by John Boyko
At the outset of the war, nursing was just being accepted as a profession for women. Only a few years before, in the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale had organized women to work as nurses in British field hospitals. Americans Clara Barton and Dorothea Dix would help to build the profession but, at that point, the dominant opinion in the United States was that women should not be exposed to the blood and gore of battle or be in such close contact with men. This sort of work was considered unbecoming of women and beyond their physical and emotional abilities.7 Consequently, in the early months of the war, male nurses such as Thompson were seen as preferable to women.
After two months of training, the 1,013-strong Michigan regiment was sent to Washington under the leadership of Colonel Israel B. Richardson. One day Edmonds stood proudly at attention with her compatriots and was inspected by President Lincoln himself. More training followed but it was ad hoc at best, as few knew what to expect or how to really prepare. With the call to march to Manassas, preparations ended.
The Michigan 2nd was ordered to protect a possible retreat route. Edmonds helped ready a field hospital in a small stone church. That night, she and the other nurses listened to young soldiers singing inspirational songs and offering mournful prayers. Many tear-spattered letters were written and left with her and the other nurses.
Through the early morning mists, Union general Irvin McDowell ordered his three divisions forward. Edmonds stood on a hill watching and hoping for the best, with medical supplies in haversacks slung over both shoulders. Within minutes, a Confederate artillery shell tore into a young soldier standing not far away. She ran to him and found a wheezing wound in his chest and his face a bloody pulp. There was nothing to be done but make the dying boy comfortable.
Wounded men quickly began to fill the church. A doctor sent her to the rear for more bandages and brandy, and while she was gone the battle turned in the Confederates’ favour. Edmonds returned to find dead and dying strewn everywhere. She and others moved up among the thundering din, whizzing minié balls and black smoke to rescue bloodied and dismembered young men all moaning for water and their mothers.
Then came the unorganized, unauthorized, mad retreat. As men and riderless horses ran by, Edmonds hurried back to the field hospital and found a scene from hell. The pretty little church, once so clean and organized, was piled with wounded. Blood smeared the walls and pooled on the floor. Amputated arms and legs were stacked haphazardly outside along one wall and uncovered dead were laid out along another. Edmonds stitched and bandaged and held men down as doctors sawed mangled limbs. Soldiers were comforted as they breathed their last. Edmonds helped one dying young man cut a lock of his hair and placed it in a packet to be mailed home to his mother.
With the Union army having abandoned the field, and the early evening casting eerie shadows over the day’s sad and tragic remains, Edmonds and other medical staff needed to flee or risk capture. They placed water within reach of as many wounded men as possible and ran. Edmonds soon lost her compatriots in the darkness. She stealthily wove her way around Confederate pickets until finally relocating her regiment in Washington. The next day found her in one of the city’s many makeshift hospitals tending the sick, wounded, and exhausted.
CANADIAN RECRUITS
Among the thousands who marched with Edmonds on that horrible July day were three brothers from the small town of Wolverton in Canada West. In 1858 Jasper, Alfred and Newton Wolverton had moved to Cleveland to attend school and try to bolster the family lumber business, which had fallen on hard times. In the summer of 1861, they spoke with a recruiting agent from New York who was enlisting teamsters. Lured by the promise of adventure and the opportunity to earn a spectacular combined monthly income of six hundred dollars, Newton and Jasper volunteered with the 50th New York Infantry. They were later joined by their brother. With the blind confidence of youth, the seventeen-year-old Jasper assured his sister back in Canada, “Where we are going we shall in all probability be in no danger at all.”8
In marching off to war, the Wolvertons joined Sarah Edmonds and thousands of other Canadians and Maritimers who had already been living in the United States when they enlisted. They were among the 102,000 who between 1850 and 1860 had crossed the border to find work.9 Eighty-eight percent had moved to Northern states, 10 percent to the west, and only 2 percent to what became the South. About half had found jobs in manufacturing, 30 percent in personal service jobs, 18 percent on farms and only about 2 percent in professions.10
Charles Riggins was among the Canadian sojourners. He left his family’s farm in Fonthill, Canada West, in the spring of 1862, looking for work in Buffalo. He wrote a rather laconic letter home to his brother explaining how his job search ended in military service: “Arrived Buffalo 2 o’clock, got room for 12 a week, went around to see sights, looked for work, found nothing to do so enlisted in the 14th USA.”11 Riggins met a number of Canadians in H Company. Some Canadian recruits made life miserable for others when, tired of training and camp life, they simply deserted. Their actions meant that while Americans in the 14th were given leave, their Canadian compatriots were confined to post lest they dash back across the border and not return. Unlike many others, though, Riggins rather enjoyed his new adventure and spoke glowingly of the bands and the cheers of the crowd when they marched to the trains to depart for Washington.12
The vast majority of Canadians and Maritimers living in the United States when the war began were living in the North, and so they, like Edmonds, Riggins and the Wolvertons, enlisted in Northern regiments. Many of those who had found homes and work in the South, not surprisingly, ended up in the Confederates’ butternut and grey. An example was Dr. Solomon Secord, the grand-nephew of Laura Secord.* Solomon Secord was born in Stony Creek, near Hamilton, and received his medical degree in Toronto. He practised medicine in Hamilton and then Kincardine. Personal health issues took him to South Carolina to escape the cold winters of Canada West. When the war began a year later, despite the fact that he was an abolitionist, he enlisted as an assistant surgeon in the 20th Georgia Regiment Volunteer Infantry.13
Beyond the thousands already in the United States who enthusiastically enlisted, many Canadians and Maritimers left specifically to join in the fight. Among them were the sons of prominent people such as William Lyon Mackenzie Junior, who left home to sign up with a Cincinnati regiment, first for three months and then later for three years.14 His father was Toronto’s first mayor and had led the 1837 Upper Canada rebellion. Another was Fred Howe, son of Joseph Howe, an important Nova Scotia editor and political leader who would spend months visiting Union regiments in a vain attempt to find his son.
Canadians and Maritimers enlisted individually and in groups. Michigan regiments, for instance, were filled when hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers arrived from Canada West’s Elgin, Essex and Lambton counties. So many Nova Scotians of Scottish descent enlisted in a Boston regiment that it was named the “Highlanders.” Other New England states boasted Highlander regiments bursting with young men from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. There were Canadians and Maritimers in five hundred Union regiments and in forty-six Confederate regiments.15 All told, about forty thousand Canadians and Maritimers fought in the American Civil War.16
Many of the thousands who crossed the border to enlist were motivated by the siren song of adventure or a cold craving for money, while others, like Edmonds, were inspired by what they saw as a noble cause. Henri Césaire Saint-Pierre, for instance, left his home in Montreal and signed up with the 76th New York Regiment. He later wrote home with an explanation: “We were Christian soldiers fighting for a holy cause and, like the crusaders of old, who wielded their violent swords in their efforts to free their enslaved brethren moaning under the foot of a ruthless conqueror, we devoted all our courage, summed all our energy in the task of breaking to pieces the shackles by which three millions of human beings were kept in bondage.”17
Enthusiasm for recruitment was such that on April 22, 1861, Joshua Gidding
s, American consul to British North America, wrote to his secretary of war, Simon Cameron, stating that gentlemen in Montreal, Quebec City and Halifax had each offered themselves as recruiters. All three men were confident that they could quickly raise full regiments and transport them to Washington. Since the war was in its early days and American recruiters were having few problems meeting Lincoln’s post-Sumter call for 75,000 men, Cameron assured Giddings that the efforts were unnecessary.18 Despite Cameron’s directive, the Toronto Leader a week later reported rumours that American agents were in Canadian cities and towns gathering young men and taking them to a recruiting centre in Chicago.19 Days later another article noted that Southern agents were in Montreal offering young men a shilling each to come and fight for the Confederates.20
In mid-May 1861, with the war only a month old, a growing number of eager Canadian and Maritime volunteers, with or without the help of recruiting agents, were crossing the border to enlist. The situation became so disconcerting that Governor General Head arranged for a statement describing relevant portions of the Foreign Enlistment Act to be published in a number of newspapers and for handbills to be posted in public places throughout the colonies.21
Head’s reminder that enlisting in foreign armies violated the law did little to stem the tide, and American agents just became more devious. In the summer of 1861, a placard found its way to trees and walls in a number of Toronto’s working-class neighbourhoods. It claimed a need for young men for railway work in Pennsylvania. It seemed harmless enough in an era when so many were crossing the border for work. However, all who saw it understood that the poster was really about filling Pennsylvania regiments. Newspapers were filled with similar advertisements offering a range of American jobs. Canadian political leaders deemed them all suspicious.22
In August 1861, Arthur Rankin, Canadian legislator and colonel of the 9th Militia District, took it upon himself to travel to Washington, where he later reported to have met with a government official. He returned to Canada and asked the governor general for a leave of absence from his public duties. Rankin then set out to create a 1,600-man cavalry regiment to be composed of Canadian volunteers that he would train and offer for service in Detroit. They were to be called Rankin’s Lancers.
One of Rankin’s Washington contacts must have leaked something to a reporter, for a September 11 New York Tribune article detailed what Rankin was doing and revealed that he had received an American commission to do so. The Tribune applauded his efforts.23 With this evidence of a flagrant violation of the law, Governor General Head initiated an investigation. On October 7, Rankin was arrested for violation of the Foreign Enlistment Act, but only for having accepted the American commission.
Rankin’s case drew the issue of Americans recruiting in Canada and the Maritimes out of the shadows. In London, Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell ordered an investigation of Rankin’s activities and asked whether his was an isolated case. Lord Lyons, the British minister in Washington, duly met with Secretary of State Seward, who assured him that no government official had offered to work with Rankin, and that no American recruiting agents had been officially dispatched to Canada.24
Rankin was in jail, but his operation had gone too far to be stopped. He had brought Michigan’s Lieutenant Colonel Tillman and Captain Villiers to his team, and they continued to enlist men for Rankin’s Lancers. They already had phony enlistment papers, ready and waiting in Detroit, stating that all their recruits were from Milwaukee. Tillman had also arranged for about eight hundred posters to be tacked up in Hamilton. Villiers worked with Tillman in the Hamilton campaign and then ran one of his own in Montreal. The Hamilton posters used the old canard of gathering men to work, in this case on Michigan farms, but readers in Montreal were directly invited to join Rankin’s Lancers and fight as a Michigan regiment. Tillman and Villiers both signed their Montreal posters with their real names and ranks.
The Globe did Tillman and Villiers a great service with the publication of an article about Rankin’s Lancers. The story glorified the life of a cavalry soldier: “The [cavalryman] with … revolver in his left hand, his sabre in his right, guiding his lance mainly with his leg, and a horse under good training can deal out death upon the front and each flank at the same time.”25
The governor general was told of the Tillman and Villiers campaigns and he informed Lord Lyons, who asked Seward to investigate.26 It was found that both men had received legitimate leaves from their Michigan units, although neither had told their superiors what they had in mind for their time away. Seward and Secretary of War Cameron assured Lyons that their government did not condone recruitment efforts in Canada and would stop them if they heard about them.27
Rankin’s trial ended with his dismissal on a technicality. Governor General Head revoked his Canadian commission. Rankin later justified his actions with a rhetorical question: “Why [should it] be a crime for Canadians to enter the American service? Is not the cause of the United States the cause of civilization and free government?”28
The Rankin case had led to American promises being made to stop illegal recruitment, but all the while Canadians and Maritimers continued to leave for the United States to enlist, often with the help of American recruiters. The Rankin case only succeeded in pushing many of those recruiters further underground. They would not stay there long.
DESERTERS HEADING NORTH AND SOUTH
Joining the many civilians in their rush for the border were increasing numbers of deserting British regulars. Desertion was a concern from the war’s outset. In late April 1861, just weeks after the fall of Fort Sumter and in the heat of Seward’s threatening words and tone, British commander in Canada Lt. General Sir William Fenwick Williams had written to Governor General Head about a strategy to defend the colonies from an American invasion. He recommended that a detachment of British troops be sent to guard important canals, with specific attention to the Beauharnois on the St. Lawrence. However, he added, there was a risk of desertion whenever troops moved that close to the border. He wrote: “Your Excellency knows as well as I do, that these locations will afford peculiar facility for desertion, and therefore, that it is desirable to send hither only men who are perfectly trustworthy.”29
Despite Williams’s efforts, too many British soldiers were unable to resist the urge to run to an American army that promised the certainty of greater action and rumours of more money and better treatment. American recruiting agents paid special attention to British regulars, for they represented a supply of men already trained for battle and used to army life.30 Williams ordered extra sentries posted each night, not to keep American invaders out, but to keep his soldiers in.
The problem became worse with the arrival of more British regulars. In late December 1861—in the troop movements addressing the Trent crisis—a number of British soldiers deserted on their way from the Bay of Fundy to Canada when they approached the Maine border. In February 1862, patrols were placed on roads crossing the Maine–New Brunswick border to try to stop desertions. The effort had some effect, but those determined to leave still managed to do so, with British soldiers leaving Saint John and St. Andrews at an alarming rate.31 The dubious honour of the worst desertion rate was earned by the British 15th Regiment, housed in the old stone barracks in downtown Fredericton. British rear-admiral David Milne ordered all merchant ships to be searched for deserters before they left Halifax.
For regiments stationed in Canada East and West, a favourite crossing was Watertown, New York; men in British uniforms were welcomed and quickly mustered into Union regiments. On a single evening in July 1862, twenty-seven members of the British 13th Regiment disappeared from their Toronto barracks. Extra guards were stationed each night and the doors were locked from the outside. British officers near the Windsor-Detroit crossing bolstered their guard details and ordered that soldiers be arrested if found more than a mile from their base.32 Matters became so serious at Kingston’s Fort Henry that the commander tried to shame his men by having the dai
ly curfew gun fire an extra shot for each deserter gone to the United States that day. British officers reminded soldiers of their patriotic duty to Queen and empire, and threatened them with harsh punishments if caught on the run. Some were imprisoned. Some had the letter D tattooed on their chest. But nothing seemed to stem the flow of British soldiers across the border.
Meanwhile, British soldiers deserting south may well have passed American soldiers heading north. Throughout the decades before the Civil War, Canada had become a haven for racial refugees escaping slavery and discrimination. From the war’s first days, it had become a sanctuary for those wishing to escape military service. As had been the case with fugitive slaves, most Canadians felt sympathy for the American deserters. Folks in border towns and farms across Canada and the Maritimes regularly encountered young men seeking lodging and work, clad in the torn vestiges of old uniforms.
Canadians came to the support of American deserters in many ways beyond offers of food, shelter and work. In early October 1861, for instance, six large and heavily armed Americans headed into the woods north of Windsor on the trail of Union deserters, with instructions to return their prey dead or alive. When caught, the deserters claimed to be Canadians who had been illegally pressed into Union ranks. The Americans would hear none of it and began hauling the still-protesting men back to Detroit. The noise alerted a group of Canadians, who stopped the procession, believed the bound and desperate men, and with threats and weapons of their own, forced the Americans to free them. A Windsor newspaper article describing the incident referred to the Americans as kidnappers and warned all who might follow them over the river to expect a similarly “warm” welcome.33
