Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
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.
The Fenian Brotherhood, especially a faction of it under William R. Roberts, mobilised up to 1,000 Irish veterans of the American Civil War to launch raids on British army forts, customs posts and other targets in Canada in order to bring pressure on Britain to withdraw from Ireland in 1866 and 1871.
Dunnville heroes: the W.T. Robb and the Dunnville Naval Brigade in the 1866 Fenian invasion. Dunnville, ON: Dunnville District Heritage Association. ISBN 978-0-9688173-1-5. OCLC 52197172. Vronsky, Peter Ridgeway: The American Fenian Invasion and the 1866 Battle That Made Canada., Toronto: Penguin Canada-Allen Lane, 2011.
Roberts joined the newly emerging Fenian Brotherhood in 1863, an organisation made up of the Irish diaspora in America that was dedicated to establishing an independent Irish Republic. The Fenian Brotherhood operated as the American support wing of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret society controlling the movement. Roberts, whose ...
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 threat prompted calls for Canadian confederation. [citation needed] Confederation had been in the works for years but was only implemented in 1867, the year following the first raids. In 1868, a Fenian sympathiser assassinated Irish-Canadian politician Thomas D'Arcy McGee in Ottawa, allegedly in response to his condemnation of the raids.
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 ...