However, days had passed without any word from the president, who hoped a military man would put an end to the Fenian uprising so that he could be absolved from blame. “This is a war on the Irish in which he, Stanton, and Grant fear to do their duty,” Welles wrote of Johnson.
* * *
Just four days after the bells of Toronto had pealed to summon volunteers to battle, they now tolled in mourning on June 5. Inside the undergraduate lounge at the University of Toronto, students had filed past the open caskets containing the bodies of their classmates, still in their muddy, bloodstained uniforms. Now the Queen’s Own Rifles assembled once again in its drill shed as the city gathered to bury five of its heroes killed at the Battle of Ridgeway.
City businesses, banks, and public buildings shuttered early, while flags drooped at half-mast. The Union Jack and other flags adorned the rough pine coffins that were processed to St. James Cemetery for burial. In a city raw with grief, six Fenian prisoners captured at Fort Erie had the unfortunate timing of being paraded through the streets of Toronto on the same afternoon as the funeral. Sorrow turned to anger as the handcuffed prisoners were marched up Parliament Street under heavy guard. Crowds returning from the funerals rushed the captives. “Lynch them!” they hollered. “Give us back our dead!” they cried. A Canadian cavalry dashed to drive the crowd back and escort the prisoners safely to jail. Eventually, sixty-five Fenian prisoners would be held behind bars in Toronto.
The Toronto Globe reported that the deaths of the province’s young men at Ridgeway bound Canadians closer together with resolve not to join the Fenians or the Americans. “The autonomy of British America, its independence of all control save that to which its people willingly submit, is cemented by the bloodshed in the battle on the 2nd of June.”
* * *
While the White House dithered, the captured Fenians continued to suffer. With barely enough room to turn around, the Irishmen stood on the open deck of the squalid barge, where they were alternately blistered by the sun and doused by heavy rains. Still, they found exposure to the elements preferable to the terrible odor and filth that lingered in the hold.
After visiting the prisoners, Dr. Edward Donnelly, a surgeon and zealous Fenian supporter, expressed his fear that an outbreak of disease was imminent. The situation grew so desperate that dozens dove into the water at night to swim ashore and make the barge’s deck a little more comfortable.
Some prisoners cussed out Sweeny for their predicament, but all cursed Johnson for betraying them, cutting their supply lines in spite of his pledge to “acknowledge accomplished facts.” The Irish Republican Army believed it could have, with reinforcements, seized the Welland Canal and advanced toward Toronto, particularly because every railway train arriving in Buffalo from the West deposited hundreds of Irishmen per day, some from as far away as Nebraska and Kansas.
At the end of their third day confined to the barge, the prisoners watched as a tug rounded the stern of the floating prison and sidled up to the USS Michigan. Aboard the boat, two American commissioners bore an order that the prisoners be released on their own recognizance. The Fenians launched their hats skyward and embraced each other at the prospects of being free men once again.
O’Neill and his fellow officers, however, were not so fortunate: They would be charged with violation of American neutrality laws. Three companies of U.S. artillery troops and large crowds of spectators escorted them to a nearby jail. The officers lacked money for a proper legal defense, but one of Buffalo’s most eminent attorneys agreed to help. Having recently lost his first run for elected office, the attorney Grover Cleveland, after visiting with the Irishmen, agreed to take their case pro bono, even refusing the purse collected by Fenian supporters.
After appearing in court on June 6, O’Neill and Starr were released on $6,000 bail each, ordered to appear at the U.S. Circuit Court in Canandaigua, New York, on June 19. An estimated six thousand Fenians remained in Buffalo, many of whom escorted the Irish patriots to the Mansion House, clamoring to see and hear from O’Neill. The hero of Ridgeway stepped onto a balcony above Main Street, looked out over the crowd, and kept his remarks brief. “Gentlemen, you may not be aware that I am no speechmaker,” he said. “The only kind of speeches I am accustomed to are such as are made from the cannon’s mouth. Situated as I am at present, I can only advise you to retire to your homes, peacefully and in an orderly manner. Good-bye.”
A modest proclamation, but all the same O’Neill had proven himself a born leader and an able tactician after being unexpectedly thrust into the role of commander. While detained on the USS Michigan, he received a promotion to brigadier general “for the gallant and able manner in which he handled the forces under his command, and for routing double the number of British troops at the battle of Limestone Ridge.” He learned something about his fellow Fenians as well. “I saw at that time that Irish troops on Canadian soil would fight with desperation and courage, and that carefully organized and properly disciplined, they would prove valiant soldiers,” he said.
O’Keeffe saw the change in his commander. After the successes at Ridgeway and Fort Erie, he wrote of O’Neill, “the re-invasion of Canada was his day vision and his night dream.”
* The banner would star as a trophy of war at Irish gatherings in Chicago for years to come.
8
Iron Wills and Brave Hearts
THE TOWNSPEOPLE OF St. Albans, Vermont, knew the look of a rebel when they saw one, for nothing could erase their memories of that terrible day when terror descended from Canada, just fifteen miles away.
It had started with a single shot from a Colt Navy revolver piercing the crisp afternoon sky, then the gunman’s stunning cry: “I take possession of this town in the name of the Confederate States of America!” Without warning, the Civil War stormed into this northern Vermont hamlet on October 19, 1864, not with a broadside from the south, but with a sucker punch from the north.
Twenty-two raiders, led by Bennett H. Young, a Confederate cavalry lieutenant from Kentucky, relieved three St. Albans banks of their greenbacks, silver, and gold. They forced tellers and customers to swear allegiance to the Confederacy before locking them inside the banks’ vaults. They held hostages at gunpoint on the village green. They even shot poor Elinus Morrison dead right in front of Miss Beattie’s Millinery Shop before galloping back across the Canadian border on stolen horses with a haul of more than $200,000.
Canadian authorities arrested fourteen of the rebels in the border towns of Quebec, but the Crown refused to extradite them to the United States. St. Albans seethed further when the rebels walked out of a courtroom with not only their freedom but also $90,000 of their ill-gotten money, after a Canadian judge ruled that he lacked jurisdiction over citizens of the Confederate States of America. The outrage even drove President Abraham Lincoln to order his military staff to draw up invasion plans of Canada.
Perhaps worse than the miscarriage of justice to the six thousand citizens of St. Albans was that the self-proclaimed “Vairmont Yankee Scare Party” had violated the hospitality of their amiable little town. They posed as horse traders, fishermen, tourists, and members of a Canadian sportsmen’s club. Wielding a Bible as a prop, the twenty-one-year-old Young pretended to be a theological student from Montreal on three separate reconnaissance visits. The village’s most illustrious resident, then-Governor John Gregory Smith, even invited the scoundrel into his mansion for a tour. All the while as the infiltrators swapped stories with the citizens of St. Albans, they were secretly scouting the community and casing its banks.
Now, two years later, unfamiliar rebels were again wandering the still-jittery town. The seat of Franklin County had awoken on June 1 to find 350 men from Boston and the mill cities of Lowell, Massachusetts, and Rutland, Vermont, eating breakfast in its saloons and wandering Main Street’s wooden sidewalks with carpetbags slung over their shoulders. Speaking in low voices, the strangers addr
essed each other as “colonel” and “captain” in between drags on their pipes. The outsiders were orderly, but then again, the Confederate invaders had been, too.
Throughout the morning, the suspicious Irishmen paid repeated visits to a tall, dignified man with a commanding military presence registered at the Tremont House. When a delegation of town authorities decided to pay the gentleman a social call as well, the tight-lipped guest volunteered only that he was awaiting friends, perhaps as many as five thousand of them, who were also “intending to take a journey for their health during the month of June.”
That evening, sixty more Irishmen arrived by train. What did these strange men want? What kind of trouble did they seek?
Answers arrived over the telegraph wire when it was learned that John O’Neill had planted the green flag on British soil four hundred miles to the west. Now war had returned to St. Albans. With it clear that the village would again be on the front lines of the action, the mystery man lodging inside the Tremont House finally introduced himself: He was “Brigadier General Spear, senior commander of the right wing of the Fenian army.”
* * *
The news was greeted with shock. Word of a possible invasion had spread, but few believed the Fenians would actually strike. That included many Fenians themselves. In cities across the United States, Irish eyes devoured the latest bulletins posted outside newspaper offices and upscale hotels. The news served as a recruiting tool and a fund-raising boon for the Roberts wing. Thousands of Irishmen abandoned their jobs and spent their last pennies for train fare to St. Albans, Buffalo, and other locales in upstate New York. The web of railroad tracks woven across New England carried carloads to the front, such as it was, along the Quebec border.
Edward Archibald, the British consul in New York City, reported “the excitement among the Irish caused by the news of a collision and bloodshed was everywhere manifest.” A green flag waved from the front balcony of Tammany Hall, where secretaries scribbled the names of hundreds of new recruits. Women showed their solidarity by donning strips of green ribbons over their hearts. Even a group of African American veterans, casting aside any lingering animosity from the Irish violence directed toward them during the New York City draft riots, reportedly lent their services to the Fenians. (Their offer was declined.)
The New York Times devoted five front-page columns to “the border excitement” the day after the Fenians breached the international frontier, while The New York Herald made a much more blunt declaration: “WAR.” The Irish-American tried with breathless hyperbole to rally readers to grab their guns. “The whole border from Maine to Michigan is bristling with Irish bayonets,” it proclaimed. But not all Irishmen were so optimistic.
* * *
William Roberts basked in what The Irish-American called “startling but most intensely pleasurable news.” For his part, though, Thomas Sweeny still feared that the entire operation would prove a disaster. A lack of manpower had plagued the initial steps in his plan and pushed back the start of the main attack on Quebec from its June 2 target. The Fenian secretary of war grew further annoyed to learn that his orders for troops to move from Detroit to divert enemy attention had not been executed. And he hadn’t heard news from upstate New York in days.
Sweeny held out hope that the tide of Celtic recruits that swelled in the days after Ridgeway had yet to crest upon the Canadian border. While Roberts continued to rally the troops with a fusillade of proclamations, Sweeny departed for the front lines in upstate New York on June 4 to see for himself how many men were there to be rallied. What the general found would do little to improve his mood.
When the Fenian secretary of war stepped off the train in Malone, New York—a town of seven thousand that had been sacked by the British during the War of 1812—he expected to find nearly as many troops as villagers. However, out of the 16,800 troops his plan called for, he had barely more than 2,000. There was little sign of the five cavalry regiments to be commanded by Brigadier General Michael C. Murphy that he had ordered to Malone. Where were all the new recruits, and why hadn’t he been told of the disappointing turnout?
An officer insisted that he had been, in six different telegraph messages. It seems the U.S. government had intercepted their dispatches. In fact, the federal authorities had seized more than just the Fenians’ communications. Two weeks earlier, U.S. customs agents in Rouses Point, New York, confiscated thirty-two suspicious cases marked “machinery” that were addressed to Malone’s Fenian leader, Edward J. Mannix, a County Cork native and Civil War veteran. Customs agents found forty muskets inside each box. Hours before Sweeny arrived, another thirty-one cases of Fenian arms had been seized. At Potsdam Junction, at De Kalb Junction, at Watertown, and at Malone, the federal government took possession of mysterious railroad shipments that Sweeny had purchased from Philadelphia’s Bridesburg Arsenal and Troy’s Watervliet Arsenal. The general was outraged. He had bought those munitions from the same government that was now seizing them.
Sweeny could feel the time to strike slipping away. He lost faith in the ability of the Fenians to launch an attack along the west side of the Richelieu River from upstate New York. With gunships now patrolling the St. Lawrence River and General George Meade lurking just sixty miles away in Ogdensburg, Sweeny decided on June 6 to move his post from Malone to a more inviting—and promising—locale.
* * *
St. Albans might have been named for the first recorded English martyr, but its scenery was pure Irish. Stone walls dissected emerald meadows dotted with sheep. Brooks trickled down from the Green Mountains to the east. To the west, the undulating tops of the distant Adirondacks floated above the cobalt surface of Lake Champlain. The tidy village’s weekly butter market drew traders from as far away as New York City and Boston.
It was guns, not butter, though, that drew Sweeny’s attention to St. Albans, home to one of Vermont’s thirteen Fenian Brotherhood circles. John Fallon, the captain of the local Fenian Brotherhood circle, assured Sweeny that St. Albans was the “best town on the line” because it was not only just sixty-five miles from Montreal but also a major rail hub, which would aid in transporting guns and ammunition in advance of the attack.
Fallon thought he had a perfect front for making the secret arms shipments. Peter Ward, secretary of the Fenian circle in St. Albans and superintendent of the town’s gasworks, was overseeing the plant’s reconstruction after a devastating fire, which meant he was receiving “a great quantity of material every day.” Beginning in late May, swords and rifles that Sweeny had purchased from the U.S. government were shipped to Ward’s attention in crates marked “glass,” “crockery,” and “gas fixtures” and then hidden in barns and buried in the woods throughout the surrounding towns.
The watchful eyes of U.S. customs agents, particularly those on the British payroll as informants, grew too prying when one suspicious shipment of boxes marked “glass, with care” arrived on an express from Springfield, Massachusetts. After the rail workers tenderly lifted the boxes to the platform, they watched in shock as a pair of Irishmen threw the supposedly precious cargo onto a wagon before bolting away from the station.
Shortly after Spear arrived in St. Albans, so did the U.S. marshal Hugh Henry and three companies of the Third U.S. Artillery, which seized boxes and barrels at the train depot that were addressed to Ward, finding them to be brimming with sabers, carbines, and cavalry equipment. “The President approves of your action in stopping the arms,” Secretary of War Edwin Stanton wrote to the local collector of customs. “You will detain them in your custody until further orders, and pursue the same course to any other lots.”
The Fenians grew wise and began to toss boxes off railcars before reaching the St. Albans depot, retrieving them later, but the arms seizures threatened the invasion plan because many of the Fenians who arrived in northern Vermont lacked blankets or overcoats, let alone a revolver. “We Irishmen are determined and will fight,” one veteran
of Antietam and Gettysburg told a newspaper correspondent, “but we cannot do anything without an abundance of arms, and where are we to get them?”
* * *
For nearly a week, a steady stream of Fenian fighters from New York and New England arrived by rail in St. Albans. Another 350 arrived on June 6. Most were young, some mere boys fourteen and fifteen years old. Some found open arms and open doors among Franklin County’s sizable Irish population. Others camped in the woods and scrounged for provisions from local Fenians. The heavy spring rains that liquefied the dirt roads into mud, however, slowed their movement. Day after day, the sodden Fenian camp slogged toward the border—from Fairfield to Sheldon to East Highgate.
By the time Sweeny arrived in St. Albans, later on June 6, the registers of the town’s hotels were inked with the names of Civil War correspondents from newspapers such as The New York Herald, the New-York Tribune, and the Boston Journal who were suddenly back on their old beat. Hundreds of government troops had converted the village green into a makeshift army camp, their white teepee tents offering badly needed coverage from days of deluges.
Sweeny convened a war council with the few Fenian officers remaining in St. Albans, including Brigadier General Spear. The general’s handpicked man to lead the most crucial phase of the Fenian campaign had spent three decades in service of the United States, serving with distinction in the Civil War as a colonel with the Eleventh Pennsylvania Cavalry until sustaining a serious leg and head injury.
When the Irish Invaded Canada Page 13
