Few people have heard of John Anderson, but the fugitive Missouri slave played as significant a role in Canada’s emergence as an independent nation as some of the Fathers of Confederation.
His capture in Brantford, Canada West, by bounty hunters in 1860 sparked an international incident and set the stage for the looming American Civil War. As the Americans and the British squabbled over Anderson’s extradition, Britain’s northern colonies found themselves in what would become a familiar position — caught in the middle and forced to fend for themselves.
John Boyko’s Blood and Daring takes aim at the Civil War’s impact on Canada and recreates a tumultuous decade that witnessed the birth of one country and the near-destruction of another. It was a time, he reminds readers, when border tensions and the mantra of manifest destiny made Americans and colonial Canadians “bad neighbours in a dangerous neighbourhood.”
No one, he writes, “can fully understand Canada without appreciating that the war was an essential factor in the country’s birth, when and how it came about, as well as shaping the fundamental ideas upon which it is based.”
Boyko, an Ontario educator and accomplished historian with four other books to his credit, enlists Anderson and five other “guides” to give this sprawling story a human face. Their personal struggles and triumphs provide the framework for a complex tale of military campaigns and political intrigue.
The group includes John A. Macdonald and George Brown, the political leaders who coaxed four British colonies to unite to stave off annexation or invasion. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state, the aggressive expansionist William Seward, and southerner Jacob Thompson, who oversaw a network of guerrillas and spies out of a Montreal hotel, wear the black hats. Rounding out the cast is Sarah Edmonds, a New Brunswick woman who disguised herself as a man and served in the Union army as a nurse and dispatch rider; while far from the typical soldier, she represents the forty thousand Canadians who enlisted to fight an American war with continental repercussions.
The story of how perilously close Canadians and Maritimers came to being engulfed in a wider conflict between the U.S. North and Britain has been told before, but Boyko injects new life and drama into the narrative for a general audience. He builds on the large body of scholarly work on the era and adds insights gleaned from his own extensive research into the archival record.
The war’s most enduring legacy for Canadians, he reminds us, can be found at the heart of the constitutional structure Macdonald, Brown, and other nation builders hammered out during those dark times. The creation of a strong central government to ensure “peace, order, and good government” was a blunt repudiation of the divisions, chaos, and bloodshed south of the border.
Boyko also explores how those divisions crept north. While Canada was staunchly abolitionist, and most Canadians in uniform fought for the Union, it also harboured rebel agents and blockade runners, and sympathy for the southern cause was widespread. Canadians tired of being bullied by the United States could identify with the underdog Confederacy.
As for John Anderson, a Canadian court eventually blocked his extradition. He embarked on a speaking tour of England before abolitionist supporters dispatched him to a new life in Liberia. His fate, and the fate of the wife and children he left behind in Missouri, is unknown. “They became as lost to history,” notes Boyko, “as they were to each other.”
Blood and Daring ensures Anderson’s story — and the myriad ways the Civil War fostered Canadian nationalism and shaped our constitution — will not be forgotten.
— Dean Jobb (Read bio)
Dean Jobb is author of Empire of Deception (HarperCollins Canada), the untold story of 1920s Chicago swindler Leo Koretz and his escape to a life of luxury in Nova Scotia.