of one individual only,” investigators could find no evidence of conspiracy.
At Whelan’s trial, the evidence against him was circumstantial at best. Still, his lack of an alibi, and the discovery of his boot prints in the snow opposite the Toronto House, were enough to seal his fate. They were bolstered by detectives who, hiding near Whelan’s cell, testified that they heard him brag to a fellow inmate, “I shot that fellow like a dog.”
After an eight-day trial, the jury delivered the verdict: guilty, sentenced to death. “I am here standing on the brink of my grave,” Whelan told the court after the verdict, “and I wish to declare to you and to my God that I am innocent, that I never committed this deed, and that, I know in my heart and soul. In the next place I have been charged with being a Fenian. I assure you and every living soul that I never was so at any time—at home or abroad.”
In his last hours on death row, Whelan penned a three-page letter to the prime minister in which he admitted to being present at the scene of the shooting and to knowing who pulled the trigger. If true, Whelan chose a trip to the gallows over being an informant. Whelan’s execution the following year would be Canada’s last public hanging.
During the summer of 1868, the American government suspected that the Fenians might again be up to something closer to the border. Fearing that some Irish Catholic government agents were sympathetic to the Fenian cause, the U.S. War Department contracted with a private detective company newly founded by the Chicago police detective and native Scotsman Allan Pinkerton to investigate the Fenians in the Midwest. Pinkerton assured government officials that “the detectives detailed upon the operation were Protestant Irishmen” and “thoroughly to be relied upon.”
Pinkerton’s detectives unearthed little evidence of an imminent attack and discovered no weapons out of the ordinary around Chicago. What they did find, however, was growing discord among the Fenian leadership over the organization’s treasury.
In spite of O’Neill’s tireless fund-raising efforts, money problems derailed his hopes to have troops stationed in Canada by the end of 1868. Only one-third of the $167,450 pledged for the next Fenian raid at the Cleveland congress in September 1867 ever made its way into the organization’s treasury over the ensuing nine months.
O’Neill and the senate began to clash over who was responsible for the depleted budget. Irishmen who had donated their hard-earned money criticized the organization’s profligate spending, and some scrutinized the mounting expense account that accompanied O’Neill’s frequent travels. “General O’Neill moves through the country with a staff larger than the King of Dahomy,” groused The Irish Republic.
O’Neill conceded his expenses were high because of his considerable travel. “I have never believed, nor do I now, in what some are pleased to term ‘economy,’ in conducting the affairs of the Brotherhood, too much economy would kill it. Our people must have excitement and are willing to pay for it,” he asserted to Senator Frank Gallagher.
The Fenian president knew that the real budget buster was Patrick J. Meehan’s rifle conversion project, which nearly bankrupted the Fenian treasury and far exceeded the projected $25,000 cost. The final total climbed to $68,040. In order to cover the cost overrun, Meehan and other senators paid $7,500 out of their own pockets.
In April 1869, O’Neill and James Gibbons, who served as vice president and senate leader, announced that they were reducing the size of the headquarters staff and jettisoning its organizing corps in order to funnel as much money as possible into breechloaders and ammunition.
In fact, the only Fenian making hay in the spring of 1869 was eating it as well. On the opening day of the spring meeting at Jerome Park Racetrack outside New York City, a chestnut stallion named Fenian, bred by the investment banker August Belmont, ran away from an eight-horse field to capture the race named in honor of his owner—the Belmont Stakes. (The silver figure of Fenian still graces the top of the Tiffany trophy that has been given to subsequent winners of the Belmont Stakes.) After that one victorious burst of speed, however, Fenian never saw the winners’ circle again.*2
American and Canadian authorities detected little Fenian activity on either side of the border during the summer of 1869. “Were it not for the almost insane enthusiasm of O’Neill himself, I should consider the affair almost at an end,” the new British minister to the United States, Edward Thornton, wrote to Secretary of State Hamilton Fish at the end of August.
The Fenian president, though, had become fed up with the ceaseless solicitation he needed to perform in order to stay solvent and the painfully slow progress of accumulating the war fund. “I am sick and tired of traveling from point to point, begging money, and will only continue as long as it is absolutely necessary,” O’Neill wrote to Gallagher. Given his lineage, O’Neill wanted to shake the British Empire, not the money trees of America. Warriors, not fund-raisers, became Irish legends.
The Fenian president was determined to fight—no matter the size of the bankroll. He felt confident that the money would flow once he crossed the border and created a sensation. An impatient O’Neill told Gibbons that he could no longer delay the attack, but the senate president protested that given their lack of men and money another Canadian foray would be doomed to fail. Where Gibbons saw prudence, O’Neill saw cowardice.
The tensions between the Fenian president and senate grew increasingly bitter. O’Neill’s critics accused him of embezzling money from the Fenian treasury and living comfortably on the donations of poor Irishmen. Flashing back to 1865, senators believed it a repeat of the extravagant spending by O’Mahony and his cronies inside Moffat Mansion.
In truth, the only people the Fenian president robbed were his wife and children—depriving them of family time and attention while he pursued his Canadian obsession—and his personal debts continued to mount, forcing him to even borrow $364.41 from his underling Henri Le Caron. As O’Neill and Meehan pointed fingers at each other for the budget-busting armory project, their friendship fell apart. The pages of The Irish-American began to direct their editorial barbs at the Fenian president.
Even without the backing of the senate, O’Neill proceeded with his preparations for a Canadian invasion. The Fenian president knew firsthand that a lack of weapons and supplies, more than a dearth of manpower, crippled his invasion in 1866 and hastened his withdrawal from the Niagara Peninsula. As a result, he vowed that every soldier who participated in the next Fenian raid would have a gun in his hands and all the provisions necessary.
The Fenians had accumulated a sizable arsenal under O’Neill’s leadership. According to the Canadian spymaster Gilbert McMicken, by the end of 1869 they had amassed more than five thousand breech-loading rifles, eighteen thousand muzzle-loading rifles, twenty thousand uniforms, four hundred saddles, and more than seven hundred sabers. All that O’Neill believed the Irish Republican Army still required to complete its preparations was breech-loading ammunition. “It should not be forgotten that an arm which discharges twenty shots per minute is an extravagant weapon and that the supply of ammunition to meet its requirements must be proportionately great,” O’Neill wrote in a circular to members.
In early November, O’Neill began to deploy the Fenian war stores to secret locations along the Canadian border. He summoned Le Caron, whom he had promoted to lieutenant colonel and acting adjutant general of the Irish Republican Army, to New York. The Parisian left behind his family and medical practice in Illinois, which was more lucrative than the $100-per-month salary that O’Neill offered, to direct the movement of arms and supplies to towns in upstate New York and Vermont that hugged the Canadian frontier. The Fenian president then traveled to Buffalo and recruited Colonel William Clingen to oversee the movement of arms hidden in Pittsburgh to cities on the Great Lakes, including Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit.
Le Caron and Clingen relied on a network of Fenian agents along the border—such as railroad company employees, hardware merchants, and grocers—who would not arouse suspicions by receiving large volumes of crates and barrels. Once shipped to border towns, the guns and supplies were hidden in the sprawling barns and outbuildings of Irish farmers in the countryside.
In spite of their efforts at subterfuge, the British and Canadian governments still had considerable intelligence about where Le Caron and Clingen stashed arms along the international boundary. Edward Archibald, the British consul in New York, had received such detailed information from his country’s spies that he was even able to hand sketch maps of the country roads around St. Albans, Vermont, and Potsdam, New York, with the locations of the stashes. Although the British and Canadians might have known where the arms were, Archibald believed there was little they could do about it. He estimated that one thousand troops would be required to seize the vast arsenal, and he doubted, given the number of Irishmen in the U.S. Army, that the secrecy of such a vast operation could be maintained.
The Fenian president never wavered in his belief that Ireland could be freed only by the rifle and saber, and he remained more determined than ever to wash away the wrongs of Ireland in the blood of its enemy. It was the Roberts wing’s strategy of freeing Ireland by attacking Canada that had originally drawn him to the Fenian Brotherhood four years earlier, and his victory at Ridgeway only solidified his opinion that the only practical way to liberate his homeland was to invade America’s northern neighbor.
Like the newly elected president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, O’Neill was a soldier at heart, which made him exasperated at the senate’s slavish devotion to deliberation at the price of actually getting something done. Didn’t the senators remember they had broken away from John O’Mahony in 1865 because of his excessive passivity and refusal to strike Canada? They were supposed to be the “men of action,” but nearly four years had slipped away since the last Fenian raid as the senate held meeting after meeting. O’Neill knew that Fenianism, like any revolutionary movement, required action to justify its existence and keep money flowing into its coffers. He saw inaction as the root cause of the Fenian Brotherhood’s declining membership and financial difficulties.
“I was painfully aware that the longer we waited, the less confidence would the Organization and the Irish people generally have in our ability to succeed,” the Fenian president recalled. “And besides, the thousands of our countrymen who participated in the late war were fast settling down in life, and if we deferred matters much longer, it would be almost impossible to secure a sufficient number of veteran soldiers for the proper inauguration of the movement.” While O’Neill hoped to repeat his military triumph at Ridgeway, he also knew from Irish history that choosing to fight the British could be enough in itself to declare victory. A respectable effort could reenergize the Fenian Brotherhood and flood its coffers.
O’Neill ignored the report from Senator Richard McCloud, who served as treasury secretary, that the Fenians lacked enough money to pay their clerks, let alone attack a sovereign nation. He believed himself destined to lead an Irish army to a battlefield victory over the British, and he was no longer willing to let the senate dictate whether or not he could fulfill his life’s mission. “The right to fight for Ireland I ask of no man living,” O’Neill wrote. “I inherit that right from my fathers, it being the only legacy left me, and I will exercise it, I trust, before England becomes much older in crime, or Ireland more decrepit in her misfortune.”