The North Star

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FINALIST FOR THE 2023 MAVIS GALLANT PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION

A riveting account of the years, months and days leading up to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, and the unexpected ways Canadians were involved in every aspect of the American Civil War.

Canadians have long taken pride in being on the “good side” of the American Civil War, serving as a haven for 30,000 escaped slaves on the Underground Railroad. But dwelling in history’s shadow is the much darker role Canada played in supporting the slave South and in fomenting the many plots against Lincoln. 
   The North Star weaves together the different strands of several Canadians and a handful of Confederate agents in Canada as they all made their separate, fateful journeys into history.
    The book shines a spotlight on the stories of such intrepid figures as Anderson Abbott, Canada’s first Black doctor, who joined the Union Army; Emma Edmonds, the New Brunswick woman who disguised herself as a man to enlist as a Union nurse; and Edward P. Doherty, the Quebec man who led the hunt to track down Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth.
    At the same time, the Canadian political and business elite were aiding the slave states. Toronto aristocrat George Taylor Denison III bankrolled Confederate operations and opened his mansion to their agents. The Catholic Church helped one of Booth’s accused accomplices hide out for months in the Quebec countryside. A leading financier in Montreal let Confederates launder money through his bank.   
    Sher creates vivid portraits of places we thought we knew. Montreal was a sort of nineteenth-century Casablanca of the North: a hub for assassins, money-men, mercenaries and soldiers on the run. Toronto was a headquarters for Confederate plotters and gun-runners. The two largest hotels in the country became nests of Confederate spies. 
    Meticulously researched and richly illustrated, The North Star is a sweeping tale that makes long-ago events leap off the page with a relevance to the present day.”A thrill. . . . In Sher’s telling, we get memorable details . . . and rich characterization. . . . [The North Star] is an important corrective to the history Canadians have clung to for far too long.” —Montreal Review of Books

“Fascinating. . . . A riveting  . . . read that makes one think about how the Civil War affected the nation and its lingering role in the South’s development . . . . [The North Star] will remind readers why knowing and remembering our past is essential.” —Seattle Book Review

“A fascinating read. . . . [The North Star] shines a light on Canada’s little known and troublesome role in the American Civil War. . . .  Sher’s timely exploration of this unpalatable slice of Canadian history not only inches us closer to what really happened in those far-off days but teaches us the need to know, however unpalatable.” —Oakville News

“The North Star is a valuable and welcome addition to our understanding of the many roles played by Canada and Canadians in the Civil War before, during and after that tragic conflict. Meticulously researched and enlivened with intriguing characters and bold tales, Sher writes with the deft touch of a skilled storyteller.”  —John Boyko, author of Blood and Daring: How Canada Fought the American Civil War and Forged a Nation

“I love a mystery. I love a mystery that deals with history. But I especially love a mystery that deals with our history, and The North Star delivers on all counts. Julian Sher does what he always does: an amazing job of digging deep, in this case uncovering the Canadian origins of a 150-year-old story that still haunts this continent.” —Peter Mansbridge, broadcaster and author of Off the Record and Extraordinary Canadians

“The North Star is a significant addition to the corpus of Civil War literature. One of the major voids in the history of that tragic event is the role Canada played in providing a sanctuary to elements of the Confederate Secret Service, without whom John Wilkes Booth could never have assembled his team of conspirators or made his escape following his assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Sher’s impressive research and highly readable writing provide a detailed account that is long overdue.” —Edward Steers, Jr., author of Blood on the Moon and Getting Right with Lincoln

“In The North Star, Julian Sher brilliantly illuminates the many ways Canada was involved in the American Civil War, revealing aspects of history that have been overlooked or not understood until now.” —William P. Binzel, Vice President of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia

“In The North Star, Julian Sher offers a robust and comprehensive view of Canada and the American Civil War, bringing to light a great many unknown stories. The prose is elegant, the analysis concise, the narration masterful, and there are also delightful surprises along the way.” —Afua Cooper, historian, author of The Hanging of Angélique and co-author of Black Matters
 
“In this engagingly written book, Julian Sher explores how Confederates in Canada were involved in plots of spycraft, theft, arson, germ warfare and even assassination. Through his expert research, Sher lifts the veil on a long-shrouded portion of Civil War history.” —Dave Taylor, historian and author of LincolnConspirators.comJulian Sher is an award-winning journalist and the author of seven books, including “Until You Are Dead”: The Wrongful Conviction of Steven Truscott and White Hoods: Canada’s Ku Klux Klan. He co-authored two books on biker gangs, The Road to Hell and Angels of Death, and wrote two books on crimes against children, One Child at a Time and Somebody’s Daughter. As an investigative reporter, he worked for the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. He was the Senior Producer of CBC’s the fifth estate, Canada’s premier investigative TV program, for five years. He has directed and written major documentaries, covering wars and intrigue across the globe. His documentary Nuclear Jihad, produced for the New York Times and CBC, won the broadcast equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. His 2021 film, Ghosts of Afghanistan, won three top Canadian Screen Awards, including Best Documentary. He is also active in protecting media freedoms, as a Senior Fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Free Expression and working with Journalists for Human Rights.PROLOGUE:

‘ABE’S CONTRACT WAS UP’

Mint juleps were available year-round in Dooley’s Bar at the swank St. Lawrence Hall in Montreal. The libations were served just the way the Southerners from the Confederate States of America liked them: mint leaf, bourbon, some simple syrup and crushed ice, cold enough toallow a thin frost to caress the outside of the cup.

When the handsome Southern gentleman walked into the popular hotel bar on St. James Street one evening in October 1864, many of the patrons would have recognized him. Dark, curly hair, piercing eyes, an easy smile and the confident walk that came from being an actor of considerable renown—“A Star of the First Magnitude,” as one glowing tribute had put it; “a muscular, perfect man,” gushed another.

In the previous months, John Wilkes Booth had starred in performances in Nashville, Cincinnati, New Orleans and Boston. But in Montreal, he stayed away from the stage; he told people he was in town on “a pleasure trip,” though in truth he would spend a lot of time conducting serious business with Confederate agents and sympathizers who flooded the city.

Perhaps the only person at Dooley’s who was as well-known as Booth—at least to the locals—was the stocky man with the neat brown hair who was standing by the pool table in the billiards room next door to the bar. Joseph Dion sported a handlebar moustache that drooped below his chin and seemed to come all the way up to his ears. The Quebec billiards champion was enough of a celebrity to have his picture on a cigarette trading card.

“I was introduced to J. Wilkes Booth,” Dion later recalled, “and indulged in a friendly contest of billiards with him in the saloon of that establishment which was to continue to a late hour in the evening.”

There is no record of whether Dion was polite enough to let his American guest win. But it was the conversation rather than the competition that the billiards champion distinctly remembered about Booth. More specifically, “the wild ideas he expressed.”

“Do you know, I have the sharpest play laid out ever done in America,” Booth boasted. “I can bag the biggest game . . . just remember my address, you’ll hear of a double carom one of these days,” ostensibly referring to the rare pool trick of sinking two balls at once.

As the game and the evening wore on, Booth seemed to get more inebriated—and more political. The American elections were just a few weeks away; Abraham Lincoln’s political future—and the uncertain future of his divided country—hung in the balance as the President fought for re-election.

For three years, Lincoln had been waging a war against the slave-holding Southern states that had broken away from the Union. His Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863, declaring “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states should be free divided the country even more.

Booth, like most Confederate supporters, despised Lincoln—and made his views clear to his Canadian host. Many months later, when his words took on a much more ominous meaning, Dion recalled Booth saying that “it made damned little difference, head or tail, Abe’s contract was nearly up.”

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It was no accident that the man who would become the world’s most famous assassin found himself in Dooley’s Bar just six months before he pointed his single-shot, .44-calibre derringer into the back of Abraham Lincoln’s head.

In Montreal, Booth was among friends. The St. Lawrence Hall wasa notorious hangout for Confederate spies in a city that was a hub for wartime plotters, assassins, mercenaries and soldiers on the run. A few hours’ journey down a dirt highway or by slow train, Toronto was also a headquarters for Confederate money men and gunrunners. Canada in the 1860s was a country rife with espionage, a secret northern frontin a civil war that was tearing apart its neighbour to the south.

By early 1864, Jefferson Davis, the leader of the Confederate States, would order some of his most trusted aides to “proceed at once to Canada” to set up a well-funded secret service network. The Lincoln administration in turn sent its detectives and entice snitches to Canada to spy on the spies.

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Today, Canadians take pride in having been on the “good side” in the battle against slavery, a refuge for thirty thousand Black men, women and children who fled to what they would call the “North Star” of freedom on the Underground Railroad. That heroic endeavour is only part of the story. Much less talked about is Canada’s own history of racism, and the complicated role Canada played in the Civil War.

The truth is that not all Canadians were cheerleaders for “Honest Abe” in his fight against the rebel slave states. In fact, with support from powerful men in the ruling elites, the country provided a staging ground for Confederate kidnap plots, fire bombings, bank raids and prison breaks. Shortly after Lincoln’s assassination, Washington issued a formal proclamation explicitly declaring that “the atrocious murder”of the President was “incited, concerted and procured by . . . rebelsand traitors against the government of the United States harbored in Canada.” Five of the six alleged conspirators named in the indictmentwere operating out of Montreal and Toronto.

The sixth man, Jefferson Davis, was still in America. He was imprisoned after the defeat of his Confederate army, but once released on bail, Davis immediately fled to where many of his Confederate compatriots had already found refuge: Canada. He received a hero’s welcome.

The echoes of the war to end slavery still linger today, in both America and Canada.

Many books about the Civil War focus mainly on the powerful politicians and generals, inevitably all men. The North Star, however, is about ordinary people who chose a life-altering path as they stood at history’s crossroads. Some choices were made for them by their circumstances: the place of their birth, their class and social standing, their gender, their religion and the colour of their skin. But at key moments in their lives, each made critical decisions. Some changed careers, some changed countries; one of them managed, in a way, to change her gender.

Their choices would have extraordinary outcomes none of them could have envisaged when they took those first fateful steps. A farmgirl from New Brunswick, disguised as a man, would fight in some of the bloodiest battles of the war as a Union soldier. A young Black man in Toronto whose parents fled slavery and racism in Alabama would become the first Canadian-born Black doctor, and would find himself at the Washington home where Lincoln lay dying from an assassin’s bullet. A prominent and wealthy Toronto aristocrat would open his heart, his wallet and his home to the Confederate Secret Service leaders in Canada.

And a boy who grew up in a small village outside Montreal would become a respected lieutenant in a Washington cavalry regiment. Immediately after the assassin’s bullet was fired at Ford’s Theatre, he was tasked with leading the most famous manhunt in American history.

His prey would be the billiard player John Wilkes Booth, whose own choices would change the course of history.CA

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