9
The Fenians Are Coming!
IN SPITE OF the panic that had gripped America’s northern neighbor for more than a week and the Fenian threat that had lingered all year, not one British regular or Canadian volunteer could be seen as the Irish army marched to the border on the morning of June 7. The defense of Quebec’s Missisquoi County had been ceded to the residents themselves in the form of a homegrown militia composed of two hundred residents under the direction of Captain C. W. Carter. Even compared with the defense forces at Ridgeway, the Missisquoi volunteers were an inexperienced lot. Most were farmers who had never fired a rifle.
Carter, a British army officer from Her Majesty’s Sixteenth Regiment, had little faith in the fighting ability of his men, and when a scout returned from Vermont with a vastly exaggerated report that a Fenian army of two thousand men all armed with rifles was approaching the border, Carter ordered his men to fall back to St. Alexandre, fifteen miles from the frontier. The farmers groused at their captain atop his horse as they marched through the mud. In him they saw cowardice and capitulation personified. Many of them had been forced to abandon their fields at the critical planting time in the short growing season. Thanks to their captain, they were now leaving their homes, farms, and families in direct line of the Fenians without any defense.
Inside the Eastern Townships, the villages in southern Quebec across the border from Franklin, farmers buried their valuables, drove away their cattle, removed their deposits from banks, and sent their wives and children to safer locales—in many cases not farther north toward Montreal but actually south to Vermont, passing by the very army that was causing them to flee. In some respects, the Eastern Townships—initially settled by New Englanders seeking cheap farmland—had closer ties to their American neighbors than to Canada. It was common for members of extended families to live, work, and even celebrate the Fourth of July on both sides of the border.
As they marched the final miles to the boundary, the Fenian army passed their wagons, laden with household goods and furniture. Unlike the liquid boundary that John O’Neill traversed, the international border ahead of Samuel Spear and his men was visible only on a map and no more of an obstacle than a county line. There were no border guards. Customs officers resided in village centers miles from the dividing line, allowing the free movement of smugglers who could make $2.00 per gallon on spirits, $0.75 per pound on tea, and great prices on spices, medicine, and silks. By one estimate, the value of the property seized by customs agents in New York’s St. Lawrence County was only 5 percent of the merchandise fraudulently imported.
Just after 10:00 a.m., British mud splattered across the boots of the Irish Republican Army, a lone iron post on the roadside the only indicator that they had crossed an international border. The men marched in a column four across as they entered Canada to cheers and a chorus of “The Wearing of the Green,” the Hibernian street ballad evoking the memory of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.
Spear, standing before his men, looked out onto the most ragtag of armies. Some, like Colonel Louis Contri, had spent their entire lives attached to a gun, while others were so young they were incapable of growing a mustache. His cavalry hugged saddles in their arms in hopes of finding a horse to match. While some officers wore the blue coats of the U.S. Army, most of the soldiers lacked uniforms of any kind, and all were wet from the relentless downpour. About three hundred of the soldiers carried Enfield and Springfield muskets and three hundred held breech-loading carbines, but their lack of ammunition rendered many of them impotent. Those without rusty sabers and balky revolvers were armed with only their patriotism.
“You are now on British soil,” Spear told his men. “I charge you to spare the women and children. I leave in your hands the enemies of your country.” Spear proclaimed the establishment of the Irish Republic, setting off cheering. Colonel Contri stepped forward and unfurled a green silk emblem hand stitched by the Fenian Sisterhood circle in Malden, Massachusetts, planting it in the spongy turf. Spear then announced a $100 reward to the first man to seize the British colors. He ventured all of five hundred yards into British territory before establishing headquarters for the “Right Wing of the Army of Ireland” inside an old red farmhouse abandoned by the Eccles family. At the base of Eccles Hill, the Fenians erected a small tent city that they named Camp Sweeny in honor of their captured commander.
“The Fenians are coming!” shouted the Canadian alarm riders sprinting through the Eastern Townships to alert any residents who still remained. The Fenians, though, largely discovered a vacant land of empty farmhouses and ghost towns. They found telegraph offices shuttered and the lines cut to hinder Fenian communications. They encountered few people, let alone any organized resistance.
Spear hoped to maintain his toehold in Canada until reinforcements and provisions could arrive. Most immediately, however, he needed to feed his starving army. “The cry was still—hunger,” Spear wrote to Sweeny, who was receiving communications in spite of being under hotel arrest in St. Albans, as the sun began to set on his first night on enemy territory. “I had but one alternative—foraging parties were sent out.”
Contri assured one Quebecer who came to the headquarters to ascertain the intentions of the invaders that his men “were not robbers, but soldiers.” Contri said his army expected to pay for what it took “but that the Irish had been downtrodden by British power, and they had come to make war upon the forces of the Province, but not on the inhabitants.” In some cases, the Irishmen handed out IOUs, such as the one given to one St. Armand farmer: “The Irish Republic promises to pay W. Stewart Holsapple 100 dollars for value received, six months later.”
More often than not, however, the Fenians who raided the farms of the Eastern Townships stole cattle, sheep, and pigs—sometimes slaughtering and cooking them on the spot—without any intentions of repayment. The hungry army forced its way into empty farmhouses and confiscated copious quantities of butter and sliced hunks from cheese wheels with their bayonets. At one farm, the woman answering the door said she had milk “only enough for the pigs” and could not supply any to the soldiers. Seconds after closing her door, she heard squealing from the pen as the Irish eliminated the excuse for their denial.
Sentries armed with muskets and fixed bayonets patrolled the roads of southern Quebec. The occupying army distributed passes to local residents allowing them to travel. The soldiers demanded the British citizens take oaths of allegiance to the Irish Republic and warned they would hang from the first tree if they were found harboring British soldiers.
By evening time, twenty-two members of the Third Fenian Cavalry had marched into Frelighsburg, five miles from Camp Sweeny. They plundered two stores and ransacked the most prominent symbol of the Crown—the customhouse. The Irish removed official stamps and split the royal coat of arms to pieces. They confiscated the British ensign that had been bought by the villagers and raised a green flag with a golden harp in its place. The Fenian cavalry returned to Camp Sweeny with the first trophy of war and raised the British flag on the staff in front of the makeshift headquarters beneath the Harp of Erin.
Spear’s second day in Canada brought with it a shipment of fresh beef from a contractor in St. Albans and the arrival of $500, but he continued to wait for his promised reinforcements. “Give me men, arms, and ammunition and I will subsist my command sumptuously off the country,” Spear wrote to Colonel John Mechan. “I feel in most excellent spirits, and if I can hold my own until the 500 muskets and 100,000 rounds arrive, I shall have no doubts of success,” the general wrote before adding one last plea to “hurry up those arms.”
While O’Neill maintained stringent discipline over his men and operated by the strict rules of war, the same could not be said of Spear’s army. His men were greener than O’Neill’s. The Right Wing of the Irish Republican Army included fewer experienced soldiers and more youngsters caught up in the Fenian fever that swept through their cities after the victory at Ridgeway. Having gone nearly a week without a decent meal and with nary a dry day, they were in a situation more desperate than that faced by O’Neill.
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 have 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.