Blood and Daring (2 page)

The Revolution was America’s first civil war. About a third of the American colonists wanted nothing to do with what Adams, Jefferson and the others were selling. With every British military defeat, more of those loyal to the Crown left or were driven out. Some fled to Britain while others went south, but most escaped to what remained of British North America. Eventually, about thirty thousand moved to Nova Scotia and ten thousand to Quebec.
⁶
A number of freed Blacks emigrated.

Britain had lost thirteen of its North American colonies and did not fancy losing the others. Wary of allowing demographic and economic growth to create a new powerhouse such as wealthy and populous Virginia, it split Nova Scotia to create New Brunswick. It divided Quebec into Upper Canada (Ontario) and Lower Canada (Quebec). A new political system was installed that afforded a semblance of self-rule with British-appointed governors in charge. A border was loosely drawn, and American fishers were granted inland rights. Those long established in the suddenly growing British colonies shared with the revolution’s refugees and the newcomers from the British Isles a deep respect for British political values and an abhorrence of the ideals and aspirations upon which the American Revolution had been based. They were determined to remain separate from the United States.

That determination was tested a generation later in the War of 1812. Relentless American expansion had led to Native resistance and then to uprisings inspired and led by Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, and his brother, known as the Prophet. So-called War Hawks in Congress convinced themselves that Britain was behind the Native unrest and was supporting piracy and the impressment of Americans into British naval service. The United States could only be safe and prosperous, they argued, if Britain was pushed out of North America.
⁷

Americans saw the struggle as a war of liberation; Canadians believed it was a war of survival. It was a cousins’ war—and it was horrible. The battles were savagely fought. Cities and towns on both sides of the border were burned and civilians were killed. Toronto, called York at the time, was taken by Americans and torched. Washington was captured and the president fled. The capitol was ransacked and the White House set on fire.

When the war finally ended, Britain’s flag was still there—Canada remained. Border tensions eased as the 1817 Rush-Bagot Agreement led to the demilitarization of the Great Lakes. The war had given Americans a national anthem and the symbol of Uncle Sam. It afforded Canadians the pride born of having defended their land and the un-American ideals in which they believed. A new, unifying and unique nationalism was taking root.
⁸

In 1837, rebellions erupted in Upper and Lower Canada. Gunfire echoed and blood stained the streets of Toronto and French Canadian towns. Britain sent Lord Durham to see what the fuss had been about, and his recommendations led to the creation of a more responsible and representative government in a unified colony called Canada. He hoped that Canada East (Quebec) would soon be subsumed by Canada West (Ontario). Nova Scotia and New Brunswick remained separate. Britain appointed a governor general to oversee all of its North American colonies. The Canadian government was ostensibly subservient to him, as were the Maritime governments to their lieutenant-governors who reported to him. It was with this political structure and its deep-seated suspicion of the United States that Canada and the Maritimes faced an increasingly belligerent America that was tearing itself apart.

The tensions that led to the Civil War were complex and are still hotly debated. One point of view emphasizes the growing differences in outlook and needs between the urban, industrial North and the rural, agrarian South. This thinking examines banking, tax and tariff policies as significant points of conflict. Another argument paints Confederate leaders as
either patriotic heroes or misguided villains attempting to protect the South’s economic and social fabric and slavery, which was inextricably woven into it. Yet another school of thought contends that the Constitution was a compact created by the states and based on the Jeffersonian-Lockean premise that a government exists to protect rights, and that when it fails to do so, people have the duty to replace it; states’ rights and property rights were seen to be under attack by Northern lawmakers and abolitionists, and so a new government needed to be created. Still others contend that the war was about right and wrong, morality versus wickedness and constitutionality versus lawlessness. To them, slavery was the cause and its abolition the justifiable value of the war.

Each point of view offers persuasive arguments and claims enthusiastic adherents. In the end, though, they all end up arguing over the degree to which slavery was a factor in causing the war. While other viewpoints exist and variants within these schools can be teased out, one always returns to slavery. It was a cancer present within the United States before there was a United States and was not removed by the wise men who wrote the Constitution. Racial bondage was allowed to grow and eventually it nearly ended the young country’s life.

Shortly after the war began in April 1861, Britain declared itself neutral. The Canadian and Maritime governments dutifully echoed that official line and informed their citizens that it was against the law to support North or South, and for individuals to join in the fight. One would expect that Canadians and Maritimers would abide by their government’s wishes and that public opinion would overwhelmingly support the North. After all, they were by and large law-abiding folks, loyal to Britain and nearly unanimous in their abhorrence of slavery, which had been banned in British North America a generation earlier. Further, Canadians and Maritimers were geographically closer to the North and for years thousands more had travelled to those Northern states for work than to the distant South. Business people enjoyed more commerce with Northern than Southern industry. Canadians travelling to Britain often went by way of New York and Boston. Despite such
familiarity, however, public and popular opinion of the North and South was divided, volatile and multi-dimensional. It was coloured by class, ethnicity, religion, ideology and region.

Many factors led Canadians to sympathize with the Confederacy. In Canada East, the Catholic Church enjoyed enormous power, but considered itself under attack by popular democratic ideas on the separation of church and state.
⁹
In this fight, American republicanism was anathema. Montreal’s
Gazette
called America the most “immoral” country in the world.
¹⁰
The destruction of the United States through civil war and the Confederacy itself was, consequently, seen as a good thing by the Church hierarchy. Priests often equated Southerners with the Québécois—a beleaguered minority, fighting to preserve a unique way of life threatened by a more politically and economically powerful enemy with no shared cultural values.

In New Brunswick, Fredericton was home to a Protestant majority that was unmoved by anti-Catholic threats. Its physical location in the centre of the province left it somewhat isolated. That it was the capital perhaps made its people more sympathetic to the exhortations of the government and the lieutenant-governor, who were resolutely neutral. The city’s
New Brunswick Reporter
was staunchly pro-North throughout the war.

However, a few miles southeast, on the Fundy Bay, lay the much different Saint John. It was a blatantly pro-South city that recognized the potential of winning business for its port if the United States permanently split. Its Irish-Catholic majority empathized with Southern nationalism and with fighting a distant government. Confederate ships were encouraged to use its harbour, and its spies and recruiters made to feel at home in the city’s hotels and bars. Many rich Southerners who had for years summered nearby moved their families to the fine cottages to escape the ravages of war. They were openly welcomed in the city. In June 1862, hundreds of folks gathered to enjoy a large and boisterous parade celebrating a Confederate victory. Confederate flags flew and a band played “Dixie.” A Maine sea captain was roughed up by the crowd
as police watched but did nothing. A similar parade was held in the border town of St. Andrews.

Halifax, Nova Scotia, was a garrison town that served as Britain’s primary North American port for its enormous and peerless navy. An entrepreneurial spirit pulsed throughout the colony, with its ship manufacturers creating internationally respected wooden vessels and Halifax’s magnificent natural harbour bustling with international trade. The city’s business people enjoyed the profit earned by magnanimously welcoming both Northern ships seeking Confederate blockade runners and the elusive Southerners themselves. In allowing Southern ships free access to Halifax, the city served as an important link in the communication network between the Confederacy and European capitals.

A major factor that shaped, shifted and divided Canadian and Maritime public opinion was Lincoln’s attitude toward that most irrepressible subject: slavery. Abolitionist Canadians and Maritimers suffered widespread disappointment when Lincoln said in his 1861 inaugural address that he would not immediately emancipate American slaves.
¹¹
Even Toronto’s pro-North
Globe
reflected disillusion in an editorial: “At first the sympathies of the British people were unmistakably with the North. They imagined that Mr. Lincoln had determined to wage a war against slavery, and in heart and soul they were with him.”
¹²
The Emancipation Proclamation that followed in September 1862 came after the opinions of many had hardened against the president.

Another factor that gave rise to Confederate sympathies was the unmistakable anti-Canadian and anti-British sentiment that swept up from the North. Lincoln had appointed notorious anglophobe and enemy of Canada, William Seward, to his cabinet. Seward had issued numerous threats of annexation before and during the war, and then a crisis involving the taking of Confederate agents from a British ship called the
Trent
nearly brought war. Many Northern newspapers published damning stories and editorials that openly promoted a hatred of Canada and Canadians, while frequently advocating invasion.
¹³
Many of the anti-Canadian rants were reprinted in Canadian papers. The barrage of
threats and disparagement led to worries that perhaps the Civil War would afford Americans such as Seward, who had for so long dreamt of taking Canada, an opportunity to turn dreams into plans.

The divided sympathies within Canada and the Maritimes were evident in its newspapers and public debates. The
Toronto Leader
was pro-South, while the
Toronto Globe
was pro-North. The
Montreal Gazette
was pro-South, while the
Montreal Witness
was pro-North. The reporting and editorial stances of eighty-four Canadian papers revealed themselves to be obviously pro-South, with only thirty-three pro-North and eight neutral.
¹⁴
A report of the Confederate victory in the war’s first battle elicited a spontaneous cheer in Canada’s legislature.

In the face of political authorities demanding neutrality and non-participation in the war, and despite the complexity of public opinion and the widespread sympathy for the South, many young Canadians and Maritimers left home to fight. Those who did fought overwhelmingly in Union ranks. A letter home from a young man stationed in the trenches facing the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, in 1864 spoke with surprise of how many of his French-speaking countrymen he had met: “You have no idea … of the number of Canadians who are in different army corp. They may be counted not in the hundreds but in the thousands.”
¹⁵
About forty thousand Canadians and Maritimers joined the fight, and the ratio was approximately fifty Canadians in Union regiments for every one in a Confederate regiment.
¹⁶

The service of so many Canadians in America’s duelling armies further split Canadian and Maritime public opinion. It also divided communities and, as in America, fractured families. Nova Scotia’s Norman Wade, for instance, enlisted to serve on Union ships enforcing the blockade. In letters home he told of the many compatriots he had encountered and the divided loyalties they suffered together.
¹⁷
In November 1861, he wrote to his sister: “A schooner was seen working in towards the mouth of the river … the Captain told me to pitch a shot across her course … she proved to be a schooner from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia … some of our officers had the joke on me for firing on my own countrymen.”
¹⁸

Wade’s family, like so many others, carried on a polite but sometimes terse debate through his correspondence. During the 1861
Trent
crisis he wrote to his brother wondering why he and so many Nova Scotians supported the South: “I was not surprised to hear that your sympathies were wholly with the south, and do not see how it is possible, considering the relations we bear the northern people. You say if these million people want freedom they ought to have it, but is it freedom they are fighting for, or are they dupes of designing politicians.”
¹⁹

The beliefs, struggles and dreams of six fascinating people will guide us on our journey of understanding. The highlights of their respective lives, and what they represent in the Civil War era, will offer insight into the most important and overlapping events and ideas that propelled Canada and the United States through the most dangerous period of their histories.

Our first guide is John Anderson. He was a courageous Missouri slave who escaped to freedom in Canada only to find his relentless pursuers unwilling to surrender their prey. His struggle to remain free came to involve international intrigue that angered Northerners, infuriated Southerners and frustrated British leaders. It inspired Canadians to stand up to both British and American pressure. The Anderson case helps us to see the extent to which Canada and the Maritimes played a part in the development of the Southern resentment toward abolitionists. Those iron resentments helped lead to secession and war. Meanwhile, the case sparked nascent Canadian and Maritime notions of greater independence.