St. Albans Incident

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The St. Albans Incident , after English. St. Albans Raid also St. Albans Robbery , occurred on 19 October 1864 in the city of St. Albans in Franklin County of the US state of Vermont . It went down in history as the northernmost land operation carried out by members of the Confederate Army during the American Civil War .

prehistory

The head of the Confederate involved in the bizarre incident is the officer Bennett Henderson Young. The from Kentucky originating Young had previously causing a stir in a year, from Brigadier General John Hunt Morgan cited cavalry -Unternehmen participated ( Morgan's Raid ) and was in Salineville ( Ohio ) in Union - a prisoner of war fall. But Young was soon able to flee from captivity to Canada , which at that time was part of the British Empire . From there he returned to the south and was entrusted with planning that provided for special commando operations against the Union from Canadian territory . The intention of these ventures should be to supplement the Confederate war chest by raids and to induce the Union to withdraw forces from the south and to relocate them to the north as security against these attacks. Young was promoted to lieutenant and returned to Canada. There he recruited other rebels who had escaped from Union captivity to carry out a raid on the rather sleepy provincial town of St. Albans in Vermont, 15  miles from the border .

Course of the incident

After crossing the border, Young and two companions moved into a hotel in St. Albans on October 10th. As an excuse they said they came from St. Johns in Quebec and wanted to go on a sporting holiday. In the next time around two to three more men arrived in the city every day. On October 19, Young had gathered 21 men there; some sources also speak of 30 men. Shortly after 3 p.m. the group split up and they began raiding three banks in the city at the same time. The plainly dressed bank robbers armed with revolvers claimed to be Confederate soldiers and some allowed themselves to be carried away to strange attacks. Bank employees were forced at gunpoint to take a pledge of loyalty to the Confederation. In total, the raiders were able to bring in $ 208,000 . During the raids, eight or nine of Young's men had taken some of the perplexed residents hostage in the village square . When some of the raider's horses were lost, the rebels reacted angrily and a scuffle broke out in which one town resident was killed and another was injured. Young now instructed his men to burn the city down. But the four-ounce incendiary bottles prepared for this purpose turned out to be unusable and only one shed could be set on fire. The Confederate raiders fled with the looted money to Canada, where they were all quickly taken into custody by the responsible authorities .

Legal and Political Consequences

A British-Canadian court then ruled that the St. Albans raiders were under official military command. Thus, it had to regular combatants traded the Confederation that are not to the United States from Canada neutral ships could be, and not to irregular guerrillas or criminals , as US authorities argued. In the United States, the judgment was angrily interpreted as a subliminal recognition of the Confederate states. In the end, the St. Albans raiders were released by Magistrate Charles-Joseph Coursol ; only the remainder of the money that had been secured from them, around US $ 88,000, was returned to Vermont. Lieutenant Young and his colleagues were initially excluded from the declaration of amnesty by US President Andrew Johnson . Young was able to return to his native Kentucky in 1868. Later he was in Louisville a respected lawyer and was involved in the founding of the Confederate Veterans Association ( United Confederate Veterans involved).

literature

  • Louis N. Benjamin: The Saint Albans Raid […], complete and authentic report of all the proceedings on the demand of the United States […] . Montreal: Canada Supreme Court 1865
  • Bernard Devlin, Samuel James Watson: St. Albans raid. Speech of B. Devlin, Esquire, counsel for the United States, in support of their demand for the extradition of Bennett H. Young, et al., Charged with the robbery upon the 19th October last, of Samuel Breck, in the town of St. Albans, in the state of Vermont, on of the United States of America . Montreal: Printed by Owler & Stevenson 1865
  • Edward Adams Sowles: History of the St. Albans raid […] . St. Albans: Messenger Printing Works 1876
  • John Branch Sr .: St. Albans raid, St. Albans, Vermont, October 19, 1864 . St. Albans (Vt.) 1935
  • Robert Paul Ashley: Rebel raiders. A story of the St. Albans raid . Illustrated by Floyd J. Torbert. Philadelphia: Winston 1956
  • Edmund H. Royce: St. Albans Raid, October 19, 1864 . 3rd ed. St. Albans (Vt.): Franklin County Savings Bank and Trust Co. 1957
  • Richard B. Miller: The bank raid at St. Albans . In: Bankers' magazine. Vol. 148, no. 3 (1965), pp. 78-83

Movie

  • 1954: The Raid - with Van Heflin - Director: Hugo Fregonese

Web links

Commons : St. Albans Incident  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files