by Conrad Black
The British government, for obvious reasons, favoured the older British colonies over the French-Canadian foundling. Seal hunting and hunting on the north shore of the Gulf of the St. Lawrence had been cut off by the 1763 Royal Proclamation, in favour of Newfoundland and, supposedly, to prevent the smuggling of French goods to Quebec. (Neither side of that fantasized transaction had any interest.) With the French masters of the interior in the fur trade cut off from their former buyers in Montreal, they did the best they could with the Hudson’s Bay Company and whatever American competition could be found, until Montreal merchants, and especially the Nor’Westers (North West Company), returned to the fray. The Hudson’s Bay Company had sent Anthony Henday to the Blackfoot country in 1754, and Samuel Hearne followed with mining exploration trips to the shore of the Arctic Ocean in 1769 and 1772. After examining how the Newfoundland fishing industry had evolved to the benefit of New Englanders over the fishermen who came from Britain, the British government appointed Captain Sir Hugh Palliser governor of Newfoundland in 1764, with a mandate supported by the Royal Navy to reserve fishing on and near the Grand Banks to the British at the expense of the Americans, who were compensated by being able to take the place of the French in the Nova Scotia fisheries. By 1775, there were approximately eighteen thousand people in Nova Scotia, mainly New Englanders attracted by the rich agriculture.
In 1765, the law officers of the British government, showing a sagacity that had temporarily deserted them in American matters, concluded that the Roman Catholics of Quebec were not subject to the restrictions imposed on their co-religionists in the United Kingdom. The British still had no real idea of what to do with Quebec, but as London’s relations worsened with the Americans and warmed with the French Canadians, the Board of Trade, which had some authority in colonial matters, recommended in 1769 an assembly in Quebec that would be “complete” by allowing Roman Catholics to vote and to sit in the legislature. This legislature should deal with the matter of Quebec’s courts, laws, and religious matters. On his recall at the insistence of the parvenu English merchant community, Murray reported to the secretary of state (Southern Department), his direct superior, that the English Quebeckers were scoundrels: “All have their fortunes to make and I hear few of them are solicitous about the means whereby the end can be obtained; in general, the most immoral collection of men I ever knew and of course little calculated to make the new subjects enamoured with our laws, religion, and customs.” The French of Quebec he described as “a frugal, industrious, moral race of men who from the mild treatment they received from the king’s officers … had greatly got the better of the natural antipathy they had to their conquerors.”8 Murray went on to distinguish himself in the (unsuccessful) defence of Minorca, and remains a respected and benign figure, in war and peace, at a decisive point in Canadian history.
Benjamin Franklin, already a world-famous inventor, printer, and writer, and in Britain a member of the Royal Society and honorary doctor of Oxford, as was his illustrious contemporary Samuel Johnson, returned to London in 1764 as debate began on the Stamp Act. The near-doubling of British public debt, largely incurred to evict the French from North America, caused the British king, government, and Parliament to believe that the wealthiest fifth of Englishmen, the Americans, must equitably, and as a practical fiscal necessity, pay down some of the debt incurred to disembark France from North America. Franklin soon discovered the extent of the gulf that was opening between British and American opinion. As relations warmed between Britain and French Canadians, and deteriorated between Britain and British Americans, the implications of these shifts would soon be evident, and would ultimately be earth-shaking.
The removal of the French from North America made Britain dispensable to the American colonists, and the heavy costs of the British victory in the Seven Years War, and the increased cohesion the colonies achieved in the war, altered the correlation of forces between Britain and America. The British did not notice this, but the more astute Americans did. Franklin had advocated the union of the American colonies at a congress in 1754 in Albany, and in the same year had written to a British scientific friend, the distinguished naturalist Peter Collinson, that “Britain and her Colonies should be considered as one whole, and not different states with separate interests.”9 He made a proposal that was considered by the Board of Trade and passed on to Newcastle, who ignored it, for what amounted to a tighter format of the eventual Commonwealth. This was before the British Empire extended far into populations that were not Caucasian (India was a joint national and private sector operation).
Most emigration from Britain continued to come to the American colonies, and significant numbers of Germans and Dutch were also arriving. If the Irish, a very large number of whom were fractious and discontented, are not included in the British population, the shift of demographic weight from Britain to America would come earlier, and if the French Canadians were included with the Americans – and Franklin assumed, then and later, that they would join the Americans when the connection with France was severed, and would be quickly assimilated to the English-speaking world, even if they were bilingual (he took no account of religious differences) – America would, within about fifty years be set at the head, in all respects except perhaps ceremoniously (that is, it would not be the residence of the constitutional monarch), of a very powerful, transatlantic, and globe-girdling British-American entity. It was a grand vision.
Franklin was the most politically far-sighted of the American leadership, and the first inkling of what he was facing came to him in London in 1760, the year of the final fall of New France to Amherst, when he met Lord Granville, president of the Privy Council and one of the most influential members of the government, who listened to his suggestions but responded that “the king is the Legislator of the Colonies,” and his will “is the law of the land.”10 By 1770, the American colonies had more than 25 per cent of the British Isles’ population and a substantially larger share of wealth and income, far greater resources, and a fraction of the indigenous debt.
The Stamp Act imposed a tax on printed and paper goods in the colonies, including even newspapers and playing cards, and was so called because the assessment of the tax was signified by a stamp. Britain already had such a tax, and it was not obvious to the British, after their expensive exertions on behalf of the Americans, why those colonies should not share the tax burden of the wars that cleared their horizon. The Stamp Act was presented by Pitt’s brother-in-law, George Grenville (not to be confused with Lord Granville), who asserted Parliament’s right to impose taxes anywhere in the British Empire, a right that was not challenged in Parliament. Grenville did allow one year for the tax to be applied to the American colonies to give them the opportunity to devise a substitute method of raising revenue and retiring debt. The only alternative proposed was by Franklin himself, who suggested establishment of a colonial credit office in America to issue bills of credit and collect interest for their renewal. It was a disguised paper currency and public finance scheme that would have addressed the British insistence that all payments be in cash, and gold and silver was scarce in America. It would have been somewhat inflationary, but America was growing quickly, and it would have been infinitely more tolerable to the taxpayers than the Stamp Act. Franklin, as disappointed as he was in the blasé indifference to the emerging problem that he found in London, was just as astounded by the depth and ferocity of feeling on the issue in America.
The Pennsylvania and Virginia and other houses of assembly adopted inflammatory resolutions of objection, the florid Virginia orator Patrick Henry taking it upon himself to warn George III of the fate of Julius Caesar and Charles I (as if their fates were similar or had any relevance to these circumstances – assassination and pseudo-judicial murder, swiftly followed by the elevation of their heirs in each case). Franklin appeared before Parliament on February 13, 1766, to answer for America, and did so brilliantly, and with persuasive fluency. He was well-received, and partly because of him
, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, but at the same time it passed the Declaratory Act, which asserted its absolute right to legislate on any subject for the colonies, America no less than Gibraltar or the Falkland Islands (or Quebec). Franklin was optimistic and wrote home of the prospects of “imperial reform.” But the atmosphere thickened and prospects darkened, and there were references to the imposition and collection of taxes in America by force. Franklin knew that the British, almost none of whom had been in America, had no idea of what they would be undertaking. The British were coming perilously close to one of the supreme errors of government: the imposition of a tax that is not collectible. It would take scores of thousands of soldiers milling about among their own countrymen, where desertions would be heavy and the chances of being punished for it would be slight. The average American artisan and farmer had a better income and easier life than a British soldier on an active mission, and the British could not strand most of their army indefinitely overseas.
Franklin wrote that America was “an immense territory favoured by nature with all advantages of climate, soil, great navigable rivers and lakes, etc.,” and that it “must become a great country, populous and mighty; and will in a less time than is generally conceived be able to shake off any shackles that may be imposed on her and perhaps place them on the imposers.”11 Unmoved by such verities, and by the cooler and wiser heads of the greatest British statesmen of the time, William Pitt, Edmund Burke, and Charles James Fox, Parliament, dominated as it could be by the system of controlled elections in underpopulated boroughs and the prevailing influence of the House of Lords, adopted the Townshend taxes (named after the chancellor of the exchequer, Charles Townshend) in 1767, which were excise taxes on a range of English manufactures, including paper, glass, paint, and eventually tea. The tax could have been collected in England, but in a rubbing of the American nose in what was fancied to be Parliamentary authority, Townshend set up a board of customs commissioners in America to collect the tax. American reaction was predictably pyrotechnic, and the foremost American, George Washington, who was not only its leading military officer but one of the largest landowners in the Ohio Valley, called in 1769 for an outright boycott of British goods and moved some of the production of his own plantation at Mount Vernon, Virginia, from cotton and tobacco to arts and crafts. In the same year, for the first time in writing, he envisioned a possible recourse to armed rebellion.12
Franklin warned parliamentarians in London that to avert disaster the Townshend taxes would have to be repealed entirely in America, even if replaced with something else. The issue was no longer raising revenue, however, but one of authority and jurisdiction, and for no logical reason the British dug their heels in on tea; they were prepared to repeal the excise taxes on everything else. In 1773, the thirty-year-old Virginia plantation owner, polymath, and legislator Thomas Jefferson proposed a committee of correspondence to coordinate acts of resistance of all the colonies. Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson would be the three key players on the American side in the drama that was to come. Matters came to a head and began their steep descent toward violence when, on December 16, 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty, a Boston autonomist organization led by Samuel Adams, a militant opponent of any official American inferiority to Britain, disguised themselves as American Indians, stormed the tea ships, and threw 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor. The perpetrators went to great lengths to show they were not an unruly mob, repairing locks on the ships and punishing one of their members who pocketed tea leaves for his own use. This virtual college prank, the Boston Tea Party, shattered the Anglo-American relationship.
Murray had been replaced as governor of Canada in 1766 by an underestimated man, then and subsequently, an ascetic Ulsterman, Colonel Guy Carleton. Carleton was forty-two and had been a close friend of General James Wolfe since they were junior officers together. Carleton had been the military tutor to the young Duke of Richmond, which caused King George II’s resentment, and the king refused to allow Carleton to accompany Wolfe in Amherst’s mission against Louisbourg. After strenuous lobbying from Wolfe, reinforced by the venerable Field Marshal Ligonier, the king permitted Carleton to accompany Wolfe on the attack on Quebec in 1759 as quartermaster general. Carleton played a key logistical role at the Plains of Abraham and was wounded slightly. He also distinguished himself, and was again wounded, in the taking of Havana in 1762, and was promoted to full colonel.
Carleton took over the headship of a colony that was in most respects serene. There were no more concerns about attacks from the British and Americans, nor about supply from Europe, as the Royal Navy delivered what it wished on all the world’s oceans. The government was more consultative and much less overbearingly authoritarian. Religious practice was unchanged, and the local bishop, who had often in the past had his differences with the French governor, went out of his way to accommodate the British successor, who was, in the case of both Murray and Carleton, careful to avoid frictions. There was none of the childish argument that occurred in the time of Frontenac and Laval about the ceremonial precedence of Church and state. There was, however, a pettifogging and priggish British magistracy which “passed severe sentences on the little frolics of exuberant privates, and this with an unctuous malevolence that was doubtless galling to the men whose devotion alone had made a career in Canada possible for these eighteenth century Bumbles.”13
As conditions deteriorated in America, Carleton quickly came to share his predecessor’s high regard for the French Canadians and began to see them as allies rather than as sullen former enemies. Unworldly and castaway though the French of Quebec were, it was impossible for them not to divine in these swiftly moving events a comparative empowerment coming so quickly on the heels of the nightmare of British conquest that had haunted the colony for over 150 years. Unlike the Americans, the French Canadians endured the Stamp Act with equanimity. Carleton perceptively saw that the French Canadians were chiefly concerned to conserve their religion and language and legal system, and that in exchange for the protection by the British of those national characteristics, they could be very loyal British subjects. In barely a wink of the eye of history, the French Canadians went from being in terror of British overlordship, to a grateful bulwark of it, at least as a stopgap. Carleton started by renouncing any pay and perquisites for his office, which astounded the Québécois, still reeling from the plundering of Bigot and his light-fingered coterie.
In one of his early acts, Carleton had to deal with the allegation of a discharged soldier, George McGovock, against the alleged intruders and despoilers of Magistrate Walker’s ear two years before. In a spectacular trial, it appeared that McGovock was not just a perjurer – earning a conviction for perjury after the accused were acquitted – but that he had colluded with Walker, his former landlord. The trial was a partial French-English, Catholic-Protestant contest, as one of the defendants was a French officer and all were friendly with senior French militia. Public opinion was against Walker, and he was severely embarrassed by the result. He became a local proponent of all American grievances and was eventually jailed by Carleton, rescued by Americans, and returned to his native Boston for the balance of his tempestuous career.
Carleton had to deal with the problem of the law: the French liked the swiftness and low cost of court access under the French system, but it was a different law, governed by French precedent, which was irritating in itself and practically incomprehensible to the administration in Quebec and difficult to obtain. The substitution of English criminal law had been popular with the public, as it instituted habeas corpus and put an end to the rack and interrogation under torture. London sent legal officers to Quebec to make a recommendation, and this issue dragged on for a few years, but Carleton became convinced that Quebec needed to devise its own civil code, to keep what was familiar, incite pride, and emancipate the province from recourse to French precedents. In 1767, Carleton also sent London a descriptive letter about his new domain in response to inquiries on legal matters
. He accurately described the demographic impossibility of redressing the preponderance of French over English, as all British emigration would be to “the more cheerful climate and more fruitful soil of His Majesty’s southern provinces.”
Carleton presciently saw that it could come to war in America, and that France could support the Americans and try to raise an insurrection in Quebec to regain the province as a platform for assisting American rebellion. He proposed construction of a proper citadel and constructive steps to appease the French-Canadian leadership, whom he found preferable in every way to the American commercial sharpers who were most of Quebec’s English population. Carleton also proposed a military integration with the French Canadians, to build an allegiance of Quebec’s militia to the British Crown, and generally showed great foresight. His recommendations were popular with Lord Hillsborough, secretary of state for the colonies, and with the king himself. Carleton also recommended that the Indian lands handed over by France in the Treaty of Paris continue to be governed from Quebec, to flatter the province, retain British control in what was now its most reliable North American outpost, and to assist a commercial revival in Montreal. It was understood that an act of Parliament would have to be passed to resolve the ambiguities in Quebec and strengthen the British hand there as matters became more tenuous in the American colonies, and Carleton returned to London in 1770 to pursue his role as governor by intensive lobbying for constructive and conciliatory legislation. It was a fateful decision.