When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  Spear reported to Sweeny that he had approximately one thousand men camping in the Vermont countryside “without supplies, commissary stores, or anything but good comfortable clothing.” He couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to the money donated to the Roberts wing to be used for precisely this moment. As in upstate New York, Spear found himself constrained by the government’s seizure of their arms. He told Sweeny that he had been forced to “beg, borrow, or take such ammunition as can be found” while avoiding the watchful eyes of federal troops. Order had prevailed, but the men were getting uneasy and eager for action.

  The good news was that for all the disruption to their town the citizens of St. Albans didn’t appear too put out. “Never has there been congregated in St. Albans so large a number of strangers who have conducted themselves more orderly than the invaders of Canada,” reported one of the town’s newspapers. After touring the front lines, Vermont’s governor, Paul Dillingham, said he would sooner “think of calling out the militia to put down a Quaker meeting as to resist the Fenian movement.”

  Aside from those Confederate raiders who had torn through their town two years prior, St. Albans had a bit of a soft spot for rebels. After all, Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys had declared independence not only from Great Britain during the American Revolution but from New York as well. For fourteen years, Vermont was its own independent republic with its own printed currency, much like the Fenian government in exile. St. Albans had refused to enforce the fugitive slave law, serving as one of the final depots on the Underground Railroad. The town’s old-timers could even remember when they barred the late general Winfield Scott, dispatched as President Martin Van Buren’s special envoy, from lecturing them about their “flaunting” of American neutrality laws by supporting the anti-British forces during the Patriot War of 1837.

  The residents of St. Albans were even less willing to listen to any talk about neutrality laws after what had been done to them in October 1864. They might not have backed the Fenian cause, but they surely approved of the Irish delivering some equivalent discomfort to the British and the Canadians. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise, as one newspaper reported, that “ninety-nine out of every one hundred of the people at St. Albans are friendly to the Fenian cause.” But resistance was brewing just a few miles north on the other side of the international frontier.

  * * *

  Scarlet-uniformed soldiers marched throughout the streets of Montreal to Bonaventure Station and boarded Grand Trunk Railway trains bound for cities such as Kingston, Cornwall, and Prescott along the St. Lawrence River and for towns in southern Quebec. A constant soundtrack of drums and bagpipes played as the Royal Artillery, Prince of Wales’ Rifles, and Victoria Rifles marched in unison through a city guarded by armed militia and papered with placards calling for volunteers to take up arms to repel the marauders.

  Many answered the call, and those who couldn’t volunteer enlisted their voices to cheer on the men marching out of Montreal. “Good luck to you!” “Don’t leave a mother’s son of the villains alive!” they called out while cursing the pirates, bandits, and robbers who had thrown the city into a frenzy.

  It was no small irony that the city in such a state of panic about lawless rebels violating neutrality laws still offered considerable sanctuary to leaders of the Confederacy. This was the city, after all, where news of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination was toasted and General George Pickett lived in a luxurious hotel and exchanged salutes with Confederate sympathizers. Boxes of official Confederate government documents were housed inside the vaults of the Bank of Montreal. The city even harbored the family of Jefferson Davis.

  The news from Ridgeway had thrown Montreal into a particular panic because it feared the enemy within. Not fully convinced of the loyalty of the two Irish Catholic companies in the Prince of Wales’ Rifles, soldiers in the Protestant “Orange Company” made sure to keep their rifles loaded at all times. Montreal’s mayor, Henry Starnes, stoked fears further by announcing he had dismissed ten policemen who had refused to take an oath of allegiance tendered to all civic employees at the outbreak of trouble.

  However, there were few outward signs of Fenian support among Montreal’s Irish after O’Neill’s raid. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, the staunch supporter of Canadian confederation, saw little nuance in the threat facing Canada. “Whoever is not with us is against us,” he told Montrealers shoehorned into city hall on June 4. “Whoever has any sympathy with the invaders commits a crime.” He assured his constituents that he was ready to travel to Ottawa and cast a vote in Parliament in favor of the suspension of habeas corpus.

  Many in his audience were already shocked that the Johnson administration had done so little to enforce American neutrality laws and control the Irish menace. “You must allow me to say that I do not understand why the United States Government does not issue a proclamation warning people against joining in these proceedings,” Sir Frederick Bruce, the British representative in Washington, wrote to Secretary of State William Seward. Sweeny and his men were just miles from the Canadian border, yet the White House remained silent.

  But that was about to change.

  * * *

  Seward and President Johnson might have tolerated the Fenians for a time, but the lark was over. The Irish succeeded in alarming British diplomats, who were increasing the pressure on their American counterparts to rein in their citizens. Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant had also had enough of the freelancing by his former soldiers, recommending to Stanton that Sweeny, Roberts, and other Fenian leaders be taken into custody and the Irish Republican Army be reeled in from the front.

  On June 6, four days after the assault on Ridgeway, Johnson scrawled his signature on a proclamation that forbade the Fenians to carry on any further operations in violation of the country’s neutrality laws and empowered “all judges, magistrates, marshals, and officers in the service of the United States” to arrest the Fenian ringleaders. That afternoon, as Sweeny was meeting with his war council in St. Albans, Johnson’s words filtered through the telegraph wires to the front lines in upstate New York and Vermont. When Major A. A. Gibson, commander of the Third Artillery, received the notice in St. Albans, he had the words printed, posted around town, and distributed by couriers to the surrounding villages. He then gave the order for his men to take the Fenian officers in the village into custody.

  Sweeny and his war council took no heed. They decided that they would cross the border at daybreak. The general had turned in for a few hours of restless sleep before his invasion when he heard a knock on the door of his hotel room around midnight. Offering no resistance, Sweeny was taken into custody along with his chief of engineers, Colonel John Mechan, to the officers’ quarters.

  The following morning, rather than leading the Irish Republican Army onto British soil, Sweeny found himself inside one of the spacious parlors of the Welden House hotel being arraigned on the “charge of aiding and abetting in the violation of the neutrality laws.” Sweeny waived his examination, and bail was set for $20,000, which Sweeny could not furnish. Instead of being placed in jail, the general was confined to a room in the Welden House with two sentries posted at his door, pending his appearance before the U.S. District Court scheduled for the following month.

  Soldiers swarmed the Tremont House five minutes too late to capture Spear. He had received word of the raid and was loaded into a horse-drawn wagon and whisked out of town. The Fenian general traveled nearly twenty miles before arriving around 8:30 a.m. at the Fenian camp in Franklin, barely two miles from the Canadian line. Spear found his rank and file singing and dancing, full of cheer that belied their restless night. The lucky ones had slept like animals—and next to animals—on the ground inside barns. Others found shelter from pelting rain in sheds and even outhouses, where they were forced to stand for the entire night.

  They emerged at first light to continue their treacherous march. In some spot
s, the men sank ankle-deep in mud, pulling ill-fitting boots right off the men’s feet. The local Fenians finally resurrected boxes of guns they had buried around St. Albans, distributing three hundred arms of various calibers. Their commissary, though, was still neglected. Some companies had one loaf of bread for every five or six men.

  Spear convened his war council again, this time inside a Franklin hotel, where Brigadier General John Mahan and his officers had spent a more comfortable night than their regulars. The general had fifteen thousand fewer men than promised to strike Montreal—six hundred in the command of Colonel Louis Contri, three hundred under Colonel John Scanlan, and two hundred under Colonel Timothy O’Connor.

  Mahan, a major with the Ninth Massachusetts during the Civil War and a member of the Massachusetts Legislature, briefed Spear that the lack of food and weapons combined with the abundance of mud and rain had driven many of his men home, but those who remained were eager to advance.

  So too was Spear. Although he had but two horses, two twelve-pounder brass fieldpieces, and half an army without weapons of any kind, the Fenian general rallied his men. To a chorus of wild cheers, he ordered them to take Canada. President Johnson’s proclamation and the White House’s perceived backstabbing had only emboldened the stubborn Irish to move ahead with their plans. The Fenian army was on the enemy’s threshold, and once again it would find the front door wide open.

  9

  The Fenians Are Coming!

  IN SPITE OF the panic that had gripped America’s northern neighbor for more than a week and the Fenian threat that had lingered all year, not one British regular or Canadian volunteer could be seen as the Irish army marched to the border on the morning of June 7. The defense of Quebec’s Missisquoi County had been ceded to the residents themselves in the form of a homegrown militia composed of two hundred residents under the direction of Captain C. W. Carter. Even compared with the defense forces at Ridgeway, the Missisquoi volunteers were an inexperienced lot. Most were farmers who had never fired a rifle.

  Carter, a British army officer from Her Majesty’s Sixteenth Regiment, had little faith in the fighting ability of his men, and when a scout returned from Vermont with a vastly exaggerated report that a Fenian army of two thousand men all armed with rifles was approaching the border, Carter ordered his men to fall back to St. Alexandre, fifteen miles from the frontier. The farmers groused at their captain atop his horse as they marched through the mud. In him they saw cowardice and capitulation personified. Many of them had been forced to abandon their fields at the critical planting time in the short growing season. Thanks to their captain, they were now leaving their homes, farms, and families in direct line of the Fenians without any defense.

  Inside the Eastern Townships, the villages in southern Quebec across the border from Franklin, farmers buried their valuables, drove away their cattle, removed their deposits from banks, and sent their wives and children to safer locales—in many cases not farther north toward Montreal but actually south to Vermont, passing by the very army that was causing them to flee. In some respects, the Eastern Townships—initially settled by New Englanders seeking cheap farmland—had closer ties to their American neighbors than to Canada. It was common for members of extended families to live, work, and even celebrate the Fourth of July on both sides of the border.

  As they marched the final miles to the boundary, the Fenian army passed their wagons, laden with household goods and furniture. Unlike the liquid boundary that John O’Neill traversed, the international border ahead of Samuel Spear and his men was visible only on a map and no more of an obstacle than a county line. There were no border guards. Customs officers resided in village centers miles from the dividing line, allowing the free movement of smugglers who could make $2.00 per gallon on spirits, $0.75 per pound on tea, and great prices on spices, medicine, and silks. By one estimate, the value of the property seized by customs agents in New York’s St. Lawrence County was only 5 percent of the merchandise fraudulently imported.

  Just after 10:00 a.m., British mud splattered across the boots of the Irish Republican Army, a lone iron post on the roadside the only indicator that they had crossed an international border. The men marched in a column four across as they entered Canada to cheers and a chorus of “The Wearing of the Green,” the Hibernian street ballad evoking the memory of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

  Spear, standing before his men, looked out onto the most ragtag of armies. Some, like Colonel Louis Contri, had spent their entire lives attached to a gun, while others were so young they were incapable of growing a mustache. His cavalry hugged saddles in their arms in hopes of finding a horse to match. While some officers wore the blue coats of the U.S. Army, most of the soldiers lacked uniforms of any kind, and all were wet from the relentless downpour. About three hundred of the soldiers carried Enfield and Springfield muskets and three hundred held breech-loading carbines, but their lack of ammunition rendered many of them impotent. Those without rusty sabers and balky revolvers were armed with only their patriotism.

  “You are now on British soil,” Spear told his men. “I charge you to spare the women and children. I leave in your hands the enemies of your country.” Spear proclaimed the establishment of the Irish Republic, setting off cheering. Colonel Contri stepped forward and unfurled a green silk emblem hand stitched by the Fenian Sisterhood circle in Malden, Massachusetts, planting it in the spongy turf. Spear then announced a $100 reward to the first man to seize the British colors. He ventured all of five hundred yards into British territory before establishing headquarters for the “Right Wing of the Army of Ireland” inside an old red farmhouse abandoned by the Eccles family. At the base of Eccles Hill, the Fenians erected a small tent city that they named Camp Sweeny in honor of their captured commander.

  * * *

  “The Fenians are coming!” shouted the Canadian alarm riders sprinting through the Eastern Townships to alert any residents who still remained. The Fenians, though, largely discovered a vacant land of empty farmhouses and ghost towns. They found telegraph offices shuttered and the lines cut to hinder Fenian communications. They encountered few people, let alone any organized resistance.

  Spear hoped to maintain his toehold in Canada until reinforcements and provisions could arrive. Most immediately, however, he needed to feed his starving army. “The cry was still—hunger,” Spear wrote to Sweeny, who was receiving communications in spite of being under hotel arrest in St. Albans, as the sun began to set on his first night on enemy territory. “I had but one alternative—foraging parties were sent out.”

  Contri assured one Quebecer who came to the headquarters to ascertain the intentions of the invaders that his men “were not robbers, but soldiers.” Contri said his army expected to pay for what it took “but that the Irish had been downtrodden by British power, and they had come to make war upon the forces of the Province, but not on the inhabitants.” In some cases, the Irishmen handed out IOUs, such as the one given to one St. Armand farmer: “The Irish Republic promises to pay W. Stewart Holsapple 100 dollars for value received, six months later.”

  More often than not, however, the Fenians who raided the farms of the Eastern Townships stole cattle, sheep, and pigs—sometimes slaughtering and cooking them on the spot—without any intentions of repayment. The hungry army forced its way into empty farmhouses and confiscated copious quantities of butter and sliced hunks from cheese wheels with their bayonets. At one farm, the woman answering the door said she had milk “only enough for the pigs” and could not supply any to the soldiers. Seconds after closing her door, she heard squealing from the pen as the Irish eliminated the excuse for their denial.

  Sentries armed with muskets and fixed bayonets patrolled the roads of southern Quebec. The occupying army distributed passes to local residents allowing them to travel. The soldiers demanded the British citizens take oaths of allegiance to the Irish Republic and warned they would hang from the first tree if they wer
e found harboring British soldiers.

  By evening time, twenty-two members of the Third Fenian Cavalry had marched into Frelighsburg, five miles from Camp Sweeny. They plundered two stores and ransacked the most prominent symbol of the Crown—the customhouse. The Irish removed official stamps and split the royal coat of arms to pieces. They confiscated the British ensign that had been bought by the villagers and raised a green flag with a golden harp in its place. The Fenian cavalry returned to Camp Sweeny with the first trophy of war and raised the British flag on the staff in front of the makeshift headquarters beneath the Harp of Erin.

  Spear’s second day in Canada brought with it a shipment of fresh beef from a contractor in St. Albans and the arrival of $500, but he continued to wait for his promised reinforcements. “Give me men, arms, and ammunition and I will subsist my command sumptuously off the country,” Spear wrote to Colonel John Mechan. “I feel in most excellent spirits, and if I can hold my own until the 500 muskets and 100,000 rounds arrive, I shall have no doubts of success,” the general wrote before adding one last plea to “hurry up those arms.”

  While O’Neill maintained stringent discipline over his men and operated by the strict rules of war, the same could not be said of Spear’s army. His men were greener than O’Neill’s. The Right Wing of the Irish Republican Army included fewer experienced soldiers and more youngsters caught up in the Fenian fever that swept through their cities after the victory at Ridgeway. Having gone nearly a week without a decent meal and with nary a dry day, they were in a situation more desperate than that faced by O’Neill.