Fenianism in North America

Abstract

That North America should by the 1860s be a centre of Irish discontent can hardly have come as a surprise to the British government. As early as the mid-1850s the British Minister in Washington had found it necessary to report to London on the nefarious activities of various Irish groups in cities as far apart as Boston, New York, Chicago and Cincinnati.¹ The treasonable sentiments of the Irish emigrants to America were bound up not only with the often harsh experiences of the circumstances which caused them to flee Ireland in the first place, but also with the less-than-ideal situations in which they found themselves in the great American republic.