Blood and Daring (28 page)

The failed disruption at Chicago and the prison break fiascos, coupled with the
Philo Parsons
episode, drew even more attention to Thompson’s Canadian operations. Stanton and Seward began to receive more regular and alarming reports. On September 30, for instance, General Dix telegraphed Stanton that Thompson had been seen in Sandwich, Canada West, with known Confederate colonel William Steele and that they were planning some kind of “piratical expedition” on the lakes. The next day, Detroit’s
provost marshal reported, “As the case now stands, the rebel agent in Canada residing in Sandwich, Col. Jacob Thompson, has organized an expedition in Canada to seize American trains.”
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Nothing seemed to be working for Thompson as planned, but with the actions he was taking and the reports and rumours piling up on Washington desks, he continued to exact a price in Union men, money and attention. His quiet activities were often the most effective. For example, Thompson worked in Toronto with Confederate agent Beverley Tucker, who arranged for cotton to be shipped to Canada and traded for bacon on a pound-for-pound basis, then secreted back to the hungry South. Other work was done to try to disrupt and devalue the American currency. Meanwhile, Clement Clay, from his Montreal office, and without Thompson’s knowledge, approved a scheme that was far from quiet. It promised to lead to the invasion and the war that Thompson had been sent to Canada to precipitate.

By October 1864, Lord Lyons, whose health had been questionable for some time, had been diagnosed with neuralgia and was feeling the effects of three years of intense stress. He had spent a couple of enjoyable weeks with Governor General Monck and his family at Monck’s official residence, the idyllic Spencer Wood. He developed a cloying friendship with Monck’s effervescent adult daughter Feo and, uncharacteristically, enjoyed himself. With Monck and his family, Lyons visited parts of Canada, seeing Shawinigan Falls, Montreal, and Toronto. He toured the American side of Niagara Falls to avoid contact with the Clifton Hill Confederates.

Duty soon had Lyons back in the United States, and on October 20 he was in tails at a New York City dinner party attended by several dignitaries, including General Dix. During cocktails, Lyons saw Dix receive a telegram and rush from the room. A half an hour later he was back and, before the startled guests, began berating Lyons: Confederates had swarmed across the Canadian border and taken St. Albans, Vermont.

The raid had been led by Thompson’s experienced Confederate agent and courier Bennett Young. Young was a handsome twenty-one-year-old from Jessamine County, Kentucky. He had ridden with General Morgan in Ohio and been captured and imprisoned, but escaped to Montreal in early 1864. He met Clement Clay, who encouraged him to return to Richmond via Halifax and Bermuda. With a letter and instructions from Clay, Young met with Secretary of War James Sedden, who commissioned him as a first lieutenant and ordered him back to Canada.

Thompson had involved Young in a number of missions, including the peace negotiations with Horace Greeley and the attempted disruption of the Democratic Party’s National Convention in Chicago. From his hotel in St. Catharines, Young had helped plan a prison uprising in Columbus, Ohio’s Camp Chase. He made it to Ohio with about thirty men but nearly all lost their nerve at the last minute, so Young was soon back in St. Catharines, and still seeking his first success.

Young met with Clay in Montreal and the two hatched the plan for the St. Albans raid. Clay gave Young two thousand dollars to cover expenses. Working through Clay’s contacts at St. Lawrence Hall, Young carefully gathered twenty fit, experienced young Southern men who shared his passion and willingness to die for the cause.

They left Montreal on different trains and arrived in St. Albans over several days. Claiming to be members of a Canadian hunting and fishing club, they booked into different hotels and Young and another man scouted the town. On October 19, at three o’clock in the afternoon, they gathered at the town’s main intersection. With a silent signal they threw their greatcoats to the ground, revealing Confederate uniforms with intimidating twin navy sixes strapped across their chests. Young bellowed from his hotel’s front porch that the town was theirs in the name of the Confederacy. With much shouting and brandishing of weapons, the townsfolk were shepherded into the public square. When a couple of men put up a fight, shots were fired and one resister was hit in the leg.

Amid the crying and quaking, several of Young’s raiders entered and robbed the town’s three banks of about two hundred thousand dollars.
From satchels came fifty four-ounce bottles of Greek fire that exploded buildings into flames.
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For forty-five minutes the rampage continued; and then it got worse.

The raiders hadn’t noticed that a Union captain named George Conger, who happened to be there on leave, had slipped out of the crowd. He quickly assembled men to retake the town. As the raiders were gathering horses to make their escape, shots rang from second-storey windows. Men in the crowd pulled weapons from beneath jackets and joined the fray. The raiders threw their remaining bottles of Greek fire against the houses from which the shots were coming, and returned fire from horseback as they fled. Three raiders were hit and a civillian was killed.

Eight miles outside town, with Conger’s posse giving chase, Young and few breathless men reined their sweating horses near a bridge. They took control of a farmer’s load of hay and waited. When the posse galloped into sight, the raiders set the bridge and hay alight and opened fire. By nine o’clock, all twenty raiders were back in Canada. They changed into civilian clothes, got rid of the horses and split up. Young finally had his success.

He set off on foot to report to Clay in Montreal, but stopped at a farmhouse to ask for food and drink. A woman allowed him in and he settled before the fire to rest. Within minutes, about twenty-five members of the posse burst into the small room, threw him to the floor and beat him. Bloodied and stunned, Young was tossed into the back of a wagon with men on either side holding weapons to his head. He shouted that his captors had violated British neutrality. The men yelled back and hit him again. Young suddenly rose, knocked both men out of the wagon, grabbed the reins and shouted to the horses. The two men recovered quickly though and pounced on Young, one beating him with the flat side of a sword. From out of nowhere appeared a British officer, who stopped the beating and demanded to know what was going on.

The red-coated soldier heard the shouted story from both sides. Thinking quickly, he assured the vigilantes that many of Young’s compatriots were already under arrest and talked them into releasing him. In exchange, he promised he would take charge of Young and that he and the other Confederates would be returned to St. Albans to face trial. The promise worked and Young was taken to jail.

While Lord Lyons was being publicly dressed down by General Dix in New York, Governor General Monck was reading a telegram from frenzied Vermont governor, J. Gregory Smith.
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Smith had surmised that the raid was part of a larger invasion and so he called out all the reserves he could to protect other towns and important railway junctions. Unaware that their capture was already in progress, Monck ordered the raiders arrested. Meanwhile, Dix telegraphed an order to Vermont that American troops should find and arrest the raiders even if it meant crossing the Canadian border. Lyons protested, and Dix admitted that he was issuing the order without authorization from Washington.
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The raid from Canada, along with Conger’s posse and the Dix order, meant trouble. Secretary of State Seward was quickly involved and sent a message to acting British minister Joseph Burnley, still in charge pending Lyons’s official return to duty, insisting on the immediate extradition of the St. Albans raiders.
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A couple of days later, with the men still in the Canadian jail, he repeated his demand.
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Even before the St. Albans raid, Seward had sent a message to Foreign Secretary Russell in London stating that recent incidents demonstrated that Britain’s pledge of neutrality could not be trusted and, therefore, that Canada and Britain should prepare themselves for the abrogation of the Rush-Bagot Agreement and the re-arming of the Great Lakes.
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The raid made the bad situation worse and had even moved Robert E. Lee to write to Jefferson Davis arguing that adventures such as occurred at St. Albans were illegal and ill-advised. Men sent to carry out such activities, he argued, would be better put to use in battle or protecting Southern cities.
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The press on both sides of the border exploded with recriminating
articles. American papers were nearly unanimous in their condemnation of Canada’s involvement in the raid; meanwhile, Canadian papers decried the raid itself while expressing outrage at Conger’s cross-border incursion.
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The
Montreal Gazette
, for example, echoed even the normally pro-Southern papers in editorializing: “It is the first duty of the Government of Canada and the people of Canada to see that the right of asylum which their soil affords is not thus betrayed and violated. The Government must spare no pains to prevent it. [But] to surprise a peaceful town and shoot people down in the streets, at the same time committing robbery, is not civilized war; it is that of savages.”
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Thompson’s people did themselves no favours by entering the newspaper fracas. From his cell, Young penned a letter to Montreal’s pro-South
Evening Telegram
explaining his actions. He wrote that he had intended to burn a number of Vermont towns in retaliation for the Union’s burning of Southern cities and towns. With impressive temerity, Young continued that he had been captured in Canada by American citizens and that each should be charged with violating Canadian neutrality.
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An editorial in the
Toronto Leader
, while not condoning the raid, allowed that it supported Young’s point. If, it argued, the Union army can act with impunity in destroying property in the South, then why could Confederate forces not use every means at their disposal to do the same thing in the North?
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Young’s letter was followed by another from Thompson’s agent George Sanders arguing that Young was a prisoner of war and must be treated as such, for he had been hired by the Richmond government with the express purpose of organizing the St. Albans expedition. It was not a raid or a bank robbery, Sanders contended, but a legitimate act of war.
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With newspapers keeping the raid hot, Burnley, Russell, Monck and the Canadian government did all they could to cool matters by reassuring everyone that they opposed the attack, and held no regard for those who carried it out or for the Confederates in Canada who had organized and financed it. Burnley wrote to Monck saying that Lincoln was pleased by the actions taken so far in the St. Albans and
Philo Parsons
cases. He said that Lincoln believed that the raid and acts of piracy on the Great Lakes
were attempts by the Confederates in Canada to embroil the United States and Britain in war and that his government would not fall into the trap.
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At the same time, rumours of more plots along the border were brought to Seward’s attention and he alerted Monck and Burnley. There were stories of planned piracy on the Great Lakes, of more border raids and of plotters in Montreal eager to put a number of Northern towns to the torch. Unlike Lincoln, Seward publicly criticized Canadian efforts to stop it all as being tepid at best: “It is not the Government or the people of the United States that are delinquent in the fulfillment of fraternal national obligations.”
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With the rumour mill churning, Vermont’s Governor Smith called out militia units and asked Secretary of War Stanton to send him cavalry supplies, including five hundred carbines, pistols, sabres and other equipment. Demonstrating the attention being paid to the northern border, Stanton replied that very day and sent the governor everything he requested.
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The next day, Stanton wrote to General Grant outlining aspects of the affairs in New York State, including the levels of security of forts, canals, ports and cities “from rebels imported from Canada.” Grant acknowledged the threat and suggested that new recruits that were currently being organized in the state for his army should be diverted to defend the northern border.
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About two thousand recruits were kept from Grant and assigned instead to Dix.

The St. Albans raiders were brought before Magistrate Charles-Joseph Coursol at St. Johns, a short distance southeast of Montreal, on October 25.
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The courtroom was packed with American, Canadian and Maritime reporters and a large crowd that included many who had arrived by train from Montreal, decked out in Confederate uniforms. Young and the others were defended by lawyers paid for through Clay’s funds and hired by George Sanders. Their chief counsel was John C. Abbott, who was McGill University’s dean of law and in 1891 would become Canada’s prime minister. There were six charges, all extraditable: robbery, attempted
arson, horse-stealing, assault, intent to murder and murder. After three days it was decided that tensions in the small town were simply too high and so the proceedings were moved to more secure facilities in Montreal. Young and his compatriots lived at the home of their jailer, where Sanders arranged fine food, good wine and expensive prostitutes. They also welcomed a number of visitors, including Clay and Thompson.

The hearing began again on November 3. It dragged on through days of arcane legal arguments and delays. Attempts were made to procure documents from Richmond meant to prove that the defendants were commissioned by Davis, but first Monck and then Lincoln refused to allow messengers safe passage. The decision to deal with each charge separately slowed the proceedings even more.