Please click the icon to follow us on Squidoo.on this day the Union Army invaded Upper Canada and eliminated that smarmy nest of rebel sympathizers for all time.

Despite the blatant fact that Confederate agents really were being harboured in British North America, in reality the bulk of the rebels were based in the Southern States which were even now threatening to secede from the Union. And surely they would have done so already had Lincoln, rather than Seward, received the Republican nomination in 1860. But due to the chance presentation of an undescribably ugly woodcut of his opponent at the "Wigwam" in Chicago, Seward had somehow prevailed and his strategem for recreating a sense of Union identity was a war of northern aggression with the old enemy - Great Britain.

Rather than wait for another negative catalyst (like the Harper`s Ferry Raid) to split the Union, he figured that a positive catalyst might reverse the forces of disintegration.

The timing was auspicious, being almost fifty years to the day when President Madison had ordered the annexation of Canada, a task underestimated as "a mere matter of marching". Had he succeeded the expansion of territory would have exceeded that achieved by his predecessor under the Louisiana Purchase. And perhaps a bigger question might well be what would have been the state of such a larger Union by 1862.

However Seward, like Madison, would also fail. And the reversal would become even more catastrophic when the Southern States decided to seize their moment to secede when the Royal Navy bombarded the helpless northern cities on the Eastern Seaboard.

And so history would ridiculed the invasion as "Seward's Folly", yet recognise that the fateful act somehow exemplified his own character. His contemporary Carl Schurz described Seward as "one of those spirits who sometimes will go ahead of public opinion instead of tamely following its footprints".