17
A Burlesque of a War
ON THE MORNING of May 25, General John O’Neill conveyed only confidence as he buckled his spurs, telling a reporter for the Boston Advertiser that he anticipated “no serious resistance in Canada.” He only hoped “there will be enough to amuse his men.”
For all his bluster, the general’s army remained woefully shorthanded. His plans called for an army of three thousand but instead had three or four hundred. All the twenty-four-hour delay had achieved was to diminish his element of surprise. But he held out hope in the reports that four hundred soldiers from New York were on the march from St. Albans and soon to arrive.
O’Neill departed the Franklin Hotel with his close friend and chief of staff, General John J. Donnelly. Five years his junior, the reserved Donnelly had left behind a lucrative law practice and his newlywed wife to join the Union army. Twice wounded in battle, he served as a staff officer and aide-de-camp in the Army of the Cumberland and joined General William Tecumseh Sherman as he stormed through the South on his March to the Sea. After his young wife passed away, just months after he returned home, Donnelly threw himself into the Fenian cause, acting as a recruiting agent in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
O’Neill and Donnelly rode to the Fenian camp at Hubbard’s Corner, halfway between the town of Franklin and the Canadian border, where they were the unwanted guests of one J. H. Hubbard. As the generals arrived, the soldiers were unloading dozens of wagons laden with weapons, equipment, and supplies. O’Neill had provided boxes of hardtack, crates of ham, and barrels of crackers, ensuring that his army had a proper commissariat and that they would have no need to loot the residents of Quebec, as Samuel Spear’s men had done four years earlier.
Fenian soldiers also pried open dozens of boxes packed with ammunition and rifles that had been taken apart lock, stock, and barrel to be shipped in ordinary crates without arousing the suspicion of authorities. While some members of the Irish Republican Army preferred to carry into battle their own trusted weapons—Spencer rifles, Bridesburg muskets, converted Sharps carbines, and even muzzle-loading Springfields—others received the breech-loading Springfield rifles that had been converted in the Fenian armory in Trenton, New Jersey. As a reminder of the cause, the soldiers found the left side of their stock flats engraved with shamrocks and the letters “IR,” the two-letter abbreviation for the Irish Republic. To load their guns, the Fenians distributed black leather shot pouches and an allotment of forty rounds of ball cartridges. They even prepared to engage the enemy with a secret weapon—a three-pound, breech-loading field gun mounted on a caisson that was camouflaged underneath a haystack.
The Irish Republican Army was not only better armed but also better dressed than it had been on its last visit to Vermont in 1866, when the soldiers sported a mishmash of Union and Confederate uniforms. Many now cloaked themselves in the regulation blue-and-green Fenian uniforms. Reflecting their dual allegiances, some Fenians wore cross and waist belts with the letters “U.S.,” others the image of a harp.
O’Neill’s army differed from its predecessor in more than just uniform. Many of those experienced Civil War veterans who had mobilized in 1866 had become disillusioned by the split in the Fenian Brotherhood or else had resumed civilian life and were unwilling to disrupt it for another Canadian foray. The army that answered O’Neill’s latest call to arms included young boys, some no older than fifteen and a significant number under the age of twenty, donning military uniforms for the first time.
One anxious boy already feared the worst. “I tell you, there’ll be hard work today and a good many hurt,” Daniel Ahern of Winooski, Vermont, told a reporter. “And I know I’ll be one of them. No use to contradict me. I know I’ll be hurt.”
Some of the lads had been just seven years old when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, and their knowledge of the Great Hunger came only from the stories they’d heard from their parents and grandparents. O’Neill couldn’t help but wonder whether these first-generation Americans would really be ready to die for the cause of a faraway island they had never known.
As O’Neill’s men drilled on a makeshift parade ground, he contemplated the road ahead to Canada. He had received reports that the enemy was waiting, but he didn’t know exactly where they were hiding and how many of them there were.
Around 11:00 a.m., a carriage from St. Albans containing the U.S. marshal George Perkins Foster; his deputy, Thomas Failey; a local surgeon; and a Boston Traveller correspondent rolled up to a barricade erected by the Fenians, across the road leading to the border. A sentinel ordered it to stop.
An irate Foster immediately demanded that the Fenians dismantle their roadblock and reopen the public road. The impatient marshal then sped ahead to the Fenian camp, where he ordered O’Neill to end the “unlawful proceeding.” Sitting on a stone wall, the marshal read the presidential proclamation to the Fenian general, who then, according to one account, “expressed his contempt for the president in language more forcible and profane than polite.” Foster told O’Neill that he had the authority but lacked the manpower to prevent him from violating the law before leaving to apprise the Canadians of the situation.
O’Neill was squeezed between two countries. Before him, enemy territory and armed soldiers. Behind him, U.S. authorities and armed law enforcement. Though he was severely shorthanded, O’Neill decided he had but one course of action.
The general spoke a few quiet words to Donnelly, who stepped forward and barked out his order: “Fall in!”
O’Neill rode at the head of the Irish Republican Army as it marched with disciplined precision in columns of four down the same road as Spear’s men had in 1866. The general ordered Colonel Henri Le Caron to stay back, locate the four hundred troops from New York he heard were en route from St. Albans, and rush them to the front. Le Caron agreed, but of course he intended to do no such thing.
Before they could confront the enemy, the Fenians encountered an unexpected traffic jam, the country road clogged with curious spectators as well as local teamsters awaiting payback. Having hauled Fenian supplies for the previous three nights, they drove their empty wagons to the border to await the Canadian plunder they had been promised as payment for their services.
The Fenians rounded a bend in the road, and the border finally came into view. The ribbon of road in front of them descended into a small valley, and through its crease bubbled the fordable Chickabiddy Creek, nearly parallel to the dividing line thirty yards to the south. Huddled together on the American side of the line was a cluster of barns, outbuildings, and the houses of Alvah and Chauncey Richard. A tannery, mill, and several farmhouses sat on the Canadian side.
If war hadn’t been on the afternoon’s agenda, the soldiers might have better appreciated the beauty. “The soft sweet breezes of the spring morning played upon our faces while the brilliant sunlight sent its rays flashing upon our bayonets and dancing on the waters underneath,” Le Caron recalled. “On the other side there rose in graceful outlines the monarchs of a Canadian forest, overtopped by a rocky cliff standing out in bold and picturesque relief.”
That rocky cliff was Eccles Hill, which rose steeply on the west side of the road between Franklin and Frelighsburg, Quebec. On its steep slopes, approximately fifty Canadian defenders hid behind bushes and in rifle pits that were concealed by time-scarred boulders. The approaching Fenians recognized the Sixtieth Battalion Volunteer Militia in their ornate crimson jackets with gold trim.
As Lieutenant Colonel Brown Chamberlin, the battalion’s commander and a member of the inaugural Canadian Parliament, prepared his men for the advancing Irishmen, he found himself interrupted by Marshal Foster, who had by then crossed over the border from the Fenian camp. The marshal assured Chamberlin that the U.S. government was doing everything possible to prevent the Fenian raid but admitted that he lacked sufficient troops to do so.
The marshal then delivered a personal pledge from O’Neill that unlike the Fenians four years earlier the men under his command would not be permitted to harm women or children or plunder peaceful citizens. Chamberlin was in no mood to receive consolation from the enemy. The lieutenant colonel pointed out that a message from “men who were mere pirates and marauders” was “scarcely satisfactory to those whom they intended to murder.”
The head of the Fenian column was soon visible, marching around the bend to the border. “I thought they intended to attack you soon,” Foster told Chamberlin, “but not so soon as this.”
With the Irish Republican Army approaching, Chamberlin returned to the Sixtieth Battalion, who were joined atop Eccles Hill by a band of local farmers determined to prevent history from repeating itself. Four years earlier, they had watched helplessly as the Fenians crossed unimpeded into the Eastern Townships, leaving their homes, farms, and property “entirely at the mercy of the lawless marauders who entered the country unmolested,” according to Asa Westover. The fifty-two-year-old, who had a salt-and-pepper beard and the weather-beaten face of a farmer who had spent decades in the sun, certainly remembered what had happened in 1866. He never forgot the humiliation of the Irish Republican Army knocking on his farmhouse door demanding food. After helping themselves to a hot meal, the Fenians helped themselves to the family’s valuables.
After confederation in 1867, Canadians took greater ownership of their defense, and the following summer Westover persuaded thirty men from Dunham, Frelighsburg, St. Armand, Stanbridge East, and surrounding towns to take matters—and guns—into their own hands. They signed an agreement to organize a small band of sharpshooters, called the Home Guards, who planned to be ready at a moment’s notice should any invaders seek to enter Canada.
The Home Guards paid for their weapons out of their own pockets. Westover, whose grandfather was a Loyalist who’d fled Massachusetts during the American Revolution, returned to that state to purchase approximately fifty breech-loading, single-shot Ballard sporting rifles. Through frequent rifle practice, he converted his band of farmers into a company of able riflemen. Even when the fierce winter snow piled outside, the Home Guards took target practice in barns and drilled in members’ homes. Locals mocked the homegrown militia for preparing for a threat they thought would never be repeated; now the men found their efforts vindicated.
Inspired by the crimson sashes worn by British army officers, Westover’s men donned red scarves draped over the right shoulder and fastened under the left arm. Having received word of the Irish Republican Army’s arrival in northern Vermont, Chamberlin ordered Westover to station his Red Sashes on Eccles Hill along the road leading north from Hubbard’s Corner and above the site where the Irish Republican Army camped during its 1866 raid.
Thirty-seven Red Sashes occupied the promontory on the afternoon of May 24 and spent a restless night keeping watch. The next morning, they were joined by the Montreal Regiment of the Victoria Rifles, commanded by Colonel William Osborne Smith, along with the Sixtieth Battalion carrying their Snider-Enfield rifles. Chamberlin stationed ten men and an officer in the right rear as well as two officers and thirty-six men strung along Eccles Hill to supplement the local farmers.
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.
Frustrated, 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 pieces 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.
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.