Produced by The James J. Kelly Library Of St. Gregory's
University; Alev Akman, Dianne Bean, and Joe Buersmeyer
THE CANADIAN DOMINION
A CHRONICLE OF OUR NORTHERN NEIGHBOR
By Oscar D. Skelton
NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
TORONTO: GLASGOW, BROOK & CO.
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1919
Copyright, 1919, by Yale University Press
PREFACE
The history of Canada since the close of the French regime falls into
three clearly marked half centuries. The first fifty years after
the Peace of Paris determined that Canada was to maintain a separate
existence under the British flag and was not to become a fourteenth
colony or be merged with the United States. The second fifty years
brought the winning of self-government and the achievement of
Confederation. The third fifty years witnessed the expansion of the
Dominion from sea to sea and the endeavor to make the unity of the
political map a living reality--the endeavor to weld the far-flung
provinces into one country, to give Canada a distinctive place in the
Empire and in the world, and eventually in the alliance of peoples
banded together in mankind's greatest task of enforcing peace and
justice among nations.
The author has found it expedient in this narrative to depart from the
usual method of these Chronicles and arrange the matter in chronological
rather than in biographical or topical divisions. The first period of
fifty years is accordingly covered in one chapter, the second in two
chapters, and the third in two chapters. Authorities and a list
of publications for a more extended study will be found in the
Bibliographical Note.
O. D. S.
QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY, KINGSTON, CANADA, July, 1919.
CONTENTS
I. THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS
II. THE FIGHT FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT
III. THE UNION ERA
IV. THE DAYS OF TRIAL
V. THE YEARS OF FULFILMENT
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
THE CANADIAN DOMINION
CHAPTER I. THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS
Scarcely more than half a century has passed since the Dominion of
Canada, in its present form, came into existence. But thrice that period
has elapsed since the fateful day when Montcalm and Wolfe laid down
their lives in battle on the Plains of Abraham, and the lands which now
comprise the Dominion finally passed from French hands and came under
British rule.
The Peace of Paris, which brought the Seven Years' War to a close in
1763, marked the termination of the empire of France in the New World.
Over the continent of North America, after that peace, only two flags
floated, the red and yellow banner of Spain and the Union Jack of
Great Britain. Of these the Union Jack held sway over by far the larger
domain--over the vague territories about Hudson Bay, over the great
valley of the St. Lawrence, and over all the lands lying east of the
Mississippi, save only New Orleans. To whom it would fall to develop
this vast claim, what mighty empires would be carved out of the
wilderness, where the boundary lines would run between the nations yet
to be, were secrets the future held. Yet in retrospect it is now
clear that in solving these questions the Peace of Paris played no
inconsiderable part. By removing from the American colonies the menace
of French aggression from the north it relieved them of a sense of
dependence on the mother country and so made possible the birth of a new
nation in the United States. At the same time, in the northern half of
the continent, it made possible that other experiment in democracy, in
the union of diverse races, in international neighborliness, and in
the reconciliation of empire with liberty, which Canada presents to the
whole world, and especially to her elder sister in freedom.
In 1763 the territories which later were to make up the Dominion of
Canada were divided roughly into three parts. These parts had little or
nothing in common. They shared together neither traditions of suffering
or glory nor ties of blood or trade. Acadia, or Nova Scotia, by the
Atlantic, was an old French colony, now British for over a generation.
Canada, or Quebec, on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, with seventy
thousand French habitants and a few hundred English camp followers,
had just passed under the British flag. West and north lay the vaguely
outlined domains of the Hudson's Bay Company, where the red man and the
buffalo still reigned supreme and almost unchallenged.
The old colony of Acadia, save only the island outliers, Cape Breton
and Prince Edward Island, now ceded by the Peace of Paris, had been
in British hands since 1713. It was not, however, until 1749 that any
concerted effort had been made at a settlement of this region. The
menace from the mighty fortress which the French were rebuilding at that
time at Louisbourg, in Cape Breton, and the hostility of the restless
Acadians or old French settlers on the mainland, had compelled action
and the British Government departed from its usual policy of laissez
faire in matters of emigration. Twenty-five hundred English settlers
were brought out to found and hold the town and fort of Halifax. Nearly
as many Germans were planted in Lunenburg, where their descendants
flourish to this day. Then the hapless Acadians were driven into
exile and into the room they left, New Englanders of strictest Puritan
ancestry came, on their own initiative, and built up new communities
like those of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Other waves
of voluntary immigration followed--Ulster Presbyterians, driven out by
the attempt of England to crush the Irish woolen manufacture, and,
still later, Highlanders, Roman Catholic and Presbyterian, who soon made
Gaelic the prevailing tongue of the easternmost counties. By 1767 the
colony of Nova Scotia, which then included all Acadia, north and east of
Maine, had a prosperous population of some seven thousand Americans,
two thousand Irish, two thousand Germans, barely a thousand English,
and well over a thousand surviving Acadian French. In short, this
northernmost of the Atlantic colonies appeared to be fast on the way
to become a part of New England. It was chiefly New Englanders who had
peopled it, and it was with New England that for many a year its whole
social and commercial intercourse was carried on. It was no accident
that Nova Scotia later produced the first Yankee humorist, "Sam Slick."
With the future sister province of Canada, or Quebec, which lay along
the St. Lawrence as far as the Great Lakes, Acadia or Nova Scotia had
much less in common than with New England. Hundreds of miles of unbroken
forest wilderness lay between the two colonies, and the sea lanes ran
between the St. Lawrence, the Bay of Fundy, or Halifax and Havre or
Plymouth, and not between Quebec and Halifax. Even the French settlers
came of different stocks. The Acadians were chiefly men of La Rochelle
and the Loire, while the Canadians came, for the most part, from the
coast provinces stretching from Normandy and Picardy to Poitou and
Bordeaux.
The situation in Canada proper presented the British authorities with a
problem new in their imperial experience. Hitherto, save for Acadia and
New Netherland, where the settlers were few in numbers and, even in
New Netherland, closely akin to the conquerors in race, religion, and
speech, no colony containing men of European stocks had been acquired
by conquest. Canada held some sixty or seventy thousand settlers,
French and Catholic almost to a man. Despite the inefficiency of French
colonial methods the plantation had taken firm root. The colony had
developed a strength, a social structure, and an individuality all its
own. Along the St. Lawrence and the Richelieu the settlements lay close
and compact; the habitants' whitewashed cottages lined the river banks
only a few arpents apart. The social cohesion of the colony was equally
marked. Alike in government, in religion, and in industry, it was a land
where authority was strong. Governor and intendant, feudal seigneur,
bishop and Jesuit superior, ruled each in his own sphere and provided a
rigid mold and framework for the growth of the colony. There were, it
is true, limits to the reach of the arm of authority. Beyond Montreal
stretched a vast wilderness merging at some uncertain point into the
other wilderness that was Louisiana. Along the waterways which threaded
this great No Man's Land the coureurs-de-bois roamed with little heed to
law or license, glad to escape from the paternal strictness that irked
youth on the lower St. Lawrence. But the liberty of these rovers of the
forest was not liberty after the English pattern; the coureur-de-bois
was of an entirely different type from the pioneers of British stock who
were even then pushing their way through the gaps in the Alleghanies
and making homes in the backwoods. Priest and seigneur, habitant and
coureur-de-bois were one and all difficult to fit into accepted English
ways. Clearly Canada promised to strain the digestive capacity of the
British lion.
The present western provinces of the Dominion were still the haunt of
Indian and buffalo. French-Canadian explorers and fur traders, it is
true, had penetrated to the Rockies a few years before the Conquest, and
had built forts on Lake Winnipeg, on the Assiniboine and Red rivers,
and at half a dozen portages on the Saskatchewan. But the "Company of
Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay" had not yet ventured
inland, still content to carry on its trade with the Indians from its
forts along the shores of that great sea. On the Pacific the Russians
had coasted as far south as Mount Saint Elias, but no white man, so far
as is known, had set foot on the shores of what is now British Columbia.
Two immediate problems were bequeathed to the British Government by the
Treaty of Paris: what was to be done with the unsettled lands between
the Alleghanies and the Mississippi; and how were the seventy thousand
French subjects in the valley of the St. Lawrence to be dealt with? The
first difficulty was not solved. It was merely postponed. The whole back
country of the English colonies was proclaimed an Indian reserve where
the King's white subjects might trade but might not acquire land. This
policy was not devised in order to set bounds to the expansion of the
older colonies; that was an afterthought. The policy had its root in
an honest desire to protect the Indians from the frauds of unscrupulous
traders and from the encroachments of settlers on their hunting grounds.
The need of a conciliatory, if firm, policy in regard to the great
interior was made evident by the Pontiac rising in 1763, the aftermath
of the defeat of the French, who had done all they could to inspire the
Indians with hatred for the advancing English.
How to deal with Canada was a more thorny problem. The colony had not
been sought by its conquerors for itself. It was counted of little
worth. The verdict of its late possessors, as recorded in Voltaire's
light farewell to "a few arpents of snow," might be discounted as an
instance of sour grapes; but the estimate of its new possessors was
evidently little higher, since they debated long and dubiously whether
in the peace settlement they should retain Canada or the little sugar
island of Guadeloupe, a mere pin point on the map. Canada had been
conquered not for the good it might bring but for the harm it was doing
as a base for French attack upon the English colonies--"the wasps' nest
must be smoked out." But once it had been taken, it had to be dealt with
for itself.
The policy first adopted was a simple one, natural enough for
eighteenth-century Englishmen. They decided to make Canada* over in
the image of the old colonies, to turn the "new subjects," as they were
called, in good time into Englishmen and Protestants. A generation
or two would suffice, in the phrase of Francis Maseres--himself a
descendant of a Huguenot refugee but now wholly an Englishman--for
"melting down the French nation into the English in point of language,
affections, religion, and laws." Immigration was to be encouraged from
Britain and from the other American colonies, which, in the view of the
Lords of Trade, were already overstocked and in danger of being forced
by the scarcity or monopoly of land to take up manufactures which would
compete with English wares. And since it would greatly contribute to
speedy settlement, so the Royal Proclamation of 1763 declared, that the
King's subjects should be informed of his paternal care for the security
of their liberties and properties, it was promised that, as soon as
circumstances would permit, a General Assembly would be summoned, as in
the older colonies. The laws of England, civil and criminal, as near as
might be, were to prevail. The Roman Catholic subjects were to be free
to profess their own religion, "so far as the laws of Great Britain
permit," but they were to be shown a better way. To the first Governor
instructions were issued "that all possible Encouragement shall be given
to the erecting Protestant Schools in the said Districts, Townships and
Precincts, by settling and appointing and allotting proper Quantities
of Land for that Purpose and also for a Glebe and Maintenance for a
Protestant minister and Protestant schoolmasters." Thus in the fullness
of time, like Acadia, but without any Evangelise of Grand Pre, without
any drastic policy of expulsion, impossible with seventy thousand people
scattered over a wide area, even Canada would become a good English
land, a newer New England.
* The Royal Proclamation of 1763 set the bounds of the new
colony. They were surprisingly narrow, a mere strip along
both sides of the St. Lawrence from a short distance beyond
the Ottawa on the west, to the end of the Gasps peninsula on
the east. The land to the northeast was put under the
jurisdiction of the Governor of Newfoundland, and the Great
Lakes region was included in the territory reserved for the
Indians.
It is questionable whether this policy could ever have achieved success
even if it had been followed for generations without rest or turning.
But it was not destined to be given a long trial. From the very
beginning the men on the spot, the soldier Governors of Canada, urged
an entirely contrary policy on the Home Government, and the pressure of
events soon brought His Majesty's Ministers to concur.
As the first civil Governor of Canada, the British authorities chose
General Murray, one of Wolfe's ablest lieutenants, who since 1760 had
served as military Governor of the Quebec district. He was to be
aided in his task by a council composed of the Lieutenant Governors of
Montreal and Three Rivers, the Chief Justice, the head of the
customs, and eight citizens to be named by the Governor from "the most
considerable of the persons of property" in the province.
The new Governor was a blunt, soldierly man, upright and just according
to his lights, but deeply influenced by his military and aristocratic
leanings. Statesmen thousands of miles away might plan to encourage
English settlers and English political ways and to put down all that was
French. To the man on the spot English settlers meant "the four hundred
and fifty contemptible sutlers and traders" who had come in the wake of
the army from New England and New York, with no proper respect for their
betters, and vulgarly and annoyingly insistent upon what they claimed to
be their rights. The French might be alien in speech and creed, but at
least the seigneurs and the higher clergy were gentlemen, with a due
respect for authority, the King's and their own, and the habitants were
docile, the best of soldier stuff. "Little, very little," Murray wrote
in 1764 to the Lords of Trade, "will content the New Subjects, but
nothing will satisfy the Licentious Fanaticks Trading here, but the
expulsion of the Canadians, who are perhaps the bravest and best
race upon the Globe, a Race, who cou'd they be indulged with a few
priviledges wch the Laws of England deny to Roman Catholicks at
home, wou'd soon get the better of every National Antipathy to their
Conquerors and become the most faithful and most useful set of Men in
this American Empire."*
* This quotation and those following in this chapter are
from official documents most conveniently assembled in Shorn
and Doughty, "Documents relating to the Constitutional
History of Canada, 1759-1791", and Doughty and McArthur,
"Documents relating to the Constitutional History of Canada,
1791-1818".
Certainly there was much in the immediate situation to justify Murray's
attitude. It was preposterous to set up a legislature in which only the
four hundred Protestants might sit and from which the seventy thousand
Catholics would be barred. It would have been difficult in any case
to change suddenly the system of laws governing the most intimate
transactions of everyday life. But when, as happened, the Administration
was entrusted in large part to newly created justices of the peace, men
with "little French and less honour," "to whom it is only possible to
speak with guineas in one's hand," the change became flatly impossible.
Such an alteration, if still insisted upon, must come more slowly than
the impatient traders in Montreal and Quebec desired.
The British Government, however, was not yet ready to abandon its
policy. The Quebec traders petitioned for Murray's recall, alleging that
the measures required to encourage settlement had not been adopted, that
the Governor was encouraging factions by his partiality to the French,
that he treated the traders with "a Rage and Rudeness of Language and
Demeanor" and--a fair thrust in return for his reference to them as "the
most immoral collection of men I ever knew"--as "discountenancing the
Protestant Religion by almost a Total Neglect of Attendance upon the
Service of the Church." When the London business correspondents of
the traders backed up this petition, the Government gave heed. In 1766
Murray was recalled to England and, though he was acquitted of the
charges against him, he did not return to his post in Canada.
The triumph of the English merchants was short. They had jumped from the
frying pan into the fire. General Guy Carleton, Murray's successor and
brother officer under Wolfe, was an even abler man, and he was still
less in sympathy with democracy of the New England pattern. Moreover, a
new factor had come in to reenforce the soldier's instinctive preference
for gentlemen over shopkeepers. The first rumblings of the American
Revolution had reached Quebec. It was no time, in Carleton's view, to
set up another sucking republic. Rather, he believed, the utmost should
be made of the opportunity Canada afforded as a barrier against the
advance of democracy, a curb upon colonial insolence. The need of
cultivating the new subjects was the greater, Carleton contended,
because the plan of settlement by Englishmen gave no sign of succeeding:
"barring a Catastrophe shocking to think of, this Country must, to the
end of Time, be peopled by the Canadian race."
To bind the Canadians firmly to England, Carleton proposed to work
chiefly through their old leaders, the seigneurs and the clergy. He
would restore to the people their old system of laws, both civil and
criminal. He would confirm the seigneurs in their feudal dues and
fines, which the habitants were growing slack in paying now that the
old penalties were not enforced, and he would give them honors and
emoluments such as they had before enjoyed as officers in regular or
militia regiments. The Roman Catholic clergy were already, in fact,
confirmed in their right to tithe and toll; and, without objection
from the Governor, Bishop Briand, elected by the chapter in Quebec and
consecrated in Paris, once more assumed control over the flock.
Carleton's proposals did not pass unquestioned. His own chief legal
adviser, Francis Maseres, was a sturdy adherent of the older policy,
though he agreed that the time was not yet ripe for setting up an
Assembly and suggested some well-considered compromise between the old
laws and the new. The Advocate General of England, James Marriott, urged
the same course. The policy of 1768, he contended eleven years later,
had already succeeded in great measure. The assimilation of government
had been effected; an assimilation of manners would follow. The
excessive military spirit of the inhabitants had begun to dwindle, as
England's interest required. The back settlements of New York and Canada
were fast being joined. Two or three thousand men of British stock, many
of them men of substance, had gone to the new colony; warehouses and
foundries were being built; and many of the principal seigneuries
had passed into English hands. All that was needed, he concluded, was
persistence along the old path. The same view was of course strenuously
urged by the English merchants in the colony, who continued to demand,
down to the very eve of the Revolution, an elective Assembly and other
rights of freeborn Britons.
Carleton carried the day. His advice, tendered at close range during
four years' absentee residence in London, from 1770 to 1774, fell in
with the mood of Lord North's Government. The measure in which the new
policy was embodied, the famous Quebec Act of 1774, was essentially a
part of the ministerial programme for strengthening British power to
cope with the resistance then rising to rebellious heights in the old
colonies. Though not, as was long believed, designed in retaliation for
the Boston disturbances, it is clear that its framers had Massachusetts
in mind when deciding on their policy for Quebec. The main purpose of
the Act, the motive which turned the scale against the old Anglicizing
policy, was to attach the leaders of French-Canadian opinion firmly
to the British Crown, and thus not only to prevent Canada itself from
becoming infected with democratic contagion or turning in a crisis
toward France, but to ensure, if the worst came to the worst, a military
base in that northland whose terrors had in old days kept the seaboard
colonies circumspectly loyal. Ministers in London had been driven by
events to accept Carleton's paradox, that to make Quebec British,
it must be prevented from becoming English. If in later years the
solidarity and aloofness of the French-Canadian people were sometimes to
prove inconvenient to British interests, it was always to be remembered
that this situation was due in great part to the deliberate action of
Great Britain in strengthening French-Canadian institutions as a means
of advancing what she considered her own interests in America. "The
views of the British Government in respect to the political uses to
which it means to make Canada subservient," Marriott had truly declared,
"must direct the spirit of any code of laws."
The Quebec Act multiplied the area of the colony sevenfold by the
restoration of all Labrador on the east and the region west as far as
the Ohio and the Mississippi and north to the Hudson's Bay Company's
territory. It restored the old French civil law but continued the milder
English criminal law already in operation. It gave to the Roman Catholic
inhabitants the free exercise of their religion, subject to a modified
oath of allegiance, and confirmed the clergy in their right "to hold,
receive and enjoy their accustomed dues and rights, with respect to such
persons only as shall confess the said religion." The promised elective
Assembly was not granted, but a Council appointed by the Crown received
a measure of legislative power.
On his return to Canada in September, 1774, Carleton reported that the
Canadians had "testified the strongest marks of Joy and Gratitude and
Fidelity to their King and to His Government for the late Arrangements
made at Home in their Favor." The "most respectable part of the
English," he continued, urged peaceful acceptance of the new order.
Evidently, however, the respectable members of society were few, as the
great body of the English settlers joined in a petition for the repeal
of the Act on the ground that it deprived them of the incalculable
benefits of habeas corpus and trial by jury. The Montreal merchants,
whether, as Carleton commented, they "were of a more turbulent Turn, or
that they caught the Fire from some Colonists settled among them," were
particularly outspoken in the town meetings they held. In the older
colonies the opposition was still more emphatic. An Act which hemmed
them in to the seacoast, established on the American continent a Church
they feared and hated, and continued an autocratic political system,
appeared to many to be the undoing of the work of Pitt and Wolfe and
the revival on the banks of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi of a
serious menace to their liberty and progress.
Then came the clash at Lexington, and the War of American Independence
had begun. The causes, the course, and the ending of that great civil
war have been treated elsewhere in this series.* Here it is necessary
only to note its bearings on the fate of Canada.
* See "The Eve of the Revolution" and "Washington and His
Comrades in Arms" (in "The Chronicles of America").
Early in 1775 the Continental Congress undertook the conquest of Canada,
or, as it was more diplomatically phrased, the relief of its inhabitants
from British tyranny. Richard Montgomery led an expedition over the old
route by Lake Champlain and the Richelieu, along which French and Indian
raiding parties used to pass years before, and Benedict Arnold made a
daring and difficult march up the Kennebec and down the Chaudiere
to Quebec. Montreal fell to Montgomery; and Carleton himself escaped
capture only by the audacity of some French-Canadian voyageurs, who,
under cover of darkness, rowed his whaleboat or paddled it with their
hands silently past the American sentinels on the shore. Once down the
river and in Quebec, Carleton threw himself with vigor and skill into
the defense of his capital. His generalship and the natural strength
of the position proved more than a match for Montgomery and Arnold.
Montgomery was killed and Arnold wounded in a vain attempt to carry the
city by storm on the last night of 1775. At Montreal a delegation from
Congress, composed of Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles
Carroll of Carrollton, accompanied by Carroll's brother, a Jesuit priest
and a future archbishop, failed to achieve-more by diplomacy than their
generals had done by the sword. The Canadians seemed, content enough to
wear the British yoke. In the spring, when a British fleet arrived with
reenforcements, the American troops retired in haste and, before the
Declaration of Independence had been proclaimed, Canada was free from
the last of its ten thousand invaders.
The expedition had put Carleton's policy to the test. On the whole it
stood the strain. The seigneurs had rallied to the Government which had
restored their rights, and the clergy had called on the people to stand
fast by the King. So far all went as Carleton had hoped: "The Noblesse,
Clergy, and greater part of the Bourgeoisie," he wrote, "have given
Government every Assistance in their Power." But the habitants refused
to follow their appointed leaders with the old docility, and some even
mobbed the seigneurs who tried to enroll them. Ten years of freedom had
worked a democratic change in them, and they were much less enthusiastic
than their betters about the restoration of seigneurial privileges.
Carleton, like many another, had held as public opinion what were merely
the opinions of those whom he met at dinner. "These people had been
governed with too loose a rein for many years," he now wrote to
Burgoyne, "and had imbibed too much of the American Spirit of
Licentiousness and Independence administered by a numerous and turbulent
Faction here, to be suddenly restored to a proper and desirable
Subordination." A few of the habitants joined his forces; fewer joined
the invaders or sold them supplies--till they grew suspicious of paper
"Continentals." But the majority held passively aloof. Even when France
joined the warring colonies and Admiral d'Estaing appealed to the
Canadians to rise, they did not heed; though it is difficult to say what
the result would have been if Washington had agreed to Lafayette's plan
of a joint French and American invasion in 1778.
Nova Scotia also held aloof, in spite of the fact that many of the men
who had come from New England and from Ulster were eager to join the
colonies to the south. In Nova Scotia democracy was a less hardy plant
than in Massachusetts. The town and township institutions, which had
been the nurseries of resistance in New England, had not been allowed to
take root there. The circumstances of the founding of Halifax had given
ripe to a greater tendency, which lasted long, to lean upon the mother
country. The Maine wilderness made intercourse between Nova Scotia and
New England difficult by land, and the British fleet was in control
of the sea until near the close of the war. Nova Scotia stood by Great
Britain, and was reserved to become part of a northern nation still in
the making.
That nation was to owe its separate existence to the success of the
American Revolution. But for that event, coming when it did, the
struggling colonies of Quebec and Nova Scotia would in time have become
merged with the colonies to the youth and would have followed them,
whether they remained within the British Empire or not. Thus it was due
to the quarrel between the thirteen colonies and the motherland that
Canada did not become merely a fourteenth colony or state. Nor was this
the only bearing of the Revolution on Canada's destiny. Thanks to the
coming of the Loyalists, those exiles of the Revolution who settled in
Canada in large numbers, Canada was after all to be dominantly a land of
English speech and of English sympathies. By one of the many paradoxes
which mark the history of Canada, the very success of the plan which
aimed to save British power by confirming French-Canadian nationality
and the loyalty of the French led in the end to making a large part of
Canada English. The Revolution meant also that for many a year those in
authority in England and in Canada itself were to stand in fear of the
principles and institutions which had led the old colonies to rebellion
and separation, and were to try to build up in Canada buttresses against
the advance of democracy.
The British statesmen who helped to frame the Peace of 1783 were men
with broad and generous views as to the future of the seceding colonies
and their relations with the mother country. It was perhaps inevitable
that they should have given less thought to the future of the colonies
in America which remained under the British flag. Few men could realize
at the moment that out of these scattered fragments a new nation and a
second empire would arise. Not only were the seceding colonies given a
share in the fishing grounds of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, which was
unfortunately to prove a constant source of friction, but the
boundary line was drawn with no thought of the need of broad and easy
communication between Nova Scotia and Canada, much less between Canada
and the far West. Vague definitions of the boundaries, naturally
incident to the prevailing lack of geographical knowledge of the vast
continent, held further seeds of trouble. These contentions, however,
were far in the future. At the moment another defect of the treaty
proved to be Canada's gain. The failure of Lord Shelburne's Ministry to
insist upon effective safeguards for the fair treatment of those who had
taken the King's side in the old colonies, condemned as it was not only
by North and the Tories but by Fox and Sheridan and Burke, led to that
Loyalist migration which changed the racial complexion of Canada.
The Treaty of 1783 provided that Congress would "earnestly recommend"
to the various States that the Loyalists be granted amnesty and
restitution. This pious resolution proved not worth the paper on which
it was written. In State after State the property of the Loyalists
was withheld or confiscated anew. Yet this ungenerous treatment of the
defeated by the victors is not hard to understand. The struggle had been
waged with all the bitterness of civil war. The smallness of the field
of combat had intensified personal ill-will. Both sides had practiced
cruelties in guerrilla warfare; but the Patriots forgot Marion's raids,
Simsbury mines, and the drumhead hangings, and remembered only Hessian
brutalities, Indian scalpings, Tarleton's harryings, and the infamous
prison ships of New York. The war had been a long one. The tide of
battle had ebbed and flowed. A district that was Patriot one year was
frequently Loyalist the next. These circumstances engendered fear and
suspicion and led to nervous reprisals.
At least a third, if not a half, of the people of the old colonies
had been opposed to revolution. New York was strongly Loyalist, with
Pennsylvania, Georgia, and the Carolinas closely following. In the end
some fifty or sixty thousand Loyalists abandoned their homes or suffered
expulsion rather than submit to the new order. They counted in their
ranks many of the men who had held first place in their old communities,
men of wealth, of education, and of standing, as well as thousands
who had nothing to give but their fidelity to the old order. Many,
especially of the well-to-do, went to England; a few found refuge in the
West Indies; but the great majority, over fifty thousand in all, sought
new homes in the northern wilderness. Over thirty thousand, including
many of the most influential of the whole number (with about three
thousand negro slaves, afterwards freed and deported to Sierra Leone)
were carried by ship to Nova Scotia. They found homes chiefly in
that part of the province which in 1784 became New Brunswick. Others,
trekking overland or sailing around by the Gulf and up the River,
settled in the upper valley of the St. Lawrence--on Lake St. Francis, on
the Cataraqui and the Bay of Quinte, and in the Niagara District.
Though these pioneers were generously aided by the British Government
with grants of land and supplies, their hardships and disappointments
during the first years in the wilderness were such as would have daunted
any but brave and desperate men and women whom fate had winnowed. Yet
all but a few, who drifted back to their old homes, held out; and the
foundations of two more provinces of the future Dominion--New Brunswick
and Upper Canada--were thus broadly and soundly laid by the men whom
future generations honored as "United Empire Loyalists." Through all
the later years, their sacrifices and sufferings, their ideals and
prejudices, were to make a deep impress on the development of the nation
which they helped to found and were to influence its relations with the
country which they had left and with the mother country which had held
their allegiance.
Once the first tasks of hewing and hauling and planting were done, the
new settlers called for the organization of local governments. They
were quite as determined as their late foes to have a voice in their
own governing, even though they yielded ultimate obedience to rulers
overseas.
In the provinces by the sea a measure of self-government was at once
established. New Brunswick received, without question, a constitution on
the Nova Scotia model, with a Lieutenant Governor, an Executive Council
appointed to advise him, which served also as the upper house of the
legislature, and an elective Assembly. Of the twenty-six members of the
first Assembly, twenty-three were Loyalists. With a population so much
at one, and with the tasks of road making and school building and tax
collecting insistent and absorbing, no party strife divided the province
for many years. In Nova Scotia, too, the Loyalists were in the majority.
There, however, the earlier settlers soon joined with some of the
newcomers to form an opposition. The island of St. John, renamed Prince
Edward Island in 1798, had been made a separate Government and had
received an Assembly in 1773. Its one absorbing question was the tenure
of land. On a single day in 1767 the British authorities had granted the
whole island by lottery to army and navy officers and country gentlemen,
on condition of the payment of small quitrents. The quitrents were
rarely paid, and the tenants of the absentee landlords kept up an
agitation for reform which was unceasing but which was not to be
successful for a hundred years. In all three Maritime Provinces
political and party controversy was little known for a generation after
the Revolution.
It was more difficult to decide what form of government should be set up
in Canada, now that tens of thousands of English-speaking settlers dwelt
beside the old Canadians. Carleton, now Lord Dorchester, had returned
as Governor in 1786, after eight years' absence. He was still averse
to granting an Assembly so long as the French subjects were in the
majority: they did not want it, he insisted, and could not use it.
But the Loyalist settlers, not to be put off, joined with the English
merchants of Montreal and Quebec in demanding an Assembly and relief
from the old French laws. Carleton himself was compelled to admit the
force of the conclusion of William Grenville, Secretary of State for the
Home Department, then in control of the remnants of the colonial empire,
and son of that George Grenville who, as Prime Minister, had introduced
the American Stamp Act of 1765: "I am persuaded that it is a point
of true Policy to make these Concessions at a time when they may be
received as a matter of favour, and when it is in Our own power to
regulate and direct the manner of applying them, rather than to wait
till they shall be extorted from us by a necessity which shall neither
leave us any discretion in the form nor any merit in the substance of
what We give." Accordingly, in 1791, the British Parliament passed the
Constitutional Act dividing Canada into two provinces separated by
the Ottawa River, Lower or French-speaking Canada and Upper or
English-speaking Canada, and granting each an elective Assembly.
Thus far the tide of democracy had risen, but thus far only. Few in
high places had learned the full lesson of the American Revolution. The
majority believed that the old colonies had been lost because they had
not been kept under a sufficiently tight rein; that democracy had been
allowed too great headway; that the remaining colonies, therefore,
should be brought under stricter administrative control; and that care
should be taken to build up forces to counteract the democracy which
grew so rank and swift in frontier soil. This conservative tendency
was strengthened by the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.* The
rulers of England had witnessed two revolutions, and the lesson they
drew from both was that it was best to smother democracy in the cradle.
* It will be remembered that in the debate on the
Constitutional Act the conflicting views of Burke and Fox on
the French Revolution led to the dramatic break in their
lifelong friendship.
For this reason the measure of representative government that had been
granted each of the remaining British colonies in North America was
carefully hedged about. The whole executive power remained in the hands
of the Governor or his nominees. No one yet conceived it possible that
the Assembly should control the Executive Council. The elective Assembly
was compelled to share even the lawmaking power with an upper house,
the Legislative Council. Not only were the members of this upper house
appointed by the Crown for life, but the King was empowered to bestow
hereditary titles upon them with a view to making the Council in the
fullness of time a copy of the House of Lords. A blow was struck even
at that traditional prerogative of the popular house, the control of
the purse. Carleton had urged that in every township a sixth of the
land should be reserved to enable His Majesty "to reward such of His
provincial Servants as may merit the Royal favour" and "to create and
strengthen an Aristocracy, of which the best use may be made on this
Continent, where all Governments are feeble and the general condition of
things tends to a wild Democracy." Grenville saw further possibilities
in this suggestion. It would give the Crown a revenue which would
make it independent of the Assembly, "a measure, which, if it had been
adopted when the Old Colonies were first settled, would have retained
them to this hour in obedience and Loyalty." Nor was this all. From
the same source an endowment might be obtained for a state church which
would be a bulwark of order and conservatism. The Constitutional
Act accordingly provided for setting aside lands equal in value to
one-seventh of all lands granted from time to time, for the support of
a Protestant clergy. The Executive Council received power to set up
rectories in every parish, to endow them liberally, and to name as
rectors ministers of the Church of England. Further, the Executive
Council was instructed to retain an equal amount of land as crown
reserves, distributed judiciously in blocks between the grants made to
settlers. Were any radical tendencies to survive these attentions, the
veto power of the British Government could be counted on in the last
resort.
For a time the installment of self-government thus granted satisfied the
people. The pioneer years left little leisure for political discussion,
nor were there at first any general issues about which men might
differ. The Government was carrying on acceptably the essential tasks
of surveying, land granting, and road building; and each member of the
Assembly played his own hand and was chiefly concerned in obtaining
for his constituents the roads and bridges, they needed so badly. The
English-speaking settlers of Upper Canada were too widely scattered,
and the French-speaking citizens of Lower Canada were too ignorant of
representative institutions, to act in groups or parties.
Much turned in these early years upon the personality of the Governor.
In several instances, the choice of rulers for the new provinces proved
fortunate. This was particularly so in the case of John Graves Simcoe,
Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada from 1792 to 1799. He was a good
soldier and a just and vigorous administrator, particularly wise in
setting his regulars to work building roads such as Yonge Street and
Dundas Street, which to this day are great provincial arteries of
travel. Yet there were many sources of weakness in the scheme of
government--divided authority, absenteeism, personal unfitness. When
Dorchester was reappointed in 1786, he had been made Governor in
Chief of all British North America. From the beginning, however, the
Lieutenant Governors of the various provinces asserted independent
authority, and in a few years the Governor General became in fact merely
the Governor of the most populous province, Lower Canada, in which he
resided.
In Upper Canada, as in New Brunswick, the population was at first much
at one. In time, however, discordant elements appeared. Religious, or
at least denominational, differences began to cause friction. The great
majority of the early settlers in Upper Canada belonged to the Church of
England, whose adherents in the older colonies had nearly all taken
the Loyalist side. Of the Ulster Presbyterians and New England
Congregationalists who formed the backbone of the Revolution, few came
to Canada. The growth of the Methodists and Baptists in the United
States after the Revolution, however, made its mark on the neighboring
country. The first Methodist class meetings in Upper Canada, held in
the United Empire Loyalist settlement on the Bay of Quinte in 1791,
were organized by itinerant preachers from the United States; and in the
western part of the province pioneer Baptist evangelists from the same
country reached the scattered settlers neglected by the older churches.
Nor was it in religion alone that diversity grew. Simcoe had set up a
generous land policy which brought in many "late Loyalists," American
settlers whose devotion to monarchical principles would not always bear
close inquiry. The fantastic experiment of planting in the heart of
the woods of Upper Canada a group of French nobles driven out by
the Revolution left no trace; but Mennonites, Quakers, and Scottish
Highlanders contributed diverse and permanent factors to the life of the
province. Colonel Thomas Talbot of Malahide, "a fierce little Irishman
who hated Scotchmen and women, turned teetotallers out of his house,
and built the only good road in the province," made the beginnings
of settlement midway on Lake Erie. A shrewd Massachusetts merchant,
Philemon Wright, with his comrades, their families, servants, horses,
oxen, and 10,000 pounds, sledded from Boston to Montreal in the winter
of 1800, and thence a hundred miles beyond, to found the town of Hull
and establish a great lumbering industry in the Ottawa Valley.
These differences of origin and ways of thought had not yet been
reflected in political life. Party strife in Upper Canada began with
a factional fight which took place in 1805-07 between a group of Irish
officeholders and a Scotch clique who held the reins of government.
Weekes, an Irish-American barrister, Thorpe, a puisne judge, Wyatt,
the surveyor general, and Willcocks, a United Irishman who had become
sheriff of one of the four Upper Canada districts, began to question the
right to rule of "the Scotch pedlars" or "the Shopkeeper Aristocracy,"
as Thorpe called those merchants who, for the lack of other leaders,
had developed an influence with the governors or ruled in their frequent
absence. But the insurgents were backed by only a small minority in the
Assembly, and when the four leaders disappeared from the stage,* this
curtain raiser to the serious political drama which was to follow came
quickly to its end.
* Weekes was slain in a duel. Wyatt and Thorpe were
suspended by the Lieutenant Governor, Sir Francis Gore, only
to win redress later in England. Willcocks was dismissed
from office and fell fighting on the American side in the
War of 1812.
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.
* "It cannot be sufficiently inculcated ON THE PART OF
GOVERNMENT that the Quebec Act is a Sacred Charter, granted
by the King in Parliament to the Canadians as a Security for
their Religion, Laws, and Property." Governor Sir Frederick
Haldimand to Lord George Germaine, Oct. 25, 1780.
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.
* It is interesting to note the dominant share taken in the
trade and exploration of the North and West by men of
Highland Scotch and French extraction. For an account of La
Verendrye see "The Conquest of New France" and for the
Scotch fur traders of Montreal see "Adventurers of Oregon"
(in "The Chronicles of America").
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.