The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867–1900 9781107023321, 2012015435

Table of contents :
Cover
The Dynamiters
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Tables
Acknowledgements
Chronology, 1867–1900
Abbreviations
Introduction
Fenians in the wider world
The first terrorist campaign? Revolutionary violence in the late nineteenth century
1 End of insurrection? Ireland and the post-1848 revolutionary world
The Fenians and the Irish insurrectionary tradition
Instructions for insurrection: the Irish Republican Brotherhood and Blanquism
Transformations in revolutionary violence: Ireland and Italy
From guerra per bande to urban guerrilla warfare
2 The Skirmishing Fund
The origins and development of the Skirmishing Fund
Opposition to skirmishing
Legitimising political violence
‘El Mahdi’s avenging hand abroad and dynamite at home’: skirmishing and empire
Police, informers and agents provocateurs
3 Science and skirmishing
DIY revolution
Ideas of warfare in the postbellum United States
The Brooklyn dynamite school and Professor Mezzeroff
Mezzeroff and the anarchists
4 The dynamiters and their supporters
‘Friendless men were better off’: the lot of the ‘honest fanatics’
The Skirmishing Fund and the Irish American diaspora
Diaspora nationalism and regionalism
Famine memories
5 Bridget and the bomb: violence, Irishness and gender
‘The credulity of the hod-carriers and servant girls’
Domestic servants: the bankrollers of violence?
6 Skirmishing, the land question, revolutionary labour
The Irish World and the Land League
Skirmishing and the Land War in Ireland
Dynamite and the labour movement
Skirmishing stops
Select bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Dynamiters

In the 1880s a New York-based faction of militant Irish nationalists conducted the first urban bombing campaign in history, targeting symbolic public buildings in Britain with homemade bombs. This book investigates the people and ideas behind this spectacular new departure in revolutionary violence. Employing a transnational approach, the book reveals connections and parallels between the ‘Dynamiters’ and other revolutionary groups active at the time, and demonstrates how they interacted with currents in revolution, war and politics across Europe, the United States and the British empire. Reconstructing the life stories of individual Dynamiters, and their conceptual and ethical views on violence, it offers an innovative picture of the dynamics of revolutionary organisations as well as the political, social and cultural factors which move people to support or condemn political acts of violence. is an IRCHSS Fellow at the Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway.

niall whelehan

The Dynamiters Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867–1900 Niall Whelehan

ca mbr idge u ni v ersit y pr ess

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107023321 © Niall Whelehan 2012 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2012 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Whelehan, Niall.   The dynamiters : Irish nationalism and political violence in the   wider world, 1867–1900 / Niall Whelehan.    p.  cm.   Based on a doctoral thesis written for European University   Institute, Florence.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-107-02332-1 (hardback)   1.  Fenians–History.  2.  Ireland–History–1837–1901.   3.  Nationalism–Ireland–History–19th century.  4.  Political   violence–Ireland–History–19th century.  I.  Title.   DA954.W54 2012   320.540941509′034–dc23   2012015435 ISBN 978-1-107-02332-1 hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.



To Eli

Contents

List of figures List of tables Acknowledgements Chronology, 1867–1900 List of abbreviations

Introduction

page viii x xi xiii xvi 1

1 End of insurrection? Ireland and the post-1848 revolutionary world

27



2 The Skirmishing Fund

70



3 Science and skirmishing

138



4 The dynamiters and their supporters

176



5 Bridget and the bomb: violence, Irishness and gender

217

6 Skirmishing, the land question, revolutionary labour

246



Skirmishing stops

295

Select bibliography Index

304 318

vii

Figures

3.1 ‘Despotism’s Doubtful Defense’, Puck, 26 March 1884. page 148 4.1 Map of Ireland in the nineteenth century. 206 5.1 ‘The Avaricious Man and His Goose: A Hint to the Usurious Money Lords’, The Irish World, 18 August 1877. 221 5.2 Frederick Opper, ‘Gorilla Warfare’, Puck, 19 March 1884. 223 5.3 Details taken from two cartoons published by Judy: (a) 2 March 1881, (b) 5 February 1885. 224 5.4 Frederick Opper, ‘The Irish Skirmishers’ “Blind Pool” ’, Puck, 6 September 1882. 227 5.5 Frederick Opper, ‘Irish Industries’, Puck, 2 November 1881. 228 5.6 Frederick Opper, ‘A Bombardment that Would Paralyse Them’, Puck, 18 April 1883. 229 5.7 Frederick Opper, ‘A Big Difference’, Puck, 2 May 1883. Collection of the New-York Historical Society. 231 5.8 Charles G. Bush, ‘Dynamiteurs in England’, Harper’s Weekly, 14 June 1884. 236 5.9 Frederick Opper, ‘The Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs’, Puck, 22 August 1885. Collection of the New-York Historical Society. 238 5.10 Thomas Nast, ‘For Ireland’s Sake’, Harper’s Weekly, 7 March 1885. 239 5.11 Frederick Graetz, ‘Ireland’s Evil Genius’, Puck, 11 June 1884. Collection of the New-York Historical Society. 240 6.1 An image evoking both Famine-era and Land War evictions, while the accompanying article is titled

viii

List of figures

‘Eviction in America – Twelve Thousand Persons Made Homeless in New York – American Landlordism’s Work – Scenes Rivalling Those of Ireland’, The Irish World, 8 May 1880. 6.2 Bernard Gillam, ‘How Do They Like It Themselves?’, Puck, 11 February 1885.

ix

251 287

Tables

4.1 Occupations of the subscribers to the United Irishman, 1883–7. page 193 4.2 Skirmishing Fund subscriptions for New York and New Jersey by county. 205 4.3 Subscribers’ years of entry into the United States. 209 4.4 Subscribers’ dates of birth. 214 6.1 Monthly subscriptions to the Skirmishing Fund in 1877. 279

x

Acknowledgements

This book is based on a doctoral thesis written in the unique setting of the European University Institute (EUI), Florence. I am deeply thankful to Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, who provided constant encouragement, theoretical wisdom and insightful supervision without ever looking over my shoulder. I consider myself immensely fortunate to have benefited from Joe Lee’s acuity, kindness and open-minded guidance. His stimulating comments were crucial as things took shape. Many thanks to Fearghal McGarry for his generous help and suggestions. For their engaging comments on various drafts and chapters I am very grateful to Arfon Rees, Jay Winter, Kiran Patel, Irial Glynn, Mark Jones and Adrian Paterson, along with the two anonymous reviewers of this book. Down the line, enlightening conversations with the following people helped things turn out all right: Tim Meagher, Nunzio Pernicone, John Ridge, Enrico Dal Lago, Marion Casey, Carl Levy and Donatella Della Porta. I also wish to thank Michael Watson, Chloe Howell and Robert Whitelock at Cambridge University Press for all their help. My archival experiences were all the better for the help and patience of the staff at numerous institutions: the National Archives of Ireland; the National Library of Ireland; the Catholic University of America, Washington, DC; the New York Public Library; The National Archives of the UK; the Archives of University College Dublin; the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam; Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze; Biblioteca Franco Serantini, Pisa; and Serge Noiret at the EUI. Much rewriting for this book was undertaken in the sealed-off serenity of the Biblioteca Bonnemaison, Barcelona. Many thanks to the staff at Glucksman Ireland House for making my stay in New York an enjoyable one. My time in Florence was also immensely enjoyable thanks in no small part to the EUI history gang, by far the most interesting department on the Fiesole hills, and places like via dei Bardi and La Ghiotta. xi

xii

Acknowledgements

Reproductions of the images cited in this book are courtesy of Bobst Library, New York University; the New York Historical Society; and the Wilshire Collection, courtesy of the National Library of Ireland. Sections in Chapters 2 and 3 have appeared in different versions in Éire-Ireland, 42 (2007); and Fearghal McGarry and James McConnel (eds.), The Black Hand of Republicanism: Fenianism in Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2009). I’m grateful to the Irish government; the EUI; and the Graduate School in History and Sociology, Bielefeld University, for funding various phases in the writing of this book. Above all, I would like to thank my parents Eamonn and Nuala for all their encouragement and support. I dedicate this book to Eli, who has put up with it in all its various stages.

Chronology, 1867–1900

1867 1871 1874 1876 1877 1879 1881 1882 1883

5 March. IRB attempt insurrection in Ireland. 7 May. Dynamite patented by Alfred Nobel. 20 June. Clan-na-Gael founded in New York. 23 November. Public execution of three Fenians in Manchester. 13 December. Explosion at Clerkenwell prison kills twelve people. 17 January. Amnestied Fenian prisoners, the ‘Cuba Five’, arrive in New York. 10 October. Article calling for an urban guerrilla war published in The Irish World. 4 March. Skirmishing Fund launched in The Irish World. 21 June. Executions of six Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania. 14 July. Great Railroad Strike begins in West Virginia. 21 October. The Irish National Land League founded in Mayo. 14 January. Explosion at Salford Barracks causes one death. 13 March. Assassination of Tsar Alexander II. 16 March. Explosive device found at the Mansion House, London. 10 June. Attempted bomb attack at Liverpool Town Hall. 14–20 July. Anti-authoritarian (Anarchist) Congress in London, where delegates debate propaganda of the deed. 26 March. Bomb attack at Weston House, Galway. 6 May. The Phoenix Park assassinations. 20 January. Three explosions in Glasgow. 15 March. Explosions at the Local Government Board Offices and The Times’ offices in London.

xiii

xiv

1884 1885 1886 1887 1891 1892 1893 1894

Chronology, 1867–1900

4–5 April. The ‘Gallagher Team’ arrested in London and Birmingham. 29 July. Patrick O’Donnell kills James Carey off the coast of South Africa. 30 October. Two explosions on the London Underground. 25–6 February. Explosion at Victoria Railway Station and bombs discovered at three London Underground stations. 30 May. Explosions at Scotland Yard, the Carlton Club and residence of Watkin Wynn, London. 13 December. Explosion under London Bridge. Three bombers blow themselves up but no other injuries. 2 January. Explosion on London Underground. 24 January. Explosions at House of Commons, Tower of London and Westminster Hall. 4 May. Bomb thrown during demonstration in Haymarket Square, Chicago. Plot to attack the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations in London organised by agents provocateurs. 26 October. Explosive device thrown into The National Press office in Dublin. 31 December. Explosion in a cellar of Dublin Castle. 11 and 27 March. Two bomb attacks attributed to Ravachol in France. 25 April. Theódule Meunier bombs the restaurant where Ravachol was arrested, killing two people. 23 July. Attempted assassination of Henry Clay Frick by Alexander Berkman during the Homestead strike, Pennsylvania. 24 December. Explosion at Dublin Castle which kills one constable. 6 May. Explosion at Dublin Four Courts. 7 November. Santiago Salvador throws an Orsini bomb into Barcelona’s Teatro Liceo, killing twenty-two people. 25 November. Small explosion at an army barracks, Dublin. 9 December. Auguste Vaillant throws a bomb into the lower house of the French parliament. 12 February. Emile Henry explodes a bomb in a train-station café in Paris. 24 May. Sante Caserio assassinates the French president, Sadi Carnot.

Chronology, 1867–1900

1896 1897 1898 1900

xv

12 September. Irish nationalists arrested in Glasgow, Boulogne and Rotterdam for planned bomb attack. 8 August. Michele Angiolillo assassinates Antonio Canovas, Spanish Prime Minister. 10 September. Empress Elizabeth of Austria assassinated by Luigi Luccheni. 21 April. Explosion at a dam in Thorold, Ontario near US border. 29 July. Gaetano Bresci assassinates Umberto I, king of Italy.

Abbreviations

CBS CSORP CUA DMP DRP Dynamite Monthly HHC IRB MCIHP NAI NLI NYMA NYPL ODRPP PCR PRO TCD TNA SSD UCDA

xvi

Crime Branch Special Chief Secretary’s Office Registered Papers American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives, Washington, DC Dublin Metropolitan Police Desmond Ryan Papers Ireland’s Liberator and Dynamite Monthly Hansard, House of Commons debates Irish Republican Brotherhood Maloney Collection of Irish Historical Papers National Archives of Ireland National Library of Ireland New York Municipal Archive New York Public Library O’Donovan Rossa Personal Papers Police and Crime Records Public Record Office Trinity College Dublin The National Archives of the United Kingdom Secret Service Division University College Dublin Archives



Introduction

Rebellion in Ireland is often viewed as something handed down through generations, part of an unbroken tradition, by both the conspirators themselves and in the histories written about them. The Proclamation of the Irish Republic, delivered by insurgents during the 1916 rising, depicted their actions as the logical extension of a history that had seen insurrection ‘six times during the past three hundred years’. Tradition kept the rifles warm, or so the manifestos claimed, and not successful precedents of insurrectionary action elsewhere. To illustrate the point, rebels had only to look to the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), more widely known as the Fenians, the nationalist movement that most readily evoked intergenerational continuity.1 Established in 1858 by a veteran of the failed 1848 rebellion, the IRB was committed to achieving an independent Irish republic through insurrectionary means. When staged in 1867, their uprising quickly collapsed and the organisation was widely suppressed. Almost fifty years later, in 1916, the IRB again organised an insurrection that indirectly led to the formation of the Irish Free State. In the War of Independence (1919–21), they played an influential role under the direction of Michael Collins, before eventually winding up in 1924. Yet outward continuities can be misleading. Between the 1867 and 1916 insurrections, Irish nationalists experimented with a variety of different strategies, the most spectacular being an urban bombing campaign in the 1880s. This break with the insurrectionary tradition is the subject of this book.

1 Fenianism was an umbrella term that referred generally to the Dublin IRB (founded 1858), the Fenian Brotherhood (1858), and the Clan-na-Gael (1867). The term Fenian itself was a variant of ‘Fianna’, the name of a mythological band of Irish warriors. The term Fenian was widely employed in both nationalist and anti-nationalist propaganda in the second half of the nineteenth century to refer to the medley of Irish organisations committed to ‘physical-force nationalism’. The term is used in this sense in the present study. See M. J. Kelly, The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882–1916, Woodbridge, 2006, 108; Owen McGee, The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood from the Land League to Sinn Fein, Dublin, 2005, 33–7.

1

2

Introduction

At around two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in January 1885, three homemade bombs exploded almost simultaneously in the chamber of the House of Commons, the crypt of Westminster Hall and in the armoury of the Tower of London. The chamber was empty at the time and few injuries were caused, but the episode – labelled ‘Dynamite Saturday’ in the press – caused an international sensation. In 1884, the Special Irish Branch at Scotland Yard – established the previous year specifically to investigate the dynamiters – was itself rocked by a blast that caused extensive structural damage and destroyed a portion of the Fenian records. These explosions were orchestrated by a faction of the Fenian movement that advocated ‘skirmishing’ from their safe haven in the United States. Skirmishing was imagined as a means of applying scientific innovation and new technologies to win the goals of revolutionary nationalism. Insurrection, they believed, caused more hardship to the Irish population than to the authorities. In contrast, dynamite bombs would spare Ireland but disrupt economic life in Britain, bringing deeprooted colonial grievances directly to the metropole. Their homemade devices – referred to as ‘infernal machines’ in the press – targeted symbolic public buildings in Britain. Numerous bombs failed to explode, though the campaign was not without startling moments. Viewed by many as a dramatic break with the conventional strategies of nationalism, skirmishing was met with markedly more opposition than enthusiasm in the wider nationalist movement. Unlike insurrection, the skirmishing or dynamite campaign was not vindicated by the rebels of the past, suggesting that revolutionary nationalism was not always moved by its own history. Instead, it is argued in this book that the rebels’ actions may be better grasped if placed in concurrent contexts and in connection with transnational milieux. The Fenians’ world interacted with wars, revolutionary movements, labour struggles and revolts in European, American and imperial settings, and they were not alone in believing violence to be the midwife of a new society. Contemporary movements opposed to capitalism and colonialism shared similar views of revolutionary violence. Indeed, precisely when the New York Fenians began to imagine skirmishing, subversive groups elsewhere also instigated a new departure in revolutionary action that was characterised by political murder and bomb attacks. The 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II with homemade bombs ensured that revolutionary violence was central to discussions at the International Social Revolutionary and Anarchist Congress in London, held just a few months afterwards. During the congress, delegates overwhelmingly endorsed the use of ‘propaganda of the deed’, a proposal that had been

Introduction

3

mooted five years earlier at the International Workingmen’s Association conference in Bern.2 Italian anarchist Carlo Cafiero described this new, ‘modern’ strategy of ‘minute bodies or groups’ armed with dynamite, in comparison to the old, ‘classic school’ of insurrection. For Cafiero, the choice was unequivocal. The classic school had ‘had its day and today is absolutely impotent’.3 Throughout the final decades of the nineteenth century, several revolutionary organisations abandoned insurrection in favour of urban guerrilla warfare and assassinations. The emergence of urban guerrilla warfare and dynamite attacks was symptomatic of the tensions provoked by modernising and globalising forces in the nineteenth-century world. The timeframe of this book – from the year of the Fenian uprising and the patenting of dynamite in 1867, to the dynamiters’ last explosion in 1900 – witnessed remarkable change and turbulence both inside and beyond Ireland. These were years that saw the broad expansion of the franchise (Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884); disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (1869); the Irish Land Wars (1879–82 and 1886–91); the Phoenix Park assassinations (1882); and Gladstone’s conversion to Irish Home Rule (1885). Internationally, the period was one of revolution and reform that saw the German and Italian wars of unification (1860–71); the Paris Commune (1871); uprisings in the Balkans (1875–6); the Mahdist revolt in the Sudan (1881–99); the Great Upheaval in the USA (1877); and the assassinations of the leaders of Russia and the USA (1881), France (1894), Spain (1897), and Italy (1900). World historians have observed that international peace was disrupted by no less than 177 war-like confrontations in the second half of the nineteenth century.4 The period was characterised by violent upheaval and militant Irish nationalism has to be understood in these historical limits, as a political movement in a violent age rather than a violent movement in an age of peaceful politics. Since the nineteenth century, militant nationalism in Ireland has been more commonly referred to as ‘physical-force’ nationalism, in opposition to ‘moral-force’ or ‘constitutional’ nationalism. Typically, varieties of nationalist political opinion were squared off under either of these two labels, both of which have proven to be stubborn in Irish historical writing. From 1858, physical-force nationalism in Ireland manifested 2 Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892, Princeton, 1993, 115; Ruth Kinna (ed.), Early Writings on Terrorism, 3 vols., London, 2006, Vol. I, 23–5. 3 Il grido del popolo (Naples), 4 July 1881; Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 189–90. 4 Michael Geyer, ‘Global Violence and Nationalizing Wars in Eurasia and America: The Geopolitics of War in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 38 (1996), 619–57 (622). The period he analyses is 1840–80.

4

Introduction

itself through the Fenian movement. Initially hostile toward constitutional politics, the Fenians were organised hierarchically in cellular structures, or ‘circles’, and committed to a Blanqui-like vision of secret conspiracy that led them inevitably to action in 1867. Though their uprising failed, the Fenians displayed considerable longevity and continued to influence Irish society through entryism or the infiltration of numerous associations, from literary to sporting groups. Secular in outlook, they espoused a form of republicanism that jumbled French and American elements and mixed differing social and economic worldviews. The movement’s centre of exile was often found in Paris, ‘a general emporium for plots, secrets, revolutionary designs and treasonable documents’, but shifted increasingly to the United States in the final third of the 1800s.5 Beyond Europe and the USA, Fenian organisations were found to a lesser extent in Canada, South Africa and Australasia. The journalist Desmond Ryan (1893–1964) was arguably Fenianism’s earliest historian. A student of Pádraig Pearse, one of the leaders of the 1916 rising, Ryan himself was present at the barricades in Dublin. His work, which laid down a rigorous empirical framework from which historians continue to borrow, was characterised by an affinity for his subject matter and an emphasis on the agency of key figures like John Devoy and James Stephens. Ryan’s pioneering investigations were followed by studies of Fenians and Fenianism by Marcus Bourke (1967) and Leon Ó Broin (1971, 1976), but these early works neglected the skirmishing campaign, excepting only Seán Ó Lúing’s biography Ó Donnabháin Rosa (1979) and Ryan’s explanatory notes in his edition of John Devoy’s letters.6 Similarly, in the United States, historians have largely overlooked skirmishing, although an interesting analysis was made in Thomas Brown’s influential study (1966), which linked Irish American nationalism to immigrants’ social and economic ambitions in the host country, above their commitment to independence in Ireland. Later studies by Eric Foner (1978), Kerby Miller (1985) and Timothy Meagher (1986, 2001) challenged Brown’s thesis by reorienting the focus of analysis toward the Irish American working class, revealing 5 Michael Davitt, Fall of Feudalism in Ireland; or, The Story of the Land League Revolution, London, 1904, 437. 6 Desmond Ryan, The Phoenix Flame: A Study of Fenianism and John Devoy, London, 1937; William O’Brien and Desmond Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, 1871–1928, 2 vols., Dublin, 1948–[1953]; Desmond Ryan, The Fenian Chief: A Biography of James Stephens, Dublin, 1967; Marcus Bourke, John O’Leary: A Study in Irish Separatism, Tralee, 1967; Leon Ó Broin, Fenian Fever: An Anglo-American Dilemma, New York, 1971, and Revolutionary Underground: The Story of the Irish Republican Brotherhood 1858–1924, Dublin, 1976; Seán Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, 2 vols., Dublin, 1969; Robert Kee, The Green Flag: The Bold Fenian Men, London, 1989.

Introduction

5

significant commitments to Irish independence and also to social justice in the new home.7 In Ireland, Desmond Ryan’s approach to the history of nationalism in some ways epitomised what the next, ‘revisionist’ generation of historians sought to counteract. In turn, their studies moved Fenian historiography in new and sometimes controversial directions. So-called ‘revisionism’ came to the fore as a challenge to an official orthodoxy that wrote histories of pious Irish heroes and little more. In time, revisionism itself became the orthodoxy, evident in the nine-volume A New History of Ireland (1976–2005).8 The frontlines of many revisionist clashes were found in the long nineteenth century, where historians looked for the origins of modern Irish nationalism (a tendency criticised by early modern scholars), and consequently Fenianism drew substantial attention.9 In fact, one of the more vibrant revisionist debates followed the publication of R. V. Comerford’s Fenians in Context (1985). Comerford viewed membership of the IRB as a release valve for young Irish men who held few opportunities for social fulfilment: ‘Fenianism found a following not because there were tens of thousands of Irishmen eager to “take up the gun” for an Irish republic, but because there were tens of thousands of young Irishmen in search of realisation through appropriate social outlets.’10 Historian John Newsinger viewed this analysis as an attempt to ‘dilute [the IRB’s] revolutionary character’, and sought to stem the tide of this new orthodoxy with his Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain.11 Yet, the debate ignored the fact that years previously, J. J. Lee, not identified as a revisionist by critics, had remarked that many volunteers 7 Thomas N. Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 1870–1890, Philadelphia, 1966; Eric Foner, ‘Class, Ethnicity and Radicalism in the Gilded Age: The Land League & Irish America’, Marxist Perspectives, 2 (1978), 6–55; Timothy J. Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880–1928, Notre Dame, 2001, and From Paddy to Studs: Irish-American Communities in the Turn of the Century Era 1880–1920, New York, 1986; Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America, Oxford, 1985. 8 On revisionist debates see M. A. G. Ó Tuathaigh, ‘Irish Historical “Revisionism”: State of the Art or Ideological Project?’, in Ciaran Brady (ed.), Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism, 1938–1994, Dublin, 1994, 306–26; Nancy Curtin, ‘“Varieties of Irishness”: Historical Revisionism, Irish Style’, Journal of British Studies, 35 (1996), 195–219. 9 The 1990s saw ‘unprecedented interest’ in nineteenth-century Ireland. See Laurence M. Geary and Margaret Kelleher (eds.), Nineteenth-Century Ireland: A Guide to Recent Research, Dublin, 2005. 10 R. V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–82, Dublin, 1998 [1985], 112; ‘Patriotism as Pastime: The Appeal of Fenianism in the Mid1860s’, Irish Historical Studies, 22 (1981), 239–50. 11 John Newsinger, Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain, London, 1994, 3. For the exchange between both authors see R. V. Comerford, reply in Saothar, 17 (1992), 46–56.

6

Introduction

found in the IRB ‘the camaraderie that helped integrate them into their new urban environment’.12 Though the divisions between scholarly camps were clearly marked in the Comerford–Newsinger debate, this has not always been the case. Today, it may be argued that divisions between revisionists and their opponents, so-called ‘post-revisionists’, have been fading for some time given the paucity of scholars that openly identify themselves with either camp. Time will tell whether the decline in revisionist controversies is linked to the success of the Northern Irish peace process. During the Troubles, the topic of political violence repeatedly brought out the core divisions among historians and many debates were shaped by presentism. Historians were clearly mindful of scholarship that risked conferring legitimacy on paramilitary activity, unionist and nationalist, whilst the palpable brutality of violence in Northern Ireland, D. George Boyce argued, led to ‘distorted’ historical treatments that highlighted the proximity of past and present, instead of putting relief between them.13 Political violence was studied in a specifically Irish context and historians rarely looked to similar debates beyond Ireland or Britain. A narrowness was evident when ‘arch-revisionist’ Conor Cruise O’Brien recycled an old quote – ‘violence is the best way of ensuring a hearing for moderation’ – in a 1969 debate with Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag and Hannah Arendt on the legitimacy of violent protest against the Vietnam War.14 O’Brien was then teaching at New York University, but when he returned to Ireland in 1969, developments in Northern Ireland led him to change his previous position and blend past and present in a moral condemnation of violence north and south of the border. Given the centrality of political violence to scholarly debates over the past four decades, the scant attention paid to the dynamiters is all the more remarkable. Or perhaps the weight of events in Ulster best explains why the skirmishing campaign was largely forgotten, no more than a footnote in the scholarship. For some it was an unsavoury departure from a nationalist tradition that emphasised honourable insurrection and the birth of the Irish Free State, and for others its exhumation 12 Joseph Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848–1918, Dublin, 2008 [1973], 57. 13 This is how George Boyce described T. W. Moody’s The Ulster Question, 1603–1973 (1974), in D. George Boyce, ‘Past and Present: Revisionism and the Northern Ireland Troubles’, in D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day (eds.), The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy, London, 1996, 216–38 (219). 14 This quotation is attributed to Irish nationalist William O’Brien (1852–1928). Arendt also quotes this phrase in Hannah Arendt, On Violence, New York, 1969, 79; Conor Cruise O’Brien, Herod: Reflections on Political Violence, London, 1978; Diarmaid Whelan, ‘Conor Cruise O’Brien and the Legitimation of Violence’, Irish Political Studies, 21 (2006), 223–41.

Introduction

7

risked gifting an historical precedent to the IRA’s bombing campaigns in Britain and Ulster. While historians engaged other aspects of Irish history, the only thorough account of the skirmishing campaign was left to the New Jersey-born historian of broadcasting and Second World War propaganda, Kenneth Richard MacDonald Short. Short’s background, both as a media historian and Anglican vicar in Oxford, made a curious pair of book and author.15 The Dynamite War provided a sound and stimulating account of the skirmishing campaign. Short’s use of official documents, particularly the papers of the Home Secretary William Harcourt, produced a cogent analysis of the actions of different individuals when dealing with the threat posed by dynamite bombs. Yet the sources that Short consulted also limited his analysis and resulted in a study of counter-terrorism that overlooked the dynamiters themselves. When it was published, neither Irish Historical Studies nor Éire-Ireland reviewed The Dynamite War, while elsewhere one historian unhelpfully found the study to be ‘historical froth. Short’s book contains a number of amusing stories drawn from a wide variety of sources, but serious scholarship it is not.’16 The past decade has provided a rich yield of new studies on Fenianism by Owen McGee (2005), Matthew Kelly (2006), Máirtín Ó Catháin (2007) and Marta Ramon (2007), which have advanced debates considerably from previous revisionist disputes, while Seán McConville (2003) has provided a rich study of Fenian political prisoners.17 McGee and Kelly addressed a former gap in Irish historiography, between the years 1890 and 1916, when alliances and new programmes were remodelled and tried out. Both authors make persuasive cases for a more nuanced picture of revolutionary nationalism, degrading the ‘physical-’ and ‘moral-force’ distinctions made by contemporaries and preserved by historians. They emphasise the metamorphosis of Fenianism during the period 1882–1916, but also how it remained central to Irish politics. McGee contends that physical-/moral-force distinctions were ‘verbal nonsense’ shaped by hostile propaganda, along with the term ‘Fenian’ itself. On this last point Kelly differs, arguing that ‘Fenian’ 15 K. R. M. Short, The Dynamite War: Irish-American Bombers in Victorian Britain, Dublin, 1979; see also obituary in The Times, 9 October 2007. 16 D. H. Akenson, ‘Review Essay’, Victorian Studies, 23 (1980), 507–8. On the influence that violence in Northern Ireland had on historiography see John M. Regan, ‘Southern Irish Nationalism as a Historical Problem’, The Historical Journal, 50 (2007), 197–223. 17 McGee, The IRB; Kelly, The Fenian Ideal; Máirtín Ó Catháin, Irish Republicanism in Scotland, 1858–1916: Fenians in Exile, Dublin, 2007; Marta Ramón, A Provisional Dictator: James Stephens and the Fenian Movement, Dublin, 2007, 251–2; Seán McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 1848–1922: Theatres of War, London, 2003.

8

Introduction

most commonly referred to a nationalist worldview, rather than an organisation, and was readily used by IRB members.18 The repression of the IRB, McGee concludes, did not reflect official fears about violent insurrection but elite desires, English and Irish, Protestant and Catholic, to maintain the social status quo. This threat to the social and political order derived from the Fenians’ mobilisation in terms of their democratic leanings and civic republicanism, above their commitment to insurrection. The democratic and egalitarian aspects of the IRB’s worldview are also drawn out by Ramon’s analysis of the 1850s and 1860s, when Fenians created a ‘mass democratic movement’ driven by the ‘belief that “the people” were capable of governing themselves independently from the traditional direction of their “trusted leaders”’.19 Kelly takes a more cautious view of the Fenians’ ideals and concurs with Comerford that the ‘social’ or recreational element was key to the IRB’s high levels of recruitment, as members sought ‘purpose against a background of rural and provincial tedium’.20 Kelly understates the IRB’s republicanism in The Fenian Ideal, though in a later essay (2009) on the 1860s, he argues that the IRB held a democratic appeal and expressed a class-based, though not Marxist, radicalism that mirrored organisations such as the Reform League in Britain.21 Of these five publications, Máirtín Ó Catháin’s found the most room for the skirmishing campaign, exploring its appeal for Irish immigrants in Scotland. Insightfully linking skirmishing with the tradition of Ribbonism or agrarian secret societies, Ó Catháin demonstrated how working-class Fenians were alienated in the 1870s and 1880s by a staid IRB organisation that was middle class in composition, preferring the actionist policies of O’Donovan Rossa.22 Dynamite conspiracies also crop up in The IRB, where McGee reveals how Irish American conspirators misled each other and the Dublin IRB regarding violent strategies and finances. The resulting organisational dysfunction allowed government spies to achieve prominent inside positions and incite bomb plots to discredit the movement as a whole. McGee’s empirical rigour and delicate detective work help clarify the spies and shadows of the era, adding to Christy Campbell’s Fenian Fire (2002). Campbell 18 Kelly, The Fenian Ideal, 108; McGee, The IRB, 33–7, 330. 19 Ramón, A Provisional Dictator, 251–2. 20 Kelly, The Fenian Ideal, 39. 21 Matthew Kelly, ‘The Irish People and the Disciplining of Dissent’, in Fearghal McGarry and James McConnel (eds.), The Black Hand of Republicanism: Fenianism in Modern Ireland, Dublin, 2009, 34–52 (45–7). 22 Ó Catháin, Irish Republicanism in Scotland, 126–39.

Introduction

9

examined the roles of agents provocateurs during the alleged ‘Jubilee Plot’ to assassinate Queen Victoria in 1887, and made the disquieting conclusion that the conspiracy was manufactured by government agents and sanctioned by Conservative prime minister and proprietor of The Times, Lord Salisbury, in order to discredit the IRB and the Irish Parliamentary Party.23 These works by McGee and Campbell greatly deepen our knowledge of the skirmishing campaign, but misgivings linger about the actual ability of agents provocateurs to manipulate Irish American nationalism as they pleased. Numerous spies infiltrated nationalist organisations but it is mistaken to overestimate their influence and understand the skirmishing campaign in these terms alone. The present study steps back from factual reconstructions of the intrigues of the dynamite campaign, as they have been adequately explored by Short, Campbell and McGee. Moreover, given the incomplete evidence available to us, it is unlikely that a definitive list of those responsible will ever emerge. There will always be doubt about the identities of the bombers and the agents provocateurs. Individuals are central to this story, such as Patrick Ford and O’Donovan Rossa, but it is also important to move away from dominant figureheads and pay attention to the diverse voices and ideas that characterised the movement. By focusing on the different groups that participated in the skirmishing campaign – leadership, journalists, operatives, supporters, sympathisers  – it is possible to set out a more comprehensive portrayal of the dynamics of revolutionary organisation. Violent escalations require some kind of explanatory marker to make narrative sense as legitimate action, and it is necessary to question how the dynamiters made sense of such a contentious departure from previous tactics to themselves and their intended audience. In discussing these aspects, this book seeks to go beyond specifically Irish contexts. Charles Townshend’s Political Violence in Ireland (1983) maintained that nationalist violence was symptomatic of social and political alienation, but also stressed that the Fenians’ commitment to violence ‘in the face of a great deadweight of reality cannot be explained by the intellectual or even the emotional power of republican ideology, but only by an inheritance of communal assumptions validating its methods as much as its ends. Indeed its methods have, at times, appeared to be ends in themselves.’24 Covering nearly 150 years of political violence, Townshend makes a convincing case that it 23 Christy Campbell, Fenian Fire: The British Government Plot to Assassinate Queen Victoria, London, 2002. 24 Charles Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848, Oxford, 1983, viii–ix.

10

Introduction

is impossible to ignore the influence of inherited attitudes when studying violent groups in Ireland, a view that finds echoes across several histories of Irish nationalism. Yet one wonders if tradition is stressed too strongly in the historiography, to the point that other causal factors are excluded. It is necessary to challenge the frequent analytical collapse of militant Irish nationalism into ‘traditions of violence’ explanations, moving beyond vertical frameworks and instead investigating how the skirmishing campaign was contingent upon horizontal contexts. Though revisionist debates greatly advanced Irish historiography they also produced insular scholarship, perhaps more so on the nineteenth than other centuries. Looking back it is hard not to agree with Margaret MacCurtain and Mary Dowd’s sentiment that ‘the debate on revisionism has revealed the limited and inward looking nature of Irish historical dialogue. Few of the contenders in the debate have recommended new methodologies or fresh ways of looking at Irish history.’25 The past number of years have witnessed the opening-up of a new research agenda that challenges such insular approaches. The ‘new wave’ of imperial history has advanced wider frameworks to re-examine national questions. ‘Nationalism in Ireland was not built in a vacuum’, Paul Townend contends in his 2007 essay, stressing two key points: that ‘modern Irish identities were essentially cosmopolitan, inseparable from imperial, Atlantic and European circumstances … that these identities must be analysed as relational and dynamic, not incorporated as axiomatic’.26 Historians of the Irish diaspora Timothy Meagher, Enda Delaney and Kevin Kenny have also compellingly argued for the necessity to measure Irish experiences within a wider framework, and the extended vistas employed in recent studies are appealing for a study of political violence.27 To investigate the genesis of the skirmishing campaign it is necessary to look across all the different contexts within 25 Margaret MacCurtain and Mary Dowd, ‘An Agenda for Women’s History in Ireland, 1500–1900’, Irish Historical Studies, 28 (1992), 1–37 (4). 26 Paul A. Townend, ‘Between Two Worlds: Irish Nationalists and Imperial Crisis 1878–1880’, Past & Present, 194 (2007), 139–74 (141, 148); Matthew Kelly, ‘Irish Nationalist Opinion and the British Empire in the 1850s and 1860s’, Past & Present, 204 (2009), 127–54. 27 Timothy J. Meagher, ‘From the World to the Village and the Beginning to the End and After: Research Opportunities in Irish American History’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 28 (2009), 118–35; Enda Delaney, ‘Transnationalism, Networks and Emigration from Post-War Ireland’, Immigrants and Minorities, 23 (2005), 425–46; Kevin Kenny, ‘Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study’, The Journal of American History, 90(1) (2003), 134–62.

The Fenians in the wider world

11

which the rebels moved. This study therefore examines the European tradition of revolutionary violence, colonial conflicts, the post-American Civil War cultures of scientific and technological innovation, land reform in Ireland and industrial unrest in the United States. Focusing transnational optics on the subject of political violence allows us to understand better the contextual opportunities that moved the rebels’ strategic choices and thus facilitated the deviation from more conventional forms of nationalist action.

Fenians in the wider world

The dimming of revisionist lights has already created opportunities for fresh approaches to Irish history that connect with ongoing debates elsewhere regarding history-beyond-the-nation-state. At the same time, the claim could hardly be made that a broad consensus has emerged regarding new methodological directions, or indeed that nation-­centred approaches should be abandoned unconditionally. The Dictionary of Transnational History (2009), for example, contains entries on a wide variety of subjects from authors working in twenty-eight different countries, yet there is no entry by an Irish author or from an author working in Ireland. This absence is all the more conspicuous when one considers the language barriers and academic networks that might excuse other countries that are nonetheless present. There is a straightforward case to be made for placing transnational approaches at the top of Irish research agendas. They are perfectly suited to explore subjects – migration, empire, diaspora, religious networks  – that historians have long recognised to be vitally important to Ireland’s past and present. In the late nineteenth century, owing to the presence of networks of immigrants and émigrés across the globe, strategies of political revolution in Ireland borrowed elements and ideas from a variety of jurisdictions. The protagonists were mobile and moved between, among other locations, Britain, continental Europe, the Americas, Australasia and South Africa. The expanse of the Irish diaspora was reflected in the fact that, when the Fenians hatched conspiracies in New York to bomb sites in London, the mayors of both cities were Irish-born – William Grace and William McArthur. In 1881, the first skirmisher to be convicted in Britain was arrested by an Irish constable in Liverpool, while at the moment of the 1885 bomb attack at Westminster, widespread damage was thwarted by the intervention of another Irish constable.28 28 United Ireland, 31 January 1885; Short, The Dynamite War, 65–6.

12

Introduction

Despite the centrality of an Atlantic triangulation between Ireland, Britain and the USA, Fenianism nonetheless extended in other directions. The geographical stretch of the movement was illustrated in 1883 when a high-profile government informant named James Carey was killed off the coast of South Africa. Carey was shot by the Donegalborn Patrick O’Donnell, who had worked in the anthracite regions of Pennsylvania in the 1860s and 1870s, and held familial connections to the Molly Maguire labour agitators of that area.29 O’Donnell acted individually and was not the agent of any organisation, but the episode nonetheless symbolised the mobility of the times. The same mobility was evident in the careers of Fenian ‘adventurers’ that traversed wars in Europe and North and South America. Francis F. Millen, for example, was an Armagh-born soldier who began his career in the British army during the Crimean War. Millen became interested in the Fenian Brotherhood in the early 1860s while employed in the army of Benito Juárez in Mexico. Finding himself on the losing side against Emperor Maximilian in 1863, he travelled to New York acting as a diplomat for Juárez. Once there, he soon joined the Irish secret society, and in 1865 Millen returned to Ireland to help preparations for insurrection and also began to spy for the authorities. Afterwards, he worked as the New York Herald’s correspondent in Cuba and Panama and became military chief-of-staff to General Barrios, the Guatemalan dictator.30 Examining mobility and networks provides indispensable points of entry into the study of transnational connections. Transnationalism is defined as the movement of people, ideas or organisations between two or more countries. And following Erez Manela’s definition, an important distinction is drawn between international and transnational: the former is taken ‘to refer primarily to interactions between established nation-states and “transnational” to mean actions and interactions that cross the borders of states but are not necessarily performed by them’.31 Utilising a transnational lens, then, centres the focus on non-state 29 Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, Oxford, 1998, 207–8. 30 Campbell, Fenian Fire, 53–74. 31 On definitions of transnationalism see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: SelfDetermination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, Oxford, 2007, 13; C. A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly et al., ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, American Historical Review, 111 (2006), 1441–64; Akira Iriye, ‘Transnational History’, Contemporary European History, 13 (2004), 211–22; Donna Gabaccia, ‘Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History’, The Journal of American History, 86 (1999), 1115–34; David Thelen, ‘The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History’, The Journal of American History, 86 (1999), 965–75; Ian Tyrrell, ‘American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History’, American Historical Review, 96 (1991), 1031–55.

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13

actors and organisations, providing perspectives from below in contrast to top-down international histories of institutions and officials. The Irish Fenians were manifestly transnational agents. To understand fully the mobility of their lives, ideas and organisations it is necessary to employ a transnational approach. Similar to the dynamiters of European anarchism and Russian nihilism, the bombers of the skirmishing campaign moved ‘above, below, through, and around, as well as within’ nation-states, fitting the criteria David Thelen used to describe transnational phenomena.32 Concurrent participation in old and new worlds gave actors, both elite and from below, eclectic approaches to political change. Investigating the Fenian movement requires the researcher to move beyond the nation-state paradigm in order to construct a complete picture. The transatlantic vistas long incorporated into Irish studies are commendable, yet at times they are limited by ‘a narrowly conceived set of activities through which migrants become involved in the domestic politics of their home countries’. Transnational perspectives, Rainer Bauboeck observes, move beyond this, mapping networks, making comparisons across territorially separated locations and investigating how migrants engaged with their new home beyond the diaspora community.33 The transnational co-ordinates of Fenianism were made possible by what Benedict Anderson has described as an earlier age of globalisation: the last decades of the nineteenth century when extensive material change transformed processes of communication, commerce, transportation and migration across continents.34 By the 1870s, the appearance of international economic cycles pointed to the fact that, particularly in the Atlantic world, substantial integration had occurred in the previous thirty years. The emergence of a trade-based international economy transformed the functions of ships and ports, transforming the latter from a protected national site to an open location within a global network. From 1860 onward, transportation was facilitated by the rapid 32 Thelen, ‘The Nation and Beyond’, 967; David Turcato, ‘Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement, 1885–1915’, International Review of Social History, 52 (2007), 407–44; Carl Levy, ‘The Rooted Cosmopolitan: Errico Malatesta, Syndicalism, Transnationalism and the International Labour Movement’, in David Berry and Constance Bantman (eds.), New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour & Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational, Newcastle, 2010, 61–79; Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, Oakland, 2009. 33 Rainer Bauboeck, ‘Towards a Political Theory of Migrant Transnationalism’, IMR, 37 (2003), 700–23 (700). 34 Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination, New York, 2005, 3.

14

Introduction

rise of the steamship, which the Suez Canal was designed to accommodate when it opened in 1869. Needless to say, these changes also accelerated the era of high imperialism. The progress of railways  – designed to benefit the movement of commodities – was evident in the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in the United States in 1867, which connected previously remote areas to urban centres by moving unprecedented numbers of people as well as goods.35 In 1873, the publication of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days was symbolic in that it underlined how ideas of distance, and of how to overcome it, were swiftly changing. These improvements also revolutionised the concept of travel and migration. Between 1850 and 1914, it is estimated that over sixty million people migrated from their countries of origin, with the majority travelling to North and South America. In fact, when compared with today, the nineteenth century may be said to have been a more globalised place. Previous to the proliferation of identity documents after the First World War, economic liberalism and the need for labour in industrialised countries had facilitated the free movement of peoples across borders and led to the relaxation of official passport controls, and sometimes to their absence.36 Communications were also transformed during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1866, the successful completion of the transatlantic telegraph cable overcame limitations previously restricting the exchange of information. In the UK, the establishment of the Press Association in 1868 supplied national and provincial newspapers with international news, building on developments in the rapid dissemination of information made by Agence Havas (1835) and Reuters (1851). By the 1880s, the existence of a thriving press industry symbolised the improvements made to the telegraph, which facilitated increasingly swift and dependable mechanisms for communicating over large distances. In 1876, the foundation of the Universal Postal Union complemented developments in the telegraph by making the international transport of letters and newspapers more reliable.37 The emergence of mass-market publishing meant radical journals were easily made and more affordable, thus reaching a greater number of readers than 35 Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: A Short History, Princeton, 2005, 77; Anderson, Under Three Flags, 3–8. 36 John Torpey, ‘Passports and the Development of Immigration Controls in the North Atlantic World during the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron and Patrick Weil (eds.), Migration Control in the North Atlantic World, New York, 2003, 73–91. 37 Anderson, Under Three Flags, 3.

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15

ever before and facilitating more systematic organisation of protest. Mechanical improvements also meant printing presses became more portable, allowing prohibited newspapers greater possibilities of evading the authorities. Swift progress was evident in the circulation of the New York-based Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, a newspaper that has been neglected by scholars of Ireland and Irish America.38 The Irish World was disseminated widely across North America, Ireland and Great Britain. In Ireland alone, the paper’s circulation reached 20,000 in 1880.39 Financial donations came to The Irish World’s various funds from different international locations, underlining people’s confidence in the dependability of new postal systems. The newspaper also travelled within revolutionary networks: in 1884, a Florence-based anarchist journal translated an Irish World article on assassination.40 It is doubtful that numbers of The Irish World reached Italy. The article was probably encountered and translated in London, a centre for exiled Italian anarchism at the fin de siècle, which in itself reinforces the interconnectedness of the late-nineteenth-century world and in particular its revolutionary networks. The Fenian movement also profited from changes in transportation, dramatically evident in the ‘Catalpa rescue’ of 1875–6. That year, Irish exiles in New York organised the successful rescue of Fenian prisoners in Australia by sending a ship – the Catalpa – around the world to bring them back to safety in the USA. They succeeded in evading the authorities through cutting the telegraph cables between Australia and Java, and returned to New York to a rapturous welcome. In the same year, O’Donovan Rossa proposed the formation of a ‘band of heroes’ who would strike the ‘enemy in Ireland, now in India, now in England itself, as occasion may present’.41 While Rossa’s assertions were undoubtedly far-fetched, Fenians in the USA nonetheless considered sending men and arms to aid the Afghanis, the Zulus and the Boers.42 In 1868, the attempted assassination of Prince Alfred, duke of Edinburgh, in Australia by a self-proclaimed Fenian prompted panic over transnational conspiracies, although the man involved later admitted he was unconnected with any organisation. In the same year, Irish 38 The only serious study of The Irish World and its editor Patrick Ford is James Rodechko, Patrick Ford and His Search for America: A Case Study of Irish-American Journalism, 1870–1913, New York, 1976. 39 Lee, Modernisation of Irish Society, 96. 40 La questione sociale (Florence), 5 January 1884. 41 The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, 4 March 1876. 42 O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. I, 282, 392, 408; Vol. II, 44.

16

Introduction

Canadian politician Thomas D’Arcy McGee was shot dead in Ottawa and a Fenian-sympathiser was later hanged for the crime. Both of these episodes, coming in quick succession, generated widespread alarm about co-ordinated violence on an international scale. Such concerns, however, proved misplaced and Fenianism never achieved the organisational strengths in Australasia or Canada that characterised its American branches. Though the Fenian movement operated in a transnational setting, can a movement whose main goal was national independence be seen as genuinely transnational? When compared to phenomena such as trade unions, financial markets, organisations such as the International Workingmen’s Association, or Donna Gabaccia’s Italian migration networks, with Fenianism there appeared to be principally national issues at stake.43 Is transnationalism ‘in danger of becoming merely a buzzword among historians, more a label than a practice’, or does it open up new possibilities for the analysis of historical phenomena that are constructed in the movement between territorially demarcated political entities?44 In political history, the conspicuous prominence of nationalism and the nation-state would appear to be a robust obstacle to its transcendence and a block on the prioritising of transnational perspectives. Yet if transnationalism is understood as a supplement to national history rather than a new paradigm, it provides new and useful ways for investigating political movements. Instead of contrasting the national and transnational, one depends on the other. When Ian Tyrrell made one of the first arguments for the importance of transnational history he included the caveat that ‘this does not mean that nationalism and the history of the nation-state can be ignored’. Rather, he called for ‘simultaneous consideration of differing geographical scales – the local, the national, and the transnational’.45 Transnational perspectives bring equilibrium to historiographies knocked off balance by nation-centred explanations. They explore connections previously taken for granted and bring to the surface fragments that, when pulled together, bring enriched understandings of phenomena left only partially explained by national frameworks. Rebounding between individuals and their 43 Donna Gabaccia says of activities that revolve around ‘circulation, return, transatlantic networks, and contacts of migrants’ that ‘today we would label these transnational’. See Donna Gabaccia, Leslie Page Moch, Marcelo J. Borges et al., ‘Review Symposium: Cultures in Contact’, International Review of Social History, 49 (2004), 475–515 (478). 44 Bayly et al., ‘AHR Conversation’, 1441, 1444. 45 Tyrrell, ‘American Exceptionalism’, 1033.

The first terrorist campaign?

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environments, a transnational approach allows for an analysis of the thinking of individuals, in concert with a full reconstruction of the concerns that informed the different milieux they lived, worked and conspired in.

The first terrorist campaign? Revolutionary violence in the late nineteenth century

Much contemporary criticism of the skirmishing campaign was framed in the context of the liberal view of violence, in which violent protest was viewed to be legitimate in repressive dictatorships or states without political freedoms. In democratic states, where citizens’ rights are protected by functioning institutions and where public forums exist to address grievances, however, such actions were deemed criminal.46 An 1883 article on revolutionary violence in the Manchester Guardian maintained, ‘the Irish-American conspirator differs from the anarchist in not being the victim of any oppression, political or social’.47 The Russian anarchists Kropotkin and Stepniak, both committed supporters of revolutionary violence, found a ready audience in Britain for their criticisms of Tsarist Russia, with the self-proclaimed terrorist Stepniak writing a column in The Times.48 The vulnerabilities in the liberal view of violence reflected a dilemma that radicals readily pointed out, perhaps most explosively when Georges Sorel published Reflections on Violence (1908).49 Sorel criticised the liberal conception because it appeared to impose limits on who could actually participate in violence: the actor qualifies the act. State force was justified in theory, as it maintained law and order and thus was not ‘violent’, while the contrary was true for non-state actors. Where the ever-varying line was drawn between admissible, acceptable forms of resistance and unacceptable ones was problematic for Sorel, as all forms of protest were labelled violent. In grouping together, and then rejecting, all forms of non-state  violence, governments created a dislocation in how society managed violence, and denied themselves the political literacy to distinguish between more and less serious offences. Eric Hobsbawm has observed that:

46 David Miller, ‘The Use and Abuse of Political Violence’, Political Studies, 32 (1984), 401–19 (403–6). 47 Manchester Guardian, 11 April 1883. 48 John Quail, The Slow Burning Fuse, London, 1978, 11–14. 49 Miller, ‘The Use and Abuse of Political Violence’, 408.

18

Introduction

Nineteenth century liberal society in rejecting all violence abolished the distinction between limited and unlimited violence, for when anything which is not actually writing a leading article in the paper or putting a cross in the ballot box could be defined as a violent action or the use of force, the very significant difference between killing somebody and threatening somebody or even going on strike may get destroyed.50

The reduction of diverse phenomena under a single term was a recurring element in constructions of state authority. The movement toward monopolies on violence strode and stumbled through the nineteenth century along diverse routes and at different speeds across Weberianstates-in-the-making. It is possible to identify across several European governments an administrative conflation that imposed limitations on ‘acceptable action’ and in which the word violence itself assumed an inherent moral value that implicitly condemned the subject it referred to. In Britain, as in other countries, this process involved the drawing of a sharp, diametric distinction between peaceful and violent protest, with the result that actors who fell between these two poles were unsure as to the legality of their activities. The relative absence of violence in post-Peterloo Britain (1819) encouraged the view that the parliamentary and constitutional system safeguarded the country against the types of upheaval seen on the Continent in 1830 or 1848. British constitutional norms, however, were not applied to the government of Ireland. Joe Lee has pointed out that ‘the presence of British troops in Ireland was the precondition for British rule, and therefore, in the circumstances, for the nature and conduct of politics’.51 Yet, an adherence to British norms of dissent and violence was maintained that made it difficult to view Irish protests against an Irish backdrop.52 Moderates and radicals alike were puzzled by the hazy boundaries of legality, particularly during the periods of exceptional legislation. Coercion and the frequent suspension of habeas corpus (1803, 1822, 1833, 1848, 1866, 1871, 1881) became a consistent mechanism for dealing with high levels of agrarian crime and political conspiracy in Ireland. John Morley – the liberal politician who was twice Chief Secretary for Ireland – concluded that ‘the persistent resort to coercion both helped to destroy any feeling of moral validity of the Union, and prevented the growth of respect for law’. Sombre misgivings were widespread

50 Eric J. Hobsbawm, ‘Political Violence and Political Murder: Comments on Franklin Ford’s Essay’, in W. J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld (eds.), Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe, London, 1982, 13–19 (18). 51 Lee, Modernisation of Irish Society, x. 52 Townshend, Political Violence, 65.

The first terrorist campaign?

19

within the Liberal Party regarding exceptional laws and Morley spoke for many when he maintained that coercion acts ‘converted what ought to have been measures of police for an emergency into a substitute for a system of national government’.53 Coercion was an abusive interference in the administration of justice that created a gap between the theory and practice of government. In that gap between the two Irelands – one governed by representative institutions, the other governed by extraordinary law  – disparate realities and contrasting notions of legitimacy were juxtaposed in a manner that allowed the limits of violence to be contested by both government and resistance. Crossing the line was easier when neither side could see where it was. The principal years of the skirmishing campaign, 1881–85, coincided with a high tide of coercion in Ireland that was designed to halt pervasive agrarian unrest. The years 1881 and 1882 saw new legislation that provided for the suspension of habeas corpus; interference with the press; powers for domiciliary searches for arms or documents; curfews; special courts; and detention without trial on reasonable suspicion of involvement in intimidation, violence or ‘treasonable practices’.54 The arrests and imprisonment resulting from the new laws fuelled the dynamiters’ commitment to violent means. Militants felt vindicated by the arrests of so-called moderates and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa commented that the ‘eloquence of the most gifted of our patriots’ had done nothing to ease levels of repression. If anything, the arrests highlighted how government policy failed to distinguish between the advocates of violence and non-violence. In the face of such ‘tyranny’, Rossa argued, the best solution was a ‘canister of dynamite flung under [Gladstone’s] carriage wheels’.55 In the eyes of many nationalists, both moderate and militant, the situation was one where non-violent action was punished with severity more commonly associated with violence. This encouraged the belief, accurate or not, that ‘the government brought about the very evils which coercion was supposed to avoid’.56 The protagonists of the skirmishing campaign, similar to the militant anarchists and nihilists of the ‘era of attentats’, argued that their turn toward extreme violence was a reaction to the state’s suppression of 53 John Morley, Ten Years of Ireland, unpublished work, c. 1897–8, John Rylands University Library, Manchester. Chapter 5 reprinted in Jacob Marinus de Waard, ‘John Morley and the Liberal Imagination: The Uses of History in English Liberal Culture 1867–1914’, Ph.D. thesis, European University Institute, 2007, 379–484. 54 Virginia Crossman, Politics, Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Dublin, 1996, 224–6; Margaret O’Callaghan, British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland: Criminality, Land and the Law under Forster and Balfour, Cork, 1994, 70–94. 55 United Irishman (New York), 29 October 1881. 56 Eugenio F. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906, Cambridge, 2007, 135.

20

Introduction

other forms of protest. Yet, while this book accepts the radical critique of the liberal view of violence, in the radical analysis revolutionary violence is repeatedly explained by ‘reactions to repression’ interpretations that assume a binary composite where state and non-state actors meet in a head-on but uneven collision. State monopolies on violence should not be overemphasised in the nineteenth century. Instead, a more rewarding conception would be to view both state and non-state actors as participants in collective experimentation with the use of force. The Tillys have argued that the maintenance of order by force works: ‘it works in the short run. It works even better in the long run … the violent path is much more effective for governments than for challengers.’57 But the present study departs from this assertion in a key aspect: repression may work as an intervention in one particular sector like rebellion, but for it to work across multiple sectors the state required a monopoly on violence that did not exist in complete form in the nineteenth century. The repeated use of coercion, extraordinary laws and force to govern in nineteenth-century Ireland should not be seen as an indication of a strong, monolithic government, but rather of its experimental nature and administrative weakness. Force is not a marker of institutional power, as Hannah Arendt argued; rather ‘violence appears where power is in jeopardy’.58 It was the experimental nature of repression, not the monolithic strength of the state, that contributed most to transformations in revolutionary violence. In the nineteenth century, the state had a sort of ‘dominance without hegemony’. It did not have a monopoly on violence but it was attempting to establish one through interventions in multiple sectors. While governments could intervene decisively in crushing insurrections they were not so effective elsewhere, something evident in the resort to exceptional laws and legislation. Problems were encountered in the recruitment of the army and police forces, and deployment was often a test of reliability rather than confident display of force. Agrarian unrest in Ireland, for example, tested government competency with regard to courts and policing, but it also tested the bureaucratic machinery necessary for the collection of data used by ministers to demonstrate that unrest was serious enough to merit exceptional laws.59 Rebels endeavoured to seek 57 Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century, 1830–1930, Cambridge, MA, 1975, 285. 58 Arendt contended that violence occurred during breakdowns of consensus-based power. Violence is not politically useful as it cannot create or win power, but only destroy it. Arendt, On Violence, 56. For a critical reading see Terry Nardin, ‘Conflicting Conceptions of Political Violence’, in Cornelius P. Cotter (ed.), Political Science Annual 4, Indianapolis, 1972, 75–119 (85–9). 59 Crossman, Politics, Law and Order, 3–4.

The first terrorist campaign?

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out areas of weakness and thus participated with the state in an ongoing process of establishing legitimacy and testing the reliability of different strategies of governance and different strategies of resistance. This book analyses strategies of resistance. There was no standard model of revolutionary action in the 1800s, but disparate cases moved along a similar trajectory. Between the insurrectionary movements of the early to mid nineteenth century and the organised revolutionary parties of the early twentieth lies a field of action as yet ill-defined. Franchise reform – for example, the 1884 Act in Great Britain or the 1882 suffrage reform in Italy  – greatly expanded the electorate and created incentives for revolutionaries to participate in parliament. In Ireland, some Fenians joined the Irish Parliamentary Party and continued to do so into the twentieth century, while in Italy the anarchists Andrea Costa, Carlo Cafiero and Francesco S. Merlino ultimately embraced constitutional methods. During this transition from strategies of collective rebellion to organised participation in government, intransigents that refused to engage with constitutional politics were forced to confront the central position they afforded to violence. Keeping faith in traditional insurrection seemed quixotic, but the emergence of new technologies and explosives presented the alternative of urban guerrilla warfare. Attempts at insurrection had repeatedly failed revolutionaries in the nineteenth century, but a new generation of left-wing radicals, embittered by the bloody repression of the 1871 Paris Commune, resolved to improvise new means of continuing the revolutionary struggle. In ways similar to the Fenian dynamiters, some anarchists emphasised the destructive potential of new technologies and chemistry. Pamphlets such as Johann Most’s The Science of Revolutionary Warfare instructed readers on how to make infernal machines and handle explosives. Yet assassination attempts characterised anarchist violence to a much greater degree than bomb attacks, even if spectacular explosions in Haymarket (1886), Barcelona (1893, 1896), Paris (1892, 1894) and New York (1920) created an indelible association in the public eye. Another difference lay in the organisational approach to the ‘deed’. The Irish dynamiters were organised in hierarchical structures where orders were carried out by the rank and file. Anarchist violence was not the product of a top-down strategy, but was executed chiefly by determined individuals, sometimes connected through loose networks. Moreover, anarchists overtly rejected constitutional action as collaboration with the state, and while the dynamiters believed an independent Ireland could not be achieved without violence, they were not intrinsically hostile to constitutional politics. Many figureheads within the

22

Introduction

anarchist movement opposed individual acts of violence and assassins were frequently portrayed as victims of society, not courageous heroes, in the anarchist press.60 Despite the 1881 endorsement of propaganda of the deed there was little consensus among anarchists regarding the legitimacy of political violence, with the possible exception of the general strike, which the majority embraced as the real site of revolutionary action and where violence repeatedly surpassed that of so-called ­terrorist actions. Nihilist groups in Russia also espoused similar tactics to skirmishing. Stepniak (Sergei Kravchinsky)  – a Russian revolutionary exiled in London  – contended that in Russia, ‘a revolution, or even a rising of any importance, like those in Paris, is absolutely impossible’.61 Instead, the most effective strategy was seen as the retributive violence and sacrifices of nihilism, which would force an eventual showdown between the state and resistance. Consciously embracing ‘terrorist’, a term that both the anarchists and Fenians rejected, the nihilists justified their actions as retaliatory, a response in kind to the complete absence of political freedoms and systematic state terrorism in Russia. In the wake of Alexander II’s death, the revolutionary executive wrote, ‘the awful repressive measures of the Government called upon the stage the terrorists’.62 Stepniak proclaimed the terrorist to be ‘noble, terrible, irresistibly fascinating’, and the western press portrayed nihilists as men and women of culture.63 Nihilists were distinguished by the predominance of intellectuals among their ranks, who in turn intellectualised their actions to a greater degree than the anarchists and Fenian skirmishers. The social background of these two groups, unlike the nihilists, came from the ranks of skilled and unskilled labour. Past efforts to categorise these nineteenth-century revolutionaries have resulted in all three groups being brought under the rubric of ‘anarchist’, a term considered by some to be synonymous with violent 60 Emma Goldman, ‘The Psychology of Political Violence’ (1917), in Anarchism and Other Essays, New York, 1969, 39–65; Peter Kropotkin, ‘Anarchist Morality’ (1890), in Roger N. Baldwin (ed.), Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings, Mineola, NY, 2002 [1970], 99–101. 61 Sergei Stepniak, ‘The Terrorism’, in Kinna, Early Writings on Terrorism, Vol. I, 104; Sergei Stepniak, Underground Russia: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life, London, 1883. 62 ‘Letter Sent by the Revolutionary Executive Committee to Alexander III at His Accession to the Throne, March 10, 1881’, in Kinna, Early Writings on Terrorism, Vol. I, 84. 63 Stepniak, ‘The Terrorism’, 112; Choi Chatterjee, ‘Transnational Romance, Terror, and Heroism: Russia in American Popular Fiction, 1860–1917’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50 (2008), 753–77.

The first terrorist campaign?

23

methods rather than political goals.64 In 1959, Eric Hobsbawm proposed the category of ‘primitive rebels’ to describe groups who resorted to revolutionary violence when faced with severe socio-economic hardships. These ‘millenarians’ stood in contrast to their twentieth-century counterparts who adopted the political attitude and organisation of modernity.65 Yet the interaction of the skirmishers, nihilists and anarchists with processes of modernity  – technology, communications, mobility – challenges Hobsbawm’s approach, as it places them, at the very least, on the fringe of the ‘primitive’ category. The search for a usable past in the wake of the September 2001 attacks has resulted in a tendency to locate the genesis of modern terrorism in the late nineteenth century, which saw the first ‘wave of international terrorism’.66 The year 2009, for example, saw new books by Claudia Verhoeven, Beverly Gage and John Merriman, all of whom argue that the activities of anarchist and socialist revolutionaries during the fin de siècle presaged the extreme violence of the twenty-first century.67 The Fenians have also been isolated as protagonists of this process. Walter Laqueur has referred to ‘the Irish terrorists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’. Two months after the July 2005 bombings, an article in History Today saw an ‘alarming parallel’ between the skirmishing campaign of the 1880s and the attacks on the London Underground, while Lindsay Clutterbuck’s work on British policing (2004) has accounted for how it was transformed by the dynamiters, or, as he calls them, the ‘progenitors of terrorism’.68 Jonathan Gantt (2010) 64 Michael J. Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists: A History of the Red Terror, Chicago, 1889. Schaak was a Chicago police captain who investigated both the Clan-na-Gael (1887) and the Haymarket anarchists (1886). 65 Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Manchester, 1959, 57. 66 David C. Rapoport, ‘The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism’, in A. K. Cronin and J. M. Ludes (eds.), Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy, Washington, DC, 2004, 47–52; Kinna, Early Writings on Terrorism, Vol. I, xxi–xl; Richard Bach Jensen, ‘Daggers, Rifles and Dynamite: Anarchist Terrorism in Nineteenth Century Europe’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 16 (2004), 116–53; Marie Fleming, ‘Propaganda by the Deed: Terrorism and Anarchist Theory in Late Nineteenth Century Europe’, in Yonah Alexander and Kenneth A. Myers (eds.), Terrorism in Europe, London, 1982, 8–28. 67 Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in Its First Age of Terror, Oxford, 2009; John Merriman, The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror, Boston, MA, 2009; Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism, Ithaca, NY, 2009. 68 Walter Laqueur, No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century, New York, 2004, 12–13; Roland Quinault, ‘Underground Attacks: Roland Quinault Finds Alarming Parallels for the Recent London Bomb Attacks in the 1880s’, History Today, 55 (2005), 18–19 (18); Lindsay Clutterbuck, ‘Countering Irish Republican Terrorism in Britain: Its Origins as a Police Function’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 18 (2006),

24

Introduction

has synthesised the actions of the IRB, the dynamiters, Land Leaguers and the IRA during the period 1865–1922 under the heading ‘Irish terrorism’. The response of elites in the USA to Irish political violence, the author argues, gave rise to ‘the antecedents of contemporary American anti-terrorist ideology’.69 ‘Terrorist’ has become what Raymond Williams would have called a ‘keyword’: a word in whose shifting meaning there are social and political stakes. When understood as the ‘use of terror’, the word terrorism has a long history. Terror and fear (Deimos and Phobos) were the sons of Ares, the god of war in Greek mythology, and, undoubtedly, terrorism has similarities with war. In fact, the most persistent problem with defining terrorism, according to Charles Townshend, is the failure ‘to discriminate between the particular concept of terrorism and the general concept of war’.70 The use of terror came to be reified in revolutionary France during the 1790s and the term therefore entered the English language as a descriptive term for state violence. By the late nineteenth century, however, the term was shifting from the state to revolutionaries. Today, the term terrorist is flung widely at many diverse phenomena, yet it is so weighed down with all sorts of doubts, ambiguities and polemics that its analytical value is difficult to assess. Unlike war, terrorism has no Clausewitz.71 In 1998, the international community could not reach agreement on a legal definition of terrorism when finalising the statutes of the International Criminal Court in Rome. Moreover, as Martha Crenshaw has noted, it can be difficult to separate concepts of terrorism from their political contexts: ‘what one calls things matters … the meanings of terms change to fit a changing context. Concepts follow politics.’72 The political climate of the twenty-first century has clearly pushed the history of terrorism up research agendas. Yet, it is necessary ‘to look 95–118, and ‘The Progenitors of Terrorism: Russian Revolutionaries or Extreme Irish Republicans?’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 16 (2004), 154–81. Jonathan W. Gantt, Irish Terrorism in the Atlantic Community, 1865–1922, Basingstoke, 2010, 10. 70 Charles Townshend, ‘The Process of Terror in Irish Politics’, in Noel O’Sullivan (ed.), Terrorism, Ideology and Revolution, London, 1986, 89; Peter Calvert, ‘Terror in the Theory of Revolution’, in ibid., 27. 71 On the problems involved in conceptualising terrorism, see Fernando Reinares, ‘Terrorism’, in W. Heitmeyer and J. Hagan (eds.), International Handbook of Violence Research, London, 2003, 309–21; Martha Crenshaw, ‘Relating Terrorism to Historical Contexts’, in Martha Crenshaw (ed.), Terrorism in Context, University Park, 1995, 3–23; Peter H. Merkl, ‘Approaches to the Study of Political Violence’, in Peter H. Merkl (ed.), Political Violence and Terror: Motifs and Motivations, Berkeley, 1986, 19–60. 72 Crenshaw, ‘Relating Terrorism to Historical Contexts’, 7. 69

The first terrorist campaign?

25

at the present through reversed binoculars’ when investigating terror and political violence in the past.73 ‘Terrorism’ should be used reluctantly, if at all, in order to establish analytic clarity in murky areas. Twenty-first-century vocabularies obfuscate clear thinking on the past, just as the weight of paramilitary violence in Northern Ireland coloured historical accounts of turned centuries in Irish history.74 This is not to argue that historians should shrug off the responsibility for any contemporary implications of their work, or pretend they are free of the silent circumstances that sway our judgements. But approaching ‘terrorism’ prudently is a mechanism against recent problems preventing clear thinking on the past. The era of attentats was certainly an important stage in the history of terrorism, and parallels with twenty-firstcentury events can be found. The dynamiters targeted one London Underground station that was again rocked by blasts in 2005, while their empty threats to explode devices aboard transatlantic passenger ships disturbingly predicted the 1988 bombing of a transatlantic flight, as well as two failed attempts in 2001 and 2009. Yet, to trace a direct path between the dynamiters and the terrorism of the 2000s is too simplified an approach. If anything else, it is impeded by the sizable obstacles of the two world wars, when concepts of terrorism and indiscriminate violence changed profoundly. When defining the character of political movements, it is helpful to bear in mind what the relevant actors called themselves. Existing studies on the Fenian dynamiters agree that ‘terrorist’ ‘was a term they never applied to themselves’.75 Neither did others apply it to them. In 1887–9, The Times’ attempt to link constitutional politician Charles Stewart Parnell to dynamite attacks and assassination were asserted in articles entitled ‘Parnellism and Crime’, not ‘Parnellism and Terrorism’.76 In the British and Irish mainstream newspapers of the time, terrorism referred to systematic and endemic intimidation by threats of force, and was used in the context of autocratic repression, electoral violence or agrarian violence in rural Ireland. With these considerations in mind, then, terrorism is largely avoided in this book as it invokes certain legal conventions and analogies with more recent historical events, and cannot be used neutrally.77 Political violence is defined as the reasoned use

73 Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Fear Reverence Terror: Reading Hobbes Today’, Max Weber Lecture Series, Florence, May 2008, 1. 74 Boyce, ‘Past and Present’, 227. 75 Short, The Dynamite War, 1; Clutterbuck, ‘The Progenitors of Terrorism’, 161. 76 The Times, 1 and 20 May, 1 and 7 June 1887. 77 Martha Crenshaw, ‘Relating Terrorism to Historical Contexts’, 7.

26

Introduction

of force in order to cause damage to persons or property through deeds ascribed political meaning by the actors involved. Irish American Congressman John F. Finerty asserted in his journal The Citizen that ‘if dynamite has ever been used in London, it was evidently not for wanton destruction but to produce a political effect … [Irishmen] employed it as a political agency’.78 Yet, the question of what constitutes the political can become so idiosyncratic that analysis is muddied. Can violence be described as political? When described as violent, political movements are too quickly essentialised or categorised as illegal.79 Absorbing the impact of social and cultural approaches to history, so-called ‘new political history’ has reconstituted political space and the people inside it, opening up perspectives from below on terrain traditionally viewed from the top down, and complementing the focus on non-state actors found in transnational studies. Building on the Schmittian view of politics as a sphere of intensive bargaining, here we find that the political, rather than being synonymous with the state and official activity, constitutes a dynamic space of communication that traverses multiple domains.80 Departing from the noisy scenes on the official stage permits us to draw upon different sites of activity in the triangulated field of the local, national and transnational. Rather than viewing violence as the rejection of political work located in a linear trajectory leading toward bureaucratic organisation, party-political participation and so on, this book understands it to be a mechanism of symbolic communication within the frame of struggles for power. Violence was not intrinsically hostile to nineteenth-century politics, but was situated inside the political process itself as a form of dialogue. This is not to say that it was shaped by discursive practices alone; material conditions mattered, as will be demonstrated in the following chapters. Yet this book owes much to the idea that to understand violence means to approach it as a form of politics, a bargaining tool in the negotiation process between state and opposition, army and protestor, friend and foe. 78 The Citizen, quoted in the Brooklyn Eagle, 25 July 1886. 79 Nardin, ‘Conflicting Conceptions of Political Violence’, 97–9. 80 Stephen Fielding, ‘Looking for the New Political History’, Journal of Contemporary History, 42 (2007), 515–24; Susan Pederson, ‘What Is Political History Now?’, in David Cannadine (ed.), What Is History Now?, New York, 2002, 36–56.

1

End of insurrection? Ireland and the post-1848 revolutionary world

The use of violence as an agent of political change was completely remodelled during the nineteenth century, and the 1848 revolutions, at the century’s mid-point, were key to those transformations.1 For nationalists and republicans, 1848 represented the concluding part of a lesson that had begun in 1830–1. This lesson irrefutably illustrated that, when faced with insurrection, government forces could intervene effectively and were never reluctant to punch their full military weight. These defeats led revolutionaries to regroup and reconsider their approaches to insurrectionary warfare. As a consequence, the emphasis shifted from programmes of insurrection to ideas of irregular warfare that incorporated the surgical use of violence against the state by individuals and guerrilla bands. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the development of unconventional tactics situated both state and resistance in a reciprocal process of experimentation that assimilated new strategies, routines and actors of political violence. In Ireland, the combination of a paramilitary-style constabulary, the army and intermittent resorts to extraordinary powers meant insurrection had value as a political statement only and held no chance of success. After the 1867 rising, Archbishop Leahy of Cashel forcefully urged the abandonment of Fenianism not, surprisingly, because of its political programme, but because it held no hope of success against ‘a very large army, fully equipped, highly disciplined, supplemented by an efficient body of constabulary, and capable of being reinforced by a hundred thousand, if need were two hundred thousand, volunteers and militia men … there could not well be a more unequal match’.2 On this point there was agreement across 1 Dieter Langewiesche and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, ‘The European Revolution of 1848: Its Political and Social Reforms, Its Politics of Nationalism, and Its Short- and LongTerm Consequences’, in Dieter Dowe, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Dieter Langewiesche and Jonathan Sperber (eds.), Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform, Oxford, 2001, 1–23. 2 Archbishop Leahy of Cashel to Freeman’s Journal (Dublin), 14 March 1867.

27

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Ireland and the post-1848 revolutionary world

the ideological spectrum. In the 1880s, Friedrich Engels argued that an uprising had ‘not the slightest chance’, as present in Ireland were ‘14,000 men of the “Constabulary”, gendarmes, who are armed with rifles and bayonets and have undergone military training. Besides, there are about 30,000 regulars, who could be easily reinforced with an equal number of regulars and English militia.’3 The growth of the state’s monopoly on violence forced rebels to consider alternatives to insurrection and improvise new ways of contesting the state. In the aftermath of the 1867 uprising, when some guerrillastyle actions were undertaken by a small band of Fenians in the southwest of Ireland, the Home Secretary Gathorne Hardy suggested to the Chief Secretary of Ireland that an outright rebellion would be preferable to sporadic, small-scale violence: ‘one almost wishes that these smouldering fires would break out that we might act more vigorously’.4 Insurrections were easily crushed but this was not always the case in different sectors and when different tactics were employed. The Fenians consciously looked beyond Ireland for successful models of revolution and were happy to borrow from transnational circulations in the post-1848 world. The spatial co-ordinations of Fenianism are regularly located on the New York–Dublin axis, but here our attention turns to Europe in order to examine configurations beyond Irish America. At the same time, the ambiguity with which the Fenians approached Continental revolutionaries should not be overlooked. Even when religious factors are left to one side, Irish nationalism had a complicated relationship with European ideologies and ideologues. Though Italian republicanism provided the most successful contemporary model for its Irish counterpart, the Fenians kept their distance from Mazzini and Garibaldi. Colin Barr and Jennifer O’Brien have demonstrated the difficulties that faced Irish nationalists who sympathised with the Risorgimento democrats owing to high levels of pro-papal sentiment in Ireland during the 1860s. Desmond Ryan pointed to Fenian membership of Parisian secret societies and connections with Carbonari organisations, but later works by Comerford and Ramón revised Ryan’s appraisal and highlighted the limitations of the Fenians’ active participation in Continental revolutionary societies. John Newsinger has analysed the extent to which Fenians shared early socialist ideas espoused by British Chartists and European 3 Friedrich Engels to Eduard Bernstein, 26 June 1882, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question: A Collection of Writings, New York, 1972, 334–5. 4 Home Secretary Gathorne Hardy to Chief Secretary of Ireland, Earl of Mayo, 1 January 1868, Mayo Papers, MS 11164. Quoted in Leon Ó Broin, Fenian Fever: An Anglo-American Dilemma, New York, 1971, 218.

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29

radicals. Similarly to Ryan, this interesting study focused on ideological exchanges and influences.5 Instead, the present chapter examines more practical exchanges and how the Fenians sought to acquire the nuts and bolts of a revolution via Continental connections. The reformulation of revolutionary strategies in post-1848 Europe provided the backdrop against which militant Irish nationalism developed. Italy, in particular, makes for interesting ground to investigate transnational links and parallels owing to the presence of a revolutionary tradition that turned, during the same period, from insurrection to guerrilla tactics and eventually to propaganda of the deed.

The Fenians and the Irish insurrectionary tradition

Irish society was inclined, in the words of one historian, to ‘cast a nostalgic look over its shoulder’,6 and revolutionary nationalists tended to look more than others. In 1916 the rebels spoke openly of inheriting a physical-force tradition that had been passed between generations, but the fact stands that throughout the long nineteenth century there were no historical precedents of successful political insurrection in Ireland. A bloody, widespread rebellion was quelled in 1798, and in the following century three uprisings, in 1803, 1848 and 1867, collapsed so quickly that one historian dismissed them as ‘botched, pathetic farces’.7 The value of the ultimate attempt in 1916 continues to stoke debate.8 As these rebellions differed in scale and intensity, so did the official response, with recourse to emergency powers of varied measure and forcefulness. On each occasion, both sides were caught up in cycles of violence that left little room for compromise: rebels were committed to violent action and government forces were unceasing in their determination to suppress them. 5 Desmond Ryan, The Fenian Chief: A Biography of James Stephens, Dublin, 1967; John Newsinger, ‘Old Chartists, Fenians and New Socialists’, Éire-Ireland, 17 (1982), 19–45; R. V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–82, Dublin, 1998 [1985], 38–9; Jennifer O’Brien, ‘Irish Public Opinion and the Risorgimento 1859–1860’, Irish Historical Studies, 135 (2005), 289–305; Marta Ramón, A Provisional Dictator: James Stephens and the Fenian Movement, Dublin, 2007, 49–62; Colin Barr, ‘Giuseppe Mazzini and Irish Nationalism, 1845–70’, in E. F. Biagini and C. A. Bayly (eds.), Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism 1830–1920, Oxford, 2008, 125–44. 6 M. A. G. Ó Tuathaigh, Ireland before the Famine, 1798–1848, Dublin, 1972, 1. 7 Michael Laffan, ‘Violence and Terror in Twentieth Century Ireland’, in W. J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld (eds.), Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe, London, 1982, 156. 8 For the most recent interventions see Fearghal McGarry, The Rising. Ireland: Easter 1916, Oxford, 2010; Charles Townshend, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion, London, 2006.

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Ireland and the post-1848 revolutionary world

The United Irishmen rebellion in 1798  – the result of an alliance between a mainly Catholic agrarian secret society called the Defenders and a non-denominational middle-class leadership  – was marked by gruesome brutality on both sides and resulted in the deaths of some 30,000 people. The rebellion in the south-east corner of the island alone has been referred to as ‘the single most destructive war in Irish history, in relative terms’. Aware of the United Irishmen’s plans for insurrection thanks to a robust network of spies, the government were ready to tighten the lid on unrest. Powered by the Insurrection Act the regular army, a yeomanry corps and paid militias crushed the rebellion.9 In 1803, Robert Emmet’s abortive uprising in Dublin was effectively smothered by official forces and would perhaps have been forgotten were it not for Emmet’s oratorical performance in court before his execution.10 The overriding consequence of the 1798 rebellion was the Act of Union, which in 1801 established the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and dissolved the Irish parliament. One hundred Irish ministers now travelled to Westminster, but an unelected executive administration remained in Dublin Castle. A predictable result of failed insurrection was to question the efficacy of violence as an agent of political change, and in the first half of the century Daniel O’Connell pursued parliamentary reform before violent upheaval. His movement for Catholic emancipation and organisation of ‘monster meetings’ in favour of the repeal of the Act of Union were non-violent affairs. A crucial moment came in 1843, when Robert Peel banned what was intended to be the largest ever monster meeting on the day before it was due to take place at Clontarf. O’Connell agreed to call the meeting off, but was criticised by contemporary nationalists for his timidity and remembered by future ones for dodging conflict and squandering a potential revolutionary moment.11 O’Connell had to weigh the possibility of whether the government would throw its full might behind the suppression of the meeting: given the history of 9 Daniel Gahan, ‘The Rebellion of 1798 in South Leinster’, in Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan, 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective, Dublin, 2003, 104–21 (104); Nancy J. Curtin, ‘The Transformation of the Society of United Irishmen into a Mass-Based Revolutionary Organisation, 1794–6’, Irish Historical Studies, 24 (1985), 463–92. 10 The bicentennial of Emmet’s rebellion produced a string of new biographies: Patrick M. Geoghegan, Robert Emmet: A Life, Dublin, 2002; Ruan O’Donnell, Robert Emmet and the Rising of 1803, Dublin, 2003; Marianne Elliott, Robert Emmet: The Making of a Legend, London, 2003. 11 Patrick Geoghegan, Liberator: The Life and Death of Daniel O’Connell, 1830–1847, Dublin, 2010, 162–5; D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, London, 1995, 167–9.

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counterinsurgency in Ireland along with the fact that Peel had already given the army orders to act, serious bloodshed would have most likely resulted. In the mid 1840s the Young Ireland group became prominent among O’Connell’s critics, although they were initially his allies in the Repeal Association. From its beginnings the Young Ireland movement was characterised by romantic views of nationalism that advanced a culturally homogeneous and non-sectarian patria. Their name echoed continental societies like Young Italy and Young Germany, but it was originally coined by others, as a pejorative term to evoke ‘Young England’, a conservative clique. The Young Irelanders were radical by comparison, but they did not instantly identify with Continental republicanism, and only after events in Europe in 1848 did they adopt republican positions.12 Tensions had previously developed within the Repeal Association over associations with the Whig Party and when, in 1846, O’Connell demanded that the Young Irelanders condemn the use of violence and adopt his ‘Peace Resolutions’, he provoked a split that led to the establishment of the Irish Confederation. The new organisation’s programme generally privileged property holders, but the Dublin ‘Confederate Clubs’ allowed space for reformist ideas that echoed Chartism in Britain, while the writings of James Fintan Lalor and John Mitchel directly addressed questions of land reform. Mitchel increasingly advocated a more militant nationalism in response to the social distress caused by the continuing Famine, which he unambiguously blamed on the British government. Unhappy with the moderation of his associates, Mitchel withdrew from the Confederation in 1848 and began advocating a ‘public conspiracy’ in his own newspaper, The United Irishman.13 In 1848, news of events in Italy and France moved members of the Confederation closer to Mitchel’s view of revolt. The rhetoric of The Nation assumed a more radical air and six members of the Confederation travelled to Paris to meet the Provisional Government. This trip amounted to little as the French leaders were clearly reluctant to intervene in Irish affairs, but the events of 1848 did alarm the British government who had long viewed Ireland as a likely avenue for a French invasion. When Mitchel was arrested and sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation that May after calling for the scenes in Milan and 12 Richard P. Davis, The Young Ireland Movement, Dublin, 1988, 56–7. 13 Ramón, A Provisional Dictator, 17–18; Takashi Koseki, Dublin Confederate Clubs and 1848, Tokyo, 1992; Bryan P. McGovern. John Mitchel: Irish Nationalist, Southern Secessionist, Knoxville, 2009, 57–86.

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Ireland and the post-1848 revolutionary world

Paris to be repeated in Ireland, support for insurrection was palpable in many Confederate Clubs.14 Ireland experienced a decidedly less dramatic 1848 when compared with Paris or Palermo, and John Belchem has observed how plans for the uprising were in some cases viewed with more enthusiasm by the Irish abroad than those in the home country.15 Nonetheless, the year was a significant marker of the direction of the nationalist movement. In July 1848, the Young Ireland leader William Smith O’Brien and a group of poorly armed confederates sought to stir up popular support for insurrection through symbolic actions in county Tipperary. Yet circumstances were not congenial to revolt. The suspension of habeas corpus and pre-emptive arrests had thrown the movement into disarray. The rebels’ timing was determined by the increasing repression, but a population exhausted by famine was ill-prepared to engage forcefully in rebellion, especially before the year’s harvest had been saved. Though 6,000 volunteers turned out to drill and erect barricades in one part of Tipperary, they soon dispersed as they were unable to feed themselves, and the leaders prohibited the confiscation of food. The main flashpoint of the rising, at Ballingarry, proved humiliating and demoralising for those involved and came to be ignominiously referred to in the British press as the ‘Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch’. The name derived from an encounter between a group of over eighty rebels and a troop of forty-six constables. The latter immediately retreated and barricaded themselves inside a local dwelling, belonging to the Widow McCormack, while outside the rebels waited in the garden. After a daylong stand off, reinforcements arrived and the group of insurgents  – which hostile reports claimed to consist of more unarmed women and children than men – was dispersed.16 Two months later John O’Mahony and Michael Doheny carried out some guerrilla-style operations under the shelter of local sympathy in Tipperary, Waterford and Kilkenny. Official unease was briefly stirred by the rural rebels whom local officials described as ‘guerrilla banditti’, whose ‘strength consists in their power of harassing and fatiguing us’.17 14 Christine Kinealy, Repeal and Revolution: 1848 in Ireland, Manchester, 2009, 136– 47; Gary Owens, ‘Popular Mobilisation and the Rising of 1848: The Clubs of the Irish Confederation’, in Laurence Geary (ed.), Rebellion and Remembrance in Modern Ireland, Dublin, 2001, 51–63; McGovern, John Mitchel, 76. 15 John Belchem, ‘Nationalism, Republicanism, and Exile: Irish Emigrants and the Revolutions of 1848’, Past & Present, 146 (1995), 103–35. 16 Ramón, A Provisional Dictator, 34–45; Robert Sloan, William Smith O’Brien and the Young Ireland Rebellion of 1848, Dublin, 2000. 17 Resident Magistrate Coulson, Carrick-on-Suir, 13 September 1848. Quoted in Brian Sayers, ‘John O’Mahony: Revolutionary and Scholar’, Ph.D. thesis, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, 2005, 125.

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Attacks were made on barracks in an attempt to launch more widespread unrest, but the rebels had little success and were soon arrested. Nonetheless, the guerrilla attacks did unsettle officials in the area who found it difficult to identify the participants. Though O’Mahony aimed ultimately to provoke an insurrection, the guerrilla actions revealed that rebels were not unconditionally wedded to open insurrection and were prepared to employ irregular tactics even if they were a short-term expedient. Indeed, in 1848 the Confederate Clubs had lectured on ‘the chemical properties of sulphur, nitrate, and charcoal, with their compounds as gunpowder &c’.18 In 1849, further plans for armed action led to only one attack on a police barracks in Waterford, in the south-east of the country. The rebels failed to capture the barracks and, again, the attempt to spark rebellion was a washout.19 The collapse of insurrection and the lack of secrecy surrounding preparations forged a stronger commitment among the younger rebels to master techniques of conspiracy and insurrectionary warfare. The future leaders of the Fenian movement  – James Stephens and John O’Mahony – had participated in the events of July and September 1848, and John O’Leary in the 1849 collapse. Stephens had fled to Paris to avoid arrest after the Ballingarry affair, and O’Mahony later joined him there. Both men left Ireland disillusioned with their part in the 1848 ‘disgrace’, and resolved to use their time in Paris to observe secret societies and master techniques of revolution, and to learn, in the words of fellow Young Ireland veteran John Savage, how ‘an indisciplined mob can be most readily and effectually matched against a mercenary army of “professional cutthroats”’.20 A decade later, Stephens established the IRB in Dublin, and O’Mahony the Fenian Brotherhood in New York. Beyond the appeal of ‘striking-out’ against occupation and injustice, Fenianism offered an alternative to a staid political climate dominated by fixed elites. Constitutional or moderate expressions of nationalism had been largely unchallenged during the 1850s, but were nonetheless damaged by the decision of Irish MPs William Keogh and John Sadleir in 1855 to leave the Irish Party and join the Aberdeen government, taking up positions in the Irish administration. In the following decade, Fenianism gathered support and momentum, raising aspirations of independence and also of land redistribution. The recruitment campaign begun by 18 Quoted in Ramón, A Provisional Dictator, 20. 19 A. M. Breen, The Cappoquin Rebellion 1849, Thurston, 1998; Ramón, A Provisional Dictator, 56; Marcus Bourke, John O’Leary: A Study in Irish Separatism, Tralee, 1967, 20–9. 20 John O’Mahony, quoted in Ryan, The Fenian Chief, 53; John Savage, Fenian Heroes and Martyrs, Boston, MA, 1868, 307.

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James Stephens and Thomas Clarke Luby showed early signs of success, and they assimilated members of the Cork-based Phoenix National and Literary Society, established in 1856 by Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa for the advancement of militant nationalism. Further recruitment campaigns involving Joseph Deniffe, Edward Duffy, O’Donovan Rossa and, in the army, the Mexican War veteran ‘Pagan’ O’Leary and John Devoy, stoked up widespread interest in Fenianism and established an organisational base of some 50,000 members by 1865.21 Along with memoir literature, the newspaper The Irish People is one of the few points of entry into Fenian attitudes during the 1860s. If Machiavelli thought that ‘the best conspiracies are those done secretly’, the Fenians differed, and in 1863 they began publishing a weekly paper. Several IRB members expressed reservations, but Stephens asserted that the secret society needed to become public, at least in part, in order to sustain the growing momentum and provide an outward representation of nationalist sentiment when its true expression  – rebellion  – was not yet ready. The main contributors to the newspaper were John O’Leary, Thomas Clarke Luby, Charles Kickham and occasionally Stephens, and articles mixed affinities for French republicanism, anticlericalism and belief that the work of the IRB was located in a trajectory of insurrectionary action that travelled through the rebellions of 1798 and 1848.22 The paper reached a circulation of 8,000, but many copies were sent to the diaspora and it is unknown what portion of this readership was in Ireland. In September 1865, the authorities closed down the paper after two years in print and the staff were arrested and imprisoned. Historian Marcus Bourke’s description of The Irish People as ‘the most brilliant organ of advanced Irish nationalist thought in Ireland’ during the period from the 1840s until the turn of the century is effusive, but Comerford’s evaluation of it as a money-making venture rather than a forum for propaganda understates its significance.23 In her study of James Stephens, Marta Ramón argues that the newspaper helped maintain cohesion between distant Fenian groups, served as a vehicle to respond publicly to attacks on the IRB and, above all, extended a challenge ‘not only to the elite of “trusted leaders”, but to the middle 21 Ramón, A Provisional Dictator, 80–2, 105, 142, 170; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 124–5. 22 The Irish People (Dublin), 5 December 1863; 28 January, 9 and 16 September 1865. 23 Marcus Bourke, Introduction, in John O’Leary, Recollections of Fenians and Fenianism, 2 vols., Shannon, 1969, Vol. I, x; Bourke, John O’Leary, 50–84; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 98, 108; James Stephens to John O’Mahony, 14 December 1863, NYPL, MCIHP, Box 4, Folder 64.

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and upper classes as a whole’. With strong echoes of Mitchel’s United Irishman, The Irish People advocated democratic republicanism and the redistribution of wealth, which in Ireland was understood as land reform.24 Matthew Kelly has also noted the newspaper’s class-based hostility to government and how its writers sought ‘to create a new Irish man, someone able to think differently about the world’. An international dimension informed the paper’s approach and writers discussed Ireland in terms of empire, particularly contemporary events in India and Jamaica.25 From the outset, the Fenian movement held a visceral attachment to the land question, and the 1867 Proclamation to the Irish People of the World by the Provisional Government declared that successful revolution would occasion the removal of ‘the aristocratic locusts, whether English or Irish, who have eaten the verdure of our fields’.26 Desmond Ryan maintained that references to land redistribution in the Proclamation ‘bore all the marks of General Cluseret and some Irish-American Fenians with strong land-nationalisation and semi-socialistic views’, rather than those of the Dublin leadership.27 This impression would seem to be borne out by the Irish People editor John O’Leary, who remarked in 1881, ‘Fenians and the like were purely political and national; Land Leaguers … have no political object in view, but simply, as they say, a social one, or as others say, an anti-social one’.28 Yet O’Leary’s views on social reform, as Marcus Bourke highlighted, were not representative of the Fenian movement, and Ryan’s criticism is directed more at the IRB’s failure to organise their views on social reform theoretically, rather than an absence of reformist sentiment in general. Many articles in The Irish People proceeded from the implicit assumption that land redistribution would automatically follow independence, but no concrete programme for land reform was visible. Once the political dam was opened social reforms would flow through, but the idea that a social revolution would come before the Irish nation reached fulfilment was not readily imaginable. The ideological debates that characterised other nationalisms on the Continent and beyond were not found in The Irish People. Empathy with 24 Ramón, A Provisional Dictator, 141–59 (153). 25 Matthew Kelly, ‘The Irish People and the Disciplining of Dissent’, in Fearghal McGarry and James McConnel (eds.), The Black Hand of Republicanism: Fenianism in Modern Ireland, Dublin, 2009, 34–52 (35). 26 Proclamation to the Irish People of the World by the Provisional Government, 1867. Reprinted in Alan O’Day and John Stevenson (eds.), Irish Historical Documents since 1800, Dublin, 1992, 77. 27 Ryan, The Fenian Chief, 240. 28 John O’Leary to The Irishman, 19 March 1881.

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Polish nationalists was expressed, events in France were monitored weekly and pieces on prominent radical thinkers, such as Proudhon, appeared intermittently.29 Yet the paper theorised neither nationalism nor republicanism, and was conspicuously silent regarding Italy. Given the timing of the IRB and the Fenian Brotherhood, an apparently obvious source of inspiration might have been the Italian Risorgimento. Yet Fenians were wary of clerical propaganda that depicted associations with Italian republicans as pacts with the devil. ‘As long as the Italian question remained unsettled’, Colin Barr has noted, ‘it was fatal for any group that wished to draw on Irish Catholic support to allow itself to be linked with Italian nationalism in general and Mazzini in particular’.30 The IRB struggled with ultramontane sentiment in Ireland and open statements of sympathy and support for Garibaldi or Mazzini could easily become counterproductive, and strengthen the hand of hostile clergymen. The truculent archbishop of Dublin, and later cardinal, Paul Cullen, lived in Rome for almost three decades and was rector of the Irish College in Rome during the 1849 republic. He trenchantly opposed republicans and secret societies. Weekly articles in The Irish People, calling for an end to priests in politics, led Cullen to fear that Mazzini’s anti-clericalism had infected Ireland, and he denounced the Fenians as members of godless, foreign conspiracies.31 Cullen also maintained that Irish Americans had somehow hoodwinked Irishmen into a republican programme they were too naive to see through. In 1866, Cullen’s pastoral address warned parishioners that ‘Fenianism has been very beneficial in a temporal point of view to its leaders and chiefs in America … But what was gain for them has been ruin for their unfortunate dupes in this country, who have to deplore the miseries and calamities which they have brought on themselves and families.’32 Vehement attacks on heretic Continental ideologues were a staple element of the sermons of local priests, the Dublin archbishop and the Papacy itself, and made the task of the secular republican a difficult one. Rhetorical explosions at the pulpit were common and Cullen was at times surpassed by Bishop Moriarty of Kerry, who bellowed about hell and eternity, neither of which was hot enough nor long enough for the Fenian leaders.33 Aside from a deeply ingrained hostility to socialist 29 The Irish People, 28 January 1865. 30 Barr, ‘Giuseppe Mazzini and Irish Nationalism’, 142; Emmet J. Larkin, The Consolidation of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, 1860–1870, Dublin, 1987. 31 Barr, ‘Giuseppe Mazzini and Irish Nationalism’, 141; For an account of Cullen’s achievements see Joseph Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848–1918, Dublin, 2008 [1973], 42–9. 32 Paul Cullen, quoted in The Nation (Dublin), 3 February 1866. 33 Bishop Moriarty, quoted in The Irishman, 23 February 1867.

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ideologies and notions of revolution, the clergy also feared that secular rank-and-file Fenians would challenge the Irish priests’ roles as community leaders in towns and villages across the country.34 Divisions were not diametric, however: several clergymen (notably Patrick Lavelle and John MacHale) were sympathetic to Fenianism, and many Fenians, though politically secular, were practising Catholics and nourished the idea of subject Catholic Ireland fighting Protestant English dominance. Irish hostility to Continental revolution, and Garibaldi in particular, was stridently evident in the Irish Papal Brigade of 1860 and the anti-Garibaldi riots that took place in Ireland and Great Britain in 1862. In 1860, the moderate nationalist Alexander Martin Sullivan recalled that a ‘feeling of uneasiness and apprehension spread throughout Ireland … that on one ground or another the Pope would be openly attacked and further despoiled’.35 In the spring of 1860, when Count Charles MacDonnell of Vienna came to Sullivan’s offices requesting Irish volunteers to defend Rome, Sullivan believed 30,000 could be found and he immediately set about organising a brigade. His estimate was grossly exaggerated, however, and a more likely figure of between 800 and 1,300 made the journey to Italy. The ‘Battalion of St Patrick’ consisted of clerks, farmers, labourers and gentlemen, and some IRB men in search of military training. They were dispersed throughout the papal army and, after brief campaigns in September 1860, most of the Irish brigade surrendered at Spoleto and then Macerata in the face of the vastly superior forces of the Piedmontese army. On their return, they were immediately lauded as heroes by the church and benevolence funds were established, though some came home embittered by their experience and critical of the church, an outcome that didn’t surprise the Catholic hierarchy.36 The Irish Papal Brigade provided an odd recruiting ground for the secular Fenian movement. Both the IRB and the dynamiters of the 1880s counted ex-Papal Brigadiers among their number. Perhaps the most notable career was that of John Kirwan, who served in the Dublin Artillery Militia and the DMP in the 1850s. In 1860, he joined the Papal Brigade in Italy and later, in 1867, he commanded the Dublin 34 Owen McGee, The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood from the Land League to Sinn Fein, Dublin, 2005, 28; Eugenio F. Biagini, ‘Liberty and Nationalism in Ireland, 1798–1922’ (review article), The Historical Journal, 51 (2008), 793–809 (795). 35 A. M. Sullivan, New Ireland, 2 vols., London, 1877, Vol. II, 31. 36 Ibid., 40; G. F. H. Berkeley, The Irish Battalion in the Papal Army, Dublin, 1929, 32–9; O’Brien, ‘Irish Public Opinion’, 298–301; Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero, New Haven, 2007, 302–3.

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Fenians who attacked barracks at Stepaside and Glencullen. He was subsequently arrested but escaped to New York where he became a prominent Irish American nationalist. In 1884 Kirwan supported Patrick Ford’s renewed calls for a dynamite campaign, advocating bomb attacks to ‘carry the war of retribution into the homes and hearts of England’. In the 1890s Nicholas Gosselin, then head of the Secret Service, suspected that Kirwan was channelling financial support and hardware to militant nationalists in Dublin.37 Another Papal Brigadier was ‘Red’ Jim McDermott, an IRB man who became infamous for his activities as an agent provocateur during the dynamite campaign.38 Thomas O’Malley Baines also went to Italy in 1860 and subsequently became a prominent Dublin Fenian and a Clan-na-Gael sympathiser in San Francisco.39 Similarly, P. J. Gordon had enlisted in the Papal Brigade and later became a Fenian and land reform agitator who made anti-clerical speeches during the Land War.40 Opposing them, on the side of the republicans, there was at least one future Fenian. Joe Murray, who had emigrated as a child to Manchester, travelled from that city in 1859 to join Garibaldi’s Redshirts. Murray later fought in the American Civil War and afterwards became a member of the Fenian Brotherhood, but deviated from orthodox nationalism to enter the American labour movement.41 The apparent paradox of Irish nationalists actively opposing Garibaldi did not go unnoticed. George Henry Moore, MP for Mayo, argued that British sympathy for Italian unification and indifference toward Ireland were no excuse for Irish hostility toward Italy. Instead, the Risorgimento should have been an example to the Irish as they effectively used propaganda to win English liberals and republicans over to their cause. For Moore, a more efficient tactic would have been full support of Italian unification, while exploiting the double-standard in Westminster of supporting reform movements abroad but ignoring them at home.42

37 The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator (New York), 12 January 1884; NAI, CBS 11842/s, and CBS 11781/s; Mark Ryan, Fenian Memories, Dublin, 1945, 180. 38 For a biography of ‘Red’ Jim McDermott see United Ireland (Dublin), 6 December 1884; The Irish World, 25 August 1883. 39 Patrick Maume, ‘Fenianism as a Global Phenomenon: Thomas O’Malley Baines, Papal Soldier and Fenian Convict’, in Leon Litvack and Colin Graham (eds.), Ireland and Europe in the Nineteenth Century, Dublin, 2006, 148–59. 40 McGee, The IRB, 76. 41 David Brundage, The Making of Western Labor Radicalism: Denver’s Organized Workers, 1878–1908, Urbana, 1994, 49–53. 42 Maurice George Moore, An Irish Gentleman: George Henry Moore, London, 1913, 275–80.

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Hostility toward Italian republicans and Garibaldi, however, did not subside during the 1860s.43 After the papal wars, popular hostility toward the Risorgimento was manifest in Ireland and among Irish communities in Britain. Some 300 Risorgimento exiles were present in London and as early as 1853 there had been scuffles between Irish and Italian immigrants.44 In September 1862, a riot ensued in Tralee, County Kerry, when the Italian exile Gavazzi denounced the Irish Papal Brigade. More serious disturbances occurred at pro-Garibaldi meetings in Hyde Park, London when a meeting of 20,000 was disturbed by a group of 1,000 people, armed with bludgeons and apparently composed of working-class Irish immigrants. The following Sunday, a crowd of almost 100,000 witnessed further brawls and scuffles, and in the subsequent months clashes between Irish immigrants and Garibaldian sympathisers were scattered throughout north-west London slums.45 The disturbances also spread to Birkenhead, near Liverpool, when ‘the lower order of the Roman Catholic population consisting of labourers at the docks’ forcefully prevented a meeting of Garibaldian sympathisers from taking place with ‘sticks, stones and other formidable weapons’.46 These events highlighted the difficulty of the task facing the Fenians. By the end of the 1860s, journalist and former IRB man J. P. McDonnell wrote to Marx, ‘Fenianism has, thank goodness, destroyed clerical power in Ireland’, but the reaction to events in Italy suggested a population that thought of itself in religious terms first.47 Anti-Garibaldian sentiment was carefully encouraged by clerical propaganda and a vanguard of journalists who sought to constrict the political space occupied by secular Fenianism. The oratory of Archbishop Cullen and local clergymen, who firmly (but wrongly) believed the Fenians held links to Mazzini, provoked anti-Italian sentiments and insecurity among Irish Catholics, and undoubtedly contributed to the riots in Britain.48 The episodes in Hyde Park and Birkenhead had little to do with nationalist politics; nonetheless, the moderate nationalist press in Dublin 43 Anne O’Connor, ‘That Dangerous Serpent: Garibaldi and Ireland 1860–1870’, Modern Italy, 15 (2010), 401–15. 44 Sheridan Gilley, ‘The Garibaldi Riots of 1862’, The Historical Journal, 16 (1973), 697–732 (700). 45 Ibid., 703, 709–12; H. Bradlaugh Bonner, Charles Bradlaugh: A Record of His Life and Work, 2 vols., London, 1894, Vol. I, 214–16. 46 TNA: PRO HO 45 7326 2; The Daily Post, 16 October 1862. The rioters were provoked to some extent by the sectarian oratory of Protestant clergy. 47 J. P. McDonnell, quoted in John W. Boyle, ‘Ireland and the First International’, Journal of British Studies, 11 (1972), 44–62 (51); Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘Fenianism and Socialism: The Career of Joseph Patrick McDonnell’, Saothar, 1 (1975), 31–41. 48 O’Brien, ‘Irish Public Opinion’, 293–4.

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viewed the events as a step toward solidifying Irish nationality. With self-­congratulatory tones, The Nation and The Universal News printed songs and poems in support of the imprisoned rioters, and argued that the events had made the Irish a power in England.49 A. M. Sullivan, who was editor of The Nation, later published a book – New Ireland – in which the chapter on the 1860s was entitled ‘Papal Ireland’.50 Catholic fears over transnational revolutionary alliances were shared by the Home Secretary and officials in Dublin Castle, who were anxious that such alliances might spread beyond Fenianism and infect the Reform League. In May 1867 the Irish Chief Secretary, the Earl of Mayo, argued before the House of Commons that Fenian links to Continental revolutionaries made a strong case for continuing the suspension of habeas corpus. The authorities had received unreliable information that a secret society intended to stage simultaneous rebellions in London and Dublin, with one report from Dublin Castle proclaiming, ‘foreign revolutionists [were] as busy as the Devil in a gale of wind’.51 When the Fenian collaborator Octave Fariola was arrested in London in July 1867, four months after the failed rising, he was questioned endlessly on Mazzini’s possible involvement. He eventually told of a meeting with Mazzini in February 1867, when the Italian concluded that Fenianism was ‘doomed to be a failure’.52 The Home Office viewed the potential threat of a revolutionary alliance seriously however, and the imagined connections between the Fenians and European revolutionaries were, according to one study, the deciding factor in the establishment of the Secret Service Division in Britain.53 In reality, the IRB was not conspiring with concurrent revolutionary organisations in Europe and mainly spoke of their movement in autoreferential terms. Irish nationalists remained somewhat insulated from the ideological debates emerging among European nationalists and they offered few hints as to what sort of nation would exist if revolution were to be successful. At the level of revolutionary strategy, however, exchanges did occur between exiled Fenians and their European counterparts. In January 1868, The Irishman reprinted a news story from 49 Gilley, ‘The Garibaldi Riots of 1862’, 727–30; The Nation, 8 November 1862. 50 Sullivan, New Ireland, Chapter 18. 51 Irish Chief Secretary Mayo, 1 December 1867. Quoted in Padraic C. Kennedy, ‘The Secret Service Department: A British Intelligence Bureau in Mid-Victorian London, September 1867 to April 1868’, Intelligence and National Security, 18 (2003), 100–27 (110). 52 ‘Fariola’s Confession’, TNA: PRO HO 144 1537 2. 53 The Times, 19 July 1867; Kennedy, ‘The Secret Service Department’, 110, 122.

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the Belgian Courrier français that claimed a sweep by French detectives on Internationalists had led to the ‘seizure of a most important correspondence between the Fenians of England and the revolutionists of Paris’. The Irishman claimed no such material existed, but historian Desmond Ryan has suggested the seizure was related to the movements of James Stephens, who professed to be in contact with Parisian radicals throughout his career.54 Though Stephens and O’Mahony found inspiration in past Irish rebellions, they also engaged with other revolutionary movements to greater degrees than their predecessors. When Stephens fled Ireland for Paris in 1848, he intended to soak up the lessons of revolutionary warfare in networks of Parisian secret societies, which had, according to John Savage, ‘peculiar fascinations for those whose former attempt at rebellion proved a failure’.55 When recounting his experiences of exile for the Weekly Freeman in 1883, Stephens remarked that, once he had established that violent insurrection was the only means of securing an Irish republic, he began ‘a particular study of continental secret societies, and in particular those which had ramifications in Italy; for Italians have in a certain way perfected conspiracy, and I thought that with certain reserves they were the best models to follow’.56 Stephens’ acquaintance with the world of European radicalism came in part through language lessons with the Italian general Guglielmo Pepe. Michael Davitt noted that Pepe ‘taught the young Irishman Italian, in exchange for a similar tuition in the tongue of the Saxon’.57 Pepe was a leading member of the Neapolitan Carbonari, the secret society that emerged in Italy in the early decades of the 1800s and which had origins in masonic lodges. Most active in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Carbonari conspired to transform Italy into a united republic. In 1820 the movement numbered, according to one estimate, over 300,000 people, and historian John A. Davis has observed how membership reached beyond the ‘narrow confines of patrician elites’. Pepe was one of the leaders of the relatively bloodless 1820 revolt in Naples, though his army broke apart the following year. In 1848–9, he was Daniele Manin’s commander-in-chief during the siege of Venice. 54 The Irishman, 18 January 1868; Ryan, The Fenian Chief, 234. 55 Savage, Fenian Heroes and Martyrs, 306. Desmond Ryan believed Stephens himself wrote this passage but later accounts raised doubts. Ryan, The Fenian Chief, 48; Ramón, A Provisional Dictator, 59. 56 Weekly Freeman (Dublin), 6 October 1883; Ryan, The Fenian Chief, 51. 57 Michael Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland; or, The Story of the Land League Revolution, London, 1904, 73.

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Given these experiences, Pepe might have imparted much to Stephens on the techniques of conspiracy.58 The precise level of Fenian participation in Carbonari or other circles, however, remains obscure. The Belfast Fenian Frank Roney considered Paris to be ‘a sort of rendezvous for revolutionaries’, and claimed to have met members of the Carbonari when he travelled there in 1865: ‘I was told of the character of the organisation and its objects, and asked to take the pledge of membership, which I did.’59 Yet Roney’s far-fetched revolutionary encounter is vague on what was actually discussed during his meetings, and typifies more general difficulties in separating hyperbole from the reality of Fenian exchanges with Continental revolutionaries. The active involvement of James Stephens and John O’Mahony in Parisian secret societies has been indicated in the reminiscences of occasional Fenians, yet Desmond Ryan pointed out that neither man ‘made any public or printed reference to these activities’. Claims that they were members of Louis Auguste Blanqui’s revolutionary organisation the ‘Society of Seasons’, which was driven underground in the aftermath of 1848, are difficult to substantiate. Equally, evidence to support claims that the Fenian leaders fought on the barricades against the 1851 coup d’état of Louis Napoleon is not abundant, although they were, at the very least, earnest observers of the fighting and became acquainted with republican leaders there.60 The Irish exiles were happy to borrow ideas and strategies from conspiratorial circles in Paris, even if they did not actively participate in secret societies there. For the majority of Fenians, interest in and acquaintance with European revolutionaries reflected an eagerness to master theories of conspiracy and insurrection. When Stephens first arrived in Paris, he made a failed attempt to join the French army, largely for the same reason he associated with revolutionaries, to learn techniques of warfare.61 The Parisian environment reinforced both Stephens’ and O’Mahony’s republican convictions and strengthened 58 Pepe’s memoirs unfortunately end in 1849: Guglielmo Pepe, Narrative of Scenes and Events in Italy, from 1847 to 1849, Including the Siege of Venice, London, 1850; John A. Davis, Naples and Napoleon: Southern Italy and the European Revolutions, Oxford, 2006, 295, 298–304; R. John Rath, ‘The Carbonari: Their Origins, Initiation Rites, and Aims’, American Historical Review, 69 (1964), 353–70. 59 Frank Roney, Irish Rebel and California Labor Leader, Berkeley, 1931, 116–17. 60 Ryan, The Fenian Chief, 50–1; John Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel, New York, 1878, 97, 118; Ramón, A Provisional Dictator, 58–9; Janick Julienne, ‘John Patrick Leonard (1814–1889), chargé d’affaires d’un gouvernement Irlandais en France’, Etudes irlandaises, 25 (2000), 49–67. 61 Ramón, A Provisional Dictator, 51.

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their determination and belief that a successful Irish insurrection was possible.

Instructions for insurrection: the Irish Republican Brotherhood and Blanquism

What strategies did Irish nationalists borrow from European revolutionaries? Stephens’ familiarity with the Society of Seasons appears to be borne out by the organisational shape of the IRB in the 1860s. The cellular structure, secret oaths, emphasis on military discipline, commitment to urban insurrection and the presence of a strong leader/ dictator were akin to Louis Auguste Blanqui’s vision of a revolutionary organisation. Blanqui was a key contributor to the theorisation of insurrectionary warfare in the nineteenth century and his influence on the IRB’s plans for rebellion merit consideration. Blanqui became a member of the French branch of the Carbonari in 1824 and came to be considered the symbolic figurehead of Parisian secret societies, though his influence extended far beyond French ­borders. Rejecting parliamentary reform as futile, Blanqui advocated violent seizure of power by a vanguard of professional insurgents, who would marshal the undisciplined and unenlightened masses into wellorganised militias.62 Blanqui spent over half of his life in jail: incarcerated from 1839 to 1848, he was rearrested in 1849 and spent intermittent periods in prison until his death in 1881. For these reasons, his principal text on revolutionary strategy – Instructions pour une prise d’armes – did not appear until 1866. The pamphlet was the outcome of Blanqui’s cumulative experience of insurrectionary failure in the Parisian uprisings of May 1839 and 1848.63 Its publication came long after Stephens’ and O’Mahony’s Parisian exile, yet the programme of revolutionary organisation outlined in the text expressed Blanqui’s long-held theories of violent struggle and is a useful representation of the theories the exiled Fenians encountered during their Parisian conversations. Instructions pour une prise d’armes downplayed spontaneous insurrection and allowed no room for the theory that revolutionaries could ‘spark’ spontaneous popular unrest, especially in rural areas. Only discipline, planning and co-ordination could bring success. The revolutionary organisation should mirror the state army in composition and 62 Patrick H. Hutton, The Cult of the Revolutionary Tradition: The Blanquists in French Politics, 1864–1893, Berkeley, 1981; Alan B. Spitzer, The Revolutionary Theories of Louis Auguste Blanqui, New York, 1957. 63 Auguste Blanqui, Instructions pour une prise d’armes, Paris, 1972 [1866], accessed online at www.marxists.org/francais/blanqui/1866/instructions.htm.

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fight under the leadership of what he termed a general commander, or what others termed a provisional dictator. Despite the favourable political circumstances of a weak government and demoralised army, Blanqui argued that the 1848 uprising collapsed owing to disorganisation and the absence of a central command with clear direction. Much more effective was the armed revolutionary party that could use moral as well as physical force against the military, spreading sedition among the rank and file through careful organisation. The revolutionary army would mirror the state military: it would have a hierarchical structure composed of a commander-in-chief and ‘the usual series of officers of all ranks’. Strict military discipline would ensure that the ‘tumultuous uprisings of ten thousand isolated heads, acting randomly, in disorder’ would not be repeated: rather, a well-drilled revolutionary organisation would meet the army face to face in regular combat.64 Five years after writing the manual, in 1871, Blanqui again attempted insurrection in Paris, by occupying the Hôtel de Ville and storming a firemen’s barracks in the Villette quarter. Both episodes ended in swift failure and Blanqui blamed defeat on the Parisian civil guard, who failed to join the insurgents in revolt against the Prussian army.65 The reality, however, was that once the rebels had seized the Hôtel de Ville they did not know what to do next. Blanqui’s plan for regular warfare presupposed a routine clash between two armies that would be acted out according to military conventions or predetermined rules of action. When that didn’t happen, he was incapable of improvising the next step. Despite the fact that Blanqui’s analysis of insurrection rested on a critique of 1848, he failed to account for the sweeping consequences the rebellions of that year had for counter-revolution and the future of armed rebellion. Substantial changes occurred after 1848, and all of them benefited governments and military. The attempt to counter the military with urban militias did not succeed in France and Germany, and in Italy and Hungary more ‘regular’ revolutionary armies were only partially successful. Large cores of volunteers organised along military lines were exclusively urban and alienated the lower classes with hierarchical militia structures and the limited potential to enact social reform.66 1848–9 marked a watershed in the history of Italian nationalism, but the uneasy alliance between Carlo Alberto and Italian 64 Ibid. 65 Auguste Blanqui, La patrie en danger (1871), reproduced in Gian Mario Bravo (ed.), Socialismo e azione rivoluzionaria, Rome, 1969, 223–42 (237). 66 Dieter Langewiesche, ‘The Role of the Military in the European Revolutions of 1848’, in Dowe, Haupt, Langewiesche and Sperber, Europe in 1848, 694–707 (698–9).

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republicans was ill-fated from the beginning as the king was fighting a traditional, dynastic campaign of annexation while the nationalists pursued a united Italian republic.67 Blanqui underestimated the military means at the disposal of European states and failed to give proper weight to technological and scientific developments in the military. The early victories of the 1848 revolutionaries over the army, as Dieter Langewiesche has observed, were political, not military in nature. Initial success was due to the weak alliance between political leaders and the military, which led to a half-hearted deployment of troops. In turn, this resulted in the ‘myth of the barricades, a common phenomenon throughout Europe, that deluded at least part of the revolutionary movement into believing in the existence of a military strength it did not possess’.68 When the counter-revolution hit back, the barricades soon collapsed. When Blanqui asked how Parisians could stand up to a ‘ferocious government’ with modern weapons, he failed to answer his own question. Against armies that had at their disposal the achievements of ‘science and art, railroads, the electric telegraph, the rifle, the Chassepot gun’, Blanqui urged revolutionaries to persist with the rifle, ‘the weapon par excellence in street warfare’.69 Dismissing artillery, grenades and cannon as weapons of intimidation and spectacle, rather than any real practical use, he insisted that these obstacles could be overcome through organisation and co-ordination. This fell short of offering rebels any clear incentive to retain faith with insurrection, a style of revolutionary warfare that had already been shown to be a failure. Moreover, the governments of post-1848 Europe, as Walter Laqueur noted, ‘wanted the revolutionaries to engage in precipitated military actions because that would lead to their defeat’.70 James Stephens borrowed from Blanqui’s conception of violence and fortified it with exaggerated estimates of the number of trained and prepared volunteers. The IRB members were to follow strict military rules, with Stephens as supreme leader, and he initially planned to establish military schools in Paris where Americans would drill IRB volunteers.71 The failure of this initiative did not diminish his stubbornly held vision of a Fenian rebellion where the insurgents would fight the government 67 Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since 1796, London, 2008, 168–80; Franco Della Peruta, ‘Il 1848 in Italia’, in L’Italia del Risorgimento: Problemi, momenti e figure, Milan, 1997, 174. 68 Langewiesche, ‘The Role of the Military’, 697. 69 Blanqui, Instructions. 70 Walter Laqueur, ‘The Origins of Guerrilla Doctrine’, Journal of Contemporary History, 10 (1975), 341–82 (368, 375). 71 Ramón, A Provisional Dictator, 166.

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forces in a regular battle in the city. In 1866 the IRB hired two professional soldiers  – Octave Fariola and Gustave Cluseret  – to direct the planned uprising, as they were men ‘trained in regular armies and possessing practical experience of European warfare’, and would be ‘able to contend with regular generals and armies with which England would oppose the Irish levies en masse’. Fariola was generally impressed with Stephens, except with regard to military affairs, in which he deemed him to be ‘worse than incompetent’.72 On this point Cluseret concurred. Regarding military expertise, he believed Stephens ‘to be worth nothing’.73 How could the Fenian leadership have rationally thought victory possible? Stephens’ letters from the period and his conversations with General Cluseret help to illuminate what they believed to be achievable at the time. In 1858, when Stephens agreed to take on the role of leader, he emphasised American financial backing and high numbers of volunteers to be prerequisites if there was to be hope of military success. Of equal weight were discipline and careful organisation along regular military lines. The volunteers, he wrote to Michael Doheny, would ‘be so organised, as to be available (all of them) at any one point at 24 hours notice at most’.74 In 1861 Stephens’ letters to O’Mahony betrayed a Blanqui-like emphasis on prepared and disciplined militias. That year, Terence Bellew McManus – a veteran of the Young Ireland uprising who fled a Tasmanian penal colony – died in San Francisco. Eight months later, his corpse was disinterred and shipped home to be buried in Dublin. The funeral was to be a singularly political event, a public demonstration of the Fenian presence in Ireland. When Archbishop Cullen questioned the church’s involvement in the funeral of a conspirator, the IRB continued regardless and the burial went ahead without full religious rites, a fact that energised secular elements in the IRB, though the nationalist priest, Fr Patrick Lavelle, spoke at the graveside. Comerford describes the funeral as ‘a masterpiece of organisation … Horsemen, strikingly attired, marshalled the pedestrian participants, who moved with something like military precision.’75 As a political demonstration the funeral was impressive: Stephens estimated that between the procession and 72 Octave Fariola, ‘Amongst the Fenians’, The Irishman, 1, 8 and 15 August 1868. 73 Gustave Cluseret, ‘My Connection with Fenianism’, Fraser’s Magazine, 6 (1872), 31–41 (35). 74 James Stephens to Michael Doheny, 1 January 1858 (emphasis in original), NYPL, MCIHP, Box 4, Folder 64; also reprinted in Joseph Denieffe, A Personal Narrative of the IRB, New York, 1906, 159–60. 75 Comerford, Fenians in Context, 78.

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onlookers over 40,000 people were present and the funeral cortege was miles long.76 At least for Stephens, the funeral underlined his belief that a conspiracy founded upon well-organised militias could be successful. He described to O’Mahony the ‘grand triumph’ in Dublin, where unforeseen numbers took part in the procession with ‘30,000 of them marching in regular order’.77 At a similar procession in Cork, he saw ‘8,000 walking in regular order’ among a much larger number of onlookers. Anyone who witnessed these events, in Stephens’ view, could no longer doubt the seriousness of preparations for revolution or Irish readiness for self-government.78 True, Stephens was writing to convince O’Mahony and Irish Americans of the IRB’s readiness so the necessary funds would come across the Atlantic. Yet the letters also revealed how the military style of the funeral procession deepened his belief that a large core of disciplined volunteers was in place and would prove a match for government forces. The effective co-ordination of these volunteers could only be realised through a strong leader, and Stephens nominated himself to act in the capacity of general commander. He paid scant attention to dissenting opinions and he underlined that his leadership of the IRB was conditional to his being ‘perfectly unshackled – in other words, a provisional dictator’.79 Many found Stephens’ style of dictatorial leadership to be overbearing. Cluseret made the oft-quoted remark that Stephens was ‘vain, despotic and overbearing beyond any man I ever saw’.80 Michael Kerwin, a member of the IRB’s military council, commented after the uprising: ‘we were willing to submit to the degrading serfdom imposed on us by this man [Stephens], willing to become for the time being slaves, that Ireland in the future might be free … no matter how much he may have loved Ireland, he loved himself more’.81 Though Stephens’ ‘dictatorship’ was obnoxious to many at the time, it was nothing out of 76 Police estimates recorded the cortege was 1 mile long with 8,000 people, while IRB member Joseph Denieffe believed it to be 7 times that. On the funeral see Ramón, A Provisional Dictator, 112–23; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 76–80; Denieffe, A Personal Narrative of the IRB, 70. 77 Stephens to John O’Mahony, 25 November 1861, NYPL, MCIHP, Box 4, Folder 64. 78 Stephens to O’Mahony, 16 November 1861, NYPL, MCIHP, Box 4, Folder 64. 79 Stephens to Michael Doheny, Paris, 1 January 1858, NYPL, MCIHP, Box 4, Folder 64. This letter is reprinted in Denieffe, A Personal Narrative of the IRB, 159–60. 80 Cluseret, ‘My Connection with Fenianism’, 4. Both Desmond Ryan and Leon Ó  Broin cite Cluseret’s negative view of Stephens. Ryan, The Fenian Chief, 239; Ó Broin, Fenian Fever, 89. 81 Michael Kerwin to John Barry, 27 December 1869, NYPL, O’Donovan Rossa Papers, MCIHP, Box 4, Folder 60.

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the ordinary in the context of the Continental movements he had studied. Garibaldi declared himself dictator when the Thousand landed in Sicily, while Blanqui was convinced a provisional dictatorship was a necessary element of revolution.82 The strength of the state’s military capacities was crucial to how Stephens and Cluseret imagined successful insurrection. When discussing the strength of British resources they concluded, after making allowances for troops in colonies and those garrisoned abroad, that the government ‘could not for ninety days oppose to us more than thirty thousand effective men’. ‘Ten thousand resolute’ volunteers, ‘acting in their own country would easily be able to seize upon the most important points for embarkation and the principal roads’, and ‘with popular sympathy’ would hold out against a more numerous but less resolute army until recognition came from the US government, or at least until Irish American reinforcements and arms arrived.83 The loyalty of army regiments was also in doubt owing to ‘Pagan’ O’Leary and John Devoy’s recruiting activities among the rank-and-file. Devoy maintained the movement ‘had the garrison of Dublin and the men on the Curragh [army base in Ireland] ready to join us’, estimating that he had won over 8,000 volunteers for the IRB.84 While Devoy did have some success among the British army this improbable figure showed that he was as given to exaggeration as Stephens. Many of the regiments that he did manage to infiltrate were withdrawn back to England or sent elsewhere in the empire before the insurrection took place, and replaced with English regiments that were transported to Ireland in little over four hours in new steamships.85 By 1867, Devoy acknowledged, the advantage in the army had been lost. Sedition in the army, the ability of IRB militias to mobilise quickly and the presence of a provisional dictator were elements that qualified the IRB under Blanqui’s theory of insurrection and helped convince Stephens that the Fenians could match government forces until the international community paid attention. Complementing these factors, the Fenian leaders believed, was the sympathy of an emerging nation of people, beyond the ranks of an intellectual elite, who were attracted to the goal of a republic. The combination of these elements ensured 82 Riall, Garibaldi, 209. 83 Cluseret, ‘My Connection with Fenianism’, 5. 84 Devoy, quoted in Terence Dooley, ‘The Greatest of the Fenians’: John Devoy and Ireland, Dublin, 2003, 59–60. For Devoy’s own account see Devoy, Recollections, 140–51; A. J. Semple, ‘The Fenian Infiltration of the British Army’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 52 (1974), 133–60. 85 Freeman’s Journal, 14 March 1867.

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Irish self-reliance and a rebellion that would no longer depend on contingent international circumstances. The phrase ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’ was a ‘blind, base and deplorable motto and motive to action’. Instead, Stephens argued, ‘Ireland’s trained and marshalled manhood alone’ could win independence, ‘whether England was at peace or war’.86 In the 1860s, the British army was not otherwise engaged in war and Stephens had to contend with this fact. His bold claim that Ireland could make her own opportunities masked reliance on North America. The large Irish population in the United States – a substitute foreign power – emboldened the IRB into staging an uprising, but the huge number of Irish in the USA did not represent a state, with the resources of a state, a fact that was glaring in the aftermath of the uprising. In the weeks before the March uprising, the ex-Confederate soldier John McCafferty planned a raid on an arsenal at Chester Castle, England, owing partly to his disillusion with the repeated delays of the Irish insurrection. The castle was selected because of its low level of security and its proximity to the port of Holyhead, which could be used to facilitate the transport of seized arms and ammunition to Dublin, kickstarting the rebellion once and for all. McCafferty was evidently a man of some standing, because on 11 February over 1,000 Fenians from various parts of England arrived in small groups at Chester, but found the castle to be heavily protected. McCafferty’s plan had been conveyed to the Liverpool police by the Irish American Fenian and Civil War veteran John Corydon. McCafferty had himself failed to reach Chester on time owing to a transportation problem, but he succeeded in issuing a countermanding order that cancelled the plan.87 Despite this failure, General Cluseret was impressed and claimed the volunteers displayed a level of co-ordination at Chester that would have been ‘unknown in France’.88 When the insurrection itself finally took place in Ireland, rank-andfile Fenians also displayed some level of organisation, even if top-down co-ordination was poor. In March 1867, several groups of Dublin Fenians gathered at different points around the city’s periphery in order to lure troops out of the centre and allow the rebels to seize strategic buildings and begin an urban insurrection. Their efforts collapsed in a matter of days and poor decision-making by the leadership was a key factor, as the high command failed to make effective use of the numbers 86 Stephens to O’Mahony, 25 November 1861, NYPL, MCIHP, Box 4, Folder 64. 87 Ó Broin, Fenian Fever, 126–8. 88 Cluseret, ‘My Connection with Fenianism’, 9–10.

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that did turn out: several thousand for the Dublin uprising; 2,000 in Cork; 1,000 in Louth; and hundreds for the smaller flashpoints in Tipperary, Kerry, Queen’s County, Limerick and Clare.89 The turnout was impressive, but in the absence of a reasonable cache of arms and national co-ordination, military discipline and high recruitment levels were not enough. Blanqui’s shortcomings may also apply to Stephens, in that his confidence in the notion of insurrection did not correlate with political and military realities. The ‘arts of conspiracy’ that he believed he had perfected were a stepping-stone to a better understanding of armed revolution, hardly more. Stephens’ myopic views also led to an intolerance of non-violent means: Fenians were not ‘given to the gun in any intrinsic way’, Comerford noted, yet forms of civil disobedience or non-violent actions were dismissed.90 The leadership remained wedded to armed uprising but they failed to give proper consideration to technological imbalance and the means available to modern governments. In Ireland, official confidence was illustrated when Mayo, the Irish Chief Secretary, remained in London on 5 March, although he knew an uprising was going to take place.91 The use of the military to suppress it served as a test of the reliability of the army regiments that remained in Ireland, as well as an indication of official fears regarding the dangers of large-scale unrest. The 1867 experience brought home the limitations of insurrection as a means of speeding up political change, as 1848 had demonstrated in parts of Europe. Yet, military-style insurrection was not the only type of political violence, and already, by 1848, revolutionaries were beginning to canvass alternatives. Writings on irregular warfare or guerra per bande began to circulate in Italy during the Risorgimento and were imported into Ireland via wandering war veterans.

Transformations in revolutionary violence: Ireland and Italy

The conspiratorial tradition that developed in nineteenth-century Italy mapped a formula of agitation that, despite failures to address entrenched social problems, achieved substantial political change. Events in Italy 89 Estimates place between 2,000 and 8,000 volunteers at Tallaght Hill in Dublin in 1867. Takagami’s study placed ‘several thousand’ there. Shin-Ichi Takagami, ‘The Fenian Rising in Dublin, March 1867’, Irish Historical Studies, 24 (1995), 340–62 (358); Ó Broin, Fenian Fever, 158; Brian Jenkins, The Fenian Problem: Insurgency and Terrorism in a Liberal State, 1858–1874, London, 2008, 85; Ramón, A Provisional Dictator, 229–31. 90 Comerford, Fenians in Context, 137. 91 Jenkins, The Fenian Problem, 85.

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merit attention not only for the direct and indirect connections between the Carbonari, Mazzinians, Parisian radicals and Irish exiles, but also for the way in which political agitation there spun off into contentious violence when republicans began to question the efficacy of traditional forms of protest. During the wars of Italian unification, patriots interested in social change recognised the limitations of regular warfare and proposed a strategy of guerra per bande as a more effective way of challenging the Austrian and Bourbon forces. Post-unification, guerra per bande resurfaced when Bourbon-loyalists violently opposed the Italian army, and also when small groups of republicans (1870) and internationalists and anarchists (1877) sought to test the legitimacy of the new state. The state’s limited success in forcefully repressing these actions resulted in further transformations in revolutionary violence, leading to the ‘propaganda of the deed’ school of direct action that emerged in the late 1870s. Similarly, in Ireland, the failure of insurrection and the accompanying harsh consequences for participants began a process of rethinking violent agitation that led to the dynamite campaign of the 1880s. First, it should be noted that Risorgimento democrats and monarchists gave Irish demands for nationhood a mixed reception. Count Camillo Cavour, the first Prime Minister of Italy, was an admirer of Daniel O’Connell but believed Irish material interests were best served by remaining in the prosperous Union of Great Britain and Ireland. Giuseppe Mazzini believed Irish nationalists were ‘philosophically and politically wrong’, as they viewed nationalism as an end rather than a means of contributing to the universal ‘advancement of humanity’. France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom all held ‘special functions’ as nations and fulfilled distinct moral purposes, but Irish nationalism held questionable democratic foundations and could not see beyond the borders of the island.92 In the weeks before the 1867 uprising, Fariola met with Mazzini in London and the latter revealed his reservations about Fenianism and ‘his mistrust of the principles of its leader [Stephens]’.93 Cluseret also maintained he held talks with Mazzini, ‘one of my most faithful friends’. At the meeting, Mazzini questioned the whole Fenian enterprise on the grounds of its political goals as well as in terms of preparations for rebellion, and convinced Cluseret ‘at once that I was on the wrong tack, and that the Irish 92 Quoted in Nicholas Mansergh, The Irish Question, 1840–1921, London, 1975, 97–9. Both Mazzini’s and Cavour’s interpretations of the ‘Irish Question’ resurfaced in Unionist anti-Home Rule propaganda in the 1880s and 1890s. See Eugenio F. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish Nationalism, 1876–1906, Cambridge, 2007, 242. 93 ‘Fariola’s Confession’, TNA: PRO HO 144 1537 2, 29.

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Question could only be settled by English co-operation’.94 Persuaded by his old friend, Cluseret proposed a working agreement with the Reform League and Chartists in Britain, but the London directory of the IRB rejected his idea.95 Garibaldi was more sympathetic, or tendentious. During a trip to England in 1867, he intended to visit Ireland ‘in order to point out to the people how they could relieve themselves from the troubles which kept them in misery’. However, as soon as his intention came to the knowledge of the British parliament he was dissuaded from making the trip. Before departing England, Garibaldi urged that an inquiry be made into the origin and nature of Fenianism, and warned that he had seen documents relating to very large resources at the disposal of Irish Americans.96 Previously, in the late 1850s, Garibaldi had ‘been writing strong letters of sympathy with the Fenians’, for which he was sternly rebuked by Charles Lever, the British consul at La Spezia, who believed him to be thoroughly ignorant of Irish affairs.97 Despite Garibaldi’s apparent sympathy for Irish independence, no apparent efforts were made by Irish nationalists to approach him, and many viewed him to be too close to Protestant Britain.98 Garibaldi felt the Fenians misunderstood him and, in reference to Irish military aid to the Papacy in 1860, he claimed that he too had once ‘hurried home from South America to fight for the Pope when we all believed that he was about to head the national movement to deliver Italy from the Austrians and the Bourbons’.99 While this was not strictly true, Garibaldi did write to the new Pope Pius IX in 1847, offering to return and fight in Italy’s national interest.100 James Stephens admired Italian conspirators, as already noted, and his posturing as ‘an international democrat rather than a nationalist’ recalled Mazzini’s universalism. The IRB’s design as a brotherhood of combatants also echoed Mazzini’s notion of a ‘community of 94 Cluseret, ‘My Connection with Fenianism’, 11. There appears to be no record stating which Fenians, apart from Cluseret and Fariola, approached Mazzini; Ó Broin and Denis Mack Smith refer to a meeting without citing their sources. Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini, New Haven, 1994, 156–7; Ó Broin, Fenian Fever, 125. 95 Ryan, The Fenian Chief, 241. 96 According to the Earl of Mayo, Chief Secretary of Ireland, quoted in The Times, 23 March 1867. 97 After their discussion of Irish affairs, the consul claimed he ‘would never comprehend how a man seemingly so ignorant and childish as Garibaldi could come to have such vast influence’. W. J Fitzpatrick, Life of Charles Lever, 2 vols., London, 1879, Vol. II, 239–40. 98 Riall, Garibaldi, 303. 99 Justin McCarthy, Reminiscences, 2 vols., London, 1899, Vol. I, 130. 100 Riall, Garibaldi, 55.

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combatants’.101 However, there is little indication of what Stephens took from his conversations with General Pepe in Paris. More practical linkages can be found in networks of nineteenth-century knights errant. A brief biography of an Italian radical named Cesare Orsini provides a useful window on the type of nominal revolutionary that Fenianism occasionally attracted. Orsini was connected to the IRB through William O’Donovan, a Fenian resident in Paris, and his career veered between that of the rebel and adventurer. A brother of Napoleon’s would-be assassin Felice, Cesare Orsini lived in America in the late 1850s, where he most likely encountered revolutionary Irish nationalism for the first time. After moving to Buenos Aires, he was condemned to death for political activities but escaped to Uruguay, then Italy, where he joined Garibaldi in 1860.102 In 1866, while in the USA, Orsini enrolled James Stephens in the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA). According to Marx, Orsini was a Fenian agent as well as a member of the IWA, and was probably responsible for the recruitment of the conservative John Devoy as ‘delegate of the Irish Section’ of the North American IWA. He ultimately settled in Italy and became a parliamentary deputy.103 Similarly to Orsini, other Risorgimento veterans who walked a fine line between revolutionary and adventurer were drawn to the Fenian movement. Gustave Cluseret and Octave Fariola were central to the planning of the IRB uprising and both men had fought in the Italian wars of 1859–60. Cluseret, whom Marx found to be a ‘vain and overambitious babbler’, finished his life as a deputy in the French government, after a contradictory career that began as a French army officer during the repression of the 1848 revolt, then in Algeria and in the Crimean War. After fighting in Italy, he arrived in the USA with a letter of introduction from Garibaldi and joined the Union Army, but was later thrown out for being a troublemaker. After that, he became a member of the IWA, a co-conspirator of Mikhail Bakunin in Lyon, and military leader of the Communards in 1871.104 101 Biagini, ‘Liberty and Nationalism in Ireland’, 794; A. M. Banti, ‘Sacrality and the Aesthetics of Politics: Mazzini’s Concept of the Nation’, in C. A. Bayly and E. F. Biagini (eds.), Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism 1830– 1920, Oxford, 2008, 59–74; Ryan, The Fenian Chief, 112. 102 Michele Rosi (ed.), Dizionario del Risorgimento nazionale: Dalle origini a Roma capitale, 3 vols., Milan, 1930, Vol. III, 472. 103 Orsini’s claim to have enrolled Stephens was substantiated in a letter from Marx to Engels. Marx believed Stephens was the ‘most doubtful of our acquisitions’. Ryan, The Fenian Chief, 236. 104 See Cluseret, ‘My Connection with Fenianism’, 11; Rosi, Dizionario del Risorgimento nazionale, Vol. II, 711; Gustave P. Cluseret, Mémoires, 3 vols., Paris, 1887–8; Marx to Engels, 10 September 1870, in Karl Marx, Collected Works, 50+ vols., London,

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When the IRB appointed Cluseret as commander-in-chief for the planned insurrection, he in turn recruited two other veterans of the Italian wars, Fariola and Victor Vifquain, but failed to attract others to the enterprise. Fariola was a graduate from a Brussels military academy and, in 1863, after fighting in Garibaldi’s Sicilian campaigns, he enlisted in the Union Army and captained an African American battalion.105 In January 1866, he was honourably discharged and was living as a large farmer in Louisiana when Cluseret invited him to join the Fenians in the capacity of chief-of-staff, ‘in a regular military enterprise … There is some risk to run, as everywhere, but at the end glory and fortune.’ Fariola, who was having difficulties in Louisiana, travelled to New York and met with Cluseret and Stephens. After a long meeting with the latter, he agreed to join the Fenians and was promised £60 a month for his services. Vifquain, who also fought in the American Civil War, ultimately played no role in the Fenians’ plans.106 Cluseret, Fariola and Orsini hardly fitted the profile of the ascetic revolutionary bound to take up arms for his ideals. One year after fighting with Garibaldi, Cluseret published a war manual that was a thinly guised appeal to the Italian constitutional monarchy for a job.107 Yet, the transnational lives of these professional soldiers made them effective vessels for the circulation of techniques of violent action. In February 1867, when Cluseret discovered the extent to which he had been misled regarding the numbers of arms and volunteers available in Ireland, he declared he would only come to Ireland to direct the uprising if a volunteer army was already in the field. In the end, he never set foot on the island. Responsibility for the rebellion then fell to Fariola.108 In late 1866 he left New York and travelled to Liverpool, then Paris, before returning to London in February 1867 to set up a base to organise the final preparations for the rising. Similarly 1989, Vol. XLIV, 70: Philip M. Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre: Americans and the Paris Commune, Cambridge, MA, 1998, 8; Ryan, The Fenian Chief, 238–9; Ella Lonn, Foreigners in the Union Army and Navy, Baton Rouge, 1951, 294–5. 105 Little evidence exists on Fariola. He is not mentioned in the Dizionario del Risorgimento, and he is not listed in the accounts of foreign soldiers in the American Civil War. It seems his full name was Octave Louis Fariola de Rozzoli; after the 1867 rising he spent over twenty years in Australia and later moved to Thailand. He died in Palermo in 1914. Octave Fariola, ‘Amongst the Fenians’, The Irishman, 1 August–17 September 1868; ‘Fariola’s Confession’, TNA: PRO HO 144 1537 2; F. N. Boney (ed.), A Union Soldier in the Land of the Vanquished: The Diary of Sergeant Mathew Woodruff, June–December 1865, University, AL, 1969, 18. 106 Fariola, ‘Amongst the Fenians’, 1 August 1868; ‘Fariola’s Confession’, TNA: PRO HO 144 1537 2. 107 Katz, From Appomattox to Montmartre, 8. 108 Ó Broin, Fenian Fever, 144; Cluseret, ‘My Connection with Fenianism’, 12.

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to Cluseret, Fariola had listened to Stephens’ boasts of 50,000 volunteers, 3 steamers and 20,000 rifles, but he quickly realised they were far from accurate. Fariola believed the plan for a regular insurrection to be ‘utterly absurd’. Instead, he argued for a guerrilla conflict that would pass through different stages before eventually culminating in direct confrontation with the forces of the state. The original plan, in Fariola’s mind, hung on the premise that the war for independence ‘was not to have an infancy and a growth during which it would get a beak with talons; it was to be born full-grown and fully armed, like Minerva coming out of Jupiter’s head’. Instead, Fariola proposed the abandonment of plans for an insurrection and insisted that the ‘war, if it can be called so, is and must be most irregular’.109 Fariola’s familiarity with irregular tactics came from his experiences as a professional soldier, in the Risorgimento wars and also during the American Civil War, which was characterised by irregular campaigns and guerrilla actions in several regions. In Ireland, bands of guerrillas were more appropriate for the number of volunteers available, even though the Irish countryside was not so mountainous and adapted to guerrilla warfare as Italy was. Fariola acknowledged ‘the idea of running away may not be most pleasing to Irish valour’, but insisted that ‘any means that enables a man to defeat his enemy is good, and the Roman of old won more honour as well as profit for running away before the Albans than he could have for standing by the dead bodies of his brothers’.110 Cluseret concurred, and though elements within the Fenian movement argued that a face-to-face battle would be more successful in mobilising popular support, Thomas Kelly, who had deposed James Stephens as leader in December 1866, agreed that the original plan was impossible, and orders were issued to begin a guerrilla campaign.111 Fariola envisaged a campaign of two stages. The first stage would be characterised by a guerrilla war and the final stage was to culminate in direct confrontations, which would begin once Ireland had been granted belligerent status by other international powers.112 The irregular character of the first stage would consist of hit-and-run attacks to 109 Fariola, ‘Amongst the Fenians’, 15 August 1868. 110 Ibid. 111 Kelly later wrote, ‘As to battles, we shall avoid instead of seeking them’; quoted in Peter Nolan, ‘Fariola, Massey and the Fenian Rising’, Journal of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, 75 (1970), 1–11 (10); Fariola, ‘Amongst the Fenians’, 12 September 1868. 112 Fariola, ‘Amongst the Fenians’, 12 September 1868; Nolan, ‘Fariola, Massey and the Fenian Rising’, 8–10.

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loosen state control over regional areas and populations. These operations would be conducted by: Small bands of men, fifteen to twenty men at most, two or three being allowed to unite only in very rare cases, when success would be twice as certain, and not at all in the first outset. These bands were never to fight regularly against troops or police; on the contrary, they were to avoid all encounters, using their legs whenever met by the enemy to draw it in vain and tiresome marches; they were to resort to ambuscades to cut off all isolated or small parties of police or soldiers; to cut the roads, railways, telegraphs, and bridges everywhere and every day, so as to keep the country in a perpetual state of apprehension and insecurity; to disperse whenever hotly pursued, and after every little expedition.113

At the outset, the guerrilla campaign was frustrated by Godfrey Massey, a veteran of the Confederate army and suspected agent provocateur, who had worked his way into the confidence of Stephens and Kelly. Shortly after Fariola arrived at Cork on 1 March 1867, he realised Massey had ordered a full-scale uprising and refused to countermand the order when Fariola instructed him to do so. On the night of rebellion, large numbers of volunteers showed up at the designated sites to begin the insurrection, but government forces swiftly intervened and the affair was over in a few days. Fariola fled to Paris, but unwisely returned to London where he was arrested the following July.114 In the winter of 1867–8, however, a group of rebels who had evaded imprisonment after the March uprising carried out guerrilla-style attacks in Cork and, as Peter Nolan has pointed out, their actions bore the stamp of Fariola’s plan.115 In September 1867, the rescue of Thomas Kelly from a prison van in Manchester by a group of around thirty men resulted in one of the most controversial episodes in the IRB’s history and a considerable propaganda success. A constable was killed during the rescue and three Fenians – William Allen, Michael Larkin and Michael O’Brien – were later hanged for their part in the affair.116 The prisoners’ oratorical performance in court stirred widespread sympathy and the executions resulted in immediate gains for Irish republicans. In Ireland, ‘the feeling had been that the government dare not carry out the sentence’, and the deaths of the men, who became known as the ‘Manchester Martyrs’, acted as a leaven for national sentiment.117 113 ‘Amongst the Fenians’, 12 September 1868. 114 Ibid., 19 and 26 September, 10 October 1868; Nolan, ‘Fariola, Massey and the Fenian Rising’, 7–8; Ó Broin, Fenian Fever, 144. 115 Nolan, ‘Fariola, Massey and the Fenian Rising’, 8. 116 P. B. Rose, The Manchester Martyrs: The Story of a Fenian Tragedy, London, 1970. 117 Précis of Police Reports, Thomas Hamilton, RM, Cork to Home Office, 24 November 1868, TNA: PRO HO 144 1537 1, 78.

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The case of the Manchester Martyrs was symptomatic of unrehearsed policy-making. Their trial had been rushed through a Special Commission in an atmosphere of revenge. On the day the men were publicly hanged, a visible demonstration of force by the state served only to emphasise the political nature of the sentences. The government and the queen, as Brian Jenkins has illustrated, were cautious of an outbreak of unrest among Irish immigrant communities, and army regiments were dispatched to various British towns. In Manchester, 500 soldiers were present with two batteries of artillery. Five hundred constables and 2,000 special constables were on duty, some of whom had been armed by local authorities who believed the potential threat merited the temporary disregard of the tradition of the unarmed constable.118 The propaganda opportunities created by the Manchester hangings invigorated an IRB that was struggling to come up for air in the atmosphere of post-insurrection repression and decline. In the south of Ireland, the Irish American William ‘Mackey’ Lomasney sought to take advantage of the moment with a series of guerrilla operations. In November 1867, 5 days after the Manchester executions, a band of men raided 120 revolvers and 8 rifles from a gun-shop in Cork city. One month later, 5 Fenians forced their way into a Martello tower, held the gunners and their families prisoner, and seized as much ammunition and gunpowder as they could carry away. Lomasney freely identified himself during the raid and The Irishman happily reported on the Irish American’s involvement in ‘one of the boldest enterprises ever yet attempted in this country in connexion with the Fenian conspiracy’.119 Less than a week afterwards, 8 Fenians raided another gun-shop on the busiest street in Cork at 9 o’clock on a Monday morning, leaving with 60 revolvers and over 1,000 rounds of ammunition. In another episode, a commercially owned powder store was emptied of half a ton of gunpowder. These actions were valuable to the IRB as they communicated a continued presence and caused people, The Irish Times maintained, mistakenly to ‘think there is something formidable in a conspiracy which is represented as having agents everywhere’.120 In 1868, the fact that Lomasney could operate in an urban centre during daylight provoked more sombre concerns and evidently disturbed the government. Conservative voices advocated that Dublin Castle 118 Jenkins, The Fenian Problem, 112: Seán McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 1848– 1922: Theatres of War, London, 2003, 133. 119 The Irishman, 4 January 1868. 120 The Irish Times (Dublin), 30 December 1867; 6 and 7 January 1868; Ó Broin, Fenian Fever, 217–23.

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implement a policy of indiscriminate arrest of Irish Americans. The Nation scorned police efforts to apprehend the raiders, and taunted, ‘the authorities are striking about indefinitely as if playing at “Blindman’s buff”’.121 Moderate and militant newspapers alike made increasingly violent pronouncements during this period and, as a marker of tensions that then existed, the editors of both The Nation and The Irishman were imprisoned for printing seditious material in February 1868.122 The government approached Lomasney’s guerrillas with reservation, and an unsureness that was exacerbated by the tensions resulting from the Manchester executions and an explosion carried out in Clerkenwell: in December 1867 the Fenians startled London when an explosion that was intended to break a prisoner out of Clerkenwell went horribly wrong and killed twelve civilians. The tragedy sparked widespread fears over future civilian casualties and placed increasing pressure on the authorities to stamp out Fenianism. This pressure was intensified by reports in the press of a Dublin ‘assassination committee’, allegedly established to kill officials such as the Earl of Mayo and the DMP superintendent Daniel Ryan. In October 1867, these rumours appeared to be confirmed by the shooting of two policemen in Temple Bar, one fatally. In November 1867, an explosion at a Dublin courthouse raised further concerns about ‘Fenian Fire’, a version of the incendiary mixture named ‘Greek Fire’ that contained white phosphorus, and which was reportedly being manufactured by the IRB in Ballybough, Dublin. The combustible, carried in bottles, was designed for use during the insurrection as a type of grenade, rather than for terrorist-style attacks in the city, and was discovered in the possession of a number of insurgents during the March uprising.123 The courthouse explosion was an accident, but one month later, four ‘letter bombs’ addressed to Superintendent Ryan came to police attention when the badly assembled packages caught fire prematurely in a Dublin post-box. Concerns that the IRB had adopted a new mode of warfare spread and the Home Office appointed Lieutenant Colonel Percy Fielding to launch inquiries into an ‘international assassination conspiracy’, sending agents to Italy and Paris to investigate the manufacture of ‘infernal machines’.124 121 The Nation, 4 January 1868; The Irish Times, 6 January 1868. 122 A. M. Sullivan, Report of the Trials of Alexander M. Sullivan and Richard Pigott, for Seditious Libels on the Government, Dublin, 1868; Jenkins, The Fenian Problem, 174. 123 The Nation, 15 and 29 December 1866; 9 March 1867; Freeman’s Journal, 7 March 1867. 124 The ‘assassination committee’ is the subject of Barry Kennerk, Shadow of the Brotherhood: The Temple Bar Shootings, Dublin, 2010, 199; Jenkins, The Fenian Problem, 92, 175–6.

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These concerns were no doubt augmented by the violence associated with trade unions in Sheffield in 1866/7, when striking sawgrinders damaged property using gunpowder and attempted to blow up the house of a strike-breaker.125 The ‘assassination committee’ was formed in 1865 and directed by John Walsh. A brother-in-law of the Fenian leader Thomas Clarke Luby, Walsh was a fringe figure in the Dublin IRB owing to his militant views, though he was involved in two key episodes of Fenian history: the 1875–6 Catalpa rescue and the 1882 Phoenix Park murders.126 When Walsh and his co-conspirators John Murphy and Michael Feely were arrested in 1867, responsibility for the assassination circle fell to Patrick Lennon. A veteran of the 1867 uprising, Lennon had served under John Kirwan when the IRB seized barracks at Stepaside and Glencullen. Previously, his career rivalled those of the many volunteers attracted to the Fenian movement: he had served in the British army and experienced first-hand the 1857 Indian rebellion. After deserting in 1860, Lennon travelled to the USA and in 1863 joined the Union Army, fighting in a guerrilla campaign in West Virginia. The DMP believed Lennon was responsible for the Temple Bar murder, but he was acquitted when tried in February 1868.127 By the time of Lennon’s trial, it was becoming evident that the assassination committee’s function was to kill informers and not government ministers or policemen. Punishing informers was a common feature of any revolutionary underground, and many Fenians discountenanced the assassination of officials or the use of Greek Fire. The shootings of DMP constables occurred because they interrupted members of the gang on their way to kill informers under protection in Chancery Lane.128 The appearance of letter bombs and importation of phosphorus, however, indicated that some Dublin Fenians were contemplating alternatives to traditional rebel activities. Irregular warfare was not new in Ireland. In the early 1800s, lowlevel insurgency continued in the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion, while in June 1848 The Nation supplied its readers with ‘Easy Lessons on Military Matters’. One of these lessons discussed guerrilla-style operations, where rebels ‘should never risk a battle on a large scale, but should always act in small independent bodies, all of course acting in concert’, 125 Sidney Pollard, A History of Labour in Sheffield, Aldershot, 1993 [1959], 153. 126 Leon Ó Broin, Revolutionary Underground: The Story of the Irish Republican Brotherhood 1858–1924, Dublin, 1976, 15; Tom Corfe, The Phoenix Park Murders: Conflict, Compromise and Tragedy in Ireland, 1879–1882, London, 1968, 137–40. 127 Kennerk, Shadow of the Brotherhood, 185–6, and passim. 128 Ibid., 295–300.

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a plan that John O’Mahony attempted to follow in September of that year.129 Irregular tactics were also counselled before the 1867 uprising when John Mitchel wrote: ‘It is not that I stand out for “civilized” warfare. The Irish have the clear right to strike at England anywhere or anyhow, in Canada, in Ireland, in London, by steel or gunpowder or firewood.’130 Moreover, readers of Irish newspapers were undoubtedly familiar with guerrilla warfare from reports of the fighting during the 1857 Indian Rebellion and American Civil War. In the winter of 1867/8, irregular warfare characterised the actions of William Lomasney’s band in Cork. The region was already a proclaimed district, and doubling patrols and sending reinforcements to guard barracks seemed to have cosmetic value only. Anxieties grew about Lomasney’s band sparking similar actions in other regions of Ireland. Under these circumstances, the Home Secretary remarked that an outbreak of insurrection would be preferable, as it would facilitate a primed and concrete state response.131 The success of the guerrillas pointed to high degrees of sympathy, if not collusion, among the population of Cork, and the full force of the coercion act could not be brought to bear on the region without risking popular unrest. The guerrilla war was short-lived, and in February Lomasney was arrested after the police received a tip-off. When resisting arrest he wounded a constable who subsequently died, and thus Lomasney was tried for murder in March. Reinforced security at his trial highlighted concerns about a rescue attempt, but also indicated more general fears of an outbreak of unrest. One hundred policemen were posted at the local prison where Lomasney waited to be transported to Kilmainham jail in Dublin. During his trial in Cork, sixty constables surrounded the courthouse and a force of cavalry was sent to the city, while trains were positioned to convey troops swiftly should they be needed. Lomasney was eventually found not guilty of murder and sentenced to penal servitude for twelve years for the crime of treason-felony.132 After release from prison under amnesty in 1871, Lomasney remained committed to revolutionary nationalism but the experiences of 1867/8 had caused him to rethink strategies of violent rebellion. In the 1880s he advocated urban-guerrilla warfare as the best means of engaging the British authorities in the current circumstances, and helped to direct a 129 The Nation, 17 June, 8 July 1848; Sayers, ‘John O’Mahony’, 102–30; Ruán O’Donnell, Aftermath: Post-Rebellion Insurgency in Wicklow, 1799–1803, Dublin, 2000. 130 John Mitchel to Mortimer Moynahan, 28 January 1867, CUA, ODRPP, Box 2, Folder 9. 131 Ó Broin, Fenian Fever, 218. 132 The Irish Times, 8 February, 9 March 1868; The Nation, 14 March 1868.

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dynamite campaign in the cities of Great Britain against the backdrop of serious agrarian unrest in Ireland. Lomasney subscribed to the New York faction of the Fenian movement that dismissed insurrection as the most effective strategy for achieving Irish independence, instead calling for an urban bombing campaign, or what Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa labelled skirmishing. In 1884, Lomasney was responsible for a number of explosions in London and he eventually died under London Bridge, when one of his infernal machines exploded prematurely, killing him, his brother and one other man. This turn from insurrection to guerrilla attacks to a bombing campaign had Irish peculiarities, but the development of revolutionary violence in this direction evokes parallels with other countries, and Italy in particular, where an insurrectionary and conspiratorial tradition also spun off into assassination and bombings in the 1880s.

From guerra per bande to urban guerrilla warfare

Fariola’s blueprint for a guerrilla campaign in Ireland strongly resembled the ideas of guerra per bande that had circulated in Italy during the Risorgimento. Partisan warfare had long existed in Europe, and Clausewitz noted the effectiveness of guerrilla tactics in Spain and Russia against Napoleonic occupation. Also in the Italian south, resistance against the French took the form of brigantaggio, or brigandage, which was characterised by guerrilla tactics. Post-restoration, the idea of a guerrilla war of national liberation took shape when Piedmontese liberal Carlo Bianco di Saint-Jorioz published Della guerra nazionale d’insurrezione per bande (1830). Saint-Jorioz argued that Italian patriots could never hope to match a regular army like Austria’s in the field and, therefore, a campaign fought by guerrilla bands made more sense. Italy’s mountainous countryside was suited to guerrilla actions, evident in the failure of successive efforts to suppress rural unrest and banditry. The principal aim of guerra per bande was to ‘surprise and unsettle the enemy when on the march; profit from advantages offered by favourable countryside; draw the war into the mountains, woods and marshes; force them to spread out … attack them from the flanks and from behind’. In this way, the army would become exhausted and eventually succumb to combinations of bands. The composition of these bands was to include the contadini class of ‘rural labourers, tenant farmers, shepherds, and the honest and frugal inhabitants of towns and villages’. Peasants were well adapted for guerra per bande owing to their familiarity with the terrain and ability to withstand the hardships that would surely accompany a guerrilla war, unlike the cittadini, or

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urban dwellers. Their loyalty to the cause could be secured through guarantees of land redistribution in the new Italy.133 Similarly, in 1843, Mazzinian-republican Giuseppe Budini maintained that tenants and labourers (salariti agricoli e braccianti) were necessary recruits for a war of national liberation, as guerra per bande in rural areas was the only means of achieving victory against an occupying army.134 Mazzini himself incorporated guerra per bande into the military programme of Young Italy, declaring it to be ‘the true method of warfare … invincible, indestructible’. Mazzini’s insurrectionary handbooks  – Della guerra d’insurrezione conveniente all’Italia (1833) and Istruzione per le bande nazionali (1853)  – provided historical examples and detailed guidelines on the role of guerrillas in warfare and their moral and political duties. The first work called for the abandonment of traditional warfare as ‘blind and exclusive faith in an Italian army had twice ruined the cause’ (1821 and 1831). The 1853 manual contained forty-one ‘rules’ for guerrilla bands and was undoubtedly influenced by Mazzini’s experiences in Rome in 1849 and the 1853 attempt at insurrection in Milan. Departing from his earlier views, Mazzini no longer thought in terms of a lengthy, unpredictable guerrilla campaign against occupation, but now understood guerrilla actions to be the sparks that would ignite a war of liberation fought by a mass army. He also emphasised that urban centres should now be the sites of action, above rural areas.135 The wars of Italian unification were mainly characterised by conventional battles, but guerra per bande did have a part to play. In 1837, the Modenese revolutionary Nicola Fabrizi organised the Legion Italica in Malta, an organisation to train volunteers for a guerrilla war that was to be launched in the south and which would then spread up through the peninsula. In 1854, Sicilian patriot Giuseppe La Masa set about the organisation of guerrilla bands, which he believed were necessary to defeat the Bourbon army.136 The writings of radical democrat Carlo 133 Carlo Bianco di Saint-Jorioz, Della guerra nazionale d’insurrezione per bande, applicata all’Italia, trattato dedicato ai buoni italiani da un amico del Paese, Marseille, 1830, quoted in Franco Della Peruta, ‘La Banda del Matese e il fallimento della teoria anarchica della moderna “jacquerie” in Italia’, Movimento operaio, 6 (1954), 337–84 (360–2). 134 Giuseppe Budini, Alcune idée sull’Italia, London, 1843; Franco Della Peruta, I democratici e la rivoluzione italiana, Milan, 1958, 294–300. 135 Giuseppe Mazzini, Della guerra d’insurrezione conveniente all’Italia, and Istruzione per le bande nazionali, in Scritti politici, editi ed inediti, 31 vols., Imola, 1907, Vol. III, 197–230, 231–41 (204); Della Peruta, I democratici e la rivoluzione italiana, 302–9. 136 Duggan, Force of Destiny, 137; Franco Della Peruta, Mazzini e i rivoluzionari italiani: Il Partito d’Azione, 1830–1845, Milan, 1974, 278–314; Salvatore Sechi (ed.), La guerra del 1848–49, Naples, 1969, 349–587 (378); Giuseppe Berti, Democratici e l’iniziativa meridionale nel Risorgimento, Milan, 1962, 539–648.

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Pisacane – who died in the ill-fated Sapri expedition in 1857 – advocated ‘improvised’ bands for attacks in occupied areas, as auxiliaries to a revolutionary army.137 Aside from Garibaldi’s own reputation as a guerrilla tactician, the German democrat Wilhelm Rüstow fought in Sicily in 1860 and subsequently published a practical guide to guerrilla warfare, Die Lehre vom kleinen Krieg (1864).138 When Garibaldi and the Thousand landed in Sicily, his small army was successful because it exploited violent unrest already stirred up by peasant guerrillas who targeted soldiers, public officials and pro-Bourbon landholders. The Sicily that Garibaldi entered was an island already in revolution.139 At the beginning of unification, however, guerra per bande changed dramatically from something Italian patriots aimed to harness to something they sought to quell. When the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies fell in 1860, armed resistance to the new Italian state quickly erupted. Brigantaggio was in essence a guerrilla war waged against the Italian army in many provinces in the south of the peninsula from 1861 to 1865. The guerrillas comprised ex-Bourbon soldiers and bandits who, at least from the authorities’ viewpoint, were sheltered by rural populations that held tacit solidarity for their cause because of loyalty to the Catholic Church and opposition to the draft, or as a form of protest at endemic rural poverty and newly imposed taxes. The term ‘brigand’ indicated how the new state viewed the pervasive unrest as inherently criminal, and official attitudes were coloured by ethnic ideas of southern inferiority.140 Historians also emphasise the political aspects of brigandage as a form of civil war, a rejection of Piedmontese conquest.141 The brutal repression was driven by anxieties about pro-Bourbon resistance, but also by fears that Garibaldi and disgruntled democrats would see the unrest as an opportunity to attempt a march on Rome. In one notorious case, the Italian army retaliated to the killing of 41 soldiers by indiscriminately massacring some 400 villagers in Pontelandolfo, 137 Although credited with being an extoller of guerrilla warfare by Laqueur, Pisacane argued that guerrilla bands were only effective when they merged together as an army or ‘mass’ of rebels. Carlo Pisacane, Guerra combattuta in Italia negli anni 1848– 49, Milan, 1961, 56–80. 138 Laqueur, ‘The Origins of Guerrilla Doctrine’, 356; Rosi, Dizionario del Risorgimento nazionale, 153. 139 Lucy Riall, Sicily and the Unification of Italy: Liberal Policy and Local Power, 1859– 1866, Oxford, 1998, 68–75. 140 Franco Molfese, Storia del Brigantaggio dopo l’Unità, Milan, 1966; John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, New York, 1999, 25–52. 141 Salvatore Lupo, ‘Il grande brigantaggio: Interpretazione e memoria di una guerra civile’, in W. Barberis (ed.), Storia d’Italia. Annali 18: Guerra e pace, Turin, 2002, 463–502; Daniela Adorni, ‘Il brigantaggio’, in Luciano Violante (ed.), Storia d’Italia. Annali 12: La criminalità, Turin, 1997, 283–319.

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Campania.142 By 1865, brigandage finally began to wane in the south of the peninsula, but the wars and severe repression indicated the weakness of the new state, weakness that left-wing republicans and internationalists sought to exploit. In the new Italy, guerrilla warfare continued to be employed by groups who were the ‘revolutionary continuation of the Risorgimento,’ according to historian Giampietro Berti, but who were also inspired by the widespread unrest during the brigandage wars.143 In 1870 disillusioned republicans in Calabria formed guerrilla bands to give active voice to their discontent. While they had little military success, they provoked an uneasy response from the government, which hesitated over whether to use available army regiments against the Calabrian guerrillas, or withhold them in case similar actions might be sparked elsewhere.144 In 1877 the so-called ‘Banda del Matese’, a group of Internationalists, republicans and anarchists, attempted to start a rebellion in the mountainous Matese area of the south, not far from the scene of the Pontelandolfo massacre. The band included future anarchist leaders Carlo Cafiero and Errico Malatesta, and also two veterans of Garibaldi’s campaigns, Pietro Ceccarelli and Vincenzo Farina. Prompted by the rediscovery of Pisacane’s works in 1875, the band sought to spark rebellion through revolutionary deeds such as disrupting communications and railways, seizing public buildings, destroying royal symbols and encouraging villagers to redistribute property. After six days in the mountains the band of twenty-six men were forced to surrender to the legions of troops that had been sent to root them out. Among the arrested was the Russian revolutionary Sergei Kravchinsky, or Stepniak, who found his way into the party through previous contact with Errico Malatesta during the Balkan wars. When arrested, Kravchinsky was carrying a small manual, written by himself, which outlined ‘minute and precise instructions for an insurgent war, first in the mountains and in the woods, conducted by small bands, then growing hand by hand until able to attack an army and take possession of the capital’.145 142 Lupo, ‘Il grande brigantaggio’, 468; Duggan, Force of Destiny, 220–8. 143 Giampietro Berti, Errico Malatesta e Il Movimento Anarchico Italiano e Internazionale, 1872–1932, Milan, 2003, 65. 144 Claudio Pavone, ‘Le bande insurrezionali della primavera del 1870’, Movimento operaio, 8 (1956), 42–107 (58). 145 Berti, Malatesta, 63; Della Peruta, ‘La Banda del Matese’, 337–84 (370); Luigi Parente (ed.), Movimenti sociali e lotte politiche nell’Italia liberale: Il moto anarchico del Matese, Milan, 2004; Pier Carlo Masini, Gli Internazionalisti: La Banda del Matese (1876–1878), Milan and Rome, 1958, 92–102; S. Di Corato, ‘Magistratura, anarchici e governo: La vicenda della Banda del Matese’, Rivista di storia contemporanea, 13 (1984), 337–8.

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The Matese guerrillas were not millenarians who believed that their actions would spark an inevitable revolution. Their intention was to use the episode to communicate, to the widest audience possible, that the Italian IWA was actively seeking social and political change. In this sense, they were relatively successful: a sympathetic jury acquitted them in 1878 and the trial was a propaganda success.146 However, the episode also demonstrated the limitations of rural guerrilla warfare. Ceccarelli acknowledged that certain factors rendered the idea of the revolutionary band obsolete: technical progress and modernisation, in the form of the telegraph, railway and deforestation, narrowed the virtues of rural guerrilla warfare and put them at a disadvantage before they even began.147 In the following years, anarchists rethought guerrilla actions in the context of ‘propaganda by the deed’. Instead of retreating to the mountains armed with rifles, anarchists began to focus on urban attacks and the exploitation of recent developments in science and technology, such as dynamite and the mass availability of pistols resulting from industrialised production. In July 1881, many anarchists congregated in London for the Anti-Authoritarian International Congress. Coming in the wake of Alexander II’s assassination, questions of political violence and ‘propaganda by the deed’ were central to the conference. Anticipating the debate in the journal Il grido del popolo, anarchist Carlo Cafiero, a key member of the 1877 Matese rebels, outlined what he thought to be a turning-point in the history of revolutionary violence: At this congress parliamentarians and legalitarians stand out for their absence, and all in attendance will be in perfect agreement regarding the need for violent means. Hence the order of the day will be reduced to one question: in what way will violent action be organised? Two options will be presented: one from the classic school, the other from the modern school. The first advocates compact orders of phalanxes and battalions; the other, instead, upholds scattered orders of handfuls of men. One requires a great concentration of force, the other an immense dissemination of force. One proposes the formation of a colossal body capable of attacking the state and holding its ground, the other proposes the creation of a boundless number of minute bodies or groups, like a net in which the monster would have to become entangled.148

Cafiero unambiguously embraced the modern school, or what came to be generally described as propaganda by the deed. Fellow Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta agreed, recognising that ‘the classic band, 146 Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892, Princeton, 1993, 141–5. 147 Pietro Cesare Ceccarelli to Amilcare Cipriani, [?] March–April 1881, Movimento operaio, 6 (1954), 377–84 (379). 148 Il grido del popolo (Naples), 4 July 1881.

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formal and solemn, no longer responded to changing conditions and aspirations … Free, spontaneous and incessant action by individuals and groups’ was better suited to contemporary circumstances.149 Similar to the decision by some Fenians to adopt urban guerrilla warfare as their principal tactic, the turn toward propaganda by the deed excited a vigorous debate among Italian anarchists over the legitimacy of different forms of violent action, and many figureheads, including Errico Malatesta, condemned the ‘terroristic tendencies’ that emerged in the movement.150 The period from 1878 until the late 1890s saw Italian anarchists employ dynamite attacks and assassination against government and industry, usually as spontaneous individual acts rather than resulting from a consensus on strategy. Anarchists from Italy became particularly notorious after fatal attacks on four European heads of state in the 1890s, but propaganda of the deed was by no means limited to one country, and during the final quarter of the nineteenth century, Cafiero’s thoughts were echoed by anarchists in Spain and France, but also by militant nationalists in the Irish diaspora. The small-scale guerrilla experiments in Ireland and Italy tested the authorities’ ability to police dissent effectively. During the Italian Risorgimento, theories of guerrilla warfare were imagined as a means of countering the numerical, financial, technological might of the Austrian and Spanish forces, by manoeuvring them into unfamiliar situations. The thinking was that the side that defines and gauges the level of violence will be successful. Post-unification, the Matese Internationalists sought to provoke an indistinct conflict where routines of action and reaction were not clear, similarly to the brigandage war of the early 1860s. The fact that the new Italian constitutionalist monarchy was attempting to establish itself seemed to make their prospects of success all the more realistic. Predictably, given that 100,000 troops had been sent to the south to brutally quell the outbreak of brigandage in the first years of the state, the response of the new government was authoritarian. A counterinsurgency force of 12,000 troops was sent to Matese in order to stop 26 poorly armed men.151 The disproportionate show of force was intended to send a national message that the government held the monopoly over violence in the new Italian state. In reality, though, the strong-armed reaction encouraged the Internationalists, as

149 L’Associazione (Nice), 6 September 1889; 16 October 1889. See Berti, Malatesta, 150–1. 150 Quoted in Berti, Malatesta, 192. On this period see Pier Carlo Masini, Storia degli anarchici italiani da Bakunin a Malatesta, Milan, 1969. 151 Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 123, 128.

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it showed the absence of power and underlined official unsureness as to how to respond. Official experiments on how best to respond to subversion stretched notions of what was legal and illegal. Italian anarchist Francesco Saverio Merlino noted that Italian governments exploited militant anarchist ideology to fabricate threats, using them as a pretext to interfere with legal processes and give arbitrary powers to the police. In the new state, Merlino believed, there was nothing more murky than the ‘boundaries that separate what is legal from what is illegal’.152 Because the boundaries of legitimate action were unfixed, dissident groups improvised with new and sometimes extreme means, not purely as a desperate reaction to repression, but because the balance of forces that usually kept excessive behaviour in check was absent. Violent acts were not consciously overstepping the mark when no one could see where the mark was. Unlike Italy, Britain was a well-established nation-state. In Ireland, however, the contested legitimacy of the 1801 Act of Union and the Dublin Castle executive provoked assertive demonstrations of civil and military strength. Ireland was frequently policed under extraordinary powers and the suspension of habeas corpus became a familiar mechanism of enforcement that drew serious objections from Liberal and Irish ministers, but was implemented as an emergency measure. According to one estimate, 105 coercion laws were passed in nineteenth-­century Ireland.153 Crimes were met with disproportionate punishments under exceptional legislation that blurred distinctions between political and criminal violence. This, in turn, led to confusion as to what constituted violent crime and where the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable action was drawn. In 1867, The Irishman described policing in the Irish countryside as the ‘Reign of Terror’.154 The newspaper was clearly not a neutral observer but the impression that justice was unevenly administered was widely held. Between 1865 and 1867, the provisions of extraordinary legislation enabled the government to prepare and deal with insurrection without serious concern, but on the other hand guerrilla tactics provoked unease and illustrated how government forces were not so effective elsewhere.155 Further difficulties for the government were encountered in the management of political prisoners. In 1848 nationalist prisoners 152 Francesco Saverio Merlino, L’Italia qual’é, quoted in John A. Davis, Conflict and Control: Law and Order in Nineteenth Century Italy, Basingstoke, 1988, 4–5. 153 Barry Vaughan and Shane Kilcommins (eds.), Terrorism, Rights and the Rule of Law: Negotiating Justice in Ireland, Cullompton, 2008, 54. 154 The Irishman, 2 March 1867. 155 Home Secretary Hardy, quoted in Ó Broin, Fenian Fever, 218.

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were treated as gentlemen, but by the 1860s attitudes had changed and the Fenians encountered harsher conditions, with the treatment of O’Donovan Rossa proving particularly contentious. The delicate nature of political imprisonment meant officials were reluctant to take responsibility for decision-making, and London and Dublin often passed the parcel, refusing to comment on the case files of particular Fenians when asked for specific instructions from prison directors.156 Official policy toward the Fenian prisoners was unsystematic, rules were improvised and revised, and conditions varied between prisons and between prisoners, highlighting the experimental nature of repression. That more official unease existed after the IRB’s uprising had been easily suppressed than before it underlines how Weberian monopolies on violence should not be overemphasised. Ireland was governed through the abundant use of force in the nineteenth century and nationalist violence has traditionally been viewed as a reaction to this. Yet, the violent presence of the state was intermittent, not permanent. Standards existed for the suppression of unrest, facilitating a state response that had become routinised and did not stir public debates about the use of excessive force. In turn, revolutionaries sought out areas where these standards could be challenged. As militant nationalists experimented with tactics ranging from insurrection to guerrilla warfare to dynamite attacks, government violence was also a form of experimentation, an unscripted reaction to changing developments and, in this sense, wasn’t always rationally thought out. Movements spin off into contentious violence once their initial momentum is abruptly halted. The Fenian attempt at insurrection was the necessary outcome of increasing tension and expectancy on the part of those who, years previously, committed themselves to rebellion as the primary means of generating political change. By locating themselves in a historical tradition of revolutionary nationalism, the Fenians’ strategy of insurrection at times seemed to be a mentality, and not a reaction to objective circumstances. Historians have pointed out that inside the Irish physical-force tradition, the failure of insurrection did not undermine it, rather the triumph of failure became ‘a moral force in its own right’.157 Yet, the development of militant Irish nationalism was not in defiance of modernising trends, evident in the fact that rebels

156 See McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 50, 144, 176; Jenkins, The Fenian Problem, 140. 157 Charles Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848, Oxford, 1983, 410; Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure, London, 1977.

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were prepared to consider alternatives in light of developments in other countries and rethink their strategies when insurrection failed. The 1867 uprising was an unequivocal manifestation of military asymmetry that began a process of reflection about violent action finding articulation in the Skirmishing Fund and dynamite campaign of the 1880s.

2

The Skirmishing Fund

No sentence can be too severe for the dynamiter. He is a disgrace to his country, an enemy to her cause, a danger to the entire community … No excuse can palliate his offence. It is monstrous … with the dynamiter there can be no civilised sympathy.1

The national rebellion that the Fenians envisaged in 1867 would have been, by necessity, ferocious and bloody. Yet thresholds of violence were observed. The Irishman – a separatist journal that survived closure in the 1860s  – played down the violent nature of the rising and emphasised the measured behaviour of the volunteers who ‘released policemen from imprisonment and paid for any provisions taken from country houses’. Evidently, appealing to prevailing standards of honour and justice factored in determining how violence worked. The moderate Nation by no means supported the venture, but nonetheless reflected on the conduct of the ‘ordinary, peaceable and virtuous’ insurgents, who ‘behaved admirably … their conduct was worthy of their race and country’. Archbishop Paul Cullen, an implacable enemy of Fenianism, acknowledged that the insurgents ‘did not rob or injure anyone’ and praised their civilised conduct. Samuel Lee Anderson, the Crown Solicitor, commented that ‘wanton outrages were not the rule, but the rare exception, and these were almost wholly the work of American desperados, strangers in the country. This fact deserves to be recorded to the credit of the Irish people.’2 The uprising was attempted within limits that had been set by routines of collective action. The rebels innovated within these limits, but a discipline was maintained in order not to alienate possible sympathisers or run the risk of being labelled criminals. Regular warfare, Stathis 1 Freeman’s Journal, 10 August 1883. 2 The Irishman (Dublin), 16 March 1867; The Nation (Dublin), 23 February and 16 March 1867; Archbishop Paul Cullen, quoted in Brian Jenkins, The Fenian Problem: Insurgency and Terrorism in a Liberal State, 1858–1874, London, 2008, 88; Samuel Lee Anderson, quoted in Leon Ó Broin, Fenian Fever: An Anglo-American Dilemma, New York, 1971, 158; National Library of Ireland, Larcom Papers, MS 7517.

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Kalyvas has observed, entails ‘face-to-face confrontations between regular armies across well-defined front lines’, and the ‘recognition by the weaker side that it must play by the existing rules and confront its enemy on the battlefield’. Irregular warfare, on the other hand, features no large-scale battles, the absence of front lines, and the implicit recognition of military asymmetry that allows the breaking of existing rules.3 The failures of 1867 led some Fenians to rethink militant nationalism in ways that transgressed routines of action and recognised the tactical limitations of regular warfare. In October 1874, The Irish World, which listed a circulation of 35,000 at the time, called for a ‘band of men’ to ‘skirmish’ in Great Britain. Dismissing the idea of insurrection as ‘untimely and ill-advised’, the paper subsequently established a Skirmishing Fund in 1876 to finance a campaign of urban guerrilla warfare.4 This chapter tells the story of the Skirmishing Fund and the bombing campaign that followed it. It explores what was new about skirmishing and how its protagonists sought to legitimise, both morally and politically, such a contentious departure. Within the transnational Fenian movement, supporters and opponents alike viewed skirmishing as a rupture with traditional nationalism. In seeking to explain new forms of political violence, the skirmishers or dynamiters needed substantially to revise conventional physical-force-tradition explanations and draft a sophisticated explanatory rhetoric addressing concerns that escalations in violence were getting out of hand.

The origins and development of the Skirmishing Fund

In December 1867, unforeseen consequences followed the attempt to demolish a Clerkenwell prison wall in order to free the Fenian prisoner Ricard O’Sullivan Burke.5 Destroying much more than the wall, the amateur explosion destroyed 2 tenement houses in the opposite street and damaged more, causing the deaths of 12 people and injuries to 120 others.6 Fear spread throughout London, mob violence threatened 3 Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, Cambridge, MA, 2006, 66. 4 The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator (New York), 10 October 1874, 4 December 1875, 4 March 1876. 5 Burke was amnestied in 1871 on condition he leave Ireland. After arrival in the USA, he swiftly secured a position at the War Department in Washington. He became a member of the Clan-na-Gael and travelled to Ireland again in 1882 to train IRB volunteers in the use of arms. Charles Clipperton to Earl Granville, 19 September 1882, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-740. 6 Figures quoted in The Times, 29 April 1868. On the explosion see Ó Broin, Fenian Fever, 210–12.

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Irish communities and outcry filled the press. The Times declared that the Fenians had resolved to act without regard for the ‘incidental consequences on innocent persons … English life is nothing on the scale’.7 Historian Brian Jenkins has questioned whether the casualties at Clerkenwell can justifiably be called accidental, suggesting that the perpetrators were aware of the potential danger to civilian lives, but accepted it as part of war.8 Yet, if indiscriminate killing was the intention, it would render Clerkenwell an anomaly: no other act of Fenian violence approached anything near the devastation caused and, internationally, it was not until Santiago Salvador killed twenty-two people by throwing two Orsini bombs among the spectators in Barcelona’s Liceu Theatre in 1893 that an act of revolutionary violence was so indifferent to civilian life. It seems likely, then, that the civilian deaths caused by the Clerkenwell explosion were the tragic and unintended results of an amateur knowledge of explosives. In Dublin, The Nation reacted to the explosion by underlining that loss of life and injury were unintended: revolutionary nationalists were committed to armed struggle, not with ‘women and children, but with men  – honourably and according to the rules of war’. Yet the article proceeded to outline, ‘there is no blinking or denying the fact that the results which followed [Clerkenwell] show that the Fenian conspirators, without ships on sea or an army in the field, have it in their hands to deal a tremendous blow to England’. Identifying a new threat for England, against which ‘neither her army nor her navy’ could offer protection, the article stressed the destruction ‘a few astute and desperate men unknown and undistinguished among the mass’ could carry out. It may well have been that The Nation was attempting to portray an apocalyptic situation where fanatics held the reins, in order to strengthen the hand of moderate nationalists and ruffle a parliament whose ‘scornful denial of claims peaceably urged’ had brought about the tragedy. Nonetheless, the article outlined a disquieting course of action available to militant nationalists.9 Some months later, William Gladstone professed that the episode at Clerkenwell had helped to hasten the embrace of ‘the vast importance of the Irish controversy’.10 When the House of Commons voted, on 3 April 1868, in favour of Gladstone’s plan to disestablish the Anglican Church as the national church of Ireland, with the accompanying abolition of 7 The Times, 24 December 1867. 8 Jenkins, The Fenian Problem, 208, 330. 9 The Nation, 21 December 1867. 10 Quoted in Charles Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848, Oxford, 1983, 37.

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tithes, The Irishman asserted that the change had been wrought by political violence.11 John Devoy later remarked that Gladstone provided ‘a stronger argument in favour of physical force – and even of terrorism – on the part of Ireland to secure justice and freedom than any Irishman ever made’.12 Devoy’s comments are often cited in studies on political violence in Ireland and the Clerkenwell explosion is regularly described as the starting gun of Irish nationalist terrorism. Indeed, less than ten years later one subscriber to the Skirmishing Fund wrote that ‘the scare that seized England’ after the Clerkenwell explosion was proof enough that similar acts should be repeated.13 When William Mackey Lomasney and his two companions were killed when placing their bomb under London Bridge in 1884, the action marked the anniversary of the Clerkenwell explosion. Whether the date was chosen intentionally is impossible to know, and overall the effect that the Clerkenwell explosion had on the development of the Fenians’ revolutionary strategy is difficult to measure. After all, what did the Fenians gain from the episode? The disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 and the consolidation of the power of the Catholic Church were hardly in the interests of a secular, illegal organisation pursuing an independent republic. Moreover, alternatives to insurrection had long been discussed previous to the explosion, and when it occurred most of the militant figures of the movement were in prison, so their views on the affair are unknown. The tragedy was referred to only on a handful of occasions in The Irish World or the United Irishman, the two New York journals committed to skirmishing propaganda. At the same time, nationalist and conservative opinion accepted that the Clerkenwell bomb focused new attention on the Irish Question, and the entire episode demonstrated how violence was used by all sides to push for more decisive action. The Clerkenwell explosion was an unplanned tragedy, but between 1875 and 1885 deliberate and unprecedented calls for the systematic use of dynamite and explosives became common in The Irish World. In 1875, O’Donovan Rossa called for the establishment of a Skirmishing Fund in a letter to the newspaper that was published, after some deliberation, in March of the following year. The letter requested financial support for an irregular campaign of violence in Britain. What skirmishing precisely meant was unclear; according to John Devoy, the

11 The Irishman, 11 April 1868. 12 John Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel, New York, 1929, 250. 13 The Irish World, 15 April 1876.

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meaning was designed to be vague as ‘it left him [O’Donovan Rossa] free to do anything to promote a revolution’.14 Skirmishes had been the term used to describe the Fenian raids into Canada. In 1866, with the barrack-room anthems of the Civil War still ringing in their ears, a newly formed wing of the Fenian Brotherhood populated by army veterans attempted to invade Canada with the aim of causing enough mischief to inflame already strained Anglo-American relations. The plans for the invasion resulted from emerging tensions between the Irish and Irish American wings of the Fenian movement. In the early 1860s, Irish American nationalists abandoned the organisational model of the IRB and adopted structures that more resembled American institutions. These reforms indicated their impatience for action and also that they now understood the Fenian Brotherhood to be the senior partner in the movement, not the IRB. The ‘Senate wing’ of the Fenian Brotherhood, led by William R. Roberts, dissented from Stephens’ and O’Mahony’s leadership and advocated raids into Canada as preferable to insurrection in Ireland, at least in the short term. Their actionist policy also briefly brought them into an alliance with John Walsh’s Dublin ‘assassination committee’ in 1867.15 In June 1866, over 1,000 Fenians assembled near the Niagara River along the Canadian border. After initial clashes with Canadian volunteer corps and victory in the Battle of Ridgeway, the band found themselves cut off from reinforcements. Facing increasing numbers of volunteers and regulars, they decided to return over the border, near Buffalo, where they were swiftly arrested and fined, but released soon afterwards. The encounter resulted in a dozen fatalities. In the same year, a failed attempt was made by John O’Mahony’s wing of the Brotherhood to capture the disputed Campobello Island off the coast of Maine, again in the hope that it might lead to deterioration in AngloAmerican diplomacy and energise O’Mahony’s wing of the Fenian Brotherhood. In 1870 and 1871, two further raids into Canada along the Quebec–New York border and at Manitoba collapsed in humiliating fashion and smothered any notion that similar raids might be successful in the future.16 14 This was how Devoy explained it during a libel case against The Irish World in 1923; Gaelic American (New York), 23 June 1923. 15 Walsh met Roberts in Paris in July 1867. Barry Kennerk, Shadow of the Brotherhood: The Temple Bar Shootings, Dublin, 2010, 137–8; Marta Ramón, ‘Square-Toed Boots and Felt Hats: Irish Revolutionaries and the Invasion of Canada (1848–1871)’, Estudios irlandeses, 5 (2010), 81–91. 16 Ó Broin, Fenian Fever, 61–72; Ramón, ‘Square-Toed Boots and Felt Hats’, 88–90; Henri Le Caron, Twenty-Five Years in the Secret Service: The Recollections of a Spy, London, 1893, 30–2, 81–5.

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Aside from the Canadian raids, dismounted skirmishers were familiar to many Irish veterans of the American Civil War, which undoubtedly influenced O’Donovan Rossa’s selection of the term. Patrick Ford also described how Washington used skirmishers during the American War of Independence to defend New York against William Howe’s onslaught. The organisers of the Skirmishing Fund were well aware that the proposed violence could alienate possible sympathisers, and hence skirmishing was depicted as a traditional means of resistance against more powerful armies, rather than being a completely new strategy. Indeed, Clausewitz described skirmishing as an essential element of warfare, and before him Machiavelli (1521) referred to a ‘screen’ of men, separate from the main army, whose role was to harass the enemy in small groups.17 In the past, however, skirmishers had always been deployed in support of a regular army, which was plainly not the case for the ailing Fenian movement in the 1870s. Instead, O’Donovan Rossa’s use of the term referred substantially to preventative attacks against arrests and executions. He explained in 1876: For instance, suppose we made an effort to tear those imprisoned Irishmen out of the English prisons, and that England caught Sam Kavanagh and Pat Crowe in making the attempt at rescue, and was going to hang them. I would feel warranted in hanging the ministers that ordered the murder, or in burning up on the previous evening, the town or the city they were to be hanged in, to prevent it so that the murder could not take place there.18

Many contemporaries believed that the skirmishing idea sprang from the imagination of O’Donovan Rossa, a man considered to have been twisted by harsh treatment and solitude in prison (which Rossa denied, claiming to be a ‘born-dynamiter’).19 John Boyle O’Reilly, editor of the Boston Pilot, wrote that ‘when she [England] had Rossa chained like a wild beast in the dark cells of Millbank and Portland she was sewing the seeds of the dreadful “policy of dynamite”’.20 Along with O’Donovan Rossa, the Fenians arrested during the mid 1860s were severely sentenced. The majority were removed to the Pentonville, Portland and Millbank prisons in Britain, where they were subject to poor diet, filthy conditions and punishment on a quota basis, while they were denied medicines and were not separated as political prisoners. In comparison 17 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Art of War, New York, 1965, 52, 61; Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Ware, 1997 [1833], 192, 256. 18 The Irish World, 4 March 1876 (emphasis in original). 19 United Irishman (New York), 9 May 1891; Seán Ó Lúing, O’Donnabháin Rosa, 2 vols., Dublin, 1969, Vol. II, 95. 20 Quoted in William O’Brien and Desmond Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, 1871–1928, 2 vols., Dublin, 1948–[1953], Vol. I, 317.

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to his fellow Fenians, O’Donovan Rossa’s treatment was particularly harsh. Moved from one jail to another in an attempt to manage his stubborn opposition to captivity, he was subjected to illegal punishments. On one occasion, his hands were cuffed behind his back for thirty-five days and, on another, he spent almost a month in solitary confinement on a diet of bread and water. When details of his treatment were publicised (thanks in part to letters smuggled out of prison), O’Donovan Rossa became a focal point for the Amnesty Association and his case garnered international sympathy.21 Between 1868 and 1871, the scale of sympathy for the prisoners moved Gladstone’s government to a compromise, and eighty-two Fenians were released on condition they went into exile. In 1871, O’Donovan Rossa, John Devoy and three other prisoners sailed into New York aboard the Cuba to a heroes’ welcome. By contemporary European standards, the British authorities handled the Fenian prisoners with relative restraint, but unduly severe and illegal punishments for some individuals ultimately proved to be counterproductive, giving a boost to the moribund Fenian movement. O’Donovan Rossa was undoubtedly radicalised by his treatment, which contributed to the ferocity of his propaganda and later commitment to urban guerrilla warfare. The impression that O’Donovan Rossa’s imprisonment led directly to the skirmishing campaign has somewhat endured in the historiography of the period, but a closer examination is necessary. Firstly, severe ill-treatment in prison did not transform a newspaper manager into an advocate of militant violence; O’Donovan Rossa was already committed to violent revolution before his imprisonment. Secondly, when skirmishing was first discussed Rossa originally aimed to enact a series of prison breaks, but other figures envisaged actions that would sweep a wider range of targets. According to Patrick Ford, the strategy was formulated at a meeting at his Brooklyn home in Autumn 1875 between himself, his brother Augustine, O’Donovan Rossa and John McCafferty, a Civil War veteran and organiser of the 1867 raid on the British arsenal in Chester. O’Donovan Rossa and McCafferty wished to start a fund in The Irish World to finance prison breaks throughout the empire, and also advocated the kidnapping of the Prince of Wales. Augustine Ford, however, advised the expansion of the scheme into a prolonged war of attrition that would ‘lay the big cities of England in ashes’. Skirmishing, then, was to be a ‘mode of warfare’ rather than episodic prison breaks. Building on this theme, Patrick Ford proposed 21 Seán McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 1848–1922, 171–82; Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, O’Donovan Rossa’s Prison Life: Six Years in English Prisons, New York, 1874.

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‘scientific-warfare’, the use of new chemicals and technologies such as dynamite in order to destroy economic and political targets in British cities. Explosions would hasten Irish independence, but would also be a means of destabilising Britain, toppling the government and inaugurating an ‘English Republic’ too. With the tumbling down of those big English cities, down also would tumble England’s credit. Down would go her insurance companies … Trade would be paralysed … India and all other British possessions would start to their feet. The English Democracy would rise … the Aristocracy would not wait upon the order of their going but would go at once. The lands stolen from the people of England would revert to them again and with the disappearance of this last relic of feudalism, up would ascend the English Republic.22

The idea for the skirmishing or dynamite campaign originated with Patrick and Augustine Ford. Over one year previous to the Brooklyn meeting, Patrick Ford had already suggested a style of urban guerrilla warfare carried out by ‘bands of men’ that extended far beyond McCafferty and O’Donovan Rossa’s proposal for prison breaks. Rossa was a willing supporter of skirmishing, but Patrick Ford was the chief force behind it. From the first week of the fund, his commitment to the success of the proposal was evident in an initial contribution of $50, followed by $5 every week, while also paying administrative costs of over $300.23 In terms of the practical conception of skirmishing and how it could be technically realised, another figure emerged: a thirty-year-old gasworks fitter named Patrick Crowe who was based in Missouri at the time. Crowe emigrated to the USA in the early 1860s from Galway. The father of nine children, he was unusually mobile and had worked and lived in New York, St Louis (Missouri), Belleville (Illinois), Peoria (Illinois) and Chicago.24 O’Donovan Rossa asserted that he pressed for the publication of the Skirmishing Fund only after ‘Pat Crowe wrote to me’ in 1875. John Devoy later claimed that regarding the ‘dynamite policy … the real author was Pat Crowe’.25 Crowe, a fitter with an interest in invention, held a degree of mechanical competence and assured others that the proposals for scientific warfare were possible. His estimates of the costs of ‘operations’ were 22 The Irish World, 16 April 1881. 23 Ibid., 19 September and 10 October 1874, 28 August 1880; Joseph Cromien to Patrick Ford, 11 October 1882, NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18016(6); Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, Vol. II, 62–5. 24 Information on Crowe taken from The United States Federal Census, 1870, 1880, 1900, 1910; Chicago Voter Registration Form, 1892; Brooklyn Eagle, 2 August 1881. 25 Gaelic American, 17 January 1925; The Irish World, 21 April 1877.

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quoted in the fund notes and, after Ford, Crowe was the second person to contribute to the fund with $50. In Peoria, Crowe attracted large support for both the Skirmishing Fund and O’Donovan Rossa’s newspaper the United Irishman, the latter counting fifty-two subscribers in the city, when other cities with larger Irish populations, such as Boston, counted only twenty-seven.26 In 1881, Crowe openly admitted to making, at his workshop in Peoria, the clockwork infernal machines that were used in Britain, and even sent a replica to one local newspaper. This apparent indiscretion caused journalists to question his authenticity: ‘He not only proclaims himself to be a manufacturer of dynamite machines but discloses the names of his confederates, and even advertises the price of explosive parcels which they are prepared to furnish. All of this leads to the belief that [Crowe] … is simply gratifying his love of notoriety by pretending to know something.’27 Crowe, like O’Donovan Rossa, was inflated with a fair share of hot air, but his role in the skirmishing campaign should not be dismissed as total hubris. His name consistently surfaced in fund lists, the minutes of meetings and newspaper subscriber lists throughout the period of the skirmishing campaign. When the Skirmishing Fund was launched, O’Donovan Rossa was voicing the sentiments of a sizable group rather than speaking in isolation, but his own particular intransigence did imbue the proposal with notions of sacrifice. A level of self-immolation was assumed. Not only the dynamiters, but whole Irish communities in Britain should be prepared for self-sacrifice; the risks involved would be great, as ‘a revolution must be made’ without ‘any consideration as to what they will suffer’. He predicted that a skirmishing campaign would ignite a nativist backlash against the Irish population in Britain, but this would have to be suffered in order to maintain the momentum of militant nationalism: ‘I am not talking to the milk and water people. I am talking to those who mean to fight, who mean war, and who know what war is.’28 Clearly, he imagined a lengthy campaign of unprecedented intensity. In the weeks that followed the launch of the Skirmishing Fund the correspondence received by The Irish World indicated the appeal that the new rhetoric held for readers. O’Donovan Rossa claimed to be overwhelmed by letters of support and donations, and printed some of the letters he thought appropriate. A ‘Rory of the Hill’ wrote: 26 Rossa’s Ledger, CUA, ODRPP, Box 5, Folder 8. 27 The Sun (Baltimore), 4 August 1881; The New York Times, 1 and 3 August 1881; The Times (London), 5 August 1881. 28 The Irish World, 4 March 1876.

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In case you at any time soon deem [it] expedient to fit and equip a detachment of the secret service whose object will be, by aid of explosives – such as Greek fire, dynamite, dualin, etc. – to be operated by electricity or slow fuse for the purpose of blowing up the parliament in London and some of the forts and castles throughout England and Ireland, if such is meditated by you I am at your service.29

Throughout the year, similar letters from Irish workers in the United States occupied more and more space on the pages of The Irish World. Contributions ranged between 25 cents and $50, accompanied by suggestions that the dynamiters target ‘the Irish landlord, that scourge of our race’, and that they profit from the invention of dynamite, which was ‘far more persuasive than any amount of blatherskite [idle talk]’.30 Before any explosive attacks actually occurred, the Skirmishing Fund was a financial success beyond everyone’s expectations. After one year, the fund amounted to $23,154, a high figure considering that subscribers in the USA were still feeling the pinch from the Panic of 1873 and the Long Depression. This lucrative show of support has been attributed by some historians to the Catalpa rescue, which helped swell the dynamiters’ treasure chest by energising Irish American nationalism. In 1875–6, a handful of American-based Fenians organised by John Devoy and James Reynolds sailed to the other side of the globe in the whaling ship Catalpa in order to break out six convicts who were all serving life sentences in a British penal colony in Western Australia. The rescue was successful and the episode secured John Devoy’s reputation and position as the dominant personality in Irish American nationalism. For the British authorities, the affair was an international embarrassment and the prisoners received a celebratory welcome when they returned to New York in August 1876.31 A new enthusiasm for the Fenian movement was evident following the Catalpa rescue. Clan-na-Gael, an American-based organisation that had become the dominant forum for Fenianism since its foundation in 1867, recorded substantial increases in membership. In the year between 30 June 1876 and 30 June 1877, almost all of the organisation’s ‘districts’ on the east coast grew substantially: District A (New York and Yonkers), 3,180 to 3,661 members; District B (New Jersey), 29 Ibid., 11 March 1876. 30 Ibid., 11 and 18 March 1876. 31 Report of the Philadelphia Convention of the United Brotherhood, August 1876, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-500; Seán Ó Lúing, Fremantle Mission, Tralee, 1965; Terry Golway, Irish Rebel: John Devoy and America’s Fight for Ireland’s Freedom, New York, 1998, 77–86; John Devoy, Philip Fennell and Marie King, John Devoy’s Catalpa Expedition, New York, 2006.

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up 538 members; District C (Long Island and Staten Island), 1,421 to 1,951; District D (New York State and Vermont), 536 to 1,103; District F (Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire), 125 to 320; District G (Pennsylvania), 29 to 546. Only one district on the east coast, Connecticut and Rhode Island, dropped from 922 to 826.32 In propaganda terms, the Catalpa rescue was a priceless coup, yet its impact on the Skirmishing Fund has been overestimated. Seán McConville (2003) has stated that not only did the Catalpa teach ‘lessons about the fruits of secrecy’, it also ‘indirectly initiated a campaign of terrorism in England’.33 This summary is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, skirmishing had been conceived of before the Catalpa rescue, even if the first attacks did not occur until 1881. Secondly, in financial terms, the impact of the Catalpa rescue did not cause a dramatic swell in the skirmishing coffers. The average weekly yield of the Skirmishing Fund for its first year, from 4 March 1876 to 3 March 1877, was $445. For the first three months of that period, before news of the Catalpa rescue reached the USA or Britain (in June 1876), the weekly yield was $435. Measured in this way, the impact of the rescue only marginally raised subscriptions to the fund. True, the Catalpa mission undoubtedly buoyed subscriptions to the fund when interest might otherwise have faded. Yet explaining the Skirmishing Fund as a reaction to one particular event is limited and does not account fully for the turn toward contentious violence or why Irish immigrants in America were attracted to skirmishing in the first place. Aside from initiating what was arguably the first urban bombing campaign in history, the Skirmishing Fund represented a turning-point for revolutionary Irish nationalism because it was also its first ‘public revolutionary fund’. In 1848 the American Provisional Committee for Ireland established a fund to support an Irish rebellion, which aimed to muster a million dollars for ‘the sinews of war’ through collections at semi-public meetings and tours. The Boston Pilot enthusiastically revealed the amounts collected and their intended ends, but the 1848 fund was nonetheless different from the Skirmishing Fund. It was not openly collected and accounted for in the paper, and subscribers’ names were not published.34 The Skirmishing Fund represented a departure. 32 VC [United Brotherhood] Report of the Eighth Annual Convention, held at Cleveland Ohio, 4–8 September 1877, CUA, ODRPP, Box 6. 33 McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 209–13. 34 John Belchem, ‘Republican Spirit and Military Science: The “Irish Brigade” and Irish-American Nationalism in 1848’, Irish Historical Studies, 29 (1994), 44–64 (46–7, 56); James Stephens tried to access the 1848 funds when he arrived in the USA in 1858: Marta Ramón, A Provisional Dictator: James Stephens and the Fenian Movement, Dublin, 2007, 21, 84.

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Its success  – by March 1880 $87,724.52 had been collected  – established a precedent in the nationalist movement that future organisations would continue to adhere to.35 In the following years, all manner of public collections were publicly taken up by nationalist associations in the USA. By 1880 it was becoming clear that the monies collected might not be directed toward an actual bombing campaign in British cities. As is often the case with revolutionary organisations, bitter feuding resulted over the control of money and caused divisions between different factions to harden. At the outset, O’Donovan Rossa was appointed chairman of the fund, and Irish World journalist J. J. Clancy and Augustine Ford acted as trustees. However, the latter two men were perceived to be ciphers by John Devoy, who argued that the arrangement was merely a mechanism that allowed Patrick Ford to retain full control of the fund. ‘He [Ford] has a monopoly and feels he can dictate his terms’, wrote Devoy, ‘and he does it’.36 The fund was also independent of any established organisation, and John O’Mahony complained that it reduced the treasury of the Fenian Brotherhood to ‘a very low ebb’ and held similar consequences for Clan-na-Gael.37 Devoy contended that the Clan-na-Gael, as the largest and most representative Irish American nationalist association, should have a large stake in the fund. He was also anxious to curtail The Irish World’s ‘wild rhetoric’, lest it upset plans afoot elsewhere. In 1877 Devoy, whose position was greatly strengthened by the success of the Catalpa rescue, moved to shift the management of the fund. Clancy and Augustine Ford resigned and the Board of Trustees was expanded to seven people: five from Clan-na-Gael (including John Devoy) and two from the Fenian Brotherhood, including O’Donovan Rossa, who had become the head of that organisation when the original leader, John O’Mahony, died in 1877. This appointment was principally symbolic, however, and did not give Rossa any real power in Irish American nationalism. The fund was now principally in the hands of Clan-na-Gael.38 35 The Irish World, 28 August 1880. 36 John Devoy to [?] White, 1 March 1876, in O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. I, 144. 37 John O’Mahony [?] to William Curry [?], 23 November 1876, NYPL, MCIHP 63. 38 The five Clan-na-Gael members included on the committee were John Devoy, Ricard O’Sullivan Bourke, John Walsh, John C. Talbot and Alex Wails. Edward Archibald to the earl of Derby, 27 February 1877, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-500. On this period see The Irish World, 28 August and 4 September 1880, 16 April 1881; United Irishman, 15 and 22 October 1881; Golway, Irish Rebel, 98; Devoy, Recollections, 330; O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. I, 141–58, 245–8, 285–6, 315–23; Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, Vol. II, 64–7.

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O’Donovan Rossa was initially content with the changes so long as the original intent of the Skirmishing Fund did not change, but within a short time clear differences emerged. Some of the new board members objected to the proposed violence and asserted that money would be better directed at financing propaganda, such as starting newspapers and turning the funerals of Fenian lights like John O’Mahony into spectacles. In addition, they believed the deterioration of AngloRussian relations in 1877 would provide a fresh opportunity for an Irish insurrection. Others, such as Devoy, agreed in principle with a skirmishing campaign but wished to plan dynamite attacks in secret, rather than ‘proclaim our intentions to the world’.39 O’Donovan Rossa vigorously argued that money had been publicly collected for a specific purpose and to spend it otherwise would betray the subscribers. The Clan-na-Gael were determined, though, and in 1878 the name was changed to the National Fund. That year, an opportunity for the Clan to end O’Donovan Rossa’s involvement smoothly opened when he was sidelined by a period of heavy drinking, ill-health and the discovery of financial irregularities in his administration of the fund.40 Interestingly, the name change from ‘Skirmishing’ to ‘National’ Fund illustrated the importance of what things were called. O’Donovan Rossa insisted on the word ‘skirmishing being left in’, protested Devoy: ‘that is just what most of us object to’.41 The label ‘Skirmishing’ was replaced in part to emphasise the end of O’Donovan Rossa’s involvement and the ascendancy of Devoy, but also because it was deemed off-putting to respectable Irish Americans: ‘the support of a very large class of our countrymen who now stand aloof might be secured by the adoption of a name of more general application than that of “Skirmishing Fund”’.42 What was contentious was partly the name itself. After the ‘Skirmishing’ tag was dropped, the fund entered a period of significant financial growth. In 1876, contributions for the first two months, March and April, amounted to $2,484. In 1878, contributions for the same period totalled $9,300. This swell in finances was due in part to circumstantial factors: the centenary of Robert Emmet’s birth in 1878 provided an occasion that mobilised substantial contributions, as did the organised collection drives during the St Patrick’s Day celebrations of that year.43 More significant, though, was Devoy’s association 39 Devoy to [?] White, 1 March 1876, in O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. I, 143. 40 Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, Vol. II, 64–7. 41 Devoy to ?, 1 March 1876, in Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. I, 143. 42 The Irish World, 23 March 1878. 43 Ibid., 30 March–20 April 1878.

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and the renaming of the fund, which now attracted a broader demographic of Irish immigrants including some of the middle classes, who had previously remained aloof. In 1876, O’Donovan Rossa contended it was ‘not rich men who contribute to this fund’, and during its first two years, subscriptions to the Skirmishing Fund had been overwhelmingly working-class.44 The British consuls in Philadelphia and New York observed that the ‘rabid sedition’ in The Irish World and dynamite propaganda ‘tends to fan into action the hatred of the lower and more dangerous Irish populations of the larger American cities’. ‘Respectable’ Irish Americans disdained the idea and their newspapers took ‘no notice of it’.45 The Irish middle class were dependent on native, Protestant Americans for patronage, as many of them were retailers, shopkeepers, salesmen etc. Therefore, they were reluctant to associate their names with the fierce and sanguinary rhetoric that O’Donovan Rossa repeated each week. Such language recalled antebellum associations between Irishness and violence, and did not help their situation in the adopted home. Although the National Fund did not jettison skirmishing per se, it re-emphasised insurrection as the ultimate goal of Irish republicanism, and subscribers were more eager to support this return to ‘civilised warfare’. Unsurprisingly, these changes infuriated O’Donovan Rossa, and for over two decades he continued to castigate the Trustees for betraying the original intent of the fund. By June 1880, Rossa and Crowe’s eulogies on the merits of scientific warfare became increasingly aggressive and they established a new organisation named the ‘United Irishmen of America’ at a convention in Philadelphia.46 Wary of their exaggerated self-publicity, Patrick Ford turned down an invitation to attend. He was still ‘in entire accord’ with scientific warfare but disliked ‘selfglorification’ and was equally uncomfortable with O’Donovan Rossa’s blustering emphasis on bloody acts of revenge.47 Ford was not alone in ignoring the convention. Rossa’s record of invitations named several prominent Irish nationalists who did not attend, such as John Devoy and Thomas Clarke Luby.48 In fact, the organisation of the

44 Ibid., 18 and 23 March, 20 May 1876. 45 Archibald to Derby, 20 April 1876, TNA: PRO FO 5 1556 43; Consul George Crump (Philadelphia) to Granville, 24 August 1882, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-742. 46 ‘The Society of United Irishmen: Constitution Adopted by the Convention Assembled at Philadelphia, June and July 1880’, CUA, ODRPP, Box 5, Folder 13. 47 Patrick Ford to O’Donovan Rossa, 17 March 1880, CUA, Fenian Brotherhood Papers, Box 3, item 33; The Irish World, 28 August 1880. 48 List of sent invitations for ‘Convention of the Irish Race’ to be held in Philadelphia on 28 June 1880, CUA, ODRPP, Box 5, Folder 8.

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Philadelphia Convention led to O’Donovan Rossa’s suspension from Clan-na-Gael.49 In a pamphlet that set out the aims of the United Irishmen convention, an alleged clergyman named ‘Le Sagart’ maintained ‘Ireland is not a free nation, and therefore not subject to the laws which should regulate the conduct of a free nation in its belligerent relations.’ Like a person endeavouring to save their life from a ‘piratical’ aggressor, the dynamiters were justified in defending themselves by any means necessary.50 Following the convention a weekly paper was established that borrowed its name from John Mitchel’s old journal the United Irishman, and which was run entirely by O’Donovan Rossa and his wife until it closed in 1910. Explosives were repeatedly eulogised: ‘Dynamite! Dynamite! Dynamite! Let every Irishman and Irishwoman put a bit of it in their pocket and become a walking revolution.’51 Moreover, a weekly ‘Resources of Civilisation Fund’ was included to implement the original plans of the Skirmishing Fund, and it directly financed explosions in Great Britain in the early 1880s. Rossa’s editorials continued to proclaim John Devoy and ‘his ­co-trustees to be, well, we’ll be mild, “traitorous knaves”’, and, along with Patrick Crowe and Joseph Cromien, he began a ‘Skirmishing Fund Investigation Committee’ in 1882.52 Accusations that Devoy and John Breslin appropriated part of the fund to support The Irish Nation newspaper spread in New York, spilling over into the mainstream papers when the Committee published a call for accounts in the New York Star.53 The allegations galled Devoy, who unusually took to drinking heavily according to informers’ reports. He denied any wrongdoing and when The Irish World republished the findings of the ‘Investigation Committee’ some thirty-eight years later, in 1920, Devoy fiercely defended himself in the Gaelic American and successfully filed for libel. In fact he had originally suspected Ford and The Irish World to be behind the 1882 Investigation Committee. The publication of the Skirmishing Fund accounts did discredit Devoy, however, and also proved damaging to the Irish Parliamentary Party. Revelations that $165 of the Skirmishing 49 Christy Campbell, Fenian Fire: The British Government Plot to Assassinate Queen Victoria, London, 2002, 110. 50 Le Sagart, ‘The Coming Convention: Its Policy’, CUA, ODRPP, Box 6 [not numbered]. 51 United Irishman, 7 June 1884. 52 Ibid., 26 November 1881, 23 August 1882; Joseph Cromien to Patrick and Austin Ford, 2 October 1882, NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18016(6). 53 ‘The Skirmishing Trustees’ Address’: Joseph Cromien, Manus O’Connor, William J. Dwyer, Thomas Dever and Peter Ryan to The New York Star, 16 September 1882; United Irishman, 2 September 1882.

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Fund had partly financed Charles Stewart Parnell’s reception in America were obviously unwelcome, as was the charge that Michael Davitt had received a loan of $1,500.54 The damage was contained, however, and the fuss stirred up by the committee petered out by 1883 as nothing could be definitively proven. The episode undoubtedly tarnished the Clan-na-Gael, though, and intensified factionalism within it. O’Donovan Rossa believed the Clan-na-Gael had betrayed the original principles of the Skirmishing Fund, but by 1882 the attitudes of some members were changing, becoming more sympathetic to skirmishing. The ‘Triangle’ leadership, which consisted of Alexander Sullivan, Denis C. Feely and Michael Boland, increasingly advocated an actionist policy, and in 1882 it was resolved to begin a separate bombing campaign to the United Irishmen’s, that targeted London in the years 1883 to 1885. Patrick Ford, who had remained committed to skirmishing throughout these divisions, reopened his newspaper – now with a circulation over 70,000 – to a new dynamite fund in January 1884, named the ‘Emergency Fund’.55 Officials in Dublin Castle believed Ford, independent of both O’Donovan Rossa and the Clan-na-Gael, intended to finance a third group of dynamiters involving Frank Byrne, a former secretary of the Land League in Britain.56 Yet this assessment overestimated Ford’s resources. The Emergency Fund was not a financial success; its main function was to generate propaganda for the dynamite explosions carried out by the Clan-na-Gael between 1883 and 1885. The bomb attacks of the 1880s targeted parliament buildings, town halls, gasworks, bridges, press offices, and railway and underground stations. London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow were all hit, while Dublin experienced a handful of explosions in the early 1890s. O’Donovan Rossa’s teams of United Irishmen initially used wooden cases filled with gunpowder and ignited by a fuse, but progressed to commercial dynamite ignited by more sophisticated clockwork and slow-burning mechanisms. Similarly, Clan-na-Gael’s dynamiters used 54 ‘Account of Money Spent by the Skirmishing Fund’, NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18016(10), MS 18016(6, 7); Pierrepont Edwards to Granville, 29 August 1882, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-736, A-755. For the Trustees’ defence see The New York Sun, 29 August 1882; O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. II, 556–61. 55 The Irish World, 5 January 1884; Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, Vol. II, 85–93; O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. I, 501–4 and Vol. II, 60–8; K. R. M. Short, The Dynamite War: Irish-American Bombers in Victorian Britain, Dublin, 1979, 44–50; Owen McGee, The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood from the Land League to Sinn Fein, Dublin, 2005, 98, 105–8. 56 E. G. Jenkinson to Lord Spencer, 14 September 1884, reprinted in Stephen Ball (ed.), Dublin Castle and the First Home Rule Crisis: The Political Journal of Sir George Fottrell, 1884–1887, Cambridge, 2008, 200–10.

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clockwork devices to trigger both homemade explosives and commercial dynamite that they concealed in portmanteaus and left adjacent to targeted buildings. The final blast of the skirmishing campaign came in 1900, when one of the key bombers of the 1880s – Luke Dillon – was involved in an attempt to destroy a lock at the Welland Canal at Thorold, Ontario, near the USA–Canadian border. The explosion was an act of active sympathy with the Boers, and intended to hurt Canadian commercial interests and slow supplies to Britain during the Boer war. Along with two small explosions, in New York and Quebec, caused by the dynamiter Thomas Mooney (alias James Moorhead), these were the only episodes of skirmishing that occurred outside the United Kingdom.57 Nonetheless, warnings came in 1882 from the British consul in Philadelphia that Edward O’Donnell, who had planted the London Mansion House bomb in 1881, had transferred infernal machines to Hamilton, Bermuda, and was set to destroy the docks there. More trouble was expected during the visit of Princess Louise to the island in 1883. Neither attack occurred, but the Home Office treated the possibility seriously, as they did reports of imminent attacks in Canada and plans to use torpedoes off the coast of South Africa. One informant warned that he and Patrick Coleman were delegated the task of destroying the Catalia steamship in the New York docks, whose cargo consisted of 500 donkeys destined for the British army in Egypt. Extra police guarded the ship while specially manned boats patrolled the docks, but the plot failed to materialise. In fact, one wonders if it ever existed. The reports of Clipperton, the Philadelphia consul, regularly despatched so-called intelligence on Irish American nationalism, but his ability to assess the veracity of his paid informers’ stories was questionable, to the extent that it is surprising he held his position as long as he did.58

57 See Chapter 3. An 1884 explosion at the provincial parliament in Quebec was attributed to the dynamiters by The New York Times; however, the evidence is not clear. See The New York Times, 5 August 1887; Brooklyn Eagle, 10 August 1887; Irish Canadian, 23 October 1884 (thanks to David Wilson for the last reference). On the Welland Canal incident see Colm J. Brannigan, ‘The Luke Dillon Case and the Welland Canal Explosion of 1900: Non-Events in the History of the Niagara Frontier Region’, Niagara Frontier: Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, 24 (1977), 36–44. 58 Charles Clipperton to Granville, 15 February 1882; Clipperton to Granville, 11 July 1882; Pierrepont Edwards to Granville, 14 September 1882; Clipperton to Granville, 23 January 1883: NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-713, A-781, A-739, A-757. The New York Star, 8 September 1882.

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If many Irish emigrants in the USA were open to skirmishing, the ­proposal met with different reactions elsewhere. The lack of consensus over the legitimacy of different violent tactics created irreparable fractures in the Fenian movement. That skirmishing was morally and politically contentious was immediately evident from the claim, posted to The Irish World, that Fenians would not be prepared to engage in the operations described, but ‘plenty of thieves and burglars in London could be got to do the job’. Ford made clear that mercenaries would not be hired ‘to do what you yourself deem wrong … if you cannot go into this thing with a good conscience, you ought not to entertain the notion at all’.59 The British consul’s informers in New York believed that the Skirmishing Fund was ‘viewed with jealousy and distrust by many who still consider themselves Fenians’, and hinted at new, bitter divisions.60 The ‘home’ leadership of the IRB, some of whom were exiled in Paris, clung to the idea of an insurrection against the state as the only legitimate vehicle to challenge British authority. John O’Leary reacted publicly and unequivocally to O’Donovan Rossa’s call for skirmishing, rejecting the scheme ‘with something like horror’, on grounds of both political and moral legitimacy. The minimum requirement, for O’Leary, in order to justify political violence was a ‘state of war’. Even during war, ‘it is not easy to say what acts are or are not justifiable’, but when countries are ‘at peace, acts of violence, such as destruction of life or property, are simply crimes, and the men who commit these crimes serve not the cause they misrepresent, but the enemy they are seeking to combat’. Writing privately to O’Donovan Rossa, O’Leary rebuked him for ‘desperate nonsense’ and advised him to remove himself from the dynamite faction as quickly as possible.61 James Stephens contended that to call dynamiters genuine Fenians was to ‘make a statement that one knows to be untrue’. Stephens viewed skirmishing as essentially the emotional reaction of men ‘in whose hearts burned an unquenchable flame of hatred for England’. He believed they stood in the same relation to Fenians as the ‘anarchists of France do to the radicals who acknowledge the leadership of M. Clemenceau’.62 For many members of the IRB who were active in the 1860s, the idea 59 The Irish World, 28 August 1880 (emphasis in original). 60 Archibald to Derby, 20 April 1876, TNA: PRO FO 5 1556, 43. 61 John O’Leary to Rossa, 31 January 1877, NYPL, MCIHP 62; The Irishman, 27 March 1876. 62 James Stephens, Fenianism: Past and Present, reprinted in Desmond Ryan, The Fenian Chief: A Biography of James Stephens, Dublin, 1967, 317–37.

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of skirmishing was hopeless. Frank Roney  – a Belfast Fenian turned American labour leader – met O’Donovan Rossa in the early 1880s and questioned how a ‘man of intelligence and capable of close observation in other respects’ could ‘delude himself [with the] hopeless chimera that dynamite could bring Irish independence’.63 The Dublin IRB initially forwarded William Mackey Lomasney $1,000 for experiments with potential weapons in 1881, but this relationship was soon discontinued. Aside from the occasional apologist, the IRB moved swiftly to distance themselves from dynamite once the bombs started exploding in Britain. Dublin bookseller and Fenian organiser John Sullivan was alone in openly advocating its merits, but he did not participate in any dynamite operations.64 In the late 1870s, the IRB Supreme Council and Clan-na-Gael in America created the ‘Revolutionary Directory’: a body consisting of three representatives from both sides of the Atlantic that would decide on a common policy regarding revolutionary action. One joint plan entailed the purchase of a small ship for transportation of arms to Ireland and to menace British vessels during wartime. It proved to be a ‘disastrous investment’ that gave no revolutionary or even commercial return. The Gulnare cost $28,000 and ran expenses in excess of $70,000. In an attempt to recoup some costs the ship was rigged up to carry freight, but it sank off the coast of Honduras in 1887 with a cargo of bananas.65 The Skirmishing Fund was unquestionably a source of tension within the Revolutionary Directory because of its size and its original aims. When the Clan-na-Gael began organising dynamite attacks the Directory crumbled. The IRB leaders were determined opponents of skirmishing but they failed to apply a brake on the Clan’s plans owing to misinformation from the Clan executive and ‘packing’ at conventions in order to favour the American side. The secretary of the IRB, John O’Connor, professed to have been assured by Michael Boland in 1883 that the skirmishing policy had been dropped and that the insurrectionary programme suggested by Dublin would be adhered to. If anything, plans were leaning in the other direction. Boland was one member of the ‘Triangle’ leadership, and a committed supporter of dynamite. When countering suggestions that he had deliberately misled 63 Frank Roney, Irish Rebel and California Labor Leader, Berkeley, 1931, 507. 64 ‘Evidence of Secretary of IRB’, NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18019, 29; M. J. Kelly, The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882–1916, Woodbridge, 2006, 20–1; McGee, The IRB, 94–5. 65 ‘Evidence of Michael Kerwin’, NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18019, 99–101; The New York Times, 20 July 1894.

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Fenians in Ireland, Boland claimed that the IRB had threatened to go as far as exposing dynamiters to the authorities in order to halt attacks.66 This was true of a few individual IRB members but not the general organisation; however, mutual suspicions engendered the estrangement of both sides in 1884. A. M. Sullivan, editor of The Nation, thought that the new strategy was symptomatic of a general moral cowardice among Irish American nationalists, and believed Irish, as well as English, civilians would perish in ‘fires which our chivalrous friends (safe and sound, 4,000 miles away) in New York are to start around us’. Sullivan was also concerned that explosions would provoke an anti-Irish backlash, ‘evicting honest Irishmen from good employment and comfortable homes’.67 John Devoy agreed: there were ‘800,000 individuals of Irish birth in Great Britain and a considerably larger number of individuals of Irish parentage … should they be exposed to every form of retaliation which the English may choose to exercise?’68 The atmosphere of fear and reprisal that followed the 1867 Clerkenwell explosion was clearly in their minds, when widespread mob action against Irish communities almost erupted. In the 1880s, explosions would undoubtedly provoke similar tensions, tensions that were encouraged by angry language in the British daily press. In 1883, Dublin newspapers feared their London counterparts were deliberately inciting tension when the Daily Telegraph wrote that the bombs would convert the ‘tranquil contempt of Englishmen into a furious wrath’. The Times added that ‘a few more cases of dynamite’ would generate ‘a feeling of angry hostility that authority will find it very difficult to control’. After the House of Commons bomb in 1885, William O’Brien – editor of United Ireland – accused The Globe of ‘preaching a war of races’.69 O’Donovan Rossa was happy to provoke anti-Irish articles in the London press and reproduced them in the United Irishman as some sort of vindication of his one-man propaganda machine.70 Ultimately, although the dynamite campaign resulted in one civilian death and many injuries, the majority of explosions failed to effect

66 ‘Evidence of Secretary of IRB’, NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18019, 25–9, 30–2; E. G. Jenkinson, ‘Memorandum on the Present Situation in Ireland’, 26 September 1885, TNA, PRO, Cabinet Papers, 37/16/52, reprinted in Ball, Dublin Castle, 243–6. 67 A. M. Sullivan, letter to The Irish American (New York), 24 March 1883. 68 The Irish Nation (New York), 7 April 1883. 69 Daily Telegraph (London), quoted in United Ireland (Dublin), 8 March 1883; Freeman’s Journal, 17 March 1883; The Times, 16 March 1883; United Ireland, 31 January 1885. 70 United Irishman, 3, 17 and 31 January 1885.

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serious damage, reducing the likelihood of mob violence against Irish communities. Some of the harshest criticism of skirmishing came from Fenians who remained wedded to insurrection as the sole strategy for achieving independence. They feared that an independent Ireland, born through assassination and outrage, not regular warfare, would be a place devoid of a moral centre or a sense of collective responsibility. Yet, behind these anxieties lay more embedded concerns about national mobilisation. Skirmishing was, by definition, action undertaken by ‘handfuls’ of men. If this were to become the principal strategy of revolutionary nationalism it suggested that independence would be won by a revolutionary vanguard and not an Irish population, politically conscious of itself as a nation, arising to achieve fulfilment. In 1873, after a ‘Solemn Convention of the Irish Republic’ was held in Dublin, the Supreme Council (formed in 1868) revised the IRB constitution. The new doctrine declared that, ‘The IRB shall await the decision of the Irish Nation as expressed by a majority of the Irish people as to the fit hour of inaugurating a war against England.’71 The failure of the 1867 rising clearly influenced Fenian attitudes to political violence: insurrection would not be attempted again without popular support. The new constitution also opened the door to alliances with ‘every movement calculated to advance the cause of Irish independence’ including the Irish Parliamentary Party, in what T. W. Moody has termed the ‘first’ new departure.72 Skirmishing was clearly at odds with the version of insurrection envisaged by the 1873 constitution. In addition, the campaign was not to be undertaken on the traditional site of national war  – Ireland  – but in Great Britain. Skirmishing, viewed in this way, meant decadence and demobilisation, the essential abandonment of the inroads Fenianism had made in ‘nationalising’ sections of the Irish population in the 1860s. The IRB understood the recruitment of volunteers to be the foundation of a national army that would fight according to interstate rules of war because it represented an emerging state. This presupposed a high level of national consciousness and, in comparison to such an explicit declaration of national will, anything less – skirmishing – was seen as a mark of immaturity.

71 Quoted in Leon Ó Broin, Revolutionary Underground: The Story of the Irish Republican Brotherhood 1858–1924, Dublin, 1976, 6–8. 72 The ‘second’ new departure is discussed in Chapter 5. T. W. Moody (ed.), Davitt and Irish Revolution 1846–82, Oxford, 1981, 122–6.

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Legitimising political violence

The turn to skirmishing was marked by disillusion with the stagnation that had characterised the Irish separatist movement since the late 1860s. Insurrection required congenial circumstances, yet waiting on a favourable revolutionary climate led to a staid movement. In the meantime, the Irish Parliamentary Party could assimilate frustrated separatists and elements otherwise sympathetic to Fenianism. Thus, when favourable insurrectionary conditions occurred, militant Fenianism might have stagnated beyond rejuvenation. This fear of revolutionary paralysis proved to be a reasonable one considering the development of Dublin Fenianism in the 1870s and 1880s. The IRB departed from orthodoxy and began to revise its traditional hostility toward the Irish Parliamentary Party, forming pragmatic and informal alliances with constitutional politicians. The insurrectionists, in the words of Matthew Kelly, were ‘consigned to the melancholic bar room reminiscences of the increasingly aged men of ’67’.73 To revive the faltering momentum of revolutionary nationalism, The Irish World began the skirmishing campaign. Ford explained: ‘The idea is that stagnation will prove the silent destruction of the Irish cause … But if a whole people cannot now move, skirmishers may.’74 O’Donovan Rossa and the United Irishmen, historian Thomas Brown observed, theorised their actions ‘historically, but saw little need for more abstract speculation’.75 O’Donovan Rossa’s propaganda depicted a kind of apocalyptic showdown between the forces of revolution and reaction, where dynamite and scientific invention would be used by revolutionaries to secure their triumph in David-versus-Goliath-style encounters. Using bloated biblical language, he described the aim of the ‘missioners’ or dynamiters as ‘to scald, to exterminate, to burn, to blow up, or demolish the cruel tyrants that have scourged our people’. In this way, dynamite and nitro-glycerine were regularly sacralised in both the United Irishman and The Irish World, spoken of as god-given instruments to strike out against tyranny. Patrick Ford advocated skirmishing in ‘the spirit of a crusader. It is in my eyes a holy war.’ Such a war would send ‘all the plagues of Egypt’ to England.76 Ford’s editorials waded through a sea of Old Testament allegories, and contemporaries noted that, for him, skirmishing held the ‘sacredness of 73 Kelly, The Fenian Ideal, 15. 74 The Irish World, 4 March 1876, 28 August 1880. 75 Thomas N. Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 1870–1890, Philadelphia, 1966, 71. 76 United Irishman, 23 February 1884; The Irish World, 12 January 1884.

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a religion’.77 But his propaganda differed from O’Donovan Rossa’s in the accent he placed on social reform (discussed in Chapter 5). Ford saw skirmishing as part of a providential struggle against tyranny and social injustice, as well as to win Irish independence. In 1854, Ford witnessed the slave Anthony Burns being returned to his master in Boston under the provisions of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, and this experience influenced his later decision to become an abolitionist. He served an apprenticeship as a printer’s devil with William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, an experience that undoubtedly helped infuse biblical tones in his prose. In an 1881 article on revolutionary violence, Ford wrote: the position occupied by The Irish World today is analogous to that held by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendall Phillips thirty years ago … So far, The Irish World has ever been on the unpopular side. Ever on the moneyless side. Ever on the side lacking power … But what care we? The one relevant question is: on what side is God?78

An important influence on concepts of revolutionary action in postbellum America was abolitionist John Brown’s self-sacrificing idealism. Infamous owing to the Pottawatomie Massacre (1856) and the attack on the Harper’s Ferry armoury in West Virginia (1859), Brown and his followers, biographer David Reynolds has argued, were nineteenthcentury insurgents whose ‘goal was to weaken the institution of slavery by terrorizing slaveholders’. Advocating a range of tactics that included exploding homemade bombs in courtrooms to obstruct the trials of anti-slavery militants, Brown’s principal strategy envisaged a band of twenty-five men stationed in the Appalachian Mountains that would periodically stage guerrilla raids on plantations, liberate slaves and then retreat with them back to cover. ‘Intimately aware of guerrilla warfare in European history’, Brown consulted with Hugh Forbes, a British soldier who had fought with Italian republicans in the late 1840s. His plans culminated in the raid on Harper’s Ferry, when a band of twentyone men cut telegraph lines, captured the arsenal, seized arms and took hostages. They hoped to retreat to the mountains, but local militias intervened and eventually the band was captured. Brown was executed two months later.79 Given Patrick Ford’s anti-slavery past, the genealogy of the dynamite campaign owed something to Brown’s righteous language and willingness to immolate himself for the cause of anti-slavery. 77 William O’Brien, Recollections, London, 1905, 274. 78 The Irish World, 16 April 1881; James Paul Rodechko, Patrick Ford and His Search for America: A Case Study of Irish-American Journalism, 1870–1913, New York, 1976, 29–30. 79 David S. Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights, New York, 2005, 123, 132–3.

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Moreover, the raid on Harper’s Ferry helped spark a war that ended the institution of slavery and was, therefore, a precedent of successful revolutionary action that Irish Americans could not fail to be aware of. The United Irishmen’s propaganda differed from The Irish World, and to keep the flag of revolutionary nationalism flying O’Donovan Rossa sought to create tensions between Ireland and England in the press and parliament. At times his scarecrow propaganda was ludicrous. He and Pat Crowe claimed responsibility not only for explosions in which they were involved, but also for ones in which they were not. In 1881, they announced that the dynamiters had caused the explosion that sank the British vessel HMS Doterel in the Straits of Magellan, when 145 people lost their lives. In reality the cause was a mechanical fire. In the same year, they advocated the bombing of British transatlantic steamships, a declaration that was a form of self-publicity rather than a strategy that either hoped to realise. When infernal machines were found aboard the SS Malta and Bavaria in Liverpool in July 1881 it appeared that they were imports to use in British cities and were not designed to explode on board the ships, though New York Fenians believed they had been placed there by police agents.80 Needless to say, many contemporaries thought this theatrical propaganda to be gratuitous and nearsighted and, of the two groups of dynamiters, the United Irishmen were seen to be the more reckless. At the Parnell Commission in 1889,81 Henry James distinguished between the United Irishmen and the Clan-na-Gael, and claimed that the latter rebuked O’Donovan Rossa’s ‘butchering schemes’ and would not strike blindly at innocent people.82 This impression of a bloodthirsty O’Donovan Rossa and a more conscientious Clan-na-Gael has remained in the historiography, owing in large measure to the letters of William Lomasney and the fact that the only civilian fatality of the dynamite campaign was caused by the 80 The New York Times, 17 June and 3 August 1881; Brooklyn Eagle, 2 August 1881; Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Irish Rebels in English Prisons: A Record of Prison Life, New York, 1899 [1882], ix–x; Short, The Dynamite War, 68. 81 The Parnell Commission or ‘Special Commission’ sat between October 1888 and November 1889 and was established following a series of articles published in The Times alleging links between Parnell and militants. The attorney general acted as counsel for The Times in a jury-less trial, causing many to question the legality of the whole affair. The letter supporting The Times’ articles was proven to be a forgery. F. S. L. Lyons, ‘Parnellism and Crime, 1887–1890’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5 (1974), 1223–40; Margaret O’Callaghan, British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland: Criminality, Land and the Law under Forster and Balfour, Cork, 1994, 104–21. 82 Henry James, The Work of the Irish Leagues: The Speech of Sir Henry James QC MD. Replying in the Parnell Commission Inquiry, London, 1890, 501–3.

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actions of the United Irishmen.83 In January 1881, a fuse-lit device exploded in an army-barracks wall in Salford, near Manchester, with the intention of destroying an arms-store. Salford prison had been the site of execution for the ‘Manchester Martyrs’ in November 1867, and as the prison had been closed in 1868 (and replaced by Strangeways) the dynamiters most probably elected to target the barracks. The bomb did not damage the armoury but caused the wall to collapse outwardly, seriously injuring a woman and killing the seven-year-old child in her care, Richard Clarke. It was the first attack of the dynamite campaign, but the boy’s death, surprisingly, caused little fuss in the British press and was almost a postscript in The Times’ report on the affair.84 When comparing the agents and actions of both groups, however, it should be highlighted that it was the activities of the Clan-na-Gael that brought greater risks for civilians, despite O’Donovan Rossa’s wild claims. The Clan-na-Gael were more attentive to the propaganda aspects of violent acts, and in 1881 the organisation produced a circular that condemned O’Donovan Rossa’s talk of bombing passenger ships and asserted, ‘nothing must be done to forfeit the respect of the civilised world’.85 Yet the United Irishmen targeted symbolic buildings and placed explosives outside the walls of empty town halls and government buildings, whereas the Clan-na-Gael also targeted underground and railway stations, where the deadly potential of the infernal machines was notably higher. Indeed, when the Clan planted an infernal machine on a train near Praed Street underground station in October 1883, seventy-two passengers suffered injuries from flying glass and debris, with thirty of them being treated in hospital. The explosion occurred shortly after 8 p.m. and the majority of the injured were workers riding in the third-class carriage of the train.86 William Lomasney  – the veteran of the IRB uprising who led the guerrilla actions in Cork in late 1867 – assumed leadership for a number of the Clan-na-Gael’s operations during the skirmishing campaign. He was most probably the architect of the sensational explosion at the Irish Special Branch office at Scotland Yard in 1884, along with other attacks in London during the same year, which ended with himself, his brother and another man perishing by their own petard when trying to place a 83 Five people were killed during the dynamite campaign: a seven-year-old boy in 1881, three dynamiters who blew themselves up in 1884 and a constable who died after attempting to remove an infernal machine from Dublin Castle in December 1892. 84 Short, The Dynamite War, 50; The Times, 17 January 1881, 5 April 1892. 85 This was the circular Sir Henry James quoted at the Parnell Commission in 1889; O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. I, 536. 86 The Times, 31 October 1883; Short, The Dynamite War, 162.

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bomb beneath London Bridge. Lomasney had planned and prepared his operations from Paris, where he was also assisting the IRB to import arms, indicating he had perhaps not abandoned all hopes for a future insurrection.87 From Paris, Lomasney wrote to John Devoy bitterly criticising the bomb attacks carried out by the United Irishmen. He vigorously asserted that clear and distinct moral precedents needed to be established before a bombing campaign could be considered: ‘If we try to force on a crisis unprepared, we will have not only the enemy to deal with, but the majority of our own people, who would in no way approve of such tactics at present … The question with me is not the practicality of doing the work, but the morality and advisability of attempting it.’88 Lomasney would go ‘thoroughly into business’ only ‘in the event of the proposed cruel evictions being carried out’, a reference to the Land War (1879–82) that was reaching a critical stage at the time. This view of violence as a retaliatory tactic contributed substantially to determining how the dynamiters understood their activities. Lomasney feared that if skirmishing was undertaken with no proper forethought, it could assume its own dynamic and become impossible to control. Without due caution being paid to the potentially counterproductive results, dynamiters could provoke an intensification of coercion in Ireland and a nativist backlash against the Irish in Britain. In order to maximise the political usefulness of violence, Lomasney claimed ‘we must feel that we can justify the act’. Like insurrection, skirmishing needed to be conveyed in such a way that the ‘act was not only justifiable to yourself and your friends, but it was also one you could honour and glory in before the civilised world’.89 Closely tied to this theme of ‘justifiable action’ was the idea that violence needed to be controlled, carried out correctly in order to communicate an intelligible message to the intended audience. O’Donovan Rossa and Crowe reasoned that if the bomb attacks didn’t benefit Irish nationalism, they would do it no harm either. Lomasney, however, insisted the deed should be done right, with precision and professionalism and not by people ‘who do not understand the first principles of the art of war, the elements of chemistry or even the amount of explosive material necessary to remove or destroy an ordinary brick or stone wall’. Lomasney likened the endeavours of some of the United Irishmen to a ‘burlesque’, where the amount of 87 Campbell, Fenian Fire, xvi; Short, The Dynamite War, 173–205; O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. II, 4–10; McGee, The IRB, 81. 88 William Lomasney to John Devoy, 31 March 1881, in O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. II, 58. 89 Ibid.

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‘folly and bungling’ was ‘simply disgraceful’. This incompetence was cause for concern, as amateur jobs dulled the sharpness of explosive attacks as an instrument of propaganda. Owing to the United Irishmen’s ‘half-idiotic attempts’, the Clan-na-Gael would also be tainted and the world would think nothing ‘but that Irish revolutionists are a lot of fools and ignoramuses’.90 Lomasney, like many Fenians, was conscious that the symbolism of violent acts dictated the success or failure of the intended message. In contrast, O’Donovan Rossa held a Sorellian-like view of violent acts as accomplishments in their own right. Exploding infernal machines in urban centres irrefutably placed civilian lives in danger, but the main dynamiters of both the United Irishmen and Clan-na-Gael professed that they sought always to avoid bloodshed and civilian casualties. Leading the United Irishmen, Thomas Mooney (James Moorhead) was similar to Lomasney in his professionalism and effectiveness, but also in the way he sought ‘to find out how best I could strike their property without the possibility of endangering life’.91 Whether Lomasney and Mooney spoke for the majority of the dynamiters we cannot know for certain. Differing attitudes existed, like that of Luke Dillon, whose life was described by the Dublin Catholic Bulletin as ‘an example of unflinching service which must ever remain an inspiration to his race’. Dillon was responsible for the explosions at the House of Commons (1885), the Welland Canal on the Canadian border (1900) and the Carlton Club in London (1884). Dillon chose to bomb the latter, a Tory drinking club, on the morning after the Epsom Derby when he thought it would be filled with drunken lords, though the blast caused no more than five injuries.92 A veteran of the American Indian wars, Dillon was known in Philadelphia as ‘The Hardest Man of All’, also the title of a ballad about his deeds.93 Dan Breen, an IRA volunteer who fought in the War of Independence and Civil War, maintained that Dillon, when on his death bed, told him that he was happy to have seen a beggar outside the rebuilt Carlton Club with a sign ‘blinded by Fenian outrages’, because ‘That’s the way I’d like to see all the so-and-sos’.94 90 Lomasney to Devoy, 23 February 1881 and ? March 1881, in ibid., 44–5, 51–2. 91 Brooklyn Eagle, 9 August 1887; United Irishman, 17 January 1885; Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, Vol. II, 104. 92 NLI, McGarrity Papers, MS 17448; the Carlton Club was bombed again in 1990 by the IRA. 93 Catholic Bulletin, 20(2) (February 1930), 110; Dennis Clark, The Irish Relations: Trials of an Immigrant Tradition, Toronto, 1982, 122–4. 94 Quoted in Tim Pat Coogan, The IRA, London, 1970, 139.

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There were echoes here of the claim by some late-nineteenth-century anarchists that there were ‘no victims among the bourgeoisie’. Parallels existed between skirmishing and the anarchists’ embrace of propaganda by the deed, and it might be argued that the dynamite campaign presaged spectacular acts of violence by anarchists in the early 1890s. In 1892, Ravachol threw a bomb into a court hearing in Clichy, France. After his arrest, he was avenged by Théodule Meunier, who placed a bomb in the restaurant where he had been betrayed, killing two civilians. Some months later Emile Henry killed four policemen and, the following year, Auguste Vaillant threw a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies, re-enacting the 1885 attack on the House of Commons. On this occasion the chamber was in session, though nobody was killed. One week after Vaillant’s execution in 1894, Henry struck again by throwing a bomb into a café beside a Parisian railway station, killing one person. Ravachol, Vaillant and Henry were all executed, the cycle of violence ending with the assassination of the French president Sadi Carnot in 1894 by the Italian Santo Caserio. The deadliest act of the decade, however, occurred in Barcelona in 1893 when Santiago Salvador, seeking to avenge the death of the anarchist Paulino Pallas, threw Orsini bombs into the Liceu theatre on the Ramblas and killed twenty-two people.95 The actions of Salvador and Henry were unprecedented in that they were attacks on the public, not the state. Henry proclaimed he was waging war against the bourgeoisie – ‘we dish out death and we will know how to suffer it’ – and he inspired anarchists such as Italian American Giuseppe Ciancabilla, who repeated Henry’s declaration that there were ‘no innocents in bourgeois society’.96 The words of Emile Henry, the son of a Paris Communard, may have resonated with those of Luke Dillon, the son of Famine emigrants, but caution is necessary when comparing the skirmishing campaign with anarchist attentats. Firstly, Henry’s declaration was motivated by a belief in class war, Dillon by nationalism. Secondly, given the bloody rhetoric found in the United Irishman and The Irish World, the limited violence that resulted from the dynamite campaign is striking, especially in comparison to the attentats of the 1890s, suggesting that the 95 A detailed reconstruction of the Orsini bomb can be viewed at the Librería la Rosa de Foc in Barcelona. M. Viaplana and R. Kuter, La Barcelona de la dinamita, el plomo y el petróleo, 1884–1909, Barcelona, 2009; Julián Casanova, ‘Terror and Violence: The Dark Face of Spanish Anarchism’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 67 (2005), 79–99 (83–5); Pier Carlo Masini, Storia degli anarchici italiani nell’epoca degli attentati, Milan, 1981, 140–91. 96 Emile Henry, Déclaration d’Emile Henry, Bruxelles-Nord, 1894; Giuseppe Ciancabilla, ‘Questioni di tattica (fra anarchici)’, L’Agitazione, 17 February 1897; Ugo Fedeli, Giuseppe Ciancabilla, Imola, 1965.

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dynamiters’ desire to inflict casualties was rhetorical rather than genuine. Concluding his study of the dynamite campaign, Short remarked that the dynamiters were prepared to attack ‘provided that it did not involve the loss of innocent life’. He drew attention to the care taken to avoid crowded areas, noting that the London Underground bombings of 1883–5 were carried out late in the evening when carriages were empty.97 This summary understated the uncomfortable fact that the Underground explosions clearly put civilians in danger but, given the scale of the violence, it seems that Lomasney and Mooney’s outlooks were more representative of the movement than Dillon’s indifference to civilian casualties. This was also the impression of Edward Jenkinson, the Irish official charged with stamping out the dynamite campaign, who believed that the dynamiters did not intend ‘to take life: The object is to create a scare’.98 Thirdly, aside from the anarchists Johann Most and Albert Parsons, there was little or no reference to the skirmishing campaign in the contemporary anarchist press and such tactics were not generally advocated. The attentats of the early 1890s were undertaken by individuals, acting spontaneously and of their own volition. Investigations of the individuals behind acts of revolutionary violence in the late nineteenth century are rarely possible owing to the fragmentary nature of surviving evidence, yet some consideration is preferable to research that presupposes a type of ideological commitment to terrorism. Assassination found many apologists in the anarchist press, but acts of indiscriminate violence were not tolerated and their advocates were reproached in most anarchist newspapers and by key figureheads in the movement, such as Peter Kropotkin, Errico Malatesta and Jean Grave. Malatesta argued that attentats alone could not develop revolutionary circumstances, and warned anarchists against ‘indifference for the lives of others’. If they continued down the path of Ravachol and the attentat, they would become ‘like the Inquisition: attacking those who don’t think like them’.99 When discussing the subject of revolutionary violence, the famed anarchist and geographer Peter Kropotkin added a clause to the movement’s endorsement of propaganda of the deed: ‘if such an act is to produce a deep impression upon men’s minds, the right must be conquered’. Listing the example of the assassination of Tsar Alexander II 97 Short, The Dynamite War, 240–1. 98 Jenkinson to Lord Spencer, 14 September 1884, reprinted in Ball, Dublin Castle, 200–10. 99 Errico Malatesta to Luisa Minguzzi Pezzi, 29 April 1892, reprinted in Pietro Adamo (ed.), Pensiero e dynamite: Gli anarchici e la violenza, 1892–1894, Milan, 2004, 139–42; Il grido degli oppressi (New York), 17 March 1894.

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in 1881, Kropotkin stated how Sofia Perovskaya ‘conquered the right to kill’ by promising to lay down her own life. Without conquering the ‘right’, then the act would be mere ‘brutal fact, of no importance in the history of ideas’.100 In this sense, the fact that dynamiters called themselves anarchists or skirmishers did not automatically give their act political significance. The act itself, and its aftermath, had to be performed in a certain way for it to communicate the appropriate message. After the assassination of Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas by the Italian anarchist Michele Angiolillo, the newspaper La questione sociale proclaimed the act to be a ‘just vendetta’. Angiolillo allowed himself to be arrested, conscious of the fact that if he were not apprehended, widespread repression would occur.101 The anarchist press commemorated Angiolillo as a martyr, but also as an example that the practice of individual violence came with a high price. Demonstrating that the ‘deed’ should be carried out in a certain way, or not at all, served to limit violence. When individuals were required to ‘conquer the right’, the possibility of violence for its own sake was reduced, and revolutionary acts were less open to misrepresentation. It is interesting, then, that throughout the skirmishing campaign, the occasion when the European anarchist press paid most attention to The Irish World came after the execution of Patrick O’Donnell, who had killed an Irish informer off the coast of South Africa. In January 1884, the Florence-based Questione sociale expressed surprise that the US authorities permitted Irish nationalists openly to laud assassination on the front page of their newspaper. Describing the images of O’Donnell on the scaffold on the front cover of The Irish World, the anarchist journal translated most of the text into Italian, commenting ‘the newspaper is full of violent articles inciting the Irish to avenge him [O’Donnell] … they laud the glorious action of O’Donnell which did justice to James Carey, the ignoble instrument of Gladstone and shame of Ireland’.102 James Carey was an ex-Fenian who helped to orchestrate one of the most notorious assassinations of the late nineteenth century. On the afternoon of Saturday 6 May 1882, the Irish Chief Secretary Frederick Cavendish and under-secretary Thomas Henry Burke were killed in the Phoenix Park, Dublin. Cavendish had only recently taken up his post and was not a target, but he was in the company of Burke when the attack occurred and died also. The men were killed by the Invincibles, 100 Kropotkin, ‘Anarchist Morality’, 100–1. 101 La questione sociale (Paterson), 15 August 1897. 102 La questione sociale (Florence), 5 January 1884.

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a small secret society of between thirty-five and forty men that had emerged from the main IRB and an ‘Old Guard’ faction that dated back to 1867, and professed loyalty to James Stephens. Led by Carey, the Invincibles had previously killed an informer and planted an explosive device outside Dublin Castle in 1882, which failed to detonate. Despite this use of an infernal machine there were no discernible links between the Invincibles and Irish America, although they may have borrowed the idea of kidnapping and perhaps assassination from John McCafferty, who also played a role in establishing the Skirmishing Fund.103 The killings were a stunning departure from conventional IRB tactics. Previously, John Walsh’s ‘assassination committee’ in Dublin had targeted informers, not officials.104 Walsh was again involved in the Invincibles, but the beheading of the Irish administration in 1882 demonstrated unprecedented ambition and organisational capacity. For the dynamiters, the affair challenged basic theories. In comparison to the new, modern and scientific credentials of skirmishing, assassination represented one of the oldest forms of political violence. Moreover, though they possessed revolvers, the Invincibles chose to use eleveninch surgical knives. The face-to-face nature of the killings stood in stark contrast to the anonymous bomber depositing a timed explosive device at a stone building and then observing the destruction from a distance. The Invincibles were undoubtedly influenced by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, an act that reverberated around the world in 1881, yet part of the appeal of the Tsar’s assassination among other European revolutionary groups was the use of modern dynamite bombs. There was something curiously anachronistic about the Phoenix Park assassinations. The Invincibles’ actions were ostensibly a militant reaction to the so-called Kilmainham treaty of 2 May 1882, a compromise between Parnell and Gladstone, where the former offered to use his influence to calm pervasive unrest if the government released the Irish leaders and addressed the issue of tenant arrears. The agreement initiated a period of improved relations and effectively ended the mass agitation of the Land War (1879–82). It was Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party 103 Tom Corfe, The Phoenix Park Murders: Conflict, Compromise and Tragedy in Ireland, 1879–1882, London, 1968, 135–45; McGee, The IRB, 94–5; Ó Broin, Revolutionary Underground, 24–30; Donal P. McCracken, Inspector John Mallon: Buying Irish Patriotism for a Five-Pound Note, Dublin, 2009, 114; Patrick Tynan, The Irish National Invincibles and Their Times, London, 1894. 104 Jenkins, The Fenian Problem, 92, 175–6; Kennerk, Shadow of the Brotherhood, 299–300.

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that gained most from the Land League, consolidating their centrality in the wider nationalist movement, leaving the IRB subdued. The subsequent Phoenix Park killings were almost universally condemned in Ireland. If the Invincibles’ intention was to derail the treaty, the outcome proved to be the opposite. Parnell felt a ‘genuine sense of revulsion’ at the murders and Gladstone’s new ‘alliance with Parnell was, in fact, placed on a more stable basis’.105 In his study of the IRB, McGee observed that the organisation ‘suffered a devastating propaganda blow as a result of the Phoenix Park murders’, and many members feared recent advances in recruitment made during the Land League would be undone.106 During the Land War, however, fault-lines had surfaced in the IRB between urban and rural circles. The latter stood to benefit most from the Land League, leaving urban members somewhat left behind, and Matthew Kelly has suggested the Invincibles were ‘a response to these urban frustrations’.107 Historian Eugenio Biagini has interestingly added that it was ‘indicative of Fenianism’s limited revolutionary potential that its members were overwhelmed by horror at the sight of the decapitation of British government in Ireland’.108 In 1883 the Invincibles were tried and convicted in court, though the hierarchy behind the plot was never revealed. Of the gang, five men were hanged and four were sentenced to penal servitude for life, while six opted to give evidence in return for their release and resettlement. The testimonies of the ‘approvers’ were vital to the convictions, and Carey’s betrayal was particularly dramatic and damaging to the IRB. The ‘tolerably large crowd’ that gathered around Kilmainham jail the day Joe Brady was hanged would probably have been smaller had it not been on Whit Monday, a public holiday, although there were many sympathetic onlookers among the curious.109 Collections were taken up by United Ireland for the families of the imprisoned or executed men, and The Irish World extolled the virtues of Brady after his death, like other nationalist newspapers. But portrayals of martyrdom on the gallows were nonetheless vitiated by betrayal, and the outcry that followed the assassins’ executions differed from the protests over the Manchester Martyrs, or even Michael Barrett after the Clerkenwell explosion. This was partly 105 F. S. L. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, London, 1977, 208–10; Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, Oxford, 2007, 336–7. 106 McGee, The IRB, 101. 107 Kelly, The Fenian Ideal, 53; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 243. 108 Biagini, ‘Liberty and Nationalism in Ireland, 1798–1922’ (review article), The Historical Journal, 51 (2008), 793–809 (801). 109 The Freeman’s Journal, 15 May 1883; McGee, The IRB, 100.

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due to the general disapproval for the Invincibles’ actions, but also because they represented something decadent in comparison to previous Fenian trials. Though Brady and four others were executed, the aftermath of the Phoenix Park affair was associated with betrayal and self-interest. In his Recollections Devoy concluded that, ‘in striking contrast to the politicians whose paltry constitutional methods they swept aside, the Fenians were self-sacrificing men … their worst enemies do not deny that they immolated themselves on the altar of their country … that is why the movement … has exercised such a profound influence on the Irish people’.110 During his 1868 trial, William Lomasney declared ‘I was determined and quite ready to sacrifice my life if necessary … I have acted right, confident that I have committed no wrong, outrage or crime whatever, and that I have cast no disgrace.’111 Against such standards, the Invincibles fell ignominiously short. How the perpetrators performed both during the violent act and in the aftermath of trial, imprisonment or execution was crucial to the deed’s symbolic power, preventing it from becoming a mere brutal fact. In many ways, then, Patrick O’Donnell gave militant nationalism the martyr it had been denied by Carey’s betrayal. O’Donnell acted individually and was not the agent of any Fenian faction. The ‘O’Donnell Committee’ even declared that he shot Carey in self-defence during a card game, though later evidence maintained he was in pursuit of Carey when the shots were fired and that Carey’s identity had been revealed.112 Nonetheless, the figure of O’Donnell – ‘The brave executioner of Carey’ – was embraced by Fenian newspapers to regenerate militant nationalism after the propaganda disaster of the Phoenix Park killings. The O’Donnell Committee presented his act as ‘not only justifiable, but meritorious’. He had killed the hated informer, did not flee the scene and made no attempt to resist arrest, but ‘heroically gave up his life for Ireland’. Thanks to the submarine telegraph, news of Carey’s death in South Africa reached Ireland in twenty-four hours and North America the following day. Effigies of Carey were burned in Jersey City and guns were fired in the air in Syracuse, NY, with similar scenes occurring among Irish populations in several cities when the news arrived. An ‘O’Donnell Fund’ was started in The Irish World to pay lawyers’ costs between South Africa and Britain, as he was tried in London. After his execution in December 1883, the paper asked ‘Will 110 McCracken, Inspector Mallon, 126–9; Devoy, Recollections, 319–20. 111 Seán Ua Ceallaigh (ed.), Speeches from the Dock; or, Protests of Irish Patriotism, Dublin, 1945, 274–94 (289). 112 O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, 229; The Nation, 5 January 1884.

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O’Donnell be avenged? … O’Donnell, just before he was murdered, expressed the confident hope that his death would not go unavenged. It would be an eternal disgrace to the Irish race if the expectations of this brave man should not be fulfilled.’113 The O’Donnell affair illustrated the centrality of prisoners and martyrs to the dynamics of militant Irish nationalism. Two weeks after O’Donnell’s execution the Emergency Fund was launched in The Irish World. Patrick Ford had never ceased to threaten to launch a bombing campaign in Britain should the government introduce coercion or should the Land League fail to meet radicals’ expectations. Dynamite attacks would probably have begun sooner, had the Invincibles not, albeit for different reasons, stolen the opportunity. Instead, almost one year passed between the Kilmainham treaty and the first blasts of Clan-na-Gael’s operations in Great Britain in 1883, while it was only at the end of December 1883 that the Emergency Fund began. The Phoenix Park murders had paralysed militant nationalism and rendered the prospects of public sympathy for dynamite attacks highly unlikely. It was not until O’Donnell’s execution that an opportunity arose to capitalise on a thawing of the general hostility for revolutionary nationalism, and Ford wasted little time in seizing upon it.

‘El Mahdi’s avenging hand abroad and dynamite at home’: skirmishing and empire

The explosions in Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and London in 1881–5 highlighted how international attention could be brought to focus on the Irish Question. Patrick Ford contended that, before the skirmishing campaign, Irish grievances were given space only in a few ‘socialistic organs of Paris … Today, leading articles and editorials on the “Irish land question” are the rule rather than the exception in both the city and provincial press of every country in Europe.’ Irish World journalist ‘W. M. C.’ concurred, noting that explosions ‘certainly arouse public attention, in spite of Egypt and in spite of India, to the Irish question … the worldwide attention that is drawn to the misgovernment of Ireland has amply compensated for the trouble [the dynamiters] have undertaken and the risks they have run’. The 1883 bomb attacks and arrests were international front-page news, and this ability to communicate with a large audience reflected the growing availability 113 The Irish World, 25 August and 29 December 1883; The New York Sun, 2 and 3 August 1883; Corfe, The Phoenix Park Murders, 259.

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of information globally, something the dynamiters aimed to exploit.114 Embarrassing Britain on an international stage was facilitated by improved telegraph and the emergence of media agencies. News of the explosions in the metropole travelled fast, and weakened, so the dynamiters believed, Britain’s image abroad as the home of democracy and asylum for other countries’ persecuted revolutionaries. The explosions also aimed to strike at the stability of the empire. The dynamiters were happy to make headlines in Europe, but they also expected that news of their deeds would travel throughout empire and inspire like-minded actions elsewhere. Equally, when responding to criticism of the bomb attacks, the rhetoric that the dynamiters used to explain violent escalations drew on imperial conflicts. From the beginning of the Skirmishing Fund in 1876 to the bomb attacks in 1885, the expanding British empire was a pressing public issue and widely discussed across newspapers in Britain, Europe and North America, and the dynamiters increasingly sought to portray their activities in anti-imperial contexts and with reference to flashpoints in Africa and central Asia. The proclivity in historical writing to linger over Ireland’s awkward position in the British empire has, until recently, been accompanied by oversimplified categorisations and vexed clashes over the island’s status as a colony or not, with postcolonial readings of conquest and subjugation jarring with accounts that point to Irish complicity in the machinery of empire and an absence of anti-colonial sentiment until more modern times. In the past few years, however, these debates have given way to a new wave of imperial studies that leave, to some extent, polemics behind and explore the manifold nuances of Irish imperial attitudes.115 Matthew Kelly, looking at Irish nationalist newspapers during the 1850s and 1860s, has illuminated how imperialism was primarily understood as despotic rule and, in these terms, anti-­imperialism was a ‘powerful component’ of nationalists’ thought. They readily identified with non-white peoples in India and Jamaica, though this readiness sometimes reflected anxieties ‘that they were not recognised as 114 The Irish World, 19 May 1883, 28 March 1885; United Irishman, 28 December 1884. In France, Italy and Germany, for example, the dynamiters made front-page news in the Frankfurter Zeitung, 16 March and 7 April 1883; Le temps, 18 March and 8 April 1883; and Corriere della sera, 18–24 and 28 March, 5–8 April 1883. 115 For an introduction to the debates see Joe Cleary, ‘Amongst Empires: A Short History of Ireland and Empire Studies in International Context’, Éire-Ireland, 42 (2007), 11–57. Terrence McDonough (ed.), Was Ireland a Colony? Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Dublin, 2005; Stephen Howe, ‘Minding the Gaps: New Directions in the Study of Ireland and Empire’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 37 (2009), 135–49.

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similarly afflicted’ in international circles.116 Paul Townend has argued that, during the years 1878–80, anti-imperialism ‘emerged as an integral, powerful part of Irish national mobilizing rhetoric’, and was central to the popular appeal of the Land League and the Irish Parliamentary Party.117 Townend is careful to note that politicians’ anti-imperialism was often opportunistic, but this did not necessarily mean it was insincere, a conclusion that Michael de Nie also points to in his essay on Irish public opinion and the Sudanese revolt of the 1880s. Crucially, all of these essays delimit their investigations within clear chronological markers, emphasising the ‘fluid’ and ‘flexible’ nature of Irish attitudes, and how anti-imperialism waxed and waned according to evolving political circumstances.118 A look at the ‘Dynamite Press’ allows us to expand the analysis of imperial attitudes further. Questions and debates about empire were inescapable in the late nineteenth century, and transformations in Irish nationalist political violence in this period cannot be understood without reference to this imperial discourse. Historians have revisited newspapers in Ireland and Britain to elucidate understandings of anti-imperialism beyond anti-Britishness, and similar approaches are necessary for the newspapers of the diaspora. Sympathy and support for rebellions in the outposts of empire formed an integral part of the content of The Irish World and the United Irishman during the 1870s and 1880s. The dynamiters’ anti-imperialism merits attention because, firstly, they sought to legitimise their actions through citing the excesses of state violence in the colonies and thus challenging categories of ‘civilised’ and ‘uncivilised’ warfare. Secondly, assessing the anti-imperial rhetoric of the Dynamite Press and its resonance among Irish emigrants in the United States allows us to move beyond simplistic ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’ frameworks. In the 1860s, the Fenians merged nationalism almost seamlessly with anti-imperialism, but in the late 1870s a third trope was added in The Irish World that portrayed 116 M. J. Kelly, ‘Irish Nationalist Opinion and the British Empire in the 1850s and 1860s’, Past & Present, 204 (2009), 127–54 (137). 117 Paul A. Townend, ‘Between Two Worlds: Irish Nationalists and Imperial Crisis 1878–1880’, Past & Present, 194 (2007), 139–74 (172). For an earlier discussion see H. V. Brasted, ‘Irish Nationalism and the British Empire in the Late-Nineteenth Century’, in Oliver McDonagh, W. F. Mandle and Pauric Travers (eds.), Irish Culture and Nationalism, 1750–1950, New York, 1983, 83–103. 118 Michael de Nie, ‘“Speed the Mahdi!” The Irish Press and Empire, 1883–1885’, Journal of British Studies, 51 (2012, forthcoming); Niamh Lynch, ‘Defining Irish Nationalist Anti-Imperialism: Thomas Davis and John Mitchel’, Éire-Ireland, 42 (2007), 82–107; Michael Silvestri, Ireland and India: Nationalism, Empire and Memory, Basingstoke, 2009.

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imperialism as an extension of landlordism, as the international expression of robber elites taking land from its rightful owners, the ‘toilers of the soil’.119 In order to answer criticisms of dynamite and small-group violence, the dynamiters sought to make clear that barbarism was neither a direct result of, nor particular to, irregular warfare. Instead, they depicted the bombing campaign as a response in kind to intensifications of conflict by the state. It was paradoxical to compare pejoratively skirmishing with imperial warfare: the latter, when practised in the empire, was characterised by ‘dozens of high-horsed captains with still higher pay, mentally and morally unfit for positions but forced there through political influence’. This mode of warfare was characterised by ‘universal demoralization, ravishing of women, outraging non-combatants, and plundering in hordes’. In 1876, the St Patrick’s Day edition of The Irish World carried an article entitled ‘Washington and His Skirmishers: A Style of Warfare which the British Pronounced “Irregular” and “Ungenerous”’. Using the example of the American War of Independence, Ford argued that while the British army fought with conventional tactics, the rebel force fought ‘with whatever means it could’, and merited victory, even if at times it used irregular tactics. When responding to criticisms that skirmishing was anarchic and individualist, The Irish World drafted ‘Maxims for Skirmishers’ that were published each week along with the list of contributors to the fund. They included ‘Humane Warfare’, ‘A Common Sense View of It’ and ‘England’s Mode of Warfare’. The final maxim was accompanied by the subtitle ‘What Is it? Ask the Kookas of India. Ask the Signers of the Declaration of Independence’.120 Through close and lengthy analysis of events in the colonial world, The Irish World sought to explain violent transgressions as counterviolence, or actions necessary to throw off foreign misrule and establish indigenous republican governments. The task of reporting on imperial conflicts was complicated by the fact that information was purchased from the Press Association, whose objectivity was often doubted by nationalist journalists. Ford and his staff sceptically sifted through casualty lists and reports from war correspondents who associated closely with the British military in the field. As a consequence, accounts in The Irish World were often vague on the specifics of battle, and instead emphasised the unequal nature of the fighting and the deployment of stereotypes in the imperial press. In 1876, for example, the Skirmishing Fund notes referred to how ‘a few score Hindus had been 119 The Irish World, 7 April 1883. 120 Ibid., 18 March 1876, 28 August 1880, 16 April 1881.

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mashed to mince meat by the muzzles of English cannon … of course, if the Hindus … were to turn about and blow up an English garrison or execute Lynch law on their most prominent oppressors, then the case would bear a totally different aspect … “treacherous savagery”’.121 Writing in his United Irishman, O’Donovan Rossa cited the 1879 invasion of Zulu territory when explaining what he considered to be the realities of British warfare. In order to ‘bring the natives to their knees – with dynamite and other “resources of civilization” as Gladstone calls them – they blasted them in the very mountain caverns in which they sought refuge’.122 In 1880 The Irish World ran a series of open letters to Gladstone that chronicled episodes of British misrule and violence in Europe, America, Asia and Africa. Presenting Gladstone with ‘the devastating effects of the monumental crimes of your empire’, Ford cited witness accounts in India that described a policy of commercial exploitation protected by the army and ‘man-made famines’, the latter evoking parallels with Ireland that hardly needed to be stated, especially given that, during the Land War, widespread fears existed that another Irish famine was imminent. In Africa, Ford emphasised Britain’s past role in the slave trade along with detailing escalations in violence in the contemporary conflicts in Egypt, the Zulu kingdom and the Transvaal. He also included a tirade against British military and commercial involvement in China and the opium trade.123 Underlying the open letter was Ford’s conviction that in the face of continued exploitation indigenous populations were duty-bound to violent resistance. Through describing skirmishing in the language of anti-imperial resistance, the propagandists of dynamite sought to situate themselves in a system of sound moral and political imperatives. Ford vehemently argued that moral anxieties over clandestine violence were hypocritical: ‘there are some well-intending but thoughtless people who would be horrified at the thought of a dynamite war, but who would be in no way shocked by such civilized warfare as England lately waged in Zululand and Egypt’.124 The bulk of the bomb attacks in Britain were carried out between 1881 and 1885, a period when conflict erupted in north-east Africa. Owing to concerns over the security of the Suez Canal and financial interests in Egypt, British and French forces looked to suppress the 121 Ibid., 20 May 1876; Brasted, ‘Irish Nationalism’, 88–9. 122 O’Donovan Rossa, Irish Rebels in English Prisons, i–iv; United Irishman, 9 November 1881, 20 May 1882. 123 ‘An Open Letter to Gladstone’, The Irish World, 30 April 1881. 124 Ibid., 5 May 1884.

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growing nationalist movement led by Ahmad ‘Urabi. In July 1882, after tensions had resulted in anti-European riots, the French military presence withdrew but British naval squadrons bombarded Alexandria. In August, the army invaded Egypt and within a month British Field Marshall Wolseley decisively defeated Ahmed ‘Urabi’s forces at the battle of Tel el-Kebir, where 2,000 Egyptians and 57 British soldiers died.125 At Westminster, Irish MP T. P. O’Connor commented that the battle had produced in Britain a ‘blind and insensate Jingoism’. One account by a sergeant present in Egypt maintained that the battle had successfully demonstrated the aim to ‘overawe and instil into the dull native mind the overall strength of the nation they had been opposing’.126 The episode gripped international press attention, and kindled widely differing attitudes and a sharp debate regarding the nature of Britain’s expanding empire. Ultimately, the episode served to draw Britain further into a conflict in north-east Africa that proved disastrous for the Liberal government. The Irish World reported the events under the unequivocal headlines of ‘Cannonading Alexandria’ and ‘Gladstone’s Resources of Civilization Shot into the Homes of 250,000 People’. Commenting on the bombardment of Alexandria, Ford claimed that ‘whilst the English were pouring a rain of shot and shell into the city the Egyptians were unable to reply from the want of heavy cannon. The consequence was that the whole thing resembled more a massacre than a battle. It is the latest chapter added to the history of the manner in which British civilization is spread.’ Elsewhere in the paper, the conflict was labelled ‘the Great Egyptian Murder’, and efforts were made to catalogue the deaths of non-combatants and the numbers of displaced civilians, while making specific references to the types of explosives and incendiary devices used by imperial forces.127 Unrest in Egypt spread to the Sudan when Muhammad Ahmad, or the Mahdi (Guided One), called for a holy war against its Egyptian rulers. In 1883–4, the Mahdi and his followers – the ansar (helpers) – overwhelmed British and British-backed Egyptian forces at Shaykan and El Teb. In January 1884, the government acceded to substantial political pressure and sent General Gordon, then based in Egypt, to consider the 125 Donald Malcolm Reid, ‘The ‘Urabi Revolution and British Conquest, 1879–1882’, in M. W. Daly and Carl F. Petry (eds.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, 2 vols., Cambridge, 1998, Vol. II, 217–38 (236); Edward M. Spiers, The Victorian Soldier in Africa, Manchester, 2004, 77–94. 126 T. P. O’Connor, Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian, 2 vols., London, 1929, Vol. I, 302; Spiers, The Victorian Soldier, 94. 127 The Irish World, 22 and 29 July, 19 August 1882.

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situation in Khartoum. Arriving in February, Gordon was instructed to oversee evacuations and abandon Khartoum, but he decided to remain and organise the defence of the city. Meanwhile, in the second battle at El Teb, 29 February 1884, the British forces secured a decisive victory, losing 30 cavalry compared to 2,000 ansar deaths.128 Throughout the following year, however, the Mahdi’s forces around Khartoum grew stronger, placing the city under siege, and in 1885 they took the city and killed Gordon. The Irish World devoted entire front pages to the events in the Sudan, which were accompanied by cartoons satirically depicting British difficulties. Ford sought to challenge claims that the Mahdi revolt was primarily religious by portraying it instead as fundamentally patriotic, proclaiming that the Sudanese rebels deserved ‘the sympathy of the friends of freedom throughout the world’.129 The Irish World was not unusual among nationalist newspapers in the attention it gave to developments in the Sudan. The Irish American, The Freeman’s Journal and The Irishman all printed regular reports and comment on events, not least because the feeling existed, in both the pro- and anti-imperial press in Britain, that a victory for the Mahdi would weaken the stability of the whole empire.130 The earliest publication of Irish cultural nationalist Lady Gregory, for example, was a pamphlet entitled ‘Arabi and His Household’ (1882). Yet front-page headlines like ‘Trashing the Beast: El Mahdi’s Avenging Hand Abroad and Dynamite at Home’ indicated the militancy with which The Irish World looked on at events.131 When, in late 1883 and 1884, the dynamiters’ organs openly triumphed the successful explosion of incendiaries in the London Underground, Victoria railway station and Scotland Yard, they simultaneously gave increased coverage to the Sudan and ‘skirmishing parties of Arabs’.132 On 24 January 1885, the most notorious episode of the skirmishing campaign occurred when three dynamite bombs exploded on a Saturday afternoon, between 2.00 and 2.15 p.m., in the Tower of London, the crypt of Westminster Hall, and the chamber of the House of Commons. The attack was organised by the Clan-na-Gael dynamiters James Cunningham, Henry Burton, Roger O’Neill and Luke Dillon – all recently arrived in London from the USA – and caused much embarrassment for the secret services and London Metropolitan Police.133 128 Spiers, The Victorian Soldier, 99–101. 129 The Irish World, 1 and 8 March, 12 and 26 April, 17 May 1884; 7 February 1885. 130 De Nie, ‘God Speed the Mahdi!’. 131 The Irish World, 8 March 1884. 132 Ibid., 16 February, 8 March, 14 June 1884. 133 Short, The Dynamite War, 205–8.

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Labelled ‘Dynamite Saturday’ by the British dailies, the attack was a coup beyond the dynamiters’ expectations. Both the United Irishman and The Irish World devoted entire numbers to the event, celebrating a ‘victory that all patriotic Irishmen and justice loving Americans will appreciate’.134 In the following days, newspapers accused the dynamiters of advocating barbarity and ‘crimes scarcely paralleled by the most desperate deeds of Russian nihilism’. Unsurprisingly The Times led the attack, as their offices had been targeted in March of 1883: ‘The Irish World, the organ of the party of disorder in the United States, exults in misery … and chuckles at the infliction of pain and fear upon men, women, and children absolutely disconnected with … the so-called wrongs of Ireland.’135 Ford responded by citing the well-worn nationalist arguments for Irish independence blended with examples of violence from empire: Let us for a moment consider what is transpiring in the Sudan. In the recent explosions in London not a single life was lost … [but] at the very moment these sheets are indulging in this language news comes that the English army, according to English accounts, has butchered some 1,300 Sudanese for no other reason than that they are defending their country from an invasion … There is no sign of remorse over the wholesale slaughter.136

Ford legitimised the unprecedented use of an urban bombing campaign by arguing that, originally, imperial armies were responsible for breaching the established thresholds of violence through their employment of explosives in various conflicts throughout the empire: ‘In Basutoland, for instance, she [Queen Victoria] did not hesitate to use dynamite to blow up chief Moirosi and his followers when they fled for protection to the caves of their native land … there were no editorials in the London newspapers about the “innocent sufferers”.’137 Through reporting on imperial armies’ use of explosive materials; civilian casualties; and the destruction done to property and state infrastructures in India, Afghanistan, Zululand, Egypt and the Sudan; the supporters of skirmishing represented contentious forms of violence as ‘England’s outrages in India, Africa and Ireland coming home to her’.138 The swift movement of information on world affairs facilitated an interrogation of empire that sought to explain skirmishing through contemporary escalations in imperial conflict. In order to confront an imperialism that proved itself willing to use experimental methods and 134 The Irish World, 7 February 1885. 135 The Times, 26 January 1885. 136 The Irish World, 7 February 1885. 137 Ibid.    138  Ibid., 21 August 1880.

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recent inventions such as dynamite, the advocates of skirmishing argued that it was necessary to experiment with forms of resistance. Responding to criticism from the IRB, Patrick Ford argued that insurrection did not correspond to objective circumstances, but to stubbornly held ideas of ‘civilised warfare’, a ‘folly’ that ‘proceeded from a mistaken sense of honour’.139 Because imperial conflicts moved the landscape of violence to urban centres and therefore threatened civilians, Ford argued that nationalist movements could then legitimately resort to urban guerrilla warfare. After the Crimean War, England was in no visible difficulty, aside from imperial entanglements. Adverse circumstances for insurrection in Ireland necessitated a pragmatic view of revolution, the dynamiters argued, that moved beyond the ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’ maxim. Bomb attacks in Britain not only spared the Irish population the hardships of insurrectionary wars, but the dynamiters believed that they could disrupt economic life in the metropole in ways that a conflict in Ireland simply could not. But skirmishing was also imagined as a means of action that was universally available: explosives could be cheaply and easily made and held the potential to arm the multitudes, beyond a core of volunteers, and regardless of social position or geography. The dynamiters’ use of distant imperial conflicts to justify political violence, however, raises further questions regarding the depth of their anti-imperial feeling. Did condemnations of state-sponsored violence and expressions of solidarity with other peoples in central Asia and Africa amount to anything more than a convenient defence of an unpopular and unprecedented bombing campaign? When the Skirmishing Fund began, O’Donovan Rossa called for attacks against the ‘enemy in Ireland, now in India, now in England itself’.140 Funding Indian rebels with money that could have been used in Ireland was an improbable proposition, but many Irish American nationalists consciously thought about Irish independence in the context of contemporary anti-imperial movements. While planning dynamite operations in London, William Lomasney wrote to John Devoy to suggest ‘applying the Skirmishing Fund’ to aid the Boers in 1881. F. F. Millen recommended approaching the Afghanis and assuring them ‘of finding in us allies and friends’. In 1879, J. J. O’Kelly urged the sending of arms to the Boers and financing the Zulus with $20,000. He later became a war correspondent during the Egyptian crisis, sending reports to the Daily News and Freeman’s Journal. In 1882, The New York Sun claimed 139 Ibid., 5 January 1884. 



140

  Ibid., 4 March 1876.

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that three Irish ‘Volunteers for Arabi’ were to set out for Egypt from Philadelphia.141 During the Mahdist rebellion, the United Irishman advised Irish-born soldiers in imperial ranks in the Sudan to desert and form circles to attack colonial forces, or else join ranks with the Sudanese rebels, availing themselves of ‘every opportunity to assist the swarthy warriors of the desert, who, to maintain their freedom, are fighting gallantly’.142 Yet little evidence exists that demonstrates how promises of men and arms materialised. Outside Britain itself, Canada appears to have been the only part of the empire targeted by the dynamiters (see Chapter 3). Clanna-Gael did little to assist the Boers beyond contacting the Dutch government. Alfred Aylward, a former IRB man and informer, was a commando leader on the Boer side but was not an agent of Clan-na-Gael.143 At the same time as they sympathised with other peoples of the British empire, individuals within Clan-na-Gael actively contacted other imperial powers, thus giving their anti-imperialism a dubious air. Indeed, at the beginning of their nationalist careers, John Devoy and J. J. O’Kelly had put their anti-imperialism to one side and joined the French Foreign Legion.144 In 1878, F. F. Millen and William Carroll – a key Clan-na-Gael leader at the time – discussed capturing Gibraltar with Antonio Canovas del Castillo, the conservative premier of Spain, whom Irish American nationalists openly condemned when sympathising with Cuban nationalists in New York. Canovas was later shot dead by the Italian anarchist Michele Angiolillo, in revenge for directing the macabre repression of Spanish anarchism in the 1890s. Carroll’s plan, which he devised with J. J. O’Kelly, envisaged a manoeuvre where Irish American Civil War veterans and IRB volunteers would seize Gibraltar and then invite the Spanish government to occupy it. Canovas declined, believing the plan impossible owing to British naval strength. Elsewhere, in Washington, DC, John Devoy, James Reynolds, Millen and Carroll met with Mikhail Shiskin, the Russian ambassador to the 141 F. F. Millen to William Carroll, 20 November 1877; J. J. O’Kelly to Devoy, 17 February 1879; Lomasney to Devoy, 23 February 1881: in O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. I, 282, 392, 408, and Vol. II, 44; The New York Sun, 9 August 1882. In Ireland, rumours circulated in 1879 of a former Fenian named McCarthy who had joined the ranks of the natives in South Africa; Townend, ‘Between Two Worlds’, 147. 142 United Irishman, 4 April 1885. 143 See McGee, The IRB, 89–90. 144 James McConnel and Máirtín Ó Catháin, ‘A Training School for Rebels: Fenians in the French Foreign Legion’, History Ireland, 16, 2008, 46–9; Janick Julienne, ‘John Patrick Leonard (1814–1889), chargé d’affaires d’un gouvernement Irlandais en France’, Etudes irlandaises, 25 (2000), 49–67 (52).

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USA, to discuss a possible alliance with Russia in the event of a war with Britain resulting from the Eastern Crisis. According to Desmond Ryan, the conversation made an impression on Devoy. Shiskin was reluctant to co-operate, remarking that there was no public trace of a separatist movement in Ireland and that hence he doubted the strength of nationalist sentiment; this observation contributed to Devoy’s later involvement in the ‘new departure’.145 The anti-imperialism of Devoy and other Clan-na-Gael leaders appeared constrained by the borders of the British empire. O’Donovan Rossa undoubtedly opposed the idea of empire and was enthusiastic when expressing solidarity with anti-imperial movements elsewhere, in comparison to the more restrained views expressed by Devoy in his Irish Nation. Editorials in the United Irishman typically compared circumstances in India and Africa to Cromwellian Ireland or the Great Famine, highlighting similarities of experience. Yet, like Devoy, O’Donovan Rossa rarely extended his criticisms beyond the boundaries of the British empire, making it difficult to see where anti-imperialism surpassed anti-Britishness. Rossa also reproduced some of the racial assumptions that circulated in both pro- and anti-imperial organs. His articles described the non-Christian Zulus as brave and honourable, but also fanatical and barbarous, in contrast to the Irish ‘race’, a term that was widely used across the Irish press.146 The anti-imperialism of The Irish World may be viewed in a different light. Patrick Ford’s opposition to imperialism was not a simple expression of anglophobia, but a condemnation of the essential concept of empire. Incriminations were not confined to the British empire; imperialism in other jurisdictions, and when conducted by the United States itself, was equally criticised. When France occupied Tunisia in 1881 and established a protectorate there, Ford denounced the ‘pretence’ of protecting French Algeria from incursions, declaring the real aim was to ‘divert the French from the consideration of social questions by reviving their love of glory’.147 Russian repression in Poland was reported on, as were Spanish military practices in Cuba, where ‘Cuban Skirmishers’ derailed the train of General Martinez-Campos. When Spain ‘challenged the rebels to open conflict or “splendid battle” … the Cubans very wisely declined. They thought the surer way the right way, and accordingly adopted the “skirmishing” idea’.148 In 1880, Ford seized 145 Gaelic American, 18 August 1906; NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-591; O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. I, 209–12, 278, 292–4, 311, 408, 412. 146 The Irish World, 11 March 1876. See also de Nie, ‘Speed the Mahdi!’. 147 The Irish World, 28 May 1881. 148 Ibid., 9 January, 13 and 27 May 1976.

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upon an early example of muscle-flexing when a US frigate, anchored off Costa Rica, ‘landed a few tonnes of coal on the shore and planted an American flag upon it’. Both Costa Rica and Colombia claimed jurisdiction over the disputed area of coastline and Ford read the episode as a US attempt to exploit the situation and occupy the land.149 Though Ford’s militant nationalism faded by the end of the 1880s, his anti-imperial convictions remained and he was particularly vocal during the second Boer War of 1899–1902. Though much of the criticism of imperial policy in the Transvaal bore the stamp of traditional hostility toward England, it was also bound up with Ford’s opposition to the Spanish–American War and the attacks on the first Philippine Republic. Irish American attitudes, historian Úna Ní Bhroiméil has noted, were ‘not designed purely with Ireland in mind, and extended to a more general critique of empire, including American overseas expansion’.150 When the conflict with Spain erupted in Cuba in 1898, Ford was initially enthusiastic and encouraged Irish American ‘patriots’ to enlist with the ‘liberating’ US armies. When the realities of the conflict became clearer, however, Ford’s support of American foreign policy soured, and in the following years his paper became an intransigent critic of McKinley’s political and military interventions in Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines, comparing the use of concentration camps in the latter country to imperial practices in South Africa.151 Aside from editorials, the weekly front-page articles in The Irish World by ‘Trans-Atlantic’ dealt at length with empire. Trans-Atlantic was the pseudonym of Thomas J. Mooney, Ford’s European correspondent and Young Ireland veteran, and according to John Devoy his articles were ‘the chief attraction of the paper … which gave instructions every week of everything that was needed for Irish regeneration’.152 Similarly to O’Donovan Rossa, Trans-Atlantic’s weekly columns in the 1870s and 1880s dealt significantly with the imperial situations in central Asia and Africa, with articles entitled ‘Famine in India’, ‘Indian Fenians and Irish Fenians’, ‘British Robbers in Afghanistan’ and ‘El Mahdi’s Great Victories’. Yet, he also broadened his critique beyond anti-Britishness, discussing at length the Roman, Greek and Ottoman empires, which were ‘histories of the blackest crimes, robberies and murders’. Writing 149 Ibid., 9 December 1876, 8 May 1880. 150 Úna Ní Bhroiméil, ‘The South African War, Empire and The Irish World, 1899–1902’, in Simon J. Potter (ed.), Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the Empire, c. 1857–1921, Dublin, 2004, 195–216 (216). 151 The Irish World, 14 and 21 May, 23 July 1898; Ní Bhroiméil, ‘The South African War’, 213. 152 Gaelic American, 23 June 1906.

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from London, Trans-Atlantic firmly endorsed skirmishing and urged readers in Ireland and other peoples of empire to familiarise themselves with dynamite as the most modern weapon of colonial resistance, a weapon that he claimed had already seen success: ‘Herzegovinians, with skirmishers through their mountains, brought the Grand Turk pretty nearly on his knees … [they] established “skirmishing societies” in Bulgaria, Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro’.153 The Irish World’s opposition to empire developed in a bifurcated critique of both political and social ills. During the first Boer War, Ford was keen to highlight advertisements in British newspapers for farmland in the Transvaal, emphasising practices that he believed to be at the core of empire.154 Anti-imperialism not only blended into separatist feeling, but incorporated a further element: the idea of imperialism as a mechanism of mass expropriation, as the global extension of the grand larceny practised by Irish landlords, American ‘robber barons’ and English industrialists. Throughout different colonial empires, not only was national autonomy denied, but also workers’ rights. In this way, The Irish World echoed, and went further than, Fenian attitudes to class and empire expressed in The Irish People in the 1860s. While articles in The Irish World unmistakably dealt with the struggle for Irish independence, the encouragement of resistance to empire also emphasised land theft and the need to ‘call out boldly for the land to the cultivator’. Through simultaneous protest by the peoples of empire and the working classes, Trans-Atlantic argued, the structures of empire would soon be on their last legs, leaving indigenous peoples and the working classes of imperial powers free to establish republics.155 In addition, connections between empire and the slave trade resonated with Ford during the African conflicts of the 1880s. As we have seen, Ford was a Boston abolitionist and his attitude toward imperialism was undoubtedly coloured by his anti-slavery past. Expressions of solidarity with non-whites were commonplace in The Irish World and they weren’t solely confined to colonised peoples. In line with his denunciations of empire, Ford criticised the forceful removal of Native Americans to reservations in the United States, although some of the dynamiters were in fact veterans of the Indian Wars: ‘Ought the Indian 153 The Irish World, 28 October 1876, 17 March, 29 September 1877; 2 February 1878; 3 and 10 January 1880. For his views on dynamite, see Trans-Atlantic to Ford, undated, in O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. I, 264. 154 The Irish World, 5 and 12 March 1881. 155 Ibid., 11 September 1880, 8 March 1884, 24 January 1880, 16 October 1886. Townend notes a similar ‘marriage of the land and imperial issues’ in Ireland during the Land War; Townend, ‘Between Two Worlds’, 160.

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to be anxious to welcome a “civilisation” which he finds breaking solemn compacts, cheating him out of his patrimony, and hunting him down like a wild beast?’156 The attitudes of The Irish World’s readers were more ambivalent, and more difficult to assess. Subscribers to the dynamite funds wrote eagerly of their support for the Mahdi and advised the application of the Skirmishing Fund to assist native forces in similar conflicts throughout Africa and Asia. Their letters were interesting given that, in the workplace, Irish immigrants resisted class-based solidarity with other ethnic groups and were openly hostile toward African Americans. Affinity for non-whites was expressed largely in imperial contexts and was not discernibly motivated by concerns about racial equality in the home country. Irish American prejudices were embedded in more general ideas about race circulating at the time, and it wasn’t surprising when, at the turn of the century, Irish Americans unequivocally sided with the white Afrikaners during the Boer War and were not overtly concerned about Boers’ treatment of the native population.157 Though the readers of The Irish World might not have shared all of the progressive views expressed by Patrick Ford during the 1870s and 1880s, it is reasonable to assume that they concurred to some degree with the sentiments expressed inside. At times, anti-imperial articles were opportunistic and sought to manipulate Irish American sensibilities for Ireland’s cause: yet, this indicates how newspapers sought to capitalise on a popular anti-imperialism that already existed, rather than shaping it as they pleased. Articles in The Irish World and the United Irishman connected with a genuine anti-imperialism among Irish immigrants in America. To be sure, the bulk of anti-imperial rhetoric was directed at Britain, but The Irish World moved beyond traditional antiBritishness to oppose the idea of imperialism as a form of expropriation of the masses across different countries and continents. Imperialism was irreconcilable with the social radicalism and republican values expressed in The Irish World. Citing the protection offered to commercial enterprises in India and China by imperial armies, Ford portrayed empire as an unnatural means of depriving workers, be they in the outposts of empire, Ireland or the USA, of the just rewards of their labour. 156 The Irish World, 20 January 1877. 157 See Timothy J. Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880–1928, Notre Dame, 2001, 258; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London, 1991, 185–9; John Kuo Wei Tchen, ‘Quimbo Appo’s Fear of Fenians: Chinese-Irish-Anglo Relations in New York City’, in Ronald Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher (eds.), The New York Irish, Baltimore, 1996, 125–52.

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Undoubtedly, not all of the advocates of skirmishing shared The Irish World’s views, evident in the Clan-na-Gael’s dealings with imperial powers with records hardly better than Great Britain’s. Yet, the majority considered resistance movements throughout the empire to be fighting the same war as the Fenians, and in this way skirmishing and dynamite were framed as part of a transnational resistance to imperialism.

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The dynamiters were convinced that some of the gravest injustices of empire were practised in Ireland. When discussing the Irish administration, the United Irishman regularly cited Gladstone’s speech at Leeds’ White Cloth Hall in October 1881, when he asserted that if ‘there is still to be fought the final conflict in Ireland between law on the one side and sheer lawlessness upon the other … then, I say without hesitation, that the resources of civilization against its enemies are not yet exhausted’.158 Gladstone was referring to the Irish Land War (1879–82) and the enforcement of the 1881 Protection of Person and Property Act, emergency legislation passed in order to confront endemic rural unrest. The speech anticipated the imminent imprisonment of the Irish leaders, and six days later Parnell was arrested. The United Irishman appropriated Gladstone’s phrase for the ‘Resources of Civilisation Fund’, started to publicise and finance the skirmishing campaign, to emphasise the reciprocating relationship between state and revolutionary violence. After the Phoenix Park assassinations the government introduced the Prevention of Crime Act, which ‘continued coercion, but it was coercion of a different kind’, in the words of Margaret O’Callaghan. The 1882 Act, which lasted for three years, ‘provided for a special tribunal to try cases that were bound to be dismissed by juries, for the extension of summary jurisdiction and the treatment of incitement to intimidation as intimidation’.159 The murders intensified the government’s determination to destroy secret societies, and as Owen Mcgee has pointed out, ‘Between 1882–1887, Dublin Castle would spend roughly £70,000 on secret service work; an amount of expenditure equal to that spent in Ireland during the entire period 1919–21.’160 Yet the Prevention of Crime Act held limited potential for policing the dynamiters, most 158 The full speech is found in The Times, 8 October 1881. 159 O’Callaghan, British High Politics, 93; Virginia Crossman, Politics, Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Dublin, 1996, 144. 160 McGee, The IRB, 102.

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of whom operated outside Ireland.161 To police irregular warfare the authorities experimented with diverse strategies that could similarly be termed irregular, and that varied in levels of effectiveness. Anti-Fenian measures were carried out by different branches that viewed each other acrimoniously. The Criminal Investigation Department (CID), established in 1878, initially handled investigations, but by 1883 a ‘Secret Service’ section was established specifically to meet the skirmishing threat.162 In 1868, the Fenian collaborator Octave Fariola remarked that the ‘admirable’ organisation of the French detective force left it ‘centuries in advance of Scotland Yard’.163 What was a source of derision for Fariola was a source of pride for the Conservative MP Henry Matthews, who maintained Britons disdained espionage and ‘the employment of that hateful creature, happily unknown in this country, the agent provocateur’.164 Historians of European policing have noted the absence of a secret service in Britain until the 1880s, and its reluctant introduction even then. Traditional British concepts of policing spurned the use of Continental methods, and this explained, for example, the short lifespan of the first British Secret Service Division (SSD), established in December 1867 after the Clerkenwell explosion, but abandoned four months later when the matter was solved.165 This explanation has been challenged by Padraic Kennedy, however, who has argued that the establishment of the SSD was not a reaction to the Clerkenwell explosion: it had been founded four days previously as a response to longstanding requests for more efficient intelligence-gathering. In addition, widespread concerns that the IRB, labour reform movements and Continental revolutionaries were combining to threaten domestic stability were key to its establishment. The department was abandoned after four months owing to administrative difficulties rather than any pervading hostility to spying. And a similar attitude was evident in Ireland, where undercover detective work had long been commonplace.166 161 Peter Gordon (ed.), The Red Earl: The Papers of the Fifth Earl Spencer 1835–1910, 2 vols., Northampton, 1981, Vol. I, 188–92. 162 Lindsay Clutterbuck, ‘Countering Irish Republican Terrorism in Britain: Its Origins as a Police Function’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 18 (2006), 95–118. 163 The Irishman, 19 September 1868. 164 HHC, 336 (4 June 1889), cols. 1829–30. 165 Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain, 1790– 1988, London, 1989, 65–100, and The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War, London, 1987; Wilbur R. Miller, ‘Police and the State: A Comparative Perspective’, American Bar Foundation Research Journal, 11(2) (1986), 339–48 (344). 166 Padraic C. Kennedy, ‘The Secret Service Department: A British Intelligence Bureau in Mid-Victorian London, September 1867 to April 1868’, Intelligence and National

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Kennedy’s interpretation is all the more convincing when considering the extensive use British authorities made of informers and agents provocateurs during the skirmishing campaign. The operations that were initiated to counter the dynamiters did not represent a substantial departure in policy, but formed part of a recurrent approach that waxed or waned depending on perceived threats to national security. In the 1840s, the line between informer and agent provocateur was crossed when the authorities sought to manage the threat posed by Chartism, and similar methods were employed for the duration of the Fenian threat.167 In 1880, the controversial historian of Ireland, James Froude, reluctantly acknowledged, ‘it may be wrong to employ persons of this kind [i.e. agent provocateurs], but every civilised government does employ them and must employ them’.168 Agents were paid to monitor Fenian activity and some were intimately involved in the organisation of dynamite attacks. At times their zeal surpassed that of the actual dynamiters. Researching the parts played by informers and agents provocateurs in the nineteenth century is a challenging task. As secrecy was a prerequisite of their work, it is hard for the researcher to collect reliable information and pinpoint their influence. Much information has been destroyed or is under lock and key. Accusations of betrayal were flung wildly in revolutionary movements, sometimes for reasons of personal bitterness alone. The number of accusations itself – even O’Donovan Rossa was alleged to be indirectly in receipt of Secret Service money in 1888  – makes it difficult to establish clarity and can lead to the undesirable situation of giving credibility to one personal account over another.169 Yet some analysis is necessary: double-agents hold the capacity to serve as ‘mechanisms of containment, prolongation, alteration or repression’, and can substantially distort the character of a revolutionary movement and how the public views it.170 When New York Fenians began to discuss dynamite openly in the late 1870s, the British Foreign Office turned to the US Secretary Security, 18 (2003), 100–27 (103); Elizabeth Malcolm, The Irish Policeman, 1822– 1922: A Life, Dublin, 2006. Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History, Manchester, 2007, 421. 168 James Froude, ‘Romanism and the Irish Race in the United States, Part II’, North American Review, 130 (1880), 32–50 (42). 169 The MP Henry Labouchere made the unlikely statement in 1888 that Rossa indirectly received British pay, which O’Donovan Rossa furiously denied. HHC, 12 November 1888, col. 934; Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, Vol. II, 165–8. 170 Gary T. Marx, ‘Thoughts on a Neglected Category of Social Movement Participant: The Agent Provocateur and the Informant’, American Journal of Sociology, 80 (1984), 402–42 (403). 167

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of State with requests for action against their newspapers. The US authorities, however, responded ambiguously when pressed to interfere with Fenian mischief-making, owing to the lack of a domestic threat and lukewarm relations between the two powers. More importantly, the means by which the federal government could act were limited by constitutional issues associated with press freedoms and the 1842 Anglo-American treaty that stipulated political criminals could not be extradited from the USA.171 The extent of Irish American institutional power made questions of political freedoms in the USA all the more delicate. The ex-Fenian convict Edward O’Meagher Condon, for example, held a high post in the US Treasury and gave openly apologetic interviews to Washington newspapers regarding dynamite. An Irish-born mayor of New York was appointed in 1880, while supporters of the skirmishing campaign  – John F. Finerty (Chicago), W. E. Robinson (New York) and Peter P. Maloney (Brooklyn) – sat in Congress. Beyond Irish American circles there was notable opposition to the 1882 Coercion Act, which did not help co-operation on extradition and policing. That said, by 1885, voices were raised in Congress for increased controls on the movement of explosives and little sympathy was shown for revolutionary Irish nationalism in the wake of the House of Commons explosion.172 At the level of policing and intelligence gathering there is little evidence of co-operation between British detectives and their American counterparts. In the 1870s and early 1880s, the New York Police Department (NYPD) was comparatively disorganised and concentrated on keeping the peace and controlling illegal gambling. Apart from street clashes with socialists in 1874 and 1877, it generally steered clear of political policing.173 To compensate, Edward Archibald, the British consul in New York, employed private detectives. Archibald held a 171 The Irish Nation (New York), 26 April 1883; Jonathan W. Gantt, Irish Terrorism in the Atlantic Community, 1865–1922, Basingstoke, 2010, 176–9; M. J. Sewell, ‘Rebels or Revolutionaries? Irish-American Nationalism and American Diplomacy, 1865– 1885’, The Historical Journal, 29 (1986), 723–33; Joseph Patrick O’Grady, IrishAmericans and Anglo-American Relations, 1880–1888, New York, 1976. 172 Maloney was a subscriber to O’Donovan Rossa’s United Irishman: ‘Rossa’s Ledger’, CUA, ODRPP, Box 5, Folder 11; for Condon see The National Republican (Washington), 7 April 1883; on American reaction to the 1882 Crimes Act see NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-765–6. 173 One letter to the mayor, 19 August 1875, stated that the NYPD was ‘so misgoverned as to render it utterly inefficient for the protection of persons and property and useless for the prevention and detection of crime’. Annual Police Report 1875, NYMA, Mayor’s Papers, William Wickham. Political policing is not discussed in the Mayor’s Papers until 1886; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, New York, 1998, 1025–7.

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close relationship with senior figures in the federal, state and municipal administrations, and during the years of Fenian turbulence – particularly the raids into Canada in 1866 and 1870 – he was ‘confidentially aided’ by the Secretary of State, the mayor of New York, and members of the Canadian parliament.174 Archibald viewed the Skirmishing Fund cynically. Donations would sooner or later be ‘consumed in support of Mr Rossa’, a man ‘who has never succeeded in any business which he has undertaken’. If O’Donovan Rossa’s associates were in earnest, they would have a small purse left to finance violent attacks and would have to make do with ‘corrupting the warders of the prisons in England’.175 Nonetheless, active measures were taken. In 1876 the Pinkerton National Detective Agency was employed to monitor ‘a large body of Fenians shortly to leave San Francisco for England to effect the objects of the Skirmishing Fund’. This report proved to be false but a precedent was set.176 Archibald continued to employ private detective agencies and after the 1882 Phoenix Park affair, Allen Pinkerton personally wrote to Gladstone offering ‘to take some active part in the matter’. With his tongue surely in cheek, Pinkerton asserted that all his staff were ‘steadfast in the truth’ and morally resolute, his pleas perhaps an indicator of sensitivities at Westminster about the use of private agencies.177 Subsequently, Gladstone wrote to Lord Spencer suggesting he seek advice from the Pinkerton agency.178 The deaths of Cavendish and Burke brought heightened concerns about assassination plots that proved to be lucrative for detective agencies, and reports of a conspiracy between Irish and Italian revolutionaries to kill the Prince of Wales led Archibald to hire detectives to follow two Italian immigrants in New York for over a month at high costs, even though the matter appeared incredible from the outset. Similarly, the dispatches of Clipperton, the British consul in Philadelphia, contained increasingly dubious and inaccurate stories

174 Memorandum by Sir John Rose (1882?), TNA: PRO HO 144 1538 4; Edith J. Archibald, Life and Letters of Sir Edward Mortimer Archibald: A Memoir of Fifty Years of Service, Toronto, 1924. 175 Archibald to Derby, 30 March 1876, TNA: PRO FO 5 1556, 24, 211. 176 Consul Edward Thornton to Derby, 28 August 1876, TNA: PRO FO 5 1556, 121, 180; memorandum by Sir John Rose, TNA: PRO HO 144 1538 4; John T. McEnnis, The Clan-na-Gael and the Murder of Dr Cronin, Chicago, 1889, 72. 177 Allen Pinkerton to William Gladstone, 8 July 1882, TNA: PRO HO 144 1538 4; Ward Churchill, ‘From the Pinkertons to the PATRIOT Act: The Trajectory of Political Policing in the United States, 1870 to the Present’, The New Centennial Review, 4 (2004), 3–42; James D. Horan, The Pinkertons: The Detective Dynasty that Made History, New York, 1967, 206–36. 178 Gladstone to Lord Spencer, 21 July 1882, in Gordon, The Red Earl, 217.

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of assassination plots and envoys of dynamite schools after the Phoenix Park affair.179 Private detectives were complemented by agents provocateurs, who were valued as a means of preventative action. Robert Anderson, Edward Jenkinson and Nicholas Gosselin, the three Irish affairs specialists closely associated with the skirmishing campaign, advocated a ‘give them enough rope’ approach, allowing plots to mature in order to catch the widest number possible.180 Anderson disingenuously claimed in his autobiography that in Britain ‘nothing of a secret service in the continental sense of the term’ existed and that such methods were ‘never to my taste’, yet he was entangled in spy-networks for over four decades.181 When writing in private to the Met Commissioner, Anderson was not so pious, and argued that policing success against London anarchists was due to ‘action taken by this department which was “extra-legal” … when treated under ordinary law these men assumed a menacing attitude’, but when extra-legal measures were taken they became ‘quiet and timid’.182 When recounting how he turned one senior London Fenian, Anderson remarked that once money was mentioned, ‘the greedy look on his face told its own tale’.183 In the USA, Archibald fully agreed. He claimed that he did not willingly seek out spies, but was embarrassed by the number of offers of information he had received in New York, and considered that it would be imprudent not to profit from such an easy source of intelligence. Archibald did not employ one ‘special informant’ but established a network ‘among those who are always eager to obtain money’. After the Skirmishing Fund was launched, he was soon ‘employing one of the [Fenian] Brotherhood for the purpose of general information’. Both Archibald and Anderson downplayed their active roles in recruiting spies, emphasising a mercenary image of Fenianism and trivialising political commitments. Numerous ‘thrifty patriots’ existed who were ‘willing, nay anxious, in many cases, to part with valuable information’.184 179 The reports of Italian assassins proved to be fabricated; TNA: PRO HO 144 100 A18893/1–4; Clipperton seemed to discriminate less and less between informants’ reports after May 1882: Clipperton to Earl Granville, 12 June 1882, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-717. 180 On the responsibilities of different police and civil officials during the skirmishing campaign see Clutterbuck, ‘Countering Irish Republican Terrorism’. 181 Robert Anderson, The Lighter Side of My Official Life, London, 1910, 96. 182 Memorandum to London Metropolitan Police Chief Commissioner Edward Bradford, 14 January 1899, TNA: PRO HO 45 10254 X36450/92. 183 Anderson, The Lighter Side, 97. 184 Archibald to Anderson, 31 July 1882, TNA: PRO HO 144 1538 4; PRO FO 5 1556, 24, 42, 60, 146. Archibald, Life and Letters, 166; Anderson, The Lighter Side, 96–9; Archibald to Thomas Larcom, quoted in Ó Broin, Fenian Fever, 47.

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The most well-known Fenian spy was Henri Le Caron, Anderson’s principal agent in America. Born Thomas Beach in England in 1841, Le Caron fought in the American Civil War where he came to know some Fenians. Posing as an anglophobic Frenchman, he infiltrated Irish organisations after the war and eventually sat on the military board of Clan-na-Gael. He sensationally revealed his identity when he testified at the 1889 Parnell Commission and subsequently penned memoirs where he claimed at least four similar agents were active in the USA. Following these revelations, the dynamiter Luke Dillon established a plot based in Paris to kill Le Caron, but it was unsuccessful. Le Caron refuted the term agent provocateur, preferring the term ‘government agent’ to describe activities that ranged from rousing addresses at Fenian meetings and encouraging the Canadian raids to always voting ‘for politic reasons on the side of the majority, even to the joining in the vote which meant dynamite’.185 British detectives had operated abroad since 1867, but Edward Jenkinson, the head of secret police operations in Dublin and London, extended this international presence by operating a network of spies in Europe with the help of a spymaster named Llewellyn Hunter. In North America similar networks were developed by different agents, often with disappointing results, as in the case of the Tipperary-born soldier and adventurer William Francis Butler, who had previously fought in the Zulu War and in the Sudan in 1884–5.186 The most notorious of Jenkinson’s agents, however, was ‘Red’ Jim McDermott. In 1883 he orchestrated a bogus bomb plot that led to four Cork-based United Irishmen – Timothy Featherstone (30), Patrick Flanagan (26), Henry Dalton (38) and Denis Deasy (29) – being sentenced to penal servitude for life. Deasy died in prison in 1884. McDermott had been peripherally associated with Fenianism since the 1860s, but had never become prominent owing to persistent suspicions about his character.187 By 1880 he was well known in Brooklyn as a supporter of the discredited republican politician Al Daggett, 185 Le Caron, Twenty-Five Years, 54–6, 60–1, 155, 277; J. A. Cole, Prince of Spies: Henri Le Caron, London, 1984; NLI, McGarrity Papers, MS 17448. 186 Clutterbuck, ‘Countering Irish Republican Terrorism’, 104; Lindsay Clutterbuck, ‘An Accident of History? The Evolution of Counter Terrorism Methodology in the Metropolitan Police from 1829 to 1901, with Particular Reference to the Influence of Extreme Irish Nationalist Activity’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Portsmouth, 2002, 243; Jenkinson to Spencer, 18 April 1884, reprinted in Ball, Dublin Castle, 199– 200; William Francis Butler, Sir William Butler: An Autobiography, New York, 1911, 268–9. 187 John O’Mahony was warned about McDermott but he kept faith in him. Patrick Downing to John O’Mahony (undated), NYPL, MCIHP 59.

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and also as a militant Irish nationalist. He attended the 1880 United Irishmen convention in Philadelphia, and it seems, by this time, he was already in contact with the Irish police. McDermott stood out for his hardline views. In 1883 he wrote to the United Irishman, ‘I suppose my subscription to the “infernal machine” paper is run out, and the news from the old land so inspires me this morning, that I enclose to you my check for $25. Put $2 of this sum to the credit of the paper, and the balance for powder.’ McDermott found an opportunity to wheedle his way into the organisation by offering to travel to Ireland as a journalist for the United Irishman. In Cork, suspicions were roused, but McDermott brazened his way into confidence using a letter of introduction from O’Donovan Rossa, and convinced Featherstone of his authenticity. He began working with Featherstone and Deasy, manufacturing infernal machines at the home of butcher Richard Short, in anticipation of a ‘mission’ to Britain. McDermott professed to have been sent to Cork by O’Donovan Rossa to deliver instructions for a genuine plot, and he persuaded Deasy to travel to Liverpool with the infernal machines (cans of nitro-glycerine) in his possession, along with a note to incriminate the others. When Deasy arrived in Liverpool detectives pounced, and six others were soon arrested for involvement in the invented plot.188 During the same period, McDermott visited Glasgow to obtain information about planned actions and he also travelled to France, where he aimed to entrap three militant Fenians living in Paris: the Casey brothers and the journalist Eugene Davis, the Paris correspondent for the United Irishman. The authorities believed Paris housed a number of dynamiters who were in regular receipt of money from New York, and a number of agents and detectives like Morris Moser were dispatched to monitor their activities. Of the three would-be Parisian dynamiters, one of the Casey brothers, Patrick, was probably an occasional spy himself. When McDermott arrived in the French capital in 1883, he persuaded Davis to participate in a bogus dynamite mission to Cork. Yet information about McDermott reached Davis in time to allow his narrow escape back to Paris. In 1884, Davis was expelled from the city for involvement with ‘Reds’, ‘Invincibles’ and ‘Dynamitards’. He was later linked to the Pigott forgeries in the 1889 Parnell Commission and by the end of the decade he was a figure of low repute among nationalists.189 188 United Irishman, 3 February 1883, 17 and 24 January 1885; The Irish World, 25 August 1883. McDermott’s name is highlighted in police newspaper cuttings as early as 1880; NAI, PCR, Police Reports, 1882–1921, Box 2, 1; United Ireland, 6 December 1884; Brooklyn Eagle, 13 August 1883, 9 May 1898. 189 NAI, CBS, B-Files, B3–5. Davis moved to Brooklyn in 1890: NAI, Colonial Office, CO 904, ‘Anti-Government Organisations, 1882–1921’, MFA 54/8, 19, 80; Jenkinson

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Back in New York, McDermott had previously met O’Donovan Rossa with a man he claimed to be his foster brother, Matthew O’Brien. O’Brien was soon found out to be a spy and Rossa believed him to be involved in the arrests, in April 1883, of another team of dynamiters headed by Thomas Gallagher, Alfred Whitehead and Thomas Clarke.190 O’Brien and McDermott found out about Gallagher’s plans and sold the details to the police. More disclosures and inconsistencies raised further suspicions about McDermott. Aware that accusations of betrayal were circulating, he travelled to Montreal in June and attempted to cook up yet another dynamite plot in that city. Upon hearing of McDermott’s activities there, Michael Davitt sent a telegram to the Montreal Evening Post that left little doubt about his spy status. When the newspaper published the telegram, McDermott returned to New York as he had received assurances he would get a fair hearing. Instead, a meeting was arranged in a Chambers Street saloon where two gunmen waited for him. Despite being shot at almost point-blank range, McDermott escaped.191 On hearing of McDermott’s narrow miss, Jenkinson became alarmed about his well-being and the damage his death could cause for the future recruitment of agents. In an extraordinary move, he brought McDermott back to Liverpool, had him arrested and staged a phoney trial that was intended to lift suspicions. It didn’t, and probing questions from the magistrate and the local press led to McDermott’s early release before the trial could begin. As a final resort, Jenkinson sent him secretly to Hamburg and sequestered any Irish American newspapers that detailed McDermott’s activities or called for his assassination.192

to Spencer, 14 September 1884, in Ball, Dublin Castle, 200–10; Brooklyn Eagle, 13 and 26 August 1883; The Irish World, 25 August 1883; United Ireland, 6 December 1884; United Irishman, 17 and 24 January 1885; Short, The Dynamite War, 155–7. McDermott came to Glasgow disguised as a Catholic bishop: Máirtín Ó Catháin, Irish Republicanism in Scotland, 1858–1916: Fenians in Exile, Dublin, 2007, 133. On Casey see Campbell, Fenian Fire, 130–3. 190 O’Donovan Rossa believed William Lynch, who gave evidence during the trial of Gallagher and his associates, was connected to O’Brien: Brooklyn Eagle, 26 August 1883; Ireland’s Liberator and Dynamite Monthly (New York), May 1884. O’Brien was sent to South Africa for his safety, but later recounted the details of his and McDermott’s dealings with Jenkinson to Michael Davitt: Campbell, Fenian Fire, 131, 145. The Gallagher team had apparent connections to both the Clan-na-Gael and O’Donovan Rossa factions; see John McCarthy to O’Donovan Rossa, 21 September 1883; O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. II, 209; Le Caron, Twenty Five Years, 230. 191 The Irish World, 25 August 1883; Brooklyn Eagle, 26 August 1883; Campbell, Fenian Fire, 130–5. 192 Campbell, Fenian Fire, 134–5; NAI, CSORP, 1883, 667.

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The dynamite campaign facilitated the expansion of policing powers in Britain. In response to the arrests of the Gallagher group and McDermott’s Cork-dupes, the Home Secretary William Harcourt drafted the Explosive Substances Act, which was passed through both houses of parliament on the same day, with unusual speed. The act made it a crime, punishable by penal servitude for life, for ‘any person who unlawfully and maliciously causes by any explosive substance an explosion of a nature likely to endanger life or cause serious injury to property’. The second provision dealt with conspiracy to cause explosions, which became punishable by penal servitude for twenty years, ‘whether any explosion does or not take place’. The third provision was more stringent. It stipulated that any person in possession of explosive substances in circumstances that gave rise to police suspicions was subject to fourteen years’ penal servitude.193 This provision greatly improved the authorities’ power to interrogate and charge suspects. In addition, it facilitated agents provocateurs who could secure arrests through convincing sympathisers to transport or store explosives, or through simply planting them. While faint objections were raised in the Manchester Guardian about the third provision, overall the act was welcomed. ‘To suppose they [dynamiters] can be watched without exceptional measures is childish’, wrote The Economist. ‘No one wishes to give the police a right to enter houses at night with skeleton keys, as was done at Birmingham [during the Gallagher arrests], but in what other way could Whitehead’s operations have been detected?’194 The web of agents provocateurs extended well beyond McDermott. Jenkinson also employed a ‘corps of female detectives or spies’ who sought to entrap both militant and moderate nationalists in Dublin. In July 1884 an ‘exceedingly pretty woman’ tried to enlist support for a bogus dynamite plot at a party in Dublin’s Gresham Hotel. She was immediately exposed and ridiculed in the press, a matter that deepened antipathies between Jenkinson and the Irish under-secretary, Robert Hamilton.195 The previous April, John Daly and James Egan had been caught in possession of explosives, entrapped in another bogus plot facilitated this time by Dan O’Neill, who appeared to have ­co-operated with the police out of genuine ethical opposition to skirmishing. Daly was sentenced to life imprisonment and Egan to twenty 193 ‘The Explosive Substances Act’, Part 3, printed in the Manchester Guardian, 11 April 1883. 194 The Economist, 14 April 1883. 195 Michael Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland; or, The Story of the Land League Revolution, London, 1904, 437–41; Ball, Dublin Castle, 32.

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years’ penal servitude. Similarly to O’Neill, Thomas Phelan offered his services out of moral rather than fiscal interests. Phelan was Jenkinson’s agent in England but travelled to the United States in 1883 to track down Thomas Mooney (Moorhead), the most effective of the United Irishmen. Phelan lived in Kansas, sending occasional donations to Rossa’s dynamite funds, but in 1885 he was uncovered and invited to New York to explain himself. While there, Phelan was confronted in Rossa’s Chambers Street office by Richard Short and barely survived a knife-attack.196 Short had travelled to the USA from Cork in 1883, most probably with the intention of killing Red Jim McDermott. Present in the office at the time of the attack on Phelan was John F. Kearney, a draper’s assistant from Cork, who now kept a saloon on West 29th Street, and who organised the 1883 Glasgow explosions. Kearney had fled Glasgow after the attacks, first to Antwerp, where his sister lived with her husband, and then to New York. When he returned to Glasgow he found that his wife and child, whom he had left behind, had died in the poorhouse during his absence. Late in 1883, Kearney was eventually cornered in Antwerp by British detectives and turned informer to gain his own freedom. His evidence helped secure the ten convictions for the Glasgow explosions. Afterwards, he evidently sought to make amends to the United Irishmen by exposing Phelan as a spy. At the same time, an unusually candid letter by Phelan in the Kansas City Journal had provoked Kearney into action. Phelan’s letter detailed his underground activities with Kearney, and claimed he was behind the Glasgow attacks and an aborted attempt to blow up the steamer The Queen while she docked in Liverpool in 1883. The truth of the latter episode is difficult to ascertain, as are Phelan’s reasons for revealing the inner workings of the United Irishmen, but one can assume that the letter was an overture to Kearney indicating that more malign revelations about him might follow should he continue to claim Phelan was a spy. Kearney intermittently strayed back onto the secret service payroll. After the 1885 ‘Dynamite Saturday’ attacks in London, Kearney provided the police with leads on the perpetrators’ identities while ten years later, in 1896, he was involved in a bogus bomb plot. Around 1888, he wrote the pamphlet ‘Scientific Warfare; or, The Resources of Civilisation’ under the pseudonym ‘Glencree’, which described how to manufacture nitro-glycerine bombs and outlined the arguments 196 NAI, PCR, Police Reports, 1882–1921, Box 2, 4; Brooklyn Eagle, 10 January 1885; The Times, 2 August 1884; United Irishman, 27 January 1883; The New York Times, 6 August 1887; O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. I, 242–4; McGee, The IRB, 120; Short, The Dynamite War, 204.

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justifying their use. The fanatical language of the pamphlet certainly casts doubt on the motives behind its publication.197 Though Edward Jenkinson’s positions in both Dublin and London were terminated in 1886, the tactics associated with him were not abandoned and the Metropolitan police and high-ranking civil servants continued to manipulate dynamite plots.198 In 1887, when police arrested Thomas Callan and Michael Harkins – two ‘dupes’ who had been drawn into the ‘Jubilee Plot’ by the double-agent F. F. Millen – Assistant Police Commissioner James Monro wrote that ‘before [Millen’s] schemes of outrage were proposed to his confederates in New York they had been communicated to the gentleman who preceded me [Jenkinson]’. Monro was aware that the government was privy to the plot at its inception; nonetheless he allowed the prosecution and imprisonment of Callan and Harkins to proceed.199 Prison broke Harkins’ health and he died shortly after his release, leaving a wife and five children in Philadelphia. In 1891, six years after the dynamite campaign had ceased in Great Britain, an explosive device was placed in the bathroom of the National Press office on Middle Abbey Street in Dublin, which shattered windows along the street but caused no injuries. On the last day of the year, a similar device – nitro-glycerine encased in a tin box with fuse attached  – was exploded in a cellar at Dublin Castle, but little damage was done.200 The Government Inspector of Explosives likened the mechanism to those of the New York dynamite school and fears of a new skirmishing campaign stirred. These fears were compounded one year later when another blast at the Exchange Court-detective office beside Dublin Castle killed a twenty-nine-year-old constable named Patrick Sinnott. The infernal machine comprised a time-fuse and Atlas Powder, which exploded when Sinnott inspected the box. Anxieties began to 197 On the attack on Phelan see clippings in New York County District Attorney Scrapbooks, NYMA. Phelan’s letter to the Kansas City Journal is reprinted in United Irishman, 17 January 1885; Brooklyn Eagle, 10 January 1885. Kearney also used the pseudonym ‘Wicklow’ and sometimes claimed to be from that county; see Edwards to Granville, 16 August 1882, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-730; The Times, 25 September 1896; NAI, PCR, Police Reports, 1882–1921, Box 2, 1; Short, Dynamite War, 158–9; Ó Catháin, Irish Republicanism in Scotland, 127, 133–4; Glencree, ‘Scientific Warfare; or, The Resources of Civilisation’ (1888?), CUA, ODRPP, Box 6, item 8. In 1896, the agent provocateur William Jones claimed Kearney was the author of this pamphlet during his testimony at the trial of Edward Bell; The Times, 14 November 1896. Already in 1882, when Glencree’s name appeared in the United Irishman it was highlighted by Jenkinson; NAI, PCR, Police Reports, 1882–1921, Box 2, 4. 198 Ball, Dublin Castle, 71–2; Campbell, Fenian Fire, passim. 199 Memorandum by James Monro and Anderson, 4 November 1887, TNA: PRO HO 144 1537 2. 200 The Irish Times (Dublin), 27 October 1891, 6 January 1892; Freeman’s Journal, 1 January 1892; Ó Broin, Revolutionary Underground, 50–5.

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spread and extra police protection was placed around public buildings in London.201 Six months later, a canister of dynamite was thrown at an unoccupied building in the Dublin Four Courts, on the eleventh anniversary of the Phoenix Park murders. Within another six months, an attempt was made to demolish a barracks wall at Aldborough House in Dublin, on the day of the anniversary procession for the Manchester Martyrs.202 There was little sympathy in Ireland for dynamite in the 1880s and less in the following decade, though in the early 1890s elements on the margins of the IRB, who held links to militants in New York, were considering new attacks. There were divisions within the IRB and Police Inspector Mallon believed four different factions were identifiable, putting the bombs down to ‘pure wanton devilry, to create alarm’.203 Matthew Kelly suggests the explosions resulted from these tensions in the Dublin IRB and were ‘of little consequence and appear to have been generally tolerated by the IRB as acts of defiance’.204 Building on Leon Ó Broin’s account, Owen McGee concludes that the explosions were most probably instigated by agents provocateurs. After the Aldborough House explosion, a twenty-seven-yearold Irish American printer named Walter Sheridan and a bricklayer named Patrick Reid were apprehended, apparently on a tip from an informer. Sheridan was arrested, but Reid was not detained by police. He was found dead the next day in Dublin, police believing that his co-conspirators had assumed he had betrayed Sheridan. His executioners were thought to be John Merna and John Nolan, two Fenians well known to the DMP. Merna had previously attempted to murder an informant named John Lucan, while Nolan was an ex-Invincible. They orchestrated the Dublin bomb attacks in association with a group of hardline nationalists in New York that had emerged out of the splintered Clan-na-Gael.205

201 NAI, PCR, Police Reports, 1882–1921, Box 2; John Mallon, Report on Explosion at Dublin Castle, NAI, CBS, 6234; Report of Colonel Ford, HM Inspector of Explosives, 10 May 1893, TNA: PRO HO 144 248 A54847; The Times, 27 December 1892. 202 Freeman’s Journal, 13 May and 27 November 1893; NAI, CBS, 7722/s; NAI, PCR, Police Reports, 1882–1921, Box 2; TNA: PRO HO 144 248 A54847, and HO 144 357 B15410. 203 McCracken, Inspector Mallon, 179. 204 Kelly, The Fenian Ideal, 104–6. 205 NAI, CBS, 4418/s; ‘Register of Suspects’: John Merna (720), John Nolan (785), NAI, CO 904, Anti-Government Organisations, 1882–1921 (microfilm copy, MFA 54/8); The Times, 29 November 1893; McGee, The IRB, 214–6; Ó Broin, Revolutionary Underground, 52.

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Police believed the explosions were planned to avenge P. W. Nally, who had recently died in prison. He had been serving ten years’ penal servitude and died of typhoid fever shortly before he was due for release. At the inquest it was declared that Nally, an athlete and in good previous health, had been subjected to harsh treatment in Millbank prison for refusing to give evidence to the 1889 Parnell Commission.206 Merna and Nolan established a ‘Nally Club’ in Dublin and another was subsequently formed in New York, but was infiltrated by an agent provocateur named William Jones. In 1896, the Armagh-born Jones revealed that he had worked as a government agent among various Irish organisations in New York since 1891 and had incited dynamite plots. He confirmed that Dublin Fenians had co-operated with him, and among them were Merna and Nolan, who had travelled to New York to obtain training in the use of explosives. Nolan had most probably been duped, but Merna, who was later killed in Washington, DC, was probably a spy. Patrick Reid, who had been involved in the Exchange Court explosion, was probably murdered in 1893 to protect Merna’s identity. Some years later, in 1900, Nolan was arrested, along with Luke Dillon and John Walsh, for involvement in the explosion at the Welland Canal, Ontario. All were sentenced to penal servitude for life: Walsh became insane and died in prison, Nolan was released in 1916, two years after Dillon.207 The spy William Jones’ revelations came in the midst of yet another dynamite trial, the ‘Ivory case’ of 1896. In September of that year, British police arrested two Irishmen in Rotterdam – John F. Kearney and Thomas Haines – and another one in Boulogne, who turned out to be the self-fashioned ‘No. 1’ of the Invincibles, Patrick Tynan. The previous day, a man named Edward Ivory had been arrested in Glasgow on suspicion of conspiracy to cause explosions. In Antwerp, a Sergeant Bryan of the London police, in the company of two local constables, searched a house believed to be the ‘dynamite factory’ and found nitric acid, sulphuric acid and glycerine. Kearney, Haines and Tynan were held in custody, pending the British application for extradition, while evidence against Ivory was quickly prepared.208 206 Ó Broin, Revolutionary Underground, 51; McGee, The IRB, 215. 207 This John Walsh should not be confused with the leader of the 1867 ‘Assassination Committee’. ‘Register of Suspects’, NAI, CO 904, Anti-Government Organisations, 1882–1921 (microfilm copy, MFA 54/8); The Times, 14 November 1896; The New York Times, 8 April 1916; McGee, The IRB, 214–6, 359; Brannigan, ‘The Luke Dillon Case’, 36–44. 208 The Times, 15 and 25 September 1896; O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. II, 342–5.

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The arrests served as evidence of a cross-border network of official and unofficial intelligence gathering used by British police. By January 1897, however, the extradition processes had broken down, exposing the absence of standard procedures for international policing.209 Sensationally, the case against Ivory also collapsed when testimonies during the trial revealed that, outside Ivory and Tynan, the plot had been operated entirely by the paid agents William Jones and Henry Armstrong, and probably Kearney and Haines too.210 The Daily Telegraph wrote that if Jones ‘is allowed to escape it can only mean that in high quarters, there is complicity in and sympathy with the abominable methods which have characterised the official dynamite campaign’. In Dublin, the Daily Express agreed: ‘It almost takes one’s breath away to think that an actual Government department should be actively promoting crime through the agency of its paid employees.’ Although Lord Salisbury wished the trial to proceed, the Solicitor-General believed the use of a ‘confederate’ was a bar to prosecution and, moreover, the Home Office and Dublin Castle were unwilling to have an agent provocateur testify in court. Jones and Ivory both walked free.211 Jones’ disclosures regarding the Dublin explosions in 1891/2 did not come as a complete surprise. The 1889 Parnell Commission revealed much about the system of agents in the Fenian organisations, and the collapse of the case against Parnell discredited the government and brought embarrassing questions about spies from Irish members in parliament.212 This precipitated a more sceptical attitude toward the Dublin explosions than had been the case in the 1880s. Indeed, before Jones’ revelations the Freeman’s Journal asserted that the blasts simply 209 Robert Anderson to Irish Under Secretary Harrel, 14 September 1896, NAI, CBS 1896 12506/s; TNA: PRO HO 144 A58224 1; PRO HO 144 507 X60692 12, 36, 60. 210 Michael Davitt’s discoveries as an ‘amateur detective’ allowed him to penetrate the McDermott and Ivory cases; TCD, Davitt Papers, 9469/4134–80. Included in the Davitt Papers is a newspaper letter referring to the spy John P. Hayes, indicating he was the ‘Haines’ involved. However, John O’Connor claimed Hayes was a spy in 1885, while Mark Ryan maintained Hayes had been exposed as a spy in 1892. Also in 1892, The Times stated Hayes had openly become a British emissary after being exposed as a traitor. His credibility then, by 1896, would not have been high, making the question of his involvement in the plot all the more curious. ‘Evidence of Secretary of IRB’, NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18019, 32; John Louden to Daily Independent, 7 October 1896; McGee, The IRB, 214; Mark Ryan, Fenian Memories, Dublin, 1945, 127; The Times, 7 March 1892. 211 TCD, Davitt Papers, 9469/4134–80; Daily Chronicle, 15 September 1896; Daily Express, 16 November 1896; The Times, 21 January 1897; Daily Telegraph, 20 January 1897; Robert Anderson, Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement, London, 1907, 128; HHC, 26 March 1897, cols. 1503–5. 212 HHC, 20 March 1889, cols. 320–3; 3 August 1891, cols. 1141–82 (col. 1182).

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gave the Tory press ‘an opportunity for refurbishing its old weapons of attack’ by linking figures such as Michael Davitt and John Dillon with dynamiters. United Ireland contended the only motive behind the attacks was to jeopardise the amnesty movement’s work for imprisoned dynamiters.213 Others made the more conspiratorial speculation that, with the second Home Rule Bill being prepared for 1893, explosions in Dublin could have helped to push Liberal-unionists closer to the Conservative Party as well as rupturing the fault-lines within the wider nationalist movement. The anti-Fenian New York Times asserted that the blast at Dublin Castle was ‘not the work of fanatical zealots, fired with a hatred of all things English … it was a bogus outrage, planned and paid for by people who have deep pecuniary and personal objections to home rule’.214 This was essentially an exaggerated repetition of Michael Davitt’s view of the plots instigated by Red Jim McDermott in 1882/3, and in this case seems somewhat far-fetched. Nolan was radicalised by Nally’s death, which is not to say he discountenanced dynamite beforehand, and sought a violent response. The plot originated as an act of vengeance, but as happened before in the 1880s, it was infiltrated and manipulated by agents provocateurs, most probably with Merna’s complicity, with the aim of damaging the IRB.215 By the time of the Dublin explosions, international attitudes to infernal machines had changed substantially from the previous decade. The number of attentats on Continental Europe surged and, as we have seen, deadly explosions occurred in France and Spain, while government buildings in Rome were also targeted. What O’Donovan Rossa had termed skirmishing in 1876 was becoming, in the words of the British consul in Paris, ‘a class of crime [that] has now assumed quite a cosmopolitan character … It is clear that the French are now undergoing some of the inconveniences that we were subjected to in 1882–3– 4.’216 Whether the Dublin bombs aimed to infect Ireland with anxieties about combinations of the worst of anarchism and Fenianism is speculation, but they occurred at a time when being tainted with dynamite might prove more costly for the IRB than in the previous decade. 213 Freeman’s Journal, 4 January 1892; United Ireland, 7 January 1893. 214 The New York Times, 15 January 1893. 215 ‘Register of Suspects’: John Merna, NAI, CO 904, Anti-Government Organisations, 1882–1921 (microfilm copy, MFA 54/8). Two anonymous letters sent to Gladstone attributed the 1893 Four Courts explosion to Dublin traders as a protest against the Sunday Closing Bill, yet the veracity of this claim is doubtful. McCracken, Inspector Mallon, 175–6. 216 ‘Dynamite Outrages in Paris’, report of British Consul Phipps, 23 March 1892, TNA: PRO HO 45 10254 X36450/1.

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The skirmishing campaign of the 1880s served as a laboratory for methods of policing revolutionary movements. Max Nettlau, the anarchist historian who was resident in London in the 1880s, kept records of the dynamiters’ trials presumably because he anticipated that the same strategies would be used to suppress the anarchist movement.217 His concerns were well founded and when the government confronted anarchism in the 1890s it used the means tried and tested during the skirmishing campaign. In 1892, a suspicious bomb plot led to the conviction of a group of anarchists under the 1883 Explosive Substances Act. The ‘Walsall anarchists’ were all militant revolutionaries, but were led into experimenting with explosives by an agent provocateur named Coulon. Two years later, the work of agents provocateurs was again suspected when a bomb exploded in the hands of anarchist Martial Bourdin in Greenwich Park in London.218 Speaking in the House of Commons on the Walsall case, Michael Davitt asserted ‘I believe there was no dynamite conspiracy in them at all. I affirm that the whole plot was the work of a French refugee in this city, well known to Scotland Yard as an agent provocateur in his own country.’219 British police forces were not hostile to the Continental spy system and, as in other countries, the operation of unregulated systems of agents was the first, rather than the last, resort when dealing with violent political movements. It would be misleading, however, to describe an established ‘system’ of political policing in Britain during this period. The authorities did not have a store of dependable mechanisms to police the dynamiters. Instead, officials stumbled through, improvising and testing different methods on a case-by-case basis. When recalling his employment in the secret service, the civil servant William Joyce wrote in a private memo that the system of secret agents was ‘most certainly a gigantic farce, although a very expensive one’.220 Success was not automatic and the authorities sometimes created the problems they ostensibly wanted to control. Republican MP Charles Bradlaugh charged ‘that disbursements of Secret Service money have been made by persons in no way under the control of a Minister at all … when you 217 International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Max Nettlau Papers, Nettlau’s Collection of Newspaper Clippings, 3775–6. 218 The Times, 22 January and 1 April 1892; John Quail, The Slow Burning Fuse, London, 1978, 103–43, 162–8; Hermia Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London, London, 1983, 75–117. 219 HHC, 11 February 1898, cols. 434–56. 220 Joyce added that Arthur Balfour, Chief Secretary for Ireland and later Prime Minister, had ‘entered thoroughly and unreservedly into the business’. Memorandum by William Joyce (1901?), NYPL, MCIHP, Box 9, 139. Christy Campbell refers to a Times archive document that is surely the same; Campbell, Fenian Fire, 338.

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employ scoundrels to do scoundrel-like things crime generally results from their employment’.221 Bogus plots caused serious injuries and the death of a Dublin constable, and led to the imprisonment of figures that would arguably have not been involved in violence without the incitements of agents. Individual agency often overshadowed systematic approaches to policing. Like the leaders of the Fenian factions in America, the heads of police intelligence took strange satisfaction from the self-defeating pursuit of one-upmanship against the people they were supposed to be working with. Jenkinson’s official post was Assistant Under-Secretary for Police and Crime in Ireland, but when the Home Secretary loaned him to London in 1884 Jenkinson held no official status or formal police authority. He used Irish constables for detective work in Britain and failed to co-operate with official departments, actions that intensely aggravated London police chiefs.222 Jenkinson’s position was not formally defined, yet he was the keeper of a vast amount of crucial intelligence. His idiosyncratic style could have resulted in a government scandal had his efforts to stage a sham trial been exposed, while McDermott and O’Brien were later to blackmail him with letters they claimed would destroy him and Earl Spencer, the Irish Lord Lieutenant.223 In 1886, further controversy flared up regarding John Daly’s imprisonment when the chief of the Birmingham police informed a watch committee that Jenkinson’s men had purchased explosive devices in the USA and then planted them on Daly’s person and in Egan’s garden. Though the watch committee pursued the matter for ten years, Daly and Egan were not released.224 Robert Anderson was a committed unionist with a personal style of secret service work. He was the sole contact for Le Caron, probably Britain’s most valuable spy, and he used this position to advance his career. Le Caron’s reports and correspondence were stored neither in the Foreign Office nor the Home Office, but were kept privately by Anderson, a fact that produced some friction and gave Anderson a level of influence beyond his talent. In the USA, Archibald similarly constructed a very personal approach to managing intelligence. When he tried to retire, the Foreign Office refused on grounds that no one else would be able to figure out his personal network of informers.225 221 HHC, 4 June 1889, cols. 1808–31. 222 Clutterbuck, ‘Countering Irish Republican Terrorism’, 106–8. 223 Campbell, Fenian Fire, 310; McDermott claimed Davitt knew about the letters compromising Spencer; Pall Mall Gazette, 26 September 1890. 224 The Times, 24 September 1890; HHC, 3 August 1891, cols. 1141–93. 225 TNA: PRO FO 5 1695, 70.

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Precedents in the use of espionage meant that the establishment of a British secret service in 1883 did not pioneer new techniques of policing, but the use of contentious agents provocateurs was greatly expanded, suggesting that if a greater threat had been posed, more repressive measures would have been taken. Britain was one of the many countries shaken by the ‘era of attentats’ that resorted to employing agents provocateurs. One of the first dynamite attacks of the era occurred in Italy, in November 1878, after Giovanni Passannante attempted to stab King Umberto I in Naples. The next day, at a procession in Florence to celebrate the king’s survival, an explosive device was thrown that resulted in four deaths and ten injuries. Nine anarchists, who had been released from prison just two hours before the blast, were convicted for having planned the attack in advance.226 The involvement of agents provocateurs is difficult to dispute and this scenario was to repeat itself in different counties when the government moved to suppress revolutionary movements. When compared to Britain, however, the measures adopted in Continental countries appear stringent. Martial law and the bloody repression of popular protests in Sicily (1893) and Milan (1898) emphasised the severity of Italian measures against subversion. Spain witnessed the indiscriminate arrests of suspected militants, some of whom were unconnected with violence but were frequently tortured then sentenced to death in the macabre Montjuic fortress in the 1890s.227 In contrast, there were no executions or internment during the skirmishing campaign. The explosions tested the boundaries of liberal political culture but the reaction was comparatively restrained, demonstrating the stability of existing institutions in Great Britain.228 Ireland was clearly another matter and coercion underlined the incongruity of liberal government under the Union. In Britain, the response to skirmishing demonstrated that the threat posed to the confident, liberal state was not a fundamental one, unlike in parts of Continental Europe where violent revolutionaries menaced fragile states. By 1898, O’Donovan Rossa claimed the Irish American organisations were riddled with ‘treachery and crookedness’ and declared his misgivings about any future conspiratorial associations.229 That it took him and others so long to realise the extent of spies’ activities was 226 Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1865–1892, Princeton, 1993, 147–51. 227 Pier Carlo Masini, Storia degli anarchici italiani da Bakuni a Malatesta, Milan, 1972; Louise Tilly, Politics and Class in Milan 1881–1901, Oxford, 1992, 261–72; José Alvarez Junco, El emperador del paralelo: Lerroux y la demagogia populista, Madrid, 1990, 133–76; Andrew Carlson, Anarchism in Germany, Metuchen, NJ, 1972. 228 The institutional strength of British liberalism when faced with Fenianism during the 1860s is the theme of Jenkins, The Fenian Problem, passim. 229 O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. II, 204.

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remarkable. In the 1880s, Irish organisations were riddled with secret agents, but the leadership proved incapable of plugging leaks in their clubs, detecting spies or taking effective action once suspicions were aroused. James Stephens had denounced F. F. Millen as a spy already in 1866, but his warnings were ignored, and Millen continued to have privileged access to Clan-na-Gael and maintained friendly relations with O’Donovan Rossa.230 Regarding McDermott, an anonymous letter to the St Louis Globe Democrat asserted, ‘Featherstone, Gallagher and the rest have themselves to blame after all. They let McDermott hang around them after they had been warned against him.’ Doubts about John F. Kearney’s character had been expressed before he turned informer, yet even after he gave evidence against his co-conspirators in Glasgow he was allowed back into the fold.231 Michael Boland, one of the Triangle leaders, was a central figure in the Clan-na-Gael’s decision to begin dynamite attacks, and some historians have identified him as a likely spy.232 The specific details of what intelligence he passed to the authorities are unknown, but his position in Clan-na-Gael would have surely presented the authorities with intimate access to the dynamiters’ plans. Yet given the secrecy of the trade, the nature of his collaboration is impossible to substantiate with existing evidence. The role of spies is difficult to work out plausibly. Despite the chronic infiltration of the skirmishing organisations by spies, portraying Jenkinson and the secret services as the puppetmasters of the bombing campaign would be an exaggeration. Owen McGee has rightly emphasised the government’s largesse toward secret service work during the 1880s and Christy Campbell has illustrated that Jenkinson himself even used the threat of reigniting the skirmishing campaign to pressure the Liberal government toward action on Home Rule in 1885–6.233 Yet both of these studies generate the impression that Jenkinson could ‘manipulate the Irish-American revolutionary movement in any way he pleased’.234 Some dynamite attacks were undoubtedly provoked or expedited by agents provocateurs, but the

230 F. F. Millen to O’Donovan Rossa, 26 February 1885, CUA, ODRPP, Box 4; John Kerwin to John Barry, 27 December 1869, and John O’Mahony to John Barry (?), 5 January 1870, NYPL, MCIHP, Box 4, 60, 63; NAI, PCR, Police Reports, 1882– 1921, Box 2, ‘1883’; Ó Broin, Fenian Fever, 47–9, 94. 231 [Tim?] to John F. Kearney, 28 February 1883, CUA, ODRPP, Box 5, Folder 4; O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. II, 343–4. 232 Boland was accused of being a spy in Michael Lennon, ‘The Murder of Dr Cronin’, The Bell, 18 (1952), 20–9, 92–102, 191, 250 (22); McGee, The IRB, 124, 179. 233 Campbell, Fenian Fire, 184–5. 234 McGee, The IRB, 124.

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influence of Jenkinson and agents like Millen should not be overstated, nor their talents be given more credit than they deserve. The dynamiters were militants, committed to the tactic of anonymous explosions. Many attacks occurred without the incitements of spies. Their commitment to skirmishing was spurred on by the conviction that they were fighting a transnational struggle for republicanism that could be won through embracing the destructive power of dynamite and other advantages of modern technology. Arguments about ‘new modes of warfare’ and the potential of new technologies predicted that skirmishing alone was enough to make a revolution. In 1881, Lomasney maintained that if he were to be provided with $100,000, he would achieve genuine political change.235 In order to obtain a thorough understanding of this overblown faith in technology it is necessary to investigate how the skirmishing idea was nurtured by a late-nineteenth-century culture that was fascinated with science and new technologies. 235 ‘It will, to do the work completely, take about twenty times the sum voted [$5,500]’; Lomasney to Devoy, 31 March 1881, in O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. II, 57; Short, The Dynamite War, 57.

3

Science and skirmishing

An 1877 editorial in The Irish World described Fenians circling London in hot-air balloons and dropping explosives upon targets below. The barracks and artilleries of the British armed forces, Patrick Ford predicted, could be wiped out in a matter of days using these methods. This was not imagined as a strategy of terror, but as a progressive form of warfare where precise targets could be effectively hit without the barbarity and loss of civilian life that usually characterised more polite encounters. The ultimate result of this scientific-warfare … will be the utter abolition of all modes of warfare … aerial bombs – Jove’s thunderbolts – will yet be invented with which one man in the clouds may assail fifty thousand below! Ascend in the air in a balloon and throw down showers of such explosives upon an army, and that army will be speedily wiped out. With armies and fleets done away with, international wars are done away with.1

Neither was Ford alone among Irish American nationalists in advocating such measures. In 1884, at a meeting of the Manhattan branch of the Irish National League, ‘balloon warfare’ was discussed. A few months later the ex-IRB leader James Stephens, perhaps seeking a return to the spotlight, remarked that dirigible balloons ‘manned by desperados’ could inaugurate a new form of aerial warfare against the British forces, which would be preferable to the dynamite campaign that was then at its height in Britain, as it could pose a more serious threat to the army and navy.2 These declarations read like something from the realms of science fiction and appeared to reflect a marked fanaticism among the small but determined group of dynamiters resident in the USA. Balloons, along with infernal machines and submarines, were imagined as the instruments of ‘scientific-warfare’, a strategy that would ‘equalise the 1 The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator (New York), 9 June 1877. 2 The New York Times, 3 March 1884; Brooklyn Eagle, 21 and 24 June 1884.

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great and the small … if weak peoples go to war to wrench back their rights from titanic powers, common sense will suggest that they use such appliances as physical science puts into their hands’.3 Revolutionary violence took a militant turn in the late nineteenth century when Irish dynamiters, nihilists and anarchists all engaged in dynamite outrages with chronological symmetry. It is helpful to examine the skirmishing campaign in light of the transnational revolutionary violence that characterised the era of attentats. Paired comparisons between violent groups such as the Fenian dynamiters and anarchists reveal mindsets and motivations, but such comparisons, usually conducted through the terrorist paradigm, can also act as an analytical cage that distracts our attention away from exogenous contexts and factors. Fish need water to swim in and measuring the scale of political violence by the activities of revolutionary movements alone leads to blinkered understandings of the mechanisms that bring about transformations and escalations. The dynamiters, like other revolutionary groups, should be considered in light of the historical situations they found themselves in for us to see what factors moved their strategic choices. It is tempting to take Patrick Ford’s article on balloon warfare and his eulogies on dynamite as colourful indicators of the extremism of The Irish World and a commitment to terrorism. Yet, they were nothing extraordinary in the aftermath of the American Civil War, when technological advances created apprehension and excitement about a society tilting toward the future. In the final decades of the nineteenth century the context in which militant Irish nationalism was debated was being redefined by international concerns about violence and warfare. A look at diverse publications reveals that The Irish World article keyed into larger discourses on science, technology and warfare that fascinated several layers of society.4 Journalists, army officials, statesmen, novelists and revolutionaries all participated in debates about the consequences that new technologies held for society, and militant Irish nationalists were no different. This chapter, then, investigates the extent to which the Fenian dynamiters participated in a moment of collective inebriation, when faith in the transformative power of technology and science led to predictions of all kinds of radical changes in the nineteenth-century world. 3 The Irish World, 16 April 1881. 4 See, for example, J. H. Seelye, ‘Dynamite as a Factor in Civilisation’, North American Review, 137 (1883), 1–7; J. Newton, ‘Modern Explosives’, North American Review, 137 (1883), 459–68.

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DIY revolution

One of John Devoy’s main criticisms of Patrick Ford’s editorial style was that he habitually reproduced half-digested material from whatever book or magazine he happened to be reading, making him a ‘mere student instructing the world’.5 While Devoy’s views were undoubtedly whetted by personal gripes, The Irish World was hastily written and Ford’s writings reflected what he was reading in the New York press at the time. His article on dropping bombs from balloons, therefore, was relatively unremarkable in the context of similar copy in the mainstream press, where dramatic predictions about scientific innovations repeatedly featured. Léon Gambetta’s escape from Paris in 1870 in a hot-air balloon left an enduring image that sustained the public imagination and interest in new techniques of warfare. The New York Times frequently printed articles with titles such as ‘Balloons for Military Purposes’ and ‘The Use of Balloons in Warfare’. The Brooklyn Eagle spoke of nihilist ‘balloon plots’ in Russia and earnestly reported on a local New York inventor who claimed ‘one of my airships can hover over any one of your great cities and destroy it in an hour and you can do nothing to prevent the destruction’. The inventor’s workshop was on Chamber’s Street, Manhattan, a few metres away from O’Donovan Rossa’s office.6 Another of the dynamiters’ more ambitious proposals suggested the targeting of British commercial ships with privately manned boats, as the Confederacy had done with relative success during the American Civil War. Unlike the notion of aerial bombs, however, the opportunity to realise attacks on British vessels was actively pursued by the Clan-naGael in 1876 when they hired an Irish inventor – John P. Holland – to develop a submarine. Over the next seven years, prototypes persistently failed, and eventually, in 1883, patience ran out, funding was cut, and the submarine – what The New York Sun labelled the ‘Fenian Ram’ – was placed in a warehouse.7 Although the plan had proposed a new ‘secret’ weapon, there was nothing secret about the submarine, and the very public nature of the experiment led to heightened humiliation for the Clan-na-Gael and did not help their reputation as serious 5 Gaelic American (New York), 20 October 1923. 6 The New York Times, 17 June and 8 August 1877; Brooklyn Eagle, 26 November 1881, 5 June 1887. 7 Gaelic American, 23 June 1923; R. K. Morris, John P. Holland: Inventor of the Modern Submarine, 2nd edn, Columbia, SC, 1998; K. R. M. Short, The Dynamite War: IrishAmerican Bombers in Victorian Britain, Dublin, 1979, 37–44. The ‘Fenian Ram’ is now housed in the Paterson Museum.

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revolutionaries. All the New York dailies, along with weekly scientific magazines, followed the machine’s development. While the Fenian Ram was a conspicuous source of Anglo-American diplomatic friction, it drew more attention as an item of technological curiosity than as an unorthodox means of achieving Irish independence.8 O’Donovan Rossa was furious that the submarine had soaked up huge amounts of the Skirmishing Fund, and when rhapsodising over dynamite explosions sneered ‘fifty fires like that would frighten England more than fifty rams lying dead in Jersey mud’.9 Of the $90,000 that the fund-trustees took control of in 1878, almost $35,000 was spent on the Fenian Ram. Rossa felt insult was added by the fact that John Breslin was paid handsomely ($2,090) for simply acting as watchman when the vessel was idle. The Fenian Ram was initially imagined to be a model of revolutionary science, but its failure encouraged the Clanna-Gael to organise teams of dynamiters, as Rossa had done in 1881, to target political and economic sites in Britain with infernal machines and nitro-glycerine.10 In December 1875, when The Irish World began calling for explosive attacks in Great Britain, the employment of dynamite and infernal machines was already a realistic proposition, unlike submarines and aerial warfare. Logistically, at least, the techniques imagined by the contributors to the Skirmishing Fund had already passed through the laboratory stage. Contemporary material culture suggests that the use of dynamite or gunpowder was no novelty in postbellum America. In fact, across the United States, experiments with combinations of explosive materials were common and mechanical bombs were successively patented. Endless articles on technological advances, both fictional and factual, provided reliable copy for a print-media industry that was constantly expanding. Periodical literature such as the Scientific American, Van Nostrand’s Eclectic Engineering Magazine and Prairie Farmer reported on advances in science, and printed detailed instructions on how to handle dynamite and how to build sophisticated explosive devices for use in farming and industry. When the Scientific American’s founder, the wealthy New England inventor Rufus Porter, died in 1885, O’Donovan Rossa paid tribute in a long obituary in the United Irishman that praised the life of Porter and the content of his journal.11 8 New York Herald, 18 April 1883; The New York Times, 29 July 1881, 15 October 1896. 9 United Irishman (New York), 23 December 1882. 10 ‘Account of money spent by Skirmishing Fund’, NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18016 (10). 11 United Irishman, 10 January 1885.

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In the 1860s and 1870s it was not difficult to experiment with explosives at home, and many people did. As early as 1857, the Chicago Tribune reported that American inventors were gaining international reputations for breakthroughs in the manufacture of infernal machines. During the Crimean War, the Russian consul had attempted to employ a Utah inventor who had ‘re-discovered … the terrible Greek-fire of the ancients’. The inventor had established that, old kegs, hollow trees, common boxes, anything in short which could be made to contain a bottle of the burning fluid, a little powder, and a considerable amount of missiles, whether of balls, iron scraps, or pebbles and fragments of rock, could be converted into cheap and formidable batteries, whose discharge could be governed, at almost any distance, to a second of time.12

The article was representative of an abundance of similar news stories describing scientific innovations that were used for criminal as well as industrial or military purposes. In 1858, when a carpet-bag was left at a detective’s house in New York, his first impression was that it had been left by an adversary and contained a bomb. In 1860, the ‘Philadelphia Infernal-machine’ was primed for use in the city by confederate sympathisers, before police discovered the plot. One year later, infernal machines were introduced on both sides in the American Civil War. These devices were essentially torpedoes: metal cases filled with gunpowder and hammer mechanisms that were floated down river in the hope they would come in contact with enemy ships. Before long, however, infernal machines were developed from relatively crude and large devices to smaller, more sophisticated boxes, which soon came to be used to settle feuds and vendettas across the country.13 In the wake of ‘Dynamite Saturday’ in 1885, The Irish World noted that the explosive powder used in the attack had ‘first exhibited its terrible powers during our Civil War’.14 In 1863, a courtroom battle over the patent rights to a type of railway brake turned nasty when a witness in the case received a parcel bomb in the mail, which was designed to explode once the lid was opened. Until the trial was concluded at the end of the year, the controversial case was widely reported in the national press.15 In 1866, a Judge Fields of the Supreme Court received a small box full of gunpowder and missiles at his office in Washington, in return for a decision he had 12 Chicago Tribune, 16 November 1857. 13 Saturday Evening Post, 19 August 1858; Philadelphia North American, 16 May 1861; Chicago Tribune, 3 September 1861; The New York Times, 1 May 1861; Burlington Times, 18 January 1862. 14 The Irish World, 7 February 1885. 15 Chicago Tribune, 24 February and 1 November 1863; The New York Times, 1 March 1863.

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made in a dispute over property titles in California. Throughout the following years, homemade explosive devices were found in a Jersey City opera house, the vestibule of a Cincinnati church, a California launderette, outside a newspaper office in Indiana, and in coal sheds, train carriages, liquor and grocery stores the length and breadth of the United States.16 The infernal machine requiring the least effort to manufacture, the Scientific American contended, was that ‘peculiar to the New York rascal, who occasionally dispatches it per express to politicians who have fallen from his good graces’.17 In 1873, a parcel bomb was sent to Comptroller Green’s office in City Hall, New York, an act that the press linked to his investigations into corruption at Tammany Hall. The parcel, which contained a six-by-four-inch box filled with gunpowder, did not explode on arrival thanks to the vigilance of postal staff. 18 A few months later, similar investigations in Brooklyn led to a former district attorney, Judge Morris, being targeted by ‘ballot-box stuffers’. Morris’s campaign against corruption in city politics and his proposed reforms had upset political interests in the ‘Brooklyn Ring’. During one investigation into fraud an infernal machine was delivered to Morris’s family home but failed to explode when opened. Attempts to find those responsible were rendered unworkable because the technique used left ‘not the slightest clue’ as to the identity of those involved.19 Indeed, the parcel bomb could have been a hoax, staged in the hope that it would stir enough public outrage to secure the successful prosecution of the Brooklyn Ring.20 Either way, the political bargaining power of explosives had been realised by elements within the city administration of Brooklyn and in Tammany Hall. Both of these episodes would not have gone unnoticed by Irish people who held considerable interests in city politics at the time. The New York Fenians did not need to look as far as European revolutionaries for models of action: gunpowder, dynamite and bombs were already being used locally for political advancement. Access to explosive substances and a degree of mechanical competency were necessary requirements for the authors of these episodes. Yet familiarity with bomb-making was not linked to employment in mining or building works where explosives were tools of the trade. Instead, the chemical elements necessary to build an infernal machine were easily 16 Washington Star, 17 January 1866; Saturday Evening Post, 22 March 1862; The New York Times, 27 December 1880. 17 Scientific American (New York), 29 January 1876. 18 The New York Times, 27 November and 5 December 1873. 19 Ibid., 5 and 6 January, 4 February 1874; Brooklyn Eagle, 5 and 7 January 1874. 20 Brooklyn Eagle, 2, 3 and 5 February 1874.

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available through common stores, while periodicals printed detailed instructions on the manufacture of explosives for practical use. The Scientific American was established in 1845 with the ethos of publishing reader-friendly information on ‘New Inventions, Scientific Principles, and Curious Work’. Unsurprisingly, after Alfred Nobel’s 1867 invention articles on dynamite soon became a common feature in the journal, with typical titles such as ‘The Dynamite Gun’, ‘Novel Applications of Dynamite’ and ‘Experiments with Explosives’. The industrial and practical value of explosives was continually underlined: ‘nitro-glycerine is the most powerful explosive in use. In difficult blasting, where very violent effects are required, it surpasses all others.’ One article by Charles Joy, professor of chemistry at Columbia University, argued that a basic knowledge of the manufacture and handling of explosives was not particular to professional chemists and scientists but open to anybody with a curiosity for experimentation. In addition, a Scientific American Catalogue was in circulation, with which readers could order articles on explosives, dynamite and infernal machines that were ‘profusely illustrated’ and accompanied by ‘measures and scales’. Manufacture of explosives was in no way confined to the military or to large commercial enterprises. Innovation in the field came from individuals who formed part of a culture of experimentation and entrepreneurship. When Spain attempted to occupy some Peruvian islands in 1864, the Scientific American predicted an outbreak of war and called attention to the fact that, ‘shot, shell, torpedoes and infernal machines are in great demand [in Peru]. Our readers who are interested should take the hint and act upon it without delay.’21 In the wake of the 1875 Bremerhaven tragedy in Germany, when an American-made bomb exploded on a German dock and killed eighty people, the Scientific American published a solemn article that accounted for the history of various types of explosives.22 On this occasion, the journal refrained from printing detailed diagrams, citing fears that the instructions could easily fall into the wrong hands: ‘We had prepared drawings of some of the ingenious machines which have been ascribed to diabolical uses, and contemplated publishing engravings of the same … but on second thought, it seemed to us wiser not to do so … the harm caused might vastly exceed the advantage of such knowledge as the pictures might impart.’23 21 Scientific American, 28 August 1845; 25 June 1864; 13 February and 20 November 1869; 9 April 1870; 2 October 1875; 12 October 1878; 26 June 1880; 15 April, 5 July and 6 December 1884. 22 On the Bremerhaven explosion see Ann Larabee, The Dynamite Fiend: The Chilling Tale of a Confederate Spy, Con Artist, and Mass Murderer, New York, 2005. 23 Scientific American, 29 January 1876.

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When the skirmishing campaign dramatically announced itself in the 1880s, the Scientific American noted that the problem was not how the bombers could lay their hands on materials, but ‘the ease with which the explosives can be made’.24 In the late nineteenth century, the pace of technological advances along with the growth of private experimentation created an environment whereby the Fenian dynamiters’ embrace of scientific warfare was more obvious than anomic. The manufacture of exploding devices in domestic homes was not uncommon, while instructions on how to assemble infernal machines were easy to find and materials were readily available to people regardless of geographic location or social class. During investigations into a series of explosions in Dublin in the early 1890s, it was suggested that the authors were miners or quarrymen. The Home Office’s inspector of explosives, however, maintained that exploding devices were ‘easily made by any one possessing a slight knowledge of chemistry … as to its use, the art of firing any of these explosives with a detonator fuse can be learned by anyone of ordinary capacity in a few moments’.25 In the words of one Brooklyn Fenian, dynamite was ‘as cheap as soap and common as sugar’.26

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The potential destructive power of man-made explosive devices was an understandable source of unease. Infernal machines threatened to transfer the landscape of violence from the battlefield to the city, catching civilians in the cross-fire. When the Clan-na-Gael and the United Irishmen began to plan dynamite attacks these concerns were felt sharply by the majority of Irish nationalists, who sought to avert actions that would surely place civilian lives at risk and cause irreparable damage to the international reputations of Irish nationalists. Debates within the walls of Irish nationalism found striking parallels in public discussions in the United States about the legitimacy of new weapons. Divisions and anxieties over scientific warfare became as sharp in mainstream newspapers and periodicals as they were within the Fenian movement. Moral concerns regarding the use of new weapons jockeyed with advocates of swift and decisive battles made possible through technological innovation. These public debates, one study has noted, ‘revolved around the horrors of the new warfare … Would the 24 Ibid., 14 March 1885. 25 A. Ford, HM Inspector of Explosives, 28 December 1892, TNA: PRO HO 144 247 A54529/2. 26 Brooklyn Eagle, 21 January 1884.

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new weapons lead to a more horrible form of warfare, with a higher number of casualties? Would they also bring war directly to civilians?’27 Central to this discourse was, firstly, the role of technology in warfare and, second, where battlefields would be located in the future. Familiarity with technological advances was a prime concern for government and military officials who kept one eye on the battlefield and the other on the workshop. By the end of the century, military generals recognised that ‘great commanders’ have been ‘compelled to yield the first place in importance to [scientists]’.28 In 1879, at a conference at the West Point military academy in New York, a Civil War veteran gave a paper entitled ‘The Legitimate in Warfare’. Clinton Sears put to his audience that when aerial navigation developed beyond the tentative stage into a fixed science, ‘will we not be sending up balloons to rain upon the enemy from directly overhead every possible device for burning buildings, blowing up his magazines, and destroying his personnel? To fail to use such affairs when practicable would be, I think, a neglect of duty.’29 During the Civil War, both the Union and Confederate sides used balloons for reconnaissance, and throughout the following decades, officials seriously considered the possibility of aerial warfare. The wars of the future ‘will have to be conducted by scientists’, wrote the Brooklyn Eagle when it reported on the inventions of a General Thayer of the US army. Thayer ‘invented what he calls a dirigible balloon, which will not only rise into the clouds, but will go whithersoever its pilot chooses to direct it … the particular purpose of such an airship is to sail over the enemy and drop dynamite bombs upon him’.30 At West Point, Sears argued that the pace of scientific discovery blurred the ‘rules of war’. The legitimacy of using tactics such as aerial bombs could only be measured on the principle that ‘usage and precedent are the foundations of the laws of war’.31 In answering the question of what was legitimate in ‘civilised warfare’, Sears responded that new technologies made all laws of war obsolete: all weapons were legitimate and the nation at war should not shirk from using all the means available to it, lest its enemies profit by them. If a machine were to be 27 John Whiteclay Chambers II, ‘The American Debate over Modern War, 1871–1914’, in M. F. Boemeke, R. Chickering and S. Förster (eds.), Anticipating Total War: The German and American Experiences, 1871–1914, New York, 1999, 241–80 (257). 28 John Schofield, quoted in B. M. Linn, ‘“The American Way of War” Revisited’, The Journal of Military History, 66 (2002), 501–33 (515). 29 Clinton B. Sears, ‘The Legitimate in Warfare’, United Service: A Quarterly Review of Military and Naval Affairs, 2(3) (March 1880), 350–66 (363). 30 Brooklyn Eagle, 24 January 1886. 31 Sears, ‘The Legitimate in Warfare’, 350.

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invented that would ‘demolish one thousand or even one hundred men at a blow’, Sears maintained that the army should immediately employ it. While ‘the laws of humanity may condemn me, I will use it to the utmost with a satisfied conscience … The laws of war will be quick to recognise its usefulness.’32 Sears’ argument rested on the assumption that the decisive use of new inventions would dramatically shorten the lengthy campaigns that had characterised the American Civil War and the Crimean War. Scientific invention held the potential to speed up warfare, and hence politics, ‘an object for which we all, soldiers as well as civilians, should strive’. In turn, this would decrease the number of civilian casualties, as sophisticated bombs and artillery would make more precise targeting possible. Humane warfare was, however, a secondary concern when Sears calculated the legitimacy of certain tactics. ‘Are any of the deaths to which the greater number killed in war are put, strictly speaking, humane? What is the humanity of which so much is made?’ Important advantages were ‘gained by that nation which sees the utility, overrides the objections, and boldly uses newly invented though terrible engines of war’. In short, when firing an arrow, why not poison the barb? If people desired warfare to be ‘short, sharp, vigorous and decisive’, then efficacy dictated what were legitimate tactics.33 In 1884, when the dynamite campaign was at its height, a US military journal published an essay entitled ‘Dynamite and the Art of War’. The author, army captain James Chester, favoured the use of dynamite and other scientific inventions but for different reasons from Sears. Technological innovation was crucial to warfare as it brought equilibrium to conflicts that were previously one-sided. Infernal machines could be made ‘in any back-kitchen’ and consequently the civilian population could be easily armed in times of crisis. Traditional weapons were expensive and this meant that ‘war can be waged only by the wealthy’, but Chester envisaged dynamite to be the means of mobilising sections of society previously marginalised from conflict. If the infernal machine ‘may not fight for the king it will for the cobbler, and the cobbler takes to it kindly’.34 Dynamite would gradually diminish the importance of the professional army, opening up immense possibilities for the arming of ‘irregular partisan troops’ when a more formal ‘defense is impossible’. 32 Ibid., 363. 33 Ibid., 356, 364–6. 34 J. Chester, ‘Dynamite, and the Art of War’, United Service: A Quarterly Review of Military and Naval Affairs, 10 (1884), 3–12 (6–7).

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Figure 3.1 ‘Despotism’s Doubtful Defense’, Puck, 26 March 1884.

Chester predicted surgical ‘raids’ would become the standard means of conflict: With dynamite or some kindred compound, in a safe, handy, manageable form, a body of raiders with no set task, no fixed objective, no lines of operation or retreat, free as birds of the air, able to fight or run away as it thinks best … would be a terrible weapon of war … It will not do, because we find the problem a hard one, to scout at its premises as barbarian war. War is by its very nature barbarous.35

Chester’s vision of inconspicuous ‘raiders’ crossing borders was strikingly similar to Patrick Ford’s ‘little band of heroes who will initiate and keep up without intermission a guerrilla warfare – men who will fly over 35 Ibid., 9.

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land and sea like invisible beings’, or Carlo Cafiero’s ‘boundless number of minute bodies’.36 ‘Dynamite and the Art of War’ envisaged a form of warfare that did not protect civilians from the hardships of conflict, but encouraged them to participate. The importance attached to volunteers and citizen soldiers in the United States was nothing new and stretched back to Minuteman militias of the revolutionary period. Yet in the postbellum, concepts of scientific warfare appeared to enhance the potential of traditional citizen soldiers and incorporate new multitudes in the fighting. Interestingly, contemporary discussions in most Continental European states placed greater emphasis on the professionalisation of state armies and the demobilisation of civic militias. Several German states dissolved volunteer corps in 1849 and in France they were disbanded after the Paris Commune. Debates about ‘arming the people’ were widespread, as civic militias were dismantled and restructured by administrations that feared unlimited enrolment would lead to subversion, particularly among youth groups. Moreover, the events of 1848 demonstrated the limitations of civic guards. By the late 1800s robust, professional armies were viewed as a necessity by governments, who also established gendarmeries with army-style barracks and uniforms for everyday policing.37 In the United States concerns regarding the arming of youths were not so diffuse, and while advances were made in professionalising the army in the postbellum period, it remained comparatively small. The tradition of the citizen soldier continued to thrive. The noted military analyst and Civil War veteran Emory Upton wrote Tactics for Non-Military Bodies, Adapted to the Instruction of Political Associations, Police Forces, Fire Organisations, Masonic, Odd-Fellows, and Other Civic Societies (1870), a manual that emphasised the importance of the citizen soldier and the role of skirmishers in preceding large battles.38 In 1884 a military-award-winning essay predicted that future wars in the United States would be fought ‘by armies composed principally of militia and volunteers: and the soldiers of the regular army will be simply a bit of leaven for a mass of inexperienced comrades’.39 36 The Irish World, 4 December 1875; Il grido del popolo (Naples), 4 July 1881. 37 Ralf Prove, ‘Civic Guards in the European Revolutions of 1848’, in Dieter Dowe, Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, Dieter Langewiesche and Jonathan Sperber (eds.), Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform, Oxford, 2001, 683–93. 38 See D. J. Fitzpatrick, ‘Emory Upton and the Citizen Soldier’, Journal of Military History, 65 (2001), 355–89. 39 This essay was part of a larger debate on the role of the volunteer soldier. A. L. Wagner, ‘The Military Necessities of the United States, and the Best Provisions for

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Irish World journalist ‘Trans-Atlantic’, or Thomas J. Mooney, asserted that all supporters of the Skirmishing Fund should procure ‘Upton’s manual’ in order to learn the ‘movements of a revolutionary force, opposed to regulars of high-training’. It was by the ‘total disregard of the old military tactics of the European kings and generals’ that revolutionary forces were successful, and if the large numbers of Irish Americans in ‘civic and semi-military organisations would give the attention to this subject’, they could make skirmishing an effective strategy.40 Irish American militia groups emerged in mid-century in the midst of a growing military culture in the USA. In 1848, Irish American nationalists had sought to capitalise on enthusiasm for the Paris revolution through organising the Irish Republican Union and mobilising the ‘Irish Brigade’. It was envisaged that the Brigade would travel to Ireland and assist the Young Irelanders with, as John Belchem observed, ‘American “military science”: an officer corps, drilled and trained in the militia; the latest firearms technology (to complement the native pike); and battle-tested veterans of the Mexican war’.41 The abject failure of Ireland’s 1848 also chastened Irish American nationalists who, facing new anti-Irish hostility, retreated into American urban politics in the 1850s. Nonetheless, the military companies of the Irish Republican Union were absorbed into the New York State Militia in 1850, and soon two other Irish regiments  – the Sixty-Ninth and Seventy-Second  – were formed. ‘Although loyal Americans’, one study observed, ‘these Irish militiamen hoped to put their military training to good use in Ireland’.42 The following decade was characterised by an expanding US military culture, the era of the American filibuster that saw ‘Narciso Lopez organising private expeditions to liberate Cuba, William Walker leading private armies against Nicaragua, and John Brown and his men attacking Harper’s Ferry’.43 Interestingly, the Young Ireland veteran, future Fenian and MP James F. X. O’Brien took part in Walker’s 1856 incursion into Nicaragua.44 This decade also witnessed the Meeting Them’, Journal of the Military Service Institution of the United States, 5 (1884), 237–71 (249); Linn, ‘“The American Way of War” Revisited’. 40 The Irish World, 20 May 1876. 41 John Belchem, ‘Republican Spirit and Military Science: The “Irish Brigade” and Irish-American Nationalism in 1848’, Irish Historical Studies, 29 (1994), 44–64 (44). 42 Michael F. Funchion, Irish American Voluntary Organizations, Westport, CT, 1983, 101. 43 R. V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–82, Dublin, 1998 [1985], 48. 44 J. F. X. O’Brien, For the Liberty of Ireland, at Home and Abroad, ed. Jennifer ReganLefebvre, Dublin, 2010.

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mass influx from the Great Famine, and Irish emigrants swelled the ranks of voluntary organisations with militia companies such as the Irishmen’s Civil and Military Republican Union; the Irish Emigrant Aid Society in Boston; and the Emmet Monument Association, which drew its main strength from the Irish companies in the New York State Militia.45 When it was founded in 1858, the Fenian Brotherhood drew much of its support from these organisations, particularly the Emmet Monument Association. By 1862, Fenians and Irish militias were drawn into the armies on both sides of the Civil War, perhaps most famously in the Sixty-Ninth Regiment. When the war began in 1861, the Fenian leadership did not view it positively, as they expected that both Union and Confederate recruitment drives would deplete the ranks of the Brotherhood’s volunteers. Yet, service in the American armies would train 190,000 Irishmen in the ‘arts of war’ and the experience of fighting came to be understood as preparation for an insurrection in Ireland. Before the 1867 rising erupted, Dublin police believed that there were ‘Irish-American officers in every county awaiting orders’.46 Though they faded in the early 1900s, Irish militias continued to be considerably active in the 1870s and 1880s. The experience of fighting in the Civil War undoubtedly influenced the high numbers of militia groups, which continued to be viewed as a means of remaining prepared in the event of conflict in Ireland. In 1876, the Newark-based Hibernian Rifles, a ‘military company numbering 78 men’, sent $50 to The Irish World ‘for the skirmishing Fund and, if you want men to Skirmish, men to go … The principal aim and object of the whole of us in learning the soldier’s art is to fight for Ireland.’47 This was the ethos behind most Irish American militia groups since the 1848 Irish Brigade. Modern restraints on what was permissible in interstate warfare, Stathis Kalyvas has observed, often bypassed civil wars.48 In parts of the United States the Civil War was fought conventionally: General William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea in Georgia, though often considered to be a precedent of total war, generally sought to avoid violence 45 Funchion, Irish American Voluntary Organizations, 102–5. 46 Report of Supt. Ryan, DMP, 3 March 1867, TNA: PRO HO 144 1537 15; Susannah Ural Bruce, The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861–1865, New York, 2006; Comerford, Fenians in Context, 114, 119–20; William D’Arcy, The Fenian Movement in the United States: 1858–1886, New York, 1947, 21–46. 47 The Irish World, 22 April 1876. 48 Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, Cambridge, MA, 2006.

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against civilians.49 At the same time, in Missouri, east Tennessee, West Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana and Arkansas the war was not always constrained to the battlefield, distinctions between guerrillas and conventional soldiers were less clear, and civilians were taken prisoner. By 1864, the dividing line between combatants and non­combatants was not easily discernible in areas affected by guerrilla warfare, where local communities and individuals were pitted against each other, or when the enemy was black or Native American.50 The actions of partisans like Morgan’s Raiders, John Singleton Mosby’s band or William Clarke Quantril’s guerrillas provoked the first official treatment of irregular warfare, when Francis Lieber assessed their tactics according to the conventions of war.51 One year later, Lieber produced what many historians view as the first attempt by a state to codify the laws of war, the Lieber Code.52 Attempts to regulate the American Civil War with new legislation illustrated the unconventional side to the fighting. Lieber’s Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field sought to establish a code of conduct by providing protection for non-combatants and prisoners of war, while giving moral and legal justification to the Union Army’s advance. It was made law during a moment when interest in the limits of warfare was expressed in several jurisdictions: in the same year the International Committee of the Red Cross was founded and was followed by the adoption of the first ‘Geneva Convention’ by twelve countries. The Lieber Code sought to provide new rules for new wars. ‘Military necessity’ was conceived by Lieber as a means of limiting violence, therefore actions that held no clear benefit for the war effort were proscribed. The code was to act as a block on emotional, unrestrained violence and revenge attacks, and illegalised private violence, or actions that weren’t subject to military discipline. ‘The unarmed citizen’ was to be ‘spared in person, property, and honour as much as the exigencies of war will 49 Mark E. Neely Jr., ‘Was the Civil War a Total War?’, in Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler (eds.), On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871, Cambridge, 2002, 29–51. 50 Michael Fellman, ‘At the Nihilist Edge: Reflections on Guerrilla Warfare during the American Civil War’, in ibid., 519–40; Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, Cambridge, MA, 2006, 55–8, 83–4. 51 Francis Lieber, Guerrilla Parties Considered with Reference to the Laws and Usages of War, New York, 1862; James Turner Johnson, ‘Lieber and the Theory of War’, in Charles R. Mack and Henry H. Lesesne (eds.), Francis Lieber and the Culture of the Mind, Columbia, 2005, 61–9. 52 Francis Lieber, Art. 29, Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, originally issued as General Orders No. 100, Adjutant General’s Office, Washington, DC, 1863.

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admit’.53 However, moralism was balanced with utilitarianism. During the American Civil War the notion of speeding war up was clearly central to the employment of new technologies: Gatling guns, torpedoes, exploding bullets and fast trains for military transport ensured that many aspects of the conflict were unlike previous nineteenth-century wars.54 Lieber’s contention that a short period of intensive violence was more humane – ‘the more vigorously wars are pursued, the better it is for humanity’  – allowed the advocates of a destructive war to reconcile their position with moral concerns over the desolation caused.55 Extensive destruction was considered as a way of making warfare as terrible as possible and thus making greater the prospects of victory and lasting peace accompanying it. In the postbellum the concerns expressed in the Lieber Code regarding the protection of civilians during wartime continued to be voiced by opponents of total war. The line between combatants and civilians was crossed by Civil War guerrillas, but it collapsed in the Indian Wars that followed. Commanding postbellum operations against Native American tribes, General Sherman did little or nothing to protect non-combatants, and his strategy presaged the total war of the twentieth century, according to one study: ‘If women and children got hurt or killed, it was lamentable, but justified because it resolved the issue quickly and decisively, and thus more humanely.’56 Postbellum attitudes toward warfare unravelled in a bifurcated discourse that viewed scientific innovation as a means of facilitating, on the one hand, a swift and hence more humane warfare. The use of modern technology meant targets could be carefully selected and civilian casualties avoided. Moreover, the Lieber Code enforced the humane and ethical treatment of civilian populations during hostilities. On the other hand, science facilitated annihilation, and belligerent voices underlined the effectiveness of war in terms of destructive power, and where discriminations between combatants and non-combatants were not easily maintained. In conflicts where warfare was ‘given her full attributes and painted in her most deadly colors’, the risks for civilians were undesirable but unavoidable.57 Neither ‘The Legitimate in Warfare’ nor 53 Ibid. 54 Johnson, ‘Lieber and the Theory of War’, 62. 55 Lieber, Art. 29, Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field. 56 Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West 1846–1890, Albuquerque, 1984, 169. 57 Sears, ‘The Legitimate in Warfare’, 365; R. Chickering, ‘Total War: The Use and Abuse of a Concept’, in Boemeke, Chickering and Förster, Anticipating Total War, 13–28.

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‘Dynamite and the Art of War’ drew a line between warfare and terrorism, the battlefield and the city, cannon and dynamite. The basic line: effectiveness drew the boundaries of what was legitimate. For centuries war had brutalised, plundered, starved and brought disease to civilian populations. In Revolutionary France, perceived association with the Ancien Régime was enough to justify widespread slaughter. During the Napoleonic Wars, mass conscription and aspects of total war heralded new hardships for civilians in both rural areas and in cities, bleakly illustrated in the case of Leipzig.58 The cultural limitations that proscribe violence against civilians vary across historical periods, places and peoples, sometimes collapsing. The history of war is not one of a linear progression away from, or toward, barbarity. It may still be argued, though, that for much of the nineteenth century cultural boundaries limited the targeting of civilians during war by regular armies. The profusion of new technologies toward the century’s end, however, altered perceptions of the relationship between war and the civilian world, leading to international conferences in Geneva, Brussels and The Hague. Both military strategists and revolutionaries came to scrutinise in new ways the distinctions between combatants and noncombatants. Dynamite and explosives held the potential to remodel the landscapes and thresholds of violence, engendering civilians as new actors with vested interests in warfare, both as partisans and targets. The rhetoric that The Irish World and the United Irishman used to describe skirmishing and scientific warfare was hitched onto these public debates. In the United Irishman the increasingly aggressive propaganda of O’Donovan Rossa and Crowe indicated that all tactics were permissible in the war against England: ‘we don’t want bloodshed but we want the freedom of Ireland whatever it may cost’.59 Historian Thomas Brown noted that, during the skirmishing campaign, to have concerns ‘about the choice of weapons was to permit England the right of defining the terms of war’.60 Similarly to Chester’s pugilist who punched below the belt ‘without any conscientious scruples’ when fighting for his life and property, the dynamiters were not to be bound by the spectators’ rules.61 58 Karen Hagemann, ‘“Unimaginable Horror and Misery”: The Battle of Leipzig in October 1813 in Civilian Experience and Perception’, in A. Forest, K. Hagemann and J. Rendall (eds.), Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–1820, Basingstoke, 2009, 157–78; Alexander B. Downes, Targeting Civilians in War, Ithaca, NY, 2008. 59 United Irishman, 22 March 1884. 60 Thomas N. Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 1870–1890, Philadelphia, 1966, 71. 61 Chester, ‘Dynamite, and the Art of War’, 8.

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John McCafferty, one of the originators of the skirmishing idea, had fought as a confederate guerrilla leader during the Civil War with Morgan’s Raiders, a group that conducted operations behind Union lines, such as disrupting communication networks and railroad tracks: a strategy that was proved successful in 1863. He also claimed to have engaged in hostage-taking and advised the IRB to adopt the same strategy.62 When responding to criticisms of the Skirmishing Fund, McCafferty contended that all means were legitimate as ‘self-preservation is the first law of nature’.63 As with the Civil War, veterans of the Indian Wars were also found amongst the dynamiters. John F. Finerty, for example, was an Irish congressman who supported the skirmishing campaign through his Chicago-based Citizen in the 1880s. He had previously worked as a war correspondent during the Sioux and Apache Wars of 1876–81. One of the most militant dynamiters, Luke Dillon, enlisted in the army in 1867 and served three years during an intense and gruesome period of the Indian Wars. He was stationed in Montana and also in Wyoming, at the site of the Fetterman Massacre. In fact, Dillon first joined Clan-na-Gael whilst in  the army.64 Experiences of irregular warfare, either in the Civil War or the Indian Wars, must have influenced how the dynamiters understood the limitations of violence and distinctions between combatants and civilians. When the skirmishing idea was first proposed at Patrick Ford’s Brooklyn home in the autumn of 1875, Augustine Ford was present and ‘took the ground that Ireland and England were in a state of war. This fact had to be recognized at the starting point.’65 Explaining the proposal in the vocabulary of warfare attempted to legitimise a violent departure that was otherwise viewed to be out of hand and barbaric by many elements within the Fenian movement. Ford, however, was keen to demonstrate that skirmishing was not simply a proposal to ‘blow up everything’, as critics had remarked of O’Donovan Rossa, and strove to show that there was a code of conduct for those involved. In 1878, ‘Maxims for Skirmishers’ were printed alongside the appeal for 62 The Irish World, 16 April 1881. Some accounts have pointed to a lack of evidence to support McCafferty’s activities during the Civil War. In 1867, McCafferty helped to organise the IRB raid on an arsenal at Chester Castle, and he was allegedly involved in the Phoenix Park assassinations of 1882. NAI, PCR, Police Reports, 1882–1921, Box 2, ‘1883’; William O’Brien and Desmond Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, 1871–1928, 2 vols., Dublin, 1948–[1953], Vol. I, 37, 67–9; Leon Ó Broin, Fenian Fever: An AngloAmerican Dilemma, New York, 1971, 126–8; Patrick Quinlivan and Paul Rose, The Fenians in England, 1865–1872, London, 1982, 26–8. 63 The Irish World, 20 May 1876. 64 ‘Luke Dillon’, NLI, McGarrity Papers, MS 17448. 65 The Irish World, 16 April 1881 (emphasis in original).

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donations that outlined the confines of the strategy to ‘give intelligent men a clear idea of the whole intent and spirit’.66 They read, Humane Warfare: the shortest, swiftest and cheapest warfare – that which does the greatest material damage to the enemy with the least loss of life to either side. Cheap Warfare: This is the age of dynamite and torpedoes – agencies with which nature has come forward to aid the weak … War against England with the smallest number of men and the least possible expense. Regular Warfare nearly obsolete: Fleets are now almost useless. ‘As the ironclad drove out of existence the old fashioned wooden ships, so the torpedo will drive out the ironclad’, New York Times.

Over the following years further maxims were added to explain skirmishing not only to Fenians but also to international audiences that began to pay attention after the first attacks in 1881. ‘The dynamite question is the war question’, claimed The Irish World and, from the outset, the paper laboured to emphasise this understanding.67 In 1883, when a British Chief Justice described one dynamite attack as ‘levying war upon the Queen’, the Clan-na-Gael presently issued a memorandum that claimed to have settled the legal status of a new mode of warfare. By a solemn decision of the highest authority in England, presided over by her chief justice, we have compelled her to recognize a new epoch in the art of war … We cannot see our way for an armed insurrection in Ireland this side of some great foreign war with England. But in the meantime, we shall carry on an incessant and perpetual warfare with the power of England in public and in secret.68

The influence of public debates about legitimate war strategies on the Irish dynamiters was unmistakable in the 1870s and 1880s. At the root of their understanding of scientific warfare was the straightforward wish to furnish their organisations with the latest technology available to state armies. This was no more than the up-to-date expression of the desires of previous generations of Irish American nationalists, the 1848 Irish Brigade and the Civil War veterans, to modernise their approach to revolution and bring the latest ‘military science’ to Ireland.69 Official enthusiasm for new technologies and their acceptance into the arsenal 66 The Irishman, 27 March 1876, 2 March 1878. 67 Ibid., 16 April 1881 (emphasis in original). 68 Clan-na-Gael circular, quoted in E. G. Jenkinson, ‘Memorandum on the Organisation of the United Brotherhood, or Clan na Gael in the United States’, 22 January 1885, reprinted in Stephen Ball (ed.), Dublin Castle and the First Home Rule Crisis: The Political Journal of Sir George Fottrell, 1884–1887, Cambridge, 2008, 222–33 (229–30). 69 Belchem, ‘Republican Spirit and Military Science’, 44; Ó Broin, Fenian Fever, 6–7, 89–91.

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provided the dynamiters with a framework in which they could collapse distinctions between civilised and uncivilised tactics and claim they were merely acting in accordance with progressive military ideas. Adherence to the ‘rules of war’ would have virtually outlawed many of the new technologies. Hence, both revolutionaries and government argued, with disquieting composure, that the rules should capitulate and not the weapons.

The Brooklyn dynamite school and Professor Mezzeroff

In April 1883, local newspapers lamented the fact that Brooklyn, then a separate city from New York, was quickly developing a global reputation. The city’s new-found fame was not for the newly constructed Brooklyn Bridge, just about to be unveiled; rather it had become renowned for harbouring Fenian dynamiters who, according to the Brooklyn Eagle, were ‘bringing disgrace upon their asylum’ and causing an ‘intolerable affront’ to the city’s good name.70 When several dynamiters were arrested in Great Britain in 1883, many were found to be residents of Brooklyn, where a special school for training in the ‘arts of scientific warfare’ had been established. Patrick Crowe established the dynamiters’ first bomb factory in Peoria in 1881, claiming the same right for the manufacture of infernal machines as others held for firearms. An even more indiscreet talker than O’Donovan Rossa, Crowe announced his plans to the world and even sent samples of his wares to local newspapers. After some months, it was decided to move the factory to a more populous Irish area.71 By June 1882, consular dispatches to the Home Office reported that New York Fenians were attending a ‘Dynamite School of Instruction’, which was based in the Greenpoint area of Brooklyn.72 At this time, the Irishborn in Brooklyn came to 78,814 out of a total population of 566,663. Brooklyn was the third largest city in the USA and also held the third largest Irish-born population after New York and Philadelphia.73 Neighbourhoods such as Greenpoint, Williamsburgh and Bushwick

70 Brooklyn Eagle, 20 April 1883. 71 The New York Times, 3 August 1881; Inter Ocean (Chicago), 31 July 1882; Brooklyn Eagle, 1 and 2 August 1882; The Times, 5 August 1881. 72 Charles Clipperton to Earl Granville, 20 June 1882, TNA: PRO FO 5 1818 291. 73 The total Irish-born population in the USA in 1880 was 1,854,571; Statistics of the Population of the United States at the 10th Census, United States of America, Bureau of the Census, Washington, DC, 1880.

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held particularly high concentrations of Irish, often over 30 per cent, and were fertile ground for ‘advanced nationalism’. The dynamite school’s main concern was, of course, the instruction of Irish separatists in the safe manufacture and handling of explosives. Skirmishers had proven remiss in storing dynamite and large quantities had been rendered useless by the New York frost. Transport was also a concern: explosions in Liverpool, London and Salford had been carried out with devices manufactured in the USA. As a result, smuggling infernal machines into Britain became difficult as ports were heavily guarded and detectives carefully watched passengers with Americanstyle portmanteaus. Hence, the dynamite school aimed to teach volunteers how to handle explosives and make uncomplicated devices with easily found materials, as the bombs would now have to be manufactured on site, in Britain itself. Thirty days’ attendance at the dynamite school was sufficient fully to train willing pupils: the course was free to those who agreed to travel as ‘missioners’ to Britain, otherwise the price was $30, including board and lodgings.74 Instruction included an introduction to clockwork mechanisms: an important innovation for the time, which allowed the infernal machines to be set hours in advance. According to informants’ reports, these infernal machines were to be made from a ‘simple outside case of sheet iron, about ten inches square; the minor compartment contains the clockworkmovement that, at the time fixed, liberates a knife which cuts a string and lets fall a spring onto the percussion cap causing the machine to explode.’75 O’Donovan Rossa did not invite Irish Americans to enrol at the school, but preferred willing students from Ireland, Scotland and England to travel to Brooklyn and then return home equipped with a new knowledge of explosives. This was not always the case, but several dynamiters who were later arrested, like Featherstone and Dalton, had come from Cork and London to New York temporarily, to acquire instruction in ‘scientific warfare’. Twenty-eight-year-old Divan Welch, from Dundee, arrived in New York in March 1882 to enrol in the school, while Peter McCorry from Glasgow and Dan McCarthy from Ireland, both of whom were thirty years old, spent periods of five to seven months in Greenpoint.76 The first class in the school included twenty-six students, among whom were Thomas Mooney (or Moorhead) and Edward O’Donnell, who had tried to bomb the London Mansion House in 1881. The British 74 United Irishman, 24 March and 30 September 1882; Seán Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, 2 vols., Dublin, 1969, Vol. II, 99. 75 Clipperton to Granville, 20 June 1882, TNA: PRO FO 5 1818 292–3. 76 United Irishman, 30 September 1882, 7 April 1883; Consul George Crump (Philadelphia) to Granville, 24 August 1882, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-742.

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consul in Philadelphia ensured that ‘all men receiving instructions are known’ and could be identified by police, yet Mooney managed to travel back and forth to Britain undetected, applying his knowledge of infernal machines to considerable effect in 1883. In July 1882, Simon Spearman arrived from Port Elizabeth in South Africa to enrol as a pupil in the dynamite school. George Spearman, a Civil War veteran and collaborator with the United Irishmen, invited his twenty-fouryear-old nephew to work in his shirt factory on the Bowery and to attend dynamite classes for some months. The younger Spearman was eager to begin, and believed that torpedoes could be used to devastating effect along the South African coast and with little risk of detection. British officials took his presence in America seriously, but nothing came of his ambitious plans.77 The comings and goings at the dynamite school were carefully monitored by Pierrepont Edwards’ newly acquired informant, Paul Kingston. The New York consul held high hopes for this ‘valuable’ informant, a Fenian from Tennessee, and he was paid a weekly stipend of $20 to try and penetrate O’Donovan Rossa’s most intimate circle. Kingston succeeded, but Edwards soon reported that he ‘has been so continually in the company of Rossa and others of his party, men who spend most of their time in the taverns, that he has taken to drinking deeply, and has, in consequence, for several days been incapacitated … I fear that his usefulness as an informer may be seriously impaired by this newly acquired habit.’78 Aside from being a revolutionaries’ bomb factory, the school also purported to be a legitimate business that was operated by a jointstock company, with the rather long-winded name ‘The Mansonitor Manufacturing and Experimental Chemical Company’. Profits were to come from sale of the articles manufactured in the school during the training process. To supplement incomes, financial support was also sought through the sale of shares in the company’s stock of $100,000. In September 1882, the dynamiter John F. Kearney wrote to fellow United Irishman and Manhattan grocer, Joseph Cromien, instructing him to send share certificates to Utica, where a local merchant would sell them to Clan-na-Gael members. Twenty thousand shares, valued at $5 each, were available to interested parties, though they had no evident success attracting shareholders, and Cromien forwarded merely four shares to 77 Clipperton to Granville, 15 February 1882, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-713; Lieutenant Smyth (Cape Town) to earl of Derby, 27 August 1883, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-781; O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. II, 556. 78 Kingston was unusually named in Edwards’ reports. Pierrepont Edwards to Granville, 8 August and 9 September 1882, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-731, A-733.

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his Utica contact. Ultimately, the school was financed mainly from subscriptions to the ‘Resources of Civilisation Fund’, collected in Rossa’s United Irishman paper. By the end of 1882, it amounted to the modest sum of $3,401.67, but it was enough to cover the expenses for qualified instructors, materials and rent, which O’Donovan Rossa estimated at $2,500 per year.79 Share certificates in the ‘Mansonitor Manufacturing and Experimental Chemical Company’ were signed by its president, Richard Rogers. The New York-born child of Russian and Scottish emigrant parents, the inconspicuous Rogers was relatively unknown. When operating under his alias, however, he made international headlines as the Russian nihilist and chemicals expert, ‘Professor Mezzeroff’. In 1881 Mezzeroff contacted O’Donovan Rossa and proposed a meeting. He professed to have been a soldier from the age of sixteen, and his experience in the battlefield, notably in the Crimean War, had taught him ‘there is no such thing as honourable warfare’.80 Soon Mezzeroff was addressing Irish meeting halls about the merits of scientific warfare. He also lectured to Anti-High Rent Meetings, Cuban nationalists and German anarchists, writing occasionally in Johann Most’s Die Freiheit, and The Alarm in Chicago.81 While Mezzeroff lectured on dynamite in the evenings, by day Rogers worked as a liquor dealer on Manhattan’s 13th Street. Yet, his true identity was of secondary importance. His role was to bring credibility to Rossa’s organisation of United Irishmen who were commonly portrayed in the press as bunglers and swindlers of no real threat to anyone except the gullible Irish immigrants from whom they conned money. In comparison to the professional Russian revolutionary, depicted in the press as a master of secrecy, chemistry and conspiracy, the Irish dynamiters fared badly. The Washington Post believed that while O’Donovan Rossa was full ‘of many words and few deeds, a vapid, frothy character’, Mezzeroff had ‘gone deeper into the subject of modern explosives’ than any other and was ‘to be more feared than a dozen Rossas’. At one dynamite lecture, The New York Sun described Rossa as a ‘portly’ 79 John Kearney to Joseph Cromien, 13 September 1882; Joseph Cromien to P. Kelly, 21 September 1882, NLI, John Devoy Papers, MS 18016 (2); Clipperton to Granville, 20 June 1882, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-713 (copies of certificates of company registration and list of Trustees in A-713, A-731); United Irishman, 30 December 1882; The New York Times, 1 August 1882. 80 ‘Professor Mezzeroff’, ‘Dynamite against Gladstone’s Resources of Civilization; or, The Best Way to Make Ireland Free and Independent’, CUA, ODRPP, 6, 1, 1883. 81 Die Freiheit (New York), 12 June 1886; The Alarm (Chicago), 13 January 1885; The Irish World, 19 May 1883; The New York Times, 30 January 1884; The New York Sun, 8 May 1883; Brooklyn Eagle, 15 February 1885.

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man with a ‘high-pitched voice’, but Mezzeroff was ‘very tall, dressed in sombre black. Curly dark hair rolled back from the top of his forehead, and plain steel-bowed spectacles barded it below. He had a grizzly moustache.’82 Without specialist expertise O’Donovan Rossa was no better than Don Quixote, fighting with windmills. Hence, Mezzeroff took to the Fenian stage in 1882, employed to instruct ‘any man of average intelligence’ in the manufacture of infernal machines at the Brooklyn dynamite school that was unabashedly advertised in the pages of the United Irishman.83 Mezzeroff also claimed to have a school in Boston although this was never referred to by the United Irishmen.84 In one year, 1883, O’Donovan Rossa paid Mezzeroff the sizable sum of $483 for his services. In the same year, $1,778.20 was spent on ‘missioners’, or the bombers who volunteered to carry out attacks in Britain.85 Maintaining a high public persona in the 1880s, Mezzeroff delivered numerous presentations of his twenty-three-page bomb-making pamphlet – ‘Dynamite against Gladstone’s Resources of Civilization’ – at commemorative occasions. Each speech produced the same argument: dynamite would imminently replace guns, cannon and swords. The British government had already set the example by using dynamite ‘to blast rebellious kaffirs from their hiding places’. Rather than providing a small revolutionary vanguard with the necessary means of revolution, Mezzeroff held that the ease with which infernal machines could be manufactured meant that ‘every trade society and workingman’s club’, indeed entire populations, could be armed for war. In Ireland, ‘five millions of people armed with chemical science … are invincible against any which the enemy can send against them’. O’Donovan Rossa agreed and urged that ‘every Irishman and Irishwoman put a bit of [dynamite] in their pocket and become a walking revolution’.86 Nonetheless, the existence of the dynamite school did imply the creation of a revolutionary elite and not a popular revolution, a fact that sat uneasily with the IRB in Dublin. 82 The Washington Post, 5 February 1885; The New York Sun, 4 September 1883. Historian Paul Avrich contended that Mezzeroff was the inspiration for the ‘Professor’ in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent; Paul Avrich, ‘Conrad’s Anarchist Professor: An Undiscovered Source’, Labor History, 18(3) (1977), 397–402. 83 United Irishman, 24 March 1882; The New York Sun, 20 March 1882. 84 Mezzeroff stated he had a ‘college’ in Boston where he taught ‘how explosives are compounded’; The Alarm, 13 January 1885. 85 Balance Sheet, 31 December 1883, CUA, ODRPP, Box 5, Folder 9. To put some perspective on Mezzeroff’s fees, the average annual labourer’s wage in New York was less than $600; 1880 United States Federal Census, Compendium of the Tenth Census. 86 Mezzeroff, ‘Dynamite against Gladstone’s Resources of Civilization’, 19–22; United Irishman, 7 June 1884; The New York Sun, 4 September 1883.

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In December 1883, the United Irishmen organised a series of Sunday evening lectures entitled ‘Scientific warfare or the Quickest Way to Liberate Ireland’.87 Held at Columbia Hall on York and Main Street, Brooklyn, the lectures were chaired by Tipperary emigrant William Burke, head centre of the Tara Circle of the Fenian Brotherhood. Speakers included dynamite enthusiasts like Mezzeroff, O’Donovan Rossa and his secretary Pat Joyce, along with ‘graduates’ of the dynamite school, all of whom argued that dynamite would soon replace conventional weapons to become the sole method of warfare. Praise for Patrick Ford was aired, as the Emergency Fund had just been launched in his paper, which was viewed as a sign of an increasing consensus among all factions of militant nationalism in the USA.88 When asked by a local reporter what they hoped to achieve with dynamite, local man Patrick McGahey stated the aim was to ‘demoralise England by striking unawares at points where she least expects. We have tried agitation for 800 years and accomplished nothing.’ Insurrection required the patient training of volunteer militias, but dynamite produced immediate results that some understood to be providential. McGahey went on, ‘dynamite was an invention of Heaven, I believe, to help the poor man the world over to gain his freedom’.89 William Burke claimed ‘A man could carry enough dynamite upon his person to blow up one of the strongest ironclads that was ever made.’ Opinions on dynamite were far from unanimous, however, and on more than one occasion accusations came from the audience that the lectures were mere ‘vaporing’ and ‘blatherskite’ that ‘amounted to really nothing’. As the months passed the Columbia Hall lectures became little more than ferocious tirades on the merits of violence that drew few admirers. Attendances dropped and by the end of February 1884 fewer than thirty people attended.90 Did the dynamite school and lectures amount to anything more than vapouring? Informants’ reports to British consuls told of imminent attacks in Bermuda, Canada and South Africa, and the destruction of the Hyde Park monument and the wine vaults at the London docks, but nothing came to pass at any of these sites, perhaps unsurprisingly, as informers in the USA were rarely reliable. Ironically, one of the most well known dynamiters of the 1880s, the physician Thomas Gallagher, was a resident of Greenpoint, but seems to have had no connection with 87 Brooklyn Eagle, 31 October and 21 December 1883; The New York Times, 4 September 1883. 88 Brooklyn Eagle, 31 December 1883. 89 Quoted in ibid., 14 April and 31 December 1883. 90 Ibid., 7 January and 26 February 1884.

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Mezzeroff’s school. He was invited to attend the dynamite lessons in Brooklyn according to Walker Elliot, a ‘graduate’ and one of the trustees of the Mansonitor Company, but refused.91 Gallagher was a physician born to Irish emigrants in Scotland. He emigrated to the United States, and in Brooklyn he began conducting experiments with explosives and acted as the instructor for a team of skirmishers, one of whom was a twenty-three-year-old Tom Clarke, the future leader of the 1916 Dublin rising. Under the auspices of ­Clan-na-Gael, they travelled to Britain in 1883 to detonate explosives at various symbolic buildings, including Westminster, with Clarke operating under the guise of a medical student. Finding that government buildings were well guarded both day and night, the team aimed at less well-known targets, but they were arrested before any damage was caused. In April, the police discovered a ‘bomb factory’ in a Birmingham house where another member of the team, Alfred Whitehead, manufactured nitro-glycerine. The other dynamiters were found in London boarding-houses with rubber bags full of explosives.92 One of them – William Lynch – was said to have attended the Brooklyn dynamite school by local Irish nationalists, but he did not claim this himself. Five days after the group’s arrest, Lynch accepted a government offer to testify against his co-conspirators. The infamous spy Henri Le Caron would later claim that Alexander Sullivan believed Gallagher ‘gave himself away’ by associating with O’Donovan Rossa’s men, who then leaked the plot to Red Jim McDermott, who in turn informed the authorities.93 The failed plot came at a cost of almost $11,500 to the Clan-na-Gael.94 The dynamite school seemingly did not prepare its pupils well for arrest and the prospect of imprisonment. John Kearney organised the January 1883 bomb attacks in Glasgow at a gasworks, a railway station and a canal bridge. Altogether the blasts caused fourteen injuries, one of which was serious. Ten men were arrested and imprisoned for their roles in the conspiracy, but Kearney himself walked, having turned queen’s evidence after his arrest late in 1883.95

91 The New York Times, 25 February 1884. 92 See John T. Ridge, ‘The Return of Dr Gallagher’, New York Irish History, 2 (1987), 15–18; Short, The Dynamite War, 125–53. 93 New York Tribune, 20 April 1883; The Times, 7 February 1889; Short, The Dynamite War, 130; Christy Campbell, Fenian Fire: The British Government Plot to Assassinate Queen Victoria, London, 2002, 326. 94 ‘Evidence of Michael Kerwin’, NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18019, 101. 95 United Irishman, 17 January 1885; The New York Times, 16 September 1896; Short, The Dynamite War, 158–9; Máirtín Ó Catháin, Irish Republicanism in Scotland, 1858– 1916: Fenians in Exile, Dublin, 2007, 127, 133–4.

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The most competent graduate of the Brooklyn dynamite school, and one who kept his own counsel, was Thomas Mooney. His fingerprints were on most of the United Irishmen’s operations in Britain during the skirmishing campaign. Born in 1848, some thought him to have been a deserter from the British army, though Fenians in New York believed Mooney’s own story that he was an ex-Royal Ireland Constabulary man from County Clare. Unable to reconcile a career in the constabulary with local loyalties, he emigrated to England in the 1870s where he continued to work as a constable. Yet, the injustices he felt that immigrant Irish communities suffered led him to quit his post and travel to the USA, where he volunteered his services to O’Donovan Rossa after the 1880 Philadelphia convention of the United Irishmen. Working under the alias James Moorhead, he quickly became one of the dynamite school’s most accomplished and determined students, eventually instructing others under another alias, ‘Professor Armstrong’. Along with John Kearney, Mooney was responsible for the organisation of teams of dynamiters in Cork and Scotland in 1881–3.96 Mooney first came to public attention when The Times named him after the attack on the London Mansion House in March 1881. Along with two other dynamiters  – Coleman and O’Donnell  – he placed a fuse-lit device, filled with gunpowder, at an external wall of the building. Within minutes, however, the fuse was extinguished by a passing constable and no damage was caused. Evading arrest, Mooney travelled to Paris and then returned to the USA. His accomplices – Coleman and O’Donnell – returned to New York amid a flurry of press interest and Coleman proudly told the story of the explosion, yet he was not arrested by local police despite protests in the British press.97 In 1882, intelligence linked Mooney and O’Donnell to explosions in both Bermuda and Canada, though neither of these alleged plots came to pass. The next year, Mooney was again in Britain. He helped prepare the hat boxes filled with lignine dynamite that were used in the January 1883 Glasgow attacks. In March of the same year, a similar device caused substantial structural damage to the Local Government Offices in London, but the real target was most likely the adjoining offices of the Home Secretary. A police station across the road was also damaged by falling debris, but despite the material destruction there were no injuries. On the same night, Mooney stirred further controversy by placing 96 The New York Times, 4 and 5 August 1887, 28 January 1888; United Irishman, 13 August 1887; ‘Glencree’ to (?), 2 March 1883, CUA, ODRPP, Box 5, Folder 4. 97 The Times, 1 April 1881; New York Tribune, 10 April 1881; Chicago Tribune, 17 April 1881; Short, The Dynamite War, 55–6.

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a hat-box full of dynamite on the window-ledge of The Times’ offices. The infernal machine failed to detonate properly, however, and did not even shatter the window-pane. Mooney again escaped undetected and returned to New York. These explosions in the first months of 1883 proved to be the most effective skirmishes that the United Irishmen undertook, and were the only episodes mentioned by O’Donovan Rossa in his report to the Fenian Brotherhood at Clarendon Hall, New York, in 1885.98 What became of Mooney after this point is not clear and evidence of his activities is thin on the ground. An explosion in Quebec, Canada was attributed to the Fenians by French Canadian papers in the province, and the New York press later accredited Mooney with responsibility for the attack. In December 1884, so the story ran, Mooney intended to travel to Britain via Quebec, but his plans were frustrated and he resolved instead to bomb local parliament buildings in the Canadian city, presumably reasoning that government buildings in the dominions were targets as legitimate as Westminster. This time Mooney struck alone and did not consult with O’Donovan Rossa or other dynamiters before acting. The explosion caused a small amount of damage to the newly constructed buildings, which were still unoccupied and hence no injuries occurred.99 In Canada, the Irish Canadian ridiculed the story, and claimed the real authors were ‘“enfants du sol” who had probably some wicked grudge against a neighbor, and took this method of satisfying it. Too much credit, in these dynamite matters, must not be given to the Fenians. They are entitled only to that which accrues from the work of their own hands.’100 Historian Sean Ó Lúing, however, has accepted Mooney’s involvement in the explosion, citing the testimony of an anonymous New York Fenian to a New York Star journalist and accusations voiced at Fenian meetings that connected Mooney to the affair. At the 1885 Fenian Brotherhood convention questions were raised regarding Mooney’s rumoured activities in Canada, and the episode contributed to his estrangement from the organisation and O’Donovan Rossa.101 Personal jealousies led many disgruntled Fenians to confide capricious stories to journalists that were sometimes contradictory and 98 The Times, 19 September 1883; The New York Times, 5 and 6 August 1887; The Washington Post, 7 August 1887; Clipperton to Granville, 15 February 1882, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-713; Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, Vol. II, 102–3; Short, The Dynamite War, 104–6; Ó Catháin, Irish Republicanism in Scotland, 131. 99 The New York Times, 6 August 1887; Brooklyn Eagle, 10 August 1887. 100 Irish Canadian, 23 October 1884 (thanks to David Wilson for this reference). 101 Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, Vol. II, 109.

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unreliable, and these rumours also circulated at Fenian conventions. Yet, the intelligence reports from British consuls, though themselves often inaccurate, had warned that Canada was both a target and a channel to transport explosives to Britain. The explosives manufactured by Mooney and O’Donnell in Greenpoint in 1882 were regularly moved to Canada, according to informers, by a dynamiter named Sweeney, who was nicknamed ‘the Canadian Mail’. Hence it was possible that Mooney had access to materials to attempt an explosion in Quebec, if he wished. Interestingly, in the wake of the 1885 London bombings, detectives from Quebec came to New York to help the police identify possible suspects for the London explosions and maintained that they were aware of four dynamiters who resided in Quebec, suggesting the city was a base for Atlantic crossings.102 Aside from the Quebec explosion, another important factor in Mooney’s departure from the skirmishing organisations were his accusations in 1885 that Patrick Sarsfield Cassidy – O’Donovan Rossa’s successor as head of the United Irishmen and Fenian Council – was a spy. An internal investigation was launched that cleared Cassidy, but five years later evidence emerged at an 1890 libel trial between Cassidy and O’Donovan Rossa that threw suspicion on Cassidy’s character and vindicated Mooney to a degree.103 However, whether Mooney was aware of these proceedings is unknown. Previously, in 1887, Mooney was arrested for exploding a bottle of phosphorus onboard a steamship moored in the New York harbour (see Chapter 6). The motives for the act were unclear, and after his arrest Mooney appeared sufficiently unstable for physicians to judge him insane, and he was subsequently incarcerated in the Hudson River Insane Asylum.104 He was released in July 1888. Two years later, newspaper reports suggested that a body found in the sea near Rockaway in New York was that of Mooney. He had suffered a severe blow to the back of the head and homicide was suggested, but the body was so badly decomposed it could not be ­properly identified and investigations proved inconclusive. Mooney was not heard of again.105 102 Chicago Tribune, 5 February 1885; Clipperton to Granville, 8 February 1883, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-713. Interestingly, anarchist publications reported in 1884 that Irish dynamiters based in Buffalo were responsible for the blast; La questione sociale (Florence), 19 January 1884; The Alarm, 18 October 1884. Owen McGee has indicated a man named Patrick Sweeney was an associate of Michael Boland and a spy; however it is not clear if this is the same person. Owen McGee, The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood from the Land League to Sinn Fein, Dublin, 2005, 121–2. 103 New York World, 22 April 1890. 104 Brooklyn Eagle, 10 August 1887; The New York Times, 5 August 1887. 105 The New York Times, 1 August 1888; Brooklyn Eagle, 3 August 1890; Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, Vol. II, 112–13.

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While the dynamite school ‘graduates’ were busy travelling back and forth between Britain and New York, the United Irishman very publicly lauded their activities and promised of greater destruction to come. The most zealous propaganda of the period, however, did not flow from the United Irishman. The bizarre Ireland’s Liberator and Dynamite Monthly repeated much of the belligerence of O’Donovan Rossa and at times surpassed it with wanton declarations of violence. Launched in March 1884, Dynamite Monthly made up the third element of the Dynamite Press, and was edited by the twenty-two-year-old, Brooklynbased Patrick Rellihan.106 Rellihan emphasised the revenge aspect of violence and urged readers to act by any means – the bullet, the knife or the ‘simple sulphur match’ – and each month he published a list of ‘obnoxious persons, informers, and others’, and encouraged their ‘removal’.107 Above all, as the title suggested, the journal was an ode to dynamite and nitro-glycerine. Rellihan proclaimed the substance to be ‘the fear of the oppressor, the hope of the oppressed, and their salvation if they will but use it’.108 Articles on the manufacture of bombs were standard, while authors with names like ‘Dinah Mite’ furnished the pages with poems and songs recited to traditional Irish airs. One of them, ‘England Beware’, read, We’ll bow their heads in sorrow, with rage   their hearts we’ll harrow And cause a brighter morrow with dreaded   dynamite. To right those wrongs we’re banded, though   rebels we are branded We’ll face them single handed with a charge of   dynamite.109

In August 1884 officials at the port of Liverpool discovered a copy of Dynamite Monthly that was ‘of such an extraordinary character, that we desire to call your [customs’] attention to it, with a view to its disposal’.110 When customs officials communicated with the Home Office, however, they were informed that detectives had been aware of the paper for months and that copies had been steadily blocked in the Post Office. 106 Dynamite Monthly (New York), March 1884; Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, Vol. II, 108; James Paul Rodechko, Patrick Ford and His Search for America: A Case Study of Irish-American Journalism, 1870–1913, New York, 1976, 43. 107 Dynamite Monthly, May 1884. 108 Ibid., March 1884; The Irish Times (Dublin), 25 March 1884. 109 ‘England, Beware’, Dynamite Monthly, May 1884. 110 Baggage Inspector to Baggage Office, Liverpool, 9 August 1884, TNA: PRO CUST 46 20.

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Ten days later, a government circular advised the seizure of all copies of Dynamite Monthly that passed through English and Irish ports.111 The paper continued to be seized in Ireland throughout the following year, but in the mainstream press it provoked more ridicule than fear.112 Rellihan was related by marriage to the Ford family and was employed for four years by The Irish World, a fact that helped get Dynamite Monthly off the ground. O’Donovan Rossa also assisted him by selling the paper through his office at 12 Chambers Street, New York. Patrick Ford was no fan of Dynamite Monthly however, labelling it ‘a bastard sheet without character, ability or principles’. Rellihan’s relationship with Ford soured when, in October 1884, an article entitled ‘Judas Iscariot Ford’ appeared in his paper which accused him of deserting the Union Army in 1862 and appropriating $18,500 from a fund collected to aid Patrick O’Donnell.113 Rellihan was soon fighting libel charges and his paper ceased publication. The true motives behind the attack lay in American party politics rather than Irish affairs: The Irish World had supported Republican James Blaine’s run for president in 1884 and Rellihan’s allegiances lay with the Democrats. He aimed to break Ford’s influence in the Irish American community, which would benefit Rellihan’s own career and rival papers such as the Democrat Irish American, which offered to help him. Rellihan lost the case and was sentenced to two months in prison. Dynamite Monthly quickly faded, and although one other issue surfaced in 1886, Rellihan’s venture in journalism was over.114

Mezzeroff and the anarchists

Mezzeroff’s pupils were found, as already mentioned, beyond the ranks of the United Irishmen. As Louis Ademic noted in his seminal Dynamite: A Century of Class Violence in America 1830–1930 (1931), during the period from 1877 to 1886 workers agitating for increased rights ‘talked much of the revolution, dynamite, human rights, justice, firearms, liberty, arson and received much sensational publicity’.115 In 1885, when Mezzeroff’s collaboration with O’Donovan Rossa was coming to an end, his name was becoming increasingly well known among 111 Home Office, memorandum, 23 August 1884, TNA: PRO CUST 46 20 11618. 112 NAI, CSORP, 1885, 20; 1886, 6341; The Irish Times, 25 March 1884. 113 Dynamite Monthly, October 1884; The New York Times, 7 February 1885; Chicago Tribune, 24 January 1885. 114 The New York Times, 27 March 1885; The Irish World, 2 May 1885; NAI, CSORP, 1886, 6341. 115 Louis Ademic, Dynamite: A Century of Class Violence in America 1830–1930, London, 1984 [1931], 39.

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the German anarchist communities of New York and Chicago. The ‘Dynamite chemist’ promised the readers of The Alarm and Die Freiheit that he wouldn’t ‘stop until every workingman in Europe and America knows how to use explosives against autocratic government and grasping monopolies’.116 At the 1881 International Social Revolutionary and Anarchist Congress in London, delegates passed a resolution that declared ‘the technical and chemical sciences have already been of service to the revolutionary cause … the congress recommends that organisations and individuals belonging to the International Workingmen’s Association pay special attention to the theory and practice of these sciences for defensive and offensive purposes’. Dr Edward Nathan-Ganz, the delegate of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, urged the conference to establish schools to instruct anarchists in military science, chemistry and the making of explosives.117 One of the most raucous factions to embrace this declaration was that of the militant German anarchists of New York, whose attitude to science and new technologies strikingly corresponded to that of the United Irishmen. Johann Most was resident in London in the early 1880s, where he edited Die Freiheit. Following his conviction for sedition, and eighteen months’ penal servitude (he was defended in court by the moderate Irish nationalist A. M. Sullivan), Most relocated to New York where he began publishing Die Freiheit once again. At this time, he found work in a New Jersey dynamite factory and he used this experience to lay out detailed instructions in Die Freiheit on how to mix and handle explosives. These articles were then collected in a manual of scientific warfare entitled Science of Revolutionary War: Manual for Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitro-glycerine, Dynamite, GunCotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc., etc. (1885).118 The manual described a fruit-jar, fitted with a fuse and filled with benzine and gunpowder: ‘Nobody will be able to deny that a hundred men, equipped with several such simple kindlers, and distributed all 116 The Alarm, 13 January 1885; Die Freiheit, 12 June 1886; Avrich, ‘Conrad’s Anarchist Professor’, 401. 117 Le révolté (Geneva), 23 July 1881, quoted in Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892, Princeton, 1993, 194. 118 Johann Most, Revolutionäre Kriegswissenschaft: Ein Handbüchlein zur Anleitung betreffend Gebrauches und Herstellung von Nitro-Glycerin, Dynamit, Schießbaumwolle, Knallquecksilber, Bomben, Brandsätzen, Giften, usw., usw., New York, 1885; English translation given in Johann Most, Science of Revolutionary Warfare, El Dorado, AZ, 1978 [1886]. Frederic Trautmann, The Voice of Terror: A Biography of Johann Most, Westport, CT, 1980; Bernard Porter, ‘The Freiheit Prosecutions, 1881–1882’, The Historical Journal, 23 (1980), 833–56.

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over a city, will, at the moment of a riot, be able to achieve more than twenty batteries of regular artillery. And the thing is remarkably easy and dirt cheap.’119 The manual read like a duplicate of the pamphlets sold through the United Irishman, such as ‘The Coming Convention: Its Policy’ (1880), Mezzeroff’s ‘Dynamite against Gladstone’s Resources of Civilization’ (1883) and Glencree’s ‘Scientific Warfare; or, The Resources of Civilisation’ (1888). All were a mix of the do-it-yourself instruction of the Scientific American and recent military theories of warfare. They declared conventional warfare to be a thing of the past and placed a naive faith in the power of science to counter the strengths of armed constabularies and armies. Most’s compatriot Wilhelm Hasselmann also sought to advance revolution through familiarising anarchists with chemistry at his ‘Natural Science Society’. Similarly to Mezzeroff’s dynamite school, Hasselmann gave classes in explosivemaking to 100 students in January 1885.120 As Paul Avrich has highlighted, Most also ‘fantasized that airships would one day be able to drop dynamite on military parades attended by emperors and kings’. These predictions resonated with Patrick Ford’s description of balloons over London and, similarly to the United Irishman and Dynamite Monthly, Die Freiheit published songs and poems in praise of dynamite.121 The Chicago-based Alarm, edited by American Civil War veteran Albert Parsons, urged its readers to study Most’s pamphlet and to use dynamite to change the modern era just as gunpowder had revolutionised feudal times: ‘in giving dynamite to the downtrodden millions of the globe science has done its best work’. The Alarm unambiguously advocated dynamite as a weapon of revolution, with a notorious article by Gerhard Lizius proclaiming, ‘dynamite! Of all the stuff, this is the stuff.’ Articles from Die Freiheit were translated and published with titles like ‘Explosives: A Practical Lesson in Popular Chemistry’ and ‘Bombs! The Manufacture and Use of the Deadly Dynamite Bomb Made Easy’. Articles carefully avoided ‘all scientific and technical terms, which are only promotive of creating misunderstandings among laymen’. At the same time, the journal also urged caution regarding dynamite. Pointing to the activities of the Irish dynamiters, and citing the Dublin-based United Ireland, Parsons contended that ‘there is no doubt that the police force and especially the secret detective force of

119 Most, Science of Revolutionary Warfare, 32. 120 Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914, Urbana, 2007, 74. 121 Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, Princeton, 1984, 165–8.

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Scotland Yard is at the bottom of all the manipulations’, and warned his readers about the activities of spies.122 The German anarchist Rudolf Rocker maintained that Johann Most was briefly in communication with O’Donovan Rossa in order to discuss revolutionary tactics, but he was almost certainly mistaken.123 O’Donovan Rossa and Most inhabited very different ideological worlds, yet their visions of, on one hand, the Irish War of Independence and, on the other, the social revolution, did converge in a narrative that declared warfare to have been fundamentally transformed by modern inventions. Explosives were the weapons of the future and the propitious discovery of nitro-glycerine signalled the imminence of revolution. That revolution, when it occurred, was depicted as an apocalyptic showdown between tyrants and the oppressed, be they proletarian workers or Irishmen. These battles were traditionally David-and-Goliath-style encounters, but science now levelled the field. Like Ford and O’Donovan Rossa, Most saw his role as a disseminator of dynamite know-how to as wide an audience as possible, rather than being an agent of violence. Not one of the three men committed an act of scientific warfare themselves. The fascination for explosives found in The Alarm and Die Freiheit came to international attention during the Haymarket affair of 1886–7, when incendiary articles from the papers were used as evidence against Parsons, August Spies and the other anarchists charged with inciting the violence that led to the bomb during a labour demonstration in Haymarket, Chicago. Before Parsons was executed along with Spies, Fischer and Engel, O’Donovan Rossa wrote a letter to the governor of Illinois asking him to show mercy to an honest and brave man whose ancestors had fought for American freedom. Rossa sympathised with what he considered Parsons’ harsh misrepresentation in the press, and claimed that had he himself been near Haymarket on the day of the explosion, the press would have probably bayed for his execution also. Moreover, Rossa argued that the hanging, if it were to go ahead, would be a permanent stain on American history.124 It is easy to see how the British Foreign Office might have been tempted to view the Haymarket explosion as a result of US governments’ previous indifference to dynamiters. The Arthur administration had shown little interest in British pleas to suppress the ‘Dynamite Press’ and indifference was underlined during the 1884 presidential 122 The Alarm, 27 December 1884; 21 February, 4 April and 2 May 1885. 123 Rudolf Rocker, Johann Most: Das Leben eines Rebellen, Taunus 1973 [1924], 163–4. 124 United Irishman, 26 November 1887; Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, Vol. II, 95, 203–4.

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race, when Patrick Ford supported Republican candidate James Blaine on one page of The Irish World and collected money for dynamite attacks on another. When the Cleveland administration roundly condemned the 1885 attacks on the House of Commons and Westminster Hall, official policy seemed to have turned a corner. The soon-to-be Secretary of State Thomas Bayard forwarded a resolution that vocally condemned the attacks in Great Britain. It was adopted by a margin of sixty-three to one in the Senate. The same day, Republican senator Edmunds proposed a Bill that sought to criminalise the collection of funds for the manufacture, transportation or use of dynamite. Yet, it failed to proceed. In 1886, a new extradition treaty was also defeated.125 While the moral indignation of the American legislature had been roused, still no concrete measures were taken against dynamite and, overall, very little effort was made in Washington to suppress the dynamiters, owing chiefly to domestic political culture and constitutional considerations. The Cleveland administration was less disposed to turn a blind eye to Fenian mischief-making, but it did not take active measures against the organisations or newspapers that supported dynamite. Though the dynamiters remained safe from government interference in their plans, increasing associations in the press between dynamite and anarchism created a hostile climate for dynamiters across the United States, whatever their political colours were. In 1885, dynamite propaganda almost ceased in militant Irish journals owing to the success of the Irish Parliamentary Party, but when Home Rule legislation failed in 1886, a return to skirmishing was not widely called for. A contributing factor was undoubtedly the new atmosphere of hostility toward revolutionaries and dynamite that found public voice in the clamour surrounding the Haymarket explosion. Skirmishing was no longer a neutral strategy, but came loaded with connotations of subversion and anarchy. By the late 1880s, the dynamite school was already a thing of the past. Mezzeroff continued to lecture on dynamite in New York but his small audiences were made up of curious passers-by, rather than committed revolutionaries. Material culture during the late nineteenth century reveals a generation that was captivated by new inventions and technologies. In hindsight, the image of handfuls of volunteers armed with dynamite sticks and fighting national wars appears fanciful. Nonetheless, in the context of the times 125 Jonathan W. Gantt, Irish Terrorism in the Atlantic Community, 1865–1922, Basingstoke, 2010, 348; Joseph Patrick O’Grady, Irish-Americans and Anglo-American Relations, 1880–1888, New York, 1976, 201.

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it was a realistic and serious presumption given the perceived pace of technological development and the future direction of warfare. Given that military experts, newspapers and the scientific profession predicted that conventional warfare was a thing of the past, it was no surprise that some elements of the Fenian movement did likewise and began to rethink insurrection, the traditional vehicle of militant nationalism. Private violence moved into public spaces. The misuse of explosives occurred in homes, in saloons, railways, stores, churches, in streets, in working places, wherever disputes and quarrels were found. Private, commercial and political interests were protected with parcel bombs before pistols, and infernal machines could be easily put together using the continually updated formulas that circulated in periodical literature. Of course, dynamite was not only readily available in the USA. In the United Kingdom the materials used to manufacture infernal machines were also accessible, a fact that was glaringly evident when two bombs were delivered to domestic residences in Edinburgh in 1882, in what newspapers found to have been a criminal vendetta.126 Elsewhere, countries such as Germany and France made sizable efforts to control the manufacture, movement and quantities of dynamite inside their borders. In 1883 the Triple Alliance sought interstate agreements between partners to restrict access to explosives. In contrast, there were few controls in the United States until the dynamiters’ activities provoked British diplomatic pressure to enforce laws that restricted the transportation of dynamite.127 Mike Davis (2007) has forwarded the argument that technological advances and techniques of violence – in his case the car bomb – are pivotal antecedents to escalations in violence.128 Innovations can arm revolutionary groups with new means of attack and lead to a rupture with previous limitations on violence. Because of the newness of the technique, the state may find itself on the back foot before it can effectively respond. The 1867 invention of dynamite gave revolutionaries a new weapon, but dynamite alone is not sufficient to explain the skirmishing campaign. Indeed, the first attacks in 1881 used the centuries-old compound gunpowder, not dynamite. New inventions shaped thinking on violence but they did not create a moment where a decisive break occurred. Instead, the skirmishing campaign should be emphasised as something that was part of a more lengthy process of transformation. The Irish dynamiters and anarchists, rather than being the protagonists 126 The Times, 16 February 1882. 127 O’Grady, Irish-Americans and Anglo American Relations, 277. 128 Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon: A History of the Car Bomb, New York, 2007.

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of a new terrorism, borrowed concepts of violence that were already in circulation. Distinctions between top-down and bottom-up terrorisms, the legal and illegal use of force, can be helpful when analysing the factors that generate transformations in political violence. Yet they can also cause the researcher to overlook the parallel paths taken by state and resistance. Both state- and non-state violence demand our attention in order to construct a reasonable understanding of how escalations occur. In 1885, the novel A Modern Daedalus described an Irish patriot who, ‘in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, in the full blaze of scientific illumination, and in the very heyday of mechanical progress’, invents mechanical wings and assembles a flying brigade to bomb Dublin Castle and attack the fleets in Dublin Bay. Faced with such methods, the British agree to Irish independence. Novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Dynamiter (1885) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s An Exciting Christmas Eve; or, My Lecture on Dynamite (1883) betrayed similar enchantment with bombs and conspiracy. In 1886, Jules Verne’s The Clipper of the Clouds warned that private inventions presented a new menace to national security. In the wrong hands, flying machines could cause untold destruction, giving anarchists the means of enacting their vision of a ruthless and bloody revolution. In the right hands, new technology could produce weapons so fearsome they would act as a deterrent to war, or at least reduce conflicts to short, incisive battles. Either way, these authors believed science was about to profoundly transform society, politics and warfare.129 It didn’t. And here was the place where many of the dynamiters’ predictions belonged, the realms of science fiction. Whether they were uttered by the skirmisher or soldier, a lot of the ideas advanced during this period were illusory. The Fenian dynamiters participated in a moment of collective self-delusion in a world where speculations on future modes of warfare were found on several levels: government, military, media and revolutionaries were penetrated by deep anxieties over violence. Many voices within these groups misjudged the power of technological change to enact a transformation of warfare in a short time. Public discussions revealed predictions that high explosives and new weapons would end the stalemate and attrition witnessed during the American Civil War, through enabling total victories that were bloody but mercifully swift. Ultimately, their predictions were completely at odds with what came in 1914. That in itself serves to underline 129 Tom Greer, A Modern Daedalus, London, 1885, xiv; Jules Verne, The Clipper of the Clouds, London, 1887.

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the significance of their commentaries, since it emphasises the danger of interpreting the era of attentats in the light of subsequent events. The sober consideration of ideas, within the military and press, that technology would imminently render warfare unrecognisable to the common soldier, reflected generally held insecurities over changes brought about by new technologies, how they redefined the boundaries of conventional warfare and what the next-step was. Similar debates were to recur after the First World War, when new developments in aerial warfare and the consequences for civilians led the Futurists to predict total wars to sanitise the world, and governments to seek international co-operation in order to regulate the destructive potential of new technologies. Obsessions with science masked a real crisis among revolutionaries regarding what direction their organisations should take. By the 1890s, Friedrich Engels had become convinced that violent challenges to the state’s legitimacy were a thing of the past, and he advocated representation through parliament.130 The gradual establishment of official monopolies on violence put revolutionary action increasingly in question. Thus the advocates of dynamite tended to cling to notions of science as a way of vindicating their methods of struggle. This resulted in the quixotic exaggeration of the effectiveness of such methods and the belief that bands of three or four dynamiters could destroy whole cities. Destruction was certainly caused; explosions in London resulted in injuries, structural damage, and one death. But overall, the dynamiters failed to bring about anything resembling the extensive material and economic damage envisaged when the Skirmishing Fund was launched in 1876. 130 Friedrich Engels to Eduard Bernstein, 26 June 1882, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question: A Collection of Writings, New York, 1972, 334–5.

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The dynamiters and their supporters

‘There are two classes of men engaged in these dynamite plots’, wrote William O’Brien after the January explosions of 1885, ‘government spies, who find the trade a paying one, and honest fanatics, who have been driven mad by the oppression of Irish landlords, or their own savage tortures in English cells’.1 The latter category directly referred to O’Donovan Rossa, who was deeply embittered by his treatment in British prisons. It was widely believed among his nationalist contemporaries that his experiences there irreversibly hardened his commitment to violence. While Rossa’s hardships were well publicised by himself and his peers, we know less about the other ‘honest fanatics’ who carried out the dynamite attacks, and almost nothing about the ‘dupes’ (as The New York Times and United Ireland liked to call them) who gave money to the various funds. The world in which the skirmishing campaign was conceived was made up of several component parts and the Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States during and after the Great Famine were a large part of that world. They were the organisational foundation of both militant and moderate diaspora nationalism, but they are regularly overlooked in Fenian histories that concentrate on leaders and struggles for power within the various organisations. In order to understand the appeal of skirmishing a more nuanced picture of the people who supported it is necessary. Irish Americans should not be looked at as a block, either as ‘Lace Curtain’ (Thomas N. Brown) or working class (Eric Foner); and nationalist organisations should not be viewed as specifically violent or non-violent, radical or conservative. Interactions were constant between different groups and allegiances overlapped. In The Butte Irish, David Emmons noted that ‘it would be good to know more about these Irish-American nationalists; whether they were Irish- or American-born, for example; how

1 United Ireland (Dublin), 31 January 1885.

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old they were; their dates of immigration; their country or state of birth’.2 This chapter answers these questions with respect to the dynamiters and subscribers to the various skirmishing funds. Firstly, the organisational dynamics, hierarchies and administration of the factions that planned the attacks are analysed. The backgrounds of the skirmishers or dynamiters themselves are assessed – where they were born, occupation, age – along with their relationship to the revolutionary organisations. Investigating the dynamics of revolutionary organisation during this period strips away the veneer of solidarity in Irish American nationalism, revealing an ugly picture of errant leaders who neglected and abandoned the dynamiters and their families. Secondly, the ancillary networks that belied the skirmishing campaign are excavated to build a profile of the 50 cent subscribers to the dynamite funds: their occupations, when they were born, when they entered the United States, and how they described violent actions in their letters to The Irish World and the United Irishman. Though not providing a rigorous statistical profile, the records of the monies collected in both The Irish World and the United Irishman provide so many keys with which to consider the people who have been passed over by existing studies of militant Irish nationalism. Finally, the crucial matter of the Great Famine and the ways it was remembered by the dynamiters is examined. The lives of the supporters of militant nationalism during the period 1875–85 were directly affected by the Famine, and news of depression and mass evictions in the late 1870s stoked palpable efforts to ensure the tragedy of the late 1840s would not be repeated, contributing greatly to the growth of the Skirmishing Fund.

‘Friendless men were better off’: the lot of the ‘honest fanatics’

Some biographical material is available for thirty-six men arrested for involvement in bomb attacks, failed or successful, from the time of the first explosion in 1881 to the last in 1900 (including the explosions in Dublin in the 1890s). The profile is not country-specific as they lived and worked in Ireland, England, Scotland and the USA. Among them were four dock-labourers, four labourers, two hammermen, two hotel porters, two railway brakesmen, two newspaper correspondents, a ship steward, a shoemaker, a chemical factory worker, a huckster, a hawker, 2 David Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875– 1925, Chicago, 1989, 303.

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a physician, a painter, a mechanical engineer, an iron moulder, a coachmaker, a newsagent, a slater, a hospital porter, a clerk, a teller, a cabinetmaker, a grocer, a print-compositor, a bricklayer and a gas-fitter.3 In 1881, the first dynamiters to be tried  – Barton and McKevitt  – were both illiterate. Of the ten dynamiters convicted in Scotland for the January 1883 explosions, four were partially literate, while five were completely illiterate.4 Although the dynamite campaign was managed and organised in New York, only one of the thirty-six dynamiters arrested  – William Lynch  – was born in the United States. William Lomasney and his brother, who died beneath London Bridge in December 1884, were almost certainly born in Ohio, though some accounts claim he was born in Cork and emigrated with his parents to Detroit at three years of age. Six of the arrested dynamiters were born in Great Britain while the rest were Irish: nine were born in County Cork, two in Limerick and the rest came principally from north Connacht and Ulster. Many were emigrants living in England or Scotland, while eleven resided in the United States.5 In his book Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain, John Newsinger compiled data on the social backgrounds of IRB members. Of those arrested in Ireland under the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act between 1866 and 1868, 47.8 per cent were skilled workers/artisans, 6.4 per cent were town-labourers, 5.3 per cent were farm-labourers, 9.1 per cent were clerks and school teachers, and 3.6 per cent were shopkeepers and assistants. A list of seventy-nine Fenians arrested for participation in the 1867 Dublin rising showed 61 per cent were skilled workers, 21.5 per cent were semi- and unskilled workers, 2.5 per cent were clerks, 11 per cent were shopkeepers and 4 per cent were students.6 This picture concurs with previous work undertaken by Vincent Comerford, who underlined the ‘remarkably high-proportion’ of artisans and tradesmen in the Fenian movement in Ireland in the 1860s. Working with data 3 Information on the dynamiters’ professions was drawn mainly from contemporary newspaper reports of the trials, and K. R. M. Short, The Dynamite War: IrishAmerican Bombers in Victorian Britain, Dublin, 1979, passim; Máirtín Ó Catháin, Irish Republicanism in Scotland, 1858–1916: Fenians in Exile, Dublin, 2007, 135. 4 Freeman’s Journal (Dublin), 11 June 1881; Ó Catháin, Irish Republicanism in Scotland, 131–3; Charles T. Couper, Report of the Trial of the Dynamitards, Edinburgh, 1884. 5 Information on the dynamiters’ backgrounds derived mainly from contemporary trial reports in The Times (London), The New York Times, Brooklyn Eagle, The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator (New York), United Irishman (New York), United Ireland; police reports to the Home Office at Kew and CUA, ODRPP, Box 5, Folder 9. 6 John Newsinger, Fenianism in Mid-Victorian Britain, London, 1994, 29–30; list of those arrested during the uprising, The Irishman (Dublin), 16 March 1867.

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based on police records, Comerford found that ‘when shop assistants and the national teachers are added to the artisans and tradesmen one has a fraternity of young, unpropertied, educated, urban dwellers’.7 Tom Garvin agreed, and following the political scientist Miroslav Hroch he argued that artisans, shopkeepers and also propertied peasants were attracted to revolutionary movements because they stood to lose the most in the modernisation of social and economic life in the second half of the nineteenth century.8 The social composition of revolutionary Irish nationalism, then, had changed when compared to the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s. There was a marked progress from the cadre of 1848 intellectuals to the broad, artisan support-base of the IRB during the 1860s. ‘The men of property are not with us’, James Stephens observed in 1858, and although elements of a ‘neo-Young-Ireland elite’ remained in the IRB they were, for the most part, a minority.9 The IRB’s base of artisans and shopkeepers, Ramon has argued, stemmed from the assumption that Irish independence would automatically entail redistribution of land and property.10 The IRB of the 1860s reached a level of politicisation lower than that of the Young Ireland movement, and this process continued during the period of the skirmishing campaign. The dynamiters and their supporters were found in the many tiers of the working class, and many were unskilled workers. The American environment was, of course, going to shape the make-up of the Fenians’ ranks in ways different from Ireland. Nonetheless, the changing composition of Irish republicanism’s support-base in the USA reflected similar trends highlighted in studies on Scotland and Ireland, among the working class in Belfast and also in rural areas where the IRB’s energetic involvement in the Land League was a marked departure from the 1860s.11 The dynamiters who planned and executed the attacks in Britain were abandoned by a leadership that was overly concerned with hierarchy; 7 R. V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–82, Dublin, 1998 [1985], 111. 8 Tom Garvin, ‘The Anatomy of a Nationalist Revolution: Ireland, 1858–1928’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 28 (1986), 468–501. 9 James Stephens to Michael Doheny, 1 January 1858, NYPL, MCIHP, Box 4, Folder 64 (emphasis in original); Comerford, Fenians in Context, 116–18. 10 Comerford, Fenians in Context, 115; Ramón, A Provisional Dictator: James Stephens and the Fenian Movement (Dublin, 2007), 154. 11 Ó Catháin, Irish Republicanism in Scotland, 126–62; Catherine Hirst, ‘Politics, Sectarianism and the Working Class in Nineteenth-Century Belfast’, in Fintan Lane and Donal Ó Drisceoil (eds.), Politics and the Irish Working Class, 1830–1945, New York, 2005, 62–86.

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that promised monies that did not arrive; that recklessly exposed them to agents provocateurs; and, after their arrests, promised family pensions that were never paid out. This was made worse by the occasional appropriation of monies for personal use by the administrators of the funds. Details of individual experiences during the bombing campaign came to light in 1888 at a self-constituted court that was created to try leading members of the Clan-na-Gael for abuses of power. At the Clan’s 1886 Chicago convention, John Devoy and Patrick Cronin had raised questions regarding the misuse of funds, and voiced concerns that the Chicago wing of the organisation had become little more than a corrupt political machine used for securing jobs and fixing juries. In June 1888, Devoy outlined several specific charges against the ‘Triangle’ leadership of the Clan, which consisted of Alexander Sullivan, Denis C. Feely and Michael Boland. The charges included violation of oaths and office, misleading the Dublin IRB, packing conventions, misappropriation of funds and malfeasance in office. The charges against Alexander Sullivan were certainly not wild in light of his past. Sullivan was the son of a British army sergeant and grew up in Ontario. As an adult he moved to Detroit and opened a shoe store, which in 1868 burned down in suspicious circumstances. He was arrested and charged with insurance fraud, but later released when a local schoolteacher, Margaret Buchanan, provided him an alibi. Sullivan later married Buchanan in 1874. Through connections in the Republican Party he moved to Santa Fe and worked as Collector of Internal Revenue and Postmaster, but lost both posts owing to financial irregularities. Transferring to Chicago, he was again arrested in 1876 for shooting and killing Francis Hanford, a schoolteacher who claimed in letters that Buchanan had seduced a local politician to influence the public school system. Sullivan claimed self-defence and was tried twice: the first trial resulting in a hung jury and the second returning a verdict of not guilty. ‘At the time there was some talk of indicting the jury’, a contemporary noted, ‘a strong belief prevailing that their verdict had been bought’. The decision stood, however, and Sullivan started practising law in Chicago; then in 1879 he began his ascent in the world of Irish American politics.12 In August 1888, a sort of revolutionary ‘trial committee’ was convoked in Buffalo, NY, that essentially became a battleground between 12 Michael Funchion, Chicago’s Irish Nationalists, 1881–1890, New York, 1976, 29–30; Henry M. Hunt, The Crime of the Century; or, The Assassination of Dr Patrick Henry Cronin, Chicago, 1889, 272–3; John T. McEnnis, The Clan-na-Gael and the Murder of Dr Cronin, Chicago, 1889, 140–6.

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two distinct factions within the organisation, with Devoy and Cronin on one side and Sullivan and Boland on the other. Testimonies were recorded that castigated the Triangle leaders and brought to the surface jealousies and feelings of injustice on both sides.13 The activities of William John Moroney were examined at another ‘trial’ in New York City, initially held at the Westminster Hotel but moved to a saloon on 3rd Avenue in order to shade proceedings from unwanted press attention. Moroney had been a central figure in the 1887 Jubilee Plot and many suspected he was a spy, or at least a money-grabbing condottiere.14 He was also an ally of Sullivan, and hence the Devoy wing was determined to expose him and maintain the pressure on Sullivan. At the tribunal John O’Connor, the secretary of the IRB in Ireland, testified that both Sullivan and Boland had visited Ireland and misled the organisation regarding the skirmishing policy. The ‘home’ members of the transnational executive body – the Revolutionary Directory – later resigned owing to the breakdown in trust and in opposition to dynamite attacks. O’Connor asserted that telegrams received in America from the ‘home body’ in 1886 were not genuine, and were designed to mislead communications between the IRB and their supporters in the USA. The principal accusations against Sullivan, Boland and Feely, however, regarded financial irregularity. Devoy’s faction alleged that $300,000 had disappeared from Clan-na-Gael funds; that $87,491 was recorded as having been spent on skirmishing when in fact it hadn’t been; and that $110,000 had been spent without the permission of or consultation with the IRB in Ireland, and ‘in a manner that could not in any way have benefited the Order’.15 When the tribunal concluded in Chicago in December 1888, Sullivan was absolved after he secured four votes of confidence on the trial committee consisting of six members. Given that the Parnell Commission – the tribunal established to link Parnell with violence – was concurrently 13 Chicago Tribune, 24 May, 8 and 26 June, 31 October 1889; Gaelic American (New York), 3 January 1925; McEnnis, The Clan-na-Gael, 135–9; William O’Brien and Desmond Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, 1871–1928, 2 vols., Dublin, 1848–[1953], Vol. II, 232–3. 14 Chicago Tribune, 11 September 1888; Christy Campbell, Fenian Fire: The British Government Plot to Assassinate Queen Victoria, London, 2002, 305, 350–1, 377. 15 ‘Evidence of Secretary of the IRB’, NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18019, 11, 25–9; Chicago Tribune, 24 May 1889. Luke Dillon, O’Donovan Rossa and John Devoy believed Sullivan had pocketed over $20,000 of Land League money which he pressured Patrick Egan to give him in Paris. Egan was close to Parnell and the British government naturally took great interest in this link between Sullivan and the Land League in order to damage Parnell. See Henri Le Caron, Twenty-Five Years in the Secret Service: The Recollections of a Spy, London, 1893, 259–68; McEnnis, The Clanna-Gael, 135–6; O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. II, 9, 113, 232–3.

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underway in Dublin, the Buffalo inquiry was treated as an extremely sensitive matter and Irish American newspapers shied away from reporting on it. Needless to say, revelations concerning Sullivan’s involvement with dynamite were untimely. He was publicly allied to Patrick Egan, who in turn was seen as the American envoy of the Land League and close to Parnell. It was widely agreed that the reports and proceedings of the trial committee should be destroyed once the defendants had been exonerated, but Cronin and Patrick McCahey  – two of the committee members  – made a minority report that was preserved by the Devoy faction. The report squarely blamed Sullivan for wasting funds and neglecting the dynamiters and their families, and contended that Boland was responsible for misappropriating money intended for skirmishing and for misleading the IRB.16 Interestingly, when Sullivan spoke in his own defence at the Buffalo trial, he produced affidavits of which one was from ‘a gentleman of undoubted respectability and the highest integrity, Dr Henri Le Caron of Braidwood, Illinois’. Within a few months Le Caron would produce evidence against Parnell at the Special Commission in Dublin, revealing himself as the leading British spy in the Clan-na-Gael.17 Sensationally, Patrick Cronin was murdered in May 1889. The case gripped the media nationwide and journalists sought to lift the rock to reveal noxious Clan-na-Gael secrets. Cronin’s killers were assumed by many contemporaries, both in the mainstream press and in Irish associations, to have been working for Alexander Sullivan. Sullivan held a fierce personal rivalry with Cronin and feared crippling revelations from the investigation into the Clan’s financial affairs. He may also have thought Cronin to be a spy, although it is not clear whether he genuinely believed this or simply wished to degrade his enemy’s name.18 Leaving murder intrigues aside, Cronin’s records from the Buffalo and New York trials, and the investigation that followed his death, give an interesting insight into the fate of the many dynamiters who crossed the Atlantic. During the trial, testimonies collected against the Triangle leaders contended that they ‘scandalously and shamefully’ abandoned the family of William Lomasney, the director of the Clan’s operations in Britain who had blown himself up under London Bridge at the end of 1884. This was compounded by the charge that Clan operatives who 16 Report reprinted in The Irish World, 1 June 1889; Chicago Tribune, 24 May 1889. 17 ‘Evidence of Alexander Sullivan’, NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18019, 72. 18 On the murder see McEnnis, The Clan-na-Gael (biased in favour of Sullivan); Hunt, The Crime of the Century. Owen McGee argues Cronin was killed owing to suspicions that he was a spy; Owen McGee, The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood from the Land League to Sinn Fein, Dublin, 2005, 185.

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went to Great Britain were treated in a manner that amounted to ‘criminal neglect’. In theory, the Clan-na-Gael dynamiters were not paid a salary, but were given $5 per day for expenses when on ‘missions’. The Clan’s treasurer, Michael Kerwin, maintained that, in total, $7,000 was spent on ‘successful work’, covering the costs of ten to fifteen men, while failures cost over $30,500.19 The evidence of the first ‘man who went abroad’ stated that he twice received $100 and the boat fare to travel to Britain, in April and again in December 1884. He complained he needed more money but was assured a contact in England would generously provide for him. However, his contact had only received $200 for a stay of six months and could hardly provide for himself. The man returned to the USA sleeping on the deck of a steamship, as he couldn’t afford bedding. Another man asked for assistance for an injury sustained during ‘active work’, but only received a small amount of aid two months later. A request for legal assistance for two arrested men was refused on the grounds that ‘it was to their interest not to be defended. He [Kerwin] said “friendless men were better off”.’20 Another man told of selling his clothes in England in order to pay his return fare to the USA.21 William Lomasney had travelled to Britain, via Paris, three times during the skirmishing campaign. When he died he left behind a wife, five children and an elderly father. Michael Boland, whose day job entailed work as a judge of the Police Court in Kansas City, was approached regarding financial assistance for the Lomasney family, but he claimed no responsibility and denied any involvement in Lomasney’s actions. At the same time, additional testimonies revealed that Boland had complained to other members that the organisation had become financially strained owing to the burdens of paying assistance to widows and dependants of imprisoned or dead dynamiters. Susan Lomasney, Boland was quoted as saying, was ‘an extravagant woman … [who was] brought up in luxury and we had to keep her that way to maintain the reputation of the order’.22 Others gave different accounts. According to Thomas Tuite, Lomasney’s family lived in a ‘deplorable’ state, with ‘no heat in the house, no proper clothing for children, often not enough money to buy supper’. In 1887 bailiffs evicted Lomasney’s widow for non-payment 19 ‘Evidence of Michael Boland’, NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18019, 80; ‘Evidence of Michael Kerwin’, ibid., 100–1. 20 ‘Evidence of Man who Went Abroad’, ibid., 3–5, 7. Michael Kerwin was later to become New York City police commissioner; The New York Times, 17 July 1894. 21 ‘Evidence of Another Man who Went Abroad’, NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18019, 11. 22 ‘Evidence of James C. O’Brien’, ibid., 29; Chicago Tribune, 8 June 1889.

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of rent, an event that evoked the scenes in Ireland that had induced Irish Americans to donate money to the Clan-na-Gael in the first place. Susan Lomasney maintained that her husband had been given $1,000 in 1884 to cover his expenses and those of two other men who had departed with him for England, but not the upkeep of his family. William Lomasney had understood that $100 would be sent to his wife every month until he returned, but this never arrived. In the meantime, her husband’s death was never confirmed by the organisation. She travelled to Chicago and met with Alexander Sullivan, who offered her the price of a train ticket back home. Sullivan claimed William Lomasney was ‘almost like a brother to me’, but he took no active measures to support his family. After one and a half years of ‘the most extreme poverty’, sympathisers gave her small donations and in 1887 she began receiving money from the Philadelphia dynamiter Luke Dillon. Dillon testified at the inquest into Cronin’s murder that he had raised $1,025 for the destitute Lomasney family, which he felt obliged to do when faced with the indifference of the Clan executive.23 In a similar case the family of John Daly, imprisoned from 1884 to 1896, was also in want but was ignored by the Clan’s leaders.24 The mother of Thomas Gallagher, one of the most high-profile dynamiters, ‘never received a dollar’. In June 1887, four years after her son was imprisoned, James Buckley maintained he found Mrs Gallagher on the point of eviction from her Greenpoint home, with ‘evidences everywhere of extreme poverty’. Collections had been made in her name among the Greenpoint Irish, but support was not forthcoming from the ‘people who sent her son away’. When questioned about Clan failures to pay up, Arthur Delaney remarked ‘I think the family are shiftless.’25 When financial assistance was requested for the mother of another imprisoned dynamiter it was declined by Michael Kerwin, the Clan-na-Gael’s financial agent. The mother of John Fleming, who perished with William Lomasney beneath London Bridge in 1884, died in the poorhouse even though Clan-na-Gael executives were aware of her situation.26 Many of the dynamiters arrested, of course, were not agents of Clanna-Gael, but acted on behalf of O’Donovan Rossa’s United Irishmen group. Funds were collected in the United Irishman to assist families 23 ‘Evidence of Mrs Susan Lomasney’, NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18019, 8–10. 24 ‘Evidence of Thomas P. Tuite’, ibid., 7; ‘Evidence of James J. Buckley’, ibid., 29–30; ‘Evidence of Alexander Sullivan’, ibid., 73. 25 ‘Evidence of Man who Went Abroad’, ibid., 4; ‘Evidence of James Buckley’, ibid., 29; ‘Evidence of Joseph P. Ryan’, ibid., 37; ‘Evidence of Arthur J. Delaney’, ibid., 71. 26 ‘Evidence of Thomas P. Tuite’, ibid., 7.

The lot of the ‘honest fanatics’

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of imprisoned dynamiters, and receipts have survived for monies paid to the mother of Timothy Featherstone (Edmund Kennedy), who was arrested in 1883 after being duped by the agent provocateur Red Jim McDermott. Featherstone’s defence, however, was funded by Patrick Ford, who loaned the $450 needed for legal fees. In 1885, a fund was started for James Cunningham and a pension of £12 (or $60, corresponding to the contemporary rate), was paid out to his widowed mother in Cork, although Cunningham was an agent of Clan-na-Gael and technically Sullivan and Boland’s responsibility.27 At the same time, O’Donovan Rossa could be equally remiss when it came to the rank and file. In the wake of the arrests of ten United Irishmen in Glasgow in 1883, Máirtín Ó Catháin has highlighted the symptomatic case of a semi-literate wife of an imprisoned man who wrote to John O’Mahony, the founder of the Fenian Brotherhood, for help. O’Mahony had died in 1877.28 In 1887, the Cork-born dynamiter Richard Short sent a letter to the Brooklyn Eagle stating that he had been hospitalised in New York with cancer for over a year, but had received small assistance from O’Donovan Rossa despite the fact that a fund had been established for him in the United Irishman. Over $500 was donated to the fund, but Short claimed it took ‘seven months to get $350 in twelve instalments, equal to $50 a month or $12 a week, just enough to keep my family going’. The rest of the sum – $185 – was still astray.29 Short was well known in New York as the man who attempted to kill the spy Thomas Phelan by stabbing him eleven times with a bowie knife in O’Donovan Rossa’s Chambers Street office in January 1885. Arrested and tried, Short was acquitted by a jury on the thin plea of self-defence.30 He fell ill one year afterwards and when his wife tried to collect his benevolent-fund money at O’Donovan Rossa’s office she was turned away, an insult that Short felt was compounded by the fact that she was the sister of Denis Deasy, the dynamiter who had been snared by Red Jim McDermott in Cork.31 The infernal machines that were found on Deasy had been manufactured in Short’s home in Cork, but Short had fled before he could be arrested, first to Chicago and then New York. 27 Balance sheet dated 31 December 1883; and receipts dated 27 March, 8 November, 14 December 1886, 27 July 1887, ‘Financial and Accounting Materials’, CUA, ODRPP, Box 5, Folder 9. 28 Ó Catháin, ‘Fenian Dynamite’, 168. 29 Brooklyn Eagle, 29 May 1887. 30 New York Herald, 7 February and 7 May 1885; NYMA, New York County District Attorney Scrapbooks. 31 Brooklyn Eagle, 29 May 1885.

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The dynamiters and their supporters

Deasy had been offered incentives to give evidence against his co-conspirators when arrested, but had rejected them. He died after less than one year of penal servitude in Chatham prison, at thirty years of age. Short travelled to New York in 1883 to avenge his brother-in-law and kill Red Jim McDermott.32 O’Donovan Rossa contended that he had given Short’s money to Patrick Sarsfield Cassidy, a Donegal-born journalist who had deposed Rossa in November 1886 as head secretary of the New York Fenian Brotherhood. Storms were always brewing around questions of financial irregularity and this case was no different. Cassidy responded immediately claiming no knowledge of the payment and a bitter row escalated. Repeating the accusations that Thomas Mooney had made against Cassidy at the 1885 Fenian Brotherhood convention, Rossa claimed his adversary was a spy, and Cassidy promptly sued for libel in a case that damaged the reputations of both men.33 At the trial, O’Donovan Rossa was also accused of personally pocketing $1,000 of a sum of $1,500 that had been collected in 1883 for the families of evicted tenants in Ireland. During the trial, Richard Short was found lying semi-conscious on Duane Street in New York, after being badly beaten up.34 Cassidy eventually won the case and Rossa was fined, but it was a somewhat pyrrhic victory. Under cross-examination Cassidy revealed that he had asked the New York chief-of-police for letters of reference before he travelled to London and Paris, and he hesitatingly named a man (James McGrath) whom he claimed to know as a spy when under pressure. Cassidy had been one of the organisers of the 1887 Jubilee Plot and Rossa claimed he handed him $250 to pay for the crossings of Thomas Callan and Michael Harkins to England. The two were arrested while there, raising suspicions over whether Cassidy simply abandoned them or somehow facilitated their arrests.35 After serving almost six years of his fifteen-year sentence Thomas Callan was released in 1893, but died in an accident shortly afterwards. Harkins had been released two years earlier but also died shortly after leaving Chatham jail, where he had become seriously ill.36 Indeed, several 32 The Times, 26 May 1884; Brooklyn Eagle, 29 May 1887, 9 May 1898; Short, The Dynamite War, 151. 33 Brooklyn Eagle, 3 June 1887; United Irishman, 15 June 1889. 34 Brooklyn Eagle, 17 November 1889; The New York Times, 26 April 1890. 35 New York World, 22 April 1890; The New York Times, 23 April 1890. The libel case was also followed closely by the Dublin police; see NAI, CBS, S-Files, 376. Cassidy left New York in 1895 and settled in New Zealand as manager of the New Zealand Times. The James McGrath he named was not the skirmisher arrested in 1881, who died in prison in 1891. 36 TNA: PRO HO 144 209 A48131, Folder 17; Campbell, Fenian Fire, 369.

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dynamiters met with wretched ends and the health of many could not withstand imprisonment. James McGrath, James Donnelly and Denis Deasy all died in jail. Peter Callaghan became almost blind. Thomas Gallagher, Thomas Devaney, Patrick Flanagan and Alfred Whitehead (James Murphy) all emerged from prison insane, with Gallagher and Whitehead suffering acutely. Although not arrested for his activities while in Great Britain, Thomas Mooney was arrested in New York for exploding an infernal machine by the docks in 1887. At his trail he was judged to be insane and was incarcerated in an asylum.37 The treatment of the rank-and-file discredited the architects and promoters of the skirmishing campaign. Though operations were often amateurish, arrests and long prison sentences also resulted from the lack of material support provided to the dynamiters during their missions and while awaiting trial. At the inquest into Cronin’s murder, Luke Dillon testified that the Triangle maintained they had funded the Gallagher mission of 1883 with $97,500, but in reality they had provided no more than $5,000.38 Financial malfeasance reached spectacular levels, but misappropriation was not the sole reason why money didn’t trickle down through the organisation. The reluctance to spend funds on the operatives was also fuelled by the philosophy that ‘the men who did the most cost the least’.39 When responding to allegations in 1888, Sullivan and Boland maintained that several persons had been furnished with money for ‘active work’ but were never heard of again, encouraging the treasurers to allocate financial resources grudgingly.40 He may have been referring to a matter raised by an anonymous letter to the St Louis Globe Democrat in 1883, which claimed that a dynamiter named John McCarthy ‘had $10,000 in his pocket, that he got from Clan na Gael or whatever society is managing the affair, and made away with it’.41 Kerwin contended that another failed operation had involved keeping six men in Britain for three months at a cost of $2,500.42 37 United Irishman, 30 December 1893; The Irish Times (Dublin), 9 September 1896; Chicago Tribune, 19 September 1896; Seán Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, 2 vols., Dublin, 1969, Vol. II, 113; John T. Ridge, ‘The Return of Dr Gallagher’, New York Irish History, 2 (1987), 15–18 (17–18). On Gallagher’s case, TNA: PRO HO 144 116 A26493; on the dynamiters’ experiences in prison see Seán McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 1848–1922: Theatres of War, London, 2003, 361–404. 38 Chicago Tribune, 8 June 1889; McEnnis, The Clan-na-Gael, 135–7; NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18019, passim. 39 ‘Evidence of Philip O’Farrell’, NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18019, 94–5. 40 ‘Sullivan’s Final Testimony’, ibid., 102. 41 St Louis Globe Democrat, 1 September 1883; UCDA, DRP, LA 10/k/30. 42 ‘Evidence of Philip O’Farrell’, NLI, Devoy Papers, MS 18019, 101.

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The risk of being defrauded partly explained the frugality, but the majority of the dynamiters had given many years of their lives to the Fenian movement and surely ran small risk of absconding with the cash. William Lomasney was an active IRB volunteer in the 1860s while Thomas Callan had been involved in Irish American nationalism since the American Civil War. Just before his arrest in 1887, however, Callan wrote a letter requesting money from America because he was starving in London. Yet the Clan-na-Gael agent E. P. Lynch believed he simply wanted more money.43 In the end, assistance came from Ellen Ford, Patrick Ford’s sister, who was in regular communication with Callan when he awaited trial, as she had been with other prisoners in the past, independently of Clan-na-Gael.44 It is more tempting to see the conspicuous absence of financial and legal support for the dynamiters as evidence that both O’Donovan Rossa and the Clan-na-Gael had their eye on a sequel to the Fenian Amnesty Campaign of the late 1860s/1870s. Rossa’s own experience illustrated how political prisoners held a widespread appeal that bridged the factionalism between different nationalist groups and challenged government in ways political violence could not. Excessive punishment risked strengthening separatist sentiment, and nationalists would not have been blind to the attention a new generation of political prisoners might bring to focus on Ireland. The imprisoned dynamiters never attracted the type of public sympathy shown for the Fenians, however, and a new amnesty campaign did not rejuvenate militant nationalism. None of the dynamiters served their full sentences, but their stays in prison were considerably lengthier than those of the Fenians in the 1860s. At the same time, the new Amnesty Association (1892–9) gave a shared platform to disparate figures. Sean McConville has highlighted the ‘moral transformation of the dynamitards through their suffering’ as prisoners, and hence their appeal beyond the ranks of militant nationalism. Politicians and activists may have opposed dynamite explosions, another study notes, but they emphasised that it was the prisoners’ ‘patriotic motivations’ that were important, not their choice of tactics. By the late 1890s the government considered the imprisoned dynamiters to be, in McConville’s words, ‘an irritant and a risk: freed, they ceased to be an issue’.45 The last dynamiter in prison, Thomas Clarke, was released in 1898. 43 ‘Cross Examination of E. P. Lynch’, ibid., 62; Campbell, Fenian Fire, 351. 44 TNA: PRO HO 144 209 A48131, Folder 6. Ellen Ford had previously travelled to Britain with funds for the defence of Patrick O’Donnell. 45 McConville, Irish Political Prisoners, 393, 403; M. J. Kelly, The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882–1916, Woodbridge, 2006, 81.

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The negligence demonstrated by the Clan-na-Gael and the United Irishmen to the upkeep of the dynamiters’ families illustrates how expendable the rank-and-file were perceived to be. Historians of New York’s immigrant revolutionary underground have found considerable solidarity among organisations when facing legal proceedings and the upkeep of dependants, despite infighting and bitter internal schisms.46 In comparison, solidarity was conspicuously absent in the Clan-na-Gael in the 1880s, when some of the leadership sought professional advancement through the organisation at a high cost for the rank-and-file. The activities of the Clan-na-Gael leadership in the 1880s revealed a mercenary element within Irish American nationalism. ‘Under the rule of Alexander Sullivan’, John Devoy commented, ‘the Clan na Gael became very much an American Political Machine, not for the purpose of influencing action in favour of preserving the old American ideals or for promoting the cause of Ireland, but for securing jobs for individuals’.47 Devoy’s observations support historian Thomas Brown’s thesis, which linked Irish diaspora nationalism to immigrants’ social and economic ambitions. At least for the Clan leadership during the 1880s, Irish American nationalism was a means of attaining Republican Party patronage, and hence securing upward mobility and raising material status in the new home. Whether the same could be said for the rankand-file is examined next.

The Skirmishing Fund and the Irish American diaspora

O’Donovan Rossa recorded the names of subscribers to the United Irishman in a ledger between the years 1883 and 1887. Organised by state, the ledger provides a window on the type of Irish American that was attracted to the skirmishing campaign. As the United Irishman was a one-man rant against British occupation and the necessity of skirmishing, and little else, it may be assumed that the majority of subscribers supported the dynamite attacks, even if some subscribed merely out of personal affinity for Rossa himself. Entries for New York and New Jersey states are examined, particularly locations that served as peripheral and feeder towns to New York City. Using the information ­available 46 Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914, Urbana, 2007, passim; Paul Avrich, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background, Princeton, 1991. 47 Gaelic American, 10 January 1925.

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it is possible to assess the subscribers’ occupation, place of birth, year of birth and, where available, year of emigration.48 In Brooklyn, where O’Donovan Rossa lived, and a separate city from New York in the 1880s, there were 225 subscribers to the United Irishman. They ranged widely in terms of profession. Reading the weekly edition of the newspaper were policemen and priests, clerks and carmen, labourers and liquor-store owners. A look at the names and addresses in the ledger for other cities in the greater New York area reveals similarly varied profiles, with inflections particular to the area. In Passaic, NJ, United Irishman readers worked mainly in the gasworks factories. In Trenton, NJ, the vast majority of subscribers worked in the city’s large pottery industry. When the Skirmishing Fund was launched, the Trenton State Gazette noted that donations arrived ‘more rapidly than supposed possible’, in part owing to the lecture tours that O’Donovan Rossa made at the time, which targeted cities with large immigrant populations. The newspaper noted that the subscribers to the fund were ‘mostly factory operatives and other labourers in small cities. Women and children are included.’49 The youngest group of subscribers resided and worked in Amsterdam, NY, while the oldest group were found in Trenton’s pottery works, where the average year of birth was 1837. The Trenton group also contained the highest number of non-Irish-born subscribers, with half coming from England, Scotland and New Jersey itself. Though the year of entry is spread out over a prolonged period and varies from region to region, over half of the United Irishman’s readers arrived in the United States in the 1860s. This indicates a degree of settlement. Many had been in the United States for more than ten years when O’Donovan Rossa proposed the skirmishing campaign in 1876. Some had been there for much longer. Studies on terrorism and political violence often rest on assumptions that supporters and operatives are transient or recently settled, and relatively young. This was not the case for the readers of the United Irishman. They were a relatively stable group and many were married with large families, not disorientated new arrivals struggling to make sense of a new world. Undoubtedly, Famine and post-Famine immigrants suffered discrimination and 48 ‘Rossa’s Ledger’, CUA, ODRPP, Box 5, Folder 11. The entries for Manhattan are missing from the ledger and are thus absent from this study. The cities included are: Albany, Amsterdam, Ballston Spa, Binghamton, Brooklyn and Buffalo in New York; Bergen Point, Boonton, Elisabeth, Englewood, Fort Lee, Franklin, Hoboken, Jersey City, Lambertville, Mine Hill, New Brunswick, Newark, Oxford, Passaic, Paterson, Perth Amboy, Port Oram, Rahway, Trenton and Washington in New Jersey. 49 Trenton State Gazette, 7 and 14 June 1876; 7 November 1877.

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were marginalised by a host culture that was unwilling to integrate the huge flood of Catholic immigrants who began to arrive in the late 1840s. Nonetheless, the argument that immigrants’ attraction to militant nationalism was a result of their being flotsams in an unfamiliar and unmerciful urban world is not accurate. They were men (women accounted for only 2.5 per cent of subscribers to the United Irishman in the areas investigated) in their late thirties and early forties with relatively stable, although low-paid and dangerous, jobs. Some scholars of diaspora groups in the United States and elsewhere have emphasised circulation, sojourn and return as the dominant pattern among emigrants, rather than permanent residency in the receiver country. This pattern was evident among Italians who began to arrive in the USA in the late 1880s.50 Among the Irish, however, Kevin Kenny has described ‘the low-rate of return migration’, and the subscribers to the United Irishman were no different.51 Marriage was a stabiliser in Irish communities abroad, and unlike the predominantly male migration from other European countries, Irish transatlantic migration was male and female in roughly equal parts. Although returning home was affordable and relatively quick (in 1880 one journey from Cobh to New York took eight days and fourteen hours), it was spoken of in sentimental rather then practical terms. Nor was circulation inside one or more countries a major factor. The subscribers surveyed in the present study travelled, in large part, directly from Ireland to New York, and remained in one particular location for most of their lives. Of course there were exceptions. A Brooklyn shoemaker named James Bellow emigrated from Ireland to England, where he married and started a family, and then moved to New York. A Paterson cabinet-maker named Thomas Casey followed the same route, as did a Buffalo Irishman of the same trade. Patrick Crowe, one of the originators of the Skirmishing Fund, travelled from Galway to the USA in 1865. He stayed in New York for a few years before moving to Belleville, Missouri, then Peoria, Illinois, and finally Chicago.52 These men were not typical of the overall pattern, however, and it was much more common that the subscribers travelled directly from Ireland to the USA, and settled without much delay. 50 See Donna R. Gabaccia, ‘Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History’, The Journal of American History, 86 (1999), 1115–34. 51 Kevin Kenny, ‘Diaspora and Comparison: The Global Irish as a Case Study’, The Journal of American History, 90(1) (2003), 134–62 (148); for a contrasting view see Donald H. Akenson, The Irish Diaspora: A Primer, Toronto, 1993. 52 The United States Federal Census, 1870, 1880, 1900.

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Returning to Brooklyn, the city with by far the largest readership of the United Irishman of the areas investigated, there is no fixed social profile among the paper’s subscribers. Occupational differences vary, as does the year of birth. Yet general observations may still be made. Of the 225 subscribers there, occupational information is available for 175: 36 were labourers, 35 were artisans/skilled workers, 24 were saloonkeepers, and among the others were 2 policemen, 4 priests and congressman Peter Maloney. The subscribers were Irish-born emigrants with few exceptions. Over half were born in the 1840s with the average year of entry into the USA being 1864. By the mid 1880s, therefore, they were relatively stable, and many were married with large families. Some second-generation Irish Americans also subscribed, but not abundantly, and made up only 5 per cent of the total number, a fact indignantly noted by Rossa: ‘hundreds of the grandsons of those patriots are in New York and Brooklyn who will not pay one dollar for the cause’.53 Subscribers with no apparent Irish ancestry were few: three Englishmen, who were most likely second- or third-generation Irish, and one German. A similar pattern emerges in the information gathered for all cities (including Brooklyn but not Manhattan) in the states of New York and New Jersey. Data on 362 subscribers reveals the occupations indicated in Table 4.1. Lower-class workers, a large number of whom were manual labourers, were the mainstay of O’Donovan Rossa’s support, subscribing to his paper and donating to the ‘Resources of Civilisation Fund’. Tim Meagher has noted a similar pattern among the United Irishman’s subscribers in Worcester, Massachusetts in the 1880s; ‘the subscribers included a few grocers and saloonkeepers but most were labourers, or other unskilled or semi-skilled workers’.54 The pattern was not without local peculiarities. In Albany, NY, for example, semi- and unskilled workers were minority subscribers, making up only 16 per cent of a United Irishman readership composed mainly of saloon-keepers and artisans. In Jersey City, the readership comprised labourers, saloon-keepers and artisans in equal parts. In industrial centres, such as Passaic and Trenton, the skilled factory workers provided over 80 per cent of the readership. When compared with Garvin’s and Comerford’s profiles of Fenianism in Ireland, the number of artisans and skilled workers was significantly lower among the United Irishman readers in the USA, where the high number of labourers resembled the Fenians in Scotland 53 The Irish World, 16 March 1878. 54 Timothy J. Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880–1928, Notre Dame, 2001, 195–6.

The Skirmishing Fund and the Irish American diaspora

Table 4.1 Occupations of the subscribers to the United Irishman, 1883–7. Occupation

No.

%

Labourer Saloon-keeper Shopkeeper Clerk Salesman/agent Shoemaker Mason Blacksmith Carpenter Pottery factory worker Carman/teamster Painter Tailor Textile mill worker Hotel-keeper/restaurateur Journalist Porter/carter Religious orders Widow Butcher Police Railway switchman/brakesman Seaman Watchman Brass-finisher/-buffer Engineer Machinist Teacher Yard foreman Bricklayer Cooper Dairy Domestic servant Iron rougher Lawyer Mineral water dealer Pedlar/huckster Printer Stevedore Unemployed Wire mill worker Artist Baker

76 43 28 15 13 11 10 9 9 8 7 7 7 7 6 5 5 5 5 4 4 4 4 4 3 3 3 3 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1

21 12 7.7 4.1 3.6 3 2.8 2.6 2.2 1.9

1.7 1.4

1.1

0.8

0.5

0.3

193

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Table 4.1 (cont.) Occupation

No.

Belt-maker Bill-poster Bookbinder Brewer Builders’ provider Building contractor Collector Conductor Congressman Fireman Furrier Gardener Hatter Inspector Jeweller Miner (iron) Nurse Patentee Physician Plasterer Plumber Rigger Veterinarian Wood moulder

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

%

The information for Manhattan is sadly lost or missing. Occupational data, compiled from city directories and the federal census, reveals much about the social class of the skirmishing campaign’s supporters but it is not without complications. It is not apparent, for example, if ‘saloon-keeper’ indicates the owner or manager of the premises. Read the same for shopkeeper. Occasionally occupational status is listed as ‘factory worker’, which could indicate a skilled or unskilled position. ‘Labourer’ could mean urban or rural. Certainly, the subscribers were not all in urban areas: farm-hands and milk-dealers are found in Rossa’s subscriber list from New York’s peripheral areas.

described by Ó Cathaín.55 Of course, employment opportunities available abroad differed from those in Ireland, and the class-base of the movement varied according to place of migration and the length of time spent in the host country. At the same time, trades were less organised 55 Ó Cathaín, Irish Republicanism in Scotland, passim.

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in the USA than in Ireland, making it easier to pass from the unskilled to the skilled professions. Coupled with the fact that occupations are sometimes exaggerated in censuses, one would expect more artisans to be found on the list. The relatively low number of artisans reading the United Irishman, then, suggests their allegiances lay elsewhere. The high number of saloon-keepers on the lists in each of the cities investigated can be explained by their dependency on working-class patronage. It also points to the saloon being a key social and political space. Daniel Moynihan observed the striking role of the saloon in Irish American life and linked it to similar functions provided by shops and pubs in Ireland, which were ‘nodal points of district organisation’.56 Historian John Belchem observed that ‘nationalism took a variety of forms and meanings in Liverpool, but in most inflexions the pub was the centre of operations, the prime (but not uncontested) location for (male-based) political activity’.57 Similarly, during the skirmishing campaign, the saloon was key for the dissemination of propaganda and the collection of funds in New York and New Jersey. The importance of saloons conjures up similarities to the roles played by coffee houses on Continental Europe, where many revolutions were cooked up. Tom Goyens’ study of German anarchists in New York in the same period has analysed how the saloon functioned as a space ‘where the anarchist ideal could be lived presently, a place of defiance and a space of resistance and revolutionary consciousness’.58 While the circumstances of militant nationalists were clearly different from those of the anarchists in New York – the latter were far fewer and more marginalised – the idea of the saloon as a ‘safe haven’, a miniature Ireland with patriotic decorations and its own moral climate, is helpful in explaining the dynamics of diaspora nationalism. Moynihan’s famous study Beyond the Melting Pot argued that ‘nationalism gave a structure to working class resentments that in other groups produced political radicalism’.59 While this was not the case in The Irish World during the period 1875–85, which combined nationalism with labour radicalism, it accurately describes the United Irishman. O’Donovan Rossa bound up immigrants’ grievances in an anti­imperialist rhetoric that saturated all matters raised in the paper. The myopia of the United Irishman’s journalism does not indicate, however, 56 C. M. Arensberg, The Irish Countryman: An Anthropological Study, London, 1937, quoted in Daniel Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negros, Puerto Picans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City, Cambridge, MA, 1963, 228. 57 John Belchem, Merseypride: Essays in Liverpool Exceptionalism, Liverpool, 2000, 68. 58 Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 8–9, 34–43. 59 Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, 241.

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that the readership was not conscious of social injustice in the new home. The United Irishman’s extreme language connected with frustrations and alienation from slow-moving politicians whose activities and discourses did not correspond to their environment in the United States or the one they left behind in Ireland. As the son of evicted tenant farmers and a politically marginalised figure, O’Donovan Rossa appealed to these frustrations through his relentless criticism of Irish and Irish American politicians, even if his rhetoric sometimes amounted to little more than demagoguery. The predominantly working-class character of the dynamiters reflects more general demographic patterns for Irish immigrants in the United States. In 1870, 40 per cent of the Irish-born in America worked as unskilled labourers or domestic servants. In 1880, 19 per cent of the Irishmen employed in New York and Brooklyn were labourers, while just 4 per cent of native-born Americans and Germans held the same occupation.60 Oscar Handlin observed, ‘just as the movement of Jews out of the ranks of unskilled labour was exceptionally rapid, that of the Irish was exceptionally slow’.61 While Handlin’s findings were too Boston-centric, it was true that Irish immigrants were concentrated in low-wage jobs for decades after arriving. It was not until the late nineteenth century that structural changes in Irish America became noticeable, bringing occupational complexity and a growing middle class.62 It has been noted above how the activities of Irish American nationalist leaders corresponded to Thomas Brown’s thesis of social ambition. Brown portrayed immigrant support for Irish nationalism as the expression of socio-economic needs in the adopted home and a desire to enter the ranks of the middle class. Brown cited the immigrant Patrick Collins as a clear example of the ‘Lace Curtain’ (middle-class) Irishman: ‘a labour organiser and Fenian in the 1860s, in 1881 the second president of the American Land League, thereafter a member of Congress, Consul General at London, and Boston’s Mayor … In this career there was no betrayal. In the Lace Curtain Irishman the rebel found fulfilment.’63 Brown’s study cast a long shadow over subsequent

60 Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America, Oxford, 1985, 319; United States Federal Census, 1880. 61 Oscar Handlin, The Newcomers: The Negros and Puerto Ricans in a Changing Metropolis, Cambridge, MA, 1959, 26; Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, 256. 62 David Doyle, ‘The Irish and American Labour’, Saothar, 1 (1975), 42–53. 63 Thomas N. Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 1870–1890, Philadelphia, 1969, 46; ‘The Origins and Character of Irish American Nationalism’, The Review of Politics, 18 (1956), 327–58. William Shannon, The American Irish: A Political and Social Portrait, New York, 1963.

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works, not least Rodechko’s biography of Patrick Ford, which traces his gradual conversion to ‘respectable middle-class values’.64 In the case of the Skirmishing Fund, which emerged during the long depression of 1873–9, it could be argued that the harder the times the more militant the politics.65 Yet, when the focus is shifted away from the leadership and onto the subscribers to the funds we find that association with the skirmishing campaign, if anything, acted as a block on upward mobility and immigrants’ entry into American respectability. Supporting the dynamiters made the immigrants’ uphill climb all the steeper, and yet the number of subscriptions to the fund was unprecedented. In this way the appeal of the Skirmishing Fund challenges Brown’s thesis, bringing a more nuanced understanding to diaspora nationalism. In 1876, the Irish World journalist Trans-Atlantic commented, ‘when the day comes I’ll be as good as another’, but these sentiments reflected his ideas of social equality, rather than a belief that Irish nationalism would elevate immigrants’ status in America.66 Supporting the United Irishman was not an attempt to achieve respectability or gain entry into the ranks of the prosperous classes; instead, it was the militant expression of political and social frustrations and a manifestation of the need to adopt new variations of old techniques of protest. In New York and New Jersey the ‘respectable’ and socially ambitious Irish immigrants, and those who were dependent on the business or patronage of the native middle class, tended not to support revolutionary nationalism, a pattern that Victor Walsh also observed in his study on Pittsburgh.67 The ridicule meted out to the dynamiters in the mainstream press and the fanaticism associated with their tactics did not encourage the involvement of socially ambitious Irish Americans. The subscribers were overwhelmingly lower-class immigrants, a class that experienced substantial degrees of marginalisation in the USA and inside the Irish American community itself. 64 James Paul Rodechko, Patrick Ford and His Search for America: A Case Study of IrishAmerican Journalism, 1870–1913, New York, 1976, 215. 65 In this sense, Brown’s thesis was not dissimilar to the ‘social breakdown’ and ‘frustrated expectations’ theories of the Chicago school that were in vogue in the 1960s: unfulfilled social expectations led to more militant expressions of violence in the hope of accelerating change. Ted R. Gurr, ‘The Revolution. Social-Change Nexus: Some Old Theories and New Hypothesis’, Comparative Politics, 5 (1973), 11–14; William H. Flanigan and Edwin Fogelman, ‘Patterns of Political Violence in Comparative Historical Perspective’, Comparative Politics, 3 (1970), 1–20 (7–15). 66 The Irish World, 20 May 1876. 67 Victor A. Walsh, ‘“A Fanatic Heart”: The Cause of Irish American Nationalism in Pittsburgh during the Gilded Age’, Journal of Social History, 15(2) (1981), 187–204 (197).

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Given the predominantly lower-class composition of the readership of the dynamiters’ organs, this leads us to consider whether escalations in political violence enfranchise ‘marginal actors in modern history’.68 Davis’ argument seems to fit the dynamiters and their supporters, as they were a marginalised class of semi- and unskilled workers, who spoke of dynamite and infernal machines as ‘agencies with which Nature has come forward to aid the weak, the poor, and the enslaved’.69 Yet, associations between socio-economic hardship and militant action are by no means clear-cut. If the dynamiters are compared to other militant revolutionary movements in New York during the same period, we see that dynamite was also advocated by the artisan and middle classes. A look at the list of subscribers for Johann Most’s Die Freiheit shows that its readership consisted predominantly of tradesmen and merchants. The first Italian anarchist journal in New York – L’Anarchico – was not an advocate of dynamite in the manner of The Irish World, but it nonetheless advanced militant ideas of political revolution, though to a readership of predominantly skilled workers.70 The hypothesis, then, is more applicable when marginalisation is understood in political terms. While support for the skirmishing idea was intensified by the economic difficulties of the late 1870s, it was also discernibly linked to political alienation and dissatisfaction with mainstream Irish American politics. The high number of blue-collar workers in the late 1870s should not be viewed as a single proletarian type or block: they inhabited different tiers of the working class and did not have uniform interests and solidarities. It is also clear that the subscribers to the United Irishman only give a half-lit picture of the dynamics of militant Irish nationalism. It is necessary to analyse the original Skirmishing Fund lists from The Irish World in the late 1870s in order to achieve a more vivid picture.

Diaspora nationalism and regionalism

In her autobiography, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote that her secondgeneration Irish American father was more intensely nationalist than her Irish-born mother, yet he had never been to Ireland.71 Flynn’s 68 Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon: A History of the Car Bomb, New York, 2007, 11. 69 The Irish World, 16 April 1881. 70 This comparison is based on subscription lists published in ‘Sottoscrizione permanente’, L’Anarchico (New York), 1 February 1888; and listed subscribers in Die Freiheit (New York), 11 August 1883. Several of the names are not in the census or the New York City directory, yet it seems reasonable to assume that the small sample were characteristic of the larger communities of German and Italian anarchists. See also Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 162–3. 71 Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, I Speak My Own Piece, New York, 1955, 16.

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remarks reflect the wider perception that the children of Irish immigrants advocated a more militant brand of politics in the USA than would be accepted in Ireland. When the Skirmishing Fund began, an Irish American woman whose parents hailed from Donegal wrote ‘the times are hard or I might send more to aid that land which, though I have never seen, I have ever been taught to love and revere’.72 Indeed, Patrick Ford had left Galway for America as a child and never returned, despite his life-long commitment to reform in Ireland. Luke Dillon, one of the most effective dynamiters of the campaign, was born in Yorkshire but moved to Trenton, NJ with his family when he was six years old. His parents were originally from Sligo and had emigrated to England during the Famine. Despite several missions to Britain, Dillon never set foot in Ireland throughout his life, yet his obituary claimed ‘No one loved [Ireland] more sincerely.’73 At first glance these stories confirm the contemporary impression, which has remained in the historiography, that the dynamite campaign was a manifestly American phenomenon. Past analysis of the Skirmishing Fund has emphasised an abstract, intrinsically Irish American militancy. Lindsay Clutterbuck has argued that the dynamite campaign did ‘not involve Irishmen’ and the ‘bombers themselves came from the United States’.74 Yet a closer look at the dynamiters and their supporters changes the picture. The skirmishing campaign was organised and financed largely in the United States, but the subscribers to the United Irishman and The Irish World’s Skirmishing Fund were overwhelmingly Irish-born, while surprisingly few of the operatives who carried out the attacks were American-born or even permanently lived in the USA. Second-generation Irish Americans tended to stay away. Out of 484 readers of the United Irishman surveyed by the present study, data on place of birth was found in the 1880 and 1900 US censuses for 203 of them. Of that number, only 34 were born outside Ireland, 23 were born in the United States, 6 in England, 3 in Scotland, and 1 German and 1 Canadian.75 That the rest were Irish-born blurs the standard picture of the ‘Irish American dynamite war’ considerably. 72 The Irish World, 25 November 1876. 73 Catholic Bulletin, 20(2) (February 1930), 110; Colm J. Brannigan, ‘The Luke Dillon Case and the Welland Canal Explosion of 1900: Non-Events in the History of the Niagara Frontier Region’, Niagara Frontier: Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society, 24 (1977), 36–44 (37); O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. II, 354–5; Campbell, Fenian Fire, 306. 74 Lindsay Clutterbuck, ‘Countering Irish Republican Terrorism in Britain: Its Origins as a Police Function’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 18 (2006), 95–118 (100). 75 United States Federal Census, 1880, 1900: New York and New Jersey States.

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How much time is spent in the host country before immigrants become hyphenated? Many of these subscribers imagined a symbolic return to Ireland, but few were likely to have had practical plans to travel home in the short term, and happily lived and worked in the United States. Nevertheless, they were by no means detached from Ireland or Irish affairs. This section analyses the subscribers to The Irish World’s Skirmishing Fund and the role that political cultures in the home country played in shaping militant diaspora nationalism. The name of each contributor to the Skirmishing Fund was recorded in lists published each week in The Irish World, along with their city of residence in the United States, and county of origin when the subscriber was Irish. Subscribers in the states of New York and New Jersey are investigated in order to correspond with research based on the subscription lists of the United Irishman (1883–7), but observations from the nationwide perspective are included where pertinent. While the United Irishman data allows us to obtain an insight into the country and date of birth, occupation, and year of entry into the USA, the Skirmishing Fund lists allow us to establish in many cases the regions of Ireland where the contributors came from. More importantly, the letters that usually accompanied their donations give insights into the dynamics of the fund and the expectations of the subscribers, beyond the simple explanation of ‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity.’ In her research on the Italian diaspora, Donna Gabaccia has noted that migration ‘helped keep alive the localism that Italian nationalists sought to overcome … migration intensified Italian regionalism’.76 To be sure, distinctions between Irish regions were not as profound, linguistically or socially, as in the new Italian state. When the Skirmishing Fund was launched in 1876, the majority of immigrants identified with the larger Irish community, and Kerby Miller has convincingly argued that they saw themselves as exiles from an as yet unfulfilled Irish nation.77 Thomas Brown observed that, while the immigrant neighbourhood held its ‘Kerry Patches, Donegal Squares, and Corkmen’s Hollows’, what counted most was the newly ‘realised sense of all being one because all were Irish’.78 Saint Patrick’s Day parades and benevolent organisations moved across county lines as manifestly national entities, but national feeling did not preclude regionalism. Rather than being an obstacle to be ‘overcome’, as Gabaccia understood it in the Italian case, regionalism provided the foundation upon which nationalism 76 Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas, London, 2000, 73–4. 77 Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 8. 78 Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 21.

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was advanced. In the case of the Skirmishing Fund, the local and the national were not separate, but were inextricably intertwined. Historians have highlighted the prominence of regional rivalries and related ‘faction fighting’ inside Irish immigrant communities in the antebellum period. When the flood of Famine immigrants arrived, between 1846 and 1855, a common sense of Irishness frequently held communities together in the new home. However, Irish neighbourhoods in urban areas soon developed a regional flavour, and often became the specific domain of immigrants from one particular county.79 In New York, historian John Ridge noted that factionalism related to competition for jobs and power, and resulted in ‘squabbles between competing gangs of Irish labourers’, who were divided along county lines. Faction fighting and inter-county conflicts faded in the 1850s, when host-­country prejudice, organised in the Know-Nothing party, forced a truce and the banding-together of Irish communities. The improved social and political status of the Irish community after the Civil War also ensured that county gangs and regional riots, previously commonplace in New York, went into decline.80 Yet, there are still grounds to extend the analysis to the postbellum period, when county rivalries, though not resulting in collective violence, persisted inside Irish America. John Ridge has noted a resurgence of localism that was identifiable in the reappearance of ‘county societies’ in the 1880s, associations that were energised by an influx of immigrants escaping the depression and bitter violence of the Irish Land War. Before this fresh wave of immigration, many of these county organisations had become moribund during the 1870s.81 However, that lack of county-society activity does not, of course, signify an absence of countyism.82 County organisations may have been in decline in the 1870s, but the Skirmishing Fund lists reveal that county-based identities remained vibrant, and many subscribers were keen to represent their home region when they donated money to the fund. Three weeks into the Skirmishing Fund, O’Donovan Rossa claimed to be overwhelmed with ‘ideas, instruction, and advice’ about how best to develop the new policy. From the outset, he had made it clear that 79 See Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 320–7; Brian C. Mitchell, The Paddy Camps: The Irish of Lowell, 1821–61, Urbana, 1988; John T. Ridge, ‘Irish County Societies in New York, 1880–1914’, in Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher (eds.), The New York Irish, Baltimore, 1996, 275–300 (276). 80 Hugh E. O’Rourke, ‘Irish Immigrant Involvement in Collective Violence in New York from 1845 to 1875’, Ph.D. thesis, City University of New York, 2001, 244. 81 Ridge, ‘Irish County Societies in New York’, 279–81. 82 Countyism refers to the association of identity with the county of origin in Ireland.

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there were financial exigencies to consider  – ‘the dollars are the sinews of war’ – and stipulated that letters to the fund would not be read without the inclusion of at least $0.25.83 Subscriptions came in from many prominent Irish American organisations of the day – the Ancient Order of Hibernians, Clan-na-Gael, the Fenian Brotherhood, Emmet Monument Association, the temperance societies, the Sarsfield militia – who forwarded their collections with the name of each person and the amount they contributed.84 Individual donations were also encouraged, to the point where O’Donovan Rossa named and shamed people he thought should send money, but hadn’t. ‘Twenty-five cents will satisfy me of the existence of (X), and if they don’t turn up in due time, I will look upon them as dead.’ The ruse worked, and during the following weeks his acquaintances responded with ‘we are neither dead nor sleeping’ and $1 contributions. A few weeks later, prosperous Albany Irishman Michael Lyons was named for ‘trying to laugh his subscription away from us when we speak to him of Skirmishing’. He was embarrassing his native county Roscommon, according to O’Donovan Rossa, and should cough up soon. When $15 was collected at a Chicago police station, a lieutenant named William Carbury refused to subscribe, stating he would rather see his throat cut than support dynamite attacks. In threatening tones, his colleagues promised to get along without him, stating ‘we don’t want to see his throat cut on account of the Skirmishing Fund’.85 From the beginning, subscribers included their names and counties of origin with their dollars and cents. Other nationalists warned against the inclusion of the home county, but O’Donovan Rossa was wholly in favour. He tended jealousies carefully, and commented after eight weeks, ‘I think the Clare men are doing pretty well in this. Galway, Tipperary, Limerick, Kilkenny, Kerry, Tyrone, and Mayo are doing pretty well, but if Leitrim was as large as either, ’twould outstrip all … I’m beginning to get ashamed of Cork entirely.’ Two contributors were described by Rossa as ‘two good men, even though they are Longford men’, while on another occasion he commented ‘it seems Cavan men are going to run away with the honor’. In this way, the column habitually came across as little more than gossip, but Rossa defended the strategy as a means of creating networks of like-minded emigrants and stirring up memories of homes left behind: ‘the publication of the names of places in Ireland appears to be making a chain of acquaintanceship 83 The Irish World, 23 March and 15 April 1876. 84 Ibid., 16 March 1878. 85 Ibid., 25 March and 29 April 1876, 2 March 1878.

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all around the States … Instead of having county against county, and province against province, to our disgrace, it is county with county and province with province.’86 Yet Rossa’s main reason for provoking cantonal rivalries was because they triggered generous subscriptions to the skirmishing war chest. Contributors were happy to indulge. One letter, entitled ‘Answer Dublin!’, asked ‘how is it that Dublin … is now so poorly represented in the Skirmishers’. More letters encouraged immigrants from their home regions to donate more money: ‘I would like to see my countymen [Monaghan] put in a better appearance in this fund’; ‘I would like to ask are there no King’s County men in the United States?’; ‘Asking about Mayo Men’; ‘Roscommon Heard From’. When place of origin was no longer included in the subscription lists some complained of feeling ‘a little disappointed at not seeing it’ with their contribution.87 Fellow nationalists were unhappy with this tactic of ‘generous rivalry for the national cause’. When Rossa complained of the absence of donations from Tipperary emigrants living in Troy, NY, he was rebuked in a letter that claimed ‘we make no distinction where a man is from, let him be from China or Japan, he is as much welcomed’. John Devoy was conscious of exaggerating divisions between Irish immigrants and warned that ‘no good can come of countyisms’. Patrick Ford was equally wary of encouraging the transfer of regional divisions to the adopted home: if anything, America was the place to leave old world allegiances behind. In 1881, he wrote that life in the diaspora elevated the emigrant out of ‘the littleness of countyism into the broad feeling of nationalism’.88 O’Donovan Rossa, on the other hand, did not ‘dwell on the misery of setting county fighting against county’ and dismissed the fastidiousness of his critics: rather, it was a ‘pleasure’ to witness counties ‘vying with one another’. That pleasure was conspicuous when he declared his wish to publish a league-type table of counties according to how much money they generated for the fund. Discouraged from the idea by his co-conspirators, he published only one table in May 1876, which is nonetheless interesting. His native Cork headed the list and the majority of subscribers originated from the south-west of Ireland. The first ten counties listed were Cork, Clare, Kerry, Galway, Tipperary, Limerick, Mayo, Kilkenny, Dublin, Waterford.89

86 Ibid., 29 April and 6 May 1876, 16 March and 20 April 1878. 87 Ibid. 22 and 29 April 1876, 11 August 1877, 2 and 9 March 1878. 88 Ibid., 11 August 1877, 6 May 1876, 17 December 1881; Brown, Irish-American Nationalism, 21. 89 The Irish World, 6 May 1876 (emphasis in original), 11 August 1877.

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The prevalence of countyism in the Skirmishing Fund illustrated that the local and the national were not separate, mutually identifiable entities among the subscribers to the fund, but folded into each other. County and sub-county loyalties were strong, but they did not impede the forward movement of Irish nationalism and neither did they obstruct large donations to the Skirmishing Fund or other nationalist funds. The USA-wide ‘league-table’ published by Rossa roughly corresponds to the data collected in the present study for New York and New Jersey. The Skirmishing Fund began on 4 March 1876 and data in Table 4.2 is taken from the first two months – March and April 1876 – and the corresponding months in 1877 and 1878. The prominence of subscriptions from the south-west of Ireland was conspicuous in the Skirmishing Fund. In 1878, the year when subscriptions were most numerous, the number of subscribers from Cork alone was three times that of the next county. Firstly, it should be noted that some Irish counties held populations significantly larger than others. In 1881, the population of Cork – 492,810 – was twice that of Mayo, Galway, Kerry, Tipperary or Limerick, and over three times that of other prominent counties such as Cavan (129,008) or Westmeath (71,513).90 This partially explains the prominence of Cork on the lists, but also raises interesting questions about the low place of Dublin, the second most populous county in Ireland. One reason for this may be the centrality of agrarianism to the nationalist discourse during the late 1870s. In his study of the IRB, Matthew Kelly found Dublin members to be marginalised from the rural-centred Land League, and lacking an equivalent movement for urban social reform.91 The Skirmishing Fund was intertwined with the theme of land reform, which probably attracted more emigrants from rural backgrounds, even if their lot was now bound up with American urban workers. Another factor behind the prominence of the south-west was that there were comparatively more Irish people from this region in the USA. Miller’s Emigrants and Exiles provided a table of Irish emigration to the USA by county, which showed that in the second half of the nineteenth century emigration from the south-west was consistently higher than other regions, peaking between the years 1851 and 1855 (a total of 296,531 people).92 Secondly, O’Donovan Rossa himself was from Cork and attracted subscriptions out of regional 90 Census of Ireland for the year 1881, Abstract of Enumerators’ Summaries, 19th Century House of Commons Sessional Papers, accessed online at http://parlipapers.chadwyck.co.uk/home.do. 91 Kelly, The Fenian Ideal, 52–3. 92 Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 570.

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Table 4.2 Skirmishing Fund subscriptions for New York and New Jersey by county. 1876

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 Total

1877

1878

County

No.

%

County

No.

%

County

No.

%

Cork Limerick Cavan Kerry Tipperary Westmeath Clare Galway Mayo Kildare Tyrone Armagh Dublin Fermanagh Waterford Derry Wicklow Leitrim Carlow Louth Down Offaly Meath Kilkenny

15 14 8 6 4 4 4 3 3 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

18 17 9.5 7 5 5 5 3.4 3.4 3.4 2.4 2.4 2.4 2.4 2.4 1.2 1.2 1.2 1.2 1.2 1.2 1.2 1.2 1.2

Galway Longford Fermanagh Cork Clare Laois Wexford Armagh Kilkenny Roscommon Tipperary Carlow Mayo Derry Dublin Leitrim

7 5 3 3 2 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

21 15 9 9 6 6 6 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3

Cork Tipperary Kerry Cavan Limerick Mayo Westmeath Louth Meath Dublin Laois Kilkenny Galway Clare Fermanagh Sligo Kildare Longford Wexford Waterford Down Armagh Derry Tyrone Monaghan Donegal Wicklow Leitrim Roscommon Antrim Carlow Offaly

57 19 19 17 16 15 13 13 11 11 11 10 10 8 7 7 6 5 5 5 4 4 4 4 3 3 3 3 3 2 2 1 301

19 6.3 6.3 5.6 5.3 5 4.3 4.3 3.6 3.6 3.6 3.3 3.3 2.6 2.3 2.3 2 1.7 1.7 1.3 1.3 1.3 1.3 1 1 1 1 1 0.6 0.6 0.3 0.3

84

33

Figures are taken for the months of March and April in each of the three years. Figures are for subscribers who included their counties of origin, not all subscribers. The number of subscribers varied substantially for this period (March/April) between each year, as indicated.

as well as national sympathies. Thirdly, Irish emigration to the United States was not evenly spread, and migrants from different counties settled in different locations. New York City and Brooklyn were home to large populations from counties Cork, Kerry, Limerick

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I R E L A N D 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40

Londonderry Londonderry Antrim

Donegal U

L

S

T

E

R

Lougth Neagh

Tyrone

Belfast

Down Fermanagh

Sligo

Armagh

Monaghan

Sligo

Dundalk

Leitrim

Louth

Cavan

Mayo

Roscommon Longford C O N N A U G H T

Drogheda

Meath

Westmeath

Galway

L E I King’s

Galway

N

Dublin

S

T

E

R

Kildare Wicklow

Queen’s Clare Kilkenny

Limerick

M

U

Limerick N S T

Carlow

Tipperary Kilkenny E

Wexford

R Waterford

Kerry

Dublin

Waterford Cork Cork

Figure 4.1 Map of Ireland in the nineteenth century.

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and Tipperary.93 Large migration groups from other areas, particularly the north-west, were under-represented in the areas investigated in the present study, as they settled more in Pennsylvania and other states. Hence, Table 4.2 may be read as a reflection of general patterns of settlement around New York’s magnetic field. Table 4.2 also illustrates that support for skirmishing came from regions where the IRB had high recruitment success in the 1860s. The high level of subscriptions from the south-west of Ireland indicates the transatlantic extension of a process of politicisation that had begun in that region in the 1850s. The Phoenix National and Literary Society – established by O’Donovan Rossa in 1856 in a remote part of the southwest  – entered areas previously indifferent to nationalist sentiment, a process that was subsequently intensified by IRB advances during the 1860s. When addressing the House of Commons in 1868, the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Mayo, observed that in the south of Ireland the mass of people were ‘deeply tainted with Fenianism’.94 The growth of Fenian support in the south-west substantially strengthened the nationalist movement in the long term and, according to J. J. Lee, ‘presaged the general location of the war of independence from 1919 to 1921’.95 The prominence of the south-west, however, did not entail the absence of other counties in the skirmishing lists. In the 1850s/1860s, Fenianism had little impact on areas in the west of Ireland, and while never being prominent, counties from that region nonetheless routinely featured in the Skirmishing Fund columns. Cavan, a county in the north midlands of Ireland, seems to be an anomaly, the only northern county that is consistently high in the skirmishing lists despite its relatively low population. While emigrants from the west of Ireland settled in reasonably large numbers in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Cavan people numbered fewer.96 Cavan’s prominence is perhaps best explained by the history of sectarian clashes and the existence of societies such as the Ribbonmen 93 See Ridge, ‘Irish County Societies’, 287–9. His figures are based on immigration flows in the early 1880s, but it is assumed they did not dramatically differ from patterns in the late 1870s. 94 HHC, 10 March 1868, col. 1356. 95 Joseph Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848–1918, Dublin, 2008 [1973], 58. In the 1990s scholars directly engaged with the question of the south-west’s militancy during the War of Independence, also in comparison to other regions. Cycles of reprisal attacks, inefficiency of police and courts, ostracisation of police from the community, and local thresholds of violence were cited among other reasons for high levels of activity. See Peter Hart, ‘The Geography of Revolution in Ireland, 1917– 1923’, Past & Present, 155(1) (1997), 142–76; Joost Augusteijn, From Public Defiance to Guerrilla Warfare: The Experience of Ordinary Volunteers in the Irish War of Independence 1916–1921, Dublin, 1996, 20–3, 342–8. 96 Ridge, ‘Irish County Societies’, 288–9.

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The dynamiters and their supporters

and the Orange Order in that county, which enhanced nationalist feeling.97 Overall, even when the prominence of counties such as Cavan is taken into account, the supporters of skirmishing were still predominantly from the south-western region. Was the south-west the Piedmont of Ireland? Donations to the Skirmishing Fund in New York and New Jersey followed a similar pattern to the one identified by Walsh among subscribers in Pittsburgh. Economic growth and increased modernisation in much of rural Munster squeezed the small tenant farmers, he maintained, bringing social disruption. This process created a space for the IRB’s republicanism, which made gains through addressing local hardships. The success of Fenianism in the region contributed to higher levels of national consciousness that emigrants ‘brought with them’ to the USA, and accounted for the high numbers of immigrants from Cork among the Pittsburgh subscriptions to the Skirmishing Fund.98 Yet, many Irish immigrants arrived in the USA as part of the Famine exodus of 1846–55, before the birth of the Fenian movement and the processes of national mobilisation that began in the late 1850s. Irish migration to the United States peaked between 1847 and 1850, declining to around half of this level by 1855, then rising again in the early 1860s and again in the early 1880s.99 When did the supporters of the skirmishing campaign arrive? Reliable data on the year of immigration is difficult to gather, as the fund lists provide us with names and city of residence only. Therefore, in cities such as New York and Brooklyn, there may be as many as thirty entries in the federal censuses of 1880 and 1900 under one name, and the subscriber cannot be identified accurately. However, some indication may be reached if the subscribers to O’Donovan Rossa’s United Irishman are considered. The newspaper’s records for 1883–7 allow the subscribers to be identified with relative accuracy, and although research on immigrants’ year of entry yielded a small return – 90 out of a total of 484 subscribers for New York and New Jersey – the results are interesting (see Table 4.3). Following contemporary emigration patterns, the majority left Ireland in early adulthood, suggesting their political worldview was at 97 See M. R. Beames, ‘The Ribbon Societies: Lower-Class Nationalism in Pre-Famine Ireland’, Past & Present, 97 (1982), 128–43. 98 Walsh, ‘A Fanatic Heart’, 192. The south-west is also the region analysed in Garvin, ‘Anatomy of a Nationalist Revolution’, passim. 99 On post-Famine emigration out of Ireland see Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘A Note on Nineteenth-Century Irish Emigration Statistics’, Population Studies, 29(1) (1975), 143–9 (144).

Diaspora nationalism and regionalism

209

Table 4.3 Subscribers’ years of entry into the United States. Year of entry

1845–54

1855–9

1860–4

1865–9

1870–9

1880–3

No. of subscribers

14

12

14

26

18

1

least partially formed by the time they entered the USA. The immigrants who were sympathetic to O’Donovan Rossa’s calls for scientific warfare were born principally in the mid 1840s and arrived in the USA during the mid 1860s, which would indicate their exposure to, but not necessarily their involvement in, Fenianism in Ireland. Information on their county of origin is not available, but it is not unreasonable to assume their profile was similar to the Skirmishing Fund subscribers in The Irish World. A substantial number were males who married Irishborn women in the United States. Therefore they travelled to the USA alone, a fact that again points toward emigration in the mid-to-late 1850s and 1860s, when labourers’ and farmers’ children leaving as individuals made up the dominant migratory demographic.100 Previously, between 1846 and 1855, whole families migrated to escape the Famine and there is some indication of this demographic in the United Irishman lists (married couples with children born in Ireland during the 1840s; immigrants living with aged Irish-born parents). However, they were in the minority: the readers of the United Irishman were married males for whom the average year of arrival was 1865. Variations of Irish American nationalism were often marked along generational lines, and it seems logical to view the dynamiters as belonging to a different generation than the Fenians of the 1867 rising and the Canadian raids.101 Skirmishing may be viewed as the initiative of a generation with different understandings of violence and warfare from those of the preceding generation. Yet, the dynamiters were not composed of one specific generation of nationalists who came of age in an era of new technologies. There were considerable age differences amongst the United Irishman’s readership: the oldest was born in 1813 and the youngest in 1865. This cross-generational appeal was embodied by O’Donovan Rossa himself: an IRB veteran of the 1860s who came to be the most outspoken proponent of the skirmishing campaign. Also, 100 Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society, 8. 101 On generational difference in Butte see Emmons, The Butte Irish, 316–17.

210

The dynamiters and their supporters

this profile corresponds to recent investigations of the Dublin IRB, which found ‘an appeal across generations’, with the most prominent age group being those in their late twenties and early thirties.102 Some IRB members and ex-Young Irelanders actively supported skirmishing as the objective expression of militant nationalism in times of modernised warfare. An M. B. O’Connor from Newcastle West in County Limerick asserted he had ‘more faith in this Skirmishing Fund than in all Home Rule oratory … I am not afraid to add that I have been a Fenian and national school teacher.’ Born in 1848, O’Connor arrived in New York in the mid 1860s and worked as a farmer on the periphery of the greater New York area.103 Other subscribers wrote of their experience of the 1867 rising. Brooklyn-based Patrick Mannix, who donated $1, ‘fought in Kilmallock in ’67 and Canada in May 1870’, while another announced: ‘I was at Tallaght and Stepaside. I send you $1 to show my desire to “try again”.’104 Questions of generational difference and the mobilisation of militants in homeland and hostland help tease out the complexities of diaspora nationalism, beyond the simple circumstance of a particular ethnic group living in an adopted home. The people who supported the skirmishing campaign maintained a distinctive ethnic identity and symbolic attachment to homeland. Underpinning the financial success of the various dynamite funds were networks of Irish-born immigrants located in different parts of the USA. First-hand memories, experiences of hardship and perceived injustices in Ireland were crucial to their worldview, suggesting that political mobilisation occurred in the home country and attitudes were then transposed to the adopted home. The relative absence of second-generation Irish Americans from the skirmishing funds, then, may be explained by the lack of immediate connections or exposure to political culture in Ireland. Yet the culture that nurtured Irish nationalism in the homeland was maintained and invigorated in the new home by individuals, county organisations and broader associational culture. Irish immigrant communities clearly served as incubators of nationalist feeling and cultural inheritance, evident in the militancy of second-generation Irish Americans in the twentieth century. That this was not the case during the late 1870s and 1880s suggests the skirmishing campaign came too early to appeal to a new, politicised generation of American-born 102 Kelly, The Fenian Ideal, 21. 103 The Irish World, 8 April 1876; US Federal Census, 1880. 104 The Irish World, 18 March, 8 April, 13 and 20 May 1876.

Famine memories

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Irish. The Skirmishing Fund came a little over thirty years after the influx of 1846–55, and the children of Famine emigrants were perhaps not sufficiently mature as a generation to engage fully in nationalist politics. Mechanisms of politicisation in the diaspora were still evolving during the skirmishing campaign, moving toward the sophisticated diaspora nationalism that proved so effective at mobilising later generations of American-born Irish. But they were not yet at those levels in the late 1870s. To be sure, individuals like the American-born William Lomasney were deeply involved in organising the dynamite campaign, but they were not generally representative of the demographic that supported and participated in the violence. The low visibility of the ­children of pre-Famine emigrants on the various skirmishing lists points to the immense importance of the Famine and memory of the Famine to the fire of Irish diaspora nationalism.

Famine memories

A key aspect of diaspora nationalism and Irish American identity was memory of the Great Famine. The transmission of memory of the Famine as a manmade catastrophe from Irish-born emigrants to their American-born offspring furnished Irish nationalism in the USA with an intensity beyond that found in other receiver countries. The Famine explained to Irish Americans ‘why they found themselves where they were’.105 Intergenerational transmission of Famine memories became a means of preserving visceral opposition and hostility toward British rule in Ireland and of efficiently mobilising the political and economic resources of the diaspora to advance the goal of an Irish republic. Kerby Miller isolated collective memory of the Famine as one of the main ingredients of Irish American nationalism, which converted emigration into a sense of involuntary exile. Nationalist explanations of the Famine ‘generalized people’s grievances into a powerful political and cultural weapon’. They also helped survivors overcome a sense of shame for ‘extensive violations of communal mores’ committed during the Famine, when competition for survival bred cruelty.106 During the late 1840s, both victims and government regarded mass starvation and disease in Ireland to be predestined, attributing suffering 105 Joseph Lee, ‘Introduction: Interpreting Irish America’, in Joseph Lee and Marion R. Casey (eds.), Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States, New York, 2007, 22. 106 Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 280–344; Kerby A. Miller, ‘“Revenge for Skibbereen”: Irish Emigration and the Meaning of the Great Famine’, in Arthur Gribben (ed.), The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America, Amherst, 1999, 180–95 (185–6).

212

The dynamiters and their supporters

to divine agencies rather than human ones. Throughout the post-Famine period, however, and particularly in Irish America, interpretations of the Famine as a manmade disaster became embedded across the spectrum of mild and militant nationalist opinion. Prominent religious leaders such as John Hughes, archbishop of New York, also veered toward the belief that the Famine was a human creation. John Mitchel’s Jail Journal (1854) and Apology for the British Government in Ireland (1860) stressed the conviction that food was continually exported from Ireland to Britain during the worst years of the Famine, an assertion that O’Donovan Rossa proclaimed to be an ‘historical truth’ in his Recollections, published weekly in the United Irishman and as a single volume in 1898. Like Rossa, Land League leader Michael Davitt experienced eviction during the Famine, and spoke of the ‘distinct remembrance’ he held of being forced to emigrate with his family when he was four years old from their farm in County Mayo.107 All of these figures agreed that violent resistance would have been preferable to the pliant acceptance of migration or starvation, and recriminations were voiced over the lack of courageous action to ‘credit’ the memories of the dead. Nonetheless, the 1848 uprising, though it quickly collapsed, gave force to nationalist interpretations of events. Highly politicised readings of the Famine by Fenian leaders boosted militant nationalism and enhanced support for unprecedented strategies such as urban guerrilla warfare. Moreover, the Famine impacted on the lives of the orchestrators of the skirmishing campaign. An eightyear-old Patrick Ford arrived in America with his guardians who had emigrated from Galway in 1845. One of the most hardline of the dynamiters  – Luke Dillon  – was a child of Famine migrants. O’Donovan Rossa’s mother and siblings emigrated to Philadelphia when the family was evicted from their holdings, following the death of his father in March 1847. Rossa himself remained in Cork and his personal experiences undoubtedly hardened his nationalism. In his first recorded speech in 1858, he asserted that the Famine was of human origin, and not a natural disaster. He later wrote in his Recollections, ‘there was no famine in the land, but there was the plunder of the Irish people by the English’.108

107 Michael Davitt, quoted in James S. Donnelly, Jr, ‘The Construction of the Memory of the Famine in Ireland and the Irish Diaspora, 1850–1900’, Éire-Ireland, 31 (1996), 26–61 (37–9). 108 O’Donovan Rossa, Rossa’s Recollections, 1838–1898, Shannon, 1972, 36; Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, Vol. I, 44–60; Rodechko, Patrick Ford, 28; Lee, Modernisation of Irish Society, 58.

Famine memories

213

Kerby Miller employed Halbwachs’ category ‘collective memory’ to describe how the Famine was remembered in the Irish diaspora, but anthropologist Aleida Assmann has argued that this category is not sophisticated enough to describe how memory functions. Instead, she has posited four new categories: individual, social, political and cultural memory. Of the four, ‘political memory’ has obvious relevance for diaspora nationalism and the Famine. Based on ‘selection and exclusion’, political memory ‘draws individuals into a tight collective community centred around one seminal experience’. With the aid of ‘memorial signs such as symbols, texts, images, rites, ceremonies, places and monuments’, personal memories are transformed by an ‘emplotment of events in an affectively charged and mobilising narrative’, which is then unified, stabilised and transmitted from generation to generation.109 In the case of militant nationalism during the skirmishing campaign, however, one significant revision should be added to her categorisation. Assmann classified political memory as ‘top-down’ or ‘made’, yet during the skirmishing campaign many militant nationalists retained autobiographical memories of the Famine, an immediate connection with the incisive historical event, and thus were not dependent on elites to ‘make’ memories for them. Most Famine emigrants had no need of politicians to politicise their evictions and loss, historian James S. Donnelly contends, because ‘harsh experience must itself have been a potent and embittering teacher’.110 In this sense, the diaspora nationalism of the late nineteenth century was different from that of later generations, in that it was defined on the basis of autobiographical, not inherited, memory. During the period of inquiry, the different tiers of militant nationalism consciously combined individual memories of hunger and evictions with those of misgovernment and repression in Ireland. Immigrants collectively exchanged stories in saloons across Irish communities, mixing memories of local hardships and incorporating them as aspects of a homogenous national past. Personal suffering was linked to Ireland’s suffering, and personal histories became synonymous with the history of Ireland. The overwhelming majority of activists and subscribers to the various skirmishing funds had themselves fled the Famine or held some childhood memories of the period 1845–55. The United Irishman’s ledger of subscribers helps us to obtain dates of birth for 201 Irish-born 109 Aleida Assmann, ‘Memory, Individual and Collective’, in Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, New York, 2006, 210–26 (215–17, 221). 110 Donnelly, ‘The Construction of the Memory of the Famine’, 44, 56.

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The dynamiters and their supporters

Table 4.4 Subscribers’ dates of birth. Year of birth No. of subscribers

1810–19 1820–9 1830–9 1840–4 1845–9 1850–4

1855–9 1860–

4

13

18

45

45

39

31

6

subscribers of the 484 names listed for New York and New Jersey states (see Table 4.4). Around 9.5 per cent of this group were born after 1855. A total of 90.5 per cent were born in Ireland between 1810 and 1854 and, though some may have migrated before 1845, the majority were likely to have experienced the ravages of the Famine directly. It is difficult to indicate precisely when these subscribers left Ireland, but following from the data shown in Table 4.3, it is reasonable to assume at least half emigrated after 1855, thus forming part of the post-Famine migration to the United States. Kerby Miller describes the post-1855 migrants as escapees from modernisation processes in Ireland that had exacerbated colonial divisions and broken traditional dependency patterns in rural areas.111 Though these groups were economic migrants, their memory of the Famine was nevertheless crucial to their cultural and political identities. Many emigrated in the 1860s, and as J. J. Lee has pointed out, ‘a twenty-five year old leaving in 1860 would have been fifteen in 1850, old enough to have seen sights he or she would never forget. Many born shortly before 1845 will have lost a parent, grandparent, or sibling during the Famine.’112 Among the readers of The Irish World the experience of famine, direct or indirect, was a key factor in how they rationalised their support for political violence. As illustrated in Table 4.2, a large proportion came from the south-west of Ireland, an area that had experienced some of the highest levels of mortality in the country up to 1850. One subscriber, Timothy McDonald from Glanworth, County Cork, was born in 1842 and emigrated to New York in 1850, where he worked as a marble-cutter and was father to eleven children. He wrote of his ‘horrible recollections of hundreds of coffinless graves on the banks of the Blackwater. Ah yes, we remember the slaughter of ’47 and ’48 by England’s artificial Famine and her poor house soup. Though only a 111 Miller, Emigrants and Exiles, 353, 550. 112 Lee, ‘Interpreting Irish America’, 18.

Famine memories

215

boy at the time, I shall never forget the cruel jeers of ruffian gentry.’ James Mulligan from Westmeath advised O’Donovan Rossa to keep up skirmishing and ‘don’t be afraid that you may establish any new precedent’; that Ireland had endured ‘British-made famines’ was justification enough.113 In July 1880, a letter to the fund from ‘An Irish Exile’ proposed the destruction of British steamships in the Atlantic. Justifying the potential loss of life, the author wrote ‘In ’47, inside of 30 days between Liverpool and Quebec, I assisted in passing seventy-five dead bodies of our people over the ship’s side. Who cared for them?’114 Kerby Miller linked similar memories to the construction of emigration as a form of forced exile, and there is a lot to be said for this interpretation in the case of the dynamiters. Michael Brennan, a forty-one-year-old labourer, wrote, ‘I Live in Brooklyn N.Y. but I would rather live in my native Monaghan, if the tyranny of the English and their robber landlords would allow me.’ Patrick Ford called the fund’s subscribers the ‘plundered and exterminated exiles’.115 The Skirmishing Fund functioned as a space where memories of the Famine were shared and compared, even in competition with each other, and integrated into the larger complex of political memory. James Donnelly has illustrated how Famine emigrants gave political meaning to evictions by viewing them as part of systemic misrule in Ireland, and not simply the actions of one particular landlord at one particular time.116 During the economic downturn of the late 1870s, attitudes were hardened by newspaper reports of skeletal children and fresh evictions, which suggested that the Famine was not just a past memory, but continued to be a present danger. These concerns accounted for the strength of Irish American support for the Land League in the 1880s, but it also helps to explain the appeal of the Skirmishing Fund. References to ‘robber landlords’ were countless in the letters sent to The Irish World, and reports of forceful evictions in Ireland in the late 1870s revived bitter memories among the Irish in America and intensified the desire to strike out against injustices in the home country. This movement back and forth across the Atlantic, be it physical or merely imaginative, shaped the Skirmishing Fund and defined the concerns of the subscribers. Memories of a catastrophic event and a sense of enforced exile in the USA were blended together in the columns of the fund, which nurtured a sense of moral superiority that legitimised 113 The Irish World, 8 and 22 April 1876; United States Federal Census, 1880, 1900. 114 ‘An Irish Exile’ to O’Donovan Rossa, 10 July 1880, in O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. I, 538. 115 The Irish World, 29 April 1876, 7 July 1877. 116 Donnelly, ‘The Construction of the Memory of the Famine’, 44.

216

The dynamiters and their supporters

something as unprecedented as urban guerrilla warfare. Many emigrants did not plan to return to Ireland in the short term, making physical participation in insurrection impossible, but subscribing to the Skirmishing Fund allowed them to strike back without leaving their new home. These subscriptions, perhaps unsurprisingly, exposed them to much ill will and ridicule in the mainstream press. As we will see in the next chapter, magazines and newspapers depicted donations from these ‘dupes’ as little more than blank cheques for the lavish appetites of conniving patriots.

5

Bridget and the bomb: violence, Irishness and gender

When summing up his experiences after twenty-five years as a spy in Irish America, Henri Le Caron wrote in his memoirs, ‘there is no greater fraud in this nineteenth century of ours than the modern Irish patriotic agitator in America. Gold is his god … he sells the votes he can command, and pockets the funds over which he has control.’1 Le Caron’s vocation assured his prejudice, but this image of the swindlerpatriot was not peculiar in the USA in the 1880s. Newspaper reports on the Fenians exaggerated cultural stereotypes of Irishness in ways that questioned their political goals and depicted them as charlatans who lived parasitically off naive subscribers. Of the various manifestations of militant nationalism, the dynamiters and their ‘dupes’ received the most merciless ridicule. Journalistic articles emphasised the perfidy of the organisers of the Skirmishing Fund, whose real aim was to finance an idle, luxurious lifestyle, while the subscribers were lampooned in equal measure for their gullibility and tolerance of violence. Campaigns of violence are cultural battlefields as well as political ones. The creation of negative identities and stereotypes during the skirmishing campaign functioned as a means of influencing action. Distorted representations of class, ethnicity and gender featured prominently in visual representations of the dynamiters in the mainstream New York press, which sought to delegitimise militant Irish nationalism through emphasising the irrationality and ignorance of the subscribers. In the nineteenth century, cartoons of Irish people were regularly characterised by crude, subhuman features and this trend found its zenith in depictions of the dynamiters, at whom satirists took dead aim. Unsurprisingly, caricatures of Irish people in nineteenth-century magazines have stoked debates over racial attitudes, prejudices and discrimination. Historians Perry Curtis and Roy Foster have generated a dialogue about whether cartoon images of Irish people were 1 Henri Le Caron, Twenty-Five Years in the Secret Service: The Recollections of a Spy, London, 1893, 278–9.

217

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Bridget and the bomb: violence, Irishness and gender

representative of racial prejudices or simply indicative of contemporary standards of satire in Victorian Britain. The former pointed to the predominance of negative, simianised stereotypes of the Irish in Victorian magazines while Foster, among others, drew attention to positive images and argued that the simianised ‘Paddy’ reflected class antipathy and satire more than racial prejudice.2 Here, our attention turns to cartoons and satirical magazines in the USA, rather than Britain. The analysis is concerned with representations of violence and not racial prejudice, but the cartoons analysed nonetheless connected the dynamiters to stereo­ typed notions of racial and gendered inferiority. Cartoons do not give historians a conclusive insight into contemporary prejudices. But neither are they neutral. Cultural historian Peter Burke has argued that images both show us the ‘conventions for representation current in a given culture’, but also provide valuable clues about ‘attitudes, values and prejudices’.3 Images of Irishness in American publications were part of a late-nineteenth-century culture of visual satire and representation, but they also functioned as a stage on which embedded prejudices and elitism were reproduced for a mass audience.

‘The credulity of the hod-carriers and servant girls’

When Patrick Crowe and O’Donovan Rossa hinted at attacks on British passenger steamers in the Atlantic in 1881, the consternation of the New York press was aroused because of the threat posed to American travellers. Many newspapers, however, did not condemn the proposal in moral terms or label it terrorism: rather, it was ridiculed as a money-making scheme.4 The liberal Brooklyn Eagle referred to Patrick Crowe, not as a dangerous terrorist, but as a ‘shallow fraud’ who made 2 See L. Perry Curtis, Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, Washington, DC, 1997; R. F. Foster, Paddy & Mr Punch: Connections in Irish and English History, London, 1993, 171–94; Henry Miller, ‘The Problem with Punch’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), 285–302; Sheridan Gilley, ‘English Attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780– 1900’, in Colin Holmes (ed.), Immigrants and Minorities in British Society, London, 1978, 81–110. On the Irish and race in America, see Kevin Kenny, ‘Race, Violence and Anti-Irish Sentiment in the Nineteenth Century’, in Joseph Lee and Marion R. Casey (eds.), Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States, New York, 2007, 364–78; Mitchell Snay, Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites: Race and Nationality in the Era of Reconstruction, Baton Rouge, 2008; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, New York, 1995; David R. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London, 1991. 3 Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence, Ithaca, NY, 2001, 184. 4 The section heading is a quote from an article entitled ‘Amateur Revolutionists’, The New York Times, 9 August 1881.

‘The credulity of the hod-carriers and servant girls’

219

sensational statements for the sole purpose of stimulating ‘continued donations’ to the United Irishman. Were O’Donovan Rossa and Crowe ‘guilty of murder? No, they haven’t the souls above the shabby rascality of obtaining money on false pretences … it is easier to live by begging and vaporing than by industry, and to some characters this mode of existence is preferable.’5 The conservative New York Times agreed. The Skirmishing Fund followed an established Fenian tradition of ‘draining Irish American pockets’. Instead of dynamite attacks, the fund ‘had nought for its results except the enrichment of schemers and the disgrace of the Irish cause’.6 When reporting on the 1883 trial of Dr Gallagher and his associates the Brooklyn Eagle observed how one of the team – William Lynch – had quickly turned state’s evidence. His actions ‘justified the English sneer, already shamefully proved true in Dublin, that whenever two Irishmen engage in crime one is sure to betray the other provided a good bonus is offered for treachery’. When John Daly and James Egan were arrested one year later, the newspaper ridiculed the outcry in the British press. Skirmishing was not a dangerous global revolutionary conspiracy: ‘the twaddling and preposterous humbug of lectures upon explosives cannot be called a conspiracy … the truth seems to be that the dynamite talkers on this side have duped the Englishmen as well as subscribers to their funds’.7 Undoubtedly, Irish American nationalism had its share of professional patriots capable of little beyond feathering their own nests. For some, material gain in the USA surpassed the goal of independence in Ireland. As discussed in the previous chapter, Philip Cronin’s body was found in a sewer after he attempted to reveal the financial affairs of the Clan-na-Gael Triangle and, in the late 1870s, O’Donovan Rossa’s irresponsible management of the Skirmishing Fund was one reason why others moved to reallocate control of the fund. The secrecy with which revolutionary funds were employed made it easy, on the one hand, for Irish American nationalists to play with the proceeds, and on the other, for the press to accuse them of misappropriation. The subscribers to nationalist funds were equally aware of the patriot-profiteer and were anxious about the destination of their dollars, with one lamenting that ‘Fenians, in the past years, have received thousands upon thousands of dollars of the poor people’s money … [and] built themselves fine houses with the people’s hard earnings.’8 5 Brooklyn Eagle, 3 August 1881. 6 The New York Times, 8 October 1881; The Times (London), 27 October 1881. 7 Brooklyn Eagle, 20 April 1883, 14 April 1884. 8 The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator (New York), 8 April 1876.

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Bridget and the bomb: violence, Irishness and gender

Some reputations for wrongdoing were certainly merited, but this does not fully account for the persistency of the themes of perfidy, laziness and violence in the press, which are better explained by embedded perceptions of Irishness in the United States at the time. Historiography has highlighted the reception of the Irish as inferiors in the antebellum when the Famine immigrants began to flood cities, with hostility resulting from the host society’s adjustment to the new arrivals. The diffusion of cultural and racial stereotypes continued after the initial period of acculturation between natives and newcomers, eventually fading in the 1890s.9 The Irish, of course, were not alone in this process. After the failure of Reconstruction in the American south, ideas of black racial inferiority were widely accepted with little protest in the north.10 Historian Walter Nugent has maintained that attitudes toward US expansion in Alaska, the Philippines and elsewhere in the decades following the Civil War reflected ‘the racist hauteur so common among Americans of that time’. During the annexation of the Philippines in particular, ‘inferiority was assumed, not analysed; it was a conventional wisdom, resting on racial and religious biases prevalent among even educated Americans of that day’.11 Prejudices were strikingly evident in the front-page cartoons of The Irish World itself, where Jews were repeatedly portrayed as moneylenders, bankers and enemies of labour (Figure 5.1). Ford asserted that his paper ‘was not opposed to any class on account of any religious views it may entertain’, and ‘emphatically and decidedly’ condemned persecution based on race or creed. Nonetheless, Irish World journalists continually referred to the Russian Jews’ ‘hereditary vocation of usurers’ and anti-Jewish sentiment was palpable in the writings of a number of correspondents. Trans-Atlantic, one of the paper’s more prominent contributors, frequently played on cultural stereotypes of Jewish moneylenders and repeated the contention that international banking dynasties like the Rothschilds were responsible for the depressed state of the working class. When reviewing the 1878 work by anti-Semitic author Frederick Millingen – The Conquest of the World by the Jews – Trans-Atlantic praised the book, commenting that it ‘shows 9 Kenny, ‘Race, Violence and Anti-Irish Sentiment’; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White, passim. 10 George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on AfroAmerican Character and Destiny, 1817–1914, Hanover, NH, 1987, 198–227. 11 Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion, New York, 2008, 267, 285.

‘The credulity of the hod-carriers and servant girls’

Figure 5.1 ‘The Avaricious Man and His Goose: A Hint to the Usurious Money Lords’, The Irish World, 18 August 1877.

221

222

Bridget and the bomb: violence, Irishness and gender

them the subtle leeches of the lifeblood of society everywhere’.12 The ‘Shylock’ cartoons in The Irish World reflected the newspaper’s opposition to international financial networks, but at the same time they were symptomatic of embedded anti-Semitic prejudices. Similarly, cartoons of Irish people in Puck and Harper’s Weekly reflected opposition to political corruption, the Vatican and violence, but they were also steeped in ethnic prejudice. In the mainstream press the perceived staples of Irishness – violent, temperamental, indolent  – were fully manifest in literary and visual representations of the Fenians. Stereotyped paradigms of ‘Paddy’ and ‘Bridget’ crossed the Atlantic from Victorian Britain in the mid nineteenth century and were soon employed to ridicule Irish immigrants in American magazines. This protosimian caricature had emerged in Britain during the French Revolution and was used to portray the agents of the Terror. By 1850, however, the ape-like figure had come to be associated specifically with Irishmen and women, and during the period of the Land War (1879–82) simian physiognomies were crudely exaggerated. Caricatures of Irish people emphasised what historian Perry Curtis has termed ‘physiognomical coding’ in his study Apes and Angels. The Fenian was depicted as a dangerous creature that ‘looked like a cross between a monstrous ape and primitive man … Notorious for his violent ways, this hirsute epitome of rebellion was a troglodyte or hybrid ape-man bent on revenge.’13 The image of the violent Irish American Fenian, which had been prominent in British magazines after the 1867 rising and Clerkenwell explosion, found fullest expression during the skirmishing campaign.14 Cultural stereotypes of Irishness were exploited to lampoon the dynamiters, emphasise associations with barbarity and underline how they were unfit to engage in politics. Through portraying the rebel as primitive and lacking the basic competence to carry out conspiracies, his violent actions were shown to be manifestations of a fixed essence, rather than motivated by real social or political grievances. Figure 5.2, from the New York-based magazine Puck, depicts a simianised O’Donovan Rossa swinging over the Atlantic and raining down bombs on Great Britain. Caricatures in American satirical magazines

12 The Irish World, 12 October 1878, 21 May 1881. 13 Curtis, Apes and Angels, xxii–xxiv, 151–3. 14 On images of Irish American Fenians in the British press in 1867 see Michael de Nie, ‘“A Medley Mob of Irish American Plotters and Irish Dupes”: The British Press and Transatlantic Fenianism’, The Journal of British Studies, 40(2) (2001), 213–40.

‘The credulity of the hod-carriers and servant girls’

223

Figure 5.2 Frederick Opper, ‘Gorilla Warfare’, Puck, 19 March 1884.

typically portrayed the dynamiters in this ape-like manner, but they rarely gave serpentine qualities to their subjects in the manner of the cartoons in Figure 5.3. These drawings from the British magazine Judy respectively show the dynamiter as a coiled snake-like species with a simian head, confined in a laboratory bell-jar; and as a toad, but again with a simian face. These hybrid physical forms pushed the dynamiter below the ape on the evolutionary scale to the level of amphibian or reptile. Serpentine images did not feature in American magazines, and their presence in Punch and Judy indicated the degree of anxiety over dynamite attacks in London, where the panic and terror of the

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Bridget and the bomb: violence, Irishness and gender

 Figure 5.3 Details taken from two cartoons published by Judy: (a) 2 March 1881, (b) 5 February 1885.

1867 Clerkenwell explosion were undoubtedly present in mind. In the 1880s, serpentine features distinguished the dynamiters from the apelike Fenians of the 1860s and other stock Irish characters in British magazines, suggesting a new level of moral decadence. In the past Irish rebels’ perceived ‘feebleness in action’ had been the object of ridicule in Britain, United Ireland noted in 1884, but the dynamite outrages shocked Britain and were vilified in the press.15 By contrast, caricatures in prominent satirical magazines in the USA portrayed the dynamiters as comical, simian characters who differed little from the stock portrayal of the prognathous Irish immigrant, suggesting they were viewed more as dishonest profiteers or bungling dupes, rather than dangerous revolutionaries. Media representations of the dynamiters reflected their lower-class support-base. The subscribers to the fund were found, in large part, 15 United Ireland (Dublin), 8 March 1884.

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on the different tiers of the working class in Irish America. Magazines and newspapers dwelt on images of male labourers and female domestic servants, portraying them as figures who were, firstly, intrinsically tolerant of violence because of their peasant backgrounds and, secondly, irrational enough to believe that ‘scientific warfare’ was viable. The dynamiters themselves were depicted as inept bunglers who, despite having all material and financial resources at their disposal, were intellectually unfit to carry out successful attacks. These images serve as striking examples of the mechanisms used to contest the political, economic or social meaning that violent revolutionaries attributed to their deeds. Satirical magazines applied the same physiognomical coding to both the agents of violence and their gullible subscribers, suggesting that both acted out a casual acceptance of violence. The images selected for this study come from two of the usual suspects: Harper’s Weekly (A Journal of Civilisation) and Puck (A Journal of Mirth and Fun). Launched in 1857, Harper’s Weekly became well known for the work of German cartoonist Thomas Nast, an influential political force in the 1870s. The weekly magazine was enthusiastically Republican and its attacks on Tammany Hall helped circulation climb to over 300,000 in the late 1870s. In the 1884 presidential elections, however, Harper’s Weekly abandoned the Republican Party and supported Democrat Grover Cleveland, who successfully opposed the pro-Irish candidate James Blaine. Puck was established in 1876 by the Austrian-born Joseph Keppler and reached a circulation of 90,000 in the 1880s. Politically conservative-Democrat, Puck nevertheless shared the Mugwump worldview of Harper’s Weekly and vigorously attacked Tammany Hall and the Vatican, particularly during the papacy of Pope Leo XIII. Each issue included three multicoloured lithograph cartoons that were not subtle in their stock portrayals of farmers, Catholic bishops, Jewish pawnbrokers and African American servants. Staples of Puck’s satire throughout the 1880s were the ‘Paddy’ and ‘Bridget’ caricatures of the working-class Irish, which featured repeatedly during the dynamite campaign.16 They were the ever-willing dupes who were swindled into sending their hard-earned dollars to support lazy relatives in Ireland, as they in

16 See Tom Culbertson, ‘The Golden Age of American Political Cartoons’, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 7 (2008), 277–99; Samuel J. Thomas, ‘Mugwump Cartoonists, the Papacy, and Tammany Hall in America’s Gilded Age’, Religion and American Culture, 14 (2004), 213–50; John J. Appel, ‘From Shanties to Lace Curtains: The Irish Image in Puck, 1876–1910’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 13 (1971), 365–75 (366–7).

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turn were swindled into supporting landlord-murdering, dynamitehappy compatriots. Satirical cartoons probably had small bearing on the dynamiters’ selfperception, but it is incorrect to suggest Irish Americans were oblivious. The Christmas 1879 issue of Harper’s Weekly published a centrepiece cartoon depicting a charitable Irish landlord distributing food and gifts among impoverished, grateful tenants during the economic downturn. The image did not escape the Irish press in New York, which criticised it as symptomatic of the magazine’s overall bias. Cartoonists’ ‘desire to make the Irish appear a beggarly, worthless race’, wrote Patrick Ford, perpetuated the view that Irish immigrants were ‘neither meriting respect nor deserving sympathy’.17 A decade later, the front page of The Irish World carried a reprint of one of Punch’s cover illustrations depicting an Irish American politician conning the sympathy of the female figure Columbia. ‘The evident object’, wrote Ford, ‘is to malign citizens of Irish descent in this country’.18 In the three images below from Puck’s cartoonist Frederick Burr Opper, we see the prognathous figure representing several different aspects of Irishness. Figure 5.4 depicts the organisers and subscribers to the Skirmishing Fund. The latter, on the right of the image, are labourers, domestic servants and their children. All are present in equal number (two of each) and are all eagerly handing over their earnings, while in the background a queue of subscribers stretches to the end of the street. The men have shovels in their hands, the women have pots and pans, and the children hold brooms suggesting that they have left school and entered the workforce early. The presence of the children is notable: married couples often subscribed to the Skirmishing Fund and included their children’s names with small donations, keen to demonstrate a patriotic family. In the cartoon, the children’s presence also suggests the immaturity of the enterprise. To the left, the leaders are getting fat on subscriptions. In ‘Irish Industries’, the bomb-maker, the Tammany politician, the Ribbonman or agrarian assassin, and the impoverished beggarman are all manifestations of one essentialised character with uniform features. In Figure 5.6, Opper recommends a bombardment of soap, carbolic acid, fresh water, towels and insect powder for an Irish village complete with ‘dynamite factory’. Pigs run freely through houses while prayers are offered up in the hope the ‘bombardment’ will stop. The drawing touched on several cultural stereotypes of Irishness while the means of 17 The Irish World, 4 January 1879. 18 Ibid., 5 January 1889; Punch (London), 17 November 1888.

Figure 5.4 Frederick Opper, ‘The Irish Skirmishers’ “Blind Pool” ’, Puck, 6 September 1882.

Figure 5.5 Frederick Opper, ‘Irish Industries’, Puck, 2 November 1881.

Figure 5.6 Frederick Opper, ‘A Bombardment that Would Paralyse Them’, Puck, 18 April 1883.

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ending the dynamite campaign is found in civilising the Irish peasants, rather than finding a political solution. Comparable visual representations during the 1880s were those of European anarchists, who were frequently drawn as wild aliens, sometimes of Jewish origin. The national phobia about anarchism was most clearly manifest after the 1886 Haymarket explosion and throughout the 1890s, when the Fenians had faded from front pages. In the 1880s, however, Johann Most was a figure that many satirical magazines paired with O’Donovan Rossa. Most’s face was badly disfigured from a childhood disease, which he attempted to disguise with a beard, but the mainstream press drew attention to it as a symbol of his otherworldliness, his fanatical behaviour.19 At the same time, the dynamiters generally fared badly in contemporary comparisons with other revolutionary organisations. In Figure 5.7 – ‘A Big Difference’ – the thrifty, disloyal Fenian outstretches his hand, eager to make money out of turning informer. Unlike professional nihilists, who were prepared to go to Siberia and suffer real hardships for their political convictions, the dynamiter engaged in conspiracy only casually and with financial gain in mind. Russian revolutionaries were portrayed in popular media as determined and professional. Invariably, they were self less intellectuals who reluctantly resorted to violence as the only means of fighting the backward system of government that they suffered under. They were commonly associated with nobility and high culture, owing in part to the noble origins of the famous anarchists Kropotkin and Bakunin, and the widespread dissemination of memoirs and political writings, especially in the case of Stepniak. Choi Chatterjee has argued that, in the USA, images of Russian nihilists ‘seamlessly linked the possession of high culture and noble bearing with the capacity for violence and radicalism’. These cultural and intellectual associations ‘sanitised’ nihilist violence for the American public. 20 In contrast, the dynamiters were stereotyped as uneducated thugs who didn’t intellectualise their actions but engaged in violence for its own sake or financial reward. A similar case could be made in Britain, where the tolerance and support offered to Russian revolutionaries vexed both the dynamiters and more moderate nationalists. After the House of Commons explosion in 19 Puck (New York), 11 February 1885. 20 Choi Chatterjee, ‘Transnational Romance, Terror, and Heroism: Russia in American Popular Fiction, 1860–1917’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50 (2008), 753–77.

Figure 5.7 Frederick Opper, ‘A Big Difference’, Puck, 2 May 1883. Collection of the New-York Historical Society.

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1885, the self-conscious terrorist Stepniak described the attack in The Times as ‘mere babywork’ when compared with the activities of nihilists. The Land Leaguer William O’Brien, an ardent critic of skirmishing, declared, ‘Nothing could be more wantonly mischievous [than the] platonic affection for foreign explosionists’ in the British daily press, which ‘lionised’ Stepniak despite his violent credentials. In Westminster, the constitutionalist-nationalist J. J. O’Kelly asserted, ‘there are Members of this House who did not hesitate to support Stepniak, a confessed murderer. It is only when these acts are directed against yourselves that they become crimes.’21 Irish caricatures in Puck and Harper’s Weekly were also manifestations of anti-Catholicism and opposition to papal interventions in American life. Leo XIII was a figure held to obloquy in several newspapers, and Vatican interference in non-denominational education in the USA was a source of pervasive unease.22 The Catholic threat to the host culture, however, is not sufficient to explain fully the pejorative representations of Irish immigrants. Firstly, given the diversity of the American population in the postbellum, Irish Catholics were not, by their mere presence, challenging a block culture. Neither were the cartoonists themselves representative of an elite culture or a particular religion, even if their audience was largely the urban middle class of the east coast. The founder of Puck, Keppler, was a Catholic immigrant, albeit his anti-­clericalism had estranged him from the church; Opper was the Ohio-born son of a Jewish immigrant; fellow cartoonists Bernard Gillam and Friedrich Graetz were English and Austrian respectively; and Nast, as mentioned above, was German.23 Arguably, Puck’s cartoonists were marginalised from the mainstream of American-ness, which may have led them to construct the concept all the more rigidly, as Roy Foster noted to be the case among the cartoonists who worked for Punch in Britain.24 On the pages of Puck and Harper’s Weekly, Catholicism combined with class, corruption and violence to render the Irish unfit for politics. The dynamiters advocated a ‘new mode of warfare’ but cartoons 21 United Ireland, 31 January 1885; HHC, 3 August 1891, col. 1182; Michael J. Hughes, ‘British Opinion and Russian Terrorism in the 1880s’, European History Quarterly, 41 (2011), 255–77. 22 Thomas, ‘Mugwump Cartoonists’, 236–7; Leroy V. Eid, ‘Puck and the Irish: “The One American Idea”’, Éire-Ireland, 11 (1976), 18–35. 23 Appel, ‘From Shanties to Lace Curtains’, 369; Helena Frenkil Schlam, ‘Contemporary Scribes: Jewish American Cartoonists’, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 20(1) (2001), 94–112. 24 Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, 178.

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suggested that there was nothing new about skirmishing; rather, it was the predictable extension of the violent tendencies of lower-class Irish. Kevin Kenny has argued that Irish associations with violence emerged from objective observations: ‘only the most blinkered historian could deny that the American Irish engaged in sustained and sometimes spectacular episodes of collective social and political violence throughout the nineteenth century’.25 Another study by criminologist Hugh O’Rourke has argued that Irish immigrants of the ‘1845 to 1875 period acted according to a cultural tradition that accepted collective violence as both a problem solving technique and a recreational activity’.26 In this sense, violence was part of a cultural baggage that the Irish brought with them to the United States, where immigrants continued to be habitually violent at labour confrontations, faction fights, parades, picnics, political meetings and elections. It may be argued, then, that the subscribers to the Skirmishing Fund were not hostile to the militant proposals of O’Donovan Rossa because violence was already accepted as a technique of political and social communication. Skirmishing was not seen as a transgression, but was understood in the context of the traditions of rural Ireland. But does such an explanation deny political consciousness and overemphasise the importance of violent cultures? It is difficult to establish connections between recreational violence and political violence owing to the paltriness of source material. Moreover, cultural stereotypes can distort the dynamics behind revolutionary movements. As mentioned in the previous chapter, indications show that the supporters of skirmishing arrived in the USA in the 1860s, and many after the Civil War. Therefore they arrived during a period when Irish recreational violence in American cities was already beginning to fade, even if it did not disappear completely until the late 1870s. For the majority of Irish Americans who did not support the skirmishing campaign, the images of violent Paddies and Bridgets re-enforced the stereotypes they had spent years struggling to overcome. The association made by cartoonists between working-class males and the dynamiters were somewhat accurate, but did Irish women in the United States also contribute?

25 Kenny, ‘Race, Violence and Anti-Irish Sentiment’, 371. 26 Hugh E. O’Rourke, ‘Irish Immigrant Involvement in Collective Violence in New York from 1845 to 1875’, Ph.D. thesis, City University of New York, 2001, vi; Patrick O’Donnell, The Irish Faction Fighters of the 19th Century, Dublin, 1975.

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Domestic servants: the bankrollers of violence?

Irish immigration to the United States was distinctive for its equal sex balance. Irish women migrated in much higher proportions than their European counterparts and many left home unmarried. In this respect they were quite different from Italy’s ‘men without women’ and Mediterranean migrants in general, while Jewish females tended to arrive in families, unlike the single Irish.27 For many Irish women, the quickest way of finding both a safe place to live and employment in the host country was to enter domestic service. The job was low-paid but rent-free, and for single women it was often the best of a bad lot, allowing them to provide for themselves, send remittances or sometimes save a dowry for marriage in Ireland. Yet, most other immigrant groups and native-born women avoided domestic service, which was generally considered to be lower than a factory job. Moreover, it was a job based on domination and placed women in vulnerable situations.28 Outside their employers’ homes, domestic servants found a means of self-assertion in the Catholic Church, donating money to church buildings and participating in benevolent associations, charity works and the social space made available through the church.29 The generosity with which domestic servants donated to the church encouraged the derisive assertion that Irishwomen had more money than sense and therefore were also the principal financiers of the Fenian movement. From the 1860s onwards, Fenian violence was lampooned using images of femininity and, particularly in the USA, cartoons of the Irish domestic servant handing over her savings to perfidious patriots became a staple of anti-Fenian propaganda. Aside from New York press reports, dispatches from the British consul in New York also suggested that unmarried servants bankrolled the Fenians. The popularity of this commonly held belief originated in the 27 The phrase ‘men without women’ is found in Donna Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas, London, 2000, 8. 28 Timothy J. Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880–1928, Notre Dame, 2001, 54–5; Kerby A. Miller, with David N. Doyle and Patricia Kelleher, ‘“For Love and Liberty”: Irish Women, Migration and Domesticity in Ireland and America, 1815–1920’, in Patrick O’Sullivan (ed.), Irish Women and Irish Migration, Irish World Wide, 4, London, 1995, 41–65; Hasia R. Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century, Baltimore, 1983; Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth Century America, Middletown, CT, 1983. 29 Meagher, Inventing Irish America, 41; John Belchem, ‘Ethnicity and Labour History, with Special Reference to Irish Migration’, in Lex Heerma van Voss and Marcel van der Linden (eds.), Class and Other Identities: Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Writing of European Labour History, New York, 2002, 88–100 (96).

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campaign to finance the 1866 Canadian raid led by Colonel Roberts and Fenian veterans of the Union Army. The raid was funded in part by ‘Fenian Bonds’, an idea directly imported from the Civil War, when both the Union and the Confederacy partially financed their armies with patriotically advertised bond drives. These bonds were ‘given in exchange for ready money to the many simple souls who believed in the possibility of an Irish republic’, explained Henri Le Caron in his memoirs. ‘Very many of the persons displaying this credulity were Irish girls in service in the States, and thus came into vogue the sneering reference to the agitation being financed by the servant-girls of New York.’30 The myth of New York servant girls and Fenian bonds encouraged the view that Irishwomen had savings they were unable to spend on themselves. In 1870, The New York Times discussed the Fenian raids into Canada under the title ‘Servant Girls’ Warfare’. After the first explosions in Britain in 1881 the same paper predicted that the United Irishmen would collect ‘a rich harvest of sixpences from Irish servant girls by pretending to be dynamite fiends’.31 When ‘balloon warfare’ was imagined as a possible strategy in 1884 the Brooklyn Eagle commented, ‘this time poor servant girls and other friends of Ireland are to be asked to furnish the funds necessary to fit out balloons, carrying loads of dynamite … it is a really brilliant scheme and if properly advertised ought to secure its promoters from want for some time to come’.32 For many journalists and cartoonists the dynamiters’ targets weren’t English public buildings or civilians, but the savings of the Irish domestic servants who worked in the city. These women were represented in the image of Bridget, the spinster who was easily tricked into giving up her earnings in order to fund not only dynamite operations, but also the lavish lifestyles of professional patriots. The Bridget caricature had featured in anti-Irish propaganda since the 1850s, but the image became more prominent in the late 1870s and 1880s, often featuring distorted and subhuman aspects.33 ‘Easily led astray, impulsive to a fault, with a tender regard for their native land’, the New York servant girls’ support for militant nationalism was portrayed as something not 30 Le Caron, Twenty-Five Years, 27–8. 31 The New York Times, 4 May 1870, 22 August 1881. 32 Brooklyn Eagle, 21 June 1884. 33 For a comprehensive look at Irish females in Puck’s cartoons see Maureen Murphy, ‘Bridget and Biddy: Images of the Irish Servant Girl in Puck Cartoons, 1880–1890’, in C. Fanning (ed.), New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora, Carbondale, 2000, 152–75.

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Figure 5.8 Charles G. Bush, ‘Dynamiteurs in England’, Harper’s Weekly, 14 June 1884.

rationally thought out.34 Paradoxically, Bridget was both victim and villain. Agitators shamelessly took her money and endangered the lives of domestic servants in London with dynamite attacks such as one at Watkin Wynn’s residence in 1884. At the same time, Bridget was the financial impetus behind the bombing campaign and therefore shouldered some of the responsibility. In Puck and Harper’s Weekly, representations of femininity and violence functioned on four levels, illustrated here by images by four different cartoonists: the masculine, unwitting dupe; the prognathous half-human; the reluctant but vulnerable domestic servant; and the determined Hibernia. Charles Bush’s cartoon in Harper’s Weekly (Figure 5.8) places Bridget in London, where she is unwittingly about to accept an infernal machine from a suspicious ‘dynamiteur’ who blithely accepts her death as a 34 The New York Times, 29 April 1883.

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necessary consequence of blowing her ‘murderin’ British employers to smithereens’. Bridget is drawn with an aging face and brawny features. In the nineteenth century, ideas of nationalism and nationhood were often represented in the allegorical images of Britannia or Marianne. In the decade following German unification in 1871, images of Germania were particularly prevalent, as the mother of the German people and as a symbol of the potent nationalism that gave birth to a nation-state.35 In contrast with these nationalist allegories, cartoons of the aging Bridget and crooked dynamiter sneered at the weakness of the Irish separatist ideal, its inability to produce a mass movement. In ‘The Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs’ (Figure 5.9), Frederick Opper drew Bridget in the ‘Headquarters of the Dynamite Coterie’ in New York. She is depicted as a subhuman hybrid – half-goose with a simianised head and large teeth – that swallows promissory notes and bonds, laying eggs filled with money for O’Donovan Rossa. She is a victim, but undeserving of sympathy as she lacks the basic wits necessary to protect herself. Rossa exploits her mercilessly, commenting ‘we’ll never kill her while her appetite lasts’. Images of Irish women, though, were not consistently negative. In one Thomas Nast cartoon (Figure 5.10) the dynamiter stands over a domestic servant with a collection box or bowl, into which she is being bled from the elbow. Interestingly, the male figure is collecting for a ‘parliamentary fund’ suggesting collusion between Parnell and militant nationalism. She is vulnerable under the pressure of his rapacity, and the dynamiters’ ‘need for more innocent blood’, nonetheless she moves to distance herself, looking at him suspiciously. She is not the typically gullible domestic servant, and her face is free from prognathous features. Finally, cartoon portrayals of the dynamiters also featured a beautiful, dark-haired woman named Erin or Hibernia, whose longing for peace was perpetually frustrated by violent conspirators. In this image by Frederick Graetz (Figure 5.11), Hibernia prepares to receive political concessions from Britannia, but is obstructed from doing so by the dynamiter. Interestingly, Hibernia is not protected by Gladstone or another male figure (as was often the case in Punch); instead she looks assertively and defiantly at the dynamiter. Unlike him, she is free of prognathous features, but neither is she the equal of Britannia. The latter is depicted in warrior-like fashion and in sovereign dress compared to the barefoot Hibernia, who represents the peasant girl as yet uncorrupted by rebellion. 35 Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller, ‘Looking for Germania’, in Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Nation, Oxford, 1998, 1–18.

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Figure 5.9 Frederick Opper, ‘The Goose that Lays the Golden Eggs’, Puck, 22 August 1885. Collection of the New-York Historical Society.

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Figure 5.10 Thomas Nast, ‘For Ireland’s Sake’, Harper’s Weekly, 7 March 1885.

The Bridget caricature appeared on comparatively few occasions in the British magazines Punch and Judy. Were Irish domestic servants simply more numerous and conspicuous in New York than in London, or did they actually support the dynamiters in the USA and not in Britain? The stereotype of the Irish labourer subscribing to the Skirmishing Fund was accurate to some degree, as we have seen in the previous chapter, but the relationship of the domestic servant to political violence needs to be questioned further. The fact that the circumstances of New York domestic servants were congenial to saving, more so than most males, has added stamina to the contention that they generously financed Irish nationalism. O’Donovan Rossa himself commented that females’ ‘substantial endorsement of the Skirmishing Fund is a rebuke to those brave and pious Irishmen who would do nothing “sinful” against magnanimous England’. He saw

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Figure 5.11 Frederick Graetz, ‘Ireland’s Evil Genius’, Puck, 11 June 1884. Collection of the New-York Historical Society.

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the role of Irishwomen as little more than financers on the outside, looking in at the revolutionary organisations. In the first weeks of the Skirmishing Fund, one female contributor from Galway wrote, ‘if we cannot do the fighting, we can encourage those who can’. O’Donovan Rossa agreed. He did not see any major roles for women in the ‘operations abroad’, apart from to ‘encourage the men, press them into service, [and] to act as volunteers in bringing men to be “sworn in”’.36 Yet the frequency with which associations were made between domestic servants and the dynamiters was entirely out of proportion with actual female contributions to The Irish World or the United Irishman. During the first two months of the Skirmishing Fund, March and April 1876, 31 women subscribed. Their average contribution was $0.50, which amounted to $15.50, or 0.6 per cent of the total of $2,484 collected during that period. Out of this figure of 31, the majority (over 60 per cent) were married. Consequently, it may be assumed donations from domestic servants were a very small fraction of total contributions.37 During the same period in 1877, letters entitled ‘A Woman’s Suggestion’ and ‘One of the Irish Girl’s Dollars’ were visible in The Irish World, but donations remained low. Only 10 women, of which 7 were single, sent subscriptions that amounted to $7 out of a total of $1,037 (0.7 per cent). Irishwomen, like their male counterparts, were feeling the pinch as depression dragged on, although one disparaging letter from Brooklyn remarked that despite hard times, domestic servants continued to send money in ‘another direction’, presumably as remittances and church offerings.38 In the March/April period of 1878, female contributions increased with the general pattern of a substantial surge in subscriptions. Almost $10,000 was collected during these 8 weeks; 207 women sent in their contributions from across the United States and overseas, and the comparatively high number of 163 were single. Taking the average female subscription to be $0.75 for that year, all female contributions came to $155.25, or 1.7 per cent of the total collected during the period. Of that figure of $155.25, unmarried women accounted for $122.25, or 1.3 per cent, and it may be assumed that a considerable section of those single women were domestic servants.39 Whereas married women subscribed with their husbands almost without exception, single women organised collections, wrote letters 36 The Irish World, 8 and 29 April 1876. 37 Ibid., 11 March–29 April 1876. 38 Ibid., 3 March–28 April 1877; 21 April 1877. 39 Ibid., 2 March–27 April 1878.

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and generally participated in the Skirmishing Fund in the same way as males, but outside male-dominated associations. Contributions collected in associations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) or patriotic organisations did not include any single women in the months surveyed; indeed, the AOH only formally accepted women into the organisation in 1894. Females participated in informal collections organised beyond the walls of the traditional Irish American clubs; these female group-donations were particularly noticeable in the New England cities of Lowell, Providence and Bridgeport. These women also frequently printed their county of origin and group collections were sometimes based around the home county.40 When O’Donovan Rossa split with The Irish World and formed the United Irishman, The New York Times believed he had carried the loyalties of the servant girls with him.41 Research with the ledger lists of subscribers, census records and city directories for the states of New York and New Jersey, however, showed that a mere 9 of 484 subscribers to the United Irishman between 1883 and 1887 were women; of these 9, 3 probably worked in service.42 The other 6 were widows who continued to pay their husbands’ subscriptions. Similarly, when Patrick Ford launched the Emergency Fund in 1884, single women accounted for a modest number of subscriptions. In 1983, Hasia Diner contended that ‘beyond a few scattered cases … few Irish-American women participated in the effort to rid the Emerald Isle of the hated British oppressors’.43 This conclusion continues to be revised by research on the prominent roles Irish American women played in political organisations. Ely Janis argues that ‘large numbers of women were active in Irish nationalism and that their participation provided them with an opportunity to declare their desire for a public voice and inclusion within the male-dominated realm of Irish American nationalist activity and public life’.44 Women more than likely donated to the Skirmishing Fund anonymously or in less obvious ways than sending their names to The Irish World. On the evidence available, however, the economic role of women was 40 Ibid., 20 May 1876. 41 The New York Times, 8 April 1883. 42 O’Donovan Rossa’s 1880–6 Ledger, CUA, ODRPP, Box 5, Folder 11; United States Federal Census, 1880; Albany, Amsterdam, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Bergin Point, Elisabeth, Englewood, Jersey City, Newark, Passaic, Paterson and Trenton City Directories, 1880–9. 43 Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America, 128. 44 Ely M. Janis, ‘Petticoat Revolutionaries: Gender, Ethnic Nationalism, and the Irish Ladies’ Land League in the United States’, Journal of American Ethnic History, 27 (2008), 5–27.

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minor during the skirmishing campaign. Domestic servants provided an extremely small fraction of the dynamiters’ war chest and there is little evidence to suggest how they were otherwise active in the movement. Most immigrant societies and nationalist associations were maledominated, and held a patriarchal view of female political participation. Domestic service reduced female dependence on males and allowed for activities outside the household. But given the continued vulnerability of domestic servants it is not surprising that their presence on the skirmishing lists was negligible. They were dependent on the patronage of middle-class Protestant families and the ‘lace-curtain’ Irish families for their board and employment, and therefore it would have been risky to donate openly to the fund. In 1878, Brooklyn-based immigrant Johannah Leahy indicated the difficulties for single women of being associated with the Irish World lists, even though she remained defiant: ‘I wish to tell those who thought we had committed such a great crime in sending money to the S. F., that we are neither ashamed nor afraid to do the same again.’45 Furthermore, Irish immigrant women were, as Tim Meagher has noted, ‘fiercely loyal to the Catholic Church’.46 The strength of donations to church buildings may not have left much for the dynamiters’ collections. More importantly, every Sunday they listened to sermons about the wrongs of Fenianism and secret societies. This is not to say they were hostile to an independent Ireland, but revolutionary nationalism was incongruous with the church’s religious teaching. Moreover, the church and Catholic reform movements discouraged Irish women from participation in public life.47 The question then arises, why were domestic servants persistently identified as the financers of violence in the American press when they clearly were not? True, outside the ambit of the Skirmishing Fund similar stereotypes were applied: they gave money to conniving clergymen, were conned by Tammany politicians, or they slogged in the United States to allow lazy relatives in Ireland to live idly off their remittances. However, only in caricatures during the dynamite campaign did Bridget assume the subhuman characteristics that she shared with Paddy. Perhaps domestic servants, as unmarried Catholic women, challenged American mores when they stepped outside the 45 The Irish World, 23 March 1878. 46 Timothy J. Meagher, The Columbia Guide to Irish American History, New York, 2005, 176. 47 Janis, ‘Petticoat Revolutionaries’, 7–8.

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household and became politicised. Kathleen Wilson had contended that during the French Revolution, British fears about the potency of politicised women unleashed ideas of ‘“female masculinity”, that, in the guise of revolutionary fervour, seemed to threaten to erase proper distinctions between men and women’.48 Irish American women participated in large numbers in the Ladies’ Land League, which came to prominence during the same period as the dynamite attacks, in the early 1880s. Female political activity threatened to destabilise accepted social roles and was viewed with hostility in the mainstream press, which sought to reassert patriarchal social order through conflating the women who consciously supported the non-violent Land League with Bridget, the dull-witted peasant who didn’t know any better than to finance indiscriminate violence. In this way, politically active Irishwomen were denied agency and tarnished with the label of the dupe, politically useful only for their financial contributions. These stereotypes also reveal more general insecurities about female political activity in the self-image of established New York society, which were then projected onto the outsiders, the immigrant Irish women. Political threats are sometimes represented in gendered terms, and the Bridget caricature provided the press with a ready tool with which to ridicule and dismiss Irish nationalism and the Land League, references to which were found in several of the dynamite caricatures. In his study of the Molly Maguires, Kevin Kenny noted the ‘discursive equation of violence and disorder with the feminine and the irrational … the construction of a powerful and enduring myth that denied Irish perpetrators of violence all rationality and motivation, explaining their actions instead as a matter of inherent depravity’. Femininity was associated with passion, wildness and hence irrationality, evident in one image cited by Kenny, that depicted a ‘fierce young woman, dressed in black and brandishing her fist’.49 Similar images were evident when journalists and cartoonists targeted female revolutionaries of other ideologies or countries. During the French Revolution, loyalist propaganda evoked female ‘sexual dysfunction’ and a ‘ragged, hydra-headed virago’.50 In the USA, female labour agitators were portrayed as wild and vengeful, though also independent, as was the case with Emma Goldman and the Irish American Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Female Russian nihilists 48 Kathleen Wilson, ‘Nelson’s Women: Female Masculinity and Body Politics in the French and Napoleonic Wars’, European History Quarterly, 37 (2007), 562–81 (564). 49 Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, Oxford, 1998, 12, 261. 50 Wilson, ‘Nelson’s Women’, 567–8.

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were depicted as beautiful and cultured, though also licentious and susceptible to seduction by exotic male revolutionaries. During the Paris Commune, French satirical magazines such as Charivari eagerly depicted the ‘Pétroleuse’, a wild and dangerous woman said to have started the fires in Paris when Versailles troops entered the city during the final week of the Commune. This figure was also occasionally portrayed with subhuman features. Clear evidence showed a minority of the arsonists, at best, were women, but the threat was nonetheless presented in gendered terms.51 The Irish Bridget was stereotyped in a different shade. She was not vengeful and dangerous, but often docile and clueless. Neither was she seduced by revolutionaries; she simply couldn’t see through men who dressed in revolutionaries’ clothes but were actually no more than snake-oil salesmen. By and large, the image of the duped domestic servant with the crude physiognomy was employed as a mechanism that equated Fenian violence with the absence of power. In this sense, the techniques used to discredit the Paris Commune or female revolutionaries differed in the case of the dynamiters. In the latter, women were denied agency and portrayed as passive and vulnerable. The fact that the dynamiters depended on co-opting Bridget to finance their plans emphasised how quixotic and irrational their actions were. Along with the depictions of simianised males, these cartoons sought to emphasise the incompatibility of political space and the exertion of violence, and essentialise militant Irish nationalism as primitive, an anomaly in the modern world. Connecting to Bridget the Fenians became an effective tool to discredit violence and led to the ­commonplace ­association of domestic servants with the dynamite campaign, an association that was entirely fabricated. 51 Gay L. Gullickson, ‘La Pétroleuse: Representing Revolution’, Feminist Studies, 17 (1991), 241–65.

6

Skirmishing, the land question, revolutionary labour

‘A number of our correspondents and contributors write most bitterly of landlords’, O’Donovan Rossa observed one month after the Skirmishing Fund began in 1876, ‘and seem to delight at the idea that we are about to exterminate them. But this is traveling too fast … landlordism cannot be destroyed without first destroying the English government in Ireland.’ Rossa reprinted endless articles from Irish papers on the hardships suffered by labourers and tenant farmers, and proclaimed continuing evictions to be ‘as strong an appeal as I can make to you for co-operation in this work’.1 Yet, in keeping with IRB attitudes of the 1860s, he put the national question before social reform, viewing Irish independence as a panacea for all ills. But the fact that the Skirmishing Fund was housed in The Irish World complicated matters. The paper expressed increasingly radical views throughout the 1870s on labour and land reform. The Irish World’s radicalism infected the Skirmishing Fund and configured it as an amalgam of the political goals of Fenianism with a platform for social reform. In doing so, the paper registered a trend in Irish nationalism that soon became explicit in Ireland in 1878/9, when land reform agitators, militant nationalists and Irish parliamentarians combined efforts in what was termed the ‘new departure’ and achieved mass mobilisation during the Land War, 1879–82. Rather than being the death cry of a moribund Fenian movement, skirmishing was a critical juncture in the development of militant Irish nationalism and was informed by the particular political and social contexts of the period 1875–85. In his analysis of collective violence in Europe, Charles Tilly identified a transformation in what he called ‘repertoires of action’; before the mid nineteenth century protest actions held parochial aims and addressed local actors, but in the second half of the century a new repertoire emerged that 1 The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator (New York), 8 April and 6 May 1876.

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was ‘more national in scope: although available for local issues and enemies, it [lent] itself easily to co-ordination among many localities’.2 In Ireland, the Land League resembled this combination of new with old: it was a national, modern organisation that was also available for local struggles for power and incorporated the old tactics of agrarian secret societies. Skirmishing was also imagined as a means of striking against both local and national targets, but it incorporated a third, transnational level in that it was influenced by the long depression in the United States. ‘Land reform’ became the watchword of Irish attitudes to grievances in both Ireland and the USA, and this intersection between nationalism, land reform and the labour struggle was crucial to skirmishing’s appeal. The eviction, the secret society and the strike became the familial foci for the framing of narratives of violence. During the period 1875– 85, Patrick Ford saw labour and land as parts of a single transnational struggle, illuminated by his conviction that ‘the cause of the poor in Donegal is the cause of the factory slave in Fall River’.3 This movement between old and new homes shaded attitudes to dynamite and the skirmishing campaign. Contentious new departures in nationalist violence were concurrent with the eruption of pervasive agrarian unrest in Ireland and unprecedented levels of industrial violence in the United States. The Skirmishing Fund proposed violent actions carried out by small groups operating in secret, echoing the traditional tactics of agrarian secret societies in Ireland. But they were also modern, embracing scientific advances and emphasising the levelling quality of cheap, easily accessible dynamite. This chapter first examines the interaction of the skirmishing campaign and the Land War in Ireland, and attention then turns to how the dynamiters and other violent revolutionary and labour organisations cut across each other in New York during the period 1875–85.

The Irish World and the Land League

The global economic downturn of the late 1870s combined with domestic problems in agriculture in Ireland, and produced a severe economic crisis. Social tensions that had previously simmered became divisive during the downturn and flared up into the Land War. After 2 Charles Tilly, The Contentious French, Cambridge, MA, 1986, 380–407. 3 The Irish World, 8 January 1881; Eric Foner, ‘Class, Ethnicity and Radicalism in the Gilded Age: The Land League & Irish America’, Marxist Perspectives, 2 (1978), 6–55 (12–15); Timothy J. Meagher, Inventing Irish America: Generation, Class, and Ethnic Identity in a New England City, 1880–1928, Notre Dame, 2001, 181.

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his release from prison in 1877, the Fenian and social reformer Michael Davitt toured the United States and met with several Irish American nationalists. John Devoy later claimed that Davitt had been radicalised by Irish America, and when the two were introduced the idea was floated that Devoy and the Clan-na-Gael would support constitutional agitation for self-government and a radical programme of land reform in Ireland.4 Irish agriculture was suffering a crisis owing to lowering prices and a poor potato crop, and the situation offered revolutionary opportunities for all three elements of the new alliance. Meetings in Paris and Dublin between Clan-na-Gael, the IRB, Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell led to a common understanding and the ‘new departure’, a phrase conjured by Devoy in an article in the New York Herald in October 1878. Devoy and the IRB were impressed with Parnell and understood that he held strong sympathies for national independence. Parnell did not commit himself to separatism, but agreed with Devoy to agitate the land question aggressively, abandon federalism and pursue a general form of self-government, resist coercion, exclude sectarian issues from the platform, and support other nationalisms within the empire.5 The new departure was characterised above all by the Land League, an organisation founded in 1879 that combined local tenants’ rights associations, social reformers, insurrectionary Fenians (though not veterans like John O’Leary or James Stephens) and constitutional nationalists in an alliance to win reform of the land system. For militant nationalists the alliance was a gamble: successful reform of the land question might burn up the energies of the nationalist movement, but at the same time they calculated, as Paul Bew has indicated, that ‘the British Parliament was a “parliament of landlords” – it would not therefore, sponsor serious land reform. Any substantial mass Irish peasant agitation would, therefore, at some stage have to challenge the framework of the union.’6 The experience of organising and agitating within the Land League revitalised the rural IRB in 1880/1 and reconfigured the ways in which Fenianism interacted with wider politics in Ireland, beyond the insurrectionary programme of the 1860s. Yet the alliance failed to bring the revolutionary ends desired by some separatists and radical reformers, and it was Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary 4 Laurence Marley, Michael Davitt: Freelance Radical and Frondeur, Dublin, 2007, 37–9; T. W. Moody (ed.), Davitt and the Irish Revolution 1846–82, Oxford, 1981, 248. 5 F. S. L. Lyons, Charles Stewart Parnell, London, 1977, 80–1; Moody, Davitt, 250; Michael Davitt, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland; or, The Story of the Land League Revolution, London, 1904, 176–7. 6 Paul Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, Oxford, 2007, 312.

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Party that benefited most, consolidating their position as the dominant expression of nationalism on the island.7 During the Land War, the IRB leadership’s slowness to adopt an active approach to social ills was bypassed by members of the rankand-file. As Donald Jordan has described, their ‘burning resentment of social injustice was inconsistent with the passivity towards social issues that characterised the Fenians’ middle-class leadership’.8 When economic crisis hit it exposed how orthodox nationalism did not correspond to social realities, and more radical-minded members of the IRB soon became enmeshed in the movement for land reform. It was through IRB networks of artisans, agricultural labourers and small farmers that the Land League achieved its organisational basis, and, in turn, the existence of the Land League invigorated the IRB’s rank-andfile with new activism.9 In the west of Ireland Fenians like Matthew Harris and Michael Boyton expressed a new, inclusive nationalism in 1880 when they spoke of ‘social independence’ and universal rights for the ‘labourers of the country’.10 The marriage of land reform and physical-force nationalism in Ireland was anticipated in the USA on the pages of The Irish World, whose circulation in Ireland reached 20,000 in 1880.11 Indeed, ‘years before the Land League’, Eric Foner has observed, ‘“The Land for the People” had become the motto of The Irish World’.12 Editor Patrick Ford held deeply Catholic beliefs and was often noted for his strict moralism and support of the Catholic Total Abstinence Union. Yet, the most ardent Catholic often makes a more ardent communist, and while Ford never fully embraced socialism, his theories on land redistribution, workers’ rights and industrialisation brought him into conflict with established Irish American institutions and leaders in the 1870s and 1880s.13 Relations between The Irish World and the Catholic Church had deteriorated in the late 1870s, and continued to do so during the Land War. 7 McGee, The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood from the Land League to Sinn Fein, Dublin, 2005, 331–2. 8 Donald Jordan, ‘Merchants, “Strong Farmers” and Fenians: The Post-Famine Political Elite and the Irish Land War’, in C. H. E. Philpin (ed.), Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland, Cambridge, 1987, 320–48 (340); Paul Bew, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858–82, Dublin, 1978, 110–11. 9 Jordan, ‘Merchants, “Strong Farmers” and Fenians’, 340. 10 McGee, The IRB, 75–6. 11 Joseph Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848–1918, Dublin, 2008 [1973], 96. 12 Foner, ‘Class, Ethnicity and Radicalism’, 14. 13 On Ford’s radicalism see Gaelic American (New York), 20 October 1923; Foner, ‘Class, Ethnicity and Radicalism’, 12–15; James Paul Rodechko, Patrick Ford and His Search for America: A Case Study of Irish-American Journalism, 1870–1913, New York, 1976, 58–90.

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Ford accused the church of being pro-British and in return the church questioned whether his Catholicism was genuine. Ford instructed readers to ignore Vatican opinion on the tactics of militant nationalism, as ‘the Pope in our times does not claim over governments and nations the power in political affairs which he exercised in the middle ages … we shall go our own road’.14 The worldview espoused in The Irish World in the 1870s and 1880s blended a form of Jeffersonian agrarian democracy with Irish nationalism and progressive ideas of social reform. The visibility of poverty and unemployment in the USA after the Panic of 1873, biographer James Rodechko observed, helped forge Patrick Ford’s views on trade union activity and led his editorials to suggest ‘that the only way workers could bring attention to their demands was through the use of violence’.15 Railroad companies, mine owners, land-monopolists, bankers and the New York press  – which Ford accused of defending ‘every species of capitalist robbery’  – were all condemned in turgid prose, sensationalist headlines and striking illustrations in the newspaper. An end to land monopoly in both the USA and Ireland would dismantle elites and grant the urban and rural poor access to land and relief from soaring rents. ‘It is not whether Ireland, America, or New Zealand are republics that is the vital question’, Ford wrote in 1881, ‘it is whether usury, land monopoly, and various species of universal plunder are to triumph, that most concerns every true citizen of the world’.16 In 1878 the title of his paper was appropriately modified to The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator. On its pages, the fortunes of Irish tenant farmers and American workers were bound up in a transnational war against global systems of land monopolisation that denied the rights of peasants and urban workers around the world. One article entitled ‘The Land War in Europe’ contended that the ‘land system that now robs the toilers of the returns of their labours’ was driving several countries toward incipient civil war. Another article asserted that ‘in Ireland or in Russia the only road to victory lies in the refusal of millions to pay rent’. Tenant rights in southern Italy were also a subject of some scrutiny, as was the situation in Spain where authorities arrested ‘the “chiefs” of the actual toilers of the soil, just as the English aristocracy are doing in Ireland’. The paper described El caciquismo in Spain as a system of clientalism perpetuated by politically influential groups and individuals – lawyers, notaries, shopkeepers – principally in 14 The Irish World, 5 January 1884; Rodechko, Patrick Ford, 164–8. 15 Rodechko, Patrick Ford, 66. 16 The Irish World, 5 March and 9 April 1881.

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Figure 6.1 An image evoking both Famine-era and Land War evictions, while the accompanying article is titled ‘Eviction in America – Twelve Thousand Persons Made Homeless in New York – American Landlordism’s Work – Scenes Rivalling Those of Ireland’, The Irish World, 8 May 1880.

southern regions. Members of ‘La Mano Negra’, or The Black Hand, the mysterious group charged with violently attempting to break the hegemony of elites, were viewed by Ford as ‘an extensive land league, anti-rent association scattering themselves through the agricultural parts of Spain’, while the system of caciquismo was likened to landlordism in Ireland.17 Ford became influential during the 1870s through shrewd decisionmaking, and the growing popularity of The Irish World allowed him to operate relatively free of the conservative centre of the Irish nationalist community. Instead of joining the established American Land League in 1880, he set up his own organisation, collecting subscriptions in The Irish World and sending them directly to Ireland. In this way, he bypassed the ‘official’ organisation in the USA and succeeded 17 Ibid., 7 and 21 April 1883.

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in organising 2,500 branches of his own league. Unsurprisingly, this development was viewed jealously by other Irish American organisations: $343,072 was collected in The Irish World and forwarded directly to Dublin, raising Ford’s prestige and influence during the Land War. A ‘Spread the Light Fund’ was also established to send thousands of free copies of the paper to individuals and Land League branches in Ireland, greatly improving the paper’s circulation. By choosing to work in isolation, Ford manoeuvred substantial political space for radical theories of land redistribution. ‘Ford has a large following outside of any organisation’, one informer reported in 1884, ‘and I would not be surprised to see a new revolutionary movement launched into existence by him alone. A hint of revenge is abroad.’18 The Land League movement in America combined three disparate elements: the Clan-na-Gael, who sought to harness the energy of the land agitation for nationalist separatism; conservatives, who supported the Irish Parliamentary Party and who were led by the Irish American politician Patrick A. Collins; and radicals, who saw the League as an opportunity for an economic and social revolution. The Irish World became the organ of the latter wing, and Ford and Collins (who became a congressman in 1883) clashed frequently and bitterly in the early 1880s. On the pages of The Boston Pilot Collins and editor John Boyle O’Reilly regularly rebuked Ford and sought to undermine his influence. Similarly, Ford used his newspaper to respond, and when Collins assumed the presidency of the American Land League Ford sought to bypass him by encouraging branches to send donations directly to The Irish World.19 This tactic worked, and monies flooded into The Irish World which were then forwarded directly to Ireland, contributing greatly to Ford’s reputation as the authoritative voice of Irish America. Irish MP T. P. O’Connor acknowledged that ‘it was through the columns of The Irish World that we got the large subscriptions that were making our movement omnipotent in Ireland, subscriptions that reached the height of four thousand pounds sometimes in a single week’.20 O’Donovan Rossa expressed the wider concerns of orthodox nationalists when he asserted that Irish farmers would retreat into traditional conservatism should land reform be enacted, thus spending a source

18 Informant to Robert Anderson, 17 January 1884, TNA: PRO HO 144 1537 1; for accounts of each individual fund see The Irish World, 16 February 1884. 19 Foner, ‘Class, Ethnicity and Radicalism’, 15–16; Meagher, Inventing Irish America, 181. 20 T. P. O’Connor, Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian, 2 vols., London, 1929, Vol. I, 209.

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of revolutionary energy.21 In contrast, John Devoy supported the Land League, but in The Irish Nation he imperiously dismissed Ford’s ‘wild theories on land’ as counterproductive to Irish nationalism and no more than a means of appealing to ‘the less intelligent class who like “strong language”’.22 Devoy believed Ford’s bypassing of the official American Land League was a Machiavellian attempt to secure personal control and thought Irish leaders held an exaggerated impression of his importance. Following Ford’s death in 1913 Devoy still contested obituaries that lauded Ford’s contribution to the Land League, writing, ‘there has been more nonsense written in the Irish press daily and weekly about Patrick Ford since he died than any other man who has died in the lifetime of this generation’.23 The ‘wild theories’ of land nationalisation emerged from Ford’s collaboration with the American reformer Henry George, who believed that the agrarian crisis in Ireland was symptomatic of the universal problem of land monopoly. In Progress and Poverty (1879) and The Irish Land Question (1881), George advocated a ‘single-tax’ or rent on all forms of property from which state revenue would be derived and that ultimately formed part of a plan for land nationalisation.24 Impressed with his writings, Ford backed George’s programme of nationalisation and sent him to Ireland in 1881 as the ‘special reporter’ of The Irish World. George’s dispatches painted a bleak picture of the Irish situation and urged immigrants in the USA to identify social injustice in all contexts, to prevent similar circumstances occurring in their new home: the ‘monstrous iniquities of Irish landlordism were just as possible, if not quite as frequent, under the laws of the United States’.25 George received a mixed reception in Ireland. He was not a charismatic speaker and often became mired in the details of his doctrine in front of confused audiences, but his cause was helped by Michael Davitt’s endorsement of land nationalisation. Davitt had first met George at Ford’s Brooklyn home in 1880 and was privately impressed by his critique of land monopoly, if not yet fully convinced by theories of nationalisation. When released from prison in 1882, Davitt gave speeches in Manchester and Liverpool that indicated his disappointment with 21 Seán Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, 2 vols., Dublin, 1969, Vol. II, 82–4; Foner, ‘Class, Ethnicity and Radicalism’, 17. 22 The Irish Nation (New York), 10 June 1882; Gaelic American, 20 October 1923. 23 Gaelic American, 25 October 1913; 20 October 1923. 24 Henry George, The Irish Land Question: What It Involves and How Alone It Can Be Settled, London, 2005 [1881]; Charles A. Barker, Henry George, Oxford, 1955. 25 The Irish World, 8 May 1880; Edward T. O’Donnell, ‘“Though not an Irishman”: Henry George and the American Irish’, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 56 (1997), 407–19.

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Parnell and the mainstream of the Parliamentary Party, and his support for George’s nationalisation programme. Other Land Leaguers, however, believed Irish peasants’ desires for land ownership rendered George’s plan for nationalisation unworkable. Moreover, nationalisation raised complex political questions as it entailed Irish land being nationalised by the Westminster government.26 George’s letters to Ford maintained, ‘we are regarded as dangerous allies’, and that he found a great deal of ‘Whiggery’ among the Land League leaders who felt that the ‘“socialism” of The Irish World is the great obstacle to raising more money’. One clergyman advised him that the paper’s left-wing views ‘frightened many Irishmen away’.27 Although land nationalisation had some support among agricultural labourers and urban workers, and gave the Land League a certain appeal in Britain, potential support for George’s programme was greatly curtailed by the 1882 Arrears of Rent Act, by which the government took significant steps to ease tenants’ arrears, increasing their security of tenure and making individual peasant proprietorship a more realistic proposition. Davitt, Laurence Marley observes, ‘effectively isolated himself by publicly proclaiming his commitment to land nationalisation, a policy generally perceived as communistic and anti-national’. Parnell was putting increasing distance between himself and revolutionary rhetoric, and Davitt, eager to avoid a public split, moderated his public references to nationalisation.28 Ford continued to laud Davitt in The Irish World and the two men undoubtedly held like-minded opinions about the land question, but at times the latter had misgivings about the extent of Ford’s radicalism and his attitude toward violence. Writing to William O’Brien, Davitt lamented that Ford appeared to desire violent repression in order to hasten revolution in Ireland: Ford gave over American funds, Davitt remarked, only on condition that they ‘invite the Constabulary to shoot the people down in an eviction campaign’.29 The Irish World was the principal organ of land reform on both sides of the Atlantic during the Land War, but Ford was never powerful enough to determine Land League policy. In October 1881, when 26 United Ireland (Dublin), 27 May and 10 June 1882; William O’Brien, Recollections, London, 1905, 440–1; Marley, Michael Davitt, 52–3; Bew, Land and the National Question, 136–7, 230–1. 27 Henry George to Patrick Ford, 28 December 1881; George to Ford, 20 April 1882, NYPL, Henry George Papers, 1840s–1950s, Series 1, Box 3. 28 Marley, Michael Davitt, 60, 64–8; Lyons, Parnell, 261–2. 29 Michael Davitt, quoted in Joseph V. O’Brien, William O’Brien and the Course of Irish Politics, 1881–1918, Berkeley, 1976, 111.

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the Irish leadership was arrested and imprisoned in Kilmainham jail, they issued the ‘No-Rent Manifesto’, a call to withhold rents nationwide. The act first appeared to be a concession to The Irish World and Irish American radicals, but in reality it was no more than a cynical acknowledgement of Ford’s financial backing. Parnell argued that he had no other strategical options left from prison, and his biographer F. S. L. Lyons accepted this ‘last resort’ view, but deemed the manifesto a ‘false prospectus’, as Parnell was ‘convinced it would not work’. A national rent-strike was called principally because it served as a means of appeasing Ford. Even aside from conservatives in the Land League, Davitt, Luke Dillon and others on the movement’s left wing believed the moment for a general rent-strike had passed, and opposed the manifesto.30 The No-Rent Manifesto served as little more than a sweetener to keep the doors open to The Irish World’s large readership and financial resources. Writing in his memoirs, T. P. O’Connor recognised that Ford’s ‘influence to a large extent had helped to elicit that declaration from Kilmainham’, but it was a ‘declaration with special and avowed conditions’.31 When the Irish leaders were released from prison in May 1882, the No-Rent Manifesto was forgotten and the Kilmainham treaty was agreed. Parnell had contacted Gladstone offering to use his influence to calm the pervasive unrest in the country if the government were to address the issue of arrears, improving the provisions of the 1881 Land Act. This represented a step away from the revolutionary rhetoric of the previous months, and Gladstone acknowledged Parnell’s new moderation and released the prisoners.32 At this point, Ford became bitterly critical of Parnell’s leadership and soon closed the Land League subscriptions in The Irish World. The Land War’s revolutionary moment had apparently passed, and Henry George returned to the United States in October 1882. The Land League officially came to an end at a convention in Philadelphia in 1883. The Kilmainham treaty illustrated Ford’s lack of political presence in Ireland, but this is not to say that the ideas expressed in The Irish World consistently fell on deaf ears. William O’Brien, the Land Leaguer who drafted the No-Rent Manifesto, acknowledged the transatlantic reach not only of remittances and Land League funds, but also of The Irish World’s radicalism: 30 Bew, Land and the National Question, 197; O’Brien, William O’Brien, 20; Lyons, Parnell, 170–2; Moody, Davitt, 495. 31 O’Connor, Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian, Vol. I, 211. 32 Bew, Politics of Enmity, 332–5.

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The storm bell of The Irish World boomed across the Atlantic with a very audible note of alarm indeed, that was heard in every mountain-glen in Ireland. There was scarcely a cabin in the west to which some relative in America did not despatch a weekly copy of The Irish World, flaming all over from the first line to the last with pictures of the havoc wrought by Landlordism, and incitements to Irish manhood to lie down no longer like a herd of starving mendicants in a land of plenty. It was as if some vast Irish-American invasion was sweeping the country with new and irresistible principles of Liberty and Democracy.33

Irish America’s role in furnishing the home movements with rifles and ready money has long been acknowledged by historians, but its ideological exports are recognised less than its material ones. In his study of the IRB, Owen Mcgee has emphasised the republican convictions behind the IRB and Land League and likened their ideological commitment to overturning aristocratic elites to ‘various nineteenth century French republican movements’.34 Yet one wonders if the influence attributed to French republicanism by McGee and others has not overshadowed the ways in which American Republicanism, and more specifically the radical agrarian democracy expressed in The Irish World, contributed to the worldview of Fenians and Land Leaguers in Ireland and Britain as well as in Irish America during the 1870s and 1880s. Comerford has described how the Fenians’ perception of the USA in the 1860s ‘included the notion of social liberty and equality’, and they practised a kind of ‘insouciance’ toward their supposed betters which they believed to be common in America.35 Beyond this type of social attitude, however, ideologies circulating in America in the 1870s also migrated across the Atlantic. The view that Irish peasants and the English and American working classes were fighting the same fight against landlordism and the exploitation of labour clearly influenced Davitt’s internationalist outlook post-1880. Ford never determined the political direction of the Land League despite the claims of the Tory press, but William O’Brien professed that he placed ‘the influence of The Irish World higher than that of either meetings or speeches, in Parliament or out of it, in giving the first wild impulse towards the Agrarian Revolution, which has since shattered all the towers and ramparts of Irish Landlordism into the dust’.36 Given the mix of social radicalism and militant nationalism on the pages of The Irish World, it is difficult to see how readers on either side 33 O’Brien, Recollections, 273. 34 McGee, The IRB, 343. 35 R. V. Comerford, The Fenians in Context: Irish Politics and Society, 1848–82, Dublin, 1998 [1985], 114. 36 O’Brien, Recollections, 274.

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of the Atlantic distinguished between labour and the land question, on one hand, and the struggle for Irish independence on the other. An integral part of The Irish World’s popularity lay in its attacks on landlordism and, in turn, this was a factor in the appeal of the Skirmishing Fund, launched three years before the Land League was founded. Throughout the period 1875–85, the Skirmishing Fund, the ‘Spread the Light’ Fund, the No-Rent Fund, the Land League Fund and the Emergency Fund all overlapped in the newspaper to the extent that the question arises how much did the readership view them as separate projects? Distinctions between the Land League and Skirmishing funds were by no means clear-cut. The traditional narrative of anticolonial resistance converged with land reform and the labour struggle. Skirmishing was understood as a flexible strategy, available for the tenant farmer, the city labourer, as well as the patriotic volunteer. The subscribers to the ‘Spread the Light’ and Land League funds overlapped with those of the Skirmishing Fund. Their letters explained that their money was for land reform and attacks on landlordism, and not specifically to blow up Westminster. In the first weeks of the Skirmishing Fund, numerous letters were printed that echoed the sentiments of this County Cavan immigrant: ‘To your tender mercies I most earnestly recommend the Irish landlord, that scourge of our race’, while money arrived from clubs with names like the ‘Anti-Landlord Skirmishing Club’. O’Donovan Rossa repeated his conviction that ‘landlordism cannot be destroyed without first destroying the English Government in Ireland’, but he was ignored. Political and social factors were entangled. Letters spoke repeatedly of land-related grievances. In 1877, money originally intended to finance a Saint Patrick’s Day parade was directed instead to the Skirmishing Fund, because the subscribers ‘thought it would be better to send it to aid the land war than to spend it in idle show’. Another reader donated to the fund in order to defeat a system of land ownership that consigned ‘families to ruin – some of them to the poorhouse, some to death on the roadside, some to material serfdom in foreign lands, some to lives of shame and crime’.37

Skirmishing and the Land War in Ireland

Given that many subscribers believed their money would finance a campaign directed against landlordism, did any acts of skirmishing occur in Ireland during the Land War? In 1882, DMP Inspector John Mallon observed, regarding ‘the O’Donovan Rossa faction, [that] they have 37 The Irish World, 8 April, 18 March, 6 and 20 May 1876; 7 April and 11 August 1877.

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not much footing in Dublin’.38 Aside from occasional apologists, republicans in Ireland moved swiftly to distance themselves from the dynamiters. The IRB leadership were ardent critics of O’Donovan Rossa’s ‘nonsense’ and plainly rejected the proposal of a dynamite campaign when approached with the idea by Alexander Sullivan in early 1882.39 The Irish World championed Michael Davitt’s role in the Land League, but he did not share Ford’s views on dynamite, and became a forceful critic of the bombing campaign. Comerford has suggested that in December 1880 Davitt ‘envisaged attacks in Britain as a possible option, if the government were to take really drastic action against the Land League’.40 Laurence Marley observed that Davitt ‘was no pacifist, and he certainly appreciated the power of the implied threat of violence’, but he also believed in the efficacy of constitutional action and considered individual bombings and assassinations to be politically counterproductive.41 Davitt held a deep-rooted opposition to skirmishing that was undoubtedly intensified by the 1882 Phoenix Park affair, which distressed him and led to fears about anti-Irish reprisals in England. In an interview with Police Commissioner Howard Vincent, Davitt called O’Donovan Rossa an ‘arch scoundrel’ whom he himself would shoot given the chance, but he did not believe that there was a strong Irish American connection to the killings.42 The assassinations also ushered in a climate of political conservatism in Ireland that proved to be very damaging to the prospects of the left wing of the Land League.43 Dynamite explosions were symptomatic of ‘the surrender of reason to rage’, Davitt argued, damaging individuals and buildings, but not systemic injustice and misgovernment. ‘Principles of reform, intelligently and fearlessly propagated’, he wrote to John Ferguson, ‘are far more destructive to unjust or worn out systems than dynamite bombs which only kill individuals or knock down buildings, but do no injury to oppressive institutions’.44 Davitt’s opposition to dynamite also included 38 Quoted in Donal P. McCracken, Inspector John Mallon: Buying Irish Patriotism for a Five-Pound Note, Dublin, 2009, 86. 39 ‘Desperate nonsense’ was how O’Leary described the Skirmishing Fund. John O’Leary to Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, 31 January 1877, NYPL, MCIHP, Box 4, Papers of Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, 62; UCDA, DRP, LA 10/k/23; McGee, The IRB, 98. 40 Comerford, Fenians in Context, 241. 41 Marley, Michael Davitt, 89. 42 Quoted in Lyons, Parnell, 233. 43 Marley, Michael Davitt, 48, 60. 44 Michael Davitt to the Glasgow Herald, 25 March 1883, reprinted in Freeman’s Journal (Dublin), 6 April 1883.

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another core aspect: he insisted that most dynamite attacks occurred at moments when constructive legislative advances for Ireland were being worked through parliament. ‘It was on the very night, last year, when Mr Parnell was moving his resolution for an amendment of the Land Act, that the explosion in the home office buildings, in parliament street, occurred.’ Davitt viewed the occurrence of explosions at important junctures in Irish policy-making suspiciously, believing many attacks were co-ordinated by agents provocateurs who played ‘an infamous and probably profitable game’.45 And, as the history of Red Jim McDermott and William Jones demonstrated, this conclusion was not wildly inaccurate. Like Davitt, William O’Brien was a former member of the IRB who disdained the dynamiters.46 Writing in United Ireland, he unequivocally condemned explosions that were ‘as contemptible as schoolboys’ squibs’ and would ‘create more resentment than a pitched battle’. In the aftermath of ‘Dynamite Saturday’, he maintained, ‘it is impossible not to sympathise with the feelings of industrious workpeople who cannot move about their own streets … without the apprehension of having their wives or children maimed or blown to death’. Editorials in United Ireland condemned the tactics of the dynamiters, but not their patriotic motivations. They were moved to violence ‘because Mr Forster and Earl Spencer are blundering tyrants’, and their emotional desire for revenge was seized upon and manipulated by agents provocateurs. O’Donovan Rossa was dismissed as ‘an unfortunate babbler’ who had nothing to do with explosions, but ‘brags of their deeds as if they were his own’. Echoing Cardinal Cullen’s label for IRB volunteers in the 1860s, the paper asserted that it was the ‘dupes’ who were ‘put in the posts of danger. If they are trapped by the police, well and good. If they succeed in exploding their squibs, care is taken that nothing except noise shall come of the explosion.’ Discussions of the explosions in United Ireland typically concluded with calls for a searching investigation into the plots, in order to reveal ‘what part Mr Jenkinson’s gold plays in the dynamite devilry’.47 The Nation was more conscious of the dynamiters’ own agency and did not adopt the ‘dupe’ line, pointing instead to their peculiar ethics and choice of tactics, which could appeal ‘to no other class or set of human beings’. Nonetheless, editorials were also apologist in tone, drawing attention to wider contexts of ‘England’s hellish work in Ireland, in 45 Davitt, letter to the Montreal Post, reprinted in The Irish American (New York), 5 April 1884; Pall Mall Gazette (London), 2 February 1885. 46 O’Brien, Recollections, 116. 47 United Ireland, 8 March 1883; 17 and 31 January, 7 February 1885; 30 January 1897.

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India, in other parts of the world’, and declaring that the explosions underlined the need for self-determination ‘in every part of the world where people have been ruled not by themselves, but against their will by others’, and that ‘conspiracy and the criminal fruits of conspiracy have been the inevitable outcome’.48 Such empathy with the bombers was not so readily evident, however, in the Freeman’s Journal. When commenting on the sentences handed down to Featherstone and his coconspirators, which came not long after the Invincibles’ executions, the editorial declared ‘with the dynamiter there can be no civilised sympathy’. The Nation and United Ireland largely avoided using the term criminal when reporting on the dynamite campaign, but the Freeman’s Journal unequivocally condemned the 1883 underground explosions as a ‘crime’, of which ‘we know of none in history so infamous, so atrocious, so diabolic’.49 Only one prominent figure associated with the Land League – P. J. Sheridan – favoured skirmishing, but his support came after the suppression of the Land League and the 1882 Kilmainham treaty. Born in Sligo, Sheridan was a veteran of 1867 and a key Land League organiser in the west of Ireland. Although he discouraged the use of violence among rural agitators, he was indirectly linked to the Phoenix Park assassinations by the testimony of the informer James Carey and, in 1883, the British government formally, though unsuccessfully, sought his extradition from the United States for his unlikely involvement in that affair.50 Under the auspices of The Irish World he went on a speaking tour of the USA, serving as a rich source of quotes for the American press thanks to his advocacy of ‘a scientific method of warfare’ and, on one occasion, the assassination of Queen Victoria. In 1883 informants’ reports to the Philadelphia consul eagerly told of Sheridan’s role as a leader of imminent dynamite plots, but it is difficult to discriminate between invention and truth in these reports, and police investigations never linked Sheridan to the explosions in Britain.51 Either way, by that stage, his involvement with the Land League was over and his influence in Ireland had diminished. 48 The Nation (Dublin), 9 April 1884; 31 January 1885. 49 Freeman’s Journal, 10 August and 1 November 1883. 50 The New York Times, 27 February 1883; McGee, The IRB, 99–100; Bew, Politics of Enmity, 333–5. 51 United Irishman (New York), 8 and 15 March 1884; Ireland’s Liberator and Dynamite Monthly (New York), March 1884; NAI CSORP, 1884, 512. Consul Clipperton in Philadelphia believed P. J. Sheridan was a leading figure behind the dynamite attacks in Britain; Charles Clipperton to Earl Granville, 31 August 1883, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-780.

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Sheridan remained a controversial figure, and the 1889 Special Commission sought to connect him with Charles Stewart Parnell. In 1882, W. E. Forster, the Irish Chief Secretary, believed Parnell and Sheridan were influencing the levels of unrest in Ireland so as to strengthen their hand in negotiations with government, and Patrick Maume has indicated that Sheridan may have administered the IRB oath to Parnell in Trinity College Dublin, shortly after the 1882 Kilmainham treaty. Whether Parnell took the oath or not, the possibility of Sheridan’s testimony evidently perturbed the Irish Party leader until it became clear that, despite cash incentives from The Times, Sheridan would not testify.52 Parnell held complex links with the IRB and land agitators. The circumstances of politics on a small island forced Parnell to engage with Fenianism and vice versa. Matthew Kelly portrays the relationship as one of mutual interaction and dependence, in which Parnell was ‘ideologically indistinct, a cipher for the structural imperatives of Irish nationalism – an agrarian agitator when the Irish people were agrarian agitators, a constitutionalist when the Irish people were constitutionalist, a Fenian when the Irish people were Fenian. Not so much an empty vessel but the arch pragmatist’.53 The 1873 IRB constitution opened doors to participation in constitutional processes, and though the experiment formally ended three years later, the alliance revealed the porous boundaries between the so-called ‘constitutional’ and ‘physical force’ wings of nationalism. James McConnel has highlighted how, in 1887, police ‘estimated that 23 of the 83 Parnellite MPs had been Fenians before entering parliament’. For some Irish MPs, their Fenian pasts did not raise conflicts of interest and remained central to their identities, often working to their political advantage.54 The skirmishing campaign forced constitutional nationalists to clarify their position on violence. After the Kilmainham treaty, Parnell and the Irish Party began to assume a more conservative direction, and it was not until the Irish Party split in 1890 that he began to

52 Patrick Maume, ‘Parnell and the IRB Oath’, Irish Historical Studies, 29 (1995), 363– 70; Bew, Politics of Enmity, 355–7; Lyons, Parnell, 446. 53 M. J. Kelly, The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, 1882–1916, Woodbridge, 2006, 51. 54 James McConnel, ‘“Fenians at Westminster”: The Edwardian Irish Parliamentary Party and the Legacy of the New Departure’, Irish Historical Studies, 34 (2004), 42–64 (42).

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appeal to Fenians again as he had during the Land War.55 Meanwhile, after dynamite attacks became international news in 1883, Parnell’s opponents regularly accused him of accepting money from the advocates of skirmishing, and it became ‘essential’, Lyons pointed out, ‘for Parnell to dissociate himself as emphatically as he could from such acts of violence’.56 Curiously, when William Lomasney was in Paris he met with Parnell, who impressed him as a man who ‘means to go as far as we do in pushing the business’.57 Yet, Parnell was publicly hostile to the skirmishing campaign, and according to his first biographer, Richard Barry O’Brien, he viewed the attacks as ‘sheer insanity’ and held ‘private repugnance’ for the dynamiters. His opposition was primarily rooted, according to O’Brien, in the view that skirmishing was politically counterproductive, though this view may have been more representative of O’Brien the Fenian sympathiser than Parnell: ‘What did Parnell think of the morality of dynamite? He did not think about it at all. He regarded the moral sermons preached by the English statesmen and publicists as the merest cant, and looked upon The Times’ denunciations of The Irish World as a case of the pot calling the kettle black.’58 Parnell used the fact that most of the skirmishing operations were organised in the USA to distance himself from the violence, while Patrick Ford’s anti-Parnell invective after the Kilmainham treaty provided useful ammunition to rebut accusations of links to violence.59 Parnell and most Irish MPs rebuked dynamite as inimical to politics, but the dynamiters thought differently. Initially they appeared to situate themselves entirely outside formal politics. Both Patrick Crowe and O’Donovan Rossa asserted that ‘by blows and blows alone’ could nationalists achieve their goals: to harness both legal and illegal means was as paradoxical as nationalists’ participation in parliament was selfdefeating, and helped ‘to rivet the chains by which they are held in bondage’. Indeed, it was the ‘tyrant work’ of those very political institutions 55 Kelly, The Fenian Ideal, 41–70. Margaret O’Callaghan goes further and speaks of Parnell’s ‘rejection of constitutionalism’ in 1891; Margaret O’Callaghan, British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland: Criminality, Land and the Law under Forster and Balfour, Cork, 1994, 121. 56 Lyons, Parnell, 250. 57 William Lomasney to John Devoy, 18 February 1881, in O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, 1871–1928, 2 vols., Dublin, 1948–[1953], Vol. II, 39–40. 58 Richard Barry O’Brien, The Life of Charles Stewart Parnell, 1846–1891, 2 vols., New York, 1898, Vol. II, 30–2. 59 Conor Cruise O’Brien, Parnell and His Party, 1880–90, Oxford, 1957, 88–9; Bew, Politics of Enmity, 339. On Ford and Parnell see Rodechko, Patrick Ford, 199–210; Lyons, Parnell, 247.

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that first brought recourse to violence.60 O’Donovan Rossa opposed the new departure, dismissing it as a method for directing revolutionary nationalists toward constitutionalism and distracting them from the more serious work of preparing for violent struggle. Residual grudges against individuals in the Clan-na-Gael over control of the Skirmishing Fund also reinforced his antipathy. At the same time, a closer look at the evolution of skirmishing shows that it was neither persistently hostile nor favourable to other methods, but was used according to the exigencies of political circumstances. There were no simple distinctions between violent and non-violent means. O’Donovan Rossa, although considered to be implacably hostile to parliamentary politics, had himself stood as a candidate in an Irish by-election in 1869. In New York, he occasionally spoke of his willingness to co-operate with moderates. One month after the launch of the Skirmishing Fund he declared, ‘the scare is already beginning to seize England. Before three months you will hear a regular hue-andcry after us, but you will also hear that Irish questions and Irish members in that London parliament will be treated with less contempt than they have been – if you care about any of that.’ When the Skirmishing Fund was renamed the National Fund in March 1878, John Devoy and the new board of trustees guaranteed that the ‘original object is in no respect changed’, in part to appease O’Donovan Rossa’s supporters, but also because many of the trustees did not oppose skirmishing in principle, just Rossa’s indiscretions in the press. The skirmishing policy remained, but was now part of a larger strategy. Resistance to Britain was to be carried out by ‘every means within the reach of the Irish people, and wherever and whenever an opportunity presented itself’.61 The dynamiters rationalised violence as a means of political negotiation. In 1886, when Gladstone committed to Home Rule legislation, The Irish World maintained that ‘it is a good and wholesome thing for British officials to keep constantly before their mind’s eye the possibilities of Irish resources and the certainties of those possibilities being realised in the event of a rejection of Ireland’s peaceful demand’.62 Used surgically, dynamite attacks could influence public opinion and government decision-making. Officials in Dublin Castle acknowledged this dimension when they informed Lord Spencer that the dynamiters’ ‘object is 60 Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Irish Rebels in English Prisons: A Record of Prison Life, New York, 1899 [1882], iii. 61 The Irish World, 1 April 1876, 23 March 1878 (emphasis in original). 62 Ibid., 13 March 1886.

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to create a scare: to keep the agitation going, and to let Englishmen feel that there is a strong and desperate party of Force behind the constitutional agitators’.63 When Ford launched the 1884 Emergency Fund (the successor to the Skirmishing Fund), he made it clear that violence was understood as part of the larger tactical store of Irish nationalism: ‘we ought to employ all our forces, moral as well as physical’. In an article entitled ‘Toleration among Irishmen’, Ford asserted that Irish independence could only be achieved through combinations of violent and constitutional means. Debates and divisions between the advocates of violence and non-violence were ‘unwise and profitless’; the true question was not ‘what kind of force is best but how best apply all the forces’?64 The United Irishman supported Ford’s initiative, and O’Donovan Rossa publicly regretted that, in the past, he had ‘laughed at, derided all constitutional appeals [and] kept the old flag of physical-force flying’. Instead, Rossa now called on all Irish nationalists to ‘forget the differences of the past, and [for] each in his own sphere do his best in the new campaign, burying forever our past disputes’.65 Moral and physical force were not different things, but different strategies. The dynamiters advocated the application of ‘all forces’ in Ireland, but most nationalists and Land Leaguers remained aloof. The enthusiasm found in New York for new, scientific weapons did not transfer to Ireland, and it was not until the early 1890s that Dublin experienced dynamite plots, which were heavily manipulated by agents provocateurs. Skirmishing was essentially urban guerrilla warfare, and this did not fit with the rural character of much of the unrest in Ireland during the 1880s. Nonetheless, in 1877 O’Donovan Rossa contemplated organising the assassination of Lord Leitrim, a landlord living in the north-west of Ireland, after receiving a letter from a Leitrim-born man, then living in Colorado, who volunteered to kill the notorious ‘Wicked Earl’. O’Donovan Rossa gave the proposal enough serious thought to ask the trustees of the Skirmishing Fund to consider it in June 1877. Rossa appeared happy to fund the plan, but the Clan-na-Gael majority on the committee of trustees ruled against it, arguing that funds would be better applied to secure release of prisoners in Ireland. Lord Leitrim was shot dead in 1878. Despite the timing of his death and rumours of 63 E. G. Jenkinson to Lord Spencer, 14 September 1884, reprinted in Stephen Ball (ed.), Dublin Castle and the First Home Rule Crisis: The Political Journal of Sir George Fottrell, 1884–1887, Cambridge, 2008, 200–10. 64 Ibid., 1 March 1884. 65 United Irishman, 1 March 1884; The Irish World, 19 January 1884.

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Irish American involvement in the newspapers, the killing was most likely an act of private vengeance.66 In 1881 the robbery of 14 kilograms of dynamite from a Cork armoury proved to be an uneasy source for rumours that it had fallen into dynamiters’ hands, until the recovery of the haul two years later. After the attack on the London Mansion House in the same year, episodes involving explosives in distant regions of Ireland – like the attempt to destroy a Mayo barracks or an attack on a Donegal estate manager’s residence – aroused attention.67 Yet, at times, stories of secret societies and dynamite plots were no more than a sequence of fabrications and hoaxes that ran until the end of the century. At other times, what incidents did occur involving dynamite were embellished by the unionist Irish Times and The Times. Among the several false alarms, however, a handful of incidents merit closer scrutiny. In February 1882 a letter soaked in an explosive  – iodide of nitrogen – and addressed to William Forster, the Chief Secretary of Ireland, was discovered in Dublin Castle. The crude explosive was easily neutralised and the incident was forgotten with little fuss; the threat represented nothing drastically new, as letter bombs had been posted to prominent Dublin policemen in 1867.68 One month later, more palpable commotion was caused when several men attempted to blow up Weston House, near Ahascragh, in east Galway. The house belonged to John Ross Mahon, a land agent for Lord Clonbrock and other landlords, and was situated in an area that had witnessed a good deal of unrest since the beginning of the Land War. Two pounds of commercial dynamite used at local works was placed on a windowsill of the house, causing a blast that the Galway Vindicator claimed was ‘heard six miles away in Ballinasloe’. The damage amounted to shattered windows and a partly fallen wall, but no injuries, Mahon himself being away from home on the night.69 After the attack some of the perpetrators fled to England, but arrests were made nonetheless, and at the end of several trials that ran for over a year the chief culprits were given sentences ranging from eighteen months’ to ten years’ penal servitude. The ‘principal’ of the plot 66 Edward Archibald to the earl of Derby, 6 April 1877, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-503; O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. I, 254–6; A. P. W. Malcomson, Virtues of a Wicked Earl: The Life and legend of William Sydney Clements, 3rd Earl of Leitrim, 1806–78, Dublin, 2008. 67 The Irish Times (Dublin), 24 February, 9 September and 22 October 1881. 68 The Times (London), 7 February 1882; Barry Kennerk, Shadow of the Brotherhood: The Temple Bar Shootings, Dublin, 2010, 205–8; Brian Jenkins, The Fenian Problem: Insurgency and Terrorism in a Liberal State, 1858–1874, London, 2008, 159. 69 Galway Vindicator, 29 March 1882; Galway Express, 1 April 1882.

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was judged to have been Brian Cormican, the secretary for the district branch of the Land League. Mahon, the target of the attack, had recently sued a tenant named Manning  – vice-president of the local Land League – for rent arrears. James Jones, the informant whose testimony led to the successful convictions, maintained that the IRB had offered to pay the gang £500 if Weston House and Mahon were successfully destroyed, while another conspirator  – Bernard Geraghty  – claimed to have been sworn into a secret society at the beginning of the plot.70 The episode suggested that the skirmishing idea, if not Irish American operatives, had reached Ireland in some form. There was no evident connection between the explosion and the dynamiters, but a correlation of events nonetheless led them to be associated in the public eye. Only four days after the convictions for the Weston House explosion in August 1883, the dynamiters Featherstone, Deasy, Flanagan and Dalton were handed down life sentences in a Liverpool court after being duped by Red Jim McDermott the previous March. While the trials were unrelated, they were reported under similar headlines that pointed to ‘Dynamite Conspiracies’ inside and outside the country. The Cork Examiner reported on the trial in a sequence of news items that also included international events, such as ‘The Nihilists – Desperate Encounters’, ‘Disturbances in Russia’, ‘Dynamite Explosions in France’, ‘The Dynamite Scare’ (London), ‘The International Anarchic Conspiracy’.71 In reality, the Galway explosion was hardly more than a local matter, and differed from the dynamiters’ tactics in that the primary target was a person – the land agent Mahon – and not a building. Nonetheless the matter accumulated misplaced significance. The 1889 Special Commission returned to the explosion and accused Parnell of providing financial and legal support for the convicted men.72 During the same year, a former Chicago police captain named Michael J. Schaack curiously included the Weston House bomb in the chronology of his book Anarchy and Anarchists: A History of the Red Terror.73 In the weeks following the Weston House affair a relatively small number of incidents involving explosives occurred that indicated the 70 Galway Vindicator, 8 August 1883; Galway Express, 4 August 1883; Freeman’s Journal, 2 August 1883. 71 Cork Examiner, 2 April 1883. 72 The Times, 8 May 1889. On ‘Special Commission’, which sat between October 1888 and November 1889, see Chapter 2 n. 60. 73 Schaack lost his job owing to corruption charges, and his book was a thinly veiled attempt to regain some standing. Michael J. Schaack, Anarchy and Anarchists: A History of the Red Terror, Chicago, 1889, 43.

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ease with which explosives could be purchased or stolen, rather than the existence of Mezzeroff-style factories. In April, the explosion of a dynamite charge at a Limerick barracks was related by the police to a robbery of commercial dynamite two months previously at Ballinacurra, Cork. During the same month, two barracks in County Galway were damaged by powder blasts, along with large farms in Letterkenny, Donegal and Offaly.74 The destructive impact was small, harming window-panes and masonry but nothing else. Using dynamite as a weapon of choice was more visible in the east Galway region when compared to other areas in the early 1880s. In 1882, dynamite was discovered at a house on Lord Clonbrock’s estate, near Loughrea, while in 1885 an explosion caused structural damage to Ballinagar House, an estate residence, again close to Loughrea. ‘Bad feeling’ had long existed between the tenants and the landlady, Mrs Lewis, who had been under police protection during the Land War. Tenants had collectively withheld rents and organised a mass meeting outside her home on the Sunday before the explosion. No injuries were caused by the blast, but the entire front of the house was destroyed.75 These explosions resulted from local confrontations. In November 1884, dramatic accounts of Clan-na-Gael or O’Donovan Rossa’s agents operating in Ireland received widespread, but short-lived, attention when a spectacular explosion occurred at a residence in Kerry. The target lent credence to the conspiracy theory: Edenburn House, near Tralee, was the home of Samuel M. Hussey, an unpopular landlord and land agent for over a quarter of County Kerry. Even before the explosion, Hussey had resolved to move to London owing to repeated harassment of himself and his family.76 At the time of the explosion, Hussey and his family were sleeping in the house along with his three police escorts. All escaped injury, though the force of the blast blew a hole in a three-feet-thick outer wall. During the following week, ghostly rumours circulated that three infernal machines had recently been imported into Kerry, and what appeared to be the remnants of an exploding mechanism was found at the site. Hussey himself was convinced that the episode had been the work of three dynamiters.77

74 Galway Vindicator, 5 April 1882; Galway Express, 15 April 1882. 75 Galway Express, 19 December 1885; The Times, 28 August 1882. 76 Cork Examiner, 10 December 1884; Kerry Sentinel (Tralee), 2 December 1884. Hussey recounts the experience in his memoirs, S. M. Hussey, The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent, London, 1904, Chapter 20. The episode also made headlines in the USA, Brooklyn Eagle, 14 December 1884. 77 Kerry Sentinel, 9 December 1884; Hussey, Reminiscences, Chapter 20.

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The Irish World noted that Hussey was an agent for the marquis of Lansdowne, a landlord with a notorious reputation among the New York Irish, and proclaimed the explosion to be ‘a warning to Irish land-thieves’ and a ‘demonstration of the resolve of Irish farmers and labourers to defend their lives and properties’.78 These comments demonstrated Ford’s undisguised support for armed struggle, but they also exposed his lack of local antennae when it came to reading events in Ireland. Newspapers in the region swiftly moved to ridicule the idea of an organised dynamite attack, either by native or transatlantic conspirators. The Kerry Sentinel agreed Hussey held an ‘unenviable notoriety’, but laughed at the fuss made over ‘a bit of tin’ that supposedly resembled an infernal machine. The sole beneficiaries of the episode were those who wished to ‘sanction a prolongation of the merry Crimes Act times’, and Hussey himself, who asked for £4,000 in damages off the Kerry presentment sessions. The editor, Edward Harrington, continued sceptically that the jury at the sessions was made up of Hussey, his sons and nephews; ‘it is practically in his own hands to measure damages and recoup them for himself’.79 The Dublin-based United Ireland linked the episode to the presence of the agent provocateur Red Jim McDermott in Cork in 1883, which had led to the arrest of Deasy in Liverpool and the subsequent arrests in Cork. In April 1883, McDermott had written to O’Donovan Rossa, lamenting the arrests but promising ‘good reports’ would soon come from an ‘effective stock on hand in Kerry’. Rossa forwarded the letter to United Ireland, which led the paper to conclude that if the Edenburn explosion had in fact been caused by a dynamite bomb, it ‘was provided by a police agent, if it was not actually placed in the drain by the hands of the police’.80 An infernal machine similar to the one discovered on Deasy in Liverpool was discovered at a bakery in Cork city in August 1883, prompting theories that it was one of the devices that had been manufactured in Richard Short’s Cork home when McDermott was in town.81 O’Brien believed the Edenburn infernal machine to be another one. The initial mystery that surrounded the episode remained unresolved and the case proved newsworthy for little more than a week, but the explosion appears suspicious given McDermott’s activities in the area the previous year.

78 The Irish World, 13 December 1884. 79 Kerry Sentinel, 5 and 12 December 1884; Cork Examiner, 10 December 1884. Hussey was awarded £2,000 the next May; The Times, 20 May 1885. 80 United Ireland, 6 December 1884. 81 The Irish Times, 1 September 1883.

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Before McDermott’s intrigues in Cork, however, O’Donovan Rossa’s United Irishmen were active in the area. John F. Kearney, John O’Connor (alias Dalton), Thomas Mooney (alias Moorhead) and Edmund O’Brien Kennedy (alias Featherstone) began to organise skirmishing operations in Cork and Glasgow in 1881. Featherstone and Dalton travelled from Cork to instruct Glasgow dynamiters on the handling of explosives, while James O’Malley was another of O’Donovan Rossa’s agents that travelled between New York and Cork in order to relay money and instructions. Kearney and Mooney attempted to gather recruits and finances in the south-west of Ireland in late 1882/early 1883 and, as mentioned above, an explosives factory was established at Richard Short’s home in Cork. After the Glasgow explosions in January 1883, Kearney and Mooney had some recruitment success in Kerry, but overall their efforts fell well short of expectations, which they blamed on incompetent local ‘missioners’.82 In the midst of this activity, in February 1883, a parcel bomb with attached fuse was discovered at the Ballydehob post-office in County Cork, a town that experienced high levels of unrest during the Land War. The parcel was addressed to John Spencer, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, but because it was unstamped the post-master thought it to be a hoax and decided to throw it into the fire. Luckily, curiosity got the better of him and he opened the package to find a percussion cap affixed to a fuse in about 200 grams of dynamite. The correspondent of the Freeman’s Journal believed the letter bomb ‘was made up with every adjunct to perform its deadly work’, and although the manufacturer must have known the package would not reach Spencer, it was nonetheless designed to explode. Of keen concern to the police, however, was how commercial dynamite had found its way into this remote area. In the following days house-searches in most of the village uncovered nothing, but soon a postal worker came forward to claim he had witnessed Richard Hodnett placing the package in the letter-box. The dynamite had apparently been purchased in Durrus, some twelve miles away. Hodnett, the son of the local Land League president, had recently been arrested under the Protection of Persons and Property (Coercion) Act 1881. His apparent aim was to stir alarm and little more. Local police 82 ‘Glencree’ [John F. Kearney] to (?), 2 March 1883, CUA, ODRPP, Box 5, Folder 4. The letter ordered the expulsion of an agent from the dynamiters’ circles in Cork and Kerry. James Moorhead had also signed this letter in approval of the order. TNA: PRO HO 144 1538 5; Brooklyn Eagle, 26 August 1883; Máirtín Ó Catháin, Irish Republicanism in Scotland, 1858–1916: Fenians in Exile, Dublin, 2007, 131. This John O’Connor (Dalton) should not be confused with John O’Connor, the IRB secretary who opposed dynamite attacks; DMP Report, 17 May 1878, NAI, PCR, A-Files, A-503, 505, 578.

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suggested the involvement of somebody with more expertise in explosives than Hodnett, but no-one else was arrested in the matter.83 One of the more active members of the Ballydehob Land League was Henry O’Mahony, a local publican and farmer, who himself was evicted in May 1882. O’Mahony was a person of standing in Ballydehob, evident when a large group of locals, including Richard Hodnett, forcibly blocked policemen from arresting him in June 1881 for suspected involvement in a non-fatal shooting. Hodnett was arrested for his role in the struggle and spent the next six months in prison. O’Mahony eventually gave himself up voluntarily and was imprisoned in Kilmainham. His case became prominent owing to his claims of US citizenship, and he urged the sceptical US consul Edward Brooks in Cork to press the authorities for a speedy trial. O’Mahony claimed to have served in the navy during the American Civil War and then remained in the USA, living in Missouri and the Mississippi Valley before returning to Ireland in 1874 because of the American economic slump. He made two trips back to the United States in 1876 and 1879, and obtained naturalisation papers on the latter trip.84 It is possible that O’Mahony returned to Ireland on these trips as a Fenian agent in order to reinvigorate nationalist organisations in the Cork area.85 O’Mahony was acquainted with O’Donovan Rossa and actively sympathised with the dynamite campaign. Before travelling to the United States, he had worked close to Rossa’s shop in Skibbereen in the late 1850s. In 1885, James Cunningham  – the son of a tenant farmer from Schull in County Cork  – was sentenced to penal servitude for life for his involvement in the Tower of London bombing that January. Cunningham had emigrated at a young age to New York and had become active in Fenian organisations in the city. Although an operative of Clan-na-Gael, Cunningham was acquainted with O’Donovan Rossa when he lived in New York.86 Rossa collected funds in the United Irishman to assist Cunningham’s family, and £12 were paid to Cunningham’s widowed mother in Schull by Henry O’Mahony, 83 Freeman’s Journal, 26 and 27 February, 14 March 1883; The Irish Times, 10 March 1883. 84 United Ireland, 10 September 1881; Freeman’s Journal, 1 June 1882; The Nation, 7 January 1882; The New York Times, 6 April 1882; The Irish Times, 7 December 1888; HHC, 25 July 1882, col. 1684. 85 See Henry F. Quirke, ‘Diary of a Land League Activist: Henry O’Mahony’, The O’Mahony Journal, 32 (2009), 3–13; and Frank Rynne, ‘Permanent Revolutionaries: The IRB and the Land War in West Cork’, in Fearghal McGarry and James McConnel (eds.), The Black Hand of Republicanism: Fenianism in Modern Ireland, Dublin, 2009, 55–71 (62). 86 The New York Times, 30 January 1885.

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who lived three miles away in Ballydehob. Similar ‘pension’-style payments were paid to the mother of Cork-born Edmund Kennedy (or Featherstone), who had been duped by McDermott. Payments were channelled through O’Mahony, who was an intermediary for Rossa’s financial affairs in Cork. In 1887, he himself received a draft order from Rossa for the sizable sum of £100.87 While O’Mahony connected O’Donovan Rossa and the Ballydehob Land League, there is no definite indication that he was any more than an intermediary for Rossa’s affairs in Cork. After all, Rossa was opposed to the land agitation, and the activities of Kearney, Featherstone and the United Irishmen did not appear to encompass local branches of the Land League. When Denis Deasy died after one year in Chatman prison, his body was brought back to Cork and, according to The Nation, when ‘the hearse passed through Bandon there were fully eight thousand people taking part in the demonstration’.88 This very large crowd more likely reflected public sympathy for Deasy the dupe entrapped by McDermott, rather than Deasy the dynamiter. The previous year, similar feelings of sympathy for Joe Brady, and enmity for James Carey, were expressed among the smaller crowd of 4,000 that attended Brady’s execution.89 Overall, no more than a series of unconnected, low-level explosions occurred in Ireland during the Land War. During 1880, agrarian outrages soared from 294 for the first quarter to 1,696 in the final quarter, an unforeseen and unprecedented climb. Despite this pervasive terrorism, in the nineteenth-century meaning of the term, dynamite attacks did not feature.90 In the following year, the imprisonment of the League’s leaders and the repression of the movement under the provisions of the 1881 Protection of Persons and Property Act increased tensions and provided a revolutionary moment when dynamite attacks might have been tolerated, but skirmishing continued to be eschewed. Tellingly, aside from the Weston House explosion, the handful of dynamite outrages that did occur in Ireland came after the 1882 Kilmainham treaty. During the peaks of Land War unrest, bomb attacks did not feature. This was surely attributable to the effectiveness of the League’s organisation and tactics of boycotting, withholding rents, obstruction of evictions, sabotage and moral suasion. Similarly, during the sequel to the Land War  – the Plan of Campaign, 1886–91  – violent attacks 87 Financial and accounting materials, receipts dated 27 March, 8 November and 14 December 1886, 27 July 1887, CUA, ODRPP, Box 5, Folder 9. 88 The Nation, 31 May 1884. 89 Freeman’s Journal, 15 May 1883. 90 Figures in Moody, Davitt, 420.

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involving explosives were scarce. The Irish Times reported that infernal machines (usually gas pipes filled with explosives) were discovered during a large eviction on Lord Clanricarde’s estate near Woodford, Galway, and at the office of the Tipperary landlord and High Sheriff of Cork, Arthur Smith-Barry. Yet, The Nation contested the veracity of these reports and maintained, ‘no such outrage had ever been committed or contemplated’ at Woodford.91 Aside from these incidents, dynamite bombs did not feature in reports of the unrest. The small explosions that did occur in Ireland, however, were provoked by the skirmishing propaganda imported into the country. Historian T. W. Moody noted that ‘great quantities of inflammable material’ were distributed in Ireland, and The Irish World undoubtedly gave the government cause for concern. The newspaper held a sizable circulation in Ireland thanks to transnational family networks, while some copies of the United Irishman also arrived, albeit in much smaller quantities.92 This Irish readership was boosted by the ‘Spread the Light’ Fund, which financed the shipment of large quantities of The Irish World (including unsold back-issues) to Ireland, where they were widely distributed by Davitt, Dillon and O’Brien.93 The weekly newspaper urged Irish tenants and labourers to use ‘simple recipes’ outlined in a series of articles, written under the pseudonym ‘Anti-Feudal’ and entitled ‘Fulminates, Dynamites, Detonates, Explosives, etc: Their Uses and Composition’. In another article, ‘Trans-Atlantic’ proposed the establishment of a fund to send ‘Anti-Feudal’ to Ireland to lecture on chemistry, and encouraged tenants to ‘[m]ake a tea-cup of saw-dust, steep this in a saucer full of aquafortis, dry slowly at a distance from fire, and … this single cupful of compound filled into a tin vessel and inserted into the base wall of a building, will, when exploded, blow it to pieces’.94 Throughout the Land War, Patrick Ford remained committed to skirmishing, even though his championing of mass mobilisation and rent-strikes surpassed his enthusiasm for dynamite in 1881. In April of that year, Ford wrote, ‘The Irish World does not now advocate skirmishing’, but added, ‘it may yet become necessary’.95 When compared to The Irish World’s radical agrarianism, dynamite propaganda did not strike the same note in Ireland and was ultimately spurned by most agitators during the Land War. Readers in Ireland were occasionally alienated 91 The Irish Times, 11 September and 21 November 1889; The Nation, 14 December 1889; Nenagh Guardian, 27 November 1889. 92 TNA: PRO FO 5 1817; Moody, Davitt, 363. 93 Lyons, Parnell, 446. 94 The Irish World, 14 December 1878, 25 January 1879. 95 Ibid., 16 April 1881 (emphasis in original).

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by violent solutions that looked good on paper, but reflected a poor understanding of Irish realities. Programmes for resisting evictions and throwing dynamite bombs overestimated the resources available to tenants and risked their ‘extermination’, at least in the eyes of one Irish reader, who requested his subscription be terminated because, ‘we in Ireland, isolated as we are, cannot be expected to feel, think and act exactly as your learned and vigorous correspondents think we should … whatever our aspirations may be, we have by sad experience learned to distinguish between the possible and the impossible’.96 Already in early 1882, Alexander Sullivan told John Devoy that he was planning dynamite attacks ‘for the purpose of retaliating on the English government for the coercion in Ireland’. At this stage, Ford was not in agreement with Sullivan, being eager to see how events in Ireland unravelled.97 His opinions changed within a few months, however, and he viewed the Kilmainham treaty as a surrender to government and landlordism. With the strategy of the rent-strike no longer plausible, he turned to support the plan for a dynamite campaign. By the end of 1883, The Irish World was again openly encouraging and financing bomb attacks.98 A substantial amount of time passed between the Kilmainham treaty and the first blasts of Clan-na-Gael’s operations in Great Britain in 1883. The 1882 assassinations of the Irish Chief Secretary Cavendish and Under-Secretary Burke by the Invincibles served to discredit revolutionary nationalism, and allowed Parnell to consolidate control of the Land League and moderate its goals. More importantly, the murder of Cavendish and Burke highlighted the length of the Irish tether. The level of moral panic generated by the affair and the damage done to Fenianism led the Clan-na-Gael to delay the new dynamite campaign until 1883. As we have seen in Chapter 2, it wasn’t until the execution of Patrick O’Donnell that Ford felt the time was right to begin to collect funds publicly for dynamite attacks again. During the Land War, Ford and the Clan-na-Gael intended to use the skirmishing card: firstly, to threaten the government should a coercion act be introduced, and secondly, to wring concessions out of conservatives in the Land League. The Phoenix Park assassinations shattered this imagined leverage. Disillusioned Land Leaguers were less likely to favour skirmishing as an alternative strategy after the general outcry and 96 Ibid., 7 July 1877. 97 Alexander Sullivan to John Devoy (undated), in O’Brien and Ryan, Devoy’s Post Bag, Vol. II, 113–15, 232; McGee, The IRB, 98. 98 The Irish World, 6 October and 10 November 1883.

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coercive legislation that followed the killings, and Ireland was spared more dynamite outrages. The 1882 Crimes Act that resulted from the Phoenix Park affair drastically curtailed the circulation of dynamite propaganda in Ireland. Already, in January 1882, Henry George complained to Ford that ‘they are undoubtedly destroying the World by carrying it off to [Dublin] Castle. I got a copy of the Saturday Evening Post today, but it had been torn open to see if it was an Irish World.’99 The Crimes Act provided more stringent powers for the seizure of seditious material, and batches of the newspaper began to be sequestered at the ports and ‘forfeited’. These measures limited the circulation of The Irish World and the United Irishman, even if some packages still slipped through.100 When The Nation reported in 1884 that the ‘Dynamite Scare seems to have extended to Ireland’, after a canister of gunpowder was left on the window-sill of Ship Street barracks in Dublin, the tone of the article was almost one of amusement, rather than fearful anticipation.101

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Events during the Land War had illustrated the limited appeal of skirmishing in Ireland, but this did not dampen the associations that subscribers in the USA habitually made between skirmishing and the land question, and Timothy Meagher has observed how The Irish World ‘believed that the war for land in Ireland was but a part of a more general fight by workers in America and England against economic oppression’.102 When Ford opened the Emergency Fund in January 1884, letters arrived from readers who continued to associate dynamite with land reform. Subscriptions came from the ‘Late Land League, Davitt Branch’ in Paterson, NJ, or from individuals who advised that ‘the application of dynamite and another No-Rent Manifesto would about solve the Irish problem.’103 John T. Ryan, an Irish-born potter living in Trenton, NJ, wrote, ‘Your call for an Emergency fund gave me great pleasure … It [The Irish World] has taught me to be a Greenbacker and a Knight of Labor as well as a Land Leaguer and an Irish Nationalist. As soon as business starts here again I will try and get subscriptions for 99 Henry George to Patrick Ford, 14 January 1882, NYPL, Henry George Papers, 1840s–1950s, Series 1, Box 3. 100 Prevention of Crime (Ireland) Act, 1882 [45 and 46 Vict. c. 25], 8; TNA: PRO CUST 33/392; NAI CSORP, 1883, 6369; 1884, 26961. 101 The Nation, 3 May 1884. 102 Meagher, Inventing Irish America, 181. 103 The Irish World, 2 February 1884.

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this Emergency Fund.’104 Associations between the Emergency Fund and social reform were informed by questions of land monopoly and usury in the hostland as well as the homeland. The motto that was used to launch the skirmishing idea in 1875 – ‘the patient dint and powder shock, will blast an empire like a rock’ – was an old Fenian Brotherhood maxim that could be seen on the placards of striking workers at demonstrations for the ten-hour working day in the 1870s.105 Skirmishing developed out of the context of frustrations and tensions in the USA, as well as grievances relating specifically to Ireland. The disparate circumstances of Ireland and New York were linked in a discourse that portrayed the social ills of both places to be fundamentally alike. ‘The Land question is the real question for the toiling class on both sides of the Atlantic, your side and our side’, Trans-Atlantic told his readers when comparing American magnates to Irish landlords.106 During the years from 1875 to 1885 Irish immigrants were caught up in the violent industrial conflicts that characterised the ‘Great Upheaval’. Irish men and women were prominent in the American labour movement and helped organise the United Garment Workers of America, the Women’s Trade Union League, New York’s Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor. The leader of the Knights of Labor was Terence Powderly, the son of two Irish immigrants. Indeed, Powderly’s career neatly illustrated the intersection of labour and Irish nationalism: he was active in the Land League branches organised by Patrick Ford and in 1881 he became head of the Clan-na-Gael in Pennsylvania.107 Historian Kevin Kenny has drawn attention to the distinct contributions Irish workers made to the American labour movement by blending ‘trade unionism and older forms of protest rooted in the Irish countryside’. Secrecy and oath-taking featured at branches of the Knights of Labor, while the Molly Maguires employed forms of intimidation and violence that strongly resembled ritualised forms of Irish agrarian protest.108 104 Ibid., 26 January 1884. 105 Ibid., 4 December 1875. See Mary H. Blewett, Constant Turmoil: The Politics of Industrial Life in Nineteenth-Century New England, Amherst, 2000, 133. O’Mahony used this phrase in an 1863 Chicago speech, quoted in John Rutherford, The Secret History of the Fenian Conspiracy: Its Origin, Objects, & Ramifications, 2 vols., London, 1877, Vol. II, 205. 106 Ibid., 25 January 1879. 107 Terence V. Powderly, The Path I Trod, New York, 1968 [1940], 177–9; Foner, ‘Class, Ethnicity and Radicalism’, 25. 108 Kevin Kenny, ‘Labor and Labor Organizations’, in Joseph Lee and Marion R. Casey (eds.), Making the Irish American: History and Heritage of the Irish in the United States, New York, 2007, 360.

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The Skirmishing Fund was launched concurrently with the trials of the ‘Molly Maguires’, the name given to a group of Irish coal miners who transported the tactics of a Donegal agrarian secret society to the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania.109 Between 1862 and 1875 they were attributed with twenty-four assassinations, largely of mine foremen and superintendents, along with arson and intimidation.110 The Mollies were not nationalists but aimed squarely at dealing with local problems. These local problems were severe. In 1871, 112 men were killed in the mines while 332 were maimed or crippled for life. During and after the Panic of 1873 conditions hardly improved.111 By 1876, the Mollies’ activities had been firmly brought to a close by coal boss Franklin Gowen and the undercover Pinkerton detective James McParlan, who himself instigated murders in order to entrap certain individuals. Interestingly, both Gowen and McParlan were also Irishborn. Through their combined efforts, several Mollies were brought to court between 1877 and 1879, and Gowen himself acted as prosecutor in trials that concluded with twenty executions and numerous sentences of hard labour.112 Throughout this period of industrial violence one of the few organs that dealt sympathetically with the Molly Maguires was The Irish World, and a substantial number of subscriptions to the Skirmishing Fund came from north-eastern Pennsylvania.113 Questioning the actual existence of a conspiracy, correspondents at the paper resisted the general hyperbole in the mainstream press, and presented the Molly Maguires from the perspective of the immigrant coal workers. ‘Tyrannical bosses in some instances were shot and killed’, Ford wrote apologetically, because of the desperate working conditions. Powerful railroad corporations had merged to take over the Pennsylvania coal mines, and as a result wages were driven down to very low levels. Rather than being the exaggerated conspiracy depicted by Gowen and the mainstream press, Ford portrayed the Mollies as a group of individuals who worked in low-paid and dangerous jobs. ‘Blackened, bent, begrimed’, they had attempted to defend their rights against corporate capitalism.114 109 Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, Oxford, 1998; Wayne G. Broehl, Jr, The Molly Maguires, Cambridge, MA, 1964. 110 Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, 188. 111 Figures taken from James D. Horan, The Pinkertons: The Detective Dynasty that Made History, New York, 1967, 206. 112 Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, 270; Horan, Pinkertons, 224–36. 113 The Irish World, 3 March, 16 and 30 June 1877. 114 Ibid., 3 June, 9 and 16 September, 28 October 1876.

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When the Molly Maguire panic began to fade, articles on class division swelled the pages of The Irish World and letters to the Skirmishing Fund voiced frustrations with labour and living conditions. In July 1877 the Great Railroad Strike erupted in West Virginia when workers of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad received their second wage cut in a year, despite lucrative payouts being made to shareholders. Conflict had been brewing for four years, and when it eventually erupted, it became the first nationwide labour-strike. The disturbance spread westward and to other industries, flaring up into a labour upheaval that traversed the county and profoundly impacted several aspects of American daily life. In Baltimore and Pittsburgh, militiamen fired into crowds of demonstrators, killing dozens of people, and eventually federal troops were called in to suppress the conflagration.115 Public opinion was divided during the strike and the mainstream press vilified the strikers. Ford accused the daily press of being in the pay of capitalists and threw his weight behind the unions in what he called the ‘War for Bread’. An estimated one-third of the employees on strike were Irish and, coming in the midst of the Molly Maguire executions, the episode further radicalised Irish American opinion.116 Patrick Ford’s sentiments were made clear in an open letter to the government, chastising their weakness in the face of railroad barons like Thomas Alexander Scott and Jay Gould, even if Gould was not central to the strike. Parsed in the turgid, religious language typical of Ford’s editorial style, the letter called on government to stand up to the press and industrial magnates, lest people think state institutions were beyond redemption. The denial of the worker’s right ‘to retain and enjoy the fruits of his toil’ was at the bottom of all rebellions, Ford argued, from the Jews in Egypt to 1789, and history illustrated that repression of workers’ demands was always in vain. Employing the biblical allegories typical of his dynamite propaganda, Ford declared that the failure of the government to act justly would mean labour, like Samson, would rise up, ‘killing both itself and its cold blooded and unfeeling tyrants’.117 When people were feeling the pinch during the disturbances of 1877 the Skirmishing Fund continued to draw subscriptions. In July 1877, Ford reported that despite ‘the depressed state of business … the Skirmishing Fund is doing exceedingly well’.118 During the strike, The 115 Philip S. Foner, The Great Labour Uprising of 1877, New York, 1977; Robert V. Bruce, 1877: Year of Violence, Chicago, 1959. 116 The Irish World, 28 July 1877; Kenny, ‘Labor and Labor Organizations’, 359. 117 Patrick Ford, The Labor Question: An Open Letter to the Executive and Law Making Powers of the Country, New York, 1877. 118 The Irish World, 7 July 1877.

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Irish World’s appeal stretched across ethnic lines to include small contributions from Danish, German, Swedish and French workers. These immigrant groups, with no obvious stake in Irish independence, contributed to the fund as a show of solidarity and because of the identification of The Irish World with working-class interests. Labour historians, such as David Roediger and Theodore Allen, have noted Irish immigrants’ resistance to multiethnic alliances to improve working conditions, along with the xenophobia and racism of the Irish American working class well into the twentieth century.119 While letters to The Irish World rarely demonstrated Irish workers’ desire to throw in their lot with Bohemian or black workers, the Great Railway Strike did provide a moment when the interests of different ethnic groups converged in the face of overwhelming adversity. Small contributions to the Skirmishing Fund from groups other than the Irish hardly point to a general wave of solidarity, but they do suggest that relations were not permanently hostile among the different immigrant groups. In mid July, O’Donovan Rossa wrote of ‘Germans coming to the front in Ireland’s cause’, and proceeded to publish a list of subscribers from Indiana that included ninety-five Germans, both male and female, along with seven Americans and a Dane. Throughout the following months, Skirmishing Fund lists were dotted with names such as Sandalowsky or Rittmaster. In August, a group of forty railroad workers who worked for $1.15 per day donated $29.50. Among them were nine Germans, one Englishman, one American and twenty-nine Irish. A week later, a group of Pennsylvania coal miners including five English, two Germans, two Americans, one Austrian and a Dane donated $15. More ‘Cosmopolitan Lists’ arrived, as O’Donovan Rossa described them, with subscriptions from Swedes, French and ‘coloureds’, along with lists entitled ‘More German Subscribers’.120 Non-Irish subscribers accounted for a tiny amount of the fund in 1877: less than 1 per cent. It was a swell in Irish contributions that caused the fund to exceed expectations. The year 1877 was an economically tough one in the United States and this was reflected in fund subscriptions. A particular economic trough in that year was, of course, the period of the Great Railway Strike in July. During the period of the strike and its immediate aftermath, however, subscriptions to the Skirmishing Fund showed an increase (see Table 6.1).

119 David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London, 1991, passim. 120 The Irish World, 14 July, 11 and 18 August, 29 September 1877.

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Table 6.1 Monthly subscriptions to the Skirmishing Fund in 1877. Jan

Feb

Mar

$513

$410 $357

Apr

May

Jun

Jul

Aug

Sep

Oct

Nov

$680 $1,266 $3,030 $2,414 $2,845 $4,691 $1,984 $1,652

Dec $1,477

The early months of 1877 were evidently lean ones but subscriptions began to improve in May, which was due in part to a change in the fund’s administration. Clan-na-Gael members  – John Devoy among them  – were inserted onto the board of trustees to accompany O’Donovan Rossa and, above all, to shorten his leash and try and assume control of the fund. Accounting for the enthusiasm generated by changes in the fund’s management, however, one would still expect subscriptions to trickle away during the strike. Yet, subscriptions for the three months most affected by the strike – July, August, September – are almost equal to the total collected for the other nine months of the year. The high level of donations during the strike points to the popularity of The Irish World among the Irish working class, but also demonstrates that they viewed Irish nationalism, in the form of the Skirmishing Fund, as a vehicle to express their discontent and protest at grievances in their new home. Supporters of skirmishing were also found among labour activists in New York and Brooklyn. Thomas Devyr was a Donegal-born pedlar turned journalist whose early experience of agrarian crisis and violence in Ireland fostered a lifelong commitment to land reform. When working for a Newcastle newspaper in the late 1830s, Devyr converted to Chartism and, in 1839, he organised armed bands of guerrillas in northern English cities, but the plan proved abortive. He escaped with his family to New York where he soon became involved in the anti-rent movement. By the late 1870s Devyr was an old man with somewhat outdated ideas of reform, but he nonetheless spoke at the 1877 labour meetings in Tompkins Square Park and wrote in The Irish World.121 His pamphlet War of the Classes: How to Avert It was published in 1878, with a foreword by Patrick Ford. Here Devyr outlined his view that ‘The first skirmishing in Ireland is mental skirmishing. To teach the people

121 See Reeve Huston, ‘Multiple Crossings: Thomas Ainge Devyr and Transatlantic Land Reform’, in Thomas Summerhill and James C. Scott (eds.), Transatlantic Rebels: Agrarian Radicalism in Comparative Context, East Lansing, 2004, 137–66; The New York Times, 26 July 1877.

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that dukes, and lords, and squireens have no title to the Irish land, and that the time has arrived for them to clear out’.122 The overlapping of militant nationalism and labour politics was visible at the Sunday evening ‘dynamite lectures’ at Brooklyn’s Columbia Hall. The chairman William Burke opened one meeting by proclaiming, ‘The Irish question is the question of the laboring classes throughout the world.’ In 1884 Devyr shared a stage with Professor Mezzeroff, who regularly spoke of the English labour movement and class struggle when addressing the Fenians. Similarly, Patrick McGahey asserted ‘thousands of oppressed English workingmen are in sympathy with us’.123 Other speakers at the dynamite lectures included local labour activist James McGrath, and Robert Blissert, one of the founders of New York’s Central Labor Union. Born in England to Irish parents, Blissert emigrated to New York after being blacklisted for his role in a tailors’ strike. Averse to O’Donovan Rossa’s sentimental talk about descending from the nobility of pre-plantation times, Blissert declared ‘Irish chieftains were just as great marauders as the English who followed them.’ Previously, Blissert had chaired a meeting of the Central Labor Union where delegates agreed that combining dynamite with mass-mobilisation would lead to the toppling of government in Ireland, and Dublin Castle monitored his more militant speeches. On the relationship between dynamite and the American working class, however, Blissert and the majority of delegates firmly maintained that the presence of political representation and functioning unions in the United States was a preferable alternative to violence.124 At the same meeting, a few voices from Brooklyn’s Central Labor Union advocated skirmishing in New York, bizarrely against the newly constructed Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge had become an object of dissatisfaction to New York and Brooklyn Irish communities because the opening ceremony, on 24 May 1883, coincided with Queen Victoria’s birthday. Delegates claimed it was an insult to the workers who had built the bridge that the queen should be honoured, and insisted on another date, or proceedings would be sabotaged with dynamite. Happily, the objectors were persuaded that the choice of day was pure coincidence and that their protests were groundless, and the ceremonies passed off as planned.125 122 Thomas A. Devyr, War of the Classes: How to Avert It, New York, 1878, CUA, ODRPP, Box. 6. 123 The Irish World, 16 April 1881; Brooklyn Eagle, 14 April 1883, 4 February 1884. 124 Brooklyn Eagle, 31 December 1883; The New York Sun, 30 April 1883; Foner, ‘Class, Ethnicity and Radicalism’, 29; NAI, PCR, 1882–1921, Box 2, iv. 125 ‘Workmen on Dynamite’, The Irish World, 12 May 1883; Brooklyn Eagle, 30 April 1883.

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Two weeks later, more serious calls for dynamite were voiced at a meeting of the Labor Lyceum on the Bowery. New York socialist Leander Thompson declared that political corruption had rendered the ballot almost useless, and urged the use of ‘moral force with a few pounds of dynamite behind it’, in New York as well as in Ireland. At the Columbia Hall lectures, Walker Elliot – a graduate and trustee of Mezzeroff’s dynamite school – suggested that Fenians would be forced to use explosives in New York as ‘monopolists are crowding us more than crowned heads’, and workers were left to support their families on a mere $5 a week.126 Another graduate of the dynamite school, and the dynamiter responsible for the attacks in London and Glasgow in 1883 – Thomas Mooney – was arrested in New York in 1887 for firing a small explosion on board the British transatlantic steamer The Queen, as it lay at the pier. The reasons why Mooney damaged the ship were not readily evident, and it was suggested that he might have been trying to burn a Union Jack on board. During his trial, evidence emerged that pointed towards Mooney’s involvement in other explosions on the steamer Guyandotte, the destruction of shipping-line warehouses and sheds, and a fire at a Pennsylvania Railroad depot that had occurred during a longshoremen’s strike the previous spring. The New York Times suggested ‘the possibility of a connection between certain labor organizations and men of Mooney’s stamp’, but no concrete proof of the dynamiter’s hand in these explosions was discovered, and at his trial Mooney was declared insane.127 Neither the New York labour activist nor the Irish Land Leaguer adopted skirmishing, but the labour/land question provided a context where subscribers made sense of the violence they supported and of the violence deployed against them. Through identifying the lot of the Irish peasant with that of the American labourer, The Irish World narrated a transnational struggle against land monopolisation, usury, political elites and industrial magnates. The Skirmishing Fund assimilated The Irish World’s ethos, creating a space where the interests of Irish tenant farmers, Fenians and American urban workers converged. This is not to say that support for skirmishing was built on a bedrock of class alone. Instead, class frustrations intersected with other bases of social identification and mobilisation – alienation in the new home, a sense of exile, nationalism, anti-imperialism  – to make the Skirmishing Fund 126 The Irish World, 29 May 1883; Brooklyn Eagle, 26 February 1884; The New York Times, 25 February 1884. 127 The New York Times, 6 August 1887; Brooklyn Eagle, 8 and 10 August 1887.

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attractive to thousands of workers. By 1885 it was evident that dynamiters had not struck at social or economic targets, and that the campaign of violence had done little or nothing to improve the economic standing of the subscribers. This was surely a factor when contributions to The Irish World’s Emergency Fund faded in 1885. Most Irish American labour activists espoused the liberal view that dynamite was permissible in Ireland and Russia, but not in the United States where democratic institutions were in place. Moreover, if linked to Irish nationalism, dynamite explosions in New York could prove disastrous. New York was the Fenians’ asylum, a haven of press freedoms and open organisation that could not be put in jeopardy. During the Great Southwest Railroad Strike of 1886, Terence Powderly, a key negotiator for the strikers, received a letter offering materials to ‘destroy every bridge and culvert on the road … an unfailing remedy for the wrongs of which your members complain’. Powderly ignored the offer and later asserted that the author was Henri Le Caron, the British spy who evidently saw potential in associating Fenianism with revolutionary labour in the United States.128 In the 1880s Powderly had gathered relief funds through The Irish World for striking Knights of Labor branches, and when the Emergency Fund began in 1884 Ford wrote to him asking for financial support. Whether Powderly obliged is not clear as his letters to Ford are missing from his papers. Publicly, at least, Powderly disapproved of dynamite in labour disputes.129 The dynamiters safeguarded their own American enclave and kept militant labour organisations at arm’s length. They could not afford to be alienated from an Irish community that was slowly building a consciously separate, Catholic identity for itself in the United States. Moreover, associations with ‘Reds’ could have modified the relatively tolerant attitude Congress held toward their activities. The Fenians’ history in Ireland had demonstrated how associations with ideological, anticlerical revolutionaries were risky and threatened their support-base. Nonetheless, the mainstream press still sought to associate Fenians and labour agitators, stirring anxieties about the possibility of discontented workers adopting the dynamiters’ tactics. The Brooklyn Eagle warned, ‘the country is full of bitterness caused by depression of business, 128 Powderly, The Path I Trod, 184. 129 Patrick Ford to T. V. Powderly, 3 January 1884, CUA, T. V. Powderly Papers, Series 1, Box 9. Powderly’s correspondence with Ford in relation to the Emergency Fund is unfortunately missing from the collection. On Powderly’s disapproval of dynamite in the labour movement see Craig Phelan, Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor, Westport, CT, 2000, 205.

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personal privation, ostentatious flaunting of wealth in the face of poverty and so on. Unless pretty prompt measures are taken we may expect to hear of dynamite linked with strikes with unpleasant frequency.’130 On 2 February 1885, a sequence of three events in New York over twentyfour hours briefly appeared to confirm the hypothesis. Firstly, a blast at a dry-goods store on the corner of Grand Street and Allen Street during a strike prompted suggestions in the New-York Tribune that the dynamiters’ methods might be blowing back across the Atlantic. A strong clerks’ union had recently made demands for a shorter working day but had been refused by the store’s owners, provoking a strike of their forty-nine employees.131 The culprits could not be found, but it was readily visible that there were no connections to Irish militants. In fact, the explosion received undue attention in the press owing to the occurrence of another sensational episode that same day. South of Grand Street, the public imagination was stirred when an Englishwoman named Lucille Yseult Dudley fired a revolver at O’Donovan Rossa several times as they walked across Broadway late in the afternoon. He was injured in the shoulder but escaped death. The assailant was proclaimed insane, and Rossa survived to protest weakly that she was a British government agent.132 Sympathy was not audible even within the Irish community, however, with the majority of people feeling that his own actions and verbosity had provoked the attack. At the same time, the episode, coming so soon after the attempted assassination of the spy Phelan in Rossa’s Chambers Street office, imbued a feeling that the consequences of a relatively tolerant attitude toward Irish dynamiters were coming home. Since 1881, newspaper reports had been filled with ‘Dynamite Abroad’ headlines, but the appearance of Irish dynamiters in New York courts, along with the growing community of militant labour agitators, prompted concerns that ‘Dynamite at Home’ headlines would soon become all too frequent. Elsewhere in the city, a number of German radicals gathered in Concordia Hall on Avenue A later the same evening. The assembly had been arranged by German socialists to express sympathy for Irish nationalism, but also to make clear their disapproval of the recent dynamite attacks in London. Once underway, though, the speeches were disrupted by German anarchists who wished to make themselves heard. Tensions grew in the hall, and when plain-clothes policemen intervened 130 Brooklyn Eagle, 2 February 1885. 131 New-York Tribune, 2 February 1885. 132 New York Herald, 2 February 1885; New York World, 3 and 11 February 1885; Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, Vol. II, 137–44.

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an all-out brawl of ‘chair breaking and head pounding’ broke out.133 The New York Times, which took a very dim view of Fenians but an even dimmer one of anarchists, asserted that the latter disrupted the meeting in order to express their support for the dynamiters’ recent bomb attacks at Westminster. The New York World made the outlandish claim that O’Donovan Rossa had planned to attend the meeting and was only prevented from doing so by Dudley’s bullet in his back. Johann Most was present, according to The New York Times, but managed to avoid arrest. However, Justus Schwab, a Frankfurt-born anarchist who had emigrated to New York in 1869, was arrested and charged with inciting a riot.134 Two weeks later, when an infernal machine was delivered to the German consul in New York, the anarchists became immediate suspects after the recent events.135 Schwab was accused of being present at the Concordia Hall meeting in order to advocate dynamite and attack socialists, but his defence countered that it was the police that had created the disturbances. The New York Sun, one of the city newspapers more sympathetic to labour, stated that policemen were ‘clubbing men’s heads indiscriminately right and left’.136 During the trial, the police produced as evidence manifestos entitled ‘Socialists, Anarchists and Irish dynamiters’, which were signed by the International Workingmen’s Association. Printed in German and English, they were claimed to have been circulated at the hall. ‘Ireland bleeds out of a thousand wounds’, the manifesto read, ‘Thundering did she come at Albion’s heart … we applaud your deeds … hurray the universal revolution’.137 Police Captain McCullough claimed to have discovered a dynamite cartridge during the meeting, but he was unable to produce it during the trial. Given the evident determination of the police to send a message to the German anarchists, the discovery of dynamite cartridges and extremist pamphlets appears suspicious. As for the German anarchists’ support for the dynamiters, historian Tom Goyens has argued that Justus Schwab and others attended the meeting in order to prevent the socialists from casually associating the Irish dynamiters with the anarchists. Instead of favouring dynamite, 133 New York World, 3 February 1885. The files of the New York District Attorney hold newspaper clippings on the episode; NYMA, New York County District Attorney Scrapbooks. See also Rudolf Rocker, Johann Most: Das Leben eines Rebellen, Taunus 1973 [1924], 164. 134 New York World, 3 and 4 February 1885; The New York Times, 3 February 1885. 135 New York World, 13 February 1885. 136 The New York Sun, 3 February 1885. 137 New-York Tribune, 3 February 1885.

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the anarchists too wanted a forum to condemn the attacks publicly.138 Overall, the attitude of German anarchists toward Irish dynamiters varied and newspaper accounts of anarchists praising bombs in London were undoubtedly exaggerated. The Central Labor Union of New York housed many Irish republicans and Land Leaguers, as well as German radicals, but the extent to which these groups paid any serious attention to each other is difficult to assess as sources are scarce. Over 1,000 German anarchists resided in New York and around 400 of their number supported Johann Most’s militant brand of revolutionary agitation. This faction openly praised the Irish dynamiters, and Johann Most, similarly to the way he had lauded the 1882 Phoenix Park assassinations, acclaimed the London bombings in 1884–5. O’Donovan Rossa’s chemicals expert, Professor Mezzeroff, occasionally wrote in Die Freiheit and The Alarm, and the latter journal maintained that the New York anarchists fully approved of the London bombs.139 The Alarm unsurprisingly condemned Irish nationalists’ republican goals, and asked, ‘in what respect will the Irish poor be better off when they are ruled and robbed by Irishmen instead of Englishmen?’ But they endorsed their means and advocated dynamite as a weapon of revolution in rhetoric that differed little from the United Irishman.140 For his part, O’Donovan Rossa sympathised with the mauling that Albert Parsons and Most received in the mainstream press after Haymarket. Sensationalist newspaper articles about violence were shameful, Rossa argued, and he believed they were the key factor for the unfairness of Parsons’ trial and execution for the Haymarket explosion. He expressed these views in a letter to the governor of Illinois and asked him to show clemency in Parsons’ case. When Johann Most’s application for US citizenship was rejected in September 1887, making his prospects for deportation all the more real, Rossa criticised the decision as a ‘grave injustice’. Although he believed that violence was unnecessary in the USA owing to the existence of representative institutions, he favoured the underdog and saw similarities between himself and Most: both had been imprisoned in Britain and then sailed to America as political refugees. There the similarities ended in Rossa’s 138 Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914, Urbana, 2007, 113, 166; Stephen Bonsal, Heyday in a Vanished World, New York, 1937, 13. Goyens gives the year as 1884, but it is surely the same episode. 139 The New York Times, 26 January and 4 February 1885; The Alarm (Chicago), 7 February 1885; Die Freiheit (New York), 12 June 1886. On the number of German anarchists in New York see Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 147. 140 The Alarm, 28 November 1885.

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mind, however, and he threatened to sue one newspaper for continually associating him with Most.141 Above all, the Concordia Hall episode illustrated, firstly, the rising tide of anti-radicalism and nativist feeling against immigrants, particularly Germans and Bohemians; and secondly, that the dynamiters’ safe haven was perhaps no longer as secure as it once had been. Irish nationalists’ use of dynamite had once been widely ridiculed in the USA as nothing more than a money-making scheme that in any case presented no domestic threat, but the rise of labour radicalism in North America put the dynamiters in dangerous company. The common association of bomb-throwers of all types, no matter what their political beliefs, resulted in unwanted comparisons with anarchists and put new pressure on Ford and Rossa to moderate their dynamite propaganda. Indicative of this was the cartoon on the cover of Puck in February 1885, depicting Rossa and Most as the ‘Apostles of Violence’, kept in check by the renewed force of American law and order (Figure 6.2). The Irish World avoided links to anarchists in Europe or the USA and sought to situate Irish nationalist ideology in the tradition of American Republicanism. However, some of the journalists writing for the newspaper held links to North American anarchism. In the late 1870s, Dyer Lum, a New York bookbinder and anarchist-syndicalist, wrote a regular column in The Irish World under the pseudonym ‘Gurth’, the paper’s Washington correspondent. Like Patrick Ford, Lum was an exabolitionist whose experiences during the Panic of 1873 turned him toward radical labour. In 1879 he became friends with anarchist Albert Parsons, and one year later the two men were delegates at a conference on the eight-hour day in Washington, DC, which Lum attended as The Irish World’s correspondent. By 1884, Lum was writing for Parsons’ Alarm as a self-described anarchist and making provocative declarations about violence that echoed the righteous indignation of The Irish World and the United Irishman: ‘Terrorism is the new gospel, to be proclaimed from the highways until that foul harlot legality lies trampled beneath a disinherited people’s wrath.’142 Similarly to Ford’s view of the dynamiters, Lum saw anarchist bomb-throwers as part of a tradition of virtuous violence and self-sacrifice that included John Brown.143 When the eight Haymarket anarchists were arrested in 1886, Lum travelled to Chicago to ensure The Alarm continued uninterrupted in Parsons’ absence. He did not dwell on proving the innocence of the 141 Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, Vol. II, 204–8. 142 The Alarm, 20 February 1886. 143 Paul Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, Princeton, 1984, 318–20.

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Figure 6.2 Bernard Gillam, ‘How Do They Like It Themselves?’, Puck, 11 February 1885.

accused anarchists, however, as he looked upon the bomb as an act of propaganda by the deed, something necessary to spark revolution. Instead, he plotted a prison-break, and smuggled four dynamite bombs and a dynamite capsule into the prison. The four bombs were discovered, but the dynamite capsule was used by Louis Lingg, one of the arraigned anarchists, to commit suicide in his cell.144 Historian Frank Brooks has observed that ‘Patrick Ford influenced Lum’s later strategy as an anarchist activist and journalist.’145 Certainly, Lum’s attitude to violence echoed Ford’s militancy in the late 1870s, and he borrowed O’Donovan Rossa’s vocabulary when he vowed that ‘the “resources of civilization” would be called into requisition’ when anarchists sought revenge for the Haymarket executions. Lum also described Spies as the ‘head center’ of the anarchist movement, a 144 Ibid., 376–7, 384. 145 On Lum see Frank H. Brooks, ‘Ideology, Strategy and Organisation: Dyer Lum and the American Anarchist Movement’, Labor History, 34(1) (1993), 57–83 (63).

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phrase clearly borrowed from the Fenian Brotherhood.146 At the very least it seems Lum’s familiarity with the Skirmishing Fund and Rossa’s newspaper influenced his attitude toward political violence. Two more Irish World correspondents – Henry Appleton and Sidney H. Morse (who signed their articles ‘Honorius’ and ‘Philip’)  – also became affiliated with anarchism and wrote for the Boston anarchist weekly Liberty. Appleton claimed to have subtly pushed anarchist articles in The Irish World: ‘I “compromised” by quietly fishing out whatever I could find of anarchistic method in the Irish movement, calling it by some other name than anarchism.’147 Whether readers were cajoled by Appleton into considering anarchist viewpoints is questionable, but he nonetheless pulled The Irish World’s centre of gravity further toward the left. Liberty espoused a moderate line when compared to other anarchist journals of the 1880s and 1890s, promoting the federalism of Proudhon above Bakunin’s collectivism and commitment to revolutionary violence. Editor Benjamin Tucker was a close follower of Patrick Ford’s activities and believed the transnational Land League movement was the closest the world had come to an alternative form of politics that was genuinely anarchistic: ‘an immense number of local groups, scattered over large sections of two continents separated by three thousand miles of ocean; each group autonomous … each inspired by a common central purpose’. Of the three strategies available to Irish revolutionaries, Tucker asserted, the rent-strike was the shortest road to success, as ‘open revolution means sure defeat … terrorism, though preferable to revolution, means years of demoralising intrigue’. When Ford began to advocate land nationalisation and rent-strikes, Liberty praised the ‘glorious’ Irish World as the ‘greatest of all powers for good now working on this planet for the emancipation of oppressed humanity’.148 Tucker’s attitude to dynamite was much more ambiguous. The risk caused to civilians was ‘morally indefensible’, but he equally condemned ‘English statesmen, who are today sacrificing innocent women and children in Egypt by the thousands’. Tucker likened Ireland to Russia; wherever repressive government existed, ‘force must be sanctioned for the time being’. Tucker did not condemn the 1885 House of Commons explosion but argued that it served as an international warning that ‘dynamite has come among tyrants to stay’, causing ‘legislators everywhere to sit much less easily in their seats, for which unquestionable 146 Dyer Lum, quoted in Avrich, The Haymarket Tragedy, 120, 408. 147 Liberty (Boston), 12 December 1885, 17 April 1886. 148 Ibid., 3 September 1881, 29 October 1881.

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blessing let us be duly thankful’. This was not an endorsement, however, and Tucker disapproved of the violent propaganda in journals such as Parsons’ Alarm, preferring to advocate a strategy similar to that of the Land League.149 In this sense, his views can be said to reflect the dominant attitude in the transnational anarchist movement. The strategies of the Land League – boycotting, mass meetings, sabotage – grabbed the attention of anarchists and militant socialists during the era of attentats, to a much greater extent than the skirmishing campaign. In 1881, anarchists in Naples wrote ‘it is time to declare our solidarity with the courageous champions of the soil in Ireland!’150 In New York, the journal Il grido degli oppressi recommended readers to spark agitation through the taking of private property and the founding of leagues to resist landlords, envisaging a rural campaign along the lines of the ‘illegal agitation in Ireland’.151 When Canovas, the Prime Minister of Spain, was assassinated by Michele Angiolillo in 1897, Errico Malatesta’s L’Agitazione did not openly criticise the act, but urged anarchists to adopt the less violent tactics of boycotting, ‘which originated in County Mayo, Ireland, against Captain Boycott’. The strategies of the Land League were preferable to assassination and bombings for the majority of anarchists, who viewed the former to be less counterproductive and ultimately more revolutionary.152 It is difficult to claim, then, that the Irish dynamiters directly inspired the anarchist attentats of the 1890s, though they were categorised with nihilists and anarchists in the mainstream press as the protagonists of a violent revolutionary moment. In 1896, the London Standard concluded that Fenianism was ‘the twin sister of Anarchism’ and the Fenian was ‘at war with civilisation quite as much as the French, the Italian, or the Spanish Anarchist, or the Russian nihilist’.153 Yet, attempts to foment a giant conspiracy of ‘enemies of society’ fell flat and were essentially scaremongering. In New York, The Irish World was anxious to avoid comparisons with the militant European left. Already in 1871, when the archbishop of Paris was killed during the Paris Commune, Ford condemned the ‘horrible crime’ committed by ‘demons in human shape walking the earth’. Regarding the causes of the Commune, Ford made the fantastic claim that Britain was responsible: ‘Who were the Reds? 149 Ibid., 31 January and 28 February 1885. 150 ‘La rivoluzione in Irlanda’, Il grido del popolo (Naples), 24 December 1881. 151 Il grido degli oppressi (New York), 18 March 1893; see also L’Anarchico (New York), 1 August 1888. 152 L’Agitazione (Ancona), 7 October 1897. 153 The Standard (London), 15 September 1896.

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The startling discovery has been made that 8,000 Englishmen were found among the Communists!’ The ‘real leaders’ of the Commune, according to Ford, were Marx, Blanqui and Diebneck, who, he incorrectly declared, were all presently living in London, ‘the retreat of all cutthroats’.154 Yet the paper’s immersion in the American labour movement and radicalisation during the late 1870s did in some ways lift the embargo on sympathy with foreign radicals. ‘Nihilism, Socialism and Internationalism’, Ford declared in 1883, ‘are but the outcroppings exhibiting the general discontent of the working peoples’.155 After the launch of the Skirmishing Fund, Ford became more and more attentive to global episodes of political violence. In 1878, Nobiling and Hodel’s attempts to assassinate the Kaiser were treated apologetically in the paper. One article, entitled ‘Distant Thunder’, maintained: The emperor William is shot at in Berlin, and the deed is imputed to a great organisation of the Disinherited through the German Empire. Russia is equally exposed to the same occult power, under the name ‘nihilists’. A woman even in the streets of St Petersburg attempts the life of the prefect of the police and is acquitted by a sympathising jury. In England the distress of the cotton workers is spreading, intensifying, and becoming more demonstrative … The symptoms then swing round to St Louis … on the Chicago and Alton [railway] extension, the men have been working broken time at $1.25.156

All of these episodes were flashpoints that made up a constellation of militant resistance to tyranny that stretched across the globe and provoked ‘the coming tempest’. In 1881, The Irish World reacted to Alexander II’s assassination with reserved but apologetic editorials. As the Irish tenant shoots his landlord, Ford argued, ‘the Russian nihilist who plots to kill the man who has sent a father or brother to die in the mines of Siberia, is not to be judged by an ordinary standard’. The struggle in Russia was depicted as a civil war between ‘Imperialists and nihilists’, with nitro-glycerine on one side, and pistols, rifles and bayonets on the other. Over the course of the following weeks, the newspaper began to commend the nihilists’ activities. Their supporters were the freed serfs whose lives had changed little since emancipation, except that they now paid rents: ‘like the soil tillers of Ireland, they cannot pay this enormous tax’.157 Usury was at the centre of the land question, Ford argued, and key to the discontent of the Russian peasantry, who ‘year after year have seen the products of their labour absorbed by the money lender’. 154 The Irish World, 3 and 10 June 1871. 155 Ibid., 14 April 1883. 156 Ibid., 25 May 1878. 157 Ibid., 26 March; 7, 21 and 28 May 1881.

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Here, a thread of anti-Semitism, which was not uncommon in the American labour movement at the time, was audible in The Irish World’s attitude toward the labour struggle. Anti-Semitism coloured many denunciations of capitalism during the final decades of the 1800s, and Michael Davitt similarly accused Jewish magnates of exploiting the working masses and promoting war in the name of their own narrow financial interests. Yet, Davitt’s condemnation of Jewish capitalists was accompanied by public condemnations of persecution and the vocal use of his journalism to highlight the plight of the Jewish masses, particularly in Russia.158 Similar empathy for the victims of anti-Semitic violence was not so readily evident in The Irish World. The analysis of the Russian land question and affinities expressed for nihilism were limited in The Irish World, and persistent parallels between nihilists and Fenians in the daily press provoked articles that refuted similarity on the grounds that Irish revolutionaries were peasants, fighting for the right to bread. By contrast, ‘nihilists can hardly be said to be the poor people of Russia. They get their recruits from college students … as well as from the ranks of the professional classes and the aristocracy.’159 In the end, the closest link the dynamiters had with nihilism was the employment of a Scottish American chemist with a Russian-sounding name – Professor Mezzeroff – to perform at dynamite lectures. By the time of the Haymarket explosion, the militancy that had featured in The Irish World for over a decade had faded, if not disappeared altogether. Ford’s radical politics subsided in tempo with his support for skirmishing, just as the two factors had intensified in 1875. When Henry George ran in the 1886 New York mayoral election on the combined labour/land platform, many New York Irish gave him their vote. The Irish World supported his candidacy and George narrowly missed out, coming second behind the Tammany candidate. By the time of the election, however, The Irish World’s radical politics were already on the wane. Dynamite propaganda was similarly in retreat and did not fit with entry into mainstream politics. In 1884, Ford, Patrick Egan and Alexander Sullivan entered an alliance to win Republican patronage and divide the spoils, and threw the weight of their respective newspapers and organisations behind the presidential candidate James Blaine, whose policies were clearly at odds with the Greenback-Labor Party which Ford had previously championed.160 This alliance with 158 Marley, Michael Davitt, 256–8. 159 The Irish World, 18 August 1883. 160 Rodechko, Patrick Ford, 122–55.

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the Republicans brought an end to The Irish World’s financial difficulties and provided Ford with a support-network he could use to defeat his competitors within the Irish American community, such as John Devoy’s Irish Nation and The Irish American. In 1887, O’Donovan Rossa hinted that he considered Patrick Ford to be a man of circumstances rather than principles, who supported ‘dynamiters, revolutionists, and advanced labor advocates when the people and the times and the tide are running in those channels’.161 The statement probably tells as much about Rossa’s lonely position as the last advocate of skirmishing as it does about Ford’s change of direction. Nonetheless, the attitude that The Irish World had taken toward the Paris Commune in 1871 jostled its way back into the paper with surprising ease. When some British newspapers casually linked the Haymarket bomb to Irish America, Ford reacted angrily and made clear he held little sympathy for the Chicago anarchists. The change with his previous position was noted by several observers, and Ford was provoked by the Catholic Union and Times (Buffalo) to explain himself. Yet his explanation served only to set the hollowness of his volte-face echoing: For any member of a community to endeavor by violence to resist the government and overturn the laws of that community after the manner of the Chicago anarchists, – I care not whether the community be a monarchy or a republic, – I hold to be altogether wrong. The line must be drawn somewhere … But dynamite employed in the direction given to it by Irish patriotism was never intended for anarchical purposes. It was not a war against society. It was a war between two nations.162

Ford largely refrained from comment during the Haymarket trials. The Knights of Labor also chose not to support the Chicago anarchists, but Ford’s attitude seems more blasé given his record with dynamite. In Texas, where Albert Parsons had lived most of his life, newspapers were quick to note that ‘four men were hanged in Chicago last fall, and several men are now imprisoned for life, whose principles were no worse than Ford’s, and who only exceeded him by personal courage in their practice’.163 Frank Roney, the Belfast Fenian turned American labour leader, was bitter in his criticism of the silence in the Irish American press during the Haymarket trials, commenting, ‘to see men crawling around like poltroons, fearful to express a charitable thought in favour 161 United Irishman, 25 June 1887. 162 The Irish World, 4 September 1886 (emphasis in original). 163 Dallas Morning News, 20 May 1888.

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of fair play, was more than I expected or could stand’.164 O’Donovan Rossa was alone among the dynamiters when he wrote to the governor of Illinois asking for mercy for the condemned men.165 Henry Appleton, the ex-Irish World correspondent, wrote that his former home, ‘once the hope of the poor and lowly, has gone back on essentially all that endeared it to humanity’s best hopes. It is morally ready to be carried out and buried.’ Appleton was responding to a letter from Austin Ford, sent to Liberty’s offices, which asked him to ‘stop using the name of The Irish World in connection with your lectures and your newspaper articles. You know well that we do not agree with your ideas, and it is unfair to make us a party to them as you do by the use of The Irish World’s name.’ Tucker publicly responded, ‘this once grand champion of labor’s wrongs has at last ignominiously skulked away from its old issues and practically gone over body and soul to the enemy’.166 When economic crises and wage cuts led to labour unrest in the early 1890s, Ford sympathised with the workers and condemned the ‘hated and despised’ Pinkertons who defended the interests of the industrialists and appeared to be exempt from the legal consequences of their actions. Sympathy for the labourers was qualified, however, and where Ford had once asked for tolerance toward Chinese workers he now reiterated the sentiments of mainstream labour leaders, maintaining that the ‘experience the Pacific Coast had of the Chinaman shows that he has peculiar vices and characteristics that make him anything but a desirable addition to our population … It is only right that steps should be taken to keep him out in the interests of American civilization.’167 When the Homestead strike violently erupted in 1892, Ford agreed that the workers held deep-seated grievances, but he was openly hostile toward agitators, and when Alexander Berkman attempted to kill industrialist Henry Clay Frick during the strike, Ford, similarly to Johann Most, declared Berkman to be an enemy of labour. Berkman’s act came at a time when news of attentats in Europe arrived with increasing frequency, and the anarchist movement, which the press associated most with the violence, was vilified in The Irish World and described as the ‘monstrous and savage outgrowth of atheism and disaffection’. Interestingly, when condemning anarchist violence, Ford invoked the 164 Frank Roney, Irish Rebel and California Labor Leader, Berkeley, 1931, 501. 165 Ó Lúing, Ó Donnabháin Rosa, Vol. II, 204. 166 Liberty, 31 January and 12 December 1885. 167 The Irish World, 14 May 1892.

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paradigm of ‘civilization’ that he himself had laboured to dismantle during the skirmishing campaign. Anarchist violence ‘should have no place or recognition in civilized society’, while the rebel who attacks ‘the very centres of civilization’ deserved only the severest of punishments.168 Comments that differed little from The Times’ condemnation of the dynamiters. 168 Ibid., 9 May 1891; 7 May and 30 July 1892.



Skirmishing stops

On a Wednesday evening in January 1889, James Mooney gave a lecture on chemistry and scientific warfare in the backroom of a saloon on the corner of Manhattan’s 21st Street and 9th Avenue. The speaker was disappointed with his audience, no more than a small group of fourteen people. One year later O’Donovan Rossa issued a renewed ‘Call for Active Work’ in his newspaper, but police in Dublin confidently concluded that he and his associates were ‘engaged in a fruitless struggle to raise funds’. The skirmishing campaign was over.1 At first glance, the measures adopted to police the dynamiters appear effective. The explosions stopped in 1885 and, early the following year, officials were confident enough to withdraw enhanced security from British ports. At the same time, the January 1885 explosions at Westminster Hall, the House of Commons and the Tower of London were unprecedented successes for the dynamiters that exposed intelligence failures and the formidable difficulties of policing determined bombers.2 The presence of counter-terrorism measures alone, then, does not explain the curious fact that the most successful attack in 1885 was also the last in Britain. The skirmishing campaign seemed to stop, not end. The Irish World’s fiery rhetoric began to fade in 1885 and things suddenly became quiet in Great Britain. The Emergency Fund continued to gather donations but its tone was thoughtfully adjusted: by April dynamite and scientific warfare were no longer mentioned. Instead, monies were collected to ‘regain self-government’ while subscribers were warned that ‘as American citizens we ought to obey the law of the land’, and not 1 NAI, CBS, S-Files, 249; United Irishman, 15 April 1890; The New York Times, 24 January 1889. 2 Jenkinson had warned James Monro – the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police  – that an attack on the House of Commons was planned. E. G. Jenkinson, ‘Memorandum on the Organisation of the United Brotherhood, or Clan na Gael in the United States’, 22 January 1885, reprinted in Ball, Dublin Castle, 233.

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provoke Congress.3 By November the fund completely receded from view. Contemporaries linked this new moderation to the fresh prospects opening up for Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party in 1885. The franchise reform in 1884 created new possibilities for constitutional nationalism and the chance for unprecedented electoral success persuaded the Clan-na-Gael and United Irishmen to shelve dynamite operations, at least temporarily. In 1885, Edward Jenkinson informed government that Irish American nationalists, ‘with the exception of some of the more violent spirits and irreconcilables, are willing to give the Parliamentary Party a chance. Mr Parnell, they think, is riding the winning horse.’4 In his memoirs, the spy Henri Le Caron quoted a ‘secret-circular’, issued by the Clan-na-Gael in 1885, which stated ‘We expect to resume active operations after the present exigencies of the Constitutional Party are passed. We have purposely and advisedly abstained from doing anything likely to embarrass them during the crisis of the elections.’5 It was in Le Caron’s interests to emphasise the relationship between Parnell and the dynamiters, but the circular was nonetheless consistent with the Clan’s previous activities. O’Donovan Rossa’s United Irishmen began the skirmishing campaign in 1881, but the Clan-naGael held off until after the 1882 Kilmainham treaty before they began to organise dynamite attacks; the treaty was seen as an unacceptable compromise that ended the Land War without sufficient gains made in property redistribution. As the skirmishing campaign evolved, the protagonists considered part of its effectiveness to lie in the use of violence as a bargaining tool that was sensitive to the cadences of constitutional developments. Urban guerrilla warfare was imagined not as a replacement, but as a complement to other methods of political agitation practised by land reform agitators, the Irish Parliamentary Party and the wider nationalist movement in general. Neither constitutional nationalists nor government recognised the dynamiters as legitimate players, but the influence of Clan-na-Gael and Patrick Ford in Irish America ensured that they could not be overlooked in the years 1885–6. ‘Parliamentary agitation is now on trial’, Patrick Ford declared after the collapse of the Liberal government in 1885, and he 3 The Irish World, 18 April 1885. 4 E. G. Jenkinson, ‘Memorandum on the Present Situation in Ireland’, 26 September 1885, reprinted in Ball, Dublin Castle, 243–6; Christy Campbell, Fenian Fire: The British Government Plot to Assassinate Queen Victoria, London, 2002, 174. 5 Henri Le Caron, Twenty-Five Years in the Secret Service: The Recollections of a Spy, London, 1893, 246; K. R. M. Short, The Dynamite War: Irish-American Bombers in Victorian Britain, Dublin, 1979, 229.

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urged his readers to ‘pray and earnestly hope that Mr Parnell and his patriot band may succeed’.6 The following November, the Irish Parliamentary Party won eightysix seats in the general election, giving them the balance of power between the Liberals and Conservatives and unprecedented leverage for Home Rule legislation. A coalition was formed with the Liberals and the first Home Rule Bill was introduced in April 1886. Images of a victorious Parnell adorned the cover of The Irish World and militants in America were broadly supportive. Parnell’s standing was helped by the fact that his ally Patrick Egan was president of the Irish National League of America. Another ally was found in Alexander Sullivan, who remained a powerful voice among militant nationalists despite his resignation from the Clan-na-Gael executive in 1884. He declared it was ‘manifestly the duty of the Irish race throughout the world to sustain Parnell in assisting Gladstone to amend, improve and finally enact this bill’.7 At the 1886 Chicago National League convention this new direction was overwhelmingly endorsed by delegates, and Michael Davitt and William O’Brien encouraged Ford to cease political violence and give continued backing to Home Rule.8 Ford distrusted Parnell, but he was influenced by Egan and Davitt. Despite the general waning of his radicalism, he continued to advocate fundamental land reform in Ireland and was privately assured that, in return for his support, a new approach to the land question in Ireland would become a priority.9 O’Donovan Rossa showed remarkably less sympathy for parliamentarians, but his United Irishmen organisation was in ragged shape since 1883, bereft of funds, rife with informers, and incapable of organising operations independent of the Clan-na-Gael. In addition, Patrick Sarsfield Cassidy was subsuming Rossa’s position within the larger Fenian Brotherhood. Cassidy was sympathetic toward Home Rule and travelled to Dublin in 1885, Edward Jenkinson maintained, to meet with nationalist leaders who urged him to ‘use all his influence on his return to New York with all parties to stop all further explosions’.10 Ford initially emphasised that the truce was temporary and that skirmishing had not been abandoned. Should a Home Rule Bill not be forthcoming, ‘it would be a challenge to the Irish race to try other 6 The Irish World, 5 December 1885. 7 The New York Times, 11 April 1886. 8 Conor Cruise O’Brien, Parnell and His Party, 1880–90, Oxford, 1957, 196; Laurence Marley, Michael Davitt: Freelance Radical and Frondeur, Dublin, 2007, 90. 9 Joseph V. O’Brien, William O’Brien and the Course of Irish Politics, 1881–1918, Berkeley, 1976, 34. 10 Jenkinson, ‘Memorandum on the Present Situation in Ireland’, 26 September 1885, reprinted in Ball, Dublin Castle, 243–59 (257).

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methods of forcing England to listen to their demands’. In 1886, his New Year editorial maintained ‘we are among those who believe that the dynamite demonstrations had much to do with bringing John Bull into an arguing frame of mind’. Yet, as the year proceeded The Irish World dedicated itself increasingly to coverage of American party politics and support of the Home Rule Bill in Ireland. Some references to dynamite occasionally surfaced, sitting awkwardly with the paper’s new direction, and indicating more Ford’s self-conscious inconsistency rather than a return to arms. Threats of a renewed skirmishing campaign stopped. Instead, Ford warned that ‘an opportunity is now offered the two countries of adjusting difficulties by light of reason … If any act of violence be committed in England now, or in the immediate future, that act, it is safe to say, will not be the act of any friend of Ireland but of some enemy.’11 Ford was the originator and key proponent of the skirmishing idea, to a much greater extent than O’Donovan Rossa, and without his support it unsurprisingly faded. By 1887 it was clear that the previous militancy no longer existed among the staff of The Irish World. With odd symmetry the dynamiters’ arch adversary, Edward Jenkinson, also converted to Home Rule at this point. Late in 1885 he warned Gladstone that, ‘should Parnell not meet with success … the outrages and murders of 1882 will be repeated, in Ireland, and in London and perhaps in other parts of England there will be Dynamite explosions, the murder of statesmen and officials, and other outrages. All are determined about this, and all are preparing for it.’ These warnings lit the necessary fires. Gladstone ‘empathetically’ agreed with Jenkinson’s arguments and circulated his letter among party colleagues.12 Aside from dynamite, Jenkinson’s entreaties also reflected his fears that, should the principle of Home Rule not be conceded, elements in the Irish National League, which grew considerably in 1884/5 and which drew on Irish American money, would lift the lid on simmering agrarian tension and leave Ireland ‘face to face with open revolution’, ungovernable without a coercion act.13 Jenkinson’s opinions were registered, but when the Liberal government fell the new administration thought him to be contaminated, and both his jobs in Dublin and London were terminated. There was no way in Jenkinson’s mind assuredly to stop determined dynamiters other than changing how Ireland was governed, 11 The Irish World, 5 January 1885, 6 January and 17 April 1886. 12 E. G. Jenkinson to William Gladstone, 11 December 1885, reprinted in Ball, Dublin Castle, 280–5. 13 Ibid., 38, 282; Margaret O’Callaghan, British High Politics and a Nationalist Ireland: Criminality, Land and the Law under Forster and Balfour, Cork, 1994, 118–19.

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but his judgement was clouded by insecurity and exaggeration that led him, and therefore Gladstone, to overestimate the Clan-na-Gael in the winter of 1885. Support for skirmishing was far from unanimous in the Clan’s ranks, and dynamite intrigues were precipitating bitter divisions that would discredit the organisation dramatically and publicly in 1887. The success of transatlantic operations were further hampered by the IRB leaders’ determined opposition to dynamite. The failure of the 1886 Home Rule Bill and the election of a Conservative coalition headed by Lord Salisbury opened up fresh opportunities on the Irish political landscape for militant nationalism, but the dynamiters did not strike in Britain again, even if the bogus 1887 Jubilee Plot created the brief perception that they had. In the early 1880s the perception that revolution in Ireland was possible, if not imminent, had been key to the financial success of the Skirmishing Fund: dynamite attacks would provide the spark that would ignite the already smouldering Land War into full revolution. The same focus and enthusiasm were not generated in Irish America during the Plan of Campaign, 1886–91, experience having taught militants to be more cautious about the prospects of revolution. Combined with organisational decline was the fact that the dynamiters’ bombs had small impact when compared to what had originally been imagined. After five years of intermittent explosions it was difficult to see what they had achieved. Slowly, they accepted their previous exaggerations and by the end of the decade their initial predictions that a handful of rebels could ‘lay London in ashes overnight’ were shown to be more at home in the pages of science fiction. Nonetheless, the skirmishing campaign demands our attention not for what it accomplished on a grand scale, but because it revealed the tensions provoked by modernising and globalising forces in the nineteenth-century world. It is necessary to abandon narrow interpretations of dynamite bombs merely as the last acts of a few fanatics or the first blasts of modern terrorism, and rethink the factors – political, social, cultural – that shaped the worldview of those involved. The skirmishing campaign demarked the limits of militant nationalism and forced constitutional nationalists to clarify their attitudes to violence and define the moral economy of their party. The history of the dynamiters also challenges research that sees the global dimension of terrorism and political violence to be something new, peculiar to waves of violence at the turn of the twenty-first century. The spatial configuration of the dynamiters’ world extended in all directions in the late nineteenth century, across North America, Europe and the British empire. Exploiting advances in transportation and communications Fenianism

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operated in multiple centres in an earlier age of globalisation. Satirical cartoons of Irish people illustrated that the cultural battlefields of terrorism are nothing new, and that the mechanisms used to delegitimise violence were also contentious in the nineteenth century. Skirmishing and propaganda of the deed were ways to maintain a presence. Intermittent explosions of violence communicated the message that resistance could not be controlled, despite the increasing monopoly on violence held by governments in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was a means of testing the reflexes of the state in certain sectors and attempting to draw it into ugly, ill-defined conflicts where routines of action and reaction were not axiomatic. Analysing the skirmishing organisations reveals distinctive characteristics that lend themselves easily to comparison with other revolutionary movements: the experience of emigration/exile; the shift away from insurrection; memory of a catastrophic event; continually establishing new organisations, newspapers, clubs, societies, funding strategies; interminable infighting and squabbling; the mobilisation of activists as soldiers in a war; schools or academies for chemistry and bomb-making; the organisation of courts to maintain discipline and order on the membership; the saloon or tavern as a space where the revolutionary culture was lived and conspiracies were concocted. These elements made up a counterculture, a state in embryo, and were crucial to the forward movement of the organisation. The general worldview of the dynamiters is not easy to discern as opinions swung wildly and in opposite directions during the period in question. Militant nationalism was a schizophrenic entity, evident in the conspicuous incongruity of figures such as O’Donovan Rossa, Alexander Sullivan, John Devoy and Patrick Ford. Nonetheless, the ideology or outlook that was most regularly found in journals, letters and manifestos during the period under scrutiny expressed a form of democracy consistent with the IRB’s outlook and which aspired to a Jeffersonian agrarian republic. Rather than exhibiting a middle-class elitism or contempt for the masses, the subscribers to The Irish World adhered to a political outlook that transcended material interests and espoused a consciously social republicanism. They contributed to the Skirmishing Fund not because they felt it gave them opportunities for social betterment in their new home, but because it addressed political and economic concerns fundamental to their lives. The Irish World was not strictly speaking a Fenian newspaper, but was undoubtedly one of the papers most read by Fenians in the late nineteenth century. The fact that the Skirmishing Fund was housed there imbued it with the social radicalism that pervaded the paper. Class and culture were entangled:

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subscribers’ letters reflected both the tensions of the Great Upheaval and local cultures left behind in Ireland. This movement back and forth between Irish and American contexts shaped the worldview of the subscribers, and meant that militant Fenianism emerged, not a fixed doctrine, but as a movement that was attractive to divergent groups for a variety of reasons. Decisions to reconfigure violent strategies were catalysed by advances in technology and the widespread availability of explosive materials. This is not to say that as technology changes so do people’s minds and their politics, but scientific progress and new technologies infected society with a sort of communal inebriation in the decades after the Civil War, when all sorts of dramatic changes to everyday life were imagined to be around the corner. Scientists and soldiers, industrialists and anarchists, all predicted that new technologies would generate radical transformations in how wars were fought, with momentous consequences for society. It is vital to locate the emergence of urban guerrilla warfare in this setting. The skirmishing campaign and propaganda by the deed were part of a global moment when new technologies remodelled concepts of warfare, relocating the landscape of violence and raising the spectre of deliberately bombing cities to terrorise civilian populations. Debates surrounding the awesome powers of technologies and aerial warfare continued at the Hague conferences in 1899, 1907 and 1923, where concerns over civilian casualties continued to be downplayed in favour of total war.14 The dynamiters turned to technology and science as a means of vindicating their chosen strategy, which in itself illustrates the difficulties they had in legitimising their actions. By the mid 1880s, the hazy hours of scientific warfare had passed and sobriety found dynamite to be less potent than previously imagined. In December 1884 an article entitled ‘Harmless Work of Dynamite Fiends’ in the Brooklyn Eagle commented that ‘People are beginning to come to the conclusion that dynamite is not near so dangerous a thing as was generally supposed … dynamite has been very much over-estimated as a destructive agency.’15 In Ireland, the Cork Examiner observed that ‘practically, the dynamite experiments have been a failure, the results being nothing like what might have been feared or expected’, while The Irish Times spoke of ‘harmless idiots’ rather than feared conspirators.16 The Pall Mall 14 Mark Mazower, ‘An International Civilisation? Empire, Internationalism and the Crisis of the Mid-Twentieth Century’, International Affairs, 82 (2006), 553–66 (557). For a contrasting view see Andrew Barros, ‘Strategic Bombing and Restraint in “Total War”, 1915–1918’, Historical Journal, 52 (2009), 413–31. 15 Brooklyn Eagle, 14 December 1884. 16 Cork Examiner, 9 April 1883; The Irish Times, 14 January 1884.

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Gazette marvelled at the ‘fright and flurry’ in the daily press when the damage caused by the dynamiters’ bombs cost no more than £10,000.17 This is not to downplay the destruction that was caused: some of the explosions resulted in significant injuries and structural damage, and the first blast at Salford killed a young boy. Yet the destructive power attributed to new explosives in the 1870s was imagined to be far greater, enough to frustrate commerce in Great Britain to such an extent that economic activity would become impossible. Overall, the dynamiters’ bombs were pinpricks, rather than serious subversion. Hostility to skirmishing in Ireland underlined how the IRB clung to the idea of the volunteer force as an emblem of an emerging nation: the drilling of insurgents reflected the construction of a national army, a crucial aspect of nation-building. An army was a potent reminder of a nation, fully conscious of itself and of its interests and asserting the right to strike against foreign domination, a point that was reiterated by the Irish Volunteers when their ranks split in 1914. When performed correctly, political violence was a stage in the development of a national culture, a forceful expression of the nation’s right to self-determination. In comparison, the dynamiters symbolised a revolutionary vanguard, the need for an elite to spark a dormant population. In this sense, skirmishing was unacceptable to insurrectionary Fenians because it represented unpreparedness, that the nation was not yet ripe. Ultimately insurrection returned to Ireland, and the 1916 rising presaged the War of Independence (1919–21) and led to the formation of a new Irish state. This has encouraged the view, challenged in this book, that from the 1798 rebellion to the 1916 rising there existed among militant nationalists an uncontested consensus about the means of achieving independence. A disciplined, insurrectionary army was undoubtedly crucial to the IRB’s strategic plans, but equally some Fenians were willing to modify conventional tactics. Changing circumstances produced different methods, evident in O’Mahony’s guerrilla-style actions during 1848, Fariola’s plans for a guerrilla war in 1867 and the turn toward dynamite in the 1870s. By 1916 circumstances had changed drastically. For the first time since the Crimean War, Britain was fighting a foreign power and insurrection became a different proposition than it had hitherto been since 1798. Nonetheless, the 1916 rising may still be seen as an aberration, a symbolic gesture out of tune with the more practical conceptions of militant nationalism that had emerged in the 1870s and 1880s. Bulmer 17 Pall Mall Gazette, quoted in The New York Times, 27 January 1885.

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Hobson  – a member of the IRB and the Irish Volunteers who was sidelined during preparations for 1916 – argued that insurrection was impracticable and instead advocated ‘a defensive struggle using guerrilla tactics, and the military training in the Volunteer paper and in the companies was directed to this end’.18 J. J. O’Connell, the Chief of Inspection of the Volunteers, published several articles in the Irish Volunteer on ‘Hedge fighting’ that emphasised guerrilla tactics and the necessity of small, mobile units. Before Easter Monday, Eoin MacNeill, the Chief of Staff of the Volunteers, also indicated that he understood a ‘rising in arms’ to mean a guerrilla campaign conducted along the lines described by O’Connell and Hobson. He famously opposed the insurrection, believing that it held no chance of success and would present the authorities with what they wanted, an occasion to take ‘drastic action’.19 Indeed, the War of Independence was characterised by military pragmatism and guerrilla actions in both rural and urban settings, while homemade explosives were used to arm volunteers. In this sense, though the 1916 Proclamation declared that every generation of Irish people had asserted their right to self-determination through arms, insurrection was not always the chosen strategy. The 1916 rising was a step backward, an action that strayed from the strategical progression evident in the path from skirmishing to the War of Independence, a path that found many parallels beyond Ireland. 18 Bulmer Hobson, quoted in Fearghal McGarry, The Rising. Easter 1916, Oxford, 2010, 49. 19 Eoin MacNeill, quoted in F. X. Martin, ‘Eoin MacNeill on the 1916 Rising’, Irish Historical Studies, 12 (1961), 226–71 (237); Charles Townshend, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion, London, 2006, 99, 135–6.

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Chicago Tribune Cork Examiner Daily Telegraph (London) Freeman’s Journal (Dublin) Die Freiheit (New York) Gaelic American (New York) Galway Express Galway Vindicator Il grido degli oppressi (New York) Il grido del popolo (Naples) Harper’s Weekly (New York) Ireland’s Liberator and Dynamite Monthly (New York) The Irish American (New York) The Irish Nation (New York) The Irish People (Dublin) The Irish Times (Dublin) The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator (New York) The Irishman (Dublin) Judy (London) Kerry Sentinel (Tralee) Liberty (Boston) Manchester Guardian The Nation (Dublin) New York Herald The New York Sun The New York Times New-York Tribune Pall Mall Gazette (London) The Philadelphia Inquirer Puck (New York) Punch (London) La questione sociale (Florence) La questione sociale (Paterson) Saturday Review (London) Scientific American (New York) The Times (London) Trenton State Gazette United Ireland (Dublin) United Irishman (New York) The Washington Post Weekly Freeman (Dublin) P u bl i s h e d p r i m a ry s ou rc e s Adamo, Pietro (ed.). Pensiero e dynamite: Gli anarchici e la violenza, 1892–1894. Milan, 2004. Anderson, Robert. The Lighter Side of My Official Life. London, 1910.   Sidelights on the Home Rule Movement. London, 1907.

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Index

Ahmad, Muhammad, 108–9, 114 Alarm, The, 160, 169, 170, 285, 286, 289 American Civil War, 38, 53, 54, 60, 74, 75, 76, 112, 123, 139, 140, 142, 146, 147, 151–4, 155, 159, 170, 174, 220, 235, 301 Sixty-Ninth Regiment, 151 Anarchism, 64–6 attentats, 97 German anarchists in New York, 169–71, 283–5 Haymarket anarchists, 171, 230, 285, 286–8, 292–3 International Social Revolutionary and Anarchist Congress 1881, 2, 65, 169 Anderson, Benedict, 13 Anderson, Robert, 122 Henri Le Caron, 123, 134 Anderson, Samuel Lee, 70 Angiolillo, Michele, 99 Antwerp, 127, 130 Appleton, Henry, 288, 293 Archibald, Edward, 120–2, 134 Arendt, Hannah, 6, 20 Arthur, Chester, 171 assassination, 2, 3, 15, 16, 21, 58–9, 65, 90, 98, 99–103, 121, 258, 260, 264, 276, 290 Australia, 15, 79 Bakunin, Mikhail, 53, 230 Barcelona, 21, 135 Liceu theatre bombing, 72, 97 Barrett, Michael, 101 Barton (James McGrath), 178, 187 Belfast, 42, 179 Berkman, Alexander, 293 Bianco di Saint-Jorioz, Carlo, 61 Birmingham, 126, 134, 163 Blaine, James, 168, 172, 225, 291 Blanqui, Louis Auguste, 42, 43–5, 48

318

Blissert, Robert, 280 Boland, Michael, 85, 88, 136, 180–1, 183, 187 Boulogne, 130 Bourke, Richard (Earl of Mayo), 40, 50, 58, 207 Bradlaugh, Charles, 133 Breslin, John, 84, 141 Brown, John, 150, 286 and political violence, 92–3 Brown, Thomas, 4, 91, 189, 196–7 Budini, Giuseppe, 62 Buffalo, NY, 74, 180 Burke, Thomas, 99 Burke, William, 162, 280 Burton, Henry, 109 Butler, Francis William, 123 Byrne, Frank, 85 Cafiero, Carlo, 3, 21, 64, 65, 149 Callaghan, Peter, 187 Callan, Thomas, 128, 186, 188 Canada, 4, 16, 60, 74, 86, 210 dynamite attacks, 112, 164, 165–6 Canadian Raids, 74, 123, 235 Canovas del Castillo, Antonio, 112, 289 Carbonari, 41, 42, 43 Carey, James, 12, 99–100, 102–3, 260, 271 Carlton Club, London, 96 Carroll, William, 112 Caserio, Santo, 97 Casey, Patrick, 124 Cavendish, Frederick, 99 Cavour, Camillo, 51 Ceccarelli, Pietro, 64, 65 Chartism, 28, 31, 52, 119, 279 Chester Castle, 49, 76 Chester, James views on warfare, 147–9 Chinese immigration, 293 Ciancabilla, Giuseppe, 97

Index

319

Clan-na-Gael, 79, 85, 136, 159, 188, 248, 252, 264, 273, 296, 297, 299 anti-imperialism, 112, 117 Cronin murder, 182, 219 dynamite attacks, 93–4, 96, 109, 156, 163 dynamiters’ families, 182–4, 189 Fenian Ram, 140–1 Henri Le Caron, 123, 182 revolutionary directory, 88 Skirmishing Fund, 81–2, 85 Triangle trial, 180–1 Clancy, J. J., 81 Clarke, Thomas, 125, 162–3, 188 Clerkenwell explosion, 58, 71–3, 89, 101, 118, 224 Cleveland, Grover, 172, 225 Clipperton, R. C., 86, 122 Cluseret, Gustave, 35, 46, 47, 49, 54 and Giuseppe Mazzini, 52 background, 53 Coleman, Patrick, 86, 164 Collins, Patrick, 196 Columbia Hall, Brooklyn, 162 Comerford, R. V., 5, 34, 50, 178, 256 Concordia Hall, New York, 283 Cork, 34, 47, 50, 56, 123, 158, 164, 178, 204, 265, 268, 269 Corydon, John, 49 Costa Rica, 114 countyism, 200–8 Crimean war, 12, 53, 111, 142, 160, 302 Criminal Investigation Department (CID), 118 Crowe, Patrick, 77–8, 93, 95, 191, 219 manufacture of infernal machines, 78, 157 Skirmishing Fund, 77 United Irishmen, 83 Cuba, 12, 113, 114, 150, 160 Cuba ‘five’, 76 Cullen, Paul, 36, 39, 46, 70, 259 Cunningham, James, 109, 270 pension, 185, 271

Patrick Ford, 253, 254, 297 Skirmishing Fund, 85 views on skirmishing, 258–9 Deasy, Denis, 123–4, 185–6, 187, 268, 271 Devaney, Thomas, 187 Devoy, John, 34, 53, 73, 76, 77, 83, 102, 111, 112, 113, 189, 203 Catalpa rescue, 79 IRB uprising, 48 Irish Nation, 292 New Departure, 113, 248 Patrick Ford, 81, 140, 253 Skirmishing Fund, 74, 81–2, 83, 181, 279 Skirmishing Fund Investigating Committee, 84 Triangle trial, 180–1 views on dynamite, 89, 263 Devyr, Thomas, 280 Dillon, John, 132 Dillon, Luke, 86, 96, 98, 109, 123, 130, 181, 199, 212 American Indian Wars, 155 attitude to violence, 96 Triangle trial, 184, 187 Doheny, Michael, 32, 46 Donegal, 12, 247, 265, 267, 279 Donnelly, James (dynamiter), 187 Dublin explosions, 129–32 Dudley, Lucille Yseult, 283 dynamiters relationship with Clan-an-Gael and Rossa, 179–89 social profile, 177–9 Easter Rising, 1916, 1, 29, 302, 303 Edinburgh, 173 Edwards, Pierrepont, 159 Egan, James, 126 Egan, Patrick, 182, 291, 297 Egypt, 86, 103, 288 Anglo-Egyptian War 1882, 107–8, 112 Emergency Fund, 85, 103, 162, 242, 264, 273, 274, 282, 295 Engels, Friedrich, 28, 175

Dalton, Henry (John O’Connor), 123, 158, 269 Daly, John, 127, 134, 184 Davis, Eugene, 124 Davitt, Michael, 41, 132, 212, 248, 255, 291 agents provocateurs, 125, 133 land nationalisation, 253, 254 O’Donovan Rossa, 258

Fabrizi, Nicola, 62 Fariola, Octave, 46, 118 and Giuseppe Mazzini, 51 arrest, 40 background, 54 guerrilla warfare, 54–6, 61 Featherstone, Timothy (Edmund Kennedy), 123–4, 136, 158, 185, 260, 266, 269, 271

320

Index

Feely, Denis C., 85, 180 Fenian Brotherhood, 33, 151, 162, 165–6, 186, 202, 275, 297 Skirmishing Fund, 81 split with IRB, 74 Finerty, John F., 26, 120, 155 Flanagan, Patrick, 123, 187 Fleming, John, 184 Florence procession bombing, 135 Ford, Augustine, 76–7, 81, 155 Ford, Austin, 293 Ford, Ellen, 188 Ford, Patrick, 138, 185, 199, 212, 215, 268, 293 abolitionism, 92, 115 anti-imperialism, 106–11 Benjamin Tucker, 288, 293 Charles Stewart Parnell, 255, 262 Collins, Patrick A., 252 countyism, 203 Dyer Lum, 287 Emergency Fund, 85, 264 Great Railroad Strike, 1877, 277 Haymarket executions, 292 Henry George, 253–4, 291 Home Rule, 297 John Devoy, 84, 140, 253 labour movement, 247, 249, 250–1, 274 Land League, 249–56, 273 Michael Davitt, 253, 254, 297 Molly Maguires, 276 nihilism and anarchism, 290 O’Donnell, Patrick, 103 O’Donovan Rossa, Jeremiah, 83 Paris Commune, 289 Punch, 226 religion, 92, 250 Republican Party, 172, 291 Skirmishing Fund, 75, 76–7, 81, 91, 277 Dynamite Monthly, The, 167–8 views on political violence, 87, 91–2, 103, 110, 111, 148, 155, 264, 272, 298 Forster, W. E., 259, 261, 265 Freeman’s Journal, 131, 260 Freiheit, Die, 160, 169, 170, 198, 285 Gaelic American, 84 Gallagher, Thomas, 125, 136, 162–3, 187, 219 family pension, 184

Galway, 77, 199, 202, 241, 267 Clanricarde estate, 272 Weston House explosion, 265–6 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 37, 38, 39, 48, 52, 53, 63 anti-Garibaldi riots, 39 Geneva, 152, 154 George, Henry, 253–4, 255, 274, 291 Germany, 44, 51, 144, 173 Gibraltar, 112 Gladstone, W. E., 72, 100, 107, 117, 121, 237, 255, 263, 298–9 Glasgow, 85, 124, 127, 130, 158, 163, 164, 185, 269 Gordon, P. J., 38 Gosselin, Nicholas, 38, 122 Grace, William, 11 Grand Street explosion, 283 Great Famine, 31, 32, 113, 151, 176, 190, 199, 201, 211 Famine memory and skirmishing, 211–16 Great Railroad Strike, 1877, 277–9 Gregory, Lady, 109 Guatemala, 12 guerrilla warfare, 3, 21, 32–3, 54–6, 57–8, 59, 60, 61–5, 66–7, 77, 92, 111, 152, 155, 296, 301 and Irish Volunteers, 303 Haines, Thomas, 130–1 Hamilton, Robert, 126 Handlin, Oscar, 196 Harcourt, William, 7, 126 Harkins, Michael, 128, 186 Harrington, Edward, 268 Henry, Émile, 97 Herzegovina, 115 Hobsbawm, Eric, 18, 23 Hobson, Bulmer, 303 Hodnett, Richard, 269 Holland, John P. ‘Fenian Ram’, 140–1 House of Commons explosion, 2, 89, 96, 97, 109, 172, 232, 295 Hunter, Llewellyn, 123 Hussey, Samuel Edenburn explosion, 267–8 Indian rebellion, 1857, 59 International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), 3, 16, 53, 65, 169, 284 Invincibles, the, 99–103, 130, 273 Ireland’s Liberator and Dynamite Monthly, 167–8, 170

Index Irish Brigade, 1848, 150, 156 Irish National League, 138, 298 Irish People, The, 34–6, 115 Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), 1, 5, 7–9, 33, 48, 95, 100, 101, 112, 161, 178–9, 207, 210, 248, 249, 256, 300 1867 uprising, 50, 54, 68 1873 constitution, 90, 261 assassination committee, 58–9 Carbonari, 42 Catholic Church, 36–7, 39 Chester Castle, 49 Dublin explosions, 129–32 European republicans, 36, 40–3, 46, 51, 53–4 Fenian Brotherhood, 74 guerrilla warfare, 54–6, 57–8 International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), 53 Manchester Martyrs, 56 McManus funeral, 46–7 Papal Brigade, 37 political prisoners, 67 revolutionary directory, 88, 181 skirmishing, 87–9, 90, 302 Weston House explosion, 266 Irish Volunteers, 302–3 Irish World, The, 91, 106, 246, 281, 298, 300, See Patrick Ford antisemitism, 220–2, 291 Catholic Church, 249 circulation, 15, 99, 255, 272 Dyer Lum, 286 ‘Dynamite Saturday’, 110 Emergency Fund, 273, 274 empire, 115–17 fundraising, 81, 252, 257 Great Railroad Strike, 277–9 Harper’s Weekly, 226 Haymarket executions, 292–3 Homestead strike 1892, 293 individualist anarchists, 288 Land League, 249–56 launches Skirmishing Fund, 71, 73 Mahdist Revolt, 108–9 ‘maxims for skirmishers’, 106, 156 Molly Maguires, 276 Nobiling and Hodel, 290 No-Rent Manifesto, 254–5 Paris Commune, 289 Patrick O’Donnell, 99 readership, 177, 199, 200–8, 214 Russian revolutionaries, 290 sequestered, 274

321 Irishman, The, 40, 58, 67, 73 Italian Risorgimento, 31, 36, 38, 40, 44, 53, 92 anti-Garibaldi riots, 39 guerrilla warfare, 61–4 Irish Papal Brigade, 37–8 James Stephens, 41 Risorgimento democrats on Ireland, 51–2 Ivory case, 1896, 130–1 Jenkinson, Edward, 122, 128, 134, 136–7, 259, 296, 298–9 Red Jim McDermott, 123–5 Thomas Phelan, 126–7 views on skirmishing, 98 Jones, William, 130–1 Joyce, William, 133 Jubilee Plot, 128, 181, 186 Kalyvas, Stathis, 71, 151 Kearney, John F., 127–8, 130, 131, 136, 159, 163, 269 ‘Glencree’, 128 Kelly, Thomas, 55, 56 Kerry, 39, 50, 204, 269 Kerry Sentinel, 268 Kerwin, Michael, 47, 183, 184, 187 Kickham, Charles, 34 Kirwan, John, 37, 59 Knights of Labor, 274, 275, 282, 292 Kravchinsky, Sergei (Stepniak), 17, 22, 64, 232 Kropotkin, Peter, 17, 98–9, 230 Ladies Land League, 244 Lalor, James Fintan, 31 Land League, 101, 179, 204, 215, 257, 258, 260, 264, 271, 273, 274, 288, 289 Henry George, 254 Irish World, 249–56 skirmishing, 266, 270 Le Caron, Henri (Thomas Beach), 123, 134, 163, 182, 217, 235, 282, 296 Lee, Joe, 6, 18, 207 Lennon, Patrick, 59 Liberty, 288, 293 Lieber, Francis Lieber Code, 152–3 Liverpool, 11, 39, 85, 93, 124, 127, 167, 195 Lomasney, Susan, 183, 184

322

Index

Lomasney, William ‘Mackey’, 57, 73, 111, 178, 211 arrest and trial, 60, 102 Charles Stewart Parnell, 262 family and pension, 182, 183–4 guerrilla actions in Cork, 57–8, 60 skirmishing operations, 88, 94–5, 137 views on the United Irishmen, 95, 96 views on violence, 95–6, 98 London underground explosions, 25, 94, 98, 109, 260 Lord Leitrim, 264 Luby, Thomas Clarke, 34, 59, 83 Lum, Dyer, 286–8 and Haymarket anarchists, 286 and The Irish World, 286, 287 Lynch, William, 163

attitude to skirmishing, 96 dynamite attacks in Britain, 159, 164–5 explosion in Canada, 86, 165–6 explosion in New York, 86, 281 in Ireland, 269 split with United Irishmen, 166 Mooney, Thomas J. (‘Trans-Atlantic’), 114–15, 150, 197, 220, 272, 275 Moore, George Henry, 38 Morgan’s Raiders, 152 Morley, John, 18 Moroney, William John, 181 Most, Johann, 21, 98, 160, 170, 198, 230, 284, 285, 293 Die Freiheit, 169, 170, 171, 285 Moynihan, Daniel, 195 Murray, Joe, 38

MacNeill, Eoin, 303 Malatesta, Errico, 64, 66, 98, 289 Mallon, John, 129, 257 Manchester, 38, 85 Salford barracks, 94 Manchester Martyrs, 56–7, 94, 129 Manela, Erez, 12 Marx, Karl, 39, 53 Matese uprising, 64–5 Mayo, 202, 204, 265, 289 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 28, 36, 40, 51–2, 62 McCafferty, John, 49, 76, 100, 155 McDermott, Red Jim, 38, 123–5, 127, 134, 136, 163, 185, 268 McDonnell, J. P., 39 McGahey, Patrick, 162, 280 McGee, Thomas D’Arcy, 16 McManus, Terence Bellew, 46 Merlino, Francesco Saverio, 21, 67 Merna, John, 129–32 Meunier, Theodule, 97 Mexico, 12 Mezzeroff, Professor, 160–2, 280 Brooklyn dynamite school, 160, 163, 172 Dynamite Against Gladstone’s Resources of Civilization, 161, 170 links with anarchists, 169, 285 relationship with O’Donovan Rossa, 160–1 Millen, F. F., 12, 111, 112, 128, 136, 137 Mitchel, John, 31–2, 35, 60, 84, 212 Molly Maguires, 275–6 Monro, James, 128 Mooney, Thomas (alias James Moorhead), 127, 166, 186, 187 and Dynamite School, 158, 164

Nally, P. W., 130 Nast, Thomas, 225, 237 Nation, The, 259, 272 Nettlau, Max, 133 Nolan, John, 129–32 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 6 O’Brien, Matthew, 125, 134 O’Brien, Richard Barry, 262 O’Brien, William, 176, 232, 254, 255, 256, 268, 297 views on skirmishing, 259 O’Brien, William Smith, 32 O’Connell, Daniel, 30, 31, 51 O’Connell, J. J., 303 O’Connor, John, 88 Clan-na-Gael, 181 O’Connor, T. P., 108, 252, 255 O’Donnell, Edward, 86, 158, 164, 166 O’Donnell, Patrick, 12, 99, 102–3, 168, 273 O’Donovan Rossa, Jeremiah, 8, 15, 19, 34, 61, 88, 113, 119, 135, 165, 209, 278, 280, 297, 298 Albert Parsons, 171, 285–6, 293 beginning of Skirmishing Fund, 73, 76 Brooklyn dynamite school, 157–63 constitutional nationalism, 263–4 countyism, 202–4 Dynamite Monthly, 168 dynamiters’ pensions, 184–6, 188 Fenian Brotherhood, 81, 186 Fenian Ram, 141 Great Famine, 212 Henry O’Mahony, 270–1 imprisonment, 68, 77 in mainstream New York press, 219

Index Johann Most, 171, 230, 285–6 John O’Leary, 87 launches The United Irishman, 84 Lord Leitrim, 264 loses control of Skirmishing Fund, 81–2 New Departure, 263 Patrick Crowe, 77 Patrick Ford, 292 Patrick Sarsfield Cassidy, 166, 186 Phoenix National and Literary Society, 34, 207 portrayed in cartoons, 222, 230, 237, 286 Professor Mezzeroff, 160–1, 162 Red Jim McDermott, 124, 125, 268 Richard Short, 185–6 Scientific American, 141 Skirmishing Fund, 75, 201–2 Skirmishing Fund Investigating Committee, 84–5 survives assassination attempt, 283 the land question, 246, 253, 257, 271 United Irishmen of America, 83–4 views on political violence, 91, 93–4, 96, 154 William O’Brien, 259 O’Kelly, J. J., 111, 232 O’Leary, John, 33, 34, 35 on skirmishing, 87 O’Leary, ‘Pagan’, 34 Ó Lúing, Seán, 4, 165 O’Mahony, Henry, 270–1 O’Mahony, John, 81, 185 1848 guerrilla campaign, 32–3, 60, 302 in Paris, 33, 42 McManus funeral, 46–7 Senate Wing and Canadian Raids, 74 Skirmishing Fund, 81 O’Malley Baines, Thomas, 38 O’Malley, James, 269 O’Meagher Condon, Edward, 120 O’Neill, Dan, 126 O’Neill, Roger, 109 O’Reilly, John Boyle, 75, 252 O’Sullivan Burke, Ricard, 71 Offaly, 203 Opper, Frederick, 226, 232, 237 Orsini, Cesare, 53 Panama, 12 Papal Brigade, 37–8 Paris, 4, 31, 32, 33, 41, 43, 53, 95, 123, 124, 140, 183, 245, 248, 262 Paris Commune, 21, 149, 245, 289

323 Parnell, Charles Stewart, 25, 117, 237, 248, 254 and skirmishing, 261–2 Irish American nationalists, 296–7 P. J. Sheridan, 261 Patrick Ford, 254–5 Phoenix Park murders, 100, 273 skirmishing fund, 85 Special Commission, 93, 123, 131, 181, 182, 266 Parsons, Albert, 98, 170, 171, 285, 286, 292 Passannante, Giovanni, 135 Pearse, Pádraig, 4 People’s Will, 2, 99, 290 Peoria, 78 Pepe, Guglielmo, 41 Phelan, Thomas, 185, 283 spy, 126–7 Philippines, 114, 220 Phoenix National and Literary Society, 34, 207 Phoenix Park murders, 99–103, 273 Pigott, Richard, 124 Pinkerton National Detective Agency, 121, 276, 293 Pisacane, Carlo, 63, 64 Poland, 36, 51, 113 political prisoners, 67–8, 75–6, 132, 188 Powderly, Terence, 275 views on dynamite, 282 propaganda by the deed, 2, 22, 51, 65, 97, 98, 287, 300, 301 Questione Sociale (Florence), 99 Ravochol, 97, 98 Red Cross, 152 Reform League, 52 Reid, Patrick, 129, 130 Rellihan, James, 167–8 Roney, Frank, 42, 88, 292 Rotterdam, 130 Russia, 13, 17, 22, 51, 61, 82, 112, 113, 140, 160, 230, 244, 250, 282, 288, 289, 290, 291 Rüstow, Wilhelm, 63 Ryan, Desmond, 4, 28 Salvador, Santiago, 72 Liceu theatre bombing, 97 San Francisco, 38, 121 Sarsfield Cassidy, Patrick, 166, 186, 297 Schwab, Justus, 283–5 Scientific American, 141, 143, 144, 170 Scotland Yard, 2, 94, 109, 118

324

Index

Sears, Clinton views on warfare, 146–7 Sheffield, 59 Sheridan, P. J., 260–1 Sheridan, Walter, 129 Short, K. R. M., 7, 98 Short, Richard, 124, 127, 185–6, 268 Skirmishing Fund, 69, 73–85, 151, 263, 290, 300 assassination, 264 Augustine Ford, 76 Catalpa rescue, 80 during Great Railroad Strike, 277–9 Edward Archibald, 121 Famine memory, 211–16 Fenian Ram, 141 financial success, 79, 80 IRB, 87 Land League, 257 portrayed in cartoon, 226 Skirmishing Fund Investigating Committee, 84 subscribers, 83, 116, 197–211, 226, 233, 239–45 Trustees, 81–2, 264 Sorel, Georges, 17 South Africa, 4, 12, 86, 102, 107, 110, 114, 159, 162 Spain, 3, 61, 72, 112, 114, 135, 144, 250 Spencer, John Poyntz, 121, 134, 259, 263, 269 Spread the Light fund, 252, 257, 272 St. Louis, 77, 187 Stephens, James, 33, 34, 74, 100, 136, 179, 248 Blanquism, 45–6 established the IRB, 33, 34 in Paris, 33, 41–2 Italian nationalism, 41, 51, 53 McManus funeral, 46–7 plans for the IRB uprising, 46–9, 50 skirmishing, 87, 138 Sudan, 123 Mahdist revolt, 108–9, 112 Sullivan, A. M., 37, 40, 169 views on skirmishing, 89 Sullivan, Alexander, 85, 163, 189, 273, 291 background, 180 Cronin murder, 182 Home Rule, 297 IRB, 258 Susan Lomasney, 184 Triangle trial, 180–2, 187 Sweeney, Patrick, 166

terrorism, 23–6, 73, 98, 154, 174, 299 Thompson, Leander, 281 Tower of London, 2, 109, 270, 295 Tucker, Benjamin, 288–9 Land League, 288 Patrick Ford and The Irish World, 293 views on violence, 288–9 Tynan, Patrick, 130 United Ireland, 89, 132, 170, 259, 268 United Irishman, 73, 78, 84, 89, 91, 112, 124, 161, 167, 170, 184, 219 circulation, 272 Red Jim McDermott, 124 ‘Resources of Civilization’ fund, 117, 160 subscribers, 189–98, 199, 208, 209, 213, 242 United Irishmen, 30 United Irishmen of America, 83, 85, 93–4, 95, 126–8, 164–5, 169, 296 Brooklyn dynamite school, 157–63 dynamiters’ families, 184–6 in Ireland, 123–4, 269, 271 Mezzeroff, 160–2 Red Jim McDermott, 123–5 views on violence, 96 Upton, Emory Tactics for non-Military Bodies, 149 ‘Urabi, Ahmed, 107 urban-guerrilla warfare, 264 Vaillant, Auguste, 97 Verne, Jules, 14, 174 Victoria station, 109 Vincent, Howard, 258 Walker, William, 150 Walsall anarchists, 133 Walsh, John, 59, 74, 100 Walsh, John (Welland Canal explosion), 130 Welland Canal explosion, 86, 130 Westmeath, 204, 215 Westminster Hall, 2, 109, 295 Whitehead, Alfred, 162–3, 187 Young Ireland, 31–3, 46, 179 1848 uprising, 32 guerrilla attacks, 32–3 Irish Brigade, 150 Young Italy, 31, 62