When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  While Spear claimed, unconvincingly, to be nothing more than a “sightseer” in northern Vermont, in truth the general had come to resuscitate the attack. But his efforts had been undermined. Because the Springfield rifles that had been sent to the front had been either sold, tossed aside, or seized by authorities, Spear needed to access those reserves of weapons that remained hidden in the countryside. And with General O’Neill detained, the only Fenian who knew their whereabouts was Colonel Le Caron.

  Spear appealed to Le Caron to supply him with five hundred stands of arms and ammunition within twenty-four hours. The spy insisted that the task would be impossible given the authorities who were watching their every move. Despite the general’s pleas, Le Caron wouldn’t budge. (He would earn every penny of the $2,000 bonus he was eventually paid above his regular retainer.)

  With no help forthcoming, Spear marched four hundred Fenians out to the countryside to where he suspected the surplus weapons had been hidden—to no avail. Spear fumed that they “had to march back like a pack of god-damn fools.”

  The episode drained Spear of any remaining enthusiasm for war. He ceased operations. Still in a disagreeable mood, Spear tore into O’Neill, telling the Rutland Herald that the Fenian president “got up this movement on his own responsibility against the better judgment of the leading officers of the Brotherhood.” He complained that O’Neill had kept too much information to himself, so that not even his secretary of war knew the location of their weapons. “Instead of that here I am unable to do nothing after a cost of thirty-seven thousand dollars to the Brotherhood, all lost.”

  O’Neill, meanwhile, stewed in a jail cell in Burlington, Vermont. Eccles Hill was no Ridgeway, and O’Neill refused paternity for the debacle. He blamed the men who both did and didn’t show up in Vermont. If the three thousand men he had counted on had materialized, he would have been on his way to Montreal already. “I never was in a battle before that I was so utterly ashamed of,” the Fenian general confided to a Rutland Herald reporter, before laying into the soldiers he’d had at his disposal.

  The only consolation for O’Neill was that a much larger force had descended upon Malone, New York. They couldn’t have any worse a day than the one the Fenians just faced.

  18

  Another Fight, Another Flight

  AS THE REPORTER John Boyle O’Reilly wandered around the Irish Republican Army’s encampment the day after the Battle of Eccles Hill, he saw little trace of the bustling bivouac he had encountered twenty-four hours earlier. The soldiers were gone, and their wagonloads of supplies had vanished. Not even “empty boxes or broken cartridge tins” remained, he wrote in The Pilot, America’s leading Irish Catholic newspaper.

  Down the road at the Canadian border, there was more activity. Alvah Richard toiled to repair dozens of bullet holes on his property. Curiosity seekers from both sides of the border gawked at the farmer’s homestead and scoured his fields for relics. Redcoats and Red Sashes kept periodic vigil from across the boundary, when they weren’t posing for photographs with each other and the captured Fenian cannon.

  A devout Irish patriot and a Fenian himself, O’Reilly had traveled to upstate Vermont from Boston to chronicle a tale of Irish warriors bravely striking the British Empire. What he witnessed instead was a farce. Dispirited, he wandered through the remains of the Irish Republican Army, treading carefully around the border lest he wander into Queen Victoria’s domain, where a price still lay on his head.

  It was a tortuous path that led O’Reilly to New England that day, his Celtic pride a constant across decades of hardship on three continents. Born in 1844 along the banks of Ireland’s River Boyne, he had, as a lad, roamed among ancient megaliths, sacred Druid sites, and the ruined castles of high kings and chieftains. From Dowth Castle—his twelfth-century ancestral home in County Meath—O’Reilly could look across the river to the spot where William of Orange defeated the Catholic forces of King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, consigning Ireland to Protestant rule. He could dip his fishing line into the same legendary waterway in which Finn McCool captured the Salmon of Knowledge.

  O’Reilly imbibed the history that flowed through the Boyne valley, as well as poems, stories, and songs about Irish patriots—many of them O’Reilly chieftains and princes themselves—passed on from his parents. Like John O’Neill, O’Reilly knew that a member of his clan had the choice to either silently accept British oppression or fight for his freedom.

  For a boy bred to rebel against British tyranny, this was no choice at all. O’Reilly joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood as a teenager in 1863 and worked as a secret recruiter inside the British army’s Tenth Hussars to ensure that the military would back the Irish people when the next rising occurred.

  When an informer blew O’Reilly’s cover in 1866, he was court-martialed for treason, found guilty, and condemned to twenty years of penal servitude. Chained, subsisting on bread and water, and sentenced to hard labor, O’Reilly toured the worst prisons England had to offer, from Chatham to Dartmoor. Behind the iron-barred door of cell 32 in London’s Millbank Prison on the banks of the Thames, O’Reilly spent eight months in solitary confinement and enforced silence, the chimes of Big Ben every quarter hour his only companion.

  After several unsuccessful escape attempts, O’Reilly was exiled to the far side of the world in the fall of 1867. Arriving on board the last convict ship to Australia just weeks before the policy of transportation was due to come to an end, he was dumped at the Fremantle penal colony in Western Australia in January 1868, along with more than sixty other Fenians.

  A year later, O’Reilly staged a dramatic escape, hiding for seventeen days in the bush—sleeping on a bed of leaves, striking possums against trees for food—until he rowed out to a waiting American whaler in the Indian Ocean. He arrived in Philadelphia in November 1869 with $30 and a bag of whales’ teeth as his only possessions. The evidence of his hardship at the hands of the British was confined to a scar on his left arm from a failed suicide attempt and his skin still bronzed from the fierce Australian sun.

  Bringing to his new home his long-standing belief that Ireland could be freed only by military action, O’Reilly quickly joined the Fenian Brotherhood. A budding journalist—he published a newspaper on his voyage from England to Australia—the Irishman made his way to Boston in January 1870, where he earned a temporary assignment with The Pilot.

  Assigned to cover the Fenian convention in New York that April, O’Reilly was the only reporter allowed inside the proceedings. The twenty-five-year-old writer had started to sour on the Fenian Brotherhood after witnessing the infighting among the organization’s leaders, but he felt new hope when he was dispatched to the front to cover O’Neill’s latest Canadian venture.

  The newspapers that O’Reilly browsed on the ride from Boston described “thousands of men and trains of war material” arriving in St. Albans. The reality turned out to be quite different. Stepping off the train, O’Reilly found few of the men and little of the excitement that he’d anticipated.

  Still, all was not lost. With a greater force gathering in upstate New York, the Canadian governor-general, Sir John Young, wrote to the Colonial Office on May 26 that he anticipated a “more serious” attack than at Eccles Hill to take place near Huntingdon, Quebec. While some disheartened Irishmen just wanted to return home, others were determined to continue the fight. Even though President Ulysses S. Grant had issued his proclamation against the Fenians, the federal authorities took no action to prevent the Irishmen from riding the rails from St. Albans to Malone, New York. O’Reilly joined the Irish Republican Army as they boarded trains heading west.

  * * *

  When the Pilot reporter stepped off the train in Malone on May 26, he discovered that, just as at St. Albans, the “thousands” of Fenian soldiers reported by the press numbered only in the hundreds. Still, with its fresh troops and reinforcements arriving on every tra
in, the Irish Republican Army found itself in a stronger position in New York than it had been in Vermont.

  O’Reilly also noted another difference in these soldiers, revealed in the wisps of gray underneath their hats. “They were older and steadier soldiers than the men who had been engaged at Richard’s farm,” O’Reilly reported. They weren’t the “raw boys who were frightened at the whizz of a bullet.”

  Most of the Fenians descending upon Malone hailed from three Irish Republican Army regiments. Colonel William L. Thompson, a thirty-four-year-old postal worker and native of Scotland, commanded the Sixth Regiment from Albany. Colonel William B. Smith arrived with the Seventh Regiment from Buffalo. And Colonel Edward Campbell led the Eighth Regiment from western Pennsylvania. They were aided by Captain Edward J. Mannix, the thirty-eight-year-old head center in Malone who had attempted to organize the raid from the town in 1866.

  Among those who arrived on the day after the Battle of Eccles Hill was a new commander, Owen Starr. Upon arriving in Malone, the thirty-year-old Louisville merchant who had fought at O’Neill’s side at Fort Erie and Ridgeway ventured twelve miles north to the Fenians’ forward encampment in a small settlement near the Trout River. For three days straight, wagons had been arriving at the camp tucked behind a church, delivering barrels of pork and hardtack and boxes of breech-loading Springfield rifles, bayonets, and ammunition—enough to equip several thousand men—that had been squirreled away in the barns and cellars of sympathetic farmers throughout the North Country. They also hauled spades, picks, and other entrenching tools bought from Malone shopkeepers. The Irish Republican Army named the base located half a mile south of the border Camp O’Neill, in honor of the Fenian president.

  The Canadian frontier remained undefended, allowing the Fenians to launch raiding parties into foreign territory. One group of raiders led by Colonel Thompson rode nearly two miles across the border and, wielding hatchets, chopped up the telegraph station at a store at Holbrook’s Corners. Following strict orders, they didn’t touch any of the establishment’s liquor selection (though that didn’t stop them from absconding with forty pounds of tobacco). Another band of raiders was at work on an entrenchment on the road to Holbrook’s Corners when Starr recalled all his men back to American territory.

  By late on May 26, news had arrived at Camp O’Neill that enemy troops were en route from Montreal. After midnight, Starr convened a war council and, to little surprise, favored action. The general naturally gravitated toward a fight, and especially in the wake of the Battle of Eccles Hill he felt that the Fenian cause needed some good news—however small it might be—in order to keep the money flowing and the men volunteering. Starr proposed to make a small inroad into the flat, undefended Canadian territory, build an entrenchment, and hope for the arrival of reinforcements in time to salvage at least a part of his operation—to, at the very least, cause some mischief and headaches for the enemy.

  The war council could not reach a consensus. Some thought it a mad enterprise. But the general decided to move on his own, taking however many Fenians were willing to join him. Starr distributed general orders from Camp O’Neill, instructing his army not “to war against peaceful citizens.” He pledged to arrest and punish any soldier who entered a private house without orders.

  As the dark morning sky began to brighten, three hundred soldiers grabbed their Springfield rifles. Starr offered rousing words to his soldiers, but they belied his own hesitation. He left his carriage at the ready on the American side of the border. Even the general, apparently, had doubts about the length of their stay.

  * * *

  After marching half a mile into Canada, the Fenians rounded a bend that gave them a clear view ahead to Holbrook’s Corners. Starr ordered his men to resume work on the barricade started by the raiding party the previous day in order to establish a defensive bulwark.

  The Irishmen’s experience with manual labor came in handy. They dismantled fences from the hop fields flanking the road and piled the logs and rails to form a four-foot-high barrier across their entire front—their left flank abutting the woods and their right flank against the Trout River. To increase their cover, the soldiers dug a one-foot-deep trench along their right flank.

  The Fenians were still constructing their breastwork when the glint of bayonets could be seen on the hill at Holbrook’s Corners. A stream of redcoats approached. Because Starr and the other generals had done no reconnaissance, the arrival of the Canadian militia and British regular forces caught them by surprise.

  The general was no less surprised by their number. It quickly became apparent to the 300 soldiers in green that unlike their brethren at Eccles Hill they were significantly outmatched. Led by Lieutenant Colonel George Bagot, who had spent nearly a quarter century in a British uniform, the Canadian army marched onto the scene with more than 1,000 soldiers, nearly half of whom belonged to the Sixty-Ninth Regiment of Foot, a venerable British infantry unit that dated back to the Seven Years’ War and fought Napoleon at Waterloo. They were joined by 225 members of the Fiftieth Battalion Huntingdon Borderers, 275 members of the Montreal Garrison Artillery, and 80 members of the Montreal Engineers.

  It had taken eighteen hours for the men of the Sixty-Ninth Regiment—already exhausted from fighting a massive blaze in Quebec City three days earlier—to arrive at the border from Montreal. They had managed to catch two hours of sleep on the parade ground in Huntingdon, twelve miles to the north, before the bugle blare awoke them at 3:00 a.m. Milk and cold water handed out by farmers offered them encouragement as they marched to the border. They were ready for whatever the Fenians had to offer.

  * * *

  Colonel Bagot ordered the Montreal Garrison Artillery and Engineers on horseback to cross a bridge over the Trout River, north of the barricade, and to advance on the east side of the river, with the notion of fording it and striking the barricade from the rear. The rest of his force advanced in three columns.

  Bagot assigned the local Huntingdon Borderers militia, who were defending their homes and families, the post of honor—a chance to be the first to engage the enemy. Shortly after 8:00 a.m., they were given the order to attack. The Borderers on the right of the Canadian line raised their Snider-Enfield rifles and fired gunshots into the hop field about five hundred yards in front of them, occupied by the Irish Republican Army’s advance picket. The Fenian picket returned fire in kind, but they quickly retreated one hundred yards to the barricade.

  The Canadian volunteers charged across a plowed field, vaulting fences and unleashing an unceasing barrage. When they closed to within four hundred yards of the barricade, the panicked Fenians began to show their nerves. They opened fire prematurely, their wayward shots whizzing high and wide over the heads of the volunteers, whose return fire riddled the Fenian barricade, sending splinters exploding through the air.

  Meanwhile, Bagot’s flankers had established excellent cover behind a forest of poles holding up the vines in the hop fields. The wild gunshots from the Fenians’ breech-loading Springfields could do nothing to stop the redcoats from continuing to close in.

  The Fenians’ resolve fled. The general gave the order to retreat. Some defiant soldiers begged their commander to change his mind. “Let us die rather than go back!” one soldier implored. Starr, however, couldn’t be dissuaded. He told his army to run for the border.

  With Irishmen disappearing, Bagot’s forces breached the hastily constructed barricade. They charged with fixed bayonets, the Fenians running and firing indiscriminately until they reached the cast-iron post that marked the 45th parallel and the sanctuary of American territory. Although Lieutenant Colonel Archibald McEachern of the Huntingdon Borderers wanted to chase the Fenians all the way back to Camp O’Neill, Bagot refused to allow his men to cross. However, their discretion didn’t prevent the Fenians from running until their enemies were no longer in sight.

  Canadian forces fire as the Irish Republican
Army flees toward the sanctuary of the American border during the Battle of Trout River.

  Starr’s jaunt to Canada was over ninety minutes after it began, but it was not without its casualties. One of the skirmishers in front of the barricade, Dennis Duggan of Troy, New York, was killed. Three Fenians were wounded, including thirty-five-year-old James Moore, who was rendered unable to walk and was captured by a pair of militia, who found him hiding in the bush. The Canadian volunteers clamored to bayonet or shoot their prisoner, but they were restrained by the British regulars. The sole Canadian injury was a Huntingdon Borderer who was grazed on the forehead by a splinter sent flying by a bullet.

  Starr’s decision to order a quick retreat was debated immediately by his men and in the days to come by the press. “Had they stood their ground they might have mowed down our men,” the Montreal Witness postulated, given the Fenians’ strong defensive position. The New York Herald was less sanguine about their prospects, pointing to their three-to-one disadvantage. “Had the Fenians remained upon the ground ten minutes longer,” declared the newspaper, “not one of them would have been left to tell the tale.”

  * * *

  In the wake of what newspapers derided as “Starr’s Stampede” over the border, many of the Irishmen retreated past Camp O’Neill and continued twelve miles south to Malone. Along the way, crestfallen soldiers crouched at streams to take sips of water from their cupped hands and doze underneath the canopies of sprawling trees.

  At their encampment, the Fenians reverted to finger-pointing. Officers claimed that they tried desperately to get their men to regroup and form a line, while privates complained that they were thwarted in their desires to charge. Some Irishmen even threatened to lynch Starr for his cowardice. The general, though, was nowhere to be found. After rushing away from the border in his waiting carriage, he ensconced himself in a Malone hotel before skipping town the same evening on a train to Buffalo.