The Crimean War’s Impact on Pre-Confederation Canada

In March 1855, Joseph Howe revelled among his acquaintances in the elite of New York City, attending theatre performances, dinner parties and private meetings with high society. As a journalist, Reformer and parliamentarian in his hometown of Halifax, he was one of the pre-eminent citizens of Britain’s North American colonies and was received accordingly. This was no holiday, though. Howe was a man on a mission.  

This prodigious attempt to serve his government abroad ultimately proved to be an embarrassing failure. At the same time as Howe was wining and dining in New York City, American authorities were arresting his recruiting agents in such cities as Philadelphia and Chicago. The American government would later force the recall of the British ambassador over the issue. It was also a professional failure for Howe. Having lost his seat in an election due to his absence, Howe hoped to leverage his American adventure into a patronage position in the imperial civil service. The London authorities rebuffed the pretensions of the enterprising colonial, showcasing the characteristic transatlantic class divide of the era.  

Despite Howe’s lack of success, his actions in response to the Crimean War represented the emergence of a unique diplomatic role for the British North American colonies. In many ways, this would pre-empt the sort of place that Canada would hold as an intermediary middle power. Before Canada was even created, the Crimean War provided figures like Joseph Howe — who would go on to be his home province’s premier, a federal cabinet minister and Nova Scotia’s third lieutenant-governor — with the opportunity to forge an independent diplomatic role as transatlantic intermediaries in response to international crisis. The war would also advance other changes to British America, shaping Canada’s political, military and economic landscape in the decade before Confederation in a world filled with conflict and competition. 

With the re-emergence of great power politics and imperial ambitions on the world stage, learning how Canada has been influenced by world events in the past can help Canadians prepare for an uncertain future.

Moulding and defending a coast

In the early 1850s, Vancouver Island was an isolated outpost of the British Empire. Its capital, Victoria, was a lethargic colonial centre made up of a small population still dominated by fur traders and administrators working for the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). Only recently had the Pacific border between Britain and the United States been set at the 49th parallel on the mainland, forcing the HBC government northward from its headquarters on the Columbia River at Fort Vancouver. In the years preceding the 1858 Fraser Canyon gold rush that would see the population of the region explode, and the establishment of the mainland colony of British Columbia, the Crimean War would firmly establish the area’s uncompromisable value to the Royal Navy.  

In the Pax Britannica era of the 19th century, the Royal Navy’s supremacy was virtually unassailable. However, halfway through that century, the north Pacific remained a weak point. HBC, governing the new Crown colony of Vancouver Island under Royal Charter, still patrolled the coast with the SS Beaver (the first steamship on the north Pacific) and the SS Otter, with both acting more as floating trading posts than naval protection.  

Royal Navy ships served as a symbol of British power as thousands of American miners flooded into HBC territory looking for gold

James Douglas, HBC chief factor and governor of Vancouver Island, saw his colony, in military terms at least, as “a liability to Britain.” War between Russia and Britain didn’t bring immediate fears of conflict in America, even though both empires’ Pacific American colonies bordered each other. The regional governments of HBC and the Russian-American Company were mutually dependent, serving as each other’s largest trading partner. Britain’s assurances that territorial expansion wasn’t a war aim resulted in an effective ceasefire in the eastern Pacific. Douglas’s assessment stemmed more from a fear that Russia might form a strategic alliance with the United States. The 1850s saw the Americans engaged in a rapid military expansion into its new Pacific territories as it waged war on the Indigenous Peoples of modern-day Washington state.  

The Crimean War only saw one real battle in its Pacific theatre, but it starkly revealed the Royal Navy’s vulnerability in the region. The 1854 Siege of Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula was a defeat for the combined Anglo-French naval force, which suffered more than 200 casualties, including the suicide of the British commanding officer, Rear Admiral David Price. With no forward operating bases, the allied squadron was forced to retreat across the Pacific, with the British regrouping at Victoria and the French at San Francisco. The humiliation of defeat was emphasized by the lack of facilities available for recuperation.  

Price’s replacement as commander of the Royal Navy in the north Pacific was Rear Admiral Henry Bruce, who soon requested the construction of a naval hospital in preparation for a followup attack the next year. The construction of three wooden hospital huts on almost three hectares at Duntze Head by Esquimalt Harbour, just west of Victoria, was the result. The 1855 operation on Petropavlovsk was an overwhelming success, in part due to the preparation and foresight of Bruce, and in part due to Russia’s pre-emptive abandonment of the fort. The naval hospital, though unused, had still proved financially burdensome on the young colony. After Douglas pleaded with them to help pay the cost of construction, the Royal Navy took control of the buildings. Ten years after its construction, Esquimalt replaced Valparaiso, Chile, as the Pacific headquarters of the Royal Navy; 1910 saw it transferred to the new Royal Canadian Navy. 

The Royal Navy would play a major role both in the colonization of Canada’s West Coast and the retention of sovereignty from American encroachment. While British officers patrolled, policed and repressed First Nations activity up and down the shore, Royal Navy ships served as a symbol of British power as thousands of American miners flooded into HBC territory looking for gold in 1858. British reluctance to take Russian America, fearing American outcries, led the way to the United States’ purchase of the Alaskan territory a decade later. However, British presence in Esquimalt did help ward off the manifest destiny creeping up from the U.S. toward B.C. 

Canada’s battle for free trade

Free trade has truly always been a source of controversy in Canada. After 1846, when Britain reformed into a doctrinally free-trade country with the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws, its colonies couldn’t rely on a preferential trade relationship within the Empire. For the colonies of British North America, whose small populations had been utterly dependent on exporting their resources to the United Kingdom, this reform caused significant discomfort. British merchants started gravitating to closer — and, suddenly, cheaper — timber and wheat sources in the Baltic, rather than the St. Lawrence. The Crimean War rapidly changed the evolving economic dynamic in North America, as war with Russia saw the Baltic quickly cut off from British trade. Suddenly given a renewed importance as a source of raw materials, the future provinces of Canada were significantly strengthened in the ensuing discussions over continental trade. Independence, not annexation, would be the result.  

Desperate to find new markets, the future provinces of Canada had turned toward the United States as their primary economic partner. In 1849, reciprocity acts passed in Canada, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, with the hope that the Americans would pass similar legislation in a move toward continental free trade. But there was also fear that free trade with the United States would make annexation inevitable. This was heightened by the 1849 Annexation Manifesto, published by a powerful group of Montreal business leaders (which included Louis-Joseph Papineau, leader of the 1837 Lower Canada Rebellion, and future prime minister John Abbott). Feeling abandoned by the British reversal of preferential colonial trade, those at the economic centre of British North America were attracted to the hungry allure of the growing republic to the south.  

The price of wheat, which had already been rising due to poor harvests in the year before the outbreak of war with Russia, rose even higher. Spring 1855 saw the 19th century’s peak wheat pricing at $2.25 per bushel. While this period saw poor yields in the eastern parts of the Province of Canada, crops prospered in the West. This encouraged more investment in the agricultural development of less populated parts of the province. The bubble later deflated, but it came at a crucial time for the economic development of the British colonies and in asserting their relevance against annexationist political impulses. 

The Reciprocity Treaty negotiated by the British — which lasted a little more than a decade — wasn’t signed as a concession to the doctrine of manifest destiny

The formation of Canada’s military  

Canadian militias before 1855 were mostly ad hoc forces raised from the colonial population in response to specific crises. Canadian militiamen fought alongside British regular soldiers in defending against the American invasions of Canada in 1775 and 1812 and the 1837-38 rebellions of Upper and Lower Canada. These often-irregular militia forces were effective in supplementing the well-trained and amply supplied British troops, but things changed drastically with the onset of the Crimean War. 

Land war with Russia exposed how, though the world’s most industrialized country with untouchable naval supremacy, Britain’s army faced major challenges. In some ways outperformed by their more numerous French allies, widespread disease and poor organization became hallmarks of the British war effort. To fulfil that demand, Britain pulled most of its soldiers, more than 4,000 men, from their garrisons throughout British North America.  

The lighter military presence was far from indicative of a reduced threat level. Besides the persistent annexationist rumblings, and memories of the rebellions that had broken out less than two decades earlier, the tensions that would lead to the U.S. Civil War were already metastasizing. The 1855 Militia Act sought to fulfil the United Province of Canada’s defence requirements through the creation of an active militia of 5,000 men. This force was broken up into 18 military districts throughout the province and included seven batteries of field artillery and five batteries of foot artillery.   

It became clear that the old order of citizen conscripts would be unnecessary for immediate defence

Past, present and future 

And now, 170 years after the Crimean War ended, as war continues to rage in Ukraine and the Black Sea remains a combat zone, there are many parallels that shape Canada’s place in both eras. Protectionism and annexationism are once again governing U.S.-Canada relations. Defence threats are fuelling a push to build new bases and infrastructure in strategically vulnerable locations (now in the Arctic rather than Vancouver Island). Canadians continue to volunteer to fight, with thousands today following Alexander Dunn’s lead and joining military operations in Ukraine. How Canada will charge forward remains unknown, but clues can be found in the 19th-century version of these events.