The Years To Come

I realized yesterday that I had not put a summer header in, and here we are starting to stare down the last weeks of summer. This is taken last year, from a visit to Kiweki Point overlooking the Ottawa River. I have to get back up there sometime soon. 

This part of the exhibit evokes a Blackfoot tipi, with a buffalo hide at its heart.

The Blackfoot tribe had a tradition called the Winter Count, noting the most important event of the year.

In 1874, Canadian and American surveyors marked what is now the border across the West. The Blackfoot homeland became separated on both sides.

These are powwow regalia for boys and girls from the Blackfoot people.

The timeline that started the exhibit winds its way towards its end. In 1872, President Grant was elected to his second term.

The following year saw economic collapse, and its impact on Reconstruction.

Soldiers under George Armstrong Custer found gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1874. It was predictable that speculators would rush in. The Hills were sacred to the Lakota.

Two years later, Custer would lead the 7th Cavalry to a quick death by attacking a force of Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho at the Little Bighorn. The arrogant, reckless, and frankly stupid officer had it coming to him.

With Grant's two terms ending, a new president, Rutherford Hayes, was elected, but only through compromise- it was at the expense of Reconstruction. Federal troops withdrew from occupation positions in the South, Reconstruction was brought to an end, and black people in the South would find themselves subjected to the so called Jim Crow laws in the years to come.

The Civil War had been the defining chapter of American history, and with its aftermath, the country still feels its effects to this day, a century and a half later.

Roar Of The Rifles

 Louis Riel was one of the leaders of the Metis people in the aftermath of the American Civil War. For years, his relationship with the Canadian government was contentious, and indeed he was hung for treason. Today he has been deemed a Father of Confederation for his role in the development of Manitoba.

Closer to home, the post-Civil War years saw a period of raids by Irish-American veterans of the Union. They were called the Fenian Raids, and they involved insertions into Canada. The objective was to hold the country hostage to force the British to give Ireland its independence. Canadian soldiers and militia drove them back each time. Among the casualties of Fenian activists was the Canadian politician Thomas D'Arcy McGee, the most eloquent of the Fathers of Confederation, who had once been a Fenian in his youth before coming to Canada, but was now deemed a traitor by his former comrades for changing his world view and seeing the value of Westminster style Parliamentary democracy.

Both Canadian and American governments put their efforts into expanding west into the territories nominally under their names in the years following the Civil War. The speed in which they did so would lead to other conflicts- with the indigenous peoples already out there.

In 1868, Ulysses S. Grant was elected president. The hero of the Civil War settled into political life. His two terms would be riddled by scandal, generally because of those around him.

The Fifteenth Amendment granted the right to vote to black men.

In 1871, the Treaty of Washington between the United States and Great Britain settled many of the issues from the Civil War. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald represented Canadian interests, and ended up getting pretty much everything he wanted out of the treaty.

A border was now being established in the West, even with people already out there. The Blackfoot tribe would find themselves on both sides of that border.

Linda Manyguns is a contemporary Blackfoot. I listened to her commentary about the period.

Appomattox

 A reminder to members of City Daily Photo that the theme for the first of August is Purple. 

We continue on where we left off yesterday with this look at the Civil War and its influences on Canada.

General Sherman had taken his army across southern countryside in their March to the Sea, destroying Confederate infrastructure as they went. Now as the last months of the Civil War began, Sherman set his sights north, looking to do the same to the Carolinas, and link up with Union forces in Virginia.

The Petersburg siege came to an end in April. General Lee could see no hope of protecting Richmond from the Army of the Potomac, and broke free with what was left of his Army of Northern Virginia, trying to reach supplies further west. Grant and the Union army followed, overtaking the hungry rebels at Appomattox. It was there that Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9th, 1865. That moment in history, the gravity, dignity, and respect of it all between the two generals- that was something I would have liked to have seen.

There were still Confederate forces in the field, but Sherman would soon receive their surrender, showing the same consideration as his friend and commanding general.

Four years of death on an unimaginable scale, a country ripping itself apart. And now it was over. Successive Union generals had blundered into serious mistakes, or failed to capitalize on opportunities, despite having the advantage of numbers and industrial output. Lee had become a legend in the eastern theatre of the war. Until Grant came along; as Shelby Foote said, Grant "knew how to beat Lee and did."

The Union celebrated the end of the war, and victory. Yet mere days after Appomattox, President Lincoln was assassinated on April 14th while attending a play at Ford's Theatre. John Wilkes Booth staged it all as part of a three pronged attack on Union leadership, shooting Lincoln himself while one of his cohorts attacked the Secretary of State and another failed to do his part to kill the Vice President. Booth fled into the night, but would meet his fate soon enough. North and South were shocked. The actions of one angry man still resonate down through history today.

A bust of the great emancipator. I would have thought this was part of an American collection, but in fact it is part of the collection at the Canadian Museum of History.

Time moved along. The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, entrenching the end of slavery into the Constitution.

Two years later, the United States acquired Alaska from Russia. The new Canadian government, fresh off Confederation, saw this as territorial designs and a reason to consolidate the West.

The Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing citizenship rights and protection under the law to the formerly enslaved and their families, was passed by 1868.

Canadian federal concerns about what the Union would now do without a war made them look west to ensure that the western territories wouldn't get gobbled up by Americans. And out west, among the indigenous tribes, was one group of people, the Metis. They were a blend of indigenous and French that had become a distinct culture on their own. Based largely in what is now Manitoba, they had their own ideas about their place inside Canada, and their relationship to the federal government. In time, that would lead to violence.

This display case includes the vivid craftsmanship of Metis peoples.

Campaigns

 Returning to where I left off with the exhibit on the Civil War.

A Union soldier had his upper arm shattered by a minie bullet at the Second Battle of Bull Run in 1862. It was amputated a few days later.

When U.S. Grant headed east to take command of all Union armies early in 1864, he left the western theatre under the command of his old friend, William Tecumseh Sherman. It was Sherman who would start driving into the deep south, later saying that war is hell. He systematically dismantled the infrastructure wherever he went, launching an assault on Atlanta.

Grant came east, assuming command over all land forces of the Union. He took the Army of the Potomac and advanced on Richmond, which had no value for him, but which he knew Lee had to defend. A series of ferocious battles at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor ensued, each of them losses. However, Grant kept his army moving. From the moment he took command, Grant seized the initiative and was making the rules of engagement. All Lee could do was respond.

By this point in the war, Canadian leaders were actively discussing uniting as a whole in response to the Civil War. 

By June 1864, the Petersburg siege began in Virginia. The railhead town, south of Richmond, became the last stand for Lee's army. Grant set in for a siege- something he was very good at. With new troops and supplies being shipped in, it was just a matter of time.

Sherman captured and burned Atlanta, and then proceeded on his march to the sea, leaving a swath of destruction on the way to Savannah.

Canadian leaders had started on the road to Confederation, recognizing that they would have to stand together to counter threats from south of the border. In discussing visions of the future, they also recognized the problems south of the border that had been part of the road to the Civil War, and decided they would not make the same mistakes.

This stonework is from the original Centre Block.

This is the throne of the Governor-General at the time when Confederation was being seriously discussed as a concept. Concerns about the intentions of the Union once the war would end drove Canadian leaders to work together. A stronger federal government was seen as key to establishing a new country, something the Americans had failed to do after the Revolution.