HE STAYED IN CANADA AS A GUEST OF JOHN LOVELL.

As a businessman Lovell may have had one eye on capturing some of the profits from the flood of Civil War literature that was already beginning to appear in 1867. Davis, one must remember, was a world celebrity. To a publisher he might have turned out to be a very useful friend. But Davis’ time in Canada was quiet — indeed, it makes for a sharp contrast with the feasts and toasts he would receive upon later visits to Britain.

The Victorians had a pronounced sweet tooth for leaders of lost causes, for losers and exiles. Throughout a politically turbulent century, Britain upheld its tradition of providing refuge for failed pretenders, ministers of provisional governments, and exiled dissidents. It’s why Karl Marx’s bones are still resting in north London, and Napoleon III’s in Farnborough.

That was, I think, the Christian spirit in which Jefferson Davis was received in Canada. We are now likely to think of this general attitude as irresponsible or even dangerous. It is difficult — appropriately difficult — not to consider Davis in the same moral light as a Nazi war criminal.

But the Empire’s view of itself as a sort of international sanctuary is part of the “context” that everybody is so keen on when it comes to interrogating the past. And, yes, it is also the reason the Underground Railroad ended in British North America.