Square-Toed Boots and Felt Hats: Irish Revolutionaries and the Invasion of Canada (1848-1871)

Abstract

The Fenian movement was born in 1858 as an alliance between the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a revolutionary secret society, and the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish-American organisation intended to supply this society with funds and trained officers. This was not the first time that Irish nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic had tried to cooperate, but it was the first time that there was a steady arrangement in place. The Fenian partnership was extremely successful on the surface, but it was undermined by fundamental differences in customs, political attitudes and ultimate goals between Irish and American Fenians. The clearest evidence of these differences was afforded by the Fenian Brotherhood’s successive attempts to invade Canada between 1866 and 1871. As military episodes the Canadian raids were negligible; as Irish revolutionary attempts they seem absurd. However, they were a perfectly coherent manifestation of the Irish-American “hyphenated identity”. The present article traces the parallel evolution of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Fenian Brotherhood up to 1866, and reconstructs the cultural and political reasons for the revival of the Canadian scheme, the ensuing split in the Fenian Brotherhood, and the final collapse of the Fenian alliance.