East Coast Pirates
The 1863 capture of the Chesapeake exposed the uncomfortable fact that Atlantic Canada was crawling with Confederate sympathizers.
The 1863 capture of the
Chesapeake exposed the uncomfortable fact that Atlantic Canada was crawling with Confederate sympathizers.
As first mate Charles Johnston ended his watch on a bitter December night in 1863, all he could think about was the hot coffee waiting for him below. The deck was coated in ice, and rain squalls pelted the Chesapeake as the steamer nosed past Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Carrying twenty passengers and a cargo of sugar, cotton, wine, and a 225-kilogram church bell, the merchant vessel was on its regular run between New York City and Portland, Maine.
There was no reason to think there was anything out of the ordinary.
Chilled to the bone, Johnston made his way to shelter below deck at about 1:30 a.m. Then he heard it — the loud bang of a gunshot. Before he could investigate, an intruder armed with a pistol wounded him in the arm and knee. More shots echoed though the vessel “as rapidly,” Johnston would later say, “as boys firing crackers.” One of the gunmen killed Orin Schaffer, the second engineer, as he tried to flee the engine room. Another gunman narrowly missed the captain, Isaac Willett, as he emerged from his cabin. Willett soon surrendered at gunpoint. Only then did Willett discover who was commandeering his ship and why. Hundreds of miles from the battlegrounds of the American Civil War, a gang of men had taken over the Chesapeake on behalf of the southern Confederacy.
The seizure was a brazen act of piracy that rapidly spiralled into an international incident. “It severely tested British neutrality laws and Yankee tempers,” observed
the late American historian Robin Winks. The New York Herald condemned the attack as the “most daring and atrocious on record.” The administration of American President Abraham Lincoln responded by mounting a high-seas manhunt to recapture the vessel and bring the pirates to justice.
What came to be known as the “second Chesapeake affair” — to distinguish it from a War of 1812 incident involving a ship with the same name — inflamed border tensions and exposed widespread support for the Confederate cause in the Maritime colonies. And the game of cat-and-mouse the ship’s captors played with Union gunboats along the Nova Scotia coast culminated in a showdown in Halifax Harbour that threatened to drag Britain into America’s bloody civil war.
The plot was hatched, it was later claimed, in a Saint John, New Brunswick, tavern over bottles of Allsopp’s India Pale Ale. The ringleader was John Clibbon Braine, a twenty-three-yearold who claimed to be an Englishman but whose rebel sympathies had landed him a stint in a Union prison. Braine was a con man who turned up in the Maritimes in 1863, peddling subscriptions to a fictitious business directory. The money collected from unwitting local businessmen was used to finance the ship-stealing scheme.
Braine teamed up with Vernon Locke, a ship’s captain from Nova Scotia’s Shelburne County. Locke — “a great scamp,” according to an acquaintance — was fresh from the Caribbean, where he had seized several Union vessels as the skipper of a Confederate privateer. Locke possessed an official letter of marque from the Confederate navy that could be used to legitimize piracy against northern vessels as an act of war.
As the beer flowed, a plan emerged to strike a bold blow for the Confederacy, which had suffered a disastrous defeat at Gettysburg that July. They would seize a steamer and use it to prey on northern shipping and to break through the Union blockade on southern ports. Their target, the Chesapeake, was a three-masted steamer with a single smokestack and a reputation for speed.
Soon, sixteen young men — Braine and his gang — were on their way to New York City. On December 5, 1863, they arrived at Pier 9 and boarded the Chesapeake as passengers. Included with their luggage was a large and heavy trunk, which, unbeknownst to the crew, contained pistols and handcuffs. In the early morning hours of December 7, when the ship was well underway, the gang stealthily retrieved their weapons. The only woman on board, stewardess Mary Burgoyne of New Jersey, was awake. “I heard the noise of a pistol in the engine room,” Burgoyne said later in an affidavit. Hearing more shots, Burgoyne closed her door. “Someone knocked at my door,” she said. “It was the cook. He asked if I was frightened. I said no. I asked if all hands were killed. He said no, but that we were prisoners to the Confederates.”
It took about an hour for Braine’s gang to round up the captain and crew. In the melee, two crewmen were wounded and one, Schaffer, was killed. Schaffer’s body was tossed over the side, and the steamer was put on a new course, toward New Brunswick. Near the island of Grand Manan, the Chesapeake rendezvoused with Locke, who came aboard and assumed command.
While the seizure had been well planned, the next phase of the operation — delivering the vessel to a southern port — was not. The Chesapeake needed to refuel before it could head to sea; if Braine and Locke had made arrangements to take on coal, those plans went awry. And, since none of the pirates knew how to run the ship, five crewmen were forced to work the engine and boilers. As the steamer neared Saint John, the captain and the remaining passengers and crew were transferred to a pilot boat and freed.
Locke then made for the familiar waters of Nova Scotia’s south shore and dropped anchor in the broad, sheltered LaHave River in mid-December. Residents of the area, who knew nothing of the piracy, welcomed what they thought was a Confederate vessel visiting a neutral port. A prominent local merchant, William McKean, snapped up some of the cargo for a bargain price, and the crew donated a brass bell found in the cargo hold to a church in the village of Conquerall Bank, just downstream from Bridgewater.
Meanwhile, news of the capture and reports that the assailants were Maritimers provoked outrage in the northern states. The New York Herald blasted those responsible for exhibiting the “cold blood and feeble circulation of reptiles.” Another paper derided the citizens of Saint John as “mere pimps” of Confederate President Jefferson Davis “and his fellow traitors.” Union gunboats were dispatched, and a swift capture was predicted. The Chesapeake “had not more than three days’ coal at the time of her capture,” noted the New York Times, “so that the rebels cannot get very far.”
After two days at LaHave, the Chesapeake — which the pirates had renamed Retribution — resumed its journey. As it cruised along the Nova Scotia coast, American consuls and northern spies in south shore ports fired off telegrams alerting Washington of its progress. The steamer eluded the gunboats on its trail by ducking into coves or hiding behind islands. During one stop, Braine, the mastermind, left the ship, carrying a trunk, and vanished. It was suggested that he had made off with a large amount of cash.
There was a close call in Lunenburg when one of the pirates, a Canadian named Henry Parr, went ashore and was in the post office when a Union naval officer showed up to send a telegram. Legend has it that the postmistress, Mrs. William Randolph, hid Parr in another room to prevent his capture.
The pirates’ luck ran out on December 17. Desperately in need of fuel, Locke hid the ship at Sambro, a reef-infested harbour just outside Halifax. Locke then went into Halifax over land to purchase some coal. A Nova Scotia schooner, the Investigator, was hired to deliver the coal to the Chesapeake at Sambro. As the coal was being loaded, the sidewheel steamer USS Ella and Annie arrived with its guns ready for action. The pirates fled to shore and disappeared into the woods, with the exception of George Wade, a New Brunswicker found sleeping in a bunk aboard the schooner. He was arrested and shackled along with two Halifax sailors newly hired to work in the Chesapeake’s engine room.
The captain of the Ella and Annie, Lieutenant J. Frederick Nick-
The steamer eluded the gunboats on its trail by ducking into coves.
els, was preparing to take the recaptured steamer and his three British-Canadian prisoners back to New England when a superior officer aboard USS Dacotah, another Union warship involved in the pursuit, intervened. The Chesapeake and Investigator were clearly in Nova Scotia waters — only a few hundred yards from shore — when boarded and seized. “Unquestionably,” the New York Times would later concede, “there was a grave breach of neutrality.” The Dacotah’s commander ordered Nickels to proceed with him to Halifax, to sort out the validity of the seizure under international law.
The Chesapeake and its captives were about to ignite a diplomatic and legal firestorm.
Crowds lined waterfront wharves as the strange flotilla entered the harbour that afternoon. Halifax was “a hot southern town,” as one rebel courier put it. Prominent citizens made no secret of their sympathy for the Confederate cause; the port was a base for blockade runners and a clearing house for rebel agents and escaped prisoners of war. Many Haligonians considered the Chesapeake raiders to be heroes, not pirates and murderers.
A day passed before Nova Scotia officials discovered what had happened at Sambro and learned that the Americans had three British subjects in custody. Charles Hastings Doyle, the commander of British forces in Halifax and a Crimean War veteran determined to defend Her Majesty’s honour, condemned the Americans for boarding and searching a Nova Scotia vessel in violation of international law. Charles Tupper, Nova Scotia’s mutton-chopped provincial secretary, was just as resolute; when Doyle asked what he should do if the American commander tried to leave port with his prisoners, Tupper is said to have replied, “you must sink his vessel from the batteries.” As tensions mounted, a Halifax merchant made an ominous diary entry. The guns of the Halifax Citadel and other harbour forts were “doubly manned,” he wrote, “and prepared for the worst.”
The Americans and the British, meanwhile, were working at the highest levels to defuse the crisis. William Seward, Lincoln’s secretary of state, had taken a hard line with the British in past disputes — the U.S. Navy’s removal of Confederate agents from the British ship Trent had almost escalated into war in 1861 — but wanted a peaceful solution. He expressed “profound regret” for the incursion into British territory and promised that the Ella and Annie’s captain would be disciplined. Lord Lyons, the British envoy in Washington, considered this the full apology needed to resolve the matter.
The Americans agreed that Nova Scotia’s admiralty court would oversee the return of the Chesapeake to its owners. Wade would be
handed over to the Halifax authorities and extradited to the U.S. to stand trial for murder. The only cannon blasts heard in Halifax in the days leading up to Christmas 1863, it turned out, were friendly salutes exchanged with the American warships.
There was one more strange twist to the Chesapeake affair. When Wade was brought ashore on December 20 to be transferred to police custody, Queen’s Wharf was jammed with onlookers. In the confusion, Wade managed to leap into a waiting rowboat manned by two of the city’s best oarsmen. When a Halifax police officer in plain clothes pulled a revolver and ordered Wade and his rescuers to stop, bystanders wrested the gun from his hand. “For God’s sake,” Wade shouted as the boat receded in the distance and the crowd cheered, “thank the Queen for my liberty.”
The melee on Queen’s Wharf and Wade’s bold escape cemented Halifax’s pro-southern reputation. The sympathies of the city’s citizens were in part influenced by Halifax’s role as a neutral port. The Union government had imposed a naval blockade to prevent goods from Europe from reaching Confederate ports. Ships attempting to elude the blockade often stopped in Halifax to refuel. This boosted the local economy and put some Haligonians on friendly terms with the southerners. The city’s American consul, Nathaniel Gunnison, was deeply suspicious that the locals were collaborating with the rebels. “A terrible retribution awaits this city,” Gunnison predicted, “for its complicity in treason and piracy.”
The bystanders who accosted the police officer at Queen’s Wharf were three of Halifax’s leading citizens — physicians William J. Almon and Peleg Smith, and Alexander Keith Jr., the nephew and namesake of the famed brewer.
Almon, Keith, and Smith were charged with obstructing a police officer. At a preliminary hearing in early 1864, Almon claimed he had been unable to stand by and “quietly allow a British subject to be dealt with by Yankees in British waters,” let alone be extradited “to a land where law is a mockery and where justice is denied.” All three were ordered to stand trial in Supreme Court but a grand jury tossed out the case, citing a lack of evidence.
As for the Chesapeake pirates, Wade was never found. Three others — David Collins, James McKinney, and Linus Seely — were arrested in New Brunswick. A Saint John magistrate rejected their claim that seizing the steamer was a legitimate act of war and ordered extradition to the U.S. However, a higher court released them in early 1864, arguing that they should stand trial locally. The trio disappeared before new charges could be filed. Of the three, only Seely was tracked down and prosecuted for piracy in 1865, just as the American Civil War drew to a close. Since it was possible Seely had believed the Confederate government had authorized the raid, the jury voted to acquit him. The Chesapeake itself remained tied up in Halifax until March 1864, when it cast off to complete its interrupted voyage to Portland, this time with a U.S. gunboat as escort.
Braine, who engineered the raid, seized or destroyed three more Yankee ships before the war ended. Arrested in the U.S. in 1866, he spent three years behind bars — one news report described
him as “the last Confederate prisoner of war” — and eventually returned to his career as a con man. He was jailed in Baltimore in 1903 for fraud and was posing as a businessman when he died three years later in Alabama. “Of such people,” historian Robin Winks noted, “are historical novels made.”
There is one final footnote to the story of the Chesapeake piracy. What happened to the brass bell the ship’s hijackers had given to the church in Conquerall Bank, Nova Scotia? Originally destined for a congregation in Maine, the bell was among the cargo aboard the steamer when it was commandeered. But the bell that tolled in the riverside church for almost 150 years tells a conflicted story. It bears the date 1865, two years after the Chesapeake’s visit. To explain the discrepancy, a written history of the church suggested the bell had been recast because the original had been too heavy, but the metal was still from the Chesapeake.
Greg Marquis, a historian at the University of New Brunswick Saint John, revealed what really happened to the bell in his book In Armageddon’s Shadow: The Civil War and Canada’s Maritime Provinces. In early 1865, he discovered, the Nova Scotia government retrieved the one taken from the Chesapeake and returned it to its rightful owners in Maine. The bell in Conquerall Bank was a replacement.
The church hosted its last service in the summer of 2012 and was sold to the owners of a neighbouring home. The bell was removed before the sale and may find a place in a museum, offering a link — even if it’s a tenuous one — to a Canadian tale of piracy and intrigue during the American Civil War.
Learn more at CanadasHistory.ca/Chesapeake