From Confederacy to Confederation

Readers with a fondness for well-crafted narrative history will be sure to enjoy Blood and Daring: How Canada Fought the American Civil War and Forged a Nation, the fourth book by Toronto historian John Boyko. The story unfolds in the midst of an extraordinary historical event, the American Civil War, and is filled with all manner of fascinating individuals from both sides of the Canadian-American border. Boyko is a very capable storyteller, not only when discussing diplomacy and grand strategy, but also in the way he manages to pull the reader down to the ground level and show the war from the perspective of six historical figures, or “guides,” as he describes them, whose exploits collectively make up the backbone of Blood and Daring.

As he did in his third book, on Canadian prime minister R.B. Bennett, Boyko has a tendency to overreach when striving for dramatic...