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The Canadian Dominion: A Chronicle of Our Northern Neighbor

by Oscar D. Skelton · English · Gutenberg #2835 · 365,227 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Canadian Dominion: A Chronicle of Our Northern Neighbor

Author: Oscar D. Skelton

Editor: Allen Johnson


        
Release date: September 1, 2001 [eBook #2835]
                Most recently updated: December 11, 2008

Language: English

Original publication: New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2835

Credits: Produced by The James J. Kelly Library Of St. Gregory's
        University; Alev Akman, Dianne Bean, Joe Buersmeyer, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CANADIAN DOMINION: A CHRONICLE OF OUR NORTHERN NEIGHBOR ***




Produced by The James J. Kelly Library Of St. Gregory's
University; Alev Akman, Dianne Bean, and Joe Buersmeyer






THE CANADIAN DOMINION

A CHRONICLE OF OUR NORTHERN NEIGHBOR

By Oscar D. Skelton


     NEW HAVEN: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
     TORONTO: GLASGOW, BROOK & CO.
     LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
     OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
     1919
     Copyright, 1919, by Yale University Press




PREFACE

The history of Canada since the close of the French regime falls into
three clearly marked half centuries. The first fifty years after
the Peace of Paris determined that Canada was to maintain a separate
existence under the British flag and was not to become a fourteenth
colony or be merged with the United States. The second fifty years
brought the winning of self-government and the achievement of
Confederation. The third fifty years witnessed the expansion of the
Dominion from sea to sea and the endeavor to make the unity of the
political map a living reality--the endeavor to weld the far-flung
provinces into one country, to give Canada a distinctive place in the
Empire and in the world, and eventually in the alliance of peoples
banded together in mankind's greatest task of enforcing peace and
justice among nations.

The author has found it expedient in this narrative to depart from the
usual method of these Chronicles and arrange the matter in chronological
rather than in biographical or topical divisions. The first period of
fifty years is accordingly covered in one chapter, the second in two
chapters, and the third in two chapters. Authorities and a list
of publications for a more extended study will be found in the
Bibliographical Note.

O. D. S.

QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY, KINGSTON, CANADA, July, 1919.




CONTENTS

     I. THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS

     II. THE FIGHT FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT

     III. THE UNION ERA

     IV. THE DAYS OF TRIAL

     V. THE YEARS OF FULFILMENT

     BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE




THE CANADIAN DOMINION



CHAPTER I. THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS

Scarcely more than half a century has passed since the Dominion of
Canada, in its present form, came into existence. But thrice that period
has elapsed since the fateful day when Montcalm and Wolfe laid down
their lives in battle on the Plains of Abraham, and the lands which now
comprise the Dominion finally passed from French hands and came under
British rule.

The Peace of Paris, which brought the Seven Years' War to a close in
1763, marked the termination of the empire of France in the New World.
Over the continent of North America, after that peace, only two flags
floated, the red and yellow banner of Spain and the Union Jack of
Great Britain. Of these the Union Jack held sway over by far the larger
domain--over the vague territories about Hudson Bay, over the great
valley of the St. Lawrence, and over all the lands lying east of the
Mississippi, save only New Orleans. To whom it would fall to develop
this vast claim, what mighty empires would be carved out of the
wilderness, where the boundary lines would run between the nations yet
to be, were secrets the future held. Yet in retrospect it is now
clear that in solving these questions the Peace of Paris played no
inconsiderable part. By removing from the American colonies the menace
of French aggression from the north it relieved them of a sense of
dependence on the mother country and so made possible the birth of a new
nation in the United States. At the same time, in the northern half of
the continent, it made possible that other experiment in democracy, in
the union of diverse races, in international neighborliness, and in
the reconciliation of empire with liberty, which Canada presents to the
whole world, and especially to her elder sister in freedom.

In 1763 the territories which later were to make up the Dominion of
Canada were divided roughly into three parts. These parts had little or
nothing in common. They shared together neither traditions of suffering
or glory nor ties of blood or trade. Acadia, or Nova Scotia, by the
Atlantic, was an old French colony, now British for over a generation.
Canada, or Quebec, on the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, with seventy
thousand French habitants and a few hundred English camp followers,
had just passed under the British flag. West and north lay the vaguely
outlined domains of the Hudson's Bay Company, where the red man and the
buffalo still reigned supreme and almost unchallenged.

The old colony of Acadia, save only the island outliers, Cape Breton
and Prince Edward Island, now ceded by the Peace of Paris, had been
in British hands since 1713. It was not, however, until 1749 that any
concerted effort had been made at a settlement of this region. The
menace from the mighty fortress which the French were rebuilding at that
time at Louisbourg, in Cape Breton, and the hostility of the restless
Acadians or old French settlers on the mainland, had compelled action
and the British Government departed from its usual policy of laissez
faire in matters of emigration. Twenty-five hundred English settlers
were brought out to found and hold the town and fort of Halifax. Nearly
as many Germans were planted in Lunenburg, where their descendants
flourish to this day. Then the hapless Acadians were driven into
exile and into the room they left, New Englanders of strictest Puritan
ancestry came, on their own initiative, and built up new communities
like those of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Other waves
of voluntary immigration followed--Ulster Presbyterians, driven out by
the attempt of England to crush the Irish woolen manufacture, and,
still later, Highlanders, Roman Catholic and Presbyterian, who soon made
Gaelic the prevailing tongue of the easternmost counties. By 1767 the
colony of Nova Scotia, which then included all Acadia, north and east of
Maine, had a prosperous population of some seven thousand Americans,
two thousand Irish, two thousand Germans, barely a thousand English,
and well over a thousand surviving Acadian French. In short, this
northernmost of the Atlantic colonies appeared to be fast on the way
to become a part of New England. It was chiefly New Englanders who had
peopled it, and it was with New England that for many a year its whole
social and commercial intercourse was carried on. It was no accident
that Nova Scotia later produced the first Yankee humorist, "Sam Slick."

With the future sister province of Canada, or Quebec, which lay along
the St. Lawrence as far as the Great Lakes, Acadia or Nova Scotia had
much less in common than with New England. Hundreds of miles of unbroken
forest wilderness lay between the two colonies, and the sea lanes ran
between the St. Lawrence, the Bay of Fundy, or Halifax and Havre or
Plymouth, and not between Quebec and Halifax. Even the French settlers
came of different stocks. The Acadians were chiefly men of La Rochelle
and the Loire, while the Canadians came, for the most part, from the
coast provinces stretching from Normandy and Picardy to Poitou and
Bordeaux.

The situation in Canada proper presented the British authorities with a
problem new in their imperial experience. Hitherto, save for Acadia and
New Netherland, where the settlers were few in numbers and, even in
New Netherland, closely akin to the conquerors in race, religion, and
speech, no colony containing men of European stocks had been acquired
by conquest. Canada held some sixty or seventy thousand settlers,
French and Catholic almost to a man. Despite the inefficiency of French
colonial methods the plantation had taken firm root. The colony had
developed a strength, a social structure, and an individuality all its
own. Along the St. Lawrence and the Richelieu the settlements lay close
and compact; the habitants' whitewashed cottages lined the river banks
only a few arpents apart. The social cohesion of the colony was equally
marked. Alike in government, in religion, and in industry, it was a land
where authority was strong. Governor and intendant, feudal seigneur,
bishop and Jesuit superior, ruled each in his own sphere and provided a
rigid mold and framework for the growth of the colony. There were, it
is true, limits to the reach of the arm of authority. Beyond Montreal
stretched a vast wilderness merging at some uncertain point into the
other wilderness that was Louisiana. Along the waterways which threaded
this great No Man's Land the coureurs-de-bois roamed with little heed to
law or license, glad to escape from the paternal strictness that irked
youth on the lower St. Lawrence. But the liberty of these rovers of the
forest was not liberty after the English pattern; the coureur-de-bois
was of an entirely different type from the pioneers of British stock who
were even then pushing their way through the gaps in the Alleghanies
and making homes in the backwoods. Priest and seigneur, habitant and
coureur-de-bois were one and all difficult to fit into accepted English
ways. Clearly Canada promised to strain the digestive capacity of the
British lion.

The present western provinces of the Dominion were still the haunt of
Indian and buffalo. French-Canadian explorers and fur traders, it is
true, had penetrated to the Rockies a few years before the Conquest, and
had built forts on Lake Winnipeg, on the Assiniboine and Red rivers,
and at half a dozen portages on the Saskatchewan. But the "Company of
Adventurers of England trading into Hudson's Bay" had not yet ventured
inland, still content to carry on its trade with the Indians from its
forts along the shores of that great sea. On the Pacific the Russians
had coasted as far south as Mount Saint Elias, but no white man, so far
as is known, had set foot on the shores of what is now British Columbia.

Two immediate problems were bequeathed to the British Government by the
Treaty of Paris: what was to be done with the unsettled lands between
the Alleghanies and the Mississippi; and how were the seventy thousand
French subjects in the valley of the St. Lawrence to be dealt with? The
first difficulty was not solved. It was merely postponed. The whole back
country of the English colonies was proclaimed an Indian reserve where
the King's white subjects might trade but might not acquire land. This
policy was not devised in order to set bounds to the expansion of the
older colonies; that was an afterthought. The policy had its root in
an honest desire to protect the Indians from the frauds of unscrupulous
traders and from the encroachments of settlers on their hunting grounds.
The need of a conciliatory, if firm, policy in regard to the great
interior was made evident by the Pontiac rising in 1763, the aftermath
of the defeat of the French, who had done all they could to inspire the
Indians with hatred for the advancing English.

How to deal with Canada was a more thorny problem. The colony had not
been sought by its conquerors for itself. It was counted of little
worth. The verdict of its late possessors, as recorded in Voltaire's
light farewell to "a few arpents of snow," might be discounted as an
instance of sour grapes; but the estimate of its new possessors was
evidently little higher, since they debated long and dubiously whether
in the peace settlement they should retain Canada or the little sugar
island of Guadeloupe, a mere pin point on the map. Canada had been
conquered not for the good it might bring but for the harm it was doing
as a base for French attack upon the English colonies--"the wasps' nest
must be smoked out." But once it had been taken, it had to be dealt with
for itself.

The policy first adopted was a simple one, natural enough for
eighteenth-century Englishmen. They decided to make Canada* over in
the image of the old colonies, to turn the "new subjects," as they were
called, in good time into Englishmen and Protestants. A generation
or two would suffice, in the phrase of Francis Maseres--himself a
descendant of a Huguenot refugee but now wholly an Englishman--for
"melting down the French nation into the English in point of language,
affections, religion, and laws." Immigration was to be encouraged from
Britain and from the other American colonies, which, in the view of the
Lords of Trade, were already overstocked and in danger of being forced
by the scarcity or monopoly of land to take up manufactures which would
compete with English wares. And since it would greatly contribute to
speedy settlement, so the Royal Proclamation of 1763 declared, that the
King's subjects should be informed of his paternal care for the security
of their liberties and properties, it was promised that, as soon as
circumstances would permit, a General Assembly would be summoned, as in
the older colonies. The laws of England, civil and criminal, as near as
might be, were to prevail. The Roman Catholic subjects were to be free
to profess their own religion, "so far as the laws of Great Britain
permit," but they were to be shown a better way. To the first Governor
instructions were issued "that all possible Encouragement shall be given
to the erecting Protestant Schools in the said Districts, Townships and
Precincts, by settling and appointing and allotting proper Quantities
of Land for that Purpose and also for a Glebe and Maintenance for a
Protestant minister and Protestant schoolmasters." Thus in the fullness
of time, like Acadia, but without any Evangelise of Grand Pre, without
any drastic policy of expulsion, impossible with seventy thousand people
scattered over a wide area, even Canada would become a good English
land, a newer New England.

     * The Royal Proclamation of 1763 set the bounds of the new
     colony. They were surprisingly narrow, a mere strip along
     both sides of the St. Lawrence from a short distance beyond
     the Ottawa on the west, to the end of the Gasps peninsula on
     the east. The land to the northeast was put under the
     jurisdiction of the Governor of Newfoundland, and the Great
     Lakes region was included in the territory reserved for the
     Indians.

It is questionable whether this policy could ever have achieved success
even if it had been followed for generations without rest or turning.
But it was not destined to be given a long trial. From the very
beginning the men on the spot, the soldier Governors of Canada, urged
an entirely contrary policy on the Home Government, and the pressure of
events soon brought His Majesty's Ministers to concur.

As the first civil Governor of Canada, the British authorities chose
General Murray, one of Wolfe's ablest lieutenants, who since 1760 had
served as military Governor of the Quebec district. He was to be
aided in his task by a council composed of the Lieutenant Governors of
Montreal and Three Rivers, the Chief Justice, the head of the
customs, and eight citizens to be named by the Governor from "the most
considerable of the persons of property" in the province.

The new Governor was a blunt, soldierly man, upright and just according
to his lights, but deeply influenced by his military and aristocratic
leanings. Statesmen thousands of miles away might plan to encourage
English settlers and English political ways and to put down all that was
French. To the man on the spot English settlers meant "the four hundred
and fifty contemptible sutlers and traders" who had come in the wake of
the army from New England and New York, with no proper respect for their
betters, and vulgarly and annoyingly insistent upon what they claimed to
be their rights. The French might be alien in speech and creed, but at
least the seigneurs and the higher clergy were gentlemen, with a due
respect for authority, the King's and their own, and the habitants were
docile, the best of soldier stuff. "Little, very little," Murray wrote
in 1764 to the Lords of Trade, "will content the New Subjects, but
nothing will satisfy the Licentious Fanaticks Trading here, but the
expulsion of the Canadians, who are perhaps the bravest and best
race upon the Globe, a Race, who cou'd they be indulged with a few
priviledges wch the Laws of England deny to Roman Catholicks at
home, wou'd soon get the better of every National Antipathy to their
Conquerors and become the most faithful and most useful set of Men in
this American Empire."*

     * This quotation and those following in this chapter are
     from official documents most conveniently assembled in Shorn
     and Doughty, "Documents relating to the Constitutional
     History of Canada, 1759-1791", and Doughty and McArthur,
     "Documents relating to the Constitutional History of Canada,
     1791-1818".

Certainly there was much in the immediate situation to justify Murray's
attitude. It was preposterous to set up a legislature in which only the
four hundred Protestants might sit and from which the seventy thousand
Catholics would be barred. It would have been difficult in any case
to change suddenly the system of laws governing the most intimate
transactions of everyday life. But when, as happened, the Administration
was entrusted in large part to newly created justices of the peace, men
with "little French and less honour," "to whom it is only possible to
speak with guineas in one's hand," the change became flatly impossible.
Such an alteration, if still insisted upon, must come more slowly than
the impatient traders in Montreal and Quebec desired.

The British Government, however, was not yet ready to abandon its
policy. The Quebec traders petitioned for Murray's recall, alleging that
the measures required to encourage settlement had not been adopted, that
the Governor was encouraging factions by his partiality to the French,
that he treated the traders with "a Rage and Rudeness of Language and
Demeanor" and--a fair thrust in return for his reference to them as "the
most immoral collection of men I ever knew"--as "discountenancing the
Protestant Religion by almost a Total Neglect of Attendance upon the
Service of the Church." When the London business correspondents of
the traders backed up this petition, the Government gave heed. In 1766
Murray was recalled to England and, though he was acquitted of the
charges against him, he did not return to his post in Canada.

The triumph of the English merchants was short. They had jumped from the
frying pan into the fire. General Guy Carleton, Murray's successor and
brother officer under Wolfe, was an even abler man, and he was still
less in sympathy with democracy of the New England pattern. Moreover, a
new factor had come in to reenforce the soldier's instinctive preference
for gentlemen over shopkeepers. The first rumblings of the American
Revolution had reached Quebec. It was no time, in Carleton's view, to
set up another sucking republic. Rather, he believed, the utmost should
be made of the opportunity Canada afforded as a barrier against the
advance of democracy, a curb upon colonial insolence. The need of
cultivating the new subjects was the greater, Carleton contended,
because the plan of settlement by Englishmen gave no sign of succeeding:
"barring a Catastrophe shocking to think of, this Country must, to the
end of Time, be peopled by the Canadian race."

To bind the Canadians firmly to England, Carleton proposed to work
chiefly through their old leaders, the seigneurs and the clergy. He
would restore to the people their old system of laws, both civil and
criminal. He would confirm the seigneurs in their feudal dues and
fines, which the habitants were growing slack in paying now that the
old penalties were not enforced, and he would give them honors and
emoluments such as they had before enjoyed as officers in regular or
militia regiments. The Roman Catholic clergy were already, in fact,
confirmed in their right to tithe and toll; and, without objection
from the Governor, Bishop Briand, elected by the chapter in Quebec and
consecrated in Paris, once more assumed control over the flock.

Carleton's proposals did not pass unquestioned. His own chief legal
adviser, Francis Maseres, was a sturdy adherent of the older policy,
though he agreed that the time was not yet ripe for setting up an
Assembly and suggested some well-considered compromise between the old
laws and the new. The Advocate General of England, James Marriott, urged
the same course. The policy of 1768, he contended eleven years later,
had already succeeded in great measure. The assimilation of government
had been effected; an assimilation of manners would follow. The
excessive military spirit of the inhabitants had begun to dwindle, as
England's interest required. The back settlements of New York and Canada
were fast being joined. Two or three thousand men of British stock, many
of them men of substance, had gone to the new colony; warehouses and
foundries were being built; and many of the principal seigneuries
had passed into English hands. All that was needed, he concluded, was
persistence along the old path. The same view was of course strenuously
urged by the English merchants in the colony, who continued to demand,
down to the very eve of the Revolution, an elective Assembly and other
rights of freeborn Britons.

Carleton carried the day. His advice, tendered at close range during
four years' absentee residence in London, from 1770 to 1774, fell in
with the mood of Lord North's Government. The measure in which the new
policy was embodied, the famous Quebec Act of 1774, was essentially a
part of the ministerial programme for strengthening British power to
cope with the resistance then rising to rebellious heights in the old
colonies. Though not, as was long believed, designed in retaliation for
the Boston disturbances, it is clear that its framers had Massachusetts
in mind when deciding on their policy for Quebec. The main purpose of
the Act, the motive which turned the scale against the old Anglicizing
policy, was to attach the leaders of French-Canadian opinion firmly
to the British Crown, and thus not only to prevent Canada itself from
becoming infected with democratic contagion or turning in a crisis
toward France, but to ensure, if the worst came to the worst, a military
base in that northland whose terrors had in old days kept the seaboard
colonies circumspectly loyal. Ministers in London had been driven by
events to accept Carleton's paradox, that to make Quebec British,
it must be prevented from becoming English. If in later years the
solidarity and aloofness of the French-Canadian people were sometimes to
prove inconvenient to British interests, it was always to be remembered
that this situation was due in great part to the deliberate action of
Great Britain in strengthening French-Canadian institutions as a means
of advancing what she considered her own interests in America. "The
views of the British Government in respect to the political uses to
which it means to make Canada subservient," Marriott had truly declared,
"must direct the spirit of any code of laws."

The Quebec Act multiplied the area of the colony sevenfold by the
restoration of all Labrador on the east and the region west as far as
the Ohio and the Mississippi and north to the Hudson's Bay Company's
territory. It restored the old French civil law but continued the milder
English criminal law already in operation. It gave to the Roman Catholic
inhabitants the free exercise of their religion, subject to a modified
oath of allegiance, and confirmed the clergy in their right "to hold,
receive and enjoy their accustomed dues and rights, with respect to such
persons only as shall confess the said religion." The promised elective
Assembly was not granted, but a Council appointed by the Crown received
a measure of legislative power.

On his return to Canada in September, 1774, Carleton reported that the
Canadians had "testified the strongest marks of Joy and Gratitude and
Fidelity to their King and to His Government for the late Arrangements
made at Home in their Favor." The "most respectable part of the
English," he continued, urged peaceful acceptance of the new order.
Evidently, however, the respectable members of society were few, as the
great body of the English settlers joined in a petition for the repeal
of the Act on the ground that it deprived them of the incalculable
benefits of habeas corpus and trial by jury. The Montreal merchants,
whether, as Carleton commented, they "were of a more turbulent Turn, or
that they caught the Fire from some Colonists settled among them," were
particularly outspoken in the town meetings they held. In the older
colonies the opposition was still more emphatic. An Act which hemmed
them in to the seacoast, established on the American continent a Church
they feared and hated, and continued an autocratic political system,
appeared to many to be the undoing of the work of Pitt and Wolfe and
the revival on the banks of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi of a
serious menace to their liberty and progress.

Then came the clash at Lexington, and the War of American Independence
had begun. The causes, the course, and the ending of that great civil
war have been treated elsewhere in this series.* Here it is necessary
only to note its bearings on the fate of Canada.

     * See "The Eve of the Revolution" and "Washington and His
     Comrades in Arms" (in "The Chronicles of America").

Early in 1775 the Continental Congress undertook the conquest of Canada,
or, as it was more diplomatically phrased, the relief of its inhabitants
from British tyranny. Richard Montgomery led an expedition over the old
route by Lake Champlain and the Richelieu, along which French and Indian
raiding parties used to pass years before, and Benedict Arnold made a
daring and difficult march up the Kennebec and down the Chaudiere
to Quebec. Montreal fell to Montgomery; and Carleton himself escaped
capture only by the audacity of some French-Canadian voyageurs, who,
under cover of darkness, rowed his whaleboat or paddled it with their
hands silently past the American sentinels on the shore. Once down the
river and in Quebec, Carleton threw himself with vigor and skill into
the defense of his capital. His generalship and the natural strength
of the position proved more than a match for Montgomery and Arnold.
Montgomery was killed and Arnold wounded in a vain attempt to carry the
city by storm on the last night of 1775. At Montreal a delegation from
Congress, composed of Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles
Carroll of Carrollton, accompanied by Carroll's brother, a Jesuit priest
and a future archbishop, failed to achieve-more by diplomacy than their
generals had done by the sword. The Canadians seemed, content enough to
wear the British yoke. In the spring, when a British fleet arrived with
reenforcements, the American troops retired in haste and, before the
Declaration of Independence had been proclaimed, Canada was free from
the last of its ten thousand invaders.

The expedition had put Carleton's policy to the test. On the whole it
stood the strain. The seigneurs had rallied to the Government which had
restored their rights, and the clergy had called on the people to stand
fast by the King. So far all went as Carleton had hoped: "The Noblesse,
Clergy, and greater part of the Bourgeoisie," he wrote, "have given
Government every Assistance in their Power." But the habitants refused
to follow their appointed leaders with the old docility, and some even
mobbed the seigneurs who tried to enroll them. Ten years of freedom had
worked a democratic change in them, and they were much less enthusiastic
than their betters about the restoration of seigneurial privileges.
Carleton, like many another, had held as public opinion what were merely
the opinions of those whom he met at dinner. "These people had been
governed with too loose a rein for many years," he now wrote to
Burgoyne, "and had imbibed too much of the American Spirit of
Licentiousness and Independence administered by a numerous and turbulent
Faction here, to be suddenly restored to a proper and desirable
Subordination." A few of the habitants joined his forces; fewer joined
the invaders or sold them supplies--till they grew suspicious of paper
"Continentals." But the majority held passively aloof. Even when France
joined the warring colonies and Admiral d'Estaing appealed to the
Canadians to rise, they did not heed; though it is difficult to say what
the result would have been if Washington had agreed to Lafayette's plan
of a joint French and American invasion in 1778.

Nova Scotia also held aloof, in spite of the fact that many of the men
who had come from New England and from Ulster were eager to join the
colonies to the south. In Nova Scotia democracy was a less hardy plant
than in Massachusetts. The town and township institutions, which had
been the nurseries of resistance in New England, had not been allowed to
take root there. The circumstances of the founding of Halifax had given
ripe to a greater tendency, which lasted long, to lean upon the mother
country. The Maine wilderness made intercourse between Nova Scotia and
New England difficult by land, and the British fleet was in control
of the sea until near the close of the war. Nova Scotia stood by Great
Britain, and was reserved to become part of a northern nation still in
the making.

That nation was to owe its separate existence to the success of the
American Revolution. But for that event, coming when it did, the
struggling colonies of Quebec and Nova Scotia would in time have become
merged with the colonies to the youth and would have followed them,
whether they remained within the British Empire or not. Thus it was due
to the quarrel between the thirteen colonies and the motherland that
Canada did not become merely a fourteenth colony or state. Nor was this
the only bearing of the Revolution on Canada's destiny. Thanks to the
coming of the Loyalists, those exiles of the Revolution who settled in
Canada in large numbers, Canada was after all to be dominantly a land of
English speech and of English sympathies. By one of the many paradoxes
which mark the history of Canada, the very success of the plan which
aimed to save British power by confirming French-Canadian nationality
and the loyalty of the French led in the end to making a large part of
Canada English. The Revolution meant also that for many a year those in
authority in England and in Canada itself were to stand in fear of the
principles and institutions which had led the old colonies to rebellion
and separation, and were to try to build up in Canada buttresses against
the advance of democracy.

The British statesmen who helped to frame the Peace of 1783 were men
with broad and generous views as to the future of the seceding colonies
and their relations with the mother country. It was perhaps inevitable
that they should have given less thought to the future of the colonies
in America which remained under the British flag. Few men could realize
at the moment that out of these scattered fragments a new nation and a
second empire would arise. Not only were the seceding colonies given a
share in the fishing grounds of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, which was
unfortunately to prove a constant source of friction, but the
boundary line was drawn with no thought of the need of broad and easy
communication between Nova Scotia and Canada, much less between Canada
and the far West. Vague definitions of the boundaries, naturally
incident to the prevailing lack of geographical knowledge of the vast
continent, held further seeds of trouble. These contentions, however,
were far in the future. At the moment another defect of the treaty
proved to be Canada's gain. The failure of Lord Shelburne's Ministry to
insist upon effective safeguards for the fair treatment of those who had
taken the King's side in the old colonies, condemned as it was not only
by North and the Tories but by Fox and Sheridan and Burke, led to that
Loyalist migration which changed the racial complexion of Canada.

The Treaty of 1783 provided that Congress would "earnestly recommend"
to the various States that the Loyalists be granted amnesty and
restitution. This pious resolution proved not worth the paper on which
it was written. In State after State the property of the Loyalists
was withheld or confiscated anew. Yet this ungenerous treatment of the
defeated by the victors is not hard to understand. The struggle had been
waged with all the bitterness of civil war. The smallness of the field
of combat had intensified personal ill-will. Both sides had practiced
cruelties in guerrilla warfare; but the Patriots forgot Marion's raids,
Simsbury mines, and the drumhead hangings, and remembered only Hessian
brutalities, Indian scalpings, Tarleton's harryings, and the infamous
prison ships of New York. The war had been a long one. The tide of
battle had ebbed and flowed. A district that was Patriot one year was
frequently Loyalist the next. These circumstances engendered fear and
suspicion and led to nervous reprisals.

At least a third, if not a half, of the people of the old colonies
had been opposed to revolution. New York was strongly Loyalist, with
Pennsylvania, Georgia, and the Carolinas closely following. In the end
some fifty or sixty thousand Loyalists abandoned their homes or suffered
expulsion rather than submit to the new order. They counted in their
ranks many of the men who had held first place in their old communities,
men of wealth, of education, and of standing, as well as thousands
who had nothing to give but their fidelity to the old order. Many,
especially of the well-to-do, went to England; a few found refuge in the
West Indies; but the great majority, over fifty thousand in all, sought
new homes in the northern wilderness. Over thirty thousand, including
many of the most influential of the whole number (with about three
thousand negro slaves, afterwards freed and deported to Sierra Leone)
were carried by ship to Nova Scotia. They found homes chiefly in
that part of the province which in 1784 became New Brunswick. Others,
trekking overland or sailing around by the Gulf and up the River,
settled in the upper valley of the St. Lawrence--on Lake St. Francis, on
the Cataraqui and the Bay of Quinte, and in the Niagara District.

Though these pioneers were generously aided by the British Government
with grants of land and supplies, their hardships and disappointments
during the first years in the wilderness were such as would have daunted
any but brave and desperate men and women whom fate had winnowed. Yet
all but a few, who drifted back to their old homes, held out; and the
foundations of two more provinces of the future Dominion--New Brunswick
and Upper Canada--were thus broadly and soundly laid by the men whom
future generations honored as "United Empire Loyalists." Through all
the later years, their sacrifices and sufferings, their ideals and
prejudices, were to make a deep impress on the development of the nation
which they helped to found and were to influence its relations with the
country which they had left and with the mother country which had held
their allegiance.

Once the first tasks of hewing and hauling and planting were done, the
new settlers called for the organization of local governments. They
were quite as determined as their late foes to have a voice in their
own governing, even though they yielded ultimate obedience to rulers
overseas.

In the provinces by the sea a measure of self-government was at once
established. New Brunswick received, without question, a constitution on
the Nova Scotia model, with a Lieutenant Governor, an Executive Council
appointed to advise him, which served also as the upper house of the
legislature, and an elective Assembly. Of the twenty-six members of the
first Assembly, twenty-three were Loyalists. With a population so much
at one, and with the tasks of road making and school building and tax
collecting insistent and absorbing, no party strife divided the province
for many years. In Nova Scotia, too, the Loyalists were in the majority.
There, however, the earlier settlers soon joined with some of the
newcomers to form an opposition. The island of St. John, renamed Prince
Edward Island in 1798, had been made a separate Government and had
received an Assembly in 1773. Its one absorbing question was the tenure
of land. On a single day in 1767 the British authorities had granted the
whole island by lottery to army and navy officers and country gentlemen,
on condition of the payment of small quitrents. The quitrents were
rarely paid, and the tenants of the absentee landlords kept up an
agitation for reform which was unceasing but which was not to be
successful for a hundred years. In all three Maritime Provinces
political and party controversy was little known for a generation after
the Revolution.

It was more difficult to decide what form of government should be set up
in Canada, now that tens of thousands of English-speaking settlers dwelt
beside the old Canadians. Carleton, now Lord Dorchester, had returned
as Governor in 1786, after eight years' absence. He was still averse
to granting an Assembly so long as the French subjects were in the
majority: they did not want it, he insisted, and could not use it.
But the Loyalist settlers, not to be put off, joined with the English
merchants of Montreal and Quebec in demanding an Assembly and relief
from the old French laws. Carleton himself was compelled to admit the
force of the conclusion of William Grenville, Secretary of State for the
Home Department, then in control of the remnants of the colonial empire,
and son of that George Grenville who, as Prime Minister, had introduced
the American Stamp Act of 1765: "I am persuaded that it is a point
of true Policy to make these Concessions at a time when they may be
received as a matter of favour, and when it is in Our own power to
regulate and direct the manner of applying them, rather than to wait
till they shall be extorted from us by a necessity which shall neither
leave us any discretion in the form nor any merit in the substance of
what We give." Accordingly, in 1791, the British Parliament passed the
Constitutional Act dividing Canada into two provinces separated by
the Ottawa River, Lower or French-speaking Canada and Upper or
English-speaking Canada, and granting each an elective Assembly.

Thus far the tide of democracy had risen, but thus far only. Few in
high places had learned the full lesson of the American Revolution. The
majority believed that the old colonies had been lost because they had
not been kept under a sufficiently tight rein; that democracy had been
allowed too great headway; that the remaining colonies, therefore,
should be brought under stricter administrative control; and that care
should be taken to build up forces to counteract the democracy which
grew so rank and swift in frontier soil. This conservative tendency
was strengthened by the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.* The
rulers of England had witnessed two revolutions, and the lesson they
drew from both was that it was best to smother democracy in the cradle.

     * It will be remembered that in the debate on the
     Constitutional Act the conflicting views of Burke and Fox on
     the French Revolution led to the dramatic break in their
     lifelong friendship.

For this reason the measure of representative government that had been
granted each of the remaining British colonies in North America was
carefully hedged about. The whole executive power remained in the hands
of the Governor or his nominees. No one yet conceived it possible that
the Assembly should control the Executive Council. The elective Assembly
was compelled to share even the lawmaking power with an upper house,
the Legislative Council. Not only were the members of this upper house
appointed by the Crown for life, but the King was empowered to bestow
hereditary titles upon them with a view to making the Council in the
fullness of time a copy of the House of Lords. A blow was struck even
at that traditional prerogative of the popular house, the control of
the purse. Carleton had urged that in every township a sixth of the
land should be reserved to enable His Majesty "to reward such of His
provincial Servants as may merit the Royal favour" and "to create and
strengthen an Aristocracy, of which the best use may be made on this
Continent, where all Governments are feeble and the general condition of
things tends to a wild Democracy." Grenville saw further possibilities
in this suggestion. It would give the Crown a revenue which would
make it independent of the Assembly, "a measure, which, if it had been
adopted when the Old Colonies were first settled, would have retained
them to this hour in obedience and Loyalty." Nor was this all. From
the same source an endowment might be obtained for a state church which
would be a bulwark of order and conservatism. The Constitutional
Act accordingly provided for setting aside lands equal in value to
one-seventh of all lands granted from time to time, for the support of
a Protestant clergy. The Executive Council received power to set up
rectories in every parish, to endow them liberally, and to name as
rectors ministers of the Church of England. Further, the Executive
Council was instructed to retain an equal amount of land as crown
reserves, distributed judiciously in blocks between the grants made to
settlers. Were any radical tendencies to survive these attentions, the
veto power of the British Government could be counted on in the last
resort.

For a time the installment of self-government thus granted satisfied the
people. The pioneer years left little leisure for political discussion,
nor were there at first any general issues about which men might
differ. The Government was carrying on acceptably the essential tasks
of surveying, land granting, and road building; and each member of the
Assembly played his own hand and was chiefly concerned in obtaining
for his constituents the roads and bridges, they needed so badly. The
English-speaking settlers of Upper Canada were too widely scattered,
and the French-speaking citizens of Lower Canada were too ignorant of
representative institutions, to act in groups or parties.

Much turned in these early years upon the personality of the Governor.
In several instances, the choice of rulers for the new provinces proved
fortunate. This was particularly so in the case of John Graves Simcoe,
Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada from 1792 to 1799. He was a good
soldier and a just and vigorous administrator, particularly wise in
setting his regulars to work building roads such as Yonge Street and
Dundas Street, which to this day are great provincial arteries of
travel. Yet there were many sources of weakness in the scheme of
government--divided authority, absenteeism, personal unfitness. When
Dorchester was reappointed in 1786, he had been made Governor in
Chief of all British North America. From the beginning, however, the
Lieutenant Governors of the various provinces asserted independent
authority, and in a few years the Governor General became in fact merely
the Governor of the most populous province, Lower Canada, in which he
resided.

In Upper Canada, as in New Brunswick, the population was at first much
at one. In time, however, discordant elements appeared. Religious, or
at least denominational, differences began to cause friction. The great
majority of the early settlers in Upper Canada belonged to the Church of
England, whose adherents in the older colonies had nearly all taken
the Loyalist side. Of the Ulster Presbyterians and New England
Congregationalists who formed the backbone of the Revolution, few came
to Canada. The growth of the Methodists and Baptists in the United
States after the Revolution, however, made its mark on the neighboring
country. The first Methodist class meetings in Upper Canada, held in
the United Empire Loyalist settlement on the Bay of Quinte in 1791,
were organized by itinerant preachers from the United States; and in the
western part of the province pioneer Baptist evangelists from the same
country reached the scattered settlers neglected by the older churches.

Nor was it in religion alone that diversity grew. Simcoe had set up a
generous land policy which brought in many "late Loyalists," American
settlers whose devotion to monarchical principles would not always bear
close inquiry. The fantastic experiment of planting in the heart of
the woods of Upper Canada a group of French nobles driven out by
the Revolution left no trace; but Mennonites, Quakers, and Scottish
Highlanders contributed diverse and permanent factors to the life of the
province. Colonel Thomas Talbot of Malahide, "a fierce little Irishman
who hated Scotchmen and women, turned teetotallers out of his house,
and built the only good road in the province," made the beginnings
of settlement midway on Lake Erie. A shrewd Massachusetts merchant,
Philemon Wright, with his comrades, their families, servants, horses,
oxen, and 10,000 pounds, sledded from Boston to Montreal in the winter
of 1800, and thence a hundred miles beyond, to found the town of Hull
and establish a great lumbering industry in the Ottawa Valley.

These differences of origin and ways of thought had not yet been
reflected in political life. Party strife in Upper Canada began with
a factional fight which took place in 1805-07 between a group of Irish
officeholders and a Scotch clique who held the reins of government.
Weekes, an Irish-American barrister, Thorpe, a puisne judge, Wyatt,
the surveyor general, and Willcocks, a United Irishman who had become
sheriff of one of the four Upper Canada districts, began to question the
right to rule of "the Scotch pedlars" or "the Shopkeeper Aristocracy,"
as Thorpe called those merchants who, for the lack of other leaders,
had developed an influence with the governors or ruled in their frequent
absence. But the insurgents were backed by only a small minority in the
Assembly, and when the four leaders disappeared from the stage,* this
curtain raiser to the serious political drama which was to follow came
quickly to its end.

     * Weekes was slain in a duel. Wyatt and Thorpe were
     suspended by the Lieutenant Governor, Sir Francis Gore, only
     to win redress later in England. Willcocks was dismissed
     from office and fell fighting on the American side in the
     War of 1812.

In Lower Canada the clash was more serious. The French Canadians, who
had not asked for representative government, eventually grasped its
possibilities and found leaders other than those ordained for them. In
the first Assembly there were many seigneurs and aristocrats who
bore names notable for six generations back Taschereau, Duchesnay,
Lothiniere, Rouville, Salaberry. But they soon found their surroundings
uncongenial or failed to be reelected. Writing in 1810 to Lord
Liverpool, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, the Governor,
Sir James Craig, with a fine patrician scorn thus pictures the Assembly
of his day.

"It really, my Lord, appears to me an absurdity, that the Interests of
certainly not an unimportant Colony, involving in them those also of no
inconsiderable portion of the Commercial concerns of the British Empire,
should be in the hands of six petty shopkeepers, a Blacksmith, a Miller,
and 15 ignorant peasants who form part of our present House; a Doctor
or Apothecary, twelve Canadian Avocats and Notaries, and four so far
respectable people that at least they do not keep shops, together with
ten English members compleat the List: there is not one person coming
under the description of a Canadian Gentleman among them."

And again:

"A Governor cannot obtain among them even that sort of influence that
might arise from personal intercourse. I can have none with Blacksmiths,
Millers, and Shopkeepers; even the Avocats and Notaries who compose so
considerable a portion of the House, are, generally speaking, such as I
can nowhere meet, except during the actual sitting of Parliament, when
I have a day of the week expressly appropriated to the receiving a large
portion of them at dinner."

Leadership under these conditions fell to the "unprincipled Demagogues,"
half-educated lawyers, men "with nothing to lose."

But it was not merely as an aristocrat facing peasants and shopkeepers,
nor as a soldier faced by talkers, but as an Englishman on guard against
Frenchmen that Craig found himself at odds with his Assembly. For nearly
twenty years in this period England was at death grips with France,
end to hate and despise all Frenchmen was part of the hereditary and
congenial duty of all true Britons. Craig and those who counseled him
were firmly convinced that the new subjects were French at heart. Of
the 250,000 inhabitants of Lower Canada, he declared, "about 20,000 or
25,000 may be English or Americans, the rest are French. I use the term
designedly, my Lord, because I mean to say that they are in Language, in
religion, in manner and in attachment completely French." That there
was still some affection for old France, stirred by war and French
victories, there is no question, but that the Canadians wished to return
to French allegiance was untrue, even though Craig reported that such
was "the general opinion of all ranks with whom it is possible to
converse on the subject." The French Revolution had created a great gulf
between Old France and New France. The clergy did their utmost to bar
all intercourse with the land where deism and revolution held sway, and
when the Roman Catholic Church and the British Government combined for
years on a single object, it was little wonder they succeeded. Nelson's
victory at Trafalgar was celebrated by a Te Deum in the Roman Catholic
Cathedral at Quebec. In fact, as Craig elsewhere noted, the habitants
were becoming rather a new and distinct nationality, a nation
canadienne. They ceased to be French; they declined to become English;
and sheltered under their "Sacred Charter"* they became Canadians first
and last.

     * "It cannot be sufficiently inculcated ON THE PART OF
     GOVERNMENT that the Quebec Act is a Sacred Charter, granted
     by the King in Parliament to the Canadians as a Security for
     their Religion, Laws, and Property." Governor Sir Frederick
     Haldimand to Lord George Germaine, Oct. 25, 1780.

The governors were not alone in this hostility to the mass of
the people. There had grown up in the colony a little clique of
officeholders, of whom Jonathan Sewell, the Loyalist Attorney General,
and later Chief Justice, was the chief, full of racial and class
prejudice, and in some cases greedy for personal gain. Sewell declared
it "indispensably necessary to overwhelm and sink the Canadian
population by English Protestants," and was even ready to run the
risk of bringing in Americans to effect this end. Of the non-official
English, some were strongly opposed to the pretensions of the "Chateau
Clique"; but others, and especially the merchants, with their organ the
Quebec "Mercury", were loud in their denunciations of the French who
were unprogressive and who as landowners were incidentally trying to
throw the burden of taxation chiefly on the traders.

The first open sign of the racial division which was to bedevil the life
of the province came in 1806 when, in order to meet the attacks of
the Anglicizing party, the newspaper "Le Canadien" was established at
Quebec. Its motto was significant: "Notre langue, nos institutions, et
nos lois." Craig and his counselors took up the challenge. In 1808 he
dismissed five militia officers, because of their connection with the
irritating journal, and in 1810 he went so far as to suppress it and
to throw into prison four of those responsible for its management. The
Assembly, which was proving hard to control, was twice dissolved in
three years. Naturally the Governor's arbitrary course only stiffened
resistance; and passions were rising fast and high when illness led
to his recall and the shadow of a common danger from the south, the
imminence of war with the United States, for a time drew all men
together.


While the foundations of the eastern provinces of Canada were being
laid, the wildernesses which one day were to become the western
provinces were just rising above the horizon of discovery. In the plains
and prairies between the Great Lakes and the Rockies, fur traders warred
for the privilege of exchanging with the Indians bad whiskey for good
furs. Scottish traders from Montreal, following in the footsteps of La
Verendrye and Niverville, pushed far into the northern wilds.* In 1788
the leading traders joined forces in organizing the North-West Company.
Their great canoes, manned by French-Canadian voyageurs, penetrated the
network of waters from the Ottawa to the Saskatchewan, and poured wealth
into the pockets of the lordly partners in Montreal. Their rivalry
wakened the sleepy Hudson's Bay Company, which was now forced to leave
the shores of the inland sea and build posts in the interior.

     * It is interesting to note the dominant share taken in the
     trade and exploration of the North and West by men of
     Highland Scotch and French extraction. For an account of La
     Verendrye see "The Conquest of New France" and for the
     Scotch fur traders of Montreal see "Adventurers of Oregon"
     (in "The Chronicles of America").

On the Pacific coast rivalry was still keener. The sea otter and the
seal were a lure to the men of many nations. Canada took its part in
this rivalry. In 1792, when the Russians were pressing down from their
Alaskan posts, when the Spaniards, claiming the Pacific for their own,
were exploring the mouth of the Fraser, when Captain Robert Gray of
Boston was sailing up the mighty Columbia, and Captain Vancouver
was charting the northern coasts for the British Government, a young
North-West Company factor, Alexander Mackenzie, in his lonely post on
Lake Athabaska, was planning to cross the wilderness of mountains to
the coast. With a fellow trader, Mackay, and six Canadian voyageurs, he
pushed up the Peace and the Parsnip, passed by way of the Fraser and
the Blackwater to the Bella Coola, and thence to the Pacific, the first
white man to cross the northern continent. Paddling for life through
swirling rapids on rivers which rushed madly through sheer rock-bound
canyons, swimming for shore when rock or sand bar had wrecked the
precious bark canoe, struggling over heartbreaking portages, clinging
to the sides of precipices, contending against hostile Indians and
fear-stricken followers, and at last winning through, Mackenzie summed
up what will ever remain one of the great achievements of exploration
in the simple record, painted in vermilion on a rock in Burke Channel:
Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July,
one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three. The first bond had been
woven in the union of East and West. Between the eastern provinces a
stronger link was soon to be forged. The War of 1812 gave the scattered
British colonies in America for the first time a living sense of unity
that transcended all differences, a memory of perils and of victories
which nourished a common patriotism.

The War of 1812 was no quarrel of Canada's. It was merely an incident
in the struggle between England and Napoleon. At desperate grips, both
contestants used whatever weapons lay ready to their hands. Sea power
was England's weapon, and in her claim to forbid all neutral traffic
with her enemies and to exercise the galling right of search, she
pressed it far. France trampled still more ruthlessly on American and
neutral rights; but, with memories of 1776 still fresh, the dominant
party in the United States was disposed to forgive France and to hold
England to strict account.

England had struck at France, regardless of how the blow might injure
neutrals. Now the United States sought to strike at England through the
colonies, regardless of their lack of any responsibility for English
policy. The "war hawks" of the South and West called loudly for the
speedy invasion and capture of Canada as a means of punishing England.
In so far as the British North American colonies were but possessions
of Great Britain, overseas plantations, the course of the United States
could be justified. But potentially these colonies were more than mere
possessions. They were a nation in the making, with a right to their own
development; they were not simply a pawn in the game of Britain and the
United States. Quite aside from the original rights or wrongs of
the war, the invasion of Canada was from this standpoint an act of
aggression. "Agrarian cupidity, not maritime right, wages this war,"
insisted John Randolph of Roanoke, the chief opponent of the "war
hawks" in Congress. "Ever since the report of the Committee on Foreign
Relations came into the House, we have heard but one word--like the
whippoorwill, but one eternal monotonous tone--Canada, Canada, Canada!"

At the outset there appeared no question that the conquest of Canada
could be, as Jefferson forecast, other than "a mere matter of marching."
Eustis, the Secretary of War, prophesied that "we can take Canada
without soldiers." Clay insisted that the Canadas were "as much under
our command as the Ocean is under Great Britain's." The provinces had
barely half a million people, two-thirds of them allied by ties of
blood to Britain's chief enemy, to set against the eight millions of the
Republic. There were fewer than ten thousand regular troops in all the
colonies, half of them down by the sea, far away from the danger zone,
and less than fifteen hundred west of Montreal. Little help could
come from England, herself at war with Napoleon, the master of half of
Europe.

But there was another side. The United States was not a unit in the war;
New England was apathetic or hostile to the war throughout, and as late
as 1814 two-thirds of the army of Canada were eating beef supplied
by Vermont and New York contractors. Weak as was the militia of the
Canadas, it was stiffened by English and Canadian regulars, hardened by
frontier experience, and led for the most part by trained and able
men, whereas an inefficient system and political interference greatly
weakened the military force of the fighting States. Above all, the
Canadians were fighting for their homes. To them the war was a matter of
life and death; to the United States it was at best a struggle to assert
commercial rights or national prestige.

The course and fortunes of the war call for only the briefest notice.
In the first year the American plans for invading Upper Canada came to
grief through the surrender of Hull at Detroit to Isaac Brock and the
defeat at Queenston Heights of the American army under Van Rensselaer.
The campaign ended with not a foot of Canadian soil in the invaders'
hands, and with Michigan lost, but Brock, Canada's brilliant leader, had
fallen at Queenston, and at sea the British had tasted unwonted defeat.
In single actions one American frigate after another proved too much for
its British opponent. It was a rude shock to the Mistress of the Seas.

The second year's campaign was more checkered. In the West the Americans
gained the command of the Great Lakes by rapid building and good
sailing, and with it followed the command of all the western peninsula
of Upper Canada. The British General Procter was disastrously defeated
at Moraviantown, and his ally, the Shawanoe chief Tecumseh, one of
the half dozen great men of his race, was killed. York, later known
as Toronto, the capital of the province, was captured, and its public
buildings were burned and looted. But in the East fortune was kinder
to the Canadians. The American plan of invasion called for an attack on
Montreal from two directions; General Wilkinson was to sail and march
down the St. Lawrence from Sackett's Harbor with some eight thousand
men, while General Hampton, with four thousand, was to take the historic
route by Lake Champlain. Half-way down the St. Lawrence Wilkinson came
to grief. Eighteen hundred men whom he landed to drive off a force of
a thousand hampering his rear were decisively defeated at Chrystler's
Farm. Wilkinson pushed on for a few days, but when word came that
Hampton had also met disaster he withdrew into winter quarters. Hampton
had found Colonel de Salaberry, with less than sixteen hundred troops,
nearly all French Canadians, making a stand on the banks of the
Chateauguay, thirty-five miles south of Montreal. He divided his
force in order to take the Canadians in front and rear, only to be
outmaneuvered and outfought in one of the most brilliant actions of
the war and forced to retire. In the closing months of the year the
Americans, compelled to withdraw from Fort George on the Niagara, burned
the adjoining town of Newark and turned its women and children into the
December snow. Drummond, who had succeeded Brock, gained control of both
sides of the Niagara and retaliated in kind by laying waste the frontier
villages from Lewiston to Buffalo. The year closed with Amherstburg on
the Detroit the only Canadian post in American hands. On the sea the
capture of the Chesapeake by the Shannon salved the pride of England.

The last year of the war was also a year of varying fortunes. In the far
West a small body of Canadians and Indians captured Prairie du Chien, on
the Mississippi, while Michilimackinac, which a force chiefly composed
of French-Canadian voyageurs and Indians had captured in the first
months of war, defied a strong assault. In Upper Canada the Americans
raided the western peninsula from Detroit but made their chief attack
on the Niagara frontier. Though they scored no permanent success, they
fought well and with a fair measure of fortune. The generals with whom
they had been encumbered at the outset of the war, Revolutionary relics
or political favorites, had now nearly all been replaced by abler
men--Scott, Brown, Exert--and their troops were better trained and
better equipped. In July the British forces on the Niagara were
decisively beaten at Chippawa. Three weeks later was fought the
bloodiest battle on Canadian soil, at Lundy's Lane, either side's
victory at the moment but soon followed by the retirement of the
invading force. The British had now outbuilt their opponents on Lake
Ontario; and, though American ships controlled Lake Erie to the end, the
Ontario flotilla aided Drummond, Brock's able successor, in forcing the
withdrawal of Exert forces from the whole peninsula in November. Farther
east a third attempt to capture Montreal had been defeated in the
spring, after Wilkinson with four thousand men had failed to drive five
hundred regulars and militia from the stone walls of Lacolle's Mill.

Until this closing year Britain had been unable, in face of the more
vital danger from Napoleon, to send any but trifling reenforcements to
what she considered a minor theater of the war. Now, with Napoleon in
Elba, she was free to take more vigorous action. Her navy had already
swept the daring little fleet of American frigates and American merchant
marine from the seas. Now it maintained a close blockade of all the
coast and, with troops from Halifax, captured and held the Maine coast
north of the Penobscot. Large forces of Wellington's hardy veterans
crossed the ocean, sixteen thousand to Canada, four thousand to aid in
harrying the Atlantic coast, and later nine thousand to seize the mouth
of the Mississippi. Yet, strangely, these hosts fared worse, because
of hard fortune and poor leadership, than the handful of militia and
regulars who had borne the brunt of the war in the first two years.
Under Ross they captured Washington and burned the official buildings;
but under Prevost they failed at Plattsburg; and under Pakenham, in
January, 1815, they failed against Andrew Jackson's sharpshooters at New
Orleans.

Before the last-named fight occurred, peace had been made. Both sides
were weary of the war, which had now, by the seeming end of the struggle
between England and Napoleon in which it was an incident, lost whatever
it formerly had of reason. Though Napoleon was still in Elba, Europe
was far from being at rest, and the British Ministers, backed by
Wellington's advice, were keen to end the war. They showed their
contempt for the issues at stake by sending to the peace conference at
Ghent three commissioners as incompetent as ever represented a great
power, Gambier, Goulburn, and Adams. To face these the United States had
sent John Quincy Adams, Albert Gallatin, Henry Clay, James Bayard, and
Jonathan Russell, as able and astute a group of players for great stakes
as ever gathered round a table. In these circumstances the British
representatives were lucky to secure peace on the basis of the status
quo ante. Canada had hoped that sufficient of the unsettled Maine
wilderness would be retained to link up New Brunswick with the inland
colony of Quebec, but this proposal was soon abandoned. In the treaty
not one of the ostensible causes of the war was even mentioned.

The war had the effect of unifying Canadian feeling. Once more it had
been determined that Canada was not to lose her identity in the nation
to the south. In Upper Canada, especially in the west, there were many
recent American settlers who sympathized openly with their kinsmen, but
of these some departed, some were jailed, and others had a change of
heart. Lower Canada was a unit against the invader, and French-Canadian
troops on every occasion covered themselves with glory. To the
Canadians, as the smaller people, and as the people whose country had
been the chief battle ground, the war in later years naturally bulked
larger than to their neighbors. It left behind it unfortunate legacies
of hostility to the United States and, among the governing classes, of
deep-rooted opposition to its democratic institutions. But it left also
memories precious for a young people--the memory of Brock and Macdonell
and De Salaberry, of Laura Secord and her daring tramp through the
woods to warn of American attacks, of Stony Creek and Lundy's Lane,
Chrystler's Farm and Chateauguay, the memory of sacrifice, of endurance,
and of courage that did not count the odds.

Nor were the evil legacies to last for all time. Three years after peace
had been made the statesmen of the United States and of Great Britain
had the uncommon sense to take a great step toward banishing war between
the neighbor peoples. The Rush-Bagot Convention, limiting the naval
armament on the Great Lakes to three vessels not exceeding one hundred
tons each, and armed only with one eighteen-pounder, though not always
observed in the letter, proved the beginning of a sane relationship
which has lasted for a century. Had not this agreement nipped naval
rivalry in the bud, fleets and forts might have lined the shores and
increased the strain of policy and the likelihood of conflict. The New
World was already preparing to sound its message to the Old.



CHAPTER II. THE FIGHT FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT

The history of British North America in the quarter of a century that
followed the War of 1812 is in the main the homely tale of pioneer life.
Slowly little clearings in the vast forest were widened and won to order
and abundance; slowly community was linked to community; and out of the
growing intercourse there developed the complex of ways and habits and
interests that make up the everyday life of a people.

All the provinces called for settlers, and they did not call in vain.
For a time northern New England continued to overflow into the Eastern
Townships of Lower Canada, the rolling lands south of the St. Lawrence
which had been left untouched by riverbound seigneur and habitant. Into
Upper Canada, as well, many individual immigrants came from the south,
some of the best the Republic had to give, merchants and manufacturers
with little capital but much shrewd enterprise, but also some it could
best spare, fugitives from justice and keepers of the taverns that
adorned every four corners. Yet slowly this inflow slackened. After the
war the Canadian authorities sought to avoid republican contagion and
moreover the West of the United States itself was calling for men.

But if fewer came in across the border, many more sailed from across the
seas. Not again until the twentieth century were the northern provinces
to receive so large a share of British emigrants as came across in the
twenties and thirties. Swarms were preparing to leave the overcrowded
British hives. Corn laws and poor laws and famine, power-driven looms
that starved the cottage weaver, peace that threw an army on a crowded
and callous labor market, landlords who rack-rented the Connaughtman's
last potato or cleared Highland glens of folks to make way for sheep,
rulers who persisted in denying the masses any voice in their own
government--all these combined to drive men forth in tens of thousands.
Australia was still a land of convict settlements and did not attract
free men. To most the United States was the land of promise. Yet, thanks
to state aid, private philanthropy, landlords' urging and cheap fares
on the ships that came to St. John and Quebec for timber, Canada and
the provinces by the sea received a notable share. In the quarter of
a century following the peace with Napoleon, British North America
received more British emigrants than the United States and the
Australian colonies together, though many were merely birds of passage.

The country west of the Great Lakes did not share in this flood of
settlement, except for one tragic interlude. Lord Selkirk, a Scotchman
of large sympathy and vision, convinced that emigration was the cure for
the hopeless misery he saw around him, acquired a controlling interest
in the Hudson's Bay Company, and sought to plant colonies in a vast
estate granted from its domains. Between 1811 and 1815 he sent out to
Hudson Bay, and thence to the Red River, two or three hundred crofters
from the Highlands and the Orkneys. A little later these were joined by
some Swiss soldiers of fortune who had fought for Canada in the War of
1812. But Selkirk had reckoned without the partners of the North-West
Company of Montreal, who were not prepared to permit mere herders and
tillers to disturb the Indians and the game. The Nor'Westers attacked
the helpless colonists and massacred a score of them. Selkirk retorted
in kind, leading out an armed band which seized the Nor'Westers' chief
post at Fort William. The war was then transferred to the courts, with
heart-breaking delays and endless expense. At last Selkirk died broken
in spirit, and most of his colonists drifted to Canada or across
the border. But a handful held on, and for fifty years their little
settlement on the Red River remained a solitary outpost of colonization.


Once arrived in Canada, the settler soon found that he had no primrose
path before him. Canada remained for many years a land of struggling
pioneers, who had little truck or trade with the world out of sight
of their log shacks. The habitant on the seigneuries of Lower Canada
continued to farm as his grandfather had farmed, finding his holding
sufficient for his modest needs, even though divided into ever narrower
ribbons as le bon Dieu sent more and yet more sons to share the
heritage. The English-speaking settler, equipped with ax and sickle and
flail, with spinning wheel and iron kettle, lived a life almost equally
primitive and self-contained. He and his good wife grew the wheat, the
corn, and the potatoes, made the soap and the candles, the maple sugar
and the "yarbs," the deerskin shoes and the homespun-cloth that met
their needs. They had little to buy and little to sell. In spite of the
preference which Great Britain gave Canadian grain, in return for the
preference exacted on British manufactured goods, practically no wheat
was exported until the close of this period. The barrels of potash and
pearl-ash leached out from the ashes of the splendid hardwood trees
which he burned as enemies were the chief source of ready money for the
backwoods settler. The one substantial export of the colonies came, not
from the farmer's clearing, but from the forest. Great rafts of square
pine timber were floated down the Ottawa or the St. John every spring
to be loaded for England. The lumberjack lent picturesqueness to
the landscape and the vocabulary and circulated ready money, but his
industry did little directly to advance permanent settlement or the wise
use of Canadian resources.

The self-contained life of each community and each farm pointed to the
lack of good means of transport. New Brunswick and the Canadas were
fortunate in the possession of great lake and river systems, but these
were available only in summer and were often impeded by falls and
rapids. On these waters the Indian bark canoe had given way to the
French bateau, a square-rigged flat-bottomed boat, and after the war
the bateau shared the honors with the larger Durham boat brought in from
"the States."

Canadians took their full share in developing steamship transportation.
In 1809, two years after Fulton's success on the Hudson, John Molson
built and ran a steamer between Montreal and Quebec. The first vessel to
cross the Atlantic wholly under steam, the Royal William, was built
in Quebec and sailed from that port in 1833. Following and rivaling
American enterprise, side-wheelers, marvels of speed and luxury for
the day, were put on the lakes in the thirties. Canals were built, the
Lachine in 1821-25, the Welland around Niagara Falls in 1824-29, and the
Rideau, as a military undertaking, in 1826-32, all in response to the
stimulus given by De Witt Clinton, who had begun the "Erie Ditch" in
1817. On land, road making made slower progress. The blazed trail gave
way to the corduroy road, and the pack horse to the oxcart or the stage.
Upper Canada had the honor of inventing, in 1835, the plank road, which
for some years thereafter became the fashion through the forested States
to the south. But at best neither roads nor vehicles were fitted for
carrying large loads from inland farms to waterside markets.

Money and banks were as necessary to develop intercourse as roads and
canals. Until after the War of 1812, when army gold and army bills ran
freely, money was rare and barter served pioneer needs. For many years
after the war a jumble of English sovereigns and shillings, of Spanish
dollars, French crowns, and American silver, made up the currency in
use, circulating sometimes by weight and sometimes by tale, at rates
that were constantly shifting. The position of the colonies as a link
between Great Britain and the United States, was curiously illustrated
in the currency system. The motley jumble of coins in use were rated in
Halifax currency, a mere money of account or bookkeeping standard, with
no actual coins to correspond, adapted to both English and United States
currency systems. The unit was the pound, divided into shillings and
pence as in England, but the pound was made equal to four dollars in
American money; it took 1 pound 4s. 4d. in Halifax currency to make
1 pound sterling. Still more curious was the influence of American
banking. Montreal merchants in 1808 took up the ideas of Alexander
Hamilton and after several vain attempts founded the Bank of Montreal
in 1817, with those features of government charter, branch banks, and
restrictions as to the proportion of debts to capital and the holding
of real property which had marked Hamilton's plan. But while Canadian
banks, one after another, were founded on the same model and throughout
adhered to an asset-secured currency basis, Hamilton's own country
abandoned his ideas, usually for the worse.

In the social life of the cities the influence of the official classes
and, in Halifax and Quebec, of the British redcoats stationed there was
all pervading. In the country the pioneers took what diversions a hard
life permitted. There were "bees" and "frolics," ranging from strenuous
barn raisings, with heavy drinking and fighting, to mild apple parings
or quilt patchings. There were the visits of the Yankee peddler with his
"notions," his welcome pack, and his gossip. Churches grew, thanks
in part to grants of government land or old endowments or gifts from
missionary societies overseas, but more to the zeal of lay preachers
and circuit riders. Schools fared worse. In Lower Canada there was an
excellent system of classical schools for the priests and professional
classes, and there were numerous convents which taught the girls, but
the habitants were for the most part quite untouched by book learning.
In Upper Canada grammar schools and academies were founded with
commendable promptness, and a common school system was established in
1816, but grants were niggardly and compulsion was lacking. Even at the
close of the thirties only one child in seven was in school, and he was,
as often as not, committed to the tender mercies of some broken-down
pensioner or some ancient tippler who could barely sign his mark. There
was but little administrative control by the provincial authorities. The
textbooks in use came largely from the United States and glorified that
land and all its ways in the best Fourth-of-July manner, to the
scandal of the loyal elect. The press was represented by a few weekly
newspapers; only one daily existed in Upper Canada before 1840.


Against this background there developed during the period 1815-41 a
tense constitutional struggle which was to exert a profound influence on
the making of the nation. The stage on which the drama was enacted was
a small one, and the actors were little known to the world of their day,
but the drama had an interest of its own and no little significance for
the future.

In one aspect the struggle for self-government in British North America
was simply a local manifestation of a world-wide movement which found
more notable expression in other lands. After a troubled dawn,
democracy was coming to its own. In England the black reaction which
had identified all proposals for reform with treasonable sympathy for
bloodstained France was giving way, and the middle classes were about
to triumph in the great franchise reform of 1832. In the United States,
after a generation of conservatism, Jacksonian democracy was to sweep
all before it. These developments paralleled and in some measure
influenced the movement of events in the British North American
provinces. But this movement had a color of its own. The growth of
self-government in an independent country was one thing; in a colony
owing allegiance to a supreme Parliament overseas, it was quite another.
The task of the provinces--not solved in this period, it is true, but
squarely faced--was to reconcile democracy and empire.

The people of the Canadas in 1791, and of the provinces by the sea
a little earlier, had been given the right to elect one house of
the legislature. More than this instalment of self-government the
authorities were not prepared to grant. The people, or rather the
property holders among them, might be entrusted to vote taxes
and appropriations, to present grievances, and to take a share in
legislation. They could not, however, be permitted to control the
Government, because, to state an obvious fact, they could not govern
themselves as well as their betters could rule them. Besides, if the
people of a colony did govern themselves, what would become of the
rights and interests of the mother country? What would become of the
Empire itself?

What was the use and object of the Empire? In brief, according to the
theory and practice then in force, the end of empire was the profit
which comes from trade; the means was the political subordination of the
colonies to prevent interference with this profit; and the debit entry
set against this profit was the cost of the diplomacy, the armaments,
and the wars required to hold the overseas possessions against other
powers. The policy was still that which had been set forth in the
preamble of the Navigation Act of 1663, ensuring the mother country the
sole right to sell European wares in its colonies: "the maintaining a
greater correspondence and kindness between them [the subjects at home
and those in the plantations] and keeping them in a firmer dependence
upon it [the mother country], and rendering them yet more beneficial and
advantageous unto it in the further Imployment and Encrease of English
Shipping and Seamen, and vent of English Woollen and other Manufactures
and Commodities rendering the Navigation to and from the same more
safe and cheape, and makeing this Kingdom a Staple not only of the
Commodities of those Plantations but also of the Commodities of other
countries and places for the supplying of them, and it being the usage
of other Nations to keep their [plantation] Trade to themselves." Adam
Smith had raised a doubt as to the wisdom of the end. The American
Revolution had raised a doubt as to the wisdom of the means. Yet,
with significant changes, the old colonial system lasted for full two
generations after 1776.

In the second British Empire, which rose after the loss of the first in
1783, the means to the old end were altered. To secure control and to
prevent disaffection and democratic folly, the authorities relied not
merely on their own powers but on the cooperation of friendly classes
and interests in the colonies themselves. Their direct control was
exercised in many ways. In last reserve there was the supreme authority
of King and Parliament to bind the colonies by treaty and by law and the
right to veto any colonial enactment. This was as before the Revolution.
One change lay in the renunciation in 1778 of the intention to use the
supreme legislative power to levy taxes, though the right to control
the fiscal system of the colonies in conformity with imperial policy
was still claimed and practised. In fact, far from seeking to secure a
direct revenue, the British Government was more than content to pay part
of the piper's fee for the sake of being able to call the tune. "It is
considered by the Well wishers of Government," wrote Milnes, Lieutenant
Governor of Lower Canada, in 1800, "as a fortunate Circumstance that the
Revenue is not at present equal to the Expenditure." A further change
came in the minute control exercised by the Colonial Office, or rather
by the permanent clerks who, in Charles Buller's phrase, were really
"Mr. Mother Country." The Governor was the local agent of the Colonial
Office. He acted on its instructions and was responsible to it, and to
it alone, for the exercise of the wide administrative powers entrusted
to him.

But all these powers, it was believed, would fail in their purpose if
democracy were allowed to grow unchecked in the colonies themselves.
It was an essential part of the colonial policy of the time to build up
conservative social forces among the people and to give a controlling
voice in the local administration to a nominated and official class. It
has been seen that the statesmen of 1791 looked to a nominated executive
and legislative council, an hereditary aristocracy, and an established
church, to keep the colony in hand. British legislation fostered and
supported a ruling class in the colonies, and in turn this class was to
support British connection and British control. How this policy, half
avowed and half unconscious, worked out in each of the provinces must
now be recorded.


In Upper Canada party struggles did not take shape until well after the
War of 1812. At the founding of the colony the people had been very much
of one temper and one condition. In time, however, divergences appeared
and gradually hardened into political divisions. A governing class, or
rather clique, was the first to become differentiated. Its emergence
was slower than in New Brunswick, for instance, since Upper Canada had
received few of the Loyalists who were distinguished by social position
or political experience. In time a group was formed by the accident of
occupation, early settlement, residence in the little town of York,
the capital after 1794, the holding of office, or by some advantage in
wealth or education or capacity which in time became cumulative. The
group came to be known as the Family Compact. There had been, in fact,
no intermarriage among its members beyond what was natural in a small
and isolated community, but the phrase had a certain appositeness.
They were closely linked by loyalty to Church and King, by enmity to
republics and republicans, by the memory of the sacrifice and peril they
or their fathers had shared, and by the conviction that the province
owed them the best living it could bestow. This living they succeeded
in collecting. "The bench, the magistracy, the high officials of the
established church, and a great part of the legal profession," declared
Lord Durham in 1839, "are filled by the adherents of this party; by
grant or purchase they have acquired nearly the whole of the waste lands
of the province; they are all powerful in the chartered banks, and till
lately shared among themselves almost exclusively all offices of trust
and profit." Fortunately the last absurdity of creating Dukes of Toronto
and Barons of Niagara Falls was never carried through, or rather was
postponed a full century; but this touch was scarcely needed to give the
clique its cachet. The ten-year governorship of Sir Peregrine Maitland
(1818-28), a most punctilious person, gave the finishing touches to this
backwoods aristocracy.

The great majority of the group, men of the Scott and Boulton, Sherwood
and Hagerman and Allan MacNab types, had nothing but their prejudices to
distinguish them, but two of their number were of outstanding capacity.
John Beverley Robinson, Attorney General from 1819 to 1829 and
thereafter for over thirty years Chief Justice, was a true aristocrat,
distrustful of the rabble, but as honest and highminded as he was able,
seeking his country's gain, as he saw it, not his own. A more rugged
and domineering character, equally certain of his right to rule and
less squeamish about the means, was John Strachan, afterwards Bishop of
Toronto. Educated a Presbyterian, he had come to Canada from Aberdeen
as a dominie but had remained as an Anglican clergyman in a capacity
promising more advancement. His abounding vigor and persistence soon
made him the dominant force in the Church, and with a convert's zeal
he labored to give it exclusive place and power. The opposition to the
Family Compact was of a more motley hue, as is the way with oppositions.
Opposition became potential when new settlers poured into the province
from the United States or overseas, marked out from their Loyalist
forerunners not merely by differences of political background and
experience but by differences in religion. The Church of England had
been dominant among the Loyalists; but the newcomers were chiefly
Methodist and Presbyterian. Opposition became actual with the rise of
concrete and acute grievances and with the appearance of leaders who
voiced the growing discontent.

The political exclusiveness of the Family Compact did not rouse
resentment half as deep as did their religious, or at least
denominational, pretensions. The refusal of the Compact to permit
Methodist ministers to perform the marriage ceremony was not soon
forgotten. There were scores of settlements where no clergyman of the
Established Church of England or of Scotland resided, and marriages here
had been of necessity performed by other ministers. A bill passed the
Assembly in 1824 legalizing such marriages in the past and giving the
required authority for the future; and when it was rejected by the
Legislative Council, resentment flamed high. An attempt of Strachan
to indict the loyalty of practically all but the Anglican clergy
intensified this feeling; and the critics went on to call in question
the claims of his Church to establishment and landed endowment.

The land question was the most serious that faced the province. The
administration of those in power was condemned on three distinct counts.
The granting of land to individuals had been lavish; it had been lax;
and it had been marked by gross favoritism. By 1824, when the population
was only 150,000, some 11,000,000 acres had been granted; ninety years
later, when the population was 2,700,000, the total amount of improved
land was only 13,000,000 acres. Moreover the attempt to use vast areas
of the Crown Lands to endow solely the Anglican Church roused bitter
jealousies. Yet even these grievances paled in actual hardship beside
the results of holding the vast waste areas unimproved. What with Crown
Reserves, Clergy Reserves, grants to those who had served the state, and
holdings picked up by speculators from soldiers or poorer Loyalists for
a few pounds or a few gallons of whisky, millions of acres were held
untenanted and unimproved, waiting for a rise in value as a consequence
of the toil of settlers on neighboring farms. Not one-tenth of the lands
granted were occupied by the persons to whom they had been assigned.
The province had given away almost all its vast heritage, and more than
nine-tenths of it was still in wilderness. These speculative holdings
made immensely more difficult every common neighborhood task. At best
the machinery and the money for building roads, bridges, and schools
were scanty, but with these unimproved reserves thrust in between
the scattered shacks, the task was disheartening. "The reserve of
two-sevenths of the land for the Crown and clergy," declared the
township of Sandwich in 1817, "must for a long time keep the country
a wilderness, a harbour for wolves, a hindrance to a compact and good
neighborhood."

A further source of discontent developed in the disabilities affecting
recent American settlers. A court decision in 1824 held that no one who
had resided in the United States after 1783 could possess or transmit
British citizenship, with which went the right to inherit real estate.
This decision bore heavily upon thousands of "late Loyalists" and
more recent incomers. Under the instructions of the Colonial Office, a
remedial bill was introduced in the Legislative Council in 1827, but it
was a grudging, halfway measure which the Assembly refused to accept.
After several sessions of quarreling, the Assembly had its way; but in
the meantime the men affected had been driven into permanent and active
opposition.

The leaders of the movement of resistance which now began to gather
force included all sorts and conditions of men. The fiercest and
most aggressive were two Scotchmen, Robert Gourlay and William Lyon
Mackenzie. Gourlay, one of those restless and indispensable cranks
who make the world turn round, active, obstinate, imprudent,
uncompromisingly devoted to the common good as he saw it, came to Canada
in 1817 on settlement and colonization bent. Innocent inquiries which he
sent broadcast as to the condition of the province gave the settlers an
opportunity for voicing their pent-up discontent, and soon Gourlay was
launched upon the sea of politics. Mackenzie, who came to Canada three
years later, was a born agitator, fearless, untiring, a good hater,
master of avitriolic vocabulary, and absolutely unpurchasable. He found
his vein in weekly journalism, and for nearly forty years was the stormy
petrel of Canadian politics. From England there came, among others, Dr.
John Rolph, shrewd and politic, and Captain John Matthews, a half-pay
artillery officer. Peter Perry, downright and rugged and of a homely
eloquence, represented the Loyalists of the Bay of Quinte, which was
the center of Canadian Methodism. Among the newer comers from the
United States, the foremost were Barnabas Bidwell, who had been Attorney
General of Massachusetts but had fled to Canada in 1810 when accused of
misappropriating public money, and his son, Marshall Spring Bidwell,
one of the ablest and most single-minded men who ever entered Canadian
public life. From Ireland came Dr. William Warren Baldwin, whose son
Robert, born in Canada, was less surpassingly able than the younger
Bidwell but equally moderate and equally beyond suspicion of faction or
self-seeking.

How were these men to bring about the reform which they desired? Their
first aim was obviously to secure a majority in the Assembly, and by the
election of 1828 they attained this first object. But the limits of the
power of the Assembly they soon discovered. Without definite leadership,
with no control over the Administration, and with even legislative power
divided, it could effect little. It was in part disappointment at the
failure of the Assembly that accounted for the defeat of the Reformers
in 1830, though four years later this verdict was again reversed.
Clearly the form of government itself should be changed. But in what
way? Here a divergence in the ranks of the Reformers became marked.
One party, looking upon the United States as the utmost achievement
in democracy, proposed to follow its example in making the upper house
elective and thus to give the people control of both branches of the
Legislature. Another group, of whom Robert Baldwin was the chief, saw
that this change would not suffice. In the States the Executive was also
elected by the people. Here, where the Governor would doubtless continue
to be appointed by the Crown, some other means must be found to give
the people full control. Baldwin found it in the British Cabinet system,
which gave real power to ministers having the confidence of a majority
in Parliament. The Governor would remain, but he would be only a
figurehead, a constitutional monarch acting, like the King, only on
the advice of his constitutional advisers. Responsible government
was Baldwin's one and absorbing idea, and his persistence led to its
ultimate adoption, along with a proposal for an elective Council, in
the Reform party's programme in 1834. Delay in affecting this reform,
Baldwin told the Governor a year later, was "the great and all absorbing
grievance before which all others sank into insignificance." The remedy
could be applied "without in the least entrenching upon the just and
necessary prerogatives of the Crown, which I consider, when administered
by the Lieutenant. Governor through the medium of a provincial ministry
responsible to the provincial parliament, to be an essential part of the
constitution of the province." In brief, Baldwin insisted that Simcoe's
rhetorical outburst in 1791, when he declared that Upper Canada was
"a perfect Image and Transcript of the British Government and
Constitution," should be made effective in practice.

The course of the conflict between the Compact and the Reformers cannot
be followed in detail. It had elements of tragedy, as when Gourlay was
hounded into prison, where he was broken in health and shattered in
mind, and then exiled from the province for criticism of the Government
which was certainly no more severe than now appears every day in
Opposition newspapers. The conflict had elements of the ludicrous, too,
as when Captain Matthews was ordered by his military superiors to return
to England because in the unrestrained festivities of New Year's Eve he
had called on a strolling troupe to play Yankee Doodle and had shouted
to the company, "Hats off"; or when Governor Maitland overturned
fourteen feet of the Brock Monument to remove a copy of Mackenzie's
journal, the "Colonial Advocate", which had inadvertently been included
in the corner stone.

The weapons of the Reformers were the platform, the press, and
investigations and reports by parliamentary committees. The Compact hit
back in its own way. Every critic was denounced as a traitor. Offending
editors were put in the pillory. Mackenzie was five times expelled from
the House, only to be returned five times by his stubborn supporters.
Matters were at a deadlock, and it became clear either that the British
Parliament, which alone could amend the Constitution, must intervene or
else that the Reformers would be driven to desperate paths. But before
matters came to this pass, an acute crisis had arisen in Lower Canada
which had its effect on all the provinces.


In Lower Canada, the conflict which had been smoldering before the war
had since then burst into flame. The issues of this conflict were more
clearcut than in any of the other provinces. A coherent opposition had
formed earlier, and from beginning to end it dominated the Assembly.
The governing forces were outwardly much the same as in Upper Canada--a
Lieutenant Governor responsible to the Colonial Office, an Executive
Council appointed by the Crown but coming to have the independent power
of a well-entrenched bureaucracy, and a Legislative Council nominated by
the Crown and, until nearly the end of the period, composed chiefly of
the same men who served in the Executive. The little clique in control
had much less popular backing than the Family Compact of Upper Canada
and were of lower caliber. Robert Christie, an English-speaking member
of the Assembly, who may be counted an unprejudiced witness since he was
four times expelled by the majority in that house, refers to the
real rulers of the province as "a few rapacious, overbearing, and
irresponsible officials, without stake or other connexion in the
country than their interests." At their head stood Jonathan Sewell,
a Massachusetts Loyalist who had come to Lower Canada by way of New
Brunswick in 1789, and who for over forty years as Attorney General,
Chief Justice, or member of Executive and Legislative Councils, was the
power behind the throne.

The opposition to the bureaucrats at first included both English and
French elements, but the English minority were pulled in contrary ways.
Their antecedents were not such as to lead them to accept meekly either
the political or the social pretensions of the "Chateau Clique"; the
American settlers in the Eastern Townships, and the Scotch and American
merchants who were building up Quebec and Montreal, had called for
self-government, not government from above. Yet their racial and
religious prejudices were strong and made them unwilling to accept in
place of the bureaucrats the dominance of an unprogressive habitant
majority. The first leader of the opposition which developed in the
Assembly after the War of 1812 was James Stuart, the son of the leading
Anglican clergyman of his day, but he soon fell away and became a
mainstay of the bureaucracy. His brother Andrew, however, kept up
for many years longer a more disinterested fight. Another Scot, John
Neilson, editor of the Quebec "Gazette", was until 1833 foremost
among the assailants of the bureaucracy. But steadily, as the extreme
nationalist claims of the French-speaking majority provoked reprisals
and as the conviction grew upon the minority that they would never be
anything but a minority,* most of them accepted clique rule as a lesser
evil than "rule by priest and demagogue."

     * The natural increase of the French-Canadian race under
     British rule is one of the most extraordinary phenomena in
     social history. The following figures illustrate the rate of
     that increase: the number was 16,417 in 1706; 69,810 in
     1765; 479,288 in 1825; 697,084 in 1844. The population of
     Canada East or Lower Canada in 1844 was made up as follows:
     French Canadians, 524,244; English Canadians. 85,660;
     English, 11,895; Irish, 43,982; Scotch, 13,393; Americans,
     11,946; born in other countries, 1329; place of birth not
     specified, 4635.

In the reform movement in Upper Canada there were a multiplicity of
leaders and a constant shifting of groups. In Lower Canada, after the
defection of James Stuart in 1817, there was only one leader, Louis
Joseph Papineau. For twenty years Papineau was the uncrowned king of the
province. His commanding figure, his powers of oratory, outstanding in a
race of orators, his fascinating manners, gave him an easy mastery over
his people. Prudence did not hamper his flights; compromise was a word
not found in his vocabulary. Few men have been better equipped for the
agitator's task.

His father, Joseph Papineau, though of humble birth, had risen high in
the life of the province. He had won distinction in his profession as a
notary, as a speaker in the Assembly, and as a soldier in the defense of
Quebec against the American invaders of 1775. In 1804 he had purchased
the seigneury of La Petite Nation, far up the Ottawa. Louis Joseph
Papineau followed in his father's footsteps. Born in 1786, he served
loyally and bravely in the War of 1812. In the same year he entered the
Assembly and made his place at a single stroke. Barely three years after
his election, he was chosen Speaker, and with a brief break he held that
post for over twenty years.

Papineau did not soon or lightly begin his crusade against the
Government. For the first five years of his Speakership, he confined
himself to the routine duties of his office. As late as 1820 he
pronounced a glowing eulogy on the Constitution which Great Britain
had granted the province. In that year he tested the extent of the
privileges so granted by joining in the attempt of the Assembly to
assert its full control of the purse; but it was not until the project
of uniting the two Canadas had made clear beyond dispute the hostility
of the governing powers that he began his unrelenting warfare against
them.

There was much to be said for a reunion of the two Canadas. The St.
Lawrence bound them together, though Acts of Parliament had severed
them. Upper Canada, as an inland province, restricted in its trade with
its neighbor to the south, was dependent upon Lower Canada for access to
the outer world. Its share of the duties collected at the Lower Canada
ports until 1817 had been only one-eighth, afterwards increased to
one-fifth. This inequality proved a constant source of friction. The
crying necessity of cooperation for the improvement of the St. Lawrence
waterway gave further ground for the contention that only by a reunion
of the two provinces could efficiency be secured. In Upper Canada the
Reformers were in favor of this plan, but the Compact, fearful of any
disturbance of their vested interests, tended to oppose it. In Lower
Canada the chief support came from the English element. The governing
clique, as the older established body, had no doubt that they could
bring the western section under their sway in case of union. But the
main reason for their advocacy was the desire to swamp the French
Canadians by an English majority. Sewell, the chief supporter of the
project, frankly took this ground. The Governor, Lord Dalhousie, and
the Colonial Office adopted his view; and in 1822 an attempt was made to
rush a Union Bill through the British Parliament without any notice to
those most concerned. It was blocked for the moment by the opposition
of a Whig group led by Burdett and Mackintosh; and then Papineau and
Neilson sailed to London and succeeded in inducing the Ministry to stay
its hand. The danger was averted; but Papineau had become convinced
that if his people were to retain the rights given them by their "Sacred
Charter" they would have to fight for them. If they were to save their
power, they must increase it.

How could this be done? Baldwin's bold and revolutionary policy of
making the Executive responsible to the Assembly did not seem within
the range of practical politics. It meant in practice the abandonment of
British control, and this the Colonial Office was not willing to grant.
Antoine Panet and other Assembly leaders had suggested in 1815 that
it would be well, "if it were possible, to grant a number of places as
Councillors or other posts of honour and of profit to those who have
most influence over the majority in the Assembly, to hold so long
as they maintained this influence," and James Stuart urged the same
tentative suggestion a year later. But even before this the Colonial
Office had made clear its position. "His Majesty's Government," declared
the Colonial Secretary, Lord Bathurst, in 1814, "never can admit so
novel & inconvenient a Principle as that of allowing the Governor of a
Colony to be divested of his responsibility [to the Colonial Office] for
the acts done during his administration or permit him to shield himself
under the advice of any Persons, however respectable, either from their
character or their Office."

Two other courses had the sanction of precedent, one of English, the
other of American example. The English House of Commons had secured its
dominant place in the government of the country by its control of the
purse. Why should not the Assembly do likewise? One obvious difficulty
lay in the fact that the Assembly was not the sole authority in raising
revenue. The British Parliament had retained the power to levy certain
duties as part of its system of commercial control, and other casual and
territorial dues lay in the right of the Crown. From 1820, therefore,
the Assembly's main aim was twofold--to obtain control of these
remaining sources of revenue, and by means of this power to bludgeon the
Legislative Council and the Governor into compliance with its wishes.
The Colonial Office made concessions, offering to resign all its taxing
powers in return for a permanent civil list, that is, an assurance that
the salaries of the chief officials would not be questioned annually.
The offer was reasonable in itself but, as it would have hampered the
full use of the revenue bludgeon, it was scornfully declined.

The other aim of the Patriotes, as the Opposition styled themselves, was
to conquer the Legislative Council by making it elective. Papineau, in
spite of his early prejudices, was drawn more and more into sympathy
with the form of democracy worked out in the United States. In fact, he
not only looked to it as a model but, as the thirties wore on, he came
to hope that moral, if not physical, support might be found there for
his campaign against the English Government. After 1830 the demand for
an elective Legislative Council became more and more insistent.

The struggle soon reached a deadlock. Governor followed Governor: Lord
Dalhousie, Sir James Kempt, Lord Aylmer, all in turn failed to allay
the storm. The Assembly raised its claims each session and fulminated
against all the opposing powers in windy resolutions. Papineau,
embittered by continued opposition, carried away by his own eloquence,
and steadied by no responsibility of office, became more implacable in
his demands. Many of his moderate supporters--Neilson, Andrew Stuart,
Quesnel, Cuvillier--fell away, only to be overwhelmed in the first
election at a wave of the great tribune's hand. Business was blocked,
supplies were not voted, and civil servants made shift without salary as
best they could.

The British Government awoke, or half awoke, to the seriousness of the
situation. In 1835 a Royal Commission of three, with the new Governor
General, Lord Gosford, as chairman, was appointed to make inquiries and
to recommend a policy. Gosford, a genial Irishman, showed himself
most conciliatory in both private intercourse and public discourse.
Unfortunately the rash act of the new Lieutenant Governor of Upper
Canada, Sir Francis Bond Head, in publishing the instructions of the
Colonial Office, showed that the policy of Downing Street was the futile
one of conciliation without concession. The Assembly once more refused
to grant supplies without redress of grievances. The Commissioners made
their report opposing any substantial change. In March, 1837, Lord John
Russell, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Melbourne Ministry, opposed
only by a handful of Radical and Irish members, carried through the
British Parliament a series of resolutions authorizing the Governor to
take from the Treasury without the consent of the Assembly the funds
needed for civil administration, offering control of all revenues in
return for a permanent civil list, and rejecting absolutely the demands
alike for a responsible Executive and for an elective Council.

British statesmanship was bankrupt. Its final answer to the demands for
redress was to stand pat. Papineau, without seeing what the end would
be, held to his course. Younger men, carried away by the passions he
had aroused, pushed on still more recklessly. If reform could not be
obtained within the British Empire, it must be sought by setting up an
independent republic on the St. Lawrence or by annexation to the United
States.


In Upper Canada, at the same time, matters had come to the verge of
rebellion. Sir John Colborne had, just before retiring as Lieutenant
Governor in 1836, added fuel to the flames by creating and endowing some
forty-four rectories, thus strengthening the grip of the Anglican Church
on the province. His successor, Sir Francis Bond Head, was a man of such
rash and unbalanced judgment as to lend support to the tradition that
he was appointed by mistake for his cousin, Edmund Head, who was made
Governor of United Canada twenty years later. He appointed to his
Executive Council three Reformers, Baldwin, Rolph, and Dunn, only to
make clear by his refusal to consult them his inability to understand
their demand for responsible government. All the members of the
Executive Council thereupon resigned, and the Assembly refused supplies.
Head dissolved the House and appealed to the people.

The weight of executive patronage, the insistence of the Governor that
British connection was at stake, the alarms caused by some injudicious
statements of Mackenzie and his Radical ally in England, Joseph Hume,
and the defection of the Methodists, whose leader, Egerton Ryerson, had
quarreled with Mackenzie, resulted in the overwhelming defeat of the
Reformers. The sting of defeat, the failure of the Family Compact to
carry out their eleventh hour promises of reform, and the passing of
Lord John Russell's reactionary resolutions convinced a section of the
Reform party, in Upper Canada as well as in Lower Canada, that an appeal
to force was the only way out.

Toward the end of 1837 armed rebellion broke out in both the Canadas.
In both it was merely a flash in the pan. In Lower Canada there had been
latterly much use of the phrases of revolution and some drilling, but
rebellion was neither definitely planned nor carefully organized. The
more extreme leaders of the Patriotes simply drifted into it, and
the actual outbreak was a haphazard affair. Alarmed by the sudden and
seemingly concerted departure of Papineau and some of his lieutenants,
Nelson, Brown, and O'Callaghan, from Montreal, the Government gave
orders for their arrest. The petty skirmish that followed on November
16, 1837, was the signal for the rallying of armed habitants around
impromptu leaders at various points. The rising was local and spasmodic.
The vast body of the habitants stood aloof. The Catholic Church, which
earlier had sympathized with Papineau, had parted from him when he
developed radical and republican views. Now the strong exhortations of
the clergy to the faithful counted for much in keeping peace, and in
one view justified the policy of the British Government in seeking to
purchase their favor. The Quebec and Three Rivers districts remained
quiet. In the Richelieu and Montreal districts, where disaffection was
strongest, the habitants lacked leadership, discipline, and touch with
other groups, and were armed only with old flintlocks, scythes, or
clubs. Here and there a brave and skillful leader, such as Dr. Jean
Olivier Chenier, was thrown up by the evidence opened a way out of the
difficult situation. A year later Peel and Webster, representing the two
countries, exchanged formal explanations, and the incident was closed.

In Upper Canada many a rebel sympathizer lay for months in jail, but
only two leaders, Lount and Matthews, both brave men, paid the penalty
of death for their failure. In Lower Canada the new Governor General,
Lord Durham, proved more clement, merely banishing to Bermuda eight
of the captured leaders. When, a year later, after Durham's return to
England, a second brief rising broke out under Robert Nelson, it was
stamped out in a week, twelve of the ringleaders were executed, and
others were deported to Botany Bay.

The rebellion, it seemed, had failed and failed miserably. Most of the
leaders of the extreme factions in both provinces had been discredited,
and the moderate men had been driven into the government camp. Yet in
one sense the rising proved successful. It was not the first nor the
last time that wild and misguided force brought reform where sane
and moderate tactics met only contempt. If men were willing to die to
redress their wrongs, the most easy-going official could no longer
deny that there was a case for inquiry and possibly for reform. Lord
Melbourne's Government had acted at once in sending out to Canada, as
Governor General and High Commissioner with sweeping powers, one of
the ablest men in English public life. Lord Durham was an aristocratic
Radical, intensely devoted to political equality and equally convinced
of his own personal superiority. Yet he had vision, firmness,
independence, and his very rudeness kept him free from the social
influences which had ensnared many another Governor. Attended by a
gorgeous retinue and by some able working secretaries, including Charles
Buller, Carlyle's pupil, he made a rapid survey of Upper and Lower
Canada. Suddenly, after five crowded months, his mission ended. He had
left at home active enemies and lukewarm friends. Lord Brougham, one
of his foes, called in question the legality of his edict banishing the
rebel leaders to Bermuda. The Ministers did not back him, as they should
have done; and Durham indignantly resigned and hurried back to England.

Three months later, however, his "Report" appeared and his mission stood
vindicated. There are few British state papers of more fame or more
worth than Durham's "Report". It was not, however, the beginning and the
end of wisdom in colonial policy, as has often been declared. Much that
Durham advocated was not new, and much has been condemned by time. His
main suggestions were four: to unite the Canadas, to swamp the French
Canadians by such union, to grant a measure of responsible government,
and to set up municipal government. His attitude towards the French
Canadians was prejudiced and shortsighted. He was not the first to
recommend responsible government, nor did his approval make it a
reality. Yet with all qualifications his "Report" showed a confidence
in the liberating and solving power of self-government which was the
all-essential thing for the English Government to see; and his reasoned
and powerful advocacy gave an impetus and a rallying point to the
movement which were to prove of the greatest value in the future growth
not only of Canada but of the whole British Empire.



CHAPTER III. THE UNION ERA

The struggle for self-government seemed to have ended in deadlock and
chaos. Yet under the wreckage new lines of constructive effort were
forming. The rebellion had at least proved that the old order was
doomed. For half a century the attempt had been made to govern the
Canadas as separate provinces and with the half measure of freedom
involved in representative government. For the next quarter of a century
the experiment of responsible government together with union of the two
provinces was to be given its trial.

The union of the two provinces was the phase of Durham's policy which
met fullest acceptance in England. It was not possible, in the view of
the British Ministry, to take away permanently from the people of Lower
Canada the measure of self-government involved in permitting them to
choose their representatives in a House of Assembly. It was equally
impossible, they considered, to permit a French-Canadian majority ever
again to bring all government to a standstill. The only solution of
the problem was to unite the two provinces and thus swamp the French
Canadians by an English majority. Lower Canada, Durham had insisted,
must be made "an English province." Sooner or later the French Canadians
must lose their separate nationality; and it was, he contended, the part
of statesmanship to make it sooner. Union, moreover, would make possible
a common financial policy and an energetic development of the resources
of both provinces.

This was the first task set Durham's successor, Charles Poulett Thomson,
better known as Lord Sydenham. Like Durham he was a man of outstanding
capacity. The British Government had learned at last to send men of the
caliber the emergency demanded. Like Durham he was a wealthy Radical
politician, but there the resemblance ended. Where Durham played the
dictator, Sydenham preferred to intrigue and to manage men, to win them
by his adroitness and to convince them by his energy and his business
knowledge. He was well fitted for the transition tasks before him,
though too masterful to fill the role of ornamental monarch which the
advocates of responsible government had cast for the Governor.

Sydenham reached Canada in October, 1839. With the assistance of James
Stuart, now a baronet and Chief Justice of Lower Canada, he drafted a
union measure. In Lower Canada the Assembly had been suspended, and the
Special Council appointed in its stead accepted the bill without serious
demur. More difficulty was found in Upper Canada, where the Family
Compact, still entrenched in the Legislative Council, feared the risk
to their own position that union would bring and shrank from the task of
assimilating half a million disaffected French Canadians. But with
the support of the Reformers and of the more moderate among the Family
Compact party, Sydenham forced his measure through. A confirming bill
passed the British Parliament; and on February 10, 1841, the Union of
Canada was proclaimed.

The Act provided for the union of the two provinces, under a Governor,
an appointed Legislative Council, and an elective Assembly. In
the Assembly each section of the new province was to receive equal
representation, though the population of Lower Canada still greatly
exceeded that of Upper Canada. The Assembly was to have full control of
all revenues, and in return a permanent civil list was granted. Either
English or French could be used in debate, but all parliamentary
journals and papers were to be printed in English only.*

     * From 1841 to 1867 the whole province was legally known as
     the "Province of Canada." Yet a measure of administrative
     separation between the old sections remained, and the terms
     "Canada East" and "Canada West" received official sanction.
     The older terms, "Lower Canada" and "Upper Canada," lingered
     on in popular usage.

In June, 1841, the first Parliament of united Canada met at Kingston,
which as the most central point had been chosen as the new capital.
Under Sydenham's shrewd and energetic leadership a business programme
of long-delayed reforms was put through. A large loan, guaranteed by
the British Government, made possible extensive provision for building
roads, bridges, and canals around the rapids in the St. Lawrence.
Municipal institutions were set up, and reforms were effected in the
provincial administration.

Lord John Russell in England and Sydenham in Canada were anxious to keep
the question of responsible government in the background. For the first
busy months they succeeded, but the new Parliament contained men quite
as strong willed as either and of quite other views. Before the first
session had begun, Baldwin and the new French-Canadian leader, La
Fontaine, had raised the issue and begun a new struggle in which their
single-minded devotion and unflinching courage were to attain a complete
success.

Responsible government was in 1841 only a phrase, a watchword. Its full
implications became clear only after many years. It meant three things:
cabinet government, self-government, and party government. It meant
that the government of the country should be carried on by a Cabinet or
Executive Council, all members of Parliament, all belonging to the party
which had the majority in the Assembly, and under the leadership of a
Prime Minister, the working head of the Government. The nominal head,
Governor or King, could act only on the advice of his ministers,
who alone were held responsible to Parliament for the course of the
Government. It meant, further, national self-government. The Governor
could not serve two masters. If he must take the advice of his ministers
in Canada, he could not take the possibly conflicting advice of
ministers in London. The people of Canada would be the ultimate court of
appeal. And finally, responsible government meant party government. The
cabinet system presupposed a definite and united majority behind the
Government. It was the business of the party system to provide that
majority, to insure responsible and steady action, and at the same time
responsible criticism from Her Majesty's loyal Opposition. Baldwin saw
this clearly in 1841, but it took hard fighting throughout the forties
to bring all his fellow countrymen to see likewise and to induce the
English Government to resign itself to the prospect.

Sydenham fought against responsible government but advanced it against
his will. The only sense in which he, like Russell, was prepared to
concede such liberty was that the Governor should choose his advisers
as far as possible from men having the confidence of the Assembly. They
were to be his advisers only, in fact as well as form. The Governor
was still to govern, was to be Prime Minister and Governor in one. When
Baldwin, who had been given a seat in the Executive Council, demanded in
1841 that this body should be reconstructed in such a way as to include
some French-Canadian members and to exclude the Family Compact men,
Sydenham flatly refused. Baldwin then resigned and went into opposition,
but Sydenham unwillingly played into his hand. By choosing his council
solely from members of the two Houses, he established a definite
connection between Executive and Assembly and thus gave an opportunity
for the discussion of the administration of policy in the House and
for the forming of government and opposition parties. Before the first
session closed, the majority which Sydenham had built up by acting as a
party leader at the very time he was deriding parties as mere factions,
crumbled away, and he was forced to accept resolutions insisting that
the Governor's advisers must be men "possessed of the confidence of
the representatives of the people." Fate ended his work at its height.
Riding home one September evening, he was thrown from his horse and died
from the injuries before the month was out.

It fell to the Tory Government of Peel to choose Sydenham's successor.
They named Sir Charles Bagot, already distinguished for his career in
diplomacy and known for his hand in matters which were to interest the
greater Canada, the Rush-Bagot Convention with the United States and
the treaty with Russia which fixed, only too vaguely, the boundaries
of Alaska. He was under strict injunctions from the Colonial Secretary,
Lord Stanley, to continue Sydenham's policy and to make no further
concession to the demands for responsible government or party control.
Yet this Tory nominee of a Tory Cabinet, in his brief term of office,
insured a great advance along this very path toward freedom. His
easy-going temper predisposed him to play the part of constitutional
monarch rather than of Prime Minister, and in any case he faced a
majority in the Assembly resolute in its determination.

The policy of swamping French influence had already proved a failure.
Sydenham had given it a full trial. He had done his best, or his worst,
by unscrupulous manipulation, to keep the French Canadians from gaining
their fair quota of the members in the Union Assembly. Those who were
elected he ignored. "They have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing
by the Rebellion," he declared, "and are more unfit for representative
government than they were in 1791." This was far from a true reading of
the situation. The French stood aloof, it is true, a compact and sullen
group, angered by the undisguised policy of Anglicization that faced
them and by Sydenham's unscrupulous tactics. But they had learned
restraint and had found leaders and allies of the kind most needed.
Papineau's place--for the great tribune was now in exile in Paris,
consorting with the republicans and socialists who were to bring about
the Revolution of 1848--had been taken by one of his former lieutenants.
Louis Hippolyte La Fontaine still stands out as one of the two or three
greatest Canadians of French descent, a man of massive intellect, of
unquestioned integrity, and of firm but moderate temper. With Baldwin
he came to form a close and lifelong friendship. The Reformers of Canada
West, as Upper Canada was now called, formed a working alliance with
La Fontaine which gave them a sweeping majority in the Assembly. Bagot
bowed to the inevitable and called La Fontaine and Baldwin to his
Council. Ill health made it impossible for him to take much part in the
government, and the Council was far on the way to obtaining the unity
and the independence of a true Cabinet when Bagot's death in 1843
brought a new turn in affairs.

The British Ministers had seen with growing uneasiness Bagot's
concessions. His successor, Sir Charles Metcalfe, a man of honest and
kindly ways but accustomed to governing oriental peoples, determined to
make a stand against the pretensions of the Reformers. In this attitude
he was strongly backed both by Stanley and by his successor, that
brilliant young Tory, William Ewart Gladstone. Metcalfe insisted once
more that the Governor must govern. While the members of the Council, as
individuals, might give him advice, it was for him to decide whether
or not to take it. The inevitable clash with his Ministers came in the
autumn of 1843 over a question of patronage. They resigned, and after
months of effort Metcalfe patched up a Ministry with W. H. Draper as
the leading member. In an election in which Metcalfe himself took the
platform and in which once more British connection was said to be at
stake, the Ministry obtained a narrow majority. But opinion soon turned,
and when Metcalfe, the third Governor in four years to whom Canada had
proved fatal, went home to die, he knew that his stand had been in
vain. The Ministry, after a precarious life of three years, went to the
country only to be beaten by an overwhelming majority in both East and
West. When, in 1848, Baldwin and La Fontaine were called to office under
the new Governor General, Lord Elgin, the fight was won. Many years
were to pass before the full implications of responsible government
were worked out, but henceforth even the straitest Tory conceded the
principle. Responsible government had ceased to be a party cry and had
become the common heritage of all Canadians.

Lord Elgin, who was Durham's son-in-law, was a man well able to bear the
mantle of his predecessors. Yet he realized that the day had passed when
Governors could govern and was content rather to advise his advisers, to
wield the personal influence that his experience and sagacity warranted.
Hitherto the stages in Canadian history had been recorded by the term of
office of the Governors; henceforth it was to be the tenure of Cabinets
which counted. Elgin ceased even to attend the Council, and after his
time the Governor became more and more the constitutional monarch,
busied in laying corner stones and listening to tiresome official
addresses. In emergencies, and especially in the gap or interregnum
between Ministries, the personality of the Governor might count, but as
a rule this power remained latent. Yet in two turning points in Canadian
history, both of which had to do with the relations of Canada to the
United States, Elgin was to play an important part: the Annexation
Movement of 1849 and the Reciprocity Treaty of 1854.

In the struggle for responsible government, loyalty to the British
Crown, loyalty of a superior and exclusive brand, had been the creed and
the war cry of the Tory party. Yet in 1849 men saw the hotheads of this
group in Montreal stoning a British Governor General and setting fire to
the Parliament Buildings, while a few months later their elders issued a
manifesto urging the annexation of Canada to the United States. Why this
sudden shift? Simply because the old colonial system they had known and
supported had come to an end. The Empire had been taken to mean racial
ascendancy and trade profit. Now both the political and the economic
pillars were crumbling, and the Empire appeared to have no further
excuse for existence.

In the past British connection had meant to many of the English
minority in Lower Canada a means of redressing the political balance,
of retaining power in face of a body of French-speaking citizens
outnumbering them three or four to one. Now that support had been
withdrawn. Britain had consented, unwillingly, to the setting up of
responsible government and the calling to office of men who a dozen
years before had been in arms against the Queen or fleeing from the
province. This was gall and wormwood to the English. But when the
Ministry introduced, and the Assembly passed, the Rebellion Losses Bill
for compensating those who had suffered destruction of property in the
outbreak, and when the terms were so drawn as to make it possible, its
critics charged, that rebels as well as loyalists would be compensated,
flesh and blood could bear no more. The Governor was pelted with rotten
eggs when he came down to the House to sign the bill, and the buildings
where Parliament had met since 1844, when the capital had been
transferred from Kingston to Montreal, were stormed and burned by a
street mob.

The anger felt against the Ministry thus turned against the British
Government. The English minority felt like an advance guard in a hostile
country, deserted by the main forces, an Ulster abandoned to Home
Ruler and Sinn Feiner. They turned to the south, to the other great
English-speaking Protestant people. If the older branch of the race
would not give them protection or a share in dominance, perhaps the
younger branch could and would. As Lord Durham had suggested, they
were resolved that "Lower Canada must be ENGLISH, at the expense, if
necessary, of not being BRITISH."

But it was not only the political basis of the old colonial system that
was rudely shattered. The economic foundations, too, were passing away,
and with them the profits of the Montreal merchants, who formed the
backbone of the annexation movement. It has been seen that under this
system Great Britain had aimed at setting up a self-contained empire,
with a monopoly of the markets of the colonies. Now for her own sake she
was sweeping away the tariff and shipping monopoly which had been
built up through more than two centuries. The logic of Adam Smith, the
experiments of Huskisson, the demands of manufacturers for cheap food
and raw materials, the passionate campaigns of Cobden and Bright, and
the rains that brought the Irish famine, at last had their effect. In
1846 Peel himself undertook the repeal of the Corn Laws. To Lower Canada
this was a crushing blow. Until of late the preference given in the
British market on colonial goods in return for the control of colonial
trade had been of little value; but in 1848 the duties on Canadian
wheat and flour had been greatly lowered, resulting in a preference over
foreign grain reckoned at eighteen cents a bushel. While in appearance
an extension of the old system of preference and protection, in reality
this was a step toward its abandonment. For it was understood that
American grain, imported into Canada at a low duty, whether shipped
direct or ground into flour, would be admitted at the same low rates.
The Act, by opening a back door to United States wheat, foreshadowed the
triumph of the cheap food agitators in England. But the merchants, the
millers, and the forwarders of Montreal could not believe this. The
canal system was rushed through; large flour mills were built, and heavy
investments of capital were made. Then in 1846 came the announcement
that the artificial basis of this brief prosperity had vanished. Lord
Elgin summed up the results in a dispatch in 1849: "Property in most of
the Canadian towns, and more especially in the capital, has fallen fifty
per cent in value within the last three years. Three-fourths of the
commercial men are bankrupt, owing to free trade. A large proportion
of the exportable produce of Canada is obliged to seek a market in the
United States. It pays a duty of twenty per cent on the frontier. How
long can such a state of things endure?"

In October, 1849, the leading men of Montreal issued a manifesto
demanding annexation to the United States. A future Prime Minister
of Canada, J. J. C. Abbott, four future Cabinet Ministers, John Rose,
Luther Holton, D. L. Macpherson, and A. A. Dorion, and the commercial
leaders of Montreal, the Molsons, Redpaths, Torrances, and Workmans,
were among the signers. Besides Dorion, a few French Canadians of the
Rouge or extreme Radical party joined in. The movement found supporters
in the Eastern Townships, notably in A. T. Galt, a financier and
railroad builder of distinction, and here and there in Canada West. Yet
the great body of opinion was unmistakably against it. Baldwin and
La Fontaine opposed it with unswerving energy, the Catholic Church
in Canada East denounced it, and the rank and file of both parties in
Canada West gave it short shrift. Elgin came out actively in opposition
and aided in negotiating the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States
which met the economic need. Montreal found itself isolated, and even
there the revival of trade and the cooling of passions turned men's
thoughts into other channels. Soon the movement was but a memory,
chiefly serviceable to political opponents for taunting some signer of
the manifesto whenever he later made parade of his loyalty. It had
a more unfortunate effect, however, in leading public opinion in the
United States to the belief for many years that a strong annexationist
sentiment existed in Canada. Never again did annexation receive any
notable measure of popular support. A national spirit was slowly gaining
ground, and men were eventually to see that the alternative to looking
to London for salvation was not looking to Washington but looking to
themselves.


In the provinces by the sea the struggle for responsible government was
won at much the same time as in Canada. The smaller field within which
the contest was waged gave it a bitter personal touch; but racial
hostility did not enter in, and the British Government proved less
obdurate than in the western conflicts. In both Nova Scotia and New
Brunswick little oligarchies had become entrenched. The Government was
unprogressive, and fees and salaries were high. The Anglican Church had
received privileges galling to other denominations which surpassed it in
numbers. The "powers that were" found a shrewd defender in Haliburton,
who tried to teach his fellow Bluenoses through the homely wit of "Sam
Slick" that they should leave governing to those who had the training,
the capacity, and the leisure it required. In Prince Edward Island the
land question still overshadowed all others. Every proposal for its
settlement was rejected by the influence of the absentee landlords in
England, and the agitation went wearily on.

In Nova Scotia the outstanding figure in the ranks of reform was Joseph
Howe. The son of a Loyalist settler, Howe early took to his father's
work of journalism. At first his sympathies were with the governing
powers, but a controversy with a brother editor, Jotham Blanchard, a New
Hampshire man who found radical backing among the Scots of Pictou, gave
him new light and he soon threw his whole powers into the struggle
on the popular side. Howe was a man lavishly gifted, one of the most
effective orators America has produced, fearing no man and no task
however great, filled with a vitality, a humor, a broad sympathy for his
fellows that gave him the blind obedience of thousands of followers and
the glowing friendship of countless firesides. There are still old men
in Nova Scotia whose proudest memory is that they once held Howe's horse
or ran on an errand for a look from his kingly eye.

Howe took up the fight in earnest in 1835. The western demand for
responsible government pointed the way, and Howe became, with Baldwin,
its most trenchant advocate. In spite of the determined opposition
of the sturdy old soldier Governor, Sir Colin Campbell, and of his
successor, Lord Falkland, who aped Sydenham and whom Howe threatened to
"hire a black man to horse-whip," the reformers won. In 1848 the first
responsible Cabinet in Nova Scotia came to power.

In New Brunswick the transition to responsible government came gradually
and without dramatic incidents or brilliant figures on either side.
Lemuel Wilmot, and later Charles Fisher, led the reform ranks, gradually
securing for the Assembly control of all revenues, abolishing religious
inequalities, and effecting some reform in the Executive Council, until
at last in 1855 the crowning demand was tardily conceded.


From the Great Lakes to the Atlantic the political fight was won,
and men turned with relief to the tasks which strife and faction had
hindered. Self-government meant progressive government. With organized
Cabinets coordinating and controlling their policy the provinces went
ahead much faster than when Governor and Assembly stood at daggers
drawn. The forties and especially the fifties were years of rapid and
sound development in all the provinces, and especially in Canada West.
Settlers poured in, the scattered clearings; widened until one joined
the next, and pioneer hardships gave way to substantial, if crude,
prosperity. Education, notably under the vigorous leadership of Egerton
Ryerson in Canada West, received more adequate attention. Banks grew and
with them all commercial facilities increased.

The distinctive feature of this period of Canadian development, however,
was the growth of canals and railroads. The forties were the time of
canal building and rebuilding all along the lakes and the St. Lawrence
to salt water. Canada spent millions on what were wonderful works for
their day, in the hope that the St. Lawrence would become the channel
for the trade of all the growing western States bordering on the Great
Lakes. Scarcely were these waterway improvements completed when it was
realized they had been made largely in vain. The railway had come and
was outrivaling the canal. If Canadian ports and channels were even to
hold their own, they must take heed of the enterprise of all the cities
along the Atlantic coast of the United States, which were promoting
railroads to the interior in a vigorous rivalry for the trade of the
Golden West. Here was a challenge which must be taken up. The fifties
became the first great railway era of Canada. In 1850 there were only
sixty-six miles of railway in all the provinces; ten years later there
were over two thousand. Nearly all the roads were aided by provincial or
municipal bonus or guarantee. Chief among the lines was the Grand Trunk,
which ran from the Detroit border to Riviere du Loup on the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, and which, though it halted at that eastern terminus in the
magnificent project of connecting with the railways of the Maritime
Provinces, was nevertheless at that time the longest road in the world
operating under single control.

The railways brought with them a new speculative fever, a more complex
financial structure, a business politics which shaded into open
corruption, and a closer touch with the outside world. The general
substitution of steam for sail on the Atlantic during this period aided
further in lessening the isolation of what had been backwoods provinces
and in bringing them into closer relation with the rest of the world.


It was in closer relations with the United States that this emergence
from isolation chiefly manifested itself. In the generation that
followed the War of 1812 intercourse with the United States was
discouraged and was remarkably insignificant. Official policy and the
memories of 1783 and 1812 alike built up a wall along the southern
border. The spirit of Downing Street was shown in the instructions given
to Lord Bathurst, immediately after the close of the war, to leave the
territory between Montreal and Lake Champlain in a state of nature,
making no further grants of land and letting the few roads which had
been begun fall into decay thus a barrier of forest wilderness would
ward off republican contagion. This Chinese policy of putting up a wall
of separation proved impossible to carry through, but in less extreme
ways this attitude of aloofness marked the course of the Government all
through the days of oversea authority.

The friction aroused by repeated boundary disputes prevented friendly
relations between Canada and the United States. With unconscious irony
the framers of the Peace of 1783 had prefaced their long outline of the
boundaries of the United States by expressing their intention "that all
disputes which might arise in future on the subject of the boundaries
of the said United States may be prevented." So vague, however, were the
terms of the treaty and so untrustworthy were the maps of the day that
ultimately almost every clause in the boundary section gave rise to
dispute.

As settlement rolled westward one section of the boundary after another
came in question. Beginning in the east, the line between New Brunswick
and New England was to be formed by the St. Croix River. There had been
a St. Croix in Champlain's time and a St. Croix was depicted on the
maps, but no river known by that name existed in 1783. The British
identified it with the Schoodic, the Americans with the Magaguadavic.
Arbitration in 1798 upheld the British in the contention that the
Schoodic was the St. Croix but agreed with the Americans in the
secondary question as to which of the two branches of the Schoodic
should be followed. A similar commission in 1817 settled the dispute as
to the islands in Passamaquoddy Bay.

More difficult, because at once more ambiguous in terms and more vitally
important, was the determination of the boundary in the next stage
westward from the St. Croix to the St. Lawrence. The British position
was a difficult one to maintain. In the days of the struggle with
France, Great Britain had tried to push the bounds of the New England
colonies as far north as might be, making claims that would hem in
France to the barest strip along the south shore of the St. Lawrence.
Now that she was heir to the territories and claims of France and
had lost her own old colonies, it was somewhat embarrassing, but for
diplomats not impossible, to have to urge a line as far south as the
urgent needs of the provinces for intercommunication demanded. The
letter of the treaty was impossible to interpret with certainty. The
phrase, "the Highlands which divide those rivers that empty themselves
into the river St. Lawrence from those which fall into the Atlantic
Ocean," meant according to the American reading a watershed which was a
marshy plateau, and according to the British version a range of hills to
the south which involved some keen hairsplitting as to the rivers they
divided. The intentions of the parties to the original treaty were
probably much as the Americans contended. From the standpoint of
neighborly adjustment and the relative need for the land in question, a
strong case in equity could be made out for the provinces, which would
be cut asunder for all time if a wedge were driven north to the very
brink of the St. Lawrence.

As lumbermen and settlers gathered in the border area, the risk of
conflict became acute, culminating in the Aroostook War in 1838-39,
when the Legislatures of Maine and New Brunswick backed their rival
lumberjacks with reckless jingoism. Diplomacy failed repeatedly to
obtain a compromise line. Arbitration was tried with little better
success, as the United States refused to accept the award of the King
of the Netherlands in 1831. The diplomats tried once more, and in
1842 Daniel Webster, the United States Secretary of State, and Lord
Ashburton, the British Commissioner, made a compromise by which some
five thousand miles of the area in dispute were assigned to Great
Britain and seven thousand to the United States. The award was not
popular on either side, and the public seized eagerly on stories of
concealed "Red Line" maps, stories of Yankee smartness or of British
trickery. Webster, to win the assent of Maine, had exhibited in the
Senate a map found in the French Archives and very damaging to the
American claim. Later it appeared that the British Government also had
found a map equally damaging to its own claims. The nice question of
ethics involved, whether a nation should bring forward evidence that
would tell against itself, ceased to have more than an abstract interest
when it was demonstrated that neither map could be considered as one
which the original negotiators had used or marked.*

     * See "The Path, of Empire", by Carl Russell Fish (in "The
     Chronicles of America").

The boundary from the St. Lawrence westward through the Great Lakes and
thence to the Lake of the Woods had been laid down in the Treaty of
1783 in the usual vague terms, but it was determined in a series of
negotiations from 1794 to 1842 with less friction and heat than the
eastern line had caused. From the Lake of the Woods to the Rockies a new
line, the forty-ninth parallel, was agreed upon in 1818. Then, as the
Pacific Ocean was neared, the difficulties once more increased. There
were no treaties between the two countries to limit claims beyond the
Rockies. Discovery and settlement, and the rights inherited from or
admitted by the Spaniards to the south and by the Russians to the north,
were the grounds put forward. British and Canadian fur traders had been
the pioneers in overland discovery, but early in the forties thousands
of American settlers poured into the Columbia Valley and strengthened
the practical case for their country. "Fifty-four forty or fight"--in
other words, the calm proposal to claim the whole coast between Mexico
and Alaska--became the popular cry in the United States; but in face
of the firm attitude of Great Britain and impending hostilities with
Mexico, more moderate counsels ruled. Great Britain held out for the
Columbia River as the dividing line, and the United States for the
forty-ninth parallel throughout. Finally, in 1846, the latter contention
was accepted, with a modification to leave Vancouver Island wholly
British territory. A postscript to this settlement was added in 1872,
when the German Emperor as arbitrator approved the American claim to
the island of San Juan in the channel between Vancouver Island and the
mainland.*

     * See "The Path of Empire".

With the most troublesome boundary questions out of the way, it became
possible to discuss calmly closer trade relations between the Provinces
and the United States. The movement for reciprocal lowering of the
tariffs which hampered trade made rapid headway in the Provinces in the
late forties and early fifties. British North America was passing out of
the pioneer, self-sufficient stage, and now had a surplus to export
as well as townbred needs to be supplied by imports. The spread of
settlement and the building of canals and railways brought closer
contact with the people to the south. The loss of special privileges
in the English market made the United States market more desired. In
official circles reciprocity was sought as a homeopathic cure for
the desire for annexation. William Hamilton Merritt, a Niagara border
business man and the most persistent advocate of closer trade relations,
met little difficulty in securing almost unanimous backing in Canada,
while the Maritime Provinces lent their support.

It was more difficult to win over the United States. There the people
showed the usual indifference of a big and prosperous country to the
needs or opportunities of a small and backward neighbor. The division
of power between President and Congress made it difficult to carry any
negotiation through to success. Yet these obstacles were overcome. The
depletion of the fisheries along the Atlantic coast of the United States
made it worth while, as I.D. Andrews, a United States consul in New
Brunswick, urged persistently, to gain access to the richer grounds to
the north and, if necessary, to offer trade concessions in exchange. At
Washington, the South was in the saddle. Its sympathies were strongly
for freer trade, but this alone would not have counted had not the
advocates of reciprocity convinced the Democratic leaders of the bearing
of their policy on the then absorbing issue of slavery. If reciprocity
were not arranged, the argument ran, annexation would be sure to come
and that would mean the addition to the Union of a group of freesoil
States which would definitely tilt the balance against slavery for all
time. With the ground thus prepared, Lord Elgin succeeded by adroit and
capable diplomacy in winning over the leaders of Congress as well as
the Executive to his proposals. The Reciprocity Treaty was passed by the
Senate in August, 1854, and by the Legislatures of the United Kingdom,
Canada, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia in the next
few months, and of Newfoundland in 1855. This treaty provided for free
admission into each country of practically all the products of the farm,
forest, mine, and fishery, threw open the Atlantic fisheries, and gave
American vessels the use of the St. Lawrence and Canadian vessels
the use of Lake Michigan. The agreement was to last for ten years and
indefinitely thereafter, subject to termination on one year's notice by
either party.

To both countries reciprocity brought undoubted good. Trade doubled and
trebled. Each country gained by free access to the nearest sources
of supply. The same goods figured largely in the traffic in both
directions, the United States importing grain and flour from Canada and
exporting it to the Maritime Provinces. In short the benefits which had
come to the United States from free and unfettered trade throughout half
a continent were now extended to practically a whole continent.

Yet criticism of the new economic regime was not lacking. The growth
of protectionist feeling in both countries after 1857 brought about
incidents and created an atmosphere which were dangerous to the
continuance of close trade relations. In 1858 and 1859 the Canadian
Government raised substantially the duties on manufactured goods in
order to meet the bills for its lavish railway policy. This increase hit
American manufacturers and led to loud complaints that the spirit of
the Reciprocity Treaty had been violated. Alexander T. Galt, Canadian
Minister of Finance, had no difficulty in showing that the tariff
increases were the only feasible sources of revenue, that the agreement
with the United States did not cover manufactures, and that the United
States itself, faced by war demands and no longer controlled by free
trade Southerners, had raised duties still higher. The exports of the
United States to the Provinces in the reciprocity period were greater,
contrary to the later traditions, than the imports. On economic grounds
the case for the continuance of the reciprocity agreement was strong,
and probably the treaty would have remained in force indefinitely had
not the political passions roused by the Civil War made sanity and
neighborliness in trade difficult to maintain.


When the Civil War broke out, the sympathies of Canadians were
overwhelmingly on the side of the North. The railway and freer trade had
been bringing the two peoples closer together, and time was healing old
sores. Slavery was held to be the real issue, and on that issue there
were scarcely two opinions in the British Provinces.

Yet in a few months sympathy had given way to angry and suspicious
bickering, and the possibility of invasion of Canada by the Northern
forces was vigorously debated. This sudden shift of opinion and the
danger in which it involved the provinces were both incidents in the
quarrel which sprang up between the United States and Great Britain. In
Britain as in Canada, opinion, so far as it found open expression, was
at first not unfriendly to the North. Then came the anger of the North
at Great Britain's legitimate and necessary, though perhaps precipitate,
action in acknowledging the South as a belligerent. This action ran
counter to the official Northern theory that the revolt of the Southern
States was a local riot, of merely domestic concern, and was held to
foreshadow a recognition of the independence of the Confederacy. The
angry taunts were soon returned. The ruling classes in Great Britain
made the discovery that the war was a struggle between chivalrous
gentlemen and mercenary counterhoppers and cherished the hope that the
failure of the North would discredit, the world over, the democracy
which was making uncomfortable claims in England itself. The English
trading classes resented the shortage of cotton and the high duties
which the protectionist North was imposing. With the defeat of the Union
forces at Bull Run the prudent hesitancy of aristocrat and merchant in
expressing their views disappeared. The responsible statesmen of both
countries, especially Lincoln and Lord John Russell, refused to be
stampeded, but unfortunately the leading newspapers served them ill.
The "Times", with its constant sneers and its still more irritating
patronizing advice, and the New York "Herald", bragging and blustering
in the frank hope of forcing a war with Britain and France which would
reunite South and North and subordinate the slavery issue, did more than
any other factors to bring the two countries to the verge of war.

In Canada the tendency in some quarters to reflect English opinion,
the disappointment in others that the abolition of slavery was not
explicitly pledged by the North, and above all resentment against
the threats of the "Herald" and its followers, soon cooled the early
friendliness. The leading Canadian newspaper, for many years a vigorous
opponent of slavery, thus summed up the situation in August, 1861:

"The insolent bravado of the Northern press towards Great Britain and
the insulting tone assumed toward these Provinces have unquestionably
produced a marked change in the feelings of our people. When the war
commenced, there was only one feeling, of hearty sympathy with the
North, but now it is very different. People have lost sight of the
character of the struggle in the exasperation excited by the injustice
and abuse showered upon us by the party with which we sympathized."*

     * Toronto "Globe", August 7, 1861.

The Trent affair brought matters to a sobering climax.* When it was
settled, resentment lingered, but the tension was never again so acute.
Both Great Britain and in Canada the normal sympathy with the cause of
the Union revived as the war went on. In England the classes continued
to be pro-Southern in sympathy, but the masses, in spite of cotton
famines, held resolutely to their faith in the cause of freedom. After
Lincoln's emancipation of the slaves, the view of the English middle
classes more and more became the view of the nation. In Canada,
pro-Southern sentiment was strong in the same classes and particularly
in Montreal and Toronto, where there were to be found many Southern
refugees, some of whom made a poor return for hospitality by endeavoring
to use Canada as a base for border raids. Yet in the smaller towns and
in the country sympathy was decidedly on the other side, particularly
after the "Herald" had ceased its campaign of bluster and after
Lincoln's proclamation had brought the moral issue again to the fore.
The fact that a large number of Canadians, popularly set at forty
thousand, enlisted in the Northern armies, is to be explained in part by
the call of adventure and the lure of high bounties, but it must also be
taken to reflect the sympathy of the mass of the people.

     * See "Abraham Lincoln and the Union", by Nathaniel W.
     Stephenson (in "The Chronicles of America").

In the United States resentment was slower in passing. While the war was
on, prudence forbade any overt act. When it was over, the bill for the
Alabama raids and the taunts of the "Times" came in. Great Britain
paid in the settlement of the Alabama claims.* Canada suffered by the
abrogation of the Reciprocity Treaty at the first possible date, and by
the connivance of the American authorities in the Fenian raids of 1866
and 1870. Yet for Canada the outcome was by no means ill. If the Civil
War did not bring forth a new nation in the South, it helped to make one
in the far North. A common danger drew the scattered British Provinces
together and made ready the way for the coming Dominion of Canada.

     *See "The Day of the Confederacy", by Nathaniel W.
     Stephenson; and "The Path of Empire" (in "The Chronicles of
     America").

It was not from the United States alone that an impetus came for the
closer union of the British Provinces. The same period and the same
events ripened opinion in the United Kingdom in favor of some practical
means of altering a colonial relationship which had ceased to bring
profit but which had not ceased to be a burden of responsibility and
risk.

The British Empire had its beginning in the initiative of private
business men, not in any conscious policy of state. Yet as the Empire
grew the teaching of doctrinaires and the example of other colonial
powers had developed a definite policy whereby the plantations overseas
were to be made to serve the needs of the nation at home. The end of
empire was commercial profit; the means, the political subordination of
the colonies; the debit entry, the cost of the military and naval and
diplomatic services borne by the mother country. But the course of
events had now broken down this theory. Britain, for her own good, had
abandoned protection, and with it fell the system of preference and
monopoly in colonial markets. Not only preference had gone but even
equality. The colonies, notably Canada, which was most influenced by the
United States, were perversely using their new found freedom to protect
their own manufacturers against all outsiders, Britain included.
When Sheffield cutlers, hard hit by Canada's tariff, protested to
the Colonial Secretary and he echoed their remonstrance, the
Canadian Minister of Finance, A. T. Galt, stoutly refused to heed.
"Self-government would be utterly annihilated," Galt replied in 1860,
"if the views of the Imperial Government were to be preferred to
those of the people of Canada. It is therefore the duty of the present
government distinctly to affirm the right of the Canadian legislature to
adjust the taxation of the people in the way they deem best--even if
it should unfortunately happen to meet the disapproval of the Imperial
Ministry." Clearly, if trade advantage were the chief purpose of empire,
the Empire had lost its reason for being.

With the credit entry fading, the debit entry loomed up bigger. Hardly
had the Corn Laws been abolished when Radical critics called on the
British Government to withdraw the redcoat garrisons from the colonies:
no profit, no defense. Slowly but steadily this reduction was effected.
To fill the gaps, the colonies began to strengthen their militia forces.
In Canada only a beginning had been made in the way of defense when the
Trent episode brought matters to a crisis. If war broke out between the
United States and Great Britain, Canada would be the battlefield. Every
Canadian knew it; nothing could be clearer. When the danger of immediate
war had passed, the Parliament of Canada turned to the provision of more
adequate defense. A bill providing for a compulsory levy was defeated in
1862, more on personal and party grounds than on its own merits, and
the Ministry next in office took the other course of increasing the
volunteer force and of providing for officers' training. Compared with
any earlier arrangements for defense, the new plans marked a great
advance; but when judged in the light of the possible necessity of
repelling American invasion, they were plainly inadequate. A burst
of criticism followed from England; press and politicians joined in
denouncing the blind and supine colonials. Did they not know that
invasion by the United States was inevitable? "If the people of the
North fail," declared a noble lord, "they will attack Canada as a
compensation for their losses; if they succeed, they will attack Canada
in the drunkenness of victory." If such an invasion came, Britain had
neither the power nor the will, the "Times" declared, to protect Canada
without any aid on her part; not the power, for "our empire is too vast,
our population too small, our antagonist too powerful"; not the will,
for "we no longer monopolize the trade of the colonies; we no longer job
their patronage." To these amazing attacks Canadians replied that they
knew the United States better than Englishmen did. They were prepared to
take their share in defense, but they could not forget that if war came
it would not be by any act of Canada. It was soon noted that those
who most loudly denounced Canada for not arming to the teeth were the
Southern sympathizers. "The 'Times' has done more than its share in
creating bad feeling between England and the United States," declared
a Toronto newspaper, "and would have liked to see the Canadians take up
the quarrel which it has raised.... We have no idea of Canada being made
a victim of the Jefferson Bricks on either side of the Atlantic."

The question of defense fell into the background when the war ended
and the armies of the Union went back to their farms and shops. But
the discussion left in the minds of most Englishmen the belief that the
possession of such colonies was a doubtful blessing. Manchester men like
Bright, Liberals like Gladstone and Cornewall Lewis, Conservatives
like Lowe and Disraeli, all came to believe that separation was only a
question of time. Yet honor made them hesitate to set the defenseless
colonies adrift to be seized by the first hungry neighbor.

At this juncture the plans for uniting all the colonies in one great
federation seemed to open a way out; united, the colonies could stand
alone. Thus Confederation found support in Britain as well as a stimulus
from the United States. This, however, was not enough. Confederation
would not have come when it did--and that might have meant it would
never have come at all--had not party and sectional deadlock forced
Canadian politicians to seek a remedy in a wider union.

At first all had gone well with the Union of 1841. It did not take
the politicians long to learn how to use the power that responsible
government put into their hands. After Elgin's day the Governor General
fell back into the role of constitutional monarch which cabinet control
made easy for him. In the forties, men had spoken of Sydenham and
Bagot, Metcalfe and Elgin; in the fifties, they spoke of Baldwin and La
Fontaine, Hincks and Macdonald and Cartier and Brown, and less and less
of the Governors in whose name these men ruled. Politics then attracted
more of the country's ablest men than it does now, and the party leaders
included many who would have made their mark in any parliament in the
world. Baldwin and La Fontaine, united to the end, resigned office
in 1851, believing that they had played their part in establishing
responsible government and feeling out of touch with the radical
elements of their following who were demanding further change. Their
place was taken in Canada West by Hincks, an adroit tactician and a
skilled financier, intent on railway building and trade development; and
in Canada East by Morin, a somewhat colorless lieutenant of La Fontaine.

But these leaders in turn soon gave way to new men; and the political
parties gradually fell into a state of flux. In Canada West there were
still a few Tories, survivors of the Family Compact and last-ditch
defenders of privilege in Church and State, a growing number of moderate
Conservatives, a larger group of moderate Liberals, and a small
but aggressive extreme left wing of "Clear Grits," mainly Scotch
Presbyterians, foes of any claim to undue power on the part of class or
clergy. In Canada East the English members from the Townships, under
A. T. Galt, were ceasing to vote as a unit, and the main body of
French-Canadian members were breaking up into a moderate Liberal party,
and a smaller group of Rouges, fiery young men under the leadership
of Papineau, now returned from exile, were crusading against clerical
pretensions and all the established order.

The situation was one made to the hand of a master tactician. The time
brought forth the man. John A. Macdonald, a young Kingston lawyer
of Tory upbringing, or "John A.", as generation after generation
affectionately called him, was to prove the greatest leader of men in
Canada's annals. Shrewd, tactful, and genial, never forgetting a face
or a favor, as popular for his human frailties as for his strength,
Macdonald saw that the old party lines drawn in the days of the struggle
for responsible government were breaking down and that the future lay
with a union of the moderate elements in both parties and both sections.
He succeeded in 1854 in bringing together in Canada West a strong
Liberal-Conservative group and in effecting a permanent alliance with
the main body of French-Canadian Liberals, now under the leadership
of Cartier, a vigorous fighter and an easy-going opportunist. With
the addition of Galt as the financial expert, these allies held power
throughout the greater part of the next dozen years. Their position was
not unchallenged. The Clear Grits had found a leader after their own
heart in George Brown, a Scotchman of great ability, a hard hitter and
a good hater--especially of slavery, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and
"John A." Through his newspaper, the Toronto "Globe", he wielded a power
unique in Canadian journalism. The Rouges, now led by A. A. Dorion, a
man of stainless honor and essentially moderate temper, withdrew from.
their extreme anticlerical position but could not live down their youth
or make head against the forces of conservatism in their province. They
did not command many votes in the House, but every man of them was an
orator, and they remained through all vicissitudes a power to reckon
with.

Step by step, under Liberal and under Liberal Conservative Governments,
the programme of Canadian Liberalism was carried into effect.
Self-government, at least in domestic affairs, had been attained. An
effective system of municipal government and a good beginning in popular
education followed. The last link between Church and State was severed
in 1854 when the Clergy Reserves were turned over to the municipalities
for secular purposes, with life annuities for clergymen who had been
receiving stipends from the Reserves. In Lower Canada the remnants of
the old feudal system, the rights of the seigneurs, were abolished in
the same year with full compensation from the state. An elective upper
Chamber took the place of the appointed Legislative Council a year
later. The Reformers, as the Clear Grits preferred to call themselves
officially, should perhaps have been content with so much progress.
They insisted, however, that a new and more intolerable privilege had
arisen--the privilege which Canada East held of equal representation
in the Legislative Assembly long after its population had fallen behind
that of Canada West.

The political union of the two Canadas in fact had never been complete.
Throughout the Union period there were two leaders in each Cabinet, two
Attorney Generals, and two distinct judicial systems. Every session laws
were passed applying to one section alone. This continued separation had
its beginning in a clause of the Union Act itself, which provided that
each section should have equal representation in the Assembly, even
though Lower Canada then had a much larger population than Upper Canada.
When the tide of overseas immigration put Canada West well in the lead,
it in its turn was denied the full representation its greater population
warranted. First the Conservatives, and later the Clear Grits, took
up the cry of "Representation by Population." It was not difficult to
convince the average Canada West elector that it was an outrage
that three French-Canadian voters should count as much as four
English-speaking voters. Macdonald, relying for power on his alliance
with Cartier, could not accept the demand, and saw seat after seat in
Canada West fall to Brown and his "Rep. by Pop." crusaders. Brown's
success only solidified Canada East against him, until, in the early
sixties, party lines coincided almost with sectional lines. Parties were
so closely matched that the life of a Ministry was short. In the
three years ending in 1864 there were two general elections and
four Ministries. Political controversy became bitterly personal, and
corruption was spreading fast.

Constant efforts were made to avert the threatened deadlock. Macdonald,
who always trusted more to personal management than to constitutional
expedients, won over one after another of the opponents who troubled
him, and thus postponed the day of reckoning. Rival plans of
constitutional reform were brought forward. The simplest remedy was the
repeal of the union, leaving each province to go its own way. But this
solution was felt to be a backward step and one which would create more
problems than it would solve. More support was given the double majority
principle, a provision that no measure affecting one section should be
passed unless a majority from that section favored it, but this method
broke down when put to a practical test. The Rouges, and later Brown,
put forward a plan for the abolition of legislative union in favor of
a federal union of the two Canadas. This lacked the wide vision of the
fourth suggestion, which was destined to be adopted as the solution,
namely, the federation of all British North America.

Federal union, it was urged, would solve party and sectional deadlock by
removing to local legislatures the questions which created the greatest
divergence of opinion. The federal union of the Canadas alone or the
federal union of all British North America would either achieve this
end. But there were other ends in view which only the wider plan could
serve. The needs of defense demanded a single control for all the
colonies. The probable loss of the open market of the United States made
it imperative to unite all the provinces in a single free trade area.
The first faint stirrings of national ambition, prompting the younger
men to throw off the leading strings of colonial dependence, were
stimulated by the vision of a country which would stretch from sea
to sea. The westward growth of the United States and the reports of
travelers were opening men's eyes to the possibilities of the vast lands
under the control of the Hudson's Bay Company and the need of asserting
authority over these northern regions if they were to be held for the
Crown. Eastward, also, men were awaking to their isolation. There was
not, in the Maritime Provinces, any popular desire for union with the
Canadas or any political crisis compelling drastic remedy, but the
need of union for defense was felt in some quarters, and ambitious
politicians who had mastered their local fields were beginning to sigh
for larger worlds to conquer.

It took the patient and courageous striving of many men to make this
vision of a united country a reality. The roll of the Fathers of
Confederation is a long and honored one. Yet on that roll there are
some outstanding names, the names of men whose services were not merely
devoted but indispensable. The first to bring the question within the
field of practical politics was A. T. Galt, but when attempt after
attempt in 1864 to organize a Ministry with a safe working majority had
failed, it was George Brown who proposed that the party leaders should
join hands in devising some form of federation. Macdonald had hitherto
been a stout opponent of all change but, once converted, he threw
himself into the struggle, with energy. He never appeared to better
advantage than in the negotiations of the next few years, steering
the ship of Confederation through the perilous shoals of personal and
sectional jealousies. Few had a harder or a more important task than
Cartier's-reconciling Canada East to a project under which it would be
swamped, in the proposed federal House, by the representatives of four
or five English-speaking provinces. McDougall, a Canada West Reformer,
shared with Brown the credit for awakening Canadians to the value of the
Far West and to the need of including it in their plans of expansion.
D'Arcy McGee, more than any other, fired the imagination of the people
with glowing pictures of the greatness and the limitless possibilities
of the new nation. Charles Tupper, the head of a Nova Scotia
Conservative Ministry which had overthrown the old tribune, Joseph
Howe, had the hardest and seemingly most hopeless task of all; for his
province appeared to be content with its separate existence and was
inflamed against union by Howe's eloquent opposition; but to Tupper a
hard fight was as the breath of his nostrils. In New Brunswick, Leonard
Tilley, a man of less vigor but equal determination, led the struggle
until Confederation was achieved.

It was in June, 1864, that the leaders of the Parliament of Canada
became convinced that federation was the only way out. A coalition
Cabinet was formed, with Sir Etienne Tache as nominal Premier, and
with Macdonald, Brown, Cartier, and Galt all included. An opening for
discussing the wider federation was offered by a meeting which was to be
held in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, of delegates from the three
Maritime Provinces to consider the formation of a local union. There, in
September, 1864, went eight of the Canadian Ministers. Their proposals
met with favor. A series of banquets brought the plans before the
public, seemingly with good results. The conference was resumed a month
later at Quebec. Here, in sixteen working days, delegates from Canada,
Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and also from
Newfoundland, thirty-three in all, after frank and full deliberation
behind closed doors, agreed upon the terms of union. Macdonald's
insistence upon a legislative union, wiping out all provincial
boundaries, was overridden; but the lesson of the conflict between
the federal and state jurisdiction in the United States was seen in
provisions to strengthen the central authority. The general government
was empowered to appoint the lieutenant governors of the various
provinces and to veto any provincial law; to it were assigned all
legislative powers not specifically granted to the provinces; and
a subsidy granted by the general government in lieu of the customs
revenues resigned by the provinces still further increased their
dependence upon the central authority.

It had taken less than three weeks to draw up the plan of union. It
took nearly three years to secure its adoption. So far as Canada
was concerned, little trouble was encountered. British traditions of
parliamentary supremacy prevented any direct submission of the question
to the people; but their support was clearly manifested in the press and
on the platform, and the legislature ratified the project with emphatic
majorities from both sections of the province. Though it did not pass
without opposition, particularly from the Rouges under Dorion and from
steadfast supporters of old ways like Christopher Dunkin and Sandfield
Macdonald, the fight was only halfhearted. Not so, however, in the
provinces by the sea. The delegates who returned from the Quebec
Conference were astounded to meet a storm of criticism. Local pride and
local prejudice were aroused. The thrifty maritime population feared
Canadian extravagance and Canadian high tariffs. They were content to
remain as they were and fearful of the unknown. Here and there advocates
of annexation to the United States swelled the chorus. Merchants in
Halifax and St. John feared that trade would be drawn away to Montreal.
Above all, Howe, whether because of personal pique or of intense local
patriotism, had put himself at the head of the agitation against union,
and his eloquence could still play upon the prejudices of the people.
The Tilley Government in New Brunswick was swept out of power early in
1865. Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland both drew back, the one for
eight years, the other to remain outside the fold to the present day. In
Nova Scotia a similar fate was averted only by Tupper's Fabian tactics.
Then the tide turned. In New Brunswick the Fenian Raids, pressure from
the Colonial Office, and the blunders of the anti-Confederate Government
brought Tilley back to power on a Confederation platform a year later.
Tupper seized the occasion and carried his motion through the Nova
Scotia House. Without seeking further warrant the delegates from Canada,
Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick met in London late in 1866, and there
in consultation with the Colonial Office drew up the final resolutions.
They were embodied in the British North America Act which went through
the Imperial Parliament not only without raising questions but even
without exciting interest. On July 1, 1867, the Dominion of Canada, as
the new federation was to be known, came into being. It is a curious
coincidence that the same date witnessed the establishment of the North
German Bund, which in less than three years was to expand into the
German Empire.



CHAPTER IV. THE DAYS OF TRIAL

The federation of the four provinces was an excellent achievement,
but it was only a beginning on the long, hard road to nationhood. The
Fathers of Confederation had set their goal and had proclaimed their
faith. It remained for the next generation to seek to make their
vision a reality. It was still necessary to make the Dominion actual by
bringing in all the lands from sea to sea. And when, on paper, Canada
covered half a continent, union had yet to be given body and substance
by railway building and continuous settlement. The task of welding two
races and many scattered provinces into a single people would call for
all the statesmanship and prudence the country had to give. To chart the
relations between the federal and the provincial authorities, which had
so nearly brought to shipwreck the federal experiment of Canada's great
neighbor, was like navigating an unknown sea. And what was to be the
attitude of the new Dominion, half nation, half colony, to the mother
country and to the republic to the south, no one could yet foretell.

The first problem which faced the Dominion was the organization of
the new machinery of government. It was necessary to choose a federal
Administration to guide the Parliament which was soon to meet at Ottawa,
the capital of the old Canada since 1858 and now accepted as the capital
of the larger Canada. It was necessary also to establish provincial
Governments in Canada West, henceforth known as Ontario and in Canada
East, or Quebec. The provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were to
retain their existing provincial Governments.

There was no doubt as to whom the Governor General, Lord Monck, should
call to form the first federal Administration. Macdonald had proved
himself easily the greatest leader of men the four provinces had
produced. The entrance of two new provinces into the union, with all
the possibilities of new party groupings and new personal alliances
it involved, created a situation in which he had no rival. His great
antagonist, Brown, passed off the parliamentary stage. When he proposed
a coalition to carry through federation, Brown had recognized that he
was sacrificing his chief political asset, the discontent of Canada
West. But he was too true a patriot to hesitate a moment on that score,
and in any case he was sufficiently confident of his own abilities to
believe that he could hold his own in a fresh field. In this expectation
he was deceived. No man among his contemporaries surpassed him in
sheer ability, in fearless honesty, in vigor of debate, but he lacked
Macdonald's genial and supple art of managing men. And with broad
questions of state policy for the moment out of the way, it was
capacity in managing men that was to count in determining success. Never
afterward did Brown take an active part in parliamentary life, though
still a power in the land through his newspaper, the Toronto "Globe",
which was regarded as the Scotch Presbyterian's second Bible. Of the
other leaders of old Canada, Cartier with failing health was losing his
vigor and losing also the prestige with his party which his solid Canada
East majority had given him; Galt soon retired to private business, with
occasional incursions into diplomacy; and McGee fell a victim in 1868
to a Fenian assassin. From the Maritime Provinces the ablest recruit was
Tupper, the most dogged fighter in Canadian parliamentary annals and a
lifelong sworn ally of Macdonald.

It was at first uncertain what the grouping of parties would be.
Macdonald naturally wished to retain the coalition which assured him
unquestioned mastery, and the popular desire to give Confederation a
good start also favored such a course. In his first Cabinet, formed with
infinite difficulty, with provinces, parties, religions, races, all to
consider in filling a limited number of posts, Macdonald included six
Liberal ministers out of thirteen, three from Ontario, and three from
the Maritime Provinces. Yet if an Opposition had not existed, it would
have been necessary to create one in order to work the parliamentary
machine. The attempt to keep the coalition together did not long
succeed. On the eve of the first federal election the Ontario Reformers
in convention decided to oppose the Government, even though it contained
three of their former leaders. In the contest, held in August and
September, 1867, Macdonald triumphed in every province except Nova
Scotia but faced a growing Opposition party. Under the virtual
leadership of Alexander Mackenzie, fragments of parties from the four
provinces were united into a single Liberal group. In a few years the
majority of the Liberal rank and file were back in the fold, and
the Liberal members in the Cabinet had become frankly Conservative.
Coalition had faded away.


Within six years after Confederation the whole northern half of the
continent had been absorbed by Canada. The four original provinces
comprised only one-tenth of the area of the present Dominion, some
377,000 square miles as against 3,730,000 today. The most easterly of
the provinces, little Prince Edward Island, had drawn back in 1865,
content in isolation. Eight years later this province entered the fold.
Hard times and a glimpse of the financial strength of the new federation
had wrought a change of heart. The solution of the century-old problem
of the island, absentee landlordism, threatened to strain the finances
of the province; and men began to look to Ottawa for relief. A railway
crisis turned their thoughts in the same direction. The provincial
authorities had recently arranged for the building of a narrow-gauge
road from one end of the island to the other. It was agreed that the
contractors should be paid 5000 pounds a mile in provincial debentures,
but without any stipulation as to the total length, so that the builders
caused the railway to meander and zigzag freely in search of lower
grades or long paying stretches. In 1873, which was everywhere a year of
black depression, it was found that these debentures, which were pledged
by the contractors to a local bank for advances, could not be sold
except at a heavy loss. The directors of the bank were influential in
the Government of the province. It was not surprising, therefore,
that the government soon opened negotiations with Ottawa. The Dominion
authorities offered generous terms, financing the land purchase scheme,
and taking over the railway. Some of the islanders made bitter charges,
but the Legislature confirmed the agreement, and on July 1, 1873, Prince
Edward Island entered Confederation.

While Prince Edward Island was deciding to come in, Nova Scotia was
straining every nerve to get out. There was no question that Nova
Scotia had been brought into the union against its will. The provincial
Legislature in 1866, it is true, backed Tupper. But the people backed
Howe, who thereupon went to London to protest against the inclusion of
Nova Scotia without consulting the electors, but he was not heeded.
The passing of the Act only redoubled the agitation. In the provincial
election of 1867, the anti-Confederates carried thirty-six out of
thirty-eight seats. In the federal election Tupper was the only union
candidate returned in nineteen seats contested. A second delegation was
sent to London to demand repeal. Tupper crossed the ocean to counter
this effort and was successful. Then he sought out Howe, urged that
further agitation was useless and could only bring anarchy or, what
both counted worse, a movement for annexation to the United States,
and pressed him to use his influence to allay the storm. Howe gave way;
unfortunately for his own fame, he went further and accepted a seat in
the federal Cabinet. Many of his old followers kept up the fight, but
others decided to make a bargain with necessity. Macdonald agreed to
give the province "better terms," and the Dominion assumed a larger part
of its debt. The bitterness aroused by Tupper's high-handed procedure
lingered for many a day; but before the first Parliament was over,
repeal had ceased to be a practical issue.

Union could never be real so long as leagues of barren, unbroken
wilderness separated the maritime from the central provinces. Free
intercourse, ties of trade, knowledge which would sweep away prejudice,
could not come until a railway had spanned this wilderness. In the
fifties plans had been made for a main trunk line to run from Halifax
to the Detroit River. This ambitious scheme proved too great for the
resources of the separate provinces, but sections of the road were
built in each province. As a condition of Confederation, the Dominion
Government undertook to fill in the long gaps. Surveys were begun
immediately; and by 1876, under the direction of Sandford Fleming, an
engineer of eminence, the Intercolonial Railway was completed. It never
succeeded in making ends meet financially, but it did make ends meet
politically. In great measure it achieved the purpose of national
solidification for which it was mainly designed.

Meanwhile the bounds of the Dominion were being pushed westward to the
Pacific. The old province of Canada, as the heir of New France, had
vague claims to the western plains, but the Hudson's Bay Company was in
possession. The Dominion decided to buy out its rights and agreed, in
1869, to pay the Company 300,000 pounds for the transfer of its lands
and exclusive privileges, the Company to retain its trading posts and
two sections in every township. So far all went well. But the Canadian
Government, new to the tasks of empire and not as efficient in
administration as it should have been, overlooked the necessity of
consulting the wishes and the prejudices of the men on the spot. It was
not merely land and buffalo herds which were being transferred but also
sovereignty over a people.

In the valley of the Red River there were some twelve thousand metis,
or half-breeds, descendants of Indian mothers and French or Scottish
fathers. The Dominion authorities intended to give them a large share in
their own government but neglected to arrange for a formal conference.
The metis were left to gather their impression of the character and
intentions of the new rulers from indiscreet and sometimes overbearing
surveyors and land seekers. In 1869, under the leadership of Louis
Riel, the one man of education in the settlement, able but vain and
unbalanced, and with the Hudson's Bay officials looking on unconcerned,
the metis decided to oppose being made "the colony of a colony." The
Governor sent out from Ottawa was refused entrance, and a provisional
Government under Riel assumed control. The Ottawa authorities first
tried persuasion and sent a commission of three, Donald A. Smith
(afterwards Lord Strathcona), Colonel de Salaberry, and Vicar General
Thibault. Smith was gradually restoring unity and order, when the act
of Riel in shooting Thomas Scott, an Ontario settler and a member of the
powerful Orange order, set passions flaring. Mgr. Tache, the Catholic
bishop of the diocese, on his return aided in quieting the metis.
Delegates were sent by the Provisional Government to Ottawa, and, though
not officially recognized, they influenced the terms of settlement. An
expedition under Colonel Wolseley marched through the wilderness north
of Lake Superior only to find that Riel and his lieutenants had fled. By
the Manitoba Act the Red River country was admitted to Confederation as
a self-governing province, under the name of Manitoba, while the country
west to the Rockies was given territorial status. The Indian tribes were
handled with tact and justice, but though for the time the danger of
armed resistance had passed, the embers of discontent were not wholly
quenched.

The extension of Canadian sovereignty beyond the Rockies came about in
quieter fashion. After Mackenzie had shown the way, Simon Fraser and
David Thompson and other agents of the NorthWest Company took up the
work of exploration and fur trading. With the union of the two rival
companies in 1821, the Hudson's Bay Company became the sole authority
on the Pacific coast. Settlers straggled in slowly until, in the late
fifties, the discovery of rich placer gold on the Fraser and later
in the Cariboo brought tens of thousands of miners from Australia and
California, only to drift away again almost as quickly when the sands
began to fail.

Local governments had been established both in Vancouver Island and on
the mainland. They were joined in a single province in 1866. One of the
first acts of the new Legislature was to seek consolidation with the
Dominion. Inspired by an enthusiastic Englishman, Alfred Waddington,
who had dreamed for years of a transcontinental railway, the province
stipulated that within ten years Canada should complete a road from the
Pacific to a junction with the railways of the East. These terms were
considered presumptuous on the part of a little settlement of ten or
fifteen thousand whites; but Macdonald had faith in the resources of
Canada and in what the morrow would bring forth. The bargain was made;
and British Columbia entered the Confederation on July 1, 1871.

East and West were now staked out. Only the Far North remained outside
the bounds of the Dominion and this was soon acquired. In 1879 the
British Government transferred to Canada all its rights and claims over
the islands in the Arctic Archipelago and all other British territory
in North America save Newfoundland and its strip of Labrador. From the
Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the forty-ninth parallel to the North
Pole, now all was Canadian soil.


Confederation brought new powers and new responsibilities and thrust
Canada into the field of foreign affairs. It was with slow and groping
steps that the Dominion advanced along this new path. Then--as now--for
Canada foreign relations meant first and foremost relations with her
great neighbor to the south. The likelihood of war had passed. The need
for closer trade relations remained. When the Reciprocity Treaty was
brought to an end, on March 17, 1866, Canada at first refrained from
raising her tariff walls. "The provinces," as George Brown declared in
1874, "assumed that there were matters existing in 1865-66 to trouble
the spirit of American statesmen for the moment, and they waited
patiently for the sober second thought which was very long in
coming, but in the meantime Canada played a good neighbor's part, and
incidentally served her own ends, by continuing to grant the United
States most of the privileges which had been given under the treaty free
navigation and free goods, and, subject to a license fee, access to the
fisheries."

It was over these fisheries that friction first developed.* Canadian
statesmen were determined to prevent poaching on the inshore fisheries,
both because poaching was poaching and because they considered the
fishery privileges the best makeweight in trade negotiations with the
United States. At first American vessels were admitted on payment of a
license fee; but when, on the increase of the fee, many vessels tried to
fish inshore without permission, the license system was abolished, and
in 1870 a fleet of revenue cruisers began to police the coast waters.
American fishermen chafed at exclusion from waters they had come to
consider almost their own, and there were many cases of seizure and
of angry charge and countercharge. President Grant, in his message to
Congress in 1870, denounced the policy of the Canadian authorities as
arbitrary and provocative. Other issues between the two countries were
outstanding as well. Canada had a claim against the United States for
not preventing the Fenian Raids of 1866; and the United States had a
much bigger bill against Great Britain for neglect in permitting the
escape of the Alabama. Some settlement of these disputed matters was
necessary; and it was largely through the activities of a Canadian
banker and politician, Sir John Rose, that an agreement was reached to
submit all the issues to a joint commission.

     * See "The Path of Empire".

Macdonald was offered and accepted with misgivings a post as one of the
five British Commissioners. He pressed the traditional Canadian policy
of offering fishery for trade privileges but found no backing in this
or other matters from his British colleagues, and he met only unyielding
opposition from the American Commissioners. He fell back, under protest,
on a settlement of narrower scope, which permitted reciprocity in
navigation and bonding privileges, free admission of Canadian and
Newfoundland fish to United States markets and of American fishermen to
Canadian and Newfoundland waters, and which provided for a subsidiary
commission to fix the amount to be paid by the United States for the
surplus advantage thus received. The Fenian Raids claims were not even
considered, and Macdonald was angered by this indifference on the part
of his British colleagues. "They seem to have only one thing in their
minds," he reported privately to Ottawa, "that is, to go home to England
with a treaty in their pocket, settling everything, no matter at what
cost to Canada." Yet when the time came for the Canadian Parliament to
decide whether to ratify the fishery clauses of the Treaty of Washington
in which the conclusions of the commission were embodied, Macdonald, in
spite of the unpopularity of the bargain in Canada, "urged Parliament
to accept the treaty, accept it with all its imperfections, to accept it
for the sake of peace and for the sake of the great Empire of which
we form a part." The treaty was ratified in 1871 by all the powers
concerned; and the stimulus to the peaceful settlement of international
disputes given by the Geneva Tribunal which followed* justified the
subordination of Canada's specific interests.

     * See "The Path of Empire"

A change in party now followed in Canada, but the new Government under
Alexander Mackenzie was as fully committed as the Government of Sir
John Macdonald to the policy of bartering fishery for trade advantage.
Canada therefore proposed that instead of carrying out the provisions
for a money settlement, the whole question should be reopened. The
Administration at Washington was sympathetic. George Brown was appointed
along with the British Ambassador, Sir Edward Thornton, to open
negotiations. Under Brown's energetic leadership a settlement of all
outstanding issues was drafted in 1874, which permitted freedom of trade
in natural and in most manufactured products for twenty-one years, and
settled fishery, coasting trade, navigation, and minor boundary
issues. But diplomats proposed, and the United States Senate disposed.
Protectionist feeling was strong at Washington, and the currency
problem absorbing, and hence this broad and statesmanlike essay in
neighborliness could not secure an hour's attention. This plan having
failed, the Canadian Government fell back on the letter of the treaty.
A Commission which consisted of the Honorable E. H. Kellogg representing
the United States, Sir Alexander T. Galt representing Canada, and the
Belgian Minister to Washington, M. Delfosse, as chairman, awarded Canada
and Newfoundland $5,500,000 as the excess value of the fisheries for
the ten years the arrangement was to run. The award was denounced in
the United States as absurdly excessive; but a sense of honor and the
knowledge that millions of dollars from the Alabama award were still in
the Treasury moved the Senate finally to acquiesce, though only for the
ten-year term fixed by treaty. In Canada the award was received with
delight as a signal proof that when left to themselves Canadians could
hold their own. The prevailing view was well summed up in a letter from
Mackenzie to the Canadian representative on the Halifax commission,
written shortly before the decision: "I am glad you still have hopes of
a fair verdict. I am doubly anxious to have it, first, because we are
entitled to it and need the dollars, and, second, because it will be the
first Canadian diplomatic triumph, and will justify me in insisting that
we know our neighbors and our own business better than any Englishmen."

Mackenzie's insistence that Canada must take a larger share in the
control of her foreign affairs was too advanced a stand for many of his
more conservative countrymen. For others, he did not go far enough.
The early seventies saw the rise of a short-lived movement in favor
of Canadian independence. To many independence from England seemed the
logical sequel to Confederation; and the rapid expansion of Canadian
territory over half a continent stimulated national pride and national
self-consciousness Opinion in England regarding Canadian 

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