The Fenians: Irish rebellion in the North Atlantic world, 1858-1876

Co-authors Patrick Steward and Bryan McGovern aim to revise our understanding of the Fenians, a transatlantic group of physical-force republican Irish nationalists in mid-nineteenth-century Great Britain and America. Steward and McGovern eschew interpretations of the Fenians as hopeless revolutionaries or maniacal terrorists. While they accept the portrayal by Irish historian Vincent Comerford of Fenianism as a means to sociability and professional networking for young men, the authors argue that Fenians also possessed “a legitimate desire to fight for Irish independence” (p. xiii). The Fenians attempts to demonstrate the sincere anti-British, nationalist convictions of Irish and Irish American (or “expatriate”) Fenians through a chronologically organized study of revolutionary activity in Great Britain, the United States, and Canada. The book succeeds admirably in delineating Fenianism’s origins and its course as a transatlantic revolutionary movement. Yet the authors are most concerned with explaining the movement’s failure to attract a broad base of support. As a result, their analysis at times focuses too much on what Fenian leaders might have done otherwise and not enough on the wider socio-economic, political, and ideological worlds inhabited by the Fenian rank and file. Among the greatest strengths of The Fenians is the authors’ attention to the difficulty of mobilizing a nationalist movement that existed across a variety of state structures. The first third of the book charts the rise and growth of Fenianism in Ireland and America between the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848 and the American Civil War, while the balance of the study navigates between Fenian plotting and activity in Ireland, England, the United States, and Canada. Drawing from the Fenian Papers in the Catholic University archives, Steward and McGovern reveal the incessant infighting and corruption among leaders of the Fenian Brotherhood (Fenianism’s American wing) and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB; Fenians in Ireland), as well as the tensions between the two organizations. They also emphasize the relative freedom in which Irish American Fenians operated in comparison with their co-revolutionaries in Ireland. Yet, even in the United States, Fenians had to contend with politicians whose support for Irish nationalism ebbed and flowed with election cycles. It is remarkable, then, that thousands of Irish American Fenians rallied to invade Canada in 1866, and that an American ship—Erin’s Hope—laden with weapons and Irish American Civil War veterans sailed to Ireland in 1867 to aid in an Irish Republican Brotherhood insurrection. That both the Canadian invasions of 1866 and the combined Erin’s Hope expedition and IRB rebellion of 1867 failed does not detract from the authors’ contention that Fenians presented a genuine threat to the sovereignty of Great Britain, to the security of the British Empire, and to the diplomacy of the United States. Steward and McGovern use British and American

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