Who’s Afraid of the Fenians? The Fenian Scare on Prince Edward Island, 1865-1867 (original) (raw)

des rebelles irlandais des États-Unis déterminés à envahir l'Amérique du Nord britannique pour contraindre la Grande-Bretagne à relâcher son emprise sur l'Irlande, déferla sur l'Île-du-Prince-Édouard. Contrairement à d'autres régions de l'Amérique du Nord britannique, la façon dont on réagit à la menace d'invasion fénienne à l'Île-du-Prince-Édouard avait beaucoup moins à voir avec la Confédération qu'avec la campagne alors menée par le gouvernement local pour éliminer la Tenant League (ligue des fermiers à bail), un mouvement radical de réforme agraire, et sa manipulation de la querelle interconfessionnelle pour obtenir la victoire électorale, illustrant ainsi comment les questions transnationales se transforment par leur interaction avec des enjeux locaux. In the winter of 1866 Prince Edward Island was swept by rumours of an attack by the Fenian Brotherhood, Irish American rebels intent on using an invasion of British North America to loosen Britain's hold on Ireland. Unlike other parts of British North America, the handling of the Fenian Scare on Prince Edward Island had much less to do with Confederation than the local government's ongoing campaign to suppress the Tenant League, a radical land reform movement, and its manipulation of sectarian discord for electoral gain-thus illustrating how transnational issues mutate through interaction with local issues. IT IS EASY, FROM WHERE WE SIT, TO SCOFF AT THE FENIANS. First there is the implausible conceit-at least to us-of the Fenian strategy in the 1860s. The American offshoot of the Irish Republican Brotherhood intended to seize part of British North America and hold it hostage to help liberate Ireland from British rule or, if conquest proved impractical, draw off British forces to improve the odds for an insurrection in Ireland itself. Then there is the undertone of buffoonery beneath the surface bluster of the Irish-American cause: a secret society that could not keep its secrets, a brotherhood in arms consumed with sibling rivalries, and invaders who barely got beyond gunshot of the British North American-American border. But few people were laughing in the winter of 1866, when Fenianism's giant shadow obscured the real magnitude of the threat it posed, and rumour multiplied what British North Americans thought they saw: thousands of well-armed, battle-hardened veterans of the American Civil War, backed by the willing alms of millions of anglophobe Irish-Americans, controlled by scheming demagogues in league with Irish revolutionaries back in the "Old Sod," and condoned by an American government willing to