Between Raid and Rebellion: The Irish in Buffalo and Toronto, 1867–1916 by William Jenkins (review)

Jenkins’ book is an interdisciplinary, comparative study of Irish immigration to North America focusing on two cities on the Great Lakes fewer than 100 miles apart—Buffalo, New York, and Toronto, Canada—both of which served as “gateways” to the West but individually provided vastly different conditions for Irish immigrants. Jenkins describes the changes in Irish experience between 1866, when the Canadian branch of the Fenian Brotherhood—a group dedicated to the independence of Ireland from Britain—raided Ridgeway, Ontario, and 1916, the year of the Easter Rebellion in Ireland.

Jenkins’ geographical skills highlight some of the similarities between the Irish in Toronto and Buffalo. Scouring city directories and censuses, he provides valuable maps outlining the primary areas of Irish settlement and innovative diagrams highlighting Irish intergenerational residential mobility between 1880 and 1910. Irish Catholic migrants in both cities formed their own ethnic neighborhoods close to their workplaces and centred on their churches. There they found shelter, employment, and an entrée into politics. Concentrating in certain wards, even after many had moved out of the old neighbourhood, the Irish vote was important in both cities, though it was “coherent” only in Buffalo (173), where the Irish were largely Democrats. In Toronto, the Catholic Irish leaned toward the Liberal party, mainly under the guidance of clergy, but the Protestant dominance of politics in general and the local dominance of the Conservatives in “Tory Toronto” in particular meant that Irish vote was by no means a given at election time (161).

Complicating the contrast between the two cities was the large contingent of Irish Protestants in Toronto. They had little in common with their Catholic countrymen, since most of them were active members of the Orange Order. Indeed, Toronto’s Orange Order determined the city’s politics for years, preventing the Catholic Irish from gaining any significant power. The fact that Buffalo’s few Orange lodges remained insignificant left the Irish there vulnerable to criticism about their loyalty to Canada, and thus the British Empire. Memories of the Ridgeway raid were fresh in many loyal minds; the Fenians’ insurgence in other parts of Canada during the 1870s only served to increase it. Across the border in Buffalo, Fenians regarded attacks against Britain on Canadian soil as badges of honor; in Toronto, as Jenkins reports, “moderation” was the norm (363).

Nonetheless, the Irish, from both the Green and Orange traditions, remained highly interested in Irish affairs. Even as they and their children integrated and became more American/Canadian, they still “linked the local with the diasporic” (364). The chronicling of how the Irish maintained this connection is a distinct strength of Jenkins’ work. This constant attention toward Ireland was certainly re-imagined as circumstances changed, but it was not invented out of whole cloth.

The other element of the Irish experience that Jenkins vividly develops in this work is the importance of political context. Nothwithstanding the two cities’ geographical proximity and similarity in size, the status of Buffalo as a city in a republic and of Toronto as a city in a dominion of the British Empire had profound effects on Irish integration. For example, despite some nativist criticism, the loyalty of Irish Catholics in Buffalo to their new home was never as much under question as was that of their countrymen north of the border. Jenkins’ social history, based on a strong geographical methodology, and a commendably transnational comparative approach, makes the reality of Irish immigration crystal clear.