8
COLONIES INTO PROVINCES
The wonder of the age: The Victoria Bridge across the St. Lawrence at Montreal, celebrated in song, 1860.
The years after the rebellion witnessed a revolution of a different kind. British North America did not cast off the British yoke, or repudiate its monarchical constitution. Quite the contrary—by the 1860s the colonies were more firmly connected to the mother country than they had ever been, through the voices of their inhabitants, expressed in a governmental system that developed autonomy as its defining characteristic. The old British Empire, classically conceived as a metropolis surrounded by economic and political dependencies, could never have tolerated such devolution of authority, but as British politics were reinvented in the 1830s, so the British Empire changed its shape and meaning in the 1840s.
The empire was literally closer together, because a revolution in transportation and communication slashed times of travel and transport through steamships and steam railways, and through the telegraph. By the 1860s British North Americans could learn of distant events almost instantly. No longer would soldiers die on remote battlefields, as at New Orleans in 1815, after the war they fought was over.
The empire was closer together for another reason—more of its subjects had moved from the British Isles to the colonial periphery, including the British possessions in America. The inhabitants of Newfoundland displayed an Irish accent, while the leading politicians of Canada—John A. Macdonald, for example, or his rival George Brown— spoke with a Scottish burr they had brought from their country of origin. By the 1860s there were enough of them to make it possible to speak of a new country, a federation of colonies within the empire—a viable, self-sufficient monarchy in the New World. Though such an event was not undreamt of in 1837 or 1840, it seemed wildly improbable, its feasibility at best doubtful.
The outward sign of the viability of the North American colonies lay in their population. In the 1810s the collective population of the British possessions in North America was roughly 700,000, including perhaps 100,000 Indian inhabitants. In the 1860s it was slightly more than 3.5 million, while its Native component was, perhaps, 150,000. Compared with the population of the United States, or Great Britain, or the British Empire, these were small numbers but, if compounded into a single entity, they were enough to form a country.
REINVENTING THE EMPIRE
Until the 1830s, Europeans clung to the fringes of North America. The eastern coasts were fairly thickly settled, and although settlers had penetrated the interior, even around the Great Lakes the landscape had changed little. The forests still carpeted the land, and human settlement was merely occasional—clearings in the woods connected by atrocious roads. Sailing ships and steamboats alleviated the isolation in the summer, and there were sleighs in the winter to cross the ice and snow, but towns like Toronto in Upper Canada were weeks away from current news, and even more from fashions or inventions. True, travel was faster and more reliable than it had been in the 1730s or 1630s but, as in earlier centuries, the transmission of information depended on direct word of mouth, or the passage of pieces of paper from one point to another.
Disease travelled too, through immigration from Europe to ports like Halifax or Quebec or Montreal, where cholera appeared in June 1832. That year eighteen hundred victims died of it in Montreal and twenty-two hundred in Quebec City; it then moved along the waterways into the interior, to York and Detroit in the west and down the Hudson Valley to New York City. Cholera was especially dreaded, because its onset was quickly followed by a painful death, essentially from dehydration following diarrhea and vomiting. No one could say with actual certainty how it was spread (medical authorities blamed “miasmic vapours”), merely that it was transmitted by human contact, and so the authorities resorted to the ageold practice of quarantining affected populations and areas. At Grosse Isle, down the St. Lawrence from Quebec City, a special quarantine station was established, to which lower-class immigrants were directed; cabin passengers, paying higher fares, moved on directly to Quebec or Montreal.1
Quarantine could do little against another disease, typhus, also spread by contaminated water supplies. In Kingston alone, in 1847, fourteen hundred luckless Irish immigrants, fleeing famine at home, found only a Canadian grave thanks to typhus.2 In the interior, the parade of European diseases continued to decimate the Native population as fur traders and then steamboats ascended the great rivers of the plains, and as contacts multiplied on the west coast, the same phenomenon occurred.
The towns and cities were tiny by later standards—Halifax roughly twenty thousand in 1850, Montreal almost fifty thousand, Toronto twenty-five thousand. It wasn’t merely lack of population that limited their size. There were real restrictions on how large a place could grow until sewers were dug for waste, reliable water supplies replaced individual wells, and coal could replace wood as the principal means of heat. In Toronto the first sewers were dug in the 1830s, and gas (made from imported coal) for lighting appeared first in 1840. The touring British author Charles Dickens in 1842 complimented the city on its “bustle, business and improvement.” There were, he told his readers, paved streets, gas lamps, and “excellent” shops.3 Dickens was apparently not poisoned by the water, nor felled by disease during his stay in Canada, but in that he was fortunate. Toronto, like other colonial population centres—Saint John, New Brunswick, was the first to act—was still feeling its way, via private water mains, to a secure and healthy water supply.4
Getting the goods to the cities for their “excellent” shops was also a problem, for there were difficulties in transport too. The necessities of life had to be imported to cities, by cart over roads alternately muddy or dusty, or painfully unloaded on the mucky banks of the Bay of Fundy or the St. Lawrence or the Great Lakes. Wood for fuel was becoming harder to find in the areas of old settlement, and hauling it to town in wagons jammed the wretched colonial roads. Market gardens and other farms could supply local needs, of course, but getting to the market was a major enterprise for farmers.
Governments in the 1830s and 1840s experimented with road improvements. They used logs to make “corduroy roads” or investigated “macadamized” pavements (named after their British inventor). They chartered companies to build toll roads and canals, with landing stages and docks and wharves. In the Atlantic provinces there was not as far to go, for the difficult terrain of Nova Scotia posed problems all its own in terms of connecting one pocket of settlement to another over intervening rocks and bogs. And beyond Nova Scotia there were miles and miles of forests only sporadically punctuated by settlements that petered out entirely before they reached the height of land that divided the St. John River Valley from that of the St. Lawrence.
In the Atlantic provinces the limits of agricultural growth were soon reached, and even in Lower Canada the Eastern Townships, the last large tract of promising arable land, were filling up. The cash crop there, as almost everywhere in the North American provinces, was wood. There was wood for burning, and wood for building. Harvests of timber and lumber in New Brunswick and Upper Canada fed the urbanization of Great Britain where the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, its appetites for overseas supply apparently unlimited. In the process the population of Great Britain was rearranged, as farmers drifted into expanding cities and prosperity encouraged the birth rate. Families had to be housed and houses had to be built, requiring lumber, and people had to be fed, requiring wheat.
In distant North America, the forest frontier receded. Clearings grew in frequency and size until, by the 1840s, the land was transformed—the forest cover might have seemed to be on the way to disappearance.5 (Paradoxically, reforestation began about the same time, as marginal lands along the Atlantic coast began to be abandoned for better, more fertile farms in the interior.) The deforestation of large parts of British North America was a testament to the efficacy and efficiency of the colonial system, the by-product of a mercantile philosophy whereby the mother country and its colonies dwelt in a cocoon of mutual support. The local governors did no more than express a traditional understanding of the proper relationship of a colony to its imperial parent, and against that understanding Howe, Papineau, and Mackenzie battered in vain.
In the 1840s the relationship between the American colonies and the British Empire was transformed. The colonies became, for the first time, more or less self-sufficient—in any event capable of paying their way without constant infusions of cash from the home government. Colonial dependence on the empire moved from the physical realm—more immigrants, more soldiers, and ever more subsidies to develop the colonies—to the psychological.
At the same time British psychological dependence on the colonies as a secure source of supply in time of war—for food, or for timber—diminished as the memory of the Napoleonic wars receded. Old habits nevertheless died hard and late. Appeasing the colonies still had some appeal—and the British government early in the 1840s provided, for what turned out to be the last time, free entry into the British market for colonial grain (or “corn” as it was called in the British Isles). It was, however, a wasting game as colonial discontent, especially in North America, continued.
The traditional enemy, France, had been so thoroughly defeated in 1815 that it no longer had the military or economic power, or the political will, to threaten British interests. The Industrial Revolution and the increase in British wealth and power left Great Britain, by mid-century, without serious competition. British industry and British products need fear no rivals. They didn’t need expensive tariffs or rigid protection, and there were cheaper sources of supply than the colonies, closer to home. There were riots against the high cost of living, and reducing tariffs on foodstuffs and building materials was one obvious way of responding to public discontent. Not surprisingly, British political leaders, and British opinion more generally, began to draw appropriate conclusions.
Unluckily for the colonists, tariffs and colonies were therefore combined into one supremely important political issue. Should Great Britain adopt free trade and abandon tariff protection, embodied in its “Corn Laws,” and with it the system of controls and incentives that bound it to the colonies? Economists then and since plumped for an answer that was right in principle, but, as always in politics, the real question was somewhat different. More realistically, should Great Britain abandon a policy that brought costly food and expensive imports to a restive and riot-prone population? Should Britain maintain a policy of expensive food in the face of an impending famine in Ireland, caused by the failure of the potato crop? The Tory prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, decided in 1846 that it should not. He split his party, but on the great question of free trade, he won. Free trade became British policy for the next ninety years.
Peel’s decision was deeply unpopular in the colonies. British policy had encouraged dependence, a profitable dependence that rewarded colonial allegiance with commercial advantages. Until 1846 grain exported from Canada to Great Britain enjoyed tariff preference, and on that basis Canadians invested in farms to grow wheat, canals to carry it, and mills to process it into flour. Under the existing colonial system, imports of American flour were transformed into Canadian products and could find their way down the St. Lawrence for export to Great Britain. A British traveller commented that he had seen a Canadian flour mill, “a new building of great size, and which must have cost many thousand pounds in its erection … standing still” as a result of the latest British policy. The effect was to transfer trade to New York instead of Montreal.6
RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT IN AN IRRESPONSIBLE EMPIRE
The economic transformation of the British Empire thus helped to stimulate a political shift. If the empire was rethinking its relations to the colonies, so were the colonists with regard to the empire. The British governments of the early 1840s straddled the problem. They tried to maintain direct imperial control over the colonial governments in North America, while simultaneously nodding in the direction of the principle that even colonial British subjects should consent to the policies by which they were governed. It was an uneasy compromise, workable only if the governor himself acted as a politician and exerted himself to secure a majority in the local legislature. Some governors tried politics—Lord Sydenham, governor general of Canada from 1839 to 1841, trounced his opponents at the polls and thereby obtained a usable though temporary majority. His successors tried first conciliation and then confrontation, dividing and combining the local politicians in the hope of establishing a stable government. It was a hopeless task, which in a system of more or less free elections was bound to produce a government led by opposition politicians.
This had already happened in Great Britain, where Peel’s adoption of free trade led to the disruption of his Tory party and the victory of the opposition Whigs. The Whigs took a permissive attitude to the colonies. Lord Durham’s son-in-law, Lord Grey, became colonial secretary, and not surprisingly he resurrected Durham’s recommendation that governments should reflect public opinion as expressed in elections. The result was Responsible Government, as Durham had hoped and advised.
A new governor general, Lord Elgin, encouraged the process. The elections that followed weren’t edifying, but they were decisive. Responsible Government was no longer an issue. Instead, Reformers denounced high salaries and elitist favouritism—the stuff of populism, and the staff of life to an alternating-party political system. In Nova Scotia they mobilized voters around sectarian allegiances, a feature that would characterize Canadian party politics for the next century. In New Brunswick the lieutenant governor simply harvested the results of a recent election, and after constructing a government left it to sink or swim as best it could.7 In less-developed Newfoundland the reforming tendency expressed itself merely in the grant of representative government; fully responsible government would have to wait. In the province of Canada the outlines of a party system were already present, and an election in 1848 witnessed the triumph of the Reform party over their conservative opponents.
The Canadian party system had a special qualification absent in the other provinces. Politics in Lower Canada had always had a racial or linguistic tinge, and the rebellion of 1837–38, though not entirely fought along linguistic lines, nevertheless appealed to the French majority in the province. In its aftermath Durham had advised officially removing the French language from public life, and encouraging French speakers to adopt English, thereby promoting unity. The union of Lower and Upper Canada and the equal representation in the legislature of the two former provinces were but a first step in that direction.
The political realities of the 1840s reversed Durham’s hopes for linguistic uniformity, but amply justified his ideas about colonial self-government. Upper Canadian Reformers led by Robert Baldwin and Francis Hincks, and Lower Canadian Reformers led by Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, combined in opposition to the various governors general and their conservative-minded supporters. In 1848 it was Baldwin and LaFontaine who were appointed to head a purely Reform government, following an election victory, and it was Baldwin and LaFontaine who had to face the crisis that followed the British government’s adoption of free trade. That they were able to do so was a testament to the flexibility of responsible government, and the durability of the party system that animated it.
The imperial transformation was not quite complete. The Corn Laws and protective tariffs had been removed, but remnants of the Navigation Laws, which governed who might trade what in the colonies, limped on until 1849.8 They were then abandoned, and with some alacrity. Some believed, and others feared, that it was a first step in the elimination of the North American provinces entirely. The sentiment that what was right for Britain was right for all, especially the colonies, had suffered a setback; but if Britain was no longer to govern the colonies directly, were they nothing more than an expensive and irritating encumbrance?
Great Britain was still committed to defend its overseas provinces, but not at any cost. In the face of belligerent American claims, the British government agreed to the division of Oregon along the 49th parallel in 1846; British authority and British commerce withdrew to Vancouver Island. The effect of the brief crisis over Oregon was to remind the government how expensive it would be to defend its American possessions, and how fortunate that diplomacy rather than the military had resolved the problem.9 It was also fortunate that there was no great enthusiasm in the United States for war with Great Britain; instead, American energies were diverted into the annexation of Texas in 1845 and a subsequent war with Mexico. Indirectly these events were of great importance for Canada, for the United States gained in territory, wealth, and power—and for the first time the American population equalled that of Great Britain itself. The relative sizes and strategic capacities of British North America and the United States were already disproportionate; now they would remain so.
Discussing North America in “national” or “border” terms is to some extent misleading, for this period and for others. The boundary signified certain things, but there were limits to what it did. People crossed the frontier more or less freely, and ideas, fashions, and habits moved too.10 Immigration to North America was a generalized phenomenon. Immigrants almost always came across the Atlantic from Europe and particularly from the British Isles. Thanks to the Navigation Acts and the timber trade, shipping was plentiful on the sea routes to British North America, and space on the westward voyage was cheap. As the historian Donald Akenson notes, “The cheapest way to get to the United States [from the British Isles] was by way of Canada.”11 Many immigrants therefore came to Montreal or Saint John with little intention of staying, but while they passed through they could well be a burden on the local authorities, sometimes because they were sick, and sometimes because they were indigent.
Local authorities did their best to cope with the phenomenon. Relatively few immigrants intended to stay in Lower Canada, but the cost of receiving them and passing them through fell on the local government. The provincial government therefore began levying a head tax to cover the cost, and increased it to cope with disease and hospitalization—and, indeed, burials.
The best remembered, or misremembered, group of immigrants came from Ireland.12 It was the largest, and it had been the largest virtually every year after 1815. By numbers alone, but also in many other ways, the Irish transformed the colonies. It’s generally assumed that “Irish” meant “Catholic Irish,” but most of the time that wasn’t the case. The majority of Irish immigrants to North America, north and south of the border, were Protestants. This gives rise to a further distortion, for Protestant is generally assumed to mean “Ulster Presbyterian,” the so-called Scotch-Irish, the descendants of Cromwellian settlers who had shoved aside the native Gaelic and Catholic Irish. But the majority of the Protestant Irish who came to British North America were probably members of the Church of Ireland; that is, they were Anglicans, and not Presbyterians. Upper Canada, called Canada West after 1840, absorbed the greatest numbers, naturally enough because it had the largest amount of untenanted, available lands for farming, which was the occupation of most of the Irish immigrants. New Brunswick, however, also took in many Irish, not so much for farming as for lumbering; and many Irish also ended up in the lumber trade of the Ottawa Valley.
All immigrants bring with them customs and habits formed in their country of origin, and the Irish were no different. Protestants imported the Orange Order, a semi-secret society founded in 1795 to commemorate Protestant (and English) victory in the religious wars of the previous century, and taking as its symbol the Protestant monarch William III— “King Billy” to his followers and admirers. Such societies—the Masons were another example—gave needed relief and support in a society starved for diversion and fellowship. Along with church membership, they defined much of the society of Britain’s backwoods American provinces.
Churches were of the essence back in Ireland, and it followed that they would be crucial in British North America. The main divide was between Roman Catholic and Protestant. There was some traffic across the divide, by conversion or absorption into the faith of the neighbourhood, but by and large Catholics remained Catholic and Protestants, Protestant. The line separating the various Protestant denominations was more fluid. As Akenson has pointed out, historians have tended to underestimate if not ignore the (Anglican) Church of Ireland, and indeed Anglicanism in its Irish, Scottish, and English branches was an important feature of colonial life. But denominational allegiance reflected not just deep sectarian conviction, but the availability of church services. Lacking a church or a minister, congregations could well wander into another sect.
By any standards, the attempt to establish a state church—the Church of England—failed. By the 1830s colonial administrators resignedly accepted the fact that their subjects would go their own way in matters of religion. With compulsion and favouritism removed from the religious equation, there was room for inter-sectarian cooperation, or more realistically neutrality, among the religious. The prospect of harmony, or at least the absence of bitter contention, made it possible to consider progress in such church-related issues as schooling.
Common education, compulsory and tax-supported, was popular in the abstract, but difficult to apply. All the colonies had school acts of some kind. A model existed, from Ireland, where a system of “National Schools” had been established with a common curriculum rigidly excluding anything that might offend any of Ireland’s Christian sects, Catholic or Protestant. In Ireland the Catholics had the numbers to call the tune, but in British North America they were the majority only in Lower Canada. Elsewhere, Catholic rigidity met Protestant assertiveness, and it took all the genius that politicians could muster to camouflage the fact. The result was a series of compromises. In the province of Canada, legislation sponsored by a Catholic politician manufactured two parallel state-supported systems for Canada West. There was a public system, effectively Protestant, and a Catholic one, known as “separate” schools. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick the arrangements were slightly different, but the result effectively the same: some schools were Catholic, and others Protestant.
THE USES OF GOVERNMENT
The schools were of course intended to inculcate religion, which was the concern of the various churches, but also to encourage proper civic values, from patriotism to orderly behaviour. Good order had always been an aspiration in the colonies—the early settlers set great store on the law and courts to regulate the unruly and to protect life, limb, and property. There was a small judicial apparatus at the top to handle the more serious cases, often badly, as we have seen (above, pp. 136–37), but most law and order was dispensed by local justices of the peace, prominent individuals who weren’t afraid to take on the task of regulating their neighbours. Local magistrates also managed the affairs of townships, districts, and counties—roads and bridges, for example.
As the population grew, forests were cleared and crops spread, and the tax base also increased. Post offices were opened not merely in the larger towns but in remote villages. Canals spread along the St. Lawrence, and in 1829 the Welland Canal, the first of many, connected Lakes Erie and Ontario. Sometimes canals were government projects, publicly built and owned outright; sometimes they were private enterprise, heavily subsidized. Canals were swiftly overtaken by railways, the marvel of the age, and railways too were paid for, ultimately, by the public because for longer distances there was neither the traffic nor the freight to support them. Fortunately, thanks to responsible government, the taxes consumed by canals and railways were freely approved by citizen representatives in the legislatures, that is, the politicians, and it’s not surprising that a flourishing, somewhat different, political class arose in the various colonies. The citizenry at large had no one to blame but themselves for the result; naturally, they scapegoated the politicians.
It was a system that suited alternating parties. These were ostensibly doctrinaire, originating in the ideological struggles of the 1830s. There were Reformers and Tories and eventually Conservatives and Liberals. The labels meant little on a left–right spectrum: the essence of the party system was caught by the eventual appearance in the 1860s of the “Liberal-Conservative” party. The parties were identified with personalities and the personalities with certain well-understood interests. The Liberals of Canada West, for example, tended to follow, or at least pay heed to, the brilliant but cantankerous editor of the Toronto Globe, George Brown. Brown, born in Scotland, came to Canada via New York to take part in sectarian politics of the Presbyterian variety. He had a forceful if not domineering personality, and under his influence the Liberals shed successive layers of younger politicians, who wound up under the sheltering umbrella of John A. Macdonald’s Liberal-Conservative party.
Macdonald, also a Scot by birth, was sinuous where Brown was forthright, accommodating where Brown was rigid. Where Brown was thought to be lacking in charm and consideration for others, Macdonald had those qualities in abundance. Brown considered Macdonald an unprincipled drunk, while Macdonald thought Brown a bigoted sectarian. Indeed, Macdonald frequently drank too much, while Brown wrote too frequently of the religious and racial failings of others, particularly Irish or French Catholics. But Brown understood that in an alternating-party system, compromise was necessary, and Macdonald accepted that there must be room in politics for larger ideas.
Macdonald was also fortunate in finding a French-Canadian partner, George-Etienne Cartier, a Montreal lawyer and, like many French-Canadian lawyers, a former would-be revolutionary.13 Cartier had followed Papineau, learned from the experience, and switched to the Reformer LaFontaine. He was the inheritor of LaFontaine’s formula of combination and conciliation, finding English-Canadian partners and constructing with them a new basis for politics. With their constitutional demands satisfied, Cartier’s kind of French-Canadian Reformer found that their interests, and, so they thought, those of their constituents, pointed to a coalition with Upper Canadian Conservatives, and ultimately with John A. Macdonald. Macdonald and Cartier, or Cartier and Macdonald, dominated the politics of the later 1850s.
The great ideas of the 1850s were tariffs and railways. Tariffs came first, as they had to, for the crude administrative system of the day found them the best and surest means for raising revenue. It might be a slight exaggeration to say no tariff, no government, but it was close. Looking south, colonial politicians saw that the American states had put their revenues to good and creative use, and as a result were apparently abounding in prosperity. What was the secret of prosperity? The British had done away with tariffs as a matter of principle, and Britain had prospered. The British population as a result got cheap food and British industry cheap inputs from abroad. The result was contentment, especially among the politicians who directed the British state, its army, its navy, and its empire. Should the British colonies not do the same?
The colonials did not see things in quite the same way. It was all very well for Great Britain, already prosperous, to use free trade to enhance its wealth and dominate the markets of the world with its industrial production. Britain already had industries, it already had production, and it already had a superabundant population. The colonies did not have these things. Neither did other countries—Prussia, for example, or the United States. Before they could subscribe to the blessings of free trade, they would have to reach British levels of production and prosperity.
Both Prussian theorists and American practitioners had evolved explanations as to why free trade was unsuitable as a policy for a developing economy. Industries needed time to mature before they could hope to compete with the British, or with any other more advanced economy. Only then would free trade be possible (the “infant industry” theory). Another argument was founded in the recent and painful experience of the colonies, which had depended so much on exporting single, “staple” products, wheat and wood, to Great Britain. The colonies hadn’t diversified their economies and as a result had nothing to fall back on when Great Britain removed their tariff preferences. Only the careful fostering of local manufactures through protective tariffs would safeguard the future livelihood of the colonial populations.
The immediate impulse in the colonies was to transfer dependence from one partner to another. If the British could undermine the economic basis of the old colonial system, then why should the colonials not abandon their political connection to Great Britain? A surge of annexationist sentiment passed through the colonies, affecting especially the moneyed classes. In Montreal, the Tories, enraged equally at the British government and at the provincial reform government of Baldwin and LaFontaine, drew up an “Annexation Manifesto” demanding union with the United States—American markets at the price of joining the American union.
It was a flash in the pan, momentarily dangerous, but doused with some skill by the governor general, Lord Elgin. With a return to prosperity in the early 1850s, the manifesto and the sentiment that inspired it were forgotten. Still, it was a sign that the colonial economies must be put on a more secure and reliable footing, and if trade with Britain couldn’t be guaranteed, why not take the better half of the annexationist platform and seek a trading relationship with the United States?
Again, Lord Elgin played a crucial role. As early as 1849 he argued that secure and preferential trade with the United States would take the edge off the colonists’ political grievances. Paradoxically, the closer the colonies were linked to the large and prosperous American market, the less likely they would be to seek annexation to the United States.14 The United States, without intending to do so, could make the British Empire in North America more secure. As a bonus, the British government could safely reduce its expensive North American garrison, while the colonials could concentrate on the development and enrichment of their provinces.
As if to underline how expensive the colonies could be, the Royal Navy was called on to patrol Nova Scotian waters to fend off American fishing boats poaching and otherwise intruding inside the traditional three-mile (five-kilometre) limit of sovereignty along the coast. This induced New England fishing communities to think of compromise, making the Atlantic fisheries part of a grand trading compact between the United States and British North America.
Appeasing the fish interest of New England was only one component, though an important one, in negotiating a trade treaty with the United States. The American constitution had reserved power over tariffs and trade for Congress rather than the executive branch; yet it was the executive that dealt with foreign affairs. Tariffs were an explosive subject in American politics: in 1833 one state, South Carolina, had actually challenged the federal government’s power to impose a higher tariff than the state’s own politicians thought desirable.
But in the United States, tariffs had been overtaken as a subject of political controversy by the even more dangerous issue of slavery, permitted in fourteen southern states, where it was regarded as the basis of the economy and society. Slavery had over time been banned in the northern states, as it had been in the British provinces.15 The American political system was finely balanced between north and south; the south demanded there be enough slave states to block northern, anti-slavery, influence.16
Naturally the first question about a trade deal with Canada was how it would affect the great question of slavery, and the American political balance. For many in the north, the attraction of a trade arrangement with the British provinces, apart from its economic consequences, was that it would serve to draw the colonials into the American orbit—that the American flag would follow American trade into the north. If that meant the admission of three or four new states, it would be enough to tip the balance.
For many southerners the argument was just the opposite. If the British Americans remained economically isolated and discontented, they would be tempted to throw off the British Empire and seek admission to the American union. If, on the other hand, they could find prosperity without admission to the union, they would remain separate and independent, thereby frustrating northern dreams of an anti-slavery majority.
Principles (even contradictory principles) were one thing. Tactics were something else again. The American executive was weak and almost indifferent, but that wasn’t where the power over trade lay. The Canadians were forced to supplement the efforts of the executive and concentrate on persuading the legislature. Winning over Congress cost time and money, the Canadian government was told. Bravely the Canadians shouldered the burden, hiring “congressional agents” and sending cabinet ministers and even Lord Elgin down to Washington to reason with their fellow politicians over champagne, whisky, and cigars.17 It was the first time, but certainly not the last, that Canadian negotiators engaged the American political system; and on this occasion they were successful.
It was a rare achievement. The Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 was one of only three trade treaties signed and ratified by the United States between 1789 and 1934. The treaty dealt with trade, navigation, and the fishery. An enumerated list of natural products could enter both countries free of duty—what would later be called sectoral free trade. Natural products included wheat, coal, timber, and “unmanufactured” lumber. The Americans secured access to the St. Lawrence canals and to the fishery off the Atlantic provinces.18 In return, the colonials were allowed to fish in American waters north of the 36th parallel and to navigate Lake Michigan. The treaty would last for ten years, and thereafter could be terminated with one year’s notice.
The Reciprocity Treaty coincided with an economic boom, and so its positive effects were enhanced by the effects of prosperity. A sharp depression in 1857 affected both the provinces and the United States, but thereafter the outbreak of the American Civil War ensured that the colonials had a market feeding the industries and armies of the Northern states in their war with the South.
POLITICS AND DEVELOPMENT
The current of development in the United States had swept past Canada after 1820. Highways, canals, and railways directed Americans west to the Mississippi Valley, and then across the prairies and mountains to Oregon and California, where there was a gold rush to entice immigrants. In place of settlers, there was commerce along the northern frontier, encouraged for the time being by the relative difficulty of communicating between the distant states of the growing union. It was easier and simpler for merchants along the northern border to derive their goods from Canada or New Brunswick, as opposed to Wisconsin or Missouri; and the same was true in reverse. Nevertheless, trade with Canada was relatively local and minor compared with trade with Great Britain, which remained until the 1920s the United States’ principal trading partner.
Canada gradually became a backwater in the American mind. French Canada was exotic and quaint, though definitely inferior. English Canada, on the other hand, was closer to what Americans were used to. Travellers crossing the border commented that it was hard to tell which country they were in. What was familiar wasn’t dangerous or even disturbing.
What was disturbing was slavery. The absence of slavery in the British provinces meant that escaping slaves directed themselves there, using a network of helpers collectively styled “the Underground Railroad.” Once on British territory, they were free, and safe from legal extradition.19 Perhaps thirty thousand ex-slaves arrived as a result, and most of them settled in the province of Canada.
They were not entirely welcome. On the one hand, there were numerous anti-slavery groups in the provinces, ready to support the refugees from the States. On the other hand, many Canadians feared what they didn’t know or weren’t used to—another skin colour.20 The resulting racist prejudice kept blacks marginalized in much the same way as in the northern United States.
Meanwhile, many Canadians found themselves engaged, emotionally and intellectually, as the United States lurched toward disunion during the 1850s. Not for the last time, extreme American politics found a distant echo in the British provinces, although the provincials had issues of their own to concern them. As always, economics loomed large: the boom of the mid-1850s became the Crash of 1857. The boom had encouraged the politicians in Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia to plump for railways—in Canada’s case, one of the longest in the world, the Grand Trunk, which eventually stretched from tidewater on the Gulf of St. Lawrence all the way to the Detroit River and beyond. Along with the railway mileage stretched government guarantees for railway investors—without which Canada’s colonial railways would undoubtedly not have been built. The Grand Trunk occasioned one of the engineering marvels of the age, the Victoria Bridge across the St. Lawrence at Montreal, which was opened in 1859.
The Grand Trunk was, to be sure, an expensive feat. The only way to complete it was to rely heavily, and increasingly, on the Canadian provincial treasury.21 The Canadian government could harvest the credit for getting the job done, but it also bore the brunt of criticism for the perceived deeds and misdeeds of what immediately became the province’s largest and most visible corporation—one that wasn’t owned in Canada, but in Britain. If Canadians complained about British investors, the investors complained about Canadians. “It was quite clear to me,” one wrote, “that the colony was getting a good deal more out of the [railway] line than the shareholders were ever likely to get.”22
The Grand Trunk and parallel lines like the Great Western were only partly designed to serve the needs of the British colonies. More importantly, they were designed to tap into the commerce of the American Midwest, and as such the colonial railways became part of a larger North American grid, integrating British America into the adjacent United States. And, of course, when an economic slump struck the United States, as it did in 1857, it affected the British colonies too.
The Crash of 1857 undermined provincial finances and ruined thousands of individual investors. Real estate values plummeted, and banks that had lent heavily in mortgages were compromised. (The Bank of Upper Canada, which was heavily into mortgages, never recovered and ultimately failed; the Bank of Montreal, which was not, survived and prospered.) But government had to be carried on: canals and railways had to be paid for. Governments reluctantly raised taxes, which in Canada’s case meant the tariff.
The tariff rose high enough to come to the attention of British exporters, who complained that their goods were being excluded from the colonial market. What kind of an empire was it, they asked, when colonies could cripple imports from the mother country? Pressed by the British government, the Canadian government replied that unless British taxpayers were prepared to pay for the administration of Canada, they had better leave the Canadians to raise their own revenue as they saw fit. The British government subsided. Rather unexpectedly, Canada and ultimately all the other colonies had jumped a constitutional hurdle. (The self-governing colonies now included Newfoundland, which had gained responsible government in 1855.) Where taxes and trade were concerned, colonial autonomy was now virtually absolute.
The colonies continued to depend on Great Britain for several expensive items, most notably defence. The backbone of defence was the Royal Navy, based at Halifax on the Atlantic. (The Pacific base was in Valparaiso, Chile, and was moved to Esquimalt, on Vancouver Island, only in 1865.) There were no local disturbances during the 1850s to suppress, no call on Britain for reinforcements for North America. Canadians did, however, serve as individuals in Britain’s imperial wars, for example in the Crimean War of 1854–56 against Russia and in the Indian Mutiny of 1857.23
THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
Neither Russians nor Indians were likely, or in fact able, to attack the British American colonies. Only the Americans could do that. As the United States teetered on the verge of civil war, some in the Northern states toyed with the idea of annexing the provinces, either to compensate for the loss of the seceding Southern states or as a last-ditch means of unifying the dis-United States against a convenient foreign enemy.24
The American Civil War broke out in April 1861, and lasted four long years. The North, under President Abraham Lincoln, fought at first to maintain the American union and prevent secession, while the South fought for independence and, with it, the preservation of slavery. Eventually, in 1863, the abolition of slavery became a Northern war aim, and Northern victory in 1865 therefore entailed the end of the South’s “peculiar institution.”
The South by itself could hardly hope to defeat the more populous and economically developed North; Southern strategy therefore sought to enlist foreign aid, especially that of Great Britain. The British government to some extent played into Southern hands by recognizing the South as a “belligerent”; the next logical step would have been to recognize the South as an independent country, making the Civil War an international conflict—rather like what had happened during the American Revolution.
The North resented the British attitude, and the resentment expressed itself in an incident in the fall of 1861, when a Northern ship intercepted a British vessel, the Trent, carrying Southern “diplomats” to Europe. This infringed British rights, though the British themselves had done the same thing during the Napoleonic Wars. The British government demanded that the Southerners be released, and there was a real danger that the North would refuse. Steamers left British ports carrying eleven thousand extra troops to reinforce the British North American garrison, and for a time it seemed that war was about to break out.
Cooler heads prevailed, the Southerners were released, and the war did not come. Meanwhile, the British provinces enjoyed the unaccustomed presence of the flower of the British army. Colonial society welcomed young and very eligible British officers, and the colonial economy welcomed their expenditures. The British treasury was not so pleased. Keeping the troops in North America was expensive, and, so it seemed, militarily futile. Strung out along a frontier twenty-four hundred kilometres long, from the Bay of Fundy to Lake Huron, the army could be cut off and gobbled up by any sizeable and competently led American army. Worse still, the colonies couldn’t agree on their own defence, which might have left the British army largely unsupported in the event of war. Increasingly, it appeared that the colonies’ best and cheapest defence was the maintenance of peaceful relations with the United States. The British certainly wanted it so. Exclaiming on the expense of defending Canada, the Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, Benjamin Disraeli, noted the “anomaly” of “an army maintained in a colony which does not permit us even to govern it!”25
As the Southern cause foundered after 1863, Southern agents in the colonies took desperate measures to provoke a war that was definitely not in the colonies’ interest. They staged a couple of raids on American territory from the colonies, and with victory all but assured, the Northern response could afford to be more forceful than in 1861. Passport controls were slapped on travellers across the border, stranding unwary Americans visiting Toronto or Saint John or Halifax. The Reciprocity Treaty was denounced in March 1865; it would expire a year later, on 17 March 1866. It’s tempting to ascribe the end of reciprocity to American irritation over border incidents, but it probably owed more to disgust at rising Canadian tariffs on American manufactured goods. Reciprocity did not lead to economic union, far less annexation. Absent political benefit, the economic gains of reciprocity could not outweigh American protectionism in Congress. There wouldn’t be another such trade agreement for the next seventy years.
There was one more trans-border eruption. Many of the soldiers in the armies of the North were recently arrived immigrants from Ireland. Many of these longed for the independence of Ireland under the leadership of the revolutionary Fenian Brotherhood. The Fenians proposed to strike at Great Britain, not in distant Ireland, but in the adjacent British colonies. This definitely alarmed the colonial governments, which had to mobilize troops of their own to counter the Fenian threat.
The Fenians did invade from time to time, most notably on the New Brunswick frontier in April 1866 and then across the Niagara River in June. The American government didn’t support them, and instead confiscated their arms and cut off their supplies. The Fenian menace eventually subsided, but it had been an expensive lesson for the colonists who had for the first time seriously to pay for their own defence. Money, as always, talked, in this case speaking to the colonists about what it meant, and what it cost, to remain British.
CONFEDERATION
Over the years British officials and colonial politicians had considered the feasibility of uniting the colonies—each colony was autonomous, and each had a political system that was discrete and self-contained. They had from time to time discussed the possibility, but until the 1860s the time was never ripe.
The driving force behind union was discontent in the western part of the province of Canada, the former Upper Canada, sometimes called Canada West. Overwhelmingly English-speaking, outnumbering the French of Lower Canada (also called Canada East) but condemned to equal representation in the legislature, the majority of Upper Canadians increasingly demanded “representation by population,” or “rep by pop.” The Lower Canadians naturally resisted any change that would diminish their political standing, or lessen their ability to control their own, largely French-speaking, society. The Canadian legislature was paralyzed, since no party or combination of parties—there were four, two for each section— could command a stable majority.
Finally, in June 1864, the leaders of three of the four parties, George Brown (Liberal), John A. Macdonald (Conservative), and George-Etienne Cartier (Conservative), agreed to form a coalition government with the object of seeking a federal union. The Lower Canadian Conservatives, who were interested in recovering the autonomy they had lost in 1840 with the union of the two Canadas, proved to have interests parallel to the Upper Canadian Liberals. Upper and Lower Canada would be divided, but they would also be united in a larger union that would include, if possible, the Atlantic colonies. As it happened, the three Maritime provinces, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, were contemplating a conference to discuss Maritime union. Learning of this, the Canadian government let it be known that they would like to be invited.
In the event, delegates from all four colonies met in Charlottetown at the beginning of September 1864. The idea of a colonial union proved surprisingly attractive, and it was decided to meet again, in Quebec City, on 10 October. The Quebec conference included Newfoundland as well as the original four colonies at Charlottetown. Again, there was a large measure of agreement, so much so that the Quebec conference produced seventy-two resolutions that outlined how a colonial federation could be governed.
The process was not entirely smooth, but on the main issue of a federated combination of colonies there was little dispute. There was no serious disagreement on the distribution of powers that made the proposed central government considerably more powerful than the provinces. As for the provinces, there would be six: the four Atlantic colonies, and the redivided provinces of Upper and Lower Canada—Ontario and Quebec. There was further discussion, more prolonged, of the composition of the new federal Parliament, and the characteristics of its two chambers, the House of Commons and the Senate. But there would be a single entity with constituent federated parts, and it would be called Canada. Its capital would be the new Canadian capital of Ottawa, where grandiose Parliament Buildings were being constructed, in time to receive the new Canadian Parliament. The conference adjourned at the end of October, recommending its conclusions to the legislatures of the several colonies.
The course of the new “confederation” project did not run smooth. Newfoundland hesitated, and continued to hesitate, as opposition to confederation grew. Finally it stayed out altogether, and remained out until 1949. The government of New Brunswick, led by Samuel Leonard Tilley, went to the polls and was soundly beaten by an anti-confederate government. The government of Nova Scotia, led by Charles Tupper, had no need to risk an election, having been elected just the year before, in 1863; so Tupper pushed the project through his legislature, even though it was obvious that there was substantial opposition, later estimated at 65 percent of the population. All Tupper had to do was hold on until confederation could be made into reality, which meant getting it passed by the imperial Parliament in London. In Prince Edward Island, the forces of locality were too great. The island was too small; it would be swallowed up and ignored in a federation as large and populous as “Canada.” As of 1865, confederation was in trouble in the Maritimes.
The greatest support for the confederation project came from the province of Canada, but even there it’s debatable how much support there really was, especially in Lower Canada. There the local Liberals, called “Rouges” or “Reds,” condemned confederation as a fraud. Cartier’s Conservatives, or “Bleus” (“Blues”), argued that confederation was a victory for French Canadians, because it finally gave them a place of their own, the future province of Quebec, in which they would be the undisputed majority. True, the Rouges replied, but the main powers of government, over railways, telegraphs, the post office, trade, and taxation belonged to the new federal government.
To work as intended, “Canada” must include at least the mainland colonies, and there the key was New Brunswick. Fortunately the anti-confederate government of that province disintegrated in 1866, to be replaced by a pro-confederate administration under the durable Tilley. It helped that the Fenians were making fierce noises on the border, which encouraged feelings of solidarity with the empire and with other colonies that might contribute to New Brunswick’s defence.
The action now moved to London, where with the assistance of colonial representatives the imperial government drafted an act to give effect to the Seventy-two Resolutions of the Quebec Conference of 1864, creating the Dominion of Canada. The resulting bill passed through Parliament on 29 March 1867 as the British North America Act, and took effect on the first of July of that year.