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."
* The natural increase of the French-Canadian race under
British rule is one of the most extraordinary phenomena in
social history. The following figures illustrate the rate of
that increase: the number was 16,417 in 1706; 69,810 in
1765; 479,288 in 1825; 697,084 in 1844. The population of
Canada East or Lower Canada in 1844 was made up as follows:
French Canadians, 524,244; English Canadians. 85,660;
English, 11,895; Irish, 43,982; Scotch, 13,393; Americans,
11,946; born in other countries, 1329; place of birth not
specified, 4635.
In the reform movement in Upper Canada there were a multiplicity of
leaders and a constant shifting of groups. In Lower Canada, after the
defection of James Stuart in 1817, there was only one leader, Louis
Joseph Papineau. For twenty years Papineau was the uncrowned king of the
province. His commanding figure, his powers of oratory, outstanding in a
race of orators, his fascinating manners, gave him an easy mastery over
his people. Prudence did not hamper his flights; compromise was a word
not found in his vocabulary. Few men have been better equipped for the
agitator's task.
His father, Joseph Papineau, though of humble birth, had risen high in
the life of the province. He had won distinction in his profession as a
notary, as a speaker in the Assembly, and as a soldier in the defense of
Quebec against the American invaders of 1775. In 1804 he had purchased
the seigneury of La Petite Nation, far up the Ottawa. Louis Joseph
Papineau followed in his father's footsteps. Born in 1786, he served
loyally and bravely in the War of 1812. In the same year he entered the
Assembly and made his place at a single stroke. Barely three years after
his election, he was chosen Speaker, and with a brief break he held that
post for over twenty years.
Papineau did not soon or lightly begin his crusade against the
Government. For the first five years of his Speakership, he confined
himself to the routine duties of his office. As late as 1820 he
pronounced a glowing eulogy on the Constitution which Great Britain
had granted the province. In that year he tested the extent of the
privileges so granted by joining in the attempt of the Assembly to
assert its full control of the purse; but it was not until the project
of uniting the two Canadas had made clear beyond dispute the hostility
of the governing powers that he began his unrelenting warfare against
them.
There was much to be said for a reunion of the two Canadas. The St.
Lawrence bound them together, though Acts of Parliament had severed
them. Upper Canada, as an inland province, restricted in its trade with
its neighbor to the south, was dependent upon Lower Canada for access to
the outer world. Its share of the duties collected at the Lower Canada
ports until 1817 had been only one-eighth, afterwards increased to
one-fifth. This inequality proved a constant source of friction. The
crying necessity of cooperation for the improvement of the St. Lawrence
waterway gave further ground for the contention that only by a reunion
of the two provinces could efficiency be secured. In Upper Canada the
Reformers were in favor of this plan, but the Compact, fearful of any
disturbance of their vested interests, tended to oppose it. In Lower
Canada the chief support came from the English element. The governing
clique, as the older established body, had no doubt that they could
bring the western section under their sway in case of union. But the
main reason for their advocacy was the desire to swamp the French
Canadians by an English majority. Sewell, the chief supporter of the
project, frankly took this ground. The Governor, Lord Dalhousie, and
the Colonial Office adopted his view; and in 1822 an attempt was made to
rush a Union Bill through the British Parliament without any notice to
those most concerned. It was blocked for the moment by the opposition
of a Whig group led by Burdett and Mackintosh; and then Papineau and
Neilson sailed to London and succeeded in inducing the Ministry to stay
its hand. The danger was averted; but Papineau had become convinced
that if his people were to retain the rights given them by their "Sacred
Charter" they would have to fight for them. If they were to save their
power, they must increase it.
How could this be done? Baldwin's bold and revolutionary policy of
making the Executive responsible to the Assembly did not seem within
the range of practical politics. It meant in practice the abandonment of
British control, and this the Colonial Office was not willing to grant.
Antoine Panet and other Assembly leaders had suggested in 1815 that
it would be well, "if it were possible, to grant a number of places as
Councillors or other posts of honour and of profit to those who have
most influence over the majority in the Assembly, to hold so long
as they maintained this influence," and James Stuart urged the same
tentative suggestion a year later. But even before this the Colonial
Office had made clear its position. "His Majesty's Government," declared
the Colonial Secretary, Lord Bathurst, in 1814, "never can admit so
novel & inconvenient a Principle as that of allowing the Governor of a
Colony to be divested of his responsibility [to the Colonial Office] for
the acts done during his administration or permit him to shield himself
under the advice of any Persons, however respectable, either from their
character or their Office."
Two other courses had the sanction of precedent, one of English, the
other of American example. The English House of Commons had secured its
dominant place in the government of the country by its control of the
purse. Why should not the Assembly do likewise? One obvious difficulty
lay in the fact that the Assembly was not the sole authority in raising
revenue. The British Parliament had retained the power to levy certain
duties as part of its system of commercial control, and other casual and
territorial dues lay in the right of the Crown. From 1820, therefore,
the Assembly's main aim was twofold--to obtain control of these
remaining sources of revenue, and by means of this power to bludgeon the
Legislative Council and the Governor into compliance with its wishes.
The Colonial Office made concessions, offering to resign all its taxing
powers in return for a permanent civil list, that is, an assurance that
the salaries of the chief officials would not be questioned annually.
The offer was reasonable in itself but, as it would have hampered the
full use of the revenue bludgeon, it was scornfully declined.
The other aim of the Patriotes, as the Opposition styled themselves, was
to conquer the Legislative Council by making it elective. Papineau, in
spite of his early prejudices, was drawn more and more into sympathy
with the form of democracy worked out in the United States. In fact, he
not only looked to it as a model but, as the thirties wore on, he came
to hope that moral, if not physical, support might be found there for
his campaign against the English Government. After 1830 the demand for
an elective Legislative Council became more and more insistent.
The struggle soon reached a deadlock. Governor followed Governor: Lord
Dalhousie, Sir James Kempt, Lord Aylmer, all in turn failed to allay
the storm. The Assembly raised its claims each session and fulminated
against all the opposing powers in windy resolutions. Papineau,
embittered by continued opposition, carried away by his own eloquence,
and steadied by no responsibility of office, became more implacable in
his demands. Many of his moderate supporters--Neilson, Andrew Stuart,
Quesnel, Cuvillier--fell away, only to be overwhelmed in the first
election at a wave of the great tribune's hand. Business was blocked,
supplies were not voted, and civil servants made shift without salary as
best they could.
The British Government awoke, or half awoke, to the seriousness of the
situation. In 1835 a Royal Commission of three, with the new Governor
General, Lord Gosford, as chairman, was appointed to make inquiries and
to recommend a policy. Gosford, a genial Irishman, showed himself
most conciliatory in both private intercourse and public discourse.
Unfortunately the rash act of the new Lieutenant Governor of Upper
Canada, Sir Francis Bond Head, in publishing the instructions of the
Colonial Office, showed that the policy of Downing Street was the futile
one of conciliation without concession. The Assembly once more refused
to grant supplies without redress of grievances. The Commissioners made
their report opposing any substantial change. In March, 1837, Lord John
Russell, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Melbourne Ministry, opposed
only by a handful of Radical and Irish members, carried through the
British Parliament a series of resolutions authorizing the Governor to
take from the Treasury without the consent of the Assembly the funds
needed for civil administration, offering control of all revenues in
return for a permanent civil list, and rejecting absolutely the demands
alike for a responsible Executive and for an elective Council.
British statesmanship was bankrupt. Its final answer to the demands for
redress was to stand pat. Papineau, without seeing what the end would
be, held to his course. Younger men, carried away by the passions he
had aroused, pushed on still more recklessly. If reform could not be
obtained within the British Empire, it must be sought by setting up an
independent republic on the St. Lawrence or by annexation to the United
States.
In Upper Canada, at the same time, matters had come to the verge of
rebellion. Sir John Colborne had, just before retiring as Lieutenant
Governor in 1836, added fuel to the flames by creating and endowing some
forty-four rectories, thus strengthening the grip of the Anglican Church
on the province. His successor, Sir Francis Bond Head, was a man of such
rash and unbalanced judgment as to lend support to the tradition that
he was appointed by mistake for his cousin, Edmund Head, who was made
Governor of United Canada twenty years later. He appointed to his
Executive Council three Reformers, Baldwin, Rolph, and Dunn, only to
make clear by his refusal to consult them his inability to understand
their demand for responsible government. All the members of the
Executive Council thereupon resigned, and the Assembly refused supplies.
Head dissolved the House and appealed to the people.
The weight of executive patronage, the insistence of the Governor that
British connection was at stake, the alarms caused by some injudicious
statements of Mackenzie and his Radical ally in England, Joseph Hume,
and the defection of the Methodists, whose leader, Egerton Ryerson, had
quarreled with Mackenzie, resulted in the overwhelming defeat of the
Reformers. The sting of defeat, the failure of the Family Compact to
carry out their eleventh hour promises of reform, and the passing of
Lord John Russell's reactionary resolutions convinced a section of the
Reform party, in Upper Canada as well as in Lower Canada, that an appeal
to force was the only way out.
Toward the end of 1837 armed rebellion broke out in both the Canadas.
In both it was merely a flash in the pan. In Lower Canada there had been
latterly much use of the phrases of revolution and some drilling, but
rebellion was neither definitely planned nor carefully organized. The
more extreme leaders of the Patriotes simply drifted into it, and
the actual outbreak was a haphazard affair. Alarmed by the sudden and
seemingly concerted departure of Papineau and some of his lieutenants,
Nelson, Brown, and O'Callaghan, from Montreal, the Government gave
orders for their arrest. The petty skirmish that followed on November
16, 1837, was the signal for the rallying of armed habitants around
impromptu leaders at various points. The rising was local and spasmodic.
The vast body of the habitants stood aloof. The Catholic Church, which
earlier had sympathized with Papineau, had parted from him when he
developed radical and republican views. Now the strong exhortations of
the clergy to the faithful counted for much in keeping peace, and in
one view justified the policy of the British Government in seeking to
purchase their favor. The Quebec and Three Rivers districts remained
quiet. In the Richelieu and Montreal districts, where disaffection was
strongest, the habitants lacked leadership, discipline, and touch with
other groups, and were armed only with old flintlocks, scythes, or
clubs. Here and there a brave and skillful leader, such as Dr. Jean
Olivier Chenier, was thrown up by the evidence opened a way out of the
difficult situation. A year later Peel and Webster, representing the two
countries, exchanged formal explanations, and the incident was closed.
In Upper Canada many a rebel sympathizer lay for months in jail, but
only two leaders, Lount and Matthews, both brave men, paid the penalty
of death for their failure. In Lower Canada the new Governor General,
Lord Durham, proved more clement, merely banishing to Bermuda eight
of the captured leaders. When, a year later, after Durham's return to
England, a second brief rising broke out under Robert Nelson, it was
stamped out in a week, twelve of the ringleaders were executed, and
others were deported to Botany Bay.
The rebellion, it seemed, had failed and failed miserably. Most of the
leaders of the extreme factions in both provinces had been discredited,
and the moderate men had been driven into the government camp. Yet in
one sense the rising proved successful. It was not the first nor the
last time that wild and misguided force brought reform where sane
and moderate tactics met only contempt. If men were willing to die to
redress their wrongs, the most easy-going official could no longer
deny that there was a case for inquiry and possibly for reform. Lord
Melbourne's Government had acted at once in sending out to Canada, as
Governor General and High Commissioner with sweeping powers, one of
the ablest men in English public life. Lord Durham was an aristocratic
Radical, intensely devoted to political equality and equally convinced
of his own personal superiority. Yet he had vision, firmness,
independence, and his very rudeness kept him free from the social
influences which had ensnared many another Governor. Attended by a
gorgeous retinue and by some able working secretaries, including Charles
Buller, Carlyle's pupil, he made a rapid survey of Upper and Lower
Canada. Suddenly, after five crowded months, his mission ended. He had
left at home active enemies and lukewarm friends. Lord Brougham, one
of his foes, called in question the legality of his edict banishing the
rebel leaders to Bermuda. The Ministers did not back him, as they should
have done; and Durham indignantly resigned and hurried back to England.
Three months later, however, his "Report" appeared and his mission stood
vindicated. There are few British state papers of more fame or more
worth than Durham's "Report". It was not, however, the beginning and the
end of wisdom in colonial policy, as has often been declared. Much that
Durham advocated was not new, and much has been condemned by time. His
main suggestions were four: to unite the Canadas, to swamp the French
Canadians by such union, to grant a measure of responsible government,
and to set up municipal government. His attitude towards the French
Canadians was prejudiced and shortsighted. He was not the first to
recommend responsible government, nor did his approval make it a
reality. Yet with all qualifications his "Report" showed a confidence
in the liberating and solving power of self-government which was the
all-essential thing for the English Government to see; and his reasoned
and powerful advocacy gave an impetus and a rallying point to the
movement which were to prove of the greatest value in the future growth
not only of Canada but of the whole British Empire.