New York Herald
Thursday,
January 17, 1870
Triple Sheet
Arrival of Escaped Irish Political Prisoners
from Australia
San Francisco, January 25, 1870
The British ship Baringer, from Australia, brings the following escaped political prisoners sent from Ireland to the British penal colonies in 1865 and 1867. Their terms of sentence to transportation to vary from five years to life:
John Kenny, Dennis B. Castman, Dennis Hennessey, Maurice Figenbohm, Patrick Lehy, Thomas Fogarty, David Joyce, John Shehan, Patrick Wall, Michael Moore, David Cumming, Eugene Geary, John Walsh, Patrick Doran and Patrick Dunns.
They say that they suffered indignities such as no other country but England offers to political offenders.
As soon as the vessel reached the harbor, Mr. Smith, the Fenian Head Centre of California, was notified of the fact and a committee at once sent on board to escort them to the city.
They were conducted to the Russ House, where rooms were prepared for their reception, and during the afternoon, they were visited by large numbers of our Irish citizens and others, who gave them a warm welcome to American soil.
When it was founded in the late 1850s, the Fenians were organized as a series of secret cells reminiscent of revolutionary societies in Europe. The Fenian Brotherhood was directed by a Head Centre, who was assisted by a Central Council of ten. The Fenian organization in each state was headed by a State Centre, who controlled the local circles. At their National meeting in 1865, American Fenians changed their organizational structure to reflect their political surroundings . . . By the late 1860s, there were military branches of the Fenian Brotherhood, including a War Department and an Adjutant General's Office . . . San Francisco Fenians argued that emigration "has been steadily depopulating our native land, and, which together with other causes, will, if not soon counteracted, lead to the total extinction of our race." Ireland was becoming a wilderness, worried the editor of the Irish Republic, and Irish immigrants to the United States were "getting every day absorbed in the great American notion of humanity."