Exploring textures of Irish America: a new perspective on the Fenian invasion of Canada

Abstract

Within an Irish nationalist history, for those at “home” and especially for members of the Irish American diaspora, venerating heroic rebels and recollecting attempted insurrections are quintessential narratives used to define Ireland's turbulent past. However, on the fringes in that regard has been the American-based Fenian Brotherhood's attempted invasion of Canada in 1866. Arguably a successful effort – although a very brief one, due to the American authorities' obstruction – its international camber and transnational implications may have kept this history apart from premier narratives of an Irish nationalist past. This paper suggests that although in the long term the Fenian invasion of Canada was largely expunged from the Irish/Irish American nationalist canon, initially it was retained, for a short time at least, in popular expressions of Irishness. By turning to “texts” that contemporaneously venerated the Fenians' efforts and uncovering transnational undertones in the process, this paper offers new suggestions concerning the changing textures of Irish America.

Keywords::

• Fenian Brotherhood
• invasion of Canada
• Irish America
• transnationalism
• Irish diaspora

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1.Cavanagh, “Our Dead Comrades,” 17.

^2.Kenny, “Diaspora and Comparison,” 159.

^3.Sweeny, Thomas William Sweeny papers.

^4.O'Neill, Official Report of Gen. John O'Neill.

^5.Anonymous, Fenian Songster.

^6. Such paucity of reporting is in stark contrast to the several quickly inscribed biographies and digests that came from the British Canadian Provinces. See, for instance, Somerville, Narrative of the Fenian Invasion of Canada; Rutherford, Secret History of the Fenian Conspiracy; Anonymous, Fenian Raid at Fort Erie; Denison, Fenian Raid on Fort Erie; MacDonald, Troublous Times in Canada; Gregg and Roden, Trials of the Fenian Prisoners at Toronto; D'Arcy-McGee, Account Of The Attempts To Establish Fenianism in Montreal; Campbell, Fenian Invasions of Canada; Le Caron, Twenty-five Years in the Secret Service.

^7. In the last few years (2011–14) it is noticeable that more attention has been paid to the Fenian invasion of Canada among Irish and Irish American studies scholars; however, in the larger scheme of Fenian exploration, the invasion of Canada is still a relatively unstudied event in any great detail outside of Canada.

^8.Miller, Ireland and Irish America, 257.

^9. See, for example, Curtis, Apes and Angels; Kenny, “Race, Violence, and Anti-Irish Sentiment,” 364.

^10.Dolan, Irish Americans, 42–4.

^11.Kenny, “Race, Violence, and Anti-Irish Sentiment,” 364–5.

Race is a particular mode of social perception and representation that casts the world and its peoples in terms of fixed, hereditary group characteristics, discernable in physical appearance, which can explain and predict behavior. Race in this sense was an undeniable feature of the stark, and still shocking, forms of anti-Irish sentiment in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world (365).

^12.Meagher, Inventing Irish America, 247.

^13.Handlin, Boston's Immigrants, 185. Nineteenth-century Americans complained about the Irish:

[I]nstead of assimilating at once with the customs of the country of their adoption, our foreign population are too much in the habit of retaining their own national usages, of associating too exclusively with each other, and living in groups together. These practices serve no good purpose, and tend merely to alienate those among whom they have chosen to reside. It would be the part of wisdom to, ABANDON AT ONCE ALL USAGES AND ASSOCIATIONS WHICH MARK THEM AS FOREIGNERS, and to become in feeling and custom, as well as in privileges and rights, citizens of the United States. (Original emphasis)

^14.Harmon, Freedom for Ireland.

^15.Quinn, “Looking for Jimmy,” 667.

^16.Lester, “Tennessee's Bold Fenian Men,” 262–77.

Prodded by Secretary of State William Seward, whose “fondness for the Irish” was well known, the Johnson administration repeatedly extended the hand of friendship and encouragement to the Irish. [A] Seward biographer reports that “the British government was fully aware of the aid and comfort provided by the United States for the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood” (265).

See also Golway, Irish Rebel, 62; Samito, Becoming American under Fire, 185–93.

^17.“Editor's Easy Chair,” 806–10.

^18.Moloney, “Irish-American Popular Music,” 386.

^19.Wilson and Donnan, Anthropology of Ireland, 92.

^20.Moloney, “Irish-American Popular Music,” 395.

^21. Ibid., 382.

^22. Ibid.; see also 394–5.

^23. Ibid., 388.

^24.Hallissy, Reading Irish-American Fiction, 35.

^25.Moloney, “Irish-American Popular Music,” 393. For example, “a great number of these songs extolled … the daughters or granddaughters of immigrant Irish women who had worked as domestics or in textile mills. Their offspring had graduated to respectable jobs as nurses, schoolteachers, and secretaries.”

^26.Snay, Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites, 1–17.

^27.Moloney, “Irish-American Popular Music,” 393. To underscore this development, the musicals of Tin Pan Alley emerged and abounded with songs of Irish and Irish American themes, earning “big commercial successes” in sheet music, “marketed to huge mass audiences on an unprecedented scale. This general climate set the scene for a proliferation of nostalgic songs about Ireland, with songwriters penning verses that looked back at a lost homeland, a place of beauty and innocence where everything was good and wholesome.”

^28.Wilson and Donnan, Anthropology of Ireland, 93.

^29. Ibid., 91.

^30. Ibid.

^31. The direct translation of Scian Dubh from Gaelic is “black knife”; however, the reference is more likely taken from the Scottish Gaelic tradition of carrying a concealed knife, as was part of the highlanders' daily uniform. The word dubh can also imply “hidden” in certain Gaelic phrases.

^32.Dubh, Ridgeway.

^33. Ibid., viii.

^34. Ibid., iv.

^35. Ibid., ix–x.

When England … exiled to France a host of our countrymen, who afterwards met her at Fontenoy, as the Irish Brigade … wrongs of the past were with them … a great corrective, or reactionary principle, attends the misdoings of nations, that, sooner or later, exerts itself in restoring the equilibrium of justice, and avenging the infringement of any of those laws, human or divine, constituted for the welfare and guidance of our race … in no case has this been made more apparent than in that of Ireland.

^36. Ibid., ix–x.

^37. Ibid., xiv–xv.

^38. This is an acronym for the words White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.

^39.Snyder, “The Irish and Vaudeville,” 407. “The Irish were typically depicted as bellicose yet fun-loving, drunken yet brave, rowdy yet patriotic … the Irishman as bellicose lent itself naturally to wildly physical slapstick comedy, in which Irish comics pummeled each other with shillelaghs onstage.”

^40.Moloney, “Irish-American Popular Music,” 388.

^41.Dubh, Ridgeway, 89.

^42. Ibid., 26.

An organization so wide-spread and so numerous as that of the Fenian Brotherhood, it was not to be expected that all of its members, without an exception, were good men and true; yet so rarely were traitors found among its ranks, that no patriotic confraternity of its magnitude had ever … presented so pure a record in this relation. When we take into consideration the fact that, the insidious and subsidizing gold of England was brought to bear upon the frightful poverty of the masses … the wonder is that there were not more … to do the work of the usurper, and betray the cause to which they had sworn fealty.

^43. Ibid., 43.

^44. Ibid., 43–4.

^45.Said, “Invention, Memory, and Place,” 175–92.

^46.Moloney, “Irish-American Popular Music,” 393.

^47. Ibid., 384.

‘In all of these forms there was a restricted set of images of the Irish that dominated the American stage. Some of these images presented the Irish as loyal, servile, and docile; others presented the Irishman as dim-witted and pugnacious. The latter images were represented by one of the most familiar figures in the nineteenth century–the stage Irishman. This character was […] a “bizarre individual, preposterously dressed in a red-flannel fireman's shirt affecting a swagger, and with a shillelagh in hand ready to knock out all others in the cast at the proper moment.”’