Blood and Daring will change our views not just of Canada's relationship with the United States, but of the Civil War, Confederation and Canada itself. In Blood and Daring, lauded historian John Boyko makes a compelling argument that Confederation occurred when and as it did largely because of the pressures of the Civil War. Many readers will be shocked by Canada's deep connection to the war—Canadians fought in every major battle, supplied arms to the South, and many key Confederate meetings took place on Canadian soil. Filled with engaging stories and astonishing facts from previously unaccessed primary sources, Boyko's fascinating new interpretation of the war will appeal to all readers of history.

During the American Civil War, Toronto, Montreal, St. Catharines and Halifax welcomed a well-financed network of Confederate spies and adventurers, bringing the war close to home with organized raids on Lake Erie and the border town of St. Albans, Vermont, where Confederate raiders were successfully defended by prominent Quebec politician J.C. Abbott, a future prime minister. Montreal's St. Lawrence Hall Hotel had so many Confederates living there it offered mint juleps on its menu. It also afforded visits by John Wilkes Booth, who made several trips to Toronto as part of an organized plot leading up to the Good Friday 1865 assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.Perhaps the most lasting impact on Canada was Sir John A. Macdonald's conviction that strong states' rights were “the great source of weakness,” which led to the war. That's why Canada emerged in 1867 with a strong federal government-including an unelected Senate-which to this day fosters endless debate between the believers of federal rights and provincial rights.

New edition of a work first published in 1960 under the title Canada and the United States: The Civil War Years by the Johns Hopkins Press. It examines the impact of the American Civil War on Canada, especially on the movement toward Confederation, offers a survey of Canadian public opinion on the war, and discusses the role of Confederate sympathizers in Canada, and the number of Canadians enlisted in the armies of the North and South. A new introduction gives an overview of Civil War studies since 1960. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Dixie & the Dominion is a compelling look at how the U.S. Civil War was a shared experience that shaped the futures of both Canada and the United States. The book focuses on the last year of the war, between April of 1864 and 1865. During that 12-month period, the Confederate States sent spies and saboteurs to Canada on a secret mission. These agents struck fear along the frontier and threatened to draw Canada and Great Britain into the war. During that same time, Canadians were making their own important decisions. Chief among them was the partnership between Liberal reformer George Brown and Conservative chieftain John A. Macdonald. Their unlikely coalition was the force that would create the Dominion of Canada in 1867, and it was the pressure of the war - with its threat to the colonies’ security - that was a driving force behind this extraordinary pact.

Unable to achieve sustained military success in the Civil War, the Confederacy tried a daring strategy in 1864--commando-style raids into northern states from Canada. Taking advantage of the undefended border, rebels hit targets along the Great Lakes, where growing antiwar sentiment was an election-year problem for the Lincoln administration. Revisiting one of the forgotten chapters of the war, this is a deeply-researched history of the South's operations in Canada. One of the most significant raids is covered in detail for the first time: Virginia planter turned Confederate agent John Yates Beall's attempt to liberate 2,700 Confederate officers from a prison camp on Lake Erie.

Presents the history of Montreal, the city, which hosted the Confederacy's largest foreign secret service base during the American Civil War.

In 1863–1864, Confederate naval operations were launched from Canada against America, with an unexpected impact on North America’s future. Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, a myth has persisted that the hijackers entered the United States from Canada. This is completely untrue. Nevertheless, there was a time during the U.S. Civil War when attacks on America were launched from Canada, but the aggressors were mostly fellow Americans engaged in a secessionist struggle. Among the attacks were three daring naval commando expeditions against a prisoner-of-war camp on Johnsons Island in Lake Erie. These Confederate operations on the Great Lakes remain largely unknown. However, some of the people involved did make more indelible marks in history, including a future Canadian prime minister, a renowned Victorian war correspondent, a beloved Catholic poet, a notorious presidential assassin, and a son of the abolitionist John Brown. The improbable events linking these figures constitute a story worth telling and remembering. Rebels on the Great Lakes offers the first full account of the Confederate naval operations launched from Canada in 186364, describing forgotten military actions that ultimately had an unexpected impact on North Americas future.

A 2020 BookAuthority selection for best new American Civil War books Hundreds of thousands of individuals perished in the epic conflict of the American Civil War. As battles raged and the specter of death and dying hung over the divided nation, the living worked not only to bury their dead but also to commemorate them. President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address perhaps best voiced the public yearning to memorialize the war dead. His address marked the beginning of a new tradition of commemorating American soldiers and also signaled a transformation in the relationship between the government and the citizenry through an embedded promise and obligation for the living to remember the dead. In Death at the Edges of Empire Shannon Bontrager examines the culture of death, burial, and commemoration of American war dead. By focusing on the Civil War, the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the Philippine-American War, and World War I, Bontrager produces a history of collective memories of war expressed through American cultural traditions emerging within broader transatlantic and transpacific networks. Examining the pragmatic collaborations between middle-class Americans and government officials negotiating the contradictory terrain of empire and nation, Death at the Edges of Empire shows how Americans imposed modern order on the inevitability of death as well as how they used the war dead to reimagine political identities and opportunities into imperial ambitions.