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The word Fenian (/ ˈ f iː n i ə n /) served as an umbrella term for the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and their affiliate in the United States, the Fenian Brotherhood. They were secret political organisations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries dedicated to the establishment of an independent Irish Republic .
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.
The leader of the Fenian Brotherhood, the scholarly John O'Mahony (who himself served as an officer in the Union Army), thought the Irish veterans should be deployed to Ireland post-haste for a rebellion there, funded by the Irish in America. However, Roberts quickly became the leader of a faction of Fenians with an alternative plan.
Christy Campbell, Fenian Fire: The British Government Plot to Assassinate Queen Victoria, HarperCollins, London, 2002, ISBN 0-00-710483-9; Marta Ramón, A Provisional Dictator: James Stephens and the Fenian Movement, University College Dublin Press (2007), ISBN 978-1-904558-64-4; Dennis Gwynn, Young Ireland and 1848, Cork University Press 1949
Fenian officers were left with little choice but to abandon their position and find safe positions until they could escape under cover of the night. Once the finally Canadian counter-attack happened, and the demoralized Fenian soldiers fled instead of fighting. They were throwing away ammunition, food, water all to lighten their load to escape.
The British and Canadian troops advanced out of the woods by the river, firing as they moved. Said one observer, "It was not an intermittent fire, but one continuous fusillade". [8] Starr told his own men to fire for 10 minutes. They held the advance for several minutes until Canadian forces moved to flank the Fenian position.
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.