When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  A policeman who heard the gunshot chased Keenan down, while the senators carried Meehan to a nearby drugstore for medical assistance, summoning a priest to perform the last rites. According to The Irish-American (which might have embellished the scene for the benefit of its publisher), Meehan made a dying plea for Fenian unity to his fellow senator Frank Gallagher, saying, “Frank, I hope this will be a warning to the General not to surround himself with such men. Let the General retrace his steps and work with the Senate who are his best friends. If my death will unite all I will not have called in vain, and the cause will triumph in the end.”

  Although Keenan’s shot had come at such close range that powder scorched and blackened Meehan’s neck, the Irish-American publisher not only survived but was even able to identify his assailant when the police hauled him into the drugstore shortly after the shooting. Doctors were never able to retrieve the bullet lodged in Meehan’s neck, but he recovered and, perhaps more miraculously, eventually lobbied for Keenan’s release from prison. After serving two years of a ten-year sentence, Keenan received a pardon from New York’s governor, Hoffman, in 1872 and returned to Ireland.

  Due to Keenan’s “insane” actions, O’Neill found himself, as he wrote, “in an extremely embarrassing position.” In light of Meehan’s plea for Fenian unity in the moments after his shooting and amid whispers that the Fenian president had ordered Keenan to pull the trigger, O’Neill announced the day after the shooting that “in view of the lamented catastrophe” he would move the Eighth National Convention from New York to Chicago, as the senate had wished to do. Two weeks later, after renewed accusations, he took back his olive branch, reverting to his original plan to stage the annual congress in New York on April 19. Reconciliation was no longer possible.

  “One Ridgeway is enough in this generation,” James Gibbons told his fellow Fenians. “Ridgeway served a glorious purpose, but a second Ridgeway would be ruin.” For O’Neill and his vastly expanding ego, however, one Ridgeway would never be enough.

  * * *

  The now-annual rumors that the Fenians were emerging from hibernation in America to plan another raid over the border signaled the arrival of spring in Canada. The Fenian scare that arrived in 1870 came just after St. Patrick’s Day when a Canadian spy who had infiltrated the Fenian Brotherhood reported that an attack was certain to occur by April 15.

  With the British government having begun to reduce its garrison the prior year, the self-governing dominion bore a greater responsibility for its defense. Based on the intelligence reports, the Canadian minister of militia and defense deployed six thousand militia to guard the border between Quebec and the United States while gunboats patrolled the liquid boundary with America.

  On April 14, the Canadian prime minister, John A. Macdonald, reported to Parliament that based on reliable information, “the peace of the country was again in danger from the invasion of lawless men from the United States belonging to the Fenian organization.” Believing his country faced a greater danger than it had four years earlier because greater secrecy shrouded the operation, the prime minister called on lawmakers to suspend habeas corpus, as during the Fenian raids of 1866. Macdonald told his fellow citizens that these annual alarms about foreign attacks had unfortunately become Canada’s new reality, and he predicted “a continuance of these attempts for many years.”

  Canadian authorities cast wary eyes at any Irishmen in their midst. In some instances, Irishmen arriving from the United States were arrested under the suspicion of being Fenian, and The New York Herald reported that in Montreal “detectives and spies haunt the hotels, depots, and drinking saloons in search of Fenians in disguise.” The Canadian public, however, was growing fatigued after five consecutive springtime alarms. Frustration mounted at the inability of the Canadian government to properly address the threat and at the United States for giving safe haven to these foreigners who continued to terrorize them.

  April 15 passed, however, without Irish soldiers marauding through Canada or even lurking in border towns in the United States. The Canadian government said its preemptive deployment of troops had deterred the foreigners, and the minister of militia and defense reported that an immediate Fenian invasion was no longer likely.

  Canada had once again cried wolf, with the Fenian menace failing to materialize. With America’s northern neighbor jaded by yet another false alarm, the Irish wolf decided that it was the perfect time to pounce.

  16

  Secrets and Lies

  HENRI LE CARON became a familiar face in the hotels of border cities such as Burlington, Vermont, and Ogdensburg, New York, during the winter and spring of 1870 as he squirreled away Fenian supplies along the frontier. Le Caron knew more than anyone else about the location of every rifle, every uniform, and every hardtack barrel procured by the Irishmen for the upcoming invasion. What the Fenian colonel didn’t know, however, was just how imminent that attack would be when John O’Neill summoned him to meet in Buffalo on May 21.

  Shortly after O’Neill welcomed Le Caron, he informed his aide of his promotion to adjutant general with a rank of brigadier general. Then O’Neill broke the news: The next attack on Canada would begin in seventy-two hours, and “no power on earth could stop it.” The choice of date was deliberate: May 24 would be Queen Victoria’s fifty-first birthday, a public holiday in Canada.

  Le Caron was surprised to hear it. Only $2,000 of the $30,000 sought for the invasion had trickled into Fenian headquarters, but O’Neill was hardly concerned. “I did not deem it necessary to wait the collection of the full amount, as I was satisfied, as soon as we advanced across the border and took up a position there, all the money needed for breech-loading ammunition, the principal deficiency, would be forthcoming,” he recalled.

  The Fenian leader told Le Caron that he had already sent letters to Fenian commanders instructing them to depart on May 23 to either Malone, New York, or St. Albans, Vermont. Fearing that any early movements could jeopardize the secrecy of his operation, O’Neill directed all Fenians to leave for the front on the same day—no matter whether they were coming from New York or New Orleans.

  “Take no man who is a loafer or a habitual drunkard,” the hero of Ridgeway instructed his commanders. In order to keep the mission covert, he directed his men to “avoid the use of uniforms or any insignia that would distinguish them” when traveling to the border as well as to refrain from speaking of any Fenian matters en route.

  O’Neill’s careful preparations ensured that the Fenians were much better equipped for this raid than they had been four years earlier. While many of the Irish Republican Army soldiers who followed General Samuel Spear into Quebec in 1866 lacked weapons, Le Caron reported that the Fenians had accumulated enough war matériel to arm a force of at least twelve thousand men.

  Unlike General Thomas Sweeny’s 1866 war plan for the invasion of Quebec and Ontario’s Niagara Peninsula, which was broadcast in newspapers for days and weeks in advance, O’Neill had succeeded in keeping the press guessing. The front pages buzzed with rumors of Fenian troop movements from Maine to Minnesota, but they were nothing more than gossip. While the Buffalo Evening Post announced O’Neill’s imminent arrival in Chicago, the newspaper had no idea that the Fenian general was around the corner ensconced in the Mansion House.

  Le Caron’s stay in Buffalo, though, lasted mere hours; both he and O’Neill boarded a train to the front in northern Vermont. Happy to be back in the more comfortable role of general, O’Neill felt self-satisfied with the apparent success of his ruse. “Every precaution had been taken to impose secrecy, and though the country is flooded with a sea of British spies, not one detail of the plans was divulged,” he boasted.

  As their train sped eastward across upstate New York, a buoyant O’Neill bragged to Le Caron “that the Canadians would be taken entirely by surprise.” The Fenian general’s most trusted adviser knew better.

  * * *

&nb
sp; O’Neill had ordered his underlings to be on a constant lookout for British spies, yet he was blind to the secret agent who had penetrated his inner circle. Henri Le Caron was neither Fenian nor French, neither Gaelic nor Gallic. In fact, he was the furthest thing from it. O’Neill’s right-hand man was as English as tea and crumpets.

  Henri Le Caron’s true identity was Thomas Billis Beach—a British spy serving queen and country.

  The second of thirteen children, Beach was born in Colchester, England, in 1841. He craved adventure from his earliest days and confessed to having a “wild mad thirst for change and excitement.” Beach told tall tales to escape the confines of reality, and as a twelve-year-old boy he packed up his marbles, trophies, and toys one morning in search of thrills—and perhaps some personal space in such a crowded house—in London. His parents retrieved him before he had gone too far on his sixty-mile walk, but having tasted adventure, he made another attempt. This time he was gone for two weeks.

  Like a wild horse determined to run free, the young boy could not be tamed. His desperate parents sent him to a strict Quaker curtain maker for a seven-year apprenticeship, but that lasted all of eleven months before the master returned the apprentice to his family. At age fifteen, Beach finally fulfilled his wish and snuck off to London for good. His employment as a clerk in a drapery firm came to a quick end, though, when he accidentally set the premises ablaze.

  Seeking excitement in a foreign land, Beach moved to Paris in 1859, though he spoke not a word of French. Then a new adventure on a new continent beckoned when the Confederate shots fired at Fort Sumter reverberated across the Atlantic. Answering the call for Union army recruits at the outbreak of the Civil War, the teenager sailed to the United States in 1861 and enlisted for three months, posing as a Frenchman and using an alias—Henri Le Caron—in order, he claimed, to save his worrying parents from learning that their boy was fighting in a foreign war.

  Three months turned into five years, and after the war Le Caron settled in Nashville. There he became acquainted with his fellow Union army veteran O’Neill, who told him of the Fenian plan to attack Canada. Le Caron dropped a mention of his discussion with O’Neill in a letter to his father, who took it to his local member of Parliament, who passed it along to the British home secretary.

  When Le Caron returned to England at the end of 1867 in the wake of the Clerkenwell prison explosion, he found a country terrified by the threat of Fenian violence. Seeing his country thrown into such panic by the Irish menace, Le Caron needed little persuasion from British officials to become a spy. “I never sought Fenianism,” he wrote in his memoir. “Fenianism rather came to me.”

  Upon his return to the United States, Le Caron offered his services to O’Neill, who gladly accepted the overture from a man with his military experience. By the end of 1868, Le Caron was drawing checks from both the Fenian Brotherhood and the British government. He worked closely with the Dublin-born Robert Anderson, one of Scotland Yard’s first spymasters, and as the Fenian threat to Canada increased, he had direct contact with Gilbert McMicken, the Canadian intelligence officer who oversaw the espionage of the Irish.

  The Fenian colonel Henri Le Caron, who claimed to be a Frenchman with an Irish mother, was actually a British spy named Thomas Billis Beach who betrayed Fenian secrets to the Crown.

  As the head center of the Fenian circle he founded in Lockport, Illinois, Le Caron received reports and financial accounts from Fenian Brotherhood headquarters in New York—which he duly forwarded to London and Ottawa. Although he wasn’t Catholic, he played the part, attending Mass and singing with the choir at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Wilmington, Illinois.

  Le Caron spilled Fenian secrets to McMicken in letters and cipher telegrams that employed a fairly simple code, using a displacement of letters, which could be cracked by knowing which letter was A. Le Caron used a variety of monikers—such as LeC, Beach, and R. G. Sayer—and referred to O’Neill by his code name, Brady. McMicken and other Canadian agents traveled to American border towns to meet Le Caron in person and smuggle his communications out of the United States. In fact, John C. Rose (the man who had been badly assaulted by the Fenians in Malone, New York) was spying not on Le Caron but with him.

  A risk taker and a supremely talented liar, Le Caron proved so adept at his job that Canadian detectives, unaware of his employment by the Crown, kept him in their crosshairs, believing him to be one of the Fenians’ most accomplished leaders. O’Neill would never learn Le Caron’s true identity.

  He couldn’t say he hadn’t been forewarned. The chain-smoking Frenchman had never been fully trusted by many Fenians. Some suspected, as The Irish-American reported, that he “would not hesitate a moment to sell the cause of Ireland for a trifling consideration.” In 1868, he was formally charged with carelessness, dangerous conduct, and suspicious acts for writing down names of Fenians in a notebook. An investigating committee found no basis to the accusation. Feigning indignation, the spy told O’Neill he would resign after having his character so impugned, but the Fenian general insisted that he wanted him to stay. In so doing, he wrote his own fate.

  * * *

  Some of O’Neill’s confidants had pushed for an attack on Canada’s sparsely populated western frontier, where the border was lightly defended. “Prominent leaders say that no foolish raid will be made upon the eastern frontier, where every man’s hand being against the invaders their defeat would be insured,” The New York Times reported in April 1870. O’Neill, however, never cared much for conventional wisdom.

  O’Neill thought that Sweeny’s original war plan had been so sound, in fact, that he planned to once again use St. Albans, Vermont, and Malone, New York, as the staging points for his border incursions. His soldiers would march on the same roads of Vermont and upstate New York that had been trodden by Fenian boots four years earlier.

  O’Neill hoped to storm across the border before the American and Canadian governments could interfere with them and entrench a small force on Canadian soil for at least two or three days. He expected that thousands of Irish on both sides of the border, upon hearing the news of the invasion, would then rush to join the cause and form a much larger army.

  O’Neill’s plan called for the Irish Republican Army to launch a two-pronged attack on St. John’s, a city along Quebec’s Richelieu River halfway between Montreal and the American border. At least thirteen hundred men would march north from Franklin, Vermont, and cross the border at Eccles Hill, where General Samuel Spear had made his camp in 1866. Meanwhile, a contingent of five hundred men armed with breechloaders would seize a train in Rouses Point, New York, and run it into St. John’s to capture the city, where they would meet a detachment sweeping eastward from Malone, New York. Farther to the east, two hundred Irishmen from Rhode Island would march to capture the town of Richmond, where a Grand Trunk Railway branch from Portland, Maine, connected with the main road.

  With St. John’s and Richmond in their hands, the Irish Republican Army would sabotage the railroad tracks to make it difficult for the Canadian militia to organize and concentrate a force to drive them back as O’Neill awaited the thousands of Irishmen he thought would rush to their aid and allow them to threaten Montreal. He expected to encounter little resistance until the Fenians advanced within sight of Montreal, where he believed the city’s sizable Irish and French populations would naturally arise to assist them against the Anglo-Saxon order (an inflated assumption given the way the assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee had dampened Fenian support in Canada). O’Neill told The Daily Phoenix that once he planted a permanent foothold in Canada, he expected “100,000 Fenians will rush to the front.”

  As the Fenians had done in 1866, O’Neill put a great deal of faith in the power of good news to persuade his fellow Irishmen on both sides of the border to rush to the cause. Fenians had flocked to Buffalo for days on end after having heard the news of his triumph at Ridgeway, only to
be prevented by American authorities from crossing the border to join him. O’Neill didn’t expect similar interference this time.

  * * *

  When O’Neill told Le Caron about the May 24 date for the planned invasion, the alarmed spy immediately telegraphed his contacts in Ottawa. The secret agent had already forwarded full details of the Fenian war plan; now McMicken knew the timing as well.

  On May 22, a disguised O’Neill disembarked from his sleeping car in the small farming community of Georgia, Vermont, twenty-five miles south of the Canadian border, and climbed aboard a buggy that whisked him away to the countryside. Only a few scattered Fenians knew his whereabouts. O’Neill holed up for the next forty-eight hours in a friend’s house as Fenians mobilized across the country on May 23.

  Fenian circles opened recruiting stations in cities across America and called upon Irishmen to fight for their country. The Irish, however, had heard all this before. There had been so many broken promises, so many false alarms in the past five years, that they hesitated. In the mill city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, Colonel Hugh McGinnis ordered his men to proceed to Vermont on the afternoon of May 23. Instead, Colonel McGinnis departed to St. Albans as an army of one; he would report on the state of affairs and send for his men if he found out that there was indeed going to be a fight.

  In cities such as Boston where the Fenians could find willing volunteers, they lacked the money to pay for their railroad fares. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, Major Daniel Murphy gathered thirty men whom he described as “ready and anxious to be the first in the field.” Murphy and his men had to spend the entire day raising $300 to pay for their train tickets north.