The Niagara Mail Defends the Right of Southerners to Choose Their Own Form of Government

Davis stayed in Niagara-on-the-Lake until June 3rd, his 59th birthday, when he returned to Montreal via Toronto, again accompanied by Mason. After he had returned to Montreal, the Niagara Mail amply reciprocated Davis' cordial sentiments:

It is a subject of pride to Canadians that they can offer the hospitality of the soil and the shelter of the British flag to so many worthy men who are proscribed and banished from their homes for no crime, but that which, according to all American principles, is no crime at all, viz. to assert the right of every people to choose their own form of government.

--Nicholas Rescher, Niagara-on-the-Lake as a Confederate Refuge, 1866-1869 (Fox Chapel, PA: NAP Publications, 2003), 12-13.