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By Root 6950 0

Britain proclaimed Ireland a free state. The existence and aims of the fifty-thousand-strong Fenian Brotherhood (many of whom were U.S. Army veterans) had never been a secret. The previous autumn, its leaders had approached Seward and Johnson asking to know how the United States would react to the establishment of an Irish republic on Canadian soil, and they had received the ambiguous answer that the government would “acknowledge accomplished facts.” The Fenians had read into this the notion that the United States would send troops north in support once the initial invasion had taken place. The United States did end up sending troops, but it was to arrest rather than to help the Fenians.

Seward knew that the government’s suppression of the Fenian raids would not play well in Washington or across many parts of the country. But a steep rise in Anglophobia aided his plan to force Britain to give up Canada. On July 26, 1866, two days before the completion of the transatlantic cable, the House of Representatives voted unanimously to remove restrictions on the building or selling of warships to foreign nations. It was a deliberate warning to the British government to be prepared in any future conflict for hundreds of Alabama-style raiders, built in U.S. dockyards and manned by U.S. crewmen.

Early in 1867, Seward’s long-held desire to acquire Canada appeared to be on the verge of fulfillment after the Russians offered to sell “Russian America” (Alaska) to the United States. With remarkably little haggling, he brought down the asking price to $7.2 million and signed the treaty of sale with the Russian minister on March 30. “I know that Nature designs that this whole continent, not merely the thirty-six States, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American Union,” Seward declared to an audience in Massachusetts. But to his surprise, the public disagreed and he was harshly criticized in the press for wasting millions on a distant “icebox.” Nor did the prospect of having a U.S. border to the north and south of them encourage the Canadians to seek their absorption within “the magic circle.” On July 1, 1867, British North America became the Dominion of Canada, initially a confederation of four provinces—Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia—under a single Canadian parliament.24 It looked probable that the other provinces, including British Columbia, would soon seek to join Canada rather than the Union.

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The existence of a united, largely self-governing Canada allowed the new British government led by the Tory prime minister Lord Derby (Lord Russell having lost the general election in 1866) to breathe a little easier. Derby’s foreign secretary, Lord Stanley, futilely hoped that Seward would realize that his plan to extract territory in exchange for dropping the Alabama claims had been compromised and would finally agree to begin negotiations. Stanley, Charles Francis Adams had noted in his diary in the spring of 1867, had little reason to be defensive about Britain’s actions during the war and was more willing than Russell to discuss the two countries’ differences. But no British politician was prepared to “confess a wrong and sell Canada as the release from punishment,” nor was the Derby government any more prepared than its predecessor to revisit the question of belligerent rights.25 Seward’s response was uncompromising: “I feel quite certain that the balance of faults has been on the side of Great Britain,” he told Adams on May 2, 1867, in a dispatch for communication to Lord Stanley. “Thus the whole controversy between the two states must remain open indefinitely.”26

The British hoped that Seward was bluffing or blustering, as so often in the past, but his recent dealings with France suggested that he was not. Louis-Napoleon had secretly asked Seward at the end of 1865 whether the United States would recognize the validity of Emperor Maximilian’s rule in Mexico in exchange for a complete withdrawal of the French army. Seward had not only turned down the offer, but allowed General Grant to send