Because of the day that's in it.
The San Patricio Battalion, the Pig War, and why the United States would go down to defeat if Mad King Donald ordered an invasion of Canada.
Yesterday was a Holy Day of Obligation and a permissible reprieve from my Lenten abstinence from the drink. That would be a fine lede sentence if it were true.
The fact of it is I was exhausting myself in background research for the National Post and for a magazine-length Real Story Special that was intended for Sunday that I’d had to set aside because rivers fell from the sky and the winds howled and the electricity disappeared this weekend and the wifi was knocked out.
So here we are and it isn’t even Lá fhéile Pádraig anymore. Oh well, missed my chance and all that. That Weekend Real Story Special is still in the works but for now I decided to do this, and even better, today is Saint Sheelah’s Day. Do read the sources to today’s newsletter in the links if you like but not until you’re done reading because it’s an interruption and there’s a lot of them. And at the bottom I have a handy reading list from the sources I rely on here.
A Brief Descent into the Half-Light of Irish Saints’ Days
I truly wish that jackeen academics hadn’t taken on the English habit of referring to Ireland’s female divinities as “goddesses,” as though they were objects of worship or belonged to the ‘pagan” past, as though there was ever such a clear distinction among the Irish between Christianity and the island’s native cosmology in the first place.
I’m thinking here of Saint Brigid, the more prominent contemporary of Saint Patrick, but also Saint Gobnait the Beekeeper, Aoibheall, Ériu, Banba and all the rest. Mythical heroines, more like, and forgotten at least partly because of the misconception that Patrick, a freed slave, brought Christianity to Ireland. He didn’t. There were already monastic cells of Christians in Ireland, and a colourful cast of what would later be called saints.
My favorite is The Morrigan, paradoxically the patroness of death, childbirth, motherhood and war, who always puts me in mind of the poem attributed to Amergin Glúingel from about 3,000 years ago or thereabouts. Several translations persist, but it basically goes like this: I am the hawk in the air. I am the lake in the plain. I am a salmon in the water, a ray of the sun, the point of the spear in battle. I am the god who puts fire in your head.
Coming Back Up For Air
On the subject of war, at the moment there is a great deal of “robust discourse” touching on military topics owing to the bone-spurs draft dodger currently defiling the White House, his threats to annex Canada, his sabotage of 76 years of NATO solidarity and his defection to the camp of the world’s tyrannies.
There’s also the specific matter of Trump’s plug ignorance about the Canada-U.S. border, how it ended up where it is and why it’s there, and how he’d like to “get rid of that artificially drawn line,” which is no such thing. It’s very real. And that’s the backstory to this extended-play edition of The Real Story. It’s about borderlands.
In Both Worlds Now
The line between Saint Sheelah and Bronze Age myth-women who preceded her is largely “artificial,” and the vast gulf that separates Canada and the United States involves a history that has been forgotten almost as completely as Sheelah herself. Until only very recently, her memory from the time before An Gorta Mor, the Great Hunger, lingered almost solely in small villages in Newfoundland and in the places where Famine emigrants settled in Australia.
The very real story of Canada’s bedrock differences with the United States came close to being entirely expunged from our own collective memory, too. It’s what happened after nearly a half-century of revisionist, masochistic Canadian pseudo-history, the rise of a neo-Maoist ideology of “settler colonialism” in the universities’ social sciences and humanities faculties, and then a decade of the Trudeau government’s heavily ritualized knee-taking, flag-lowering, Cancel Canada Day national shaming project.
Which brings to mind another auld poem, Great my glory: I that bore Cuchulainn the valiant. Great my shame: My own children that sold their mother. This might seem a bit melodramatic and I suppose it is, given the day that’s in it.
Some Things You Need To Know First
Before we come to the officially censored story of the gallant Battalion of Saint Patrick and the uncanny links between their story and the Pig War of 1859, you need to know that the whole thing has everything to do with the Canada-U.S. border and what makes our story so different from that of the Americans. I will need to explain this right away.
The Pig War started when the Yankee Lyman Cutler shot one of our pigs on San Juan Island, in the Gulf Islands, just a few sea miles from Victoria. The incident led to a standoff between our soldiers and theirs that wasn’t resolved until October 21 , 1872.
Kaiser Wilhelm I, the Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia, had agreed to serve as arbitrator. The kaiser appointed the Prince Otto von Bismarck to adjudicate. Bismark shifted the Canada-U.S. border through the Gulf Islands from where it had been, in Rosario Strait, to Haro Strait, to the great satisfaction of the Americans.
The arbitration forced us to surrender San Juan Island, Orcas Island, Lopez Island, Blakely, Decatur, Shaw and the surrounding archipelago of smaller islands. And I’ve been bitter about it ever since, as I like to joke when I’m among American friends down that way.
The whole story isn’t so funny.
The calumny of it is that it heaped a petty betrayal upon what was already an ignominious territorial withdrawal in the Oregon Treaty of 1846, which forced our retreat from the lower portion of the Columbia Territory. It’s why the current boundaries of Canada’s Pacific province contain what is called British Columbia.
The whole story should tell you everything you need to know about the ordinarily taboo subject of American barbarism, which stands out in sharp relief and dramatic contrast with the civilized heritage and enlightened way of life that prevailed north of the American territories. This is no small difference. We aren’t different from Americans just because we’re not gun crazy and we say “sorry” as a form of greeting or constantly rely on “eh” as an interjection. The story of our differences is told in our borders, and that story has everything to do with the vile thing that has mutated into Trumpist belligerence.
Just Try It, Yanks.
The story of the San Patricios (which I’m coming to in just a moment, I promise) is immediately relevant to the current fashion for speculation about an American military invasion of Canada. I had my own fun with it a couple of months ago with the story of Canada’s very first “war game” exercise, Defence Scheme No. 1, the 1921 brainchild of Lieutanant-Colonel James “Buster” Sutherland Brown.
The Scheme laid out a strategy to defend against an American invasion by launching a series of preemptive surprise attacks, retreating back into the Canadian wilderness and waiting for Commonwealth reinforcements.
More recently, Eliot Cohen, professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, took a slightly more serious tone in The Atlantic, focusing mainly on 18th century invasions of Quebec: Invading Canada Is Not Advisable. We’ve tried before. It didn’t work out.
A couple of weeks ago there was this: Proposed bill would keep Trump from funding military invasion of Canada. Rhode Island congressman’s No Invading Allies Act also rules out Greenland and Panama Canal from hostile incursion.
Spoiler: The Yanks would lose after having been bled senseless in “a decades-long violent resistance, which would ultimately destroy the United States,” not least because of the decent American patriots who should be counted on to fight on our side for the purpose of rebuilding their own destroyed republic to its former glory. Remember that bit when we come to the San Patricios.
We should always bear in mind that the American people have been our beloved cousins for most of the past 100 years, that only a lowbrow tenth of Canada’s population at the very outside would want to join the United States, and an even smaller proportion of Americans harbour Trumpist fantasies about annexing Canada. These facts would matter rather a lot in the vanishingly tiny possibility that push should comes to shove in the current unpleasantness.
Which brings us to the main event in our story today.
The Legion of Strangers
In Mexico, the San Patricios are remembered as heroes. Every September 12 Mexican bagpipers play a tribute to them in Mexico City’s San Jacinto Square. On that same day every year in Clifden, County Galway, the birthplace of the the battalion’s commander, John Riley, the town hoists the Mexican flag to the top of the town’s flagmasts. The Irish and Mexican memory comes from the time of the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848.
In the United States the San Patricios are remembered rarely and begrudgingly, and usually in ways more suitable to a certain kind of maudlin paddywhackery for which Americans of Irish extraction are sometimes known, may their hearts be blessed.
The story of the San Patricios was long officially suppressed in America. It wasn’t until 1915, more than six decades after the end of the Mexican-American War, that a Congressional Inquiry revealed the cover-up that had had kept the story from the American people.
Like so many Irishmen during years of the Great Hunger, the battalion commander Riley ended up in America in an army uniform. In Ireland, Riley had been recruited by the British and trained as an artilleryman, and after leaving the army he appears to have emigrated to Canada in the early 1840s, quite possibly signing up with the 66th (Berkshire) Regiment of Foot. In any case, by 1843, he showed up at Fort Mackinac, in Michigan, and enlisted on the American side.
This was not a pleasant time to be an Irish Catholic in the United States. The American Know-Nothing Party was on the rise, and “Nativist” Protestants were routinely inciting ant-Catholic riots and church burnings. To be an Irishman in the American Army was to be treated little better than livestock or cannon fodder, but Irishmen needed work and the U.S. Army needed soldiers, because the expansionist American president James K. Polk declared war on Mexico in May of 1846.
Polk’s intention was to annex all of the Mexican territories north of the Rio Grande. The American slave states were all for war. New Englanders were not. Neither was the great Abraham Lincoln, then a young Illinois Congressman. But Polk’s side prevailed. The war was on, and it was brutal. The burning of churches and the slaughter of Mexican civilians were commonplace atrocities.
Ulysses S. Grant, who would later go on to become a great general and a decent president, was a young soldier at the time. “I do not think there ever was a more wicked war than that waged by the United States in Mexico,” Grant wrote in his memoirs. “I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.”
There were roughly 5,000 Irishmen enlisted in the American ranks when war was declared, and if their cruel treatment at the hands of the officer class wasn’t enough to cause them to bolt, their sympathies with their fellow Catholics among the Mexican poor often sufficed. About a fifth of the Irish deserted.
Riley, who came to be called “Juan Reley,” swam across the Rio Grande to join the Mexican forces shortly before war was officially declared. It was due to what he would later call “the common bonds of religion and Ireland’s long kinship with Spanish-speaking Catholic nations.” Riley and his second in command, Santiago O’Leary, were soon joined on the Mexican side by several hundred of their countrymen.
Originally called the Legion of Strangers, not all of Riley’s men were Irish. Among the later recruits were poor Catholic immigrants from the European continent and escaped slaves from America’s southern states, but it was under an Irish banner they fought. “That glorious Emblem of native rights,” Riley wrote, “that being the banner which should have floated over our native Soil many years ago, it was St. Patrick, the Harp of Erin, the Shamrock upon a green field.”
The San Patricios fought fiercely and bravely, at the battles of Angostura, at Matamoros and at Monterrey. One of the battalion’s bloodiest encounters with the U.S. Army was the Battle of Churubusco, where the Patricios were defending a Catholic convent. More than half the Patricio defenders were killed there. It was at Churubusco that Riley was wounded and captured.
Because he and a handful of other fighters had technically deserted before war was declared, their punishment was to have the letter “D” branded on their faces. As for the rest, they were tried without benefit of legal counsel. No transcripts or records were allowed. Fifty men were executed within a week of their capture.
The most savage of the punishments was a mass hanging of thirty men on September 13, 1847. It remains the largest mass execution in American history. It was overseen by the notorious General William Harney, who ordered that the suspended corpses be left to rot as a macacbre warning to any Mexicans whose inclination was to keep up the resistance.
We will be coming to Harney in a moment. Within little more than a decade, he was coming for us.