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SPRING 2010 |
1866 RIDGEWAY: P eter Vronsky On June 1, 1866, a force of one thousand Fenian raiders invaded Canada across the Niagara River from Buffalo. The Fenians were combat-hardened Irish American veterans recently demobilized from the Civil War, many still carrying their personal battlefield tested weapons. Their objective was to seize and hold hostage Canadian territory in order to precipitate a military and political crisis in British rule over Ireland. The Canadian volunteers who were hastily called upon to fight the Fenian incursion were weekend soldiers–store clerks, farmers and college students, mostly boys, parade-ground drilled who had never seen combat nor had their homes invaded in a generation since the War of 1812. The next day at Lime Ridge near the village of Ridgeway, the two sides collided. When the Battle of Ridgeway was over, nine volunteers had been killed including three students from the University of Toronto volunteer rifle company, while the Fenians celebrated the first Irish victory against the forces of the British Empire since the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745. The Battle of Ridgeway, the last battle fought in Ontario, took place half-way between the fall of the US Confederacy in 1865 and the rise of the Confederation of Canada in 1867. A forgotten period in Canadian history, often subsumed by the story of the confederation debates of the wise founding Fathers, the Fenian terror in Canada and its climax at Ridgeway loomed large in a crisis politics of nation-making at the time. It gave birth to Canada’s first intelligence agencies, to its early military traditions and it tested its most cherished judicial limits and freedoms on the eve of its own founding as a nation. In 1858 one of the earliest modern transnational terrorist organizations–the Irish Republican Brotherhood and its US-based counterpart–the Fenian Brotherhood, were founded. Their objective was to expel by force British rule from Ireland. Their call reached by telegraph, steamship and railway mail and through popular press and print an enormous Irish Diaspora scattered throughout the English speaking world. Money, subscriptions, arms and volunteers were raised in hundreds of Irish communities. In the United States such activity was not illegal and was even encouraged by some US politicians trolling for the Irish vote. In Canada such activities were treasonous. As secret Fenian cells began be established in Canada and border tensions with the USA began to rise with the Civil War, the colony began to seek new ways to defend itself without Britain’s help. In the provinces of Canada new security defense policy was adopted which included new provisions for border defense, militia troops, intelligence gathering and internal security and policing measures. At a time when British public opinion frowned on espionage of any kind, Attorney General and Minister of Militia for the province, John A. Macdonald, Canada’s future first Prime Minister, had an array of colonial, provincial and municipal officials running networks of spies, informants and infiltrators on both sides of the US-Canadian border. Throughout the province men of military age were provisioned with infantry weapons and drilled to respond to sudden invasion–at first from the United States army, later from the Fenians. At the core of some of these new measures was a deeper fear of an internal danger. There was a growing unease about the former ‘famine’ Irish Catholics and their children now massing into the factories of newly industrializing cities of Canada. Might these disgruntled ‘dangerous classes’ join with the Fenian invaders and rise up in a St. Bartholomew’s Night massacre of the provinces’ Protestant establishment? In the wake of Ridgeway, John A. Macdonald determined to stamp out any vestiges of further subversion, suspended Habeas Corpus and put Fenian prisoners captured at Ridgeway to state trials. This forgotten security crisis on the eve of Canada’s confederation–and the just as forgotten Battle of Ridgeway–are touchstones to a missing part of our national founding myth. |
