Ireland after the Famine was a different place. The appalling tragedy resulted in a mass depopulation, as around two million people either died from disease, hunger, or emigrated. The Repeal of the Union campaign, which was paralysed by O’Connell’s death in 1847, was terminated by the Famine. Young Ireland was broken and scattered across the world.Footnote ³ The Famine shone a chilling light onto the injustices of the tenure system in Ireland, bringing land to the political fore as an issue that tested the legitimacy of parliamentary governance.Footnote ⁴ In 1849, the relaunched Nation newspaper wearily captured the contemporaneous political mindset, which had little bandwidth for reimagining the shape of governance in Ireland. Depicting Ireland as ‘a sick and disabled man’, the Nation called for achieving ‘preliminary successes’ before the ‘last and most precious right’ – political independence – was won.Footnote ⁵ Given the failure of the 1848 rebellion, the clear lack of appetite for insurrection within the Irish countryside, and the destruction of the Repeal platform, Charles Gavan Duffy, the author of the editorial, believed that new thinking was necessary to stabilise Ireland.

Political innovations did indeed follow the Famine. Duffy was instrumental in founding the Tenant League in 1850, which protested the strengthening of landlord rights enshrined in the Encumbered Estates Act of the previous year. While the League quickly faded away, its establishment marked a watershed in Irish politics: reforms to materially aid farmers and questions over landed rights became dominant aspects within political culture in the decades that followed. Duffy was adamant in later writings that it was correct for the ‘48-generation to move away from the O’Connellite-Young Irelander prism of national politics that centred on visions of Irish governance and agitate instead for more piecemeal reform. Writing in 1886 on the origins of the Tenant League, he lamented that ‘in politics you have to choose not what you would prefer but what you can accomplish’.Footnote ⁶ Yet Duffy was careful at the time not to lose sight of the fundamental reason why such grievances arose in the first place. ‘Independence is no longer the first achievement’, he recorded in the Nation in 1849, ‘but the end result of many previous victories’.Footnote ⁷

While the Tenant League was a decidedly non-revolutionary body, its ethos was intensely radical. Strengthening the legal rights of tenants inevitably implied the weakening of the landlords’ absolute grip over land ownership. Duffy, traditionally seen as a conservative figure within the Young Ireland milieu, may have been influenced in his shift to agrarianism by the writings of James Fintan Lalor, who died in 1849.Footnote ⁸ Duffy and Lalor met in prison in 1848, with the two men striking a friendship based on a shared loathing of John Mitchel.Footnote ⁹ But while Lalor advocated the fusion of political independence and the destruction of landlordism, Duffy separated the two issues, relegating the political immediacy of Ireland’s constitutional status in favour of addressing agrarian grievances.Footnote ¹⁰ This philosophy, which was coupled with Duffy’s advocacy of parliamentary politics (the Tenant League programme was taken up by the short-lived and clerically supported Independent Irish Party at Westminster), alienated Lalorite radicals.Footnote ¹¹

While Duffy was pursuing an agrarian agenda from the early 1850s, his erstwhile political opponents within Young Ireland presented an alternative programme. What remained of the Irish Confederacy following the state trials of 1848 gathered in a new organisation called the Irish Democratic Association.Footnote ¹² The Association attracted the patronage of the Chartist and former Repeal MP, Feargus O’Connor, and held a number of public meetings throughout 1850 and 1851. While the organisation’s emphasis remained national independence, its mission statement mimicked some of the values of Chartism and the wider European turn to socialism. Richard Pigott, the noted Irish journalist and later forger of the Parnell letters, began his career with the Association’s newspaper, the Irishman: he recorded later that the movement’s aims were ‘entirely socialistic and revolutionary’, with a focus on the creation of a peasant proprietary system.Footnote ¹³ But the Irish Democratic Association was not confined to a radical vision of rural Ireland: its first programme also appealed to the ‘rights of labour’, the ‘working class’, and the ‘artizan’. The desire of the Association was to ‘train the democracy of this country into full and complete knowledge of their power’. Such a Chartist-esque mission had become imperative because ‘the rights and interests of the people have been totally neglected by our representatives’.Footnote ¹⁴ While the Irish Reform Act of 1850 lowered the property-value threshold for voters, thereby tripling the number of rural voters, this was far from enfranchising the Irish ‘democracy’. Nevertheless, the Irish Democratic Association petered out by the end of the year.

The Tenant League, Independent Irish Party, and the Irish Democratic Association were all short-lived ventures, but taken together offer a snapshot into the fluidity of the political landscape in Ireland in the immediate aftermath of the Famine. Despite the collapse of these organisations, the critical issues with which they grappled – the nature of land reform, the tug of war between non-sectarian and clerical politics, and the tension between parliamentary and popular sovereignty – animated Irish thought over the subsequent decades. Radical new ideas of agrarianism, democratic legitimacy, and, most subversively, an underground Irish state flourished in the wake of the Famine, challenging the efficacy of the existing structures of parliamentary government. The most notable manifestation of this radicalism was the formation of a secret society, which included former Young Irelanders, boldly proclaiming the virtues of an Irish Republic achieved through revolutionary means.

Pikes, Not Pamphlets: Interpreting Fenian Political Thought

The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) was founded by James Stephens in Dublin on St Patrick’s Day, 1858. The IRB recruited heavily from small, post-Famine separatist networks, such as the Phoenix National and Literary Society in Co. Cork, and quickly built up a presence throughout the country. The label ‘IRB’ was not initially in common parlance; early members referred to ‘the brotherhood’, ‘our body’, or ‘the organisation’.Footnote ¹⁵ Almost simultaneously, the Fenian Brotherhood was established in the United States by two Irish exiles, John O’Mahony and Michael Doheny. Linking Stephens, O’Mahony, and Doheny was a connection to rebellion in Ireland, as all of them took part in the uprising of 1848. That shattering defeat left an indelible mark on the three men. The grim but essential lesson was that for a rebellion to become the stepping stone towards national revolution, organisation, discipline, and, above all, secrecy, were necessary.

Stephens and O’Mahony relocated to Paris in the aftermath of the Ballingarry debacle, and there they observed the workings of various revolutionary societies, such as the followers of Blanquism.Footnote ¹⁶ The Parisian interlude may have been crucial in pushing the two Irishmen to reflect on the problems that beset the Irish revolutionary moment of 1848, chiefly the relative conservatism of Young Ireland in the absence of Mitchel and Lalor (William Smith O’Brien apparently pleaded with his peasant army not to violate the sanctity of private property at the height of the rebellion),Footnote ¹⁷ and the folly of open insurrection. A subversive interpretation of popular sovereignty that manifested itself in separatism, delivered through conspiracy and clandestine organisation, became the raison d’être of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

While the IRB was not the first Irish separatist group intent on winning political independence through revolutionary means, it was the first that articulated that goal from its inception. Both its revolutionary predecessors, the United Irish and Young Ireland movements, embarked on rebellion as a last resort: they had been open societies, but were radicalised through external events (the French Revolution and the Irish Famine respectively) and government suppression. In opting for a conspiratorial approach with violent insurrection at its heart from the off, the IRB represented a genuinely new departure. It adopted a cell-like structure, with the ideal of 800 active members organised into ‘circles’, each reporting to an officer. The intention was that individual members should only know the men in their own circle, lessening the disruption of spies and informers.Footnote ¹⁸ Stephens rather grandly stood at the top of the organisation as the ‘Provisional Dictator’ or ‘Head Centre’, the despotic president of the underground Irish Republic.Footnote ¹⁹

The IRB’s relationship with the Fenian Brotherhood and its successor organisation, Clan na Gael (established in 1867), was testy. The Fenian Brotherhood and the Clan were reminders of the mass migration that had radically altered Ireland since the Famine. Given that more than three million Irish people lived outside Ireland by the end of the nineteenth century, transnational and transatlantic exchanges became an increasingly visible dynamic within political culture.Footnote ²⁰ Fenianism was the most powerful political manifestation of the mass migration of the Famine era, providing the diaspora with a direct connection to Irish agitation and fraternal association within their new home.Footnote ²¹ The experience of exile also radicalised conceptions of sovereignty, democracy, and resistance, as evident within aspects of the Irish-American press.Footnote ²²

The Brotherhood in the US was, in theory, the junior partner to the IRB, an auxiliary network to support the revolution in Ireland. They did not, however, accept a passive role: the American contribution to Irish revolutionary separatism was vast in terms of resources, propaganda, and (significantly) activists, a number of whom were battle-hardened from the Civil War in the US during the 1860s.Footnote ²³ At times, the initiative for revolutionary action came directly from the US. During the 1880s, two separate factions from the American-based Fenians – the United Irishmen, fronted by the mercurial Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, and Clan na Gael – launched deadly dynamite attacks in Britain, independently from the IRB.Footnote ²⁴

While the IRB was formally a separate entity from its US-based sister organisation, the terms ‘Fenian’ and ‘Fenianism’ quickly became synonymous with the Irish secret society. The Fenian label was originally coined by O’Mahony, a noted Gaelic scholar, as a homage to the legendary ancient warriors, the Fianna. It was not an unproblematic name for the movement. John Boyle O’Reilly, a member of the IRB who later became the editor of the Boston Pilot, a major American Catholic newspaper, believed that the Fenian brand was harmful to the cause. ‘Had we been called Republicans or United Irishmen or aught else’, he complained to John Devoy in 1871, ‘we would have retained respectability – but that meanly-sounding word, with its associations of defeat, dissension, and trickery has been a millstone on the neck of our Nationality for years past’.Footnote ²⁵ Non-Irish sympathisers, such as the editor of the English Republic magazine, W. J. Linton, were similarly critical, arguing that the ‘Fenian’ name implied a narrowly defined nationalist conspiracy, detached from the republican international fraternity.Footnote ²⁶ Indeed, there are some telling confusions within the semantics of Fenianism. John O’Leary recalled that Stephens used the label ‘Irish Republican Brotherhood’ as the name of the movement, while Thomas Clarke Luby ‘now and then’ called the organisation the ‘Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood’. O’Leary, for his part, could not recall the use of ‘the magic letters’ of the ‘IRB’ before his release from prison in 1871.Footnote ²⁷ Rossa used the term ‘Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood’ exclusively throughout his autobiography.Footnote ²⁸ Joseph Denieffe called his memoir A Personal Narrative of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, but used ‘Irish Republican Brotherhood’ several times in the text.Footnote ²⁹

There was, therefore, ambiguity within the letters ‘IRB’. On one hand, active members of the IRB would hardly shy away from the revolutionary tag; on the other, not all in the movement were necessarily ‘republican’ in outlook. John Rutherford, who published a hostile ‘secret history’ of Fenianism in 1877, declared that the ‘great majority’ of IRB men were ‘Republican only in opposition to English rule’, and would have ‘any leading man of Irish descent [as] their king, and give him despotic power, on condition that his kingdom should be strictly and exclusively Irish’.Footnote ³⁰ Stephens’s ‘provisional dictatorship’ of the movement actively mimicked such a model, and there were, curiously, monarchists, such as O’Leary, within the ranks.Footnote ³¹ While the secretive oath taken by members of the IRB swore allegiance to an Irish Republic, ‘now virtually established’, the constitutional blueprint of this polity was not sketched out by the movement.Footnote ³² This might have been a reflection of the diversity of political opinion within the IRB beyond separatism,Footnote ³³ but there is another explanation more in keeping with the organisation’s image of itself as the embodiment of the Irish people. The revolution was today’s glorious purpose; the granular detail of constitution-making was the work of tomorrow.

To take Rutherford’s claim as it was intended – that the membership of the IRB was insincere in their republicanism – therefore misses the point. The Brotherhood styled itself as a vanguard liberation movement, tasked with kindling what O’Leary described as a ‘Fenian spirit’ that ‘is ever present’ in Ireland.Footnote ³⁴ It presented itself as the manifestation of popular sovereignty in Ireland, representing the will of the Irish nation to be free from British rule, and its right to determine its own structure of government. This was a radical challenge to the parliamentary tradition in Ireland: the IRB bypassed parliamentarianism to offer an alternative path to political change. The people, and not corrupt parliaments, were sovereign within the political thought of this new separatist society: Fenianism was the manifestation of the Irish general will.

This was a subversive new departure in Irish political life. The traditional view of the IRB as representing merely a ‘physical force’ expression of nationalism does not adequately capture the idea of ‘the Republic’ as an assertion of popular sovereignty. The ideological trappings of the IRB chimed with – and perfected – the ‘anti-parliament’ sentiment that first appeared within the extreme fringes of radical politics during the 1770s. The ‘anti-parliament’ was heralded by radicals who claimed the allegiance of the sovereign people in a clash with the corrupt and unreformed parliament at Westminster.Footnote ³⁵ The concept of ‘anti-parliament’ was conceptualised primarily as an alternative authority, one that claimed popular legitimacy in the face of an oppressive and unrepresentative legal power. In establishing a metaphysical Irish Republic, in proclaiming themselves (as they did from the mid 1860s) the provisional government of that entity, the IRB leadership tapped into an older radical tradition that harnessed popular sovereignty to contest the moral jurisdiction of the state. The Brotherhood positioned itself not as physical force nationalism, but as the legitimate expression of the Irish people to wage war against ‘English government in Ireland’ and to secure an independent state.Footnote ³⁶ The IRB was, in the minds of its adherents, nothing less than the true constituent power in Ireland.

While championing its inherent legitimacy as the expression of a sovereign power, the flagrantly illegal nature of the IRB impacted its ability to partake in political debate. The conspiratorial nature of the IRB and its rejection of ‘constitutional’ norms also account for the dearth of political tracts in support of Fenianism. Indeed, the Irish People newspaper, the closest thing to an official declaration of IRB doctrine, suggested that a hundred pikes were preferable to a thousand pamphlets: words were meaningless without action.Footnote ³⁷ But resistance to pamphleteering does not imply that Fenians did not ‘think’ politically: the very existence of an IRB-sponsored newspaper tells its own story.

The Irish People was the brainchild of James Stephens. Stephens envisaged a newspaper as an important outlet to spread Fenian ideas (and raise money) in the aftermath of the mass expansion of the movement following the well-documented funeral of Terence Bellew MacManus in 1861.Footnote ³⁸ The People also appeared – not coincidentally – at a time when the Dublin press was largely monopolised by a pro-clerical and moderate pro-reform political tone, which was fiercely critical of the IRB’s secretive, subversive nature. The People was designed to combat this consensus. While the People was hardly a commercial success, it marked a definite development in separatist politics in Ireland.Footnote ³⁹ The language of separatism was crystallised through the newspaper, as the IRB was forced to articulate its political objectives. This was the revolutionary vanguard attempting to radicalise public opinion not through the propaganda of the deed, but through words, interpretation, and polemic argument.

Some Fenian sympathisers considered it unwise for the IRB to found its own newspaper. Michael Davitt, who joined the IRB in 1865, recorded tongue-in-cheek that Stephens ‘did what an Irish conspirator would alone be likely to think of doing – he founded a newspaper to be a mouth-piece for a secret organisation’. There was a serious point here: Davitt believed publishing the People was a mistake, as it directly led to the arrest of Stephens and most of the upper tier of the IRB.Footnote ⁴⁰ John Devoy, a talented IRB man who, following his release from prison in 1871, became an integral part of Clan na Gael in the US, disagreed, believing that ‘the services of the paper to the Cause … far outweighed the damage’. Devoy believed that any rebellion against British rule needed to be a popular uprising; and while secrecy was ‘essential’ to develop a revolutionary plan, ‘the people had to be converted to its views and committed to its objects, and that could not be done by a whispering campaign’.Footnote ⁴¹

Indeed, by the time that the Irish People was founded, newspapers had long been a ubiquitous presence within radical politics. Much has been written about the abolition of the stamp tax and the boom in the newspaper business during the nineteenth century, but rather less on newspapers as a status symbol of sorts for a political movement.Footnote ⁴² Publishing a newspaper was a marker of seriousness and intent, especially for a movement or cause that might otherwise be considered ‘fringe’. In the Irish context, the success of the Nation during the 1840s unquestionably altered the boundaries of political expression and popularised the ideas of Young Ireland. It was no coincidence that the primary figures behind much of the editorial content of the Irish People – John O’Leary, Thomas Clarke Luby, and Charles Kickham – cut their teeth within the Young Ireland movement during the late 1840s.Footnote ⁴³ The most notorious figure associated with the Nation, John Mitchel, believed words as important as action in creating favourable conditions for revolt. In Jail Journal (1854), Mitchel recorded his belief that the ‘most dangerous enemy’ of the government was ‘an honest man, armed with a newspaper’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The ranks of Ireland’s army, it appeared, would be filled by enthusiastic readers.

The first edition of the Irish People appeared in November 1863, and it ran weekly without interruption until the government suppressed the paper in September 1865. In an anti-parliament tradition, the title of the paper was an assertion of popular sovereignty. The central messages preached by the People were militant separatism, the bankruptcy of ‘constitutional’ agitation, the need to untangle the clergy from politics, and the desirability of land reform. An additional central thread running through the paper was the urgency of moral reform in Ireland to enable the country to fulfil its potential as an independent republic. The editorial content of the People typically showcased great literary skill, while the paper often carried thoughtful book reviews and occasional flashes of brilliance in its regular poetry column. These literary endeavours provided spaces for women within Fenian politics, most prominently John O’Leary’s sister, Ellen, who was a noted poet.Footnote ⁴⁵ The containment of women within the literary pages reveals that, while the IRB believed in a ‘sovereign people’, women such as Ellen O’Leary were muses rather than citizens.

Still, the Irish People was a formidable operation, put together by talented people. While the paper did not have a wide paying audience (many issues were given away for free), its subscription list included several notable personalities from outside the realm of Fenianism, such as Isaac Butt and Delia Tudor Parnell, mother of Charles Stewart and the later leaders of the Ladies’ Land League, Anna and Fanny.Footnote ⁴⁶ Part of the appeal of the newspaper was its freshness: the Irish People pioneered a form of literary separatism in Ireland hitherto absent since the fleeting days of the United Irishman and the Irish Felon in 1848.

The People undoubtedly benefited from the contemporary popularity and influence of John Mitchel’s works. Mitchel’s most famous book, Jail Journal, was published in 1854, and The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) followed in 1860, both of which did much to legitimise anger and hate as valid political emotions.Footnote ⁴⁷ Indeed, the uncompromising content, vigorous style, and scurrilous tone of the Irish People closely resembled Mitchel. While Stephens had little time for Mitchel, the People’s core trio of Luby, Kickham, and O’Leary fell under the Young Irelander’s literary spell. O’Leary recalled in his memoir that during the high point of the Nation newspaper in the 1840s, ‘many, if not most, of the younger amongst us were Mitchelites before Mitchel, or rather before Mitchel had put forth his programme’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Mitchel endured an uneasy relationship with Fenianism, but did much to shape its ideological blueprint.Footnote ⁴⁹ His oeuvre articulated, in vivid Carlylean terms, virtuous hatred of the British Empire (with imperialism condemned as a vehicle for the expansion of soulless laissez-faire), the emasculation of constitutional political struggle, and the nobility of warfare against the oppressor. These were issues that were taken up with zeal by the Irish People.

Mitchel’s identification of the British Empire as Ireland’s enemy, rather than the more traditional ‘England’, marked a major development in Irish separatist language, and one periodically repeated in the pages of the People.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1860, Mitchel published the ironic An Apology for the British Government in Ireland, which argued that the might of British imperialism rested on the exploitation of the other nations, a process that would only end with the ‘dismemberment of that Empire’.Footnote ⁵¹ Mitchel believed that underneath the veneer of a liberal civilising mission, the structure of power at the heart of the British Empire was unfeelingly bureaucratic, motivated by the dynamics of liberal political economy and capitalist greed. The fruits of the imperial system were ‘torture in India, opium in China, famine in Ireland, pauperism in England, disturbance and disorder in Europe, and robbery everywhere’.Footnote ⁵² The British Empire was, as he put it with Carlyle-esque force in Jail Journal, the ‘Empire of Hell’.Footnote ⁵³

While British imperialism was Ireland’s primary enemy, Mitchel was as forcibly hostile to what he saw as a domestic evil: the lure of constitutional politics. Much of Mitchel’s post-Famine writings denounced the peaceful political path taken by Daniel O’Connell. Mitchel was at his most unrestrained in The Last Conquest. O’Connell had, in Mitchel’s estimation,

Mitchel believed that, had O’Connell given the word, the Irish would have mobilised for an epoch-defining revolt during the 1840s. O’Connell, of course, did not advocate rebellion, and this made the ‘Liberator’, according to Mitchel, ‘next to the British Government, the worst enemy that Ireland ever had’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Such an analysis of O’Connellism and the related folly of constitutional politics were explored further in the pages of the People.

While Mitchel was suspicious of the IRB, disliking the secretive nature of the organisation, the Fenians gave form to his long-stated desire for the Irish to take up arms and overthrow their British oppressors. In articulating a disdain for constitutional politics and a hatred of British domination of Ireland, Mitchel provided an intellectual framework for violent separatism. The Irish People developed many of his themes to legitimise the idea of armed struggle. In a discussion of the Ballingarry ‘failure’ of 1848 in Jail Journal, Mitchel set out a blueprint for a successful revolt in Ireland, which anticipated the rationale of the Irish People:

Mitchel’s rage stemmed from the Famine, which he infamously positioned as a deliberate act of attempted genocide by the British state, driven by Malthusian conceptions of the burden of an ‘excessive’ population. He argued that the experiences of the Irish during the 1840s legitimised violent insurrection: the horrors of war ‘were by no means so terrible as the horrors of peace which their own eyes had seen’. Mitchel believed that the survivors of the trauma were ‘ashamed to see their kinsmen patiently submitting to be starved to death, and longed to see blood flow, if it were only to show that blood still flowed in Irish veins’.Footnote ⁵⁶ He framed rebellion as the only method to free the Irish from the clutches of British imperialism and constitutional slavery. The Irish People took up this argument with considerable aplomb.

While the People ran for only twenty-two months, its ninety-five issues offered a sustained engagement with the idea of shattering the Union. This was positioned as the first stage of the positive transformation of Irish society and, indeed, the wider world order. In a dramatic editorial, written against the backdrop of Britain being dragged into the Second Schleswig War in early 1864, the People propounded the possibility of the ‘Irish Revolution’ becoming one of ‘the grandest events in all history’. A small country overthrowing the yoke of the most powerful imperial power of the nineteenth century would ‘electrify the world’, turning the course of history on its head. ‘On that day’, declared the editorial,

The People frequently praised resistance to imperial rule in the colonies, such as the Māori in New Zealand during the Second Taranaki War.Footnote ⁵⁸ But the editorials of the People rejected the notion that Ireland should be viewed in the same manner as the ‘remote British colonies’; the People recognised that the Union, which forced the Irish to be ‘politically identified with Great Britain’, left Ireland a constitutional peculiarity within the Empire.Footnote ⁵⁹ The People’s identification with the colonised was based on a shared hostility to the British state, and not on the basis that Ireland was a colony. The image of the downfall of the British Empire was conjured first and foremost because such a historic event would mark the end of Britain’s domination over Ireland.

There was no question within the Fenian mindset that revolutionary means were the only legitimate method to end British rule in Ireland. The centrality of violence in this process was embraced and heartily repeated throughout the People’s print run: the accepted logic was that ‘no conquered ever regained its independence peacefully’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The ‘sword’ was praised as the only true way to secure national independence. Constitutional agitation worked only for political and social elites, asserted the People, as the ‘achievements’ of the independent legislature in 1782 and Catholic Emancipation in 1829 demonstrated.Footnote ⁶¹ In contrast, the overthrow of tyranny during the revolutions in France and America was ‘the work of the people’, willing to shed blood for freedom.Footnote ⁶² Those who proclaimed to be patriots but affirmed only to a constitutional code were merely willing abetters of British dominance in Ireland. What was needed was not eye-catching political gatherings or the return of MPs to parliament, but the ‘silent work’ of organising a conspiracy. ‘Patriotism, not militarily organised, is worth nothing’.Footnote ⁶³ Mass rallies akin to the O’Connellite ‘monster meetings’ of 1843 were dismissed as ‘a mere waste of popular strength’, when a policy of ‘no-action’ prevailed among the leaders. Such examples from Ireland’s recent history served to discredit the notion that constitutional struggle could deliver meaningful change.Footnote ⁶⁴ The IRB was never mentioned by name in the People, but referenced euphemistically as Ireland’s great hope of realising a national rejuvenation through the achievement of separation from Britain. The people ‘lost all faith in political action’ following the disappointments of elected politicians, but in 1858, the year of the IRB’s founding, ‘earnest political teachers’ once again resurfaced in Ireland.Footnote ⁶⁵

The People denounced a ‘slave’ mentality that permeated Irish society, ensuring that the national potential could never be realised. The chief cause of this condition was, of course, British domination over Ireland, ‘the root of our country’s wrongs’.Footnote ⁶⁶ ‘A people subject to bad laws are necessarily slaves’, proclaimed an editorial in January 1865. The worst of the ‘bad laws’ concerned restrictions on gun ownership, which were particularly loathed by the People. The right of subjects to arms for self-defence was enshrined in the English Bill of Rights of 1688, but this was, of course, never extended to Ireland. This had been reaffirmed by an updated Arms Act in 1843 and the Crime and Outrage Act of 1847, which placed extremely prohibitive restrictions on the sale of guns in Ireland.Footnote ⁶⁷ The People interpreted this as a deliberate ploy to oppress the Irish, as a ‘disarmed people’ was equated with ‘an enslaved people’. The Irish were thus denied the ability to lawfully resist tyranny through arms, which was, technically at least, a right in England.Footnote ⁶⁸ As such, the People reasoned that the denial of the right to possess arms ‘is the deadliest blow that has been aimed at the Irish nation – more deadly than confiscation, penal laws, land laws, military and legal murder, bribery, corruption, and famine’.Footnote ⁶⁹

This was a powerful argument that had wider purchase than the Fenian movement, as the writings of John Mitchel and (most strikingly) Isaac Butt reveal. In his major works during the 1850s and 1860s, Mitchel asserted that the legal disarming of the Irish was one of the most potent ways in which British domination over the smaller island was maintained.Footnote ⁷⁰ During his campaigns for land reform in the latter half of the 1860s, Butt frequently drew on the differences in legal rights to possess arms between Ireland and Britain as an indication that the Union did not function as a partnership of equals.Footnote ⁷¹ Gun control was an issue, then, that spanned the political spectrum in Ireland. The difficulties in acquiring weapons were held up by Mitchel – and, later, the IRB through the Irish People – as evidence of a deliberate ploy by the British to inflict a permanent state of slavery on the Irish mind. For Butt, representing a critical unionist perspective, denying the Irish the right to bear arms was evidence that ‘the constitution of England is not in force here’, thereby highlighting the unwelcome exceptionalism of Irish legislation under the Union.Footnote ⁷² Despite their ideological differences regarding the Union, the rhetoric deployed by Mitchel, the IRB, and Butt relating to the legal restrictions on gun ownership was very similar. Indeed, Butt was not averse to deploying the ‘slave’ mantra of the Irish People, equating a ‘disarmed nation’ with ‘an enslaved one’.Footnote ⁷³

Such language was not used within a vacuum. When Frederick Douglass, the famed black abolitionist, toured through Ireland in 1845, he expressed bemusement at the idea that the Irish thought of themselves as ‘slaves’. He told an audience in Belfast that the Irish drew on a classical definition of slavery as political oppression, but the term had morphed, carrying a very different (and more horrifying) meaning in the contemporary world.Footnote ⁷⁴ Indeed, Douglass pointed out an important interpretative problem: the word ‘slave’ carried two distinct definitions during the nineteenth century. One referred to the chattel slavery found most notoriously in the United States; the other was a historicised political form of slavery in which rights were denied but human beings were not legally designated as property. Douglass depicted chattel slavery not as the loss of rights but their annihilation, which cast human beings as little more than animals. This was more grotesque than any form of political oppression that hitherto existed, in Ireland or elsewhere, and could not be likened to the classical form of slavery.Footnote ⁷⁵

As Douglass’s interventions highlight, the language of slavery was slippery, with two very different concepts sharing a common term. Political slavery was an expression of Greco-Roman political philosophy, implying the antithesis of civil freedom. A political slave found themselves governed by an arbitrary power. This metaphorical form of slavery was reinvigorated by Hobbes and Locke in the context of the major dynastic upheavals in seventeenth-century England.Footnote ⁷⁶ Liberty was contrasted in such works with slavery, the latter of which referred to a denial of political rights.Footnote ⁷⁷ This interpretation of slavery was embraced in Ireland by William Molyneux and Jonathan Swift, who deployed the trope to describe England’s political dominance over Ireland. Swift, it seems, did not imply any similarity between the metaphorical slavery of the Irish and the experience of enslaved Africans.Footnote ⁷⁸ The American Revolution (and Locke’s prominent place within justifications of the colonists to break with Britain) popularised the linguistic binary between liberty and political slavery within Irish Patriot and radical thought from the 1770s to the 1790s, which provided a vocabulary to legitimate the campaigns for legislative independence and ending the penal laws.Footnote ⁷⁹ Indeed, the adopted word for the relief of Catholics – emancipation – derived from the language of classical slavery.Footnote ⁸⁰

Already by this point, however, use of the slavery trope to define a political relationship had become problematic. The Atlantic slave trade flourished at the same time as protestations against political slavery were uttered. Some American writers were accused of hypocrisy for embracing the liberty/slavery dichotomy in depicting British arbitrary rule over the colonies while also defending chattel slavery.Footnote ⁸¹ What Douglass observed in Ireland was a different but equally dubious set of practices: that there was no distinction between the political slavery of the Irish and the enslavement of Africans, or that the former was worse than the latter.

This trend was so prevalent that the Presbyterian clergyman and abolitionist, Isaac Nelson, was forced to denounce any proclaimed similarities between the political status of the Irish and chattel slavery during the 1840s.Footnote ⁸² There were indeed some breathtaking double standards. John Mitchel, a racist of the Carlylean mould, championed chattel slavery in the antebellum South while denouncing the figurative slavery of the Irish under British rule.Footnote ⁸³ Mitchel applied the political slavery trope to the Irish because they ‘are not citizens in their own land’ and are ruled ‘by the sword’.Footnote ⁸⁴ At the same time, he defended chattel slavery on the basis of a racial hierarchy and the cultivation of a ‘respectful’ master–servant relationship, thereby (perversely) nurturing a trait of civility in the enslaved.Footnote ⁸⁵ The two forms of slavery met when Mitchel denounced the Irish for passivity during the Famine, choosing to meekly die of hunger rather than revolt against the British, thereby displaying a stereotypical trait of docility that he believed was shared by enslaved people.Footnote ⁸⁶ Mitchel thus damned the Irish for a lack of defiance while justifying the enslavement of Africans as natural order.

Mitchel’s handling of the slavery trope was extreme, but he was not an outlier. Many mainstream figures within the world of Irish nationalist journalism shared such a racialised interpretation of the right to liberty.Footnote ⁸⁷ A. M. Sullivan, a more moderate figure than Mitchel, condoned chattel slavery while condemning the ‘political slavery’ of the Irish during the 1860s.Footnote ⁸⁸ Despite the celebrated pro-abolitionism of Daniel O’Connell, Irish political culture in the years following his death was ambivalent on the question of enslavement.Footnote ⁸⁹ Even within abolitionist activism and writing, there were some questionable comparisons between the enslavement of African people and Irish hardship. The quasi-Fenian Irishman was critical of chattel slavery in the US, but believed that the ‘white slavery’ suffered by the Irish poor was worse and elicited much less sympathy.Footnote ⁹⁰ The slavery idiom in Ireland had deep roots, but the ubiquity of the language within nineteenth-century Ireland is striking for the ability of writers to ignore or downplay the horrors of contemporary enslavement. The Irish People was certainly not alone on this. The conflation of political and chattel slavery was a murky part of the Irish political mind.

The Irish People brought a new aspect, with the rhetoric of slavery targeting internal forces perceived as equally complicit in Ireland’s subjugation. The twin evils of constitutional political agitation and the prominent role of the clergy in politics were cited as factors that contributed to the crushing of the Irish aspiration to political independence. The O’Connellite commitment to a ‘no-drop-of-blood doctrine’ surrendered the Irish right to arms to resist tyranny, thus creating ‘a nation of helots’.Footnote ⁹¹ The view of the People was that O’Connell propagated such an approach to ensure clerical support, but in doing so, created another suffocating layer that smothered political expression. The People frequently championed the idea that national liberty was not the business of the priest; ‘submission to certain Irish bishops, in political matters, is equivalent to slavery’.Footnote ⁹² The political priest, speaking out against revolutionary conspiracy and embracing constitutional action, did ‘the work of the enemy’ in subduing the people.Footnote ⁹³ In this reading, Britain was not the only cause of the misery of the Irish people. ‘False teaching, and false consciences do more to keep us down than the bayonet of the Saxon.’Footnote ⁹⁴ Part of the remit of the Irish People was an explicit desire to liberate the Irish mindset from the nefarious effects of constitutional and clerical domination, twin barriers to waging a successful revolutionary war against Britain.

Despite the formal ‘republican’ aims of the IRB, the People did not provide much insight into what the hallowed Irish Republic would look like. Indeed, the paper stated categorically that national independence was the desired outcome of the revolution, and until this was secured, ‘it is of little use to discuss forms of government’.Footnote ⁹⁵ While there was a reluctance to sketch out the blueprints of an independent Ireland, the People made occasional overt references to republicanism, which belied a fusion of classical and modern influences. In early 1865, the People proclaimed that there were two forms of governing philosophy that have dominated conceptions of power since time immemorial, namely ‘despotism and republicanism’. Despotism was defined as the arbitrary rule of an individual; republicanism, on the other hand, was defined by the primacy of laws designed by the ‘people’. The law represented the sovereign will of the people and could not be overturned by individuals. Quotes from Livy and Algernon Sidney were brandished to salute a definition of liberty rooted in the authority of law and freedom from external domination.Footnote ⁹⁶ But republicanism in a more radical Paineite form was also articulated by the People. A later editorial equated republicanism with opposition to hereditary privilege, especially in the form of monarchy, and combined this with a democratic idiom that suggested that legitimate power sprang from the people.Footnote ⁹⁷

The argument was consistently presented through the pages of the People that such republicanism could not be realised in Ireland through the constitutional mechanisms that existed under the Union. While the People conceded that the mixed form of government of the hated enemy carried some aspects of republican thought, given the restrictions of the franchise, it was far from democratic. Members of parliament did not truly represent the people: power resided in the hands of a select and wealthy few.Footnote ⁹⁸ In Ireland, this power was monopolised by a ‘bastard aristocracy’ that personified and perpetuated conquest. The story of the British constitution in Ireland was a tale of oppression by ‘bad laws’ that ran contrary to Irish interests. Ireland appeared to enjoy the apparatus of constitutional rule – elections, the rule of law, and a free press – but these forms masked the oppression of the British connection. Indeed, this veil over the truth ensured that Ireland suffered more than it otherwise would have under straightforward despotism.Footnote ⁹⁹ Such an analysis explained the People’s deep-rooted hostility to the norms of constitutional political life. Irish politicians only deluded themselves, and the wider population, about the ability to change Ireland’s course from within the British system. Petitioning parliament was merely a form of ‘whining’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The People took a hardline stance against elections, declaring that it was ‘criminal’ for the Irish to take any interest in choosing representatives to a foreign parliament.Footnote ¹⁰¹ When the 1848 veteran, John Blake Dillon, declared an intention to stand for election to parliament, the Fenian organ was incensed, depicting him as a useful idiot in legitimising British rule. ‘No man will be more heartily welcomed to London than Mr Dillon’, bemoaned the People. ‘An ex-rebel leader is the very worst enemy Ireland could have in the foreign parliament.’Footnote ¹⁰² The Fenian impulse that found expression in the People was untainted by the compromises of everyday political life. The purity of its message thus stands in stark contrast to the later political dalliances of the IRB – Fenian prisoners standing for parliament, cautious support for Home Rule, the ‘New Departure’ with Charles Stewart Parnell, and the Land League – following its reconstruction after the rebellion of 1867.

Proclaiming the Republic

The Irish People ceased publication in September 1865, after its office in Parliament Street – mere minutes away from Dublin Castle – was raided by the police. The paper left an impressive legacy in disseminating the vocabulary of Fenianism. Its demise was intimately bound up with the perception, shared by many in both the IRB and British intelligence, that 1865 was the year when an insurrection was likely. With the end of the Civil War in the US came the possibility of battle-hardened, demobilised Irish-Americans crossing the Atlantic to wage war on Britain. At the same time, IRB operatives proved successful in infiltrating the British Army and recruiting agents.Footnote ¹⁰³ But while Stephens proclaimed 1865 as the year of action, he dithered, endlessly postponing the insurrection. The Head Centre’s hesitation gave the British time to counteract the Fenian threat, including suppressing the People. The chief writers were arrested or went on the run, and mass arrests of suspected Fenians continued to cripple the movement through 1865 and 1866. The euphoric rhetoric of ‘the year of action’ had transformed into despair. Stephens was deposed from the leadership of the IRB by the end of 1866, replaced by his deputy, Colonel Thomas Kelly, a Galway-born immigrant to the US with experience in the Civil War.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Kelly shared military authority over the IRB with Gustave Paul Cluseret, a French soldier of fortune who also came to Ireland via the Fenian Brotherhood. The organisation that Kelly and Cluseret inherited was far from ready for insurrection, but given the course of dispiriting events of the preceding year, they felt that the IRB needed to assert itself militarily as a matter of urgency.

The uprising was planned for 11 February 1867, but in a Stephensian twist, the leadership pushed it back to 5 March 1867. The attempted insurrection, which was mostly centred on the hills of Dublin, as well as Cork, Tipperary, and Limerick, was a damp squib.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The IRB could call on an impressive number of men, but weapons were pitifully few. Combined with confusion over tactics (a hybrid ‘regular’ and guerrilla insurrection plan was ditched at the last moment in favour of a full-scale mobilisation) and the arrest of Godfrey Massey, a senior leader who subsequently turned informer, the rebellion petered out after a day.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ But one of the most notable aspects of the rising was that, unlike the rebellion of 1848, it assumed a literary form with a proclamation of the Irish Republic, which was widely reprinted in newspaper reports.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This proclamation received little traction at the time, however, as its stated ambitions were immediately defeated with the quick suppression of the rising. Yet the extraordinary document vividly captures a fleeting moment of Fenian engagement with international radical ideas and associations.

Aspects of the proclamation were familiar to readers of the Irish People – the injustices on the land, the slave mindset fostered by decades of British domination – but these were honeycombed with a newly found streak of fraternal radicalism. The legitimacy of violent action came from the ‘centuries of outrage, enforced poverty, and bitter misery’, and the failure of peaceful methods to bring improvement to Ireland’s condition. The oppressor took the form of an ‘alien aristocracy’ that drove away the ‘real owners of the soil’. The appeal to force was ‘our last resource’, but it was ‘better to die in the struggle for freedom than to continue an existence of utter selfdom’. While the proclamation built on aspects of Fenianism as articulated in the Irish People, the forceful class-based depiction of agrarian relations in Ireland was a new departure. This was coupled with a radical democratic vision of an Irish Republic that enshrined forms of popular sovereignty. The proclamation affirmed that the Irish were ‘unable to endure the curse of monarchical government’, and instead offered a blueprint for a republic based on universal suffrage and equality. The new dispensation would return the land to the people, securing ‘the intrinsic value of their labour’. The ‘war’ waged by the IRB was against ‘the aristocratic locusts, whether English or Irish, who have eaten the verdure of our fields’. A striking fraternal hope for international support – and, explicitly, an insurrection in England – concluded the proclamation:

In language, tone, and content, the proclamation thus went far beyond the literary pillars of Fenianism as constructed by the Irish People.

Unlike the better-known proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916, the document associated with the 1867 rising was not signed. The authors were almost certainly Kelly and Cluseret.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The Irish Republic was thus invoked by an Irish-American who served during the US Civil War and a French radical who had fought for Garibaldi in Italy: the radical fraternalism of the proclamation comes into sharper focus given the likely authors. The document, then, occupies a curious space within literary manifestations of Irish separatism. It was written by the new leaders of the IRB, but they were not necessarily representative of the IRB; its contents present the Irish mid-Victorian revolutionary movement in a more politically radical and universalist light than previous expressions found in the Irish People.

Indeed, the appeal to the ‘workmen of England’ is one of the most intriguing aspects of the revolutionary strategy of 1867. Its presence in the proclamation of the Irish Republic was the outworking of an attempt by Kelly and Cluseret to secure the support of radicals in Britain. Planning for the rising occurred against the backdrop of political and social unrest in Britain, as a renewed campaign for parliamentary reform, focused on the extension of the franchise, reached its crescendo. The most prominent – and seemingly dangerous – organisation agitating for political change was the Reform League. The League was a mostly working-class organisation and attracted the support of the socialist International Working Men’s Association (established in 1864) and many ex-Chartists. It enjoyed a noisy political presence through mass rallies, including the infamous Hyde Park meeting in 1866, in which radical supporters clashed with the police and military for three days. The Hyde Park ‘railings’ affair (so called because the crowd ripped the railings of the park out) was defused after an astonishing climbdown by the Home Secretary, Spencer Walpole, who gratefully consented to the withdrawal of the forces of law and order. Some of the more radical followers of the Reform League, such as Karl Marx, believed the revolutionary potential was sucked out of the movement when the anticipated heavy-handed state response did not materialise. ‘Those stiff-necked John Bulls’, Marx lamented to Friedrich Engels, ‘will accomplish nothing without a really bloody clash with those in power’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Despite the lack of a radicalising ‘Peterloo moment’ in 1866, the leadership of the IRB followed the fortunes of the Reform League with great interest, ultimately reaching out to English radicals to assess the possibility of collaboration.

The exact nature of the dealings between the IRB and the Reform League remains shrouded in mystery. The two organisations were, of course, very different from one another – the IRB was a secret society dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of the British state in Ireland, while the Reform League was a popular pressure group agitating for parliamentary reform – but they shared a general belief in the virtues of radical democracy. While the Irish People preached the need for self-reliance – separatists should not pin their hopes on an invading French or American army and should look to ‘ourselves alone’ to win independence – aspects of the leadership of the IRB were less dogmatic.Footnote ¹¹¹ In 1866, Cluseret calculated that an alliance between the IRB and the Reform League was feasible, and such a coalition would shake the British establishment to its core. In an extraordinary article for Fraser’s Magazine, published in 1872, Cluseret detailed his mission on accepting the Fenian brief, stressing his belief that ‘the Irish Question could only be settled by English cooperation’. Cluseret admitted that such a strategy divided the hierarchy of the IRB, but he pressed ahead and claimed to have reached ‘an agreement between Fenianism and the Reform League’. Had the police and army moved in with force against the Hyde Park protestors in 1866, Cluseret claimed, ‘all the Fenians in London’ would have come to their aid.Footnote ¹¹² This version of events was disputed by John Bedford Leno, who claimed that Cluseret first met with a radical faction of the Reform League in a London pub after the Hyde Park meeting, and that no agreement was concluded. Indeed, the English radicals baulked at Cluseret’s scheming, which, in Leno’s recollection, amounted to a dangerous attempt to ‘create civil war’.Footnote ¹¹³

Another partnership that Cluseret wished to nurture was with Charles Bradlaugh, the leading English radical and controversial advocate of free thought, secularism, and republicanism. This was a complicated and decidedly murky relationship. Stephens attempted to build links with British republicans in 1865, sending Frank Roney to London for an interview with Bradlaugh. Bradlaugh promised the IRB’s envoy the ‘practical support of 100,000 men’, although in Roney’s memoir the scope of this backing was not explicit.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Stephens was heartened by the support apparently given to the IRB by Bradlaugh, but resisted calling for a rising in 1865, given the damaging splits within the American Fenian movement.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Ties with Bradlaugh were rekindled in early 1867, after Stephens was deposed as Head Centre and replaced by Colonel Thomas Kelly. Kelly and Cluseret, the two most senior figures in the IRB, visited Bradlaugh in London in the weeks before the rising of 1867. What transpired behind closed doors is unclear. After Bradlaugh’s death, his daughter, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, published an account of her father’s life, which drew on his own memoirs. She affirmed that Cluseret and Kelly gave a rather curious reason – the premise of seeking ‘legal advice’ – for visiting her father. Why Cluseret and Kelly, two seasoned revolutionary soldiers, desired to speak to Bradlaugh about the legalities of insurrection and treason is a moot point. In any case, the proclamation of the Irish Republic formed part of the conversations between the IRB leaders and Bradlaugh. Indeed, two high-ranking informers from the IRB ranks claimed that Bradlaugh himself was the author of the proclamation of 1867.Footnote ¹¹⁶ A hostile biography of Bradlaugh published during his lifetime repeated this charge, alleging that Bradlaugh confessed his authorship of the proclamation to John Morrison Davidson, a radical journalist, before publicly denying the charge.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner believed that her father was not the author of the document, but did play a substantial role in drafting it. ‘I was talking to him in his study one day’, she recorded,

Hypatia did not, alas, ask her father which parts of the proclamation had been altered.

After the rebellion of 1867, Bradlaugh issued a pamphlet that vocally rejected ‘any separation of Ireland from England’ and the establishment of a republic in Ireland. Republicanism was ‘the best form of government possible’, Bradlaugh insisted, but it did not follow that a republic was achievable in the short term. The ‘people of England and of Ireland’, Bradlaugh bemoaned, ‘are yet too much wanting in true dignity and independence, and too ignorant of their political rights and duties, to at present make good republicans’. Bradlaugh staked his hopes on the ability of the Reform Act, which received its royal assent five months after the IRB’s rising in 1867, to transform the British body politic, enabling legislative interventions to correct the worst abuses of the land system and the Established Church in Ireland.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In words that rebuffed the Irish People’s assertion of the need for pikes and not pamphlets, Bradlaugh colourfully called for the IRB to renounce violent methods and use arguments to present their case for independence: ‘I do not believe in a lasting republic to be formed by pike aid – the pen and printing press best teach the littleness of kings’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Bradlaugh was, then, a complex champion of Fenianism. Despite his association with the proclamation of the Irish Republic, he abhorred revolutionary violence and the idea of Irish separatism. While his atheism and republicanism put him on the fringes of radical society, on the question of Irish governance he was closer to the opinions of his more ‘respectable’ contemporaries, such as John Stuart Mill or William Gladstone.Footnote ¹²¹ Sympathy for the IRB from such radical networks was more an attack on the perceived illiberal structures of the British state in Ireland than support for the ideas of Fenianism.

Even still, Bradlaugh’s connection to the IRB’s revolutionary moment in 1867 offers a tantalising glimpse into the potential of a radically subversive Irish-British coalition. ‘It is the English revolution’, Cluseret claimed in 1872, ‘which will enfranchise Ireland’.Footnote ¹²² Before his disposal as Head Centre in 1866, Stephens looked to the International Working Men’s Association for support, while his successor, Colonel Thomas Kelly, was eager to explore Cluseret’s ideas. Rumours circulated about IRB sponsorship of a revived Chartist movement, with the aim of renewed agitation in England.Footnote ¹²³ Fenianism in the 1860s blossomed as a transatlantic phenomenon,Footnote ¹²⁴ but the appeal to English radicalism reveals a lesser-known dynamic, which was, as it played out, not without its problems. Radical leaders in Britain distanced themselves from the IRB because of the divisive nature of the use of violence, particularly after the Clerkenwell explosion in December 1867, which saw the Brotherhood plant a bomb in a London prison in a failed attempt to rescue its incarcerated men.Footnote ¹²⁵ Some within the IRB were not surprised at this turn of events. Back in 1864, before the Reform League agitation, the Irish People warned that Fenians could not rely on even ‘the most advanced of English reformers’, such was the powerful grip of imperialism over the radical mind. Radicals in Britain loudly championed national rights in Belgium, Greece, and Poland, but the People sardonically noted that calls for independence within the British Empire were quietly ignored in favour of imperial unity.Footnote ¹²⁶ Following the debacle of 1867, Fenianism retreated from its appeal to the English working class. The radical internationalism hinted at in the proclamation of 1867 would not be repeated in the more famous document that accompanied the Easter Rising of 1916.

The IRB was at a low ebb in the aftermath of the 1867 rising. The attempted revolt was not quite as embarrassing as the battle of the Widow McCormack’s cabbage patch in 1848, but the conspiracy was far from the imagined revolution that would liberate Ireland. Following the failed uprising, the IRB restructured its leadership, moving away from the autocratic model that centred on one man at the head of the organisation. A Supreme Council was established in 1868 and expanded the following year, styling itself as the government of the Irish Republic. The new body was unafraid to critically reflect on the IRB’s first ten years of existence. A public statement issued by the Supreme Council in 1868 implied that the rising of the previous year was driven by Irish-American vanity, without adequate material support. Ties to the American organisation were thus defiantly severed.Footnote ¹²⁷ A constitution was adopted in 1869 and updated in 1873. With these documents, the IRB turned away from Stephens’s vanguardist interpretation of revolutionary action – the secret society leading the insurrection and radicalising the masses in its wake – and adopted a more subtle approach. In a ‘time of peace’, the constitution of 1873 asserted, the IRB would confine itself to ‘the exercise of moral influences’, such as ‘the cultivation of union and brotherly love among Irishmen, the propagation of republican principles, and the spreading of a knowledge of the national rights of Ireland’. This was a tacit admittance that preparation for the revolutionary moment was not simply a matter of recruiting soldiers and importing arms: Irish society should be ‘Fenianised’ to provide a foundation for the struggle. The use of the term ‘time of peace’ was revealing. Under the leadership of Stephens, the IRB’s very existence suggested that Ireland was on a war footing. The Irish People routinely stressed the need to maintain the organisation for imminent conflict and dismissed the theory that a rising should only occur when Britain became embroiled in an international war.Footnote ¹²⁸ The post-rising IRB envisaged by the Supreme Council was a rather different body from that which had existed before.

This was confirmed in the most controversial decree in the IRB’s constitution, which referred to the movement’s relationship with democratic values. ‘The IRB shall await the decision of the Irish nation’, the third article announced,

The IRB thus revised its role as the vanguard of Irish democracy, with the ‘general will’ replaced by the agency of majority opinion. The mechanism to gauge the revolutionary fervour of the population was not, however, mentioned. In effect, this clause postponed revolutionary activities – as hitherto understood – indefinitely. The IRB moved into a new phase of infiltrating and attempting to direct political, agrarian, and cultural movements that sprang up in Ireland from the 1870s. Fenians were to be found close to the heart of a number of popular bodies, from the Land League to the Gaelic Athletic Association.

As the IRB reorganised after the rising of 1867, the organisation received a boost when a body of ‘respectable’ Irish opinion began lobbying for the release of Fenian prisoners. The rising did not find much support within the Irish population, but the subsequent state trials shone a sympathetic light on the patriotic character of senior IRB men. The transformation of the leaders of the IRB from failed revolutionaries to dedicated servants of Ireland was confirmed by the publication of the influential Speeches from the Dock, an anthology of separatist oratory from the courtroom. Originally compiled by the Sullivan brothers, well-known journalists and writers from Cork, the book went through numerous editions throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Speeches from the Dock included addresses from a range of Fenians who had stood trial through 1865 and 1866, placing them in the same rhetorical and political milieu as the likes of Theobald Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, and John Mitchel. The Sullivans’ introduction unblushingly legitimised the right of the Irish to insurrection to resist ‘oppression’, with those on the dock displaying immense ‘dignity and patriotism’.Footnote ¹³⁰ Writing only a few years after the first edition, Isaac Butt recorded that Speeches from the Dock had already become ‘a portion of the national literature of Ireland’, and had been instrumental in uniting Irish feeling in favour of an amnesty for IRB prisoners.Footnote ¹³¹

The publication of Speeches from the Dock was an important milestone in the development of political language in Ireland. The book introduced Irish readers to some of the boldest separatist rhetoric of the past, while doing much to create an accessible ‘canon’ of revolutionary figures, movements, and ideas.Footnote ¹³² The mass appeal of Speeches from the Dock served to sanitise rebellions against the Crown, stripping away the violence and bloodshed – and failure – while affirming the courage of the rebels and the attractive idealism of their politics. In using their courtroom appearances to denounce the British connection and equate Irish patriotism with separatism, the incarcerated IRB men followed a tradition that was given a coherent shape by the Sullivans’ enterprise.Footnote ¹³³ In this sense, rebellion was secondary to displaying defiance and rhetorical elegance on the dock. Patriotism may have been a pastime for some in Ireland, to use R. V. Comerford’s memorable phrase, but patriotism was increasingly equated with challenging British rule.Footnote ¹³⁴

Despite the failure of the 1867 rising, Fenianism continued to dominate political life in Ireland, as well as in Britain. Gladstone’s Liberal government was elected in 1868 under a banner of ‘pacifying Ireland’, with a programme of constructive Irish policies to tackle the social and religious grievances that Fenianism was presupposed to represent.Footnote ¹³⁵ The disestablishment of the Church of Ireland and a moderate, if symbolically important, land act swiftly followed. But the Gladstonian administration also had to face an active campaign for an amnesty for Fenians in prison, some of whom had been included in the Sullivans’ Speeches from the Dock. An additional factor that inflamed Irish opinion was the execution of William Philip Allen, Michael Larkin, and Michael O’Brien – the ‘Manchester Martyrs’ – in November 1867 for their role in the accidental death of Sergeant Charles Brett during an attack on a police van transporting the captured Fenian leaders, Thomas Kelly and Timothy Deasy. Again, it was the subsequent events that followed the rescue mission, rather than the operation itself, that increased sympathy for the IRB: the death sentences were expected to be commuted.Footnote ¹³⁶ When the hangman tied the noose around the necks of Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien, they died in the same grisly manner as condemned criminals, which only intensified the anger and grief felt in Ireland.

The Amnesty Association was established in 1869, then, against a fluid and decidedly unstable political backdrop. The Association was a splinter from the Amnesty Committee, which had been founded a year earlier. The Committee was sympathetic to the Gladstone government and restrained itself to ‘respectable’ means such as petitioning; the Association grew out of frustration with the mildness of the campaign and represented a notable ratcheting up of political anger in Ireland.Footnote ¹³⁷ Large public demonstrations followed in the summer and autumn of 1869, which heard bitter outbursts against the imprisonment of Fenians, who were held up as men of conviction and sincerity. At a rally at Drogheda in August, A. J. McKenna of the Belfast Northern Star proclaimed that the amnesty issue eclipsed all others: even though the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland was a boon, he ‘will refuse it and refuse everything else till the prison doors are unbarred’.Footnote ¹³⁸ The make-up of the Association was notable, as it brought together an unlikely alliance of Fenians (John Nolan, a member of the IRB’s Supreme Council, was the secretary of the Association) and farmers (the Association championed tenant right), under the chairmanship of that most impulsive of Irish Tories, Isaac Butt. Frustrated by the lack of progress on the vital questions of prisoner amnesty and land reform, Butt ultimately used his high profile to push for a new federal relationship between Ireland and Britain called ‘Home Rule’.

Political Revolt, Moral Revolution

In 1870, John Savage, the Chief Executive of the faction-ridden Fenian Brotherhood in the US, published an address. He condemned the Gladstonian reforms in land and education that were occurring in Ireland as distractions from the major grievance that occupied the Irish mind:

Savage was a Young Ireland veteran who, like John O’Mahony, fled Ireland for the US after a failed attack on a police barracks in Waterford in September 1848. After establishing himself as a writer and journalist, he came relatively late to Fenianism, replacing O’Mahony as president in 1867.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ He soon tired of the splits that engulfed Fenianism in the US and left the movement in 1871. In 1856, he published a book (which was reissued in the 1880s) that sketched out the development of the revolutionary tradition in Ireland, fusing together the rebellions of 1798 and 1848 into one unitary ideological event. Many of the later tropes of Fenianism – the justification for violence, the tyrannical nature of British rule, and the bitter hostility to constitutional politicians – were found through Savage’s work. Those who took up arms against the British state were positioned in the book as selfless patriots who were above the partisan interests that animated constitutionalism. The rebels, Savage contended, ‘were not enamoured with politics, but they worshipped Ireland’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ ‘Politics’ here referred to the realm of politicians; the statement explicitly situates separatist struggle as a moral imperative to combat the grotesque clique of self-serving political representatives. Savage believed that the mission of Young Ireland did not end in failure, as theories of resistance had, by the 1840s, become more expansive. Despite the failure of 1848, Young Ireland gave Ireland a ‘new literature’ to ‘warn the old and educate the young generation’. The rise of a separatist literary mindset, according to Savage, created a morally improved country, turning labourers away from the tavern, instilling self-reliance in tenant farmers, and leaving the ‘landlord more fearful’.Footnote ¹⁴² Savage turned again to this theme in his address in 1870. The success of Fenianism should be judged not by the existence or not of an Irish republic, but by whether a revolution had occurred in ‘the hearts of the people’. ‘The Fenian revolution’, Savage concluded, ‘is practical because it creates an intellectual revolution as a basis for the political one’.Footnote ¹⁴³

The idea of militancy as a stimulus to the moral improvement of Ireland was taken seriously by Fenian thinkers across the transatlantic nexus. While some IRB activists were attracted to democratic and republican political institutions as the means to improve Ireland, this did not imply a rigid, top-down political vision.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The Fenian press urged individual accountability and reflection on personal lifestyle choices. An early edition of the Irish People expressed a desire to ‘kindle a spirit of heroism in the young manhood of the country’, to ‘fire them with the rational ambition of the soldier of liberty’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ A later issue celebrated that ‘drunkenness and faction-fighting are disappearing’ in parts of Ireland where Fenianism was well established. ‘Our young men are becoming more intelligent and manly, and, consequently, more moral every day.’Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The framing of political action through moral improvement, especially the prism of masculinity, permeated Fenian literature. In his memoir, O’Donovan Rossa denounced those who ‘say that [Ireland] cannot be freed by force’ as ‘something that no manly Irishman should say’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ ‘Manliness’ within the ranks of the Fenian movement was associated with resistance against the British state; constitutional political campaigns, which sought reconciliation between Ireland and Britain within the Union, were dismissed as evidence of degenerate effeminacy.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ The separatist agenda pioneered by the IRB and their transatlantic counterparts was, then, multifaceted. The overthrow of the British state and the creation of an independent Irish polity was at the heart of Fenianism; but the Fenians also positioned themselves at the frontline of a slower, gradual revolution. ‘Republican forms of government’, as the Irish People put it, were attractive not only because they illuminated a pathway to Irish independence, but because they tended ‘to foster self-respect and manliness amongst a people’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The earnestness of the Fenian message was a product of the belief that the British state in Ireland must be shattered, but also that the Irish as a nation had to be morally redeemed. The IRB was more than a militant nationalist group: it was a manifestation of Irish popular sovereignty that claimed the allegiance of the Irish, challenged the legitimacy of the state, and attempted to alter the character of the people themselves.