Timothy John Deasy was an Irish survivor of the Great Famine who emigrated with his family to Massachusetts in the United States. He later became an officer in the Union Army during the American Civil War, as well as a revolutionary fighting alongside the Irish Republican Brotherhood in both Canada during the Fenian Raids and Ireland during the Fenian Rising of 1867. Towards the end of his life, he became involved in electoral politics in Massachusetts, becoming one of the few Roman Catholics elected at that time to the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
A depiction of the Battle of Ridgeway in which Deasy fought
Irish Republican Brotherhood
The Irish Republican Brotherhood was a secret oath-bound fraternal organisation dedicated to the establishment of an "independent democratic republic" in Ireland between 1858 and 1924. Its counterpart in the United States of America was initially the Fenian Brotherhood, but from the 1870s it was Clan na Gael. The members of both wings of the movement are often referred to as "Fenians". The IRB played an important role in the history of Ireland, as the chief advocate of republicanism during the campaign for Ireland's independence from the United Kingdom, successor to movements such as the United Irishmen of the 1790s and the Young Irelanders of the 1840s.
Thomas Osborne Davis
John Mitchel
James Stephens was the founding President of the IRB and a tireless organisor for the group
John O'Mahony was amongst many Fenians who saw the American Civil War as an opportunity to gain military experience that could be used in the liberation of Ireland.