The Fenian raids were a series of incursions carried out by the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish republican organization based in the United States, on military fortifications, customs posts, and other targets in Canada (called British North America until 1867) in 1866, and again from 1870 to 1871. A number of separate incursions by the Fenian Brotherhood into Canada were undertaken to bring pressure on the British government to withdraw from Ireland, although none of these raids achieved their aims.
While authorities in the United States arrested the men and confiscated the arms of the Fenian Brotherhood, there was speculation that some in the U.S. government ignored the preparations undertaken by the Fenians due to anger over British assistance to the Confederacy during the American Civil War. The Fenian raids were one of the factors that led to Canadian Confederation, as the provinces united to face the threat of invasions.
==== Abortive raid from Dedham, Massachusetts ====
In Massachusetts, the Dedham chapter of the Fenian Brotherhood, which had offices in the Norfolk House, hosted a meeting at Temperance Hall in which a raid into Canada was organized. John R. Bullard, a recent Harvard Law School graduate, was elected moderator of the meeting and, having been swept up in his own sudden importance and fever of the meeting, ended his animated speech by asking "Who would be the first man to come forward and pledge himself to go to Canada and help free Ireland?" The first of the roughly dozen men to sign the "enlistment papers" were Patrick Donohoe and Thomas Golden. Thomas Brennan said he could not participate, but donated $50 to the cause. The meeting ended with the group singing "The Wearing of the Green." The raid was a failure. Some of the men got as far as St. Albans, Vermont, but none made it to Canada. U.S. authorities arrested a few, and some had to send home for money.
This abortive Fenian raid occurred in April 1866, at Campobello Island, New Brunswick. A Fenian Brotherhood war party of over 700 members under the direction of Bernard Doran Killian arrived at the Maine shore opposite the island intending to seize Campobello from the British. Royal Navy officer Charles Hastings Doyle, stationed at Halifax, Nova Scotia, responded decisively. On 17 April, he left Halifax with several warships carrying over 700 British soldiers and proceeded to Passamaquoddy Bay, where the Fenian force was concentrated. This show of force discouraged the Fenians, and they dispersed. The invasion reinforced the idea of protection for New Brunswick by joining with the neighbouring colonies of Nova Scotia and the Province of Canada to form the new Dominion of Canada.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
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