Against this backdrop, ‘most Americans sympathised with Irish nationalism, but not to the point of sparking a crisis with Britain’.100 The radical American republican Charles Sumner, a one-time chairman of the US Foreign Relations Committee, developed an informal association at this time with a circle of professional revolutionaries, Irish or otherwise. Anglo-American tensions would remain for so long as Sumner was in office, not least because one of Sumner’s ideas (rooted in his past experience of the annexation of Alaska) was that the United States should be granted Canadian territory as reparation for Britain’s allegedly hostile actions during the US civil war.101 This was an idea that some American Fenian filibusters echoed.102 Canadian raids, however, also involved key British intelligence operatives,103 effectively making the Canadian ‘Fenian’ raids a mere episode to embarrass those Americans who had spoken about annexing Canada. For Britain, this event was seen to have permanently neutralised the Fenian threat. It also served to make the Fenians, at best, a mere embarrassing footnote in the future writing of American history.104 After denouncing the Canadian raids and castigating all secret society conspiracies for being ‘at once the terror and the offspring of the sway of tyrants’,105 John Savage, the president of the American Fenian Brotherhood, worked with the conservative American Republican presidents Andrew Johnson and Ulysses Grant in securing an amnesty for all Fenian prisoners, in turn giving birth to an internal legal debate on American citizenship and naturalisation laws.106 American-Irish Fenians, who had always promoted a tradition of American state-militia service, also worked within the Grand Army of the Republic Association in an effort to heal US civil war divisions.107 Ignoring Catholic condemnations of their politics,108 many distanced themselves from immigrant politics, represented not least by the Democratic Party’s infamous Tammany Hall machine in New York,109 and embraced the perhaps more conservative Republican Party,110 including John Devoy, a journalist and recent political exile from Ireland who also attempted to cultivate a rapport with politicians in Ireland from his New York base.
Devoy was exiled from Ireland because he was a leading member of a nationalist–revolutionary secret society known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). This had used Fenian fund-collection channels in the United States to establish the Irish People, a shortlived Dublin journal (1863–5). In its take on international relations, the Irish People was less a champion of American republican values than it was an advocate of the Eurocentric idea that Ireland, like Poland (which had just witnessed a failed uprising), was indisputedly one of the suppressed nationalities of Europe.111 Although the IRB was supposed to have an oath-bound discipline, its leaders and members were politically talented individuals rather than soldiers. As a result, a misconception about the IRB existed among those American militia soldiers who had joined the American Fenian Brotherhood.112 A proclamation by Irish republican rebels during 1867 was inspired by French republican adventurers who had served under infamous continental revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi and mistakenly believed that a UK-wide potential for a republican revolution existed.113 ‘Fenianism’ was practically negated as an aspect of Anglo-American tensions during 1872, but a tradition of vocally pro-Irish Congressmen and newspaper editors in America developed thereafter. This provided the inspiration for men like John Devoy to attempt to initiate cross-Atlantic political communications. Uniquely and controversially, however, Devoy also saw this as a means to revive the IRB.114
American influence on Ireland grew more significant after Ulysses Grant, accompanied by the US minister to France and the ‘ever brash’ foreign affairs staff of the New York Herald, visited Ireland in early 1879 upon being granted the freedom of Dublin.115 Devoy, one of several Fenians who worked for the New York Herald, also came to Ireland to secretly reorganise the IRB, which he publicly called upon to ‘come out of the rat holes of conspiracy’ and form a new Irish nationalist party at Westminster with American financial support.116 This was a prelude to a US tour by Irish politician Charles Stewart Parnell, who was able to address the American House of Representatives about Ireland, thanks mostly to William Carroll, a Donegal-born American freemason and Republican Party activist who claimed to be a descendant of Charles Carroll, a governor of Maryland of Irish descent who had been the sole Catholic signatory to the American Declaration of Independence in 1776.117 Through the freemasons, Carroll had become the leader of the American Clan na Gael, a secret society that was designed to replace the Fenian Brotherhood, which soon disbanded, and which Devoy soon remodelled upon less masonic lines.118 An end result of this ‘new departure’ was to make the idea of fund collection in America by means of Irish relief organisations an acceptable notion to many Irish politicians. The British government was very opposed to this development, however, because it considered that it amounted to illegal attempts to collect funds abroad for either party political or seditious purposes (the IRB reached a peak in terms of its resources during the period 1879–84).119 For this reason, many Irish politicians were arrested and the freedom of the Irish press was often curtailed throughout the 1880s.120 A British secret service even promoted bogus dynamiting conspiracies in Paris, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago with two goals in mind: first, to convince American and French intelligence services of their need to cooperate more with the British; and, second, to justify mass arrests in Ireland on the grounds that all Irish nationalists supposedly possessed the same financiers as these largely fictitious American and Parisian ‘dynamitards’.121 While this devious propaganda was ultimately countered by Irish politicians at its root during 1889,122 it served to discredit Irish nationalism in both America and France.123 Reflecting this, although James Blaine, an Anglophobe US Secretary of State, appointed Irish republican rebel Patrick Egan to an American diplomatic office,124 circumstantial evidence that some US citizens of Irish birth had irresponsibly become involved in ‘dynamitard’ conspiracies led Blaine to accept at face value British propaganda that portrayed Irish nationalist activists of the day as ‘the scum of Europe’.125
After the UK franchise was extended to include half of adult males in 1884, Irish nationalists perpetually won the vast majority of the Irish seats at Westminster. To defuse this situation and to stem the decline of the landed aristocracy’s political power in Ireland, British Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone decided to promote the idea of establishing a devolved parliamentary assembly in Ireland that would be without fiscal autonomies.126 Parnell’s acceptance of this idea helped to take the steam out of the idea of establishing an independent Irish republic, be it American-inspired or otherwise. Gladstone’s idea was
