When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  As discipline broke down, the Fenians looted more than just food. When local farmers refused to sell them horses they could use to organize a cavalry company, the Irish stole them. They broke into locked houses to raid closets and rummage through drawers for clothes.

  While only $6,000 of losses were reported at Fort Erie and Ridgeway, a Canadian government report found that Spear’s army caused $15,463.83 in damages reported by 102 claimants. Compensation claims filed by the farmers, traders, innkeepers, and spinsters of the Eastern Townships listed bureaus, safes, and even the axes used to break into those safes among the damages. The Fenians apparently drank well in Frelighsburg, where there were considerable losses of high wine, old rye, and other liquors. Spear placed three of his men under arrest for looting in violation of orders, but officers excused the thefts as the work of “bummers” who had tagged along on the venture.

  Blue skies had finally banished the rain clouds by June 9, but this brought little cheer to Camp Sweeny. Spear had yet to receive reinforcements or orders. Discipline and morale were eroding, as was the size of his force. Not only were individual men deserting, but in some instances colonels marched off with entire commands.

  * * *

  News of Spear’s raid wrecked nerves in Montreal. Fearful that the Fenians could commandeer a train into the city or signal an uprising of the city’s Irish, five thousand people crammed inside Bonaventure Station to send off the Royal Guides, the governor-general’s bodyguard in Quebec, to safeguard the city. Primarily populated with aristocrats from the Montreal Hunt Club, the voluntary cavalry unit was composed of the city’s most elite horsemen who looked every bit the part, from their blue tunics with white froggings to their dragoon-style helmets punctuated with red horsehair plumes.

  While the Royal Guides boarded trains for St. John’s, Sir John Michel, commander of forces in Canada, dispatched four hundred men from a wing of the Twenty-Fifth Regiment to St. Alexandre, where Carter’s two hundred volunteers had retreated.

  On the morning of June 9, the Crown forces approached St. Armand, just a few miles from the Fenian camp. As the Canadian soldiers reached Pigeon Hill, they encountered five Fenian prisoners captured by local farmers. The Royal Guides were ordered to the front of the column as the regulars and militia cheered.

  Fenian scouts brought news of the Canadian advance to Spear, who gathered his officers for a war council. They agreed to a man that they had only one course of action. At 9:30 a.m., Spear ordered a retreat.

  It did not take long to break down a camp that had been erected only forty-eight hours earlier. While some men loaded looted goods on their backs and packed them in satchels, others erected protective barricades of brushwood on the road outside their headquarters at the base of Eccles Hill. Spear was among the last to leave camp as his men started to trudge south.

  Fenians who never had the opportunity to take aim at a British soldier instead fired indiscriminately into the Canadian sky as their parting shot. They also fired off curses toward Andrew Johnson. A few even directed their verbal volleys at Sweeny for mismanaging the invasion. Many Fenians tossed aside their muskets, sabers, and ammunition before crossing the border—some to improve their ability to tote blankets, clothing, and any goods they might have pilfered during their Canadian foray. A line of U.S. regulars that flanked the Eccles Hill Road just across the international frontier relieved any Irish hands of their weapons as they returned to America.

  While the Irish continued to straggle out of Canada, two hundred Fenians remained huddled behind the makeshift barricades when the Royal Guides suddenly turned right onto Eccles Hill Road just a few hundred yards in the distance. After dismounting and dismantling the barricades, the cavaliers of the Royal Guides came upon scores of enemy fighters running for the border.

  As the Irish began to scatter, Captain D. Lorn MacDougall, a Montreal stockbroker born in Scotland, ordered the Royal Guides to charge with their sabers drawn. He yelled at his men to strike with only the flat of their swords as they attempted to cut off the Fenian retreat.

  Gunfire broke out across Eccles Hill Road. Canadian forces began to take prisoners. The Canadian detective Anthony Sewell chased a band of armed Fenians into the woods near their headquarters and wounded Thomas Madden, a twenty-five-year-old immigrant from County Tipperary, in the right shoulder before arresting him. The Fenians rounded up by the Canadians were not grizzled Civil War veterans but, as one correspondent noted, “little scamps such as one sees about the streets of all great cities.” Of the sixteen Fenians captured, three were fifteen years old.

  When the Fenians were backed to within three hundred yards of the border, they tossed their weapons aside and made a run for it. With American troops flanked across the road on the other side of the border directly in front of them, the Canadians were afraid of a misfire that could strike the American picket and create an international incident. So exuberant were four of MacDougall’s men, though, that they did not see the iron post marking the boundary and crossed two hundred yards onto American territory.

  The Fenians returned to the United States weary and footsore, though the looters could at least lay claim to new suits, hats, and shoes. Spear and his officers were left with no choice but to surrender to American forces and were taken into custody for violating neutrality laws. Having given his word to report to Major A. A. Gibson in St. Albans, Spear was permitted to travel in his private carriage as the dispirited column filled the roads from Franklin to St. Albans.

  Spear wept as he rode past his disheartened men resting by the roadside, partaking of a meager lunch of dry bread. The Fenian general declared “that he would rather have been shot than have left Canada in the manner he was obliged to.”

  After three days, the Eastern Townships were no longer Irish lands. The Right Wing of the Irish Republican Army returned to the United States with little to show outside the Union Jack it had seized in Frelighsburg. They milked the enemy ensign for all it was worth, parading their prized trophy around New York City. It was dragged through the muddy streets of Brooklyn as it trailed the hearse carrying the body of the nineteen-year-old Eugene Corcoran, who was killed accidentally in a Fenian camp in upstate New York.

  The lone fatality from the Fenian incursion into the Eastern Townships occurred days after the Irish returned to the United States. With tensions remaining high, a picket guard of the Seventh Royal Fusiliers patrolled the border around Eccles Hill as it grew dark on June 10. Through the gloaming they spotted a shadowy figure moving through a pasture. The cloaked individual refused three calls to halt. With their commands unheeded, the picket opened fire. The suspected Fenian dropped to the ground, dead instantly from a shot to the head.

  When the soldiers reached the body, a collective look of horror came over their faces. “My God, it is a woman,” uttered one of the soldiers. The victim was seventy-one-year-old Margaret Vincent, born into a Loyalist family, who lived with her sister north of the international border near Eccles Hill. The former teacher at a one-room schoolhouse in Pigeon Hill had been fetching water from Chickabiddy Creek in spite of orders to remain inside after dark. She never heard the verbal warnings nor the shots that ended her life, because she was nearly deaf. Her gravestone at Pigeon Hill Cemetery was erected by the men who mistakenly killed her.

  * * *

  Following a long day of marching, the Fenian army returned to St. Albans as darkness descended. Outside the Welden House, where Sweeny remained in custody, General George Meade, who had just arrived in the town, was being serenaded by the Third Artillery’s marching band and cheered by a crowd gathered in front of the hotel. “We will show the world that, no matter how we have been treated by others, we have but our rule of duty to do to them as we would be done by,” he told his audience. “I am here as a soldier to fulfill all my duty, and whatever my sympathies are in regard to this movement, and those who are engaged in the scheme which has caused so much trouble, I h
ave but my duty to perform and it must be done at all hazards.”

  Meade had come from upstate New York with an enticing offer for all the Fenians below the rank of field officers—free transportation home courtesy of the War Department for those destitute and willing to sign a parole in which they pledged to “abandon our expedition against Canada, desist from any violation of the neutrality laws of the United States and return immediately to our respective homes.” Meade wrote that he trusted “these liberal offers will have the effect of causing the expedition, now hopeless, to be quietly and peaceably abandoned.”

  “Let no Fenian disgrace himself by accepting ignominious terms attached to proffers of governmental transportation,” thundered the Fenian senator Michael Scanlan, who urged his brethren to refuse the government’s offer. General Sweeny, however, told his men to accept it and go home. He telegraphed Roberts not to send any more troops.

  Although bitter at the federal government for crippling their attack, most of the Fenians reluctantly accepted its hospitality because they lacked money for the return train fare. Within hours of returning to St. Albans, nearly all of the one thousand soldiers were gone on trains heading south. Spear and the officers remained in custody in the Vermont village where they were released under heavy bond the next day to await trial for violating the neutrality laws.

  Similar scenes played out in towns such as Ogdensburg and Malone along the northern border of New York as the Tammany Hall kingpin, William “Boss” Tweed, and New York City’s mayor, John Hoffman, footed the railroad bill for any Fenians who didn’t want to accept the government’s largesse.

  The Fenian fighters last left Buffalo, the place where they first arrived. They fled by the hundreds on the night of June 15, to the relief of Buffalonians who had wearied of their guests. In all, the War Department provided transportation home to seven thousand Fenians.

  “It grieves me to part with you so soon,” the Fenian brigadier general Michael Burns told his men as he bade them farewell from Buffalo. “I had hoped to lead you against the common enemy of human freedom, England, and would have done so had not the extreme vigilance of the United States Government frustrated our plans. It was the United States, and not England, that impeded our onward march to freedom. Return to your homes for the present, with the conviction that this impediment will soon be removed by the representatives of the nation.”

  The final days of spring brought with them the conclusion of the Fenian raids of 1866. Although Ireland was no closer to freedom as a result of the failed attacks on New Brunswick, Ontario, and Quebec, Irish Americans were far from discouraged. The invasions had thrown a scare into Canada, and the victory at Ridgeway demonstrated that the Irish could defeat enemy forces—when given the chance to fight. The willingness of the soldiers of the Irish Republican Army to undertake such daring action energized the Irish diaspora in the United States.

  The curtain had come down on the theaters of war. But, as Burns told his men departing from the border, the fight was not over; it would simply move to the political arena.

  10

  Hail the Vanquished Hero

  WILLIAM ROBERTS HAD expected to be savoring the fleeting days of spring reigning over New Ireland from its new capital of Sherbrooke, Quebec. Instead, his dominion comprised four walls, two chairs, a small table, and a bed inside Manhattan’s Ludlow Street Jail.

  Hours after Sweeny had been taken into custody in St. Albans, federal authorities acting under Attorney General James Speed’s orders arrested the Fenian president inside his Broadway headquarters on charges of violating the Neutrality Act and “disturbance of the peace between two nations.” Far from offering resistance, Roberts could barely bottle up his excitement as he was led into a waiting stagecoach for the short trip downtown. He now had his opportunity to become a legitimate Fenian martyr.

  As news of the arrest spread from one Celtic tongue to the next, eager Irishmen crowded into downtown streetcars bound for the U.S. District Court on Chambers Street. An overflow crowd clogged the hallways and stairwells outside the courtroom when Roberts appeared for examination before the U.S. commissioner George F. Betts. No fewer than a dozen Fenians—one even willing to post $40,000 bail for Roberts—begged to be their leader’s bondsman. The Fenian president, however, refused all offers. “I will not give bail of any kind, nor will I, under any circumstances, give any bail to keep the peace against Great Britain; for that would interfere with my duties as an Irishman,” said Roberts, who insisted that doing so would have been treasonous to his presidential oath.

  Betts remanded Roberts to the custody of two deputy marshals as friends cursed his obstinacy. “He’s making a damned ass of himself,” one Fenian quipped to nodding heads as Roberts rode away from the courthouse. One man’s martyr was another man’s fool.

  The government-furnished accommodations given to Roberts inside the lavish Astor House were considerably more comfortable and befitting of a president. The proprietors of New York’s first luxury hotel, however, moved quickly to evict the prisoner after the property’s insurers informed them that they could not cover damages if the Fenians attempted a jailbreak, as they had done for James Stephens.

  They needn’t have worried. Given the president’s desire to be taken into custody, the Fenians weren’t enthusiastic about assembling a force to break him out. “He got himself in there without any help,” one Irish longshoreman grumbled, “an’ I say let him get himself out.”

  * * *

  For two days, the rowdy spectators who squeezed inside the Chambers Street courtroom hooted and hollered as if they were fans ringside at a boxing match. Prolonged cheering greeted Roberts when he entered the legal arena, and indignant hisses awaited any witnesses who gave testimony against their man.

  From the opening gavel, the defense attorney John McKeon fought to keep the Fenian president’s case out of court. He immediately identified the carpenter George Weishart as the “wretched informer” responsible for the arrest of Roberts, and he made sure to loudly divulge the tipster’s Houston Street address, so it could be heard by all Fenians who wanted to administer their own form of justice.

  One witness after the next withheld knowledge. The Fenian vice president James Gibbons refused to answer nearly every query, including a question about the location of the Fenian headquarters, on the grounds that he might incriminate himself. Even subpoenaed reporters from The Sun, the Daily News, the Tribune, and other New York broadsheets who covered Fenian affairs remained tight-lipped when called to testify. William Cole told the court he was a publisher but refused to divulge what exactly he published. The New York Herald reporter John Gallagher managed no recollections of what Roberts had said in a recent interview because “subsequent duties drove them from his mind.”

  Witnesses disclosed such a paucity of information that McKeon waived his opportunity to cross-examine them. He told the court that the government failed to prove anything, and he was right. After two days of ineffectual testimony, the proceedings, as The New York Times reported, “failed to connect in the slightest degree Mr. Roberts with the Fenian Brotherhood.”

  The district attorney, Samuel Courtney, faced an added complication: Fearing reprisal, witnesses had a tendency to disappear when officers came to collect them at their residences. Those concerns were not unfounded, for Courtney reported that a collection of Fenian roughs had shown up at Weishart’s doorstep and chased him through the streets after McKeon broadcast his address. Courtney informed Betts that his star witness failed to show because he “found it necessary to change his place of residence, secretly, to escape the vengeance of a mob.”

  The obstruction and witness intimidation worked. Courtney decried “the utter impossibility of securing the service of subpoenas” and complained that witnesses were “deterred by threats or terrorism from giving testimony.” In light of that, the district attorney announced to the court that he was dropping the prosecution.


  The courtroom erupted in cheers. The Fenian president was a free man. Scores of his followers, however, remained behind bars, and behind enemy lines.

  * * *

  Irish Republican Army soldiers entered Montreal on June 11, but not in the way they envisioned. Rather than marching triumphantly through the city, the sixteen handcuffed prisoners encountered groans, hisses, and periodic cries of “Lynch them!” as they arrived at Bonaventure Station.

  As the captives were escorted through the streets of Montreal by the Twenty-Fifth Regiment, their anxious eyes darted through the angry crowds lining the sidewalks. Fearing that Canadian justice might be delivered by the mob, the captives were relieved to finally arrive at the safety of the Montreal Prison.

  As the Fenians’ journey through the streets of Montreal demonstrated, the Canadian public was in no mood for mercy toward the sixteen men in custody in Quebec and the sixty-five fighters captured in Fort Erie, now in prison in Toronto. Residents of the Eastern Townships were still cleaning up broken furniture and fragments of glass from their ransacked homes. Soldiers killed at the Battle of Ridgeway still needed to be buried. Canadians were enraged that not only did the American government refuse to extradite the scoundrels who had attacked them, but it gave them a ride home.

  The captured Irishmen had been lured to Canada with dreams of the adventure of their lives, and now they faced the nightmare of losing everything. The Canadian Parliament had approved the suspension of habeas corpus on June 8, and the prisoners faced indictment under legislation enacted during the 1837 rebellion that called for the death penalty for subjects of a foreign state convicted of entering Canada for the purpose of levying war.