When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  Exhausted from lack of sleep, Westover and seventeen of his Red Sashes descended Eccles Hill in the late morning of May 25 to eat at a local farm when a cry came: “They’re coming! They’re coming!” The Canadian farmers fled their meal, hoping it wouldn’t be their last.

  * * *

  Poor Alvah Richard couldn’t seem to shake those Irishmen who he said displayed “more courage ’n sense.” For the second time in four years, the Fenians had landed at the doorstep of his dairy farm. They could have chosen any route along the four-thousand-mile border with Canada, and they had chosen the very same road.

  Given that the sixty-two-year-old Richard sold cattle in Montreal and conducted most of his business north of the border, the farmer’s sympathies rested wholeheartedly with the Canadians. In fact, when Richard purchased his farm abutting the frontier, he believed it to be in Canada.

  The families who lived along this stretch of the international boundary routinely crossed the border as they moved from house to house and job to job. Through marriages and friendships, they had loyalties among themselves that trumped national allegiances. Richard’s brother Stephen, for instance, had married Mary Ann Eccles, of the eponymous hill. Her aunt was Margaret Vincent, the nearly deaf woman killed accidentally by the Seventh Royal Fusiliers during the last Fenian raid. There were even Richards among the roll of the Red Sashes.

  When he heard the news of the Fenians’ return, Richard sent his wife, daughter, and domestic to a neighbor’s home where it was safer while he guarded the house with his son, Albert. When the Irish Republican Army arrived outside their two-story brick farmhouse, one hundred yards from the border, O’Neill asked the farmer whether he could survey the battlefield from his north-facing bedroom. Richard refused. He didn’t want “them ruffians up in the best chamber puttin’ their dirty boots on Grandma’s handmade quilts,” he said.

  Outside Richard’s farmhouse, O’Neill addressed his men for a final time before meeting the enemy: “Soldiers, this is the advance guard of the Irish American Army for the liberation of Ireland from the yoke of the oppressor. For your own country you now enter that of the enemy. The eyes of your countrymen are upon you. Forward, MARCH!”

  Before they could obey, though, Captain William Cronan of Burlington, Vermont—whose men had asked to be given the front—stepped forward to say his piece. “General,” he intoned, doffing his hat, “I am proud that Vermont has the honor of leading this advance. Ireland may depend upon us to do our duty.” Not to be outdone, Colonel John H. Brown told the troops he was honored to command the skirmish line and that “all he asked of them was to keep cool and obey orders.”

  The speechmaking concluded, Cronan’s advance guard departed the Richard farmhouse and led the charge to capture Canada.

  * * *

  Positioned at the front of the Irish Republican Army, Private John Rowe reached into his bag of Boston crackers for some last-minute sustenance as Cronan signaled the attack with a wave of his sword. A recent Fenian convert and a sergeant in Burlington’s Boxer Fire Company, Rowe and the rest of the Vermont Fenians cheered as they charged past the iron post marking the border. The valley crackled with energy as Captain John Lonergan, a hero at the Battle of Gettysburg and head center of the Fenian Brotherhood in Vermont, rode near the vanguard of the attack with a green silk battle flag waving in the breeze. Sparked by the adrenaline and Irish pride coursing through his body, the twenty-five-year-old Rowe sprinted to the front of the pack, approaching the short wooden bridge spanning Chickabiddy Creek.

  Up on Eccles Hill, the Sixtieth Battalion occupied the left side of the line; the Red Sashes were posted to the right, from the crest of the hill along a line of rocks extending down toward the creek at its base. From their perch, the Red Sashes had clear views as the Fenians ran exposed through the valley. They held their fire until the enemy drew within range of their guns.

  Crouching behind a boulder, James Pell of Dunham, Quebec, squinted down the thirty-inch barrel of his Ballard rifle. He remembered well how Irishmen had ransacked his house and smashed his piano on their previous visit to the Eastern Townships. As he held his rifle’s heavy hexagonal barrel and peered through its graduated sight, Pell focused on the first green figure rushing toward the bridge.

  Pell’s finger squeezed the trigger, and the butt of his rifle bit into his shoulder. A sharp crack reverberated around the dale. Rowe collapsed to his knees, his hands still clutching his rifle. Pell’s shot pierced an artery on the Fenian’s left arm and tore through his lungs, leaving him to suffocate in his own blood on the bridge where he lay.

  The Fenians were greeted with a further downpour of Canadian bullets after Pell’s opening salvo. The younger soldiers were struck with panic at the sight of their fallen comrade and their first taste of combat. They jumped off the bridge and crawled underneath it for cover. Others scattered, harboring themselves behind stone walls, outhouses, and chicken coops. William O’Brien of Moriah, New York, was shot dead. Others fell wounded while seeking shelter.

  When a Canadian shot brushed the high felt hat off the head of the St. Albans Messenger correspondent Albert Clarke, who had commanded a company of the Thirteenth Vermont Infantry at Gettysburg, he beat a hasty retreat from the lumber pile on which he stood, under “no disposition,” he said, “to satisfy his curiosity further at the risk of his life.” Many of the other spectators who had come to Richard’s farm for an afternoon of entertainment suddenly found that the war was not as enjoyable as they had envisioned. So many Fenians had taken flight that the rounds of ammunition rattling around inside the tin interiors of their swaying black leather shot pouches, according to one eyewitness, “could be distinctly heard even above the din of the civilians who were still scampering in both directions from the field.”

  Canadian forces fire at Fenian invaders during the Battle of Eccles Hill.

  In total, as many as fifty Fenians—and a dozen war correspondents and spectators who hadn’t counted on being quite so close to the action—fled for cover in Richard’s brick farmhouse. The farmer was furious, for not only had the throng stomped through his kitchen in their muddy boots, but they had taken shelter in his cellar, where he stored his precious foodstuffs. O’Neill managed to dash up the stairs to survey the battlefield, such as it was, from an attic window. He could see that the main body of the Irish Republican Army had finally regrouped on the wooded summit of a hill fifty yards to the west of Richard’s farmhouse. Flame and smoke belched forth from Eccles Hill and Richard’s farm, but the return fire was “very ill directed,” Chamberlin reported, “sometimes more resembling a feu de joie than anything else.” The stray shots that reached Eccles Hill either whistled through its underbrush or pinged off its boulders.

  Although the Fenians outnumbered the Canadians nearly six to one, the Red Sashes and the Sixtieth Battalion had the advantage of a nearly impregnable position. Thousands of years earlier, the retreating glaciers had sculpted the perfect fortress “behind which twenty men could have defied a thousand,” one newspaperman reported.

  The Richard farmhouse found itself pockmarked with bullets as Canadians took aim at O’Neill’s perch. When Richard heard a noise in the attic, the indignant farmer stormed up his stairs, discovered O’Neill, and forcibly evicted him. The Fenian general emerged into the light and examined the battlefield through his looking glass. Where is Le Caron with his reinforcements from New York? Why is their field gun not yet deployed?

  Le Caron had proven ruthlessly effective in his campaign of disruption. Back at the Fenian camp, between smokes, the British spy delayed the deployment of the New Yorkers. He rendered the field gun inoperable by removing its breech piece and hiding it where it couldn’t be found for several hours. Matters didn’t improve for the Irish Republican Army when a loud cheer erupted from Eccles Hill: A battalion of the Royal Victoria Rifles and cavalry troops from Montreal had arrived as reinforcements.

  Frustrat
ed, O’Neill gathered those troops within shouting distance in a protected area behind Richard’s house. He castigated his men in green for their timidity. “Men of Ireland, I am ashamed of you! You have acted disgracefully today; but you will have another chance of showing whether you are cravens or not. Comrades, we must not, we dare not go back with the stain of cowardice on us. Comrades, I will lead you again, and if you will not follow me, I will go with my officers and die in your front!” He then ascended a hillside orchard to rally his soldiers next to the Richard farm.

  Returning, the general stopped to check on a wounded Fenian lying on the side of the road when Marshal Foster suddenly appeared at his side. O’Neill was under arrest, Foster declared, by no less an authority than President Grant himself.

  O’Neill didn’t give himself over so easily. “You must not do so,” he warned, “I am armed.”

  Undeterred, Foster grabbed O’Neill before he could escape and threw him into the backseat of his waiting carriage. With a crack of the driver’s whip, the horses darted from the battlefield, beginning the fifteen-mile return journey to St. Albans. As they passed through the rear of the Irish Republican Army, Foster warned O’Neill that any attempt to cry for help might cost him his life. The marshal kept his hand close to O’Neill’s mouth to prevent any shouts for assistance, but the cocked Colt revolver pressed against the general’s temple proved the more effective silencer.

  The cover of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper depicts John O’Neill’s arrest during the Battle of Eccles Hill.

  “Clear the way! Clear the way!” shouted Foster and his deputy, and the green sea of soldiers—unaware of the coach’s occupants—obliged. One man, however, caught sight of the detainee as he sped by: Le Caron, and he could only smile. “To have given the command to shoot the horses as they turned an adjacent corner would have been the work of an instant,” he recalled, “but it was no part of my purpose to restore O’Neill to his command.”

  O’Neill had been considered the Fenians’ best military mind. Now the hero of Ridgeway was being escorted off the battlefield by his own government, without so much as a bullet fired in defense. His detractors could only have gloated.

  * * *

  When Donnelly, the next in command, heard news of O’Neill’s arrest, he walked away from his men, dropped his head into his hands, and wept for several minutes. Once recomposed, Donnelly convened an impromptu war council. Given the arrest of their commander and the increasing desertion of soldiers back to St. Albans, the officers were left with no choice but to abandon their attack and hold position until they could escape under the cover of darkness.

  Around 3:00 p.m., Donnelly ordered a truce flag to be raised in the hopes of removing the bodies of Rowe, O’Brien, and the wounded. The gunshots ceased. Colonel Smith, however, sent a message to the Fenians by way of an envoy of Red Sashes, letting it be known that he refused to negotiate with the marauders. Donnelly traded sharp words with the contingent of Red Sashes, and bullets were exchanged soon again, which left him among the upwards of thirty Fenians trapped inside buildings on Richard’s farm, unable to leave without risking their lives. In an attempt to divert Canadian fire, the Fenians managed at last to pull the caisson with their three-pounder field gun to the brow of the hill adjacent to Richard’s farmhouse. After they trained it on their enemy and loaded the shot into the breech-loading cannon, however, it refused to fire. Under the command of Colonel Hugh McGinnis, they finally coaxed it to launch—first with an ax, then with a hammer, and finally with a crowbar. The shots landed in the swamp at the base of Eccles Hill, harmless to the opposing troops but enough to draw their attention away, as Fenians vacated their sanctuaries and beat a hasty retreat.

  Colonel Smith responded with orders to attack. A bugle sounded, and the Canadians cheered as they advanced toward the border and peppered the Irishmen with gunfire. Donnelly was struck in the hip as he tried to scale a stone wall to return to his men. When a loud cry of “double quick” rang out on the American side of the border, the Fenians, according to the St. Albans Messenger, “converted their retreat into a regular skedaddle.” They fled into the woods to the east and ran south down the dirt road toward the camp at Hubbard’s Corner. Canadian officers chased them no farther than the borderline. The body of Rowe lay on the bridge as a marker of their deepest advance into the British Empire.

  The demoralized Fenians cast off their green uniforms like snakes shedding their skins. They tossed their ammunition pouches and knapsacks to the side of the road in order to lighten their loads. Straggling back to camp, some nursed cups of coffee and gnawed on pieces of ham, while others kicked off their shoes and peeled off their stockings.

  Their resignation was complete: Irishmen sold their rifles to local farmers for $2 apiece. Le Caron could not resist an opportunity to stealthily twist the knife. He urged townspeople to “help themselves” to thousands of their weapons—an offer freely accepted. The Irish-American estimated that as a result “before daylight the next day, war material sufficient to equip between three and four thousand men disappeared.”

  One retreating soldier whipped off his green jacket and turned it inside out because, as he told a Burlington Free Press reporter, he felt betrayed by the Fenian leaders. “It’s all up; and damn the men that got us up here. I come from Massachusetts. They told us it’d be a glorious business, and a good job, and all that; and then got us into Canada and sent us down there to be shot at for two hours,” he said. “I’ve got enough of this Fenian business; and I’m going home.”

  * * *

  The Battle of Eccles Hill, or what some newspapers called the Battle of Richard’s Farm, had ended with two Fenians dead and nine injured. For their part, the Canadians suffered not a single casualty.

  A reporter for the Boston Advertiser saw the young Daniel Ahern being treated for a ball in the hip. “What did I tell you?” the boy shouted. “I told you I’d be shot; and here I am.” Ahern cursed his officers, except Captain Cronan, as traitors or cowards.

  According to the Burlington Free Press, O’Neill was the target of the “most profane and abusive epithets” and denounced by his men “as not only a traitor, but an arbitrary ignoramus.” His arrest had been so humiliating that many Fenians whispered it had been deliberate on his part, as a ploy to avoid gunfire.

  Though the charge was unfair, O’Neill’s crimes of leadership were numerous enough. The Burlington Free Press thought it such a “curious and crazy piece of generalship” to attack the well-entrenched enemy that it demonstrated either an expectation of the Canadians fleeing “at the first show of an advance” or an absence of common sense. It was also a curious choice, given all the roads O’Neill could have selected, to attempt an entry into Canada directly below a natural fortress.

  The general’s greatest failure, however, might have been his decision not to scout the Canadian position in advance to know just how strong it was. Perhaps he relied too much on history as a guide, recalling how he and Spear had crossed effortlessly into Canada four years earlier, encountering not a single soldier at the border.

  Le Caron did the Fenian general no favors, delaying the arrival of the New York reinforcements and the deployment of the fieldpiece. All the same, O’Neill failed to take advantage of his considerable edge in manpower and attempt a flank movement around Eccles Hill by advancing on Pigeon Hill, a village about two miles to the west. He refrained perhaps because of a concern that his army was too young and inexperienced. (O’Neill would claim he was plotting just such a flank movement when he was arrested.)

  After the Fenians departed the battleground, curiosity seekers harvested Richard’s farm for souvenirs such as bayonets, swords, powder horns, belts, water bottles, and IRA coat jacket buttons left behind by the Irishmen. Soldiers posed next to the body of Rowe, whose right-handed grasp on his weapon became only tighter in death. According to the St. Albans Messenger, the Canadians ripped the IRA buttons and piece
s of braid from his uniform jacket, rifled through his pockets, and carried off his belt. The Fenian evoked no pity; the treatment, the Canadians said, “served him right.”

  As the sun faded, Canadians planted their spades into the rocky soil of Eccles Hill and excavated a shallow grave into which they placed Rowe’s body facedown without prayers, last rites, or fanfare. Using scattered blocks of granite, they erected a two-foot-high cairn over his burial plot so, as they told one reporter, “that Fenian shouldn’t rise again.”

  As a final insult, one farmer from Cook’s Corner, Quebec, rode across the border and hitched his horses to the caisson that carried the Fenian field gun. Under the cover of night, he hauled it back to his barn before presenting it to Westover as a trophy of war the following afternoon. A testament to the diminutive “farmer force” that repelled the much larger Irish Republican Army, the cannon sits today next to a historical marker on the crest of Eccles Hill.

  * * *

  As it did four years earlier, St. Albans became a refuge of broken dreams and shattered hearts. General Samuel Spear could still well remember the day in 1866 when he was forced to retreat back to the town after his brief foray into Quebec. He arrived yet again in the Vermont town the day after the Battle of Eccles Hill to consult with his fellow officers, who promptly elected him their commander in chief in a war council.