Shiners on the River

This chapter investigates the activities of the Shiners, a notorious band of Irish Catholic lumberjacks in the Ottawa Valley who haunted the public imagination as the very worst representation of Irish male violence in the Canadas. Their criminal activities included rape, arson, assault, battery, and murder. They were led by Peter Aylen, an Irishman who had risen to the heights of economic and social power in the timber business. Aylen wanted to destroy his French Canadian and Orange rivals, and used his teams of lumbermen to achieve these aims on either side of the Ottawa River. The chapter recounts many of the Shiners’ worst crimes within a framework of gendered violence and uses contemporary comparisons with the Irish in Australia and the United States in order to place the Shiners’ infamy within a broader transnational context.

The Irish Hero

This chapter is a case study of James FitzGibbon, the “Irish Everyman” of Upper Canada. He was one of the best-known Irishmen in the Canadas in the first half of the nineteenth century, with a sterling public reputation for heroism, physical courage, and gentlemanly conduct during his lifetime. A protégé of General Sir Isaac Brock and a noted officer during the War of 1812, FitzGibbon later was a famous mediator between Irish Catholic immigrants and the colonial establishment and a ‘one-man riot squad’ when threats of Irish violence turned into actual altercations. After the 1840s, however, he became a mostly forgotten figure, in part perhaps because his representations of Irish manliness and heroism were so thoroughly traditional. This chapter is the first to explore his importance to his fellow Irishmen in the Canadas and to the colonial establishment through ethnic and gendered paradigms.

Wanted? Coming to the Canadas, 1798–1830

This chapter explores themes of war, migration, gender, and sectarian conflict between 1798 and 1830. It questions how the 1798 Irish Rising factored into some emigrants’ motivations for coming to Canada in the decades that followed. The Rising also affected how these new arrivals were associated with presumptions of Irish aggression and disloyalty. Many United Empire Loyalists in Upper Canada expressed particular concerns about the violent tendencies of new Irish immigrants and the importation of Irish sectarian conflict to British North America. The chapter then examines the influence of James and Alexander Buchanan, brothers from the north of Ireland in the colonial establishment who decided which Irish immigrants would be most welcome in the Canadas. The chapter closes with the case studies of the Richards and Tackaberry families on their journeys from Co. Wexford to Upper Canada after the War of 1812.

Dismemberment at Windmill Point

This chapter analyses events before, during, and after the 1838 Battle of the Windmill in Upper Canada. It explores how masculine imagery informed the manner in which the Irishmen fighting at Windmill Point were perceived by their peers, their enemies, and amongst themselves. It pays particular attention to local Orangemen who fought in the battle and how that hyper-masculinized and often violent Irish fraternity positioned itself within the frameworks of loyalism, social ascendancy, and imperial defence. In trying to prove their loyalty and gain social respectability within the colony, many of the Irishmen fighting at the windmill ended up reinforcing some of the more basic and crude stereotypes about their ethnicity and gender. The chapter includes gendered analyses of the mutilations that occurred during the battle, and closes by comparing how punishments against rebels in 1838 mirrored those from the 1798 Irish Rising.

Conclusion

The conclusion of this book re-examines the thematic interplay between gender, violence, and loyalty in shaping evaluations of Irish manliness and constructions of Irish masculinities in Upper and Lower Canada in the first half of the nineteenth century. It questions why Canadian examples of a gendered Irish Diaspora have not gained as much traction as those from colonial Australia or nineteenth century America. The chapter reasserts how the book as a whole has added to various historiographic and gendered debates and emphasises that using a gendered paradigm in concert with cultural analyses of violence and loyalty can weaken predominant local, national, and imperial myths. It closes by asserting that violent Irishmen very much existed in the Canadas. While they did not represent a majority of their countrymen in the colonies, they did represent important aspects of Irish Canadian masculinities that have been underplayed or ignored in national and diasporic histories.

Bodies of Men

This chapter explores what qualities of manliness were valued in Canadian colonial discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century. Evaluations of Irish manliness in Lower and Upper Canada were not only the result of social constructions, but also of people’s emotional reactions to the stories that they heard about Irishmen arriving in their towns, cities, and countryside. Codes of Irish manliness in the Canadas, as elsewhere in the empire, included both dominant and demeaning cultural representations that were the result of only a handful of real experiences and were much more products of fantasy and the ‘wild Irish’ stereotype that had followed them across the ocean. However, these same presumptions were powerful in determining how Irishmen were accepted or rejected as fellow settlers, as well as affecting individual Irishmen’s private thoughts and public actions.

Irish Patriotes

This chapter explores how codes of manliness and the culture of masculinity in Lower Canada revealed themselves in the public career of Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan, the final editor of The Vindicator newspaper in Montreal and a major figure within the parti patriote on the eve of the 1837 Lower Canadian Rebellion. Using the themes of gender, violence, and loyalty, the chapter analyses O’Callaghan’s fidelity to the patriote cause, his commitment to overthrowing British rule, and his ability to use gendered and inflammatory language in order to qualify what and who was truly ‘Irish’ in the Canadas. Through his Irishness, his radicalism, and his use of gendered language, Edmund Bailey O’Callaghan made the Irish element of the Lower Canadian Rebellion appear absolutely fundamental; in the end, however, appearance was not the same thing as reality.

Ogle Gowan and Orangeism in Upper Canada

This chapter examines the early career of Ogle R. Gowan, the founder of the official Orange Order in Canada and his quest for respectability in political life and within the colonial establishment. Gowan introduced a more belligerent construction of Irish loyalist manliness than had existed prior to his arrival in Upper Canada. His public representation of Irishness centred on defending Protestantism, the fraternalism of the Orange lodge, and extreme loyalty to the Crown. The chapter traces his path from Co. Wexford to Upper Canada, and how he presented Orangeism as a vital transatlantic link between Ireland and the Canadas. The chapter also investigates how Gowan’s wife, Frances, was involved with his first cousin, James R. Gowan, and the implications which that close relationship had on James’ decision to abandon Orangeism in favour of a successful public career that his cousin Ogle was never able to attain.

Introduction

Benjamin Lett’s escapades on the Canadian frontier, including the destruction of the Brock Monument in 1841, strengthened the stereotype of Irishmen in the Canadas as violent, rebellious, and politically agitated newcomers who created an unsettling presence in the colonies. The violent actions of comparatively few Irishmen in the Canadas were more powerful in the colonial imagination than the lived experiences of hundreds of thousands of their countrymen in Lower and Upper Canada. This chapter introduces the power that this negative stereotype had in shaping the experiences of Irish immigrants in the decades before the Great Irish Famine. It outlines how codes of manliness and constructions of masculinities intersected with popular ideas about Irish violence and loyalty, placing the book’s subsequent case studies in a wider international and comparative framework. It also explores previous historiographies of the Irish in Canada and argues for the influence that gendered analyses can bring to transnational histories.