The Fenian Brotherhood was founded in a room above a saloon on Broadway in December 1858. Its Irish counterpart, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, had been founded in Dublin earlier the same year, on Saint Patrick's Day, by James Stephens. The New York organization was run by John O'Mahony, a Gaelic scholar who had fought in the abortive rising of 1848 and then escaped to Paris and eventually to America. The two groups were meant to work together. One would raise the money and the men. The other would carry out the rising. Between them, they would end seven hundred years of English rule in Ireland.
That was the plan. What actually happened over the next fifty years was that the Irish revolution failed, repeatedly and expensively, in every form it took. What succeeded, quietly and durably, was the political machinery that the failures built.
Why so many Irish were in America to begin with
The context is the Famine and what came after. Between 1845 and 1852, roughly one million people died in Ireland from starvation and disease, and another million left. Emigration did not stop when the Famine did. It became the defining fact of Irish life for the rest of the century. By 1890, there were more people of Irish birth or descent living in the United States than in Ireland.
The emigrants did not forgive. They did not consider themselves lucky refugees who had escaped a natural disaster. They considered themselves survivors of a policy, one that had allowed a food-exporting country to starve while its landlords collected rents and its government dithered. That interpretation, historically defensible if incomplete, hardened over a generation of American life into something like a founding grievance. The America the Irish built in the late nineteenth century was in significant part a machine for taking that grievance and turning it into political action.
The Fenian Brotherhood and the Canadian invasions
The Fenians' first major operation was one of the strangest episodes in nineteenth-century North American history. Between 1866 and 1871, the Fenian Brotherhood launched a series of armed invasions of British Canada from American soil. The theory was that if a Fenian army could seize part of Canada, they could hold it as a bargaining chip and trade it for Irish independence.
They actually tried it. In June 1866, about a thousand Fenians under John O'Neill, mostly Civil War veterans, crossed the Niagara River and briefly defeated a Canadian militia force at the Battle of Ridgeway. It was the first battle in North America since the Civil War fought by an organized army against an organized army, and the Fenians won it. They then discovered that reinforcements were not coming, the American government had blocked further crossings, and they were surrounded. They surrendered to the U.S. Navy on the American side of the river.
There were further attempts in 1870 and 1871, all smaller, all easily defeated. The Canadian invasions accomplished nothing in Ireland. What they did accomplish, entirely accidentally, was the acceleration of Canadian Confederation. The perception that a divided British North America was vulnerable to Irish-American attack gave the confederation debate an urgency it had previously lacked. Canada became a country in 1867 in part because Irish-Americans had tried to invade it.
The Rising of 1867
The other half of the plan, the actual rising in Ireland, went even worse. In February and March of 1867, the IRB attempted a general insurrection. It was betrayed by informers before it started, undermined by a snowstorm that immobilized the rebels, and suppressed within days. A few of the leaders were captured and hanged. Most escaped to America and became the second generation of Irish-American revolutionaries.
That was the pattern. Each failed rising sent a new wave of exiles across the Atlantic, where they joined the existing organizations, took over the leadership, and started planning the next attempt. The Fenian Brotherhood eventually collapsed under the weight of its internal disputes and the Canadian embarrassment. It was replaced in 1867 by Clan na Gael, a more disciplined organization that would dominate Irish-American nationalism for the next fifty years and provide much of the money and organization behind the 1916 Easter Rising.
The Catalpa and the propaganda war
The Catalpa rescue of 1876 was the exception in a decade of failure. Six Fenian prisoners were being held at Fremantle in Western Australia, sentenced for their part in the 1867 rising. John Devoy, then in New York, organized a plan to buy an American whaling ship, sail it to Australia, and take them off.
The ship was the Catalpa, an old whaling bark out of New Bedford. The captain, George Anthony, was a New England Quaker who agreed to the plan for reasons that had nothing to do with Ireland and everything to do with money. In April 1876, the Catalpa arrived off the Western Australian coast. The six prisoners were smuggled out of the penal colony, taken by wagon and boat to the ship, and pursued by a British steamer. Anthony ran up the American flag and told the pursuing captain that firing on the Catalpa would be firing on the United States. The British backed off. The prisoners reached New York four months later and were paraded through the streets to enormous crowds.
The Catalpa was militarily insignificant. As propaganda it was priceless. It demonstrated that a small, well-organized Irish-American operation could beat the British Empire on the other side of the world. Devoy became famous. Clan na Gael grew.
The Land League and the Parnell strategy
What actually changed things in Ireland was not the risings but the land question, and the American money that made the land campaign possible.
The Irish National Land League was founded in 1879 by Michael Davitt, a former Fenian who had spent seven years in English prisons and had emerged with a different theory of how to win. The goal was to end landlordism in Ireland, and the tactic was mass agitation: rent strikes, boycotts (the word entered English during this campaign), and mass meetings. Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant landlord who had become the leader of the Irish parliamentary party at Westminster, took the presidency of the League and provided its political cover.
The League needed money. It got it in America. Parnell toured the United States in 1880, giving speeches in sixty-two cities and raising the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars in today's money. He addressed a joint session of the House of Representatives, the first foreign politician to do so. The American Land League, founded during the tour, grew to over a thousand branches. Patrick Ford's newspaper The Irish World, published in New York, ran fundraising drives that pulled small donations from Irish domestics and laborers across the country. The paper claimed, with some plausibility, that no organization in Irish history had ever raised so much money from so many people.
The Land League campaign forced the British government to pass the Land Act of 1881, which for the first time gave Irish tenants real legal protection against their landlords. Subsequent land purchase acts, culminating in the Wyndham Act of 1903, effectively ended landlordism in Ireland by allowing tenants to buy their farms with government-backed loans. This was the largest transfer of property in modern European history, and it was accomplished without a revolution. The Irish-American money made it possible.
The dynamite years
Not everyone approved of the parliamentary route. In the early 1880s, a faction within Clan na Gael launched what became known as the Dynamite Campaign, a series of bombings in England intended to force Irish independence through terror. The organizer in America was Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, an exiled Fenian who ran a "Skirmishing Fund" collected mostly from Irish-American donors.
Bombs went off at the London Underground, the Tower of London, Scotland Yard, the House of Commons, and various railway stations. Some bombers were caught. Some blew themselves up. The campaign killed relatively few people, radicalized British public opinion against Irish nationalism, and demonstrated that a small determined faction with American funding could carry a war onto the British mainland.
It was also a strategic disaster. Parnell disavowed it, as did the parliamentary Irish party and the Land League. The dynamite campaign gave the British government exactly what it wanted, an excuse to treat Irish nationalism as terrorism rather than a legitimate political movement. The bombers accomplished nothing except to demonstrate what a poisoned relationship looked like.
O'Donovan Rossa lived to be an old man in Staten Island. When he died in 1915, his body was shipped back to Ireland for burial. The graveside oration, given by Patrick Pearse, contained the sentence that became the epigraph of the Easter Rising the following year: "the fools, the fools, the fools, they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace."
What the money bought
The scorecard of the failed Irish revolution, from the American side, looks like this. Every armed operation failed. Every rising was suppressed. Every invasion collapsed. Every bombing campaign backfired. The Catalpa was a stunt. The Fenians dissolved. Clan na Gael was riddled with informers and internal feuds.
But the political machine that all this activity created was enormous, and it did work. The Irish-American vote became one of the decisive forces in urban American politics from the 1870s onward, and Irish-American politicians learned how to convert that vote into leverage at every level of government. The money that flowed from America to Ireland funded the Land League, the parliamentary party, the newspapers, the political campaigns, and eventually the guns of 1916. The organizational networks that Clan na Gael built provided the infrastructure that Éamon de Valera would use during the War of Independence to raise five million dollars in the United States between 1919 and 1920. That money paid for the Irish state.
The revolution the Fenians dreamed of, the sudden armed rising that would sweep the English out in a season, never came. What came instead was slower and stranger. A transatlantic political movement, sustained by immigrant labor and organized in American cities, ground down a British policy over four decades and set the conditions for eventual Irish independence. The people who did the actual work of building that movement were mostly not the men with guns. They were the ones who ran the newspapers, collected the dues, gave the speeches, managed the ward committees, and figured out how to get an Irish-American mayor elected in Boston or a Fenian-friendly senator elected in New York.
The failed revolutionaries got the statues. The people who won the actual struggle mostly did not.
The pattern
American immigrant politics in the late nineteenth century was full of movements like this. The Germans had their Turnverein and their forty-eighters. The Italians had their mutual aid societies and their labor organizers. But the Irish case is distinctive because the Irish were organizing to intervene, from across an ocean, in the affairs of a country most of them would never see again.
They pulled it off, more or less. Not through the risings they attempted, but through the slower work of using American democracy to fund and pressure Irish politics. It is one of the strangest and most successful examples of long-distance nationalism in modern history, and it happened almost entirely because a generation of hungry immigrants refused to forgive.
That refusal shaped the twentieth century in Ireland. It also shaped, in ways less often noticed, American politics itself. Every American ethnic political movement that came after worked from a template the Irish invented in the 1860s and refined for the next fifty years. Zionist organizing, Cuban exile politics in Miami, Polish-American Solidarity support in the 1980s: all of them borrowed the model. The failed Irish revolution was the beginning of something else. The Irish just did not live long enough, most of them, to see what.
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Excerpt: They tried to invade Canada. They tried to rise in Dublin. They tried to blow up London. Every armed attempt to free Ireland from across the Atlantic collapsed. And yet, by the time the last Fenian was buried, Irish-American activism had built something no rising ever could.
Tags: fenian-brotherhood, irish-american-history, clan-na-gael, land-league