7

TRANSFORMATIONS AND CONNECTIONS, 1815–1840

Rural settlement: A recently cleared farm on the Rideau River, Upper Canada, 1830.

 

British North America at the end of the War of 1812 appeared externally and internally stable. The colonies had weathered the war. They were part of a triumphant empire, with its victorious army and a navy that faced no discernible rivals. There was no significant disloyalty or rebellion in any of the North American provinces, and Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Lower Canada had profited greatly from the war. The mercantile system guaranteed the colonies special economic benefits— favourable duties and a protected market—in the home country. Meanwhile, the business of economic development kept the local politicians happy, or at any rate preoccupied.

The world, or at least the colonies’ place in it, was more uncertain than it appeared. The Treaty of Ghent had established peace in North America, but a very doubtful peace. To get peace, the British sacrificed their Indian allies, who were left to the mercy of the Americans, to be absorbed into the republic. Boundary questions remained unresolved; the American republic was in an expansive, aggressive mood; and in the middle distance the Spanish empire in America was convulsed by revolution. Fear of revolution at home obsessed the British government just as fear of revolution abroad obsessed its allies. There was no guarantee, no certainty that the United States might not try again to annex Canada and fulfill the dream of the American Revolution.

Things turned out very differently. Relations between British North America and the United States were never easy, but the War of 1812 proved to be the last officially sanctioned war along the border. Gradually the Americans turned their attention elsewhere and onto other matters in the years after 1815—to their western frontier, rather than to the north, to immigration and its problems, to war with Mexico rather than Great Britain, and to slavery and the internal contradictions of their own country. Canada and the United States did not grow apart, but they nevertheless became more distant.

The maintenance of the British connection had much to do with that, but so did the flow of British immigration to Canada, which eventually totalled in the hundred thousands—meaning that Canada was actually more British by 1840, in terms of its population, than it had been in 1800 or 1815. One estimate showed emigration from the British Isles to British North America rising from 3370 in 1816 to 23,534 in 1819 to 66,000 in 1832. The numbers continued to grow through the 1840s until, in 1847, British migrants to British North America numbered almost 110,000.1 Of these numbers, well over half came from Ireland, and of the Irish total, Protestants outnumbered Catholics by roughly two to one.²

The immigrants came because British North America had entered a phase of chaotic growth and change. Timber and lumber brought development to New Brunswick and the Canadas. One driver of change was technology: the generation after 1815 saw the implementation of steam power—steam engines in lumber mills and factories, and on steamboats and in railways. Canals, elaborate and expensive, brought the ocean into direct contact with the Great Lakes. The invention and perfection of the railway transformed distance, and the steamship brought Europe and North America closer together. Communication no longer required travel—the telegraph replaced the dispatch rider and the railway replaced the stagecoach and the teamster’s wagon.

Politicians tried to respond to the miracles of the age. Development was its own reward, since a more developed economy produced more affluent workers. Life was still hard, but not quite as hard. Timber flowed to Great Britain, and timber ships sailed back crammed with immigrants—slowly at first, but in huge numbers after the middle 1820s. Increasingly the ships sailed faster, as steam began to take hold. Sailing times and transoceanic fares dropped, and more immigrants signed on for the voyage. Governments were encouraged to invest in transport—in canals, first, and then in railways. They raised the money partly through taxes, but also through loans and hence debt. Taxes and taxpayers fed the appetites of developers and mercantile speculators; taxpayers, meanwhile, could meet the charge because of growth in immigration and population.

As the population grew it became more difficult for the British government to respond to the needs of the colonies. Increasingly, however, the British government didn’t want to. There were two main reasons for this. The focus of empire was shifting, economically, politically, and militarily, toward the east, especially to India, but also to China and Australia. Lower Canada’s importance, so apparently great in the 1790s, dwindled by comparison with India’s, and the British garrisons in North America seemed minuscule in comparison with military cantonments in India. The army of twenty-nine thousand in North America in 1815 shrank to a mere three thousand by the 1850s. At the same time, larger populations in a more developed colony meant that the urgency of imperial subsidy diminished.

The rearrangement of the British army mirrored a rearrangement of the empire. The provinces of British North America were no longer the only colonies of settlement: Australia, starting in 1788, South Africa (from 1806), and New Zealand rivalled Canada in British attention. Granted, it was easier to get to North America—as little as four weeks’ sailing in 1820—compared with Australia, which took nine or ten months.3 The relatively short shipping time and the familiarity of the run across the North Atlantic encouraged trade and emigration with and to the Atlantic provinces and the Canadas. The timber trade in particular stimulated the availability of shipping, as it was discovered that timber ships could be easily, albeit cheaply and shoddily, refitted to carry immigrants on the outward voyage to Canada. Accommodation didn’t have to match the numbers carried, however, and some wretched emigrants found themselves spending part or all of the voyage on deck or sheltering under lifeboats. Authorities in the colonies complained, with reason, about “the confined, crowded and filthy state of the vessels”⁴ and hence the condition of their immigrants. Nevertheless, while Canada was still an obvious aspect of the empire, it was no longer unique among colonies of settlement.

The ties between Britain and the colonies remained tight. There was, above all, the mercantilist colonial system. Colonial goods, especially timber and foodstuffs, had preferred entry to the British market, and the British market was expanding. With the Industrial Revolution in full swing, factories sprouted on the British landscape, and with factories came new houses, even new cities. Canadian timber, the mainstay for the construction of naval ships, was even more desirable for housing. Demand in Britain stimulated log booms down the Saint John, Miramichi, and Ottawa rivers, profits for colonial timber merchants, and immigration to the edges of the Canadian forest.

The British government contributed to the colonial economy by building and rebuilding fortifications along the border with the United States and at Halifax and Quebec City. New canals were dug to bypass rapids along the Ottawa and St. Lawrence, but, mindful of the exposed transport route along the international frontier on the St. Lawrence, British army engineers built what was at the time the single largest and most expensive public works project in the empire: the Rideau Canal, which stretched southwest from the Ottawa River to Lake Ontario at Kingston. At £800,000 the canal was costly, with its large stone locks and kilometres of connecting waterways; in its defence it could be said that it was built to a very high standard. (Including canal improvements on the Ottawa and St. Lawrence and contributions to the new Welland Canal bypassing Niagara Falls, British taxpayers contributed £1,069,026 to the improvement of Canada’s waterways.)5

The locks still stand and the canals remain a monument to nineteenth-century engineering, although the Rideau Canal is now essentially a tourist attraction. That canal helped populate eastern Upper Canada and in a minor way stimulated the lumber industry. A new settlement on the Ottawa, at the junction of the Rideau river and canal, was named Bytown after Colonel John By, the officer in charge of the project. Bytown never was used as a staging area for troops and military supplies, but it proved extremely convenient in forwarding log booms, and later for lumber mills.

Canals were the great technological attraction of the early nineteenth century, and induced speculators and speculative governments to invest millions in their construction and upkeep, but it wasn’t the St. Lawrence or Rideau canal that had the greatest impact on Canada. It was, rather, a project conceived by the governor of New York State, DeWitt Clinton, linking the Hudson River with the Great Lakes at Buffalo and points along Lake Ontario. The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, competed directly with the inadequate canals along the St. Lawrence and secured New York City’s position as the dominant port of entry to the continent. New York, after all, was ice-free year-round, while Montreal, its most logical rival, was blocked by ice from December to April or May.

By the 1820s Montreal was losing its trademark business, the industry that had founded the fortunes of the great merchants of the city. For 150 years fur brigades had annually left the city in the spring in their great canoes, heading up the Ottawa for the pays d’en haut, returning in the fall with their lucrative cargoes destined for the fur markets of London and Paris. The North West Company of Montreal competed directly and mostly successfully with the London-based Hudson’s Bay Company. The Bay Company had finally bestirred itself and begun to compete directly with the Montrealers, sending traders into the interior and founding posts across the west, until, in 1819, the fur-trade rivals began negotiations to end the misery of competition. Along the Red River in what is now Manitoba, where one of the Hudson’s Bay Company directors, the Earl of Selkirk, a Scottish peer, had founded a colony of displaced Scots, there was actual violence, including the murder of some of the settlers, and this attracted unfavourable notice at home.6 By 1817 the disputes between the earl and the North West Company had become entangled in the corrupt Canadian legal system, heavily influenced if not dominated by the North-Westers and their connections. (One of Selkirk’s men stated, accurately, that “the judges, juries and crown officers of Canada are a set of damned rascals,” and that consequently the earl would act independently of “the rascally Government of Canada.”)⁷

Understandably, the earl was not anxious for a settlement of the differences between the North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company, short of the surrender and prosecution of most of the North-West partners. But the earl died, virtually bankrupt, early in 1820, speeding negotiations to put an end to his quarrels and to the competition they had come to symbolize. Putting an end to inter-company rivalry wasn’t the only impulse in play, however. There was dissension inside the North West Company between the “wintering partners”—those in the interior who did the actual trading—and the Montreal end of the business.

Under the circumstances, the North-Westers were disposed to compromise. In a settlement confirmed at a council of “wintering partners” at Fort William in 1821, most of the North West Company’s active personnel moved over to the Hudson’s Bay Company. Those trading for the Bay (“chief factors” or “chief traders”) would receive a share in the company’s profits, regulated by a document specifying the division called the “Deed Poll.” Over the longer term, the most important change was that the base for the fur trade shifted from Montreal and Fort William to the HBC posts on Hudson Bay. Guided in its operations by an able and ambitious Scot, George (later Sir George) Simpson, and encouraged by a relieved British government, the HBC would henceforth control the fur trade from Labrador to the Pacific and from the Arctic to the American border. But where, exactly, was the border?

DEFINING AND DEFENDING THE BORDER

The War of 1812 did not miraculously remove or release tensions between Great Britain and the United States, or between the British provinces and their American neighbours. The American government had trading ambitions, asking the British to allow American ships to trade into British West Indian ports and retaliating when they were not. There was a brief naval race in the 1820s. There were constant complaints about fisheries regulations off the Atlantic provinces. There were reports in the American press of discontent, and eventually, in the 1830s, rebellion among the provincials. Many Americans remained convinced that the provincials would, given half a chance, join them. Many American politicians in the 1820s and 1830s could reasonably be described as anglophobic, and many of their British counterparts were condescending if not contemptuous where Americans were concerned.

The border continued to be fortified and garrisoned. The British took expensive defensive measures, like the Rideau Canal, and maintained or expanded their fortifications, like the Citadel at Quebec. The Americans too built forts, including one on the British side of the frontier, owing to a surveyor’s mistake. That fort, at Rouse’s Point on Lake Champlain, had to be abandoned, and with it the $100,000 the United States had spent. The British government deployed a succession of generals to run the North American colonies—Sherbrooke, Richmond, Dalhousie, Maitland, and Colborne. They would have been available in case of war with the Americans, but the war never came. Instead, they were called on to deal, usually unsuccessfully, with local politics, which they managed, as we shall see, very badly.

Both the British and American governments, fortunately, had to pay off their previous wars and repair their relations with their taxpaying voters. British generals, including the apparently eternal Duke of Wellington, gave their opinion that the military odds in favour of the Americans were increasing, though the superiority of the British navy would allow Great Britain to hang on to port cities and coastal areas as well as blockade the American coastline. Increasingly, the defence of British North America seemed to be something that wasn’t worth spending money on, and there were naturally other priorities, political and economic.

The British government had its own political difficulties: with Catholic Emancipation (giving political rights, including the vote, to Catholics), political reform (adjusting a scandalously outdated parliamentary system), and the government of Ireland (imprudently absorbed into the United Kingdom in 1801). Then there was emancipation pure and simple, freeing the slaves across the empire and ending slavery as an institution. There was also a large empire to manage, and not just Canada.

These considerations made British cabinets increasingly careful of spending money on the colonies and, after the 1830s, especially on Canada. As long as there was a balanced relationship with the colonies, mercantilism offset by colonial acceptance of overall British political and economic direction, there would be little cause to change the meandering course of British colonial policy. But, as is so often the case, economics did not dictate the course of politics.

The United States gradually forgot about the British colonies. There was obviously no threat from the reduced British garrisons of the postwar period, and the forts and canals, though costly, were obviously designed for defence, not aggression. The British stopped subsidizing the Indians of the American northwest: they were on their own in dealing with the American government.

The Great Lakes naval fleets became early casualties of a drive for disarmament, a situation ratified by the Rush-Bagot Agreement of 1817, which limited rather than abolished warships on the lakes. That was followed by a convention in 1818 that ran the British–American boundary from the Lake of the Woods west to the Rockies along the 49th parallel. There was a further agreement to treat the territory west of the Rockies, north of Spanish California and south of Russian Alaska, which was to be called Oregon, as a condominium, a jointly sovereign space. It wasn’t a stable arrangement, but in 1818 there was no need for government in the territory, no need for garrisons, and no point in courts. The Hudson’s Bay Company became the principal commercial operator in Oregon, as in all British territory north of the United States and south and east of Alaska. It was free, for the time being, to pursue profit. In the east, a boundary dispute lingered in the Aroostook country between New Brunswick and Maine; it wouldn’t be resolved for another generation.

The imprecision of these arrangements eventually caused disagreements, accompanied by a great deal of heated rhetoric. Neither the United States nor Great Britain especially wanted war, but there were occasional demands to cut through the compromises and reach a conclusion by annexing British America, even if that had to be done through war. One such publicist, John J. O’Sullivan, coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny” to encapsulate the inevitable absorption by the United States of the entire continent of North America.

Eventually, in 1846, the condominium was ended by a compromise, dividing Oregon into a British zone north of the 49th parallel but including Vancouver Island and an American zone to the south. The boundary farther east was also completed, by treaty (the Webster-Ashburton treaty) and an arbitration in 1842 that divided disputed lands along the upper St. John River and fixed the border between New Brunswick and Lower Canada on the one side and Maine on the other.

All this was possible because Americans were looking elsewhere: at the settlement of the Mississippi Valley, at the absorption of large numbers of immigrants, and at the question of slavery, which began in the 1820s to disturb and then to define American politics. There were quarrels with the newly independent, but militarily weak, republic of Mexico, and eventually there was a war that resulted in the annexation of Texas and California and the lands in between to the United States. All this took time and energy, with little political will left over to bring the British colonies into the fold.

There was no cause to disturb the provincials who so closely resembled Americans on the English-speaking side. As for the French of Lower Canada, they came to be seen as increasingly exotic, clustered in their villages along the St. Lawrence under the church spires. They were no longer a threat, given their Catholic religion and their French language, but rather a kind of tourist attraction. “To a traveller from the Old World, Canada East [Lower Canada] may appear like a new country, and its inhabitants like colonists, but to me,” Henry Thoreau wrote in 1850, “coming from New England, and being a very green traveller withal … it appeared as old as Normandy itself, and realized much that I had heard of Europe and the Middle Ages.”8

The view of the United States from the Canadian side was darker. During the war, most of the American-born inhabitants of the colonies had remained loyal to the British side, or at least hadn’t aided the American armies. But some had, especially in western Upper Canada. Captured, tried, and condemned at Ancaster in May 1814, eight Upper Canadians fighting on the American side were hanged. Their property was confiscated.

The question of “American” loyalty lingered after the war. Provincial elites used the loyalty issue, or the American issue, to consolidate their own power. Officiously loyal to the crown, they sought to exclude ex-Americans from public office. Given the large proportion of American-born people in the provinces, there was the possibility that half the population of Upper Canada could be discriminated against, if not completely disenfranchised. “[The] very first elements out of which our social system was framed,” a Toronto lady wrote in 1837, “were repugnance and contempt for the new institutions of the United States, and a dislike to the people of that country.”9

Seen from London, and through the prism of two hundred years, the concept of “British North America” seems natural—British colonies of more or less similar origins, political systems, economic ties, and general culture, Lower Canada always excepted. In the 1820s or 1830s, however, British North America was little more than a name. The governor in Quebec City was merely the titular head. The lieutenant governors in the Atlantic provinces took their directions straight from London, and the lieutenant governor in Upper Canada was hardly more subordinate. Politicians in the various provinces had little to do with each other, nor was there much movement of people back and forth. The economies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland faced outward, toward the sea, and across the sea to the West Indies or Great Britain.

The Atlantic provinces had more to do with New England than with the Canadas: old connections died hard, and Boston was still the regional metropolis as far as Nova Scotians were concerned. Certainly people on both sides of the border still recognized each other. When the Nova Scotian lawyer and judge Thomas Chandler Haliburton serialized the adventures of an imaginary Yankee peddler travelling through Nova Scotia in the mid-1830s, it quickly became a hit in the United States as well. The first American edition pointed out that Nova Scotians came from the same origins as Americans, and prophesied that eventually North America would be reunited as “one compact empire of friendly and confederated states.”10

Haliburton’s Yankee character, Sam Slick, was presented as a sharp dealer, active and enterprising. The British provincials, though amiable, were not, or not so much. It was an impression that occurred to many travellers moving through the United States and the British provinces in the early nineteenth century. An official observer, Lord Dalhousie, governor general in the 1820s, took a negative view: “The conclusion must be,” he wrote, “that there is no natural disposition to public improvement— they would go on to the end of time, indolent, unambitious, contented, & un-enterprising.”¹¹

A visiting French magistrate, Alexis de Tocqueville, observed of the Canadiens, “All in all this race of men seemed to us inferior to the Americans in knowledge, but superior in qualities of the heart. One had no sense here of that mercantile spirit which obtrudes in all the actions and sayings of an American.”¹² Much the same was said of the English-speaking Canadians, though it might be cloaked in appreciative terms; they were considered superior in gentility, or at least lacking in the vulgarity that some British travellers and some of their Canadian hosts claimed to discover in the United States.¹³

It was, therefore, a case of political differences and cultural resemblance. But even the political differences weren’t so deep: as a political crisis developed in the colonies in the 1820s and 1830s, there was even the possibility that the colonies would abandon monarchy and the British connection and opt for republicanism and, presumably, annexation to the United States.

What was important was that the British connection didn’t necessarily mean Toryism, a devotion to feudal or traditional forms of society or behaviour.¹⁴ There were, certainly, Tories in the provinces, powerful in government and the Anglican Church and anxious to preserve privileges that amounted to a monopoly on public office and lucrative official patronage. But there were many more who weren’t Tories, who belonged to different Protestant sects, who wanted a share in government and the things that government could facilitate—roads, schools, canals, and progress. Not for the last time, the provincials looked across the border and glimpsed progress, enterprise, and prosperity. Their sense of rivalry, or even envy, gave a special edge to politics. As it would turn out, the constitutional systems of the various colonies were ill adapted to contain serious political differences.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF STALEMATE

The constitutional framework devised for the colonies in the 1780s and 1790s broke down in the 1820s and 1830s. The particulars vary with the province: all politics are proverbially local, and there was no common cause among the Maritime provinces and the Canadas and certainly no common leadership. Newfoundland was, as always, a very special case.

Newfoundland was both the oldest and most backward British colony. The island was most valued as a piece of rocky real estate surrounded by fish, and it was the fishing enterprise that was most important. The government had only grudgingly accepted and recognized permanent settlements along the coast, and the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had stunted such habitation as there was. Authority was a seasonal thing, embodied in a British naval officer appearing and vanishing with the fishing fleets; only in 1825 did a governor arrive and take up permanent residence in the capital, St. John’s. Seven years later this oldest British colony finally acquired an elected assembly, which thereafter quarrelled with the governor over revenues and expenditures, and, of course, patronage, the filling of offices.

Prince Edward Island had a much older governmental structure, with a lieutenant governor and assembly since the 1770s, but its society and politics were almost as unusual as Newfoundland’s, centring not so much on who was who within the colony, as who was not—the absentee proprietors who owned much of the province’s fertile land but who definitely did not wish to be taxed for the privilege.

In New Brunswick the key question revolved around not who owned land, but who leased it. Outside the fertile St. John Valley and a few other arable enclaves, land was valuable for growing trees, but not for farming. Forests were leased, not granted or sold. Who, then, could or should cut the trees and sell the resulting timber or lumber, and how much should they pay the crown—the provincial government—for the privilege? Since trees were the passport to wealth in New Brunswick, and since politics and government determined the leases, these were questions of the utmost importance.

They were also the easiest to resolve. The British government gave way before provincial insistence and in 1831 transferred control over crown lands from an imperial official to the local government, which, though still appointed and elitist, kept its profits at home.

Nova Scotia was the most populous of the Atlantic colonies, especially after it was reunited with Cape Breton Island in 1820. Nova Scotia’s problems began with geography, a difficult terrain that separated rather than united the various parts of the province. Halifax, the largest town and the provincial capital, the home of the legislature and the Anglican bishop, was also the seat of an army garrison and a Royal Navy base.15 Looking outward, to Britain and the seven seas, Halifax was often seen as remote and aloof from the concerns of the hinterland—whose inhabitants were non-Anglican, and were engaged in farming or fishing, or, in Cape Breton, mining coal.

If Halifax had an English or Loyalist character, other parts of the province were the domain of the Scots. Until the 1770s Nova Scotia was “New Scotland” by title only. Then, in 1773, Scots landed and settled at Pictou. Over time, and interrupted by war, more filtered in, encouraged by the desire of Scottish landlords to replace their human population, unprofitable and frequently needy and demanding, with sheep, who had a better attitude to property and could be converted into profit. These were highland Scots, frequently Catholic and Gaelic-speaking, abandoned by their clan chieftains: “The coward who now rules us,” an emigrant poet wrote, “Evicted his own, few remain. / He prefers sheep in the hills to a kilted retinue.”16

The later immigrants headed not for Pictou but Cape Breton Island, which they dubbed “the land of freedom and food,” where landlords were mercifully lacking.¹⁷ It was mainly a rural society they founded, divided between majority Catholics and minority Presbyterians, and with little direct connection to the rest of Nova Scotia. What was unusual was that by the middle of the nineteenth century three-quarters of the island’s population spoke Gaelic, in part because of the remoteness and isolation of Cape Breton and, within the island, the absence of a major, offsetting centre of population and the lack of alternative immigrant streams.

Cape Breton did not exert much influence on the politics of Nova Scotia in the nineteenth century. Politics were, and had to be, Halifax-based, and it was in Halifax that the first serious political dissent arose. It began softly, with disputes over revenue between the elected assembly and the appointed council—which became known in a rather sinister way as the “Council of Twelve.” (Thomas Chandler Haliburton, the author of Sam Slick, called them “the twelve old ladies,” but there were plenty of aspiring politicians, sitting outside the charmed circle, who wished to join them.) Then, in 1835, a journalist, Joseph Howe, the son of a Loyalist refugee from Boston, levelled charges of misconduct against members of the local elite. They answered with a libel suit. Howe vigorously defended himself, and after ten minutes’ deliberation, a Halifax jury acquitted him.

Howe had a gift with words. “The government is like an ancient Egyptian mummy,” he wrote, “wrapped up in narrow and antique prejudices—dead and inanimate, but likely to last for ever.”¹⁸ Howe set out to unwrap the mummy. Elected to the assembly in 1836, he cobbled together a rather shaky majority in favour of reform and in 1837 passed Twelve Resolutions that demanded, in effect, that the government be responsible to the elected assembly, as was the case in Great Britain. One prominent feature in Howe’s propositions was the disestablishment of the Anglican Church, so that all religious denominations might be placed on the same level. No demand better expressed the non-Tory nature of colonial society; and it represented, too, the large majority of the non-Anglican inhabitants of the province. It was a demand guaranteed to enrage the very Anglican Halifax establishment, and it did.

The British government’s response was feeble, contradictory, and prolonged. In London the Whigs were in power, and had gained it using the issue of parliamentary reform, expanding the right to vote to whole classes of people previously excluded. The government collectively and individually was therefore uneasy about denying or defying the wishes of an elected assembly. “You deceive yourself,” a colonial governor wrote to a conservative friend in Upper Canada, “the spirit of real, downright, old Style Toryism [is] extinct, dead, defunct, defeated and no more capable of revisiting the Nations of the Earth than it is possible for the sparks to descend or the stream to flow upwards.”19 Slowly the British government retreated—conceding this or that point while attempting to maintain its right to control, through the lieutenant governor, what it considered essential powers. The process was confused and messy, and reached no sudden satisfactory conclusion.

It could hardly move faster, because the case of Nova Scotia or New Brunswick could not be considered in isolation. What was conceded to one colony would ultimately have to be conceded to all, and the rhythm of change was set not by the coastal colonies but the larger provinces in the interior.

THE CANADAS

The Atlantic provinces had always been smaller in terms of population than Lower Canada, but by the 1820s they had fallen behind Upper Canada as well. It was the two populous Canadian colonies that would cause the most trouble for the British government through the 1820s and 1830s, until, in 1837–38, they actually produced armed rebellions.

The basic problem was the same. Local majorities came to believe that government was not responding to their needs or wants. The constitutional system made it impossible to rectify the problem, because the appointed government was independent of the elected assembly. Delays in response, or refusals to respond, from the local governors or from the Colonial Office in London provoked exasperation and, eventually, radicalized local political leaders.

The local reform politicians did have one weapon in their arsenal. If they could command a majority in the assembly, they could refuse to fund the government through taxes. The government, in its turn, tried to find ways to raise funds without asking the assembly for money. The easiest way to raise money was through tariffs—divided on a prorated basis between Upper and Lower Canada—and through the sale of crown lands. If sales were plentiful, the governors and their officials and supporters could live off the proceeds. This fitted in any case with the main business of government in the Canadas after 1815: to populate and develop the provinces. There was some urgency in selling and populating the vacant lands, for there were signs by the mid-1820s that the imperial government would not forever subsidize the North American colonies.20

In Upper Canada settlement should have been a relatively straightforward affair. The government sought out settlers, either directly or through some intermediary, such as a colonization agent or a land company. Sometimes the imperial government encouraged emigration, by locating disbanded regiments in the colony after the Napoleonic Wars, or by encouraging surplus populations, especially in Ireland, to emigrate.

The most extraordinary settlement scheme was the Canada Company, the inspiration of a Scottish novelist, John Galt: it purchased from the Upper Canadian government vast tracts of land—2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) at three shillings and sixpence per acre, or the equivalent of $295,000, payable over sixteen years.²¹ The British government, seeing an alternative source of funding for Upper Canada, was very pleased. Despite some early reverses—Galt at one point was imprisoned for debt—the company was profitable and, as it turned out, long-lived. It sold its last lot only in the 1950s, when it was finally wound up.²²

There were other changes in land policy. Though veterans and Loyalists continued to get free land, all others paid cash. The frontier of settlement moved north and west, to the edge of the Canadian Shield by 1850 and to Lake Huron in the west. During the 1820s and 1830s the population of Upper and Lower Canada virtually exploded. In Upper Canada this was mainly the result of immigration, but in Lower Canada it was a combination of factors.

LOWER CANADA

Language, or rather the difference in language, made Lower Canada unique. There was immigration, certainly, mainly from the British Isles. As a result some areas in Lower Canada took an English-speaking tone, and Montreal for much of the nineteenth century was mainly an English-speaking city. Even Quebec City had a substantial English-speaking minority. There were Anglophone enclaves to the south and east of Montreal, between the old seigneuries and the American border—the Eastern Townships; and there were English speakers in pockets around the Gaspé Peninsula and along the north shore of the St. Lawrence—the Lower Labrador coast. The French-Canadian majority more or less held its own as a proportion of the population, and grew in numbers. While French Canadians had been concentrated in the valley of the St. Lawrence, they gradually expanded, in the 1830s, into regions that had until then been English.

At the same time, agriculture was changing in the colony. That much is certain: but why it was changing, and what the effects of the change were, remain matters of dispute among rival historians. At the turn of the nineteenth century, around 1800, Lower Canada was a major wheat producer with a substantial surplus for export. By the 1820s that was no longer the case, and farmers had turned away from wheat toward mixed farming.23

There was also considerable population pressure, causing the division of farms and the expansion of farming into marginal lands. Some older farms were also becoming marginal as the soil deteriorated from overproduction. There may also have been a problem with the kind of wheat sown—only later in the century did hardier strains of wheat, more suitable for the Canadian climate, develop. Nor is there conclusive evidence that farming practices in Lower Canada were much different from or much worse than those of competitors in Upper Canada, or New England. Put another way, there is no conclusive evidence that French-Canadian farmers were worse at the business than anglophones—nor is there likely to be.

Wheat production did not so much disappear as stagnate, but the consequence seems to have been a decline in living standards if not genuine hardship in some parts of the province. Some historians have argued that an economic crisis contributed to the radicalization of politics in Lower Canada in the 1830s, but the problem with that analysis is that not every impoverished farming region, and certainly not every impoverished farmer, became radical, or took up arms when politics turned to violence in 1837–38.

The cities of Lower Canada, especially Montreal, did not stagnate. As the economy of Lower Canada prospered during the Napoleonic Wars, and as Upper Canada grew in wealth and population, Montreal became the distribution, commercial, and financial centre for the St. Lawrence basin; its commercial elite easily transformed themselves from fur traders to merchants, bankers, and manufacturers. Quebec City was too isolated, with a small agricultural hinterland, while Montreal sat at or near the confluence of three great rivers, the Ottawa, the St. Lawrence, and the Richelieu. The city became the entrepot for supplying and servicing the upper province. Canals and steamships facilitated the task, so that by the end of the 1820s there was regular land and water communication up and down the rivers.24

Encouraged by the prosperity, syndicates of Montreal merchants founded the Bank of Montreal in 1817 and McGill University in 1821. The town was expanding to the northwest; its newer streets were widening; and its stone buildings were striking to visitors. Edward Silliman, a geologist at Yale College in Connecticut, visited the town in 1819 and wrote that he was “much gratified at entering, for the first time, an American city built of stone.” The new merchants’ houses, he enthused, were “handsomely hewn and very beautiful, and would be ornaments to the City of London.” (Some of the early nineteenth-century streetscapes have survived along streets close to the harbour.) Silliman wrote too early to describe the impressive Notre Dame church, built between 1824 and 1829, and at the time the largest building, apart from fortresses, in British North America. The merchants’ city became the largest in British North America, and as a sign of its new status acquired a mayor and city council in 1832.25

It was a turbulent city, divided by language, religion, economic interest, and ethnicity. There was of course the large gap between English and French, but within the anglophone community—if it can be called that— there were subgroupings—the Irish, who were both Protestant and Catholic, the Scots (called in the nineteenth century the Scotch), and the English—and the Americans, who maintained some of their own separate identity.

It was natural to expect that English and French would be at each other’s throats—as Governor General Lord Dalhousie put it, Lower Canada was “a country where violent party feelings have long separated the two distinct Classes of the King’s subjects—the English and the French.”²⁶ Dalhousie exaggerated, though in his time as governor general, 1820 to 1828, he did a fair amount to promote partisan bitterness and ethnic ill feeling. Some years later another governor general, Lord Durham, “found two nations warring in the bosom of a single state.”

Matters were never that simple. Lower Canada was a divided society, divided between merchants, usually anglophones, and usually from Montreal, and rural interests, generally francophones. It was divided between Protestant and Catholic, and divided regionally, especially between Montreal and Quebec. Finally, it was divided between an older elite—seigneurs, placeholders, officers, and clerical dignitaries—and a newer group of politicians who wished to displace them, and yet some of the would-be reformers were themselves seigneurs, or rich men, or officers. Most important, both languages were found on both sides of politics.

The 1820s and 1830s were a time of liberal ferment around the world. There were rebellions in Spain, Belgium, and Poland, demands that the rights of nations be vindicated against empires and distant monarchs. That was most obvious in Latin America, where almost all the colonies, Spanish and Portuguese, severed their links with Europe and became independent. (Most also became republics, except for Brazil, which became an empire.) In the United States, there was a revolution inside the republican system, as older elites gave way before the agitation of newer interests, epitomized in the election of Andrew Jackson, a democrat and a populist, to the presidency in 1828.

There had been periodic stirrings in Lower Canada since the early 1800s. A “Patriote” party had formed and by 1810 it dominated the elected assembly, but its program was of a mild, constitutional kind: its leaders saw salvation in the British constitution and the rights of British subjects. These rights included the notion that the government should be responsible to the legislature for the tax money it spent. Governors general did their best to resist any such idea, and the Patriotes didn’t press the issue. But they didn’t give up on it, and it remained a serious question when Lord Dalhousie became governor general in 1820.

Dalhousie, one of Wellington’s generals, was an active and improving governor. He had been a constructive if somewhat quarrelsome lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, where he left behind a college that would eventually become Dalhousie University. Dalhousie’s imperiousness served him badly in Lower Canada, where he overestimated his own judgment and underestimated the political dangers he faced, as well as the very real limitations on his position.27

No governor could escape the fact that to govern he had to govern through someone or something, and in the case of the Canadas that meant the appointed councils, executive and legislative. In Lower Canada the councils were predominantly English-speaking, though with a sprinkling of Canadien seigneurs and officeholders. Collectively, they were sometimes known as “the English party” and sometimes as the “Chateau Clique,” after the Quebec residence of the governor general. Dalhousie approved the “firm and steady” character of the legislative council, but from the beginning he had problems with the assembly.28 The House of Assembly was the obstreperous element in the constitution, but its cooperation could, with a certain amount of conciliation, usually be obtained.

The assembly wasn’t especially radical in tone; its politics could be described as moderately liberal, accepting the benefits of the constitution of 1791 with an inclination to expand those benefits as far as possible. The most prominent figure in the assembly was its speaker, Louis-Joseph Papineau, himself a seigneur (of Montebello, on the Ottawa River). A comparatively young man—thirty-four in 1820—Papineau was already an assembly veteran (since 1809). He had served as a militia officer during the War of 1812 and in the early 1820s believed and proclaimed himself a loyal subject and strong supporter of the British connection. He prized the liberties that British rule had brought, not least the ability of the French-Canadian majority in Lower Canada to preserve its language and traditions even under anglophone and Protestant rule.

Papineau was nevertheless a man of contradictions—logically inconsistent, unstable, and opportunistic, as his biographer, Fernand Ouellet, has shown.²⁹ He personally did not believe in the Catholic Church, yet saw it as a bulwark of the Canadien identity and thought that as seigneur he should set the example for his tenants by attending mass. (Still, on his deathbed he would refuse the Catholic sacraments.) Papineau became after 1815 the unchallenged leader of the Patriotes, the mildly liberal, mildly nationalist majority grouping in the assembly, and over the next twenty years saw off any and all possible rivals. It was clearly the case that the Patriotes were expected to serve Papineau’s ends, whatever these might be; but like the man himself these were often confused and uncertain, rhetorically bold yet often timid in practice. As so often with bold orators, Papineau understood that words were weapons and exploited their impact; yet he didn’t understand that words once spoken couldn’t easily be withdrawn, nor replaced with other, more temporizing sentiments.

What would turn out to be a defining event in Lower Canadian politics occurred in 1822. The “English party” had it in mind to alter the constitution in order to improve its own position and diminish that of the Patriote-dominated assembly. This was to be achieved by reversing one of the key provisions of the Canada Act of 1791, which had divided Upper and Lower Canada. The Canadas were to be reunited, with the cooperation of the government in London but without the consent and, initially, even the knowledge of the assembly. Accordingly, in 1822 the under-secretary for the colonies introduced a Union bill to the British House of Commons.

When the terms of the bill became known in Lower Canada, they caused an explosion. The bill made English the only language of record for government in the province, and after a pause of fifteen years, it provided that only English could be used in the assembly. It extended government control over the Catholic clergy, who could collect tithes from their communicants only if the tithes had been approved by the governor. It raised the property qualification for voters, something that could be assumed to be directed against the majority of the population. And with Upper Canada rapidly expanding in population, there was the prospect that sooner or later the new province of united Canada would have an English-speaking majority.

The assembly, needless to say, disapproved of the project, and sent Papineau to London to influence opinion against it. The bill had already become the target of opposition MPs, who had the power to delay and prolong debate on the subject, and that was sufficient to derail it. Papineau spoke, therefore, to the converted in London where, not for the last time, colonial affairs were seen as an impediment to the passage of more important business.

The episode seemed to have been satisfactorily resolved, but it set affairs in motion, gradually moving Lower Canada from a position as a fractious but contented colony to a state of armed rebellion in 1837. At first the Patriotes directed their ire at the “English party” whose scheme this was correctly seen to be. That raised the question of the governor’s choice of advisers and the near certainty that he could choose better men, less encumbered by personal interest and prejudice. The assembly’s weapon was revenue, needed, obviously, to pay officials, including those to whom the assembly objected. Dalhousie resisted to the best of his considerable ability until events finally forced his departure in 1828.

The British government did its best, too. It made concessions on revenue. It appointed conciliatory governors, Lord Aylmer (1830–35), who at least spoke excellent French, and Lord Gosford (1835–37), who had a well-merited reputation at home in Ireland as a broad-minded and conciliatory politician. Neither could make headway. As Aylmer’s biographer Phillip Buckner has observed, the Lower Canadian politicians, led by Papineau, were determined to prove that even the best governor must be seen to be a failure.30 Papineau by the early 1830s had evolved from a liberal constitutionalist to a radical republican, an admirer of the French Revolution of 1830 and an enthusiast for American-style democracy— provided, of course, his privileges as a seigneur were respected after the revolution, along with a few similar trifles. By 1832 Papineau had discarded many of his earlier, moderate associates, and his language pointed toward a fundamental revision of Lower Canada’s constitution.

He and his followers refused British attempts to compromise over the control of revenue. If public money were to be spent, especially on officeholders, they wanted to determine who those officeholders must be. It was the negative of the proposition that was important: if Papineau chose the governor’s councillors, it would not be the governor or even the British government who ruled the province.

Political hysteria mounted through the 1830s. Some of the Patriotes suspected that the government was trying to overwhelm them through immigration. But when the immigration produced a cholera epidemic in 1832, killing seven thousand people out of a population of 500,000, some Patriotes speculated that the government was really trying to kill off the Canadiens in order to replace them with English-speaking immigrants. That same year, 1832, an election riot in Montreal called out the British army to maintain order. The troops fired on the rioters, killing three— more proof, if proof were needed, of British tyranny.

In 1834 Papineau and his supporters passed “Ninety-two Resolutions” through the assembly, demanding popular control of the government through elections; and thanks to elections they gained an overwhelming majority there. They used their majority to block all legislation, including revenue, until their constitutional demands were met. It was all or nothing, though Papineau may not have understood it as such. The governors understood it very well, and so, eventually, did the British government.

In response, the government did three things: it retained Sir John Colborne, an experienced general, in Canada; it began to make connections to more moderate politicians; and it did its best to shore up such revenues as it could extract outside the assembly’s control, so as to keep some semblance of government functioning. Colborne had been a controversial lieutenant governor in Upper Canada—too controversial for the Whig imperial government’s taste (see below), and the Whigs had accordingly recalled him in 1836. But as a general, he proved to be the right man in the right place at the right time. Lord Gosford, the governor general, was very much a man of peace and compromise, and for a time in 1837 and 1838 it seemed that his policy of compromise, of building bridges to the opposition, had failed. Yet as events would show, it did not fail even though Gosford himself, who resigned his office in November 1837 and left the province early the next year, wasn’t there to see it.31 It remained for Colborne to set the stage, assembling troops and fortifying his positions.

Papineau and Colborne were converging, without realizing it. In the summer and fall of 1837 Papineau convened a series of monster meetings—“assamblées”—around the province. The language at the meetings became wilder and wilder. As the historian Allan Greer points out, this may have been necessary in order to dislodge the French Canadians from a profoundly monarchical and traditional way of looking at the world. If republican notions were to be inculcated, Papineau and company would first have to get rid of monarchical language as a prelude to abolishing the monarchy itself. The young queen, Victoria, who had just mounted the throne, became a particular target for personal abuse.³² Then, in an action reminiscent of the rebels prior to the American Revolution, Papineau established “committees of correspondence.”

Caught between words and reality, Papineau put his faith in words. Just in case, he had been in contact with the radical leader in Upper Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie, and hoped for simultaneous uprisings, thus overwhelming the overstretched British garrison. The words failed, and instead of terrifying the government and its supporters, it galvanized them into action: local British patriots mobilized to defend their constitutional notions as opposed to Papineau’s. The popular leader was at a loss. The governor suspended the constitution, authorized paramilitary forces raised from loyal (anglophone) subjects, and issued warrants for the arrest of Papineau and his associates.

Fighting broke out in November 1837, north and south of Montreal. The other regions of the province—and this was crucial—did not join in. Colborne was ready, and after some initial setbacks, he crushed the rebels. His regular forces and their unofficial paramilitary allies looted and burned, making an object lesson to show what rebellion and resistance would bring.33 Papineau and some of his followers fled to the nearby United States, while others remained, to die or to be arrested.

There were sporadic risings and incursions from rebel sympathizers in the United States for about a year, but they were repelled. Looking at the rebellions as a whole, and at their suppression, the historian Allan Greer concluded that “it was a painful and costly episode with decisive and lasting results.”³⁴ The rebels had read too much about the Paris revolt of 1830, which had toppled the unpopular Bourbon king, Charles X, or about the revolutions in Latin America that had ended the Spanish empire. They conceived and followed a scenario in which the forces of order were unprepared for resistance and crumbled at their approach, and not a situation in which the government was able not only to muster an effective army but to retain enough authority to order and enforce the arrest of the various rebel leaders.

Papineau was not, of course, among those arrested. In years to come this fact would be a standing reproach against him. The circumstances of his flight in 1837 would be endlessly rehearsed by his opponents, who came to include many of those who had followed him to the brink of rebellion, and often beyond. In the 1840s and the 1850s—for Papineau eventually returned to Canada with an amnesty in hand—he had the capacity to be a nuisance, but he was no longer the leader of the French-Canadian population.

Those who stayed suffered the consequences. Some were executed, some were exiled,35 and some were arrested. Their fate depended on timing, and on chance. The government suspended habeas corpus in 1837, and did not restore it until 1840, which meant that suspected rebels could be kept in jail indefinitely without having to face charges or trial. Denis-Benjamin Viger, the financier of the aborted revolution, a rich man and himself a very prominent politician, spent two years in jail, until 1840. While he was absent, politics in Lower Canada took a very different turn. In that turn, the politics of Upper Canada were decisive.

UPPER CANADA

In Upper Canada, as in the lower province, radical politics and defective leadership constituted a toxic brew. The issues of Upper Canadian politics were more than local, though it was local matters that first gave them force. Liberalism and radicalism were the spirit of the age, in Britain, the United States, and Europe, demanding an end to privilege and inequality. In Upper Canada privilege and inequality were embedded in the constitution and structure of the province. Hierarchy and deference in politics, society, and religion would, according to the Upper Canadian elite, preserve British rule and repel republicanism. As the historian Carol Wilton has pointed out, loyalty and conformity to the established system were to them axiomatic. Upper Canada had been attacked once and would, they were certain, be attacked again. Division and discord advertised the colonies’ weakness to the Americans.³⁶

The American menace wasn’t only external—there were also many thousands of American-born settlers inside Upper Canada. Fear of domestic republicanism drove the government and its supporters to attempt to limit the Americans’ political rights during the 1820s. The effect was to arouse, not suppress, opposition. In the event, the American-born Marshall Spring Bidwell wasn’t only elected and re-elected to the Upper Canadian assembly, but became its speaker.

The American or “alien” question was one of many. Religious differences also played a part, owing to the privileged position of the Church of England under the Constitutional Act of 1791. Believing that sound religion made for sound politics, Pitt and Grenville had provided for an established Church, endowed with the only asset the province had—land set aside for the support of a Protestant clergy, or rather the Protestant clergy, the ministers of the Church of England. Amounting to one-seventh of Upper Canada’s available land, the Clergy Reserves awaited development and sale. Development, however, depended on the work of other settlers on adjacent lots, to clear trees, build roads, and establish farms. This increased the value of the land, to the profit of an absent or distant clergy.

This might have been borne had the majority of settlers been Anglicans, members of the official Church. At no time was this the case. Even in England most professing Protestant Christians weren’t Anglicans, but members of dissenting sects—Baptists, Congregationalists, and the recently established Methodists. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, waves of religious revivals swept across English-speaking America—in the 1740s, the 1770s, the 1800s, and the 1820s. Saddlebag preachers, the Methodist “circuit riders,” usually Americans, brought the Bible and a message of personal salvation to the English-speaking backwoods of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Lower and Upper Canada. As unofficial preachers, living by their wits and through charity, the Methodists filled a gap left by the established Church, overcoming even their inability to perform legal marriages, which were reserved for the provinces’ few Anglican parsons. Language was an insurmountable barrier in French Canada, but elsewhere the message was enthusiastically received, even by families or individuals who had previously been Anglicans.

Such a family was the Ryersons, loyalists and Anglicans from New Jersey, living in Norfolk County on the north shore of Lake Erie. Joseph Ryerson, a justice of the peace and militia colonel, adhered to the Anglican Church, barring his door to his son Egerton when the latter converted to Methodism. Despite his father’s fears, Egerton did not see his choice of religion as determining his political allegiance; he had as a child experienced American marauders during the War of 1812,37 and had no cause to admire the republic or its institutions. When an opportunity occurred to detach Canadian Methodism from its American cousins and return to its British roots, Egerton Ryerson, by then the Church’s most influential publicist and journalist, seized it. But until the authorities recognized that the Methodists and the other dissenting Protestants weren’t disloyal merely because they chose not to worship in the state Church, the religious issue undermined the harmony of the province.

It was the Methodists’ misfortune to confront the immovable object of John Strachan, the Anglican archdeacon of York, later the first Anglican bishop of Toronto. Strachan, a Scot and originally a Presbyterian, was Anglicanism’s fiercest and strongest, though not its ablest, defender.³⁸ A later governor general, Lord Elgin, called him “the most dangerous and spiteful man in Upper Canada.”³⁹ Strachan did his best to create a province founded on if not dominated by his Church. A former schoolmaster, he saw his former pupils into positions of power, which they in turn used to enhance the standing of the Church. Strachan himself sat on the executive council, where he offered sectarian advice to lieutenant governors who were exceedingly disposed to accept it. But Strachan wasn’t alone in his position, for he had the support of his fellows on the close-knit executive council and beyond them the acquiescence if not enthusiasm of prominent men from one end of Upper Canada to the other.

The three lieutenant governors of Upper Canada in this period, Sir Peregrine Maitland (1818–28), Sir John Colborne (1828–35), and Sir Francis Bond Head (1835–38), were not devoid of talent, though Head was so eccentric that his critics plausibly argued that he must have been appointed by mistake. They were all devoted to the principles of the British constitution, which included, as they saw it, the Church of England. They were also devoted to a strict interpretation of their function, and of the proper relationship of a colony to the empire. Governors governed, and colonists, if they were truly loyal, accepted the result. Consequently, the governors rebuffed any and all attempts to compromise—over the clergy reserves, over education, or over the conduct of appointed officials.

As in Lower Canada, obduracy led in a straight line to confrontation. Strachan and his friends squelched an early attempt by a Scottish-born radical, Robert Gourlay, to question their conduct. Gourlay was arrested, twice acquitted by juries, but eventually convicted and deported in 1818. His departure made way for another, more difficult, Scot.

William Lyon Mackenzie was born in Scotland in 1795 and, after a misspent youth, immigrated to Upper Canada in 1820, settling finally in the provincial capital, York, in 1824. He brought with him to York his newspaper, The Colonial Advocate, along with a restless temperament, a lively sense of victimization both personal and general, and an unmatched talent for vituperation. In York he found plenty of fodder for his pen, and soon enraged the members of the capital’s tiny elite, so much so that some of their sons took revenge on Mackenzie by dumping his printing press into the town’s harbour in 1826. It was the making of Mackenzie, who thereafter was not merely a notional victim of official persecution, but a real one. The victim sued his tormentors and won, and with the money he got in compensation built up both his newspaper and his reputation.

Mackenzie began his Upper Canadian career believing and arguing that the British constitution, properly applied, would suffice for the colony’s political needs and future prosperity. In this he did not differ from other reformers, like William Warren Baldwin, or his son Robert, or even Marshall Spring Bidwell. But like Papineau in Lower Canada he turned away from the British model, which he argued would never allow the people’s voice—which he equated with his own—to be heard.

In fact, there were many other voices besides Mackenzie’s demanding reform—Methodists and other Protestants demanding equality of treatment from the government and an end to the privileges of John Strachan’s established Church, and farmers demanding better roads for their farms and better schools for their children and better prices for their product—and lower taxes. All these were denied them by an entrenched oligarchy. Mackenzie freely borrowed from contemporary American radicals for his economic program; confused enough in its original American version, it was hopelessly muddled by the time Mackenzie had finished with it.

The details hardly mattered. It was the struggle between Mackenzie and the oligarchs that dominated the political stage, and the oligarchs— the Family Compact—unwittingly did everything they could to help Mackenzie, expelling him from the assembly, thereby ensuring his reelection. The resulting brouhaha distressed the British government, which was pressing its own political reform program at home, and was accordingly sensitive to the charge that it was acting arbitrarily and repressively in its Canadian colonies.

The government’s response counted heavily on appealing to loyalty and the British connection. Steady British immigration, the settlement of disbanded regiments, and an inflow of half-pay officers improved the odds, in some areas outnumbering the older American-born or -connected inhabitants. The politics of demography are always slow and uncertain, however, and a quicker method was needed. The Methodists were sectarians, it was true, unseemly and enthusiastic in their religious practices in the eyes of the Anglican establishment, but their main grievance was one of status and subsidy—or rather subsidy’s lack. If both were provided, if the Methodists were no longer excluded but brought into closer association with their British cousins, might not something be done?

The colonial administration chose to swallow some of its pride. British Wesleyan Methodists had proved to be anything but radical in their politics—were in fact a bulwark of the British constitution. They were invited to come to Canada, where they offered the Canadian Methodists, American in their origins, political respectability. Led by Egerton Ryerson, the Upper Canadian Methodists seized the opportunity and supported the government. As Ryerson explained, there was “a simple and sufficient reason, [which was that] the administration of government towards them has been essentially changed.” Seemliness in religion was easily twinned with a commitment to order in politics, at least as long as the Anglican establishment wasn’t allowed to provoke the evangelicals.

This was difficult. Sir John Colborne in particular was determined to do right by the Anglicans, and as his parting gift to the province—he was in the process of being dismissed by an enraged colonial secretary— endowed forty-four Anglican rectories with about nine thousand hectares of land. Colborne thereby partially undid some of the good the rapprochement with the Methodists had done, and contributed to the final confrontation between government and radicals.

That confrontation was brought on by his successor, Sir Francis Bond Head. Head at first tried to conciliate public opinion by appointing moderate reformers, including Robert Baldwin, to his executive council. He proceeded to ignore their advice, precipitating the resignation of not just the reformers but of his whole council. He then confronted the assembly, with predictable results. Facing deadlock with the assembly, Head dissolved it and called a general election in which the lieutenant governor personally stumped the province, denouncing his enemies as disloyal. He had the support of an unusual coalition: moderate Methodists, local landowners like Colonel Thomas Talbot, the anti-Catholic Orange Order (recently arrived from Ireland), and the Catholic clergy, which in Upper Canada as in the lower province stood firmly on the side of legitimate authority.40 (The Orangemen were so impressed by the display of Catholic loyalty that they called off their annual anti-Catholic 12 July parade commemorating the Protestant victory in Ireland in 1690.) The 1836 election, not surprisingly, delivered a pro-government majority.

Head had his majority, but it did not bring political stability. Deprived of their one useful weapon, the power to obstruct the government by tying up the legislature, the radicals under Mackenzie veered toward rebellion. They established the usual revolutionary paraphernalia of committees of correspondence, secret councils, and the like, and marched their supporters up and down farmers’ fields north of Toronto, to prepare them for the uprising to come. The government was fortunate that it was Mackenzie who directed the rebels, for when it came to concrete action he proved irresolute and incompetent.41

Head did his best to even the odds, sending off the province’s small garrison of regular troops to help in the graver crisis in Lower Canada. The forces of order and the radical rebels were now commanded by their respective pamphleteers. Mackenzie prepared a “Declaration of Independence” to inspire his followers, and if that weren’t enough he promised them land and unspecified spoils, to be confiscated from the government’s Tory supporters. It was not enough. Mackenzie never had enough followers, and even if he had, he lacked the ability to command them. Early in December 1837 he marched on Toronto, paused, retreated, and marched again. His pause allowed the government’s supporters to reinforce Toronto by steamboat. It was now the government’s turn to march. Mackenzie fled, eventually reaching safety in the United States.

The rebellion would henceforth be based in the United States rather than in Canada. Assisted by American sympathizers and American money, Mackenzie and his followers tried several times to invade Upper Canada. The British authorities raised troops of their own and garrisoned the frontier, and reinforced their local levies with regular soldiers. The American government, alarmed at the disorder along its northern border, did its best to cut off the rebels’ supplies and discouraged their American supporters. In this they were buttressed by most American opinion.⁴² After about a year of desultory guerrilla activity, the rebellion subsided.

The government had won. In the aftermath of rebellion, hundreds and possibly thousands of rebels or rebel sympathizers left the province. Those who stayed could be and frequently were arrested. Two of the rebels of 1837 were hanged. (Some of the later invaders of 1838, including a misguided Swede named Nils von Schoultz, were also hanged. Schoultz was defended at his trial by a rising young Kingston lawyer, John A. Macdonald.)

The government’s victory changed the political balance. Politics after 1838 differed only in shades of loyalty on the fundamental question of whether Upper Canada should be British. How best to keep it British was the question of the day.

LORD DURHAM AND THE UNION OF THE CANADAS

The news of the Canadian rebellions and their successful suppression forced the British government into a more active form of contemplation. Lord Gosford had already resigned as governor general, his mission of conciliation an obvious failure. To replace him the Whig government sent a much more prominent figure, John Lambton, Earl of Durham. Durham was a wealthy mine owner from the north of England who had figured in radical politics during the 1820s (from which he got his nickname, “Radical Jack”). He was briefly a minister in the early 1830s, but, after quarrelling with some of his colleagues, he was sidelined as British ambassador to Russia (1833–35). Back in England he was a disruptive force inside the Whig party, stimulating thoughts among ministers of whether another distant mission might not be timely and appropriate.

Durham accepted the mission to Canada in January 1838.43 He had broad powers, or so he thought. He would be governor general, with an authority that included the Atlantic colonies as well as the Canadas, and within those colonies he would be significantly less encumbered than his predecessors by constitutional and political obstruction. Durham would do more than govern; he would investigate what had gone wrong and make recommendations to London, which would, presumably, act accordingly.

After reviewing the Canadian files at the Colonial Office, Durham set sail for the colonies with a large official suite, arriving in May 1838. As governor, he acted decisively on the most pressing question of the day: what to do with the rebels captured and still in captivity. Durham sent some into semi-tropical exile in Bermuda, sparing them from any more extreme penalty. Unfortunately, Bermuda was beyond his jurisdiction. His action was promptly disavowed by the home government; when the official news reached Canada, Durham resigned, and set sail in October, after one of the shortest terms on record.

If that had been all, Durham would be remembered as little more than a flash in the pan. But the governor had passed a diligent summer, travelling, inquiring, and researching the problems of British North America, and on his return to England he and his staff prepared and submitted a report on the colonies and their problems, and how to solve them.

The fundamental constitutional difficulty was the deadlock between a popular assembly and a colonial government. The government relied on the assembly to raise taxes, but refused to allow it to determine how the taxes might be spent. Colonies were colonies—by definition they couldn’t govern themselves or they would cease to be colonies. Durham suggested that the problem was artificial: as long as the home government controlled external affairs and defence, the colonial link was intact.

As Durham wrote, “The system which I propose would, in fact, place the internal government of the colony in the hands of the colonists themselves.… The constitution of the form of government, —the regulation of foreign relations, and of trade with the mother country, the other British Colonies, and foreign nations, —and the disposal of the public lands, are the only points on which the mother country requires a control.” It was a form of “responsible government,” a government answerable to its citizen taxpayers rather than to a distant imperial authority. Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia would have agreed, as would the Baldwins in Upper Canada, but would the British government? While the British taxpayer was still responsible for army garrisons and naval bases in North America, and when even Durham assumed that the British government and not a colonial authority must regulate—i.e., tax—trade, a truly self-sufficient colonial authority was still some distance off.

Durham did not think that responsible government by itself would cure colonial discontent. If colonial discontents were merely political, then a political reform would suffice. But, as he wrote in the most famous phrase in his report, he had found “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state.” There could be no peace until the two nations became one, and that one must be English-speaking: political harmony would be served thereby, but also economic development.

The “single state” was Lower Canada. Lower Canada had a French-speaking majority that Durham identified as the source of most of its problems. The solution was to modify the boundaries of that state, merging Upper and Lower Canada and granting each section equal representation. (This was actually Durham’s second choice, behind a federal union of all the British North American provinces: continuing disorder in Lower Canada in the fall of 1838 persuaded him that more immediate and drastic action was necessary.)44 In the future combined Canada, French Canadians would become an artificial minority, because the anglophones of Montreal and the Eastern Townships joined to the anglophones of Upper Canada would create a permanent majority in the legislature. In addition, French would lose its privileged status in government and the courts; for good measure, Durham proposed doing away with French civil law and the seigneurial system—in fact, with everything that differentiated French-speaking from English-speaking subjects.

Durham’s proposals have caused controversy ever since. Was this liberal governor the prototype for Anglo-Saxon racism in Canada? Some, including many French Canadians, have argued this was the case, but others, like the historian Fernand Ouellet, have seen Durham as essentially a liberal modernizer. “[His] conclusions derived less from ethnic considerations than from his liberalism and his great sympathy for the historical role of the middle class,” he writes. “On finding the institutions of the [French] ancien régime functioning among the French Canadians as they had formerly in France, he may have tended as a good liberal simply to heap upon these people the scorn he felt for absolutist and feudal France.”⁴⁵

Another student of the period, S.J.R. Noel, strongly disagrees. In his view Durham’s understanding of Canada and especially French Canada was “superficial,” with “a paucity of factual information” shot through with “lurid racism.” As for Durham’s recommendations, they were “naïve” and “jejune.”⁴⁶ The truth is probably somewhere in between. Durham naturally applied the perspective of a liberal and progressive Englishman to his subject—and that probably included a negative view of France and French despotism. His views on French Canadians were far less sympathetic than Tocqueville’s a few years earlier, but they were not in fact radically different. Unlike Tocqueville, Durham was in a position to do something about the situation—or at least to have his strictures taken seriously by legislators.

It was a drastic prescription, and there was little to prevent it. In Lower Canada there was no assembly, merely an appointed Special Council. French-Canadian opinion was confused and demoralized; with Papineau in exile in France, his former lieutenants—those who weren’t too compromised by the rebellion—disputed over his legacy and his leadership. There was even a faction that urged the acceptance of Durham’s prescription for assimilation as a means for getting on with life and finding prosperity. The Upper Canadian assembly cheerfully voted for union, understanding that their own debt-ridden province would be joining the comparatively debt-free Lower Canada.

All that remained was for the Whig government to take action. First they appointed a new governor general, Charles Poulett Thomson, another Whig politician; he arrived at Quebec in October 1839.47 Then they turned to what they hoped would be a longer-term solution. This they did through the Act of Union of 1840, which enacted the form but not the spirit of Durham’s report. Upper and Lower Canada were reunited, and endowed with the same system of government as they had before—appointed executive and legislative councils, and an elected assembly of eighty members, forty from the former Upper Canada and forty from the former Lower Canada. The Act, like its predecessors in 1778 and 1791, allowed the new “Province of Canada” to live off its own resources, but unlike them it provided that the province must first pay the salaries of an enumerated list of officials and judges. The colony also remained subject to the British government’s overall authority over trade.

This was scarcely a new beginning. It was the product of fear rather than hope: it guarded against past dangers and left hope, if any remained, to a very uncertain future.