Clan na Gael [spelt ClanNaGael for wiki purposes]

Irish-American secret society, part of the IrishFenian movement.

ClanNaGael was founded 20 June, 1867, in New York, dominated initially by Jerome J. Collins, “the scientific and meteorological correspondent of James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald.” The main point of the Clan, at the start, was to avoid the factionalism that had impeded various revolutionary efforts of the previous decade, for example the IrishRepublicanBrotherhood^?. HenriLeCaron, the great spy within the IrishFenian ranks, wrote to the HomeOffice that the Clan was an “off-shoot of the permanent conspiracy known under the name ‘Knights of the Inner Circle,’ which was joined by many Irish conspirators,” including of course HenriLeCaron himself. By 1869, the situation was reversed: the ClanNaGael had absorbed the “Knights” as well as the “Brian Boru” FenianBrotherhood^? Circle of New York, and possibly other small groups.

The ClanNaGael was organized in some respects on the model of Freemasonry^?, not so much in conception (though there was some of that in its Enlightenment-style republicanism) as in secret oaths and handshakes and such. According to Short,

Copies of ClanNaGael rituals do survive. A new hailing sign was put into operation in November 1876:

The Hailing Sign of Recognition, instead of being the passing of the hand down the cheek, will be in the future: Placing the right hand carelessly under the left breast of the vest; reply by placing the left hand under the right breast of the vest.

The change occurred when the executive committee found that the sign announced at the beginning of the month was similar to that being used by the Ancient Order of Hibernians and that it was in the possession of two Massachusetts detectives “operating against that order (and it is suspected against our own) in the Anthracite Coal Region of Pennsylvania.... The times require the utmost vigilance against betrayal.” The Irish Confederation had collapsed for lack of support; the Fenian Brotherhood remained moribund; the future was to belong to ClanNaGael.

By 1884 the ClanNaGael national organization in the United States had a membership of 20,000 men in sixteen districts, predominantly in the northeast (from Pennsylvania through New England). These members paid an initiation fee of $1 and a further 10¢ per week; assuming all paid this there would have been an income of some $100,000 per annum, plus the initial fees of $20,000.

Like so many other IrishFenian groups, the ClanNaGael was continuously betrayed by HenriLeCaron, the “Prince of Spies,” from 1876 onward. By his extraordinary efforts, the HomeOffice was constantly apprised of a great portion of the membership and the majority of the purposes and directives of the ClanNaGael. He was even able to pass large quantities of documents directly: Clan rules dictated that all documents not returned to headquarters had to be burned in the view of the whole “camp,” and HenriLeCaron was able, by sleight-of-hand, “to substitute old and unimportant documents for those which really should have been burnt, and to retain in my possession, and subsequently transmit to England, the originals of all the most important.”

ClanNaGael was most important as an organizing body behind the 1880s DynamiteWar.

References

Short, K.R.M. The Dynamite War: Irish-American Bombers in Victorian Britain. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979.

-- ChrisLehrich^? - 22 Jan 2005