A Canada Day Connection

The following article was copied directly out of the Toronto Star (without permission) because I thought it was so interesting. I had never before made a connection between Canada's Confederation in 1867 and the US Civil War. John Boyko of Lakefield, Ontario has made a strong case for such a tie. It's something to ponder, with Canada Day fast approaching.

How the U.S. Civil War led to ‘birth of Canada’
By: Jim Coyle News, Published on Mon Jun 10 2013       

   

Simon Spivey / Courtesy of Knopf Canada

Many people don’t believe that Canada had any role in the Civil War,” says John Boyko. His new book is Blood and Daring: How Canada Fought the American Civil War and Forged a Nation.

 

On one of the annual trips he led for his Lakefield, Ont., high-school students to Washington, D.C., and the blood-sanctified soil of Gettysburg, John Boyko came away with the most wonderful of souvenirs. A friend. And an idea.
 

It was in the early 1990s, he recalled last week in an interview with the Star, that he met a Gettysburg guide named Ed Guy. “Ed Guy the guide,” Boyko laughs. “He was the guy who made Gettysburg come alive” for the students.
 

For Boyko, a teacher, historian and currently an administrator at Lakefield College School, Guy also brought Gettysburg closer to home than most Canadians would imagine possible. “He came out with this little pamphlet, a very small pamphlet, that listed Canadians at Gettysburg,” Boyko recalls“And I said, ‘Well, that’s fascinating. I didn’t know there were any Canadians at Gettysburg.’ And that got me interested in it. As I was reading more about it, I thought, ‘Wow, Canada was involved way more than I thought.’ ”
 

For the last two decades, even while researching other books, the subject enthralled him. Now, in time for the 150th anniversary of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, and thanks to the seed planted by Ed Guy, Boyko tells the story of how influential he believes the U.S. Civil War to have been on Canada in his new book Blood and Daring: How Canada Fought the American Civil War and Forged a Nation.
 

“Many people don’t believe that Canada had any role in the Civil War,” Boyko says. In fact, 40,000 Canadians fought in it (at a ratio of roughly 50 in northern regiments for every one in a Confederate regiment). Twenty-nine Canadians won the Congressional Medal of Honor in the Civil War. Canadian Civil War vets are buried in Arlington National Cemetery. “Standing in the honour guard with Ulysses S. Grant when Robert E. Lee surrendered was a Canadian,” says Boyko.
 

While the fighting was done south of the border, a good deal of scheming, planning and fundraising was done on this side, he says. Confederate meetings were held in Canada, arms were supplied from this side of the border, and Canadians profited from the war through the traffic of both warring sides in its maritime ports.
 

Birth of Canada
 

Most significantly, Boyko argues, Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, used the war to leverage both the timing and manner of Canada’s Confederation, and to demonstrate how important it was to create our own system, different from the U.S.
 

“It wouldn’t have come about when it did or how it did if the Civil War wasn’t around,” Boyko says. “The Civil War was really responsible for the rebirth of the United States and the birth of Canada.”
 

Perhaps in a nod to the inspiration of Ed Guy down in Gettysburg, Boyko spins the tale through the experience of six key “guides” — the likes of Sir John A., newspaperman and legislator George Brown, Confederate agent and head of the south’s so-called “Canadian cabinet,” Jacob Thompson, and fugitive slave John Anderson, who had made his way to Canada from Missouri along the Underground Railroad.
 

Anderson’s story in the years just before war broke out is particularly pivotal. After escaping the U.S., he was eventually arrested near Brantford and the original Missouri warrant issued on his escape was used by the Americans to reclaim him via extradition. But after labyrinthine legal proceedings, played out at Toronto’s Osgoode Hall and elsewhere, Anderson was freed. And the Underground Railroad rolled on.
 

“The determination of this judge of whether to allow John Anderson to be extradited to the States or not was the entire future of the Underground Railroad,” Boyko says. “If they sent him back, it meant Americans could come up and arrest and take back every one of the blacks who were here as a result of the Underground Railroad and that would end it.
 

“So Canada was involved in the Civil War because we were involved in the Underground Railroad even before the Civil War began.”
 

Toronto rebel hotel
 

After the fighting broke out, much Confederate activity went on in Canada under the leadership of Jacob Thompson. In Toronto, the centre of Confederate activity was the Queen’s Hotel, which occupied the land now home to the Royal York; in Montreal, it was the St. Lawrence Hall. In Halifax, locals gave aid and succour to either side willing to pay the freight. “One of the people who was doing that was a guy called Alexander Keith,” says Boyko, “who we know for other reasons now.”
 

“(Thompson) sent raids down into the United States. They burned down part of New York City at one point; they set fires simultaneously to a number of theatres and hotels up and down Broadway. They tried to help (Confederate) prisoners at a camp in Sandusky, Ohio, escape. They disrupted the Republican national convention in Chicago that was going to get Lincoln renominated.”
 

Boyko concludes that, while the War of 1812 was more of a British colonial war than a Canadian war, the Civil War — in its consequences — “was very much a Canadian war.”
 

“Britain at that time had had enough of us,” he says. “We really had to stand up, unite ourselves to save ourselves. Therefore, if we’re going to look at a war responsible for the creation of Canada, it was the Civil War.”
 

In Boyko’s telling, the pivotal decision for both the United States and Canada about what each was to become as a people “was made at precisely the same time. The Americans had to decide whether they would live up to their creed: ‘Are all men created equal or are they not? Will we live as one country or will we split into many?’
 

“And Canada at that point, as a direct result of the Civil War and the threats (of U.S. expansionists) that were being made on Canada through the Civil War, had to decide: ‘Will we become Americans, because it would have been dead easy? Or will we defend ourselves by becoming Canadians?’”
 

Some American historians have been as surprised as Canadians likely will be to learn of this country’s involvement in the Civil War, the author says.
 

Boyko asked to send an early draft to Prof. James McPherson at Princeton University, a leading Civil War historian. “He said, ‘This is a hole, this is a gap that needs work done.’
 

“I think the Americans are in for as much of a surprise as Canadians are,” Boyko says. “I think Canadians who are not immersed in history will be absolutely shocked by what an enormous role the Civil War played in forming Canada.”
 

As for Ed Guy the guide? Naturally, Boyko sent him a copy. “He’s seen it. And he loves it.”