Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
A blood-red leaf
It was the summer of 1994. I had taken a couple of weeks holiday in the southern United States, landing in Louisville, Kentucky and gradually making my way through a dozen different states. I took in concerts and plays, baseball games and golf tournaments, but my chief purpose in going was to tour a number of historic sites, all of them connected to one central catastrophic event - the American Civil War.
My fascination with this conflict originated with a book I read in my youth - The Day Lincoln Was Shot - by a popular historian named Jim Bishop. Understandably, that book had a distinct pro-Union bias. It wasn’t until I read a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel called The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara in the late 70’s, a fictionalized treatment of the battle of Gettysburg, that I began to see there were two or more sides to a very tragic story. I began to read everything I could get my hands on about what they call the first modern war - involving trains, machine guns, balloons, submarines and a number of other innovations - which pitted brother against brother and ultimately killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
One of the most difficult things for a Canadian boy to understand about the Civil War - which officially began 150 years ago this week with the bombardment of Fort Sumter in the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina - was the motivation of the men who fought for the South, the Confederacy. What was so precious about the abominable institution of slavery, or about the state governments who seceded to preserve it, that men would willingly face certain death in its cause?
If Quebec had chosen to secede from Canada in a referendum, would the rest of us have gone to war to prevent it? Of course not. But that’s the principal reason - the preservation of the Union - that Lincoln and his troops endured four long years of horror and heartbreak, until on April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. And five days later, Lincoln himself died at the hands of an actor who believed that Father Abraham was almost singlehandedly responsible for the destruction of his nation.
So after 30 years of reading about the Civil War, and spurred by seeing the 1993 movie version of The Killer Angels, I decided to go south (where 98% of the war was fought) to try and get a better understanding of what it was all about. I went to Gettysburg and Antietam, to Manassas and Fredericksburg, to Chattanooga and Appomattox and Harper’s Ferry. I stood where John Brown and Lincoln and Stonewall Jackson and Chamberlain stood, tried to imagine what they saw, how they felt.
Finally I got near the end of my journey, which would be a PGA tournament on a very hot weekend in Memphis (which a Canadian very nearly won!). But before becoming absorbed in that modern world, I paid one more visit to an 1860’s battlefield. Not far east of Memphis, on the banks of the Tennessee River, a major battle was fought almost an exact year after Fort Sumter, again in early April, around an old church called Shiloh. It was Grant’s first significant victory.
On that July day in 1994, I drove around the Shiloh battlefield and stopped to read a plaque at a site called Bloody Pond. I closed my eyes to try and contemplate the chaos that must have whirled around this spot some 132 years earlier, when the men of the war’s western armies had very little experience of what battle was all about. I was in a bit of a reverie, with no tourists about, when I felt something touch my right hand, which was resting on a stone wall. I opened my eyes and there was a small blood-red leaf, just sitting gently on the back of my hand as if it had floated down from a tree.
Except here’s the thing. There were no trees at that spot, the closest were a hundred yards away, and there wasn’t a breath of breeze that afternoon. Besides, it was July, the leaves were green, every leaf was green. So out of nowhere, at Bloody Pond, the very last stop on my Civil War tour, a bloody leaf comes to me.
I took it as a sign that the Civil War had meaning to me, that at some point it would play an important part in my life. But there’ve been a few false starts since then. A play I wrote that mixed the Klondike Gold Rush with the Battle of Fredericksburg, that audiences shrugged at. A potential film about four Canadian brothers who fought for the North, based on a book that turned out to be fiction. A plan to get rich from tourists in Appomattox, which foundered on pesky work visa regulations.
Somewhere along the line the little red leaf dried up and crumbled into dust. But I still believe in its fortune-telling power. I’m still fascinated by the Civil War, I still can’t figure it out, but someday I’ll find out why it has such a spell on me.
