When the Irish Invaded Canada Read online

  ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER KLEIN

  Strong Boy: The Life and Times of John L. Sullivan

  Copyright © 2019 by Christopher Klein

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  Cover images: The Battle of Ridgeway, June 2, 1866; courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Harp: Atlaspix / Shutterstock

  Cover design by Michael J. Windsor

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Klein, Christopher, author.

  Title: When the Irish Invaded Canada : the Incredible True Story of the Civil War Veterans Who Fought for Ireland’s Freedom / Christopher Klein.

  Description: New York : Doubleday, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018032572 (print) | LCCN 2018042393 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385542609 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385542616 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Canada—History—Fenian Invasions, 1866–1870. | Fenians. | BISAC: HISTORY / Military / Other. | HISTORY / Europe / Ireland. | HISTORY / North America.

  Classification: LCC F1032 (ebook) | LCC F1032 .K54 2019 (print) | DDC 971.04/8—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018032572

  Ebook ISBN 9780385542616

  v5.4

  ep

  For Erin

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Christopher Klein

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1: The Young Irelanders

  Chapter 2: Bold Fenian Men

  Chapter 3: The Civil War

  Chapter 4: Torn Between Brothers

  Chapter 5: The Eastport Fizzle

  Chapter 6: Erin’s Boys

  Chapter 7: A Lawless and Piratical Band

  Chapter 8: Iron Wills and Brave Hearts

  Chapter 9: The Fenians Are Coming!

  Chapter 10: Hail the Vanquished Hero

  Chapter 11: Political Blarney

  Chapter 12: Erin’s Hope

  Chapter 13: The Call of Duty

  Chapter 14: Blood in the Street

  Chapter 15: One Ridgeway Would Never Be Enough

  Chapter 16: Secrets and Lies

  Chapter 17: A Burlesque of a War

  Chapter 18: Another Fight, Another Flight

  Chapter 19: The Fenians Behind Bars

  Chapter 20: Losing Their Lifeblood

  Chapter 21: The Invasion That Wasn’t

  Chapter 22: The Next Best Thing

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Spellings of some words in quotations have been Americanized from the British versions for consistency and ease of reading. Italics have been maintained to preserve the original emphasis.

  Prior to July 1, 1867, present-day Canada was referred to as “British North America.” For the sake of clarity and simplicity, this book employs the term “Canada” in place of “British North America.”

  PROLOGUE

  THIRTEEN MONTHS AFTER Robert E. Lee laid down his sword at Appomattox Court House, former Confederate rebels slipped on their gray wool jackets. Union veterans longing to emancipate an oppressed people donned their blue kepis. Battle-hardened warriors from both the North and the South returned to the front lines, but not to reignite the Civil War. Instead, the former foes became improbable brothers in arms united against a common enemy—Great Britain.

  Entwined by Irish bloodlines, the private army that congregated on the south side of Buffalo, New York, on the night of May 31, 1866, shared not just a craving for gunpowder but a yearning to liberate their homeland from the shackles of the British Empire. For seven hundred years, British rulers attempted to extinguish Ireland’s religion, culture, and language, and when the potato crop failed in the 1840s and 1850s, causing one million people to die, some Irish believed that the British were trying to exterminate them as well.

  Many of the two million refugees fleeing the Great Hunger washed ashore in the United States, where the newcomers continued to face the scorn of nativist Know-Nothings who believed the Irish had no intention of assimilating into American culture but plotted to take handout after handout while imposing papal law on their adopted home. Even from a distance of nearly fifteen years and three thousand miles, the trauma remained raw for many of the insurgents who enlisted in the self-proclaimed Irish Republican Army. Radicalized by their collective ordeal, these Irish American Civil War veterans viewed their service in the bloody crucibles of Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg as training for the real fight they wanted to wage—one to free Ireland.

  Wearing green ribbons tied to their hats and fastened to their buttonholes, eight hundred Irish paramilitaries who had traveled from as far away as New Orleans emerged from the boardinghouses and saloons of Buffalo’s Irish enclave, the First Ward, on a clear spring night. Carrying green flags sewn by their wives, girlfriends, and mothers and hauling nine wagons laden with secretly stockpiled rifles and ammunition, the Irish Republican Army set off on one of the most fantastical missions in military history—to kidnap Canada.

  * * *

  Bred to hate the British, the thirty-two-year-old colonel John O’Neill was fulfilling his boyhood dream as he led the Irish Republican Army on its march northward. “The governing passion of my life apart from my duty to my God is to be at the head of an Irish Army battling against England for Ireland’s rights,” he declared. “For this I live, and for this if necessary I am willing to die.”

  O’Neill could neither forgive the British for the unspeakable horrors that he had witnessed as a boy coming of age during the Great Hunger nor forget his grandfather’s soul-stirring tales of seventeenth-century ancestors who dared to take up arms against the Crown. Although they did not deliver freedom to Ireland, the young lad learned that just the mere act of fighting the British could render an Irishman a hero.

  Even after taking a Confederate bullet in defense of the Union, O’Neill never forgot the plight of his homeland. Lured by its plan to strike the British province of Canada, which was directly ruled by London, he enlisted in the Irish Republican Army after the Civil War. O’Neill saw the logic in targeting the British Empire at its most accessible point—on the other side of America’s porous northern border—instead of an ocean away in Ireland, a plan that had failed repeatedly over the centuries.

  “Canada is a province of Great Britain; the English flag floats over it and English soldiers protect it,” he wrote. “Wherever the English flag and English soldiers are found, Irishmen have a right to attack.”

  * * *

  Far from some whiskey-fueled daydream, the plan for the Irish invasion of Canada had been carefully crafted for months by veteran Civil War officers, including the one-armed general Thomas William Sweeny. Keen students of military history, the Irishmen knew that attacking Canada had been as time-honored an Am
erican tradition as fireworks on the Fourth of July. In fact, even before John Hancock affixed his signature to the Declaration of Independence, the Continental army had launched its first major assault of the American Revolution by storming into Quebec.

  In the first American century, the United States and Canada were hardly peaceful neighbors. Old-timers in Buffalo could recall when British soldiers breached the border during the War of 1812 and burned the nascent village to the ground in retaliation for similar measures by U.S. forces. American anger toward Canada surged during the Civil War, when the British colony became a haven for draft dodgers, escaped prisoners of war, and Confederate agents who plotted covert operations including raids on border towns, the firebombing of New York City, and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

  Given Great Britain’s tacit support for the Confederacy and American hopes that Canada would become the next territory to be absorbed as the country continued to fulfill its Manifest Destiny, President Andrew Johnson was more than willing to let the Irish Republican Army twist the tail of the British lion. The U.S. government sold surplus weapons to the Irish militants, and Johnson met personally with their leaders, reportedly giving them his implicit backing. The Irishmen had been free to establish their own state in exile—complete with its own president, constitution, currency, and capitol in the heart of New York City.

  While the Irish Republican Army believed its invasion could spark an Anglo-American war or force the British to redirect troops from Ireland, leaving it more vulnerable to an internal rebellion, what it sought, in essence, was to capture the British colony on America’s northern border, hold it hostage, and ransom it for Ireland’s independence.

  In what is now a little-known coda to the Civil War, Irish Americans invaded Canada five times between 1866 and 1871 in what are collectively known as the Fenian raids. They attacked New Brunswick, Ontario, Quebec, Quebec again, and Manitoba in a series of incursions that eventually devolved into a mix of farce and tragedy. From the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes to the vast prairie, the Fenian raids sowed panic along the border and generated front-page news on two continents.

  Before their conclusion, the Fenian raids would prove instrumental in the creation of a new nation—just not the one that Irishmen intended. In the process, however, O’Neill and his brethren would achieve the first Irish military victory over the British since 1745, make the United States a key player in Anglo-Irish affairs, and forge a transatlantic framework that proved pivotal in providing the financial and military support that led to Ireland’s eventual liberation from British rule.

  The Irish invasions of Canada drew in some of the most notable figures from the Civil War—such as Ulysses S. Grant, George Meade, Edwin Stanton, and William Seward—as well as a colorful cast of characters that included a British spy who successfully infiltrated the Irish Republican Army, a turncoat targeted for assassination, and a radical Irish revolutionary who staged his own funeral to evade capture by the British. No man, however, would become as consumed by the improbable scheme of holding Canada hostage as O’Neill.

  * * *

  After leading the Irish Republican Army on their six-mile march through Buffalo, O’Neill halted his troops at a dock near the Pratt & Co. blast furnace, where the distance across the Niagara River was among its narrowest.

  As the Irish colonel surveyed his ragtag force clad in blue, gray, and green, he saw grizzle-bearded men and fair-skinned boys, Catholics and Protestants, Yankees and Rebs. As O’Neill squinted into the darkness, he could faintly make out the enemy territory one thousand yards across the river. Awaiting the troops were two steam tugs and four canal boats, which had been procured by an Irishman posing as a foundry owner seeking to transport his employees to a company picnic on Grand Island.

  With Canadian defense forces stationed miles away, the Irishmen easily slipped across the international boundary. The soldiers shook the American dust off their boots and planted their feet firmly on the soil of the British Empire.

  The Irish Republican Army’s invasion of Canada had begun.

  1

  The Young Irelanders

  WHILE HIS COUNTRYMEN wept at the news of his death, James Stephens absorbed the view from atop Ireland’s highest mountain. He might not have been in heaven yet, but the young rebel was closer to it than any man in Ireland.

  Shot twice and left to die during a failed uprising against the British Crown, Stephens somehow escaped both death and the enemy that had occupied his beloved island for seven centuries. An outlaw in his own land, he hid from the authorities in the mist-shrouded Macgillycuddy’s Reeks, where he followed in the footsteps of Finn McCool, the mythical Celtic warrior who hunted deer with his five hundred Irish wolfhounds in these mountains. Now, in the summer of 1848, Stephens and his fellow Irish patriots were the prey, with the world’s foremost superpower in pursuit.

  To throw the police off the chase, friends and family in the fugitive’s hometown of Kilkenny spread the erroneous news of his death. The Kilkenny Moderator ran an obituary for “poor James Stephens,” who “proved a martyr in the true sense of the word.” To further the ruse, the Irishman’s father staged a mock funeral. In the shadows of Kilkenny’s St. Canice’s Cathedral, which had been ransacked by the British forces of Oliver Cromwell two hundred years earlier, broad shoulders bore a coffin laden with stones. They laid the casket in the turf and erected a simple gravestone that bore the inscription “Here Lies James Stephens.”

  The deceased, however, was very much alive as he traversed vast bogs, overgrown moors, and mountain streams swollen from summer downpours on a journey across the south of Ireland—one that he knew could conclude at the end of a noose. A stout man of average height, Stephens had fair skin and noticeably small hands and feet, which gave him an effeminate appearance. A voracious reader, he had few close acquaintances apart from his beloved books, perhaps because of his shifty appearance, thanks to an involuntary twitch in his left eye that caused him to wink constantly.

  James Stephens, the founding member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, never wavered in his opposition to any invasion of Canada.

  Covering as many as forty miles a day on raw, blistered feet, Stephens left behind a trail of blood drops from County Tipperary to County Kerry and the summit of Ireland’s tallest peak. Surely, he thought, the British combing the countryside for insurgents would not bother to look on the roof of Ireland. From the top of Carrauntoohil, Stephens gazed out at a wondrous panorama of glimmering lakes and rain-scoured mountains.

  The beautiful facade, however, belied the rotting death that lurked below the surface of Ireland’s green sod. The same newspapers that had printed the rebel’s obituary also reported that the dreaded “potato disease” had returned for the fourth straight year. Potatoes that had appeared perfectly healthy just weeks earlier now bled a putrid red-brown mucus. A closer inspection of the scenery from Carrauntoohil’s summit revealed a horrific landscape of abandoned potato ridges, walking skeletons, and deserted homes.

  Along his trek, Stephens had encountered families dressed in rags and farmers who locked their cows and sheep inside their hovels at night to save them from slaughter by desperate neighbors with empty stomachs. He witnessed his starving countrymen withering away and feared that the revolutionary spirit of the Irish might be wilting too.

  * * *

  For seven centuries, the luck of the Irish was nothing to be coveted. A geographic accident had placed them in the backyard of the most powerful empire in world history. Ever since the Englishman Nicholas Breakspear, who inherited the throne of Saint Peter to become Pope Adrian IV, purportedly granted his countryman King Henry II his divine blessing to invade the island in 1155, Ireland had been occupied—and abused—by its neighbor.

  While English politicians watched the richest, most modern economy on earth flourish across the Irish Sea from the poor, starving potato people who spoke a foreign langua
ge and practiced an exotic religion, they wrestled with what they called the “Irish problem.” The problem with the Irish, of course, was that they weren’t English.

  For nearly a millennium, the English sought to reshape the Irish in their own image and Anglicize what they saw as a savage land populated by people who lacked the intellect and initiative to govern themselves. Following the Reformation, Presbyterians from Scotland and Anglicans from England were transplanted to the north of Ireland. The 1690 defeat of the forces of King James II, the deposed Catholic monarch, at the Battle of the Boyne secured the Protestant ascendancy in Ireland.

  That wasn’t enough for the Crown, however. It inflicted extra vengeance upon the conquered by attempting to annihilate their Celtic culture. Under the Penal Laws that passed beginning in 1695, Irish Catholics could not openly worship their God. They could not vote or hold public office. They could not send their children to Catholic teachers—or employ Catholic teachers to come to them. They could not own firearms or hold military commissions. They could not own horses valued at more than £5. They could not purchase or inherit land from a Protestant. In fact, they could not inherit anything from a Protestant. They were permitted to own a knife—as long as it was chained to a table to be of no threat to the police.

  The English also required inheritances of Catholic-owned land to be subdivided equally among sons, which resulted in Irish Catholic farmers clinging to progressively smaller and smaller parcels of land. An eldest son, however, could take full ownership of his father’s land by converting to the Anglican church. Even in death the Irish could not be free, because their colonial overlords prohibited priests from presiding over graveside services, forcing them to bless handfuls of dirt that they gave to mourners to sprinkle over the deceased.