However, over the course of the next few years' Bourke's mother's health began to fail and on a Doctor's advice that she needed a colder climate, the family once again moved, this time to St. John's in Newfoundland.

Edmond Burke was once again able to establish a successful business, but soon he too was encountering health problems (possibly due to lead poisoning) and the family was once again forced to resettle, this time in Toronto.

Thomas would move to Boston, but following the panic of 1857, he was forced to live a nomadic lifestyle, travelling from one American city to another in search of work.

Bourke was brought to a Union Army hospital that did what they could for him, but his leg was permanently destroyed by his wounds as the muscle atrophied until there was little more than skin covering the bone.

[2][3] In January of 1867, Bourke, alongside many other Irish-American Fenians, sailed from New York to London, with the aim of taking part in a rebellion in Ireland that spring.

The rising was poorly organised, not well supported or armed, and most of the American contingent (who were planned to act as officers) were intercepted at sea by the British.

Bourke, for his part, assembled a group of local Fenians at Kilfeakle, County Tipperary, before marching to Bansha, seizing arms on the way.

At Bansha they cut the telegraph wires and tore up some railway tracks before proceeding to Ballyhurst Fort, where they were confronted by members of the 31st (Huntingdonshire) Regiment of Foot.

I hope, too, that inasmuch as He has for seven hundred years, preserved Ireland, notwithstanding all the tyranny to which she has been subjected, as a separate and distinct nationality, He will also retrieve her fallen fortunes—to rise in her beauty and her majesty, the sister of Columbia, the peer of any nation in the world[2] Having been held in Kilmainham Jail in Dublin, Bourke was put on trial for high treason in April 1867 and sentenced to death.

Bourke was sentenced to die on 29 May 1867, however a public campaign for reprieve began almost immediately, culminating in a mass meeting at Dublin's Mansion House on 13 May.

However, following direct appeals from US President Andrew Johnson and Cardinal Paul Cullen, they acquiesced to commuting Bourke's sentence to penal servitude for life on 27 May.

In 1870 Bourke was interviewed by the Commission of inquiry on prison conditions, and he submitted a report detailing the suffering of his fellow Fenian inmate Ricard O'Sullivan Burke at Woking.

[1] Once settled back in America, Bourke, alongside Thomas Clarke Luby and O'Donovan Rossa, attempted to heal the rifts in American Fenanism by touring, lecturing and speaking to Fenians across the nation.

Nonetheless, afterwards, Bourke was appointed deputy sheriff and clerk of supply in the department of public works in New York, a position he held until his death.

[1][2] In January 1880 Bourke sat on the New York reception committee for C. S. Parnell and John Dillon and was an enthusiastic supporter of the "New Departure" (in which the insurrectionary Fenians agreed to work with the constitutionalists of the Irish Parliamentary Party) and the Land League, which fought for the rights of poor tenant farmers in Ireland.

[1] After a short bout of acute inflammation of the kidneys, Bourke died on 10 November 1889 at his home at 209 East 36th Street, New York City.