An Irishman’s Diary on the Battle of Ridgeway, the Fenian invasion of Canada in 1866

The Fenians had one of their few military victories 150 years ago, in Canada. On June 2nd, 1866, about 600 Irish veterans of the American civil war defeated a militia force at Ridgeway in southern Ontario. It was a pyrrhic victory, advancing Canadian confederation rather than the cause of Irish independence.

The folly of invading Canada, conceived in the Anglophobic netherworld of the Famine exodus, was a postscript to Irish involvement in the American war. The Fenian Brotherhood – the American auxiliary wing of the IRB – turned its attention to the Canadian provinces as arrests in Ireland diminished prospects of a rising. The policy adopted by the Brotherhood was riddled with miscalculations – the biggest being the assumption of US non-interference. Its rationale was to ignite Anglo-American tension in the aftermath of the conflict, in which an estimated 200,000 Irishmen had fought – and 30,000 died.

In October 1865 a delegation left the Philadelphia convention of the Brotherhood to seek an interview with William Seward, the US secretary of state, and President Andrew Johnson (Lincoln’s successor). The deputation inquired how the administration would react to a raid on Canada, with the double objective of securing a foothold for the putative Irish republic and setting the St Lawrence river as the northern frontier of the US. (During the civil war, the theme of Canadian annexation had been revived, as compensation for British encouragement of the Confederacy.) The answer provided was sufficiently vague to raise Fenian hopes.

One of the delegates, William Randall Roberts, returned to Philadelphia and persuaded the convention that Washington would countenance the seizure of Canadian territory. Roberts, an Irish-American millionaire with political ambitions, next challenged the leadership of John O’Mahony, a scholarly exile. He viewed the Canadian scheme as a diversion which could end only in disaster, unless it resulted in war between England and the US. The Brotherhood then split amid much rancour, the underlying causes being O’Mahony’s resentment at his loss of authority and disapproval of the invasion policy.

Nonetheless, he allowed himself to be talked into sanctioning a plan to seize Campobello, a British-held island off the coast of Maine, in the hope of forestalling the “senate” faction (led by Roberts) and causing an Anglo-American crisis. This ended in fiasco and cleared the way for the senate wing.

But Thomas D’Arcy McGee – former Young Irelander and by then a leading Canadian politician – said there was little room for Fenianism in British North America except in Toronto (known as “the Belfast of Canada”), where “Orangeism had been made the pretext for Fenianism and Fenianism was doing its best to justify Orangeism”.

The chief organiser of the IRB, James Stephens, also denounced the notion of invading Canada. He asserted (on arrival in New York) that "the scheme of wreaking revenge upon England through her Canadian possessions" would "strike a death blow at Irish nationality, and this was the unanimous feeling of the Irish republicans at home". Nevertheless, Gen Thomas Sweeny, "secretary of war" of the senate wing, issued a casus belli which cut little ice with Canadians when a Fenian column crossed the Niagara river on June 1st, 1866.

Led by Monaghan-born John O’Neill and carrying a green flag emblazoned with the letters “IRA” – an early use of this acronym – they overcame 900 militia at the battle of Ridgeway. However, with imperial troops closing in and reinforcements cut off, O’Neill withdrew his men on June 3rd (leaving the seriously wounded in the care of a priest). They were arrested midstream by the US authorities.

Johnson, confronted with the delicate task of balancing international obligations with the exigencies of domestic politics, moved belatedly to enforce US neutrality laws; some 7,000 Fenians assembled in Buffalo were dispersed at public expense.

While the invasion threat continued for a few more years, during which Washington used the Brotherhood as a poker chip in negotiations with the British foreign office, ultimately Fenian incompetence and British resolve ended US ambivalence.

The American split had a fatal effect on Fenianism in the 1860s, diverting resources from the home organisation. John Devoy said efforts by Stephens to heal the split paralysed his energies. American Fenianism expressed the alienation of beleaguered Irish communities living in ghettos of mind and place.

In the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty after the raid, the term Fenian entered the sectarian lexicon through Canada. The Stratford Beacon observed: "With some narrow-minded people the idea appears to prevail that if a person is a Catholic, he must necessarily be a Fenian". But the Irish Canadian concluded that capturing Canada "could not advance an iota the cause of Ireland's freedom from misrule". To what extent a major incursion would have tested Irish-Canadian loyalty remains conjectural.