Obama hero was Canada's best friend

Afro-American people owe Abraham Lincoln their freedom. Canadians owe him their existence. A few weeks before his death in 1865, a plan was laid before the President for the invasion of the remaining British colonies in North America.

Canada had been attacked by the United States twice before. In 1776 she was invaded in an attempt to bring her into the American Revolution as the Fourteenth Colony.

In the War of 1812, Britain and her former colonies faced off again. To Americans imbued with Manifest Destiny, this was an opportunity to finish what the Revolution had begun: to see the Stars and Stripes fly over the continent from the Rio Grande to the Pole.

These attempts failed. The US was then a new and untried power fighting on several fronts against powers of many times her strength and size. Americans won independence only as a result of French intervention in 1781. And in 1812 they were fighting Britain on the high seas as well as in North America.

1865 was different: the chance of a successful invasion was much greater and the reasons for it were stronger. America was finishing the Civil War with the strongest military force on Earth. Internally she was at odds, with smoldering resentments dividing families, neighbours and states who had fought each other. British support of Confederate forces, and skirmishes across the border in response to Fenian raids created a sense of grievance.

A strike against British North America would have settled the score for the Union. More important, it would offer a chance to reconcile North and South in a single army fighting in territory where Britain was weak and eager to withdraw. And it would reduce mass unemployment resulting from the demobilization of both Union and Confederate forces.

All these were reasons for President Lincoln to have approved an invasion proposal. Many of his successors have undertaken military operations on much less solid grounds.

Abraham Lincoln refused the proposal: he described it as “a stupid one.” In the spirit in which he offered “malice towards none, charity for all” in his second inaugural address to Americans, he was not inclined to pick a fight with a foreign foe. The wounds of one war were not to be healed in another one.

Secretary of State William Seward, who drafted the plan, continued to promote Manifest Destiny under successor President Andrew Johnson. The year of Canadian Confederation he sealed the US purchase of Alaska from Russia. In early 1869 he monitored events in Manitoba and was scheming how these could be used to bring the Canadian West under US control as well. He left office a few months before Louis Riel’s uprising.

Americans still rank Lincoln as one of their greatest presidents. He never set foot in Canada and his entire presidential career was preoccupied by the crisis in his own country. Yet in his refusal to approve the one Canadian invasion that almost certainly would have succeeded, he may have been the greatest foreign friend Canada ever had.