John Baird: Canada's freedom agenda - Diplomat Magazine

DELIGHTS|BOOKSHow Anglo-American diplomacy averted ‘world war’george fetherlingAs we begin to observe the bicentenaryof the War of 1812, it’s hardto miss the importance of a passageon the very first page (the first of 958)in Amanda Foreman’s impressive newbook A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Rolein the American Civil War (Random Houseof Canada, $40). One legacy of that war,she writes, summarizing the political anddiplomatic mood of London in the decadebefore the Civil War, was the fear that theUnited States would invade Canada (for athird time). The anxiety was partly in responseto “a conviction among Americansthat they should never stop trying” to dojust that. But there was a second factor aswell. Forty years had passed but it “wasneither forgiven nor forgotten in Englandthat precious ships and men had had to bediverted from the desperate war againstNapoleon Bonaparte in order to defendCanada.”Dr. Foreman, an English-reared residentof New York, educated at Sarah LawrenceCollege and Oxford, has written a masterfuland exciting one-volume history of theCivil War itself, with all its gore and (apopular Civil War concept) glory. Yet she’sdone far more than that. She focuses onhow old-fashioned diplomacy preventedwhat could have been a world war ofsorts, as the British Empire took up onequarter of the global land mass. The heartof the matter was the familiar possibilitythat the Northern government would annexCanada, as the U.S. secretary of state,William H. Seward, kept insisting it do.That would have had the effect of bringingBritain into the war as a Southern ally. Thecooler head of Abraham Lincoln soughtnothing of the kind, famously saying “Onewar at a time.” The British too had nowish for such an outcome. The situation,however, came to a boiling point several60In only two years at sea, the Confederate raider Alabama, powered by both canvas andsteam, sailed the Atlantic and Pacific top to bottom, while also going as far afield as SouthAfrica and the Indian Ocean.times, thanks to the intrigues of Confederatediplomats in Canada, Britain andFrance.In Canada, there were Confederate representativesposted to Halifax, Montrealand Toronto. They were mere “commissioners”because the South wasn’t recognizedby any other country and so had noembassies or ambassadors. These Canadiancommissioners didn’t work togetherterribly well (one reason being that theydidn’t all report to the same branch of theConfederate government in Richmond).Even individually they were not quitesuccessful, despite having a secret fundof a million dollars in gold: a tremendousamount of money for a government that,throughout the war, had difficulty evenkeeping its soldiers clothed and shod.The commissioners’ plans to encourageanti-war sentiment in the North andexecute a series of clandestine raids intoU.S. territory were generally unworkable,though one venture — a raid on the townof St. Albans, Vermont — was successfulenough that it didn’t end in ludicrousfailure. The success rate, however, didn’tmatter so much as the fact that such eventstook place at all. By permitting them toproceed, Britain seemed to have assumedan ambiguous if not downright passiveattitude to its own neutrality laws. ManyBritish and British colonial subjects livingin the Northern states got caught up invarious drafts while the towns along theU.S.-Canada border were full of officialrecruiters, as well as “crimpers” who impressedinnocent fellows into service inWINTER 2012 | JAN-FEB-MAR