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FENIANISM-PAST AND PRESENT.

"Ist mein Gewissen gegen diesen Staat
Gebunden? Hab' ich Pflichten gegen England ?”

FEN

ENIANISM was bred in the camps of the American civil war, if not actually born upon its battle-fields. Englishmen are accustomed to talk in a loose way about the Irish-American element in the Irish question, but as a rule all that the English public knows of Irish-Americans will be found to be composed of such deductions and conclusions as the average English editor draws from selected excerpts from the journals of Mr. Patrick Ford and Mr. O'Donovan Rossa, and from the ignoble bluster or more ignoble crime of a handful of anti-social desperadoes. It is probable that the most of the trouble which now confessedly arises from the so-called Dynamite Section is largely due to the fact that English public opinion, misled in many cases by reckless English politicians, has steadily refused to recognize any Irish-American feeling, except that which may be presented in the American correspondence of the Times, and the anti-Parnellite denunciations of Sir William Harcourt. There is a great deal of truth in the recent reproach of the New York Herald, that it is the manner in which England has paid exclusive attention to "men whose names are gist for our comic paragraphers," which has given to them a species of importance and a growing ascendancy over a revengeful mass of expatriated Irish, victims, or the heirs of victims of eviction, whom every remorseless clearance of the Irish hillsides at once recruits and exasperates by the same operation. If to-day both English and Irish homes in England are menaced by the explosion of hundredweights of dynamite and carboys of nitroglycerine, it is instructive to remember how a couple of years ago the receipt of a rusty pistol stuffed with burnt paper was converted by the rhetorical panic of a prominent minister into the most desirable advertisement for the obscure and uninfluential group-if, indeed,

If a

they even amounted to a group of would-be terrorists. horrible and felonious aspect of the Irish question is now uppermost, if deeds deserving of the reprobation of mankind are contemplated in any quarter, it is on that account all the more urgent to remember that it has been the deliberate policy of too large a portion of English political society to see in Irish patriotism and Irish conspiracy nothing but the inspiration and the preparation of atrocity and outrage; and a glance at the early days of Fenianism, some adequate reflection upon the national forces to which Fenianism has appealed, will be all the more useful for Englishmen who are anxious to apply the methods of practical politicians to the settlement of the eternal Irish question.

THE IRISH AND THE AMERICAN CIVIL War.

There is not a more glorious page in the history of any people than that which records the valour and the services of the Irish soldiers of the American Union. Splendid as is the military story of my countrymen in the armies of England and in the Irish Brigades of the Continent; not even in that Peninsular War, in which the flower as well as the mass of the battalions which scattered the marshals of Napoleon, consisted of the Gaels of Erin; not even on the hundred battle-fields of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, watered by the blood of the companions and successors of Sarsfield and Mountcashel; neither at Vimiera nor at Vittoria, neither at Marsaglia and Almansa, nor at Laufeldt and Fontenoy, did the courage of the race exhibit itself more brilliantly, or with more important results, than in the crisis of the American conflict, at Fair Oak and Fredericksburg, at Richmond and Antietam.

The eve of the civil war found the exiles still plunged in the brooding desperation which had taken the place of the enchanting visions of O'Connell's prime; still fettered to the sordid lot which awaited the evicted Irish farmer on the foreign shore to which he had escaped from famine and the workhouse. With the woe of the great expatriation writ large in the scantiness of their resources and the hardship of their life, the Irish masses in the United States appeared to be inextricably absorbed in the difficult task of winning their daily bread in the rudest and roughest of all possible ways. The politico-economic systematizers who had banished them had not reckoned what might become of a whole agricultural population cast, without capital or instruction, upon a strange land, under unknown social conditions. They were like Issachar who stooped between two burthens. Their poverty, the product of the rack-rent and the famine, and their ignorance, the product of a secular proscription of education, weighed them down. The Know-Nothings had essayed to array against them the "native Americanism" of a couple

of generations. The First Families of Manhattan only knew by a sort of grotesque repute the existence of a strong-backed multitude, who built docks and railroads, and expressed themselves in a dialect of English which scarcely constituted an improvement on the nerve and music of the Celtic tongue. There were, indeed, many conspicuous exceptions to the humiliation of the banished Irish. The upward impulse was asserting itself in spite of natural and artificial drawbacks. But the general aspect was too depressing to be relieved even by the importance of the Irish Vote to the ward-politicians and managers of the Republican or the Democratic party machine.

The Secessionist shot that struck down the Federal flag on the ramparts of Fort Sumter was the signal for many sublime and tragic changes. It operated the transfiguration of the Irish-American nation. Generally speaking, the exiles went with their States, on Home Rule principles, as it were. A gallant band of Irish residents in the South went with General Patrick Cleburne. The vast majority, immigrants and dwellers in the cities of the North, went with General Thomas Francis Meagher, the "Meagher of the Sword" of enthusiastic speech-making assemblies in Dublin twenty years before, and now to be the Meagher of the Sword in very grim and glorious earnest, in the most desperate days of the awful conflict which was commencing. When once the impetus was given, the Irish rush was tremendous and incalculable. The native American and the circumspect Dutchman were astounded by it. The Faugh-a-ballaghs stretched their strong arms in hundreds of thousands to rear up and bear onwards the Stripes and Stars. More Irishmen than died in the service of France during the century between the violation of the Treaty of Limerick and the fall of the French monarchy, stood at one moment shoulder to shoulder in defence of the American Union. In the crowning year of the war, 190,000 Irish recruits still pressed forward to fill the gaps caused by the genius of Robert Lee and the iron courage of Stonewall Jackson. After the terrible fight of Fredericksburg, the correspondent of the London Times wrote home to his journal how

"To the Irish division, commanded by General Meagher, was principally committed the desperate task of bursting out of Fredericksburg, and forming under the withering fire of the Confederate batteries to attack Maire's height immediately in their front, and never at Fontenoy, at Albuera, or at Waterloo was more undaunted courage displayed by the sons of Erin than during the six frantic dashes which they directed against their foes."

If it had been an objection to some Irishmen that they obtained their American citizenship ou terms arranged by wire-pulling politicians, the reproach was washed out on such battle-fields as these :

"After witnessing the gallantry and devotion exhibited by Meagher's troops," continues the same correspondent, viewing the hillsides for acres

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strewn with their corpses as thick as autumnal leaves, the spectator can remember nothing but their desperate courage, and regret that it was not exhibited in a better cause. That any mortal men could have carried the position before which they were wantonly sacrificed, defended as it was, seems to me idle to conceive. But the bodies which lie in dense masses within forty yards of the muzzles of Colonel Walton's guns, are the best evidence what manner of men were they who pressed on to death with the dauntlessness of a race which has gained glory on a thousand battle-fields and never more richly deserved it than at the foot of Maire's heights the thirteenth day of December, 1862."

Though the individual soldiers of Irish brigades might be sacrificed in hecatombs to their own superlative daring, and to the experimental science of so many Federal generals, the substantial formation of the Irish regiments, their corporate entity, was kept intact by new hosts of headlong heroes of the same impetuous nationality, and the pen of a German staff-officer of the Confederate army can relate how at Richmond the gallant columns of Hill, and Anderson, and Pickett, with the flower of the North Carolina and Virginia regiments, went down in precipitate ruin before the ranks where the Green Banner flashed above the battle-smoke beside the Stripes and Stars.

"The struggle was man to man, eye to eye, bayonet to bayonet. The hostile Meagher's Brigade, composed chiefly of Irishmen, offered heroic resistance. After a fierce struggle our people gave way, and at length all orders and encouragements were vain; they were falling back in the greatest confusion. Infuriated, foaming at the mouth, bare-headed, sabre in hand, at this critical moment General Cobb appeared upon the field, at the head of his legion, and with the Nineteenth North Carolina and the Fourteenth Virginia Regiments. At once these troops renewed the attack; but all their devotion and self-sacrifice were in vain. The Irish held their position with a determination and ferocity that called forth the admiration of our officers. Broken to pieces and disorganized, the remnants of Cobb's fine legion came rolling back from the charge."

Such was the story of Irish valour on the side of the North, while the merit of those Irishmen who had cast in their fortunes with the lost cause may be noticed in the words of General Beauregard himself:

"Relative to the soldierly qualities of the Irish who took part in the late war," said that distinguished Confederate commander, "I beg to state that they displayed the sturdy and manly courage of the English, combined with the impetuous and buoyant character of the French. They were found to be always the worthy companions of the gallant Confederate soldiers. with whom they fought side by side during over four years of internecine struggle."

THE IRISH BACKWOODS SONG.

These are proud testimonies to the position which the Irish exiles had achieved for themselves in the service of their adopted country, and the hundreds of thousands of Irish soldiers were proud to have deserved them. But there was another sentiment besides fidelity to the flag of North or South animating the breasts of that vast host

of armed and disciplined Celts who, as they counted with exultation their innumerable files, were tempted to boast, like the Christian knights on the eve of the fatal battle of Nikopolis, that "though the heaven were to fall, they could uphold it on their lances." This sentiment may be illustrated by a well-known story of the war. While two hostile armies of Federals and Confederates lay facing one another on the opposite banks of the Rappahannock, the soldiers on both sides not on duty were accustomed to wile away the evening in the camps by jest and song; and one evening there suddenly arose on the tranquil air the manly melody of a favourite chant of the American-Irish, the composition of Mr. T. D. Sullivan, now Member of Parliament for the County of Westmeath. Beginning at one wing of the Federal army, it rolled in thunderous music along the tents and through the crowded lines. It swept in storm across the separating river. It was taken up in thinner volume but with no lesser emotion by Confederate company after company. Both banks of the stream were quickly swarming with a martial multitude, divided by discordant American sympathies, but one and indissoluble in the common devotion which rang forth in the Irish Backwoods Song:

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THE PRECURSORS OF FENIANISM.

The question was "How far they'd won their way?" Though, as it was easy to perceive, the spirit and disposition of the Irish exiles were favourable in the highest degree to the reception of Irish Nationalist projects, it required a plan, a purpose, and at least a prospect of action, in order to convert that mass of anti-Englishdisaffection into a concrete danger to the existing relations between

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