Canada and the American Civil War are more connected than most Canadians realize, and a new exhibition at the Canadian War Museum called Close to Conflict lays out exactly how. Dr. Tim Foran walks through what that connection looked like, from the border crackdown, to kidnapped recruits, to the birth of Canada’s own military.
The exhibition doesn’t stick to comfortable mythology either. It traces how freedom seekers who escaped enslavement in the United States found legal freedom in Canada, but not social equality, and how that struggle continued long after slavery was abolished across the British Empire in 1834.
There’s also the stranger side of the story: draft dodgers nicknamed skedaddlers, recruiters who resorted to kidnapping, and a border that went from barely enforced to a serious security concern almost overnight. Dr. Foran connects all of it back to why Canada started building a real military in the first place.
Topics: American Civil War, Canadian War Museum, black Canadian history, Canadian militia, Canada-U.S. border
GUEST: Dr. Tim Foran | https://www.warmuseum.ca/exhibitions/canada-and-the-american-civil-war
Originally aired on2026-08-11
