The Canadian Dominion Part 1

The Canadian Dominion.

by Oscar D. Skelton.

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.

CHAPTER I. THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS

Scarcely more than half a century has pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 Ma.s.sachusetts, 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 Roch.e.l.le 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 a.s.siniboine 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 sh.o.r.es 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 sh.o.r.es 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 th.o.r.n.y 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 circ.u.mstances would permit, a General a.s.sembly 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 Quant.i.ties 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 doc.u.ments most conveniently a.s.sembled in Shorn and Doughty, "Doc.u.ments relating to the Const.i.tutional History of Canada, 1759-1791", and Doughty and McArthur, "Doc.u.ments relating to the Const.i.tutional History of Canada, 1791-1818".

Certainly there was much in the immediate situation to justify Murray's att.i.tude. 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 pet.i.tioned 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 pet.i.tion, 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 t.i.the and toll; and, without objection from the Governor, Bishop Briand, elected by the chapter in Quebec and consecrated in Paris, once more a.s.sumed control over the flock.

Carleton's proposals did not pa.s.s unquestioned. His own chief legal adviser, Francis Maseres, was a st.u.r.dy adherent of the older policy, though he agreed that the time was not yet ripe for setting up an a.s.sembly 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 a.s.similation of government had been effected; an a.s.similation 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 princ.i.p.al seigneuries had pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sembly 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 circ.u.mspectly 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 inst.i.tutions 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 a.s.sembly 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 Grat.i.tude 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 pet.i.tion 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.

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 pa.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 n.o.blesse, Clergy, and greater part of the Bourgeoisie," he wrote, "have given Government every a.s.sistance 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 pa.s.sively 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 Ma.s.sachusetts. The town and township inst.i.tutions, which had been the nurseries of resistance in New England, had not been allowed to take root there. The circ.u.mstances 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 inst.i.tutions which had led the old colonies to rebellion and separation, and were to try to build up in Canada b.u.t.tresses 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 rest.i.tution. 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 circ.u.mstances 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 const.i.tution 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 a.s.sembly. Of the twenty-six members of the first a.s.sembly, 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 a.s.sembly 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 a.s.sembly 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 a.s.sembly 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 pa.s.sed the Const.i.tutional 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 a.s.sembly.

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 Const.i.tutional 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 a.s.sembly should control the Executive Council. The elective a.s.sembly 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 t.i.tles 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 a.s.sembly, "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 Const.i.tutional 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 a.s.sembly played his own hand and was chiefly concerned in obtaining for his const.i.tuents 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 inst.i.tutions, 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 a.s.serted 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 cla.s.s 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 n.o.bles 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 Ma.s.sachusetts 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 Willc.o.c.ks, 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 a.s.sembly, 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. Willc.o.c.ks 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 a.s.sembly there were many seigneurs and aristocrats who bore names notable for six generations back Taschereau, d.u.c.h.esnay, 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 a.s.sembly of his day.