Thousands of French Canadians crossed the international border and served with distinction in the Union armies during the U.S. Civil War. Some of them went on to achieve more than passing historical fame.

Rémi Tremblay survived incarceration in a Confederate prison and spent years in Woonsocket and Fall River. In the latter place, in 1885-1886, he edited l’Indépendant with Hugo Dubuque. Back in Canada, he crossed swords with the federal Conservatives over Louis Riel’s execution and patronage. He authored Un Revenant, which first appeared serially in Honoré Beaugrand’s La Patrie.

Calixa Lavallée, likely wounded in combat, travelled across the United States and then to France following the war. He worked as an organist, a conductor, and a composer in Montreal and Quebec City. He composed O Canada, the future national anthem, in 1880. Shortly thereafter he moved to the U.S., where he spent the last decade of his life—winning more acclaim than financial security.

Prosper Bender served as a surgeon in the final days of the war. He earned a medical diploma upon returning to Canada and was promptly expelled from the Canadian Medical Association for advertising homeopathy. He hosted a literary salon in his Quebec City home before moving to Boston, like Lavallée. He contributed to a number of prominent magazines, promoted annexation, and spent his final years in Canada.

And then there was Edmond Mallet. As historian Robin Winks has noted, most of the French Canadians who enlisted in the Union armies were already settled on American soil prior to the war. Tremblay and Lavallée lived and toured in the U.S. in the late 1850s; likewise, though Mallet was born in Montreal,[1] his family crossed the border when he was still a child.

The Mallet family lived in Oswego, New York, and there Mallet enlisted in 1861. He spent three years in uniform. Severely injured at the Battle of Cold Harbor, a Confederate victory in the spring of 1864, he also earned recognition for his heroic actions. He was promoted to brevet major and, like other officers who survived the war, bore that title for the remainder of his life as a semi-official courtesy.

This was the basis for Mallet’s rise to prominence among Franco-Americans, a community that so far had had too few pedestals—too few of its own to celebrate. No longer would the French Canadians in the United States have to rely on the Marquis de Lafayette and Louis-Joseph Papineau in their search for legitimacy; the glorious past would remain but now they had their own great leader in the flesh.

It is almost impossible to envision Mallet’s success without his military service and his actions—which are still shrouded in the fog of history—at Cold Harbor. Survival amid the thousands of battle deaths was alone a significant feat. The rapid promotions further enabled him to draw attention after the war. Making the most of federal largesse, he earned his pension, obtained a law degree, and won appointment to an office in the Treasury Department.

The next fifteen years seem to have passed quietly. Mallet married Mary Christell Lyons (who passed away in 1894); they had three sons. Mallet devoted his free time to the Carroll Institute, a cultural center of which he was a founder, and the Young Catholics’ Friend Society of Washington, D.C., a charitable organization.

His path began to intersect with Franco-American life more seriously at the turn of the 1880s. According to Robin Winks, living in New York State from an early age, Mallet “hardly could speak French.” The fact that he attended Oswego’s public schools would lend credence to that idea. Still, there is little question that the spoken language of the household through his upbringing was French and that even after years in Washington he would have retained some of his maternal tongue.

Perhaps it was through the Carroll Institute’s library that Mallet began, at a distance, to return to his cultural roots. Regardless, he was inspired to attend the great celebration of the Saint-Jean-Baptiste in Quebec City in 1880. He met the right people and began to develop a network of correspondents in the Province of Quebec and in the U.S. Northeast. Mallet contributed a piece on French-Canadian emigration in La Minerve. Through noted orator Charles Thibault, his biography appeared in Le Canadien later in 1880. Ferdinand Gagnon reproduced it in Le Travailleur, in Worcester. Franco-American elites were ready and willing to embrace their long-estranged brother.[2]

His was a rapid ascent. When Franco-Americans met at their “national” convention in Rutland, Vermont, in the summer of 1886, U.S. newspapers described Mallet as “president-general” of a league of French-Canadian societies and as “the leader of French Canadians in this country.” Contemporary accounts from non-Franco sources represented his role as far more official than it ever really was. But, if not a leader, after Gagnon’s death in the spring of 1886, Mallet was at least a figurehead. Through the Civil War veteran, who had shed his blood for his adoptive nation, Franco-Americans literally and metaphorically entered the halls of American political power.[3]

While building his library, Mallet occasionally travelled north and presented his research in Boston and French-Canadian centers in New England. Some question remains as to whether his talks, though printed in French, were actually delivered in English. He certainly did write in English. Regardless, even from afar, he took an active interest and participated in the cultural life of the French-Canadian diaspora through the remainder of the century.

But trouble was brewing. Metis and Indigenous resistance in Saskatchewan caught the attention of the men assembled in Rutland and, through Mallet, the attention of Washington’s political class. Mallet inherited the position of “Indian Inspector” in 1888 perhaps because he had known Louis Riel, yet he had to navigate the web of partisan patronage in the nation’s capital. And suddenly, the following year, he was out of a job. What happened?

Next week: Why Was Major Mallet Fired?

Sources

Jean Levasseur traces Tremblay’s life in two articles published in the Journal of Eastern Townships Studies in 2004; I used the Dictionary of Canadian Biography to ascertain the basic facts of Lavallée’s life. For Bender, readers can turn to prior posts on this blog or to my article published in the Journal of Canadian Studies in 2018. Other famous Canadian soldiers of the Civil War are mentioned here.

Historian Jean Lamarre has authored what is currently the definitive work on Quebeckers, or French Canadians, in the Civil War: Les Canadiens français et la guerre civile américaine (1861-1865): Une autre dimension de leur migration vers les États-Unis (2006). Robin Winks has written The Civil War Years: Canada and the United States (1998), the standard survey of Canada’s relationship to the U.S. during the war.

Additional information concerning Mallet’s life and his relationship to the Franco-American community is drawn from contemporary newspapers and his correspondence with Charles Thibault.

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[1] I have encountered a few sources that mention Nova Scotia as Mallet’s birthplace. Not only have I not found any primary evidence of this; later records match the information stated in a Montreal baptism record that bears his name.

[2] A biographical statement written by Gabriel Nadeau contains a number of dubious claims, but seems to confirm that Mallet’s renewed dedication to French life and culture occurred around 1880.

[3] Although an unelected civil servant, Mallet’s life did intersect with partisan politics, especially as patronage continued to play a part in Washington appointments. Letters exchanged with Charles Thibault suggest that Mallet was a Republican and was afraid of losing his position when Democrat Grover Cleveland became president in the 1880s. Recollections by Corinne Rocheleau-Rouleau confirm this, even if prominent historians of our day have made him into a “staunch Democrat.”