God's Peculiar Peoples: Essays on Political Culture in Nineteenth Century Canada 9780773595712

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God’s Peculiar Peoples

The Carleton Library Series A series of original works, new collections and reprints of source material relating to Canada, issued under the supervision of the Editorial Board, Carleton Library Series, Carleton University Press Inc., Ottawa, Canada.

General Editor Michael Gnarowski

Editorial Board Valda Blundell (Anthropology) Irwin Gillespie (Economics) Robert J. Jackson (Political Science) Stephen Richer (Sociology) S.F.Wise (History) Barry Wright (Law)

S.F.Wise God’s Peculiar Peoples: Essays on Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Canada

Edited and Introduced by A.B. McKillop and Paul Romney

Carleton University Press Ottawa, Canada 1993

© Carleton University Press Inc. 1993 ISBN 0-88629-172-0 (casebound) ISBN 0-88629-173-9 (paperback) Printed and bound in Canada Carleton Library Series 172

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Wise, S.F. (Sydney Francis), 1924God’s peculiar peoples (Carleton Library Series 172) Includes bibliographical references ISBN 0-88629-172-0 (casebound) ISBN 0-88629-173-9 (paperback) 1. Political culture-Ontario-History-19th century. 2. Ontario-Politics and government-19th century. I. Title. II. Series. FC95.3.W58 1993 F1021.W58 1993

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Acknowledgements Carleton University Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing programme by the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. It also offers its gratitude to the Ontario Heritage Foundation for the subsidy that allowed publication of this volume.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

ONE tw o three

four f iv e

SIX

seven

e ig h t n in e

TEN

eleven

TWELVE

vii

Editors ’ Introduction

ix

Sermon Literature and Canadian Intellectual History

3

God’s Peculiar Peoples

19

Canadians View the United States: Colonial Attitudes from the Era of the War of 1812 to the Rebellions of 1837

45

The Rise of Christopher Hagerman

61

John Macaulay: Tory for All Seasons

73

Tory Factionalism: Kingston Elections and Upper Canadian Politics, 1820-1836

91

Canadians View the United States: The Annexation Movement and Its Effect on Canadian Opinion, 1837-1867

115

The War of 1812 in Popular History

149

Upper Canada and the Conservative Tradition

169

Conservatism and Political Development: The Canadian Case

185

Liberal Consensus or Ideological Battleground: Some Reflections on the Hartz Thesis

199

The Ontario Political Culture: A Study in Complexities

213

Notes

229

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T he essays in this volume have been previously published. The author and the editors wish, therefore, to acknowledge their indebtedness to the following journals, publishing houses and organizations for permission to republish them, sometimes in slightly altered form, here. “Sermon Literature and Canadian Intellectual History first appeared . in The Bulletin of the United Church of Canada Archives, Vol. XVIII (1965). “God’s Peculiar Peoples” appeared in W.L. Morton, ed., The Shield of Achilles; Le Bouclier d’Achille: Aspects of Canada in the Victorian Age (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968). “Colonial Attitudes from the Era of the War of 1812 to the Rebellions of 1837” and “The Annexation Movement and Its Effect on Cana­ dian Opinion, 1837-67” were published in S.F.Wise and R.C. Brown, eds., Canada Views the United States: 19th Century Political Atti­ tudes (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967, and Toronto: Macmillan, 1972). “The Rise of Christopher Hagerman” appeared in Historic Kingston Vol. XII (1965). We thank the Kingston Historical Society. “John Macaulay: Tory for All Seasons,” appeared in Gerald Tulchinsky, ed., To Preserve and Protect: Essays on 19th Century Kingston (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976). “Tory Factionalism: Kingston Elections and Upper Canadian Politics, 1820-1836” was published in Ontario History Vol. LVII (1965). We thank the Ontario Historical Society. “The War of 1812 in Popular History” appeared in R. Arthur Bowler, ed., War along the Niagara: essays on the War of 1812 and its legacy (Youngstown, N.Y.: Old Fort Niagara Association, 1991). “Upper Canada and the Conservative Tradition” was published in Profiles of a Province: studies in the history of Ontario (Toronto: Ontario Historical Society, 1967).

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“Conservatism and Political Development: The Canadian Case” was published in South Atlantic Quarterly (February, 1970). “Liberal Consensus or Ideological Battleground: Some Reflections on the Hartz Thesis,” a presidential address to the Canadian Historical Association, was published in Canadian Historical Association His­ torical Papers (1974). The Ontario Political Culture: A Study in Complexities” appeared in Graham White, ed., The Government and Politics of Ontario. 4th ed. (Toronto: Nelson, 1990). The editors wish to thank the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Re­ search of Carleton University for the research grant that supported the costs of reproducing the text. We thank Beverly Boutilier for undertak­ ing computerized text-entry with such despatch and good humour, and Noel Gates for his efficient copy-editing of the volume. A.B. McKillop conveys his deep gratitude to Dr. Naomi S. Griffiths, whose constant en­ couragement and support was instrumental in bringing the project to completion. All the while, S.F.Wise has served as a kind of deus ex machina. Having been responsible for the original appearance of a sub­ stantial body of historical writing, he judiciously stepped back to let the editors rummage through it, shaping and interpreting it as they wished. For such forbearance they are grateful, as they also are for his silence in print on the subject of Upper Canada or political culture while God’s Peculiar Peoples was being assembled. The silence is, we hope and trust, a temporary one. ’

ED ITO RS’ INTRODUCTION

Two centuries after the Constitutional (or Canada) Act of 1791 came into existence, the peoples of Canada again find themselves in the midst of constitutional and political reform of major proportions. The people of Quebec seek as never before to articulate and to shape their own national identity, and English-speaking Canadians, as a result, have been forced to examine the nature of their own political and social beliefs. The seriousness and urgency of this self-examination is heightened by the fact that since the passing of the Canada-U.S.A. free trade agreement in the late 1980s the nature of the relationship between Canada and the United States has also become a matter of intense scrutiny and much anxiety. In such a cultural and political milieu, the appearance of a book about the origins and development of political culture in Canada seems timely as well as important. No Canadian historian has given more sustained attention to the political convictions and attitudes of God’s peculiar, northern peoples than has S.F.Wise. Sydney Francis Wise was born in Toronto in 1924, and became in­ terested in the past when still a child. Like historian W.L. Morton a generation before him, that interest was fanned by reading the romantic historical adventures of writers such as G.A. Henty.1 By the time he had finished his first history essay assignment in high school— on the Eliza­ bethan age— Wise was “hooked” on the subject. As a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the last years of the Second World War he managed to find time to read a good deal of more serious history, and as a war veteran at the University of Toronto after the war, enrolled in the first year “Social and Philosophical Studies” programme in honours Arts, he had ample opportunity to develop his interests further. The University of Toronto in the immediate post-war years was an ideal environment for the making of an historian, for the historical ap­ proach characterized much of what went on in the humanities and social sciences. Wise studied with Griffith Taylor in Geography, Harold Innis and C.B. Macpherson— “outstanding, a marvellous lecturer,” Wise remembers2— in Political Economy, T.F. Mcllwraith in Anthropology, and Northrop Frye in English. In the History Department, he studied the

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Tudor-Stuart period with Richard Preston (later a colleague of Wise at the Royal Military College, Kingston) and Upper Canadian history with Chester Martin. He also took courses from Donald Creighton and Frank Underhill, whose writings collectively embodied the major elements of the Canadian political tradition. Both were easily, in Wise’s recollection, “the most dominant personalities” in the department. “I was attracted to both of them,” he reflects, “and never resolved the obvious tension between the two. And neither did they.” Few students who studied with such men would not have had an ex­ isting interest in the history of political thought and culture enhanced. Wise remembers well, for example, the essay he wrote for C.B. Macpherson on “Cromwell and the Levellers,” an exercise that acquainted him not only with the early works of historians such as Christopher Hill and J.H. Hexter but also with the great figures of Tudor-Stuart politi­ cal history. With this exposure to “these marvellous characters of the seventeenth century” also came entrance in depth into the world of po­ litical ideas. “And, of course,” Wise recalls enthusiastically, “they were speaking political thought! Imagine! Very exciting, this confrontation between the officers and the higher command of the army over the ends of the revolution.” 3 Without knowing it at the time, S.F.Wise was pro­ viding himself through such exercises with an ideal background for the study of Upper Canadian politics. Reflecting on the matter in 1991, he confirmed that the seventeenth century was “very relevant” to the kind of studies he later pursued. “A lot of the ideas I formed about the nature of intellectual history really crystallized in that period.” Wise graduated from the University of Toronto in 1949, taking with him the Maurice Cody Memorial Prize in History as well as the Senate Gold Medal. After a year at the University’s Library School (B.L.S., 1950), he returned to the study of history by enrolling in the Master’s programme at Queen’s University in Kingston. There he studied under A.R.M. Lower, and wrote an M.A. thesis on an aspect of eighteenthcentury Amerindian history.4 It was Arthur Lower who first suggested that he examine the Family Compact as the subject of the doctoral dis­ sertation he intended to write at Queen’s. Wise had already been solidly grounded in Upper Canadian history by Chester Martin at Toronto. Martin, he recollects, was “the only one” in the Toronto History Depart­ ment of the time “who took Upper Canada seriously. The rest did broad jumps over it and headed for Responsible Government and Confedera­ tion.” The approach of Lower to Canadian political and constitutional development was, like that of Martin, decidedly “Whiggish,” for both were more interested in the Baldwins than in the Robinsons. Yet that

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did not deter Lower from recommending to Wise that a serious exami­ nation of the Upper Canadian Tory tradition needed to be undertaken. The simple fact was that, as Lower told his prize student, “no one has ever done it.” Throughout his early years as a student at Queen’s, Wise also lectured (1950-55) at Royal Military College. His research on Amerindian history in the era of the American and French Revolutions was conducted, as a result, at a time when he was developing lectures on “War and Society.” The latter became the subject of his first book, Men in Arms: a his­ tory of the interrelationships of warfare and western society (New York, 1956), written with R.A. Preston and H.O. Werner.5 By the mid-1950s Wise had moved to Queen’s as a member of the History Department. For the next eleven years, he found himself teaching Tudor-Stuart and modern British as well as Canadian history. Among the many Cana­ dian courses he offered at Queen’s was one which was probably the first course on Canadian Intellectual History— a graduate seminar that he initiated in 1961. His research on the Upper Canadian conservative tra­ dition continued in spite of the fact that he was forced to abandon the prospect of a Queen’s Ph.D. because he was now on the university’s staff. Talented graduate students, such as A.W. Rasporich, R.A. Bowler, Nor­ man Shrive, and J.E. Rea— the latter, like Wise, now an ex-President of the Canadian Historical Association— were attracted in the 1960s to his highly stimulating graduate seminar on Upper Canada. By the middle of the decade Wise began to publish the first of what became a lengthening series of articles on different aspects of political culture in Canada, particularly Upper Canada. By the early Seventies his growing Upper Canadian ceuvre had begun to inspire a new generation of grad­ uate students to investigate the links between political and intellectual history.6 When Wise left Queen’s University in 1966 to take charge of the Di­ rectorate of History at National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa, his organizational and research skills took several new directions. Much of his attention was given to directing the research and writing of the official history of Canadian military aviation. The result was the first volume of that history, Canadian Airmen and the First World War (Toronto, 1980).7 At the same time, he applied his professional skills to a subject of long personal interest: the history and practice of sport in Canada. With his friend and fellow University of Toronto graduate of the 1940s Doug Fisher, he wrote the 1969 Report of the federal Task Force on Sport for Canadians,8 and he was the main author, a decade later, of the White Paper on Sport and Fitness Policy, Partners in Pursuit of Excellence (Ottawa, 1979). Between these two reports Wise published,

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with Fisher and in conjunction with the Sports Hall of Fame, Canada’s Sporting Heroes; Their Lives & Times (Toronto, 1974). This cornucopia of sports information and insight brought scholarly standards and his­ torical context to a much neglected and little known aspect of Canadian social experience. It also made history fun for many Canadian readers. Wise returned to formal academic life in 1973, as Professor of His­ tory (1973-78), Director of the Institute of Canadian Studies (197881), and Dean of Graduate Studies (1981-90) at Carleton University. When not engaged in academic administration, he found time for mem­ bership and executive positions on the Archaeological and Historical Sites Board of Ontario (1968-75) and the Ontario Heritage Foundation (1975-87).9 During these busy years he also directed many M.A. theses and doctoral dissertations on different aspects of Canadian social, mil­ itary, Amerindian, sport, religious, and political history. Nevertheless, the study of Canadian political culture remained the first priority of his research agenda, and he continued to publish in the field. rv

rsj

rsj

S.F. Wise’s many essays on Canadian political culture are as relevant and stimulating today as when they first appeared. Their longevity is testimony to their quality, but it also owes something to the circum­ stances of their appearance. The 1960s and early 1970s were years of partial breakdown in the post-war political order at home and abroad. In 1957, the Liberals’ federal hegemony had given way to the turbulence of the Diefenbaker and Pearson years. The Quiet Revolution, and the related rise of Quebec nationalism, were matched by an upsurge of regionalist sentiment in western Canada, where by 1972 the NDP were to take power in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and British Columbia. Abroad, in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, a degree of detente had softened the asperities of the Cold War, but for many Canadians the main concern in international affairs was the country’s relations with the United States, whose economic and cultural penetration of Canada was proceeding apace even as its moral authority was being undermined by a succession of military adventures in Indo-China. In this context, a new paradigm of English-Canadian historical self-perception took shape, a paradigm of which Wise’s interpretation of Canadian political culture was to be an important element. The English-Canadian sense of national identity is rooted in the con­ sciousness of not being American. Professor Wise has described how the United Empire Loyalists’ need to dignify their dispossession and exile found expression, especially in Upper Canada, in an ideology of provi­ dential mission, which perceived the destiny of British North American

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provinces to be the upholding of civilized values on a continent beset by anarchic republicanism.10 For most of the nineteenth century, the pre­ dominant Canadian attitude to the United States was a mixture of moral superiority and fear, the superiority feasting on the perceived degrada­ tion of the slave republic, with its endemic public violence erupting into a climactic civil war, the fear nourished by the Juggernaut’s spasmodic gestures of menace: the War of 1812, the post-rebellion border raids, the hysteria of the “fifty-four forty or fight” presidential campaign of 1844, the Fenian raids of the 1860s and 1870s. Before the rebellions, it is true, the Republic had admirers in both Upper and Lower Canada, and it is doubtful whether most Canadians of American stock shared the anti-Americanism of the colonial elites, but, except in the 1830s, antiAmericanism formed part of the official ideology of conservatives and reformers alike. By the same token, conservative politicians long contin­ ued to identify their policies with the good of Canada and the empire and to equate opposition to those policies with disloyalty. Towards the end of the century, this attitude began to change. H.A. Tulloch has described how British intellectuals of the 1880s, facing the prospect of mass democracy at home, learned to admire the United States, with its constitutional safeguards for private property, as a model for healthy conservatism. In Canada these men had their counterpart in the annexationist Goldwin Smith. Conservative politicians assailed the annexationists and anti-protectionists of the early 1890s with the stan­ dard accusations of disloyalty, but Smith scorned Canada’s monarchical institutions (and soon enough Britain’s too) as a mask for legislative tyranny and praised the constitution of the United States for its con­ straints upon the democratic will. Carl Berger has discerned a sudden decline in anti-Americanism in the mid-1890s and the rise of the notion that Canada’s mission was to act as a bridge or intermediary between the two great English-speaking empires.11 This shift in attitudes towards the United States evoked a correspond­ ing adjustment of attitudes toward the mother country, and EnglishCanadian historical consciousness entered a new phase which was mainly concerned with Canada’s relationship with Great Britain. This phase, which coincided with the birth and maturing of professional historical scholarship in Canada, was marked by two conflicting tendencies: the celebration of Canada’s pioneering role in the establishment of colonial self-government within the empire, and the resentment against Canada s continuing subordination to Britain in international and constitutional affairs. Infuriated by the Privy Council’s decentralizing construction of the British North America Act, exponents of the latter tendency dis­ cerned the key to Canada’s history not in the advent of responsible

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government but in Confederation, which they saw in a special light. Ig­ noring— and implicitly denying— the importance of Confederation as a fulfillment of Upper and Lower Canadian aspirations to local selfgovernment, they represented it instead as an expression of the cen­ tralizing aspirations of John A. Macdonald.12 Although this version of Canadian history emerged from a preoccupa­ tion with Canada’s place in the empire, its centralist view of Confedera­ tion naturally drew attention to the anti-Americanism that underlay the founding of the Dominion and the nation-building policies of Macdonald. It was thus well adapted to the international situation in which Canadi­ ans found themselves after the Second World War. No longer shielded by British might from the threat of American domination, Canadians were primed to find meaning in an idea of their history which emphasized the nineteenth-century struggle against that threat. Deriding the preoccu­ pation of Canada’s “Grit” or “Whig” historians with the feats of “Robert Responsible-Government, FYancis Responsible-Government, and Wilfrid Responsible-Government,” Donald Creighton raised Sir John A. Nationbuilder to pre-eminence in the pantheon of Canadian statesmen.13 Creighton’s magisterial biography of Macdonald14 defined the histor­ ical consciousness of the new Canadian nationalism — but only up to a point, for it tended to present Macdonald as the originator rather than the bearer of a political tradition. One important piece in this collection was written precisely to show that the Canadian conserva­ tive tradition had not begun with Macdonald— a point that needed making, as the author remarked, partly because Macdonald’s charisma obscured the society that had produced him and partly because Upper Canadian Toryism had been so discredited by accounts of the villainy of the Family Compact.15 In recovering the ideas and values of early nineteenth-century Canadian political culture, the essays collected here made an essential contribution to the establishment of the new historical paradigm. In attaining such influence, they were assisted by appearing, perhaps fortuitously, at a moment when other scholars were preparing the Cana­ dian mind to give them a sympathetic hearing. In the years 1963-66, four important works appeared which encouraged Canadians to consider the origins of their society as relevant to the present condition. In The First New Nation, a comparative study of American political culture, S.M. Lipset ascribed the differences between the political cultures of Canada and the United States to the United Empire Loyalists’ rejection of the “formative” or “founding” event of the United States: the Ameri­ can Revolution.16 A year later, in The Founding of New Societies, Louis Hartz argued that the political cultures of nations like Canada and the

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United States, which had grown out of European colonial settlements, had been determined by the values of the founding colonists.17 Premis­ ing that “the central figure of the English-Canadian tradition [was] the American liberal,” 18 K.D. McRae applied this hypothesis to Canada in a manner which admitted little variation between the culture of Canada and the United States, but in 1965 G.P. Grant published his account of how John Diefenbaker had re-enacted, at once as tragedy and as farce, John A. Macdonald’s epic resistance to American expansionism and its Canadian Liberal collaborators. In Hartzian fashion, Grant asserted that the right and left wings of American politics were just “different species of liberalism,” but he contradicted McRae by portraying the Loyalist founders of Upper Canada and New Brunswick as principled opponents of American liberalism in its revolutionary phase.19 Finally, in 1966, Gad Horowitz synthesized the three preceding works by modifying the Hartz thesis in a fashion that allowed him to emphasize, with Grant and Lipset, the non-liberal element in Loyalist political values.20 In retrospect Horowitz’s article and Wise’s essays present a fascinat­ ing study in cultural synthesis. By linking Canadian socialism and pro­ gressive statism to a primal Canadian conservatism, Horowitz enabled left-wing nationalists to seat themselves comfortably in the Canadian conservative tradition and disposed them to receive Wise’s ideas with sympathy. Without subscribing to Hartz’s thesis, which he criticized as unhistorical,21 Wise put flesh on the skeleton of Horowitz’s theoret­ ical exposition. Together the two scholars, working independently of each other, completed the foundations of the “conservative-nationalist” historical paradigm which had originated in Creighton’s studies of Con­ federation and one of its authors. But while the following pages are mainly concerned with ideas, values and perceptions— in sum, with the stuff of intellectual history, broadly conceived — they also make a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Upper Canadian political organization and practice. In 1963, only two years before the appearance of Wise’s first essays, the Carleton Library had considered it useful to reprint Aileen Dunham’s Whiggish sketch of Upper Canadian politics, first published in 1926. That same year G.M. Craig despatched the Whig interpretation with elegant economy, but his account of provincial politics, accurate enough in the main, left much room for elaboration.22 Wise’s essays on Christopher Hagerman and his role in Kingston politics shed new light on relations between the central bureaucracy and regional elites and challenged the linger­ ing tendency, evident in Craig’s account, to think in terms of a single, homogeneous provincial electorate.

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Wise’s ideas on conservative thought, organization and practice were synthesized in “Upper Canada and the Conservative Tradition,” an ar­ ticle written in order to correct the “habit of viewing the first fifty years of Ontario’s history as a political false start.” Writers before Craig had “telescoped the complexities of early conservatism into High Toryism,” a creed identified with the iniquitous Family Compact — a phrase which, Wise felicitously noted, those writers had “turned . . . into a term of political science, when it was nothing but a political epithet.” For his part, Wise presented Upper Canadian conservatism as an alliance of various groups, whose stake in the colonial political order impelled them to present a common front against political attacks on that order and hence to oppose the Reform movement in whatever guise it appeared, “moderate” or “radical.” Wise proceeded to define these groups in func­ tional, occupational and sectarian terms and to argue that the nature of the government apparatus— in particular, the control of patronage by a politically unaccountable central bureaucracy— enabled the conser­ vative alliance to operate as a virtual political party while denouncing organized opposition as factious or even seditious. Only after seating “Upper Canadian conservatism” securely in the political economy of the province did he turn to its ideological elements: the willingness to commit the public credit to “national” projects of economic develop­ ment, the special significance of the concept of loyalty, the distinctive sense of providential mission, the anti-Americanism, and — underlying all these elements of belief— the special intensity which distinguished Upper Canadian conservatism (or some elements of it) from the official ideology of other provinces of British North America. This integrated approach to the recovery of the conservative tradition points to the value of these essays as exemplary exercises in the reconsti­ tution of a literate but scantily documented culture. Wise began “Ser­ mon Literature and Canadian Intellectual History” with a brief argument for the importance of Canadian intellectual history and a discussion of its problems. On the one hand, he repudiated the condescending assump­ tion that there could be no Canadian intellectual history “in the absence of any vigorous tradition of original thought” ; on the other hand, he re­ jected those ahistorical ideal types, the “French and Catholic mind” and the “English and Protestant mind,” as explanatory categories. Even if the ideas of the colonists of British North America could be traced back to European sources such as Burke, De Lolme, Montesquieu and Blackstone, it was still important to examine how those ideas had “been adapted to a variety of local and regional environments, in such a way that a body of assumptions uniquely Canadian had been built up; and to trace the changing content of such assumptions.” Granting that “no

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connected history of formal thought in Canada” was possible, he recom­ mended approaching the subject by means of an analysis of the meaning of commonplaces of social terminology and political rhetoric. What did “yeoman” mean? When did it give way to “farmer,” and what did the change signify? What was the significance, in different parts of British North America, of terms such as “loyalty,” “order,” “liberty” and “au­ thority,” and how had their significance changed in the course of time? He rejected the ideal types mentioned above because they could not explain regional variety and because they implied that “the Canadian mind, of either category, [was] a constant.” Wise did service enough in calling for an intellectual history informed by an awareness of the reciprocal influence of ideas and their social con­ text, but his Upper Canadian studies made another important contri­ bution to the study of political culture by emphasizing the importance of behaviour. We have noted how “Upper Canada and the Conservative Tradition” was devoted as much to political organization as to ideas. Equally important, though less well developed, is Wise’s reference to electoral behaviour as an expression of political culture. Having already recommended election studies as a way of identifying different patterns of electoral behaviour in Upper Canada,23 he placed the subject in a broader perspective by noting, as one aspect of Upper Canada’s legacy to the post-colonial era, that “ (l]ong before the Union, conservative and reform strongholds had emerged; areas from which the later Conservative and Liberal parties were to draw strength to the present day.” 24 rsj How has the historical study of the political culture of English-speaking Canada progressed in the more than twenty years since the publication of most of these essays? Considering the vast growth of other areas of Canadian history during the past quarter-century (one thinks of busi­ ness history and several other areas of social history), it cannot be said to have got very far — at any rate, not until recently. For this there are several reasons. One, undoubtedly, is the trend away from polit­ ical and intellectual history during the 1960s and 1970s. This was a general phenomenon in the English-speaking world, but it was perhaps exceptionally emphatic in Canada, being a Marxist posture which ap­ pealed to many Canadian nationalists by virtue of its anti-American overtones. The hunger for new perspectives and ideas led to a general reaction against the established canon of English-Canadian historiogra­ phy and its preoccupation with nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “national” politics, giving rise to an intellectual environment that was

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unpropitious for the study of nineteenth-century political doctrines and sentiments.25 This state of affairs may have been exacerbated, oddly enough, by the contribution of these essays to the ascendancy of the conservativenationalist paradigm. That paradigm, as we saw, was grounded in the identification of Confederation as the key event in Canadian history— but Confederation imagined as the expression of Macdonald’s desire to create a powerful Canadian empire, not as the fulfillment of Upper and Lower Canadian aspirations to local self-government. Wise argued that the essential themes and patterns of Macdonaldian federalism (which figured in the paradigm as key elements in the modern Canadian po­ litical culture) could be traced back to the early nineteenth century, but in the intellectual context established by Lipset, Hartz, Grant and Horowitz this had the effect of confirming and entrenching the new his­ torical paradigm. As a result, while Wise gave new definition and new dignity to early Canadian— and especially Upper Canadian — history as a part of the Canadian experience he did so at the cost of fostering the impression that he had left nothing very important to be said about it. This is not to say that no interesting historical work on Canadian political culture appeared in the wake of Wise’s essays. Graeme Pat­ terson’s subtle study of elections and public opinion in three regions of Upper Canada was just the sort of thing Wise had called for in his “Tory Factionalism.” 26 Carl Berger’s The Sense of Power carried the investi­ gation of conservative thought and opinion into the twentieth century in a fashion which belied Wise’s assumption that no connected history of formal thought in Canada was possible. Terry Cook wrote a much cited article on the political ideas of John Beverley Robinson and a brief but trenchant criticism of the tendency to identify the conservative tradition with the Conservative Party (a caveat that resounds clamorously in the day of Brian Mulroney, the Free Trade Agreement, and the decentral­ ization of the Canadian federal state).27 Hartwell Bowsfield’s study of Upper Canadian opinion in the 1820s, though traditional in its failure to relate ideas vigorously to their social and personal contexts, was a valuable attempt to unearth the public concerns of Upper Canadians from newspapers, pamphlets and literary ephemera.28 Two very differ­ ent works, H.V. Nelles’s history of Ontario’s resource exploitation policy and Robert Fraser’s account of the economic goals and social values of the Upper Canadian administrative elite, constituted exemplary exer­ cises in the relation of economic policy to political values.29 The flour­ ishing field of urban history generated two important studies, Barrie Dyster’s account of mid-nineteenth-century Toronto politics and Peter

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Baskerville’s “socio-cultural” analysis of the economic goals of the Fam­ ily Compact and the broader mercantile-administrative patriciate that began to develop in Toronto during the 1830s.30 Little of this work was followed up, however, either by its authors or by others. Much it remained interred in theses, and some of the abovementioned authors chose not to dwell on the cultural significance of their investigations. Berger’s study of twentieth-century historical writing is of vital importance to the student of political culture, but the analysis of political culture, as such, was not central in The Writing of Canadian History. From the standpoint of political culture, Nelles’s work with Christopher Armstrong on the history of Canadian utilities confirmed rather than elaborated his earlier book. Kenneth C. Dewar’s attempt to use the founding of Ontario Hydro in order to test the ideas of Grant and Horowitz did not advance beyond a “comment.” 31 Among political scientists a comparatively vigorous debate continued on the merits of “Hartz-Horowitz,” the thesis being variously challenged and modified without losing its ascendancy.32 Recent years have brought a quickening of production and the emer­ gence of new themes and approaches. One source of refreshment has been the treatment of the economic and social values of the Upper Cana­ dian elite as a manifestation of legal thought and culture, an approach which derives its force from the fact that most of the leading lights of Upper Canadian society were lawyers and proud of it. Several authors have followed up the pioneering work of R.C.B. Risk by comparing John Beverley Robinson’s judicial treatment of economic subjects with that of contemporary American judges;33 Blaine Baker has surveyed the ju­ ridical culture of nineteenth-century Ontario and described how legal education and professional organization in Upper Canada were shaped by the ambition of leading lawyers to establish the profession as a civ­ ilizing elite amid the rude agrarian society of their frontier colony;34 a controversy between Baker, David Howes and Paul Romney concern­ ing the authority of traditional Whig precepts concerning due process in the Upper Canadian political culture has revealed the importance of those precepts in justifying political opposition to the administra­ tive oligarchy.35 Another promising departure is the analysis, just begin­ ning, of the formation of the Canadian political culture in the context of that opposition between classical republicanism and commercial in­ dividualism which J.G.A. Pocock and other scholars have discerned in eighteenth-century Anglo-American political thought.36 This new ap­ proach to Canadian political ideology is matched by Gordon Stewart’s operational study of “The Origin of Canadian Politics, which applies the eighteenth-century Anglo-American concept of opposition between

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Court and Country to the development of the Canadian political sys­ tem. Like Stewart’s, S.J.R. Noel’s book on nineteenth-century Ontario provides a valuable complement to ideational interpretations by dwelling on the operational importance of patronage.37 Much of this writing is especially valuable for its portrayal of Canadi­ ans as conscious participants in a common Anglo-American politico-legal discourse extending back into the seventeenth century, and for exposing new aspects of their participation. By facilitating new sorts of compar­ ison between Canadian and American political thought and practice, it provides new ways of testing the conventional contrast between “Cana­ dian conservatism” and “American liberalism.” According to Bernard Hibbitts, the broad correspondence between Robinson’s thought and that of his American contemporaries casts doubt on Horowitz’s attribu­ tion of what is distinctive in the Canadian political culture to a primal “Tory touch.” The discovery of points of convergence between republican luminaries and Upper Canadian Tories is bound to discredit the more naive analytical antitheses, but Horowitz himself took care to acknowl­ edge the broad similarity between the American and Canadian political cultures and Baker notes that the selective adoption of foreign legal doc­ trines is quite compatible with the existence of a flourishing indigenous culture.38 Whatever the outcome of this incipient controversy, it points up the importance of relating the formation of the Canadian political culture to the contingencies of Canadian history rather than treating it as an autonomous mental system. Invigorating though these fresh perspectives are, they have done little as yet to remedy one conspicuous lacuna in modern scholarship on the Canadian political culture. If historians, as Wise observes, have a pecu­ liar duty towards losers 39 they have yet to perform that duty by making any sustained inquiry into what it was that the triumphant conserva­ tive tradition, as elaborated in the essays reprinted here, was opposed to. Graeme Patterson’s two articles on reform ideology and rhetoric, valuable antidotes to the old “responsible government” historiography, stimulated no movement to reconceptualize the reform tradition.40 Pat­ terson’s own inquiry may have been compromised by his conviction that William and Robert Baldwin adhered to the orthodox understanding of imperial sovereignty as enunciated by Sir William Blackstone, for subse­ quent research suggests that the Reform tradition was largely based upon a rejection of that orthodoxy. With the aid of that key, both Elwood Jones’s useful article on localism and federalism in pre-Confederation Ontario and Brian Beaven’s study of Reform party rhetoric and organi­ zation in late post-Confederation Ontario, the latter so valuable for its hints at the extent to which the Reformers’ appeal to the electorate was

E d it o r s ’ I n t r o d u c t io n - x x i

an appeal to the past — to a Reform tradition — might have matured into a challenge to the conservative-nationalist paradigm by weakening one of its principal props, the centralist idea of Confederation.41 A similar reticence marks Robert Vipond’s book on the ideology of provincial rights and David Mills’s on the idea of loyalty in Upper Canada. Vipond draws on the work of Jones and Beaven in order to show that Ontario’s resistance to Macdonald’s centralism entailed no re­ pudiation of the understandings upon which Reformers of the 1860s had accepted Confederation, but his failure to grasp in full the doctrinal-ba­ sis of the Reformers’ commitment to responsible government for Ontario occasionally leads him to belie himself by terminology which implies that Macdonald’s conception of Confederation had some superior validity.42 Mills provides a well-focused account of the genesis of distinct tory and reform understandings of the nature of political allegiances and traces their convergence towards the consensus that sustained party govern­ ment after about 1850, but he passes over the hidden continuities that enabled the Ontario Reformers to represent the provincial rights contro­ versy of the 1880s as a replay of the constitutional struggles of the 1830s and 1840s.43 In a broader perspective, the Reform tradition appears as a synthesis of heterodox constitutionalism and agrarian localism, which flourished under circumstances that fostered in its adherents a garrison mentality and sense of special destiny much like those which Wise perceives as essential to the conservative tradition. By depicting Upper Canada as a distinct and sovereign polity within the empire, the Baldwins’ hetero­ dox constitutionalism provided political definition for the special con­ ception of provincial identity which was engendered (as Mills notes) by the alien question; because the imperial government denied the possi­ bility of colonial responsible government, Baldwinite constitutionalism nourished a vision of Upper Canada as a community subjugated by an external oppressor with the aid of domestic collaborators— the admin­ istrative elite. Owing to the circumstances in which responsible gov­ ernment came to Canada, this vision retained its potency even after the formation of Mills’s mid-century consensus. Concentrated in stable agrarian communities, mainly in the southwestern peninsula but also in pockets along the shore of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River, Reform voters, many of them as exclusive in their vision of the Upper Canadian community as the Tories ever were, from the 1850s to 1880s consistently rallied to the struggle against external oppression and do­ mestic treason, now represented by the Conservative-clericalist alliance led by Macdonald and his Lower Canadian partners 44

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In a nutshell, the essays collected here assert the centrality to the Cana­ dian political culture of a “conservative tradition” which originated in British North America’s confrontation with revolutionary America. Its earliest exponents were antidemocratic and elitist administrators and di­ vines, who prized peace, order and good government above the liberty of the individual and— especially in Upper Canada— cherished the idea that the special destiny of Great Britain’s North American subjects was to contain the expansion of the United States, the political embodiment of democracy and licentious individualism. Reinforced by immigration from the mother country, these conservatives managed to prevent their distinctive values from being overwhelmed by the democratic populism that flourished in the 1820s and 1830s. Although the rebellion and its aftermath were as lethal to the “High Tory” aspirations of the Upper Canadian elite as to radical populism, the political consensus which pre­ vailed throughout British North America at mid-century was essentially conservative in its devotion to the British empire and British political in­ stitutions, in its hostility to American-style democratic populism, in the premium it placed on orderly government, and in perceiving economic growth as no less important to Canada’s survival than the militia and hence no less legitimate an object of public expenditure. If John A. Mac­ donald personified this consensus, and Confederation was its supreme expression, his great rival Mowat epitomized it no less completely as a cautiously interventionist administrator who “incorporated the arduous struggles and survival values of the Loyalists in the image he presented to electors of the province.” 45 On the whole, recent writing has tended to confirm or elaborate this interpretation of the Canadian political cul­ ture rather than to contradict it. Mills’s book is an elaboration of Wise’s perception of Upper Canadian political debate as a clash between an ex­ clusive Tory and an assimilative Reform conception of loyalty. Baker’s work on the Upper Canadian legal profession, by presenting William and Robert Baldwin as exponents of lawyer elitism, confirms Wise’s notion of a conservative consensus that embraced moderate reformers. Despite disagreements between them, none of the studies of Robinson’s judicial thought is inconsistent with the idea of the Family Compact’s commitment to controlled economic growth as an exigency of resistance to American expansion. The work of Nelles and Armstrong confirms Wise’s insistence on the fundamentally pragmatic temper of the Cana­ dian approach to public ownership (nationalization if necessary, but not necessarily nationalization, as it were). Stewart’s and Noel’s studies of nineteenth-century politics fall in with Wise’s account of the political

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basis of the Upper Canadian oligarchy and the subsequent conserva­ tive consensus. Another recent book, Jane Errington’s study of Upper Canadian attitudes towards the United States, shows that members of the first generation of the provincial elite, while detesting republicanism in general, could yet discriminate between out-and-out democrats and republicans of a more aristocratic sort.46 While no substantial challenge has emerged to the interpretation ad­ vanced in this collection, recent research has disclosed aspects of it which might fruitfully be refined. The notion of the emergence of a conserva­ tive consensus is one of these. Democratic populism in Upper Canada was checked in the early 1850s only by virtue of Canadian union. This made Lower Canadian aid available to the conservatives of both parties but created a state of affairs which that small “c” conservative Oliver Mowat was to compare unfavourably in 1859 with the old days of oli­ garchic oppression.47 These facts, together with the apparent persistence of disagreement among Upper Canadians as to the nature of the colonial relation, suggest that the nature and extent of the mid-century consen­ sus needs further definition. Coupled with the research of Brian Beaven, they prompt one to ask how far the arduous struggles and survival values that Oliver Mowat incorporated in his political persona, and the provin­ cial patriotism he expressed, were those of the Loyalists and how far those of another embattled minority which also conceived of the Upper Canadian community in its own image: the Grits of the southwestern peninsula. For much of the nineteenth century, the struggle between an exclusive and assimilative vision of the Upper Canadian community was as much a feature of internal Reform politics as it was, before 1850, of Upper Canadian politics as a whole. Mowat’s special achievement was to devise the politics of consensus that kept his party, based as it was on the electoral support of a declining and exclusivist electoral minority, in power for three decades. Another question, of broader relevance, concerns the hypothesis that derives the comparative acquiescence of Canadians towards the interven­ tionist state from the conservative tradition. A recent article by Janet Ajzenstat purports to disclose “the liberal heart of [Canadian] toryism” by presenting John Beverley Robinson as a friend to individual liberty, no less hostile to the tyranny of the majority than those quintessential late Victorian liberals A.V. Dicey and Goldwin Smith. Likewise, Paul Romney has suggested that the garrison mentality of the Upper Cana­ dian Grit may have been quite as conducive to the ideological legitimacy of the interventionist state as the garrison mentality of the Upper Cana­ dian Tory.48 The resolution of this question would appear to require further empirical investigation of relations between the individual, the

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community and the state in Canada with reference to the different types of claims made by the public on the individual, the justifications offered and the beneficiaries thereof. Terry Cook suggested some time ago, in re­ lation to much the same question, that different ideologies might produce similar practical results.49 In a federation whose constituent governments enjoy and habitually assert a quasi-sovereign status, and in which mutu­ ally opposing social interests have simultaneously contrived to imagine themselves as the exclusive embodiments of one and the same provincial community, historical analysis of the ideological prestige of “the state” may be impossible without specifying which state and whose. Indeed, while current scholarship calls in question certain nuances of Wise’s account of the Canadian political culture, it may be the current state of Canadian politics which poses the sharpest challenge to one of his arguments: the critique of political developmentalism. In using “the Canadian case” to contest the developmentalists’ culture-bound hypotheses as to the prerequisites for political modernization, Wise noted that the critical impulse to confederation emanated from a Canadian union which ought, according to developm ental theory, to have been relatively inhospitable to the process of national integration.50 The state of Confederation in the early 1990s might lead one to ask how far the transcontinental union achieved 125 years ago conformed to that national integration which developmentalism aspired to explain, and how far it reflected the temporary conjunction of certain interests and sentiments which failed to foster a truly national political culture and subsequently faded, leaving precious residues that were not “American” but little that could usefully be called Canadian— at least over the long haul. If historians have done little work on the ideological aspects of Cana­ dian political culture, they have done still less on electoral behaviour; but J.K. Johnson has questioned Wise’s perception of “continuity between the electoral behaviour of colonial Upper Canada and the political ge­ ography of twentieth-century Ontario.” According to Wise, the core of Tory support was in the eastern counties, the area of major Loyalist set­ tlement, and in the towns.51 Johnson grants Wise and the Conservatives the towns, but he shows that the other major areas of Conservative dominance from 1828 to 1841 were not Loyalist centres but “thinlysettled, newly-developed or remote sections of the province,” above all the Western and Bathurst Districts. In parliamentary elections from 1828 to 1841, he reports, 45 Reformers and only 42 Conservatives were returned from the four eastern districts to which Wise refers, and the same region gave the Reformers an edge in four of the eight parliaments of United Canada. In the earlier period, moreover, no less than 25 per cent of all Reform representatives were of Loyalist stock, as against 36

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per cent of Conservatives. Noting that Loyalist Reform members tended to come from the rank and file, and Loyalist Conservative members from the officer class, Johnson suggests that “most representatives of the lead­ ership group were firm adherents to the social and political status quo, while ’ordinary’ Loyalism . . . was much more likely to be critical of entrenched ways and established leaders, and to advocate political and social change.” 52 Johnson provides a salutary warning against the temptation .to equate Loyalist with Tory or Conservative, but his analysis may not undermine Wise’s continuity hypothesis so much as demonstrate the need for closer definition of the continuities. Enough is known of provincial electoral behaviour to suggest some striking continuities throughout the nine­ teenth century at least. The political differences between the ridings of East and West Durham in the later nineteenth century reflect a pattern that is traceable to the 1820s.53 The dramatically different voting of “Canadian” and “British” Wesleyans in the Toronto election of 1836 il­ luminates A.R.M. Lower’s childhood memory that Methodists of British stock “were usually Conservatives but Canadian Methodists could not be classified so neatly.” 54 Lower’s recollection that “party lines had a perma­ nence about them that has become almost exceptional today” confirms the contemporary observations of his elders.55 As to regional voting patterns, Wise’s formula clearly needs revi­ sion; yet no less an authority than John A. Macdonald warned in 1856 that “The Peninsula must not get control of the ship. It is occupied by Yankees and Covenanters, in fact the most yeasty and unsafe of populations.” 56 Graham White has demonstrated that the Liberals’ provincial dominance from 1867 to 1905 was based on their control of the region stretching westward from Toronto’s eastern environs and the Niagara River. The more westerly portion of that territory continued to sustain them until the Second World War, except when it deserted them for the United Farmers of Ontario.57 On the whole, electoral continuities should probably be defined primarily in ethnic, and only secondarily in geographic, terms: “Yankees” of both Loyalist and post-Loyalist stock, seconded by Presbyterians, more especially those of Scottish stock and voluntarist leanings, formed the Reform Party’s electoral backbone wher­ ever they were to be found, but they were more preponderant in the west. And in every location, of course, their electoral weight relative to other groups changed with the passage of time. While some of the ideas in these pages may today appear less compre­ hensively correct than they once did, none of them has been rejected by the consensus of scholars; nor is any significant number of them likely to be. On the other hand, it is precisely because the interpretation offered

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herein has not yet been absorbed into a broader scholarly discourse that the re-publication of these essays is of great contemporary value. At the time of writing, students of the Canadian political culture are still under the necessity of engaging directly with the ideas advanced in this collection. In doing so they will benefit from Professor Wise’s admoni­ tion as to the need “to engage in the laborious analysis of the surviving record of a period, to crack its linguistic code, as it were,” rather than resort to some “set of postulates about the nature of the world historical process,” 58 and also from the salutary memorandum these pages offer of the fact that political culture is something to be reconstituted not merely from texts, formal or informal, but also through the investiga­ tion of political demography and electoral behaviour. rsj

When this volume of his essays went to press, S.F.Wise was in the Reading Room of the British Museum. While there, some scholars have sought to sit in Karl Marx’s old desk. It is possible that Wise would be as pleased if he found himself seated where John Beverley Robinson had once scribbled. Certainly, Robinson’s ghost, if hovering over Wise’s shoulder, better to see the characters on the professor’s laptop computer, would be bemused to discover notes bearing upon the origins of political institutions in Upper Canada. Wise has not yet finished with the Fam­ ily Compact. Disputed Upper Canadian elections, the newspaper record of legislative debates, and the to-and-fro of political conflict in the for­ mative years of Canadian politics are the means of taking the student of history into the Canadian equivalent of the years leading toward the English Civil War of the Seventeenth Century. The “linguistic code” of Upper Canadian politicians, to which he pays such assiduous attention, gained much of its modern meaning in that century of English turmoil, and much of Wise’s effort, in his writings and his graduate seminars, has been directed toward “cracking” it for a given place and time. “It is extremely important . . . for the historian to establish very clearly for any time and context what the content of important words is. . . . I think it absolutely vital that students working in the English language read widely in the culture of the period in which they are working. . . . Here’s a road in, it seems to me, for students to gain access to the realm of the history of ideas. It’s an easier road in than the analysis of a body of thought. I think that the content of language, any language, is an important clue for the understanding of the intellectual culture.” The legislative record, in Wise’s view, has always been a major site in which certain keys to a society’s linguistic code can be found. Wise’s current studies of the legislature of Upper Canada take him once more

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into what he calls “the cockpit of Upper Canadian politics.” “In any society, but particularly in a democratic society,” he notes, “all the values that are really important at any single time converge in a legislature. This is the arena of the culture. What better way to study it than through these debates?” One of the reasons Wise has returned to his original arena of research is to address a kind of historical study that, in his view, “slipped off the agenda of both historians and political scientists at least a gener­ ation ago. I’m referring to the kind of study that MacGregor Dawson and J.M. Beck and others inaugurated: that is, of institutions and of the evolution of political institutions. It’s something we’ve left behind. We’ve now come back to it because we’ve realized how important insti­ tutions are in our current constitutional difficulties.. . . This means that I’m almost going back to a form of history that we’ve left behind. But I don’t see how we can do without it.” Other historians have called for a recovery of political and constitu­ tional history, or have addressed themselves to the question of political culture in Canada,59 but none has practiced what he or she has preached in a more sustained fashion or done so with such fundamental insight or elegance of expression than has Wise himself. The many essays on political culture Wise has written are eloquent testimonials to the in­ herent links between political practice and political thought. “I hold,” he states, “that at the heart of political culture is the ideational content of that culture. But political culture is about more than that, and it is certainly about political behaviour, political styles. I think at the heart it is an intellectual concept. What you are looking at are not just the explicit beliefs and intellectual stances that exist within the culture but you are also looking for that other dimension, the assumptions people hold, the kinds of assumptions which axe passed on within a healthy political culture and have an extraordinary length of life. So I would argue that although it is perfectly proper to write about political cul­ ture as if it consisted almost entirely of the intellectual life, in fact this is only part of a continuum you have to look at, and that those who write about mass political behaviour are also writing about political cul­ ture.” These words remain as much a challenge to Canadian historians today as those with which “Sermon Literature and Canadian Intellectual History” or “God’s Peculiar Peoples” began a quarter century ago. At a time when Canada faces a political rupture not witnessed since the Conquest, it is Wise counsel indeed to suggest that students of Canada’s past think again about the rich and still largely unexplored continuum of the nation’s formative political culture a century and more ago.

God’s Peculiar Peoples

ONE

Sermon Literature and Canadian Intellectual History

C a n a d ia n intellectual history must be concerned, almost of necessity, with the kinds of ideas that lie between the formal thought of the philoso­ pher or the political theorist and the world of action, and probably closer to the latter. Since (to understate the matter) no connected history of formal thought in Canada is possible, the Canadian intellectual historian must be concerned primarily with the interrelationship between ideas and actions, and therefore the intellectual commonplaces of an age, its root notions, assumptions, and images, will be of more significance to him than the study of coherent bodies of abstract thought. This sort of interest, of course, applies not merely to Canada but to the history of ideas in other places at other times. The historian who wants to estab­ lish the connections between ideas and events in the Civil War period in England is much less interested in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes than in ideas, well-worn though they may be, to be found in the ephemeral writings of such politicians and pamphleteers as Hyde, Vane, Lilburne, Prynne, or Milton (particularly true in this particular instance, since Hobbes’ political behaviour was not even Hobbesian). But it seems necessary to state the nature of a Canadian intellectual history, because there has been so little of it written; perhaps through a conviction that nothing of the kind was possible in the absence of any vigorous tradition of original formal thought. It is indeed true that the explicit structures of thought from which most Canadian ideas derive lie outside Canada. It can be shown, for example, that the commonplaces of political or social language by which British American Tories of the early nineteenth century justified their ac­ tions to themselves stem directly from such European thinkers, or their popularizers, as Burke, De Lolme, Montesquieu, and Blackstone. No doubt the stock of Canadian ideas is replenished every generation from European and American sources; and doubtless it should be an impor­ tant function of the Canadian intellectual historian to perform the sort

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of operations that will trace Canadian ideas to their ultimate external source. But his major task, surely, is to analyse the manner in which externally derived ideas have been adapted to a variety of local and re­ gional environments, in such a way that a body of assumptions uniquely Canadian has been built up; and to trace the changing content of such assumptions. What, for example, are the social assumptions implicit in the early nineteenth-century term “yeoman” ? When is “yeoman” re­ placed by “farmer,” and what is the significance of the change? What is the relationship between changing terminology, and hence changing social assumptions, and the actual social process? Do these changes, both intellectual and social, occur at the same time in different parts of Canada? Again, what is the content, at any given time, of such terms as “loyalty,” “order,” “liberty,” “authority” ; terms which are merely ab­ breviations for complex socio-political assumptions? The content of the words “respectability” and “interest” is radically different today from what it was a century and a half ago; the life history of either term would disclose a great deal about the intellectual history of Canada. There are good grounds for saying that the content of social image terminology, or the constellation of notions inherent in a word like “or­ ders,” will vary from region to region in Canada, and not just between French- and English-speaking regions. This may be the result of varying rates of assimilation of externally derived ideas in different parts of the country, or perhaps because some are not received at all, being “filtered out” because of the nature of local institutions. Before anything con­ vincing can be said about the possibility that life in different regions of Canada is organized around marginally different sets of assumptions, however, much work must be done in charting the history of ideological configurations. This is not to imply that an approach which employs “French and Catholic mind” and “English and Protestant mind” as two categories is erroneous; but simply that it is inadequate, because it can­ not explain Canadian variety and because it implies that the Canadian mind, of either category, is constant. Useful statements about the Cana­ dian mind, at least in its historical context, are likely only after a series of careful investigations of those source materials in which the dominant assumptions of any one age are chiefly to be found, used in a context which makes their current meaning plain. In any period, political rhetoric is a good guide to the current scale of public values, and also can provide a measurement of the frequent lag between professed belief and actual behaviour through a comparison of what the politician says with what he does. Newspaper editorials, public and private correspondence, travel books by Canadians (especially about other countries), the literature of criticism in the arts: all these

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classes of material are of permanent value. Other kinds of material, however, are of more significance in a particular age than any other. Institutional and corporate advertising, for example, embalms values important in the age of large-scale economic enterprise; and a study of the advertising of the Bank of Montreal, the Steel Company of Canada, or even O’Keefe Breweries, over a generation, would probably show some remarkable shifts and changes. The main purpose of this essay is to show, through illustration, the peculiar value of sermon literature as a medium for the expression of con­ servative ideas in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British America. Sermon literature as a source for the history of ideas, though untapped in Canada, has been used extensively elsewhere. Christopher Morris’s Political Thought in England: Tyndale to Hooker (London, 1953)1 and William Haller’s brilliant study, The Rise of Puritanism (New York, 1938), both rely upon the exploitation of a large body of sermons to reconstruct the intellectual movements of early modern Eng­ land; R.B. Perry’s studies of the New England mind draw partly upon sermons. The most casual check of standard bibliographies of Canadian imprints will disclose that large numbers of sermons were published in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while many more manuscript sermons of the time are preserved in libraries and archives. In the On­ tario Archives, for example, are several substantial bundles of sermons of John Strachan, covering approximately sixty years of our history. They have never been used by an historian. Yet his sermons, and those of his contemporaries, are indispensable to an understanding of the conserva­ tive mind of the age. rsj

r\j

rsj

Most of the sermons printed in British North America between 1784 and 1820 were those of “churchmen,” that is, clergy of the Church of England, the Church of Scotland, and the Congregational churches of Nova Scotia. Each of these churches, in the land of its origin, was an established church and a defender of the established order of things. It is hardly remarkable that the sermons of the colonial clergy of these churches were uniformly conservative in character. It might perhaps be argued that unpublished rather than published sermons are a more valid source for the dominant ideas of the time, since they were intended only for the minister’s congregation. It is true that since printed sermons were frequently those given on such public religious occasions as the opening of the legislature, days of general fast and humiliation, or days of public thanksgiving, they tended to be concerned with such matters as the relationship between the state and its enemies, the purposes of

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God in times of war and revolution, or the duties of the citizen; while unpublished sermons, on the whole, seem to be less taken up with such questions. Even so reputedly political a churchman as John Strachan rarely gave an overtly political sermon to his own congregation. More­ over, the language of manuscript sermons is less studied, less formal, and less concerned with creating an impression of classical erudition. Yet there seems to be no substantial difference in the social and politi­ cal assumptions which can be found running through the two classes of sermons. Whether on public occasions, or in ordinary Sunday services, the churchman preached social and political conservatism as well as the gospel. It is the strategic position of the churchmen of the revolutionary age that lends a special importance to the content of their sermons. Ac­ cepted as members of the small colonial upper class, and accorded a special respect because of their superior education in a society in which the general level was low, the clergy of the Anglican, Presbyterian, and Congregational churches (and indeed those of the Catholic church as well) were well-placed to exert a considerable influence upon the polit­ ical outlook and behaviour of a large part of the colonial population. It has been argued2 that social rank and education cut the established clergy off from the “people,” but this is so only in a restricted sense, because their influence reached well beyond their by no means negli­ gible congregations. In defining the public philosophy and the public morality, the conservative clergy had little competition, and that chiefly from the judges of the high courts, whose jury charges invaded, periodi­ cally, the ideological monopoly of the ministers. Legislative debates were not reported at this time, and thus the politician was virtually stifled. The day of the journalist-politician had scarcely dawned. The popular press did not exist. Society was wholly Christian; freethinkers kept their thoughts to themselves. No challenge to the intellectual primacy of the clergy came from such dissenting denominations as the Baptists and the Methodists, who accepted the political and social, if not the ecclesiastical and theological, assumptions of the churchmen. The position of the conservative clergy in the realm of ideas was rein­ forced by the outbreak of the French Revolution, and by the long wars which were its aftermath. Men knew that the Revolution had brought a new age, and whether they wished it well, or were horrified by it, they followed the shifts and changes of the huge drama with absorbed fascination. Even in the little societies of British North America, a weekly budget of despatches, letters, bulletins, treaties, atrocity stories, and propaganda, borrowed by the infant colonial press from newspapers abroad or from the United States, kept the reading public informed (a

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few months in arrears) of the enormous events that were shaking the old order to its foundations. The deadly antagonism between the Revolution and established ideas and institutions meant that everywhere conserva­ tives rallied to attack it. The politician Edmund Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, provided both a defence of British institu­ tions and an eloquent assault upon the Revolution and all its works, and of course his arguments made a deep impression upon British American conservatives as well as those of Great Britain. In the colonies, however, it was the clergy, not the politicians, who bore the chief responsibility for interpreting the meaning of Europe’s convulsions to society at large, and because of this, they made a lasting contribution to the nature of Cana­ dian conservatism. It can be seen in that combination of religious and secular elements which gave to colonial Toryism one of its most marked characteristics, and perhaps its only real claim to distinctiveness. This synthesis, worked out during the long crisis of the Revolution, the French wars, and the War of 1812, proved an extraordinarily durable one. Some illustrations of its beginnings follow.

That the French Revolution surpassed previous revolutions in scale and in the social depths to which it reached was not questioned, even by the Loyalist clergy of British North America. To Charles Inglis, the Loyalist Bishop of Nova Scotia, it was an event without precedent. The state of France at the present day is an occurrence wholly new in the annals of the human race. The history of mankind . . . furnishes no instance . . . of so general a phrenzy seizing a populous and polished nation; a phrenzy that is not confined to any particular description, but diffused through all ranks and orders of people. The high and the low, the peer and the peasant, the learned and the ignorant, are equally stimulated to the perpetration of the most atrocious crimes; delighting in slaughter and unbridled cruelty; sporting with the lives and property of mankind; destroying all religion and subordination; openly avowing atheism; and sinking into a total depravation of principles and manners!3

That it might be possible to equate the revolutions in France and Amer­ ica does not seemed to have occurred to Inglis;4 it was not the degree of violence or the universality of upheaval that made the French Revolution so radical a break from previous experience, but the shock of such an explosion in a nation so “populous and polished.” How could so ancient and civilized a people be “suddenly transformed into a race of sanguinary barbarians and ruffians” ?5 Had the French gone spontaneously mad? Or were there deeper causes for the apparent national insanity? Could an explanation be found in the instabilities of the volatile French character,

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or was the Revolution a product of causes which could operate anywhere, and not exclusively in France? The sermons of the day were attempts to answer such questions. In them is to be found an anatomy of the Revolution, and of revolutions: the false ideas from which they spring, the nature and the motivation of the men who concoct and spread inflammatory ideas, the vast deceptions behind the protestations of reformers. It is not really important that these sermons were couched in the terms of traditional thought, despite some flashes of insight or felicities of phrase. What is important is their contribution to the formation of a conservative political ideology. The principles hammered home from the pulpits during the long crisis with France were those which were to condemn a Gourlay, a Mackenzie, or a Papineau in the years after the end of the wars, and were to endure, in modified form, long beyond the collapse of political Toryism. According to the Reverend Andrew Brown, incumbent of the Protes­ tant Dissenting Church in Halifax, the seeds of the French Revolution were planted in the free-thinking followers of Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Under the guise of defending the freedom of the press and the right of private judgement, they launched a subtle attack upon organized re­ ligion, and by degrees poisoned the arts, science, and philosophy with their sceptical doctrines. In this they had the assistance of the European aristocracy, who, out of a sense of guilt for their historic crimes, sought “a commodious apology for the disorders of their conduct.” 6 Aristocratic complicity was crucial: Abandoned by the rich and fashionable, the church continued for a sea­ son to be a refuge to the poor and afflicted. But in time the lower orders learned to despise, in their hearts, those religious observances which they saw their more enlightened superiors treat with unreserved contempt. Copying their example with perverse ingenuity, they joined in the ridicule poured upon their clergy, and regarded every scandalous story which reflected on the church or the sacred office, as an invaluable piece of history which could not be too carefully recorded.. . . Amidst.the indifference and depravity of a degenerate age, Christianity was publicly renounced by many in the upper ranks of life, and a speculative deism, in no respect distinguishable from actual atheism, was substituted in its room.7

It was a cardinal principle of Tory social psychology that the example set by the upper orders would always influence decisively the conduct of the mass of mankind. This is why a relatively few followers of “Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, D’Alembert, & c.” could produce a “nation of Atheists.” 8 Once “Reason” was enthroned, the way was clear for the

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perpetration of the shocking crimes of the Revolution. But this black page of history had a moral utility, could its lesson be understood: . . . from the general tenour [sic] of the affairs of France since its rulers abjured religion, the least instructed of mankind . . . may be enabled to institute a comparison between the effects of genuine Christianity, and of that sublime Philosophy which was to regenerate the human race. . . . no sooner had the sceptical philosophers usurped the powers of legislation than . . . strife and anarchy prevailed. The worst passions of the worst persons rioted without controul. . . . The prisons were crowded with victims; new modes of trial and execution were invented; and under the direful agency of a murderous tribunal blood flowed in a continual stream.9

The bloody events of the Revolution, then, were the natural and in­ evitable outcome of the abandonment of religion by the ruling classes of France. It was vain and self-deceiving to imagine that the enlightened principles of the philosophers had somehow been betrayed by weak men; the atrocities in France were, in fact, “inseparable from the nature of the new principles, and would mark their rule to the world’s end.” 10 Here the conservative clergy were on familiar ground: the mutually supporting nature of religion and the state. While admitting that with­ out government, man would have long since exterminated himself, Inglis argued, following Warburton,11 that religion was necessary to rectify the imperfections of government. Secular laws, which rested upon force, could not reach “the source and spring of our actions,” the conscience. Moreover, society cannot work without such “duties of imperfect obli­ gation” as gratitude, hospitality, charity, and so on. Yet social duties, without which the state of society would be “miserable,” cannot possibly be legislated. Indeed, society is insufficiently incapable of rewarding its members to ensure its own preservation. Aside from the very few persons who receive rank and emolument from serving the state, society provides for the general mass of citizens only the reward of mere protection, quite insufficient to stimulate preservative civic virtues. As man grows more numerous, new problems arise: the more populous the society, the larger the cities, the wealthier their citizens, then the greater the increase in crime as “the depraved appetites of mankind” are inflamed. A rise in material prosperity and urban population does not mean progress, but merely more inducements to greater crime. A government based upon secular philosophy, no matter how benign, is powerless against the forces of evil and destructiveness latent in society itself. There is only one prin­ ciple that will bind up the warring elements within peoples, and that is the “superior principle” of religion. Only religion teaches that the gov­ ernment is ordained of God, a principle that gives the state an authority

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that no secular sanction can give it.12 Only religion renders man con­ scious of the all-seeing eye of God and of his own ultimate accountability to God. Without instruction in his duty toward God, man inevitably falls victim to the ever-increasing temptations that surround him, and is drawn into enormous crimes. It is therefore “the avenging terrors of the Almighty God” which are “the best support of Government.” 13 Brown’s argument was similar to that of Inglis, if a little less crudely put. Any system, he held, that considered this life as the whole of exis­ tence, and thought of death as an everlasting sleep, would hold out only “safety and self-aggrandisement” as the ends of life, and since man is not accountable for his behaviour, the pursuit of these ends “by all means, even the most atrocious” is justified. But when society is Christian, then “the gospel . . . moderates the passions of the rich, and supports the virtues of the poor.” 14 These and other arguments concerned with the vital social and political utility of religion were to be vigorously em­ ployed by the next generation of clerical and lay conservatives in their defence of the principle of the connection between church and state, or at least the public recognition of the Christian nature of society through financial aid to churches other than the Church of England. To con­ servatives, the necessity of some connection between organized religion and the state had been triumphantly vindicated by the horrors which irreligion had caused in Prance, and by the final defeat of France herself. Andrew Brown, in the early years of the Revolution, had been confident that such would be the outcome of the great contest then beginning: To all the arguments in [Christianity’s] favour which past ages have furnished, will be added those alarming ones derived from the bloody history of the French revolution. . . . Christianity will thus be restored to new credit and influence. The vain babblings of philosophy will be consigned to everlasting perdition. Men will reject with detestation the modifications of deism, and be solicitous to establish in their country, in their houses, and in their hearts, the genuine doctrines of the Cross of Christ.15

Although the first concern of the conservative clergy was to explain the French Revolution in terms of the abandonment of religion for the pernicious ideas of the free-thinkers, they also addressed themselves di­ rectly to radical French politics and the dangers French radicalism posed for British North America. Much is said, for example, of the character of the political innovator. Taken together, these remarks form a kind of compendium of the Tory rhetoric against reform and are an illustra­ tion of a conventional pattern of thought that was to have a long life. To the churchmen, society was delicately and precariously balanced, an entity dependent upon the maintenance of an equilibrium between the

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desire of all its members for security in life and property, and the desire of each for self-aggrandizement. As we have seen, it was the function of religion to “subdue this restlessness and discontent,” and to teach man to be “resigned to the will of God, and thankful for his allotment in the state of life where his providence has placed us.” 16 The innova­ tor, however, had more than the ordinary share of natural restlessness. He was a person in whom “ambition, self-interest, and humour” were in dangerous combination. “Not content with [his] proper rank in the scale of beings,” he schemed to advance himself by stirring up others.17 His tactics were ever the same: he called for redress of grievances in the name of patriotism, liberty, and the public welfare; he formed clubs, circulated inflammatory publications, got up petitions, spread rumours, worked up the multitude in the name of some great cause. He was a demogogue, who played upon the baser desires of the artless populace; he was a hypocrite, because “self-interest generally lies at the bottom” of the ringing ideals he professed. Such men rose on the hopes they cre­ ated in the masses, and “secretly laugh at those who are the dupes of their artifices.” 18 In this timeless game, the people were always deluded; indeed, doubly so: first by the deceitful demagogue who used them for his purposes, and second by their own illusion that programmes of re­ form could have any beneficial effect upon their condition. Just as the state of Prance demonstrated the horrible consequences of irreligion, so it also showed the absurdity of impracticable schemes of political ref­ ormation, launched “under the specious names of Fraternity, Equality, and Liberty ” 19 Just as the deists had had the arrogant presumption to challenge eighteen centuries of Christianity, so the political philosophers had been dreaming dreams of perfection and calling them constitutions, when the teachings of both religion and history showed that the hard lot of man was to submit to his own imperfections and to put up with the institutions he had, which represented, after all, the wisdom of countless generations. How cruel to hoodwink the masses with glittering slogans! To meditate the establishment of equality . . . , that splendid delusion of the present age, the vision of the weak, and the pretext of the wicked, is in fact to meditate war against God, and the primary laws of creation----In society inequality is just as natural as in the forest, but productive of much more salutary effects. Without inequality what would become of the necessary distinctions of parent and child, master and scholar, the employer and the employed!20

Most clergymen were prepared to admit that there were times when political and social changes were necessary and even desirable, and that failure to change could bring upheavals like the French Revolution. But there were some, like Bishop Inglis, who saw no need at all for change

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in the present state of perfection. For him, religious history had come to a stop with the salutary changes of the Protestant Reformation, and political history with the culmination of the English genius, the Glorious Revolution of 1688: But, blessed God, those times are now past. We enjoy the benefits re­ sulting from those changes; we should be thankful to heaven for them; and look back with reverence to the fortitude of our ancestors who were instruments, in the hand of Providence, of conferring those signal bless­ ings upon us. For we live in a period, when the Religion of Jesus Christ is professed and taught in its native purity, as contained in holy Scrip­ ture. We live under the best of Civil Constitutions; where we enjoy as much Liberty as is consistent with a state of Civil Society. . . . In these circumstances, to think the business of changing should still go on, and never stop, must surely proceed from [the] spirit of innovation . . . or something worse.21

Therefore, enjoined Inglis in the words of a text no longer in fashion, but then much used: “Fear thou the Lord and the King; and meddle not with them that are given to change.” Another important theme of the sermons of this period had to do with the meaning of the great struggle in which Britain and France were en­ gaged. How could the larger purposes of God for man be reconciled with the necessity to justify a British victory? The interpretive framework upon which these sermons were preached was the providential theology, and, like other churchmen before and since, the clergy of the day were gradually drawn to identify the purposes of God with the policies of their own nation. Preaching in the first months of the war, Andrew Brown, “a short-sighted mortal,” was wary of divining God’s “precise purposes,” but remained confident that He “never ordained impiety and anarchy to be perpetual among men.” 22 Inglis was less cautious. He declared that “the judgements of God are actually abroad,” and announced his con­ viction that the war against France was a sacred war. Surely it was “a contest in the cause of humanity against violence and blood, of order and government against anarchy and confusion, of right and justice against lawless rapacity, of real liberty against oppression and tyranny, of truth against falsehood, and of God against the most audacious Atheism.” 23 Yet both Inglis and Brown asserted that the war was also a sore judge­ ment of God against Britain and her allies for their transgressions, in which godless France was the divine instrument of punishment, just as God had used such pagan idolators as the Egyptians and Babylonians when Israel had strayed from the paths of righteousness. The war was monitory, therefore, and was to be seen as providing opportunity for a

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purifying repentance. Should the opportunity so presented be wasted, then Britain would be broken like a potter’s vessel.24 But as the war went on, the emphasis upon British sinfulness became less strong, and more and more the clergy, especially the Anglicans, came to equate the aims of God and Great Britain. When Nelson won at Aboukir Bay, Mather Byles in Saint John adduced the victory as proof that the British people were “the favourites of God,” and that France was Satan personified as a many-headed nation. Behind Great Britain was “the secret, irresistible scheme of Providence.” 25 In a sermon celebrating the same victory, Bishop Mountain at Quebec nodded to conventional theology in acknowledging that God had used France to chastise a sinful world, but professed to see that the British people, having passed through the refiner’s fire of adversity, were now “happily for ourselves, and for the world, made the instruments of chastising the arrogance, humbling the power of France.” Who could doubt that “we are engaged against an enemy whom we may, without presumption, consider as much more wicked than ourselves?” 26 Mountain, and many another minister of the time, fell into the clas­ sic error of accommodating Christianity to the current system of values. They persuaded themselves, and many of the hearers, that God was not merely using Britain to defeat atheistic France, but that British victories meant also Divine approval of the social, religious, and politi­ cal institutions of the mother country.27 This delusion, always latent in British nationalism, was given special strength by the zeal with which it was preached during the many years of crisis, and was permitted to take firm hold partly because there was nothing that could be called an “intellectual opposition” in colonial society. The notion that God had staged the quarter-century of destruction as a kind of lesson to benighted humanity on the superior virtues of the British constitution in church and state (though never stated quite so baldly) became an article of faith with British American Tories. The special religious element in colonial Toryism owed much to the inculcation, during the war years, of a crude providentialism, as did the fact that British American conservatives had no provision in their scheme of things for orderly change, but merely for the orderly acceptance of things as they were. In the sermons of John Strachan, the “lessons” the conservative clergy thought the French wars had taught can be read plainly. Unlike the other clergy mentioned up to this point, Strachan belonged essentially to the post-war period, but his ideas were formed, once for all, before 1815. This fact is of prime importance, because Strachan was teacher, mentor, and minister to a whole generation of Tory politicians in Upper Canada, a central figure in the politics of his province for at least twenty-five years

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and a dominant influence in his church for many more years than that. His impact upon the Ontario community in its formative stage was very great, in one way or another, and yet it cannot be said that his ideas have ever been adequately analysed. Plentiful material for such an analysis is to be found in the large body of sermons, printed in manuscript, that he left behind him. These sermons establish clearly Strachan’s intellectual debt to the clergy of the age of revolution, but also demonstrate that he was much more extreme in his conservatism than any of them. Strachan’s mind was rather like a megalithic monument: strong, crude, and simple. It moved in straight lines, was impatient of subtleties and qualifications (though often itself devious and self-deceiving), and was unleavened by what might be variously described as realism, a sense of proportion, or merely as a sense of the absurd. To such a mind, prov­ identialism was heady wine, for Strachan pushed the conclusions to be drawn from it farther than did any of his contemporaries. Not for him the modest disclaimers of Brown, or even the more specious qualifications of Mountain. God’s intentions could not be doubted; “never have so many unquestionable proofs of a superintending Providence appeared in so short a period.” 28 The secular, egalitarian assumptions upon which the governments of the United States and France were, or had been based, had been judged and found wanting; “the two great experiments in America and France to constitute governments productive of virtues and happiness only . . . have completely failed.” The lesson of the war was that “no great and decided amelioration of the lower classes of soci­ ety can be reasonably expected: . . . that foolish perfectability with which they had been deluded can never be realized.” 29 On the other hand, Stra­ chan was not content to depict Britain as an instrument in the hands of God, used to accomplish His purposes, as had his clerical contempo­ raries. Just as God revealed His truth to the Jews, thought Strachan, so had he in a latter day to another nation. “Here, My Brethren,” said Strachan, “I allude to the British nation, but not in the spirit of boasting or ostentation.” 30 His victory sermon of 1814 and such other sermons as the Rebellion sermon of 183831 disclose that his deepest beliefs were that the British were God’s peculiar people, and that their order in church, state, and society was providentially blessed. Among God’s British, the Upper Canadians occupied a special position. This “remnant” of a once great continental empire had been purified and united through strug­ gle with the United States, the only country in the world to become the ally of France by free choice. The miraculous survival of tiny Up­ per Canada was a North American testimony to God’s gracious dealings with those whom He designed specially to prosper. Strachan’s sermon of 1814, preached in the first flush of victory over Napoleon and in the

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knowledge that Wellington’s veterans were soon to be launched against the Americans, is an important document. It is a kind of manifesto for Upper Canadian Toryism, but it contains not a programme so much as an anti-programme; that is, it lays down those things — the connection between church and state, the relative perfection of the British constitu­ tion, the delusiveness of projects of reform, and the suicidal dangers of listening to innovators— which the will of God as revealed in the verdict of the war had determined to be beyond challenge. Rid of her invaders, cleansed of her traitors and secure in her beliefs, Upper Canada would stand as a shining witness in North America. “Now,” said Strachan, “the dawn of the happiest times is rising upon us.” 32 rsj rs^

One of the great difficulties in reconstructing the conservative mind (of any period) is the fact that the conservative is rarely explicit about his most cherished beliefs. He assumes certain things to be immutably true and established, and finds it unnecessary to explain them to his friends, and pointless to explain them to his enemies. When an Upper Canadian Tory ran for election with a strong belief in the British constitution as his only declared platform, neither he nor his sympathetic constituents found such an appeal platitudinous or ludicrously inadequate. Such phrases stood for a whole set of conservative values. At no time was the Tory less explicit than in explaining his social values. Quite possibly this was because the standard British arguments in justification of the principle of aristocracy seemed irrelevant to the much more democratic societies of North America; more probably it was because the Tory, while retaining his belief in a graded social order, realized that he was unlikely to get a favourable hearing for his views from the community at large. At any rate, any source which supplies an exposition of what the British American conservative meant by a phrase like “due subordination in society” is valuable. The unpublished sermons of John Strachan contain some of the most illuminating expositions of conservative social thought available, perhaps because the Doctor in his pulpit, speaking to his parishioners, felt a freedom unknown to his pupils, on the hustings, in the legislature, or in the press. As an illustration, there is his sermon on I Timothy 4:8, “But Godliness is profitable unto all things.” Strachan’s notations show that it was first preached at sea on September 24, 1824, and that he delivered it several more times in the 1820s and 1830s. His ostensible purpose was to comment upon the relationship between the enjoyment of the pleasures of the world and the prospect of salvation. Should religion “stalk abroad with all the rigour of Egyptian Taskmasters?” 33

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He concluded (predictably enough) that when not carried to excess the pursuit of pleasure, wealth, and honours was natural, proper, and by no means out of keeping with the religious life. But Strachan’s purpose was not primarily to justify temporal happi­ ness, but the existence and necessity of social inequality. His argument was immeasurably old, a kind of historical pastiche of the commonplaces of social conservatism, but with some quirks which are his alone. Just as in the natural world there is an ascending order of creation, and within each species there are both weak and strong individuals, so in human society are men given an infinite variety of capacities: One is formed to rule, another to obey. . . . Subordination in the Moral World is manifest and this appearance of nature indicates the intention of its Author. The beauty and advantages of this arrangement are obvious and universally acknowledged. . . . The various relations of individuals and Societies require a mutual exchange of good offices. . . . Hence it would appear that they who labour in the inferior departments of life are not on that account the slaves of their superiors. The Magistrate requires the aid of the people — the Master of his Servant. They are all dependent upon one another, as they subsist by an exchange of good offices. . . . The lowest order enjoys its peculiar comforts and privileges, and contributes equally with the highest to the support and dignity of Society.

Not only did the social order correspond to the different levels of ability given to men by God, but men were also allotted “different shares of sensibility,” so that the pursuit of happiness became the pursuit of that degree of happiness one is capable of attaining. Because of this, only bitterness can come to the man who aspires to a place above his station. While “efforts to better our condition are laudable,” the man who gets above himself will drink deeply of “Chagrin, Melancholy, Envy, Hatred and other wretched passions.” Strachan offered as consolation for the inferiority of one’s lot the perennial conservative cliche that the mighty of this world ought not to be envied their luxury and pomp; they pay for their splendours many times over with the heavy burden of care that attends high position: Let us not be dazzled by the opulence and splendour of the great. The delicacies of his Table would soon pall upon our sense, vitiate our taste, and perhaps enervate us by Sickness or disease. We admire the pomp of his public appearance, when his pride, the duties of his station, the applause of a surrounding multitude, or the brilliancy of the whole scene may preserve an air of superior ease and happiness in his deportment, but let us follow him to his retirement during the season of reflexion and we may see him oppressed with cares, which neither the most delicate

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repast nor costly apparel nor a multitude of Friends and dependents nor all the glories of the Crown can alleviate.

Not pausing to explain to his hearers how it was that the share of sensi­ bility awarded the great did not bring them the kind of happiness com­ mensurate with their rank, Strachan rushed on to provide a sovereign remedy for dissatisfaction with one’s subordinate position in life (so long as one was not too subordinate). Instead of eating one’s heart out with envy for those more fortunate, why not reverse the process? You compare your situation with that of your Superiors. This will turn your attention to the advantages you want rather than those you pos­ sess. . . . But compare it to the inferior stations of life, and the effect will be more favourable to your comfort. . . . You do not consider their blessings but plume yourselves as enjoying much superior. By thus con­ trasting your position with those that are worse, you will see how much more unhappy you might be and thus derive satisfaction from your su­ periority. In this way learn to contrast your desires and you will obtain all the happiness which others so anxiously pursue.

Strachan’s recommendation is testimony to his sense of social psychology, if not to his grasp of Christian social ethics. Stripped of its characteristic individual quixotries, this sermon is probably representative of early nineteenth-century social thought. How relevant its categories were to the social and economic realities of British North America is quite another question. Deeply held political and social assumptions change when circumstances dictate, when they have clearly ceased to have any connection with the life they purport to explain. Perhaps it was such a change that explains the superscription scrawled upon this sermon by John Strachan in old age: “Read this sermon on 12 March 1858 and found it very inferior to what I expected.”

TWO

God’s Peculiar Peoples

“For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor?” Romans 11:34

I n every age men, in innocence or presumption, have brought the de­ ity down into life and attributed divine sanction to their earthly ends. Wherever this has happened, and for whatever reason, the resulting psy­ chological consequences have been extraordinarily powerful. The convic­ tion of being in harmony with the purposes of God has set up strong inner drives that are manifested externally as a righteous sense of mis­ sion. Among Christian peoples, group myths of this kind have frequently been arrived at by way of the providential theology. The fact that the French-Canadian people were helped to a consciousness of themselves through the preaching of their special mission by the Catholic Church is well known, although the history of the idea of the unique FrenchCanadian witness in North America has not yet been traced. This essay is concerned with some unfamiliar variations on the same theme among English-speaking inhabitants of British North America, and with the failure of the providential theory to furnish a unifying myth for English Canadians in the early Victorian era. Looking for a sense of common purpose animating any of the societies of colonial British America in the late years of the eighteenth century is not the most rewarding of pursuits. Only when a society has come to consciousness of itself as a community, as a collectivity distinct from all others, with its unique interests and special place in the world, is it gripped by the idea of an overmastering destiny that transcends the short-term divisions of politics or class or locality. The more intense the feeling of communal distinctiveness, the sharper, more far-reaching and more exclusive will be the sense of common purpose.

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In some of the societies of colonial America a sense of unique destiny, even of mission, took shape with astonishing rapidity. New England is the prime example. A homogenous people — united by a common mis­ fortune, a common role in dramatic events, and sharing deep religious convictions — soon came to an intense belief in their special mission un­ der God. “God sifted a whole nation that he might send choice grain over into this wilderness,” said William Stoughton in 1688. And so miraculous did the survival and prosperity of New England appear, and so much in keeping with their reading of the manner in which God had prospered Israel, that the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay concluded that they had been singled out for special favour. Look from one end of the heaven to another, whether the Lord hath assayed to do such work as this in any nation, so to carry a people of His own from so flourishing a state to a wilderness so far distant, for such ends and for such a work. Yea, and in a few years has done for them, as He hath here done for his poor despised people. . . . What shall we say of the singular providence of God in bringing so many shiploads of his people through so many dangers, as upon eagles’ wings, with so much safety from year to year?1

The Puritan sense of being specially called lay at the root of American national feeling, and has always been an important part of the Ameri­ can’s sense of national destiny. During the Second World War, the presi­ dent of the Princeton Theological Seminary thought it not inappropriate to recur to this most venerable stream in the American consciousness, observing that the United States was “committed as a nation to accept that responsibility which God, in his providential economy, lays upon states such as ours to provide a political order in which principles of righteousness may receive concrete social expression. It becomes the responsibility of the American state, in a world in which the most el­ emental principles of human right are denied, to employ force for the restraint of evil and the establishment of an order of justice.” 2 There are certain similarities between the Puritan founders of New England and the peoples who moved into the colonies of northern British America in the last half of the eighteenth century. All were, in a sense, displaced peoples, whether fleeing from sixteenth- or eighteenth-century religious persecution, or from severe social and economic dislocations in Scotland, Yorkshire or New England, or as political refugees from the American Revolution. But unlike the Puritans, the refugee populations of early Canada had little to unite them. Each group had its own tragic myth to sustain it; even the New Brunswick loyalists (who would seem to have provided that province with a homogeneity lacking in the other colonies) were united only by the fact of their common loyalty. In terms

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of origin, class, religion, and politics they were divided. In each of the colonies, a sense of community and of communal purpose took genera­ tions to build; and a national consciousness was at least a century away. In the meantime, the idea of empire was the only myth providing some sense of unifying purpose which transcended the intense localisms of British North America— but by no means for all. On one level, the politics of each colony consisted in conflicts be­ tween local executives and their opposition (impermanent alliances of religious and sectional interests); but, on another level, politics consisted in conflicts between imperfectly realized concepts of the proper future of the colony (often conflicts between idealized examples such as the gov­ ernment and society of Great Britain and those of the United States). However, because few in all the colonies participated fully in politics, regarded politics as a central concern, or conceived of it as a meaningful way of achieving their aspirations, the politicians had no monopoly on visions of British North America’s future. In Canada, just as in early New England, the providential theology was a fruitful source of such visions; but rather than providing a unified intellectual framework into which the whole of the colonial experience, past, present and future, could be fitted, it was appropriated to the needs and uses of various distinct groups, and the manner in which it was employed is a demonstration of the degree of difference among these groups. Among the fishermen and pioneer farmers who had settled in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, the power of the gospel raced like wildfire as a result of the extraordinary preaching of Henry Alline. It was a fire not soon spent. For the next generation, outport and farm were kept in a state of fervour by itinerant New Lights, Methodists, Baptists and dissenting Presbyterians. Though politically mute during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the folk of hin­ terland and seacoast underwent a religious experience as sustained and exalted as anything in the history of the Canadian church. In the eyes of the thousands of men, women and children won to grace, their lead­ ers were like the prophets and patriarchs of the Old Testament (indeed, among the Baptists, the founding preachers were styled “Fathers” ). To the preachers themselves, overwhelmed by the quenchless thirst of their flocks for the Word, it appeared that the Old Testament God was once more moving among his people in all His awful splendour, strengthening the hearts and lungs of His professors, and striking terror into the souls of the sinful. “I cannot refrain from letting you know,” wrote Father Harris Harding to a brother Baptist, “that the Almighty God of Jeshurun has girded his sword on his thigh, and is riding the flaming chariot

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of Israel like a glorious conqueror; his majesty and power are seen among the inhabitants of Annapolis. . . . Colonel Delancey’s daughter and some others . . . are under distress of soul.” 3 That God could be a real presence among the poor and meek of Nova Scotia, just as He had been among the oppressed people of Israel, was not a difficult idea for Bible Christians to accept. It was, in their view, only the vain professors of mechanical Christianity, who in the pride of wealth and station had interposed between themselves and the grace of God the earth-bound institutions of men, were casting doubt upon the reality of the divine presence, and thus denied the promise of the Scriptures. “Some perhaps will now say,” Henry Alline wrote in response to orthodox criticism of his ministry, “that all extraordinary calls are ceased, and therefore how is it possible for us to know, who God calls or intends to call for the work of the ministry any other way, than by their coming through such and such orders of men, &c. To which I answer that if extraordinary calls are ceased, yet the spirit of God hath not ceased to work with the children of men; neither is the spirit of God any more limited now, than it was seventeen hundred years ago.” And who better to know the intentions of God than Alline, blessed with the supreme confidence that came from “a divine commission from heaven,” or the many who through him had “experimentally” known grace, and “can call God to witness?” 4 The world that Alline and his followers denied was the world of the wealthy and the powerful, the world of the officers of the government, the well-to-do merchants, the ministers of the formal churches. This was a world inhabited by men who believed in the laws of reason, and who attributed those events not explicable by reason to the operations of chance and fortune. To them, the existing political and social order was the product of natural forces that in the last analysis were identical with the ordinary providence of God, the ultimate rationale disposer of things. Whatever was, was right. Set against this world was that of the evangelical Christians of the maritime colonies. Their world, while indubitably the product of God’s ordinary dealings with men, was one in which chance had no place. There was nothing random about the life of man, or about the life of society. All that occurred was the outcome of divine intent, even the most seemingly trivial of circumstances. Normally, it was true that the race went to the swift, and the battle to the strong; but God’s transactions with men were not always at this level. In these isolated little colonies in British America signs abounded of God’s grace to the humble. So numerous and unusual were these manifestations that it was evident that the ordinary rules of providence were once again suspended, and that God was abroad

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among the people in a special and particular way, confounding the proud, casting down sinners, breaking up dead churches, and calling forth a host of witnesses to truth where before had been only “the dryness of the desert.” There was, in these convictions, a world-view powerful enough to open and sustain a political and social gulf between the upper and the lower order of maritime society. But while the sense of living in separate worlds unquestionably existed on both sides, those moved by evangel­ ical Christianity were too diverse in origin, and soon too fragmented by sectarianism, to achieve a consciousness of themselves as a separate “people” ; although occasionally the rhetoric of political reformers owed much to righteous evangelicalism and to its sense that the common peo­ ple were set apart from the self-serving and corruption of the great. Far more frequently expressed than the conception of a providence deter­ mining the destiny of a whole society was the intense belief in the role of Providence in an individual’s life. Life on the frontier may be depicted as brutish and hard, and the frontier itself as a stage of cultural regression and of the democracy of common suffering. Yet the inner lives of those who endured its cruel testing were filled with the struggle of the spirit, and the life of the pioneer community was quick with signs, visitations, dispensations, and “times” , and abounded with small miracles. Over every man was the hand of God. Each man’s life was a record of his transactions with God and of God’s purposes with him— for those who had the faith-given discernment to read it. The speechifying of assemblymen, the comings and goings of the governor and his lady, the echoes from Parliaments, Congresses and Conventions, even the distant thunder of the great clash of nations, were less real and far less important than the backwoods drama of eternity surrounding those touched by grace. The dominant idea of the omnipresence of God received most elo­ quent expression in the sermons, writings and memoirs of the frontier preachers. “Providence is the glory of the missionary,” Joshua Marsden exclaimed. “What man upon such an errand would leave his native shores and face peril and fatigue in distant climates without the hope of a reward, without the confidence of a protector, without the consolation of believing in an all-seeing God?” The biography of Rev. James Mac­ Gregor, missionary of the general Associate Synod to the poor Scots of Pictou, is essentially a narrative of the gracious dealings of God with him and with his work. The education of young James for the church was the off-shoot of a trip taken by his father to the Lowlands; but what the mundane historian might regard as mere chance MacGregor’s biog­ rapher saw “as the means of the arrangements of Divine Providence of

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determining the character of his whole future life.” (It was providen­ tial, too, that the money to send James to school came by his father “keeping a still, and manufacturing a little whiskey.” ) MacGregor never doubted that his mission to Nova Scotia was specially blessed, and that his successes were signs of God’s tenderness towards him. As he said in urging young ministers to follow his example: “I shall not say that God is better in America than in Britain, but I mistake it if you shall not find him better to you.” God prepared his work, and occasionally did so in the most direct way. In July 1790, at Onslow meeting house, I had a speedy and remarkable answer of an ejaculatory prayer. Immediately after sermon, at my right hand stood up a man and intimated to the congregation that Mr. Chipman would preach there after half an hour’s interval. Immediately I prayed in my heart, ‘Lord, confound him, that he may not prevent the springing of the good seed sown’ , for I knew that Mr. Chipman, being a new light preacher, would teach the people the grossest errors. About five minutes after he began to preach, Mr. Chipman fainted and contin­ ued senseless about ten minutes and though he recovered, yet he did not preach any that day.5

The Methodist literature enshrined a less partisan Providence. The memoirs of the Rev. Duncan McColl contain a number of gentle mira­ cles, related with utter simplicity and earnestness. McColl was a former soldier who underwent a conversion experience while setting up as a merchant at St. Stephen’s, and, feeling certain that “the Lord called me to the ministry,” set up as a preacher instead. Even before he formally joined the Methodists, he had built up a faithful congregation through the power of his preaching and the impressive example of his own life. The emotional pitch of this little society is conveyed by McColl’s ac­ count of the recovery of his wife from desperate sickness in 1788. She had “lost her speech, and nearly her motion,” and in a sickroom filled with brethren, was sinking towards her end. McColl continues: I was walking the room, when a feeling came over me which at first caused me uneasiness; I challenged that feeling, and wondered from whence it came, and instantly a thought came forcibly across my mind, saying, that Christ went into Peter’s house, and saw his wife’s mother lying in a fever, rebuked the fever, and she rose up. A thought followed, saying, which was it, his body or his spirit, that wrought the miracle? I said it was the spirit. Is he not here? Can he not raise up your wife as well as her? I said, yes, Lord. Go touch the clothes on her bed, and she shall recover. Nature trembled, but the spirit said go, nothing doubting. I went quietly and touched the clothes over her; she looked at me and

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called for a tea spoon to cleanse her mouth from phlegm. All wept when she spoke, and from that moment she recovered.6

Such things bred conviction; and conviction bred further miracles. The sense of election supplied by experiences such as these kept the Methodists a people apart. Joshua Marsden’s Narrative of a mission to Nova Scotia, New Bruns­ wick, and the Somers Islands is full of “precious seasons.” He and a company of the faithful, journeyed by sled across the Gulf ice to Tatamagouche (where he proposed, somewhat audaciously, to level a sermon at the Acadians), were brought into extreme danger when their horses “as if possessed of a thousand devils,” bolted and overturned the sleds. Although several sleds were smashed, “the providential hand of God was most visibly displayed,” for not a single person was seriously hurt. On another occasion, Marsden vividly described the plight of himself and some companions lost in a blizzard while crossing the River St. John. The cold bit to the bone and the night was coming on, when suddenly they stumbled upon the shoreline and entered the saving warmth of a house. “Thus divine providence (the infidel would say chance) interposed for our preservation.” Such experiences strengthened Marsden’s faith, and prepared him for further tests. In 1804, the brigantine Rover, on which he was a passenger, was driven helplessly out to sea when in sight of Sambro Light. While the crew and his fellow passengers gave themselves up for lost he let his Bible fall open, he tells us, and “although I am no advocate of bibliomancy,” was deeply struck when it opened to Psalm 107. I reasoned thus: “is not God the same as heretofore? has he not all power in heaven and on earth? do not the prayer of his people still come up before his throne? is not all nature under his control? even the winds and the waves obey him. Were not the things written aforetime written for our instruction, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures might have hope?” From these reflections sprung an inward reliance on the divine veracity, faithfulness, and power; and I felt satisfied God would deliver us. The wind, which had blown from the north-east, lulled and came round to the south-west; and . . . we got into Halifax the next night.

Evidently Marsden was a man over whom a superintending eye was much needed. His knack for getting into tight corners (an infidel might have something to say about that) had not left him on another voy­ age— this time across the Bay of Fundy. He strayed into the path of the main boom as the vessel came about, and was knocked over the rail by the foresheet and launched toward the cold Fundy waters. In

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mid-arc he managed to lay hold of a convenient rope and swing himself back abroad, to the astonishment and edification of the crew. This re­ markable piece of gymnastics Marsden chastely described as “a gracious deliverance coming through the gut of Annapolis.” 7 Kindly interventions of Providence to spare the lives of the faithful, whether upon the sick bed or when at the mercy of the elements, were by no means the only occasions upon which the ordinary course of nature was reversed. Quite as characteristic was the sudden visitation of the wrath of God upon the sinful, in so dramatic a way that no one could misunderstand the proper wages of sin. There were many such stories; but one will suffice. Marsden relates the fate of a particularly dissolute member of a dissolute and godless community. In the prime of his life and at the boisterous peak of a drinking bout amid his carousing fellows, this man was struck stone dead while fetching yet another jug of rum. This alarming providence “damped the mirth of his companions,” but, as in all such sudden removals, God’s purposes were fulfilled in the consequent reformation of the settlement.8 Another means by which God’s intentions toward men were made manifest was through the dramatic conversion of some person who, per­ haps because of his wealth or station, or because of his outstanding depravity, would be deemed a most unlikely recipient of grace. Such conversions were inevitably given maximum publicity through the pulpit and in religious literature because of the promise of mercy they provided even to the most miserable of sinners. Perhaps the most remarkable instance of the kind was that narrated in the Rev. Charles Milton’s Nar­ rative of the gracious dealings of God in the conversion of W. Mooney Fitzgerald and John Clark? Fitzgerald and Clark were convicted felons, each with a long criminal record of the blackest kind. Their trial, at St. John, occurred during a revival being preached in the town by Milton, one of the Countess of Huntingdon’s missionaries. Milton undertook not merely to bring them the consolations of religion in their last days, but actually to convert them before they went to the gallows. At the same time, he used their experience to heighten the success of the revival he was conducting. Milton’s account of the proceedings would have been as familiar to the seventeenth century as was his surname; it was the kind of thing that gladdened the hearts of the Saints and appalled the orthodox. He first visited Fitzgerald and Clark the morning after a jury had found them guilty, and discovered them loaded with chains, “like the damned in hell,” in black despair. “This, together with the disagreeable stench which arose from them, so affected me, that I was speechless for some time.” Once recovering his voice, he embarked upon his mission with

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great ardour; for it was at once apparent to him (and soon to the world to which he published the matter) that the condition of these men was an allegory of the human condition in general. All men were damned by the Fall, were loaded by the chains of their sins, and were utterly incapable by their own efforts of saving themselves. Fitzgerald and Clark were especially depraved: their violent crimes, their black hearts “hard as adamant,” their boyhood religions (one “a rigid papist,” the other “a churchman” ) would provide the most testing of challenges for the saving grace of God. So, day by day (and often twice a day), Milton led his charges through the theology of salvation: read to them, argued with them, prayed with them, and joined them in hymns. Gradually Saint John itself and soon the country round about became aware of the wondrous work being wrought through Providence upon the souls of these hideous malefactors. As each familiar obstacle in the progress towards becoming “new men” was surmounted within the death cell, the tidings were conveyed beyond the prison walls. The penultimate event for popular edification came when Milton (standing upon a table) preached out of doors to “a great concourse of people,” who divided their attention between him and the prisoners, exhibited upon a slope next the jail. By the thirteenth day of his visitation to them, Milton felt able to announce that Fitzgerald and Clark, through the blessings of Providence, “were ripening for the inheritance of the saints in light.” That evening he went once more to them. At five o’clock I was again locked up in the cell with them. This afternoon the death warrant was read to them by order of the judge; after which, by their own desire, their coffins were sent into the cell. To see them lying in their coffins was a sight which no feeling mind could behold without being affected. I endeavoured to comfort them with those cordials which the Physician of Souls appoints for a troubled soul. After the useful exercise of praying and singing I left them.

On the eve of their execution, the prisoners underwent the temporary lapse customary in the spiritual biographies of the Saints, when Satan was let loose upon them,” but their faith triumphed over this testing. Their execution was transfigured from a sordid hanging to an intense religious drama. The emotions of the condemned, of the folk of Saint John, and of Milton himself reached a state of ecstasy transcending the inexorable operations of secular law. Fitzgerald and Clark were led from the cell that had been “turned into a Bethel” for the common folk of the town. Clark said as they went, “Here I walk to glory,” while Milton drew the attention of the reverent spectators to “the mystery and goodness of Divine Providence.” “After they had warned others to escape the wrath

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of God, at half past twelve o ’clock they were launched into eternity,” having consummately acted their parts in a morality play directed, not by the skilful Milton but, so far as the spectators were concerned, by Providence. It was exhibitions such as this that aroused the ridicule of the sects by the “respectable” classes and their churchmen. Though God might superintend the life of every man, it was unwarranted and excessive, ac­ cording to them, to believe that one could interpret His intentions in the lives of individuals. Unbalanced attachment to such a doctrine led directly to extreme forms of behaviour, to the kind of absurd, tasteless and grotesque conduct that the eighteenth century knew as “enthusi­ asm.” Alexander Pope epitomized this view: Shall burning Etna, if a sage requires, Forget its thunders, and recall its fires; On earth and heaven new motion be imprest, O blameless Bethel! to relieve thy breast? . . . When the loose mountain trembles from on high. Shall gravitation cease if you go by?

Indeed it will, said Joshua Marsden, “if this seem like enthusiasm I shall bear the stigma.” 10 Shall we, in compliment either to Pope, Hume, Middleton, or any other sceptical poet and philosopher, give up and deny a particular provi­ dence?— we might as safely give up the whole of religion altogether, and go back to the chance, atom, and fate systems. What! overlook the many particular answers in prayer with which God favours his people; overlook the many promises that offer his interference in the hour of need; overlook his watchful care over his church, and say that Jehovah is only an unconcerned spectator of his children’s afflictions?

Vital religion, in the view of its adherents, must be shielded from the sceptics, the dry moralists, the rationalizers and the episcopal latitudinarians; for otherwise its mystery, beauty, holiness and simplicity would be stripped away, and nothing be left but a lifeless code of moral regu­ larity. Vital religion was too powerful and honest a thing for those who attached importance to respectability and mere forms; “so it often fares, O blessed Jesus, with thy pure gospel— ‘the poor receive it, and the rich will not.’ ” 11

While the orthodox clergy of the time scoffed at the absurdities into which the enthusiastic sectarians were led by the undue emphasis upon a particular providence, they themselves were prone, as the custodians

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of the nationally established churches, to an extensive application of the providential theologies to the fortunes of nations rather than individuals. Just as invocation of a special providence gave meaning and consolation to the hard life of the new settlements, so did fitting of the enormous convulsions of the French Revolution and ensuing wars into a divine plan of history provide a satisfactory explanation for the more politically oriented members of the national churches. From the pulpits of the Anglican and Presbyterian churches of British North America the clergy attempted to impose system and order upon the extraordinary events overtaking the world, and to reconcile the part played in them by Britain and British North America with the larger purposes of God for man. Quite the most detailed sermon on this subject was delivered, in 1794, by the Rev. Andrew Brown of the Church of Scotland, who was for a time minister of the Protestant Dissenting Church in Halifax. Entitled The perils of the time, and the purposes for which they are appointed, it is worth examining at some length because of the representative char­ acter of the argument employed and because it provides a standard of orthodoxy against which other sermons of the time can be measured. Al­ though he was not a political preacher, Brown said, “the present times challenge particular notice” ; in such times, it was the duty of the Chris­ tian minister to extend his province to public affairs, since all history was “ordered by God for the correction and instruction of all the nations.” Who could doubt that the hand of God was behind the catastrophe of the French Revolution? Even for remote and insignificant Nova Scotia, the contest with France was a vital struggle, “the most important in its principles, and . . . the most divisive in its consequences of any national quarrel that ever demanded the unanimity and vigour of Britons since the foundation of the monarchy.” Revolutionary France had released the energies of twenty-six million people for the purpose of extending to oth­ ers, by propaganda and by conquest, its new-modelled government. But though its leaders spoke the language of liberty and fraternity, France stood for the principle of evil in history; “with a Daemon’s purpose, the anarchy of France assumed an Angel’s form.” For the first time in modern European history, the nations opposing France risked not merely military defeat, but the actual destruction of their constitution, social order, and arrangements for religious worship, and their replacement by the novel principles of Condorcet and the strange gods of Robespierre. “Hence, in a general view, it is not the war of one country more than another, but of the whole body of mankind. It is the war of every coun­ try that has either a civil establishment, a code of law, or a system of religious faith.” 12

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Why had God made the times so perilous? What moral effects were his judgements intended to secure? Brown properly observed that “it would ill-become a short-sighted mortal to determine beforehand what may be the precise purposes which God is carrying forward” ; yet, with singular precision, the divine plan of history had been revealed in Scrip­ ture and was there for all to read. According to that plan, it was no part of the intention of God that impiety and anarchy should conquer permanently, but rather that such afflictions were visited upon men to purify their hearts, and upon nations to restore their moral health. In this sense God’s judgements were monitory and corrective, and meant for trial. In another sense they were penal, and meant to punish in­ corrigibility. It would be wrong, therefore, to interpret God’s disasters as proof of the universality of guilt. Both the just and the unjust were involved in them, and it was impossible for man to discover what judge­ ments were intended for trial, and what for punishment. To some extent, however, God’s purposes had already been made plain. Without doubt the terrible calamities which have lately been desolating France, and which by her instrumentality have been extended to other countries, were commissioned in part to scourge a guilty age for the gross corruptions which universally abound, and for the growing boldness of profaneness and immorality. Yet in the awful dispensations ordained by God for the cure of those disorders, the good suffered with the bad, and frequently merit and virtue themselves prove the occasions of ruin. Still the lesson is forcibly written, even in the blood of the righteous, that in the end national vices will draw down national punishments.13

Thus the faults of the Ancien Regime in France had been terribly corrected, while the punishments awaiting “the nameless atrocities of anarchy” were yet to come. What mercies yet lay unrevealed behind these awful happenings? Brown was persuaded that Providence was admonishing the nations for their reception of the sceptical philosophy of the age, and of the tenets of deism. The social effects of the rationalist attack upon Christianity had been profound and destructive; so destructive, indeed, that men must surely apprehend the warning given, and return to the ancient guide of the gospel, “which moderates the passions of the rich, and supports the virtues of the poor.” So this age of darkness, hopefully, would be followed by an age of light, in which public morality and private virtue would be restored. In addition, Brown believed, Providence had been demonstrat­ ing, through the exhibition in France of the “uncontrolled licentiousness of savage democracy,” how impracticable all abstract schemes of polit­ ical reformation were, and had been warning the peoples of Europe to return to acceptance of frames of government more in accord with the

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frailties of human nature. There could, after all, be no liberty without coercion, and as for equality— “that splendid delusion of the present age, the vision of the weak, and pretext of the wicked” — it was against the primal laws of creation, since “regularity and beauty, harmony and the universal whole, result from the existence of inequality.” Such, my brethren, in my humble opinion, are some of the purposes of correction and instruction for which the late disastrous revolutions have been ordained by God: And I am strongly inclined to believe that until these lessons be effectually inculcated, there will not be an end to the troubles of the earth. Should therefore the admonitions already given prove insufficient to subdue a licentious and intractable generation, justly may we fear that more grievous admonitions will be added to the number, until awakened by the divine judgements, and chastened by their own disorders, the residue of the nations shall listen to the voice of Providence, and learn submission to its appointments.

What was the place of the British nation in the providential scheme? God has shown “the most unmerited goodness to our nation.” Despite the grossness, luxury and dissipation of British life, the nation had been exempted from the full fury of divine wrath. Nova Scotians had special cause for thankfulness, perhaps because they had some special merit. No factions have divided our people, or distracted our government. Clubs and cabals are unknown in our settlements. No one has dared to accuse another of disaffection. . . . No people were ever more highly favoured, or blessed with a better opportunity of becoming wise and good and happy. Let not the kindness of Providence plead with us in vain. Enjoying safety in the midst of danger, let us observe the dispen­ sations of judgements to other lands, and apply the instructions which they deliver to our own improvement. In a particular manner let us be­ ware of the prevailing vices which have produced the perils of the time — infidelity, licentiousness, and a spirit of innovation.14

Nowhere, however, did Brown claim for Britain or for Nova Scotia a select place in the workings of Providence. Unlike Henry Alline and his followers (who claimed supernatural sanction for their ministry), Brown asserted no “divine commission” for the British nation. What he did profess was sufficiently sweeping: that divine sanction upheld the polit­ ical, religious and social arrangements of the countries arrayed against Revolutionary France, and that the perils of the time were warning of the punishment that awaited those who fell away from them. In this, he was at one with his Anglican contemporaries. Bishop Inglis had no doubt whatever that humanity had reached a great crisis in its history, in which the judgements of God were abroad.

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The aspect of the present times seems to be big with events that are momentous and alarming— like a dark and gloomy cloud, overspreading the face of heaven, full charged with materials of ruin, and ready to burst with destructive violence. The prophecies contained in the book of God, which will assuredly be fulfilled in due time, authorise us to expect the most awful calamities in the latter times. The commissioned Angels stand ready with Vials of wrath. . . . The judgements of God are actually abroad.15

Inglis was quite as confident as Brown that regicide France merited the most condign punishment; and like Brown, though in much stronger language, Inglis described the war as “a contest in the cause of human­ ity against violence and blood, of order and government against anarchy and confusion, of right and justice against lawless rapacity, of real lib­ erty against oppression and tyranny, of truth against falsehood, and of God against the most audacious Atheism.” Long before the Revolution, France had invited calamity by embracing materialism and deism, and with them came the reign of “voluptuousness, sensuality, and lascivious­ ness.” The Bishop’s only specific charge in this formidable catalogue of sins is a little anticlimatic— the French had taken to card-playing on Sundays, and reprehensibly carried it on “under an exterior of politeness . . . ” which only served to disguise the poison.16 Yet how was it that the undisciplined armies of Revolutionary France had been permitted a series of smashing victories against the profes­ sional soldiery of monarchical Europe? Was it possible that God was using the French as his instrument to punish Britain and other nations for their transgressions? Inglis thought it quite possible. The history of the Jewish people showed that whenever they had fallen from the paths of righteousness, God had visited them with his sore judgements, and had used for his purpose such pagan idolators as the Egyptians and the Baby­ lonians. “God Almighty permits wicked and tyrannical governments to prosper for a time . . . he makes them his scourge, the instruments of his justice upon others.” The British peoples should therefore take their recent misfortunes as an express sign of God’s displeasure. “Come, and let us return unto the Lord,” Inglis enjoined his hearers in the words of Hosea, “for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up.” The course of events in France demonstrated that “a nation is no more exempted from madness and phrenzy than is an individual,” and that the horrors of the Terror, the wanton destruction of the fabric of organized religion, and the invasion of ancient rights of rank and property were “the natural and necessary consequences of the levelling, atheistic principles which are adopted in that miserable coun­ try.” The proponents of these principles in Britain, to Inglis, offended

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both God and genius of English history. Had that history not come to a stop with the Reformation and the Glorious Revolution? We enjoy the benefits resulting from those changes, we should be thank­ ful to heaven for them; and look back with reverence to the fortitude and virtues of our ancestors who were instruments, in the hands of Provi­ dence, of conferring those signal blessings upon us. For we live in a period when the Religion of Jesus Christ is professed and taught in its native purity, as contained in holy Scripture. We five under the best of Civil Constitutions; where we enjoy as much Liberty as is consistent with a state of Civil Society. . . . In these circumstances, to think the business of changing should still go on, and never stop, must surely proceed from [a] spirit of innovation . . . or from something worse.17

Although Inglis’ sermons sounded a more patriotic note than did those of Brown, the Bishop was nevertheless careful not to exalt British virtues. The real meaning of current history was that there was a need for puri­ fying repentance; without it, the British nation would be broken like a potter’s vessel. But as the wax unfolded, and as the Royal Navy began to reach to­ ward that control of the seas finally won at Trafalgar, the sermons of the Anglican clergy of British North America became progressively less humble and more patriotic in content. More and more the purposes of God were linked to the war eifort of Britain; and more and more the national church preached the divinely ordered mission of Britain against the new Babylon. Some interesting examples of this process occurred after Nelson’s vic­ tory over the French fleet at Aboukir Bay in 1798. Nelson himself had an­ nounced to the Lords of the Admiralty that “Almighty God has blessed His Majesty’s arms in the battle.” In far-off Saint John, the Rev. Mather Byles, Loyalist and Harvard graduate, uttered a heartfelt “Amen.” What man could question that Nelson’s victory was the outcome of “the secret irresistible scheme of Providence,” and that it provided irrefutable proof that British people were “the favourites of God,” doing His work against “Satan,” personified as France. “Satan was the first Rebel; the first who disdained subordination, despised Government, insulted his King, and renounced his God. He deceives and infatuates a distracted world, and under the specious names of Liberty and Equality introduces anarchy and confusion.” Byles’ sermon is one long, strident flight of national self-congratulation, in which the purposes of God axe intermingled with the bloody triumphs of British arms. When have our irresistible Navies, the floating bulwarks of the Kingdom, been more potent and more formidable? And in what period of history

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have their victories been more illustrious, complete, and decisive? Some have spread the terror of the British Arms to the burning line, and others to the Northern Ocean. Some have rode [sic] with unrivalled Majesty on these American seas; others have controlled the Eastern World, and anticipated the first blush of the dawning day; and others have recalled to our memories the miracles of ancient times, by turning the waters of Egypt into Blood. In this uninterrupted series of prosperous events, is not the Almighty Hand conspicuous?1®

The sermon offered on the same subject by Bishop Jacob Mountain of Quebec presents a contrast in style. It lacks Byles’ bumptiousness, and is pitched at a much higher level of biblical scholarship. But Mountain’s intellectuality and grasp of Old Testament historiography led him to a conclusion as extreme as that of Byles, and much more thoroughly worked out. His view of the role of Providence in history was that its judgements were, in effect, rewards and punishments for good and bad behaviour on the part of nations, a stand that was certainly a perversion of the orthodox theology of the question. Nations undergo chastisement by various means, arising out of their own misconduct; by the irregular ambition, the factious intrigues, the sedi­ tious turbulence of their members, by the annihilation of order, and the subversion of government, by the destruction of their fleets and armies, . . . by the growing power of their enemies, and by the diminution of their own power, and the loss of their independence: these various calamities are the result, and under Providence, the punishment of public vices. Nations prosper by the concurrence of events which are the reverse of these: and their prosperity is the fruit, and the reward, of the public virtues.1®

Although God had first used the French as His flail to “chastise the wickedness of an ungrateful world,” the British people, having passed through the refiner’s fire, were, “now, happily for ourselves, and for the world, made the instruments of chastising the arrogance and humbling the power of France.” The public virtues of Great Britain were obvious to any discerning eye. Her constitution, “established on the broad basis of natural justice, matured by the experience of ages” was “calculated, beyond all others, to preserve the liberties, to engage the affections, and to promote the happiness of the people,” whether in the homeland, or “extending to these Provinces, her highly favoured Children.” Her arts, sciences and letters were distinguished by the accomplishments of genius. Above all, her established religion, “equally remote from Superstition and Fanaticism,” was “sound in its Doctrine, correct yet liberal in its Discipline, simple yet dignified in its Ceremonies,” and stood as a shining light to the world. Mountain denied that it was “National Pride” that

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enabled him to testify to the superiority of Britain, and conceded that her worthiness was a matter of only degree. “We may justly hope . . . that we are comparatively the objects of God’s favour, for we have not yet denied him — and we are engaged against an enemy whom we may, without presumption, consider as much more wicked than ourselves.” But such qualifications are unconvincing. The heart of Mountain’s message was not just that Providence was rewarding British virtues by success in arms, as Byles said, but that these marks of favour meant that Britain was elected by God not only to defeat the French, but also to fulfill a mission to all mankind, like Israel, her ancient counterpart. What is it that our example, combined with our successes, might not do for the world? The noble stand which we have made, has been consid­ ered as effecting the salvation of Europe. . . . How glorious a distinction it would be for us, to be worthy of being made the instrument, in the hands of Providence, of restoring the tranquility of the world! of dis­ crediting that spurious and pernicious Philosophy, which has deprived them at once of the benefits of Divine Instruction, and human Experi­ ence, and delivered them over to the darkness of scepticism, and the wild speculations of conjectural policy; which has dissolved all the bands of order and society; and under the specious names of Fraternity, Equal­ ity and Liberty, let loose ail the plagues of tyranny and oppression, of assassination and plunder, of debauchery and atheism!20

Mountain was by no means alone among the colonial Anglican clergy in expressing this radical extension of the providential theology. His brother bishop, Charles Inglis, had concluded by the time of the false peace of Amiens that Britain had been set apart for a mission to all mankind. Her survival amidst the general ruin of kingdoms and empires, and specifically the miraculous thwarting of such infamous plots as the Nore mutiny and Colonel Despard’s conspiracy, were “signal mercies of God to our nation,” and proved that Great Britain was “the delegated instrument of Providence to arrest the progress of anarchy and impi­ ety, and to vindicate the cause of Religion, social order, and regulated Government throughout this habitable earth.” 21 The conception that certain nations may be specially favoured by God in order to perform a providential role in history has a strong foundation in Christian theology. It hinges upon the acceptance of the eternal valid­ ity of Old Testament historiography, the core of which was the covenant between God and Israel. God called the Jews, made them a peculiar people, and their history thus became a record of their vocation. Israel was elected of God, not to glorify itself, but because it was signally fit to stand as witness to God’s intentions for man. The history of Israel was

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therefore a prolonged transaction between God and the Jews, in which the Jews, according to the Christian view, were ultimately condemned and dispersed. But during the epoch when Israel was favoured by God, its prophets, as Herbert Butterfield has pointed out, . . . ascribed the successes of Israel not to virtue but to the favour of God; and instead of narrating the glories or demonstrating the righteousness of the nation, like our modern patriotic histories . . . denounced the infidelity of the people, denounced it not as an occasioned thing but as the constant feature of the nation’s conduct throughout the centuries; even proclaiming that the sins of Israel were worse, and their hearts more hardened against the light, than those of the other nations around them.22

Far from emulating the prophets, Mountain, Inglis and other ministers of the state religion fell into the common error of accommodating the workings of Providence to the prevailing system of values, an error that has trapped so many of their counterparts in other ages. They dutifully ascribed British victories to God, but at the same time took them as proofs of special merit; and instead of denouncing the sins of the nation, became apostles of the divine mission of Britain to the world, a mission in which secular elements were inextricably intermingled with religious ones.23 No Anglican clergyman went farther in confusing the two than John Strachan, rector of York. His most noteworthy sermons on the subject were delivered in 1814, on an occasion of imperial triumph; and again at a time of crisis in the history of the provinces Upper Canada, on December 14, 1838.24 Though the two sermons were delivered nearly a quarter of a century apart, they are sufficiently alike to be considered together. They represent Strachan’s deepest feelings and beliefs with respect to the proper place of Upper Canada in North America and in the Empire. Nothing he said in them is inconsistent with his behaviour in his years of power and influence, and the position he took in them explains a good deal about that behaviour. In his speech in 1814, Strachan started from the historically sound po­ sition that the whole period from the decade of the 1770s onward should be regarded as a unity: “posterity will call this the age of revolution.” It was a time unique in human history. Whereas it had taken humanity two thousand years to discern God’s intentions when he gave the victory to the Greeks at Marathon, in the present age “never have so many un­ questionable proofs of a superintending Providence appeared in so short a period.” The meaning of recent history was to be sought through an informed application of the lessons of the Old Testament.

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The history of the Jews, tho’ merely a fragment of that of the world, unfolds most distinctly the moral government of God and demonstrates that as he dealt with that people so does he deal with all nations. By this we are taught to contemplate profane as well as sacred history in a religious point of view, and though the finger of God may not always be distinctly seen, we may rest assured of his continual presence and superintendence. The Jewish history is therefore a lamp by which we can read passing events.25

What the lamp of Jewish history disclosed to Strachan was nothing less than that the British were the second Chosen People of God. “What the Israelites of old were to the surrounding nations, so the British appear to be to the present inhabitants of the world.” Just as God had entrusted his truth to the Jews, so He had entrusted it to another nation in the present day. “Here, my Brethren, I allude to the British nation, but not in the spirit of boasting or ostentation.” What proofs existed for this extraordinary assertion? Britain’s miraculous triumph over the French Antichrist, and the qualities which, under God, had made it possible: Now, although Great Britain has many sins to deplore; yet, on a com­ parison with other nations, it will be found that she possesses more true liberty, more solid morality, and more true religion, than they. Where is there a nation to equal the British in the number and extent of its charitable institutions? or possessing such a spirit of independence, such intrepid virtue; such a rational piety; these are the distinctions which have enabled her to continue successful against the world in arms!26

The notion that the British are God’s chosen people has never been very far beneath the surface of English patriotism, though seldom in comparatively recent times has it been quite so solemnly proclaimed as by Strachan. It is not sufficient to explain Strachan’s relentless pushing of the providential theology to its ultimate conclusion by the fact that he was an ideologue, while his clerical colleagues on the whole were not. There is about his treatment of the subject a tone redolent of a more vigorous Protestantism, deriving perhaps from the unorthodoxies of his Scottish upbringing, and from a version of the national tradition more vital, positive and assertive than that of his English contemporaries.27 As William Haller has pointed out, the idea of England as the Elect Nation was a significant part of the nationalism of Elizabeth’s time 28 It was propagated chiefly through the national church and by popu­ lar religious writers like John Foxe. In the margin of his patriotic dia­ tribe against the French, Bishop Aylmer condensed the notion into three words: “God is English,” while Archbishop Parker had no difficulty in justifying persecution of nonconformists, since “where Almighty God is so much English as he is,” Englishmen had a duty to protect His true

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religion from impious assault. The central theme of Foxe’s martyrology was the election of the English nation as revealed in history; and Milton, in his well-known references to “God’s Englishmen” and to England’s mission “to give out reformation to the world,” was but the most dis­ tinguished of his generation to draw heavily and with conviction upon Foxe’s historiography. John Strachan, temperamentally and perhaps through his schooling, was much closer to this tradition than were his brothers in the church. In the overblown prose of the 1838 sermon there are many echoes of the language of Foxe and of the Areopagitica, as in the following passage: At the Reformation, the Holy Spirit seemed to be with our Fathers, & they separated no farther from Romanism than Romanism separated from Christian truth, & the Apostolic Church which they purified and renewed has ever stood forth as the bulwark of the Protestant or true Faith. Three centuries have elapsed since England was considered the seat of true Christianity. She arose from the slumber of ages and shook off the mass of heavy corruptions which had accumulated in darkness, and stood forth dauntlessly in her purity, the witness of God amidst a world lying in wickedness. She has stood since the period with the Bible in her hands, abiding firmly by the doctrines it reveals.

Although Strachan’s sermons had as a chief theme the doctrine that the British were “God’s peculiar people,” they differ greatly in tone. It was not just that the first came at a time of victory, and the second during one of the most critical and disheartening periods of Canadian history. When Strachan preached his victory sermon, he was a young man who had just planted his feet firmly upon the lowest rungs of the ladder of colonial preferment, and could see opening ahead of him oppor­ tunities for influence and power not normally given to the poor son of a Scottish quarryman. The Rebellion sermon, on the other hand, was an embittered valedictory, a defiant vindication of the principles for which Strachan had stood during his years of political power, and which had been in retreat, both in England and in Upper Canada, for some years prior to 1837. Thus the 1814 sermon is a political manifesto couched in the trappings of providentialism. In it Strachan laid down for his York congregation the lessons of the great war now ending. All flowed from the central fact that Great Britain, “the shield of afflicted humanity, the successful hope of a suffering world,” had been God’s chosen instrument in the punish­ ment of atheistical France, and was now given the task of ordering a world restored to peace. Since Strachan held that the particular system of government, religion and society obtaining in Britain was an approx­ imation of the providential order blessing by God, it naturally followed

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that the restored monarchs of Europe must re-shape their realms in ac­ cordance with the British model. This meant that the lot of the lower classes of Europe must be raised above that of 1789. “Wise reforms” must be introduced to ameliorate their condition; criminal codes must be revised so that “justice may be separated from ferocity, and punish­ ment from revenge” ; exclusive distinctions of rank must be broken down; and economic distress relieved by the abolition of oppressive systems of taxation. Even in England, a reformation of manners on the part of the upper orders of society was required, in order to prevent a recurrence of democratic unrest. “Public decorum, a reverence for religion, and attention to the feelings of inferiors, ought never to be separated from rank and station.” In calling for a more enlightened and humane leadership from the ruling classes of Britain and Europe, Strachan by no means intended to encourage a reforming spirit among the people. The core of his message is to be found in his reflections on what Providence wished to teach the masses. They must have learned that the “self-named Patriots” and abstract constitution-spinners who had led the world such a dance had been unmasked for the deceivers they were. The wars had taught that no government framed by fallible man was, or could be, perfect. It was to be hoped that the peoples had learned to suspect the artifices of factious demagogues who, from demonic ambition, sought to turn them against their natural rulers. It was inescapably revealed that “the two great experiments in America and France to constitute governments productive of virtues and happiness only . . . have completely failed.” Only by “peaceable and gradual steps, and not by revolutions,” can “the most solid improvements in the Science of governments can be obtained.” The American Revolution had wrought a cruel delusion in the mind of the people of Europe; they had lost themselves in “golden dreams of transatlantic felicity.” God’s judgements had shattered such visions: The present age has demonstrated that no great and decided ameliora­ tion of the lower classes of society can be reasonably expected: much im­ proved they certainly may be, but that foolish perfectability with which they have been deluded can never be realized. . . . In times of tranquil­ ity the people may be better instructed, the laws may be made more equal and just, and many new avenues of enjoyment may be opened; but labour is the lot of man, and no system of policy can render it un­ necessary, or relieve the greater portion of mankind from suffering many privations.

These lessons were not for Europeans alone, but for those Canadians who had been foolish enough to be attracted by American republican­ ism. For Strachan, there was really no difference at bottom between the

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United States and revolutionary France; the two societies were founded upon the same secular and egalitarian assumptions. In 1812, this fun­ damental identity was disclosed when the United States had “deserted the cause of humanity” and become the abettor of Napoleon. “No state but this became the ally of France by choice.” The American people, “traitors to the peace and happiness of mankind,” had made themselves “the Satellites of the Tyrant,” yet had the arrogance to address Canadi­ ans as slaves, and to profess engagement in a war of liberation. Divine retribution would be visited upon the United States just as surely as it had been upon France. In the blessed struggle against the powers of darkness, the Upper Canadians had taken a distinguished part. Their survival alone was miraculous. Like the Israelites of old, they had kept the faith against formidable odds, they had vindicated the memory of the Loyalists. They would emerge from the struggle a better and purer people, having been purged of those “traitors and false friends whom a short-sighted and mistaken policy had introduced among us.” Among God’s chosen peo­ ple, therefore, the Upper Canadians had won a special place; “we have gained a name among our fellow-subjects which will be forever precious.” Strachan appears to have conceived the future role of Upper Canada in the New World as a kind of leaven, or, to borrow a phrase from Prynne, though “but a Remnant, a seede, a little flocke,” the Upper Canadians would stand as witness in North America to the truth of God in church and state. “Now,” he proclaimed, “the dawn of the happiest times is rising upon us.” 29 It is at this point that the Anglican interpretation of the time of trou­ bles ceases to be war-inspired propaganda and becomes the doctrinal basis for post-war conservative policy. As it happened, John Strachan, the most extreme proponent of the idea of the Elect Nation among the colonial clergy, was also in the best position after the war to translate the implications of that idea into the shaping of the future of a colony. Upper Canada was a remote and exposed colony, filled with inner tensions and deeply apprehensive of the United States; and it was the environment in British North America most receptive to extreme political solutions. As teacher to a whole generation of political leaders, as churchman, polemi­ cist and political infighter, and as a member of the executive government John Strachan, more than any other man, was responsible for the fram­ ing of Tory policy in church and state, and for the rationale by which it was defended. Too frequently Strachan’s career has been explained in terms of his great vanity and ambition, and his rhetoric has been dis­ missed as a kind of elaborate cover for self-seeking. But beneath that rhetoric there lay utter conviction. The ruthlessness and intolerance of

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his political style derived from the absolute belief that the prescriptions he defended in church, state and society were part of the providential or­ der, that Upper Canada had a special mission to preserve them in North America, and that any opposition to them was a sign of the grossest and most blasphemous infidelity, and of a dangerous sympathy for the condemned revolutionary society of the United States. By the time of the Rebellion of 1837, Strachan had all but failed in his attempt to build an ordered Christian society in Upper Canada. He him­ self had lost his position as executive councillor, had been passed over for advancement in the Church, and had been forsaken in his defence of the privileges of the Church by many of his pupils and proteges. The people of Upper Canada, or many of them, had turned to such false prophets as Mackenzie, the Baldwins and Peter Perry. In Great Britain the very Ark of the Covenant had been violated. Dissenters and Catholics had been emancipated; the Reform Bill had destroyed the delicate balance of the constitution; a Whig government had betrayed the faith by with­ drawing support from the great mission societies of the Church. When Keble, Newman and Pusey denounced national apostasy, Strachan was strongly attracted; but as prominent members of the Oxford movement drifted towards what Strachan regarded as an outmoded superstition, he was filled with dismay. His cup of bitterness was filled to overflowing by the whole course of British colonial policy in the 1830s, which to Stra­ chan seemed nothing but a series of betrayals of the appointed purposes of the Empire. Strachan’s commitment to his personal vision for Upper Canada approached fanaticism, for only a fanatic could believe that the Rebellions of 1837-38 were God’s punishment upon a sinful generation. In the Rebellion sermon, Strachan identified himself with Hosea, the prophet from which he took his text. The paraphrase of Jewish history with which the sermon began was a transparent recapitulation of recent British and Upper Canadian history; when he spoke of Hosea reproach­ ing “with stern intrepidity” the deplorable profligacy and licentiousness of the Jews, it was his own role and other targets that he had in mind. Much of the sermon was an indictment of the British government. Stra­ chan deplored the spectacle of a nation “raised up for mighty purposes” proving false to its destiny, and, like Israel, quitting the service of Je­ hovah. “It is because the Protestant principle has been in less vigorous operation, and superstition and infidelity have raised their heads in high places.” True, some signs of the great calling remained. The moral tri­ umph of the emancipation of the slaves was a benefaction that stood “without a parallel in the history of the world.” Perhaps it was not yet too late; perhaps “the illustrious part which Great Britain and Ireland have been so long appointed to take in the great theatre of this world

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is not yet accomplished; but this great Empire is reserved to a suffer­ ing world to be the refuge of the afflicted and distressed, the asylum of liberty, the guardian of Morality, the bulwark of Christianity, and the impregnable barrier against that dreadful torrent of infidelity which so many of the nations are now drinking.” Perhaps God’s wonderful de­ liverances might still be recalled, and the warning judgement delivered upon the Canadas “may be confined to this extremity of the Empire and our Government may take warning and repent . . . as the Israelites sometimes did when punishment only reached the borders.” The original sin of the British government was in permitting a pow­ erful nation to grow up in North America without providing it with an established church. The consequent “liberalism, fraud and infidelity” had brought the judgements of the American Revolution. But recent colonial policy demonstrated that the meaning of this providential warn­ ing had not been assimilated; Britain’s remaining colonies had not been adequately protected from contamination and therefore “the mass of cor­ ruption engendered in the neighbouring States, once our Sister Colonies . . . has rapidly increased and extended to these Provinces its venomous poison.” Great Britain was not alone in its guilt. Strachan had bitter words for those Anglicans who had withdrawn their support from his projects for education and for the Church. Even more bitterly he denounced provin­ cial society at large for its unnatural preoccupation with party politics. When the Jews split into parties, they became soft and enervated, at a time when “union and National energy were essential to render them a match for their more powerful Neighbours.” With traitors within, and a malevolent enemy without, what need had Upper Canada of factions in order to achieve her simple destiny? “And,” Strachan burst out, per­ haps with his eye upon those regrettable parishioners, the Baldwins, “here suffer me to remark that there is not a single grievance or matter of contention in this Province, lately so tranquil, prosperous & happy, which three well-informed honest men might not, in a few days, settle to the satisfaction of all reasonable minds.” What might not have been accomplished had Britons and Canadians not sinned against the light? What glorious things might have been effected in North America. The brightest imagination is unable to picture the scenes of peace and hap­ piness which it would have exhibited, said these Provinces, instead of being exposed to traitorous conspiracies within and without would have presented a Christian society built upon righteousness.

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The Rebellion Sermon, for all its conventional summons to repentance and purification, was a cry of despair by a man who had all but given up hope of seeing “a Christian society built upon righteousness” come into being in Upper Canada. The idea of Upper Canada as a beacon or wit­ ness of religious and secular truth in North America, first broached by Simcoe and taken up so enthusiastically by Strachan, was an impossible one, at least in the terms in which Strachan conceived it. But the fact is that Strachan held this ideal; and that for many years it gave coherence to conservative policies, and had a most decided effect upon early Cana­ dian development. It also helps to explain why the forms of conservatism which grew up in old Ontario appear so much more extreme than those found elsewhere in British North America. And it is surely paradoxical that John Strachan, the harsh critic of the fanaticism and enthusiasm of the sects, should at heart have been a zealot far more extreme than they. Were the sectarians, in their heartfelt trust in a particular provi­ dence, any more absurd than the clergy of the Church of England, and the higher enthusiasm that proclaimed the providential mission of the Elect Nation? Unlike Massachusetts Bay and nineteenth-century French Canada, the societies of English-speaking British North America did not discover in the providential theology the materials for a myth that would unite them as a people apart, and supply them with an inner cohesion and direction. Among the frontier folk of the Maritimes, the effect of the idea of a special Providence was to exalt the humble as against the worldly, and ultimately, when given a secular twist, to provide a basis for political dissent. The Anglican myth of British election was to have a long life, whether in the Upper Canadian expansionism of a Charles Mair, the Anglo-Saxon racism so prevalent among those Canadians caught by the vision of Empire at the century’s end, or in the recent pathetic by-way of British Israelitism. But in the hands of Strachan and his fellows, the providential sense of mission was too narrowly conceived, too deeply rooted in the defence of a dying order to catch the imagination of the people, and to provide the basis for an emergent Canadian nationalism.

THREE

Canadians View the United States: Colonial Attitudes from the Era of the War of 1812 to the Rebellions of 1837

F or nearly two centuries, the political institutions of the United States have been subject to critical scrutiny by transatlantic visitors, whose observations have both pleased and provoked, and invariably interested, the American public. Very few Americans, however, have been aware that their institutions were under constant examination from a quarter much closer to home. Prom the inception of the Republic, Canadians have been eavesdropping upon the great carnival of American politics through the unobtrusively parted lace curtains of their window looking south. There is little reason why Americans should have been conscious of this second critical presence, for Canada has produced no James Bryce or Harold Laski, nor even a substantial literature on the subject. This essay is an attempt to find out what Canadians learned, or thought they had learned, about the American polity in the generation from the War of 1812 to the rebellions that shook both Upper and Lower Canada in 1837. The opinion it synthesizes is that of the politically effective minority, but on the basis both of the contemporary evidence and of continuing Canadian stereotypes about American politics, it is doubtful that the views of the inarticulate majority of Canadians were very much different from those of their political spokesmen. It might perhaps be assumed that such an inquiry can produce only the most predictable of results. Would it not be legitimate to expect that a North American people, sharing an environment, comparable institu­ tions, and a similar political heritage with the American nation, and in an unrivalled position to observe the workings of the American govern­ ment, would come to conclusions about that government not dissimilar to those held by Americans themselves? Such is not the case, however, and the fact that it is not raises some interesting questions about the role of the political culture in the formation of national character. Of course, many Canadians shared the sympathetic European view that the United States, this great experiment in popular republican government,

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was destined to be the education of the world. Most, however, did not; on the contrary, they expressed their disagreement with the proposition in a variety of ways that demand explanation in terms of the complexities of British North American life. rsj

“So fluctuating are American politics that we cannot reason upon them with any degree of safety,” wrote Edward Winslow of New Brunswick in 1800.1 What struck him, and other colonial observers of American poli­ tics, was the disorder that seemed endemic to the system. The Canadian diagnosis was always the same: the American disease was democracy, it was probably fatal, and its chief symptom was galloping factionalism. The entire country, said Richard Uniacke, Attorney General of Nova Scotia, was quite “distracted by faction.” 2 The following passage from an Upper Canadian newspaper of 1811 encompasses virtually the whole range of British American criticism of American institutions. The characteristic evil of their democratic system is its tendency to fos­ ter an uncontrollable spirit of party. Their frequent popular elections of all branches of their government furnish fuel and fan the flame. The rage of their parties has become intolerable. In their mutual struggles to oppose and crush each other, they spare neither feelings nor characters. If their newspaper publications were to be credited, we should think al­ most every man of any prominence among them guilty of the blackest vices and crimes. . . . This fervor of party zeal must disturb the har­ mony and intercourse of social life, and pollute the streams of justice. It must render their tribunals, and especially the popular branch of them, their juries, prejudiced, partial and prone to favor their co-partizans and condemn those of the opposite party. . . . These are the practical and perhaps inevitable results of the principle of democracy, operating under the passions of human nature; and they detract much from the advan­ tages of elective government. . . . Whatever imperfections there may be in any part of our Provincial system, we are happily exempt from those overwhelming tides of party passion and prejudice, which prevail in more popular governments. Let us, then, not envy our neighbours, but be contented with and improve our own condition, and . . . lead peaceable and quiet lives in all godliness and honesty.3

Where did such ideas come from? Did they spring from extensive first­ hand knowledge of the United States? Far from it. The average Cana­ dian has never really believed that extensive travel was necessary for such a purpose; he rather appears to have leaped from the womb fully equipped with a lifetime’s antagonism toward the United States. John

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Strachan came out to Upper Canada from Scotland in 1799 quite Whiggish in his views and was prepared to “secure a retreat in New York should his new situation not please him. It is instructive to trace through his correspondence the gradual lessening of his regard for the United States, “so deeply absorbed in dirty little private quarrels among them­ selves,” until he could write in 1809 that though he was “as Friendly as ever to true liberty,” living in “neighbourhood to Democracy” had taught him that it did not exist in the American republic.4 No doubt some of his views came from a reading of American newspapers, or ex­ cerpts from them in the Canadian press, but ideological hostility to the United States was already so pervasive a part of the cultural ambiance of Upper Canada that, as Strachan began to move up the ladder of political preferment, he took on the provincial orthodoxies. These orthodoxies were based as much upon classical political science as upon close observation of the Republic, and were familiar to all literate British Americans. Had not the histories of Greece, Rome, and Carthage shown that in democratic republics the rights of the individual, the rule of law, the deference due to great men were all abridged by “the wild caprice of a Mob,” swayed by “factious k designing men” ?5 In such states, all was flux: there appears to be one material defect incident to all Republics, which is, the want of that permanence or duration so essential to the progressive improvement and perfecting of any human situation, for it is a well known historical fact, that Republics are most perfect at their commencement, and invariably fall and degenerate, until, by internal discord, corruption and Anarchy (before any great lapse of time) they end in the most intolerable Despotism, or become an easy prey to some neighbouring Power.6

Nothing could stop this process of decline but a strong executive un­ touched by partisanship; but the government of the United States was “weak & feeble,” and its chief executive nothing but the leader of the faction paramount for the time being.7 The “fatal preponderance being won by the factious Democrats over the Federalists, that party in which “the wealth, talents, and national ideas of Government centre almost exclusively,” was proof that the rot of the body politic was advanced. It was “the perpetual recurrence to Elections” that was doing the Fed­ eralists in, not just because they lost them, although they regrettably did, but because it was axiomatic that they should. Men of ability and substance “dread the fraternal hug of liberty and equality, refuse to use “the servile means necessary to obtain power” in a democracy, and so “they are generally shrinking from the scene.” 8

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The equalitarianism of American life, joined to the turbulence gener­ ated by party, meant that drives of a most dangerous kind were released in the body politic. Indeed, every American election was a kind of social revolution, and the electoral process a most potent instrument for social levelling. At each election, demagogic politicians made inflammatory appeals to social jealousies and roused in the humblest of citizens unreal hopes of personal advancement. To stimulate such ambitions was to play with fire, and the day of reckoning would not be far away. William War­ ren Baldwin, by no means an uncritical admirer of colonial institutions, reflected the dominant British-American view in a hustings speech to the electors of York. In the United States, the want of a hereditary sovereign and perhaps also the want of the intermediate estate of an hereditary nobility, awake in the breast of the American citizen a spirit of personal ambition unknown to an Englishman. An ambition . . . aiming at the first office of the state will one day or another open the door to a terrific anarchy amongst that people — even now the spirit of party is so virulent among them, its machinations so widely extended and at work, that the shoemaker at his last and the farmer at his plough are alike worried by its politics and have not the free use of their voices at . . . elections— from these evils you are in a like manner free, and therefore I say you are the most independent yeomanry on earth.

Even before the War of 1812, many British Americans detected the be­ ginnings of the descent to terrific anarchy” in the emergence of the Virginian oligarchy tainted by its ties with slavery and contemptuous of constitutional forms.9 Negative criticisms of American institutions, drawn from classical sources, were generally part of a comparison, stated or implied, with colonial and British institutions, and with the guarantee which the lat­ ter gave for “firm & well established government” and “for the repose and security which it is the object of every well informed system to provide.” 10 Such comparisons, and the positive values they upheld, were psychologically vital to the Loyalist population of British North America. How could this emigre people deny their own history, or the choice they had made? Already, then, it was essential for Canadians not to believe in the United States, and to assume that the country they lived in was not a kind of subarctic, second-best America, but rather a genuine alter­ native to this revolution-born democracy, and organized upon principles and for purposes quite different from those it espoused. The bond be­ tween psychological need and conservative ideology was firmly cemented by the blasts of propaganda that for twenty years were directed against the French Revolution and all its works. This Burkean flood, poured

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forth from government, press, and pulpit, met no resistance whatever in British America, a situation hardly paralleled even in England, and had an enduring effect upon the character of Canadian conservatism.11 American institutions were visible to Canadians only through the chinks in an extremely constricting ideology. So closed was their system of beliefs that they were quite unable to incorporate in their picture of American politics information they received which conflicted with their presuppositions. The result was absence of significant detail and some extraordinary omissions. The process even survived total immersion in American life. In 1808, for example, John Howe, King’s Printer of Nova Scotia, was sent on a spying tour of the United States to estimate its military readiness and zeal for war. Howe avoided contamination alto­ gether, partly by moving within a network of sympathetic Federalists, partly through the efficient screening of his ideological filter. He returned to Halifax without a single belief impaired. When the distress of the people of Boston (his birthplace) over the effects of the embargo did not accord with his notion of what it ought to be, he observed that “they en­ dure it with a degree of philosophy that is really surprising in a Country where the actions of Men are under so little restraint.” Because he knew that “Philosophers in general make wretched Politicians,” he recorded no specific detail of a half-hour interview with President Thomas Jef­ ferson (an interview, incidentally, which followed successful espionage in the Washington naval yard). His opinion of the Democratic President was confirmed by Jefferson wearing a home-spun coat during the Fourth of July levee, to Howe an example not of patriotic self-sacrifice but of stooping, in an undignified way, for vulgar popularity, a “giving another Tub to the Whale.” 12 Like many another Canadian, he sought, and hence found, many de­ plorable examples of American license. He was gratifyingly appalled when the Federalist legislature of Massachusetts, maddened by a chance for partisan electoral advantage, overrode “both the Letter of the con­ stitution and the former practice under it.” It was bracing to be able to remark that “striking indeed is the happiness we enjoy under our well poised constitution . . . when contrasted with the heterogeneous changeling Constitutions of this whimsical age.” 13 When I observe the licentiousness of this country, their continual recur­ rence to Elections, the manner in which all the Officers of the Govern­ ment are obliged to cringe for public favor . . . I cannot help expe­ riencing the most pleasing sensations on reflecting that I am a subject of Great Britain, whose inestimable constitution, defines and secures the rights of all descriptions of Men, and the Acts of whose dignified

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executive, originate with a Sovereign who loves and is the Father of his People.14

New information which reinforced his conception of American institu­ tions was, of course, added immediately to the picture. Howe was prob­ ably the first Canadian to comment upon the adverse effect that massive European immigration was bound to have upon American chances for stability. What would become of politics in a city like New York, which “contained an immense number of foreigners” ? Every day’s experience shews, that men who will be restless and intrigu­ ing under one Government, will be so under every other. A great part of the Intrigues which agitate this country, originate with men whom the Nations of Europe have been compelled to spue out from among them, and wherever they get a footing, they will be a perpetual source of disease to the body politic. Their having obtained footing is openly lamented by the best men here: but they have become so numerous they do not know how to counteract the mischiefs they are continually effecting.15

Was there any difference among the colonies in the degree of dogma­ tism with which they regarded the American political system? One way to find out would be to determine whether British Americans were able to distinguish between the two countries toward which they were most deeply hostile— Napoleonic France and Jeffersonian America. Reputable psychologists have held that the more closed the mind, the greater the in­ ability to make distinctions of this type.16 A full answer to this question would require a thorough review of the evidence, but it would appear that Maritimers were apt to be more open in their attitudes toward the United States, when tested in this manner, than were the peoples of the Canadas. Bishop Charles Inglis had thought that, compared to the French, “our American Rebels were Angels” ; Edward Winslow sim­ ply knew too much about the diversity of the United States to make an equation so crude as one between imperial France and republican America; and even John Howe, while he saw “a disposition to imitate everything French” among Americans, went no further than to say that “an attachment to the New order of things in France, of which Mr. Jef­ ferson largely partook, has also predominated throughout the States, and interested them in favor of France.” Even during the War of 1812, Mar­ itimers remained conscious of the complexity of American affairs, and of the deep regional divisions within the United States. Their close rela­ tionship with New England familiarized them with the fact that many people of that region strongly opposed “the conduct of the general gov­ ernment in all its deformity.” 17

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It is hard to know what the French-Canadian political elite thought about American or French institutions. Le Canadien, their organ from 1806 to 1810, contains little on the subject. Although it was filled with constitutional discussion, this was drawn from the authorities on the British Constitution, William Blackstone or Jean-Louis Delolme, and was connected with the efforts of Pierre Bedard and his allies to manip­ ulate the colonial government.18 References in La Constitution to the United States were uniformly hostile. In 1808 Americans were called “les Sansculottes du Nouveau-Monde,” a phrase suggesting a belief in the equivalence of the two revolutionary people. The Mandements of the Church hierarchy made no distinction between republican America and imperial France; they lumped them together in 1812 as common allies, and they identified resistance to the United States as resistance against the principles which had been convulsing Europe for twenty-two years.19 But French-Canadian fears were cultural rather than political. When Le Canadien compared Americans to Goths and Vandals, it was expressing a profound hostility toward an alien and capitalist culture, threatening through its overflow into the eastern townships to engulf a peaceful, moral, agrarian society and “Yankifier le Canada.” 20 In Upper Canada, the most vulnerable of all the provinces to rev­ olutionary subversion, the most radical equations of the United States and France were made. In A discourse on the character of George III, published in 1810, John Strachan argued that the two great modern revolutions were inextricably interconnected. It was not a conspiracy of Illuminati or the spread of the ideas of the philosophes among the illiter­ ate masses that had precipitated the French Revolution, but the utopian pictures of life in America painted by returning French soldiers and such lionized visitors as Benjamin Franklin. “The American,” Strachan as­ serted, acutely enough, “was the chief cause of the French Revolution.” In their guiding democratic principles, the two revolutions were identi­ cal; it was no accident that “a very great proportion of the American people still regard this sanguinary revolution with exultation, and after it had sunk into the most alarming despotism that the world ever saw, behold its progress with joy.” It was erroneous to make a distinction be­ tween America and France on the ground that the former still had such institutions as trial by jury and a free constitution. These were “masks for oppression,” because in the United States “democracy has corrupted the heart.” Americans, lacking the check of an executive above faction, were anarchists; the French were the slaves of despotism, “and faction produces the same effects as the cruel tyranny of France.” 21 The two countries were identical in another major respect: the mis­ sion of revolutionary state to subvert legitimate authority in the name of

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liberty.22 In this respect, what France was to the Old World, the United States was to the New; and the War of 1812 was further proof of their common identity. American drives were not for freedom, wrote John Neilson in the Quebec Gazette, but for power and gain, the first “engen­ dered by their political institutions,” the second “so universally prevalent in a country where money is the sole source of distinction.” Why was America the only nation to ally itself freely with despotic France? Be­ cause the alliance was a natural one; “the simple truth is, the turn of the United States is arrived.” 23 In the great war against the “bloody Tyrant” Napoleon and his “worthy disciples . . . the Rulers of America,” it was Great Britain “which contends for the relief of oppressed nations, the last pillar of true liberty, and the last refuge of afflicted humanity,” declared the Upper Canadian House of Assembly in 1812; and John Stra­ chan preached that, had the United States been truly the home of liberty, she would have supported the struggle for freedom and overlooked “any little fault on the part of the British.” 24 For, asked Neilson, were not the struggles of Britain “the struggles of the Almighty Himself.” 25 rsj

The most noticeable change in Canadian conceptions of American po­ litical institutions that had taken place by the 1830s was that their dominant conservatism was supplemented by more favourable views, associated with the reform parties that had appeared in the several colonies. The tendency to regional variation, already apparent by 1812, was marked. In Nova Scotia, the relative moderation of conservative attitudes to­ ward the United States and its institutions was matched by the tone of the reformers. Joseph Howe, their leader, thought that conservative criticism lacked balance in alleging a gulf between American “theoretical liberty” and the actuality of slavery and lawlessness. In a remarkable eulogy of the United States delivered in the assembly in response to such a criticism, he asked where, “excepting the British Isles . . . upon the wide surface of the globe . . . an equal amount of freedom, prosper­ ity and happiness are enjoyed?” 26 The linking of British and American liberty, and the characteristics attributed to American life, are signifi­ cant. Howe’s writings showed that what impressed him chiefly about the United States was not its institutions, but its vast material prosperity. Continually he reminded sluggish Nova Scotians that American progress stemmed not from “mere political institutions” but from the “high intel­ lectual and social cultivation” of Americans (especially New Englanders) being brought to bear upon boundless resources.27 It is true that Howe,

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like reformers elsewhere, occasionally grew impatient with the extrav­ agance of the institutions of the old colonial system and cast envious eyes upon the admirably cheap state governments to the south. It was patently absurd, he thought, that Nova Scotia, with a population one fourteenth that of New York’s, should have a structure of government that cost substantially more. Nor did he consider it an adequate defence to argue that Nova Scotia’s establishment was virtually identical to that of the other colonies; “it is much better to take good examples where we can get them, and copy frugality from our enemies rather than ex­ travagance from our friends.” On the other hand, like his conservative opponents, he deplored the weakness of the American executive and the excessive powers assigned to the states. But on.the whole, American in­ stitutions really made little impression upon him, one way or the other. Howe’s whole public life was testimony to his ardent admiration of Great Britain; his political model was the reformed British constitution.28 Howe had little in common, on this score, with Louis-Joseph Papineau, leader of the Patriote party in Lower Canada. Papineau, who had once denounced American democracy and described Americans as “ces republicans ambiteux . . . avides de pouvoir et de conquete,” had undergone total conversion by about 1830. Like Howe, he praised the energy and intelligence of the New Englander, “le vrai Yankee” ; un­ like Howe, Papineau attributed Yankee superiority and leadership to the practical republicanism of their institutions during the colonial period, and believed that the rest of the United States was only then catching up. He had come to believe, from the American experience, that democracy was “in the nature of things” in North America, and he was particularly impressed by the resiliency of democracy in the United States, by its capacity to tolerate, and preserve, the existence of radically clashing in­ terests and opinions. French Canadians, he concluded, ought to accept American political institutions as “notre modele et notre etude.” 29 Thus the Ninety-two Resolutions of 1834 praised American elective institu­ tions highly and singled out for particular commendation the technique embodied in some state constitutions for constitutional revision through popular conventions.30 How just was the charge of the Montreal English that Papineau, him­ self a seigneur, was promoting the elective radicalism of America in order to swamp the provincial government with a reactionary French majority at every level? Was his chief purpose in politics the survival of “a slav­ ish and antiquated system of feudal jurisprudence,” and a society that was “a not unfaithful picture of France in the seventeenth century” ?31 Papineau appears genuinely to have come to the final conclusion, one not shared by the conservative majority.of his own people, that French

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Canada stood a better chance of survival within what he saw as the decentralized democracy of the United States than in the authoritarian imperial structure dominated by the British and the English Canadians. His picture of the United States emerges clearly in such passages as this, from his Histoire de Vinsurrection du Canada: Je reponds a Lord Bathurst (en 1823) que mon utopie differait de la sienne, et me paraissait tout a la fois plus desirable et plus realisable; que la confederation americaine serait dans l’avenir une et indivisible; qu’elle me paraissait marcher plutot vers l’agregation et la croissance, que vers la mutilation et 1’impuissance; qu’au jour de notre independance, le droit de commune citoyennete et de commerce libre entre Quebec et la NouvelleOrleans, entre la Floride et la Baie d ’Hudson, assureraient au Canada une periode indeterminee, mais longue, de paix, de conquetes sur la nature, de progres dans les sciences morales, politiques et industrielles, avec individuality pour chaque Etat souverain, sous la protection du Congres, qui ne pouvait etre tyran n’ayant ni sujets, ni colonies, et ne possedait d’attributions que dans les questions de paix ou de guerre avec 1’etranger et de commerce exterieur.32

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that not only was Papineau quite as selective in his view of American institutions as were Canadian conser­ vatives, but also, in his belief in the possibility of ethnic survival, he was under a profound misapprehension about the main forces of American life. William Lyon Mackenzie, Papineau’s counterpart in Upper Canada, probably knew more about American institutions than anyone else in British North America. His knowledge was founded on omnivorous read­ ing, extensive travel in the United States, and a numerous acquaintance­ ship among Americans. At the outset of his journalistic career in the 1820s, his views on American republicanism were decidedly mixed, being those of a moderate Scottish Whig. “We like American liberty well,” he told his readers in the first number of the Colonial Advocate, “but greatly prefer British liberty.” It was slavery that stuck in his craw and led him to denounce “the quack system of liberty” in the United States, where politicians “mock the ear with the language of freedom in a capital pol­ luted with negro slavery.” Certain aspects of American government he also thought deficient; for example, he considered the union of the states excessively loose, the elective presidency too much the toy of the caprices and fluctuations of politics, and the various representative bodies overly infested with lawyers, who could hardly act as spokesmen for the several distinct interests of the country in the same way as those solid and re­ spectable manufacturers and country gentlemen who filled the House of Commons. Nevertheless, as Mackenzie became more closely involved on

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the reform side of Upper Canadian politics, he came increasingly to ap­ preciate the immense benefit the example of the United States provided for those who wished for change in the colonies. Despite the defects he saw in the American polity, he informed John Neilson, I do admire their course as a nation, and glory in their success, as affording proof of the practical utility of the representative system of government.” 33 In one respect, Mackenzie was an advocate of the American form of government from the start. Like other colonial reformers, he thought that the relatively stagnant state of the British-American economy, in contrast to the enterprise and prosperity of the United States, was con­ nected with the difference in the two systems of government. He cried: Look at New York, look at its machinery, its manufactures, its canals, its Ontario glass works, its Salina salt works, its agricultural associations: look at De W itt Clinton, compare him with Sir Peregrine Maitland — the latter in enjoyment of a princely salary; the former wasting the best years of his life in improving the resources of his country without fee or reward.

It was the cheap government of the United States at all levels, and its lack of a torpid and privileged official bureaucracy, that cleared the path for the enterprising citizen, instead of presenting, as in Up­ per Canada, a series of dispiriting barriers to those seeking public and private improvements.34 This argument, an article of faith with all reformers, was perhaps their most effective criticism of colonial institutions, and half convinced many conservatives who otherwise rejected all unfavourable comparison of colonial institutions with those of the Republic. It was in vain that moderates like William Hamilton Merritt, who had made his name syn­ onymous with the great public enterprise of the Welland Canal, scoffed at such economic innocence. Those who attributed the economic progres­ siveness of the United States to republicanism, he argued, had failed to explain the unchallenged economic leadership enjoyed by Great Britain, a leadership first won under a most reactionary and unreformed system of government. The form of government has no bearing on the subject. The true cause must be attributed to capital — for instance, take one country governed by a tyrant, if you please; let that country adopt the means to acquire an abundant capital, and let another country with similar advantages, governed by pure democracy— without adopting similar means to ac­ quire capital — and you will see all branches of trade flourish in the one possessing capital, while it languishes in the other.3®

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But Merritt’s argument was unconvincing to many Canadians who, in this respect at least, followed the views of Mackenzie and his radical friends long after Mackenzie’s general views on American government underwent so pronounced a change that few could agree with him. This change came about as a result of the interaction between Macken­ zie’s deepening disillusionment with colonial government and his growing knowledge of the United States, and appears to have coincided roughly with the election of Andrew Jackson as president in 1828. Once con­ verted, Mackenzie, always an enthusiast, became utterly convinced of the superiority of American institutions and discarded his previous crit­ icism almost entirely. Now he could even stomach the gradualists’ argu­ ments on the question of slavery; the “profligate and loose” Negroes of the South “must be accustomed to the blessings of freedom ere they can appreciate their value.” 36 Although Mackenzie’s new admiration of American democratic insti­ tutions was not confined to any particular level of government, he did tend to emphasize those elements that seemed to him in stark contrast to the defects of the Upper Canadian constitution. Running through his Sketches of the United States and Canada (1833) was a double theme: the cheapness and efficiency of American federal and state government, and the democratic simplicity and accessibility of American officers of government. The hero of the Sketches is unquestionably Andrew Jackson, the noblest of these modern Romans,” whose austere republican virtues, whose rise to greatness through sheer merit, not birth or wealth, and whose advocacy of the cause of “the humbler classes against the united rapacity of their more exalted brethren,” testified to the moral strength of American democracy. Such pygmies as Lieutenant-Governors Pere­ grine Maitland and John Colborne were not to be compared to a Jack­ son; it was absurd of Canadian Tories to believe that a system that could produce men such as they was superior to the American. But then, To­ ries have a natural alliance with the enemies of mankind in every part of the world.” Even Illinois’s Governor C.A. Gilman, an honest tavern keeper, was infinitely to be preferred, because chosen by the people, to some stiff-necked, irresponsible soldier imposed arbitrarily at the head of a government because of a few minutes’ action at Waterloo. The ad­ mirable farmers’ republic of Vermont was enough to demonstrate that cheap government, popular institutions, and universal education enabled Americans “to attain a high degree of happiness,” while Canadians suf­ fered under costly church and state establishments. When his colleague John Rolph said of the future of the United States that “it may tran­ scend sublunary bounds, to reach the height of sanguine prophecy about

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them,” Mackenzie would have agreed. Tory prophecies of impending anarchy were based on nothing more substantial than “the eternal dingdong of administration and anti-administration papers.” Mackenzie, too, he confessed, had once had such doubts, but “I did not understand these matters then so well as I do now.” 37 In his hard fight against provincial Tories and imperial officaldom to win acceptance of the need for a thoroughgoing reform of colonial govern­ ment, Mackenzie increasingly advocated measures derived from contem­ porary American political forms. To his own followers he prescribed the use of the nominating convention as the nucleus for party organization at the local level, and to the electorate at large he preached the virtues of an elective executive and upper house, which, as in the United States, would sweep away the oligarchs and the monopolies through which they preyed upon people. When driven to desperation by the smashing elec­ toral victory of his Tory archenemies in 1836, he turned to the paths of violence. His draft constitution for the state of Upper Canada pro­ posed a system of government modeled faithfully upon that of the central government of the United States.38 Despite the fervour of Papineau and the vigour and insight of Macken­ zie, theirs were distinctly minority reports. The prevailing picture was still a conservative one, and little had been added to it since 1812. Mar­ itime conservatism in the 1830s was most eloquently, if perhaps not quite accurately, expressed by T.C. Haliburton, whose retreat from politics to the Bench signalled his shift to the right wing of Tory politics. Never­ theless, he shared with his fellow Nova Scotian Tories an attitude to the United States that had elements of real openness. He knew a great deal about American affairs in general; he admired wholeheartedly the enter­ prising spirit of Americans; and his specific purpose in writing many of his Sam Slick stories was to encourage his countrymen to emulate their New England cousins. But Nova Scotians had nothing to learn from American political in­ stitutions. Sectionalism, heated clashes over federal-state jurisdiction, the evil omen of nullification, all confirmed what Nova Scotian students of American democracy had long known, that the United States was headed for disaster, and meanwhile “presented the melancholy spectacle of a Government unable to enforce its own laws, or respect for those of its neighbours.” 39 These new touches on the old Tory dogma of the weakness of au­ thority and the anarchy of factionalism in American politics are closely related to the appearance of a conception of the United States savour­ ing more of nightmare than image. The radical increases in the scale of American life, the enormous size of contending interests in the American

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polity, the “mammoth breed” of parties, the restlessness and mobility of the people and the rapidity of their advance to the west, the upward leap in population, and the huge immigration from Europe aroused in British-American conservatives a profound disquietude, eloquent of their insecurity both toward the United States and toward more general prob­ lems in life and politics. No one expressed these anxieties more vividly than Haliburton. To him, the United States was best described by words like “vortex,” “volcano,” or a phrase like “a great whirlpool,” much as China is described today as an “ant-heap.” He was particularly obsessed by the teeming “factorin’ ” cities of America, peopled with those he called “the driftwood and trash” of Europe. One of his characters says of this development: “It don’t suit us or our institutions. A republic is only calculated for an enlightened and vartuous people, and folks chiefly in the farmin’ line.” 40 A fellow Nova Scotian, William Young, observed that in the great cities like New York “there is a spirit among the working classes symp­ tomatic of danger, and no man can tell how far it may proceed.” Such cities, wrote Haliburton, “generate mobs,” “vice,” and “want,” a com­ bination that could lead to “anarchy and bloodshed.” How could so weak a political system as that of the United States stand up to such gigantic tensions? Canadian conservatives saw the United States as a country “without a rallying point,” adrift on uncharted seas, without anchor, helm, or rudder, and at the mercy of every wave that ruffled the surface of the vast human sea of Americans. There was a savage satisfac­ tion in the chorus of Canadians predicting a fearful catastrophe.41 One of the most extraordinary of these prophecies was made by Haliburton through the mouths of his unlikely Yankees: “I guess we have the ele­ ments of spontaneous combustion among us in abundance; when it does break out, if you don’t see an eruption of human gore, worse than Etna lava, then I’m mistaken. There’ll be the very devil to pay, that’s a fact.” And in a most revealing passage, Haliburton expressed the innermost Tory urge when he alleged that the human suffering to come would be a blood payment for the guilt of the American Revolution: If our country is to be darkened by infidelity, our Government defied by every State, and every State ruled by mobs, then, Sam, the blood we shod in our revolution will be atoned for in the blood and suffering of our fellow-citizens. The murders of that civil war will be expiated by a political suicide of the State.42

While Haliburton’s attitudes toward American life and politics were highly ambivalent, those of the Upper Canadian conservatives were ab­ solute in their unchanging hostility. In the wake of the Rebellion of 1837,

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when American citizens were still giving aid and comfort to Mackenzie’s rebels, Robert Baldwin Sullivan prepared a report on the state of the province for the new lieutenant-governor. Of the torrent of indictments of the United States produced in this period, Sullivan’s was the most cogent; it has been suggested that it was influenced by de Tocqueville.43 While such influence is quite likely, de Tocqueville added to the Cana­ dian analysis no more than a few phrases, for Sullivan’s argument was a purely traditional one. “Nothing could be more for the interest of this Colony than the practical success of the American theory of a purely representative government,” he wrote ironically, for then Upper Cana­ dians need not fear aggression from the peaceful and enlightened people that “the march of intellect and education” in democratic republics sup­ posedly created. But how very different has been the working of the American constitu­ tion. In the anxiety of the people to leave no power to do evil in the hands of the Government, almost all power has been denied it. It is true that no individual can be a tyrant, but the tyranny of the majority is less responsible, and more unrelenting and universal in its application, everything is referred to party, and from the highest to the lowest ev­ ery functionary of the Government is dependent upon the will of the majority for his continuance in office.44

There follows a castigation of American political anarchy, executive weakness, judicial corruption, mob law, and “the agitation of a con­ tinual election” that differs in no significant particular from those made thirty years before. John Beverley Robinson once claimed that the War of 1812 “produced in the British colonists a national character and feeling.” 45 Whether or not that was so, the war did fix conservatism in Upper Canada in a rigid mould. John Strachan had construed British victory and Upper Canadian survival against France and the United States as a providen­ tial judgement: “Of the two experiments made in America and France to constitute governments productive of virtue and happiness only, both have completely failed.” 46 “Now,” he proclaimed, “the dawn of the hap­ piest times is rising upon us.” Robinson had been far more realistic: vic­ tory meant merely that Upper Canada must look forward to “a constant struggle for independence against a powerful and unprincipled neigh­ bour” with whom she shared six hundred miles of frontier. “It is idle to talk of absolute security anywhere in the Province . .. the Inhabitants of Canada, My L ord,. . . are unfortunately doomed to a constant, anxious speculation about the probable loss, or preservation of everything they possess.” 47

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Like men living on the slopes of a volcano, the Upper Canadian gov­ erning class adjusted to what they termed their “peculiar situation” and tried to anticipate every rumble from their revolutionary neighbour through use of state, church, and school to control immigration, check loyalty, ferret out treason, and inculcate the right values. So acute was the threat to the Vesuvian mentality of the Upper Canadian Tory, disbe­ lief in the United States and belief in his frozen image of its institutions were crucial. In the Maritimes, where the threat from the south was much less credible, the image of the American political system was more flexible and the need to maintain it less acute. In all regions, the re­ bellions of 1837 and the ensuing violations of British North American territory by American citizens in support of the rebels, with the ap­ parent sympathy of the United States government, served to telescope colonial opinion toward the right. Favorable views of American insti­ tutions were now irretrievably associated with treason, and it required more courage— and more conviction— than most moderate reformers possessed to voice publicly the mildest praise for them. For more than a decade after the rebellions, there would be no major challenge to the dominant conservative position on the nature of the American polity.

FOUR

The Rise of Christopher Hagerman

I n January, 1840, the Attorney General of Upper Canada, Christopher Hagerman, resigned his office and accepted a judgeship from the hands of the Governor General. His retirement marked the end of an era in the politics of the province. For Kingston, too, it was a significant event, as Hagerman had been member for the town in the Assembly during fifteen of the previous twenty years, and had been the first member ever elected for the riding of Kingston. More than any other man, Hagerman had dominated the town’s politics, and his passing from the stage left a decided vacuum. In view of Christopher Hagerman’s long involvement in Kingston pub­ lic life, and of his prominence in Upper Canadian politics, it is surprising how few are the associations with him that remain today in Kingston, No house is identified with him; no street, much less a freeway, is named after him. All that appears to survive of his presence is his portrait in the Memorial Hall of the city building. It is possible, from his picture, to see not merely why he was called “Handsome Kit” , but also why this harshly eloquent, aggressive lawyer was held in fear and hatred by many reformers of his time. Throughout the 1820s, William Lyon Mackenzie gave Hagerman a place of honour in the “Legislative Black List” he liked to run periodically in the Colonial Advocate. In the turbulent 1830s, Hagerman became the foremost Tory spokesman in the Assembly. As Solicitor General of Up­ per Canada, he was removed from office by the Imperial Government for the part he took, in defiance of stated British policy, in the repeated ex­ pulsions of Mackenzie from the Assembly. After his surprising reinstate­ ment, an event Mackenzie called “a spoke in the wheel of another violent revolution in America,” 1 he became the chief defender of High Tory prin­ ciples in the Legislature, and the favourite target of Reformers. Later, as Attorney General, he prosecuted many of those charged with treason­ able participation in the Rebellion of 1837, including Samuel Lount and

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Peter Matthews, who were executed. Charles Lindsey, Mackenzie’s bi­ ographer and son-in-law, claimed that Hagerman’s prosecution of these men was brutal; that he “closed his ears to the cry of mercy, and only regretted that the gallows had not more victims.” 2 Charles Durand, a young Hamilton lawyer exiled to the United States until 1844 as a re­ sult of the relentlessness of the Attorney General, still thought of him, many years later, with deep bitterness. In his Reminiscences, Hagerman figured as a tyrant, a bullying, persecuting politician, a “grim old bull dog” with a “tiger countenance,” whom he always thought of as a “type of Nero.” 3 So obsessed was he with what Hagerman and his ally, Sir Allan MacNab, had done to him, that he regarded their early deaths as a gracious dispensation of Providence. They had ruined him, “but not for all time; for here I am, all safe and God-blessed, in a very advanced age, half a generation older than [MacNab] and Hagerman were at their deaths, able to swing my pen, to utter my mind and scourge these two men thoroughly for their wicked persecution of a young man who had done no wrong.” 4 Durand is only the most violent of Hagerman’s many detractors. It was inevitable that a man so able, aggressive, and partisan in his defence of the old order of church and state should attract to himself a large share of the conventional invective launched at the Family Compact. So iden­ tified was he with the political cause of High Toryism that perhaps no other event so clearly symbolized the passing of the age of the Family Compact as his elevation to the Court of King’s Bench in 1840, a “pro­ motion” skillfully stage-managed by Governor General Poulett Thomson because of Hagerman’s last ditch opposition to the union of Upper and Lower Canada. The career of so important a politician as Christopher Hagerman is worthy of investigation, though there has yet been none. In the history of Kingston politics, he occupies a place of particular significance: he was the real architect of the Conservative party. It is the purpose of this paper to show how closely his early life was bound up with that of Kingston, and to explain why Kingstonians chose him to be their first member of the Assembly in 1820. p j

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Nicholas Hagerman, Christopher’s father, was a native New Yorker of Dutch origin.5 When the American Revolution began, he fled north to Quebec, and there enlisted in a Loyalist corps, only to be taken prisoner during Burgoyne’s ill-starred campaign.6 He said his last farewells to his homeland on September 8, 1783, as the Loyalist fall fleet set sail from New York City for Quebec. A miserable winter at Sorel followed,

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and from there Hagerman, in company with others from the old New York counties of Rockland, Orange, Ulster, Westchester, Duchess, and Columbia, set out under the leadership of Major Peter Van Alstine for their promised land on the Bay of Quinte. Nicholas drew a farm right on the Bay, at what became known as Hagerman Point, close to the village of Adolphustown. Whether by this time he had met and married Mary Ann Ketchum (Ketchum is a wellknown Loyalist name) is not known, but John, the first of their seven children, was not born until 1789. Christopher Alexander, born in 1792, was the third child of the marriage. Probably among his playmates, or among his early schoolfellows, there was a Ruttan, a Casey or a Roblin — future political friends and enemies. Perhaps he saw something of young Peter Perry, like him the son of a Loyalist, and about his own age, but destined to be the most durable of all his political foes.7 Just what school Christopher did attend is a question of some com­ plexity. The parents of Dr. Canniff went to the local Adolphustown primary school with Christopher and his younger brother Daniel; then, according to Canniff, Christopher studied law at home with his father and later went on to John Strachan’s school.8 Was he in fact a student of Strachan’s either in Kingston or Cornwall? The question is important, since to have been a Strachan pupil was later a passport to preferment for many young men. There seems little doubt that Christopher did not have this advantage. Though Dr. Strachan kept nothing as systematic as a record of attendance, he was in the habit of listing, from time to time, the names of all the men he had taught. These lists begin as early as 1804; the fullest is a list of 1827 entitled “Alphabetical list of young Gentlemen now living, who have been educated by the Honourable and Reverend John Strachan, Archdeacon of York in Upper Canada.” 9 The list contains the names of many of Hagerman’s political contemporaries: John Beverley Robinson, Henry John Boulton, John Macaulay, George H. Markland, Allan MacNab, Robert Baldwin; but neither it, nor any other such list, includes the name of Christopher Alexander Hagerman. Strachan did not compile these lists merely as a matter of record. They were meant to impress people, especially influential people in England, with the valuable services he was performing in training up the lead­ ers of a new society in the way they should go. Thus, in 1831, he informed his old sparring-mate at the Colonial Office, James Stephen, that Speaker McLean, Attorney General Boulton, and nine other mem­ bers of the newly elected Assembly, plus Chief Justice Robinson and two other judges of King’s Bench, were all former pupils of his.10 That John Strachan should have passed up the opportunity to add Solicitor General Hagerman to this galaxy is too wildly out of character to be credited.

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If Christopher Hagerman was not a Strachan protege, and this seems virtually certain, then some peculiarities in his relationships with those who ought to have been his close political colleagues may be partly ex­ plained. For instance, although he was for many years the chief pro­ ponent of the most extreme Church of England views on the Clergy Reserves in the Assembly, and therefore Dr. Strachan’s chief lay ally, the co-operation between them was never close. Might one not have expected, at least when either was away from York, some approxima­ tion of that steady stream of letters on politico-religious subjects that flowed between the Doctor and former students like John Macaulay or J.B. Robinson? There is nothing of the sort, but rather a very few let­ ters, mainly formal or perfunctory in character. Strachan’s references to Hagerman in his correspondence are rare, and then almost invari­ ably patronizing: “a good specimen of our Native Canadian.” 11 Much the same holds true for Hagerman’s relations with other Tory leaders. His correspondence with them does not appear to have been volumi­ nous, and other evidence makes it clear that he was never regarded as a member of the innermost circle, but rather as an ambitious outsider of uncertain motives who had somehow managed to climb high. It seems, absurdly enough, that the newly fledged elite of Upper Canada regarded Christopher Hagerman as an arriviste. nu

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It is certainly true that Hagerman, as a young man, took some astonish­ ing shortcuts to success, quite apart from his lack of foresight in failing to go to Strachan’s school. He began orthodoxly enough, however. As well as being a farmer, his father Nicholas was also a lawyer, one of those sixteen men of “sufficient probity, education and condition in life” selected as the first members of the Upper Canadian bar. He may have had a smattering of legal training in New York, but was probably largely self-educated. For many years he was the only lawyer in the neighbour­ hood, and local tradition says that though he kept no office hours, he was always ready to come in from the farm chores if someone wanted to consult him on law business.12 In 1808, Christopher was admitted student at law by the Law Society of Upper Canada, and the Society’s records show that he was at that time articled to his father.13 As much as any man’s, Hagerman’s career in Upper Canada was made by the War of 1812. When the war began, he was still a Kingston law student, and a very junior lieutenant in the Adolphustown militia. His chances of advancement were no better, and no worse, than those of scores of other young men throughout the province. Talent alone was not enough to enable a man to rise. One had to have “interest” with

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some one near the centre of power in the colony, someone like Judge William Dummer Powell, whose recommendation was enough to secure the favour of a lieutenant-governor. Increasingly, it helped to have been educated by the Rector of York, John Strachan, whose pupils were just beginning to occupy some of the offices in the lower echelons of the provincial elite. But Hagerman was not even a member of the inner Kingston circle of families like the Cartwrights, Marklands, Macaulays, or Kirbys. While it is true that his father was a justice of the peace, served on the bench at Kingston Quarter Sessions,14 and was an active member of St. George’s Church, this countrified Dutch attorney counted for little in determining the affairs of the town. Had there been no war, the odds against Christopher Hagerman rising to prominence would have been much greater. It has generally been held that the effect of the War of 1812 upon Upper Canada was to strengthen the ascendancy of the conservative ruling group which had led in its defence. While this is valid enough, it has never been sufficiently emphasized that another important effect of the war was to make possible the advancement of men who might otherwise have remained in obscurity. As in any society, the coming of war to Upper Canada short-circuited the peacetime power structure, and with it the elaborate mechanisms of patronage that had been built up over the previous twenty years. Political authority was subsumed under the military, and the virtues and qualifications which impressed soldier-administrators were not necessarily those that might bring reward in time of peace. To the bigwigs of York, Christopher Hagerman was a nonentity; to the men of standing and respectability in Kingston he was another brash son of a country lawyer; but to Sir George Prevost, Governor General and Commander of the Forces, to whom all Upper Canadians were equally unknown, he was a young officer worthy of notice. Sir George had arrived in Kingston in the middle of May, 1813, with the new commodore, Sir James Yeo, and kept his headquarters there until late September.15 Some time during the first few weeks of Prevost’s stay in Kingston, Lieutenant Hagerman (who until this time had seen no action whatsoever) managed to bring himself under the general’s eye. Possibly this occurred during Prevost’s operation against Sackett’s Harbour, for which he had volunteered.16 By August he was being entrusted with despatches of the most vital importance to Major General De Rottenburg, commander of the Army of the Centre on the Niagara frontier.17 There is no doubt that he owed this distinction to Prevost. In later life, he wrote that he had “had the good fortune to attract the notice and obtain the patronage of that brave soldier and good man, the late Sir George Prevost.” 1®

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To be thus singled out is to be put in the way of opportunity. Op­ portunity came with General James Wilkinson’s left hook down the St. Lawrence against Montreal in November. Among the two hundred or so men whom Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Morrison picked up as he passed Fort Wellington was Lieutenant Hagerman. Why Hagerman was in the fort in the first place is not clear; his Military Journal merely says that he had watched from the fort the night passage of Wilkinson’s army, and that “here also I volunteered to accompany Col. Morrison.” 19 It is likely that he was there on the same kind of detached duty that Pre­ vost had sent him on previously. Whatever the explanation he got the chance to take part in one of the key battles of the war, Crysler’s Farm. “In this engagement,” he wrote, “I had the good fortune to participate, Col. Morrison having been good enough to receive me to act as his Aide De Camp in the field.” 20 His Journal is not very illuminating about the battle, or about his own part in it (although inevitably, as aide to Morri­ son, he must have been in the thick of things); it would be unreasonable to expect a revealing account from a militia officer of no experience. Of the quality of his service, however, there can be no doubt. It was good enough to get him mentioned in Morrison’s victory despatch.21 Instead of returning to Kingston, he accompanied Morrison on a trip to Pre­ vost’s headquarters in Montreal;22 and, unquestionably, while he was there he exhibited a vital pre-requisite for political success: the capacity for milking the last drops of personal advantage out of public duty well performed. ^Vithin a few weeks he was named Collector of Customs at Kingston by the President of Upper Canada, De Rottenburg,23 and then provincial aide de camp, with the provincial rank of lieutenant-colonel, to De Rottenburg’s successor, Lieutenant-General Gordon Drummond.24 At the age of 21, and at one bound, he had achieved rewards that elude most men in a lifetime of office hunting: a rank next to the topmost rung on the colonial militia ladder, and a juicy collectorship the prof­ its from which would enable him to live comfortably for the rest of his life. And he owed his advancement, not to some influential member of the colonial ruling class, but to men whose connection with Upper Canada was temporary; and especially to one man, Prevost, who was looked upon with deep disfavour by the office-holders of Little York.25 It is simply inconceivable that Hagerman, under ordinary circumstances, could have advanced to lieutenant-colonel through the hidebound ranks of the Upper Canadian militia in anything under twenty years’ service; it is equally inconceivable that he could have picked off a plum like the collectorship with less than a decade of diligent toadying. Small won­ der that his promotion, the result of the interference of British regulars, was long resented by Canadian militiamen; and small wonder that the

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public offices he was to hold in Upper Canada he owed to direct favour from the top, and not to any help from members of the provincial power structure. It must have been with great pride, however, that Christopher Hager­ man returned to Kingston after Crysler’s Farm as a member of General Drummond’s staff. There is no hint of this in the Journal, although there is plentiful evidence that he considered himself a Kingstonian, and was proud of it. 1st December, arrived at Kingston (my native place) situated nine miles from the Entrance of Lake Ontario and is the Principal Town in Upper Canada. The Deep bay at the bottom of which it is built affords a most excellent harbour for Shipping, and on a Point of land opposite the Town called Point Frederick is an extensive Dock Yard, with a Strong battery and block house. Opposite to this point again is a high piece of ground, on which strong fortifications are erecting, and which in a short time will most effectually command the Town and harbour, and completely secure it from an Attack. Two strong Towers axe nearly completed, and a regular work with a ditch and ravelin, is already in a state of defence. The Works about the Town consist chiefly of block houses, a line of which (5 in number) extended completely around the Town and are so placed as to enable a cross fire to be kept up from each.

To such a local patriot, it was right and proper that “the Principal Town in Upper Canada” should be well defended; but to be a Kingsto­ nian was also to have a healthy contempt for the petty village to the west whose only distinction was its incomprehensible selection as the capital of the province. Like other Kingstonians, Hagerman believed that the people of York had brought their grief in 1813 upon themselves, through their arrogance and cupidity in insisting that one of the two naval ves­ sels started during the winter be built in their “inferior harbour,” when “all reasonable men fancied the Dock Yard would be established” at Kingston.26 The Military Journal is unfortunately bare of much significant per­ sonal detail. One has the impression that this quite uncharacteristic modesty arose from Hagerman’s consciousness of himself as a green provincial thrust into the company of sophisticated European officers, and that he was trying to emulate their professional attitude towards war. There are flashes of deep antagonism towards the Americans, par­ ticularly with reference to their depredations on the Niagara frontier, but for the most part he kept himself and his opinions in the back­ ground. We do learn from the Journal that he accompanied General Drummond on his abortive winter march towards Detroit in early 1814; but so impersonal is a subsequent account of the successful assault led

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by Drummond upon Oswego in May that it is only from official sources that one discovers that Hagerman was there and indeed distinguished himself.27 He took part in the Niagara campaign from Lundy’s Lane to the siege of Fort Erie,28 but since the Journal ends with Oswego, no pic­ ture whatever of his service during that climactic period can be built up. On thing, however, is certain. When Christopher Hagerman returned to Kingston and civilian life he was no longer the aspiring young student. The war had made him; he was now a coming man, and within a very few years he would begin to make his political mark upon his native province. rsj

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Between 1815 and 1820, Hagerman established himself in his profession, in business, and in Kingston society, and thus laid the foundation for his election* as Kingston’s first member in the Upper Canadian Assembly. Some time before September 5, 1815, he must have been admit­ ted to the provincial bar, for on that date it was announced from the Lieutenant-Governor’s office that “His Excellency . . . has been pleased to appoint Christopher Alex. Hagerman, Esq., Barrister at Law, His Majesty’s Council in and for the Province of Upper Canada.” 29 This public notice was probably intended to convey the information that Hagerman had been appointed the 1815 equivalent of Q.C. or K.C.; but perhaps because of the curious spelling of “Council” it has given rise to a curious error, first made by Canniff, and most recently found in W.S. Wallace’s article in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, in which it is mistakenly asserted that he had been appointed to the Ex­ ecutive Council of Upper Canada.30 In fact he was never a member of either the Executive or Legislative Council, at any stage of his career. To be made King’s Counsel at the outset of one’s legal career was a testimony only to the “interest” the erstwhile lieutenant-colonel still had with the military government of the province. Nevertheless, it could not have been very long, according to the tradition recorded by Canniff, before Hagerman had established himself as the best lawyer in town. He and his father were frequently employed by opposing parties. On one such occasion, when Christopher’s advocacy won a contest for his client, Nicholas is supposed to have said: “Have I raised up a son to put out my eyes?” “No,” replied Christopher, “to open them, father.” 31 In view of the reputation Hagerman came to enjoy in the profession, and in the legal history of Ontario, there must have been many such victories even at this early stage. By the 1820s his contemporaries, whether friendly or hostile, regarded him as one of the most eloquent courtroom lawyers in the colony, and certainly the most forceful; it was

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Hagerman, for example, whom the “Press Rioters” hired for their defence when prosecuted by William Lyon Mackenzie. W.R. Riddell described him as “probably the most powerful advocate this Province has ever seen.” 32 His swiftly won stature at the bar was recognized by his senior colleagues in 1820, when they elected him a Bencher of the Law Society of Upper Canada, where he took his place beside such lawyers as W.W. Baldwin and D’Arcy Boulton, and younger rivals like John Beverley Robinson and Henry Boulton.33 Unquestionably, Hagerman was doing very well. Materially, he was probably already prosperous; his professional income plus that from his collectorship, which he himself termed “lucrative,” 34 must have been considerable. In 1818 he took steps to increase it further; he joined with a number of local merchants who believed “that Kingston and the adjacent country, by one Banking institution, under proper regulations and restrictions, would be much improved.” 35 Together, they founded the Bank of Upper Canada, a venture which seemed at the time to be quite in accord with Kingston’s wealth and future prospects, but which in a few years was to bring nothing but grief to its founders. Socially, too, the young lawyer had left his village origins far be­ hind, and was making his way successfully in the little society of King­ ston. Thus he actively assisted in the charitable undertakings of the respectable part of the community. With the end of the wars, emigra­ tion from Great Britain to British North America had resumed upon a scale larger than anything that had gone before. The poverty and inex­ perience of so many of the emigrants caused much suffering among them, a good deal of which was seen in Kingston since it was inevitably a way station for those wishing to pass into the western parts of the province. Their situation aroused a sympathetic concern among Kingstonians, for on November 29, 1817, a public meeting chaired by Rev. George Okill Stuart was held at the Court House, and it was resolved that a society “for the relief of distressed emigrants and others, in and about King­ ston” should be established.36 Christopher Hagerman was a member of the small committee named to draw up the rules and regulations of the new society, and since he was the only lawyer on it, he probably had a good deal to do with its form and substance. The society was to be called the Kingston Compassionate Society; compassion was to be exercised by bringing together the “inactive and starving” emigrant and “the Farmer and country resident. . . complaining of their inability to procure hands for the common purposes of husbandry;” in other words, it was to be an agency for the supplying of cheap labour. Although temporary relief might be provided, it was recommended that the society “decline ad­ ministering relief to any Emigrants who shall refuse such Employments

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as may be procured for them,” a provision all too reminiscent of Eliza­ beth I’s Statute of Artificers. But apparently it was precisely this kind of practical benevolence that was wanted, for Hagerman found himself elected an executive member of the new society, along with such eminent local personages as George Okill Stuart, president; Thomas Markland, J.P., and Alexander Fisher, J.P., vice presidents; and John Macaulay, treasurer.37 The Kingston Compassionate Society did not have a long life, either as a labour exchange or as an agency of judiciously adminis­ tered philanthropy, but the leading part that the 25-year old Hagerman had played in its formation was a good indication of the position he had achieved in town. The biographer of Christopher Hagerman must compile an account of his subject from bits and pieces of information gathered from a variety of sources of differing orders of merit (as must already be evident). There are no Hagerman Papers, although a number of his letters are to be found in other bodies of correspondence.38 Unless some Hagerman Papers are found, a fully rounded picture of the man will never be possible. One feels the lack of such letters particularly when discussing his marriage to Elizabeth Macaulay in 1817. She was the daughter of Dr. James Macaulay, and was not related to the Kingston Macaulays in any way. Did Christopher meet her during the War of 1812? Through her brother, and his brother lawyer, James Buchanan Macaulay? At what stage were their families further intertwined, in the well-known Upper Canadian way, by the marriage of George Macaulay to Jane Hagerman? All that we know is that in the same year as his marriage, Christopher bought a town lot from “J. Robinson” (John Beverley?) and started to build a town house for his bride. He called it “Harewood House” ; it was a twostorey stone house with an arched doorway. It still exists today as part of the Frontenac Hotel at Ontario and Johnson Streets, though hidden from the street by an 1853 facade.39 Not only had Hagerman been establishing himself professionally, and socially, but he had also been making the right kind of political enemies, supposing that he cherished the ambition of founding a political career upon Kingston support. For months Robert Gourlay and his “Friends to Enquiry” had been stirring things up throughout the province, and although eastern Upper Canada was relatively barren ground for him, Gourlay had made a couple of trips there to address township conven­ tions. On one of these trips, Hagerman had lent his name to an unsuc­ cessful prosecution of Gourlay for criminal libel conducted in a Kingston court by the Solicitor General, John Beverley Robinson. It was scarcely coincidental that Hagerman in his capacity as customs collector became a target for the local Gourlayites just three months after a Kingston

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jury had found Gourlay not guilty. Sympathy for the Scottish agitator was strong in Hagerman’s home county of Lennox and Addington, and grievance petitions were organized in a number of townships through the leadership of such men as the American Barnabas Bidwell and the Loyalist Robert Perry. These petitions, presented to the incoming gov­ ernor, Sir Peregrine Maitland, were concerned chiefly with grievances about land policy. But the Ernesttown Petition, which Perry had had much to do with, devoted three of its thirteen complaints to the injus­ tices of the Kingston Collector of Customs. Hagerman was accused of attempting “to entrap and plunder, by captious penalties,” the inno­ cent importers of the Lake Ontario shore. In particular the “hard case” of William Fairfield was mentioned, in which Hagerman was alleged to have enforced regulations so rigidly and harshly that it was enough to drive men to smuggling.40 Daniel Hagerman was in the thick of these goings-on at Ernesttown, organized an anti-Gourlay convention, defend­ ing his brother, and producing a counter-petition which alleged that “men without property and Character” (meaning Bidwell), were behind the township grievance mongers, and that the names on the petition tes­ tifying to the truth of the groundless charges against Christopher had been extorted from school children during recess 41 These little flurries were the opening guns in the long political warfare between Hagerman and the Bidwells and the Perrys, fathers and sons. More immediately, however, they were the first shots in the political campaign for the general election of 1820. Whether by design or not, everything that Christopher Hagerman had done since the end of the War of 1812 had gone to establish his claim to candidacy in the Tory interest for Kingston.

Before the Seventh Assembly of Upper Canada was dissolved, it passed an act revising the system of representation. Among other changes the new system provided for the first “borough” or urban seats, York, Nia­ gara and Kingston, which were to be filled for the first time in the 1820 provincial election. Thus it was that on June 30, 1820, the Kingston Chronicle carried the following brief account of the first election for the Kingston seat. The election of a Member to represent the town of Kingston in the Provincial Parliament, commenced pursuant to notice on Monday last, at ten o’clock. After the reading of the writ, George H. Markland and C.A. Hagerman, Esquires, were nominated by their respective support­ ers, on which these gentlemen stepped forward on the hustings, and addressed the electors. A poll was then demanded which was kept open

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until Tuesday at two o ’clock, when Mr. Hagerman was declared duly elected, the votes being as follows: — For Mr. Hagerman — 119 For Mr. Markland — 94 This contest, it gives us great pleasure to say, was conducted on both sides with the greatest liberality — and without exciting any feelings of animosity either between the candidates or their friends.

This genteel reporting masked what had been a hot and spirited con­ test. It masked also what was perhaps the most significant aspect of the election: it was a straight fight between two conservative candi­ dates. George Markland was the son of the Loyalist Thomas Markland, a prominent merchant and the chairman of Kingston Quarter Sessions. George was one of Dr. Strachan’s favourite and most promising pupils. His classmate, John Macaulay, made no secret of his support for Mark­ land in the account he wrote for his newspaper, the Chronicle, of the speeches of the candidates on the hustings. Essentially, the contest was between a local man, George Markland, who was nevertheless connected with the centre of political power in the province, and with those inter­ ests usually implied by the term “Family Compact” ; and Christopher Hagerman, a man of equally conservative views who had no connection whatever with the provincial power structure, but had built up, over several yeaxs and by a variety of means, a solid base of local support. His election was a sign that the Family Compact was a good deal less compact than it has been taken to be. In a sense it was a victory of Kingston over York, of localism over provincialism. It was certainly a victory for Hagerman over the provincial ruling group, since by military patronage, his own talent and activity, and the electoral process, he had shown, and was to show again, that there were other paths to power than through the teacher-pupil relationship. For his election meant the beginning of an important political career, during which Christopher Alexander Hagerman constructed that delicately balanced coalition of local conservative groups that was bequeathed, on his retirement, to his successor as Kingston’s Tory chieftain, John Alexander Macdonald.

FIVE

John Macaulay: Tory for All Seasons

K i n g s t o n ’ s three most notable institutions— Queen’s University, the Royal Military College, and the penitentiary— are all concerned, in their different ways, with order and discipline. So too have been most of Kingston’s political leaders. Long before any of these institutions was founded, Kingston had already begun to produce the first members of a remarkable succession of conservative politicians (though, like Queen’s, some of these men might protest that they were “Liberal” ). The first of them was Richard Cartwright, a pillar of Tory Loyalism in eastern Upper Canada from the founding of the province to his death just after the end of the War of 1812. Shortly after Cartwright died, three young men of similar stamp entered public affairs almost simultaneously. The members of this Kingston trio were all the sons of Loyalists; each, through his public career, was to play a part in that Tory coalition of local interests and provincial bureaucracy that is fated permanently to be known as the Family Compact. Two of these men, George Herchmer Markland and John Macaulay, were sons of prosperous merchants. Each was related to other promi­ nent Kingston families— the Herchmers, the Kirbys, the Andersons, the Macphersons, the Kirkpatricks— who together constituted the town’s “society” and controlled its affairs. Both were former pupils of the man who was coming to be the most important single figure in the provin­ cial administration, John Strachan. The third, Christopher Hagerman, had neither of these advantages. His father Nicholas was a farmer and part-time lawyer of Adolphustown. Christopher, very much an outsider to begin with, was to make his way through his legal talents and the fortuitous boost on the ladder of preferment that resulted from his mil­ itary exploits during the War of 1812.1 Hagerman, outgoing, ambitious and physically impressive, was elected Kingston’s first member of the provincial assembly in 1820; in the 1830s, as Solicitor General and then Attorney General, he was to be one of the most articulate and combative

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members of the provincial Tory elite. Markland, full of early promise, with a quickness of wit and social glitter rarely found among the conser­ vative worthies of Upper Canada, was Hagerman’s defeated opponent in the first election. Through Strachan’s influence he was promptly named to the Legislative Council and later to the office of Inspector General of Public Accounts and to the Executive Council. His public career ended in scandal in 1838. Even before then, however, he had not fulfilled the hopes Strachan had placed in him; his influence upon the political life of the province had been negligible. John Macaulay was as different, both in personality and in political role, from Hagerman and Markland as those two were from each other. Hagerman, something of the Tory demagogue, excelled in the clash of will and emotion in the courtroom and on the hustings; Markland cultivated the ease and position his rank in the administration brought him in the provincial capital. Macaulay preferred the shadows. He belonged to that class of men so necessary to the workings of any political mechanism, especially one so loose and unstructured as Upper Canadian Toryism. Publicist, patronage go-between, election organizer, confidant, the writer of other men’s speeches — Macaulay was all of these and more. “Back­ room boys” are often cynics about the politics they espouse and help to manipulate; just as often, however, they cherish the true faith more rigidly than the public men they serve. Macaulay was one of the latter kind. There was no cynicism in him; only a deepening pessimism about his fellow Upper Canadians as the years passed. In 1818, John Macaulay became editor of the Kingston Chronicle; in 1836, he joined the administration as Surveyor General of Upper Canada. In the intervening years, he was deeply involved in the politics both of Kingston and of the larger provincial scene. There was nothing acciden­ tal about this. Macaulay’s standing in the community, because of his family, his comparative wealth, his prominence as an Anglican layman, his service in the local militia, as well as his involvement in the economic life of the town as postmaster and bank official, guaranteed him a place of some importance in Kingston’s politics, should he choose to take it. More than that, his position ensured that he would be important to the provincial administration. The Compact’s political system was, in part, a coalition between a central bureaucracy and local conservative elites. In most parts of the province, local Tory chieftains performed functions for the government at York, and received a variety of favours in ex­ change. Macaulay was scarcely a typical specimen of the local Compact Tory, however. His position was a special one because of the political and economic importance of Kingston, and because, first as a newspaper

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editor and then as a political agent in a number of other ways, his value to the provincial administration transcended the local scene. The Macaulay papers in the Ontario archives provide most of what is known of his activities. Unhappily, there are few of John Macaulay’s own letters in this large collection, and those few are chiefly from his later career, after he joined the provincial administration in Toronto and wrote home to relatives in Kingston. Judging from the references in letters written to him, the range and volume of his correspondence was very large, but only a few of his own letters have been preserved in such collections as the Strachan and Robinson papers. So his activities must be pieced together, in part at least, from what his political friends wrote to him; this account cannot pretend to do more than show their general nature. One thing we know for certain: the opinion held of him by his friends. He was thought of as serious, intelligent, responsible, and diligent; his few personal letters confirm this opinion. They show also that Macaulay was an intensely private man, a trifle pompous, perhaps quick to take offence at a slight to his dignity, never a blind follower of the administration’s policies but its fierce partisan nevertheless, and occasionally apprehensive and even fearful about the threats, from within and without, to the peaceful world of Upper Canada. When John Macaulay and a friend and fellow-townsman, Alexander Pringle, bought the Kingston Gazette from Stephen Miles in Decem­ ber 1818 and began to publish the Kingston Chronicle, their intention was to produce a newspaper that was independent of party.2 Gradually, however, the Chronicle swung to strongly partisan Tory views. Hugh Thomson’s Upper Canada Herald, which began publication shortly af­ ter the Chronicle and also adopted an independent line (though with a Reform bias), may have persuaded Macaulay and Pringle that a proadministration approach would at least assure them of conservative read­ ers. Moreover, from the outset they were subjected to direct pressure from York to become the defenders of government in eastern Upper Canada. Yet it is interesting that Macaulay resisted such a role for the paper for some time. Most of the pressure came from John Strachan. For him, the chance seemed too good to miss. An organ outside York, edited by a former pupil, seemed just the vehicle to counteract the “sullen discontent” the Gourlay agitation had caused. He blandly told Macaulay that he in­ tended writing a few letters for his paper under a pseudonym, and that he would guarantee the Chronicle against costs “should I say anything considered libellous.” The editors’ prized independence would not be affected — “I restrain you in nothing” — but surely a “little zeal” in the correspondence column “is not a bad thing.” 3 Strachan was in for a

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shock. Apparently he had enclosed a letter attacking Robert Gourlay’s charges against provincial land-granting policy. Macaulay not only re­ fused to print it, but gave some credence to Gourlay’s charges. The astounded Strachan was “mortified . . . that there should be a leaning on the part of the Editors against the Government in the discharge of one of its functions before hearing its defence.” 4 Nor, despite Strachan’s pleadings, did the stiff-necked editors revise their view of the Gourlay affair. Evidently Strachan chose to accept Macaulay’s explanation of the Chronicle's stand as an apology, “notwith­ standing some little asperity of expression,” and continued to send letters on the subject. Macaulay and Pringle, however, believed that the use of the Alien and Sedition Act of 1804 against Gourlay, an act passed to meet dangers to internal security during the Napoleonic Wars, was plain persecution. Gourlay himself they saw as a pitiable figure, and com­ pared the action to expel him from Upper Canada to the expulsion of John Wilkes from the House of Commons. It might be legal; it was not expedient; it was certainly unfair. The most Strachan was prepared to concede, and that “between ourselves,” was that Gourlay’s arrest might have been inexpedient; he thought the Alien Act “wise and salutary for a Colony like this.” 5 Macaulay’s final editorial on the Gourlay affair was all that Strachan could have wished, since the Chronicle quarrelled mainly with the methods employed against Gourlay while regarding his agita­ tion with hostility. Yet the gap between the two was not inconsiderable, and Macaulay had refused to be dominated by Strachan.6 The two were to quarrel often enough in the future. On fundamen­ tal political principles, however, they (and their Tory brethren) were in profound agreement. It was inevitable that the Kingston Chronicle, given the times, should become a partisan of government and of those in authority in church and state. Its editors, independent though they thought themselves to be, believed fiercely in the special need for order, due morality, and proper subordination in a province so vulnerably situ­ ated as Upper Canada. To support government was not be truly partisan but to be truly loyal; to oppose it on principle was to be factious and even subversive of good order, and therefore to menace the existence of the colony. Strachan’s tenaciousness and diplomacy helped, however, to speed the Chronicle into the government fold. A constant flow of letters from him during these years, filled with advice, information, and flattery, proved difficult for Macaulay to resist, especially since Strachan, once burnt, was careful to avoid too direct a clash over political matters. Instead, he turned to a subject dear to the hearts of Kingstonians and one to which Macaulay himself was to give much time during his career: public

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improvement, or, as another age would put it, economic development. Macaulay believed that economic advance was the surest way to build an orderly and contented society, and he was confident of Kingston’s place in such a society. Under his editorship, the Chronicle became the leading advocate of canal-building and improvements in lake navigation and internal communications. Both Strachan and John Beverley Robin­ son were in accord with Macaulay’s views, and in 1819 the Chronicle printed a series of essays and articles calling for major improvements in the St. Lawrence waterway, particularly at Lachine, to meet the chal­ lenge of the Erie Canal, and for a canal to connect Lakes Erie and On­ tario. Most of these essays were probably by Strachan; certainly he had promised something “to make amends for the political remarks with which I am troubling you.” Interestingly, it was argued that “all these Canals should be made by the public, and the whole expense defrayed by the Provincial Treasuries,” since such works were natural monopolies and therefore any objection to government enterprise was “trite.” 7 At least one of these articles was by Robinson. It was probably an essay commending American enterprise and “anticipation,’ while at the same time satirizing the American penchant for excess. The founding of universities upon the banks of the Mississippi, or the proliferating of banking institutions “without having any stock to depend upon, but the stock of credulity” of the public was irrational and imprudent, but Amer­ ican confidence was better than the “fatal mistrust” of Upper Canadians. “This Province certainly affords fair scope for anticipation, and as there is no danger of its people over-rating their strength, or expecting too much in the compass of a short time, those who venture to show a little public spirit and rational enterprise will assuredly be disappointed. ® More and more the Chronicle turned to the fair prospects opening out for Upper Canada, now that its “peaceable and loyal inhabitants are no longer annoyed and disturbed by the visionary schemes of a restless demagogue.” In a complacent New Year’s survey of the state of the world in 1820, Macaulay pronounced editorially that “rational liberty,” as distinguished from the noxious revolutionary variety, was everywhere gaining ground. Even France was now guided by the light of English jurisprudence in building a constitution. England, though a little trou­ bled by a “strolling mountebank politician” like Orator Hunt, needed nothing more than more equitable parliamentary representation, more economical poor laws, and more humane criminal laws, to safeguard “the venerable fabric of the British Constitution” from dangerous inno­ vation. The United States, however, was a troubled giant, racked by tempestuous politics and ruinous economic ventures. In contrast to it, Upper Canadians had much to be thankful for. Under a “wise, vigorous

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and provident administration” the colony was increasing in wealth, and immigrants were pouring in to take advantage of the prudent measures adopted for developing the resources of the country.9 In view of such sentiments, it is scarcely surprising that by the close of 1820 the Chronicle was regarded as the chief organ of Tory opinion in the province. The powerful at York were not slow to express their gratitude. Macaulay was instructed by Strachan in the manner in which he could qualify for a modest subsidy: I have reminded the General of the importance of your paper of which I may have told you before — he says that you must make a lumping ac­ count of £50 annually for advertisements— to enable you to do this copy Govt Advertisements occasionally or always from the Gazette. Send such an account for one year ending with last June that arrears may not ac­ cumulate. If you find any difficulty enclose it in quintuplicate to me & I will speak to Hillier or if necessary to the Governor on the subject.10

J.B. Robinson bestowed warm compliments, “without a fee.” The Chron­ icle had given “the highest satisfaction to every well wisher of Church & State” he wrote, in promising to “subscribe [his] mite” more frequently.11 For the rest of his tenure as editor Macaulay was the recipient of a stream of letters from York, not only from Strachan and Robinson, but also from Hagerman, Markland, Hillier, and other political notables. These letters, which make the Macaulay papers one of the most valuable sources of Tory opinion during the Maitland administration, provided the Chronicle with background information on current political issues, drew the editor’s attention to subjects which needed airing, provided grist for columns in the form of “squibs” and satiric material, and fur­ nished corrections to slanted accounts of assembly debates appearing in less sympathetic newspapers. Macaulay did not always confine his political interests to his editorial chair. One of his most interesting ventures concerned Barnabas Bidwell. “Old Barney,” as the Tories called him, had come to Upper Canada from his native Massachusetts in 1810, and established himself as a school­ master in the Bath-Ernesttown area. Almost immediately he attracted the unfavourable notice of John Strachan and his faithful pupils by a witty attack in the Kingston Gazette upon Strachan’s effusive pamphlet, A discourse on the character of George III.12 Bidwell himself was not invulnerable. A highly successful Republican congressman during Jeffer­ son’s administration, he had been indicted for misappropriation of state funds in Massachusetts and left his country under a cloud. When, in 1820, Bidwell ran for election to the Assembly for Lennox and Adding­ ton, Strachan hoped that he would be “hissed off the Hustings” because his election would be “a disgrace to the Province.” The Chronicle, which

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took no sides in the Kingston election — the only candidates were two Tories, and Macaulay himself was the returning officer— printed a num­ ber of satirical pieces on Bidwell, apparently written by Rev. William Macaulay, John’s brother. To the general satisfaction of the Tories, Bidwell finished a well-beaten fourth in a five-man field.13 But Bidwell was not to be so easily disposed of. The death of Daniel Hagerman opened one of the Lennox and Addington seats, and Bidwell won it in an 1821 by-election. His election was received by conserva­ tives with some consternation. It was not simply that the Assembly opposition, erratically guided by William Warren Baldwin and Robert Nichol, would receive a formidable augmentation. Nor was it solely a question of Bidwell’s fitness to serve, given the charges against him in Massachusetts. It was rather that his election forced into the public arena a most dangerous question; as Robinson told Macaulay, “more de­ pends upon it than you are aware of, or I can answer for.” 14 Although Bidwell had taken an oath of allegiance to the Crown during the War of 1812, he had previously, in taking elective office in the United States, specifically abjured that allegiance in taking his oaths under the forms of the American constitution. At least half of the population of Upper Canada was composed of United States-born, non-Loyalist Americans and their offspring, brought into the province under the liberal immigra­ tion policy inaugurated by John Graves Simcoe. Their political and civil rights (for example, the right to acquire and transfer property) had never been challenged in Upper Canada until a reference for clarification from Lieutenant-Governor Gore had elicited a most disturbing response. A despatch from Lord Bathurst, the colonial secretary, called into question the rights of resident Americans, at least until they had been formally naturalized. On Attorney General Robinson’s advice, the Maitland ad­ ministration had decided to ignore Bathurst’s instructions, since public disclosure of them would have caused the gravest complications. But with Bidwell’s election, the alien question was thrust into politics, and became one of the most divisive issues of the 1820s.15 The Tory instinct was to get rid of Bidwell as quickly as possible, and it was in this effort that Macaulay took a leading, if hidden part. He first helped to organize a petition signed by 126 freeholders of Lennox and Addington, asking that the election be voided on the grounds that Bidwell was both morally and legally disqualified. This petition, sent by Macaulay to Robinson, enabled the Attorney General to raise the matter in the Assembly. Macaulay then proposed that proof be secured in the United States of the allegations so often made in the past against Bidwell. Robinson seized immediately upon this method of disposing of “old Barabbas.” “If you have reason to believe,” he wrote Macaulay, “that

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the old vagabond has solemnly sworn to renounce forever all allegiance to the King of Great Britain & that proof can be obtained of it, I will go you halves of procuring a certificate of it, properly authenticated — but this is of course, as Judge Boulton says, sub rosa.” 16 Macaulay promptly despatched one of his employees, named Driscoll, to Boston to get the goods on Bidwell, not only with respect to his oath of office but also in connection with his alleged defalcations. Driscoll was equipped with a letter of introduction from Strachan to a leading Boston clergyman; his expenses were paid by Robinson, Strachan, Markland, Hagerman, and Macaulay. The conspirators also secured the services of the Solici­ tor General, Henry John Boulton, to bring the evidence against Bidwell before the House.17 Driscoll’s evidence, both of the oaths of abjuration and of the indict­ ment for malversation of funds, was sprung upon an astonished House and an unprepared Bidwell. Though lamely presented by Boulton, it was sufficient to unseat Bidwell, but in a manner scarcely satisfying to the Tory plotters. By the narrowest of margins, the Assembly voided his election upon moral, not legal grounds, and only after the most pow­ erful speeches by Robinson and Hagerman. “I am sure there is no one who will more rejoice than yourself,” Hagerman wrote Macaulay, “at the triumph we have at length obtained in the expulsion of old Bidwell & certainly without flattery or exaggeration I know of no one who is more entitled to share in the credit of victory than yourself— he is expelled, but by a Majority of one!” 18 Macaulay could not refrain from lambasting editorially those who had failed to vote for a righteous cause: “We congratulate the honest part of the community on this grand triumph of the cause of correct principle and sound morals, we cannot, nor indeed are we anxious to disguise our regret on seeing that it was a majority of one only that saved the Province from appalling disgrace, and its House of Assembly from indelible pollution.” Members who, in spite of everything, had persisted in voting for Bidwell were “apostates” ; “their names should be emblazoned on the tablet of memory by every true hearted man in the country.” Very properly, the Assembly declared this editorial a libel and a breach of privilege. Macaulay could not have been repentant — Hagerman declined to present his apology to Speaker Sherwood, because “it was more in justification than in excuse for your conduct.” 19 Few editors escaped such raps on the knuckles from the Assembly. But Macaulay’s self-righteousness led him far beyond the bounds of fair comment in his treatment of Barnabas Bidwell, “that crest-fallen indi­ vidual.” In effect, Macaulay declared that Bidwell was an outcast and a leper, generously suffered to live in Upper Canada but betrayed by

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ambition into exposing his unsavoury past to public debate. Bidwell had “dragged his own sins before the light of Heaven, and met with well merited exposure and overwhelming disgrace. Henceforth, when he walks the streets, he must expect that ’the slow unmoving finger of scorn will point’ him out as an unprincipled peculator and a notorious refugee from justice.” The editors of the Chronicle excused this sav­ agery by appealing to their “paramount . . . duty as Journalists.” How could they be silent on an issue affecting “the honour and safety of the Province? When hardened profligacy boldly rears at any time its un­ blushing head, all good men and true patriots should combine to quell the hideous monster and expose it in the nakedness of its own loath­ some deformity.” 20 Such language helped to poison politics in Upper Canada. John Macaulay, who preached (and at times almost practised) moderation and decorum in public and private life, forgot, like many of his brother Tories, such warnings against excess when confronted by re­ ally dangerous political enemies. Macaulay not only wanted to win — he wished to vanquish opponents, to crush them utterly. This crisis men­ tality was the source of many of the difficulties which were ultimately to beset conservatives in Upper Canada. Even in the short run, Macaulay’s victory over Bidwell proved a hollow one: for “old Barney” was imme­ diately succeeded by his son Marshall Spring Bidwell, destined to be a leader in the provincial reform movement for years to come. John Macaulay also became much involved in the controversy over the proposed union of Upper and Lower Canada in 1822. The imperial government sought, through union, to check French-Canadian political power, to meet the demands of the Montreal mercantile community, and to solve Upper Canada’s revenue problems, which stemmed from the fail­ ure of Lower Canada to renegotiate the interprovincial customs-sharing agreement after 1818.21 The union bill provided for equal representation of the two provinces in the new legislature, despite the fact that Lower Canada was more than twice as populous as its neighbour. All govern­ ment records were to be kept in English only, and English was to become the sole language of debate in the legislature after fifteen years. Eligibil­ ity for the Assembly was to be restricted by introducing a high property qualification of £500. The executive arm of the government was to be guaranteed a voice in the Assembly through a device permitting the gov­ ernor to name four executive councillors to seats in the Assembly, where they might debate but not vote. The bill split opinion in Upper Canada on regional as well as political lines. By and large, most reformers opposed the bill because of its reac­ tionary character. Conservatives from western Upper Canada, and the officialdom at York, also opposed the bill, partly from fear and distrust

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of French Canadians and partly because they could see no strong eco­ nomic advantage in union. Tories from the eastern part of the province (and some Reformers as well), strong believers in the development of the St. Lawrence water route, saw union as an economic necessity, and were inclined to overlook, or underplay, the political problems it might raise. John Macaulay was the most effective spokesman for the eastern in­ terest. During the summer of 1822, as public discussion of the union question got under way, the Chronicle indicated that it was prepared to swallow the political provisions of the imperial bill in order to get union itself.22 Indeed, some of these provisions it welcomed. “Young GalloCanadians” would now learn English, Macaulay wrote (perhaps think­ ing of the struggle he had as a youngster in Terrebonne, learning French from Father Varin), and “our language must now become with them, as it ought to have long ago been, an essential branch of education.” 23 During October and November, the Chronicle carried many accounts of meetings for and against union throughout Upper Canada. Kingstonians had their say at a meeting arranged by “the Friends of the Union,” held at the Court House on 30 October, with Allan MacLean in the chair. Macaulay was the chief speaker at this meeting. It was a novel expe­ rience for him. Throughout his long political career he was most reticent about speaking in public, and his willingness to do so on this occasion is a testimony to his belief in the union cause. Much of his speech was an attempt to allay the doubts some of the Union Bill clauses had aroused. While he agreed that the seating of executive councillors in the Assembly was an impolitic proposal because “liable to distrust and misrepresen­ tation,” he found the intent of the measure good. After all, there was nothing in the present provincial constitution which forbade an executive councillor from sitting in the Assembly, provided that he had “the good fortune to be also a favourite with the people.” Too often assemblies were led astray by simple ignorance. Members of the executive could supply information upon the policies of the provincial administration that could be obtained in no other way. It was absurd to construe a measure designed to increase the flow of information as one intended to obtain undue influence on the part of the executive over the decisions of the House. “What is in reality the influence of the Crown here? It is indeed little more than a phantom, and is scarcely sufficient to preserve the due weight of the Executive and the just poise of the Constitution.” On the other hand, Macaulay disliked very much the proposed increase in property qualifications for members of the Assembly, terming it “an infringement of the rights vested in us by our Constitutional charter.” While admitting that the current £20 qualification was perhaps too low, he thought that the figure established ought to bear a close relationship

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to the general distribution of wealth in the society, and certainly should not exclude “men of moderate fortune, yet of worth and independence and sound judgement . . . from the great council of the country.” 24 On the whole, however, Macaulay was impatient with particular crit­ icisms of the bill, believing that its main aim was too important to be smothered by partisan controversy over details. “It is as a great measure of policy, affecting the general happiness and prosperity of the great Canadian family, as well as our external political relations, that the legislative union of the Provinces ought to be discussed,” he said. Macaulay’s use of the word “family” is most interesting, and scarcely accidental. For one thing, he was not alone among Tories in experiencing the first faint stirrings of the conception of a distinct Canadian national destiny at this time. Moreover, Macaulay detested empty partisanship and factiousness (never recognizing his own behaviour in that light). So­ ciety should cohere, like a family, rather than be divided against itself by the “discord, clamour, prejudice and distrust” which characterized the political process, especially in Lower Canada where public men were “wasting their time in factious debates.” Political union would bring the stability and sense of direction of Upper Canada, where “the great body of the people continue loyal and zealous,” to bear upon the factiousness and discontent of Lower Canada, while the language provisions would in time eliminate those “national prejudices and jarring interests” which encouraged faction. Thus brought together, “the great Canadian family could address itself to the chief object of political union, the large-scale economic development of the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes system. The resultant prosperous and contented society would have a substantially enhanced influence upon the direction of imperial policy. This vision was not Macaulay’s alone; it was one he shared with such Kingston “Friends of Union” as Archdeacon G.O. Stuart, Allan MacLean, Thomas Markland, Allan McPherson, Christopher Hagerman, John Cumming, T.R. Cartwright, and John Kirby. Other conservatives were not so confident as the Kingston elite. Jonas Jones of Brockville, a fellow-pupil of Strachan’s but always something of a maverick among Tories until his elevation to the bench, wrote Macaulay to reproach “you Kingston people” for stomaching so easily the politically objectionable sections of the bill. “You are a staunch Govt man,” he told Macaulay. “I am as much disposed to support the Govt in what I consider right as you or any other man can be; but I will never consent to yield the privilege of the people and sacrifice all to the Influence of the Crown.” 25 The same post may well have brought Macaulay a disapproving letter from a genuinely staunch government man, John Strachan. He sweet­ ened the bitter pill with a teacher’s bouquet: “You were wont to be so

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bashful and sparing of your tongue that I am not a little surprised at the length of your speech— it is by much the best on the occasion I congratulate you on being able to speak so well, for tho’ the matter is in my opinion objectionable the style and arrangement do you much credit.” Convinced that union would serve only to unite French and English radicalism to form a new and threatening majority, and that “in all questions of a nature to produce collision on Provincial feeling this Province would go to the wall,” Strachan pronounced Macaulay’s generous idealism “all fudge.” 26 Macaulay, however, heeded Strachan’s somewhat insincere assurance that he had always encouraged “Young Friends who have any parts” to think for themselves, rather than to ac­ cept his criticisms, and continued to uphold the Kingston view of union until it was clear that the matter was politically dead in England.27 In early 1823, Macaulay gave up the editorship of the Kingston Chron­ icle. He did so in order to accept preferments that Strachan had ar­ ranged. He was offered the position of secretary to the commission for arbitrating the division of customs duties between Upper and Lower Canada. As Strachan pointed out, he would be the real power on the commission, nominally headed by James Baby. Baby was “a man of most Gentlemanly manners tho’ rather slow of apprehension” ; he would be guided by Macaulay’s “superior intelligence.” The other office was that of cashier to handle the Bank of Upper Canada’s business in King­ ston; acceptance of it necessitated that Macaulay step down as editor of the Chronicle. Strachan advised his protege to take both positions; it was the first chance he had of “bringing you forward in so honourable a way,” and the next opportunity might be long in coming. On this occasion Macaulay took his mentor’s advice.28 For the next fifteen years, little occurred of a public nature in King­ ston in which John Macaulay was not involved. As agent for the Bank of Upper Canada, and as postmaster from 1828, he was at the centre of the commercial life of Kingston and the surrounding district. As a justice of the peace, he became familiar with the squabblings and vagaries of his fellow-townsmen. As chairman of the Quarter Sessions, he led his brother magistrates in protesting the provocative activities of the local Orangemen, that outraged “their Catholic fellow subjects.” With them, he deplored “the transfer to this happy portion of the British Empire of public exhibitions commemorative of the ascendancy of one religion over another” and of “societies assuming a higher degree of loyalty than their Christian brethren of another faith.” 29 As a community leader, he helped organize the Kingston Bridge Company, interested himself in

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the establishment of a Mechanics’ Institute, and, concerned to main­ tain a sanitary water supply for the town, campaigned for a Kingston waterworks.30 He became, in fact, the Tory man-of-all-work in Kingston. As Stra­ chan once wrote, in connection with Macaulay’s labours in the drafting of reports and papers for Archdeacon Stuart, “the truth is at all places there is only one or two that do anything. Mr. Cartwright before your time did everything at Kingston. Now it has luckily fallen on you.” 31 As a matter of course, Macaulay was consulted by the provincial adminis­ tration on patronage matters in Kingston and the surrounding area. His assessments were based upon his wide knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses, both political and moral, of the people of the region. A man in Prince Edward County, “a good natured idle drunken fellow,” was not sufficiently respectable for the office of coroner. A Fredericksburg man was probably “an extensive smuggler” and though “externally loyal from convenience” had political principles “better suited for the meridian of Jefferson County.” So confident were those at York of the soundness of Macaulay’s political judgements that when he nominated Davis Haw­ ley, a former Bidwell supporter, for justice of the peace, J.B. Robinson, though amazed, could only write that “I take it for granted by your rec­ ommending him, you are aware that his appointment wd. rather give satisfaction than disgust to the loyal part of the population.” 32 During these years Macaulay served the provincial government in an official capacity in a variety of ways. Successful as secretary to the cus­ toms duty commission, he subsequently served as commissioner in fur­ ther negotiations, demonstrating astuteness in the defence of provincial interests.33 At various times he was a commissioner for settling the affairs of the “Pretended Bank” of Kingston (a thankless task that temporarily estranged him from Hagerman, one of its directors), for inquiring into the state of lighthouses on the lakes, and for investigating the affairs of the Welland Canal. After a tour of American penal institutions, he wrote, with Hugh Thomson, the report that resulted in the establish­ ment of the Kingston Penitentiary.34 Above all, he involved himself with enthusiasm in the promotion of provincial waterways and internal navi­ gation. As a Commissioner of Internal Navigation (from 1822), he took part in an early survey of the Rideau route. His warm support of this and similar projects brought from Robinson the comment that “one day or another we shall be a great people— that’s certain.” For a time, in the 1830s, he was also one of the commissioners for the improvement of St. Lawrence navigation.35 He kept himself informed on the progress of internal improvement in the United States; in 1835, for example, he sent Lieutenant-Governor Sir John Colborne a series of reports on American

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canal and railway projects. He strongly advised Sir John, despite the province’s weak finances, to have a canal route surveyed between Lake Huron and the Bay of Quinte, for such a route would connect “the whole trade of Michigan, Indiana and the future establishments in the West” with Montreal and New York. A Georgian Bay canal “would immortalize His Excellency’s Administration.” 36 Such activities testify not only to the regard in which Macaulay was held by the provincial government and the legislature but also to his public spirit and his keen interest in improvement. Despite his interests, he chose never to run for an Assembly seat, though repeatedly urged to do so, especially by Robinson and, at a later time and under other cir­ cumstances, by Sydenham. On one occasion, when Macaulay predicted (correctly) “a stormy parliament and the revivifying of the seeds of fac­ tion,” Robinson made a direct personal appeal to him to run, in the rather suffocating manner he tended to use in such circumstances. “We must buckle on our armour to meet them,” he told Macaulay, “& let me tell you, Classmate, you ought to have made it your calculation to be ready to join us in the fight. You are of the regularly bred, and ‘You owe the State some service’.” 37 Macaulay preferred to serve the state, and the Tory party (although he would have recognized no such distinction), in other ways. There were few elections in the Kingston area in which Macaulay did not take some shadowy part. In the Lennox and Addington by-election of 1823, in which the Tory candidate, Ham, was pitted against Marshal Spring Bidwell, Macaulay seems to have enjoyed himself thoroughly. He wrote squibs and handbills, “rather bombastic and libellous of course,” noted that “old Barna, Dalton & Bartlet” had “set themselves to work transferring titles h splitting freeholds” in order to create votes, bemusedly reported that Tories were adopting “the same way of getting votes as Bidwell,” and concluded that “the party which can make bad votes the fastest will carry the day.” 38 In 1828 he tried to keep the Kingston nomination open for as long as possible in case Hagerman should be avail­ able to run, sought for a suitable candidate to oppose Thomas Dalton in Frontenac, and distributed election pamphlets and handbills to political allies not only in the Kingston district but in Brockville, Prescott, and Cornwall 39 In the key election of 1836, he was in touch with political developments in at least five seats, from Carleton to Hastings, and used his influence to try to ensure that “only two conservatives shall come forward” for each two-member constituency. Radicals, he thought, were much more disciplined than conservatives; “we never see them put into the field 3 or more candidates, where only two can be elected.” 40

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Between elections, Macaulay continued to exert some influence upon politics through the press. As he had told Hillier in 1824, he and Pringle had had no regrets about giving up the active editorship of the Chronicle: There was a prejudice existing against the paper, excited by old Bidwell, and not to be conquered by us, while we were editors, that it was wholly a Government paper. This feeling was sufficient to keep away a good many subscribers, for it unfortunately happens that though a man may oppose the Government from principle, it is impossible in the opinion of the multitude that he can support it in principle. No man, they are taught to think, can go with the Government, unless from corrupt motives, arid the Chronicle therefore which did not revile or abuse its measures, was not a favourite with such people. To get the better of this prejudice, I have advised Macfarlane to throw the paper open to discussion rather more liberal, as the phrase is, than we chose to publish.41

It may well be that Macaulay retained a share in the ownership of the Chronicle after he and Pringle had been succeeded as editors by Thomas Thomkins in 1823 and by James Macfarlane in 1824.42 But part-owners or not, Macaulay continued to write for it, and for other conservative newspapers, until he joined the provincial administration in 1836. No particular piece he wrote can now be positively identified; his papers simply make it evident that he was a regular contributor, especially to the Chronicle and to the York Gazette and U.E. Loyalist, and occasion­ ally to Hugh Thomson’s Upper Canada Herald. Among his own circle his activities were no secret. “You are the very best political writer in the Province,” Strachan told him in 1832.43 The one-sided correspondence of the Macaulay papers also shows that Macaulay attempted to influence provincial policy on quite a range of matters outside his main interest in economic development. How often he did this, or precisely what line he took when he did, there is no way of knowing. Just what was contained in the draft bill he sent Robin­ son in 1828 which, the attorney general told him, “shews your itch for legislating, as well as your talent” ?44 What experiences in Kingston led Macaulay, in 1835, to propose to Robinson a bill providing penal sen­ tences for adultery, incest, and bigamy? The Chief Justice was amused. “You long to spread your net where you know there will be abundance of game,” he teased the sober Macaulay. “But my dear Sir, should you not consider that an Irishman or any other man who has two or three wives pays already the penalty of hard labour, & as for ’solitary confinement’ I should think . . . it would come as a relief to him.” 45 Macaulay does not seem to have had much more satisfaction from John Strachan, to whom he frequently wrote on questions of religion and education. Macaulay was a staunch Anglican, but Strachan’s aggressive

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and often injudicious defence of the church frequently dismayed him. He was most disturbed by the Ecclesiastical Chart of 1827, and its attacks upon Methodists.46 It may be that Alexander Pringle, his partner on the Chronicle and a Presbyterian, had educated him to appreciate the claims of other denominations; it may be that Macaulay was impressed with the political importance of the supporters of the Kirk. At any rate, he did accept Strachan’s claim to exclusive Anglican rights to the Clergy Reserves, and considered it only sensible to work out some arrangement with the Presbyterians. When Macaulay proposed such an alliance to Strachan in 1832, the Archdeacon rejected it out of hand.47 In later years, Macaulay continued to believe that had a more moderate approach been taken by the Anglicans in the 1820s and 1830s the religious issue would not have embittered politics as much as it did, and the Church of England would have fared better. When, in 1839, it appeared that there was a chance to settle the Reserves question, he wrote his mother: “I feel that the safety of the Country requires its being settled at all hazards, even if we retain but a third for the church. If no settlement takes place this session, matters will only grow worse. Our people have sadly mismanaged things for years. In 1825 we might have secured two thirds. A few years hence it may be all forever lost.” 48 John Macaulay’s labours on behalf of the conservative cause in King­ ston and throughout the provinces rendered him, according to the Tory standard, a person deserving of high preferment. If not so greedy for office as some of his contemporaries, he was certainly not devoid of per­ sonal ambition. As the years passed, and his claims failed to win the recognition he thought they merited, he became somewhat querulous. When Christopher Hagerman was raised, temporarily, to the Bench in 1828 and his lucrative appointment as Collector of Customs for King­ ston fell vacant, Macaulay felt that the job should be his. “I have fagged for years in editing a paper — the only one which defended the admin­ istration at the time, & though I had no profit,” he wrote Robinson in appealing for his support. He had always tried to be “useful,” and the customs job would enable him (in ways he did not specify) to continue to combat “the unceasing efforts of our democrats to injure the tone of public feeling.” 49 Considering Kingston’s status as a port of entry, the customs appoint­ ment was one of the most coveted at the disposal of the colonial govern­ ment. Like other candidates, Macaulay was dependent upon the inter­ est his friends could make with the Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Peregrine Maitland. His friends were either unable to serve him, or reluctant to do so. Strachan and Markland backed him, but Robinson’s influence with Maitland was crucial— and he supported the impecunious Dr. Sampson.

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Somewhat lamely, Robinson explained to Macaulay that the LieutenantGovernor had “better things” in mind for him; moreover, he was thought “to be very rich, because all the world knows you to be very industri­ ous & prudent.” 50 Before an appointment was made, Sir John Colborne succeeded Maitland and, to the dismay of Macaulay’s circle, Thomas Kirkpatrick got the job. He was a protege of Hagerman’s, having arti­ cled for him and assisted him in the collectorship. The incident showed how much Strachan’s influence had declined— “nothing could be worse in taste and heart than Sir P. or rather perhaps Col. Hilliers conduct for the last year in the way of appointments,” he complained — and also the favoured position that Hagerman enjoyed from the commencement of the new administration.51 It was Christopher Hagerman who paved the way for Macaulay’s even­ tual appointment to the Legislative Council. In 1830, he first suggested to Colborne that Macaulay would make a good member. “He always talks to me of my friend Mr. McAulay,” Hagerman wrote; “sometimes he abuses you and then I defend you — sometimes he praises you and then I abuse you.” Not until 1834, however, did Colborne recommend Macaulay to the Colonial Secretary as a legislative councillor. He iden­ tified him as the son of a Loyalist, as “an opulent Merchant of Kingston and a large proprietor of Land,” who “from his character, intelligence and acquirements possesses great influence.” 52 It was characteristic of Macaulay that when informed of his appointment, he wrote not the cus­ tomary letter of thanks but a short essay on the Council and the spirit of the times: The restless spirit of innovation, now abroad, in its assaults on exist­ ing authorities and institutions has not spared the middle branch of the Legislature, which, indeed, it seeks either totally to destroy by one open and mortal stroke, or else to wound, by means of such change, as would not merely disturb the equilibrium which the wise founders of our Constitution fondly hoped they had succeeded in establishing, but would degrade the Council from its present independence and dignity as a co-ordinate Branch of the Provincial Parliament into a pliant tool of the party possessing temporary predominance in the Lower House, a mere passive instrument for giving effect to an unbridled democratic will. This spirit does not, in fact, confine its machinations to the Province of Upper Canada, but displays an incessant activity in other Colonies, and even at the very seat of Empire. Such being, according to my view, the political circumstances of the times, a steady and unbending adherence to its duties by the Legislative Council does certainly appear most im­ portant to the stability of the Constitution, and the permanent welfare of the Province.53

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This statement was typical of Macaulay’s ponderous orthodoxy on mat­ ters of principle. One doubts that he ever enlivened debates during his long career in the upper house (he died in 1857); in the 1830s politics for John Macaulay had become, on the whole, a pretty gloomy business. When, through Strachan’s influence, Macaulay became Surveyor Gen­ eral of Upper Canada under Sir Francis Bond Head, his appointment might be viewed as a piece of Family Compact favouritism— as it was. Yet he was well suited to the job. As a politician he had been honest and responsible; as a local agent of government he had been efficient and reasonably imaginative. His long Kingston apprenticeship had prepared him well for the curious double role of higher civil servant and back­ stairs politician that the unreformed constitution of 1791 demanded of senior officials. His subsequent career as Surveyor General, secretary to Sir George Arthur, and Inspector General of public accounts under Sydenham belongs more properly to provincial than Kingston history. His shift to Toronto, to new duties and to coping with the “frostwork of ceremony” erected by Toronto hostesses came in early 1836.54 But John Macaulay remained the most Kingstonian of conservatives: responsible, respectable, and unquestioning in his faith in material prosperity as a sure cure for political ailments. Above all, he had a profound convic­ tion that proper institutions, whether constitutional, religious, or edu­ cational, could not only control conduct but transform men into persons as sober, sound, and respectable as himself. He must have strongly ap­ proved of Queen’s.

SIX

Tory Factionalism: Kingston Elections and Upper Canadian Politics, 1820-1836

T he traditional picture of Upper Canadian elections of the 1820s and 1830s is one of province-wide party struggles, in which Tory and Re­ former fought each other in ridings from Kent and Essex in the west to Glengarry and Stormont in the east. In these party battles, the burning issues of clergy reserves, responsible government, Family Compact priv­ ilege and corruption, and the many planks in the Reform programme were debated, and local electorates became divided, ever more sharply, over them. With the advent of William Lyon Mackenzie upon the po­ litical stage in 1830, the tempo of party politics speeded up, the whole process coming to a tempestuous climax in the Bond Head election of 1836 with its violent and unhappy aftermath the following year. Gerald Craig has challenged the assumptions upon which this pic­ ture was based. He holds that party organization was primitive, that the appeal of individual candidates was often more important than the substance of the political programme they espoused, and that the voters “swung in pendulum fashion between conservatives and reformers, from election to election.” So, he argues, “it is not easy to give a rational explanation of election results.” 1 It is impossible to disagree with Craig’s contention that “party,” in anything but the most embryonic sense, was not a factor in Upper Cana­ dian elections. The evidence for any substantial degree of province-wide party organization, even in 1836, simply does not exist. Yet his use of the pendulum figure to describe the behaviour of the electorate appears to carry with it the assumption that there was a provincial electorate, rather than a set of local ones. This electorate, every four years (or less), according to the Craig thesis, acted inexplicably, or at least irrationally, but somehow or other concertedly, to elect in orderly alternation assem­ blies dominated by conservatives and reformers. Surely it is too much to assume, in the present state of knowledge, the existence of a provincial electorate, especially one so peculiarly actuated as that Professor Craig

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depicts. Why should a provincial electorate exist at a time when a true provincial society had not yet come into being? Is it not possible, for ex­ ample, that only a part of the total number of constituencies swung from one election to the next, and that another, perhaps larger, part remained relatively stable in its representation in the Assembly, and therefore in its political affiliation at the provincial level? Is it possible that some seats were more influenced by provincial issues than were other seats, perhaps because of their social structure, economic organization or geographic location? And if there are affirmative answers to these questions (and it seems probable that there will be), then might there not be a rational explanation, not merely for the existence of different kinds of constituen­ cies, but also for sudden shifts in election results in what appears to be a “provincial” manner? A rational, and quite complex, explanation of Upper Canadian elec­ tion results may be achieved, but only after a number of intensive studies of election history in single ridings and in groups of ridings has been car­ ried out. The chief purpose of this paper is to examine the six Upper Canadian elections that affected the constituency of Kingston, in the light of the general considerations already raised. Kingston has been selected not because it is imagined that it has any special significance, but simply because a start must be made somewhere, and the material for this study lies close at hand. Kingston is the oldest continuous single-seat urban constituency in Ontario. It was created by an act of the Seventh Assembly of Up­ per Canada, along with the ridings of York and Niagara, in time for the provincial election of 1820. It had been thought of as essentially the property, in the nineteenth century, of John A. Macdonald, but be­ fore Macdonald overshadowed Kingston’s politics, another conservative, Christopher Alexander Hagerman, enjoyed a pre-eminence almost as de­ cided. Another result of the study of early elections in Kingston, apart from the matter of the nature of the elections themselves, is the emer­ gence of Hagerman as local politician and as architect of the conservative party in Kingston. Doubtless, with further studies of local elections in other Upper Canadian ridings, similar figures will emerge, and new and more complicated dimensions will be added to our political history. On the surface, the first election for the Town of Kingston seat was a quiet and genteel affair. Neither George Herchmer Markland nor Christopher Hagerman, the candidates, stooped to the publication of an election address. No partisan letters appeared in the columns of the Kingston Chronicle. A week before election day, the Chronicle drew its readers’ at­ tention to the fact that Markland and Hagerman had “come forward for the town,” but this discreet notice was to constitute the total of electoral

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solicitation.2 The report of the election was brief. The polls were open for two days, with Hagerman winning by 119 votes to 94. “This contest, it gives us pleasure to say,” wrote the editor soothingly, “was conducted on both sides with great liberality— and without exciting any feelings of animosity either between the candidates or their friends.” 3 And surely he was right. What issues could divide two men so profoundly conser­ vative as George Markland and Christopher Hagerman? Both men were to become pillars of the Compact. Surely all at stake in this friendly contest was the honour of becoming the first member for Kingston? But beneath the surface, things were a good deal more complicated. In the provincial capital, the Rev. John Strachan watched both Kingston and York elections anxiously as his prize pupils, George Markland and John Beverley Robinson, tried their political wings. He was provoked when he heard that there would be a “warm contest in Kingston” ;4 such a struggle could only “produce some irritation.” It was bad form on the part of Hagerman to oppose one so intelligent and literate as George Markland, but it was no more than could be expected from a man who always appeared to be thrusting himself forward in an unseemly way. The mixed feelings with which Strachan and his following habitually re­ garded Hagerman were registered, as early as 1810, by John Robinson in a letter to a former schoolfellow. “We have been favored for two or three weeks with the company of the enlightened Christopher Hagerman, a youth whose bashfulness will never stand in his way— and who you may undertake to say will never be prevented by embarrassment from displaying his natural talents or acquired information to the best advan­ tage. After all, tho’, he has a good heart and not a mean capacity, in short he is not so great a fool as people take him to be.” 5 During most of his public life Hagerman had to accept such condescension from men whose superiority to him was by no means evident. He was patronized partly because he had not the good fortune, or perhaps the foresight, to attend Dr. Strachan’s school, and he was to discover that talent and the most impeccable High Tory principles counted for little, in the eyes of the Strachan “connexion,” when one lacked the right schooling.6 During the War of 1812, he had built up a record as distinguished as that of any Upper Canadian. He had been promoted lieutenant-colonel at 21, had been mentioned in despatches several times, had been appointed provincial A.D.C. to the president and officer commanding in Upper Canada, Sir George Drummond, and had taken part in most of the im­ portant battles of the last two years of the war. His remarkable rise, and his post-war job (a lucrative one) as Collector of Customs at Kingston, were due solely to the patronage of regular army officers temporarily administering the province, and to Sir George Provost, the Governor

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General, a man thoroughly disliked by the York bureaucracy. Hagerman owed nothing whatever to the help or influence of a single Upper Cana­ dian politician. Unquestionably his climb to prominence was resented, especially by those young men whom Strachan was training up to rule the province. To them, Hagerman was both a rival and an interloper. John Macaulay, a classmate of Markland’s, made no secret of where his sympathies lay in his report of the election. After perfunctorily acknowledging that Hagerman’s address to the electors “displayed his usual ability,” he turned to the more congenial task of praising the losing candidate. Mr. Markland’s opening speech was manly and dignified. It was an animated appeal to the feelings and understandings of his audience, and though he did not prove the successful candidate, he exhibited talents highly creditable to himself and to those who supported him— talents which we hope one day to see appreciated and called into action for the service of his country. In returning thanks to his friends at the close of the poll, he expressed himself in a style of ease and gracefulness which was not to have been expected from any person unaccustomed to public speaking, and by the liberality of his sentiments towards his opponent, deservedly gained the esteem and applause of all who heard him.7

Hagerman was never to be quite forgiven by the Strachan connexion for having defeated George Markland. In the meantime, however, something had to be done for Markland. A few weeks after his Kingston defeat, his talents were called into action for the service of his country; Sir Peregrine Maitland appointed him to the Legislative Council, a reward that would never conceivably have come to Hagerman, had he lost. The whole episode reveals how misleading a term like “Family Compact” can be, while the most that can be said about the election is that Kingston voters had rejected one conservative, whose significant affiliations were with the provincial centre of power, for another conservative whose affiliations were solely local. There was another dimension to the dismay of York conservatives at Hagerman’s victory. A hint of it is found in a letter John Robinson wrote Macaulay not long after the opening session of the new legisla­ ture had got under way. Because of certain Kingston associates of his, suspicions circulated at York that Hagerman had democratic or radical sympathies. These suspicions were, for a time, given credence by John Beverley Robinson, though he dismissed them in a letter to Macaulay shortly after the new legislature had met. Our friend Hagerman had been grievously mistaken. He is anything but a Democrat. Indeed his conduct is manly, correct, & sensible &

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shews in every thing that kind of independence most rarely met with which determines him to follow the right side of a question tho’ it may appear unpopular. His speeches gain him great credit.8

Yet the fact remains that someone as intelligent as Robinson, living in a society as small as Upper Canada’s, had mistaken Christopher Hager­ man, the future scourge of the radicals, for a “Democrat,” if only mo­ mentarily. Had Hagerman not helped swear out the warrant for the arrest of Robert Gourlay on a criminal libel charge in Kingston? Was he not singled out for direct attack by the Gourlayites of Ernesttown, manipulated by Robert Perry and the notorious Barnabas Bidwell? Or is it possible that Robinson, who attached great value to public dignity and decorum, may have been misled by Hagerman’s style in the court­ room and on the hustings? Though Tory rhetoric would have it so, all demagogues, or even popular orators, were not to be found exclusively on the radical side in politics. Hagerman (like Allan MacNab) was a tremendously effective speaker, with the tricks of voice, the impressive and even overpowering presence, and the florid sentiments that appealed to jurors and electors. Egerton Ryerson (not a friendly witness) thought him one of the most eloquent men he had ever heard; he has been called the most powerful advocate ever to practise in the courts of Ontario.9 It may well have been true that Hagerman owed his victory over Markland to a low democratic trick: his eloquence on the hustings may have tipped the balance in his favour. But it is not very likely that it was Hagerman’s public style, broad though it was, that Robinson had in mind when he characterized him as a democrat. The crime he had committed was far more serious than that of? bidding for vulgar popularity. It was his association with the Kingston bank. In 1817 a group of Kingston merchants had successfully petitioned the provincial legislature for permission to start a bank. While they waited for Imperial approval of the provincial act of incorporation, they had begun business as a private association calling itself the Bank of Upper Canada.10 The approval of the home authorities, however, came too late to permit incorporation of the Kingston bank under the 1817 legislation. Instead, a second provincial act was required. Through this loophole, the Kingston association was outflanked by a York group (including the ubiquitous John Strachan) that secured the coveted charter from the legislature, and took to itself the title of Bank of Upper Canada. In conjunction with this power play, a dispatch from Lieutenant-Governor Maitland to the Colonial Office damned the Kingston bank projectors as American in composition and dubious in politics, as well as being financially unreliable.11 The economic primacy of Kingston had been successfully challenged by York, through the best weapon the capital

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had at its disposal: political influence. Strachan and his allies, through the ascendancy they had obtained over Maitland, had efficiently killed Kingston’s chances of getting a chartered bank. Nevertheless, the Kingstonians determined to carry on with what their rivals in York began to call the “Pretended Bank of Upper Canada.” The bank was a legitimate outcome of Kingston’s commercial needs and eco­ nomic aspirations; better a local bank, managed by local men to meet local needs, than the branch bank that Strachan, Macaulay, and William Allan hoped to establish in Kingston as an appendage to the York of­ fice. The decision to carry on, however, meant war to the knife with the Bank of Upper Canada, whose directors were prepared to use any tactics to undermine the position of the Kingston enterprise. The composition of the Kingston group gave them plenty of ammunition. Its president, Benjamin Whitney, was an American; so were several directors and laxge stockholders. Some of its backers were well-known as Gourlayite radi­ cals— such men as Thomas Dalton, Dr. E.W. Armstrong, and Robert and Daniel Perry. With the exception of the erratic Henry Boulton, not a single York figure of any importance invested in the bank, and such respectable Kingston names as Markland, Macaulay, and Kirby were not among its stockholders. On the other hand, a good many Kingstonians like Archdeacon George Okill Stuart, who were unimpeachable in their staunch conservatism, were also among the original stockholders. One of these was Christopher Hagerman, who was connected with the Kingston bank from the start as a shareholder, and subsequently as a director.12 The election of 1820, viewed in light of the bank issue, was a straight fight between York and Kingston commercial interests. Hagerman’s votes, or many of them, must have been derived from local resentment of York ex­ pansionism. To regard Hagerman as a democrat in this context, simply because of the banking company he kept, was to confuse totally economic and political orientations; that John Robinson could suspect him to be a radical is indicative of the degree to which the Tory elite deceived itself with its own propaganda. By the end of the first legislative session of 1821, the Attorney General had forgotten his suspicions of the new member for Kingston. I do indulge very sanguine expectations of the next and succeeding sessions of this Parlt. The House certainly does credit to so new a Coun­ try. Our friend Hagerman is a sterling good fellow, free from prejudice, and with every bias on the right side . . . his talents and information cannot well be spared.13

In this session, and in years to come, Hagerman proved himself a stout upholder of the government cause in the House, second only to Robinson

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himself. He turned out to be a good member for Kingston as well, despite his lofty conception of the proper relationship a parliamentarian should have with his constituents. The first bill he introduced in the Assembly was designed to secure the absolute independence of members by repealing the act that provided for their payment, on the ground that they “were sufficiently respectable and wealthy to be able to attend without any remuneration in a pecuniary way.” 14 The bill got short shrift from the House, although members could not really have relished Robert Nichol’s argument that while the bill “might do, perhaps, for men in government employ or wealthy Lawyers,” most Upper Canadians were not wealthy, and unpaid members would sell themselves to the highest bidder. Despite this rebuff, Hagerman himself never accepted money for his services as a member, and was always distinguished for his independence from (and occasionally a certain contempt for) the notions of the Kingston electorate. “I am happy to think,” he wrote Macaulay, “that my constituents are too enlightened and too liberal to expect me to sacrifice my principles to their wishes.” 15 This is not to say that Hagerman did not faithfully represent the interests of his riding. Throughout the first session, he struggled to push through a bill providing tonnage duty relief for steam vessels, a measure of direct benefit to the owners of the Kingston steamboat Prontenac.16 He took a hand in reorganizing the Kingston militia, lobbied to have a public building torn down that interfered with the business of Thomas Markland, the father of his recent opponent, piloted through bills to license taverns more strictly (and therefore reduce Kingston’s inordinate number) and, coming at the same social problem in another way, to provide his home town with a new jailhouse. There is no reason to question his statement that “it is my anxious desire to do my constituents all the service in my power.” 17 On the big issues, too, Hagerman provided leadership for Kingston. He and his constituents, for example, were at one on the question of union with Lower Canada, when that became a possibility in 1822. The chief speeches at the public meeting of the Kingston “Friends of Union” were delivered by Hagerman and John Macaulay, in which they argued that economic advantage outweighed the possible political diffi­ culties. “Nature intended us to be one people,” said Hagerman, “un­ der one government.” 18 United behind his leadership was the whole Kingston mercantile community, while in the political sense he had the support of every prominent conservative in town, including Macaulay, the Cartwright brothers, Archdeacon Stuart, Thomas Markland, Allan

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MacLean, Henry Murney, John Kirby and David Rankin.19 In support­ ing Union so strongly, Hagerman was taking a position diametrically op­ posed to that of the provincial government and leading men at York.20 Such opposition did him no harm in Kingston. By virtue of the prominence his abilities had brought him in the As­ sembly, by the care with which he had safeguarded the interests of his constituency, and by his use of such issues as Union to knit together Kingston conservatives, Hagerman ought to have been returned hand­ ily in the election of 1824. Yet he was not. Was he defeated because Kingstonians joined an alleged wave of antagonism against lawyers in politics?21 There is no evidence for anything of the kind. Did the alien question, which is supposed to have greatly strengthened the reform el­ ement in the Assembly, unseat him? Certainly he had been the leader in the ejection of Barnabas and Marshall Bidwell from the House, on the grounds of their ineligibility as American aliens. But no trace of this issue can be found in connection with the contest in Kingston. In fact, issues supposedly convulsing the province were of no importance whatever in this riding. Why, then, did Hagerman lose? One answer to the puzzle was pro­ vided by a correspondent of William Lyon Mackenzie. You will have learnt with pleasure that Hagerman has been effectually baulked of his Election, and I feel no little pride from the circumstance of his rejection having been brought about principally by me. Such was manifestly his influence through his Collectorship that it became morally certain he must be returned if both Mr. Cumming and I con­ tinued separately to oppose him. On consulting with my friends I found them almost unanimous in their pledge to support Mr. Cumming if I consented to withdraw in his favor, which I did immediately and Hager­ man’s rejection was thereby secured. I think it impossible he can ever be elected again. I may say that two thirds of his Voters are heartily glad for his defeat.22

This correspondent was Thomas Dalton, a local brewer who at this point in his life was a flaming radical. (In a second career he was to become a violently Tory newspaper editor.) Was Dalton right in thinking that his withdrawal as a candidate threw the election to John Cumming? Cumming won by the narrow margin of eleven votes, so Dalton’s help may have been essential.23 Certainly Hagerman was already sufficiently disliked by reformers for them to vote against him at the cost of electing Cumming. Mackenzie, in his first issue of the Colonial Advocate, had attacked the “cringing submission” of the Assembly, but thought it not to be wondered at when “a Hagerman (the well known name needs no addition) should (mis)-represent Kingston.” If he were returned, then

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Kingston would “merit the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.” 24 Yet a vote for Cumming must have been distasteful enough to a tried reformer. Mr. John Cumming of Kingston . . . is one of the government candidates that offers to represent the place. [He] prides himself in that he has not set foot in the U.S. for many years. He is a jolly fat old gentleman, the very picture of ease and good living, and the Antipodes of a meagre starved radical.25

Clearly Dalton was correct in thinking he had defeated Hagerman only in the most superficial sense. It was not the handful of votes that Kingston reformers could muster up, but the split in the ranks of the conservatives that had turned out the sitting member and replaced him with another fully as conservative. And, as in 1820, conservative fac­ tionalism is to be explained in part by the affairs of the Kingston bank. By 1822, the bank had run into serious difficulty because of misman­ agement and quite probably because of substantial embezzlement of its funds by its president, cashier, or teller.26 After the failure of an attempt by the directors to straighten out the bank’s affairs, a group of dissatis­ fied stockholders petitioned the Legislature to intervene.27 A provincial act established a commission of the Kingstonians unconnected with the bank, George Markland, John Macaulay, and John Kirby, and vested them with powers to make inquiries and if possible to reach a settlement in bankruptcy. Although none of the commissioners had any reason to be friendly to the bank, they appear to have laboured conscientiously to make sense out of its tangled operations. Their report, however, was most unwelcome to the bank’s directors. It stated that the commis­ sioners “could not discover whether the [alleged] abstraction took place before or after the resignation of the President.” 28 This general state­ ment immediately expanded the cloud of suspicion which surrounded the bank’s affairs to enshroud its Board of Directors, namely such men as Henry Murney, Allan McLean, Thomas Dalton, Christopher Hagerman and John Cumming. At this point Hagerman made a bad error in political judgement. On March 1,1824, from his place in the Assembly, he defended the integrity of the bank’s directors but pointedly refrained from including in their number the name of Thomas Dalton. He took strong objection to the recommendation of the commissioners that they be empowered to pros­ ecute shareholders and other debtors of the bank in order to get at their real property (which in consequence would be frozen until the bank’s af­ fairs were wound up), but conceded that he “would however be sorry to release the property of Thomas Dalton” and the three bank officers.29 He had thus used his legislative immunity to destroy Dalton’s reputation;

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but he dealt as harshly with the commissioners. He denounced their report as “a monster of the most deformed shape,” that would enable “the scoundrel and the rogue” to escape justice.30 This injudicious speech drew upon Hagerman the maiden literary flight of Thomas Dalton, a 56-page pamphlet in the form of a public letter. In it Dalton first displayed that talent for invective, sarcasm, the telling personal reference and the calculated low blow that was later used to flay radicals. Unerringly he attacked that sense of self-importance that was the fatal flaw in the makeup of so many members of the Upper Canadian conservative elite. Whenever necessity imposes on one of lowly condition, the task of addressing a personage exalted a dozen atmospheres above him, his sit­ uation becomes peculiarly embarrassing. Judge, then, Sir, of my distress, on emerging from my insignificance, to approach the awful dazzling greatness which irradiates the name of Christopher Alexander Hager­ man. A learned Counsellor, a wise Legislator, the confidential Repre­ sentative in Parliament of the most important City in the Province, a Colonel of Militia, a Collector of His Majesty’s duties at the Port of Kingston; and Heavens! still elevating the keen glance to grandeur yet in embryo. Honors, like the multiplying dews of heaven, showering upon your merit their fertilizing riches, have swollen it to a bursting exu­ berance, and placed it in such prominent relief, as must not only fix the admiring regards of contemporary men, but of succeeding generations.31

Proper Kingstonians, in spite of themselves, must have been tickled by the gusher of ridicule that spouted from Dalton’s pen, in prose as yeasty and frothy as his own brew. Some may well have agreed with him that it was unfair of Hagerman to take advantage of legislative immunity to slander him. If you are Dutch, I am English; if you would be a man of standing, I trust I am one of some understanding; if you are a Lieutenant Colonel of Militia without a Regiment, I am a Lieutenant of a Militia Regiment, and Lieutenants have feeling. If you have a wife, so have I; children, I have seven to your one. . . . If you be a Mason, so am I, though I must confess that in becoming one, it was not with the end of being elected a member of Parliament.32

It is difficult to gauge the effect of Dalton’s pamphlet upon Kingston vot­ ers. Dalton was too deeply implicated in the failure of the bank to profit greatly by it himself, but undoubtedly it focused attention upon Hager­ man and exposed him to considerable ridicule. The substance of Dalton’s argument was that Hagerman was not in earnest in his violent criticism

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of the commissioners’ report, and that in fact he had been secretly con­ spiring to have Macaulay, Kirby and Markland named commissioners in order to persecute Dalton, deceive the public, and distribute the assets of the bank to favoured creditors in an arbitrary and partial way. The commissioners and Hagerman, alleged Dalton, were “all one family com­ pacted junto.” 33 It is quite possible that he succeeded in kindling the suspicions of the many small shareholders and creditors of the bank who had been badly hurt by its failure against the moneyed few in Kingston, and especially against Hagerman. Unfortunately for Hagerman’s political prospects, neither a plot nor a family compacted junto existed. Not only were his chances impaired by Dalton’s attack, but his own unwise attack upon the commissioners had destroyed the coalition of conservatives that his good record in the legislature had slowly built up. As early as December, 1823, George Markland told Macaulay that Hagerman’s terms for settling the bank issue were totally unacceptable, and that . . . all negotiations . . . must be considered at an end. He gave you a detail of his plan I believe, the beauty of it is that the clauses are almost word for word the same as our Bill except the repeal of the old law and vesting the trust in the honest Directors. The stock is to be set off, the Certificates and notes received for the same period, and almost every other provision the same. I think I see the scheme— tis to get the credit of all those popular measures, which really originated with us, and to magnify the odium of our having their estates in our power. The Doctor swears he won’t agree to it and he urges pretty strong the absurdity of our enacting one year that they were unfit to manage their own concerns, and in the face of our report wh. confirmed it now doing away all that and placing the matter just where it was.34

The day after Hagerman’s March 1 speech, Robinson, his former praise forgotten, wrote scathingly that he “blinded no one, I imagine,” with his “most unsenatorial chopping & changing in consequence of a desire of meeting every one’s wishes which commonly ends in pleasing no one & in sacrificing principle in the attempt.” 35 Colonel John Cumming was the beneficiary of Hagerman’s mistakes. It is most doubtful that this “jolly fat old gentleman” was wholly in earnest when he said on the hustings, after his victory, that “had he not been himself a Candidate, his opponent was the person of all whom he knew the best entitled to his conscientious vote.” 36 But there was an element of truth in the polite remark. Although there is direct evidence that at least one of the offended commissioners, John Kirby, had given his considerable influence to Cumming,37 yet Cumming belonged to pre­ cisely the same conservative faction as Hagerman, that connected with

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the bank. This, plus the fact that the total vote cast in 1824 was much lower than that cast in 1820, points to the conclusion that there were a number of conservatives who could bring themselves to vote for neither candidate, and “went fishing.” This was perhaps literally so in the case of John Macaulay. “If you cannot support the Colonel,” wrote Robin­ son, “you are right, certainly, I think to take no part, & as neutrality, in a small society, can hardly consist with actual presence— you do right, as you say, to go to the bottom of the Rideau Lake, where Dalton I dare say would tell us you ought to have gone long ago.” 38 The 1824 election in Kingston, then, had nothing to do with such provincial issues as the alien question; in fact the opposite appears to be true, especially if full value is given to Mackenzie’s jibe that Cumming “prides himself in that he has not set foot in the U.S. for many years.” A local issue, the affairs of the Kingston bank, was decisive.39 Electoral divisions were the result of divisions in the overwhelmingly conservative body of voters, and had no relationship to “Tory” and “Reform” party labels. It was not long before Hagerman, with all his faults, was contrasted favourably by some Tories with his torpid successor. Even George Mark­ land had some regrets. I am rather sorry, entre nous, that Hagerman is out of the house for he has more talent than the present member, and understands the task. His chief defect is that he’s not strictly honest, but he would have stuck to Government . . . thro’ thick and thin. As to Col. John there will be much of the thick in body and soul.40

Soon Macaulay too was yearning for some one who “can expose the mean attacks of old Bidwell & his son upon the Attorney General, &c, in the manner we could desire.” “In this respect,” he conceded, “we have to lament Hagerman’s exclusion from the Assembly,” an exclusion he him­ self had much to do with.41 By 1828, the “provincially oriented” Tories, that is, those Tories whose connection with the provincial government led them to think in province-wide terms, were extremely anxious that Hagerman run again. The political climate of Upper Canada had wors­ ened greatly since 1824. The local government’s mishandling of the alien question, and the demagogic advantage that oppositionists had taken of the opening afforded them; the shock occasioned by the violence of young Tories in attacking Mackenzie’s printing office in York; the religious and social schism created by Strachan’s Ecclesiastical Chart with its gratu­ itous attack upon Methodists; the beginnings of the university question and the warming up of the clergy reserve issue: all these matters and more demanded that John Beverley Robinson be joined in his defence of

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government proceedings by the proven ability of Christopher Hagerman. When it was rumoured, early in the year, that the “scoundrel" Dalton might run, a flurry of nervous letters passed between York and Kingston: the man must be stopped, and who better to do that than Hagerman?42 Robinson was deeply concerned |When he heard that a Kingston lawyer, Donald Bethune, had begun canvassing for support. He asked Macaulay to steer I . . . our friend Bethune into tlje right path, for I really think he has strayed from it, in canvassing during Hagerman’s absence. I do not think, setting all other reasons aside, that he is judicious in opposing himself to Hagerman whom we should all like to see in, but he will fail. The attempt I apprehend may produce disunion among you & be injurious to Bethune. I could have told him I had reason to know that Mr. Kirby wd. not support him, but I did not feel at liberty.43

It seems plain from Robinson’s letter that the Kirby-Macaulay-Markland group was at last ready to support Hagerman, and also that Bethune himself was regarded as a conservative. Any doubts to Bethune’s poli­ tics are dispelled by his election address (apparently the first such appeal to a Kingston electorate), in which he identified himself as the descen­ dant of a Loyalist and as a “Scotch man,” and courageously exposed his most cherished political principles: “I am not pledged, gentlemen, to any particular set of opinions— I profess no politics but those to keep the British Constitution unimpaired, the privileges of British subjects uninvaded, and British pre-eminence and British honour permanent and untarnished.” 44 Clearly, Kingston politics were once again degenerating into a Tory faction fight. Robinson was exasperated. As he confided to John Macaulay, if Hagerman ran, there was a good chance that “Old Barney” Bidwell would vote for him: 11after that, talk of Coalitions.” 45 The key to understanding Kingston’s political muddle in 1828 was, as before, the matter of the Kingston bank. A recent act of the legisla­ ture had authorized the naming of three new commissioners to make a final settlement; one by the stockholders, one by the creditors, and one by agreement of the first two commissioners. H.C. Thomson, publisher of the Upper Canada Herald, was chosen as the stockholders’ commis­ sioner unanimously. For the post of creditors’ commissioner, however, there was a sharp contest, in which Donald Bethune was narrowly elected over Henry Smith, a candidate nominated by Hagerman and supported by Marshall Spring Bidwell and Dr. E.W. Armstrong, as well as by John Macaulay. Then the Hagerman group proposed Marshall Bidwell as third commissioner, a suggestion that Bethune refused to consider on the perplexing ground that his political conduct was unacceptable.46

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Only the coincidence that another extraordinary affair reached a cri­ sis in June, and that Hagerman accepted an appointment to the va­ cancy created on the Court of King’s Bench by the bizarre conduct of Judge Willis, apparently spared Kingstonians the spectacle of John Macaulay, George Markland and John Kirby joining Barnabas and Mar­ shall Bidwell in voting for Hagerman against a man who had pledged to keep the British Constitution unimpaired and British pre-eminence permanent and untarnished.47 Instead, Bethune opposed and defeated yet another Tory, a fellow member of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, John Strange.48 Again in 1828 Kingston’s electoral behaviour had no connection with that ascribed to the province as a whole. The elec­ torate was divided into local factions, each headed by nominal Tories who represented local interests rather than political principles. In 1830, Kingston and Upper Canada seemed at last to be in step. The province reversed its verdict of 1828 and elected an assembly with a Tory majority, and Kingston elected Hagerman. This is not to say, however, that there was any change in Kingston’s political folkways. As usual, the election was a straight one-“party” , two faction contest. Hagerman had become available as a candidate when his temporary appointment to the Bench ended and as solace he was named Solicitor General. Lieutenant-Governor Colborne noticed that Hagerman “thinks himself very ill used with reference to the late promotions,”49 but in terms of Kingston politics, the possession of high political office may have had some slight prestige value. Also in his favour, perhaps, was his relinquishment of the office of Collector of Customs, an office that Dalton had alleged had cost him votes in 1824— the smuggler vote? Against him was the fact that he was no longer a Kingston resident, having moved to York in 1828 at the time of his elevation to the bench. But the sitting member, Bethune, had not distinguished himself in any way during his short term as member, and more than a month before the election, the Chronicle predicted that “the Solicitor General will, we believe, be without a competitor for the representation of Kingston.” 50 This was enough to prompt Mackenzie to rush another issue of his Upper Canada Black List into print, in which the names of Hagerman and other Tory ultras were jointly described as “politically speaking, as bad as bad can be, and perhaps the very worst members any country or nation could be afflicted with. They form a class.” 51 If Mackenzie hoped to induce some public spirited Reformer to offer himself as St. George to Hagerman’s Dragon, he was disappointed. What he got was Donald Bethune.

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It is possible that there was some attempt to avert a contest in 1830 by an arrangement between the two camps in Kingston. If so, the ar­ rangement broke down. The only substantial account is in the Tory Chronicle, and it leaves the important question unanswered. A report has been circulated that Mr. Bethune had pledged himself to Mr. Hagerman not to oppose him. This report, we are informed, Mr. B. adverted to in his address to the Electors, and stated, ’that he hoped for Mr. Hagerman’s own character and honor, he had not autho­ rized it — for it was unfounded and untrue— as he had neither given a pledge nor any assurance to Mr. Hagerman that he would not oppose him.’ This statement of Mr. Bethune, we learn, was not attempted to be contradicted.52

Sources for the Kingston election of 1830 are scanty. Those that exist indicate that there was nothing resembling a campaign for either can­ didate, that no provincial issues were discussed, nor does there seem to have been any local issue, resembling the bank question of past elections, to divide the voters. One possible explanation for the blanket of silence in 1830 is that negotiations between the Tory factions may have been proceeding right up to the time of the election, and only their failure produced Bethune’s candidacy. In other respects, the election did not depart from the Kingston pattern, and when it was over Hagerman had been returned with more than double Bethune’s vote. The election of 1834 was the false dawn of two-party politics in King­ ston. The Eleventh Assembly of Upper Canada had been the most event­ ful in the history of the province, and even the parochial Kingstonians seem to have become caught up in the drama going on in York, perhaps because their member was one of its central figures. The repeated ex­ pulsions of William Lyon Mackenzie by the Tory majority had the effect of blurring the distinctions between the cause of reform and the cause of Mackenzie, and enabled him to pose plausibly as the champion of a whole society when he appeared at the Colonial Office in London. Per­ haps the most sensational achievement of his stay in England was the part he played in the removal of the crown officers, Attorney General Boulton and Solicitor General Hagerman, for their share in his expul­ sions in apparent opposition to stated imperial policy. When the news of Hagerman’s removal reached Kingston, in May, 1833, a public meeting of his political supporters passed a series of indignant resolutions praising his virtues and protesting his removal. For the first time since the Union question of 1822, Kingston conservatives were acting together. Mem­ bers of each Tory faction joined in the resolutions, and it is significant that a good deal of care was taken in the representation of different re­ ligious and national groups. Thus the Anglican Loyalist J.S. Cartwright

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chaired the meeting; the Scottish Presbyterians George Mackenzie and Oliver Mowat and the Irish Catholics G.A. Corbett and Anthony Manahan took prominent parts.53 Even more significant is the fact that for the first time a separate meeting of genuine Reformers was held in Kingston, 24 May 1833. This meeting passed a quite different set of resolutions, congratulating His Majesty’s Government upon its judgement in dismissing Hagerman, and repudiating the Tory address as the production of a few of his “per­ sonal and political friends.” 54 Among those signing the address were Reform stalwarts like Barnabas Bidwell, Dr. E.W. Armstrong, Duncan Vanalstine, John Vincent and Abraham Truax. It would appear, then, that the increasing gravity of provincial politics, and the fact that Hager­ man had become deeply involved in them, had a catalytic effect upon localism and factionalism in Kingston politics, forcing Tories to drop their differences in the common cause, and impelling Reformers to de­ clare themselves even in a climate so unsympathetic as Kingston’s. The elements in the crisis that precipitated this sudden change were per­ sonal (the confrontation of such disparate social types as Hagerman and Mackenzie) and ideological (the fact that each man was symbolic, as well, of absolutely opposing systems of values), but whether or not such elements were fundamental enough, or lasting enough, to pull Kingston permanently into provincially oriented politics and a two-party electoral structure remained to be determined. At first sight, it appears that they were. Hagerman’s reinstatement shocked Reformers deeply. Mackenzie called it “a spoke in the wheel of another violent revolution in America.” 55 To the reform-minded, Hager­ man had come to stand for the very worst in ultra Toryism, and many must have resolved to do what they could to defeat him in the coming elections. In 1834 the Reformers put on the closest thing to a provincial campaign Upper Canada had yet seen. The existence of a central com­ mittee, and its attempts to assist Reform candidates in many ridings, probably helped to polarize electorates and to draw many voters out of their narrow localism. Even the little band of Kingston Reformers took heart from the surge of reform and radical strength sweeping out from Toronto and the Yorks. J.S. Cartwright became so disturbed at the buildup of Reform sentiment that he advised Hagerman’s quick return from England, if electoral disaster was to be prevented.56 Cartwright was unnecessarily alarmed, but nevertheless, as one of the Reform papers re­ ported, Hagerman thought it worth his while to stop in Kingston on his way home from England to “canvass the electors of this town for their suffrages,” even though the election was nearly three months away.57

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As the date for the Kingston election drew near, Abraham Truax, the man who could have had the Reform nomination for the asking, decided not to run. This may have been the result of simple prudence, since he had no chance of winning, but the British Whig found other expla­ nations. The cholera had carried off two of his “warmest adherents,” Messrs. Vanalstine and Butterworth, while “the cry of ’Yankee’ set up against him by the friends of Mr. Hagerman, himself the son of a Yankee, had prejudiced the minds of the populace against his legitimate claims to their notice as a townsman, a man of property and a British subject.” 58 Had he run, however, the old bank issue would have been revived in a new dress. Hagerman had succeeded in bucking the Toronto Tories and their monopolistic Bank of Upper Canada, by securing for Kingston the chartering of a new bank, the Commercial Bank of the Midland District, while Truax was the Kingston agent for a new and unchartered Toronto bank with strong Reform affiliations. Despite Truax’s withdrawal, Kingstonians were treated to one of the liveliest elections in the town’s history. The plight of its Reformers had been observed in Toronto, and soon help was on the way. The alarm was sounded by the Cobourg Star. “O’Grady, of the Correspondent, has been skulking about here for the last two or three days, by way, we suppose, of trying his sophistry among the Catholics; but it’s no go. The ‘Gentleman in Black’ can neither hide his tail nor hoof.” His intention, warned the editor, was to make “an inflammatory speech to the good people of Kingston.” 59 The Rev. William O’Grady, a suspended priest and editor of the radical journal, the Toronto Canadian Correspondent, had in fact been invited by the friends of Truax to come to Kingston. He arrived in time to take part in a tumultuous meeting of the Friends of Constitutional Reform in Scanlon’s Long Room. Though he spoke only, he said, to persuade them to try Truax once again, he did so for two hours, and the longer he spoke, the more he sounded like a can­ didate. Holding a copy of the Kingston Chronicle in his hand, “this mean, low, pitiful and grovelling rag,” run by a Yankee editor who is “an INFAMOUS LIAR” and “a DESPICABLE MISCREANT,” O’Grady deprecated any notion that his audience might have had that he, “a stranger amongst you,” could possibly be a candidate. Such doubts, in­ terminably pressed, convinced the assembled Reformers. O’Grady must be their man. The last scruple was swept away when O’Grady climaxed his speech with the charge that Hagerman, in his presence, had said that Daniel O’Connell, the Great Liberator, ought to have been hanged years ago, and that if no Irishman would do it, “he would volunteer his services, and cross the Atlantic to become his executioner.” When this dreadful revelation was made, “there was a general burst of indignation

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manifested by both Whig and Tory, and the meeting rose as one man, & gave three distinct rounds of applause for DANIEL O’CONNELL.” With feelings that look suspiciously like hilarity, Kingston Reformers shouted approval to a motion that “the close and rotten borough of Kingston should be broken up, and . . . the town should henceforward represented by an independent member, such as we believe Dr. O’Grady to be.” 60 The unprecedented nomination of a Reform candidate, coupled with the strength of radicalism provincially, united all conservatives in King­ ston behind a single candidate for the first time. The emergence of party politics, primitive though they might be, brought also the first appearance of electioneering pageantry, according to the acid account of Dr. Barker of the Whig: On Wednesday morning last, shortly before ten o’clock, the friends of Dr. O ’Grady assembled in large masses, and conducted him to the Court House, where the hustings had been erected. Shortly after ten, Mr. Hagerman, proceeded by two flags, one borne by Mr. Robison, and the other by a young man dressed up fantastically . . . and followed by his friends and hangers-on arrived.61

Though the Chronicle termed Hagerman’s speech on the hustings “ani­ mated and eloquent,” it did not print it, while Dr. Barker refused to do so because he found it “morally impossible to divest his pen of bitterness.” 61 But O’Grady’s marathon speech was copiously printed; it is safe to say that Kingstonians had never heard anything like it before. Though Tory editors might scoff at its blarney, it was the first thoroughgoing reform speech the township people had ever been exposed to, and it was a very good one of its kind. O’Grady swung into his speech with great verve. It is a glorious thing to commence in this hot-bed of toryism the battle of reform . . . , and tho’ the Reformers may not, for the present, be able to slay the Goliath (here he turned to Mr. Hagerman) is it not a glorious thing, that on examining the materials of the pedestal on which he stands and discovering their rottenness, . . . we may anticipate the not far distant day . . . when public opinion will dash the proud Colossus in the dust.

He taunted Hagerman with the old Reform allegation that he had once referred to his constituents as “the rabble of Kingston.” Warming to his work, O’Grady characterized the ruling group of the province as “a band of mushrooms, raised by sycophancy to their present station,” accused them of having “usurped all the patronage of the country,” leaving noth­ ing for anyone else, warned once more of the sitting member’s murderous designs upon Daniel O’Connell, and despatched Sir John Colborne’s re­ cent foundation, Upper Canada College, with one devastating pun.

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He described [it] to be a Preparatory School — that is to say, a Pre­ pare a Tory Nursery, where little tories were carefully brought up and educated, kept away from the vulgar radicals, until, arriving at years of discretion . . . they were transplanted to the hot-bed of provincial corruption.

There seemed no end to O’Grady’s practised flow of invective, satire, and happy invention. Hagerman found himself accused of having ghoulishly stolen the credit from the late H.C. Thomson for the building of the provincial penitentiary at Kingston, and then (being allowed the credit) attacked for permitting the establishment of such an institution when he knew full well that “all the thieves and vagabonds in the province” would settle in Kingston once their sentences were up. Yet, on the other hand, with such as Hagerman about, perhaps “it was advantageous to have such an establishment if properly conducted — in which all the ‘Yankee Scamps’ and other vagabonds, who came over to the country professing LOYALTY, might be properly taken care of.” Hagerman appears to have suffered this outrageous slanging with gallantry. “There sat Mr. Hager­ man, good humouredly nursing a little boy, and occasionally kissing him, to show the electors how he valued a sneer of the Doctor s. It is true, a few clouds of passion now and then passed over his handsome coun­ tenance.” Handsome Kit got his own back when the vote was counted. With the polls opened only a short time, and Hagerman ahead by 150 to 37, O’Grady conceded long before the bulk of Tory votes had been cast. Then, wrote Barker, “Mr. Hagerman was . . . chaired and dragged about town by the ’Rabble of Kingston’.” 63 The election of 1834 was only a false dawn of two-party politics in Kingston for several reasons (leaving aside the fact that the riding re­ verted to type in 1836). William O’Grady’s candidacy, though spirited, was not a true indication of the state of Reform organization in the town. He had virtually mesmerized local Reformers into nominating him. Had he not appeared, it is at least possible that they would not have fielded a candidate. In such an intensely parochial community, an outsider stood no chance, unless he was a transplanted Kingstonian like Hagerman. As for O’Grady, a more wildly unsuitable candidate for the riding cannot be imagined. As the editor of the Chronicle wrote, An Excommunicated Priest a Candidate for the Representation of the Town of Kingston, in the Provincial Parliament!!! Even while recording this fact, we can scarcely think it possible. Will our distant readers believe it?” 64 The thirty-seven men brave enough to step forward in the sight of their townsmen and vote for O’Grady (Marshall Bidwell was one of them) must have represented the core of die-hard reformism in Kingston.

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On balance, it is likely that O’Grady did the Reform cause more harm than good in the Midland District. On the other hand, though two-party politics existed in 1834 only in a superficial sense, the Reform challenge, both from within and with­ out the riding, contributed to the elimination of Tory factionalism and broadened the scope, if it did not lift the level, of political debate. But this was by no means the whole story. There were, from about 1830 on, processes at work consolidating the various conservative factions into a unified whole. The chief of these was the healing balm of provincial patronage. Its importance can only be mentioned here, but there is plentiful evidence to show that under Colborne conservative Assembly­ men secured a greater share in the dispensing of jobs than ever before. Hagerman put this new instrument to good use in knitting the disparate elements of local politics into a Tory machine. One of his patronage letters is worth quoting, if only to show how adept a prominent member of the supposedly austere and unbending Compact was in that familiar exercise of Macdonald conservatism, the driving of an ill-matched team. “My dear Colonel,” he wrote to Colborne’s secretary, I send herewith a bundle of papers relating to applications for honors and rewards; deal with the parties according to their merits, if you can find them out. I shall take the liberty at the same time to mention to you two persons who I think it desirable to appoint commissioners of the Court of Requests in Kingston: when commissions to these offices are filled up. One is John Strange, the other Walter McCuniffe, the for­ mer a true blue Presbyterian, the latter an equally determined Roman Catholic. Both these persons were expectant of the honor of being made J.P.’s and both were a good deal offended at being left out of the last commission for the Mid: Dis: They however are both respectable, and possess a good deal of property; they are conspicuous members of their respective societies and are much looked up to among them: and al­ though neither of them possessed of much learning, they are sufficiently well informed and discreet to assist in the Court of Requests, and there is the less objection to their being appointed in Kingston from the cir­ cumstance that they will be associated with persons of unquestionable intelligence.65

Without expanding further a subject that requires separate develop­ ment, it is sufficient to say that in the 1830s, and well before the advent of Head, the government apparatus of Upper Canada had become, to all intents and purposes, the Tory party. The Kingston experience suggests that, whether or not as a result of positive policy, the provincial gov­ ernment chose to deal with Tory constituencies through their members, rather than proceeding, as in the past, to handle matters of patronage

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through the complex net of “interest” that connected the leading figures of the ruling group to the lesser elites in every locality of the province. At least in Kingston, this course had the effect of making the member the single most important politician in the community, rather than one who had been given no more weight, and usually less, than such people as Macaulay, Kirby or Markland. It remains to be seen whether this process occurred in other ridings, or whether it was simply the result of Hagerman’s prominent position in government.66 Whichever interpreta­ tion is correct, however, its importance in the elimination of faction is plain. No constituency in Upper Canada could possibly have been immune from the effects of Sir Francis Head’s noisy anti-radical campaign in 1836; Kingston and the surrounding counties were no exception. The pressures generated during this most tempestuous of Upper Canadian elections, however, did not change the form of Kingston’s petty politics, but merely accentuated tendencies already well-established. As we have seen, Reform was weak in the riding, so weak that a Reform candidacy in 1836 was out of the question. George W. Yarker, a Reformer of the Baldwin stamp, acknowledged by Tories to be a “constitutionalist, and, indeed, a founding member of the Constitutional Society that local conservatives had organized on the Toronto model, had toyed with the idea of challenging Hagerman.67 He refused a requisition, however, and ran instead for Frontenac, where he had at least a fighting chance. The Chronicle's editorial on this occasion is a good example of the form of argument employed to unite conservatives and moderates in this election. We could not for a moment believe that a Gentleman of Mr. Yarker’s known political sentiments would suffer himself to be brought forward at such a crisis as this, to divide the loyal portion of the Electors, who should now remain firmly united, or that even under less pressing cir­ cumstances he would think of attempting to throw any impediment in the way of Mr. Hagerman’s election . . . . There is now . . . no probabil­ ity that any person will be brought forward as a candidate of opposition to Mr. Hagerman. . . . His arduous and important public services, his entire devotion to the duties of the Assembly, his labours to promote the welfare of the Province generally, and of this his ever favorite Town in particular, his powerful efforts to support in every emergency the admin­ istration of good and equitable Government, and his struggles to resist the torrent of radical and revolutionary fanaticism in this Province en­ title him to our unanimous support. . . . at this particular crisis in the political affairs of this Province. Mr. Hagerman’s presence is indispens­ ably necessary in the House of Assembly.6®

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No Tory, in such circumstances, would have dared to raise his head against Hagerman. On the hustings, some momentary embarrassment was caused by the action of some Irishmen, lacking a sense of occasion, who insisted on nominating a Lieutenant Clarke, R.N., but that worthy declined in a speech “of the Hibernian cast.” Christopher Hagerman then stepped forward to receive the first acclamation in the history of Kingston riding. His speech was described, in the perfervid language so much a part of this election, as “the extemporaneous effusion of the moment, y e t . . . the effort of a commanding genius, of an exalted mind, and its spirit and power came subduing and irresistible like the out­ breaking of a fountain from the earth, o r the bursting forth of volcanic fires.” 69 It was, in fact, a good speech, no doubt eloquently delivered. In it, Hagerman announced that this would be his last election (he was as good as his word), but this was the only personal or local note in an exceedingly lengthy address which was concerned otherwise with the crisis facing Upper Canada because of men who wish “to get rid of the connection with and dependence on the Mother Country.” 70 One cannot help but be struck, on reading the Kingston press, with the degree to which politics had moved to the centre of the stage by 1836, in comparison to the almost surreptitious way in which the first Kingston election had been reported in 1820. In the 1830s, especially in 1836, the columns of newspapers were filled with political essays, squibs, letters and editorials, with election addresses of candidates from the surround­ ing ridings (though not from Kingston), and with the latest intelligence from other parts of the province. Politics was having a “provincializing” effect, breaking down the barriers of locale and region. A remarkable instance of this occurred in 1836, when Hagerman, newly acclaimed for Kingston, campaigned in Lennox and Addington for the Constitution­ alists Cartwright and Detlor against Peter Perry and Marshall Bidwell. In the past, each constituency, at least in the Kingston area, had been considered a self-contained political entity. The climax of Hagerman’s electioneering came when he addressed a large crowd at the hustings, just a few miles from the point on the Bay of Quinte where, fifty-three years before, his Loyalist father had landed to build his first home. That this was thought to be an event both dramatic and unusual is shown by the full coverage it was given in the press.71 What can be learned of Upper Canadian electoral behaviour from a study of the early politics of Kingston? For one thing, it seems clear that, whatever may be said of other ridings, Kingston’s political pattern does not conform to the traditional accounts nor did Kingston electors swing pendulum-like from election to election. The town was and remained Tory, whether the issues were local or provincial. Its electorate was not

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divided in political affiliation in any significant way. Reform was so weak that only in one election were the Reformers able to run a candidate, and a novel one at that. Early elections were fought on local, not provincial issues. Factionalism, a sure sign of one-party politics, was rife up to 1830. The crisis in the provincial capital may have helped curb faction, but it strengthened the Tory ascendancy at the same time, since it produced an acclamation. It seems probable that Upper Canada contained ridings of three or four types, in terms of electoral patterns, and that Kingston represents an extreme type. Doubtless there were other ridings, whether Tory or Reform, that were as consistent. Further research will be necessary to discover all the categories into which constituencies fell, and hence in what parts of Upper Canada provincial elections were actually won and lost by the swing of a few seats. Tied inextricably to the early history of Kingston politics were Christo­ pher Hagerman and his association with the slow consolidation of local conservatism. The institutional arrangements of party were all but ab­ sent, unless the structure of local government itself be excepted, but Hagerman’s skilful use of patronage built a coalition of interests that were to be fully exploited by the man to whom the Kingston Tory “ma­ chine” was bequeathed. If John A. Macdonald was the father of the Conservative party, it can be fairly claimed for Christopher Hagerman that, if he was not its grandfather, he was at least its Dutch uncle.

SEVEN

Canadians View the United States: The Annexation Movement and Its Effect on Canadian Opinion, 1837-1867

B e t w e e n the period of the Canadian rebellions and the outbreak of the Civil War, little change occurred in the fundamental attitudes the Canadians held about American political institutions. Nevertheless, al­ terations in the structure of government and in the direction of party development brought changes in the tone, if not the content, of Cana­ dian opinions. For one thing, extreme conservative antagonism toward the United States became the hallmark of Tory groups bypassed by the mainstream of politics. At the same time, the achievement of responsible government in the late 1840s meant that liberals no longer need look to the United States as exemplar; the provinces now had their own form of local self-government. Increasingly, moderate liberals and moderate conservatives drew closer together in their attitudes toward American institutions, and though they might remain enemies upon the hustings, something akin to a common political culture was taking shape— at least insofar as the dominant image of the United States held by the two parties was concerned. The end of the old colonial oligarchies also had a generally liberat­ ing effect upon political discussion in the provinces and allowed a frank expression of admiration for selected aspects of American constitution­ alism, which had been politically impossible before. Coupled with a general lessening of tensions between British North America and the United States, especially during the period of the Reciprocity Treaty, this meant that Canadians were more receptive to information about political behaviour south of the border. At Confederation, Canadians were far better informed about, and better disposed toward, American institutions than they had been half a century before. But the level of information remained very low, and the quality of debate scarcely any higher. On the whole, regional differences with respect to the United States were less sharp in 1860 than they had been a generation or so earlier;

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but French Canada remained an exception. There, knowledge of Amer­ ican institutions tended to lag behind that in English-speaking areas, and French Canadians were even more arbitrarily selective than En­ glish Canadians in what they chose to regard as the leading motifs of American political life. French and English, Maritimer and Upper Cana­ dian, continued to display marked defensive characteristics in discussing American political forms; and any such discussion was always closely re­ lated to provincial problems rather than to any attempt at an objective appraisal of the United States. The emergence of a larger degree of consensus about the United States was a reflection of the movement toward a two-party system in the British North American provinces. As radicalism of both left and right diminished in political importance, so did the radical views of the United States held by these groups. The parties of the centre could still be distinguished from each other in terms of their attitudes toward American institutions, but their differences tended to be of em­ phasis; and on many matters they were in complete agreement. That the consensus of the centre happened to be, on the whole, a moderately conservative one is hardly surprising in view of the strong conservative orientation of British America in the past and in view of the fact that democracy, as a political creed, was still largely the property of the rad­ ical left. Nor must the constant reinforcement of native conservatism by continued British immigration be omitted; and one cannot forget, of course, the essentially conservative character of the institutions with which the colonies embarked upon self-government. These influences, all of long standing, were greatly strengthened by the shock occasioned by the annexation movement of 1849, against which colonial opinion hard­ ened rapidly. Most important, however, was the spectacle presented to British American onlookers by the deepening crisis of the United States itself, a crisis that to Canadians seemed to confirm everything that their domestic tradition had taught them about the ephemeral nature of the American polity. rsj

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The annexation movement of 1849 was primarily economic in origin, being largely the reflex action of the Montreal business community to the shift to free trade on the part of Great Britain. What counted for them was the maintenance of political control over economic policy. The conjunction of the British swing to free trade with the grant of responsible government, which in effect handed political power to the French majority in Lower Canada, was more than enough to convert many Montreal businessmen into enthusiastic advocates of union with

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the United States, a union they believed would provide both an escape from the reactionary French and the substitution of a continental for an imperial trading system. Since the political faith of the Montrealers had been almost exclusively Tory, their manifesto was understandably mute on the political advantage of annexation. The only political overtone to this document was contained in a reference to the “simple and economical state government.” 1 Most Canadian Tories scrambled to disassociate themselves from the ultimate heresy of the Montreal group. How could any British American, no matter how great the provocation, bring himself to advocate union with a country far gone in profligacy? Was not the American judiciary “of the most inferior description” and the local magistrates “generally speaking most contemptible” ? Even though the Canadian Assembly had recently disgraced itself (through its Reform majority), its acts “shine with superior lustre and rise in proud preeminence when compared with most of the popular legislative bodies of the separate States, and even the House of Representatives of the vaunted Congress has no point of superiority over our Assembly.” Only the American Senate warranted a modicum of praise, since it was “the only bulwark against the unwea­ ried progress of an insatiable democracy.” Of what worth were written constitutions when all the available evidence showed a country that was socially diseased: The numerous defalcations both in public and private offices in the U.S., shew something very far from perfection in the morale of Society, while the dreadful catalogue of crimes of every description, exceeding in amount and proportion that of every country of civilized Europe, except France, illustrates forcibly the proposition that it is not to the United States we can look for any principle or practice by which our country is in any shape or form to be elevated or improved.2

The ecclesiastical wing of Canadian Toryism responded in tones equally shocked and indignant to this new, domestically manufactured threat from the ancestral enemy. For the Church of England, the United States remained what it had always been, a godless republic that had willfully denied the divine origins of government. How else to explain the curious fact that ex-President James Polk underwent a deathbed baptism? . . . it appears that the Supreme Magistrate of the United States admin­ istered the Government of his country, a country professing Christianity, before he had been made a Christian, according to any form whatsoever of the Christian religion. . . . For four years the neighbouring republic was govern by an unbaptized President. . . . How is it that the people of the United States suffered themselves to remain in this ignorance of the religious position of their Chief Magistrate? The anomaly must bring

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disgrace with it, and possibly something worse, to a nation professing to honour Christianity at all.. . . What could be thought of the Monarch of the British Empire, if he or she had never been baptized? Could such a thing ever happen in our Monarchy, or in any other Christian Kingdom in the world? No!3

No true loyalist, contemplating his Bible rather than his ledger book, could conceivably advocate union with such a nation. Were not British institutions “heaven-founded” ? Resistance to the powers that be, even in the form adopted by the Montreal group, was contrary to Holy Word and liable to “the stern penalty of damnation.” The crime of subversion was compounded by the proposal to join the United States, a country born in sinful rebellion and explicitly based upon “the blasphemous Whig as­ sumptions, that the people are the source of political power, and that the popular voice is the voice of God.” Archdeacon A.N. Bethune of York, in a special sermon on annexation, pointed out that “when our Lord Jesus Christ wished to make men understand the nature of his domin­ ion,” he took his imagery not from a republican polity like that of Rome, but “exclusively from the kingly office” ; it was scarcely accidental that the “whole economy of grace is styled the kingdom of heaven.” Monar­ chy, and monarchy alone, schooled the mind to religion and morality, by instilling in it the sentiments of humility, and by checking “the extrava­ gant wanderings and never-ceasing cravings of an unbridled ambition.” Everyone, “from the peer to the peasant,” is led to accept tranquilly “that state of life in which God has placed us.” Monarchy restrains “the madness of the people” and preserves to Canadians “the inestimable blessings of law, order, quiet, and true religion.” 4 In response to the argument of annexationist newspapers that, after all, the Episcopal church was in a flourishing state in the United States, The Church argued that even in “the uncongenial soil of republicanism” the Church would continue to the end of the world. Yet over the United States still hung the dark sin of rebellion, and even now, “their sin is finding them out” in the form of slavery. It will require a new revelation to expunge from the Bible these solemn words: ‘ LET EVERY SOUL BE SUBJECT UNTO THE HIGHER POWERS. FOR THERE IS NO POWER BUT OF GOD: THE POWERS THAT BE, ARE ORDAINED OF GOD. WHOSOEVER THEREFORE REINSTATETH THE POWER RESISTETH THE ORDINANCE OF GOD; AND THEY THAT RESIST SHALL RECEIVE TO THEMSELVES DAMNATION .’5

Such doctrine as that dispensed by The Church and Archdeacon Bethune, though very much in the tradition of colonial Anglicanism, and especially of that of Upper Canada, had a much diminished appeal by

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mid-century. The Bishop of Montreal, George Jehoshaphat Mountain, was distinctly more moderate than his Upper Canadian brethren in a pastoral letter, Thoughts on Annexation, printed for private circulation in 1849. While agreeing that a loyalty that rested merely upon sordid computation was worthless, he observed that a preference for British America against the United States rested, in part at least, upon nothing more substantial than “habits of mind, tastes, predilections, prejudices if you will.” Nevertheless, for the faithful, the question of allegiance was at the core of a sacred one. Because of this, there was little point in de­ bating the political character of the American Republic— even though he found it “loose, unfixed and dependent upon capricious influence.” Having thus set aside mere expediency and the comparative worth of po­ litical institutions when measured against the binding obligations upon the Christian subject of the Empire, Mountain permitted himself a few words on the subject of slavery. Although he saw in the American polity “many things to admire and approve” (a quite unprecedented observa­ tion from a Canadian Anglican bishop), still “the monstrous anomaly exists, the political contradiction unsurpassed, rather unequalled, in the world.” Millions of men were in bondage in the Republic, in a state of “studied and carefully contrived degradation,” yet America “vaunts it­ self aloud to the world, as the only really free country on earth.” Could true Christians consent to join a state that had “practically disallowed the consanguinity of the family of man” ?6 At bottom, Mountain shared the same assumptions about the United States with his more outspoken Tory contemporaries, but in his refusal to entrench his thoughts in the usual ideological outworks, in the mildness of his language, and in his moderate tone he was much closer to mod­ erate conservative politicians like John A. Macdonald. Indeed, since Macdonald and his friends were more concerned with retrieving Tory fortunes from the debacle into which the apostasy of Montrealers had plunged them than in descanting upon American institutions, Moun­ tain’s remarks may be taken as fairly representative of the few allusions to the subject made by true-blue conservatives. There was an equal display of reticence on the part of the moderate Reformers, the governing party of the time. In the past, reformers of ev­ ery hue had customarily been far far more sympathetic in their attitudes toward the United States and its institutions than had conservatives, and radical reformers had used American political forms as gauges to mea­ sure the utility and worth of British institutions. The achievement of responsible government, however, had persuaded most reformers that it

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was no longer necessary to look to the south for inspiration, particu­ larly since the first by-product of responsible government was their own elevation to power. Robert Baldwin, joint leader with Louis Lafontaine in the first Reform administration, had required no such persuasion. From the beginning of his political career, in the late 1820s, he had consistently advocated the adaptation of the British mode of cabinet government to the colonial situation, and it is testimony to his single-minded pursuit of this goal that, in nearly a quarter of a century of political debate, he never pub­ licly uttered (aside from an occasional oblique reference) any extended opinion of the American political system. It is testimony also to his in­ stinctive political caution. Accused again and again by Tory opponents of hidden republicanism throughout his career, his whole inclination in 1849 was to regard the annexationist agitation as simply another Tory ramp, designed to trap unwary Reformers into injudicious statements. As always, therefore, he took pains to disassociate himself from the rad­ ical enthusiasts for American ways who dwelt on the fringes of his party. In a public letter to the veteran radical reformer, Peter Perry, he made it plain that he kept “unaltered my attachment to the connection with the motherland.” 7 Only after the furor of annexation had abated did he permit himself an uncharacteristically tough statement on American institutions. The occasion was a radical-supported resolution to convert the Legislative Council into a popular institution, comparable to the United States Senate, through some form of election for its members. There was a time when the Legislative Council was an obstructive body, and there was then some excuse for advocating elective institutions. He believed the English constitution to be the best in the world — infinitely superior to that of the United States. An elective council would subvert all the institutions in the country. . . . In the United States, there is in fact no government in their Legislatures. There could be no comparison between the two systems. Here it is the duty of the government not only to introduce measures, but to watch over the legislation. In the American Legislature there is no directing body.

He never wished to see his country cursed with what he considered the worst of the two systems.8 In his emphasis upon the need for executive control over the process of government and upon the incompatibility of a popularly elected upper house with the ordered structure of British par­ liamentary government Baldwin was occupying ground long since taken up by colonial conservatives. Certainly he and his moderate Reform party were nearer to moderate conservatives in their views of American institutions than they were to the men of their own left wing.

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Even before the annexationist movement got under way, Canadian radicals were seeking new departures in colonial government, departures based almost exclusively upon their ardent admiration for democratic republicanism as practiced in the United States. To the Clear Grits, as they came to be called, Baldwin was a Whig, a “finality man,” whose sacrosanct responsible government was merely a device to extend a share in political power to a slightly larger portion of the Canadian elite. “The present system favours the wealthy classes at the expense of the poor,” said a correspondent in the Grit organ, the North American. By remedying the defects of our system and assimilating it more to that of the neighbouring Republic, there would be nothing left that a Canadian could envy, and annexation would have received its death blow. But it rests with the people whether they wish to advance any farther on the road to democracy or not. If they raise their voice it must be heard. Even under a limited monarchy such as ours (whose tendency however is Republicanism) the voice of the people is all powerful.9

The Clear Grits were essentially correct in their estimate that Bald­ win, at heart, was an elitist without a program, now that the technical adjustment of responsible government had been achieved. To the farmers who formed the rank and file of the reform movement, responsible gov­ ernment had been a means to an end, the democratization of society and a place in the sun for the common man. To the middle-class leaders of the Reform party, such aspirations were unintelligible, and increasingly disenchanted reformers turned back to the great democratic model, the United States. The first plank of the Clear Grit movement, as announced in the North American, was “Elective Institutions.” Why should men of the New World be saddled with some “well-paid favourite of the Colo­ nial Minister” as governor, rather than a native Canadian who, instead of being “a puppet in a silly pageantry,” would cut through the pom­ posities of government, give leadership founded upon a genuine interest in local affairs, and vastly reduce public expense, just as the elective state governors had done in the United States. Instead of an appointed Legislative Council, “the spaniels of an Executive,” why not an elective upper house like the Senate of the State of New York, where senators were elected by universal suffrage from thirty-two districts? It was the elective principle that ensured that New York senators were honoured and respected, “the ripened fruit gathered from the political field.” In whatever light we view the nominated Council and Elective Senate the advantage is with the democratic institution. . . . If we follow, as we undoubtedly shall, the example set us by honest republicans, there is little doubt of the result. The Legislative Council will become valuable

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and worthy of retention, and be looked up to by the people as a noble bulwark of their liberties.10

If the democratic principle of election were extended down to the low­ est levels of local administration and police, then, as in the United States, the mass of bureaucratic and privileged corruption attendant upon a sys­ tem dominated by cliques of the wealthy would be swept away, and gov­ ernment would, the Grits thought, become an instrument of the people, sensitive and responsive to their needs. Nor should reform stop at this point. The medieval apparatus of the law and the courts, a great engine skillfully operated by the rich and the powerful to thwart natural justice, ought to be dismantled and reconstructed along the lines of the recent law reforms in the State of New York, where costs of litigation had been slashed, antique technicalities swept away, and judicial procedure much simplified. It was natural that such a comprehensive and rational legal reform should come about in a country “where the people are sovereign, where they elect all officers, even the judges themselves, and where edu­ cation is nearly universal.” The task before Canadians was to throw off the incubus of British heritage, which had heretofore compelled them “to abjure a republican simplicity, and assume the paraphernalia, or ape the pageantry, of an aristocratic government,” and, following the example set for them by the Americans, assert their own Canadian identity by establishing government more in accord with North American realities.11 The most vehement opponent of annexationist sentiment and of the crypto-annexationism of the Clear Grits was George Brown, the Scottishborn editor of the Toronto Globe and a rising star in the Reform party. Brown, who had lived for some time in New York before coming to Canada, was deeply affected in all his attitudes toward the United States by his personal detestation of slavery.12 In a series of editorials prompted by the annexation movement, Brown returned again and again to the question. Those “dazzled with the name of a Republic” should keep in mind that the American conquest of Texas had meant slavery for an area that the benighted Mexicans had kept free of the institution. Un­ questionably American public men were admirable when they denounced the tyrannies of Russia or Austria, or the despotism of Neo-Napoleonic France, but it was difficult not to convict them of “national hypocrisy” when they shied away from action against the sin of slavery in their midst. The whole slavery question had unfortunately become entangled with the excessive partyism of the United States; the two forces mutu­ ally strengthened each other, made resolution of the issue impossible, and consequently led the Union farther and farther from the paths of true liberty. How else to explain the rocky road for antislavery petitions in the House of Representatives, or the winning of only one fortieth of

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electoral votes cast in 1848 by the Abolitionist party, “the only really free party in the United States” ? “Party with them goes before liberty, and . . . they would rather let the world be covered with one unbroken cluster of Slave States than suffer the most trifling infraction of their party purposes and objects.” 13 In a long historical article entitled, “What Has Republicanism Done for Freedom?” Brown argued that (in a manner indistinguishable from similar conservative outpourings, except perhaps in its air of seeming objectivity) that though the ancient republics of Greece and Rome were greatly superior to the servile societies of Persia or Babylon through their possession of popular government and belief in popular rights, when one probed beneath their military accomplishments one found “the same des­ titution of the gentler virtues, the same lust of power, and of dominion, which distinguished the most despotic monarchies.” That such qualities might emerge whatever the political structure, Brown did not for a mo­ ment consider; it was sufficient for his purposes to observe that, like the Eastern tyrannies they fought, both Athens and Rome were slave pow­ ers. Similarly, the two great nineteenth-century republics, endowed with representative institutions based on universal suffrage and clothed with civil and religious liberties, were yet subject to the greatest invasions of human freedom. Republican France, launched by the noble actions of a Lamartine, had moved rapidly to a tyranny which was “the work of France, the work of universal suffrage,” and not of any clandestine plot. And “what has the great and swelling Republic of the United States done for freedom? We answer— nothing.” Rather, partly through the onward march of slavery, the Union had regressed in the point of freedom since its independence. We . . . are forcibly led to the conclusion that Republican Institutions are not favourable to genuine liberty. . . . It is not easy to understand how a Government with fifteen states, rejoicing in their cherished institutions of slavery, can be actively and perpetually engaged on the side of freedom. It is difficult to believe that the Government will be perpetually on the side of freedom, when the very preservation of that unholy bond, the Union, is based on the principle that in vast tracts of their country the human mind is placed under Russian restraint, that it is death in some places to teach children to read if they have a drop of coloured blood in their veins. . . . These, Canadians, are the allies to whom the annexationists would introduce you. But you will spurn the degradation with the contempt it merits.

The degree to which the reform editor echoed the native Tory tradition is remarkable, even to the point of evoking American treachery to the true cause of liberty in 1812 by joining France against Britain: why? “Because

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they have no love of liberty as a nation.” In that act, the American people demonstrated “the most selfish indifference to the freedom and independence of Europe.” 14 Among Canadian reformers, Baldwin and Brown were closest to the conservative position on American institutions, but between such men as they and whole-hog admirers like the Clear Grits there were delicate shadings of opinion. Probably William Buell, a veteran in the reform cause, spoke for many who occupied this intermediate position. He held that since the blight of oligarchic Toryism had been expunged by the grant of local self-government, Canada was in a position to forge ahead on her own. But it would be absurd for her to be so jealous of this small portion of newly won independence that she would fail to profit from the seventy years’ experience of the United States in self-rule, or not to emulate those American techniques that helped to stimulate that country’s vigorous development. True enough, democratic America had committed blunders, but “how infinitely preferable is such a Government to that of an oligarchy!” This lesson has been taught us by our American neighbours, yet we see no sufficient reason, to jump to the conclusion, that there is no hope for us but by a union with them. There is no real good in their institutions, not embraced by the British mode of conducting Government [yet] our prejudice against ‘Yankee notions’ and ‘republican wares’ has lessened, and we may avail ourselves of their experience, and legislate more direct to the point. They have been compelled to go on step by step, shap­ ing them, legislating on them, and introducing new plans, amending, changing, abolishing and substituting— can we not select the txse/u/?15

Among French Canadians, opinions with respect to the United States at the time of the annexation agitation were far less diverse than in En­ glish Canada; instead, opinion was sharply polarized into two schools. Prominent politicians of the radical nationalist generation of 1837, like Louis Lafontaine or George-Etienne Cartier, had undergone a transfor­ mation since they had followed Papineau to rebellion. Recovering from the double catastrophe of Durham’s Report, which had damned the French Canadians as a people, and from the Union of Upper and Lower Canada in 1841, a union explicitly designed to submerge and anglicize the French, French-Canadian leaders had collaborated with Baldwin’s English-Canadian reformer group so successfully that they had not only ensured the survival of their people, but had made themseives the one indispensable element in the politics of coalition which union and respon­ sible government made mandatory in the united legislature. In coming to terms with the British political system, however, and in learning how to manipulate it in order to secure place and power for themselves, these

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erstwhile radicals imperceptibly changed into Bleus — conservatives. By their own efforts they had demonstrated that their people’s identity and institutions could be preserved within the reformed colonial parliamen­ tary system. Therefore, what had seemed appropriate in 1837 now ap­ peared suicidal. Cartier rejected annexation out of hand as meaning death to French Canada. Responsible government and parliamentary institutions “sont suffisantes pour nous assurer . . . un remfede prompt et efficace a tous les maux dont la Province puisse se plaindre,” 16 Among the leaders of the older generation, only Papineau himself remained true to former ideals, but around Papineau as a figurehead there gathered a group of articulate and impatient young men, shortly to be known as the Rouges. Through their newspaper, L ’Avenir, such men as Eric and A.A. Dorion, Joseph Doutre, Rodolphe Laflamme and L.A. Dessaulles expressed their scepticism about the “miracle” of FrenchCanadian survival. To them, leaders like Lafontaine were corrupted by their association with the English within a system that demanded all the compromises from the French and secured to the English all the benefits. Deeply impressed by contemporary liberal thought in France, they rejected both secular and clerical leaders of French Canada and regarded themselves as born to lead the masses of the people out of poverty, ignorance, and subjection to antique survivals like the tithe and the seigneurial system. It was not merely a question of leadership, how­ ever. As long as the parliamentary system — the badge of their political subjection — remained, the unnatural condition that protected alien or worn-out institutions would also persist, and French Canadians would be unable to realize themselves fully as a people. The nationalism of the Rouges, signified by L ’Avenir's motto, “Canadiens frangais avant tout,” was joined to a heartfelt acceptance of American political institutions, which were seen as the agency through which a national regeneration could take place. What was needed in Canada was the establishment of a political structure “aussi avance que celui des Etats-Unis, qui certainement est le plus parfait de l’Univers.” 17 To the Rouges, therefore, the dramatic political heresy of the Montreal merchants was a genuine miracle. It provided a basis for racial collabo­ ration far different from the false and subservient relationship between the Lafontaine group and the Upper Canadian politicians to whom they had sold themselves for the sake of power. Racial politics in Canada had arisen because of a conflict of interests: while the real leaders of the French Canadians had sought to further the general interest of the coun­ try as defined by the interest of the greatest number, the Tory merchants had been pursuing their selfish individual interests. Now, however, the force of events had led the merchants to seek Tinteret du pays pour

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obtenir leur prosperity individuelle,” because all who sought annexation were clearly those who had the general interest at heart.18 It was not simply that the Rouges thought the American polity a good in itself— which they did; what was more important wa the value they place on it for the leverage it provided against entrenched institutions. Their diagnosis of the origins of the misery of French Canadians was primarily economic and social; American democracy, with the direct connections it established between elected and electors, made the people the instrument of their own liberation. On the other hand the system of responsible government, with its all-powerful executive, unrepresentative upper house, and appointed governor, interposed a series of barriers effectually reducing the popular will to a nullity and providing ample shelter to vested interests of all kinds. The greatest of these interests was the Church, which on many levels kept the people in subjection. The clergy fulminated against annexation; “il a peur, il a horreur de l’annexation, pourquoi?” Because in the United States there was complete freedom of religion, the tight control which the Church exerted over the political opinions of its flock would be swept away in a matter of months; and the whole inequitable system of tithes which, being assessed in grain, bore heavily on the habitants and exempted the merchant, the lawyer, the notary, and the doctors, would through annexation become voluntary. The clerical monopoly over education, and consequent denial of its benefits to all but a few, would be replaced by the exemplary system of universal education that had swiftly raised the masses in the United States and made them “les plus heureux de la terre.” 19 The response of the clergy, led by Bishop Ignace Bourget of Montreal, was not merely to denounce in general terms the popular institutions of the United States, but also more specifically to condemn what was construed as the atheistic and materialist liberalism of the Rouges. In order to protect themselves from the politically damaging charge of irreligion, the Rouges were led to argue that their criticisms were directed, not against the Church itself, but against its abuses of its au­ thority; and that they stood for a system of religious freedom as practised in the United States, one that would permit Catholics, as all others, to take their places in the political and social van. However, as was pointed out by Denis Viger— a patriot of ’37 who had turned conservative in the 1840s— there was a considerable difference between toleration for Catholics and the absence of social and political discrimination against them as found in the United States. Otherwise, how was it that “dans l’etat du New Hampshire un catholique ne peut etre ni gouverneur, ni conseiller, ni s^nateur, ni repr^sentant?” 20

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It was not just the Church, however, that barred the upward progress of the people of French Canada. The Church kept the people down in order to maintain its control, but the colonial regime sought to destroy them altogether. The union of Upper and Lower Canada was explic­ itly designed to eliminate the political power of French Canadians and ultimately to assimilate them to the English; responsible government had merely enticed such leaders as Louis Lafontaine or Auguste Morin to betray their compatriots. Otherwise, why did Upper Canada con­ tinue to receive the lion’s share of revenue, and why were the crying needs of Lower Canada in the fields of agriculture, education, shipbuild­ ing, and other areas of public improvement not met? French Canadians must choose whether they wished to continue an existence of ignominious servitude, with extinction as a people its end, or whether they wished the option of annexation, with the opportunity for full development as a people.21 This was the crucial point in the Rougeist case, and the one upon which their critics, both French and English, concentrated their fire. Sur­ vival, they argued, would be impossible within the Republic; as Denis Viger put it, “les Canadiens ne devaient pas d&irer l’annexation parce qu’il y avait la un danger pour leur nationalite.” Under the American form of government, Canada would become a mere “territoire” adminis­ tered by an alien governor who knew nothing of its language, laws, and institutions. It would suffer the same fate as Louisiana.22 The Rouges rejected all such criticism. Was not the United States, as one of their orators said, “trente nations s6par6es” ? Anyone acquainted with the Constitution of the United States, wrote the editor of L ’Avenir in response to an attack by the Journal de Quibec, knew that “la protec­ tion d’un des premiers empires du monde” would be assured to “notre nationality.” This was because each state in the Union was given the means to safeguard its separate nationality, through its full control over its internal government. . . . maitres de l’election de notre gouvernement, nous aurions une legislature et un executif veritablement canadien-frangais; nos lois et notre langue seraient reellement lois et langue officielles. . . . Nous au­ rions la liberte de commercer avec le monde entier et nos voisins des autres Etats; nous aurions liberte du culte, liberte de droits politiques les plus laxges et les plus complets; nous aurions un controle direct sur la politique et les depenses de notre gouvernement; et joignez a cela l’accroissement naturel de notre population, la conservation intacte de notre territoire si riche et si etendu, et l’amelioration de notre industrie agricole par le moyen d’une education forte et universelle.23

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Not only was the individual state provided with all the powers necessary to run its own affairs, but in the central government itself states had a protector in the Senate. Unlike the Canadian Upper House, the Senate, in which each of the states was equally represented, was based squarely upon the popular will and could not be altered in composition at the whim of an executive. Moreover, were by any mischance the Senate to block legislation passed by an overwhelming majority of the House of Representatives, its membership could be adjusted at the next elec­ tion “sans perturbation dans la constitution.” The separation of powers among the branches of the federal government, which most Canadians saw as an unfortunate weakness of the American polity, was for the Rouges one of its most praiseworthy features: “. . . le gouvernement des Etats-Unis e s t. . . tellement divise et subdivise que la concentration du pouvoir n’y est pas a craindre.” 24 Yet even if it were true that the Constitution of the United States was a weak confederation of sovereign states— and such critics of the Rouges as Viger disputed this point— the question remained: was the climate of American democracy really favourable to the retention of national distinctions, or was it, in fact, a far stronger agency of assimilation than anything experienced under British rule? Did not all the social and political forces of the Republic work toward the establishment of an Anglo-Saxon norm? While conceding that people of British stock were dominant in the United States, one Rouge newspaper, Le Canadien Independant, attempted to argue that French-Canadian identity would be guaranteed by the freedom and equality all Americans enjoyed, and also because Americans were too preoccupied with the material progress of their country to waste time in petty persecutions. La population des Etats-Unis se compose d’hommes de tous pays qui sont tous egaux, bien que la majorite y soit d’origine britannique; mais la question de la suprematie d’une nationality sur une autre ne demande pas l’emploi inutile d’une grande somme d’energie parce que nulle n’est attaquee, nulle n’est consideree comme une cause suffisante de pro­ scription, d’inferiorite. Chaque citoyen est interesse a travailler a sa prosperity individuelle et cette somme d’efForts constitue la prosperity publique. . . . Pourquoi lutterait-on au nom de la nationality dans un pays ou tous les hommes sont egaux et libres?25

Had not Congress printed some of its laws and public documents in Ger­ man, because “le premier interet du gouvernement americain est d’etre bien vu et bien compris de tous ses administres” ? It was easy for French-Canadian opponents of annexation to brush aside such arguments. Communal, not individual, rights were in ques­ tion. But the pursuit of happiness by an individual American was in

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fact one of the forces that made for social homogeneity. One would have expected the Rouges to put the best face upon the situation of the French in Louisiana (let alone the thousands of French Canadians who had been migrating to New England for the past generation) in order to strengthen their case that “il y a des etats ou deux races distinctes existent sur le meme sol” ; but little of this kind appeared in print. The fullest article on Louisiana, one which praised, in an unhappy phrase, “l’heureux amalgame des populations frangaise et americaine dans la Louisiane,” had been translated from the Montreal Herald, which had borrowed it from an article in the North American Review of 1830 writ­ ten to commemorate Lafayette’s visit to the United States in 1824-25!26 The peculiar provenance of this article, the paucity of current informa­ tion about the state of the French of Louisiana and New England, and the Rouge tendency to use quotations from de Tocqueville instead of first-hand accounts of American institutions, suggest that for them the United States had become an idealized utopia, a set of principles rather than an actual place. It represented the promise of secular salvation, its republicanism was “le Messie politique,” and it was sufficient to have the guarantee of deliverance without the specific details of the form that bliss would take. This theme of deliverance, then, runs through Rouge comments upon American institutions. A junction with the United States would deliver the people of French Canada from the unnatural legacy of the Conquest, an alien aristocracy and polity, and the grotesque domination of intellec­ tual and social life by an authoritarian church. Support for annexation was not simply an affirmation of belief in the value of American insti­ tutions, but also the ultimate rejection of the whole system of controls upon which Canada was based, and of the ordered, constricted, and conservative mode of life and thought that most Canadians— French or English— thought essential to preserve Canada against the threat from the south. It is hard to resist the thought that, for the Rouges, the loss of nationaliti might be a small price to pay for the freedom that Amer­ ican institutions would bring. Perhaps this is why L ’Avenir dropped its motto when embarking upon the annexationist campaign. In the Maritimes the annexation question was neither as important nor as productive of debate as it was in the Canadas. Changes in British trade policy had no significant effect upon the Nova Scotian economy, which was geared to a world trading system. New Brunswick, however, with its prosperity tied to a major staple export, was much affected by the dismantling of the protective timber duties that had guaranteed a market in Britain for its forest products since the Napoleonic Wars. A clandestine organization called the Reform Club, with a membership

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that included a number of Saint John merchants, was formed in 1848 to put forward the idea of annexation to the United States.27 The most prominent advocate, however, was George Fenety, the editor of the Saint John Morning News, who had been associated with political reform in New Brunswick since he started his paper in 1839. Fenety had started his career in journalism under Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia and then spent five years as a newspaperman in the United States. He became a somewhat equivocal annexationist when sectional politics blocked rail­ way legislation that he had hoped would recreate provincial prosperity. “We may sink either into insignificance,” he wrote, “or into the arms of the Great Republic.” For too long had New Brunswickers been guilty of “Toadyism to British forms and systems, however oppressive and how­ ever ridiculous.” Why not face reality, and acknowledge that they were Americans? “Geographically speaking we belong to the United States. We are connected by an imaginary line. We have sprung from the same stock, we speak the same language, profess the same literature, and [are] not lacking the enterprise of our neighbours.” The difference between the two people lay in New Brunswick’s colonial institutions, that had stunted the development of her political and social life. “Why is it,” asked Fenety, “that in the United States there never was yet a political question brought forward that threatened to subvert the constitution?” It was because, from childhood, Americans were schooled in free politics, had mastered the techniques of toleration and mutual accommodation that such politics required, and thus could openly debate, and resolve, great and complex issues with the dexterity of a politically mature peo­ ple. Among such a people, “a nation of statesmen,” it was impossible for bad legislation to endure, despite (Fenety was colonist enough to observe) “all their latitude and party spirit.” 28 Once they were citizens of the United States, New Brunswickers could become the Scotsmen of the New World. A glittering highroad of place and preferment would beckon men whose talents had been thwarted in the narrow confines of provincial life. A galaxy of governors, judges, con­ gressmen, and senators, perhaps a cabinet minister or two, and, glorious irony, even a minister to the Court of St. James, might be produced from New Brunswick’s present population. In a province that had been almost exclusively a Loyalist foundation, such views were shocking enough. The culminating heresy was Fenety’s celebration of “the triumph of Yankeydom over British tyranny,” the Fourth of July, as a historical event that lovers of freedom throughout the world had as much cause to observe as had Americans themselves. The Revolution had released the energies of the Americans; annexation, its peaceful counterpart “in this dark corner of the Continent,” would do the same for the people of New Brunswick.29

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Despite Fenety’s undoubted courage in broaching the American ques­ tion, there is little evidence that the light of republicanism had pene­ trated very far into darkest New Brunswick. Those who agreed with the editor of the Morning News were men who preferred the shades of anonymity; their arguments in favour of annexation were those of busi­ nessmen driven to desperate courses by the stagnation of trade. On Loyalty we cannot live, One ounce of Bread it will not give, Clear the way for Annexation, Or we shall meet with starvation.30

Like their Montreal counterparts, the merchants of Saint John forgot about annexation with the quickening of business in 1850; only Fenety himself seems to have been more than superficially impressed by the political attractions of union. Apart from one or two local newspapers, Fenety had no support from his brother editors, whether liberal or conservative. The conservative Fredericton Headquarters considered the “gorgeous fabric” of the Amer­ ican Constitution doomed by slavery: “. . . the peculiar institution lies like a mine, ever ready to be sprung beneath the very foundations of the American Union.” The editor of the New Brunswick Reporter thought the Union on the verge of dismemberment because of the slavery issue, but even if it were not, no genuine liberal (as he believed himself to be), could support a junction with a country so manifestly corrupt in all its political branches. Customs scandals, fraudulent bankruptcies, congres­ sional abuse of privileges such as franking and travel expenses, and the extravagant salaries of men in public life betrayed the inherent vicious­ ness of American republicanism. Like many another British American he attributed such public immorality to the influence of “the masses of the people in the greater cities of the Union,” who were also ultimately responsible for the faithless, murderous, and aggressive foreign policy of the United States, whether directed against Mexico or Cuba or other parts of the New World. Ere we annex ourselves to a slave-holding Republic, we’ll go down with the British flag— the true emblem of true liberty— flying at the mast­ head. . . . We form a part of THE GREATEST NATION UNDER THE SUN — a nation which holds the cultivation of young slaves, and the repudiation of old debts, in equal abhorrence; and as such, we desire no nearer connection with the United States, than that which is induced by mutual and voluntary good feeling, based upon genuine yet distant interests.31

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Argumentation such as this — and there was much in a similar vein in the New Brunswick press— suggests that the province’s economically dependent position, and its unformed and localistic politics, had done little to advance the quality of its public debate which, while high in zeal, was much lower than that of the Canadas in terms of informa­ tion. Nevertheless, New Brunswickers were capable of a generosity of sentiment toward the United States that was rare among the Canadi­ ans. The conservative editor of the Headquarters thought annexation “a nauseous potion,” but primarily because British Americans were a separate people, with a destiny of their own. They might, indeed, become a part of that great confederacy, but such a part as few men worthy of the name of Englishmen would wish to occupy. They would be received as the improvident and prodigal children of the same parent, who had sold their birth-right for a mess of pottage, and bartered their allegiance to their lawful Sovereign for the badge of a back door independence which could inspire them with no other feeling than a painful perception of their own denationalization. These were not the feelings which stirred the hearts of the fathers of American independence. They contended for the rights of Englishmen, and when blindly refused they fought to establish for themselves a name and a nation which is respected throughout the civilized world.

American history belonged to Americans; the United States had a legacy that New Brunswickers could not share. It is no blind hatred of the institutions of our neighbours which prompts us thus to speak. We admire American enterprise and honor American progress, and would not rank that man among the friends of human freedom who would seek to dim the lustre of one star in her glorious galaxy; but . . . where is the British colonist who feels any national in­ feriority when compared with the proudest republican in that country? . . . Our geographical position on this continent is more favorable for ultimate progress in the scale of wealth and civilization, when our con­ nexion with the mother country is taken into account, than that of the United States itself.32

This is not mere shabby-genteel defiance; implicit is an awakened selfconsciousness and a hopefulness that permits recognition of the virtues of the American polity. Not just for the editor of the Headquarters, but for many British Americans in all the provinces, the precipitation of the American question into politics at a time of crisis in their relationship with Great Britain forced a new examination of themselves and their institutions and awakened the first glimmerings of the idea of a new British North American people. As George Fenety observed when, still

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unrepentant, he concede that annexation as an option was dead, “who­ ever writes the History of British North America, by whatever name it may be known in time to come, will date the epoch of its Nationality from the middle of the Nineteenth Century.” 33 rsj

During the 1850s, American institutions were discussed in Canada with a freedom and a frequency unknown before 1849. Perhaps the wideranging debate of that year had lifted the taboo; it is quite likely, how­ ever, that Canadian interest in American politics waxed in the more permissive atmosphere of this decade. The achievement of responsible government gave rise naturally to a readiness for political experimenta­ tion, and American models for change were ready to hand, if only as warnings. The politics of ideology declined as two major parties took shape about the political centre. Although conservatives might still, on occasion, use the loyalty cry, a kind of rough consensus on funda­ mentals was forming, and conservatives and liberals alike came to hold much the same attitude toward American institutions. Hostility toward these institutions was, of course, still the dominant attitude, but in this era of reciprocity and economic well-being, the most primitive fears of Canadians were quiescent, and the language they employed was softened accordingly. It would be wrong, however, to overemphasize the degree of consensus about the American polity achieved during the 1850s; liberals were still much more apt than conservatives to look favourably upon certain as­ pects of republican politics. But, as a survey of attitudes toward specific American institutions in the period illustrates, the line between the two groups was blurring. The presidency was commonly regarded as much too partisan an office, and the President himself seemed inordinately in­ fluential because of his control over patronage. “The President of the United States is a despot during his official term, in comparison with the Queen of England — his power is enormous, and as a political partisan he uses it unblushingly for party purposes,” wrote George Brown in 1850.34 The conservative Cartier used much the same language a decade later: “Le president des Etats-Unis est un despote. . . . II peut braver les deux Chambres; son cabinet n’en pas un; il n’est pas compost de ministres. mais de simples chefs de departments.” It also became customary to comment that the quality of men elected to the highest office had de­ clined from the pinnacle reached in what it was now safe, apparently, to regard as the Golden Age of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the two Adamses.

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Malheureusement pour les Etats, les grand hommes y sont rares aujourd’hui, et les plus capables ne peuvent plus parvenir aux premieres places. Voyez, par example, cette trinite si remarquable: Webster, Clay et Calhoun. Tous ceux qui connaissent la politique americaine savent que Webster et Clay sont les deux plus illustres chefs du parti whig, mais ils savent aussi qu’ils ne pourront jamais se faire elire a la presidence des Etats-Unis.35

The acceptance of a heroic period in American history made it that much easier for Canadians to scoff at such presidents as Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan, and to attribute their mediocrity to the debilitating effect that democracy had had upon American insti­ tutions and values since that time. What else, indeed, could be expected from that final democratic aberration, the nominating convention? This institution, which Canadian radicals had long regarded with favour, was noticed generally for the first time in the 1850s. John A. Macdonald, who infinitely preferred the mysterious process by which Canadian party lead­ ers were chosen, thought the convention system “immoral” and “horrid” ; and most of his countrymen agreed with him.36 The “perfect scramble” of the convention, the “class [of men] sent to the conventions,” the dis­ graceful scenes that occurred on the floor, meant that worth and talent counted for little and low trickery for much.37 The choice of candidates for the two parties lies with their Conventions. These bodies are often very irregularly chosen, and there is always a great deal of influence brought to bear upon the members, so that the selection is not always what the people would have made. A two-thirds vote of the convention is necessary also, and when this cannot be secured in this irregular body for any prominent man, another individual is taken up, probably obscure and not half so fit for the office as his rivals, and may be elected. It is one of the weak points of the American system, that the President who possesses so much patronage, who could almost totally demoralize the country by its use, and may involve the nation in troubles attended by the most injurious and lasting effects, should be chosen by cliques of the lowest politicians.3®

Such were the sentiments of most Canadians up to (and often beyond) the time when they began holding political conventions of their own. The American Senate was more highly respected among Canadians than any other part of the Constitution. The names of a number of sen­ ators were well-known, and such men were frequently praised for their eloquence, statesmanship, or the able leadership they provided for sec­ tional interests. This “galaxy of great men,” elected indirectly for a relatively long term, had a strong appeal for Canadian conservative in­ stincts, while reformers attributed the quality of its membership to the

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elective principle itself and invariably contrasted it with the appointive upper house of the United Province of Canada. One of the political oddities of the 1850s in Canada was the collabora­ tion among High Tories, Clear Grits, and Rouges to bring about a reform of the Legislative Council upon elective principles. Prior to the coming of responsible government the Legislative Council had always been the bulwark of Toryism; but when the form of colonial government changed, the Reformers flooded the upper house with their own appointees and, in the Tory view, destroyed the value of the institution as a check upon democracy. These latter therefore reversed their long-held opposition to an elective second chamber; but instead of favouring, as did the radicals, some form of direct election, Tory leaders like Henry Sherwood turned to the example of the Senate. “Go to the United States and see how the system is worked out there. Do you find that the Upper House is elected by the same people that elect the House of Representatives? Of course not. The great men who drew up the declaration of independence would never have been so silly.” The Americans wisely chose their senators by indirect election, through the state legislatures, and in this way a weightier body of men was elected. There is no seeking by these men after popular suffrage, they are chosen by an independent constituency, and are unconnected with the body that choose the lower branch of the Legislature. And they hold their office for a longer time. And what is the effect of this system? When any great question axises in the United States — to whom do you look — to which branch of the Legislature? . . . It is to the opinions of men which have the greatest weight throughout the country.39

So, to the Tory, the elective principle as exemplified in the Senate could be put to conservative use in Canada, just as it was in the United States. To the Clear Grits and the Rouges, however, a bicameral, democratically elected legislature was “the best, the most successful” of all working systems of government, and they tended to see the Senate and House as elective bodies working together to check the power of the executive, from which the greatest danger was to be apprehended.40 Both Tories and radicals got their wish when, as part of the complex arrangements producing the Liberal-Conservative coalition of 1854, it was agreed to reconstitute the upper house upon the elective principle. It is probable that the elective Council was thrown in to attract fringe votes for the coalition; at any rate, Baldwinite Liberals and Macdon­ ald Conservatives, who normally would have denounced such legislation, kept mum during the debates on its passage. Only George Brown, left out in the cold by the coalition, attacked the measure vigorously. As early as 1852, he set down a reasoned analysis of the function of the

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second chamber in the United States and Canada. He was convinced, rightly, that an elective upper house would make responsible government unworkable; and that, while the Senate merited the praise bestowed upon it, it had no value as a model for Canadian institutions. The present Upper House may not be an influential, powerful body like the Senate of the United States, but is there any necessity that it should be so? Does not the Governor and his responsible Council, and the House of Assembly, give us as efficient means of legislation, without an independent Upper Chamber? . . . The two houses of the American legislatures often come to a dead lock — one chamber vetoing what the other passes; but then, the division of opinion does not affect the execu­ tive. Here, the Cabinet could not possibly remain in office, if a majority in either house was ready to vote want of confidence in them. . . . In the American Congress, there is a necessity for a second chamber, be­ cause there are no such members in the lower house as our ministers, and unless some one has a direct interest in opposing, almost any mea­ sure may be passed through it. Bills are killed in the senate every year by the score which have been log-rolled through the lower house. Such things cannot occur here. No bill passes through the assembly which is disagreeable to the ministry; if it is agreeable to them, it would pass the upper house also.41

Brown’s constitutional logic was unanswerable, and he was vindicated in the sequel. After some unhappy experiences with the elective upper house, Canada abolished this short-lived imitation of the Senate at the time of Confederation — and Brown was in on the kill. Compared to the Senate, the House of Representatives was virtually an unknown quantity to Canadians in the 1850s. Almost invariably most Canadians contrasted it unfavourably with the upper house, and thought of it as the arena for the grossest kind of politicking, filled with scheming, corrupt, and disorderly congressmen engaged in fleecing their constituents and abusing their privileges. “In the Senate of the United States is to be found its matured intellect and statesmanship; in its House of Representatives, its brawling demagogues and political intriguers.” Even William Lyon Mackenzie, when acting as a congressional reporter for the Examiner, had some harsh things to say about the House.42 Canadians of the 1850s were rather more knowledgeable about Amer­ ican elections and the American electoral process than previous gener­ ations had been, but were only marginally less jaundiced in their com­ ments. Some of them knew just enough of the institution of the electoral college to be critical of the anomalies it could produce. George- Etienne Cartier, for example, was fond of pointing out the contradiction between the obsession for head counting in a polity based upon universal suffrage

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and the complex mechanism of the college which on occasion could result in a minority President; but it cannot be said that he really understood the matter.43 Canadians for the most part continued to emphasize the licentiousness and turbulence of the American democracy, as they had been doing for half a century, as in this description of the Iowa election of 1856: In the different hotels, lounges, and bar-rooms nothing is heard but one continual din of politics, and to a stranger who has no interest further than the peace and prosperity of the country, such harangues are anything but agreeable to listen to. . . . It is astonishing with what virulence and invective the press everywhere assail the candidates who are opposed to their views. Nothing is sufficiently low or vulgar for their depraved tastes to utter. The domestic hearth is not sacred from their entrance; and even the very portals of the grave axe opened up in order to vent their licentious spleen. The unbridled license of such a press is destructive to the best interests of society, and can only be tolerated, one would think, where the tastes of the people are as depraved as themselves.44

One might almost imagine, on reading such accounts, that Canadian and Maritime elections of the 1850s were models of propriety and deco­ rum. Yet it was true that few Canadian politicians, except those of the radical left, were believers in universal suffrage. Political disorders at election time were put down to “the democracy,” whether the masses had the franchise or not. George Brown admired the progress of the United States in general education, a necessary precondition of pure democracy, but deplored “the mass of ignorance still to be encountered in every constituency” during the 1856 federal election, and the effect it had upon the level of politics. The two great parties in the neighbouring Republic struggle earnestly and for what? To gain power by deceiving, coaxing, bribing, and betray­ ing that immense body of uneducated electors, who, though incapable of thinking or judging for themselves in matters of State, are of suffi­ cient weight in the electoral scale to make any party to whom they are opposed kick the beam. Questions of public policy, of enlarged states­ manship, are never discussed on the eve of an election. These would not be understood by the masses. Cant phrases, popular catchwords, songs, vituperative attacks, appeals to national prejudices &c.; these are the weapons most useful in the contest, and these only are employed. The balance of power is held by the ignorant unreasoning mass; to sway them is the grand aim of the contest. . . . The great struggle of 1856, which was to limit the era of freedom to a few northern states or extend it over the broad territories of the West, was decided by a few thickheaded voters in the State of Pennsylvania.45

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In light of such comments as this, it would be unreasonable to expect anything in the way of sophisticated analysis of the state of the parties, or of the electoral prospects of this candidate or that from Canadian sources. Indeed, most Canadian editors made a virtue of their ignorance, and made little effort to explain the tangled web of American politics to their readers. The most that can be said of Canadian knowledge of American institutions in the 1850s is that it was considerably advanced over that of previous generations. i' n j

Overshadowing British North American views of the American polity in the 1850s was the fate that seemed to be swiftly overtaking the great Republic. As the decade wore on, premonitions of disaster muted further the voices of those who valued American institutions highly. Those in the dominant tradition plainly regarded the onset of the great crisis as the inevitable outcome of the weaknesses of government in the United States and as a satisfactory vindication of British American forms and ways. It has been held that the predominantly conservative view expressed by Canadians with respect to the political breakdown in the United States was a mere echo, imitatively colonial in character, of current English opinion. The truth seems to be that Canadians required little outside help in forming their opinions about the coming of the Civil War. The native conservative tradition on the subject of the United States was long established, though ultimately derivative in character. As has often been remarked, Canadians were deeply divided in their attitudes toward the contestants in the Civil War, and careful study of this division of opinion has disclosed little pattern to it. There was nothing so simple as a liberal identification with the North, or a conservative sympathy for the South. Instead, both liberals and conservatives were at odds within themselves in a most bewildering and complex way. Moreover, opinion shifted quite radically at different stages of the war. The most recent and authoritative student of this phenomenon has established, however, that previous attempts to analyze Canadian opinion in terms of “proNorthern” or pro-Southern” sympathies were scarcely well-founded. It is much more accurate to speak of “anti-Southern” or “anti-Northern” feelings.46 What gave Canadian opinion this peculiar twist was, in part at least, the underlying lack of sympathy for American institutions, South or North, that was by this time firmly established as part of the Canadian political culture. Naturally most Canadians saw the origins of the Civil War as a break­ down of the federal system, a triumph of overly powerful states against a feeble central government. In addition to this argument, which had an

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almost universal currency, many professed to see a qualitative decline in American public life, a tragic failure in leadership, as responsible for the Civil War. To some (especially in the Maritimes), the breakdown in lead­ ership was the result of the admixture of peoples in the United States, the “too great dilution of the Anglo-Saxon element in the population,” as a Montreal newspaper asserted as early as 1852.47 Most commonly, however, it was attributed to the progressive corruption of American in­ stitutions by unchecked democracy. The Civil War was thus the logical and long-anticipated culmination of tendencies in the American polity that had been present from the beginning. And as with any Canadian judgement on life in the United States, the dominant view of the ori­ gins of the Civil War was intimately related to the feelings of Canadians about themselves, their institutions, and their current problems. Al­ though there is little reason to doubt the genuineness of the dismay and regret expressed by the politically effective population of British North America, at the same time, or at least before the horrors of such battles as Shiloh or Gettysburg, the Civil War was satisfying to them in the deepest sense. In French Canada, the war was a club with which to beat the Rouges, now proved to be so lamentably mistaken about the United States. “Quant k moi,” said Cartier, “je n’aime pas le systeme americain. J’aime le regime de responsabilite pratique en Angleterre, et, si aujourd’hui les Americains sont a la veille de conflits deplorables, cela est du entierement a l’irresponsabilite des chefs de l’administration.” This observation, supremely irrelevant to the American situation, was in reality connected with the decision of the Lafontaine radicals to cooperate with the En­ glish in the system of responsible government, rather than follow the road of the Rouges, and was a demonstration of how completely that radicalism had accommodated itself to the power structure. The Civil War had vindicated the Lafontaine-Cartier school of politicians and had discredited the Rouges, and with them their radical program for the transformation of French-Canadian society. It had discredited de Toc­ queville as well, for whether this distinguished observer had known it or not, his La Democratic en Amerique had long been the chief source for French-Canadian radical opinions of the United States. Now, according to the Bleus, he had been posthumously exposed as a well-meaning but naive idealist, and his weightiest judgement, that the United States in its reconciliation of freedom with power provided an object lesson for the world, had been disproved by events. The cause of American failure lay not in slavery, but in the American democracy itself: “. . . par la corruption morale et politique du peuple Americain.” It lay in the prin­ ciples of that democracy: “ . . . peuple roi, peuple dieu, souverainete de

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la multitude, infaillibilite de la democratic.” The real lesson the fate of the United States taught was to those who had been misguided enough to believe that “le dernier mot est la ruine de toute autorite legitime.” 48 To most English Canadians, too, the Civil War meant, quite sim­ ply, the final bankruptcy of republican institutions. Nearly every public man expressed this sentiment, none so voluminously as Thomas D’Arcy McGee. To him, the New World in the nineteenth century had been a kind of outlandish laboratory for republican experimentation, a producer of grotesque devices of government of every kind. The last representative of this luxuriant and unnatural growth had been in the United States, and its death had sounded the knell of democratic republicanism on two continents. On the fate of so many republics we may surely be allowed to reason. They have been of all sizes and shapes; federative and consolidated; with and without privileged classes; with and without established churches; with two chambers of legislation or with one; with longer or shorter terms of executive office; with every variety of division between the executive, the judicial, and the legislative branches of government; and what has been their invariable experience? Is there one, a single one, which can be cited as an example of a ‘model Republic’, supposing nations to be made on models? From the Banda Orientate to New England on the one ocean, from Chili to California on the other, what is the lesson taught us by the short and troubled annals of all these revolutionary Republics? . . . If stability be essential to good government, they have not had stability, and therefore, their description of government cannot be good either for themselves or for others.49

John A. Macdonald, though much less given to sweeping pronouncements than McGee, and not at all convinced that the fate of America was sealed, thought that there were lessons for Canadians, to be drawn from the breakdown of the great democracy: He was opposed to universal suffrage. . . . Experience had shown that it left a nation weak and led it toward anarchy and despotism. Unless there was a middle power, unless property was protected and made one of the principles on which representation was based, they might perhaps have a people altogether equal, but they would soon cease to have a people altogether free.50

Macdonald’s views, in fact, were not much different from those of his Tory predecessors. “Property” had replaced the less specific “aristoc­ racy” as a guiding principle, but otherwise little had changed. Macdonald’s great opponent, George Brown, had a more complex at­ titude toward the meaning of the American struggle. For one thing, he

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was much more generous in spirit, for had not “the example set by the United States . . . been of infinite value to the cause of liberty the whole world over” ? His abolitionism led him resolutely to oppose the South and to denounce its “rebellion” as a “great sin,” and he was sorely tried by Lincoln’s ambivalence on the central question of slavery. Neverthe­ less, he thought the Civil War attributable not just to slavery and to the political idiocy of the South, but to a more general cause to which all parts of the Union had contributed. The American polity and social tradition denigrated respect for authority. Americans prized “indepen­ dence, sauciness, swagger” in their children, not Canadian virtues like “docility, humility and prudence.” Democracy alone was not responsible for this contempt for order, which came, rather, out of the oldest Amer­ ican traditions: from the values of the Puritans, whose natural spirit of independence had founded the country through a massive rejection of authority; from the Revolution, which compounded and sanctified the colonial tradition with the blood and energies of the patriots; and from the American tradition of foreign policy, so typically unheeding of the rights of other peoples and of the usual decencies of the international or­ der. These traditions had deeply influenced the “American character.” “It has become a matter of national faith that there is something con­ temptible in submitting to rule, and that the true position of mankind is one of entire independence of his neighbour.” For such a people, democ­ racy was the worst of political systems, since it placed no checks upon popular passions. Brown was convinced that the United States would emerge from the war a less democratic, but more stable country; and he was most critical of those Canadians who not only prophesied but wished for its ruin. “Let us not forget,” he said in a speech to the Toronto Anti-Slavery Society in 1863, “that there have been, and still are, very different monarchies in the world from that of our beloved Queen, and assuredly there are not so many free governments on earth that we should hesitate to desire earnestly the success of the one nearest to our own, modelled from our own, and founded by men of our own race.” 51 The editor of the Toronto Leader, a moderate Conservative newspa­ per, took a rather different tack. Charles Lindsey, son-in-law of William Lyon Mackenzie and his political biographer, was at first inclined to ar­ gue that “it was not necessarily a contrast of systems; not necessarily a question between a republican form of government and a constitutional monarchy.” Slavery was the root of the disruption, not republicanism, a judgement with which the little rebel (then in his last month of life) prob­ ably agreed. But as the political crisis in the United States deepened, Lindsey was brought to ask his readers, “Is Republicanism a failure?”

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If Mackenzie read his answer, some acrimony may have entered family relationships, for in the course of 1861 Lindsey developed a set of ar­ guments both familiar and distasteful to the old radical. The core of the American problem was partyism, which had been permitted by the Constitution to infect even the highest office in the land. The President was both party leader and the party’s prisoner; here was “the vicious principle in the American constitution.” Since the President was not so much the head of the nation as he was the instrument of a faction, it was hardly surprising that the cabinet and higher offices of government were filled with party hacks and wire pullers, “picked from the mass for party fidelity, capacity, and as representing the opinions which prevailed at the White House.” Such men were sycophants, unlikely to check a headstrong or foolish leader. Nor need a President conciliate Congress. There were no parliamentary majorities to soothe, no pertinacious re­ former to propose awkward questions, no constant reader of blue books to expose inconsistencies. Accordingly questions as such have seldom been debated in the American Senate. On the contrary, there has been much declamation, personal tournaments of power, finished orations, and undoubtedly the exhibition of much mental vigor; but, although the party opposed to the President were fully represented, there was no Par­ liamentary warfare, for nothing was to be gained by it. No opposition vote could affect a single Minister, applying that term to the heads of departments. Hence there has always been a pretty general indifference to the proceedings of Congress.®2

Had the American cabinet been forced, like a British ministry, to answer for its policies within Congress itself, instead of being separated from it by an unbridgeable constitutional gulf, then perhaps “the combination which is now directed to destroy the Union” might have been “satisfied with an effort to destroy the Government.” Lindsey’s case illustrates a general proposition. The answer he sup­ plied to the question, “Is Republicanism a failure?” was not one that would be meaningful to Americans who were asking themselves similar questions. Indeed, given his initial objectivity, it is a singularly disap­ pointing and puzzling answer, since it is not really a statement about the American political problem at all, but an affirmation of the superior utility of British forms. In fact, one of the major problems confronting the historian of Canadian ideas about the American political system is the intellectual shoddiness of those ideas. Without raising the question of the general quality of Canadian public thought, it seems apparent that even Canadians who were as sympathetically inclined toward the United States as Lindsey undoubtedly was were unable to reason ef­ fectively about American politics beyond a certain point. As has been

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previously suggested, that point seems to be reached whenever develop­ ments in the United States threaten the precarious Canadian sense of security. The earth-shaking events of 1861 profoundly disturbed Cana­ dians; and they were further shocked by the Trent crisis near the year’s end. In such circumstances, capacity to reason effectively about the United States, never very high, gave way to instinctive reiteration of old generalizations (in whatever contemporary dress they might be clothed). It is disillusioning but entirely characteristic to find Lindsey, at the close of the year, warning of the “contagion” of American constitutional ideas from the circulation in Canada of “piles of dubious American litera­ ture,” and expressing envy for the immunity of French Canadians from the American “virus” because of the barrier of their language; or to dis­ cover that George Brown, at the same juncture, thought it “useful and instructive” to publish a series of retrospective editorials on the War of 1812 offering an interpretation of American conduct in no way dissimilar from that put forth by John Strachan during the War itself.53 The most notable difference between Canadian and Maritime opin­ ion about the coming of the Civil War was that Maritimers paid much less attention to the matter. The sense of involvement so present in Canadian opinion was absent in the Atlantic provinces, and the lack of lively debate in the press meant that opinions, when expressed, tended to be highly individualistic and even quixotic in nature. Aside from its crankiness and lack of sophistication, however, Maritime opinion had much in common with that in the central provinces. The Novascotian thought that Jacksonian rotation in office was a prime cause of the Civil War. At the election of a new President, sixty thousand people lost their government jobs and became a potential nucleus for revolt against the in­ coming government. “This is not the way things are done in the Mother Country or in these North American colonies.” 54 Perceptively enough, the same journal denied that the Civil War represented the failure of re­ publicanism or democracy, but rather was the result of “the implacable contention of many distinct democracies” ; on the other hand, it also saw “the gigantic streams of various foreign races which have been swept into the country” as responsible. The Novascotian's Halifax contemporary, the Tory Chronicle, took an even more extreme view. It alleged that there was “a peculiar bond of sympathy” between Tsarist Russia and the United States, masked only by American institutions. Both were expansionist powers with continental ambitions, both were slave states, and both, in their separate ways, were “semi-barbarous” societies. The United States, like Russia, had a highly cultivated and enlightened intel­ ligentsia, but in North and South alike it was “the masses that misruled” and gave to the whole country its special character, “that odious and

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bombastic self-adulation which has rendered the people of the Union a laughing stock to their more polished neighbours.” 55 In New Brunswick, the conservative Headquarters, as late as May of 1861, was inclined to put the whole crisis down to another passing derangement of the fevered brain of American democracy. Already cool heads can see that all the noise, the racket, and the ‘ tremen­ dous excitement ’ will, like the froth of beer, or the bubbles of champagne, soon subside to flatness; and that all the troubles that affect the nation — the mob rule and tyranny, the spread eagle speeches, the star and stripe sentiments, the warlike sermons, the song singing in churches, the fight­ ing parsons, the lying telegrams, the spouting, the cheering, the cursing, the swearing, the tremendous excitement, all the sounding and fury of ten millions of voices speaking bunkum and breathing deathless devotion to country, and the thunder of two thousand ‘columbiads’ rending the very heavens and displacing two or three stones, and wounding a man here and there — will soon cease.

And when the war nevertheless came, the Headquarters attributed it to a politics controlled by “the dissolute and desperate mobs who fester in the large cities.” 56 Perhaps the most interesting of the Maritime newspapers on the ques­ tion of the Civil War was George Fenety’s Morning News. Little re­ mained of his former annexationist outlook. Universal suffrage, he was convinced, had destroyed American institutions. At every election, peo­ ple “of the most stolid ignorance” were manipulated by “crafty politi­ cians” to the detriment of “the intelligence and best interests of the country.” The United States had made the fundamental error of extend­ ing political power too widely, even to “the depraved and the brutal” ; the consequence was “political ruffianism.” Yet Fenety had no doubts about the disastrous effect that the destruction of the free government of the United States would have upon the world. America had shown, he wrote, that wealth and prosperity were not “incompatible with demo­ cratic rule, or in any way dependent upon Aristocratic pretensions.” The United States had proved a home for the oppressed peoples of con­ tinental Europe and had served as a model for England itself; indeed, “England’s greatness is, in a measure, dependent upon the perpetuity of American Institutions.” “Her people are taught that Nations may flour­ ish and become great, under the rule of plain men; and that hereditary law makers and the grandeur of Courts, are not an absolute condition to secure this. The American system teaches self-reliance and the dig­ nity of true manhood.” This was, perhaps, the most eloquent tribute uttered to the American polity by any British American editor of the

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period; but Fenety’s conclusion put him squaxely in the colonial tradi­ tion. Despite the virtues of the United States, he wrote, “we prefer our own system of government, because in the colonies we feel that we have all the privileges of a Republic, with immaterial exceptions, without any of the excesses.” 57 Fenety’s observation exemplifies the blending of the Canadian liberal and conservative outlooks on American institutions into something ap­ proaching a “national” consensus. Henceforth, the majority of Canadi­ ans, except unrelenting High Tories, were prepared, however reluctantly, to concede the virtues of American republicanism; yet most, except ded­ icated radicals and Rouges, believed that it was ineluctably tainted with flaws unknown to their system of parliamentary government. That the consensus achieved was predominantly a conservative one was in part the result of the misfortunes that overtook the United States in the 1850s and the consequent disenchantment of Canadian liberals with American institutions; but in the main it was the logical outcome of tendencies in Canadian life and politics over the previous half century. Whatever the explanation, it is not too much to say that the large measure of agree­ ment among provincial leaders on the nature of and dangers from polit­ ical “Americanism” constituted one of the unifying intellectual forces in the Confederation movement. Perhaps the prominence given in this essay to the conservative charac­ ter of Canadian views will be challenged by those predisposed to think that Canadians must have been more sympathetic to American insti­ tutions because they ought to have been. Unquestionably many were. What is contended here is simply that the majority of the politically effective and articulate Canadians were not, and that they, not the rad­ icals or the High Tories, were in the mainstream of Canadian opinion. Perhaps Mackenzie was right to prefer the austere virtues he saw in Jacksonian America to the petty courts of Canada; and perhaps Pap­ ineau held correctly that democracy and republicanism were the natural order of things in the New World; but they and their followers in the next generation spoke only for a minority of British Americans. How­ ever much the fortunes of nineteenth-century radicalism have attracted the interest and sympathy of later historians, the Canadian radical tra­ dition is so episodic in character that it may scarcely be said to have existed. It was precisely because Canadian radicals represented accu­ rately the orthodoxies of North American political existence that they failed in the Canadian environment. The real puzzle in the history of Canadian ideas about the United States is why the bulk of Canadians, standing on the very threshold of liberty, were so little susceptible to

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American institutions, a seeming contradiction of nature, environment, and proximity. The essential continuity of the Canadian picture of the American polity is highly suggestive. It would appear that the primitive experience of the British North American colonies, coming to consciousness in an age of war and revolution, exerted a profound formative influence upon the stock of political assumptions held by Canadians at mid-century. Early notions about the United States, though modified, outlived what have been considered to be the watersheds of the rebellions and the coming of responsible government. What was it that gave these early conservative conceptions their remarkable capacity to survive in the face not merely of a frontier environment but also of great changes in the politics of the United States and of British America? As we have seen, the Canadian picture of American institutions had little to do with objective reality. Occasionally, it is true, Canadians ex­ pressed judgements about political events in the United States that seem, on first examination, to be the result of some insight. But ignorance and insight are unusual companions. On the whole, the judgements of Cana­ dians upon American political phenomena were not judgements at all, in any rational sense, but rather were ritualistic expressions of deeply held assumptions, responses triggered by danger signals from the south that their political culture had conditioned them to recognize. Not only were Canadian attitudes relatively impervious to changes within the political structure of the United States, they were also proof against the gradual democratization of Canadian society and politics that was bringing British North America significantly closer to Amer­ ican patterns. An uneasy awareness of such tendencies was probably one of the reasons why some modification of Canadian views vis-a-vis the United States occurred in the 1850s. But as distinctions between Canadian and American life and institutions diminished, the need to insist upon them intensified. What Freud termed “the Narcissism of small differences” became more and more characteristic of the Canadian mentality. Attitudes toward the American political system, and the values these attitudes reflected, were only part of the structure of Canadian values in the first half of the nineteenth century; and it would be a gross mistake to imagine that they gave coherence to the whole. In certain negative respects, however, they coloured the Canadian outlook. The tensions generated by American politics, and indeed by the robust totality of American life and culture, had a profound influence upon Canadian be­ liefs and upon the manner in which they were held. The urgent necessity for a small people, in the overwhelming presence of a supremely confident

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neighbour, to insist not merely upon their separateness and distinctive­ ness, but even upon their intrinsic political and moral superiority, had a paralytic effect upon the Canadian mind and upon the quality of Cana­ dian thought. The rigidities established by the compulsion to main­ tain identity narrowed the range of political debate, channeled political thought along familiar paths, and discouraged the venturesome, the dar­ ing, and the rash. There is an imprecision and superficiality, a lack of progression and proliferation, about Canadian thought with respect to the United States that mirrors the general state of Canadian political thought in this era. The impact of the American political system upon the Canadian po­ litical culture in this period is of central significance because of the close connection between the political culture, the awakening of Canadian na­ tionalism, and the building of the Canadian character. Although their reasons varied greatly, most Canadians, whatever their class, religion, economic interest, or region, were agreed in the conception they held of American democratic republicanism. One learns little about the Amer­ ican polity from the Canadian idea of it, but much about Canadians. Their picture of the United States was a projection of their own fears and emotions, of their sense of living in a hostile world, of their anxiety for their own survival, and of their uncertainties about their special place in North America. To be sure, it omits the positive aspects of Canadian beliefs; but one learns from it, at the very least, that to Canadians “hap­ piness” was too much to hope for from any government. Government should provide peace, stability, guiding authority, and security — cer­ tainties to which a prudent and loyal people could cling while all about them raged the giant storms of a vital and turbulent world whose enthu­ siasms they dared not share. “Let us, then, not envy our neighbours, but be contented with and improve our own condition, and lead peaceable and quiet lives in all godliness and honesty.” 5®

EIGHT

The War of 1812 in Popular History

A comparison of the popular history written about the Wax of 1812 in the United States and Canada in the nineteenth century presents some remarkable contrasts.1 There axe similarities, given the nature of the subject. Almost all of this literature is patriotic in character; that is, it treats history as a means of glorifying the national past, and seeks to maintain or enhance pride of country. Americans produced much more of it in the nineteenth century than did Canadians, and on the whole were better at it, especially those who, like Benson J. Lossing, aimed at a mass market. What the Canadians lacked in literary skills and flamboyance, however, they made up in terms of patriotic vehemence. The two societies, of course, were at significantly different stages of development. The United States was the product of two centuries of colo­ nial experience, capped by a revolution; much of British North America was much younger, being in part a product of that revolution. The Americans, whatever the importance of state and region, thought of themselves as a people, indeed, as a new nation; British North America, at the time of the war and for two generations thereafter, was a set of separate, small societies, divided by geography, language and the compartmentalization incident upon colonial dependency. The Americans had made an important start upon the development of common cultural institutions, had a political process which periodically focussed atten­ tion upon the national stage and had a thriving press and a publishing industry. For most of the first half of the nineteenth century, the British North American colonies had few institutions in common, except those having to do with the appurtenances of empire and of religion, had no common politics, and lacked anything more than local presses. Until well after Confederation, popular historical literature tended to be regional and local in character. The two historical literatures, therefore, make for an awkward com­ parison, since they represent very different stages in cultural evolution.

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There is, for example, an immense nineteenth-century American bibli­ ography on the war; that having to do with Andrew Jackson alone bulks as large as the whole British North American output on the war before 1914.2 In another way as well these works axe awkwardly juxtaposed. American historical publication on the war began even while hostilities were going on, in such documentary records as Hezekiah Niles’ Weekly Register. The first Upper Canadian monograph on the war was David Thompson’s A history of the late war between Great Britain and the United States, first published in Niagara in 1832.3 By that date many American accounts of the war had already appeared. The spate of U.S. popular history about the war peaked by the time of the American Civil War (although publications on the war, both popular and academic, have never ceased); Ontario and Canadian publication is infrequent prior to Confederation, and reaches a peak in the decade prior to the outbreak of the First World War. This temporal disjunction in the two litera­ tures must be borne in mind, since perceptions of the war, north and south, were affected by the generational context within which they were written. Obviously, to deal with two historical literatures over a century (rough­ ly from the generation following 1815 to the first decade of the twentieth century) renders it impossible, in the compass of this paper, to mention more than a few broad themes, and to refer only briefly to some of the particular interpretations different generations of Americans and Cana­ dians put upon the war, according to the exigencies of time. What is suggested here is simply that such broad themes do exist; that they have much to tell us about the divergent values of the two societies; and that comparative analysis of historical memories of the same events in two different countries may be a useful historical exercise.4 oo

It is an historical commonplace that all participants won the War of 1812. For Britain, the Shannon had avenged an embarrassing string of single-ship victories by American vessels over the Royal Navy, and the peace treaty was silent on American claims to “maritime rights.” The United States had challenged proud Britannia on her own element and done exceedingly well; and had not the “Second American Revolution” concluded with the triumph of New Orleans, when American militia defeated Wellington’s Peninsular veterans? As for the British North American colonies, they had survived, and that was victory enough. In the American states and in the British North American colonies, remembrances of the wax proved enduring. For Britain, however, the war virtually disappeared from the national record. “The events of the Wax of

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1812 have not been forgotten in England,” wrote William Kingsford with some asperity, “for they have never been known there. There is a dim recollection that the public buildings were burned at Washington, and that we were defeated before New Orleans . . . But the great features of the war in which the men and women of the provinces risked all they had to remain British . . . have obtained little recognition ‘at home’.” 5 For Britain the war was a relatively unimportant sideshow. For the United States certain features of the war were rapidly assimilated into the. central myths of national identity and national purpose. For Upper Canada, the manner in which the war was remembered was fundamental to the formation of Ontario political culture, and hence an intrinsic element in later Canadian nationalism. In these developments, popular histories of the war, as well as plat­ form oratory, played an important part. The stories they told, and espe­ cially the values they upheld, passed into the general culture of the two societies, and were incorporated into children’s schoolbooks.6 Whether American or Canadian, naive or sophisticated, they had certain charac­ teristics in common. All sought to give meaning to the war in terms of national character, national traditions, and national institutions. Popu­ lar history on both sides of the border was therefore explicitly concerned with patriotic values, and set out to provide lessons for a broad audience. For this reason, the popular histories of the war repay examination in terms of the evolution of nationalism in the two countries, in a unique comparative frame. In large part the popular histories, and the stump speakers on com­ memorative occasions, were fostering the mythic content of nationalism, out of the wealth of incident provided by the war. There is little connec­ tion, therefore, between the American and Canadian versions of the war found in the nineteenth-century histories. This does not mean that the writers of either nationality sought deliberately to falsify the record; it is likely that most did not. But they saw the war with their ideological blinkers on. Many protest the veracity of their narratives. Charles Jared Ingersoll, a congressman during the War of 1812, published the first vol­ ume of his history in 1845. His aim was “to exhibit plainly the causes and course of the war” ; he intended to do so truthfully, “without acri­ monious condemnation of the great people the war was waged against, whose wrongs and misconduct, however, being the burthen of the story, must be told as they merit, or the truth would not be told at all.” 7 Sim­ ilarly David Thompson, whose history has already been mentioned, told his readers that an “authentic” history was his chief concern. A faithful and impartial account of the late war must be hailed with the most exalted enthusiasm by all who can boast the name of a Briton

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. . . In such a work, generations yet unborn will trace the footsteps of their ancesters [sic] for the salvation of their country . . . Our British youths, too, whose minds have been endangered by the poisoned shafts of designed malevolence which have been every where discharged through the country, by the many erroneous accounts . . . that have hitherto been published . . . will catch that patriotic flame which glowed with an unequalled resplendence in the bosoms of their fathers. . . .®

James Hannay, who published his history of the war in Toronto in 1905, defended his impartiality against those who might accuse him of being too hard on the Americans. “No doubt,” he wrote, “it will be said by some critics that in this book I have been too severe on the Americans, who invaded our country, burnt our towns, ravaged our fields, slaugh­ tered our people and tried to place us under a foreign flag. . . . I see no reason why any American of the present day should feel offended [by] an absolutely truthful narrative.” 9 Because Canadian historical writing about the war was far less prolific than the American, and also because many American publications cir­ culated freely in Canada, Canadian authors tended to see themselves as beleaguered witnesses to a special truth, almost overwhelmed by the vol­ ume of writing from the United States. Writing in 1864, William Coffin bemoaned the fact that “faithful and reliable” Canadian works were out of print, “their places having been usurped at our firesides by a flood of American publications, sensational as they are termed, written for show, designed for sale, and to this end pandering to the worst passions of a morbid nationality.” Stemming the tide of American materialistic nationalism, his book would “impart . . . a Canadian individuality to this Canadian chronicle of the war.” 10 Popular historians, north and south of the border, in fact toyed with the truth in a variety of ways to the national advantage: exaggeration, suppression, horrific detail for lurid affect and the occasional use of whole cloth were their stock in trade. Most had an unquenchable thirst for rumour, unsupported allegation and local tradition favourable to their own side; for all, not impartial history but memorable testimony to the national virtues was their purpose. The War of 1812 may have been a sideshow to the struggle in Europe, and the forces involved in it never large. But its scope was vast; it was fought on the high seas as well as the Great Lakes; along many points on the border between the United States and British North America; throughout the Indian territories beyond the settled American frontier in the northwest; on the waters of Chesapeake Bay and in the environs of Washington; and on the banks of the Mississippi in front of New Orleans. This huge theatre, or rather set of theatres, offered unlimited scope to

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nineteenth-century American popular historians. Most of them settled for their state or locale; others were much more ambitious. The Canadians, in contrast, wrote of their own provincial experiences. There is little connection between Upper Canadian accounts of the war, and those written in Lower Canada and the Maritime colonies. It is true, of course, that American histories written on a scale beyond the local still betray regional biases; but there is nothing in American historiogra­ phy to match the barriers Canadian historians seem to have established for themselves. Though the ambivalence— indeed, hostility— of much of New England to the war somewhat cramped the patriotic flights of American historians, nevertheless, unlike the Canadians (whether preor post-1867) the general American histories have as their central matter the grand evolution of the country and its people; the Canadian histo­ rians, though certainly conscious of their place in the larger imperial scheme, remain local in outlook. rs j

Patriotic history is inevitably about heroes, and this was a subject the Americans handled with great flair. “Between a people and its heroes there is an intimate sympathy,” according to a Rhode Island orator in a commemorative address on the fortieth anniversary of the Battle of Lake Erie. Heroes, he remarked, were “the richest product of the peo­ ple” ; “in the affluence of their creative forces they throw back upon the soil whence they have sprung the seeds of new forces.” 11 American so­ ciety craved heroes; and exhibited an astonishing fecundity in throwing them up. Though the pre-eminent military hero of the war was Andrew Jackson, at least in terms of the volume of literature devoted to him, the American pantheon was thronged with naval officers. The frigate cap­ tains who won single-ship victories over British ships— William Bainbridge, Stephen Decatur, Isaac Hull, and James Lawrence— became in­ stant heroes. Lawrence, killed aboard Chesapeake in a celebrated action against Shannon in June 1813, gave the U.S. Navy its popular motto, “Don’t give up the ship.” Indeed, in this war, as in most of the wars of the United States, American military men proved singularly adept at producing, under the most trying circumstances, the apt and memorable phrase, thenceforth to be quoted by every popular historian. Was there some consciousness that they were acting upon the stage of the nation; that their words and their behaviour would be scrutinized by a large democratic audience through the press? Or were they conforming to a set of heroic attitudes already established by the culture? Certainly if one examines the exploits of Oliver Hazard Perry, victor of the Battle of Lake Erie in September

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1813, one sees a hero to the manner born, and a godsend to the popular historian. Perry named his flagship Lawrence in honour of the commander of the Chesapeake; as he sailed against the British fleet, the Lawrence was adorned with a banner inscribed “Don’t give up the ship.” In the course of the battle, the Lawrence being dismasted, he transferred his pennant and banner to the Niagara. Perry, standing erect in a small boat, “the pennant and banner half folded around him,” became the subject of innumerable sketches, prints, paintings and word pictures. The British ordered “great and little guns to be brought to bear upon the frail but richly adorned little vessel— laden with a hero of purest mold— but Perry stood erect, unmindful of danger.” Having escaped the furious enemy fire, and leading his fleet to victory, Perry capped his triumph with the consummate despatch, written on the back of the mandatory old envelope: “We have met the enemy and they are ours.” 12 Reflecting on the Rhode Islander’s gallant conduct, Josiah Headley remarked that “Such unshaken composure— such gallant bearing, stern resolution and steadiness and tenacity of purpose in a young man of twenty-seven, in his first battle, exhibit a marvelous strength of character, and one wonders more at him than at his success.” 13 Americans, in fact, were at no loss to explain the heroic conduct of their military men. American life and institutions had produced a new breed of men, and the events of the war repeatedly demonstrated the superiority of the American character. Samuel White, a Pennsylvania militia officer who served on the Niagara frontier, reflected after the war that Americans lived much better than Europeans. “An American,” he wrote, “eats three times the quantity of animal food, he sleeps more comfortably, and lives in greater plenty of fish, flesh, vegetables and spirituous liquors. Add to this, his freedom is unbounded. He speaks his mind to any man.” 14 It was this last point that was emphasized again and again in popular histories and platform oratory; American heroism arose directly out of the creative energies of a free people. In the words of a commemorative speaker: Such a people carry into war all the requisites of victory, with a fulness of possession which no discipline of despotism can ever bring about. Their sight is keener, their aim is surer, their resistance is more steadfast, their assault is irresistible, there is more life in them, there is more manhood in them. In wax as in peace, men are efficient in proportion as they are free, and the freest nation will be the only one that invincible. . . . from the bosom of a people thus inspired, there will spring up to lead them other Decaturs, other Perrys.15

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The war, then, was a great vindication of democratic self-government. No writer was more eloquent on this subject than Charles Jared Ingersoll who, while serving as a congressman from Pennsylvania, published a two-volume history of the war in the 1840s. His particular heroes were the Kentuckians, especially Governor Isaac Shelby, who accompa­ nied General Harrison’s invasion of Upper Canada in 1813 as a volunteer. Shelby’s career connected the American Revolution and the War of 1812; he had commanded a regiment at King’s Mountain in 1780 when a Loyal­ ist force had been defeated. “On the top of King’s Mountain,” Ingersoll wrote, “Shelby helped to plant the seeds of a republic, since spread from the frozen St. John to the fervid plains of San Jacinto, and destined, by similar spontaneous accomplishment, to much further extension.” 16 He and his frontiersmen were “a pure and perfect military democracy;” such soldiers were more than a match for the troops of aristocratic Europe and its colonial minions. Democracies at the outset of war always pay in defeats for the freedom they enjoy; ultimately, however, “disciplined freedom is eventually an overmatch for despotic discipline.” Voluntary government, voluntary religion, voluntary hostilities are Amer­ ican experiments, which . . . have withstood foreign aggression, main­ tained democratic peace, escaped civil war, and advanced the arts of civilization. By happy mixture of constraint with independence, law and liberty, the United States stand now among the primary powers of the world, to which elevation the war of 1812, with its preliminary reverses and post-liminous successes, largely contributed.17

Whereas the American public, and particularly American school chil­ dren, were given a large gallery of heroes of 1812, the Upper Canadians had no such bounty. During the war the provincial press was almost non-existent, and there was no local publishing industry. It was almost a generation after the war that the first Upper Canadian account of it was printed. Yet the province had its hero: Isaac Brock. There were others; Laura Secord’s feat in walking some miles to warn the British of an American force gained currency as the nineteenth century wore on, while Tecumseh was idealized by Major John Richardson both in his history of the war, and in verse and novels as well.18 For Upper Canadians, it was Isaac Brock who had, through his lead­ ership and example, brought about the miracle of the province’s survival. In the face of overwhelming odds, Brock had won at Detroit and Queenston Heights, and gave hope to a society that had all but abandoned it. William Coffin caught the impact of Brock’s victories: It is impossible to ignore the alarm and confusion and despondency which settled down like a black cloud upon the country, until suddenly

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day broke through the gloom and the stalwart form and sterling charac­ ter of Brock strode into light. Like the white horse in a battle piece by Wouvermans, in every delineation of this war, Isaac Brock stands forth from the canvas the central figure.1**

Brock’s death at Queenston Heights invested his heroism with the char­ acter of sacrifice; from the first he was called “the saviour of Upper Canada.” As early as March, 1814, the Upper Canadian Assembly re­ solved to set aside money to erect a memorial to Brock on the Heights; it was constructed in 1824. That monument was blown up— “a demon’s deed” — in 1840 by an Irishman who had fled Upper Canada during the Rebellion of 1837.20 The sequel to this outrage was one of the most remarkable manifes­ tations of public sentiment in the short history of the province. On 30 July 1840, a day declared a provincial holiday by Lieutenant-Governor Arthur, eight thousand people gathered on Queenston Heights “to deter­ mine in the most public manner, upon the best mode of reconstructing the monument.” The day was “beautifully fine,” reported the Cobourg Star, and steamers brought throngs from Cobourg, Toronto, Hamilton, Kingston and other points. Eight of them steamed in line up the Nia­ gara River, saluted from Port Mississauga, “in splendid order, sweeping rapidly up to Queenston, the bands playing, colors flying, and cheered by the shouts of thousands.” 21 A number of speakers addressed the assem­ blage; most notable was Chief Justice John Beverley Robinson, who had fought at Detroit and Queenston Heights. “No man,” he said of Brock, “ever established a better claim to the affections of a country.” Had he not engaged in this most risky campaign, and convinced the Americans how formidable were “a few gallant soldiers of the line, and the brave defenders of the soil,” the province would have been lost. “If he had begun to compare numbers, and had reserved his small force to make a safer effort on a future day, then would thousands upon thousands of the people of the neighbouring states have been found pouring into the western portions of this province.” 22 As it turned out, the new monument was not started until 1853. When it was completed later in the decade, it was claimed to be the second highest column in the world, exceeded only by Wren’s monument to the Great Fire in London. It testified , in a most visible way (especially to the Americans on the other side of the river) the veneration of Upper Canadians for the man deemed responsible for their survival; as James Hannay later wrote, “the lofty column erected to his memory informs the whole world that patriotism still lives in Canada.” 23 The fact of Brock’s death at the climactic moment of the battle was central to the power his name exerted upon Upper Canadians. Not only

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was there the element of sacrifice, of Brock having laid down his life to save the province, but also death had removed the hero to another and superior level of veneration. This transfiguration was faithfully recorded in 1859 by John Symons in his Battle of Queenston Heights. Brock and his provincial aide-de-camp, Lieutenant-Colonel John Macdonnell, who was also killed in the battle, were originally buried in one of the bastions of Fort George. Both were disinterred for reburial in 1824, at the new monument; Symons states that “Although twelve years had elapsed since the interment, the body of the general had undergone little change, his features being nearly perfect and easily recognized, while that of Lieutenant Colonel MacDonell was a complete mass of decomposition.” 24 American heroes sprang from the creative forces of the people, and partook of their collective character; Brock, an upper-class English gen­ eral, was an example to the people, whose task it was to emulate his virtues. “Honesty of purpose, faithful discharge of duty, encouragement of the young, support of the old and pure patriotism were all combined in him,” wrote his biographer David Breakenridge Read; his “example stands out as a beacon to all generations of Canadians.” 25 To William Kingsford, Brock was a leader far beyond the capacity of ordinary men; “there are men of this calibre, of whose power we cannot explain the cause, even when we feel we are subjected to it.” 26 Kingsford, by no means an uncritical historian, had no flaws to find in Brock; his delin­ eation of the hero as exemplar was of considerable eloquence: No name is better preserved in Canadian history, In priority to all oth­ ers, his has become a household word to each succeeding generation, as the type of chivalrous honour and unfaltering gallantry, as of one who re­ mained undismayed in the most threatening circumstances. In the hour of danger he exposed himself like the humblest soldier in the ranks; he was foremost when toil was to he exacted, and was to be seen the most prominent wherever the call of duty pointed. He brought the mind of a statesman to every enterprise in which he was engaged . . . By his own conduct he set the bright example for others to follow. If he did not spare others, he never spared himself. Gentle, considerate, kind and sympa­ thetic with men of all ranks and in all circumstances, no commander ever shewed more firmness in the maintenance of discipline and order. It is not an exaggeration to say that even to this day in Canada, many cannot pronounce his name without the tremor of suppressed emotion.27

Brock’s insistence upon “discipline and order,” said Read, should en­ courage the military drilling of schoolboys, since that “incites in them a spirit of patriotism, a love of country, obedience and discipline and respect for authority— all essential for the formation of a good citizen and loyal subject.” 28 American heroes, then, exemplified the values of

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the free democracy which had produced them; the Upper Canadian hero stood pre-eminently for order, loyalty and discipline. P J

n j

What, according to the popular historians, was the place of the War of 1812 in the national epic? For the Americans, there could be no doubt: the wax was a miraculous rounding-out of the verdict of the American Revolution. Many nineteenth-century histories were subtitled “The Sec­ ond War of Independence against Great Britain,” or some similar phrase. Benson J. Lossing captured the theme vividly. Just after the end of the American Civil Wax he published his Pictorial field book of the War of 1812, certainly the most colourful of all the nineteenth-century popular histories. Full of telling anecdotes, sketches of battlefields (he visited them all), and the first-hand testimony of survivors, it was immensely popular in its day and is still a remarkably good read. The Pictorial field book begins with a vignette. According to Lossing, when the British, at the end of the Revolution, abandoned Fort George at the foot of Broadway in New York, they nailed the Union flag to the top of the flagstaff, knocked off the cleats and greased the pole. John van Arsdale, “a sprightly sailor boy of 16 years,” climbed the staff, pulled down the British ensign, “and unfurled in its place the banner of the United States.” With that act, . . . the work of the Revolution was finished. As the white sails of the British squadron that bore away from our shores the last armed enemy to freedom in America became mere specks upon the horizon in the evening sun to the straining eyes of eager thousands gazing seaward beyond the Narrows, the idea of absolute independence took possession of the mind and heart of every true American. He saw the visible bonds of British thraldom fall at his feet, and his pulse beat high with the inspiration of conscious freedom, and the full assurance that the power and influence of British sovereignty had departed from his country forever.29

But as Lossing saw it, independence was a cruel illusion. Though Amer­ icans were free, they were still under British domination. Great Britain controlled “their trade and commerce, their manufacture and arts, their literature, science, religion and laws . . . To this domination was added a traditional contempt of the English for their transatlantic brethren as an inferior people.” 30 For Lossing, as for other patriotic historians, New England was a spe­ cial case, retaining a submissive and colonial attitude toward England. As Ingersoll put it, “among the many benefits of the War of 1812, there were none greater than breaking down the idolatry of England.” The

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war, therefore, was both just and necessary: just because of the flagrant abuse by the British of American sovereignty, especially on the high seas, and necessary in order to create a genuine sense of nationhood.31 For the United States, according to Lossing, the war “was an exhibition of its powers in vindication of its rights;” as a result of it, the country became “a powerful consolidated nation,” when heretofore it had been a set of “weak, isolated commonwealths;” “this is the whole drama of the con­ test known in history as the War of 1812, or the Second Struggle for Independence.” 32 It became the object of many of the American popular historians to show the British in the worst possible light, in all their arrogance, perfidy, and old-world depravity. Among many subjects, two were par­ ticularly favoured — the British use of Indians as auxiliaries, especially in the West, and the perpetration of atrocities by regular British forces, especially in the burning of Washington. Few American historians recognized that the Indian part in the war in the west was simply a continuation of the long war on the frontier virtually coincident with settlement. Indian resistance prior to the war had been organized by Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief, and the opera­ tions of the Indians merged into the war between Britain and the United States. Indian support was vital to British arms, but the army was not always in full control of its allies. The most notorious incident occurred at the settlement in Frenchtown (now Monroe) in the Michigan territory in January 1813. After an American force under General Winchester had surrendered to British regulars, Upper Canadian militia and Indi­ ans, all under Colonel Henry Procter, an unknown number of prisoners, chiefly the wounded and almost exclusively Kentuckians, were slaugh­ tered and scalped. It would be impossible to exaggerate the bitterness of the language of American writers on this and similar incidents. Henry Brackenridge, one of the earliest historians of the war, referred to Proc­ ter’s “cold, deliberate, fiendlike depravity, which assimilates men to the most odious and ferocious of the brute creation.” 33 Ingersoll attributed to Captain Matthew Elliot, an Upper Canadian officer in the Indian De­ partment, a cold-blooded remark which entered many histories; when appealed to by the prisoners for medical help, he is supposed to have replied, “The Indians are excellent doctors.” 34 Headley depicted Procter as “a perfect monster,” filled with “deceit, treachery, falsehood, murder, and that refinement of cruelty which looks with derision on slow tor­ ture. . . . His memory shall be kept fresh while the western hemisphere endures, and the transaction hold a prominent place in the list of dark deeds that stand recorded against the English name.” 35 Lossing, filled with indignation over the equivocal role Britain had taken during the

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Civil Wax, moved from the case of Procter to a general indictment of British barbarism: When the British government, in its pride or blindness, lectures that of the United States on lust for power, barbarity in warfare and kindred subjects . . . it is sometimes a wholesale service to prick the bubble of its pride. . . . That conduct, the manifestation of the intense selfishness of the aristocracy of rank and wealth which have ever ruled England — will always appear darkly in the history of nations as a crime against humanity. . . . The employment of bloody savages to butcher their rela­ tives in America, the demonic treatment of captive sepoys in India, the encouragement of frightful atrocities in China . . . should forever close the lips of English government when it attempts to lecture others onhumanity, or claims to be, par excellence, the guardian of civilization.36

The place of the Canadians in this American picture of British impe­ rial criminality was to figure as the brutal minions of the English upper class. A favourite tale of the popular historians was the finding of the scalp near the mace in the Upper Canadian legislature at the time of the capture of York in 1813. “This atrocious ornament” (the Speaker’s wig, one surmises?) was borne off, with the mace, by Chauncey’s squadron on leaving York, having burned the parliament building. “The sight of the American scalp, hanging as a trophy in a public building, would naturally exasperate soldiers;” incendiarism was a natural and just ret­ ribution. Lossing found the juxtaposition of mace and scalp precisely indicative of the barbarism of empire; “the mace is the emblem of au­ thority, and the scalp’s position near it is truly symbolic of British power in Canada.” 37 The Canadians, then, were seen as willing participants in British bru­ tality. Lossing reserved his ugliest anecdote for the Loyalists ( “Tories” were not looked upon favourably by any of the American writers). Noting that many of Butler’s Rangers, “those bitter Tory marauders . . . during the Revolution, who in cruelty often shamed Brant and his braves,” had settled in Upper Canada, he observed that they were “mostly men of savage character, who met death by violence.” An unnamed Toronto informant told him “that one of these Rangers, when intoxicated, once told him that ‘the sweetest steak he ever ate was the breast of a woman, which he cut off and broiled.’ ” It was these violent, savage men who gave the mass of the Upper Canadian population its true character.38 The execration of the British for their use of the Indians was coupled with the universal condemnation of the burning of Washington in 1814. The destruction of the capital had been preceded, during 1813, by a series of British amphibious operations along Chesapeake Bay, when Virginians and Marylanders were for the first time exposed to the war.

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These raids were condemned as piratical maraudings; they gave to the American public an anti-hero, Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn, “a titled incendiary.” Cockburn did appear to have engaged in this form of warfare with some enthusiasm, and was certainly prominent in the burning of Washington. The capture of the city, by a small force of British soldiers and marines, was a national disgrace for which every history has a differ­ ent explanation. That of Theodore Roosevelt was inimitable; he put it down “to the ludicrous and painful folly and stupidity of a Democratic administration,” to the “Doctrinaire Democracy” and to the visionary and incapable Jefferson and Madison, who “thought the war could be fought by the nation in arms; the exponents of this particular idea, the militiamen, a partially armed mob, ran like sheep.” 39 All united, however, in condemnation of the burning of the Capitol, the archives, the President’s mansion, and every other public building except the post office. Headley depicts Cockburn as literally revelling amid destruction: “To bring the day’s work to a fitting close, Cock­ burn, while the heavens and surrounding country were still ruddy with flames, entered a brothel and spent in lust and riot a night begun in in­ cendiarism and pillage,” a vile performance Headley contrasts with the behaviour of the steadfast Dolly Madison, who fled the capital bearing a full-length Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington and “the precious parchment upon which was written the Declaration of Independence.” Napoleon, wrote Charles Ingersoll, had destroyed not a single European capital; this culminating British atrocity finally “alienated Americans from a nation with which they said we were more naturally connected by the ties of common origin . . . than any other.” Its effect “was grad­ ually to disenchant this country of colonial reverence and party disaffec­ tion. . . . It required inhuman English misconduct to eradicate the deep seated feeling of national attachment which prevailed on the Atlantic seaboard to a mother country.” 40 rsj

Canadians had much more difficulty than Americans in formulating the meaning of the war. There was, of course, the miracle of survival, but survival of what? Prom the beginning, there was a consciousness that they lived in a world where external threat was permanent, a world in which there was little room for optimism. William Coffin laboured, somewhat clumsily perhaps, to express this timeless Canadian viewpoint: 1812 . . . is a sign of solemn portent to the people of Canada. It carries with it the virtue of an incantation. . . . These words . . . quicken the pulse and vibrate through the frame, summoning from the pregnant past

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memories of suffering and endurance and honurable exertion. They are inscribed on the banner and stamped on the hearts of the Canadian people — a watchword, rather than a weir cry. With these words on his lips, the loyal Canadian, as a vigilant sentinel, looks forth into the gloom, ready with his challenge, hopeful for a friendly response, but prepared for any other.41

At the time Coffin wrote, the United States was locked in the bitter struggle of the Civil War; to Coffin, it was natural that Canadians should feel once more “within the edge of the fatal circle,” and natural, too, for them to turn back to their experience of the War of 1812 “as an example and a warning.” 42 For Americans, the war was the completion of the work of the Revo­ lution; for Canadians, from David Thompson onward, it was simply an extension of the Revolution itself. The United States was a revolution­ ary power, involved in a collusive relationship with the French despotism, and timing its resort to war to correspond with the point of greatest peril to Britain. Conversely, Britain was fighting a lonely struggle against a tyrant for the liberties of humanity and the independence of nations. The Americans, therefore, were essentially hypocritical in promising “libera­ tion;” in fact, Napoleonic France and Republican America had both been spawned by revolution, and despite differences in governmental forms, were both actuated by the same secular imperialism.43 These ideas stemmed from the earliest period of the war in Upper Canada, and were first articulated by John Strachan. They were given most cogent expression, however, by his old rival Egerton Ryerson, writ­ ing in 1880. In his The Loyalists of America and their times, Ryerson delivered the following indictment: At the darkest hour of the eventful contest, when the continent of Eu­ rope was drenched with the blood of nations, the Tyrant had his feet upon their neck, and England alone stood erect, taxing her resources to the utmost and shedding her best blood for human freedom, the Democratic party in the United States— the ever-anti-British party — the pro-slavery party — the party in the United States least subordinate to the law and most inimical to liberty . . . declared war against Britain and forthwith invaded Canada.44

How, then, did they manage to survive despite the odds against them? We have already seen the importance they attached to Brock, but the nineteenth-century Canadian histories of the war also concluded that survival was won because of certain qualities possessed by the peo­ ple, certain strength attaching to their institutions, and to fundamental weaknesses in the American society and polity.

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A theme common to all these historians was the utterly peaceful and unoffending character of the Canadians themselves. Far from harbouring any designs upon their great neighbour, they were preoccupied with the hard labour of carving a living from the wilderness. War was forced upon them; it was none of their choosing. Out of this peaceful people came the militia, and most Canadian popular historians gave scant credit to the British Army in accounting for the successful defence of the province. The militia myth had its origins in 1812, in a November sermon preached at York by the Rev. John Strachan. Referring to the victories at Detroit and Queenston Heights, he said: It will be told by the future Historian, that the Province of Upper Canada, without the assistance of men or arms, except a handful of regular troops, repelled its invaders, slew or took them all prisoners, and captured from its enemies the greater part of the arms by which it was defended. . . . And never, surely was greater activity shewn in any country than our militia have exhibited, never greater valour, cooler resolution, and more approved conduct; they have emulated the choicest veterans, and they have twice saved the country.45

Strachan’s encomium was certainly a gross exaggeration of the part played by the militia, significant though it was in 1812, but he was right in suggesting that future historians would seize upon its role. William Winthrow, for example, asserted that “It was Canadian militia, with little help from the British regulars, who won the brilliant victories . . . and throughout the entire conflict. . . were the principal defence of their country.” 46 The militia myth was propagated so assiduously that it was widely held to be true. Placing the militia in the forefront helped to make even more dramatic a contrast which all patriotic writers wished to make: the peaceful, orderly handful of Upper Canadians against a nation of eight million. Ryerson wrote of “the Spartan bands of Canadian Loyalist volunteers, aided by a few hundred English soldiers . . . repelled the Persian thousands of democratic American invaders, and maintained the virgin soil of Canada unpolluted by the foot of the plundering invader.” 47 The ordered liberty of Upper Canada instilled a discipline in the militia that compensated for their lack of numbers; the Americans, on the other hand, were a democratic “rabble that called itself an army,” as Hannay put it.48 No one drew the contrast between the steady, disciplined Upper Canadians and the disorderly troops of frontier America more graphically than Richardson. He wrote of the Kentuckians captured at Frenchtown in 1813:

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Their appearance . . . was miserable to the last degree. They had the air of men to whom cleanliness was a virtue unknown, and their squalid bodies were covered by habilments that had evidently undergone every change of season. . . . They were covered with slouched hats, worn bare by constant use, beneath which their long hair fell matted and uncombed over their cheeks, and these, together with the dirty blankets wrapped around their loins to protect them against the inclemency of the season, and fastened by broad leathern belts, into which were thrust axes and knives of an enormous length, gave them an air of wildness and savageness.49

“This description,” said Richardson, “may be considered as applicable to the various hordes of irregular troops sent forth throughout the war from the States of Ohio and Kentucky.” Just as American historians lavished detail upon atrocities commit­ ted by their enemies, so the Canadians, for their own purposes, related the looting and inhumanity of the Americans. Although the burning of the parliament building at York was a favourite topic, most condem­ nation was reserved for the burning of Newark (Niagara on the Lake) in December 1813, when only one house of 150 in the village was left standing, and the inhabitants were left huddled in the snow. General McClure, the American officer responsible, was Upper Canada’s Admiral Cockburn. David Thompson set the tone when he wrote of him, “The historian laments that it is not in his power to record one magnanimous act of that recreant general, to rescue his name from the gulf of infamy to which his nefarious conduct has ever doomed it.” 50 Nor was there any Canadian sympathy for the burning of Washington. Even in 1905, by which time one might have expected a less vindictive outlook, Hannay could write: The burning of the public buildings was a severe measure but a just one. It was but a proper return for the burning of the public buildings of York in the spring of 1813. It was in these halls of Congress that the Acts had been passed which led to the war. It was in these now ruined buildings that the invasion of Canada had been sanctioned and her fields, farmhouses and villages given up to destruction. It was there that the proud boast had been made that Canada could be taken without soldiers; it was there that the hypocritical prayers had been addressed to an all wise and powerful God for His aid in the murder and enslavement of the people of Canada. And now the prayers had been answered to the confusion of those who made them.51

James Hannay was not an Ontarian but a New Brunswicker; he was also an ardent member of the Imperial Federation movement. As Carl Berger has shown in The Sense of Power, this movement coincided with the rise

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of Canadian nationalism, and also, as it happened, the efflorescence of books, poetry and other publications about the War of 1812, culminating in the centenary observations in 1912. Hannay sought to tap the Upper Canadian experience for the benefit of all Canadians. The reason that the Ontario memory of the War of 1812 fitted in so well with the outlook of the Imperial Federationist was its emphasis upon the central value of loyalty. More than any other writer of the pe­ riod, Egerton Ryerson gave voice to this interpretation of the war, and he seems to have spoken for a generation. For him, as for the Ameri­ can historians, the War of 1812 was nothing but the continuation of the American Revolution, but his reasons for believing so were very different from theirs. In his uncompromising opinion, the war had been precipi­ tated by the American war party, consisting “largely of the mob or refuse of the nation;” the same party that has persecuted the Loyalists during the Revolution and driven them into the Canadian wilderness; “the same party that in subsequent years aided the rebel Mackenzie and the rabble Fenians to invade Canada.” 52 Canadians posed loyalism against anarchic American democratic republicanism, and it was loyalism that brought victory: . . . there is this essential difference between the two armies: the lit­ tle Canadian army had homes, families and liberties to defend, con­ nection with the mother country to maintain, and the consciousness of right; the great American army . . . had the consciousness of longcontinued and widespread wrong in depredations against their western Indian neighbours, bloated avarice for conquest, and inveterate hatred of Great Britain.53

What was at the heart of Upper Canadian survival, and what precisely had been preserved? In an extraordinary paean to loyalty and the val­ ues surrounding it, Ryerson defined the Ontario legacy from the war as “the sacred love of hearth and home, the patriotic love of liberty, and that hallowed principle of loyalty to truth, and law, and liberty com­ bined, which have constituted the life and development and traditions and strength and unity and glory of British institutions and of the British nation from the resurrection morn of the Protestant Reformation to the present day.” 54 Such views were obviously not exportable to Quebec, which in any event had its own special view of the war, and would have been incom­ prehensible in the Maritimes, where the war was remembered, on the whole, as a prosperous opportunity. Only in Upper Canada did the war generate such intensity of feeling. Ontario’s expansionism, and the

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distinctive form of nationalism expressed by Ontarians, derived in sig­ nificant part from the collective memory of the experience of the War of 1812. By the time of the centenary of the war, there were some signs that the old fires were diminishing. The United States no longer seemed so menacing (even though the American embrace had once more been re­ jected in the federal election of 1911), and at the same time there was a good deal of recognition, especially along the Niagara frontier, that the two countries had shared interests as well as a history that divided them. Imperial Federationists like Sir George Parkin and Principal G.M. Grant, among others, pointed out that the Anglo-Saxon peoples, including the Americans, shared a common mission towards the lesser peoples of the world, and urged closer relations with the United States.55 In his Naval War of 1812, published two years after his graduation from Harvard, Theodore Roosevelt asked his readers to keep in mind “that the Ameri­ cans and the British are two substantially similar branches of the great English race, which before and after their separation have assimilated and made Englishmen of many other peoples.” 56 The British failed to realize how misguided was war with the United States; had they won, it would have given “a new lease of life to the Indian nationalities, the hemming in, for a time, of the United States, and the stoppage, perhaps for many years, of the march of English civilization across the conti­ nent. The English of Britain were doing all they could to put off the day when their race would reach to a world-wide supremacy.” 57 As for the Canadian militia of the War of 1812, they were virtually honorary Americans: A New Englander and an Old Englander differed little enough, but they differed more than a frontiersman born north of the line did from one born south of it. . . . The only un-English element in the contest was the presence among the Canadian English of some of the descendants of the Latin race from which they had conquered the country. Otherwise the men were equally matched.5®

This message of Anglo-Saxondom, and others like it, found some response from speakers at the centenary of the Battle of Queenston Heights. Dr. James Hughes, chief inspector of Toronto schools, reflected the new spirit: We have no wish to fill the hearts of the pupils in our schools with animosity towards the great nation whose fertile fields and happy homes we see beyond the great river that separates it from our own fair land. We wish to develop in our children a spirit that will lead them to say to the people across our borderland not ‘Hands off Canada,’ but ‘Hands

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together to achieve for God and for humanity the highest and broadest and truest ideals that have been revealed to the Anglo-Saxon race.’ 59

Despite many polite affirmations of amity, recognition of common interests and problems, and such doubtful compliments as one speaker’s tribute to “our brave but defeated enemy,” the old memories remained powerful. The address of Dr. Alexander Fraser, the Provincial Archivist, at the celebration of the anniversary of the Battle of Lundy’s Lane, was characteristic of the content of the speeches of most speakers on these occasions. “Heaven,” he said, “is not always on the side of the big battalions.” The war was one of aggression by the United States against a weak and peaceful people, but “iron was in their blood:” . . . we were strong in our faith, strong in our loyalty, and invincible in the defence of our home and country. . . . That war gave Canada a saga of glowing tradition, an epic of patriotism, an historic pageant of men and women whose deeds will be our national inspiration and whose names will be our everlasting glory.®0

The Upper Canadian memory of the war, as transmitted through the popular historians, failed to become “our national inspiration.” Why American popular historians were much more successful is a question that does not concern us here. As for the Upper Canadian epic, it was too narrowly and exclusively cast to be incorporated in the culture of either Quebec or the Maritimes, and in any event bore little relation to the wartime experience of those provinces. Though the resonance of the War of 1812 lingers still in Ontario, never again was its patriotic meaning to be proclaimed with the same vigour and conviction as it was during the centennial observances of 1912-14. The War of 1812 was shortly to be overshadowed by another and much greater conflict, and memories of that war (and others that followed) stand between us and the tradition the popular historians sought to transmit.

NINE

Upper Canada and the Conservative Tradition

T w o streams of conservatism met and blended in the two generations of Upper Canadian history before the Union. One was that brought by the Loyalist founders of the colony: an emotional compound of loy­ alty to King and Empire, antagonism to the United States, and an acute, if partisan, sense of recent history. To the conservatism of the emigre was joined another, more sophisticated viewpoint, first brought by Simcoe and his entourage, and crystallized in the Constitutional Act of 1791: the Toryism of late eighteenth-century England. What Upper Canada received from this source was not merely the somewhat creak­ ing intellectual edifice of Blackstone and Warburton, but a conservatism freshly minted into a fighting creed through Edmund Burke’s philippics against the French Revolution. The joining of two intensely counter­ revolutionary outlooks in a colony as peculiarly situated as was Upper Canada had powerful consequences for the Canadian conservative tradi­ tion. It is not, of course, usual to think of Upper Canadian Toryism in relation to the Canadian conservative tradition. Its contribution has not been freely acknowledged by later Conservatives, and probably not even dimly apprehended by them. There are good reasons for this state of affairs. For one thing, John A. Macdonald dominates the history of Canadian conservatism. His long career, his creative association with great acts of nation-building, his extraordinary attractiveness and com­ plexity as an individual, and the very brilliance and persuasiveness of his biographer, have made it difficult for us to see beyond him to the society that produced him, and that shaped his approach to politics. Secondly, the evil repute in which Compact Toryism is held has made it difficult for Conservatives, from the day of Macdonald onwards, to own that anything in their tradition could conceivably derive from a period prior to his coming. Thus the Conservative party dates its origins from the coalition of 1854, which is normally depicted as a grand rejection of the

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past by essentially forward-looking men, who turned to building modern conservatism from the foundations up. This is a harmless myth, and like other ancient monuments should doubtless be treated with reverent care. Since it is highly improbable, however, that anything said here will have the slightest destructive effect upon it, we propose to examine briefly some of the contributions made by Upper Canadian Toryism to the conservative tradition in Canada. In doing so, it is necessary to acknowledge at once that much of that contribution was negative; that is to say, that the example set by the Family Compact in its exclusiveness, inefficiency, arbitrariness and occa­ sional corruption had a salutary effect upon generations to come. High Toryism fell, once for all, with the system of government that had nur­ tured it; but its sins were recapitulated ad nauseam by succeeding gen­ erations of reform politicians. Thanks to their labours, and to those chroniclers and historians of Whiggish bent, it seems unlikely that the failings of the Compact will ever be forgotten; on this side of the ledger, at least, the historical record is complete. Nor is there any good reason why the ledger should be forgotten. Upper Canada’s fifty years of oli­ garchic rule remain standing testimony to the weakness and dangers of government by an authoritarian and paternalistic elite. But historians have a peculiar duty towards losers, not out of mere perversity, but because much is to be learned from them. This is the case with the conservatives of Upper Canada. Our reform tradition has telescoped the complexities of early conservatism into High Toryism, and has turned the phrase “Family Compact” into a term of political science, when it was nothing but a political epithet. The habit of viewing the first fifty years of Ontario’s history as a political false start has obscured the essential continuity of Upper Canadian with subsequent provincial history, and has fostered the tendency to attach fundamental importance to the Rebellion and the Union as rejections of the colonial past, when they ought more accurately to be described as events which eliminated certain alternative lines of development, reform as well as conservative, implicit in the early circumstances of the colony. Beneath the polemics and violence which accompanied these events, beneath the clash of such personalities as Gourlay, Strachan, Mackenzie and Bond Head, beneath the struggles over constitutional change or clergy reserves, a provincial community was being born, and by 1841 it had taken on characteristics both distinctive and permanent. In the building of the new Ontario society, conservative forces had been powerfully at work, and nowhere more so than in the sphere of pol­ itics. During Upper Canada’s existence as a separate province, thirteen

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general elections were held, as well as a large number of by-elections. Al­ though these elections have yet to be carefully analyzed, it is clear that their prime effect was to organize the population into its basic conserva­ tive and reform patterns. Since party, in the modern institutional sense, did not exist, political affiliations were quite fluid, and a sizeable body of electors shifted allegiance from election to election. Yet long before the Union, conservative and reform strongholds had emerged; areas from which the later Conservative and Liberal parties were to draw strength to the present day. The core of Tory support was in the eastern coun­ ties, the area of major Loyalist settlement, and in the towns, especially Kingston, Brockville, York-Toronto, Niagara and London. There was no significant variation from this pattern in the later Union period; indeed, there is a continuity between the electoral behaviour of colonial Upper Canada and the political geography of twentieth-century Ontario. Conservative members were returned to the Assembly from ridings other than the eastern counties and the towns, but not quite so consis­ tently. In the 1830s, the Tory cause was further strengthened by the addition of members from “frontier” constituencies, peopled by the re­ cent flood of immigration from Britain. All this is to say that the political situation of Upper Canada was not invariably, or even normally, one in which a reform majority in the Assembly found its legislative programme blocked by the solidly Tory upper house. In the first few assemblies, po­ litical dissent was of little significance. A number of oppositionists were elected to the Fifth Assembly in 1808, and the habitual end-of-session absenteeism of the eastern county members seems occasionally to have given the opposition a temporary majority. There was, however, no real unity of purpose among such men as Joseph Willcocks, Samuel Sher­ wood and David McGregor Rogers and these early stirrings disappeared with the wartime election of 1812. From 1812 to 1824, the provincial house was once more dominated by conservative-minded members. By no means did this guarantee to the executive government an acquiescent and docile Assembly. Both the American Loyalist and English Blackstonian traditions emphasized the separate and distinctive functions of the popular assembly in the constitution. Conservative Assemblies, es­ pecially when led by men as able and articulate as Robert Nichol, were quite capable of kicking over the traces, as the 1816 Assembly did, for example, on the issue of land and immigration policy. It might be argued that the conservatism of the early Assemblies reflected an electorate not yet awakened to its grievances, and content to elect men who could benefit the locality through their connections with government. The real beginnings of reform strength in the Assembly date from the election of 1820, and unquestionably some of the Reformers

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then elected owed their success to the agitation of Robert Gourlay. Yet it would be incorrect to say that, as reform sentiment became provincewide, conservatism as a force in the Assembly melted away. In the five elections from 1824 to 1836, there were two reform and two conservative victories, while another resulted in a virtual stalemate. The house elected in 1824 was very evenly divided, although on some issues the government could still find a majority. The mishandling of the alien question by the provincial executive had much to do with the reform sweep of 1828, yet in 1830 the conservatives were back in the saddle again, though by a relatively narrow margin. The 1834 Assembly was reform, but there was a substantial conservative opposition. The Thirteenth Assembly elected in 1836 was decisively conservative in composition. In sum, these elections demonstrate that conservatism met the democratic test of the hustings in Upper Canada, and that even after the rise of reform, men of conservative outlook had at least one chance in two of forming a majority in the Assembly. Long before the day of Macdonald, thousands of provincial voters had become habituated to voting on the Tory side, and a substantial voting base for the future Conservative party had been firmly established by 1841. It must not be imagined that the Tories elected to the later Assem­ blies were a solid phalanx at one with themselves and with the ruling elite. They were no more united than were the reformers. Relatively few conservative assemblymen were prepared to go down the line with the “pure” Tories of the Councils on every issue. This is not to say that High Tories were not elected. John Beverley Robinson and Christopher Hagerman were repeatedly returned, despite their close association with official policy, and virtually every Assembly contained a few Tories who followed their lead. Most conservatives, however, were unwilling to fol­ low Hagerman when he championed the views of Dr. Strachan on such matters as the clergy reserves, the right to conduct the marriage cer­ emony, or the maintenance of the principle of primogeniture in cases of intestacy. Not even Hagerman would submit to official policies that conflicted sharply with the local interests he represented. Conservatives were frequently divided on banking legislation, the scale of appropria­ tions for local services, proposals to tax unimproved lands in private hands, and hardy perennials such as the claims for war losses during the war of 1812; on these and other occasions Tory assemblymen were at odds with the position taken by the official class. Members like Charles and Jonas Jones of Leeds and Brockville, William Morris of Perth, and Allan MacNab of Wentworth, all of whom have been identified with the Compact, took independent stands in the Assembly. On the whole, the

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brand of Toryism they represented in the lower house was more moder­ ate than that found in the councils; undoubtedly the need to get elected, and then to keep one’s seat, helped to dilute High Tory principles. The lack of a constitutional connection between the Assembly and the other branches of government also encouraged independent behaviour in as­ semblymen, much as in the American congressional system, and allowed Tory candidates to distinguish themselves somewhat from government, although their reform opponents did what they could to obliterate this distinction in the minds of the electorate. Undoubtedly the system of government under the Constitutional Act had something to do with swelling the ranks of conservatives in the assembly. Some moderate conservatives would have been quite comfort­ able with the Baldwin reformers, had their business interests not induced them to retain official favour by maintaining some degree of orthodoxy on divisions. The permanence of officialdom, and the squeezing out of moderate reform options in the 1830s, kept several men on the govern­ ment side of politics. Perhaps the most prominent of these “business conservatives” was William Hamilton Merritt. Without the support of the provincial government, and of such figures in it as J.B. Robinson and John Strachan, Merritt’s great undertaking, the Welland Canal, would have been impossible, and he trimmed his sails accordingly. Or was it his conversion to liberalism at the Union that is open to suspicion? In an intriguing correspondence with Robert Baldwin in 1840—41, Merritt admitted that he had never understood the principle of Responsible Gov­ ernment until he read Durham’s Report, “but now that I see and feel the necessity of that measure being fully carried out in this province, no person can be more fully devoted to aid in its accomplishment.” He was aware of his reputation for “inconsistency in advocating Lord Durham’s Report & not having supported the Reform Party heretofore” ; inter­ estingly enough, he denied this charge on the grounds of his past inde­ pendent performance in the legislature on such issues as the dismissal of Hagerman and Boulton, in which he had joined his fellow Tories in denouncing the interference of the imperial authorities! While it is quite possible that Merritt was a genuine convert, it is remarkable how nicely his conversion coincided with new directions in politics. To him, Re­ sponsible Government signified “the improvement of the St. Lawrence, a better and more abundant circulating medium, and unrestricted Em­ igration or at least on as liberal a footing as before the War of 1812” ; business objectives all, and much in keeping with the new Sydenham approach. The thousands of recent immigrants from the British Isles who cast their first votes in the election of the 1830s must have included many men

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of moderately liberal politics who, like Merritt, were forced by colonial realities to support Tory candidates. At an earlier time, the elector often could choose among five, six or even more competitors, but such smor­ gasbord politics diminished sharply after 1828. In many constituencies, the recent immigrant of Whiggish background found he had to choose between a Tory and a Mackenzie radical. “I feel myself fast growing a Tory,” said John Langton, and many another must have made a similar choice. If Upper Canada conservatism lacked uniformity and homogeneity, this is only another way of saying that it was an alliance of various groups, with different interests and outlooks. It is possible to express the nature of the alliance in several ways. A Tory of the time would cer­ tainly have said that conservative leadership came from the “respectable classes” in the community. In this sense, Toryism was the political ex­ pression of the province’s small upper class, the people who considered themselves the natural leaders of society. For members of the professions, attachment to government conferred status and more tangible benefits. It is true that many reform leaders came from the legal and medical professions: John Rolph and William Warren Baldwin were members of both, while Dr. T.D. Morrison and the lawyers Robert Baldwin and Marshall Spring Bidwell testify to the lack of a Tory monopoly in this sphere. Yet most members of both professions seem to have been conser­ vative. As for the military profession, its bias was instinctively conser­ vative; among the hundreds of army and navy officers resident in Upper Canada on half-pay, a reform politician like Captain Matthews was very much a rare bird. Similarly, most landowners who thought of themselves as gentry, not farmers, were conservatives in politics. Yet, though the Tories were indisputably the representatives of the classes, to the dismay and mystification of reformers they were also able to win the support of many artisans and farmers, a phenomenon by no means confined to this period. Merchants and other men of business were a special case. By and large, it was advantageous for them to be on the right side of government; as creditors, both their interests and their inclinations pushed them in that direction. Moreover, although the upper echelons of Toryism were almost exclusively bureaucratic in character, the official class proved reasonably responsive to the interests of the provincial mercantile com­ munity, and the larger needs of St. Lawrence commercialism. Although there were exceptions, most substantial merchants, ship-owners and lum­ bering operators were Tory adherents, while many smaller tradesmen and shopkeepers tended the other way.

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Early Toryism is usually associated with Anglicanism, and with the exclusive pretensions of the Church of England to the clergy reserves and to control over public education. This is not altogether an inaccurate impression, but it is a misleading one; obviously the Tories could not have achieved any measure of electoral success had they depended upon the votes of Anglicans alone. The situation has perhaps not been recognized in all its complexities. On the one hand, it is certainly true that for many years John Strachan spoke both for his church and for the executive government of the province upon religious policy, and that from first to last he never yielded an inch in his claims for the exclusive rights of the Anglican Church. Yet Strachan did not speak for all conservatives, probably not for a majority of Anglican laymen, and certainly not for the Tory politicians whose first concerns were to win elections and to keep their local supporters satisfied. Whatever the merits of Strachan’s cause, from the political point of view his pronouncements were inept, and disastrously weakened the conservative alliance at some crucial stages in its history. For an alliance, however precarious, did exist among Anglicans, mem­ bers of the Church of Scotland and Catholics. There was not a great deal of difference, except in national origin, between well-to-do Anglicans and Presbyterians, and they met and mingled easily in society and business. All three denominations were united in their distrust of Protestant dis­ sent, particularly that emanating from the United States. The clergy of all three churches were instinctively social and political conservatives; all believed that churches had a public role to play; and all accepted the principle that churches should support order and government through the promotion of public and private morality and the inculcation of ideas of subordination and of veneration for authority. Neither Presbyterians nor Catholics (with a few notable exceptions) objected to the principle of public endowment, of churches, or to church control over public edu­ cation. What they found objectionable was Strachan’s insistence upon the exclusive jurisdiction of the Church of England in those spheres, and the style he chose to adopt in urging his case. On the whole, then, an alliance, however fragile, was maintained po­ litically among the members of all three churches, and was manifested in a variety of ways. Through the provincial government, the clergy of the Catholic Church and of the Church of Scotland were accorded a sta­ tus not extended to the clergy of the sects. Grants of Crown land for churches, and small grants of public money for the support of clergy and schoolmasters, were made to both churches from an early date. Bishop Alexander Macdonell was made a legislative councillor; so were a num­ ber of Catholic and Presbyterian laymen. In the Assembly, spokesmen

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of the three denominations combined to defend their common viewpoint on such matters as the right to perform marriages, or to denounce the radical proposal to secularize the reserves and devote the proceeds to a system of secular education. It was only at the critical election of 1836 that the Tories opened their ranks to admit Ogle Gowan and his Orange­ men to a full political partnership; prior to that time the Orangemen had been regarded with deep distrust, not only by Catholics, but by nonCatholic Tories as well, precisely because of the danger to the religious foundations of the conservative coalition. Bishop Macdonell’s address to the Catholic and Protestant freeholders of Stormont and Glengarry in 1836, advising them to vote the conservative ticket, was remarkable testimony to the religious base of Toryism.1 Upper Canadian Toryism was an alliance, or rather a system of al­ liances, between the bureaucratic elite attached to the government of the province, and local elites and their followings. Although the alliance was held together in part by natural affinities arising from common so­ cial, economic and institutional outlooks, its chief bond was political. Only in the central arena of politics did the interests of all the groups that made it up intersect, and only through the political process could tangible satisfaction for these interests be forthcoming. In other words, in order to meet the needs of the conservative coalition, something very like the modern political party was required, and something very like it was created. Under the shelter of the 1791 constitution, the Tories con­ structed the first province-wide organization in Upper Canada. While it might be technically incorrect to employ the term “party” to describe a system that lacked the modern party’s distinctive trappings, yet if the crucial test of function is applied, there was a provincial Tory party long before the reformers had begun to organize themselves. The constitu­ tion of Upper Canada was doubled— outwardly, it was the usual formal structure of the British colonial establishment; inwardly, the apparatus of government was virtually identical with the apparatus of party. There was no need for the Tories to band together in any permanent fashion, as reformers began to do under the leadership of W.W. Baldwin, William Lyon Mackenzie and Jesse Ketchum in the late 1820s. Little wonder that reformers writhed at Tory hypocrisy when their party organizations were denounced as “factions.” So long as the constitution remained un­ reformed, conservatives had no need for political associations outside it. The building of the Tory party into the constitution can best be traced briefly in the history of the distribution of Crown patronage in Upper Canada, since the handling of patronage illustrates clearly the dynam­ ics of the system. During Simcoe’s tenure, the dispensing of patronage

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remained in the hands of the Lieutenant-Governor, though even Simcoe distributed jobs and other favours partly on the advice he got from his principal officers of government. He used patronage for the explicit pur­ pose of cementing to government the loyalties of the most “respectable” members of society, whose principles through emulation would then be broadcast throughout their localities. Though Simcoe’s political objec­ tive was never departed from, inevitably it became intermingled with motives of private advantage as population grew and as the process of selection became more complicated. Continuity in government patron­ age policy came to rest with the officials, whose tenure was permanent in fact if not in law, even though successive lieutenant- governors ex­ erted ultimate control, and sometimes intervened directly in the process. Those officials of government who enjoyed the particular confidence of the Lieutenant-Governor used their favourable position to benefit their friends in various parts of the province. As a result, a simple clientage or “interest” system took shape, and by the time of the war of 1812 it was so well-established that it was impossible for a young man to make his way up the ladder of preferment without the necessary connections. The inner political history of Upper Canada is largely the history of warring interests, and their rise and fall. Peter Russell’s interest was paramount for the first decade of provincial history, and through him the fortunes of families like the Baldwins and the Willcockses were ad­ vanced. Russell’s influence waned after the turn of the century, and at his death in 1808, since the politics of patronage were personal, the Russell interest collapsed, and with it the hopes and prospects of his clientage. The ascendancy of Judge William Dummer Powell dates from shortly after the arrival of Lieutenant-Governor Francis Gore. Through Pow­ ell’s help, usually obtained through such local intermediaries as Richard Cartwright of Kingston or Dr. Solomon Jones of Augusta, a large num­ ber of people received places or other benefits from the government. Dr. John Strachan and his protege, John Beverley Robinson, were both in Powell’s debt at early stages in their careers— something of an irony, since they combined to ease the Chief Justice out of his place at the centre of power and of the web of patronage shortly after Sir Peregrine Maitland took over. As the clientage system ramified, as indeed it was bound to do, since every prominent official at York had at least some jobs or perquisites in his gift, it hardened into a complex network joining officials at the cap­ ital to interest groups in every locality, in a bewildering maze of inter­ relationships. As early as the 1820s, and probably well before then, each community had a local oligarchy— in effect, a party machine— through which the provincial government dispensed its favours. In Kingston, for

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example, a group headed by John Kirby, John Macaulay and Thomas and George Markland advised the York officials on questions of patron­ age, and submitted nominations for justices of the peace, local court officials, commissions and promotions in the local militia, the issuance of licences, or the allocation of government contracts of one kind or an­ other. In Leeds and Grenville the Joneses and Sherwoods performed the same functions; everywhere, in fact, across the province a voluminous po­ litical correspondence was maintained between the central bureaucracy and local Tory personages, from district chieftains like Allan MacNab of Wentworth and Mahlon Burwell of the London district down to party wheelhorses like Thomas Mears of Peterborough and George Hamilton of Hawkesbury. The Tory “party,” then, was a semi-official coalition of the central and local elites united for the purpose of distributing honours and re­ wards to the politically deserving. The system was certainly effective in building, maintaining and disciplining a conservative coalition for elec­ toral purposes, although that was by no means its only function. On the whole, it worked fairly smoothly, despite the inevitable faction fights among local groupings over the division of spoils, and tussles among higher officials over jurisdiction and influence. Its operation strength­ ened the social, economic, religious and ideological bases of the conser­ vative alliance in the most tangible way. Thus, in the Perth area, the Presbyterian William Morris was given a leading voice in the allotment of jobs; in the eastern counties Bishop Macdonell had for many years a free hand in dispensing patronage among the Catholic population; while in Kingston, Christopher Hagerman took care to see that his Presby­ terian and Catholic constituents got their share of plums. Some of the most intricate balancing of competing group claims was done whenever new writs for the commissions of the peace were issued. Nominations for justice of the peace went up to York from the localities, and then were sifted by the law officers of the Crown before the new commissions went out. It is worth noting that John Beverly Robinson, among others, was quite prepared occasionally to accept the appointment of known re­ formers as J.P.s, usually when there was a shortage of competent Tory candidates. But because the patronage system hinged upon personal relationships, and had little to do ordinarily with forms of merit other than the po­ litical, its operations led inevitably to abuses that in the long run hurt the Tory cause. Too frequently men of real ability were passed over, and became permanently embittered. Robert Nichol, William Warren Baldwin, and an assortment of Ridouts, Jarvises and Smalls were given jobs of a demeaning kind, either in terms of their competence, or in

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terms of their personal measurement of their merit; such incidents had something to do with the making of a few reformers. In the 1830s, hun­ dreds of able new Upper Canadians found that the official avenues of preferment were closed to them; the system had hardened too much, had become too exclusive and too inflexible to make room for enough of them. Pluralism, the cosy practice of passing offices down from father to son, and the maintenance in office of incompetent or unreliable men, were abuses of the second generation of Upper Canadian Toryism that provided weapons for reformers, and sharpened their desire to turn the rascals out, and to get rid of a form of government that could foster such a system. Political patronage was hardly the invention of the Upper Canadian conservatives. Yet their use of it to build up a coalition was the central fact of provincial politics, and established a political climate that pro­ foundly affected reformers as well. It is true that the reformers of the 1840s and 1850s did much to regularize public administration, and to rid the structure of local government of many of its more spectacular abuses. But it was no accident that the reform-spirited conciliar crises of 1836 and 1843-44 centred upon control of Crown patronage, even though, on each occasion, the issue was masked in the lofty principles of Respon­ sible Government. Nor is it an accident, as students of the Baldwin papers know, that well over half the surviving Baldwin correspondence is devoted to questions of patronage. The Tories pioneered in the use of patronage to build party; the reformers, despite their rhetoric, learned the lesson well, and played the same game as intensely, and perhaps more skilfully, than had their conservative teachers. The Upper Canadian Tories contributed to subsequent politics on quite other planes than patronage. In the field of public policy, their ma­ jor legacy was the Welland Canal, and to a lesser degree the St. Lawrence canal system. The Welland was a collaboration between the energy and enthusiasm of private projectors like William Hamilton Merritt, and the readiness of the conservatives, official and otherwise, to pledge the co­ operation of government in an enterprise of great provincial importance. Both elements were indispensable to the completion of this remarkable project, which in the end became a government-owned facility. The Tories, in entering into collaboration with private initiative in the development of the Welland and other canals, were responding to a general desire for public improvements, and in particular to the threat posed by the building of the Erie Canal, which, if not countered, would drain off the commerce of the province to the south and New York. It is important to emphasize, however, that conservative canal policy was not just a response to public pressure. In the lengths to which they were

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prepared to go in mortgaging the public credit, the Tories far outran the views of a large section of provincial opinion. At first, the reformers had been quite as enthusiastic as conservative assemblymen in their support for the Welland, but as the real difficulties of its construction and financ­ ing unfolded, they became more and more hostile towards it, and more and more suspicious of the ties between it and government. Some Tory Assembly members did oppose the Welland Canal, usu­ ally as a result of the same regional considerations that influenced re­ formers from the eastern part of the province. Many easterners could not accept the argument that the Welland, as an integral part of the whole St. Lawrence system, would benefit the whole province and not just the merchants and farmers of the west. On the whole, however, most opposition came from the reformers, from whatever region. Some of them, like William Lyon Mackenzie, were convinced that the canal was a great engine of Tory corruption and patronage, although an As­ sembly investigation under Mackenzie’s chairmanship disclosed nothing but inefficiency. Most reformers thought that Upper Canada was too small for such an immense undertaking. “This great overgrown con­ cern,” said Marshall Spring Bidwell in the Assembly debates of January, 1824, was “consuming the life’s blood of this young province.” “Is all to be subservient to this great Moloch?,” Peter Perry asked; it should be left to rot, in his opinion, as “a monument of the folly of the Legisla­ ture of Upper Canada.” By and large, reformers took a democratic view of their relationship to their constituents, and as mouthpieces for local electorates tended to be more parochial in outlook than most conserva­ tives. Consequently, public improvements for them meant chiefly roads and bridges for their own constituencies. Conservative members were more responsive to the commercial interests that formed so important a part of their political support, and while quite ready to play the politics of roads and bridges, were more open to the appeal of enterprises that were provincial in scope. Here they were following the lead given them by the official Tory elite. The list of substantial provincial subscribers to Welland stock under the charter of 1825 was dominated by the names of men in the inner cir­ cles of power: J.B. Robinson, William Allan, J.H. Dunn, H.J. Boulton, D’Arcy Boulton, and Colonel Joseph Wells. Repeatedly, during the en­ suing years, it was the influence of these men, and others like Strachan, Hagerman, MacNab and John Macaulay, that rescued the Canal from final disaster. Vested as they were with responsibility for the whole province, largely unconnected with popular politics and thus relieved of the inconvenient necessity of assuaging the doubts of the local elec­ torate, acutely conscious of the military, economic and political menace

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of the United States, the Tory elite backed the Welland Canal to the hilt as a measure vital to the security as well as the prosperity of all. Robinson termed the prospect of private gain from the Welland “quite a secondary consideration” ; it was well he did, for none was made. “The grand object,” he said, “was to overcome a great natural impediment to the prosperity of the better half of our country.” There was nothing doctrinaire in the readiness of the conservatives to use public credit to supplement, and eventually to replace private capital; in a country so short of fluid capital as Upper Canada, in the face of so urgent a public necessity, government had to step in. When the legislative commission­ ers, John Macaulay, W.B. Robinson, and Absalom Shade, found that the Welland Canal Company was no longer equal to maintaining the canal, they recommended public ownership without a tremor, so that “the Canal should be thus rendered in name, as it always has been in fact, and must be in effect, a national concern.” Despite their inefficien­ cies and miscalculations, there was an undeniable statesmanship in the pragmatic conservative acceptance of the positive role that government must play in order to counteract the vulnerabilities of the Canadian economy and polity. The example they set was to be followed by the next generation of canal builders, and by the Conservative party in the years to come, whether the object involved was one of national impor­ tance, as with the Intercolonial and Canadian Pacific railways, or of provincial concern, as with Ontario Hydro. In this realm of public pol­ icy, both Macdonald and Whitney were legatees of the Upper Canadian conservatives. When the Tories used the term “national” to describe projects like the Welland and St. Lawrence canals, they meant only that they were natu­ ral monopolies, affecting so vitally the common weal that they were, or should be, removed from the sphere of private relationships. In all other senses, “national” still meant “British” or “imperial” , since the conser­ vative still regarded himself as a member of the British nation. Yet the seeds of a separate nationalism were implicit in the Upper Canadian Tory’s approach to the economic problems involved in public improve­ ments, trade, and banking, for though he might justify a particular policy on grounds of imperial interests, it was the provincial stake he had chiefly in view. Joined to the concern for local interests was a deeply defensive cast of mind. To most Tories, though perhaps not to the aggressive and optimistic merchants, a canal like the Welland was a protective device, to be visualized in political, social and cultural contexts as well as in the economic. It is at this point that the conservative economic policy intersected with the total structure of conservative values; values which have had

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an influence far beyond the bounds of party, and which indeed lie at the roots of Canadian national feeling. Conservatism is concerned with the preservation of arrangements deemed good. The more highly such arrangements are prized, the more strongly the conservative will react under challenge to them. Upper Canada, in conservative eyes, was not merely challenged, but was in a state of permanent siege; hence the conservative mind in Upper Canada was a mind beleaguered. While conservatism flourished in all the provinces of British North America, only in Upper Canada was it professed with such passionate convic­ tion, because Upper Canada was vulnerable in ways in which the other provinces were not. The apprehended threat from the large Americanborn element in the population, and the quite genuine danger, military,’ political and cultural, from the United States, made “loyalty” the crux of conservative attitudes. Loyalty did not simply mean adherence to the Crown and the Empire, although it started there. It meant as well adherence to those beliefs and institutions the conservative considered essential in the preservation of a form of life different from, and superior to, the manners, politics and social arrangements of the United States. To the Tory, American democratic republicanism was the worst possi­ ble form of government, since it tempted politicians to play upon the worst appetites of men. The Tory was ignorant of such subtleties in the American constitution as the system of checks and balances, or if he was not, considered that their effect was rather to weaken executive govern­ ment than to check the turbulence inherent in democracy. The deistic founding fathers, in their rejection of the connection between religion and the state, had sacrificed the most effective brake upon public disor­ der, and paved the way for anarchy. While it was true that men created the institutions under which they chose to live, the conservative believed quite as strongly that institutions made men and made nationality. The American, shaped by his secularized and revolutionary democracy, was a being altogether different from the British American; and his society was moving along another road. The shape of things to come was to be seen in the cities of the United States: swollen by non-British immigrants, torn by crime and violence, and governed by corrupt machines kept in power by demagogic appeals to mass envy and greed. How preferable it was to live under the stable, orderly and peaceful government of Up­ per Canada, with institutions that encouraged both private and public morality, and that cherished true liberty, personal independence and a decent respectability. Loyalty, then, meant much more than political allegiance. It signified acceptance of the special character of life in Upper Canada. Any attack

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upon the beliefs and institutions that guaranteed that life was an at­ tack upon the order of things that made the Canadian different from the American, and hence the Upper Canadian conservative reacted with pe­ culiar vehemence against reformers, particularly those who were “soft” on the American question. The relation of these attitudes to the foster­ ing of an intense local patriotism, or, as S.R. Mealing has put it (having in mind the Union period), a spirit of Ontario sectionalism which “sur­ vived the Compact’s disintegration,” is fairly clear. What has not been apprehended so clearly is the extent to which early conservatism was assimilated into the dominant attitudes of nineteenth-century Canadian society, and how significant a part of present day patterns, of thought de­ rives from colonial Toryism. For this transformation to come about, the focus of loyalty had to be shifted from Britain to British North Amer­ ica. As has been suggested, that process was well under way before 1841. (It is remarkable, incidentally, how conscious such Upper Canadian High Tories as J.B. Robinson, William Macaulay, H.J. Boulton, George Mark­ land and Christopher Hagerman became of their separate identities as Canadians when, at various times, they visited the centre of the Empire, and discovered with a sudden shock how greatly Britain differed from their picture of it.) It was necessary, too, for the concept of loyalty to be broadened to embrace the party system and the idea of responsible opposition. That was to be the work of the next generation. In certain ways, Upper Canadian conservatism was a major formative influence upon the nature of the reform tradition in the province. This was so not only in the sense that the failings of Toryism provided reform­ ers with a platform and with a catalogue of grievances, but also, and quite as significantly, because the long conservative dominance, and the effect this had upon Upper Canadian habits of mind and political behaviour, eliminated radicalism as a major political alternative. The mainstream of reform is represented by Robert Baldwin and George Brown, not by Robert Gourlay, William Lyon Mackenzie King and “Coon” Cameron; by a mingling of moderate political reformism and social and economic orthodoxy, not by across-the-board democratic radicalism; and by the observance of the proprieties in political discourse, rather than by the unfettered approach of the radical school. In all this, the reformers were adapting themselves to an environment largely created by early conser­ vatism. When, in the 1850s, a common political culture emerged in the Canadas, and the major parties, despite their surface antagonisms, came to be in agreement upon the fundamental assumptions without which a viable polity could not have existed, the foundations for a Canadian na­ tional feeling were laid. In the new synthesis, though both liberal and

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conservative traditions were considerably modified, it was the values of conservatism that gave coherence to the whole. In this context, it was Macdonald’s function to extend the values he had inherited from the Toryism of old Ontario to the rest of the country, in company with those thousands of Upper Canadians who took part in the peopling of the West.

TEN

Conservatism and Political Development: The Canadian Case

H i s t o r i a n s , habitual eclectics who have long borrowed shamelessly the language, methods, and insights of other disciplines to help them make some sense of their own, do not seem to have noticed that a new branch of political science, called political development, is well on the way to borrowing the entire field of study which they view as theirs. Political development is about the discovery and application of what are termed the laws of historical change. Just as the economist has been concerned with the modernization of postcolonial economies, so the political scien­ tist, by investigating the processes that have produced the modern state, has tried to provide political guidelines for the building of modern, stable polities in the Third World. The political developmentalists are eclec­ tics too, but in a much more imposing manner than the unsophisticated historian, since they have deployed upon the raw materials of history techniques and insights from psychology, social psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other behavioural disciplines.1 While the conventional historian may learn much from this new method of attacking the past, he is not in much danger of extinction. Political development, at least in a good part of its literature, suffers from the characteristic weaknesses that affect all attempts to systematize history. Although the political developmentalists have concerned themselves with every form of polity, their ideal seems inescapably to be the de­ veloped polity of the Western liberal democratic state. While breaking free from the concerns of orthodox political science, they have retained as their model the evolutionary, two-party system beloved of the tra­ ditionalist. Their vision of the most appropriate form of development for emerging nations, glimpsed through formidable thickets of technical apparatus, is not really so very far removed from that of the liberal im­ perialists of the nineteenth century— Macaulay with methodology, as it were. The existence of a Western liberal bias in much of the literature of the developmentalists raises some doubts about the applicability of

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their findings to the political requirements of non-Western cultures. Of more immediate concern here, however, is its effect upon the usefulness of their generalizations to historians of Western societies. As a Cana­ dian historian primarily interested in that phase of Canadian history embracing the movement from colonial status to national integration, I have found the analytical techniques of the developmentalists illuminat­ ing when comparing and attempting to explain variations in growth and political culture among several colonies. But it is quite clear that some of the “laws” of development for which universal applicability is claimed are inadequate to explain the movement of political modernization in Canada.2 The springtime of Canadian political development was the first half of the nineteenth century, which culminated in the nation-creating act of Confederation in 1867. In the stage before formal union took place, six polities — or rather subpolities, because their status was colonial— co-existed in British North America. Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and the two Canadas (Ontario and Quebec to-be) had similar though not identical institutions, given them at different times by the imperial power to which they stood in common subordination. All were governed by imperial representatives in alliance with bureaucratic elites whose makeup varied marginally from colony to colony. In every colony, the official ideology of empire won support from the great majority of the politically articulate. Because of these similarities, it has been customary (and convenient) for Canadian historians to interpret the process of political change in each of the colonies as part of a general development towards local au­ tonomy. Unity in this development is supplied by the all-embracing imperial structure and movements in metropolitan politics in response to changing concepts of empire. Inevitability is imparted to it by the “Whig” view that the revolt of liberalism and democracy against con­ servatism, whether local or imperial, was “natural,” and hence, in a Canadian context, the central impulse behind the linear development from responsible government through Confederation to the twentiethcentury apotheosis of full national independence. As will be seen, the assumptions of “Whig” Canadian historians are not dissimilar to those of the new school of political developmentalists.3 Yet there were real differences among the colonies in their political processes, rates of change, styles of political leadership, and general po­ litical culture. Essentially there were three patterns. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick the course of political change was relatively smooth, the tone of political life moderate, and no absolute challenges were launched against authority. The transition to local self-government was made

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without real crisis in the 1840s. In the Canadas, on the other hand, political life was rarely untroubled, the relationship between political groupings was acutely antagonistic, and frequent crises ended in a re­ sort to arms by sections of both provincial populations in 1837. When responsible government was achieved in 1848, it came about in an at­ mosphere of treason and violence. Finally, Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island, less populous and less advanced in political organization than the other colonies, had most unhappy political records. Nothing quite comparable to the civil insurrections in the Canadas developed, but in both islands economic distress and social and religious tension gave rise to popular disturbances comparable to the outrages of rural Ireland in the same period. In these two colonies, comfortable “Whig” notions of linear political progression are completely irrelevant. Prince Edward Island achieved responsible government in a manner both awk­ ward and meaningless, while in Newfoundland the imperial gift of local self-government, unexpectedly granted, was abruptly withdrawn on the outbreak of political disorders, and the colony then embarked upon a political history that bears not the faintest resemblance to that of any other British North American province, nor to the complacent schema of twentieth-century liberal historians.4 Traditional Canadian historiography held that the chief explanation of the marked differences in the political development of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick on the one hand, and of Upper and Lower Canada on the other, was the reactionary character of the conservative elites of the Canadas, a character which made the transition to self-rule more violent though no less inevitable than that in the maritime colonies. This view coincides precisely with that of the political developmentalists about the general nature of political change in the direction of modernization. They have defined political development as that process of change by which economic advance, improvement in the efficiency of the admin­ istrative performance of government, decline in particularism, and rise in social and political integration occurs; and they contend that tradi­ tional or conservative beliefs are distinctly unfavourable to this process.5 Change in a political culture in which the ideas of the governing elite are deeply conservative is apt to be sudden and violent, or at least disharmo­ nious and discontinuous. Lucian W. Pye sets these ideas out in a series of simple oppositions. Despite the great diversity of political cultures, he argues that there are four fundamental themes, universally applicable, that are related to the achievement of orderly political modernization leading to national integration, or to the failure to do so: (1) Trust versus distrust: Does the politically dominant culture ex­ hibit faith in the general trustworthiness of the citizenry, or does

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it harbour the belief that most people cannot be trusted? Who then are the safe people, and why? Who are not? According to Pye, “the presence of diffuse distrust seems to impede seriously the kinds of public organization essential for national develop­ ment.” (2) Hierarchy versus equality: Political development occurs most harmoniously in political cultures in which equalitarian assump­ tions are broadly held and is unlikely in those marked by arbi­ trary distinctions of status. (3) Liberty versus coercion: The accordance of the central place to values associated with liberty is vital to successful political modernization; a political culture which displays a readiness to use coercion as a means for forcing or resisting change is unlikely to develop in an orderly or efficient manner. (4) Level of loyalty and commitment: The more the group loyalties in a society transcend the particular, the more propitious the climate will be for political development and for the national union that is its culmination.6

The conditions Pye proposes as necessary for political development are plainly tautological; his ideal society pregnant with potentiality for fruitful change is already a liberal democracy without the institutional trimmings. Leaving aside theoretical circularities, however (and in thus reducing his theme to these four propositions Pye has done his argument an injustice), what is to be made of the approach when it is applied to the early stages of British North American political development? Diffuse distrust certainly was a characteristic of all the colonies at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The colonial elites subscribed firmly to the dictum of Tory pamphleteer Jonathan Boucher, who ob­ served that men are seldom gathered together in large numbers for any useful purpose. The various colonial constitutions froze distrust of men in the mass into a system. Separation of powers among the branches was rigid; the popular houses were closely circumscribed; and colonial executives were endowed with powers much more genuine than those exercised by their pre-Revolutionary American counterparts. Institu­ tions designed to curb the natural passions of men had always been part of the British tradition of colonial government, but the impact of the democratic revolutions upon British colonial policy had been greatly to strengthen the monarchic and aristocratic elements in colonial constitu­ tions. An acute consciousness of the American and French Revolutions was central to the outlook of the colonial elites. Both the United States and France were deeply distrusted and feared, as were forms of colonial

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behaviour that might, to the susceptible minds of the authorities, appear similar to the practices of these alien and godless republics. In each colony a combination of recent history and immigration pat­ terns fostered suspicion among groups and prompted governing elites to divide their populations into the safe and the unsound. Throughout the Maritime colonies were scattered the Acadians, the unwanted survivors of a great social tragedy, hived off in less favored areas and excluded from political life. In Lower Canada the great bloc of recently conquered French Canadians was divided from the small English-speaking elite su­ perimposed upon it by mutual antipathies, accentuated by the English fear of latent revolutionary tendencies among the French and by French resentment of American immigration into the Eastern Townships region. In Upper Canada, the Loyalist founders of the province were in real dan­ ger of being submerged by a flood of American immigration, and old Revolutionary hostilities were rekindled. Nova Scotia’s population was remarkably varied in origin. While pre-Loyalists and Loyalists, by 1812, had managed to work out roughly equitable sharing of political prizes, the people they governed— Yorkshire Methodists in the Chignecto area, Catholic and Calvinist Scots around Pictou and Cape Breton, German Lutherans in Lunenburg, and Irish Catholics in Halifax— were divided among themselves and from their rulers by distance, sectarianism, and mutual incomprehension. Only in New Brunswick, the most Loyalist of the provinces, does there appear to have been anything approaching a sense of trust in the inhabitants arising from a common sentiment as exiles, though they came from many different American colonies. But class and economic disparities and the hard New Brunswick environment soon cut across the bond of the shared experience of the Revolution. Since the beliefs of most of the colonial population are hidden from us by illiteracy, it is impossible to estimate how widely egalitarian notions were held. Among the dominant groups, the rejection of “levelling” was absolute. Each provincial elite cherished ambitions of establishing a social hierarchy based upon ascription. New Brunswick was to be “a country fit for gentlemen.” Prince Edward Island was originally designed as a feudal colony; Lower Canada actually was one. The Constitutional Act of 1791 provided for hereditary aristocracy in both Canadas; though Upper Canada never came closer to aristocracy than a brief experiment with lords lieutenant of counties, yet the members of its elite and those who aspired to join them never doubted that as society matured special distinctions among classes would emerge. Every colony was governed by a member of the British nobility or gentry. Each little court, plus the military and civil branches of the colonial establishment and the clergy of the hierarchic and national churches, stood behind the conception of

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the ordered society that is condensed in a key phrase of their rhetoric, “due subordination.” Only the place accorded liberty in the values of the colonial political culture seems to meet Pye’s prerequisites. Conventional rhetoric in all the colonies extolled the freedom inherent in the British constitution. In the great war against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, Britain was portrayed as the last defender of liberty against the encroaching forces of despotism.7 It was not difficult for British Americans to believe that the United States, in deciding for war in 1812, had cynically be­ trayed its own professions of liberty and had turned to its true destiny in alliance with its European revolutionary counterpart. But there were significant qualifications to the colonial conception of the nature of lib­ erty. Among British Americans, liberty had a tendency to break down into liberties, themselves narrowly defined within Blackstonian bounds. “Liberty” was used interchangeably with the phrase “rational liberty” ; the implied distinction was with that irrational and excessive form of lib­ erty supposedly found in the United States and formerly in France before its natural consequence, the dictatorship, had supervened. While it is true that the belief in rational liberty coincided with a large measure of actual freedom in the colonies, rational liberty in practice was frequently combined with governmental readiness to employ coercion whenever the political order seemed threatened by a too robust assertion of the right to protest. The Upper Canadian legislature passed an Alien and Sedi­ tion act in 1804 that was more savage than the comparable acts of the Adams administration; in 1809 the Lower Canadian executive seized the press of Le Canadien and jailed its editors; while in 1806 the governor of Nova Scotia rejected the popular speaker chosen by the Assembly, an action for which the reign of James II provided the most recent prece­ dent. Only New Brunswick seemed exempt from flagrant abridgments of political liberty, though through it, as through the other colonies, there ran the black thread of slavery (so conveniently forgotten by Canadi­ ans, then and later, when they criticized the institutions of the United States.)8 Broad loyalties did exist in the British America of 1812, but they were markedly colonial in character. The elites were deeply committed to the Crown, to the values of British civilization, and to a conception of their destinies within the British imperium. Their sentiments were shared by part of the colonial population, but in each province there were groups to whom such notions were meaningless. As we have noted, each colony was a welter of parochialisms, of disparate groups cut off from one another by differences of origin, religion and language, and

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by poor communications. Among many groups, self-justifying and selfsustaining myths had already been generated; the crucial task for the conservative elites, and one for which they were singularly ill-fitted, was somehow to break down such nascent petty separatisms and instead to inculcate higher loyalties, whether to the province or to the idea of British America.9 If this summation of the beliefs dominant in British North America in the first decade or so of the nineteenth century is reasonably accu­ rate, it is evident that there is something lacking in Pye’s formulation of the preconditions for political development, given the incontrovert­ ible fact that scarcely fifty years later the colonies had managed to pull themselves together to create, from these unpromising early materials, a second transcontinental union in North America. But there is more to the position of the developmentalists than this. As Gabriel Almond and others have pointed out, political culture and the development con­ sequent upon it are not merely a matter of belief systems, but also a question of the intensity with which beliefs are held and of the political styles connected with them. Between the two Maritime Colonies and the Canadas there was a marked divergence in the way in which fundamen­ tal values were held, in the frequency with which they were expressed, and in the forms of political behavior to which they gave rise. Generally speaking, political leadership in Nova Scotia and New Bruns­ wick was more open in its attitudes and more pragmatic in its methods than that of the two Canadas. Maritimers, both well-placed and sim­ ple, saw the War of 1812 not as a deadly conflict between absolutely opposed political systems but as a splendid opportunity to profit from the shortsighted trade policy of the Madison administration, and so, on “the Lines” between New Brunswick and Maine, a truce was declared for the duration, and American citizens and British subjects fraternized freely to their mutual benefit. To Canadians of both languages, how­ ever, the war was one for survival; the French-speaking elite depicted Americans as Goths and Vandals bearing the new barbarism, and the Upper Canadian propagandists saw them as hypocrites with liberty on their lips and conquest in their hearts. Though Nova Scotians and New Brunswickers were active as privateers during the war (for some, a most lucrative occupation) and Maritimers took part in some of the Cana­ dian campaigns, there was no siege mentality in either province, nor any reason why there should have been. But in the Canadas, and especially in Upper Canada, the more exposed province, the war hardened dislike for American ideas and institutions into fierce hostility, and produced a kind of Messianic Toryism inflexible in its insistence upon unbending adherence to orthodox values. For the Upper Canadian conservative,

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the war was an opportunity to cleanse a society that had been in mor­ tal danger from internal rot. Thousands of acres of land belonging to men of dubious loyalty were confiscated; a network of informers ferreted out those suspected of harbouring American sympathies, and loyalty oaths were imposed wholesale. “Loyalty” itself came to mean not sim­ ply the traditional allegiance to the British Crown, but also adherence to the social, political, religious, and cultural values essential, in Tory eyes, to the preservation of the province. The Loyal and Patriotic Soci­ ety, formed during the war, symbolized the coming of a fully conscious conservatism seeking to monitor all conduct. The deep suspicions and insecurities within the ruling group that were reflected by the Society became imbedded in the postwar political system. The Gourlay episode, for which there is no parallel in the Maritime colonies, illustrates the pro­ fundity of the Upper Canadian conservative reaction in the years after 1815. Gourlay, a Scottish agronomist and reformer whose views and style resembled those of his English contemporary Henry Hunt, was hounded from the province when he proposed economic advantage through re­ newed American immigration and fundamental political change through a provincial “Convention” — a term whose historical resonances terrified the Tories. Gourlay supporters who held public offices were ruthlessly ejected from them, and the right of public meeting was curtailed. Remarkably different political styles emerged in the Maritimes and Upper Canada from a belief system that was virtually uniform through­ out the several colonies. Yet the underlying values of the Maritime Colonies remained fundamentally conservative, as was repeatedly demon­ strated at various later stages of their history. The difference in styles and varying intensity with which beliefs were held can probably be ex­ plained, at least in part, by the impact of distinct economic and geo­ graphic situations upon the two regions. But such explanations appear to have little place in the ideology-centred approach of political devel­ opmentalists. According to the developmentalists, a significant phase of political modernization is that in which political parties emerge. Party politics is a sign of a higher degree of political complexity, and a demonstration of the social capacity to create corporate forms, bridge localisms, advance joint interests, and manage men and things on a growing scale.10 But there are “good” and “bad” kinds of party systems. Joseph LaPalombara and Myron Weiner, in discussing party formation and political develop­ ment, distinguish between “internally” and “externally” created parties. Internally created parties are the politically healthy form; they grow naturally out of the temporary alliances of individuals within the legis­ lature, at the point when such alliances congeal into more or permanent

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coalitions and reach out beyond the legislature to organize the electorate. Externally created parties appear outside the legislature, and “invariably involve some challenge to the ruling group and a demand for represen­ tation.” From the point of view of orderly, stable political development, the ideal party system is that in which two internally created parties compete for the support of the electorate and alternate in power accord­ ing to well-established rules of the political game. Externally created parties, on the other hand, pose a challenge not only to such a com­ petitive system but to the whole political order. As LaPalombara and Weiner put it, externally created parties, precisely because they do not “naturally” come into existence within the context of parliamentary institutions, tend not to be strongly identified with these institutions themselves. Indeed, some of the external mass parties not only reflect deep social fissures within the societies but may actually emerge in the teeth of legal and other repressive obstacles placed in their way by the dominant elites. Leaders of such parties do not necessarily subscribe to the gentlemanly rules of political competition and do not necessarily share an interest in keeping the political process operating within historically prescribed patterns.11

Judged by the comparative behaviour of parties, it was the Mar­ itimes, not the Canadas, that conformed to the developmental model of a healthy polity. Nova Scotia, in fact, though it figures not at all in the literature of developmentalists, seems to be the kind of polity they had in mind when formulating their categories. In the generation after 1815, the Nova Scotian political culture remained moderately con­ servative. Political opposition appeared from time to time within the legislature, but the governing elite proved so temperate and responsive that the fate of most of the early oppositionists was to be stifled by the gift of office. Fundamental opposition could have been built up on re­ ligious and educational issues, but was averted by the granting of full political rights to Catholics three years before similar rights were granted in England and by the creation of an unusually diverse system of higher education which reflected the religious pluralism of the province. The perennial issue in politics was the division of Nova Scotia revenue. Well before 1812 the ruling elite had conceded this task to assemblymen, who were not interfered with in their annual game of trading support for roads, bridges, schools, and drainage schemes. The alliances this kind of politics created were quite impermanent. Young, able, and ambitious assemblymen could not be satisfied with such a political system forever, no matter how moderate the governing group remained. In the 1830s the reformer Joseph Howe precipitated the

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formation of permanent parties by challenging the right of councillors to occupy office perennially, unaffected by election returns. Essentially, in developmental terms, what occurred was a crisis of legitimacy.12 “I believe all monopolies are bad,” Howe argued. But the attack upon the system launched by the group of reformers who coalesced around Howe was not fundamental. What they wished was an adjustment in the colonial structure of government that would place executive office and responsibility in the hands of those possessing the majority in the Assembly— responsible government. In effect, this was a challenge to a political ruling class by men who in social and economic position were little different from those who held office. Thus parties developed internally, within the legislature, and although a good deal of heat was generated by the responsible government is­ sue, by and large the Conservatives recognized the Reform opposition as “loyal.” The essential moderation of both parties was shown in their agreement to serve together in a coalition, engineered by Governor Gen­ eral Sydenham, that lasted for more than three years. Only on the breakup of the coalition did the two parties reach out vigorously to or­ ganize the Nova Scotia electorate, a recognition by the Conservatives of new facts of political life. When, in 1848, the Reform Liberals won a majority and took office, the Conservatives accepted without demur the changed constitutional situation. The Liberal assumption of power was followed by such reforms as the rationalization of bureaucracy; but significantly enough, when the Conservatives returned to office in 1854, one of their first acts was a democratic extension of the franchise. Sub­ sequently, in what seems almost a classic case of liberal, rational, and moderate political development, the two parties alternated in office until 1867. Upper Canada, on the other hand, seems a textbook example of how not to develop. While its Tory elite did not actually exclude the idea of “progress,” they hedged change about with taboos and restrictions that stemmed from their hostility towards the United States; that is, to­ wards republicanism, democracy, non-Anglo-Saxons, industrial masses, and big-city crime. What they wanted was a society free but orderly, prosperous but stable; in short, controlled change: not an unusual drive in small fearful societies living beside large turbulent ones. To achieve their aims, they resorted to every means an unreformed administrative apparatus possessed. Schools and churches were used as instruments for instilling conservative values; hidden subsidies maintained a loyal press; political opposition was heavily penalized. Occasionally such penalties were brutal, as when a gang of Tory youths smashed the printing shop of William Lyon Mackenzie and pitched his type into Toronto Bay, or

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when their elders passed a savage sentence upon the journalist Francis Collins upon a specious charge of seditious libel. More frequently, pun­ ishment was indirect. The bureaucracy was a case in point. No one who did not share the assumptions of the central ruling group had a chance to enter— a significant deprivation, since the bureaucracy was the vital area of provincial decision making. Within it, rather than in the Assembly, small wars over development policy, appointments, privi­ leges, honors, licences, franchises, and other prizes were fought between clientage groups.13 Even the mildest reform sentiments were sufficient disqualification from eligibility for patronage; many Tories suffered from a marked inability to distinguish among various brands of reformers.14 In the language of political science, there was a close relationship between the fundamental conservative belief system and official rhetoric, and be­ tween official rhetoric and political norms and style. It was hardly sur­ prising, in such an atmosphere, that a considerable politicization of soci­ ety should have taken place by the 1830s.15 Such eminently respectable families as the Baldwins— wealthy, well-born, well-educated, and Angli­ can— found themselves excluded from certain forms of social life because of their liberal political sentiments. As in Nova Scotia, parties in Upper Canada first began to form in­ ternally. Within the legislature, spokesmen for moderate reform, con­ cerned with questions of participation and legitimacy, appeared in the 1820s. But the tactics of the conservative elite in such provincial issues as the Clergy Reserves question and the struggle over the Alien Bill and the rights of American immigrants had the effect of squeezing out such moderate leaders as Dr. W.W. Baldwin and his son Robert and of driv­ ing others, like Marshall Spring Bidwell, over to the radical extreme. Outside the legislature, a popular radical movement took shape and rapidly gained a measure of support. Its rhetoric was democratic, secu­ larist, Jacksonian, and ultimately millenarian in content; under stress its goals shifted from the Baldwinite platform of adjustments in the existing constitution that would permit greater participation to objectives more fundamental in nature, having to do with the overthrow of the whole imperial-colonial structure and the creation (as William Lyon Macken­ zie later wrote) of a “social democracy” in Upper Canada. Violence in language led to violence on the hustings; severe electoral defeat for radicalism in 1836 led directly to armed rebellion in 1837. Thus, or so it would appear, the principles of the developmentalists are vindicated in the contrasting histories of the Maritimes and the cen­ tral Canadian colonies, the one leading through gradual change to the peaceful alternation of parties in the 1850s, the other, characterized by a rigid conservatism and rejection of moderate values, culminating in

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armed conflict and chaos in 1837. In fact, however, developmentalist principles, at least as enunciated by the scholars under review, are sim­ ply inapplicable to Canadian history, and leave out of consideration the drives and energies which really brought about the national integration so prized by the developmentalists. Within the compass of this article, it is possible to sketch only a few reasons why this is so. In the first place, the open, permissive, and tranquil atmosphere of Maritime politics meant that goals were limited by the necessity to har­ monize particularisms, rather than by crushing them or by knitting them into some larger framework. The Acadians, for example, were never in­ tegrated within the main body of the population in either Nova Scotia or New Brunswick, but remained a people apart, animated by their spe­ cial myth. Schemes of economic development that might have greatly assisted the provinces, but which required the harnessing of resources on a provincial scale, were either never attempted or broke down in short order. Not until the First World War did the Nova Scotia cabinet assert the controlling role of the executive in the process of setting provincial priorities in spending policy through the allocation of supply. Until that time politics in the province remained what they had always been — a demeaning and petty scuffle among assemblymen for the division of rev­ enues among localities to support a host of short-run projects of little provincial significance and of questionable benefit to the communities for which they were intended. In New Brunswick it was only in the 1960s that the government of Premier Louis Robichaud precipitated a major political crisis by coming to grips for the first time with the an­ tiquated parish system of local government established in 1786. This system had decentralized public finance and administration to such a degree that both economic development projects and social regeneration programs were hamstrung. There are explanations other than political ones for the durability of Maritime particularism, but within the context of political developmental analysis it must be said that the moderation, harmoniousness, and superficial rationality of Maritime politics were in the long run self-defeating. Upper Canada, on the other hand, created out of the very extrem­ ism and violence of its politics the drives that powered the movement towards the national integration of Canada. Its strong-willed conser­ vative leaders, acutely conscious of the threats posed to their values from within and without, were driven to formulate provincial goals of a distinctive kind and to bequeath their special sense of mission to the Canadian political culture. Their defensive conservatism led them to build a genuinely provincial political system, based upon the alliance of the central bureaucracy with regional power groups. This coalition,

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highly partisan and illiberal though it was, was also sufficiently respon­ sive to local needs to win considerable electoral success. As a result, it was able to break down the particularism of its supporters and ulti­ mately to generate a provincial mentality. As early as the 1820s, many Upper Canadian conservatives were beginning to think in terms of a de­ velopmental strategy that transcended the bounds of their province. The precarious and vulnerable position of Upper Canada, at the extremity of the empire, sharing one border with the United States and another with the potentially hostile French Canadians, and dependent upon the maintenance of an extremely long economic lifeline subject to metropoli­ tan fluctuations, impelled the conservative leadership to break through traditional constraints and to embark upon a a remarkable series of highrisk developmental projects unique in British North America and with few parallels in contemporary America. Such ambitious undertakings as the Welland Canal, the St. Lawrence canals, the aggressive railroad politics of the 1850s, were all products of the survival drives imparted to the Upper Canadian political culture by Toryism. All these projects were characterized by a remarkable readiness to use public authority and public credits in the pursuit of provincial goals. It was precisely this kind of developmental strategy, in the hands of a second generation of Upper Canadian conservatives, that was central to the scheme for the union of the British North American provinces in the 1860s and to the cementing of that union in the post-Confederation era.16 While it is true that the political style of the conservatives stimulated radical opposition to them and ultimately brought the explosion of 1837, the fact of violence did not mean the final failure of the Tory mission. The intense politics of the pre-Rebellion period, indeed, had the effect of creating a provincial political community, divided upon provincial issues. In the event, radicalism lost both the elections and the Rebellion and by the 1850s existed only as a democratic fringe on the margin of main­ stream politics. While the shock of rebellion, and subsequent British policy, compelled the Upper Canadian Tories to moderate somewhat their views and their rhetoric, their fundamental attitudes remained, and these they succeeded in imparting to the bulk of the electorate. By the 1850s the major opposition party, the Liberals, had clearly come to share many of the “nationalist” assumptions of the Conservatives, and major party discourse was chiefly about the means to be used in achieving goals defined by Conservative values. From the seeds of early Toryism, with its deep hostility towards demo­ cratic and republican values, had sprung, by the decade before Confed­ eration, a dominant set of political values of sufficient sharpness and intensity to provide the ingredients for a transcontinental nationalism.

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Prom this point of view it is hardly surprising, except to a modern devel­ opmentalist, that the chief impulse for national integration should have emerged from the irrational pressure cooker of Upper Canadian poli­ tics, and that the leader of the integration movement should have been the true heir of early Toryism, the Conservative John A. Macdonald. In significant respects, Confederation was a triumph of Upper Canadian “imperialism” ; its slogan, “peace, order and good government,” came di­ rectly out of the conservative lexicon; and the manner of its attainment, through negotiation and legislation rather than popular ratification, was entirely characteristic of the undemocratic and elitist Canadian political style. It may be that the Canadian experience is simply an exception to the normal processes of political change contemplated in the categories of the developmentalists. Yet if conservatives, and rather reactionary con­ servatives at that, could manage to bring off a fruitful political change in defiance of developmental analysis, is it not possible, given the variety of human circumstance and situation, that the liberal democratic approach is not the only way in which nations are built? And from an historian’s point of view, does not the Canadian experience suggest that any analy­ sis of the nature of political change that omits the positive, even creative, function of violence, extremism, irrationality, and just plain cussedness is too antiseptic to be a real description of life?

ELEVEN

Liberal Consensus or Ideological Battleground: Some Reflections on the Hartz Thesis

I n the last few years it has become clear that Canadian historiogra­ phy has entered a new phase, and that most Canadian historians are interested in questions that concern narrower horizons than those which attracted their predecessors. The point is an obvious one; the awaken­ ing or revival of interest in such areas as urban and labour history, land holding and land use patterns, family history and collective biography, demography, or the study of particular groups has been remarkable. Re­ gional history has become a major preoccupation, accompanied by the appearance of excellent journals. Canadian historians, moreover, have begun to group themselves with varying degrees of formality into regional or area study associations. It is easy enough to trace the origins and development of this move­ ment in the historiography. For a considerable time it has been evident that the interpretive sweep of the Laurentian thesis, a brilliant explana­ tion of the nation-building process, has been found less satisfactory as an account of other aspects of our life. As long ago as 1946, W.L. Morton launched a series of important critiques of the thesis, drawing attention to its centralist and nationalist bias. Since then, others have challenged its division of the Canadian population into winners and losers, heroes and villains, depending upon where they stood with respect to the na­ tional dream. Thus J.M.S. Careless, observing that “the nation-building approach to Canadian history neglects and obscures even while it ex­ plains and illuminates,” suggested an approach in terms of the “limited identities of region, culture and class.” Alan Smith subsequently traced the historical content of the idea of the mosaic, and concluded that “the national preoccupation came to be . . . with creating a nation out of culturally disparate groups, not with establishing cultural uniformity.” 1 Perhaps the deep divisions laid bare by the politics of the last decade or more have induced historians to seek explanations through more re­ stricted and specialized studies. Perhaps English-speaking historians

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have become somewhat envious of the distinctiveness and coherence, if not the concord, that marks the historiography of French Canada, and are searching for a comparable uniqueness in the complexities of the rest of the country, if only to demonstrate that English Canada, too, has both a special past and a special destiny. Historians are no more im­ mune than other groups to the resonances of their times. Quite apart from these considerations, however, it is perfectly clear that much of our past has been overlooked, and that the content of Canadian history positively invites more specialized approaches. It will be some years before a new synthesis emerges; before historians can speak with more confidence both to each other and to a larger public. When such a synthesis forms, it will inevitably be a richer and more complex explanation of the life of the Canadian people than we now have. The Laurentian thesis is not a sufficient explanation; too much is left out of account. The idea of limited identities is a perception, not a thesis; it identifies an historical reality, but offers no illuminating hypothesis for it. Among other explanations of the manner in which our society has developed, by far the most interesting and stimulating is the Hartzian fragment thesis. Even though it, too, is an oversimplication, it is filled with provocative insights and has the decided merit of positively inviting fruitful challenge from many angles. The fragment thesis deals with the problem of limited identities by denying the importance of such variations in the society-building pro­ cess. When this lunar perspective is applied to the history of the Englishspeaking colonies of British North America, significant detail recedes, an­ gularities are softened and rounded, mountains are made low and rough places plain. Yet the more conscientiously the formula is applied, the more anomalies swim upwards into view. The view from space has a blurred symmetry, yet one that we who are earthbound scarcely recog­ nize as our own landscape. But if it is assumed that discordance and complexity are at least as significant as correspondence and similarity, then, in answer to the fragment thesis, a counter-hypothesis comes to mind. Ideological clash, a possibility specifically excluded by the Hartz analysis, can help to explain the persistence of limited identities and can offer a less deterministic explanation of the society-building process. Every historian of the pre-Confederation period must take cognizance of Louis Haxtz’s The Founding of New Societies, for, as “a general the­ ory of five societies created by European migration in modern times,” it grapples with the very problems they are attacking. To Hartz, English Canada is a liberal bourgeois fragment of the Old World, and therefore, despite certain “Tory touches,” it has been “governed by the ultimate

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experience of the American liberal tradition.” His approach has achieved a measure of influence. J.M.S. Careless, for example, accepted the hy­ pothesis of the formative power of transferred cultural fragments, but contended that that the traditions of English Canada were shaped, not by the weak remnants of the eighteenth century-American empire, but by “the swamping force of earlier nineteenth century British immigration” and by “the organic, pragmatic Victorian liberalism” these immigrants brought with them.2 When distilled from the persuasive witchery of his language, his wealth of allusion, and his almost endless flow of insight and perception, Hartz’s argument reduces to a few main points. All the societies considered by his collaborators and himself are fragments “struck off,” “hurled out­ wards,” “extricated” from Europe into new lands. According to differ­ ences in time and place of detachment, the fragments are feudal, liberal, or radical. Whatever its type, the fragment is transformed in a fashion that creates the cultural co-ordinates of the new society. That trans­ formation is described as a “purely mechanistic” process, resting upon Hartz’s quasi-Hegelian perception of the European historical process. His great ideologies— feudalism, bourgeois liberalism, radicalism and radical socialism— are the inexorable results of the clash of opposites. Since Europe “locks them together in a seething whole,” none has the freedom to evolve according to its own inner logic.3 The dictates of the European historical process do not apply to the fragment. Freed from the strangling effect of the ideological jungle of the Old World, the fragment’s development pursues a strange new course. “All sorts of magic inevitably takes place.” The first piece of magic is the traditionalizing or conservatizing effect. The fragment freezes culturally; the United States, for example, has had “over three hundred years of liberal immobility.” In the American case, the liberal fragment escaped not merely its enemy, the feudal and authoritarian past, but because of that very fact, it escaped the European future as well— “Marx fades because of the fading of Laud.” So, with both past and future removed, and disturbing emanations from Europe cut off, the fragment, like a time capsule, is cocooned within its new environment.4 Out of the cocoon rapidly emerges a “rich interior development,” faithful to the ideological nature of the fragment, but free to flourish in a manner impossible in the Old World. For the fragments are Cinderellas; “the story here is marvellous,” Hartz declares; “Bossuet, Locke and Cobbett, miserable men abroad, all wake up to find worlds finer than they have known.” What transpires is the swift emergence of fragment nationalism. The ideology of the fragment becomes universal, “sinking below the level of thought to the level of an assumption.” Then, “almost

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instantly,” it re-emerges as nationalism. “Feudalism comes back at us as the French-Canadian spirit, liberalism as the American way of life, radicalism as the Australian legend.” Since the fragment, by definition, cannot contain its enemies, its nationalist ideology has a peculiarly con­ formist quality. Europe is rejected as decadent, sinful and alien. The immigrant becomes the object of utmost suspicion, either to be rebuffed, as by the French Canadians or the Afrikaners, or to be subjected to a conscious process of assimilation to the ideological norms of the new nation.5 Canada is unusual, though not unique, in that it is a two-fragment situation, containing competing ideologies of feudalism and liberalism. It should be observed incidentally that Hartz has little or nothing to say about the possibility that this conjunction may have started the Hegelian engines once more. Adopting A.R.M. Lower’s primary antithesis, he states that “it is to be corporate and Catholic to be French in Canada; to be Protestant and liberal to be English.” Since English Canada, by definition, could contain no genuine conservative element, its political tensions resolve themselves in struggles between Whigs, the elite wing of the liberal spectrum, and liberal democrats, the counterpart of the petit bourgeois Jacobins of Europe. Thus we are presented with the picture of that great Jacobin, George Brown, refusing to “knuckle under to the Whigs of Kingston.” 6 We are told by Hartz that the fragment process is “as simple, as intel­ ligible as any historical process we normally take for granted.” Moreover, if one is disposed to reject the mechanistic determinism of the hypothe­ sis, and to argue that English-speaking Canadians in the past did make choices about their future, even though the context in which such choices were made was not so variegated as that of the world left behind, then one becomes part of that “bottomless subjectivity” of the fragment that is its fate as the memory of Europe recedes. So much for Hartz.7

Now with all this there are serious difficulties. The first and most ob­ vious is the identification of the fragment itself, that potent leaven. In American history, the liberal moment is precisely that when the first Pu­ ritans set foot on the soil of New England. What group or collectivity is the liberal culture bearer, the fundamental moulder of English Canada’s cultural tradition, the Canadian Cinderella? It might seem unfair to suggest that it was that group which first settled within the geographic bounds of English Canada— but the very presence, and survival, of the Acadians introduces a first unsettling complexity. Though Hartz him­ self does not particularize, his followers seem to have settled upon the

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Loyalists as the founding group, and we might perhaps assist them by adding the pre-Loyalist Yankees of Nova Scotia and the thousands of American settlers who poured into Upper Canada in response to Simcoe’s open door policy. Somewhat anomalously, these groups are all sub­ fragments of a fragment. Passing for the moment over that complication, we must nevertheless ask ourselves whether the American components of the English-Canadian fragment were liberal brethren to the Scottish Presbyterians of Nova Scotia and their Upper Canadian compatriots, to the melange of foreign Protestants at Lunenburg, to the Ulstermen of the Moncton region or to the Yorkshiremen of Chignecto. If they were, then in what relationship did they stand to such groups as the High­ land Catholics of Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island and the eastern counties of Upper Canada? A second difficulty has to do with the timing of the liberal moment. Though Hartz tells us that the coming of democracy in English Canada was “delayed by a Tory touch, by imperial arrangements, or the pres­ ence of the feudal French fragment” — it is somehow characteristic of his argument that it does not really matter which — he nowhere reveals just when the liberal ideology became co-terminous with the fragment, just when homogenization occurred, just when that ideology, having been sublimated, was reborn as nationalism, and just when immigrants were consciously assimilated to it.8 The problem is, of course, that imperial arrangements, geography and communications divided colonial societies from each other in a manner far more isolating than had been the case with the pre-Revolutionary American colonies. All of them had sepa­ rate existences for appreciable lengths of time: Upper Canada and New Brunswick for three quarters of a century, Prince Edward Island for about a hundred years, Nova Scotia for a century and a half, and New­ foundland for at least three hundred years. The Hartzian scholar may be forced either, to defer the timing of the magical liberal moment, or to face the probability that he is examining, not the founding of one but of several new societies in British Canada. Part of the problem is the level of abstraction upon which Hartz is writing. It is not men, women and children who migrate, on crowded decks, or packed in holds and steerages, it is ideas and symbolic figures; it is not people who evolve, but ideological-cultural entities. One of the strengths of his argument is his emphasis upon the significance of the European heritage, but the very generality of his categories makes them difficult to apply to the awkward facts of Canadian history. The Acadians, perhaps, were feudal, but since they lacked most of the hierarchy implied by that category, the identification itself is useless. Were the Newfoundland Irish feudal, or liberal with tribal touches? Does it help

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to identify the Chignecto Yorkshiremen as liberal, or is it more important to know that they were Methodist, or that in Yorkshire they had been small tenant farmers and landless labourers? The work of the Annales School in France, or that of the modern English social historians— or, one might add, that of the historians of colonial America— shows that it matters very much indeed, in terms of cultural norms, whether an immigrant came from Nantes, Dieppe, or Marseilles, and whether a man farmed in Devon, Yorkshire or Fife. At this level of analysis the frag­ ment thesis is of no utility, for it overrides variation and assumes the very points we have yet to investigate. By the same token, Canadian histo­ rians can no longer be content with their own crude categories of Scots, Irish, English, French or even Loyalist and American: European and American scholarship is now making available the kind of evidence that will permit a more precise and therefore a more complex appreciation of the variety of the European cultural legacy. r \j n u r\j

A crucial part of the fragment thesis is the contention that, once freed from the inhibiting effect of the European context, the fragment flowered untrammelled, in a Platonic fashion, towards its Ideal Form. There is a major objection to this contention. British North America was never isolated from Europe; it was never free to develop fully according to its own inner impulsions. It was not simply the continuing fact of the imperial presence, an imposing force in itself in the relatively small and weak colonial societies. Even more important was the continuing transmission to British North America of the political and social ideas of the Old World. The vehicles, human and literary, official and unofficial, for the transmission of British ideas, beliefs and assumptions to the several colonies need not concern us here; it is, they are, after all, part of the familiar metropolitan story. Admittedly, the inflow of metropolitan culture was not uniformly spread throughout each colonial society. Its centres of dissemination were urban, and the degree to which it touched and influenced the mentality of the bulk of the population through the intricate internal network of communication each colony possessed has yet to be sufficiently explored. But the impact of what may be called the official culture upon those actively participating in the political life of the colonies was substantial. It determined the roles, set the standards and established the norms of those whose business it was to conduct the colonial institutional appa­ ratus, it affected the attitudes and behaviour of those who aspired to a place in the structure, and it defined the limits even for many of those who found themselves in positions of political opposition.

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There is an important contrast here with American colonial history. The presence of the metropolis and the diffusion of ideas from it were never so powerful and pervasive in the American colonies as in British North America. In colonial America, political power had devolved in considerable measure to such institutions as the town meeting and the parish vestry. In British North America, until the reforms of the era im­ mediately before Confederation, each colony was a mirror of the Blackstonian principle that sovereignty (the qualified colonial version of it) was located at the centre. There decisions were made; the administration of them was left to the bureaucracy and to a chosen few in the localities. In a situation of power and no power (except for the periodic flurry of assembly elections), the socializing effect of political participation was far weaker than in colonial America. The lack of local representative institutions, a relatively low participation rate in assembly elections de­ spite a quasi-democratic franchise, and the fact that most of the time politics was the concern of the few, seems to have acted to preserve local variations and to stratify values. There is another important point of contrast with the American colo­ nial experience. In all the British North American colonies, with the ex­ ception of Newfoundland, imperial authority coincided with the arrival of settlers. In colonial America the very legitimacy of existing governments was from time to time called into question; in British North America immigrants of all origins were confronted by a constitutional structure, laws, rules and principles that seemed beyond challenge. Whether the American colonies were “born” liberal, as in the Hartzian conception, or, as seems more likely, they arrived at that happy state by the slow per­ meation through the culture of the implications of the early covenants and compacts, local government institutions, or Lockean ideas conveyed by Locke’s Radical Whig popularizers, it is beyond question that by the Revolutionary era the root idea had taken hold that what legitimized government was the consent of the governed.9 This idea, fundamental to the liberal ethos, got short shrift in British North America. A brief attempt to institute the town meeting and local proprietorial control in Nova Scotia was cut off at birth in the 1760s. The Maugerville rebels, who mimicked Congress in composing their declaration of independence in 1776, were swiftly overawed by armed force, then inundated by New Brunswick’s Loyalist influx. This brings us to the knotty question of the ideological content of Loy­ alism. According to the fragment formula, since America was liberal by definition, Loyalists could not possibly be conservatives. The American fragment, containing no feudal element, could not produce conservatism, since (again by definition) conservatism was the by-blow of the onslaught

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of the European liberal bourgeoisie upon feudalism. Loyalism, therefore, was simply the defeated wing of American liberalism; the Loyalists were nothing more than anti-American Americans, Old Whigs, in the current scholarly vocabulary. K.D. McRae, Professor Hartz’s Canadian collaborator, has added some glosses to the picture. He has suggested, for example, that the high proportion of the European-born among the Loyalists is of little consequence. “That these recent immigrants,” he observes, “were willing to pioneer a second time under similar conditions indicates acceptance of the liberal ethos.” This conclusion strains the evidence to meet the exigencies of the thesis and ignores W.H. Nelson’s depiction of Loyalism as “congeries of conservative minorities resisting Americanization.” 10 To be sure, McRae notes that the principle of selection involved in the Loy­ alist exodus “has served to differentiate the English Canadian tradition from the American in certain subtle, minor ways.” It all depends on the perspective. Others examining the content of Loyalist beliefs may conclude that “subtle” and “minor” were “major” and “significant.” It is undeniable that within the Loyalist spectrum Lockean ideas ex­ isted, though much depends on whether Joseph Galloway, say, is taken as representing Loyalist though and not, for example, Thomas Hutchin­ son, Daniel Leonard, Jonathan Boucher, or Mather Byles.11 More im­ portant, perhaps, is the fact that among Loyalists who came to British North America, a distinctively American attitude toward government and authority was common. In Nova Scotia, a Loyalist-led Assembly impeached judges in the 1780s; in New Brunswick, in the sharp division between elite and rank and file which occurred at the inception of the colony, the rhetoric of the popular cause contained strong American ac­ cents. In Upper Canada, an individual like David MacGregor Rogers plainly represents the liberal vein in Loyalist thought. Accused as early as 1796 of being connected with a “republican and enemy form of gov­ ernment” by a brother Loyalist, Nicholas Hagerman, Rogers, in 1808, from his seat in the Assembly, bitterly attacked the forming network of power and patronage in the colony. “Upon any vacancy do we not see persons running, writing and using every means in their power to influ­ ence some powerful person in Europe. . . . An American can have but little chance, let his abilities be what they may.. . . Can it be any wonder that they should not feel such a warm attachment to the Government or constitution of the Country?” Rogers specifically objected to the free­ dom from popular control permitted the local government through its independent source of revenue from customs. Privately he reflected that the American Revolution was “a natural consequence of their arriving

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at a state of Opulence and Popularity;” the unstated future of Upper Canada seems plain enough.12 Though the persistence of the liberal democratic element among Loy­ alists is a matter of record, it is equally certain that among the bulk of the Loyalists who inclined to the government side, the liberal strain was rapidly subordinated to the values of the official political culture. Those values were undeniably conservative even in Hartzian terms; the only justification for calling them Whig could be the identification of Edmund Burke as a Whig when he wrote Reflections on the French Rev­ olution. A careful examination of the rhetoric of the Upper Canadian elite and its substantial followings discloses little that is Lockean; only among some of the moderate conservative assemblymen are there occa­ sionally such shadings. The most frequently cited political philosopher, at least among the conservatives of Upper Canada, was neither Locke not Burke, but Sir William Blackstone. Blackstone has customarily been considered a Whig, but in the context of resurgent aristocratic and anti­ democratic thought, he was a conservative, as R.R. Palmer has pointed out. As selectively used by Upper Canadian conservatives, Blackstone provided an eloquent evocation of the glories of the British constitution, a justification for aristocracy, and a specific rejection upon legal and historical grounds of popular sovereignty, of the Lockean compact and of the right of revolution. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, it was not Blackstone and Burke alone but the whole floodtide of anti-revolutionary British conservatism that surged through the arter­ ies of British North America and permeated the mentality of its ruling groups. Europe had returned to North America. The fragment was not a fragment, but the seat of clashing ideologies, a dialectical battleground. It seems a curious anomaly to charge the Hartzian school with neglect of the European dimension of British North American values, yet that seems to be the case. The conservatism of the colony was the product of a fusion of the values of British conservatism, Loyalist hostilities, and the survival ethos of the leadership of other groups within each colony, for of course the Loyalists were by no means the only or even the chief component of the oligarchies in most of these societies. Just how such an intermeshing of values occurred, and how it varied from colony to colony, must await further investigation. In Upper Canada, for demographic, historic and geographic reasons, conservatism was most intense, the line between it and North American liberalism most sharply drawn, and the struggle between the two most embittered.13

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An understanding of the fundamental beliefs of any era, and the intensity with which they were held, is unlikely to be reached when one reasons solely from a set of postulates about the nature of the world historical process. It is necessary, still, to engage in the laborious analysis of the surviving written record of a period, to crack its linguistic code, as it were, in order to identify the values and beliefs actually held, and their relationship to each other. The employment, no matter how dazzling, of such evocative names as Locke and Cobbett— or Blackstone— or even of such broadly inclusive terms as liberalism and conservatism, is to short-circuit the task of the historian. Even a limited acquaintance with the literary record of early nine­ teenth-century British North America is sufficient to indicate that a condition of ideological clash, not liberal consensus, existed. But it is not enough to pursue ideas through the literary record; they must be related to the cultural and material environment within which they were held. The fact of the idea of aristocracy will illustrate the point. Its reception in liberal North America has been counted an absurdity, and it is true that its enunciation in European terms scarcely survived the 1790s, though W.W. Baldwin for one can be found praising it at a much later date. The idea itself did not die but was modulated and transformed (though in no magical way) until by the 1820s it had been reformulated as a rationale for the leadership of the best, however de­ termined. This modulation had occurred in response to a complex set of variables which include both the shifting constellation of beliefs and the changing social and economic institutions of the society. The idea, and the operative strategy that was connected to it, has had a long life in Canada. John Porter’s Vertical Mosaic needs to be given historical underpinnings. How fascinating it would be to trace the mentalities, the behaviour patterns, the institutional folkways that have enabled the descendants of supposedly superseded elites— Cartwrights, Symonses, Robinsons, Richardsons and many others— to find places of honour and status for themselves, generation unto generation. It is the persistence of culturally diverse societies that raises the greatest difficulty about the applicability of the fragment hypothesis to British North America. Liberal values, especially egalitarianism and in­ dividualism, ought to have been solvents of distinctions, eating away at differences stemming from other lands, and converting peoples into the People. To explain why this did not occur remains a challenge to pre-Confederation scholarship, and returns us to the theme of limited identities. How did the many groups of the Atlantic Provinces and Upper Canada first establish separate identities? Were their numbers

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reinforced— and their identities thereby sustained — by accretions from further immigration or through natural increase? To what extent did economic and geographic factors contribute to the forming pattern of particularism? To what degree did various groups and collectivities con­ form to broader norms in provincial societies, and to what degree were their values threatened by those of the dominant groups in society? How far, in each province, was a condition of stable pluralism achieved, and how was it brought about? Answers to questions such as these require a complex historical scholarship, drawing upon the whole range of meth­ ods available, and employing the materials of what was once scornfully thought of as parish pump history. It would be rash to venture at this point any covering statement to encompass such questions. What might be suggested is that a hypothesis that argues for the dominance of a conservative outlook among the di­ recting groups of British North America may offer a readier explanation for the fact of pluralism, and some approaches to the manner in which it is articulated, than does the hypothesis of the liberal fragment. What seems to have happened as a result of the immigration experi­ ence was not the flowering of a fragment but the efflorescence of group myths. Some of them are sectarian— the powerful consciousness of be­ ing a people set apart— although there may well be ethnic and economic dimensions of this phenomenon. Some myths fasten upon the migration experience itself, like that of the Pictou Scots and the coming of the Hector. Some are myths of a Golden Age overlaid by tragedy, as with the Acadians and the Loyalists. All sustain separate identity, all are exclusive in their character. The alien question in Upper Canada in the 1820s centred around the issue of whether or not post-Loyalist Americans should be accorded full civil rights as British subjects. Underlying the issue was a conflict between an exclusive and an assimilative myth. Here is the voice of the Loyalist: I am an old man, but I have not forgotten the scenes of my youth— the house wherein I was born— the garden where I played, and the fields where my hands first learned to labour. Well can I remember how I was driven from them, and from the spot where my father fell, fighting for his king against rebels. By whom was I robbed of my patrimony? Even by such as [Barnabas Bidwell] who now claims equal privileges with the best of us. . . . [He] now comes forward after a lapse of a few years, to enjoy one of your highest prerogatives, to amend and make your laws, to sit, cheek by jowl, with your honourable men. What are you about, ye sons of Loyalists? Will ye suffer these things?14

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Speaking for the Americans, John Rolph said of them: Upon their arrival they received grants of land; for they did not emigrate here to settle as squatters in the woods— not to spend the flower of their youth in hunting muskrats and destroying wolves — not to waste their strength in clearing the forest without the honour of owning an acre of it that the mosquitoes might the less disturb the dignified repose of those who sent the invitation — not to linger in the wilderness without a title to clear an acre, pluck a mushroom, or strip a slippery elm bark to prepare eve a dish of Indian soup— by no means. They came at this Imperial invitation not to be degraded— they came from a free country, elated with the assurance that they would enjoy freedom here.15

Here history speaks against the homogenizing force of the common pio­ neering experience. Colonial conservatism did not act to break down such myths. Rather, in a variety of ways, it tended to sustain them. Since conservatives were disposed to think in terms of collectivities, not of individuals, their ten­ dency was to identify individuals with reference to the groups to which they belonged. Conservatism, at least in Upper Canada, was a coalition both of interests and particularisms, whether religious, ethnic or both. It made no high assimilative demands beyond its insistence upon ad­ herence to vital survival values — loyalty, order, stability— values that coincided with the interests and outlooks of many of the groups and col­ lectivities that made up colonial society. The remarkable convergence of attitudes held towards the United States, its political system and its social tendencies, by a wide variety of disparate groups in British North America is not accidental. It can be interpreted as an extension of the success of long-dominant conservatism in imposing its outlook; it is just as likely that to each group, in different ways and from different per­ spectives, American civilization was perceived as threatening. Though the language of hostility towards the United States had a high degree of uniformity, its subjective content or inner meaning might be quite differ­ ent for each group. For the most part, conservatism dealt with leaders, not followers. Elitist politics, while assimilating group chieftains to the values of the directing elites, made less impression upon their adherents. This is not to claim any special virtue for conservatism. Many of its spokesmen would have preferred more uniform and organic societies, and some of its leaders were prepared, like John Strachan, to use drastic methods to build such societies.16 But it does suggest that the prevalence of conservative beliefs is a factor to be taken into account when explain­ ing the phenomenon of limited identities. Professor Careless, in referring to the swamping effect of British immigration and of the liberalism it purportedly brought with it, proposes to stand the Hartz thesis on its

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head. The arrival of the fragment is delayed until the 1830s or 1840s; the fate of the already existing people of British North America was to be assimilated to it and its values. This seems too George Brown-centred a view. I would suggest that there was a continuity in the society-building process of British North America. Though the shape and content of the early societies was certainly modified by massive immigration, to an extent yet to be explored, later comers took on some of the values and patterns of the long-established societies. In other words, perhaps George Brown did knuckle under to those Whigs of Kingston. For the pattern of English Canadian complexity derives not only from local, regional, ethnic and other variations, but also from the continued workings of a liberal-conservative dialectic. How far were the two sides of the dialectic reinforced by importation from abroad? When did a synthesis of values occur, and what form did it take? It is probably right to look for its beginnings in the generation immediately before Confederation, but we have scarcely begun to trace its nature. The English Canadian style and character is not to be understood in terms of the consensus of a triumphant liberalism, but, out of its contradictory heritage, in terms of muted conservatism and ambivalent liberalism, of contradiction, paradox and complexity.

TW ELVE

The Ontario Political Culture: A Study in Complexities

T he application of the concept of political culture to the province of On­ tario is not a simple task, for two basic reasons. The first is the nature of the province itself: geographically vast, regionally and demographically diverse, historically complex, and yet seemingly lacking in distinctiveness or special character. We will return to this aspect shortly. The second reason has to do with the concept of “political culture” itself. When Gabriel Almond coined the term in the 1950s, he wished to bring precision to those elements in political behaviour that older generations loosely called “tradition” or “custom” or “national charac­ ter.” For Almond, political culture was the mental matrix within which the politics of a society took place. How do people think about politics and government? What is their sense of themselves as political actors? What are their beliefs about the right relationship between government and the governed? Every society, he held, has its own distinctive beliefs and assumptions about such fundamental questions, formed over time and lending a special character to the way in which the political system functions. Unfortunately, the proliferation of literature on the subject since Al­ mond’s definitive work1 has altered the original simplicity of the concept, which has now become complex and somewhat slippery. The analysis of political culture may be concerned with mass political attitudes or the beliefs of elites within the institutions of a polity and attitudes toward them, or with the origins and evolution of the dominant assumptions about politics. In a useful essay of admirable clarity,2 David Bell de­ fined political culture as the sum of those “beliefs and values related to politics, attitudes to the political system and to political issues, and commonly accepted standards of political behaviour,” but at the same time he considered the concept as a particularly valuable way of looking at “mass opinion and values.”

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Most scholars, in confronting the problem of describing the Ontario political culture, have seen the necessity of coming to grips with the his­ torical experience of the province. To what degree are the beliefs and attitudes underlying political behaviour today the product of the past? The concept of political culture, however defined, assumes both histor­ ical continuity and historical distinctiveness, and, like culture itself, is thought to change only slowly over time. Is there continuity in Ontario’s history, or have its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiences been submerged in today’s highly industrialized, urbanized, and ethnically diverse society? At the outset of its history, Upper Canada had a political structure all but identical to that of every other British North American colony. It shared with them a common government organization, headed by a lieutenant-governor and his executive representing the authority of the imperial crown. Allied to these imperial officials were the military, the judges, the semi-official press and those churches (Anglican, Ro­ man Catholic, and Presbyterian) with a tradition of establishment; these made up the “official culture” of empire. That culture was tied to Lon­ don, the imperial metropolis, and received constantly from it a flow of political, social, and economic ideas and values. Since Upper Canada was founded as a consequence of the American Revolution and in the midst of the French Revolution, these ideas and values were strongly conservative in nature, Britain at that period being the leading counter-revolutionary state. Like New Brunswick, Upper Canada’s founding population was largely Loyalist, and Loyalist hostility toward the new American republic reinforced the conservative tone of the colony’s administration. What distinguished Upper Canada from the other colonies, and gave the new society its special character, was the result of the combined effects of environment and historical circumstance. Geographic isolation, compounded by the barrier of French-speaking Lower Canada between the inland province and the Atlantic colonies, and the proximity of the United States, inspired in the ruling group a sense of profound unease. The insecurity of the elite was heightened by a significant change in the makeup of the population as a result of immigration; by 1812 a majority of the people were non-Loyalist Americans. The War of 1812, which struck Upper Canada far more severely than any other colony, hardened the already powerful forces of conservatism into a fierce and aggressive Tory ideology that became the foundation block of the Ontario political culture. For half a century, Upper Canada, a political culture in the formative stage, was ruled by a conservative elite, the so-called Family Compact, deeply suspicious of reform in any guise, bent on perpetuating its own

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exclusive power, and aiming to build a hierarchical social, religious, and political order in the province. In any political culture, however, it is possible for several ideologies to co-exist, and almost from the beginning that it was (and remains) the case in Ontario. A liberal and reformist ideology was represented by such politicians as William Warren Baldwin and his son Robert, while the democratic ideology of the American and French Revolutions found its most notable spokesman in William Lyon Mackenzie. Nevertheless, for most of the period during which the Tories controlled the Assembly, the loyalty cry found a response in the elec­ torate. Acute tensions between Compact Toryism and the democratic movement led by Mackenzie brought rebellion in 1837. This event, cou­ pled with the gaining of responsible government a decade later, is com­ monly supposed to have freed Ontario from its reactionary past, and to have given its politics a fresh, liberal, and reformist start. Despite the surface violence, however, the conservative value system of Upper Canada, as well as its populist and demographic elements, was to be transmitted to future generations of politicians. The values associated with loyalty (and Loyalism), for example, were to have a long life, and, shedding some symbolic elements, were to continue into the twentieth century. Loyalty meant not only loyalty to Britain and hostility to the United States, but also adherence to the vision of an Upper Canada orderly, free, and prosperous, and to the political system that guaranteed these virtues. Similarly, the intense survival drives of the colonial conservatives, coupled with the expectations of the Loyalists and later arrivals, led to an emphasis upon the role of the state unique among all early colonial societies. Not only did the Tories employ the state vigorously to maintain order, ferret out the disloyal, and fasten their political control upon the province through a complex web of patronage; they also did not hesitate to use it in furthering the economic objectives of the whole society. Thus, in a spirit of pure pragmatism, they assumed control of the huge enterprise of the Welland Canal, and justified the takeover, in the phrase of Chief Justice John Beverley Robinson, as “a national project.” Their motives were both defensive (against the lure of the American economy) and developmental; already conservative political and social values were being harnessed to powerful expansionist forces. The Upper Canadian experience was fundamental to the formation of the Ontario political culture. The colony, created by a counter­ revolutionary state in an era of democratic revolutions, and peopled in part by emigres from one of those revolutions, had a history of tension and violence matched by Quebec. Its survival in the War of 1812 stimu­ lated a deep provincial patriotism, and cemented upon it the hold of its

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conservative elite, who during the war had hanged traitors and expelled the disloyal. Yet the conservative values of the elite were shared to an important degree by a significant proportion of the population at large; not only the Loyalists, but also the masses of British immigrants who flowed into the provinces in the 1820s and 1830s. Ranged against the dominant elements of the society were forces— chiefly agrarian and artisan— who represented the values of democratic and republican equalitarianism. The Rebellion of 1837 was a crisis of legitimacy for the society; and despite sentimental liberal histories of Mackenzie and his followers, it was undoubtedly the forces of conser­ vatism that triumphed. The real drama of the Rebellion was found in the overwhelming turnout of the militia, not the few hundreds of radicals gathered at Montgomery’s Tavern. Farmer and labour radical­ ism certainly was not eliminated by the Rebellion and its aftermath; it remained, nonetheless, distinctly a minority element in the dominant political culture. At the same time, the Rebellion and the Union that followed it de­ stroyed the radical, High Tory right. Instead, two moderate parties of the centre emerged, sharing a common political culture. Upper Canar dian conservatism had always had liberal and entrepreneurial strands, as we have seen. On the other side of politics, the moderate Reformers, af­ ter the Union, readily absorbed the conservative view of the War of 1812 and the Rebellion. The Macdonald Conservatives and Brown Liberals, despite their political warfare, were in fundamental agreement in their attitudes toward American democracy and violence, in their belief in the superior merits of the British constitution and the “peace, order and good government” that accompanied it, and in their acceptance of the integrative role of the state, whether in the social or economic sphere. It was in this period, for example, under the auspices of both parties and with the leadership of the Loyalist Egerton Ryerson, that the highly centralized Ontario school system was created, well in advance of any other Canadian province. Its role was to assimilate newcomers to what Ryerson termed “Canadian” values, and to disseminate the conservative social and moral creed prized by the elite culture. Similarly, both par­ ties (though chiefly the Conservatives) were ready to use the resources of the state to engage in developmental projects much riskier than the Welland Canal— namely, the construction of railroads on a large scale, thus pioneering what Reg Whitaker has termed “private enterprise at public expense.” 3 The Confederation movement, to an important extent, stemmed di­ rectly from the dynamics of the political culture of Ontario. Both parties

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saw the developmental possibilities that a national federation would cre­ ate; both perceived the significance of the West as an area for provincial expansion. Spokesmen for both parties exhibited, to a high degree, a kind of Upper Canadian patriotism. In the case of the Liberals, this took the form of an active rejection of the influence of French Canada in Upper Canadian affairs; “The Lower Canadians,” Oliver Mowat as­ serted, “impose upon us laws which we do not want,” such as separate school legislation. Upper Canadian politicians were uniformly conserva­ tive in the political and social values they espoused, and in the manner in which they contrasted their own stable society with civil disorder in the United States. Confederation was yet another high-risk enterprise for the Ontario political culture, but the change it brought would be managed in accordance with the moderate conservative values derived from the province’s past. The career of Oliver Mowat is of special relevance to the study of the nature and transmission of the Ontario political culture. His life spanned every era of the province’s political history except that of the most re­ cent past. He was born in Kingston in 1820, and reached adolescence in the midst of the bitter political battles of that era; served as a militia officer in the aftermath of the Rebellion of 1837; articled in the law office of John A. Macdonald; chose to enter politics as a Liberal (Reformer) in the 1850s; served as premier from 1872 to 1896; and after an inter­ lude in the federal cabinet, died as the province’s lieutenant-governor in 1905. Mowat has not received his due at the hands of historians, possibly because he has been found bland or dull; he was, however, the quintessential Ontario politician, summing up in his beliefs, styles, and actions (and in his hidden and complex personality) the province’s ma­ turing political culture. Though a Liberal partisan, Mowat was at bottom a small “c” con­ servative; to him, parties were the means by which the business of the province was advanced, its interests protected, and the aspirations of its people met. “Do not be carried-away by names, my dear fellow,” he wrote a friend at the time he decided to be a Liberal rather than a Con­ servative, “one party has sometimes had most virtue on its side, and the other party has had it at other times.” Mowat assiduously used appeals to Ontario’s past to justify his actions, and in so doing he synthesized the conservative and reform traditions, appealing without distinction to the memory of Robert Baldwin and John Beverley Robinson, who to him represented the values he most prized in politics. Though not of Loyalist descent, he incorporated the arduous struggles and survival val­ ues of the Loyalists in the image he presented to electors of the province, and with great political skill— and deep personal conviction— wove into

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his public vision of Ontario and its destiny the many distinct strands of its history. For Mowat neither 1837 nor 1841 nor 1867 represented any break in the continuity he saw extending from the province’s origins in 1784 to his own age. Mowat used to be depicted as a laissez-faire liberal, but in fact it is now clear that he was as ready to intervene in the social and eco­ nomic affairs of the province as any of his conservative predecessors. The activities of his government in education, health, labour relations, working conditions, public works, resource exploitation, heritage preser­ vation, and other areas together constitute an impressive list of public initiatives (all of them, however, undertaken cautiously and with much restraint, in a manner that may remind a twentieth-century Ontarian of the familiar style of Bill Davis). Above all, Mowat was an Ontario nationalist within the Canadian nation, standing for the advancement of his province and its people’s interests, yet seeing this as compatible with true Canadianism. Thus his struggles with Ottawa over the respective jurisdictions of the two levels of government can be seen as an assertion of Ontario aspirations nurtured in the colonial period. In 1884, when Ontario won a major victory over the federal government in securing a vast extension of its territory in the north, Mowat was exultant. His statement on that occasion still resonates today, because it affirms a belief still very much part of the province’s political culture: Now, why is it that we are so anxious that the limits of our province shall not be curtailed? First and foremost, is because we love Ontario, we believe in Ontario, and we know from past experience that it is in the interest of the Dominion, as well as of the provinces composing the Dominion, that the limits of Ontario should not be restricted. Ontario is, in fact, the “back-bone” of the Dominion; and we desire that that should continue to be the position of our province; that it should not be brought down to be one of the least of the great provinces; that there should be an extent of country ample enough to admit of its development so that, as the other provinces develop, Ontario should develop also.

To what extent were the values and attitudes Mowat represented so well passed on to the next generation of politicians? It may well be, as David Cheal has persuasively argued, that much of the symbolic and religious content of old Ontario patriotism has been discarded in this century, except in certain Tory fastnesses in eastern Ontario.4 Yet there appears no sharp dividing line between the style and belief content of the late nineteenth-century’s elite political culture and that of the generation of politicians who bridged the First World War.

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In a brilliant book, which unquestionably stands as the most signifi­ cant contribution yet made to our understanding of Ontario politics in the early twentieth century, H.V. Nelles addressed the meaning of the legacy of the Ontario past in terms of the relationship between poli­ tics and resource development in the period up to the beginning of the Second World War.5 At the centre of his analysis is the tradition of On­ tario statism. State intervention and the fundamental principle of crown ownership of resources were crucial to the manner in which Mowat’s successors, whether Liberal or Conservative, tackled the challenge of in­ dustrialization and resource exploitation. Whether in the building of a publicly owned railway to tap the riches of the north, or in the as­ sertion of the public interest over forest, mineral, and water resources, these politicians were behaving in a manner consistent with the longestablished norms of the culture. Forgotten now, though enthusiastically welcomed at the time, was the Whitney government’s acquisition of a silver mine at Cobalt in 1906. Far more important, of course, was the same government’s decision to assume public ownership of hydro-electric power transmission, a step that made it unique among all provincial and state jurisdictions in North America. The decision was taken in the same pragmatic spirit in which the High Tories of Compact days had annexed the Welland Canal. As Premier Whitney informed a British newspa­ perman, “It is indeed a ghastly joke to charge the Ontario Government with being socialist, etc., when it is the bulwark in Canada by means of which such influences will be shattered.” Perceived in a historical vacuum, actions such as those of Whitney might appear incomprehensible; viewed in the context of the province’s historical development, they were well within the limits of the culture. The explanation, Nelles argued, lies in the interplay between “political values on the one hand and the environment and economic characteristics of the Canadian Shield on the other.” The role of the Upper CanadianOntarian state was to provide both moral and material leadership, and to preside “over just and orderly social change.” 6 As it happened, the as­ sertion of those values coincided with the particular interests of powerful economic groups. The Whitney regime may be said to have been the apex of the polit­ ical culture of old Ontario. It is true that this government inaugurated a Conservative dominance that lasted until 1985, broken only by the United Farmers in the early 1920s and the interlude of the Hepburn gov­ ernment in the 1930s. But the forces of change were already sweeping the society. Already the ethnic homogeneity of the population was cut across by French-Canadian migration into the eastern and northern parts of the province, and by newcomers from eastern and southern Europe.

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The First World War greatly quickened the pace of industrialization, and also somewhat weakened both the attachment to Britain and the memory of the colonial past, primacy now being given to a stronger identification with the country as a whole. The transformative effect of war was deepened in the generation be­ tween the wars by further immigration, by economic depression, and by the re-emergence, in a modern form, of working-class radicalism. Soci­ ety became ever more urbanized and secularized. All these trends were further accentuated by the Second World War, and by the immense changes at the war’s end, with massive immigration, the creation of a multi-ethnic society, and the emergence of a fully industrialized economy and an overwhelmingly urban and increasingly well-educated population. That Ontario possessed a distinctive political culture prior to 1914 can hardly be doubted. It was a culture of political elites, but their shared values permeated the society as well. What is the relationship between that Ontario— dynamic and stable at the same time— and the complex polity of today? Can it any longer be said that Ontario has a distinctive political culture? The question is a real one. Two decades ago, Arthur Lower, only partly in jest, asked “Does Ontario exist?” 7 In his view, the province had lost its “collective will” (a phrase certainly relevant to any defini­ tion of political culture). That will had emerged from the conflicts— religious, political, economic— of the various foundation groups who had settled the province; “Ontario,” as he visualized it, was a land made up of yeoman farmers on the one hand, and substantial towns and cities on the other, reaching its pinnacle under the government of Sir Oliver Mowat in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Since that era, the province had expanded its boundaries enormously, to take in the north (a hinterland with little affiliation to the old province), and in the twenti­ eth century it had become urbanized and industrialized to such a degree that its special character had been destroyed. “Ontario,” he wrote, “is a space on the map, it is a legal entity administered from Toronto, it is a section of Canada, but has it any of its own flesh and blood on its bones?” Big, bland, diffuse, cut up into many regions and sub-regions, Ontario has not lent itself easily to the forms of analysis appropriate to a study of its political culture. Northrop Frye called the province “one of the most inarticulate communities in human culture.” 8 Canadian historians, by and large, have avoided the challenge of determining the nature of Ontario distinctiveness, at least for the period from Confederation to the present day. That Canada is a country of regions, and that regional explanations are to be sought when interpreting the political behaviour

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of the prairie west, the Maritimes, or Quebec, has become a historian’s truism over the last generation. Yet it would appear that Ontario is not a distinctive region like the others. In a thoughtful essay, “On being an Ontarian,” Peter Oliver reformulated Lower’s question: The extent of internal regional diversification, an undeniable lack of so­ cial and cultural definition and the pallid picture which exists in litera­ ture surely seems reason enough to account for the undeveloped state of Ontario historiography. Why should anyone attempt to write the history of a region which isn’t? Why should historians labour to define regional characteristics of a society so elusive or so banal as to defy definition?9

Oliver writes as a committed Ontario historian, concerned to grapple with the elusive nature of the province’s politics in the twentieth century. Most of his colleagues, however, would resent being called “Ontario” his­ torians; they, and for that matter most Ontarians, do not perceive the province as merely a region, but rather a kind of provincial equivalent of Canada as a whole. Nowhere else in the country is this attitude to be found, and indeed, its existence provides a clue to the peculiar charac­ ter of the province’s political culture. Ontarians have always regarded Confederation as primarily their creation, and the province as pivotal to its maintenance. Ontario premiers, from Mowat to Robarts and Davis, have never hesitated to don the mantle of saviours of the federal state, or at least that special version of it that protects the place of the province. The idea of centrality, linked to the idea that the country as a whole is a field for the expression of Ontario’s interests ( “Empire Ontario,” a phrase current at the turn of the century), continues to be part of the province’s political ethos. Ever since 1867, this attitude has earned for Ontario the suspicion and occasionally the active hostility of the other provinces and regions in Canada. At the same time, as a number of scholars have pointed out, the On­ tario electorate has for generations tended to focus upon national rather than provincial politics— another side of Ontario’s sense of centrality. This national political orientation of the populace has posed difficulties for Ontario politicians from Mowat to Peterson; it is a unique character­ istic of the culture that would seem to have its roots in the nineteenth century. The belief that Ontario was the “golden hinge” of Confederation (the phrase was used, if not minted, by John Robarts) stems naturally from the province’s geographic position, the size of its population (more than one third of the Canadian total), and its wealth in industry and natural resources. Well before 1867, in the old province of Upper Canada, the seeds of economic expansionism were sown; the role of the provincial

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state in the advancement of economic enterprise is a product not of re­ cent times, but of the colonial past. It is normal, therefore, for Ontarians to expect their government to be directly concerned with the economic well-being of the province, and to take an active role in its promotion. Thus, in the post-1945 years, a succession of Progressive Conservative administrations supervised a spectacular period in the province’s growth. Not only did these governments give primacy to the economic develop­ ment of the province, but spending over the whole range of government service, from highways to health, social welfare and post-secondary ed­ ucation was justified in large part in terms of its contribution to the provincial economy. Similarly, immigration was encouraged from 1945 on, the government taking active steps to encourage it. “Government is business, the people’s business,” said Premier Leslie Frost. “Good government is therefore a matter of common sense . . . our creed is that more people lead to more industry, more jobs, more wages and more opportunity and from these come more productivity and more revenue.” Graham White has pointed out the remarkable degree to which Ontario premiers are expected to be “solid, competent managers rather than vi­ sionary leaders with clearly set-out programmatic goals.” 10 Few premiers exemplified the Ontario type so exactly as Leslie Frost. Ontario’s politics of affluence appear to be mirrored in the unusual durability of its government. From shortly after Confederation until 1905, the Liberal party of Sir Oliver Mowat, Arthur Hardy and George W. Ross held power, while with only two breaks the twentieth century has belonged to the Conservatives. The United Farmer government of E.C. Drury (1919-23) and Liberal government of Mitchell Hepburn and his successors (1934-43) appear from the vantage of the late twentieth century as temporary aberrations in an endless succession of Conserva­ tive administrations. Though there have been governments of consider­ able duration elsewhere in Canada, no other province exhibits this singu­ lar pattern of one-party dominance. To what extent is this attributable to the pervading political culture, and in what degree to other, extrane­ ous factors? It may well be, for example, that Ontario with its wealth and low-cost energy has been relatively easy to govern, and therefore it has been easy for governments to achieve such longevity. At least until very recently, the Conservative Party has proven itself capable of renewal at a time of a change in leadership without the necessity of a sojourn in the wilderness of opposition. It is just as likely, however, that the capacity of twentieth-century Progressive Conservatism for continuous renewal was not due to dexter­ ity alone, but also owed a good deal to the correct interpretation of the expectations of the society by a succession of Conservative politicians.

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Their political success, like that of the long administration of Sir Oliver Mowat, must surely be testimony to a certain skill in ascertaining the desires and deeply held convictions of the electorate they served (at least in the pre-polling era). Much more research, by political scientists and historians alike, needs to be done before such speculations can be given any solidity. This holds especially for twentieth-century Ontario politics. Important work on these issues has appeared, relatively recently, from political scientists who have addressed the question of whether Canada is a single political culture or in fact composed of a number of dis­ tinctive regional political cultures. In a key study published in 1974,11 Richard Simeon and David Elkins concluded that the latter was the case, thus taking a position already adopted by a number of historians, who were reacting against the metropolitan school of Harold Innis and D.G. Creighton. Simeon and Elkins analyzed statistically the responses gathered by John Meisel in his post-election surveys of the federal elec­ tions of 1965 and 1968 in terms of whether or not these data revealed the existence of separate political cultures. The categories they employed were those identified by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba as crucial to a political culture in their influential survey, The Civic Culture — namely, the degree to which citizens believe they count in the political process (efficacy), the degree of trust they exhibit in government and politicians, and the degree of actual involvement of the citizenry in politics. After statistical allowance was made for such differentiating factors as wealth, education, and rural/urban composition of provincial electorates, Simeon and Elkins found substantial regional divergences in terms of ef­ ficacy, trust, and involvement. What is significant for our purposes is that Ontario was found to be unlike any of the other cultures under examination, although it most closely approximated British Columbia. A relatively high proportion of Ontarians saw themselves as politically effective and at the same time exhibited a high degree of trust in gov­ ernment. Yet nowhere in Canada, except in British Columbia, was there a higher proportion of “critics,” citizens scoring high in efficacy and in­ volvement but low in trust. These findings are important for several reasons. To begin with, a statistical basis has been established for arguing the existence of a dis­ tinctive Ontario political culture. Moreover, the profile of the Ontario voter that emerges from the Simeon-Elkins analysis of the attitudes and behaviour of mass publics in Canada appears to accord with the mod­ ern political history of the province. The bulk of the Ontario electorate is active in politics, confident of its role, yet positively oriented toward government and with fewer alienated or disaffected citizens than almost any other region. As for the relatively high proportion of critics, that

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may well be accounted for either by the long periods of Conservative dominance, or by the presence of the CCF-NDP option, or by both. If most of the electors believe, most of the time, that government does the right thing, obviously that makes for political stability of a high order and for a generally conservative temper in politics. Simeon and F.lkins do not attempt to account for the distinctiveness of the Ontario political culture, except to observe that, like the cultures of the other provinces and regions, it is derived from “the matrix of histor­ ical and sociological factors unique to each province.” Their conclusions were pushed further, and refined as well, by another political scientist, Frangois-Pierre Gingras. He pointed out that what his colleagues were describing was the dominant political culture of “affluence, centrality, and satisfaction with a ’progressive conservatism’,” but there were in fact two cultures, the other being one of “deprivation, remoteness and alienation.” 12 Ontario has the highest in-migration from other parts of Canada and the highest proportion of foreign-born of any province; nei­ ther of these elements accommodates readily to the dominant culture. In particular, we may well ask whether the vast number of immigrants from countries outside the British political tradition have had a signifi­ cant impact upon the political culture. How effectively have the values and beliefs characteristic of the culture been transmitted to the hun­ dreds of thousands of people who have arrived from Europe, Asia, and other parts of the world? To what extent are alterations to the culture taking place? It is surely no secret that the politics of Toronto have been changing rapidly in recent years, and it seems likely that the patterns evolving in the metropolis owe as much to the impact of newly estab­ lished and politically conscious ethnic communities as they do to the immense pressures exerted by Toronto’s powerful developmental effect upon its immediate hinterland. Indeed, it is likely that the cumulative effect of major social and eco­ nomic change, coupled with the singular growth of Toronto, has rendered the political culture of the province far less homogeneous than it once was. Even in the early period of provincial politics, certain regions ex­ hibited distinctive characteristics that suggest the existence of political subcultures. Eastern Ontario, the Niagara Peninsula, the Ottawa Valley, the areas of Scottish settlement in Western Ontario, and other regions as well, have displayed for over a century differences in voting behaviour, styles of political leadership, and attitudes to urban-inspired change that suggest the retention of local values and beliefs, even if for the most part these subcultures have conformed to the dominant culture.

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The addition of the enormous region of Northern Ontario in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century furthered complicated the pic­ ture. Its dispersed settlement pattern, the relatively low degree of so­ cial integration among the many ethnic communities to be found there, and the presence of the major concentration of Franco-Ontarians in the province have often set the north apart from the rest of the province. Northern Ontarians view Toronto, justly, as remote and often uncaring of their distinct interests, and the South generally as exploitive. The northern part of the province has never been fully integrated into the dominant political culture, and its distinctive character and economy has provided a continuing source of support for the CCF and New Democratic parties. The existence, historically, of a set of political subcultures in Ontario suggests that the massive socio-economic changes of the latter half of the twentieth century are likely to have a further fragmenting effect upon the dominant culture. At the very least, it is possible to hypothesize that the present era is one of transformation and re-integration. Nor is the dominant political culture quite as stable as it first appears. Historically, as Gingras points out, governments in Ontario have been sustained by relatively slim margins; no party in the province’s history has won as much as 60 percent of the total vote. Only twice in its nine successful elections from 1871 to 1902 did the governing Liberal Party receive as much as 50 percent of votes cast. The Conservatives under James Whitney took more than 50 percent of votes in the four elections from 1904 to 1914; after the interlude of the United Farmers, Howard Ferguson reasserted Conservative primacy, and won more than half the votes in each of the three elections held during the 1920s. His 57 percent of votes cast in the 1929 election remains the highest portion obtained by any party since 1867. Mitchell Hepburn’s Liberals got a bare 50 percent in 1934, and 51 percent in 1937; but in the thirteen elections from 1943 to 1985, the ruling Conservatives were never able to win the votes of even half the voting electorate. On three occasions, most recently in 1985, the party winning most seats took less than 40 percent of the votes cast. “On the average, in every election since Confederation,” Gingras observes, “54 percent of all voters have opted for a change of government.” Ontario politics, then, have always been characterized by an uneasy equilibrium. Provided a government remains sensitive to the expecta­ tions of those who wish some measure of change, it can count on the trust of the majority of those who actively participate in the electoral process. Incremental change, combined with moderate conservatism, has there­ fore been the hallmark both of the nineteenth-century Liberals and their

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Conservative successors. Parties accommodating themselves to these features of the political culture are accorded a long lease of power, with the additional assistance of an electoral system which over represents parties winning a plurality of votes. The by-product of the process is a surprising amount of reform legislation, no matter what the party hue. This tendency has been further accentuated by the three-party system of the last forty years. Gingras’ electoral analysis gives some timely depth to the study of the Ontario political culture, but many questions are left unanswered by it. Values, beliefs, and attitudes are at the heart of political culture, and although the quantitative assessment of survey results and electoral behaviour can assist in determining this layer of mentality, the results tend to be somewhat abstract. There exists no Ontario study compa­ rable to Robert Lane’s Political Ideology: Why the American Common Man Believes What He Does.1* In any event, Lane’s classic use of direct interview techniques to tap the roots of the political belief system can only be employed with those now living, and thus cannot be extended historically beyond the recent past. Even the analysis of voting patterns cannot penetrate the barrier of 1867, since reliable voting figures prior to that date are almost entirely absent. John Wilson, another political scientist who has made important con­ tributions to the study of Ontario and Canadian political culture, agrees substantially with the Gingras analysis but places even stronger em­ phasis upon the conservative value system of the province. Employing adjectives such as “ascriptive,” “hierarchical,” “stable,” “restrained,” and “cautious,” he contends that “it is easy to see the province’s reluc­ tance to engage in change for the sake of change as a natural extension into the twentieth century of that conservatism which distinguished preConfederation politics in Upper Canada.” 14 This is a crucial point. Polit­ ical cultures are not created overnight or altered drastically by changing circumstances. Deeply held assumptions and beliefs, once formed, are not easily shaken; beneath the ebb and flow of electoral politics remains a value system less subject to fluctuation. Political culture is a subspecies of the broader term “culture,” and like culture evolves over time and has roots deep in the past. It is precisely here that our knowledge of Ontario political culture rests upon uncertain foundations. Political scientists have not themselves investigated the origins of the present-day culture they are intent upon analyzing, even though the historical dimensions are obviously intrinsically important to the validity of the concept it­ self. Nor have many historians interested themselves in the subject. As a result, there is as yet no major body of scholarship establishing an effective linkage between the contemporary political culture and nearly

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two hundred years of Ontario’s past, during which time that culture first took shape and evolved. In other words, the study of Ontario political culture is only begin­ ning, and a fuller understanding of it will require the efforts of both political scientists and historians. Robert Putnam, an American polit­ ical scientist, put the challenge well in his The Beliefs of Politicians: Ideology, Conflict and Democracy in Britain and Italy.15 “In some dis­ cussions of national political traditions,” he wrote, “whether at the mass level, or among elites, culture has been used as a residual category, one whose contents were unique to the given nation and virtually inexpli­ cable except by vague reference to the importance of history.” But, he continued, “political culture need not be treated as a question-stopper, as an uncaused first cause.” He concluded that the subject “cries out for interpretation in historical terms.” The material for such an interpretation already exists, or is being generated, especially for the nineteenth century. In the historical study of Ontario mass publics and their values, the methodology of the po­ litical scientist is not adequate and must be augmented by the work of social historians, particularly by the research of labour, urban, and im­ migration historians. The transference of beliefs and attitudes already identified in the socio-economic and socio-cultural spheres to political behaviour is likely to have been fairly direct, although cleaxly a consid­ erable task of synthesis will have to be done. The most immediately promising way in which historical depth can be given to our knowledge of the Ontario political culture is through the study of values of successive generations of political elites (the chief actors in the political process). Putnam’s own work is of this type, al­ though addressed to the present day. In making a comparative analysis of the beliefs of British and Italian members of Parliament, he asked his subjects questions such as: What is the nature of politics? How does it work? How ought it to work? What is human nature like? What is soci­ ety like? What is a good society? What determines political obedience? What does human liberty consist in? In touching these deeper layers of thought and value, Putnam was able to build up a coherent picture of the belief systems of the two political cultures, ranged along the pre­ dictable spectrum of party affiliation and ideological commitment. He encountered a roadblock, however, in attempting to determine the ori­ gins of these ideas and values, and how they had been transmitted from generation to generation of politicians. He could only conclude, rather lamely, that “the study of elite political culture offers unique opportuni­ ties for students of history and politics to investigate the impact of the past upon the future.”

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That Ontario has been characterized by an elite political culture from its origins is a central contention of this essay. That the values of succes­ sive elites have not been fully shared by all elements in the population is obvious: the periodic eruption of protest movements and of radical groups and parties is significant enough; so is the remarkable durability of local, regional, and ethnic subcultures. What is the significance of the fact that in the twentieth century, on average, 35 percent of Ontarians do not vote in provincial elections? On the other hand, the relative stability of the province’s politics may indicate that to an important extent the elite culture has intersected with the mass political culture, no matter how fractionated the latter may be. But precisely how remains the final complexity.

NOTES

Editors’ Introduction 1 See A.B. McKillop, ed., Contexts of Canada’s Past; Selected Essays of W.L. Morton (Toronto, 1980), pp. 18-19. 2 All quotations from S.F. Wise in the introduction are drawn from an inter­ view with A.B. McKillop, conducted in November, 1991. 3 Although he took no courses from University College Professor of English A.S.P. Woodhouse, Wise still recalls vividly his excitement when reading Woodhouse’s lengthy introduction to Puritanism and Liberty; Being the Army Debates (1647-49) from the Clarke Manuscripts. Selected and edited with an introduction by A.S.P. Woodhouse (London, 1938), pp. 11—100. On occasion he also heard Woodhouse lecture. 4 Some of this early research is embodied in S.F. Wise, “The Indian Diplo­ macy of John Graves Simcoe,” Canadian Historical Association Annual Report (1953). 5 By 1991, this book had reached its fifth edition, and had been translated into Tta.1ia.Ti a s Storia sociale della guerra (Verona, 1973). 6 See, for example, A.B. McKillop, “Nationalism, Identity, and Canadian Intellectual History,” Queen’s Quarterly 81 (1974), reprinted in McKillop, Contours of Canadian Thought (Toronto, 1987), 3-17; Terry Cook, “John Beverley Robinson and the Conservative Blueprint for the Upper Canadian C o m m unity,” Ontario History 64 (1972). 7 For other works reflecting Wise’s ongoing interest in the history of avia­ tion, see “The Borden Government and the Formation of a Canadian Fly­ ing Corps, 1911-1916,” in Robert Bothwell and M.S. Cross, eds., Politics by other means: essays in honour of C.P. Stacey (Toronto, 1973); “The Royal Air Force and the origins of strategic bombing,” in C. Archer and T. Travers, eds., Men at War, 1914-1976 (Chicago, 1982); “Canadian mili­ tary history: a comparative report,” Journal of the Australian War Memo­ rial, no. 7 (Oct. 1985); “The Royal Canadian Air Force,” New Canadian Encyclopedia (Edmonton, 1986); “Strategic use of the air weapon in the First World War,” International Commission of Military History, ACTA 8 (Stuttgart, 1987). 8 Other members of this Task Force were Harold Rea, chairman of the board of Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, Olympic skier Nancy Greene, and Dr. Jacques Des Ruisseaux. 9 In part as a result of his contributions to the heritage conservation move­ ment, as well as to Canadian history, he was awarded an honorary LL.D. by the University of Guelph in 1987 and became a Member of the Order of Canada in 1989. 10 See “Sermon Literature and Canadian Intellectual History,” “God’s Pecu­ liar Peoples,” and “Conservatism and Political Development: The Canadian Case,” Chapters One, Two, and Ten in this volume.

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11 H.A. Tulloch, “Changing British Attitudes towards the United States in the 1880s,” Historical Journal 20 (1977); Goldwin Smith, Canada and the Canadian Question (introd. by Carl Berger, Toronto, 1971), chapter 8 pas­ sim; Paul Romney, “From the Rule of Law to Responsible Government; Ontario Political Culture and the Origins of Canadian Statism,” Canadian Historical Association Historical Papers (1988), pp. 113-14; Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 18671914 (Toronto, 1970), pp. 170-74. 12 Carl Berger, The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing, 1900-1970 (Toronto, 1976; 2nd ed. 1986). 13 Donald Creighton, “Sir John Macdonald and Canadian Historians,” Cana­ dian Historical Review 29 (1948). 14 Donald Creighton, John A. Macdonald: The Young Politician (Toronto, 1952); John A. Macdonald: The Old Chieftain (Toronto, 1955). 15 See “Upper Canada and the Conservative Tradition,” Chapter Nine in this volume. 16 Seymour Martin Lipset, The First New Nation: The United States in His­ torical and Comparative Perspective (New York, 1963). 17 Louis Hartz et al., The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York, 1964). 18 Ibid., p. 234. 19 George Grant, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965; reprinted Ottawa, 1986), p. 65. 20 Gad Horowitz, “Conservatism, Liberalism and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 32 (1966). 21 See “Liberal Consensus or Ideological Battleground: Some Reflections on the Hartz Thesis,” Chapter Eleven in this volume. 22 Aileen Dunham, Political Unrest in Upper Canada, 1815-1838 (1927; re­ printed Toronto, 1963); Gerald M. Craig, Upper Canada: The Formative Years, 1784-1841 (Toronto, 1963). 23 See “Tory Factionalism: Kingston Elections and Upper Canadian Politics, 1820-1836,” Chapter Six in this volume. 24 See “Upper Canada and the Conservative Tradition.” For discussion of a major study of political and electoral behaviour in Upper Canada, see the commentary on J.K. Johnson’s book, Becoming Prominent: Regional Leadership in Upper Canada, 1791-1841 (Kingston and Montreal, 1989), below. 25 See Berger, Writing of Canadian History, 2nd ed., pp. 260-65, 318-19, passim. 26 Graeme Hazlewood Patterson, “Studies in Elections and Public Opinion in Upper Canada,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1969. 27 Terry Cook, “John Beverley Robinson and the Conservative Blueprint for the Upper Canadian Community,” Ontario History 64 (1972); reprinted in J.K. Johnson, ed., Historical Essays on Upper Canada (Toronto, 1975);

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28 29

30

31

32

33

34

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“The Canadian Conservative Tradition: An Historical Perspective,” Jour­ nal of Canadian Studies 8 (1973). Hartwell Bowsfield, “Upper Canada in the 1820’s: The Development of a Political Consciousness,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1976. H.V. Nelles, The Politics of Development: Forests, Mines and Hydro-electric Power in Ontario, 1849-1941 (Toronto, 1974); Robert L. Fraser, “Like Eden in Her Summer Dress; Gentry, Economy and Society: Upper Canada, 1812-1840,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1979. Barrie Drummond Dyster, “Toronto 1840-1860: Making it in a British Protestant Town,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1970; Peter A. Baskerville, “Entrepreneurship and the Family Compact: York-Toronto 1822-1855,” Urban History Review 9 (1980-81). Other work in this vein includes Paul Romney, “On the Eve of the Rebellion: Nationality, Reli­ gion and Class in the Toronto Election of 1836,” in David Keane and Colin Read, eds., Old Ontario: Essays in Honour of J.M.S. Careless (Toronto, 1990), and the essays by Dyster, Romney and Gregory S. Kealey in Vic­ tor L. Russell, ed., Forging a Consensus: Historical Essays on Toronto (Toronto, 1984). Berger, Writing of Canadian History', Christopher Armstrong and H.V. Nelles, Monopoly’s Moment: The Organization and Regulation of Canadian Utilities, 1830-1930 (Philadelphia, 1986); Kenneth C. Dewar, “Toryism and Public Ownership in Canada: A Comment,” Canadian His­ torical Review 64 (1983). This literature is cited in H.D. Forbes, “Hartz-Horowitz at Twenty: Nation­ alism, Toryism and Socialism in Canada and the United States,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 20 (1987), p. 288, n. 3; see also Nelson Wise­ man, “Hartz-Horowitz at Twenty: The Case of French Canada,” ibid. 21 (1988). R.C.B. Risk, “The Law and the Economy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century On­ tario: A Perspective,” University of Toronto Law Journal 27 (1977), re­ printed in David H. Flaherty, ed., Essays in the History of Canadian Law, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1981-83), vol. 1; Peter George and Philip Sworden, “The Courts and the Development of Trade in Upper Canada, 1830—1860,” Busi­ ness History Review 60 (1986); David Howes, “Property, God and Nature in the Thought of Sir John Beverley Robinson,” McGill Law Journal 30 (1985); Bernard J. Hibbitts, "Progress and Principle: The Legal Thought of Sir John Beverley Robinson,” ibid. 34 (1989). G. Blaine Baker, “Legal Education in Upper Canada, 1785-1889,” in Fla­ herty, ed., Essays, vol. II; “The Juvenile Advocate Society: Self-Proclaimed Schoolroom for Upper Canada’s Governing Class,” Canadian Historical As­ sociation Historical Papers (1985); “The Reconstitution of Upper Canadian Legal Thought in the Late-Victorian Empire,” Law and History Review 3 (1985); ‘“ So Elegant a Web’: Providential Order and the Rule of Secular Law in Early Nineteenth Century Upper Canada,” University of Toronto Law Journal 38 (1988).

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35 Paul Romney, “From the Types Riot to the Rebellion: Elite Ideology, Antilegal Sentiment, Political Violence and the Rule of Law in Upper Canada,” Ontario History 79 (1987); Romney, “Very Late Loyalist Fantasies: Nos­ talgic Tory ‘History’ and the Rule of Law in Upper Canada,” in W. Wesley Pue and Barry Wright, eds., Canadian Perspectives on Law and Society: Issues in Legal History (Ottawa, 1988); and see the work of Baker and Howes cited therein. 36 Peter J. Smith, “The Ideological Origins of Canadian Confederation,” Cana­ dian Journal of Political Science 29 (1987); Janet Ajzenstat, “Durham and Robinson: Political Faction and Moderation,” Journal of Canadian Studies 25 (1991). See also Peter J. Smith, “The Dream of Political Union: Loyal­ ism, Toryism and the Federal Idea in Pre-Confederation Canada,” in Ged Martin, ed., The Causes of Canadian Confederation (Fredericton, 1990), and Peter J. Smith, “Civic Humanism vs. Liberalism— Fitting the Loyal­ ists In,” Journal of Canadian Studies 26 (1991). J.G.A. Pocock’s classic work is The Machiavellian Moment; Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975). 37 Gordon T. Stewart, The Origins of Canadian Politics: A Comparative Ap­ proach (Vancouver, 1986); S.J.R. Noel, Patrons, Clients, Brokers: Ontario Society and Politics, 1791-1896 (Toronto, 1990). For a lucid discussion of the work of Stewart, Smith and Ajzenstat, see Jeremy Rayner, “The Very Idea of Canadian Political Thought: In Defence of Historicism,” Journal of Canadian Studies 26 (1991). 38 Hibbitts, “Progress and Principle,” 517-29; Baker, “Reconstitution of Up­ per Canadian Legal Thought,” p. 234. 39 See “Upper Canada and the Conservative Tradition.” 40 Patterson, “Whiggery, Nationality, and the Upper Canadian Reform Tra­ dition,” Canadian Historical Review 56 (1975); “An Enduring Canadian Myth: Responsible Government and the Family Compact,” Journal of Canadian Studies 12 (1977). 41 Elwood H. Jones, “Localism and Federalism in Upper Canada to 1865,” in Bruce W. Hodgins et al., eds., Federalism in Canada and Australia: The Early Years (Waterloo, Ontario, 1978); B.P.N. Beaven, “A Last Hurrah: Studies in Liberal Party Development and Ideology in Ontario, 1878-1893,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Toronto, 1981. 42 Robert C. Vipond, Liberty and Community: Canadian Federalism and the Failure of the Constitution (Albany, NY, 1991); see esp. pp. 10, 12, 73. 43 David Mills, The Idea of Loyalty in Upper Canada, 1784-1850 (Montreal, 1988); and see Romney, “From the Rule of Law to Responsible Govern­ ment,” p. 112. 44 See these works of Paul Romney: “From the Rule of Law to Responsible Government,” p. 105-12; “Reinventing Upper Canada: American Immi­ grants, Upper Canadian History, English Law and the Alien Question,” in Roger Hall et al., eds., Patterns of the Past: Interpreting Ontario’s History (Toronto, 1988), pp. 98-101; “The Nature and Scope of Provincial Auton­ omy: Sir Oliver Mowat, the Quebec Resolutions, and the construction of

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45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54

55

56 57

58 59

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the British North America Act,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 25 (1992); Sir Oliver Mowat,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. XIII (forthcoming). See “The Ontario Political Culture: A Study in Complexities,” Chapter Twelve in this volume. Jane Errington, The Lion, the Eagle, and Upper Canada; a Developing Canadian Ideology (Montreal and Kingston, 1987). C.R.W. Biggar, Sir Oliver Mowat: A Biographical Sketch, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1905), I, pp. 94-95. Ajzenstat, “Durham and Robinson” ; Romney, “From the Rule of Law to Responsible Government.” Cook, “Canadian Conservative Tradition,” p. 36. See “Conservatism and Political Development: The Canadian Case,” Chap­ ter Ten in this volume. See “Upper Canada and the Conservative Tradition,” Chapter Nine in this volume. J.K. Johnson, Becoming Prominent: Regional Leadership in Upper Canada, 1791-1841 (Kingston and Montreal, 1989), p. 145; see also pp. 140,148-54. Paul Romney, “A Man Out of Place: The Life of Charles Fothergill; Natu­ ralist, Businessman, Journalist, Politician, 1782-1840,” Ph.D. thesis, Uni­ versity of Toronto (1981), pp. 298-303, 313-21, 403. Arthur R.M. Lower, “Nationalism and the Canadian Historian,” Canadian Historical Review 66 (1985), p. 543; Romney, “On the Eve of the Rebellion,” p. 200. “It is astonishing with what tenacity a Canadian farmer adheres to his party Shibboleth” : Smith, Canada and the Canadian Question, p. 140. “The great mass of the voters, more particularly in the rural ridings, adhere very firmly to one or other of [the] two parties and are very slow to change” : Sir Richard Cartwright, Reminiscences (Toronto, 1912), p. 22. “In Canada ideas are not needed to make parties, for these can live by heredity and . . . by memories of past combats” : James Bryce, Modem Democracies, 2 vols. (London, 1921), I, 528. Bryce’s remark reflects personal observations made in the 1890s. Quoted in Fred Landon, Western Ontario and the American Frontier (1941; reprinted Ottawa, 1967), p. 232. Graham White, “Social Change and Political Stability in Ontario: Elec­ toral Forces, 1867-1977,” Ph.D. thesis, McMaster University (1977); see esp. p. 236. White’s study is usefully complemented by Douglas O. Bald­ win, “Political and Social Behaviour in Ontario, 1879-1891: A Quantitative Approach,” Ph.D. thesis, York University, 1973. Baldwin’s study is con­ fined to the four federal elections of this period. See “Liberal Consensus or Ideological Battleground: Some Reflections on the Hartz Thesis.” See John English, “The Second Time Around: Political Scientists Writ­ ing History,” Canadian Historical Review 67 (March, 1986), pp. 1-16; see

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also Colin Read, “Conflict to Consensus: The Political Culture of Upper Canada,” Acadiensis 19 (Spring, 1990), pp. 169-85, for a recent overview.

I Sermon Literature and Canadian Intellectual History 1 See especially the two chapters entitled “The Elizabethan Assumptions.” 2 S.D. Clark, Church and Sect in Canada (Toronto, 1948). 3 Charles Inglis, A Sermon Preached in the Parish Church of St. Paul in Halifax on Friday, April 25, 1794• Being the day appointed by Proclamation for a General Fast and Humiliation in His Majesty’s Province of Nova Scotia (Halifax, 1794), p. 24. 4> See R.R. Palmer, Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760-1800 (Princeton, 1959), chap. VII. 5 Charles Inglis, Steadfastness in Religion and Loyalty Recommended, in a Sermon Preached before the Legislature of His Majesty’s Province o f Nova Scotia . . . Sunday, April 7, 1793 (Halifax, 1793), p. 22n. 6 Andrew Brown, The Perils of the Time, and the Purposes for which they are Appointed. A Sermon Preached on the Last Sabbath of the Year 1794 (Halifax, 1795), p. 27. 7 Ibid., p. 28. 8 Inglis, Steadfastness in Religion and Loyalty, pp. 15, 16n. 9 Brown, Perils of the Time, pp. 29-30. 10 Ibid., p. 30. II Bishop William Warburton, Alliance of Church and State (London, 1766). 12 Inglis, Steadfastness in Religion and Loyalty, pp. 9-12. The Rev. John Burns, Presbyterian minister of Stamford, Upper Canada, could find no other way to express this idea than by enunciating the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, in words virtually those of James I! “Kings are God’s deputies, or vicegerents, here upon earth. They derive their power from him, and are the instruments, which his providence has made choice of, to govern and protect the world.” True Patriotism; o Sermon Preached in the Presbyterian Church in Stamford, Upper Canada, on the 3rd day of June, 1814• • • • (Montreal, 1814), p. 10. Upper Canada, the nursery of a variety of out-of-the-way political notions during these years, presents no more extraordinary spectacle than this revival of divine-rightism by a spiritual descendant of John Knox and the Melvilles. 13 Inglis, Steadfastness in Religion and Loyalty, pp. 12-13. 14 Brown, Perils of the Time, p. 31. A representative of Catholic development of similar themes is Rev. Edmund Burke, Letter of Instruction to the Catholic Missionaries of Nova Scotia (Halifax, 1804). 15 Brown, Perils of the Time, p. 31. 16 Inglis, Steadfastness in Religion and Loyalty, p. 17. 17 Mather Byles, The Victory Ascribed to God. . . . (Saint John, N.B., 1798), p. 5. 18 Burns, 7V«e Patriotism, p. 15; Inglis, Steadfastness in Religion and Loyalty, pp. 17, 22.

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19 Jacob Mountain, Sermon Preached at Quebec January 10, 1799 . . . for General Thanksgiving (Quebec, 1799), p. 29. 20 Brown, Perils of the Time, pp. 34-35. 21 Inglis, Steadfastness in Religion and Loyalty, p. 18. 22 Brown, Perils of the Time, p. 19. 23 Inglis, Sermon . . . for a General Fast and Humiliation, pp. 31, 23. 24 Ibid., pp. 24-25; Brown, Perils of the Time, p. 24. 25 Byles, Victory Ascribed to God, pp. 9, 12. 26 Mountain, Sermon . . . for General Thanksgiving, pp. 15-17. 27 Ibid., pp. 25-30. 28 John Strachan, Sermon Preached at York, Upper Canada, on the Third of June, being the Day Appointed for a General Thanksgiving (Montreal, 1814), p. 5. 29 Ibid., pp. 29-30. 30 Ibid., p. 8. 31 Ontario Archives, Strachan Papers, Sermon on text “And thy judgements are as the light that goeth forth,” Hosea 6: 5, delivered December 14, 1838. 32 Strachan, Sermon . . . for a General Thanksgiving, p. 38. 33 Ontario Archives, Strachan Papers, Sermon on text “But Godliness is prof­ itable unto all things,” I Timothy 4: 8, first delivered September 24, 1824. All subsequent quotations are from this sermon.

2 God’s Peculiar Peoples 1 William Stoughton, “ ‘New’ England’s true interest” ; Thomas Shepherd, “A defence of the answer made unto the nine questions or positions sent from New England against the reply thereto by Mr. John BaH” ; in Perry Miller, ed., The American Puritans: their prose and poetry (New York, 1956), pp. 26-27, 116. 2 John A. Mackay, Heritage and Destiny (New York, 1943), p. 105. 3 John Davis, Life and Times of the Rev. Harris Harding (Charlottetown, 1866), appendix. 4 Henry Alline, Two mites cast into the offering of God for the benefit of mankind (Dover, N.H., 1804), pp. 127, 133, 134. 5 Joshua Marsden, The narrative of a mission to Nova Scotia, New Bruns­ wick, and the Somers Islands (Plymouth, 1816), p. 72; George Paterson, A memoir of Dr. James MacGregor (Edinburgh, 1859), Ch. 1, passim; James MacGregor, Letter . . . to the General Associate Synod (Paisley, 1793), p. 12; Paterson, Memoir, p. 90. 6 Duncan McColl, “ M em oir o f the Rev. Duncan McColl,” Methodist Magazine (1841), p. 301. 7 Marsden, Narrative, pp. 40, 62-63, 70, 95. 8 Ibid., p. 39. The sectarians’ belief in the immediate punishment of trans­ gressors came under frequent attack from churchmen. Bishop Charles In­ glis thought it was the result of a gross misreading of Scripture. During the Jewish theocracy, such situations occurred, but under the Christian dispensation, “when the whole will of God, and the plan of redemption,

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11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21

22 23

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are explicitly revealed,” punishment was reserved to a future state. See Charles Inglis, A charge delivered to the clergy of Nova Scotia at the trien­ nial visitation of Holden in the Town of Halifax in the month of June, 1791 (Halifax, 1792), p. 33. The narrative was published in London in 1790. Marsden, Narrative, p. 63. According to Bishop Inglis, “enthusiasm, when applied to religion, signifies a belief in private revelations, calls, or some commission from the Deity. . . . In general, this proceeds from a heated or disordered imagination; the suggestions of which are mistaken for luminous communications from God.” Charge to the clergy (1791), p. 23. As will be seen, Anglicans were not immune to luminous communications. Marsden, Narrative, pp. 71, 93. Andrew Brown, The perils of the time, and the purposes for which they are appointed (Halifax, 1794), pp. 30-31. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., pp. 31-35, 36, 39. Charles Inglis, A sermon preached in the parish church of St. Paul at Halifax on Friday, April 25, 1794> being the day appointed by proclamation for a general fast and humiliation in His Majesty’s Province of Nova Scotia (Halifax, 1794), pp. 30-31. Ibid., pp. 23, 27-28. Ibid., pp. 14, 24-25; Charles Inglis, Steadfastness in religion and loyalty recommended (London, 1793), p. 18. Mather Byles, The victory ascribed to God: a sermon delivered December 2d, 1798, on the late signal successes granted to His Majesty’s arms (Saint John, 1798), pp. 5, 9, 12, 15. Jacob Mountain, Sermon preached at Quebec, January 10, 1799 . . . for general thanksgiving (Quebec, 1799), pp. 7-8. Ibid., pp. 15-17, 26-30. Charles Inglis, A charge delivered to the Clergy of the Diocese o f Nova Scotia . . . in 1803 (Halifax, 1804), pp. 8, 22-23. By this time Inglis’ mind had taken an apocalyptic turn. Since it was probable that the Seven Last Judgements had begun, it was now necessary to establish the equiva­ lences among the Little Horn of Daniel, the Whore of Babylon, the Roman Catholic Church, and Napoleon the Antichrist. Ibid., 44-47. Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (London, 1957), pp. 73. A sense of national mission arising from the experiences of the war was not confined to the ministers of the Anglican Church. Thomas McCulloch, who had joined McGregor at Pictou in 1803, was proud of Britain’s role as “the bulwark of liberty and the refuge of oppressed nations.” But to his mind, the time of troubles through which the world was passing had been marked out by Providence as the prelude to a great revival of religion. In this coming resurgence, Britain’s glory was to be religious, not political. “Our native country is invested with honours more transcendent and glo­ rious: it has (a witness in heaven’ and 'a record on high’. The churches of Britain are the glory of Christ, and, by divine grace, they have become

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the centre of a zeal for religion which is spreading like a torrent.” Britain had been elected to carry the gospel “to the whole family of man.” The providential theology thus provides a link between the imperial and mis­ sionary urges, Anglicans emphasizing the one, the dissenter McCulloch the other. See Thomas McCulloch, The prosperity of the church in troublous times (Halifax, 1814), pp. 9-10, 23. 24 John Strachan, A sermon preached at York, Upper Canada, on the third of June, being the day appointed for a general thanksgiving (Montreal, 1814); Ontario Archives, Strachan Papers, MS sermon on the text “And thy judge­ ments are as the light that goeth forth,” Hosea 6: 5. The MS sermon has the notation in Strachan’s hand: “Toronto, 14 Deer. 1837. A Fast day by public proclamation on account of the rebellion & attacks from the U. States.” Strachan was a year out in his reckoning. No attacks from the United States had occurred by December 14, 1837, nor had the secret societies like the Sons of Liberty or the Patriot Hunters, to which Stra­ chan refers in the body of the sermon, yet been organized. On December 8, 1838, The Church published Lieutenant-Governor Arthur’s proclamation fixing Friday, December 14,1838, as a day of public fasting and humiliation. Attacks from the United States took place very shortly before that date, on November 11 at Prescott and on December 4 at Windsor and Sandwich. Most of the superscriptions on Strachan’s MS sermons appear to have been made by him in the 1850s. 25 Sermon of 1838, p. 4; Sermon preached at York, p. 5; Sermon of 1838, p. 2. 26 Sermon of 1838, pp. 7, 8; Sermon preached at York, p. 6. 27 The tradition has produced many forms of theological exotica in Scotland. The Gifford Lecturer at the University of Glasgow in 1897 made a gal­ lant attempt to combine the notion of “elect race” with the new biology of Darwin, equating “finest” with election. Why, he wondered, had “Provi­ dence . . . hitherto shown a preference for small nations as its instruments: Israel, Greece . . . the inhabitants of the British Isles?” Alexander Balmain Bruce, The Providential Order of the World (New York, 1897), p. 262. 28 William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London, 1963). 29 “Times” is the scriptural term for changes of providence, as in Acts 1: 7: “It is not for you to know the times and the seasons which the Father has put in his own power,” a passage Strachan and brethren seem to have overlooked.

3 Canadians View the United States: Colonial Attitudes from the Era of the War of 1812 to the Rebellions of 1837 1 Edward Winslow to Sir John Wentworth, 24 June 1800, in W.O. Raymond, ed., Winslow Papers, A.D. 1776-1826 (Saint John, N.B., 1901), p. 451. 2 D.C. Harvey, “Uniacke’s Memorandum to Windham, 1806,” Canadian His­ torical Review 17 (1937), p. 46.

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3 Kingston Gazette, 30 January 1811. 4 Strachan Papers (MSS in the Ontario Archives, Toronto), a series of letters from 25 August 1799 to 21 October 1809 to Dr. James Brown, St. Andrews University, Scotland. 5 Harvey, “Uniacke’s Memorandum,” p. 43. 6 Mr. Justice William Campbell, charge to the Grand Jury, in Upper Canada Gazette, 1 April 1822. 7 Harvey, “Uniacke’s Memorandum,” p. 43. 8 Ibid., p. 46; D.W. Parker, “Secret Reports of John Howe, 1808,” American Historical Review 17 (1911-12), p. 345. 9 Baldwin Papers (MSS in the Toronto Public Library), “Notes at Hustings,” undated but probably June, 1820; John Strachan, A Discourse on the Char­ acter of King George the Third, Addressed to the Inhabitants of British America (Montreal, 1810), p. 54. 10 Harvey, “Uniacke’s Memorandum,” p. 46. 11 For an estimate of the role of the clergy in this process, see S.F.Wise, “Sermon Literature and Canadian Intellectual History,” Chapter One in this volume. 12 Parker, “Secret Reports of John Howe,” pp. 79, 82, 98, 343. 13 Ibid., p. 340. 14 Ibid., p. 84. 15 Ibid., p. 85. 16 E.g., Milton Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind: Investigations into the Nature of Belief Systems and Personality Systems (New York, 1960), pas­ sim. 17 Charles Inglis to J.G. Simcoe, 13 March 1793, in E.A. Cruikshank, ed., The Correspondence of Lieut. Governor John Graves Simcoe (Toronto, 1 92326), IV, p. 354; Parker, “Secret Reports of John Howe,” p. 345; Halifax Weekly Chronicle, 31 July 1812. See also Halifax Journal, 3 August 1812. 18 L.A.H. Smith, “ Le Canadien and the British Constitution, 1806-1810,” Canadian Historical Review 38 (1957), pp. 93-108. 19 Le Canadien, 24 December 1808; H. Tetu and C.-O. Gagnon, Mandements, lettres pastorales et circulaires des Eveques de Quebec, 3 vols. (Quebec, 1888), III, pp. 86-97. See especially Mgr. J.-O. Plessis, “Mandement pur des prieres publiques,” 29 October 1812. 20 E.g., Le Canadien, 12 December 1807; 24 December 1808. 21 Strachan, Discourse, pp. 22, 23-24, 54, 64. 22 In 1806, R.J. Uniacke argued that it was the aim of the United States to “revolutionize” the West Indies, “old