On October 19, 1864, a group of Confederate soldiers attacked the small northern Vermont town of St. Albans. They robbed three banks, shot and wounded a number of residents, and then fled to Canada while tossing incendiaries into buildings on their way out of town. They failed to burn down more than a single structure, and most of the raiders were captured by Canadian authorities within a few days. While the raid was relatively unimportant to the larger war effort for both sides, it stands as one of the most perplexing and bizarre events of the Civil War.
The soldiers came to St. Albans in groups of two and three. They wore plainclothes and told inquirers they were there on business or on sporting vacations. The leader of the group, 21 year-old Confederate lieutenant Bennett Young of Kentucky, arrived a full 10 days before the attack and stayed in a hotel while he scouted the town and made plans. He was described as a young firebrand, equally idealistic and charming. During his short stay in the town, he managed to talk his way into a tour of the governor’s mansion, which his men would later try to burn down. Mostly, he surveyed his targets, greeted his soldiers, and mapped out a relatively detailed strategy. With the posse assembled and the plan written, it was time to strike.
It is unclear just what the 18 Confederates were trying to achieve with the raid. Young led his men out of the hotel and announced to whomever happened to be within earshot “I take possession of this town in the name of the Confederate States of America.” St. Albans was no metropolis, but with hundreds of factory workers nearby and a population of over two-thousand, Young could have hardly expected to take and maintain control of the town with his small band of soldiers. And, given the plan he and his men carried out, it seems clear that despite this grandiose announcement, they never intended to stay in St. Albans past that afternoon.
With the conclusion of Young’s brief speech, the group split up to tend to the various duties they had been assigned in the plan. One group of four headed to the nearby St. Alban’s Bank to relieve them of their notes and gold. They stormed in brandishing pistols and locked the main doors behind them before rounding up the employees. One thing that is well-known about gold and silver is that they are very heavy metals, and these bandits arrived with no real plan for transporting them. While they found a bag of $1,500 worth of silver, they only took $400 worth as they couldn’t carry anything heavier in their pockets and shoulder-bags. Even more strangely, while they were standing in a bank vault with hundreds of thousands of dollars around them, they paused to answer a knock at the bank door and robbed 17 year-old Morris Roach of the $210 he was trying to deposit for his employer. Some have posited, and Young even once claimed, that the raid was intended to bolster the treasury of the Confederate States of America. Had this been the case, one would expect that Young would have prepared his men with carts or some other means of conveying large amounts of precious metal, and would also have allowed time for a thorough cleaning out of the banks rather than a smash and grab heist. When they sacked the St. Albans Bank, the thieves took less than half of the money there.
Adding to the outlandishness of the robbery, the perpetrators forced the bank employees at gunpoint to swear an oath of fealty to the Confederate States of America, to promise not to shoot any of the raiders, and to not report the robbery of the bank for at least two hours after they had left. It makes little sense that the Confederates would take the time to complete such an ideological oath had they viewed this as a simple bank robbery. The men retreated to the street, backing out of the bank with their guns still trained on the unarmed employees who still had their arms raised in the air.
At the same time the St. Albans Bank was being looted, two other banks were also being cleared of their cash, and the thieves at those banks were just as careless. A fourth group of Confederates had been rounding up horses from passersby and any nearby stables to facilitate a mass escape - the raiders had all arrived by train. With all of this activity happening around the town green in the late afternoon, the people of St. Albans began to take notice. And, this being 1864, many of them had easy access to firearms. Gunfire broke out in pockets between the raiders and citizens. One of the Confederates was wounded, but survived, while a number of Vermonters were hit with one succumbing to his wounds days later.
Under fire and with the banks robbed, Young rounded up his men and they began to make their escape on horseback. As they fled town they flung small bottles of Greek Fire onto doorsteps and through windows. The Greek Fire of the Civil War era resembled the highly-flammable mythical weapon of antiquity only in name; it was almost entirely ineffective at setting buildings alight and the only thing the Confederates successfully burned down was a woodshed. Perhaps if they’d had more time to stop and use matches they would have wrought more destruction, but with a 50-man posse of angry Vermonters now chasing them, speed was of the essence.
All of the raiders successfully escaped to Canada, where fourteen of them were quickly apprehended by Canadian authorities. The remaining four escaped with their subsequent whereabouts unknown to history. The group that was captured had only around $90,000 of the more the $200,000 that was reportedly stolen, so it can be surmised that whatever became of the four escapees, they probably lived well. The group was detained in Montreal and stood trial before the Canadian courts, who, after delaying the trial by a month, declared the crimes were not in their jurisdiction and that they would not extradite the criminals to the Union. They were set free and left up to their own devices. Young, the highest profile of the bandits, fled to England knowing that returning to America was not an option. Before he left, he sent taunting letters to the St. Albans newspaper and paid for his subscription with a $3 St. Albans Bank Note, but also used his cash to pay off his tab at the hotel at which he’d stayed during his time there.
In searching for an explanation for the strange nature of the raid, there seem to be a confluence of factors that led to the choice of St. Albans as a target, as well as the combination bank robbery and attempted razing. Bennett Young was just 21 years-old and full of spite for the North. He had escaped to Canada from a Union prison camp, and received a loose commission from the Confederate States of America to harass and otherwise wage war against the Union from Canada. He recruited his group of fellow Confederates and chose St. Albans as a target, most likely because it was only 15 miles from the border. The cash they grabbed would probably have been used to finance further raids, and the whole endeavor was fueled by a youthful exuberance and hatred for the Union. All of this combined to give us one of the most interestingly strange stories from the Civil War.
