The Montreal Link

[Barry Sheehy]

(06-15-2018 08:13 PM)Gene C Wrote:  I'm adding this one to my wish list.

Barry, I know when writing a book there are certain items you have to leave out, there just isn't room for everything.
Can you share with us one or two items you wanted to add, but couldn't?

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Gene C.
My original focus in the Montreal book was to dissect and document the inner workings of the CSS in Canada and particularly in Montreal. Few people realize how large and well funded an organization it was. Certainly few Canadians realize how influential this clandestine organization was in Canada and how much quiet support was provided by British and Canadian authorities, who saw a permanently divided United States as preferable to a unified, militarized and hostile neighbor. A unified US represented an existential threat to the survival of British North America.Thus they quietly indulged the CSS until the St Albans Raid woke everybody up to the reality that the charming, ever polite, free spending southerners were down-right dangerous.

The arrival of John W. Booth's in Montreal, with his his clear links to the CSS, threw my original construct for the book into a cocked hat. Just look at how many players in or near the Lincoln assassination turn up in Montreal. The list is long. But not wanting this to become an "assassination book" I underplayed this story to some degree. I hope to correct this in a new paper I'm working on. The other aspect of the story I approached cautiously was the powerful northern politicians, War Department, Treasury Department, National Detective Police and (often politicized) newspaper editors who were in Montreal. For example, what was Lafayette Baker, Walter Pollack, Thomas Eckert doing in Montreal in a hotel full of Confederates? Why was most of Chase's presidential committee on hand? The answers may be benign but surely the questions needs to be asked. Consider also an ordinate number of players involved in Johnson's impeachment are in Canada; so many as to make their presence a coincidence a statistical impossibility. I highlighted some of this in the book but avoided drawing any conclusions. I felt like I was walking on eggshells. These are some of the dilemmas I faced in writing Montreal-City of Secrets.
Barry