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Rhetoric Society Quarterly

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Lost in TransNation: The Limits to ConstitutiveNationalism in the Fenian Movement

Timothy R. Dougherty

To cite this article: Timothy R. Dougherty (2015) Lost in TransNation: The Limits to ConstitutiveNationalism in the Fenian Movement, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 45:4, 346-368, DOI:10.1080/02773945.2015.1065159

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2015.1065159

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Rhetoric Society QuarterlyVol. 45, No. 4, pp. 346–368

Lost in TransNation: The Limitsto Constitutive Nationalism inthe Fenian MovementTimothy R. Dougherty

Applying a constitutive rhetorical framework to public speeches and letters circulatedtransnationally from 1859–1866 by the leadership of the revolutionary Irish nationalist Fenianmovement, this essay argues that constitutive rhetorical theory’s assumed ideological effects must bemodified to account for the transnational rhetorical practices of movements like the Fenians. Theessay first traces how Fenian identification practices seek to fix the entire diaspora as the “Irishpeople” and Ireland as the true homeland. It then examines how the movement transcodes itsconstitutive rhetoric to better fit the separate national constraints operating in the United Statesand Ireland, and how these strategies hamper the organization’s ability to sustain the unityrequired for success. While the constituted Irish Revolutionary remained in each national context,their strategies for fulfilling the constitutive narrative had splintered, helping to doom the cause.The Fenian case demonstrates the need to render constitutive rhetorical theory in more dialogicterms, especially for transnational audiences.

On May 15, 1866, Irish revolutionary and the Fenian movement’s “provisionaldictator” James Stephens stepped onto the speaker’s podium at Jones’s Wood inNew York City confronting a serious rhetorical problem. As he understood it, thetransnational unity he had worked so hard to cultivate between the Irish in NorthAmerica and Ireland for the previous six years was being destroyed and, with it, thechance at successful Irish revolt against England. The Irish in the United States—so vital to the success of the promised Revolution—were once again stepping outof line. And Stephens, fresh off a steamship from Paris, was here to take the reinsand persuade them to stick to the original plan: trust their revolutionary brothersin Ireland; send as much money, men, and munitions as possible back to the OldSod; wait for the perfect time to strike, when success would be assured; and drivethe wretched English out of Ireland once and for all. As he saw it, the thousands

Timothy R. Dougherty is Assistant Professor in the English Department at West Chester University of Pennsylvania,700 S. High Street, West Chester, PA 19383, USA. E-mail: tdougherty@wcupa.edu

ISSN 0277-3945 (print)/ISSN 1930-322X (online) © 2015 The Rhetoric Society of America

DOI: 10.1080/02773945.2015.1065159

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of Irish gathered at Jones’s Wood provided the perfect opportunity to re-focus thedirection of the fracturing North American Fenian Brotherhood.

After all, he was the founder and leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood(IRB), the underground radical nationalist organization that had been the FenianBrotherhood’s counterpart in Ireland. Collectively, these organizations had beenbuilding transnational support networks for the revolution among the Irishdiaspora since 1858. He had been tapped for IRB leadership by his friends JohnO’Mahony and Michael Doheny. Fellow exiled veterans of the Young Ireland Revoltof 1848, O’Mahony and Doheny were active in the Emmett Monument Associationin New York City that had been a precursor to the revolutionary organization tocome (Ramón-García 84). Once Stephens agreed to lead the Irish side of the move-ment, O’Mahony dubbed the North American arm the “Fenian Brotherhood” asa nod to the Fianna, an ancient band of warrior bards known through Irish oraltradition as the staunch defenders of the island. Largely on the backs of O’Mahonyand Stephens (Doheny died in 1862), the Fenians had become a sprawling organi-zation, rumored to be 50,000 strong with radical Irish emigrants all over the UnitedStates. Yet in 1866, the Fenian Brotherhood were threatened with an internal splitbetween those who wanted to fight in Ireland and those who advocated invadingBritish Canada.

Stephens was confident he would succeed. Not only had he founded the organi-zation in Ireland, he had already been to the States twice for successful organizingtrips. During those visits, he had used his charisma and his ethos as the first-handrepresentative of the growing movement in Ireland to galvanize the U.S. Fenians.And both times, the coffers and membership rolls had swelled in his wake, withpromises of more money, weapons, and trained Irish veterans of the U.S. Civil Warto follow. Yet, as the months dragged on after the United States’ Civil War, that ten-uous identification they had been building these long six years had once again falleninto fractious division.

Although the goal was the same for all these radicals—Irish emancipation fromEngland and the establishment of an Irish Republic—the tactics for achieving it hadbecome a point of contention. As we will see, Stephens would be unable to suturethe Fenians back together over their tactics for liberation. While each side had thebest of intentions and shared the same pure vision of Irish freedom, their consub-stantiality was ultimately undone, in part, by the incompatible national contextsand constraints they had to negotiate as they sought to constitute the nascent Irishnation transnationally.

Given their transatlantic positioning, the Fenian struggle offers a promisingsite to extend discussions in both constitutive rhetorical theory and transnationalrhetorical studies. In constitutive rhetorical theory, James Jasinski and JenniferMercieca have called for expanded studies of what they call a constitutive rhetoric’sinteriors—the constitutive invitation offered in an utterance’s form and content—and its exteriors, which they suggest as a constitutive rhetoric’s effects as embraced,rejected, or modulated by its immediate or future audience through acts of

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reception, circulation, and articulation (319). While recent constitutive rhetoricalscholarship on a text’s interiors remains robust (Branch; Cramer; Gruber; McClish)and scholars have begun to apply Jasinski and Mercieca’s framework to the waysconstitutive rhetorics circulate or are rearticulated (Kirk; Heidt; Gaffey; English;Samek), few studies beyond Christa Olson’s work on Ecuadorian nation-building(Constitutive; “‘Raíces Américanas’”) and Jolanta Drzewiecka’s diasporic lens onthe constitutive rhetorical practices of Polish-Americans have applied constitutiverhetorical frameworks in transnational contexts.

In transnational rhetorical theory, Wendy Hesford has recommended a revisedconceptual orientation based in a “comparative-historical frame” that can help thefield to better account for rhetoric’s work in this latest iteration of globalization(791). Elsewhere, Hesford and Eileen Schell have critiqued how rhetorical studiestoo easily assumes nation-states as discrete entities. Rather than replacing this out-moded model of rhetoric as neatly contained by national borders with a romanticvision of globalizing hybridity, Hesford and Schell urge the field to interrogate thetransnational at the nexus of the national (467). And while numerous scholars havefollowed suit in transnationalizing contemporary rhetorical studies without dis-missing the importance of nation-states to the neocolonial dynamics of this latestround of globalization (Dingo; Dingo and Scott; McKinnon; Queen; Wingard), fewhave followed Hesford’s call to investigate transnational rhetorical history. Readingthe Fenian case through these frameworks both complicates the ideological effectsposited by Maurice Charland’s theory of constitutive rhetoric while helping to pro-vide another fruitful comparison for the ways that contemporary transnationalsocial movements must negotiate shifting national constraints as they forward theirconstitutive invitations.

This essay traces the transatlantic rhetorical wrangles of the organization from1858–1866 leading up to Stephens’ visit and (ultimately) failed unification speechat Jones’s Woods on May 15, 1866. By examining key public speeches, letters, andcirculars coupled with the backchannel correspondence of the movement’s lead-ership, I will examine the Fenians’ evolving interior constitutive invitations andtheir exterior circulations in the movement’s early years as it negotiated the difficultand differing constraints posed by the Irish and North American contexts. Afterbriefly situating the Fenians in the context of nineteenth-century Irish-Americanimmigrant identity, the essay first traces their separatist constitutive rhetoric asit seeks to establish Ireland as the proper homeland and rightful object of trueIrish patriotism on both sides of the Atlantic, illustrating the first two ideologicaleffects—constituting a collective subject and positing a transhistorical subject—ofCharland’s theory of constitutive rhetoric. The essay then analyzes the ways thatthis delicate counterpublic consubstantiality is constantly interrupted—and ulti-mately undone—as it is transcoded to attend to the separate national constraintsit must negotiate as it travels across the Atlantic. Despite their best efforts to sustainthe cause of Irish liberation, the transnational circulation of the Fenians’ rhetoricmilitates against the successful realization of Charland’s third ideological effect of

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constitutive rhetoric: the illusion of freedom that calls interpellated subjects to ful-fill the naturalized narrative in sustained action. While Fenians on both sides of theAtlantic do indeed act, they are unable to overcome division and constitute theiroriginal vision of a unified transnational identity. The Fenian case of transnationalnation-building challenges this narrative telos that Charland ascribes to a con-stitutive rhetoric, providing a more dialogic grounding to constitutive rhetoricaltheory while complicating our existing historiography of white-skinned immigrantrhetorical practice.

Fenianism in the Context of Nineteenth-Century Irish Immigration

Our rhetorical histories often assume that immigrants to this continent unques-tioningly desired to participate fully in the settler nation-state. Thus, when white-skinned immigrants appear in rhetorical histories, they are usually figured in one oftwo ways: (1) as a subaltern group that desires but has not yet been granted accessto the public sphere of the United States (Clark and Halloran 8) or (2) as a groupacquiring some form of rhetorical education so they can gain access to the mate-rial and political opportunities potentially available to them in the United States(Trasciatti). Although the locus of agency differs in these approaches, the underly-ing assumption is the same—that immigrants to the United States unequivocallydesire to enter the hegemonic public sphere. As Jason Peters puts it in his recentstudy of Francophone language rights activists in 1920s New England, our field’simmigration discourse assumes that assimilation is both inevitable and uncriticallydesired by immigrants. As such, “Immigration discourse withholds from the immi-grant the agency needed to make use of immigration as a cultural tactic” of survival(565). The Fenian Irish are a fruitful group to extend this critique, as they were aradicalized nationalist subset of an immigrant group who had long been makinguse of immigration as a cultural tactic of survival.

In the midst of dehumanizing stereotypes and Protestant American religiousdiscrimination, Irish immigrants cultivated a fierce loyalty to their homeland asthey sought to make a place for themselves in the United States. Indeed, KerbyMiller’s Emigrants and Exiles makes the case that the social and political condi-tions in the United States encouraged even voluntary emigrants to vocally identifyas involuntary exiles from the land of their birth, cultivating a shared sense of eth-nic pride—and a shared disdain for oppressive British politics. Similarly, TimothyMeagher’s study of Worcester, MA Irish from the 1880s to the 1920s complicatessimple narratives of easy assimilation or absolute separatism in the Irish immigrantcommunity, noting three waves of identifications over these years: from a spirit ofaccommodation to Yankee Protestants in the 1880s and early 1890s to a more ethno-centric Irish-first identification in the 1890s and first half of 1900s, followed by anaggressive Pan-Catholic American identity anchored through membership in theKnights of Columbus from mid 1900s to the 1920s. Although Meagher’s study isfocused on the next generation of Irish, rather than Fenianism’s apex during the

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first-generation famine exiles, it points to the complexity of Irish identifications inthe United States over time and in a specific place.

The Fenians, of course, represented an extreme form of Irish-first identifica-tion that falls under the Irish tradition of physical-force nationalism. A reactionagainst the demonstrated limits of constitutional nationalists’ attempts to reformEnglish oppression of Ireland through parliamentary participation and legislation,physical-force nationalists throughout the history of Irish-English relations advo-cated a total break with England through military revolution. The Fenians couldtrace their militant lineage back to the Young Ireland Revolt of 1848 and the UnitedIrishmen Movement of 1798, although the Fenian movement also represented sig-nificant changes from these recent violent uprisings. On the one hand, as PadraigÓ Concubhair notes, the Fenians differed in that “no longer did the leaders of thestruggle for freedom come from the intelligentsia and the gentry of Ireland” (13).And, on the other, they hoped to harvest the lessons of these earlier failed revo-lutions’ disorganization in order to pre-organize the scattered Irish diaspora to beready for powerful action when a geopolitical opportunity arose.

Pre-organizing the diaspora, though, was no easy task, and not least because ofthe failures of past revolutions that caused emigrants to strike a more assimilation-ist tone in their nationalist activities. Irish Nationalist sentiment in America hadnever wavered in the decade since the failed uprising of 1848, but it had grownwary of overconfidence in the promises of revolutionary idealists. Historian JohnBelchem has noted that Irish Nationalist rhetoric in the United States leading up tothe failed Irish uprising of 1848 straddled a careful line between constituting sepa-ratism from the United States and integrating themselves into it. As they raised theirvoices in 1848 to mirror the fever pitch in Ireland, the ultimate failure of the move-ment in Ireland had led to hardening of nativist sentiment against the Irish in theStates and a concomitant tempering of republican nationalist rhetoric (119–120; seealso Brown). These pre-potato famine Irish were the same ones who held moneyand power and influence in the Irish diaspora in 1859 when Stephens stepped offthe boat that first time. Undoubtedly, these were the Irish that Stephens privatelyexcoriated in his diary for having succumbed to “the influence” of America. And,undoubtedly, given their memories of the pain of ’48, they would be a difficult lotto convince.

Nevertheless, on the heels of the mass immigration of potato famine refugees amovement was emerging in the United States. Marta Ramón notes in her introduc-tion to Stephens’ diary that the Emmet Monument Association in New York hadactually been instrumental in bringing Stephens over in 1859 to begin the necessaryorganizing in the United States. Ramón notes that this pre-planning of a long-termrevolutionary project was unprecedented in early Irish Nationalist efforts, and itwas Stephens’ job to “work his persuasion powers on Irish recruits and potentialAmerican backers alike, infuse them with confidence in the project’s long-termpossibilities, and help to make Fenianism a durable political entity rather than acrisis-driven, perishable movement” (xiv).

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As more historians have turned their attention to the post-potato famine Fenians,some have situated Fenian agitation in the context of Irish assimilation into theUnited States (Samito; Snay). And the scholarly consensus has long been that theFenians were doomed by incompetence and overambitious egos in their leadership(D’Arcy; Jenkins). Yet Marta Ramón-García’s treatment limns the differing con-texts and constraints bearing down on Fenians from both sides of the Atlantic mostclosely, noting that “American Fenians had to divide their attentions between theland of their birth and the land of their adoption. . . . It is not surprising that thisshould prove impossible” (89). Attending to the transnational rhetorical constraintsfacing the Fenians as they sought to constitute the Irish nation across the oceanextends Ramón-García’s analysis and helps us to better understand the terriblyinhospitable discourse conditions attending their organizing across these separatenational contexts. Despite their ultimate failure, Fenians worked hard on both sidesof the Atlantic to establish the Irish nation as primary in Irish hearts, united as one,across the ocean.

Home Is Where the Art Is

One important constitutive rhetorical strategy many North American Feniansemployed was to define Ireland as the true “home” for the Irish, even despite theirdiasporic scattering. While it is no surprise that James Stephens and the IRB woulddefine home this way, prominent Fenians living and organizing full time in theUnited States did so as well. For instance, in an 1861 open letter that likely circulatedthroughout Fenian Brotherhood circles, Fenian Catholic priest Edmund O’Flahertydecried his U.S. Irish compatriots for their lack of support for Irish nationhood.In true jeremiadic form fitting for a man of the cloth, he stated, “Irishmen inAmerica have not done their duty towards the movement at home, their peri-odical fits of action and inaction ‘have clogged the wheels of the movement inIreland’” (1,3,4–10/5/1861). From the start, O’Flaherty made it clear that the Irishare in America, but they remained Irish, not American. Moreover, he clearly figuredIreland as “home,” reminding readers to rekindle their bonds with Ireland above anynascent affiliations with the United States. Were this simply one instance, this mightbe written off as a semantic coincidence. But O’Flaherty insistently maintained thisdivision and identification practice throughout the letter. He continued: “I grieve tosay there has been hitherto too much spasmodic patriotism in this country, that is,we love our country but by starts.” This is an even starker example of O’Flaherty’scontrastive strategy, as the United States was merely “this country,” not really “ourcountry.” He underscored this figurative property at the end of his letter when hedelivered his ultimate prophetic call to action for the Irish living in the United States:

If we are to redeem our country, we must do it soon, or not at all. I thereforeurge all our friends to work energetically, at this side of the Atlantic, for the

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thorough organization of the strength of the Irish people at home depends uponour exertions here.

O’Flaherty’s disjunctive framework clearly invited Irish emigrants to privilege theircommitments to Ireland by subtly dividing them from the United States. Comingat a moment when tens of thousands of Irish soldiers were enlisting in the UnionArmy and thousands more in the Confederate grays, O’Flaherty’s public letter tothe Irish in the United Sates conspicuously left the Civil War threatening to tear theU.S. Republic apart out of its constitutive frame altogether.

As a vocal member of the Catholic clergy, O’Flaherty’s voice was an important onein early Fenianism. The Catholic Church, and especially the Church leadership inIreland, was hostile to Fenianism on the whole and represented a significant barrierto both Stephens’ and O’Mahony’s constitutive designs for Fenianism. O’Flaherty’sdogged commitment likely earned this public letter heavy circulation and publicreadings at Fenian Circle meetings in the United States.1 Coming from a mem-ber of the clergy, and addressed as it was to all Irish living in the United States,O’Flaherty’s jeremiad establishes a powerful constitutive foundation that the FenianBrotherhood would build on as it took on a more public character in the UnitedStates.

At the Brotherhood’s 1863 national convention, O’Mahony reiterated this senseof true home that O’Flaherty first posited. To do so, he introduced an additionalimportant topos in Irish nationalist rhetoric: exile. In O’Mahony’s opening addressto the gathered Fenians, he identified the most pressing obstacles the Brotherhoodovercame in its first five years of existence: direct opposition from famous YoungIreland veterans, denouncement from the English government as an illegal secretsociety that the United States should act to abolish, challenges from the Irish clergy(O’Flaherty notwithstanding), and the limited organizing due to Irish enrollmentin the Union Army. Having named these constitutive challenges, O’Mahony pro-ceeded to attack them. Referring to the backpedaling of former Young Irelandrevolutionaries from the tenets of “physical force” nationalism, O’Mahony declared:

By following [the leaders of ’48, who were less organized] I brought ruin anddeath upon those I loved dearest upon earth, and condemned myself to a life ofbitter exile. I, like many other ’48 insurgents, was not of their party till they took

1Given that O’Flaherty died shortly before the Brotherhood’s first national convention in 1863, the conven-tion devoted considerable energy to crafting and adopting a resolution honoring his memory. That resolutionacknowledged that O’Flaherty had, as State Centre of Indiana, “labored with untiring zeal and indefatigableenergy” on behalf of the cause, even publically preaching “a crusade for Ireland’s National Independence”throughout the Western states (24). Additionally, one of their resolutions states “That Ireland may numberhim among those illustrious ecclesiastics . . . who labored with zeal and with all the powers of his mind toband Irishmen together so as to be in position to attack and crush the oppression and misrule which have solong prostrated Ireland” (24). Not only do these words sketch the weight that O’Flaherty’s words carried withIrish nationalists in the United States, they also figure him as an Irish Patriot who worked to unite Irishmeneverywhere under the cause. There is no distinction made here based on where he lived. His actions and wordshave united him across time and space with other Irish Patriots.

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the field. I expected all from them. Up to this time I have been sadly disappointed.When one of them attacks the Fenian Brotherhood and its plans and policy ofIrish Revolution, I feel thoroughly indignant, not alone for the sake of my country,but for my own. I consider that they owe a debt to Ireland that is still unpaid.I consider my own personal claim upon them to be no light one. I trust indeedI shall never again see a young Ireland leader come out to America, and thenstrive to crush out from the hearts of my fellow-exiles the hope of our country’sredemption by armed force. (9–10)

This passage endeavored to accomplish at least four important rhetorical goals.First, it established O’Mahony’s ethos as an insurgent going back to the last failedrising in 1848. Second, it reiterated O’Flaherty’s position of continued owner-ship and allegiance to Ireland above all, as O’Mahony performed “indignance” onbehalf of “my country.” Third, by employing the trope of exile, the passage suturedO’Mahony’s life to the fate of Ireland. Note the parallel syntax, where he was indig-nant for both himself and his country. Indignant for his country, that such feebleleadership would have failed it. Indignant for himself, that those leaders’ feeble plan-ning resulted in his exile. His final line drew these threads together, admonishingthese failed leaders even as he replaced them with the Fenian Brotherhood as thenew vanguard. Given his ongoing commitment to armed revolution and his ongoingwork to pre-organize the Irish so as to make that revolution successful, this framingestablished O’Mahony’s ethos as the true Irish Patriot, superseding those ’48 leadersstill living in Ireland who came to the United States seeking to dissuade exile Feniansfrom their cause. Finally, calling on his fellow-exiles and naming them as such, heinvited all Irish living in America into a consubstantial circle of exile-ship, regardlessof the circumstance of their emigration.

O’Mahony’s performance here illustrates two key tasks that Jasinski and Merciecahave described for a constitutive rhetoric. On the one hand, he “challenges” an“established sourc[e] of cultural authority” represented by the earlier revolution-ary leadership of the 1848 Young Ireland movement (320). He sought to galvanizethe recent post-famine emigrants around their own experience as exiles from theirhomeland, while also challenging more established Irish emigrants who came tothe United States in earlier eras to redouble their commitment to their home coun-try. On the other hand, he also affirmed the “bonds of affiliation” that exiled Irishhave for Ireland and for each other as true Irish people (320). Invoking the toposof exile to cement that bond became a powerful constitutive invitation amongst aroom full of Irish folks, especially those who came to North America post-famine.It also underscored a second theme running through Fenian constitutive invitations,closely related to invocations of Ireland as “home” or “ours:” to identify across theocean as one Irish “people.”

Taken together, these interrelated themes of “home” and “people” circulated byFenian leaders sought to realize what Charland has called the first ideological effectof a constitutive rhetoric: the constitution of a collective subject. Indeed, in the verysame passage excoriating these ’48 revolutionaries, O’Mahony claimed them “blind

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to the advantages of the present position of the Irish nation, taken as a whole, athome and abroad” (9). Clearly, in the Fenian constitutive framework, the Irish peo-ple who comprised the Irish nation were bound together by blood and experience,not by their mailing address. While invoking home sought to transcend the divi-sions of geography into a collective unity, the Fenian invocation of “the people” alsosought to transcend time, promoting a sense of the Irish people as an oppressednation unified for centuries and destined for future regeneration. In the resolutionsemerging from the initial convention, they proclaimed that the

Irish Race is everywhere pervaded by an intense and undying hatred towardsthe monarchy and oligarchy of Great Britain, which have so long ground theircountry to the dust, hanging her patriots, starving out her people, and sweepingmyriads of Irish men, women, and children off the paternal fields, to find a refugein foreign lands, bringing with them thither a burning desire for the destruc-tion of British tyranny, and bequeathing this feeling as an heirloom to theirposterity. (36)

This passage clearly illustrated a constitutive invitation to experience the Irish peo-ple’s past as one seamless garment of unified opposition to British occupation. In sodoing, it gestured toward what Charland has called the second ideological effect ofconstitutive rhetoric, the positing of a transhistorical subject: a “‘consubstantiality,’to use Burke’s expression, between the dead and living” Irish (140). Although Irishpeople have been “swept” from home and many blessed to “find a refuge in foreignlands,” Fenian rhetoric urged them to remain consubstantial with their ancestors,and pass that unity—and enmity for the British—to their progeny.

Indeed, the Fenian invitation to transhistorical subjectivity sought to unite thedead, the living, and the future Irish, on both sides of the Atlantic, who have yet to beborn. At the same inaugural Fenian convention, James Gibbons echoed O’Mahony:

We resemble somewhat the silk-worm. We are industrious, and we are gather-ing around us material, which, when woven, will make a garment of prodigioussplendor for regenerated Ireland; although we, like the silk-worm, may pass away.We can however look into the future with a prophetic eye and behold Ireland walkforth from the long night of slavery, clothed in the robes of liberty woven by thehands of the sorrow-stricken exile. (18)

Reinforcing the exile’s bonds of affiliation with Ireland, Gibbons also reinforcedthe permanence of these Irish identifications, and the inevitability of success.Additionally, he established the centrality of the exile to their country’s redemp-tion story. They must gather material for war. They must be willing to work, and ifnecessary, to die. But they were also the ones fashioning liberty’s garments for theIrish people.

These tropes of unity across time and place performed in public Fenian texts—what Jasinski and Mercieca call a constitutive rhetoric’s “interiors”—invited thoseIrish living in the United States to rally around their identities as Irish people and

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their bonds of affiliation to their home country. An archive of letters from Fenianorganizers and members throughout the Unite States demonstrates that the messagewas circulating with success, reverberating outwards in the audience’s uptake andrearticulation of the message. In 1864 from Davenport, IA, Richard Quinn wrote toO’Mahony about the feasibility of shipping arms from “this country” to Ireland, andmentioned that his members wished that Mr. Daly (code name for James Stephens)could have personally “come and given an account of the state of our organiza-tion at home” (1, 6, 14, June 28, 1864). Richard Doherty, writing from Lafayette,Indiana in 1864, also utilized a similar approach when he referred twice to Irelandas “home”: first as he wondered about the “present condition of the organization athome” and then when he referenced Philip Coyne’s recent journey back to Irelandas an “envoy sent home for personal experience” of the situation in Ireland (1, 6, 31,November 22, 1864). These are but a few instances throughout this archive whereinFenian writers, on both sides of the Atlantic, unequivocally referred to Ireland astheir real “home,” demonstrating that the Fenian constitutive rhetoric had currencybeyond the immediate leadership.

Such identifications are no doubt common in diasporic communities grapplingwith the geopolitical complexities of what Sara McKinnon, in her work on therhetoric surrounding court judgments about female refugee asylum-seekers to theUnited States, has called “transnational subjectivity” (179). For instance, JolantaDrzewiecka has noted the ways that Polish Americans carefully balance identi-fications with Polishness and American-ness as they seek to maintain or buildrhetorical authority in both contexts (7–8). The simultaneous dual identificationwith homeland and host country that Drzewiecka traces certainly resonates with thehistorical scholarship mentioned earlier on the complex identities forged in Irishdiaspora communities in North America. And Fenian public statements aboundwhere they reiterate their intentions of upholding the Constitution. Yet, the rhetorsin Drzewiecka’s Polish-American diaspora also willingly claim their “American-ness” as their own, not just their Polishness (16). In these public statements andbackchannel letters, it is clear that many Fenian Irish were working hard to maintaina dogged attachment to an Ireland-first identification. While the larger story of theFenians reinforces Drzewiecka’s insight that the active identifications of a diasporapopulace are contested ground and, thus, open to the rhetorical action that emergesfrom struggle and changing material conditions, these early constitutive efforts inthe counterpublic enclave show Fenians working hard to remain true to their Irishhome.

Rather than celebrating the hybrid identity and expansion of Irishness that couldarise from their diasporic scattering, the Fenians instead noted that Irish transhistor-ical subjectivity was threatened by indulging in hybridity. For instance, when in thepassage noted above Fr. O’Flaherty lamented the “flagging patriotism” of the Irish inthe United States who “love our country but by starts,” he concluded by introducingan ethnic aspect to his patriotic nationalist rhetoric that privileged racial purity andabhorred assimilation to England’s “Saxon” culture. As he put it, if the Irish in the

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United States do not step up to support the Fenian cause, “then is Ireland doomed—doomed to become as integral a portion of the British Empire as Scotland, onceCeltic and now Saxon, more Saxon than England herself” (1, 3, 4, October 5, 1861).Like other Fenians, Fr. O’Flaherty figured assimilation as Irish apocalypse, a direjeremiadic warning meant to spur the diaspora into action.

Gibbons echoed this theme at the 1863 Fenian Convention. At the end of aglowing epideictic speech proclaiming the transhistorical unity between his exile“silk-worms” and the Irish at home, Gibbons concluded with a stark warning thatsuch transhistoric unity of the collective Irish subject was not a foregone conclusion.Rather, it required follow through to support armed action in Ireland: “If you arenot ready when that cry is heard, mankind will despise you, your people will despiseyou, and I say to you, woe, woe, and ten thousand woes upon you, for you will be asCain” (18). Gibbons painted a bleak picture of the consequences from failing to actin support of revolution on Irish soil. Not only would your people, the Irish peo-ple, “despise you,” but you would be equivalent to Cain, the first murderer knownin the biblical tradition who also committed fratricide. Beyond reinforcing familialaffiliation across the ocean, this line implied that inaction from exiled Irishman wasequivalent to the “murder” of their family, the remnant Irish. From a typologicalperspective, this sin of inaction would yield the equivalent punishment as Cain; theIrish exile, having assured the death of their family, would become a fugitive and avagabond upon the earth, an outcast without a home or nation.

Such appeals for purity of action invite comparisons with Charland’s thirdideological effect of constitutive rhetoric, the illusion of freedom by which aninterpellated collective and transhistorical subject can choose to act for the cause.Following Althusser, Charland maintains such freedom is an illusion because theconstituted subject is itself an effect of a narrative that has a preordained telos (140).In other words, the subject addressed in the constitutive rhetoric “is constrained tofollow through, to act so as to maintain the narrative’s consistency [emphasis in theoriginal]” (141). Ostensibly, the act demanded from the constituted Fenian subjectwas to ready themselves to support or actively participate in armed revolution onIrish soil.

For Fenian leaders like Stephens, Saxon capitulation resulted from a too-easyassimilation to the United States, itself a country whose hegemonic nationalismparadoxically prided itself on its simultaneously Anglo-Saxon roots and its politi-cal resistance to them. In a diary passage from his first organizing visit to the UnitedStates in 1859, Stephens’ negative opinion of those supposed Irish Nationalists whogave in to the “corrupting influences” (17) of the United States, which he later refersto as “this land of Self, Greed, and Grab,” was evident (64). Indeed, writing toO’Mahony on the occasion of their friend and fellow Irish revolutionary MichaelDoheny’s death in 1862, Stephens questioned O’Mahony’s willingness to let certainU.S. Irish fund the funeral celebration. No matter the amount of money, no matterthe pomp and circumstance, no matter the support to Doheny’s family that mightcome from allowing the sponsorship of a more materially successful Irish emigrant,

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Stephens lamented “Would that the effect to make some provision for his family hadfallen to the duty of an Irishman. Nothing could have brought me to allow the initia-tive to that miserable hybrid, Richard O’Gorman” (1, 4, 4, April 29, 1862; emphasisin original).

Framing O’Gorman as a “miserable hybrid,” Stephens established a discursivedichotomy between true Patriots like O’Mahony and those U.S. Irish like O’Gormanwho have succumbed to the corrupting influence of the United States. Stephenscontinued, decrying O’Mahony’s public identification with the likes of O’Gormanas “a national crime to forgive such a wretch, and especially so to cooperate withhim in any public way.” For Stephens, a shared ethnicity was not enough to sustainthe transhistorical subject of the Irish patriot. It also required a purity of action, ofa disciplined dedication to the cause of Ireland above all else.

Transnational Constitutive Telos Interrupted

Committed Fenians labored alongside Stephens to build a compelling constitutiverhetoric that fashioned a radicalized collective subject with transhistorical unity ofpurpose for Irish emancipation. Such constitutive rhetoric grew in strength fromits inception in 1859 and demanded from its adherents a dogged attachment tocompleting the constitutive narrative through armed uprising in Ireland. As themovement flourished on both sides of the Atlantic, though, so did the growing U.S.memberships’ impatience with the seeming inaction in Ireland, especially once theU.S. Civil War ended. In the meantime, many war-hardened and hawkish Fenianswere eager to put their newfound military training to work for Irish Independenceand had begun booking passage back into Erin at the end of the Civil War, prompt-ing the British to suspend the Writs of Habeas Corpus and arrest some of them onarrival for fear of sedition. British authorities also raided the Dublin offices of Feniannewspaper The Irish People, arresting a number of important Fenian leaders. Oncethe foreboding news of these arrests made its way back to the States, and despite allof Stephens’ assurances to the contrary, North American Fenians began to questionthe viability of an immanent revolt on Irish soil. And with some of their brethrenserving hard time in British work prisons, the American organization had fallen intoits most serious wrangle yet over the best way to support the old sod. Led by WilliamR. Roberts, a faction of the Brotherhood advocating invasion of British Canada hadascended to power and threatened to divide North American Fenians. What littlehope for revolt in Ireland that remained would be absolutely crushed by this changein North American Fenian tactics. This was the crisis that brought Stephens back tothe States for the third time in six years. Determined as he was, though, Stephensfaced challenges that were likely insurmountable in a single speech.

From the very beginning, Fenian unity of purpose and action was tested by thetransnational reality that was at once the movement’s greatest strength and itsgreatest liability. On the one hand, the Irish diaspora had access to more money,military training, and weapons in North America, allowing the Fenians to become

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a formidable political force that frightened British authorities and gave pause to thewartime United States government. On the other, though, they were beset by obsta-cles of distance and shifting national contexts that required them to adjust theirstrategies for fostering the people in each location. In transnational feminist rhetor-ical parlance, the Fenians had to transcode their constitutive invitations to build anIrish nation that spanned the ocean, and this made it nearly impossible to share aconstitutive telos.2

Stephens was no stranger to the challenges of distance that hamperedtransnational organizing. Coupled with the distrustful memories of the pre–potatofamine Irish, this organizing distance had constantly bedeviled his ethos construc-tion and subjected him to ongoing surveillance from the North American backerswho had financial clout. The archive is replete with letters from Ireland answeringNorth American Fenian distrust of Stephens’ representations of either the move-ment’s strength or its financial situation. In response to stories being circulatedin North America that Stephens is lining his own pockets with the funds insteadof building the movement in Ireland, as early as April 1860 a letter from a writerin Ireland addressed to O’Mahony maintained, “stories of alleged extravaganceare pure calumnies; life here is most frugal” (1, 2, 2, April 28, 1860). Distanceengendered this distrust as money, revolutionaries, and Fenian rhetoric traveledtransnationally across the Atlantic, not to mention the British spies and misinfor-mation circulating as well. While Stephens had weathered this distrust with aplomband resourcefulness since he first experienced it in 1860, the resources of his ethosfor suturing the movement together had been exhausted by 1866.

As he stepped to the podium at Jones’s Wood, he sought to foreground his cred-ibility by yoking his constitutive invocation of true Irish peoplehood to an ethicalclaim of his own intimate knowledge of said people. Speaking of his first organizingtrip through Ireland, he noted that “the first thing I did was to travel throughoutthe country in every direction to know the people and see what could be done; Idevoted a whole year to that, during which year I travelled over thirty-five hundredmiles on foot” (1, 2, 2, April 28, 1860). By foregrounding his own selfless and com-mitted actions for the cause in his introduction, Stephens invited gathered listenersto trust him as the absolute authority on the matter of Irish readiness for revolu-tion. Indeed, he noted that few intellectuals would organize for the nationalist causewhen Stephens began in 1857, and he underscored this point by declaring, “Theydid not know the people. The Irish People, then as ever, were sound. [Three cheers

2In her book Networking Arguments, Rebecca Dingo borrows from Inderpal Grewal’s definition oftranscoding as “‘the process of directly changing assembled code to work on different platforms’” (31).In Dingo’s examination of the ways that neoliberal frameworks for gender mainstreaming are altered tofit different contexts for women’s structural conditions in the one-thirds versus the two-thirds world, shedemonstrates how the policy solutions in each context network highly individualistic understandings of theunderlying causes for women’s poverty, even as the actual policy recommendations offer polar opposite solu-tions in each context. Just as powerful actors like the World Bank need to transcode their neoliberal frameworkin order for privatization to expand in different contexts, a transnational social movement like the Fenians haveto transcode their constitutive invitations across distance and context as well.

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for “The Irish People.”]” (“Speech”). By contrasting false leaders’ ignorance of theIrish people with his own intimate knowledge of them, he invoked “the people” asan invitation for the gathered crowd to renew their bonds of affiliation with all Irishpeople, united across time and space under Stephens’ credible and tireless servantleadership. In foregrounding his own pure actions, he challenged the ascendancy ofthe Roberts faction—most of whom had gotten involved with the movement muchlater than Stephens or O’Mahony—and their Canadian invasion scheme. Throughan implied dissociation, he distinguished the “true” actions of a “true” Irish patriotwith the false ones of U.S. leaders that led to this crisis. Stephens continued in thisvein: “I think that my opinion—I, who have lived in Ireland and worked for Irelandall my life—I think, I say, that my opinion on this subject ought to be worth morethan the opinions of people who have not seen Ireland since the greenness of theiryouth” (“The Fenians,” New York Times, May 16, 1866). Stephens used his directexperience of and personal familiarity with the cause in Ireland as his trump cardover these relative newcomers.

Yet, his approach here also signaled an inevitable paradox, since the Fenianconstitutive rhetoric had been positing a transhistoric Irish people whose unitytranscended time and distance. Stephens introduced a division in that timeless andplace-agnostic unity. This division asked the gathered listeners who have cheeredmost loudly at his invocation of the “people” to trust that he better embodied theIrish people’s ethos than the Fenian leadership in North America who had workedto build the membership in the United States and beyond. Although Stephens hadbeen closest to the work, North American Fenians in both major camps believedthey acted purely for the cause of Ireland as well.

This may seem a small division, and one that seems reasonable enough, but it sig-naled a deeper fissure in the Fenian constitutive narrative’s telos—or what Charlandhas called the constituted subject’s illusion of freedom to act so as to fulfill thenarrative’s teleology of the people’s destiny. These were cracks in the constitutivefoundation born from the fundamentally different geopolitical context in the States,a context that required the organizations to ultimately develop in different ways.Although these cracks had widened into full-blown breaches by 1866, they hadshown themselves from almost the beginning of the organizing efforts, manifestedmost clearly in the simultaneous need for public shows of Fenian strength in theUnited States and the need for utmost secrecy in Ireland as they built power underthe thumb of British rule.

As early as July 1861, a letter addressed to O’Mahony from IRB operative WilliamO’Carroll tried to answer the U.S. Irish’s need for more public assurances of theorganization’s strength in Ireland. Answering O’Mahony’s “lengthy complaint” thathe had been “kept in the dark” about the strength of numbers in Ireland, O’Carrollreplied, “how could an organization, ‘whose life breath is privacy,’ publicly recog-nize any man as its head or even as its agent?” (1, 3, 2, July 1861). In this rebuttal,he reminded O’Mahony how dangerous and expensive it was to continue plyingthe field for exact membership numbers amidst constant surveillance. He solicited

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O’Mahony’s trust that the organization was growing and asked him to recognizethe vexing conditions—an “eternal struggle against the law and poverty we haveto maintain”—that made it difficult to specify exact numbers. On the other hand,O’Carroll tried to recognize O’Mahony’s opposite predicament in the United States,noting that he understood that “the onerous nature of your charge forces you to bemore or less exigent.” Rather than apologize for this, though, he turned the crisis offaith back on the Irish in the United States: “I fear that if tomorrow the mail bore tothem the news of a Rising here they would, many of them, even then require us toprove we were in earnest by being hewn in pieces before they would be convinced”(1, 3, 2, July 1861).

In this passage O’Carroll revealed that the trust in each sides’ ethos was beingcontinually strained by the distance involved. The U.S. Irish’s need for public andexact numbers to bolster their faith in the IRB was not only taxing on the Irish orga-nization’s limited resources, it actually directly threatened their work by drawingunnecessary premature attention to it. And as the members of the IRB attemptedto augment the organization’s power while under constant surveillance, the U.S.Fenian Brotherhood seemed to demand too much proof while offering too littlesupport. The U.S. Irish who were busy making public speeches and organizing con-ventions to prove their legitimacy must have seemed to the IRB to be burdened byextravagance that could be better used in furnishing Ireland with supplies. Yet, thesewere the necessary realities of transcoding Fenianism between North America andIreland, and it led to constant threats to the consubstantiality of the nascent nation.

Traveling under an alias to protect his identity, Stephens had experienced thistension in his previous 1864 organizing trip. In a letter to O’Mahony describing hisexperiences throughout the United States, he noted this tension as an impedimentto collecting funds from Fenians in Indiana, reporting that the Indiana leadership“could not get in more than half the amount subscribed” and that one of the reasonswas “that I had been introduced under a name which, they had been informed, wasnot my real one” (1, 6, 32, December 11, 1864). Stephens observed that “the chiefofficers only knowing my real name” is a standard and necessary practice, and thatthe onus is on those head organizers in each location to assure their constituentsof Stephens’ authority. Having arrived in a transcoded Fenian context that wasaccustomed to public and vocal declarations of Irish strength, Stephens could notunderstand the rank-and-file’s inability to comprehend the necessity for his secretidentity.

Beyond the secrecy and privacy dichotomy, the Fenians also had to success-fully transcode their constitutive invitations across disparate national legal contexts.Whereas the underground nature of the cause in Ireland precluded official struc-tures and was actually nurtured by Stephens’ leadership as a de facto “dictator,” theFenians in North America had to project increasingly visible shows of competentrepublican organization and strength in numbers in order to attract more adher-ents. Furthermore, this increasing visibility subjected them to intense critique fromBritish ambassadors to the United States, who appealed to both the U.S. government

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to brand the Fenians as criminals, and the Roman Catholic clergy, who saw partici-pation in secret societies as a grave sin worthy of excommunication. The transcodingdilemma came to a head in 1863, as the U.S. members of the Fenian Brotherhoodput pressure on O’Mahony to adopt a style of organizing better suited to the U.S.context. As O’Mahony wrote to Stephens in his resignation letter to Stephens onOctober 19, 1863,

The F.B. requires, for efficient action, to be placed on a basis more in accordancewith the habits and customs of the American Republic than that whereupon it hashitherto stood. The chief officer thereof must hold his position by election and hisoffice must be terminable within a period to be fixed at the aforesaid Convention[coming up in Chicago].

Adopting this representative governmental structure would give the Fenians achance to display their credibility to the U.S. government as a legitimate nation-building enterprise conducted by Irish emigrants—many of whom also possessedU.S. citizenship—rather than the unruly criminals the British ambassadors por-trayed. What is more, it would insulate them from the critiques of “hostile church-men” that threatened his organizing efforts (emphasis original). As O’Mahonyframed it,

Becoming an American association and basing our right of action upon our privi-leges as American citizens and keeping within the laws of these states, we can placeultramontane plotters against human freedom in a very awkward predicament,and a very unsafe one for them if they presume to assail us.

Of course, O’Mahony realized that this more official incorporation as a U.S.-stylepolitical organization might be threatening to the secrecy needed for the IRB to besuccessful. To assuage such fears, he noted,

This, and it is a great one, churchmen being our most formidable enemies, will bea benefit to be derived from having the Fenian Brotherhood independent of ourfellow-laborers in Ireland, where the organization must be “secret” for some timeto come, Here, all the good effects of secrecy may be realized by having none butthe executive officers in communication with our Irish Brothers.

Throughout these passages, O’Mahony employed U.S. citizenship as a way todefend against those who would interfere with the shared object of the orga-nizations, transcoding Irish Fenian organizing more seamlessly into its NorthAmerican geopolitical context. U.S. citizenship became a malleable tool to furtherthe prospects of the Irish Nation, lending the Fenians in the United States credibil-ity that would be useful in protecting the growth of the movement, allowing themto demonstrate more openly and therefore attract more sympathizers in the UnitedStates. Yet, even as these rhetorical transcodings were a powerful tactic to ensure

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Fenian survival in North America, they unleashed a host of paradoxes that wouldcome to a head by 1866.

By 1864, Stephens realized the importance of attending to these contextual differ-ences, and admitted in a letter that IRB secrecy had been a potential detriment to thecause in the United States. In a lengthy report of the conditions he met in the UnitedStates as he toured the country, as well as an updated account of the numbers of theIRB in Ireland, he concluded that—contrary to typical policy of secrecy—as muchof the letter should be made public as the U.S. Fenian leadership deemed necessary:

There is no need of withholding documents of this kind through motives of pol-icy. It is likely enough that we have lost considerably through this fear of tellingtoo much and shocking people. All that could possibly be told should be told toall true men. (1, 6, 32, December 11, 1864)

This admission that secrecy had perhaps cost the movement time and resources inthe United States came a bit too late to reverse the inevitable course toward greaterfactionalism between the two allied organizations.

In the 1866 Jones’s Wood speech, Stephens’ narrative performance was an iconicrecognition of the need in the United States for forthrightness. Indeed, the wholespeech was a public recounting of his side of the events from 1858 until thatmoment, almost as if he was seeking to make up for lost time with total trans-parency. Yet, though he fully recognized the need to transcode Fenian constitutiveinvitations into more public and open articulations of Irish militancy, his lex-ical choices revealed the extent to which he misunderstood the exigencies thatattended being a public organization in the United States: that is, the need for trans-parency in leadership and republican-style representative government as the FenianBrotherhood had developed in 1863.

Instead, in the midst of his narrative, Stephens impugned their decision tobecome an independent organization. Speaking about his first trip to the States in1858, he remarked, “At that time, the organization in America was a secret soci-ety as well as in Ireland. It has been found proper to change it here since; it hasbeen changed, but whether for the better or not the future only can tell” (“TheFenians,” NYT, May 16, 1866). Couching his statements throughout as appeals tounity, he once again subtly challenged the authority of Fenian leadership in theUnited States, appealing to the gathered crowd to rally around his leadership. Whilehe was partly right to question this choice for all the complications introduced by theFenian Brotherhood’s turn to representative democracy, his jab ignored the politicalobstacles that helped to hasten that structural change in the North American orga-nization. Thus, he sought a unified identity that was no longer possible as it hadbeen a few years earlier:

if both [Mr. Roberts and Mr. O’Mahony] were here to stand by me and endorseme to-day [sic], I believe that in a single month our organization would be tentimes as powerful as it has ever been, and the freedom of Ireland would be a

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certain thing. [Loud cries of “Never mind them.” “We don’t care for either ofthem.”]

Hoping that his mere presence and invocations could suture an organization thatwas in utter disrepair, his constitutive invitation was quite literally ignored byRoberts, who was not in attendance. And, given the audience’s response, his perfor-mance of unity actually inspired more division in the gathering, as they convertedhis appeals to unity-through-obedience into calls to cut these divisive elements fromthe movement altogether.

This call and response sequence highlights how a Charlandian approach to con-stitutive rhetoric that understands a text or speaker as interpellating audiences intoan “illusion of freedom” that culminates in fulfillment of the singular constitutivenarrative is inadequate in transnational contexts. These gathered Irish suggest that,especially in transnational contexts, even if a constitutive rhetoric hails an audi-ence into a subject position, it cannot guarantee their teleological participation inits lockstep ending. In place of an assured telos of unity for Ireland, Stephens wasmet by a dialogic cacophony. Some are talking back, urging a different solution.Others, like Roberts, have literally turned their back. Charland’s framework seemstoo rigid to account for the countless ways that an inscribed subject of a constitutivenarrative might speak back to the text, whether by voice or by body.

It is important to attend to this shortcoming in the theoretical framework, espe-cially in this transnational context replete with the added complication of rhetoricaltranscoding of key constitutive themes like “the people.” The crescendo of Stephens’speech at Jones’s Wood invoked the same constitutive themes of a unified peopleand the true homeland that characterize Fenian constitutive appeals from the begin-ning. Speaking in the United States, he made it clear that he was addressing the Irishpeople, not Irish-Americans:

Let any man who has come here to bring discord into our ranks . . . let such aman go home, let him go home [Cheers.] Let him go to England, that is the placefor him. [Laughter and cheers.] Let him go to the British Minister—there he willbe well received, but let him not stand here with Irishmen who have sworn beforeGod and men they will free their land or die. [Loud cheering. Voices, “That’s thetalk.”] . . . Your motto today should be union. . . . You can make it to be done;you are the people, you are the power; you can make men, you can direct men,you can force men into the right path even if you should find them go astrayfrom it.

In this passage Stephens was still speaking to the “Irish people,” a collective subjectpossessing transhistorical unity that crossed borders and oceans. And the audienceappeared to be in agreement on this point. Indeed, as he invoked this consti-tutive invitation of “the people,” the newspaper account reported it to be theloudest and most positive affirmation from the gathered crowd during the wholespeech.

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Yet, Fenians of all stripes never doubted their Irish peoplehood. What theCharlandian perspective cannot adequately explain is the real ways that theseinscribed subjects did not find themselves in a teleological narrative leading onlyto revolt in Ireland. Rather, they seem to be in a dialogical constitutive choose-your-own-adventure that refracted through changing material conditions. As the consti-tutive invitation to peoplehood was repeatedly transcoded to fit these transnationalcontexts, the Fenian Brotherhood’s invocation became increasingly interarticulatedwith U.S. ideologies of constitutional republicanism and Manifest Destiny, such thatit produced multiple valid endings to the people’s destiny.

As Stephens spoke in New York, determined to muster his rhetorical authority tostop this madness and reinstate the original constitutive vision of armed action inEire, the Roberts-led U.S. Fenians were less than one month from attacking Canadaby way of Buffalo. While Stephens successfully galvanized a portion of the U.S.movement to redouble its efforts for the coming war in Ireland, the factionalismthat hardened in the wake of the Fenian schism and failed invasions of Canadawould ultimately skewer what sliver of hope remained for successful revolt inIreland.

Conclusion

Transnational feminist rhetoricians have called for a territorialized and groundedsense of the transnational movement of rhetoric—one that pays attention to theways that rhetoric must be transcoded to fit its encounter with the particular con-straints imposed by national publics, discourses, and laws (Dingo; Hesford; Hesford& Schell). The transnational wrangles of the Fenian movement illustrate the con-ceptual value of blending a transnational rhetorical orientation with constitutiverhetorical theory, as this revised framework helps further explain the Fenians’decisions and ultimate failure.

My analysis demonstrated how the Fenian movement sought to constitute a uni-fied people across the ocean, presenting a vision of Ireland as “home” and the Irish“people” as united transhistorically across time and distance. However, that unitywas constantly interrupted by distrust born out of distance, and by the separatenational constraints that pushed North American Fenians into ever more publicdisplays of Irish nationalist legitimacy while Fenians in Ireland tried their best tooperate in secrecy and anonymity. Even as each wing of the movement continuedto invoke a unified Irish people in their constitutive invitations, their consubstan-tiality could not survive their rhetorical transcoding to fit each separate context.Where Stephens saw his emerging rivals as miserable hybrids or, worse, full-blownAmericans playing in greenface, these exiled radicals saw invocations of U.S. cit-izenship as cultural tactics of Irish survival. As they saw it, they could remainwholeheartedly “the Irish people” while veering from the script of an armed revo-lution in Ireland as conditions changed. This transnational-constitutive rhetoricalanalysis complicates historians’ explanations of the Fenian failure along lines of

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simple incompetence or interpersonal bickering, extending Marta Ramón’s call tolook beyond psychological explanations for the political motives that guided Fenianleaders’ sometimes vexing decisions.

Conceptually, the Fenians invite us to rethink the narrative teleology inscribedin Charland’s constitutive theory as a dialogic habitus, especially in transnationalcontexts. While Fenian constitutive efforts no doubt fashioned a collective Feniansubject of radical Irish revolutionaries, they did not produce the inevitable narrativeclimax of Irish freedom as this subject was transcoded into Fenian discourse andpractice in different places. Despite each group’s claims to Irish consubstantiality—and the rousing cheers of that Jones’s Wood audience when Stephens invoked “thepeople” ready to fight and die for “home”—there was no longer a prescribed endto the constitutive narrative. In place of a singular telos united for action in Ireland,the radicalized collective Fenian subject had created a choose-your-own-adventureending, a dialogic constitutive cacophony that wrangled over fighting in Ireland,fighting in British Canada, or simply biding their time.

Finally, the Fenians provide an important historical case to extend our under-standing of transnational rhetorical practice. In particular, while the Fenians’ failureto remain unified partly confirms Drzewiecka’s insight that diasporas “strategicallyenact” constitutive identities “in response to changing political and cultural condi-tions” (18), their staunch early refusal to identify with the United States as homecomplicates Drzewiecka’s explanation for such “strategic enactments” (18). Whileshe finds that “Diasporas have to protect themselves from possible accusations ofbetrayal of their ‘American’ nationality,” and thus must alter the terms of theirconstituted collective subject in relation to others, the Fenians’ collective subjectremained intact as the militant Irish Revolutionary in their geopolitical moment.In contrast to Drzewiecka’s late-twentieth-century Polish-Americans, the Fenianswere operating in a U.S. context that was decidedly weakened by the U.S. CivilWar. In this situation, the Irish Fenians were formidable enough to give U.S. politi-cians pause as they cultivated the Irish vote, allowing the Fenians greater latitude inconstituting themselves as a nascent Irish nation on U.S. soil.

The Fenians’ conundrums invite further rhetorical studies of transnational justicemovements, both contemporary and historical, to enhance our understanding ofhow rhetorical actors negotiate the dilemma of feeling consubstantial with a distantcause, yet are hindered in their work by that distance and additional local con-straints. As a nation-in-process that was buffeted by geopolitical and legal contextsbeyond their control, they also serve as a reminder that case studies of constitu-tive nation-building must resist restricting their frame solely to existing nationalboundaries. Coupling transnational feminist rhetorical methods with a more dia-logic constitutive rhetorical framework can help scholars trace how constitutiveinvitations negotiate shifting geopolitical and material conditions as rhetoric, bod-ies, ideologies, and legal frameworks take root and are uprooted across nationalborders.

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Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to the editor and anonymous reviewers for insightfuland generous feedback. He is also deeply indebted to Lois Agnew for her cru-cial guidance on this project, as well as feedback at different stages from KevinBrowne, Steve Parks, Eileen Schell, Gwendolyn Pough, Niall Whelehan, and AndreaRiley-Mukavetz.

ORCID

Timothy R. Dougherty http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0056-4346

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