In Lower Canada the clash was more serious. The French Canadians, who had not asked for representative government, eventually grasped its possibilities and found leaders other than those ordained for them. In the first Assembly there were many seigneurs and aristocrats who bore names notable for six generations back Taschereau, Duchesnay, Lothiniere, Rouville, Salaberry. But they soon found their surroundings uncongenial or failed to be reelected. Writing in 1810 to Lord Liverpool, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, the Governor, Sir James Craig, with a fine patrician scorn thus pictures the Assembly of his day.
"It really, my Lord, appears to me an absurdity, that the Interests of certainly not an unimportant Colony, involving in them those also of no inconsiderable portion of the Commercial concerns of the British Empire, should be in the hands of six petty shopkeepers, a Blacksmith, a Miller, and 15 ignorant peasants who form part of our present House; a Doctor or Apothecary, twelve Canadian Avocats and Notaries, and four so far respectable people that at least they do not keep shops, together with ten English members compleat the List: there is not one person coming under the description of a Canadian Gentleman among them."
And again:
"A Governor cannot obtain among them even that sort of influence that might arise from personal intercourse. I can have none with Blacksmiths, Millers, and Shopkeepers; even the Avocats and Notaries who compose so considerable a portion of the House, are, generally speaking, such as I can nowhere meet, except during the actual sitting of Parliament, when I have a day of the week expressly appropriated to the receiving a large portion of them at dinner."
Leadership under these conditions fell to the "unprincipled Demagogues," half-educated lawyers, men "with nothing to lose."
But it was not merely as an aristocrat facing peasants and shopkeepers, nor as a soldier faced by talkers, but as an Englishman on guard against Frenchmen that Craig found himself at odds with his Assembly. For nearly twenty years in this period England was at death grips with France, end to hate and despise all Frenchmen was part of the hereditary and congenial duty of all true Britons. Craig and those who counseled him were firmly convinced that the new subjects were French at heart. Of the 250,000 inhabitants of Lower Canada, he declared, "about 20,000 or 25,000 may be English or Americans, the rest are French. I use the term designedly, my Lord, because I mean to say that they are in Language, in religion, in manner and in attachment completely French." That there was still some affection for old France, stirred by war and French victories, there is no question, but that the Canadians wished to return to French allegiance was untrue, even though Craig reported that such was "the general opinion of all ranks with whom it is possible to converse on the subject." The French Revolution had created a great gulf between Old France and New France. The clergy did their utmost to bar all intercourse with the land where deism and revolution held sway, and when the Roman Catholic Church and the British Government combined for years on a single object, it was little wonder they succeeded. Nelson's victory at Trafalgar was celebrated by a Te Deum in the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Quebec. In fact, as Craig elsewhere noted, the habitants were becoming rather a new and distinct nationality, a nation canadienne. They ceased to be French; they declined to become English; and sheltered under their "Sacred Charter"* they became Canadians first and last.
The governors were not alone in this hostility to the mass of the people. There had grown up in the colony a little clique of officeholders, of whom Jonathan Sewell, the Loyalist Attorney General, and later Chief Justice, was the chief, full of racial and class prejudice, and in some cases greedy for personal gain. Sewell declared it "indispensably necessary to overwhelm and sink the Canadian population by English Protestants," and was even ready to run the risk of bringing in Americans to effect this end. Of the non-official English, some were strongly opposed to the pretensions of the "Chateau Clique"; but others, and especially the merchants, with their organ the Quebec "Mercury", were loud in their denunciations of the French who were unprogressive and who as landowners were incidentally trying to throw the burden of taxation chiefly on the traders.
The first open sign of the racial division which was to bedevil the life of the province came in 1806 when, in order to meet the attacks of the Anglicizing party, the newspaper "Le Canadien" was established at Quebec. Its motto was significant: "Notre langue, nos institutions, et nos lois." Craig and his counselors took up the challenge. In 1808 he dismissed five militia officers, because of their connection with the irritating journal, and in 1810 he went so far as to suppress it and to throw into prison four of those responsible for its management. The Assembly, which was proving hard to control, was twice dissolved in three years. Naturally the Governor's arbitrary course only stiffened resistance; and passions were rising fast and high when illness led to his recall and the shadow of a common danger from the south, the imminence of war with the United States, for a time drew all men together.
While the foundations of the eastern provinces of Canada were being laid, the wildernesses which one day were to become the western provinces were just rising above the horizon of discovery. In the plains and prairies between the Great Lakes and the Rockies, fur traders warred for the privilege of exchanging with the Indians bad whiskey for good furs. Scottish traders from Montreal, following in the footsteps of La Verendrye and Niverville, pushed far into the northern wilds.* In 1788 the leading traders joined forces in organizing the North-West Company. Their great canoes, manned by French-Canadian voyageurs, penetrated the network of waters from the Ottawa to the Saskatchewan, and poured wealth into the pockets of the lordly partners in Montreal. Their rivalry wakened the sleepy Hudson's Bay Company, which was now forced to leave the shores of the inland sea and build posts in the interior.
On the Pacific coast rivalry was still keener. The sea otter and the seal were a lure to the men of many nations. Canada took its part in this rivalry. In 1792, when the Russians were pressing down from their Alaskan posts, when the Spaniards, claiming the Pacific for their own, were exploring the mouth of the Fraser, when Captain Robert Gray of Boston was sailing up the mighty Columbia, and Captain Vancouver was charting the northern coasts for the British Government, a young North-West Company factor, Alexander Mackenzie, in his lonely post on Lake Athabaska, was planning to cross the wilderness of mountains to the coast. With a fellow trader, Mackay, and six Canadian voyageurs, he pushed up the Peace and the Parsnip, passed by way of the Fraser and the Blackwater to the Bella Coola, and thence to the Pacific, the first white man to cross the northern continent. Paddling for life through swirling rapids on rivers which rushed madly through sheer rock-bound canyons, swimming for shore when rock or sand bar had wrecked the precious bark canoe, struggling over heartbreaking portages, clinging to the sides of precipices, contending against hostile Indians and fear-stricken followers, and at last winning through, Mackenzie summed up what will ever remain one of the great achievements of exploration in the simple record, painted in vermilion on a rock in Burke Channel: Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three. The first bond had been woven in the union of East and West. Between the eastern provinces a stronger link was soon to be forged. The War of 1812 gave the scattered British colonies in America for the first time a living sense of unity that transcended all differences, a memory of perils and of victories which nourished a common patriotism.
The War of 1812 was no quarrel of Canada's. It was merely an incident in the struggle between England and Napoleon. At desperate grips, both contestants used whatever weapons lay ready to their hands. Sea power was England's weapon, and in her claim to forbid all neutral traffic with her enemies and to exercise the galling right of search, she pressed it far. France trampled still more ruthlessly on American and neutral rights; but, with memories of 1776 still fresh, the dominant party in the United States was disposed to forgive France and to hold England to strict account.
England had struck at France, regardless of how the blow might injure neutrals. Now the United States sought to strike at England through the colonies, regardless of their lack of any responsibility for English policy. The "war hawks" of the South and West called loudly for the speedy invasion and capture of Canada as a means of punishing England. In so far as the British North American colonies were but possessions of Great Britain, overseas plantations, the course of the United States could be justified. But potentially these colonies were more than mere possessions. They were a nation in the making, with a right to their own development; they were not simply a pawn in the game of Britain and the United States. Quite aside from the original rights or wrongs of the war, the invasion of Canada was from this standpoint an act of aggression. "Agrarian cupidity, not maritime right, wages this war," insisted John Randolph of Roanoke, the chief opponent of the "war hawks" in Congress. "Ever since the report of the Committee on Foreign Relations came into the House, we have heard but one word—like the whippoorwill, but one eternal monotonous tone—Canada, Canada, Canada!"
At the outset there appeared no question that the conquest of Canada could be, as Jefferson forecast, other than "a mere matter of marching." Eustis, the Secretary of War, prophesied that "we can take Canada without soldiers." Clay insisted that the Canadas were "as much under our command as the Ocean is under Great Britain's." The provinces had barely half a million people, two-thirds of them allied by ties of blood to Britain's chief enemy, to set against the eight millions of the Republic. There were fewer than ten thousand regular troops in all the colonies, half of them down by the sea, far away from the danger zone, and less than fifteen hundred west of Montreal. Little help could come from England, herself at war with Napoleon, the master of half of Europe.
But there was another side. The United States was not a unit in the war; New England was apathetic or hostile to the war throughout, and as late as 1814 two-thirds of the army of Canada were eating beef supplied by Vermont and New York contractors. Weak as was the militia of the Canadas, it was stiffened by English and Canadian regulars, hardened by frontier experience, and led for the most part by trained and able men, whereas an inefficient system and political interference greatly weakened the military force of the fighting States. Above all, the Canadians were fighting for their homes. To them the war was a matter of life and death; to the United States it was at best a struggle to assert commercial rights or national prestige.
The course and fortunes of the war call for only the briefest notice. In the first year the American plans for invading Upper Canada came to grief through the surrender of Hull at Detroit to Isaac Brock and the defeat at Queenston Heights of the American army under Van Rensselaer. The campaign ended with not a foot of Canadian soil in the invaders' hands, and with Michigan lost, but Brock, Canada's brilliant leader, had fallen at Queenston, and at sea the British had tasted unwonted defeat. In single actions one American frigate after another proved too much for its British opponent. It was a rude shock to the Mistress of the Seas.
The second year's campaign was more checkered. In the West the Americans gained the command of the Great Lakes by rapid building and good sailing, and with it followed the command of all the western peninsula of Upper Canada. The British General Procter was disastrously defeated at Moraviantown, and his ally, the Shawanoe chief Tecumseh, one of the half dozen great men of his race, was killed. York, later known as Toronto, the capital of the province, was captured, and its public buildings were burned and looted. But in the East fortune was kinder to the Canadians. The American plan of invasion called for an attack on Montreal from two directions; General Wilkinson was to sail and march down the St. Lawrence from Sackett's Harbor with some eight thousand men, while General Hampton, with four thousand, was to take the historic route by Lake Champlain. Half-way down the St. Lawrence Wilkinson came to grief. Eighteen hundred men whom he landed to drive off a force of a thousand hampering his rear were decisively defeated at Chrystler's Farm. Wilkinson pushed on for a few days, but when word came that Hampton had also met disaster he withdrew into winter quarters. Hampton had found Colonel de Salaberry, with less than sixteen hundred troops, nearly all French Canadians, making a stand on the banks of the Chateauguay, thirty-five miles south of Montreal. He divided his force in order to take the Canadians in front and rear, only to be outmaneuvered and outfought in one of the most brilliant actions of the war and forced to retire. In the closing months of the year the Americans, compelled to withdraw from Fort George on the Niagara, burned the adjoining town of Newark and turned its women and children into the December snow. Drummond, who had succeeded Brock, gained control of both sides of the Niagara and retaliated in kind by laying waste the frontier villages from Lewiston to Buffalo. The year closed with Amherstburg on the Detroit the only Canadian post in American hands. On the sea the capture of the Chesapeake by the Shannon salved the pride of England.
The last year of the war was also a year of varying fortunes. In the far West a small body of Canadians and Indians captured Prairie du Chien, on the Mississippi, while Michilimackinac, which a force chiefly composed of French-Canadian voyageurs and Indians had captured in the first months of war, defied a strong assault. In Upper Canada the Americans raided the western peninsula from Detroit but made their chief attack on the Niagara frontier. Though they scored no permanent success, they fought well and with a fair measure of fortune. The generals with whom they had been encumbered at the outset of the war, Revolutionary relics or political favorites, had now nearly all been replaced by abler men—Scott, Brown, Exert—and their troops were better trained and better equipped. In July the British forces on the Niagara were decisively beaten at Chippawa. Three weeks later was fought the bloodiest battle on Canadian soil, at Lundy's Lane, either side's victory at the moment but soon followed by the retirement of the invading force. The British had now outbuilt their opponents on Lake Ontario; and, though American ships controlled Lake Erie to the end, the Ontario flotilla aided Drummond, Brock's able successor, in forcing the withdrawal of Exert forces from the whole peninsula in November. Farther east a third attempt to capture Montreal had been defeated in the spring, after Wilkinson with four thousand men had failed to drive five hundred regulars and militia from the stone walls of Lacolle's Mill.
Until this closing year Britain had been unable, in face of the more vital danger from Napoleon, to send any but trifling reenforcements to what she considered a minor theater of the war. Now, with Napoleon in Elba, she was free to take more vigorous action. Her navy had already swept the daring little fleet of American frigates and American merchant marine from the seas. Now it maintained a close blockade of all the coast and, with troops from Halifax, captured and held the Maine coast north of the Penobscot. Large forces of Wellington's hardy veterans crossed the ocean, sixteen thousand to Canada, four thousand to aid in harrying the Atlantic coast, and later nine thousand to seize the mouth of the Mississippi. Yet, strangely, these hosts fared worse, because of hard fortune and poor leadership, than the handful of militia and regulars who had borne the brunt of the war in the first two years. Under Ross they captured Washington and burned the official buildings; but under Prevost they failed at Plattsburg; and under Pakenham, in January, 1815, they failed against Andrew Jackson's sharpshooters at New Orleans.
Before the last-named fight occurred, peace had been made. Both sides were weary of the war, which had now, by the seeming end of the struggle between England and Napoleon in which it was an incident, lost whatever it formerly had of reason. Though Napoleon was still in Elba, Europe was far from being at rest, and the British Ministers, backed by Wellington's advice, were keen to end the war. They showed their contempt for the issues at stake by sending to the peace conference at Ghent three commissioners as incompetent as ever represented a great power, Gambier, Goulburn, and Adams. To face these the United States had sent John Quincy Adams, Albert Gallatin, Henry Clay, James Bayard, and Jonathan Russell, as able and astute a group of players for great stakes as ever gathered round a table. In these circumstances the British representatives were lucky to secure peace on the basis of the status quo ante. Canada had hoped that sufficient of the unsettled Maine wilderness would be retained to link up New Brunswick with the inland colony of Quebec, but this proposal was soon abandoned. In the treaty not one of the ostensible causes of the war was even mentioned.
The war had the effect of unifying Canadian feeling. Once more it had been determined that Canada was not to lose her identity in the nation to the south. In Upper Canada, especially in the west, there were many recent American settlers who sympathized openly with their kinsmen, but of these some departed, some were jailed, and others had a change of heart. Lower Canada was a unit against the invader, and French-Canadian troops on every occasion covered themselves with glory. To the Canadians, as the smaller people, and as the people whose country had been the chief battle ground, the war in later years naturally bulked larger than to their neighbors. It left behind it unfortunate legacies of hostility to the United States and, among the governing classes, of deep-rooted opposition to its democratic institutions. But it left also memories precious for a young people—the memory of Brock and Macdonell and De Salaberry, of Laura Secord and her daring tramp through the woods to warn of American attacks, of Stony Creek and Lundy's Lane, Chrystler's Farm and Chateauguay, the memory of sacrifice, of endurance, and of courage that did not count the odds.
Nor were the evil legacies to last for all time. Three years after peace had been made the statesmen of the United States and of Great Britain had the uncommon sense to take a great step toward banishing war between the neighbor peoples. The Rush-Bagot Convention, limiting the naval armament on the Great Lakes to three vessels not exceeding one hundred tons each, and armed only with one eighteen-pounder, though not always observed in the letter, proved the beginning of a sane relationship which has lasted for a century. Had not this agreement nipped naval rivalry in the bud, fleets and forts might have lined the shores and increased the strain of policy and the likelihood of conflict. The New World was already preparing to sound its message to the Old.
The history of British North America in the quarter of a century that followed the War of 1812 is in the main the homely tale of pioneer life. Slowly little clearings in the vast forest were widened and won to order and abundance; slowly community was linked to community; and out of the growing intercourse there developed the complex of ways and habits and interests that make up the everyday life of a people.
All the provinces called for settlers, and they did not call in vain. For a time northern New England continued to overflow into the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada, the rolling lands south of the St. Lawrence which had been left untouched by riverbound seigneur and habitant. Into Upper Canada, as well, many individual immigrants came from the south, some of the best the Republic had to give, merchants and manufacturers with little capital but much shrewd enterprise, but also some it could best spare, fugitives from justice and keepers of the taverns that adorned every four corners. Yet slowly this inflow slackened. After the war the Canadian authorities sought to avoid republican contagion and moreover the West of the United States itself was calling for men.
But if fewer came in across the border, many more sailed from across the seas. Not again until the twentieth century were the northern provinces to receive so large a share of British emigrants as came across in the twenties and thirties. Swarms were preparing to leave the overcrowded British hives. Corn laws and poor laws and famine, power-driven looms that starved the cottage weaver, peace that threw an army on a crowded and callous labor market, landlords who rack-rented the Connaughtman's last potato or cleared Highland glens of folks to make way for sheep, rulers who persisted in denying the masses any voice in their own government—all these combined to drive men forth in tens of thousands. Australia was still a land of convict settlements and did not attract free men. To most the United States was the land of promise. Yet, thanks to state aid, private philanthropy, landlords' urging and cheap fares on the ships that came to St. John and Quebec for timber, Canada and the provinces by the sea received a notable share. In the quarter of a century following the peace with Napoleon, British North America received more British emigrants than the United States and the Australian colonies together, though many were merely birds of passage.
The country west of the Great Lakes did not share in this flood of settlement, except for one tragic interlude. Lord Selkirk, a Scotchman of large sympathy and vision, convinced that emigration was the cure for the hopeless misery he saw around him, acquired a controlling interest in the Hudson's Bay Company, and sought to plant colonies in a vast estate granted from its domains. Between 1811 and 1815 he sent out to Hudson Bay, and thence to the Red River, two or three hundred crofters from the Highlands and the Orkneys. A little later these were joined by some Swiss soldiers of fortune who had fought for Canada in the War of 1812. But Selkirk had reckoned without the partners of the North-West Company of Montreal, who were not prepared to permit mere herders and tillers to disturb the Indians and the game. The Nor'Westers attacked the helpless colonists and massacred a score of them. Selkirk retorted in kind, leading out an armed band which seized the Nor'Westers' chief post at Fort William. The war was then transferred to the courts, with heart-breaking delays and endless expense. At last Selkirk died broken in spirit, and most of his colonists drifted to Canada or across the border. But a handful held on, and for fifty years their little settlement on the Red River remained a solitary outpost of colonization.
Once arrived in Canada, the settler soon found that he had no primrose path before him. Canada remained for many years a land of struggling pioneers, who had little truck or trade with the world out of sight of their log shacks. The habitant on the seigneuries of Lower Canada continued to farm as his grandfather had farmed, finding his holding sufficient for his modest needs, even though divided into ever narrower ribbons as le bon Dieu sent more and yet more sons to share the heritage. The English-speaking settler, equipped with ax and sickle and flail, with spinning wheel and iron kettle, lived a life almost equally primitive and self-contained. He and his good wife grew the wheat, the corn, and the potatoes, made the soap and the candles, the maple sugar and the "yarbs," the deerskin shoes and the homespun-cloth that met their needs. They had little to buy and little to sell. In spite of the preference which Great Britain gave Canadian grain, in return for the preference exacted on British manufactured goods, practically no wheat was exported until the close of this period. The barrels of potash and pearl-ash leached out from the ashes of the splendid hardwood trees which he burned as enemies were the chief source of ready money for the backwoods settler. The one substantial export of the colonies came, not from the farmer's clearing, but from the forest. Great rafts of square pine timber were floated down the Ottawa or the St. John every spring to be loaded for England. The lumberjack lent picturesqueness to the landscape and the vocabulary and circulated ready money, but his industry did little directly to advance permanent settlement or the wise use of Canadian resources.
The self-contained life of each community and each farm pointed to the lack of good means of transport. New Brunswick and the Canadas were fortunate in the possession of great lake and river systems, but these were available only in summer and were often impeded by falls and rapids. On these waters the Indian bark canoe had given way to the French bateau, a square-rigged flat-bottomed boat, and after the war the bateau shared the honors with the larger Durham boat brought in from "the States."
Canadians took their full share in developing steamship transportation. In 1809, two years after Fulton's success on the Hudson, John Molson built and ran a steamer between Montreal and Quebec. The first vessel to cross the Atlantic wholly under steam, the Royal William, was built in Quebec and sailed from that port in 1833. Following and rivaling American enterprise, side-wheelers, marvels of speed and luxury for the day, were put on the lakes in the thirties. Canals were built, the Lachine in 1821-25, the Welland around Niagara Falls in 1824-29, and the Rideau, as a military undertaking, in 1826-32, all in response to the stimulus given by De Witt Clinton, who had begun the "Erie Ditch" in 1817. On land, road making made slower progress. The blazed trail gave way to the corduroy road, and the pack horse to the oxcart or the stage. Upper Canada had the honor of inventing, in 1835, the plank road, which for some years thereafter became the fashion through the forested States to the south. But at best neither roads nor vehicles were fitted for carrying large loads from inland farms to waterside markets.
Money and banks were as necessary to develop intercourse as roads and canals. Until after the War of 1812, when army gold and army bills ran freely, money was rare and barter served pioneer needs. For many years after the war a jumble of English sovereigns and shillings, of Spanish dollars, French crowns, and American silver, made up the currency in use, circulating sometimes by weight and sometimes by tale, at rates that were constantly shifting. The position of the colonies as a link between Great Britain and the United States, was curiously illustrated in the currency system. The motley jumble of coins in use were rated in Halifax currency, a mere money of account or bookkeeping standard, with no actual coins to correspond, adapted to both English and United States currency systems. The unit was the pound, divided into shillings and pence as in England, but the pound was made equal to four dollars in American money; it took 1 pound 4s. 4d. in Halifax currency to make 1 pound sterling. Still more curious was the influence of American banking. Montreal merchants in 1808 took up the ideas of Alexander Hamilton and after several vain attempts founded the Bank of Montreal in 1817, with those features of government charter, branch banks, and restrictions as to the proportion of debts to capital and the holding of real property which had marked Hamilton's plan. But while Canadian banks, one after another, were founded on the same model and throughout adhered to an asset-secured currency basis, Hamilton's own country abandoned his ideas, usually for the worse.
In the social life of the cities the influence of the official classes and, in Halifax and Quebec, of the British redcoats stationed there was all pervading. In the country the pioneers took what diversions a hard life permitted. There were "bees" and "frolics," ranging from strenuous barn raisings, with heavy drinking and fighting, to mild apple parings or quilt patchings. There were the visits of the Yankee peddler with his "notions," his welcome pack, and his gossip. Churches grew, thanks in part to grants of government land or old endowments or gifts from missionary societies overseas, but more to the zeal of lay preachers and circuit riders. Schools fared worse. In Lower Canada there was an excellent system of classical schools for the priests and professional classes, and there were numerous convents which taught the girls, but the habitants were for the most part quite untouched by book learning. In Upper Canada grammar schools and academies were founded with commendable promptness, and a common school system was established in 1816, but grants were niggardly and compulsion was lacking. Even at the close of the thirties only one child in seven was in school, and he was, as often as not, committed to the tender mercies of some broken-down pensioner or some ancient tippler who could barely sign his mark. There was but little administrative control by the provincial authorities. The textbooks in use came largely from the United States and glorified that land and all its ways in the best Fourth-of-July manner, to the scandal of the loyal elect. The press was represented by a few weekly newspapers; only one daily existed in Upper Canada before 1840.
Against this background there developed during the period 1815-41 a tense constitutional struggle which was to exert a profound influence on the making of the nation. The stage on which the drama was enacted was a small one, and the actors were little known to the world of their day, but the drama had an interest of its own and no little significance for the future.
In one aspect the struggle for self-government in British North America was simply a local manifestation of a world-wide movement which found more notable expression in other lands. After a troubled dawn, democracy was coming to its own. In England the black reaction which had identified all proposals for reform with treasonable sympathy for bloodstained France was giving way, and the middle classes were about to triumph in the great franchise reform of 1832. In the United States, after a generation of conservatism, Jacksonian democracy was to sweep all before it. These developments paralleled and in some measure influenced the movement of events in the British North American provinces. But this movement had a color of its own. The growth of self-government in an independent country was one thing; in a colony owing allegiance to a supreme Parliament overseas, it was quite another. The task of the provinces—not solved in this period, it is true, but squarely faced—was to reconcile democracy and empire.
The people of the Canadas in 1791, and of the provinces by the sea a little earlier, had been given the right to elect one house of the legislature. More than this instalment of self-government the authorities were not prepared to grant. The people, or rather the property holders among them, might be entrusted to vote taxes and appropriations, to present grievances, and to take a share in legislation. They could not, however, be permitted to control the Government, because, to state an obvious fact, they could not govern themselves as well as their betters could rule them. Besides, if the people of a colony did govern themselves, what would become of the rights and interests of the mother country? What would become of the Empire itself?
What was the use and object of the Empire? In brief, according to the theory and practice then in force, the end of empire was the profit which comes from trade; the means was the political subordination of the colonies to prevent interference with this profit; and the debit entry set against this profit was the cost of the diplomacy, the armaments, and the wars required to hold the overseas possessions against other powers. The policy was still that which had been set forth in the preamble of the Navigation Act of 1663, ensuring the mother country the sole right to sell European wares in its colonies: "the maintaining a greater correspondence and kindness between them [the subjects at home and those in the plantations] and keeping them in a firmer dependence upon it [the mother country], and rendering them yet more beneficial and advantageous unto it in the further Imployment and Encrease of English Shipping and Seamen, and vent of English Woollen and other Manufactures and Commodities rendering the Navigation to and from the same more safe and cheape, and makeing this Kingdom a Staple not only of the Commodities of those Plantations but also of the Commodities of other countries and places for the supplying of them, and it being the usage of other Nations to keep their [plantation] Trade to themselves." Adam Smith had raised a doubt as to the wisdom of the end. The American Revolution had raised a doubt as to the wisdom of the means. Yet, with significant changes, the old colonial system lasted for full two generations after 1776.
In the second British Empire, which rose after the loss of the first in 1783, the means to the old end were altered. To secure control and to prevent disaffection and democratic folly, the authorities relied not merely on their own powers but on the cooperation of friendly classes and interests in the colonies themselves. Their direct control was exercised in many ways. In last reserve there was the supreme authority of King and Parliament to bind the colonies by treaty and by law and the right to veto any colonial enactment. This was as before the Revolution. One change lay in the renunciation in 1778 of the intention to use the supreme legislative power to levy taxes, though the right to control the fiscal system of the colonies in conformity with imperial policy was still claimed and practised. In fact, far from seeking to secure a direct revenue, the British Government was more than content to pay part of the piper's fee for the sake of being able to call the tune. "It is considered by the Well wishers of Government," wrote Milnes, Lieutenant Governor of Lower Canada, in 1800, "as a fortunate Circumstance that the Revenue is not at present equal to the Expenditure." A further change came in the minute control exercised by the Colonial Office, or rather by the permanent clerks who, in Charles Buller's phrase, were really "Mr. Mother Country." The Governor was the local agent of the Colonial Office. He acted on its instructions and was responsible to it, and to it alone, for the exercise of the wide administrative powers entrusted to him.
But all these powers, it was believed, would fail in their purpose if democracy were allowed to grow unchecked in the colonies themselves. It was an essential part of the colonial policy of the time to build up conservative social forces among the people and to give a controlling voice in the local administration to a nominated and official class. It has been seen that the statesmen of 1791 looked to a nominated executive and legislative council, an hereditary aristocracy, and an established church, to keep the colony in hand. British legislation fostered and supported a ruling class in the colonies, and in turn this class was to support British connection and British control. How this policy, half avowed and half unconscious, worked out in each of the provinces must now be recorded.
In Upper Canada party struggles did not take shape until well after the War of 1812. At the founding of the colony the people had been very much of one temper and one condition. In time, however, divergences appeared and gradually hardened into political divisions. A governing class, or rather clique, was the first to become differentiated. Its emergence was slower than in New Brunswick, for instance, since Upper Canada had received few of the Loyalists who were distinguished by social position or political experience. In time a group was formed by the accident of occupation, early settlement, residence in the little town of York, the capital after 1794, the holding of office, or by some advantage in wealth or education or capacity which in time became cumulative. The group came to be known as the Family Compact. There had been, in fact, no intermarriage among its members beyond what was natural in a small and isolated community, but the phrase had a certain appositeness. They were closely linked by loyalty to Church and King, by enmity to republics and republicans, by the memory of the sacrifice and peril they or their fathers had shared, and by the conviction that the province owed them the best living it could bestow. This living they succeeded in collecting. "The bench, the magistracy, the high officials of the established church, and a great part of the legal profession," declared Lord Durham in 1839, "are filled by the adherents of this party; by grant or purchase they have acquired nearly the whole of the waste lands of the province; they are all powerful in the chartered banks, and till lately shared among themselves almost exclusively all offices of trust and profit." Fortunately the last absurdity of creating Dukes of Toronto and Barons of Niagara Falls was never carried through, or rather was postponed a full century; but this touch was scarcely needed to give the clique its cachet. The ten-year governorship of Sir Peregrine Maitland (1818-28), a most punctilious person, gave the finishing touches to this backwoods aristocracy.
The great majority of the group, men of the Scott and Boulton, Sherwood and Hagerman and Allan MacNab types, had nothing but their prejudices to distinguish them, but two of their number were of outstanding capacity. John Beverley Robinson, Attorney General from 1819 to 1829 and thereafter for over thirty years Chief Justice, was a true aristocrat, distrustful of the rabble, but as honest and highminded as he was able, seeking his country's gain, as he saw it, not his own. A more rugged and domineering character, equally certain of his right to rule and less squeamish about the means, was John Strachan, afterwards Bishop of Toronto. Educated a Presbyterian, he had come to Canada from Aberdeen as a dominie but had remained as an Anglican clergyman in a capacity promising more advancement. His abounding vigor and persistence soon made him the dominant force in the Church, and with a convert's zeal he labored to give it exclusive place and power. The opposition to the Family Compact was of a more motley hue, as is the way with oppositions. Opposition became potential when new settlers poured into the province from the United States or overseas, marked out from their Loyalist forerunners not merely by differences of political background and experience but by differences in religion. The Church of England had been dominant among the Loyalists; but the newcomers were chiefly Methodist and Presbyterian. Opposition became actual with the rise of concrete and acute grievances and with the appearance of leaders who voiced the growing discontent.
The political exclusiveness of the Family Compact did not rouse resentment half as deep as did their religious, or at least denominational, pretensions. The refusal of the Compact to permit Methodist ministers to perform the marriage ceremony was not soon forgotten. There were scores of settlements where no clergyman of the Established Church of England or of Scotland resided, and marriages here had been of necessity performed by other ministers. A bill passed the Assembly in 1824 legalizing such marriages in the past and giving the required authority for the future; and when it was rejected by the Legislative Council, resentment flamed high. An attempt of Strachan to indict the loyalty of practically all but the Anglican clergy intensified this feeling; and the critics went on to call in question the claims of his Church to establishment and landed endowment.
The land question was the most serious that faced the province. The administration of those in power was condemned on three distinct counts. The granting of land to individuals had been lavish; it had been lax; and it had been marked by gross favoritism. By 1824, when the population was only 150,000, some 11,000,000 acres had been granted; ninety years later, when the population was 2,700,000, the total amount of improved land was only 13,000,000 acres. Moreover the attempt to use vast areas of the Crown Lands to endow solely the Anglican Church roused bitter jealousies. Yet even these grievances paled in actual hardship beside the results of holding the vast waste areas unimproved. What with Crown Reserves, Clergy Reserves, grants to those who had served the state, and holdings picked up by speculators from soldiers or poorer Loyalists for a few pounds or a few gallons of whisky, millions of acres were held untenanted and unimproved, waiting for a rise in value as a consequence of the toil of settlers on neighboring farms. Not one-tenth of the lands granted were occupied by the persons to whom they had been assigned. The province had given away almost all its vast heritage, and more than nine-tenths of it was still in wilderness. These speculative holdings made immensely more difficult every common neighborhood task. At best the machinery and the money for building roads, bridges, and schools were scanty, but with these unimproved reserves thrust in between the scattered shacks, the task was disheartening. "The reserve of two-sevenths of the land for the Crown and clergy," declared the township of Sandwich in 1817, "must for a long time keep the country a wilderness, a harbour for wolves, a hindrance to a compact and good neighborhood."
A further source of discontent developed in the disabilities affecting recent American settlers. A court decision in 1824 held that no one who had resided in the United States after 1783 could possess or transmit British citizenship, with which went the right to inherit real estate. This decision bore heavily upon thousands of "late Loyalists" and more recent incomers. Under the instructions of the Colonial Office, a remedial bill was introduced in the Legislative Council in 1827, but it was a grudging, halfway measure which the Assembly refused to accept. After several sessions of quarreling, the Assembly had its way; but in the meantime the men affected had been driven into permanent and active opposition.
The leaders of the movement of resistance which now began to gather force included all sorts and conditions of men. The fiercest and most aggressive were two Scotchmen, Robert Gourlay and William Lyon Mackenzie. Gourlay, one of those restless and indispensable cranks who make the world turn round, active, obstinate, imprudent, uncompromisingly devoted to the common good as he saw it, came to Canada in 1817 on settlement and colonization bent. Innocent inquiries which he sent broadcast as to the condition of the province gave the settlers an opportunity for voicing their pent-up discontent, and soon Gourlay was launched upon the sea of politics. Mackenzie, who came to Canada three years later, was a born agitator, fearless, untiring, a good hater, master of avitriolic vocabulary, and absolutely unpurchasable. He found his vein in weekly journalism, and for nearly forty years was the stormy petrel of Canadian politics. From England there came, among others, Dr. John Rolph, shrewd and politic, and Captain John Matthews, a half-pay artillery officer. Peter Perry, downright and rugged and of a homely eloquence, represented the Loyalists of the Bay of Quinte, which was the center of Canadian Methodism. Among the newer comers from the United States, the foremost were Barnabas Bidwell, who had been Attorney General of Massachusetts but had fled to Canada in 1810 when accused of misappropriating public money, and his son, Marshall Spring Bidwell, one of the ablest and most single-minded men who ever entered Canadian public life. From Ireland came Dr. William Warren Baldwin, whose son Robert, born in Canada, was less surpassingly able than the younger Bidwell but equally moderate and equally beyond suspicion of faction or self-seeking.
How were these men to bring about the reform which they desired? Their first aim was obviously to secure a majority in the Assembly, and by the election of 1828 they attained this first object. But the limits of the power of the Assembly they soon discovered. Without definite leadership, with no control over the Administration, and with even legislative power divided, it could effect little. It was in part disappointment at the failure of the Assembly that accounted for the defeat of the Reformers in 1830, though four years later this verdict was again reversed. Clearly the form of government itself should be changed. But in what way? Here a divergence in the ranks of the Reformers became marked. One party, looking upon the United States as the utmost achievement in democracy, proposed to follow its example in making the upper house elective and thus to give the people control of both branches of the Legislature. Another group, of whom Robert Baldwin was the chief, saw that this change would not suffice. In the States the Executive was also elected by the people. Here, where the Governor would doubtless continue to be appointed by the Crown, some other means must be found to give the people full control. Baldwin found it in the British Cabinet system, which gave real power to ministers having the confidence of a majority in Parliament. The Governor would remain, but he would be only a figurehead, a constitutional monarch acting, like the King, only on the advice of his constitutional advisers. Responsible government was Baldwin's one and absorbing idea, and his persistence led to its ultimate adoption, along with a proposal for an elective Council, in the Reform party's programme in 1834. Delay in affecting this reform, Baldwin told the Governor a year later, was "the great and all absorbing grievance before which all others sank into insignificance." The remedy could be applied "without in the least entrenching upon the just and necessary prerogatives of the Crown, which I consider, when administered by the Lieutenant. Governor through the medium of a provincial ministry responsible to the provincial parliament, to be an essential part of the constitution of the province." In brief, Baldwin insisted that Simcoe's rhetorical outburst in 1791, when he declared that Upper Canada was "a perfect Image and Transcript of the British Government and Constitution," should be made effective in practice.
The course of the conflict between the Compact and the Reformers cannot be followed in detail. It had elements of tragedy, as when Gourlay was hounded into prison, where he was broken in health and shattered in mind, and then exiled from the province for criticism of the Government which was certainly no more severe than now appears every day in Opposition newspapers. The conflict had elements of the ludicrous, too, as when Captain Matthews was ordered by his military superiors to return to England because in the unrestrained festivities of New Year's Eve he had called on a strolling troupe to play Yankee Doodle and had shouted to the company, "Hats off"; or when Governor Maitland overturned fourteen feet of the Brock Monument to remove a copy of Mackenzie's journal, the "Colonial Advocate", which had inadvertently been included in the corner stone.
The weapons of the Reformers were the platform, the press, and investigations and reports by parliamentary committees. The Compact hit back in its own way. Every critic was denounced as a traitor. Offending editors were put in the pillory. Mackenzie was five times expelled from the House, only to be returned five times by his stubborn supporters. Matters were at a deadlock, and it became clear either that the British Parliament, which alone could amend the Constitution, must intervene or else that the Reformers would be driven to desperate paths. But before matters came to this pass, an acute crisis had arisen in Lower Canada which had its effect on all the provinces.
In Lower Canada, the conflict which had been smoldering before the war had since then burst into flame. The issues of this conflict were more clearcut than in any of the other provinces. A coherent opposition had formed earlier, and from beginning to end it dominated the Assembly. The governing forces were outwardly much the same as in Upper Canada—a Lieutenant Governor responsible to the Colonial Office, an Executive Council appointed by the Crown but coming to have the independent power of a well-entrenched bureaucracy, and a Legislative Council nominated by the Crown and, until nearly the end of the period, composed chiefly of the same men who served in the Executive. The little clique in control had much less popular backing than the Family Compact of Upper Canada and were of lower caliber. Robert Christie, an English-speaking member of the Assembly, who may be counted an unprejudiced witness since he was four times expelled by the majority in that house, refers to the real rulers of the province as "a few rapacious, overbearing, and irresponsible officials, without stake or other connexion in the country than their interests." At their head stood Jonathan Sewell, a Massachusetts Loyalist who had come to Lower Canada by way of New Brunswick in 1789, and who for over forty years as Attorney General, Chief Justice, or member of Executive and Legislative Councils, was the power behind the throne.
The opposition to the bureaucrats at first included both English and French elements, but the English minority were pulled in contrary ways. Their antecedents were not such as to lead them to accept meekly either the political or the social pretensions of the "Chateau Clique"; the American settlers in the Eastern Townships, and the Scotch and American merchants who were building up Quebec and Montreal, had called for self-government, not government from above. Yet their racial and religious prejudices were strong and made them unwilling to accept in place of the bureaucrats the dominance of an unprogressive habitant majority. The first leader of the opposition which developed in the Assembly after the War of 1812 was James Stuart, the son of the leading Anglican clergyman of his day, but he soon fell away and became a mainstay of the bureaucracy. His brother Andrew, however, kept up for many years longer a more disinterested fight. Another Scot, John Neilson, editor of the Quebec "Gazette", was until 1833 foremost among the assailants of the bureaucracy. But steadily, as the extreme nationalist claims of the French-speaking majority provoked reprisals and as the conviction grew upon the minority that they would never be anything but a minority,* most of them accepted clique rule as a lesser evil than "rule by priest and demagogue."