Montreal harboured a Confederate

The U.S.A.’s outbreak of Civil War iconoclasm touched the Dominion on Tuesday, when the Hudson’s Bay Co. store in downtown Montreal hastily removed a 1957 plaque honouring the brief residence in the city of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Davis had been captured by Union soldiers three weeks after Lincoln’s assassination and been clapped in irons at Fortress Monroe in Virginia. He was gradually treated less brutally while the federal government wrestled with the idea of a trial for treason, eventually deciding in the post-Lincoln power vacuum that the various political risks were not worth taking. Davis’ supporters were allowed to bail him out in 1867, and he came north to reunite with his wife and children, who had been sent to Quebec for safety during the war.

He stayed in Canada as a guest of John Lovell, an important book publisher who had used his close personal ties to the Tories to build a fortune while consciously cross-subsidizing an infant Canadian literature. (Lovell’s ink-stained descendants are still running Lovell Litho presses in Montreal.) Montreal’s flagship Bay store stands on the site of Lovell’s very grand home. But Davis was not a resident there for long: the family moved on to Lennoxville to be near Bishop’s College, and wintered in Cuba because, as his wife Varina later wrote, “the Canadian winter proved too severe for Mr. Davis’s enfeebled frame.”

There are probably not very many tourists who come to Montreal just to see a department store where there used to be a house where the Confederate President resided. But, then again, Civil War buffs and Confederate nostalgia addicts (you will have to imagine the Venn diagram with overlapping circles that would ideally appear here) tend to be ... intense.

The short, effective clamour over the plaque on the Bay store lets us see the advantages of the British blue plaque system of sightseer guidance. A brusque neutral statement that “Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, lived here from (date) to (date)” might not have been objectionable. The plaque was exposed to justified criticism because it had been donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and was dedicated (with French text) “to the memory of Jefferson Davis.” The distinction between remembering and commemorating is subtle, but important.

Lovell, in taking the crushed and exhausted President Davis into his home, was probably not making some sort of gesture on behalf of the virtues of the Confederacy. British imperial government had been strict about its neutrality in the Civil War, choosing to take both sides at their initial word that the fight was not fundamentally about slavery. Southern spies tried to use Canada as the base for a second front in the rear of the Union, messing around with boats and small arms in Ontario and Quebec, but this activity was never allowed to get too far out of hand. (There is one incredibly enormous exception: John Wilkes Booth’s conspiracy to kidnap Lincoln, which turned into an assassination plan after the war was lost, was arranged and funded in Canada.)

British public opinion was (on the whole) strongly opposed to slavery: indeed, it may still be the strongest and most effective force for liberating slaves that has ever existed, with the Union Army in second place. But during the war the Union was still a potential military rival to the Empire, and the Confederacy had to be dealt with as if it might prevail, for as long as there was any chance of that.