The Great Halifax Explosion Read online

  No sooner had the Rebels kicked the British Loyalists out then they started eyeing the Loyalists’ new land, too. In fact, the Americans’ ambition to annex the land to the north is baked into the Articles of Confederation, Article XI: “Canada acceding to the confederation, and adjoining in the measures of the United States, shall be admitted into, and entitled to all the advantages of this Union.”

  Canadians understood a threat when they heard one—no matter how courteously phrased. Their worst suspicions would be confirmed in just a few decades.

  On June 18, 1812, President James Madison, responding to real and perceived British threats, sent his “War Message to Congress,” accusing Great Britain of “a series of acts, hostile to the United States as an independent and neutral nation.” The United States, now 7.5 million citizens strong, entered the rematch confident of victory. Thomas Jefferson, who had never seen combat, boasted that beating the British again would be “a mere matter of marching.”

  Early on the Americans earned upset victories against the world’s greatest naval force, on both the Great Lakes and the Atlantic. They boldly attacked Fort York, now called Toronto, where they burned public buildings and private homes. But the British turned things around when the HMS Shannon blasted away at the USS Chesapeake off Boston, then boarded her. In just thirteen minutes, 252 men were wounded or killed before Chesapeake surrendered. The Shannon then towed the Chesapeake to Halifax Harbour, where the townspeople ran to the docks to cheer.

  Haligonians were fiercely loyal British subjects, but they were also shrewd businesspeople. During the War of 1812, Halifax port receipts tripled, from £31,041 in 1812 to £93,759 in 1814. Halifax celebrated the British naval and army officers with lavish parties, while offering its many pubs and taverns to the lower-ranking sailors and soldiers, who stumbled about the city streets at all hours.

  Halifax historian Thomas Akins was a young boy during the War of 1812, and recalled that “the upper streets were full of brothels; grog-shops and dancing houses were to be seen in almost every part of town. The upper street along the base of Citadel Hill between the north and south barracks was known as ‘Knock Him Down Street,’ in consequence of the number of affrays and even murders committed there.”

  One theory goes that the term “Haligonian” was coined as a play on Haligoonian. If so, we know where it started. (Ditto the nickname Bluenosers, given to the sailors for their cold noses and their blue-dyed wool mittens, which deepened the color when their owners wiped their noses.) But if Halifax wasn’t exactly a monastery, it knew its strengths: supplying wars, and all that went with them. Halifax proved exceedingly good at all of it.

  A few Halifax residents found a way to profit more directly from the war: privateering. A privateer is exactly like a pirate, except the privateer is licensed by his government to attack enemy ships and capture, sink, or burn them. When Nova Scotia’s privateers captured an American ship, they would bring it back for auction at the Privateers’ Warehouse, a three-story stone building right next to the docks (now a popular college pub), and split the proceeds with the government.

  It sounds like a lark, but it was an extremely dangerous business, usually starting with the privateers catching up to a boat and firing a shot across the bow. If the other ship’s captain didn’t surrender, the privateers fired their cannons at the ship, which returned fire. The ship whose guns did the most damage usually won, but if that didn’t settle things, one crew would invade the other’s ship and start punching, strangling, and stabbing with knives and bayonets—all of them more reliable than rudimentary firearms. If the ship started to sink, the sailors were often doomed to drown no matter how close to shore, since many of them couldn’t swim. As they said, swimming just prolonged the agony.

  All this explains why outgunned ships typically tried to run away, and if they couldn’t, they simply surrendered. The winning crew would board the losing ship, put their own crewmen in charge, and steer the prize back to their home harbor.

  It wasn’t easy to make a living out of it either. During the War of 1812, a third of Nova Scotia’s privateers never seized a single American ship, only half could capture more than two for all their troubles, and a quarter Nova Scotia’s privateering ships were captured, burned, or lost.

  But if you were good at it, you could become rich and famous—and Joseph Barss Jr. was the best. When Barss’s father, Joseph Barss Esq., was just eleven his widowed mother left Barnstable, Massachusetts, in 1765, for Liverpool, Nova Scotia, where her son grew up to become a noted privateer against the Americans in the Revolutionary War. His son, Joseph Jr., inherited his seamanship and antipathy for Americans.

  When Joseph Barss Jr., and his business partners sensed war with the United States was coming, they spent a mere £440 to buy a tiny, putrid-smelling former Spanish slave ship called the Black Joke. They fumigated her with a concoction of vinegar, tar, and brimstone; rechristened her the Liverpool Packet; and installed five rusty cannons.

  Barss, a hale and hearty thirty-six-year-old with flowing black hair, headed straight for Massachusetts Bay, where he took eleven American vessels in one week, and followed that up by taking nine fishing schooners—in one day. While the American press howled for his capture, Barss and crew kept it up until Christmas 1812, when they returned to Halifax to bask in their bounty: more than $100,000 in prize money, or $3 million today. When they returned to sea in the dead of winter, the hardest season for privateering, they took thirty-three more ships in two months.

  Barss finally met his match on June 11, 1813, when an American privateer in a bigger boat with more firepower spotted the infamous Liverpool Packet off the coast of Maine and gave chase. After six hours, Captain Barss had to concede the inevitable, and struck his colors. But the Americans were not going to let a little thing like surrender keep them from storming the highly coveted Liverpool Packet, with sailors on both sides dying in the fight before the two captains ended it.

  The Americans towed Captain Barss and crew to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where local authorities shackled them in irons, marched them through Portsmouth, and then tossed them in jail, where Barss received “especially severe treatment.” They kept him in shackles and fed him only hardtack, crackers as tough and dry as plywood, designed to last months at sea. Several months later Joseph Barss’s captors paroled him, on one condition: that he never engage in privateering against American ships again.

  Barss retired to a farm in Nova Scotia, but not before establishing himself as the greatest privateer on the continent, catching somewhere near a hundred American vessels in less than a year. We don’t have Barss’s journals, but it stands to reason that capturing a few dozen American ships indicates you want to be rich. Capturing, burning, or sinking six or seven American ships suggests you don’t like Americans very much.

  By the end of the war, few citizens of the British Commonwealth would disagree, including the ones who burned the United States’s Presidential Mansion in retaliation for the Americans’ torching their homes in Fort York. They didn’t finish the job, but the smoke damage forced the Americans to whitewash it, which inspiring a new name: the White House. The man behind that attack, Major General Robert Ross, was killed days later, and is buried in Halifax’s central cemetery, with signs leading you to his gravestone. He died a hero.

  These combatants passed their anti-American sentiment down through the generations, including to Joseph Barss Jr.’s great-grandson Ernest, who would fight valiantly in the Great War while grumbling about Americans staying on the sidelines.

  When the War of 1812 ended three years after it started, Haligonians focused on cementing their city as the banking capital of British North America—and its shipping capital, too, with an effort led by Samuel Cunard. During the last year of the War of 1812, Cunard expanded into steamships, sending one across the Atlantic in 1840 to Liverpool and then back to Boston, establishing a popular route for Cunard’s standing as a leader in the cruise industry.

  In its first sixty-fiv
e years, Halifax learned that war could pay, but only if it prepared for the next one, and kept a vigilant eye on the Americans.

  After the War of 1812, the Duke of Wellington ordered that Halifax’s Citadel be rebuilt to keep out the French, the Spanish, and any other attackers, but mainly the Americans, who’d already shown an appetite for Canadian land. They started rebuilding the massive structure in 1828 and finished it in 1858—just in time.

  When the American Civil War broke out in 1861, British North America was conflicted, and Halifax even more so. Haligonians still had many family and commercial ties with Boston, one of their biggest shipping partners, but they were also doing a lot of business with Southern cotton growers, too. In fact, Halifax’s Richmond neighborhood had been named for Richmond, Virginia, because that Southern city shipped cotton to Halifax, where it was processed and shipped around the world. This divide explains why both the Union and the Confederates attracted hundreds of Haligonians to fight for their side.

  Haligonians also feared war-hungry Americans might instigate border skirmishes, or worse. Canadian politician D’Arcy McGee was the first to recognize the danger of the Civil War to British North America. If Americans were willing to kill each other over a principle, he reasoned they would also be willing to attack Canadians for their land—something the Yanks had been considering since 1776. When large Union armies gathered on the Maine–New Brunswick border, older Loyalists remembered 1812. When Union forces finally got the upper hand against the Confederates after Gettysburg, Northern newspapers urged the Union to keep going until they’d driven the British out of Canada.

  This was no mere rumor. In April 1861, Secretary of State William Seward proposed to President Lincoln that they attack British North America, and offered to start the war himself. Nova Scotians knew it wouldn’t take much of a spark to set the Yankee brushfire headed their way, yet they still took chances that could strike one.

  During a remarkable ten-day run in August of 1864, the Confederate State Ship (CSS) Tallahassee, captained by the skilled and daring helmsmen John Taylor Wood, grandson of U.S. president Zachary Taylor and nephew of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, destroyed twenty-six Union ships and captured seven more off the coast of New England. It was a streak worthy of Joseph Barss Jr. himself—and one that earned Wood the enmity of every Union general.

  But as Barss himself could tell Wood, they eventually catch up to you. On August 18, when two Union ships chased the CSS Tallahassee up the Eastern seaboard, Captain Wood sailed into Halifax Harbour, ostensibly to re-coal before returning South. With the two Union ships blocking the harbor, however, it seemed that Wood and his crew were doomed. Under British neutrality laws, the Tallahassee had exactly forty-eight hours to refuel, repair any damages, and return to sea.

  While one of Halifax’s many Confederate sympathizers, the highly respected Dr. Almon, distracted a Union officer who’d been ordered to keep an eye on Tallahassee by punching him in the face, Captain Wood brought aboard local helmsman Jock Fleming, “who knew the rivers as well as the fish who swam in them.” Fleming waited until dark on a moonless night to sneak Tallahassee around the narrow side of McNab’s Island, a passage normally too shallow to get a large ship through. But not, Fleming knew, at high tide, when it offered an additional seven feet of water, enough for him to gingerly guide Tallahassee through the small, dangerous strait, out of sight of the Union ships, and out to sea.

  Once the Union captains realized they’d been duped, they were furious with the Haligonians. If the Yankees needed an excuse to open fire on Nova Scotia, Dr. Almon and Jock Fleming had given it to them. But once again President Lincoln kept his cool, keeping his soldiers squarely on the American side of the border.

  Captain Wood never forgot the Haligonians’ help, nor their beautiful town. After the Civil War ended, he and some Confederate leaders returned to Halifax to raise their families. Wood’s neighbors “long remembered the upright figure, the quiet courtesy, the broad hat, the white hair and trim goatee of a typical Southern gentleman of the old school,” wrote Halifax historian Thomas H. Raddall, who was born the year before Wood died and knew many of his Halifax friends. Wood’s oldest son would graduate from the Royal Military College of Canada, and was the first Canadian officer to fall during the Boer War in 1899. Wood’s grandson, S. T. Wood, joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and would rise to commissioner, one of the best to lead that revered unit.

  The affection was returned. In 1992, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, which has since been absorbed by Halifax, opened a grade school named for the CSS Tallahassee.

  Chapter 4

  Waking Up Just in Time

  1865–1914

  From Halifax’s birth in 1749 through 1865, Haligonians had ridden a wonderful wave of wealth by supplying materials, people, and transport for wars around the world, mass migrations, and even the California Gold Rush. But after the American Civil War, Halifax struggled, and the Americans were none too eager to help the people who had helped the Confederates. Instead, talk resumed in New England papers of annexing British North America.

  This perpetual fear of an American invasion pushed British North America to set up a central government among Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the “Province of Canada,” present-day Quebec and Ontario, in 1867. Voting against its own economic self-interest, Nova Scotia approved “Confederation,” and to this day Canadians consider July 1, 1867, their birthday. To replace the unwieldy “British North America,” everyone agreed that “Canada,” a Huron-Iroquois word meaning “village” or “settlement,” was a fine name, and that was that. To celebrate the Dominion of Canada’s first birthday on July 1, 1868, the Citadel fired its cannons in salute, but one of them fired prematurely, killing two artillerymen. Things didn’t go much better for Nova Scotia afterward.

  Confederation brought Canada its own Intercolonial Railway, which was supposed to help Halifax sell its products in the West, but instead it boosted Toronto and Montreal at the expense of Halifax, whose population dropped from fourth highest to eleventh, behind former backwaters like Winnipeg, Calgary, and Edmonton. Halifax was no longer a rowdy town of privateers and entrepreneurs but a quiet haven for retirees who valued a rich lifestyle over mere riches. Without a war to work for, Halifax went into hibernation.

  One thing everyone could agree on: if Halifax didn’t do something soon, it would fall hopelessly behind the rest of the world, which was spinning faster than ever before. The turn of the century saw women fighting for the right to vote, workers earning the right to unionize, and Ford employees in Detroit soon earning five bucks a day. With that kind of money, they could afford to buy the Model Ts rolling off their assembly lines, or to travel to their growing cities by train, and once there get about by streetcar or subway. A few years later, airmail would carry their letters.

  These sweeping political and social changes accompanied an equally dramatic wave of innovation, which brought this brave new world telephones, toasters, instant coffee, tea bags, and Kellogg’s Cornflakes in the 1910s alone.

  Canada could claim full credit for at least one modern creation: the sport of hockey. The Mi’kmaq invented the game while manufacturers in Halifax and Dartmouth produced the first clamp-on skate; the first popular hockey stick, which they called the Micmac; and the Halifax Rules of Hockey. While Americans were consumed with baseball, boxing, and college football, Canadians formed the National Hockey Association in 1909, which became the National Hockey League in 1917. But the NHL’s first teams were based in the booming cities of Montreal, Ottawa, and Toronto, with none in Nova Scotia—a harsh slap in the face of the sport’s creators.

  But the spirit of reform introduced by American progressives soon hit Halifax. In March 1911, the city organized a campaign called Halifax Uplift, a kind of religious revival to push Halifax to throw off its sleepy past and join the future.

  In Canada’s 1911 national election, still considered the most important in Canadian history, citizens voted on a proposal called “Recipr
ocity,” which was intended to reduce trade tariffs with the United States—the NAFTA of its time.

  In a reversal of modern roles, Canada’s Liberal Party, led by its famously charismatic prime minister Wilfrid Laurier, sixty-nine, from Quebec, pushed to pass Reciprocity so Western Canadian farmers could sell their produce to the United States. Canada’s Conservative Party, led by Halifax’s fifty-seven-year-old Robert Borden, who had already lost two elections for Prime Minister to Laurier, opposed the deal, because Conservatives feared it would weaken Canada’s ties to Great Britain and leave its economy and national identity in the hands of the Americans. (A small example: Canadians still drove on the left side of the road, British style.) While Liberals tried to argue that the Americans were Canada’s partners, not predators, the Conservatives warned of the worst sort of behavior from their southern neighbors.

  The Americans gave them plenty to fear when the United States Congress’s speaker of the House, Missouri Democrat Champ Clark, took the floor to openly express an American ambition that went back to the nation’s founding: annexing Canada. “I look forward to the time,” he declared, “when the American flag will fly over every square foot of British North America up to the North Pole. The people of Canada are of our blood and language.” He went on to describe the trade agreement as just the first step toward taking over Canada.

  The Congressional Record reported that Clark’s speech received “prolonged applause.” The American press took note. “Evidently, then,” the Washington Post reported, “the Democrats generally approved of Mr. Clark’s annexation sentiments and voted for the reciprocity bill because, among other things, it improves the prospect of annexation.”