Blood and Daring (3 page)

William Seward was a rapaciously ambitious, cigar-chomping New York political leader and secretary of state to presidents Lincoln and Johnson. He was also an avowed expansionist. Before and during the early months of the war, he expressed an eagerness to instigate a war with Britain that he believed would lead to the capture of its Canadian colonies and a reunited America. His desire to bomb, buy or barter for territory never abated. Canadians and Maritimers were justifiably afraid and began polishing their weapons. With Britain’s help, the borders were reinforced
and preparations made for invasion. Seward enables us to recognize the growing desire on the part of British North American colonies to unify as a means to better defend themselves against American military threats, aggression and aspirations, and shows just how close the Civil War came to bursting its borders.

The mysterious Sarah Emma Edmonds invites us to comprehend why approximately forty thousand Canadians and Maritimers donned the blue or grey, and to appreciate the contributions they made. Many rest in Civil War cemeteries throughout the United States. Twenty-nine won the Congressional Medal of Honor. Some stood with Grant when Lee surrendered. Another captured Lincoln’s assassin. Whereas Edmonds volunteered to serve as a nurse and spy, many Canadians and Maritimers, including children, were tricked into enlisting or even kidnapped by American agents. Meanwhile, British and American deserters passed each other as they crossed the border. The whole time, Edmonds hid a captivating secret.

Another of our guides is wily Mississippi politician and former federal cabinet secretary Jacob Thompson. When the Confederacy was awash in military, economic and diplomatic bad news, the decision was made to send agitators to Canada. They were to organize the large number of Southerners already there into a potent force that could harass the North from the north. Thompson led the mission. He and his agents worked openly in Niagara Falls, Toronto and Montreal. Thompson’s efforts led to missions to burn Manhattan, spring Confederate prisoners of war, and support Lincoln’s opposition in ways that could have split the North and guaranteed the South’s survival. His Confederates killed Americans on raids launched from Canada. Thompson’s exploits further illustrate how Canada’s implicit participation brought the war dangerously close to involving Britain and the military subjugation of what would become Canada.

George Brown, our next guide, owned Toronto’s
Globe
, Canada’s most widely read, unabashedly partisan and influential newspaper. In the years leading up to and through the Civil War, he was a member of the
legislature, Reform Party leader and, for a very brief period, prime minister. When Canada needed concerted action to address American threats, its political structure was a shambles. No one expected the taciturn Brown to summon the courage needed to put political advantage and personal ambition aside and bring squabbling factions together to seek a solution. Similarly, few expected the Maritime colonies to warm to his vision of a broad union. The ideas proposed by Brown and those he drew to him became the basis for a new state, decidedly different from its neighbour. Brown’s work enables us to understand how the United States provided both the alarming incentive to invent a new country and the negative example that informed the nature of that invention. After all, the war was startling proof to Canada’s founding fathers that the American political system was an abject failure.

While Brown began the nation-building process, it took our final guide, the hard-drinking and effervescently convivial John A. Macdonald, to get it done. Macdonald was the indispensable man in the nation-building years beginning in 1864. But even after the war ended in 1865, it appeared that his vision and political genius might not be sufficient to allow Canada to survive long enough to be born. Canada and the Maritime colonies were blamed for playing a role in starting the war and then in prolonging it. Montreal was identified as the site where the plot to assassinate Lincoln was hatched, and Canadians were castigated for harbouring the conspirators. American invaders crossed the border and blood was spilled. The war was not really over. Macdonald needed to fight a renewal of annexation plans by Seward and then-president Grant, who were determined to use postwar compensation they demanded from Britain to see the stars and stripes hoisted north of the border.

While enjoying the story of Canada and the Civil War through the lens of our six guides’ lives, we will also investigate the roles played by many others. Americans Frederick Douglass, John Brown and John Wilkes Booth advanced their goals while in Canada. Jefferson Davis and many of his generals sought postwar refuge in Canada. Canadian and Maritime politicians Thomas D’Arcy McGee, Alexander Galt and George
Étienne Cartier and soldiers George Denison, Charles Riggins and the four Wolverton brothers play important roles. Also significant are British lords Palmerston, Russell, Lyons, Head, Monck and Thornton. At different times and for various reasons, some British leaders irked America to the verge of war, while others pushed Canadians to save themselves and still others offered to give the young country away.

Throughout our journey, the political wiles, characters and visions of two men will tower over all the rest: Abraham Lincoln and John A. Macdonald. At a time when so much could have gone so wrong, Canada and the United States were blessed with wise, transformational leaders. Our stable and independent nations, which share a continent in peace, freedom and understanding, are their gifts to us and the Civil War’s legacy.

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JOHN ANDERSON AND THE RAILROAD TO FREEDOM AND WAR

J
OHN
A
NDERSON WAS A SLIGHT MAN
, about five foot six, with dark, intelligent eyes. Although only thirty years of age, his heavily lined face betrayed a lifetime of hardship. He wore a new suit purchased by his supporters, many of whom were there, watching him sit stoically behind a polished oak table in the main courtroom of Toronto’s Osgoode Hall. The building was designed to intimidate. It demanded respect. The commanding façade greeted visitors and then, once they were inside, its dark oak and mahogany, rich leather and high ceilings whispered that this was a place for serious people conducting serious business. And today’s proceedings were serious indeed.

Outside on that chilly morning of December 15, 1860, stood fifty Toronto police officers. At Government House, only five minutes away, a hastily assembled company of soldiers from the Royal Canadian Rifles had muskets at the ready with bayonets menacingly attached. All were prepared for the demonstration promised and the riot expected, should the court decision go as the two hundred or so people
in the crowd feared. Stretchers were piled against a wall, ready to haul away casualties.

More heavily armed policemen were inside Osgoode, nervously eyeing the onlookers who were crammed into every nook and cranny. Toronto sheriff Fred Jarvis had tried a ticketing scheme to control access to the courtroom, but it had failed, and so the place was packed by the well-connected and the curious and by many of Anderson’s staunchest supporters. Reporters from a number of Canadian and American newspapers were also in attendance.

All hushed and rose when the elderly and deeply respected Chief Justice John Beverley Robinson, flanked by justices Robert Easton Burns and Archibald McLean, entered the room. Anderson stood with his lawyers. With a nod from Robinson, the three justices sat and adjusted their robes. The spectators took their seats. Robinson looked up and cleared his throat.

There was a great deal at stake—far more than the life of an African American ex-slave. For months, the Anderson case had been discussed in the halls of power in colonial Canada, Britain and the United States. Political leaders such as George Brown, John A. Macdonald, Thomas D’Arcy McGee and others who would soon play crucial roles in the founding of an independant Canada concerned themselves with the case. Options for Canada’s future as a British colony, an independent country or perhaps even new northern American states, were being openly debated on both sides of the border. The case had influenced a growing consensus among Canadians and those in the Maritime colonies that a new political structure—more independent of Britain and better able to defend itself against American threats, yet reflecting British values—was needed.

In Britain, the case brought to a head a confluence of issues that were forcing a re-evaluation of the country’s relationship with its colonies and the United States. A growing number of influential leaders, including Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone, were openly advocating cutting ties with increasingly expensive and bothersome colonies such as Canada. The Anderson case helped bolster their argument.
Others contended that the case was a moral issue, and that it necessitated intervention regardless of the consequences for Canada’s growing independence or Anglo-American relations, even if such intervention might mean war.

In the United States, many hoped the Anderson decision would finally settle an issue that had been tearing the American North and South apart and straining relations between Canada, Britain and the United States for decades. It would once and for all either open Canada’s doors to fleeing African Americans or slam those doors shut. It could destroy the Underground Railroad by allowing American slave catchers to capture their prey on the streets of Toronto, as in Boston or New York, or it could heighten tensions with the many Southerners who found the Underground Railroad, and the Northern and Canadian abolitionists who made it work, insulting to Southern beliefs. With that, it could also provide secessionists with one more reason to dissolve the fragile Union.

Anderson sat in silence. He had never sought notoriety. He had not wished to be at the centre of an international crisis. He had wanted only to live a quiet life. He had wanted only to be free.

To comprehend the events that had brought Anderson and international attention to Osgoode Hall that cool December morning, we must understand slavery in America. Slavery meant suffering the wrenching, piercing pain of being deprived of home, family, health, name, language and religion; being denied options, opportunity, dignity and one’s fundamental humanity. It inflicted the rage of powerlessness while witnessing one’s husband emasculated and bloodied by the lash, or one’s wife and children raped, beaten, and bought and sold as chattel by men protected by their status, wealth and race, and by the policies, practices and laws of the land. Slavery meant that even if one saved pennies and purchased one’s liberty, life as a freeman remained beset by discrimination, violence and the constant threat of kidnapping by those more concerned with bounty than justice. Slavery was the contradiction at the heart of the American ethos.

The first American slaves arrived in Virginia in 1619 at the hands of Portuguese traders. They were referred to as
negro
, which is the Portuguese word for “black.” By 1750, 44 percent of Virginia’s population and 61 percent of the population of South Carolina were African slaves. Slaves carried the burgeoning colonies on their whipped backs. Slave labour built roads, farms and towns, and would later help construct the White House and the Capitol Building. An economist has called slavery “the first principle and foundation of all the rest, the mainspring of the machine which sets every wheel in motion.”
¹

Slavery was not mentioned in the American Constitution but its presence was clear. In tallying Americans to determine Congressional representation, the Constitution’s first article prescribed that slaves would count as three-fifths of a person. Article 4 stated that a person “held to service or labour” who escaped to another state would “be delivered up on claim of the part to whom such service or labour shall be due.”

Southern states went further. All passed laws called Black or Slave codes meant to determine not just behaviour but thought. Slaves were legally obliged to show all white people deference, and whites were given the statutory right to determine if even a slave’s eye contact, facial expression or body language represented a transgression of the law. Slaves could not carry firearms or ride horses without written permission, and it was illegal to teach a slave to read.