When the courts finished with the Mollies, nineteen of their members
had been hanged, a large number imprisoned, and the organization was
completely wiped out.
Meantime the Fenian movement served to keep the Irish in the public
eye. This was no less than an attempt to free Ireland and disrupt the
British Empire, using the United States as a fulcrum, the Irish in
America as the power, and Canada as the lever. James Stephens, who
organized the Irish Republican Brotherhood, came to America in 1858 to
start a similar movement. After the Civil War, which supplied a
training school for whole regiments of Irish soldiers, a convention of
Fenians was held at Philadelphia in 1865 at which an "Irish Republic"
was organized, with a full complement of officers, a Congress, a
President, a Secretary of the Treasury, a Secretary of War, in fact, a
replica of the American Federal Government. It assumed the highly
absurd and dangerous position that it actually possessed sovereignty.
The luxurious mansion of a pill manufacturer in Union Square, New
York, was transformed into its government house, and bonds,
embellished with shamrocks and harps and a fine portrait of Wolfe
Tone, were issued, payable "ninety days after the establishment of the
Irish Republic." Differences soon arose, and Stephens, who had made
his escape from Richmond, near Dublin, where he had been in prison,
hastened to America to compose the quarrel which had now assumed true
Hibernian proportions.
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