Blood and Daring (10 page)

Meanwhile, Macdonald’s request relating to the independence of Canada’s courts was taken to Westminster. In March 1862, the British government passed the
Habeas Corpus
Act, which rendered it illegal for Britain to issue writs in Canada. The Anderson case had thus led to the taking of major step toward Canadian nationhood.

John Anderson stayed in England and continued to live and attend classes in England. A year later, in 1862, the American Civil War was grinding into its second year, and Anderson’s draw as a speaker, a role at which he was never especially adept, had waned. He was no longer needed to make a point or further a cause. Without consulting Anderson, British abolitionists arranged for him to be given land in and free passage to Liberia, the west-African nation created to provide a home for ex-slaves. Its capital, Monrovia, was named after the American president.

On December 22, 1862, Anderson delivered his last speech. As always, he ended with the mournful hope that he might again see his family. The next day he was aboard the steamer
Armenian
, bound for Cape Palmas. There are no records of him in Liberia; nor are there records of his wife, Marie, or their children in Missouri. They became as lost to history as they were to each other.

Found, however, was the South’s determination to save its soul through fighting for its independence, while in the North a new president demanded more risk and sacrifice than the country had ever mustered to deny that independence. Also discovered in the shadow of that titanic struggle was Canada’s soul—un-American, British; modestly but stubbornly Canadian. The question was whether, stuck between
the angry giants, Britain and America, Canada could survive long enough to save that soul by bringing about its own creation. If William Seward had his way, it would not. He was just about to be given the power he needed to prevent it.

2
 
WILLIAM SEWARD AND THE POWER OF DIVIDED LOYALTIES

A
BRAHAM
L
INCOLN WAS AN
exceptionally skilled communicator who was often most lucid when saying nothing at all. For weeks after becoming president-elect in November 1860, he was nearly silent. He remained at his modest home in Springfield, Illinois. He granted a few interviews and spoke with many people who were eager to offer advice or seek jobs, but said nothing on the main issues of the day, most specifically on the fact that his country was falling apart.

Among the many decisions that Lincoln made in those first weeks after his election was who would form his cabinet. He decided upon men who would bring talent and experience to their jobs while reuniting the Republican Party. For secretary of state, Lincoln chose William Seward. Seward was intelligent, well-read, well-travelled and widely respected for his knowledge of international affairs, which had been developed and reflected in his service as an influential member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Despite his many strengths, and even before Lincoln swore upon the Bible in March 1861, Seward became one of the most dangerous men in the world.

Seward was a fit and feisty man who enjoyed a hearty laugh and nothing more than long dinner parties that served raucous stories and juicy gossip along with eleven sumptuous courses and fine wines. He puffed a dozen Havana cigars a day, which he had imported two thousand at a time.

Seward had served in the New York legislature, as governor, and then as one of his state’s senators in Washington. He was hard-working and a brilliant political strategist. Seward was also a staunch abolitionist who, in welcoming fugitive slaves to his Auburn, New York, mansion, was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. He narrowly missed being nominated as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate in 1856. Four years later he won the party’s first two ballots for that nomination before Lincoln surprised nearly everyone by taking it on the third.

Seward had toured Britain in 1833 and then Britain, Europe and the Near East for seven months in 1859. In 1857, he set out on a tour of Canada. With influential journalist Francis Blair and several political friends, he marvelled at the crashing cascades of Niagara Falls, spent time in Toronto and enjoyed fishing at Lake Ontario’s picturesque Thousand Islands. Joined by his son Frederick and wife, Anna, Seward chartered a small boat for an invigorating stint to Labrador. While admiring Labrador’s spectacular vistas, he was moved to record in his journal that Canada was “a region grand enough for the seat of a great empire.”
¹
But he was no friend of Canada. The empire he had in mind was American.

Seward was an unapologetic supporter of Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States should and would someday own or control all of North America. He saw territorial expansion as an essential element of America’s economic development. In line with that vision of peaceful, relentless, commercial growth, he believed that Canada should someday become part of the United States. He held no compunction about telling people in public and private that he would do all he could to see it happen.
²
But he was patient. In 1855, for instance, he helped shepherd the Reciprocity Treaty through the Senate, creating a free trade arrangement between the United States and Canada. He spoke of increased economic integration as the first step toward eventual annexation. He said: “I
would not seize in haste, and force the fruit, which ripening in time, will fall of itself into our hands.… I have shown you then that a continent is to be peopled, and even distant islands to be colonized, by us.”
³
His endgame made itself brazenly apparent in an 1860 speech at St. Paul, Minnesota, when he addressed Canadians directly: “It is very well you are building states to be hereafter admitted to the American union.”
⁴

A number of British political and civil society leaders had met Seward and were not impressed. On his 1859 trip to England he had insulted all those at a reception held in his honour by observing that absurdly high prices for art and books were probably a reflection of the willingness of upper-class English snobs to pay too much for just about anything. In a conversation with
London Times
journalist William Howard Russell, he had repeated his designs on Canada and blustered that Britain should not threaten the United States for, “A contest between Great Britain and the United States would wrap the world in fire, and at the end it would not be the United States which would have to lament the results of the conflict.”
⁵

In October 1860, the Duke of York and Britain’s colonial secretary, the Duke of Newcastle, had visited Seward. It was part of the royal tour that had caused such embarrassment and political trouble for John A. Macdonald in Kingston. During the meeting, Seward announced boldly that he would make full use of insults to Britain to help the American domestic situation. The Duke of Newcastle reported the conversation to the British cabinet and also warned Canadian governor general, Sir Edmund Head.
⁶
Newcastle found Seward’s comments and attitude distressing, but guessed that Seward would stop short of war. After Lincoln’s election, Britain’s secretary of war, Sir George Cornwall Lewis, offered what became the consensus opinion among Britain’s political leaders who were suspicious of American democracy, the untested president and the belligerent Seward: “The Washington government is violent and unscrupulous but it is not insane.”
⁷

In February 1861, Seward invited Lord Richard Lyons, Britain’s minister to the United States, to his home to discuss what he saw as an unacceptable threat. Lyons had served in a number of diplomatic posts
with his father since 1839, and had been appointed to Washington in 1859. He had arrived in April knowing little about America yet firmly believing in the superiority of Britain, Britons, and the British parliamentary system. Like many of his contemporaries, he saw American democracy as beholden to the mob power of the uninformed majority, and most political leaders as lacking the education and breeding necessary to rule.
⁸

Besides these philosophical differences, he and Seward could not have had more divergent personalities. Where Seward was effusive and extroverted, Lyons was shy, disdained displays of emotion, and seldom met people’s eyes. He was a cold and officious man who disliked the social aspects of his job and later bragged about not having delivered a speech or sipped a drink the entire time he was in Washington. A non-smoker, Lyons suffered through meetings in rooms reeking of Seward’s ever-present cigar smoke. His Victorian priggishness and unwillingness to establish personal contacts sometimes led to a failure to appreciate context. He seemed to confuse American patriotism for arrogance and confidence for aggression. Lyons’s suspicion of Seward, at least at the beginning of their professional relationship, blinded him to the clever tactics the wily secretary of state was employing in the pursuit of a greater strategy. Lyons grew to like Seward, but he never really understood him.
⁹

Seward told Lyons that Britain must stay out of American domestic affairs and, no matter what might happen, it could never recognize the Confederacy or meet with Southern commissioners. Seward stated bluntly that if Britain ignored these directives, then the United States would respond with a war that would involve an immediate invasion of Canada. The war would actually be helpful, he said, because all Americans, even those in rebellion, would rally around the flag and in a patriotic fervour directed against Europe, forget old grudges and reunite.
¹⁰

Lyons had no way of knowing whether Seward was speaking for Lincoln, and believed that he was not bluffing. He wrote to British foreign secretary, Lord John Russell, on February 12 stating: “Some of the leaders of the party which is about to come into power are on the lookout for a foreign dispute in the hope that they should rekindle the fire of
the patriotism both in the North and the South.”
¹¹
Britain and France began to work together, assuming that, while the United States might declare a diversionary war on one of them, it would not be so foolish as to initiate a conflict with both. Lyons was not so sure. He wrote a number of increasingly desperate notes to London, declaring Seward a dangerous demagogue with designs on Britain that ran through Canada.
¹²
He became convinced that Seward was spoiling for a diversionary war to end the Civil War or, failing that, that if the South were somehow lost, then the annexation of Canada might be apt compensation.
¹³

Canada was a sitting duck. Its forts and harbour defences had been left in a sorrowful state since the War of 1812. There were not nearly enough soldiers to guard the long American border, let alone defend it should an attack come. Responding to tension with the United States in the mid-1850s and with troops freed up by the end of the Crimean War, Britain had increased its military presence in Canada a little, but by 1860 there were still only about 4,300 British regulars stationed mostly in Canada East and West and in Nova Scotia. Augmenting that meagre number were Canadian volunteer militia. Every male between sixteen and sixty was a member of a militia company and had to devote two weekends a year to military training. Intentions were often good, but absenteeism was widespread. The training was mostly useless if it happened at all. British soldiers scoffed at the Canadian Sedentary Militia in which many men drank more than drilled. In addition, about 8,500 paid Active Militia could be called on in a time of emergency. They met for two to three weeks a year, and their training was somewhat more strenuous but, like the militia units, their equipment was antiquated and their dedication questionable.