by Conrad Black
The Treaty of Paris ended the American Revolutionary War on September 3, 1783. The British dropped their claims of debts for the services rendered in the Seven Years War and the Americans – Franklin, suffering from kidney stones at the age of seventy-seven, aided by the very capable John Jay – promised compensation for the confiscated Loyalist property on behalf of the thirteen individual colonies, but subject to their agreement and they were not going to pay a cent, as the British knew. There were side deals about joint navigation rights on the Mississippi, and the British encouraged the Americans to evict Spain from the Gulf Coast, including Florida. (Not much encouragement would be required on this subject.) Britain retained all of Canada and all it started with in the West Indies, and broke the siege of Gibraltar after four years. Britain returned Minorca to Spain, but the French had been swindled by Franklin, and the Spanish by the French, and neither power gained anything for its efforts, which, in the case of France, were decisive in the outcome. Carleton, who had finally been appointed commander in North America but for the task of handing over New York, ignored Washington at the final ceremonies there and refused to give back three thousand fugitive slaves, who were evacuated to the West Indies as free men.
Washington had won the war and Franklin the diplomatic battle, and Jefferson had composed the founding documents and polemical rationale, but the articles of confederation that were written up were clearly inadequate. Independent America was a rudderless and incoherent country, until Washington, and one last time Franklin, led it to the adoption of a new dispensation. Thus began the great American experiment that would astound the world through all the intervening years. It would be a powerful challenge and an opportunity for Canada, the long unnoticed spectator in the American drama, made more gripping by the American genius at promotion and dramatization of events. Canada had had a brilliant war, and next to America itself it was the big winner. Approximately fifty thousand Loyalists had fled the American colonies and settled in Quebec or on the north shore of Lake Ontario and in Nova Scotia. With the Nova Scotians, the combined population in the colonies north of the new American country was about 150,000 people, almost 60 per cent of them French. Developing and maintaining a raison d’être for Canada would be a difficult task in the ensuing two centuries and more, and one which Canadians, because of their natural reticence and ambiguity, would not always be well-equipped to address. The Americans made it clear that they did not accept the permanence of any foreign presence to their north, but they could not seduce the French Canadians nor easily entice back the tens of thousands of Americans who had just fled, having been mistreated and had their property expropriated in the new post-colonial America. And while they could outlast British patience and commitment in a guerrilla war among those in revolt, the Americans certainly could not successfully challenge British power where it rested on popular approval, as Carleton had shown with a handful of French Canadians and Indians. Canada was the “more obscure progeny of the American Revolution … the offshoot of the losing side of a great racial upheaval,”21 and with an unpredictable and exotic French wild card. The British had no idea what to do with the Canadians, such as they were, but they were now more than just the (French) speck on the map they had been for 250 years, and had demonstrated some level of distinctness, as well as an aptitude for political and cultural and martial survival. They might eventually prove to be strong, if not very pliable, clay for a new nationality.
4. The Beginnings of a Bicultural Canada, 1783–1793
At this time, Canada, to Britain, was the naval harbour of Halifax; the fortress city of Quebec; a refuge for the Loyalists who had fled America; the fur trade; and this inexplicable community of stoical French castaways. The tentative frontier was through the Great Lakes, leaving all Lake Michigan to the Americans, and from Lake Superior northwest to Lake of the Woods and then due west. Pressure and protests in London from the fur trading community of Montreal caused a great British reticence to withdraw from the forts along the Ohio and the northern Mississippi. Because the British weren’t much interested in North America apart from the American colonies, they did not take as hard a line as they might have about the section of the continent between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River, or along the south shore of the St. Lawrence River for the first 150 miles after it debouched from Lake Ontario. In the earliest notions of a role for the components of Canada, New York’s chief justice, William Smith, a Whig who initially favoured the revolution but was eventually repelled by it and departed at war’s end to Canada as a Loyalist, touted, and his friend Carleton agreed with him, the possible role of Canada as a bulwark against eventual American aggression toward Britain itself. The British government did respond with reasonable promptness and generosity to the claims of Loyalists, thus solidifying their resolution as citizens of the Empire, subjects of the British Crown, and fugitives from what soon became the United States.
By the end of the Revolutionary War, three-quarters of the sixteen thousand people of northern Nova Scotia were Loyalist arrivals, and New Brunswick was set up as a colony, with a governor, a council, and a legislature. Sir Guy Carleton’s brother, Thomas Carleton, was appointed governor. Newfoundland inched toward colonial status when, in 1791, disorder in the winter months reached such a level in the absence of the naval governor, that a full-time, year-round chief justice was named. The fisheries of the Grand Banks continued to attract the fleets of Europe and America, but Newfoundland had not made hasty jurisdictional progress: it was three hundred years since John Cabot had claimed the island for King Henry VII. These maritime colonies were given greater preferences in trade with the British West Indies than they could at first fulfill, but it was an encouraging gesture by the home government.
A number of whole regiments of Loyalists had moved from upstate New York and Pennsylvania and New England, and though an effort was made to send them to the Atlantic colonies and maintain the almost entirely French character of Quebec, and five hundred were settled in the Gaspé, these were farmers, and they wanted the richer farmland adjacent to the St. Lawrence, the Richelieu, and the northern side of the Great Lakes. These military families, like those that Talon and Frontenac had imported to New France, proved to be staunch and resourceful defenders of their farms. In addition to Loyalists of the most explicit kind, there were also Germans, Scottish Highlanders, Mennonites, Dutch, and Quakers, who were either monarchists who feared republicanism as disorderly or were simply tired of the strife and violence of the revolution, which, though it left large parts of the country unscarred, did severely tear up parts of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
In the circumstances, the Quebec Act was going to be a difficult regime for the increasing numbers of non-French. The seigneurial system implied avoidance of the sort of freehold the Loyalists and British immigrants were accustomed to, and as years passed after the American Revolution, it became clear that some thought would have to be given to the structure of government in remaining British territory in North America, however uncertain were the ideas of the ultimate disposition of those colonies. The English in Quebec, their numbers now heavily reinforced, wanted jury trials, normal civil rights, starting with rights of habeas corpus, an elected assembly, as long as it wasn’t entirely packed out by the French advocates of Bourbon autocracy. The problem was that the English had a right to more and different rights than what had been given to the French, and the French were entitled to retain the system they favoured, and reconciling the two positions in the same jurisdiction was a challenge. Haldimand had continued Carleton’s policy of supporting the French Canadians over the British Montreal merchants, and in 1784 successfully sued a government agent, John Cochrane, whom Haldimand thought unethical. The British merchants considered this oppressive, and they petitioned London for the governor’s recall. Haldimand took home leave, and was not sent back to Canada after 1784. He was replaced, first by his deputy governor, Henry Hamilton – who had a civilian background (he had been the governor of Detroit) and
expanded the use of jury trials – but after a year, on the urging of Haldimand and the French, Hamilton was replaced in turn by another who cleaved to the Carleton-Haldimand tradition of favouring the French: Henry Hope. Hope did not try to roll back the progress of jury trials and habeas corpus, but kept the colony under the tight control of the governor, backed by the pro-French majority on the council. William Pitt the Younger was now prime minister (he took office in 1783 at the remarkable age of twenty-four, and would govern a total of twenty years). Pitt sent Sir Guy Carleton, now Lord Dorchester, back to Canada as governor in 1786 with a mandate to propose reforms to the colony’s governing statutes.
Dorchester by this time was taking a good deal of counsel from former New York chief justice William Smith, the dean of the Loyalists. Smith sought a replication of the government of the United Kingdom, in the hope that it would attract back into the Empire at least a larger harvest of Loyalist waverers and possibly even some of the former American colonies who were now floundering in disunion and virtual bankruptcy under the Articles of Confederation, which conferred no authority at all on the Continental Congress. Smith believed that the American Revolution had been caused by an excess of democracy and proposed to Carleton a system in which monarchical and aristocratic elements balanced the democratic ones. The problem with this vision was two-fold. Washington and Franklin convened the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 and, with the younger James Madison and Alexander Hamilton doing most of the drafting, produced a brilliant and practical Constitution for the new republic. Second, the Smith vision flew directly in the face of the French preference for the civil law, the seigneurial system, and relatively authoritarian government. Dorchester and Smith tugged at the problem until their efforts were authoritatively supplemented by those of the foreign secretary, Lord Grenville (Pitt the Younger’s cousin), who subscribed to Smith’s vision of copying British government in Canada and converting the French Canadians to its virtues.
Grenville’s plan included a strengthening of the position of governor, the separation of the executive and the legislative council, an elected assembly, and, most importantly, the division of Quebec in two parts, one overwhelmingly French and the other almost entirely English-speaking. They were Lower and Upper Canada, depending on how far along the St. Lawrence River they were. He proposed a colonial nobility and an established Anglican Church in the English-speaking colonies, and sent his plan to Dorchester for his comments. Dorchester persuaded Grenville that a Canadian nobility would be unsuitable to the rugged egalitarian sense of the frontier, and Smith, a Presbyterian, objected to anything smacking of an established church, but Grenville retained that feature. The Constitutional Act, as it was styled, was adopted in 1791. The King, Privy Council, House of Lords, and House of Commons were replicated in the governor, Executive Council, Legislative Council, and Legislative Assembly. An eighth of Crown land was set aside for the Protestant clergy, and money was set aside for the construction of Protestant rectories. The exact borders could not be specified, because the British had not vacated the posts and forts trading with the Indians down to the Ohio. The Quebec Act’s protection for the Roman Catholic Church, French civil law, and French language continued entirely in the French section of Canada. The implicit ambition of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to assimilate the French had not been retrieved; and the 1774 to 1791 elevation of the French had only been varied to allow for an elected legislature and to confine it to the area of French majority.
The Constitutional Act was another great step forward in the laying of a cornerstone for a new eventual country. Though it was Grenville’s bill and not Dorchester’s, Dorchester helped to modify it and implemented it and it is another ingredient in his seminal role in Canadian history. He would retire as governor in 1796 after a total of twenty years (serving as governor of Quebec from 1768 to 1778 and of Canada from 1786 to 1796), and had held high military commands intermittently, from being Wolfe’s quartermaster general starting in 1758, to negotiating the transfer of New York to George Washington in 1783 (and securing the safe passage of the Empire Loyalists and fugitive slaves to British territory). His leadership in producing the Quebec Act and the Constitutional Act and in launching Canada as an Anglo-French entity gives him a status in Canada’s history roughly as distinguished and important as Champlain’s. He would die in his country home in southern England in 1808, aged eighty-four.
There was now a group of remnants of the French and British empires, invested with a will to survival and possibly to survive together, based on fear of the Americans, in the case of the French, of cultural assimilation, and of the English, of the potential for chaos of American republican government. The debates prior to parliamentary enactment at Westminster were famous only for the exchange of acerbities between Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, who had agreed about the American Revolution, over the significance of the French Revolution, which had begun to unfold in 1789.
France had gained nothing from its endless wars in the eighteenth century. It had held its own for the first half of the century, been soundly beaten by the British in the Seven Years War, and swindled by the Americans in their Revolutionary War, and the extravagance of Louis XIV had left France, as Turgot had warned Louis XVI before he was politically seduced by Franklin, in an acutely over-taxed and financially precarious condition. In May 1789, to raise revenues, Louis XVI summoned the Estates General for the first time since Richelieu dismissed them in 1614. The Estates General had twelve hundred delegates. Three hundred were from the first estate, the clergy, which owned 10 per cent of France’s land and paid no tax, and three hundred were from the second estate, the nobility, which owned about 30 per cent of the territory of France. About half of these delegates were somewhat reform-minded. The remaining six hundred delegates represented 97 per cent of the population, but most of them were professionals, businessmen, and the bourgeoisie. There was no direct representation at all of the 60 per cent of the French who were rural peasants or the urban poor. The French Revolution gathered strength slowly, and though one of the defining moments in the history of the Western world, it was a rather farcical sequence of events until it took on a violent character and then became a nightmarish national horror story. After a few weeks, the first two estates tried to exclude the third, which repaired to a covered tennis court and, joined by forty-seven of the nobles, pledged to continue their demands for reform. They called themselves the National Assembly, and the king unwisely tried to dissolve them on June 27, 1789. Riots ensued that rippled around the country, especially in Paris, and culminated in the seizure and destruction of the famous Bastille prison on July 14. It contained only five counterfeiters and two lunatics (the half-mad dissolute the Marquis de Sade had been released just a week before). The governor of the Bastille was lynched and decapitated and his head carried around on a pike through a number of Paris’s less salubrious neighbourhoods by tens of thousands of demonstrators.
On August 4, the National Assembly voted to abolish almost all aristocratic and clerical privileges, and on August 26 adopted a Declaration of the Rights of Man based largely on the American Declaration of Independence. (Jefferson was now the American minister in Paris.) On October 5, a mob of five thousand women and men dressed as women marched to Versailles and compelled the return of the royal family with them to the Tuileries Palace (the Louvre), where they were more or less detained. (They reasoned that the king’s guards would not fire on women.) Count Mirabeau was the principal figure of the National Assembly and a constitutional monarchist adept at isolating and outwitting the extremes that were always present and agitating. It was one of the misfortunes of French history that he died suddenly in March 1791, following a particularly frolicsome evening with two dancers that he brought home with him for an afterpiece of tableau vivant following a night at the opera. A new constitution largely written by Mirabeau retaining but limiting the powers of the monarchy was proclaimed on May 3, 1791.
In another misfortune, Queen Marie Ant
oinette (daughter of Maria Theresa, who had died in 1780) persuaded the king that they should flee Paris, which they did on June 20, disguised as servants. They crowded everyone into one slow carriage and foolishly stopped for the night at Varennes, close to the frontier of the Austrian Netherlands, and were recognized, arrested, and ignominiously returned to Paris as prisoners. The moderates felt betrayed by the king and the extremists claimed to be vindicated. The queen’s brother, Austrian emperor Leopold II, asked for all Europe to help restore the French monarchy. On August 27, Leopold and the Prussian king, Frederick William II (Frederick the Great had died in 1786), along with Louis’s brother the Count of Artois, met at Pillnitz and urged all Europe to restore Louis to power. This accomplished nothing except a paroxysm of patriotic rage in the National Assembly, which declared war on Austria in April 1792. Except for one year, war would now continue until 1815, taking the lives of probably 750,000 French and five million or more Europeans of other nationalities. Conflict would engulf Europe from Cadiz to Moscow and from Copenhagen to Naples, and even to Egypt and Palestine (where the British commander, the flamboyant Sidney Smith, would grandiloquently announce, rather prematurely as it turned out, that Napoleon Bonaparte’s “extraordinary career has come to an end on the Plains of Nazareth”). The revolution now careered to the left in sanguinary lurches, massacring innocents and factions in horrifying circumstances and feeding a primordial bloodlust that stupefied the world, even those who initially wished the revolution well, like Jefferson and Fox. There were mass executions and drownings in the provinces, and the committee of Public Safety produced the Terror in Paris and elsewhere from 1793 to 1794, until Maximilien de Robespierre, its leader, set out to execute the sinister Joseph Fouché, subsequently police minister under successive regimes, and was overthrown and, with almost all the committee, was sent to the guillotine also, to the delirious joy of the fickle, bloodthirsty mob.