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A mere 14 years later, the lands of Canada would seem just as welcoming to a man who could not have been more opposite to John Henry Hill. In fact, it was a man who had given up his political career, his fortune and even his freedom to ensure that men like Hill remained enslaved.

In May, 1867, few Canadians noticed when a train trundled into Montreal carrying Jefferson Davis, the deposed president of the Confederate States of America.

Davis was a marked man blamed by Northerners and Southerners alike for the deadliest war in U.S. history, and after a harrowing train journey through New York — where he would have needed to avoid the gaze of war widows and crippled veterans alike — Davis was just happy to be in a country where nobody recognized him.

“My trip was so devoid of incident that like the weary knife grinder, I have no tale to tell,” he wrote in a letter to his brother.

There had been a time not too long before where Davis could have assumed that history would remember him as a second George Washington: A hesitant but duty-bound figure who had led a righteous revolution against an overbearing oppressor.

Instead, his Confederacy was under military occupation, 500,000 of his countrymen were dead, and slavery had been permanently abolished.

Davis, gaunt and weakened by two years in a military jail, had headed north to join his exiled family in a crowded Montreal boarding house and begin looking for a job.

“In mining I think there is profitable employment to be found,” wrote Davis in a hopeful letter to his brother. Mostly, though, the 60-year-old was depressed.