8
Iron Wills and Brave Hearts
THE TOWNSPEOPLE OF St. Albans, Vermont, knew the look of a rebel when they saw one, for nothing could erase their memories of that terrible day when terror descended from Canada, just fifteen miles away.
It had started with a single shot from a Colt Navy revolver piercing the crisp afternoon sky, then the gunman’s stunning cry: “I take possession of this town in the name of the Confederate States of America!” Without warning, the Civil War stormed into this northern Vermont hamlet on October 19, 1864, not with a broadside from the south, but with a sucker punch from the north.
Twenty-two raiders, led by Bennett H. Young, a Confederate cavalry lieutenant from Kentucky, relieved three St. Albans banks of their greenbacks, silver, and gold. They forced tellers and customers to swear allegiance to the Confederacy before locking them inside the banks’ vaults. They held hostages at gunpoint on the village green. They even shot poor Elinus Morrison dead right in front of Miss Beattie’s Millinery Shop before galloping back across the Canadian border on stolen horses with a haul of more than $200,000.
Canadian authorities arrested fourteen of the rebels in the border towns of Quebec, but the Crown refused to extradite them to the United States. St. Albans seethed further when the rebels walked out of a courtroom with not only their freedom but also $90,000 of their ill-gotten money, after a Canadian judge ruled that he lacked jurisdiction over citizens of the Confederate States of America. The outrage even drove President Abraham Lincoln to order his military staff to draw up invasion plans of Canada.
Perhaps worse than the miscarriage of justice to the six thousand citizens of St. Albans was that the self-proclaimed “Vairmont Yankee Scare Party” had violated the hospitality of their amiable little town. They posed as horse traders, fishermen, tourists, and members of a Canadian sportsmen’s club. Wielding a Bible as a prop, the twenty-one-year-old Young pretended to be a theological student from Montreal on three separate reconnaissance visits. The village’s most illustrious resident, then-Governor John Gregory Smith, even invited the scoundrel into his mansion for a tour. All the while as the infiltrators swapped stories with the citizens of St. Albans, they were secretly scouting the community and casing its banks.
Now, two years later, unfamiliar rebels were again wandering the still-jittery town. The seat of Franklin County had awoken on June 1 to find 350 men from Boston and the mill cities of Lowell, Massachusetts, and Rutland, Vermont, eating breakfast in its saloons and wandering Main Street’s wooden sidewalks with carpetbags slung over their shoulders. Speaking in low voices, the strangers addressed each other as “colonel” and “captain” in between drags on their pipes. The outsiders were orderly, but then again, the Confederate invaders had been, too.
Throughout the morning, the suspicious Irishmen paid repeated visits to a tall, dignified man with a commanding military presence registered at the Tremont House. When a delegation of town authorities decided to pay the gentleman a social call as well, the tight-lipped guest volunteered only that he was awaiting friends, perhaps as many as five thousand of them, who were also “intending to take a journey for their health during the month of June.”
That evening, sixty more Irishmen arrived by train. What did these strange men want? What kind of trouble did they seek?
Answers arrived over the telegraph wire when it was learned that John O’Neill had planted the green flag on British soil four hundred miles to the west. Now war had returned to St. Albans. With it clear that the village would again be on the front lines of the action, the mystery man lodging inside the Tremont House finally introduced himself: He was “Brigadier General Spear, senior commander of the right wing of the Fenian army.”
The news was greeted with shock. Word of a possible invasion had spread, but few believed the Fenians would actually strike. That included many Fenians themselves. In cities across the United States, Irish eyes devoured the latest bulletins posted outside newspaper offices and upscale hotels. The news served as a recruiting tool and a fund-raising boon for the Roberts wing. Thousands of Irishmen abandoned their jobs and spent their last pennies for train fare to St. Albans, Buffalo, and other locales in upstate New York. The web of railroad tracks woven across New England carried carloads to the front, such as it was, along the Quebec border.
Edward Archibald, the British consul in New York City, reported “the excitement among the Irish caused by the news of a collision and bloodshed was everywhere manifest.” A green flag waved from the front balcony of Tammany Hall, where secretaries scribbled the names of hundreds of new recruits. Women showed their solidarity by donning strips of green ribbons over their hearts. Even a group of African American veterans, casting aside any lingering animosity from the Irish violence directed toward them during the New York City draft riots, reportedly lent their services to the Fenians. (Their offer was declined.)
The New York Times devoted five front-page columns to “the border excitement” the day after the Fenians breached the international frontier, while The New York Herald made a much more blunt declaration: “WAR.” The Irish-American tried with breathless hyperbole to rally readers to grab their guns. “The whole border from Maine to Michigan is bristling with Irish bayonets,” it proclaimed. But not all Irishmen were so optimistic.
William Roberts basked in what The Irish-American called “startling but most intensely pleasurable news.” For his part, though, Thomas Sweeny still feared that the entire operation would prove a disaster. A lack of manpower had plagued the initial steps in his plan and pushed back the start of the main attack on Quebec from its June 2 target. The Fenian secretary of war grew further annoyed to learn that his orders for troops to move from Detroit to divert enemy attention had not been executed. And he hadn’t heard news from upstate New York in days.
Sweeny held out hope that the tide of Celtic recruits that swelled in the days after Ridgeway had yet to crest upon the Canadian border. While Roberts continued to rally the troops with a fusillade of proclamations, Sweeny departed for the front lines in upstate New York on June 4 to see for himself how many men were there to be rallied. What the general found would do little to improve his mood.
When the Fenian secretary of war stepped off the train in Malone, New York—a town of seven thousand that had been sacked by the British during the War of 1812—he expected to find nearly as many troops as villagers. However, out of the 16,800 troops his plan called for, he had barely more than 2,000. There was little sign of the five cavalry regiments to be commanded by Brigadier General Michael C. Murphy that he had ordered to Malone. Where were all the new recruits, and why hadn’t he been told of the disappointing turnout?
An officer insisted that he had been, in six different telegraph messages. It seems the U.S. government had intercepted their dispatches. In fact, the federal authorities had seized more than just the Fenians’ communications. Two weeks earlier, U.S. customs agents in Rouses Point, New York, confiscated thirty-two suspicious cases marked “machinery” that were addressed to Malone’s Fenian leader, Edward J. Mannix, a County Cork native and Civil War veteran. Customs agents found forty muskets inside each box. Hours before Sweeny arrived, another thirty-one cases of Fenian arms had been seized. At Potsdam Junction, at De Kalb Junction, at Watertown, and at Malone, the federal government took possession of mysterious railroad shipments that Sweeny had purchased from Philadelphia’s Bridesburg Arsenal and Troy’s Watervliet Arsenal. The general was outraged. He had bought those munitions from the same government that was now seizing them.
Sweeny could feel the time to strike slipping away. He lost faith in the ability of the Fenians to launch an attack along the west side of the Richelieu River from upstate New York. With gunships now patrolling the St. Lawrence River and General George Meade lurking just sixty miles away in Ogdensburg, Sweeny decided on June 6 to move his post from Malone to a more inviting—and promising—locale.
St. Albans might have been named for the first recorded English martyr, but its scenery was pure Irish. Stone walls dissected emerald meadows dotted with sheep. Brooks trickled down from the Green Mountains to the east. To the west, the undulating tops of the distant Adirondacks floated above the cobalt surface of Lake Champlain. The tidy village’s weekly butter market drew traders from as far away as New York City and Boston.
It was guns, not butter, though, that drew Sweeny’s attention to St. Albans, home to one of Vermont’s thirteen Fenian Brotherhood circles. John Fallon, the captain of the local Fenian Brotherhood circle, assured Sweeny that St. Albans was the “best town on the line” because it was not only just sixty-five miles from Montreal but also a major rail hub, which would aid in transporting guns and ammunition in advance of the attack.
Fallon thought he had a perfect front for making the secret arms shipments. Peter Ward, secretary of the Fenian circle in St. Albans and superintendent of the town’s gasworks, was overseeing the plant’s reconstruction after a devastating fire, which meant he was receiving “a great quantity of material every day.” Beginning in late May, swords and rifles that Sweeny had purchased from the U.S. government were shipped to Ward’s attention in crates marked “glass,” “crockery,” and “gas fixtures” and then hidden in barns and buried in the woods throughout the surrounding towns.
The watchful eyes of U.S. customs agents, particularly those on the British payroll as informants, grew too prying when one suspicious shipment of boxes marked “glass, with care” arrived on an express from Springfield, Massachusetts. After the rail workers tenderly lifted the boxes to the platform, they watched in shock as a pair of Irishmen threw the supposedly precious cargo onto a wagon before bolting away from the station.
Shortly after Spear arrived in St. Albans, so did the U.S. marshal Hugh Henry and three companies of the Third U.S. Artillery, which seized boxes and barrels at the train depot that were addressed to Ward, finding them to be brimming with sabers, carbines, and cavalry equipment. “The President approves of your action in stopping the arms,” Secretary of War Edwin Stanton wrote to the local collector of customs. “You will detain them in your custody until further orders, and pursue the same course to any other lots.”
The Fenians grew wise and began to toss boxes off railcars before reaching the St. Albans depot, retrieving them later, but the arms seizures threatened the invasion plan because many of the Fenians who arrived in northern Vermont lacked blankets or overcoats, let alone a revolver. “We Irishmen are determined and will fight,” one veteran of Antietam and Gettysburg told a newspaper correspondent, “but we cannot do anything without an abundance of arms, and where are we to get them?”
For nearly a week, a steady stream of Fenian fighters from New York and New England arrived by rail in St. Albans. Another 350 arrived on June 6. Most were young, some mere boys fourteen and fifteen years old. Some found open arms and open doors among Franklin County’s sizable Irish population. Others camped in the woods and scrounged for provisions from local Fenians. The heavy spring rains that liquefied the dirt roads into mud, however, slowed their movement. Day after day, the sodden Fenian camp slogged toward the border—from Fairfield to Sheldon to East Highgate.
By the time Sweeny arrived in St. Albans, later on June 6, the registers of the town’s hotels were inked with the names of Civil War correspondents from newspapers such as The New York Herald, the New-York Tribune, and the Boston Journal who were suddenly back on their old beat. Hundreds of government troops had converted the village green into a makeshift army camp, their white teepee tents offering badly needed coverage from days of deluges.
Sweeny convened a war council with the few Fenian officers remaining in St. Albans, including Brigadier General Spear. The general’s handpicked man to lead the most crucial phase of the Fenian campaign had spent three decades in service of the United States, serving with distinction in the Civil War as a colonel with the Eleventh Pennsylvania Cavalry until sustaining a serious leg and head injury.
Spear reported to Sweeny that he had approximately one thousand men camping in the Vermont countryside “without supplies, commissary stores, or anything but good comfortable clothing.” He couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to the money donated to the Roberts wing to be used for precisely this moment. As in upstate New York, Spear found himself constrained by the government’s seizure of their arms. He told Sweeny that he had been forced to “beg, borrow, or take such ammunition as can be found” while avoiding the watchful eyes of federal troops. Order had prevailed, but the men were getting uneasy and eager for action.
The good news was that for all the disruption to their town the citizens of St. Albans didn’t appear too put out. “Never has there been congregated in St. Albans so large a number of strangers who have conducted themselves more orderly than the invaders of Canada,” reported one of the town’s newspapers. After touring the front lines, Vermont’s governor, Paul Dillingham, said he would sooner “think of calling out the militia to put down a Quaker meeting as to resist the Fenian movement.”
Aside from those Confederate raiders who had torn through their town two years prior, St. Albans had a bit of a soft spot for rebels. After all, Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys had declared independence not only from Great Britain during the American Revolution but from New York as well. For fourteen years, Vermont was its own independent republic with its own printed currency, much like the Fenian government in exile. St. Albans had refused to enforce the fugitive slave law, serving as one of the final depots on the Underground Railroad. The town’s old-timers could even remember when they barred the late general Winfield Scott, dispatched as President Martin Van Buren’s special envoy, from lecturing them about their “flaunting” of American neutrality laws by supporting the anti-British forces during the Patriot War of 1837.
The residents of St. Albans were even less willing to listen to any talk about neutrality laws after what had been done to them in October 1864. They might not have backed the Fenian cause, but they surely approved of the Irish delivering some equivalent discomfort to the British and the Canadians. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise, as one newspaper reported, that “ninety-nine out of every one hundred of the people at St. Albans are friendly to the Fenian cause.” But resistance was brewing just a few miles north on the other side of the international frontier.
Scarlet-uniformed soldiers marched throughout the streets of Montreal to Bonaventure Station and boarded Grand Trunk Railway trains bound for cities such as Kingston, Cornwall, and Prescott along the St. Lawrence River and for towns in southern Quebec. A constant soundtrack of drums and bagpipes played as the Royal Artillery, Prince of Wales’ Rifles, and Victoria Rifles marched in unison through a city guarded by armed militia and papered with placards calling for volunteers to take up arms to repel the marauders.
Many answered the call, and those who couldn’t volunteer enlisted their voices to cheer on the men marching out of Montreal. “Good luck to you!” “Don’t leave a mother’s son of the villains alive!” they called out while cursing the pirates, bandits, and robbers who had thrown the city into a frenzy.
It was no small irony that the city in such a state of panic about lawless rebels violating neutrality laws still offered considerable sanctuary to leaders of the Confederacy. This was the city, after all, where news of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination was toasted and General George Pickett lived in a luxurious hotel and exchanged salutes with Confederate sympathizers. Boxes of official Confederate government documents were housed inside the vaults of the Bank of Montreal. The city even harbored the family of Jefferson Davis.
The news from Ridgeway had thrown Montreal into a particular panic because it feared the enemy within. Not fully convinced of the loyalty of the two Irish Catholic companies in the Prince of Wales’ Rifles, soldiers in the Protestant “Orange Company” made sure to keep their rifles loaded at all times. Montreal’s mayor, Henry Starnes, stoked fears further by announcing he had dismissed ten policemen who had refused to take an oath of allegiance tendered to all civic employees at the outbreak of trouble.
However, there were few outward signs of Fenian support among Montreal’s Irish after O’Neill’s raid. Thomas D’Arcy McGee, the staunch supporter of Canadian confederation, saw little nuance in the threat facing Canada. “Whoever is not with us is against us,” he told Montrealers shoehorned into city hall on June 4. “Whoever has any sympathy with the invaders commits a crime.” He assured his constituents that he was ready to travel to Ottawa and cast a vote in Parliament in favor of the suspension of habeas corpus.
Many in his audience were already shocked that the Johnson administration had done so little to enforce American neutrality laws and control the Irish menace. “You must allow me to say that I do not understand why the United States Government does not issue a proclamation warning people against joining in these proceedings,” Sir Frederick Bruce, the British representative in Washington, wrote to Secretary of State William Seward. Sweeny and his men were just miles from the Canadian border, yet the White House remained silent.
But that was about to change.
Seward and President Johnson might have tolerated the Fenians for a time, but the lark was over. The Irish succeeded in alarming British diplomats, who were increasing the pressure on their American counterparts to rein in their citizens. Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant had also had enough of the freelancing by his former soldiers, recommending to Stanton that Sweeny, Roberts, and other Fenian leaders be taken into custody and the Irish Republican Army be reeled in from the front.
On June 6, four days after the assault on Ridgeway, Johnson scrawled his signature on a proclamation that forbade the Fenians to carry on any further operations in violation of the country’s neutrality laws and empowered “all judges, magistrates, marshals, and officers in the service of the United States” to arrest the Fenian ringleaders. That afternoon, as Sweeny was meeting with his war council in St. Albans, Johnson’s words filtered through the telegraph wires to the front lines in upstate New York and Vermont. When Major A. A. Gibson, commander of the Third Artillery, received the notice in St. Albans, he had the words printed, posted around town, and distributed by couriers to the surrounding villages. He then gave the order for his men to take the Fenian officers in the village into custody.
Sweeny and his war council took no heed. They decided that they would cross the border at daybreak. The general had turned in for a few hours of restless sleep before his invasion when he heard a knock on the door of his hotel room around midnight. Offering no resistance, Sweeny was taken into custody along with his chief of engineers, Colonel John Mechan, to the officers’ quarters.
The following morning, rather than leading the Irish Republican Army onto British soil, Sweeny found himself inside one of the spacious parlors of the Welden House hotel being arraigned on the “charge of aiding and abetting in the violation of the neutrality laws.” Sweeny waived his examination, and bail was set for $20,000, which Sweeny could not furnish. Instead of being placed in jail, the general was confined to a room in the Welden House with two sentries posted at his door, pending his appearance before the U.S. District Court scheduled for the following month.
Soldiers swarmed the Tremont House five minutes too late to capture Spear. He had received word of the raid and was loaded into a horse-drawn wagon and whisked out of town. The Fenian general traveled nearly twenty miles before arriving around 8:30 a.m. at the Fenian camp in Franklin, barely two miles from the Canadian line. Spear found his rank and file singing and dancing, full of cheer that belied their restless night. The lucky ones had slept like animals—and next to animals—on the ground inside barns. Others found shelter from pelting rain in sheds and even outhouses, where they were forced to stand for the entire night.
They emerged at first light to continue their treacherous march. In some spots, the men sank ankle-deep in mud, pulling ill-fitting boots right off the men’s feet. The local Fenians finally resurrected boxes of guns they had buried around St. Albans, distributing three hundred arms of various calibers. Their commissary, though, was still neglected. Some companies had one loaf of bread for every five or six men.
Spear convened his war council again, this time inside a Franklin hotel, where Brigadier General John Mahan and his officers had spent a more comfortable night than their regulars. The general had fifteen thousand fewer men than promised to strike Montreal—six hundred in the command of Colonel Louis Contri, three hundred under Colonel John Scanlan, and two hundred under Colonel Timothy O’Connor.
Mahan, a major with the Ninth Massachusetts during the Civil War and a member of the Massachusetts Legislature, briefed Spear that the lack of food and weapons combined with the abundance of mud and rain had driven many of his men home, but those who remained were eager to advance.
So too was Spear. Although he had but two horses, two twelve-pounder brass fieldpieces, and half an army without weapons of any kind, the Fenian general rallied his men. To a chorus of wild cheers, he ordered them to take Canada. President Johnson’s proclamation and the White House’s perceived backstabbing had only emboldened the stubborn Irish to move ahead with their plans. The Fenian army was on the enemy’s threshold, and once again it would find the front door wide open.