Casualties

 Music was part of life during the Civil War. North and South, regiments had at least some members with the pipes and drums who kept things going on the march. Canadians were among them.

Calixa Lavalee was born and raised near Montreal, went south to join the 4th Rhode Island Infantry, composed patriotic music, and was wounded at Antietam, later discharged into civilian life at home. He would later compose O Canada.

John Goosberry was working in St. Catharines when the war came. He became one of 21 black Canadians who joined the 54th Massachusetts regiment- which saw action in the ill fated attack on Fort Wagner at Charleston, an attack that saw massive casualties, but which paved the way for black soldiers to be enlisted on a much larger scale, helping to turn the tide of the war.

There were doctors and nurses with the armies, including Canadians.

Anderson Abbott was one of the first black Canadian doctors. He went south and served in the Union army hospitals in Washington for the last two years of the war.

Sarah Emma Edmonds led quite a life during the war. She disguised herself as a man and served as a nurse with the 2nd Michigan Infantry. It was also said that she served as a spy behind Confederate lines during the war.

Chaplains were present in both North and South during the war, ministering to the soldiers in their care and facing many of the same dangers of war.

Napoleon Mignault had been ordained as a priest here in Ottawa in 1849, and spent time ministering in parishes in New York, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin. When the Civil War had gotten underway, he enlisted as chaplain of the 17th Wisconsin.

More than 750 000 soldiers died in the Civil War, making it by far the deadliest war in American history. Many died of contagious disease, caused because no one understood sterilization or sanitation of the military camps. As well, the tactics were well behind the technology; new and more accurate handguns and field artillery, especially on the Union side, while nearly everyone was still using Napoleonic era tactics.

This is the standard battlefield kit of a military surgeon during the Civil War.

Schemes

 Mary Ann Shadd had already done much as a journalist before the war based out of Canada. During the Civil War she actively recruited black men for the Union, and turned out to be good at the job. She would later earn a law degree.

Garland White had been a slave, escaping that life and settling in London, Ontario, becoming a pastor. He was commissioned a chaplain to black soldiers, and saw the end of the war in a dramatic manner, reunited with his mother in the fallen Richmond.

The Chesapeake Affair was another one of the incidents of the war that heightened tensions between the Canadian colonials and the Union. Confederate sympathizers in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia hijacked the Union ship Chesapeake to give it to the Confederacy. The Union navy pursued the ship into Nova Scotia waters.

Ironically it wasn't the only example of Confederate sympathies in Canada. Southern intelligence operatives worked out of Canada and launched schemes and irregular operations, the most infamous of which was the St. Albans Raid, in which the raiders crossed the border into the town of St. Albans Vermont to rob banks. Blockade runners were welcomed in Maritime ports.

St. Lawrence Hall, a 19th century hotel in Montreal, was a hotbed of Confederate intelligence operatives. This display case features a Confederate jacket, a sheet from the hotel registry, and a photograph of one of the most infamous men of all time- the actor John Wilkes Booth, a spy for the Confederacy who stayed at the hotel.

This is the registry sheet. Booth's signature is second from the bottom. A chilling reminder of an evil man.

While some Canadians went south to fight in the war, some Americans came north. Skedadlers were dodging drafts. Crimpers were recruiters who were known to resort to kidnapping to bring recruits south to the Union army.

Tensions got to the point where the colonial governments knew they would have to step in to reinforce neutrality and man the border. The Union was reinforcing the northern border even as they were fighting the rebels.

Combat

 Continuing on where I left off yesterday, more of this exhibit on Canada and the Civil War.

This profiles three men who went south and fought in that war.

Edward Doherty signed up as a private at the outset of the war, fought in numerous battles in the eastern theatre, and was transferred to the cavalry as an officer. At the end of the war, he led the troop of cavalry who hunted down assassin John Wilkes Booth and his accomplice David Herold.

Charles Bilodeau enlisted in the 52nd Pennsylvania in the fall of 1861, seeing combat in the Peninsula campaign, and nearly died of disease.

Alonzo Wolverton and his three brothers went south and joined the Union army as teamsters. Alonzo stayed on to the end.

The images projected on the walls, combined with the period music and the sound effects of battle, made for an effective experience.

This is the standard Union private's coat, cap, shoes, and cartridge box.

How many Canadians went south, violating the neutrality status Britain had insisted on? There were somewhere between 33 000 to 55 000, the vast majority for the Union cause.

A display panel allows the visitor to look at some of those who got involved.

George Ellsworth, born and raised in Canada, was working in Tennessee at the outset of war as a telegraph operator. He got pulled into the Confederate cavalry by John Hunt Morgan.

Alexander Augusta had been born among a free black family in Virginia but went to Canada to study medicine. He offered his services as a doctor to the Union, and by the end of the war was a lieutenant colonel.

Torontonian Samuel Robinson was enlisted as a private into the 54th Massachusetts only to be transferred to the 55th Massachusetts. He was made a sergeant major but demoted after complaining about racism in the Union Army.

Remi Tremblay came from Quebec to Rhode Island, lied about his age, and fought in horrendous battles like the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor before being taken prisoner. He survived the war and returned to Canada after the war.

Battles

The Second Battle of Bull Run was a blunder for Union forces against Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Lee would take his army into Maryland, where they would fight Union forces at Antietam. It would end in a strategic victory for the Union. It was also the single bloodiest day in American history.

In December 1862, yet another Union commanding general, Ambrose Burnside, devised his own plans to take on Lee, and his plans met with disaster in the Battle of Fredericksburg. Union casualties would be double that of the Confederates.

Despite official stances of neutrality, Canadians were affected by the Civil War- and some started to join it.

This map of eastern North America includes the Canadian colonies, the Union north, the neutral border states who remained within the Union, and the Confederacy. Spots where major battles and sieges of the Civil War took place are seen throughout both the Union and the Confederacy.

At this point, the exhibit starts looking again at individuals. Arthur Rankin was a politician and militia officer who accepted a commission to raise recruits for the Union army- violating neutrality, getting him arrested, and costing him both commissions.

Abram Shadd was one of the sons of the Shadd family of Buxton, Ontario. He enlisted in the 55th Massachusetts in 1863, rose to the rank of sergeant-major, and recruited other black men into the Union army.

Kahgegagahbowh (George Copway) recruited Ojibwe warriors for the Union army, but with the deaths of some of them, became ostracized.

Smoke on Civil War battlefields carried far, and made it hard to actually see what was going on at times.

After the victory at Antietam, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. It deemed those black people in bondage in those states in open rebellion to be free. It said nothing about the border states not in rebellion, where slavery existed- though the leadership of those states understood what was coming. It was a military and diplomatic maneuver that in making the war about the abolition of slavery ensured that the British and French would stay out of it. And it gave the Union a higher cause to fight for than simply restoring the Union.

Another Union general, Joseph Hooker, took command of the Army of the Potomac, with another plan. It fell apart at a crossroads called Chancellorsville, deep in Virginia, a place with dense woods and undergrowth. Robert E. Lee- already undermanned with a portion of the Army of Northern Virginia on another assignment with General James Longstreet- went with his other commanding general Thomas Jackson to meet the Union army. Jackson would take a part of the army and launch a surprise attack into the Union flank, which had not been dug in for defense. The surprise would collapse the Army of the Potomac into retreat, but Jackson would later die of wounds sustained while between the lines at night.

The greatest battle ever fought on North American soil took place over three days at a small town in Pennsylvania. Lee  and his army had invaded the north, and the Union army followed. They met at the town of Gettysburg on July 1st 1863, where the high ground south of town was occupied by Union infantry on that first day, and over the next two days, Confederate forces were decisively beaten, with the battle culminating in what would be called Pickett's Charge. The Confederates began a retreat back to Virginia, with the Union army following. Both sides had taken a mauling during the battle.

During this same period out west, Grant's siege of the town of Vicksburg on the Mississippi resulted in the surrender of the town. The tide of the war had turned.

In the fall, Grant's forces fought and won a campaign around Chattanooga, Tennessee, which would lead to Grant taking overall command the following year of all Union armies.