Fenians fancied a Manitoba foothold

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/08/2022 (1522 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sometimes it’s the local angle that turns a book into a bit of a revelation.

Canadian Spy Story, University of Toronto historian David A. Wilson’s account of the 19th-century Fenian invasions of Canada, and how Canadian spies helped thwart those attacks, is a case in point.

The Fenians were a late-1850s Irish-American movement dedicated to freeing Ireland of British rule. The movement ultimately split into two camps — one faction favoured an uprising in Ireland, while the other was intent on hurting Great Britain by seizing its Canadian colonies.

It’s this latter group that’s the focus of Wilson’s recounting of how Canadian spies infiltrated the Fenians, and thereby sabotaged their efforts to conquer Canada via surprise cross-border attacks from the United States.

The Fenians launched several invasions between 1866 and 1870, all inevitably abortive, in what are today Quebec, southwestern Ontario and New Brunswick. All are well documented and generally credited with being the external threat that spurred the colonies to Confederation in 1867.

But it’s Fenian aspirations regarding Manitoba that’s the surprise in Wilson’s narrative.

Manitoba became a province after what’s known as the Red River Resistance, led by Louis Riel. When the newly created Canadian government bought what was then Rupert’s Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1869, Ottawa sent land surveyors to re-parcel the land and an English-speaking governor to rule Manitoba as a territory.

The occupying Métis wanted their hereditary land entitlements guaranteed, and Manitoba to enter Confederation as a province. To that end, they set up their own provisional government and barred both the governor’s entry to Manitoba and the surveyors’ plotting of the land. Manitoba entered Confederation in 1870 as a province.

In Wilson’s telling, even before the Red River Resistance the Fenians had their eye on Manitoba. “Some Fenians had identified the region as the weakest point in Britain’s North American empire,” he writes. “The seizure of the territory would not only humiliate the Hudson’s Bay Company but also insert Irish republicans into the heart of North America.”

Wilson’s book also reveals the far lesser-known story of how the Fenians tried to forge a military alliance with the Métis to keep Manitoba out of the orbit of Great Britain and Canada, and make our province part of the U.S.

One of Riel’s chief lieutenants, and treasurer of the Métis provisional government, Irish-born William Bernard O’Donoghue, had Fenian ties, and lobbied hard for the Red River settlement to join the U.S. But Riel rebuffed him, and steadfastly and successfully held out for Manitoba to be part of Canada.

O’Donoghue subsequently joined a Fenian group in Minnesota, participating in a failed attack on Manitoba in 1871.

Wilson’s academic penchant for detail is admirable, but his sometimes so-much-minutiae text may be a struggle for the average-Joe reader. On the other hand, his account is redeemed by a crisp and lucid style.

What’s also engaging and timely — and a bit of an outlier here, albeit a welcome one — is the book’s final chapter. In it, Wilson embarks on a reflective discussion of state security, espionage and the suspension of civil liberties, in times of grave national threat — clearly authored with recent anti-vax, so-called “freedom” protests and the rise of populist extremism in mind.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.