by John Boyko
The divided sympathies within Canada and the Maritimes were evident in its newspapers and public debates. The Toronto Leader was pro-South, while the Toronto Globe was pro-North. The Montreal Gazette was pro-South, while the Montreal Witness was pro-North. The reporting and editorial stances of eighty-four Canadian papers revealed themselves to be obviously pro-South, with only thirty-three pro-North and eight neutral.14 A report of the Confederate victory in the war’s first battle elicited a spontaneous cheer in Canada’s legislature.
In the face of political authorities demanding neutrality and non-participation in the war, and despite the complexity of public opinion and the widespread sympathy for the South, many young Canadians and Maritimers left home to fight. Those who did fought overwhelmingly in Union ranks. A letter home from a young man stationed in the trenches facing the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, in 1864 spoke with surprise of how many of his French-speaking countrymen he had met: “You have no idea … of the number of Canadians who are in different army corp. They may be counted not in the hundreds but in the thousands.”15 About forty thousand Canadians and Maritimers joined the fight, and the ratio was approximately fifty Canadians in Union regiments for every one in a Confederate regiment.16
The service of so many Canadians in America’s duelling armies further split Canadian and Maritime public opinion. It also divided communities and, as in America, fractured families. Nova Scotia’s Norman Wade, for instance, enlisted to serve on Union ships enforcing the blockade. In letters home he told of the many compatriots he had encountered and the divided loyalties they suffered together.17 In November 1861, he wrote to his sister: “A schooner was seen working in towards the mouth of the river … the Captain told me to pitch a shot across her course … she proved to be a schooner from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia … some of our officers had the joke on me for firing on my own countrymen.”18
Wade’s family, like so many others, carried on a polite but sometimes terse debate through his correspondence. During the 1861 Trent crisis he wrote to his brother wondering why he and so many Nova Scotians supported the South: “I was not surprised to hear that your sympathies were wholly with the south, and do not see how it is possible, considering the relations we bear the northern people. You say if these million people want freedom they ought to have it, but is it freedom they are fighting for, or are they dupes of designing politicians.”19
OUR GUIDES
The beliefs, struggles and dreams of six fascinating people will guide us on our journey of understanding. The highlights of their respective lives, and what they represent in the Civil War era, will offer insight into the most important and overlapping events and ideas that propelled Canada and the United States through the most dangerous period of their histories.
Our first guide is John Anderson. He was a courageous Missouri slave who escaped to freedom in Canada only to find his relentless pursuers unwilling to surrender their prey. His struggle to remain free came to involve international intrigue that angered Northerners, infuriated Southerners and frustrated British leaders. It inspired Canadians to stand up to both British and American pressure. The Anderson case helps us to see the extent to which Canada and the Maritimes played a part in the development of the Southern resentment toward abolitionists. Those iron resentments helped lead to secession and war. Meanwhile, the case sparked nascent Canadian and Maritime notions of greater independence.
William Seward was a rapaciously ambitious, cigar-chomping New York political leader and secretary of state to presidents Lincoln and Johnson. He was also an avowed expansionist. Before and during the early months of the war, he expressed an eagerness to instigate a war with Britain that he believed would lead to the capture of its Canadian colonies and a reunited America. His desire to bomb, buy or barter for territory never abated. Canadians and Maritimers were justifiably afraid and began polishing their weapons. With Britain’s help, the borders were reinforced and preparations made for invasion. Seward enables us to recognize the growing desire on the part of British North American colonies to unify as a means to better defend themselves against American military threats, aggression and aspirations, and shows just how close the Civil War came to bursting its borders.
The mysterious Sarah Emma Edmonds invites us to comprehend why approximately forty thousand Canadians and Maritimers donned the blue or grey, and to appreciate the contributions they made. Many rest in Civil War cemeteries throughout the United States. Twenty-nine won the Congressional Medal of Honor. Some stood with Grant when Lee surrendered. Another captured Lincoln’s assassin. Whereas Edmonds volunteered to serve as a nurse and spy, many Canadians and Maritimers, including children, were tricked into enlisting or even kidnapped by American agents. Meanwhile, British and American deserters passed each other as they crossed the border. The whole time, Edmonds hid a captivating secret.
Another of our guides is wily Mississippi politician and former federal cabinet secretary Jacob Thompson. When the Confederacy was awash in military, economic and diplomatic bad news, the decision was made to send agitators to Canada. They were to organize the large number of Southerners already there into a potent force that could harass the North from the north. Thompson led the mission. He and his agents worked openly in Niagara Falls, Toronto and Montreal. Thompson’s efforts led to missions to burn Manhattan, spring Confederate prisoners of war, and support Lincoln’s opposition in ways that could have split the North and guaranteed the South’s survival. His Confederates killed Americans on raids launched from Canada. Thompson’s exploits further illustrate how Canada’s implicit participation brought the war dangerously close to involving Britain and the military subjugation of what would become Canada.
George Brown, our next guide, owned Toronto’s Globe, Canada’s most widely read, unabashedly partisan and influential newspaper. In the years leading up to and through the Civil War, he was a member of the legislature, Reform Party leader and, for a very brief period, prime minister. When Canada needed concerted action to address American threats, its political structure was a shambles. No one expected the taciturn Brown to summon the courage needed to put political advantage and personal ambition aside and bring squabbling factions together to seek a solution. Similarly, few expected the Maritime colonies to warm to his vision of a broad union. The ideas proposed by Brown and those he drew to him became the basis for a new state, decidedly different from its neighbour. Brown’s work enables us to understand how the United States provided both the alarming incentive to invent a new country and the negative example that informed the nature of that invention. After all, the war was startling proof to Canada’s founding fathers that the American political system was an abject failure.
While Brown began the nation-building process, it took our final guide, the hard-drinking and effervescently convivial John A. Macdonald, to get it done. Macdonald was the indispensable man in the nation-building years beginning in 1864. But even after the war ended in 1865, it appeared that his vision and political genius might not be sufficient to allow Canada to survive long enough to be born. Canada and the Maritime colonies were blamed for playing a role in starting the war and then in prolonging it. Montreal was identified as the site where the plot to assassinate Lincoln was hatched, and Canadians were castigated for harbouring the conspirators. American invaders crossed the border and blood was spilled. The war was not really over. Macdonald needed to fight a renewal of annexation plans by Seward and then-president Grant, who were determined to use postwar compensation they demanded from Britain to see the stars and stripes hoisted north of the border.
While enjoying the story of Canada and the Civil War through the lens of our six guides’ lives, we will also investigate the roles played by many others. Americans Frederick Douglass, John Brown and John Wilkes Booth advanced their goals while in Canada. Jefferson Davis and many of his generals sought postwar refuge in Canada. Canadian and Maritime politicians Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Alexander Galt and George Étienne Cartier and soldiers George Den
ison, Charles Riggins and the four Wolverton brothers play important roles. Also significant are British lords Palmerston, Russell, Lyons, Head, Monck and Thornton. At different times and for various reasons, some British leaders irked America to the verge of war, while others pushed Canadians to save themselves and still others offered to give the young country away.
Throughout our journey, the political wiles, characters and visions of two men will tower over all the rest: Abraham Lincoln and John A. Macdonald. At a time when so much could have gone so wrong, Canada and the United States were blessed with wise, transformational leaders. Our stable and independent nations, which share a continent in peace, freedom and understanding, are their gifts to us and the Civil War’s legacy.
* In Britain and Canada, it was called the Seven Years War.
1
JOHN ANDERSON AND THE RAILROAD TO FREEDOM AND WAR
JOHN ANDERSON WAS A SLIGHT MAN, about five foot six, with dark, intelligent eyes. Although only thirty years of age, his heavily lined face betrayed a lifetime of hardship. He wore a new suit purchased by his supporters, many of whom were there, watching him sit stoically behind a polished oak table in the main courtroom of Toronto’s Osgoode Hall. The building was designed to intimidate. It demanded respect. The commanding façade greeted visitors and then, once they were inside, its dark oak and mahogany, rich leather and high ceilings whispered that this was a place for serious people conducting serious business. And today’s proceedings were serious indeed.
Outside on that chilly morning of December 15, 1860, stood fifty Toronto police officers. At Government House, only five minutes away, a hastily assembled company of soldiers from the Royal Canadian Rifles had muskets at the ready with bayonets menacingly attached. All were prepared for the demonstration promised and the riot expected, should the court decision go as the two hundred or so people in the crowd feared. Stretchers were piled against a wall, ready to haul away casualties.
More heavily armed policemen were inside Osgoode, nervously eyeing the onlookers who were crammed into every nook and cranny. Toronto sheriff Fred Jarvis had tried a ticketing scheme to control access to the courtroom, but it had failed, and so the place was packed by the well-connected and the curious and by many of Anderson’s staunchest supporters. Reporters from a number of Canadian and American newspapers were also in attendance.
All hushed and rose when the elderly and deeply respected Chief Justice John Beverley Robinson, flanked by justices Robert Easton Burns and Archibald McLean, entered the room. Anderson stood with his lawyers. With a nod from Robinson, the three justices sat and adjusted their robes. The spectators took their seats. Robinson looked up and cleared his throat.
There was a great deal at stake—far more than the life of an African American ex-slave. For months, the Anderson case had been discussed in the halls of power in colonial Canada, Britain and the United States. Political leaders such as George Brown, John A. Macdonald, Thomas D’Arcy McGee and others who would soon play crucial roles in the founding of an independant Canada concerned themselves with the case. Options for Canada’s future as a British colony, an independent country or perhaps even new northern American states, were being openly debated on both sides of the border. The case had influenced a growing consensus among Canadians and those in the Maritime colonies that a new political structure—more independent of Britain and better able to defend itself against American threats, yet reflecting British values—was needed.
In Britain, the case brought to a head a confluence of issues that were forcing a re-evaluation of the country’s relationship with its colonies and the United States. A growing number of influential leaders, including Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone, were openly advocating cutting ties with increasingly expensive and bothersome colonies such as Canada. The Anderson case helped bolster their argument. Others contended that the case was a moral issue, and that it necessitated intervention regardless of the consequences for Canada’s growing independence or Anglo-American relations, even if such intervention might mean war.
In the United States, many hoped the Anderson decision would finally settle an issue that had been tearing the American North and South apart and straining relations between Canada, Britain and the United States for decades. It would once and for all either open Canada’s doors to fleeing African Americans or slam those doors shut. It could destroy the Underground Railroad by allowing American slave catchers to capture their prey on the streets of Toronto, as in Boston or New York, or it could heighten tensions with the many Southerners who found the Underground Railroad, and the Northern and Canadian abolitionists who made it work, insulting to Southern beliefs. With that, it could also provide secessionists with one more reason to dissolve the fragile Union.
Anderson sat in silence. He had never sought notoriety. He had not wished to be at the centre of an international crisis. He had wanted only to live a quiet life. He had wanted only to be free.
THE ESCAPE
To comprehend the events that had brought Anderson and international attention to Osgoode Hall that cool December morning, we must understand slavery in America. Slavery meant suffering the wrenching, piercing pain of being deprived of home, family, health, name, language and religion; being denied options, opportunity, dignity and one’s fundamental humanity. It inflicted the rage of powerlessness while witnessing one’s husband emasculated and bloodied by the lash, or one’s wife and children raped, beaten, and bought and sold as chattel by men protected by their status, wealth and race, and by the policies, practices and laws of the land. Slavery meant that even if one saved pennies and purchased one’s liberty, life as a freeman remained beset by discrimination, violence and the constant threat of kidnapping by those more concerned with bounty than justice. Slavery was the contradiction at the heart of the American ethos.
The first American slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619 at the hands of Portuguese traders. They were referred to as negro, which is the Portuguese word for “black.” By 1750, 44 percent of Virginia’s population and 61 percent of the population of South Carolina were African slaves. Slaves carried the burgeoning colonies on their whipped backs. Slave labour built roads, farms and towns, and would later help construct the White House and the Capitol Building. An economist has called slavery “the first principle and foundation of all the rest, the mainspring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion.”1
Slavery was not mentioned in the American Constitution but its presence was clear. In tallying Americans to determine Congressional representation, the Constitution’s first article prescribed that slaves would count as three-fifths of a person. Article 4 stated that a person “held to service or labour” who escaped to another state would “be delivered up on claim of the part to whom such service or labour shall be due.”
Southern states went further. All passed laws called Black or Slave codes meant to determine not just behaviour but thought. Slaves were legally obliged to show all white people deference, and whites were given the statutory right to determine if even a slave’s eye contact, facial expression or body language represented a transgression of the law. Slaves could not carry firearms or ride horses without written permission, and it was illegal to teach a slave to read.
In 1777, Vermont banned slavery. By the turn of the century many other states had followed its lead. Abolitionist leagues grew in all northern cities. Northern states did not need slavery for economic reasons and could not abide it on moral grounds. As the United States developed south and west, the struggle to maintain a balance in Congress between those representing slave and free states tore at the fabric of the nation and the state.
While white America argued, increasing numbers of enslaved Americans demonstrated the fundamental human desire to be free. There were rebellions that saw whites killed. There were many sad but heroic acts of resistance, such as men who acted dumb to slow or sabotage work, and slave women and girls who underwent abortions after being raped by white owners.
Thousands
of slaves risked their lives and ran. As early as 1793, runaways were such a problem that Congress passed the first of many fugitive slave laws. Each afforded owners more freedom to hire slave catchers and their agents more power to chase, catch and return their prey. By the 1850s, about 50,000 runaway slaves were hiding somewhere in the United States.2 Others ran south to Mexico or Spanish-held Florida. Canada had abolished slavery in the 1830s and so was seen by many slaves as the great beacon of freedom to be won by following the northern star. Escape to Canada meant leaving both bondage and the slave catchers behind. By 1860 an estimated 100,000 slaves had escaped to freedom and about 30,000 of those had found it in Canada.3
In December 1860, sitting in silent dignity, John Anderson had become a symbol in the overlapping waves of international moral, legal, political debates that were coming to a head and would soon bring war. Anderson had come to know the indignity of slavery when he was born to a Missouri slave in 1831. At seven he saw his mother reach her breaking point and lash out at her mistress. She managed to knock the woman down and rip a handful of hair from her head before being pulled away and, as John watched, savagely beaten. Shortly thereafter, as was the practice for all slaves with the audacity to stand up for themselves or their children, she was sold to a Louisiana plantation where conditions were even more brutal and the chances for another such outburst remote. Young John had not known his father, for he had escaped years before, and now his mother had been “sold down the river,” as the saying went.
