Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 754
The Carrolls failed also. Not even a Jesuit could persuade people that the Roman Catholic religion would be happier under the Acts of Congress than under the Quebec Act. Carroll’s argument reminds one of the famous plea of a later American trust magnate, “Leave the consumer to us.” It was equally unsuccessful. As danger gathered down the St. Lawrence the commissioners cleared out, Franklin on May 11, 1776, in company with Walker and his wife; the rest on May 29. Arnold and his “Army of Congress” also cleared out (June 17), Arnold taking with him from Montreal a lot of plundered goods which he sold in Albany.
All this happened before the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776.
With the close of the American invasion of Canada, Montreal ceased to be a part of the theater of conflict, and the history of the long years of war that ended only with the Peace of 1783 belongs elsewhere. Only for one brief period did it look as if war might come again to Montreal. The entrance of France into the war as the ally of the United States (1778) put a new complexion on the scene. Already the young Marquis de Lafayette, coming to America to join Washington “on his own,” had eagerly advocated the invasion of Canada. The French alliance and the arrival of the French fleet opened a wide opportunity. Lafayette obtained the warm support of Admiral d’Estaing and a favoring vote of Congress. He proposed to ask France for five thousand new troops. He would invade Canada at both ends and in the middle, striking at Montreal by way of the Connecticut River. Congress approved the plan. D’Estaing sent to Montreal a proclamation (October 28, 1778) entitled Déclaration Adressée au Nom du Roi à Tous les Anciens Français de l’Amérique Septentrionale. It called upon the French of Canada to return to their native allegiance. “You were born French. There is no other house so august as that of Henry IV, under which the French can be happy and serve with delight.” But the note was wrongly pitched. Many plain French Canadians, after eighteen years of fairly fair play and of religious freedom, felt less sure of Henry IV. But even at that the appeal shook French-Canadian clerical and seignorial opinion. Sir Fredrick Haldimand, who had succeeded Carleton as the Governor of Canada (1778-86), wrote home: “Since the address of the Count d’Estaing and a letter of M. de Lafayette many of the priests have changed their opinions.” Jesuit missionaries, it was reputed, were seeking to rouse the Caughnawaga Indians for the Congress. Haldimand buried himself with defensive measures on the Richelieu to cover Montreal. But the danger passed. General Washington himself averted it. To his sagacious mind a French conquest of Canada would turn back the clock of the history of North America. There was no invasion. Without it, revolt in Canada was impossible.
But though the war of the Revolution, after its opening phases, affected Montreal but little, the conclusion of peace affected it and all Canada a great deal. For it led to a new American occupation which settled the future destiny of the country by the incoming of the United Empire Loyalists. Their migration, which brought forty thousand settlers to British North America within one generation, was on a scale unknown to the world of that day. Even before the peace was ratified they were leaving New York in shipfuls; after it, in fleets. They swarmed into Nova Scotia when a fishing village such as Shelburne became a town, or rather a camp, as large as Boston. The mainland section of Nova Scotia became New Brunswick with twelve thousand settlers in 1784. Other Loyalists made their entry across New York State by way of Oswego and Niagara. Others again came all the way round by river and sea, with Montreal as the great point of distribution. For many this trip took two seasons, the winter spent on the way. Many stayed in Montreal.
The new settlers transformed the country. They brought the English language on their lips and British freedom, as expanded in America, in their hearts. Patterned on their minds were the Massachusetts schoolhouse, free education for all. Thanksgiving turkey, town government, election to office, everybody at least as good as everybody else and perhaps better. This incoming flood broke the mold in which French Canada was cast. Into empty Upper Canada it came, to use a metaphor older than our glass bottles, as new wine to a new bottle, needing all the bottle to itself; into Lower Canada, as new wine into an old bottle, endeavoring to stretch the skin. Hence the clamor from Montreal for the government to open up land that was not seignorial and to divide it into “townships,” to make it seem like home. Hence presently the Eastern Townships. Here belongs the famous petition from Montreal (November 24, 1784) asking for an assembly. It carried 246 names, all British except Levi Solomons, and a few odd names difficult to classify. The second name is James McGill. With this from all British quarters came the desire and the demand for British institutions, for government by vote, for separate rule in Upper Canada.
Strangely enough, Lord Dorchester — the title borne by Sir Guy Carleton soon after his return as Governor General of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick in 1786 — was lukewarm in the cause of change. He thought it unwise to divide the provinces, argued that the demand for an assembly came only from the commercial class in Montreal and in Quebec, and that the gentlemen and the clergy were still against it. Dorchester was sixty-two years old. Age will have its way. Thus divided councils held action in suspense.
The current stirred not only political life but economic life as well. Here begin for Montreal new industries, of new character and importance, such as the first attempts toward the export timber trade that presently made the St. Lawrence raft a unique feature of the Canadian scene. Men of brains and energy were attracted by the new Montreal as by a magnet. Here enters on its annals, in 1782, the name of Molson, which henceforth echoes down the history of the city in the throb of the steamship, the tinkle of the bank tellers’ coins, the whisper of the college library, and the roar of the college stadium. At its first coming it breathed in a softer atmosphere. Young John Molson, aged eighteen, came out from Lincolnshire, a country where the moist climate of the fens and fields breathes malt with the air and where brewing is a hereditary, domestic art. This art, unknown in French Canada, Molson brought to Montreal. Mr. B. K. Sandwell, the biographer of the Molson family, speaks of young John Molson’s opportunity with something like awe. “He found a large, prosperous, and growing population entirely without local supplies of the national beverage.” Molson built his brewery a little way downstream from the town, close beside the river. Archaeologists can easily locate the spot as the brewery is still there.
But if the man found the opportunity, the opportunity had also found the man. Within a decade brewing was but one of Molson’s many activities. As Henry Ford, exactly a hundred years later, tinkered in his back yard with a “gasoline buggy,” so did Molson on the riverbank tinker with a “steamboat.” Accentuate both syllables instead of one, “steam, boat,” as they named the thing yet to be contrived, and the past will rise before you.
Nor was Molson the only man of opportunity, remaking Montreal. There were dozens of them. Most of all is this true of the fur trade which at this period got the new impetus that created the Northwest Company and wrote history. There are certain trades and avocations dear to the human heart, and certain others repugnant. All the world loves a sailor, suspects a lawyer, and avoids a professor. The fur trade is one that carries a peculiar attraction — the open air, the splash of the canoe, the smell of the pine woods, the campfire, and the lullaby of falling water. . . . This native attraction now joined with new opportunity. Now that England owned all America to the sunset, British explorers could go and search for it, as witness Captain Carver’s Travels through the Interior Parts of North America. British fur traders could go West by the new route of the lakes and rivers. Exploration and trade went together. We may doubt if such men as Alexander Henry and Alexander Mackenzie knew which they were doing. Henry came first, coming to Montreal at the time of Montgomery’s invasion, and entered on the Western fur trade, spending many years beyond the Great Lakes on the plains. On Henry’s trail followed a flock of independent traders, every man for himself, striking out from Montreal into the Lake Superior wilderness. Common sense showed the folly, in the fur trade among Indians, of every man for himself, which meant every man for today and no man for tomorrow. The Montreal traders, under the leadership of Henry, joined in an association called the Northwest Company. At this time, there being no statutory companies or company law of incorporation, except by single charter, the company was really a partnership. The headquarters were at Montreal, housed presently in the famous Beaver Hall that stood well outside of the town, southwest of it, on the slope that perpetuates its name in Beaver Hall Hill. At this time, and for another thirty years, the fur trade was the leading commerce of Montreal. Many, if not most, of the substantial men were in it, there being sixteen shares divided as follows: Todd and McGill, two shares; Benjamin and Joseph Frobisher, two shares; McGill and Paterson, two shares; McTavish and Company, two shares; Holmes and Grant, two shares; Walker and Company, two shares; McBeath and Company, two shares; Ross and Company, one share; Oakes and Company, one share.
Among these Montreal traders was formed in 1785 the famous Beaver Club, originally of nineteen members, all of them men who had wintered in the wilds. Later on they let in tamer men, who lived in town, and had fifty-five members with ten honorary members. They held club nights and club dinners, told tales about the bush, mixed hot scotch, and sent an aroma of good cheer down the decades. Their ghosts still walk in the Montreal Curling Clubs.
This new stimulus to trade affected to some extent the character of the Port of Montreal. More ships came up from the sea in what was then an all-British voyage protected by the Navigation Acts. But the number was still trifling. Except with a very special wind, ships had to be hauled up against St. Marys current with long teams of oxen, as many even as forty. The bateaux, as already described, carried practically all the trade, with transshipment at Quebec. The Durham boat, used in the States, does not appear in Montreal till later. The steamboat was too weak to offer a tow — a “tug” — up the current for many years after its invention. It had all it could do to tug itself. But on the lakes up above shipbuilding began with settlement itself.
It had been quite obvious that the government of the province of Quebec (still so called) must be altered, indeed that the province itself must be altered. The American Loyalists and the French new subjects had too little in common to amalgamate. Hence the new Constitutional Act (or Canada Act) of 1791 that cut Quebec in two and set up Lower and Upper Canada. The ultimate wisdom of this may be left to historians to argue. It looked like common sense to people in Upper Canada at the time. There were about 150,000 French and about 15,000 English-speaking Canadians, with rural French Canada still entirely French, as the Eastern Townships were not yet opened, and the new Upper Canada settlements entirely English-speaking.
The new act reiterated the guarantees to the Roman Catholic Church. It set up provincial legislatures at Quebec and at Toronto, each with an appointed legislative council and an elected assembly. Montreal now found itself a parliamentary constituency sending up, or rather down, four members to Quebec, to the Assembly of fifty. Montreal, meaning the district around, also sent two members, being one of the new “counties.” With characteristic inanity the government of the day christened the counties of French Canada with English names and divided Upper Canada into German districts. Later on both were painlessly removed. When the first Assembly met at Quebec on December 17, 1792, the Montreal town members included James McGill — nothing was now complete without him — J. B. Durocher, James Walker, and Joseph Papineau. In the new Assembly sixteen members were British and thirty-four French. It was from its cradle bilingual both in speech and record. It met, though it didn’t know it, on the very eve of England’s entry (February 1793) into the first great war that had already begun and was to last out the lives of many of them. At the moment no such thought troubled them. The British were as slow in realizing the approach of war in 1792 as in 1913 and 1938. In Montreal the new members’ thoughts were elsewhere: Papineau’s no doubt in his warehouse or on his clever son, Louis Joseph, then six years old and attending the seminary in Quebec; McGill’s thoughts on his fur trade; Molson’s on steam, and all on the pipe of peace.
Thus shifted noiselessly the scene of history. In place of French Canada was now British North America; the walled French city of Montreal knocked down its walls (1803) and opened its Harbour Gate to the world.
FOOTNOTES:
J. L. Lemoine, The Sword of General Montgomery, 1870.
V. Coffin, Province of Quebec and Early American Revolution, 1896.
See anecdote in Tree Toad, R. H. Davis, 1935.
Journal of Charles Carroll, 1776.
CHAPTER VIII. Lower Canada
1791-1841
A HALF CENTURY of Lower Canada. The Great War and the News of Trafalgar at Montreal. The Great Peace. A Rapid Age. Steamboats. Gaslights. City Government. The Coming of the Immigrants. The Cholera Years. Opening the First Railway. The Rebellion. Execution of the “Patriotes.”
By an odd coincidence of Canadian history the half century from 1791 to 1841, like the previous 1713-63, actually means a definite period. It corresponds to the life of the province of Lower Canada, created under the Act of 1791 and expiring in 1841. Read in the false light and from the false angle of history as written, until yesterday, to be learned at school, it seems all fire and smoke, all war, anger, and rebellion. Here first is the shadow of the great war in Europe, beginning in 1792 and lasting with just a little break (1802-03), hardly observable from Montreal, till the city heard in July of 1815 the news of the Battle of Waterloo of June 18. The war is hardly over till we are dragged forward to the Rebellion of 1837-38. In such history any little intervals of quiet seem like boating at Chippewa, above Niagara Falls.
But in reality the period as seen in retrospect by old people in Montreal in 1841 would not seem like that at all. The war to them was something like a shadow that came and went, darkening and passing. An old man might remember the excitement and apprehension that went with the outbreak of the French Revolution, but more likely, as nothing happened, he had quite forgotten it. He might remember having heard people say that Napoleon was going to send a fleet against Montreal. Among the vivid memories that never left him would be those of Montreal in 1812-13, with the streets full of soldiers, with every able man under arms or under a pitchfork, the cheers and shouts, when they heard about the battle, right close by, at Châteauguay and how three or four hundred of their own side, they said, had beaten ten times as many Americans. Still more vivid, only yesterday, only three years ago, would be the recollection, brief but lurid, of the Rebellion, of the fighting on the Richelieu, the cruel slaughter in St. Eustache Church, and the hangings in Montreal.
But those pictures, lurid in the foreground, were not the real scenes of life, but only patches of fire seen against a wood as evening falls. Real life, as it came down the years, carried different recollections. If you were to let the old man tell you all about it (a dangerous permission to give) you would find that his main recollection of that half century in Montreal was the terrific change from a period ever so slow to a period ever so fast. It is with all old men. In fact, the old man would admit that he didn’t know what the world was coming to. Old men never do. He could recall from his childhood the old French town, all gardens and seminaries and soft with the sound of the church bells; could recall looking forty feet down from the great walls of the fortification (eighteen feet high) at the pasture of the common and the river and the bateaux hauled up on the mud. Why, in those days you took a good part of a week, or even more, to come from Quebec. Ships would lie down there, below the current; they might be a fortnight waiting for a wind. But now, in 1841, a steamboat runs you back and forward over the river or rushes you across to La Prairie to get on a train that whirls you away to St. Johns at fifteen miles an hour — another steamboat and off again — and in less than a week, in a few days, you’re in New York.
Think of that sleepy old French town with perhaps two hundred English families in it, and this great city of 1841 with forty thousand people, where you hear English spoken all day, with ocean ships all the way from Liverpool, with this great Lachine Canal where the little river and the marshes used to be, but now steamers up and down from the Great Lakes. Think of the wonderful new gaslight, of this plan for a great bridge to be made across the river, and people talking of this new fangled invention they call a magnetic telegraph that takes a message forty miles through a piece of wire. The old man hopes he doesn’t live to see anything of that sort in Montreal. Perhaps he didn’t. It came in 1847, but he may have died of cholera first.
The enthusiasm of the opening French Revolution, almost bloodless in its early stage, awoke in foreign lands echoes of sympathy, of sentiment, of silliness. “The greatest event in the world,” said Fox when the Bastille fell. British “friends of the people” and “Constitutional Clubs” held gatherings, where lords and lackeys met as equals, “in childish imitation,” says a British historian, “of what was going on across the channel.” In the United States a wave of ultrarepublicanism, with Phrygian liberty caps and songs and demonstrations, swept the country. “The American people,” says McMaster, “went insane.”
