The Fenian Rising E-Book

Michael T Foy

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 550

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Fenianism was the Irish separatist movement committed to winning Irish freedom through revolution. Defeated often, its tremendous resilience enabled it to rise time and again, phoenix-like, until it eventually inspired the 1916 Easter Rising, soon followed by an Irish War of Independence that finally established an Irish Free State. The Fenian Rising vividly describes the evolution of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and its American counterpart, the Fenian Brotherhood, two revolutionary organisations dedicated to overthrowing British rule in Ireland and establishing an Irish Republic. Led by James Stephens, nineteenth-century Ireland's most important revolutionary, the IRB rapidly became an increasingly serious threat which Dublin Castle struggled unsuccessfully for years to suppress. Despite Stephens's downfall in January 1867 the long-anticipated rising followed two months later. In spite of its failure, republicans snatched political victory from the jaws of defeat when in September 1867 the execution of the Manchester Martyrs galvanised every shade of Irish nationalism. Rising from the ashes, the IRB survived to eventually become what one historian has called the most enduring and successful revolutionary secret society in Europe.

Leseprobe

First published 2023

The History Press

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© Michael T. Foy, 2023

The right of Michael T. Foy to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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ISBN 978 1 80399 263 1

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Contents

Acknowledgements

1 The Birth of Fenianism

2 Fenianism in the Doldrums

3 The Two Burials of Terence Bellew McManus

4 Stephens and the IRB: 1861–65

5 Stephens, O’Mahony, the IRB and the Fenian Brotherhood: August 1864–September 1865

6 Lord Wodehouse and Ireland: November 1864–September 1865

7 The Struggle Between Dublin Castle and the IRB: 15 September 1865–December 1865

8 Dublin Castle: From Stephens’s Escape to the Suspension of Habeas Corpus: February 1866

9 From the Suspension of Habeas Corpus to Lord Wodehouse’s Departure: 17 February–16 July 1866

10 Chief Secretary Lord Naas and Conservative Government Policy in Ireland: July–December 1866

11 Stephens in America: May 1866–January 1867

12 Fenianism in England and the Descent on Chester: January–February 1867

13 The Countdown to the Rising

14 The Fenian Rising

15 The Manchester Martyrs

Postscript

Endnotes

Sources

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Walter Grey and Tricia Ramsay. These two wonderful friends died before the book was completed.

Acknowledgements

I owe a great debt to Dr Michelle Brown who meticulously read and corrected every chapter and made valuable suggestions for improvement. I also appreciate the help I received from Stewart Roulston, Dr Timothy Bowman, Nick Dexter, Len O’Driscoll. Anne O’Mahony and Mary Horgan. Finally I want to thank Nicola Guy who commissioned the book, editor Dan Coxon and project editor Ele Craker.

Michael T. Foy

1

The Birth of Fenianism

Fenianism has been called the political force that sporadically dominated Irish politics from the 1850s until recent times.1 First manifesting itself in America as the Fenian Brotherhood under John O’Mahony, and in Ireland as the Irish Republican Brotherhood under James Stephens, its role has been described as that of a watchdog acting on behalf of an Irish separatist tradition that was committed to winning Irish freedom through physical force.2 Defeated often, Fenianism’s tremendous resilience meant it rose time and again, phoenix-like from the ashes, to eventually inspire the 1916 Easter Rising and finally an Anglo–Irish war that established an independent Irish state.

The origins of Fenianism lay in five decades of Irish history that culminated in the tumultuous 1840s, when Ireland simultaneously experienced momentous political, social, economic and demographic upheavals. Ever since the Act of Union in 1800 had abolished the Irish parliament and made Westminster supreme, the country constantly seethed with discontent, political, religious and agrarian. Within three years, Robert Emmet led a brief unsuccessful rebellion, after which he and the other leading conspirators were executed. Subsequently, Ireland often seemed more like an occupied country in which the Irish government maintained control through a large military garrison, a paramilitary police force and a panoply of repressive legislation. In the 1820s, the nationalist politician Daniel O’Connell mobilised popular disaffection into a movement that in 1829 secured Catholic Emancipation, a triumph that saw him be acclaimed as ‘The Liberator’ and ‘The Great Dan’. For the next decade, O’Connell concentrated on influencing successive Whig governments to enact legislation benefitting Ireland but his supremacy remained undimmed. A prominent supporter declared that ‘it seemed Celtic Ireland had lodged its proxy in his hands alone, to be used at his unquestioned discretion’.3

In 1840, O’Connell resumed mass campaigning through a Repeal Association that demanded the restoration of an Irish parliament. Although O’Connell was now 65 years old, his new organisation attracted a younger generation enthusiastic for political change that included John Blake Dillon, Thomas Davis, Charles Gavan Duffy and William Smith O’Brien. Dillon and Davis had become friends at Trinity College, Dublin, and in 1842 they founded The Nation newspaper, which successfully propagated a generous nationalism inclusive of all classes and creeds. Soon, Dillon and Davis (who died prematurely in 1845) were joined by Duffy, a Northern Catholic experienced in the newspaper industry, and O’Brien, a Protestant landowner from Co. Clare.

Inside the Repeal Association, the quartet’s followers became known as Young Ireland, and unlike most members they did not uncritically idolise O’Connell, resenting as they did his dictatorial methods, his susceptibility to flattery from an inner circle of sycophants, and the way O’Connell increasingly identified nationalism with Roman Catholicism. They respected him even less in 1843, when O’Connell cancelled a major meeting at Clontarf after the prime minister Sir Robert Peel banned it. Although the British government did not destroy O’Connell, the climb-down had damaged his authority, seriously eroded confidence in the idea of peaceful political change, and emboldened Young Irelanders to challenge the direction in which O’Connell was leading them. By now Young Ireland had concluded that, if necessary, revolution could be justified to achieve its goals. The dispute came to a head in July 1846 when the Repeal Association endorsed O’Connell’s resolution rejecting physical force except in self-defence. Young Irelanders immediately seceded and established their own organisation, The Irish Confederation, which operated through a network of Confederation Clubs.

By now, a devastating potato famine had gripped Ireland in the nineteenth century’s greatest natural catastrophe. Over the next four years a million people died and another million fled the country as unforgettable scenes of horror became seared into the memories of traumatised survivors. At Bantry in west Cork, many inhabitants awakened to find, leaning against their front doors, the emaciated corpses of victims who had taken shelter on their porches overnight. Daily, two drivers on a horse and cart collected the bodies. A lady whose companions rowed her out to an island was puzzled by the death-like silence and an absence of life when the dogs were fat and healthy. But her friends shied away from revealing the terrible truth. On countless roadsides lay corpses that were partly green from eating nettles and partly blue from cholera and dysentery. Lacking the money, strength or material to make coffins or dig graves, people often tied bodies to a plank of wood and sank them in bogs. Communal wailing at funerals in overflowing graveyards was everywhere. Evictions, a mass exodus of people, families and even entire communities ripped apart and a government and landlords almost universally perceived as callous had profound consequences. With considerable understatement, a Fenian, John O’Leary, declared that the Famine inflamed the minds of men both then and after against England.4 In fact, it dug a bottomless well of hatred and fury that for many decades thereafter poisoned Anglo–Irish relations and strengthened the claim of radicals that the only language the British government understood came from the barrel of a gun. Revolutionaries also argued that famine made an insurrection necessary as delay meant that there might soon be nobody left to rebel.

After O’Connell died in 1847, the Repeal Association went into steep decline and Young Ireland gained the political ascendancy. But an influx of new members contained ultra-radicals like John Mitchel, who in The Nation advocated a social revolution and the destruction of landlordism. Alarmed, the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, described Mitchel’s violent rhetoric as the ravings of a disordered imagination. Mitchel’s incitement had now trapped O’Brien, Duffy and Dillon in the same predicament into which they had previously put O’Connell. In early 1848, political tensions rose steeply when Mitchel demanded an immediate rising. After the Young Ireland leadership rejected his aggressive policy, Mitchel seceded and established his own newspaper, the United Irishman. Unsurprisingly, the British government arrested Mitchel and sentenced him to fourteen years’ transportation in Van Diemen’s Land.

Mitchel’s conviction inflamed Confederation clubs, which were already arming and drilling. Accusing the British government of repression and provocation, they began preparing for rebellion, but the leadership’s plans were half-hearted, ill thought-out and over-optimistic. The intention was to rise in September after harvest time, but Dublin Castle had already devised detailed countermeasures and planted spies inside Young Ireland. Then, in mid-July 1848, the government struck pre-emptively by proclaiming Dublin, Cork, Drogheda and Waterford and suspending Habeas Corpus. O’Brien, Dillon and Thomas Meagher responded by travelling through Kilkenny and Tipperary, attempting with minimal success to rouse a demoralised peasantry into rebellion. Finally, they reached the village of Ballingarry, where fifty policemen barricaded themselves inside a large two-storey house owned by a Mrs Margaret McCormack. After a tense stand-off, the police opened fire and began a desultory exchange that lasted until police reinforcements appeared. Despite being fired on, they kept coming until the rebels, low on ammunition, faded away. Effectively the rising was over. The Ballingarry shootout became known derisively as the Battle of Widow McCormack’s Cabbage Patch: Duffy called it an ignominious failure.

At Special Commission trials in September and October, prominent Young Irelanders like William Smith O’Brien, Terence Bellew McManus and Thomas Meagher were condemned to be hanged, drawn and quartered, though their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. Arrested before the rising, Charles Gavan Duffy was eventually acquitted of all charges. Many nationalists succumbed to despair. O’Connell’s constitutional politics was seemingly discredited and revolutionary violence had ended in fiasco. There appeared no way out. But not everyone gave up hope, especially those Young Ireland leaders who had sought refuge in America. In fact, prominent Fenians agreed that their movement was born from the wreckage of 1848. John Devoy described it as the child and successor of the Young Ireland uprising, while John O’Leary claimed Fenianism was the direct and inevitable outcome of ’48.

The failure of the rising had scattered Young Ireland leaders across the globe.5 Some were transported to Van Diemen’s Land and others wandered far away, including Darcy McGee, who sojourned for a while in Constantinople. A number were smuggled out of Ireland by sympathetic local populations: disguised as priests, Michael Doheny and Richard O’Gorman escaped separately to America, where they joined John Blake Dillon. John O’Mahony and James Stephens stayed for some years in Paris. But everyone except for O’Brien, Martin and Stephens eventually ended up in America. O’Mahony and McGee arrived in New York, while Mitchel, McManus and Meagher would escape captivity and sail to freedom in the United States.

In America, not everyone kept the faith. John Blake Dillon had always opposed even the idea of insurrection and only turned out at Ballingarry as a gesture of solidarity with his leader William Smith O’Brien. In New York, he concentrated on his successful legal practice until 1855, when he returned home after an amnesty and permanently abandoned revolutionary politics. William Smith O’Brien and John Martin also availed themselves of amnesty to return home, where they also embraced entirely constitutional methods. Richard O’Gorman became a partner in Dillon’s law firm and like him renounced revolutionary violence, before fading into harmless obscurity. Even more strikingly, Darcy M’Gee effectively went over to the enemy. After moving to Canada, he entered politics and played a leading role in establishing the Federation of Canada in 1867. McGee also became bitterly hostile to American and Canadian Fenians, who retaliated by assassinating him in April 1868 on his way home from parliament in Ottawa.

But from their analysis of the 1848 rising, Doheny and other exiles had concluded that it had been doomed from the start because leaders like William Smith O’Brien, John Blake Dillon and John Martin were never serious revolutionaries. Socially and intellectually refined, disconnected from militant followers and frequently Protestants of the Ascendancy landowning class, these hesitant theoretical revolutionaries had thought insurrection should only be undertaken reluctantly as a last resort if the British government left them no alternative or even provoked them into rebellion. Many performed half-heartedly during the rising and appeared almost relieved when it rapidly collapsed with little physical and material damage. But to their more radical supporters, revolution was an all-consuming passion for which they were prepared to sacrifice everything. For them, constitutional nationalism, repeal, devolution and federalism were all chimeras best left to political daydreamers, and there was no alternative to violently toppling British rule in Ireland. Accordingly, if a new resistance movement emerged, its leaders had to be hard-headed and dedicated revolutionaries, completely focussed on the single goal of an independent Irish Republic. And this could only be achieved by mobilising every resource in Ireland and America in order to forcefully sever the connection with England.

In the United States, these irreconcilables had considerable potential support among a growing Irish-American population.6 Transatlantic migration had existed from colonial times and continued during the country’s early decades, when newcomers settled in northern cities, the south and emergent western states. They expressed their Irish-American identity through cultural societies and nationalist organisations but many remained passionately interested in Irish politics. Overwhelmingly supportive of Daniel O’Connell’s constitutional nationalism, few envisaged violently separating Ireland from England, but the huge influx of Famine refugees radicalised Irish-American attitudes, regarding themselves as they did innocent victims of an almost biblical tragedy, deliberately made strangers in a foreign land by a heartless British government. And their bitterness intensified when English newspapers like The Times rejoiced that: ‘in a few years more, a Celtic Irishman will be as rare in Connemara as the Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan’. Unsurprisingly, Irish-America became a factory of grievances, its anti-English hostility constantly fanned by political demagogues, incendiary pamphlets and ballads demanding vengeance. An Irish journalist declared that the Famine sowed ‘dragon’s teeth from the Hudson to the Mississippi. The maddened fugitives of the dreadful Famine and eviction times hated the English power with quenchless hate.’7

Dublin Castle’s expectation that transportation or banishment thousands of miles away from Ireland would eliminate Young Ireland refugees as a threat proved erroneous. After voyaging far beyond the British government’s reach, Doheny, Mitchel, O’Mahony and others were free to dream of an independent Ireland and strive to realise it. A journalist drily observed that the Queen’s writ did not run in Manhattan.8 These irreconcilables formed a nucleus from which a new revolutionary organisation might emerge to renew the war against England, and New York was a haven from which they could strike at the enemy. Over time in America, many Irish migrants gravitated towards the exiled rebel leaders, in part because America was not after all a Promised Land. Starting at the bottom, they often remained trapped there. The exiled leaders offered them the hope of climbing out of poverty and some migrants even envisaged a great return to Ireland, like the Jews out of Egypt and Babylon. Consequently, a significant minority of Irish-Americans shifted from constitutional nationalism to revolutionary separatism, extolling exiled Young Ireland leaders as heroic martyrs and in the process endowing them with great moral authority. Potentially, they had a large base of support, because between 1848 and 1851, 848,000 Irish migrants entered America, in particular massively swelling New York’s small Irish community.9 By 1859, 134,000 Irish-born residents comprised 26 per cent of the city’s population. New York’s Irish newspapers, bars, clubs and societies, churches and St Patrick’s Day parades dominated Irish-America’s political, cultural and social life. Furthermore, despite living in the city’s poorest areas, Irish-Americans accumulated political power through a legendarily corrupt Democratic party machine, and gradually New York became the beating heart of Irish-American separatism. Uniquely among immigrant communities, the Irish remained deeply involved in the affairs of their homeland and new migrants kept their grievances alive. Over half a century earlier, Lord Cornwallis had speculated that Irish-Americans might one day become very dangerous. ‘They will embark with a spade and return with a musket.’10

Some exiled Irish leaders hoped to quickly resume the armed struggle against England. In 1851, Doheny dispatched Michael Phelan, a famous billiards champion, to Ireland, ostensibly for an exhibition tour but secretly on a reconnaissance mission to communicate with those ’48 men who had remained at home. However, Phelan soon concluded that revolutionary conditions did not exist in a country whose exhausted population had mostly abandoned politics altogether.11 A contemporary observer had discovered ‘districts where the land being exceptionally good, the tenantry were still able to live, but when they met at market time or church, there were such gaps visible in the familiar muster that even in these districts the population looked like the remnant from a shipwreck’.12 Moreover, despite a declining death rate, human misery was unabated. Smallholders who accepted poor relief had legally forfeited ownership to landlords known chillingly as ‘Exterminators’, whose pitiless clearances meant that ‘a traveller in any southern or western county saw the ruins of human habitation from morning till night’.13 With hundreds of thousands of tenants evicted, more surviving on relief and poorhouses overflowing, Phelan’s bleak report disappointed Doheny but he grudgingly accepted that a long haul was inevitable – especially as no single powerful separatist organisation existed in both America and Ireland.

However, it was difficult uniting Irish-American organisations that constantly squabbled, and only a charismatic leader could fuse the warring parties into a single separatist movement with a clear sense of purpose. Irish-American morale was still at a low ebb in 1853 when John Mitchel escaped from captivity and reached New York on 29 November 1853.14 Even Young Irelanders, who distrusted Mitchel’s judgement, acknowledged his brilliance as a polemicist, someone whom Charles Gavan Duffy called a constant trumpet of resistance to England15 and who to many nationalists seemed the embodiment of the revolution.16 Mitchel’s strong personality, the fear he inspired in enemies, and his formidable intelligence and journalistic talent quickly established him as America’s foremost Irish émigré. But unifying the warring Irish-American factions required a conciliator, a skilled politician adept at compromise and who could understand other people’s opinions. As someone who alienated legions of people, Mitchel was the last person in the world fit for that role. Divisive and vituperative, he regarded politics as war and believed that even fellow nationalists who differed from him should be crushed.

Almost immediately, Mitchel founded the Citizen newspaper, which fuelled an atavistic hatred of England by preaching that the Famine was a British government conspiracy to annihilate an entire nation and completely anglicise Ireland. When the Crimean War began in March 1854, Mitchel created the Irishmen’s Civil and Military Republican Union, New York’s first pre-Fenian society, to recruit volunteers and raise funds for arms and ammunition. Optimistically, Mitchel promised that if the war lasted another year, an Irish-American naval invasion would land in Ireland. Next, he asked Russia’s minister in Washington to provide ships for the expedition, offering in return an insurrection in Ireland that would weaken England militarily. However, the Russians were indifferent and negotiations petered out, causing the Union to collapse. Then Mitchel’s brief political career in New York imploded spectacularly when he publicly feuded with John Hughes, the city’s Roman Catholic Archbishop and himself an Irish immigrant. After Mitchel defended the right of Papal States inhabitants to overthrow their ruler the Pope, Hughes denounced him. As a titan of New York public life who had built churches, schools, hospitals and orphanages for Irish-Americans, the Archbishop was well-connected to politicians, businessmen and the city’s social elite, and accustomed to obedience and respect. But Mitchel had never bowed the knee to any establishment figure, political. social or clerical, and as a Presbyterian Ulsterman least of all to a Roman Catholic archbishop. Instinctively, he retaliated by accusing Hughes, the Roman Catholic hierarchy and priesthood of ‘having twice in ’98 and ’48 delivered over the Catholic people of Ireland. Therefore, no terms are to be kept with such inveterate and treacherous enemies.’ Nicknamed ‘Dagger John’, Hughes hit back, calling Mitchel a ‘vitriol flinger’. After years of firing literary bullets, Mitchel had finally shot himself in the foot.

Battling the archbishop alone was political insanity, but incredibly, Mitchel doubled down and recklessly antagonised New York’s powerful abolitionists. He not only defended Southern slavery but endorsed a resumption of the transatlantic slave trade so that poor whites could also become slave-owners. Long a white supremacist – and anti-Semite – Mitchel regarded Northern industrial capitalism as a threat to the Southern way of life. These two different cultures, he contended, meant that Southern states had gradually evolved into a separate nation. In March 1854, Mitchel provocatively declared that, ‘We deny that it is a crime, or a wrong, or even a peccadillo, to hold slaves, to buy slaves, to keep slaves to their work by flogging: we, for our part, wish we had a good plantation, well-stocked with healthy negroes in Alabama.’ Outraged, abolitionists demanded Mitchel’s political scalp.

Warring simultaneously with two powerful New York institutions was political suicide, one that shredded Mitchel’s base, decimated the Citizen’s circulation, and in December 1854 forced his resignation as editor. Tin-eared and ham-fisted, Mitchel had embarrassed followers who realised – if he did not – the fatal contradiction between demanding Irish freedom and simultaneously championing human bondage in America. At the end of December, public outrage at Mitchel’s moral blindness effectively ran him out of town. Just like his political career, he went south to Tennessee, a slave state where Mitchel farmed land outside the city of Knoxville. Behind, he left an Irish-American community in turmoil.

Responsibility for filling a leadership vacuum now fell to 50-year-old Michael Doheny,17 originally a Tipperary lawyer who during the 1848 Rising had begun a life-long friendship with John O’Mahony. After settling in New York, Doheny was admitted to the bar, founded a legal practice, and also became a well-known speaker on the political lecture circuit. In November 1853, Doheny and 40-year-old O’Mahony resumed their partnership when the latter moved from Paris to New York. Steeped in Irish culture, Celtic folklore and ancient manuscripts, O’Mahony had studied classical texts at Trinity College, Dublin, but he left university prematurely when his father died in November 1835 and returned home to manage the family’s farm holdings in Cork and Tipperary.18 At 6ft 2in tall, immensely strong and charismatic, O’Mahony became a commanding local leader but shied away from politics until he joined the 1848 rising. Afterwards, O’Mahony led a prolonged guerrilla campaign along the Suir valley from 22 August to late September. Attacking police and army posts, O’Mahony proved himself a talented military commander, but as British forces closed in he fled to France. As a penniless and jobless political exile, O’Mahony survived in Paris teaching Gaelic at the Irish College until Napoleon III overthrew the Second Republic, after which he left for America.

As Mitchel’s successors, Doheny and O’Mahony worked well together, but the former was senior partner, a well-known attorney prominent in Irish-American politics and the stronger personality, a brawler who frequently gatecrashed opponents’ meetings. By contrast, the relatively unknown and impoverished O’Mahony relied heavily on Doheny as he adjusted to his new American life.19 Moreover, O’Mahony was temperamentally a dreamer, often impractical and at times emotionally fragile. Soon after arriving in America, he briefly abandoned Catholicism, founded a spiritualist circle, and became a medium before suffering a mental breakdown. ‘I really was delirious – insane if you will – for several days in consequence of long mental and physical suffering and extreme nervous excitement.’20 This manifested itself as religious euphoria during which O’Mahony’s great physical strength became almost preternatural. Once he hurled two policemen down steps and another half-dozen officers were needed to subdue him. O’Mahony attributed his recovery to the Virgin Mary’s divine intervention. Even so, Doheny made O’Mahony the public face of Irish-American separatism, preferring to exercise power from behind the scenes. Doheny’s aggressive and rather uncouth behaviour had alienated important Irish-Americans like Archbishop Hughes, whereas O’Mahony’s dignified bearing made him widely acceptable, an emollient figure bent on restoring harmony in the separatist movement.

Doheny and O’Mahony began reviving separatism by replacing the defunct Irishmen’s Civil and Republican Union with an Emmet Monument Association.21 This was a shrewdly chosen title as Robert Emmet’s life and death exercised a tremendous hold over the imagination of Irish-Americans. By November 1855, the Association had over 3,000 members pledged to embark for Ireland when a rising began. As the Crimean War was still raging, Doheny and O’Mahony again tried to enlist Russian aid, by asking the New York consul to provide ships to transport 2,000 Irish-American volunteers to Ireland and weapons for 50,000 rebels. The Russian diplomat took them seriously and reported their proposal sympathetically to St Petersburg.

Doheny and O’Mahony also hoped that revolutionary prospects had improved in Ireland since Phelan’s mission in 1851, as an attempt by prominent Young Irelander Charles Gavan Duffy to effect peaceful change had recently collapsed.22 Sensationally acquitted in April 1849, Duffy was the only Young Ireland leader left free in Ireland. After resurrecting The Nation newspaper, he had toured Ireland and witnessed immense poverty and starvation. In Kilkenny an Exterminator landlord had evicted hundreds of people, and local priests responded by establishing a Tenant Protection Society. Soon, similar organisations proliferated across Ireland, and in August 1850 they united to form a Tenant League that demanded fixity of tenure and lower rents. Having rejected the idea of another rebellion, Duffy believed that fusing land reform and parliamentary representation could produce radical change, especially if a strong nationalist group of MPs held the balance of power at Westminster. Packed Tenant League meetings showed considerable support for Duffy’s programme and revived nationalist hopes. The first step was contesting a general election and removing ineffective Irish MPs, whom Duffy scathingly denounced as ‘never more discredited and distrusted than at this time. The few honest men among them were too feeble to count for much; the majority were habitual jobbers and some were accused of selling for hard cash the petty local patronage placed at their disposal by the Treasury.’23 More pithily, a journalist derided them as a miserable parody of reality.24

In the general election of July 1852, the Tenant League endorsed candidates who supported an independent parliamentary opposition that would extract concessions from the British government. But many candidates had simply jumped on the populist bandwagon and were no better than the incumbent MPs. Duffy recalled ‘wealthy nincompoops who had joined the League in the vague hope of getting into parliament’.25 Despite triumphing with fifty-eight MPs, Duffy was saddled with deadwood like Daniel O’Connell’s eldest son, Maurice, who had achieved nothing during twenty years in parliament. Duffy branded him ‘a moral wreck’ whose life of dissipation and philandering scandalised Dublin society; he was probably relieved when Maurice died from a brain haemorrhage in June 1853. Even so, Tenant League MPs now held the balance of power at Westminster, and in December 1852 they helped topple Lord Derby’s minority Tory government. Duffy believed that to avoid the same fate, Lord Aberdeen’s new coalition Cabinet of Whigs and Peelites would concede reforms in Ireland, but instead, Aberdeen bought off some of Duffy’s MPs. William Keogh, the ambitious member for Athlone, performed a spectacular political somersault, reneged on his pledge of independent opposition, and accepted office as Solicitor-General for Ireland. Having long paraded himself as a nationalist champion, Keogh’s unscrupulous behaviour astounded even the most cynical politicians and – against stiff competition – made him the most hated man in Ireland. John Sadleir, a Carlow MP, also defected and became a Treasury Lord, taking with him a brother and three cousins, all of them MPs. Edmund O’Flaherty, MP, a wheeler-dealer, was appointed a Commissioner of Income Tax. Outraged, Duffy claimed that until the last moment they had emphatically promised him not to take office.26 However, some Tenant League MPs hoped the defectors could actually influence government policy, while others quietly gravitated to the government side. By-election losses also steadily eroded the League’s parliamentary strength, while Duffy lacked the steely resolve to impose iron discipline on his MPs. Furthermore, Aberdeen’s government adamantly resisted land reform in Ireland and after March 1854 it focused entirely on the war in Crimea.

By 1855, Duffy led only twenty-two MPs in parliament, where his speeches made little impact. From America, John Mitchel relentlessly caricatured him as ‘Mr Give-Away-Duffy’, always kow-towing to the British government. Absurdly, Duffy also continued to edit and write lengthy parliamentary reports for The Nation, whose treasurer absconded with its funds. Depressed and haunted by a sense of failure, Duffy decided to quit his ‘blind and bitter land’ for a new life in Australia, where he hoped to recover his health and become a successful lawyer. Duffy’s gloomy valedictory address in The Nation on 4 August 1855 announced his retirement as MP; unless conditions changed dramatically, there was no more hope for Ireland than for a corpse on the dissecting table.27 On 6 November, the virtually penniless Duffy and his family left Ireland, a departure that for many people seemed proof that constitutional politics had ended in miserable failure.

Duffy could hardly imagine matters getting worse, but they did because of John Sadleir.28 Sadleir’s almost rags-to-riches story had begun in Tipperary, where he bought up estates from ruined landlords and also established the Tipperary Joint-Stock, a bank whose branches throughout Ireland attracted large deposits. After moving to the City of London, Sadleir became chairman of the London and County Bank, speculated in Italian, American and Spanish railways, invested in iron mines and reputedly owned every cargo of sugar from the West Indies. By 1852, 36-year-old Sadleir’s supposed Midas touch had elevated him to the status of financial wizard, a millionaire surrounded by the trappings of luxury whose Hyde Park mansion hosted grand receptions for the capital’s social elite. His election to parliament made Sadleir valuable political connections; a peerage seemed only a matter of time.

However, the law then required that MPs accepting government posts underwent re-election and Sadleir was humiliatingly defeated in Carlow. Despite finding another seat in Sligo, his political career stalled when a Mr Dowling sued him, claiming that during the Carlow by-election, Sadleir had him kidnapped to prevent Dowling voting for Sadleir’s opponent. In court Sadleir perjured himself blind, but in January 1854 the jury found for Dowling, effectively calling Sadleir a liar and forcing his resignation from the government. Two months later, after exploiting his official position to steal £15,000, Edmund O’Flaherty absconded just ahead of pursuing Scotland Yard detectives. In America, Edmund O’Flaherty MP resurfaced as William Stuart, a successful theatrical impresario and respectable businessman who was feted in high social circles. O’Flaherty’s vanishing act strengthened a growing suspicion in Ireland that MPs were less politicians and more a criminal conspiracy of charlatans, sanctimonious guardians of public morality who enriched themselves at taxpayers’ expense. Moreover, unlike men he had prosecuted for tax evasion, O’Flaherty eluded justice and never spent a day in jail.

But O’Flaherty’s offences were petty compared to Sadleir’s criminality. Despite dismissing his resignation from government as a minor bump in the road, Sadleir’s fortunes went relentlessly downhill. During 1854 and 1855, a series of high-risk investments flopped spectacularly, losses that he covered by recruiting more investors in a giant Ponzi scheme. But still Sadleir’s debts mounted inexorably. Trapped, he forged deeds and share certificates and treated the Tipperary Joint-Stock as his private piggy bank, all the while maintaining a façade of glittering success. Despite the enormous strain of his double life, Sadleir continued circulating parliament, glad-handing politicians and gloating over Charles Gavan Duffy’s troubles. But behind the mask, Duffy saw a desperate man: ‘His face was appalling. He had always been a dark, mysterious person but now he looked wild; haggard and repulsive. It seemed that thwarted ambition had turned his blood to liquid mud.’29

On Saturday, 16 February 1856, the Tipperary Bank ran out of cash and Sadleir’s complex web of fraud finally unravelled. After his brother James requested £30,000 to keep the bank afloat, Sadleir spent the day frantically trying to raise funds but he was repeatedly turned down. And when one investor, whose deeds had been forged, began investigating, Sadleir realised that his rickety financial empire was about to collapse. However, unlike O’Flaherty, he saw no way out. Facing financial ruin, social disgrace and lengthy imprisonment, Sadleir committed suicide. On 17 February, pedestrians on Hampstead Heath found his body lying beside a silver tankard smelling of prussic acid and a note in which Sadleir admitted sole responsibility for his crimes. Others suffered not at all. William Keogh rose ever higher, first becoming Attorney-General for Ireland and then a senior judge.

When news of Sadleir’s death reached Ireland, panic erupted among thousands of investors facing financial ruin. Technically this did not trigger a bank run; there was no money in the bank. A prominent journalist, A.M. Sullivan, recalled that:

The Tipperary Bank closed its doors; country people flocked into the towns. They surrounded and attacked the branches; the poor victims imagined their money must be within and they got crowbars, picks and spades to force the walls and ‘dig it out.’ Old men went about like maniacs, confused and hysterical; widows knelt in the street and, aloud, asked God was it true they were beggared for ever. Even the poor-law unions, which had kept their accounts in the bank, lost all and had not a shilling to buy the paupers’ dinner.30

By April 1856, the colossal scale of malfeasance became known: £1,250,000 and counting. John Sadleir was exposed as nineteenth-century Ireland’s most prolific white-collar criminal.

Coming soon after the Tenant League’s demise, the financial crash of February 1856 unleashed popular revulsion against a system that had apparently debauched public life, ruining the innocent while powerful guilty men evaded justice. And Sadleir perfectly epitomised a culture of greed and corruption rampant in ‘respectable’ society. A.M. Sullivan claimed that:

not even in the darkest days of the eighteenth century a lower level of public spirit, a lower tone of political morality, prevailed in Ireland than at this time. Public life was almost wholly abandoned to the self-seeking and adventurous. Good faith, honesty, consistency, sincerity in public affairs were cynically scoffed at and derided. The political arena was regarded simply as a mart in which everything went to the highest bidder; and the speculator who netted the most gains was the man most applauded.31

Nationwide disgust fuelled a widespread conviction that an entire rotten system should be swept away. However, though many Irishmen believed the 1850s were Ireland’s locust years, Sullivan asserted that others found stagnation and apathy strangely comforting, and that:

If the absence of political life and action could be called tranquillity, or torpor be deemed repose, Ireland from 1852 to 1858 enjoyed that peaceful rest, that cessation from agitation which so many authorities declared to be the one thing wanting for her prosperity and happiness. To the eye of superficial observers, Ireland was in 1856 more really and completely pacified than at any time since the time of Strongbow. The people no longer interested themselves in politics. Who went into or who went out of parliament concerned them not. The agitator’s voice was heard no more. All was silence. Rest and peace some called it.32

It was the quiet and peace of a political graveyard. Like a river when dammed, Irish nationalism always sought another outlet. Over previous decades, revolution, mass agitation and parliamentary politics had all been tried unsuccessfully, but defeat never ended the story; instead, it was merely a prelude to another chapter. The Tenant League’s disintegration and Duffy’s departure from Ireland simply meant that many nationalists would henceforth travel a different political path.

Capitalising on constitutional nationalism’s disarray, Doheny and O’Mahony dispatched an emissary to Ireland, Joseph Denieffe, a 22-year-old tailor and EMA member.33 However, proof of their scarce resources was that the EMA had well under fifty members, and they chose Denieffe as a cheap option because he was travelling to say farewell to his dying father in Kilkenny. Moreover, Denieffe was astonished when Doheny and O’Mahony ordered him to establish a revolutionary organisation in Ireland as the EMA had no important contacts there. Even more surprisingly, Doheny told Denieffe that in September 1855 a naval expedition of 30,000 Irish-American volunteers would descend on Ireland, a promise that only made sense if Doheny had secured Russian assistance. Naively reassured, Denieffe left for Ireland. Upon finding his father completely recovered, he began his political mission. First, Denieffe enlisted John Haltigan, a Kilkenny Journal foreman, and together they recruited EMA members in neighbouring towns and villages, helped by an economic depression that had paralysed business and swamped the poorhouses. Denieffe recalled that although it was merely the nucleus of an organisation, the prospects seemed good.34

Haltigan next advised Denieffe to visit Dublin and meet Peter Langan, the owner of a Lombard Street timber yard at which radicals discussed revolutionary prospects. The group included John Hickey, a foreman builder from Kingstown with three militant brothers well-connected to the building trade: Garrett O’Shaughnessy, a metal worker; Philip Gray, a bookkeeper; and Thomas Clarke Luby, a Protestant journalist. Luby had never heard of the EMA, was sceptical about Denieffe, and completely dismissed the idea of an American naval invasion in September without extensive preparations having been made in Ireland. Unlike Langan, Gray and O’Shaughnessy, Luby refused to join the EMA and he was apparently vindicated when the promised fleet never materialised. As his savings diminished, Denieffe was about to return home when a Dublin friend gave him a job in Carrickmore, Co. Monaghan.

September passed uneventfully because Russia hesitated to risk an American naval expedition that the Royal Navy would probably have annihilated. Nevertheless, Doheny and O’Mahony continued negotiating with the Russians until the Crimean War ended in March 1856 and the Emmet Monument Association disbanded – though a committee was left in place to revive it if circumstances changed. However, by autumn, Irish-American politics had descended into renewed bickering. Sickened, O’Mahony contemplated founding an Irish colony in the west, but after a year spent translating a seventeenth-century Gaelic history of Ireland, he returned to politics in late 1857 as hopes of an Irish rebellion revived.35 Deteriorating Anglo–French relations threatened a major European war and the Indian Mutiny had diverted British military resources from Ireland to the sub-continent. The EMA was swiftly reconstituted, though for another eighteen months it remained nameless, until in 1859 it would finally re-emerge as the Fenian Brotherhood.

Meanwhile, an almost penniless Denieffe had heard nothing from Doheny and O’Mahony, and he was about to leave for America when a letter from Haltigan announced that a former political exile, James Stephens, wanted to meet him. Denieffe’s decision to delay his departure transformed everything. Born in Kilkenny, 32-year-old Stephens had worked in Dublin during the 1840s as a civil engineer, while gravitating politically to Young Ireland. At Ballingarry on 29 July 1848, Stephens led rebels in a skirmish with police and was shot in a hip and thigh. After he fled to the Tipperary/Kilkenny border, an angry mob mistook Stephens for a British spy and almost lynched him. ‘The moments I passed in the midst of this infuriated and exasperated multitude were the most terrible moments of my life.’36 Just in time, a visitor from Kilkenny recognised Stephens and saved him.

Stephens and Michael Doheny then went on the run together, hounded for weeks by police as they trekked from town to town, physically and emotionally exhausted. The flight established Stephens’s reputation for daring, courage and resourcefulness, and he greatly impressed Doheny. ‘During the whole time which we spent, as it were, in the shadow of the gibbet, his courage never faltered and his temper never once ruffled.’37 Stephens’s family and friends helped out by placing in the Kilkenny Moderator a report of his death from serious injuries. Stephens’s father then arranged a mock funeral in which a stone-filled coffin was buried at the city’s ancient cathedral.

After he and Doheny parted, Stephens sailed for England, caught a ferry to France, and on 16 September reached Paris, where he recuperated from his wounds in a run-down hotel. Unemployed for over a year, Stephens survived on loans, handouts and teaching English. Paris broadened him culturally, especially after he lodged in the Latin Quarter while studying logic, ethics and philosophy at the Sorbonne. From August 1849, Stephens shared accommodation with John O’Mahony, who was ‘dearer to me than any man I ever knew. O’Mahony and I then were almost inseparable.’38 Once O’Mahony threw over a banister a Polish Jew who demanded Stephens repay a loan. Afraid the debt-collector was dead, they collapsed in laughter when he scampered away.

Both men followed political events in Ireland closely while associating with the secret revolutionary societies that abounded in Paris. Gradually, Stephens became less political refugee and more a professional revolutionary, inspired by European conspiracies like the Italian Carbonari. Pondering Ireland’s political future, he eventually concluded that Irish nationalism had three possible courses of action.39 Firstly, it could again resort to the constitutional agitation for legislative independence that O’Connell had organised. But the British government had rebuffed even the Liberator. Where O’Connell had failed no one else could succeed. Secondly, Ireland could lash out ‘wildly and insanely’ at England, a strategy that had led straight to the ill-fated Cappoquin Rising in 1849. This was the ‘politics of Bedlam’ whose advocates were ‘criminals or lunatics’. Scorning both constitutional agitation and spontaneous violence, Stephens declared that armed revolt was the only possible course but only after a secret oath-bond society had spread all over Ireland, armed its members with rifles like soldiers, and disciplined them like an army. Stephen later claimed that after Ireland was liberated, he would gladly leave public life a happy man. Often depicted as a blinkered fanatic, he outlined a generous vision of independence, draining the poison from Anglo–Irish relations and inaugurating an Entente Cordiale between Ireland and England. ‘Nothing would please me better than to see England and Ireland forget mutual pains, wrongs and frettings and insure their common future by an alliance, offensive and defensive.’40

At the end of 1855, Stephens returned to Ireland, probably because he felt isolated after O’Mahony left for America two years earlier, and also alienated from Napoleon III’s authoritarian monarchical regime. Moreover, after the Tenant League’s collapse, the Irish political situation seemed more favourable to revolutionaries. Stephens also longed for a sense of purpose in his life. ‘I hated the sedentary life of the litterateur, and my desk appeared to be an instrument of torture. I passionately longed for work – to do something.’41 By early January 1856, Stephens was back in Dublin, penniless and literally on his uppers. After former comrades from 1848 told him that Ireland was in a hopeless state, he left Dublin in the bleak mid-winter, walking towards his family home in Kilkenny city. Sometimes trudging through the night, Stephens’s continental clothes and long flowing beard had him often mistaken for an Oriental and sometimes as part of a travelling circus. After losing contact with his family, he discovered, at journey’s end, that his two brothers had vanished and their father was dead. ‘My only sister (Anna) had followed him to the grave in the prime of girlhood and thus was a household ruined and broken up.’42 Virtually alone in the world, an exhausted Stephens was nursed back to health by an uncle and three aunts.

In Kilkenny, Stephens found political opinion ‘at a very low ebb, cold, dead and passionless, as if Young Ireland had never existed’.43 An exodus of people, especially natural leaders, had completely demoralised even his 1848 comrades. ‘All my enthusiasm was frozen for the moment. I looked like one who had come on a wild goose chase after all and whose mission had been prematurely ended.’44 But Stephens soldiered on and decided to undertake a walking tour of Ireland, funded by occasional French tutoring and dependent for bed and board on friends and the kindness of strangers:

I was anxious to see the people for myself, to walk through as much of the island as possible, to go to the city and speak to the toiling artisan, to walk into the rural districts and chat with the farmer or the labourer, to make scrutinising tours through the minor towns and villages, seeking to find out, wherever I went, the sentiments real of the masses.45

In a sense this was an anatomy study to test Duffy’s contention that Ireland resembled a corpse on the dissecting table, an analogy that had gripped popular imagination. Like a doctor, Stephens planned to discover whether the body politic was indeed dead, slowly expiring, or capable of a full recovery: ‘In fact, I wanted to feel Ireland’s pulse.’ If the situation was indeed hopeless, Stephens intended resuming his exile and living permanently in Paris. ‘With this fixed and firmly-rooted idea I took up my pilgrim’s staff and commenced my walk of three thousand miles through the country.’46

Travelling as ‘an seabhac’, ‘the wandering hawk’ (after his hawk-like eyes) Stephens calculated that between spring and autumn 1856 he actually covered about 3,500 miles, a testing distance for someone prone to hypochondria and who claimed to have suffered from fading memory, famine fever, rheumatism, depression and a fear of blindness. All the while he battled aristocratic hostility, farmers’ apathy and what he considered bourgeois pig-headedness. But labourers, tradesmen and peasants’ sons listened sympathetically, a reception that left Stephens well satisfied at journey’s end: ‘My three-thousand miles walk through Ireland had convinced me of one thing - the possibility of organising a proper movement for the independence of my native land.’47 However, after consulting with Dublin republicans, Stephens decided against establishing a revolutionary movement immediately – though the time would come. ‘From what I had seen I could say that the cause was not at all dead, but sleeping. The corpse on the dissecting table was a myth. Ireland lived and glowed but lived and glowed – in a trance.’48 Stephens believed decisive action was vital in the near future because Ireland was in a race against time for survival. Otherwise, a much-diminished population would continue an irreversible decline ending in a complete extinction of the Irish race:

I was as sure as of my own existence that if another decade passed without an endeavour of some kind or another to shake off an unjust yoke the Irish people would sink into a lethargy from which it would be impossible for any patriot however Titanic in genius or for anybody of patriots however sincere and zealous to arouse them into anything like a healthy existence. To save my race from this dream, to revive old hopes and aspirations. Such was my aim, such my ambitions.49

In late 1856, Stephens caught a lucky break when a bookseller friend informed O’Mahony that he was back in Ireland. O’Mahony immediately re-established contact with Stephens, though initially he had no political role for him in mind. Indeed, having withdrawn from Irish-American affairs, O’Mahony was himself actually drafting a farewell speech. Even so, he and Doheny realised Stephens’s return was significant and that he was a far more important person than Denieffe for their project of an Irish revolutionary movement. In letters, Stephens criticised O’Mahony’s enemies and urged him to stay in politics; when O’Mahony eventually returned to the EMA, Stephens took the credit for changing his mind.

Although determined to avoid the ‘drudgery’ of full-time teaching, Stephens survived by tutoring in French the children of three suburban families and two sons of John Blake Dillon, the former Young Ireland leader. He also invited Dillon to join his conspiracy but was rebuffed; Dillon now wanted nothing to do with revolution. Stephens also unsuccessfully approached John O’Leary, a 26-year-old medical student from Tipperary whom he had known for a decade. O’Leary had no principled objections to rebellion but argued that the time was not yet right for an insurrectionary movement.

In 1857, Stephens learned from John Haltigan about Denieffe’s Irish mission. When they met, Stephens urged Denieffe to remain in Ireland and together they would establish a secret revolutionary organisation. Dazzled by Stephens, Denieffe cancelled his journey home and returned to his job. Over the following months Stephens consolidated his relationship with Doheny and O’Mahony, who were making the still unnamed Fenian Brotherhood supreme in Irish-America and were confident now that Stephens could build a viable counterpart in Ireland. Two days before Christmas 1857, an American emissary, Owen Considine, delivered to Stephens a letter from a committee whose chairman, Michael Doheny, wanted to know whether Ireland was ripe for rebellion and, if so, would Stephens establish a revolutionary organisation. Significantly, though, Considine also handed over a private message from O’Mahony cautioning Stephens about the American side’s meagre resources, a proviso that Stephens ignored.50

Reading aloud his reply to Denieffe, Stephens declared that Ireland was ripe for insurrection and that he would lead it. Provided Irish-America sent £80–100 for three months, Stephens promised to organise 10,000 men, 1,500 of them armed with rifles. But, ‘the Centre of this or any similar organisation should be perfectly unshackled; in other words, a provisional dictator. On this point I can conscientiously concede nothing.’51 Irish-American leaders did not realise that this was an ultimatum. Some wanted to control a transatlantic relationship and others envisaged an equal partnership but everyone had misjudged Stephens, whom most knew little and understood less. Even Doheny’s and O’Mahony’s passing friendship with Stephens was in bygone times when neither had fathomed his lust for absolute power, his inability ever to work harmoniously with anyone on an equal basis. Nor was Stephens’s demand for total control confined to Ireland; his ambition encompassed the entire revolutionary movement on both sides of the Atlantic. This misunderstanding right from the start as to where authority ultimately resided would bedevil transatlantic relations and help bring about defeat in 1867.

Denieffe brought Stephens’s reply to New York, encountering Doheny outside the New York City Halls of Justice in Manhattan and handing him the letter. ‘He tore it open and read a few lines; the tears came to his eyes; he folded the letter and we hastened on to his office.’52 Assembling his inner circle, Doheny organised a whip round, but although everyone chipped in their last cent and later collected more money from friends, only £80 was raised over the next two months. Finally, Denieffe left for Ireland and reached Dublin on 17 March 1858, bringing a letter from ‘the Irish revolutionary committee’ that appointed Stephens ‘chief executive of the Irish revolutionary movement’ with ‘supreme control and absolute authority over the movement in Ireland’.

Despite a shortfall in cash, Stephens seized the historically symbolic Day of Saint Patrick. At his lodgings in McGuinness Place near Lombard Street, he, Luby, Langan, O’Shaughnessy, Denieffe and Considine launched a new revolutionary organisation. None could have imagined that their creation, after struggling for existence, would eventually succeed beyond their wildest expectations and become what one historian has called the most enduring and successful revolutionary secret society in Europe.53 Under Stephens’s guidance, Luby devised an oath that pledged members’ loyalty to an Irish Republic and obedience to their superior officers. Initially, the organisation lacked even a name and members referred to Our Body, Our Movement, The Society, The Organisation and The Brotherhood. Luby referred to the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, while Stephens sometimes mentioned the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Only after mass arrests in September 1865 would the last name become popular, starting among Irish fugitives in America and eventually finding favour in Ireland. However, for convenience, historians habitually speak of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) from 1858 onwards.

In late spring 1859, the EMA holding committee would remodel its organisation and elect O’Mahony as president. Influenced by his Gaelic studies and the imaginary world of ancient Ireland that he often mentally inhabited, O’Mahony then persuaded the EMA to rename itself as the Fenian Brotherhood.54 Almost 2,000 years earlier the Irish national militia was the ‘Fiana Erion’ or Fenians, a name derived from its famous commander, variously known as Fenius, Fin and Fion. O’Mahony’s choice was inspired. Short, strong and Irish, it denoted modern Fenians as warriors in an army of liberation. Moreover, by harking back many generations, O’Mahony had located Fenianism in a long line of resistance that would only end with final victory over England. By giving his Irish-American organisation a unique name, O’Mahony was asserting the existence of two separate but equal wings of the same movement, united in a common purpose but each contributing in different ways. Yet, ironically, many IRB members in Ireland found O’Mahony’s choice of title appealing and began calling themselves Fenians as well. Regardless of names, the Fenian Brotherhood and IRB shared the same raison d’etre, which one historian has identified as the ‘violent struggle against British rule; parliamentary and other constitutional action were anathematised’.55

Stephens structured the IRB as an army, emphasising hierarchy, discipline and secrecy. As Central Organiser of the Irish Republic (‘C.O.I.R’) he was effectively commander-in-chief, exercising total authority over the entire movement. Many members were uncomfortable with this untrammelled power, but John O’Leary believed that the leader of a conspiracy was much more like the chief of an army than the chief of a state: ‘His power must be theoretically absolute. All unlimited power, as all restraints upon liberty, are in themselves evils. A conspiracy is in itself an evil, but is sometimes necessary to oppose a greater.’56 Recruits were enrolled in circles, analogous to an army regiment, with every circle presided over by a centre or A, equivalent to a colonel. Centres chose nine Bs or captains, who in turn selected nine Cs or sergeants. Finally, Cs chose nine Ds who comprised the rank and file. Every IRB member was to unquestioningly obey his superior officers. In order to shield the IRB from British espionage, Stephens tried to hermetically seal the organisation by insisting on each rank knowing only the identity of his immediate superior, though in practice this rule was often violated. From the start, then, Stephens was a provisional dictator, universally acknowledged as The Boss, The Captain. Yet he hardly looked an imposing leader – unlike O’Mahony, who stood over 6ft tall, and whom John O’Leary considered perhaps the manliest and handsomest man he had ever seen.57 By contrast, at 5ft 7in, Stephens was stout with fair hair balding around the top of his head and a long flowing sandy beard, tinged with grey. While Stephens had a massive forehead, his hands and feet were remarkably small, and he had a disconcerting habit of closing his left eye when speaking.

However, Stephens exuded an absolute conviction that the revolution would ultimately triumph and that only he could lead it to final victory, a spellbinding certainty that banished all doubt. His followers’ blind faith and adulation resembled a semi-religious devotion which, one prominent Fenian claimed, made Stephens ‘an object of wonder, almost worship’.58 Denieffe regarded him with boundless admiration:

I would undertake anything for him. He seemed to have me under a spell. There was an earnestness in his every move. He was abstemious, frugal – in fact, in adversity his greatest qualities were shown to perfection. He was all that could be desired as a leader. Strict attention to duty, perseverance, privation, toil – no rest until the object was reached and victory achieved. We were willing to bear all and follow him to the end.59

Even A.M. Sullivan described Stephens as ‘a man of marvellous subtlety and wondrous plausibility; crafty, cunning, and quite unscrupulous as to the employment of means to an end’.60 He believed that Stephens’s great manipulative ability and strength of will made him a born conspirator; in fact, ‘one of the ablest, most skilful and most dangerous revolutionists of our time’.61

By portraying himself as a man of action bent on a rising at the earliest opportunity, Stephens sowed the seeds of transatlantic discord. Cautious and methodical, O’Mahony came to regard Stephens as an irresponsible firebrand who would probably destroy Fenianism. He believed that an open Fenian Brotherhood should be independent from but closely allied to a secret IRB organised on military lines, and furthermore, unlike Stephens, O’Mahony doggedly adhered to a gradualist policy about starting the rising. Only when the Fenian Brotherhood and IRB had achieved sufficient discipline and resources should they should launch a combined onslaught against England. Until then, both organisations should be kept in a state of constant, watchful preparedness, biding their time and waiting for an opportunity to strike, especially when England became embroiled in a foreign war.

As the IRB’s provisional dictator from the start, Stephens had avoided the long climb to supreme power that most politicians must endure and, in the process, also superseded another potential leader, Thomas Clarke Luby. The son of an Anglican clergyman from Dublin and a Roman Catholic mother, 33-year-old Luby was a law graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. After abandoning his family tradition before joining O’Connell’s Repeal Association, he wrote for The Nation newspaper, before defecting to Young Ireland. During the 1848 rising, Luby commanded rebels on the borders of Dublin and Meath and audaciously planned for 200 Dublin volunteers to seize Blanchardstown police station, but fewer than twenty men mustered at Blanchardstown. Luby then went south, intent on joining the Young Ireland leaders, only for the rising to suddenly collapse in fiasco at Ballingarry. A year later, Luby helped lead the so-called Cappoquin rising, along with fellow radicals Fintan Lalor, John O’Leary and Joseph Brennan, who planned to simultaneously attack police stations in Waterford, Kilkenny, Clare and Limerick on 16 September 1849. But turnout was poor and the only fighting occurred at Cappoquin in Co. Waterford, where Brennan unsuccessfully attacked a police barracks.

After a brief imprisonment, Luby left for Paris in 1851 to join the Foreign Legion and gain military experience. Since recruiting for the Legion had been temporarily suspended, he spent a year in Australia before returning to Ireland in 1853, his revolutionary ardour undiminished. Teaming up with comrades from 1849, Luby edited The Tribune, a newspaper whose belligerent rhetoric echoed that of Mitchel. However, after two unsuccessful risings, even Luby reacted cautiously when Denieffe turned up in Dublin, but when Stephens appeared his impeccable revolutionary credentials won Luby over.

Although both Stephens and Luby essentially created the IRB, Stephens was always its single unchallenged leader, despite Luby’s stronger claim through his social rank, university education, literary ability, conspiratorial history and greater standing among Dublin revolutionaries. But whereas Stephens craved primacy and power, Luby lacked personal ambition: even his best friend, John O’Leary, acknowledged Luby’s ‘weakness of will’ and that he was ‘too ready to be swayed by inferior, though in a sense, stronger men’.62 Luby considered Stephens ‘an able organiser’ and was content to remain his loyal but never utterly subservient second-in-command. Sometimes, he deflated Stephens’s inflated ego as well as his literary, artistic and philosophical pretensions, even openly teasing Stephens about his talking ‘hocus pocus trash. I used in our jollier moods to make him laugh by calling him to his face “the great Sir Hocus Pocus”.’63

As IRB leader, Stephens began creating a mass movement. He had already absorbed Langan’s Dublin friends, while the Hickey brothers recruited in Kingstown and among the capital’s building trade. However, two years later the Dublin IRB would still have only about fifty members. On 19 February 1858, Stephens and Luby started a southern recruiting tour and assumed control of a secret network that O’Mahony had established in Cork, Waterford, Limerick and Tipperary before the 1848 rising, and left in place when he fled Ireland. O’Mahony later claimed that from France and then America he maintained contact with these rebel artisans and labourers, ‘some thousands of stalwart fighting men. This I considered a good basis to build an organisation on. And I have not been disappointed in my expectations.’64 Stephens and Luby also integrated Denieffe’s Kilkenny network into the IRB and urged Haltigan to continue recruiting. Denieffe recalled that:

The object of Stephen’s tour was to secretly visit and personally interview the most influential Nationalists in each town, explaining to them as far as was permissible at that time the plan and scope of the organisation in America and Ireland and what it hoped to accomplish. He invariably succeeded in getting them interested to the extent of their becoming active local organisers and always, before leaving, instructed them regarding the expected growth and future government of the society in that section. The meetings were carried on with great secrecy behind closed doors and, in each place, Stephens was given the name of reliable men in the next town, men whose patriotism he could rely on to the death; these in turn referred him to others further along and in that way the entire South was organised. Later on, other men were sent North and West, men widely acquainted in those sections repeated the good work performed by Stephens, Luby and others in the South and Southeast.65