I

T happened only six months before Lee surrendered at Appomattox; it had been dreamed of as one of a series of great deeds which should give back life to the dear, dying Confederacy; but, as the cards of war fell, it was the single dash of the Southern riders into the real North. It was the exploit of a troop of mad boys; it failed utterly of its larger purpose; it had no immediate military significance; and it came to an inglorious end in the courts of the civil law. But for a time it made heroes and bandits of its actors; it set men and women risking the gallows to save the military honor of the South; it startled the ponderous departments of the British. Empire; and it frightened thirteen hundred miles of Northern border to an extent which required many a regiment for its allaying. It had more human drama than many a far greater engagement. Comedy grinned at tragedy, and brave endeavor rode perilously close to sordid offense. For of such were the boy soldiers of the Confederacy.

On the 19th of October, 1864, twenty yelling young men in butternut and gray appeared as if by magic in the peaceful little border village square of St. Albans, Vermont. They cut the horses loose from farm wagons and sprang upon their backs; they herded dazed citizens at the muzzles of revolvers; they dashed into banks and dashed out again with the banks' money bulging from their pockets, and one terrified cashier left locked in his own vault; they smashed their flasks of Greek fire against the sides of buildings, until the town seemed about to meet its end in flame; and then, with a laugh and a whoop, they rode away in a

sputtering fusillade from every weapon the aroused townsfolk could turn against them.

Earlier in the war there had been alarm in the States along the Northern border at the prospects of a Confederate descent from Canada. Seward went into long correspondence with Earl Russell and Lord Lyons concerning Confederate activity in Canada, and as early as 1863 Governor Smith, of Vermont, demanded five thousand muskets, horses for a battery, and authority to raise troops to station at Burlington and St. Albans to resist invasion. This provoked sharp protest from Russell and caused assurance from Seward that no such "unfriendly demonstration" would be made. Smith got neither muskets nor authority. They came very rapidly and without objection from Lord John after the raid, when a border regiment of cavalry was hurriedly recruited and sent to join the battalions of the Invalid Corps in staving off such unknown perils of the future as might come over the Canadian line.

C. C. Clay and Thompson, the Confederate commissioners, were in Canada, and Clay and Thompson had ideas of what might be done if only the hardships of the struggle could be brought home to the North. Clay, in particular, was sure that, with the infliction of a few "terrors," the North peace-at-any-price party would make itself felt in no uncertain way.

The man who first suggested the raid and who carried it through to its end was a tall Kentucky boy, Bennett H. Young. Young was a strange combination of blithe Southern recklessness and Puritanic severity. He had been with Morgan on the ill-starred ride into Ohio, and when Morgan was hard

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pressed he had gone to him with a suggestion to swim his men and horses across the swollen river.

"I should lose half my command if I tried that," objected Morgan.

"You'll lose it all if you don't," returned Young. "Which is better?"

And, Morgan having surrendered, Young had gone along to prison with him, subsequently finding himself transferred to Camp Douglas, from which he made his escape.

Reaching Canada, Young had thrown himself into all the activities of the Confederates swarming there. He had played a prominent part in the attempt to release the Douglas prisoners on the day when the Chicago Democratic Convention was nominating McClellan, and he had commanded the little group who attempted a similar delivery at Camp Chase. But what most convinced Clay of his unflinching nerve was his exploit in walking into Buffalo with $25,000 in greenbacks for John Yates Beall, when the Northern Secret Service men were closing in on that desperate contriver to send him to the scaffold, and when more than one Southern operator in Canada had flatly refused the mission. Young was only twenty-one. He was Fayette County bred, and he had been one of Morgan's hardest-riding troopers, but he hated liquor, tobacco, and profanity.

Young was arrogantly confident of the suc cess of his St. Albans plan. He had seen raw Ohio militia run before nothing more formidable than the "rebel yell " of Morgan's men; he had found it simple to elude the vigilance of the military and detective guards on his various trips back and forth across the line; and he had seen much of the disaffected population which made up the Vallandigham faction of Ohio. He was contemptuous of the Yankees and all their works. Given Chenault's regiment, he was sure he could ride through all New England and "take it home" with him. it hard to convince Clay.

He did not find

There is reason for believing that another partner to the St. Albans scheme was no less a personage than Jefferson Davis, for at Richmond, where Clay sent Young by way of the Bermudas and a blockade-runner, he had several consultations with the Confederacy's President. However, the boy's mind was filled with schemes for taking Buffalo, Chicago, Milwaukee, a hundred different places along the frontier. He poured them all into the Presidential ear, some of them to

be received with a smile and some with serious consideration. Young talked, too, with Seddon, the Confederate Secretary of War, and of Seddon's connivance there is no doubt, for, after running the blockade again, Young came back to Canada with a commission and an order over the Secretary's signature to collect Confederate soldiers in Canada and to "execute such enterprises as may be intrusted to you." At eleven o'clock one night, in a bedroom of St. Lawrence Hall, Clay, having read the order, drew a valise from under the bed, counted out $1,000 in United States currency, and told Young to "go ahead." Later, he issued to him a memorandum in which the suggestion for a raid on "towns in Vermont, commencing with St. Albans," was approved and authorized.

In the subsequent court preceedings this memorandum, which played an important part, was attacked by counsel for the United States as a forgery or as a document prepared especially for the court emergency, but Clay later admitted its authenticity.

Young's recruiting was swift. He enlisted nineteen men. Some he found in Montreal, but Clay's orders were positive that these must be taken over the line into the enemy's territory before they were formally enlisted. Perhaps these orders were obeyed, and perhaps they were not. Certainly some of the raiders made the descent on St. Albans from Canadian territory. Other recruits Young secured in Chicago, Columbus, and Detroit.

These were the boys who, with Young as their head, set out upon what they called "the Vairmount Yankee scare party:" Squire Turner Teavis, William T. Teavis, Alamanda Bruce, Marcus Spurr, Charles Swager, Joseph McGorty, William H. Hutchinson, George Scott, Caleb Wallace, James Doty, Samuel Gregg, Dudley Moore, Samuel Lacky, Thomas Collins, John McInnis, Charles Higbie, Lewis Price, Daniel Butterworth, and John E. Moss.

Several of the boys had been in Morgan's command. McGorty and Higbie were the ancients of the lot, for McGorty, a fighting Irishman, was thirty-eight, and Higbie even older. With the intolerance of youth for age, Young, who attributed the failure at Camp Douglas to "gray-haired wisdom," hesitated at taking this pair, but McGorty was an old fellow-campaigner who had hurried up from Danville, Kentucky, because he had heard that Benny Young was at it again, and Higbie was finally accepted because of his lively record as a member of Quantrell's

partisans. Of the rest there was not a man over twenty-three.

Young's plan of campaign was simple. His men were to make their way to St. Albans as best they could in groups of not more than three. They were to register at various hotels, and in their encounters with townspeople they were to pass themselves off as prospective horse-buyers, English tourists, or invalids in search of rest. They were to be particularly careful not to speak in the Southern drawl, and, above all things, the members of different groups were not to appear to recognize each other. They were to arrive not later than noon of October 18, and they were to remain in the vicinity of their hotels until they received word of an assembling-place from Young.

Each man was given two heavy navy revolvers, and each was ordered to provide himself with a Confederate uniform. Young was liberal with Clay's money for this purpose, but it is doubtful if the uniform was anything like complete. Uniforms were scarce in the Confederate armies, and money with real purchasing power was scarcer still. It is highly improbable that all of Young's excited boy recruits were sufficiently impressed with the formalities of the situation to part with cash for mere clothing even when they could obtain it. There are old men in St. Albans who insist that there was not a vestige of a uniform among the yelling raiders who galloped through Main Street; but Young, always a bit of a dandy in his soldiering, provided himself in Montreal with a handsome new outfit of gray; McGorty exhibited to the clerk at his hotel a rusty suit of butternut, which, he declared, was a trophy taken from a "reb" prisoner; and Higbie, a moment before the action started, pinned to his hat a long black plume, which, he said, had belonged to Quantrell. It is probable, too, that most of the others were at least partially uniformed. The question of clothing afterwards played an important part in the court proceedings.

Three times Young, who had some skill as a topographer and who was a natural woodsman, traveled over the road from the Canadian border to St. Albans. It was on these visits that he established his reputation as a theological student, for he read his Bible so rigorously at the American House that some of the elderly lady boarders considered the propriety of asking him to supply the

pit at the Congregational church. Once

he took with him Collins, the daredevil, who had brought his contingent up from the South through New York, and who had shown the conductor of his train a gray jacket, which he declared he intended to wear when he captured Vermont. St. Albans, then a village of about four thousand, clustered about a square or "green." Its three banks—the St. Albans, the Franklin County, and the First Nationalstood on Main Street within a space of one hundred yards. Conveniently near were livery stables, where Hutchinson had discovered mounts in plenty. Moreover, there were sure to be some farm-horses hitched about the 'green." An effort by Collins to borrow arms for "hunting" had shown that the town possessed few. Young made a polite call at the residence of ex-Governor Smith, where he secured the privilege of inspecting the horses in the first citizen's stables. They could be made into "serviceable cavalry chargers," he said.

Collins was hilarious. The "green," he pointed out, would make an ideal prison in which the whole Yankee population could be herded while the raid was on, if only one Confederate could be spared to guard them. Young, a cooler tactician, glanced down Lake Street, where were located the machine shops of the railway, employing several hundred men. "We'll use more than one guard," he said. "I shouldn't like to have the news get down to these fellows too soon."

On October 18 Young once more appeared at the American House. Fifteen of his men soon also appeared. One of the men announced himself to the proprietor of the St. Albans House as Mr. Jefferson Davis, of Richmond, Virginia. His companion, he said, was his valet. They thought him very amusing at the hotel. The rest of Young's command arrived next mornng. It does not appear that St. Albans noticed anything peculiar in the arrival of twenty boyish strangers, each of whom carried a satchel of a uniform type slung over his shoulder. It was in these that their wearers planned to carry away the dollars from the banks; but how could St. Albans associate a war a thousand miles away with twenty satchels? The boys wandered about the streets, joked with the merchants, and paid particular attention to such farm-wagons as were driven in.

Still unsuspected, the raiders ate their dinners at their various hotels. At 2:30 they made their way in small groups to Young's