In an excerpt from his new book, Julian Sher introduces readers 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.
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 “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.
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. “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.”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.
“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.” 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.
He lived in Quebec for almost a year, but when he journeyed to Toronto for a visit, his biggest fan was ready.
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