Blood and Daring (42 page)

Private A.G. Gilbert of Peterborough was on the ridge as a member of the Queen’s Own Company 7. He later wrote of the battle:

The Fenians reinforced their right and their left, and the cry went up for a cavalry charge. The Queen’s Own girded themselves in textbook fashion by forming a square to repulse the horses, but the Fenians reacted by quickly moving to their flanks and filling the air with enfilade fire. The Canadians were forced to withdraw, leaving the Fenians with the field.

Generals Meade and Grant both hurried to Buffalo. Grant ordered Meade to stop further border incursions. American law enforcement authorities and militia were alerted. The American steamer
Michigan
arrived at the scene, and her crew confiscated a cache of hidden weapons. Meade then took a train to St. Albans, Vermont, to address reports of five hundred Fenians moving north. O’Neill heard this news along with a startling report that about five thousand Canadian militiamen and British regulars were heading toward him from Chippawa, just a few miles away, and decided to withdraw. The ragtag, retreating Fenians made it half-way across the Niagara River, and then were captured by an armed American tugboat and put in the
Michigan
‘s brig.

The Fenian raid and Ridgeway battle moved President Johnson to finally break his silence. On June 6 he issued a proclamation stating that the Fenians had violated neutrality laws and warning Americans against helping them or anyone else with designs upon Canada. The next day, thirteen hundred Fenians, ignoring the presidential proclamation, marched north from St. Albans and crossed into Canada, where they established picket lines and waited for reinforcements. Meade, meanwhile, had ordered those reinforcements stopped. Sweeny was arrested. The Fenian invaders quietly retreated back across the border and went home.
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Eighty-one Fenian raiders were in Canadian custody, hundreds in American jails, and no one knew what to do with them. Their fates rested on the delicate complexity of the Canadian-American-British relationship. Seward initially suggested that those held in the United States should be allowed to escape, but the decision was finally made to release them all on bail. The young Civil War veterans were then offered free transport home on their promise never to participate in another attack on Canada.
⁸⁸
None were ever prosecuted.

The American prisoners languishing in Canadian jails were not so lucky. On a clear and warm afternoon on June 5, Toronto businesses closed for a public funeral to honour the five members of the Queen’s Own militia who had lost their lives at Ridgeway. The
Globe
captured the mood of the day: “We have buried our dead but the lesson which they have taught us will live long after all those who were present at the ceremonies have followed them to the tomb … there lurks a desire to force this country into a connection with their neighbour by means of border troubles.… The autonomy of British America, its independence of all control save that to which its people willingly submit, is cemented by the bloodshed in the battle on the 2nd of June.”
⁸⁹

The Canadian legislature reconvened three days later in the recently finished and grand Parliament Buildings overlooking the Ottawa River. Macdonald introduced a motion stating that American requests for the extradition of the Fenian prisoners would be ignored. He suspended
habeas corpus
and stated that the prisoners would be tried by Militia General Courts Martial.

American reaction was explosive. In Washington, Seward led the charge by fuming to British minister Bruce that the Canadian decision was unacceptable and that Britain would be held responsible.
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Bruce wrote to Monck: “The future relations of Canada [with the United States] and its deliverance from any chance of becoming a battlefield of Fenianism will depend in a great measure on the tact and temper with which this question of the prisoners is managed.”
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This time it was Monck’s turn to
rage a little. He let London know that he was sadly disappointed with Bruce’s handling of the entire matter, believing him to be pandering to the Americans. He also argued that Britain could not at the same time support Confederation and Canada’s growing independence and then interfere in a case of jurisprudence that was so obviously a Canadian matter. In his demand, Monck was channelling the growing Canadian nationalism that the Confederation debates and Fenian excitements had bolstered: “The course of justice cannot be interfered with at the dictation of a foreign power.”
⁹²

The British government, of course, was simply doing as it had done throughout the war in seeking to avoid confrontation with the United States. Monck understood, and he pledged to use his influence with Macdonald to try to postpone the Fenian trials until emotions in Canada and the United States had subsided. As he put it in a dispatch to the Colonial Office: “I think you may safely dismiss from your mind all fears of any difficulties arising from the treatment of the Fenian prisoners. I am resting on my oars with regard to these prisoners until Congress shall have adjourned, which will probably be in a few days and we shall then try them in statutable felony before the ordinary courts.”
⁹³

As Monck suggested, the imprisonment of American veterans had become a part of the ruthless struggle between Congress and the president and a factor in the upcoming 1866 mid-term elections. Congress passed a resolution demanding that Johnson act to have the prisoners immediately released from Canada. Trying partly to court the same Irish vote that Johnson was seeking, Massachusetts congressman and chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Nathaniel Banks condemned the president for interfering with the Fenian raids, arguing that if he had just let events play themselves out, then Canada would have fallen. On July 2, Banks introduced a bill that contained changes to the neutrality laws that would encourage Fenians or others to undertake Canadian invasions in the future. The bill also suggested provisions for Canada and the Maritimes to join the United States as four new states and two territories. Fenian leader William Roberts praised the bill for its demonstration that
radical Republicans were supportive of the Fenian cause, while Charles Sumner and others in the Senate expressed their intention to kill it through either filibuster or death in committee.
⁹⁴
The bill sank into Banks’s House Committee, however, and never emerged.

While the bill vanished, its promotion had been widely reported in Canadian and Maritime papers and, coming so soon after the Fenian raids, it boosted the pro-Confederation forces by serving as yet another catalyst for gelling the burgeoning sense of nationhood. As noted by the
Toronto Daily Telegraph
a few days after the Banks bill made headlines, and with the Fenian raids still on peoples’ minds, “the covenant of our nationality had been sealed with blood.”
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D’Arcy McGee made a similar observation to Monck, calling his old Fenian enemies “wretches” and a “scourge.” But he concluded, “Our population are up and united as one man; we are three millions; we are on our own soil.”
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A
Globe
editorial almost thanked the Fenians for their role in uniting Canadians: “The events of the last fortnight have not only shown unmistakably that the true British spirit beats universally throughout our country—that the people of Canada are ready, as one man, to defend their homes and fire-sides.… The Fenians have unwittingly done an essential service to the Canadian people, by inspiring them with a degree of confidence in their defensive strength which they did not before possess.”
⁹⁷

In August, perhaps encouraged by the House bill or perhaps trying to regain the momentum lost by the failed Canadian incursions, Roberts organized a Fenian picnic in Buffalo. Macdonald ordered ships to full alert in lakes Erie and Ontario and three thousand militiamen to Fort Erie. On August 15, at another Fenian picnic, in Chicago, Illinois’s Governor Oglesby, Senator Logan and two congressmen spoke of brave Fenians, treacherous Englishmen and a criminal president who prevented the raiders from taking Canada.
⁹⁸
Macdonald and Monck met to discuss the increasingly anti-Canadian rhetoric in Congress and on the part of state officials—and President Johnson’s silence. If Fenians launched another attack, they concluded, the Americans might not this time help in stopping it. Monck asked for more British troops for the Canadian
border and for forty thousand state-of-the-art Snider-Enfield breech-loading rifles.
⁹⁹

Monck’s requests for more military assistance initiated a fresh round of discussions at the British cabinet table on the subject of Canadian defence. The arguments brought forward ignored the quick defence that Canadian and Maritime militia had recently launched and the pledges of money and men that had been made. Powerful Tory and Little Englander Benjamin Disraeli argued, “It can never be our pretence or our policy to defend the Canadian frontier against the United States. If the colonists can’t, as a general rule, defend themselves against the Fenians, they can do nothing … what is the use of these colonial dead weights which we do not govern.”
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Despite these reservations, British domestic politics, as always, needed to be considered. The government could not be seen to be allowing Fenians to succeed anywhere if it hoped to keep on successfully battling them at home. The British Parliament grumbled but voted another fifty thousand pounds for Canadian defence, and more troops were sent in September. Fortunately, by the time Britain’s 61st Regiment arrived, the new danger had gone cold and so the men were sent on to the West Indies. Their arrival nonetheless reassured Canadians and Maritimers who still feared American intentions after years of Civil War threats and insults followed by Fenian scares.

As the American fall mid-term elections approached, Johnson’s policies on Canada and the Fenians became hot-button issues in Irish districts. A
New York Tribune
article, for instance, attacked the president for having supported the raids by meeting with Fenian leaders and then saying nothing while public plans were made, but then double-crossing them when those plans were executed. It concluded: “A weak policy is always wrong at both ends and bad in the middle; and thus the President has failed to satisfy Irishmen, Americans and Canadians.”
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A similar point was made by many Fenian leaders, including a general whom Meade had known in the Civil War, who told him, “We have been lured on by the Cabinet, and used for the purpose of Mr. Seward. They encouraged us on this thing. We bought our rifles from your arsenals, and were given to understand that you would not interfere.”
¹⁰²

President Johnson was sorely disappointed when the voters of Maine, Vermont, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Ohio elected his political opponents. The elections in the more heavily Irish New England states were still to come. The president announced that no Fenians would be prosecuted and that all captured arms would be returned to their owners. He fired Attorney General William Dart, who had publicly advocated stopping the Fenian raids, and ordered Seward to work harder to free the Fenians still in Canada.

The Fenian trials had been postponed to allow time to heal wounds, but they could be delayed no further. Amid new rumours of Fenians on the border and American belligerence fanning the increasingly hot embers of Canadian nationalism and anti-Americanism, the trials began on October 8. The Americans were charged with having entered Canada to wage war on Her Majesty. They were brought before the court one at a time and defended by Toronto lawyers who were paid by the American consul. It all moved quickly. Robert Lynch and Catholic priest Father John McMahon were the first to be found guilty and sentenced to be hanged.

Seward jumped to intervene. He asked for trial transcripts and wrote to Bruce asking that Britain review the cases and act to prevent the sentences from being carried out. The Colonial Office had written to Monck with the same request.
¹⁰³
As he had with the case of former slave John Anderson years before, Macdonald respected the legal process while being too smart to hurl himself into whirlpools of political peril, and so said nothing. Canadian newspapers were not so circumspect. Most united in supporting the courts with a nationalist fervour that lashed out at American and British attempts at intervention. Maritime papers joined the chorus. The
St. John Morning Telegraph
reflected the thoughts of many in its November 6 editorial: “It is to be hoped that Canadian Courts will deal with the convicts without reference either to England or the States.… We hope the sentence of the Courts will be firmly carried out, notwithstanding the rage of the American Fenians and the diplomacy of Mr. Seward.”
¹⁰⁴

The trials continued, with more guilty pleas and death sentences. With Fenians on Canada’s death row and Johnson’s government unable to save them, and with an increasingly fierce struggle between parties and branches
of government, voters in New England went to the polls. Nearly every Johnson candidate in predominantly Irish districts was defeated. With the elections lost, his cabinet divided, and so many of his vetoes overturned, President Johnson’s political influence had evaporated. He carried on with his constitutional authority but was bereft of political capital. In his State of the Union address, delivered a few weeks later, he expressed regret that there had not been more progress in resolving the differences between the United States and Britain that remained as a result of actions taken during the war. He noted that he had issued a proclamation condemning attacks on Canada from the United States, although he failed to mention his tacit support for the raids or that his proclamation had been issued only after they had taken place. He also spoke of his government’s attempts to intervene in the Canadian trials and expressed hope that the prisoners would be treated with “clemency and a judicious amnesty.”
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