Civil War memorial unveiled
ONTARIO: Monument pays tribute to 40,000 Canadians who served in U.S. conflict
While Civil War memorials may not be the most popular things lately, the world’s newest monument to the American Civil War has just opened in Canada.
The granite obelisk is Canada’s only monument to the 1860s conflict, and honours more than 40,000 Civil War soldiers who hailed from what would become modern-day Canada.
“At the time, there were as many in the (Canadian) military as volunteered to fight in the Civil War,” said Bob McLachlan, president of the Grays and Blues of Montreal, a Quebec-based Civil War re-enactment group involved with the monument’s creation.
About 7,000 Canadians are believed to have died in the war.
This means that, to this day, the Civil War killed more Canadians than any other conflict except the two world wars.
For context, 26,000 Canadian troops fought in the Korean War and more than 500 were killed. In the 12 years of Canada’s deployment to Afghanistan, a total of 40,000 served and 159 have been killed.
The monument, a black obelisk, honours Canadians who took up arms on both sides of the war, which pitted the United States against the Confederate States of America, a breakaway region of 11 southern states. It was unveiled Saturday at a historical village near Cornwall, Ont.
Although Canada would not exist as an independent country until 1867, its various colonial governments followed Britain’s example of staying officially neutral during the war.
However, American ranks soon swelled with Canadians already living in U.S. territory, or supporters who trekked south to enlist.
The volunteers included O Canada composer Calixa Lavallée, who was wounded at the Battle of Antietam.
John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, was cornered and killed by a cavalry regiment led by Canadian Edward Doherty.
When Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to his Union counterpart Ulysses S. Grant, one of the witnesses was a Quebec-born blacksmith in Grant’s personal guard.
One of the most well-known Canadian Civil War veterans is Sarah Edmonds, a New Brunswick woman who disguised herself as a man to join Union forces and then became a spy behind Confederate lines.
The conflict also saw 29 Canadian soldiers awarded the Medal of Honor, the United State’s highest military decoration.
One citation credits 18-year-old Frank Bois with staying cool while Confederate shellfire tore apart his ship, the USS Cincinnati. After noticing that all the ship’s flagpoles had been shot away, Bois quickly lashed up a new flag “to enable this proud ship to go down with her colours.”
The majority of Canadians in civil war uniform fought for the North. The Grays and Blues of Montreal estimates that of the 40,000 Canadians in Civil War uniform, only 4,000 fought for the Confederacy.
However, Canadian public opinion at the time was surprisingly supportive for the South, which had seceded in large part to protect the institution of slavery.
Although the British Empire had spearheaded global efforts to abolish African slavery, Canada nevertheless identified with the South as a fellow agrarian country facing an invasion from the United States — a situation Canada had twice endured in the previous century.
In the book Blood and Daring, a history of Canada in the Civil War, historian John Boyko surveyed 84 Canadian newspapers and 43 were pro-South, 33 were proNorth and eight were neutral.
The monument was a collaboration between the Grays and Blues of Montreal and the Lost Villages Historical Society, a group that preserves the history of pioneer villages flooded by the 1950s widening of the Saint Lawrence River to form the Seaway. An accompanying GoFundMe page raised $43,780 for the effort.
In the United States, Confederate monuments have recently become hubs for controversy, either as rallying points for white supremacists, or as targets for vandalism by radical leftists.
However, the Saturday unveiling in Cornwall was devoid of what Bob McLachlan called “yahoos.”
“We don’t have any far-right maniacs, racists or anti-Semites, we’re just town folks who are interested in history,” the Grays and Blues president told Postmedia News.
The American Civil War is not the only major U.S. conflict whose massive Canadian contribution has largely been forgotten.
The Canadian Military Journal notes that 40,000 Canadians enlisted in the U.S. Armed Forces at the time of the Vietnam War.