The last decade has seen a number of impressive works published on the history of the Irish in America.Footnote 1 Mention of Irish-American nationalist activity during the Crimean War (1854–6), however, has not progressed much in the sixty years since William D'Arcy's The Fenian movement in the United States, 1858–1886, cursory references to John Mitchel's attempt to get arms from the Russian ambassador in Washington or the fanciful plans of Michael Doheny and John O'Mahony to sail an army of liberation across to Ireland seeming to suffice for most writers.Footnote 2 David Murphy is one exception to this rule, devoting a few paragraphs at least to Irish-American involvement in the ‘recruitment affair’ – a diplomatic wrangle that stemmed from British efforts to recruit soldiers for the Crimean War in America and resulted in the expulsion of four British diplomats – but still not delving into the episode too deeply.Footnote 3
Regarding the so-called ‘recruitment affair’, it is well documented that the British minister to Washington, John Crampton, and three consuls in the country had their passports returned to them in 1856, throwing them out of the United States.Footnote 4 Less is known, however, of the particulars that led to this drastic action. This article examines the prelude to, and machinations surrounding, the arrest, trial, and eventual expulsion of Charles Rowcroft, the British consul at Cincinnati, demonstrating how the incident was indelibly linked with the conniving of Irish-Americans in the region.
Much of the recent work that deals specifically with nineteenth-century Irish-American nationalism has focused on various aspects of the Fenian movement, Clan na Gael, and the Land League in America.Footnote 5 There have also been studies of Irish-American responses to both the Spanish-American and South African Wars.Footnote 6 Angela Murphy has published an important article on the collapse of the repeal movement in America in the mid-1840s.Footnote 7 Historians, however, have all but ignored Irish-American nationalism during the late 1840s and 1850s. John Belchem, for example, is still alone in having paid serious attention to Irish-American nationalism during 1848.Footnote 8
This article explores one important facet of the considerable history of Irish-American nationalism in the phase immediately following the great exodus to America caused by the great Irish famine. It illuminates especially the lengths to which relatively ordinary Irish-Americans were willing to go in their efforts to harass and humiliate a British government bogged down in the costly and unpopular Crimean War.
I
From the beginning of the Crimean War, Britain struggled with the limited number of soldiers at its disposal, especially when contrasted to the vast, conscripted French army with whom it was fighting against Russia.Footnote 9 The Foreign Enlistment Act, passed in December 1854, a time of extreme suffering for British troops in the Crimea, allowed for the admission of foreign volunteers into the British army and was seen as a possible panacea.Footnote 10 Its effect was immediate. In America, envisaged as prime recruiting territory on account of a surfeit of jobless immigrants, offers to join the British army in the Crimea were sent to Crampton in Washington and many consuls.Footnote 11 Most of the proposals pointed out the intention of the correspondents to refrain from infringing upon America's Neutrality Act of 1818. This was the great obstacle to the British scheme for enlistment in America, the law that made it illegal to hire or retain men for service with a foreign army within the territories of the United States.
Adding to the difficulty of enlistment was a recent background of Anglo-American disputes over the Caribbean and Central America, disputes that stemmed from the selfish designs both powers held for the region. British influence was on the wane while American minds were consumed with the idea of ‘Manifest Destiny’; the annexation of Texas in 1845 was followed quickly by victory and more land in the Mexican War (1846–8). The Clayton–Bulwer treaty, signed in April 1850, attempted to ensure that neither Britain nor America further fortified or colonized Central America (as well as making provisions for the prospective construction of a canal through the Panamanian isthmus). The treaty, however, failed to assuage either government and they repeatedly contested each other's interpretations of it.Footnote 12
Franklin Pierce's election as president in late 1852 exacerbated an already tense situation. A former general in the Mexican War, he had run on an aggressively expansionist platform and was involved in the notorious ‘Ostend Manifesto’ that proposed the American seizure of Cuba if Spain refused to sell it.Footnote 13 This plan (not acted upon) did not directly affect British interests in the Caribbean but still added another layer to the difficulties between the two countries. Of much more importance at the time of the Crimean War was the American bombardment and destruction, in July 1854, of the longstanding British settlement in Greytown on the Mosquito Coast and the angry British retorts.Footnote 14 Pierce, for his part, was suspicious of British interference in American schemes to annex the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii).Footnote 15 Such a poisoned diplomatic atmosphere ensured America would not respond lightly to any apparent British contravention of its laws during the Crimean War.
Crampton, a career diplomat, was fully aware of the ‘malignant hostility’ (his words) that characterized much of the American attitude to Britain in the mid-1850s. The British government, however, under the leadership of a new prime minister, Lord Palmerston, was ‘anxious’ that something ‘should be attempted’ regarding recruitment. Lord Clarendon, the foreign secretary, Crampton wrote, wanted him ‘to act and to act immediately’.Footnote 16
In February 1855 Crampton suggested to Clarendon that the solution to the neutrality laws problem lay in employing agents to send men to British North America (now Canada) for enlistment. His legal adviser in Washington gave the scheme only a cautious, qualified backing. It sufficed for London, however, and instructions were sent out to begin the recruitment, albeit with the disingenuous proviso to refrain from infringing upon the neutrality laws.Footnote 17 Crampton wrote hurriedly to Sir Gaspard Le Marchant, the lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia, that ‘the experiment’ was to be ‘tried’.Footnote 18 A depot was established at Halifax, Nova Scotia, with thousands of recruits expected to arrive almost immediately.
Prior to this, on 5 January 1855, Charles Rowcroft, erstwhile novelist and recently installed consul at Cincinnati, sent a dispatch to Clarendon that read: ‘The Passing of the Foreign Enlistment Bill has attracted the notice of persons here, and has given rise to an offer which I think it my duty to communicate without delay.’ The proposal came from a Hungarian, Colonel Gabriel de Korponay, who offered to send 500 German and Hungarian men to Canada to enlist. The nationalities of the budding recruits fitted in well with the British government's assumption that enlistment would be most successful among disaffected Europeans. Korponay was aware of the neutrality laws and, believing it sufficient protection, said he would not take any pay for the men until after their enrolment in Canada.Footnote 19
Rowcroft sent a second letter on this topic a week later. The number of men available had doubled to 1,000, the majority with some military training and all under thirty-five years of age. The terms proposed were that Korponay, who wanted to take command of the force in the Crimea, would receive fifteen pounds per head. To make this more palatable, the Hungarian stipulated none of the men would claim the thirty pounds bounty due to them upon enlistment. Also, demonstrating perhaps that the hangover from the revolutions of 1848 had not yet fully subsided, Rowcroft assured Clarendon that none of the Hungarian officers proposed had engaged in ‘any insurrectionary proceedings against Austria or any other country’.Footnote 20
Korponay was an exiled Hungarian noble, his life a tale ‘of high birth and lost fortune’. Arriving in America in the early 1840s he had taught fencing at a military school on the east coast. A skilled dancer he was then credited with introducing the polka to America in 1844. He participated in the Mexican War before moving to Philadelphia in the early 1850s. In 1851 he led the reception in this city for the visiting Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth. A year later he used his linguistic skills as a translator in the trial of two Polish men accused of murder. Korponay had settled in Cincinnati after Philadelphia and earned his living teaching dance lessons.Footnote 21
Clarendon, wary of too deep an involvement in these schemes, did not reply to Rowcroft's letters, one line of which indicates how the consul might not wholly have grasped the meaning of the neutrality laws. The men to be recruited, he wrote, were ‘all represented to me to be not Americans, but Germans’.Footnote 22 However, the nationality of those enlisted was not important: it was the fact of hiring or retaining within America that was key.
The matter rested until March when Rowcroft received, through George Mathew, the British consul at Philadelphia, a letter from Joseph Howe. Howe was a charismatic Nova Scotian politician of renown who had been put in charge of the recruitment by Crampton. He asked Rowcroft to send him ‘under cover’, via Mathew, ‘what number of men might be got in your section of the country’.Footnote 23 Rowcroft answered confidently that ‘800 to 1000 trained and efficient soldiers’ could be found within a month.Footnote 24
Here again matters paused until Korponay ‘suddenly reappeared’ at Rowcroft's house in Cincinnati on 30 April. The Hungarian had been ‘commissioned by Mr. Howe to raise men for the Foreign Legion’.Footnote 25 Howe had been impressed with Korponay, who was apparently anxious to serve the British government in the hope they would help secure the release of his brother from an Austrian prison.Footnote 26 Korponay was now set to put into action a scheme that differed only slightly from the proposals he had made earlier to Rowcroft. The consul believed the whole affair to be a result of his correspondence with Clarendon and promised to help.
Korponay gathered together 600 men in Kentucky, the state immediately south of Ohio. They were ready for transportation to Canada and awaiting only the funds for their passage. This money was to be sent by Howe to John Turnbull, a retired British officer living in New York who was also in contact with Crampton. Turnbull would then join Korponay in the interior of the country, but here the scheme stalled and began to unravel. No money came from Howe and the would-be recruits waited unhappily in Kentucky for more than a month. Howe had returned to Nova Scotia to defend his seat in the state legislature and Turnbull speculated that, caught up in the election, he might have been ‘so busy that he forgot all about it’.Footnote 27
The plan had been to send the men in groups of fifty or a hundred to Boston where a boat would transport them to Nova Scotia. Instead they were stationary and became rapidly fed up. Turnbull got in touch with Crampton and was given $3,000 by the British minister.Footnote 28 He wrote to Korponay on 4 June to say money was finally available for conveying the men, but then did not show up with it at Cincinnati as promised.Footnote 29
Korponay's frustration increased. He told Rowcroft that the men considered the whole affair a ‘breach of faith’ by the British government and demanded that the consul give him the funds needed for the transportation.Footnote 30 Rowcroft refused, mindful of the neutrality laws and the want of firm instructions from London regarding the enlistment of these particular men. He did, however, warn Clarendon of ‘the discredit to Her Majesty's Gov[ernmen]t’ that would occur should nothing be done about the men.Footnote 31
To prevent such discredit, on 7 June 1855 Rowcroft drew down from the treasury £150 to placate the men and keep them in Kentucky, primed and ready for transportation.Footnote 32 Though he did not dispense funds for their passage to Canada, Rowcroft unambiguously violated the neutrality laws, especially when it is considered how Crampton's legal adviser had earlier intimated the Americans would take the broadest view possible of the neutrality laws, and that the words ‘hire or retain’ could be extended to cover ‘every case of payment, expenditure or other valuable consideration’ made to facilitate the departure of likely recruits.Footnote 33
By the time Clarendon replied to Rowcroft – stating that ‘enlistment in the manner you propose is contrary to the U.S. Law, and H.M.'s Govt can give no directions to promote it’Footnote 34 – the consul was already in legal trouble. On the morning of 10 July he was arrested with three others; Turnbull, who did eventually make it to Cincinnati, Robert McKay, an agent of Korponay's in Cincinnati, and a Dr William Hamilton who was to examine the health of the prospective recruits. Also arrested were a number of Germans and Hungarians, the would-be recruits. Korponay, however, evaded capture: careful, according to Crampton, to keep himself ‘on the Canada side of the line’.Footnote 35
Despite ordering the recruitment in America, Clarendon had never fully put his weight behind the scheme, concerned with the neutrality laws and exacerbating already poor relations with America. Elsewhere, the enlistment of foreign nationals met with some success: in Switzerland, for example, more than 5,000 men were raised.Footnote 36 In America, however, despite initial expectations of recruits by the thousand, only ninety had arrived in Halifax by mid-April.Footnote 37 Nor had the supposedly surreptitious efforts at recruiting gone unnoticed. Trevor Royle has deemed the whole proceedings ‘amateurish’, and it took little time for the activities of Howe and other agents, some openly giving out handbills and inserting newspaper advertisements, to arouse the suspicion of the American government.Footnote 38
William Marcy, the American secretary of state, met with Crampton on 12 March 1855 regarding enlistment. He left the meeting believing the British minister ‘would not tolerate recruitment in any form’.Footnote 39 Crampton had feigned ignorance but was clearly cognisant of the recruitment, dispensing funds and information to Turnbull and a number of other recruiters in Halifax, Niagara, and New York.Footnote 40 He even travelled up to Niagara – one of the main entry points into Canada used by recruiters – in June to see how matters were progressing and was annoyed to find that ‘only eighteen men’ from Korponay had as yet ‘presented themselves for enlistment’. He advised Turnbull that he had shut down other operations that had proven ‘delusory’ and could do the same with Korponay's.Footnote 41 A conversation with Korponay (also in Niagara) a few days later assuaged Crampton's concerns.Footnote 42 By this stage, however, American anger was growing stronger as a number of recruiters had been arrested, including one Henry Hertz in Philadelphia, their testimonies making clear the official complicity in the enlistment schemes. The spirit of the 1818 law was being violated and so was the word.
II
In 1850, 12 per cent of Cincinnati's population of 115,000 were Irish born.Footnote 43 Those with nationalist sympathies had a history of forming themselves into political clubs and in 1848 had sent money to the Young Irelanders then on the cusp of rebellion.Footnote 44 In early 1855 they organized a large reception for the escaped Young Irelander, John Mitchel.Footnote 45 A similar event had taken place a few years earlier for Michael Doheny, another political exile.Footnote 46 In a later period, William Mackey Lomasney, a Fenian agent born in Cincinnati in 1841 of Irish parentage, was blown to bits while attempting to dynamite London Bridge.Footnote 47
In mid-June 1855, when Britain still seemed to be struggling in the Crimean War, Daniel Conahan, William G. Halpin, and David Reidy conceived a plot to entrap Rowcroft in a violation of the neutrality laws, vaguely hoping to precipitate an Anglo-American war to pave the way to Irish independence. The first act in the plot was for Halpin – later a prominent Fenian – to approach McKay, Korponay's agent in Cincinnati. Halpin then put McKay into contact with Conahan, one of the leaders of the previous year's St Patrick's Day parade in Cincinnati. According to Conahan – born in Co. Derry before emigrating to America and settling around 1830 in Cincinnati – the deal offered by McKay was that if he (Conahan) forwarded to Korponay a company of 100 men for enlistment he would receive the rank of captain in the British army. The men raised were to be given free passage to Buffalo where they would board a steamer for conveyance to Korponay at Niagara. They would then enter Canada, enlist, and receive their bounty.Footnote 48
Conahan claimed to be dissatisfied with the assurances received and told McKay that only if Rowcroft himself personally guaranteed the commission would the proposed enlistment occur. On the evening of 5 July, therefore, Conahan went with McKay to Rowcroft's residence. Reidy followed and spied in through a window. As Rowcroft later related to Crampton:
this talk was sufficient for the purposes of the parties engaged in the entrapping plot. One of their number was able to say that he had been in the Consul's house, and had conversed with him; and another of the Confederates was able to say that he had seen the Consul in conversation with Conahan.Footnote 49
A few days later, on Monday 9 July, a meeting took place at the Broadway Hotel in Cincinnati where McKay gave Reidy, who was to be an ensign in the company raised by Conahan, thirty-one train tickets and fifty dollars in expenses for the transport of recruits. The local authorities were informed and Rowcroft and his accomplices arrested the next morning.Footnote 50
The plot was neither sophisticated nor ingenious, but it worked. Giving evidence at the preliminary trial, held before Commissioner W. Wallace Warden, Conahan, Reidy, and Halpin all stressed how McKay had told them that Rowcroft was ‘the head and front of the whole matter’ but was ‘obliged to keep himself quiet’ as he was the only one who could get them out of any difficulty.Footnote 51 On these unverifiable assertions the prosecution was founded.
Rowcroft was the victim of a crude entrapment plot but should have been wiser in his dealings with Irishmen regarding enlistment. He had read earlier, in instructions to Korponay from an official in Halifax, that: ‘No Irish will be received as experience has shewn, they invariably, on arrival here, refuse to enlist [sic].’Footnote 52 He might, however, have been thrown by Conahan's mention of the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing party as a reason for his willingness to uproot and fight in the British army.Footnote 53 Nativism, xenophobia, and animosity toward foreigners had become significant factors in American politics in the early 1850s, giving rise to the bigoted Know-Nothing party.Footnote 54 Cincinnati, something of a Know-Nothing stronghold, had been the scene of riots between the Know-Nothings and Germans as recently as April 1855.Footnote 55 Prior to this Know-Nothing supporters had also held a counter-demonstration against the reception for John Mitchel, accusing the city council members who attended of ‘toadying’ to foreigners and begging for ‘foreign votes’.Footnote 56 This prevalence of nativism had been one of the reasons the British government had been so confident of positive recruitment results in America.Footnote 57 It was a lie by Conahan, but a believable one.
Rowcroft's lawyers rebuked the Irish-born witnesses for putting ‘the enginery of American law in operation to gratify their ancient malice against England’. It was suggested that in their entrapment plot they had ‘not acted as Americans, but as Irishmen, and were likely to arouse a storm of indignation against them’. This was a sharp point and on the stand both Conahan and Reidy stated how they were naturalized Americans. The prosecuting counsel countered adroitly that the witnesses, wishing ‘to keep their friends from being seduced into the service of the country which has injured them so much’, had simply ‘listened to the promises and received the bribes of the British Agents, and in this they gained for themselves instead of a disgraceful, an enviable position as defenders of the laws of their new country’.Footnote 58
The main threads to Rowcroft's defence were (1) that as a consul he was exempt from arrest in his own house and had been illegally brought before court, and (2) that actual rather than attempted enlistment was necessary to have committed the offence. Commissioner Warden who, an agitated Rowcroft claimed, was a member of an Irish-American society, gave no credence to the cry of immunity, stating instead Rowcroft had ‘no privileges, rights or immunities … more than any other Foreigner transiently residing in Cincinnati’. He similarly disappointed Rowcroft with his judgement that even the paying of passage amounted to an infringement of the neutrality laws and sent the case forward for trial.Footnote 59 The British consul was released on bail. Clarendon, wary of any impression of official sanction, believed there was little more he could do other than approve Rowcroft's drawing down of $1,000 for his defence.Footnote 60 The trial, due first in October, was put back until December and then again to April 1856.
III
Though the instructions came too late to save Rowcroft, Clarendon actually called for an end to recruitment in America in late June 1855.Footnote 61 This was also too late to prevent a further steep decline in Anglo-American relations as, after the trial of Henry Hertz in Philadelphia, secretary of state Marcy knew Crampton had lied to him at their March meeting. James Buchanan, the American ambassador in London, approached Clarendon for explanations. The foreign secretary, however, admitted no culpability, insisting strict instructions had been sent to British officials to guard against any violation of the neutrality laws. His words left the American government ‘far from feeling satisfied’.Footnote 62
The recriminations continued, a note of Marcy's stating with certainty ‘that officers of the Britannick Majesty's Government were taking an active part’ in ‘the scheme to raise recruits for the British Army’ within the territories of the United States.Footnote 63 The ill will over recruiting spread into other quarrels. The Anglophobic New York Herald, for instance, reported that the British and French consuls in that city had colluded to prevent the conclusion of a treaty between the United States and the Dominican Republic.Footnote 64
The British government, for its part, was suspicious of rumours of a new and powerful privateer being built in New York under the direction of a Russian naval officer, Clarendon complaining to Palmerston about the ‘pseudo-neutrality’ of the United States.Footnote 65 They had some cause for complaint as the Russian government did actually place an order for a steamship in New York. The boat, named America and nominally American-owned, was completed too late to take an active part in the war. Marcy, however, was undoubtedly friendly with Edouard de Stoeckl, the Russian chargé d'affaires in Washington, as were a number of important senators.Footnote 66
All through the autumn, then, and into the winter months of 1855–6 Anglo-American relations continued to deteriorate. A near monomaniacal Rowcroft blamed ‘Irish renegades’ in the press who never neglected ‘an opportunity of spitting their spite against everything British’ for this stirring of American prejudices.Footnote 67 Strong anyway, the Irish imprint on the American press had grown exponentially in the years following the famine and the failed 1848 Young Ireland rebellion.Footnote 68 It was not just major figures like Mitchel who had turned to journalism in America, but a myriad of lesser-known Young Irelanders including P. J. Smyth, Thomas Devin Reilly, and John Savage.
Newspapers like The Irish American and The Citizen (the latter owned and edited by Mitchel) did rail against the British war effort and laud the tsar.Footnote 69 Rowcroft exaggerated their influence, however, public opinion in the United States favouring Russia for its own selfish reasons, primarily a fear of a strong Anglo-French alliance hindering American expansion and domination of the Western hemisphere. Other factors included a preference for Christian Russia against Muslim Turkey, in whose defence Britain and France had declared war.Footnote 70 There was also the not inconsequential fact that the War of 1812 between Britain and America was still alive in many minds, as were the succession of diplomatic and territorial disputes that had pockmarked the 1830s and 1840s. Nevertheless, the deep cultural ties between the two countries ensured Britain was not totally bereft of strong allies in the United States, including the influential Harper's Magazine.Footnote 71
Rowcroft's attention meanwhile, with his own trial being repeatedly postponed, focused increasingly on the Irish plotters and a new, more dangerous plot. He claimed to ‘have information of a meeting that took place before my arrest’ between Conahan, Commissioner Warden, and the Irish-born Archbishop John Purcell of Cincinnati.Footnote 72 The entrapment plot stretched higher still, the consul insisted, his intelligence pointing ‘to a member of the present Government of the United States as having been one of the parties concerned in instigating the plot to entrap me … which was arranged under the advice of Edward Purcell’, the brother of Archbishop Purcell. Edward Purcell, ‘a Priest of great smoothness, cunning, and advice’, was regarded, according to Rowcroft, ‘as “the Brain” of the Roman Catholic Church in Cincinnati’.Footnote 73
In early September 1855, Rowcroft described to Clarendon how ‘a scheme’ was ‘on foot … for making a descent on some part of the Irish coast by a body of men to proceed from the United States’. Involved in the scheme were Russian agents, the church hierarchy, and the same unnamed member of the American government. The plan, funded by the Russian government ‘through its Consul at New York’ and ‘the heads’ of the Catholic Church in Cincinnati, was well advanced, he wrote, with 10,000 men ready to move and a large supply of arms in New York. The consul was not insensible ‘to the ridiculous light in which this Irish project may be viewed’. Nevertheless, he could not divest himself ‘of the conviction, that, the scheme is real; is in progress; and will be attempted’.Footnote 74
Rowcroft's certainty at the involvement of the Cincinnati clergy is interesting given most references to this period point out instead the animosity that existed between Irish revolutionaries and the church, particularly in New York where Mitchel was embroiled in a very public dispute with the powerful Archbishop John Hughes.Footnote 75 The Purcells were at something of a remove from the church hierarchy, their strong anti-slavery views at variance with the main thrust of church thinking at the time.Footnote 76 The claims of collusion with the Cincinnati conspirators, however, seem unfounded.Footnote 77
Regarding an invasion of Ireland, the Emmet Monument Association, ‘one of the small societies into which Irish-American extremists were fragmented’, did make fanciful plans, though they came to nothing.Footnote 78 Similar schemes had been conceived in 1848, again amounting to nothing.Footnote 79 The Emmet Monument Association, founded in March 1855 by the Young Irelanders Michael Doheny and John O'Mahony, was a secret oath-bound society and precursor to the much more important Fenian Brotherhood, a number of whose American-based members did eventually sail to Ireland – more than a decade later – for the abortive rising of 1867.Footnote 80
In October 1855, Rowcroft forwarded to Crampton more details of the supposed invasion scheme. The command of the expedition, he claimed, was to be given to James Shields, an Irish-American general of some ‘military celebrity’.Footnote 81 Shields, a senator for Illinois and hero of the Mexican War, had been a long-time supporter of Ireland.Footnote 82 Crampton wrote appreciatively of all the information passed on. It concurred with reports from other consuls and he made it ‘the subject of a Representation to the Government of the United States’.Footnote 83
On 17 October Rowcroft reported the death (from natural causes) of one of the main conspirators against him, Daniel Conahan. More importantly, he reported that up to 1,500 men from Cincinnati had apparently enrolled in the invasion scheme and that the date of the expedition was fixed for May 1856, when the British fleet would be ‘absent in the Baltic’. It was a strong, strange combination, the ‘Irish Roman Catholic Party’ in league with both the Russian and American governments. Rowcroft stressed how he needed to be ‘exceedingly cautious’ in his part of the country where ‘daggers and revolvers are so readily used’.Footnote 84
By late October, Rowcroft was even more intimately acquainted with the Cincinnati conspiracy scene. An informant, ‘L’, had joined the Robert Emmet Club (as opposed to the Emmet Monument Association), the Cincinnati branch of the newly established Irish Emigrant Aid Society, a large Boston-based organization that had Robert Tyler – son of the former American president John Tyler – as its head. The Irish Emigrant Aid Society, a rival to the more secretive Emmet Monument Association, had only been set up in August 1855. The two organizations, however, instead of working together for the common cause, were soon caught up in an endless swirl of feuds and backbiting.Footnote 85
Rowcroft's informant had been made to pay a subscription of a dollar and raise his right hand to declare his hatred of Britain. The motto of the group, he told the consul, was ‘Liberty for Ireland or Death’. The substance of his information was that the ‘movement is known to the American Executive Government and is secretly approved and “winked at” by them’. He added that:
the promise of gain held out by the leaders to the ignorant persons who join is, that, Ireland being made a Republic, all the Estates of those not engaged in the Insurrection shall be forfeited, and divided among those who have effected the revolution; so that, as they say, every man (of the party) shall have his own freehold forever.Footnote 86
By 19 November 1855, Rowcroft believed it was time to make public the full depth – as he saw it – of the conspiracy.Footnote 87 The rumoured plot had begun to attract sensationalist coverage in the press on both sides of the Atlantic, for instance the New York Herald headline ‘The Great Celto-American Invasion Project’.Footnote 88 Nevertheless, he saw flaws, too, in going public; it would be ‘an end to further discoveries’ and there would be ‘a great danger of the assassination of those who have been instrumental in detecting the Plot’. Furthermore, any legal action would have to go through the office of Hugh Jewett, the district attorney for Ohio, whom Rowcroft believed to be sympathetic to the Irish. It might be better, he suggested, to intercept the expedition at sea.Footnote 89
A week later, Rowcroft was ready to act, his legal advisers certain he could secure a conviction against the Irish plotters.Footnote 90 Rowcroft informed Clarendon how he could demonstrate that the Irish in Cincinnati were gone beyond mere ‘preparing’ and had in fact broken the neutrality laws themselves by enlisting soldiers, accumulating arms, and collecting money for an invasion. On Crampton's advice Rowcroft withheld temporarily from this course of action.Footnote 91 However, no definite orders came from London against securing legal process.
Clarendon had been lord lieutenant of Ireland in 1848, when similar stories about an invasion from America had proved illusory. He did not really believe them now either, admitting to Palmerston, the prime minister (and foreign minister in 1848), that the Irish in America were ‘not doing more agst. us than the Refugees here do agst. the countries of their birth in Europe’.Footnote 92 Clarendon, however, did not write to Rowcroft quickly enough to assuage the consul's fears. Rowcroft approached the local authorities and on the night of 4 January 1856 the arrests took place of twenty members ‘of the Irish Club engaged in the Conspiracy for promoting Insurrection in Ireland, and for aiding it by an armed force from this country’.Footnote 93 That the Irish had no foreknowledge of this action rather discredits some of Rowcroft's earlier accusations against the local authorities of being in league with the conspirators.Footnote 94
The chief target of the raid, Edward Kenifeck, the club secretary, was ‘arrested just before he entered the outer door of the Hall’. The contents of the club's minute books, Rowcroft boasted, completely established ‘the Case against the accused’.Footnote 95 Kenifeck, a native of Limerick, had been a Young Ireland adherent in 1848 before fleeing to America in the aftermath of the failed rising.Footnote 96
The Irish arrested were charged, like Rowcroft previously, with breaking the neutrality laws of the United States. Their trial was followed closely in Britain and Ireland, The Nation in Dublin accusing Rowcroft of ‘wreaking a little petty vengeance on some of the gentlemen who spoiled his recruiting scheme’.Footnote 97 Such comments, however, could not disguise the complete lack of enthusiasm for any revolt within Ireland. The country, slowly beginning to prosper again after the turmoil of the famine, was remarkably quiescent during the Crimean War; so much so, in fact, that the British government felt free to pardon the Young Ireland leaders, including William Smith O'Brien, still captive in Tasmania.Footnote 98 According to a report from the home office in London: ‘the ample demand for labour, with other indications of permanent improvements, together with the growth of better feelings among the people affords reasonable security against any designs of disaffected persons’.Footnote 99
Though Rowcroft testified at the trial, the prime witness against the Irish was their fellow-countryman John Barber. Barber, a twenty-six-year-old presbyterian from Co. Tyrone, was a naturalized American who had emigrated in 1845 before moving to Ohio in 1851. Barber had met Rowcroft a number of times and is almost certainly the spy, ‘L’, referred to by the consul.
Barber, initiated into the Robert Emmet Club on 24 September 1855, testified as to the passwords and secret signs, to the complicity of the clergy, and to the object of a military expedition, to the collection of funds for the purchase of arms, and to there being usually twenty-five to forty men present at the meetings. A second witness, John Powers, a friend of Barber's, also gave evidence that highlighted the involvement of the clergy. Barber had met Rowcroft more than fifteen times and received about $100 in instalments. He claimed, however, to have spent much more than he ever received.Footnote 100
The trial of the Irish in Cincinnati concluded in late January 1856. Rowcroft was weary from the tribulations and wrote that he ‘should be sorry to be engaged in such another affair’. Still, he seemed to let slip a sense of excitement at the dangers involved in exposing the plot and showed a bit of the melodramatic novelist remained in him. The principal witness, Barber, had twice been shot at, one bullet passing through the front brim of his hat and cutting off a lock of his hair. Rowcroft, too, received violent threats and had to be careful when sitting in his room not to make an easy target ‘to any lurking assassin’. There was, he complained, no protection ‘in this part of the world’.Footnote 101
To Rowcroft's amazement, Judge Humphrey Leavitt decided there were no grounds for holding the Irish parties to bail, as the evidence furnished proved ‘not the first act of military movement, or organization … that could bring the defendants within the provisions of the act of 1818’.Footnote 102 American attitudes to the recruitment affair had hardened considerably by this stage, Marcy, the secretary of state, communicating to Buchanan in London the government's desire for Crampton and three consuls, Anthony Barclay at New York, George Mathew at Philadelphia, and Rowcroft to be recalled.Footnote 103 The letter, dated 28 December 1855, was forwarded to Clarendon. The foreign secretary was uncomfortable with the actions of diplomats who had displayed ‘rather more zeal than prudence’ in gathering recruits.Footnote 104 He defended Crampton, however, in a meeting with Buchanan at the end of January 1856 and held back from discussing the topic too closely. The Crimean fortress of Sevastopol had fallen the previous September and Clarendon was engaged in negotiations to conclude the war. The recruitment question was old news to Clarendon's mind, a ‘bygone transaction’ that could be put on hold.Footnote 105
Not long after this meeting with Buchanan, Clarendon asked Rowcroft what proof he had of American complicity in ‘the project of invading Ireland’.Footnote 106 The essence of Rowcroft's argument against the American government was that by ‘abstaining from checking the [invasion] attempt’, it incurred ‘the charge of lending its secret countenance to the design’. The consul, admitting a reliance on circumstantial evidence, cited the constant indifference of the American government despite representations made by Crampton to Marcy in October 1855 and the very public nature of some of the meetings of Irish-American agitators, including, in December 1855, a convention of the Irish Emigrant Aid Society held at Astor Hall in New York, which some of the Cincinnati conspirators attended. Rowcroft offered the electioneering of President Pierce as a reason for this conduct. It was by the Irish vote he had reached the White House, Rowcroft claimed, and it was only by the Irish vote he could hope to stay there, 1856 being an election year.Footnote 107 The consul was mistaken in this analysis, Pierce's victory in 1852 due far more to support from the expansionist ‘Young America’ movement.Footnote 108
Pierce had shown some sympathy for the Irish cause, nevertheless, the Young Irelander Thomas Francis Meagher attending his inauguration in early 1853. This is unsurprising given this was a period (even allowing for the strong nativist spirit) when much of American society – itself hewn out of revolution against an oppressor – retained an affinity for nascent nationalist movements like those of the Poles, Hungarians, and Irish. The American government, indeed, had been the first officially to recognize the revolutionary government in France in 1848.Footnote 109 It was not actually until the decades following the Civil War that American opinion turned sharply against Irish revolutionists, the result of a shift in mindset that came to identify Irish nationalism with socialism, anarchism, and other ‘threats to the established order’.Footnote 110
IV
By late March 1856, Rowcroft's attention had returned to his own impending trial in Cincinnati. He asked Clarendon to allow Korponay, by now an army officer in London, to make some ‘declaration or oath’ admitting it was he (Korponay) ‘who directed all the movements of the agents active in forwarding volunteers to Canada from Cincinnati’.Footnote 111 Clarendon held back from giving Rowcroft too much support while diplomatic relations with America remained tense. Buchanan had returned to the United States to run (successfully in the end) for the Democratic nomination for the presidential election and was replaced as ambassador in London by a former vice-president, George Dallas. The British government continued to refuse to recall Crampton and the three consuls, and Palmerston had actually to be talked out of sending back Dallas instead.Footnote 112 In letters to his father, Sir Philip, the surgeon-general to the British forces in Ireland, Crampton praised Clarendon and Palmerston for standing up for him ‘manfully’.Footnote 113
Regarding his trial, Rowcroft feared that Dr Hamilton had ‘been tampered with by the Irish Party’. Worse, Captain Frederick Poshner, one of the Hungarians arrested back in July 1855, had turned ‘States Evidence’ and was to be the principal witness against him. The consul wrote forlornly that ‘any amount of Perjury can be obtained in a case against the British Government’ and ‘no justice can be expected from American Judges or American Juries in a political trial in which the British are the parties to be muleted or insulted [sic]’.Footnote 114
Despite the number of previous postponements, Rowcroft's legal team were of the opinion that another, until October 1856, would be favourable. Their reason: the highly charged atmosphere in Cincinnati where the Democratic convention was about to be held to choose a candidate for the forthcoming presidential election.Footnote 115 Jewett, the district attorney, delighted Rowcroft by making just such an offer in view of ‘the negotiations now pending which may result in the settlement of all questions touching the foreign enlistments’.Footnote 116 With the peace conference in Paris nearing conclusion, Clarendon had turned his attention to negotiations – less aggressive and intransigent from both sides – with Marcy and Dallas.Footnote 117 The British government, nevertheless, would not escape the ‘recruitment affair’ without reproach.
On 31 May 1856, Rowcroft received notification of the withdrawal of his exequatur. Already, on 28 May, Crampton had been handed back his passport. Barclay and Mathew, in New York and Philadelphia respectively, were also expelled from America. The reaction in Britain was less outraged than expected, the realities of the consequences, commercial and otherwise, of a war with America having set in alongside a general war-weariness after the traumatic excursion to the Crimea. Clarendon, in fact, complained to Palmerston about the ‘cowardly feeling’ in the country regarding war with America.Footnote 118
On 9 July 1856, Rowcroft informed Clarendon that a ‘Nolle Prosequi’ had been entered into ‘the Minutes of the United States Court in respect of the Prosecution against me and other parties charged with an infringement of the neutrality law’.Footnote 119 The prosecution was formally abandoned. The consul left America with his family in mid-August. He did not survive the journey, however, dying en route having complained of a bad cold. The Times floated the possibility of ‘foul play’, clearly hinting at some Irish involvement. The idea that Irish-American conspirators had slipped aboard the ship to poison or in any other way harm the ex-consul is improbable at best. The strenuous exertions, nevertheless, of the previous twelve months may have taken their toll on the fifty-eight-year-old Rowcroft whose wife was later granted a civil list pension in light of his service.Footnote 120
V
Caleb Cushing, the attorney general under Pierce, was among the most hawkish members of that administration, pushing hard for Crampton's dismissal and stating explicitly the need to ‘take the opportunity to hit Lord Palmerston and his foreign secretary hard … perhaps gaining something on the Central American issue in the process’.Footnote 121 The ‘recruitment affair’ was thus conjoined with the wider Anglo-American antagonism over Central America, and while one historian has condemned the United States for making ‘a grave issue of some inconsequential activities of British diplomats that were of questionable legality’, still it made clear America's increasingly uncompromising stance.Footnote 122 This hard-nosed approach was evident again in late 1856 when the American government officially recognized the new regime established in Nicaragua by the Californian filibusterer William Walker, a regime that claimed sovereignty over all of the Mosquito Coast, including the contentious British settlement at Greytown. The ‘Cushing Gang’, Clarendon observed, did not want reconciliation, ‘big words & offensive articles’ suiting their political ends.Footnote 123
Nevertheless, while happy to put pressure on the British government and flex its diplomatic muscles, the American administration, like its rival in London, had no real desire to go so far as actual war. In this respect it is, perhaps, not insignificant that despite first seeking the recall of Crampton and the consuls in December 1855 the United States did not actually expel them until more than a month after the official end of the Crimean War, thus diminishing the impact of the action. Likewise, after its initial backing, the American government later retracted its support for the filibusterer Walker so as to prevent matters escalating with Britain.Footnote 124
Regarding the Irish in America, John Mitchel, in New York at the beginning of the Crimean War, complained bitterly about the want of energy amongst his countrymen to make use of the war for Ireland's benefit.Footnote 125 This apathy, combined with other personal factors, caused a dispirited Mitchel to abandon New York in early 1855 and move to Tennessee. The majority of the Irish in America, as Kerby Miller and John Belchem have both intimated, were perhaps still reeling from the embarrassment of 1848 and their vocal support for the failed Young Ireland rebellion.Footnote 126 Others sympathized with the idea of invading Ireland but did not think it ‘practicable in the present state of the world’, the British spy Andrew Doyle discovered, and stayed clear of involvement.Footnote 127 Those more willing to act, meanwhile, organized too late (the large meeting in Astor Hall in December 1855 taking place several months after the fall of Sevastopol) and wasted their energies in seemingly endless infighting.
The example of the Cincinnati Irish and the ‘recruitment affair’, however, shows one portion at least of the post-famine Irish immigrant population took advantage of the difficulties between Britain and America to exact some measure of revenge. They met with tangible success, too, proving not all 1850s Irish-American nationalism was, as James Stephens, the future Fenian leader, suggested, just ‘a windbag or a phantom’. Kerby Miller has quarrelled with this demeaning description and Stephens's trivializing of the ‘fierce dedication’ and ‘depths of emotion’ of some Irish nationalists in America.Footnote 128 Miller refers to Mitchel, Doheny, and O'Mahony but could just have easily have been writing about Conahan, Kenifeck, and Halpin, the latter of whom wound up on trial in Ireland for his part in the Fenian rising of 1867.Footnote 129
