The curse which seemed to attend on Fenian endeavours was in early evidence in this case. In April, the plans had come under threat when John O’Neill, who had won the Battle of Ridgeway in 1866, and was now president of the Roberts/Senate wing, appeared ‘awfully drunk’ at a strategy meeting. A disgusted Senate wing voted the presidency out of existence, but a powerful breakaway group was formed to support O’Neill. O’Neill meant to go ahead with an invasion, preferably for the Queen’s Birthday, 24 May, before the Fenian Senate could meet to take away his military authority.
All factions of Fenians, O’Neill included, faced the problem that earlier that year the Vatican had specifically outlawed the Fenian Brotherhood. There had been debate amongst priests and in the Fenian ranks as to whether the Fenian Brotherhood had been covered by the decree of the previous year, Apostolicae Sedis, which simply mentioned secret organisations. The British minister to the Vatican had worked very hard to persuade the Pontiff to issue a Fenian-specific decree, as a means of protecting both Canada and Britain. The new decree of January 1870 made it clear ‘that the American or Irish society called Fenian is comprised among the societies forbidden and condemned in the Constitutions of the Supreme Pontiff.’ Some pro-Fenian papers treated the press reports of the decree as lies. ‘It is a contemptible fraud therefore,’ said the Irish People of 12 March.
Free in conscience, O’Neill, at barely more than thirty years old, was still brimming with coherent schemes for supply and personnel. He had spent months successfully depoting Confederate surplus arms, re-tooled in a factory in Trenton, New Jersey, in rented warehouses and barns along the Canadian border. But his security was slapdash, and his adjutant, Civil War veteran and surgeon Dr Henri LeCaron, was a long-established and competent British agent, born in southern England and really, and prosaically, named Beech.
Letters delivered to Fenian circles required officers to start their men moving towards Malone near the New York–Quebec border, and into northern Vermont during the night of Monday 23 May. Fenian officers needed to move their entire membership at individual expense, all within a space of twelve hours. Nonetheless, the enterprise was supported with a poignant enthusiasm by sundry Irish labourers and clerks, though with a lesser proportion of Civil War veterans than there had been four years earlier.
O’Reilly, dispatched as a journalist by the Boston Pilot, and by some means or other fully aware of the Fenian plans, was sceptical of the moral and practical value of Canadian raids. We do not know if he seized the assignment or was persuaded to take it by Donahue, the editor-owner of the Pilot. But if he crossed into Canada and was caught by Canadian forces, as escapee and Fenian he would suffer doubly. He took the train from Boston to western Massachusetts and picked up the railroad north into Vermont. As he travelled, President Ulysses S. Grant issued a proclamation dated 24 May condemning ‘sundry illegal military enterprises and expeditions on foot within the territory and jurisdiction of the United States … against the people and district of the dominion of Canada.’
To begin the campaign, O’Neill depended on men from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, and northern New York. O’Neill said, ‘I would have under my command in this section on Wednesday morning upwards of four thousand men.’ From 1,000 to 1,500 men were in the meantime to assemble at Malone, New York.
O’Neill’s plan of campaign was to enter Quebec and capture Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, called locally St Johns. But in St Albans, Vermont, where O’Neill and LeCaron waited on Tuesday morning, 24 May, the six o’clock train brought not 1,200 men from Massachusetts, as expected, but just twenty-five to thirty, led by a Fenian colonel named Sullivan. In lieu of the 600 men promised by Vermont and north-eastern New York, eighty to ninety were on the train. A company of sixty-five Irishmen from Burlington, Vermont, had arrived the previous evening and had already been sent north to Franklin, only two miles from the border. O’Neill decided not to delay. Since he expected reinforcements, he would take up a position at Franklin, and then cross the line. He also ordered the movement across the border of men assembled far to the east, at Malone, New York. To begin with less than 200 men seemed an act of recklessness, but he was working on the same failed supposition as Smith O’Brien at Ballingarry—that an early success would draw in more men. He claimed to have promises from prominent American military men that they would join the expedition ‘once the demonstration was fairly under way.’
Beyond the town of Franklin, the nearest crossroads to the border was Hubbard’s Corner. It served as a mustering point for armed Fenians. Arms and ammunition had been hauled by volunteers up from depots by Vermont citizens, ‘all of whom will please accept my thanks on behalf of the brotherhood,’ wrote O’Neill, ‘for their unpaid and untiring exertions on this and on other occasions.’ O’Neill was delighted that this time the enemy had no force near the line to oppose them. He intended to make all necessary arrangements to cross over and take up a position on Eccles Hill on the Canadian side. But his Adjutant-General, LeCaron, sent to St Albans to hurry on the men who arrived on the six o’clock evening train, deliberately took his time, and overnight the border remained uncrossed and Eccles Hill unoccupied.
Within a short ride of the border, O’Neill occupied as headquarters a home which belonged to an Alvah Richard or Rykert. Here Fenian General Donnelly had turned up, telling O’Neill that the US Marshal in St Albans was making moves to arrest him. He also reported that between four and five hundred men had arrived on the train the previous evening, and were now but a few hours march from Franklin. ‘In fact it turned out to be not over 230 or 240 men arrived … They lost their way coming to Franklin and did not arrive until five o’clock in the morning.’ A handful of men under a Captain Keneally of Marlboro, Massachusetts, also arrived. Early that morning of 25 May, with these forces, O’Neill could still have simply crossed and occupied Eccles Hill, but did not do so.
O’Reilly reached the Fenian positions that morning and left a pithy and graphic account of that Wednesday morning. In Franklin, ‘the solitary street filled with wagons and teams of every description, and a large crowd of men, composed principally of citizens attracted by curiosity.’ He found the Fenian uniform most attractive—‘a green cavalry jacket, faced with yellow, army blue pantaloons and a blue cap with a green band.’
At 10.30 a.m. the US Marshal General George P. Forster, accompanied by a number of citizens, came to the camp around Rykert’s house. There were too many armed Fenians there to make an arrest feasible, so the marshal limited his discussion with O’Neill to the question of whether the Fenians would kindly keep the road open. The marshal gone, O’Neill ordered a force of 176 men moved forward at 11.30 a.m., but Colonel LeCaron, perhaps as a stratagem, rode up and informed him that the New York Fenians were close at hand and it was worth waiting. LeCaron was secretly concerned at what would happen to him if he were captured by Canadians or British who did not know of his arrangement with Her Majesty’s government. It would be ridiculous to be shot or lynched as a Fenian!
Amongst these induced delays, the Canadian militia suddenly turned up on the border. They were joined by an irregular body of armed local farmers wearing red sashes, men outraged by the raid of 1866 in that area. Militia and irregulars willingly posted themselves on Eccles Hill about 300 yards from the frontier. O’Neill acknowledged they had taken up ‘a splendid position.’ Fenian companies were now, too late, sent over the border and across the little bridge at the bottom of Eccles Hill. Once over they deployed skirmishers. There was a volley from the top of this escarpment, and Fenian John Row of Burlington, Vermont, shot through the heart, fell dead in the centre of the road.
O’Neill tried outflanking, ordering groups coming up from the rear to cross an open field in Vermont to the timbered hill on the Fenian left. Three of them were shot, one fatally. The Fenians wavered. John Boyle O’Reilly, unlike the reporter of the New York Herald who had fled, advanced with O’Neill from Rykert’s house and met some men making for the rear. ‘They seemed to have a ver
y erroneous idea as to the number of the enemy,’ wrote O’Reilly. Canadian rapid fire from Snyder rifles was ending Fenianism’s credit on that rustic border.
‘Men of Ireland,’ O’Neill told the Fenians gathered near Rykert’s, above the position where General Donnelly’s men at the border itself lay huddled, ‘I am ashamed of you! You have acted disgracefully today.’ He himself, he declared, would lead them to a new attack, but first, ‘I will leave you under the charge of John Boyle O’Reilly, and will go after reinforcements and bring them back at once.’ This curious appointment of O’Reilly went without further explanation, and O’Reilly himself would imply he had in no way welcomed it. Everything he wrote of the expedition after that day was disapproving of the enterprise, but on the day itself, was he tempted, for the last time in his life, by the military possibilities? O’Neill obviously hoped O’Reilly’s lustre as Fenian and escapee would settle the men, and also remembered from his Civil War days how men who behaved badly at the start of the battle rallied when reinforcements began to arrive. O’Neill himself intended to meet the reinforcements coming up from St Albans, but down the road he saw Marshal General Forster stationed. Fearing he would be arrested if he were on his own, he returned to ask O’Reilly, as a gentleman of the press, to accompany him, and put Major Daniel Murphy of Connecticut in charge for the moment. O’Neill started again with John Boyle O’Reilly, but at a crossroads Marshal Forster emerged from a crowd surrounding a wounded Fenian soldier, shook hands with O’Neill, and said, ‘I think, General, you had better get in the carriage and drive back with me.’ O’Neill argued that he would not let himself be arrested and pointed to O’Reilly’s presence. The marshal said that he had more armed men in the vicinity now than O’Neill. O’Neill later explained that he was carrying only his sabre, and that he knew that the Vermonters, sympathetic as they were, would back up a Federal official. He told O’Reilly to take journalistic account of the fact that he was powerless to resist. In the marshal’s carriage, he was cautioned against calling out to any of his men who might be coming up to support the Fenian front.
In an account O’Neill later prepared in prison, he reproduced a report written the next day by O’Reilly. ‘As you ordered me, I told my command on the hill that you had been arrested. I then gave command to Major Daniel Murphy … I then went down to General Donnelly.’ Donnelly was commanding the troops who had tried to cross the ground below Eccles Hill, and there was some risk in O’Reilly’s reaching him. ‘He was deeply affected when I told him of your arrest. He could not leave his place, determined to do so in the night. He did so last night, and is now with the main body at the stores.’ This letter seemed to indicate that O’Reilly saw himself as at least a disillusioned officer of the enterprise.
On the afternoon of 25 May, the Fenians abandoned their flanking position of the timbered hill, and darkness mercifully permitted Donnelly’s men to withdraw.
In O’Reilly’s published reports in the Pilot, there seemed to be a distance between him and the other militant Irishmen. The recurrent term ‘we saw’ may have been a justifiable journalistic device, but also riveted O’Reilly in the posture of a witness, not an enthusiastic actor. O’Reilly’s sympathy in his reports, as President Grant moved US army units up to the border to prevent any more Fenian assaults, was for the rank and file of Fenianism. ‘The citizens here all feel for the poor fellows who are left destitute in their towns.’ And if there had been any identity of intent between O’Reilly and these Fenian men, it was the last time in his life he would give room to physical force.
As operations ceased in Franklin, O’Reilly travelled by train from Burlington across to New York State, to report on the outfall of the Fenian attack at Trout River. The Fenians had crossed the border near Malone but been hit by rapid fire from well-placed Canadians behind fences and in woods at a crossroads. The situation had been rather like Ridgeway in 1866, but with the roles reversed. Fenian General John H. Gleeson, who had served three years with Meagher’s 63rd New York and would later be attacked by O’Neill in his bitter report, got little credit from O’Reilly either. O’Reilly was outraged enough by the debacle to deal harshly with the common Fenian usage of the rank of general: ‘We use the word general as a mean—there might have been a colonel, and there probably was a field-marshal.’ Gleeson O’Reilly described holding court at the Ferguson house near the Canadian border and expressing ‘disgust.’ He ‘interlarded said expression with Munchausen assertions of what could be done, were things after his way of thinking, and especially of what he himself could do.’ Meanwhile, many of the men O’Reilly met—‘poor disheartened fellows’ straggling along the road from Malone to Trout River—burst into tears at what they called their disgrace. ‘Judging from the military physique of the greater number, there can be no doubt that, with qualified officers, these men would prove that they did not merit the name they now feared—cowards.’ Back in Boston by 11 June, O’Reilly speculated in the Pilot on the good which would have been done had the money been sent to Ireland for land purchases and for supporting schools.
In his Federal prison cell, O’Neill would have leisure to list the many reasons for failure: ‘thousands of good men who were anxious to be with us, kept indulging their doubts and fears until too late to be of service … The Senate party had their emissaries walk all over the country, destroying the confidence of the people.’
‘Shall another attempt be made to invade Canada?’ he asked at the end of his report, ‘to which I answer, no! Emphatically no!’ But O’Neill did make one last abortive attempt the following year, at Pembina, Manitoba, to link up with the Metis leader Louis Riel. From that point, there was no further armed assault over a line which in modern times became one of the most stable on earth. The Fenians had in fact demonstrated to the United States that an unstable border was of no advantage to them, and that Canadians did not long by the hundreds of thousands for the benefits of American republicanism. The Fenian plan to invade Canada, a stratagem laughed at by John Kenealy in Cork as he waited to be sentenced, had proved disastrous.
After 25 May 1870, O’Reilly stated his disenchantment with Fenianism in a Boston speech on the new Irish Home Government Association—the Home Rule movement which had been inaugurated at a meeting in Dublin in May 1870 to seek an Irish domestic legislature. O’Reilly himself would as a young Fenian have despised this option, for it countenanced a continuing nexus to Britain. But a pragmatist now, he saw Home Rule as an honest first step in the process of deliverance. But at the same time he supported the obstructionist group amongst the Irish members of the British Parliament, who set out to delay government business in the House of Commons to force Gladstone to attend to Irish reform. O’Reilly would come particularly to admire and support the emergent leader of this Irish group, a complex young squire from Wicklow, Charles Stewart Parnell.
O’Reilly had also developed almost instantly into a pluralist American. A month after the failed invasion, he damned the behaviour of his fellow countrymen in anti-Orange riots brought on by a 12 July procession in New York. Orangemen, parading with the normal flags and music, were heard to yell, ‘To hell with the Pope!’ and ‘Croppies lie down!’ (Croppies had been the nickname for rustic Catholic rebels in 1798.) The upshot was that ‘a terrible melee’ broke out, and four lives were lost. ‘What are we today in the eyes of Americans? Aliens from a petty island in the Atlantic, boasting of our patriotism and fraternity, and showing at the same moment that deadly hatred.’ He foresaw a time ‘when America, tired out and indignant with her squabbling population, puts her foot down with a will and tells them all—Germans, French, Irish, Orange—” You have had enough now. There is only one flag to be raised in future in this country and that is the Stars and Stripes.” ’ Critics of John Boyle O’Reilly began to complain that he was ‘sneering at the Sunburst,’ the symbol at the centre of the Fenian flag.
Since an Amnesty Association to campaign for the release of imprisoned Fenians had been founded in 1868 by a Dublin dry-goods mer
chant Fenian named John ‘Amnesty’ Nolan, it had achieved considerable success. Its meetings in Dublin and London were massively attended, and had been one of the factors which led to the release of the thirty-four Fremantle Fenians. The association particularly sought to have O’Donovan Rossa released, and so nominated him for election to the House of Commons, a daring stratagem which would be repeated with other political prisoners in the twentieth century. In November 1870, while still serving at Chatham Prison, O’Donovan Rossa was elected member for Tipperary in absentia. This set off meetings of rejoicing throughout Ireland. Towards Christmas 1870, Gladstone announced that specified civilian Fenians in British prisons, and the eight remaining Western Australian civilian Fenians, were to be conditionally pardoned. Only one of the newly pardoned, James Kearney, a Cork man in his mid-twenties, stayed in Western Australia. He was in love with a local Irish immigrant woman, would marry, earn his living as an itinerant bootmaker in the bush, and die an Australian elder in 1923.
The newly pardoned included one of the editors of the Wild Goose, that natural newspaperman John Flood. Also amongst the pardons were those of John Edward Kelly of Cork and Boston, and Kenealy’s friend Thomas Fennell, who had suffered a bullet wound in the testicles and thigh during the skirmishes of 1867. Settling in the large Irish enclave of Elmira, New York, Fennell would give certain parties advice concerning the rescue of other Fenians still serving life sentences.
Five freed men, including Flood and Goulding, used the £30 Brophy and Noonan were holding for each of them to take ship to Port Lyttelton on the South Island of New Zealand in May 1871. This was the venue of the hour, serving the Otago goldfields, the world’s latest bonanza. Adventurous settlers needed to move themselves and their luggage up the steep escarpments surrounding the port to get to the hinterland, but the Fenians were never put to that trouble, for they were arrested on landing. New Zealand had, like Victoria, passed an Introduction of Convicts Prevention Act in 1867. All five men appeared before a magistrate the next day, and were able to produce a letter from the Colonial Secretary of Western Australia stating that he was not aware of any restriction against their landing in New Zealand. The magistrate dropped charges against Goulding, who had a totally free pardon and had by now already served his time. But the prosecutor pressed that the others be returned to Western Australia as a warning to that colony. Bail was posted, to be forfeited if they did not quit the colony within fourteen days. £100 was raised by the Irishmen of Christchurch so that the Fenians were able to pay for five passages to Sydney.
The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World Page 73