Farmers knew their muskets
Re: Lawless men called Fenians, Tristin Hopper, May 8
The premise of Hopper’s piece is a stretch since the Fenians represented ‘Ireland’ only in their own minds. But the real howler is when Hopper writes that Canadian militias were made up of farmers “who barely knew how to work a musket.” Really? On this entire continent, in the 19th century, there wasn’t a farmer who couldn’t shoot straight, not only for protection but also to feed themselves. Jack Guthrie, Victoria, B.C. Too bad Tristin Hopper didn’t bother to dig a little deeper when he reported on the history of the Fenian raids. In this year of Canada’s bicentennial, why is he crowing over the tragedy of the Fenian raids?
This was not a proud moment in Canadian history. Hopper ignores how Canadian governments offered pitiful half measures to Irish immigrants who arrived here dying from typhus on the “coffin ships” despatched by English absentee landlords.
Over 1,000 died after landing at Grosse Isle, 6,000 in Montreal, Upper Canada recorded 3,500 deaths.
The Fenians were Irish immigrants In the 1860s, recruited from the docks by the U. S. Army to serve in the American Civil War. By the end of the war they were trained and hardened soldiers. In 1860s Ireland, English absentee landlords continued to demand exorbitant rents of small farmers, taking away whatever crops and cattle they had raised, leaving them to starve. Then they ejected them from the farms, knocking down their thatched cottages with battering rams, so they could turn the land to grazing. They created a class of paupers dying on the roadsides. To get rid of this annoyance, they organized massive transportations; 2.1 million people fled the Emerald Isle between 1845 and 1852.
Why not attack a British colony in 1867 in an effort to destabilize Britain’s rule over Ireland? It may not have worked out, but they were brave. Can you imagine the rage and desperation of Irish emigrants at the continuing conditions in Ireland?
What’s more, when the Fenians threatened Upper and Lower Canada, Britain continued to display its customary casual disregard for its colonies and possessions.
The Canadians were left on their own to defend themselves. Inadequately equipped, untrained farmers, townsmen and over enthusiastic young men were recruited to defend the colony. And they lost their lives.
Efforts to celebrate Canada’s bicentennial by aggrandizing “Canada’s” victory over the Fenians is a shoddy exercise. Mary Wells, Toronto I’m going to give Tristin Hopper the benefit of the doubt and assume he was put up to this historic drivel by an editor. Ireland clearly did not invade Canada with the Fenian Raids. Some Irish American radicals in the name of Ireland did that. An Ireland legally capable of making war on anyone did not exist.
It was a totally subjugated, horribly oppressed colony of Great Britain.
Moreover, any treatment of the Fenian Raids ought to deliver the historical context, which was the starvation of the Irish people due to British policies permitting the export of food from the country at the same time millions died. Steve Weatherbe, Victoria, B. C.