Full Comment - Spies, sabotage, secret police and the time the Irish invaded Canada

00:00:00.000 If you said the word Fenian to most people today, that many wouldn't know what you were

00:00:10.180 talking about, and those who did might wonder why you were bringing it up.

00:00:14.380 Yet there was a time in Canadian history when dealing with Fenians was considered the biggest 0.92

00:00:19.400 threat to Canada's national security.

00:00:22.280 They were, in fact, the last people, the last organization, not a country, but an organization

00:00:26.960 to invade Canada.

00:00:28.340 Hello, my name's Brian Lilly.

00:00:30.840 This is the Full Comment Podcast, and to celebrate Canada Day, looking at a bit of Canadian history.

00:00:37.200 The Fenians were a group of people around the world connected to Ireland and the cause of

00:00:42.800 Irish nationalism that wanted to fight different battles in the cause of making Ireland a free

00:00:49.460 country.

00:00:50.360 And at one point, some people felt that the best way to do this was to invade and take

00:00:55.360 over Canada.

00:00:56.200 It seems far-fetched now, but that is the true story.

00:01:01.200 But going along with that is the fact that at one time we had a vast network of secret

00:01:08.200 police trying to undermine this effort.

00:01:11.320 That is what the book Canadian Spy Story, Irish Revolutionaries and the Secret Police is all

00:01:17.420 about.

00:01:17.760 It's by David Wilson.

00:01:18.720 He is a professor at the University of Toronto, the Celtic Studies Program at St. Michael's

00:01:22.860 College, and the editor of the Canadian Dictionary of Biographies.

00:01:27.420 Do I have that right, Professor?

00:01:29.140 That's correct.

00:01:29.820 Thanks for the time today.

00:01:31.040 The Fenians, we get a brief mention of it in your average elementary school or early high

00:01:39.640 school history course, and it's brushed over in a couple of seconds, but a couple of paragraphs

00:01:45.060 perhaps.

00:01:46.080 But at one point, this was a very major concern for the government of the day, both as we were

00:01:53.600 coming towards Confederation and in the time shortly after, wasn't it?

00:01:58.460 That's right.

00:01:59.360 And you're quite right about the way the Fenians have been portrayed. 0.96

00:02:03.200 Donald Creighton, the historian, described them as a bunch of grandiloquent clowns and 0.98

00:02:08.320 vainglorious incompetents. 0.98

00:02:10.020 These mad Irish men with this bizarre scheme to liberate Ireland by invading Canada, and 1.00

00:02:17.020 the only consequences of their action were the very reverse of their intentions to strengthen

00:02:21.860 the cause of Confederation.

00:02:23.580 That, in a nutshell, is the predominant view of the Fenians, and one that I challenge in

00:02:30.700 my book on many fronts, because the deeper you look into it and the more you can situate

00:02:39.140 yourself in the context of the time, rather than with the dubious wisdom of hindsight,

00:02:45.520 you can understand fully why one group of Fenians, the so-called Senate wing of the Fenians,

00:02:53.560 believed that an invasion of Canada could trigger the liberation of Ireland.

00:03:00.100 Now, they did invade Canada at one point, June 2nd, 1866, 13 months before Confederation's

00:03:06.520 declared, but while talks are still going on, final points being ironed out about how this

00:03:12.040 would happen, there was the Battle of Ridgeway, sometimes called the Battle of Lime Bridge.

00:03:16.900 This is Niagara Peninsula, outside of Fort Erie.

00:03:22.740 Did they actually invade Canada?

00:03:24.480 Was it an army?

00:03:25.480 What happened in that incident that so few of us know about?

00:03:29.600 Yes, it was an attempted invasion of Canada.

00:03:33.820 It was one that was undertaken in a situation of desperation for the Fenians.

00:03:40.100 They felt if they didn't move then, in June of 1866, support would ebb away.

00:03:46.680 But John O'Neill, the last-minute commander of this force, took 1,000, somewhere between 800

00:03:54.020 and 1,000 men into the Niagara Peninsula.

00:03:57.120 And this was supposed to be a feint for the real movement, which was going to come in from

00:04:02.620 Vermont and attack Montreal, which was the key prize.

00:04:07.940 So the idea was to draw Canadian and British troops west to defend the Niagara Peninsula,

00:04:15.460 leaving an opening for a much larger Fenian army to move in to Montreal

00:04:22.220 and shut off the Great Lakes system.

00:04:24.940 So this was the strategic plan.

00:04:28.360 Now, behind that were several assumptions that I think we need to consider to understand

00:04:34.820 why 800 to 1,000 men would have done this and why still more were massed and they are assembling,

00:04:43.160 I should say, in the Vermont-Quebec border to undertake what was intended to be the major attack.

00:04:50.500 And what you have to understand is the situation in Ireland itself.

00:04:56.300 The Fenians are a secret society wanting to bring about an independent Ireland through revolutionary means. 0.64

00:05:05.920 And they believe that the best chance they have of doing this is when Britain is at war.

00:05:12.760 The slogan is, England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity.

00:05:17.000 And they'd pinned all their hopes on France, you know, a war between Britain and France.

00:05:21.900 But France selfishly kept on letting the Irish down by refusing to be drawn into a war.

00:05:27.980 But there was always the possibility that a war between Britain and the United States could be triggered,

00:05:35.640 that you could actually accomplish facts on the ground, so to speak.

00:05:39.440 Relations were already bad in the aftermath of the Civil War when Britain, although formally neutral,

00:05:47.700 had a policy that actually favoured the Confederacy, the South.

00:05:51.760 Relations were bad.

00:05:52.420 And a lot of Canadians also favoured the South.

00:05:55.540 I think that is another part of our history that many don't know.

00:05:59.840 Many did.

00:06:00.720 Most, I think, did not.

00:06:02.240 And if you look at the numbers of Canadians who joined the Civil War, a fair number, the vast majority joined the Union side.

00:06:11.820 But there were significant pockets of support for the Confederacy in Canada.

00:06:19.220 And indeed, if we just move forward for a moment to the origins of the Canadian secret police force,

00:06:24.520 it had nothing to do with the Fenians.

00:06:26.600 It had everything to do with attacks being planned, and one was actually undertaken by Southern Confederates into the northern states.

00:06:37.140 So the secret police force was designed, actually, to stop Southern Confederates from using Canada as a base to attack the United States.

00:06:47.120 Anyway, going back to the Fenian rationale, if you had the tacit support of the United States, which they believed they had to enter Canada,

00:07:02.980 if they could hold Canadian territory for a few days, then they believed thousands of Irish Americans,

00:07:10.660 veterans of the Civil War with military experience, would rush to the front,

00:07:14.900 and that the act of holding Canada would simultaneously prompt Britain to send troops across the Atlantic

00:07:21.960 and inspire the revolutionary movement back home in Ireland.

00:07:27.280 A bit of a convoluted route, isn't it?

00:07:30.300 Well, yeah, but it was.

00:07:33.140 But the prospects in Ireland for revolution were diminishing rapidly.

00:07:39.040 No war was on the horizon with France.

00:07:41.180 The British government was cracking down on the Fenian Brotherhood, had moved against the organization in September of 1865,

00:07:49.960 which is very significant because the Battle of Ridgway takes place a few months later.

00:07:54.700 And it was convoluted.

00:07:56.480 But I think you can see the logic.

00:07:57.960 If you can draw Britain and the United States into a war, big if, of course, but they believed they could,

00:08:06.880 then the ultimate goal could be the absorption of Canada into the American Empire of Liberty

00:08:13.080 and the liberation of Ireland through revolution.

00:08:17.640 And they did have some precedence for this.

00:08:19.400 I mean, during the Civil War in 1861, there was a crisis brewing between Britain and the United States.

00:08:27.600 I won't go into the details, but Britain actually sent 10,000, 10,000 to 12,000 troops across the Atlantic in December of 1861,

00:08:38.180 when the Atlantic crossing was not easy.

00:08:40.460 They sent them to New Brunswick to protect Canada against a potential American invasion. 0.55

00:08:45.060 And these guys, I mean, there was no railway connection between New Brunswick and the St. Lawrence Valley.

00:08:51.700 They trudged through 700 miles of snow to get to Quebec City and Montreal.

00:08:57.480 I mean, it was an extraordinary story.

00:09:00.040 So the Fenians knew that when Canada was threatened, Britain would indeed send troops to this country to protect it.

00:09:08.680 And they were also right in their assumption that victories in Canada would inspire revolutionaries in Ireland.

00:09:16.460 In fact, they didn't.

00:09:17.360 The Battle of Ridgway, which the Fenians won, did indeed inspire not just revolutionaries in Ireland,

00:09:24.660 but moderate nationalists in Ireland as well.

00:09:27.820 Their response was ecstatic, actually, to the people who had been criticizing the Fenians a week before, 0.96

00:09:33.940 saying that their plan was, indeed, as you might say, convoluted, was foolish, was harebrained,

00:09:39.660 were praising it to the sky, praising the Fenians to the skies after they proved that they could beat the Redcoats, 0.97

00:09:45.940 who, of course, actually were mainly University of Toronto students and the 13th Hamilton militia

00:09:54.060 who had no previous military experience whatsoever.

00:09:57.700 Yeah, there's a statue that I walked my dog past on a regular basis on the campus of the University of Toronto

00:10:03.840 that's dedicated to the students from the school who went and fought and lost their lives.

00:10:11.340 So if the Fenians won the Battle of Ridgway, why didn't the invasion to take over Montreal happen? 0.83

00:10:20.480 Why do we not have a harp on our national flag?

00:10:24.720 Yes, precisely because of poor coordination.

00:10:32.040 In fact, there was supposed to be a three-pronged attack on Canada across the Great Lakes coming into Goderich.

00:10:38.220 That never got off the ground.

00:10:40.980 The troops were slow to come in to Vermont and upstate New York,

00:10:47.260 so there were logistical problems there.

00:10:49.800 They did actually go in, but it was too late.

00:10:53.120 By the time they went in to Canada, and they were actually in the eastern townships area for three days

00:10:59.860 before they were pushed back, perhaps a lesser-known part of the story, but a significant one nonetheless.

00:11:06.780 But by the time they crossed over, the superior forces had pinned back the Fenians in the Niagara Peninsula. 0.64

00:11:16.560 And actually, the leader, John O'Neill, who was in constant communication with the Fenians back in Buffalo,

00:11:23.780 heard that the attack in Quebec hadn't yet materialized, from inter-Quebec hadn't yet materialized.

00:11:31.180 And he was faced with a choice.

00:11:33.020 You know, do we pull back? Do we retreat?

00:11:35.800 Or do we keep fighting, knowing we're going to lose, even though there's no coordinated troop movement to our east?

00:11:46.320 And in the end, he decided to pull back.

00:11:48.540 And a key factor here was the United States, which had indeed led the Fenians to believe that if they succeeded,

00:11:56.240 the American government would, quote, accomplish acknowledged facts.

00:12:00.640 The American government had no intention whatsoever of doing that.

00:12:04.780 The American government arrested the Fenians when they returned,

00:12:09.620 and also made damn sure that the other Irish Americans, who are already heading to the frontier to support them,

00:12:18.420 would not be allowed to cross into Canada.

00:12:20.940 There were, you mentioned Buffalo, and it's, you know, for those of us who've lived along the border,

00:12:26.160 and most of us live not far from the American border.

00:12:28.960 That's the way our population is.

00:12:31.460 You don't think of your neighbors in Vermont attacking the eastern townships.

00:12:36.540 You don't think of people in, you know, troops rallying in Buffalo to come across in an invading army.

00:12:43.840 And yet that was quite the threat that the McDonald government and others had to deal with.

00:12:51.620 Yeah, that's, you know, you're quite right.

00:12:53.020 I mean, it takes an exercise of significant imagination, even more so when you go to the small and sleepy towns in upstate New York

00:13:01.940 and in Vermont, where there was an arms buildup and where there were virulent speeches against Canada.

00:13:10.720 And Canada and Britain were regarded as synonymous, basically, by the Fenians.

00:13:15.900 They did not distinguish between the two.

00:13:18.620 The Union Jack flew here.

00:13:20.180 That was enough, you know.

00:13:21.300 But it is quite something to put yourself back into that context.

00:13:29.360 And indeed, the Canadian authorities took the Fenians very seriously, indeed.

00:13:36.740 And not just the Fenians in the United States, but also the Fenians within Canada.

00:13:43.720 And that's a large part of the story that historians have never really told.

00:13:50.020 I mean, historians have generally neglected the Secret Service, which I think is an absolutely fascinating story.

00:13:56.440 They've generally neglected the importance of the Fenian Brotherhood within Canada.

00:14:01.980 They were dismissed as, you know, a few hundred restless individuals, rootless and restless individuals.

00:14:09.840 They were much more serious than that.

00:14:11.820 Not because they were strong enough in themselves to affect a revolution in Canada.

00:14:21.000 They certainly were not.

00:14:22.440 Not that they were a majority of Irish Catholics in Canada, because they certainly were not.

00:14:27.600 But they were a significant minority.

00:14:30.840 And the most radical elements within the Fenian Brotherhood had plans to, well, they had their own secret service.

00:14:42.840 The Fenians had their own secret service.

00:14:44.840 They sent sleeper agents into Canada to liaise with the Fenians here. 0.96

00:14:50.260 And there were all kinds of plans to destroy the Welland Canal, to disrupt communications, to raise more recruits, to basically to synchronise the invasion with domestic disruption.

00:15:04.180 There were plans to cut telegraph wires, blow up bridges, burn down buildings, suborn Irish soldiers in British regiments, spike guns and take people like John A. MacDonald and Thomas Darcy McGee hostage.

00:15:17.780 By themselves, they could not have done it.

00:15:20.740 But in conjunction with a successful Fenian invasion, who knows what would have happened.

00:15:28.660 And John A. MacDonald and Darcy McGee in particular were highly conscious of this.

00:15:34.320 And the interesting thing is, whereas Thomas Darcy McGee made no bones about it, he highlighted the Fenian threat and its dangers.

00:15:44.820 But MacDonald, who was a much shrewder politician, said as little about it as possible, which is really interesting.

00:15:53.560 He deliberately downplayed the threat.

00:15:57.060 And actually, my book begins with several quotations, one of which is from MacDonald to that effect.

00:16:06.460 The Fenian organization, he wrote in 1868, after the Battle of Ridgway, when you think it would have been defeated,

00:16:14.820 the Fenian organization has gone to a very large and dangerous extent in Canada, although I said as little about it as possible.

00:16:26.880 So interesting that he would take that position.

00:16:29.160 And you've also got the quote from Thomas Darcy McGee, I believe our only political assassination in Canada.

00:16:38.100 And depending on the view of history, the official story is he was assassinated by a Fenian sympathizer, Patrick Whelan.

00:16:47.080 Some dispute that, but that is, you know, Patrick Whelan hunt for that.

00:16:51.380 But Thomas Darcy McGee, just months after the Battle of Ridgway and after the failed attempt to take the eastern townships, he said,

00:16:59.860 Canada and British America have never known an enemy so subtle, so irrational, so hard to trace, and therefore so difficult to combat.

00:17:08.560 So this was, they viewed the Fenian Brotherhood as an enemy that was often hiding when it was in Canada.

00:17:18.980 I mean, in America, they would be very upfront, but in Canada, it would be underground, correct?

00:17:25.160 Absolutely.

00:17:26.080 And, you know, the Canadian spy story that I tell is one of double deception.

00:17:31.140 I mean, there are Fenians in Canada who are pretending they are not Fenians, and there are secret police who are pretending that they are not secret police.

00:17:40.660 There's a plethora of codenames and pseudonyms going on.

00:17:46.500 Yeah, this is actually one of the most interesting aspects of the research, to try and identify Fenians in Canada.

00:17:55.260 And you find, especially when you look at some of the records in the United States that are extant, you find cases of people such as Francis Bernard McNamee, who was a contractor in Montreal, who actually brought Fenianism into Montreal and actually planned to set up a revolutionary Irish militia that would join Irish-American invading forces.

00:18:21.520 And he portrays himself in the press as being, you know, a butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth Canadian loyalist.

00:18:29.020 Quite the contrary.

00:18:31.160 And also...

00:18:32.140 So in public, you know, singing God save the Queen, and in private, you know, singing Fenian songs in the pub.

00:18:44.380 That's right.

00:18:44.780 With the result that some people thought he was a double agent, which I have no evidence for, but he might well have been.

00:18:52.180 So I think this is a very, very interesting part of the story.

00:18:57.640 Well, then let's get into the secret police, because that is a large part of your book.

00:19:01.420 It's the majority of it.

00:19:03.140 It's the story I didn't know.

00:19:06.600 And so tell me about someone like Cornelius O'Sullivan.

00:19:11.520 Cornelius O'Sullivan was a cattle dealer from Missouri, who joined the Fenians.

00:19:29.520 He was part of a Fenian circle or cell.

00:19:33.340 And through that, he went to New York and met William Roberts, who was the president of the Fenian Brotherhood, the man, the architect behind the invasion plans.

00:19:48.680 And this was after Ridgway.

00:19:49.840 The Fenians are now regrouping and planning a second invasion, which they did indeed attempt in 1870.

00:19:55.340 So it's now 1867 and Cornelius O'Sullivan goes to New York and he meets William Roberts, has a good conversation with him about the state of the Fenian Brotherhood, their prospects for success, their financial difficulties.

00:20:12.260 He's taken to Brooklyn to see where the Fenian uniforms are being made, and he admires the Fenian uniforms and thinks that he might buy one for himself.

00:20:25.020 He buys some Fenian bonds, that's to give money to the cause.

00:20:30.120 He hangs out with some of the veterans of Ridgway.

00:20:33.040 They go to stage plays in New York together.

00:20:35.460 They go drinking together.

00:20:37.240 They're having a grand time all together.

00:20:39.740 He returns to New York with a pony for William Roberts, his 11-year-old son.

00:20:47.820 He goes to mass with Mrs. Roberts when William Roberts is away and has Sunday dinner afterwards.

00:20:56.160 I mean, he's right there, is Cornelius O'Sullivan.

00:21:00.040 And he's also featured in the Irish-American newspaper, which is a pro-invasion paper, as a model Fenian. 0.95

00:21:08.520 And he's presented with a Fenian uniform that he so admires for his services.

00:21:15.160 But what nobody knows about Cornelius O'Sullivan is that he does not actually exist as Cornelius O'Sullivan.

00:21:24.820 His real name is Charles Clark.

00:21:27.860 He is an Irish-speaking orange man who converted to Protestantism from Catholicism during the famine, who joined the Orange Order, who lived in Missouri, who'd become part of the Toronto regular police force, was fired in a sex scandal.

00:21:47.360 It would not be his last, and who joined, who was snapped up by the secret police because he knew his way around Catholic religious ceremonies.

00:21:58.220 He knew the language.

00:22:00.240 So, you know, almost hardly any Protestants knew the Irish language.

00:22:04.760 Some did, but most did not.

00:22:05.920 So, he was a perfect candidate.

00:22:08.860 Let's pause and maybe explain for a minute for people that forget.

00:22:13.200 Yes.

00:22:14.300 Orangeman.

00:22:16.040 That's also a really good question, and thanks for pulling me up on that.

00:22:20.380 It's a question no one in Canada would ever have asked a century ago.

00:22:26.120 One in every three adult male Protestants was a member of the Orange Order.

00:22:33.380 The biggest event, and in fact the most important Irish event in Canada for many years, for decades, was not St. Patrick's Day.

00:22:44.100 It was July the 12th, the day that the Orange Men celebrated. 0.99

00:22:48.800 Who were the Orange Men? 0.91

00:22:50.020 They were originally Irish Protestants, militant Irish Protestants, who were involved in sectarian battles with Catholics in Ireland in the 1790s.

00:23:03.480 It goes back to 1795, and the Battle of the Diamond.

00:23:08.340 And they were ultra-Protestant.

00:23:10.400 They were ultra-loyal, hyper-loyal, you could say.

00:23:15.760 And they became enormously influential.

00:23:19.080 And actually much more complex than that initial description would indicate.

00:23:25.900 There will become many layers to the Orange Order. 0.74

00:23:31.600 John A. MacDonald himself joined the Orange Order, but that did not stop him from working closely with Catholic bishops to get out the vote for the Conservative Party.

00:23:41.360 But the Orange Order was massively important in Canada at that time.

00:23:46.640 Look, in 1921, fast forward a bit, they were so powerful, they were planning to buy Casa Loma.

00:23:52.780 I mean, they could bring out 15,000 people every July 12th onto the streets of Toronto with thousands more, thousands more watching and celebrating the parade.

00:24:02.200 And right up to the 1950s, in this city in Toronto, workers for City Hall got the day off with pay to attend the Orange Parade.

00:24:15.480 Wow.

00:24:16.180 It would only change when Nathan Phillips broke the Orange stranglehold on the city when he became mayor, the first Jewish mayor in Toronto's history. 0.96

00:24:25.980 Let's pause there for a moment and we'll take a quick break.

00:24:30.800 When I come back, I do want to ask you more about the secret, please, because Cornelius O'Sullivan was one of many.

00:24:36.480 But also, I think a lot of people wouldn't realize that what we're talking about may sound like Irish history or Irish politics in Canada, but it was very much local because of what you just described.

00:24:51.680 And we'll get into that when we come back.

00:24:54.520 Cornelius O'Sullivan, a secret police agent, a Catholic convert to Protestantism who joined the Orange Order and was infiltrating Fenian causes.

00:25:04.260 It's a fascinating story.

00:25:07.200 And he was one of many.

00:25:09.000 And in the book, you're describing how at one point everybody had secret police sources trying to infiltrate this group because it was a concern for the Canadians.

00:25:18.580 It was a concern for the British.

00:25:20.340 It was a concern for the Americans.

00:25:22.400 But as I said just before the break, it may sound like we're talking about a foreign story.

00:25:28.480 But to the people of the time, Montreal was a very big Irish city.

00:25:34.620 Toronto was one of the most – I think it had more Irish immigrants, both orange and green, than Boston.

00:25:42.660 This was massive local politics.

00:25:47.060 This wasn't foreign politics.

00:25:48.740 This was local politics, wasn't it?

00:25:51.660 Yeah, it was really both.

00:25:53.380 And that's one of the things that I argue.

00:25:54.940 You have to look at the transatlantic context and you also have to look at specific localities because they interact with each other all the time.

00:26:02.540 You know, things that happen in Ireland deeply affect what's going on at the local level in Canada.

00:26:09.700 So that's also part of the story.

00:26:11.840 It's really a quadrilateral story with Britain, Ireland, the United States, and Canada.

00:26:18.320 But within that, the local variations in Canada are extremely important.

00:26:23.880 Absolutely.

00:26:24.920 You know, so, for example, you get Catholic communities in rural areas.

00:26:30.360 You know, not many people will know Aberfoyle near Guelph, but that was a Fenian stronghold, largely thanks to the efforts of one person who organized the Fenian Brotherhood there.

00:26:45.920 And, you know, you find Fenians among the canal workers, the Irish canal workers in the Welland Canal in the Niagara Peninsula.

00:26:59.140 You find them.

00:27:00.480 This is a culture in Canada, as elsewhere, that's centered on taverns, definitely taverns rather than churches, social clubs, informal social clubs.

00:27:12.400 And it's operating under the surface, which makes it so hard to get at.

00:27:20.480 I come back to that Darcy McGee quotation about the subtlety of the Fenians.

00:27:24.320 They can't advertise themselves as Fenians, so they call themselves Hibernian benevolent societies.

00:27:31.400 And there's a whole web of Hibernian benevolent societies.

00:27:34.840 And to complicate the matter still further, not all Hibernians are Fenians.

00:27:39.160 These are classic front organizations within which the Fenian Brotherhood can operate. 0.67

00:27:45.400 I may have had some relatives in the Hibernian Brotherhood in Glasgow years ago, and they would...

00:27:54.660 Famous tales of one of them losing a shoe in a drum as the Orange Parade went through the Gorbals. 0.97

00:27:59.720 So...

00:28:00.200 Okay.

00:28:03.300 Ah, the Gorbals.

00:28:04.620 All right.

00:28:05.360 The sight of the Glasgow kiss.

00:28:07.220 Yes.

00:28:07.660 All right.

00:28:08.840 I did not know that was part of your heritage.

00:28:11.440 Your ancestor would more likely, excuse me, more likely have been a member of the ancient order of Hibernians.

00:28:18.280 Yes, that would be it, yes.

00:28:18.940 Yes.

00:28:19.660 Different organization altogether.

00:28:21.220 But what's really interesting here from the...

00:28:26.200 And this is actually what got me into the book.

00:28:29.800 It was that here we have a revolutionary underground movement within an English-speaking Catholic community

00:28:42.440 that is a minority community in Canada and is outside the mainstream.

00:28:48.680 So you have a revolutionary minority within a suspected ethnic group, ethno-religious group.

00:29:00.280 And so the question for the authorities becomes, how do we isolate, marginalize, and defeat the revolutionary minority 0.70

00:29:09.680 without alienating members of the larger ethno-religious community to which they belong?

00:29:16.740 That was a key question.

00:29:18.940 And as I think you'll see straight away, there are modern resonances to this question.

00:29:24.480 So what I wanted to get at was the relationship between state security and civil liberty and how that played out.

00:29:35.700 And that took me into the world of the secret police, of the suspension of habeas corpus, of the interception of mail, that kind of thing.

00:29:47.000 And then the story kind of took over, Brian.

00:29:51.180 You know, I became somewhat seduced by the story because I kept encountering such astonishing characters

00:29:57.520 and a whole series of vignettes that connected to the whole, but that were fascinating in and of themselves.

00:30:05.660 So it's not simply a local level you have to look at.

00:30:09.680 It's the personalities in that local level.

00:30:12.720 At one point, you tell the story of Cornelius O'Sullivan, really Charles Clark,

00:30:17.440 who's the Canadian embedded in with the Fenians in New York, and he's dealing with people, some of whom are real Fenians,

00:30:26.260 but there's also several of them are double agents for different people.

00:30:30.320 And so they're all reporting back to somebody else of what's going on.

00:30:35.360 Yeah, that's right.

00:30:36.080 I mean, there are different sources of intelligence operating against the Fenians.

00:30:41.060 The Canadian secret police force is the main one, but the Nova Scotia-born Edward Archibald,

00:30:48.400 who was a British consul in New York, ran an intelligence network out of the consulate

00:30:54.700 and was inundated with would-be informers, most of whom had no information of value but wanted some money.

00:31:04.120 He didn't buy any of that.

00:31:06.200 And then you had the...

00:31:07.060 I do appreciate their entrepreneurial spirit.

00:31:12.440 Yes, yeah, right.

00:31:14.720 But they did not fool Gilbert McMicken, the Canadian spymaster.

00:31:18.900 They did not fool Edward Archibald.

00:31:20.760 But these spymasters had a very difficult task on their hands

00:31:25.760 because they were being inundated with information

00:31:29.760 and people knocking on their doors wanting money for information. 0.97

00:31:36.000 And they realized that most of it was just garbage, 0.84

00:31:41.160 but they were really afraid of letting a key one slip through.

00:31:45.360 You know, but they did not want to reject someone who had really valuable information.

00:31:49.780 And one of the striking things about the secret police is

00:31:53.860 that they weren't actually a vast network of detectives.

00:31:58.700 They were a very small group.

00:32:00.560 Quality was more important than quantity.

00:32:02.480 And the idea was to infiltrate the top of the brotherhood.

00:32:09.700 That was the key.

00:32:11.060 And this is what Charles Clark did in 1867 under the name of Cornelius O'Sullivan.

00:32:17.800 The trouble is...

00:32:18.640 I'll return to the others in a moment.

00:32:20.820 But the trouble with Charles Clark was that everywhere he went,

00:32:25.600 he betrayed not only the Fenians with whom he was working,

00:32:30.960 but also, it seems, just about every woman he met.

00:32:34.660 And in New York, while his wife Anne is lying ill in bed in Toronto,

00:32:41.700 he starts an affair with one of his niece's friends.

00:32:46.460 And we don't know anything about her, really, except for two things.

00:32:52.320 One is her name, which you'll think I'm making up, but I'm not.

00:32:56.840 It's Miss Clap.

00:32:58.660 And the other thing...

00:33:00.480 I know.

00:33:02.020 You wouldn't get a date today with that name.

00:33:04.060 You would not.

00:33:05.280 And the other thing is that he either, and or, really, got her pregnant,

00:33:14.100 promised her marriage, and then abandoned her.

00:33:17.600 And when Clark's niece found out what had happened,

00:33:23.620 she told him how she could get in touch with Charles Clark,

00:33:28.640 contact the postmaster at Welland, I think it was,

00:33:32.620 and the postmaster wrote back to Miss Clap and said,

00:33:37.900 Oh, yeah, I know Charles Clark.

00:33:39.260 He's a secret policeman.

00:33:43.080 John A. MacDonald and Gilbert McMicken were apoplectic.

00:33:47.260 You can see it in their correspondence,

00:33:49.380 calling the postmaster an old goon,

00:33:51.840 and they were furious because all this work that they'd put in,

00:33:56.080 all the efforts they'd made to get this guy to the top just exploded.

00:34:00.760 Fortunately for Clark, he wasn't in New York when this happened. 0.70

00:34:04.180 Otherwise, he would have had a bullet through the back of his head.

00:34:07.280 Now, at the same time, he'd brought in other detectives 0.94

00:34:10.040 to the Fenian Brotherhood under the guise that, you know,

00:34:13.360 they were good, solid Fenians.

00:34:15.740 And now they were under suspicion.

00:34:18.800 And one of them, not knowing what had happened in New York,

00:34:21.660 shows up at this Fenian convention and says,

00:34:26.740 Oh, you know, I'm okay.

00:34:28.520 I'm a good friend of Cornelius O'Sullivan.

00:34:30.940 And they run him out of town.

00:34:32.340 You know, he's lucky to escape with his life.

00:34:35.020 But this other one, William Montgomery is,

00:34:38.420 well, actually, yeah, William Montgomery is his name.

00:34:41.420 He goes under William McMichael.

00:34:43.580 And he sticks it out in New York.

00:34:46.740 And his response when he's challenged is, 0.99

00:34:49.800 that bastard O'Sullivan, he fooled me just as he fooled you. 0.99

00:34:54.380 And he stays where he is, even though he's a subject of threats. 0.99

00:34:58.400 He's told on one occasion,

00:35:00.040 someone around here is going to smell the whiff of grape shot

00:35:02.660 when they least expect it.

00:35:04.360 And he still stays.

00:35:06.020 And for about a year, they don't let him near anything that's secret.

00:35:10.280 But gradually, he gets back in their good graces.

00:35:14.320 And believe it or not,

00:35:15.800 and this is actually on the cover of my book,

00:35:17.920 in 1868, so two years after the Battle of Ridgway,

00:35:21.700 there's a big parade in Philadelphia celebrating the battle.

00:35:25.340 And the flag that was carried in to Canada is carried in the parade.

00:35:30.140 Who is carrying it?

00:35:31.720 William Montgomery, Canadian secret policeman.

00:35:35.380 That is a great story, David.

00:35:37.600 It's wonderful.

00:35:38.520 You said that there are similarities to current day affairs.

00:35:44.060 And, you know, this happening for ethnic and religious minority groups

00:35:50.420 isn't new to Canada.

00:35:52.920 It's not new for Muslim Canadians now,

00:35:55.940 where you've got people on different sides and in different views.

00:36:01.060 And it wasn't different for the Irish. 0.97

00:36:03.220 But it didn't end back in the 1860s for the Irish.

00:36:06.480 I remember being at events where T-shirts were sold for here in Toronto.

00:36:15.140 There were a group of executives, including a Canadian,

00:36:18.300 arrested in the United States in the 1990s for trying to buy arms.

00:36:24.220 I think it was in Arizona.

00:36:26.620 And they were arrested.

00:36:30.480 They were tried.

00:36:32.920 But suddenly in pubs in Toronto, you've got T-shirts being sold.

00:36:37.020 Free the Tucson 6 or whatever.

00:36:38.960 I forget what they had dubbed them.

00:36:41.180 Spoke to one of the lawyers, the Canadian lawyers who prosecuted him,

00:36:46.560 son of Irish immigrants.

00:36:47.440 So it was happening then.

00:36:51.820 It didn't stop in the 1860s that both sides of the Irish community

00:36:56.720 were on different sides of this battle for Irish independence back home.

00:37:02.820 It's fascinating.

00:37:03.540 I agree.

00:37:04.260 It's fascinating.

00:37:05.020 And I actually refer to that case in the penultimate chapter of my book

00:37:09.080 to indicate exactly what you're saying,

00:37:13.740 that this doesn't cease in the 1860s.

00:37:16.080 And I had a very interesting interview with a CSIS agent

00:37:20.280 who asked me not to use his name, so I didn't do that.

00:37:26.020 But he was telling me about the techniques they were using

00:37:29.600 to track the IRA supporters.

00:37:33.780 He was telling me about the pubs in which they would take fugitives,

00:37:41.740 basically, IRA terrorists on the run.

00:37:47.440 They would do that.

00:37:50.360 Also, money raising, not just for the Tucson 6 or whatever it was.

00:37:56.160 I don't remember the exact phrase for that.

00:37:59.120 They were raising money for the IRA.

00:38:02.500 They were also sending detonators to the IRA.

00:38:06.720 And the CSIS agent was telling me that there was a place east of Toronto

00:38:14.560 where it had connections with northern Ontario mining activities.

00:38:22.580 And they would get detonators that had been used in the mines

00:38:27.780 and were sending them for bombs to be made in Ireland.

00:38:34.060 And CSIS got hold of this and intercepted the detonators

00:38:38.320 and neutralized them and then put them back in the package

00:38:40.860 and sent them on, which is a very interesting story.

00:38:44.800 At the same time, talk about freedom of information requests.

00:38:49.160 That's been in the news recently, and so it should be.

00:38:54.000 I mean, I thought it would be very interesting to learn more about this

00:38:57.820 and to see what kind of intelligence operations were going on

00:39:01.720 in the 1960s, well, basically 70s and 80s and 90s,

00:39:06.360 against not only IRA supporters, but also Ulster loyalist supporters.

00:39:12.920 I mean, there were the Ulster Defence Association

00:39:15.400 and Ulster Volunteer Force organizations here in Toronto as well.

00:39:19.000 And they were doing the same kind of thing.

00:39:20.660 You know, they were sending arms and money to the loyalists back in Ireland.

00:39:27.640 So I thought it would be very interesting to learn more about this

00:39:30.540 and see what kind of intelligence operations were being used

00:39:33.560 beyond and over and above the information I received from the CSIS agent.

00:39:40.000 And I'm still waiting.

00:39:40.900 I'm still waiting.

00:39:42.740 And every few months, I get a very nice letter telling me that,

00:39:47.140 you know, your request is still being considered.

00:39:50.180 Please be patient.

00:39:52.800 I'm not shocked at all because I've been fighting the access

00:39:55.900 to information system for more than a decade,

00:39:57.900 and it hasn't improved regardless of who's in power.

00:40:02.580 You mentioned the efforts.

00:40:05.640 When I was trying to find the name of that group because it happened pre-internet days,

00:40:12.860 I found all kinds of headlines, including 1982 in the New York Times,

00:40:17.120 where, you know, to relate it back to that battle we started talking about,

00:40:22.800 it was people trying to go across from Canada into Buffalo in order to buy arms for the IRA

00:40:30.500 and send back, that Buffalo connection very much still there.

00:40:35.840 So it's fascinating history and fascinating part of how this country came to be.

00:40:43.260 It is, and also it's part of a much longer process than I initially realized when I began the research.

00:40:51.320 Actually, you can take it right back to 1775,

00:40:56.100 just before the Declaration of Independence,

00:40:59.860 when an Irish-American general attacks Quebec City

00:41:07.680 and is immediately regarded as a hero by the Irish communities in the States,

00:41:13.820 well, then still the 13 colonies.

00:41:17.060 And he would have, his name was Richard Montgomery,

00:41:20.460 and he would have, you know,

00:41:21.640 the Fenian cells would later name themselves the Montgomery cells.

00:41:25.900 War of 1812, the same thing.

00:41:27.840 You know, Irish revolutionaries from the 1798 rising

00:41:32.040 joined with the Americans to get revenge on the British Empire.

00:41:36.920 1848, during the revolutions in Europe,

00:41:40.060 there was another attempt to launch an attack in Canada

00:41:45.060 to aid and abet a rising in Ireland.

00:41:48.400 1860s, as we know,

00:41:49.760 but you can take it up also to the period of the Irish Revolution

00:41:54.160 between, well, the Easter Rising of 1916

00:41:57.600 and the Irish Revolution of 1919 to 21.

00:42:01.860 Secret police, there are really good secret police reports

00:42:05.100 that you can get on the monitoring of Irish revolutionary movements in Montreal.

00:42:11.120 And Montreal was a Fenian center in the 1860s,

00:42:14.440 and it was an Irish revolutionary center in the 1920s.

00:42:19.440 Only now, the guns were being brought across the border

00:42:24.160 by car rather than by horse.

00:42:27.600 But the same places, the same patterns,

00:42:30.560 and in one case, the same person.

00:42:33.360 A Fenian I tracked down from the 1860s,

00:42:36.260 who was still gun running in 1920.

00:42:39.140 Oh, it's an amazing story.

00:42:43.500 And thanks for telling it, David.

00:42:45.060 Thank you very much for the book and for your time today.

00:42:49.260 My pleasure. Thank you.

00:42:50.500 Pick up David's book.

00:42:52.120 Find it where you can.

00:42:53.480 Full Comment is a post-media podcast.

00:42:55.520 My name is Brian Lilly, your host.

00:42:57.080 This episode was produced by Andre Pru

00:42:59.100 with theme music by Bryce Hall.

00:43:01.280 Kevin Libin is the executive producer.

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Full Comment - July 03, 2023

Spies, sabotage, secret police and the time the Irish invaded Canada

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