Historian Barry Sheehy looks at the historical links between Montreal and the Confederate past of the United States.
Did you know ? For 60 years, a commemorative plaque celebrating the feats of arms of a Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, adorned one of the exterior walls of the La Baie store in downtown Montreal before being discreetly removed in 2017 from the view of passers-by. However, we learned from this bronze plaque that the slave-owning president had settled in the city for several years after the defeat of the American South.
In the surprising work Montreal, nest of spies by Barry Sheehy, finally available in French, we also learn that the former deposed president who became for a time persona non grata in the United States had not chosen the Canadian metropolis by chance to take refuge there with his women and children. Surprisingly, from 1860 onwards, the metropolis had opened its arms wide to a range of southern personalities – refugees, mercenaries, spies, killers and smugglers – while establishing itself as one of the strongholds for the Confederate secret services during the Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865.
“The largest Confederate Secret Service headquarters outside of Richmond [en Virginie] was in Montreal,” writes the historian, a native of the Quebec metropolis, in a well-crafted work that draws on an impressive number of sources. His book, full of details, is enriched with vintage photos by the famous photographer William Notman.
Among the “disastrous” visitors, note the arrival of John Wilkes Booth before he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln several months later. A certain number of archival documents brought out of the shadows by the historian indicate a stay in Montreal in October 1864, notably at the distinguished St. Lawrence Hall, an old hotel which became a real headquarters for Confederate militants, such as Captain P . C Martin, who unsuccessfully planned a series of attacks in the heart of New York.
It is also in this place that Booth would have met with the greatest discretion Confederate leaders and other influential southerners. “There is a huge amount of circumstantial and material evidence that points to Montreal as the place where the plot against the president was coordinated and financed,” reveals the historian.
The essayist, who has written several stories on the Civil War, meticulously dissects the ideological sympathies of the Anglo-Montreal elite towards the southerners during the American Civil War. At the time, even if the Canadian population, including French-speakers, lined up in large numbers behind the union and the fight of American abolitionists, the loyalists and the British colonial power were suspicious of Washington. The latter were generally favorable to the Confederate States. An entire organization, often illicit, would have been set in motion through the banking institutions of the metropolis in order to finance clandestine activities in the hope of destabilizing the northern economy.