The Fenian Rising (Irish: Éirí Amach na bhFíníní, IPA: [ˈeːɾʲiː əˈmˠax n̪ˠə ˈvʲiːnʲiːnʲiː]) was a rebellion against British rule in Ireland organised by the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). After the suppression of the Irish People newspaper in September 1865, disaffection among Irish radical nationalists continued to smoulder, and during the later part of 1866, IRB leader James Stephens endeavoured to raise funds in the United States for a fresh rising planned for the following year.
However the rising of 1867 proved poorly organised. A brief rising took place in County Kerry in February, followed by an attempt at nationwide insurrection, including an attempt to take Dublin in early March. Due to poor planning and infiltration of the nationalists by the Dublin Castle administration, the rebellion never got off the ground. Most of the leaders in Ireland were arrested, but although some of them were sentenced to death, none were executed. The IRB subsequently carried out a series of attacks in England aimed at freeing Fenian prisoners, including a bomb in London and an attack on a prison van in Manchester, for which three Fenians, subsequently known as the Manchester martyrs, were executed in November 1867.
Background
The Fenians were a transatlantic association consisting of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, founded in Dublin by James Stephens in 1858, and the Fenian Brotherhood, founded in the United States by John O'Mahony and Michael Doheny, also in 1858. Their aim was the establishment of an independent Irish Republic by force of arms. The Great Famine of 1845–50 had killed about a million people, and caused another million to emigrate, hardening Irish attitudes to British rule. In 1865, the Fenians began preparing for a rebellion. With the ending of the American Civil War, they hoped to recruit willing Irish veterans of that war for an insurrection in Ireland. They collected about 6,000 firearms and had as many as 50,000 men willing to fight. In September 1865, the British moved to close down the Fenians' newspaper The Irish People and arrested much of the leadership, including John O'Leary, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, Bryan Dillon, Thomas Clarke Luby and Stephens. Stephens, the leader of the movement, later escaped. In 1866, habeas corpus was suspended in Ireland and there were hundreds more arrests of Fenian activists.
The Irish People had been founded in Dublin in November 1863, with Luby as proprietor, O'Leary as editor and O'Donovan Rossa as business manager, and had championed both Irish republicanism and, according to the historian Marta Ramón, a radical social programme centred on peasant proprietorship, social egalitarianism and independence from clerical influence in politics. Between 27 November 1865 and 2 February 1866, a Special Commission sat in Green Street courthouse in Dublin, and later in Cork, to try Stephens, O'Leary, O'Donovan Rossa, Charles Kickham and others for treason-felony; it was the first such Commission convened in Dublin since the 1803 trial of Robert Emmet. Luby and O'Leary received twenty years' penal servitude, O'Donovan Rossa a life sentence and Kickham twelve years, sentences that were widely criticised in the British press as excessive. The evidence against several of the accused rested heavily on the testimony of the informer Pierce Nagle, an employee of the Irish People who had been passing information to Dublin Castle since 1864.
Stephens's successor as leader, Thomas J. Kelly tried to launch the insurrection in early 1867, but it proved uncoordinated and fizzled in a series of skirmishes. The plan was for a country-wide campaign of guerrilla warfare, accompanied by an uprising in Dublin in which Fenian fighters would link up with Irish troops who had mutinied and take the military barracks in the city.
Separately from the movement in Ireland, the American wing of the Fenian Brotherhood split in 1865 over strategy: one faction, led by John O'Mahony, wished to concentrate resources on a rising in Ireland, while a rival "Senate wing" under William R. Roberts favoured an invasion of British-controlled Canada, intended to force a British withdrawal from Ireland in exchange for the return of Canadian territory. Fenian raids into Canada led by former Union general John O'Neill took place in June 1866, including a victory over Canadian militia at Ridgeway, Ontario, but the raids were checked when United States troops intervened to block Fenian supply lines and arrest their leaders. The diversion of American money and manpower towards the Canadian scheme left the home organisation in Ireland correspondingly short of funds and arms in the run-up to 1867.
Preparation
In February 1867, the Fenians, including Michael Davitt, attempted to seize weapons from Chester Castle in order to obtain arms for the rising. The plan relied on support from Irish immigrants and their descendants in England. The rebels intended to cut telegraph lines, use railway stock to reach Holyhead, commandeer ships, and launch a surprise attack on Dublin before the authorities could respond. However, the plot was foiled when John Joseph Corydon, a trusted agent of Fenian leader James Stephens, informed the government.
The Chester scheme had been drawn up by Captain John McCafferty, an Irish-American who had served with the Confederate army during the American Civil War, together with the journalist John Flood, both of whom sat on a "Directory" of Fenians in England. Large bodies of Fenians converged on Chester on 11 February 1867, but McCafferty called off the attack after learning that the plan had been betrayed to the authorities by Corydon, and he and Flood attempted to reach Dublin aboard a collier, only to be arrested on landing. McCafferty had earlier been tried and acquitted for treason-felony in 1865 before a rare mixed jury, on the grounds that as a foreign national he could not be held liable for acts committed outside the jurisdiction before he entered the country; at his second trial in 1867 he was convicted of high treason and sentenced to death, a sentence subsequently commuted.
Leadership and military planning
Following his escape from America in December 1866, Stephens was deposed as military leader of the American wing of the Brotherhood after he again postponed the promised rising, citing inadequate preparations; Godfrey Massey, a former sergeant in the British Army land transport corps who had adopted the name Massey after serving in the American Civil War (reputedly with the Confederacy), was among the most active in bringing about Stephens's removal. Colonel Kelly was chosen to lead the rising in Stephens's place and travelled to Paris in January 1867 with Thomas Francis Bourke, William G. Halpin, McCafferty and the French soldier of fortune General Gustave Cluseret, who had served in the Italian and American civil wars and had been appointed commander-in-chief of the projected Irish forces on condition he be supplied with 10,000 armed men. Cluseret's chief of staff was Colonel Octave Fariola, a Belgo-Italian who had also served as a colonel in the Federal army during the American Civil War; Fariola later published a detailed account of the planning of the rising in the Irishman newspaper.
On 10 February 1867 a "Provisional Government of the Irish Republic" was established in London under Kelly's chairmanship, with representatives for each of the four provinces: Edward Duffy for Connacht, William Harbison for Ulster, Edward O'Byrne for Leinster and Dominick Mahony for Munster. Cluseret was confirmed as commander-in-chief, with a scaled-down plan calling for 5,000 armed men rather than the 10,000 he had originally demanded. Massey, entrusted with the task of reporting on the readiness of the organisation in Ireland, visited Dublin, Cork, Castlebar and Tipperary in February, reporting to Kelly on 24 February that "every district was duly organised, the chiefs were at their posts, well-instructed, the men ready to rise". He returned to Ireland to announce the date and plan of the rising, midnight on 5 March, to a meeting of Dublin centres convened by O'Byrne on 26 February.
Fariola's plan called for the rising to proceed in two stages, beginning with a guerrilla phase in which small, mobile bands of fifteen to twenty men would avoid pitched engagements with troops or police, cutting roads, railways, telegraphs and bridges to keep the country "in a perpetual state of apprehension and insecurity", before a second, regular phase once belligerent recognition and American aid had been secured. Historian Shin-ichi Takagami has argued that the final plan for Dublin represented a shift from earlier schemes by American officers General Francis Frederick Millen and John Devoy, which had centred on a direct assault on Dublin Castle and the city's military barracks, towards a more decentralised strategy in which a large force gathering on Tallaght Hill would draw troops away from the city, allowing smaller Fenian bands within Dublin to act more freely. Command of the Dublin rising was given to General William Halpin, who was to establish his headquarters at Colonel White's demesne at Killakee in the Dublin mountains.
Fariola later held that Massey had disregarded these instructions and, in the course of a tour of the country in late February, devised a rival plan of his own to concentrate unarmed Fenians in large bodies in order to march on and besiege Limerick city by force from outside, disrupting the arrangements Fariola had communicated to district officers. Fariola travelled to Ireland to assess the situation but was unable to make contact with Massey until 2 March, by which time it was too late to countermand his orders; as a result, according to Fariola, Connacht was left without a military officer to take command, and Edward Duffy, foreseeing failure, called off the rising in Connacht.
On the evening of 4 March, Massey travelled from Cork towards his headquarters at Limerick Junction, where he was arrested by police; he was reported to have fainted with surprise and, on recovering, agreed to turn informer and give evidence for the Crown. Contemporaries and later historians have disagreed sharply over whether Massey had been a British agent from before his arrest, or whether, as some contemporaries believed, his conduct stemmed from a conviction that the rising was doomed and that surrender would spare lives.
Authorities in Dublin Castle received advance warning of both the date and general strategy of the rising, chiefly through the informer John Joseph Corydon, an American officer based in Liverpool who reported the departure of American officers for Ireland in mid-February and, having attended the 26 February meeting at which Massey issued his instructions, supplied Dublin Castle with the date of the rising on 27 February. Superintendent Daniel Ryan of the Dublin Metropolitan Police independently pieced together information from lower-ranking informers in the city, only confirming the date with confidence on the night of 4 March. Lord Strathnairn, commander-in-chief of the British forces in Ireland, ordered the principal points of Dublin, including the Four Courts, the Custom House, the Royal Exchange and the main railway termini, to be guarded, while cavalry and artillery were held ready to respond once the Fenians had moved into the open.
Ulster
Although a rising had been prepared in Ulster, where the IRB had established a base among the Catholic population of the Pound district of west Belfast as well as pockets of activity in Monaghan and Tyrone, the decision was taken in February 1867 not to proceed, owing to the strength of the military garrison in Belfast and the damage done to the organisation by the mass arrests that followed the 1866 suspension of habeas corpus. The arrest of the north's chief organiser, William Harbison, shortly before 5 March further weakened the Ulster IRB; Harbison later died in prison, and his funeral drew over 10,000 mourners onto the streets of Belfast. Arms caches were nonetheless discovered by police in Belfast in the weeks either side of the rising, including a substantial haul of Enfield rifles, revolvers, swords and pike-heads at a house in Hamill Street in January 1867 and a further haul in Pound Street on 11 March, less than a week after the failed rising at Tallaght.
Rising
On 14 February 1867 there was an attempted rising in County Kerry. The Fenians attacked a coastguard station, robbed a man's house and stole his horses, and killed one policeman before heading towards Killarney. When the Fenians were near the town the presence of the Irish Constabulary and British Army there dissuaded them from attacking it. They then retreated by passing between the Toomey Mountains and MacGillycuddy Reeks.