Flashback: Canada's Role in the U.S. Civil War

The Globe and Mail offers up Tim Cook's favorable review of John Boyko's new work Blood and Daring:  How Canada Fought the American Civil War and Forged a Nation.

Some interesting facts re: Canada and the U.S. Civil War:

• 40,000 = # of Canadians who fought in the Civil War.
• 12,000 = # of Civil War Draft dodgers who made Canada home.

But, most interesting, is Boyko's apparent contention that it was during America's bloodiest years that Canada, under John A. Macdonald government, truly became a nation.

From Tim Cook's review:

Relations between Canada and the North were not helped by the open gloating of many Canadians and their newspapers over the fast-collapsing republican experiment to the south. But far more damaging was the harbouring of Confederate terrorists who set up home in various Canadian cities, especially Montreal and Toronto, and then launched cross-border raids.

There were calls throughout the North for American troops to cross the border in retaliatory expeditions and to abrogate trade treaties. Canada barely stood the pressure. While the story here is firmly set in the past, one cannot help but draw parallels to terrorist and border threats in the early 21st century.

Even after the cessation of hostilities in 1865, the threat continued, with Irish-American Fenians storming into Canada in the ludicrous dream of capturing it and holding it ransom so that Britain would be forced to set Ireland free.The raids were enough to topple an anti-Confederation government in New Brunswick and eventually led to that colony entering into Confederation with Nova Scotia, Canada East and Canada West, on July 1, 1867.

Blood and Daring is a fast-paced read, and Boyko skillfully weaves together the complex and conflict-filled Canadian, British and American wartime policy, with John A. Macdonald emerging as the nation-building hero that he was, fending off American threats of annexation and holding off weak-willed British politicians who sought to cut Canada loose. That Canada survived was probably against the odds, but this nation has a habit of doing that.