The Fenian Brotherhood
Above : Photo Of John O’Mahony
The idea of engineering an Irish evolution by means of American help was too promising to be easily abandoned.In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Ireland had oked to Spain. In the eighteenth she turned to France. Now she held out her supplicating hands to America, but with a surer hope, for those whose aid she sought were not strangers, but her own exiled sons.
The actual originator of ” The Irish Republican Brotherhood,” founded in New York in 1858, was John O’Mahony, who, like Stephens, had joined in the ‘48 rising, and had been obliged, in consequence, to fly from Ireland. He was the first ” Head Centre ” or chief. A translation which he had once made of Geoffrey Keating’s History had interested him in the Fianna, the militia of ancient Ireland, and he adopted as a title for the new society that of the ” Fenian Brotherhood,” by which it is still generally known and remembered.
The Fenian organisation resembled greatly that of the United Irishmen. The members in each district formed a ” Circle,” presided over by a ” Centre.” Unlike the earlier society, this was from the first a secret oath-bound association, of which the avowed objective was to achieve, by force of arms, the complete political independence of Ireland. It differed, too, in pushing its propaganda chiefly amongst the lower and lower-middle classes.
Above: Portrait of James Stephens (1887)
The task of establishing the Brotherhood in Ireland was confided to James Stephens. He found plenty of material ready to hand. He established numbers of Circles, and in the towns especially, the movement spread rapidly. He was ably assisted by O’Donovan Rossa, John O’Leary, Charles Kickham, Thomas Clarke laiby, and many others ; most of them young and inexperienced men, but all filled with the spirit of the purest patriotism, and ready to sacrifice all their possessions, and even their very lives, for what they believed to be the good of Ireland.
Across the Atlantic, too, the Fenians enlisted, especially after i860, 8fiG n.Umbers of recruits. When the American Civil War broke out in it was said that in some of the Irish regiments practically every man was a sworn member of the Brotherhood. There were Fenians in the army, the navy, the civil service,the of the jailers and warders of the prisons had taken the oaths.
as this more than anything else which disconcerted the British Government and the English people. Fenianism was a hidden force a secret mine; no one could tell how far it had extended its ramifications.