Revisiting the Irish invasion of Canada
IRELAND BRAGS THEY’VE NEVER INVADED ANYONE. TOO BAD IT’S NOT TRUE; THEY INVADED CANADA
In 2015, Ireland’s justice minister Frances Fitzgerald attended a Dublin citizenship ceremony and proudly told 73 people that they were now citizens of a country that didn’t invade things.
“Ireland has never invaded any other land, never sought to enslave or occupy,” he told the crowd of newlyminted Irish.
It’s a uniquely Irish boast. On a continent jam-packed with invaders, the Emerald Isle often counts itself as one of the few that has resisted the urge to step onto foreign soil and plant a flag. Too bad it’s not true. Go back 150 years to the frontiers of Canada, and you’ ll find no shortage of armed, rowdy, top-hatted militants who would beg to differ that they weren’t an invading army of Irishmen.
“Canada … would serve as an excellent base of operations against the enemy; and its acquisition did not seem too great an undertaking,” wrote Irish nationalist John O’Neill, an architect of what are now known as the Fenian Raids.
The plan was simple: Take a bunch of Irish veterans of the American Civil War, take over Canada and then tell Queen Victoria she could have it back in exchange for an independent Ireland.
The wildly optimistic planners of the scheme figured they would only need about two weeks to take over Kingston, Toronto and the other major centres of what is now southern Ontario.
From there, they would commandeer some ships, slap together a navy, sail up the St. Lawrence and demand the surrender of Quebec.
The invasion’s organizers, the Fenian Brotherhood, even began funding the effort by selling bonds that would be repaid by a future Irish Republic.
But like most rebellions throughout Irish history, the “invade Canada” scheme was big on romance but very deficient in strategic planning.
Although the Fenian Brotherhood had envisioned vast columns of battle-hardened Irish-Americans streaming into Canada, their peak showing was only about 1,000. Of those, many forgot to bring guns, and many more deserted as soon as they hit Canadian soil.
All told, Fenian conquests added up to little more than brief occupations of a customs house, some hills, a few villages and Fort Erie.
To any Brits back home hearing the name “Fort Erie” and nursing visions of Irish forces over-running a mighty Canadian fortification, a letter to the Times of London quickly set them straight.
“It may relieve the anxiety of people to know that Fort Erie … consists of a corn mill with a dwelling house,” it read, adding that the “corn mill was burnt a few years ago.”
And, unlike most successful conquerors, the brief rulers of Fort Erie ended up having to bum transit fare in order to finish retreating.
After the U.S. government eventually got around to arresting Fenians massed on the border (staging foreign wars from U.S. soil is illegal, after all), New York’s Tammany Hall political machine put up the train fare to get the raiders back home.
And yet, the Fenians just kept invading.
They invaded New Brunswick, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. They invaded Canada when it was still a British colony, and they invaded it after it had become an independent dominion.
For five full years, any Canadian who lived within a day’s walk of the U.S. border would never be quite sure whether they might wake up to find that yet another Irish raiding party had taken over a post office.
“Intelligence has just been received from trustworthy sources that a band of lawless men calling themselves Fenians … intend to make a raid into this province,” was the proclamation issued to the residents of Manitoba in 1870.
The message then implored Manitoba’s “loving subjects, irrespective of race or religion, or of past local differences, to RALLY ROUND THE FLAG.”
As early Canadians would never tire of boasting, the Fenians were often pushed back by hastily assembled militias filled with farmers who barely knew how to work a musket.
“Times of ease and quiet are not the times for cultivating a martial spirit,” read one contemporary account of the somewhat lacklustre Canadian forces.
They were also pushed back despite stunningly bad leadership. Future Canadian prime minister John A. Macdonald, who was serving as minister of militia during the largest raid in 1866. As telegrams poured in with updates about the rebel advances, Macdonald remained far too drunk to read any of them.
To be sure, the Fenians were not official “armies of Ireland,” a country that was then still part of the United Kingdom.
But the invaders can claim a direct line to the forces that established the modern Republic of Ireland.
The Irish Republican Brotherhood, a sister organization to North American Fenian groups, would ultimately stage the 1916 Easter Rising, an attempted armed takeover of Dublin.
The Fenian Raids had leaned heavily on the idea that once first blood was drawn, it would stir the hearts of Irishmen everywhere: Thousands of sympathetic Irish-Americans would pour over the border, Irish-Canadians would pull down the Union Jack and countrymen back home would stage a revolution.
The strategy ended up being dead wrong for a Canadian invasion, with some dissident Irish nationalists saying that it would have made as much sense to invade Japan.
But the “public sentiment” card worked wonders in the 1916 Rising. Although a military failure that was initially opposed by the Irish mainstream, the harsh British put-down of republican leaders ended up sparking a wave of Irish nationalism that would see the Irish Free State established only six years later.
While Irish nationalists would generally do their best to forget their invasion phase, 19th-century Canada would do anything but.
For a young country that was still somewhat short on patriotic achievements, it’s easy to forget that it was immeasurably extremely exciting that a bunch of them had dropped what they were doing to beat back some Irish republicans.
Canadians of the era were so wildly pro-British that it was even known to creep out Britain at times.
And for thousands in this sleepy, agrarian corner of the British Empire, it had been their chance to fight back forces that were soon being lambasted as “barbarians” and “bands of plunderers.”
There were patriotic songs, epic poems, gripping bestsellers and government grants of 160 acres apiece to veterans. For decades afterward, a column of proud bemedalled Fenian fighters were a regular feature of Canadian parades.
As one particularly jingoistic poem put it, “your proud valour made them flee, and the wildest jubilee sound o’er our loved land again.”
YOUR PROUD VALOUR MADE THEM FLEE.