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The Fenian raids were a series of incursions carried out by the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish republican organization based in the United States, on military fortifications, customs posts and other targets in Canada (then part of British North America) in 1866, and again from 1870 to 1871.
During the 1866 Fenian raid of the Province of Canada, the Battle of Fort Erie was a surrounding and forcing of the Fenian armies surrender following a skirmish near Fort Erie and the farther-away Battle of Ridgeway on June 2.
The Battle of Ridgeway (sometimes the Battle of Lime Ridge or Limestone Ridge [nb 1]) was fought in the vicinity of the town of Fort Erie across the Niagara River from Buffalo, New York, near the village of Ridgeway, Canada West, currently Ontario, Canada, on June 2, 1866, between Canadian troops and an irregular army of Irish-American invaders, the Fenians.
In December 1866, the Fenian Brotherhood sent both O'Meagher Condon and Thomas J. Kelly to Ireland with the intention that they, alongside many other Irish-American veterans of the Civil War, would lead a rebellion against the British. The Rising suffered from poor planning, and logistical difficulties (most of the Fenians coming from the ...
The Fenian Chief: a Biography of James Stephens. Coral Gables, 1969. Senior, Hereward (1991). The Last Invasion of Canada: The Fenian Raids, 1866–1870. Dundurn. ISBN 978-1-77070-064-2. Steward, Patrick, and Bryan P. McGovern. The Fenians: Irish Rebellion in the North Atlantic World, 1858-1876. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013.
On 1 June 1866, he led a group of six hundred men across the Niagara River and occupied Fort Erie. The following day, north of Ridgeway, Canada West , O'Neill's group encountered a detached column of Canadian volunteers, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred Booker (mainly formed of the Queen's Own Rifles of Toronto and the 13th Battalion of ...
In 1866, he commanded the ill-fated Fenian invasion of Canada, after which he was arrested for breaking neutrality laws between the United States and Britain, but was soon released. He was reinstated with his former rank of major later that year, and retired from the regular army in May 1870 as a brigadier general.
Once there, Thomas Kelly (who ousted James Stephens as head of the Irish Republican Brotherhood) sent him to England to purchase arms, but funding was hampered by Fenian divisions in the U.S. He returned to New York in 1866, and was back in Ireland at the start of 1867 for the Fenian rising (in charge of Waterford), which was a failure. [3]