Premier Divisions

TFSmith attempts to partly justify his decision to have the Canadians not bother to turn up to the Trent War with the comment that 'The co-premiers were as yet unwilling to approve expanding the volunteer force to anything more than 10,000, with 10,000 organized militia behind them.' This is also intended to set up the concept of open Canadian disloyalty from all sections of the community. This picture is false, as relatively cursory research will demonstrate.

John Charles Brady's thesis Lord Monck in Canada 1861-1864 demonstrates how much support Monck received from his Executive Council during the Trent crisis.

As Monck had not yet received instructions from the Colonial Office relating to the Trent Crisis, he was forced to act on his own initiative. He learned that the Executive Council was prepared to pledge itself to bring before the coming session of Parliament a money vote to defray the expenses of those volunteers whose service Monck had accepted before it met.

A December 2nd Executive Council Minute urged an increase of the active militia force from fifty-five hundred to seventy-five hundred... One hundred thousand uniforms were requested by Monck on an Executive Council recommendation; so that the Sedentary militia could be clothed, should it be necessary to call out that force.

In fact Monck, who was legally authorized to call out the Sedentary militia in cases of war, invasion, insurrection or imminent danger of any one of them, felt the circumstances in late December warranted a partial mobilization of the force. Therefore, he gave orders for the enrollment of one company from each battalion throughout Canada on and judging from the spirit prevailing in Canada, he felt that the desired number of men could easily be raised. Thus in addition to the increase in the number of Volunteers, Executive Council concurrence was won for enrolling a large number of the Sedentary militia.

Historically, the Canadian Executive Council were fully prepared to support Monck in his requests when it appeared war was close. However, TFSmith chooses to overlook this in favour of his own flawed interpretation of the militia's role in Canadian politics. His justification for reducing the Canadian contribution to a Trent War to negligible levels is based almost exclusively on the failure of the 1862 Militia Bill, but his reading of this event is overly simplistic.

For a start, using peacetime decisions as the basis of wartime politics is completely insane. Both the US of 1861 and the British of 1914 showed no indication of being prepared to tolerate massive militaries and the existence of conscription, yet we are assured that votes taken by the Canadians after the tension over the Trent had dissilated are an indication of their likely wartime enthusiasm. Moreover, we are rarely given any indications of how exacting the 1862 Militia Bill was: it proposed to enlist a force of 50,000 for between 14 and 28 days annual training, at the astronomic cost of $1,110,204. In peacetime, this was too much for the Canadians- just as a peacetime army of 500,000 was too large for the US to contempate. Another factor, which affected both the passage of the bill and the willingness of parliament to keep the administration in office, was that the Premier Sir John A. Macdonald was frequently drunk during the parliamentary debates on the topic.

If in 1863 the Canadians were prepared to fund 35,000 volunteer militia, it seems hard to understand why in wartime they would only fund 20,000. But this is Burnished Rows of Steel: both logic and logistics only apply when the author is reasonably certain that they won't prevent him from reaching his ultimate goal of having the British humiliated by the Union.