16
Secrets and Lies
HENRI LE CARON became a familiar face in the hotels of border cities such as Burlington, Vermont, and Ogdensburg, New York, during the winter and spring of 1870 as he squirreled away Fenian supplies along the frontier. Le Caron knew more than anyone else about the location of every rifle, every uniform, and every hardtack barrel procured by the Irishmen for the upcoming invasion. What the Fenian colonel didn’t know, however, was just how imminent that attack would be when John O’Neill summoned him to meet in Buffalo on May 21.
Shortly after O’Neill welcomed Le Caron, he informed his aide of his promotion to adjutant general with a rank of brigadier general. Then O’Neill broke the news: The next attack on Canada would begin in seventy-two hours, and “no power on earth could stop it.” The choice of date was deliberate: May 24 would be Queen Victoria’s fifty-first birthday, a public holiday in Canada.
Le Caron was surprised to hear it. Only $2,000 of the $30,000 sought for the invasion had trickled into Fenian headquarters, but O’Neill was hardly concerned. “I did not deem it necessary to wait the collection of the full amount, as I was satisfied, as soon as we advanced across the border and took up a position there, all the money needed for breech-loading ammunition, the principal deficiency, would be forthcoming,” he recalled.
The Fenian leader told Le Caron that he had already sent letters to Fenian commanders instructing them to depart on May 23 to either Malone, New York, or St. Albans, Vermont. Fearing that any early movements could jeopardize the secrecy of his operation, O’Neill directed all Fenians to leave for the front on the same day—no matter whether they were coming from New York or New Orleans.
“Take no man who is a loafer or a habitual drunkard,” the hero of Ridgeway instructed his commanders. In order to keep the mission covert, he directed his men to “avoid the use of uniforms or any insignia that would distinguish them” when traveling to the border as well as to refrain from speaking of any Fenian matters en route.
O’Neill’s careful preparations ensured that the Fenians were much better equipped for this raid than they had been four years earlier. While many of the Irish Republican Army soldiers who followed General Samuel Spear into Quebec in 1866 lacked weapons, Le Caron reported that the Fenians had accumulated enough war matériel to arm a force of at least twelve thousand men.
Unlike General Thomas Sweeny’s 1866 war plan for the invasion of Quebec and Ontario’s Niagara Peninsula, which was broadcast in newspapers for days and weeks in advance, O’Neill had succeeded in keeping the press guessing. The front pages buzzed with rumors of Fenian troop movements from Maine to Minnesota, but they were nothing more than gossip. While the Buffalo Evening Post announced O’Neill’s imminent arrival in Chicago, the newspaper had no idea that the Fenian general was around the corner ensconced in the Mansion House.
Le Caron’s stay in Buffalo, though, lasted mere hours; both he and O’Neill boarded a train to the front in northern Vermont. Happy to be back in the more comfortable role of general, O’Neill felt self-satisfied with the apparent success of his ruse. “Every precaution had been taken to impose secrecy, and though the country is flooded with a sea of British spies, not one detail of the plans was divulged,” he boasted.
As their train sped eastward across upstate New York, a buoyant O’Neill bragged to Le Caron “that the Canadians would be taken entirely by surprise.” The Fenian general’s most trusted adviser knew better.
O’Neill had ordered his underlings to be on a constant lookout for British spies, yet he was blind to the secret agent who had penetrated his inner circle. Henri Le Caron was neither Fenian nor French, neither Gaelic nor Gallic. In fact, he was the furthest thing from it. O’Neill’s right-hand man was as English as tea and crumpets.
Henri Le Caron’s true identity was Thomas Billis Beach—a British spy serving queen and country.
The second of thirteen children, Beach was born in Colchester, England, in 1841. He craved adventure from his earliest days and confessed to having a “wild mad thirst for change and excitement.” Beach told tall tales to escape the confines of reality, and as a twelve-year-old boy he packed up his marbles, trophies, and toys one morning in search of thrills—and perhaps some personal space in such a crowded house—in London. His parents retrieved him before he had gone too far on his sixty-mile walk, but having tasted adventure, he made another attempt. This time he was gone for two weeks.
Like a wild horse determined to run free, the young boy could not be tamed. His desperate parents sent him to a strict Quaker curtain maker for a seven-year apprenticeship, but that lasted all of eleven months before the master returned the apprentice to his family. At age fifteen, Beach finally fulfilled his wish and snuck off to London for good. His employment as a clerk in a drapery firm came to a quick end, though, when he accidentally set the premises ablaze.
Seeking excitement in a foreign land, Beach moved to Paris in 1859, though he spoke not a word of French. Then a new adventure on a new continent beckoned when the Confederate shots fired at Fort Sumter reverberated across the Atlantic. Answering the call for Union army recruits at the outbreak of the Civil War, the teenager sailed to the United States in 1861 and enlisted for three months, posing as a Frenchman and using an alias—Henri Le Caron—in order, he claimed, to save his worrying parents from learning that their boy was fighting in a foreign war.
Three months turned into five years, and after the war Le Caron settled in Nashville. There he became acquainted with his fellow Union army veteran O’Neill, who told him of the Fenian plan to attack Canada. Le Caron dropped a mention of his discussion with O’Neill in a letter to his father, who took it to his local member of Parliament, who passed it along to the British home secretary.
When Le Caron returned to England at the end of 1867 in the wake of the Clerkenwell prison explosion, he found a country terrified by the threat of Fenian violence. Seeing his country thrown into such panic by the Irish menace, Le Caron needed little persuasion from British officials to become a spy. “I never sought Fenianism,” he wrote in his memoir. “Fenianism rather came to me.”
Upon his return to the United States, Le Caron offered his services to O’Neill, who gladly accepted the overture from a man with his military experience. By the end of 1868, Le Caron was drawing checks from both the Fenian Brotherhood and the British government. He worked closely with the Dublin-born Robert Anderson, one of Scotland Yard’s first spymasters, and as the Fenian threat to Canada increased, he had direct contact with Gilbert McMicken, the Canadian intelligence officer who oversaw the espionage of the Irish.
The Fenian colonel Henri Le Caron, who claimed to be a Frenchman with an Irish mother, was actually a British spy named Thomas Billis Beach who betrayed Fenian secrets to the Crown.
As the head center of the Fenian circle he founded in Lockport, Illinois, Le Caron received reports and financial accounts from Fenian Brotherhood headquarters in New York—which he duly forwarded to London and Ottawa. Although he wasn’t Catholic, he played the part, attending Mass and singing with the choir at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church in Wilmington, Illinois.
Le Caron spilled Fenian secrets to McMicken in letters and cipher telegrams that employed a fairly simple code, using a displacement of letters, which could be cracked by knowing which letter was A. Le Caron used a variety of monikers—such as LeC, Beach, and R. G. Sayer—and referred to O’Neill by his code name, Brady. McMicken and other Canadian agents traveled to American border towns to meet Le Caron in person and smuggle his communications out of the United States. In fact, John C. Rose (the man who had been badly assaulted by the Fenians in Malone, New York) was spying not on Le Caron but with him.
A risk taker and a supremely talented liar, Le Caron proved so adept at his job that Canadian detectives, unaware of his employment by the Crown, kept him in their crosshairs, believing him to be one of the Fenians’ most accomplished leaders. O’Neill would never learn Le Caron’s true identity.
He couldn’t say he hadn’t been forewarned. The chain-smoking Frenchman had never been fully trusted by many Fenians. Some suspected, as The Irish-American reported, that he “would not hesitate a moment to sell the cause of Ireland for a trifling consideration.” In 1868, he was formally charged with carelessness, dangerous conduct, and suspicious acts for writing down names of Fenians in a notebook. An investigating committee found no basis to the accusation. Feigning indignation, the spy told O’Neill he would resign after having his character so impugned, but the Fenian general insisted that he wanted him to stay. In so doing, he wrote his own fate.
Some of O’Neill’s confidants had pushed for an attack on Canada’s sparsely populated western frontier, where the border was lightly defended. “Prominent leaders say that no foolish raid will be made upon the eastern frontier, where every man’s hand being against the invaders their defeat would be insured,” The New York Times reported in April 1870. O’Neill, however, never cared much for conventional wisdom.
O’Neill thought that Sweeny’s original war plan had been so sound, in fact, that he planned to once again use St. Albans, Vermont, and Malone, New York, as the staging points for his border incursions. His soldiers would march on the same roads of Vermont and upstate New York that had been trodden by Fenian boots four years earlier.
O’Neill hoped to storm across the border before the American and Canadian governments could interfere with them and entrench a small force on Canadian soil for at least two or three days. He expected that thousands of Irish on both sides of the border, upon hearing the news of the invasion, would then rush to join the cause and form a much larger army.
O’Neill’s plan called for the Irish Republican Army to launch a two-pronged attack on St. John’s, a city along Quebec’s Richelieu River halfway between Montreal and the American border. At least thirteen hundred men would march north from Franklin, Vermont, and cross the border at Eccles Hill, where General Samuel Spear had made his camp in 1866. Meanwhile, a contingent of five hundred men armed with breechloaders would seize a train in Rouses Point, New York, and run it into St. John’s to capture the city, where they would meet a detachment sweeping eastward from Malone, New York. Farther to the east, two hundred Irishmen from Rhode Island would march to capture the town of Richmond, where a Grand Trunk Railway branch from Portland, Maine, connected with the main road.
With St. John’s and Richmond in their hands, the Irish Republican Army would sabotage the railroad tracks to make it difficult for the Canadian militia to organize and concentrate a force to drive them back as O’Neill awaited the thousands of Irishmen he thought would rush to their aid and allow them to threaten Montreal. He expected to encounter little resistance until the Fenians advanced within sight of Montreal, where he believed the city’s sizable Irish and French populations would naturally arise to assist them against the Anglo-Saxon order (an inflated assumption given the way the assassination of Thomas D’Arcy McGee had dampened Fenian support in Canada). O’Neill told The Daily Phoenix that once he planted a permanent foothold in Canada, he expected “100,000 Fenians will rush to the front.”
As the Fenians had done in 1866, O’Neill put a great deal of faith in the power of good news to persuade his fellow Irishmen on both sides of the border to rush to the cause. Fenians had flocked to Buffalo for days on end after having heard the news of his triumph at Ridgeway, only to be prevented by American authorities from crossing the border to join him. O’Neill didn’t expect similar interference this time.
When O’Neill told Le Caron about the May 24 date for the planned invasion, the alarmed spy immediately telegraphed his contacts in Ottawa. The secret agent had already forwarded full details of the Fenian war plan; now McMicken knew the timing as well.
On May 22, a disguised O’Neill disembarked from his sleeping car in the small farming community of Georgia, Vermont, twenty-five miles south of the Canadian border, and climbed aboard a buggy that whisked him away to the countryside. Only a few scattered Fenians knew his whereabouts. O’Neill holed up for the next forty-eight hours in a friend’s house as Fenians mobilized across the country on May 23.
Fenian circles opened recruiting stations in cities across America and called upon Irishmen to fight for their country. The Irish, however, had heard all this before. There had been so many broken promises, so many false alarms in the past five years, that they hesitated. In the mill city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, Colonel Hugh McGinnis ordered his men to proceed to Vermont on the afternoon of May 23. Instead, Colonel McGinnis departed to St. Albans as an army of one; he would report on the state of affairs and send for his men if he found out that there was indeed going to be a fight.
In cities such as Boston where the Fenians could find willing volunteers, they lacked the money to pay for their railroad fares. In Bridgeport, Connecticut, Major Daniel Murphy gathered thirty men whom he described as “ready and anxious to be the first in the field.” Murphy and his men had to spend the entire day raising $300 to pay for their train tickets north.
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.