Canada Caught in the Cross Fire: How U.S. Major General John Adams Dix Confronted Confederate Violence on the International Border
Hundreds of miles from the cacophony of hissing Minié balls, rumbling artillery fire, and thumping drums that defined the acoustic environment of battlefields in established theaters of war, Major General John Adams Dix commanded the U.S. Army’s Department of the East from its headquarters located at forty-four Bleecker Street in New York City. Maps unraveled, papers rustled, and pens scratched across official stationary as Dix issued orders and made decisions on behalf of the War Department that dictated the actions and movements of armed forces within his geographic jurisdiction. Dix led and oversaw the large-scale administration and mobilization of army operations in his department that spanned the states of New York, New Jersey, and New England; and the deployment of men from these states to southeastern and southwestern battlefields. Marshaling and allocating military resources against the enemy demanded his attention, but so did the need to use these resources against social unrest on the northern home front when Dix assumed this position in the wake of the violent draft riots that took place in New York City in July 1863. Since June 2, 1862, Dix had commanded the Department of Virginia from enemy territory and now in this new position, away from the heart of battle, he accepted that one of his vital responsibilities was protecting American civilians on the northern home front from internal threats to its security and order through the assertion of federal power.[1]
Edward Anthony and Mathew B Brady. Major General John Adams Dix (New York: E. & H.T. Anthony, 1861) https://www.loc.gov/item/2021669483/.
However, Dix must not have imagined that he would also be charged with protecting northern civilians from raids launched by Confederate operatives in Canada. The Confederacy expanded the boundaries of warfare by exploiting Canada’s borders, and in turn, foisted Dix into an international front of the war reminiscent of his military service on the Canadian border in the War of 1812. This post explores how one U.S. army department under the leadership of General Dix responded to irregular warfare. The Confederacy tried to counteract setbacks on established battlefields in southeastern states by moving the boundaries of war farther north to cause destruction on the United States home front in the form of violent raids across the international border in 1864.[2]
Historians have looked and continue to look to the West, Latin America, and Europe to broaden our understanding of the Civil War and its aftermath, but specific northern regions, including Canada and the Great Lakes, have not been fully fleshed out in the historical record. For example, Megan Kate Nelson affords scholarly attention to Civil War battles that occurred west of the Mississippi River by illustrating how the Union and Confederate armies not only looked to the West for alliances with First Nations to aid their war-making actions, but also to find and exploit resources on their lands. Moving from a continental to a hemispheric perspective, Michel Gobat’s work sheds light on the activities of filibusters like William Walker who invaded Nicaragua and the United States’ pursuit to advance its imperial power by denying the sovereignty of other nations while Evan Rothera points out the many locations where Confederates went to after the war to avoid a Reconstructed America including Mexico and Brazil. [3]
In addition to examining the war through a hemispheric lens, historians have also viewed the war as one that crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Don Doyle positions the Civil War within the larger struggle between republican and monarchical systems of government. European expansionists wanted to maintain a foothold in the western hemisphere and illustrate the instability of democracies and republican governments. Canada, and other British North American provinces, have also been included in larger assessments of the Civil War’s impact on the world stage or in the context of the diplomatic relationship between the United States and the Confederacy with Great Britain. For instance, Beau Cleland’s work recognizes and considers the unofficial, yet deeply impactful, diplomatic work performed by Confederate and British business leaders, traders, merchants, shipowners, sailors, etc. in the economic, maritime arena. Cleland is in conversation with scholars such as Amanda Foreman who explores Britain as a historical force in the Civil War and Canada’s analysis emerges in the context of Britain’s formal and informal interactions with leaders of the United States and the Confederacy.[4]
Confederate President Jefferson Davis formalized the use of Canada in the spring of 1864 when he sent Confederate commissioners Jacob Thompson, Clement C. Clay Jr., and James P. Holcombe to Canada to advance the Confederacy there in any way they saw fit. Agents and soldiers under their direction organized and carried out violent attacks across the border and then crossed the border back into British North America before they could be arrested by the United States. After a hijacking of a two passenger steamboats on Lake Erie, and an attempted hijacking of an American gunboat called the U.S.S. Michigan—to attack Johnson’s Island Prison in Sandusky, Ohio, and use the collective force of the officers imprisoned there to attack the only source of federal protection on the waters of the Great Lakes—the United States government remained on high alert of other plots that circulated among civilians and government officials in Canada and the U.S. In the following month, the most well-known raid on St. Albans, Vermont, took place on October 19, 1864, leading to the death of a civilian, destruction of property, and the loss of at least $200,000 from multiple banks in the town. The confusion and fear continued as Dix tried to make sense of the violence and respond in the most effective manner possible.[5]
On December 14, 1864, the United States Army took action when General Dix issued General Order Number 97 after learning that the Canadian authorities released the Confederates involved in the St. Albans raid. Knowing that their release would empower raiders in their pursuit of violence against the United States and subsequent refuge in Canada, Dix used his power as Commander of the Department of the East in the United States Army to put an end to raiders acting with impunity. Dix ordered military officials in the Department of the East to cross the international border and go into Canada to apprehend raiders and prevent them from benefitting from the legal refuge it provided. Military officials on the border were instructed to shoot “marauders or persons acting under commissions from the rebel authorities at Richmond.” If the raiders were captured, they had to be sent to the Department of the East headquarters in New York where they would be tried and punished under martial law. Dix exercised the full power vested to him in the order’s enforcement to protect American citizens from “persons organizing hostile expeditions within Montreal territory and fleeing to it for an asylum after committing acts of depredation within our lines…to protect our cities and towns from incendiarism and our people from robbery and murder.” Dix wanted to prevent further Confederate exploitation of the Canadian border.[6]
President Abraham Lincoln thought this step was one step too far on an already delicate tightrope of the relationship between Britain and the United States. To this end, he revoked the ability to cross the boundary in pursuit of guilty parties. On December 15, 1864, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, conveyed President Lincoln’s disapproval of Dix’s order. Stanton explained, “The act of invading neutral territory by military commanders is, in the opinion of the President, too grave and serious to be left to the discretion or will of subordinate commanders, where the facility of communication with superior authority is so speedy, as it always may be with the chief authority in your department, and even with the President at Washington.” President Lincoln thought that crossing the border was not “required by any public necessity or compatible with proper military subordination or the public peace and security.”[7]
Although Dix did not contest Lincoln’s decision, he did defend his actions to Stanton by stressing the unrealistic nature of asking approval by telegraph before pursuit across the border. Dix asserted that taking this power from military commanders “removes all hope of capturing marauders who cross the boundary line for the purpose of committing depredations on our side.”[8] Dix issued General Order Number 100 on December 17, 1864, to revoke the part of his previous order that allowed military commanders to cross the border and instead instructed them to reach out to the Department of the East for guidance if the criminals entered foreign territory while being tailed.[9]
Although General Dix removed the permission for soldiers to cross the border into Canada outlined in General Order Number 97, his wife, Catharine M. Dix, crossed the nineteenth-century middle class political border when she wrote directly to President Lincoln. Catharine M. Dix probably did not include in her wedding vows a promise to defend her husband’s reputation in the eyes of President Abraham Lincoln, the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the world, but she did it anyway. Catharine Dix thus inserted herself in international diplomacy and in the actions of the United States military, with just a few pages written to President Lincoln. While there was not much written on the page, Catharine Dix still managed to cover a significant amount of ground in her message. Dix declared, “The Country is with my husband—The Press is with him. The Canadian authorities are with him…the British Consul here, is with him— and the Law of Nations, by which he stands fast, and firm, is with him.” Dix questioned Lincoln, “Why Then, cannot you be with him also—and accept The service of his strong arm—and his honest, and valuable support.”[10]
Through the lens of General Dix and his actions, we can understand one channel in which the United States responded to irregular warfare on an international level to prevent further raids from Canada. The international border is a useful framework and entry point to demonstrate the many ways in which the border was used by Confederates, and the many ways in which U.S. civilians, government, and military responded to their actions. My research builds on the work of historians who have complicated, and continue to complicate, our understanding of the scope and magnitude of the Civil War.
[1] Edwin M. Stanton, “General Orders, No. 217,” 15 July 1863, United States War Department, Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Volume XXVII, Part II, Part II (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1889), 919–920. For reports from Dix’s predecessor, Major General John E. Wool, and others about the draft riots that took place in New York City from see pages 875–940; John A. Dix to Edwin M. Stanton, 15 May 1863 Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series II, Volume V, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1899), 615–616. For information about the evolution of military organization and professionalism throughout U.S. history see Joseph T. Glatthaar, The American Military: A Concise History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), ix–44.
[2] John A. Dix, “General Orders, No. 97,” 14 December 1864, United States War Department, Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Volume XLIII, Part II (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893), 789-790.
[3] Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2020); Michel Gobat, Empire by Invitation: William Walker and Manifest Destiny in Central America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Evan C. Rothera, Civil Wars and Reconstructions in the Americas: The United States, Mexico, and Argentina, 1860-1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022)
[4] Don H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Beau Cleland, “Sustaining the Confederacy: Informal Diplomacy, Anglo-Confederate Relations, and Blockade-Running in the Bahamas,” The Journal of Southern History LXXXIX, No. 1 (February 2023): 61-88; Amanda Foreman, A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2012).
[5] Jefferson Davis to Jacob Thompson, 7 April 1864, Dunbar Rowland, L.L.D., ed., Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers and Speeches, Volume VI (New York: Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company), 220. Jefferson Davis, letter sent to Jacob Thompson on April 27, 1864, found in John W. Headley, Confederate Operations in Canada and New York (New York and Washington: The Neale Publishing Company. Reprint, London: Forgotten Books, (1906) 2015), 220-221. Citations refer to the Forgotten Books edition; John B. Castleman, Active Service (Louisville: Courier-Journal Job Printing Co., Publishers, 1917), 133; “MILITARY EXECUTION. EXECUTION OF JOHN Y. BEALL, THE LAKE ERIE PIRATE AND REBEL SPY. DETAILS OF THE CRIME, THE TRIAL, AND THE PUNISHMENT OF THE CULPRIT. HIS CONDUCT DURING HIS LAST HOURS,” New York Times (New York, February 22, 1865), 1; William C. Harris, Confederate Privateer: The Life of John Yates Beall (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023); “The Invasion of St. Albans. E. J. MORRISON SHOT. Messrs. Huntington and Bingham Wounded. EXCITEMENT GREAT.,” St. Albans Messenger, October 28, 1864. Vol. 28, No. 51., St. Albans Historical Museum, St. Albans, Vermont.
[6] John A. Dix, “General Orders, No. 97,” United States War Department, Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Volume XLIII, Part II (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893), 789-790.
[7] Edwin M. Stanton to John A. Dix, December 15, 1864, United States War Department, Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Volume XLIII, Part II (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893), 793-794.
[8] John A. Dix to Edwin M. Stanton, December 17, 1864, Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Volume XLIII, Part II (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893), 799-800.
[9] John A. Dix, “General Order #100,” December 17, 1864, Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Series I, Volume XLIII, Part II (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1893), 800.
[10] Catharine M. Dix to President Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln papers: Series 1. General Correspondence. -1916: Catharine M. Dix to Abraham Lincoln, December 18 1864 Urges support for her husband. 1864. Manuscript/Mixed Material. https://www.loc.gov/item/mal2052700/, accessed November 2024.