“The mission had shown the people of the North that they were not immune from the pain and suffering of the Civil War.”

By Julian Sher

THEY WERE FEARED because they struck suddenly and swiftly, deep inside Union territory. More akin to stealthy guerrillas than a traditional, slow-moving army, members of the elite force were considered heroes to many in the South for disrupting supply lines and terrorizing Union forces from Kentucky to Tennessee and as far north as Ohio.

Their leader was a charismatic, skilled marauder named John Hunt Morgan.

“Colonel Morgan issued a stirring proclamation calling upon the young men of Kentucky to rally to his standard,” recalled Bennett H. Young, one of the first to answer the call. “Their hearts were thrilled with the story of his adventures and his triumphs.”

“All wanted to get with Morgan,” wrote another recruit, John W. Headley. “Morgan had been the first man in history to raid far in the rear of the enemy’s great armies and successfully defy overwhelming numbers.”

In the summer of 1863 Morgan’s Raiders, as they came to be known, launched a stunning assault of more than a thousand miles that started in Tennessee and ran through Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and even West Virginia. Morgan’s luck soon ran out, however; he and many of his men were surrounded by Union forces in Ohio in the summer of 1863. Morgan was imprisoned. Although he escaped, he never fully regained the confidence of the Confederate generals. He was later killed in a skirmish with the Union Army.

Yet in early 1864, Young and Headley would be tapped to bring the skills and tactics they learned as guerrillas under Morgan’s command to one of the most surprising fronts in the closing years of the Civil War: Canada. They, along with other exiles from Morgan’s Raiders, would become the backbone of what developed into the Confederates’ secret army north of the border.

“You are detailed for special service to proceed to Canada,” wrote Confederate Secretary of War James Seddon, “effecting any fair and appropriate enterprises of war against our enemies … in any hostile operation.”

Three years into a war they were beginning to lose, a desperate Confederacy decided to attack and undermine Lincoln’s government from where he least expected – north of the border.

Confederate President Jefferson Davis authorized about $1 million (about $16 million in today’s currency) to set up a secret service operation in Canada. He named two close political allies to run the service, but they relied on many exiled Southern soldiers to carry out the plots and missions.

Canada, still part of the British empire, was formally “neutral” in the Civil War, which made it a safe haven for thousands of Southern spies, soldiers and saboteurs. While it was true that Canada was a “North Star” – a beacon of freedom for thousands of escaped slaves along the Underground Railroad – it was equally true but far less well known that most of the elites in Canada backed the South. Many Politicians, business men, church leaders and most of the newspapers were decidedly pro-South.

In November, 1864, John Headley launched his boldest mission from Canada.

Mounted in the aftermath of Philip Sheridan’s destructive Shenandoah Valley campaign and Major General William Tecumseh Sherman’s infamous “barren waste” drive through Georgia from Atlanta to Savannah, Headley hoped to even the score.

Headley first led a handful of men – several of them veterans of Morgan’s Raiders – to New York City, where they registered at multiple hotels. On the evening of Nov. 25, they set fires in rooms in 19 lodgings along Broadway, using bottles of “Greek fire” – an early form of the Molotov cocktail, filled with flammable liquids.

“There was the wildest excitement imaginable,” Headley recounted as he stood on Broadway watching the resulting mayhem. “There was all sorts of talk about hanging the rebels to lamp posts or burning them at the stake.”

“The city was paralyzed last evening by the loud and simultaneous clanging of fire-bells in every direction,” a lengthy front-page story in the New York Times reported.

Though the fires caused a lot of damage, miraculously, no one died. The Confederates had mistakenly closed the doors and windows in the hotel rooms they set ablaze, thereby depriving the fires of the oxygen needed to spread.

Still, the New York hotel arson attack accomplished what all acts of terrorism seek to do: sow fear and panic. Of equal significance, the mission had shown the people of the North that they were not immune from the pain and suffering of the Civil War. The Confederates had struck at the very nerve centre of the Union’s financial and cultural base in its largest city. It was, as the New York Herald put it, “a vast and fiendish plot . . . which if successful, would have been accompanied by such unspeakable horrors.”

Headley made it back safely to Canada, where he went on to take part in piracy on the Great Lakes and an attempted train derailment in New York state. He eventually wrote a popular memoir boasting of his adventures called Confederation Operations in Canada and New York.

Bennett Young had been even more successful in the raid he pulled off in Vermont. With a band of 20 well-armed men, he rode into the small border town of St. Albans in October, 1864.

“In the name of the Confederate States, I take possession of St. Albans!” Young declared to the shocked community. “I have been sent here to take this town, and I am going to do it; the first that offers resistance I will shoot him.”

Young’s men stormed three banks in a swift, well-coordinated attack. In less than 15 minutes, they made off with at least $208,000—over $3.7 million in today’s currency. A sizeable haul for a Confederacy desperate for cash.

As panic reigned and bullets flew in the small town, tragedy struck – an innocent bystander was shot and killed.

“We’re coming back and we’ll burn every damned town in Vermont,” Young and his raiders shouted as they fled on stolen horses.

Lincoln’s military commanders, understandably, were furious.

Major General John Dix, who led the Federal forces in the east, wanted to invade Canada if necessary “to destroy them.” Luckily, that was avoided.

Young and about a dozen of his men were quickly arrested by Canadian authorities after they crossed the border. About $90,000 of the stolen loot was also seized – the remaining $118,000 was never recovered.

Young was far from finished waging his war for the Confederacy – only this time he would use his words and wile as his weapons.

“I went there for the purpose of burning the town and surrounding villages in retaliation for the recent outrages committed in the Shenandoah Valley, and elsewhere in the Confederate States,” he wrote to the newspapers from his jail cell.

Lincoln’s government wanted the raiders extradited to the U.S. where they would face a swift military and almost certain execution. But when his trial began before a Canadian court in Montreal, Young unapologetically told the judge: “Whatever was done at St. Albans was done by the authority and order of the Confederate government. The course I intended to pursue … was to retaliate in some measure for the barbarous atrocities” committed by the North.

It was a stunning and politically explosive defence. In effect, the St. Albans raiders were trying to prove they were innocent—by admitting they were guilty of participating in an organized military plot sanctioned by Richmond and run out of Canada. They were not traditional bank robbers—after all, they did not wear masks—but belligerents in a war for which Canada had pledged its neutrality.

It worked. The judge threw out the case claiming his court did not have jurisdiction over the matter. Northern papers were incensed. Once again, there were calls for an invasion of Canada.

“Take her by the throat and throttle her as a St. Bernard would a poodle pup,” the Chicago Tribune bellowed.

Lincoln, in his State of the Union address in December, 1864 – his last as it turned out before he was struck by an assassin’s bullet four months later – berated Canada for allowing “recent assaults and depredations committed by inimical and desperate persons who are harbored there.”

The administration soon imposed passports for citizens travelling between the two countries and warned of scrapping a treaty that had barred warships from the Great Lakes.

American anger only intensified when it emerged that Young and other Confederate agents had schemed with the Montreal police chief – who had been given custody of the $80,000 stolen from the banks for “safekeeping” – to have the money stored in a local bank sympathetic to the South. Young and his men reclaimed the cash — in effect, stealing it twice — and fled right after their acquittal.

An embarrassed Canadian government filed new charges and recaptured Young and a handful of his men. They were put on trial once more in April 1865 only to have another judge dismiss the case again.

“Such a decision meant that Canada was a lawless neighbour to be shunned,” one pro-Lincoln paper fumed.

Within weeks, the Civil War was over. The slave-owners of the Confederacy may have lost the war but not the peace.

Bennett Young took up a new battle, becoming an outspoken advocate of the “Lost Cause” movement, which sought to rewrite history and bury the dark side of the slave states’ past.

In 1889, Bennett Young joined the United Confederate Veterans, eventually rising to become its commander-in-chief as he worked to restore the glory of the Southern war effort.

In 1913 he was the highlighted speaker for the South at the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, which brought together over 50,000 Union and Confederate veterans in the largest Civil War reunion ever held.

The crowning achievement of the campaign by Young and his Southern comrades came in 1914, when an imposing Confederate Memorial was placed at the Arlington National Cemetery in Washington

On hand at the ceremony on June 4—the 106th anniversary Jefferson Davis’s birth —was none other than President Woodrow Wilson.

Bennett Young, by then 71 years old, was the first speaker to address the crowd of 4,000, which included every member of Congress.

“True patriotism does not require that either the North or the South should give up its ideals,” he said from the podium.

Young brought that message to Canada when he returned in 1915 for a remarkable visit to the country that had sheltered him during the war. It began with a surprising reunion on July 14 at the swank downtown Ritz-Carlton in Montreal.

“Four leading citizens of St. Albans Vermont entered the hotel and paid their respects to General Bennett H. Young,” the Montreal Gazette reported.

Among the delegates was the editor of the St. Albans Messenger, which had five decades earlier denounced Young as a marauder with blood on his hands.

Young had pulled off perhaps his greatest battlefield victory, helping to rewrite history in which for many the Confederates like Young became the winners to be cheered as heroes, not the losers in what remains to this day the bloodiest war in U.S. history, claiming more American lives than all the wars since combined.

Young passed away in February 1919. The simple inscription on his grave read: “I have kept the faith.”

Julian Sher is the author of The North Star: Canada and the Civil War Plots Against Lincoln, published by Penguin Random House, from which this article is adapted. More information at www.juliansher.com.