When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  The delayed departure meant that Murphy’s men were sleeping on “the soft side of a plank board” in Springfield, Massachusetts, more than two hundred miles south of the international border when O’Neill emerged from his hiding spot two hours after midnight on the scheduled date of the attack, ready to lead his Fenian army into Canada.

  * * *

  A drenching rainstorm greeted O’Neill as he took his seat for the buggy ride to St. Albans. In spite of the time, the Fenian general found plenty of company on the muddy country roads of northern Vermont during the wee hours of May 24. The Fenians had hired 125 teams that worked through the pitch-black night to haul wagonloads of supplies and arms that had been stashed away in the largely Irish farming community of Fairfield and surrounding towns to the Canadian border in Franklin.

  Nearly every team in St. Albans and Burlington had been engaged by the Fenians for the night. The Fenians paid farmers and livery stables for a night’s work or offered promises that they could share in the plunder expected to be seized in Quebec.

  Dawn had broken by the time O’Neill’s buggy slogged into St. Albans, where he planned to deliver his final instructions to his close friend and chief of staff, General John J. Donnelly, before taking the train to Malone. There he would rally the other half of his troops. Donnelly assured O’Neill that he would have between one thousand and twelve hundred men from Rhode Island and Massachusetts ready to fight on May 24, with an equal number trailing right behind them. Colonel E. C. Lewis reported that an additional six hundred men from Vermont and northeast New York would also be present for the attack, with another six hundred arriving the following day. That would give O’Neill a four-thousand-man army by the end of the invasion’s second day.

  O’Neill watched as the 6:00 a.m. train pulled in to the depot at St. Albans. He expected hundreds of Irishmen to pour out of the train. However, there were only twenty-five, maybe thirty men from Massachusetts and eighty or ninety from Vermont and northeastern New York.

  Unlike four years earlier, O’Neill had secured the guns and the supplies. But where were his bloody men? He had only about one-tenth of the soldiers he had expected. He saw no choice but to delay the attack by twenty-four hours in the hopes that the sixteen hundred men promised by Donnelly and Lewis would materialize. “Even if 800 arrived, I foresaw that they would be ample to take a position, and this was all we wanted at the outset,” he said. O’Neill canceled his plan to travel to Malone and ordered Donnelly to divert all Fenians going to upstate New York to the border town of Franklin, fourteen miles northeast of St. Albans, where he proceeded to spend the night.

  The Fenian general knew, however, that any postponement could be fatal to the operation. It would not only give Canadian and American authorities time to gather forces to stop him but give his own men an opportunity to have second thoughts. “Every hour’s delay,” Le Caron recalled, “added to the danger of failure and collapse.”

  * * *

  Rain fell on St. Albans during the forenoon of May 24 as the U.S. marshal George Perkins Foster and his deputies kept watch. The boys with the brogues had returned to northern Vermont. From his lodgings at the Welden House, the marshal sent regular dispatches to Washington, D.C., where President Ulysses S. Grant stood ready to take action.

  At a cabinet meeting, the commander in chief listened as Secretary of State Hamilton Fish shared the telegrams he had received from army officers and federal marshals who were monitoring the border between Buffalo and Vermont. Once confronted with reports that the Fenians were on the move, the president didn’t dither as his predecessor Andrew Johnson had four years earlier.

  Within hours of the cabinet meeting, a proclamation signed by Grant began to cross the telegraph wires, warning American citizens against any violations of the country’s neutrality laws. The president ordered federal marshals to arrest any offenders, and he directed Attorney General Ebenezer Hoar, if at all possible, to prosecute the railroads that were transporting Fenian units to the Canadian border. General William Tecumseh Sherman, Grant’s fiery Civil War colleague who had succeeded him as commanding general of the army, warned the president, however, that his options for preventing a raid were more limited than he might have thought. “We cannot prevent unarmed men from entering Canada, unless it is proven that they are marauders bent upon mischief,” he said.

  O’Neill was certainly determined to make mischief, but every passing hour that he spent waiting in Vermont jeopardized all the effort he had made to keep the attack a secret. The White House now knew of the movement of the Fenian troops, and thanks to Le Caron the secret was out on the other side of the border as well.

  * * *

  The persistent downpours that drenched Montreal on Queen Victoria’s birthday foiled plans for a military parade through the city streets. Outside the city’s newspaper offices, Montreal residents read the reports that an Irish threat loomed only fifty miles away. Wild rumors circulated, and while many believed the reports a simple ploy to sell more newspapers or yet another false alarm by the authorities, the militias and regulars who had congregated for the parade knew something was afoot when they were forced to spend hour after hour in their drill shed awaiting further orders from Ottawa. That afternoon, the Canadian troops were told that one company from each battalion would be sent to the American border.

  Soldiers who had expected to spend the day parading through Montreal now marched off to the war front. Accompanied by the music of two military bands and cheering crowds lining the sidewalks, the soldiers sang lively choruses on their two-mile walk to the Grand Trunk Railway Station. As the first train departed for St. John’s filled with troops to repel the attack from Vermont, residents of houses that flanked the track leaned out of their windows to cheer and wave handkerchiefs. Hours later, another train left the station with soldiers bound for Huntingdon, Quebec, to confront the Irishmen who, according to Le Caron, would be invading from Malone, New York.

  That night, Queen Victoria’s seventh child held a large dinner party at his temporary quarters in Montreal before attending a military ball in his mother’s honor. Twenty-year-old Prince Arthur, who was in Canada to serve with the Queen’s Rifle Brigade, was enjoying an evening of dancing when the music suddenly stopped and an announcement came that the prince and his fellow officers had been ordered to the front.

  Leaving the ballroom for the battlefield, Prince Arthur reported for duty. More than fifty years earlier, the prince’s godfather, the Duke of Wellington, had been torn away from a ball in Brussels to confront Napoleon on the plains of Belgium. The British prince could only hope that this Fenian raid would end with O’Neill meeting his Waterloo.

  17

  A Burlesque of a War

  ON THE MORNING of May 25, General John O’Neill conveyed only confidence as he buckled his spurs, telling a reporter for the Boston Advertiser that he anticipated “no serious resistance in Canada.” He only hoped “there will be enough to amuse his men.”

  For all his bluster, the general’s army remained woefully shorthanded. His plans called for an army of three thousand but instead had three or four hundred. All the twenty-four-hour delay had achieved was to diminish his element of surprise. But he held out hope in the reports that four hundred soldiers from New York were on the march from St. Albans and soon to arrive.

  O’Neill departed the Franklin Hotel with his close friend and chief of staff, General John J. Donnelly. Five years his junior, the reserved Donnelly had left behind a lucrative law practice and his newlywed wife to join the Union army. Twice wounded in battle, he served as a staff officer and aide-de-camp in the Army of the Cumberland and joined General William Tecumseh Sherman as he stormed through the South on his March to the Sea. After his young wife passed away, just months after he returned home, Donnelly threw himself into the Fenian cause, acting as a recruiting agent in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

  O’Neill and Donnelly rode to the Fenian camp at Hub
bard’s Corner, halfway between the town of Franklin and the Canadian border, where they were the unwanted guests of one J. H. Hubbard. As the generals arrived, the soldiers were unloading dozens of wagons laden with weapons, equipment, and supplies. O’Neill had provided boxes of hardtack, crates of ham, and barrels of crackers, ensuring that his army had a proper commissariat and that they would have no need to loot the residents of Quebec, as Samuel Spear’s men had done four years earlier.

  Fenian soldiers also pried open dozens of boxes packed with ammunition and rifles that had been taken apart lock, stock, and barrel to be shipped in ordinary crates without arousing the suspicion of authorities. While some members of the Irish Republican Army preferred to carry into battle their own trusted weapons—Spencer rifles, Bridesburg muskets, converted Sharps carbines, and even muzzle-loading Springfields—others received the breech-loading Springfield rifles that had been converted in the Fenian armory in Trenton, New Jersey. As a reminder of the cause, the soldiers found the left side of their stock flats engraved with shamrocks and the letters “IR,” the two-letter abbreviation for the Irish Republic. To load their guns, the Fenians distributed black leather shot pouches and an allotment of forty rounds of ball cartridges. They even prepared to engage the enemy with a secret weapon—a three-pound, breech-loading field gun mounted on a caisson that was camouflaged underneath a haystack.

  The Irish Republican Army was not only better armed but also better dressed than it had been on its last visit to Vermont in 1866, when the soldiers sported a mishmash of Union and Confederate uniforms. Many now cloaked themselves in the regulation blue-and-green Fenian uniforms. Reflecting their dual allegiances, some Fenians wore cross and waist belts with the letters “U.S.,” others the image of a harp.

  O’Neill’s army differed from its predecessor in more than just uniform. Many of those experienced Civil War veterans who had mobilized in 1866 had become disillusioned by the split in the Fenian Brotherhood or else had resumed civilian life and were unwilling to disrupt it for another Canadian foray. The army that answered O’Neill’s latest call to arms included young boys, some no older than fifteen and a significant number under the age of twenty, donning military uniforms for the first time.

  One anxious boy already feared the worst. “I tell you, there’ll be hard work today and a good many hurt,” Daniel Ahern of Winooski, Vermont, told a reporter. “And I know I’ll be one of them. No use to contradict me. I know I’ll be hurt.”

  Some of the lads had been just seven years old when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, and their knowledge of the Great Hunger came only from the stories they’d heard from their parents and grandparents. O’Neill couldn’t help but wonder whether these first-generation Americans would really be ready to die for the cause of a faraway island they had never known.

  * * *

  As O’Neill’s men drilled on a makeshift parade ground, he contemplated the road ahead to Canada. He had received reports that the enemy was waiting, but he didn’t know exactly where they were hiding and how many of them there were.

  Around 11:00 a.m., a carriage from St. Albans containing the U.S. marshal George Perkins Foster; his deputy, Thomas Failey; a local surgeon; and a Boston Traveller correspondent rolled up to a barricade erected by the Fenians, across the road leading to the border. A sentinel ordered it to stop.

  An irate Foster immediately demanded that the Fenians dismantle their roadblock and reopen the public road. The impatient marshal then sped ahead to the Fenian camp, where he ordered O’Neill to end the “unlawful proceeding.” Sitting on a stone wall, the marshal read the presidential proclamation to the Fenian general, who then, according to one account, “expressed his contempt for the president in language more forcible and profane than polite.” Foster told O’Neill that he had the authority but lacked the manpower to prevent him from violating the law before leaving to apprise the Canadians of the situation.

  O’Neill was squeezed between two countries. Before him, enemy territory and armed soldiers. Behind him, U.S. authorities and armed law enforcement. Though he was severely shorthanded, O’Neill decided he had but one course of action.

  The general spoke a few quiet words to Donnelly, who stepped forward and barked out his order: “Fall in!”

  * * *

  O’Neill rode at the head of the Irish Republican Army as it marched with disciplined precision in columns of four down the same road as Spear’s men had in 1866. The general ordered Colonel Henri Le Caron to stay back, locate the four hundred troops from New York he heard were en route from St. Albans, and rush them to the front. Le Caron agreed, but of course he intended to do no such thing.

  Before they could confront the enemy, the Fenians encountered an unexpected traffic jam, the country road clogged with curious spectators as well as local teamsters awaiting payback. Having hauled Fenian supplies for the previous three nights, they drove their empty wagons to the border to await the Canadian plunder they had been promised as payment for their services.

  The Fenians rounded a bend in the road, and the border finally came into view. The ribbon of road in front of them descended into a small valley, and through its crease bubbled the fordable Chickabiddy Creek, nearly parallel to the dividing line thirty yards to the south. Huddled together on the American side of the line was a cluster of barns, outbuildings, and the houses of Alvah and Chauncey Richard. A tannery, mill, and several farmhouses sat on the Canadian side.

  If war hadn’t been on the afternoon’s agenda, the soldiers might have better appreciated the beauty. “The soft sweet breezes of the spring morning played upon our faces while the brilliant sunlight sent its rays flashing upon our bayonets and dancing on the waters underneath,” Le Caron recalled. “On the other side there rose in graceful outlines the monarchs of a Canadian forest, overtopped by a rocky cliff standing out in bold and picturesque relief.”

  That rocky cliff was Eccles Hill, which rose steeply on the west side of the road between Franklin and Frelighsburg, Quebec. On its steep slopes, approximately fifty Canadian defenders hid behind bushes and in rifle pits that were concealed by time-scarred boulders. The approaching Fenians recognized the Sixtieth Battalion Volunteer Militia in their ornate crimson jackets with gold trim.

  As Lieutenant Colonel Brown Chamberlin, the battalion’s commander and a member of the inaugural Canadian Parliament, prepared his men for the advancing Irishmen, he found himself interrupted by Marshal Foster, who had by then crossed over the border from the Fenian camp. The marshal assured Chamberlin that the U.S. government was doing everything possible to prevent the Fenian raid but admitted that he lacked sufficient troops to do so.

  The marshal then delivered a personal pledge from O’Neill that unlike the Fenians four years earlier the men under his command would not be permitted to harm women or children or plunder peaceful citizens. Chamberlin was in no mood to receive consolation from the enemy. The lieutenant colonel pointed out that a message from “men who were mere pirates and marauders” was “scarcely satisfactory to those whom they intended to murder.”

  The head of the Fenian column was soon visible, marching around the bend to the border. “I thought they intended to attack you soon,” Foster told Chamberlin, “but not so soon as this.”

  * * *

  With the Irish Republican Army approaching, Chamberlin returned to the Sixtieth Battalion, who were joined atop Eccles Hill by a band of local farmers determined to prevent history from repeating itself. Four years earlier, they had watched helplessly as the Fenians crossed unimpeded into the Eastern Townships, leaving their homes, farms, and property “entirely at the mercy of the lawless marauders who entered the country unmolested,” according to Asa Westover. The fifty-two-year-old, who had a salt-and-pepper beard and the weather-beaten face of a farmer who had spent decades in the sun, certainly remembered what had happened in 1866. He never forgot the humiliation of the Irish Republican Army knocking on his farmhous
e door demanding food. After helping themselves to a hot meal, the Fenians helped themselves to the family’s valuables.

  After confederation in 1867, Canadians took greater ownership of their defense, and the following summer Westover persuaded thirty men from Dunham, Frelighsburg, St. Armand, Stanbridge East, and surrounding towns to take matters—and guns—into their own hands. They signed an agreement to organize a small band of sharpshooters, called the Home Guards, who planned to be ready at a moment’s notice should any invaders seek to enter Canada.

  The Home Guards paid for their weapons out of their own pockets. Westover, whose grandfather was a Loyalist who’d fled Massachusetts during the American Revolution, returned to that state to purchase approximately fifty breech-loading, single-shot Ballard sporting rifles. Through frequent rifle practice, he converted his band of farmers into a company of able riflemen. Even when the fierce winter snow piled outside, the Home Guards took target practice in barns and drilled in members’ homes. Locals mocked the homegrown militia for preparing for a threat they thought would never be repeated; now the men found their efforts vindicated.

  Inspired by the crimson sashes worn by British army officers, Westover’s men donned red scarves draped over the right shoulder and fastened under the left arm. Having received word of the Irish Republican Army’s arrival in northern Vermont, Chamberlin ordered Westover to station his Red Sashes on Eccles Hill along the road leading north from Hubbard’s Corner and above the site where the Irish Republican Army camped during its 1866 raid.

  Thirty-seven Red Sashes occupied the promontory on the afternoon of May 24 and spent a restless night keeping watch. The next morning, they were joined by the Montreal Regiment of the Victoria Rifles, commanded by Colonel William Osborne Smith, along with the Sixtieth Battalion carrying their Snider-Enfield rifles. Chamberlin stationed ten men and an officer in the right rear as well as two officers and thirty-six men strung along Eccles Hill to supplement the local farmers.