On Oct. 10, 1864, three strangers arrived in St. Albans, a Vermont town near the Canadian border, and checked into a hotel. They said they were Canadians. More strangers arrived, in twos and threes, in subsequent days. On Oct. 19, these men, 21 in all, revealed themselves as Confederate soldiers, declared the town conquered territory, raided three banks - and rode off to Canada, 25 kilometres away, with $208,000.
Though insignificant as a military operation, the St. Albans raid profoundly shaped Canadian and American sentiment at the time - and remains instructive to this day. Take our protectionist legacy. Take our imperial Parliament - and our dysfunctional Senate. Take the border itself - the cause of much American fear of Canada and much Canadian fear of America. St. Albans illuminates the comparable legitimacy of these fears.
Although Canada East (Quebec) captured 13 of the raiders, a Montreal magistrate set them free a few weeks later on a legal technicality - infuriating the U.S. government and inflaming public opinion throughout the northern states. The Confederacy regarded the raiders as belligerents; Washington saw them as criminals. The magistrate's ruling rattled the Canadian prime minister, John A. Macdonald, who had assumed the case would drag through the courts for months (or years). To quell American concern, he rushed 2,000 "detectives" to patrol the border between Sarnia and Toronto.
Historian Donald Creighton recounts the misadventure from a Canadian perspective. "As Macdonald realized, its consequences were likely to be extremely unfortunate. But even he may possibly not have been prepared for the violence of the reaction in the United States." The American executive and Congress responded, he said, almost as pugnaciously as the American newspapers - which called for the conquest of Canada.
Washington regarded the affair as proof that Britain, though neutral, wanted a Confederate victory. On Dec. 17, four days after the raiders were released, Abraham Lincoln issued an executive order requiring passports from all persons entering the U.S. from the Canadian provinces - the first (but not last) such impediment to cross-border travel.
Within days, Lincoln served notice of abrogation of the Rush-Bagot Convention, the treaty that had disarmed the Great Lakes 50 years earlier. For its part, Congress gave notice that it would repeal the 1854 Canada-U.S. Reciprocity Treaty - an action destined fundamentally to change Canadian history.
Taken together, the American response came close to being an informal declaration of war, militarily and economically, at the very moment that the Canadian provinces were trying desperately to construct a defensive alliance, a confederacy, of their own.
Ontario's Macdonald and Quebec's George-Étienne Cartier formed their "great coalition," a first step toward Confederation, in June of 1864. The Charlottetown Conference took place the first week of September. The St. Albans raid occurred on Oct. 19 (three weeks before the 1864 presidential election), and the raiders were set free on Dec. 13. The punitive American response began on Dec. 17 and ended two years later, in 1866, when the U.S. formally revoked reciprocity - thereby imposing a sentence of hard labour on the partners in Confederation.
Macdonald regarded the rough-hewn American experiment in democracy as an irrefutable argument for highly centralized government. In his model of parliamentary government, political power would reside symbolically in the Crown, effectively in the prime minister. Thanks to his fear of democracy, Canada would never experience multiple centres of political power now celebrated as checks and balances. As for our Senate (from the Latin senex - "old man"), Macdonald's model empowered the Crown to maintain an upper house of privileged men of property, for life.
Canada can now acquire a semblance of parliamentary checks and balances only by small, incremental fixes to a reactionary Senate, with the aim, ultimately, of making it an elected body with specific responsibilities - perhaps (as in the American model) for approving treaties or for confirming government appointments. It's remarkable that we now have a prime minister willing to surrender part of his imperial power.
We should exploit this moment. As U.S. experience proves, the election of senators is infinitely preferable to the appointment of senators, a conclusion that should be evident to everyone - now that the threat of American invasion has eased.