The Last Invasion of Canada: The Fenian Raids, 1866–1870

The Last Invasion

of Canada

Canadian War Museum Historical Publication No. 27

Canadian War Museum Historical Publications

Series editor: Fred Gaffen

Previous Titles in the Series

[1] Canada and the First World War, by John Swettenham. Ottawa: Canadian War Museum, 1968, Bilingual. OUT OF PRINT.

[2] D-Day, by John Swettenham. Ottawa: Canadian War Museum, 1969. Bilingual. OUT OF PRINT.

[3] Canada and the First World War, by John Swettenham. Based on the Fiftieth Anniversary Armistice Display at the Canadian War Museum. Toronto: Ryerson, 1969. Published in paperback. McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1973. OUT OF PRINT.

[4] Canadian Military Aircraft, by J. A. Griffin. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1969. Bilingual. OUT OF PRINT.

5. The Last War Drum: The North West Campaign of 1885, by Desmond Morton. Toronto: Hakkert, 1972.

6. The Evening of Chivalry, by John Swettenham. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1972. French edition available.

7. Valiant Men: Canada’s Victoria Cross and George Cross Winners, ed. by John Swettenham. Toronto: Hakkert, 1973. OUT OF PRINT.

8. Canada Invaded, 1775-1776, by George F.G. Stanley. Toronto: Hakkert, 1973. French edition available.

9. The Canadian General, Sir William Otter, by Desmond Morton. Toronto: Hakkert, 1974. Bilingual. OUT OF PRINT.

10. Silent Witnesses, by John Swettenham and Herbert F. Wood. Toronto: Hakkert, 1974. French edition available.

11. Broadcast from the Front: Canadian Radio Overseas in the Second World War, by A.E. Powley. Toronto: Hakkert, 1975.

12. Canada’s Fighting Ships, by K.R. Macpherson. Toronto: Samuel Stevens Hakkert, 1975. OUT OF PRINT.

13. Canada’s Nursing Sisters, by G.W.L. Nicholson. Toronto: Samuel Stevens Hakkert, 1975. Bilingual. OUT OF PRINT.

14. RCAF: Squadron Histories and Aircraft, 1924-1968, by Samuel Kostenuk and John Griffin. Toronto: Samuel Stevens Hakkert, 1975. Bilingual. OUT OF PRINT.

15. Canada’s Guns: An Illustrated History of Artillery, by Leslie W.C.S. Barnes. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1979. French edition available.

16. Military Uniforms in Canada 1665–1970, by Jack L. Summers and René Chartrand, and illustrated by R.J. Marrion. Ottawa: National Museums of Canada, 1981. French edition available.

17. Canada at Dieppe, by T. Murray Hunter. Ottawa: Balmuir, 1982. French edition available.

18. The War of 1812: Land Operations, by George F.G. Stanley. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1983. French edition available.

19. 1944: The Canadians in Normandy, by Reginald H. Roy. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1984. French edition available.

20. Redcoats and Patriotes: The Rebellions in Lower Canada, 1837-38, by Elinor Kyte Senior. Stittsville, Ont.: Canada’s Wings, 1985. French edition available.

21. Sam Hughes: The Public Career of a Controversial Canadian, by Ronald G. Haycock. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986.

22. General Sir Arthur Currie: A Military Biography, by A.M.J. Hyatt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.

23. Volunteers and Redcoats – Rebels and Raiders: A Military History of the Rebellions in Upper Canada, by Mary Beacock Fryer. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1987.

24. Guarding the Goldfields: The Story of the Yukon Field Force, ed. by Brereton Greenhous. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1987.

25. Toil and Trouble: Military Expeditions to Red River, by George F.G. Stanley. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1989.

26. Tangled Web: Canadian Infantry Accoutrements, 1885-1985, by J.L. Summers. Museum Restoration Service/Canadian War Museum, 1991.

For further information on these titles, please write to the Canadian War Museum, Ottawa, Canada K1A 0M8.

— Hereward Senior —

The Last Invasion

of Canada

The Fenian Raids,

1866 – 1870

Copyright © Canadian War Museum, 1991

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except brief passages for purposes of review, without the prior permission of Dundurn Press Limited.

Design and Production: JAQ

Copy Editor: Michelle Maynes

Printing and Binding: Gagné Printing Ltd., Louiseville, Quebec, Canada

Dundurn Press wishes to acknowledge the generous assistance and ongoing support of The Canada Council, The Book Publishing Industry Development Programme of the Department of Communications and The Ontario Arts Council.

       Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in the text, including the illustrations. The author and publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any reference or credit in subsequent editions.

       In the writing of this book the inferences drawn and the opinions expressed are those of the author himself, and the Canadian War Museum is in no way responsible for his presentation of the facts as stated.

J. Kirk Howard, Publisher

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Senior, Hereward

       The last invasion of Canada

Co-published by the Canadian War Museum and the

Canadian Museum of Civilization.

ISBN 1-55002-085-4

1. Canada – History – Fenian Invasions, 1866–1870.

I. Canadian War Museum.    II.  Canadian Museum of

Civilization.    III.   Title.

F1032.S46 1991

Dundurn Press Limited

2181 Queen Street East

Suite 301

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Dundurn Distribution

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OX3 7AD

— In memory of —

Elinor Kyte Senior

We are a Fenian brotherhood,

skilled in the arts of war,

And we’re going to fight for Ireland,

the land that we adore.

Many battles we have won,

along with the boys in blue

And we’ll go and capture Canada,

for we’ve nothing else to do.

— Captain John A. Macdonald,

Troublous Times in Canada:

A History of the Fenian Raids

of 1866 and 1870

— Contents —

Preface

1 The Military Tradition of the Irish Revolutionary Movement

2 The Military Institutions of the British North American Provinces

3 Preparations for the Fenian Raids

4 The Campobello Fiasco

5 Ridgeway

6 The Problem of Frontier Patrol

7 Operations on the Quebec Frontier

8 Preparations for the Fenian Raids of 1870

9 The Raids of 1870

10 The Raid against Manitoba

11 Conclusions

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Brome County Historical Society

Border volunteers stand over a Fenian slain during the Battle of Eccles Hill, 1870.

— Preface —

THE FENIAN RAIDS ARE ONE of the many points where Irish, American and Canadian history meet. They provided folklore for the Irish, military history for the Canadians, and social and some diplomatic history for the Americans. This volume is concerned solely with the military aspects of the Fenian raids; in The Fenians and Canada, I dealt with the political dimension. This work provides details of military operations that could not easily fit into a volume devoted largely to politics.

As the Fenians were scattered over the three continents of Europe, North America and Australia and flourished for nearly a generation, it is difficult to tell the entire story. Yet the military aspects of Fenianism in North America are of manageable proportions, even though they appear as a series of episodes rather than a single event. The literature on the Fenian raids is discussed in the introduction to the bibliography.

In producing this work, I am greatly indebted to Fred Gaffen of the Canadian War Museum for his constant help in all aspects of preparing the manuscript. Professors George F. Stanley and Reginald Roy have vastly improved the quality of the text with their helpful suggestions, although only I am responsible for its shortcomings. Margaret Blevins, my sister-in-law, Jean Kyte, and my son-in-law Karl Stiefenhofer were helpful with the typing. I owe a good deal to Elizabeth Allen for her patience and efficiency in putting a draft on a word processor. Bruce Dolphin of the McGill University Archives has been of valuable assistance providing military details and pictures. Tim Locke and Elaine Burton have contributed much-appreciated skills in getting the manuscript into its final form. Gerald Iles of Montreal has been of great help with pictures, and Bill Constable of the Directorate of History likewise with the maps. I would like to thank Elizabeth Hale of the David M. Stewart Museum, and the Brome County Historical Society. In addition, I thank the staffs of the Notman Collection at the McCord Museum of Canadian History, the National Archives of Canada, and the Rare Books and Special Collections Departments and the Lande Room of the McLennan Library at McGill University.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to my wife, Elinor Kyte Senior, a far greater military historian than myself, who died on 23 June 1989.

Hereward Senior

— 1 —

The

Military Tradition

of the Irish Revolutionary

Movement

The wild geese are flighting.

Heads to the storm as they faced it before.

Where there are Irish, there’s bound to be fighting

and when there’s no fighting, it’s Ireland no more.

— Rudyard Kipling, The Irish Guards

THE RAIDS AGAINST Canada gave the Fenian Brother-hood a place in Irish folklore. That, perhaps, was the unconscious purpose for which the organization was created. In terms of Irish military history, these operations were only a few among the many episodes in a long, bitter and sometimes bloody story. But they were more important to Canadians than to Irishmen, if only because they afforded a whole generation of Canadian militiamen a chance for active service and aroused in Canada a martial spirit when it was much needed. In purely military terms, the raids were a series of clashes between Irish veterans of the American Civil War, mobilized by a voluntary society, the Fenian Brotherhood, and volunteers, organized by the Canadian government. Although Imperial troops were still present in Canada, the main shock of the Fenian attacks was taken by Canadian militiamen, part-time soldiers who had acquired their training during a few hours’ drill a week supplemented, in some cases, by a week or so in summer camp. Very few of these part-time officers or men had heard a shot fired in anger, but their battle-hardened opponents lacked strong political support and orderly mobilization. Their political supporters could cheer them on but do little else for them once they were in the field.

The Fenian raids were, therefore, little other than a test of stamina, for both the Canadian militia and the Fenians; both met the test according to their needs. The militia secured the frontier against major intrusions, while the Fenians, by a spectacular victory at Ridgeway, justified the existence of their organization in the eyes of their followers and convinced many North Americans, British and Yankee, that they were a force to be reckoned with.

An understanding of the origin and nature of the Fenian threat to Canada must begin with an examination of the military traditions of the Irish overseas. Ireland began to export military talent very early in its history. The losers in tribal warfare, those who resisted the English conquest and those who resisted the Reformation, all had reason to take service in foreign armies. After the defeat of King James II in the Campaign of 1690, there was an exodus of Irish military talent into the armies of Catholic powers on the Continent, principally France and Spain, Catholics being no longer welcome in the British service. By degrees, the Irish military tradition was diffused among most of the armies of Europe, with Protestant Irish making up a large contingent in the British forces. Towards the end of the eighteenth century an effort to bring Catholic and Protestant together in a republican United Irish Society added a new dimension to the Irish military tradition that was to have consequences for the Irish in America.¹

In Ireland itself there was both a conventional and a guerrilla military tradition. Many Irishmen were fond of uniforms and drill, and while revolution shook America, there emerged in Ireland a volunteer movement or Home Guard. This movement was armed by the government but supplied its own uniforms and remained under the control of the landlords and various private associations. Towards the end of the American Revolution it became politicized, won legislative independence for Ireland and then withered away. Two volunteer corps survived, one in Belfast and one in Dublin, both coming under the sway of radical nationalists who invited Catholics to join their ranks.

At the same time several networks of secret societies took root among the peasantry, for instance the Catholic Defenders and Protestant Orange Boys. These functioned as agricultural trade unions, employing terrorist tactics against landlords and against one another. As these secret societies included many former soldiers and engaged in secret drilling from time to time, it would seem that the Irish preferred conventional military organization but would accept guerrilla warfare as a second best.

Most of the Irish immigrants to eighteenth-century America were Protestants, and it is not surprising that the American expedition against Montreal in 1775 was commanded by General Richard Montgomery, an Ulsterman and former British officer. The Catholic population in America, being fairly small, played a subordinate role in the Revolution. Even so, Catholics fought on both sides. Loyal Catholic Volunteers were organized during the siege of Boston, and Lord Rawdon’s Corps, an Irish unit, paraded on 17 March 1779 in New York, while the city was still under British occupation. Incidentally, this demonstration marked the first St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York.²

The United Irish Society was founded in Ireland in 1791 and soon expanded to America in an effort to link Irish and American republicanism. With the outbreak of war in Europe, the United Irish joined with agents of the French republic in efforts to draw the United States into war with Great Britain. These efforts antagonized the ruling Federalist administration in America, and it is no accident that the first American prosecuted under the Alien and Sedition Act was Matthew Lyon, an Irish Catholic from Vermont.³ During the same period, David McLane was executed in Quebec City on the charge of stirring up social unrest in the interest of Jacobin France.⁴

With the collapse of the uprising in 1798, the United Irish movement became a spent force in Ireland, but in the United States it lingered, stimulated by the arrival of republican exiles and the advent of the Jeffersonian administration. Great hopes were again aroused in the hearts of Irish republicans when the war with Britain broke out in 1812. The Hibernian Society and the Tammany Club pledged toasts to the memory of General Montgomery, and the editor of the New York Shamrock wrote that Ireland’s wrongs would be avenged on the plains of Canada. Irishmen were urged to prove their loyalty to America by enlisting in the American forces, and those who were not yet citizens were reminded that they would have to register as aliens.⁵

The support of what soon became an unpopular war aroused resentment among conservative Americans and there was some talk of limiting the rights of naturalized citizens, but the Irish were only a minor irritant because their numbers were as yet insignificant. The massive Irish immigration that began with the end of the wars in Europe in 1815 and reached a climax during the famine years of the mid-1840s brought few revolutionaries to America. Under the influence of a Catholic revival and the personality of Daniel O’Connell, the Irish were content to create non-revolutionary societies that carried on agitation in the cause of Irish nationalism. This had important consequences for Canada. During the period of the Canadian rebellions and raids along the frontier from 1837 to 1840 there were no active Irish conspiratorial organizations in Ireland or the United States.

Daniel O’Connell, who supported the Melbourne government then in power in England, opposed the Canadian rebellions as a matter of course. Moreover, the years leading up to the Canadian rebellions had been difficult for the growing Irish population in the new world. A rising tide of anti-Catholic nativism and nationalist agitation resulted in the burning of an Ursuline Convent near Boston in 1834.⁶ In Canada, both the French Canadian Patriotes and the Upper Canadian Reformers supported a head tax on immigrants and denounced pauper immigration. It is not surprising that Orangemen and Catholics united to support the government party in the Upper Canadian election of 1836, and filled the ranks of the militia in both provinces the following year when rebellion broke out.⁷

Some Irishmen, such as E.B. O’Callaghan, did support the Patriote cause and went into exile, and others, like E.A. Theller, carried on raids over the Canadian frontier, under the sponsorship of Hunters’ Lodges.⁸ William Lyon Mackenzie courted Irish support, but without much success, while the Hunters’ Lodges were based upon a strongly Protestant, abolitionist and temperance-minded section of the American population.⁹ They welcomed Irish recruits into their military organization, but they could not easily cooperate whole-heartedly with Irish immigrant political organizations. Some efforts apparently were made to bring the Hunters and the O’Connellite Repeal Association together, as was reported by Father T.A. Pulby of the Parish of Patterson, New Jersey, in 1841.¹⁰ However, the Hunters, like the Fenians some thirty years later, blamed the American president – in this case, John Tyler – for interfering with their raids. As a whole, the Irish were interested in conciliating the authorities. In Canada they evinced pride in helping to put down rebellions, and even the Canadian Fenians insisted that the main burden of counter-revolution had been carried out by them.¹¹

During the raids by the Hunters’ Lodges, the American armed forces were small, the veterans of 1812 were overage, and the only people prepared for adventure were native Indians, settlers and frontiersmen. Their attitude had changed by the time of the Mexican War of 1846-48, a triumph for Manifest Destiny that coincided roughly with the revival of republicanism in Ireland.

The Mexican War created thousands of veterans in the United States, many of them Irish, who could not be immediately reabsorbed into civilian life. Of the 4,000 American troops who crossed the Mexican frontier in 1846, nearly a quarter were Irish. Relations with their predominantly Protestant officers were poor, Roman Catholic padres were few, and there were complaints about compulsory Protestant church parades.¹² Many responded to appeals that reminded them that Mexico was a Catholic power and to offers of 320 acres of Mexican soil to those who deserted and enlisted in the Mexican forces. Several hundred joined the Mexican-sponsored San Patricio brigade which turned out to be one of the most effective units in the Mexican army. The Patricios included in their ranks some excellent gunners who gave a good account of themselves in the early battles in the north and in the defence of Mexico City. In the final actions, eighty San Patricios were taken prisoner by the Americans, who hanged fifty-four and flogged another twenty-six, who were then branded with the letter D, for deserter, on their right cheeks.¹³

This treatment of the San Patricios aroused much resentment among Irish Americans, adding fuel to the indignation caused by the rising tide of nativist agitation, which crystallized in the founding of the Know-Nothing party in the mid-1850s. Irish Americans were beginning to acquire grievances against American society, later expounded by Thomas D’Arcy McGee, which were immediate, and independent of their historic quarrel with Great Britain. Nevertheless, Irish American nationalists felt the need to treat America as the promised land and their inclination to do so was greatly enhanced by the revival of republicanism in Ireland. This gave them common ground with their fellow Americans, affording the Catholic Irish the argument that Great Britain was the common enemy of Irishmen and Americans alike.

Until his death in 1847, Daniel O’Connell maintained a policy of legal agitation that commanded the support of nearly all Irishmen. But in the last years of his