Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites: Race and Nationality in the Era of Reconstruction

Conclusion

171 Conclusion After the Battle of Ridgeway, American Fenians continued to see an invasion of Canada as a means of attacking Britain. In 1870, John O’Neil led another expedition—with a smaller force of about two hundred men—across the border. This time the Canadian militia was prepared and repulsed the Fenian invaders. The “Battle of Eccles Hill” was a humiliating defeat for the Fenians. Not one Canadian soldier had been wounded or killed. Moreover, O’Neil was captured by U.S. marshals for violation of the neutrality laws. He was found guilty and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, although President Ulysses S. Grant commuted his sentence. O’Neil apparently could not shake his Fenian fever. He led one more abortive attempt to invade Manitoba a year later. Afterward , O’Neil settled in Nebraska, where he died in 1878.1 The fate of the Fenian movement in the United States paralleled that of John O’Neil. The Brotherhood in New York was so broke by 1870 that they could not even pay for a telegram sent from the Canadian front. John O’Mahoney, one of the founding fathers of the Fenian movement, died in poverty in a small, unheated room in New York City in 1877. The Fenian Brotherhood officially disbanded in 1886. Yet the spirit lived on. John Phillip Holland of New Jersey, one of the last Fenian holdouts, devised a plan to harass British shipping by sending underwater boats to destroy English ships. Holland built a few prototypes of what would later become the submarine. It would be the Germans in 1914, however, who would successfully attack English shipping with torpedoes.2 Irish American nationalism persevered through the Clan na Gael, a more secret association founded in 1867 by Jerome J. Collins. Like the 1. W. S. Neidhardt, Fenianism in North America (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1975), 120–121. 2. Ibid., 123–130. 172 Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites Fenians, they were dedicated to using force to achieve Irish independence and established a Skirmishing Fund to finance terroristic activities . One of their members was Terence V. Powderly, future leader of the Knights of Labor. During the 1880s, Irish American nationalists continued to follow the lead of their Irish brethren. Charles Stewart Parnell led a “New Departure” movement, which stressed constitutional reform through the Parliamentary Party in Ireland. Michael Davitt centered nationalist efforts around land reform, organizing the Land League of Ireland in 1879. An American Land League was established in 1880 and became quite popular during the early part of that decade. On Easter 1916, Irish nationalists staged a revolt against British rule. A few years later, Ireland was divided between a northern part that remained British and a south that became an independent Irish republic.3 The Union Leagues, after their peak years of 1867–1869, also went into decline. They gradually dissolved after they had achieved their primary function of mobilizing black voters into the Republican Party. In Georgia, they began to disintegrate after the 1868 election and had virtually disappeared by the early 1870s. James Justice, a Republican lawyer and state legislator in North Carolina, believed that the Leagues died out after 1868. Similarly, Essie Harris, a black North Carolinian, claimed in 1871 that the Leagues broke up “some two years [ago]—may be more.” This chronological pattern seems to fit other states as well. At the Ku Klux Klan hearings in 1871, future Democratic leader John B. Gordon of Georgia said he had heard nothing about the Union Leagues 3. Thomas N. Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 1870–1890 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott ,1966),65–69;FlorenceE.Gibson,TheAttitudesof theNewYorkIrishTowardStateand National Affairs, 1848–1892 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1951), 330–335. The course of Irish nationalism during the rest of the nineteenth century can be followed in Norman D. Palmer, The Land League Crisis (1940; reprint, New York: Octagon Books, 1978); Paul Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978); James S. Donnelly, The Land and the People of Nineteenth-Century Cork: The Rural Economy and the Land Question (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975); Conor Cruise O’Brien, Parnell and His Party, 1880–1890 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957); and T. W. Moody, Michael Davitt and Irish Revolution, 1846–82 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). See also the valuable essay by Eric Foner, “Class, Ethnicity, and Radicalism in the Gilded Age: The Land League and Irish-America,” in Politics and Ideology in...