Led by John O’Neill, the Fenian Brotherhood advanced to Ridgeway and lured the Canadian forces out to meet them for battle. Using his extensive military experience, O’Neill used a smaller force to draw the Canadians out. The Canadian troops were completely unprepared for combat with the Irish. Their formations were formal and rigid compared to the Fenian guerrilla warfare.
As the Canadians advanced and pushed the Fenians back, their lines disintegrated. The remaining Fenian troops, who were hiding in the trenches, overwhelmed them with bayonets, winning the battle. By the end of the charge, 22 Canadians were dead, and 37 were wounded. The Canadians withdrew from Ridgeway, leaving it to the Fenians.
Lacking the support to hold the town, the Fenians also withdrew, choosing instead to take Fort Erie. The Canadian soldiers of Fort Erie, outnumbered but brave in their defense, lost the fort to the Irish. In the end, the Fenians captured the fort, setting themselves up for their occupation of Canada. Their success would not last.
The British and Canadian military joined forces and marched on Fort Erie, surrounding the Fenian Brotherhood. The Irish were now the ones outnumbered. Fearing for their lives and seeing that they were fighting a war they could not win, many of the Fenian Brotherhood abandoned O’Neill and returned to the United States. After losing half of his men, O’Neill and the rest of his men left the fort and returned to America as well.
As the American military took the Fenian Brotherhood into custody when they crossed onto U.S. soil, the Irish realized that the Americans and the British did not take them as seriously as they would have liked. American support for the invasion was unspoken: the United States did not acknowledge that the Irish had held the lands of a foreign power, no matter how briefly, but they did nothing to stop it, either.
The Americans never thought the Brotherhood would succeed because of their first failed invasion of New Brunswick, and they did not bother to keep them from launching a second attack into Canada. The British refused to acknowledge the Battle of Ridgeway at all because the Irish did not hold any land in Canada long enough to use it as a bargaining chip for the independence of Ireland, or for anything at all.
Even though the Irish invasion of Canada was internationally considered a failure, the Fenian Brotherhood did not give up hope of making their influence known to England and succeeding in proclaiming an independent Ireland. Although they continued to launch invasions into Canada, they were all unsuccessful.
The United States indulged their efforts, refusing to punish them severely and escorting them back to American soil when they launched an attack. The frustrated Brotherhood became more aggressive toward British rule in the coming years: a faction located in London detonated a bomb that killed or injured over 100 people to free one of their Fenian brothers.
Eventually, the focus of the Fenian Brotherhood changed from launching invasions into British territories to using violence to become enough of a nuisance to force England to deal with them. Their efforts had the opposite effect: instead of giving up and negotiating with the Brotherhood, the British began to resent the Irish and mistreat them more than they already did, which weakened the influence of peaceful independence movements in Ireland that were starting to gain ground.
While the Irish invasions of Canada divided many, it had a unifying effect on Canadians. Canada was still a British possession at the time, divided into separate territories without any sense of nationhood. After the Battle of Ridgeway and the ensuing invasions by the Fenian Brotherhood, the Canadians learned that the attacks could come at any moment and they had to rely on themselves to defend their territory swiftly.
They could not rely on British troops to come to their aid every time the Irish invaded because that kind of mobilization took time. By learning how to defend themselves by themselves without any outside influence, the Canadians developed a sense of self-preservation that contributed to its independence from Britain.