18
Another Fight, Another Flight
AS THE REPORTER John Boyle O’Reilly wandered around the Irish Republican Army’s encampment the day after the Battle of Eccles Hill, he saw little trace of the bustling bivouac he had encountered twenty-four hours earlier. The soldiers were gone, and their wagonloads of supplies had vanished. Not even “empty boxes or broken cartridge tins” remained, he wrote in The Pilot, America’s leading Irish Catholic newspaper.
Down the road at the Canadian border, there was more activity. Alvah Richard toiled to repair dozens of bullet holes on his property. Curiosity seekers from both sides of the border gawked at the farmer’s homestead and scoured his fields for relics. Redcoats and Red Sashes kept periodic vigil from across the boundary, when they weren’t posing for photographs with each other and the captured Fenian cannon.
A devout Irish patriot and a Fenian himself, O’Reilly had traveled to upstate Vermont from Boston to chronicle a tale of Irish warriors bravely striking the British Empire. What he witnessed instead was a farce. Dispirited, he wandered through the remains of the Irish Republican Army, treading carefully around the border lest he wander into Queen Victoria’s domain, where a price still lay on his head.
It was a tortuous path that led O’Reilly to New England that day, his Celtic pride a constant across decades of hardship on three continents. Born in 1844 along the banks of Ireland’s River Boyne, he had, as a lad, roamed among ancient megaliths, sacred Druid sites, and the ruined castles of high kings and chieftains. From Dowth Castle—his twelfth-century ancestral home in County Meath—O’Reilly could look across the river to the spot where William of Orange defeated the Catholic forces of King James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, consigning Ireland to Protestant rule. He could dip his fishing line into the same legendary waterway in which Finn McCool captured the Salmon of Knowledge.
O’Reilly imbibed the history that flowed through the Boyne valley, as well as poems, stories, and songs about Irish patriots—many of them O’Reilly chieftains and princes themselves—passed on from his parents. Like John O’Neill, O’Reilly knew that a member of his clan had the choice to either silently accept British oppression or fight for his freedom.
For a boy bred to rebel against British tyranny, this was no choice at all. O’Reilly joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood as a teenager in 1863 and worked as a secret recruiter inside the British army’s Tenth Hussars to ensure that the military would back the Irish people when the next rising occurred.
When an informer blew O’Reilly’s cover in 1866, he was court-martialed for treason, found guilty, and condemned to twenty years of penal servitude. Chained, subsisting on bread and water, and sentenced to hard labor, O’Reilly toured the worst prisons England had to offer, from Chatham to Dartmoor. Behind the iron-barred door of cell 32 in London’s Millbank Prison on the banks of the Thames, O’Reilly spent eight months in solitary confinement and enforced silence, the chimes of Big Ben every quarter hour his only companion.
After several unsuccessful escape attempts, O’Reilly was exiled to the far side of the world in the fall of 1867. Arriving on board the last convict ship to Australia just weeks before the policy of transportation was due to come to an end, he was dumped at the Fremantle penal colony in Western Australia in January 1868, along with more than sixty other Fenians.
A year later, O’Reilly staged a dramatic escape, hiding for seventeen days in the bush—sleeping on a bed of leaves, striking possums against trees for food—until he rowed out to a waiting American whaler in the Indian Ocean. He arrived in Philadelphia in November 1869 with $30 and a bag of whales’ teeth as his only possessions. The evidence of his hardship at the hands of the British was confined to a scar on his left arm from a failed suicide attempt and his skin still bronzed from the fierce Australian sun.
Bringing to his new home his long-standing belief that Ireland could be freed only by military action, O’Reilly quickly joined the Fenian Brotherhood. A budding journalist—he published a newspaper on his voyage from England to Australia—the Irishman made his way to Boston in January 1870, where he earned a temporary assignment with The Pilot.
Assigned to cover the Fenian convention in New York that April, O’Reilly was the only reporter allowed inside the proceedings. The twenty-five-year-old writer had started to sour on the Fenian Brotherhood after witnessing the infighting among the organization’s leaders, but he felt new hope when he was dispatched to the front to cover O’Neill’s latest Canadian venture.
The newspapers that O’Reilly browsed on the ride from Boston described “thousands of men and trains of war material” arriving in St. Albans. The reality turned out to be quite different. Stepping off the train, O’Reilly found few of the men and little of the excitement that he’d anticipated.
Still, all was not lost. With a greater force gathering in upstate New York, the Canadian governor-general, Sir John Young, wrote to the Colonial Office on May 26 that he anticipated a “more serious” attack than at Eccles Hill to take place near Huntingdon, Quebec. While some disheartened Irishmen just wanted to return home, others were determined to continue the fight. Even though President Ulysses S. Grant had issued his proclamation against the Fenians, the federal authorities took no action to prevent the Irishmen from riding the rails from St. Albans to Malone, New York. O’Reilly joined the Irish Republican Army as they boarded trains heading west.
When the Pilot reporter stepped off the train in Malone on May 26, he discovered that, just as at St. Albans, the “thousands” of Fenian soldiers reported by the press numbered only in the hundreds. Still, with its fresh troops and reinforcements arriving on every train, the Irish Republican Army found itself in a stronger position in New York than it had been in Vermont.
O’Reilly also noted another difference in these soldiers, revealed in the wisps of gray underneath their hats. “They were older and steadier soldiers than the men who had been engaged at Richard’s farm,” O’Reilly reported. They weren’t the “raw boys who were frightened at the whizz of a bullet.”
Most of the Fenians descending upon Malone hailed from three Irish Republican Army regiments. Colonel William L. Thompson, a thirty-four-year-old postal worker and native of Scotland, commanded the Sixth Regiment from Albany. Colonel William B. Smith arrived with the Seventh Regiment from Buffalo. And Colonel Edward Campbell led the Eighth Regiment from western Pennsylvania. They were aided by Captain Edward J. Mannix, the thirty-eight-year-old head center in Malone who had attempted to organize the raid from the town in 1866.
Among those who arrived on the day after the Battle of Eccles Hill was a new commander, Owen Starr. Upon arriving in Malone, the thirty-year-old Louisville merchant who had fought at O’Neill’s side at Fort Erie and Ridgeway ventured twelve miles north to the Fenians’ forward encampment in a small settlement near the Trout River. For three days straight, wagons had been arriving at the camp tucked behind a church, delivering barrels of pork and hardtack and boxes of breech-loading Springfield rifles, bayonets, and ammunition—enough to equip several thousand men—that had been squirreled away in the barns and cellars of sympathetic farmers throughout the North Country. They also hauled spades, picks, and other entrenching tools bought from Malone shopkeepers. The Irish Republican Army named the base located half a mile south of the border Camp O’Neill, in honor of the Fenian president.
The Canadian frontier remained undefended, allowing the Fenians to launch raiding parties into foreign territory. One group of raiders led by Colonel Thompson rode nearly two miles across the border and, wielding hatchets, chopped up the telegraph station at a store at Holbrook’s Corners. Following strict orders, they didn’t touch any of the establishment’s liquor selection (though that didn’t stop them from absconding with forty pounds of tobacco). Another band of raiders was at work on an entrenchment on the road to Holbrook’s Corners when Starr recalled all his men back to American territory.
By late on May 26, news had arrived at Camp O’Neill that enemy troops were en route from Montreal. After midnight, Starr convened a war council and, to little surprise, favored action. The general naturally gravitated toward a fight, and especially in the wake of the Battle of Eccles Hill he felt that the Fenian cause needed some good news—however small it might be—in order to keep the money flowing and the men volunteering. Starr proposed to make a small inroad into the flat, undefended Canadian territory, build an entrenchment, and hope for the arrival of reinforcements in time to salvage at least a part of his operation—to, at the very least, cause some mischief and headaches for the enemy.
The war council could not reach a consensus. Some thought it a mad enterprise. But the general decided to move on his own, taking however many Fenians were willing to join him. Starr distributed general orders from Camp O’Neill, instructing his army not “to war against peaceful citizens.” He pledged to arrest and punish any soldier who entered a private house without orders.
As the dark morning sky began to brighten, three hundred soldiers grabbed their Springfield rifles. Starr offered rousing words to his soldiers, but they belied his own hesitation. He left his carriage at the ready on the American side of the border. Even the general, apparently, had doubts about the length of their stay.
After marching half a mile into Canada, the Fenians rounded a bend that gave them a clear view ahead to Holbrook’s Corners. Starr ordered his men to resume work on the barricade started by the raiding party the previous day in order to establish a defensive bulwark.
The Irishmen’s experience with manual labor came in handy. They dismantled fences from the hop fields flanking the road and piled the logs and rails to form a four-foot-high barrier across their entire front—their left flank abutting the woods and their right flank against the Trout River. To increase their cover, the soldiers dug a one-foot-deep trench along their right flank.
The Fenians were still constructing their breastwork when the glint of bayonets could be seen on the hill at Holbrook’s Corners. A stream of redcoats approached. Because Starr and the other generals had done no reconnaissance, the arrival of the Canadian militia and British regular forces caught them by surprise.
The general was no less surprised by their number. It quickly became apparent to the 300 soldiers in green that unlike their brethren at Eccles Hill they were significantly outmatched. Led by Lieutenant Colonel George Bagot, who had spent nearly a quarter century in a British uniform, the Canadian army marched onto the scene with more than 1,000 soldiers, nearly half of whom belonged to the Sixty-Ninth Regiment of Foot, a venerable British infantry unit that dated back to the Seven Years’ War and fought Napoleon at Waterloo. They were joined by 225 members of the Fiftieth Battalion Huntingdon Borderers, 275 members of the Montreal Garrison Artillery, and 80 members of the Montreal Engineers.
It had taken eighteen hours for the men of the Sixty-Ninth Regiment—already exhausted from fighting a massive blaze in Quebec City three days earlier—to arrive at the border from Montreal. They had managed to catch two hours of sleep on the parade ground in Huntingdon, twelve miles to the north, before the bugle blare awoke them at 3:00 a.m. Milk and cold water handed out by farmers offered them encouragement as they marched to the border. They were ready for whatever the Fenians had to offer.
Colonel Bagot ordered the Montreal Garrison Artillery and Engineers on horseback to cross a bridge over the Trout River, north of the barricade, and to advance on the east side of the river, with the notion of fording it and striking the barricade from the rear. The rest of his force advanced in three columns.
Bagot assigned the local Huntingdon Borderers militia, who were defending their homes and families, the post of honor—a chance to be the first to engage the enemy. Shortly after 8:00 a.m., they were given the order to attack. The Borderers on the right of the Canadian line raised their Snider-Enfield rifles and fired gunshots into the hop field about five hundred yards in front of them, occupied by the Irish Republican Army’s advance picket. The Fenian picket returned fire in kind, but they quickly retreated one hundred yards to the barricade.
The Canadian volunteers charged across a plowed field, vaulting fences and unleashing an unceasing barrage. When they closed to within four hundred yards of the barricade, the panicked Fenians began to show their nerves. They opened fire prematurely, their wayward shots whizzing high and wide over the heads of the volunteers, whose return fire riddled the Fenian barricade, sending splinters exploding through the air.
Meanwhile, Bagot’s flankers had established excellent cover behind a forest of poles holding up the vines in the hop fields. The wild gunshots from the Fenians’ breech-loading Springfields could do nothing to stop the redcoats from continuing to close in.
The Fenians’ resolve fled. The general gave the order to retreat. Some defiant soldiers begged their commander to change his mind. “Let us die rather than go back!” one soldier implored. Starr, however, couldn’t be dissuaded. He told his army to run for the border.
With Irishmen disappearing, Bagot’s forces breached the hastily constructed barricade. They charged with fixed bayonets, the Fenians running and firing indiscriminately until they reached the cast-iron post that marked the 45th parallel and the sanctuary of American territory. Although Lieutenant Colonel Archibald McEachern of the Huntingdon Borderers wanted to chase the Fenians all the way back to Camp O’Neill, Bagot refused to allow his men to cross. However, their discretion didn’t prevent the Fenians from running until their enemies were no longer in sight.
Canadian forces fire as the Irish Republican Army flees toward the sanctuary of the American border during the Battle of Trout River.
Starr’s jaunt to Canada was over ninety minutes after it began, but it was not without its casualties. One of the skirmishers in front of the barricade, Dennis Duggan of Troy, New York, was killed. Three Fenians were wounded, including thirty-five-year-old James Moore, who was rendered unable to walk and was captured by a pair of militia, who found him hiding in the bush. The Canadian volunteers clamored to bayonet or shoot their prisoner, but they were restrained by the British regulars. The sole Canadian injury was a Huntingdon Borderer who was grazed on the forehead by a splinter sent flying by a bullet.
Starr’s decision to order a quick retreat was debated immediately by his men and in the days to come by the press. “Had they stood their ground they might have mowed down our men,” the Montreal Witness postulated, given the Fenians’ strong defensive position. The New York Herald was less sanguine about their prospects, pointing to their three-to-one disadvantage. “Had the Fenians remained upon the ground ten minutes longer,” declared the newspaper, “not one of them would have been left to tell the tale.”
In the wake of what newspapers derided as “Starr’s Stampede” over the border, many of the Irishmen retreated past Camp O’Neill and continued twelve miles south to Malone. Along the way, crestfallen soldiers crouched at streams to take sips of water from their cupped hands and doze underneath the canopies of sprawling trees.
At their encampment, the Fenians reverted to finger-pointing. Officers claimed that they tried desperately to get their men to regroup and form a line, while privates complained that they were thwarted in their desires to charge. Some Irishmen even threatened to lynch Starr for his cowardice. The general, though, was nowhere to be found. After rushing away from the border in his waiting carriage, he ensconced himself in a Malone hotel before skipping town the same evening on a train to Buffalo.
While the shattered Fenians lumbered back to Malone, three hundred reinforcements at last arrived in the upstate New York town, looking to join the fight. Among those pulling in to the train station was Pittsburgh’s Fenian leader, Dr. Edward Donnelly. When Donnelly asked where the commanding officer was, he received an unexpected reply: “He is lying drunk in the hotel.”
General John Gleason, a thirty-two-year-old County Tipperary native who liked “a battle better than his breakfast,” according to one reporter, stepped into the void left by Starr. He tried to rally his reluctant troops to launch a second attack. The arrival of the reinforcements had brought the size of the Irish Republican Army in the vicinity to upwards of thirteen hundred men. The math, he argued, was on their side.
The general found support in Dr. Donnelly, as well as Father John McMahon, the Indiana priest who had recently been released after spending more than three years in a Canadian prison after the Battle of Ridgeway. The two civilians made for an unlikely pair of war hawks as they attempted to whip up the troops that had encamped at the fairground in Malone.
With their speechifying complete, a color-bearer unfurled an Irish flag and called on the men to fall in. Only thirty did so. The disheartened Fenians might have hungered for Ireland’s independence, but after the previous day’s humiliations they couldn’t stomach another raid.
This latest attempt on Canada was officially put to rest that night when a familiar face, General George Meade, arrived by train from St. Albans along with General Irvin McDowell, the onetime commander of the Army of the Potomac, and upwards of five hundred U.S. soldiers. Meade once again arrived to snuff out the last chance of any Fenian raid. His forces seized twenty-three boxes of weapons and arrested Gleason, Donnelly, Mannix, and four other Fenian leaders on Sunday morning, before sending them to Canandaigua, where they would be tried for violating the Neutrality Act. The rest of the Irish Republican Army, however, remained stranded in Malone.
When President Grant received news of the Battle of Eccles Hill, he muttered that it was “one of the most ludicrous things he ever knew.” He was in no mood for charity; Meade received orders not to pay for transportation home for the Fenians remaining in Malone and St. Albans. So, broke and disappointed, hundreds of Fenians loitered on Malone’s street corners and inside its hotel barrooms until the authorities prohibited the sale of liquor of any sort to the Irishmen. With stomachs rumbling, they banged on doors in search of food. The overtaxed residents of Malone wanted the Fenians to go home just as badly as the Irishmen did.
Grant was no more generous toward the citizens of Malone. “The people along the frontier have been sympathizing with these movements and aiding these people,” he groused, “and if it is annoying to them both, it is well that they should sweat a while.” If the local and state authorities “wished to rid themselves of the invaders,” they could foot the bill.
On May 30, the railway company stepped in, agreeing to transport the Fenians at half price. A member of New York governor John Hoffman’s office came with offers from both the state’s chief executive and Tammany Hall’s William “Boss” Tweed to cover the remainder, and at last the six hundred Fenians still stranded in Malone finally departed, a week after the ignominious Battle of Trout River.
Six days after the Fenians spoiled his mother’s birthday party in Montreal, Prince Arthur came to Eccles Hill to personally thank the Canadian volunteers and Red Sashes who had repelled the Irish Republican Army. Queen Victoria’s third son was presented with a Fenian uniform and cap—a trophy of war that according to some newspaper accounts had been stripped from the corpse of John Rowe, still buried in a shallow grave on the promontory.
The day following the royal visit, Lieutenant Colonel William Osborne Smith gave his assent for Rowe’s body to be removed by his brethren—as long as no Fenian crossed the border in the process. The task fell to a St. Albans undertaker, who exhumed Rowe’s body and placed it in a coffin to be escorted back to his hometown of Burlington, Vermont, by his commander, Captain William Cronan.
On June 2, a merciful priest, ignoring the Roman Catholic Church’s condemnation of the Fenian Brotherhood, held a joint funeral inside Burlington’s St. Mary’s Cathedral for the two fallen privates from the Battle of Eccles Hill, Rowe and William O’Brien. The decomposed state of the Fenians’ bodies, coupled with a heat wave that sent temperatures scraping one hundred degrees, required that their bodies be kept across the street on the porch of St. Mary’s Hall while the mourners celebrated the requiem Mass.
As their bodies were laid to rest, many silently delivered last rites for the Fenian Brotherhood as well. “The entire Fenian movement is now practically at an end, for the failures at St. Albans and here, kill the whole thing,” The New York Times reported from Malone. Most of America’s newspapers echoed these sentiments, castigating the Irish immigrants who seemed to remain more preoccupied with the land of their birth than with their adopted home. The most severe lashing, however, would come from one of their own.
O’Reilly had arrived at the Canadian border ready to pen an ode to a new generation of Celtic warriors. Instead, he scripted its obituary. The journalist told the readers of The Pilot that the Fenian soldiers, confronted with proof of their failure, returned “sadder and wiser men.” That included O’Reilly.
He recounted that Fenians he interviewed at Trout River “burst into tears at what they termed their disgrace.” The Pilot reporter blamed their leadership. “Judging from the military physique of the greater number, there can be no doubt that, with qualified officers, these men would prove that they did not merit the name they now feared—cowards.”
The Pilot was only more critical in its next edition, criticizing the “mad foray” by “criminally incompetent” Fenian leaders. “Fenianism, so far as relates to the invasion of Canada, ceases to exist, but it has done all the evil it could do. It has torn thousands of men away from their homes and their employment in a wild and futile enterprise. It has caused the deaths of several brave men and the imprisonment, perhaps death, of many others, and it has given occasion to the enemies of the Irish people to renew the slurs which such enterprises have given birth to before now.”
Eccles Hill and Trout River did something to O’Reilly that not even solitary confinement in Millbank Prison or banishment to Australia could do: It tempered his patriotic fervor. It stripped some of the romantic veneer off those poems and songs he had heard as a boy that first compelled him to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Disillusioned, O’Reilly doubted that the Fenian Brotherhood would ever be able to deliver independence for Ireland.
During O’Reilly’s short time in the United States, he had come to see the way many Irish had remained stubbornly separated from mainstream American life. But the Fenian raids of 1870 marked a turning point. He would become an impassioned advocate not for Irish independence but rather for assimilation into American society—for the Irish to break out of their enclaves, reach beyond their clans, and stop undertaking these forays that caused the rest of America to question their true allegiance.
The debacle at Trout River marked the end of the Second Fenian War, as it was known. It could be viewed as nothing more than a complete failure. This time there were no Ridgeways, no moral victories to claim. Unlike 1866, the Fenians couldn’t fault their preparation. The failure of 1870 was that of execution. One could question O’Neill’s wisdom in recycling much of General Thomas Sweeny’s plan of attack—down to the use of the same gateways from St. Albans and Malone—but O’Neill managed to both secure sufficient weapons and supplies and transport them to the front without alerting federal authorities to their presence.
While newspapers in the past had “laughed at the Fenians as an army without a commissariat,” the Huntingdon Gleaner noted, “the truth is, it was a splendid commissariat without an army worthy of it.” O’Neill simply didn’t have the men to engineer a victory. This was in part a result of the division that had torn the Fenian Brotherhood apart in the previous five years.
And while O’Neill might have managed to organize the raid without his plans spilling onto the front pages of newspapers, he failed to notice the enormous breach that stood by his side. In Le Caron, Canadian and British authorities had an incalculably valuable asset. Faced with the inherent difficulty of having to launch a sneak attack, with forces mobilized from hundreds of miles away, and having to surprise not one but two governments, O’Neill was always up against long odds.
Complicating matters for the Fenians, the political landscape had turned against them in the intervening four years. Feelings toward Great Britain were not nearly as raw as they were in the aftermath of the Civil War, and Canada was no longer a British colony but a fledgling country. British troops might have been lackluster in their response in 1866, but the homegrown militias that confronted the Fenians proved fierce and quick in defense of their homes and farms.
The Irishmen who had picked up their rifles at Eccles Hill and Trout River longed to be bathed in glory. Instead, they departed from the Canadian border in a shower of ridicule. Newspapers giddily printed the joke that the “I.R.A.” emblazoned on the buttons of the Fenians’ green jackets stood, not for the “Irish Republican Army,” but for their new motto—“I Ran Away.”