Southern History Series: Jefferson Davis’s Exile In Canada

“We feel that our cause is just and holy; we protest solemnly in the face of mankind that we desire peace at any sacrifice save that of honor and independence; we seek no conquest, no aggrandisement, no concession of any kind from the States with which we were lately confederated; all we ask is to be let alone; that those who never held power over us, should not now attempt our subjugation by arms.”

– President Jefferson Davis, April 29, 1861

The Union cause in the War Between the States was received with much more skepticism across the West at the time than it is presented today as a noble abolitionist crusade to liberate the poor suffering blacks by mythmaking Northern historians. We’ve already seen how the French came to regret their decision not to intervene in the war on the side of the Confederacy.

By the time of the Lincoln administration, Mexico had already lost half of its national territory to the United States. The French under Napoleon had parted ways with Louisiana. Britain had been bullied out of half of Oregon. Japan had been “opened” by the U.S. Navy. Spain had been bullied out of Florida and Latin America by the independence movements which had been enthusiastically supported by Americans. It would later be bullied out of the rest of its empire in the Spanish-American War.

Foreigners had good reasons to fear the ascendant Yankee Empire. After it finished off the Confederacy, the Union Army redeployed to the Great Plains to crush the Plains Indians. The Russians sold Alaska to the United States. President Grant nearly succeeded in annexing the Dominican Republic. Hawaii was conquered and annexed to the United States. We created Panama by splitting it off from Colombia. By the early 20th century, the defeat of the Confederacy in the War Between the States led to American Empire stretching its tentacles across all of Latin America and the Caribbean and into the Philippines and China in the eastern Pacific.