The making of Canada

HOLY REDEEMER

•#*

.WINDSOR

FROM THE
- BOOKS OF1 -

THE MAKING OF CANADA

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE FIGHT WITH FRANCE FOR

NORTH AMERICA

New and Revised Edition, with Frontispiece and Maps
Demy 8vo. 5s. net

1 The story has all the stir and tension of a romance. '

Morning Post.

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

Demy 8vo. 6s. net

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

52 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

54 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

56 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

58 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 59

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.

60 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 61

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

62 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

CANADA BEFORE THE QUEBEC ACT 63

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-

64 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

THE INVASION OF CANADA 65

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

66 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE INVASION OF CANADA 67

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

68 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE INVASION OF CANADA 69

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

70 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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,

THE INVASION OF CANADA 71

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

72 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

THE INVASION OF CANADA 73

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

74 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

;6 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE INVASION OF CANADA 77

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,

78 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE INVASION OF CANADA 79

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.

8o THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE INVASION OF CANADA 81

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

82 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE INVASION OF CANADA 83

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

84 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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-

THE INVASION OF CANADA 85

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

86 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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-

THE INVASION OF CANADA 87

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

88 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 89

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.

90 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 91

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

92 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 93

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

94 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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,

THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 95

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-

96 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 97

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

98 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 99

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

ioo THE MAKING OF CANADA

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,'

THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 101

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,

102 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 103

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

104 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 105

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-

io6 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 107

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.

io8 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC 109

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

no THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

THE SIEGE OF QUEBEC

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.

ii2 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 113

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

ii4 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 115

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

n6 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 117

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

ii8 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 119

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

120 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 121

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

122 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 123

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-

124 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 125

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

126 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 127

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

128 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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-

THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 129

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

130 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 131

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

132 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 133

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

134 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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—

THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 135

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

136 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 137

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

138 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE CLOSE OF THE AMERICAN WAR 139

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.'

140 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

142 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

144 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 145

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

146 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

148 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 149

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

ISO THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

152 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

154 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 155

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

i$6 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 157

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

158 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 159

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-

160 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.'

THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 161

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

162 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 163

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

i64 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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-

THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 165

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

166 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 167

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

168 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 169

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

1 70 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 171

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

172 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

1 76 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

178 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 179

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,

i8o THE MAKING OF CANADA

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-

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 181

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-

182 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 183

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

1 84

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

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 185

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

1 86 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 187

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

i88 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 189

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

THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 191

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

192 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 193

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

194 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 195

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

196 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 197

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.

1 98 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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,

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 199

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

200 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 201

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,

202 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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-

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 203

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

204 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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-

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 205

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.

206 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 207

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

208 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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,

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 209

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

210 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 211

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

212 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

UPPER AND LOWER CANADA 213

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.

214 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 215

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-

216 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 217

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.

218 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 219

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

220 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 221

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

222 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 223

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

224 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 225

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

226 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 227

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.

228 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 229

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

230 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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-

DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 231

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

232 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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-

DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 233

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

DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 235

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.

236 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 237

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,

238 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 239

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

24o THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

DORCHESTER AND SIMCOE 241

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.

242 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

IMMIGRATION 243

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

244 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

IMMIGRATION 245

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

246 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

IMMIGRATION 247

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

248 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

IMMIGRATION 249

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

250 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

IMMIGRATION 251

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

252 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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-

IMMIGRATION 253

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-

254 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

IMMIGRATION 255

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

256 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

IMMIGRATION 257

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

258 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

IMMIGRATION 259

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,

IMMIGRATION 261

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,

262 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

IMMIGRATION 263

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.

264 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

IMMIGRATION 265

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

266 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

IMMIGRATION 267

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

268 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

IMMIGRATION 269

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

2;o THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 271

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-

272 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 273

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

274 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 275

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

276 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 277

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

278 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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-

APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 279

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,

28o THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 281

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

282 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 283

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

284 THE MAKING OF CANADA

^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

APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 285

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.

286 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 287

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

288 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 289

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

290 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 291

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

292 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 293

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

294 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

APPROACH OF WAR AND ITS CAUSES 295

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.

296 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1812 297

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.

298 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1812 299

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

300 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1812 301

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

302 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1812 303

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

304 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1812 305

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

306 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1812 307

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

308 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1812 309

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-

3io THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1812 311

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

312 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1812 313

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

314 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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-

THE WAR IN 1812 315

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

316 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1812 317

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

318 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1812 319

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

320 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1812 321

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

322 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1812 323

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,

324 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1812 325

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.

326 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1813 327

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

328 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1813 329

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

330 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1813 331

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

332 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1813 333

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

334 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1813 335

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

336 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1813 337

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

338 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1813 339

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

340 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1813 341

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

342 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1813 343

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,

344 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1813 345

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

346 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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-

THE WAR IN 1813 347

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

348 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1813 349

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,

350 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1813 351

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

352 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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.

THE WAR IN 1814 353

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

354 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1814 355

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

356 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1814 357

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

358

THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1814 359

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

360 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1814 361

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

362 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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-

THE WAR IN 1814 363

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

364 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1814 365

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

366 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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,

THE WAR IN 1814 367

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.

368 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1814 369

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

370 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1814 371

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

372 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1814 373

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

374 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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

THE WAR IN 1814 375

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

3/6 THE MAKING OF CANADA

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,

THE WAR IN 1814 377

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.

378

THE MAKING OF CANADA

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,

CONCLUSION 379

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)