Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 723
Difficulties, of course, there were. The Loyalists showed a tendency to keep moving round like lost sheep; speculators bought up their land, the “location tickets” foolishly being made transferable; some grumbled, being Americans, for ‘town-meetings,’ to run their own affairs; others had had enough of town meetings for ever. Another grievance was that the government at first shut them off from the excellent land, still empty and easy of access, in what we call the Eastern Townships of Quebec. It seemed too near the United States from which it had, and still has, no real boundary. Other new-comers, thousands of them, were not Loyalists at all — just incoming Americans tempted by good land.
Indeed it is important to remember that the Loyalist settlers themselves were most of them not British in the first-hand sense, but Americans. Many of them came of families already several generations in America. They differed in this from the generality of the settlers, British people from their own Isles, who came later in the great migration after the Napoleonic War. Now allegiance is one thing, culture another. These Americans, Loyalists and others, helped to give to the Province of Ontario that peculiar stamp of similarity to “the States” in speech and habit which its plainer people have always carried. From them comes the Thanksgiving Dinner of Massachusetts, half appetite, half religion, originating from a turkey-feed with the Indians in 1630. From them came the ‘York’ — the New York shilling, 12½ cents — which many of us still remember as current calculation. From their traditions came presently the school ‘sections’ and the spellers and the spelling bees, and the township. They H. L. Mencken, “The American Language,” Chapter II, 1919 spoke of their “dooty” and they “reckoned” and “guessed” and “calculated” and used all those American ‘novelties’ of speech which were old in East Anglia when the Pilgrim Fathers left it. Time was when the word ‘Loyalist,’ and the prouder ‘U. E. Loyalist’ were terms used as if in contrast to Yankee or American. We know better now. The word British-American has come again into its own.
The difficulties described led naturally to a reorganization of government. The Constitutional Act of 1791 divided Canada into the two provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, with a Governor-General for all Canada and under him a Lieutenant-Governor for Upper Canada. In each province was a Legislative Council appointed for life, with hereditary titles grantable, but never granted, by the Crown. In each was a popular Assembly elected on a property franchise. The Governor and his Council were thus set over against the people’s Assembly, with neither in control. But it would have been hard to go further at the time. It was a half-way house, in which was made too long a sojourn. This later brought rebellion. But at first the new government in Upper Canada worked wonders. Colonel John Graves Simcoe, the veteran Commander of the Queen’s Rangers, was appointed as first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada. He arrived at Kingston July 1, 1792 and organized his Legislature at Newark (Niagara) in the same month. For over four years he governed the province and immensely influenced its future.
Simcoe was a notable man. He had a vision that looked a “The Simcoe Papers,” Ontario Historical Society, 40 Vols., 1923-6 hundred years ahead, and that lingered also a hundred years behind. He could see in the sandbars and marshes of Toronto the mirage of a metropolis; his great military roads swept in his fancy east and west five hundred miles; he held the North in his hand and Niagara was his footstool. For him Upper Canada — so he told his Parliament — went, in its responsibilities, “infinitely beyond whatever, till this period, have distinguished any other colony.”
Yet to Simcoe, democrat meant scoundrel; dissenter, snivelling hypocrite; and without the Church of England morality would go under. But he was all for what he considered progress; he must have schools, and grammar schools; he looked forward to a college; he gathered in a printer to set up the Upper Canada April 13, 1793 Gazette or American Oracle; he collected three refugee clergymen of the establishment to make a church, and asked the Crown for a bishop.
For government Simcoe wanted British government and he wanted it all; its established church, its hereditary titles, its forms, its feathers, its venerable humbugs; and nothing newer than Queen Anne.
On these terms Simcoe called his first Legislature together on September 17, 1792. It met in a frame building close by the village of Niagara (Newark) with uncleared bush all around. It numbered twenty-three men in all, seven councillors and six elected assembly-men. The councillors, hand picked, were gentlemen, but more than half the others were a rougher lot, “fellows of one table,” that is fellows who ate with their servants, and hence, to Simcoe, disqualified for British Government. But Simcoe’s Duncan C. Scott, ‘John Graves Simcoe’ in “Makers of Canada” 1905 vision saw it all in the colours of the autumn woods; he read its future in the majesty of the lake and the broad sweep of the river. All that Ottawa now is, he saw it then. And he must have the pomp to match it. He threw in more circumstance in one afternoon than the Philadelphia Congress in eighteen years of its drab sessions. There were mounted guards, soldiers in brilliant scarlet uniforms, Queen’s Rangers in rifle green, guns from the fort answered by guns from the sloops in the harbour. Within there was a sergeant-at-arms, a ready-made dais and a “speech from the throne” — old as Edward I, and younger than to-morrow. As background spectators for the scene, there were Indians in full paint and feathers, with scalps of dead enemies hanging in their belts, to show that England still had friends.
Simcoe moved his capital to a strategic position at Toronto (York from 1793 to 1834). He planned and commenced arteries of military roads, that turned to avenues of settlement. One that was called Yonge Street, much of it at first only a horsetrack, led through the bush and over the hills to Lake Simcoe and so down to the Georgian Bay. Its first purpose was, so to speak, to outflank the United States. In place of that it opened up as farm land the hills and valleys forgotten since the martyr’s mission of Brébeuf.
Thus as Napoleon made France so did Simcoe make Upper Canada. The best remains. The worst is gone. He named its most beautiful lake in his father’s memory. Time has transferred it to his own. Simcoe told his Parliament, when its first session ended, that it represented an “image and transcript of the British constitution.” At least he did his best to make it so. The seeds he sowed were to come up later as harvest, and some of them as tares.
All this however came later. The unexpected outbreak of the French Revolution and the twenty-three years of war that followed, called a halt to the natural development of British America. Immigration from abroad slackened. It would have failed altogether but for distress at home in Britain that drove unwilling settlers overseas. This was especially so with Scotland. The old Highlands of the clans were breaking up. Deer and sheep paid better than tenantry. Highland ‘clearances’ gave Canada some of its best. Reports showed that in 1802 above 3,400 people left Scotland; estimates claim that the West Highlands W. A. Carrothers, “Emigration from the British Isles,” 1929 and the Islands lost a quarter of their population. Most notable in this period was Lord Selkirk’s colonization of Prince Edward Island and on the Red River, as discussed later. To Upper Canada also came the immigration organized by Colonel Thomas Talbot on Lake Erie. But all this was held back by war in Europe, and presently stopped dead by war in Canada. Similarly, all through this period, trade moved among the alarms of war, over-quickened here and obliterated there, with certainty nowhere. Meantime legislation, as it has since the days of Tacitus, fell asleep in a country under arms.
Most unfortunate of all were the quarrels of Britain and America over maritime rights that culminated in the deplorable and fruitless war of 1812. Of the 80,000 people of the Upper Canada of that day, most were still ‘American,’ 35,000 representing Loyalists and their families, 25,000 later American settlers, and only 20,000 directly from the British Isles. Few hearts “Niles Weekly Register,” Aug. 1, 1812 were in the war; many in secret hoped for republican victory. Per contra, in Massachusetts the war seemed wanton wickedness. Governor Caleb Strong by proclamation (July 26, 1812) called for a public fast for a wrong committed “against the nation from which we are descended.”
Only the bravery of the combatants redeems the memory of the fruitless struggle. It is all a past echo now. The incursions across the St. Lawrence, the spectacular fights above the gorge of Niagara, the battle of the summer evening and night among the leaves of Lundy’s Lane, the fury that committed to the flames the frame houses of York and the crude beginnings of Washington, the guns that thundered over Lake Erie, never to be heard again — all of this is now but the mist and echo of the past. The monuments that indicate for the tourist of to-day the site of these inroads and these combats, mark only a soil on which the seeds of dissension have long since sprung up as flowers.
When the war closed with the Treaty of Ghent, British America looked out, as did Europe, on a changed and changing world. War seemed dead; peace enthroned. The new economic life of liberated industry moved in a flood, sweeping the seven seas. The Great Peace, as it presently began to be called, rested on the new ideals of liberty, democratic justice, equal rights and equal trade for all; it had behind it the new power of the machine, the new organization of finance and the magic aid of science. It seemed to many at the time that it must last for ever. It should have. Some day it will.
ORIGINAL PAINTING BY FREDERICK H. VARLEY, A.R.C.A., VANCOUVER, B.C., 1941
“The emigrant ship . . . was the world’s symbol of peace and progress . . .” — page 124
CHAPTER V. THE MIDDLE PERIOD:. SHIPS, COLONIES, COMMERCE — 1815-1867
EMIGRATION AND THE Victorian Age — Upper Canada — The North-West and the Selkirk Settlement — The Rebellion of 1837 — Lord Durham and the Union of the Canadas — Responsible Government — Maritime Progress — American Boundaries and Reciprocity — The Civil War — Provincial Deadlock — Confederation.
The age that we now call Victorian began in reality before Queen Victoria was born. Under this name we think of the era during which England became the workshop of the world, Britain the mistress of the peaceful seas; the era of free trade and the rainbow visions that went with it; of the expectation of universal, perpetual peace that inspired the Great Exhibition and its Crystal Palace of 1851; and above all, the era of the literature of Scott and Dickens, Carlyle and Tennyson and the rising science of Darwin and Huxley.
It would have seemed the brightest age in all history but for Spenser Walpole, “History of England from 1815,” 1886 the dark shadows behind it; the new poverty brought by the new wealth; the new liberty of people free to starve and of others free to let them do it; the stones in place of bread; the festering slum, the cry of the children in the factories, the Song of the Shirt, and starvation under its new name of the survival of the fittest. Seen thus, the new pauperism of the nineteenth century makes the rude plenty of the fourteenth century seem a golden age, and a plain meal at sunset in a log cabin a very glimpse of paradise.
But in spite of all, this Victorian Age was an age of hope; such as was never before; such as is gone now, or at least is eclipsed beyond present vision. In this age of hope people could see poverty, want and war only as the last dark clouds of a night that was breaking into morning.
We cannot understand our Canadian history without an appreciation of this background in the mother-country. After 1815, we exchanged war for peace, political for economic life, conquest for commerce. The war was no sooner ended by the Settlement of Vienna than a great migration poured forth from the British 1815 Isles. In those forgotten days immigration fell like Portia’s mercy as a double blessing, on him that gave and him that took. The emigrant ship, crowded and dirty and triumphant, was the world’s symbol of peace and progress — the dirtier and the poorer the more welcome. At times cholera and scurvy swept the ships and turned the ocean transit into a horror, as witness Mrs. Traill’s account of the cholera in Canada in the year 1832. But Mrs. Traill, “The Backwoods of Canada,” 1836 mainly migration meant more hands to work, more chance of prosperity for all. Time was to show that even in a new country prosperity comes not in leaps and bounds but in rises and falls, and that bad times are as hard to exorcise in the bush as on the Bourse.
But at first the current ran strong. Migration no longer meant the wanderings of adventure, the flight of refugees towards shelter or of pilgrims to the ecstasy of the wilderness. It was now the outgoing of people from a crowded mother-country to new homes. It assumed proportions never seen before. In colonial days in America no exact count of migration was kept. Settlement indeed was mainly effected by a first mass movement, as to Massachusetts in 1629-30, and then by slow infiltration. Perhaps, at the best, 3,000 British settlers came to colonial America in an ordinary year. But in the five years after Waterloo 98,000 British went overseas. Twenty years later the immigrants of five years (1835-9) numbered 280,000, and for 1850-54 as many as 1,639,000. Here began the still unsolved problem of empty land and willing men, the jig-saw puzzle over which the economists mumble algebra. It is not only still unsolved but grows more difficult W. A. Carrothers, “Emigration from the British Isles,” 1929 with each new complexity of civilization. At this time not only was British North America little more than a mere outline and a frame for future settlement, but Australia and New Zealand lay entirely open. A certain tide of the new migration went therefore to Australia where New South Wales was opening into respectability with other sheep than its original black ones. The migration of free people to Australia reached 15,000 in the year 1840.
But the main outflow of migration came to British America, and overwhelmingly to Canada. In the twenty years 1815-34, 403,000 British settlers went to British America as against 269,000 to the United States. Into Upper Canada they poured in a steady stream. The steamboat now began to multiply the movement. The steamship was originally the child, and presently the main support, of inland waters, beginning where sail ended. With the St. Lawrence canals that began in 1821 the steamboat came into its own. Even for the ocean voyage steam joined forces with sail with the Cunard Company of 1839. Hence immigrants now came direct from the old country up the St. Lawrence to the Lake Ontario settlements and marked out all the lake-shore counties from Kingston to Niagara. From Toronto, Yonge Street took them northward to Lake Simcoe, and Dundas Street westward M. L. Hansen, “The Mingling of the Canadian and American Peoples,” 1940 to the valleys of the Grand River and the Thames. Along Lake Erie was spread the settlement that marked the enterprise of Colonel Thomas Talbot. With a grant of 5,000 acres he had begun actual colonization in 1809. His operations were checked by the war of 1812, his flour-mills and saw-mills burnt in American inroads, he himself at the front, or looking for it. But with peace Talbot went on. The Government gave him grants of land, the original 5,000 acres and then more and more. Admiral Fisher once said “There is nothing like favouritism.” He meant there is nothing like having the power to advance a good man. In Anna Jameson, “Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada,” 1838 Canada the Crown still had it. Talbot brought out settlers in thousands. His Talbot Road went all along the Lake Erie shore. Before the Rebellion broke in 1837 Talbot claimed to have had 50,000 people settled on 650,000 acres of land, and all of it good. He is the Thomas, if not the saint, whose name is preserved in the chief city of his making. Many, perhaps most, of Talbot’s settlers were Americans from New York and Pennsylvania and helped to balance the larger influx of purely British stock.
Of these other people a great many were settled by the old Canada Company, chartered by John Galt in 1826. It was an enterprise possible only when one and the same authority could control the outgoing and incoming of migration, its financial support, the grant of land and the conditions of settlement. In our eagerness not to give too much of this power to anybody, we have taken it all from everybody. Westminster, Ottawa and Winnipeg must now all act together before a sparrow can light in Manitoba. None do.
It was different then. John Galt was a Scot, a typical Scot, for he combined a literary culture with good works and a keen sense of business. His culture has enriched the literature of migration with those haunting verses that convey all the wistful affection of the exile.
From the lone shieling on the misty Island,
Mountains divide us and the waste of seas.
But still the blood is true, the heart is Highland,
And in our dreams we see the Hebrides.
But John Galt’s Canada Company did more than dream. They subscribed money and bought land from the Crown, nearly 2,500,000 acres in the Western Peninsula. Their payments ran J. W. Aberdeen, “John Galt,” 1936 to £20,000 a year but the Government accepted the building of roads, schools, churches and bridges as part of the price. They advanced land and money to settlers and looked ahead for the return, forward and upward. They put 4,500 people into the Huron district. They founded Galt and Goderich and Stratford. Most notable of all is the story of their foundation of Guelph. Galt and his friends stood on a summer evening, on a forest slope, all dripping from a day of rain. There they felled a huge maple to mark the selected site of the town. This done, they passed around whisky and drank the health of the whole Royal Family. Patriotism could go no further.
For a time it looked as if this tide of migration might also flood into the North-West, thus anticipating history by half a century. After the Treaty of Utrecht had confirmed their territorial 1713 rights, the Hudson’s Bay Company went forward undisturbed G. Bryce, “Remarkable History of the Hudson’s Bay Company,” 1900 with their enterprise. It is true that French traders from Montreal, especially after Vérendrye, drew away a certain share of the fur trade by way of the lakes. But the main territory around the bay, known and unknown, was still theirs. Their S. Hearne, “Journey from Fort Prince of Wales,” 1795 ships came and went. Their sagacious policy promoted exploration to find new fields. The Company’s agent, Samuel Hearne, made three successive journeys westward from the Churchill across the treeless ground of slate and stone and flattened river valleys — the Barren Grounds of Canada. These are ‘lands forlorn,’ Douglas, “Lands Forlorn,” 1914 in summer carpeted with grass and humming with a myriad insects, with wide lakes, a glare of day that hardly knows sunset, fast rivers that cannot linger, and in winter the starlit desolation of arctic snow. Thus Hearne made his way to the Coppermine River and to the sea over mineral wealth still waiting.
