Thread:ML4E/@comment-21519-20140213213414/@comment-21519-20140214005814

There was a LOT going on in Montreal, so it's hard to say, but a couple of people connected to the assassination blew through there at different points, though never Booth himself. (He was playing one of the theaters on Broadway when the Greek Fire attack happened.) So much monkey business went on in Montreal, with the authorities unable or unwilling to put a stop to it, that it was the single greatest contributing factor to the deterioration in Anglo-American relations in this period, more so than the Trent or the blockade running or the warships built in England or anything else. It led directly to the abrogation of a free trade agreement which knocked the Canadian economy into a recession, and to the remilitarization of the Great Lakes in violation of an 1817 treaty (which the US Navy had already been largely ignoring for some time). According to Boyko, the fallout from these two broken treaties led to a feeling of desperation in Quebec City and the Maritimes which forced a lot of strange bedfellows together. Since the pre-Confederation political system made it ridiculously easy to obstruct important constitutional business, getting all the power brokers pulling together was a must.

There were indeed Canadians in both armies, but their numbers in the Confederate ranks were tiny. Most Canadians in the Union army and navy had already been living in the US for some time before the war started, though some were seduced to come south by offers of large bounties and a handful were taken by force by unscrupulous recruiters. Also, during the Trent affair, London sent nine regiments to reinforce the border of British North America, but it was a miserable posting. Add to that misery the facts that the US Army paid more than the British and that Washington was desperate for professional soldiers in the first year of the war, and a surprisingly large number of British soldiers defected. In one case an entire company was whittled down to zero within a few weeks.

As I said, lots of good info in this book. I just wish it were written more compellingly; reading it feels like something of a slog.