The public is invited to join our Civil War Round Table, to hear Claire speak on Canadians who made an impact on the American Civil War. A question and answer period will follow the break.

• We will have his book available for sale and for signing, if you wish, at a 20% discount off the regular price: $30. A generous portion of this goes towards the expenses of our Civil War Round Table.

• Also, the Members' Annual Book Sale will be open to everyone - all of the proceeds from the sale of these books goes towards the club's expenses.

• There will be NO charge for this event, but reservations would help the planners; please RSVP by E-mail.

Claire Hoy

Book Cover

BIOGRAPHY

CLAIRE HOY is one of Canada’s best known journalists. A veteran columnist with a host of Canada’s largest daily newspapers, he also co-hosted the popular CBC Newsworld debate show Face Off for 5 years. His books include: Bill Davies: A Biography; Friends in High Places, Margin of Error, and Stockwell Day: His Life and Politics.

FROM THE BOOK'S FLY LEAF

"The American Civil War not only subsumed Canadians at every level, it directly determined the shape of the Canadian confederation.

The U.S. Civil War was America's bloodiest conflict, involving 3 million fighters, some 600,000 of whom died. Most Canadians know something about its American impact, but few realize that it also stands as a defining event in Canadian history.

Thousands of Canadians fought in the war - about 5,000 died - and twice during that period this country, along with Great Britain, came within a whisker of all-out war against Washington.

Thousand of Canadians (British North Americans at the time) enlisted in the northern armies, mainly to collect bounties of $200 or more, but many more were dragooned, pressed into service involuntarily by unscrupulous 'crimps,' who, in cahoots with U.S. military authorities, prowled our borders looking for young men to either cajole, drug or kidnap into service. The war also saw an influx of American 'skedaddlers,' the original draft dodgers, avoiding conscriptions by fleeing north into Canada."

"During the American Civil War, Toronto, Montreal, St. Catherines and Halifax welcomed a well-financed network of Confederate spies and adventurers, bringing the war close to home with organized raids on Lake Erie and the border town of St. Albans, Vermont, where Confederate raiders were successfully defended by prominent Quebec politician J.C. Abbott, a future prime minister. Montreal's St. Lawrence Hall Hotel had so many Confederates living there it offered mint juleps on its menu. It also afforded visits by John Wilkes Booth, who made several trips there and to Toronto as part of an organized plot leading up to the Good Friday, 1865 assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

Four Union Generals were Canadian-born, along with 29 Medal of Honor winners. And while most combatants fought for the North, the only monument in Canada to a Civil War veteran sits in Kincardine, Ontario, a tribute to Dr. Solomom Secord, a surgeon with the 20th.Georgia Volunteers and the grand nephew of the War of 1812 heroine Laura Secord. Southern sympathies were so prominent in Halifax, where blockade running created several family fortunes, that some businesses openly flew Confederate flags and traded in Confederate currency.

But perhaps the most lasting impact on Canada was Sir John A. Macdonald's conviction that strong state's rights were the 'great source of weakness', which lead to war. That's why Canada emerged in 1867 with a strong federal government - including an unelected senate - which to this day fosters endlesss debate between the believers of federal rights and provincial rights."