A Q & A With Christopher Klein: When the Irish Invaded Canada
Christopher Klein’s When the Irish Invaded Canada: The Incredible True Story of the Civil War Veterans Who Fought for Ireland’s Freedom tells one of those overlooked stories from history that make your jaw drop.
Here’s the short version: A year after the end of the American Civil War, veterans from both the Union and Confederate armies went to war again. Their goal? To seize the British colony of Canada and hold it hostage for until Ireland was given it’s independence.
Klein does a masterful job of first untangling and then weaving together the complex histories of Irish nationalism, Irish immigration to the United States, America’s expansion westward, Canadian unification, and post-Civil War American politics. The resulting story is alternately heartbreaking and hysterical,—and always fascinating.
And now, please welcome Christopher Klein.
When did you first learn about the Fenian Raids, and what about the story captured your imagination?
When researching my last book, a biography of the Irish-American heavyweight boxing champion John L. Sullivan, I came across a description of one of Sullivan’s ring opponents as a veteran of the attack on Canada and immediately did a double-take. Like most Americans, I had never heard of the Fenian Raids. The more I delved into this passing message in a book, the more I found that there was an incredible adventure story to be told about a band of revolutionaries who fled Ireland’s Great Hunger after the potato crop failed, fought on both sides of the Civil War, and then united to attack Canada not just once, but five times between 1866 and 1871. It sounds like a bunch of blarney, but it’s one of those stories that only history could concoct. What also drew me into the story of the Fenian Raids was the opportunity to write a prequel of sorts to my Sullivan biography, which chronicled the generation of Irish-Americans born to Great Hunger refugees who rose to political and cultural power during the Gilded Age. When the Irish Invaded Canada tells the story of the previous Great Hunger generation, which encountered the nativist hostility of the Know-Nothings, struggled mightily to assimilate into American culture, and never forgot the plight of their homeland, which had been under British rule for seven centuries.
Were there special challenges in researching what was effectively a series of covert actions?
Luckily for me as a writer—but unfortunately for the Fenian Brotherhood, the organization that carried out the series of attacks—the Irish-Americans who invaded Canada were not particularly adept at keeping their covert operations secret. British and Canadian spies easily infiltrated the Fenian Brotherhood, although, in all honesty, a newspaper subscription was all that was required to stay up-to-date on the comings and goings of the Fenians since they freely exercised their gift of gab. “No news travels so freely or so fast as the ‘secret’ doings of the Fenian Brotherhood,” quipped Mark Twain. “In solemn whisperings at dead of night they secretly plan a Canadian raid, and publish it in the ‘World’ next morning.” Letters, telegrams, and internal communications sent among the Fenians have been preserved in a number of archives in the United States and Canada, which were very valuable in researching the story.
What impact did the failed Fenian Raids have on the broader history of Canada, the United States, Britain, and Ireland?
The Fenian Brotherhood succeeded in bringing self-government to one part of the British Empire—just not the one they intended. In the wake of the 1866 Fenian Raids, Canadians questioned the ability of the British government to defend their southern border from foreign invaders. This spurred on a burgeoning confederation movement that led to the establishment of the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa in July 1867.
As for Ireland itself, the Fenian Brotherhood was the first to organize the Irish diaspora into financial and material support that flowed from America to Ireland. It made the United States a player in Anglo-Irish relations—a role that continues to this day in Northern Ireland—and demonstrated that America could provide Irish republicans with a base of operations beyond the legal reach of the British government. The transatlantic revolutionary framework first established by the Fenian Brotherhood, by which money and arms were raised in America and shipped to Ireland, would prove vital to the 1916 Easter Rising and the eventual establishment of the Irish Free State.
After the Civil War, Anglo-American relations were at their lowest ebb since the Redcoats torched the White House. However, the Fenian Raids saw the dawn of the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain as diplomats from the two countries invested considerable time and effort to defuse the tensions between the Fenians and Canadians.
You keep the balance between farce and tragedy beautifully throughout the book. Is there an event that you found particularly heartbreaking, or alternatively, hysterically funny?
The final Fenian Raid on Manitoba in 1871 is a farce of the highest order. It was led by John O’Neill, who is the thread that stitches together When the Irish Invaded Canada as he had a hand in all of the principal attacks. As a boy growing up in Ireland, O’Neill witnessed firsthand the horrors of the Great Hunger, and at his grandfather’s knee he heard the tales of famous members of the O’Neill clan who dared to stand up and fight the British. O’Neill carried both that inspiration and that trauma with him to America and became one of the most famous Irish-Americans of his age by scoring the first victory by an Irish army over British Empire forces since 1745 at the Battle of Ridgeway. O’Neill would never let go of the idea of invading Canada, no matter how great the odds facing him, even after giving President Ulysses S. Grant his promise to never attack Canada again in return for a pardon. In spite of his pledge, O’Neill led three dozen men on an attack from North Dakota in which he seized a Canadian customs house and an outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company. However, O’Neill was unaware that the international border had recently been resurveyed and rather than being a quarter mile north inside Canadian territory as he believed, the Fenians were actually three-quarters of a mile south of the border, on American soil. Not only had O’Neill failed to conquer Canada, he failed to even enter it. I still can’t decide whether O’Neill is a character out of a comic opera or a Shakespearean tragedy because he is so blinded by his hatred of the British.
What would you like readers to take away from the book?
I’d like readers to be entertained but also perhaps gain a greater understanding that the assimilation of the Irish into American life was nowhere near as smooth as many people might imagine. I think it’s well known that Irish Catholics who fled to America after the Great Hunger encountered nativist scorn, but the Fenians who attacked Canada were so “radicalized” by their experiences under British rule that even after fighting in the Civil War they viewed themselves as Irish first, American second. Even after being in the country for two decades, these immigrants were still willing to take up arms for their homeland in these spasms of violence.
The Fenians also teach us that you don’t always have a Hollywood ending when facing overwhelming odds, but just because a win is unlikely doesn’t mean that you don’t put up a fight. Fighting a losing battle is still better than putting up no fight at all. Whether it’s the fight for civil rights or against cancer, even if you don’t find success in your lifetime, one of your descendants just might because you kept the cause alive. That was the case with these Fenians. They didn’t see a free Ireland in their lifetimes, but by keeping the revolutionary fire from being extinguished, they passed the torch of freedom onto a subsequent generation that was successful.
What are you working on now?
I’m keeping up my contributions to History.com, the website of the History Channel, and still searching for the right story for the next book I’d like to write.
Christopher Klein is the author of four books, including Strong Boy: The Life and Times of John L. Sullivan, America’s First Sports Hero. A frequent contributor to History.com, Klein has also written for The Boston Globe, The New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, Harvard Magazine, Smithsonian.com and AmericanHeritage.com . If you want to know more about his work, check out his website: https://christopherklein.com/
From the Archives: The Longest Day
At this time last year, My Own True Love and I took a D-Day tour put on by the fabulous National World War II Museum in New Orleans. In honor of the 75th anniversary of D-Day, it seemed like a good time to re-run the blog posts I wrote about the trip. I’m ending this series with the first post I wrote on the subject. Thanks for traveling with me.
As I’ve mentioned before, My Own True Love and I are traveling to Normandy in May on a tour led by the National World War II Museum. The focus of the trip is D-Day–something I know about in only the broadest of terms. Which means I decided to read up, because that is what I do. The museum helpfully included a list of suggested reading: ten serious works of military history written by respected historians and journalists, ranging in scope from a comprehensive history of the war from the American and British perspective drawing largely on first hand accounts to the story of a group of men from one small town in Virginia who died at Omaha Beach.(1) Overwhelmed by the choices, I identified the ones we already owned (and by we, I mean My Own True Love) and then picked one at random.
The book gods smiled on me. Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day proved to be just the kind of military history I like. In the foreword Ryan claims the book is “not a military history. It is the story of people: the men of the Allied forces, the enemy they fought, and the civilians who were caught up in the bloody confusion of D Day.” Ryan manages the paradoxical task of portraying the sense of confusion with utter clarity. Instead of telling the story from the viewpoint of a omniscient narrator who can see the invasion as a whole, he moves from one powerful vignette to another, replicating the isolation of each unit on the battlefield. He moves from tragedy to comedy and back. His enlisted men are as vivid as his generals. He not only made me care about members of the invading force, he made me feel sympathy for lower-level German officers unable to respond to the invasion because of bad decisions made higher up the chair of command. (Quite a hat trick.) My only complaint with the book is that it made me cry on public transportation.
Will The Longest Day help me follow the course of the invasion as we walk the beaches in Normandy? Maybe not. But it certainly helped me understand the battle in human terms. And that is, after all, one of the reasons I read history.
(1)Here’s the list for anyone looking to add to your To-Be-Read shelf:
Stephen Ambrose. Band of Brothers.
Stephen Ambrose. D-Day: June 6, 1944
Stephen Ambrose. Pegasus Bridge**
Rick Atkinson. The Guns at Last Light: the War in Western Europe, 1944-1945
Tom Brokaw. The Greatest Generation
Robert M. Citino. The German Way of War
John Keegan. Six Armies in Normandy
Alex Kershaw. The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice.
Donald L. Miller. The Story of World War II
Cornelius Ryan. The Longest Day
It’s an impressive list, but I must admit it made me wonder if there are any books about D-Day written by women. A quick Google search gave me an impressive number of hits, all with notation “missing: women“–which sums things up on many levels. If anyone knows of an example, please let me know.
(2) In case you hadn’t caught on, Dr. Ambrose was one of the founders of the museum.
From the Archives: The Falaise Pocket and the Long Legacy of Battle
At this time last year, My Own True Love and I took a D-Day tour put on by the fabulous National World War II Museum in New Orleans. In honor of the 75th anniversary of D-Day, it seemed like a good time to re-run the blog posts I wrote about the trip. Settle in: for the next few posts it’s going to be D-Day in the Margins.
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The final day of our tour of Normandy was spent on the critical engagement known as the Falaise Pocket or Falaise Gap. Between August 12 and August 21, Allied forces, including exiled Polish forces who had taken refuge in Britain after the Germans invaded Poland, encircled the German Seventh Army in a pocket around the city of Falaise.
Unlike many of the operations of the Battle of Normandy, which are often told in terms of the heroic actions of small groups or individuals in the midst of chaos, the events of the Falaise Pocket lend themselves to clear descriptions of troop movements. Allied troops surrounded 100,000 of Hitler’s best troops in a pincer movement: United States forces moving south and east while British, Canadian, and Polish forces moved in from the North. The delay of American troops created a brief opening, the Falaise gap, through which some 50,000 German troops fought their way free. The two-thousand-man 1st Polish Armored Division captured Hill 262, in the middle of the bottleneck, and held it against overwhelming odds against German forces for two days and nights until relieved by Canadian troops. It was a thrilling story, even though I am not generally a fan of military history reduced to troop movements.
After driving through the Dives valley where the battle of the Falaise Pocket occurred we stopped at a small private museum dedicated to the battle, the Mémorial de Montormel. Located on a hill overlooking the battlefield, the museum told the story of the battle in three different forms: a contoured table map with lights representing the various troops movements,* a brief film, and a personal narrative told by the museum director while we stood at an enormous picture window looking out over the valley where the battle occurred.
The director’s account brought the battle back to the human level, and reminded us that even liberation leaves horror in its wake. General Eisenhower described the events at Falaise as “one of the greatest killing grounds that any sector of the war has ever experienced… forty-eight hours after the closing of the gap, it was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.” The museum director made it clear that the effects lasted more than forty-eight hours. He described land cloaked first with a layer of black flies and later with a white layer of maggots. It was two years before the people of the Dives Valley could plant crops again because the ground water was polluted with the corpses of dead men and dead horses.** Twenty years later, contractors were still removing scrap metal left from the battle. I can’t say it too often: war is ugly.
*I thought it was excellent. My Own True Love thought it was confusing. Just so you know.
**We tend to think of World War II as highly mechanized, but horses still played an important role and died in battle. More than 10,000 horses were killed in the Falaise Pocket alone.
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Before I abandon the invasion of Normandy for other historical topics, I want to recommend a museum on the other side of the Channel which deals with the invasion from another perspective: the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth. The museum does an excellent job of portraying both preparations for D-Day and the invasion itself, but it is not “just” a military museum. A significant portion of the exhibit focuses on social history of the period, looking at bombing raids, women in the workforce, black outs, evacuation and rationing as experienced in Portsmouth. I was particularly taken by the oral history element of the museum: the museum not only provided book after book of first hand accounts for the visitor to read, it also played recordings of those accounts in the relevant sections of the museum. The centerpiece of the museum is the Overlord Embroidery: a 272-foot long embroidery commissioned as an answer to the Bayeux Tapestry. Pretty spectacular.