by Chad Fraser
Maitland goes on to describe the solemn return to Amherstburg that same day:
Having secured the woods, and satisfied myself that the island was cleared, I reformed the troops, and about five o’clock in the evening proceeded back, and the soldiers returned to their quarters at Amherstburg that night.
In all, the soldiers had been gone about thirty hours. Not one of them had slept during that time.
Upon reaching the Ohio shore, the remaining rebels were intercepted by American authorities, ordered to turn over their weapons, and held briefly before being allowed to return to their homes. For the greater Patriot movement, the defeat at Pelee Island would prove devastating. There would be no further incursions on the Lake Erie front; instead, the rebels decided to concentrate what remained of their resources along the St. Lawrence River. In the fall of 1838, they met government forces for one final, all-out assault near Prescott, Ontario, in what would become known as the “Battle of the Windmill.” Once again, the battle was decided in the government’s favour, effectively ending the Patriot threat to Canada.
The McCormicks would not return to Pelee Island for more than a year after the invasion. They resettled there permanently in the summer of 1839, but faced a daunting task in rebuilding. The farms and homesteads were heavily damaged and the settlers’ possessions and provisions looted, while the island’s lighthouse, built shortly before the rebellion, had been severely damaged by the Patriots, who took many of its fixtures with them back to Ohio. McCormick, whose home suffered miserably while it served as the invaders’ headquarters for nearly a week, claimed £592 ($1,190) in damages to his own property from the colonial government, while seven other island farmers claimed a total of £472 ($950) — significant sums for such a small community.
The depressing work took an immediate toll on William. His health declined rapidly, and he died on Pelee on February 18, 1840, at the age of fifty-six. His elderly mother, Elizabeth Turner, had died barely a year before him at the family home in Colchester.
Colonel John Maitland, too, would not live long past the Battle of Pelee Island. He had suffered severe exposure to the bitter cold during the action, and finally died of its effects, nearly a year later, at Fort Malden on January 18, 1839. The announcement of his death, in the January 24 edition of the British Colonist, reflected the sorrow many felt at his loss: “The great assistance which has been rendered by this highly valuable and much lamented officer in . . . various ways assisting and promoting the welfare of the community through a most eventful period has been most highly appreciated, not only by the Government but by the inhabitants at large, whose esteem and respect he had entirely gained.”
Photo by author
The gravesite of William McCormick, the first non-Native owner of Pelee Island, at the Pelee Island Cemetery.
As for the rebel prisoners, they would languish in a Toronto jail while the case became bogged down in legal difficulties, mainly relating to a dearth of defence witnesses and the American citizenship of the accused. They were eventually all returned to the United States.
Very little physical evidence of the Battle of Pelee Island remains today, and islanders mention it only in passing, if at all, and most often as a peculiar aside to Pelee’s long history. But it should be remembered that the battle itself, and the greater rebellion, claimed many lives, caused considerable damage, and struck fear into the hearts of Upper Canadian colonists for many years. On a more positive note, the rebellion hastened the end of the hated Family Compact and contributed to the birth of the representative system of government that Canada enjoys today.
Photo by author
The monument to the five soldiers who fell at Pelee Island now stands in the front yard of an Amherstburg home.
The only real commemoration of the Battle of Pelee Island on the island itself is a plaque erected by the provincial government at the north end. As for more lasting memorials, the only tribute to the brave men who died on the frozen ice of Lake Erie on that frigid March day is a stone monument erected in Amherstburg shortly after the battle. Now positioned awkwardly on the front yard of a house, in a subdivision not far from the centre of town, the weathered inscription reads simply: “This monument is erected by the inhabitants of Amherstburg in memory of Thomas McCartan, Samuel Holmes, Edwin Miller, and Thomas Symonds, of H.M. 32nd Reg. of Foot, and of Thomas Parish of the St. Thomas Volunteer Cavalry, who gloriously fell in repelling a band of brigands from Pelee Island on the Third of March, 1838.”
Chapter 4
Raid on Johnson’s Island
The evening of September 19, 1864, found western Lake Erie calm, the skies clear. Off the coast of Kelleys Island, Ohio, the sidewheel passenger steamer Philo Parsons followed its normal route, plodding its way toward its final destination for the day, the coastal town of Sandusky. To the naked eye, all appeared normal; the Parsons regularly ferried passengers from Detroit to Sandusky, often calling at Sandwich, Ontario (present-day Windsor), and Amherstburg, also on the Canadian side, and at many of the U.S. Lake Erie islands along the way.
But “normal” was probably the last word to describe what had happened on this day. One clear sign of trouble was that the Parsons, captained by Sylvester F. Atwood, a skipper known for his studiousness, and co-owned by the boat’s clerk, Walter Ashley of Michigan, was running hours behind schedule. But this was not the only thing amiss; more unusual was the fact that neither man was even aboard.
After a routine trip to nearby Middle Bass Island, Atwood had returned to his home there, leaving Ashley in charge for the final push to Sandusky. But Ashley and the Parsons’s crew ended up getting more than they bargained for in the wake of this seemingly simple handover of command. For in the course of this last leg, Ashley would find himself staring down the barrel of a passenger’s loaded pistol before being forced off the boat entirely. The end result was that the Parsons was now steaming for Sandusky under the command of hijackers who were part of a Confederate spy ring based in Canada.
The American Civil War, which had been raging for more than three years, had finally arrived on Lake Erie.
The Parsons was now in the hands of a band of twenty “Lake Erie Pirates” (as the Toronto Globe would later dub them), who were setting in motion the early stages of a secret plan first conceived several months before. On Johnson’s Island, a tiny speck of rock in Sandusky Bay, stood a Union prison holding 2,500 Confederate officers. With John Yates Beall, a former privateer and a devoted partisan of the Confederate cause leading them, the hijackers were steaming to the rescue of this unfortunate lot. But this would be no easy prison break; first they had to overcome the formidable might of the fourteen-gun USS Michigan, the Union warship that guarded the island prison.
Photo courtesy of A Memoir of John Yates Beall
Confederate conspirator John Yates Beall.
With darkness setting in, Beall leaned over the Parsons’s deck railing, straining his eyes into the darkness, keeping watch for the Michigan, which routinely rode at anchor at the mouth of the bay. Daniel Bedinger Lucas, a lawyer, poet, and close friend, provides a vivid description of Beall in his biography, A Memoir of John Yates Beall, published shortly after the war ended in 1865:
. . . he was stoutly built, with broad shoulders, flat chest, and measuring about five feet seven inches in height . . . His hair was brown, and half covered the ear; the forehead high, the nose straight and regular, the complexion pale . . . He wore a slight moustache, and whiskers coming to a point under the chin.
Suddenly, the Michigan’s lanterns emerged out of the blackness. The Union gunboat was right where Beall expected it to be, settled in on the smooth water at the entrance to the bay. Beall ordered the Parsons’s engines cut, and the steamer glided silently through the water, closing in on its quarry. As the minutes passed, an uneasy calm descended over the men aboard the Parsons as it drifted now so close to the Michigan that the warship’s guns could be clearly seen against the blackness, its crew’s voices heard lilting through the
still evening air. Captain George Orr of the Island Queen (another passenger vessel serving the Lake Erie islands) who, through a set of equally incredible circumstances, found himself aboard the Parsons that night, described the scene to South Bass Island resident and historian Lydia Ryall, who published his account of that evening in her 1913 book, Sketches and Stories of the Lake Erie Islands: “It was about 10 p.m. The U.S. gunboat Michigan lay off Johnson’s Island, her hull glooming through the night. The plotters were awaiting signals evidently which failed to appear. Three or four of the leaders went aside and held a consultation and I overheard Lieut. Beale [sic] say to the men: ‘I have a notion to make the attempt, anyhow.’ ”
Orr was right. Beall had been waiting for a signal, possibly a rocket flare, which was supposed to be given by Captain Charles Cole, a Confederate spy who had spent the past two months befriending the Michigan’s captain and crew. According to the plan, when the signal was given, Beall would pull the Parsons alongside and take his raiding party aboard.
But no matter how closely the raiders watched, nothing discernible changed about the Michigan. A dark feeling overcame Beall, and his men began to grow fearful, to the point of whispering openly about mutiny. If the Michigan’s crew had somehow been tipped off, the Philo Parsons would be no match for the powerful gunboat. The grand plan would quickly become a suicide mission. Confusion reigned aboard the Parsons. What had gone wrong? Why had the signal not been given?
Photo from Lore of the Lakes
The gunboat Michigan. Confederate spies planned to take the ship and free the prisoners held on Johnson’s Island.
A Fanatical Loyalty
John Yates Beall was born in Jefferson County, Virginia, on January 1, 1835. A quiet, withdrawn youth, Beall spent much of his time working on his grandfather’s farm before heading to the University of Virginia in 1852 to study law and political economy. By all accounts he was a successful, though not particularly ambitious, student during his three-year academic career, leading Bedinger Lucas to note: “The modesty and reserve of his character combined to render the circle of his acquaintances very limited. With professors he had no recourse outside the lecture room . . .”
Beall’s entire life could have been as listless as his academic career, had the Civil War not intervened. Fiercely loyal to his native Virginia, the twenty-six-year-old Beall was one of the first to enlist when hostilities erupted between the Union and the seceded states at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861.
Beall began his military career in the 1st Brigade of the Army of Northern Virginia, under the command of General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson. The General would go on to become a storied figure in American history, routing Union troops during a daring campaign in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley that ebbed and flowed through 1861 and 1862 before the general was fatally wounded by his own troops in what today would be termed a “friendly fire” incident. Struck by three .57-calibre bullets, Jackson struggled to recover for eight days before finally succumbing, uttering as he did so his now-famous last words: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”
Beall would miss much of the action in the Shenandoah. He was on leave during the first major land battle between Union and Confederate troops, the First Battle of Manassas in his home state of Virginia (or the First Battle of Bull Run as it was known in the North), in July 1861. But like Jackson, Beall too would have his infantry career cut short on the battlefield. In October 1861, Beall was at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, the very place where another fanatic, antislavery campaigner, John Brown, had led an unsuccessful raid on the federal arsenal. Captured and hanged, Brown became a martyr to the cause and the subject of the famous song, “John Brown’s Body,” chanted by Union soldiers on the march.
Beall’s trial by fire came on October 16, 1861; during a raid on a group of Union soldiers who had taken shelter behind a deserted brick house, he was cut down by musket shot. As Bedinger Lucas describes: “Beall emptied his musket twice, and had it raised to his shoulder in the act of aiming to fire again when a shot from the retreating party passed under his gun and, striking him obliquely in the right breast, broke three ribs and passed around his body. He discharged his own gun and fell.”
To Beall’s horror when he awoke moments later, the militiamen who accompanied him had fled. But fortunately, so had the enemy. Miraculously, he managed to hobble back to the Confederate line, and from there was taken to his mother’s home in Jefferson County. Unlike Jackson, however, Beall would go on to almost fully recover from his wounds, no mean feat given the risk of infection and the limits of nineteenth-century medicine.
After a long convalescence, Beall was again well enough to travel, and he ventured deep into the South, stopping in Richmond, Tallahassee, and Virginia before riding west to Iowa, a Union state, and settling in the village of Cascade during the summer of 1862. But when suspicions of Beall’s true political allegiance were spread by what Bedinger Lucas calls “the imprudence of his friends,” Beall knew he could remain no longer. Late on the evening of September 2, 1862, he fled on horseback, crossing the border into Canada and taking refuge in the town of Dundas, near Hamilton. Here, he rested and followed news reports of Jackson’s exploits in the Shenandoah before returning to the South in early 1863.
Though his first stay in Canada was uneventful, his experience travelling in the country, and the Lake Erie region in particular, would later prove valuable. But, in the short term, Beall was returning to the South a man with an injury that made it impossible to resume his career as a soldier.
He would have to serve the Confederacy in some other, more clandestine, way.
The Island Prison
The bloody defeat of Union forces at Bull Run was a grim wake-up call for the North, erasing all doubt about the Confederacy’s determination to win the Civil War. It would not be the short military adventure that everyone had hoped for after Fort Sumter, but a long, bloody war of attrition that neither side could afford to lose.
As this realization began to set in on the fledgling Lincoln administration, it became clear that the Union would need more capacity to house prisoners of war. Northern Ohio, far from the frontlines, was seen as an ideal location, and in October 1861, Lieutenant-Colonel William Hoffman, the Union’s commissary-general for prisoners, was ordered to build a new prison among the Lake Erie islands, off the state’s northern coast — and to complete the project as quickly as possible.
Hoffman was a veteran regular army soldier who had served in the Mexican War before being deployed to Texas during the secession crisis that led to the outbreak of the Civil War. It was here that, in a quirk of history, Hoffman was made a prisoner of war before the conflict even officially began. With the Texas Secession Bill before the state legislature, his commander, Brigadier General David E. Twiggs, an elderly Georgian and Southern sympathizer, surrendered all Union forces in the state to the Confederacy in January 1861.
Twiggs’s treachery had the unfortunate consequence of taking away any chance that Hoffman had to fight for the Union on a Civil War battlefield. The Confederates quickly paroled him, but the terms of his release stipulated that he could not take up arms against the South for the war’s duration. So instead, Hoffman took the post of commissary-general for prisoners.
Hoffman hit the ground running when he arrived in Sandusky in mid-October 1861. It was late in the season, and if construction of the prison could not be started before the lake froze it would have to wait until the following spring, a serious delay in the face of a war that was continuing to escalate. Hoffman sailed the island chain in George Orr’s Island Queen (a vessel that would play a recurring role in the Johnson’s Island story) looking for an appropriate site, spending one night at the village of Put-in-Bay on South Bass Island and one night on Kelleys Island.
Finding a suitable location for such a massive facility on one of these small islands (at its peak, the prison would house 2,633 prisoners) presented more than a few challenges. S
ome of them, namely North Bass Island and Middle Bass Island, were too close to Canadian territory, making escape to the neutral British colony a constant temptation for prisoners, especially when the lake froze over in the winter. Another issue was security; the distance of these islands from Sandusky made them difficult to resupply, and left them almost entirely out of range after freeze-up. Other islands, like South Bass Island and Kelleys Island, were home to the region’s emerging winemaking industry, which made it prohibitively expensive to acquire the necessary land. Hoffman also knew from his experience as a regular soldier that trusting the garrison to maintain its discipline in such close proximity to alcohol was a recipe for disaster.
With Kelleys Island and the Bass Islands effectively ruled out, Hoffman turned his attention closer to the Ohio shoreline, and it was here that he came upon the ideal spot. Nestled within the protective confines of Sandusky Bay, between the town of Sandusky and the Marblehead Peninsula, the 200-hectare Johnson’s Island could easily be defended and resupplied, even in harsh weather. And, having no commercial value save for its timber, the government could lease half of the island (though it would have effective control over all of it) at a relatively cheap $500 a year. Johnson’s Island was the obvious winner; Washington quickly approved Hoffman’s choice and, wasting no time, Hoffman granted the construction contract to Sandusky builders W.T. West and Philander Gregg on November 15, 1862.