Christopher Klein
author of four books; frequent contributor to History.com; has written for the New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, Harvard Magazine, Red Sox Magazine, Preservation, Mental Floss, The Daily, The Boston Phoenix, St. Petersburg Times, New England Travel, JSTOR Daily, ESPN.com, Biography.com, Smithsonian.com, AmericanHeritage.com, and others; lectured at dozens of libraries and historical societies and appeared on television and radio programs from Tokyo, Japan, to Yellowknife, Canada; also contributed to Lonely Planet’s Boston City Guide and National Geographic Traveler: Ireland
PROLOGUE
Thirteen months after Robert E. Lee laid down his sword at Appomattox Court House, former Confederate rebels slipped on their gray wool jackets. Union veterans longing to emancipate an oppressed people donned their blue kepis. Battle-hardened warriors from both the North and the South returned to the front lines, but not to reignite the Civil War. Instead, the former foes became improbable brothers in arms united against a common enemy – Great Britain.
Entwined by Irish bloodlines, the private army that congregated on the south side of Buffalo, New York, on the night of May 31, 1866, shared not just a craving for gunpowder but a yearning to liberate their homeland from the shackles of the British Empire. For seven hundred years, British rulers attempted to extinguish Ireland’s religion, culture, and language, and when the potato crop failed in the 1840s and 1850s, causing one million people to die, some Irish believed the British were trying to exterminate them as well.
Many of the two million refugees fleeing the Great Hunger washed ashore in the United States, where the newcomers continued to face the scorn of nativist Know-Nothings who believed the Irish had no intention of assimilating into American culture but plotted to take handout after handout while imposing papal law on their adopted home. Even from a distance of nearly fifteen years and three thousand miles, the trauma remained raw for many of the insurgents who enlisted in the self-proclaimed Irish Republican Army. Radicalized by their collective ordeal, these Irish American Civil War veterans viewed their service in the bloody crucibles of Bull Run, Antietam and Gettysburg as training for the real fight they wanted to wage — one to free Ireland.
Wearing green ribbons tied to their hats and fastened to their buttonholes, eight hundred Irish paramilitaries who had traveled from as far away as New Orleans emerged from the boardinghouses and saloons of Buffalo’s Irish enclave, the First Ward, on a clear spring night. Carrying green flags sewn by their wives, girlfriends, and mothers and hauling nine wagons laden with secretly stockpiled rifles and ammunition, the Irish Republican Army set off on one of the most fantastical missions in military history — to kidnap Canada.
from When the Irish Invaded Canada by Christopher Klein (Doubleday, 2019)