Blood and Daring (19 page)

Meanwhile, British soldiers deserting south may well have passed American soldiers heading north. Throughout the decades before the Civil War, Canada had become a haven for racial refugees escaping slavery and discrimination. From the war’s first days, it had become a sanctuary for those wishing to escape military service. As had been the case with fugitive slaves, most Canadians felt sympathy for the American deserters. Folks in border towns and farms across Canada and the Maritimes regularly encountered young men seeking lodging and work, clad in the torn vestiges of old uniforms.

Canadians came to the support of American deserters in many ways beyond offers of food, shelter and work. In early October 1861, for instance, six large and heavily armed Americans headed into the woods north of Windsor on the trail of Union deserters, with instructions to return their prey dead or alive. When caught, the deserters claimed to be Canadians who had been illegally pressed into Union ranks. The Americans would hear none of it and began hauling the still-protesting men back to Detroit. The noise alerted a group of Canadians, who stopped the procession, believed the bound and desperate men, and with
threats and weapons of their own, forced the Americans to free them. A Windsor newspaper article describing the incident referred to the Americans as kidnappers and warned all who might follow them over the river to expect a similarly “warm” welcome.
³³

American soldiers and agents entering Canada to recover deserters became yet another source of tension among Canada, Britain and the United States. Another incident in the Detroit-Windsor area brought the issue to the fore. A Captain Church from Michigan was ordered across the border at Detroit with five unarmed men to find a small group of deserters. They found their erstwhile comrades and, one way or another, persuaded them to return. On their way back, though, they were accidentally discovered by a local magistrate named Billings and a few of his friends. Words were exchanged and the deserters ran—apparently not convinced to return to Michigan after all.

Billings reported the incident to recently appointed Governor General Lord Monck, who, upon investigation, found that the story was not an isolated one. Within days, Lord Lyons was in Seward’s office, demanding to know what was going on. Seward asked questions of military officials and then told Lyons that Captain Church had acted on his own and that since he had gone unarmed and allowed the deserting men to flee rather than start an altercation with Billings, he had acted honourably.
³⁴
Seward was quite obviously skirting the larger questions of sovereignty and neutrality, but Lyons allowed the matter to drop. Lyons supported Monck’s intention to move more troops to the border near Detroit—not to stop American deserters, but to prevent the incursions of those intent upon retrieving them.
³⁵

With newspapers filled with stories of deserters running both ways, and then the
Trent
crisis and talk of an imminent American invasion of Canada, many Canadians who had jumped to the lure of joining the Union as a great and glorious crusade had second thoughts. Colonel Rankin, for instance, after working so hard and tossing away his career to raise a regiment of
Rangers, publicly renounced his dedication to the Union cause. He resigned his American commission and declared his loyalty to Canada.

Norman Wade of Granville Ferry, Nova Scotia, felt his loyalty similarly tested. He had left his home in 1859 for a life at sea and found employment on American ships. In September 1861, he had enlisted in the Union navy and was assigned to the 400-ton USS
Young Rover
. In letters home to his parents, Wade explained his reasons for enlisting and touched on the main motivators for nearly all who were doing so: adventure, profit and cause: “When I came back to Boston from Detroit, times were so dull I had a good mind to come home but falling in with an old friend who was going on the
Young Rover
and who got the billet for me, which is not so bad as my pay is twenty-five dollars a month besides the prize money.… I am confident our cause is a just one.”
³⁶

Wade served his three-month enlistment largely by playing his part in guarding ports against blockade runners. He then signed up again. When the
Trent
crisis broke, he found his mates suddenly girding up for the new war most thought was coming. He wrote home expressing the fear felt at every level: “If a war should break out between these two Countries there is no telling where it would end, as it is bad enough now.”
³⁷
He could not tell his parents whether he would fight or desert.
^*

The Wolverton brothers similarly felt conflicted fears and spoke with many fellow Canadians who had no desire to be a part of an American army that appeared poised to march north rather than south. While only fifteen years old, the precocious Newton Wolverton was chosen by his peers as their spokesman. Using contacts he had developed through his work in Washington’s quartermaster’s department, he eventually secured a brief meeting with President Lincoln. He told the president of his concerns and Lincoln said that he understood. The president said: “We are happy to have you Canadians helping the Northern cause and want you to stay. I am not in favour of war with either Britain or Canada. As long as I am president, there will be no such war, you may be sure of that.”
³⁸

Many Canadian parents felt great trepidation about having their sons so far from home and in constant peril, and wrote to Monck and Lyons asking for help in extricating their children from Union regiments. Most claimed that their boys needed to be saved because they were minors who had run away from home to join the army. In December 1861 alone, at the height of the
Trent
crisis, Lyons and Monck placed ninety-two cases before American authorities.

Lyons continued throughout the war to intercede on behalf of parents, but it was an arduous process of moving through diplomatic channels and contacting regiments in the field. It was all made more difficult by unreliable enlistment records. Most cases bogged down somewhere along the red-taped route or ended when it was reported that the soldier in question could not be found, had deserted, or had died. Lyons was proud on the rare occasions when he was successful in returning a child soldier to his parents.
³⁹

The problem of so many Canadian and Maritime parents wanting their sons out grew to the point that American Secretary of War Cameron applied to Congress to grant him the power to expedite the process through which he could discharge foreign minors from service.
⁴⁰
Instead, on February 13, 1862, Congress enacted legislation that ended the practice of petitioning for the release of all underage soldiers. The regulation remained that one needed to be over eighteen to enlist, but the recruit’s word was to be taken as proof and once taken it would not be questioned.
^*
The new legislation required that Monck inform all distraught parents who suspected their underaged children were in the American army that there was little he could do to help.
⁴¹
A growing number of parents nonetheless begged for help, but fewer and fewer releases were secured.

The American legislation hurt many young people whose martial enthusiasm dimmed with the realization that a soldier’s life was hard work, with long stretches of boredom punctuated by bursts of terror. Charles
Riggins from Canada West, for instance, who had initially enjoyed military life, became disenchanted when training ended and fighting began. In July 1862, he wrote to his sister, “I am quite shure that if I was home now I would let the south whip the north or vis versa or any other way for all I would care, it is well enough soldiering is very nice in peace & it is all nice enough to fight for ones country but when you are treated as slaves & that too worse than the slaves at the south.”
⁴²
Only a month later, Riggins wrote again about how he had made a mistake to enlist and wanted out: “You may write to Lord Lyons & try to get me out if you can—try very hard if you please—I want to get out very bad—tell him that I enlisted under eighteen & that I am only five months over it now. Tell him that I am a British Subject but do not say anything to anyone about it.”
⁴³

From the chaos of Bull Run in July 1861 until March 1862, the handsome and egotistical thirty-five-year-old Union general George McClellan built his army. To the frustration of Lincoln and the Northern press, he gathered more and more troops and weapons but, other than small skirmishes, all his massive army did was train.

Riggins and his 14th United States Infantry Division were part of it all. Although they would not meet, Edmonds was there too, still in her guise as Franklin Thompson. Having spent the winter tending the sick and wounded who overwhelmed hospitals, she had developed the thick skin needed for survival when engulfed by so much human misery and sorrow. Her journal records her experience: “Of what an amount of suffering I am called to witness every hour and every moment. There is no cessation, and yet it is strange that the sight of all this suffering and death does not affect me more. I am simply eyes, ears, hands and feet. It does seem as if there is a sort of stoicism granted for such occasions.”
⁴⁴
Edmonds put in long shifts and tried to cheer the sick and dying with card games, letter writing and spirited conversation while tending to their failing bodies.

Finally, on March 14, 1862, McClellan passed the orders that had been anticipated for months, and his enormous army, the largest in American
history, began to move. Riggins’s and Edmonds’s regiments were part of a giant flotilla heading down the Potomac River and south through Chesapeake Bay to Fort Monroe, near the mouth of the James River. The plan had McClellan’s army marching northeast up the York Peninsula past Yorktown and Williamsburg all the way to Richmond. Lincoln’s concept of McClellan’s mission was that it should destroy Lee’s army, but his young general saw the war as a mammoth game of capture the flag, with the enemy’s capital as his goal. McClellan hoped that the Peninsula Campaign would win him—and the men he encouraged to call him Young Napoleon—the everlasting glory that he so desperately craved.
⁴⁵

The campaign began badly as McClellan sabotaged himself by moving slowly and digging in. While helping to construct entrenchments, Edmonds saw the freeing of slaves, and felt the humbling sensation of watching families crying for joy with the dawning realization that they were truly and finally free. She noted her surprise that all were not as she had expected: “Some of them are whiter and prettier than most of our northern ladies. There is a family here, all of whom have blue eyes, light hair, fair skin and rosy cheeks; yet they are contrabands and have been slaves. Yet why should blue eyes and golden hair be the distinction between bond and free?”
⁴⁶

As the army began to move, an unyielding rain turned Virginia clay to mud, slowing down the trudging, demoralizing slog to Yorktown. Edmonds suffered with the rest. Damp breezes and malarial mosquitoes wafted from adjacent swamps over the tired, sodden troops—yet they walked on. They walked for five days on two days’ rations.

During the Peninsula Campaign, as happened throughout the war and on many fronts, it was common for Canadians and Maritimers to come across countrymen in the field. One day as Edmonds was returning from a scavenging mission, she saw a funeral ending for yet another fallen comrade. She was told that the young man was Lieutenant James Vesey. He was thirty-two years old, had been popular among fellow officers and his men, and was from New Brunswick. Edmonds deeply mourned his loss for they had known each other at home and she had been rekindling feelings for
him. On their first chance encounter shortly after embarking on the muddy march, she had avoided eye contact and conversation lest he reveal her disguise. When he did not recognize her, she initiated brief chats. Edmonds was warmed by his stories of home and his affectionate mentions of her, but she managed to maintain her ruse, and then he was gone. She later wrote, “His heart, though brave, was tender as a woman’s. He was noble and generous, and had the highest regard for truth and law.”
⁴⁷

Vesey was not Edmonds’s first affair of the heart. In October 1861, Franklin Thompson had developed a close friendship with Jerome John Robbins. Robbins’s letters indicated the depth of the friendship, then his growing suspicion about Thompson and his surprise when Edmonds confessed her true identity. When Robbins indicated that he was married, their relationship went no further. Robbins kept Edmonds’s secret.
⁴⁸

In late April, Edmonds was re-assigned as the regiment’s postmaster and then as mail carrier and dispatch rider. Her skills with a horse and determined courage served her well, as her new duties were tough and dangerous and sometimes demanded rides of up to sixty miles. Edmonds was often alone for hours or even days at a time, and she came to know the cold fear of capture and the heat of enemy fire. She became more aware of rumour and camp gossip, and one day heard that a Union spy had been killed in Richmond. She decided that she wished to fill the vacancy. She gave her notice of interest to her direct report, who moved it up the chain of command. After being interviewed and tested, she got the job and declared her oath to the Union for the third time.

Edmonds’s first mission was to infiltrate enemy lines and ascertain the strength and preparations around Yorktown. She began with a disguise. She purchased the clothes of a liberated slave, dyed her skin black, shaved her head and donned a wig. She practised the broken English of a field hand and assumed the name Ned. She tested her ruse with friends at the medical station where she had been working and fooled them all—she was ready.

After sunset, she passed through both Union and Confederate pickets. The next morning, she fell in with a group of slaves carrying coffee and provisions to the front lines. It was clear that the men suspected Edmonds,
but they played along. The group moved back to Yorktown, where they were ordered to work on reinforcing the breastworks. It was perfect. She was able to estimate height and depth and count artillery pieces. She made special note of the Quaker guns: logs painted black to resemble real artillery pieces, meant to intimidate the enemy. She made rough sketches of the works and hid them in her shoe. After two days she stole away and reported back to McClellan’s aides.