John O’Mahony sent two American envoys, grandly named ‘plenipotentiaries,’ to Ireland to report on the state of readiness. The first envoy was an Illinois politician, P. W. Dunne of Peoria, who wanted the Fenians in America and Ireland either to take immediate action or to disband. The other member of the mission was the editor of the Irish American, P. J. Meehan. Meehan carried documents—including a letter of introduction from John O’Mahony, addressed to ‘James Stephens, CEIRB’ (chief executive, IRB), a comprehensive table of organisation of the IRB including the names of Centres and As, and a draft for £500 ($2,000). All Meehan’s papers carried the address of the then New York headquarters of the Fenian Brotherhood, 22 Dwayne Street. O’Donovan Rossa himself, manager of the Irish People, was on the same ship as the envoys, returning to Ireland after a visit to New York:
Going into the Cove of Cork, I told Mr Meehan that … it should be well for him to give those papers he had to his sister, or to Mrs Dunne, who accompanied us. He told me that they were all right, that he had them sewed up between the soles of one of his carpet slippers … Pursuant to the caution given him, and to his own promptings, he thought it better not to have those papers in any pocket of his, he fastened them with a pin inside the waistband of his drawers. The upshot was that on landing in Kingstown, Meehan lost his table of organisation document in the lavatories at Kings Bridge railway station, in the train into Dublin, or else at Westland Row station in Dublin.
Dunne and Meehan rushed into John Denieffe’s tailor’s shop in the city and reported the loss. Denieffe and Meehan went to Westland Row Station, questioned the old man on the luggage wagon and searched the coach. The Meehan documents had in fact already been found near the Kingstown railway station by a messenger boy, who turned them over to a woman in the telegraph department. She in turn took them to a local police inspector. These papers, O’Mahony said, ‘put the bloodhounds on the track of the Irish Revolutionary leaders.’ They gave conclusive proof of the connection between the US Fenian Brotherhood and the IRB, and provided a comprehensive table of organisation. Stephens also believed that ‘the loss of these documents was the immediate occasion of the arrests in Ireland.’ Kenealy remembered that, in Denieffe’s upper room, ‘There was a private meeting held where the matter was discussed, and where it was proposed to do away with Meehan, but Stephens would not allow it without full proof.’ Some believed Meehan had jettisoned the documents out of fear.
Kenealy had already met the envoys when their ship first put into Cobh, and had not been impressed. Before leaving Cobh, Dunne had told him that the Fenian Brotherhood would land 30,000 men. Kenealy said he ‘had been for a little while accustomed to American exaggeration, so I gave the matter no thought.’
The Fenians hoped that the government, if indeed they now had Meehan’s lost papers, would not take any action on them until after the general election in a few months’ time. Lord Palmerston’s Liberals would surely desire to avoid outraging the Irish population until then. Meanwhile, the Fenians expected to be under considerable surveillance, though even they would have been astounded by the extent of what was reported to Dublin Castle or Whitehall, by police, agents and the public. ‘My Lord,’ wrote a concerned loyalist in Cork, ‘will you send troops and protect women and children if you do not care for the men of this place. A very bad and seditious house is in a street from the Mall close to Parliament Bridge. Surely you do not want an Indian mutiny or a Cawnpore tragedy.’ An agent named Thomas Saunders told the Metropolitan Police that he had attended a Fenian drill in a public house in Newburgh Street, Dublin. Then he had gone to Bride Street where thirty or fifty Fenians were assembled in a hall. Some drilled with rifles, others sparred, others trained with swords and some played cards.
A Constable Meagher from Roscommon told the superintendent of the Metropolitan Police: ‘From what I could learn from several persons both in Athlone and here I fear that the subordinates of the Midland Great Western Railway are all more or less “Fenians” or sympathisers with the movement.’ A characteristic report from Mitchelstown, Cork, shows how intimately observed a society Ireland was:
A number of strangers on a two-horse car from Fermoy visited this town and put up at Miss Jane Russell’s Public House, amongst who were three men of the 4th Dragoons from Fermoy in uniform with a few in civilian clothing supposed to be Officer’s servants—the only persons of the party I could learn the names of are a Mr Edward Sheehan of Fermoy and John Casey (The Galtee Boy in the Irish People newspaper) …
Patrick Phelan, second head constable, likewise reported how he drank in Cork City with an American who told him that
he was the first to receive the late General Corcoran in his arms, after his fall from his horse, which killed him. He bestowed more praises on Corcoran than Napoleon ever deserved … This man is about 26 years of age five feet nine inches in height. Black hair … He is of most respectable appearance and gentlemanly conduct and demeanour, dressed in a black frockcoat, light tweed trousers, and vest, a massive gold chain to his watch.
Even in America Fenians were subject to surveillance. Sub-Inspector Doyle spent two years there, working with the very effective British consul in New York, Archibald. And from the Continent, the British consul at Saint-Nazaire warned the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs that a British steamer, the Collima, of Glasgow, had entered Saint-Nazaire three times in August and September and shipped 13,000 shells to Liverpool from the foundry of M. Voucy, who had supplied shells to the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Amongst this welter of disturbing news, however, a reassuring report did reach Dublin Castle on the matter of the supposedly secret Papal decree issued to Irish and American bishops that Fenianos non esse inquietandos (‘Fenians are not to be disturbed’). An agent reported that his investigations showed that such a decree had never been published by the Vatican, and was merely a sectarian rumour.
More crucially for the future of the Fenians, in Dublin Superintendent Ryan of the Metropolitan police had in place an extremely handy informer, Pierce Nagle, a copy-reader at the Irish People. Nagle reported that Hugh Brophy, a building contractor and intimate of Stephens, was importing rifles from Sheffield.
Kenealy made his last buying trip for the Queen’s Old Castle in early September 1865. Coming back to Dublin from England, he was met at the boat and told that ‘the Captain wanted to see him.’ Kenealy travelled out to Stephens’s house in Sandymount, where Stephens, now a little portly, handed him a telegram from Cork. It read, ‘Tell John not to return the same way.’
After thinking a moment, Stephens concluded that this message referred not to Kenealy, but to another Fenian named John, who had gone to New York recently as a courier to O’Mahony. Stephens now gave Kenealy ‘final instructions’—they included orders to appoint deputy As who would keep rank-and-file Fenians ready for the coming revolt. Stephens’s last words to Kenealy were: ‘There will be great changes before we meet again, if indeed we ever do.’
Two nights later, wrote Kenealy, ‘The Irish People was seized, Luby, O’Leary, Rossa and others were arrested in Dublin, and the same night Brian Dillon, John Lynch, myself and two or three others were arrested in Cork.’ By the time Meehan stepped on board a steamer for Philadelphia, to attend the Fenian Brotherhood Convention of Philadelphia, the leadership of the IRB was already in prison. These arrests signalled the onset of a catastrophic period of reckless Fenian endeavour and failure, yet of gestures potent enough to set the tone of Anglo-Irish discourse for the remainder of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries.
The night before the arrests, J. J. Geary, a Fenian publican, thirty years of age, frequently mentioned in police reports, asked Kenealy not to sleep in the Mill Street dormitory accommodation the Queen’s Old Castle provided for its staff, ‘as I would most certainly be arrested … But for several reasons I would not change.’ One reason was that Stephens had told his As (staff officers) not to go into hiding. Kenealy reflected later, ‘With the same prospects … though I have tast
ed something of British prisons, I would do the same now.’
On the evening of 15 September 1865, Kenealy left his office with another employee of the Queen’s Old Castle, James Barrett, and attended to the last of the Fenian visits Stephens had asked of him. On their way to their dormitory, Kenealy and his friend went into a corner ‘cigar divan,’ or smoking pub, to have some cheese and porter. The proprietor of the pub, a liberal Orangeman from the north of Ireland, took Kenealy aside and said, ‘Don’t go to your room tonight—let James go …’
Kenealy and Barrett went back briefly to Kenealy’s room. Again, Kenealy did not feel justified in fleeing or going into hiding. Leaving him, Barrett exchanged ‘a rather sad good-night,’ and went to his own room on a higher floor. At two in the morning, Kenealy’s room was all at once filled by armed police led by Mr O’Neill, Chief Constable of Cork. Asked for the key of a trunk in the corner, Kenealy told a sergeant that that trunk belonged to his roommate Mr Scanlon, another buyer, absent in England. He pointed to Scanlon’s own trunk and claimed it as his own. Kenealy’s real trunk contained a gift from John O’Mahony, ‘a very fine revolver.’
Sympathetic Head Constable O’Neill told a policeman who tried to handcuff the prisoner to desist, remarked that it was raining a little and that Kenealy should put on an overcoat. Kenealy told the senior policeman that it was upstairs in a friend’s room. The Head Constable said, ‘Go and get it, Mr Kenealy.’ Kenealy went to the fourth floor, knocked on James Barrett’s door, asked him for his overcoat, handed him the key of his (Kenealy’s) trunk, and asked him to extract the revolver as soon as the police took him away. That arranged, Kenealy went back downstairs in Barrett’s coat. On reaching the street, the Head Constable asked Kenealy quietly if he had any papers or documents he did not wish to be seen. ‘If I had he would destroy them.’ Kenealy did find a sample home-made Fenian cartridge in his pocket, and dropped it on the pavement in the dark. ‘It is only fair,’ Kenealy would write long after, ‘to say that many of the police have good hearts.’
Now conducted through the columned gateway and under the portcullis of the county gaol of Cork, on his way along a corridor he passed cells from which newly arrested Cork Fenians, John Lynch and Brian Dillon, called out to him. At daylight the prisoners were taken to the square in front of the jail and arranged in single file, a policeman standing by each one. On either side of this party, there was a long file armed with rifles. ‘Among those marching with the rifles, I noticed two or three glancing slyly in our direction. One, I knew well, did on occasion act as drill master—and not one of them gave information.’ The prisoners then were taken a little way through the streets to the city jail near the court and locked in separate cells.
The police had raided overnight a blacksmith’s shop in Cork kept by a man named Heggarty, who had fled to England to escape arrest. They discovered on the hearthstone a recess in the ground, ‘wherein were two pikes and a ring-locked bayonet … The barb-pointed, horizontal spike across one of the pikes is intended to catch the bridles of cavalry.’ Heggarty would later testify that these pikes had been commissioned by John Kenealy.
A special commission was appointed in December by Dublin Castle to try the Fenians in Dublin and Cork. In the intervening three months, the spirit of the prisoners remained excellent. Many warders carried information from one cell to another, and from the outside to the inside. What was most stimulating was news of the skilful rescue from Richmond prison of the Captain, James Stephens, in late November. Stephens had been tracked by police to his home at Sandymount, where he lived under an assumed name, on 11 November. The plan for his rescue, devised by John Devoy and Captain Thomas J. Kelly, an American military man presently in Ireland, was communicated to the prisoner by a medical orderly named John Breslin, who also passed on to Devoy a soap imprint of the key to Stephens’s cell block. On the night of 24 November, Breslin opened Stephens’s cell, gave him the forged key, and directed him out of his block to the wall, beyond which Kelly and Devoy awaited him.
He was taken to a secure house, and the Fenian leadership, particularly the American soldiers, urged him to raise the rebellion. ‘Stephens plainly did not want to fight,’ wrote Denieffe, ‘… in fact, I concluded then and there that Stephens’s work was done, and his usefulness ended on that night of November 26, 1865.’
The men in prison lacked the information that left Denieffe and the American officers so disillusioned. They also knew nothing of a dangerous split which had occurred in the American Fenian Brotherhood. The American Fenian Senate, voted into place to ensure more democracy in the movement, had authorised the issue of Irish Republic Bonds, which Irish Americans could buy now and redeem after an Irish republic was established. The issue was to be made under the authority of a Fenian bond agent named Patrick Keenan. But Keenan resigned, and without the Senate’s approval, O’Mahony told the printing company to engrave his own signature on the bonds. O’Mahony’s salary as president was $2,000, and as bond agent he was entitled to an extra $1,200 a year. When the Senate objected, O’Mahony accused the Senate itself of being an illegal assembly. But led by the Manhattan dry goods merchant William Roberts, it dismissed him from office for calumnies against Stephens, the chief executive of the Irish Republic, and against the Senate and membership of the Fenian Brotherhood.
O’Mahony still had supporters, and they retained the new Fenian Brotherhood headquarters in the Moffatt Mansion in Union Square and barred entry to the Senate and its supporters. General Thomas W. Sweeny, who had lost his right arm in the Mexican War and who had also served in the Civil War, gave legitimacy to the Senate wing by becoming Roberts’s War Secretary. So, O’Mahony summoned his own Fenian Congress in New York and invited the schismatics of the Senate to appear. General Sweeny did so, to make a futile appeal for unity. Meagher—in Montana—must have been pleased to have evaded the bitterness of this split, and the blandishments both sides might have held out to him. For Fenianism was beginning to compound its follies.
By the end of January, while Irish Fenians began to fill up the gaols of Ireland and England, Sweeny and Roberts were on the road, visiting every large centre of Irish population in the United States. The general’s plan was a departure from O’Mahony’s. It was to ‘make a warlike demonstration on Ireland by way of Canada.’ General Sweeny was willing to present the plan ‘to any six general officers of the American Army …’ If any of the six decided against its feasibility, then he was willing to adopt any other scheme likely to bring about the independence of Ireland.
Whatever the mixture of nobility, faction and venality in the movement, American Fenianism had begun to look sufficiently farcical for the late Mr Lincoln’s favourite humorist, Artemus Ward, to raise an easy laugh from it. ‘The Finians,’ went one of his sketches, ‘conveened in our town the other night, and took steps toord freein Ireland.’ The meeting described in Ward’s sketch was of course attended by an amusing gaggle of non-Irish politicians who wanted to be voted in on the Democrat ticket for county clerk and dog-catcher. ‘There’s two parties—O’Mahonys and Mc O’Roberts. One thinks the best way is to go over to Canady and establish an Irish republic there, kindly permittin’ the Canadians to pay the expenses of that sweet Boon; and the other wants to sail direck for Dublin Bay … But there’s one pint on which both sides agree—that’s the Funs.’ Funds. Both sides actively sought them.
The special commission appointed by Dublin Castle to judge the Fenians in Dublin and Cork was headed by Solicitor-General William Keogh, of the betrayers of the Tenant Rights Movement, and J. D. Fitzgerald—both Catholics. ‘To the outside world, especially the countries in sympathy with Ireland,’ wrote Kenealy, ‘this might have seemed fair on the part of the Government.’ But Kenealy and the others knew that Billy Keogh had a few years beforehand sent brothers named McCormack to the scaffold in Tipperary, ‘when it was well known they were innocent of the crime charged.’ The government charged the Fenians with Treason-Felony, under the same statute which had been rushed throug
h Parliament in two days for the purpose of convicting John Mitchel in 1848. In Green Street courthouse in Dublin, the approaches blocked off by dragoons at either end of what was a narrow thoroughfare, Thomas Clarke Luby was the first to be placed on trial before Judges Keogh and Fitzgerald. He was defended, as the Young Irelanders had been, by Isaac Butt, QC.
It was through Luby that the government tried to establish the conspiracy: if they got him, they got the rest. Prosecution was made easier by documents seized in the People office, including ‘Manuscripts Selected by reason of their Seditious Tendency.’ One anonymous manuscript seized conveys their general character:
We’re slaves my boys and slaves we’ll be
Till maddened by our chains
We’ll raise the flag of liberty
And muster on the plains
And sweep the Saxon from our shore
As once we did the Dane …
Luby was found guilty and sentenced to twenty years’ penal servitude. John O’Leary got the same. ‘I am a working man,’ he declared, ‘and if a man is found guilty of high treason, earning his honest livelihood in his own country, I just put it forward as a sample, and as a proof to those that are to come after me to live in this country.’ For Charles Kickham, the hearing-impaired editorial writer for the Irish People, the charge was read ‘through an acoustic instrument,’ and he was found guilty. O’Donovan Rossa, fire-eating Cork man, was brought forward, made an 8-hour speech in defence of the Fenian position, and was given a life sentence.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 60