Topic: American Civil War posts
Other than my welcome post made a few minutes ago, this will be my first post to the forum.
My name is Bart Armstrong and I have spent the last 8 years researching the Medal of Honor and the Canadians who were awarded this incredible award.
Doing research earlier today I found this forum..and this theread and would like to make a few comments about some of the previous 25 comments herein.
The first post intrigues me as the motto the author uses sures sounds like a CSR motto, If I am write, then to the author, I am a former TSR. You ought to know what that is.
Re the Readers Digest article, one should realize that whilst no doubt many sources for the article were checked and double checked, one should consider that even the most powerful sources do not get it right all the time. Any ref to early Military records are full of errors that the trained eye would discover. Many soldiers lied about their age, their home town etc for a zillion reasons yet the records reflect their name was so an so from wherever, when clearly neither was the case. In fact one fellow was so shrude he enlisted I think it was 42 times before getting caught and sent off to jail. He believed in multi levels of income and collected 41 bounties for signing up befor his gig came to an end.
Whilst some 50,000 Canadians went south and fought, probably as many as 7,000 died on US soil. There were not 4 but 8 Canadian Generals in the Civil War and one of these actually nominated Lincoln for office.
While oodles of site will tell you that 54 Canadians earned the MOH, and some 29 came from the Civil War days, both numbers have almost been doubled by my research. CW days prduced 57 MOH's coming to Canadians or those with ties to Canada and more may yet remain to be discovered.
Regarding post number 4, I should think that with the recruitment efforts, legal and otherwise in Canada during CW days, Lincoln was anything but AGAINST Canadian recruiting. And of interest to some, one of the Generals buried in NB served in the honor guard to escort his body after the assassination. Yet another Canadian was in charge of those sent off to capture his murder and yet another..a MOH recipient actually played a role in the building of the very funeral car used to escort his body throughout the several states passed during the procession.
Re the note at post 7 regarding the 61 Canadians who earned the MOH, that figure is nout of date, and in fact is mine from a few years back when I sent supporting materials to the Canadian Embassy at Washington with the request, honoured, for the Ambassador and some staff to attend at Arlington to conduct a ceremony for 9 Cdn MOH soldiers buried there. The "61" list was released to the CBC who then posted it on the net. They got some of the info wrong and ignored a subsequent request by me to correct their materials.
Post 9 makes ref to materials that ought to be reliable, but are not.
Two examples... EE Dodds was NOT born in Canada, but England.
BF Young's name is NOT YOUNG, but YOUNGS.
And many recipients are missing from the list.
I hope none of this offends any reader and welcome feedback
Bart Armstrong, CD
Victoria BC
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