New history documents Canada’s surprising role in U.S. Civil War
New history documents Canada’s surprising role in U.S. Civil War
TIM COOK
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jun. 14 2013, 4:00 PM EDT
Last updated Friday, Jun. 14 2013, 4:00 PM EDT
The American Civil War of 1861 to 1865 haunts the United States to this day. Canadians also have an enduring fascination with the conflict that set state against state, community against community, family against family and killed around 750,000 Americans in the North and South. But Canadians at the time were more than mere spectators: The war threatened British North America, pushing the weak Canadian colonies together for protection to withstand the annexationist dreams of many in war-inflamed Washington.
The United States was Canada’s traditional enemy, with much bad blood spilled between the two peoples during the Seven Years War (1756-1763), the 1775 American invasion and when the at first bumbling and then increasingly professional American naval and ground forces nearly carried the country during the War of 1812. The peace that followed was an uneasy one with many conflicts and trials, especially as the Americans embraced their sense of Manifest Destiny – to envelop all of North America into the United States. John Boyko, an historian and administrator at Lakefield College School and author of several books, reminds us that the Americans were bad neighbours. And Canadians viewed them with a careful eye, especially when war between the states erupted in 1861.
The anodyne title of Boyko’s new book, Blood and Daring, strikes no chord, but the subtitle is more accurate. While Canada desperately tried to stay clear of the costly entanglements of war to the south, tens of thousands of Canadians were drawn to the fighting.
Building on the research of other scholars, Boyko pegs the number at roughly 40,000 Canadians who fought in the war, although he is less clear on why some Canadians would have supported the South. Was it the sense of romance, the war against “northern aggression,” or sympathy for slavery? In a foretaste of a more unpopular war a little over a hundred years later, there were also an estimated 12,000 American draft dodgers who came north to escape conscription after 1862.
While Boyko’s focus is on a limited number of historical actors, his fluid prose carries the story forward. This is Boyko’s strength, and the result is a compelling narrative of the civil war conflict, and the constant endeavours on the part of Canadians, especially Globe editor George Brown and the indefatigable John A. Macdonald, to pacify the Americans, draw together the squabbling colonial governments toward Confederation and ensure that Britain’s sometimes antagonistic actions toward the North did not lead to a full-scale invasion. War hawks in president Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet were set to march on Canada throughout the war.
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