Phil Egan
As a boy growing up in the 1950s I was acutely aware of the fear known as the Red Menace.
Worries about communist influence as the Cold War grew in the years following the Second World War were rampant everywhere.
In the U.S., it was the time of loyalty oaths and the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Joseph McCarthy hunting communists in government, the film industry, and even the Boy Scouts.
Sarnia wasn’t immune to the fear. I remember whispered schoolyard tales of communist bombers casing the St. Clair Tunnel, the Blue Water Bridge, and the oil refineries and rubber manufacturing plants of Chemical Valley.
It is easy to imagine, then, the similar fear that stalked the border in the period immediately prior to Confederation, particularly in towns such as Sarnia, Windsor, Niagara and Prescott.
Named for the fierce Fianna Eirionn, the ancient Celtic Warriors of Ireland, the Fenian Brotherhood was a real threat, unlike the Red Menace 90 years later.
Thousands of Irish immigrants served on both the Union and Confederate side in the American Civil War, which ended in 1865, just as the British were crushing the Irish independence movement in the Emerald Isle. Enraged by the British action, U.S. soldiers from both sides of the conflict rushed to enlist with the Fenians. Their plot involved seizing key points in Canada to hold as ransom for Irish freedom.
The colonial government took the threat seriously, and, beginning in January of 1866, began mobilizing troops in the threatened areas. Nearby Detroit had become a hotbed of Fenian sentiment, and rumours were everywhere in Sarnia about a St. Patrick’s Day plot to invade the town. For months, it was all Sarnians could talk about as the “Green Menace” led to the tramp of marching feet in the town.
In January, troops from the York Rifles, the Caledonia Rifles and the Brantford Rifles were being garrisoned in the town, at the Alexander House (then situated on the site of the Federal Building), at Hall’s Hotel on London Road, and even in private homes. They were reinforcements for the 27th Lambton Battalion of Infantry. A little further south, the St. Clair Borderers were a rag-tag militia formed to watch for an incursion across the St. Clair River.
An invasion never happened in Sarnia, but other border areas were not so fortunate, resulting in a couple of notable battles and a handful of casualties on both sides.
The Green Menace of Fenianism would go down in history as Sarnia’s first real military threat. It also provided one more impetus for all Canadians to embrace the security of Confederation the following year.