Blood and Daring: How Canada Fought the American Civil War and Forged a Nation Hardcover - 2013

Media reviews

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
 
“A wonderful and seamless popular history full of colourful characters, intrigue and political backstabbing of the first order. Though there is no secret as to how the book ends...he deftly adds enough suspense to keep readers turning the pages.... Boyko’s accomplished narrative is precisely the kind of popular history that deserves a wide audience.”
—National Post
 
“A thrilling, near-theatrical look at the years leading up to Confederation.... The authoritative narration is clear, precise, and entirely enjoyable for non-scholars. The book presents a startlingly unfamiliar and ominously dangerous period in Canadian-American relations.... It’s the birth of Canada in all its glory and muck.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“Boyko has spun a compelling narrative. Better still, it’s supported by just the right measure of academic rigour.”
—Winnipeg Free Press

“In the middle of the nineteenth century, Canada was at a risk never matched before or since. After threatening invasion during the Civil War, the United States looked northwards after it was won to fulfill its Manifest Destiny. Historian John Boyko tells this story in Blood and Daring. He does so by recounting the stories of six ‘guides.’ Some are famous like Sir John A. Macdonald, and his principal opponent William Seward, Secretary of State and an ardent annexationist. Others are little known, such as escaped slave John Anderson who used Canadian law to avoid expatriation, and Sarah Edmonds, one of forty thousand Canadians to join the fight with the North or South. With verve and passion and impeccable research, Boyko makes this vital story come alive.”
—Richard Gwyn, award-winning author of John A. and Nation Maker
 
“The American Civil War involved more of the North American continent than the Union and the Confederacy. Forty thousand Canadians fought in Union armies, Confederate agents operated in Canadian provinces, and the Canadian-American border was the scene of skirmishes that threatened to escalate into a larger conflict. In this lively and eye-opening book, John Boyko shows how the war and its aftermath not only gave the United States a new birth of freedom; it also gave birth to the new nation of Canada.”
—James M. McPherson, Princeton University’s Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom