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CR: The New Centennial Review 1.2 (2001) 109-137



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Jefferson Davis on the Plains of Abraham

Thomas Loebel
University of Calgary


I

My title is a metaphor, for it is doubtful that Jefferson Davis actually spent time as far east in Canada as Quebec City. Neither his financial situation nor his state of mind would have had him venture too far from Lennoxville in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, where he had moved in October of 1867. Encouraged by James Mason to come to Niagara to join other high-ranking Confederate expatriates, Davis declined. While the unpleasant irony of Niagara as the site of freedom at the end of the Underground Railroad for escaping slaves might have weighed on his mind, Davis opted for the more familial choice of Montreal, where his older children had lived throughout the Civil War in the care of his wife's mother. 1 Yet it is also a metaphor for Jacques Parizeau in 1995, whose dramatically orchestrated "Preamble" to the Déclaration de souveraineté du Québec creates an uncanny feeling for students of American history. "We entered the federation on the faith of a promise of equality in a shared undertaking and out of respect for our authority in certain matters that to us are vital. But what was to follow did not live up to those early hopes. The Canadian State contravened the federative pact by [End Page 109] invading in a thousand ways areas in which we were autonomous, and by serving notice that our secular belief in the equality of the partners was an illusion." 2

Troping the southern Confederacy may not have been conscious; nor, however, was it necessarily by chance. The ways in which the South articulated its issues prior to the Civil War—those of self-determination, protection of its minority difference and its peculiar institutions—have a continued resonance in Canada as the relations between the provinces, the Council of First Nations, and the federal government are in a constant state of negotiation over jurisdiction in a variety of arenas: pragmatic budgetary issues of transfer payments of tax dollars, which facilitate control over provincial programmes such as health care, arts, and culture; and over ratification of the attempted Accords attendant to the Constitution Act, which collectively redefine the structure of confederation. The repeated moves of Quebec toward sovereignty via the provincial referendum structure are the most pressing and the most publicised examples of how tenuous a confederacy of difference can be when the very discourse that enables association has at its core the belief in a right to self-determination of the various signatory collectives. Socio-political groups formed as provinces confederate, and if economic issues of progress—some say survival—partial sharing of a history and partial relations of sociality enable such groups to confederate as a country, then the emergence and prolongation of severe and limiting differences concerning those very issues may become the impetus for the signatories to reassert their separate sovereignties and to create their futures separately. While secessionist sentiment also exists in the West of Canada, the Maritimes, and in Newfoundland, Quebec is a distinct and difficult instance because of its language and culture, though it is not an isolated case. Indeed, secessionist sentiment is constitutive of confederate political theory, making a confederacy a distinct political structure from a federalist union—more tenuous, perhaps, or more adaptive and democratic, and it demands a different kind of culture and commitment to political negotiation to keep it beneficially intact.

Canada's discourse and construction of a confederacy is as different from that found in the United States as are both countries' histories in which [End Page 110] those discourses emerged. While there are points of historical intersection, and sites of potential influence, the interest in reading each against the backdrop of the other is rather with how the recourse to a discourse of self-determination and secession comes in response to a union that has become oppressive. In the Canadas, as tensions in Lower Canada mounted in the 1830s, residents and...

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