John A (30 page)

Four months before that election was held, a single mortar shot fired on the morning of April 12, 1861, had signalled the start of the bombardment of the small federal garrison in an unfinished
fort, Fort Sumter, at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. A day and a half later, the garrison's commander, Major Robert Anderson, surrendered to the Confederate commander, Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard. One of the most bloody, brutal and tragic of civil wars in history had begun. It would go on for four relentless years. Out of it would come a totally different America, pulsating with energy, confidence and drive, never pausing on its way first to industrial supremacy and thereafter to military and geopolitical supremacy. Out of it too would come a radically different Canada. The crisis that could dislodge everyone from their fixed positions had happened at last.

Interior of the badly damaged Fort Sumter by John Kay ( 1863 ). From out of the Civil War came a transformed United States and also a transformed Canada.

 

FIFTEEN

Canada's First Anti-American

Long may that principle—the Monarchial principle—prevail in this land. Let there be “No Looking to Washington.” John A. Macdonald

F
or the premier of a country whose next-door neighbour had just been convulsed by a murderous domestic conflict, Macdonald's reaction to the start of the American Civil War was remarkably calm. Through the balance of 1861, he made no comments about the war in any of his letters. For quite a time, his principal concern was only the war's potential effect on Canadian politics. In his June 1861
Address to the Electors of the City of Kingston,
Macdonald put forth this analysis: “The fratricidal conflict now unhappily raging in the United States shows us the superiority of our institutions and of the principle on which we are based. Long may that principle—the Monarchial principle—prevail in this land. Let there be ‘No Looking to Washington,' as was threatened by a leading member of the opposition.”

As was by no means always the case, there was actually some validity to Macdonald's accusation. In the legislature, a leading Grit, William McDougall, had blurted out that unless Rep by Pop
was enacted, he and other populists might look southwards for support. A jugular having been offered up to him, Macdonald went straight for it. During that summer's election, a crowd of six hundred Conservatives at Whitby burned McDougall in effigy, as the figure's straw-filled hand held up a placard reading, “Look to Washington.” The Conservatives hurried out a pamphlet warning of “Clear Grit treason.”

The start of hostilities at Charleston came as no great surprise to Macdonald. Close observers of the U.S. scene—so far as Canadians were concerned that really meant the British ambassador in Washington—had long regarded Southern secession as all but inevitable, particularly since the Supreme Court's famous, and infamous, 1857 Dred Scott ruling in favour of the legality of slavery. Overwhelmingly, Northerners refused to accept this judgment. The remaining issue became whether the North would allow the South to secede. This choice was determined by the victory in the November 1860 presidential election of the comparatively little-known Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln, who, although not prepared—yet—to free the slaves, was committed to an “indivisible union.” Soon after Lincoln's election, Southern senators and congressmen streamed out of Washington. The new Southern Confederacy was proclaimed on February 11, 1861. Lincoln dismissed the secession as “legally void” and declared that the federal government would maintain control over all military installations throughout the country. Lincoln's policy was blown to pieces by the Confederate guns at Fort Sumter.

William Seward, U.S. secretary of state. A strong annexationist, he believed that Canada would sooner or later join the United States peacefully and passively, like a “ripe fruit.”

During this period, Macdonald expressed no opinions about Lincoln in his private correspondence. (In a later letter, of November 1864, he referred to Lincoln as “a beast,” but in a jokey way, his full comment being that, for Canada's sake, “Abe Lincoln, beast as he is, should be elected.”) The prevailing Canadian view
about Lincoln was conveyed by the
Globe
's dismissal of him as “a fourth-rate lawyer.”
^*85
Canadian insiders, though, regarded Lincoln as a plus. That wasn't because of Lincoln's as yet-untested qualities, but rather those of William Seward, the politician who, most unexpectedly, had lost the Republican presidential nomination to Lincoln. Seward, a former New York senator, able and supremely confident, a man likened to “a huge bird chiseled in stone,” now became secretary of state rather than president.

He was also an unabashed annexationist—and an astute one. He espoused the “ripe fruit” doctrine, which held that Canada would fall naturally from Britain's grasp into the handily available and incomparably more attractive basket of the United States.
^†86
coded telegram to Governor General Head warning that “a sudden declaration of war by the United States against Great Britain appears to me by no means impossible.” The
New York Times
declared that Canada's union with the North was a certainty, and the New York
Herald
reassured readers there would be “no necessity for hostilities,” because Canadians themselves overwhelmingly favoured annexation. Offstage, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, talked up the advantages to the North of letting go the South in exchange for getting Canada. Ambiguous evidence exists suggesting that, in London, William Gladstone, then the chancellor of the Exchequer, may have been considering the same kind of swap to head off a possible war between Britain and the United States.
^*87
The ire of Americans had been raised by Britain's declaration of neutrality, meaning that it treated the South as a legitimate belligerent.

About the Civil War itself, Canadian public opinion was deeply divided. Taverns became meeting places for either pro-Northerners or pro-Southerners. (One bar in Montreal served mint juleps.) Anti-slavery sentiments were strong, led by George Brown, who penned denunciatory editorials in the
Globe
and donated generously to organizations that looked after runaway slaves. The historian Sidney Wise has observed astutely that Canadians didn't so much favour one side or the other, but rather were either anti-South or anti-North. The South was slave country, yet it had a British social quality to it and was a safe distance away. Canadians knew the North quite well, many had worked
there, and some forty thousand enlisted in the Northern armies, for the pay or for the excitement.
^*88
It was the North, though, that threatened Canada. A song sung by Union soldiers to the tune of “Yankee Doodle” included the lines: “Secession first he would put down / Wholly and forever, / And afterwards from Britain's crown / He Canada would sever.”

As a conservative and a believer in hierarchy, and one who was always silent on the slavery issue, Macdonald appears to have favoured the South. At the war's start, he expected the South to succeed in its attempt to break away: “If they [Americans] are to be severed in two, as severed in two I believe they will be,” he said in the legislature in his first post–Fort Sumter speech on April 19, 1861, “they will be two great, two noble, two free nations [that] will exist in the place of one.” And his principal concern was always the North. He wrote to a friend that all the Canadians who had joined the Northern armies “will return to Canada sadder and wiser men, with a good deal of military experience that they may perhaps be able to use hereafter against their teachers.” His public stance, though, was always strict neutrality. When, early on, some Conservative members cheered the news of the Southern victory at the First Battle of Bull Run, Macdonald angrily silenced them.

By the fall of 1861, it appeared that the cross-border threat had passed. The North, now losing engagement after engagement, could not risk a wider war. As well, Britain that summer hurried over an extra two thousand troops, deliberately doing so in the most public possible way by transporting them in
Great
Eastern,
the world's largest steamship.
^*89
As always, the unexpected then happened.

On November 8, 1861, the U.S. warship
San Jacinto
came upon the Royal Mail steamship
Trent
in the Bahamas Channel. On information received from federal spies in Havana, its last port of call, but without any orders from Washington, the
San Jacinto
's commander, Captain Charles Wilkes, forced the
Trent
to stop and sent marines aboard; they found there, and brought back to their own ship, two Confederate officials who were on their way to England to order supplies and arrange for them to be brought back by blockade runners. This action was outright piracy on the high seas. The Northern newspapers, delighted to have even a small victory to report, cheered, and Wilkes was celebrated at public dinners. Canadian newspapers, naturally loyal to Britain, answered with outrage. Even if limited in itself, the affair was the most serious diplomatic incident between the United States and Britain since the War of 1812. As the giants glared at each other, Canadians, caught in between, could only blink nervously.

Sometimes, bad communications can lead to good decision making. The news took three weeks to reach London. Another three weeks passed before the British government's official response—a demand for the release of the prisoners and for a formal apology—reached Washington. By this time, heads in the White House had begun to cool. After fierce cabinet debates,
Lincoln ruled, “one war at a time.” With deft timing, the Confederate pair was released around Christmas, when the newspapers were distracted; just as deftly, the Imperial government “forgot” that it had ever called for an apology. By luck, Alexander Tilloch Galt, Macdonald's finance minister, was then in Washington to discuss trade matters; he got an unexpected call to come to the White House; there, Lincoln reassured the visiting Canadian that he and the Northern government had no hostile intentions towards their neighbour. The assurance only partially reassured, because both Macdonald and Galt remained worried that public opinion might yet force Lincoln to take precipitate action.

That risk did exist. The New York
World
pronounced, “The simple fact is, Canada hates us.” More threatening still was the Cleveland
Leader
's declaration that, in a reference to the vast Northern Armies, “six hundred thousand men will want something more to do” once they had done with the South. To placate his public, Lincoln ruled that all visitors to the United States would henceforth have to carry passports, a rule that hit Canadians by far the hardest. Fortunately, American public opinion cooled quickly, and the passport regulation was quietly lifted.

On first hearing the news of the
Trent
crisis, the British cabinet had decided that a show of force had to be made. Some eleven thousand additional redcoats were rushed out. By the time the ships had reached the St. Lawrence, the freeze-up had begun. The boats hurriedly swung round to Saint John, where the soldiers disembarked. Using a kind of snowshoes called “creepers,” they marched over the snowbound, hilly roads of New Brunswick to the St. Lawrence River. Britain had done its bit; it was now Canada's turn.