How U.S. Civil War helped forge Canada
Anyone who has ever sat through a senior high Canadian history class on Confederation in the preor post-PowerPoint age has undoubtedly had the nation-building event of 1867 explained as the result of several key internal and external factors.
Internally, there was political deadlock in the Province of Canada together with crucial economic issues, railway building and a genuine desire by John A. Macdonald, George Brown, George-Etienne Cartier and the other Fathers of Confederation to establish a new nation under British constitutional principles.
And externally, there was the eventual British support for the scheme and the most important factor of all: the American Civil War.
More than 50 years ago, historian Donald Creighton postulated that Confederation might have happened in the late 1850s, but the impetus to make it a reality was lacking a significant ingredient. This turned out to be the bloody U.S. conflict and its attendant military, political and social consequences and machinations.
Whether real or imagined, fear of U.S. expansion into Canadian territory seemingly convinced the naysayers to accept that Confederation of British North America was the only answer.
As John Boyko shows in this fascinating account of those tumultuous years, there is much more to the story of Canada’s interaction with Civil War.
The fear about the Americans that propelled Confederation was easily understandable, entangled as it was in Canadian attitudes about slavery and the southern Confederacy, British economic self-interest and American Manifest Destiny.
Boyko has mined primary and secondary sources to produce a wonderful and seamless popular history full of colourful characters, intrigue and political backstabbing of the first order.
His approach is also creative. Rather than attempting to write a definitive (and dull) A History of Canada During the U.S. Civil War 1861-1865, he has selected six “guides,” exploring the events and issues through their lives and experiences as well as through the historical personalities they encounter.
The biographies of three of the guides — John A. Macdonald, George Brown and U.S. secretary of state William Seward — are well known. The other three’s stories are the most compelling sections of the book.
John Anderson was a runaway slave from Missouri who was forced to kill a white farmer trying to capture him. His extradition case in Toronto in 1860, a year before the start of the war, was briefly a cause célèbre that pitted the many opponents of slavery against the narrower legal definition of the law.
Sarah Emma Edmonds was one of an estimated 40,000 Canadians and Martimers to fight in the war, most for the Union side. Born in New Brunswick in 1841, she left her abusive father, moved to Boston and — disguised as a man, volunteered as a field nurse named Franklin Thompson.
A skilled rider, she later served as a spy dangerously infiltrating enemy territory. On one of her missions, and in a great twist, she posed as a woman!
Through the life of Jacob Thompson, a Mississippi politician and devoted southerner, Boyko adeptly traces the various conspiracies the Confederates tried to hatch from the confines of Canada. Allan Levine’s most recent book is King: William Lyon Mackenzie King, A Life Guided by the Hand of Destiny. Blood and Daring: How Canada Fought the American Civil War and Forged a Nation