Canada during the American Civil War
Relations between Canada and the United States during the American Civil War were complex. What is now Canada was then the Province of Canada and the colonies which included British Columbia and Vancouver in the west, and Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick in the east, all of which comprised British North America. Officially the British and their provinces and colonies did not recognize the Confederacy and were neutral in what was an internal dispute among the Americans. Unofficially the British and many Canadians sympathized with the Confederacy, despite its support of slavery.
Confederate agents operated in Canada throughout the war. Much of the press in the Eastern cities of Canada decried the war as being an aggression of the north, and supported the argument of the southern states that they had the right to secede from the Union. The diplomatic crisis over the Trent Affair, in which Union officials removed Confederate diplomats from a British ship, led to the deployment of 14,000 British troops to eastern Canada. The expense of the deployment in turn helped lead to the unification of the British possessions in North America. Unification would defray the cost of defending each colony individually.
Confederate blockade runners used Halifax as both a place to sell their cargoes of cotton and rice and to repair their ships, a clear violation of the neutrality laws which the government in London ignored. CSS Tallahassee, a ship commissioned in the Confederate Navy, entered Halifax Harbor on one commerce raiding cruise. Tallahassee had captured or destroyed 33 ships and was pursued by Union Navy vessels. Using a local harbor pilot, Tallahassee escaped through a little used channel, evaded capture, and returned to Wilmington, North Carolina. Diplomatic protests over the incident – Tallahassee had been allowed to remain in Halifax twelve hours longer than neutrality law allowed – were dismissed on a technicality.
The St. Albans raid was planned by Confederate agents in Montreal. Twenty-one Confederate cavalry troops checked into hotels in St. Albans before robbing three of the town’s banks and attempting to burn the town (their pyrotechnic devices failed) They then fled back to Canada. Canadian officials arrested them at the demands of US authorities but a judge refused to extradite them back to the United States. The judge decided that they were soldiers acting under orders of their superiors and not criminals. They were set free.
Not all of the actions by Canadians were in support of the Confederacy, up to 55,000 Canadians served in the Union Army, many of them recruited in Canada, while others had already taken up residence in the United States. More than two dozen won the Medal of Honor. In a precursor to a much later war, Canada offered refuge to draft dodgers and deserters from the Union Army, despite US protests. Canada also provided refuge to escaped Confederate prisoners of war, which was legal under the Neutrality Law. The overall perception of the Union was that British North America, like Britain itself, aided the Confederacy, and the Union demand for reparations following the war dominated Anglo- American relations for years.