Canada Dry: Temperance Crusades before Confederation 9781487578565

Citation preview

Canada Dry

Canada Dry Temperance Crusades before Confederation

Jan Noel

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1995 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada Reprinted in 2018 ISBN o-8020-0552-7 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8020-6976-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Noel,Janet Canada dry : temperance crusades before Confederation Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-8020-0552-7 (bound) I.

ISBN 978-0-8020-6976-4 (paper)

Temperance - Canada - History. I. Title.

HV53o6.N64 1994

c94-32101-x

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Interpretations of Temperance 3

ONE TWO THREE

Atlantic Temperance: The Origins

Atlantic Temperance: Turning the Tide FOUR FIVE

Christmas in Montreal

SEVEN EIGHT

55

The Prophet 77

Mothers of the Millennium 89 Bringing In the Saints

103

Moving to Mainstream in Canada West TEN

Nearly Dry

123

141

ELEVEN

French Canada Awakens

153

TWELVE

Patriotism and Sackcloth

167

THIRTEEN

41

Dry Goods and Dry Gospel 63 SIX

NINE

17

The Bottle and the Hudson's Bay Company

183

vi

Contents FOURTEEN FIFTEEN

Red River Crusades Millennium Refused

SIXTEEN

209

217

U.S. Consumption of Spirits, 1780-1970 227

APPENDIX A: APPENDIX B: APPENDIX

Conclusion

195

Canadian Alcohol Sales, 1871-1992

228

c: Temperance Societies in the Province of Canada, 1840-52 231 Notes

239

Bibliography 293 Index

307

Picture Credits 311

Acknowledgments

Many debts to individuals and· institutions have been incurred in the course of writing this book. I shall here name only a few of the most important and hope that a more general thanks to the many others will suffice. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the History Department of the University of Toronto provided funding at vital junctures during research. When I was a graduate student, Professor Susan Mann (who directed my initial researches into temperance at the University of Ottawa) and Professor William Eccles were helpful and inspiring mentors in their different fashions. Colleagues over the years such as Elwood Jones, Doug McCalla, and Keith Walden at Trent University; Gail Brandt, Michiel Horn, Rob Perin, Bill Westfall, and Carol Wilton at York University; Hannah Gay.Jack Little, and Veronica Strong-Boag at Simon Fraser University; and Allan Greer, Claire LaVigna, Laurel MacDowell, Ian Radforth, Sylvia Van Kirk, and Bruce White at University of Toronto have all offered stimulating ideas and practical assistance. Gerry Hallowell, Ken Lewis, and the editorial staff at University ofToronto Press shepherded the manuscript to publication with care and consideration. Most helpful of all were my dissertation supervisor, ProfessorJ .M.S. Careless, and my husband, Wynton Semple. Maurice Careless, after an initial reluctance to take on this topic ('My sympathies,' he told me, 'are more with the other side'), not only took it on but continued to read my slowly emerging chapters during several years of his retirement. His distinctive blend of enthusiasm and caution taught me much about scholarship. Wyn ton's contributions -economic, domestic, emotional, technical, intellectual -win my deepest gratitude. His response to job-related separations, bouts of single-parenting, financial uncertainties, and academic obsessions has always been the same: generosity and never-failing wit.

Fight at Montgomery's Tavern, 1837. The famous gathering ofrebellious farmers on Yonge Street led to the shooting of Colonel Robert Moodie, a government supporter. Public meeting halls were scarce and neither government buildings nor churches seemed right for planning a rebellion. Taverns, however, offered a warm fire and courage-inducing substances.

The Tecumseh Wigwam Tavern. Small wooden taverns such as this were found across British North America. Travellers claimed that in some towns every third house sold liquor. This one stood at the northwest corner of Toronto's Bloor Street and Avenue Road for much of the nineteenth century until it was demolished around 1875.

Oakville Temperance Hall. Built in 1842 and believed to be the first temperance hall in Canada West. Similar frame structures where the dry faithful could meet were erected across Canada and the Maritimes in the 1840s, with larger brick edifices appearing in big towns. Such real estate signified the growing 'respectability' of the movement and provided an alternative meeting place to the tavern .

Ketchum Hall. Built by tanner, Reformer, and philanthropist Jesse Ketchum, this hall stood until the 1980s on Davenport Road in Toronto. In 1853 Ketchum deeded it to the York Division Sons of Temperance, whose heterogeneous membership included brickmakers, bootmakers, merchants, and at least one 'gentleman.' From such benches, teetotallers plotted their nearly successful mid-nineteenth-century prohibition campaigns.

Newfoundland Total Abstinence Medal. After Father Theobald Mathew began in 1838 to preach temperance to the Irish masses, numerous immigrants arrived in British North America with these medals around their necks and their pledge unbroken. This inspired Canadian priests to found Canadian societies, whose own medals featured local iconography such as beavers, maple leaves, and Stjean Baptiste.

John Dougall, the temperance ' prophet.' Born in Paisley, Scotland, Dougall began his Canadian career selling shawls and dry goods until a conversion experience revealed his true metier as a social reformer. Long-time president of the Montreal Temperance Society, Dougall edited both the Canada Temperance Advocate and the Montreal Witness. His personable, if opinionated, style and tireless reforming drive won him a dedicated following among evangelicals.

The Story of Latimer. A series of prints appeared in the Canada Temperance Advocate in 1851 to accompany the story of the Latimer family's sad decline after Latimer is fired for drunkenness. He kills his wife and sends the children out to beg, one daughter meeting a bloody end in a brothel. On one surviving copy of the paper, a sober adult reader has apparently penned advice for a youngster: 'Good story. Read it all.' Temperance papers were the first widely circulating family papers, featuring songs, advice, and colourful fiction written by women and adolescents as well as finger-wagging clergymen.

Ignace Bourget, bishop of Montreal, 1840-85. Championing the pre-eminence of church over state, and the temporal power of the pope, Bishop Bourget is associated with a very conservative, ultramontane Catholicism. At the beginning of his career, however, his promotion of working-class education, technical schools, penny savings banks, specialized social-welfare institutions, and temperance placed him in the ranks of the progressives of the 1840s. Social reform of that decade had an ecumenical flavour, with Presbyterians and priests sharing temperance platforms and rejoicing together over Father Chiniquy's triumphs.

L a ~ ...... lf~ «-Alf__..._r, ...,,.

tWJl",-E1 They were organized into 600 societies and included 60,000 adult males, 52,000 adult females, and 38,000 juveniles between five and sixteen years of age. 6r. Even allowing for some inflation in the figures, by 1844 there were clearly thousands of newly converted teetotallers at large. They had promised to 'discountenance the use of liquor throughout the community.' Not a few set right to work. Women broke Victorian strictures to join temperance processions; indoctrinated schoolchildren lectured their parents; laymen knocked at rectory doors to warn the parson that his drinking was leading others astray. In a world where people in the higher social strata tended still to drink, such activities led to trouble. The Advocate reported some members of church congregations were ostracized for 'speaking out somewhat too frankly on certain points.' 66 The aggressiveness of teetotallers eventually alienated even Methodist clergymen, particularly when temperance gatherings began to draw members away from regular church services. By 1844 the long sympathetic Christian Guardian expressed reservations about the uncompromising evangelism endorsed by the Montreal Temperance Society. So fanatical were some converts that the hard-line Montreal Society itself found it necessary to reprove them for 'slandering and abusing Christian ministers. '67 When even friends had reservations, it is hardly surprising that opponents were up in arms. Jeering fellow workers sometimes forced teetotallers to resign and seek other employment. Some military officers broke up regimental temperance societies, refusing to enlist any man who could not 'take his glass.' Gentlemen appeared at temperance gatherings to persuade people to give up their foolish fanaticism. 68 Ungentlemanly opponents threw rocks at agents, set fires at meetings, or doused members with cold water. Incidents such as these no doubt frightened some away, but they strengthened the solidarity of true believers. This was much in evidence at the increasingly large and elaborate teetotal ceremonies of the 1840s. These celebrations not only helped replace the old conviviality of the tavern but presaged the harmonious and loving society teetotallers believed they were creating. An account of a meeting on the banks of the Ottawa River in 1842 captures the flavour of these gatherings:

Bringing In the Saints

117

... notes of music fell upon [the] ear, and presently the advance guard of a temperance army was seen winding down the hill. No weapon however of hostile import was with them . . . Banners, great and small, borne by ladies as well as gentlemen.waved in the air. 'Union and Temperance,' 'Temperance will you join us' ... and 'Happiness' were some of the mottoes they bore. In passing from Hawkesbury to the place of meeting . . . sixty carriages, and many persons on horseback, presented an imposing appearance.69

As the movement grew, societies were able to collaborate in huge District celebrations which grouped hundreds of people together. The mingling of young and old, men and women, Catholics and Protestants, and people of various nationalities seemed to observers to portend a happier day when 'national and party distinctions would die away, and the only ... [question] would be, who should excel in virtuous deeds.' 70 At Point Pleasant in 1842, people of different creeds 'all met on common ground in this cause, and all appeared to be actuated by the same spirit for the present and future benefit of mankind.''' At Belleville, another heterogeneous gathering was seen as evidence that in a dry world, ancient emnities would fade away. Such illusions could not be sustained indefinitely. Temperance agents remarked on a general falling off of enthusiasm in 1844. Reports of growing consumption made it clear that popular support was waning; membership figures stopped growing. 72 Montreal began to lose its influence. Societies reporting to the annual temperance convention there fell from 116 in 1844 to 34 in 1848; and reviving 'slumbering' societies became one of the agents' chief activities. 73 Agents sometimes felt they were operating on a treadmill as English, Scottish, and Irish immigrants with a 'tenacity for the old country usages' 74 continued to arrive in great numbers. Increasingly after 1845 the Montreal Society would leave the work in Canada West to forces there, directing its own dwindling resources to Canada East. IV

While teetotal ranks were rapidly expanding in the early 1840s, one group was conspicuously absent: the people at the top of the social hierarchy. The farming communities, rather than the elite who resided mostly in the towns, account for most of the changes in drinking which can be traced to that period. Farm folk also composed the rank and file of the temperance lobby which emerged in the 1840s.

118 Canada Dry Sir Richard Bonnycastle's comment on temperance societies typified a disdain for the movement which was common among the gentry: I am not an advocate of an educated man joining temperance societies ... with the uneclucated, it is another affair altogether. If an educated man has not sufficient confidence in himself, and wishes to reduce himself to the degraded condition of an habitual drunkard, all the temperance pledges and sanctimonious tea-parties in the world will not prevent him from wallowing in the mire. 75

According to the Advocate, reservations about the movement were still widespread among the professional classes in 1841: Fully two-thirds of the ministers of religion throughout Canada are opposed ... to the Total Abstinence principle. A large proportion of the school teachers are ... opposed ... All our governors.judges, magistrates and legislators, with very few exceptions, give their influence against the Temperance Reformation.76

In the towns particularly, temperance societies tended to be led by people such as Jesse Ketchum of Toronto and Jeffrey Hale of Quebec, who despite their wealth were felt to have lacked education or culture and were not quite 'persons of the first rank.' 77 The evangelical campaign of the Montreal Society was not well calculated to recruit the urban elite. In the two cities of Montreal and Toronto, the move to total abstinence had the initial result of causing the more genteel supporters to resign and be replaced by working-class members. 78 Platform performances in the towns at this time reinforced the movement's plebian reputation by featuring as speakers humble soldiers, sailors, or Indians, or representatives of the Victoria Society of Reformed Drunkards (inspired by the American Washingtonian Society) who toured the province in 1842. 79 In rural areas and smaller towns, a number of middle-class people did respond. Letters to the Advocate from such places report a number of merchants, ministers, and magistrates who joined. G.W. Bungay claimed that at Newmarket in 1844 'the largest building in the place was filled with intellectual and influential persons•So (who applied their intellects to his three-hour temperance lecture). Elsewhere, such elements were less forthcoming. The secretary of the Lancaster society, for example, reported in 1845 that they had enrolled 'a respectable proportion of persons of high standing in society, yet ... not what may be called the leading

Bringing In the Saints

119

influences of the town. ' 81 On balance, it appears that a number of community leaders in small towns and rural districts had begun to endorse the movement by the mid-184os, while others held back. Contemporary observers agreed that rural converts were more likely than urban ones to stay faithful. Doubtless that was because the Montreal campaign was timely, coinciding with a shift in the agrarian economy. In the pioneer era of primitive roads, distilling had made economic sense. When converted to liquor, grain was less perishable and also had a higher per unit value, making shipment worthwhile. Lack of social institutions and amenities apart from taverns also assured that much of this local produce was consumed locally. By the 1840s though, schools, churches, and other neighbourhood institutions were more common, providing alternatives to tavern-going; and improvement of markets and transport made it advantageous to ship grain in its natural state rather than distilling it first. While temperance crusading often was the immediate occasion for change, these socio-economic shifts form the ba,ckdrop to the dramatic success stories of the agents who ranged the province in the early 1840s. In the Home District in the summer of 1843 there was a change in field crops as many temperance converts stopped planting barley and rye for whisky production.82 The closure of local distilleries was widely noted, and the reports indicated that, rather than replacing the home-made product with the city-made one, many people were simply doing without. Reports of decreased drinking, of closed taverns and distilleries, and reformed drunkards poured into the Advocate from across the province.113 As Canada West passed out of the pioneer stage, liquor was losing its central place in rural economy and society. Temperance agitation undoubtedly helped speed a process already underway. Government statistics report a decline in the number of distilleries in the 1840s: Number of Distilleries Source: Hildebrand, 16; Census of uinnda (1871), 4:140, 158,198, 218

Canada East

Canada West

70

36

147

7

102

120 Canada Dry Before 1846 no official records were kept of how many gallons of liquor distilleries produced per annum,84 so that it cannot be claimed with certainty that the decline in numbers indicates decreased production. What the figures do suggest is the centralization of production in the towns as facilities for transporting grain to market improved. The increasing taxation and regulation of distilling after 1845 also helped to phase out the smaller rural operations. Other evidence does suggest that consumption was indeed declining at this time. As the supply of cheap, locally produced alcohol waned, farmers abandoned the use of liquor as a medium of exchange. Its discontinuance as a form of pay at house and barn raisings was one of the most widely cited temperance reforms of the 184os.8~ Many farmers stopped dispensing liquor to field hands as well.M Of course, one could still find hard drinking in rural communities long after this period, but drier trends had begun. The Advocate, taking stock in 1845 of the successes and failures of the temperance movement, cited the removal of liquor from outdoor worksites as one of the major achievements of their campaign: 'Amongst the agricultural population at bees, raisings, haytime, harvest ... whiskey used to flow like water; and by lumbermen, boatmen and sailors it was considered as necessary as flour or pork ... these absurd customs have either passed or are fast passing away. ' 87 Governor Elgin, among other observers, noted the change in the timber trade, which rivalled agriculture as the province's major industry, when he wrote in 1854: 'For some years past, intoxicating liquors have been vigorously excluded from almost all of the chantiers [shanties] ... and ... the result of the experiment has been entirely satisfactory. ' 88 Social factors also help to explain rural sobriety. Members of evangelical sects such as the Methodists which supported temperance seem to have eajoyed greater influence in the country than in Toronto.89 Letters to the Advocate suggest that these devout evangelicals continued to be the most active supporters. Many correspondents cited a religious motive for supporting temperance, such as their desire to decrease incidents of Sabbath-breaking or blasphemy.90 For the not-so-devout, temperance meetings could provide a welcome form of recreation in the days before small communities had their arenas and Legion Halls, the more remote areas lacking even church and school. An historian of North York describes this function: Attendance at temperance meetings ranged from seven to twenty-five ... Singing of songs and hymns provided the settler with an outlet for his emotions. Social

Bringing In the Saints

121

evenings were arranged with ... ice-cream, bananas and lemons as refreshments ... [and) oyster suppers from time to time. Many families really did benefit from the movement, but perhaps its greatest value was its meeting of the settler's need for social life. The programme at these socials included mouth organ solos, readings, songs, recitations, debates and speeches. The speakers covered a wide variety of subjects ranging from the federation of Upper and Lower Canada to whether farmers should keep or sell their stock and ... marriage versus bachelordom.9 '

Besides enjoying the sociability, the closer-knit rural communities had enforcement mechanisms that were lacking in the more diverse urban milieu. Social pressure reinforced weakening resolves in small communities, particularly when local ministers, schoolteachers, and justices of the peace endorsed the movement. Some local reports remarked on the fact that temperance revivals had converted such a substantial proportion of the population that they were able to influence the habits of members and non-members alike. 92 While temperance campaigns by no means dried up the entire countryside,93 they did sometimes transfer the mantle of respectability from drinker to non-drinker - as at Hawkesbury, where by 1842 'instead of its being disrespectful to refuse friends' invitations to partake of this hell-creating poison, the blush is on tl1e other cheek. ' 94 Sober recreation, socially approved, was soon institutionalized. Quite a number of the taverns closed during temperance revivals never reopened. Social gatherings shifted instead to drier places; for example, to the temperance halls which sprang up across the Province after a prototype appeared in Oakville in 1843.% Halls such as the one built in Durham in 1849 might reinforce the idea of dry entertainment by specifying rental 'for Public, Private and Social Assemblies, Meetings and Entertainments ... upon STRICTLY TEMPERANCE PRINCIPLES.' 96 Dry pockets were created, such as that in the St Clair District in the 1850s, about which a settler reminisced: ... there were often open-air assemblies in the woods. Temperance societies with bands of music drew great crowds. Rough boards were provided for seats, and a rough platform did for speeches. All the countryside, young and old, went to them, for most of the people in the country districts were rigid teetotallers. 97

This phenomenon seems to have been rather widespread, for witnesses before parliamentary enquiries in the 1850s agreed that the countryside was ready to accept prohibition while the towns were not. 911 Rural sobriety contrasted with urban drinking well into the twentieth century.ro

122 Canada Dry In the 1840s, more sober habits do seem to have been woven into the fabric of rural life. In a province which in 1851 was 85 per cent rural, this was a very significant change; and it created a forceful lobby for future legislative battles. Thus, even though the Montreal Temperance Society's evangelical campaign was fading by the mid-184os, it left behind an enduring legacy in Canada West.

NINE

Moving to Mainstream in Canada West

A number of Canadian institutions assumed their characteristic form around the middle of the nineteenth century, and this often bore the stamp of evangelical ideals. Such ideals affected the school system designed by Methodist minister Egerton Ryerson to bring forth 'a teeming harvest of virtue ... to make youth good men." The evangelical outlook also permeated a penal system which utilized prayer and meditation as instruments of reform. Similarly, it was not only the quest for efficiency but also a more exacting Christian morality which influenced the re-organization of police forces, replacing rowdy constables who had winked at rioting and prostitution with a set of stern professionals. Evangelical in inspiration, too, were the municipal ordinances of the 1850s which required bathers to cover up and boys to stop their street games on Sunday. 2 Our purpose here is to show the incorporation of yet another evangelical ideal, temperance, into mainstream thought and practice in Canada West around the middle of the nineteenth century. Temperance in this period clearly emerged as a respectable reform movement with support in the corridors of power. As we have seen, the Canadian movement had developed in the late 1820s as a humble and somewhat radical cause. Although the Montreal Temperance Society succeeded in disassociating temperance from radical politics in the period after the Rebellions, it did so by presenting temperance as radical Christianity. As such, it became quite popular in farm communities; it also became perhaps somewhat less distasteful, and certainly less threatening, to the elite. It did continue, however, to bear a stigma among educated Canadians, who tended to shun extremism either religious or political. But as the 1840s progressed, temperance began to acquire greater respectability, recruiting people in

124 Canada Dry positions of wealth and power in the towns. It became evident that temperance was more than a fleeting enthusiasm riding a wave of religious revivalism. The support of urban leaders swung the weight of laws and institutions behind the movement and assured it a lasting influence, particularly in Canada West, where temperance became a hallmark of 'Toronto the Good' and its hinterland. The character of temperance as an upwardly mobile social reform movement has been noted before. F.L. Barron, who studied the movement in Upper Canada/Canada West between 1828 and 1854, observed that this period 'saw the asceticism of the temperance movement transmuted into an ingredient of middle class status.' 3 Barron's finding is consistent with an earlier study by Jean Burnet. After tracing the rise of temperance and Sabbatarian sentiment in Toronto, she concluded that the city's moralistic 'ethos and reputation were shaped in the 183o's and 184o's by the upward thrust of business men and industrialists in a town previously dominated by aristocratic groups. ' 4 My own research would place the turning point in Toronto's moral climate slightly later, in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Give or take a decade, though, this study is in basic accord with Burnet's analysis. This chapter will therefore build on the work of Burnet and Barron by presenting further evidence that temperance became a mainstream movement in Canada West around 1850. It will also provide further analysis of why the change occurred. Economic and social transformations - particularly the growing power of the middle class which Burnet and Barron stressed - were important; so, too, was an element about which they had less to say, ideological change. The rising creed of the period, as writers such as L.S. Fallis, Douglas Owram, and Leo Johnson have discussed, was belief in progress. 5 The middle years of the nineteenth century witnessed the evolution of all sorts of institutions towards what was perceived as both greater efficiency and greater benevolence. The drive for change won adherents among the traditional gentry• and the working and farming classes as well as among the newer commercial and professional elite. Thus, we shall fill in the gaps in previous research by looking not only at the 'new men' and the changing class structure which earlier writers have analysed, but by focusing more closely than they did on the new ideas in the air around 1850, which created a congenial climate for moral reform. The contemporary eagerness for change helps explain why a movement which tended to be led by members of the middle classes was able to win support among what was, in fact, a large and varied group of people.

Moving to Mainstream in Canada West

125

Having traced, in the preceding chapter, the consolidation of the movement in rural Canada West, we focus here upon the towns, which were potent transmitters of the new ideology of progress to the countryside. This chapter gives particular attention to the emerging metropolis of Canada West. The rough little frontier town was just beginning, around 1840, its metamorphosis into 'Toronto the Good.'

I Toronto had not always been 'good.' Travellers of the 1830s called the town a drunken place. The regularity of newspaper advertisements for five-hundred barrel sales of liquor suggests the truth of such assertions, as does Anna Jameson's remark that taverns were almost the sole places of amusement. 6 There are reports of half-pay officers strutting about with 'their noses in red uniform,' of gentlemen unashamedly getting drunk after dinner. There were drunken fatalities at Orange balls, and even Reformers formulated their visions of the future in taverns.7 Toronto stood out for its traditional drinking habits when English temperance advocate J.S. Buckingham, a well-travelled observer, visited in 1840 and wrote: 'From the opportunities I had of judging .. . the people of Upper Canada were much less temperate than the people of the United States. Absolute drunkenness ... abounds to a greater extent in Toronto than in any town of the same size in America ... ' 8 As late as 1846, Toronto was still being described as a place famous for drunkenness. 9 Around that time (for a population of about twenty thousand), there were over five hundred beer shops, two hundred licensed retailers of spirits, and perhaps one hundred and fifty unlicensed drinking places, all operating without any effective limitations on hours or other conditions of sale. w This situation was not accepted without question. As we have seen, temperance societies had appeared in Upper Canada by the late 1820s; Toronto's own society dated from 1830. 11 In the 1830s, the widely circulating Christian Guardian published complaints against such practices as the steamboat which carried hundreds of townsfolk over to the Island pubs each Sunday, forcing the crew to work on the Lord's Day and enabling the passengers to profane it with 'drinking, rioting and blasphemy."' James Lesslie, a devout Baptist who would soon become editor of the Toronto Examiner, also condemned the prevailing moral climate; but heedless citizens mocked him with the sobriquet 'Bishop' Lesslie. ' 3 Reform efforts seemed to fall on deaf ears, particularly when the Rebellion so thoroughly discredited the advocates of change; just after

126 Canada Dry the Rebellion, the town council actually voted to increase the number of tavern licences. During the course of the 1840s, though, righteous souls such as 'Bishop' Lesslie would begin to be taken seriously outside of their own sectarian ranks, and a consensus for moral reform would emerge. By 1850, groups which had stood poles apart in the Rebellion era would find common ground. This is perhaps most clearly evidenced by the railway fever which consumed old and new wealth so indiscriminately, and by the closing of an ancient wound when the Clergy Reserves question was settled in 1854. Social values of established churchgoers and reforming chapelgoers also tended to converge as Canada West moved (to use John Moir's terminology) from 'centrifugal denominationalism' to 'centripetal nationalism" 5 and (in William Westfall's view) established 'religion of order' began to converge with evangelical 'religion of experience.' There arose that alliance which historian Barrie Oyster has called 'the Protestant Loyal Coalition.' 16 Loyalty became more impassioned because of a growing pride in Britain's accomplishments. Protestant loyalties were heightened by widespread resentment of the erection of Roman Catholic bishoprics in England and of state-supported Catholic schools in Canada West. These things, along with the growth of nationalist sentiment, tended to make mid-century Protestants think in terms of what they held in common rather than their differences. All such currents flowed into a larger stream: the general faith in Progress. The contemporary conception of humanity's moral and material destiny was anything but static. A writer in the Christian Guardian in 1850 alluded to 'the gradual but irresistible march of improvement, rising and swelling in its movement until it reaches its climax, "Man's Perfection.'"'' The Globe in that same decade gloried in the capacity of the human mind for ' progress from total ignorance to almost unbounded knowledge.' 18 Such optimism was not confined to the starry-eyed few. It travelled along the lengthening road and rail lines which carried the Globe and the Guardian to the outlying communities of Canada West. With such authorities proclaiming the gospel of infinite improvability, the perfectionism which the Reverend Christmas had preached in Montreal to his small group of devots in the 1820s was becoming, at mid-century, a general conviction. Seeing, after all, is believing, and people in the 1850s could observe dramatic changes all around them. Railways and mechanized production speeded life remarkably. There was sharp demographic growth between 1830 and 1850, which saw Canada West increase more rapidly than some of the fastest growing American states.' 9 After doubling in the 1840s, the

Moving to Mainstream in Canada West

127

population doubled again in the 1850s. In the latter decade, too, the Canada West wheat boom turned many a sleepy town into an export centre, spurring local industry. New technology began to revolutionize production, commerce, and social relations. There was also a rapidly changing social structure in which not a few immigrants were personally 'moving up' - arriving threadbare and amassing an inheritance for their children - a much mythologized phenomenon, which nonetheless enjoyed a basis in reality in mid-nineteenth-century Canada West. 20 Drawn from all these sources, converts to the gospel of improvability flocked to the mechanics' institutes in record numbers21 to attend lectures and night classes, to pore over cyclopaedias of 'useful knowledge' and ponder the lives of those nineteenth-century saints, the 'self-made men.' Every god, including Progress, requires its burnt offerings. In Reverend Christmas's day, and in the 1850s, the perfecting of the species was thought to entail some sacrifice. Sensual pleasure sprang to mind. A target of moralists from time immemorial, fleshly indulgence was attacked with fresh vigour in the long period of transatlantic evangelism, which had begun with Wesley in the mid-eighteenth century and stretched far into the nineteenth. Since they rested on a broadly Protestant basis, evangelical moral principles were well suited to the consensus developing in mid-century Canada West. Indeed a stress on Protestant liberty, such as John Dougall articulated in the Witness, struck a responsive chord in the growing number of Canadians who prided themselves both on their English political traditions and on their Protestant refusal to crook the knee to received authority. The preconditions of liberty, as Dougall made clear, were two virtues often considered particularly Protestant: self-restraint and self-improvement. In Canada, none but radicals had ever supposed that the great unwashed were ready for perfect liberty; and even radicals - the Bidwells and James Lesslie, for example - might come from Calvinistic or evangelical backgrounds which stressed that freedom was not so much a natural right as a pearl of great price. One was not ready for freedom until one acquired self-discipline and some basic capabilities. Here was a social correlate to the mid-Victorian political tenet that one needed education and property to qualify for the vote. 22 One needed to be sober, rational, and literate to enjoy full citizenship in the wonderful world the lecturers, penny catechisms, and steam engines were creating. Thus, midnineteenth-century progressives in Canada were disposed to agree with the concern expressed in the temperance press that 'the people drink, smoke or sleep, while they might be receiving some useful instruction.' 23

128 Canada Dry One needed not be a saint to appreciate the evangelicals' message. They presented a variety of secular reasons for temperance alongside the religious ones. Indeed, the secular arguments were carried so far that the movement at times veered away from the millennial significance given to it by apostles such as the Reverend Christmas and John Dougall. The more secular ideology emerging in Canada West caused the Christian Guardian to lament in 1846 that 'temperance has been divorced from religion, and has lost its power ... While God was acknowledged, wonders were wrought . . . but the cause has changed hands, and its tone and temper have gradually but surely changed . .. ' 24 By that' time, temperance was often linked to productivity, drinking to prodigality. This argument was presented to a generation of Canadians that included many in the stamp of Toronto's Mayor Boulton, who after visiting Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1846 came back and declared himself 'sick and ashamed' of the lack of similar enterprise in Canada. 25 Temperance forces claimed that the national torpor was liquor-induced. They made elaborate calculations of the number of dollars dissipated at taverns and of the value of grain converted into useless alcohol. 26 One lecturer said that the enormous amounts spent on liquor, if redirected, could clear all the waste land in the province. 29 Better use of time and money was so essential, claimed Toronto temperance agent James Lamb, that sobriety was 'intimately connected with the preservation of Canada.' 28 Would not the ongoing development of the province's transportation network be meaningless without the spread of temperance? How could the tipsy traveller keep to the centre of good roads, cross bridges safely, and 'navigate the canals with ... three sheets to the wind?' 29 Accident reports of steamboats with intoxicated crews confirmed that technology without sobriety only led to bigger and costlier accidents. On the brighter side, temperance advocates pointed to the success story of the timber trade, where lives had been spared and productivity increased by the general banning of liquor from worksites during the 184os.30 Along with other improvers, men of science strode the temperance stage. Physicians lectured crowds on the salutary effects of total abstinence.3' Huge anatomical illustrations were unfurled to reveal the progressively deteriorating organs of the occasional drinker, the heavy drinker, and - horrible to see! - the putrefying insides of the drunkard. The 1840s saw an array of doctors, politicians, journalists, and businessmen putting forth the view that drinking was unhealthful, wasteful, and obsolete, completely out of step with what a Toronto temperance editor

Moving to Mainstream in Canada West

129

called described as 'the active, practical, pushing, speculating, moneymaking, philanthropic, onward age in which we live.' 32 As the decade progressed, such arguments tended to replace the more spiritual emphasis of the Montreal Temperance Society. Temperance was less often presented as religion, more often seen as part of community progress. It awoke interest among educated and enterprising people who were somewhat more likely to stress worldly benefits. It is going too far to say that temperance had become a secular movement; contemporaries tended not to compartmentalize in such a way. Most, like a Port Dover resident who praised the effects of the new temperance society there, probably intertwined the sacred and the secular: It is well known by all who have been acquainted with the place that there has been a very great change for the better in the last six months; the community begins to wear quite a moral aspect; the general feelings are mellowed, and there is forming a cement bordering on brotherly love. Business of every kind is carried on with more life and animation. 33

The world that temperance forces were building was one in which moral and material improvement, Christianity and commerce, would go hand in hand. But teetotalism no longer required the martyr's courage of its first disciples, and these new converts seldom alluded to the Messiah coming on thunderclouds.

II Apart from the appeal of their message to a bourgeoisie intent on progress, evangelicals more often won a hearing after 1840 because there were more of them around - and in more exalted places. Methodists, Presbyterians, and Baptists were all increasing in number, relative to most other Protestant denominations, and most significantly, pulling ahead of the conservative Church of England.:H Their prestige grew along with their numbers. In Methodist ranks, backwoods itinerants were increasingly joined by educated leaders cast in the mold of Guardian editors Ryerson and Richardson. An influx of immigrants from the British Isles joined Yankee-born farmers in chapel pews and pulpits, a matter of some import in places such as Toronto and London, where prejudice against American evangelicals was strong. Rigid moral standards might seem unsavoury at the best of times, but they were somewhat more palatable when preached by a baccalaureated Scotsman than by a semi-literate Yankee.

130 Canada Dry British-born Congregational clergymen became particularly active in the temperance cause.Joining the Congregational 'bishop' Henry Wilkes, who was an officer in the Montreal Temperance Society, were several activists in Canada West. These included the Reverend W.F. Clarke in the London area and James T. Byrne, who served Whitby and other posts east of Toronto. Clarke, as we have seen, became an agent of the Montreal Society. The Reverend Byrne, apparently not an official agent, nonetheless maintained contact with the Montreal leadership and rode many miles to preach the dry gospel. 3~ A particularly prominent new supporter from Congregational ranks was the Reverend John Roaf, who arrived from Britain in 1837 and soon became one of Toronto's leading ministers. Like Dougall, he too believed that the reign of Christ would be ushered in when humanity had been renewed in a magnificent outpouring of moral reform, good works, and earnest Christian child-rearing. The Reverend Roaf exhorted Torontonians to 'conceive of salvation flowing like a river' and predicted a time when missionaries would 'be spread throughout the earth like stars thick studding the vault of night. ' 36 This sparkling paradise would be a dry one; among Roafs visionary schemes was a plan to 'swallow up' the existing political parties with a new one dedicated to temperance.37 The planting of the Scottish Free Presbyterian Church in Canada in 1844 also reinforced the British character of the Canadian temperance movement. John Redpath of the Montreal Temperance Society was a leading force in establishing the Canadian Free Church. The Reverend Robert Burns, the first moderator of the Canadian Free Kirk, and pastor of Knox Church in Toronto, stayed at Redpath's estate of Terrace Bank upon his arrival in Canada. Burns also became a close friend of two other Montreal Temperance Society activists,James Court and James Orr. Moving in such company, the Free Kirk's moderator not surprisingly decided to become a teetotaller shortly after his arrival in Canada.38 A delegation sent out by the Free Kirk to visit all its congregations in Canada reported that intemperance was the almost invariable cause of infractions of church discipline.:19 While unreformed Church of Scotland ministers continued to tipple at public banquets, 40 prominent Free Kirkers now stood with the American Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Baptists in endorsing abstinence. This new support from Free Kirkers and Congregationalists, and the general growth in respectability of evangelical groups, augured well for moral reform. Further indication of the newfound respectability of temperance is seen in growing approval by people who held public office. One reason for this was the advent of responsible government, which meant that

Moving to Mainstream in Canada West

131

members of the conservative Churches of England and Scotland were less likely than in Family Compact days to monopolize such offices.4' The Compact gentry were gradually succeeded by men more apt to have connections with Reform, commerce, and non-established creeds. A prime example of such change was the important position of assistant superintendent of education of Canada West. In 1844 the Church of Scotland minister Robert Murray, who publicly attacked temperance societies, was replaced by the Methodist Egerton Ryerson, who staunchly defended them. 42 Towards the end of the Upper Canadian period, fewer innkeepers were elected to the Assembly, the occupation 'evidently no longer considered entirely respectable.' In Toronto, former 'outsiders' by the 1850s had come to form a majority on the city council. These included members of humble sects such as the Primitive Methodists along with contractors, manufacturers, lawyers, and other beneficiaries of calls 'the politics of enterprise.' 44 By then Reform politicians no longer laboured under suspicion of treason. They tended to hold office quite regularly, alternating in power with more conservative regimes. 4~ A.T. McCord had begun his forty-year tenure as Toronto chamberlain (or treasurer) even before the Rebellion, but the office took on growing importance as the years went by. McCord demonstrated his commitment to reform by donating time and money to evangelical causes and presiding over the Toronto Temperance Reformation Society.16 There are indications that other towns, too, were beginning to replace the old guard with officials more favourable to reform. Chatham in 1853 had a justice of the peace on the executive of its temperance society; and a majority of the municipal officials and inspectors of licences were reported to be temperance men.47 One of Oakville's founding fathers, Justus Williams, held many posts, including warden, justice of the peace, and town treasurer, while also presiding over the temperance society.48 East of Toronto, another temperance activist, Abram Farewell, represented Oshawa-Whitby interests on both the Home District and Ontario County Councils. 49 Farther east, William Buell, a Brockville reformer of Loyalist background, spoke out for temperance in the Brockville &corder. In the 1850s, he was exerting his reforming influence from the mayor's seat.~ North of Toronto, in Whitchurch Township, the New Connexion Methodist Joseph Hartman was a temperance supporter who held office as township superintendent of education and Home District councillor. After the reorganization brought about by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1849, he served for many years as warden of York and Peel Counties. He also served in parliament for a timeY

132 Canada Dry In the provincial parliament, Hartman joined a small but increasingly illustrious band of 'drys.' In the early 1840s a handful of Reformers, generally men of evangelical persuasion, advocated temperance but, as in the Atlantic colonies, no party would go out on a limb to endorse the cause.r.• Some of these first champions probably reinforced the movement's backwoods image.JP. Roblin was a Prince Edward County farmer of Loyalist stock who early identified himself with the movement. 53 Malcolm Cameron, a popular stump politician from Lanark County (and later, Sarnia), was a self-educated man whose manner of speech was ridiculed when he first entered parliament. He nonetheless succeeded in securing several cabinet portfolios, including commissioner of public works and postmaster general under successive Union governments. The genial Cameron was an inveterate advocate of sobriety, equally willing to address scoffers in parliament or the temperance faithful in the countryside.51 Nicknamed 'the Coon,' Cameron at the outset of his political career was regarded as something of a country bumpkin by his parliamentary colleagues. r,r, During the course of the 1840s, however, more urbane parliamentarians joined this group. J.H. Price, a Home District Congregationalist, was a Toronto lawyer and a respected Reformer. 56 The Tory Robert Baldwin Sullivan, whose distinctions included service as mayor of Toronto, legislative councillor, and provincial secretary, moved into the Reform camp in the 1840s. He announced his conversion to teetotalism in 1844, and soon afterwards became president of the Toronto Temperance Reformation Society. Sullivan's 'conversion,' though, was short-lived. He was an alcoholic seeking to recover both his sobriety and his political fortunes, and succeeding at neither. 57 Another illustrious new supporter, though, laboured under no such difficulties. George Brown, a member of the Reverend Burns's Free Kirk, was soon to become one of Canada West's leading politicians - as well as its foremost newspaperman. The Gwbe, which Brown founded in 1844, was committed to evangelical views to the extent that it refused advertising for theatricals and horse-races, and in its first decades brought its presses to a halt on Saturday night so that no hands would toil on the Sabbath. 58 The Gwbe endorsed Sabbatarianism's sister virtue, temperance, singling out drink in 1855 as 'the widest spread and most rlestructive vice with which our land is cursed' 59 and advocating restrictive laws. With the voice of the G/,obe added to that of the Examiner, the Presbyterian Ecc/.esiastical and Missiona1y &cord, and the Christian Guardian, a goodly proportion of the Toronto press called for temperance measures.

Moving to Mainstream in Canada West

133

While men of evangelical persuasion were increasingly visible in the press, pulpit, and public office, they were also moving into positions of leadership in the business community. 'Community' may be a misnomer for the group in Toronto, which must have changed beyond recognition as the town mushroomed from three thousand in 1830 to thirty thousand in 1850, and wholesale and retail houses proliferated. Before the Rebellion, leading merchants had belonged to the Churches of England or Scotland. Now, however, genteel business leaders of the 1830s such as William Allen and William Spread Baldwin were succeeded by new men drawn from the chapelgoing middle classes.r'° As the personnel changed, so did the outlook. Not bound by the vested interests and traditional views of their predecessors, a number of business leaders after 1840 undertook a campaign for moral reform similar to that which their Montreal counterparts had initiated some years earlier. Such leaders were often self-made men who had felt the cutting edge of a social system which honoured breeding and education more than industry and wealth. In this category, as we have noted, was long-time temperance advocate Jesse Ketchum, who bore the double stigma of American birth and poor education; and Rowland Burr, a farmer's son who built up a fortune in the Home District through various milling, real estate, and timber enterprises. Burr attributed his success to temperance, hard work, and the Proverbs of Solomon; and he prided himself that he 'never saw the Ritious [sic] forsaken or his seed Beging Bread.' 6' Not all of these reforming entrepreneurs, though, had deficiencies of citizenship or education. During the 1840s, temperance sympathizers began to appear at the pinnacle of the Toronto business establishment. As early as 1844, the city's Board of Trade made an appeal to British underwriters, shipowners, and shipmasters asking that preference be given to ships sailing, as many American vessels had begun to do, on temperance principles. The Board said it sought the reform because of the loss of lives and property caused by drunken captains and crews. The petition was signed by many of Toronto's leading businessmen, including George Ridout, William Ross, T J. Farr.John Mulholland, T.D. Harris, P. Paterson, Jr, A. Dixon, J. Christie and Son, I. Buchanan and Company, W. Perrin, Moffats Murray and Company, and Gilmour and Coulson.62 Cost considerations alone may have accounted for some of these signatures, but it is surely more than coincidental that the Board included men of evangelical principles. George Ridout, a leading hardware merchant who presided over the Board of Trade from 1844 to 1852, was a British-born Sabbatarian.63 Businessman-politician Isaac

134 Canada Dry Buchanan, who had been the first president of Toronto's Board of Trade (and would later become a magnate in Hamilton), supported the Free Kirk, and E.F. Whittemore, a future Board president, was a zealous Congregationalist.f>1 At the head of the mid-century business elite were large wholesalers with evangelical leanings. Scottish-born John Macdonald, 'the merchant prince,' built up one of Toronto's largest dry goods establishments in the 1850s. Macdonald was a convert to Methodism. Of an imperious temperament, he perhaps lacked the milk of human kindness. The sincerity of his evangelica_l convictions, however, was patent. He gave roughly one-fifth of his income to charity, invited paupers into his office, and spent his leisure hours distributing tracts and visiting the sick. He preached temperance both to his employees and his business associates. 65 (Macdonald extended his influence beyond his own time and place by helping to establish a struggling young merchant, Timothy Eaton, the future retail magnate, who would refuse to carry liquor in any of his stores.) The evangelical outlook also strongly influenced two of the other top wholesalers, John McMurrich and William McMaster. The Scottish-born McMurrich helped inaugurate the Toronto branches of the Free Kirk and the Sabbath Observance Association. 00 The Irish-born McMaster, while building up Canada West's largest dry goods establishment, served as an officer of the Upper Canada Bible Society and devoted large sums to the education of Baptists, a group he considered 'a people of destiny. ' 67 At the summit of the new group of entrepreneurs emerging around 1850 was E.F. Whittemore. A Montreal-born Congregationalist, Whittemore became involved in several Toronto wholesale firms. By the end of the 1840s, he headed one of the city's largest banking and financial houses. He led the drive to build the Northern Railway which preoccupied local financiers at mid-century. Whittemore also served as a city councillor, Grand Trunk Railway director, and president of Consumer's Gas Company; he crowned his career with election to the presidency of the Toronto Board of Trade in 1858. On his way to the top, Whittemore had identified himself with the temperance cause, donating generously to the movement and presiding over at least one society himself?1 By the 1850s such sympathies did no damage to a man's prestige in Toronto. When Whittemore died at the age of forty-one, he was described as a man 'universally esteemed,'r19 and his huge funeral, attended by nearly all the city's prominent citizens, seemed to verify the eulogy. Two other men who had worked with Whittemore to promote the Northern Railway, H.W. Jackson and R.H. Brett - the latter a leading hardware dealer and

Moving to Mainstream in Canada West

135

New Connexion Methodist - also held office in temperance groups in the 185os. 70 Moreover, Whittemore's successor as president of the Board of Trade, W.P. Howland, a grain dealer and a rising force in the Liberal Party, also had some sympathies with the reforming outlook of the evangelicals. Smaller towns, too, had their reforming businessmen, who helped shape a more puritanical social order. The examples noted here probably represent the vanguard of change rather than the norm; yet the fact that so many people in the province did come (as we shall see) to endorse rigid temperance views suggests that such changes were not anomalous. In any case, Oakville supplies an example of a town's moral metamorphosis which can be traced in temperance literature in the two decades following the Rebellion. A leading instrument of change was a man who seems to have been Oakville's most inveterate 'improver,' merchantcontractor Justus Williams. Williams, who was related by marriage to the Ryerson family, was an active school promoter and a long-time president of the Oakville Temperance Society. The first people to join this society, in the 1830s, were sailors, carpenters, and farmers.'' The gentry demurred; and lacking their support, the group encountered much opposition. Even though the society was three hundred strong by the time Montreal Society agentjames Macdonald visited it in the autumn of 1842, swords seemed to have been drawn between supporters and opponents. Macdonald wrote that 'great virulence exists, manifesting itself by outrageous conduct at meetings, and lately by a slanderous paper warfare . . . in consequence, the conduct of some of the friends has become indiscreet and unjustifiable. ' 72 About the time of the Montreal Society campaign, and perhaps as a result of it, opposition died down, and temperance came into greater favour. Macdonald reported with relief that the opposition had altered its tactics and 'at this far-famed village ... we had a quiet and agreeable meeting, although the contrary was feared ... •7:1 People of some means began to take an interest. In 1843 Oakville opened the first temperance hall in Canada West - such real estate in itself suggesting the movement's growing respectability and permanence. For some time, this edifice remained Oakville's only public hall, 74 which gave the dry faction some control over the refreshments served at town gatherings. By the time a Toronto temperance editor visited Oakville in 1851, he was able to report stronger dry sentiment there than he had seen in any other town of its size. He claimed that some of the captains of schooners and sailors who retired there, having seen the ill effects of shipboard

136 Canada Dry drinking, had become keen temperance men. He reported that in Oakville of that day, 'a man is ashamed to be seen drunk on the streets. The ladies as well as the gentlemen join in the movement and there are but few families here of any influence who do not advocate the total disuse of all intoxicating drinks.' 75 Big temperance rallies drew as many as five hundred people. The whole pattern of leisure seems to have been changing in this period. Coterminous with the rise in temperance sentiment were increasingly heavy licence fees levied by the town and township on circuses, juggling acts, puppet shows, and other 'idle feats,' while much lighter charges fell on the 'scientific or artistical Lectures' and concerts76 favoured by reforming members of the bourgeoisie. A similar evolution occurred in some other outlying areas. Ontario County, too, saw increased restrictions of traditional popular entertainments after mid-century. 77 Here a leading proponent of change was Abram Farewell, who was, as we have seen, an office-holder. He also had extensive business interests as a railway contractor, financier, and manufacturer of farm implements in Whitby Township. Farewell, a Disciple of Christ, was an anti-liquor activist who founded a number of temperance organizations in Ontario County. In 1855 he and George P. Ure made a tour of American states which had adopted prohibition. Their report concluded with a call for a similar measure in Canada. As president of the Canadian Liquor Law League, Farewell spearheaded the campaign. 78 Hamilton, too, had its 'born-again' businessmen. Among them was the American-born manufacturer Edward Jackson, who had experienced conversion during a Methodist revival in 1832 and became a life-long class leader and Sunday school worker, a patron of missionaries and Methodist colleges. Another Hamilton industrialist, Calvin McQuesten, was a devoutly evangelical Presbyterian.79 Here, as in other towns, successful entrepreneurs were enhancing the respectability of moral reform efforts as well as their funding. One does not wish to exaggerate the changing moral climate in the business community. The 'drys' may have been prospering; but so were the wets. The Toronto liquor manufacturers Gooderham and Worts, for example, demonstrated their success handsomely by building their fivestorey stone distillery in 1859; in addition, they operated the city's largest fleet of freight boats.&> Gooderham was also elected to city council. His traffic in spirits does not seem to have ruined his status in the community. The point is, not that Toronto's business community had become dry or joined the temperance camp, but that by 1850 some of its major

Moving to Mainstream in Canada West

137

figures had done so, just as had their counterparts in smaller towns. Respected institutions such as the Board of Trade now endorsed reform. This marked a real change from the situation reported by Buckingham in 1841, when it was reported that the elite as a body, 'all the heads of the community,' 8 ' had shunned the subject of temperance.

III Even more telling than the growing support in business circles was the change of heart among people associated with the old guard. The Church of England, the army, and the police all began after 1850 to endorse a more sober social order. When even such veteran tavern brawlers as the Orangemen sprouted a temperance wing, there could be no doubt times had changed. The 'low church' faction of the Church of England was much influenced by evangelical ideas after 1840. This remained a minority group within the church, but it had considerable strength in the southwestern part of the province, particularly among clergymen who had come over from Ireland. At Niagara Falls, Thornhill, and Kingston there were also evangelical ministers. In Toronto, where Bishop Strachan fended off the evangelicals, the movement remained weak among the clergy but enjoyed some support among the laity. 82 In the 1850s, Church of England evangelicals became vocal advocates of moral reform. The puritanism of the low church journal in mid-nineteenth-century Toronto, the Echo, caused it to be dubbed the 'Echo of Geneva.' The paper took a dim view of theatres, circuses, and lotteries, and even extended its censure to church bazaars. Readers were admonished that they were 'called upon by God's word and the prevailing evil to discountenance worldly conformity in every shape - even to the dining and evening party of a worldly kind. God's people have ever been a separate and peculiar people, in principle, in conduct, and in aim ... ' 83 On the question of drink, the Echo was somewhat muted because the editorial committee found itself divided. Elsewhere, however, Church of England clergymen broke ranks to support the temperance movement, particularly in the southwestern part of the province.81 Lay evangelicals who came out from Britain with the army also helped to introduce Toronto's elite to more puritanical ways. Emily Robinson, daughter of the chief justice, married Captainj.H. Lefroy, who arrived in 1842. The son of an English clergyman, Lefroy was an ardent evangelical. Although the polka was much in favour at gentry balls, Lefroy considered

138 Canada Dry it so highly improper that he refused to dance. Singular at first, such views were re-inforced by other officers, such as those of the Second Rifle Brigade, which arrived in 1847 and merely looked on when the customary ball was held in their honour. These officers convened prayer meetings in their quarters. Military officers had long been a mainstay of urban balls, theatricals, and hunting and driving clubs, and the earnestness of the younger generation of officers helps account for the decline of such activities in the 1850s. Many common soldiers, such as those of the 93rd Highlanders' 'praying regiment,' were also affected. Reading rooms, choirs, and temperance societies began to offer more 'improving' forms of leisure to former devotees of the chase, the dance, and the bottle. Such influences help explain why even a figure associated with the more easygoing morality of Family Compact days such as Sheriff W.B. Jarvis was by mid-century questioning the practice of devoting Sunday to amusement. 85 Other elements associated with the old guard in Upper Canada were changing too. Policemen who might be as rowdy and partisan as the crowds they were supposed to control could still be found in Canadian towns in the 1840s. In an attempt to correct this situation, the Toronto police force was reorganized in 1858. Well-trained professionals, often British-born, who were literate, 'sober, steady men,' were hired in place of local patronage candidates. The new police were instructed not to board in taverns or 'be seen lounging and talking about Bar Rooms and public houses.' Within a few decades, the Toronto force would be boasting of in-house Bible classes and 'probably more temperance advocates ... than in any comparable institution in the country.' 86 Even the Orange Order, the famed breeding ground of Tory storm troops, became more sedate. With the advent of responsible government, Orange intimidation and rowdyism came to be regarded by conservative political leaders as an embarrassing anachronism, for it threatened the bleu alliance with French-Canadian Catholics. Grand Master Ogle Gowan called for change in his address to the Grand Lodge reunion of 1856. He extolled the virtues of temperance and asserted that its practice would improve both the quality and quantity of Orange membership. Gowan instructed the men not to meet in taverns and urged them to set up temperance lodges, reading rooms, and savings banks.87 Gowan's efforts were seconded by John Holland, a young Montreal businessman who advanced rapidly into a position of leadership in the Orange Order after moving to Toronto in 1853. Holland was a social reformer who founded the Toronto Young Men 's Christian Association and spoke out against racial discrimination as well as intemperance.88

Moving to Mainstream in Canada West

139

Although there was no dramatic alteration in Orange behaviour, reform was at least on the agenda. One lodge, at any rate, Toronto's 'Virgin Lodge,' was established to provide a new model of Orange conduct. Such a model was not universally admired, but it did give rise to discussion. Indeed one historian tells us that 'heated lodge room discussions about to drink or not to drink became as much a part ofJuly 12 as King Billy and his white horse. ' 89 Although Orange revels and brawls were far from over, it seems significant that leaders of this epitome of traditional rough and drunken leisure had begun to advocate sobriety and restraint. These shifting attitudes and practices in a rather wide range of midcentury institutions suggest that Toronto and its hinterland were beginning to assume their proverbially puritanical demeanour. The grip of the new forces was as yet unsteady, and reformers who attempted to limit tavern licences and enforce Sunday closings in the 1850s were apt to be punished at the polls.90 However, an influential segment of the population had begun to identify sobriety with progress. In the 1850s, moral reformers spoke out for change from positions of leadership not only in the churches but also in business and professional groups, in parliament and local governments, in the army, in the police, and even in the Orange Order. This broad coalition would soon act to bring the laws into line with its convictions.

TEN

Nearly Dry

The 'drys' in the Province of Canada signalled their newfound strength by attempting to legislate sobriety. They tried first to curb distribution of alcohol; later, to stop supply at its source. The 1840s saw local drives to close down some of the small taverns which lined the lanes of every hamlet. Repeating the pattern seen in the Maritimes, the 1850s saw new forces led by the Sons of Temperance initiate the quest for complete prohibition of the manufacture and sale of liquor. They came surprisingly close to success.

I Even before 1840, some voices had drawn attention to the links between drinking and crime and called for reform. The Advocate noted such a finding by a group of Montreal magistrates in 1839 but maintained that despite such testimonials from year to year, 'the evil remains as it was. Will our magistrates act more faithfully this season? We confess we have little hope.'' After 1840, however, the campaign to close down the rowdier public houses began to prevail over whatever considerations of profit, patronage, and pleasure had brought them to life. With growing frequency and urgency, judges, chiefs of police, keepers ofjails and asylums, and boards of health proclaimed that their experience showed drunkenness to be a contributory factor in countless cases of crime, family abuse, accidents, and mental and physical illness. One of the most prominent spokesmen for this view was Judge Charles Mondelet of the Montreal circuit court. Mondelet cited many a case of alcohol's destructiveness, and he asserted that it undermined the efforts of schools and other institutions ofreform and improvement. 2 By 1847, Mondelet had concluded the

142 Canada Dry effects of drinking were so pernicious that taverns should be entirely suppressed.3 Such statements, and Mondelet's supporting evidence drawn from his years on the bench, received prominent press coverage. While not everyone supported the judge's call for abolition of taverns, his arguments probably helped swing public opinion towards more restrictive laws and practices. Mondelet was something of a radical; but he was joined by several conservative members of the bench who also favoured stricter tavern control. In 1843 Judge JS. Cartwright, of a prominent Midland District Tory family, drew attention to the heavy drinking in Kingston (then the seat of government for the province), which played host to three notorious groups of quaffers: soldiers, sailors, and members of parliament. The judge noted that the town had 134 taverns for a population of only twelve thousand. He lamented the thousands of pounds spent annually in such establishments, chiefly by the labouring classes, 'on an article not only useless, but highly injurious. What benefit would not result to our community if this enormous outlay was spent in works of public usefulness - in the endowment of schools - the support of hospitals - the establishment of libraries ... but above all, in the extension of the Gospel of Salvation. ' 4 Coming from a family influenced by evangelical ideals, Cartwright was part of a growing vanguard who were shifting their views on the desirability of taverns. In 1842 the Advocate lamented that nearly all the magistrates in Canada were against temperance measures; 5 but two years later, opinion had changed considerably. In the Talbot District, for example, where temperance agents were quite active, it was reported in April 1844 that there were twenty-one teetotal magistrates.6 Attempts to restrict taverns would find a sympathetic hearing in such quarters; and they also won support outside temperance ranks. Indeed, even a conservative opponent of temperance societies such as Richard Bonnycastle became convinced after travelling across the province that whisky was very frequently the source of 'idiocy, madness, and perhaps two-thirds of the dreadful calamities to which human nature is subjected.' 7 Such members of the upper and middle classes could agitate with impunity, for they did not frequent the rowdier taverns which bore the brunt of the attack. Support seems to have grown steadily during the 1840s for the idea of restricting drinking hours and closing down some of the more disreputable taverns. Officials began to act. The Toronto city council, for example, responded to a petition from the city's Temperance Reformation Society by

Nearly Dry

143

reducing the number of tavern licences in 1843 and again in 1847.8 Local measures, however, tended to be short-lived. Licence applications which had been rejected by one magistrate were granted by another more lenient one, or by one of a number of provincial officials who had licence-granting powers.9 Temperance supporters retaliated by linking the anti-tavern campaign to the then-current struggle for responsible government, attacking provincial officials who subverted local attempts to limit taverns. 10 They won additional public support towards the end of the decade when thousands of destitute Irish immigrants arrived, supplying 'the bitterest example of human misery in all Canadian history' 11 and heightening alarm about urban violence at the very time many authorities were claiming drink lay at the root of misery and violence. Members of the gentry who continued to defend the delights of drunkenness during this crisis were portrayed as misanthropes. 12 Perhaps the accusation rankled; there does appear to have been some curtailment of carousing during this period. According to the parliamentary enquiry on the subject of intemperance in 1849, 'of late, among the educated and elevated classes, intoxication has been so much discountenanced as to be very rare, and drunkenness is not now a gentlemanly vice.' 13 In 1849 Governor-General Elgin put the official stamp on this restraint by publicly abstaining and by curtailing the flow of wine at government banquets.' 4 Magistrates of Toronto and the Home District in the same year voted by a large majority to seek tighter controls on licensing; they went on to urge the legislature to take the more extreme course of banishing taverns altogether as soon as public opinion would permit. 15 Magistrates and councils in other districts, too, strongly recommended change. 16 Thus, for a variety of reasons, the campaign for more restricted use of alcohol had by 1850 garnered support beyond teetotal ranks. Within the ranks, some leaders had reservations about the class nature of the attack on taverns. T.S. Brown, a former patriote commander who became a temperance activist in the 1840s, was part of a radical wing of the teetotal movement which saw this campaign as hypocritical in attacking plebian taverns while ignoring the upper classes who drank in clubs or at home. 17 Movement leader John Dougall was perhaps also part of this wing. Appearing before the parliamentary committee of 1849, he was still expressing the idealistic opinion that there should be no government provisions whatsoever regarding taverns and the liquor trade; the government should stay out of the matter and let education and moral suasion do its work to gradually eliminate the evil. 18

144

Canada Dry

Government, however, was ready to act. Pressured for reform, and reminded of the adverse social effects of alcohol in the forceful report of its own 1849 committee of enquiry into the effects of intemperance, the provincial parliament passed a series of temperance measures in 184~50. The legislation stipulated more stringent requirements for tavern-keeping, and it even held publicans liable for accidents involving people who became drunk in their taverns. Criticism of irresponsible licence-granting by the central authorities was addressed when town and township councils were granted sole power to grant licences in Canada West; the same right was given to a committee composed of the senior magistrate, church warden, and militia captain in the parishes of Canada East. ' 9 It was declared that the penalty for intoxication was arrest, with fine or imprisonment. These mid-century drinking regulations were, according to one historian, the first legislation which clearly branded drunkenness as anti-social and illegal."" However, this legislation was no sooner on the books than teetotallers began marshalling their forces for a still stronger measure; for they had new cause to flex their muscles.

II Around 1850 there was an influx of new members into the temperance movement. Part of this was a result of the Canadian tour of the celebrated temperance lecturer, John B. Gough. The Sons of Temperance organization in Canada West capitalized on the enthusiasm generated by Gough's visit to recruit previously unsympathetic groups into the movement. John B. Gough had emigrated from England to the United States as a child. He became an alcoholic, reformed, and began a renowned career on both sides of the Atlantic as a temperance advocate. In the winter of 184~50, when he visited Canada, Gough was a rising star. He was a magnetic speaker, reported to combine pathos, wit, and sincerity in perfect measure. He was particularly noted for his ability to overcome the reservations which educated people often had about the teetotal movement. W.H. Pearson, the future postmaster of Toronto, who heard Gough at this time, wrote: Under his appeal I, with many others, became a total abstainer, and have remained such. As a result of his lectures a wave of temperance reform swept through the city and country at that time, and very many hundreds took the pledge. Two Sons of Temperance lodges (the Toronto and Coldstream divisions)

Nearly Dry

145

were formed. The members of the first were largely from amongst the well-to-do families of the city ... The impetus given to the temperance movement by this marvellous man can hardly be overestimated ... His personal magnetism ... dramatic power ... and intense zeal have perhaps never been surpassed ... 21

For several years afterwards Gough made occasional visits to the Province of Canada. He sparked fervour wherever he went. 22 Gough's initial foray thus fostered the spread of the powerful Sons of Temperance organization to Canada West. As in the Maritimes, this organization (which originated in New York) served as a benefit society and social club for teetotallers. The fees were low and,.in contrast to many other fraternal societies, membership was open to men of all nationalities, creeds, and political persuasions. Women and children could join the affiliated Daughters and Cadets of Temperance. The Sons paraded through the streets in their fancy regalia and attracted large gatherings. They created renewed interest in temperance, as this report of activities on the shores of Lake Ontario on a winter day in March 1851 suggests: From what we can learn there has been nothing got up to aid the temperance cause during the year equal to the Oakville Soiree. There was a public procession of Sons, in full regalia, in the streets. Between two and three hundred Sons marched from the Temperance Hall to the Lake shore, and then back to the Hall where tea and choice refreshments were served to an overflowing house. The house contained about five hundred persons, and hundreds more could not enter it for want of room. 2 '

Public gatherings such as these, along with frequent private meetings, gave teetotallers an alternative to the older camaraderie of the tavern. The Sons visited one another in time of sickness. They held elaborate funerals for members and provided financial support for their bereaved families. There was strong inducement to keep the pledge, since any member found guilty of drinking during a 'trial' held by his fellows forfeited this insurance.'1 The Sons influenced the temperance movement in English Canada in several important ways. First of all, their appearance signalled a shift in temperance leadership away from Montreal. While the Sons spread slowly in Canada East, their growth in Canada West was dramatic. In the year following the establishment of their first Canada West branch in Brockville in 1848, they had twenty-five divisions in the western half of the province. By January 1850 there were fifty-two divisions. 25 The Order continued to grow for several

146 Canada Dry years. It numbered eleven thousand members in Canada West in 1855. 26 Besides recruiting new members, the Sons enlisted a number of temperance veterans, thus sometimes causing older groups affiliated with the Montreal Society to languish.2 7 Moreover, Sons of Temperance literature soon rivalled that emanating from the Montreal Society. By 1851 there were three newspapers associated with the Order in the Province of Canada. One of these was published in Belleville, another in Toronto, with the Cadet for juveniles appearing in Montreal. The Canadian Son of Temperance and Literary Gem, published by Charles Durand in Toronto between 1851 and 1855, bore certain similarities to the Advocate. It, too, had an agricultural section and a utopian bent; besides beckoning workingmen to the reading room, it made sweeping predictions of the end of ignorance and oppression in a sober world. 28 By inspiring these new journals and by circulating thousands of copies of temperance tracts, the Sons added appreciably to the store of temperance literature in Canada. They propelled their major field of activity, Canada West, to the forefront of the movement. Besides shifting the dynamism to Canada West, they introduced a secular approach which was quite unlike that of the Montreal Society. The Sons did proclaim temperance as one of the loftiest causes in history, and their elaborate costumes, titles, rituals, and secret passwords fostered a quasi-religious mystique. Yet they catered directly to material needs with their insurance benefits, and they operated on the down-to-earth assumption that people would become sober when they developed other forms of leisure to replace drinking. Disregarding the raised eyebrows of Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian temperance supporters, they invited the public to teetotal balls and dances. 29 They made a point of addressing 'respectable' audiences to enlist their support, sometimes entertaining them with comical speeches. By distancing the movement somewhat from earnest evangelicals, they tapped a new group of supporters. The Sons were able to set up societies in places which had previously shown little interest, and to secure wider press coverage. Yet, perhaps partly because of its American associations, the Order did meet with some prejudice, particularly in Toronto. 30 North of the city, though, according to the historian W.R. Riddell, the Sons had a real impact in the 1850s, their numerous lodges exercising a marked effect on drinking habits. 3 '

III The political strategy adopted by the Sons exemplified their more secular approach. They did not share the Montreal Society's commitment to

Nearly Dry

147

'moral suasion.' They called instead for a specific, coercive legislative measure: prohibition. The Sons, in fact, introduced the campaign to ban the production and sale of liquor in the Province of Canada. In less than a decade after passage of a prohibitory law by the State of Maine in 1846, eleven New England and Midwestern states had followed suit. Hoping that Canada would comply too, the Sons began a vigorous campaign in the early 1850s. They lobbied members of parliament individually, and they besieged the whole body with petitions bearing thousands of signatures, reaching one hundred thousand a year in the mid-185os. Some petitions came from Canada East, but 80 per cent were from Canada West. 32 So influential were the Sons of Temperance that this campaign quickly overshadowed less Draconian approaches to sobriety. Prohibition became the rallying cry of Canadian temperance forces in the early 1850s. Despite John Dougall's predilection for voluntary measures, the Montreal Society and many of its affiliates endorsed the campaign. 33 The Montreallers, however, were not well-placed to spearhead the prohibition movement. Predominantly Protestant, the Society could not deliver French-Canadian votes for prohibition. It did not even succeed in persuading Montreal's anglophone press of the value of the measure. 34 It was Toronto and its hinterland that would lead the coming battle in Canada. The campaign proceeded steadily through the first half of the 1850s. In December 1852, despite the Montreal Society's difficulties in converting its own fellow townsmen, the Advocate rejoiced that things were better elsewhere in the land: 'The past year has been one of the most important in the history of the temperance movement. A decided stand has been taken against the traffic. If not on the statute book, at least in public sentiment, the liquor business is outlawed ... ' 35 In Toronto the following summer, the Presbyterian Eccksiastical and Missionary &cord also applauded 'a complete revolution ... in man's ideas and sentiments on the subject of licence laws' 36 both at home and abroad. The Anti-Liquor Law League was established in Toronto in 1853. Benefiting from the financial backing of railway entrepreneur E.F. Whittemore, it undertook to send 'Maine Law' lecturers out to the countryside. 37 This enterprise may account for the swelling attendance at prohibition conventions, with Toronto rather than Montreal now playing host. Thirty-five 'very respectable' gentlemen discussed strategy in 1853; three hundred such gentlemen discussed it in 1855. Like prohibitionists in the adjacent states, Canadians were clearly moving away from the movement's revivalist origins. Perhaps it is true that the movement's supporters were by this time largely (as their American counterparts have been characterized) 'an al-

148 Canada Dry liance of property and middle class respectability against the specter of pauperism and urban crime.' 38 The gentlemen were interested in a change which they regarded as both businesslike and benevolent. A well-known Canadian prohibition pamphlet of the period, The Maine Law Illustrated, discussed the sterling results of prohibition in Portland, Maine: The good effects of the law manifest themselves in a hundred varied ways. Active industry has supplied the place formerly occupied by the mere consumers of the city's wealth. The streets are now quiet and orderly by day and night; the Sabbath is tranquil, and observed throughout with becoming decorum. Five new churches have been built since the passing of the law, and they are well filled ... 39

Not only was this population peaceful and pious, all classes were more prosperous: Business of all kinds has benefited. The grocer who formerly supplied to many a cadaverous-looking customer a small quantity of tea or coffee, and a large quantity of rum, now promptly meets the cheerful demand for a healthful supply of the necessaries of life. The dry goods merchant finds that sundry carpets and blankets, and warm clothing, and the numberless incidentals to a comfortable home are in requisition ... the money, formerly worse than squandered, now goes to make the family respectable and the home happy.10

Support for this cosy prospect came not only from the business community but from a wide range of improvers. As might be expected, various Methodist groups approved of a prohibitory law; as did smaller sects such as the Children of Peace.4' The more measured voice of the Free Kirk also seemed sympathetic to this admittedly drastic measure: For years benevolent Christian men have been trying to have taverns reduced with very little effect. Now they are beginning to look at the entire suppression of taverns and tippling houses as the only means of arresting the progress of intemperance and restoring society to a sound and healthy condition. 12

Various political reformers chimed in, ranging from the aging radical hero William Lyon Mackenzie to the liberal George Brown, whose Globe spoke for urban business interests as well as those of the farm. 43 Beyond the city's limits, the call for prohibition was strong. A number of observers expressed the opinion before parliamentary committees of the

Nearly Dry

149

1850s that a majority of the rural population of Canada West favoured prohibition, being considerably more supportive of the measure than townsfolk were. 14 The combination of widespread rural support and leadership by a dynamic segment of the urban elite seems to have justified the assertion of the Christian Guardian in 1855 'that a large and influential portion of the community are decidedly in favour of a prohibitory law cannot be questioned.' 45 Noting the size and strength of the prohibition camp, the politicians were quite circumspect. For a variety of reasons, the measure was not well regarded in parliament. Quite probably the majority of members drank themselves, some certainly to excess; and many used liquor to win votes at election time. 16 Some objected that prohibition was unenforceable; others opposed the idea of coercion. Nonetheless, most of the members kept their reservations quiet, and either abstained from voting on the question or made a public show of support. When a Maine Law or prohibition bill was presented in parliament in the autumn of 1854, only a few brave souls such as George-Etienne Cartier and J.H. Cameron spoke against it.47 The Montreal Witness rejoiced that even 'if teetotallers do not form the majority of the present members of Parliament, there is a majority pledged to vote [a Maine Law] .' 18 In October 1854 the bill passed its second reading in the House by a majority of ninety-seven to five. 49 It was anticipated that the real struggle would take place in committee and thereafter, but the size of the majority on the second reading and the bill's popularity 'out of doors' raised great expectations in temperance quarters. When the bill emerged from committee in the spring of 1855 for its final reading, alcohol manufacturers were sufficiently alarmed to petition the government for compensation in the event of passage. In temperance camps, hopes mounted when it became known that the Legislative Council had indicated willingness to accept the bill if it passed in the Assembly. Victory celebrations were planned. After an all-night debate, the bill was carried through final reading with a large majority in the House. However, the Speaker moved quickly to shatter temperance dreams by declaring the bill out of order on a technicality! 50 The convenient objection which got the members off the hook was that, since the bill affected commerce, it should have been discussed by a committee of the whole rather than a select committee. Naturally, temperance forces were outraged. The Christian Guardian declared that this was the third time the bill had been before the House and been fully discussed without anyone raising the technical objection. Always before, the Guardian complained, the politicians had been able to

150 Canada Dry forestall prohibition. But this time 'the expression of public feeling in the country has been so decided in demanding a Prohibitory Law, and the Bill has passed through its preliminary stages by such overwhelming majorities, that but few of its opponents felt they could meet it with a direct and open opposition.' 5' The need to resort to such strategems does suggest the politicians were aware of strong public backing for prohibition. The Province of Canada's close brush with prohibition in 1855, at the same time similar campaigns were under way in the Maritimes, indicates the strength of temperance sentiment in the middle of the nineteenth century. In English parts of the Province of Canada, much of the support for strong measures against drink had grown from the Montreal Temperance Society's vigorous province-wide evangelism during in 1841-2. This campaign had given rise to grass-roots activism in a host of communities. That in turn had been followed by more secular drives by urban businessmen and professionals and by the Sons of Temperance. Fifteen years of these varying forms of agitation culminated in the cliff-hanging vote on prohibition in the mid-185os. Considering that the temperance movement had been unknown to most Canadians in 1830, and was still generally opposed by the elite in 1840, the near-passage of a prohibitory law in 1855 attests to the remarkable power of the movement in the mid-century decades. During the decade and a half after 1840, emphasis had passed from voluntary pledges to prohibitory legislation, and leadership in the temperance cause had moved from the eastern half of the province to the west. A legislative committee convened in 1856 to discuss prohibition reported that, despite strong temperance sentiment in French Canada (to be discussed in chapters 11 and 12), fewer than 14,000 people from Canada East had petitioned for prohibition, in contrast to 88,945 such petitioners from Canada West. Canada West also became a growing stronghold for temperance brotherhoods, with other groups such as the Independent Order of Good Templars and the British North American Templars soon joining the Sons. By 186o, when petitions for prohibition were still flooding in, 80 per cent of the petitioners were members of these fraternal societies. 52 In the middle of the nineteenth century, temperance societies of all sorts were in fighting fettle in the Province of Canada. In the back townships, passersby might upon occasion find their way blocked by a Jong procession composed of members of diverse societies, including Sons, Daughters, and Cadets of Temperance, children in a Coldwater

Nearly Dry

151

Army, 53 and members of some local group founded long ago by a Montreal Society circuit rider .. For decades to come, these assorted converts would gather for picnics and parades. In temperance halls across the province, they would meet to sing hymns to a better, drier world and discuss strategies for bringing it into existence. If local energies flagged, they could look to Toronto for leadership. There on a cold March night in 1851, a line of Sons of Temperance slipped out of a meeting room and paraded by torchlight, determined that henceforth their neighbourhood - which happened to be Yorkville - would be famed for sobriety rather than for drinking. 54 Such fires spread. By the end of the decade, Toronto had Templars as well as Sons; and the venerable Toronto Temperance Reformation Society, no longer despised, attracted a large public to meetings, week in and week out. 55 A few years later, in 1864, the Dunkin Act would open the way for counties, cities, and townships to vote to eliminate bars in their localities - an experiment which would only strengthen the drive for a more comprehensive ban. In town and country, the mid-century years saw the first wave of prohibitionists on the march. Probably none of these fresh recruits suspected that children and grandchildren of theirs would be waging the same war for some eighty years to come. The prohibitionists had just begun to fight.

ELEVEN

French Canada Awakens

When temperance crusades reached French Canadians in the 1840s, they were a people at a turning point. A newfound interest in sobriety was one manifestation of their changing attitudes. A key reform of the Catholic revival of that decade, temperance and other religious societies helped consolidate clerical prestige and control. Catholic temperance enhanced church influence because it was able to attract not only religious reformers but secular progressives as well. This built a broad coalition to support the clerical agenda for reform. Much of the writing on French-Canadian temperance has simply narrated the colourful story, or taken the form of clerical hagiography or demonology.' Scholarly studies of popular religion in town and country have begun to offer what are as yet only tantalizing hints of how temperance affected popular culture, assuring that Catholic practices gradually replaced more traditional ones. 2 Here we are telling the story mostly 'from the top down,' relying primarily on ecclesiastic and legislative records, temperance literature, and newspaper accounts of the crusade. Taken together, however, these sources allow us to go beyond earlier accounts to see that the crowd-pleasing qualities of Father Chiniquy or the determination of Bishop Bourget were not alone responsible for the sobering of French Canada. The 'miracle' of the mid-century's mass conversions lay, rather, in the movement's ideology. It will be argued here that temperance offered apparent solutions to the grave social concerns then facing French Canada. Energies that had been channelled towards political radicalism before it was discredited in the Rebellions, were redirected towards social reform. This was no sham: temperance reform was certainly needed in the hard-drinking colonies of British North America. As we have seen,

154 Canada Dry though, the movement's solid value was typically accompanied by a most unrealistic optimism about its power to completely regenerate society. French Canada's particular dry utopia owed more to l'appel de la race than to Apocalyptic notions. As in English Canada, though, the Gospel of Progress was much in evidence. Temperance seemed such a timely and progressive path to suroivance that former patriotes joined the priests in singing its praises. When the broad spectrum of leadership was thus moved, it is hardly surprising that the people joined in the chorus.

I Historians have noted the transformation in French-Canadian society in the decade following the 1837-8 Rebellions, a 'watershed in Canadian political development,' which began a realignment of classes and also a dramatic change in the function and power of the Catholic Church.3 In 1837 the popular leaders had been patriotes, who, drawing their supporters largely from the agrarian majority, had blocked plans for commercial development put forward by British Lower Canadians. The patriotes were also wary of the clergy, tending to share the opposition seen among European liberals to the dime and to church control of education. Heedless of the clergy's condemnation, thousands of people had joined the uprising which the patriotes led. After it was over, the French-Canadian bourgeoisie experienced what Fernand Ouellet has called a psychological revolution. 4 A number of French-Canadian businessmen involved themselves in large-scale commercial enterprises, including some in the newer areas of finance, industry, and transportation. 5 Steering away from the sharp ethnic divisions of the Rebellion era, French-Canadian Reform politicians, led by L.-H. Lafontaine, formed an alliance with like-minded English Canadians. In this new Reform party, former patriotes also restored connections with the Catholic Church.6 For the church, too, the 1840s were a time of change. It recovered the popularity it had lost during the Rebellion decade. A new fervour arose among the people. Strengthened by an expanding clergy and many new institutions, the church experienced 'un tournant decisif.' 7 By the end of the 1840s, it would be strong enough to go on the offensive against the dwindling groups of anti-clerical liberals. By that time, the clergy had a number of liberal friends. Etienne Parent, French Canada's leading intellectual and long-time editor of the influential newspaper Le Canadien, had abandoned his former scepticism to support an activist social Catholicism, with a new role for the clergy as national leaders. Another intellectual and former patriote, Franrois Xavier Garneau,

French Canada Awakens

155

held out a little longer. A critical attitude towards the clergy surfaced in the first volume of his Histoire du Canada in 1845. By the time the third volume appeared four years later, Garneau, after weathering much criticism, was ready to concede that religion and nationality were inseparable. It took some time for the changed climate to affect everyone. Enthusiastic converts to liberal ideas did not retreat without resistance. It was not until Confederation that ultramontane influences really curtailed liberal expression. By the 1850s, however, it was clear which way the wind was blowing. Temperance was one of the first manifestations of this new clerical leadership. It was while the religious reorientation of French-Canadian society was occurring that the temperance movement there enjoyed its years of greatest success. Two currents created the strong Catholic temperance movement of the 1840s. The first was a desire for progress on the part of the French-Canadian left, the men associated with the rouge political group and with the lnstitut canadien. The second, stronger current stemmed from the program for a fully Catholic society presented by ultramontane clergymen and particularly associated with Bishop Ignace Bourget of Montreal. Both groups found in temperance an ideology of change that was simple, immediate, and capable of uniting people of otherwise divergent views. As we have seen, temperance movements tended to attract both the pious and the progressive - and often those who, like the Montreal Temperance Society's Scottish merchants, were both. In French Canada similarly, there were both free-thinking radicals and devout Catholics who would come to see temperance as the most basic and vital of reforms. The common ground was a strong desire for change. Temperance supporters believed society would progress when people altered their habits. Moralists and materialists agreed that people would be better off if they acquired self-discipline, education, thrift, and foresight. They also agreed that parents, and particularly mothers, might bring dramatic change if they devoted themselves to the moral training of the next generation. Reformers of various stripes shared the hope that temperance would turn a stagnant and demoralized population into an enlightened, energetic, upright one. The triumph of temperance was not expected (as some Protestants believed) to usher in the end of the world but, rather, the birth of a mighty Catholic nation. II Drinking had become a serious problem among the French-speaking population, which was largely concentrated in Lower Canada (or, as it

156 Canada Dry was renamed in 1841, Canada East). Governor Murray had reported in 1762 that the newly conquered population was a sober one;8 but things had begun to change with the influx of very cheap rum from the British West Indies. In the early nineteenth century, local production also increased,!'' and a steam process was introduced, causing prices to drop even further. The cheap liquor found many uses. In the countryside, British traders found rum one of the few trade items of which the relatively selfsufficient habitants were willing to expand their consumption.' 0 By the 1790s travellers were reporting that the habitants had become heavy drinkers." In 1807 Le Canadien confirmed that the taste for spirits 'est fortement repandue en ce pays.' 12 As the towns grew, sanitation problems increased, and Montreallers began to doctor their dubious water with brandy before drinking it. ' 3 Towns also suffered from a lack of recreation facilities, and drinking was one of the few amusements available to the lower classes. The bitter climate also fostered increasing use of the cheap liquor. In the nineteenth century, outdoor labourers, carters, and farmers considered liquor a necessary on-the:job stimulant. As in English Canada, gentlemen as well as common folk were given to heavy drinking, and moralists attributed the decline of many seigneurs' sons to drink. ' 1 According to both clerical and lay observers, intemperance reached its height in many parishes in the 1830s.•~ When the first French-Canadian temperance societies appeared around 1840, one of these societies established as a criterion for reform that members would restrict themselves to six small glasses of liquor a day. 16 Perhaps it was unlikely, as temperance forces said, that anyone who had more than six glasses would be working energetically for change. The unreformed are recorded, at a slightly later date, in Kreighoff paintings, emerging from a night's carousing at the local inn to careen home across the snowy landscapes. Their bushels, as counted up by the historian Fernand Ouellet, are found to be too few and too concentrated in wheat, when rust, insects, and markets all suggested a change to oats or barley.'' They were not like the thrifty, improving American or Scots farmer in the Eastern Townships who studied how to tap the market and applied himself (and his little hoard of capital) unceasingly. The habitants, according to the nineteenth-century historian Thomas Chapais, stayed with the traditional cycle of feast and famine: Les fetes etaient presque continuelles, ii n 'y avait pour ainsi dire que dans Jes saisons des semences et des recoltes qu'on travaillait.J'ai vu des habitants, pour

French Canada Awakens

157

n'avoir pas repare !es ponts fosses de traverse, clans la morte-saison,jeter clans le fosse le premiere charge de gerbes, pour passer !es gerbes par-dessus. 18

A battle rages about the accuracy of this image; and some who concede its accuracy question the degree to which it was peculiar to the FrenchCanadian farmer.' 9 A study of the temperance movement throws an interesting sidelight on this controversy, for it suggests that the people themselves in the 1840s were accepting the characterization of themselves as hidebound traditionalists. Temperance campaigners called upon the habitant to reform and become more like the sober, informed, and industrious immigrant. Temperance was presented as a rite of passage from an impoverished rural society to an advanced or 'civilized' nation with indigenous industry, modern agriculture, and universal education. One finds large numbers of habitants who appear to have themselves conceded - after some clerical urging - they needed to change their ways and were willing to undergo considerable self-sacrifice in order to do so. Such self-abegnation prepared the ground for temperance to become the most popular social reform movement in French Canada in the decade following the Rebellions.

III During the 1840s, when the impetus for change passed from the laity to the clergy, the torch passed to the cluster of ultramontane clergy identified with Ignace Bourget, who became Bishop of Montreal in 1840. For many, the name calls up unpleasant associations. Was it not Bourget who for years tried to suppress the intellectual freedom of the Institut canadien, an attempt that culminated in the notorious Guibord affair of the 1870s, when the bishop would not even let a liberal lie in peace in a Catholic cemetery? Then, too, there were the anachronistic Zouaves, young French-Canadian men whom Bourget decked out in exotic garb and sent off to Europe in the 1860s to defend ancient and crumbling claims of temporal papal power. Bishop Bourget's Catholicism conjured up a very literal spirituality, a constant mixing of God in everything. It seems a latter-day transfer from pre-literate societies in which the world was alive with spirits - convenient spirits used to explain everything that was not readily explainable. In Bourget's mandements, one encounters this very immanent God, who ruins the harvest to punish the people for drunkenness, and stems a typhus epidemic to reward them for their good behaviour. 20

158 Canada Dry Moreover, the basic issue on which ultramontanes came together was opposition to liberal ideas, known in the bishop's terminology as 'the forces of evil.' His ultramontanes were counter-revolutionaries who stressed obedience to established authority. The bishop had an explicit counter-revolutionary aim in promoting temperance societies; he hoped that besides improving morality, they would substitute for the political clubs of the Rebellion years.21 In this respect, he seconded the views of some English-Canadian magistrates (and the Canada Temperance Advocate) who asserted that the Lower Canada rebellions had been fomented in taverns.22 Bourget and his followers also took an uncompromising stance towards other religions. The bishop asserted that 'no one is permitted to be free in his religious and political opinions,' for it was the prerogative of the church ' to teach sovereigns to govern with wisdom and subjects to obey in gladness.' 23 This principle, in Phillipe Sylvain's opinion, 'led directly to theocracy.' Bourget's church was colourful, intolerant, and profoundly out of step with many of the more progressive currents of the nineteenth century. All this may sound sufficiently unpalatable to raise the question of why so many French Canadians adhered so ardently to this extreme form of Catholicism. Why was there so much support for Bourget's program that he became, as even a critic admits, 'one of the great architects of the Province of Quebec'?•~ In fact, many of his enthusiasms cast him with the moderns rather than the ancients, and the image of a reactionary autocrat does not do justice to the dynamic bishop. His ultramontane state was sustained, not by martial or state power (still in 1840 in British hands), but by a strong body of public opinion. This support was won in the decades after the Rebellion - and particularly during the 1840s, the time which most concerns us here, because that is the period when French-Canadian temperance sentiment would peak. During the 1840s, ultramontanism had not yet clearly assumed its conservative, or b/,eu, coloration. Indeed, many of Bourget's early actions seemed quite progressive. In a society recently humiliated and demoralized by the Rebellions, Bourget was building anew. He promoted the alliance with the Baldwin-Lafontaine Reformers. He recruited the numerous religious orders who established the elementary schools for which progressives had long campaigned. To address growing urban poverty, he helped set up a network of new and timely parish organizations, such as the St Vincent de Paul Society, to administer poor relief, and the Ladies of Charity to look after country girls who migrated to town. When concern arose that too many French Canadians were emigrating, the clergy helped

French Canada Awakens

159

direct settlers towards the Eastern Townships and other regions where farmland was available. During the Irish famine immigration, Bourget led a contingent of nuns and priests who worked among the victims with a heroism that won praise from Catholics and Protestants alike. Such efforts were partially funded by wealthy laymen, particularly by one who has been labelled the bishop's 'minister of finance ,' businessman Antoine-Olivier Berthe let - a philanthropist whose commitment to temperance and other social concerns paralleled that of English Montreallers such as Joseph MacKay and John Redpath.26 Berthelet's bounty and Bourget's clergy created a whole range of new Catholic social welfare institutions, magdalens and orphanages, hospitals and asylums, and a school for the deaf founded on the most up-to-date principles. The church was the institution which most visibly addressed the social dilemmas of the day. In many ways a modern man, Bourget even accepted innovations which came from Protestant quarters. An early riser and a tireless worker, he seemed to find the nostrums of Samuel Smiles congenial; like Protestant reformers, the bishop tried to encourage prudence and thrift. He declared idleness the mother of all vice. He encouraged practical education,'' workers' savings banks, and insurance schemes. Another modernizing feature of the bishop's program was temperance. Bourget did not dismiss temperance as a Protestant movement the way his predecessor, Bishop Lartigue, had done. Indeed, he became convinced that drunkenness was the 'mal capital de ce pays,' 28 that drinking on saints' days was a prime cause of sexual immorality and domestic discord.29 By 1845, the bishop concurred with another conclusion that Protestant temperance leaders had reached: that total abstinence was the only way to prevent backsliding in a world where there was such constant temptation to over-indulge in drink. Like the Protestants, Bishop Bourget upheld total abstinence as a form of charity that the strong should undertake in order to save the weak.30 Bourget was a key figure in all three major mid-century temperance efforts in French Canada; in the revei,l religieux, outlined in this chapter, and also in the Chiniquy crusade and the Societe de la Croix, discussed in chapter 12. Another aspect of Bourget's Catholicism which might be considered progressive was its commitment to the masses rather than to the elite. The Montreal ecclesiastic built popular religious fervour by introducing large, impressive ceremonies which brought the warming influence of Mediterranean Catholicism to Canada. Thousands of people thronged to open-air masses, processions, and pilgrimages, which were said to produce a feeling of ecstacy not unlike intoxication.!!' Indeed, such ceremonies

160 Canada Dry embodied the collective ideal of the ultramontanes. Religion, in Bishop Bourget's view, could correct a fault with which French Canadians were sometimes charged: that they were disunited, and too lacking in public spirit to be able to cooperate for the common good. 32 Ultramontane pageants which gathered thousands together symbolized a newfound unity. By contrast, the individualism which the liberals acclaimed could seem selfish and paltry. Mother Church instead called the people to a higher, collective destiny. The flock was also attracted by popular preachers analogous to Protestant religious revivalists; and it was through this means that many French Canadians first heard about temperance. Although isolated parish temperance societies appeared in the 1830s, Catholic temperance really got under way when Bishop Bourget invited a hellfire-and-damnation preacher from France to preach at a series of parish religious services during 184-1. The visit of Monseigneur Charles Forbin:Janson, bishop of the diocese of Nancy, to Canada East initiated a reveil religi,eux, or religious awakening. The French bishop used tactics such as darkening the church and recreating the sounds of hell so vividly that the worried organizers warned women and children to stay away. Forbin:Janson visited some sixty parishes from Gaspe to Bytown. Everywhere he was greeted with tremendous enthusiasm. Many lapsed Catholics used the occasion to return to the sacraments.33 Often at the close of one of these revivals, the people would march in procession to erect a large public cross as a symbol of their renewed Catholic faith. In order to reinforce resolutions to abandon immoral ways, ForbinJanson founded temperance societies at the close of his services. After the revival in September 1840 at the parish of Notre-Dame in Quebec, a great crowd of men and women applied to join. The town's leading citizens provided enthusiastic leadership, and several thousand people of the neighbouring parishes of St Roch and St Patrick also enrolled.34 At TroisRivieres, six thousand similarly became members. 35 But Montreallers, who were not noted for obedience to the clergy, and whose town was a distilling centre, were not so enthusiastic. The city's elite had some hesitation about joining, and the women did not come forward; also, unlike some Quebeckers, the Montreallers showed no interest in pledging total abstinence. Nevertheless, several thousand men did pledge to restrict themselves to moderate drinking. 36 Montreal's Li\urore called upon the principal citizens to support the society, urging that it was not, as many supposed, only for drunkards. Nonetheless, most of the early members were drawn from the lower classes.37

French Canada Awakens

161

Meanwhile Bishop Forbin:Janson continued his circuit of the province. Returning to Quebec, he presided over a magnificent ceremony held in Beauport in the fall of 1841. This pageant, like many others of the 1840s, celebrated sobriety. Twenty-two ecclesiastics marched from the Quebec seminary to Beauport to erect a column in honour of temperance. Following the prelates were two white-robed girls carrying a snowy banner; then more banners, seven choirs of women, twenty-two cavaliers, each leading a contingent of men; a large group of priests (who were in town for a clerical retreat); and finally, a crowd of ten thousand people from the surrounding parishes who prayed, chanted, and cried out, 'Vive la croix!' and 'Vive Jesus!' Le Canadien could not find enough superlatives to report the experience: We have never seen such an immense multitude gathered in one place with such a noble aim. Man, no matter what the strayings of his heart and the impious revolts of his spirit, in the presence of so much majesty feels small ... feels magnetised with respect and fear, possessed by the vast idea of his destiny ... 311

Not all were awestruck; some doubtless came for entertainment, and needy citizens found parish alms more forthcoming if they supported temperance. 39 For those who shared the reflective cast of mind of Le Canadien's editor, though, here indeed was balm to heal the defeats and dissensions of the Rebellion years, and hope that French Canada would see glory once again. Although Bishop Forbin:Janson presided over the Beauport ceremony, the affair had been arranged by the young cure of Beauport parish, Father Charles Chiniquy. The son of a Kamouraska notary, Chiniquy had been orphaned early in life. He had been encouraged by a friendly local priest to enter the seminary. After ordination, he began his priestly career as a chaplain at the Quebec Marine Hospital. After some exposure to British temperance literature, Chiniquy had become convinced that many of the ills he saw at the hospital could be traced to drink. He and several other priests had begun preaching temperance in parishes near Quebec City some months before the reveil got under way in 1840. They had been inspired by the temperance campaign Father Theobald Mathew was conducting in Ireland, which was said to be creating a moral revolution among the people there. After founding a temperance society in his own Beauport parish in 1840, Father Chiniquy perceived a dramatic new commitment both to morality and to schooling. 40 When Bishop Forbin:Janson arrived, Chiniquy had invited the visiting prelate to erect a temperance

162 Canada Dry column, which would record for future generations the transformation of the people of Beauport. After the French bishop departed for home, French Canada's Catholic churchmen worked to keep the spirit of the reveil alive. Reports from cures suggested that people tended to persevere in their new moral resolves in parishes where temperance societies had been founded. Bishop Bourget and Archbishop Joseph Signay of the Quebec diocese both promoted the spread of these societies.4' Bourget invited the Oblate Fathers, a French order dedicated to preaching to the poor, to establish themselves in his diocese, and temperance work became a standard feature of their missions to the settlers, Indians, and lumbermen. The timber camps, in particular, were affected. In the spring of 1845, the residents of Point Gatineau were astounded to see usually riotous lumberjacks praying and singing hymns as they rode their rafts down the river to Quebec. 42 While the Oblates penetrated north and west into the Shield country, Father Chiniquy and several other priests also continued to preach temperance in various parishes east of Trois-Rivieres. The first wave of temperance lasted from 1840 until about 1845. In February 1842, Archbishop Signay was able to report that temperance societies had been established in every parish in the Quebec diocese. For two years thereafter, the movement continued to flourish. Father Chiniquy's temperance manual, published in 1844, reported 75,000 Catholic temperance society members in Canada East, 43 and Archbishop Signay congratulated his people on a marked increase in sobriety. 44 Declining liquor imports and merchants' records do suggest, besides, that the people (who in those years generally pledged moderation rather than abstinence) had in fact reduced their consumption of alcohol. A new brewery was established in Quebec City in 1844, supplying those who had taken the 'moderation pledge' with a milder substance than spirits. 15 The reveil, in sum, had reawakened Catholic spirituality; the temperance movement which accompanied it in the early 1840s was an attempt to curb drunkenness because it corrupted that spirituality. Typically, though, the enthusiasm generated by religious revivals cannot be sustained; and by the mid-184os, observers were noting that temperance fervour was on the wane. IV

When French-Canadian temperance re-emerged in the second half of the 1840s, it focused more on social reform than on salvation. Sobriety began

French Canada Awakens

163

to appear less as a path to personal holiness, more as a solution to worldly woes. Some of the most glaring of these were the dislocation and crime associated with the growth of towns and the influx of impoverished immigrants. It was in the second half of the decade that Charles Mondelet, the Montreal circuit court judge, would issue to Montreal grand juries his series of well-publicized addresses singling out intemperance as the major cause of crime. Another grave concern in the late 1840s was the migration of French Canadians in swelling numbers to the United States. Some lay leaders began to relate the problem of drink to the question of French Canada's ability to survive in the midst of rapidly advancing anglophone communities in North America. This second wave of temperance sentiment in French Canada had some radical associations. Judge Mondelet, the most prominent of the lay temperance reformers, was a man of independent mind who has been called a follower ofVoltaire. 47 No party man, Mondelet had broken with the patriotes in the 1830s over what he considered their extremism; but he acted as defence counsel for those same patriotes when they were imprisoned in 1837; in 1838 he too suffered arrest. Like some of the other progressives of his generation, he became interested in the questions Lord Durham had raised about what degree of anglicization was necessary to modernize French Canada. Mondelet dealt with the issue in his Lettres sur ['education eumumtaire et pratique. On good terms with the city's young liberals, the judge was invited to address the Institut canadien on a variety of subjects during its peak of popularity in the late 1840s. There he dispensed modernizing advice: to rise early, eat and drink moderately, and keep busy; to educate women, that they might raise the moral tone of the whole household; to make tomorrow's society a rational one by keeping the young away from superstitious nursemaids. 48 Such ideas found favour with the young intelligentsia. The journal of the leftwing intellectuals, Montreal's L 'Avenir, exhorted its readers to pass the long winter evenings in study and other forms of self-improvement. 49 Young French-Canadian leaders, the influential journalist Etienne Parent noted in 1848, no longer fell prey to the dissipated habit,; that had claimed so many of their elders. 50 This wing of the movement had not taken the clerical path to temperance beliefs; Mondelet's conversion was probably a result, not of the revei~ but of the influence of his father, a coroner who had long maintained that drink was largely responsible for crime. 5 ' Accordingly, when the free-thinking judge became a temperance activist around 1845, he introduced a secular and rouge strain into what had hitherto been a religious movement among French Canadians.

164 Canada Dry Judge Mondelet claimed that drink was a contributing factor in seveneighths of the crimes annually committed. 52 He released to the press examples gathered during his years on the bench, and claimed that case after case had shown that excessive use of drink occasioned violence, arson, and theft. The Montreal jail-keeper as well as Mondelet's colleague on the bench, J.S. McCord, also declared that they had found a strong correlation between drunkenness and crime. 53 Mondelet further insisted that young criminals were learning their skills in taverns - veritable academies of crime, which also drained off the money which should have been used to send children to school. 54 Temperance was presented as the most basic of all social reforms. Excessive drinking was a prime cause of human suffering which society could, and should, begin to eliminate. It led to the abuse of innocent wives, children, and parents. The wealthy, as well as the poor, were guilty - a point Mondelet supported by publicizing the drunken misconduct of seigneurs' sons, including the death by deli,rium tremens of a young gentleman at Longueuil. 55 Other observers seconded the judge's assertions that drink took a heavy toll. A writer who claimed to be familiar with rural inheritance practices said that liquor payments in the annuities that children promised to their aging parents added significantly to the burden of debt in assuming a farm. 56 Another writer calculated that drunkenness had led to the break-up of nearly seven hundred French-Canadian families, leaving about 3,800 children to beg for their bread. 57 When these claims were considered, it began to seem that curbing drink might be a forward step. Arson, suicide, and drunken accidents would decline; public health and manners would improve. The desire for education and selfimprovement would spread, leading Canada at last to prosperity. 58 In Judge Mondelet's view, the drinking problem was so extensive, and current practices so injurious to society, that temperance would bring about 'a complete revolution in human affairs.' 59 A growing chorus of reformers endorsed temperance reform. The editor of the Lower Canada Agriculturaljournal said sobriety would improve farming in the most basic way, by making the farmer more vigorous. 60 School Superintendent J.B. Meilleur, who had long advocated levying higher liquor taxes as a source of school funding,61 endorsed Chiniquy's temperance manual and recommended its use in the schools.62 Political radicals such as T.S. Brown and Wolfred Nelson also endorsed the campaign against drink. Brown, who had led patriote forces at St Charles, became a platform speaker on temperance, presenting 'King Alcohol' as the great oppressor of the poor.63 Mondelet, as has been noted, carried his convictions to what he saw as

French Canada Awakens

165

their logical conclusion. He urged the community to unite and take whatever steps were needed to see that the taverns closed down.r"' The judge lashed out at the provincial government's disregard for its citizens in granting licences upon appeal to people rejected by local authorities. 6~ The priests had relied on individual conviction to curtail drinking; but Mondelet wanted civic action, and he recruited prestigious members of the grand juries to the cause. He predicted that temperance reform would be a rallying point which would unite laymen and priests, and people of various classes and groups. 66 By the late 1840s, when Mondelet called for the abolition of taverns, others were sufficiently alarmed about Montreal's growing crime and misery to agree. The journal La Revue canadienne argued that for /,es grands maux one needed /,es grands remedes. Since it was intemperance that filled the streets with ragged beggars and the jails with criminals, then 'a bas /,es licenses d'auberges, qui soot la plupart d'infames repaires de brigands ... a bas ces lieux inutiles remplis d'oisifs et de faineants, qui soot la terreur et l'effroi, la home et le desespoir, des villes et villages.' 67 Another cause of concern was the growing number of French Canadians who were emigrating to the United States. Could drink again be the culprit? A legislative committee appointed to enquire into French-Canadian migration found that lumberjacks who frittered away their wages on wild living had no savings to fall back upon when periodic slumps hit the timber trade. Thus, unemployed lumbermen were forced to emigrate. The committee also heard evidence of farmers drinking themselves into such heavy debt that they, too, had to sell out and leave. 68 As such testimony mounted, those who worried about French Canada's future began to see drink as a menace. The Quebec Committee on Reform and Progress passed temperance resolutions, and the Montreal lnstitut canadien chose a temperance lecturer to address them on the subject of 'National Industry and Economy.'f'9 Hector Langevin, then at the beginning of his long political career, declared that drunkenness had become so serious that it had replaced assimilation as the great national peril: ... ce petit peuple a grandi ... sa langue et ses moeurs ne periront pas. Mais un danger plus grand le menace; cette fois, ii ne s'agit plus de l'anglification; c'est le chancre de l'intemperance qui le devore ... ravissant la , 168ff, 17 5-82

Upper Canada, 4-5, 14-15, 82, 104-7, 125,219 Wadsworth, Richard Dawson, 4, 73-5, 100, 109, 112, 115 Ward, Edmund, 25, 33 Whittemore, E.F., 134-5, 147 Wilkes, Henry, ~70, 83-5 women: and drink, 5-7, 14, 21, 32-5, 79, 82, 97, 212, 221; and moral mission, 33-4, 89-95, 163, 178, 226; temperance work of, 11, 30-4, 38, 53, 97-102, 109, 116, 145, 177, 181,

206

Picture Credits

Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library: 'Montgomery's Tavern,' T13350; 'Tecumseh Wigwam Tavern,' fromj.R. Robertson, Landmarlcs (1897); 'Ketchum Hall,' T34770; 'Pledge Card,' 842P2;J. Ross Robertson Collection 'Bourget,' 16324; 'Notre Dame,' 14914; 'Voyaging,' T15g61. Public Archives of Canada: 'Oakville Temperance Hall,' PA87397; ' Newfoundland Medal,' C139902; 'Dougall,' C51702; 'Chiniquy,' C33233; 'Tilley,' C10115; 'Red River Expedition,' C48859; 'Gooderham and Worts,' PA136485; John Black,' by C.W.Jeffreys, C73433. Canada Temperance Advocare, 1851: 'Story of Latimer.'

Collection of Power Corporation of Canada: detail of 'New Year's Day Parade,' by Cornelius Kreighoff. Notman Photographic Archives, McCord Museum of Canadian History: 'Excise Official,' 30178-I.