HOLY REDEEMER
•#*
.WINDSOR
FROM THE - BOOKS OF1 -
THE MAKING OF CANADA
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
THE FIGHT WITH FRANCE FOR
NORTH AMERICA
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1 The story has all the stir and tension of a romance. '
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1 The story of the Seven Years' War in America is one of the most stirring and romantic in history.'
Westminster Gazette.
CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Popular Edition, with Illustrations
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SIR GILBERT PARKER :— ' If I could, I would put this volume in the hands of every public man in the Empire, of every merchant, of every intending settler.'
TH E MAKING OF CANADA
BY
A. G. BRADLEY
AUTHOR OF 'THE FIGHT WITH FRANCE FOR NORTH AMERICA 'CANADA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY,' ETC. ETC.
LONDON ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO LTD
10 ORANGE STREET LEICESTER SQUARE
HOLY REDEEMER
PREFACE
THIS book is virtually a sequel to The Fight with France for North America, now republished, in which I described the long Anglo-French conflict that terminated in the conquest of Canada. The title I venture to think is entirely justified, in spite of the fact that the various provinces were not consolidated into what is now known as the Dominion of Canada till a much later day. In the half-century fol- lowing the conquest, of which the present book treats, occurred all those events which formed and stereotyped the British provinces as did every crisis which seriously threat- ened their existence and their future. After the American war of 1812-15 they were left free to pursue their respective destinies along the lines upon which the stormy period of trial, friction and bloodshed here dealt with had moulded them. During these first fifty years the Old French Canada was familiarised with British rule, the attempt of the revolting American Colonies to include it in their con- federacy was frustrated, the loyalist refugees from that struggle arrived to create those British provinces which as populous and well-organised communities ultimately united with the other to form the present Dominion. Lastly, the close of this half-century witnessed that struggle for exist- ence under the British flag, waged by both races side by side with British troops, which determined once and for all the question of allegiance and confined their future troubles and trials to matters of domestic if sometimes serious import. It would be idle to suppose that any relation of
vi THE MAKING OF CANADA
these last would at present appeal to very many readers outside the Dominion. But the earlier period has far more claims to general notice, and is in truth a far more stirring one, not only from its really dramatic episodes in both peace and war, but from the fact that through the whole of it Canada was more or less involved in the great struggle of nations which agitated the world from the Seven Years' War till the fall of Napoleon.
There are several excellent short histories of Canada ; compassing its three centuries in a single volume, achieve- ments of compression that admit of room for little more than bare facts ; history condensed for elementary purposes, not for the type of reader whose interest I have before solicited upon this subject, and now again venture to solicit. There are also many-volumed works valuable to the student and specialist, but altogether out of scale for the purpose in hand even if readily accessible to the general reader, which they are not.
I have here attempted to depict the most vital and most interesting period of Canadian history within a compass that is neither sketchy on the one hand, nor monumental on the other. The original material for this period, in the State Papers, the British Museum, and elsewhere, is abundant. I had already collected a great deal of that used here for my Life of Dorchester, recently written for the publisher and editors of The Makers of Canada series. In the final chapters dealing with the war of 1812-15 I was confronted with the difficulties of compression, and unlike the rest of the period was on ground that has been admirably and recently covered in handy volumes by Dr. Hannay and Mr. Lucas as well as in older and practically obsolete works.
A. G. B.
RYE, SUSSEX.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY ..... I
II. CANADA UNDER MURRAY .... 1 8
III. CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT: 1766-1774 . . 36
IV. THE INVASION OF CANADA . . . . .65 V. THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC ..... 89
VI. THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR . . .112
VII. THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS .... 140
VIII. UPPER AND LOWER CANADA . , . .178
IX. DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE . . . . .214
X. IMMIGRATION— SETTLEMENT AND PROGRESS . . 242
XI. THE APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES . .271
XII. THE WAR IN l8l2 .... . 296
vii
Vlll
THE MAKING OF CANADA
CHAPTER
XIII. THE WAR IN 1813
XIV. THE WAR IN 1 8 14 XV. CONCLUSION .
INDEX .
PAGE - 326
• 353
• 378
• 392
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
IN a former volume, which told of the conquest of Canada, my story closed with the surrender of the shrunken band of its brave French defenders upon the old Place d'Armes at Montreal. The success of Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham was not the end of French dominion, though it made that end inevitable. A majority of my readers will doubt- less need reminding that for many months following the famous victory a British garrison, penned within the ram- parts of Quebec, represented our only footing in Canada, and had to face sickness, scanty fare, a rigorous winter, and a vigilant foe smarting with defeat, and led by an able general. Nor is it often remembered that a sortie in force from the isolated city, in the March following the death of Wolfe, resulted in a severe repulse near the Plains of Abraham, known as the' battle of St. Foy. Murray, the British commander, it is sometimes said, though probably without reason, was stimulated to this action by a desire to emulate the fame of his late chief. But he only gave Levis, then in much superior strength, an opportunity to avenge the death of Montcalm by a thousand British casualties, and to relieve the gloom of the fall of Canada with the illuminating memory of a single glorious day.
I have told too, in this former story, how a British fleet relieved the hard-won and now hard-pressed city, and how three British armies, from east, west, and south, reached Montreal upon the same September day of the same year, 1760, and left the civil and military government of Canada
A
2 THE MAKING OF CANADA
enclosed therein no alternative but the immediate surrender of the colony and the troops that had fought so bravely for so many years in its defence.
It was a gay and bright little city of some 7000 souls that witnessed this transfer of no insignificant slice of the earth's surface from France to Britain, and the fall of the curtain on French dominion and French ambition in North America. A town too of martial and adventurous traditions, but for all that, the home of many polished folk whose sprightly manner and brave attire, and well-ordered villas set upon the surrounding slopes drew notes of admiration from such of their conquerors as kept diaries, or wrote letters that have come down to us ; a place whose destiny at the head of a vast waterway, and at the edge of an illimitable wilderness, was patent to the earliest settlers, and had grown slowly but surely amid Indian wars and Indian trade. Steeped in the heroic deeds of priest and soldier, as in the merciless traditions of the white man's petite guerre^ its bells, during the past five critical years, had rung out many a victorious peal, in an altogether greater and more vital struggle, and now the end had come ! A century and a half has passed away since the remnant of those half-dozen French regiments who fought through the war stacked their arms on the Place d'Armes at Montreal, and the last French drum beat on Canadian soil. As one stands to-day on the uplifted sylvan ridge from which Montreal was named, a noble city of 300,000 souls spreads itself beneath one's feet, from the base of the same mountain to the banks of the St. Lawrence, whose broad belt of blue shimmers wide across the middle distance. Next to the prospect of Quebec from the deck of an approaching vessel, and the far-ex- panding outlook from the historic heights above it, that which rewards the visitor who with pious zeal ascends the mountain at Montreal assuredly takes rank. More par- ticularly must this be so if he have in his mind the story of Canada as he looks away into the glimmering distance to the southward, whence the tide of the old wars rolled back
INTRODUCTORY 3
and forth, or up and down the broad trail of the river which, from east or west, bore those varied flotillas, pregnant with weal or woe, to the great trading station.
Down in the business heart of the city, and but a short way from the ample docks which now obscure the old landing - places of sloop, batteau, and canoe, the Place d'Armes is still there for those who, amid the triumphs of modern progress, can yet spare a thought for the days of old. Hard by, too, the Notre - Dame church and the picturesque Chateau de Ramezy, which sheltered the French, and afterwards the earlier English governors, almost alone remain to recall the old regime and the dramatic scene with which it closed. No conditions were then exacted* as is sometimes rather loosely stated. With nearly 18,000 veteran troops in and around the city, Amherst had De Levis and his 2000 men at his mercy; but generous con- ditions, as every one knows, were granted. Those relating to purely military matters, such as the shipment of the French troops and kindred details, do not concern us here, but ample protection was guaranteed to the religion and the religious corporations of the Canadians, and full opportunity to those who wished to leave the country of disposing of their property. But it was not till the Treaty of Paris in 1763, more than two years later, after the actual close of the war, that these privileges, and many others, were formally confirmed to the 'new subjects.' It was from this latter date, too, that I would start my narrative. For though France and England sheathed their swords on the continent of North America at the surrender of Canada, the Seven Years' War dragged on its weary length elsewhere till the close of 1762. Nor need the interregnum in Canada detain us. Military rule, exercised for the most part with discretion and generosity, prevailed under Murray at Quebec, with Haldimand and Burton commanding at Montreal and Three Rivers respectively. The war-wearied Canadians of all ranks welcomed peace only too gladly, and returned to its pursuits under the protection of their own civil laws
4 THE MAKING OF CANADA
I
and customs, and a criminal code more merciful than their own, administered by British officers in a manner both lenient and just. It must be always remembered that the retention of Canada was by no means yet an accepted fact. Pending the Treaty of Paris, signed in February 1763, this question became quite a burning one in Great Britain, and was eagerly discussed by pamphleteers and politicians both within and without the Houses of Parliament. This may now seem at first sight almost incredible, but a few words will, I trust, show what a plausible case was put forward by the opponents of retention, even had a quid pro quo, reckoned at that time an extremely valuable one, been left out of consideration. The contention rested, in short, on an eventuality still hidden in the mists of the future, and inviting the widest differences of opinion. We know now who were right; but we also know how much less of a catastrophe to Britain that which they foresaw has proved. I need hardly say that this was the effect which the with- drawal of France would produce on the British American colonies. There would seem nowadays to be a tolerably prevalent, if rather vague, impression that these populous provinces were ardently attached to the British connection and the British Crown. So far as this was true it was due mainly to the fact that without it their existence would not have been worth a year's purchase, and they knew it. Nevertheless the colonists suffered, and that very con- sciously, grave inconvenience from the restrictions on their sea-borne trade, only modified by wholesale smuggling, and the attempts to combat this provoked no small share of the discontent, which ripened into revolt. These people, it should be remembered, were not generally English folk of the old-country type who happened to live in America. They were mostly the descendants of men who had gone out in the seventeenth century, and developed another type of Briton in an atmosphere which, climatically and socially, differed widely from that of the mother-country. That these colonies, or rather groups of colonies, differed from
INTRODUCTORY 5
one another matters nothing, but only emphasises the extreme spirit of provincialism and independence which animated them all. Even in appearance and manner of speech they had already as a mass drifted away from the conventional Englishman. How indeed could it have been otherwise ? All contemporary evidence of a more intimate as well as an official nature goes to prove that the average European and the average Anglo- American, then as now, misunderstood one another, to put it mildly, in the early stages at any rate, of individual acquaintanceship. Every colony was practically a republic, with the further entertain- ment of a perennial quarrel with its royal or proprietary governor, whose salary it refused to vote if that usually unfortunate official proved intractable. They were above all things democratic, though the note might vary some- what in nature and degree in different sections. Modern American fiction, with retrospective yearnings after a more decorative past, revels in the creation of gorgeous whites who, in the planting colonies, led the lives of luxurious nabobs among a deferential tenantry and a vast retinue of negro slaves. Sober fact, however, pursuing the same retrospective course, runs up against a simple, plain-living country gentleman farming his own somewhat ill-cultivated acres, with a dozen or two African slaves, and perhaps a few indentured European whites. He too, with rare ex- ceptions, is a democrat, though drawing the line of recogni- tion perhaps at freeholders, with no particular devotion to the King, and certainly no special liking for the very few Englishmen he had seen, with what appear to him their insufferable airs. His interest was quite absorbed in his own affairs, or at the most in those of his own province. He rarely knew anything of neighbouring provinces, for there were no sources of information, nor did he often desire this knowledge, regarding them with feelings any- thing but friendly. When the French peril arose before the Seven Years' War, and threatened to wall him out from his fertile western country with a belt of military occupa-
6 THE MAKING OF CANADA
tion, and a possible prospect of some day tumbling him into the Atlantic, it scarcely disturbed the even tenor of his life. He only half believed the warnings of the outer world enunciated by governors and other tiresome people, for he had rarely even seen a Frenchman unless the sons and grandsons of a few Anglicised Huguenot refugees may count for such. When another kind of Frenchmen, however, began to build forts on the wild lands of companies in which he had shares, he began to bestir himself a little. The middle and southern colonies, with a population of over half a million, raised a few paid companies of tattered white men, stiffened by Scotch-Irish frontiermen, for which they could scarcely find officers among their abundant well-to-do class. When Braddock with his regulars came out to help them every difficulty was thrown in that poor choleric gentleman's way. When his defeat let loose a horde of French-incited savages on the frontiers, and deluged them with blood, the people of the lower countries, not being personally inconvenienced, pursued the paths of peace and agriculture with sublime indifference, though ten thousand well-to-do horsemen, used to firearms, could have been mustered without putting any appreciable strain on either individual or colonial resources. The English have been called a warlike but unmilitary race, which, despite the touch of paradox, is a not infelicitous description. But when blows are going anywhere England has always been prolific in adventurous souls who want to give and take them. The hatred to militarism displayed by Pennsyl- vania, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas at a moment when their own people were being butchered, and their future threatened by a power of alien blood, language, and religion, has no parallel in British anti-militarism. Selfish apathy is perhaps the truer phrase. Nor did the love even of glory or adventure fire the souls of one per cent, of that genera- tion of the well-endowed youth of the southern colonies throughout the war, for scarcely three thousand rank and file were raised between them all during that critical period,
INTRODUCTORY 7
and nothing like enough young men of the right class came forward to officer this meagre force. If, however, in speak- ing of colonial democracy and republicanism, I have misled the reader into thinking that the American colonists dis- regarded the distinctions of birth, means, and education, I must hasten to correct so false an impression. They were practical common-sense people, without any unworkable theories, and their social arrangements being natural and unaggressive, in no way interfered with an outdoor re- publicanism. The gentry class of the old colonies were, as a matter of fact, perhaps the most robust opponents of monarchical interference, and their pride the most easily touched, not merely by any political encroachments, but by those little sparks that the blundering unconscious Englishman of all time is apt to strike when he comes in contact with more sensitive bodies not moulded upon his particular pattern. This civic temper then, and this torpor in martial affairs, the British statesman had to take into consideration, when discussing a question of really pro- digious import. Pennsylvania had great excuse for its military shortcomings, being largely dominated by Quakers whose faith forbade recourse to arms, while Germans, little interested in anything beyond their personal affairs, were another strong element. The Jerseys and New York had shown reasonable activity in the late struggle, while the New England colonies, always martial compared to the rest, had covered themselves with glory by the exertions that they had made in men, money, and performance. Now throughout the middle and southern colonies there was some ground for assuming a certain amount of senti- mental attachment to the British connection. But no man with the least knowledge of New England, well as her provinces had fought, would have suspected her people generally of altruistic attachments of this kind. The triumphs of Chatham's war kindled for the moment an outburst of rejoicing that might well have deceived not merely distant Britons, but almost the bell-ringers them-
8 THE MAKING OF CANADA
selves. The French terror had been removed, a deliverance of infinite significance to the northern colonies, while even those of the south had learned something about the French before the end of the struggle, and in part realised what fate might have been theirs. But the war, while it produced a quite unprecedented intercourse between the people of the various provinces who, in field and camp, could readily fraternise, had a precisely opposite effect on the relations of the provincials with their British deliverers. There had been continual friction between them in matters of business, and no little in social intercourse. In short, a near acquaintance had produced no small measure of that mutual antipathy with which the abounding correspondence of the period bristles. It is an old story this, and in a slightly altered and modified form still pursues its inevitable way in Anglo-Colonial relationships. In 1762, however, there were in England, for obvious reasons, great numbers of persons, soldiers mainly, who had spent many years in America. On the question at issue it is significant that those who favoured the retention of Canada, and discounted the fear of colonial secession, did so, not on the grounds of any British attachments, but on the impossibility of any effective union against the power of Britain. Franklin himself scouted the notion of secession, but purely on those grounds. The abandonment of Canada in a military sense must have been at that moment, too, a bitter suggestion, and one is not surprised at the great preponderance of those who could not or would not look the possible result of the alternative in the face. Moreover, the Canada just wrested from the French included illimitable territory to the north- west, and the regions beyond the Ohio at the back of the colonies. A third suggestion was to restore only that portion of the country then occupied and roughly indicated by the present province of Quebec. But this did not come seriously on the table. If the French were permitted to retain any footing on the mainland, it was said that another war, sooner or later, was inevitable. We are at this day
INTRODUCTORY 9
only too familiar with that foolish article in the treaty which, in the teeth of Pitt's protests, left two rocky islands and some awkwardly defined fishing rights on the New- foundland coast to France as a constant source of friction between the countries even to our own time.
Precisely the same considerations, curiously enough, were agitating the minds of Frenchmen. Many were opposed to receiving Canada back again, regarding it as a barren, inhospitable country that brought them no profit and much trouble, and they, too, found further consolation in the prediction that its gain would bring about the loss of her American colonies to Great Britain. Some, on the other hand, protested that without Canada, its timber and its coast fisheries, the French marine would sink into insignificance.
With the British Government the matter finally resolved itself into the alternatives of Guadeloupe or Canada. Turn- ing to the map to-day and looking at that little French island in the Caribbean Sea, sixty by twenty miles perhaps in area, one may well feel amazement. But Guadeloupe had that year sent home over half a million pounds-worth of sugar and cotton, while Canada had exported a few thousand pounds-worth only of furs. The scale of the figures may seem to us nowadays to give this particular argument trifling significance. At that time, however, there was an important element who held tropical colonies as the most to be desired. Their produce competed with no home market, and supplied England with what she otherwise would have had to buy from foreign countries, nor did they set up manufactures. Jamaica, for instance, not merely performed the first office, but purchased nearly twice as much from Great Britain as the whole of New England combined, though the continental colonies were gaining rapidly on the islands. Burke, among others, was against retention not merely from his preference for tropical and above all for island colonies, but from fear of loosening the only practical tie that bound the American provinces to Britain.
io THE MAKING OF CANADA
The treaty was signed, however, in February, and France retained nothing in North America but New Orleans and the two islands off Newfoundland. Nor will it be amiss to con- sider for a moment what this Canada surrendered to Great Britain precisely meant and what were its bounds. Nova Scotia had been British for just half a century, containing only the remnant of the Acadians and the settlers from New and Old England and from Germany who took part in or followed the founding of Halifax in 1748, after which a government and small legislature had in due course been established. Cape Breton, with its dismantled town and fortress of Louisbourg, was given up by the French and united with Nova Scotia, to which Prince Edward Island, till then unsettled, was also temporarily attached. New- foundland retained its isolation under its own government. As regards Canada proper, with which we are mainly here concerned, it represented in the first place all that we usually now mean by the term so far as Lake Superior, beyond which nothing was sufficiently accessible to have raised any serious question of claim or ownership. But what really gave such peculiar significance to the newly acquired terri- tory, and created such complications in regard to its future government, was the vast region between the Ohio and the Mississippi that automatically passed with it under the French cession. Into this country from the eastward ran the parallel lines of Pennsylvania and Virginia, with western boundaries as yet undetermined. At the moment when swarms of greedy speculators, now relieved from fear of the French, were grasping at wild lands beyond the Alleghanies, richer than any in their respective states, feudal tenure and the Catholic faith had, technically at least, been set up there by Act of Parliament. For an Anglo-American pioneer to find his imperial westward progress barred by such an unspeakable combination, and that too erected by a free and Protestant Government, seemed an outrage of the most flagrant kind. So in due course the new province of Quebec was delimited upon lines roughly corresponding with the
INTRODUCTORY n
Quebec and Ontario of modern times. The great region beyond Lakes Huron and Erie, occupied by Indian tribes and sparse villages of French traders and a thin sprinkling of forts, was now to be garrisoned by small companies of British regulars. A turbulent wilderness was this, almost immediately to become the scene of a great Indian war, and administered by the British Commander-in-Chief at New York till it fell into the melting-pot of the American revo- lution twenty years later, and passed from British rule to become ultimately the States of Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
This brief survey of Western solitudes brings us at last to the region that actually represented the Canada of that day. An attenuated belt of humanity, its habitations began upon either bank of the St. Lawrence about eighty miles below Quebec, and from the latter again hugged the river for the whole 170 miles of its upward course to Montreal, where it abruptly terminated. This was a considerable distance for some 70,000 souls, a fifth part of whom were domiciled in three towns, to cover with their little home- steads, keeping them at the same time virtually within easy sight and touch of one another. West of the island of Montreal wooded solitudes stretched away, fringing the northern shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie, till they dipped into the great inland sea of Huron which cut immediately across their path. This virgin tract within the lakes was to become the province of Upper Canada twenty years later when the English loyalists came. In the French time it was all trackless forest, with a fort only at Niagara and an old French settlement at Detroit, its extreme limit. The Canada that Wolfe and Amherst conquered had grown up on a system absolutely unique in the history of modern colonisation. The inhabitants were mostly the product of the experiments and theories of Louis XIV. in his youthful and comparatively virtuous days. Some of them, to be sure, were the descendants of a small company who pre- ceded the emigration fervour of the Grand Monarque. But
12
THE MAKING OF CANADA
all were carrying out his original ideas and piously adhering to the picturesque schemes under which he and Colbert and Turgot had planted them a century before. These were in effect quasi-feudal and wholly ecclesiastical. The original pioneers of Champlain, the traders, servants, priests, and high-born devotees who founded Quebec and Montreal, had certainly done nothing to taint the atmosphere with political or religious heresies, or sterilise the soil for the reception of these offshoots of an old-world system. The four thousand or so transplanted peasants and others, the ancestors of the men who fought under Montcalm, did not find that such initiative was required of them when they had been set down on the banks of the St. Lawrence. They were neither to be freeholders, scholars, village lawyers, politicians, nor heretics. They were to be virtuous, industrious, ignorant, and happy, obedient to their governors and priests, and to the seigniors who had been granted the large tracts of wild woodland, out of which their tenants cleared long strips back from the river and set their gabled one-storied white- washed houses upon the river bank in neighbourly pro- pinquity. This Canadian aristocracy had been manufactured, partly from the host of penniless fletzte noblesse of seventeenth- century France, some of whom, as officers or adventurers, found their way across the Atlantic, and partly from such persons of humble origin as could and would pay the very moderate sum required for a seigniory with the honours and obligations thereby involved. So though all nobles were seigniors, the seigniors were by no means all noble. The scheme had achieved permanency and prospered in that it fulfilled most of its somewhat restricted purposes. The seigniors had been gradually increased as population grew and prominent families had been ennobled by patent from time to time. A list of the adult male nobles resident in Canada in 1761 lies before me and contains about three hundred names. This would mean probably one hundred heads of families, particularly as another seventy or eighty Canadian gentilhommes were serving in Europe as French
INTRODUCTORY 13
officers. It was compulsory on the seigniors to open up their estates, held in trust as it were for the Crown, which frequently exercised its right of resumption when the con- ditions of ownership were neglected. The seigniory had usually a frontage of three or four leagues, with a much greater depth in the forest behind. It was on such estates the peasantry were settled, the average holding having had a frontage of two or three hundred yards, and a depth of a mile or more. The tenant or censitaire, so long as he paid the almost nominal rent to his lord in cash or capons, ground his corn at the seigniorial mill, and observed other feudal dues if they were required, was secure in his holding. He could sell his interest subject to the fine of a twelfth part of the purchase-money to his seignior, while the latter could sell his seigniory with the larger tribute of a fifth to the Crown. The revenue from such properties was inevit- ably small, sometimes nothing but what the seignior could extract from his 'home farm' by his own labour. This curious aristocracy exhibited every variety of condition except that of wealth, of which there was none. Some few had improved their estates to a moderate degree or held offices under the Crown. Some were well educated and ruffled it at the Governor's little court in brave attire ; others could not write their names, and led the lives of peasants. The fur trade, though strictly tied by Crown, company, and official privileges, tempted the impecunious seignior or his sons to defy such restrictions and turn trader on his own account. The wild adventurous life of the forest, too, had a fascination of its own for men whose temperament was in fact well suited for excelling in it. The situation in which the average Canadian seignior found himself was not an attractive one for a man of action or ambition. He had no voice whatever in the government of the colony, which was controlled by a governor, intendant, and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, always held in their turn with a tight rein by the King and his Council at home. Save for some petty magisterial work the seignior
14 THE MAKING OF CANADA
was politically a cipher in his own country, the very price of his crops with those of his tenants often fixed in arbitrary fashion by corrupt officials from France for their own benefit. From such a company, however, came ideal leaders in frontier war, and explorers who have never been surpassed. The habitants, who from the first scorned the name of peasant, considering themselves, and actually being, in an altogether better position than their contemporaries in old France, had nevertheless to serve in the militia and march to war when called upon without pay ; and were, furthermore, liable to the Government corvee. The militia was officered by district captains of the seigniorial class, though not of necessity themselves seigniors. Parishes had been organised early, and churches of generous proportions had by degrees lifted their tin or shingle spires above the thatched roofs of the settlements. The Church and its religious orders owned immense tracts of land in the colony. The hierarchy, as I have said, suffered no interference in their department from the civil or military government, while free enough with theirs in matters properly outside their sphere. The parish priest shared an autocratic but not unkindly sway over his habitants in most affairs of life with the seignior or the militia captain, and in his own department was supreme. His dime or tithe, literally a twenty-seventh, was punctually paid, not as a civil ordinance, but by the decree of the Church which carried an equal obligation. The dis- cipline of his Church, whose moral tone was high, and which vigilantly strove against demoralising influences, pressed somewhat on the more restive souls who sought refuge in the woods, and in the ranks of the coureurs de bois employed by the fur trade, from the kindly but censorious eye of the priest. Sprung mainly from Normandy and its fringes, and in a less degree from the country around Rochelle, the habitants were a hardy and hard-headed people. Their limitations, ignorance, and credulity, which caused such trouble to their new but well-meaning rulers, was the fault of the paternal system which for good or evil deliberately
INTRODUCTORY 15
sought to keep them ignorant. A God-fearing people, content with their station, with their farm, and with the rule of those above them, was the ideal colony of the seventeenth-century Frenchmen who created this one, and of their successors who strove to maintain those ideals. In the latter half of the same century the accepted theory of a perfect government, throughout Latin Europe at any rate, was a silent, submissive, voiceless people, ruled by a benignant despotism, and the theory of Europe was success- fully applied to Canada. There were plenty of Frenchmen who saw the material failure thus produced, and noted with envy the comparative opulence of their English neighbours to the southward. Still these last were heretics and factious politicians whose governors were sincerely to be pitied ; money grubbers, unadventurous, plodding husbandmen and mighty poor soldiers till the Seven Years' War, in the eyes of Canadians, who, usually governed by able warriors as a quasi-military colony, were strongly imbued with the military spirit.
This is no place for defining the precise limitation of French Canadian settlement at the conquest. I have de- scribed it with quite sufficient accuracy for the purpose as lining both banks of the St. Lawrence. But I shall some- what relieve my conscience in this respect by remarking that the considerable island of Orleans just beneath Quebec was perhaps of all the best cultivated ; and furthermore, that up the fertile level lands along the Richelieu and south of Montreal a portion of the regiment of Carrignan, with many of its officers, had been settled in the seventeenth cen- tury. Here and there, too, more opulent Seigniors, when exposed to the Indian or New England frontier, had en- trenched themselves in embattled stone fortresses, like the now ruinous Boisbrule" on the Lake of the two mountains, or the long disappeared castle, flanked with corner towers, which we read of as inhabited by the Baron de Longueil, representative of the only Canadian barony, across the river from Montreal. The great disturbers of the domestic
16 THE MAKING OF CANADA
peace both of the town and adjoining parishes, and the bane of the authorities civil and clerical, were the coureurs de bois. On their return from the far west with their pay in their pockets and their veins dancing with the fumes of rum or brandy, they were reckless, roistering bravos, with a contempt for all following a steady calling, and affecting themselves the swagger and airs of gentilhommes, which a few of them actually were. The trade of Canada had been trifling, beaver skins its chief unit of commerce, as tobacco on a much greater scale was that of Virginia, and the beaver trade was easily overdone, while a little timber and wheat almost completes the list of exports. The balance of its small trade was nearly always against it, and the Home Government had been regularly compelled to come to its relief. The habitants, however, with occasional periods of dearth, lived upon the whole a self-supporting life of rude plenty, well clad, well warmed, well housed. Early marriage was carried almost to excess, and grandmothers of thirty were not uncommon. Yet rapidly as they multiplied and still multiply, their large families would have been repre- sented by an even greater increase but for the somewhat high rate of mortality.
But Canada as it concerns us here and affects the story of North America and the British Empire must not be judged by its exports, its imports, or its population. At the time of the conquest, apart from its extraordinary interest as a unique example of French experiment in over- sea statesmanship and colonisation, we have only to re- member that as a military factor it had proved a match for and a thorn in the side of the thirteen British-American colonies, and as an outpost of French power had aspired to a predominant place in North America. Finally, when its chief stronghold fell, the bells of England rang with a fervour that would alone have been a significant tribute to its im- portance. The decision to retain Canada embodied, no doubt, the opinion of the majority in England, and in the Treaty of Paris the King undertook to give the most
INTRODUCTORY 17
effectual orders that his new subjects should enjoy the fullest privileges of the Roman Catholic religion compatible with their allegiance as British subjects. It continued the priests in their offices, and guaranteed quiet possession of all property, lay and clerical, but that of the Jesuits. In regard to the laws, which were those generally known as the Coutome de Paris, and of immemorial use in Canada, there was great anxiety. The Statute and Proclamation of 1763 in no way allayed this, as it directed the establishment of Courts ' as nearly conformable as may be to the laws of England/ It provided also for * the calling of Assemblies as used and directed in those colonies and provinces in America which are under our immediate government.' This is vague, and with a knowledge of the peculiar difficulties surrounding the situation, was doubtless intended to be. What is known in Canada as ' The rule of the soldiers ' termi- nated in the autumn of 1763, when civil law took its place, and General Murray, to the loudly expressed satisfaction of the French Canadians, remained and took his seat as Governor in matters both ecclesiastical and civil.
18 THE MAKING OF CANADA
CHAPTER II
CANADA UNDER MURRAY
CANADA was now fairly started on her career as a British colony. The concessions granted to Canadians in the matter of their religion had given great umbrage to the New Englanders, who were nothing if not Protestant, while the British traders, mainly from these provinces, who had settled after the conquest in Quebec and Montreal, were still more dissatisfied, as they had expected to form in themselves a small party of ascendency in matters both ecclesiastical and civil. They had endured as a disagree- able necessity the interval of military rule, but the attitude of the soldiers and of Murray towards the French Canadians had been little to their liking, and now that the stamp of approval had been set on the military Governor by retaining him as a civil one, they foresaw what they conceived to be further slights, and girded themselves to assert what they regarded as their just dues.
But some months before the Proclamation of October 7, '63, and less than three after the signing of the Treaty of Paris, there broke out that great Indian war which fills two volumes of Parkman's stirring prose, under the heading of ' The Con- spiracy of Pontiac.' Even the historian reasonably familiar with the long procession of events that make up the tale of European dominion in North America is pulled up at times during those two solitary decades of universal British dominion by a temporary lack of boundaries and definitions. Hitherto the former had at least been roughly outlined by the claim, albeit a disputed one, of two hostile nations, while
CANADA UNDER MURRAY 19
a little later they were to become familiar to the very school- boy on his map. But the spectacle of a British Commander- in-Chief at New York, responsible for British red-coats far away in the late French trading-posts and near by the site of modern Chicago, must always seem a strange interlude. Yet this, after all, was only the natural situation in 1763, and is a sufficient reason why the war of Pontiac, that last great combination of the western and northern tribes to re- pulse the advancing wave of settlement, forms no essential part of the story I have set myself to tell. And this is well, for the former has been told in an inimitable and final fashion, delightful alike to the schoolboy and the serious student, while the other as a connected narrative has found no chronicler between the extremes of many-volumed works of reference and the brief chapter or two that is its portion in a general history. No fighting in Pontiac's war worth mentioning actually took place on what afterwards became Canadian territory, though the long and dramatic defence of Detroit by Major Gladwin is its most notable incident. But this Indian rising was the result, nevertheless, of the conquest of Canada. Relieved from the French terror, the traders and land hunters of the British provinces which had as yet no western boundaries pressed thick upon the edge of the Indian country beyond the Ohio ; an inevitable eventu- ality, no doubt, but at that time of confusion after the long French war, and as yet unsettled boundaries and agreements between the provinces, terribly premature. It affected Canada inasmuch as militia and supplies were forwarded from thence up the lakes, and in yet another sense was associated with the old French province. For, heady and reckless as were these British pioneers in their approach, the evil and the portent of their coming were made every use of by the French traders and settlers in the west, natur- ally sore at the humiliation involved by the recent hauling down of the French flag and the admission of British garri- sons. In short, these French backwoodsmen could pro- claim, what was only too true, namely, that while they
20 THE MAKING OF CANADA
themselves injured the Indians in no sense, but on the con- trary intermarried with them, bought their pelts and coveted nothing of their lands beyond a patch for maize and vege- tables, the advent of the English settler meant destruction of the game and ultimately of the tribes who depended upon it. They circulated a good deal, however, that had no such basis of truth ; such, for instance, as the evergreen romance that the Indians' late father Onontio had been only taking a rest and was coming, nay, had actually landed with an overpowering French force to drive the British out of Canada.
It was characteristic of most of the provinces whose im- patient adventurers had caused the trouble, that they could barely be induced to contribute a man or a dollar to the expeditionary forces so directly needed to overcome it, but even refused accommodation or decent treatment to the hapless troops who were there to defend them. The voluminous correspondence of the many admirable and by now war-worn and experienced British officers, who had to preserve the country, teems with anathema and despair at the attitude of those they were sent to protect. Bouquet, that able Swiss colonel, than whom in all these wars Britain had no more devoted servant, launches out again and again into what for his sober pen is the most unusual luxury of invective.
How in June of 1763 he won the two hardly fought fields on two consecutive days of Edge Hill and Bushy Run, and how the disciplined British regular showed, and not by any means only there, that with a little experience of bush fighting, he was after all, when in actual contact with the most resolute savages, the staunchest of any white men, is a familiar story. All this, accompanied by the constant fear of the defalcation of the formidable Six Nations, held in check by Sir William Johnson, the capture of a half-score of lonely posts with the attendant horrors, the widespread panic and massacre on the frontier settlements, as I have remarked, does not directly concern us. The matter may be dismissed with the reminder that the flame of war was
CANADA UNDER MURRAY 21
lit from Machillimackinac, near the foot of Lake Superior, to the middle reaches of the Mississippi, that the renowned Pontiac, who took up the hatchet at Detroit in 1763, fell in 1765 by some mysterious hand within easy reach of New Orleans. Yet Canada, remote though she was from these sanguinary scenes, was collectively perhaps the greatest sufferer by them. For the western fur trade was still to her the very breath of life, and Pontiac's war strangled it for the time at its source.
The Proclamation of 1763, and perhaps inevitably so, was a little vague. It divided the new territory acquired in North America into four governments, the two Floridas and Grenada in the south, and that of Quebec in the north, respectively. The eastern boundaries of the latter were defined as against those of New England, Nova Scotia, and the Hudson Bay territory, but in the far west its civil jurisdiction was left for the present undetermined, and gave some colour to the complaints of the other colonies, that the religious and civil concessions made to the French might apply automatically to virgin lands actually in the rear of the English provinces. Such fears, admissible in theory on the part of over ready and censorious critics, were not likely to be fulfilled in practice. In fact, Great Britain had scarcely yet had time to get breath after the exertions of her titanic and triumphant struggle. Had she chosen the short stern method, such as any other power of that time would most undoubtedly have adopted, and actually desired by most of her own self-governing colonies — annexed Canada, that is to say, without conditions, and governed her handful of people as a conqueror of their own race would probably have governed hers in like situation — the matter would have been simple. Frontenac's intentions, if he had succeeded in his attempt on New York, it may be remem- bered, was to forcibly deport the inhabitants of that and the neighbouring provinces.
But Great Britain chose the nobler part, even to offending her own colonial subjects, and it was no easy part to play.
22 THE MAKING OF CANADA
Nor was it by any means in the French province alone that her difficulties lay. Three distinct races on thorny terms with one another had to be dealt with, the French, the Indians, and her own people, each of them concerned wholly with their own interests, and two of them in a violent hurry. The British military officials, after years of warfare with and against the Red man, had, Heaven knows, no cause to love him, and their letters teem with disgust at the horrors they had constantly to witness. But they recognised his claims to an existence in his own country, and still more perhaps, not being land speculators, felt the madness of arousing him to justifiable vengeance.
The others, however, were inclined to think that the Indian had no rights, the more so as, if peradventure they should stir him up, the British Government would do most of the fighting, and pay for it.
But the French Canadians at any rate were not in a hurry. They were tired, and on the whole pleasantly surprised with their lot. Murray had his coming troubles, but his earliest ones in Quebec, strange to say, came from his own nation. The first of them was soon over, and was sufficiently serious, but calls for some measure of sympathy. The other was not dangerous, but abiding, and will probably not excite the reader's sympathy at all unless perhaps for Murray ; but then we are not New Englanders of the eighteenth century.
For while George the Third and his Government were squandering thousands on unworthy legislators and syco- phants, and in an unworthy cause, they selected this moment to exercise economy in the matter of their soldiers' wages. The mute heroes of many campaigns, who had driven the French from America and fought Indians through mosquito-haunted swamps in broiling summer days, were to be made to pay for their rations, hitherto free, at the rate of fourpence a day. Moved with indignation, the troops in Quebec assembled en masse, but without arms, before the Cha- teau St. Louis, and made complaint to the Governor. Some
CANADA UNDER MURRAY 23
civilians, who upbraided the men, were pelted with stones, which fetched out the officers with drawn swords. Upon this the men ran to the barracks, siezed their arms, formed in order, and, with beat of drum, moved towards the St. John's Gate. Murray himself now went among them, but to his appeals they replied that they would march to Amherst, the Commander-in-Chief, at New York, and lay their arms at his feet. They spoke with pride and respect of their officers, nor was any one drunk, but the excitement was intense. The town-major, however, managed to close the gates, which created a panic lest the troops should mutineer and loot the city. Murray now persuaded them to march to the adjoining parade-ground, and earnestly besought them to remember their cloth, and return quietly to barracks. Addressing the officers, he dwelt on the cer- tainty of a mutiny in Quebec spreading to the other gar- risons, if successful, and the catastrophe thereby involved. Ordering a general parade, he again urged the men to obedi- ence. They replied in praise of their officers, but resolutely refused to pay for their food. The night passed quietly, and on the next morning, September 20, Murray told his officers that they must compel obedience to the obnoxious order, or die in the attempt, and the day was spent by them in fruitless attempts to talk their men round. On the next day a general parade was ordered, and the matter had to be put to the test. Murray, after reminding the men again of ' the enormity of their crime/ declared his fixed resolution, and that of his faithful officers, to compel them to sub- mission, or perish in the attempt. He then went to the head of Amherst's grenadiers, he writes, ' determined to put to death the first man who should disobey. Thank God I was not reduced to that horrid necessity/ The whole com- pany, followed by the entire body of troops, submitted, and marched quietly between the royal standards placed for the purpose, and back to barracks. So ended a mutiny that, if it had been met with less courage, would almost certainly have spread and reduced his Majesty's forces in
24 THE MAKING OF CANADA
North America, where labour was scarce, and escape easy, to the numbers of those who held his Majesty's commission, and a few sergeants.
The other trouble begun under Murray's rule will be with us more or less for the next few chapters. It was caused by the community of British traders, mainly from New England, spoken of in a preceding page as having settled in Quebec, and found things not by any means up to their expectations. Though provision was made in the treaty and proclamation for summoning an elective assembly, it was undoubtedly intended to convey the power only to do so, rather than the actual adoption of so serious a measure in a colony utterly unprepared for anything of the kind. The actual government set up was that of a ' Crown colony/ to make use of a generally understood term, of a Governor, that is to say, acting with the advice of a nominated Council. This consisted at first of only eight members, not one of whom was a French Catholic, a fact at this early period not apparently resented, nor likely to be. British rule had been unprecedentedly benignant. The French are at least a logical people, and the ethics of that period saw nothing strange in the withholding of office from the conquered before the conquerors had been given time to set their house in order. The most enduring name, and probably the ablest man of the number, was Dr. Mabane, a Scotch army surgeon. A Chief-Justice and Attorney-General had been despatched from England to ensure the best legal assistance to the new Government. Like most of such appointments in those days, they were doubtless pure jobs. As neither could speak a word of French, and according to Murray, who had no personal dislike to them, were quite ignorant of the world, they were somewhat worse than useless, and their names not worth recording. The pro- clamation had ordained that both the civil and criminal law of England should become the Canadian code, nor was any disability of race or religion to be regarded in selecting juries. It was further specified that purely English cases
CANADA UNDER MURRAY 25
should be tried by English, and French cases by French juries, and that when the litigants were of the opposite races, the jury also should be equally divided. A Court of King's Bench, sitting twice a year at Quebec, was established, with appeal over a certain sum to the Governor and King respectively. Once a year the Chief-Justice was to hold assizes at Three Rivers and Montreal, while a Court of Common Pleas was established, with recourse to a jury if demanded by either party.
Justices of the peace were appointed throughout the country to adjudicate cases involving small amounts ; three such justices to form a quorum for quarter-sessions in amounts under £30, while two were to sit weekly in Quebec and Montreal respectively. This all sounds very simple and satisfactory. The English criminal code was from the first accepted with little demur from the fact that it was more merciful than that which had hitherto obtained. As for the rest, something like chaos set in from the very first, and none the less so that the habitant, released from the cares of war and in other respects relegated to a somewhat freer existence, soon began to display the litigiousness that has ever since distinguished him. The difference between French and English law was profound ; the population who were to be submitted to the change were ignorant, simple, and stubborn ; while the interpreters, who were intrusted with a task that might have tested the legal and judicial abilities of a Napoleon, were utterly unfitted by training and sym- pathy to grapple with it, nor had they even the necessary lingual equipment. The seigniors objected to the jury system on aristocratic grounds, misliking the confinement of a jury-box in company with butchers, shoemakers, and their own tenants. The latter grudged the time, and had no hereditary faculty for weighing evidence. The English laws concerning land and inheritance clashed utterly with the complicated seignioral system. The fees were all fixed upon the scale of a wealthy country, whereas the standard of Canada in this respect had naturally been an extremely
26 THE MAKING OF CANADA
low one. Most of the money left in the country after the war was a currency of stamped cards issued by the late French Government, the redemption of which by the latter was still a matter of such doubt and procrastination that much of it had passed into the hands of speculators at a ruinous discount, though Murray made every attempt to stop the traffic. The instructions sent from England and the men responsible for carrying them out suggested the picture of a virgin country, a people without a past, and minds blank upon such subjects, and ready to absorb any kind of beneficent legislation. Indeed, the very term ' infant colony ' frequently used in this connection illustrates the temper in which a well-meaning British Government set about the task. Here, on the contrary, were an ancient people, peculiarly wedded to their immemorial customs, presenting a solid front of adamant to a strange code written and delivered in a language they did not under- stand. The situation was not without humour, but it took a little time in so simple a society to create the impasse that arose later. Murray writes to the Lords of Trade in October 1764, that very little will satisfy the 'new subjects (French), but nothing will satisfy the licentious fanatics (British traders) save the expulsion of the Canadians, the bravest race on the globe, who, if indulged with a few privi- leges, will become the most faithful men in this American Empire. Unless Canadians have judges and lawyers who understand them, his Majesty will lose the greater part of this valuable people.' In his despair at the appointments worked by interest in London, he protests against three proposed additions to his Council of this kind, mentioning their names. * The first is a notorious smuggler, the second a weak man of little character, the third a conceited boy.'
As regards the ' licentious fanatics,' the political feature of Murray's, as of later administrations, was the attitude of the British trading community in the cities of Quebec and Montreal. In 1764 they consisted of about two hundred adults in all, doubling their number in the next three years.
CANADA UNDER MURRAY 27
As already stated, they seem to have come in considerable part from the New England colonies, and in possession of most of such trade as had developed since the war, fully expected to govern not merely the French but his Majesty's representative himself, as had been more or less the custom in their native colonies. They fell foul at once of the whole scheme of Canadian government, and particularly of Murray, as its representative. The latter by no means suffered them gladly, but in his despatches calls them so many other names besides those mentioned, that one scents a bitter quarrel, and would discount more of his abuse if it were not that his successor, the temperate Carleton, followed in the same strain. The Georgian officer and the New England Republican of secondary condition were not indeed calcu- lated to esteem each other, even had their views on public affairs not clashed so hopelessly. These earliest British settlers in Canada, though the great influx of after years seems to obscure their claims to be the nucleus of English Canada, at any rate demand equitable consideration at the hands of the fair-minded chronicler. We know their opinion of themselves, namely, that they were the salt and prop of the colony ; we know also the opinion of Murray and his friends, which held them as the scum of the earth. We know their names, too, quite well, for they were con- stantly petitioning the Crown, but nothing more about most of them. One gathers that they were struggling men of small capital, though Murray denies them even that much. They doubtless had great difficulties to encounter, as well as slights to put up with, and one in a measure sympathises with their grievances if one puts oneself in their position with the point of view almost inevitable to it. But this is not easy, even for the most unprejudiced historian. Their leading idea was to keep the French down, even to the harassing of their faith, while enjoying themselves the ' full privileges of British subjects ' ; an elective assembly, that is to say, chosen from the two hundred, by which they could govern their eighty thousand fellow-subjects and the
28 THE MAKING OF CANADA
Governor to boot. They were indignant when they found that these things were not to be. Had they been, Canada beyond doubt would have become the fourteenth State of the Union.
If there had been twenty, or even ten, thousand such zealots, if they had represented a large share of the industry and substance of the colony, and lifted it to a conspicuous com- mercial position in the world, it would have been utterly different, a remark not altogether uncalled for, seeing how apt are Englishmen to draw analogies in colonial experi- ments and experiences where there are absolutely none. But of these people, as I have said, there were not ten nor twenty thousand, but about two hundred, mostly obscure and rarely substantial men, for there was as yet little to tempt another sort. The first breeze was at the Quebec Quarter-Sessions, in October 1764, when the Grand Jury, largely composed of British traders, interpolated their presentment with several clauses so irrelevant to the business in hand and to their position as Grand Jurors, that the astonished Chief-Justices felt called upon to remind them somewhat sharply of the purpose for which they were convened. This remarkable pronouncement maintained that the Grand Jury ought to be consulted before any ordinance of the Government passed into law, and the public accounts of the colony ought to be laid before them twice a year. It demanded a better observance of the Sabbath Day, and that it should not be profaned by buying and selling or idle amusements, and called for a learned clergy to preach the Gospel to the French. It furthermore declared that the Courts of Justice established by the Governor in Council were unconstitu- tional. Fourteen of the twenty jurymen were British, and by way of making themselves pleasant to the six French- men who had signed the main clauses without understand- ing them, thirteen of these added a supplement protesting against Roman Catholics sitting on juries as 'in open viola- tion of our most sacred laws and liberty, tending to the entire subversion of the Protestant religion and his Majesty's
CANADA UNDER MURRAY 29
authority.' The fourteenth British juror apparently had the saving grace of humour, or possibly saw visions in his thrifty mind of himself and his two hundred compatriots doing jury duty for the whole colony ! As justice without juries was unthinkable to the stalwart New Englander, and, moreover, as most of these men are said to have known scarcely any French, this proposition seems lacking in ordinary sanity, and goes far to confirm Murray's estimate of his troublesome neighbours as men possessing, in addition to most other vices, ' but a mean intelligence.' When the six French jurors were furnished with a translation of the document they had put their signature to, they were greatly upset. So much so, that they forwarded a petition to the King complaining of the trick they had been played, sup- porting Murray's institution of law-courts, praying against their exclusion as jurors on account of their faith, and begging that French advocates and notaries should be per- mitted to practise according to their ancient law, for there was not an English lawyer in the country who understood French.
Murray sent an account of the business to England. There were one hundred and forty-four of these persons in Quebec, he said, and fifty-six in Montreal, not ten of whom were freeholders, but as Protestants they had tried to usurp the government of eighty thousand French Canadians. The performance of the Quebec Grand Jury generally, and par- ticularly their fraudulent method of obtaining French signa- tures, was duly censured by the King in Council, and Murray was furthermore instructed 'to give notice that his Majesty will give the utmost attention and consideration to proper representations from his Canadian subjects, and will cause to be removed every grievance of which they may have just reason to complain.'
A legislative Assembly was for the present out of the ques- tion. A mixed House would not have been tolerated by the British community even if workable, while the latter's pre- posterous scheme was, of course, unthinkable except to some
30 THE MAKING OF CANADA
sons of liberty from Boston or Salem. The noblesse, satis- fied for the present, though their exclusion from offices formerly held by them was not unfelt, had no interest what- ever in popular assemblies, and would have objected to any that included their social inferiors. The peasantry did not even know the meaning of the term, and it was some years before they could be persuaded to take the faintest interest in such questions. The clergy, it need hardly be said, had no spark of enthusiasm for such a departure, and clerical matters pursued their old course. Still, affairs wore a generally unsettled aspect, and some anxiety was manifested as to the future. The concessions granted to the Catholic Church had been coupled with the proviso of ' so far as the laws of Great Britain permit,' and the pressure of French- bred or French-educated priests raised a serious point for the British Government. France herself during the treaty negotiations had made some attempts to preserve a quasi- official supervision over certain Canadian Church appoint- ments which met with a prompt refusal from the British minister. It was obvious that a stream of French ecclesias- tics flowing into Canada would encourage a retrospective state of mind among the people, even when it did not unsettle them with anticipations of a future reversion to their old ties with the mother-church and the mother- country, which was more than likely, as merely human.
Two hundred and seventy persons, including women and children, French officials, and members of the noblesse chiefly, had returned to France under the agreement. Many of the latter, however, held commissions in French regiments, and others were promised them. This exodus has been much exaggerated. Murray thought it extremely small, and had ships available for many times the number. Moreover, those already in or about to join French regiments would assuredly prefer such a career to remaining without one at home, and their action was probably not determined by any abstract objection to staying in Canada. The Bishop, how- ever, and a few of the clergy had left, and the colony was
CANADA UNDER MURRAY 31
now without a Prelate, and remained so for some years. The Jesuits were the only religious order definitely excepted from the Convention. Though they had a good deal of property, the body itself was represented in Canada by a mere handful of aged brethren, at whose death the estates were to be vested in the Crown, as was hoped, for educational purposes. The maintenance of a proper supply of parish priests, depending for the moment on the local product, which was both insufficient and in some respects inadequate, was one of the many difficulties that arose hydra-headed around a Government that by the very liberality of its intentions was facing an experiment unprecedented at that epoch. Laval's great foundation at Quebec, with its. offshoot at Montreal, was not yet what it afterwards became. It had long been the Seminary of youth, who when intended for the priest- hood passed into the latter through the Jesuits' College. The teaching of the Jesuits, however, was now suppressed, and their buildings converted into barracks for the troops. Though the Seminary soon began to take up the work, there was a considerable hiatus. Not for six years was there any Bishop, so ordination was suspended. The Dean and Chapter of Quebec bestirred themselves under the Abbe Lacorne, who mooted the matter in London, itself putting forward a candidate unacceptable to the Crown. Finally, with Mur- ray's full approval, Monsignor Briant, a Canadian cleric, then in France, was consecrated Bishop at Paris, and arrived in Canada apparently upon the very day of Murray's departure — a modest, tactful man, avoiding the personal pomp and ceremonial observed by those Bishops of Quebec in the ancient regime, who had contended for civil power with Governors, and held spiritual sway from the cold capes of Gaspe" to the mouths of the Mississippi. The Head of the Church in Canada under the new regime had a much more difficult, if less showy, part to play for the next half-century. As the unofficial, but no less vital, prop of a Government out of sympathy with his race and religion, his integrity and loyalty of character were a matter of vital moment to the
32 THE MAKING OF CANADA
Crown. The influence of the priests in the hundred and twenty parishes of the province was unbounded, while the power of the bishop in an Ultramontane Catholic Church over the priests needs no emphasising. As we shall see, though there were trying moments, the Canadian bishops failed nothing in their loyalty till the French Revolution relieved them for ever of all temptation to look backward.
Murray, it will be remembered, had two Lieutenant- Governors within his administration over whom he had no military authority. That of Three Rivers was soon dis- continued, but Burton at Montreal, who was nursing a sore head from some disappointment in promotion, vented his ill-humour on his superior and made himself unpleasant. But Montreal itself was also in due course abolished as a civil department, and future Governors of Quebec were hence- forth relieved from the pin-pricks of touchy subordinates.
Murray had of a truth troubles enough. The trade of Canada under the navigation laws had, of course, come within the English system. But the old traffic in French goods was not likely to be suppressed when the English colonies themselves had reduced smuggling to a science. The islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, left to France by the late treaty, now proved most convenient centres of dis- posal for French goods, which were freely despatched thence both to New England and to Canada. But the Protestant stalwarts of Quebec were as difficult to suppress as the smugglers, and more formidable both to Murray and the peace of the country. Finally, they petitioned for his recall with a long list of grievances, which was supported by the mercantile houses in London with whom they trafficked, and to whom they probably owed money. One of their com- plaints ran that Murray had suggested the appointment of some judges who could speak French ; another that he did not attend church with sufficient regularity ! They were at length successful, not in disgracing their enemy, but in bringing about his recall to explain the causes of friction to his Government.
CANADA UNDER MURRAY 33
The French, however, * were penetrated with grief at the departure of his Excellency, whom, since the conquest of the Province, they have loved and respected even more on account of his personal qualities than as their Governor, and they would be unworthy to live if they did not make known to the King and the whole of England the obligations they owe him, which they will never forget, and the sincere regret they feel at his departure.' Murray left Canada in June 1766 to give an account of his stewardship, or more literally, perhaps, to discuss with the Home Government the complications which must already have struck them as per- taining to the administration of their recently acquired dominion. He never returned. Probably he had never intended to. Seven laborious years of continuous residence through peace and war was no light performance ; and he had striven faithfully. He was a man of fortune, and had no material motives for clinging to a colonial governorship. That his Government were grateful seems likely enough from the fact that he retained his office for nearly two more years, his successor at Quebec serving for that time as Lieutenant-Governor. He died in Great George Street nearly thirty years later as M.P. for Perth and Colonel of the 72nd Regiment, and appears to have seen no more active service. Very possibly he was disabled for it, since, according to the Annual Register, when his body was embalmed after death it was found to contain several bullets received on the battle- fields of Europe and America. So if he was short-tempered at times with the Protestant faction in Quebec, as they com- plain in their royal petition, one may fairly credit him with a reasonable excuse for irritability.
A series of letters from Canada during Murray's adminis- tration and for a little afterwards give an interesting account of the lighter side of social life there among the French and English of the higher sort. The ladies of the former, says the writer, who is quite free, apparently, from insular pre- judices, are gay, coquettish, and sprightly, more gallant than sensible, more flattered by the vanity of inspiring passion
c
34 THE MAKING OF CANADA
than capable of feeling it themselves. They are better educated, however, than the men of their class, very few of the seigniors being able to write much more than their own names — a failing, however, which at that day in that country, from its peculiar traditions, did not probably detract from their social eligibility. The ladies' led the English officers captive apparently in wholesale fashion. At Montreal the irresistible charmers drove about the town with one always in attendance, while on the St. Foy road leading out of Quebec every summer afternoon forty or fifty calashes with pretty women in them could be counted. According to the writer, an Englishwoman who mixed apparently like the other English ladies of the garrison at that time freely with them, they had no consciousness of the natural beauty of their surroundings, and many had never even seen the Falls of Montmorency, almost within sight. It was the fashion, too, to take the air by sauntering on the Battery ; dress, admiration and religion constituting the life of a Quebec lady of that period, who was lively and handsome rather than pretty. The gentlemen never rode on horseback, being always driven in a calash, yet the number of horses kept by every family, even the habitants, struck this ob- server as remarkable. She was told that there were two ladies in the province who read books. They were both over fifty, and were considered to be prodigies of learning. We have a pleasant picture of a water journey from Mont- real to Quebec, with a band of music on the vessel, and an adjournment each night to the house of the seignior of the district, where they were entertained to supper and a dance ; while a ball at Government House is described as consisting of a hundred women and three hundred men. Beaver-skin coats were worn in winter, and buffalo robes for driving, as in recent times till the buffalo was killed out. The ladies in winter wore long cloaks, ' like English market women/ with hoods, sometimes black and sometimes red. The dress of the habitant then, as for some generations afterwards, was the grey homespun capot or frock enclosed
CANADA UNDER MURRAY 35
at the waist with a red sash, a woollen or fox-skin cap in winter and straw hat in summer, with moccasins for shoes. The women on week-days wore a cap, a stiff petticoat, a mantelot, and moccasins ; on Sundays, we are told, they dressed in ' English fashion,' though much more gaudily. The extreme comfort of the habitant struck every visitor at that time, and even then protests against the epithets of 'bleak and barren/ as commonly applied to Canada in Europe, were feebly raised. There were three or four good rooms in every peasant's house, and the heads of the family at any rate had always linen sheets and curtained beds. The tremendous heat at which the habitants kept their stove-warmed rooms struck the visitor of 1760 as it strikes the visitor of modern times with horror. Then too, perhaps even more than now, the gaiety, the love of song and dance and social meetings with which they beguiled so cheerfully the long dead hours of their snow-bound winter, was a thing of common remark. To the English eye, and still more, no doubt, to the British colonial eye, the men seemed lazy and the women industrious. This meant no more than that they made their living easily in a country which the outside world had decided with slight authority was hardly fit to live in !
36 THE MAKING OF CANADA
CHAPTER III
CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT: 1766-1774
IT is remarkable as well as fortunate that, during the first thirty-six years of English rule, Canada was in the hands of only three Governors, and that all of them were men above the common stamp. For it was of all her epochs the one when such men were most needed ; not merely because the times were all agog and dangers within and without almost constantly present, but no stable local material had yet been formed on which a pro-consul could lean for support. Prejudice and self-interest, or at least self-protection, were the springs that moved men and factions. There had been time for neither experience nor training in public life. A people who had never before experienced official con- sideration suddenly found themselves objects of solicitude at the hands of their Government, and in a sense taken into its confidence. If the novelty gratified them, it at the same time bred certain suspicions in their untutored minds, while an alien minority, traditionally familiar with the habits of politics and agitation, were not for a long time good speci- mens of their type. They had all its critical and aggressive qualities, with little of the ballast and sense of proportion which belongs to the better sort of Briton. In these early times the Governor of Canada had to be an autocrat or nothing, and for whatever happened, to him belonged the praise or blame.
When Murray reached home his first care was to prepare a full account of the condition of the province, and his report lies in the Haldemand collection. It is a lengthy document,
CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 37
and interesting as the production of a capable Briton who, so far as a knowledge of Canada was concerned, was better qualified than almost any of his contemporaries at that time, to give an account of it. He describes the Canadians as a frugal, industrious, and moral race, who from the just and mild treatment they had received from his Majesty's mili- tary officers in charge of the country for nearly four years after the war, had greatly got the better of such natural antipathy as they had towards their conquerors. 'The noblesse/ he says, ' pique themselves upon the antiquity of their families, their own military glory and that of their ancestors, and though not rich are generally in a situation, in that plentiful part of the world where money is scarce and luxury still unknown, to support their dignity. Their tenants, who pay only an annual quit-rent of about a dollar for one hundred acres, are at their ease and comfortable. They have been accustomed to respect their superiors, and, not yet intoxicated with the abuse of liberty, are shocked at the insults which their noblesse and the King's officers have received from the English traders and lawyers since the civil government took effect. They are very ignorant, for it was the policy of the French Government to keep them so. Few or none can read, nor was printing permitted in Canada till the British occupation.' Murray himself had imported a printing press from Philadelphia, together with a printer who had recently started the Quebec Gazette.
He goes on to speak of the veneration for the priesthood, who, however, are of mean birth and likely to deteriorate intellectually now that the supply from France is cut off. ' Disorders and divisions could not be avoided in attempting to establish civil government agreeable to my instructions. Magistrates had to be made and juries composed from four hundred and fifty contemptible sutlers and traders [the number at the close of his time]. It would be unreasonable to suppose that such men would not be intoxicated with the unexpected power put into their hands and not be eager to show how amply they possessed it. The improper choice
38 THE MAKING OF CANADA
and the number of civil officers sent over from England increased the disquietude of the colony. Instead of men of genius and untainted morals, the reverse were appointed to the most important offices, under whom it was impos- sible to communicate those impressions of the dignity of government by which alone mankind can be held together in society. The Judge pitched upon to conciliate the minds of seventy-five thousand foreigners to the laws and govern- ment of Great Britain, was taken from a gaol, entirely ignorant of civil law and the language of the people. The offices of Secretary of the Province, Registrar, Clerk of the Council, Commissary of Stores, Provost-Marshal, etc. etc., were given by patent to men in England who let them out to the highest bidder with so little consideration for the capacity of their representatives that not one of them understood the language of the natives. As no salary was annexed to these places, they depended upon fees which I was ordered to establish equal to those in the richest ancient colonies, and the rapacity which followed was severely felt by the poor Canadians. But they patiently submitted. They cheerfully obeyed the Stamp Act, though stimulated to resistance by some licentious traders from New York/ In regard to the complaints made against him, which he had answered elsewhere, Murray concludes : * I glory in having been accused of warmth and firmness in pro- tecting the King's Canadian subjects and of doing the utmost in my power to gain to my royal master the affec- tions of that brave, hardy people, whose emigration, if ever it shall happen, will be an irreparable loss to the Empire, to prevent which I declare to your Lordships I would cheer- fully submit to greater calumnies and indignities, if greater can be desired, than hitherto I have undergone.'
Murray's successor, or to be precise his deputy, as he remained titular Governor for two more years, was the greatest, as well as by far the longest in office of all Canadian Viceroys during an epoch in which the personal qualities of those high functionaries were of vital con-
CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 39
sequence to the state they administered. Sir Guy Carleton, afterwards Lord Dorchester, stands unquestionably first upon the long list in the minds of Canadians, French or English. In Great Britain his name rarely conveys any mean- ing even to the well-informed, though to him we probably owe the fact that Canada now flies the British flag.
Guy Carleton was an Anglo-Irishman, like so many of our famous soldiers, and came of a landed family in co. Down. An active and distinguished officer, he had also been a close friend of Wolfe, and the latter had persisted, in face of the opposition of the King, whom Carleton had indirectly offended, in taking him to Quebec, not for friendship's sake, but for his abilities. Here he was quartermaster- general, but was also invaluable for his engineering skill, and was wounded on the Plains of Abraham. Previous to this he had won credit in Germany, and won still more subsequently at Havana, where he was severely wounded.
Like Murray, Carleton was still a bachelor, a failing for a Colonial Governor that he most effectually remedied later on. On arriving at Quebec, where Colonel Irving, a leading councillor, had filled his post in the interregnum, he received the usual complimentary addresses of welcome, and declared in reply his determination to mete out even-handed justice irrespective of class or race — no empty sentiment in Carle- ton's mouth, for he practised it consistently for twenty years. Lord Egremont had been the Secretary of State to whom most of Murray's dispatches had been written. The more distinguished Shelburne, first Marquis of Lansdowne, now became for some three years his official correspondent. The new Governor was a man of dignified presence, with a cold manner but a warm heart. He had sound judgment, a keen sense of justice, and cared nothing for hostile criti- cism when in pursuit of it. He was also a hard worker and an admirable letter-writer, for which last all students of Canadian history should be duly grateful. His Council, who had by now settled down somewhat firmly into their seats, tested his measure very early. For it seems that the Governor,
40 THE MAKING OF CANADA
anxious for information on some special matter, privately summoned only those two or three members qualified to give it, whereupon the others sent a written remonstrance against what they considered a bad precedent, but excusing Carleton for this occasion, since they were informed it was an accident. The Governor replied it was nothing of the kind ; that he should consult whom he pleased either in the Council or out of it, if they were men of good sense, truth, and impartial justice, and preferred their duty to the King and the tranquillity of his subjects and the good of the Province to party zeal and selfish mercenary views. There were now twelve members in the Council, an honour for the present confined to Protestants, so there was not unnaturally a very decided ' tail ' to Carleton's team of advisers. Walter Murray, one of those whose opinion had not been asked, Carleton writes, was a strolling player. Mounier again, an honest trader who will sign anything his friends ask him to. The troubles of Canada were at present wholly internal and unavoidable, though apparently the fears of the French were aggravated by the arrogance of the British traders. Religious anxieties had quieted down a good deal with the presence of a well-behaved Bishop, but the two legal systems were clashing hopelessly, and in this vital branch of existence there was something like a dead- lock. The rising troubles in the American provinces had not yet touched Canada. There could be no valid objection to a stamp act in a Crown colony, and the French, who might with logic have resented helping to pay the expense of their own conquest, had not yet acquired the habit of political reasoning or remonstrance and probably felt it very little. At any rate Murray had written that they paid it with cheer- ful alacrity.
One great disturbance of a peculiar and mysterious nature, however, had shaken the colony from end to end and con- tinued into Carleton's time, so much so that it can hardly be ignored, and is worthy of mention if only to illustrate the cleavages of the time and the rancour caused by them. It
CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 41
even reached the London coffee-houses, and fills half a volume of MS. correspondence in the State papers. Montreal was the scene of the exploit, a city which, while keeping pace with Quebec in population and trade, was always more prone to disturbance from its remoter situation and its long association with the fur trade and those exuberant souls engaged in it, both red and white, who periodically for- gathered there. This, however, by the way ; for the Walker affair was a quarrel, speaking relatively, of aristocrats not of coureurs-de-bois or mechanics ; hence the excitement caused. The feeling between the new British mercantile community and the garrison ran even higher in Montreal than in Quebec, and no doubt there were faults on both sides. The average British officer was not of a type likely to con- ciliate a society of touchy American traders who aspired to political monopoly, but were rarely of the social class whose daughters he had danced with at Alexandria or New York or beneath 'Aunt' Schuyler's hospitable roof at Albany. It was from these not unworthy if unpolished and somewhat narrow-minded and arrogant souls that the magistrates of Montreal had to be appointed after the institution of civil government in 1763. The scope for friction and unpleasant- ness here prepared will be sufficiently obvious to any man of the world, particularly such as have been much about it. What further aggravated the situation, both in Quebec and Montreal, was the very natural friendliness and social fusion between the British officers and their old opponents in the field, those of the French Canadian officers and seigniors, the term being practically synonymous, who had the means and opportunities to share in the social life of the little capitols. In these circles there was little real cause for soreness. The defeat of the French, almost abandoned as they had been by their mother country, was only less glorious than victory. Contemporary evidence all agrees in the philosophic light-heartedness with which the noblesse, of both sexes, accepted * Le Fortune de guerre ' while they had received nothing but good treatment from the victors who,
42 THE MAKING OF CANADA
as valiant fellow-soldiers, had every cause to hold them in respect. The third element, uncongenial to the others and regarded by both with social contempt, while at the same time endowed with official and magisterial rank, would not have been mortal, as chiefly the natives of democratic countries, had they been otherwise than bitter, nor had the latter mended the situation by an address to Murray com- plaining of the arbitrary imprisonments and exactions they had suffered during the military regime. This was merely an eighteenth-century Bostonian method of emphasising the fact that they had been under a military government, the only one possible in a conquered country not yet annexed by treaty ; nor had they chosen to remember that but for these soldiers they would not have been there at all.
There had been a more general source of discord too in Montreal, which was no one's fault, unless indeed that of the over-burdened British Government, who had neglected to build or acquire barracks for the troops. This was the ever- lasting question of billeting, in the course of which Captain Frazer, who was officially responsible for it, had on a certain occasion sent an officer to the house of a French Canadian where one of the justices lodged. The latter claimed exemption by virtue of his office. The exemption, however, he was answered, related only to his own rooms not to his landlord's house ; and the officer in question, Captain Payne, proceeded to immediate occupation. Upon this the justice issued a warrant for his arrest, and on his refusal to vacate the rooms he was committed to prison for contempt by another magistrate, one Walker, a most violent leader in that faction. There was now a great commotion, and feeling ran prodigiously high, the populace taking sides and the soldiers of course supporting their officer with much zeal. Frazer wrote to Murray that, unless these magistrates were deposed, he should resign his post, whereupon the latter were summoned to Quebec by the Governor to explain their conduct.
Walker, though English by birth, had spent many years
CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 43
in Boston, where no doubt he had imbibed that spirit of freedom which he cultivated in the less congenial air of Montreal with all the traditional enthusiasm of a recent convert. But he was undoubtedly a man of quarrelsome habit and violent temperament, and distinguished himself by an exceptionally hostile attitude towards the military. Almost on the eve of his departure for Quebec he was seated at supper with his wife, when, according to his own depositions, the door was forced and he was set upon by several persons disguised by crape masks and blackened features. In the struggle which ensued his ear was cut off and he was other- wise seriously maltreated. Every effort was made to discover the perpetrators without avail. Murray issued the strongest condemnations of the crime, and offered officially £200 reward for its discovery, while the people of Montreal offered a yet larger sum, but no witness could be induced to come forward. A little later another serious trouble occurred, on some men of the 28th being committed by the magistrates to jail, and created such excitement that a mutiny was feared. Murray hurried to Montreal and found the citizens in a state of panic and in fear of their lives. He stayed a month, quieted things down, investigated the recent Walker affair and learnt nothing, but he caused the 28th to be exchanged for another regiment, their passions having been so aroused by the vindictive spirit of the magistrates. Walker continued so insolent that even his brother magis- trates refused to sit with him, and finally Murray dismissed him from the bench. He possessed influence in England, however, and worked it so skilfully that the Government were entirely imposed upon, and to Murray's disgust ordered his immediate restoration, with other signs of favour, which made him yet more intolerable. It appears from the corre- spondence to have been mainly this affair of Walker's that brought about Murray's recall. Two years passed away, till in Carleton's first autumn a discharged soldier of the 28th regiment named Macgovoc came forward and testified that M. Saint Luc de la Corne, a prominent seignior and officer,
44 THE MAKING OF CANADA
Town-Major Disney of the 44th, Captain Campbell of the 2/th, Lieutenant Evans of the 28th, and a Mr. Howard, had all assisted at the assault upon Walker. The Provost Marshal thereupon arrested them all in their beds, cast them temporarily into a common gaol, and then dispatched them to Quebec. The Chief-Justice and Attorney-General Hey and Maseres, both able men, were, like Carleton, new arrivals. All had previously heard of the affair in England, where, from ignorance of the situation, the assault had aroused unqualified indignation. The prisoners were refused bail by the Chief-Justice, though petitioned to the contrary by all the Council, the chief residents and officers in the city. They were then returned to Montreal, and only escaped the gaol again by the consent of the Sheriff to sub- stitute for it a private house. Walker, much gratified at the situation of his real or supposed assailants, tried to postpone the trial. But as delay would involve, so the Chief-Justice declared, their admission to bail, Walker, affirming that his life would not then be safe, gave up the point.
At the trial the Grand Jury threw out all the bills except that against Disney, upon which account Walker made a violent scene in court, abusing the jury in impassioned and unrestrained language. Disney was tried in the following March, and the case created intense excitement. The jury contained eight Canadian seigniors, and it may be worth noting that Walker, through the Attorney-General, objected to three of them as being Chevaliers of the Order of St. Louis, and not having therefore taken the oath of allegiance, a difficulty they surmounted by immediately taking it. Maseres, the new Attorney-General, prosecuted for the Crown. Of recent Huguenot descent, his bitterness against Catholics, then as always, biassed his otherwise sound judgment and good sense. Disney was directly charged with burglary and felony, forcing Walker's house with intent to murder, and for cutting off his right ear. The witness Macgovoc swore to having been present, and recognised the Town- Major. Mrs. Walker also professed to identify him. Mac-
CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 45
govoc, on the other hand, was accused of bearing false witness for the sake of the large reward. He contradicted himself, and his evidence disagreed with that of Mrs. Walker. He was a man of bad character, and indeed was soon afterwards arrested for rape. Disney was proved by several witnesses to have been dancing at the time of the outrage at a private house, and they swore he could not possibly have been absent five minutes without their knowledge. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty, and the mystery was never cleared up, while Walker continued to stir up faction in Montreal till the American invasion of Canada, where as we shall see, he figured as the leader of the local rebels, though not as a combatant.
Carleton soon formed general opinions on the situation in which time and experience made no sensible difference. An abler man and of a cooler head than Murray, it says much for the latter that his successor in the main held much the same views. His indignation at the pretensions of four hundred Protestants to rule eighty thousand Catholics was every whit as strong, and his opinion of the general body of the former was almost as pronounced. Their constant petitions for an Assembly elected solely from their own community, he regarded as preposterous. The Canada of the future seemed to him, the French Canada that he now administered, slowly growing between the mouth of the Saguenay and the Island of Montreal. It was a vast enough district for the sober prophetic eye of that day to deal with, in view of a trifling population, who had, in a century and a half, cut away but a narrow fringe of its boundless woodlands. Within these bounds it seemed to Carleton that no British or Protestant settlers, with choice of domicile in the more fertile and more habitable spaces, as they then appeared to the southward, would dream of intruding themselves, to face not merely the rigour of a fierce winter but a social atmosphere alien in speech, habit, and creed. There was no little fascination, too, to an Englishman of enlightened views and cultivated mind, in this little isolated nation of
46 THE MAKING OF CANADA
seventeenth-century Frenchmen, a brave, simple, happy and unexacting people, that the fortune of war had thrown on the care and generosity of Great Britain. With every respect for the vigorous, liberty-loving people of the Anglo- American colonies, they had by this time begun to get no little on the nerves of the English governing class who had come in contact with them, and the French Canadians must have afforded a contrast that could hardly have failed to appeal, in many respects, to a man like Carleton and excite his sympathy, above all when practical politics seemed so fully to justify it. The future with all its racial troubles and complications was hidden at the moment from the most prescient eye. That the new subjects, while still politically raw, would be agitated by an immediate revolt of their southern neighbours and the country overrun by their armed forces, was outside the bounds of practical forecast. And yet much more than this — a crisis which, after all, if over- come might leave no trace — who could have guessed that thirty thousand Anglo-American refugees expelled as the result of a successful revolution would drop suddenly into this unknown, despised Canadian soil as agricultural settlers, upset every calculation, and with their inevitable growth form, in Lord Durham's memorable words half a century later, ' two nations warring within a single state ' ? There is a letter, though not a fully authenticated one, from Montcalm, written when the end of French dominion was in sight to his friends at home, to the effect that this little offshoot of their race might become to England, if it treated them well, loyal and faithful subjects, a very pillar and support some day against their own kith and kin. This was not at the moment, to be sure, an appreciable factor in Carleton's politi- cal calculations. However much he might have wished to protect the French Canadians from American political in- fluences, the idea of war with the colonies when it actually came was so repugnant to him, that in 1766 he would pro- bably have brushed any such forebodings from his mind. He was one of the many British soldiers who abhorred the
CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 47
very idea as unnatural, and did his utmost to soften the horrors of war when it came to his opponents, even when dealing them the one great and permanent rebuff they were to receive at the hands of a British general. The British trading community did not under the circumstances seem likely to develop into a factor of numerical consequence. The trade of Canada was unimportant. Her great export, beaver skins, reached but a trifling figure when compared with the products shipped from other colonies, and the Canadian fur trade, what with the Hudson Bay Company on the north and the restless traders from the English colonies at the south, was hardly an expanding one. Timber at that day was somewhat of a drug, and every seaboard province in North America was covered thick with it out- side the area of its farms and plantations, the more accessible Nova Scotia among them. Canada tanned some indifferent leather, and the ancient forges at Three Rivers turned out a little iron, from which the plainer edge-tools used in the colony were made. The peasants span their own wool and the cultivation of flax was encouraged by all the British Governors, though most of it was woven by the habitants into linen for their own use. All other manufactured goods were imported, and the perennial complaint of the merchants was the insufficiency of money and exports to pay for them. The revenue was mainly from customs and excise, the British Government making up the deficiency for current expenses, which, though a relatively large one, scarcely exceeded the annual pension paid to many an English politician for voting against his conscience and to many a butterfly as the reward of his mother's shame. The virtual absence of manufactures was certainly no blemish to Canada in the eyes of its official well-wishers. A colony with industrial ambitions was the reverse of an ideal one to a statesman of that day. Carleton probably had no par- ticular visions of Canada as a great commercial asset to Britain. He wanted a loyal and contented people pro- gressing steadily in the rural arts and rising to a modest
48 THE MAKING OF CANADA
export trade in grain which they already aspired to in addition to furs and timber ; a people of martial traditions whose descendants in return for equable treatment would rally to the British flag from whatever quarter it was threatened. It was a reasonable dream, and was partially, in spite of unlooked-for earthquakes, fulfilled. In the absence of these and with a succession of Carletons it was almost a certainty. But it is perhaps idle to dwell on what might have been, when a convulsion which beyond doubt was all for the best so early in the experiment tore up every track upon which the future life of North America was expected to run.
In Carleton's time there was not a British farmer in Canada save a stray ex-soldier here and there, Irish or Scotch, who had married a habitant, and whose children became French. There was indeed one such entire settle- ment, which, in evidence of its origin, remains to-day perhaps the most interesting ethnological survival in Canada. Immediately after the conquest the seigniory of Malbaie had lapsed to the Crown, almost the only instance of the kind occurring after the commencement of British rule. Now Malbaie, somewhat famous to-day as the summer resort of Murray Bay, lies eighty miles down the lofty and often rugged north shore of the St. Lawrence, through the gaps in which you may see farms and villages lying amid or on the breast of high ridges, that roll back to the Lau- rentian mountains. A very different class of country this from the Isle of Orleans, or the smooth banks of the Upper St. Lawrence, or again from its comparatively low-lying opposite shore, here some fifteen or twenty miles distant. It was all occupied, however, this picturesque upland — much of it Church property — if sparsely enough, settled and divided into parishes and seigniories long before Murray's time. The seigniories lying about the mouth of the im- petuous river which bears his name were the last of all and the limit of civilisation upon that bold, romantic shore. And indeed there is not much beyond it even now.
CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 49
Murray had divided the seigniory in half by the river which waters it, granting each side respectively to Messrs. Nairne and Eraser, two Highland officers either tired of war or enam- oured of the patriarchal life of a resident seignior. With them went several of the discharged men of their regiments on to the then almost unoccupied forest tracts, and settled as censitaires under their old chiefs. They soon found wives in the more populous seigniory of Baie St. Paul, to which parish and church a contemporary list shows that Malbaie was attached, for some of the Scotsmen, if not all, were Catholics. Their children, or grandchildren at the latest, became as French Canadian in every way as any descendant of a seven- teenth-century Perche husbandman or Dieppe artisan among them. To-day the prevailing names in the large villages scattered on either side of the river mouth or in the picturesque little verandahed homesteads that spread up and above its course towards the Laurentian mountain wilderness are Warrens, Blackwoods, M'Nicholls, M'Leans, and others of like unmistakable significance. But no other trace of their origin pertains to them, nor anything of their language, no- thing but a vague tradition among the more enlightened of their ancestors of (Les Ecossais" The seigniorial mansions of Nairne and Fraser, who had assisted both to attack and de- fend Quebec, and had unexpectedly to grasp their claymores once more in yet another defence, though enlarged or rebuilt, still face one another across the mouth of the Murray. It may be noted incidentally, too, that when the writer saw them they were still in possession of direct descendants or representatives of the two Highland seigniors, who were still locally known by the old appellation. Even yet, too, there were a few old farmers whose Norman-Scottish blood had revolted in 1854, when seigniorial tenure was abolished, or later, at parting all at once with the commutation fee of twenty-five dollars, or thereabouts, for the freehold of their entire farms, worth about that per acre, and remained as censitaires paying a dollar or two a year to the seignior, who still, of course, owns large tracts of interior forest lands.
D
50 THE MAKING OF CANADA
Whether Fraser and Nairne paid foy et homage to Murray, as representative of the King, no record tells us. But the first Frenchman, Noel of Tilly and Bonsecours, to succeed to his father's seigniory after the conquest, we are told, did so ; knocking duly at the door of Government House, and on Murray's appearance, repeating the acknowledgment of faith and homage ' without sword or spurs, bareheaded and with one knee on the ground.'
One of Carleton's first acts was characteristic of the man. He remitted all the fees that were customary on various transactions to the Governor, and gave as his reason that he considered the exaction of fees as beneath the dignity of his office. The Jesuits who, it will be remembered, had been turned out of France, took the opportunity of a change at the Chateau St. Louis to make further petition for the restor- ation of their property, and yet more, that they should be assisted and permitted to resume the education of youth. None of these propositions could be entertained for a moment in a British possession. Jesuit teaching was not likely to lessen such difficulties as Canadian Governors had before them.
There was no doubt, however, that Carleton found a good deal of unrest among the * new subjects.' They had been to some extent disturbed by the truculency of the British merchants and their undisguised aims at political monopoly. But the real crux of the whole trouble was the chaotic fashion in which the law was being administered, and the delays and abuses thereby encouraged. It was less the fault of indi- viduals than the difficult situation they found themselves in. So momentous a question as settling the laws of a country presumably for all time could not be done in a hurry. The opinion of even the able and the impartial differed, while the prejudices of the untutored and bigoted on both sides, as was natural, found unrestrained expression. The Home Government, with whom lay the decision, had to be con- sulted, and themselves to take counsel of jurists. Trans- atlantic correspondence occupied more weeks then than it
CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 51
now does days, while in the winter it took much longer to convey a letter from Quebec to an open port than it does now to carry one across the ocean. English criminal law, as we have seen, was universally and, save for a little demur from the noblesse, gladly accepted. But in the civil law all was confusion. Canadian advocates had been admitted to plead in French and knew nothing of English law, while the English judges, equally ignorant of the French code, and indeed with definite instructions not to follow it, gave their decisions accordingly. It was obviously impossible even to the most zealous upholder of English law that the whole French system of land tenure could be ruthlessly upset, without at least some preliminary measures. But the theory that English law had been proclaimed led to a good many practices that were not without humour. For example, while a seignior would not hear of abandoning his privileges, or of submitting his estate to English laws of succession and dower, he often took the opportunity of letting land to cen- sitaires on higher terms than his own code permitted. Or again, when a seigniory changed hands by purchase, the quinte, or fifth of the price due to the Crown as feudal superior, was refused on the same plea. Tenants too, who by the French law were not permitted to erect a house unless they held sixty arpents (fifty acres), began to build them freely, creating thereby, according to some contemporary evidence, much misery and thriftlessness. But the greatest terror of all was the English custom of imprisonment for debt, and, yet more, the ruthless practice of the magistrates and bailiffs. For in the French regime the courts had been conveniently distributed, while civil law had been cheap, speedy, and not oppressive to the person. By the ordinance of 1764 a number of magistrates had been appointed, from the small body of Murray's * licentious fanatics,' of course, and had assumed powers that Chief-Justice Hey, in an able report on the subject, declares to be far beyond those in- trusted to English justices, men of means, position and education, identified, for the most part, both in sympathy
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and interest, with the people in their jurisdiction. Worse still, the accruing fees were an object of avarice to the men who in Canada held the King's commission of the peace. Carleton reports to his Government that the better and more prosperous sort among the eligible, that is to say, the English community, had neither time nor inclination for such work, but that when a publican or a butcher went bankrupt his next procedure was a request to be made a magistrate and scrape a living out of its ill-gotten fees. The bailiffs were French Canadians of small repute, or dis- charged British soldiers, who did all in their power to encourage litigation among the ignorant peasantry in the recovery of small debts. For trifling sums men's stock and farms were sold up at forced sales in a country where money was scarce, and bidders under such conditions prac- tically non-extant. If that did not satisfy the debt plus a legal fee often of six times the amount, the hapless habitant was cast into prison, a hopeless and ruined man. Nothing like this, at any rate, had ever occurred under French rule, and if the noblesse objected to a mere interference with their quasi-feudal tenure, how infinitely more must the habitant have been intimidated by such strange scenes of horror. But this after all was the abuse, not the spirit of English law, though the British merchants held out stoutly for imprisonment for debt as simplifying the process of collection and discouraging fraud. Among the universal testimony to this state of things a pathetic MS. letter to Carleton from an old gentleman and ex-captain of militia at Yamaska is among the State papers; not a personal sufferer, but a distressed spectator of what is going on around him: 'Every day may be seen suit upon suit for nothing ; for twenty or thirty sous suits are entered which usually mount up to forty, fifty, or sixty livres, owing to the multitude of expenses heaped on these poor people by the bailiffs appointed by the^ authority of the Justices of the Peace. These bailiffs are instigators of unjust suits; they entice the poor people, who know nothing of the matter,
CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 53
to get writs against each other, which the bailiffs carry in blank, and require only the addition of the names of the plaintiff and defendant and date of appearance. I send one as a curiosity to your Excellency to judge of it. It often happens that a single person has several citations to answer at different Courts on the same day, and as it is impossible he can do so he is at once condemned by default, whereupon the bailiffs seize and carry off everything these poor people may be possessed of, the whole being disposed of at a half or a fourth of the real value. Should there be no one in the house and the doors locked they break them open to get in. If the goods siezed and carried off are not sufficient to discharge the multitude of costs laid on for the travelling charges of the bailiffs and otherwise, a warrant of imprison- ment is obtained, and thus, after having been robbed of all they have and possess in the world, their furniture as well as their cattle, their persons are finally laid hold of as a guar- antee that the tyranny may be complete. I would call your Excellency's attention to this so that you may become aware of the troubles of this poor afflicted people, who are really most tractable, and whom I have guided for the space of twenty-five years as Captain, and very often as Judge.'
This was written in 1769, and it seems difficult to under- stand how under a continuously sympathetic government such abuses can have crept in. The size of the country, the lack of communications, the ignorance of the earlier law officers, the irritating self-assertion of the Anglo-American residents, were all no doubt contributing factors. But the new law officers had now become well aware of it, and there was a general consensus of opinion that the well-meaning ordinance of 1763, by its very vagueness, had made all these troubles possible. It was felt, both in Canada and by the British Government, that a proper settlement and Act of Parliament clearly defining the conditions of the future administration of the country was imperative, and the wits of all persons responsible in the matter were set busily
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working towards those conclusions which resulted in the repeal of the ordinances and the passing of the Quebec Act of 1774. A Secretaryship of State for the Colonies was, moreover, instituted in 1769, under the increasing pressure of business from North America and the West Indies, which Lord Hillsborough was the first to undertake, though Lord Shelburne continued his interest in the proposed Canadian legislation. I do not propose to weary the reader with all the various alternatives for a legal code suggested by those competent and incompetent to do so. Some were for persevering with the English civil law in its unmodified form, others for retaining it, but modified by French law where such seemed advisable. This plausible compromise, however, carried the danger of prolonging the present chaos in which each man pursued the law that mostly favoured his case. An entirely new code, a blend of both, the experts declared would involve such a vast amount of erudition on the part of the framers, as well as so much delay in preparation, as to be out of the question. Others again favoured the retention of the entire French civil code, subject to the slight amendments that common-sense and necessity might require. Among these was Carleton him- self. He urged on the Home Government the appoint- ment of seigniors as councillors. He also protested against their exclusion from military service, and affirmed that their natural but secret attachment to France was being stimu- lated by this continuous neglect. Most of the gentlemen of the colony had asked for military employment, in view of trouble with the colonies which even Carleton was now beginning to anticipate. There was the uncertainty again how France would act, and it was vital that the interests of the noblesse should be secured, for ' nothing had yet been done to gain one man.' The ruinous state of the defences of Quebec, too, gave much concern, and Carleton writes urgent letters to the Government on the subject accom- panied by plans of his own. He quotes incidentally the opinion of leading Canadians that the city could have
CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 55
been taken in May 1759 if Durell had pushed quickly up to it, that the surrender after the Plains of Abraham was due to the weak fortifications, and Murray could not have held it in the following winter if Levis had possessed artillery and sufficient ammunition. Ticonderoga and St. John on Lake Champlain, guarding the main and only feasible route to Canada from the colonies, were dilapidated, and Carleton more than once urges the Government to put them in a proper state of defence and, as we shall soon see, with very good reason. He strongly recommended too a Canadian regiment, for the seigniors missed the small posts and occasional subsidies that had come from the Crown in the old regime, and some of them were in a distressed con- dition. Upon the whole the tranquillity and contentment that was so marked among the 'new subjects' during the years following the conquest had been considerably ruffled. The Church alone seems to have had no complaints of importance. Bishop Briand for the present on his own initiative, and not from any desire to suppress pomp on the part of the Government, lived simply and almost entirely at the seminary, taking his meals at the common table. Peti- tions from time to time were presented by the French asking that religious disabilities should be abolished in the matter of employment, and fervently assuring the King of their loyalty. The British community, who may have increased by a hundred or two, still importuned for an elective assembly from their own members, sometimes footing their petitions with the names of a few obscure Frenchmen, who, according to counter-petitions of their compatriots, only affixed their signatures because they owed the merchants money.
Maurice Morgan had in 1767 been sent out by the British Government to draw up and bring back a full report of the working of the laws, both new and old, in Canada. This report had now been for some time before them, and sub- mitted to the Crown advisers. Morgan was in after years secretary to Carleton, and to him we owe some forty volumes of official MS. correspondence of his chiefs now on the
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shelves of the Royal Institution. The knowledge that a definite settlement of the Constitution was impending kept the country outwardly quiet though in considerable suspense, while every interest very naturally did its utmost to reach the ear of the Home Government. The atrocious outrages of the magistrates and their bailiffs were put a stop to by a fresh ordinance in 1770, in regard to which it will be enough to say that it removed all smaller suits to the Court of Common Pleas, took away the power of selling up debtors by forced auction for small claims, assured them reason- able time for payment, and protected certain agricultural necessities from seizure and land in any case against debts under £12. This was met by an outburst of indignation from the British traders, the magistrates, and their attendant leeches who lived on the ruin of the poor. A petition to this effect was presented to Carleton, who had recently, by his own authority, released a whole company of habitants from gaol whose debts did not average £2 apiece. The petitioners got scant sympathy from that somewhat formid- able, cool-headed but warm-hearted dignitary, who ' saw no reason to repeal the ordinance or to modify a single clause.' ' These people [magistrates] were cantonned,' he says, * upon the country, and many of them rid the people with despotic sway, imposed fines which they turned to their own profit, and in a measure looked upon themselves as legislators of the Province.'
In this same year Carleton went to England, nominally on private affairs for a brief period, but the new charter of Canada was in fact under discussion. His presence and assistance were thought desirable, and he remained till the passing of the Act nearly four years later. A little before this Carleton had compiled and has left among his papers a useful list of the Canadian noblesse resident in Canada as well as of those serving as French officers. Of the former there are one hundred and twenty-six adult males, representing a proportionate number of women and children. Of the latter seventy-nine. The Canadian Judge, Baby, a
CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 57
contemporary, gives four hundred families as remaining in Canada and constituting a more or less educated and enlightened class from whom legislators or officials could be drawn. According to M. Benjamin Suite of Ottawa, whose labours in the personal and genealogical department of early Canadian history are most illuminating, Baby divides them thus: a hundred and thirty seigniors, a hundred gentle- men and bourgeois, a hundred and twenty-five financiers of various sorts, twenty-five judges and lawyers, and about the same number of notaries and doctors respectively. Maseres had also returned to England after doing a good deal of useful and honest work. But his prejudices against the French, mainly on account of their faith, were so invincible that, while he could suggest useful schemes as alternatives, he was himself for the continued ascendency of the Pro- testant faction even to a House of Assembly of their number, though he had no hope of it. He became ultimately Cursitor Baron of the Exchequer.
Hector Cramahe' remained at Quebec as Lieutenant- Governor. He was a Swiss captain in the British service, who, though not hitherto mentioned, had been useful as a public servant, and was to prove still more so at a much more critical time.
Nothing of moment took place in Canada during the four years of Carleton's absence. Cramahe had to receive and forward a great many petitions of a diametrically opposite tenour from French and English respectively in view of the forthcoming Act. Of another kind, however, and showing what dislocation in educational matters had been occasioned by the war and change of government, were frequent requests by the French that the college at Quebec should be re- suscitated for the education of youth regardless of creed or nationality. In answer to some statements in France that the Canadian habitants were c slaves,' the seigniors declared that on the contrary they had acquired such freedom of habit that neither they nor the middling sort treat their superiors with the same respect as of old. There
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are an abnormal number of fires too, thought to be the work of incendiaries, one of them destroying the recently erected barracks of the troops at Montreal, and again raising the irritating question of quarters. The Canadian officers in the French army very naturally keep up a correspon- dence with their parents and relatives in Canada, which as inevitably perhaps, having regard to the restless character of that military nation in those days, gives the good Cramahe occasional qualms of anxiety. Some immigrants from France, too, come in by permission, and the Governor keeps a sharp eye on them also. There are more than two thousand semi-domesticated Indians in Canada, at Lorette near Quebec, on the Island of Montreal, and at other places, whose wants and complaints occur in the papers of that as of most periods. The western Indians in the meantime had temporarily ceased from troubling, though letters to Cramah^ from that able ruler of red men, Sir William Johnson, at Johnson Hall on the Mohawk, echoes the chronic complaint of French intrigue and the illegal, provocative doings of the western traders both French and English. But the period was little more than a long lull of expectancy; the two parties, the large and inarticulate one, the minute and vociferous one, remaining as it were on tiptoe in a state of nervous anxiety. I must ask the reader, how- ever, to leave Canada for the moment and follow Carleton across the Atlantic, and in as brief fashion as possible see the Quebec Act through the British Parliament.
The bill known as the Quebec Act was introduced by way of the House of Lords on May 17, 1774, and was handled so expeditiously that by May 26th it had reached its second reading in the House of Commons, which was the occasion selected for a full discussion and for such fight as the opposition were able to make against it. It would seem to have been the final measure for that session, and to mark a halcyon age when society expected to get away into the country before their hay was cut. For only about thirty peers and a little over a fourth of the House of Commons
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remained in town to discuss or vote upon the bill, which after being the subject of quite a brisk debate during several days, passed the third reading by fifty-six to twenty, and on the 1 8th of June was ratified by the House of Lords. Though neither Parliament nor people took as a whole any interest in it — which is hardly surprising, seeing the apathy still displayed toward the grave troubles brewing in the wider field of the English American colonies — some few individuals had taken a good deal all through the preceding year. Carleton, Maseres (now Cursitor Baron), De Lotbiniere, a French Canadian seignior, Chief-Justice Hey,and Marryott, Advocate-General, had written and talked much concerning it. These and others were severally examined before the Committee of the House. When even Maseres, whose deep-rooted prejudices against the Catholic faith would have led him personally even to violate justice and risk a Protestant House of Assembly, admitted such a thing under the circumstances to be impossible, it will be enough to say that no re- sponsible counsellor was likely to hold any other opinion. The question of law was much more complicated. Every one knew what the upper and articulate classes of Canadians of either race wanted, but the habitants offered a field for divergent statements that were quite incapable of proof. There was no evidence that they were pining to have their civil cases tried by juries, while there is some that they object to sitting on them without being paid. The English laws of debtor and creditor, as recently practised upon them, resulted, as we have seen, in shameless outrages. In the seigniorial system, however,there were obviously weak points, which the attention of the habitant could be, and indeed had been, drawn to by the emissaries of freedom who from Montreal and even New England had already been busy ; his quit-rent, his fines on sale of land, the corvee which, though now carrying wages, was not popular, and other small and sometimes wholesome restrictions. In Church matters there had never, so far as he was concerned, been any alteration, and he neither looked nor wished for any.
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The bill which finally received the King's signature was on the whole as equitable a one as could have been drafted, but nevertheless it caused much indignation in certain quarters. Had it been such, however, as to meet with their approval, it would have raised a rebellion in Canada on the first opportunity, an opportunity much nearer than most people thought. And the British Government was con- cerned with Canada, not with orators in New England or sectarian fanatics in Surrey or Yorkshire. But there were opponents to it in Parliament who were neither the one nor the other, but merely playing the party game with the best weapons they had to hand. It was recognised that an elective assembly drawn from a few hundred Protestant townsmen of indifferent status for the coercing of 80,000 Catholics would have been an instrument compared to which the much-abused Protestant Parliament in Dublin repre- senting most of the land, wealth, education, and a fourth of the nation, would have been almost democratic. A mixed assembly in such proportions would have left the British equally helpless. Moreover, as the admission of Catholics to Parliament was not as yet within the range of practical politics in England or Ireland, such a measure even in Canada would have met with great opposition. Lastly, the French were either perfectly indifferent or absolutely hostile to anything of the kind. So the bill provided for a legislative council only of seventeen to twenty-three members nominated by the Crown. In short, the government remained much as it was before, that, namely of a Crown colony.
The criminal law of England and the civil law of France, subject to any necessary or future alteration, were adopted in their entirety. As this included the perpetuating of the seigniorial system, it was provided that the laws should not apply to any land already granted in free and common soccage, or to be granted in future by the Crown. This virtually meant that the old system would be limited to the area then under seigniorial tenure, and that any new and
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unsettled districts would be treated as freehold, which was wholly satisfactory.
Religion was dealt with on the lines of the former guarantees. Indeed the Catholic Church was apparently strengthened by the legalising of the dime, actually the twenty-seventh part, in the rural districts. This was a point eagerly seized upon by the enemies of the bill both in Eng- land and in the American colonies, as since the conquest the legal obligation of church dues had been in abeyance. That with a devout peasantry in willing subjection to an Ultramontane Church, any shirking of these ancient dues had been manifested or was likely to be, was not even sug- gested. But to a remote Protestant who did not know the Canadian Church, the cry of tyranny and reaction was a plausible one. This tithe was, of course, only due from Catholics. An oath of allegiance, too, which the latter could take without doing violence to their faith, was embodied in the Act. Lastly, the boundaries of the province were laid down and so determined as to follow the Ohio from the western boundary of Pennsylvania to the Mississippi — to include, in short, the whole territory of New France north- ward to that of the Hudson's Bay and westward indefi- nitely. Here was the weakest spot in the Act. The Government, who reserved powers to make any fresh ordinances it chose, and had in truth no idea of shackling this remote wilderness with a reactionary system, should have determined the western boundary of the province of Quebec, leaving the unpeopled wilderness beyond with its scattered forts to another administration under the Crown. Perhaps there was a desire to control the old Canadian sphere of trade from headquarters, or possibly, in view of colonial troubles, it was thought prudent to include as much as possible in the government of Quebec. But the effect in America was instantaneous, and the outcry loud. ' What/ cried the Virginian or Pennsylvanian, * is our own western progress to be brought up short by a barrier behind which feudalism, Popery, an absolute government, and an alien
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law code are permanently entrenched ? ' There was a good deal in this; though so lurid a picture of the future was not practically possible, the cry was a justifiable and telling one. Among the list of grievances that were being piled up against the mother country by the colonies the concession to the French Canadians by Act of Parliament of their religion and their laws ranked high. The debate in com- mittee on the bill is instructive and sometimes entertaining. One or two members desired a * government for Canada, not a despotism' It seems curious for an eighteenth-century Englishmen to describe the government of a little com- munity of 80,000 souls by a Governor and Legislative Council in such sounding terms. No alternative, it may be remarked, was offered by any malcontent. There was none to offer, as either a Protestant or a mixed assembly would at that time have been absurd, but ' despotism ' was a popular phrase at the moment, and tickled the palate of speakers who knew little more of Canada and the perplexities of the moment than they did of Mexico — a mental condition not unfamiliar even in these days of their remote successors. * It was preposterous,' said Colonel Barre, ' to suppose that the Canadians would fail to recognise the superiority of good and just laws/ a pious opinion so typically British as to be worth transcribing.
Fox disliked the bill, partly because it conferred the tithes (of devoted Catholics) on Romish priests, and partly because it originated in the House of Lords. The repre- sentatives of the London merchants trading to Canada appeared in protest, as they said the bill would injure their business. Its vulnerable spot was easily assailed, and the picture of Roman law and Popery established on the Ohio and Niagara rivers was seized upon by several as a telling point. Carleton testified in favour of the French civil code, Chief-Justice Hey in favour of a blend that the technical difficulty of codifying, however, seemed insuperable. Maseres, who has left us a volume or two on the subject, and who longed to hold a brief for the other side, but was an
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amazing honest man, told the House that any interference with the land laws would be offensive to the French, and that they objected to juries, but might be won over by a small allowance. He regretted, and so did many, that no provision could be made for the Habeas Corpus. The old French lettres de cachet were an object of some anxiety, but it turned out that a Governor could not act upon them except by forms sent out by the King himself — as unlikely a proceeding for an English monarch as it was natural to the peculiar relationship of the Kings of France towards Canada. A mild sensation occurred during this debate. A Frenchman, primed by the English community, had come over to represent the Canadians as anxious for an elective assembly. Carleton, when under examination, was asked by Lord North if he knew anything of a Mons. le Brun. The Governor, as usual, did not mince matters. ' I know him very well. He was a blackguard at Paris, and sent as a lawyer to Canada. There he gained an extreme bad character in many respects. He was imprisoned for an assault on a young girl of eight or nine, and was fined £20.' Carleton was proceeding with this precious delegate's biography when one of the Opposition protested. Carleton was then asked to retire, while North explained that it was necessary to know the standing of a man claiming to represent Canadian opinion.
When the bill with certain amendments went back finally to a tired remnant of twenty-seven peers, Lord Chatham spoke against it. Lord Lyttelton answered rather unfor- tunately that if the colonies persevered in their resistance, he saw no reason why the loyal inhabitants of Canada should not co-operate with the rest of the Empire in sub- duing them, and thought it fortunate that their local situa- tion might enable them to be some check to ' those fierce fanatic spirits who, like the Roundheads of England, directed their zeal to the subversion of all power which they did not themselves possess.' It was commonly, though most un-
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truly, noised about in America that the Quebec Act had been framed and pushed through with a view to using the Canadians as a military weapon for the coercion of the colonies.
Enough perhaps has transpired even in the course of these two chapters to show how entirely the legislation of 1774 was brought about by the failure of the proclamation of 1763 to determine satisfactorily the internal affairs of the province, and how consistently and warmly, whether for good or ill, the men on both sides of the Atlantic re- sponsible for bringing about this settlement had sympathised with the situation of the French. That their allegiance was held to be a strong asset in case of outside trouble was a corollary of the other, but it was in no sense its motive. In the whole private and official correspondence it is only occasionally mentioned. Urgent local considerations are uppermost, while the sentiments which produced the Act were strong in Murray's time before any serious discord to the southward had arisen.
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CHAPTER IV
THE INVASION OF CANADA
WHEN Carleton, almost immediately on the passing of the Quebec Act, returned to Canada, this time as a married man, he found events swiftly hurrying towards the crisis that, fortunately for the British Empire, he and not some other was confronted with. He arrived in September the bearer, as he honestly, and with apparently good cause, believed, of a charter that would bring content, happiness and loyalty to the King's subjects. He found everything outwardly peaceful and in order under the excellent Cramah£, who remained in association with him as Lieu- tenant-Governor. He was received by the French with acclamations and with such measure of lip respect by the British merchants as he could reasonably expect from men who held him as a leading agent in a measure they cordially detested. While in England he had married Lady Maria, younger daughter of his friend and contemporary Lord Howard of Effingham. He was himself approaching fifty, while his wife, who by this time had borne him two children, was not half that age. She was a young lady of sprightly if perhaps imperious bearing. Educated at Versailles, and acquainted with its brilliant court, she made herself peculiarly acceptable to the Canadian noblesse, and gave early promise of that character of grande dame which sat so naturally upon her in future and more peaceful years at the Chateau St. Louis. The coming ones were not for brilliant ladies, or vice-regal amenities, and the Governor's dainty and high-born wife was in no long time
E
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sent home again to England, comfort and safety by her prudent and harassed lord.
Outside Canada the storm-clouds were gathering fast and the seduction of the French Canadians was not only included in the programme of the revolutionary party, but had been for some time insidiously prosecuted. The famous convention of Philadelphia had met almost at the moment of Carleton's arrival, and one of its measures was a proclamation addressed to the Canadians, and by means of the disaffected British circulated in translation through- out the colony.
This is rather a precious document. The same men who in almost the same breath had denounced Great Britain in equally formal documents for tolerating a creed in Canada that 'had spread hypocrisy, murder, blood and revolt into all parts of the world/ was the root of all evil, and, in short, the curse of the earth, which sentiments they had of course a perfect right to express, now announced the conviction that ' the liberality of sentiment so charac- teristic of their French Catholic neighbours would assuredly not stand in the way of a hearty amity.'
That very concession of their laws and religion to the French which had aroused the indignation of the sons of liberty, both in England and America, was twisted in this infelicitous and lengthy document into measures of savage tyranny towards the beneficiaries. It was not the invitation to the Canadians to unite their efforts with those of their neighbours, not as yet warlike ones, and to send delegates to the Continental Congress appointed for May 1775, which was the gist of the message that makes it noteworthy. Such an invitation was natural and legitimate, but the statements and sentiments in which it was clothed were neither the one or the other. Among them is the in- credible suggestion that the King might even impose the Inquisition upon his unfortunate subjects. By what process of reasoning a Protestant monarch and government could be impelled to introduce the Spanish Inquisition among a
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community Catholic to a man, presents a conundrum, and suggests nothing but the king and the atmosphere of a famous child's story, now a classic in the English language, and therefore a legitimate source of analogy. In short the Canadians were told that they were neither free nor happy, and if they thought they were they had no business to think so ; it must be the fault of their deficient education. Tem- perament and race did not perhaps weigh much with a British colonial Protestant of the eighteenth century, wise and shrewd though in many respects he might be. The manifesto, intended obviously for the unlettered and the unsophisticated, was treated with natural contempt by the noblesse and the priests, who were now secured to the Crown, and virtually included among the various agents of tyranny arraigned in the text. On the inhabitants, since they could not read, the message would have fallen equally flat, but there were busybodies going back and forth now in the parishes explaining it to them with all the wealth of imagination natural to irresponsible demagogues playing upon an absolutely virgin political soil. Some of these came from south of the border, imported by Walker, whose missing ear was a most natural irritant to political activity, and who was now only awaiting his chance to promote a revolt should that chance come. A majority of the British community were in bitter antagonism to the Act, and one cannot be surprised. If they had been a substantial minority, with a great stake in the country, one would more than sympathise with their attitude, but then there would have been no Act and no call for sympathy. Including servants and employees not greatly interested, they had increased to perhaps a thousand or more, but such pre- cision does not really signify; they were still an infinitesimal fraction of the whole. The Quebec British do not seem to have been so antagonistic, a fact due perhaps to Carleton's personal influence. Montreal was the centre of disaffection, and Walker was the leader who, with his friends, now made a descent upon the Capital, and stirred up the party there to
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greater activity. Vaudrueil or Frontenac would have put such political excursionists in irons and shipped them to France. But their worse than prototypes, as their successors were called, somewhat stultified their reputation for tyranny by leaving them absolutely alone after the British custom, and the inhabitants fell easy victims to the tales of emissaries who knew their business thoroughly. The situation was a somewhat unforeseen one. The credulity of Jean and Pierre had never had occasion to be seriously put to the test. It was now found to be unfathomable, nor indeed, was it very difficult to thoroughly frighten these unsophisticated souls and arouse the greed of men in whose veins ran the peasant blood of Normandy and Picardy. They were told that the old impositions which, at the hands even of rulers of their own race and faith, had tried them no little, were to be renewed with greater stringency. The militia, which for home defence was partially maintained under its former captains, was to be sent into foreign service and used in England's European wars. The corvdes were to be re-imposed with more than their former rigour, and the iniquity of the seignioral dues was painted with all the eloquence that a New England orator of that day could, with a clear conscience, from his point of view paint them. The technical confirmation of the dime, which had never in itself been for a moment resented, was put in a fresh light, and made no little impression. They had been robbed, they were told, of their inalienable right to make their own laws by their own representatives, which was soaring a long way above their level of political intelligence, and it was quite safe to omit that the gift of political power was no part of their friends' scheme, the main object being to secure them as allies, or at least as neutrals in the coming struggle. The seigniors were not a difficult target to hit. Their position before the conquest had been accepted as a matter of course by their censitaires. Feudal affections and respect, all things considered, had not perhaps been very deeply seated. It is true that the seignior under the French
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regime had no political power, but his position was inevit- ably a more favoured and conspicuous one at the govern- ment centres than now, and he had administered rude justice throughout the province to his tenantry. Since then the latter had seen him excluded from a legislative council that embraced men in trade and put on one side for a pack of Protestant magistrates of obviously mean condi- tion. All this had lessened his social dignity in the eyes of a class who combined native cunning with political simplicity in a quite remarkable degree. The nominal recognition for a time, too, of English law, enabled the cen- sitaire to practise it occasionally upon his seignior, when it profited him, in a manner that was nothing less than sharp since both preferred the old code. It was not difficult for the agitator to point to the somewhat slighted seignior as now reinstated in all his former arbitrary rights with loud forebodings of the truculent fashion in which he would use them. The dethronement of the priest was of course much harder, but he succeeded even here, as we shall see, to the extent not of sensibly affecting his tithe, but of robbing him for a brief but critical time of all his influence. To give a lucid picture of the habitants' mental attitude under the influences of 1774 and the following year which, moreover, varied much according to locality, is probably beyond the power of any historian, and would, moreover, be attempting a particularism out of scale in this work. As events progressed, and the future looked graver, domestic politics, mainly concentrated in the Quebec Act, ceased to absorb the articulate portion of the Canadian people. The British community began to disintegrate in face of so serious a step as definitely committing themselves to union with a people whose policy seemed drifting to an armed defiance of the Crown. The Walker faction, who would go all lengths consistent with their present safety, were unable to carry the majority of their party with them in their messages to the Continental Congress. It is impossible to follow the attitude of the general body of mere political
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malcontents as distinct from the minority who were for extreme measures. The latter were mainly New Eng- landers. The others, of various origin, from motives of prudence, self-interest or genuine loyalty ceased from troubling, and when it came to the point redeemed, what at the worst was an excess of political and sectarian arrogance, by rallying to the British flag.
There is no occasion here to enter into the causes of the quarrel between Great Britain and her American provinces, nor to dwell on the grievous mistakes, not all on one side, that led to the final rupture. If they are not sufficiently familiar they have been, at any rate, sufficiently and ably dealt with. We are concerned here with an obscurer story that nobody is expected to know anything about, and have our hands quite full. It will be enough for the moment that Massa- chusetts, the focus of agitation, had been put under a military governor, General Gage, and that its port of Boston was closed, that the British Government and the British people for the most part maintained an apathetic and sceptical attitude, with an altogether exaggerated estimate of the strength of the loyalist party in America, and that Gage himself, though in command of a large force, had taken no precautions to secure the points of vantage around Boston. Lord North in the past winter had declared the colonies to be in a state of rebellion, and announced the intention of Government to suppress it at all costs. The challenge with its sting was sent out, but few steps taken to follow it up. Lastly, the second Congress, with much more definite views than that of 1774, was to meet in May at Philadelphia. In partial justification, however, of the pre- valent belief in England that no recourse to arms would be attempted, the military apathy of all the colonies south of New England in the recent Seven Years' War may fairly be urged.
A recent effort at combination for purely military pur- poses against the Indian nations, encouraged by Great Britain and many leading colonists, Franklin among them,
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had utterly failed through their insurmountable sectional jealousies. Carleton's letters to Dartmouth during this winter and spring breathe of anxious moments present and perilous times to come. He had already begun to realise the widespread corruption of the habitants, and to fear greatly for any appeal to the militia, though he had but a handful of British regulars in the province. The noblesse were eager to serve, but were significantly lukewarm about commanding militiamen and urged Carleton to enrol a regiment of regulars, a measure entirely in accordance with his own wishes already intimated to the Home Government. The Quebec Act was to come into force on May I, 1775, when, in normal times, Carleton would have organised his Legislative Council and duly called it together. But in May the first overt act of war, for the previous affair of Lexington was rather in the nature of a suppression of riot, occurred, and directly menaced Canada. This was the seizure of the forts, Ticonderoga and Crown Point, at the head of Lake Champlain, which were the keys of the ancient and only direct military route between Canada and the American provinces. The achievement was a simple one, but the idea, originated partly by that rude but vigorous Vermonter, Ethan Allen, and partly by Benedict Arnold, with the con- sent of the Massachusetts committee of safety, was a spirited one, and made a great sensation. Congress, though not responsible for it, took no steps to disavow the action. Carleton had before this urged Gage to secure these posts. As it now turned out, a captain and a handful of men lead- ing a careless isolated existence at Ticonderoga were sur- prised in their beds at night by a superior force headed by Allen, who, keeping his men in the background, announced to the guard that he had despatches for the Commandant. Knowing Allen merely as a neighbour, and suspecting nothing, the men opened the gate and the rest was simple. Crown Point, a few miles up the lake, occupied by half a dozen men, was taken with similar ease, and a large supply of war materials obtained from the two forts. Arnold then
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seized the only armed vessel on the lake, and sailing up to St. John's near the outlet of the Richelieu, captured the small guard stationed there, together with another armed sloop. The news of this audacious and somewhat precipitate action, which tended to force the hand of Congress, and took place on May loth and following days, quickly reached Montreal, not forty miles distant, and created great excitement. The city had barely recovered from a domestic disturbance, foolish in origin but noisy of result. For on May 1st, the day on which the Quebec Act came into force, the King's bust revealed itself to the scandalised eyes of the citizens in a coat of black paint and further decorated with a necklace of potatoes, a cross and a placard bearing the inscription ' Voila le Pape du Canada et le sot Anglais.' The French were indignant, as the inscription suggested a French culprit, and one of them offered a hundred pounds reward. Many personal quarrels and broils arose out of the incident, till a fortnight later news arrived which gave the city more serious things to think about. Colonel Templer of the 26th Regiment, to which the captured detachments of the lake forts belonged, at once despatched Major Preston with a hundred and forty men of that corps to St. John's, which they found just deserted by Allen, who in the meantime had sent a message to ' those friendly to the cause ' at Mont- real requesting a supply of ammunition and provisions. Templer now called a general meeting, at which it was decided that volunteers should be immediately palled for. Fifty young French Canadians of family enrolled themselves at once and were despatched to St. John's, a weak post, but the last check on an invading force.
But this, after all, was not actual war. These early skir- mishers had fallen back to Ticonderoga, and there were yet a few weeks of respite left to Canada before the struggle began. On hearing of the capture of the forts Carleton had hurried up to Montreal at once, and writing from there to Dartmouth explains his own position and that of the colony in unmistakable language and with some bitterness.
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He had less than a thousand regulars available, Gage having recently deprived him of two regiments. He had already measured the temper of the habitants with sufficient accuracy to dread the moment now impending when the militia would have to be called out, while as to the peasantry in general he would be only too thankful if they were nothing worse than neutral. The better class of French and the priests were sound and zealous, but had lost much of their influence. ' So poisoned with lies ' had been the minds of the people. For this last, too, the British Canadians had been mainly responsible, acting as they had done in concert with American emissaries. As to the proportion of actual rebels of either race, neither Carleton nor any one else could judge till the test came. Martial law was now proclaimed and a part of the militia called out. Both measures were fiercely resented by the British Canadian Whigs under the plea that the Ameri- cans intended to let Canada severely alone provided she remained neutral, but that any show of arming herself would be taken by the others as an intention of offensive operations against the northern colonies. This was absurd, as none knew so well as the objectors that the Americans with their co-operation had cut the claws of the Canadian militia and rendered them virtually useless even as a defensive force, and quite impossible as an aggressive one. While the Governor was in Montreal all compromise was discarded and war virtually declared. The British in the city for the most part refused point blank to serve till Chief-Justice Hey, who accompanied Carleton, addressed them with such im- passioned reproaches that many were shamed into a better mood, while a few had been staunch throughout. The militia, however, justified the worst expectations, and with rare exceptions resolutely declined to muster. Accepting their credulity as an unavoidable if incalculable fact in the situation, one cannot be surprised at their disinclination. They had done fighting enough and to spare under the old regime when their national and religious animosities were involved. Here, however, were two sets of Englishmen and
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heretics bidding for their favour, and their old particular enemies the Bastonnais had bid, as they thought, highest. They offered them in private, if not precisely in proclama- tions, a future free of all obligations, and in which every- thing was to be had for nothing. If this kind of talk can be used with effect in the twentieth century, how much more so on the quite illiterate Canadian habitant of the eighteenth. They had been tolerably pleased with their English rulers, but they now learned that all this clemency was a mere deceptive prelude to an iron tyranny, as foreshadowed by the skilful interpreters of the Quebec Act. No doubt they were often a good deal bewildered, and we might fancy a vein of natural shrewdness caused many to reserve their opinions. But it is not unnatural that as a mass they decided to let these mad Englishmen fight out their own quarrel. It was in vain their seigniors harangued them and reminded them of their duty to their God, their King, and to themselves, and of their ancient prowess against the once hated Baston- nais. It was in vain that Bishop Briand invoked their loyalty, and the priests from a hundred and twenty rural pulpits thundered against the republican heretics. They laughed at their seigniors, showing them plainly and telling them their day was over, and for one brief interval in Canadian history disregarded their priests. A few meagre companies were scraped together in the parishes, but some even of these melted away on the march and left their officers to proceed alone. It would be absurd to blame them, but it is well the truth should be recognised, since it is quite com- monly stated in histories that our policy to the French Canadians, as stereotyped by the Quebec Act, saved Canada, and the impression thereby conveyed, even when the fiction is not actually perpetrated, that the Canadian masses rose in defence of the colony. It is true in a sense that the Quebec Act in all probability did save Canada, but not in the way generally understood. The policy it represented attached the upper class and the clergy to the Crown. The former, though they could bring no appreciable following,
THE INVASION OF CANADA 75
fought together with a handful more as individuals and counted for much, since the invaders were also few. But what is more important still, if the noblesse and clergy had been alienated, their influence would have carried a peasantry, now for the most part merely neutral, into the ranks of the enemy, and the fate of Canada would have been sealed almost without a blow.
Carleton returned to Quebec at the end of July, having done all that was for the present possible at Montreal. Colonel Prescott, of that famous but then sadly shrivelled regiment the 7th Fusiliers, was left in command with such handful of combatants as could be spared, but most of the effectives had gone forward to the Richelieu forts. At St. John's Preston had now with him five hundred regulars of the 7th and 26th Regiments and a hundred and twenty Canadian volunteers, mostly 'gentilhommes,' with a few artillerymen, while at Fort Chambly, lower down the Richelieu, was Major Stopford with eighty regulars. The British soldiers at these two forts comprised the greater part of the regular force now available for the defence of Canada. The Quebec Indians had been tampered with, but Guy Johnson, nephew of the late Sir William, had arrived with three hundred of the Six Nations from the Mohawk, to serve their useful part as scouts and messengers, and these were now set to watch the Americans at Ticonderoga.
Carleton descended the St. Lawrence to open the first session of his new Council at Quebec in no sanguine temper. While halting at Three Rivers with De Tonnancour, a wealthy seignior, trader and staunch supporter of the Crown, he gave a sovereign to a sentry at his door with the caustic remark that he was the first Canadian (peasant) he had seen in arms. He felt deeply the desertion of a people whose welfare he had consistently studied even to the loss of no little popularity at the hands of his own race, though he was fully alive to the fact that he was not the victim of any particular malignancy but of peculiar and untoward circum- stances. On his arrival he found another fraternal address
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from the Americans circulating in the parishes which opened with characteristic bombast, ' The parent of the universe hath divided this earth among the children of men.' Leaflets too had been thrust under the peasants' doors inscribed —
* On-y soit qui mal y pense. A celui que ne suivra le bon chemin.'
B ASTON.
The people had also been threatened by their American well- wishers, not perhaps too judiciously, that if they stood by the English fifty thousand troops would sweep the country with fire and sword. The first meeting of the newly organised Council on August I7th, with so much possibility of its being the last, must have been a somewhat melancholy one. Twenty-two members, with Cramahe as Lieutenant- Governor, met Carleton on this depressing occasion, and included eight French Canadians, of whom St. Luc de la Corne and De Contrecoeur were perhaps the more notable. Among the others, Hey, as Chief-Justice, Dr. Mabane, Finlay, Allsopp and John Fraser were the most conspicuous. But the session was brief enough, for with the opening of September came the news that the Americans had again crossed the border into the Richelieu country, and all in- terest in domestic legislation dropped into abeyance.
Carleton started at once for Montreal, leaving Quebec, practically bare of troops, in Cramahe's charge ; but Quebec was for the present regarded as out of harm's way. Instruc- tions from home had just arrived announcing the King's perfect faith in the zeal of his new Canadian subjects, and authorising Carleton to raise six thousand of them, for half of whom clothes and arms were on the way. There was but cold comfort in all this and a little unintentional irony, together with some evidence that the King and his friends had been as slow to accept the signs from Canada as those from the southward. Carleton had also secret intelligence from Tryon, Governor of New York, that three thousand men were to muster at Ticonderoga to be joined later by
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four thousand more from New England, with a view to a general advance into Canada. He had already written to Gage pointing out his utter lack of troops and urging the despatch of two regiments. The latter in the meantime had been supplanted by Howe at New York, who conceded a battalion and transports, but Graves, the Admiral, refused the ships, and there the matter ended. There had been no definite idea of an attempt on Canada at the American headquarters early in the summer. It was regarded as exceeding the legitimate aims of the resisting colonies and likely to alienate outside sympathy. But it soon became obvious to Washington how useful a base Canada might become to a royal army intent on cutting off New England from her sister colonies, as of course it did, though the attempt failed. Now that neutrality, if not the native assist- ance of the inhabitants, had been secured, the task appeared easy and the gains great. The strength of the defence seemed ridiculously inadequate, about eight hundred regulars and a mere handful of British loyalists and Canadian gentry. Quebec, to be sure, was a fortified town, but the low walls of Montreal were quite dilapidated and useless. There was now no longer any doubt at the latter city that an army was gathering on Lake Champlain for an advance upon it, but Carleton could not know that the very day upon which he arrived there Benedict Arnold with eleven hundred picked men was starting for the mouth of the Kennebec, with Quebec itself as their objective point. It was enough for the moment that fifteen hundred were on Lake Cham- plain awaiting reinforcements, and that some seven hundred regulars and volunteers, the greater portion of Carleton's effective force, in a couple of indifferent forts, was all that stood between them and an open city and a defenceless country.
Philip Schuyler had taken command of the American army of invasion. He was head of a Dutch family dis- tinguished for their social qualities, their large territorial possessions on the Hudson, their loyalty in the late war,
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and their hospitality to the British officers engaged in it. He also, later on, became father-in-law of Alexander Hamil- ton— all of which is perhaps a little parenthetical, as illness compelled his resignation, and Richard Montgomery, of great but somewhat fortuitous renown, succeeded to the command. Son of a Donegal landowner and M.P., and educated at Trinity, Dublin, Montgomery became at eighteen an ensign in the I7th Foot. He fought at Louis- bourg, was with Amherst in the two ensuing campaigns, which culminated in the conquest of Canada and later on as a Captain served in the West Indies. At the peace he sold his commission, through pique at some official slight, it has been said, and went to New York, near which he bought a small estate and married a daughter of Judge Livingstone, whose family was among the foremost of the Anglo- New York gentry. They were now the leading partisans of Congress in the province as opposed to the powerful De Lancy's, who stood for the Crown. Mont- gomery had sat in the first provincial convention of New York, and from his knowledge of soldiering, backed by the Livingstone influence, was appointed a brigadier. He was now just under forty and appears to have been a good- looking, attractive man, with the professional knowledge one would expect and the capacity for dealing with colonial levies one would also look for in a resident among them. A little more perhaps than an average soldier, and a gentle- man, though afflicted with an unfortunate epistolary style, who with an American wife and estate and a grudge against the British Government, found himself a quite useful general in a raw army and a personage of consequence. Such a web of emotional verbiage has been weaved about Mont- gomery's name, founded apparently upon slender fact and flavoured with such banal anecdotes, it is tolerably obvious that very little is really known about him. Historians, for instance, describe with unction how in bidding farewell to his tearful wife he remarked, * You shall never have cause to blush for your Montgomery.' We are further told that on
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the same painful occasion the great thoughts revolving in his mind were obvious from his enunciating in a deep voice, ' Tis a strange world, my masters ; I once thought so, and now I know it,' and that his wife's young brother was so overcome by this weighty and original outburst that he rushed awe-stricken from the room ! This is hard on Mont- gomery when there is so little else to say about him. He died bravely doing his duty before he had the good fortune even to draw his sword, as forty or fifty of his more fortunate but less famous comrades died in the heat of battle but are not remembered.
Schuyler had an unsatisfactory brush or two with Preston's Indians and volunteers before he retired to intrench his rather dissatisfied force on the Isle-au-noix, and then, out of health and out of spirits, into the back- ground for a space, after which Montgomery put a new face on matters. Ethan Allen with a body of Indians who favoured his cause was despatched into this region, which received the invaders with open arms and gave them both active and negative resistance. Here he met Major Brown, prominent diplomatically and actively in all this Canadian business, prowling about with two or three hundred men. Allen proposed an attempt upon Montreal, which the other agreed to, but on second thoughts, being a man of judg- ment, if not according to Allen of his word, failed the Vermonter, who with characteristic foolhardiness and puffed out with the memory of his bloodless achievement at Ticonderoga proceeded to the adventure by himself with a hundred and fifty followers.
It was near the close of September and Carleton with a hundred or so men of the 26th and a body of hardly- raised doubtful militia was lying at Montreal awaiting events at St. John's, when Ethan Allen crossed the river on the 24th and occupied some houses at Long Point, a league from the city. Thither Carleton despatched thirty regulars and two hundred and fifty militia, who in half an hour captured Allen and thirty-five of his people with slight loss.
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The over-enterprising Vermonter was shipped as a prisoner to England, where in Dartmouth Castle he had abundant leisure to reflect on the vicissitudes of the brief military career, which in his own country has given him immortality. We shall meet this somewhat irrepressible and not over scrupulous Green Mountain man again in a future chapter and in another character. Carleton in the meantime would have given much to relieve St. John's, which was now regularly invested by Montgomery's greatly superior force, recently supplied with most of the necessities of war. Indeed he actually made an attempt to cross the St. Lawrence at Longueuil with his hundred and fifty regulars and some raw militia. But the further banks were lined with American riflemen who were now swarming in this country, abetted everywhere by the inhabitants, and the fire was too hot to face.
Montgomery had now two thousand men, and one of the Livingstones residing at Sorel, as a grain merchant, had enrolled in his cause several hundred of the habitants, descendants mostly of that famous French regiment of Carrignan which had been in part disbanded and settled on the Richelieu a century before.
Fort Chambly stood and still stands at the foot of the long rapids which below St. John's broke the navigation of the Richelieu on its way from Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, a square stone fortress with bastions and curtains, erected in 1710. It was now held as already stated by Major Stopford, son of Lord Courtown, with eighty men of the 7th, and was considered proof against anything but heavy artillery. Stopford, however, after receiving a few shots from nine pounders brought down from St. John's by the ubiquitous Brown and a small detachment, surrendered at discretion in thirty-six hours, on October i8th. There were a good many women in the fort to be sure, but it was also full of stores and war material, invaluable to the Americans. Its fall brought about that of St. John's, from before which winter must have driven the invaders, if
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only by cutting them off from their base of supplies. Under the circumstances, Stopford's conduct, leading as it did to the occupation of Canada, was disgraceful. There is con- temporary evidence that it was so regarded by the army in Canada, though not apparently by the home authorities, for he was neither censured, nor hindered in promotion. But Germain had just become the first minister of the Crown ; and in an age when that exalted post could be occupied by an ex-cavalry commander who had been cashiered for cowardice in the field, anything was possible.
Stopford had not even the wits to throw his stores and guns into the river beneath the walls of the fort, which would probably have saved the situation. A fortnight later, after a short defence but with provisions almost exhausted, Preston had to succumb before the prospect of a prolonged siege and the battering of a more formidable artillery. Montgomery's bad turn of manner brought a brief hitch in the negotiations, his written conditions ending with * regrets that so much valour had not been shown in a better cause/ This superfluous improvement of the occasion Preston, as a King's officer, would not brook, swearing that he and his men would rather die at their posts than subscribe to a document containing such a gratuitous insult, upon which it was expunged. So most of Carleton's regulars, the luck- less Andre" of later notoriety among them, and some four- score picked Canadians, went off to New Jersey as prisoners. Montgomery with his exultant army, and the goodwill of the surrounding parishes that were incidentally making some money out of him, moved directly upon Montreal by the rough road which cut straight across to La Prairie, within sight of the defenceless city. Carleton, who could make bricks without straw as well as most people, could not save Montreal. All he could do was to spike his guns and attempt to save himself and the hundred and thirty men and officers who were left around him, praying at the same time that the west wind might hold.
To the sorrow of their friends and the delight of Walker
F
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and his party, who had been inconveniently subjected to martial law, Carleton sailed on November 2nd, the day before the Americans entered the city. A fair breeze bore their little flotilla safely along to Sorel, where the Americans in force had erected batteries to dispute their passage. Here at an ill moment the wind veered to the east and held them in a trap with capture inevitable. But 'the vital importance of Carleton himself getting through to Quebec was urged on all sides, and the French skipper of one of the boats, who had earned the sobriquet of ' La Tourtre ' or the wild pigeon for his rapid voyages, undertook to get the General past the Americans, and he proved as good as his word. Starting that night with muffled oars and paddling through the narrow passage of the fie du Pas with their hands, they escaped the vigilance of the foe, and traversing Lake St. Peter in safety arrived at Three Rivers, where Carleton heard that one American force was marching along the north shore to Quebec and another encamped near it. When he reached the city by means of an armed sloop, * to the unspeakable joy of the garrison/ he found that the latter part of the rumour current at Three Rivers was substantially true, but how that came about requires some brief explanation.
It has been already stated that on that very September day which witnessed Carleton's arrival at Montreal, a force was sailing for the mouth of the Kennebec bent on a secret march through the wilderness and the surprise, if possible, of Quebec. This of course was that somewhat famous exploit which brought the notorious Arnold to the front. Now the mouth of the Kennebec is just north of the present town of Portland in Maine. The river is navigable as far as Augusta, then Fort Western, a frontier post. Thence a trail of water, sometimes rapid, sometimes still, and merging betimes into lakes of various sizes, climbs the long mountain watershed forming the Canadian frontier, beyond which again the waters of the Chaudiere pursue their rapid down- ward course to the St. Lawrence just above Quebec. The
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distance by a crow's flight is some two hundred miles, that traversed by tortuous streams and defiles was at least a hundred more. But its mileage was the least of it, for the whole route lay through a shaggy untrodden wilderness of rock, flood and forest. It had been once surveyed and the trees blazed, but there was now scarcely any trail, and it was only known to stray Indians and trappers, who could travel light or support themselves by the way with fish-hook or rifle. But for an armed force of over a thousand men in a hurry, the northern woods offered of course no shred of sustenance. They had not only to carry a month's pro- visions, and their ammunition, but the stout boats which were necessary to their transport over the innumerable obstacles which choked or parted the waterways.
Washington approved the enterprise and nominated Arnold, who had already shown his mettle and talent for leadership, to the command. The force was a picked one, * the flower of the colonial youth ' as was said at the time, all young men and lusty. About half of the eleven hundred were hardy mountaineers from the Indian frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia, including men like Daniel Morgan and Hendrichs, the rest New England volunteers, gentlemen or farmers' sons. They started from Fort Western on September 25th, with two hundred bateaux, and were five weeks in the wilderness. Their adventures form a somewhat thrilling chapter in American annals. Letters, journals and evidence of every kind have been so industriously collected that, even allowing for some exaggera- tion of patriotic editing, there is no doubt but that it was a great performance, for they were confronted by unusual floods and an altogether unseasonable snowfall. They had to haul the bateaux, now up flooded torrents, now up shallow rocky channels ; to carry them on sore shoulders over portages bristling with primitive evergreens, and often broken by rocks and cliffs, or through that sodden chaos of prostrate trunks and oozy wreckage that distinguishes the Canadian woodland swamp. They slept and toiled through days of
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chill and snow and rain. Their bateaux were gradually broken and washed away, their provisions spoiled, their boots gave out, and after a time from semi-starvation, their strength as well. Four hundred flinching at the idea of death from sheer want turned back. Seven hundred struggled on, reduced at last to eat boiled bits of hide and leggings, candle-ends or grease. Some died, a few were drowned, but the actual extremity of starvation only lasted a very few days, though they had not at the moment even the consolation of that foreknowledge. Arnold himself went forward down the head-waters of the Chaudiere on a rickety raft. Reaching the first Canadian settlements he found them friendly, another uncertain calculation, and carried back provisions just in the nick of time. The short remainder of the march produced supplies, and the men had the recuperative powers of youth and strength. They reached the St. Lawrence at Pont Levis by the 8th of November for the most part recovered, to find that Gramaae* had only a few hours before removed every boat from the south shore, having just heard of their approach through an intercepted letter that Arnold had sent by an Indian to Washington.
Arnold's dash and resolution in this enterprise is beyond cavil, and the tenacity of his followers was no little due to his inspiration, while his resourceful energy at the end possibly saved their lives. With normal October weather his difficulties would have been infinitely less. His whole force would have come through in good condition a week or two earlier, and if Quebec had been unprepared he might conceivably have captured it. Had this been so I should not have felt called upon here to dwell even thus long upon 'Arnold's March' by way of explanation to my readers, for the exploit, like that of Wolfe, would have rung down the ages.
As it was, Arnold summoned a council of war, and suggested an immediate attempt on the city, against which adventure only one member voted. They found the habi-
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tants friendly, and collected sufficient canoes to cross the river and land at Wolfe's Cove, whence they marched over the Plains of Abraham and demonstrated against the walls of the city, being received with defiant cheers and a salute of cannon-shot. Arnold now lodged his men in and about the general hospital near the St. Charles, and sent a summons to Cramah£ couched in the bombastic phraseology that was the mode among his contemporaries. Cramah£ declined to receive it, and Arnold coming to the conclusion that the city was invulnerable to riflemen, marched his force up the river to Pointe-aux-Tremble, there to await Montgomery who had just occupied Montreal.
' Never,' wrote Chief-Justice Hey, who was in the thick of all this business, to the Lord Chancellor, * did such a mixture of ignorance, fear, credulity, or perverseness take possession of the human mind ' (alluding to the habitants). * Every- thing seems desperate, and I fear before this letter arrives Canada will be in full possession of the rebels.' He blames the seigniors in part for this disaffection of the habitants, though as a matter of fact the latter had small cause for complaint. Political liberty, as understood and preached by their American friends, had not as yet the faintest meaning for them ; their rents were microscopic ; their church dues to this day, after generations of political power, are scrupulously paid. Certain coercive customs of the old French regime had disappeared. They had virtually every- thing necessary to their situation, which was beyond all comparison, as every traveller admitted, far superior to that of the European peasant. But the more ignorant the subject the easier to move it by irresponsible appeal to simple greed, and this is what the American agents had mostly done. ' But for the British troops,' wrote Hey, ' this province would have subdued the colonies from north to south in the last war, and the terror of that memory has made them take enormous pains to win over the French.'
But the seigniors, by their imprudent and overdone
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exultation at the retention of the land laws, as one can well imagine, gave needless provocation to their rivals the British merchants, and conveyed the impression, and sometimes no doubt a good deal more, to the peasantry that the good old times and all their abandoned privileges were to be renewed. Restraint and political sagacity were hardly to be expected of an eighteenth-century Canadian seignior. One can see it all so plainly in the correspondence of the time, and the whole situation is so natural in view of the curious, picturesque and inharmonious elements that created it. The high-tempered, ultra-provincial and often ignorant seignior cursing the impudence of the peasantry in chorus with a bourgeoisie allied to the former in interest, often in marriage, and frequently seigniors themselves. A British mercantile community resenting the pretensions of a pseudo- aristocracy not qualified from their point of view to air them and altogether an anachronism in a poor, undeveloped country; Protestants themselves of the vigorous kind generally found in a Catholic country, to say nothing of the strong New England Puritan strain among them, and exciting some jealousy in the towns by their success in trade. A priesthood socially humble but professionally autocratic, detesting and dreading the American influence. A nondescript population in the two cities, French and English, the latter not large below the bourgeoisie, and remaining historically inarticulate. Lastly, an altogether preponderating peasantry, illiterate, inscrutable, twisted this way and that by currents of strange and new ideas, which play now upon their fears, now upon their robust underly- ing instinct for the main chance.
When Carleton arrived soon after Arnold's disappearance up the river he found Cramahe" had taken every precaution within his power. The militia had been enrolled, the stores for eight months laid in. A skilled engineer, James Thompson, who has left us an account of his experiences, had the dilapidated walls patched up and erected much heavy palisading at vulnerable points. For no representa-
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tion of Murray or Carleton had been able to wring money out of the British Government for securing the key of Canada. One provision Cramahe, who complained that he was more afraid of the rebels within, even in the militia, than those without, had not yet made, and that was the somewhat critical one of severing the sheep from the goats. Carleton soon remedied this by issuing a stringent order that every man who was not prepared to take his part in the defence of the city must quit it within four days, and there was a great exodus. After this purging Carleton took stock of his resources in men and material. The second was ample enough for the scanty number of the first, as a hundred guns were mounted, or soon to be, on the walls and batteries, while there were more firearms than men to use them, and more ammunition than they could fire away. Of the militia there were some five hundred and odd French, and some three to four hundred seasoned soldiers of M'Lean's Royal Emigrants with ninety recruits just arrived from Newfoundland. This enterprising officer had raised his corps quite recently from the Highland settlements of disbanded soldiers and others made in America after the late war. He had scoured the colonies as far as North Carolina, but on account of the tense local feeling, and not from any reluctance on the part of the Gaelic immigrants, was ultimately reduced to the limited recruiting-grounds of the Murray Bay seigniories and the New York frontier.
The men from the frigates Lizard and Hunter lying in the haven and the crews of some merchant vessels made up about four hundred more. French volunteers, students and others capable of guarding prisoners or performing negative but useful duties, made up the roster of that nationality which is extant to seven hundred and ten names. In all there were some eighteen hundred men armed and on duty, while the exodus from panic or from Carleton's purging process had reduced the population to about five thousand souls. Colonel Caldwell, a retired officer resident
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in Quebec, commanded the British, Colonel Voyer the French volunteers, and Captain Henderson the naval detachment, while M'Lean of the Royal Highland Emi- grants acted as second in command to Carleton. Thus poorly manned, though fortunate in command and the only spot in the colony still held by a British force, Quebec braced herself for the fourth and last siege in her history, and once again to determine who were to be the future masters of Canada. Carleton knew and the Americans knew that while Quebec still rose unconquered upon her rock above the waves of domestic anarchy and foreign invasion Canada was not won.
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CHAPTER V
THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC
THE complacent photographer has made almost every one familiar with the hopelessly inadequate presentation of Quebec that seems inseparable from his process, and its limitations. I would ask the reader who has nothing better before his mind than the low-lying flattened out ridge extended across the background of a wholly dispropor- tionate expanse of water, exhibited by steamship companies' emigration pamphlets and books of travel, to banish from his mind this triumph of the inartistic and these distortions of a camera. How different is the reality of this same scene as you draw up to it over the face of the waters, every one who has the good fortune to be familiar with it well knows. It is not my business to dwell here on the noble pose of the historic city as it rises with its spires and gables and much of the detail of an ancient town and all the dignity of a storied one to the high stern outlines of the citadel and the flanking buttresses of Cape Diamond. The mention of the camera, however, which so stultifies the distinction of Quebec, brings us to hard prose, which is fitting as we are concerned here with a siege, so I will make free with a suggestion that will help the reader unfamiliar with the locality to a rough-and-ready notion of the physical character of the famous city. Let him imagine a shoe pointing down the river, with the lower town, the quays and business quarters forming the flat toe, and the upper town climbing in parts where it is not abrupt rock and spreading wide over the higher part of the instep.
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The flat upper and hollow part of the shoe, prolonged con- siderably, may represent the plateau ridge at the back of the city loosely known as the Plains of Abraham, while the near side may fairly stand for the cliffs which raise them above the St. Lawrence. The further or inland side of the toe, continuing the metaphor, splays out to be roughly marked by the tortuous course of the St. Charles, while the further side of the shoe falls with less abruptness to the flats beside it. The confluence of this river with the greater one, makes an angle or partial promontory on which the city is set and so majestically upraised. All this water front, however, has been greatly altered in modern times by the pushing out of docks and their embankments. The land defences, the walls with their three gates ran and in great part still run across the angle from river to river, though now, on the St. Lawrence side, to the Citadel crowning the height above it. The river contracts slightly just opposite Quebec, the distance across to Point Levis, its complement on the south bank and the site of Wolfe's batteries, being only three-quarters of a mile. Below, it ex- pands again immediately, helped by the spreading shallow mouth of the St. Charles, in itself but an inconsiderable stream and for five straight miles down forms a wide and noble basin, terminated by the woody and fertile island of Orleans which parts the river for nearly twenty miles. A point this last at which generations of Quebeckers, looking down over the broad reach with its distant background of the Laurentian mountains, have caught their first anxious sight from the ramparts of a friendly or a hostile sail or watched for the first harbingers of news from Europe after the long winter silence, or cast eager eyes in the lean years of old for the oft-needed provision ships from France. On December the 5th Montgomery and Arnold, with about twelve hundred men, a considerable proportion tricked out in scarlet uniforms acquired at the capture of the St. John's forts, and about three hundred Canadians under Brown, sat down before the city. Arnold quartered his men in
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and about St. Roch near the St. Charles, while the general pitched his headquarters at Holland House on the St. Foy road. The latter before proceeding to those more active measures in which he was calculated to shine, tried some preliminary passes with his pen directed at Carleton and his garrison. The former he accused of ill-treating himself and of cruelty to his prisoners (Allen and company) but his own humanity, he protested, moved him to give his opponent the chance of saving himself and others from the destruction which hung over them. He was well ac- quainted with Carleton's situation, namely ' a great extent of works, from their nature incapable of defence, manned by a motley crew of sailors, the greatest part our friends or of citizens who wish to see us within their walls, and a few of the worst troops who ever styled themselves soldiers.' He pointed out the impossibility of relief, the want of necessities in the event of a simple blockade, and the absurdity of resistance. He was himself at the head of troops accustomed to success, confident in the righteousness of their cause and so incensed at Carleton's inhumanity that he could with difficulty restrain them, and much more to this effect. He concluded by warning Carleton that if he destroyed stores, public or private, there would be no mercy shown. Carleton regarding Montgomery, an ex- British officer in arms against his king, as outside the pale of recognition, took no notice of his missive, which was conveyed by an old woman. Several copies of a further address to the inhabitants were shot over the walls affixed to arrows and were not calculated to edify the thousand or so volunteers in arms, whom he called * a wretched garrison defending wretched works,' and drawing for their benefit a lurid picture of a city in flames ; carnage, confusion, plunder all caused by a General courting ruin to avoid his shame.
The snow was already a foot deep when Montgomery planted his batteries, one of twelve pounders, on the St. Foy road five hundred yards from the St. John's gate, and a bomb
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battery in the suburb of St. Roch. A few score shells were thrown into the city, but with small effect, before the heavy guns of the garrison put the others out of action. Arnold was driven by their fire from his headquarters, and Mont- gomery's horse was killed by a cannon ball. The rifle fire of the Alleghany men who occupied the cupola of the Intendant's palace near the St. Charles did much more damage, picking off the men on the walls till it became unsafe to show a head above them. But this really did not advance matters, and the besiegers, exposed to all the rigour of winter and ineffectively clad against it, were in no enviable situation. Montgomery had expected an easy triumph after his Montreal experience, and if his friends are to be believed, began to suffer no little from dejection. His letters to his father-in-law were pitched in a considerably lower key than those he addressed to Carleton and the garri- son : * I need not tell you that till Quebec is taken Canada is unconquered. There are three alternatives — siege, invest- ment, or storm. The first is impossible from the difficulty of making trenches in a Canadian winter and the impossi- bility of living in them if we could.' The soil, he continued, did not admit of mining ; and lastly, his artillery was useless for breaching walls. Nor had he enough men to invest the city and prevent the garrison, familiar with the country, from getting in food and firewood. He was limited, too, in the number of Canadians he could enlist by the want of specie, for the paper money of Congress was already looked at askance by the country people. Storming might be feasible, for if his own force was small, so was Carleton's, who had moreover a long extent of works to defend, which was against him, as Montgomery could select his point, while the long strain of constant expectation would breed weak- ness and discontent in so mixed a garrison.
Thus Montgomery calculated his chances, and from the first it will be seen that he had virtually decided on the bold venture in which he so bravely fell. Whatever mis- givings he had, he wore a brave front at least, and openly
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gave out, so says tradition, that he would eat his Christmas dinner either in Quebec or Hell, though we may suspect that Daniel Morgan or Arnold or possibly the garrison in exuberant reminiscence, interpolated the alternative. I am not going to linger over the various schemes of assault that were mooted, and how scaling-ladders were made under the direction of Aaron Burr of later political fame, then an ardent and militant youth, and how some of Walker's friends from Montreal came up, though not as combatants, but with urgent advice to attempt the lower town, as with true commercial insight they argued that the citizens in arms, fearful for their storehouses, would surrender rather than suffer the batteries from above to play on them. Montgomery, it is said, was all for attempting a preliminary breach in the walls, but was overruled, and possibly with shrewder forecast than the spirited amateurs around him, counted the cost.
The plan of action was at length settled. The lower town was to be attacked simultaneously at the south-west corner below Cape Diamond and at the opposite extremity, where the defences dipped to the St. Charles. Arnold with the larger force was to attempt the latter, Montgomery with a smaller one the former. If successful, the two were to effect a junction and carry the upper town from within.
In the meantime all went well in the city. Montgomery kept Christmas neither in Quebec nor in the other place, but in Holland House. Reports of the enemy's intentions were brought in by deserters or escaped detenus for several days in succession, each more or less specifying the night after their arrival as the appointed hour, and each in a manner right, for either the news of their escape or an unfavour- able turn of the weather, caused a series of postponements. Every man from the General at the convent of the Recollets in the upper town, with the defenders of that quarter, to the officers and privates at their several posts in the lower town, slept in their clothes. French and English, say all of the half-dozen combatants who have left us day-to-day journals
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of the siege, which sorely tax the restraint necessary to our space, vied with one another in spirit and energy.
At last, in the dark of the small hours on the last morning of the year, at about four of the clock, Captain Malcolm Eraser of the Emigrants, who commanded the main guard, saw a rocket shoot up and fire signals flash beyond Cape Diamond. Judging, and rightly so, that it was the signal for attack, he sent men hurrying hither and thither to spread the alarm, and himself ran rapidly down St. Louis Street shouting ' Turn out, turn out,' as loudly and as often as he could. Every one from the General downwards sprang to arms and hurried immediately to their posts. Drums beat and the bells of the city clanged their loud alarums. The morning, though two hours yet from dawn, after a quiet starlit night waxed black and boisterous with a driving snowstorm from the north-east, so that at some of the remoter posts neither drums nor even bells could be heard. But the Canadian rebels under Brown, making a feint against the walls, began firing so early that the flashes of their guns and the hurtling of some stray shells from St. Roch made further warning unnecessary.
All this meant that Montgomery and about three hundred men had dropped down by Wolfe's Cove to the narrow strand between cliff and river, and were picking their way in the teeth of the storm over the rough, narrow, ice-encumbered track towards a barrier at Pre"s de Ville, the narrow entry to the town between the river and the rocky steep of Cape Diamond. Here, in a stone house by the barrier, a small battery under a merchant skipper, Captain Barnesfare, was stationed with a sergeant and fifteen sailors, while above it was a blockhouse garrisoned by a squad of French Canadian riflemen. A wealth of melodramatic accessories have been woven in picture magazines and elsewhere around this brief and simple tragedy. Poor Barnesfare has been represented as drunk and fleeing in panic from his guns at the sight of the approaching column, and then rushing back terrified but repentant and applying the fatal match that saved Canada. As a matter of fact, the stout skipper and his sergeant,
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peering into the dark, blustering, and snowy night, descried a group of men approaching, and duly fired their battery, with such apparent effect that they saw little or nothing more. They seem to have fired again for good luck into the void, and the riflemen in the blockhouse to have done the same with equal vagueness. The result was only dis- covered the next morning after all was over, when thirteen bodies with just a flicker of life in one of them were found lying buried in the new-fallen snow, and a single stark hand peering above it — a gruesome signal, one might almost fancy, that the body of the gallant, ill-fated leader lay beneath it, for the hand was Montgomery's. The whole advanced company had in fact fallen, and the column behind had fled, with no clear knowledge among them of what had happened, save the very just conclusion that the venture was a too perilous one for average men. Shortly afterwards a passing panic arose in this quarter of the city, started, it is said, by an old woman who shouted that the Americans had got in on the other side, as panics will be started among citizens playing the soldier at a critical moment in a stormy night.
Arnold in the meantime had led some six to seven hundred men, mostly his own tried followers, from St. Roch against the almost equally narrow gut between the mouth of the St. Charles and the steep pitch of the town above it. Here at the Sault au Matelot a barrier had been erected, mounted with two cannon, and another some way behind it, as the Americans found to their cost. If Arnold had expected to surprise the guard, he must have been disappointed, for long before his men got there the bells of the city were clanging wildly, and Brown's Canadians were firing harmless fusilades on the plateau and slopes beyond the city walls, while as he passed under the Palace gate and the Hotel Dieu his troops were fired on briskly by the pickets and exposed by the glare of fire-balls flung from the heights above. He himself was hit in the leg and put hopelessly out of action, while his men, encum-
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bered with scaling-ladders, made slow progress and lost many of their numbers. Morgan now assumed the com- mand and carried the first barrier under conditions which are surrounded by hopelessly conflicting evidence, but of little importance and in any case to his credit. Following a slightly circuitous route, the Americans now found them- selves in a narrow street, the end of which was blocked by a second barrier strongly defended and so impregnable to assault that it was in fact never in danger. Behind and around the barrier were Highlanders and Frenchmen under Nairne and Voyer, soon afterwards joined by Caldwell and his British volunteers, who had completed their easy task of frightening Brown's Canadians away from the upper walls. Exposed to the fire of the barrier and that of one or two adjacent houses manned and prepared for the purpose, the Americans were in an awkward trap. Some of them occu- pied houses, but were soon driven from them into the street again at the point of the bayonet. After a little desultory fighting their position became untenable from the punish- ment they were receiving, while to complete their dis- comfiture Carleton had sent Captain Laws with seventy Highlanders and two guns out of the Palace gate to take the Americans in the rear. Here in St. Roch they encoun- tered a belated company of Arnold's under Dearborn, which after a short fight they routed or captured, destroying at the same time an American battery which had been active in that quarter. Thence wheeling round they came in over the outer barrier of the Sault au Matelot and cut off the retreat of the Americans, a few of whom, however, ventured the dangerous passage over the ice of the St. Charles to the Beauport shore. Having in the meantime received no sign from Montgomery and done all that men could do, the Americans, to the number of four hundred and thirty, forty of whom were wounded, laid down their arms. Thirty-two were reported dead. But Colonel M'Lean, who ought to know, states in a private letter that numbers more were found afterwards in the snow, and yet others when it melted
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in the spring, and he gives the whole total of those who fell at two hundred and twenty. The loss of the British, who were less exposed, was trifling — Captain Anderson of the merchant service, killed by Morgan, and five privates, with a like number of wounded.
Day had now broken, and in due course the prisoners were marched to the upper town, paraded before Carleton, provided with breakfast and then with secure quarters, the officers in the Seminary, the men in the Recollet. A little later a party went out from the Pr£s-de-Ville and found the bodies of Montgomery and his companions buried by the snowstorm, as already related ; that of the former being identified at once by an American officer who accompanied them. He was buried with all respect under a bastion near the St. Louis Gate, and the spot where he fell has long been indicated by a tablet, while another has more recently been placed by his countrymen near that where he lies. He died a soldier's death, like his friends around him, in the act of adventuring an enterprise the nature of which none of them could estimate, and of posthumous fame he has had his full share. His division, however, shared in none of the honours of that day, which belong wholly to Arnold's corps and in great part to Daniel Morgan's mountaineers, whose courage and endurance are set forth in some detail by a good deal of contemporary evidence, and can be no more than acknow- ledged in this brief record.
The crisis was over. French and British volunteers were delighted with themselves, and for once with one another. As for Carleton, his military capacity and cool, confident demeanour had been a tower of strength. * His looks were watched and gave courage to many ; there was no despon- dency in his features. He will find a numerous band to follow him in every danger. He is known, and that know- ledge gave courage and strength to the garrison/ Naturally enough there was no lack of ardent spirits burning to follow up their success by a sally on the reduced and dispirited Americans. Even Caldwell and M'Lean were in favour
Q
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of it. The general, however, was too old a soldier to take superfluous risks for nothing. His business was to hold Quebec, and it was at least four months before relief could come. Till then they must be cut off from all the world, nor could they guess what reinforcements the Americans might bring up. But Quebec was a formidable place to invest in winter. It speaks well for the resolution and courage of this handful of raw American soldiers, scourged now with small-pox, and not for some little time reinforced, that they stuck to their task. Arnold was now in command, though his wound kept him in the hospital, and Wooster, an elderly New Englander of some military experience but slight initiative, and still at Montreal, succeeded to the chief command in Canada. Later on he exchanged with Arnold at Quebec. It is unnecessary to dwell on the remainder of the siege, which dragged its slow and uneventful length till the British fleet arrived in May. It is not often that the crisis of a five months' siege is over in the first fortnight, but though there were plenty of alarms, and still more alarming reports and a good deal of almost futile cannonad- ing, the city was never again in danger. Sufficiently victualled and with a reasonably good health record and plenty of confidence, the garrison, though kept well on the alert, were in good spirits and only eager for another brush with the enemy. Congress was keenly anxious to retain occupation of Canada if only till the spring brought a British force there for the moral effect they conceived it to have on the rest of the country. So great efforts were made to spare money and men, and to forward the latter over the long formidable snow-bound route that led to Canada. Fifteen hundred men, fit for duty, were at one time before Quebec, but the hardships and sickness there suffered, particularly by the earlier combatants, ill-clad, indifferently fed, and often unpaid, enhances the merit of their resolution. The winter was unusually fierce, and the guns on the walls, says a diarist, thirty feet above the bottom of the ditch, seemed lifted but little above the snow-drifts.
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A battery was opened at Point Levis, but its shells had little effect, while as a last despairing effort in April when the river opened, a fire-ship was sent up from the Island of Orleans, and in the confusion it was expected to cause an assault was to be attempted. But the navigator lost his head, left his charge prematurely, and it went blazing harm- lessly down the river.
Montreal in the meantime had been the base and head- quarters of the occupation. No less a person than Franklin, with Chase and Carrol of Carrolton, in Maryland, and his priestly brother the future Catholic Bishop, had been there as a commission from Congress, the lay members to take stock of the situation, the priest as a fraternal envoy to the Canadian Church. The former did not like the look of things, while the priest utterly failed to impress his Canadian brethren. A reaction against the Americans gradually but surely set in. The best-intentioned of half-disciplined armies must in time cause friction : above all when they have only worthless money to exchange for goods, and the habitant, with some bitter experience of card money under Bigot, insisted on handling coin from the very first. In April there were no less than four thousand Congress troops in the colony. Military rule, too, inevitably infringed on civic and rural justice till the Americans in their correspondence begin to ask one another in despair, as their British pre- decessors had done, who of the British or Canadians were true to them and who could be depended upon. They could raise no more Canadian regiments as the men would not serve for anything but hard money, which was not to be had, while certain disciplinary measures that were found necessary were ill-taken as coming from the sons of liberty. The notary Badeau of Three Rivers has left us a minute and instructive picture of all that went on in his little town of two thousand souls midway between the two capitols during the American occupation and on their line of march. Stout Royalist himself, but as interpreter in close association with both parties, he tells us of dinners where Canadian guests
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were wagered by American officers and took their bets in dozens of wine that Quebec would be taken. Of more importance, he paints a substantial Royalist minority who sang Te Deums with the nuns and priests for British successes, but had to act circumspectly, as pronounced sentiments or even statements of fact suggesting partiality to the Crown were forbidden under the military rule. This, both here and at Montreal, was sometimes unwise and irritat- ing though not harsh, save for the despatching of a good many suspected loyalists as prisoners to the middle colonies. Attempts were made to persuade the Canadians to elect representatives to a provincial assembly at Montreal, but the habitants as yet cared for none of these things. A convention of men too, who could not sign their own names, must have struck even the most perfervid democrat from Connecticut or Rhode Island as a little premature.
The urgent despatches of Carleton and Cramahe" sent home in the preceding summer and autumn had not been fruitless. On the morning of May 6th every one still abed sprang out of it at the joyful news that crowds were gather- ing at all the vantage-points of the upper town to witness the welcome sight of a sail forging out from the bend at the Point of Orleans. It was a British frigate, the Surprise, to be quickly followed by the I sis sloop-of-war. It was soon known that they had troops on board, and better still, were but the harbingers of a substantial armament even now upon the sea. For the immediate purpose, however, there proved to be marines and infantry sufficient, and when all of these, some two hundred in number, were landed, and in order, the drums beat to arms and the joyful order went out that all the French and English militia were to join the troops and seamen in the long-wished-for attack on the foe who had for so long hemmed them in. Marching out of the St. Louis and St. John's Gates headed by Carleton, the little army reached the old battlefield of St. Foy without opposition, where it extended itself in line, the new-comers in the centre and the French militia as a reserve, ' making,'
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says one joyous diarist, * a noble appearance.' The Congress troops were seen gathering from every direction, but not, as it proved to the others' disappointment, for battle. They were under the command of General Thomas, of Bunker Hill fame, Wooster having been removed as incompetent, and having already recognised that the game was up were preparing for retreat. It was a pity that an army, part of which at least had borne itself with such fortitude, should not have been a little more or a little less expeditious in its departure. As it was, they executed a somewhat disorganised flight in face of the enemy. Nine hundred Pennsylvanians took ambush in the woods for a brief period, but soon took to their heels with the rest. ' They left cannon, muskets, ammunition, and even clothes,' says an eye-witness ; ' we found the roads strewn with these, while bread and pork all lay in heaps on the highway with howitzers and field-pieces. So great was their panic that they left behind them many papers of consequence to those who wrote them and to whom they were writ. Look which way soever one could, men were flying and carts driving away with all possible speed.' There was no attempt, however, at pursuit, and it was a bloodless victory.
One may fairly credit Carleton with this. To his soldierly qualities he added that of mercy in a very marked degree. Strong cause for resentment as he had towards the Americans, he always evinced a reluctance to shed their blood or even to inflict unnecessary suffering. He had caused the prisoners captured at the assault to be well cared for, and only on the discovery of a plot for escaping had been reduced to harsher measures. An American force, which had latterly occupied Point Levis with their batteries, had at this moment no open route for escape but the wild forests to the southward. A day or two later Carleton issued strict orders that the woods should be diligently searched, and any American fugitives in distress should be brought to the general hospital and properly cared for ; concluding with the further promise,
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made known by proclamation, that as soon as their health was restored they should be set free to return to their respective provinces. Yet there was no man alive who had more cause to feel aggrieved at their action than Carleton, and oddly enough he was the one solitary British general who left off the better of them in this unfortunate war.
More transports now came dropping into the basin of Quebec, and Carleton was able to start up the river with the 29th and 47th Regiments for Three Rivers, the base decided on for further movements against the enemy. Before going he dismissed his trusty volunteers to their civic duties with the thanks they had well earned. By June ist he was back again in time to receive Burgoyne with the rest of the expeditionary force which arrived upon that day.
All was now rejoicing. The river was alive with shipping and the Chateau St. Louis, gay with the resplendent uniforms of the British and German officers, for the King's birthday on the 4th was celebrated at an auspicious moment for Canada. Besides the two regiments already pushed on to Three Rivers, the 2ist, 24th, 3ist, 34th, 53rd, and 63rd were here with four batteries of artillery. Of Brunswickers there were three infantry regiments, three of dismounted dragoons, with a corps of Hessians, all under Baron Riedesel, whose gallant wife joined him later to face the perils of Burgoyne's campaign and add another to the list of foreigners whose pen-pictures and journals during these wars have laid every one interested in them under such uncommon obligations. Little recked these proud battalions, who this year were to form Carleton's army for the purging of Canada and as much more as might be, and Burgoyne's more definitely aggressive force for the next, what lay in store for them. The habitants about and below Quebec, fickle enough from lack of experience, per- haps, rather than temperament, discovered that they had made a mistake, once more listened to their priests, and above all went to farm work again cheerful in the best
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market prospects for hay and grain that had probably ever been theirs. The price of wheat was no longer settled by an Intendant, for the habitant had become an exporter. The British merchant, with all his intolerance, had at least made an open market, put money in his pocket, and stimulated his simple prosperity. Little need be said of Carleton's rapid march at the head of the greater part of his now ample force in pursuit of the Americans. Eraser, one of his brigadiers, who fell afterwards at Saratoga, had a brush with two thousand of the enemy beyond Three Rivers, but there was no other fighting, and the Americans travelled so expeditiously that Sorel, Montreal, Chambly, and St. John's were all evacuated by the time the British in two divisions reached them. Canada was cleared by June 25th, and the general found himself over the border looking up Lake Champlain, recently furrowed by southern-bound American keels, in a somewhat helpless situation so far as further enterprise was concerned. For there was as yet no road to speak of along the rugged and then wooded and swampy shores of this long ninety miles of lake, while the Americans had been careful to leave no vestige of any shipping for the transport of troops and even found time in their hurry to burn all the craft they did not want. Carleton had urged the Home Government to send out many things besides soldiers necessary to campaigning in this region, artificers and boats in sections among them, but they had sent neither the one nor the other, and he was now at a standstill. Germain, the most impossible and unpopular minister who had ever been in charge of national undertakings, was now at the helm. As Lord George Sackville he had been cashiered for cowardice in the field at Minden. The Lords had even protested on that account against his taking his seat in their House. He had neither tact nor ability, and was arrogant, vindictive and narrow-minded. But he suited George the Third and was now a principal Secretary of State conducting a critical war in a country the very nature
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of which he had not taken the pains to understand. He hated Carleton for having ignored a placeman he had shipped to Canada, and showed his dislike so plainly in several futile despatches that he received a series of as contemptuously ironical letters as a British general ever wrote to a Secretary of State. Carleton had done most things in his time, but never before had he to build a fleet and command it himself. The building took a long time. The country had been denuded of everything, and Carleton himself shut up for months in Quebec. There was scarcely any skilled labour, and every plank had to be sawn from the woods with inadequate machinery, while the Americans were in force at Crown Point and Ticonderoga, at the head of the lake, with the intention of blocking the road to the Hudson and the south.
Arnold, it will be remembered, had been commanding in Montreal since April, and he had a narrow escape of being caught there by Generals Riedesel and Philips. But in May, while Quebec was being relieved, there had been some righting between his command and an enterprising British officer, Captain Forster, who belonged to the far-away garrison at Detroit but was on duty at Oswegatchic, some fifty miles above Montreal, with forty men of the 8th Regiment and a few volunteers. On hearing of the relief of Quebec he reflected that a demonstration against Montreal could at least do no harm, so with his small party and two hundred Indians he felt his way there. At the Cedars he found an American major and four hundred men with some guns barring this path. Joined, however, by De Senneville, a local seignior, and a few score Canadians, he forced the position and captured its de- fenders. Arnold, however, now came on from Montreal with fifteen hundred men, and Forster had no alternative but to re-cross the mouth of the Ottawa to Vaudreuil. Arnold followed to St. Anne's on the hither shore, and skirting the rapids made famous by Tom Moore, occupied the old fortified stone chateau of De Senneville known as
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Boisbriant on the shore of the Lake-of-the-Two-Mountains. Advancing across the lake in bateaux against Forster, he was repulsed, and after setting fire to the fort returned to Montreal. But a fortnight of skirmishing, unnecessary to touch upon here, resulted in Forster giving up four hundred and thirty prisoners, to be exchanged later for an equal number of the Royalists taken the preceding year at St. John's. The contract was broken by Congress, which created much indignation on the British side and not a little in some quarters on the other. The old fortalice of Boisbriant, built about 1700, still displays its ruins picturesquely set in the grounds of a country house by the lake shore. It is in part roof-high, and overhung by forest trees presents the most suggestive relic of ancient frontier warfare in all Canada and probably in North America. As this story is concerned solely with Canada, we need not follow Carleton and his fleet, which was not ready till October, up Champlain, nor describe the two victories he gained over Arnold, who had also become an admiral for the occasion, and a sufficiently clever one to escape most skilfully with his sloops from his first defeat, though utterly destroyed as regards his ships in the second. Nor need we enter into the reasons which influenced Carleton against sitting down to a probably protracted siege of Ticorideroga with only a month of campaigning weather left him so far from his base, and with no strong reasons for occupying so advanced a post through the winter which could be taken with certainty in the spring. So it was decided to retire to the foot of the lake and go into winter quarters in Canada. The decision was a weighty one, as it was made a handle by Germain for superseding Carleton ; and had Carleton led Burgoyne's expedition, it is most improbable that he would have got into Burgoyne's scrape, in which case the future course of the War of Independence suggests infinite possibilities for interesting but futile speculation. Germain fully believed that British troops could campaign in the northern wilder-
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ness in midwinter, and his criticisms were based upon this entirely fatuous notion. The presence of eight or nine thousand regular troops in the various centres and posts of Canada through the winter of 1776-7 was an economic and social situation unprecedented in the annals of the colony with a total population even yet of scarcely a hundred thousand souls. Never in the palmiest days of the French regime, when Quebec did its utmost to atone by its isolation and limitations by its social energy and ceremonial observances, had this old city-stronghold of soldiers and priests been anything like so gay, and never had money circulated so plentifully and so freely. Lady Maria was now back at Quebec, and on the last night of 1776, the first anniversary of Montgomery's attack, Carleton gave a dinner of sixty covers, followed by a public fete and a grand ball where all social Quebec danced out the old year which had broken on them in so dramatic and different a fashion. On the same morning the Archbishop celebrated a grand mass in the cathedral, and those citizens who had shown open sympathy with the invaders had to do penance in public. The Church, which had received a serious fright, breathed again. The upper classes, a hundred of whose more adventurous sons were sharing the captivity of their British brothers-in-arms in the south, and who fully shared in the triumphs of the past year, were in the best of humours. They had a recognised place in the Legislative Council, while small grievances, that later on assumed larger proportions, were for the present in abeyance. As regards the inscrutable habitant, to try and imagine the sort of talk that went on round the hot stove of his air-tight kitchen and between the puffs of his home- grown tobacco is an interesting but irrelevant speculation. The priest had him once more safe under his wing, and no doubt made the most of such opportunities as the excellent market and the removal of pestilent republican influences gave him.
Burgoyne, whose social gifts as a playwright and composer
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of light verses would have been invaluable to Quebec that winter, went home on urgent domestic business, and also with a view to discussing the plan of campaign that Carleton, in counsel with himself and others, had made for the next summer. Burgoyne, though his plays were acted at Drury Lane, his verses the delight of great ladies, and his speeches in the House of Commons always welcomed, was also a good soldier, and devoted both to his profession and to his wife, whose serious condition was the cause of his temporary absence. He had distinguished himself greatly in the front of battle, and if not seriously tested as a tactician, his notes on European armies had been much valued by Chatham. He knew nothing, however, of the peculiar conditions of American warfare, and seems not only to have deferred to Carleton's experience, but to have explained his proposals to Government with all honesty and such approval as his own might be worth. Germain, how- ever, was not weighing the fitness of one officer against an- other when he sent out Burgoyne to supersede Carleton in command of what proved the ill-fated expedition of 1777. He hated Carleton, who had shown as much contempt for him as official etiquette permitted, and took no pains to hide his vindictiveness. Carleton was no mean performer with his pen, and Germain's ill-instructed orders and criticisms had laid him open to retorts that a far inferior despatch- writer in a North American command could have penned effectively had he dared. Carleton, like very many of his contemporaries, thought of Germain as the poltroon who had brought disgrace on the English cavalry at Minden in the first place, and as a fool in the second, and yet worse, an arrogant, narrow-minded, vindictive fool. The former's despatches are piquant to a degree, and I have dealt with them elsewhere.1 Burgoyne returned to Quebec in the spring, almost at the moment Carleton received Germain's letter confining his sphere of authority to his own govern- ment, that of Canada, and notifying the appointment of
1 Life of Dorchester.
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Burgoyne to the command of the force destined to act against the colonies. Sir Guy at once sent home his resigna- tion. But in those days of slow travel officials could not be replaced in a month, nor was Carleton's situation easy to fill, and he remained for a year busy and loyal as ever in spite of his just mortification. Nor was Burgoyne himself made to feel the other's chagrin, invidious as his position was. He told the House of Commons at a later day that if Carleton had been preparing for an expedition he was himself to lead, or been actually his own brother, he could not have laboured more indefatigably. Burgoyne, moreover, brought out a new plan from Germain, and no bad one, if the minister in his culpable carelessness had not omitted to instruct the second and equally interested party in it. It is a tolerably familiar one : how Burgoyne was to advance on the Hudson, and there join hands with Howe, who was simultaneously to ascend the river from New York whither he had now moved from Boston. But Germain unfortun- ately forgot to mention the matter to Howe! The story runs that the despatch to that lethargic general was pigeon- holed, and overlooked by the minister while enjoying a few days in the country. At any rate Howe never got it, and was sailing south for Philadelphia when the despairing Burgoyne was looking for him on the upper Hudson.
Carleton's plan, which had been to make Ticonderoga a base, and operate thence against the New England colonies as circumstances allowed, does not concern us. Nor indeed do the adventures and the fate of that fine army of seven thousand men which Burgoyne led to disaster at Saratoga, save that Canada despatched them, remained for long in touch with their movements, and for the whole time an anxious spectator of events. Carleton's officers, even those not yet familiar with American campaigning, who in the preceding October had criticised his Fabian policy, parted with him regretfully at St. John's. How they traversed Lake Champlain, occupied Ticonderoga without resistance, and then wandered into the wilderness that was
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to envelop them, as I have said, is no part of this story. The belief of the Home Government that Canadian militia could be freely and profitably raised was not yet scotched. Carleton was against any further muster, other than of those anxious to serve, as superfluous and likely to arouse the habitants' old suspicions of foreign service. A considerable number, however, were mustered, and for the most part deserted on the first opportunity. Another and much smaller expedition was despatched at the same time from Canada. It was under Colonel St. Leger, and was to advance by Lake Ontario and the Mohawk valley, force the posts there, which were occupied by Congress troops, and join Burgoyne on the Hudson. This also was frustrated by the strength of the opposition it encountered, and St. Leger brought his men back to Canada before the news arrived that on October 2Oth Burgoyne had surrendered. In the face of this the small garrison left at Ticonderoga was withdrawn to Canada, and the famous fortress was dis- mantled and left to relapse into groups of still upstanding roofless walls of weather-worn masonry that have served to remind generations of careless holiday-makers in a now much-frequented region of two famous and epoch-making wars.
Domestic affairs in the meantime were at a lull, and the Government at Quebec almost wholly concerned with warlike measures. The new Legislative Council had not met since its brief session in 1775. The Quebec Act had not yet been put in operation, nor the courts of justice placed upon a proper footing. Carleton had been com- pelled at the time, by the confusion of the country, to nominate the judges himself — three at Quebec and Montreal respectively, two of whom were French. A clause in the Act had annulled all appointments held prior to it, but Carleton had supported this as a form only, and a useful instrument rather for evicting such as had failed in their capacity or duty. Germain, however, looked upon it as an admirable opportunity for foisting proteges on the Canadian
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establishment. So the correspondence between the minis- ter and Carleton on this subject became as acrid as in matters of war. ' I should have reproached myself/ wrote the latter, 'with an abuse of power and trust, if under the sanction of that cause I had turned out any of the King's inferior servants who had executed the duties of their office with integrity and honour. Two judges of Montreal have been turned out by your Lordship's nominees, and I own 'tis unfortunate that your Lordship should find it necessary for the King's service to send over a person [Livius, shortly afterwards made Chief-Justice] to administer justice to the people when he understands neither their laws, manners, customs nor language, and that he must turn out a gentle- man who has held it with reputation for many years, well allied in the province, and a considerable sufferer for his attachment to his duty both as a magistrate and a loyal subject.' Carleton's estimate was well justified by the fact of the evicted judge returning to England and within a reason- able time becoming Master of the Rolls as Sir William Grant! As to Livius, a German Portuguese with a legal experience gained in New England, he is described as ' greedy of gain, imperious and impetuous in his temper, but learned in the ways and eloquence of New England, valuing himself particularly on his knowledge of how to manage governors.'
After Burgoyne's surrender there was another alarm of invasion, though there were nearly four thousand regulars in the colony. The American troops were in great part no longer raw militia, but hardened and experienced cam- paigners. A militia bill had been passed making every able-bodied male liable to be called out in defence of his country, a measure which the habitants regarded as a great hardship. However, in the autumn of 1777 Carleton called out one-third of the force from the Three Rivers and Montreal districts, and the muster under Tonnancour, de Longueuil and De Lanaudiere was tolerably successful. But the alarm passed away, and the men were disbanded.
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in
A new Governor had at length been nominated in the person of General Haldimand. * I have long and im- patiently looked out for the arrival of a successor/ wrote Carleton to Germain. ' Happy at last to learn his near approach that into hands less obnoxious to your Lord- ship I may resign the important commands with which I have been honoured. Thus for the King's service as will- ingly I lay them down as for his service I took them up/
Haldimand arrived in Quebec on June 26, 1778, and Carleton returned in the same vessel, after more than eleven years of service and nearly eight of actual residence. He was the only British general who recrossed the Atlantic during this hapless period wearing the laurels of victory, and of all generals his task had perhaps been the hardest. He little suspected that ten years later he would be again recalled to the thorny seat of which he had in truth and with good reason grown somewhat weary.
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CHAPTER VI
THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR
GENERAL SIR FREDERICK HALDIMAND, the new governor and Commander-in-Chief in Canada, as already noted, was the most conspicuous of those Swiss officers in the British service who served the King in America with such uncom- mon fidelity and intelligence. Commencing his military career as a youth in the Sardinian army, he then appears to have served under Frederick the Great, and later on was certainly an officer in the Swiss Guards of William of Orange. He had come to America in 1756 as one of a large number of foreign officers destined for service in the four battalions of the Royal Americans, afterwards the 6oth Rifles, which were being raised very largely from German- speaking settlers in the middle colonies. Of one of these he assumed the command, and served through the French war in America with more than credit, being wounded in the pitiful slaughter to which Abercrombie exposed the flower of the British forces in his fatuous assault upon the French works at Ticonderoga — the heaviest punishment this, wrote Haldimand, that in all his experience he had ever known troops to face unflinchingly. After the war he held chief command in Florida, New York and, as will be remembered, at Three Rivers during 'the Rule of the Soldiers' in Canada. No man probably had enjoyed a wider personal experience of American affairs, both civil and military, than he. For nearly twenty consecutive years he had been intimately associated as friend or foe, in uneasy peace or laborious war, with the far-scattered communities
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and various races, white and red, that were now busy wiping out old lines of cleavage for new ones, breaking with their past and repainting the map of North America. Haldimand had just spent some three years in England, where he was liked by society, the army, and the ministry, and now returned to North America to see the finish of that thirty years' drama which beginning with Braddock's defeat and ending with an Anglo-French Canada, recast the continent from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson's Bay. A mad world enough it would have seemed to any man, French or English, but thirty years dead, could he have risen from his grave by the James, the Hudson or the St. Lawrence, and roamed it again. A British flag flying on the citadel of Quebec, South Carolinians and Pennsylvanians ploughing the cold northern shores of Lake Ontario, and a strange device fluttering on every public building from Boston to Charleston, with the lilies of France hoisted in amity beside it. But all this was not quite yet.
Haldimand was a monument of method and the keenest of observers, if not always the truest of prophets, though it is easy to prophesy a century afterwards. As a writer and, above all, as a collector of letters and documents, England and America owe to him, as to his friend and brother-officer and fellow-countryman, Bouquet, a great debt had he done nothing else, whereas he was always doing something and generally doing it well. As a recent biographer justly remarks, it was Haldimand's lot when in sole command, civil or military, to be always on the defensive, a simple enough matter among a united and homogeneous community. But most of the stationary commands in the America of that epoch must have been far more distracting, and much more destructive of official nerve and tissue, than campaigning even in North America. Haldimand, however, seems to have borne it well, and though we left Canada in the last chapter apparently secure and content, she contained in her geographical situation, as well as in her social elements, material for a world of
H
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anxiety even yet. Haldimand, moreover, had a difficult man to follow in Carleton, whose popularity is all the more significant for his coldness of manner and somewhat lofty demeanour, noticed even by his successor, who sums him up nevertheless in a private letter to England with brief eulogy as 'a perfect gentleman, and one of the ablest officers in the service.'
One must not be tempted here, however, into the maze of the Haldimand correspondence outside that more perti- nent portion of it which has helped to write history. It will be enough to say, before resuming the thread of our narrative, that a somewhat unfair impression is given in condensed histories of Canada that Haldimand was an indifferent pro-consul, a fact mainly due, it is suggested, to his being a foreigner, and it may possibly be that his actions, which were generally those of wisdom and sanity, had a suspicion of the commanding officer about them, and lacked the grace and instinct for governing — the adroit combination of velvet glove and iron hand which dis- tinguished the best type of British Governors in such marked degree. The situation of Canada since Burgoyne's defeat had in fact again become precarious, and since France, influenced by that great disaster, had openly espoused the American cause, the danger seemed im- measurably aggravated, both from the access of fighting strength she brought to the colonies, and even more from the strain such a situation would and did put on the loyalty of the * new subjects.' Another proclamation was now nailed up on every parish church door, signed by no less a person than Admiral D'Estaing. He reminded the people that they were French and could not cease to be so ; nor could they raise parricidal hands against their mother country or her allies. As a noble himself, he appealed to the nobles to remember that there was only one august house under which Frenchmen could serve with honour and be happy. The memory of Montcalm was invoked, and much more to the same effect, while he appealed to the clergy and the
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people in language suited to their respective situations. American emissaries too were again busy in the parishes. Common-sense seems against the habitant entertaining for a moment a reversion to that ancient state of things, the mere traces of which had formed his stock - in - trade of complaint against the British Government, and D'Estaing had openly hinted at a renewal of the old connection, though he well knew France had pledged herself against it to Congress. The seigniors and the Church, however, had no such practical reasons to reject the notion of the old regime, and with these the attachments of race and creed were of course even stronger. Fortunately they were not seriously tested. The situation indeed appeared worse to Haldimand than it actually was. Canadian governors of that day were deplorably cut off from news of the outer world, and this isolation added greatly to their difficulties. Haldimand, for instance, could not guess that Washington was quite determined that if Canada was not American it should be English, and not only that, but in any expedition undertaken against the province the French should play a very minor part. The test would come if Frenchmen should be called to fight against Frenchmen. Would the hate of the priest and seignior for the Bastonnais be strong enough to turn the scale? Would the memories of the ancient regime, the forced corvtes, the card money, the compulsory unpaid soldiering, the old arrogant pretensions, as they now professed to think them, of the seignior, the official corruption and interference with the price of grain, steel the heart of the habitant against the eloquence of their French brethren? Was it possible that the sight of a French uniform would wipe out these memories? Or again, would they forget D'Estaing's proclamation, and regard their compatriots as security only for the abound- ing promises of the Bastonnais fighting by their side ? That the latter were not everywhere repudiated there is evidence in a letter to Haldimand from a German colonel reporting that the Maypoles near Three Rivers were
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decorated with Republican colours. None of these problems fortunately were put to the test, though Haldimand took every precaution. He built blockhouses on the Chaudiere, down which Arnold had followed his adventurous course. He did the same on the St. Francis, a back-door route of the Vermonters to Canada. He condemned St. John's and Chambly as weak posts, though repairing them for an outer defence, and concentrated his main defensive works on Sorel, which seigniory, oddly enough, had become the property of a firm of London merchants. He did not confine himself to such negative measures, but with a force under Major Carleton, Sir Guy's nephew, who had also married his wife's sister, destroyed the American settle- ments that had recently appeared along the shores of Lake Champlain as forming useful food supplies for an invading force, and finding justification for his action in their harsh treatment and expulsion of loyalists. He was continually importuning the Government for reinforcements. Three reduced, but otherwise efficient, British regiments, in all 1 200 men, and about 2000 Brunswickers, mainly composed of the least efficient of the German contingent, with a few Canadian volunteers, were all he had got, though there were now over 50,000 British troops in America. He begged also for one or two ships of war to winter in Quebec, as a French fleet from Boston might slip up in the spring at the opening of navigation and hold Canada at its mercy ; but he got neither and, as it turned out, had no need of them. He was very active, however, in equipping merchant vessels for scouting after privateers about the mouth of the St. Lawrence, and keeping his isolated province in some sort of touch with the warring world without. In Carleton's time the British western country, though nominally Canadian, and if not actually engaged in a frontier war, yet on the fringe of the contest, and further- more embarrassed with a doubtful Indian and French population, had ignored the fact that Quebec was its head- quarters. Commanding officers at Niagara, Detroit, and in
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the forts of the Ohio and Illinois countries, had corre- sponded direct with the Home Government, to the detriment of good service and any lucid plan of action. Haldimand had insisted on full powers over this distracted hinterland, and he now had his hands full as the struggle had over- flowed into regions where three of the four parties con- cerned, to wit, the French, the Indians, and the British American traders, usually took the winning side of the moment, and were prepared to swear allegiance, in their loose fashion, to the British officer or the American partisan who for the moment had the upper hand. It is enough to say that the important posts of Niagara and Detroit, virtually within the zone of the Canada that counts for us in this narrative, held their own. The unfortunate exploits to the south- westward of Hamilton, the governor of Detroit, his memorable capture at Vincennes by the redoubtable George Rogers Clark, and his brutal treatment by the same is, with the suppression of such unpleasant accessories, a famous and familiar tale in America to-day. But all these things belong to the greater war, though occurring in the vast western wilderness, the inclusion of which in the Quebec Act was the latter's weakest point. They form a tangled tale of petites guerres much better reading than most fiction which deals with such affairs, and equally dramatic, but unintelligible without illustrating maps, and, as I have said, but vaguely bearing on our story.
Somewhat more pertinent, however, are those operations undertaken from Niagara in the valley of the Mohawk and the upper Susquehanna, chiefly headed by the vigorous British partisan Butler, the descendants of whose redoubt- able corps of ' Rangers ' now swarm on the fertile farms of the Niagara country. The primary object of these raids, com- menced in 1778, the summer of Haldimand's arrival, was the destruction of the base of supply for the constantly threatened hostile expeditions against Niagara. The Six Nations, too, in their ancient haunts on the Mohawk, had
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been a source of vast perplexity to the now contending and divided British, who in former days were generally sure of their allegiance against their common enemy, the French. That the Indians themselves shared the feeling of uncer- tainty to at least an equal degree goes without saying. The traditional alliance with the British, though sometimes infringed, had been as nearly a guiding principle as the red man was capable of. It was much weakened now by the British split, and King George, one might say, was the only name to conjure with. That of Johnson would perhaps have been a stronger prop, but the redoubtable backwoods baronet, leader and diplomat had closed his vigorous, pic- turesque career at his patriarchal fortress on the Mohawk just before the first shot of the struggle was fired, and his nephew and son-in-law Guy, as Indian superintendent, and his son, Sir John, ruled much less successfully at Johnson Hall in his stead. There had been much talk about the employment of Indians in this war. The difficulty lay in retaining as neutrals a fighting race whose interests and property came within the desolating zone of strife. No man could weigh the chances of a sheer fight between the redcoats and the continentals better than the savage who had seen so much of both, though of the wider influences operating in war he could form little notion. The value of discipline, both in the French and Pontiac's wars, had been obvious in many a crisis. Brilliant at times, the irregular had always a crop, and perhaps a family at home tugging at his heart-strings. Like the Indian himself, he was more easily disheartened by a repulse, and more apt to consult his own personal safety in withdrawal, for reasons too obvious to need elaboration. The redcoat in 1778 was justly regarded as a more reliable ally by the Indian, and more likely to stand by him in a tight place. For one thing, he had less temptation to give way, and had his back, so to speak, against the wall ; and for another, the sense of dis- cipline often made unconscious heroes of English rustics or wastrels on a shilling a day, facing not merely death but
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often the possibilities of unspeakable torture in these wild woods. The British soldier as well as officer had learned a good deal since Braddock's time, as any one following him through the bloody mazes of Pontiac's war well knows, and with what he had learned he combined his incomparable staunchness and skill with the bayonet, not by any means the useless ornament it is sometimes represented by the writers of picturesque articles in these bush and stockade combats. The Indians knew all this very well, but they could not then foresee that the loose-fighting, uneven pro- vincial soldiers would have time and opportunity to grow also into veteran troops and learn in the severest of schools the sense of discipline. The Indians, however, such as fought at all — for they were only encouraged to a limited extent in this war — though partisans of the British, did not prove of great value. Both sides bidding for them, they were encouraged to draw rations for their families as the price of their neutrality and became as often a burden as a help. Moreover, the difficulty of restraining their passion for scalps was a hideous responsibility on every British leader. It was in this frontier war for the defence of Canada that the destruction of the Susquehanna settlements came about, made famous by Campbell's probably best known poem of Gertrude of Wyoming which, thirty years after- wards, made a great sensation in England. The poet's idyllic picture of an American frontier settlement cast in a mellow, leisurely, old-world atmosphere ; the happy valley, frisking peasants, and innocent pipe-playing swains, with some stage-backwoods accessories, is of course grotesque, if a single detail be considered at all. While far from having * nought to do but feed their flocks on green declivities/ the Wyoming settlers had been extremely busy arresting all those among them suspected of loyalist sentiments and despatching them to prisons in Connecticut. His poor Highland countrymen, whose peace, so ruthlessly shattered by Butler's Indians, the poet especially compassionated, had, on the contrary, been made a particular victim of some time
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ere this by his neighbours, unless perchance he had got safe away to join M'Lean's Royal Emigrants at Quebec. His scalp was therefore inadvertently saved by the very trucu- lency of the gentle swains from whose opinions he differed, and as regards his humble home and the fair sheaves from which the Scottish bard pictures him, not very felicitously, as distilling whisky for his own consumption, they had both been already annexed by his friends of the other political complexion. So the Indian torch made things no worse for him or for the Dutch, who had been the other principal victim of the sons of liberty. So far from being peaceful and innocent swains, the Wyoming settlers had been advanced and extremely intolerant politicians and had shown the courage of their opinions by taking the field in unusual strength. It was the centre of an organisation then forming for an attack upon the villages of the Six Nations on the Mohawk and on Niagara. Butler's raid was in anticipa- tion of this, and he took with him some five hundred Rangers and Indians. There were eight palisaded blockhouses which he first captured, and he was then encountered by three hun- dred and odd Congress militiamen, whose colonel challenged the Rangers. The former were entirely defeated, and the Indians, who had lost heavily under St. Leger the year before, now broke from control and gave no quarter, killing and scalping two hundred and twenty-seven men, only one being killed on the other side. The immediate cause of defeat is stated by eye-witnesses on both sides to have been the stupidity of the American drummer, who sounded a retreat when told to beat the charge. The sight of the enemies' backs was too much for the savages, who had been stationed apart behind a hill, under Captain Burd of the 8th Regiment, and had no chief of consequence to control them. Butler then laid waste the settlement, destroying a quantity of houses, eight forts, and several mills, and bring- ing away a thousand head of cattle, besides other stock. These were harsh if, from the Canadian point of view, necessary measures. Without attempting to palliate the
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conduct of the Indians, Butler's despatch to Haldimand distinctly states that no harm was done to a single indi- vidual not in arms. The natural answer to this was an onslaught in force the following year upon the towns of the Six Nations by General Sullivan, which were destroyed, and the ancient strongholds of this famous confederation wiped off the map. In return for Wyoming such loyalist settlements as could be reached were destroyed, to which Butler and the famous Indian chief Brant replied in kind by further devastations. And thus the partisan warfare raged back and forth with relentless fury, Niagara, the key to western Canada, being always in the mind of both parties. To the west, in the Ohio, Wabash, and Illinois country, beyond civilisation, companies of regulars for the most part on the one side, and Virginia and Pennsylvania borderers on the other, had campaigned laboriously against one another among Indians, mostly neutral, and isolated groups of Frenchmen, wholly so. This huge territory, roughly marked by the present States of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Illinois, could in no case have been held, even had the defeated party been able to insist on its retention at the peace. The restless wave of western progress was already breaking on its fringes. Nothing but the sheer force of large permanent garrisons could have withstood it, and even such resistance would have bred something like frenzy in the dammed-up torrent of lawless frontiermen, and created a friction, compared to which the right of search and fishery disputes and remote delimitation questions, which were to raise trouble between the countries, were by comparison almost academic ones. Nor were the men who crossed the Ohio of the kind prepared to settle on British soil with an idea of remaining British subjects. They would have started with the hatred of England that the ruder American of that period, who could not rightly understand the quarrel, shared to the full with those of his countrymen who could. In no case would they have remained quiet under any form of government that the England of that or even a much
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later day was likely to grant a raw community. And when it is further remembered that the prevailing element among them was Scotch Irish, but a slight knowledge of the insane policy that drained the sturdiest blood of eighteenth-century Ulster, and the kind of feelings it carried with it into America, is needed to realise the hopeless prospect offered to Canada of retaining the west. Even the milder type of law-abiding Republican who drifted by hundreds, nay thou- sands, into Canada on the heels of the U.E. loyalists after the war, from the northern frontiers of New England and New York, though a small minority, gave some trouble. To those who have interested themselves historically in the communities typified by men like Boone and Sevier, Clarke and Shelby, Robertson and Kenton, and yet more have tasted the atmosphere in which their virile spirits were bred, the notion of them proving docile under the most diplomatic colonel of British infantry who ever governed an eighteenth-century western territory is inconceivable. While the crude assembly which they would have had or died for — for they had all been politicians to the extent of jealously governing themselves in some remote trough of the Alleghanies with much rude assurance and common- sense — would never have tolerated the not unreasonable, and for the time even liberal, methods by which the Crown kept Canada in modified contentment for the next half-century. They were, in truth, a peculiar type of colonial Briton, for that was their breed, flavoured slightly with some earlier Celtic strains, and more recently with Germanic stocks. Driven in their own or a former generation from the old Ulster colony, watered with their blood and by their labour con- verted into a second North Britain, they resented outside interference in the ruder homes they had maintained with their lives on the long Indian frontier, and hated all autho- rity that savoured of Anglicanism or aristocracy with a fervent hatred. They had little love and slight regard for the Virginian country gentlemen and Eastern Pennsylvania Quakers, who legislated for the provinces, along whose
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western frontiers, fortunately for the other, their stockaded villages so thickly clustered. Presbyterians and fierce Pro- testants, they were admirable and in a sense God-fearing, nay even law-abiding people, if the seeming paradox is admissible. But the laws must be interpreted by their own narrow public opinion, which was no bad one where they were thick enough upon the ground, but it did not include the faintest sense of justice towards an Indian, while a royal Governor, with his little corps of placemen, would have had a hopeless prospect. Nor are the foregoing remarks by any means parenthetical. For by some writers the dream has been indulged in that this great western country might have been included in Canada by greater military activity in the war or more diplomatic firmness at the peace. It does not matter that every effort was made to hold it in the former, and in the latter that Great Britain was in no position to be firm. The dream, in any case, is an idle one. It was inevitable that Canada should be reduced to her natural limits behind the Lakes, and fortu- nate for her was it that her Great North-West was still outside the politician's survey or the restless settler's vision.
It was still an anxious time in Canada. One or two bad harvests, even with the vastly improved agriculture of the colony, produced a scarcity, for a numerous soldiery had to be fed, and the western posts with their increased garrisons all looked to the province for their supplies. These last, too, had to be carried laboriously round the long portages of the St. Lawrence, including that of Niagara, though Haldimand eased the situation somewhat by the beginnings of that canal system which in after years was to become such a feature of Canadian transportation. In- dividuals travelled by canoe, goods were shipped in bateaux some twenty feet long, flat-bottomed and tilted fore and aft, which were dragged empty up the edges of the rapids while the freight was carried along the densely wooded shore. Haldimand also founded a library in Quebec, com-
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missioning Richard Cumberland, the poet, to purchase the volumes, which still exists in a famous institution.1 The officers at Quebec, too, were now on better terms with the merchants, as we find them giving joint balls and enter- tainments, in one of which the indefatigable Quebeckers danced the clock round. A play of Moliere's, and many less ambitious pieces, were acted. Haldimand gave quite brilliant balls at the Chateau, though Baroness Riedesel, who saw him almost daily for many weeks and had an immense admiration for his character, describes his private life as very quiet and gardening as the passion of his leisure hours. He was strongly of the opinion that the Quebec Act was the right policy. Ministers and politicians in England and elsewhere might expend themselves in floods of oratory and sheets of print upon the subject, but the simple fact remained that the Act alone, with Carleton's help, had saved Canada, which seemed to the practical Swiss veteran fairly conclusive evidence in its favour. Madame Riedesel, who was here with her children during her husband's detention as one of Burgoyne's ' Convention prisoners ' in the south, also met Brant, the famous Indian chief, at Haldimand's table, and found him a man of polished manners and conversation, having been partly educated in England. She used to have her dinner and wine sent to her at the Ursuline convent, and though the strictest of the three great sisterhoods of Quebec, the Baroness tells us the nuns grew so merry in her company that they would dress up and execute a kind of Cossack dance for her amusement. She tells us of the long red-hooded cloaks, exchanged in summer for silk ones, worn by the women of the noblesse, and their woollen caps decorated with coloured ribbons, a mark of their rank, and how they would tear such a cap off the head of any woman of lower degree they found pre- suming to wear one. Montreal, we are told, drowned its anxieties in an even more continuous round of gaieties than the senior and rival city, and an officer of Butler's Rangers
1 The Literary and Historical Society of Quebec.
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declared that only a snowshoe run round the mountain every day enabled him to keep in condition. As regards Quebec, at any rate, it may be doubted if any place in Britain's oversea possessions past or present, having regard to its size, can boast of such a picturesque social history as this gay little city, from the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries, when the British garrisons were finally withdrawn.
In 1779 began that long and curious flirtation on the part of Vermont with the British authorities in Canada. An old dispute concerning territory between New Hampshire and New York had culminated in 1779 by the hardy settlers of that part of the former known as the Hampshire grants, otherwise Vermont, proclaiming themselves an independent State within the Confederacy and so free from New York interference. This put a frontier self-constituted province of the New Federation, which declined for a long time to recognise it as such, in a position to threaten the American Government with the obvious alternative, and by secret though only half-sincere negotiations with the Government at Whitehall and Quebec, to keep a back door open for a return to the British flag. We left Ethan Allen in Dart- mouth Castle after his attempt on Montreal in 1775. He now appears with his brother Ira in the light of a semi- repentant rebel representing a majority in a wavering province, while the Governor of the Green Mountain country at the same time writes to Washington that if the rights of Vermont, which has earned his gratitude by her valour in the cause as well as by her severe treatment of Tories with 'confiscation, banishment, imprisonment, and hanging,' is not going to be duly recognised, it was high time for her seriously to consider what she was fighting for. Congress paid no attention to this, whereupon the Vermont pro- vincial government appointed Ira Allen and another to open communications with Haldimand ' on general matters/ There is no occasion to follow the extremely tortuous and non-committal advances of the Vermonters, which were
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met by Haldimand with caution accompanied by distrust of and some contempt for the emissaries. But the attach- ment of Vermont, which could put four or five thousand admirable irregulars and hardy men into the field, was too good a prospect to forgo any chance of realising. Infinite mystery was observed by the Vermonters, and enjoined on Haldimand's emissaries. Allen writes to Congress, however, that they had a right to cease hostilities with Great Britain, and that he was as resolutely determined to defend the Independence of Vermont as was Congress that of the United States. The immediate upshot of all this was a tacit truce on that part of the frontier. In October Colonel St. Leger was sent with one thousand men to Crown Point to await events in Vermont, while a force of Green Mountain men, to allay suspicion, was stationed on their own side of the lake. The subalterns, however, not being in the secret, a skirmish resulted, after which St. Leger, to the surprise of the rank and file, returned his prisoners with apologies. But in November 1781 the staggering news arrived of the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, and for the moment put an end to all these amenities. They were soon however revived, the Vermont cabal thinking that Congress in its now secure position would reject their claims. But as regards the Aliens and their friends it was a somewhat shady business, prompted by egotism, pique and selfish considerations generally, among which, however, was the venial one that Vermont's natural trade outlet at that time was towards the St. Lawrence.
The disaster at Yorktown in October 1781, in which the French took so conspicuous a part, caused grave misgivings to the Canadian Government. It was only human that a glow of rekindled national glory should flare in the breasts of the Canadians at so decisive a triumph, so complete a revenge, achieved over conquerors, howsoever generous, at whose hands they had one and all met within easy memory such dire humiliation. But nothing happened of any moment, and there is no occasion to attempt an analysis
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here, though there is some data for doing so, of the private attitude of seignior, priest and peasant. It is enough that no temptation was offered them to give practical shape to any measure of unrest there may have been. We know Washington's views as to Canada and his allies. No enemy appeared, and the suspension of hostilities which preceded the peace quickly followed, while Carleton, much against his inclination, was sent to New York as Commander-in- Chief. As a combatant officer at any time in the war, Sir Guy would have been invaluable. With the perversity which distinguished ministers and most of their servants throughout this hapless period, he was sent out now it was all over, on business extremely painful and difficult, with no prospect of glory or even of military activity. At Quebec he had fortuitously been the right man in the right place. This was altogether another kind of business, yet he was still the right man, and the Government knew it so well that they would not listen to his objections. Conciliation coupled with a frank recognition of independence was now the cue of the new Rockingham Ministry. Carleton, who had been for every possible measure of conciliation in the early days of the war, and had almost refused to treat the very men who fought against him as ordinary enemies, did not like this complete volte-face at the sword's point. The Americans, on their part, were a little uneasy at his advent. They had been thankful to see his back four years ago, but for quite different reasons. It was not his sword they had now any reason to fear but the bigness of his heart, which, from his treatment of their prisoners in Canada, had earned him much unforgotten gratitude. He was the only British general, too, whom they had not beaten. He was also the only one who had not harried them, for the opportunity to do so had not been his, and yet for him alone was in many quarters a kindly feeling and in all one of respect, and this was not for the moment quite convenient. Congress within sight of peace negotiations was stiffening its back for the encounter. There was an element even in the patriot party
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who might find ancient affections too strong for them before a King and Ministry in a mood approaching the apologetic and repentant. Congress wanted the last pound of flesh, and they did not altogether relish the presence during these negotiations of a commander who himself had established some claim on the more generous feelings of their people.
They might have spared themselves, however, all anxiety. Carleton's business at New York, so far only as it con- cerns our story, was to see the swarms of refugee loyalists, civilians and military, with their women and children, safe out of the country. This generous and painful task he performed with that steadfast and unshakable thoroughness which distinguished most of his actions, and till he had completed it so far as lay within his power, Congress found him as hard to shift by importunities and threats as he had proved behind the ramparts of Quebec to stronger arguments, It is doubtful if any commander in the service would have done this delicate and painful task so well. While his heart went out to the misery and sufferings of the people under his protection, for whom the transport facilities were nothing like sufficient, his imperturbable coolness remained un- broken before the natural impatience of the Americans to see the back of the last redcoat on the quays of New York. Though the military saviour of 'Canada, and twice for long periods her Governor, the service he rendered in New York to the loyalists who were the second founders of the colony was scarcely less valuable.
In a very different strain from the foolish Germain who had so materially helped to bring about the debacle, Town- shend now wrote to Carleton, ' All we can do is to indicate our objects and choose a fit man like yourself to carry them out.'
He succeeded Clinton at New York in May 1792. Besides the troops, regular and provincial, he found several thousand loyalists of both sexes and all ages within the lines, and the situation was one of tacit but armed and suspicious neut- rality. Charleston and Savannah, also in Carleton's com-
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mand, were the only other footholds in the united colonies now occupied by the British. They too, like New York, were crowded with loyalists, the victims of that banishment, con- fiscation and persecution decreed against every individual who by act, sympathy, or refusal to take the new act of alle- giance, had favoured the King. * The banishment or death of over one hundred thousand of these most conservative and respectable Americans/ writes the most recent American chronicler of their fortunes, ' is a tragedy but rarely paralleled in the history of the world.' No modern American writer of repute any longer attempts to defend the harsh and too often brutal treatment of fellow-citizens whose only crime was a legitimate difference of opinion on the subject of certain political measures, or more often a difference merely as to the right method of encountering them. It can hardly be accounted unpardonable that there were men who honestly thought that a ' threepenny tea tax/ openly denounced by one of the great English parties, was not a sufficient cause to plunge the country into a war disastrous in any case and seemingly hopeless for the thirteen jarring and jealous colo- nies. But for Washington and the French, humanly speak- ing it would have been a hopeless struggle. No people were justified in expecting such an almost miraculous and timely intervention of Providence as Washington proved, while those ancient and bitter enemies the French were not in the reckoning. Besides motives, which at the time seemed so obviously sensible, those of conscience alone operated with great numbers, for the tie of allegiance was taken more seriously in those days than in these. The loyalist party contained a large proportion of persons of wealth, character and education, capable of judging for themselves in what was really a difficult and many-sided question; men less likely to be influenced by the floods of impassioned oratory to which the rank and file of America at that day as at this, for some inscrutable reason, are more susceptible than the English or Scotch. But as I have before remarked, there were many contributing causes to the revolutionary move-
I
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ment that were as tinder to the spark struck by the definite grievance of the second foolish attempt to tax the colonies, or rather to test and rouse them by an admittedly trifling impost. The motives that drove or drifted men to one side or the other were mixed both in nature and quality. Prin- ciple, self-interest, expediency, fear, all found a numerous following. But it was much easier as a rule to shout with the patriot multitude than to face their wrath, which was manifested in truculent fashion almost from the very first, and upon the whole the consistent loyalist had to sustain his opinions with a more than average exhibition of courage.
No apology is needed for this brief digression on his account, for he became the somewhat ill-mated partner of the French Canadian and the co-founder of the Canada we know to-day. At this moment, however, a more forlorn concourse of civilised beings have rarely collected together than were these potential makers of Empire. In every case deprived of their real and the greater part of their personal property, they practically depended on that charity of the British Government to which they had assuredly every right. Some twenty provincial regiments, however, reduced to about five thousand men, were on the active pay list, while numbers of widows and children were already in re- ceipt of military pensions granted more or less on the scale of the British establishment. An armed neutrality in the mean- time was observed between the armies within and without New York. After the surrender of Cornwallis no fighting of much moment had occurred in the south. A few thousand loyalists, some from Boston when Howe evacuated it, others flying independently from the persecution of their various States, had already arrived in Canada and Nova Scotia, while some again of the highest class had repaired to England or the West Indies. But the great majority were huddled together behind the British works at the three coast cities which alone still flew the British flag — in very truth between the devil and the deep sea. Through the whole of
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1782 constant accessions were made to their numbers at New York. In July Charleston and in August Savannah were evacuated, many thousand Tory refugees being carried thence to Florida, the West Indies, or to Carleton's already crowded lines at New York. In August Carleton heard that complete Independence was to be ceded in the coming treaty, and he at once requested to be recalled. He had already been compelled to act as the mouthpiece for some- what humiliating and uncompromising submission though he himself had met with nothing but success, and this com- plete surrender ill suited the military pride and sense of honour of the veteran soldier. But the ministry would not, or to be precise could not, relieve him. So he set himself, as was his habit, to the distasteful task for which his firm- ness and humanity at once fitted him. When news of the impending treaty, and above all of its nature, reached New York, the hapless Tories were in despair. They had only one more drop to drain from their cup of bitterness, and that was the actual conclusion of the treaty early in the following year, 1783. They then knew the worst, and what that meant they were better able to appreciate than his Majesty's ministers. The latter, however, represented mainly in these negotiations by Lord Shelburne, the first Marquis of Lansdowne, and the King himself, were lacking neither in sympathy for their situation nor in efforts on their behalf. They had held out long and stoutly for such treat- ment of the loyalists as even in those days was expected of civilised humanity at the close of a civil war. The days of ' Hell or Connaught ' were justly regarded as belonging to a cruder period of British civilisation, and for the American loyalist there was not even a Connaught offered them within the vast unsettled boundaries of their respective provinces. It was ' Hell or Halifax ' now, in the catch phrase of the day. The sentences of confiscation decreed in various forms early in the war by every one of the thirteen legislatures on combatant and non-combatant loyalists alike were practi- cally confirmed. Even the French protested, not so much
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it is said from philanthropic motives, though at that moment they could afford to indulge them, as from a desire to keep an important element in the country who would at the same time be under an obligation to France. For the French were ill-pleased with the Treaty, which had been passed as it were behind their backs, and held that their share in the business, which was in fact decisive, had been too lightly re- garded. One object in their military policy had been the capture of the American trade, a prospect which the early termination of the war and the somewhat unexpected nature of the amenities which distinguished the Anglo-American overtures considerably dimmed. The loyalists, therefore, reinstated by their means, might be fairly expected to exert a favourable influence. But neither English nor French diplomatists could move the Americans in this matter. Congress with some truth made the reply so familiar to-day in certain American complications, that they had no power to bind the several States. The limited concession was ' a promise to earnestly recommend ' lenity towards the Tories to the various provincial governments, to suggest also that those who had taken up arms should be permitted to buy back their estates at the price they had been disposed of, and that those of non-combatant Tories should be restored. That no hindrance should be offered to any persons return- ing to the country for the settlement of their affairs or the collection of their debts. This was of course useless, and known to be so by Franklin, Jay and Laurens, the American commissioners : above all in those days, when the intense sectional particularism of the provinces had, in spite of a successful war, given way but little. The ruined Tories in their despair said many hard things of the British Govern- ment. But the latter were virtually helpless. They had nothing wherewith to support their protests ; for the nation would not support a continuation of the war, the only argument that was left to them.
If the rigour exercised against the ' sons of despotism ' or the Tories, as they were usually called, had not developed
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till later in the war when they and the patriots had drawn each others' blood and often plundered each others' property, it would be more conceivable. But these acts and laws, making the lives of those who dissented even negatively from armed resistance a burden to them, were passed in many States as early as 1775, and in most but a year later. The schedule of these laws in each State, with their addi- tions from year to year throughout the war, are instructive reading. The thoroughness with which they were carried out in a physical sense, with the utter looseness of the machinery and the quality of the adjudicators, is still more so. ' We have many unhappy devils to take their trials for their life,' writes a North Carolinian Whig to his Governor — 1 an exasperated jury and a lay judge. My God ! what may we not expect.' Measures differed somewhat in the various provinces, but in no very material details. The culprits were usually rated in three or four classes. There were those who merely sympathised with the Crown and refused the oath to Congress, with many who were only suspected of such sympathy. There were great numbers, again, who had sworn allegiance to the Crown in the cities or districts occupied by British troops, whose protests of undue influence were interpreted by their Whig neighbours after their own fashion, which under the heat and passions of the hour had become almost totally devoid of any judicial qualities. Lastly, there were the men actually enrolled in the numerous loyalist corps, who could look for no mercy and found none. Property was confiscated very early. The idea of providing the sinews of war from the estates of those who objected to support it was a practical and popular one with most of the colonial governments. Even thus, however, by the time the machinery for carrying out their plan was in motion, they found that private individuals had forestalled them to quite a serious extent. The grabbing of Tory property by patriot neighbours had gone merrily on before their govern- ments stepped in to seize the spoils in more reputable and orthodox fashion. Non-combatant Tories were mulcted
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in heavy fines, and if not able to pay, their property was sold remorselessly for what it would fetch. The families of those who had gone abroad to escape the turmoil were compelled to hire soldier substitutes. A Tory, everywhere using the word in its most comprehensive sense, had no rights. If an ordinary thief under trial swore that he had sinned under the belief that the purloined article belonged to a neighbour of this detested class, such a plea was held valid. Families of wealth and refinement, while still resident in their houses, were stripped of everything they possessed but a few necessary chairs and cooking utensils, while the mob, who on such occasions are always worse than the men at the front, took every liberty. The militia treated the property of Tories as contraband of war. So many of the latter belonging to what were known as 'the first families/ class jealousy added further fuel among the vulgar to passions that needed no fanning. And in colonial times persons were openly listed and designated as gentlemen or esquire, farmers, yeomen and so forth, distinctions which from the Revolution onward have been discreetly relegated to private conversation for many and obvious reasons. The Revolution not only gave independence to the American colonies, but it greatly democratised them. Even New England could look back on vanished aristocratic tend- encies they had never suspected at the time. But the others had practically been ruled by the propertied classes, the merchants, gentry, and substantial yeomen. The franchise in all had been restricted ; the small farmers, labourers, servants, foreign settlers and backwoodsmen had little voice in public affairs. These people, however, came to the surface in the Revolution, helped much in the shouting and mobbing as well as in the fighting. Samuel Adams, Tom Paine and the cant of the day generally cheered them on. In the temporary governments and committees of the various provinces men found seats who hitherto had no recognition. The higher element of the very large pro- pertied class — the aristocracy, to use a convenient term—
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were not depleted by the loyalist emigration, but they were greatly weakened. Their legal privileges were swept away by enlarged franchises and a successful democratic challenge of the pre-eminence they had by tacit consent enjoyed. There was no subversion, but in future they had to share their power with a new class, and outside the thresholds of social life to profess even in Virginia that one man was as good as another. Never again even in the middle and southern States was the word * gentleman ' used in public to designate a class. It became in future a mere foolish and illogical term for the male of the human species other- wise than black. Washington, who certainly wrote on one occasion that the best thing a Tory could do was to commit suicide, nevertheless deplored the licence and cruelty which were being practised towards them, and issued orders to his troops to that effect which were ill obeyed beyond the reach of his eye. They, he considered, had only as much or as little cause of complaint against a Tory as the British Government had against any supporters of Congress that should come into their power. The practice of wholesale confiscation, of robbing and hounding non-combatants and persecuting women and children, he held to be not only wrong in itself but dangerous, as likely to create reprisals. But Washington's hands were full of other matters, and he had no concern with these either during or after the war. The strength of the great middle element of the population, between Tories and patriots probably a majority, who awaited indifferently the tide of events, and were ready to yield to slight pressure from either side, no one has ventured to estimate. The avowed loyalists, men who in deed or spirit were prepared to answer the appeal of the King to assist in the repression of what, after all, was rebellion pure and simple, got a late start. They were as a rule awkwardly situated. It was much easier for the other side, with their local organisation and the lower rabble generally on their side, to take the initiative. The Tory had to seek out the distant military camps, and abandon his
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home and perhaps his family to men whose intentions became quite easily unmistakable. New York and Long Island having been British ground early in the war, had gradually accumulated, as I have already said, the greater part of these unfortunates. In the days of that over-con- fident and supercilious failure, Howe, it was declared that inadequate facilities were given for the raising of Royalist regiments. He had despised the help as much as the opposition of colonial soldiers. The one perhaps was a corollary of the other. Yet more, he was cold and un- gracious to the refugees, and his officers, it was affirmed, followed suit; and this was the brother of the man who, before his untimely death at Ticonderoga twenty years before, had made himself conspicuous for every opposite quality. Sir Henry Clinton, his successor, was ' cut to the heart ' by the sufferings and the lamentable state of these suffering people. When Carleton came their numbers had increased and were daily increasing, and their circumstances were not only more immediately distressing but were now without hope of recovery in their own country. Hitherto they had been buoyed up with hopes of a good time coming when they would recover their own and perhaps something more than their own in return for their sufferings. In the constant presence of a powerful British force and the mutual encouragement of a large sympathetic body of fellow- sufferers, that hope had been fed with too much doubtful fuel. Every favourable item was exaggerated, and Riving- toris Gazette, run in the loyalist interest, battened on fancy rather than on fact. So the terms of the treaty came as a frightful shock. The scramble to get away by sea and the scuffle to get within the lines from the inland districts grew frantic. The latter was swelled at the last by many who had tested in person the recommendation by Congress to the States on their behalf and found it wholly futile. It must be remembered that the measure originally dealt out to the loyalists had been meted out by them in turn when opportunity had placed their persecutors within their power.
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It was only natural, but it did not tend to improve their mutual relations. In some districts the war had meant a ruthless civil strife. This was particularly the case in South Carolina, where the Anglo-Saxon even by then had acquired the more heated passions that still mark the people of the Southern States, and perhaps it is character- istic that the only State which in a modified but belated and almost useless form ultimately held out the olive branch to the banished Tories was that hot-headed one that set the spark to a far more sanguinary war eighty years later.
Thanks to Maurice Morgan, Carleton's indefatigable secretary, some forty stout volumes filled with the MS. correspondence and accounts of those eighteen months of 1782-3 remain to us on the shelves of the Royal Institu- tion. It is a harrowing record. Here are petitions from the body of loyalists collectively, urging some better guarantee for their lives and property should they attempt to return than the treaty gives them ; there innumerable others for pensions from the widows and families of men who had died in the service of the Crown and depicting the forlorn condition of the survivors. Here too are Carleton's own letters describing the pitiful scenes he had to witness and the painful stories he had to hear. He had plenty of provision, however, and no lack of money. The Crown was generous for all present needs, and as regards future provision in deserving cases upon the modest scale incumbent on the disbursers of public money, and Carleton within such limits had practically carte blanche. We have the lists too of the loyalist regiments on the strength, their rates of pay and pension ; and it may be noted as curious that the custom of purchasing commissions was prevalent even among these irregular corps. Hundreds of negroes again of both sexes were congregated at New York, some the property of refugees, some the spoils of war, others run- away slaves. Each one is described by name, sex, age, and physical qualities, with owner's name and home where possible. The deportation of American property was
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especially provided against in the treaty, unless paid for under valuation, and this negro problem was complicated to a degree. But with this and the vexed question of the release and exchange of prisoners and many others that fell on Carleton we have nothing to do here. It is due, however, to the memory of a man so much concerned with Canada, to note that the ministry in begging him to see the business through had declared that there was not a man on either side of the Atlantic in whom the Govern- ment had so much confidence. The American colonies that remained to Britain had long been looked to as the only solution of the loyalist problem — Canada, Nova Scotia, Florida, and the West Indies. The two latter for reasons of climate proved unsatisfactory, for considerable shipments to all had already been made. Tropical countries were ill-suited to men with little or no means, even to such refugees from the planting colonies as sailed thence from Charleston or Savannah. Many of the better sort, with in most cases enough saved from the wreck to subsist on, had fled to England. How they fared we may gather from the letters of ex-Governor Hutchinson, Curwen, and others. They were characteristically chilled at the indifference with which they were regarded by the great world which amused itself, eat and drank, went on its way, to their surprise, as if no Empire was at stake. They were shocked to find one party in the country rejoicing in the defeat of their own armies. They writhed, on the other hand, at the con- temptuous way in which the Americans were spoken of, and encountered at every turn that curious insular super- ciliousness towards the ' colonist ' aggravated by a blank mind towards his colony, for which the most colonising of nations has always been and is still distinguished. Within a month of the receipt of the news that the preliminaries of the treaty of peace had been signed, 5600 loyalists sailed for Nova Scotia. Many of these, wrote Carleton to Governor Parr of that province, * are of the first families and born to the fairest possessions, and I beg therefore that
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you will have them properly considered/ By the terms of the treaty the British were to evacuate New York with as much despatch as possible. Nothing was said about the loyalists, but Carleton, to his honour, determined to inter- pret the clause this way. Through the spring, summer and autumn of 1783 the melancholy and difficult task of shipping the exiles with such poor effects as they had managed to save from the general wreck went forward. The insufficient supply of vessels made the task a slow one. The American authorities contended that the trans- portation of the loyalists was not in the agreement, and continually importuned Carleton to name an early day for the evacuation of the city. He replied firmly but courteously that he differed from them in his interpretation of the treaty, that he was as anxious as they were for the evacuation, but it was simply a matter of ships not of will, and he was privately determined that not a soldier should move till the last loyalist who claimed his protection had embarked. The pressure of the Americans increased and Carleton's replies got shorter, till at length the last batch of the melancholy band, which had been estimated at 27,000, were safe on board. Then came the turn of the army, and it was near the end of November before the last British drum beat on the Battery at New York and the last redcoat filed into the boats. ' His Majesty's troops,' ran Carleton's last despatch on board the Ceres, 'and such remaining loyalists as chose to emigrate, were successfully withdrawn on the 25tht inst. from the city of New York in good order, and embarked without the smallest circumstance of irregularity or misbehaviour of any kind.'
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CHAPTER VII
THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS
IT will hardly be supposed that the inability of the British Government to enforce the restoration of the loyalists to their homes and properties was allowed to pass by the opposition in Parliament without criticism. On the contrary the clamour was loud and the ministry were assailed in bitter and scathing terms. The opportunity was too good a one for party purposes to let slip, and the heroics which leaped to men's lips one might say were ready-made. So was Shelburne's answer, that the only alternative was the continuation of the war, a course which the country at large was unflinchingly opposed to. Furthermore, the restoration of the loyalists to estates long sold and subdivided would have been difficult, andj in the temper of the Americans would have been in any case a most dubious experiment, while money compensation was out of the question, as Congress could not even pay the troops who had fought its battles. It was the attitude of the Americans, who refused the olive branch in any shape or form, that was the crime, and it was dearly paid for in after years. Nor is it the place here to tell of men like Alexander Hamilton, Washington himself, and even Patrick Henry, with thousands of others, who were ashamed of the business and would have had it otherwise. The former as a lawyer and with deliberate purpose took up the case of a rich Tory against a poor widow as a courageous but unpopular display of his principles. The demagogue Henry expended futile eloquence in the quasi-aristocratic
THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 141
Assembly of Virginia in behalf of Tory creditors, and his speeches are instructive reading. But these men were as voices crying in the wilderness, and the loyalists who tried the experiment of repatriation were boycotted, imprisoned or banished. Only a few of the obscurer sort contrived to slip back and survive unnoticed in the larger towns till men's passions had cooled, which in this case was a slow and tedious process. It only remained for the British Government to compensate so far as they were able those who had suffered so grievously on their behalf, and this, as we know, they had already taken steps to accomplish. Free grants of wild land in the still British provinces to be sure cost them nothing, but free transportation, implements and provisions for two years were supplied, while all the officers of the colonial corps and many who had held civil appointments, as well as the widows of those who had fallen, were pensioned. A further grant, which amounted eventually to nearly three and a half millions, was allotted in compensation for losses of all kinds, including confisca- tion. The difficulties of testing the genuineness of claims, the delay from the number of applicants and necessary witnesses, with the remoteness of the property at issue, dragged on the work of the Commission, which sat in London and elsewhere, for many years.
It is with Canadian settlement alone, however, that we are here concerned, and the landing of the refugees in their thousands on these then inhospitable shores, little as the average Englishman knows of it, is among the most tragic and dramatic incidents in our Imperial history. Famous poets have sung in melodious but inaccurate numbers of the expulsion of the Acadians and the burning out of the Wyoming settlers, but these were mere trifles in scale compared with the fate of the infinitely greater number of American Tories and the greater sensibility of so large a fraction of them. Ruined and banished almost to a man, in- sulted, tarred and feathered : half-hanged, occasionally wholly hanged : flung by droves into prisons always foul, sometimes
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noisome dungeons deep under ground like the Senna mine, their lot was pitiful indeed. As refugees again in the British lines were delicately-nurtured women and children, exposed to a makeshift, often ill-nourished life, to be ultimately dumped out upon the shores, whether of Lake Ontario or of the Atlantic, in either case at that time a forbidding wilderness. One can sympathise with the heart- sinkings that found expression in the letters still preserved from some of them as over the chill autumn seas, huddled in small ships, they pitched and rolled along the cruel iron- bound coast of southern Nova Scotia. The old Acadia contains great areas of fine land, but the noble harbour of Halifax, with its rocky shores, its indented high-pitched mainland, bristling then with its interminable mantle of pine forest, must have chilled the heart of men and women from the fat well-tilled levels of the Jerseys and eastern Pennsylvania, from the snug brick mansions and warm open undulations and oak forests of easy-going Virginia, from the homely fields of King's and Queen's and Orange counties where New York loyalty had. chiefly flourished. In all, nearly 30,000 refugees landed in Nova Scotia, some crossing the strait to Cape Breton, a few going to Prince Edward Island, already sparsely settled, and about 9000 to the St. John River and the district which soon afterwards became the province of New Brunswick. The population of this whole country after seventy years of British owner- ship had only reached a total of about 14,000, including perhaps a thousand of the old French Acadians, who it may be here stated neither then, nor ever, had the slightest con- nection with their fellow-countrymen in Canada. While the origin of the latter is known with almost minute precision, that of the Acadians has apparently baffled investigation. Their dialect and their character is some- thing different from that of the others, a fact due no doubt to the isolation and independence of their earlier history. Unlike the Canadians, they were neither coddled nor tyrannised over by a paternal government. They had
THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 143
lived on the smooth and fertile northern bays of Acadia till the great uprooting of 1755 almost as the descendants of a long-forgotten shipwrecked company on some pleasant island in untravelled seas might have lived, save for a little priestly intervention and shepherding. Nor again did they clear the forest like all other settlers on the North American seaboard, but dyked out the ocean instead and reclaimed the great salt marshes in the Bay of Minas and elsewhere. The English government at Halifax across the province, with its sparse British population from the mother country and the New England provinces, largely fishermen, could hardly have affected the few hundred sur- vivors of the Acadian deportation and their increase. But it was in 1783 that the foundation of Nova Scotia as a great and important province to contribute more than its share of able men to the body politic of British North America was really laid. The ' Blue nose,' as every one familiar with American ethnology is well aware, differs in certain marked but unimportant characteristics from an Ontario Canuck. On a less progressive plane and with roots more widely sundered, the divergence between the modern French Acadian from the Bay of Fundy and the habitant of the Richelieu valley should be quite an engaging study to the Gallic ethnologist, as both are seventeenth-century French- men turned loose to grow in a somewhat similar wilderness under different conditions. I do not propose to dwell at any length on the loyalist settlement of Nova Scotia and the future New Brunswick, for no racial nor serious political difficulties presented themselves. The building up of these provinces was a matter merely of sheer straightforward hard work. The people, though mixed in blood, were homogeneous in temperament and habit, the vast majority ardent loyalists, but at the same time used to colonial life in all its branches, legal, political, mercantile and agri- cultural, and in a mood, for the present at any rate, to support any reasonably sensible representative of the British Crown.
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How the thirteen thousand British in possession, with their little government and Assembly, received this over- whelming incursion we may not pause to inquire. The former were certainly not strong in the talents, and must have been very poor, for the revenue was microscopic. It was not to be expected that so undistinguished a community would be anything but overwhelmed by such a flood of rather virile humanity, judges, advocates, professors, clergy- men, soldiers and men of affairs generally, that lodged for the moment in tents, log shanties and clapboard houses, with their energies temporarily paralysed by physical hardships and misfortunes. History does not say how the old colonists, whose leading men were anything but loyalists, fared. Even Judge Haliburton, the son of a loyalist, who lived reasonably near the time and has dealt so inimitably in Sam Slick with the humours of old Nova Scotia as well as with its history in a deplorably opposite fashion, does not paint this feature of a situation which he could have painted so well. It is notable that one rarely meets a genuine Nova Scotian who is not of U.K. blood and justly proud of it. The descendant of what might be called the pre- historic Anglo-Nova-Scotian stock seems little in evidence, and yet there were as many of them in the province before the Revolutionary war as there had been a century before of those Frenchmen who are the ancestors of nearly all French Canada.1
Halifax and the province as an appreciable unit in the British constellation was not yet forty years old. During the French wars its infant settlements had been sorely harassed by the fierce Micmac Indians egged on by the French at Louisburg. Among its small population too there were in 1783 the increase of nearly two thousand German and Swiss immigrants from Europe settled by the British Govern- ment at Lunenburg soon after the founding of Halifax.
1 One conspicuous exception known to the writer is that of the Archibalds, of abiding prominence in the province, who came from Pennsylvania before the war.
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Throughout the Revolutionary war, sea-girt and remote, the sympathies of this handful were of slight consequence ; but Colonel Morse in his survey report of this date tells us that New Englanders were the prevailing element and held generally much the same opinions as their compatriots at home. The most sensational feature of the loyalist influx of 1782-3 was the founding of the town of Shelburne, which in a year or so contained a larger population (8000) than either Quebec or Montreal and then almost as suddenly collapsed, owing to the unsuitability of its site. Indeed many of the official preparations for settlement had been ill-advised and inadequate. Nor can one be surprised, in view of the unprecedented demands made upon the British and Provincial governments at so remote a situation. All the immigrants, however, were not officers, judges, and country gentlemen by any means, for a considerable element of worthless or useless people had been unavoidably included. Many of the disbanded soldiers too, as has so often been the case, proved incapable of settling down to laborious industry. But immigration schemes in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century had one supreme advan- tage in the fact that an immigrant once planted could with difficulty get away again. If in the case of real undesirables this may have been a dubious advantage to the community, that large element, who are now readily encouraged by the widely circulated reports of other countries and modern facilities for travel to shift from place to place in search of an imaginary Utopia, had then no such temptations, and survived the early period of hardships and acclimatisation to their own advantage and yet more that of their children and the country of their adoption. The U.E. loyalists in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick as in Upper Canada, if in part ill-suited to the labour of hewing homes out of a forest wilderness, were as a whole and in other respects well qualified to make a country. The first two winters, when rations were served out not always abundantly or of the best, as one can imagine under the circumstances, were
K
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terribly trying. Accounts both optimistic and very much
the reverse went back to the States. Some said the
country was fertile and the climate fine, others that they
were wrapped in perpetual fog and that moss grew in the
place of grass. The American Whigs, we are told, keenly
relished the more despondent versions, and in allusion to
the broken indented coastline of Nova Scotia, declared that
it gave them the palsy even to look at it on the map.
But though some went on to Canada the grumblers stayed
nevertheless, scattering over what a better knowledge of
the two provinces and the adjacent island of Prince Edward
showed them were the most eligible districts ; life in time
became for most of them once more tolerable and more
than tolerable to their children. Those of experience and
ability found congenial use for both in the many posts of
trust, legal, official and otherwise, that a growing colony in
those days was somewhat profuse in and reserved more
jealously than now for the well-educated and the well-bred,
if not always for the most capable. A moderate emigration
from Great Britain assisted by the rapid increase natural
to a healthy country and a wholesome life, combined to
multiply the 50,000 inhabitants of Nova Scotia and Cape
Breton by many times within a few decades. Halifax, an
important naval station, waxed and prospered. Prince
Edward Island, to-day completely covered with the farms
and villages of 100,000 souls, even thus early attracted its
hundreds and fell under the governorship of Fanning, a
famous South Carolina loyalist. The nine thousand or so
who had founded St. John and spread up the rich interval
lands of the beautiful river of that name had not long to
wait before they were deemed worthy to form a sister and
rival state to Nova Scotia. The first council of New
Brunswick in 1784 is significant of the quality of the settlers,
including as it did two distinguished American judges ;
two colonels of colonial corps and men of former large
estates, one of the Winslows, a colonel of regulars, Beverly
Robinson, an old friend of Washington's and one of the
THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 147
largest landowners in New York, and Judge Saunders, of the well-known Virginia family and a bencher of the Inner Temple. Among the settlers on the St. John River were the Queen's Rangers, one of the most distinguished of the loyalist corps which had been captured with Cornwallis.
And all this time the Canadas, which more directly con- cern us, had been receiving smaller but constant waves of refugees. The benevolent Haldimand had his hands full, and the good French priests had begun to look askance at such a horde of dangerous heretics on their borders. The exiles had come by every conceivable means and by many devious routes. The influx, as in Nova Scotia, had begun on a smaller scale quite early in the war, for several hundred had been collected about Sorel and Montreal under Haldi- mand's supervision before the year 1780. But at the close of the war and for some time afterwards they arrived in much greater numbers and in more organised fashion. There too the loyalist regiments were disbanded and, like those that went to Nova Scotia, were settled together ; the field officers being allotted 5000 acres, the captains 3000, the subalterns 2000, and the rank and file 200, with further plots for their children as they came of age. These military groups were known as ' Incorporated settlements,' the town- ships allotted to civilians as ' unincorporated/ About seven loyalist corps, besides several detachments of disbanded regulars, amounting with their women and children to nearly four thousand souls, were planted mainly on the present site of Kingston and along the. shores of the Bay of Quinte* on Lake Ontario. The early loyalist influx to Canada was not so large as that which settled the Maritime Provinces, not numbering in all probably, though no general muster was taken as in the other, more than twelve thousand souls. But whereas in the seaboard colonies the additions for the next few years were inconsiderable and no serious problems of government were created, the movement into the Canadas continued to flow steadily for many years. The banished or persecuted loyalist exile was succeeded by a stream of
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immigrants from the States, impelled northwards neither by violent methods nor passionate loyalty, but by a host of mixed motives. These are readily conceivable, when good land is being offered cheap alongside an older community in a condition of considerable financial and political con- fusion and dominated in many districts by factions that success had made a trifle arrogant and distasteful to the quite neutral soul. But these people, though contributing materially to the development of Canada and the upsetting of the arcadian French-Catholic prospect embodied in the Quebec Act, are not reckoned among the Pilgrim Fathers of English Canada, as we shall see. The latter, which may be approximately reckoned at twelve thousand, mostly came in at the close of the war, with a few additions who had made a vain attempt at repatriation, to encounter nothing but contumely and rigid laws of exclusion. A natural point of settlement was that attractive region, fertile, picturesque, well timbered and well watered, known soon afterwards and to-day as the Eastern Townships, lying in the southern part of Quebec and over against the lakes and highlands of the Vermont frontier. But the militant note was strong in the U.E. loyalist. ' His true spirit,' writes Haldimand, 'is to carry arms, and the Governor did not deem it well to place these fiery souls within sight of a community of hardy rifle-shooting farmers whom at the moment they execrated. So Ontario, at that time a shaggy wilderness whose fertility, though but experi- mentally tested, was not fully realised, was selected and portions surveyed for the main settlement. It was neces- sary, of course, to go outside the French seigniories, which reached, as we have shown, a little beyond Montreal, but had not stretched southwards to the future Eastern Town- ships. It was obvious that a New Jersey farmer would not become a ' vassal,5 even in the mild form the term now signified, of a French or English seignior. Indeed a certain fear of the French laws and the notorious Quebec Act had deterred a great many refugees from setting their faces
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northward. It may be here remarked, too, that the late treaty of peace had defined the bounds of Canada within the same limits as now enclose it. The wilderness forts west and south of the Lakes were still occupied by British garrisons, in spite of the protests of the Americans, as some guarantee, though a futile one as it proved, for the proper treatment of the loyalists.
The refugees, as I have said, came to Canada by many routes; a few by sea, to Montreal, but the majority by canoe and bateau up the laborious, rapid, broken water- ways, both the more noted ones such as Champlain and the Mohawk, and others trodden only by the Indian or the voyageur. Some are said to have even travelled the whole way on foot ; others again, from Pennsylvania and more remote North Carolina, to have laboured through the wood- land trails in two-horse waggons till they struck the height of land whence lake and stream carried them down on im- provised boats to the great Canadian Lakes. From the last-named province came, among others, the two sons of Flora Macdonald of Scottish Jacobite fame, who with their father, a Highland settler in North Carolina and a major in a royalist corps, had fought through the war. The new survey had begun at the edge of the French country on Lake St. Francis, near the mouth of the Ottawa, and ex- tended westward up the St. Lawrence for over a hundred miles to old Fort Frontenac or Cataraqui and the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario. Fate had reserved the first of these tracts, the present county of Glengarry, for much later comers, the Catholic M'Donnells. Cleared from their Scottish holdings before the inexorable sheep, em- bodied in a regiment which assisted in quelling the Irish rebellion of '98, these Highlanders, at the instigation and under the leadership of their priest, afterwards their bishop, came hither with their families over a thousand strong. Many times that number may be found in Glengarry to- day, flourishing farmers, still mainly Catholics and till quite recently speaking the ancient tongue. But that all came
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later. In 1784 Johnson's Royal New York Regiment with its first battalion, mostly Germans of the Mohawk valley, whose women and children had joined them, started to open the broad tract of westward settlement that was to develop ultimately into a great province, in the present county of Dundas. Jessup's Rangers, English-Americans of the same battalion, came next, while the King's Rangers, also English New-Yorkers, under James Rogers, were allotted lands at Frontenac. These corps had mainly operated from Canada and been recruited from the loyalists near the borders. Colonel James Rogers was a brother of Robert, the famous partisan of the Seven Years' War, and had commanded a detachment of those rangers who in that same struggle won for themselves and their leader an imperishable repu- tation for deeds of daring and endurance. Robert Rogers went after Pontiac's war as a half-pay major to England and to Court, where he attracted some attention, as he deserved to, and figured large in the windows of the London print-shops. His after career does not concern us. He fought, however, in Africa, and raised both the Queen's and the King's Rangers in the Revolutionary war. But his health, undermined by later indulgences and earlier hardships, was not equal to his spirit, and he had practically to give up active service, and died in England. His brother James, Colonel of the King's Rangers and founder of the Canadian family still numerous, had a Crown patent for 22,000 acres on the Vermont side of Lake Champlain, which he was busy developing when the war broke out. He at once espoused the royal side and fought through it, and his property, valued at from .£30,000 to £40,000, went by confiscation.
Here too was Major Van Alstine with a large and capable gathering of exiles from New York, and Colonel M'Donnell, with further parties of disbanded soldiers, which in the next year were reinforced by some companies of Hessians that had been detained in Lower Canada. Along the good wheatlands by the Richelieu too, and around the indented foot of Lake Champlain, numbers of other
THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 151
refugees, both German and English, soldiers and civilians, found homes. And away in the west the fertile levels and less rigorous climate of the Niagara peninsula had taken the fancy of Butler and his Rangers, those ogres of Revolu- tionary story-books who, from long garrison work at the edge of its still virgin forests, must have got a good scent of its value, for it was the cream of all the districts then open for settlement. Lonesome and remote enough in those days was this country lying within sound of the roar of the Falls, before American settlement had yet touched the southern shores of Ontario and Erie, now the site of so many flourishing cities, but then, like the northern coast, wrapped in sombre forest from Oswego to Detroit. But the Niagara shore had even then for nearly a century been periodically enlivened by the passage of the western trade back and forth over the long portage round the cataract. The St. Clair river too, at the remoter end of Lake Erie, was an object point for some few loyalists, and this, though far the most advanced of all, as will be remem- bered, had been an oasis of French settlement for three generations. Lastly, so far at least as concerns us here, came the loyalist refugees, as they may in a sense be called, of another colour. Not only had the harried estates of the Johnsons and their numerous German, English and Dutch dependants and loyalist neighbours on the Mohawk been confiscated, but the flourishing villages and orchards of the Six Nations had been levelled with the ground. The Indians, indeed, had been alarmed and not a little in- dignant when they found that a treaty of peace had been concluded without any regard whatever to their interests. They failed to understand how the King could surrender a country that did not belong to him, having in mind, that is to say, their own recognised territories. Some of them had done good service for the Crown, and the Mohawks had suffered much for it. There was not unnatural discontent among the Six Nations generally, a feeling which Schuyler, on behalf of the Americans, attempted to make some
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capital out of. La Fayette, whose enterprises in America were not always conspicuous for wisdom, repaired himself to the Indian country, and advised the tribes to let the fact 'sink deep into their hearts that their old friends the French would soon be among them again.' He also placarded Canada to the same effect, and one feels tolerably sure that had Washington known of his young protege's superfluous activity in such an unwelcome direction, he would have called him to order in that emphatic language he is said to have had always at command. The upshot of this Indian question, however, so far as it concerns Canada, was the immigration of the Mohawks, with some others of the Six Nations in two bodies, to that country at the invitation of the Government. The greater part under the chief, Joseph Brant, who had led them in the late war, settled on the Grand River to the north of Lake Erie, the banks of which from its mouth to its source, covering over half a million acres of first-class land, were allotted them by the Crown. Here in a much more contracted area around the neighbourhood of Brantford, in the very heart of agricul- tural Ontario, their descendants may be seen to-day follow- ing with moderate success the trades of the country. The lesser portion settled in like manner on the Bay of Quinte, and thus was finally broken up that famous confederation, great in spirit and discipline if small in numbers, that had shattered most, and been held in dread by all the Indian nations from the Ottawa to the Mississippi ; that had been the nightmare of the French for much over a century, and from the earliest strifes of Europeans had been the third factor which both sides had always to take into account. Here then were ten or twelve thousand people, the west- ern wing, so to speak, of the first and genuine U.E. loyalists, those whose deeds or opinions had irrevocably stamped them as the partisans of the British connection, scattered along the fringe of the most formidable forests from the axemen and settlers' point of view, in eastern North America. To realise their situation the reader should look
THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 153
at the map, note the position of Kingston and Niagara, and bear in mind that Montreal was practically the limit of civilisation. He must remember too those innumerable facilities and inventions of modern times, which now so vastly ameliorate the lot of the frontier settler in a score of ways, were not then dreamed of. These people had been accustomed to think vaguely of Canada as a hyperborean region with an indifferent soil. Reliable reports had, it is true, corrected this, or the experiment should not have been tried, but the inherited traditions and time-honoured beliefs were still rife among the adventurers. Beneath the forests of Upper Canada lay a country as good as the best of New York, the Jerseys, or Pennsylvania, and far better than most of Maryland. Virginia, and North Carolina, even in their virgin prime, which by now was a very old story. But its forests were harder to subdue than had been the primitive woodlands of most of these other countries, and the winters of Canada, bearable enough under more developed conditions, had terrors for the ill-supplied pioneer that the well-fed, well-clad Montrealer of to-day on a snow- shoeing party, or the Ontario farmer driving his cutter over well-beaten roads, is apt to forget. There was no mercy in the Canadian bush from October to June, no scrap of com- fort for the old-time pioneer, no bite for horse or cow, nor any breadth of hay meadow, but a few patches made by the beaver, yet opened from which he could fill his barn. The raw stumps bristled thick and high over the clearing for a decade or two before they rotted. Nor were these mere soft pine-woods springing from smooth carpets of needles, nor yet again comparatively open forests of hard wood with light underbrush, as was much of the country to the southward. The Canadian bush of oak, maple, beech and hemlock stood on the good soils, with peculiar density, while the cedars with other underwood and debris in the swamps presented a hideous tangle. In summer the mosquitoes, and yet more torturing black flies, made life a burden even to the thickest skinned. After generations to be sure
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had this to face as they pressed further and further back, but these earlier pioneers were not all labouring men who had exchanged a somewhat hopeless prospect in old countries for a period of hardship with the certainty of an ultimate rise in life. They had nearly all left comfortable farms and homes, many luxurious ones, to begin life again. If companionship in adversity was some consolation, their very numbers in another sense aggravated the situation. Food and supplies were furnished by Government, and Haldimand, though in poor health, spared himself no exer- tions in the difficult task of ministering to the innumerable necessities of so great a number of almost destitute people. The officers to be sure had small pensions, not a very appreciable asset among so many thousands in such an emergency. The Court of Claims established in London had scarcely as yet begun to sit. In spite of Haldimand's endeavours food at times fell wofully short, while the pre- mature freezing-up of provision ships in the St. Lawrence caused much distress. In the following spring the settlers on the Bay of Quinte were on the verge of starvation. Men offered a thousand acres for a bushel of potatoes ! Hungry children devoured the young buds of the bass-wood tree, and eagerly plucked the first heads of rye and barley, while a beef bone was passed round from house to house to be boiled and reboiled. But at least the immigrants were not raw Europeans, a fact which made a world of differ- ence in facing their trials. They possessed for the most part the resourceful qualities of the colonial and a general familiarity with the ways of life, though these qualities were tested under unprecedentedly hard conditions. Nor had they the advantage of their Nova Scotian brethren in a settled government ready to hand. They were technically under French law, but outside the pale for the present of any machinery but such as they might for local purposes, when they had time to think of it, set up for themselves. Shelter from the weather, acquisition of supplies, of seed, wheat and potatoes, or of felling timber, was the sole
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immediate care whether of colonel or private, ex-judge or labourer. They were probably not yet aware that they were creating another difficult problem for Canada. And here for the moment we must leave them, the hopeful and the despondent, the satisfied and the discontented, for there is a profusion of correspondence extant amply proving, if proof were needed, in a community of human beings thus situated, that there were plenty of both sorts. One senti- ment at any rate remained to cheer their darkest hours. They were still under the British flag and beyond the reach of the people, once friends and neighbours, between whom and themselves the horrors of a most implacable civil war had raised a barrier of mutual hatred and exasperation that lingered among the exiles to the second and third gene- ration. Whether this added bitterness or helped to assuage the memory of their former homes and dignities and easy lives one may not say. It must be remem- bered, however, that the impecunious and factious state of the still unconsolidated Republic after the peace, the rise of new and blatant elements to the surface, was some measure of consolation to those it had expelled, for the ethics of charity and goodwill could not reasonably be looked for. The exuberant loyalty of their leaders stamped itself indelibly on the map of Canada. The fifteen children of George the Third were responsible for the names of fifteen adjoining townships, the six miles square which the Anglo-Canadians from that day to this have made the unit both of survey and local administration. When these were exhausted, other abundant relatives of that King whose obstinacy and deplorable choice of councillors had been the chief cause of all their woes, were duly honoured in like fashion.
Haldimand's closing years of service were heavy ones, and he met his Council at the end of 1784 for the last time. He has been accused by an uncritical posterity of harsh and arbitrary imprisonments, and among other things of violating the Act of Habeas corpus. The absurdity of
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the latter needs no demonstration, as the Habeas corpus was not at that time on the Canadian code, and if it had been the critical period of a great war was not one in which to quibble over its suspension. With gaols full of prisoners of war frequently attempting their escape assisted by out- side sympathisers : with spies and emissaries from France and the other colonies going up and down the country, Haldimand in the whole course of his administration im- prisoned just nineteen persons, some of them for only a few days. A French Protestant trader, Du Calvet, who for his dealings with the enemy fell under Haldimand's dis- pleasure, pursued him with extraordinary malignity, follow- ing him back to England and suing him, though to his own undoing, in the English Courts.
Domestic politics had been in abeyance under the long suspense of war and the excitement aroused by the advent of the loyalists. The victory of the Americans had naturally shaken the prestige of British arms among the Canadians, both those who looked to them for protection, and such as may have had other hopes. Vermont too, though silenced for the moment by the surrender of Corn- wallis, had renewed its intrigues with Canada in the person of the Aliens and their friends. It is altogether a curious passage in the history of the times. The dominant faction there were pervaded by a provincialism so absorbing that they were prepared to hoist the flag of either Government which would guarantee them autonomy, and Congress, in no very good humour with them, had shown as yet no inclina- tion to recognise their pretensions.
Haldimand to his great relief took his departure in November 1784, and a more conscientious servant Great Britain never had. A tardy justice is now being rendered to his memory in Canada. On the more crowded pages of national history he is never likely to get his deserts. His work was of the underground vigilant kind. It is sometimes said, though with little truth, that nothing occurred in Canada during Haldimand's time. It has been better said by a writer
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on the period that nothing occurred because Haldimand took care that it should not occur. But both statements are metaphorical. For the coming of the loyalists took place in his time, the weightiest event in Canadian history, and a prodigiously important one in that of the United States. And the success of their settlement in Canada owes to its Swiss Governor what only an altogether too elaborate relation of detail for the reader's patience, or my space, could convey ; for there is documentary evidence enough to fill a
(volume. Haldimand shares with the numerous relatives of George the Third such kind of immortality as topography can ensure, which if prosaic is unshakable, a county in Ontario and a street in Quebec bearing his name. He added a wing to the Chateau St. Louis, the site of which is now occupied by that conspicuous pile, the Chateau Frontenac hotel, the far-seen and dominating lodestar which beckons insistently to every properly constituted tourist steaming up to Quebec. His country house above the Montmorency Falls gathered fresh fame by becoming in after years a frequent residence of her late Majesty's father, the Duke of Kent, who lived there for so long, and is now, like his other residence, a hotel. Most of the remaining seven years of his life Haldi- mand spent in London, going freely into society, dining, card-playing and attending levees, where the King always talked to him as a wise and valued servant. One is tempted to say so much as the indefatigable diarist continues his record, which becomes valuable now merely as the confes- sions of a wise old bachelor who knew everybody and has an opinion worth having about many current things and people. He died in his native Switzerland, but a tablet in Westminster Abbey inscribed in French to Sir Frederick Haldimand, Knight of the Bath, and briefly recounting the offices he held, testifies at least that his adopted country held him in some honour, at his death in 1791.
* We must preserve Quebec even if we have to send out Carleton himself/ Shelburne had written in a moment of anxiety and with scant courtesy to Haldimand. Though
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no such urgency as this suggests was present on the latter's retirement, Carleton was in fact appointed, and one might add persuaded, to succeed him. But this did not happen for nearly two years, critical in a civil sense as the state of Canada under its rapidly changing conditions had become. The country in the meantime was under the care of a Lieutenant-Governor. Cramahe' had recently retired, and Hamilton, as a reward for his activity in frontier wars and his sufferings after Vincennes and at the hands of his Virginian gaolers, was already in his place. An energetic soldier, popular both with his men and the Indians, Hamilton as a politician seems to have been incautious and tactless ; a breezy advocate of premature reforms in a country whose unique conditions required the most careful handling and were yet to tax the wits of many much wiser men. He was in a short time, however, recalled, and Hope installed as his successor. The venerable Bishop Briand also retired about the same time before his increasing infirmities, after playing an honourable and useful part during critical times, and M. Hubert, a native Canadian, but adequate to the post, and comparatively young, became the next Bishop of Quebec. There had been some difficulty since the conquest in the supply of priests, not so much as to numbers as to qualifica- tions for the higher posts. The parish clergy, though almost absolute among their illiterate flocks, were no doubt for that very reason in a condition of some mental stagnation them- selves. It had been found necessary to forbid the country to French ecclesiastics on account of their irrepressible tendency to promote dissatisfaction, while the importation experiments from other Catholic countries had not been a success. The western posts still held by British garrisons remained too a source of no small anxiety, as the irritation of the Americans at their retention was extreme, while the continuous flow of loyalists into Canada, as evidence of their treatment at home, was a standing justification in the eyes of the British Government for their action.
Carleton, now created Lord Dorchester, arrived at Quebec
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in October 1786 for his second term of government. He had been appointed, though not without resistance on his own part on the plea of advancing years, during the previous winter. Everything within and without the borders of Canada pointed to coming difficulties. France was ripening for the Revolution. One of the rival parties in the United States was in the worst ill-humour with Great Britain. Canada herself was altogether outgrowing the Quebec Act, assuming features that had never been contemplated, and presenting a fresh and perplexing problem to British states- manship. Carleton, or Dorchester as he now becomes, was regarded everywhere as the one man to fill the breach, and following a strong sense of patriotism rather than inclination, he left his country home in Hampshire and sailed for the St. Lawrence. It goes without saying that the people of Quebec, particularly the French, were glad to see their old friend and defender, and the warm addresses of welcome which greeted him were something more than the usual forms. After nearly a decade of bachelor regime at the Chateau, varied by that of Lieutenant-Governors not sufficiently endowed for social enterprise, the advent of Lady Maria, the mother now of a numerous and already fighting family of sons, was in a social sense equally accept- able. Dorchester came out with wider powers than any of his predecessors. He was not only the ruler of Canada, but had chief authority when called upon to exercise it over Nova Scotia, Cape Breton (not for some time reunited to the main province), New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, all now under Lieutenant-Governors. He was also Commander -in -Chief of all the forces in British North America. He brought out with him his own Chief-Justice, William Smith, son of a New York judge, and himself formerly Chief-Justice of that important province. Taking the loyalist side, he had retired to England with Carleton, who held him in great respect. Both of them, together with Haldimand, had been much in consultation with Lord Sidney, now Secretary for the Colonies, as to the future administra-
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tion of Canada. The Quebec Act had theoretically settled the legal code, but Dorchester found himself once again confronted with something like the old confusion. English litigants in matters not pertaining to land frequently rejected the French code, which was a mixture of the old French and Roman law, with much that custom alone had improved and sanctioned. The English lawyers often found its intricacies too difficult for them, and so it came about that while French judges followed French law, and English judges English law, precisely as they chose, to the great confusion of litigation, Chief-Justice Smith showed a predilec- tion at once for a loose interpretation of the Quebec Act in the courts and a reversion towards the royal proclamation of 1763. The confusion became so great that one of Dorchester's first acts was to get a committee appointed to inquire into and report upon the matter. Committees were also nominated to report on the commerce, the police, and the education of the province. The former was mainly represented by Montreal and Quebec, neither of them even yet with quite eight thousand inhabitants. Their merchants being mainly British, formally complained of the great irregu- larities in the legal situation which Dorchester's committee strongly recommended to his ' most serious consideration.' Trial by jury in civil cases was now optional with litigants. Smith brought a bill before the council for establishing it in all civil affairs, which was rejected. Attorney- General Monk made a speech of six hours, which exposed such a chaotic state of justice as to 'astonish the whole audience/ Dorchester then appointed a fresh committee under Chief- Justice Smith to investigate the past administration of the laws as well as the conduct of the judges in the courts both of Appeal and Common Pleas. Every prominent person was examined, and such a state of anarchy and confusion was exposed, says a contemporary legal writer, as no other British province ever before experienced. * English judges following English, French judges French law, and worse still, some following no particular laws of any kind whatsoever.'
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The committee on schools and education and the feasi- bility of founding a university, produced like the others no immediate result, on account of those increasing changes in the balance of race which turned men's minds towards a division of the province. It produced, however, an instructive passage of arms between Hubert the new Bishop of Quebec and his coadjutor Bailly a highly accomplished cleric who had visited England with Carleton in the capacity of tutor to his family. The former obviously favoured education rather in theory than in practice. He enumerated the various seminaries, that at Quebec for the higher education mainly of priests, and the other at Montreal which was simply a large free school, together with its college. He spoke with warmth of the teaching of the nuns, particularly those of the Ursulines and the General Hospital, who imparted instruction free and otherwise to females, mostly of the better classes. It seems pretty clear that virtue and a respect for religion were the chief items in a curriculum which the good bishop thought fully adequate. When the illiteracy of the parishes with a reputed average of three or four to the parish who could read and write was brought forward, his lordship accounted the figures to be 'wicked calumny' but admitted that as regards men only they might be true. The country cures he protested did their utmost to spread education, while as for a university presided over by men of unbiassed and unprejudiced views, he was of the opinion that men of that description had no views at all on sacred matters. He also thought that the farmers with so much land to clear would prefer to keep their sons at home to clear it rather than to spend their savings by providing them with a classical education. M. Bailly, the coadjutor, who disliked the bishop and was an abler and a wider-minded man, pro- ceeded to demolish his superior's arguments with con- siderable irony and asked whether Canada was to wait for educational facilities till it had been cleared to the North Pole. He then proceeded to display an eloquent
L
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enthusiasm for non-sectarian education, unusual for his class and period, pointing out among other things that such a university at Quebec would attract students from the Maritime Provinces. The committee reported in favour of free schools in every parish and a secondary school in every town and district and also of a non- sectarian college from which religion was to be rigorously excluded. Upon the last head at any rate this committee of 1787, which included several Frenchmen, may be regarded as a singularly sanguine body of men. It should also be related that the income of the Jesuit estates of which only four aged members still survived was regarded by all Canadian educationalists of that day as their reversion by equity if not by right. Dorchester forwarded a petition to this effect widely signed in Canada, but in the meantime a half- forgot ten claim to the property was put in by no less a person than General Amherst, who affirmed that it had been granted to him at the conquest. This promised a sore disappointment to so poor a country, as the estate was a matter of some half million acres and though mainly wild lands had considerable potential value. The after relations with North America of the ' Conqueror of Canada,' as the cautious, plodding, uninspiring Amherst had a technical right to be called, had not been felicitous when in chief command at New York. His claims whether valid or not were now staved off by the genuine plea that the Jesuit estate had originally been granted by Louis XIV. to the Order in trust for the education of Canadians and Indians and could not be alienated. The dispute continued intermittently for nearly half a century when the property passed into the control of the Quebec parliament.
Once again, after the lapse of a decade, Canada had a burning domestic question and those responsible for her government were free to concentrate themselves upon it. The far west alone gave external cause for anxiety, that wide domain lately ceded to the United States but still
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sprinkled with small British garrisons, the constant subject of protest on the part of the American government to Haldimand and now in turn to Dorchester both of whom could merely reply that they had no instructions to with- draw them. The danger, however, was not so much from any direct American action on this account but rather from the bad blood between their lawless pioneers and the Indians beyond the lakes, whose territories, with no regard whatever to the injunctions of Congress, they were invading right and left. Bloody skirmishes were already going forward with a promise of something more between the two races, within touch of the British forts, and a general Indian war, which did in fact soon afterwards break out, was fraught with grave consequences to Anglo- American relations, from the awkward situation of the British garrisons. But out in the west at any rate Dorchester could do nothing but answer the frequent alarmist despatches from his captains there and urge them at every hazard to keep their heads. There is no good reason to believe that the American government were not equally well-meaning and gave similar orders to their officers, but they had to deal with an element that cared little for Congress or its officials. That the Indians were restive is not surprising, and by this time they may well have been bewildered as to who was now their ' father.'
But immigrants all this time were flocking over the bound- ary line into Canada. The genuine U.E. movement was over. The roll of honour had been closed and the last name inscribed or practically so upon it. The forty to fifty thousand in Canada and the Maritime Provinces to whom and to whose descendants for ever the government of the day seriously proposed to grant the right of affixing the magic letters U.E. after their names, now looked upon all new comers from the States with suspicion. There is no doubt, however, that as the new settlements showed promise of their future, and the fertility of the land became more
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apparent many friends and relatives of the humbler sort of refugees, who had kept out of trouble through the war, were tempted to join them by the prospect of free land in a country so well reported of. But the mass of the new comers were attracted by the last considerations alone, tempered often by dissatisfaction with the state of things produced in the old colonies by the war. One has only to mention the currency and financial difficulties, the increased taxation and the fear of more, the uncer- tainty of the future government and the lack of unanimity with which these difficult questions were approached by various States, to understand that many despaired of their country and were quite disposed to abandon it if a good opportunity offered. The reaction that followed the glamour of victory, and the apparently bankrupt condi- tions of the country before the genius of Hamilton had grappled with the question of unity, concord and finance very naturally turned the minds of many doubting souls with no strong ties and no tangible recollections of ' British tyranny' to this new country, stable at least in its govern- ment, and fertile by all accounts in its soil. There is no doubt that the spectre of Popery and dread of French laws had acted at first as a strong deterrent. But very soon questions of a modification at least if not a change in these conditions were in the air. The very strength of the immigration gave confidence that something would be done, and indeed the rulers of Canada and the loyalist settlers who had time to indulge in reflection or agitation were thinking of little else. The new population came in practical contact with neither the scarlet women nor the arrogant seignior nor yet the tithe-exacting priest of their imaginations. A few hundreds at Sorel and the foot of Champlain had settled on lands, at least within sight of these belated and mediaeval institutions which on close acquaintance lost most of their terrors and at any rate held none in store for them. A few stragglers even married French women, and if they did not them-
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selves become as Gallic as their wives, their children invariably did, and grew up to speak the seventeenth- century French as well and pay the priest's dime as cheerfully as any descendant of Turgot's earliest shipment of stalwart Perche peasants and virtuous Dieppe maidens. But the bulk of the new comers, whether of the original elect or of the later batches, saw none of these things. In the townships west of Montreal, on the Niagara peninsula, or again in the Eastern Townships soon surveyed for settle- ments, they might have been in the woods of New Brunswick so far as any French atmosphere was discernible. Indeed it was the French rather for whom one's sympathies are enlisted. They had just settled down with almost every- thing French Canadians of that day under alien rule could expect or wish for. Votes, elective assemblies, and free schools were not in their scheme of order or happiness. The habitant was waxing prosperous according to his standard. His tenure was secure ; the questions which had agitated him were the distortions of utterly unsympathetic, alien and self-interested intriguers, who had merely played on his primitive passions. His priest was the soundest interpreter of his well-being such as he was then qualified for and the priest was absolutely contented. The seignior and the growing bourgeoisie only wanted a little more recognition on the Legislative Council which they would certainly have got from any reasonable Governor to complete as happy a community as the sun shone upon. The impending French Revolution if the Americans had let them alone, and no U.E. loyalists had been gathering on their western flank would, humanly speaking, have destroyed for ever, through the influence of their church and Noblesse, every tie of sympathy with France and permanently reconciled them to the only other monarchy with whom they were concerned. For the French Canadian sentiment of that day is unthinkable without a king of some sort as a figure- head. The only element of future friction, the British merchants of Quebec and Montreal, had already established
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a more social and friendly footing while their commercial value to the country was now recognised by all and by none more than the habitant whose grain they bought for export. Politically the British merchant, with a royal governor and a strong voice in his council, would have had nothing to fear. But this Utopia of quite legitimate anticipation was now upset and a fresh start had to be made.
These large grants and settlements of freehold land within and without their borders alarmed the seigniors, who feared it would depreciate their own properties and make their tenants restless. A move was made in the Legislative Council for reconsidering their land laws, but all the seigniors were stoutly opposed to it except Carleton's friend and military secretary, De Lanaudiere, whose seign- iory of thirty-five square leagues he would willingly, he declared, surrender to the Crown and receive back again under terms of free and common soccage. They had, he declared, within the seigniories, an immense territory but sparsely cleared and meagrely settled, and was it likely that immigrants would take up their abode under conditions they detested. It may be doubted if they would have been altogether welcome had they ventured to do so. The feature of the seigniorial system that militated most against material progress was the lods et ventes, the payment, that is to say, of the twelfth part of the purchase money to the seignior every time a parcel of land, howsoever improved by buildings or otherwise, changed hands. This of course tended to discourage all improvement.
The first Royal visit was now paid to Canada in the person of the sailor Prince, afterwards William IV., as captain of a war ship. The hearty manners of this young man made him a favourite in every British dependency, and an admir- able stimulant to colonial loyalty had Canada needed any. De Gaspe tells us in his memoirs that he was the despair of Lady Dorchester at her state balls for the persistency with which he chose his partners where he listed, rather than
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where ceremony required. At Sorel, where Government had encouraged the beginnings of a town and shipyards, the inhabitants were so delighted with the genial young man that they christened their town William Henry. But Sorel, though but a modest aspirant to urban rank, had bitten its name too deep into the story of two wars to readily accept such violation of its past, and remained Sorel in spite of the sustained efforts of official documents to the contrary. The agitation for an assembly among the British mercantile class had never ceased, in spite of the assumed finality of the Quebec Act. Adam Lymburner, a leading Quebec merchant, had quite recently been sent to London with a petition to that effect. Their difficulty, however, now that their former monstrous pretensions to Protestant monopoly could no longer be seriously proposed, was to secure good value for their efforts, and in their pursuit of political emancipation, not ultimately to find themselves the sport of an emancipated habitant, for that was not by any means what they were aiming at. With such a possible catastrophe embarrassing the efforts of the class he repre- sented, Lymburner proposed to the British Government that Quebec and Montreal, now containing a tenth part of the population, should return half the members. Lymburner had been followed by a petition covering sixteen pages, with French signatures, protesting against any changes, and treating the sacred question of popular government with an almost contemptuous levity that would have made the blood of Patrick Henry, or of John Adams, turn cold. But the loyalist influx now introduced silent arguments for this new departure infinitely more potent than all the thunders of the old British faction at Quebec.
By 1790 there were probably between twenty and thirty thousand of the refugees and their successors within the Government of Quebec, and the tide was still flowing. It was patent now to all that the machinery of government would have to be recast, and those who thought that a representative assembly could be deferred in the presence
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of such a phalanx of hereditary freemen must have been sanguine indeed. It was all very well for the American Whigs in the abounding metaphor of their kind and period to call the Tories ' sons of despotism.' But as a matter of fact there had been no vital difference in political ethics among the so-called Whigs and Tories, between whom the war opened such an impassable chasm. They had objected equally to the aggressive measures of the Crown. Both had dressed in homespun, and adjured imported luxuries as a protest against them. They differed only in their views on the right methods of resistance, and there was unfortunately no room here for a difference. That was the tragedy of the domestic side of the American war. Men who had never voted against each other even in the mild divisions of a provincial assembly, who had seen eye to eye in every conceivable question, and had protested together against the Stamp Act, the tea tax, and all the rest of it, found themselves suddenly called upon to decide, without com- promise and without delay, on a plan of action, not on a political opinion. Even had it been purely a matter 'of principle, few sober men could have foretold what road his nearest neighbour would choose, so unexpected and mo- mentous a decision was it that either had to make. But a score of other influences were at work on both sides ; fear, self-interest, persuasive counsels, eloquent pens and tongues, family ties. The U.E. loyalist, therefore, though his passion for the British connection was fired by the trials he had suffered on its behalf, was no more likely to sit down quietly under the most benignant despotism than his old rebel friends and neighbours in Virginia and Massachusetts. His peculiar experiences had made of him a somewhat strange mixture of political sentiment. He is, in short, a unique figure in history. So far as I know you may look in vain elsewhere for a truculently anti-republican democrat. If the expression sounds hopelessly paradoxical it is never- theless sufficiently accurate, for he had nothing in common with the British * Tory democrat ' of a recent age. If his
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characteristics had died with him they would be less remark- able as the product only of untoward personal experiences,but he transmitted them to his children and his children's children. Even to-day the unsophisticated but intelligent European traveller may perchance find himself confronted by some country farmer of what may possibly seem to one unversed in the subtler shades of transatlantic ethnology the most pronounced type of American rustic with the finest of American accents ; while he himself, dimly conscious of being regarded as something like a foreigner, and doubtless feeling one under the painfully critical eye of a wholly un- familiar type of rural Briton, may quite likely strike a spark of Imperialistic eloquence or sentiment that suggests the period of the battle of Waterloo or the coronation of Queen Victoria. The aforesaid visitor will be surprised both at its fervour and yet more at its flavour, and a vague sense of its incongruity will mayhap supervene, as he con- fronts the very incarnation of latter-day democracy in demeanour and person, but otherwise a militant monarchist of a departed type. The somewhat puzzled stranger will hardly grasp the true inwardness of the situation or fully realise that he has lighted upon, and himself unconsciously lit, the still smouldering embers of the old truculent U.E. loyalism which, in politer circles, is embodied in a less antique form. In an entertaining little book by a well- known English novelist of Ontario rearing, I remember that the scene opens on a rugged old farmer of the Niagara district who, in all good nature, has just taken up in his spring waggon a chance but well-dressed wayfarer. The unsuspecting agriculturalist opens at once on his favourite topic, the war of 1812, in which his father had fought some sixty years previously, and thereby elucidating the almost unthinkable fact that he is conferring his favours on a stranger from the wrong side of the line. Upon this dis- tressing discovery he pulls his team up short, hitches it to the fence, and insists on the American gentleman alighting, taking off his coat and engaging in a pugilistic encounter
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by the road-side on general U.K. principles. The other, who is visiting Canada for the first time, dumfounded that such a spirit could still exist, but with a sense of humour overmastering his annoyance, enters into the spirit of the thing, and for a round or two parries the blows of the enraged and long-memoried patriot till want of breath or a sense of satisfied national honour on the part of this descendant of Butler's Rangers terminates the combat. After this, if memory serves me, they shake hands, resume their coats, and drive on together the best of friends. This of course is fooling, but quite admirable fooling, and very much to the point, and as a caricature even yet not wholly out of date.
The proportion of British born to American born, among the rank and file at any rate of the loyalist exiles, is impos- sible to assess. There had been considerable immigration into America after the peace of 1763, and though the strongest element in this was Scotch-Irish who, from the smart of recent treatment, would have been rarely Tories, it is probable that the inclination of the others, English, Scottish, German, and even Catholic Irish, their old regard for stable institutions, and their inevitable early prejudices against their new compatriots, not yet rubbed off, leaned towards the Tory side. As the later Scotch- Irish fought by hundreds in the American ranks, so these others, not yet well established, often still landless, readily swayed by instinct, or sometimes by a higher form of loyalty, and as often by a soldier's pay, contributed very largely to the other side. Of the 2500 who actually divided the £3,000,000 disbursed by the court of claims altogether up to the year 1790, more than half, we know, were of British birth. These successful claimants roughly represented the men of former estate and of professional position. The English born would incline towards a return to England ; the others still more to- wards remaining in North America. Almost certainly there- fore a majority of the elite of the loyalists in Canada and the Maritime Provinces were Americans by birth and tradition.
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It was now admitted by almost all whose opinions mattered and would have weight, that an elective assembly was inevitable, and concurrently with this lay a far more burning question, that of the division of the province into separate governments. The point of division was so to speak ready made, namely, that where the new English settlements began on Lake St. Francis and the spot at which the provinces of Quebec and Ontario meet to-day. It was into the latter, then, for some time yet to be known as Upper Canada, that the bulk of the British- American immigration went, though the considerable German and loyal Dutch element in it must by no means be forgotten. Here beyond doubt was the nucleus of a Protestant English-speaking province, that could live under its own laws and faith and at no point clash with the customs and administrations of Quebec or Lower Canada. This was simple enough. But at the prospect of division a bitter cry arose from the old British subjects of Quebec and Montreal as well as from the recent immigrants into the lower country. The old merchant class with their de- pendants may by this have numbered between two and three thousand, the recent settlers perhaps as many more. The former were now to be at last hoisted, in a sense, with their own petard, for with the rapid peopling of Upper Canada they had looked forward to popular government, as they somewhat sanguinely though naturally interpreted an assembly to mean. Their last petition, just before the loyalist settlements, had in its suggested legislation con- ceded somewhat to the French, since it was proposed that the three towns should have half the seats in the assembly eligible only to Protestants, while the rest of the country might elect Catholics at will. Now it promised to be no longer necessary to put forward claims for an assembly saddled with the offensive conditions of whole or partial disfranchisement of their French fellow-subjects. They could freely join with the Upper Canadians and the French in a reasonable unfettered demand for the natural
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rights of British colonial subjects such as had already been granted to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The French, if they were mostly indifferent in the matter, contained a small bourgeois element that had by now achieved some political aspirations. In any case they would not stand in the way, and if for the moment they were in a numerical majority, the others would possess the political vigour and experience and within measurable time as it seemed a numerical equality as well. Now at last one's sympathies honestly go out to these people, the mercantile pioneers of Canada. It was not that they suffered seriously under the Quebec Act and this * governing of the French accord- ing to French ideas,' as the modern cant has it. But they were inconvenienced in minor matters, in the com- plications that surrounded the purchase or tenure of land for a country house for instance. But their real grievance was the utter indifference to expansion and progress, the perfect content with the present that the French system, as they thought, encouraged. They wanted the country to grow as the English colonies grew, and their trade with it. And now this rumour of division seemed to sound the very knell of all their hopes. They were to have an assembly of a truth, but where would they be in it ? A pitiful four or five thousand in all against the 100,000 French that Haldimand's recent census had enumerated. Quebec was to be, in fact, definitely regarded as a French province. The swarming thousands of the future who had promised for a blissful moment to correct all this were now to be cut off in a country to themselves. Mr. Lymburner represented, as I have said, the Quebec merchants in England, and he pleaded for the abolition of the Quebec Act, which circumstances had already doomed, and against the division of the province with much ability, before a committee of the House of Commons. Dorchester had been requested by Lord Sydney then in office, to send home opinions on the future government of Canada. Personally he was in favour of moving cautiously and
THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 173
of retaining for a time a modified form of the present system. He thought division somewhat premature, and that for the present the new districts might be organised as counties. But as it was likely to be decided otherwise, he forwarded suggestions upon those lines. His long colonial experience enabled him, among other things, to quash a ministerial suggestion of hereditary legislation with simple and unanswerable logic. Nothing shows the inability of British statesmen of those days to realise colonial communities, with their fluctuations of individual fortune and other prohibitory features, than their almost chronic desire to create everywhere some kind of nobility. Dorchester in this same letter (to Grenville) is equally against quit rents for which irritating superfluity they also had a passion. The English statesmen of that time could never quite divest their minds of the sacredness of land such as they knew it, and a certain reluctance to frankly create freeholds wholesale. Nothing is more certain than the virtual impossibility of realising the nature of a primitive country till it has been seen with the eye. Who shall say what blunders and disappointments and losses have arisen, from absentee administration, public and private, on account of this one single and insurmountable fact. Governments could not understand as their com- mercial contemporaries concerned with such things very often could not understand that men cannot clear virgin forest and pay rent concurrently. The fact too of money going out of a new country in rents for lands only made serviceable by the colonists' labour created a bad impression.
The most interesting contribution to the new problem was that of Chief-Justice Smith, who draws on his long and intimate experience of government in old colonies and the troubles that arose in them. Here indeed we find a Federationist eighty years before his time. * A native as I am of one of the older provinces and early in the public service and councils, I trace the late revolt and rent to a
174 THE MAKING OF CANADA
remoter cause than those to which it is ordinarily ascribed. The troubles in the old colonies,' he continued, 'arose from their having outgrown their several governments and wanted the time to remedy half a century ago before the late rupture occurred. It should have been the parts of our fathers to have found a cure in the erection of a power upon the continent itself to control all its little republics and create a partner in the legislation of the Empire capable of consulting their own safety and the common welfare.' And again : * I am old enough to remember what we in the Maritime Provinces dreaded from this French colony in the north and what it cost to take away that dread which confined our population to the edges of the Atlantic.' Enclosed in the same document is a carefully propounded scheme for the federation of the two provinces of Upper and Lower Canada with Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Newfoundland. The general lines are those upon which the present Dominion of Canada is laid. It is worth noting too that Dorchester also recommended something of the sort to the Home Government.
On March 7, 1791, the new act was introduced into the House of Commons by Mr. Pitt, who still fought so hard for the Hereditary legislator that the clause was actually passed by a majority of 88 to 39, to remain in permanent abeyance through the recognition of successive Canadian governments of its utter absurdity. The province was divided in the manner already indicated and in fact very much as it stands to-day. Mr. Lymburner addressed the House for several hours on March 23rd on behalf of the party he represented, urging the total repeal of the Quebec Act, and protesting against division as ' a violent measure which could never be recalled.' It was recalled in fifty years as every one knows in favour of re-union which proved a complete failure. He accused the Quebec Act of introducing a confusion which had existed in a greater degree under the ordinance of 1763 which pre- ceded it. He declared that there was small reason for
THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 175
division as Niagara Falls would prove an insuperable barrier for all time against the transport of produce from the country beyond and would in fact remain the permanent limit of the province. Even canals which Haldimand had already begun were outside this gentleman's wildest dreams. In fifty years this hopeless country was the garden of Canada ! The difficulty of equitably apportion- ing the customs collected at Montreal was a more real though not an insuperable one. Blundering again in ignorance of the quality of the new settlers, Lymburner foretold that they would have no thoughts for legislative cares or duties under the engrossing cares of manual labour. This excellent but prejudiced Scotch trader had not yet realised that he had many superiors in political training and knowledge of the world in readiness at the Kingston and Niagara clearings to show of what metal they were made.
He told the House of Commons that these benighted beings would for many years merely choose their repre- sentatives from among the traders in Montreal and Quebec. He also told the familiar story of inefficient judges and miscarried justice which Dorchester's commission had already exposed. Having declared himself of these infelicitous prognostications which were all falsified within his own long life, and many other destructive arguments, he then went on to the constructive theories of his party, modified by unpalatable concessions to the inevitable. His allies, the London merchants trading with Canada, also presented a petition to parliament against the Bill.
On April 2ist the latter went into committee, and a member complained that no attention had yet been paid to the details of the question, but that gentleman had seized the opportunity to air their opinions on general questions of government. Fox, who knew nothing whatever of the conditions of Canada, and probably cared less, objected to being thus pinned down to the business in hand, and Burke, who also found the subject a spur to his eloquence, and was
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equally vague with regard to the practical side of the question, joined issue with his friend on the more congenial theme of the French Revolution, a parenthetical digression which culminated in their famous and final quarrel. Indeed, this debate, apart from the misfortune his irrelevant treat- ment of it brought him, seems to have been mainly service- able to Burke in providing occasion for sonorous and alliterative adjectives, though * bleak and barren ' were not felicitous ones in the case of a country of universal forests and remarkable fertility. That, however, did not much matter in the House of Commons, nor would it very much perhaps now. Then, as to-day, the opinions of many private members were expressed with much complacency, and difficulties seemed quite trifling to those cocksure orators and country squires, which had exercised the wits of Dorchester and Haldimand, Smith, and Maseres for years, to say nothing of ministers who, with much pains and inquiry, had drafted the bill. However, the latter was carried through both Houses, and ratified on May 14, 1791. Since the loss of the colonies, and the attention attracted to North America by the war, Canada had become a subject of more interest to the average Briton than she had been during the passing of the Quebec Act, nearly two decades earlier, and on some of the clauses of the Canada Act nearly a third of the Houses recorded their votes. Dorchester was not present in England during the discus- sion and passing of the Act, a draft of which had been sent to him for revision, and may be read to-day with his sug- gested alterations. It had been intended otherwise, and such was his own wish, not only on account of the import- ance of the measure to Canada, but for the sake of his health. What is known, however, as the * Nootka incident ' had occurred in 1790, in which Spain had seized some British trading vessels from Vancouver Island. She refused all satisfaction, and brought the two countries to the brink of rupture, only yielding when France, being in no mood for a great war to small purpose, refused her support, it
THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 177
was not the prospect of a Spanish war in itself that created anxiety so much as the fear lest the United States should take the opportunity to seize the western posts. When the danger had passed Dorchester sailed for England, arriving in the autumn of 1791, soon after the passing of the Act. He left the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Alured Clarke, in his place, and to him fell, in his superior's absence, to inaugurate the new form of government, which was done with much jubilation and ceremony in the closing week of the same year that saw it through the House of Commons.
M
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CHAPTER VIII
UPPER AND LOWER CANADA
CLARKE had gained some reputation in the West Indies, and lost none of it at Quebec during the two years of Dor- chester's absence. In 1793 he divided the French Province for elective purposes into counties, giving them homely and inappropriate English names, which have long disappeared. Most of these returned two members, while Quebec and Montreal were allotted four apiece, amounting to about fifty in all. The Legislative Council remained as before, and con- stituted an Upper House, while the power of veto was with the Governor. The franchise and qualification for candidates were both liberal. The Crown withdrew all right to taxa- tion, except such duties as might be imposed for the regula- tion of commerce, the revenue from which, however, was to be applied to the use of the province in which it was raised. There was also provision for the exchange of seignioral tenure into freehold on individual petition. The Crown, in the meantime, reserved to itself the fullest powers of veto and appointment. As regards the Lower Province, it is hardly necessary to say that the general principles of the Quebec Act were to be maintained, and the country governed with a full measure of respect for French ideas. The British settlers, both old and new, were bitterly dis- appointed at being enclosed within a province that, humanly speaking, must always be, in the main, a French one. Still, one must consider the times. It was not as if they were being handed over to the complete disposal of an unfriendly majority. The Governor, who nominated his Council and Executive chosen from it, would, together with several of the
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latter, be always of their race and creed. They were not in the helpless position that would be theirs as a minority in a modern isolated self-governing colony. On the contrary, in all vital matters, the traditions of that day amply secured them, and according to modern views, more than secured them, as will be seen. The English of the cities were to continue subject to the inconveniences, which to them were no doubt considerable, of modified French law, and other kindred matters of secondary consideration. They had no injustice nor resentment to fear, for no power to cause it was in reality conceded. As to the agricultural settlers, they had less still. They had been planted on wild lands surveyed on English lines, and held them in free and common soccage. The Habeas corpus was now in force in the province, and so was trial by jury in civil cases when litigants chose to demand it. The Roman Church did not touch them in any way. They erected their own places of worship with perfect liberty as to sect or creed, while the Anglicans were now supplied with a Bishop in Quebec, the excellent Dr. Mountain, and assisted by the missionary societies of England to pastors of their own faith.
In the Eastern Townships particularly, that beautiful and fertile region of hill and stream lying on the southern fron- tier against the Lakes and Highlands of Northern New Hampshire and Vermont became a little imperium in imperio of British settlement. It had not been opened to the militant U.E. loyalists for reasons of caution already stated. But just before and after the separation of the provinces, agricultural settlers from the adjoining States, with a keen eye to good land, sane views on the matter of British tyranny, doubts occasionally as to the drift of things in their own country, and no particular objection to con- siderable tracts of land, obtainable on easy terms, drifted in there by hundreds, to be reinforced later by some good elements from the Old country. Great as was the natural disappointment of the Quebec British at being cut off from the rising tide of British immigration to the west of them,
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the peopling of the Eastern Townships, and that, too, mainly by American settlers, is sufficient proof that they had nothing serious to fear. Judged by modern ethics, a mis- guided and foolish standard, it was the French who had most to complain of. The modern French Canadian, like the modern English democrat of the unreflective and less instructed kind who indulges in retrospective flights, is apt to be a sad sinner in this respect. He is not often a his- torical student. The more enlightened French Canadian and cleric of that day knew their period at any rate, and represented it. That they recognised their English rulers, with all their faults of manner, as a generation ahead of their time is sufficiently obvious from the tenor of their whole correspondence. They were doubtless mutely con- scious of what their own people would have done had the situations been reversed. It is a pity that their descendants do not more often throw their minds back to that alter- native. A note of genuine gratitude, the consciousness of experiencing a treatment beyond the ethics of their own day, underlies most of their ample correspondence. Even their occasional protests against this or that particular action, show that they are dealing with an unaccustomed standard of policy and know it. Because there were one hundred thousand Canadians and perhaps five thousand British in the province in 1791, the 'new subjects' did not expect the Governor's Council to consist of fifteen Frenchmen and two English members, and it was only reasonable. The counting of heads was not yet in vogue. The first council, as a matter of fact, which was practically the old one, included eight Frenchmen — De Levy, De St. Ours, Francois Baby, De Longueuil, and De Lanaudiere being the most prominent. Of the others, Finlay (Post- master-General), Pownal, John Fraser and Sir Henry Cald- well (Receiver-General and of Quebec Siege fame) seem to call for chief mention. Chief-Justice Smith was Speaker, Dr. Mabane, the ablest perhaps of the earlier British councillors of Canada, and the intimate friend of Haldi-
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mand, had retired. There is no evidence that the French in general were particularly exhilarated by the present of an elective Assembly, such appreciation as there was being mainly confined to the bourgeois class, who were now perhaps one-thirtieth of the population. The habitants had mainly a blank mind upon the matter, but no doubt received the instructions of their more gifted friends upon their newly-acquired importance in a fashion one would give a great deal to hear something of. No picture remains, however, so far as I know, of a situation and its accompani- ments that must have been prolific of interest and humour. But neither the little Parliament of Lower Canada nor the smaller one of the Upper Province, was to be by any means the authoritative assembly that, at the first sight, it looks on paper, or even such as the colonial legislatures, which had just given such a lesson to Great Britain, had been, and perhaps for that reason. The Governor and his council, which last, to a great extent, was the Governor, were to have no qualms whatever about throwing out objectionable bills. A House of Commons is not very effective, merely as an advisory body, without the power of the purse and an executive responsible to it. And it was a long time before either Canadian Assembly enjoyed these privileges with sufficient amplitude to use them with effect. Perhaps, on the whole, it was as well, and that by slow degrees, they should work out their own salvation.
In this first elective Assembly of Quebec that met in December 1793, a fourth of the members were British, a proportion about maintained during the half century of its existence prior to that temporary fusion of the two provinces which proved such a failure. Panet, a clever French advocate, was elected Speaker, and many interesting ques- tions of procedure and detail arose, the lingual one, of course, being prominent. Having said that the language was left optional in debate, the clerk acting as interpreter when necessary, and that the journals were to be kept in both languages, we may leave the first Anglo-French parlia-
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ment of Canada, making its address to the King of ' joy and gratitude ' for calling them into existence, to face that future which was not to prove quite all they perhaps expected.
Before turning our attention westward, however, to the other province, it may be noted as a social event that Prince Edward, her late Majesty's father, had arrived in Quebec with his regiment, the /th Fusiliers, in the summer of 1791, just before Dorchester's departure, and remained there for over two years. He achieved great social popularity, and Kent House, near Montmorency Falls, still serves as a country hotel, to remind both the tourist and the native of so interesting and ancient a connection between Canada and the reigning House. For the late Duke of Kent was altogether nearly seven years in British North America.
To a few again, it will have an interest as the white elephant of poor Haldimand, who built it for himself, and could find neither tenant nor purchaser when he left Canada. For Dorchester, the natural successor to his tenements, failed him, since her ladyship absolutely refused to trust her now numerous brood in such close vicinity to the yawning chasm of the falls. Nova Scotia had already a Bishop, with jurisdiction over the handful of missionaries and army chaplains who safeguarded the souls of the Quebec Anglican, and preached to them in the Chapel of the Recollets and elsewhere, for such at present was the shelterless condition of the Church of the ascendency. The arrival of their own Bishop Jacob Mountain, late a Norwich rector, and Fellow of Caius, Cambridge, has been already noted. It is said that he was greeted with much cordiality by his Catholic brother Bishop Hubert, kissed upon both cheeks, and informed that it was full time he had come to keep his people in order.
The winter mails to Europe,too,had exercised the Canadian officials no little. Sending them 200 miles by sleigh to Albany, whence a stage coach of dubious habits and un- certain pace conveyed them to New York, was not as may be imagined a lightning service. But beyond this the U.S.
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postal authorities were so unaccommodating to Canadian packages and so exorbitant in their charges, that the wit of Mr. Hugh Findlay had been set to work to devise what would in modern phraseology be styled an ' All Red route.' This had in fact been accomplished just before the division of the province. Halifax and St. John, then as now, two open winter ports of British North America on the Atlantic, vied with almost the zeal of modern rivalry for the mail contract. They were calmed by an equal division of favours ; a packet in short was to sail in alternate fortnights from either. Modern analogy ceases when we find the mails carried by walking postmen for hundreds of miles through the wintry woods from Quebec to Nova Scotia till roads could be cut.
When it is remembered that the crisis of the French Revolution and the fall of that monarchy had occurred with the apparent destruction of most things that French Canadians revered, it might be fairly supposed that Canada would at length cut her last tie of sentiment with the mother-country, and whatever external movements might in future threaten British rule in the colony, they would assuredly not come from France. Singularly enough and for reasons which will presently transpire this was anything but the case. For the next few years, the last of Dor- chester's administration, the country was agitated within and threatened without by the French Revolution, to an extent, short of actual invasion, as great as had been the case of the earlier Revolution upon her very borders.
John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, arrived in Quebec in the autumn of 1791, but was delayed there till the following summer through the non-arrival from England of certain officials who were vital to the administrative machinery of the new province. He was a man of parts, character and energy. His father, a north-countryman as the name implies, was a naval captain and unfortunate enough to die on board his ship as it was actually sailing from Halifax to Quebec on the
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THE MAKING OF CANADA
ever-glorious expedition of 1759. The son, though of Northumbrian stock and birth, inherited property in Devon- shire, was educated at Eton and Oxford and gazetted to the 35th Regiment in 1771. Proceeding to America at the opening of the war he was first under fire at the Battle of Brandywine, and immediately afterwards got his heart's desire, the command, namely, of irregulars. These were the New York Rangers, which under his energetic leadership acquired for themselves and their young commander a con- siderable reputation by four years of continual fighting and campaigning. Captured with Cornwallis, Simcoe returned to England and his estate on parole, and with a constitu- tion weakened by his incessant activities. He was some- thing of a scholar and an almost too ready penman in the way of despatch-writing. He kept a journal, how- ever, of his campaigns, which Mr. Duncan Scott, his recent biographer, tells us is written 'in the swelling style of the ancients,' and, in short, a trifle out of scale. He also wrote verses, some of which, in the heroic style, show at least his ardour and patriotism, and a good ear for cadence. He was a good specimen of a certain type of eighteenth-century British officer, of active habit and literary instinct, high principle and ready sword, a type of which Wolfe and Burgoyne in their different ways were conspicuous examples. Simcoe sat in Parliament for a time, and as a successful leader of colonial troops seems to have been freely consulted at headquarters. He was at least held sufficiently in regard to be appointed first Governor of the new province. Dorchester, knowing nothing of this, had urged the appointment of Sir John Johnson, whose rank, parentage and experience would seem to fit him for it. Born on a frontier to a baronetcy won by his father for incalculable frontier service, and himself reared in the picturesque turmoil that, almost ever since his back- woods German mother bore him, had shaken the northern borderland, and at the same time familiar with a wider and politer world, his claims were obviously strong. But the
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government, it seems, thought he knew too much and was too deeply involved in local affairs for supreme authority, so they made him Superintendent-General of the Indian department instead. A newly-raised regiment was sent out to Simcoe, named from his old corps, who had long ex- changed their swords for Nova Scotian ploughshares. With these and three of his councillors, Osgoode, Russell and Grant, he set out from Quebec for the West in June 1792.
After three weeks in the Kingston settlements he sailed up Lake Ontario for Niagara, where, among the clearings on the British side of the river the first Governor of Upper Canada was to be inaugurated. Nearly a decade had now passed away since the first settlement, and how had these early makers of Ontario fared in the Kingston townships and in the western peninsular ? They had experienced a far harder struggle than their compatriots in the maritime provinces, if they had better land. The others were on the seaboard, and supplies could reach them easily from both Old and New England. More corn was circulating, and one must think too that more money from the loyalist Court of Claims found its way there. Sawn lumber and shingles for building were plentiful, for hundreds of good houses had been erected at once. Upper Canada, on the other hand, was deplorably isolated. It is a two or three hours' run now on the Grand Trunk from Montreal to Kingston, but the settlers on the Bay of Quinte might for years have been virtually in another planet so almost wholly do they seem to have been dependent on what they made or produced with their own hands. In the first two or three years, though supplied with rations by the Government, there was a pain- ful scarcity of tools, even of axes, while of grindstones there were none, of ploughs scarcely any, though had there been more there would have been nothing like enough animals to pull them. Later on these also were supplied by Govern- ment. But the hoe seems to have been the chief depend- ancy for grubbing the hardly cleared ground, and even for want of extra clothes and blankets there was for a long
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time great suffering. The French method of settlement, the elongated strips which entailed at least propinquity of residence, had much to be said for it. The English settler on the chess-board system he has always affected, together with his pride of acreage, added individual to corporate isolation : not, however, in the spirit, for the pioneer was the incarnation of mutual help, but in the fact. Save in Kingston itself where the requirements of a small garrison advanced things more rapidly, the rest of the townships were a long time in struggling out of the homespun and log-hut stage of existence. The many rapids of the St. Lawrence made transport difficult from Montreal, and there was practically no road there. The live stock difficulty had been very great, while in the crop failure and famine of 1787 such as had been collected was either devoured, even to horses, or perished. Mere food since then had been plentiful, but there were no markets. Fine crops of fall wheat, an earnest of the future, had been grown in the crude clearings, but there were not enough accessible mills to grind it even for home consumption, and the primi- tive method had to be resorted to of pounding it in mortars or grinding it in coffee mills. Flax and hemp were grown, and small flocks of sheep in constant danger from the wolves and bears were raised, which by degrees produced wool enough for the spinning wheels that whirred in the log- cabins. The French Canadian smoked comfortably by his stove through the winter months, but the pioneers of Upper Canada had as yet to huddle round the great open fire- places in the stone chimneys, for which in truth there was no stint of fuel.
And in the nights of winter
When the cold north winds blow
And the long howling of the wolves
Is heard amidst the snow.
When round the lonely cottage
Roars loud the tempest's din
And the good logs of Algidus
Roar louder yet within.
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When the goodman mends his armour, And trims his helmet plume, When the goodwife's shuttle merrily Goes flashing through the gloom.
The goodman of the Canadian bush had laid aside his armour to be sure, but with no certainty that he would not have to furbish it up again, and in the meantime we may be certain his hands were as busy as those of his womenfolk in the blaze of logs that flared more unsparingly, we may safely say, than ever did those of Italy. If there was no talk of Horatius to go round, no pioneer people ever perhaps had such a fund of stirring reminiscence to cheer their solitude. All but the very young had lived through seventeen years of war. Some had fought through the whole of them against French, Indians, and fellow- Americans. The majority had borne arms throughout the latter struggle, while the women had known something more than the anxieties of soldiers' wives. There were men here too — English, Hessians, Highlanders — who had served in the Low Countries, the West Indies, and the Mediterranean. If books were scarce and the present was one of arduous monotony, there was in truth no lack of colouring in their past, or of material for reminiscence. It was a time, too, of great events. Two young republics, things of horror to these people, were labouring into life ; the one at their doors, the other of the nation best known of any foreign one to that generation of Americans, and when news came up to Kingston and filtered through the settle- ments, whether true or not it was generally worth hearing. Their fellow-refugees, the Indians of the Six Nations, proved friends in need, with innumerable primitive methods for making life bearable, which the average American farmer of the eighteenth century had never had occasion for, but were welcome enough now that he was flung back into the condition of his great-grandfather. Deer-skin moccasins supplied the place of shoes, and stockings were
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wofully scarce. There were no doctors, and as an appeal to the Government still extant in the State papers shows, there were scarcely any drugs. Of schools for a long time there were none, and an occasional itinerant preacher was the only religious consolation for many years available. Good health, however, and its concomitant good spirits at least were theirs. Of wild fowl in the fall of the year, of fish at most seasons there was an abundance, and venison to be had by the hunter. If want of time and lack of appli- ances were doubtless some hindrance to much success in the chase, the Indians settled round them, one may safely assert, made up such deficiencies. Finality in such a situa- tion which may betimes depress the weak offers vast com- pensations to the strong either in body or in mind. Few here could get away and give up the struggle. They had to see it through, and this determination, combined with numerical strength and unity of purpose, if born of hard necessity, bore in time lasting fruit. The half-pay officer, and the ex-merchant, emerged from the contest into the comparative comfort secured by those who saw the century out, a tanned and toil-worn veteran with all those signs of a long struggle with primitive nature in the woods which will be familiar enough to many of my readers. Grist and saw mills arose, and men no longer pounded their wheat into flour with stones or with cannon balls suspended from balanced logs. Frame houses took the place of the log cabins ; merchants set up country stores, and in exchange for country produce supplied in abundance those articles of domestic commerce that had been conspicuous hitherto for their absence or for their rude home-make. The grain buyer made his appearance, provided with better facilities for getting the wheat down the river to Montreal, while the garrison kept in Upper Canada both at Kingston and Niagara created a considerable local demand. Nor were better wheat crops ever raised in a new country, not even in Manitoba, than those harvested upon the virgin soils of Upper Canada while the stumps were yet upon the ground.
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Stock multiplied, and the wolf and bear, retiring ever northwards, ceased at length their ravaging. Roads of such kind as the pre-Macadam world would everywhere put up with, whether about Boston or Philadelphia, nay even about York and Bristol, were run through settlements or cordu- royed through the pungent cedar swamps. How the broad fertile fringe of Ontario, now flat, now undulating and ever deepening towards the more rugged back country and quickly pressing westward to join the yet more fertile lands opening in the peninsula, was turned by degrees into a region not inferior to even the best of those these early refugees had left, is a story neither quite pertinent to this one of ours nor probably of surpassing interest to readers, with nothing but a bald map to stir it. Yet more, it would be misleading to suggest that such progress as might be implied by the above comparisons had been achieved by the period at which this volume closes. Far from it, for the great leap forward was made by Upper Canada in the half-century between the Napoleon and the American (civil) wars. In the waves of immigration that helped to accomplish this, the experiences of the U. E. loyalists, without those more distressing details arising from a wholly untoward situation and peculiar circumstances, repeated themselves again and again. The brief picture I have ventured to draw of the latter is no fancy one; no one familiar with the Canadian bush and Canadian topography and with sense enough to grasp the conditions of the eigh- teenth century could imagine it to have been otherwise. But it may be well to state, what after all is natural enough at so recent an epoch, that there is abounding contemporary evidence of all these things, small things perhaps and on the surface possibly sordid ones, if borne for the most part heroically, and by men and women who were the makers of Empire, if ever mortals were. In one of Dorchester's despatches, after a visit to the Kingston townships, he mentions another stimulus to exertion among the loyalists which was characteristic and not in the least material. The
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hitherto desolate shores along the south of the St. Lawrence and the lake towards Oswego was now beginning to show the clearings of American settlers, either within view or within touch of their whilom enemies and very far indeed from present friends. Among the latter, says Dorchester, there was the keenest desire to show the exchange they had made in the best possible light, and if the very map of Nova Scotia gave the waggish Whigs of Massachusetts the palsy, they were anxious to show these rival pioneers crops of wheat such as Massachusetts had never grown, which by this time they could very easily do.
I have sufficiently shown how the reputation of Canadian land was already bringing in another kind of immigration from over the border, and one that exercised loyal souls and anxious officials not a little. Before leaving the largest and most typical of the U.K. settlements I must note, though it is not quite easy to say precisely how it was effected, a certain natural drift of its better born and edu- cated members out of backwoods life and into the villages, such as Kingston, which grew subsequently into towns. For it was the little towns that very early in its history governed Upper Canada. Nothing approaching the terri- torial influence, though that of course was archaic and artificial, which was the prominent feature in Quebec, ever arose in Upper Canada, though its foundations, as we have seen, were laid in land grants, military and otherwise, eminently aristocratic on paper and in intention. Now in the old colonies, though to a less degree in those of New England, land had been a distinct social power, not merely in the case of great landowners of eminently aristocratic flavour, such as the Schuylers of New York, the Carrols of Maryland, the Carters of Virginia, and many others that spring to the mind at once. But all through these pro- vinces, north as well as south, there was a less conspicuous class, though merged with the other, who owned more land and had some pride in owning it and keeping it, and were lifted by habit of life and education somewhat above the
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ordinary farmer. Patrick Henry, in a speech quite late in life at Richmond, recalled with indignation the days of his youth when an ordinary countryman stepped to the side of the road and took his hat off if a gentleman rode by, This was not confined to the South, though perhaps more empha- sised there, and it was one of the things destroyed by the Revolution even in Virginia, though it often escapes the notice of the many-volumed historian.
In Upper Canada an aristocratic class arose out of the U.E. loyalists destined to be even more politically powerful than any equivalent in any of the old provinces had ever been, but not on the basis of acres. They became land- grabbers, to be sure, with a vengeance, as will doubtless transpire later, but only of wild lands and in the r61e of speculators, if a man can be said to speculate who con- trives to get land for nothing or next to nothing. With all its fertility, Upper Canada proved no country for the many- acred supervisor of labour. Neither in this fashion nor by rents would it support such measure of simple dignity and comparative elegance of life as survived above the normal rank and file in all parts of the older colonies in varying phases. Canada shook off all attempts at ' the country gentleman ' from the first, and this from no democratic pre- judices, but simply from the deterrent physical conditions. It was hoped, no doubt, that the Major and the Captain and their social equivalents, with three and five thousand acres apiece scattered about among the rank and file, civil and military, with their more modest freeholds, would continue a rural state of society somewhat on those lines. Class dis- tinctions then were marked and anti-republicanism rampant. But the reverse happened. The educated and the influential wearied for the most part of the struggle, sold their lands to those more fitted for the life, and by degrees gathered into the centres, acquired all the Government posts and a virtual monopoly of the professions, and gradually created that small exclusive oligarchy which practically governed the province for the whole half-century of its separate
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existence. Something very like this, too, happened in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. There also the better born and more gently nurtured generally flinched, after a brief experience, from life in the bush, and rallied to the towns to fill the posts of honour, the professions, and the higher branches of trade. As regards all these provinces, and more particularly that of Upper Canada, they dropped almost at once into the lines that no amount of develop- ment and prosperity have ever diverted them from. They became, in short, countries wholly given over to the one and two hundred acre farmer, that being the limit of occupa- tion, including the timber preserved on it, which a man and his family, speaking broadly, could work with their own hands ; the economic ideal after all, of any country and a standard easy to maintain where there are always unoccu- pied lands at some point or other available for its surplus sons. The French Canadian rejected this alternative, as we know, and subdivided under the influence of a more sociable and less ambitious temperament and a paternal church. The Anglo-Canadian wanted elbow-room and land. At first he was sometimes land greedy, but a few years of inti- macy with the Canadian bush cured him of that ; for, with but a tenth probably of his holding cleared and a world of toil behind him in the clearing of it, he felt small ambition to own a further mile or two of forbidding forest perfectly useless except as a possible speculation if he had the money to lock up. These forest lands, however, entailed such labour in clearing, and there was such an abundance of them, that their virgin values, though of course susceptible to the usual causes of increase, had strictly modest limits to this, and offered little temptation to the genuine settler when he understood the situation to overburden himself with. It was otherwise for the gentry at headquarters, who had the ear or the favour of Government and got grants of thou- sands of acres of Crown lands at suspiciously favourable figures or at no figures, but on account of some roundabout claim, and held them without taxes till the inevitable and
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advancing wave of settlement brought them on the market. So a yeoman's country above all things Canada became and remained. No landed estates were amassed, nor farm added to farm, in the sense understood by the phrase. No spark of social prestige attached to land, for all this went very early to the towns. There was neither land- lordism nor big farming operations ; for where land is cheap or free the tenant is an anomaly — certainly a satisfactory and substantial tenant is so. Labour too was scarce and dear, while the price of produce in such a situation was of course low. The higher-class U.E. settler soon dis- covered that his talents and energies were thrown away in the clearings, modest promise as they held out to such as had nothing better to expect. Later on men of the same class from England, half-pay officers and the like, with characteristic obstinacy and contempt for local experience, attempted again and again to deny the inexorable facts of Canadian life and play the quasi-country gentleman — 'to keep two tables/ as a pertinent old expression of this period has it. But the facts, though sufficiently proclaimed by the democratic level of the farming community, could not be made so logically obvious to strangers of condition, ama- teurs too, who could not see why they should not cultivate a couple of hundred acres of land with hired labour as else- where, enjoy the advantages of at least a cheap table, unlimited sport, and retain the habits of polished life and even command the deference of their humbler and horny- handed neighbours. They did not usually even get their respect, for the courting of foredoomed failure, particularly when a superior social standard is aimed at, invites ridicule, and not always kindly ridicule, among men and women of hard lives. For nearly three-quarters of the nineteenth century, heedless of the victims and the failures of the past, a constant succession, if not a numerous one, of men and families of this type flickered on and off the somewhat pitiless stage of Canadian rural life, which went steadily on its own somewhat hard economic way. But though these
N
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obstinate and often courageous souls took but a faint part in the making of Canada, they are serviceable here in show- ing how it was not made, and the more so as most other British colonies owe no little to the agricultural enterprise of such people, who in large operations and in a more con- genial atmosphere for them have often gathered fame and wealth. Plenty of the type have done so in Canada, but not by farming, though Upper Canada to-day is in the front rank of American agriculture. But it began, for reasons that I have endeavoured to make intelligible, as a country of small farms, if of large grants. It remained, with a few exceptions, one of small profits and still remains such, but to the small profits have to be added an hereditary thrift un- matched among men of British race at any rate outside New England — the outcome perhaps of the struggles and self-denials during the time we are dealing with, and absorbed by future waves of hard-fisted immigrants. I am concerned here, of course, only with general rules. Many a U.E. loyalist of gentler breeding beyond doubt had to stay in the clearings and emerged, or his children did after him, into rustic prosperity, no longer or rarely discernible from the ruder mass. Even the later type of gentlefolk, civil or military, who in such hundreds sought the woods, not of necessity like the first loyalists, but with sanguine obstinacy and light-heartedness, did not always suffer vainly in purse or person. For many of these too could not get out, but remained to face the unexpected as best they could and raise a hardier brood, who could handle an ox team at a logging bee, swing an axe or cradle wheat with any grandson of a backwoods U.E. If the descendants of the latter number thousands in every class of life in Canada, who shall say how many grandsons and great-grandsons of officers, clergymen, squires and the like barely cognisant of the fact of their own origin are following the plough to- day in the second or third generation of undistinguishable membership in the great well-to-do democracy of Ontario yeomen ? Most of us know some, while here and there an unmistakably significant name betrays others.
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Simcoe met his legislative council of ten at Niagara on July 8th, and his first Assembly of sixteen on September 17, 1792. The provincial capital had not yet been decided upon, and for the present there was no difficulty in finding accommodation. The province had been divided into four districts reckoning from east to west ; the settled portion into counties, following for the most part with some want of originality the names of the English shires already dupli- cated in almost every one of the old colonies, varied with compliments to contemporary statesmen some of whom ill deserved them. The Briton of that day all over the continent had a hapless aversion to the mellifluous Indian names. Canada, however, was at least not disfigured by the excruciating nomenclature with which an unbridled illiterate democracy on its triumphant westward progress branded for ever, as a perennial torment to the ear, the inland portions of the old and the nearer western States. Primitive Canada was satisfied with a ruthless Anglicising of its map tempered by perfervid loyalty. But these names at least suggest many stately and historic associations, if a trifle incongruous when applied to the edge of primitive forests or the shores of lonely freshwater seas. Some townships in modern Ontario, however, still bear the names of the pet spaniels of an early Governor's lady, while Simcoe quite rightly commemorated himself both in a Lake Erie coast- town and a well-known inland lake. His wife bore the Welsh name of Gwillim, still recalled by some adjoining townships. But none of these need bring a blush to the cheek of the native where confronted with the register of a European hotel as must surely Rome and Jonesville, Homer and Jerusalem, Higginsville, Cicero, and Pompey, a mere stray garland culled from a rich store of such on the neigh- bouring frontier of western New York. The four, or a little later six, districts proved but temporary. The single tier of counties fringing the whole southern water-front of the province with a few at the back, which are shown on the surveyor-general's map, completed soon after Simcoe's departure, exist to-day with many a teeming shire behind
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them. Three or four small * Ridings ' — an English designa- tion much affected in Upper Canadian topography — of the county of Lincoln abutted on the Niagara shore. As we have preserved in the archives a full list of the U.E. settlers of 1784 in the Kingston districts, with the town- ships allotted to them, as well as of those in what became the Lower Province, so we have here the same elaborate statistics of the men and women and children of Butler's Rangers and others who settled the Niagara shore. The figures are also those of 1784, and are under the signature of the famous partisan John Butler himself, with that of Colonel de Peyster, an Anglo-Dutch loyalist who had fought with distinction throughout the war. The total number was then 620, greatly strengthened beyond a doubt in eight years by driblets of new comers ; but the great inflow of immigrants awaited the new government, its surveys, rules and regulations, with which Simcoe had scarcely yet begun to deal.
It is a little curious that the first elective Assembly of Upper Canada, which gathered from far-sundered districts in bateaux and canoes, disappointed Simcoe by its demo- cratic flavour. Two of the recently arrived M'Donnells came of course from Glengarry, whose loyal Highlanders had already petitioned the Government for a supply of broadswords, while Major Van Alstine secured a seat, also James Baby from the Detroit district : otherwise they were ' men of one table.' The Governor need not have been disturbed. The U.E. aristocracy were not submerged. A little patience and they were to control, though not in his day, the Legislative Council, which was the only body that really much mattered for fifty years, and to make uncon- scious puppets of most of Simcoe's successors. There were no parties yet, however, and no schisms. The honest and capable backwoodsman who paddled down to form this Assembly had only some elementary duties to perform that called for no political skill and created little friction.
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Simcoe was a man of sentiment and imagination, and we are told he met his first parliament with due regard to ceremony and effect. The Rangers were all there paraded in their green uniforms, and a company of redcoats of the Fifth Regiment with their fifes and drums. The cannon thundered from the neighbouring fort which guarded this gateway to the then illimitable west and from the little navy of Lake Ontario floating below. It was not much of a Parliament House; a building run up some time before by the enterprising and ubiquitous order of Freemasons, but quite sufficient for the purpose, and Simcoe delivered his speech from an extemporised throne. With becoming solemnity he told the sixteen homespun-clad members of his faithful Commons and the eight members present of his Upper House that the great and momentous trusts and duties which had been committed to them as representatives of the Province infinitely beyond any that till this period had been conferred upon any other colony, originated from the British nation upon a just consideration of the energy and hazard with which the inhabitants had so conspicuously supported and defended the Constitution. * The natural advantages/ he went on to say, ' of the Province of Upper Canada are inferior to none on this side of the Atlantic. There can be no separate interest throughout its whole extent. The British form of government has prepared the way for its speedy colonisation, and I trust that your fostering care will improve the favourable situa- tion, and that a numerous and agricultural people will speedily take possession of a soil and climate which under the British laws and the munificency with which his Majesty has granted the lands of the Crown, offer such manifest and peculiar encouragements/ One might wish a peep into the future could have been vouchsafed to Simcoe, for with all his practical activity he felt the romance of subduing and peopling the wilderness to the full. He was as zealous in roadmaking and bridge-build- ing and laying out townships as he had been in soldiering.
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Nor would any part of Ontario to-day be more calculated to startle a Rip Van Winkle from the eighteenth century than the shores of the Niagara river, its vast bridges, its railroads, hotels, gay villas, neat farms, and general appear- ance of being in the heart of an abounding civilisation. All that Simcoe, however, saw on that bright August day from its mouth was Lake Ontario, unflecked by a single sail, shimmering away to a faintly seen coastline on the north and spreading eastward to a shoreless and shipless horizon. On the former a few shanties lurked amid the still wooded shores of the great land-locked harbour, that unconsciously marked the site of the future capital of Ontario, about which Simcoe and his chief Dorchester were to have some passages of arms. Looking south and westward, a strip of clearing lined the bank of the river in the direction of the great cataract, whose column of mist would then as now have been conspicuous above the intervening heights. Behind the long narrow belt of settlement lay ten thousand square miles of unbroken forest, a vast peninsula, some- what the shape of Wales, but nearly twice the size and washed like the latter on north, south and west by seas though brineless ones. Here the analogy ceases, for no mountains nor barrens broke the fertile continuity of the better half of Ontario, undulating and well watered, clad mainly with forests of hardwood timber. The labour of three generations was here to lay open to the sun as fine an all-round country as perhaps it ever shone upon, for the sons of a hardy race ; a country where the vineyard and the wheatfield were to produce of their abundance along the same roadside, where waters and pastures were to preserve the finer characteristics of the Clydesdale, the Shorthorn or the Southdown in a manner not common to most parts of North America, and where clear rapid streams were to turn the wheels of busy factories whose products are now household words in Europe. Simcoe, who voyaged busily up the streams and through the dense forest trails almost to the further limits of the peninsula,
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open-eyed, a little fussy but full of schemes, guessed something perhaps of its agricultural and industrial future. He was not quite happy, however, in his prognostications, foreseeing a country of indigo, tobacco, hemp and flax, though primitive needs may partially account for his thoughts running on such products or his long campaigning in the Southern colonies with Cornwallis. Courts of Common Pleas and Quarter Sessions had been for some time established by the Quebec Government and had worked smoothly. Simcoe now had his own Crown officers, Judges Powell and Osgoode, the latter name so conspicu- ously immortalised in the great Toronto* law-buildings. The counties had already been laid out for electoral pur- poses, and in order, as Simcoe writes to Dundas, * to promote aristocracy/ he created county lieutenants with powers to make magistrates and militia officers ; for a militia organisa- tion was not a vague precautionary measure in the Canada of those days. An Indian war was raging just south of the line, and complications with the United States as well as with France were possible at any moment. The reader will hardly care to know the measures defeated or carried in this first provincial session. They were of an ordinary and necessary kind. One cause of anxiety, however, among these earlier settlers was the legitimacy of their marriages, which was now called in question. At that time under the law of England an Anglican clergyman was an indispensable accessory and scarcely any had been available. Majors, captains and magistrates had united most of the happy couples west of Montreal for the last ten years, and such doubts got abroad as to the validity of the knot thus tied that retrospective legislation to settle the matter was called for. There were loyalist refugees even in London too waiting to come to Upper Canada, one hundred and eighty souls in all, wanting everything, writes Dr. Peters, but 1 hunger, nakedness and cold.' They had been pressing their claims at the Board of Settlement, and obviously failed in many cases to make them good, and were now 'perishing
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under poverty and naked distress.' Simcoe and Dorchester, his superior, came in conflict early though they never met. This friction which proved chronic, though it had fortunately no effect beyond the irritation it caused to the principals themselves, has always seemed historically a jarring note. For they were the two best Governors in their widely different ways who ever went to Canada in the period when Governors counted for much. In Dorchester's absence and afterwards, the enthusiastic Simcoe bombarded with despatches not only the Home Government, but also Hammond, the British representative accredited to the U.S. Government. Dundas, at Whitehall, was obviously bored at times by this volubility. In answer to a request of Simcoe's that the country should be advertised in England, the minister replies that nothing is more offensive to their notions than to make the emigration of their subjects a professed object of government : on the contrary, steps would be taken to stop emigration from Great Britain, but it is wished that those who do go should settle in the colonies, and much more that illustrates the current views on colonies. Hammond gives Simcoe all the doings and pro- spective doings of the Americans. How St. Clair's defeat by the Indians and resignation has brought about the appointment of Anthony Wayne, the most active and enterprising officer in the American service. ' He is just the man,' writes Hammond, ' to attack the posts, backed as he would be by a strong public opinion, in the middle and southern States.' When Dorchester came back he was not overpleased with this voluminous correspondence that still continued to flow from a Lieutenant-Governor under his authority. They disagreed about other things too, the site of the capital of the new province for one, and the selection of its principal naval harbour for another. Simcoe, who made long expeditions through the wilderness, had his eye on the site now occupied by London, Ontario, which he himself thus prematurely named with the infelicitous mania for tautology of his generation, quite regardless of future
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inconvenience. Its central and secure inland situation on the river La Tranche which, of course, he rechristened the Thames, took his fancy. Toronto he designed for the naval harbour of the Lake fleet, then consisting of about a dozen armed sloops and schooners. Dorchester, however, decided for Toronto as the capital and Kingston for the naval harbour. Simcoe thought building barracks and quartering troops in a wilderness locality was the best way to encourage a town. Dorchester held very strongly that these should grow naturally on spots that nature and cir- cumstances intended for towns, and Dorchester as Governor- in-Chief had his way. The conflicting opinions and prog- nostications of even able Governors are not of the first importance to my story, but they are not without interest to those face to face with the remote results of such dis- cussions. London to-day is a pleasant country town of 10,000 souls, and its name is therefore not often a cause of confusion, but it might have been. Toronto is about the size that Bristol was when Simcoe reluctantly hauled up his flag at * Muddy little York/ the nucleus of the present capital.
But all this time, while Governor Simcoe and his staff, civil and military, were busy with the infant settlements of the province, the shadow of an invasion lay heavy upon the whole of Canada. The French Revolution had been hailed with universal joy in the United States. As it progressed in licence the Federal party of Washington and Hamilton cooled considerably, while the fervour of the Jeffersonian Republicans, with their chief strength in the South, showed no abatement. The United States Government under the new constitution had come into being in 1789. The first symptoms of that sectional cleavage which was to explode in the sanguinary civil war of seventy years later had already begun to show themselves. North and South were respec- tively the prevailing elements in opposite parties. The former tended towards conservatism, centralised authority, dignity and restraint in foreign politics and sound finance,
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combined with a qualified friendliness towards Great Britain. The latter headed by Jefferson, an ultra-Gallophile, and to- gether with certain other notable Virginians, fanatical in their hatred of Great Britain, was, with the exception of a few such groups, the more illiterate party. As regards an understanding of foreign nations, save for its perfervid leader it was prodigiously ignorant from top to bottom and conse- quently emotional, reckless, and dangerous to the peace of its own and other countries. Its domestic policy favoured the individual liberty of each State as against the Federal power. Into Charleston, one of the hotbeds of this party, was precipitated in the year 1793, soon after the French Republic had declared war against Great Britain and Holland, the most grotesque and offensive minister ever credited to a foreign court, the ridiculous Genet. Washing- ton had recently issued a proclamation enjoining a friendly and impartial conduct towards the belligerent Powers. Genet had come to stir up strife against Great Britain, which was quite legitimate, but he hopelessly overdid his part, though the agents who acted under him, particularly in Canada, caused infinite trouble. The Southerners, however, were delighted with this preposterous mountebank. All the way to Philadelphia they feted him, and even dragged his chariot in places over the rough and rutty roads. Planters and farmers, who had never felt, nor their fathers before them been in a situation to feel, even a breath of the social miseries and feudal tyrannies that Genet's government had destroyed or even to know what they meant ; men whose simple easy lot had been further ameliorated by the forced labour of 300,000 negro slaves, cut capers in caps of liberty, and dropped the sane courtesies of American life for the most grotesque phraseology of Parisian Sans Culottes.
Through North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland the feather-headed Frenchman enjoyed the frenzies of these demented Anglo-Saxons, ' not ten of whom/ says one historian of the period, 'could have pronounced a single French sentence with approximate correctness to save them-
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selves from being hanged.' He fitted out privateers at Charleston manned by American seamen, which captured unsuspecting British craft, and pursued generally a course of licence which very soon brought him into conflict with Hammond. Jefferson, the indiscriminating admirer of everything French, however extravagant, watched Genet's triumphant career with something more than complacency — an attitude which he had soon good reason to reconsider, for he was in the cabinet. Nor should it be forgotten that the Americans regarded the French Revolution, and not without justice, far different though the causes were which provoked it, as in some sort inspired by their own success- ful struggle. Imitation we are told is the sincerest form of flattery, and to this conviction the exuberance of the American mobs and country people may no doubt be in great part attributed. The first chill Genet received was on encountering Washington. That great man had already taken his measure, and a personal interview did not enlarge it. We have no concern here with the annoyance and anxiety Genet caused to the President, to Hamilton, the Federal party, and even in the end to their opponents. His privateers were ordered out of American waters, and soon afterwards the French Government was requested to recall him, which it did, or rather suspended him, though not before he had contrived to insult and disgust every member of the ministry from the President downwards even to his friend Jefferson. ' Citizen ' Genet, however, continued to be for some time the idol of shouting mobs, and did a great deal of mischief in the few months he was at large. His mission, at least as interpreted by himself, was to involve the Americans in a war with Great Britain and to spread disaffection in Canada, where his agents became extremely busy. This too was quite legitimate from his point of view, but it may be noted that he was afraid to return to France, and lived for the rest of a long life in America with an American wife, in obscurity.
The Jacobin views of French Republicans may or may
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not have been a better card to play on that inscrutable being, the Canadian habitant, than the misinterpreted clauses of the Quebec Act, but they proved alluring to a most disquieting degree. It was Frenchmen this time appealing to Frenchmen, and not now offering them merely the dis- credited old regime with modifications, but a Utopia in which everything was to be had for nothing, and all dues, taxes, and suchlike vexations to be swept away. Among the increasing class of bourgeois in Lower Canada it would have been strange if the furore of the French Revolution had not made some converts ready to work with Genet's agents at the corruption of the peasantry. Some passing disputes between the seigniors and their tenants formed an opportune and serviceable weapon for the preachers of sedition. Liability to service in the militia was another fact inevitable to Canadian life that it did not need much oratory to convert into a grievance. It mattered little that the habitant had now got practically everything his simple soul could desire short of actually looting his neighbours, which was not natural to his disposition — even a vote, though history is silent as to his earlier electioneering ardour. But it is enough that sedition was rife among a certain small class in the towns, and chiefly, as usual in Montreal, as well as through an unknown proportion of the parishes. This would seem to have been fermenting all through 1793, the year of the execution of the French King, of the declaration of war against England and Spain, and of the machinations of Genet. These continued under his successor Fauchet through the next year, when Monk, the Attorney-General of the Province, who had been taking depositions through- out them, reported to Dorchester that a majority of the parishes were corrupted. The Governor on looking over his long career in Canada and his efforts on behalf of this same habitant, may well have despaired of him. In 1793 he writes regarding the condition of North America to Dundas, then Minister for the Colonies : ' Soon after my return to America I perceived a very different spirit animat-
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ing the United States, much heat and enmity, extraordinary exertions, some open, some covert, to inflame the passions of the people, all things moving as by French impulse rapidly towards hostilities, and the King's government of Lower Canada in danger of being overwhelmed, so that I considered a rupture as being inevitable. Their old State policy on all occasions to impress on the people of the United States the rank injustice and unfairness of our procedures had already prepared their minds, so that con- sidering recent events as of the desired magnitude, they eagerly joined their Jacobin friends. Some not aware to what extremes it might lead them, others willing to run all lengths, both desirous to profit by the supposed em- barrassment of our affairs, and of opinion that we dare not resist. Private inclination and public duty apart, it would be folly in the extreme for any Commander-in-Chief, cir- cumstanced as I find myself here, without troops, without authority, amidst a people barely not in arms against the King, of his own accord to provoke hostility or to begin (as Mr. Secretary Randolph is pleased to call it) hostility itself:
f The contempt with which this country is treated by the United States sufficiently evinces their knowledge of our own impotent condition, and that we are abandoned to our own feeble efforts for our own preservation, and even these they seem to expect and require we should not employ.'
The allusion to Randolph's phrase is concerned with a speech Dorchester had just made to a deputation of the Miami Indians, who had complained to him of the utter disregard of the Americans for the boundary south of Lake Erie, which had been recognised upon all sides as still defining the territory of their kindred and the other tribes still occupying that country. The British theory, and the one nominally held by the Americans themselves, main- tained that the country north of the Ohio, which before the war had been recognised Indian ground, was so still.
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Nothing had been said or done to invalidate their ancient claims. In replying to this deputation the Governor had concluded : ' I have waited long, but have not yet received one word of satisfaction from the Americans, and from what I can learn of their conduct towards the Indians I should not be surprised if the English were at war with them during the present year, and then a line must be drawn by the warriors. What further can I say to you? You are a witness that for our part we have acted in the most peaceful manner, and borne the language and conduct of the people of the United States with patience, but I believe our patience is almost exhausted.' These words, addressed in a private interview to half a dozen Indians, were caught up by the Jacobins in Montreal and forwarded to the press of the United States, which blazed it everywhere abroad as an evidence of a British desire to bring about a war. American writers to this day either perpetuate the cry, or quote it without comment. If they had read the tedious and pro- tracted correspondence between the Canadian governments and the officers at the frontier forts and Indian agents, they would see how baseless were such accusations. That the British Canadians had not felt some satisfaction at St. Clair's crushing defeat would be to write them down as less than human. But to suppose them anxious, in a situation so precarious as theirs, to invite an attack from the United States, backed by France and the Jacobins of Lower Canada, would be to suppose all concerned as persons wearied of life, of liberty, of employment, and even of patriotism. The whole Indian difficulty lay in a nutshell, and had nothing whatever to do with the British of the posts who have been persistently and monotonously ac- cused of feeding the struggle. It is an accusation based wholly, I believe, on mere inference, from the peculiar situation of the western British, objects of hatred as they were to the American filibusters and to most Americans of that day, and at the same time at peace themselves with the Indians. Nothing they could have done would have
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saved them from the accusations that their mere presence in such a situation made inevitable at a moment when passions ran high, and accuracy, never a virtue of western borderers, at a discount.
A scholarly and living American historian first quotes Washington on the cause of the troubles to this effect : * Land-jobbing, intermeddling of States and disorderly con- duct of the borderers, who were indifferent to the killing of an Indian are, in my opinion, the great obstacles in the way of success. Yet these very men, who shot Indians at sight and plundered them of their lands as well as the States concerned, were the first to cry out for aid when war, brought by their own violation of the treaties of the United States, was upon them/ Having stated an obvious truism through the mouth of Washington himself, the author seems doubtful if shooting Indians on sight and seizing their lands were sufficiently justifiable provocation to a warlike and high- spirited race ! Or it would seem rather as if he suddenly remembered the properly constituted reader looking for the conventional pound of British flesh, but at the same time forgot to re- write what he had already set down ; for he adds a rider that the Indians were spurred on by England in a way ' difficult to understand at the present day.' The average modern, one might think, would see nothing incomprehensible in advising an Indian, if advice were needed, to resist men whose object was to shoot him on sight and steal his land ! With regard to the persis- tent intrigues attributed to the British Governor and the officials of Canada, one must conclude that the redundant correspondence through all these years between these and the officers of the western posts preserved in the archives has never been perused by American writers on this period. Nay, more than this, whether they do or do not know of it, they never allude to the solemn Treaty of Fort M'Intosh in 1785 with the Delawares and Wyandottes, recognising most of the country north of the Ohio to Lake Erie as theirs, and stating in the fifth article that ' if any
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citizen of the United States shall attempt to settle on their land, they may punish him as they please.'
But war seemed imminent, and in 1794 Dorchester in- structed Simcoe to rebuild one of their former outposts on the Maumee, about fifteen miles south of Lake Erie, which might be in a manner regarded as one of the treaty posts. It had been abandoned as no longer necessary to the fur trade, but was now reoccupied as vital to the safety of Detroit, ' a poor fort with a nominal garrison.' The energetic Simcoe saw to this himself, and installed there Major Campbell with about 120 men of the 24th Regiment in the following summer, amid the outcry of the filibusters and landgrabbers from Kentucky sounding loud through all the States. Wayne with about 4000 men was now pressing on to meet the Indians, who could only muster about a third of that number and, as ill luck had it, the final battle took place almost under the guns of the little British post. * Old Anthony ' was a cautious and admirable soldier and took no chances. The Indians were utterly broken, and victorious Kentucky horsemen galloped up in a threatening fashion to the fort. Campbell turned his guns upon them, and lit his matches. It was an anxious moment. A single shot and the flame of war would have blazed forth, but the borderers fortunately wheeled about. The crisis was not over, however, for there were some wordy passages between Wayne and Campbell. The former required that the Major should evacuate the fort, a demand that was promptly refused. Wayne, however, was a cool-headed soldier, and a servant of the government, and the government was by no means abreast of the inflamed opinion of its excitable public. The controlling spirits at the moment were fortunately neither landgrabbers, nor Kentucky riflemen, nor Southern planters with long outstanding debts to British merchants, nor Francophile philosophers who had never smelt powder, nor Boston demagogues masquerading in Phrygian caps. Washington was still in his second term, and Alexander Hamilton, as a statesman a yet greater man,
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and powerful on the side of sanity, was at the zenith of his fame. To these men and their supporters, this exuberance of Franco-mania was altogether distasteful. They mis- trusted the new policy of France, and misliked its represen- tatives, to say nothing of the cavalier treatment by that country of American ships and even American envoys. Gratitude to the France of another day had not made them forget that they were after all Britons, not Frenchmen, that the people for whose dubious destiny they were responsible were by blood and tongue, and every instinct that guided their political and domestic life, British and not French. Nay more, they were further removed from the latter than even the English of Britain, who at least knew something of their neighbours.
To the Federal administration, though keenly jealous of their nascent national dignity, which the French Republic for that matter was showing scant respect for, the task of welding together thirteen States full of the traditional prejudices of nearly two centuries, and making a nation of them, seemed a domestic problem altogether sufficient for the moment. Jay had in fact already been sent to England to negotiate the treaty which, when accom- plished, raised such an uproar among the noisier party in the United States, and averted war for the time at any rate, though ultimately as we know, the Republicans, as the democratic or Jeffersonian party were then styled, had their way. At that moment, when the fires of American adven- ture were relit in France, Canada might probably have been overwhelmed. It may be doubted, however, if the Federal leaders, so keenly alive to their domestic difficulties, con- templated with equanimity the prospect of yet another State, rife with something more than fractious individualism. Fifteen or twenty thousand U.E. loyalists of military habit and incurable hatred rankling in their hearts, together with a hundred and twenty thousand French Catholics wedded to every habit of life and faith that the American abhorred and scorned, and accustomed to political
O
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indulgence, would probably give infinite trouble. Yet more, the aggressiveness of the new French regime caused many to reflect that Great Britain as a neighbour might, after all, have her uses, while no sane American could have tolerated the prospect of France on the St. Lawrence.
Authority during the years 1793-4 in the United States was in inverse ratio to noise. The latter was so great that no one in Canada imagined that war could possibly be averted. There had been a narrow escape at the Maumee fort. But Washington's government was steadily though quietly working towards a peaceful settlement of all outstanding difficulties, for too conspicuous efforts would have stirred the anti-British multitude to yet greater frenzy. As we have seen, Jay, their envoy-extraordinary, was already at St. James's and a comprehensive treaty was ultimately negotiated between the Powers. It had a bare majority in the Lower House, North and South voting almost solid against each other. Samuel Adams, one of the few prominent Jeffersonian Northerners and then Governor of Massachusetts being on the losing side, characteristically suggested changing the Constitution of the United States ! His oratory too was characteristic of his party, which had denounced the generous measures of the British Government towards the French in the Quebec Act of 1774 as 'so barbarously and flagrantly unjust that the annals of Constantinople might be searched in vain for a parallel.' After the advent of the American Republic, how- ever, he had assured an audience that ' Godlike virtue shall blazon our hemisphere until time shall be no more.' But flowers of speech were ineffective against the American Constitution, and these exuberant souls discovered what many future malcontents were to discover, namely that it was to prove the most unyielding instrument and in many respects the most monumental bulwark of Conservatism that in a free country ever confronted either the single- minded reformer or the featherheaded demagogue. The annoyance which greeted an understanding with Great
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Britain in France was natural, as that country had begun to treat the United States almost as a dependency. The storm of abuse and virulence that it awakened in the latter country was also inevitable, in view of the passions into which a moiety of Americans of that generation lashed themselves or could be lashed. Prior to the Revolution the States now most vociferous were on the whole quiet, easy-going, rather amiable communities, polite even in their refusals to vote governors' salaries or men and money for defending their borders against the French or Indians. But the War of Independence would seem to have set their nerves permanently on edge and changed their corporate natures, though the froth within their borders brought up to the surface by the struggle must not be overlooked. Whichever side had literally drawn first blood, it was they after all and in actual fact who had challenged the mother-country to a trial of arms and won with the help of the French a well-merited but rather unexpected triumph, thereby justly earning the admiration of the civilised world and a goodly store of laurels besides. They had humiliated Great Britain, whose initial offences in the eyes of other nations would hardly have been detected under a microscope. One might reasonably have looked for hatred and virulence 'on the side of the proud and vanquished mother. As a government and a nation, however, she behaved in the trying hour of surrender and afterwards with considerable dignity and good feeling, nor as yet at any rate had there been any manifestation in a form that could be called representative of a less correct attitude. Americans were neither hooted nor insulted in the streets of London, though such outburts, particularly in view of the treatment of the loyalists, would have been conceivable. But English envoys, officers and others who had to traverse the United States even ten years after the peace, enjoyed no such immunity from the populace. To be a good loser is a severe test, and one that the Briton perhaps excels at. It cannot be said that the most
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articulate portion of the American people of this period were even good winners. No amount of laboured ex- planation set forth by American historians, now mostly endowed with a praiseworthy sense of equity and con- scious to a man that explanation is needed, seems to mitigate the situation. What the temper of the majority would have been under adverse conditions is an interest- ing speculation. It is in fact about the best argument in favour of that overwhelming pressure of English opinion which terminated the war. If the chastened King, how- ever, and his ministers behaved like gentlemen in their hour of humiliation, so did Washington and his government though loaded with abuse, while France, on the other hand, proceeded to such amazing insults that liberty caps disappeared and Gallophilism for the moment lost some- thing of its fervour. Yet the strange experience has been permitted to the present writer in times now past of listening to the grandsons and great-grandsons of the very pillars of that bitterly anti-British faction cursing with a fervour allayed in some cases by time, in some only by death, the triumphant moment when they parted company with King George. And this too not here and there, nor now and then, but day in and day out and year after year and in the very ancient stronghold itself of the Jeffersons and the Madisons, the Randolphs and the Henrys ; nay, sometimes with men actually of their blood. The Yankee- phobia of the close of the third quarter of the nineteenth century was even more violent, but then it was natural and logical ; the Anglophobia which kept Canada for twenty years more or less on the strain, was neither. The Americans had deliberately placed themselves outside the British family circle, and could now trade where and with whom they pleased, yet they were sore and angry because they had no longer the trading privileges of the British connection. As an independent Power too, they found themselves like every other one without a strong navy inconvenienced and put upon in the struggle between the
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two great maritime nations, whereas in former days they had sailed in safety beneath the flag of England. These annoyances, however, were felt far more in New England, whose people for the most part took a broader grasp of the world's politics and had practically buried the hatchet.
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CHAPTER IX
DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE
MY remarks in the last chapter on the strained and uneasy relations between Great Britain and the United States carried us on to Jay's treaty of 1795, leaving the anxious years immediately preceding it not fully disposed of as regards some matters which demand notice for a proper appreciation of the condition of Canada. Dor- chester in opening the second session of the Lower Canadian Parliament in November 1793 had laid stress on the inadequate defences of the country against foreign aggression. All kinds of people, the very reverse of U.K. loyalists and not always of wholly agricultural intention, were coming into the province, and an alien act was passed as a precaution against undesirables, also a militia bill under the prospect of invasion. In regard to the first, the Eastern Townships were now filling up, mainly from Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and New York. To each township (thirty-six square miles) granted by the Government a man of character and position known as a 'leader' was appointed, and to him fell the duty of introducing settlers, all of whom had to take an oath of fealty to the Crown. Though not U.E. loyalists, the founders of this important British wedge thrust northward from the American frontier into Lower Canada were generally men of experience, quality and substance, and proved as good subjects as the military loyalists of Ontario, without the exuberant and picturesque features of the others' patriotism. Hemmed in between the States on one side and French Canadians on the other, though
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with ample elbow-room to develop a large, powerful and prosperous community, they progressed along slightly different lines from their contemporaries of Upper Canada. They might be almost said to represent to-day a third strain of Anglo-Canadian, alongside of those of the Mari- time Provinces and Ontario respectively. Less than a century later, spreading for fifty miles over hill and valley around the flourishing towns of Sherbrooke, Rich- mond, and lesser centres, the ' Townships ' were at their zenith. The opening of the north-west, however, and some other causes in later days carried away the flower of their youth, while their French neighbours remained, multiplied, and bought the vacated farms to an extent that has greatly altered the original character of the country. The alien act now provided for a critical examination of every man who entered Canada either by land or sea. In cases of treason or suspicion of it the Habeas Corpus Act could be suspended, while ' assemblages of people, seditious dis- courses and false news ' were to be carefully watched and if necessary suppressed with a firm hand.
Dorchester's legislation at Quebec went peaceably for- ward. The French majority in the House were in part seigniors and the remainder merchants, notaries and doctors. Matters of judicature and excise were dealt with, in the course of which it transpires that the net revenue of the province is about two-fifths of the expenditure, the deficit being made up by the Crown, to whom the sale of lands and fees on land grants were already bringing in sub- stantial returns. Even now had the power of the provincial purse been wholly with the Assembly, it is easy to see what an ineffective lever — the only one they had for enforcing their will on the nominated executive — it would have proved and did prove. But outside conditions were for the present so serious that internal affairs excited comparatively small interest. In mustering the militia the British, writes Doi- chester to his Government, came out with alacrity, but the spirit of the rank and file of the French was, with few ex-
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ceptions, quite the reverse — a fact due as often, in the Governor's opinion, to long cessation from soldiering as to disloyalty. ' A people so disused to military service for twenty-seven years do not willingly take up the firelock and march to the frontier when their passions are not strongly agitated.' The two chief causes of complaint, he writes in the same letter, are the expense, as it seemed to the habitants, of litigation, which always was and still is with them a popular pastime, and the exactions of the seigniors. With the rise of land and brisk demand for it going on out- side the seigniories, owners of the latter were no doubt occasionally tempted to raise rents by this and by the very reluctance of the habitant to move, while a few of them, British purchasers, were inclined to regard themselves too exclusively in the light of landlords. Against this there was now no opportunity for appeal, though one was in- stituted later. But in the French regime the Intendant had acted as a kind of informal but quite autocratic land court, holding the seignior as in some sort trustee for the Crown, and quite prepared to displace him should he give just cause for so doing. Probably this particular grievance was now in part manufactured under the stimulus of French and American intriguers, but the state of the province was so alarming that the methods by which it was made so are not of the first consequence. The spread of sedition, not now, as had been the case in '75, most active about and to the south of Montreal, but showing itself in parishes close to Quebec like Charlebourg, Beauport, and the Island of Orleans, grew so formidable that prominent men of both nationalities sank their minor differences and formed societies for the public safety. Attorney-General Monk, shortly afterwards Chief-Justice, who was active in forming these associations, wrote freely to the Home Government on the state of the country. In regard to the militia, he says there seemed small hope of substantial assistance from the new subjects. * Threats are used by the dissatisfied against those who would be loyal, and it is astonishing to find the same
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savagery exhibited here as in France in so short a period of corruption. Blood-alliances do not check the menaces against the non-complying peasants. These threats include the burning of houses, decapitation and carrying heads on poles, as the depositions show, besides throwing off all regard for religion. Many Canadians who in '75 had com- mitted themselves, or thought they had, too deeply to venture on returning, remained in the United States and kept up a correspondence with their friends. These it appears now enrolled themselves among the other emissaries who secretly patrolled Canada in the interests of revolt. An address was read at church doors and widely circulated, * From the Free French to their brothers in Canada/ urging them to follow the example of France and the United States and upset a throne ' so long the seat of hypocrisy and imposture, despotism, greed and cruelty. Canadians, arm yourselves, call your friends the Indians to your assist- ance, count on the sympathy of your neighbours and of the French.' The habitants having demolished most of the upper class, nearly all that is to say who could read or write, were then invited to form an ' Independent nation in league with France and the United States.' A pretty and work- able prospect ! incidentally suggestive of the fact that the Aliens and company with their five thousand Green Mountain riflemen would have been the nearest neighbours of this Utopia, and apparently ready to fight either Great Britain or th^, United States, whichever seemed for the moment the least formidable or offered the lowest terms ; admirable makers of Empire, Puritan-bred, hardy, indomitable, money- making, narrow-minded and self-obsessed, with an in- stinctive hatred of an alien race and creed. From these and their kindred communities, whether for the moment as a * neighbouring nation ' or as the inevitable ' fellow-citizen/ the French Canadian and his thousand archaic prejudices would have got scant measure indeed. It may also be remembered that a generation had now grown up in the parishes who knew nothing of war and had little taste for it.
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Dorchester was no mere provincial governor, concerning himself only with the administration and defence of his own colony. He took an abiding interest in the various move- ments which accompanied the difficult task of consolidating the Union of the United States, and had correspondents in many quarters of that country whose letters concerning the hopes and fears and conflicting opinions of different locali- ties are deeply interesting, and make somewhat strange reading nowadays. As the pioneers on the north-west frontier were pressing forward at any cost across the old Indian boundary of the Ohio, so those in the south- west were chafing at the presence of Spain on the Mississippi, for that Power now controlled the navigation of the great river to its mouth, a fact which goaded the Americans, advancing through the spacious new territory of Kentucky, to exasperation. No idea that Spain having been in the south-west for ages had prior rights, seems to have occurred to the exuberant Kentuckian, if one may judge by his utterances, nor indeed is the concession always obvious on the pages of the modern writer. All sorts of schemes were in the air. One party was for playing the prodigal son to Great Britain if she would seize the Mississippi and make it the fatted calf. Others were for attacking the Spaniards at all costs, and others again for uniting with them and seceding from the States. And it was all so absolutely natural and human in a second generation of pioneers, with the vast potentialities of the west and south-west spread so temptingly before their eyes, and themselves mostly unen- cumbered by any national feeling to speak of, or attachment to anything particular but good land, personal liberty, and dollars. George Rogers Clarke had actually proposed to raise five thousand men on the Ohio and attack the Spanish settlements in the Illinois and thence descend the river on the rest of Louisiana. Baron de Carondelet, Spanish governor of that province, sent Indian messengers through the woods to Simcoe, proposing that they should unite in checking the irrepressible American frontier-men. It was
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to the interest of England, he wrote, that the Illinois should be in Spanish hands, while for himself he should repel force by force if it was attacked. The Vermonters were obviously divided among themselves, the disaffected and articulate party blowing hot and cold by turns towards Great Britain as represented by Canada, and incidentally committing all sorts of small outrages against the British posts on Lake Champlain, which their government disavowed. Next we find the Aliens and Governor Chittenden professing to represent their people and making overtures to Simcoe for annexation ; while finally Ira Allen, on board a ship sailing out of Ostend with 20,000 stand of arms and artillery, is captured and brought into Portsmouth in 1796. There he declared, with an overstrained confidence in British ignor- ance of American statistics, that this formidable consignment was intended for the equipment of the Vermont militia ! Who were to carry all these rifles and man these batteries remains to this day a mystery. But as British regiments did so eventually and Jay's treaty came into operation, it does not much matter whether or no they were originally intended for French Canadian habitants. Now at last all immediate fear from the American side was allayed, and the only clause in the treaty that concerns Canada, the evacuation of the posts at Oswego, Niagara, Detroit, the Sault - St. - Marie, Michillimacknack and elsewhere, was accomplished. The small British garrisons, with joy and thanksgiving in most cases we may be sure, marched out and the Americans marched in. Once again after thirty years the French and half-breed traders of the far west saw the flag of a mighty nation solemnly hauled down and another run up and unfurled to the lake breezes in its place, this time to stay there. The great Michigan peninsular and all the country south and beyond the lakes passed out of Canadian influence, as a dozen years before it had passed out of Canadian dominion.
The fur trade was still by far the chief commercial asset
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of Canada. The boundary of the Hudson's Bay Company, that great corporation which I need hardly say governed itself, in a sphere aloof and remote from the other provinces, lay far to the north, crossing the wooded wilderness from the bay to the prairie wilderness, which began where their station at Fort Garry, the modern Winnipeg, now stands. Save for the sieges and sea fights waged on those lonely seas by the famous d'Ibervilles just a century previously, by which the Company's domain was transferred to France, to be returned at the Peace of Ryswick a year or so later, nothing had disturbed the profitable repose of their vast and silent Empire save when the voice of the shareholder in London had been pitched betimes in a louder key. At the period of the founding of Upper Canada their posts and those of the old French traders had been pushed west- ward almost to within sight of the Rocky Mountains. Fort Edmonton, now as a rising city the latest Mecca of the modern agricultural emigrant, had been erected in the very year of Jay's treaty, while their explorers had actually camped on the banks of the Peace River, a district even still far beyond the limits of north-western settlement. For in the time of Governor Haldimand, the British fur-trading houses of Montreal had emerged from that struggling embryonic condition so contemptuously described by Governor Murray soon after the cession of Canada, and half a dozen strong firms led by the Frobishers formed themselves, for economic reasons readily conceivable, into a corporation known as the North- West Company, or more familiarly in Canadian story, as the Nor'- Westers. The old French trade, as the reader may be incidentally reminded, had been virtually the perquisite of the French Crown, and had left no strong private houses to carry on their business under the British flag. The threads had been picked up by the British, or let us say at once by the Scots, for most of the incorporated firms bore Highland names. The Nor'- Westers flourished exceedingly and pushed their forts through the wilderness with amazing vigour. Following up
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the long course of the Ottawa and away up the northern shores of Lake Superior, they planted their lonely stations. Fort William, the present well-known port at the head of the great lake, where the latter's traffic now meets the Canadian Pacific railroad, they had their chief back-country depot. Already they had crossed the Rocky Mountains, descended the Fraser River, and were seated on the Pacific slope. Their connections in short extended over a line of nearly two thousand miles in length, and a country that when faced as a wilderness by solitary groups of men as voyageurs, or traders sheltered in rude forts, abounded in forbidding elements, and suggests the limit of commercial hardihood and daring. That a second company broke away early from the first is hardly worth recording, as in a few years' time the two were again united to be stronger than ever. Liquor was of course a leading, if deplorable, collateral of the fur trade. It was a day of deep potations the world over at this close of the eighteenth century, and the Americans of all kinds were no more addicted to temperance than their relatives in Europe, more particularly perhaps the common sort, who drowned their cares in West Indian rum, or some- times brandy either French or locally distilled from peaches and apples. Even Wolfe complains of the addiction to rum of his New England troops at Louisbourg, pious and respectable farmers' sons as they were. If Fox and Pitt went unsteadily to bed every night, it is only natural that the true backwoodsman of that day should have drunk his fill and only maintained his useful purpose in life by the intermittent nature of his opportunities and his strenuous habits. The great wilderness entrepot of the Canadian fur trade of that period and for long afterwards, as I have said, was Fort William. Even to-day the stir and bustle of elevators, steamships, and locomotives, and the habitations of many thousand souls, only emphasises the shaggy and sterile and indeed awesome solitudes through which it is approached by land or water from every side. Here a century ago, divided by many weeks of laborious travelling
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on foot or by canoe from the nearest civilisation, stood the receiving storehouses of the Canadian merchants with the great hall in the centre, round the walls of which were hung as time went on the portraits of the nabobs of the Canadian fur trade — an oasis whose picturesque blend of savagery both human and physical with civilisation, seems to have a place of its own in the romance of commerce. Here on the grim shores of Thunder Bay, where the rapid amber streams of the Katninistiquia subside with deeper current into the waters of the mighty lake, were wont to gather at the appointed season the motley battalions of the Northern fur trade; but little dissimilar from those which a century earlier had gathered outside the stockades of Montreal, neither advanced in the amenities of life nor altered aught in their fantastic mien and wild appearance. Indians were here by hundreds, French and British and half-breeds by the score, all off long journeys, most of them handling money or its equivalent, and bent to a man on celebrating their bargains in one tremendous orgie. Here too at these original gatherings were various partners of the company, members sometimes of the Governor's Council at Quebec, kirk elders, magistrates, militia colonels, and men of light and leading. Strange but characteristic pictures of these functions have been preserved for us by the chroniclers of the fur trade. New Year's Day, if not the earlier Christian festival, had always and has even yet an exhilarating effect on the Scotsman. We are given some racy pictures of these dignitaries at play on such occasions, far from the censorious eye of governors, councillors, ministers and wives and deferential citizens as, seated in a row one behind the other on the floor of the great hall, they paddle imaginary canoes with poker, tongs or shovel in the small hours of the morning, and shout the boat-songs of the voyageurs.
The buffalo robe of the prairies, that invaluable accessory to the civilised winter life of North America now extinct, had already been added to the spoil of beaver, mink, fox
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and other small fur-bearing animals that had formed the peltry supply of the wooded country from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Red River of the north. No picture of Canada at this time would be anything but inadequate without some mention of the fur trade, not merely for its commercial importance, but for the political and social power it came to be. While the U.E. loyalists of condition were struggling towards their supremacy in Upper Canada on small Government salaries, lawyers' fees, and well-advised speculation in land, and laying the founda- tions of the Family Compact, the wealthier fur traders of Montreal were steadily ripening for power, and forming another oligarchy for the virtual control of the Lower Province, which in after years, like the other, contributed so materially to the Mackenzie and Papineau rebellion of 1837-8. Dorchester's long term of service was now drawing to a close. Full of years, and weaned with the suspense and anxieties that the later, like the earlier ones in Canada, had brought him, he was beginning to look forward to the arrival of the successor whom the Government had promised him to appoint now that the critical period seemed over. But Adet, the French minister to the United States, still continued to disturb Canada with his emissaries, and is said to have actually written many of the inflammatory addresses that were circulated there with his own hand. Canards were started from the same source. Crushing British defeats by sea and land, the approach of French armadas in the St. Lawrence, and all manner of similar fables, were sent flying about the country. There is no evidence that the upper classes of French Canadians had the slightest desire to renew their connection with a France so utterly changed from the country of their origin and their old affections. Moreover, they admired and respected Dorchester, for though somewhat cold in demeanour, he was just and he was straight. Furthermore he liked them, and they knew it. Every appointment was open to them, and so far, according to the standard of that day, they had as yet nothing to
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complain of. Dorchester had given up all his fees, even those usual ones pertaining to Crown grants of land, a process which had been going forward busily since the immigration into the Lower Province began. He had also insisted on the higher servants of the Crown accepting their offices on the salaries alone, and dispensing with all extraneous exactions as lowering their dignity and offering improper temptations. He fought vigorously to the last against saddling the colony with mere placemen from Eng- land. His plain language to ministers is refreshing. He entered strong and constant protests against rewarding the petty political services of hangers-on in England by en- trusting the difficult services of a rising colony to their tender mercies. He deplored to their faces the short tenure of colonial ministers, telling them point-blank that it was impossible under such conditions that they could get a grasp of their duties. The corrupt practices of many of the agents concerned with land allotments had worried him not a little. He had kept in touch too with the Maritime Provinces that were under his suzerainty, but the strength of the U.E. loyalists there and their isolated situa- tion saved them from the troubles and anxieties that had been chronic in the Canadas. Naval attacks from France were practically their only danger, and that was chiefly the concern of the Imperial navy. What had really somewhat embittered Dorchester's last years was the friction between himself and Simcoe already alluded to. As the latter pathetically put it in a letter to the Home Government, he and his chief agreed in nothing either civil or military. Some of their differences have already been alluded to. But Simcoe, who in some ways was as fine a character as Dorchester, had none of the latter's equability and restraint. He was much his junior, and was inclined to petulance and a too free insistence on his own theories. He had, moreover, gone to Niagara with the notion that he was in a manner absolute, a conviction that was not likely to grow less in the heart of those wild woods.
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Dorchester too was perhaps a little touchy on the matter of his supreme authority. In short they did not like each other, a misfortune, however, of very little consequence, since geographically there was such ample room in which to differ. The sharpest brush between them was when after Jay's treaty, Upper Canada being no longer in danger and the Lower Provinces alone being exposed to French attacks, Dorchester, who never had more than 2500 regulars in the whole country, ordered down the greater part of Simcoe's garrison. The latter, however, who very wisely used his troops for roadmaking and developing purposes, raised objections, and though the troops were ultimately sent the Lieutenant-Governor replied to the instructions in such a way that Dorchester wrote sarcastically to Portland, then in charge of the colonies, that the enclosures (from Simcoe) turned on the question of whether he was to receive orders from Simcoe or Simcoe from him. Dundas too had apparently and without premeditation humoured Simcoe's irregular method of direct correspondence with the Home Government. ' All command, civil and military, being dis- organised and without remedy, your Grace will, I hope, excuse an anxiety for the arrival of my successor who may have authority sufficient to restore order.' These final shots of the veteran pro-consul couched in ironical and some- what hyperbolic strain almost suggest the manner which, as Sir Guy Carleton in years gone by, he had rated Germain with yet more reason. But Dorchester was a privileged person, and deserved to be. This little ebullition, which is practically the end of our acquaintance here with a great Englishman, and one held by Canadians of to-day, and justly so, as the greatest of their Viceroys, must not leave the impression that he left the country under anything approaching a cloud. He was seventy-two and tired ; no wonder ! It was nearly forty years since he had made his first acquaintance with Quebec as Quartermaster-General in Wolfe's army and an active combatant in the siege. In every service he was engaged in for thirty years he had held
P
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supreme command, and may be forgiven a little testiness at being, so he thought, dictated to by his subordinate as well as his junior in rank, years and experience. If he made mistakes they were fewer than most men's, and he had held the respect continuously of both friends and foes. The Chateau St. Louis, though not always his residence, was during both his long administrations the centre of a graceful and dignified hospitality. He was beloved by the French, for the political tergiversations of the habitants had nothing personal about them, and when a polished British society developed out of the unpromising material of earlier days he had as many staunch admirers among them as there were others who misliked his eagle eye for a job or his method of doing what he considered right regardless of what men might say of him. Though distinctly a Grand Seigneur, his kindness of heart was a byword. No case of undeserved hardship or neglected merit seems to have been too obscure for his attention, and when he thought rebuke was required he cared little for the rank of the offender. ' Come, my boys,' he had said to a batch of prisoners brought in to him after the flight of the American army from before Quebec, * what do you come bothering me here for ? I have never done anything to annoy you ! Why do you come interfering with us in Canada ? Well, go and get your dinner, and some provisions. Be off with you to your homes, and stay there.' The amour propre of the altruistic patriot may have been a little upset by this fatherly speech, but the practical benefits conveyed in it no doubt were ample compensation. For the, whole of his career in Canada, Dorchester had to govern a community whose in- harmonious elements would have made the task no easy one in an island in mid-ocean. But his labours were nearly always carried on under the actual guns or under the war- like threats of a powerful neighbour across an unprotected frontier of virtually indefinite length, while, almost worse than war, he had to encounter intrigues that were scarcely ever for a moment at rest.
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Addresses of affection, respect and regret were showered upon the departing Governor by the French and British inhabitants both of Quebec and Montreal, coupled with the expression of devotion to the Crown and 'the happy government under which it is our glory to live/ while the high example set by the private lives of himself and his family were gracefully alluded to. The Governor and his lady, whose peculiar qualifications for her position at Quebec have already been alluded to, together with the younger members of their redundant family, left for Eng- land on July 9, 1796, Prescott, the Lieutenant- Governor, remaining as his representative till the following year, when he became himself Governor-in-Chief. The frigate Active, in which Dorchester sailed, was wrecked off the island of Anticosti, near the mouth of the St. Lawrence, but no lives were lost, and the party were conveyed by coasters to Halifax, where they reshipped for England. Dorchester died in 1808 at Stubbings near Maidenhead, one of the properties he had purchased. His wife, much his junior, lived nearly thirty years longer. Members of the family not long dead remembered her perfectly, and with some awe for the extraordinary ceremony she observed and exacted even in her own domestic circle, and though a small woman for the hauteur and dignity of her carriage to the last. Posterity, however, owes her a grudge, for she made a bonfire of all her husband's private papers on the lawn at Stubbings after his death. To say that we have nothing but his public correspondence, though true, does not seem a felicitous way of putting the case, seeing the immense amount of it which his long public service involved and is now preserved to us. It only remains to be told that six of Dorchester's sons died of wounds or disease on active service, and to plead in extenuation, if such plea be needed, of this somewhat protracted farewell we have here given him, the prominent part he played for so much of the half-century we have ventured to style the Making of Canada.
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Adet, who had so greatly troubled Dorchester, left North
America soon after him, and we must leave Prescott to deal
with some forty French Canadians and others who were at
this time arrested as victims of his fictions, or of their
own ambition or ignorance. A single one only, and he a
Briton, a certain M'Lean of doubtful sanity, was made an
example of by the hangman and quartered in the old style.
The remainder were released or got light sentences. But
we must go back to Simcoe and also a space in point of
time, for the Governor of Upper Canada actually left for
England, invalided, soon after Dorchester. Simcoe at
Niagara had experienced even more troublous times than
his chief. The Indian war raging on his frontiers was a
constant menace, still further complicated by the strained
situation towards the United States, which greatly agitated
his own Indians on the Grand River, over whom he had no
constituted authority. The man who had, Sir John Johnson,
was constantly absent, and his lieutenants, the Butlers,
Clauses and M'Kees, inured all their lives to such an
atmosphere, pursued courses which, whether right or wrong,
conflicted with the notions of this fastidious and in some
ways rather prejudiced British officer. The great Mohawk
chief Brant, whose influence with the militant tribes was
great, though pledged himself to neutrality as a British
subject and Canadian settler, was a chronic source of
anxiety to Simcoe, who did not do him justice. Indeed,
the Governor was somewhat inclined to hasty suspicions
and to underrating men who stood in the path of his own
enthusiasms or had been open enemies of his nation, for
Simcoe's patriotism was of an ardent and burning kind.
The desire of his life was to meet Washington again in the field, which was a not unworthy one, but his estimate of the sentiments of that great man and his good genius Hamilton are curious reading. In 1792, after St. Clair's defeat, and prior to Wayne's victorious campaign, three American com- missioners of distinction, Pickering, Lincoln and Beverly Randolph, had appointed Niagara as a place for a peace
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conference with the western tribes. They remained there some weeks awaiting the envoys and their negotiations with them, which we know ended in failure. The Indians would hear of no boundary but the Ohio. The Americans had already overleaped it and stood out as insistently for the more westerly Muskingum, that was ultimately adopted after Wayne's victory. Brant, who was present as ' Indians ' friend/ and was expected to have great weight, perceived the case to be hopeless, and the consequent lukewarmness of his speech lost him the confidence of both parties. But General Lincoln has at least left us some picture of Simcoe's little backwoods court, the hospitality of which he enjoyed for so long. He describes a levee on the King's birthday as attended by the members of the government, the legisla- ture, and the army, together with many strangers, while Simcoe's politeness and attention to every one present much gratified the American visitor. There was firing from the troops, the battery, and a ship in the harbour, and in the evening ' quite a splendid ball of twenty well-dressed handsome ladies and about sixty gentlemen, music, dancing and supper being all good and in excellent taste/ The Americans were greatly affected by the manners and ap- pearance of the half-breed Indian daughters of Sir William Johnson, who seemed the equals of the other ladies, and were accepted as such, though their mother, Brant's sister, kept the manners of her tribe. Altogether Lincoln was greatly struck by the hearty and sensible manner in which Simcoe had thrown himself into the work of an infant province of great potentialities. The Duke de la Rochefou- cault-Liancourt was also a visitor at Navy Hall, as Simcoe's homely residence was styled, a log-house built originally for the few naval officers on the lake, and now furbished up with additions to serve in makeshift fashion as the first Government House of Upper Canada. A refugee from the guillotine terror of the French Revolution and despoiled of his estates, the Duke travelled widely in America and left a record of his impressions. Of his host here he wrote, * He
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is simple and plain though living in a noble and hospitable manner without pride, his mind enlightened, his character mild and obliging. Mrs. Simcoe is bashful and speaks little, but a woman of sense, handsome and amiable.' She acted as private secretary to her husband, helping him with the numerous maps and plans on which the practically- minded Governor was always busy. One of his younger officers and a companion in his backwoods travels was Lieutenant Talbot, who a few years later became so con- spicuous a promoter of Canadian settlement. Rochefou- cault, so long in Simcoe's company, tells us of his glad endeavours to deal discreetly with the stream of immi- grants that now came flocking in. Such colonists as cannot give a good account of themselves he sends to the back country, while he stations soldiers on the shores of the lakes in front of them. He would admit every superannuated soldier of the English army and all officers who are on half- pay to share in the distribution of such lands as the King had to dispose of. He would also like to dismiss every British soldier quartered in Canada as soon as he could find a young colonial to take his place, and give him a hundred acres of land, thereby making settlers out of European regiments and attaching young Americans to the British service before they settled on the land. As the Duke and Governor were riding along one of the new-made roads they met an American family from New York State with oxen, cows and sheep, who not knowing them said, ' We come to see if the Governor will give us land.' 'Ay, ay,' said the genial Simcoe, 'you are tired of the Federal government and of having so many kings ; you wish again for your old father King George, and you are quite right! Come along, we love such good loyalists as you are, we will give you land.' Simcoe's theories as to British regulars were hardly sound ; neither they nor their officers as a rule proved fixtures. But there was such a rush of more practical material, if not always of such assured monarchical prin- ciples, that this mattered little for the present. The Gover-
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nor was indefatigable. He hewed long roads through the forests, surveying lots upon either side ; one in particular from Niagara to his favourite embryo city of London on the Thames, that he had set his heart on for the capital, and that is still known in places with its metalled surface, cleav- ing an ornate country which would astonish the shade of Simcoe, as the ' Governor's Road.' Another was the notorious Yonge Street, which runs north forty miles from the heart of Toronto, keeping its name to this day for the entire distance. One of the most informing of the eighteenth- century travellers in North America, George Weld, was at Niagara, or Newark, in 1795 and counted seventy houses, and dilates on its rapid rise owing to the increase of the back-country trade and the wonderful immigration of people from the United States. Another spot which Simcoe in his letters is continually urging attention to is Long Point on Lake Erie, mainly famous for duck shooting, but his friend Captain Ryerse settled the county of Norfolk and the Port of Simcoe not far short of it, which became a notable county and a prosperous town. It is said that twenty thousand settlers came in during Simcoe's four years of administra- tion. The ten thousand or so U.E. loyalists, who had an average of about ten years' start of these others, regarded this wholesale influx with mixed feelings. Even the increase of prosperity it brought them they thought might be too dearly paid for if they were to be swamped by hordes of people from whose obnoxious views and distasteful society they had escaped. They had not encountered the hardships of Canadian pioneering to be again surrounded by the very people who had hounded them from their homes and robbed them of their property. It might be conceded that the newcomers were the least militant part of that accursed brood. Most of them probably were harm- less people who had ' sat upon the fence ' through the war. Many were inoffensive Quakers from Pennsylvania, or Germans from New York in whom there was at least no guile, but several thousand at any rate were suspects in the
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eyes of the faithful, and a good many in those of Simcoe. All, however, had taken the oath, but to probe the secret of their hearts or reckon on their line of action at a crisis would have been beyond the power of mortal man. Perhaps in most cases there was not much to probe and there was no guile at all. Simcoe and his U.K. subjects in their different ways were fired with altruistic principles of patriot- ism that took the first place in their lives. Such political feelings as these others had were in the main entirely sub- ordinate to their desire for good land and a quiet life. Simcoe, in spite of his friendly, genial ways with all sorts and conditions of men who would settle on his lots and open out his roads, had more than the common hatred of an English gentleman of that day for republicanism. He would have liked to found an hereditary aristocracy, not having the shrewd eye of Dorchester for its absurdity. He fought hard for an established Episcopal Church, and struggled against the licence for non-Anglican ministers, even those of the Scottish Establishment, to perform marriage rites. He was not in the least arrogant, but simple and honest in these convictions. He had something of the woodenness of a common type of Englishman. Practical in many ways and in spite of everything ex- tremely popular, he had never quite understood Americans of any kind, and never really absorbed the atmosphere as the cold and somewhat distant Dorchester had long ago succeeded in doing.
The U.E. settlers shared his anti-republican prejudices, but as Americans looked on life from a somewhat different standpoint. For the moment they only felt that they alone had borne the burden and heat of the day. A good many land schemes and speculations that were beginning to interest many of them were disturbed by Simcoe's wholesale allotment of Crown lands. They had a natural feeling that they were a chosen people and a caste apart. Their names had been inscribed as it were upon a roll of honour, which the British Government had actually proposed to per-
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petuate by inheritance though the plan was not executed. Through the military nature of most of their settlements, they had a kind of corporate existence from the first and a feeling of brotherhood which made a serviceable base for the leaders among them to exact what they believed to be their deserts, an achievement which they contrived in course of time with notable success. In the Maritime Provinces power and rewards came to them naturally and without effort. They were so numerous as virtually to swamp the older population, and by their altogether superior quality to nearly all of the later waves of immigra- tion, chiefly from Great Britain, to keep their monopoly without any conscious effort. The full lists and personal details preserved for us of these people show that even of their greater abundance in the coast provinces the per- centage of men of standing was higher. Indeed, the U.E. element in these other colonies was almost too strong for the existence of a caste feeling. In Upper Canada it was different, and the smaller proportion of persons among the elect eligible in the eyes of an aristocratically-minded government for its loaves and fishes, made their oppor- tunities better, though they provoked a proportionately stronger feeling of jealousy among the large population of outsiders. Simcoe's county lieutenants, an office abolished later, were mainly chosen from this class, and so when possible were the sheriffs and magistrates, and very natur- ally so, as their loyalty was not merely assured, but was the argument for their existence in Canada. Many of them had pensions, some of them had now got their compensa- tion money from the Court of Claims. Having had the first selection of generous tracts of land, the very modest figure per acre which increasing settlement soon made it worth caused its sale in parcels to realise quite a handsome sum for a country of small things financially. They acquired valuable sites in the rising towns, built comfortable houses, turned their attention to politics and its incidental advan- tages and to the learned professions which had their
234 THE MAKING OF CANADA
plums. They began to combine too in the various specu- lations which a new country offers to those familiar with it in finance and wholesale trade. They became courtiers, if the term may be applied to the sunshine of a major-general's or a baronet's presence. To the latter the society of such people was naturally the most acceptable, and the social exactions of a more jealous and democratic age were not yet upon the Colonial Governor. And when your friends filled the legislative council and the bench and the Governor was also one — in short a happy family, together showing a united front to the common but somewhat impotent enemy, the popular Assembly, all the plums of office were then gathered as of right by the charmed circle and their nominees, while opportunities for even legitimate financial enterprise came much more easily to a group in touch with headquarters and one another and with their officials throughout the province. There had been practically little of this as yet in the Canadas, as any one who has followed my story so far might guess. They had been ruled by strong governors, not cliques. The provinces had been neither ripe enough nor rich enough for such conditions, nor had other circumstances favoured them. But the little U.K. oligarchy was germinating in Upper Canada. The seeds of the Family Compact were beginning to sprout, and Simcoe with his strong aristocratic tendencies was inadver- tently watering them. But the season was not yet quite ripe ; the ground was still a little too rough, the atmo- sphere too harsh. For all its first sessions, indeed, Simcoe's little parliament was busy with practical non-contentious measures. There had been as yet scarcely any Church of England clergymen, who alone in those days could legally tie the nuptial knot. Hitherto in many districts the marriage rites had been of necessity performed by colonels, adjutants or magistrates. It became necessary now to pass a retrospective law confirming these respectable but techni- cally irregular alliances and legitimising the fruit of them, and also providing for their legality in future should an
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Anglican parson be inaccessible. Acts were passed too for the destruction of bears and wolves, and one in the teeth of considerable opposition against the introduction of negro slaves. Numbers of these had been brought up from the South and elsewhere, and in the scarcity of labour proved very valuable. They were still occasionally bought and sold even in Upper Canada, and it was proposed in the legisla- ture to allow two years in which to purchase more, but the measure was defeated. A militia Act was of course passed, which further empowered the Governor to make use of the men if necessary on the King's ships on the lake. The little navy on Lake Ontario was at present chiefly manned by French Canadians, uniformed in blue and white, with a beaver stamped on their gilt buttons. The militia muster roll of the province amounted to 4700 officers and men, and I daresay a more efficient and ardent militia would seldom have appeared in the field had they been called to it as they constantly expected to be. The French emigrt Duke already mentioned gives a humorous account of the fourth session of 1795, which Simcoe had deferred till August for otherwise good reasons, but it clashed with the harvest, and only two members of the Council and five of the Assembly put in an appearance. The Governor, however, entered the hall with the ceremony and decorum which his soul loved, dressed in silk with his hat upon his head and attended by his adjutant and two secretaries, while guard was mounted by fifty soldiers. The two members of the Council gave by their speaker notice of it to the Assembly, whose five members then appeared at the bar when Simcoe read the King's speech announcing Jay's treaty. The five members by proroguing the House from day to day kept the session going till the bulk of the country's legislators had housed their wheat and put in their appearance. The rest of the business transacted during Simcoe's time is not vital to this narrative and would most assuredly be of small interest to the general reader.
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The capital in the meantime had been moved to Toronto in the year 1794-5, and its euphonious name with character- istic conventionality changed to York, * in memory of the Duke of York's victories in Flanders.' It fortunately recovered in no long time its ancient and more harmonious designation, and during its intervening and unkempt period is chiefly recalled in Canadian annals with half-affectionate contempt as * muddy little York.' The Legislature con- tinued for a time to meet at Niagara, but Simcoe, who was the possessor of a remarkable house of canvas stretched on movable frames which he had purchased from the celebrated Captain Cook, pitched it amid the stumps and woods that then covered the site of the future capitol. Here with his Queen's Rangers he busied himself in the congenial task of opening land to the sun and tracing out future streets and roads. Sawmills were erected, and a few houses built, though the transport of tools and machinery from the east to the embryo Toronto was a slow business in these days, while the goods were often of an inferior kind when they arrived. Through the summer, autumn and winter, travel- ling himself great distances on foot and by canoe up Yonge Street to Lake Simcoe and thence across to survey potential harbours on the Georgian Bay, the Governor rested little. Neither mosquitoes nor black flies, neither snow nor hail, rain nor mud, tedious portages nor laborious cruises with oars or paddle on windy lakes, seemed to have mattered much to this energetic soul. He could not have worked harder had he been developing some huge estate in which his present and future fortunes were wholly engaged, where- as his motives here were purely platonic. He doubtless owned his military grant of wild land, but we hear nothing of it. He was neither a needy man nor an intending settler ; such an asset would have been a trifle compared to his comfortable property in Devonshire which was waiting for him when he should choose to return to it. His constitution too was suffering from his exertions. Indeed, they shortened his life. It is not surprising that the idea he had brought
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with him to Upper Canada of being its independent administrator strengthened, and that he chafed under Dorchester's orders to make his towns here or his harbours there, and worse than all to despatch those handy, red- coated labourers of his to do garrison work at Quebec and Montreal ; and the worst of it was that Dorchester was generally right The apparent certainty of war with the United States, so far as the Upper Canadians could judge, and the preparations to resist Wayne on the Maumee, already treated of, interrupted the industrial activities of the ever-busy Governor for a time in 1794. But Jay's treaty in the following year accelerated the rush into Upper Canada and the Eastern Townships from across the line and quickened the small stream that already trickled slowly in there from Great Britain. Having seen the infant endeavours of Toronto to struggle into a town well on their way, Simcoe spent some time at Kingston, and also in that eastern angle of the province formed by the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence. This is only worth mention for the sake of noting that population was here thickest and civilisation most advanced, that Kingston had now a hundred houses and considerable business, barracks which the Governor and his family and staff made their headquarters, and wharves for the war- sloops, gunboats, and merchant schooners. The religious difficulty had already arisen in the province. Its settlers were of all creeds, Lutherans, Quakers, Menonites, Dunkers and Methodists, while among the British U.E.'s Anglicans and Presbyterians were in a preponderance. The notion of an established Anglican Church seems to have occurred quite naturally to the Government in creating the province, though without any intention of directly taxing non- conformists. This was a more natural corollary than such a measure would seem to our more tolerant minds. The extent of the Establishment, however, was the reserva- tion of every seventh block of Crown land for the support of the Church and the building of parsonage houses. Simcoe was an unyielding Churchman. The Presbyterian body,
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which the Anglican of those days in Ireland or the colonies never seemed to remember was the Established Church of Scotland, petitioned him to empower the ministers of other denominations to perform valid marriages. The Governor not merely refused it, but was honestly shocked at the suggestion, and speaks of it as a truly wicked one. The not very respectful language in which the petition was framed perhaps aggravated in Simcoe's eyes the iniquity of the proposal. Allowances were made in the estimates for a few Anglican ministers, and the ' clergy reserves ' remained for nearly half a century a burning question in Upper Canadian politics. Bishop Mountain, the first Anglican prelate of Quebec, made a tour through Simcoe's domains and was greatly concerned at the preponderance of non- conformists who had here and there erected their small log churches. He found also a few itinerant Methodist preachers, ' a set of ignorant enthusiasts whose preaching is calculated only to perplex the understanding, to corrupt the morals, to relax the nerves of industry, and dissolve the bands of society/ a trenchant and finely-rounded indictment on the part of his lordship which has hardly been justified. Indeed the Anglican Church has never really flourished in any rural community in North America, unless one may except the upper classes in the Southern States, who even before the Revolution could not keep the majority of their neighbours within their communion, and after it lapsed freely themselves into the other sects. The Anglican Church in Canada, as in the United States, has never sensibly spread beyond the wealthier and more exclusive classes ; strengthened by a certain proportion from all classes whose connection with England and its communion is more recent. Its hold upon the average Canadian farmer was in earlier days, as now, always of the slightest. The more democratic and homelier creeds whose cruder forms shocked Bishop Mountain, and whose existence in any shape spelled for Simcoe republicanism and disloyalty, have always been a kind of second nature to the working
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yeoman of the colonies. Its strength has lain almost entirely in the cities and towns, where in the earlier days it monopolised all the social prestige that in later years, as was natural in a country where so many of the wealthiest and most enlightened people were sprung from the Scottish middle class, it has shared about evenly with the Presbyterians. The British Government might map out vast thinly-settled tracts with ecclesiastical parishes, build rectories, grant glebes, and allot wild lands for their support. But they only by these means aroused the jealousy of the majority and made cause of trouble. Simcoe was burning to found grammar schools and even a University. As to the grammar school, Dundas's discouraging reply was qualified by his expression of belief that there was a very good school in Nova Scotia, which as an educational alternative for the youth of 1795 on the Bay of Quinte was worthy of the ancient traditions of the colonial office, and would have given Dorchester's caustic pen a good oppor- tunity in his next despatch. Indeed there was a grammar school at Halifax, and very much so, for its pupils were either so numerous or so loyal that at the opening of the Napoleonic struggle, when every British community was sending voluntary subscriptions to the war fund, they contributed twenty-three pounds in a single occasion out of their pocket-money. Simcoe had started a printing press and a newspaper with a King's printer at Niagara at the beginning of his administration, and instituted an annual agricultural show. Indeed his head was full of schemes for the province, practical and otherwise, but he was also full of fever, the corollary of even a healthy virgin country while being cleared of its original forests. In short, he had worn himself out for the time and could not have encountered another season. He sailed for England in September 1796 on leave of absence, but as it so happened never to return. Almost at once upon his arrival, though quite unfit for it, he was appointed to Santo Domingo, where he had to quell an insurrection of the negroes. But
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his health, only half recovered, again gave way. After two years' rest at home in Devonshire, and two more in command at Plymouth, he was appointed in 1806 Commander-in- Chief in India. In the interval of waiting for Lake's return he was sent on a diplomatic mission to the Court of Portugal concerning the expected invasion of that country by Napoleon. On arriving at Lisbon he was seized with an illness which proved to be fatal, and he just reached Exeter in time to die there. Simcoe is not forgotten in Canada. His weaknesses were minor ones, his virtues conspicuous, his industry untiring, and his aims lofty. He found twelve thousand settlers in the province. He left it with nearly thrice that number after five years, and in the somewhat critical planting of all those new- comers he had taken a personal lead. He was popular with both white men and red, and in short was in Canada at the very time to suit his genius. For it is questionable if his pronounced convictions on matters of Church and State and his exacting definition of a loyal subject would have suited the country in a more advanced stage of development. There is always a recognised flavour of romance about Simcoe's rule in Upper Canada : the meet- ing of the first little parliament in the backwoods station of Niagara; the long uncertainty whether a couple of shanties on Toronto bay or some shaggy woods on the banks of the Thames were to become the capital of the country ; the hardy explorations of the Governor himself through wild woods now replaced with familiar domestic landscape, by stormy solitary bays now lined with wharves and houses and crowded with shipping. Scenes change rapidly, and history makes apace in a new country and provides abundant food for sentiment to the reflective mood and the retrospective temperament. It is not the single century that gives the old log blockhouse its pathos within sound of the electric car, but the prodigious change, the making of whole nations and the wiping out of others, that its rude timbers symbolise. But there is something
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about the old associations of Upper Canada or Ontario, as we now call it, with its flavour of eighteenth-century personal devotion to a Crown, and the struggles of its loyalist refugees with intolerable hardship, that assorts well with the name of Simcoe. His devotion to his mission, his single-mindedness, his honesty and militant unconquer- able Georgian prejudices will, at any rate, always stand as an altogether felicitous figurehead to this earliest chapter of Anglo-Canadian history, the pathos and enduring heroism of which is a memory that, let us hope, will always be duly treasured by the descendants of the men — and the women — who made it.
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CHAPTER X
IMMIGRATION — SETTLEMENT AND PROGRESS
WITH the almost simultaneous retirement of Dorchester and Simcoe the two Canadas entered on that period of sixteen years preceding the war of 1812, during which they both rolled up population a little too fast for the somewhat halting machinery of their respective Governments and a succession of not particularly strong Governors. General Prescott was now in charge at Quebec, and early in 1797 became Governor- General. The trials of the political prisoners referred to in the last chapter came up at this time, M'Lean alone, as before mentioned, suffering the extreme penalty and his body being afterwards quartered, the last instance in Canada of that time-honoured treatment of traitors. This last movement in Lower Canada must be disassociated from American influence or desires with the exception of Vermont. Such plot as there was, poorly and ignorantly conceived, and such sedition as had un- doubtedly been fostered, was in the cause of French Republicanism. Adet was at the root of it all, being con- sumed with a desire for reannexing Canada to the utterly changed France from which she had been parted. It was futile enough, as the American Government were hardly less hostile to such a scheme than the British themselves. But Republican France understood the American genius as little as the American anti-Federals had understood Re- publican France and for some time treated the United States with little less than contempt. But Adet was
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singularly active and persistent He had told the Canadians that France having already conquered Austria, Italy and Spain, was now turning her attention to the subjection of Great Britain. He represented himself as having secured enslaved Canada as the first object of French deliverance, and shortly, so he told the habitants and those of the middling townsfolk who listened to him, many of whom were attracted by the offer of French ' commissions/ only one cry would be heard from Canada to Paris, namely 'Vive la Republique.' But Vermont, though enrolled as a State in 1791, was to be a factor in this precious scheme. These restless people as represented by their spokesman and Governor, Chittenden, cared nothing for cries, nationalities or theories, but simply for trade outlets. Their aspirations, ideals, and political ethics centred wholly on a canal to the St. Lawrence. Whoever would secure to them this good thing, that flag would they fly. The shipload of arms already mentioned as captured in the English Channel with Ira Allen, proved how deeply the canal policy had in- fluenced their minds. The British attitude almost through- out, whether of Haldimand, Dorchester or Simcoe, had been mistrustful. It was conducted as a disagreeable duty that on behalf of Great Britain they were not justified in rejecting, but one obviously distasteful to men of fastidious honour. It would be absurd, however, in view of the uncemented political condition of that day, to judge these Vermonters by a high moral standard of patriotism. With a changed situation Vermont forgot its errant schemes and became a staunch pillar of New England and the United States. Ethan Allen, if not Ira, on the strength of his opportune but bloodless seizure of the lake forts, remains a hero and nothing but a hero to the average American. This twenty years' flirtation with Canada is probably un- known to most Vermonters, and certainly to most Americans but historical students. A reprint of the voluminous and extremely frank correspondence of their forebears with British governors and ministers between 1779-1796 would
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not make good reading for a 4th of July celebration in the Green Mountains. But Adet, who like Genet and Fauchet had come as minister to embroil the United States with Great Britain and seduce Canada, only succeeded in further alienating the Northern States and helping to secure the narrow defeat of his patron Jefferson at the presidential election of 1796. After this he was recalled and the particular poison with which he had inoculated Canada gradually evaporated before troubles of other and kindred kinds.
When Prescott came out some two thousand regular troops and a volunteerxorps of Royal Canadians ready for service and mostly French, constituted the sole defence of Canada. In Upper Canada the Queen's Rangers, about six hundred strong, were the only regulars. There is a curious correspondence preserved between the Duke of Kent, the late Queen's father, commanding at Halifax, and Prescott, now Commander-in-Chief, respecting the 'enormous price of living' and the pay of soldiers and officers. The latter, declares the Duke, ought to have a special allowance, for everything in Halifax is so dear that even a mechanic who has a better income than a subaltern cannot make both ends meet. The fleet too eat up all the butcher meat in the market. He pleads for more winter clothes for the men and more provisions, if only as a guarantee against insubordination, and in another letter urges the abolition of the pay deduction for rations, which it may be remembered cost a mutiny in Montreal thirty years before in the days of Murray. Prescott replies that the cheapness of fish in Halifax in a measure offsets the other disadvantages, and in his own experience, which is hardly to the point, not being in Nova Scotia, represents the drunkenness of the soldiers on being paid off as proving that they had money to spare.
There is not much of salient interest to be said of Prescott's three years of government. There was some lull in alarm and sedition. The Federal government of the
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United States was for peace, and reports of French fleets sailing up the St. Lawrence and French armies landing in England ceased to be circulated or at least to be believed even by the most credulous. The House of Assembly was still in its first youth and not yet conscious of its relative impotence. Prescott provides a variety in the chronicle of Canadian administration by falling out with his council, though outside it he was obviously popular. He was an honourable, and as his despatches would suggest, an able man. The great question of his day, always excepting the alien danger of the French war, was land settlement. The evil he fought, or thought he fought, was land- grabbing in high places. Though Upper Canada was the chief Mecca of the immigrant, the Lower Province was absorbing its thousands, not only in the Eastern Townships but in other districts outside the seigniories, which have now lost most of their British flavour. Elaborate details of Prescott's quarrel would be resented by the reader. But speaking broadly, the enormous number of applicants for land, mainly from the United States, had overtaken the activity or the supply of the Crown surveyors. The in- dividual grants which strike one nowadays as extra- ordinarily liberal, were twelve hundred acres, and the condi- tions, two acres to be cleared in the first five years and five more in the next. Many grantees were in the nature of undertakers, to use an old Ulster phrase; but that is a detail. All of them had to wait so long for the surveyors and the consequent title that many either went home again dis- gusted, or having ' burned their boats ' had no option but to squat without legal rights. Others again in choice localities had sold their grants or part of them previous to obtaining a legal title, but on the faith of it. The confusion therefore may be imagined, and that some definite settlement of it was imperative is obvious. On the top of all this came the oath of fealty, which had rightly been decreed as obligatory on every settler, but which from pressure of numbers and inadequacy of machinery had
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been in innumerable cases overlooked. Speaking broadly, again, Prescott took the view favourable to the ' man on the spot ' — to vested interests, that is to say, hewed out, if informally, by the axe and earned by the plough. He maintains in his letters to the Duke of Portland, still in charge of the colonies, that these men were mainly sub- stantial and industrious people and politically well disposed to Government. Numbers of them too, he urges, had gone home disgusted at the belated action of the surveyors and been lost to Canada. His executive council took the other view, and held that the rights of all such squatters should be disregarded, or at least subject to a strict inquiry into their sentiments and antecedents — a line which Prescott thought im^ssible, injurious to the country, and unfair. But the root of the matter lay in his deep suspicion of his advisers. Large tracts of land had been patented in the names of Quebec and Montreal clerks, and persons without money to pay the fees themselves, or the least likelihood of any desire to hew out homesteads. History thus repeats itself in curious fashion. At the close of the eighteenth century we find the virgin lands of Canada being advertised and sought after in the older regions of the contiguous States, even then, we may remind ourselves, approaching the bi-centenary of their corporate history. To-day and ever since the close of the nineteenth century, after the lapse of a hundred years, during most of which the move- ment was overwhelmingly the other way, there is once again the same activity of land jobbers, the same emigra- tion across the line from the south into Canada, and if the latter-day movement is infinitely larger, it is not much more so perhaps than is represented by the difference be- tween the surplus of eighty millions and the surplus of eight. The round figures of a century afford an always legitimate excuse for comparisons and reflections of a retrospective nature, and in this case they are of peculiar interest. Nowadays the two countries are in such peace- ful mood that the idea of war between them is commonly
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spoken of as ' unthinkable.' In those days they stood always upon the brink of it, and were in fact drawing near to its stern realities. Nowadays too the Americans seek Canada because they have no longer any virgin soil to speak of, and none at all approaching the other in fertility. But why, it may be asked at a time when the two countries were hurling opprobrious epithets at one another collectively and individually, and were always ready to do worse, did the surplus farmers and others of New York, New England and Pennsylvania — for only U.E. loyalists had come from the Slave States, — why did such thousands of these people prefer the yoke of a tyrannical king from whom they had just delivered themselves, to their own virgin west, then represented by the country south of Lakes Ontario and Erie, and the Ohio and Kentucky regions, which were equally fertile and of a milder climate? The reminder perhaps is hardly needed that the monarchical tyranny was a principle or a theory which the farmer in the colonial days had never practically felt. He was promised in Canada constitutional government, and against several hundred acres of good land, practically gratis, the Connecticut yeoman with a worn-out farm or his younger son may have been ready to risk King George, even though he might have learned at school to declaim Patrick Henry's famous 'chains and slavery ' oration. Furthermore, the American west had the Indian trouble still with it. Most of it was much further off than Canada. Taxes too were now heavy in the States whereas there were almost none in the colony. It may be even suspected that the village deacon was the chronic cause of a perceptible trickle of heady adventurers from the New England townships, just as the censorious eye of the Canadian priest in former days had driven hundreds of restless young habitants into the exciting paths and unbridled licence of the fur trade. Lastly, one may remember that the various States had not yet shaken off that ancient inter-colonial jealousy and dislike which had
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even interfered with the harmony, we are told, of the loyalist refugees when they gathered to drink confusion to George Washington in London taverns. It caused some friction in the early U.K. settlements of Nova Scotia and elsewhere, and would no doubt have caused more if the hardships of the situation had allowed time for such indulgences. There is ample evidence that the New York frontier was open to objection on the part of some New Englanders from the very fact that it was within the State government of New York. They would prefer their old enemy the King to that, and illustrated their preference by swearing allegiance to him. The many thousands of their successors who are annually doing the same to his Majesty's successor a thousand or two miles to the west- ward, have no such inter-state prejudices to help influence their steps. But in those days, with the memory of the ancient colony life and its old jealousies, it was perfectly natural. The immigrant of 1800, however, made actually a greater change in his political atmosphere, though he might not feel it more than his prototype of 1900 who makes practically none in Western Canada. For in the earlier period there were governors who counted for much, legislative councils who counted for more, and something approaching a privileged bureaucracy. Another thing too must be remembered, namely, that the greater part of the insensate rage which continued against Great Britain and threatened constant trouble came from the South. The border States, though by no means devoid of a hostile element, were businesslike and busy people and quite inclined to be friends. The Jeffersonian element, on the other hand, whose lands had been steadily running down under slave cultivation and were to run down still more, had ample time for conversation and social intercourse which helped no doubt to keep the anti-British feeling seething even to remote plantations. Still this earlier immigration was all, so to speak, suspect and had to be scrutinised, though it is obvious that in Prescott's
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time in Lower Canada it had in this respect got out of hand.
Prescott, owing to his strained relations with a majority of his council, was recalled in 1799, nominally to explain matters, but actually never to return. He remained titular Governor-General, however, with a retiring salary attached, after the curious custom of those days, for eight years. That he was generally popular in the province is beyond question. Christie, the historian of Lower Canada, who could himself remember these events, says that he was ' universally deemed an upright and honourable man, much respected by all classes and popular as a Governor/ He secured an Imperial grant for the construction of court- houses in Quebec and Montreal, for hitherto the law officers of Canada had been housed in a fashion hardly worthy of jurists of the class of Maseres and Hey, Osgoode and Monk. In the meantime Robert Shore Milnes, who as an absentee had held the lieutenant-governorship of the province, arrived in that capacity to take up the higher office as deputy to Prescott, and in 1801 was created a baronet. It may interest some to know that his salary was ^4000 a year. Dorchester drawing on his private means and at a cheaper period had spent over ^"5000. The chief officers of the province at this time were the Chief-Justice with a salary of £1200, and a Chief-Justice of Montreal with .£900, and three Puisne Judges at £500. There was also a judge at Three Rivers, and one at remote Gaspe", a fragment of the province at the mouth of the St. Lawrence, peopled by Canadian fishermen and a few U.K. settlers.
There was a secretary and treasurer of the province, an Attorney and Solicitor-General, a Recorder-General, an Inspector-General and Surveyor-General, both of lands and works. All of these posts carried smaller salaries, but considerable fees. There was also an office known as Voyer- General, a sinecure of £500 a year, now held by the prominent French seignior Charles de Lanaudiere, one of the old Carrignan Regiment noblesse. The Legislative
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Councillors had allowances of ;£ioo, and their clerk, at this time Herman Ryland, who was also secretary to the Governor, demands a word, as he played a considerable part in the history and correspondence of Canada. A Northamptonshire man, he had gone young to America in the pay department of the army with Cornwallis, but was taken up later by Dorchester when in command at New York, and became his private secretary afterwards in Canada and also Clerk to the Council. He threw up both situations owing to a disagreement with Prescott and went to England as informal envoy of the dissatisfied councillors. He returned, however, with Milnes and occupied his old posts, exercising a great deal of influence on the Canadian Governor, and no little from time to time on the Colonial Office through several administrations, dying at his house at Beauport in 1838. An able man was this, who in spite of the most robust Anglicising theories succeeded in retaining the private liking and respect of his French as well as his British neighbours; and we shall meet him again. Sub- scription lists are not stimulating items in history, but there is one preserved under date of May 1799 which speaks for itself with more significance than a page or two of descrip- tion. The contributions sent from all parts of the British Empire towards the French war have already been alluded to. In 1798 it was suggested by some that a vote of the House should be taken for a grant of £20,000 for this object. It strikes one now as a daring project in an Assembly overwhelmingly French, but there seems to have been no anticipation of its actual defeat, but only of some individual protests, on which account Prescott opposed it. A private subscription list was therefore opened, which is significant of the patriotism of the British and the un- mistakable sympathies of a considerable number of leading Frenchmen, having in view their lack of wealth. Among the former Bishop Mountain is down for £300 ; so are Osgoode and Caldwell. The House of Frobisher for £i 100. But much more interesting is the £500 given by the
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Catholic Seminary of Montreal, in addition to £300 a year during the war. The coadjutor Catholic Bishop de Plessis and numbers of cure's figure for proportionately liberal sums. Among the French laity are such names as Tasche- reau, Duchesney, Panet, De Boucherville, St. Ours, De Lotbiniere, and others famous in the older annals of Canada and some still conspicuous in its bench and bar, and all down for substantial contributions. The most significant of all, perhaps, is a modest £10 contributed by a son of the gallant De Beaujeu who had flourished his hat as a signal for the daring and only too successful attack on Braddock forty odd years before and fallen dead at the first answering volley. The cards had indeed been shuffled since I755J When the news of Nelson's victory of the Nile was received, a solemn mass was performed and a Te Deum chanted in all the parish churches, though it does not follow that the habitant was necessarily an enthusiastic participator.
It was just now too that the last Jesuit died, and the old thorny question of their estates became ripe for settlement. Portland sent the necessary deeds for conferring them upon Lord Amherst, subject to their being passed by the Quebec parliament, apparently leaving to Milnes some latitude in the matter. Both races were anxious that the funds should be applied to education. Bishop Mountain complained of the lack of facilities for the higher education of the British, and with many others was anxious to spread the English language among the French by official instructors in every town and large village. The French leaders too were not backward in the cause of learning, but on condition that it was altogether in the hands of their Church. So matters languished. Sewell and Fouchet, Attorney and Solicitor General respectively, reported flaws in the text of Amherst's grant, so the Jesuit estates, which now produced £1400 a year, were put in commission and not made over to Amherst at any time, and only to education thirty years later. A bill for allotting Crown lands to education and establishing free schools for the teaching of English passed
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through both Houses in 1801, but was never carried out owing to the opposition of the Catholic clergy. There is an interesting letter from Milnes to the Duke of Portland on the state of the province as it appears to him. He expresses some anxiety as to the strength of the Executive to resist the pressure of a somewhat raw and aggressive popular Assembly. He deplores the decline of the noblesse to such an extent that only a few of them are now lifted above the habitants in substance or manner of life. And this he says is owing to the laws of inheritance in the seigniorial families by which the small rents and fees are subdivided among the owners' families. He shows himself as still obsessed by old-world reverence for land qua land, and thinks the habitants ought to have more re- spectful gratitude to the seigniorial class for having granted them their plots, forgetful of the fact that the censitaires had cleared the land of timber and had put every improve- ment upon it ; in short, that they had created their farms out of, let us say, a hundred acres of wild forest land worth possibly, as the seignior handed it them, about twenty pounds. They obviously appeared to Milnes in the same economic situation as his father's Yorkshire tenants ! He laments too this decay of the aristocracy, lauding the peasantry as industrious, peaceable and well disposed, but easily led by designing persons through their simplicity. In all the world he thinks there is nowhere such absolute equality of condition as exists here outside the cities of Quebec, Montreal and Three Rivers. By this time, how- ever, the reader will understand this almost as well as Milnes. While Milnes himself is trembling for the authority of the Executive and Legislative Council, the latter as a matter of fact, having neither a Dorchester nor even a Prescott to modify their oligarchical tendencies, were pro- gressing steadily in that direction. The Governor and others complain of the lack of desire to exercise influence and take part in public affairs among the still well-to-do seigniors. The sympathies of these were with the Govern-
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ment, and the latter would have welcomed a more active co-operation. The bourgeoisie was rapidly growing into a class whose attachment was much less certain. He reports an excess of £1 2,000 a year in expenditure over revenue with pleasure, and hopes it will continue, as this dependence on the Crown for making up the deficit is one of the guarantees that ' His Majesty's Government can be carried on with advantage,' and he looks to the Crown lands to be a constant source of comfort to the Executive. So did they, and moreover had no scruples about throwing out any bill they disapproved of, which in the somewhat callow state of the popular House was perhaps just as well. Milnes reports the population as 160,000, including 30,000 British. He would attach the Catholic Church and priests to the government by salaries, and insist on a Government licence being a necessary preliminary to ordination. In all this Ryland's influence is manifest. The paper militia, comprising all males between the ages of sixteen and sixty, number 37,000, including 292 of those time-honoured parish notables known as 'captains,' at this time according to Milnes for the most part leading habitants ; the sixteen e*tat-majors only belonging to the aristocracy. He would like to give both of these ranks who do so much useful work a small salary or allowance. He looks forward to so large a sale of Crown lands that the proceeds invested in the British Funds will supply an income sufficient to make his Majesty's Government in Canada pecuniarily indepen- dent of an Assembly likely to be troublesome in the future, and one which perhaps most administrators at that time would have regarded with some anxiety. He is also gratified at the grant of Crown lands to education — which we have seen was not utilised — as the necessity for sending the youth of the better -class Anglo-Canadians to the United States for that purpose was clearly dangerous to their principles. He concludes : * The respectable footing upon which the Protestant Church was about to be put in Quebec will likewise tend to that increase of con-
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sideration which ought to prevail for the Established Church.'
Bishop Mountain soon afterwards addressed the Govern- ment on the advisability of establishing the English Church in the province. He thought it suffered in dignity by the measure of state recognition enjoyed by the higher Catholic functionaries. Since the re-establishment of the Catholic bishop and coadjutor bishop of Quebec, the former was technically nothing more than the * Superintendent of the Romish Church/ but courtesy had conceded the full titles to both. When the excellent Bishop Denant died in 1806, and his able young coadjutor Plessis succeeded him, the feelings between the party whose aim was gradually to Anglicise Lower Canada and the others was brought to a head. The then acting Governor Dunn, however, decided that Monseigneur Plessis should take the oath of allegiance as Bishop of Quebec, which finally determined the ques- tion. The Anglicans too by that time had erected their cathedral in the upper city of Quebec, that modest and eminently Georgian building so suggestive of the atmo- sphere of its day, about which so many memories have gathered, and that no one but perhaps an unsympathetic ecclesiastical architect would wish to replace. Till the close of Milnes' administration in 1806 there seems to have been little of the acute racial feeling which may be said to have begun immediately after it with the founding of the first French Canadian paper Le Canadienne, a notable pub- lication that enjoyed a somewhat stormy career. In what proportions cause and effect were blended in the pages of this fiery journal we need not stop to consider here. Hither- to political cleavages had run mainly along natural lines, such as those between commerce and agriculture and the methods of taxation that each supported in its own behoof. For it will have been seen how large an English-speaking agricultural element had by now arisen even in the Lower Province ; if numerically but a sixth perhaps of the rural French, yet infinitely more active as agriculturists when
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the first laborious years of timber-felling, logging, fencing and house-building were over. It is a pity that such normal and healthy conditions, due in part to the primal necessities of a large but recently settled element, could not have con- tinued. He would have been, however, an ingenuous or optimistic soul who could have looked forward without anxiety to the juxtaposition and partnership of these two sturdy and obstinate nations representing so much that was opposite in faith, character and tradition.
Upper Canada in the meantime, from the departure of Simcoe in 1796, had for the decade, lightly dealt with in the foregoing pages, pursued the path of early development with the dogged industry that is to this day its charac- teristic. There is not much in this that the reader would call history. The question of land and surveys, roads and mill sites, harbours and townships, submerges all else, and fills the atmosphere. Interminable lists of candidates for blocks and parcels of land fill pages of the archives. Yet as memory ranges over that now teeming country covered even more thickly with substantial homesteads than most parts of genuinely rural England, and thickly sprinkled with busy little manufacturing towns bearing names often familiar throughout the world for their commercial products, the long weary lists of these pioneers who went into the forest so long ago, English, Scottish, Irish, German, Dutch, page after page, seem to gather about them an almost romantic significance. For ten years after the departure of Simcoe Upper Canada was administered by deputies, of whom Peter Russell, President of Simcoe' s Council, was the first. Like Ryland, while a junior in the British army during the American war, he had attracted the notice of a Commander-in-Chief and served as Sir Henry Clinton's secretary, gaining a varied experience, however, both in civil and military life. Energetic and industrious, he ad- ministered the province efficiently for three years, though his enemies declared that part of his industry was directed to ascertaining the best tracts of land and deeding them to
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himself. Every member of the Executive and Legislative Council was legally allotted 6000 acres, but having practi- cally the sole disposal of the Crown lands were confronted with immense temptations to take care of themselves and one another. All these blocks of land were merely specu- lations, and resold to actual settlers at leisure. Russell summoned the second parliament of Upper Canada to York, to the disgust of many of the legislators, lawyers and jurymen, who for lack of accommodation had to live in tents, or crowd together in huts — a situation perhaps unique in the story of British Parliaments. American garrisons had now taken possession of the treaty posts, of which Detroit and Niagara looked right over into Canada. Brant and his Indians too were causing a little anxiety. That astute chieftain, bitten with the land-dealing fever, wished to convert into cash some of the lands on the Grand River which Government had granted them. Russell did not think their title of occupancy admitted of this, and Brant wrote letters to Philadelphia and elsewhere accusing the deputy-governor of land-grabbing, but the matter was ultimately arranged. An unfortunate incident had some- what embittered the famous Mohawk chief, for in an unprovoked attempt on his life made by his own son he had accidentally killed the latter in self-defence. The American occupation of such neighbouring forts made a bad impression on the Indians, and rumours of a combined attack of French and Spaniards from the Lower Mississippi on Upper Canada had been bruited about, but nothing serious of a political nature actually occurred. The cor- respondence of the time other than such as was concerned with land chiefly illustrates the inconveniences of remote- ness as felt in a new country before those inventions of science with which our generation are familiar made pioneering a far briefer as well as a milder trial. There was not a single church as yet west of Kingston, and the Crown now contributed a few hundred pounds towards the building of one at York, Newark, and Sandwich respectively.
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The former place was still so much in the woods that during the session's parliament Elmslie, the Chief-Justice, complains that in this embryo Toronto the people compelled to resort there had not merely to live in the open, but were in danger of being starved. Among the applicants for land the traitor Arnold reads strangely, and the correspondence accompanying it stranger still. His claims were those of course of a U.K. loyalist, and Cornwallis supports them on the ground of his ' gallant and useful services in the island of Guadelope.' So does Simcoe, referring at the same time to any suggestion of his residence there as most obnoxious to the loyalists ; for Arnold, now a retired general in the British service, had intended to go and settle in Canada with the older members of his family. An excep- tion was made in his favour by Portland in consideration of his wounds, and he was given the large concession of 14,000 acres with the option of non-residence.
Among the numerous groups that were now pouring into Upper Canada the most picturesque in the retrospect and the most unsuccessful in performance was that of some noble French exiles from old France, expelled for their military activity against the Republic. The leader of this movement was Count Joseph de Puisaye, who had served with the British forces at Quiberon. His motives and schemes are fully set forth in letters from Portland and Windham, who knew him personally, to Russell. These, broadly speaking, were to plant a military colony of French Royalists in Upper Canada on grants of land, which was to constitute at the same time a regiment in the British service. The scheme, as embodied by De Puisaye at great length, and more briefly indicated by Windham to Russell, was characteristic of many such, before and afterwards, patheti- cally elaborated by men familiar only with the class distinctions and atmosphere of an old country and full of plans for their conduct in what may almost be called another planet. Locke, it may be remembered, had drafted a consti- tution for the first settlement of South Carolina, in which an
R
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order of nobility designated Caciques were to be created on the spot and play the part of hereditary lords in the future colony ! The Count, says Windham, wishes to settle away from all other French-speaking people in Canada, consider- ing his party, who all know each other, as of a purer description than the mass of the latter ; nor do they wish to be mixed with those of whose principles they are not assured, and who might bring future reproach on the colony. Windham admits that he is attracted by the feudal flavour of the movement, and so evidently was Simcoe. The whole organisation of the regiment, commencing with 150 rank and file, is carefully detailed, which is reasonable ; and then comes the domestic and agricultural side of the question, the distribution of labour, the manner in which the land of the 'gentlemen' shall be cultivated, and all sorts of beauti- ful schemes that by any one familiar with a wild country, above all one like Upper Canada, can, as I said before, be only described as pathetic in its innocence. However, the King approved of the rules, and the cabinet ministers made no adverse comments. Russell did not of course get the full draft of this little feudal Utopia, that lies before me now, but on receiving the general idea of the scheme and instruc- tions to allot lands, he proceeded to the latter business, and selected the townships of Pickering and Whitby to the north-east of Toronto, which may interest any of the present inhabitants of those populous districts of an anti- quarian turn of mind. One can detect a dry flavour in his reply to the Government, for Russell was a hardened expert in the science of settlement. The loyalist regiments had been of course by comparison ready-made pioneers, but he had watched the fortunes of more than one company of regulars thus planted, and though even these, as compared with French counts and marquises, were eligible settlers, had seen the considerable measure of failure which attended them. He nevertheless surveyed a tract of primaeval forest, though his Chief- Justice, Elmslie, like all his com- peers an imported English barrister, was ready with judicial
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objections, and doubtful if a proper title could be made out for aliens. They arrived in due course at Quebec, two counts, two marquises, a viscomte and a dozen gentil- hommes and a few ladies, with a rank and file amounting to forty in all, having shed some deserters at Plymouth by the way. Russell recommended them to winter at Kingston, as he doubted if York could accommodate persons of their condition in a suitable manner. He considered the locality allotted to them as excellent, seeing its remoteness from the French of Lower Canada on the one hand and those of Detroit on the other. Moreover, he continues with prophetic significance, its propinquity to the seat of govern- ment would enable him to relieve their difficulties in case of need. He was ready to enrol them as a militia regiment at once, and to put De Puisaye in the commission of the peace. General Hunter, who superseded Russell in 1799, takes up the correspondence with Portland. When the company actually arrived, Lieutenant-General Count de Puisaye preferred the comparative civilisation of Niagara, and bought a farm there. Twenty of the others, with the Viscomte de Chalus, settled on their grants, named after their best friend, Windham. The remainder, under the Marquis de Beaupoil, abandoned the enterprise on sight, in disgust apparently at its condition and prospects. ' The Marquis de Beaupoil,' writes Hunter, 'having had some misunderstanding with the Count de Puisaye, or not finding the enterprise suitable to his expectations, has determined to return to England.' How well one can see it all ! The faithful twenty, however, cleared a few acres with the help of some French Canadian woodsmen, but are reported as quite without means, and applying for seed and rations. De Puisaye himself ultimately died in poverty in England. His remaining settlers were soon scattered, and apparently Colonel Quetton de St. George alone remained to leave descendants to play a part in Canadian life. This to be sure is but a passing incident, a trifle more picturesque than common, but otherwise merely one of those innumer-
26o THE MAKING OF CANADA
able little enterprises of the optimistic, the well-bred and the unsuitable that so thickly sprinkle the three-century chronicle of British colonisation with the marks of their foredoomed failures. The beginning of the nineteenth century, however, throughout all British North America is thick with pioneering adventures, mostly under leaders like Selkirk in the North- West ; Talbot, the Irish officer and Simcoe's friend, along the shores of Lake Erie ; Bishop M'Donnell in the Glengarry country towards the angle of the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence ; Gait, the novelist, with his Canada company towards Lake Huron. Pennsylvania Germans too had occupied en bloc the present prosperous county of Waterloo, still peopled with their descendants, while alongside of them is an equally vigorous and pros- perous population, whose ancestors William Dickson of the Legislative Council brought from Annandale and his native county of Dumfries. There are others again whose names have long been merged and forgotten in those of flourishing towns or villages, covering the spot where they opened their first clearing, or erected their primitive land office. These, however, were not for the most part schemes for giving the soft-handed and the well-born a woodland Utopia, but for the relief of the British peasantry. They assumed for obvious reasons greater dimensions after the peace of 1815, when the British Government moved actively in the matter. But already among the swarms of Ameri- cans who had followed the U.E. loyalists, batches of Scotch, Irish and English were to be found, though for the present the Maritime Provinces seemed their more natural goal, and became so. Another enthusiastic but far more practical and persevering nobleman, the young Lord Selkirk, bought 70,000 acres of land in the extreme west of Upper Canada on l!ake St. Clair in the year 1803 ; and for those to whom the price of wild land in these old times may be of interest it seems generally in large blocks to have been worth about a dollar an acre. Of Selkirk's I shall speak presently. The clearances in the Highlands,
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which helped so much in the earlier building up of our greatest colony, may often have been effected ruthlessly ; but that is another matter. Yet is there any one living who has been privileged to see the effect of transfers like this to the comparative fatness of a new country, with the certain prospects it holds out, that could look on the agents of it as other than benefactors, or the objects as other than benefited ? What was the use of British colonies if poverty- stricken people, though from ignorance they may have tolerated their poverty and feared the unknown, could not be transplanted to those free and fertile spaces where the British flag flew and laws, of necessity even better for the poor man than British laws, obtained ? Thousands who at home were very far from the verge of want have gone there cheerfully, without thought of regarding themselves as objects of compassion, and thanked heaven for their own sakes and above all for their children's, that they have taken a hand in building up the British Empire. Why then should the removal of those whose lot must have been and must always be hard, even if they had their wretched lands free, be regarded, not by the politician, for he is concerned with votes not actualities, but by the honest and unreasonable sentimentalist as if it were some question of Siberian exile ? It is only possible to attribute this attitude to the limitation of the objector himself, his lack of oppor- tunity to contrast the two situations, his want of proportion in weighing the timorous ignorance and nostalgia of an elderly minority against the prodigious advantage of the younger majority and the immeasurable gain to their own and their children's children. No properly constituted Briton who loved his country, unless he were a hopeless materialist, would wish to banish the man of reasonable com- fort on the chance of his acquiring a greater measure of it, nor, however intimate he might be with colonial life, would he wish to dislodge the tenant sitting on an average fifty or hundred acre farm, whether in West Yorkshire, in Cardigan, or Kilkenny. Though he may only make both ends meet,
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he has the housing and requirements of a self-respecting man. He is farming land, that the Almighty meant to be farmed, though he is almost sure to be living on a less generous scale than his relative of equal diligence who took up land young in a colony. In a country like modern Britain, so much and so unfortunately given over to urban or suburban existence, with a corresponding loss to the rural perceptions, a wet moorland seems often to be credited with the potentialities in agricultural calculations of a Lothian farm or a Manitoba prairie. It is vainly and vaguely imagined by so many men of the pavement to be only a question of science and industry. An inclement climate and a poor soil with their unconquerable terrors in combination would seem to have scarcely any significance. Land is land, and that is enough ! There seem to be some who hold the incredible theory that even the unalterable verge of want on a native soil is better than comfort and prosperity on another, though that be a British colony ! The amor patrice of the ignorant is not a matter to be spurned, but it is a question how much of mere superstitious terror of a change of scene is blended with it all. It is another whether these local attachments, whatever view an analyst may take of them, should not be sacrificed to the welfare of the young and those to come after them.
In 1799 General Hunter arrived as Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and commander of all the troops in both provinces. Nothing of moment occurred unless the fact of his Attorney-General, White, being killed in a duel by the Clerk of the Council may be accounted as such. It was extremely inconvenient, as his place had to be filled from England, a tedious process in those days. It provides an occasion too for remarking that duelling was tolerably frequent with these councillors, legislators and lawyers in their backwoods capital. So also was hard drinking, a custom in which they were not likely to be backward at a time when both Celt and Saxon at home were so convivial. There was not much wine probably at even York and
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Kingston dinner-tables ; the cost of carnage was prodigious. Whisky punch of home manufacture was more popular, for imported rum was not likely to hold its own against such a rival in the face of the large Scottish element.
There seems to have been chronic anxiety in regard even to the Canadian Indians, whose nerves had been naturally upset by their uprooting on the Mohawk. They maintained a not wholly unsuspicious correspondence with the western tribes towards the Mississippi, from up whose waters and their base at New Orleans some fraction of the vast fighting machine of Napoleon was half looked for on the borders of Canada, and not altogether without reason. For Adet's emissaries had been as busy among the Indians as among the French Canadians, while the American borderers of Kentucky and the Ohio were always an uncertain quantity. They would, cczteris paribus, be Americans, but were in fact political egotists feverish with the lust of land, fascinated by the dawning possibilities of the New West, and not averse to making a bargain with almost any Power who would give them a free hand on the Mississippi and then leave them alone. But the Peace of Amiens in 1801 brought a short respite for a time to these alarms. Hunter ruled Upper Canada for six years without friction, and that is almost all that is known of this, the most shadowy figure on the whole record of Canadian Governors, though evidently not a shadow in fact, but rather an energetic military man who got himself obeyed and earned no bad name. There are plenty of his letters, but they tell nothing except that he was diligent, blunt and straightforward, and met little opposition. He describes Toronto in 1804 as being without a single public building. His council of nine and his legislature of sixteen met in two rooms erected by Simcoe as the nucleus of Government House. The Executive met in a room in the clerk's house, through the thin walls of which every word was audible. The Courts of Appeal and of the King's Bench, the district court and quarter sessions, all held their sittings in the same room.
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The Crown had erected suitable courts in Lower Canada, and they were now petitioned to do likewise for the Upper Province. Hunter was unmarried and in his sixtieth year when he died in Quebec during one of the frequent visits that, as Commander-in-Chief, he was compelled to make. He was buried in the new cathedral, where a tablet may be seen erected to his memory by his brother, a London physician. Russell was not re-nominated administrator on the death of Hunter, somewhat to his mortification. Alexander or Commodore Grant, so-called from the fact that he had commanded the fleet on the lakes, was voted to the office by the Council. As Hunter is said to have been son of an Ayrshire landowner, so with more certainty was his successor the son of an Inverness-shire laird, who moreover had been out in the Forty-five. In the following year, however, Mr. Francis Gore was nominated Lieutenant- Governor of the province, and, with the exception of the war period of 1812-14, held that office till the year 1818. He was a weak man, and it may be said, speaking broadly, that his advent marked the period when Upper Canada began to fall into the hands of that oligarchy which developed later into the celebrated Family Compact, the leading note of Upper Canadian history. A little breeze of popular clamour had arisen even in Grant's tenure. The internal taxes of the province, with its eighth share in the customs revenue of Quebec, nothing like met the expenses of administration, for the considerable revenue from lands went to the Crown though expended by it upon the province. Hunter it appears had applied, and Grant had endorsed a trifling sum from the internal revenue to some public purpose without the consent of the legislature, who thereupon protested in language worthy of the most momentous occasion and the largest financial operations. It was of little material consequence, but was the first note of the long conflict which the popular House waged against what they regarded as usurped powers that on several occasions in after years set the Crown itself, or at least its
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nominees, at defiance. Dr. Bryce in his short history probably represents the average impression that has come down in Canada when he alludes to Gore even on his arrival as being ' surrounded by a combination of office- holders, land speculators, and so-called persons of good society in the capital of Little York. He became their bond slave. This knot of professional politicians and hereditary rulers, as they regarded themselves, looked with contempt on the inhabitants of the rural districts, especially on the later American emigrants.' This would be not unfair criticism for any one holding a brief for the Canadian public of those early days, but the U.E. loyalists, who were the chief offenders, would stoutly urge their claims to the first-fruits of the country. They had been the first settlers, and regarded the province in a sense as their inheritance. They could not prevent their former fellow- countrymen, against whom collectively they had naturally the bitterest feelings, pursuing them into their refuge, as that was the concern of the British Government. Moreover, they made money out of them by land sales, and in the various ways that early and well-established settlers always make money, and legitimately out of the needs of later immigrants ; a satisfactory and partial atonement for the confiscation and persecution they had themselves suffered. But they viewed with not unnatural suspicion every American who settled in the country attracted only by the fertility of the soil and with political principles either indifferent or republican. That they should have been willing to share place and power with these nondescript hordes of a now detested nation because they were ready to sell them land is a little too much to expect of human nature. They were still a chosen people ; they had been thus officially tabulated, and had very nearly become a legally perpetuated caste. Above all, as we know, they contained a percentage of men fitted by rank and educa- tion to lead, such as would scarcely exist in the ordinary agricultural element that had been flowing in from the
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States. It was of course the upper ranks of the U.K. loyalists, combining with the few imported English legal and other officials, who thus by degrees acquired supreme control. The rank and file stuck to their leaders for the most part, for esprit de corps was still strong within them, and they got some crumbs. But both they and the new comers were too busy in the woods, from which the gather- ing oligarchy had now mostly freed themselves, to make much protest. The latter had with some justice secured most of the offices and much of the trade, and lived con- genially in clusters at Kingston, Newark, and Little York, with here and there an exception, where on the shores of either lake some especially promising enterprise made isolation endurable. They had secured the Council, the Executive, and now, as we have seen, had a valuable recruit in the Governor. The Lower House mattered little at present, for it had small control over the finances and remained nearly impotent for two generations. Nor was this monopoly by any means the deplorable thing that some modern readers might imagine and some Canadian writers have been inclined to represent it. It is quite true that this perhaps somewhat arrogant clique used their opportunities for securing Crown lands very freely, and perpetrated a good deal of jobbery such as was then rife among those in power in every country — a fact that commends men like Dorchester, Haldimand, and Simcoe so strongly to one's admiration. It would be irrelevant to say that under the purely democratic regime of modern Canada similar things are not unknown. For in a democracy they are winked at as a kind of natural outcome of success by so large an element that the worthier one is powerless, while under mutual recriminations of party strife the sinner is practically safe, and is further aided by the modern worship of success even when it is sordid. The achievement of the aristocrat in undue aggrandisement at the popular expense seems to stir the wrath of many who will sit down quietly under the other. This is illogical. There is no excuse for either, but
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the aristocrat has at least that of tradition. The other is automatically a professor of political morality, the traditional opponent of a class for whose benefit, once upon a time, the people were really considered to exist. So when the latter plunders the class whose champion he has in a sense become, and after a decade or two in politics, without other occupation, emerges a millionaire, it is not merely that wealth does not become him so well, for that is purely an artistic standpoint, but he also wears the odious guise of an impostor.
The old U.K. loyalists, however, were not half so bad as either. They pr6bably felt that they had almost a right to substantial slices of the country. Few of them had been compensated to anything like their losses, and if they some- times helped themselves to Crown lands, objected to sharing office with freshly imported republicans, for all they knew, and generally regarded themselves as the salt of the country, it is not surprising. They were a robust people of strong convictions, and ready to fight for them. As a matter of fact, it was a good thing for Canada that such an oli- garchy was in power ; for the war of 1812 was coming, and no community of British blood had ever been in a more perilous situation than were they. Only men of strong convictions and deep prejudices could have won through. The stump politician, the Quaker settler, the itinerant preacher, admirable work as he had done in the wild woods, or again the mere land-hunter, were not the men for the moment in Upper Canada. With all his arrogance, if one must have it so, the U.K. loyalist and the oligarchy he was setting up were just the local weapons which Great Britain needed to help her in the formidable task of defending a frontier over eight hundred miles in length against a numerous foe. The population was now about seventy thousand, and that in a country which, a little more than twenty years previously, had been a virgin wilderness — not a miraculous performance in these days of teeming popula- tions, easily and quickly shifted about, and given every facility
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for making the wilderness speedily habitable, but it was an unprecedented one in those. Something like it in the way of figures had occurred simultaneously in Kentucky. There, however, one sees but the natural breaking of the tide of civilisation, forced by normal pressure over the Alleghanies ; picturesque enough in detail, more so indeed in the individual environment of its pioneers than was the case with the early Anglo-Canadian settlers, entombed as they were for years between slowly yielding forest walls that, in a densely timbered, non-mountainous country, so ruthlessly and for so long shut out the world. For the forests of Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Ohio were much more open, the land as rich and richer in the river bottoms, the seasons longer, the climate less severe. Nor were there any natural parks of blue grass and white clover to relieve the uncompromising bristling antagonism of the Canadian bush. There was nothing, however, of the historical and social picturesque- ness in the horny-handed hordes who followed Boone, Clarke, and Sevier across the Alleghanies, that attaches to the U.K. settlement of Upper Canada. Not poor men moving westward to better themselves were these, but the survivors of a lost cause, pitchforked out of ease and pro- sperity into the wilderness to begin life again, and form as best they could a strange partnership with a small nation of seventeenth-century Frenchmen of differing faith, speech, laws and traditions. So far the founding of Upper Canada had been achieved, somewhat in this wise, by original U.E. loyalists, about eight thousand in all, with a rather smaller succeeding influx who are usually, though vaguely, described as ' later loyalists.' These last, however, contained a good many of the first U.E. exodus to Nova Scotia, attracted to Canada by reports of its superior fertility and brighter climate. The seventy thousand of 1806 were represented by the increase of these, which could hardly as yet have become normal, and by alien immigration, chiefly from the States. No great number of English had as yet come to Canada, nor indeed were they much in evidence till after
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the war of 1812. The Highlanders, however, flocked in. Those of Johnston's Mohawk settlement, original loyalists, had settled at the eastern corner of the province — Grants, M'Leans, Mackays, Hays, McDonnells, and others, while there came a little later from Scotland M'Gillies, Clanranald Macdonalds, Macphersons of Badenoch, and Camerons of Lochiel. It was not till 1804 tnat tne large M'Donnell movement, the whole regiment of Glengarry Fencibles with their families, before alluded to, arrived and settled near their compatriots in the county of Glengarry. These last, and many of the others, were Roman Catholics. A few Catholic Irish had been introduced, while a great many disbanded soldiers were of that race and faith. But the more wholesale movement of them to Canada was not yet. Colonel Talbot of the 24th had broken ground on his own six thousand acre grant near the western end of Lake Erie, to launch out a little later into one of the largest private promoters of emigration and pioneers of Canadian civilisation of his or any day. There are many accounts of these early movements buried away in the back shelves of libraries, in which men and women who helped to lay the foundations of now populous colonies tell the tale of their early endeavours. Not ' travellers' tales/ but those of work and hope and hardship, of humour and pathos, and of peculiar fascination, wholly aside from any literary qualities, to those of us who may know the fields as they look to-day of these old strivings. Talbot was notoriously eccentric, and was known as mad Dick Talbot, but mad or sane there are said to be nearly a quarter of a million souls now living on the twenty-eight townships that he acquired and opened for settlement. The anniversary of his birthday was cele- brated as ' Founder's Day ' for years after the Colonel had departed from the scene, a touch of sentiment that in the somewhat hard atmosphere of Upper Canadian story is unusual. A still more picturesque and equally worthy figure of this period, though he left slight impress on Ontario, was the fifth Lord Selkirk already mentioned, an
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able, upright, and warm-hearted young man of ample means and a fine taste for colonising. Great clearances were going on in Sutherlandshire in his youth, and it cannot be denied that the Highland chieftain turned landlord showed a great deal less regard, when the question of profits came in, for the people who would have died for him or his ancestors, than an unromantic Yorkshire landlord would have shown for mere prosaic copyhold tenants had they stood in his way. Selkirk, who was not a Highland chief, took pity on the somewhat mercilessly evicted tenants of those who were. Recognising, however, to the full how much good might come out of evil, he tried the experiment of taking eight hundred of the Duchess of Sutherland's outcasts to a grant of his own on Prince Edward Island, which proved a com- plete success, and their descendants to-day form a prosperous fraction of the hundred thousand souls who compose that prosperous little island commonwealth.
In 1803 Lord Selkirk purchased large tracts on the Grand River, and another about Chatham in Upper Canada, offering at the same time to make a road from one to the other right through the peninsula. But he was unable to come to terms with the Government at York, and did little him- self towards settling these lands. It was during and after the war that he made such a stir with his fresh colony on the remote prairie near the present Winnipeg, and as a large Hudsons Bay stockholder, brought about those dramatic and sanguinary little episodes around Fort Garry between the older Company and its Montreal rivals, the Nor'- Westers, who struggled hard to prevent any settlement of farmers.
In a sense Lord Selkirk was the founder of the present Province of Manitoba, though sixty years were to elapse before his isolated quasi-agricultural community on the Red River were to come within the purview of Canadian states- men, and before the quiet efforts of the united fur com- panies to belittle the agricultural capacities of their vast domain were to be overcome by the practical demonstration made possible by the Canadian Pacific railroad.
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CHAPTER XI
THE APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES
THE time was now approaching when the course of Canadian development was to be arrested by a call more urgent, and the makers of the country were to be summoned from desk and plough to fight with the sword against great odds for what their axes had won. Formidable, however, as was the prospect, it at least cannot be said that, when the hour of trial arrived, it came as a surprise, though the military condition of Canada, so far as Great Britain was responsible for it, might well bear that interpretation. But to clear the ground in these pages for the war of 1812, we must leave Upper Canada, which was to be the principal scene of action, and get back again to the better point of outlook at Quebec, which, in the main, as an old province with more time for disputation, had not enjoyed quite the same political repose as its younger and busier sister. The elements of potential friction and disagreement were always face to face in the two cities of the Lower Province where its pulse beat. In Upper Canada the race problem was absent An oligarchical calm reigned in its rude little capital. The opposition had not yet come out of the woods, where they were still inarticulate and struggling for their living. There had been a trifling breeze even there. An imported English circuit judge with popular sympathies had met the grievances of the rural grand juries a little more than half way, and got himself elected to the House of Assembly for the purpose of denouncing what he conceived to be irregu-
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larities and high-handed proceedings. He was an Irishman, and if there was some justice in his reflections, his ways were those of a demagogue and egotist, certainly not of a judge. The Government party, however, were too strong for him, and had him recalled. His friend and abettor, another Irish barrister, one Weeks, had graduated as an election agent in the service of Aaron Burr when the latter missed the Presidency by Hamilton's efforts, and shot him for it, as every one knows. Weeks, in imitation perhaps of his late patron, and with equally unjustifiable provocation, called out Mr. Dickson, already mentioned as of the Gover- nor's Council. But fortunately for the town and district of Gait, which, as already mentioned, owes its origin to this Scottish gentleman, the wrong man was not shot this time, while the other was killed on the spot. Yet another Irish- man, Joseph Wilcocks, though sheriff of the Home district, had shown his native genius for agitation against both real and imaginary abuses in a newspaper called the Freeman's Journal, started in the people's cause in 1807. He too entered the House of Assembly, and spoke so freely that the Government laid him by the heels in York gaol. This made a martyr of him, and he was returned again, but died righting against Canada in the coming war. Wyatt, the Surveyor-General, also appointed by the Home Government and hailing from Ireland, was of the same faction. He too displayed that particular political bent which the air of America seems to generate in his type, and expelled the chief clerk of his department, a Crown servant and a U.E. loyalist, for voting against his friends. This of course was altogether too much, and rightly so, for the Government, and Wyatt proving contumacious, was sent about his business, which apparently took him to New York, where he loudly proclaimed the people of Canada to be ripe for rebellion. For most of these importations Castlereagh appears to have been responsible, and one might almost fancy he had made a point of dumping troublesome local firebrands on to the colonial establishments. The first of
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the long roll of impressionist travel writers now made his appearance in Canada, and at the same time no little sensa- tion among the reading public at home — one John Mills Jackson — so much so indeed that questions were asked in the House of Commons, and the Government went to the trouble of asking Gore for material to refute the author's statements. This was not difficult, as Mr. Jackson's arraign- ment of the administration of Upper Canada is obviously to the discriminating reader not worth powder and shot. He would like to have bought land in the province, he declares, but for the fact that neither his person nor his property would have been safe — whether from wolves or U.K. loyalists is not quite clear ! But he made such a pother in England that the Upper Canada legislature thought it worth while by a unanimous vote to declare his little book to be ' a false, scandalous, and malicious libel containing expressions of the most unexampled insolence and contumely towards His Majesty's Government in the province and on the House of Assembly and the Courts of Justice therein, and tending to alienate the affections of the people and to incite them to insurrection/ At any rate the statements of Mr. John Mills Jackson were quite successfully refuted.
As I have said, it was no time now for Wilcockses and Thorpes, for Weekses and Wyatts, whatever may have been their theories on the qualifications for office or hereditary rights, but for United Empire loyalists of a thoroughgoing unequivocal stamp. Whether Upper or Lower Canada were in the most doleful condition to face the ever impend- ing war and repel an American invasion would have been an interesting speculation in the years preceding it. Twenty or thirty thousand recent American importations of no definite political attachments were in the former, in the latter perhaps a third of that number, with that always incal- culable factor and inscrutable element the Canadian habitant. In Quebec too the seigniors of standing and weight had been reduced to a handful, while the bourgeoisie had gained immensely in numbers and influence, and in their ranks
S
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was now to be found a somewhat vociferous element, who were on bad terms with the Government and anxious to arouse disaffection. This is generally regarded as in part the fault of poor old Sir James Craig, who came out as Governor-in-Chief in 1808. Craig is assuredly the black sheep of Canadian Governors in the popular mind. He too was a Scotsman of good family. Though barely sixty he must have been old for his years, due no doubt to the fact that he was suffering from dropsy, and indeed he left Canada at the close of his term a dying man. He had been in the army from boyhood and fought with credit all over the world, in Europe, India, and America, and held important commands. It was for this reason, and in anticipation of trouble with the United States, that he was sent to Canada. Craig was pre-eminently a soldier and a capable one, straightforward, honest and well-meaning. He had no pretension, however, to be a statesman, unless Tory prin- ciples of an unshakable nature constitute one. His por- traits seem instinct with his personality such as it has come to us ; a short, stout man with a not unkindly but heavy inflexible face. 'Severe but dignified,' says Christie, who knew him, ' while his manners in society were frank, affable and polished.' Had the clock of his destiny been put on four years, and had he arrived in Quebec a sound man the year he left it a dying unregretted one, Craig would have been invaluable as a military chief. In any case he was a little unfortunate. He found the racial bitterness that became unhappily perennial thoroughly aroused ; an un- comfortable three-cornered social atmosphere, and a mainly French legislative Assembly, aspiring through inexperience to more than those reasonable rights of which it was balked by an unimpressionable Executive. In short, the troubles of which Durham wrote so eloquently forty years later had already begun, and Craig, with many sterling qualities, which posterity has at the best ignored, was not the ruler to assuage them.
Ryland, perhaps the cleverest man in the Canada of his
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day, and a permanent secretary and adviser of Governors, exercised great influence over his chief, and of Ryland's wholesale Anglicising policy I have already said something. Mention too has been made of the newspaper Le Cana- dienne, started to represent French aspirations and those of the majority in the Assembly. Like most publications of the kind at that day it ran to violent extremes, and a press war was raging when Craig arrived, in which both parties and both races were feeding with printed abuse the bitter- ness that had already sprung up between them. His first duties lay in organising the militia and in enforcing the alien and sedition Act, which was now running in both provinces and much facilitated the arrest of persons sus- pected of promulgating seditious opinions. He appears to have injured the amour propre of the popular House by lecturing them on their waste of public time in irrelevant disputations, in which he was probably quite right, for they were very raw. Their lawyers had seized with enthusiasm on the letter of the British Constitution, but through lack no doubt of tradition and heredity had failed to appreciate its limitations, and contracted a notion that their House was legally constituted the sole and final arbiter of the country's destiny. They had gone so far as to summon before the bar of the House certain newspaper editors on the Govern- ment side for criticising their conduct. Pretensions that even in these days of demos-worship would not be tolerated, were grotesquely premature in the face of an Upper House that had no scruple in throwing out any bill, and a perfectly irresponsible Executive. The British minority in the House, though on some other accounts far from contented, had no conception of a colony, which was still one of the pawns in a war-distracted world, being handed over to a majority elected by French Canadian habitants. ' The members believe or affect to believe/ wrote Craig to Castlereagh, ' that there exists a ministry here, and that in the imitation of the con- stitution of Great Britain that ministry is responsible to them for the conduct of government. It is not necessary
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to point out to your lordships the steps to which such an idea may lead them.' The actual measures wrangled over hardly matter here. As a sample of their grasp of parlia- mentary institutions, a perfectly reasonable bill that judges should be excluded was sent back from the Council approved of, with the amendment only that the bill should not take effect till the next election. The Lower House took no notice of this, but its majority passed a resolution that Judge de Bonne, who usually voted against them, could no longer hold his seat. They also refused to admit a Jew merchant twice elected for Three Rivers. Craig, on the strength of their ' unconstitutional disfranchisement of a large portion of His Majesty's subjects,' to wit Three Rivers, and of evicting from his seat in the House another member, the Judge above mentioned, without any legal justification for the act whatever, dissolved them. He then, after his fashion, read them a not altogether superfluous homily. ' They had wasted,' he told them, * in fruitless debates, excited by private and personal animosity or by frivolous contest upon trivial matters, that time and talent to which within their walls the public had an exclusive title. The abuse of their functions they had preferred to the high and important duties which they owed to their Sovereign and to their con- stituents. So much of intemperate heat had been manifested in all their proceedings, and they had shown so prolonged an attitude of disrespect, that he felt the necessity of dis- solving them and taking the sense of the country upon their conduct.' A considerable part of the country wholly approved of Craig's action. With all reasonable men the Assembly had put itself out of court. But Le Canadienne became more violent than ever. Craig had already broken hopelessly with it by depriving five militia officers associated with the paper of their commissions, among them Colonel Panet, who for years had been Speaker of the House. Craig had doubtless been ill-advised, but in the constant presence of seditious aliens from France or the United States and the peril of the times, suspicions were easily
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aroused. It is not probable that any of these persons harboured disloyal designs, or were animated by anything worse than opposition to the Legislative Council and the general racial soreness that had now unfortunately become the leading note in political and social life. The French organ, however, expressed this in the shape of a hostility to everything British that may well have made an old soldier doubt if its staff were fitting men to lead troops, themselves perhaps lukewarm, against Britain's foes. It is extraordinarily difficult, however, to determine the line between mere local passions and revolutionary sentiments. The personality of the King for one thing meant a great deal to the French Canadian of those days. Not for a moment that his suc- cessor to-day earns any less measure of respect ; but it needs no saying that the attitude of that period was more personal, above all with these descendants of seventeenth- century Frenchmen. It is tolerably certain that Panet, Badeau (the leader of the House), and others were dissatis- fied only with the administration, though they pitched their objection in the heated key which both parties had adopted towards each other. To grant a Constitution and a popular House, and withhold at the same time responsible govern- ment and the chief power of the purse, is to invite criticism, discontent and agitation, and this was now happening in every North American colony left to the British Crown. It would certainly have been unwise thus early and in the dis- turbed state of the world to have given such full powers to Lower Canada. The French would in the main have been content for a long time with the Quebec Act of 1774. But the British settlers would certainly have been content with nothing less than the Canada Act of 1791, and now their representatives with some exceptions fell into line with racial instincts and upheld the Executive rather as the ex- ponent of English ideas than for any love of it. The Con- stitution had in fact seemed to give the people through their Assembly much more than they actually got. They discovered in time that they were practically powerless, and
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as they could do little else set to work to make themselves as unpleasant as they knew how to be.
One leading cause of this racial bitterness had been the proposal in Milnes' time by the party of the merchants of a land tax, coupled with some reduction in the customs duty. This was regarded by the French farmers as an invidious impost. The compensating reduction in some articles of commerce either did not appeal to them or did not affect them, since they bought scarcely anything. Craig was now ill-advised enough, with the full connivance, however, of his Executive, to seize the press of the Canadienne and commit the printer, together with Messrs. Bedard, Blanchet, a 'd Taschereau, to prison under the Sedition Act. Steps were taken as if a rising had been contemplated, guards increased, and the city patrolled. So far as anything of this kind was concerned, the whole thing was a mare's nest. Craig issued a long proclamation summarising in general terms the critical condition of the country as regards alien foes and potential ones, and pointing out the danger at such a time of seditious writings being disseminated throughout the colony. He refuted the reports, some of them in detail, that had been spread concerning himself and his intentions, and then with some pathos the somewhat stern but by no means hard-hearted old Tory continues in allusion to these reports: ' Is it for myself that I should oppress you? For what should I oppress you ? Is it from ambition ? What can you give me? Is it for power? Alas, my good friends, with a life ebbing out slowly to its period, under pressure of disease acquired in the service of my country, I look only to pass what it may please God to suffer to remain of it in the comfort of retire- ment among my friends, and I remain among you only in obedience to the command of my King.' All this was in 1 8 10, during the course of which year Craig sent Ryland to England to put the state of affairs before the Government. One may almost doubt if it were not more accurate to say that Ryland persuaded Craig to allow him to undertake such a mission. His letters to his chief from England are pro-
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foundly interesting as evidence of the condition of Lower Canada viewed through the spectacles of the ablest of the extreme British party. Ryland's ability seems to have been at once recognised by Perceval, who was then Prime Minister, and he was treated with extreme confidence and courtesy by ministers in general, though his views, nomin- ally Craig's, were not adopted, and in the main were im- possible. Briefly, they were to abolish the Constitution, do away with the popular Assembly, break the power of the Catholic Church by giving its entire patronage to the Crown, and incidentally to resume for the Crown the considerable revenues of the Seminary of Montreal. Ryland was on one occasion admitted to a cabinet council. His experience and information, biased as it was, appealed strongly to the Government, though no thought of adopting his reactionary views was entertained.
The Assembly of Quebec in their anxiety for financial authority had offered to take the whole expenses of the civil list. The provincial expenditure was now approxi- mately £45,000, the revenue about three- fourths of that amount, the deficit being found by the Crown to the great convenience of good government from its own point of view. Indeed it must be admitted that if the power of producing a deadlock had been conceded to the popular House at this early period, the result would almost certainly have been disastrous.
Though the troubles of this period may be safely classed as domestic ones, with no sinister views against the British Crown among any responsible faction, short of that the tension was very acute. We have a picture of it among others drawn without any heat whatever by the kindly hand of Philip de Gaspe in his memoirs, which are those of an elderly man recalling in after times of peace and amity the memories of a happy and sociable French youth of the upper class who knew everybody of both factions and nationalities and was obviously a persona grata with all. Nephew of the well-known seignior Charles de Lanaudiere,
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Dorchester's favourite aide-de-camp and in Craig's day an extremely Tory member of his Legislative Council, educated and resident in Quebec, De Gaspe* was also intimate with the heady spirits of Le Canadienne and at the same time a welcome guest at the mess of British regiments and a personal friend of many of the members. Christie, the British historian of Lower Canada, was his contemporary and friend, so between the historian and the raconteur, to say nothing of state papers and other private evidence, we have testimony to the state of things existing before the war of 1812, in which the few interested in what to the reader may seem a small and far-away question may find ample entertainment. To summarise it all in brief is not easy. I have alluded to the situation as a three-cornered one. There is no doubt that the bureaucracy, which though mostly British, either native or imported, contained a few Frenchmen, were carrying things with a high hand. Both nationalities outside the charmed circle smarted from it, and both were equally snubbed. The resentment of the French, for which we cannot blame them, took so strong a turn that it seems to have thrown the British minority, not wholly out of accord with them, into the hands of a clique which gave them little in return and under other circumstances would have provoked their hostility. Racial lines, which had upon the whole been hitherto no sharper than difference of temperament, language and religion made inevitable, and softened by a considerable share of the amenities, now became painfully defined and mutual abuse the order of the day. Social relations grew very strained, and the women of the privileged class, as one can well imagine, aggravated the evil. In the days of Murray the ladies of the garrison, as the experiences related in Frances Brooke's letters show us, mixed as easily as the lingual difficulty would allow with the French society of that time. Their husbands and men friends at any rate seem to have given them no alternative even had pressure been required, of which there is no evidence. But now all this seems to
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have been altered. The daughters of country squires and parsons and professional men who followed the drum of the five regiments quartered in Canada had an opportunity, in consort with the wives of the small political oligarchy, of regarding themselves as a caste apart, and under the aegis as it were of Government House. This was not only gratifying to the average feminine instinct, but in a majority of cases had no doubt the further charm of novelty. Here too the situation harmonised with the somewhat complacent and unsympathetic temperament of the average Briton, male or female, and his instinctively frigid attitude towards the alien of his own or any other race, to whom then as now he was apt to show his worst side. The ladies were of course merely an aggravating note in the general hauteur that it became the fashion to observe towards all who were not inside the ring. A few French families of the higher sort were within it, but the majority of those socially eligible fell away in the face of the mutual recriminations between French and English that had been stirred up in Parliament and the Press. It did not take much to make a social breach between two elements so diverse in tempera- ment and associations, and there had been for a long time no chatelaine at Government House to keep such matters in hand. To this day there is no social fusion of any moment between British and French in Canada, though the old rancour and the cause for it is dead. But in the first decade of the nineteenth century things in all centres of life in the Lower Province had got into a most parlous con- dition. The British of Quebec and Montreal had been provoked by the language of the French press and the pretensions of the Assembly into a revival of the old feeling that the French were a conquered people who had been treated far too well and were destitute of all gratitude. It is idle, with the superior knowledge and aloof position of a hundred years, to sneer at what seems bigotry and prejudice. It is much more interesting to read the sentiments and grievances of both sides, and when you have done so you
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will probably feel how natural and even logical their re- spective points of view were. But the British of the cities, now containing quite a numerous well-to-do and well- educated element, though Gallophobes just now of the most extreme kind, were smarting at the same time from the untoward exclusiveness of the official clique. Craig did his best and gave entertainments at his charming country house perched above the river towards Cap Rouge and now known as Spencer Wood, where he was affable to all. One great compensation, however, cheered the years immediately preceding the war, and that was prosperity, for the embargo laid by the Washington Government on their shipping had brought nothing but profit to their neighbours. The demand for lumber, too, now that the United States were shut out of the field and European seas so frequently unsafe for the trader, greatly stimulated that business in Canada. It is generally held that the lumber trade, as Canada's greatest industry for the next three- quarters of a century and the source of so much individual wealth, took its rise from this period.
Craig did not let the slight hold he had on life interfere with his endeavours to get Canada placed in a proper con- dition of defence, for war was looked upon now as inevitable. He had only about four thousand regulars in the two provinces, and thrice that number, he wrote, would be required to defend the Canadas, besides artillery and some frigates and gunboats. Like Dorchester, he declared that Quebec at all hazards must be held, as it would always be a base whence the British could recover any losses they might suffer in the interior. At the entrance of the Champlain approach to Canada there were no defences worth mention- ing, Ile-aux-Noix and St. John's had disappeared, and Chambly was no use against heavy artillery, The Ameri- cans were now at war again with the Indians, and General Harrison was surprised and defeated at Tippecanoe near Vincennes with a loss of nearly a fifth of his force. Craig, who for Canada's sake had only too good reason to dread an
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attack on her borders, and had done his utmost to keep the Indians from a war which would strain the Anglo-American situation still further, was accused by the war party of inciting them, as his predecessors with always the same good cause to dread a border war had been accused with wearisome reiteration. In 181 1, however, his wasting health compelled him to resign without waiting for formal leave from England. So nominating Mr. Dunn as his representa- tive, he sailed in June, and in spite of all the invective that chroniclers have showered upon the honest if obstinate old Tory, able if misguided, the people unhitched the horses from his carriage and dragged him through cheering crowds to the wharf, whence the Amelia frigate took him home to die within six months.
Bad farming seems to have begun to tell upon the lands of the French seigniories. Travellers tell us how the habitant of those days flung his manure heap into the St. Lawrence, and if this method of procedure, so astonish- ing in the case of a small cultivator, was not universal, Craig wrote that the province in this particular was going back while the rest of the world was moving forward. But as some compensation, roads had now been opened to the Eastern Townships, whence an altogether more enterprising people were already sending such supplies of meat and grain to Quebec and Montreal as to lower the prices while the quality was greatly improved. The first steamboat too plied upon the St. Lawrence in Craig's time. De Gaspe" tells us how he and Christie the historian made one of the first trips in it at the lightning speed of four miles an hour. Quebec and Montreal were far apart in those days, while Toronto was in the wilderness indeed. The credit of this early enterprise is due to John Molson, the founder of the well-known banking family of Montreal. He was a Lincolnshire squire who sold his patrimony of Snake Hall near Moulton and started a brewery at Montreal. His steamboat enterprise immediately followed Fulton's first and famous one on the Hudson. He began with a loss of
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^3000, but much more than recovered it by the other vessels he subsequently built and which did good service as transports in the coming war. Mr. Kingsford writes with great indignation that this courageous and successful pioneer of steam should in that capacity have been con- signed by posterity to oblivion. The founder, however, of the bank that bears his name and has long been one of the national institutions of Canada, is not without compensa- tion for any injustice done to his mechanical genius and enterprise.
Once again a Swiss, and again of that distinguished band who made the 6oth Rifles or the Royal Americans, was to imprint his name on Canada. Sir George Prevost, however, was of the second generation, for it was his father who had been the comrade of Haldimand, of Bouquet, and of Cramahe. He had been severely wounded on the Plains of Abraham, and twenty years later defended Savannah against the French fleet and the Congress troops. The son had done the same for Dominica in the current war with Napoleon and in the year of Trafalgar, by which feat he had won a baronetcy, and later on the lieutenant-governor- ship of Nova Scotia. While in that command he had assisted in the capture of Martinique, and at Halifax been popular with the Nova Scotians who, like the Canadians, were discovering that an elective Assembly did not neces- sarily mean popular government. A group of powerful U.K. families managed the affairs of the Maritime Pro- vinces, much as their prototypes were beginning to do in Upper Canada and their equivalents under more heated conditions already did at Quebec. But as we have said, the system at this time had its obviously good points.
Prevost was born in his father's regiment while it was quartered in or near New York during that brief dozen or so of years when England was in peaceful enjoyment of both Canada and the future United States. He inherited wealth from his mother, had advantages of person and manner, and spoke French like a native. He was a great
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contrast to Craig, and pleased the Canadians, both English and French, mightily. Before they had finished with him, however, they must have sighed for poor old Craig. Prevost was active, well-meaning and clever, but he had later on to fill a breach that wanted something more. For the present he did well enough. He went the round of the frontier posts, and found them as reported quite defenceless, for it was then thought that the Champlain entrance, not Upper Canada, was the likely point of attack. We must leave Prevost here in the brief interval of peace yet remain- ing, to meet his legislature and gently chide the Lower House for harping as they did on past personalities, instead of bending their attention to the urgent affairs of the moment. But the Assembly were in no mood for this. They mutilated a bill sent down from the Council for the better government of the country out of all recognition, and passed one for payment of members which the Council in their turn extinguished.
The Lower House had appointed committees to right the wrongs they held were being done when war fell upon them and gave them yet more urgent things to think about. For when all has been said, they were very few Canadians who wanted to be either Yankee or Napoleonic Frenchmen. The Legislative Council too had by the mere flight of time accumulated such a concrete weight of years and service, with which of course their sense of importance had kept pace, as to become not only a peculiar irritant to the flamboyant and youthful reformer, but almost a menace to their friends or rather to the safe and sound principles they advocated. The Crown lawyers were moved to sug- gest fresh blood, and a good many new appointments were made to the august company of greybeards. Gore had left Upper Canada on leave of absence about the same time as Craig sailed from Quebec, and that excellent soldier and potential successor in an only less degree to Wolfe's mantle, namely, Isaac Brock, was now in a good hour sent to Upper Canada as civil administrator and military chief.
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This I think sufficiently clears the ground of all the main facts of the situation in Canada, for a brief glance at those doings in the great world without, which meant more per- haps to her than to almost any country in either Continent involved in that world-wide struggle. I do not wish to involve the reader of these pages in the maze of the great Napoleonic contest — a subject more voluminously treated and within easier reach of the average man's hand than any other in history. It is my object here to tell a so far rather obscure tale, and one that has been the reverse of accessible in any shape but that of bare outline, and I have en- deavoured in doing so to exclude all world-politics and extraneous events that have not borne directly on the Canadas. So much is said nowadays of sea power in history, I am not sure that it is quite enough merely to remind the reader, if indeed he needed it, that the immunity of so poorly defended a city as Quebec from England's enemies was largely due to the latter's superiority at sea, though it is a less obvious fact and more interesting reflec- tion what America would have said if a strong French force had slipped in and planted the tricolour on the ram- parts. It was the British sea power at any rate that baffled and finally broke Napoleon, and from the year 1792 till 1812, with the trifling interval of the peace of Amiens, the struggles of these two giants kept the Americans in a continual state of irritation by the losses direct and indirect it entailed upon them. Great Britain began in 1793 with the Orders in Council decreeing that neutral ships found carrying bread-stuffs to France or any country occupied by French armies should be brought to England and their cargoes there sold, or as an alternative that security should be given against the supply being taken to a French port. Soon after this further orders were issued applying the same code to ships carrying goods either to or from the French colonies. This touched the American carrying trade to the quick, and a further aggravation was to follow almost immediately in the exercise by British ships of the
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right of searching American vessels either of the navy or mercantile marine for deserters, and for impressing British seamen found therein. These conditions not unnaturally caused intense irritation in America, but Jay's treaty in 1785, alluded to in a former chapter as raising such a storm from the Democratic party in the States, practically put an end for a time to these annoyances, and was a fair and equitable one. The North were fully satisfied, but the South, led by Jefferson and fanatically anti-British, had never in- tended to be. The ' sons of liberty ' in those districts had lost a great many negro slaves in the war, and Jay's treaty contained the egregious stipulation that they should pay their old debts to the British merchants. But the wrath of France with her former allies was greater than ever, while that of the Democrats was intense at being bound over to amity with Great Britain. For many years the insulting treatment of the American Government and American ships by France tried the Gallophiles sorely and confirmed the others in the dislike, which the horrors of the Revolution and the impertinences of Genet and his successors had provoked. With Napoleon, however, as first consul, the French attitude towards America changed, and though it made no impression on the utterly alienated North — speak- ing broadly — it rekindled the Gallic fervour and Anglo- phobia of the South. Though the United Kingdom, with a population of eighteen millions, had to keep a large army of three hundred thousand men on foot, her fleet in this death grapple was her chief shield and support, and that required nearly half as many sailors. The Americans with the high wages and abounding opportunities that a new country offers to the poor, found it no easy thing to man their ships, while the British seaman under the temptation of better pay was often ready enough to serve in them.
In 1806 Great Britain declared the whole north coast from Brest to the Elbe to be in a state of blockade, while Napoleon replied with the Berlin decrees proclaiming the British Isles to be under the same ban. But Britain could
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enforce her ordinances, while Napoleon, his navy almost swept from the ocean, had to content himself with the thunder only of his utterances.
Great Britain soon afterwards forbade all neutral trade with France or her allies. Napoleon replied with the Milan decrees, which was only yet more empty noise, and forced Holland and Spain, then in his grip, to do likewise.
In 1806 the Washington Government, hit in its commerce by the strict enforcement by England of its sea policy, retaliated with a non-import measure to be kept back, how- ever, till an effort at some understanding had been made. This was attempted and with success by Monroe, the United States minister, and Pinkney, a favourable com- mercial treaty being effected. Upon the impressment and right of search question, however, Great Britain stood firm. She considered it vital to her naval efficiency, and conse- quently to her struggle for existence with half Europe. She promised, however, consideration in carrying it out, and the terms were accepted. It should be stated, moreover, that this was not regarded as an unnatural proceeding in those days, nor was it yet admitted that men could abjure their country by hastily taking out papers of naturalisation in a foreign one. Jefferson, however, who was now President, and rabid as ever against England, took the unjustifiable step of suppressing the treaty and refusing to submit it to the Senate for ratification. At this moment too occurred the unfortunate incident of the Chesapeake and the Leopard^ in which the latter, a fifty-gun ship, by the orders of Admiral Berkely, demanded delivery of three deserters known to be on the American frigate. On the latter's refusal to surrender them, the Leopard poured several broadsides into her, killing three men, and wounding eighteen. The British Government disavowed the act, and Berkely was recalled, but it raised a fresh storm in the United States. Monroe and Pinkney were sent back to demand reparation, and above all abandonment of the right of search. England was willing to go all reasonable
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lengths in the former matter, but would not yield in the latter. A treaty she declared had been already made at considerable trouble, and signed, only to be torn up by Jefferson with petulant and inconstitutional insult. Rela- tions now were more strained than ever, and the United States passed the Embargo Act at the end of 1807, which, after eighteen months of ill consequences to themselves and much comfort to Canada, was revoked. In 1809 the Washington Government requested the recall of Mr. Jack- son, the able young British Minister, who had succeeded the weak and foolish Erskine, and whose letters from America, together with those of his wife, are of great interest. Throughout these last years the give and take of more or less heated diplomatic exchanges went on between the United States and England, Napoleon always playing the former off against the latter. The Americans having purchased Louisiana from the French, the war party in power had no longer any ulterior purpose in being civil to England, and in any case, even had they not been obsessed with hatred of her, would have avoided any undue amenities lest they should offend Napoleon. The latter, brutal as were often his manners to their nation, arrogant to all nations as he had shown himself, was still the god of Jefferson and his party. Henry Clay was then his ardent follower, and was boasting in the bombastic western fashion natural to him that the Kentucky woodsmen alone would wipe out Canada. Young Calhoun of South Carolina, who forty years later did so much to bring on the war that shattered his State and section, was also on the committee of foreign relations, though only thirty. Most indeed of the leaders of the war party were young men. Great Britain seemed to them a declining Power. Corunna had appeared to seal the failure of the British arms in Spain, while Napoleon, triumphant everywhere, was marching his vast army on Russia, as the Americans thought, to com- plete his dominion over Europe. The non-importation measures adopted against Great Britain had been con-
T
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currently put in force against France as a cheap sop to the peace party, since French ships had been virtually long driven from the sea. In 1810 the American minister, Armstrong, had been instructed to offer France, should she withdraw the Berlin and Milan decrees, and Great Britain fail to follow her example, a declaration of war on the part of the United States against the latter. In the same year the French Government informed Armstrong at Paris that the decrees were abolished, but made no general statement to that effect. Reporting this to his Government, the Americans now demanded the withdrawal of the English Orders in Council, a measure the Government was not averse to, provided they had a proof that Napoleon had really taken the alleged step, which it turned out he did not actually do till nearly a year after the specified date. It was not till May 1812 that the British Government was furnished with the proof that Napoleon had withdrawn his decrees, and by that time war was practically resolved upon by the American Government and no leash could have held their followers. The British withdrawal of the Orders in Council was too late. There had been another collision at sea, the offending ship this time being an American, while a further source of irritation had been the divulgence of a perfectly legitimate but confidential correspondence carried on by Craig and a secret agent he had sent to the States to report upon the feeling there in regard to war. The latter was an Irish adventurer named Henry, who, not content with his pay, importuned the Government for a judgeship in Canada. Unsuccessful barristers from Eng- land or Ireland had been far from unknown in these posts. But here was a man, wrote the indignant Gore to his Government, who had not even a legal education, and was moreover a citizen of the United States— in short a sheer adventurer. So Henry sold the correspondence directly or indirectly to Madison for a large sum variously quoted, and though there was nothing in it but a summary of local opinion on the situation, it helped to further inflame the
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excitable minds of a House practically elected for the pur- pose of declaring war. The aversion of the North to a rupture with Great Britain was naturally dealt with in these letters, and the free language often used in the dis- sentient States as to a secession from the Union naturally made the most of. This enabled the war party to raise the further cry of the Union in danger, which fifty years later was to drown their own secession efforts in rivers of blood. It was hardly needed. Madison not so rabid as Jefferson, nor a vociferous * war-hawk/ as the term went, like Henry Clay, had been himself inclined to a compromise. But before his election in 1811 he had been given formal in- timation that he would be accepted as the Democratic candidate only as a war President. So this not very imposing but clever and well-meaning Virginia squire had nothing for it but to provoke a war, which by an irony of fate is even still in the United States frequently called after his name. France, it may be noted, had recently made a bonfire of one hundred and thirty confiscated American ships worth a million and a half sterling. This, said Clay complacently in a war speech in Congress, did not cause them embarrassment. They had complete proof, he de- clared, that Great Britain would do everything to destroy them.
Great Britain as a matter of fact was thinking very little about them, too little indeed. She had her hands a great deal more than full struggling single-handed with the would- be despot of the world, and at that moment none too hope- fully, as the latter was bound for Russia, which he was expected, in America at any rate, to annex, before devoting his whole powers to the extinction of Great Britain. This was the moment chosen by a nation, or part of a nation, sprung from her loins, and who had derived not merely her blood and names but every characteristic that had made them what they were, from the mother-country, to fly at her throat, and in company too with such an ally ! The better part of the nation, averse to war on practical grounds
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as they were, felt this also. ' War is no terrible thing/ shouted Henry Clay while urging its declaration in Congress. ' There was no terror in it but its novelty.' Clay had never seen war, and was never likely to. Moreover, such material interests as he may have had, were fairly safe in Kentucky. Perhaps he learned something about it in the conflict he helped to provoke, for the rest of his political career was conspicuous for its compromises. In spite of the protests that sounded loud from the more enlightened and responsible States, the bill for the declaration of war passed both Houses on June 18, 1812, but a day or two before the Orders in Council had been revoked by the British Govern- ment, who had lost very little time in taking the step after receiving proof of Napoleon's concessions. But the news of this only arrived after hostilities had begun; and what the Democrats wanted was not a good pretext for peace, which even then could have been arranged, but war to relieve the pent-up passions into which they had for so long been lashing themselves. One obstacle, however, even then might have intervened, for before the British general at the front received the news the first ' army of invasion ' were cooling their heels as prisoners within his lines.
The indictments against Great Britain were in the first place her exercise of the right of overhauling and searching vessels on the high seas ; secondly, her interference with trade by Orders in Council, and lastly, her supposed incite- ment of the western Indians. This we know was, so far as responsible people are concerned, a figment of the imagina- tion, a trite and hoary shibboleth that had done duty for two decades. The first cause, as we have seen, was withdrawn the day before war was declared, and only thus tardily, for good reasons already given. The second was insisted upon by Great Britain, and in the treaty of peace three years later was not so much as mentioned. Canada was the real object of the war-hawks, not greatly concerned themselves with seaports or maritime interests on which the brunt of the strife would fall. They abandoned their coerced partners to
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that share of the business and prepared for a triumphant promenade into Canada. They scarcely wanted soldiers, so the Secretary for War declared, but only officers, as the Canadians would rise as one man. They had forgotten, or at any rate their orators had forgotten, the U.E. loyalists, who of all men in the world might have been counted upon for the most desperate resistance. But with their many virtues there was always a certain fatuity concerning outside matters in the old south and west. Living beyond the influence of the main current of the world's life, which in a manner washed the Atlantic States to the north of them, they had all the prejudices and vanity of an extreme provincialism. They had consequently no proper standard by which to judge outsiders, and as a mass were not qualified to interpret the sense of international affairs, garbled and distorted views of which found easy credence among men who were almost entirely agriculturists, had little personal traffic with the outside world, and had few channels of communication even with one another. Save for a small class, scarcely less provincial though educated, the States that mostly followed Madison had no intellectual life, no newspapers worth mentioning, no schools to speak of, no touch with the world into whose vast struggle they were so eager to fling themselves with a na'fve confidence. They had never as a mass understood even the Seven Years' War which had threatened their very existence, certainly their whole future. They had gone into hysterics over the French Revolutionary envoys with probably the vaguest notion of the details of that tremendous cataclysm, and they now imagined that Canada was pining for the blessings of democracy. Fifty years later they had so far forgotten the military record of New England, till then far superior to their own, as to imagine her people had no fight in them. They had lived in small worlds of their own with homespun notions of those beyond ; a condition no little encouraged by the false standards and upon the whole deteriorating influence, of negro slavery. This was the element that was
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mainly, though not entirely, responsible for the cry of f on to Canada' which heralded the war of 1812. It was an element too extraordinarily susceptible to wordy and per- fervid oratory, partly from defective education and partly perhaps from some subtle change in temperament that a century or two of warmer suns had wrought upon what was then an almost pure British stock. Till the Revolutionary war they had been in apathetic fashion the more contented of the two sections with the old British connection, but for the half-century following it the Southern States, from the very narrowness of their outlook, hugged their anti-British sentiments and continued to hug them in a curious belated and unreasoning fashion, till they began to fall foul of the North. After the wreck produced by that great encounter there was nothing, as I have already remarked, in their sore eyes like a monarchy and the British Constitution. This was transient and merely human, if curious to British ears, on which it so often fell. On the North, however, with their marine and fisheries, their more numerous seacoast towns, their more vulnerable possessions, their naval responsibilities, the brunt of war would naturally fall. For the war-hawks there was only, as they fancied, the promenade to Canada, the glories of territorial conquest, and, incidentally, the spoils to be found there. As outraged Justice had it, it was the land war that failed, and for a time with disgrace, and the others who succeeded, upon the sea at any rate, in winning no small measure of renown. The only party to the war of 1812, however, who gained an unalloyed triumph was Canada and the little army who assisted in her defence.
On the declaration of war several of the New England and other legislatures and great numbers of town meetings passed resolutions denouncing it. Even Maryland, as the fateful stroke fell, bethought her of the planters on her eastern shore and her seaport capital of Baltimore, and passed resolutions commending the attitude of the more northerly States, but the mob broke the windows of the offices of the Federal press and maltreated every advocate
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of peace. On the 2Oth of August a day of general fasting was appointed for invoking the blessing of the Almighty on the crusade, and the struggle was fairly launched. Before this an appropriation had been made for 35,000 regulars and 50,000 volunteers, while 100,000 militia were to be provided by the various States. Most of those of New England, however, declined to muster their forces.
The plan of campaign against Canada was designed upon three lines, much as in the former wars, with the exception that the left wing of attack was now shifted further west and directed against the extremity of Canada opposite Detroit. This last army was led by Brigadier-General Hull, who had served in the Revolutionary war. The central expedition against the Niagara frontier consisted of 6000 men under Major Van Rensselaer. The eastern one up the old Champlain route to Montreal was led by Major-General Dearborn, who was Commander-in-Chief except as regards Hull's brigade, which was directed by Dr. Eustis, Secretary of War, for political purposes of his own it was said. He had an eye, it seems, on the Presidency, and a direct share in the capture of Upper Canada would be a telling asset as well as an easy task, since he had declared that no soldiers would be required for its accomplishment. Look at it how we may, it was an unjustifiable and unnecessary war, desired only by one party in the United States and by Napoleon. It failed in its object, as it deserved to fail, and the only people who really came out the better for it were those who were looked upon as its potential victims, the Canadians.
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CHAPTER XII
THE WAR IN 1812
THE British Government, then under Perceval, till the very last failed to realise the full gravity of the situation. Neither they nor the nation at large had the least desire for a rupture with the United States, but every motive for the contrary. The resources of Great Britain in 1812 were strained to breaking-point in a single-handed struggle with the conqueror and tyrant of Europe. The Orders in Council had been but an answer to the latter's policy, and if American commerce suffered from them with that of other nations, the Americans had deliberately severed themselves from all ties with England, greatly to their own satisfaction, and might seem in all equity to be the last people to complain of hardships which otherwise they would by comparison not have felt, and that were the common lot of most nations at the moment. As regards British deserters on their ships and the impressment of their citizens among British sailors, the Americans had started a nation pre-eminently British in race, laws and language, and yet more, had invited all and sundry to embrace its citizenship without probation. This sort of procedure was neither well understood nor well liked in those days. Any Englishman, Scotsman, Irishman or Nova Scotian in a seaport town could now declare himself an American. The Press-gang was not, judged by modern ethics, an admirable institution, but it was a recognised one, and indiscriminating zeal was the essence of its success. That numbers of American citizens, under a code hardly
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yet accepted by mankind, were caught in its toils is as certain as that the Civis Americanus sum pretext was freely attempted by innumerable unfortunates who had not even a paper right to it.1 The United States had in short by their mere existence raised a great difficulty to a nation, numerically small for its world position. Though without design it was nevertheless manning its ships at the expense of British seamanship and offered prodigious temptations to deserters for whose recapture its local authorities refused the facilities generally rendered by other friendly nations under like circumstances. Nor was it even the classes which had mainly suffered by all these incidental trials of the Napoleonic struggle that made the war, but landsmen, whose ardent following had for the most part never seen the sea, or a ship or a sailor, and whose endeavours to punish Great Britain through her commerce by Act of Congress had punished chiefly those New England States who saw no sense in fighting Great Britain and abominated Napoleon and all his works. It was a gratuitous war inspired partly by domestic political exigencies, partly by a desire for Canada, and according to Henry Clay not only for Canada, but for all Great Britain's North American colonies — in short ' to drive her from the Continent.' Never- theless the British Government had received ample warning from its representatives that war was certain, and had small excuse for the defenceless condition of Canada at so critical a moment. Perceval, who had kept a stiff back towards American demands while neglecting the natural corollary of Canadian defence, had been assassinated in March. A new administration, of virtually the same tenor under Lord Liverpool, had met in June and, as stated, had revoked the Orders in Council. The King was suffering from one of his mental attacks, and the Prince Regent
1 The proportion of the British navy ' pressed ' in the Napoleonic wars has been prodigiously exaggerated even by leading historians. Recent investigations have proved that out of the extra 40,000 seamen called for in 1803, 38,000 were quickly raised by voluntary enlistment.
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was in his place. Wellington in the Peninsula was begin- ning to make headway, taxation was crushing, provisions abnormally dear, and wheat touching those fabulous prices which are now among the curiosities of domestic history. Trade was paralysed by Napoleon's edicts launched in the interest of his lust of conquest, and by England's counterstrokes in the interest of self-preservation. Accumu- lated stores of goods were rolling up in Great Britain under an almost prohibitive marine insurance of nearly fifty per cent, and of foodstuffs in the United States under her fatuous embargo and non-intercourse acts. There was ruin everywhere except to British agriculture and to Canada, which became a natural channel for American exports. To pour men into Canada would have been impossible, but with something like three hundred thousand in regular pay, a total of something over four for the defence of British North America seems amazingly disproportionate. From eight to twelve thousand had been the figures usually quoted by commanding officers in Canada as the minimum of safety. From the sea no danger was to be apprehended. The British navy having destroyed its rivals, had de- teriorated somewhat for this very reason, but it was more than equal to guarding the mouth of the St. Lawrence against any American enterprise. It could have reinforced Canada if there had been any troops worth mentioning to bring there, and again by destroying American commerce it could and did help in time to tire even the American war party, and when there were troops available much later on, it landed expeditions in the more southerly and fire-eating section as well as in Canada, and helped the cause of peace to even greater purpose.
One serious naval oversight, however, had been com- mitted in failing to place a sufficient fleet on Lakes Ontario and Erie, an omission for which the Home Government was entirely to blame. Local effort had done its best, but it was without funds for serious shipbuilding, or sailors to man such ships when built. Over four hundred miles of the
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frontier, though drawn together in the middle for thirty miles at Niagara, were divided and controlled by seas as wide as the English Channel. At Detroit as at Niagara, and for about the same distance, a river only parted American from British territory. Eastward of Kingston and Lake Ontario the St. Lawrence was for a time the boundary, and afterwards the old border line cut across to the head of Lake Champlain and thence for several hundred miles zigzagged through the wilderness to the Atlantic. But for all practical purposes the frontier which Canada had now to defend ran from Lake Champlain to the foot of Lake Huron and was six to seven hundred miles in length. The brunt of the war, however, was to fall on the Upper Province, and by a fortunate chance, for he had automatically succeeded to the position, a soldier of lofty character and great ability held both the civil and military command there.
Isaac Brock came of a good old Guernsey family and was one of eight brothers. He had joined the 8th Regiment at fifteen, had seen much active service in Europe, and at twenty-eight was Lieutenant-Colonel of the 49th. He had spent ten years in that capacity in Canada, either in Quebec, Montreal, or the Upper Province, and was now a Major-General. It is not merely because he fell in the hour of victory upon Canadian soil that he is so frequently compared to Wolfe. Being of robust health and physique and possessed in consequence of a ruder vitality in the ordinary affairs of life, he was doubtless more popular with the average man in the street than was the hypercritical and exacting hero of Quebec. But he had some of the latter's studious habits combined with nearly all his practical efficiency. He had gained the affection as well as the respect of the Canadians, particularly the British wing — no mean achievement for an English officer in those days. Thus cut off from active service for many years, Brock had found no opportunity to distinguish himself but in the discipline of regiments and the planning of the Quebec
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fortifications, in which he had been of much service to Craig. Such letters as his biographers have printed rather suggest those of Wolfe, with his warm consideration for his relatives and friends and his keen sense of integrity. In his qualities he certainly had something of the earlier hero — quickness in seizing a point, in dash, in ardour, and magnetic power of leadership. A characteristic incident is told of his energy. Desertion was naturally frequent from the regiments quartered in Canada, and late one night when stationed at York news was brought to Brock that some of his men had got away in a boat and made across the lake for the Niagara shore about thirty miles distant. The Colonel, as he then was, without a moment's hesitation manned another boat, rowed after them, landed on the American side, and eventually captured the whole party in the woods.
The population of the Canadas was now estimated at something over 400,000, about a fifth only of which was seated in the Upper Province. Early in the year, under the conciliatory influence of Prevost, the Lower Canadian Legislature had passed a militia bill without opposition for enrolling two thousand unmarried men, with a grant of nearly the whole year's revenue, which was now £75,000, for their support. This had been done, and the stationary militia were also in fact mustered and drilled. An active regiment of Voltigeurs, too, was raised and placed under the command of Major de Salaberry, a seignior who held that rank in the 6oth Regiment. Lastly, £250,000 was raised by means of army bills redeemable in five years. The regulars now in Lower Canada were the first battalion of the 8th, the 49th, and the looth Regiment, a few artillery and two provincial corps, the Canadian and Glengarry fencibles. In Upper Canada were the 4ist, nearly a thousand strong, two hundred and fifty of the roth Veteran battalion, and the Newfoundland Regiment respectively, and fifty artillerymen, in all something under fifteen hundred men. The militia, who were mainly composed
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of U.K. loyalist stock, responded to a man and declared themselves ready to serve in any part of Canada. But it was a question rather of the number that could be equipped, maintained and transported, for there was no money in the chest. A group of private individuals, however, came to Brock's aid and guaranteed sufficient for the moment. Nearly a thousand militia and a volunteer transport corps of farmers' sons made up Brock's total effective force to two thousand five hundred. Hull was first among the invaders to take aggressive action. An elderly man who had fought in the Revolutionary war, he was now Governor of Michigan, and in that capacity, according to the rites of the democratic creed, till things got serious became a Brigadier-General and had chief command over Miller, a colonel of regulars, who supported with his corps the undisciplined horde of Ohio militia. It is only just to say that Hull had advised Eustis, whose detached expedi- tion it may be remembered this one was, against crossing into Canada from Detroit till he had some shipping to cope with the British vessels on the lake. But the would- be President was in too great a hurry to take Canada on his own account and brushed aside such trifling objections. As Governor of Michigan, however, Hull played his part adequately. Starting a week or two before war was declared, he carried his two thousand five hundred men to the ancient French settlement town of Detroit, where the western end of the fertile peninsula of Canada lay within cannon shot across the river of that name. On the further shore was the village of Sandwich, upon whose primitive houses his gunners tried their hands. This was not at all in the spirit of amity now breathed over western Canada by the invad- ing Governor's proclamation from Sandwich, which he occupied on July I2th. It is too long for transcription, but here is part of it : —
1 After thirty years of peace and prosperity the United States have been driven to arms ; the injuries and aggressions, the insults and indignities of Great Britain have once more
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left them no alternative but manly resistance or uncon- ditional submission. The army under my command has invaded your country, and the Standard of the Union now waves over the territory of Canada. To the peaceable unoffending inhabitant it brings neither danger nor diffi- culty. I come to find enemies not to make them, I come to protect not to injure you.' Separated by the ocean and the wilderness, Hull told the Canadians they could have no interest in Great Britain, while they had felt her tyranny and seen her injustice. He then offered them the invalu- able blessings of civil, political and religious liberty. He adjured them to remain at home and pursue their avoca- tions, and as children of the same family not to raise their hands against their brethren, for the army of friends he brought with him must be hailed by them with a cordial welcome. They would be emancipated from tyranny and oppression and restored to the dignity of freemen. ' Had I any doubt of eventual success I might ask your assistance, but I have none. I have a force which will look down all opposition, and that force but the vanguard of a much greater one. If, contrary to your own interests, you should take part in the approaching contest you will be considered and treated as enemies, the horrors and calamities of war will stalk before you.'
After denouncing the barbarous policy of Great Britain in letting loose the savages to murder American women and children, he threatened that the first stroke of the toma- hawk would be the sign for a war without quarter and of extermination, a statement hardly fair on the Upper Canadians who had been originally hounded out of their ancient abodes and were now peaceably settled under the British flag. This astonishing peroration — seeing that in the main it was addressed to U.E. loyalists — concludes : * The United States offers you peace, liberty and security ; your choice lies between these and war, slavery and destruc- tion. Choose then and choose wisely.'
This precious document could scarcely have reached any
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Canadians to speak of before Hull's colonels began with singular inconsistency to raid the country up the river Thames, which, though but thinly settled, furnished con- siderable loot in breadstuffs and other spoils. But before reaching Detroit, Hull's misfortunes had begun and his forebodings as to danger from the lake justified. He had loaded a schooner at the mouth of the Maumee with his stores and other necessaries for the campaign, while there went with it as passengers many of his officers' wives anxious to participate in the Canadian promenade. The schooner was in due course overhauled by an armed British ship and captured. The loss of its cargo seemed serious at the time, though as events turned out of not much moment, and the ladies were, no doubt, eventually thankful to have been thus balked of their trip. The British force on the Detroit river was as yet trifling, a hundred men of the 41 st, thrice as many militia, all under Colonel St. George, and a hundred and fifty Indians under Tecumseh, the great Shawnee chief — a second Brant, but on the whole a finer one. A good deal of forest skirmishing took place ; enough, at any rate, to show the inefficiency or even worse of the Ohio and Michigan militia. In the meantime a company of Ohio volunteers with Hull's beef cattle and other supplies were waiting at Brownstown on the mouth of the Maumee to come through to Detroit, but the parties sent to convoy them were ambushed and routed by Indians. The outlook was now rapidly changing. Instead of advancing into Canada, Hull discovered that Sandwich was no longer tenable and recrossed to Detroit, leaving only a small post behind him. He had been in Canada altogether about a fortnight, had done a good deal of pillaging, and killed apparently one Indian, whose scalp, so the Ohio captain who killed him informed his wife in a letter, he had torn from the skull with his teeth. Brock, who was still busy at York and Niagara both in his civil and military capacity laying his plans for defence and providing ways and means therefor, had sent Colonel Procter and another sixty men of the 4ist
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west as soon as he got news of the invasion. Hull was now seriously concerned for his supplies, and wholly disillusioned as to his militiamen. Another attempt in force was made to get the convoys through. Colonel Miller with six hun- dred men, mainly regulars, some cavalry and two guns, marched southward down the right bank of the Detroit river, and bearing more than one recent stampede in mind, the Colonel gave orders that every man who left his post should be instantly shot. Fourteen miles south of Detroit they met Captain Muir of the 4ist with seventy-five men of his regiment, sixty militia, and two hundred Indians, mainly under Tecumseh, thrown across their path at a spot known as Mayauga, which gave its name to the only real stand-up fight of this campaign. On the American attack a minority of the Indians unconnected with Tecumseh fled. The rest of the force retiring to a better position after some smart fighting, Miller flinched from attacking it, and on the next day Colonel M'Arthur came down with a hundred more Ohio men in boats for the use of the wounded, which num- bered nearly sixty. But no further attack was made on the British, and the disheartened force marched back to Detroit, while the boats and wounded were captured by Lieutenant Rolette, who had already distinguished himself by the seizure of Hull's supply ship. Eighteen Americans had been killed, while the British loss was three killed and twelve wounded. This may seem a chronicle of small things, but it caused the evacuation of Canada and Hull's complete withdrawal of his troops to short commons and mutual recriminations within the fort above Detroit. Brock himself now hastened to the scene with two hun- dred and forty militia and forty regulars, travelling in boats up Lake Erie to Amherstburg and thence to the scene of action. As soon as Hull's detachment evacuated Sand- wich it was occupied by the British, intrenched, and five guns mounted within range of Detroit. On Brock's arrival there he sent a flag of truce to Hull with a demand for his surrender, which was met by a defiant refusal. The
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little battery now opened on the fort with considerable effect, and the fort replied with none whatever. In the night Tecumseh, with one or two British officers and six hundred Indians, crossed the river and took ambush till morning, while at daylight Brock himself made the passage with three hundred and thirty regulars and four hundred militia, supported by a sharp and extremely effective cannonade from the Sandwich battery, which killed among others several officers. Brock now advanced with his whole force against the fort, which contained a good many non- combatants and women and the whole of Hull's force save a detachment of three hundred and fifty men, who were endeavouring to reach by a circuitous route the still isolated convoys. But in the very act of delivering his attack, a white flag was displayed and an aide-de-camp came out from Hull proposing negotiations for surrender. These were arranged and signed in an hour. Hull and his two thousand five hundred men, including Colonel M'Arthur and his absent detachment, capitulated and became prisoners of war, while thirty odd cannon and a considerable supply of arms and stores, with an armed brig, proved a welcome acquisition to the Canadians. The date of this achieve- ment, so memorable in Canadian annals, was August i6th. The Indians under Tecumseh had not merely behaved well in battle, but had also belied their reputation and the fearsome anticipations indulged in by Hull and others of their ferocity, by behaving well to their captives. Brock sent the Ohio and Michigan militia to their homes, under a stipulation not to serve again during the war, while Hull and his regulars, infantry, cavalry and artillery were despatched as prisoners to Quebec. Eighteen months later, under a court-martial presided over by General Dearborn, a personal enemy, Hull was found guilty of cowardice and sentenced to be shot. Madison endorsed the verdict, but repealed the sentence. The horse upon whose back Madison's war minister had hoped to ride into the presidential chair had indeed broken down. It must be said, however, for Hull,
U
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that he had expressed doubts of the strategy imposed upon him, and had not himself written that hisforic and pre- posterous proclamation. But he was old and faltering-, with few qualifications for leadership, certainly for leadership of a force two-thirds of which was an undisciplined mob. Still the fact of two thousand five hundred well-armed men in a fortress capitulating unconditionally to seven hundred and fifty regulars and mjlitia, with six hundred Indians, could not be minimised by any amount of explanation, and above all coming as an abrupt climax to such triumphant screeds as had sounded from the war -hawks all over America. The effect was disproportionate to the scale in the humiliation on the one side and encouragement on the other. Hardly less important was its effect on that large portion, possibly a majority of the English-speaking inhabitants scattered throughout Canada, whose loyalty was doubtful or lukewarm. Brock had encountered symptoms of this even in the House of Assembly when the necessary bills were hurried through before his departure for Detroit.
Even before this another and smaller success had fallen to the British arms. For at the first note of war the little garrison of Fort St. Joseph, the lonely post on the far-away Straits between Lakes Huron and Superior, had surprised the still weaker force holding the old fort of Michillimackinac forty miles away. The chief import of this coup was the impression it made on the Indians. Brock, who had replied to Hull's vapouring manifesto in a stirring address to the Canadians, now issued one to the inhabitants of Michigan under the assumption that he had conquered and held their territory. Colonel Procter was left with a small garrison at Detroit, and the General himself hastened back to the Niagara frontier, where the chief danger now lay. Before recounting what took place there, however, one or two incidents concerned with the proclamation of war must be told.
Now the American Government, particularly as regards Hull's expedition, had counted on its following up the
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declaration before the Canadians were aware that it had been made, for official intimations from British sources were slow and circuitous. Curiously enough, it was an American who, by a special courier to his agent at Niagara, put Brock on his guard, and no less a person than John Jacob Astor, the founder of that famous family, who was interested in the Canadian fur trade. Furthermore the revocation of the Orders in Council by the British Government concurrently with the American declaration of war, caused the former, and most naturally so, seeing that the said orders were the chief cause of it, to reopen negotiations with the Washington Govern- ment and to instruct Prevost and the Admiral on the North American coast to suspend operations till the result of their overtures should be known. Prevost immediately sent his adjutant-general, Baynes, to Dearborn at his Albany camp, and concluded an armistice commencing on August 6th. He requested that Hull's command at Detroit should be included in it, but in this Dearborn was powerless, as the other was not under his authority. Had he been so, he and his country would probably have been saved the disgrace into which Eustis's selfish haste and folly and his own incom- petence involved them. But the temperature of Madison's Government had passed the line that divides reason from delirium and would listen to no talk of peace and put a prompt end to the armistice, which closed on August 29th. England's well-meant efforts had been unfortunate for her arms in Canada. The truce enabled the Americans to bring up belated troops and supplies to the front and to use the water carriage of Lake Ontario, which was at present controlled by British ships. Above all, it enabled a flotilla of American merchant ships blockaded at Ogdensburg to sail for Sacketts harbour, where they were converted into ships of war. The command of the lakes was recognised as of vital consequence to Canada, and here an ill fate had more than half thrown it away.
The Niagara river front of thirty odd miles, all of it navigable save the eight or nine of rapid above and below
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the Falls, was now the point of strife and interest; for Dearborn, on the Champlain route, with all his honours and his ample force, gave little trouble this year as we shall see. Van Rensselaer was the American commander at this important point. He was not in the army, but represented one of the most important old patroon and territorial families of New York State, a sensible and worthy gentleman of some political influence who had opposed the war, and by this mark of confidence it was hoped both to conciliate him and his following. We are not concerned with the mysterious reasonings of these early Democratic makers of war in the United States, who were sometimes saved in the end, though at considerable cost, by the ignored professionals, forced by emergencies to the top. Hull had two or three such officers under him who arraigned him for their misfortunes in savage terms. The humour of the situation in Van Rensselaer's case was either mitigated or increased, as we may choose to regard it, by the company of his cousin Solomon of the same name, who as a colonel of regulars was placed at his elbow. Yet one must in equity remember that the American regular of 1812 had a limited experience and no more traditions than a militiaman.
By way too of making the path more difficult for Van Rensselaer, Brigadier-General Smythe of the regular army was placed under his command, and very naturally took the keenest pleasure in thwarting him. The ' army of the centre,' as this one was designated, consisted of over 6000 men, of whom 3600 were regulars. They were stationed in the various posts along the river of which Fort Niagara, Lewiston, the General's headquarters, and Buffalo, then but an embryo town, were the chief. At the latter place, which with a neighbouring post, Black Rock, stood at the eastern entrance to Lake Erie, was Smythe. The regulars were chiefly gathered at both extremities, the militia immediately under Van Rensselaer at Lewiston, but within eight miles and easy call of the regulars at Fort Niagara and Four Mile Creek at the Ontario mouth of the river, whence a
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straight road had been cut. S my the was therefore nearly thirty miles away from his chief and somewhat out of touch, a fact he made the most of. The militia had all the preliminary ardour of inexperience, and the Washington Government looked on success as an absolute certainty. They had an early note of encouragement too in the achievement of Lieutenant Elliot, of the U.S. navy, a service that shared in none of the disadvantages which belonged to the land forces of that day. For two small British war vessels, the captured Detroit and another containing forty American prisoners, both lying off Fort Erie opposite Buffalo, were surprised by this young officer and captured.
Brock all this time was making such disposal of his meagre forces as he was able. He had for the moment only twelve hundred men in all, regulars and militia. Ludicrous as such a muster sounds when opposed by the main attack of a contiguous nation numbering nearly eight millions, it is a fact, and one of the most remarkable probably in military history. When one has said that the regulars, mainly of the 41 st and 4Qth, were first-class troops, though they constantly got drunk and were occasionally mutinous — a paradox familiar to any one with any book knowledge of the British army that fought Napoleon — and furthermore, that the militia were ready to die to a man for the stake they were fighting for, it scarcely seems to lessen the significance of such preposterous odds. One may go on to say that they were commanded by a soldier of talent and spirit whom they adored, and furthermore that no spark of the friction which a blend of regulars and irregulars almost always ignites was here present ; yet even with all this the prospects of Upper Canada might well have seemed desperate. Brock's second in command was Major-General Sheaffe of American birth, but Colonel of the 49th, and we may note by the way how many old colonial Americans of that generation became officers in the British army. Of the U.E. loyalists, young Beverly Robinson of the always distin- guished Canadian family of that name, and afterwards Chief-
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Justice of the province, had been with Brock at Detroit and was still with him. Merritt, an old Queen's Ranger of the Revolution, whose lineal representative led Canadians in the Boer War, was here in command of the Niagara dragoons as well as his son. Colonel McDonnell, another notable U.E. of Glengarry and Attorney-General of the province, led the York militia, to die at its head. Powell, son of the Chief-Justice, had a local battery of artillery. Dickson, the founder of Gait, whose house at Newark was within the firing zone, was a militia captain, besides many others whose sons and grandsons have worthily maintained their tradi- tions through the succeeding century of Anglo-Canadian history.
It was not till the I3th of October that Van Rensselaer delivered the attack which no one in the United States, whether of the bellicose or the dissentient party, doubted for a moment would make Upper Canada at any rate another star in the American constellation. The intention was to form a large camp at Queenstown as a base of operations against the rest of the province and Montreal, though Smythe at Buffalo was all for crossing at that point and would have nothing to say to the other plan. Fort Niagara was to bombard Fort George, while the regulars from its camp assisted Van Rensselaer's militia, whom the success of Elliot had so fired with martial ardour as to protest that unless they were immediately led into Canada they would go home. The idea seems to have been rooted among them that the Canadian people were friendly to the invasion, that serious resistance was impossible, while with many the prospect of plunder was a strong incentive, as the experience of Hull's invasion had demonstrated. A day or two later the same men obstinately refused to move on the plea that they had only enlisted to serve on their own soil.
This fiery impatience somewhat unduly hurried Van Rensselaer's plans, and the first attempt was a fiasco. An hour or so before daybreak on the nth of October the
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invading force was gathered with sufficient boats imme- diately opposite Queenston heights, a then thickly wooded ridge some 350 feet high, which at this point breaks the comparatively level shores of the Niagara river, just here about 200 yards broad, and of swift though navigable current. One Lieutenant Sim, who from his skill in such matters had command of the leading boat, either by design or accident carried off in it nearly all the oars of the flotilla, landed on the other side, and disappeared to be no more seen or heard of. The troops on shore, exposed in the meantime to a prolonged storm, marched back again to camp, soaked to the skin and sore with disappointment. On the next night preparations were renewed for another attempt. The British general had been convinced that the attack would be delivered either near Fort George or above the Falls. But Major Evans of his regulars, who had crossed the river on a mission to Van Rensselaer a day or two before, caught a glimpse of boats obviously concealed, and thus Brock was warned. Three hundred of the 49th and York militia were stationed at Queenston, the river- side village just north of and beneath the lateral ridge which fell with a steep wooded pitch into the water. Half- way up the heights on their north side a single gun battery was posted, the rest of Brock's meagre force being disposed at points along the seven miles between Queenston and his own quarters at Fort George near the mouth of the river.
In the dark of the morning of the I3th, about an hour before day, three hundred regulars and as many militia, under Van Rensselaer's cousin and Colonel Christie, com- menced the passage by relays to Queenston as a first instalment. They were discovered by three small British batteries which commanded the spot ; one already men- tioned as high up the hill side, another at Queenston village, and a third at Vrooman's point just below. Con- siderable execution was done and several men were killed in the boats ; some of the latter being washed lower down
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by the swift current, while others were driven on to the British shore and their freight captured. Lieutenant Robinson, before mentioned as being with Brock at Detroit, and afterwards Sir John Beverly Robinson, has left a notable MS. account of his experiences : — ' Grape and musket shot,' he writes, ' poured upon the Americans as they approached the shore, a single discharge from a brass six- pounder destroying fifteen in a boat. Three of the bateaux landed below Mr. Hamilton's garden in Queenston, and were met by a party of militia and regulars who slaughtered almost the whole of them, taking the rest prisoners. Several other boats were so shattered and disabled that the men in them threw down their arms and came on shore, merely to deliver themselves up as prisoners of war. As we advanced with our company we met troops of Americans on their way to Fort George under guard, and the road was lined with miserable wretches suffering under wounds of all descriptions and crawling to our houses for protection and comfort. The spectacle struck us who were not inured to such scenes with horror, but we hurried to the mountain, impressed with the idea that the enemy's attempt was already frustrated and the business of the day nearly com- pleted.' Some two hundred regulars with Van Rensselaer landed, however, and formed on the shore under the high bank of the river. While awaiting their comrades they were attacked by a small British detachment under Hatt, aided by the fire of some of the 49th and Chisholm's com- pany of militia, who had taken post near the brow of the height with a gun. More boat-loads of American regulars now joined their comrades, and at this moment Brock arrived at a gallop from Fort George with his aides M'Donnell and Clegg, having roused the posts on the way. It was now daybreak, and Brock pushing forward to the small battery on the higher slope ordered down the com- pany stationed there, save a few men at the gun, to the support of their friends on the river bank by the village. General Van Rensselaer seeing the hilltop almost clear of
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troops, determined to seize it. Some of his officers long stationed at Fort Niagara were familiar with the ridge and a steep path up it, which had not escaped Brock though reported to him as inaccessible. Captain Wool, afterwards a well-known General, was entrusted with the task, which he possibly initiated, and a detachment of from three to four hundred men for its achievement. This was so suc- cessfully performed that Brock and his party were almost surprised at the battery now captured by the Americans. Reaching the bottom of the slope, however, the General collected about a hundred men, whom he at once led against the hill, and recovered the battery, though unfortu- nately himself to be soon afterwards hit in the breast by a ball and almost instantly killed. Upon this his little party fell back down the hill again, when M'Donnell, coming up with his two companies of militia, which brought the force up to two hundred, took the stricken general's place, and again reached and carried the battery, though at the cost of both leaders, Captain Williams wounded and himself killed. The men, outnumbered and now without leaders, were once more driven down the hill, whereupon Captain Dennis taking command of the whole, fell back to a battery at Vrooman's point behind the village to await rein- forcements. There was now a long lull. The Americans established themselves at their leisure on the heights, to the number, as subsequent events proved, of about twelve hundred, mainly regulars. Van Rensselaer came over him- self, his cousin the Colonel being badly wounded, and indeed several boat-loads of killed and wounded men had already been sent back to Lewiston. A British artillery officer, Holcroft, had planted a gun in the village at some risk and succeeded in sinking more than one of the American boats laden with fresh soldiers. But the pro- spects for the British now looked sufficiently gloomy. The death of Brock had rilled every man in the little army with profound grief. An eye-witness tells us how a dragoon on a bespattered foaming horse, without either helmet or
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sword, brought the news to Fort Erie, where, according to orders, a fierce cannonade was being maintained against the answering batteries on the American shore. 'Brock was dead and the enemy in possession of Queenston heights ! ' Some wept, some swore; all worked the heavy guns with demoniacal energy, as if they were field pieces, while triumphant cheers rang out along the American shore as the news which arrived there at the same time travelled from post to post. At the Niagara end of the line too the disaster only stimulated the gunners at Fort George to such energy as to silence the opposing American batteries, which had been pouring red-hot shot with destructive effect on the shingle roofs of the former capital of Upper Canada. Towards three o'clock, however, General Sheaffe, now in command, arrived from Fort George, having left a detachment there under Major Evans to keep Fort Niagara in check. He brought with him every other available man, three hundred and eighty of the 4ist, and three hundred militia, with a hundred and fifty Indians under a well-known chief, Norton, by repute a Scotsman, who had been already skirmishing around the heights, while two hundred more militia were coming up from the post at Chippewa over against the Falls. Van Rensselaer in the meantime from his lofty perch on Queenston heights had descried the advance of Sheaffe, and noticing with anxious impa- tience that the militia at Lewiston, under orders to join him, were painfully slow about it, he recrossed the river himself to quicken their movements. To his disgust he found that every spark of the martial frenzy which had forced him, as a matter of fact, to rather overhurried measures had absolutely vanished. Whether it was the thunder of the guns or the returning boats with their cargoes of dead and mangled men, these fire-eaters had at any rate dis- covered that their terms of enlistment did not provide for their service outside the borders of their own State, and they were fully resolved to stand by the Constitution. Raw militia in all countries at various times have flinched un-
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blushingly as they have also, like the U.K. loyalists across the river, performed heroic deeds. But never perhaps, unless at Detroit, have they prefaced timorous conduct with such vociferous bombast as did these hapless warriors of New York on this particular occasion. So the General, having vainly awaited help from his jealous subordinate at Buffalo, was, fortunately for himself as it turned out, obliged to leave Brigadier Wadsworth in command on the heights, where he had a force at least slightly superior to anything his enemy could bring against him, and more than half of them regulars. Sheafife in the meantime, doubting the wisdom of a frontal attack up the open north slope, and leaving some of the original Queenston force to command the river and hold the village, moved round the hill with the rest of his men and his Indians, and in conjunction with the small Chippewa detachment attacked the heights from the landward or western side. The Americans, somewhat crowded on the ridge and with their backs to a precipice above the river, relieved only by the tangled path up which they had come, received his onslaught at some disadvantage. It was now afternoon and they had been on the move for twelve hours, while most of Sheaffe's men were compara- tively fresh, and all, moreover, either highly disciplined or burning with ardour and exasperated by the death of Brock ; and they were admirably led. A single volley, a rousing cheer, an Indian war-whoop and a charge with the bayonet practically finished the business in spite of the equality in numbers, though there was some partial resist- ance. Many of the fugitives flung themselves over the precipice ; those that could escaped down the narrow path, while others leaped into the river and were drowned. Brigadier-General Wadsworth, who was in command, sent an offer to surrender his whole force by Colonel Winfield Scott, the future hero of the Mexican war, and the object of invocation to this day in a familiar American slang phrase. Something under a thousand surrendered, ninety were slain, numbers drowned, and many escaped. Brock and
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M'Donnell were the only officers killed on the British side, while seventy of the rank and file and about a dozen Indians were killed or wounded.
Such was the battle of Queenston heights, next to the Plains of Abraham the most cherished place of bygone strife in Canada, though there are many far more deeply dyed in blood and distinguished for much fiercer struggles between much larger armies. Brock was buried in a bastion of Fort George, and the rage of a conflict to which his death made such an incalculable difference swept back and forth over his grave. He was virtually irreplaceable, for not only was he a fine soldier and born leader, but he had turned his long service in Canada to good account and won the affectionate admiration of the U.K. loyalists. His influence and his memory nerved many an arm in the coming struggle, but as a commander he had in no sense any successor in it. Some years after the peace Brock's remains were removed to Queenston heights and a monu- ment raised above them, which was blown up in 1846 by some unknown and undiscovered miscreant. Immediately after this disaster a great gathering, including nearly all able to attend it who had served under him, was held on the heights, and ten thousand pounds raised out of which the much statelier and now familiar column was erected.
The mortification of the American people at this disaster was intense. It could not be laid upon the shoulders of a General, nor was it. No wealth of invective was spared the militia who stood and looked on while the more resolute portion of their comrades-in-arms were slaughtered or captured. Van Rensselaer soon resigned, and for the re- mainder of that season Smythe took command of the 'army of the centre,' and proceeded to the invasion of Canada upon the quarter above the Falls that he had stoutly maintained to be the proper one for the purpose. Sheaffe had unfortunately agreed to an armistice which gave his opponents time to bring up forces and supplies, while he had himself neither the one nor the other to bring
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up. Presumably too it gave opportunity to Smythe for the composition of that Napoleonic address, which was to come down to posterity with the former one of Hull's among the flowers of martial perorations. It was addressed to the * men of New York/ who it must be admitted needed a stimulant, and Smythe after all knew their taste better than we do. But there was no excuse for official abuse of Van Rensselaer as an incompetent amateur, since he acted in perfect accord with military advisers, whose plans and resolution in prosecuting them, together with that of the men who actually followed them, left little to be desired. The final dtbdcle on the hilltop before the rush of the British was no disgrace. The discipline of the British regular, the Man of the British amateur defending his country was greater than that of the similar elements opposed to him — that was all.
' Hull and Van Rensselaer,' said Smythe to the men of New York, * were popular persons, destitute alike of theory and experience in the art of war. In a few days the troops under my command will plant the American standard in Canada. They will conquer or die ! Will you stand with your arms folded and look on at this interesting struggle ? The present is for renown : have you not a wish for fame ? Then seize the present moment ; if you do not you will regret it, and say the friends of my country fell, and I was not there.'
A few days later Smythe gave them a second dose, com- mencing, ' Companions in arms ! The time is at hand when you will cross the stream at Niagara to conquer Canada and enter a country that is to be one of the United States. You are superior in number to the enemy ; your personal strength and activity are greater ; your weapons are longer ; the regular soldiers of the enemy are generally old men whose best years have been spent in the sick climate of the West Indies. They will not be able to stand before you ; you who charge with bayonet, Come on, my heroes ! '
If the New York and Pennsylvania farmers' sons who
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mustered about Buffalo, and had rarely even an elementary knowledge of the use of the bayonet, believed these flights of fancy, which from the sequel appears unlikely, they must have been surprised when they met the * Green Tigers/ as the 49th were then called in North America.
Smythe during this month of November, independently of Van Rensselaer's old command below the Falls, which still watched that country, had an army of about 4500 men, 1 500 of whom were regulars ; the rest were New York and Pennsylvania militia, with a company from Baltimore. Opposed to Smythe and extended over the sixteen miles between Chippewa, above the rapids which precede the Falls and Fort Erie, near the lake entrance, over against Black Rock and Buffalo, the American headquarters, were just a thousand men. These consisted of detachments of the 41 st and 49th (British Regiments), the Lincoln county (Niagara district) and Norfolk militia, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Bisshop. Their disposi- tion, with the local topography responsible for it, cannot be described here. It will be enough that on November 28th and at three in the morning, Smythe launched his great attack on Canada. It was well conceived, but entirely frustrated. There was a night of confused and tolerably severe righting between the vanguard of his army, or such parts of it as succeeded in landing, and about a third of the British force, all of whom, however, did their part either in guarding the shore, serving guns, or in responding to those many emergencies which the hour and the darkness occa- sioned. As at Queenston, several of the American boats were sunk by artillery fire. Though the whole of Smythe's army was under arms on the shore the attempt was finally abandoned. The British had lost about eighty officers and men, the Americans from the nature of their service more than twice as many.
During the day Smythe held a council of war, at which there was considerable disagreement. But on the 29th he resolved upon another attack, and boomed forth another
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caricature of Napoleonic thunder : * The General will be on hand ; neither rain, snow, nor frost will prevent the embar- kation. The cavalry will scour the fields from Black Rock to the bridge and suffer no idle spectators (this in reference to Van Rensselaer's militia at Lewiston). While embarking the music will play martial airs. Yankee Doodle will be the signal to get under weigh. The landing will be effected in spite of cannon, for the whole army has seen that cannon are little to be dreaded.' And finally : ' Hearts of war ! To-morrow will be a day memorable in the annals of the United States.' Lack of harmony in council, however, delayed the proceedings a couple of days till December 1st. Fifteen hundred men were at length successfully embarked when the Pennsylvania militia, entirely sceptical as to their General's views on the inefficiency of cannon, stood upon their constitutional rights and refused to leave American soil. Their example spread, and another council of war was held. The invasion was ultimately abandoned and the militia sent home, while the regulars went into winter quarters, and General Smythe was given indefinite leave of absence.
The surrender of Hull at Detroit had by no means ter- minated the season's fighting in the far west. Exasperation at that disgrace ran high in the south, particularly in Ohio and Kentucky. The latter State put no less than five thousand men under arms, and Generals Winchester and Harrison, the * hero of Tippecanoe,' had actually under their command threatening Detroit at least seven thousand, including two or three regiments of regulars, in addition to cavalry and artillery. Prevost, who had a weakness for truces, had insisted on Procter, after Hull's defeat, observing the one which was then in force to the eastward, though his field of operations had been specially exempted from it by Dearborn, the American commander-in-chief. This gave the enemy every opportunity to bring up their forces from the south, prevented Procter from checking them, which had been Brock's last orders, and drove numbers of
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Indians in disgust from his standard. The Americans, however, took pains to secure and justify that hostility of the savages, which they not unnaturally execrated, by burn- ing their villages and winter supplies. They never took them prisoners in the field, and generally scalped them, which made it almost impossible for British officers, or even their own chiefs like Tecumseh, to restrain the natural impulse of the savage when out of sight, though on many occasions their conduct after a victory was blameless. It should also be remembered, firstly, that the Americans had broken faith with the Indians south of the lakes ; secondly, that they had destroyed all their property and means of livelihood ; thirdly, that their war was one of aggression all round, clamoured for by themselves, and which, if suc- cessful, would have resulted in the certain destruction of the Canadian Indians; fourthly, that they would have them- selves utilised the services of the savages without a doubt had they been on sufficiently good terms with them at the time and the situation reversed, as indeed they actually did later on.
Winter, however, was not to stop the ardour of the avengers of Detroit. The little village of Frenchtown on the Raisin river, which flows into the western extremity of Lake Erie, was Procter's most southerly outpost. Here he had thirty Canadian militia and two hundred Indians under Major Reynolds to watch the enemy. Against these there now came on from the Maumee rapids, where the Americans were concentrating six hundred and fifty regulars and Ken- tuckians under those well-known frontier officers, Lewis and Allen. After a smart defence with their single gun, the little British party, with the trifling loss of one man and three Indians to themselves, and of sixty-seven killed and wounded to the enemy, retired to Brownstown, at the mouth of the Detroit river. Winchester in the meantime moved up to Frenchtown with reinforcements, while Procter, with- out loss of a day, on hearing the news started from Amherst- burg, on the Canadian side of the lake and river, with all
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his available force, about five hundred regulars and militia and as many Indians. They marched across the four miles of frozen snow- covered water in a compact force, a small, resolute, and martial company. The rumble of guns upon the icy track, the war-cries of the Indians, the glint of the bright wintry sun upon the burnished arms, says Major Richardson, who was there, left a lasting picture upon his mind.
Winchester had a thousand men at Frenchtown, and with almost precisely that number, upon January 22nd, in the dark of a bitter morning, too cold even for the usual scouts to be abroad, Procter fell upon him with scant notice. Part of Winchester's force was in the open, others under cover of houses and buildings, while a small redoubt sheltered a number of riflemen and made their fire especially formidable. After an hour's fighting the American right was turned and crumpled up by the Indians and militia, and the whole force, with the exception of four hundred, who threw themselves into a blockhouse, forced back and pursued with great slaughter. General Winchester himself was captured, and having no troops left but those in the blockhouse, he sent an order for their surrender. Five hundred prisoners, including these last, were delivered to Procter, and about four hundred Americans lay dead on the snowbound field and in the trail of the pursuit, for the Indians, exasperated by the destruction of their villages, made no prisoners. Something over a hundred stragglers survived to reach Fort Meigs and the main army, to tell the tale to General Har- rison. Of the British part of Procter's force rather over a third were killed or wounded, so he could neither follow up his victory, nor even remain where he was, for the whole of Harrison's army would shortly be upon him. He had more prisoners than white troops to guard them, but ultimately succeeded in taking them all back save the severely wounded, who were left in charge of a detachment. There were Indians, however, prowling about in search of scalps, who here and there were only too successful, Among those
x
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lifted, by some irony of fate, was that of a brother-in-law of Henry Clay, chief of the non-combatant war-hawks. His scalp, though in this case its loss was due to its owner's indiscretion, was worth much more to the war press than those of a whole company without political affinities. Procter for this affair at Frenchtown was made a brigadier, though one or two very capable subordinates were of the opinion that his attack being a partial surprise, he would have effected his object much more speedily if he had gone straight in with the bayonet. It was a highly meritorious action nevertheless, and broke Harrison's advance, sending him, though tardily, into winter quarters at Fort Meigs. That either side, with the rude equipment of their day and situation, were ready to campaign through a winter in Michigan, and did so for much of it, speaks volumes for their hardihood and resolution.
The addresses of the American generals of 1812 to their troops would make a pretty and unique collection. General Harrison told his men that the loss of life at Frenchtown was due to British treachery. To these same regiments, half composed, and that in their best part, of regulars in the very act of invasion, he exclaimed, ' Can the citizens of a free country who have taken arms to defend its rights think of submitting to an army composed of mercenary soldiers, reluctant Canadians goaded to the field by the bayonet, and wretched naked savages ? '
There can be little doubt that the Americans had been in most points hopelessly misled as to the condition of things in Canada. There were unquestionably great num- bers of recent American settlers in that country, thou- sands probably who were in favour of annexation, but in most cases isolated, busy unmartial people who were not prepared to risk their lives for a mere preference between forms of government that were much the same in practice to the average farmer. These people, settled often in clusters, out of touch, from the engrossing demands of their narrow lives, with the prevalent tone of the province, and
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at the same time perhaps the most accessible to American channels of information, may well, and in all innocence, have distorted the latter. But it only remains now to say a few words about Dearborn's failure to make headway against Montreal, and while on the subject of Canadian sympathies to note in passing how little encouragement was given to the invaders by the French peasantry of the Richelieu country, the district which formerly in Dorchester's time had been distinguished above the rest of Lower Canada for quite opposite conduct.
Montreal was as vulnerable as it was important. Its old walls, useless enough, had not long before been swept away and no means of defence raised by spade or trowel existed. With a view to its capture, Dearborn had early in September a force of eight thousand men at the head of Lake Champlain, upon the Canadian frontier and but some forty miles from the city. There it remained doing practically nothing till in November it had increased to over ten thousand, half of whom were regulars. To oppose them a chain of posts had been created along the land frontier, from Ymaska to St. Regis, consisting of Major de Salaberry's Canadian Volti- geurs and some militia. At Blairfindie, on the old road from St. John's to Montreal, a brigade was stationed con- sisting of the lOQth and iO3rd regiments, part of the 8th, the Canadian fencibles, some companies of militia, and a detachment of artillery with guns, all under the command of Major Young, of the 8th. The North- West Company too raised a body of voyageurs, while several companies of the sedentary militia organised themselves and did garrison duty in Quebec and Montreal, thereby releasing the regulars and embodied militia for active service. Some addition to the defence of the country had arrived during the summer, namely the iO3rd above mentioned, and the ist Royal Scots.
Beyond a few raids, met by counter raids, Dearborn with all his force effected nothing. In November it was reported he was going to move with his entire strength on Montreal,
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and a further call on the militia was made to which they responded readily, for nothing is more remarkable than the different attitude adopted by the mass of French Canadians towards the invasion of 1812 from that prevalent in 1775, the more so as the signs of the preceding years had by no means pointed to such a display of goodwill among the rank and file. In December, after Smythe's repulse, Dearborn too went into winter quarters.
The vital importance of sea power as regards Lake Ontario had not been lost sight of during this season, but unfortun- ately Prevost's armistice, or rather the unconditional manner in which he interpreted his instructions, had allowed so many American merchant ships to slip into Sackett's Harbour, their principal naval depot, nearly opposite Kingston, as to greatly facilitate the despatch with which they made ready a strong fleet. Commodore Chauncey, a fairly able seaman, had the supervision of the naval department, and by the end of the season had so outpaced the British that he was able practically to blockade Earle, who commanded them, in Kingston harbour. Brock had been anxious to attack Sackett's Harbour and destroy this little fleet of war- ships in the making, but was prevented by Prevost, who was not merely lacking in energy and foresight, but in the face of a somewhat ruthless aggressive war cherished foolish theories of non-provocation, admirable in peace time, but infinitely mischievous in his present situation. In spite of Prevost's excellent French accent and his conciliatory manners, the mind runs back in vain over the list of Canadian Governors or their deputies to find a single one who would not have better filled the post in time of war. The distress in Upper Canada was now considerable. So many farmers and farmers' sons had voluntarily abandoned their homes in defence of their country, that the effect told severely on a province dependent on agriculture and virtu- ally without a detached labouring class. Provisions too, and above all clothing, were short. The difficulty in all matters of supply when a handful of people scattered over
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a huge undeveloped forest country are called upon to play the unusual part of combination for defence, can hardly be realised without an effort, and any modern parallels for the Canada of that day are idle. This, moreover, at a moment when the far-away mother country was fighting for her life with what seemed to be her last shilling. Clothing alone, above all with winter approaching, was a most serious matter, let the women at home work their spinning-wheels as they might. A loyal and patriotic society was formed for providing this and other necessaries for the men in the field and for alleviating the distress caused by their absence from home. Chief- Justice Scott was president, and the treasurer was Strachan, then Rector of York, the most famous schoolmaster, bishop and politician of early Upper Canadian annals. There were also the widows and orphans of the killed to be looked after. With the help of the Duke of Kent, who raised £5000 in England, .£17,000 was the total collected in the various provinces. At the close of the year the legislature of Lower Canada met. Prevost congratulated them on the loyalty of the country and the successful resistance made to the enemy. He alluded to the events of the year, particularly to Brock's glorious death and victory. In return the Assembly voted a liberal sum of money, judged by their resources, for the prosecution of the war. The legislature of Upper Canada too was called together a little later by Sheaffe, now the Lieutenant- Governor, at York, where they passed without contention several measures pertaining to the militia and military matters of technical necessity.
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CHAPTER XIII
THE WAR IN 1813
THE divergent views of the two political parties in the United States on the war may be conveniently illustrated by the language held in Congress this winter by Josiah Quincey on the one hand, and Williams, the South Carolinian chairman of the military committee, on the other. The former denounced the invasion of Canada as ' a cruel, wanton, senseless, and wicked attack, in which neither plunder nor glory were to be gained, upon an unoffending people, bound to us by ties of blood and good neighbour- hood, undertaken for the punishment over their shoulders of another people three thousand miles away by young politicians, fluttering and cackling on the floor of that House, half-hatched, the shell still on their heads and their pin feathers not yet shed ; politicians to whom reason, justice, pity, were nothing, revenge everything.' The South Carolinian replied : * The St. Lawrence must be crossed by a well-appointed army of twenty thousand men, supported by a reserve of ten thousand. At the same moment we move on Canada, a corps of ten thousand more must threaten Halifax from the province of Maine. The honour and character of the nation require that the British power on our borders should be annihilated in this campaign.' The news of Napoleon's utter failure and appalling loss of men in Russia reached America this spring, and was a great blow to the war party. Dr. Eustis, in his Presidential flights, had lost such good things as he already had and been relegated to obscurity. The American army had been
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increased to fifty- five thousand men, mainly destined for the invasion of Canada, backed by an innumerable militia. To oppose these in the spring of 1813 there were barely seven thousand regular troops. Included in this force were five colonial corps, the iO4th (New Brunswick Regiment), which had marched through the wintry forest wilderness to Montreal ; the iO3rd (Newfoundland Regiment), the Glen- garries, the Voltigeurs (French), and the Canadian fencibles (mixed). In addition to these were the whole or part of the ist, 8th, 4ist, 49th, looth, and a squadron of the iQth Dragoons. Later on in the year the I3th and the two De Watteville regiments (Germans) arrived. Admiral Sir James Yeo, a young sailor of enterprise and varied service, with some naval officers and about four hundred seamen for the lake service, came too this spring. This, with an Upper Canadian militia zealous enough but having their livelihood to earn, and a French sedentary militia of doubtful ardour and no longer of much use, was a pitiful force with which to defend so large a country against such great odds. But the exigencies of the Peninsular War and the desperate fight in Europe held Great Britain in their grip ; she could do no more.
In the early spring of 1813 General Dearborn was at Sackett's Harbour, opposite Kingston, ready for operations, with five thousand regulars and two thousand militia. He had also three thousand regulars, besides others, at Buffalo watching the Niagara frontier. His orders were to cross the ice and attack Kingston and, having captured it, march by land on York. This, however, was not attempted. Instead of it one of his officers, Major Forsyth, made a midnight raid across the river from Ogdensburg and harried the un- defended village of Brockville, looting it of goods and stock and carrying off fifty of the inhabitants. Colonel Pearson, then at Prescott in command of the troops who were ex- tended down the St. Lawrence from Kingston, sent a protest against this style of warfare but without avail. On Prevost's arrival Colonel M'Donnell of the Glengarries requested
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leave to attack Ogdensburg, which the .weak-backed Gover- nor refused till his subordinate frightened him into a con- cession by the assurance that his own road to Kingston would otherwise be insecure. He then assented to a ' demonstration' only. M'Donnell had other views, and on February 22, with less than five hundred men from the Glengarries, the 8th, the Newfoundlanders, the militia, and three guns, crossed the ice. The river is here over a mile in width. Forsyth was prepared, and pounded the gallant company from his batteries with deadly effect in their un- protected approach. Nothing daunted, however, they reached the American side and dragged their guns through the deep snow up on to the high ground. The enemy was driven through the town, his rifle fire from the houses being silenced by the guns, and the rest of the business left to the bayonet. The fort near by containing Forsyth was next attacked, one of its outlying batteries rushed, and the other reduced to silence, after which the fort itself was carried without resistance, as the commander and his men did not await the final attack, but with their routed comrades from the town retired for some miles southward through the woods. This is worthy of mention, as though only a raid in force like so many of the affairs in this war, it was not the midnight looting of a defenceless village like Forsyth's, for which it seems he was awarded promotion, but a most daring attack in broad daylight over a bare expanse of deep snow swept by artillery and on a fortified position held in strength by regular troops. The British casualties were about sixty. Among many gallant acts, Captain Jenkin, of a New Brunswick U.K. family, continued to lead his com- pany of Glengarries against a battery after both arms had been shattered by grape till he fell from loss of blood. A large supply of arms, ammunition and stores rewarded the victors, who burned the barracks and four armed ships that were fast in the ice, and Ogdensburg gave no more trouble as a base for raiding expeditions.
The Americans, thanks to Prevost's folly in the preceding
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year, were now supreme on Lake Ontario. Chauncey had done his work well, and had thirteen ships of war carrying eighty-four guns and thirteen hundred sailors. The British had nothing to oppose to this, though still in control of Lake Erie. Dearborn, having given up the idea of attack- ing Kingston, was now in a situation to move on York. So at the end of April, when navigation was fairly open, he embarked nearly two thousand men, representing four regular regiments, some artillery and riflemen, and travers- ing the length of the lake, arrived in two days and without mishap at York. Toronto harbour is almost landlocked, and is virtually formed by a long narrow barren spit running out in a south-westerly direction parallel with the trend of the coast, like a leg turning a foot shoreward with the toe approaching near the mainland and leaving a comparatively narrow entrance. A mile within the harbour, at the far corner of the rude parallelogram it describes, and at the mouth of the little river Don, lay York, the infant Toronto. The harbour entrance being easily commanded by cannon, the natural landing-place for an enemy was to the westward. Here were two or three blockhouses, while the ravine of a small stream between them and the town gave some help to any scheme of defence, and on this line the meagre garrison of about four hundred men, three-fourths of them local militia, were intrenched with a few ill-mounted or small guns, though such details are in fact scarcely worth enumerating. Prevost had failed to make any preparations for the defence of the little capital, while Sheaffe, who it will be remembered had succeeded Brock as civil governor and military commander of the province, though now him- self at York, had been almost equally negligent. If the place had been abandoned under the plea that no means were at hand for its defence, criticism would be disarmed. But a valuable warship was being deliberately built there, a proceeding which stultifies such a plea on Prevost's behalf, who was responsible for it. Sheaffe in his turn had ap- parently left twenty heavy guns, intended for the said
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vessel, but which would have proved invaluable in batteries, lying about under the snow. Quite fortuitously, on their march from Kingston to the west one hundred and eighty men of the 8th Regiment dropped in at the moment of the enemy's arrival, raising the total force to six hundred, with a few Indians. The Americans, led by General Pike, landed under the guns of their fleet to the westward of the harbour's mouth. In the intervening woods they encountered the small but spirited British force. The result was a foregone conclusion, but it was not arrived at till after seven hours' hard fighting. A battery was even then uncaptured, but its magazine exploding and putting forty men out of action, terminated the resistance. Sheaffe drew off about two hundred of his regulars, retiring through the town, which was untenable, and got them safely away to Kingston. The militia, whose homes lay in York county, and the remaining regulars, surrendered and were released on parole. If pursuit had been contemplated, it was paralysed by the terrific explosion of a magazine containing five hundred barrels of powder which, hurtling grape-shot and bullets stored in the same building in every direction, killed fifty- two Americans, disabled one hundred and eighty more, and naturally stunned, for the time, all further enterprise. General Pike himself, while seated amid his staff, was killed by a flying rock. When the Americans recovered they did so to some purpose. For though the terms of surrender guaranteed immunity to all property, they deliberately burned the Parliament buildings which had recently been erected, together with all its public documents and library. The church was robbed and the town library despoiled, an act of which Chauncey was so ashamed that he subsequently collected as many as possible of the scattered volumes and returned them. Several private houses too were ruined and much property carried away.
This, however, was a costly performance to the invaders, as during the subsequent occupation of Washington by the British its much more imposing Capitol, with its far more
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valuable documents, was destroyed in retaliation ; an action frequently denounced by historians without the context. It is generally held that by mounting the twenty-three ships' guns that Sheaffe had left in the mud he might have saved York. At any rate, he was soon afterwards superseded, leaving a flavour of unpopularity as well as of failure behind him. It has been asked too why Dearborn did not hold York and thereby cut the connection between eastern and western Canada. But with the first favourable wind he sailed away across the lake with all his force to the neighbouring Fort Niagara, whither reinforcements were rapidly forwarded from Sackett's Harbour, till by the end of May his army for operations on the Niagara frontier was swelled to six thousand men. The earlier scheme of the invaders still held good. Harrison's army was to push on from the Detroit frontier in the west, brushing Procter aside, while the Niagara force beating down all opposition there, was to join the other. With the peninsula of Upper Canada thus in possession and cleared of British troops, the united force would press eastward by land and water down Lake Ontario to Kingston and the St. Lawrence and, co-operat- ing with the considerable army already acting against Montreal, take that flourishing city and so to Quebec.
Fort George was the first point of attack, standing, as it may be remembered, near the outlet of the Niagara river, but with the town of Newark lying inconveniently between its batteries and the actual river mouth. The British force along the thirty miles of Niagara frontier now consisted of about eighteen hundred regulars and six hundred militia under the command of Brigadier-General Vincent. All that could be spared for Fort George was a scant thousand from the 49th, 8th, Glengarries, and Newfoundlanders, a few gunners, three hundred and fifty militia, and a handful of Indians. On the 27th of May, Dearborn, who does not seem to have been himself a great fire-eater, sent four thousand men to the attack, the vanguard led by Colonel Winfield Scott, followed by the remainder under Brigadiers
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Boyd, Winder, and Chandler. The political soldiers, though Chandler and Winder seem to have been such, were gradually disappearing under the stress of failure and public indignation, and several capable officers were forcing them- selves to the front. The American regulars were also improv- ing with experience, and some of the provincial irregulars had discovered that battles were not won by vainglorious bombast, and were beginning to do justice to the sterling qualities which they possessed. Yet something must be con- ceded to custom ! The southern backwoodsman till within present memory was wont to anticipate a personal encounter by cracking his heels and flapping his arms upon a stump, announcing at the same time his invincible qualities in primitive vainglorious vernacular, a blend of the cock-pit and the Indian council fire. It was probably with the Kentucky rifleman in mind, and most certainly with Napoleon on the brain, that the American generals produced those early masterpieces of oratory that opened this war in unforgettable fashion. These prologues had now been mostly abandoned, though the elementary blunders that followed them were still rife. The political general still went to war with a colonel of regulars at his elbow to prevent mistakes or breed friction, as the case might be. Whether in war time the politician was least mischievous at the front or in the council chamber was perhaps a point worthy of consideration.
The Americans on a still foggy morning landed about a mile to the west of the outlet on the open sweep which comprised the whole field of action, under the guns of Chauncey's powerful fleet and the fire of their own fort, Niagara. The landing was checked for a moment by a small advanced company with a gun or two under Colonel Meyer. But the gunners were soon killed when the whole force of the enemy landed and advanced in columns, to be met again by the same officer with six hundred men, including a hundred and sixty local militia. A most gallant stand was here made, and though raked by grape-shot from the fleet the
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British repelled several attacks. At length, with the loss of two-thirds of their number, including their leader, the survivors fell back under cover of a supporting force brought forward by Harvey, whose name stands out nobly through- out this war. Fort George was for every reason untenable, and Vincent after his three hours' fighting and spiking guns at the Fort, retired to Beaver Dam, sending word to Ormsby and Bisshop, commanding at Erie and Chippewa, to join him. This was duly effected, but the Niagara frontier was perforce abandoned, and with sixteen hundred regulars, Vincent moved westward in the direction of Burlington heights. The militia, farm work in the short Canadian season being insistent, were in part dismissed. The Americans fearing, though groundlessly, a junction with Procter, followed the British, who after a forty to fifty mile march encamped on the heights above Burlington Bay, the extreme western point of Lake Ontario, near the present city of Hamilton. Nowadays a fat and ornate country of tillage and meadow, fruit orchard and vineyard, this was then an almost unbroken forest wilderness. Near the present track of the main line from Toronto and Hamilton to Niagara a single road then ran through the forest, broken here and there by raw clearings, and it was in and about one of these and near the present station of Stoney Creek that on June the 5th three thousand of the Americans under Generals Chandler and Winder, both amateurs and politicians, pitched their camp for the night. They were now within seven miles of Vincent. The ever- active Harvey reconnoitred their position and discovered the disposal of the force and the carelessness of the outposts to be characteristic of an army commanded by lawyers, though not wanting in good troops and good officers. So a night attack was resolved upon, and the night was dark beyond common. With seven hundred men, therefore, of the 8th and 49th, Vincent and Harvey left camp before midnight and by two had reached the American position undiscovered. This position was a good one only open to attack on its
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front, but Harvey's estimate of the enemy's lack of vigilance was accurate. The unsuspecting outposts were bayoneted without a sound, and only a premature shout from some of the British soldiers gave the Americans much more than time to leap to their feet and seize their arms before the seven hundred bayonets were among them. The guns were rushed, the gunners bayoneted, and after some brief sharp fighting the whole American force within reach was routed and scattered in all directions. Both generals, several officers, over a hundred prisoners, and all the guns, were captured. Vincent withdrew his men before daylight should discover their small numbers to the enemy, having lost in killed and wounded about a hundred men. The effect of the blow was prodigious. The Americans retreated on the following day with precipitation, leaving dead un- buried, wounded uncared for, and such of their stores as they had not time to destroy. Halting at Forty-mile Creek en route for Niagara, they were met by Colonel Miller of Detroit memory and four hundred men, and soon afterwards by General Lewis, who took command of the army, now again numbering over three thousand. The unexpected sight of a British fleet which Sir James Yeo had now scraped together, bringing three hundred more men of the 8th and supplies for Vincent, upset again the returning confidence of the Americans, whose camp came under its fire. Another hurried retreat took place to Fort George, leaving tents standing, a great store of flour, and nearly a hundred disabled men. The rest of their equipage was despatched by water in twenty bateaux, all of which were captured by Yeo, who, thanks to Chauncey's apathy or timidity, cruised along the American shore of the lake, seized some well-stored magazines upon it, and took several supply ships bound for Niagara.
Back again at Fort George, with a loss from various causes of a thousand men, the American plan had proved an utter failure. The iO4th Regiment, moreover, had arrived at
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Vincent's camp, and the British lines were pushed forward again to the posts adjacent to the Niagara river. It was during this movement too, at the end of June, that the heroine of Upper Canadian song and story, Laura Secord, whose monument surmounted by her bust stands in the graveyard of Lundy's Lane, gained immortality.
Now in a stone house at Beaver Dam, an outpost con- sisting of half a company of the iO4th, under Lieutenant Fitzgibbon, had been giving General Dearborn some particular annoyance, whereupon Colonel Boerstler of the I4th U.S. Infantry proposed to surprise it, and with 570 men started by way of Queenston and St. Davids to carry out his plan. The lady in question was the wife of James Secord, who lived in Queenston, but as behoved the member of a well-known U.K. family, was serving with the militia. His wife overheard some American officers in the last- mentioned village discussing Boerstler's proposal, and deter- mined to warn Fitzgibbon. So setting out then and there, and travelling a circuitous woodland course through the zone of war of some twenty miles, ran into some Indians at dark near Beaver Dam. These at first alarmed her, but ultimately took her by request to Fitzgibbon, to whom she told her tale. The consequence was that Boerstler and his party were themselves surprised by Indians and others and compelled to surrender, to the number of 512 officers and men, with their colours and two guns. This fresh chain of disasters in the face of so small a defending force, following upon so promising a start, caused the deepest mortification in the United States. Dearborn anticipated his recall by resigning on the plea of ill-health, and Wilkinson, who had been prominent as a young officer in the Revolutionary war under Arnold and Gates, was appointed in his place. Much raiding and counter-raiding across the river took place during the summer. Several brave deeds were performed and many lives were lost, but nothing of moment occurred. The number of more recent settlers in Upper Canada who showed American sympathies
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and sometimes more than sympathy, continued to be a cause of anxiety, but the sickness which now began to prevail in both armies did much to cool their activities. General de Rottenburgh, moreover, arrived in July vice Sheafife as Governor or President of Upper Canada and Commander- in-Chief. Some of the New York Indians too, chiefly Senecas, who had not migrated to Canada, joined the Americans and proved very useful, while Yeo and Chauncey fought two engagements on Lake Ontario with no very decisive results.
But in the meantime, after a considerable lull in hostilities on the western frontier, Procter, who was stationed 'at Sandwich and had been reinforced by part of the 4ist, became again active, though neither wisely nor willingly. Early in May he had attacked Fort Meigs, which Harrison had built on the Maumee, and had taken five hundred prisoners in a battle before it, but had not the strength to carry the Fort itself. Since then he had remained at Sandwich. The farming season had now carried off half his militia, who had gone home for a time, while the savages composing so much of his strength had become restive. For Harrison lay with twelve hundred regulars and a mass of militia at Seneca near Fort Stephenson, a new post upon which the Indians had set their heart. Procter consequently marched there and made a vain but gallant attempt to storm it.
Harrison in the meantime, large by comparison though his force was, recognised, as did his government, the futility of advancing into Canada so long as the British fleet held Lake Erie. There was now to be a struggle for it which proved one of the memorable incidents of the war. Barclay, who had lost an arm at Trafalgar, was in command of the six British vessels. The Americans, who if they had not been quicker to recognise the vital importance of sea power on both lakes, were at least in a position to build much quicker, had by the month of August nine vessels, more heavily armed than Barclay's, under the command of
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Captain Perry of the U.S. navy, a smart and capable officer. A few of these had been built some time, but being scattered about could not get out of their respective harbours for the British who were first afloat. Barclay is said, through preferring pleasure to business on a particular occasion, to have allowed them to escape and combine at Presqu'ille, the chief harbour on the American side, corre- sponding to the very poor one of Amherstburg on the other. The situation was a pretty but perfect illustration on a small scale of the modern theory of sea power. Procter had been eaten nearly bare of provisions by ravenous Indians whom he dared not offend, and depended on sea carriage for more. He had now come almost to his last crust, and the stores at Long Point, near the eastern end of the lake, could not be moved in the face of Perry's fleet. Harrison on his part, with his overpowering force, could not cross the Detroit or St. Clair river into Canada even against Barclay's small ships of war. The latter had only half rations for a few days between them and starvation. It was a case of a duel, and that without delay between the two small armaments, which would decide the future of the two land forces and the fate, as it might well seem, of Upper Canada. So on the i8th of September Barclay sailed out to engage in the inevitable but unequal trial. Perry's nine ships were far superior in weight of metal — as President Roosevelt in his work on the maritime side of this war is careful to impress — about double, in short. Perry again had 532 men, 329 of whom were seamen, 158 soldiers (marines), and 45 volunteers. Barclay had 55 seamen, 102 Canadian sailors whom he describes as mere boatmen, and he was compelled to make up the necessary complement by shipping 250 officers and men of the much-enduring 4ist Regiment. The only two considerable vessels on either side were of little over 300 tons burden. The engagement began about twelve, and was most obstinately contested for some hours. The flagships Lawrence and Detroit, carrying Perry and Barclay respectively, fought desperately
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together for half that time and were terribly shattered, the former rendered helpless and actually striking her flag after Perry had boarded a fresh vessel, the Niagara, which had hitherto kept out of action. The guns of some of Barclay's six ships were almost useless at a range at which their opponents could punish them severely. His own vessel, unable to await her supply of guns from the east, had been filled with an ill-assorted lot from the fort at Amherstburg. Barclay himself was badly wounded, and after a resistance conducted with great skill and hardly less creditable than a victory, and with a loss of 140 in killed and wounded his utterly dismantled ships succumbed to, or tried to escape from the two or three Americans that were still manageable and consequently supreme. The victory was complete, though the loss in men was nearly equal, and at one -moment it actually hung in the balance. Perry deserved success and used it well, though with such superiority in ships, gun power, and trained men, had he been beaten no such honour as remained to Barclay could possibly have been his. But the little fight was of con- siderable import, and should have been of much more. It came as a godsend to the Washington Government, who were starving for something good to say. Madison, though not greatly addicted to the Kentucky-Napoleonic style, was equal to the occasion and pronounced it 'a victory never surpassed in lustre if in magnitude.' Yet Trafalgar was still fresh in men's minds !
Lake Erie now remained to the Americans. There was nothing left for Procter bift a rapid retreat through the peninsula to Niagara and supplies, while Harrison started in pursuit. The former, his white force reduced to about seven hundred but accompanied by over a thousand Indians, having first destroyed Fort Maiden, made his way to Lake St. Clair and the mouth of the Thames. A week after the battle Harrison crossed Lake Erie from Sandusky, landed five thousand men on Canadian soil near Amherstburg, and advancing northward to Detroit there met another
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thousand. From this base on October 2nd he started up the Thames in pursuit of Procter with thirty-five hundred men, including a swarm of Kentucky irregulars, horse and foot, with their veteran Governor Shelby, a famous old pioneer and frontier fighter of Welsh blood, who, originally from the North Carolina Alleghanies, had been one of the makers of Kentucky. Harrison had also with him two hundred and fifty Indians. We cannot here follow Procter in his toilsome retreat for some forty-five miles up the Thames, his material, like that of his pursuers, accompanying him in boats. He was accused at his subsequent court-martial, and in contemporary correspondence, of dilatoriness both in the start and the retreat, of failure to destroy bridges over creeks, and of hampering himself with useless baggage. The two forces passed through the present town of Chatham, and at the Moravian Mission, twenty-five miles above, Procter was forced to stand at bay. His men, mostly of the 4 ist, had been long ill-fed, and great numbers were sick in hospital. They had borne the brunt of two seasons' campaigning and fighting against continual odds with singular tenacity and great credit, and had never been accustomed to retreat. About four hundred of them fit to fight were now drawn up at right angles to the river in an open forest near the Moravian town, together with forty Canadian dragoons, while Tecumseh's Indians, reduced by desertions to barely five hundred, held the woods upon their right. The coming and going of Procter's Indians, their perversities and enormous appetites, which owing to the paucity of white troops it had been imperative to humour, had long been the commander's leading difficulty.
The battle was soon over. Twelve hundred Kentucky horsemen, though checked for a moment by a couple of volleys, came on with the confidence of numbers helped by the moral support of 2500 infantry just behind them, and rode by sheer weight clean over the slender British lines. The spirit that had prolonged so many hopeless fights and turned many that seemed so into victory, in a moment
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as it were, collapsed and the broken companies surrendered without further effort. A great strain had been laid for a long time upon these men, and now under the depressing conditions of retreat and scanty food, with a long wilderness and yet more starvation in their rear, confronted moreover by a well-fed, successful force of many times their number, there is nothing strange in the sudden moral collapse of these hitherto enduring and courageous men. About six hundred of them, including 150 sick in hospital and their attendants, were taken prisoners. The dragoons escaped, and Procter, who would have left a good reputation had he fallen, escaped with them. The Indians in the woods on the right maintained for some time the unequal contest, the brave Tecumseh falling at their head. His body was secured and carried away, but the Kentuckians falling on another mistaken for it, imitated the barbarous custom of some Indian squaws, and going even further made razor- strops of the skin ; a singularly misdirected piece of savagery, since Tecumseh himself had an untarnished re- putation for mercy. Prevost chose to publicly censure, and with contumely, this broken remnant of the 4ist. Later judgment has emphatically repudiated the justice of his criticism. Few indeed would exchange the reputation of these much-enduring men and officers in the war of 1812 for that of Prevost himself, who might almost be called its evil genius. Harrison reported that his men won the battle ' by superior prowess.' Statistics make comment needless. Procter, however, was court-martialled and found guilty of the mistakes already mentioned, but acquitted as regards personal conduct, his previous valour and activity being warmly recognised. Harrison, having burned the missionary station of Moravian-town, evacuated Canada by the route he had entered it with a good deal of loot added to his legitimate captures, though most of it appears to have been afterwards lost in a lake storm. The militia were sent home and the General, with over a thousand regulars, proceeded to Buffalo and the Niagara frontier, where the
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Americans, it will be remembered, occupied Fort George alone outside their own territory. Their chief attention, together with that of the two newly appointed generals, Wilkinson and Wade Hampton, had been diverted to a great effort against Montreal, of which more anon. In the meantime M'Clure, a militia brigadier, remained in command at Niagara with about three thousand men. At the news of Procter's defeat, it was naturally assumed by the British on the Niagara that Harrison's victorious army from the west would be upon them. So General Vincent at St. Davids, now again in chief command, gathering his troops together abandoned the river front and withdrew to his former strong post on Burlington heights, where Procter and his handful of survivors from Moravian -town soon joined him. Orders, however, soon came from Prevost to evacuate the whole peninsula of Upper Canada and retire on Kingston. This catastrophe was happily averted by the good sense and subsequently better information of Vincent and his officers, who at a council of war determined to ignore it. But on their brief retirement from the Niagara frontier M'Clure had let loose a whole horde of plunderers who ravaged the defenceless country, not merely of property, but even to the abduction and imprisonment of loyalist residents. He was aided in this by Wilcocks, the renegade ex-member of the Upper Canadian legislature who, with a band of disaffected American settlers in Canada, gave a specially virulent and personal touch to such outrages. Bands of defence were organised by the U.K. militiamen at home on leave, who caught eighteen of these marauders on one occasion and hung fifteen of them on the spot as traitors. If any veterans of the Revolutionary war from Eastern New York or the Carolinas were settled hereabouts, old memories must surely have been stirred by such doings, which helped at any rate to perpetuate the bitter feelings of their fathers.
As early in December the British, with slight resistance, moved back again to the river front, M'Clure evacuated Fort George with much despatch, signalising his departure
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from Canadian soil by a dastardly act. For some two months previously he had procured the sanction of Arm- strong, the War Secretary, to destroy Newark, with sufficient notice to the inhabitants, should the measure be of strategic urgency. And now on a bitter December night, after he had decided to leave Canadian soil, he set fire to the town at sunset, with half an hour's warning and without a shadow of excuse. Thus a well-built and, as described by every one, an attractive little town of some 150 houses, two churches, and a few public buildings, was burned to the ground, and four hundred women and children turned out into the rigours of a Canadian winter's night. The conscience or the fears of this foolish and malevolent amateur were so quickened at the sight of the British troops, who had been sent forward at the news, that he hurried across the river leaving all his tents standing and Fort George intact with many guns and much material. So the British at any rate recovered a vastly improved fortress, besides some newly built barracks that M'Clure's panic had not permitted him to destroy. His brutal act disgusted his own countrymen and raised a storm of in- dignation in Canada, while Prevost's kid-glove tendencies were more than ever denounced.
General Sir Gordon Drummond, the new civil and military commander of Upper Canada, together with General Riall, arrived at this moment. Vincent had gone east, but Colonel Murray, a daring and active officer, was there to put the new commanders en rapport with the local situation. This resulted in a dire retribution for the burning of Newark. Fort Niagara was stormed with a loss of four hundred in killed, wounded and prisoners to the defenders, and an aggressive campaign instituted which in less than a month's time had laid the entire American frontier from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie in ashes, including the town of Buffalo, which was defended by two thousand men, and more than half the ships with which Perry had won his victory. Fort Niagara^was garrisoned, to be held, as it turned out, till the
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peace. And thus ended the second year of the war in western Canada, leaving the province swept clear of the enemy and their principal post on the American side of the river in British hands. It now only remains to say a few words on the doings in the neighbourhood of Montreal, where a greater display of force had been made by the Americans, but much less achieved in the way of injury to their opponents.
On May 28th, the very day on which the Americans were taking Fort George, Sir George Yeo and his fleet, carrying seven hundred and fifty regulars, had advanced against Sackett's Harbour, before described as nearly opposite to Kingston, and in a manner its American counterpart. Its former large garrison was now reduced to about nine hundred regulars and four or five hundred Albany militia. Unfor- tunately the prospects and the ardour of the attacking force were stultified by the blighting presence of Prevost himself, for on this occasion the troops were actually in the boats with the prospect of effecting something like a surprise, and full of confidence. The Commander-in-Chief, however, whistled them on board again, and nobody to this day knows why. After giving the garrison this timely warning, he was persuaded to make the attempt again under less promising conditions at dawn the next day. But this time there was not a breath of wind, and the ships could not approach near enough to the shore to cover the landing. This was, however, ultimately effected on Horse Island to the west of the harbour, and connected by a causeway with the mainland. At the end of the causeway stood the Albany militia, well posted and with a gun, but only to vanish like smoke at the approach of the British, and be seen no more. Owing to the immobility of the becalmed vessels carrying the field guns, the attack had to be made without artillery. But it was so far successful, after a smart fight with the American regulars and no little loss on both sides, that the enemy went the length of setting fire to their ships in the harbour and to their barracks,
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preparatory to an evacuation. But at this moment the fatuity which seemed to seize upon the hapless Prevost, whenever the wrong thing could possibly be said or done, again took possession of him, and he ordered a retreat. Major Drummond guaranteed him success if he would give him but a few minutes, but this singular man, solicitous apparently as ever for the feelings of his enemy at the ex- pense of his friends, was almost fiercely resolute in his scuttle policy, and silenced all protest. So after a loss of 250 in killed and wounded, he re-shipped his forces and sailed away. Yet six months afterwards, as we have seen, he berated the gallant 4ist as cowards and sent Procter to a court-martial. It was fortunate for Prevost that he had no superior within three thousand miles, and lamentable for Canada.
After this there was a long lull, due chiefly to the atten- tion bestowed by Dearborn on York and the Niagara frontier. On his retirement, when Wilkinson and Hampton were appointed to the northern army, it was decided, after some difference of opinion, to make a great effort against Montreal. Wilkinson, now in chief command, was to con- centrate his division near Sackett's Harbour, and thence to descend the St. Lawrence, while Hampton, who had taken over the force which had been cantoned all this time at the foot of Lake Champlain, was to march down the Chateauguay river to its confluence with the other above Montreal, and join forces at He Perrot. Hampton had over 4000 regular infantry, ten guns with artillerymen, some cavalry, and 1500 militia. By the end of September he had moved forward to Four Corners, just above the spot where the Chateauguay river enters Canadian territory. It was not till a month later that Wilkinson was ready to move from Sackett's Harbour, and the advance was begun simultaneously by both armies. Wilkinson had under him nearly 8000 men, mostly regulars, while watching Hampton with a view of checking and obstructing him at every point was De Salaberry and his 300 Voltigeurs, with 80 fencibles under Ferguson, and about 200 Indians. He
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was supported on the day of battle by 600 of the embodied French militia under Colonel M'Donnell of the Glengarries, who had drilled his men with considerable effect, and brought them up by a remarkable forced march.
Hampton decided for the Chateauguay route, and on October 25th, the fourth day's advance down the river, in an intervening tract of forest, behind which lay an open country all the way to the St. Lawrence — a fact which gives special significance to this famous incident — he ran into the man who created it blocking his path to Montreal. De Salaberry, in short, was astride the road, and partially protected by an abatis ; his three hundred and odd regulars and fifty Indians extended into the forest, with their left on the river, which was only fordable at some rapids in their rear. These were guarded on the further shore against a rear attack by some of M'Donnell's militia. Hampton cannot be accused of over-confidence. It is a slightly con- fused but absolutely definite and altogether wonderful story, both in detail and results. On the night of October 25th, General Izard, another South Carolinian, held Hamp- ton's main force in Salaberry's front, while Colonel Purdy, with a United States infantry regiment, and a number of light troops, was despatched through the woods to cross the ford which had been duly noted by their scouts. Purdy lost himself in the woods, and it was past noon on the next day when scattering shots from near the ford set Izard's 3500 men in motion. Bearing down on De Salaberry's extended handful, they drove in his pickets, and in due course the Voltigeurs themselves to a second line of defence in some shallow ravines nearer the ford. De Salaberry alone remained, as attested by McDonnell, and seizing his bugler boy by the collar made him sound the advance lustily. This brought up M'Donnell with his men to the support of the retreating regulars, and yet more a happy inspiration prompted that officer to practise a ruse that went a long way towards deciding the day, for he caused every available bugler to scatter out into the woods and
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make as much noise as he was able, and all his men to cheer loudly, while a hundred fresh Indians arriving at this moment spread out and filled the forest with their war- whoops. Under the impression that a large force was in front, these measures gave pause to the advancing foe. The Canadians renewed their fire, and pushed forward again in great strength to where De Salaberry with extraordinary coolness had apparently remained alone. Impressed by the firing, the clamour, the bugle-calls and war-whoops from all directions in the woods, disappointed moreover at the evident failure of Purdy to force the ford on to the Canadian flank and rear, the Americans retired, whether in order or disorder does not seem clear, and is of no con- sequence since they retired for good. Purdy in the mean- time, having scattered an advanced post of undisciplined Beauharnois militia, merely placed there to give warning, advanced on the ford. Here McDonnell had stationed a company of his trained French militia under Daley, who, pouring into the Americans an effective fire, re-crossed the river to his main body. This was under the two Duches- nays, and posted in part along the nearer bank, kept up a hot fusilade across the water. Disconcerted by this, impressed, like Izard, by the far-extended uproar in the surrounding woods, fatigued perhaps with a night and half a day of wandering in the forest, Purdy and his men also fell back and beyond doubt in great confusion, for they began firing wildly on one another in most destructive fashion. Straggling back to headquarters, they materially helped to confirm the idea already current on the north bank of the river that they were confronted by a strong force. Incredible as it seems, Hampton precipitately aban- doned the enterprise, gave the order to retire, sent word to Wilkinson not to expect him, and facing about marched his whole force ingloriously back to Plattsburg on Lake Champlain. This hopelessly inefficient general was given, it seems, to drink, but Purdy was not, and his fiasco at the ford at the head of over two thousand men was un-
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pardonable. It was not a very bloody affair this, a dozen Canadians and less than a hundred Americans being the extent of the casualties ; otherwise it was a kind of modern Thermopylae, blocking the open road to Montreal and possibly saving the State. The resolution of De Salaberry, who throughout the war was invaluable, and the spirit of hisVoltigeurs proved of incalculable benefit. To M'Donnell belonged almost equal credit. What would have happened if Hampton had behaved like an ordinary normal com- mander instead of like a worse than madman it would be ill saying. Izard's force alone could have overwhelmed with ease the little company in front of them, more than half militiamen never before under serious fire. They were disciplined regiments with many admirable officers among them — Wool for one, who has left it upon record that for years afterwards no American officer would admit to having been at Chateauguay. It must be presumed they had nothing to say in the matter, and were the victims of a general, who, whether drunk or jealous, for he hated Wilkinson, deserved shooting more thoroughly than any com- mander within my historical knowledge. Prevost's addic- tion to lost opportunities was trifling to this. Poor Hull, who was actually sentenced to be shot, though acquitted, was by comparison a venial sinner, the victim of circumstances, inexperience, and others' blunders. Some American his- torians brush away Chateauguay as a battle qua battle, and regard it as a trifling check which merely gave a feeble excuse to Hampton to thwart Wilkinson and back out of an expedition he hated because not devised and wholly commanded by himself. This seems almost plausible, for it is otherwise unintelligible. But Canada did not look at it in this way, and indeed had this opportunity not been boldly given him, Hampton would have been compelled to march on. So De Salaberry may fairly be said, on the face of it, together with M'Donnell and the staunch behaviour of all his men, to have very possibly saved Montreal. At any rate so brilliant a deed, performed almost wholly by
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French Canadians, was from every point of view peculiarly acceptable. It should be said that some companies of the De Watteville Regiment were lower down the Chateauguay river. It may also be added that Prevost arrived on the scene after all was over, wrote the despatch to his Government, treated the business as a mere outpost affair, took most of the credit to himself for its valuable result, and gave the rest to De Watteville who was not within miles of the field. He did not even mention M'Donnell. The truth, however, came out, and that gallant officer was made aC.B.,but he felt the injustice of excluding De Salaberry to whom, in a letter extant, he attributes the chief honour, and furthermore he personally importuned the Government to confer the same distinction on his friend, which they eventually did. Prevost and McDonnell both put Hampton's force at seven thousand. But Hampton was not shot, nor, so far as I know, reprimanded.
Wilkinson also was said to be intemperate, and as a friend of Aaron Burr had been suspected a few years previ- ously of those unorthodox ambitions and revolutionary designs in the south-west which brought the other to grief. But now he was journeying down the St. Lawrence towards Montreal with nearly nine thousand men, a force one might think should have been more than sufficient to overwhelm a place so scantily defended. He had with him too some good ofBcers — Macombe, afterwards Commander-in-Chief, and Forsyth, ever active, besides Generals Brown and Lewis, both of approved worth. Unlike the condition of things on Montgomery's advance in 1775, Wilkinson found the popu- lation, just here part British and part French, universally hostile. Chauncey had been endeavouring with only partial success to blockade Kingston, but several gunboats had got out and followed on the heels of Wilkinson's flotilla to its no small annoyance. The only two regular regiments, and those weak in numbers, available for the serious business in hand were the 49th and 89th, with some companies of fencibles and Voltigeurs and a few artillery. These were
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grouped for the time under Colonel Morrison, while Captain Dennis of the 49th and Queenston memory commanded three hundred British militia of the counties of Glengarry and Dundas, in all not over a thousand men. Montreal in the meantime was in the hands of the sedentary militia, a force whose disposition was now beyond doubt, but whose efficiency remains an unknown quantity, as it was never tested, but it could not possibly have been very great. Even with the knowledge of Hampton's failure, which Wilkinson was not yet in possession of, the prospects of Montreal may well have seemed to be tolerably hopeless.
The progress during these early November days of the American army by land and water to the foot of the Long Sault rapids was accompanied by various incidents and skir- mishes of slight consequence, but on November nth was fought the battle of Chrystler's farm, which decided the fate of Montreal and dashed Wilkinson's hopes in a manner scarcely less sensational than that in which Chateauguay had baffled Hampton. Indeed it was more so, as there was a tougher fight, and the general was not an amateur, though he appears to have been himself sick in bed during the action. At the moment of the battle Wilkinson with his main force was at Williamsburg. General Brown with the vanguard of the army had safely negotiated the Long Sault rapids below, and Boyd's brigade was to follow when Morrison with the 49th and 89th, and indeed the whole little force as already described, and some eight hundred in number, came up and compelled him to a rearguard action. Morrison, accom- panied and assisted by Harvey of Stoney Creek renown, drew up his men on the open fields of Chrystler's farm, his right on the river and his left on pine- woods, exposing a front of nearly half a mile. To be precise, it was com- posed of six hundred and forty men of the 49th and 89th and two hundred Voltigeurs, fencibles, and artillery, with a score of Indians and two six-pounders. Against this Wilkinson, according to his own despatch, threw two and a half brigades consisting of eighteen hundred men,
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to be followed later by six hundred more; and the fight began at half-past two. General Boyd, who was in command, made repeated efforts, according to his orders, to turn Morrisons left flank. Failing there and in front, a strong attack supported by cavalry was then made on the right near the river under Colonel Pearson. This handful of regulars from their paucity had to support each other from left to right of the field, and they seem to have been not only most skilfully handled, but as staunch as they were active. They not only preserved their few guns, which were specially struck at, but captured one of the enemy's and finally repulsed the latter with such decision that a body of six hundred men had to be despatched to support their retreat. The casualties on the British side were one hundred and eighty ; on that of the Americans three hundred and forty, besides a hundred prisoners. It was now getting dark, and under cover of the night Boyd carried his men across the St. Lawrence, and the next day they ran the rapids of the Long Sault and joined the van- guard under Brown near Cornwall, about eighty miles above Montreal. Wilkinson was himself incapacitated during the action at Chrystler's farm with the same ailment it was said that afflicted Hampton. It is not at first apparent why this fight at Chrystler's, brilliant little affair though it was, should be held as one of the decisive engagements of the war, sharing, that is to say, with Chateauguay the honour of having saved Montreal in 1813. Four hundred men was a slight loss to the enemy out of seven or eight thousand, but its moral effect was sufficient to influence a weak and irresolute general at a moment when he received a much more staggering blow. For on the day after Chrystler's farm Wilkinson got Hampton's message an- nouncing his withdrawal to Lake Champlain. Wilkinson raged and put his rage upon paper, and with justice. He then called a council of war, which decided on the prompt abandonment of the expedition and its objects and a retire- ment to winter quarters. The wrath of the American
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nation, or of the war party at any rate, was great, and well it may have been. Readers of this book may contrast this spirit with that of Arnold's march to Quebec, and yet more with the tenacity with which Montgomery's raw men stuck to the Plains of Abraham, half-clad through a bitter winter, while to travel outside our subject into the campaigns of Washington, one finds another order of things, and that too among what was sometimes but a mere militia. One may well ask what was it that thus ailed, with rare exceptions, these American troops and their leaders who invaded Canada in 1812-13. The numbers stated here are in all cases their own ; those of the British we have very pre- cisely. If Hampton's conduct can be explained by in- sobriety and malevolence towards his rival, surely a council of war, above all with an amateur general at its head, would in ordinary cases have shouted down such palpable dishonour. But Wilkinson had no motives of jealousy at least, and he too called a council of war. What point of view would officers commanding seven thousand regular troops within a few days' easy march of the practically defenceless city which spelt their final triumph be considering when they threw the whole thing up ? They lacked nothing in food nor material. Could it be because a thousand or fifteen hundred active troops were worrying their march ? Had a succession of incredibly bad commanders blighted the spirit of the regular soldier and filled the militiaman with an almost chronic panic? Did the American armies miss the spirit and the element of New England which in former wars had taken the lead, both as organisers and combatants? The people of other States would probably not accept such a suggestion. But to the impartial inquirer with a reasonable knowledge of the Seven Years' War and that of the Revo- lution it is not easy to imagine an American combination of this era without the cool heads, the varied resources of Massachusetts and Connecticut with their sturdy and in- telligent battalions. Fortunately perhaps for Canada, New England had practically held aloof. There was indeed
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something like an understanding between these provinces and the British that they should annoy each other as little as possible, on land at least, and even upon the coasts, where such distinctions were difficult, there was strong evidence of this feeling. Some American historians have not spared the Puritan Commonwealths for the part they played. But it may be remembered that the Canadian war was one purely of aggression, a policy from the first denounced by New England. Nor was it a question of defending the soil of the United States against an enemy's designs. The raids of the British were purely retaliatory, made as it were in self-defence, without any ulterior design, and with the sole object of shortening the war. These were mainly directed, as was natural and right from the British point of view, against those regions which had especially challenged them as the fomenters of the strife. It was altogether a curious situation, without precedent, perhaps, in its way, and only made possible by the ill-assorted and but yet half-united elements which then composed the American Federation.
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CHAPTER XIV
THE WAR IN 1814
SIR GEORGE PREVOST met the legislature of Lower Canada in January. There had been a great dearth of specie for carrying on the war. This had been met in 1812 by an Act authorising the issue of army bills bearing 4 per cent, interest, and payable in London, which proved a great success, and a further Act was now passed increasing the limit to £1,500,000, all of which was redeemed in 1815. The Lower House being relieved from any personal con- tact with the war, devoted itself to a campaign against the Executive and Legislative Council, and to raking up the old grievances of Craig's day, such as the forcible suppres- sion of Le Canadienne and the action taken in connection with it. Arising out of this too was a measure passed for disqualifying the Chief-Justice and the Judges of the King's Bench from sitting in the Council, which, whether within or without their constitutional powers, of which they had somewhat enlarged ideas, was promptly thrown out by the august assembly to whom they thus ventured to dictate. The root of the whole matter was a grievance against Sewel and Monck, chief-justices of the province and of Montreal respectively, whom they accused of being the instigators and evil genii of Governor Craig's somewhat peremptory methods. If malcontents had been at the front with De Salaberry or Drummond they would have frequently wished, no doubt, for one hour of Craig. That they were not was no fault of theirs, many of them, in- cluding the brilliant young Papineau of after notoriety in
Z
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the rebellion of 1837-38, were good militiamen, and would, no doubt, have led their companions with ardour against the Americans had the military dispositions of the moment required it. But as the militia of Lower Canada was only used in the field to a limited extent, the province having been comparatively immune, they had no opportunity of vindicating their character for militant loyalty in the eyes of those who objected, and not without reason, to their ill- timed and rather foolish political attitude. It was quite true that they had at present rather the shadow than the substance of the British Constitution. Their Upper House neither had nor needed the moderation of the House of Lords, and were financially independent as we have seen. But this Lower House, on the other hand, cherished aspirations which quite failed to appreciate the limitations of even the British Constitution. Neither they nor the times were ripe for really responsible government. That the claimants should think otherwise is perfectly natural, but they believed themselves entitled to much more authority than belonged or even to-day belongs to the British House of Commons. They were under the impres- sion that they could make laws independently of the Governor in Council, and in short had been sent to Quebec to be the absolute rulers of the colony. Stuart, a Scotsman who in later times held high office and was made a baronet, was among the leaders of this mainly French party, to become himself in time a target for the same shafts that he was now levelling at those in power. The Lower House, without evidence or examination, passed articles of impeach- ment on Sewell and Monk, which the Upper House absolutely condemned not merely because they had not themselves been consulted, but because the articles were enacted in quite irregular and unconstitutional fashion. The dominant party in the Assembly were greatly wroth and demanded that their ' articles of impeachment ' should be presented direct to the Prince Regent, that Stuart, with an appropriation of £2000, should be immediately sent to
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England to prosecute the matter, and that the two judges should be, in the meantime, suspended. Prevost had no objection to forwarding the address, but the suspension of the two most important functionaries in the colony on a mere majority vote of the House of Assembly unsupported by any admissible evidence, was of course absurd, and plainly demonstrated the fact that if the Legislative Council were inclined to be too autocratic, they were not without justification in the crude conception that the Assembly still had of its powers. The selection of this critical moment, however, to rake up bygone grievances, when none of any real consequence were pressing, and a great struggle for existence with a powerful foe upon their borders was going forward, puts them altogether out of court. It will be enough to say that Chief-Justice Sewell felt called upon to go home and defend himself, bearing with him an abundance of spontaneous testimony from the leading people of both nationalities to his character and public conduct. No doubt there were many imperfections in the Canadian body politic, but it was hardly the time for violent agitation on the subject, much less on issues now some time dead, and that even in quiet times might well have been buried.
The legislature of Upper Canada were also called to- gether in February 1814 by Sir Gordon Drummond, and sat for a month. War was much too near these men who had been burned out of their very Parliament House, and some even out of their own dwellings, for wordy broils on civic trifles. Most of their talk was of carrying on the war, and of ways and means so far as they could assist in it. A few of the members were prisoners in the United States, two had turned traitors, Wilcocks, of course, for one, and were fighting in the enemy's ranks.
The first movements of the new year were made by Wil- kinson, eager to obliterate his disgrace. He had withdrawn much of his army from their winter quarters on the Salmon river and in the St. Lawrence neighbourhood to the old
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camp at Plattsburg on Lake Champlain, though not without annoyance from Colonel Hercules Scott and a thousand men who followed him. He had sent Brown with two thousand men to Sackett's Harbour, and had with him in March twice that number with which to make the attack on the Canadian frontier that was to retrieve his fame. This supreme and final effort of Wilkinson's need not take up our space. Before the ice had melted he led nearly his whole force a few miles across the border to be repulsed at the Lacolle river, a tributary of the Richelieu which crossed his march, by a small British and Canadian force, chiefly under Major Handcock. After a stone mill, which was a leading point of defence and attack, the engagement is known as Lacolle Mill. Wilkinson after failing to force the position, in holding which some companies of the I3th and a few marines were conspicuous, fell back again to Platts- burg and to retirement, enlivened by a court-martial of a singularly indulgent disposition. This should be a sufficient tribute to the valour of the defenders, who fought, said the witnesses at Wilkinson's trial, with desperate bravery ; one company, according to an artillery captain, ' made a charge on our guns, receiving their fire, and that of two whole brigades of infantry at the same time.'
The Americans had recently built a small fleet for service on Lake Champlain, which found shelter at Otter Creek, a harbour on the Vermont side, while the British had also some vessels at Isle aux Noix of historic memory a few miles down the Richelieu. But it was once again on the Niagara frontier that the really serious business of the year was to be done and the two most fiercely contested battles of the whole war, those of Chippewa and Lundy's Lane, were to be fought. Yeo in the preceding summer had to some extent got the upper hand of Chauncey, but this winter the American commodore had increased his fleet while icebound in Sackett's Harbour, and with the open season hoped to reverse the situation. Brown with his two thousand men
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as before mentioned was at Sackett's Harbour, but in March was ordered west to the Niagara frontier, giving Prevost another excellent opportunity to attack that naval station on the ice and destroy the fleet. But Prevost's old tenderness towards Sackett's Harbour was still in the ascendant. Yeo, however, had also been building ships during the winter at Kingston, and admitted no inferiority to Chauncey. The active General Drummond was in command here, and the two together persuaded Prevost to consent, which he did, though apparently with some reluctance, to an attack on Oswego, a post now of secondary importance to Sackett's, but of some consequence as a depot of military stores. Yeo sailed with two frigates just launched, and six smaller ships, sloops, and brigs with gunboats. A little over a thousand troops, mostly regulars, under Drummond went with him. Fortunately Prevost did not accompany the expedition, for just as the British were commencing the attack they were blown off the coast by a sudden gale, which would have been to Sir George an altogether too tempting opportunity for sparing Oswego. It gave the latter, however, which had only three hundred and odd regulars in the fort protecting it, a chance to call in some of the local militia. They proved of no use in action, affording a great contrast to their counterparts in Upper Canada, who fought with great determination. They scarcely ever were in this war, and one can only suppose that they turned out, either from curiosity as spectators or in the hope of plunder. On the following day Yeo returned to the attack, and after a good deal of artillery fire between the land batteries and the ships, the British force was landed. The militia in the bordering woods ran the moment they came into action, while the regulars, quite outnumbered, were driven into the fort, and very soon out of it, though not before a hundred of the attacking force in all had been killed and wounded, for the defensive capacities of the place were really formid- able. Oswego, though not at the moment fully stocked, yielded a large supply of stores besides a few small vessels
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to the captors, who destroyed the fort and the public build- ings. It was only another raid, but strategically a service- able one, and occurred on May 6th. Yeo, after returning to Kingston, soon afterwards sailed away to look up Chauncey at Sackett's, who was still awaiting some materials for the fitting out of his fleet, so he was thus able to blockade him. On this account the Americans had some difficulty in forwarding Chauncey's requirements by water, though closely hugging the lake shores and creek inlets. In a some- what rash attempt to cut some of these out of the Big Sandy Creek with gunboats, Yeo lost his whole party of a hundred and eighty men, nearly half of whom were killed and wounded.
Brown was now in command at Buffalo with about five thousand men on the Niagara frontier. He was an active commander with a nice sense of discipline, and by constant drilling and exercise had vastly improved his division. His orders in July were to take Fort Erie, and thence push forward and seize the strong British position at Burlington, thus cutting off their posts on the Niagara frontier, such as Forts Niagara and George, from all connection with York and Kingston save by water, while Chauncey was expected to dominate the lake and co-operate with Brown. The posts and forces of the British on the frontier were approxi- mately as follows : Fort Niagara (700), Fort George (1000), Queenston (300), Chippewa (500), and Fort Erie (150). In addition to these were 1000 at York, 400 at Burlington heights, and a company or two at Long Point on Lake Erie. Riall was in command with headquarters at Fort George, when on July 3 the Americans crossed the river and captured Fort Erie, which was not seriously garrisoned but never- theless was of considerable value to them as a base for retreat. Just above the Falls of Niagara, on the British side, the Chippewa river, with the village and post of that name at its mouth, had to be crossed by the Americans advancing from the direction of Lake Erie. But a mile or two in front of this again was the smaller stream of Street's
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Creek. Though none of Wellington's veteran regiments had as yet reached the west, some had arrived in Lower Canada, releasing in advance the troops already stationed there. One battalion of the 8th was now just arriving. In addition to this, Riall had about five hundred of the Royal Scots and the looth respectively, a squadron of the iQth Light Dragoons, a few artillerymen, and three light guns. Of militia there were three hundred of the Lincolns under Colonel Dickson and Major Secord, and the same number of Indians. With a little over two thousand men in all, Riall moved forward from his lines of defence on the Chippewa on July 5 to meet the enemy on the open half-mile strip between the water and the forest, which for obvious reasons was the distinguishing characteristic of so many battlefields in this war. Both forces, as elsewhere, had one flank on the river, the other on a wood which was occupied by their respective clouds of skirmishers and Indians. Generals Scott and Ripley led the two brigades of American regulars, which, with a third of volunteers and Indians, were extended along the line of Street's Creek, and amounted in all to about four thousand five hundred men. The battle thus fought between the two tributary streams opened with the easy repulse of the few British Indians in the woods to the right by Porter's brigade of mixed irregulars. But on the advance of the first British line of the Royal Scots, the looth and the Lincoln militia, Porter's men fell back without loss, but in haste and disorder, on their main body, who had nine field pieces skilfully placed. The Americans, now rapidly acquiring under discipline and experience the qualities of veteran troops, encountered the attack of the smaller force with steadiness both in front and on their left, where Ripley with his brigade had in view the turning of the British right. The battle began about four and was hotly con- tested, the British, with many former fields in mind, throw- ing themselves with great courage again and again upon Scott's lines, but this time all in vain. The superior numbers of the Americans were now able to do themselves
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justice, and their guns played upon the British with great effect. As Riall was acting on the defensive, it seems some- thing rash to have thus abandoned the line of the Chippewa and attacked the Americans with such advantage at any rate as their smaller stream gave them. When Riall drew off his men, though in good order, to his own lines behind the Chippewa, and then repulsed an attempt to cross it, the battle was over, and he had lost a fourth of his small army, but practically no prisoners. The 1st Royal Scots lost nearly half their strength, as did also the looth. The militia fought bravely and suffered considerably, but the 8th were only slightly engaged. The Americans, who only lost about three hundred and fifty men, claimed a victory. It seems too that their calculations did not include Porter's brigade driven off early in the fight, nor yet Ripley's, which, attempting a flanking movement in the woods, was not much engaged, but for this very reason held the 8th Regi- ment also out of action, though this gallant corps was enumerated as being in the thick of it. This, however, does not much matter. Riall attacked, partially justified to be sure by recent tradition and experience, when he was lead- ing a campaign of defence, and was repulsed to the lines he had to defend, losing more men than he could afford. This was the sum-total of the battle. But with scarcely any artillery, and the Chippewa indefensible higher up, and his force greatly reduced, he now retired from his lines, and on the 8th reached Fort George, where he was met by eight hundred Glengarries and U.E. militia. Leaving his wounded and some of his men here he started for Burlington heights to unite with the iO4th and fla.nk companies of the iO3rd, who held that post. Brown meant well, but he could not control the New York militia either in the face of the foe or when a defenceless country was to be ravaged. The frontier was now again exposed to these gentry, and Colonel Stone of their service burned the village of St. Davids, for which Brown cashiered him. ' My God ! ' writes an American officer who was killed at Lundy's Lane at the head of his
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regiment the next day, ' what a service ! I have never witnessed such a scene. If their commanding officer had not been disgraced and sent out of the army I should have handed in my sheepskin.'
Brown pressed on to Queenston, doubtful whether to attack Fort George or follow Riall on his way to Burlington. He now learned that the latter was reinforced and lying at Fifteen Mile Creek but a dozen miles away. And more important still, that Chauncey, on whose fleet he counted, had failed him ; another case of jealousy, but apparently of a 'service' rather than a personal nature, with the merits of which, and the acrid correspondence that discussed them, we are not concerned. It is enough that while a council of war were considering whether they should invest Fort George or attack Riall, they were suddenly apprised of the fact that the latter was at Queenston. Brown at once retreated to the south bank of the Chippewa, while Riall's van almost immediately afterwards, following on the same road along the Niagara river to the Falls, halted somewhat more than a mile short of them upon some rising ground, across which, and at right angles to the river, ran the in- significant but historic byway known as Lundy's Lane. This point was reached on the morning of July 25th, and in position there were the Glengarry Regiment, a company of the iO4th, five hundred local militia, and a few dragoons and artillerymen, just under one thousand in all. The main body, somewhat more numerous, through some mistake did not arrive till after sunset, when the battle was half over. A third division of eight hundred men under General Drummond had been hastily brought across the lake from York and, marching independently, arrived just in time to turn a retreat into a battle. Brown, though only three miles away, had not discovered the advance of the British to Lundy's Lane till noon, and it was late in the afternoon when he sent Scott with his brigade to feel the force of the enemy. Riall, with nothing but his first division and the whole of the American army before him, ordered Colonel
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Pearson to retire. Soon afterwards, however, Drummond came up, counter-ordered the movement, and with about seventeen hundred men in all, formed his line of battle to meet the enemy, who were close at hand. Drummond had with him the Spth, the 8th, and detachments of the 1st and 4 ist, and among them Colonel Morrison, who had won the fight at Chrystler's farm. Winfield Scott had thirteen hundred men in his own division and attacked the low ridge held by the British an hour before Ripley's brigade of regulars, sixteen hundred strong, and Porter's volunteers of thirteen hundred, arrived. The attack was vigorously delivered mainly on the British centre, and with a view to turning their left in a gap above the seething waters of the Niagara river, just below the Falls, that Drummond's extended line could not cover. Scott was repulsed, but the slender British force could not venture to follow up any advantage with the two other American brigades only now coming into action, and their own third division marching from Oueenston at a quite doubtful distance. At half-past seven the rest of the American army joined issue, making a total of over four thousand, and the British were heavily pressed, their left above the Niagara cliffs being once actually turned, and the 8th and the militia stationed there being driven back over the Queenston road. But re-forming behind the main body they returned to the attack and recovered the position, though at this point General Riall was wounded and captured. The seven British guns on the top of the ridge, which were doing great execution, and were covered by the 89th and detachments of the Royal Scots and 41 st, now became Brown's principal object, and he sent that excellent officer, Colonel Miller, with seven hundred men of various battalions against them. It was now almost dark, and as Miller's men advanced against the guns one of his regiments received such a hot fire and sub- sequent bayonet charge that it broke utterly. In the con- fusion and darkness, however, and with much adroitness, Miller led the rest of his men undiscovered up to a brush-
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grown rail fence close to the muzzles of the British guns. From thence they poured in a discharge that killed and wounded every gunner and rushed in on the battery, which was out of action for the rest of the fight, though owing to the staunchness of the infantry on the ridge the Americans never succeeded in getting away with the guns. Soon after nine the third British corps, some thirteen hundred strong, under Colonel Hercules Scott, the victims of much futile marching and counter-marching for the whole of a hot day, reached the field, now shrouded in moonless night, illumined only by the flare of the musketry. These weary newcomers consisted of the iO3rd, iO4th, some more of the Royal Scots and 8th, with three hundred militia and a couple of guns. Part of this force in the turmoil and dark- ness ran unawares right into the American centre, now on the top of the hill, and were repulsed in confusion by a withering fire. The Americans now held the hill and the British position along most of the line, and Drummond re-forming his troops, with the new arrivals now recovered from their rough reception in the second line, made a vigorous attempt to regain it, which was entirely successful. But for nearly three hours of that July night the battle raged furiously along the very ridge where two hours before sunset the combatants had first joined issue. The Americans, unlike the British, had come into the fight fresh, but were now suffering from excessive thirst, to which their people, then as now incessant water drinkers, were more liable than the European in similar emergencies. About midnight Brown drew off his whole force, leaving his dead and badly wounded behind, the British in the position they had taken up in the morning and the guns still on the hill. Such was the battle of Lundy's Lane, the most fiercely contested of any in this war. The loss of the British was nearly a third of those engaged, that of the Americans nearly a fourth of their larger force, and one may wonder how many of the countless visitors to Niagara Falls remem- ber that the bones of several hundred men killed in a famous
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battle, fought in great part by the light of its own gun fire, mingle with the dust about their feet. The Sgth Regiment lost much more than half its numbers, the Royal Scots in the two battles of Chippewa and Lundy's Lane four hundred, and the active militia about half of those engaged. Their colonel, Robinso'n, was badly wounded, while Genera] Drummond himself was severely wounded, but kept his post. So also was Morrison, and Riall, as already men- tioned, was captured as he was proceeding wounded to the left rear. On the American side Generals Brown and Winfield Scott were both severely wounded. Ripley, next in command, had orders to attack the British on the follow- ing morning, a venture one can well understand his men were in no condition to attempt. But instead of this he burnt the bridge over the Chippewa, flung a portion of his stores and tents into the Niagara river, and retreated to Fort Erie with Drummond's light troops on his heels. Lundy's Lane was a desperate hand-to-hand encounter, in which both sides fought till they were exhausted and left off where they began. Strategically, of course, the sole advantage was with the British. The Americans were try- ing to drive them out of western Canada, and failing at Lundy's Lane to break through Drummond's defence, retired somewhat precipitately, destroying at the same time much of their stores, to Fort Erie, and were virtually besieged there at the edge of the country for the rest of the season. Some American historians claim Lundy's Lane as a victory. If so, an invaded nation might pray for a long series of such defeats. Canadian writers, on the other hand, speak of the * flight of the American army from the field to Fort Erie.' Ripley's retreat on the next day was per- haps superfluously undignified, but to describe it as a flight is certainly an exuberance of patriotism. The Americans failed in their object undoubtedly, but the actual fight was unquestionably a drawn one, and it seems a pity to mar an incident replete with dogged valour and endurance on the part of the soldiers, both the American regulars and the
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British of all arms, by patently absurd statements on the one hand and rather ungenerous and misleading phraseology on the other. Seldom have British infantry, on the top too of an exhausting day's march in a hot sun, shown their great qualities more conspicuously than on that black July night within reach of the very spray of Niagara. The U.E. militia too, not merely the incorporated but the sedentary companies, who returned after the battle to their ripening harvest fields, fought with equal staunchness, rallying when hard pressed with the coolness of regulars around the regimental colours planted along that stubbornly-contested and firelit ridge. Within sight of the lofty shaft on Queens- ton heights, commemorating a noble soldier and the repulse of the first attempt at invasion, there rises on the lower ridge of Lundy's Lane a humbler obelisk in memory of what may be called the last attempt and the stubborn infantry, British and Canadian, who fell in defeating it. For the rest of the season Drummond was more or less investing Fort Erie, and on August 15 he made a desperate assault on its now large and formidable works, a night attack delivered at three points. It was no surprise, for every attempt was received with a deadly fire, and the defenders were more numerous than the attacking party. On this night too the de Watteville Regiment, hitherto steady, stampeded, carrying with them the 8th. Deprived of their flints, so that the bayonet alone might be used, and with scaling-ladders which proved much too short, they were severely tried. The left of the works, which were half a mile in length, was attacked by Colonel Hercules Scott and his regiment, the iO3rd, who were received with withering volleys of musketry and grape which killed Scott and knocked over a third of his men.
In the centre under Colonel Drummond a small force, mainly of the iO4th, joined by a number of Scott's baffled men of the losrd, performed one of the most heroic deeds of the war, but most disastrous in its effect. After three or four determined efforts against the abatis in the teeth of the fire of sheltered riflemen innumerable, they won a
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bastion and held it, neither could the repeated and desperate attacks nor the hottest fire of the enemy dislodge those intrepid men. General Gaines had succeeded Brown, who was laid up with his wounds, and appears from the style of his despatches to have been a belated specimen of the Jeffersonian Democrat politician once more in the field. He writes to his government of the approach of the British on this night as being 'enveloped in darkness, black as their designs and principles.' No soldier, certainly none occupying his neighbour's territory, could have written such stuff as this.
Nothing, however, could dislodge the British from the captured bastion, when Gaines seems to have been informed by an officer that there was a store of powder under it, and that he could blow them to pieces in a moment. The suggestion was promptly and perhaps legitimately adopted by the virtuous general, and with a terrific explosion three or four hundred gallant soldiers with the masonry of the bastion were blown high into the air. This may not have been out of accord with the most illuminating principles, but it was extremely characteristic that the successful Guy Fawkes should sit down and write to the Washington Government that the bastion 'was carried at the point of the bayonet with dreadful slaughter/ The explosion put an end to everything, for some four hundred or five hundred British soldiers were either killed or wounded by it. The total casualties of the attacking force amounted in consequence to something like nine hundred, one or two regiments being almost destroyed. Several incidents took place during the autumn, and the Americans made an attack in force on Drummond's lines, which after a loss of several hundreds on both sides was repulsed. Izard too came up and replaced the unctuous and unveracious despatch-writing Gaines, who was wounded while actually seated at his desk wielding the eloquent but erring pen, which really does seem a quite remarkable instance of retributive justice.
Two Peninsular regiments now came up to Drummond,
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and though Izard had eight thousand men at Fort Erie, the fact of Yeo having again wrested the command of Lake Ontario from Chauncey made the American general hesi- tate to press on into Canada until the time for winter quarters had arrived. Several small raids were made ; Port Dover and Port Talbot on Lake Erie, peaceful villages, were burnt and ravaged by filibustering parties, while Colonel M'Arthur from Detroit with seven hundred Ken- tucky horsemen, made a much more serious one in late October through the heart of the peninsula as far as Burford. But on the approach of the iO3rd Regiment he retraced his steps, having been three weeks in the country and done a great deal of damage by fire and requisition on property, and left a further instalment of bitter memories to be hugged by Canadian firesides. Fort Erie was dis- mantled and evacuated by Izard's army at the beginning of November, and with his departure we also may leave Upper Canada, now clear once more of all enemies. After three campaigns it was still intact though much ravaged, and more pronounced than ever in its political convictions which henceforward its people were left in peace to cultivate. Nor can I do more than repeat here that the north-western post of Michillimackinac was captured by the British early in the war ; and add that a thousand disorderly men, with the unopposed American fleet on the western waters at their disposal, vainly attempted its recapture but did a little profitable plundering among the few traders' stores at the Sault Ste. Marie and elsewhere. So the famous old post, even then still far into the wilderness and the scene for so many generations of romantic combats by land and sea between various races, remained with the British to hand back again at the peace. Commodore Chauncey and Sir James Yeo had alternately held the supremacy of Lake Ontario, an advantage depending mainly on the activity which they respectively showed in the building of the quickly constructed short-lived little war-ships that so vitally influenced the land operations.
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And now it only remains to say something of the last year's fighting, or rather inglorious campaigning, in eastern Canada, where the luckless Prevost with the finest troops that probably ever set foot upon American soil contrived something approaching disgrace, and to sully at its close the three years' glorious defence of Canada. To those who have followed through these three chapters the tough struggles of little handfuls of men and of battles, decided sometimes by a single regiment at half strength, the hearing that 16,000 of Wellington's veterans had now landed in Canada will cause something like a start. Two regiments, as we know, went up to Drummond in the autumn, but most of these troops were in the neighbourhood of Kingston and Montreal, and unfortunately for every one but the Americans, were under Prevost's immediate command. Though as regards despatches the Governor had the ear of the Home Government, other tongues and other pens had by this time been busy enough with his military incapacity, his utter want of nerve, and the obstinacy that often marks the timid man. So it had been politely but forcibly intimated that these choice troops who had won battles and sieges innumerable and fought and marched for years through Spain and France were not sent out for the purpose of making futile demonstrations. They were meant to strike with; in other words, that Prevost must now accomplish some- thing definite. So the invasion of New York State by the old Champlain route was decided upon. Perhaps Prevost was ahead of his age ; at any rate his reliance on sea power as represented by the lakes was almost an obsession, tender as he had been of his enemy's naval resources at Sackett's Harbour. Plattsburg on the west shore of Lake Champlain, and twenty-five miles over the border-line, was the first objective point, redolent as it was of the memories of Hampton and Wilkinson and their perform- ances, which Prevost was to emulate. The east shore of the lake was to be avoided, as it was in the State of Vermont, whose heart was not in the war, and who had in
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fact been doing a roaring trade in beef and flour with the British army all through it. There was now a weak British flotilla on the Lake with a big ship not yet quite fit for sea, and Captain Dowie was sent by Yeo to take charge of this little fleet which was lying at Isle-aux-Motte in the Richelieu river. Prevost, with de Rottenburgh as second in command, picked up his troops quartered for the most part on the old camping and fighting ground between Montreal and the head of Lake Champlain, and marched toward Plattsburg with 1 1 ,000 of perhaps the best soldiers at that moment in the world ; men not accustomed merely to summer campaigns in Flanders, but who had faced every vicissitude of heat and cold and every physical obstacle that nature could confront them with, to say nothing of Napoleon's soldiers, and to whom the now half-cleared American forest of this district in the pleasant season of early autumn must have seemed almost a holiday country. Izard with his army had recently left Plattsburg, and as we know had reinforced Fort Erie. There was now nothing there but a trifle of fifteen hundred regulars under a good soldier, Macombe, and behind admirable defences, together with a mob of militia hastily gathered from the surrounding country. As Prevost advanced with prodigious delibera- tion along good roads, Macombe made more than one attempt to check him. His militia, he says himself, ran at the sight of the British, who ' did not deign to fire on them except by their patrols.' Major Wool, whom we have met before, handled some guns with admirable effect, but so undaunted by it, says Macombe again, were the British veterans that they never even deployed but pressed on in columns. When the Americans had concentrated in Platts- burg and Prevost had sat down within a mile of it, Macombe was working very hard at his defences, which lay on a ridge but need not be described as they were never attacked, while behind them, as before mentioned, were fifteen hundred regulars and about two thousand militia. Had Drummond been there with the comparatively feeble
2 A
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force by which he held Brown, Gaimes and Izard at Fort Erie, he would have attacked Plattsburg without hesitation. Prevost could have walked over it. But he was obsessed of 1 naval co-operation,' admirable on normal occasions but with this man a kind of fetish. He must also have been, like many of his kind, invincible against remonstrance. There was a small American fleet in Plattsburg harbour and a rather smaller British one higher up the lake, as we know, under Dowie. So Prevost arranged with the latter to come down and fight the enemy's fleet in the harbour while he attacked the intrenchments. Bowie's largest ship was not quite ready, so Prevost kept his 11,000 veterans marking time for five days before a task that one of his generals of world-wide experience assured him would take about twenty minutes, while the Americans, though nothing could have saved them had another officer been in Prevost's place, could at any rate put in five more days' work on their fortifications. At length Dowie had his flag- ship ready and gallantly sailed down the lake, entered the difficult harbour, and engaged the somewhat superior arma- ment within it with the result that he was beaten after a stubborn fight, being himself killed at the beginning of it, which may have influenced the result. The shape of the harbour, the disposition made by Macdonough, the American commodore within it, and the direction of the wind at the time, put Dowie at an immense disadvantage. But Prevost after opening his batteries in half-hearted style on the enemy, gave in at once when the result of the naval en- gagement, which he had not even concurrently supported, was evident. Incredible as it seems, he at once ordered a retreat. His generals and his colonels protested, but protests from old soldiers never had affected Prevost. ' Naval co-operation ' was at an end ; that was enough for him. It is not denied, if the expression is allowable, that it would have been child's play for these superb troops to have carried intrenchments held by one-seventh of their number of soldiers and a mob of militia. From these, if
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captured before the sea-fight, Prevost could have driven the American fleet to fight in open water, or attacking after the naval engagement could have recovered the crippled British ships as well as the cripples of the enemy. It was supposed at the time that Macombe merely contem- plated a brief show of resistance had Prevost attacked, nor would such a course under the circumstances have been any discredit to him. No one in his army, it is said, was more amazed, and naturally no one so delighted.
So Prevost, having first destroyed a quantity of his own stores, marched his Peninsular veterans back to Montreal. There appears to have been an unusual amount of desertion on the return journey, and one can well believe that the men who had chased the French across the Pyrenees reflected that working on a farm was better entertainment, and not less glorious, than following such a general as they had discovered in Canada. The officers must almost have regretted that they too could not desert. The total casualties of Prevost's advance division in approaching their position before Plattsburg from cannon and rifle fire, which Macombe, it will be remembered, said they scorned to recognise by deploying, was about a hundred and eighty ; the bulk of the force was not even engaged. The jubilation which succeeded to the astonishment of the Americans was very natural. Prevost wrote home that just as his troops were in the very act of storming the Plattsburg lines ' he had the mortification to hear the shouts of victory announc- ing the defeat of the flotilla in the harbour,' and that without the co-operation of the vessels it would have been useless to go further. The next summer a naval court- martial was held on the little sea fight, which found that the fleet had been lured to destruction by an unfulfilled promise of land co-operation. This brought a summons to Prevost to come home and give an account of himself, at which, being a man quite without guile but assuredly pos- sessed of a vein of obtuseness or self-complacency, he seems to have been surprised and hurt. Indeed so much
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so that his health, injured by an overland journey in winter to Halifax, broke down under the suspense of a deferred court-martial, and he died in England about a year later, at the early age of forty-eight. He was a quite blameless and well-meaning man in the ordinary affairs of life, very amiable and popular with the French Canadians, who by comparison felt the strain of war nowise, prices being good and money plentiful. Most of those who served actively were regular soldiers in Government pay, while their province remained intact. Prevost's nice behaviour to them, and his excellent French accent, were useful assets in the back- ground, and in a minor sense were of value to the defence of the country, while his hopeless inefficiency in the face of an enemy did not worry a community who, unlike the Upper Canadians, were enjoying the advantages rather than the terrors of war, not from any disinclination to take their share, but simply because war did not come their way. There is no evidence that Prevost failed in his more passive duties connected with the war, such as finding the ways and means for carrying it on, which was not easy, though Canadian historians blame him for laxity in shipbuilding in spite of the maritime obsession which signalised his final fiasco. But he is remembered as a man possessed of an amazing tenderness for the feelings of an enemy who were themselves somewhat truculent ; who made superfluous truces to suit their views which were avowedly aggressive ; who watched with complacency an enemy's fleet building in Sackett's Harbour, and subsequently, when he himself attacked, withdrew his forces as they were in the very act of striking the final blow. He is remembered as the general who ordered the evacuation of the whole peninsula of Upper Canada at a critical moment, an order happily and deliber- ately disobeyed by his subordinates, and who later on urged a second attack on Fort Erie to the enterprising fire- eating Drummond, who regarded it as too desperate, and was justified by its later evacuation. Above all he is remem- bered as the man who disgraced Wellington's veterans and
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spoilt the finish, so far as Canada was concerned, of a struggle in which it is no exaggeration, no mere redundancy of patriotism, to say that nearly all concerned actively in its defence till that moment had covered themselves with glory. This is not a history of the war. In three chapters it is only possible to give its salient points, enough to show what services were performed for three trying years by a handful of British and Canadian regulars of both races aided by a U.E. militia, who in no instance that I can find flinched or failed, and in a less degree by that of the French, for the simple fact that they lay adjacent to the quasi-friendly American States, and were not attacked. There was prac- tically none of the spirit of 1775-6, or of the years of the French Revolution, or again of the disaffection which, if partial, was conspicuous at a much later date. It is true that their Quebec politicians, with the enemy not far from their gates, excited themselves over matters that most small countries in imminent peril of their existence usually defer till a more appropriate period. This may perhaps be attributed in part to the flapping of immature and half- fledged political wings, and to the fact that the politicians were quite safe. The sedentary militia, both of Quebec and Montreal, showed every readiness to do their part should the occasion arise, and though the former never had a moment's anxiety, the latter had reason to give practical evidence of its undoubted ardour. A last word on Prevost may record the fact that great efforts, in view of the fact that death robbed him of the opportunity to defend himself, were made in behalf of his memory by his relations, and a monument erected to him in Winchester Cathedral. But the man who enjoys the lustre of conspicuous public position must stand or fall in his public character by the judgment of history, and not least by that of the people he governed even though they be three thousand miles away. It would be not unfair to say that Canada was saved in spite of Prevost, honestly zealous as he was to save Canada, though not always quite honest in his despatches, for the very shifts
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the poor man must have been sometimes put to in explain- ing away his military vagaries. And as an historical per- sonage of considerable fortuitous importance in North America he cannot be appraised, in spite of the eulogy at Winchester, on the principle of De mortuis nil nisi bonum. As I have considered it no part of my business here to describe the naval duels in the Atlantic between British and American frigates, that American historians very natur- ally dwell on at greater length and with more satisfaction than they do upon the events with which we have been con- cerned in the current chapters, so I need do no more than mention the British expedition to the Chesapeake, which took place at the end of this year 1814. English historians have followed suit, knowing, one may venture to say without offence, scarcely anything of this war, and dwelt upon these isolated sea fights, which, though admirable exhibitions of courage and seamanship, meant little, and had small effect on the war, to the exclusion of the far more vital conflict on Canadian soil that meant everything. The British expedi- tion under General Ross was directed against the South for reasons of equity as much as of military strategy. New England, though one or two small naval expeditions were sent against the coast of Maine, had now carried her denunciations of the war to serious threats of secession, and it was only just that Great Britain should strike against those who challenged her rather than those who had shown a stedfast aversion to picking a quarrel. The opportunity was given to the bellicose souls of Virginia and Maryland to flesh their swords and to President Madison to have a personal taste of the war he had helped to create. Ross's four thousand men, however, walked very easily through the defenders of Washington, scattered the government as well as their troops, and with much deliberation, as a return for the destruction of the government buildings of Upper Canada, burnt those at Washington to the ground. There was a tremendous outcry. Jefferson and Madison called all ancient and modern history, after the curious and portentous
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bombast of their day and type, to parallel so heinous a crime. Both of them knew perfectly well, and could not pretend to deny, that their people had meted out precisely the same treatment and a great deal more of it and with equal deliberation to the poor Canadians, while at that very moment M'Arthur was burning and robbing an unresist- ing yeomanry through seventy miles of Upper Canada. It would not indeed be worth dwelling upon the matter but for the fact that English historians, even such as Green, follow suit for the simple reason that the details of the Canadian war of 1812 are quite obviously altogether outside their purview. Three years of arduous fighting, distin- guished by many heroic deeds on the part of the British and Canadian soldiers, and resulting in the preservation of Canada to the Crown, does not somehow seem so contemptible a passage in British history as this indifference would indi- cate ! But the wanton burning of York and Newark and of many inglorious but hardly won and laboriously created villages and farms had been perpetrated long before the torch was applied to the public buildings at Washington, not merely as an answer but as a warning, and it served that purpose for the brief period of conflict that still re- mained for the Canadian frontier. English historians as a rule know little of all this, and echo the cry of wanton vandalism raised by the earlier American writers, who did know better, but for reasons of their own omitted the context. In this autumn too Sir John Sherbrooke, Governor of Nova Scotia, had led a small expedition to the mouth of the Penobscot in Maine, with a view of annexing that wedge of country between the Penobscot river and New Brunswick which geographically belongs to Canada. He met with but a slight and half-hearted resistance, the people being doubtless indifferent. He left a garrison there till the end of the war, when by the treaty all conquests were returned. It is a pity for all reasons that this wedge of country was not retained, as it created the Maine boundary question, and to this day is an eyesore on the map to the
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patriotic Canadian, and obviously out of focus to any eye. By the close of 1814 both sides were sick of war. The British government and people had never of course pro- fessed the slighest enthusiasm for it. How could they with all Europe on their hands and minds ? The northern States, as we have seen, were constantly threatening seces- sion, the burden of a war which they did not want having fallen most heavily upon them and their commerce. The war-hawks had reaped no glory. Such as there was had been gathered on the water, an element with which they had little to do, while general after general had gone home from the Canadian border on * long leave.' The militia with rare exceptions had nearly always failed in front of the enemy. The regular army had, to be sure, gained much experience, but an experience of no use whatever to a country entering upon a peace of over thirty years. The defence of New Orleans by General Jackson was almost the only bright spot in the military record, and this occurred early in 1815, after the peace preliminaries had been signed at Ghent between the two Powers on the day before Christmas 1814. The war party in America, re- presenting to a large extent the more ignorant and excit- able half of the country, had cherished the idea in the plantations and in the backwoods that Napoleon was in- vincible, and entered upon the struggle with a light heart as his ally, in opposition to what they had persuaded them- selves was a decaying nation. Pluckily as their own small navy had fought, they were practically cut off from the world. They could now neither buy nor sell and were face to face with ruin. They were virtually blockaded from Florida to Maine, while the southern people on the coast had been kept in a constant state of alarm by the menacing behaviour of small war parties sent here and there to divert some of the troops destined for Canada. Jefferson's confident and unsophisticated back-country friends had learned something of * sea power,1 and were now quite as ready as any for peace. Great Britain had suffered, however,
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a great deal from American privateers and still more from the loss of her American trade, and all this was only a heavy addition to the sacrifices she had made, and as it turned out had not quite done with, in her resistance to Napoleon. The peninsula of Upper Canada had suffered grievously from the legitimate horrors of war, and much more from the ruthless and irresponsible raider. But that region, after all, was then but a small fraction of the British North American provinces. These upon the whole had profited in every way, in military reputation, in self-confidence and even in trade, by the war. Above all, the latter definitely settled the question of the ' fourteenth State.' Canada, both French and English, had given a decisive answer. However they might quarrel among themselves, the war had made a breach that gave Upper Canada over wholly to the U.E. influence, which in truth had needed no such conflict as this to perpetuate its principles. To the mass of Upper Canadians of hitherto indifferent or wavering opinions it put American prepossessions out of the question either as a matter of personal conviction or as a thing any longer to be tolerated in the expression. The French Canadians, whose previous and partial fraternisation with the Ameri- cans had of course been artificial and, unlike the other, without any national and racial affinities, had shared in the very real military triumph which Canada could boast of. They had already as regards their intelligent classes long done with France politically and for obvious reasons, while the parishes could never again be the happy hunting-ground of the American propagandist.
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CHAPTER XV
CONCLUSION
THE treaty of peace virtually restored matters between the two countries to the status quo. The conquest of Canada had been a leading object of one party to the struggle, its preservation the sole object of the other. The aim of the first had been utterly frustrated, that of the second had been entirely successful. The principles for which the war had been ostensibly waged by the Americans as regards the Orders in Council, had been, it will be remembered, conceded by Great Britain just before the first shot was fired. As to the right of search for deserters on the high seas which was tenaciously adhered to by the British, it was virtually ignored at the treaty. As a matter of fact, however, the times had wholly changed. Peace had fallen on a war- weary world and Napoleon was thought to be permanently out of mischief at Elba. Friction on the ocean had automatically ceased, and the American Government was not prepared to prolong a ruinous war for principles that were not likely to be put to the test in their time. Every one, in short, was only too relieved by what seemed a real and lasting peace. When in the same spring Napoleon burst again upon the world for those memorable ' Hundred days ' that terminated with Waterloo, the fact of the American war forces itself incidentally for the moment on the thousand readers so familiar with the greater struggle, for the cream of Wellington's infantry at this crucial moment was in Canada. Every one knows too that the British army at Waterloo was of very uneven quality,
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and contained an unusually large element of recruits and militiamen, a fact which has always given its performance upon that immortal day exceptional significance. So no one will need more than reminding that it was the recent defence of Canada that created Wellington's chief difficulty before Waterloo. For a not greatly inferior force numerically to that which filled the British squares at Waterloo, and of higher average quality, had been recently marched away by Prevost from a trumpery and feebly-manned intrenchment on Lake Champlain and were now kicking their heels on the banks of the St. Lawrence or in mid-ocean homeward bound.
With that most significant of all years, that most luminous of all dates perhaps in recent history, 1815, Canada too winds up an epoch. Hitherto her story has been generally an eventful, sometimes a dramatic one, and always more or less concerned with the great events then going forward in he world. Indeed it is on this account I have ventured to solicit for it the interest of outside readers. Henceforward it is an wholly domestic tale, interesting mainly to those curious in constitutional questions and experiments, or in colonial progress. Two clearly marked stages in Canada's progress towards political salvation, each covering about a quarter of a century, followed the war, and both were in a sense political failures. The first wound up in partial and simultaneous rebellion in both provinces, due in the one to the indiscreet pretensions of an oligarchy and in the other to something resembling this, further complicated by racial bitterness. This epoch was closed by Lord Durham's advent and famous report in 1838-9. The two provinces were now united in a single Parliament, which scheme also proved a failure, till in 1867 came the great work of Federa- tion which in a different sense from that implied by the title of this book might also be truly called the making of Canada.
The most pronounced social and political feature, how- ever, that followed the war in Upper Canada was the con-
38o THE MAKING OF CANADA
solidating of all power in the hands of a class, represented or at least led by a group of families and hence known as * The Family Compact' As we have seen, this movement actually arose before the war from the peculiar composition and antecedents of the U.K. settlers and the physical con- ditions of the country. As the better sort of this body regarded themselves as the peculiar heirs of Upper Canada and entitled to a chief share, not only in directing its destinies but in such good things as the increasing require- ments of the province made available, so the war served to accentuate their position and even increase their sense of proprietorship. For they and their followers had naturally played the most prominent part in it of all the local elements, and formed the bulk of the militia regiments that fought through it so staunchly. The mass of the later immigrants from the States, their feelings not being deeply involved either way, took a comparatively small share in the defence but represented among them no doubt every variety of attitude and opinion according to circumstances and the course of the war.
The others, however, had been passionately in earnest, for obvious reasons. And at the close of the war their leaders, together with all their connection, considered that they had further title both to the gratitude of Great Britain and to the best things of the great province they had been the first to settle and the foremost of its people to fight for. Further- more, they represented the bulk of its educated class. They came out of the war more intensely British and anti- republican than ever. A small oligarchy, already in the making out of this class, consolidated itself after the peace and virtually ruled Upper Canada, as well as most of its successive governors till it provoked rebellion, and indeed its members retained considerable prestige, sometimes well earned, till the period of Federation in 1867 or even later. The Family Compact, a borrowed phrase not strictly applicable, is indeed the leading note in Upper Canadian history from the war till the political union of the province
CONCLUSION 381
with its French neighbour. It is a somewhat picturesque situation this small aristocracy, based very literally in the main on its military service to the Crown, planted in a crude new country and withstanding the popular instincts of a democratic freeholding yeomanry for nearly two generations. For this, as was shown when dealing with its inception, was no territorial aristocracy, such as had existed in a modified form in the American provinces and even yet existed in a still more modified one. Canadian land was a useless instrument for political or social power. It was inadaptable to anything of the kind, and these people had very early recognised its futility. They were judges, lawyers, bankers, doctors, and above all office-holders ; for they kept a tight grip on the emoluments of the province. They lived in Toronto, Kingston, and a few smaller towns which they made extremely pleasant places of abode, and where a certain simplicity of life, for incomes and fortunes were small, was combined with a general air of good breed- ing. Their attitude was aristocratic, and a contempt for the populace who were clearing the forests and conducting its minor trades was at any rate a leading indictment against them in the long struggle for power made by the growing popular party. In a sense they were more truly aristocrats than the old families in the American provinces from whom many of them sprang, for their claims to precedence were largely based on military service to the King and the de- votion of two generations through two long and sanguinary wars. The ingredients of the Family Compact were not literally confined to those who had such claims, and a part of the U.E. rank and file were in the other camp, but it was of such that the nucleus was composed. As the tone was largely social, it will be readily understood that other elements in sympathy with class distinctions as opposed to democratic influences, retired officers from Great Britain and their equivalents, were gathered within the fold, sup- porting and sometimes sharing in its influence. Successive governors with their entourage, and British garrisons
382 THE MAKING OF CANADA
quartered in the country, had natural affinities with a caste who, if they monopolised the offices, also monopolised most of the graces to be found in a new country. History * denounces them as arrogant and intolerant. They were certainly out of touch with that democratic note that the retrospective modern looks for in a young and struggling country. But they and their fathers had lived through stirring times that are not easy for the modern voter or politicain in a latter-day oversea community to realise without an effort of imagination that he may sometimes be incapable of making. Democracy to them was the parent of all evil. The United States was from their point of view an abiding example of its anarchic principles. They were human too, and self-interest was strong within them, and that they overdid their part is beyond question. They fought the growing opposition in the elective assembly with the formidable weapons which at that day the control of the Governor, the Executive, the Council, the justiciary and practically all the offices made possible, though not without a good many dramatic incidents and the making of a good many popular martyrs. They became so exclusive that even educated and well-endorsed Englishmen not seldom found the gates of a career in the higher walks of life closed against them, sometimes to become themselves leaders in the popular opposition and sometimes to publish for British readers trenchant accounts of the parlous state of the Canadian body politic. Occasionally even appointments made by the British Government itself were flouted.
In the face of a democracy growing by leaps and bounds through natural increase and an immense immigration, it may be a matter of surprise how such an oligarchy succeeded in defying it for so long. The reason is not far to seek, and has indeed been already hinted at in a former chapter touching upon the origin of these peculiar conditions. Upper Canada remained almost wholly an agricultural country, and for two generations after the war the laborious process of clearing its forests continued. Agriculture even
CONCLUSION 383
in the cleared regions entailed a hard, absorbing, isolated life, and educational facilities had been slow in reaching the rural districts. Even the more accessible communities had been a long time in acquiring sufficient political vitality to make effective attacks on the well-disciplined centres of power and privilege.
Emigration from Great Britain into Upper Canada between the war and 1840 was continuous. The Home Government took an active part in promoting it, no less than fifty thousand souls being landed at Quebec in a single year, while the old influx from the States had almost dried up. These new-comers, immense benefit as they ultimately proved to the country, being almost wholly of the labouring class, had neither the time nor the equipment in the first generation to concern themselves much with politics. They came largely from the surplus agricultural population, with which all three Kingdoms at that time, strange as it reads now, were equally encumbered. The statistics of these move- ments, too, show an English element as large even in pro- portion as that from Scotland and Ireland, nor is there any sign that it proved, as now, somewhat inferior in the colon- ising qualities to the others. The reason for this, too, seems tolerably obvious. The Englishman, like the others, then came mainly from the rural districts, added to which his greater propensity to quarrel with strange conditions of life did not then much matter, as he had to stay in the bush whether he liked it or not till he outgrew this particular form of nostalgia and his robuster qualities asserted them- selves.
The rebellion of Mackenzie in 1837, which incidentally put an end to the rule of the Family Compact (so called), was a feeble effort in itself, but expressed the rising tide of popular feeling. It was concurrent with that of Papineau in the Lower Province, equally futile but expressive of a somewhat similar protest against a condition of things only differing in detail from the situation in Upper Canada, but complicated by racial bitterness and other matters which
384 THE MAKING OF CANADA
cannot be as briefly tabulated. Neither movement was directed against British rule, though it included a few individuals who were, but against the withholding what the malcontents considered as the promised privileges of British representative and responsible government. Their demand to-day would be considered only natural and just. They had been given the shadow but not the substance of the British Constitution, which last, as a matter of fact, had been promised, to Upper Canada at any rate, at the division of the provinces in 1791. That neither were then ripe for it for somewhat different reasons will be the opinion of most students of the period. That its full privileges were with- held too long, and grave abuses thereby engendered, would seem equally certain. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, though removed from the racial problems and alien dangers that give peculiar interest to the story of the Canadas, each witnessed a more or less prolonged struggle between privi- lege and democracy, the former represented by a some- what similar element to that which dominated Upper Canada. This element in all the provinces were, for the most part, members of the Anglican Church and supporters of its pretensions to exclusive official recognition and other favours. The mass of the Protestant population belonged to other denominations, and resented this claim to preced- ence on the part of the Church, which, as that of a caste against whom they had other grievances, became to some extent identified with what was regarded as the latter's political and social arrogance. Mere priority would in those days have doubtless been taken as a matter of course in a British colony even by Presbyterians, but there was more than this here, for every seventh parcel of the Crown lands throughout Upper Canada had been reserved for the support of the Church of England. In course of time, as population increased, this endowment began to rankle in the minds of the Presbyterians and nonconformist majority, more espe- cially so as these scattered tracts remaining mostly un- cleared, were a serious obstacle and inconvenience to the
CONCLUSION 385
rapidly settling neighbourhoods around them. The question of the ' Clergy reserves ' was a burning one in Upper Canada through the whole of the period referred to, and helped still further to embitter the populace against the oligarchy, who stood for the Church. A staunch supporter of Family Compact rule, many of whose leading members he had personally educated, and a militant fighter for Anglican supremacy, was the able and famous Bishop Strachan of Toronto, born, strange to say, in a Scottish manse.
I had intended to limit this book absolutely to the eventful half-century it professes to deal with, and to say my last word with the peace of 1815. But effective as this seemed in the intention, in its fulfilment my last pages had an appearance of incompleteness that seemed to invite criticism. Having endeavoured to modify this, I need only remind the reader again that the Union of the two provinces in 1841, the one five-sixths French, the other wholly British, under one Parliament and Executive, even with the privilege of responsible government, proved no cure for the political ailments of Canada. It is difficult to understand how any one could have imagined it would do so. The Union was serviceable, however, in hastening that federation into which Nova Scotia alone, which was then in no political straits and quite self-satisfied, came in with any considerable measure of reluctance.
But if Canada ailed politically, knew discontent and friction within her borders, and was the despair at times of her friends within and without, the half-century following the war and terminating with Federation was, despite a few interludes, one of amazing material development. The French habitants too, in their own slower way, developed their country, though at nothing like the rate they increased their numbers. The seigniorial rights were commuted for a lump sum in 1857, and the censitaires turned into free- holders. But for the British, both of the Upper and Lower Province, this was, agriculturally speaking, the golden age, in which a great majority of the farming population rose
2 B
386 THE MAKING OF CANADA
from the position of poor emigrants with a log shanty in the woods to become themselves, or in the persons of their chil- dren, the owners of one to two hundred acre farms, equipped with as good homesteads and buildings as in any country would be held sufficiently adequate. Canada had bred a race of farmers, inoculating her successive waves of immi- grants with their qualities, that for sturdy industry have never been surpassed ; and speaking broadly, grain, which at times touched high prices, was the basis of their success. There were no fortunes in it, no big men, as in Australia. Circumstances, alluded to early in this book, limited the scale. Penniless labouring men, or practically such, grew slowly into substantial yeomen. There they stopped, for their limitations became then practically those of an English freeholder in the same situation. This, broadly speaking, is the story of the Ontario that we see to-day. It was vir- tually completed in an agricultural sense by the year of Federation or soon afterwards, and allowing for difference in details, brought to a condition resembling England, or Denmark, or Pennsylvania, or any other old country where men and animals are well housed, convenient to all the requirements of civilisation, and where land has to be farmed more or less scientifically and intelligently to compete with the produce of distant virgin soils. In Ontario, as the old Upper Canada is now called, each region as it was suc- cessively cleared grew wheat on rich virgin soils for a cycle of years, as the North-West on a greater scale and for many more years with impunity does now. That, indeed, was the basis of its prosperity, the source of supply that enabled most of its earlier settlers to establish themselves so firmly ere the time came when they had to adopt other methods.
The old U.E. settlers and their neighbours, whom they regarded with such distrust, had of course a start of more than a generation of the British influx that set in after the war. But their settlements along the lake shores were but a small fraction of the Ontario that lies open to the eye of
CONCLUSION 387
the stranger to-day, not seriously altered since the decade following Federation. For I am taking no account of the recent manufacturing development and the rise of small towns with fresh railroads and other accessories due to such industries. Nor when I speak of the province of Ontario as being fully developed agriculturally by the year 1873, let us say to be safe, as I can speak of that period from experience, do I mean to imply that methods or improvements were perfected, but merely that, with trifling exceptions in the north-west of the peninsula, it was all approximately occupied by farmers and cleared of timber save such as was reserved for fencing and firewood. The reader must be reminded, however, that the Ontario1 of serious agriculture, of habitation and civilisation, is not the Ontario of the map, which covers an immense northern and western wilderness, valuable, with exceptions not worth considering, only for its timber and minerals. Ontario that stands in an agri- cultural sense for that great province, is only a broad belt from the Ottawa river along the northern shores of Lake Ontario, opening out into that fertile western peninsula so frequently dealt with in the preceding chapters. All this was fully occupied by the decade following Federation, and in this decade, that of the seventies, came the knowledge, though but half the truth, that Canada had a vast fertile West and consequently an altogether wider and greater future than men had been accustomed to anticipate. Curiously enough, the dawning of this prospect and the still recent political success of Federation, marked an apparent lull in the pace at which all the Canadian provinces, Quebec partially excepted, had been growing since the war of 1812. The last two decades of the nineteenth century may indeed be justly described as a period of disappointment. To fully indicate the reasons for this would not be difficult, but much too exacting on our space. When a once wild country, however, is at last cleared up and occupied, and immigra-
1 Note. — ' New Ontario ' of recent development, in the far West, toward the Manitoba border, is not considered here.
388 THE MAKING OF CANADA
tion inevitably ceases, one stimulant, as it were, is with- drawn. The high prices too following on a succession of great wars, had saved the old Provinces of Canada from greatly feeling this till the beginning of the eighties, when they found themselves in the situation agriculturally of an old country, suffering from Western competition and low prices. The great West had^ already been opened, to be sure, and bound to them by its now famous railroad, but as yet it had shown them more of its rough than its smooth side. It had carried away, too, a considerable fraction of their rural population and helped to depress the price of their farms. Nor did the New Eden for a long time seem to fulfil its promise. It was not as yet properly understood while continuous low prices, aggravated by physical mis- chances and coupled with an undeniably low winter tem- perature, checked that popularity with the European emi- grant which its productive, easily cultivated soil ought to have ensured. In short, it acquired a very indifferent repu- tation in Europe, and even Canadians of the old provinces viewed it as a place of settlement with mixed feelings. There were even men of sense who gravely affirmed that Manitoba would not prove permanently fitted for human habitation. The voices of its numerous friends within and without who stuck to it, and scouted all such pessimism, were not so audible. It grew, of course, quickly enough to surprise unsophisticated British globe- trotters, but Canadians knew, and Americans knew, that such was not the kind of progress a western country of that quality ought to make. The comparison with its prototypes south of the line was inevitable and discouraging. The old provinces too in the same period, though their big towns increased as well as their trade and manufactures, were far from satisfied with the outlook, if we except the French, whose temperament is more independent of material progress and statistics. They had reason for this, and comparison with their neighbours was significant. They had no longer any lands to offer the European emigrant that, with the virgin West both
CONCLUSION 389
British and American as an alternative, besides the attrac- tions of the other colonies, would have been worth his acceptance. That was, of course, inevitable ; but the flower of their own youth had been for long leaving them by thousands for the States, and the census returns of Ontario, the most prosperous region of all, had dropped to that of a normal European country. Solid comfort abounded, but individual wealth was rare, which seemed, with the example of the United States confronting them, vexatiously anomalous to the materially patriotic Canadian, almost indeed a reproach. The country, sound as it was, had an outside reputation of being relatively poor and certainly of being slow-going. The Canadians themselves echoed the cry, while their young men showed their views, as I have said, by a steady emigration to the States. The British capitalist thought lightly of the Dominion, not of its credit, which was above reproach, but of its scope as a profitable financial field. And this was all the harder as Canada seemed to possess every essential for rapid progress, including a vigorous people — equally capable as farmers, traders, or manufacturers. There was something the matter, but nobody quite knew what. It was in the very last years of the century that Canada ' found herself/ and commenced that new era of development which only to those who knew it before and after, fully reveals the breach which divides the Dominion of the nineteenth century from that of the twentieth.
The causes of this astonishing forward movement would provide material for a chapter. In brief, however, the Americans, who for nearly a century had looked on Canada commercially with good-natured contempt, discovered the North- West, a discovery stimulated by the virtual filling up, as the word there means, of their own West. They have come in since by the hundred thousand, ready-made Western farmers, with capital and experience. Concurrently, and no doubt half-consciously encouraged by the movement of such undoubted experts, and by a vigorous government
2 B 2
390 THE MAKING OF CANADA
immigration policy, an immense volume of emigration from Great Britain and elsewhere has steadily flowed into the same vast and fertile prairies. Above all, the movement has been wholly successful. The difficulties that troubled the earlier emigrants have proved to be, in the main, those of conditions now passed away, both natural ones incidental to a raw virgin country, and commercial ones inevitable to scattered remote communities. Though the world-price of grain is not greatly higher than in the depressing old times in the Canadian West, facilities for transport and the recog- nition of its peculiar value has raised the Canadian article to a price that spells prosperity, and that, humanly speaking, can hardly fail to be at least maintained in the future, while millions of virgin acres have yet to be broken, not only to grow grain but to feed stock. The old provinces, with their splendid water-power, more especially that of Upper Canada, in whose primitive woods, amid the far different scenes of other days, we have spent so much time in these pages, are the suppliers of these great and growing regions with practically every manufactured article they require. Here too and for this purpose American energy and capital of another sort has flowed in to share in the prosperity and incidentally strengthened the position of the Canadian manufacturer, who now, like the Canadian agriculturist, sends his wares to every quarter of the world.
The farmers of the old British provinces, and even parts of Quebec, have by degrees, and with much intelligence, adapted themselves to new conditions and Western com- petition. In the seventies and eighties they farmed very much on the lines of the lesser tenants in Essex or Suffolk or similar tillage districts in England, and only suffered less because they were in the main their own labourers. It is to their credit that they had begun very generally to readjust their methods before the present era set in. With dairying, and pedigree-stock, co-operation in most branches — not difficult with a uniform level of freeholders — poultry, fruit, and other small products, they are able to take full
CONCLUSION 391
advantage of their greatly improved local markets and the greater facilities for export. We have wandered something from the conventional path of history in this closing chapter, and this brief glance at a few of those the leading causes, which have contributed to the making of current history such as it is in Canada to-day. The atmosphere of Canada is not conducive, perhaps, to retrospection, of the kind at least to which this book invites. But not every new country — grafted as this is upon an older one — throws its roots back over so long, so chequered, and so picturesque a past, of which the half-century here dealt with is beyond doubt the most continuously stimulating portion.
INDEX
ABRAHAM, Plains of, 95.
Adams, S., 134, 210.
Adet, 223, 228, 242, 263.
Albany, 307.
Allen, Ethan, 70, 72, 79, 86, 125-6,
243, 320.
Ira, 125, 243.
Amherst, General, 3, 23, 161, 251.
Amherstburg, 304, 320.
Amiens, Peace of, 286.
Anderson, Captain, 99.
Armstrong, 290, 342.
Arnold, B., 70, 77, 82, 84, 90, 93, 95,
104, 105, 257. Astor,J.J., 307, 337-8.
BABY, M., 56, 180. Badeau, 277. Baie.St. Paul, 49. Bailly, 161. Baltimore, 294. Barclay, 336-8. Barnesfare, 94. Barre, 62. Beaujeu, de, 257. Beauport, 216.
de, 259.
Beaver Dam, 333, 335. Bedard, 276. Berkeley, 288. Black Rock, 318. Blanchet, 276. Boerstler, 335. Boisbriant, 165. Boston, 73, 130. Boune, de, 276. Bouquet, 113. Bourgoyne, 106-10. Boyd, 332, 349, 350. Braddock, 6.
Brant, 121, 152, 229, 256. Brantford, 152. Briand, 158.
Brock, 285, 299, 301-14. Brockville, 327.
Brown, 79, 80, 90, 95-6, 348-9, 350,
356, 358, 360-6. Brownstown, 320.
Buffalo, 309, 315, 318, 340, 349, 350. Burd, 1 20. Burford, 367. Burke, 9, 175-76.
Burlington Heights, 333, 341, 360-1. Burr, Aaron, 93. Burton, 3, 32. Bushy Run, 20. Butler, 120.
CALDWELL, 87, 97, 180, 250. Calhoun, 289. Calvet, 156. Camerons, the, 269. Campbell, 205. Cape Breton, 142.
Carleton, Sir Guy, 39, 45-8, 50, 51, 127-31, 136-9, 158-77, 183-4, 189,
190, 200-1, 205, 208, 215, 2l8, 223-
Lady M., 65, 106, 159, 227.
Carolina, South, 127.
North, 149.
Carrignan regiment, 15.
Carrol, 99.
Castlereagh, 272, 275.
Chalus, de, 259.
Chambly, Fort, 75, 103.
Champlain, Lake, 77, 103, 108, 150,
164, 285, 295, 299, 323, 346, 350,
356, 369. Chandler, 332-3. Charleston, 128, 131, 202, 203. Chase, 99.
Chateauguay, 344-50. Chatham, 270, 339.
Lord, 62.
Chaudiere, river, 84, 116.
Chauncey, 324, 329, 330, 332, 334,
336, 348, 358, 361, 367- Chesapeake, 288, 374. Chippewa, 318, 356, 359, 360, 364.
INDEX
393
Chittenden, 219, 243.
Christie, 249, 280, 282.
Chrystler's farm, 349, 350.
Clarke, G. R., 117, 218.
Clay, 14, 289, 291, 292, 297, 322
Clegg, 312.
Clinton, 128, 136.
Colbert, 12.
Contrecoeur, 76.
Cornwall, 350.
Cornwallis, 126, 257.
Craig, 274-82, 290.
Cramahe, 57, 58, 65, 76, 85, 86, 87,
158. Crown Point, 70.
DALEY, CAPTAIN, 346.
Dartmouth, Lord, 70, 72.
Dearborn, General, 96, 305, 307-8,
323, 327, 329, 330-5. Delawares, the, 207. Denant, Bishop, 254. Dennis, Captain, 313, 340. De Peyster, 196. D'Estaing, 114. Detroit, 11, 13, 21, 116, 150, 219, 256,
295, 299, 301-4, 306-7, 319, 367.
River, 320, 338.
Diamond, Cape, 89, 93.
Dickson, 272, 310, 350.
Disney, Captain, 44, 45.
Dorchester, Lord. See Carleton.
Dowie, 369, 370.
Drummond, Sir G., 302, 355, 357,
362-8.
Major, 344.
Duchesney, 251, 346. Dundas, 225. Dunn, 254, 283. Durham, 46.
EARLE, 324. Edgehill, 20. Egremont, Lord, 39. Elliot, 309. Elmslie, 257, 258. Erskine, 289. Eustis, Dr., 295, 301, 326. Evans, 311, 314.
FANNING, 146.
Fayette, La, 152.
Ferguson, 344.
Finlay, 76, 180, 183.
Fitzgibbon, 335.
Forster, 104, 105.
Forsyth, 327, 328, 348.
Fort Erie, 309, 314, 318, 364, 367.
Fort Garry, 270.
George, 311, 312, 314, 331, 332,
334, 341, 342, 358, 360, 361.
Maiden, 338.
Meigs, 321, 322.
William, 221.
Fouchet, 251. Four Corners, 344.
Mile Creek, 308.
Fox, C.J.,62, 175. Franklin, B., 70, 99, 132. Eraser, John, 49, 76, 180.
Malcolm, 93.
French town, 320, 321. Frobisher, 250. Frontenac, 150.
GAGE, 70, 73, 77.
Gaines, 366.
Gait, 260.
Gasp£, de, 166, 279, 283.
Gaspe, 249.
Genet, 202, 204.
George in., 22, 155, 212, 297.
Georgian Bay, 236.
Germaine, Lord, 103, 105, 107-9, I28.
Glad win, 19.
Glengarry, 149, 260, 269, 361.
Gore, Sir Francis, 264, 273, 285.
Grand River, 152, 270.
Grant, Judge, no.
Commodore, 185, 264.
Grants, the, 269. Graves, Admiral, 77.
HALDIMAND, GOVERNOR, 3, 111-15, 123, 125, 126, 147, 148, 152, 155-7.
Halifax, 10, 142-45, 103, 239, 244, 284.
Hamilton, Governor, 117, 158.
Alex., no, 203, 208.
Hammond, 200.
Hampton, Wade, 341, 344, 346-51.
Handcock, 356.
Harrison, General, 282,
336-9.
Harvey, 332, 349. Hatt, 312. Hays, the, 269. Henderson, 88. Hendricks, 83. Henry, Patrick, 140.
290.
Hey, 42, 44, 51, 59, 76, 85.
Hillsborough, Lord, 54.
Holcroft, 313.
Hope, Governor, 158.
Howe, General, 77, 108, 130, 136.
319, 321,
394
THE MAKING OF CANADA
Hubert, Bishop, 158, 161, 182. Hudson, 1 08.
Hull, General, 295, 301-6. Hunter, Governor, 259, 262-4.
ILLINOIS, the, 117.
Irving, 39.
Izard, 345, 367, 369.
JACKSON,;. M., 273.
General, 376.
fay, 132, 207, 210, 237, 287.
[eflferson, 202, 288, 289.
[enkin, 328.
fessup, 149.
[ohnson, Sir W., 20, 58, 75, 118.
Sir John, 118, 149, 184.
Guy, 1 1 8.
KENNEBEC, the, 82.
Kent, Duke of, 157, 182, 244, 325.
Kentucky, 263, 268, 319.
Kingston, 147, 184, 189, 190, 196,
237, 256, 266, 324, 327, 341,
368.
LA COLLE, 356.
La Corne, 31, 41, 76.
Lanaudiere, no, 166, 180, 249,
279.
La Prairie, 81. La Tourtre, 82. Laurens, 132. Laws, Captain, 96. Le Brun, 62. Leopard, the, 288. Levis, 3.
Lewis, 320, 334, 348, 349. Lewiston, 308, 314. Lincoln, General, 229. Liverpool, Lord, 297. Livingston, 80. Livius, Judge, 1 10. Long Island, 136.
Point, 231, 337.
Sault, 349.
Longueil, 15, 180. Lorette, 58. Lotbiniere, 251. Louis xiv., n. Louisbourg, 10. Louisiana, 288. Lundy's Lane, 356, 361-5. Lunenburg, 144. Lymburner, 167, 172-75. Lyttelton, Lord, 63.
MABANE, 24, 76, 180.
MacArthur, 304, 367, 375. M'Clure, 341, 342. Macdonald, Flora, 149. Macdonalds, the, 269.
M'Donnell, Bishop, 260. — Colonel, 310, 312, 313, 316, 327, 328, 345-8.
M'Donnells, the, 149.
M'Donogh, 370.
M'Intosh, Fort, 207.
M'Lean, 87, 88, 96, 97.
Macombe, 348, 369, 371.
Macovog, 43.
Macpherson, 269.
Madison, 290-3, 305, 338, 374.
Malbaie, 48.
Marryott, 59.
Maryland, 294.
Maseres, 44, 51, 59.
Mayanga, 304.
Merritt, 360.
Meyer, 332.
Miamee Indians, 205.
River, 208, 210, 237, 303, 320,
336.
Michigan, 219, 306.
Michillimackinac, 25, 219, 367.
Miller, 304, 334, 362.
Milnes, Governor, 249-53.
Minas Bay, 143.
Miquelon, 32.
Mississippi, 263.
Mohawk River, 120, 203.
Mohawks, the, 151.
Molson, 283.
Monk, 160, 204, 216, 353, 354.
Monroe, 288.
Montgomery, 78, 79, 90-7.
Montmorency Falls, 157, 182.
Montreal, I, 2, 25, 29, 32, 34, 41, 42, 43, 72, 73, 75, 76, 77, 81, 103, 104, 140, 141, 149, 160, 175, 178, 206, 227, 249, 280, 283, 295, 323, 341, 343, 344, 347, 348, 350, 368, 369, 37i,.373-
Moravian-town, 339, 340.
Morgan, D., 83, 93, 96, 97.
Maurice, 55, 137.
Morrison, 349, 350, 364.
Morse, 145.
Mountain, Bishop, 179, 182, 238, 250, 251, 254.
Muir, 304.
Murray, 3, 17, 18, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30-4, 42, 49.
Muskingum, 229.
NAIRNE, 49, 96.
INDEX
395
Napoleon, 286-8, 292, 295, 297, 298.
Newark, 256, 265, 342.
New Brunswick, 145, 146, 158, 172,
193-
Hampshire, 125.
Orleans, 263, 376.
York, 125, 127-30, 136, 137, 139,
161, 172, 308. Niagara, II, 116, 120, 121, 195-8,
219, 240, 256, 299, 341, 361.
Fort, 308, 310, 331, 332, 342.
River, 311, 358, 362, 364.
Nootka incident, 176.
North, Lord, 63, 70.
Nor '-Westers, the, 221.
Nova Scotia, 130, 142, 146, 158, 172,
182, 183, 192, 248.
OGDENSBURG, 317, 327, 328. Ohio, 117, 121, 205, 218, 263, 319. Orleans, Island of, 15, 48, 90, 99,
216.
Osgoode, 184, 199. Oswegatchie, 104. Oswego, 158, 219, 357. Ottawa River, 104, 221, 232.
PAINE, TOM, 134.
Panet, 251, 277.
Papineau, 353.
Parr, Governor, 138.
Payne, 42.
Pearson, 327, 350, 362.
Pennsylvania, 149.
Penobscot, 375.
Perceval, 279, 297.
Perry, 337.
Philips, 104.
Pike, 330.
Pinkney, 288.
Pitt, 174.
Plattsburg, 346, 356, 368-71.
Plessis, Bishop, 251, 254.
Pointe-aux-Tremble, 85.
Pontiac, 21.
Jorter, 359-62.
Portland, 225, 246, 251, 252, 257.
Port Dover, 367.
J Talbot, 367.
Powell, 1 80, 199, 316.
Prescott, 75, 242, 244, 245, 246, 249,
327-
Pres de Ville, 94, 97. Preston, 72, 8l. Prevost, Governor, 284, 307, 319, 324,
327, 328, 329, 340, 342, 343, 347,
355, 357, 368, 370-3- Prince Edward Island, 146, 158.
Procter, 303, 306, 320, 321, 322, 336,
338, 339, 340, 344- Puisaye, de, 257-9. Purdy, 346.
QUEBEC, x, 22, 25, 28, 31, 34, 41, 43, 54, 57, 77, 89-124, 158, 161, 175, 178, 181, 183, 216, 226, 227, 242, 249, 253, 254, 259, 271, 273, 274, 279, 280, 283, 285, 286, 305.
Queenston, 350, 361, 362.
Heights, battle of, 311-16.
Quinte", Bay of, 147, 154.
RANDOLPH, 205.
Reynolds, 320.
Riall, 35o-6i, 364-
Richardson, 321.
Richelieu, 2, 72, 150, 356, 369.
Riedsel, Baron, 104.
Madame, 1 21.
Ripley, 360, 362.
Rivington, 136.
Robinson, B., 146, 309, 312, 364.
Rochefoucault - Liancourt, Duke of,
229, 230. Rogers, James, 149.
Robert, 150.
Rolette, 304. Ross, 374. Rottenburgh, 336. Russell, 255-9. Ryerse, 231. Ryland, 250.
SACKETT'S HARBOUR, 307, 324, 327,
33i, 343, 344, 356, 357- St. Anne's, 104. St. Charles River, 90-5. St. Clair, Lake, 236, 338. St. Davids, 341 375. St. Foy, I.
St. Francis River, 116. St. George, 259, 303. St. John, Fort, 55, 72, 75, 79, 80, 108,
282, 323. St. Lawrence River, 2, II, 12, 15,148,
49, 75, 80, 116, 123, 126, 154, 190,
227, 237, 243, 298, 327, 344, 348,
350.
St. Leger, 109, 126. St. Ours, de, 251. St. Pierre, 32. St. Roche, 91-5. Salaberry, de, 323, 344-8. Sandusky, 338.
Sandwich, 256, 301, 303, 305, 336. Sault St. Marie, 219, 367.
396
THE MAKING OF CANADA
Savannah, 128, 131.
Schuyler, 77, 79.
Scott, Hercules, 359, 363, 365.
Judge, 325.
Winfield, 161, 315, 325, 329, 330,
33 1 » 359, 362. Secord, Laura, 335.
Major, 359.
Selkirk, Lord, 260, 276. Senneville, de, 104. Sewell, 251, 253-5. Sheaffe, 309, 314, 315. Shelburne, 145.
Lord, 39, 140, 157.
Shelby, 339.
Sherbroke, Sir J., 375.
Sidney, Lord, 159, 172.
Simcoe, Governor, 183, 195-8, 200,
201, 218, 219, 225, 229, 230, 231-
41.
Lake, 236.
Mrs. , 230.
Port, 231.
Smith, Judge, 159, 160, 172, 180. Smythe, 308, 309, 310, 316-19. Stone, 360. Stopford, 75, 80, 81. Strachan, 325. Street, 358, 359. Stuart, 354. Sullivan, 121. Suite, 57.
TALBOT, 260, 269, 270.
Taschereau, 25, 276.
Tecumseh, 203, 204, 205, 320, 339,
340.
Templer, 72.
Thames River, 201, 240, 338, 339. Thompson, General, 10*1. *
J.,86.
Three Rivers, 3, 32, 47, 102, 103, 276.
Thunder Bay, 222.
Ticonderoga, Fort, 55, 70, 72, 76, 108,
109.
Tippecanoe, battle of, 282. Tonnancour, de, 75, no.
Toronto, 201, 237, 263. Townsend, 128. Try on, 76. Turgot, 12.
VAN ALSTINE, 156, 196.
Vancouver, 176.
Van Rensselaer, 295, 308-16.
Vaudreuil, 104.
Vermont, 125, 126, 156, 219, 243, 368.
Vincennes, 117.
Vincent, 331, 333, 334, 341.
WABASH, the, 121.
Wadsworth, 315.
Walker, 42, 43, 44, 67.
Washington, General, 77, 115, 125,
127, 129, 135, 152, 202, 203, 207,
208, 212.
Waterloo County, 260. Watteville regiment, 348, 365. Wayne, 200, 208, 229, 237. Weeks, 272. Western, Fort, 82. White, 262.
Wilcocks, 272, 341, 355. Wilkinson, 335, 341, 344-50, 355. William, Prince, 166. Williams, 313. Williamsburg, 349. Winchester, General, 319-21. Windham, 257-9. Windier, 332, 333. Wolfe, General, I. Wolfe's Cove, 94. Wool, 313, 369. Wooster, 101. Wyandottes, the, 207. Wyatt, the, 272. Wyoming, 120.
YEO, 327, 334, 336, 343, 356, 357,
358, 367, 369- York, Little, 236, 256, 266, 325, 329,
330, 358. Yorktown, 126.
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press
FC 400 .873 1908
SMC
Bradley, A. G. (Arthur
Granville), 1850-1943. The making of Canada /
AAE-0244 (mcih)
1 I