Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 722
Yet even at that it is a mistake to exaggerate the situation of 1767 French Canada at this period. For most of its French inhabitants life pursued a more even tenor now that war had passed, that Indian massacre was over and they could be let alone. It is true Article § 36 the incoming British had many advantages. When Vaudreuil went away, nearly three hundred civilians, as permitted by the G. M. Wrong, “A Canadian Manor and its Seigneurs,” 1908 capitulation, left for France. These included many French officials and noblesse. There were many seigneuries thrown on the market. The British, then and later, bought them freely. General Murray obtained the seigneurie of Malbaie (Murray Bay), General Sir H. Cavendish, “Debates” (of 1774). 1839 Burton that of Chambly, Simon McTavish became seigneur of Terrebonne and Sir Frederick Haldimand of Sorel. By 1774 the chief seigneuries were British.
The British also enjoyed from the start that control of capital V. Bracq, “Evolution of French Canada,” 1924 which was soon to count in a world beginning to be industrialized. The British (presently Scottish) command of the commerce of Montreal, and control of the banking and transport and monetary power — all this was due not solely, perhaps not principally, to the native genius or acquired capacity of the English merchant and the Scottish banker, but to the initial opportunity of circumstance. Something also of the new situation was due to the different habits of urban townsfolk, merchant people like the incoming British and British Americans, and people of the land like the French. The conquest brought the printing press and a Quebec Gazette, in which, like the genie in the bottle-smoke, first appears “the advertiser,” whose oyster was to be the world.
Yet mainly the people agreed. British officers and soldiers fraternized with their late opponents as honourable combatants were able to do in the days of honourable war. “The soldiers,” wrote General Gage to his superior, General Amherst, as early as 1762, “live peaceably with the inhabitants and they reciprocally acquire an affection for each other.”
ERNST NEUMANN, MONTREAL, P.Q., 1941
“Lumber and shipbuilding sprang into life” — page 107
In this period of quiet was laid the foundation of the mutual tolerance and co-operation of French and British in Canada. Such troubles as existed have, as said, falsely coloured this interim of uncertain destiny. It has been the peculiarity of our Canadian history that it is commonly presented in too lurid a light. Its opening chapters of adventure, danger, war and massacre carry forward a sort of storm and stress that no longer belongs. The annals leap from war to war till peace seems alien, and commonplace life beside the mark.
A certain mistaken school of British writers has looked upon the policy of this period as a fatal error, destined, in a homely phrase, to come home to roost. The country, it was claimed, should have been made British from the start. The French language should not have been tolerated, the Roman Catholic religion should have lost all government support. The French-Canadians, to use Lord Durham’s phrase of 1839, should have been led away from “their vain hopes of nationality.” The contrary opinion is the sound one. This period first showed the possibility of a united French and British Canada, and with it the British Empire that we have.
While French Canada remained under its somewhat uncertain destiny for ten years after the conquest, Nova Scotia was being opened up for settlement and was assuming its characteristic M. L. Hansen, “Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples,” 1940 form of a British, in places a Scottish, province. A few settlers came to Pictou County in 1667; then, in 1772, a whole shipload of Highlanders, landing with kilts (forbidden in Scotland since Prince Charlie’s rebellion), skean-dhu, and broadswords, the woods loud with the bag-pipes. Other Scots settled on the Gulf of St. Lawrence coast, later New Brunswick. Lumber and shipbuilding 1761 sprang into life. The great pines of Longfellow’s ‘forest primeval,’ furnished masts for the British navy, 108 feet long, W. A. Carrothers, “Emigration from the British Isles,” 1929 three feet through at the butt and worth £136 each. The Irish came also, 500 of them to Colchester in 1766 and others to Cumberland County, with Yorkshire Methodists to balance their exuberance. Cape Breton by 1765 had enough settlers to rank it as a county, with two members in the Halifax Assembly. Thus was set on maritime Canada the stamp it has never lost — its homeward look, its industry of the woods and the sea.
Meantime the uncertain status of French Canada was brought to a close by the Quebec Act of 1774. This aimed at the permanent retention of Canada under British sovereignty, with such Sir H. Cavendish, “Debates” (of 1774), 1839 full measure of recognition of the religion, the customs and the law of the French-Canadians as should secure allegiance. In spite of all denunciation it fulfilled its purpose. Rebuilt into the later statutes of 1791, 1840 and 1867, its principles are still the basis of our commonwealth. It preserved the French civil law and with it the criminal law of England; it gave freedom of worship to Roman Catholics and authorized the collection of the tithe on farm land from Roman Catholic holders. It preserved the existing seigniorial tenures, in large part now bought up by British proprietors. It took for granted the use of the French language in daily life and in the courts, making no attempt to extend English beyond its necessary official sphere. It declared it inexpedient to call an assembly. The main government was to consist of a Governor and a Council.
One clause rapidly made history. The act extended the boundaries of Quebec to include all of the unsettled territory south and west of the Great Lakes between the Mississippi and the Ohio. Thus Chicago, then an unredeemed portage-place from Lake Michigan west, was in this way for a brief interval under the fostering care of the Roman Catholic Church. The intention most likely was to preserve Crown control over Indians and land grants for fear of a new Pontiac. But New England read into it tyranny and Popish idolatry.
To Canada the act was generosity itself, a bid for Canadian gratitude and support. It was needed. Events were moving Sir G. O. Trevelyan, “History of the American Revolution,” 1899-1905 rapidly. It was possible that Britain in keeping Canada might find little else to keep. The unhappy colonial quarrel that began over the war debts, was going from bad to worse. The attempt at taxation by the Stamp Act of 1765, by customs acts and the tax on tea, had brought a sudden union to the disunited provinces. Disaffection grew on argument in New England, bravado in the South and stupidity across the ocean. By the time of the Boston Tea Party (1773) the whole country was in a turmoil of disagreement, reaching for arms if only to secure them first, while the current of public life moved with increasing tumult as the waters move above unseen Niagara. The Quebec Act, intended as oil on the Canadian waters, came also as oil on the American flames. The pulpits of New England thundered with denunciation, the echo of which reached French Canada and was never forgotten. The Quebec Act, in taking away the ‘North-West Territory’ from the provinces, many of whose charters claimed parts of it, took away the promised land. Already the resources of the Ohio Valley had cast a spell over ambition. Hence the new boundary offended both against the soul and the body, religion and profit, and could not last. Probably no one meant it to. In any case there was no time to see what would have happened; as usual, something else did. The rush to seize arms led to Lexington and Concord, to Bunker Hill; from fighting to war, and from war to independence and the republic. The most 1775 important chapter of the world’s history, as we see it now, was here being written.
The war of the American Revolution (1775-1783) was the last of the four great wars which had ravaged the frontiers of North America in the eighteenth century. In all they cover thirty-two years, one-third of the century. Apart from the bravery of the combatants, its annals make sad reading. The war came to a divided people. Resolute patriotism took arms against resolute allegiance, a new ideal against an old loyalty, a sudden angry struggle, undreamed of yesterday and feeding on its own anger. Even if the separation of America from Britain was manifest destiny, and the republic a nobler ideal than kingship, the separation might have waited yet a while. The parting might have been made in peace.
On Canada fell the first full impact of the blow. To bring the Canadians into the insurrection the Americans tried both force and persuasion. Force came first, with General Montgomery’s invasion and his capture of the fort at St. Johns, which gave him undefended Montreal. Montgomery’s occupation of the city is still recalled by the tablet on his headquarters, an old stone house on Rue Notre-Dame, buried in the financial district of Montreal. The Governor, Sir Guy Carleton, gathered his feeble forces into Quebec. Montgomery followed. He was joined by General Benedict Arnold, who had forced a way through the wilderness of the Kennebec. Montgomery was killed in a night Dec. 31, 1775 attack outside the gates. He was not yet forty. His name endures, lauded by both sides. Arnold had not the luck to die in the snow. He lived to be the Judas Iscariot of America.
With invasion came to Montreal a mission of persuasion from Congress, Benjamin Franklin and two others, honest men in the uncomfortable role of foxes in a hen yard. Then came the spring opening of the river and a British fleet, and invasion and persuasion vanished together. Canada was out of the struggle. Sir Guy Carleton (later Ford Dorchester), the defender of Quebec, kept guard over Canada. From it General Burgoyne presently organized, with care, his defeat at Saratoga. Carleton was afterward criticized for not throwing the French-Canadians into the struggle. The truth is, they would have been hard to throw; Sir C. Lucas, “History of Canada, 1763-1812,” 1909 not from lack of bravery but from lack of motive. They only wanted to be let alone, a plea that has lasted now nearly two centuries.
The war went its way. Each year it threw a deeper shadow on the prestige of Britain. From the time when Chatham rejoiced that America had resisted, the British themselves were divided as to the struggle. The shadow fell on British arms with Burgoyne’s defeat, and then, for the first time since the Dutch War of Charles II, it fell on the British navy. The loss of the command of the sea along the American coast compelled Cornwallis’s surrender. Nothing but Rodney’s crowning victory over De Grasse 1782 in the West Indies helped to save the record of what naval W. N. James, “The British Navy in Adversity,” 1926 historians have called ‘the British navy in adversity.’
In their quarrel with Great Britain over stamps and taxes the Americans had been united almost to a man. But no one as yet (the words are those of Benjamin Franklin) “talked of independence, drunk or sober.” When the quarrel led to fighting, unity of opinion fell apart. Republican ideas fermented. Then came Tom Paine’s pamphlet The Crisis, written in camp, advocating independence and read everywhere — a sudden light to slower minds, a trumpet call to lively patriotism. Then came the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, and five years of actual warfare.
This War of Independence was not in the full sense a national C. H. Van Tyne, “The Loyalists in the American Revolution,” 1902 uprising nor yet a civil war. John Adams himself said afterwards that in 1776 one-third of the people were Loyalists. Indeed a large number of Tories took up arms, perhaps 50,000 in all, of whom one-half were from the Province of New York. But it must be remembered that among these were such bodies as the King’s Royal Regiment of the Province of New York, raised by Sir John Johnson from among a Mohawk Valley settlement of Highlanders who had arrived only in 1773. After the war they became part of our Scottish Glengarry settlement on the St. Lawrence. Johnson, who had succeeded his father, Sir William, the famous Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs, raised, among his retainers and refugees and from Canada, various irregular corps, among them the Royal Greens, infamous for their savagery. Other corps of similar origin, but higher honour, were the Highlanders recruited in Boston while still British, and the regiments formed under British army protection, the Royal Fencible Americans, the Prince of Wales’ Americans and the Queen’s Rangers, at first of Connecticut, later under Colonel John Graves Simcoe with Howe at Philadelphia. After the war the British Government voted half pay to the officers of a score of such regiments. Evidently such corps were in large measure alien. Most Tories were content with doing nothing. But in areas held by the British — as the town of New York, as New Jersey, as most of settled Pennsylvania for the first of the war, and the country round New York itself till the very end — the Tories by J. Winsor, “The Narrative and Critical History of America,” Vol. VI royal favour fell heir to the houses and properties of dispossessed rebels. This meant a day of reckoning. The terms of peace expressly provided for the safety of the Tories against retaliation, confiscation and ill-treatment. But there was no way as yet to bind thirteen states to thirteen codes of honour.
Retaliation began at once. Many Tories did not even wait for it. Indeed Tory refugees had been moving out during the war itself. When Howe evacuated Boston in 1776, about 900 Loyalists went in his ships to Halifax; 3,000 left Philadelphia with the British army in 1778. With the peace and the separation from Great Britain, the movement became an exodus; partly of people who were afraid to stay, but mainly of people who did not want to. The first destination was Nova Scotia, a place of easy access by sea, for the province extended then on both sides of the Bay of Fundy, joining the Maine district of Massachusetts. “Nova Scotia is the rage,” reported the London Chronicle. A great ‘spring fleet’ of twenty ships went in 1783, and another in the autumn. They flooded into Nova Scotia, into the Annapolis Basin and into the new town, or camp, called Shelburne, till it presently contained 10,000 people, the largest British ‘town’ in America. The ebb-tide of the flood left it a village. For the 1784-1820 Loyalists found better homes in Prince Edward Island, to which went 600, and in Cape Breton with 400 — temporarily made a province by itself but without an assembly — and found a veritable land of promise in the valley of the St. John in the empty western end of the province. A muster roll of Loyalists as early as the summer of 1784 showed 28,347 in Nova Scotia. Of these 9,260 were on the St. John River and nearly 3,000 more in that vicinity, a fact which led to the separation of their settlements as J. Hannay, “History of Acadia,” 1879 the Province of New Brunswick. Certain later troubles of the province were laid in its cradle at its christening. Achilles, we are told, started life vulnerable in his heel, New Brunswick in its boundary. It fell heir at once to its share of the ambiguities of the Treaty of 1783 that vexed half a century. By this treaty the boundary of British North America at one end was “the north-west angle of Nova Scotia” — there isn’t any — at the other, a line drawn west from the Lake of the Woods to meet the Mississippi — it never will. But these troubles still were in the future.
FREDERICK H. VARLEY, A.R.C.A., VANCOUVER, B.C., 1941
“‘Nova Scotia is the rage,’ reported the London Chronicle” — page 112
Other Loyalists made their way to other British territory by land. At this time Quebec ended, as settlement, with Lake St. Francis. Above that was the river stretch of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, Ontario, Erie and Huron, and the peninsula between. This territory, which corresponds in latitude to Southern France, is the garden, one of the gardens, of Canada. Access was now open to it. From the settlements of the Mohawk Valley, portage routes led to Niagara, to Oswego and to Ogdensburg and thence across the Lakes and the St. Lawrence. The Indian J. W. Lydekker, “The Faithful Mohawks,” 1938 danger was gone. Indeed the Indians themselves were now ‘Loyalists.’ The migration of Mohawks with their chief Thayendanega — in easier English, Joe Brant — gave us Brantford. By this route now came many Loyalists, settling at Niagara-on-the-Lake (Newark) even during the war.
Other Loyalists came to the new region by the sea — a year’s journey for many of them — to Nova Scotia, up the St. Lawrence, wintering on the way, many at Sorel, then past Montreal in a stubborn ascent of the St. Lawrence to the settlements laid out along the river to the new Kingston. The British Government was generosity itself; it did not do anything by halves. It supplied transport, tools, implements, seeds and food for one year and for more if needed. It gave land with an ungrudging hand; two hundred acres went to each disbanded private soldier; two hundred to every farmer civilian; to officers, according to rank, up to five thousand acres.
