‘THE NORTH STAR” EXCERPT:
how a toronto aristocrat aided the south in the u.s. civil war
In an excerpt from his new book, Julian Sher introduces us to aristocrat George Taylor Denison III, who offered his wealth, his home and more to the South’s plotters. Then he became a bigoted judge, with fans in the former Confederacy.
Toronto Star, April 22, 2023
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Julian Sher • Special to The Star, April 22, 2023
It was as close as you could get to a Southern plantation home, considering it stood in the middle of a wooded estate in the 1860s on the western outskirts of Toronto.
The mansion boasted a wide veranda supported by Doric columns, shuttered windows, 18-foot ceilings and imported marble fireplaces, surrounded by a rose garden adorned with rustic bridges, wild strawberries, and trilliums.
It was called Heydon Villa, and its owner, a wealthy and powerful aristocrat named George Taylor Denison III, sought to emulate more than the architecture of the slave South — he was an avowed ally and supporter of the Confederacy.
“I was a strong friend of the Southern refugees who were exiled in our country, and I treated them with the hospitality due to unfortunate strangers driven from their homes,” Denison wrote.
The “refugees” Denison harboured and helped were hardly the poor victims of the bloody American Civil War that raged from 1861 to 1865. On the contrary, they were the cream of the slaveholding aristocracy that had started the war — the top Confederate leaders, generals and spies.
And the support Denison offered them would eventually land him in a mess of trouble.
For tens of thousands of American Blacks escaping slavery, Canada was a “North Star” — a beacon of hope that offered freedom at the end of a long journey on the Underground Railroad that brought runaways across the border.
Canada, still a British colony during the Civil War and just a few years away from Confederation, was ostensibly “neutral” in the conflict between the North and South. But many among Canada’s elites in politics, business and the church played a darker role, supporting the slave South and in fomenting numerous plots against Abraham Lincoln.
Most newspapers here were more sympathetic to the Confederates over the “mad despot” Lincoln. Catholic church leaders praised the Southern rebellion and helped hide fugitive Confederates. Bankers allowed Southern conspirators to finance their plots and launder their money.
But more than anyone in Canada, George Taylor Denison had the clout and convictions to help the slave South.
Denison had inherited his family’s wealth, his conservative politics and his family connections to the local militia and government. By the 1860s he sat on Toronto’s city council, as his father had before him, representing the St. Patrick’s Ward that bordered his family estate.
He was in the perfect position the help the Confederates when, in 1864 — three years into a war that was beginning to look bleak for them — they made a desperate effort to surprise Lincoln with unexpected attacks, from north of the border. Confederate president Jefferson Davis set aside about $1 million (about $16 million in today’s currency) to set up a Secret Service operation in Canada, headed by a Southern politician named Jacob Thompson.
Thompson, like many other Confederates, set up shop at the luxurious Queen’s Hotel on Front Street where the Fairmount Royal York now stands. Filled with Union spies as well, it was not the safest location for a Confederate undercover operation.
Denison was only too happy to offer a solution. He opened up his secluded Southern-style villa to the Confederate plotters he so admired.
“I became very friendly with Colonel Thompson … at my house,” Denison recalled. “There were a number of escaped prisoners … and many other officers of lower rank, with whom I was in the habit of frequently discussing military matters.”
It was a lot more than just talk.
The Confederates ran a network of couriers and spies who carried secret dispatches back and forth between Toronto and Montreal and the capital of the breakaway Southern states in Richmond, Virginia.
Early in 1865, Jacob Thompson asked Denison to hide one such courier named Samuel B. Davis of the Confederate army. Denison was only too pleased to help Davis, whom he described as “a gallant officer” connected to “the celebrated prison at Andersonville.”
In truth, what that prison in Georgia was celebrated for was the abuse and torture of Union soldiers.
When the Confederates sought to send the courier back to Richmond with secret messages, Denison came up with a strategy.
“An idea struck me which I explained to Colonel Thompson,” Denison recounted. “It was to write the despatches on thin white silk in pencil, and sew them in the back of the coat or vest, and in the sleeve near the elbow. The silk could not be felt, nor would it rustle.”
Five pieces of very thin silk were prepared and Denison recruited his wife, who worked from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. to sew them into Davis’s coat and vest under Thompson’s supervision. Denison then secured Davis a passport from the U.S. consul and drove him by sleigh in the middle of the night to the train station. Denison was relieved when he saw his companion get on board safely.
On his second day on the train, however, Samuel B. Davis had the misfortune to run into Union soldiers who had been freed from the Andersonville prison. They recognized the man they blamed for their torment and Davis was immediately arrested. In jail, he was searched, but thanks to Denison’s silken subterfuge, nothing incriminating was found.
(Davis was found guilty of spying after a swift military trial but managed to avoid execution thanks to a last-minute reprieve.)
Before long, the Confederates in Canada called on Denison for more help. Jacob Thompson wanted to refit a streamer called the Georgian, turn it into a sort of warship and attack Northern cities. Denison fronted $16,500 for the scheme.
Authorities, though, grew suspicious about activity around the Georgian and had it seized in the Collingwood harbour.
In April 1865, an informant inside the Canadian Confederate ranks revealed more details of the plot. When police officers raided the house of one of Denison’s accomplices in Toronto, they found bullet moulds, cartridges and — rather startlingly — 26 torpedoes in a cellar he had filled with water.
It all led to more sensational reports in the American papers with the New York Times headlining the story: “An Armed Expedition Ready to sail from Toronto. A TORONTO COUNCILMAN IMPLICATED.”
Unapologetic, Denison had the nerve to take the government to court to fight for his money and ship back. He lost.
The Toronto aristocrat also showed no shame after Lincoln’s assassination on Friday, April 14, 1865.
On the Monday following the killing, the city council in Toronto met in a solemn mood to express condolences to the American people. “A nation weeps,” said one alderman in support of a resolution to shut down for two hours as a tribute to the slain president.
There was only one council member who opposed the idea: George Taylor Denison III.
“We had plenty of things to attend to under our own Government without attending to those of another,” he said.
Denison showed much more affection to Lincoln’s opponent, the defeated leader of the slave South. After the war, Jefferson Davis sought refuge in Canada in the spring of 1867.
He lived in Quebec for almost a year, but when he journeyed to Toronto for a visit, his biggest fan was ready.
“I went around and started a number of friends to pass the word through the city for as many as possible to come down to the wharf and give him a reception,” George Denison wrote in his memoirs. “By the time the vessel arrived a crowd of several thousand filled the landing place. I got on a pile of coal with a number of friends to give the signal and start the crowd to cheer.”
In the years after the war, Denison’s fervour for the defeated slavocracy never wavered.
He travelled to New Orleans to spend two days with the South’s most famous military leader, Robert E. Lee, and then corresponded with him regularly. “He is one of those men that made the ancients believe in demigods,” Denison gushed.
In 1882, Jefferson Davis invited Denison to his home, a former plantation in Mississippi where the Toronto man spent a week “on the broad veranda, looking through the orange and magnolia trees upon the sea, discussing the events of the war and the inside history of it from the Southern side.”
The Confederates never forget Denison’s devotion to their cause — even a half-century after the war. In 1916, when more than 200,000 people attended a Confederate memorial march in Alabama, the Birmingham News ran the headline “George Denison given magnificent reception here.” The visitor from Canada got a standing ovation from the crowd at the Bijou Theatre, hailed as “a friend and helper.”
Back in Toronto, the unrepentant Confederate sympathizer got to display his politics from the bench, serving as a police court judge for more than four decades.
“He constituted a one-man ‘Vigilante Committee,’” as his family biography put it, handling no fewer than 90 per cent of the indictable offences that came before the court.
He was openly contemptuous of the Irish, Jewish, Italian and Chinese immigrants who appeared before him. He devoted an entire chapter in his book “Recollections of a Police Magistrate” to what he called “the Negro element.” As he put it, “The negroes, many of whom were escaped or freed slaves, were a source of amusement in the court because of their many peculiarities.”
After a brief illness, he died on June 6, 1925.
But his legacy lives on.
A street in Kensington Market bears his family’s name, a reminder of one of Toronto’s most powerful aristocrats who found himself on the wrong side of a war, and of history.
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