Chapter Sixteen
Attitudes and Beliefs
Canada was an overwhelmingly Christian country, with a handful of major denominations. Without the aboriginal peoples, Canada in 1871 was 98 percent Christian. Roman Catholics, who were primarily of French, Irish, and Scottish descent, made up 41 percent of the population, while a further 57 percent were divided amongst various Protestant groups. During the Confederation decades, the Anglicans started as the most numerous group but over the years lost considerable ground to the Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, and numerous Evangelical sects.1
Christian churches in the period were influential, energetic, and powerful forces within their respective communities. Church attendance was high, and church-centred life was extremely popular in both English and French Canada. Churches assumed not only religious importance, but they also ran many of the public charities, and, in both urban and rural areas, were at the centre of much of the social life.
Few Canadians during this period identified themselves as being agnostic or having no religious affiliation. This stands in fairly sharp contrast to the UK and America’s northern states, where, especially in the later years of the era, there was a new embryonic and public sense of religious uncertainty. Victorian angst about religion was largely based on recent challenges to conventional religious tenets and literal interpretations of the Bible arising from Charles Darwin’s findings on evolution, as well as discoveries, by several geologists, of the earth’s geological age. Canadians were a literate population, and they were likely as aware of these new scientific discoveries as Britons or Americans. Canada’s absence of religious anguish may reflect, not a shallow lack of moral inquiry, but a habit of not challenging the status quo. This trait likely had its roots in how the two major cultures co-existed. Both French and English understood the art of getting along in a time of relative religious antagonism. From a political perspective, Canada was not yet two solitudes, but had over the years developed into a kind of easy social, political, and economic symbiosis. People had adopted a “live and let live” attitude when it came to core beliefs that were not creating conflict with one another. In this manner, they were likely to refrain from disrupting things, and self-identified with the cultural features of their religious affiliation, regardless of their private beliefs.
For a time during the mid- and late nineteenth century, belief in spiritualism was also popular. Although it was much more in vogue in America and Britain, it did have a short currency in southern Ontario and Montreal from the 1850s through to the 1870s. Séances and the idea of communicating with the dead became popular around the same time as extensive use of the telegraph. There was also considerable interest in the new field of mesmerism, which proposed to bring about medical cures by regulating the flows of animal magnetism in a human body and aligning these magnetic flows with universal magnetic fields. These beliefs were popular only briefly and their appeal was likely consistent with a heightened interest in science and a general fascination with the era’s advances in knowledge.
Apart from religious beliefs, Confederation-era Canadians shared a number of overarching attitudes that distinguished them from other countries. Canada was a relatively peaceful and orderly nation because of its geography, its colonial parentage, and good luck. But there was a fourth element to its good fortune, and that was that Canadians trusted in the rule of law. Canadian conflicts had all been small ones. The rebellions of 1837 and 1838, the Red River Rebellion, and even the post-Confederation-era North-West Rebellion, while indicating larger social problems, were all fairly mild by comparison with the violence that wracked other countries during the period. Problems were generally dealt with, not always successfully, but within democratic structures.
Where Canadians were similar to the British and the Americans was in a number of nineteenth-century attitudes. Chief amongst these was the overriding belief in respectability. Victorian respectability had numerous facets. It most obviously displayed itself as a belief in manners. The period had rules that governed almost all aspects of life. There was an accepted and “proper” way of doing things for every conceivable situation. Propriety became a mark of distinction, a sure sign that one knew how to behave, and was comfortably a part of a decent class of society. As a result, people deported themselves in a stiff and dignified manner. This in turn led to a kind of conformity that successive generations would find constricting and artificial. Examples of this can be found in things like prudishness. Victorians were neurotically unwilling to discuss or mention subjects that lay on the margins of good taste. Discussions of things such as sex and sexuality were socially prohibited as they violated respectability. Canadians were by no means immune from this trait. This desire for respectability and propriety led to a serious and sober kind of conformity. Even the language was, by today’s standards, somewhat pompous, mannered, and pretentious. But this obsession for respectability was almost certainly driven by an underlying purpose.
With the Industrial Revolution, class divisions changed. The middle class grew in terms of its size and influence; and with the growth of the middle class came a kind of social anxiety, which had at its heart the recently affluent middle classes’ desire for social acceptance. In this new order, people were defined by their jobs and their station in life rather than their family backgrounds. Showing that one knew how to behave, how to speak, and how to conduct oneself was implicit proof that one had arrived. Being in the middle class was incredibly important in a culture where the great majority of the population were descendants of those who had spent the last several millennia at the bottom of the social pyramid.
These factors were at play in Canada as well, but there were other influences changing the equation. The middle class in Canada differed substantially from both the middle class in the UK and the newly industrialized cities of the northern states.* Canada’s middle class was overwhelmingly rural, while in these other regions, the middle class was growing as a result of booming urban markets for professional, trade, and commercial services. Because the majority of Canada’s middle class was made up of proud and relatively self-sufficient frontier farmers, the middle class was initially not as well-to-do. This in turn meant that entrance to the middle class was much more open, and its values were shared by a larger proportion of people. While Britain and America’s booming northern cities were developing socially in the shape of a pyramid, Canada was growing more in the shape of a milk bottle.
Canadians, like their British and American counterparts, believed that work was a duty, that it was character building and good for one’s soul. The Protestant ethic of industry thrift and hard work had by the 1840s drifted across denominational boundaries. By the mid-nineteenth century, it had become thoroughly ingrained in middle-class thinking. The Irish dairy farmer, no less than the Anglican shop owner in the next village, regarded “undeserving poor” as those who were poor through no fault of their own and could not work. This category included widows and orphans, the very elderly, and the disabled. It did not include the “deserving poor,” those who were capable of working but did not. The deserving poor included those who were victims of any of the larger economic changes that threw thousands out of work, as well as those who were considered to be in any way morally suspect, such as vagrants or unwed mothers.
In this there was a strange contradiction. In Canada, like the rest of the new world, the middle class accepted people into its ranks fairly readily, probably because most Canadians were within a generation or two of being poor themselves: Scottish crofters who had their cottages torn down, starving Irish, families fleeing English workhouses, and the sons of American farmers seeking new land all shared this acceptance into a large amorphous middle class. As willing as they were to regard these new immigrants as equals, they also readily accepted the era’s prevailing judgment as to what constituted deserving poverty. What differentiated Canada from the industrial cities of England was that Canada could much more readily absorb large numbers of the poor, and there were relatively fewer poor unemployed people in Canada. There were futures to be had homesteading, jobs to be had in the lumber industry or as a hired hand on a farm. Canadians did not have to deal with masses of unemployable workers drifting into England’s cities. In Canada, the percentage of impoverished people was much smaller and therefore more manageable. In this manner, constant low-level economic growth and steady demographic growth did much to shape the national character.
First- and second-generation Scottish Canadians, Eastern Ontario, 1882. The middle classes in the Confederation decades were not only comfortable; they enjoyed a standard of living and security that would have astonished their grandparents’ generation.
Along with Confederation era’s middleclass values of respectability and the dignity of work went the concept of integrity. Integrity was laden with class overtones. In the early years of the period, being a gentleman, or a lady, meant one belonged to the aristocracy, but during the Confederation decades, being a gentleman morphed into meaning that one subscribed to a certain lofty moral code. The gentleman was idealized as being a man of unassailable integrity, a kind of modern day, saintly Arthurian prince.2 It was an aspiration rather than a reality. That image of class integrity was contradicted by obvious inconsistencies. The era’s outward appearance of restraint, dignity, and righteousness contrasted with the pervasiveness of the era’s commercial exploitation, widespread prostitution, child labour, and utter disinterest in the welfare of dispossessed classes, such as the urban poor and First Nations. And while it is dangerous to pretend to be outraged about the shortcomings of previous generations, it is fair to say that this was a generation that prided itself on its sense of integrity, rectitude, and morality. However, Victorian Canadians were no more or less virtuous than any other generation, and had their own strengths and failings.
One issue from the Confederation era that surfaces periodically is the subject of racism. It is a reasonable concern. Canadian society of the period was racist. Many of the English-speaking peoples in Canada believed that the British Empire was leading the world into a new and better age. English-speaking Canadians believed as a matter of course that the English race was demonstrably superior to all others. British North Americans, along with their fellow members of the Empire in Britain, were utterly convinced of the innate superiority of the British over the inhabitants of other countries. This was simply assumed as a matter of common knowledge. Most Victorian thinkers of the time did not hesitate to question this. Charles Kingsley, the famous social reformer and a prominent Anglican priest, summed up the prevailing spirit of the time as Britain’s “glorious work which God seems to have laid on the English race, to replenish the earth and subdue it.”3
The best that can be said is that it was a time of massive contradictions. Closer to home, George Brown, the founder of The Globe newspaper, was forever regaling his readers to be wary of the dangers posed by Catholics, Jews, and Irish; yet at the same time, he was a passionate abolitionist and a strong proponent of the integration of escaped black American slaves and white Canadians. Canadians were generally ardent supporters of the Underground Railroad, but at the same time, few would tolerate racially mixed schools or hotels. People’s perspectives were limited, confused, and evolving.
Racism was not just a British failing. In the nineteenth century, it was a global problem. National, ethnic, and religious chauvinism (the word would not be used in its current meaning until 1945) was an intrinsic component of every culture. Notions of racial tolerance and understanding had existed for thousands of years, yet these beliefs only assumed their widespread and current emphasis after the world had endured two catastrophic world wars. A hundred years before, racist views were common. What kept Canada moving forward and prevented the country from sinking into a nasty squalid autocracy were its democratic traditions and adherence to the rule of law.
The rule of law and the justice system in the Confederation era displayed some noteworthy differences and similarities to what we know today. Although crimes of the period were comparable to modern offences, many laws, the courts, the police, and the penal system were very different. The Confederation era was a period that saw the abandonment of public executions, the rise of modern police forces, and growing social advocacy for juveniles, victims, and criminals, but in many respects, it was a much more lawless time than the present.
One of the most notable differences in nineteenth-century crime was the frequency of riots. Before Canada had trained and disciplined professional police forces, demonstrations and altercations quickly escalated, often turning into prolonged mob violence. Almost always, the fighting had religious or political associations. Some of the most significant Confederation-era riots were: the Irish sectarian Battle of York Point in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1845; the burning of the Montreal parliament buildings in 1849 after the Rebellion Losses Bill; the Gavazzi riots in Quebec City and Montreal in 1853, which were triggered by anti-clerical lectures given by an Italian ex-monk; and the Jubilee Riots in Toronto in 1875, which was just one of that city’s many bloody outbreaks of violence between Catholics and Protestant Orangemen. Toronto alone had an estimated twenty-six riots between 1839 and 1860, almost all of them sectarian in nature. New Brunswick listed eighteen similar riots that had to be quelled by troops during the same period.4 Many of these riots involved fatalities, either from shootings by rioters or troops having to fire into the crowds to disperse the mob. Even with the advent of police forces, things didn’t initially get much better. In Toronto for example, members of the police force who had been recruited from the city’s Orange Lodges often actively joined in the rioting.5
Before the creation of municipal police forces, larger towns and cities, such as Halifax, Montreal, and Quebec, hired armed, untrained constables to assist watchmen. In the event of mob violence, the British Army and local militia units were called out to restore order.6
By the 1830s, municipalities recognized the need for specialized policing. Toronto raised the first real permanent police force in 1834, and other cities followed soon after. In rural townships and villages, judges and justices of the peace conscripted local men for short periods of time to serve as untrained constables and supervisory “high constables.” These rural constables served warrants, escorted prisoners, and attended court, but there was nothing in their duties in terms of responsive or proactive policing. In those early years, police also carried out numerous functions that are now conducted by other civil organizations. In the Confederation decades, police served as health and fire inspectors, checked on tavern and hotel licenses, as well as enforced regulations relating to agricultural produce and animal control.
It is difficult to assess the actual crime rates during the period, as intensive policing was confined to cities with permanent police forces, and the bulk of the population lived in the country. In the rural areas, it is likely that, given the absence of police, the distances, the relative isolation of most of the population, and poor communications, many crimes went unreported. As well as this, the actual court proceedings were not recorded for most of the period. Existing documents indicate that while there was serious crime, the overwhelming majority of criminal behaviour consisted of public drunkenness, vandalism, brawling, petty theft, prostitution and other undefined acts of immorality, the breaking of local ordinances, the abandonment of indentured service contracts, and swearing.7 We do know that juveniles were treated as adults for most of the period. From 1846 to 1857, three hundred juveniles were imprisoned with adults in New Brunswick alone.8
In the earliest years of the period, children were give horrific prison sentences. Whippings were common, and children were locked up in the same cells as hardened criminals and the mentally ill. One ten-year-old boy was incarcerated for seven years in the Kingston Penitentiary. Within his first eight months he was flogged fifty-seven times for misdemeanours, which included the crimes of laughing and staring.9 Juvenile “industrial homes” were opened in the late 1850s, but throughout the decades, physical punishment of minors was considered to be the most effective and economical means of handling delinquents. Those advocating more lenient treatment of children in the justice system were not successful in seeing major reforms until the adoption of the new Criminal Code in 1892.10
The period between being arrested and the time the accused was tried was very short. Minor offenses came to trial within days and trials for major offenses were underway within a month. Trials for serious crimes rarely lasted more than a few days, as there were strict limits on who could be called as an expert witness. Juries were often eliminated, and up to half of the trials for serious crimes saw defendants waive their rights to trial by jury. Courts of Error and Appeal were instituted in Canada in 1849, which was decades earlier than they were in Britain. The process was completely uncoupled from the trial courts with the establishment of a separate appeals court in 1876.11
The Confederation decades had their share of famous crimes. The most notorious one of the period was the Cypress Hills Massacre in 1873, when twenty-three men, women, and children of the Assiniboine First Nation were killed. It took two-and-a-half months for word of this atrocity to get back to Ottawa, but the news hastened the raising of the North-West Mounted Police who were sent out to bring stability to the Prairies. The case dragged on for almost a decade and, although years later three arrests were eventually made, no one was ever successfully prosecuted.
The next most famous crime of the Confederation era was the mob killing of the “Black Donnellys” near London, Ontario. The Donnellys were an Irish immigrant family, well-known as unsavoury, small-time criminals and violent bullies. In the middle of a snow storm, one night in February 1880, a mob attacked and burned two of their houses, murdering five people, including children. Despite the eyewitness testimony of a surviving child, no one was ever charged with or convicted of the crimes.
* The rural middle class in America’s northern states shared some similar class characteristics with Canada. However, rural society in the northern states was generally older and more established. In the 1840–60 period, the most dynamic and influential elements in American society were in its large rapidly industrializing cities, a phenomenon which would not appear in Canada until the early twentieth century.