A house subdivided
In his famous 1839 report, Lord Durham observed that British North America was plagued by “two nations warring within the bosom of a single state.” To the south, a similar problem bedeviled the United States. While language had created two national solitudes in Canada, for Americans the root cause was slavery. Either way, distinct peoples found themselves trapped together in uneasy relationships.
How should politicians solve such problems of national division? The answer depends on whom you ask, as James Laxer shows in his account of the nearly simultaneous founding of Canada and re- founding of the United States.
In Staking Claims to a Continent, Laxer t ran-sports us back to the North America of the 1860s. To Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, the answer to the American dilemma was to carve out a new nation-state from the rib of the United States. To Abraham Lincoln, the answer was to refuse the South’s right to secede. Both Davis and Lincoln led their societies into total war in pursuit of their objectives.
North of the border, in present- day Ontario, John A. Macdonald came up with a different answer. While the Americans settled their national question with war, the colonists of British North America discussed terms of a new self- governing union. Partly this was a matter of necessity: the United States had been a relentlessly expansionist power, and if the North succeeded in preserving the Union it could very well turn its gaze towards Canada next. So in 1867, four British colonies came together under the idea that safety could be found in numbers. In doing so, Macdonald and his partners, most notably George- Étienne Cartier, recognized that they needed to safeguard provincial autonomy without replicating the problem of states’ rights that had led to the Civil War. The resulting political system, which Laxer praises as “a work of genius,” blended American federalism with British parliamentary supremacy.
One of the virtues of Laxer’s book is that it reminds us of how uncertain this all was, and how it nearly all fell apart. There was nothing inevitable about the triumphs of either the Union or Canadian Confederation. The Confederacy was actually the latest ( albeit the most serious) in a long line of separationist threats in the United States: shortly after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, schemers and dreamers – among them former Vice President Aaron Burr – tried to hive off small pieces of the loosely controlled western frontier; at the end of the War of 1812, representatives from disaffected New England states met at the Hartford Convention to discuss whether to secede.
Canada had similar centrifugal problems. Two future provinces invited to join Confederation decided to wait – Prince Edward Is- land came aboard in 1873, Newfoundland much later in 1949 – while two of the original provinces that did join in 1867, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, were deeply divided; many had hoped for a Maritime Union instead.
Rather than North America consisting of a unified Canada and t he United States, then, the continent might well have resembled Europe or Latin America by fragmenting into several smaller states locked in endless competition.
Laxer writes with enthusiasm, yet none of this is exactly breaking news. For some time now, American historians have sought to make U. S. history, including the Civil War era, less parochial and more transnational. Meanwhile, world historians have portrayed the Civil War and Confederation as episodes in a much broader, global story. They have a point: both the Canadian and American national projects were driven by powerful currents of modernity that weren’t unique to North America. Around the same time that Lincoln, Davis and Macdonald were active, the pressures of industrialism, nationalism and liberalism were combining to forge modern nation- states around the world – either by thoroughly reforming existing but feudalistic societies (the abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and the Meiji Restoration in Japan in 1868) or by creating totally new ones ( Germany and Italy became unified nationstates in 1871). Other countries, similarly roiled by the dynamic modernity of the mid- nineteenth century, experienced internal conflict infinitely more destructive than America’s. For example, the Taiping Rebellion tore China apart over 14 years of incredibly brutal warfare. When it finally ended in 1864, close to when General Ulysses S. Grant was laying siege to Petersburg, Virginia, as many as 30 million Chinese had died. Tragic as it was, the American Civil War was puny by comparison.
Laxer’s contribution to this narrative is to situate Canada more firmly within it. This is a worthy goal, and a terrific idea for a book – it’s just a shame he didn’t pay more attention to it. Long stretches of Staking Claims to a Continent simply rehash conventional portrayals of Civil War battles and Confederation debates. His three narrative threads, which interweave all too rarely, will be familiar to anyone with knowledge of American and Canadian history. The settlement of the American West and subjugation of its native peoples, which was one of the most i mportant developments triggered by the Civil War, is strangely neglected; so too is Reconstruction. The life stories of Lincoln, Davis and Macdonald promise much but deliver little, and there are too few surprises in Laxer’s account of them. Perhaps this is because he’s done little research of his own, instead relying on a pretty narrow selection of books by other historians. It’s a bit like rummaging in the garage and finding a mix tape of classicrock songs – the music’s still good, but we’ve heard it all many times before.