Voice of the Vanishing Minority: Robert Sellar and the Huntingdon Gleaner, 1863+1919 9780773567252

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Voice of the Vanishing Minority Robert Sellar and the Huntingdon Gleaner, 1863-1919

At the turn of the century Robert Sellar, editor of the Huntingdon Gleaner in Quebec's historic Chateauguay Valley, was the mostquoted rural newspaperman in Canada. His controversial opinions on Confederation, national policy, and especially French-Canadian nationalism sparked debate across Canada and around the world. Widely regarded as the authentic voice of the English-speaking minority, Sellar attempted to alert the rest of Canada to the threat of ultramontane clericalism and French-Canadian nationalism emanating from Quebec. In his newspaper and his book, The Tragedy of Quebec, Sellar lamented the exodus of Quebec's English-speaking farmers from the Eastern Townships, attributing it to the frenchification of the region. His provocative views were shared by grass-roots supporters in Ontario and the Prairies but were largely dismissed as Anglo-Protestant francophobia and bigotry. Drawing on Sellar's diary, the Gleaner, and a wealth of other original materials, Robert Hill recounts Sellar's one-man crusade for English rights in Quebec, a crusade for which he endured obloquy, legal harassment, physical violence, arson, clerical condemnation, and the indifferent support of the people he was championing. Exploring the earliest origins of "English exodus" and the Englishspeaking minority rights battle in Quebec, Voice of the Vanishing Minority makes for timely reading in light of recent developments in Quebec. ROBERT HILL taught history at John Abbott College. He is retired and lives in Montreal.

Voice of the Vanishing Minority Robert Sellar and the Huntingdon Gleaner 1863-1919 R O B E R T HILL

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

McGill-Queen's University Press 1998 ISBN 0-7735-1736-7 Legal deposit third quarter 1998 Bibliotheque rationale du Quebec Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Hill, Robert, 1932Voice of the vanishing minority: Robert Sellar and the Huntingdon Gleaner, 1863-1919 Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1736-7

i. Sellar, Robert, 1841-1919. 2. Huntingdon gleaner. 3. Canada - English-French relations - History. 4. Newspaper editors - Quebec (Province) - Eastern Townships - Biography. 5. Eastern Townships (Quebec) - Biography, i. Title. PN4919.H83G58 1998 97i.4'6o3'o92 098-900397-3 Typeset in Palatino 10/12 by Caractera inc., Quebec City

To April

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Contents

Illustrations Preface

ix

xi

1 The Journalist and His Field 3 2 Confederation and the New Era 42 3 The Church, the State, and the Gleaner 77 4 Under the National Policy 107 5 Fighting the "Rebel Movement" 145 6 A Liberal of the Old School

190

7 The Tragedy of Quebec 236 Appendix: Gleaner Songs and Poems 301 Notes 307 Bibliography 349 Index 365

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Illustrations

Robert Sellar frontispiece The sailing of the Inkerman, 1856 5 The district of Beauharnois at the time of Confederation 13 The first Gleaner, 1863 27 A page from Robert Sellar's diary, 1863 32 Job printing for the Huntingdon fair, 1868 40 Sellar's sketch of the Fenian position, 1870 68 Prince Arthur in Huntingdon, 1870 70 Reward for the Gleaner arsonist, 1870 72 Mary Watson 143 The hard truth about circulation 198 The family home on Chateauguay Street 202 Father and son 205 Robert Sellar in his prime 228 The historic Chateauguay Valley 267 Leslie Sellar goes to war, 1917 273

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Preface

This study is based upon original materials that I discovered during the late 19605 in preparing my doctoral thesis, "Robert Sellar and the Huntingdon Gleaner: The Conscience of Rural Protestant Quebec 1863-1919" (McGill University, 1970). Chief among these was the Huntingdon Gleaner itself, virtually complete in its office of publication, along with intact files of lesser-known newspapers of the region. My search also unearthed an important cache of Robert Sellar's personal papers - his diary and that of his brother Thomas, his business records, correspondence, handwritten manuscripts, scrapbooks, and dozens of miscellaneous documents he deemed sufficiently important to save. This collection now forms part of the Robert Sellar Papers bequeathed to the National Archives of Canada. It is sad to realize that so many who assisted me back then have passed away. The late Keith Howden permitted me to ransack old cabinets in the Gleaner office and remove documents and newspaper files for weeks on end. The late Gwendolyn B. Sellar of Ottawa was most gracious in granting me access to Robert Watson Sellar's personal family reminiscences. The late Alister Somerville of Hemmingford kindly allowed me to use Andrew Somerville's diary. The late Dr David C. Munroe of the Superior Council of Education took a personal interest in my project and favoured me with much enlightening discussion about Protestant education, the Chateauguay Valley, and Robert Sellar. I retain fond memories of the late Leslie Rennie, J. Orville Gamble, and other remarkable oldtimers who were so willing to share their personal recollections of my subject.

xii Preface

More recently I was assisted by Steven Bonspille of the Kanesatake Cultural Centre in my search for information about Chief Joseph and his family. I am indebted to Professor Michael Bliss, whose interest in Sellar encouraged me to persevere with the revision of my thesis after so many years, and to Lynn and Michael Green of Carnation, Washington, whose belief in me helped keep me focused on my task. I am thankful for the love and understanding of my wife Nell, who stuck by me when I came down with cancer, and of my daughter April, who gave me my best reason for fighting back. Thanks are also due to Phillip Norton of Chateauguay for his expert help with my faded old illustrations, and to my longtime friends and teaching colleagues Gerald Lavalley, who rescued me from countless computer crises, and Dr James Perry Vanstone, who never offered an opinion that was not helpful. And without the moral and material support of the directors and members of the Chateauguay Valley Historical Society, who are dedicated to keeping alive the history of the region served by Robert Sellar, my humble contribution might never have made it to the printer.

The Canadian Cleaner.

RULES

FOR

MY CONDUCT

1 Rather to offend half a dozen friends, than insert anything personal or uninteresting to my readers. 2 To consider whether I am right in forming a decision, and then to stick to it no matter how unpopular or offensive it may be. 3 Never to seek any office whatever. 4 Never to accept a single sixpence as a gratuity from any man, but to be most scrupulous in preserving my independence. Diary of Robert Sellar, i October 1864

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i The Journalist and His Field Canada! That ungenerous land That grudged the crust I hardly earned Withheld the kindly word that was my due Verse fragment in the handwriting of Robert Sellar

FROM THE OLD WORLD TO THE 1794-1856

NEW,

The Sellar family originated in northeast Scotland, with branches in Aberdeenshire, Banffshire, and along the Moray Firth into Inverness. A tattered journal and inscriptions in a well-used King James Bible passed down from Robert Sellar's father depict sober, industrious, well-educated, and staunchly Protestant folk. Robert's paternal grandfather was a blacksmith who won an award in 1824 for designing a cartwheel "with knaves, spokes, and felloes entirely of malleable iron." His grandmother was a schoolmistress who had taught the poet Dr Alexander Geddes to read and write. His father, Alexander Sellar, was born 20 April 1794 in the parish of Rathven, county Banff. He was, in the opinion of the Anglican clergyman of Inverness, "a steady young man of excellent behaviour and good character, well informed and well rooted in the true principles of Christianity, a staunch Member of the Church and also a Communicant." Patrick Sellar, an uncle whose assistance Alexander sought on leaving home in 1815 to study for the legal profession, saw in him a youth of "sound honest principles," devoid of pride or vanity, "for if his probity and industry don't make a man of him, he knows he must sink to nothing."1 At twenty-five years of age Alexander Sellar was certified as a writer of law, and in June 1821, after two threadbare years in Edinburgh, he was admitted to the legal profession as a notary public.

4 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

Failing to secure a station in Edinburgh, he drifted through Aberdeen, the small coastal port of Peterhead, his boyhood home at Rathven, and thence to Morayshire. "I have peregrinated to and fro like the dove from the Ark seeking dry land to settle on," he lamented in his journal, "but have found none." His peregrinations terminated for a while in Elgin. In 1822 he entered into partnership with another notary, married Isabella Grant of Strathspey, and established a home for their first five children Fennel, Alexander, Janet, Thomas, and Isabella. But nine years later the wanderings began anew. The sixth child, Charlotte, was born in Edinburgh. Henry, who died in infancy, and Elspet were born in Dundee. Robert, the second youngest of the large family, was born in Glasgow on i August 1841. He was baptized there on 17 November 1844 along with Charles, born in August of that year. For several years Alexander Sellar held the position of factor of an estate of farms and cottages, but an impending subdivision of the property prompted him to consider emigrating with his family to Canada. Thomas was the first to go. Sailing for Quebec aboard the Elf on i July 1853, he found employment as a countinghouse clerk at George Brown's Toronto Globe. On 6 December 1854 Alexander and his daughter Isabella embarked on the John Baring for New York and reached Toronto in February. Robert, at age twelve, was left responsible for the welfare of his mother, his sisters Charlotte and Elspet, and his younger brother Charles, as the older children were no longer with the family. He dropped out of school in May 1854 to work in the countinghouse of a Glasgow manufacturing firm, Tillie & Henderson, at three shillings a week; in October 1855 he was promoted to entry clerk at an annual salary of £15. In the summer of 1856 his employer, testifying to his "correctness and activity," gave him a letter stating that he was being released at his own request to join his father in Toronto.2 On 16 July 1856 Isabella Sellar and her four children boarded the Inkerman at Glasgow as steerage passengers bound for Quebec. The vessel was towed to the tail of the bank, where it was delayed three frustrating days for repairs. It set sail the evening of 19 July but was becalmed for another day off Ailsa Craig. At night the wind freshened, and in the morning the impatient passengers, on their way at last, were able to discern the green coast of Ireland through the mist. The sights, sounds, and smells of the ocean crossing, judging from vivid descriptions in his fictional writing of later years, left an indelible impression on the memory of the young emigrant. On 18 August, after a rough passage, land was sighted, and a river pilot came aboard to guide the ship up the majestic St Lawrence. By 23 August

5 The Journalist and His Field

The sailing of the Inkerman, 1856

the Inkerman reached Riviere du Loup; five days later it anchored at Quebec. Isabella Sellar and her children transferred to the Napoleon the following morning, and Thomas was on hand to meet them when they set foot on Canadian soil for the first time at Montreal. But it was not until 2 September, after an interminable delay at Kingston aboard the Banshee, that the weary little party straggled into Thomas's

6 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

boarding house in Toronto, their seven-week odyssey finally at an end. Three weeks later Robert began work at the Globe as an apprentice compositor at two dollars a week.3 Thomas Sellar, meanwhile, had managed to secure a niche in the developing field of Canadian journalism. For over a year he managed the Globe's countinghouse, earning the trust of the somewhat testy George Brown. He contributed articles in the Globe's pungent style and soon became sub-editor under Brown's brother Gordon. As Brown's political activities intensified, Thomas was loaned money to establish a Grit organ in Tory territory. Taking Robert with him, he acquired the Brampton Weekly Times, dedicating its opening number of 6 March 1857 to the Globe platform. But Peel County turned a deaf ear, and Thomas fell into a ruinous dispute with his printers. The Times floundered after fourteen issues, and disaster was narrowly averted by its sale to George Tye.4 In 1858, leaving Robert to resume "miserably paid" work at the Globe, Thomas invested in part ownership of the Toronto Echo and Protestant Episcopal Recorder, the organ of the evangelical branch of the Anglican Church in Canada. Primarily a political writer, he left religious articles to clergymen through whose efforts the Echo was periodically subsidized, and whose antagonism towards the Church of Rome and opposition to "the semi-popish party" in the Anglican Church were well-received by Protestant churchmen. The Echo, rarely exceeding 1200 in circulation and often in financial straits, was no moneymaker, but it sufficed to establish Thomas Sellar in journalism. By 1860, following the death of George Henry Halse, a Toronto bookkeeper who had married Thomas's sister Isabella, Thomas was sole proprietor. He was the moving spirit behind the founding of the Canadian Press Association in 1859. As its first secretary-treasurer and later its president, he was credited by his professional colleagues with overcoming the initial apathy of Canadian newspapermen toward the idea of an organization dedicated to promoting their common interests.5 THE M A K I N G OF A J O U R N A L I S T , 1856-63

Robert Sellar would recall the Toronto of his youth as "an attractive little city of over thirty thousand inhabitants; large enough to have somewhat city features yet not so large that the bulk of its residents were strangers to one another, or that their interests and tastes moved in widely separate grooves." He walked to work under wooden awnings spanning the sunny side of the streets, so that "on a rainy day you could walk from Queen to King streets without a

7 The Journalist and His Field

drop reaching you." Passing fugitive slaves, branded and scarred beneath tattered shirts as they split wood along the curb of King Street, he would enter the Globe office for his daily round of toil.6 After work, on streets resounding with youthful cries of "Here ye are for the Ev-ning Leedar!" and the tinkling bells of hot muffin vendors in white aprons, the young expatriate would move with interest through the expanding city's only slum, Stanley Street, "where goats and pigs shared the sidewalk and cowbells were heard night and evening." Or he might stroll down to the quay to mingle with the expectant knot of people clustered there to watch for the smoke of the Montreal steamer bearing the mail. He saw political victories celebrated by torchlight parades "with spouting Roman candles," and visiting dignitaries being driven in open carriages up College Street to be treated to a sail down the bay. In the winter there were visits to the lyceum and the crystal palace, or to St Lawrence Hall to hear the lecturers or (if he could afford it) the touring Scottish entertainers. Down at the lakefront he would ponder his future as he watched the Rochester steamer, unable to reach Queen's Wharf, unloading passengers and freight upon the ice. Such small pleasures were scant consolation for a young man whose early experience in Canada was one of grinding poverty and hardship, endured largely out of devotion to family duty. Letters that Robert wrote to the Glasgow Herald in 1858 and 1859 and to the Journal of the Board of Arts and Manufactures in 1861 tell a story of disenchantment - of how the Scottish emigrant finds, after "a weary and uncomfortable journey," that Canada is not "the land of plenty, universal comfort and independence" he had imagined. Poverty, taxes, low pay, poor housing, and high living costs were as characteristic of the New World as of the Old. "Of printers," he reflected ruefully as he studied for his mechanic's certificate, "there are many out of work," and "the general wages is from seven to nine dollars." Though he denied that his letters were written by one who had been "soured in temper, and prejudiced against the country by disappointment," the tone of disillusionment is unmistakable.7 Times were indeed hard in Canada, and he had been "ungenerously" rebuffed by his foreman when he asked for an additional two dollars a week. Alexander Sellar, employed by land speculators, spent months in the bush outside Toronto and returned to the city with fever and a bad cough. On 26 October 1860 Thomas came home from work to news that his father had suddenly passed away. "The family bore the death of poor father with resignation," he noted in his diary after the burial service at St James' Cemetery. But Robert's older brother, drinking to excess, falling in and out of love, and squandering his

8 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

money accordingly, proved unequal to the responsibilities that devolved from the loss of their father. In 1862 he moved the Echo to Montreal and became unreliable as a breadwinner for the struggling family. Young Charles, restless in his menial job at the Globe, yearned to escape to the excitement of the American war. It was Robert who emerged as the only stable pillar of support for his mother and two unmarried sisters. On 13 June 1862 he left Toronto aboard the Champlain for a better position at the Montreal Herald, only to be paid eight dollars at the end of a fortnight and discharged. He was hired immediately by the Montreal printer John Lovell at five dollars a week, but in September came word that his mother was dangerously ill. Arranging to trade jobs with Charles, Robert boarded the train and returned to the underpaid work of typesetter in the Globe's composing department.8 The winter of 1862 reduced the family to desperate straits. By April the largest sum Robert had received for a week's work was six dollars. He was "so hard up for cash" that even his subscription to Mechanics' Institute had to lapse. His mother rallied, however; "rescued from the Jaws of Death," exulted Thomas, who had not seen her for a year. On 24 May Robert took her outside to see the military review. "Mother had a dram," he marvelled, "she's no sae auld." In June he took her to a photographer to "get her likeness," but could not afford his own. "It breaks my heart my means prevent me from doing more for her," he grieved. "We had a hard time of it last winter," he wrote Thomas with a touch of bitterness, "but that's past now and there's no use speaking of it."9 Though the ordeal had been difficult, by the fall of 1863 Robert Sellar had acquired a unique set of qualifications in the various departments of journalism. His Scottish schooling had familiarized him with Burns and introduced him to Shakespeare; his family was one in which the literary graces were revered. He began to employ precious leisure moments in creative writing. His first published work, a romantic Scottish tale called "The Scarlet Cloak," appeared above his initials in Waverley Magazine on 10 July 1858, just before his seventeenth birthday. The delicate sentiments that typify his romantic tales contrast sharply with the tough-minded editorials that would become his hallmark. He never wrote for the Globe, developing his editorial style through contributions to the Echo, the Prince Albert Ontario Observer, the Uxbridge North Ontario Advocate, and other small journals. Already it was beginning to crystallize into terse, brusque prose, remarkably clear and straightforward for that era of ponderous paragraphs. His interest in public affairs was stimulated by daily association with newspapers; his politics, judging

9 The Journalist and His Field

from an article he wrote favouring dissolution of the Canadian union in 1860, were radical Grit.10 In those days it was assumed that a publisher must himself be a practical printer. One day the son of a well-to-do Toronto family was brought to Gordon Brown to learn to be an editor. "When the lad appeared he was detailed to roll for a hand-press - two rolls and distribute - damn yer eyes - with added instructions as to the brayer," Sellar reminisced. The lad went home to his mother soiled with ink from head to foot and "did not return to his editorial class."11 The Globe was a hard school, but unexcelled as a proving ground for the aspiring journalist. Sellar's two years in a Glasgow countinghouse rounded out what was indeed a thorough apprenticeship for his profession. By the age of majority he was capable of performing every task in the publication of a newspaper. The methods and the men that had built the Globe into Canada's greatest newspaper also had an important formative influence upon Robert Sellar. George Sheppard was judged a competent assistant editor, capable of "expressing his views in a striking way," but a greater impact was made by his predecessor, James K. Edwards (a native of Huntingdon County), who could take down a three-hour parliamentary speech verbatim and condense the gist into a paragraph that omitted little save superfluous verbiage. Sellar's own appreciable ability as a reporter was enhanced by a unique system of shorthand that was probably acquired from Edwards.12 Sellar discerned that the Globe owed its preeminence not, as commonly supposed, to its politics but to its excellence as a purveyor of news: "Even people who did not like its politics read it first." Editorially, it was not George but the less obtrusive Gordon Brown who was judged "the best newspaperman Canada has yet known." George Brown's editorials were few and far between, according to Sellar, and easily identified by a prodigality of big-letter headings, capitals, italics, and other "grotesque methods of emphasis." But he was undeniably the master of his journal; its special character was an extension of his own. Prize fights, horse races, and the like were never advertised or reported, and the Sabbath was strictly observed at the Globe. Less exemplary, in Sellar's view, was Brown's practice of rewriting speeches for publication after he had already delivered them. He believed Brown's overweening desire for large circulation must have cost him a fortune in unpaid subscriptions.13 Politically, the George Brown of the 18503 was the incarnation of Sellar's ideals. Honest, energetic, and fearless, he had advocated prohibition when the very word invited derision. He had agitated to spare Upper Canada the "incubus" of an established Anglican

io Voice of the Vanishing Minority

Church and was currently combating similar pretensions on the part of the Roman Catholic clergy of Lower Canada. Even at Quebec, "where the very atmosphere is permeated by the spirit of the Papacy/' he courageously upheld the principle of representation by population. Robert Sellar never spoke with George Brown, and there is no indication that Upper Canada's mighty tribune ever noticed the lowly printer who watched him with such rapt attention, but the two were cut from the same cloth. "With Brown there was no middle course, he was one-sided to the verge of arrogance," wrote Sellar in igi/.14 For over half a century people had been saying the same thing about Robert Sellar. H U N T I N G D O N C O U N T Y AND REP BY POP, 1820-63

Robert Sellar's fateful venture into rural journalism had its origin in the political affairs of Huntingdon County - a corner of Canada East about which he knew absolutely nothing. Situated on the upper reaches of the Chateauguay River and watershed along sixty-five miles of American border, Huntingdon could hardly be called a typical Lower Canadian county. The nonfief lands that would later comprise its townships of Dundee, Elgin, Godmanchester, Hinchinbrook, Franklin, Havelock, and Hemmingford had lain beyond the pale of original French settlement. After the War of 1812 they had, unlike the Eastern Townships beyond the Richelieu, been kept in wilderness as a protective zone along the American frontier, discouraging any sizeable influx of either French Canadians or Americans, and were not opened for settlement until the 18205 and 18305. The opening of the Huntingdon townships coincided with the massive post-Napoleonic surge of direct immigration from the British Isles. Concession after concession was cleared by hardy bands of Scots, while significant pockets of North and South of Ireland settlement appeared. The only appreciable concentration of French Canadians lay along the south bank of the St Lawrence, where the municipal parish of St Anicet was erected in 1855 on lands detached from the township of Godmanchester. The census of 1861 lists 4,060 of Huntingdon's total population of 17,491 as of French origin. There were other counties in Lower Canada that could boast an even higher proportion of English-speaking inhabitants, but none was more thoroughly "British" than the Huntingdon townships. Robert Sellar would never gain unanimous acceptance of his leading opinions even in Huntingdon, where Roman Catholics accounted for a surprising 45 percent of the population due to the numerical strength

ii The Journalist and His Field

of the Irish. But it was one of the few areas of Lower Canada where his particular editorial policy could have been sustained at all.15 The pro-British character of Huntingdon County did not derive from numbers alone; there were compelling historical reasons for it as well. For the original settlers, while still clearing their farms in the newly opened townships, had felt threatened by the rising tide of French Canadian nationalism that manifested itself in the rebellions of 1837 and 1838. They resented Louis Joseph Papineau and the Lower Canadian assembly for their reluctance to open wild lands and their refusal to grant parliamentary representation to the Eastern Townships. Many had taken alarm at the wholesale abolition of English place-names that accompanied the redistribution of 1830. The name "Huntingdon," for example, had been replaced by "Beauharnois." The apprehensive English-speaking settlers accordingly looked to the governors and their appointed councils as the guardians of their rights. Papineau's agitation to reform the legislative council on the elective principle was viewed as a plausible device for wiping out British influence in its last Lower Canadian stronghold.16 In 1834 the British settlers in the Huntingdon townships organized themselves politically for the first time. They attempted unsuccessfully to unseat Jacob De Witt, an American-born hardware merchant of strong republican leanings, for his endorsement of Papineau's Ninety-Two Resolutions. The local Yankee element, headed by Joshua S. Lewis and Fisher Ames, comprised a scant 3 percent of the county's population and caused resentment by professing to speak, through De Witt, for the English-language minority as a whole. Their support for Papineau was generally attributed to an ill-concealed desire for annexation to the United States. The region remained quiet throughout 1837 but was the scene of many of the troubles that erupted during November of the following year. It is significant that the rebellion of 1838 was suppressed in large measure by the British farmers of southwestern Lower Canada themselves, with only scant and belated assistance from regular troops. While John Scriver led his Hemmingford men in their brave charge at Odelltown, volunteers from the western townships were blocking the advance of the Ste Martine rebels at Baker's farm. The rebellion, as experienced and interpreted by these settlers, was not a political movement but an ethnic one, aspiring to the elimination of hated English "bureaucrats" - a generic term applied even to farmers - from the national life of the French Canadians.17 Tensions generated by these events would mark the attitudes of those affected for years to come. Huntingdon's member of parliament, following the incorporation of the townships and St Anicet into a new and predominantly British

12 Voice of the Vanishing Minority county in 1853, was Robert Brown Somerville of St Michael's (Athelstan). His qualifications were impeccable. He had been a militia organizer in 1837 and 1838 and was a veteran of the confrontation at Baker's farm and the subsequent "march of spoliation" up the Bean River. Currently mayor of Huntingdon Village, he had been since 1834 the chief organizer and spokesman for the district's "British party." He had been opposed by James Davidson of Dewittville, a longtime rival in militia affairs, and by the village priest, Father Edmund Doyle, who had admonished his parishioners from the altar that it would never do to vote for an Orangeman. Somerville entered parliament, as was customary in those days of loose party ties, as an Independent, pledged only to consider measures in the interests of his constituents. His logrolling efforts on behalf of the county were successful in obtaining government authorization for such projects as the Huntingdon courthouse and registry office, financial aid for the incorporated academy erected at great sacrifice by the people in 1851, and for the unremunerative plank road that linked Huntingdon Village to the St Lawrence at Port Lewis (and in which he had a direct personal interest).18 It was also a local matter over which Somerville and the government parted company. Somerville wanted to locate the courthouse for the new judicial District of Beauharnois at the geographic centre of the three counties, in the English-speaking village of Durham (Ormstown). His proposal was rejected by George Etienne Cartier in favour of the predominantly French-speaking village of Beauharnois, inconveniently situated on the district's northern perimeter. Somerville's appeal to the Upper Canadian ministers was shrugged off with the explanation that Canada's "double-majority" system of government precluded interference with the will of the French majority in the neighbouring section - an arrangement he decided to construe as "French domination." On 13 July 1858 he caused a sensation by becoming the only representative from Canada East to advocate representation by population in the parliament of the Province of Canada - an act that set in motion the chain of events that would bring Robert Sellar to Huntingdon five years later.19 It is tempting, since other public men failed to join Somerville in embracing "rep by pop" as urged by their Upper Canadian compatriots and the Globe, to think that "French domination" might not really have been a bugbear to British Lower Canadians at all. Resistance to rep by pop, however, owed less to amity between the section's rival ethnic groups than to a calculated shift in the political strategy of Montreal's business leaders after their setbacks of the postrebellion era. "For long, long years the British of Lower Canada

13 The Journalist and His Field

The district of Beauharnois at the time of Confederation

had but one wish - an intimate union with Upper Canadians that the Province might be anglified," the Montreal Gazette explained, but "the ties of race and blood and language went for nothing in the race for office." Upper Canadian politicians had repeatedly scorned the Lower Canadian British in favour of governing alliances with the French majority; their support for responsible government had handed their compatriots and co-religionists over to the French Canadians without a tear.20 Britain's abolition of preferential duties on Canadian timber and wheat, a major reversal for Montreal businessmen, was seen as another betrayal. The rebellion losses bill of 1849, viewed by the Gazette as payment for treason, had been the last straw. Faithful subjects who "offered property, home, children, life itself, to keep this same Lower Canada to the British crown," had been forced to "put our hands in our pockets and pay the losses of the lambs that strove to blow the loyalty out of our hearts with gunpowder and balls and burn it out of our homes by the midnight torch." The Gazette failed to recall that the wealthiest mob ever seen in Canada had subsequently vented its spleen on the governor general and set the parliament buildings ablaze or that hundreds of its most respectable readers had signed a manifesto seeking annexation to the United States.21 Lower Canadian capitalists, unable to rel any longer on appointed governors and councils to advance their interests, turned

14 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

in the 18505 to elected politicians. John A. Macdonald, who owed his prominence in Upper Canada to Carder's Lower Canadian majority, showed them the way. "The truth is, you British Canadians can never forget that you were once supreme - that Jean Baptiste was once your hewer of wood and drawer of water," he counselled Brown Chamberlin of the Gazette. "No man in his senses can suppose that this country can for a century to come be governed by a totally unfrenchified government. If a Lower Canada British desires to conquer he must 'stoop to conquer.' He must make friends with the French."22 French Canadian leaders, seeking allies in their political struggle against rep by pop, appeared ready to drop their opposition to capitalism in return for a share of the profits. Cartier himself was a good example - a onetime rebel reinvented in the 18505 as a defender of big business and a solicitor for the Grand Trunk Railway. The Liberal-Conservative party spawned by his political marriage with Macdonald became the instrument to hand, and a rich yield of legislation favourable to canals, railways, and protective tariffs ensured Montreal's continued preeminence as the metropolis of Canada. Small wonder that those for whom the Gazette spoke had now "learned to cooperate with our French Canadian fellow countrymen, to appreciate more rationally their good qualities, to live in comparative peace and harmony with them."23 This elitist strategy of accommodation between the English-speaking business oligarchy and the French-speaking political majority would leave a permanent stamp on the leadership style of those purporting to represent the Englishspeaking people of Quebec. The new cynical tactics were reflected in the Gazette's riposte to the Globe's appeals on behalf of representation by population. Upper Canadians had taught the British of Lower Canada the "difficult lesson" that they were to be governed forever by a French-Canadian majority. Spurned Lower Canadians, "looking well to their material interests," now found it expedient to "retort the sneer" by making a bargain of their own with the French Canadians at Upper Canada's expense. "They don't like it," gloated the Gazette. "Nor did we. They compelled us to endure it. We compel them; and their screams at the infliction are rather pleasant than otherwise. 'Nous avons 1'avantage; profitons-en! '"24 Ideologically, the Gazette dismissed rep by pop as "absurd" Yankee demagoguery and democracy as a "fustian phrase which a nation of slaveholders put forth, as if in mockery," that all men were born free and equal. Proper representation required "a mixed basis of population and territory and great interests." Since Grit strength increased

15 The Journalist and His Field

with distance from Montreal, the metropolis would suffer if political control of the entire province was thrown into the hands of George Brown's western agrarian radicals, who did their buying in New York and imported via American canals. Their opposition to St Lawrence lighthouses, the deepening of Lake St Peter, and ad valorem duties had always been "war to the knife with Lower Canada."25 Too late had the Globe discovered that blood was thicker than water; money, as far as the Gazette and Montreal's prospering business leaders were concerned, was even thicker than blood. Whatever the reasons for Robert Somerville's conversion to the Grit cause of rep by pop, he found himself at once a celebrity in the columns of the exultant Globe and a bete noire in the Frenchlanguage press of Lower Canada. His position was not totally isolated in his own section, for Liberal papers like the Montreal Herald and Sherbrooke Gazette were giving guarded support to representation by population in 1858, while the independent Montreal Witness had already declared in favour of it. The Witness agreed with the Gazette that the 1841 union had reduced the British of Lower Canada to a "political nonenity," but deplored the current strategy of collaborating with French Canadians instead of Upper Canadians. "French domination," it believed, was still the overriding concern of British Lower Canadians and assimilation with Upper Canada a consummation they wished rather than dreaded. It heaped scorn upon the obsequious "class of dough-faces and cat's paws" who now misrepresented them by pretending otherwise.26 Somerville found his own constituents well disposed towards rep by pop and voted for it at every subsequent opportunity. Three years later the Globe was still praising his "solitary courage" as the only elected Lower Canadian to uphold the just rights of the west. On 5 April 1861, at the conclusion of a five-hour speech opposing any change of representation as a violation of the Act of Union, Cartier ominously predicted that the member for Huntingdon would not be returned in the next election. Ten days later, after Cartier had again attacked him in another long speech, Somerville evoked cheers from the Grit benches by daring the prime minister himself to come and run against him in Huntingdon. "You won't be elected, you may depend on it!" Cartier shouted, but Somerville continued undismayed. His closing remarks about the earlier violation of the Act of Union in the restoration of the proscribed French language to official use were drowned out by the indignant shouts of the aroused French-speaking members.27 The battle lines drawn, Somerville returned home to prepare for the summer election of 1861. His first step was the cultivation of

16 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

Josiah Ball, proprietor of the district's first and only newspaper, the Huntingdon Herald. Ball, a printer who had served his "devilship" in southern England, had been deluged on his arrival in 1858 with overtures from the Orange lodges to start a local paper. Succumbing to lavish promises, he had purchased the plant of the Toronto Old Countryman and issued the Herald's first number on 15 May 1859. "Let the world know," it trumpeted, "that the pioneer's axe has been superseded by the Printing Press, and that Huntingdon is now impelled onward by the invigorating March of Intellect." It was inevitable that poor Ball would become disillusioned. Hard times, bad roads, and his too close affiliation with the Orange lodges combined to wreck his prospects in the developing community. "The people of Huntingdon want a circulating medium," he complained, "but they don't want to bear the expense of it." On completion of its first volume the Herald had a mere four hundred subscribers; its demands for payment in advance had become pathetic pleas for the settlement of delinquent accounts. Job printing and advertising, "the life blood of newspapers," were shunned by dubious backwoods businessmen. Somerville's recruitment of the Herald in such circumstances did not prove very difficult.28 Robert Somerville stumped the county relentlessly in 1861, but no opponent appeared and he was returned by acclamation. "Hurrah for Huntingdon!" exulted the Globe over the triumph of rep by pop in its first test before Lower Canadian voters. Somerville did not fail to twit Cartier in parliament for his unfulfilled threats, but the Herald received no tangible assistance. Ball's bitterness began to show in his columns. By spring the disgruntled publisher had lost no fewer than one hundred subscribers, a quarter of his entire list, and was only too willing to seize an unlooked-for opportunity to sell his plant at a fraction of its asking price in May 1862. The purchasers, Amos Rowe and his brother Ransome, were both natives of Franklin Township. Their new paper, the Huntingdon Journal, began publication on 16 May 1862. Unlike its predecessor, the Journal enjoyed a fair measure of success. Ransome had learned the printing trade in Illinois and had operated the Halton Journal of Milton, Canada West, before succumbing to financial woes and immoderate drinking habits. Amos, a steadying influence, left the inside work to his brother and turned his own talents as an auctioneer to good advantage by soliciting subscriptions and job work throughout the district. The Rowes profited from the better times initiated by the American war, and during their first year took care not to spoil a good thing by offending anybody. As Joshua Breadner explained to Thomas Sellar in the summer of 1863: "The persons

17 The Journalist and His Field

who conduct the Journal cannot write an editorial of any length, their main hobby being puffing, yet by an active canvass and being neutral they got their subscription list from 300 when they started to 1,400 at the 15* May."29 However, with the election of 1863 only three weeks away, the Journal suddenly abandoned its nonpartisan tone. Somerville was astounded to read in the issue of 22 May that the paper was "determined to oppose to the bitter end" any candidate pledged to the pernicious principle of representation by population. "The Journal of this week," recorded his brother Andrew in his diary, "has a sneaky article against Rep by Pop." Others shared his consternation. An emergency meeting of the Elgin council was called to endorse Somerville's stand, and indignant letters were fired off to the Rowes. But in its next issue the Journal threw its weight behind a Montreal lawyer, Thomas Kennedy Ramsay, introduced as a Conservative opponent to Somerville. Ramsay's campaign manager was Louis Renaud, the legislative councillor and Carrier's lieutenant for the District of Beauharnois. Renaud was renowned for his political largesse, while the Journal complained that in sixteen months Somerville had produced no "government pap" apart from the paltry sum of forty cents for the publication of dead letter notices. It was soon common knowledge that the Journal had become a "Renaud organ"; its editor boasted, while in his cups, that he was the councillor's personal representative at Somerville's meetings. Behind Ramsay, Renaud, and the Journal, Somerville and his friends could discern the shadowy influence of George Etienne Cartier moving to settle old scores. The Huntingdon Journal was now replete with all the arguments used by the government press to poison Lower Canadian opinion against rep by pop. Members of Huntingdon's British faction shook their heads. "The Journal," wrote Andrew Somerville in his diary 29 May, "today written in a careless and foolish manner - present circulation 1,500, if it continues the present style of writing, it won't have one-half the number of subscribers in a year." When the show of hands at the nominations went against its candidate, the Journal's attacks became more personal. "The Journal today very abusive against my brother," noted Andrew Somerville on 5 June, "and with more than one falsehood in it." On Somerville's reelection by a count of 881 to 696, the Journal insisted Ramsay had been injured by a whisper campaign stigmatizing him as a Catholic and by his opponent "crawling around from house to house in the dead of night, cramming the credulous with all sorts of lies and balderdash about 'Popery' and 'French domination.'"30 Something, thought Robert

i8 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

Somerville as he departed to assist Luther Helton's campaign in Chateauguay, would have to be done about the Huntingdon Journal. Reaction against the Journal did not take long to materialize. On 16 June it was roundly condemned at a public meeting in Huntingdon Village, and a committee of three was delegated to see to the founding of a journal "which would more fully express the views of the people of this and adjoining counties." The facts pertaining to this local triumvirate are revealing. Joshua Breadner, secretary to the committee, was an Athelstan storekeeper soon to be elected Deputy Grand Master for the Eastern Canada Lodge of the Loyal Orange Association. Daniel Macfarlane, a crusty old Elgin farmer, was a "Scotch radical" and surviving member of the Glasgow Political Union who had agitated for the 1832 reform bill in the old land and was now striving for representation by population in the new. Alexander "Laird" Anderson was a bonafide "Scottish laird of the old school" who was currently mayor of the village and warden of the county. On 22 June the committee, circulating subscription blanks and a tentative prospectus, met to name subcommittees in the various municipalities. The new paper would be published weekly at the Journal's price of a dollar a year. It would advocate British connection, abolition of sectarian grants, representation by population, and the assimilation of Canada East and West. It would, in sum, "know neither Upper nor Lower Canada, but Canada one and inseparable, as the fairest daughter of the British Empire."31 The committee, having raised enough for a down payment on some printing materials, appealed to George Brown of the Globe for assistance in recruiting an appropriate editor. Brown turned the communication over to his Montreal correspondent, Thomas Sellar of the Echo. FOUNDING THE CANDIAN GLEANER, 1863

On 29 June 1863 Robert Sellar returned home from his night shift at the Globe to find a letter from Thomas. "The Reformers of Huntingdon want me to start a new paper and give good encouragement," Thomas wrote. "If you would take it in hand, or take the Echo, perhaps I might go into it." They had "kicked the Journal off for turning traitor, and nearly all the businessmen go in for a new paper." It would serve three counties and get council work and government advertisements. "Write me by return mail as to what you think of it."32 Robert was interested, but his reply reveals a mature appreciation of the hazards of newspaper enterprises. What kind of men were the committee? Was there enough support in the counties for two news-

19 The Journalist and His Field

papers? Politicians could do much for a paper, but it was on "commercial support it must depend and be permanently established by." He could get out a country paper "very cheaply well done," but there must be "a prospect of making a living by it." Printing was cheaper in Lower Canada, "and the delightful race of non-paying subscribers are not so numerous as in Upper, but then the people are no great readers and the merchants don't advertise much." If the committee would rent an office with an option to purchase, "well and good," for it was important to stay out of debt. "It won't do," he cautioned, "to repeat the Brampton disappointments." As to "taking hold" of either paper, Robert did not conceal his desire for a change: "I hate the night work and don't make more than moderate wages, and would be very glad to escape from it." But he was determined "not to go anywhere unless I can take mother and the girls with me." He would take the Echo only if it was clear of debt, but the first decision was not up to him. "You know best which you would prefer," he reminded Thomas. "Write and tell me the terms they offer."33 On 10 July Thomas met Joshua Breadner in Montreal to price printing materials. He received written assurance that the committee was ready to guarantee 1,000 subscribers within six months and that "1,500 might be got within twelve." Breadner assured him of municipal printing, "as the majority of councillors in each township are for our party," and thought it unlikely the Journal would even continue, "Mr Somerville's supporters being the reading class in the county." They had agreed to spend $600 on a secondhand press and accoutrement and promised "a written guarantee for the 1000 subscribers at $1 each to be paid three months after the paper is started." Thomas enclosed copies of the Journal to show "that a large advertising business can be done" and suggested that the lack of a railway near Huntingdon would minimize competition from Montreal. "Rowe went to Huntingdon from Milton c.w. (where he broke down with the Journal) without a copper and has prospered," he confided, though "with two papers, of course, the chance for similar success is not so good." He would go to Huntingdon to meet the committee at the end of the month, "and will then have to come to a final decision."34 To Robert it all sounded good - perhaps too good to be true. If the place was really thriving and the committee not "mere busybodies," the venture must succeed. But the price of only $1 was not encouraging, Reform politicians like Luther Holton did not seem to be assuming "their share of the responsibility," and the guarantee of a thousand subscribers made him dubious. "With your experience of the Times and Echo," he wrote Thomas, "you know how impossible

2O Voice of the Vanishing Minority

such a number is." His own forecast, based on an estimate of six hundred subscribers - "two boys, on piece, $9; foreman $7; paper for 600 copies $6: total, without counting rent, devil, and sundries, $22" - revealed the risk involved. "If you calculate how much all this would come to in a year, you will find (supposing all the subscribers to pay) that you will have to make up the deficiency of $600 by the advertising, and your own living have to come out of the job-work."35 Robert ruled a partnership out of the question. "It might afford an income for one but not for two; and, besides, if it broke thro' (and it is as well to look that possibility in the face) mother would not have a home." He had no money but was prepared to get out a "creditable sheet" within a fortnight of the type leaving Montreal provided the committee advanced him at least a hundred dollars in gift. After the first year he would "either pay an annual rent for the office or make arrangements for purchasing it by annual instalments." Thomas was urged to explain "that it is better to come down liberally at once, and have the paper thoroughly and prosperously established; instead of, by a false economy, bringing it into life a weakling that might not survive six months, or by giving it to incompetent parties because they make a low offer and great promises."36 Thomas Sellar, angling for a $600 appointment as secretary to the Anglican diocesan synod of Ontario, was never really serious about giving up the Echo but hoped to profit in some way from the new paper. "I suppose you feel yourself you would be more at home editing a political journal," ventured Robert, who considered himself "better suited to a religious paper" and clearly would have preferred the Echo. "If I had it there would be a light in Israel, and no mistake," he joked, "but a good situation as bookkeeper would be better than either." Nor was the time of year, with most of the subscriptions already in, propitious for taking over the, Echo. With Charles discontented at the Globe and "speaking of going to New York every other week," Robert was already considering ways and means of moving his mother and sisters to "set up house" in Huntingdon before the end of the season. "We are all middling," he concluded, "except myself that has got a confounded rumbling in the guts by overwork, likely. Mother has improved wonderfully of late, tho' she will never be what she was. I think a change of scene would do her good."37 Thomas's next letter contained decisive news. He had been to Huntingdon and had been authorized by the committee to buy $700 worth of printing material "for which they pay part in cash and give good notes signed by four or five of the wealthy men here." They had not acquiesced easily to the demand for an initial bonus but would lower their guarantee of a thousand subscribers to five hundred and

2i The Journalist and His Field

advance $100, which would be regarded as a loan should the subscription list reach one thousand within six months. The money would suffice for a small assortment of job type. He enclosed a tentative draft of the Canadian Gleaner prospectus he had written. The committee were enthusiastic about the paper and wanted it out within four weeks in order to advertise the fall goods and cover the agricultural shows.38 Thomas's appraisal of his brother's prospects was inviting enough. "Huntingdon County," he pointed out, "is on the borders of Yankeedom and Upper Canada - see the map." It was prosperous, "and looks more like Upper Canada than Lower." The people he met were "nearly all old countrymen," and "the Scotch are numerous." One "old wealthy farmer gives $50 towards the fund for buying the office and promises a cord of wood and a leg of mutton to you when you start." The village was not large, "but nearly all the storekeepers around will advertise, as they have done liberally in the Journal." Their mother, he believed, would like the place very much. "A beautiful river runs through the village, which is very healthy."39 Robert received Thomas's communication on 30 July and stayed home from work until it had been answered. He liked the prospectus and the name but was peeved that his brother wanted one quarter of any profits in excess of $400 for writing the political editorials. "It is your interest, apart from this, as well as mine that I should succeed," he remonstrated, "for I would thereby be enabled to give mother a comfortable and permanent home, an object I earnestly desire, and which causes me more than anything else to venture on this speculation." But as the committee had agreed to a bonus, "I have nothing more to say - I am into it. If they do their part I have very little doubt but I will do mine to their satisfaction. Since it has to be done, the quicker the better."40 The Huntingdon committee was not alone in anxiously awaiting the appearance of the new newspaper. At the Journal office Ransome Rowe pondered with jaundiced eye an ominous clipping from the Montreal correspondence of the Globe announcing a new journal advocating rep by pop in Somerville's constituency. "When Monsieur Codfish Cartier gets back into power," it mocked, "Huntingdon will, assuredly, be disfranchised." The Journal's response was an intemperate preview of things in store for its new adversary. Whoever put such "abominable balderdash" on paper should be consigned to a "lunatic asylum," it charged, for "the country is not safe with him at large." On 8 August Thomas Sellar, undeterred by Rowe's reminder that the proposed journal would not be the first to "go the way of all flesh" in Huntingdon, issued the prospectus of the

22 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

Canadian Gleaner in his brother's name.41 On 19 August Robert Sellar, having barely passed his twenty-second birthday, boarded the Banshee for Montreal. On the early morning of 24 August, after tending to final details in the city, Sellar caught the train for Lachine - the first lap of a fiftyfive-mile journey that could, depending on conditions, take upwards of twelve hours. Crossing the river to Caughnawaga as the sun began its climb into a cloudless sky, he watched with interest the groups of Indians lounging about the steam-ferry landing. He boarded the waiting stage and was plunged into the depths of the Caughnawaga woods, the worst stretch of the entire route. Swaying and pitching as hole after hole was precariously surmounted, the vehicle at one point abandoned the road altogether in favour of a course through the scrubby brush. The rest of the trip would be better, the driver assured his shaken passengers as the horses took water under the elms at Ste Philomene - good clay hardpan with ruts evened by heavy traffic. The stage traversed the Laroque road, a shortcut through farm lots and maple-sugar groves, to the east bank of the Chateauguay. The hot and dusty travellers rattled up the river road, sighted the twin spires of the Catholic church at Ste Martine, and alighted to a meal of garlic-flavoured soup, soggy beef, and waxy potatoes at the tavern. "Ah, well," the hungry wayfarer resigned himself, "the bread is good, the butter would pass with a blind man, and the tea is refreshing."42 Crossing a rickety bridge to the west bank of the Chateauguay, Sellar noted the old-fashioned thatched barns, narrow and crooked fields, women pounding clothes between rocks at the river's edge, and tidy whitewashed dwellings with little stone ovens that bespoke the presence of the French Canadian farmer. Salutations from habitants out with pick and shovel to level cahots almost made one forget the "awful jerks" of the passage, but one stolid old wagoner was nearly upset when he refused to yield right-of-way to Her Majesty's mail, "and he screams and sacres us until out of sight." Sellar's sympathy for Quebec's polite older generation did not extend to a "spruce young French Canadian, with black coat, loud waistcoat and louder necktie, who twirls the point of his moustache, cocks his shiny plug hat a little more to one side, and having made all the impression possible on his fellow travellers, favors them with the perfume of a villainous cigar." Bypassing Howick, the stage made for Turcot's yard opposite the Georgetown church. Sellar crossed the site of the barricade at Baker's farm, "where the rebels meant to fight in '38 but didn't," and passed Reeve's old stone tavern, which had housed the equally reluctant

23 The Journalist and His Field

Colonel Campbell and his loyal volunteers. The country along the way was becoming beautiful, "for the Chateauguay here is broad and stretches of it almost lake-like." Beyond the English River was visible evidence of population change. Whitewashed log cabins and small barns were now giving way to the frame houses and more ample steadings of the old-country farmers. Pinched and crooked patches of peas were replaced, as the heavy clay soil beyond the seigniory line was reached, by large, level, square, and uniformly cultivated fields of hay and grain. Their straight ridges and wellcleared acreage, interspersed with frequent meadows, evinced that superior agricultural practice that the habitants would in time imitate to their advantage. The speech of the passengers, from the modest lass standing beside her little pile of baggage at the concession road to the city jobber haranguing the driver about horses, was now congenial to Sellar's ear. He was touched by the sight of a faithful collie trotting off with a roll of paper he had been given in lieu of any mail that day. He passed the old blockhouse, a quaint fortalice associated with the Battle of Chateauguay that Sir John A. Macdonald later "gave up to destruction," and Allan's Corners, where General Hampton and Colonel de Salaberry "burned a good deal of powder with no special harm to either side." Beyond Durham Village in the parish of St Malachie d'Ormstown, which he would one day appreciate as "the finest farming section in the province," he could discern the slopes of Covey Hill through the sweltering afternoon glare. Such eminences, he reflected as he rolled past Purse's Hill, would have been styled "bourocks" in the old country. As the stage entered Huntingdon County, Sellar saw that the fields were rockier and more cut up by ridges, while far to the south of the placid waters of the Chateauguay slumbered the forest-girded range of highlands from whence they came. The driver had made good time. Bowling into Huntingdon Village with horn sounding, he hauled the stage to a stop in front of Barrett's Hotel, where its dishevelled occupants were disgorged in time for supper. The coming of the young printer to his field of labour shared the spotlight with the weather in Andrew Somerville's diary: "Sellar the new newspaper editor arrived from Montreal - Glass at 96, warmest day of the season." Huntingdon, later recalled as "a straggling cluster of wooden buildings interspersed with occasional apple orchards," hardly looked capable of supporting a first newspaper, let alone a second. Its buildings, except for two fine stone edifices, the academy and the county building, were all of wooden frame or log construction. Their

24 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

unpainted appearance was rendered even more unkempt by a proliferation of dilapidated eyesores and makeshift sheds for cows, pigs, and chickens. Rotting stumps were everywhere on a terrain utterly denuded of trees. The main thoroughfare, a succession of "shocking quagmires" dubbed Front Street, meandered along the west bank, joined at awkward angles by equally unimposing back streets that had been laid out using the township lines rather than the river as a base.43 Though what Sellar saw represented the fruits of a half century of unremitting toil on the part of local pioneers, its initial impact on one whose life had not been spent in the bush was far from encouraging. For hours he lay in the stifling heat listening to the gabble of conversation, swearing, singing, and other raucous sounds of the tavern. Huntingdon, according to Hiram Stevens Maxim, the future inventor of the machine gun who tended bar at Barrett's, "was a particularly lively place in those days," when it furnished a temporary haven for American "skedadlers" from the Union armies.44 Only when the inevitable drunken brawling erupted did the barroom close, enabling the worried young printer to find brief refuge in sleep. Sellar's activities next morning began with a tour of the village in company with Breadner and Huntingdon's portly mayor, Alexander Anderson. Anderson, known locally as "the Laird" by virtue of his inheritance of the Aberdeenshire estate of Canda Craig, spoke authoritatively as the trio passed up Front Street, stopping frequently to acquaint local businessmen with the new publisher. Huntingdon's growth, he admitted, had been stagnant, but the American wartime demand for livestock and farm produce was rapidly changing all that.45 At the upper end of the village Anderson suddenly called a halt. The whole area west of Lake Street, he explained, was occupied by an American colony that was part of the opposition. The Americans were unpopular in the village, Sellar was informed. They had been an anti-British element during the rebellions; they patronized their own wagon shop, tannery, cobbler, blacksmith, and tavern; they favoured Universalism and Methodism in religion and maintained a rival school. Their chief spokesman, Joshua S. Lewis, had lost his government mail contract after the rebellion but was still an important man in the district. Storekeeper, crown lands agent, and justice of the peace, he had been prominent in the movements to secure the academy and the plank road to Port Lewis (named for him) on the St Lawrence. But his influence stopped short of the dominant British faction in the municipal council, which had refused to extend sidewalks across the American lots until 1860.

25 The Journalist and His Field

The tour of Huntingdon's three hundred acres ended on the sparsely settled east bank, where the chief objects of interest were the woolen mill of George and Henry Lighthall and Archibald Henderson's grist mill. These, along with Schuyler's and Ruston's sawmills, were the chief industries of the village, which also boasted a mitten and glove manufactory, a couple of tanneries, and a number of lesser workshops. Agriculture was booming, Anderson went on, and there was now talk of deepening the channel and demolishing the upper dam to convert the woolen mill into a second grist mill. Huntingdon's future prosperity was assured. Sellar's own estimate was considerably less optimistic. "I reached this place by 4 o'clock on Monday after a most desperate jolting ride," he wrote Thomas. "I must say I am disappointed with the village; if I had been starting a paper on my own hook, it is the last place I would have chosen. There is next to no trade, and there is not a shop in it that pays cash for wheat. All my advertising will have to be taken out in trade." A few well-wishers had already confided that "Rowe has got a sure footing," that "before last May it would have been impossible to have competed with him, and that as it is the support won't be enough for both and that either must give in sooner or later." Breadner and the Laird had promised him $50 but as yet had paid him nothing. An annual profit of $400, he predicted, "is an event, I much fear, neither you nor me will ever see."46 Five days later he was even more apprehensive. "The delays and impediments that befall the Gleaner," he wrote Thomas, "are never to have an end, I think." Many of the principal men were "lukewarm about the Gleaner and a few decidedly hostile." Much would depend upon the journal itself, but he was still without an office and felt frustrated in every attempt to get it started. Paper was available in Valleyfield but the committee, reacting to whispers that they had engaged a "chiel" to do a man's work, had yet to advance him a cent. A team sent to Port Lewis for the type had returned with only a letter from the Montreal supplier requiring the bills to be signed anew and attested by a village lawyer. He and the Laird had gone after the signatures and "got a precious ducking in going to old Macfarlane's."47 The problem of help was still unsolved, though one local boy was expected to engage. Could Thomas send another from Montreal? They would be unfamiliar with a hand press, "but if they are strong I can soon teach them." A lad with a couple of years at the trade could be offered "$2.50 or $3 a week, but on no account promise more than $4. Rowe has got boys at $1.50." Advertising was not coming in, prompting Sellar to offer a cheap annual rate and urge

26 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

Thomas to solicit in the city. Thomas was also asked to negotiate copy exchanges with the Scottish American Journal, to start mailing his used issues of the Globe and the Witness, and to supply a halfdozen "Canadian Gleaner Office" door signs. Robert promised to pay for them and the prospectuses as soon as possible. "Have you heard from mother?" he inquired. "I feel anxious about them all." His letter closed with a crowning frustration: "This being Sunday I was unable to get a stamp, which you will excuse."48 It had been a trying week indeed. During the first half of September, Sellar succeeded in drawing many of the loose ends together. On i September he moved into his office - a room in the back of Chalmers' store, just west of the county building. The committee's antiquated press was installed nine days later, the long-awaited type arrived, and an excited group of urchins gathered in the street to watch him distribute the shiny new fonts into their cases. An Irish youth named Patrick Ford arrived from Montreal to be his helper. The British American, Scottish American Journal, and Illustrated Scientific American agreed to make exchanges for free advertising, and Thomas was asked to seek similar arrangements with John Dougall of the Witness. Robert Somerville, as yet unacquainted with his new publicist, sent three government advertisements from Quebec, but the number of commercial ads - five from Montreal and only four from Huntingdon - was discouraging. Only four days prior to publication did Sellar's sponsors overcome their distrust of his youthfulness long enough to release him $50 the only portion of the promised cash advance he would ever see. A delivery of paper from Alexander Buntin's Valleyfield mill followed, and the Gleaner was ready to go to press. One sensitive matter remained. "You rather 'take me down' by returning my first article" (a withering attack on Renaud), Thomas complained. "You will make a mistake if you imagine that the kid gloves style of handling the subject is best." Nothing would induce "a single one of the other side to take the Gleaner," he grumbled. "I would rather not write at all than to have to do this again. It is a thing I am not accustomed to, to have my articles 'rejected.'" Enclosing his Montreal newsletter, he advised Robert to be on the lookout for a newspaper by Thursday's mail "with latest news so as to be ahead of Journal."^ "The first issue of the Gleaner out today," noted Andrew Somerville in his diary on 18 September, though the paper was not finally worked off the press until sunrise the following morning. It was well printed on rag paper of quality far superior to the newsprint of a later era. Its outer pages carried old-country items and a story entitled

27 The Journalist and His Field

The front page of the first Gleaner, 18 September 1863. Note the austere masthead and the absence of heavy black lines, which Sellar felt pandered to sensationalism and marred the beauty of a printed page.

"The Drover's Weird." This first of Robert Sellar's Gleaner tales, written expressly for his newspaper, was deemed a feature unique in Canadian journalism, "in itself an inducement to subscribe." The inside columns consisted of editorials, a parliamentary newsletter, and summaries of Canadian, American, and local news. As Sellar was

28 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

still without contributors, local coverage did not extend much beyond the village. Editorially, the Gleaner bade fair to deliver its backers their money's worth. Its salutatory, written by Thomas, affirmed its intention to uphold Huntingdon's true values against the "imputations and calumnies" of a "worthless clique." Its political goals were "consolidation of the two provinces into one" and "continuance of our cherished connection with the mother land." Though rep by pop was no longer the primary issue before the country, the Witness led the Reform press in wishing Somerville and his new organ success in their efforts to "make Canada a unit." The Gleaner was out at last, and it had come out fighting. THE ORDEAL OF COUNTRY 1863-64

JOURNALISM,

Reaction to the Gleaner's appearance did not take long to materialize. On the evening of 24 September, after spending the day at the Huntingdon fair, Sellar arrived at Barrett's Hotel for the agricultural society's annual dinner. The society's free wine was in full flow as Ransome Rowe rose to respond to the toast to the press. Flushed and unsteady, he became more and more excited as he spoke. He and his brother were the real pioneers of the press in Huntingdon, he proclaimed. The previous "rag" was undeserving of the name "newspaper," and its successor was a nothing but a "paid sheet," the "organ of a few." Sellar sat quietly through the ensuing commotion. His reply, prudently reserved for his newspaper, may have intended a message for his friends as well. The Gleaner had not been established "to trumpet the views of private individuals" but to "advocate the great principles of Reform," he wrote. "When we find that we cannot publish the Gleaner longer so, our connection will cease with it."5° They were brave words, but the problem of maintaining a journal's independence without the means of supporting it independently was a serious one, as its editor realized only too well. The Gleaner's battle with the Journal was joined in the hotly partisan arena of local politics. In January 1864 the Irish and American faction backed by the Journal succeeded in winning control of the Huntingdon Village and Godmanchester municipal councils. Rowe did not emerge from these victories unscathed, as the Gleaner accused him of personal interest in the paid office of secretarytreasurer of Godmanchester. When the new council appointed him as predicted despite a petition of protest from no ratepayers, the allegations of collusion were borne out. At the agricultural society

29 The Journalist and His Field

elections a week later the Gleaner touched off further reaction by declaring that Rowe's candidates had agreed to railroad him into another secretary's office when elected. An unprecedented turnout of members, with over a hundred paying their dues on the spot, spilled out of Barrett's Hotel into the open air to send every candidate backed by the Journal down to defeat. The Gleaner scoffed aside allegations of electoral skulduggery. "We were present during the whole of the election and saw no boys voting on either side," it chided, "but we did see a bartender fetched from vocation to vote for the Journal's friends."51 The Gleaner had struck a telling blow at the Journal's influence in the county, and no one knew it better than Ransome Rowe. But the Gleaner was in far more precarious circumstances than its feigned well-being would lead one to suppose. It had only four hundred subscribers, of whom half had not paid. Advertising amounted to a pittance, and it was making little headway beyond the environs of the village. Realizing the need for a wider canvass, Sellar left young Ford in charge and set out through the crisp bite of a mid-October morning with Alexander Anderson, who was bound for Beauharnois with a wagonload of grain. The harvest of 1863 had been a rich one, and the roads became congested as the steady stream of double wagons bearing oats and barley from the townships converged with the French carts laden with peas from the parishes. From as far away as Trout River the farmers came, making round trips of up to eighty miles to convert their grain into ready cash. The heavy traffic had combined with autumn rainfall to bring about a serious deterioration in the road surfaces. As the wagon lurched from rut to rut, with horses groaning through mudhole after mudhole, the journey became a slavish ordeal for man and beast alike. Sellar took advantage of Anderson's frequent tavern stops to beat about for subscriptions, and it was not until dawn of the following day that the weary travellers arrived at their destination. Already a few wagons were waiting for the market to open, and by sunrise the queue stretched far back into the village. Activities commenced with the arrival of the market clerk, who chalked each wagon and motioned it into place along the quay. With prices on the rise due to the American war, buyers were not long in appearing. After some perfunctory haggling each wagon was driven onto the wharf to empty its contents into a waiting barge. It was the golden age of the Beauharnois grain trade, and Sellar noted that business was done almost entirely in English. After breakfast at Kelly's Hotel he left Anderson to see to the horses and set out to canvass the stores. It was three and a half days before he and the Laird straggled back into

30 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

Huntingdon. "I met with just tolerable success, so-so in fact," he informed Thomas. The Gleaner was giving satisfaction, but there was no persuading farmers already receiving the Journal to take it just now. A good subscription list would be "the work of time." The Laird "got tight at Beauharnois," he reported, "and I had a devil of a time getting home."52 Returning with a bad cold, he had found the Gleaner unprepared and had to work desperately for forty-eight hours until Ford showed up the day before publication, haggard and bleary-eyed after a Montreal spree. "I don't think I will trouble myself going about much more," he confided. "Breadner and the others must take their turn of it. Getting out the paper is more than enough for me to attend to." Nor did it lighten his burden to learn that Somerville had secured Thomas a profitable appointment to issue marriage licenses as a reward for his editorial services. "The Gleaner," he returned with a trace of bitterness, "has done well by you anyway."53 Although the Gleaner kept up its brave front, its publisher was beginning to falter. "Since last Monday morning I have been very ill - hardly able to go to the office," he entered in his diary. "A bad cold, I think, grafted on my previous weariness." His health continued poor, and he was plagued by "a strange pain between the right shoulder and spine" - a harbinger of the recurring back problem that would trouble him the rest of his life. With colder weather he was obliged to dip into his slender resources for "boots (3.50) shirts (6.50) collars (75c) gloves (4/2.) and a book Thesaurus (1.50)," By the end of November he was $30 behind and dreading the prospect of falling into debt. With 583 subscribers and only $217.25 paid "it has come to this pass that I would soon not have a six-pence left."54 Sellar's depression was aggravated by loneliness. "It will be Christmas Eve a fortnight from tomorrow night," he brooded. "I wish to God I had my poor old mother beside me - but not in this place." Huntingdon offered no congenial field, either for himself or his sisters. "The people are insufferably close and narrow-minded, paying everything they can in trade, and I am not adapted to barter after the manner of primitive nations." Resolving that he must "give it up," he agonized over the decision: "No, Bob, give it up now; it is the only course left; you cannot possibly regret it. The paper can never pay you. I have not received a quarter dollar for the last six days."55 In the morning he wrote Breadner asking to be released from the Gleaner. On Christmas day the committee met at Breadner's store to try to salvage the Gleaner. Josiah Ball, currently teaching at the Gore school, agreed to take it over on 8 January, with Sellar assisting for a few

31 The Journalist and His Field

weeks at wages of $6. "Yesterday he changed his tune/' Sellar noted four days later. "I don't know how it will be settled." A long talk with Somerville failed to sway his determination to "commence the world anew/' but he was already dreading the prospect of winter unemployment. "To look for work these cold days," he shuddered, "God grant I may be successful." Nor was it heartening to contemplate emigration to the United States, "a country plunged in war, with a disturbed currency and liable to a collapse." Finally, he sensed within himself a compelling urge to "be my own master." He ended up resigning himself to sticking it out for the winter even without wages. "I should have gone straight on at first," he grumbled. "I might have seen no business could be formed here sufficient to pay 800 dollars in 3 years."56 It was impossible in a village the size of Huntingdon for Sellar to keep his discomfiture from becoming common knowledge. Ransome Rowe, deriving fresh hope from his rival's every trial, did all he could to hasten the Gleaner into an early grave. When Sellar dismissed young Ford after a New Year's carouse that had left him abandoned a second time, the Journal furnished editorial space for the disgruntled printer's rebuke that the "now almost defunct" Gleaner "was begot in spite and will end in disappointment and chagrin."57 The Gleaner was still appearing as the bitter grip of winter fastened itself upon the country. In those days there was real suffering during cold snaps along the Chateauguay. The slimly constructed buildings of the region were most inadequate in winter, coal was unobtainable, and furnaces were unheard of. With sub-zero temperatures came a host of new publication difficulties. Inking rollers had to be thawed prior to use; chill damp paper, before the advent of moveable types, had to be drawn through a vat of clear water to prevent blurring; and type, placed near the window to catch the available light, froze solid in the water sprinkled on it to prevent sticking when the fonts were distributed back into their case compartments. With fingers so stiff and numb that blowing on them availed nothing, Sellar's day became a series of excursions to and from the stove. As the paper's publication became a weekly battle against the elements themselves, he found himself only too willing to accept payment in cordwood a commodity that his huge box stove consumed with voracious appetite while failing to heat the drafty expanse that was at once his editorial, composing, and press room. Physical exertion at the pressbar failed to warm his jaded physique. "It is cold," he noted in his diary, "much colder than Upper Canada, and I feel it very much."58 Under such conditions the country printer's very soul came near congealing at its source.

32 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

A page from Robert Sellar's diary, 1863

Getting out the Gleaner was a tedious and fatiguing process even at the best of times. Like most country journals it was set entirely by hand, with every line composed and printed in the local office. Much of Sellar's week was spent swaying rhythmically, "stick" in hand, over his type case, selecting letters in a manner that reminded one rural observer of "an old hen pickin' up millet." A major headache was the seemingly simple matter of ink rollers. These, according to his typographer's handbook, needed to be "moderately soft to the

33 The Journalist and His Field

touch, yet perfectly elastic and strong in texture"; they should be "perfectly free from all cracks and holes," should "shrink but little, and yet last a considerable time." With no commercial product yet available, pursuit of these elusive desiderata had to be undertaken in a large bucket on the office stove. Stirring four pounds of presaturated vellum glue into a gallon of fine green sugarhouse molasses, Sellar would heat the concoction until it began to splutter, adding a dash of high-grade pigment called Paris white through a fine sieve as it began to boil. The roller's wooden core was then fixed within a large copper mould into which the molten formula was introduced, great pains being taken to allow air bubbles to escape. Next morning he would withdraw the roller from its mould, usually to see it come out with such gaping hollows in its sides that it had to be cut up at once and boiled anew.59 A successful casting furnished a composition unexcelled at imparting ink evenly over type, but such happy results were rarely achieved until the hapless printer had been several times reduced to the verge of tears. The actual printing of the Gleaner was done on a Washington hand press. Its economy, strength, and portability were telling factors in backwoods journalism despite the time and labour it demanded. Grasping a crank low on its left side, Sellar would bring the bed out from under the platen. The blanket, a covering flannel used to absorb the impact of the platen upon the type, was then raised on its hinges to reveal the smooth granite imposing stone upon which the forme would be placed. When ink had been rolled onto the forme, a sheet of paper placed on top, the blanket lowered and secured, and the bed cranked back under the platen, all was in readiness. Seizing with calloused hands the curved handle of the tightly sprung press-bar, Sellar would grit his teeth and fling himself backwards with the final heroic effort required to impress a single page. To complete the four pages of the Gleaner for five hundred subscribers, a total of two thousand crankings, inkings, and heaves at the bar was required. "By God," Sellar exclaimed in his diary, "the work is too hard."60 Coupled with physical hardship were emotional anxieties of the sort all too familiar to country editors. On 15 February 1864 Sellar was notified of the Gleaner's first cancelled subscription, while another reader threatened to sue for four thousand dollars over an article exposing illegal recruitment for the American army. The Gleaner's sangfroid, after six months of tortuous operation, belied the true feeling of its publisher as it announced on 11 March that, "without any extraordinary exertion," it had already attained the weekly circulation of 750 needed to secure its permanence. Not all the bravado was ill-founded. People were responding to the paper's first-

34 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

rate coverage of news, paid advertising had doubled to fill six columns, and the office had been moved from Chalmers' store to a large shanty opposite Whealey's blacksmith shop. But the Gleaner's improved prospects were still not good enough. "I don't see how I can keep out of debt far less earn a sufficient income," Sellar reckoned in his diary. "At eight hundred subscribers, the expenses would be - Wages, $416; Paper, $350; Sundries, $100 nearly 900 dollars, against which I could only calculate on about 700 dollars cash," Even if the paper recouped the $400 needed for his own support, "if it did not yield a surplus large enough to enable me to purchase the office for myself within a few years, it would not be worth my keeping it on." He hated the editorial work, "this weighing of everything in a political balance," and disliked village life. "My health is failing me under the continued labour and worry," he wrote. "I am not happy."61 On 26 March he informed Somerville of his renewed intention to quit the Gleaner. Sellar's announcement could not have come at a worse time for Huntingdon's member of parliament. The Macdonald-Dorion ministry had just resigned and another election seemed imminent. On 29 March Sellar was promised $400 a year and any losses incurred if he would stay. The same day, after writing to ask his mother's advice, he received word that Charles had gone to enlist in the American army. "May God guide and protect the footsteps of the thoughtless boy," he prayed, realizing that his brother's desertion of their mother and sisters shattered any illusions he might have entertained about abandoning his own meager employment. On 31 March a letter from Charles, "the first he has written since I came to Huntingdon," confirmed the news. It left Robert no alternative but to remain in Huntingdon for at least the summer. Pondering his lot in a solitary walk along the riverbank, Sellar contemplated the stillbarren landscape he did not yet regard as home. "April, but not the April of the land my heartstrings are woven to," he inscribed in his diary. "Streaks of snow diversify the fields, and not a blade of grass is green." But the river had "cast its slough, and it comforted me to watch its red flood eddying along to its final destiny on my walk this morning. I felt very disheartened and weak. It is unmanly but I cannot help it."62 At least the committee, having agreed to an undertaking beyond their ability to fulfil, had finally shaken off their lethargy on behalf of the Gleaner. "Nor did we ever yet have an MPP stalking through the county with book and pencil in hand and hat under his arm, saying, 'pray, sir, stop the Journal and take my paper/" complained the Journal. "Neither do any half dozen men on the day of publication

35 The Journalist and His Field

of our sheet back up their manure carts at our office door and load in their forties, their fifties or their sixties (their own personal subscriptions) and go hawking it through the country, at the same time defrauding the revenue of its just due in money accruing for pedlars' licenses."63 On 8 April a letter arrived from Sellar's mother endorsing his decision to remain in Huntingdon. Robert tucked $10 into the return envelope and plunged back into the work of the Gleaner. L I F E I N H U N T I N G D O N ,18 6 4

The realization that fate was conspiring to keep him in Huntingdon took its toll on the spirit of Robert Sellar. Work, exhaustion, poverty, and devotion to family precluded leisure, recreation, female companionship, and other amenities normally cultivated by young men. Melancholia permeates his diary during 1864: "Sunday: a dull, dreary day as I remember. A cold steady pattering rain, the earth covered with a shroud of ice and snow that hides not its nakedness. Sick and have a bad cold." Literature remained his only escape, but he had little time or energy for reading or creative writing. "I have not read a book since coming to Huntingdon," he lamented. A "lickspittle" article on Macaulay's speeches was his "first taste of that literature, which was once to me a source of pleasure." He brooded over his own unfinished book of rhymes. "It is an infliction for me to write," he noted, "and yet I am forced." Had his acceptance of the committee's offer been prompted by an urge to write something that might open to him a better field? "Oh, a curse on my hopeful imagination," he lamented. "An insatiable thirst for I care not what, unless it may be the love of God, is a curse. No one faculty of man, passion or desire, can be gratified to the exclusion of the rest, without the inevitable result - misery."64 At least by August he was no longer alone. His mother and Elspet were met by Thomas at Cornwall and brought to Huntingdon. "Spent a few days there," Thomas noted in his diary, "and was much pleased."65 Once again he had shifted the primary responsibility and expense of maintaining the family onto Robert's overworked shoulders. Difficulty in finding people of congenial interests compounded Sellar's sense of isolation. "The folks here are not much inclined to literature," he had discovered. "Probably four-fifths of my readers never read a play of Shakespeare's." He tried to stimulate interest by opening columns on the Gleaner's outer pages to the literary offerings of a few kindred souls within the district. John Davidson of Dundee, who wrote local humour under the pseudonym "Colonel Phunny," became a lifelong contributor. Annie L. Jack of Chateauguay Basin

36 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

and Andrew Learmont Spedon of St Jean Chrysostome would go on to publish literary works in their own right. Of Sellar's own poetry little trace survives. It is impossible to say with certainty whether the verses in the early Gleaner that were either anonymous or styled "Original" are his. As for those penned by his contributors, probably the less said the better. Sometimes enthusiasm compensated for lack of literary merit, as in the submission from Daniel Jones of Elgin in the issue of 22 January 1864: Take the Gleaner, 'tis not dear, A dollar only for a year, You'll not rue it, never fear Take the Gleanerl All its prospects now are glorious, Onward, onward, still victorious, Britain's banners waving o'er us Take the Gleaner*.

If the Gleaner's condition still fell somewhere short of glorious, at least its publisher was beginning to shake off his winter gloom. He welcomed the sprouting green grass and the music of the frogs as he took his walks up the plank road. In April he was introduced to James Fortune, "the first man I have ever met who ever saw Burns." Burns had sent him as a boy to a public house for some refreshments and made him taste the beer. He was a tall man, Fortune recalled, "just like any other ploughman," with "nothing peculiar in either his appearance or manner." Fortune had also met the poet Tannahill, "whose song though pitched in a different and minor key to that of Ayrshire's bard, is yet so sweet that the world will not willingly let it die."6* Another "very agreeable time" was spent at the Elgin farm of Daniel Macfarlane. "I rode up and down," Sellar thrilled, "my first essay on horseback." Late into the evening the grizzled old Scotch radical captivated his youthful listener with tales of his grandfather's adventures with Rob Roy, of the apprehensions of his native Perthshire over Napoleon's anticipated invasion, of his opposition to the tyrannical regime of Castlereagh. "When thus engaged," Sellar recalled, "his features would light up/the deep-set grey eyes gleam, the high-pitched voice grow more sharp, and the rapid utterance more quick, until it was seen that in the ardor of his narration the old man had forgotten for the moment where he was, and in imagination was transported back to the vigor of his manhood and the scenes of his native land." Macfarlane described the zeal of the old-

37 The Journalist and His Field

country radicals as something marvellous - "an enthusiasm bordering on fanaticism" - but he had, significantly, broken with them on the issue of Catholic emancipation. Emigrating to five hundred acres in Huntingdon in 1843, he became Elgin's perennial mayor and played a formative role in the agricultural society, the temperance cause, and the agitations to secure the academy and the county building.67 It was a pity, Sellar mused, that no one was recording for posterity the fascinating stories of the older generation of Huntingdon pioneers. Apart from his work, Robert Sellar's main contact with the people of Huntingdon derived from his churchgoing habits. He associated himself with the small Anglican congregation of St John's and was elected warden in 1866, but his face was a familiar one in each of the village's five Protestant churches. Sellar was an evangelical rather than a catholic Anglican, preoccupied with the sinfulness of his condition and his need for salvation through spiritual renovation and faith. Though well versed in doctrine, his faith was emotional and remarkably free of theological subtleties. For him there was not the slightest doubt that truth must inevitably triumph over error and good over evil. His universe was an ordered one in which the hand of God was evident in the everyday miracles of nature; his God was a personal one, whose presence in the world motivated him to resist temptation. "If I would not have a fellow mortal see me stray - if I would withhold from sin if the eyes of the most contemptible of my fellows were upon me - how much more I should refrain and seek to walk aright, when Christ's gaze is fixed upon my every movement?" he explained in his diary. "It is hard to realize he is ever so near."68 Though Sellar's diary is full of self-loathing at his perceived failure to live up to standards that would bring him into communion with God, his unfailing faith provided him with an inner reservoir of strength that would sustain him throughout the many tribulations of his long and eventful life. A believer in Protestant union, Sellar found little encouragement on this score in Huntingdon. Presbyterians, roughly half the village population, gave the community its predominant character but were themselves fragmented into three congregations - St Andrew's, known as the "auld" or "Scotch kirk," the evangelical American Presbyterian Church, and the Second Presbyterian Church, a coalition of local adherents to the Free Kirk and United Secession movements. The Methodist Church, originally confined to Americans, was making inroads into the Scottish population, largely at the expense of the dwindling Anglican congregation of St John's. There were roughly two hundred Roman Catholics in the village, almost all

38 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

Irish, but their St Joseph's Church was located, perhaps symbolically, on the outskirts of town. Religion was hardly a unifying factor in the life of Huntingdon. Institutions that drew the community together were few indeed. The temperance movement was interdenominational in scope, but tended to align prohibition-minded Protestants against their more permissive Catholic neighbours. Infinitely more antagonistic towards Roman Catholics were the county's ten Orange lodges, whose flourishing condition bespoke the old-country predilections of Huntingdon's pioneers. Only in the struggle to provide and maintain suitable educational facilities did the people of Huntingdon briefly overcome their sectarian divisions. The construction of a fine rural academy in 1851 - the only one south of the St Lawrence within a hundred miles - was the work of Protestants and Catholics alike, whose village clergymen served as honorary members of the board. The academy was to Sellar everything a school should be - a community institution imparting the same nonsectarian education to children of all creeds.69 The academy also filled an important social need in Huntingdon. It provided the settlers with a common meeting hall apart from their churches and made social gatherings feasible during winter. The most popular entertainments were the "fancy fairs" run by the women to raise funds. "Who that ever attended one, can ever forget the old-time academy soiree?" asked Sellar in later life. The upstairs hall seated about three hundred, and a like number could be jammed at supper tables in the classrooms below. People flocked in from a wide radius when sleighing was good - from Durham, Franklin, Dundee, La Guerre - eager to renew acquaintances with friends not seen for months. Archibald McEachern, the perennial chairman, would shout his stentorian voice hoarse attempting to impose order for the speakers, but the milling crowd simply would not be seated. Only the singers - Simon Fax was the favourite - commanded attention, though the Durham saxhorn band was capable of blasting everybody into submission. Fundraising entertainments included raffles for quilts, the grab bag, the ring-cake auction, the post office, and tickets to an oyster supper, which precipitated a mad scramble for the tables below. Towards the close there was the inevitable attempt to shove back the chairs for a grand promenade, but the directors usually intervened to preserve decorum. They were momentous occasions, these Huntingdon bazaars, and without them the academy would have broken down financially more than once.70 Huntingdon's educational unanimity ended when the nuns of the Congregation of Notre Dame established a convent school in the

39 The Journalist and His Field

village in 1861. That it would divert Catholics from the academy was to be expected, but its low fees and courses in French, art, music, and embroidery attracted Protestant girls as well. The Gleaner's fulminations against conventual institutions and Protestants who patronized them constituted an offence against the sensibilities of an appreciable segment of the community.71 It would not be the last. Whatever the divisions within Huntingdon County, the interests of agriculture were sacred to all. The agricultural society of the old county of Beauharnois had given way in 1857 to separate societies for the three new counties of Beauharnois, Chateauguay, and Huntingdon. Sellar arrived in time to witness the Huntingdon society's second show on its new fair grounds in 1863. He was not overly impressed. The directors, in imitation of the Malone fair, had fenced the grounds, erected a grandstand, and laid out a racetrack, attracting such an "unsavory crowd" from across the line that horseracing was subsequently abandoned by common consent.72 More representative of the region was the district show of September 1864, organized by J.M. Browning, the last of the seigniorial agents. Among the cattle tied along the fences in a field adjoining Durham Village, Sellar counted nineteen pedigreed Ayrshires and two breeds, Galloways and Devons, since disappeared. Local stockmen were among the progressive few in Canada who imported purebred animals for breeding in the nineteenth century. Clydesdales predominated in the horse-ring, thanks to the stallion Briton, imported by the Beauharnois society in 1862, and two stallions previously imported by John Somerville. The "Scotchmen" of Huntingdon, reported the Montreal Gazette, "are making determined efforts to elevate the standard of farming and stock-raising in the county."73 At the fair dinner that evening Sellar noted that the temperance movement had made such headway that many of the complimentary bottles of wine were left on the table uncorked. After Simon Fax had amused the company with his songs, the district's three members of parliament presided with good-natured banter over the prizegiving. Browning had intended to hold such an event every third year, but in 1865 the Seigniory of Beauharnois wound up its affairs. With Browning's departure the concept of a district show lapsed until the inauguration of the Ormstown Exhibition nearly a half-century later. Another rural tradition, the old-time ploughing match, was already on the wane when Sellar came to Huntingdon. For the district in the early i86os was in throes of a revolution in farm machinery that heralded the coming age of mechanized agriculture. The long-handled Scotch ploughs manufactured by Alexander McGarth of North Georgetown were being superseded by the gang plough,

40 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

Job printing for the Huntingdon fair, 1868

which enhanced the efficiency, if not the artistry, of the ploughman. The old hand rake was giving way to the horse rake - an innovation for which Jabez Dewitt of Dewittville won first prize at the provincial exhibition. New mechanical mowers manufactured by B.P. Paige did not win immediate favour owing to their difficulty of draft, but later refinements rendered such "horse killers" more acceptable. The

41 The Journalist and His Field

horse thresher was supplanting the flail, with those made at Brasher Falls, New York, gaining preference over the Montreal makes of Paige and Johnson. The Chateauguay Valley's better agriculturalists, Sellar soon realized, were moving with the times, matching pace with the most progressive in Ontario. But the new labour-saving devices encouraged careless practices, and he continued to hold the old-time agriculturalists and their primitive equipment in great respect. "Those who tilled the fields then," he would recall with reference to the clean, straight, and even ridges of a bygone era, "had been trained in the old country and took more pains."74 Although the privations of the pioneer period were beginning to recede by Sellar's time, life in the Chateauguay Valley remained far from luxurious. Bad roads kept people home from church and confined them for long periods on their farms. Isolation promoted neighbourliness, and overnight visits were the rule. Families lived primarily on the produce of their farms. Flour from homegrown wheat, flavoured with wild pea, made bread that Sellar found "more commonly bad than good." The trusty pork barrel and a side of beef, salted down in the fall, furnished the staple for winter dinners, and milk was rare after New Year's. On higher farms, where corn, buckwheat, vegetables, and apples could be grown, there was greater variety to the diet, though fruit was always scarce in the district. The womenfolk had yet to be emancipated from field labour, and Sellar judged their cooking a matter for improvement. The region's houses were in transition from the pioneer log cabin to the frame or stone house of the next generation, and winters were an ordeal for man and beast alike. Cattle, housed in low-roofed stables and fed straw, generally emerged so "spring-poor" that, according to local lore, they would not rise until their tails were twisted. The typical farm was a hundred acres, its chief crops oats and barley. In its heyday the thriving little port of Beauharnois was shipping upwards of 120,000 bushels of grain per harvest month. Mixed farming was not common and the butter, stored in cellars to be sold in bulk at the end of the season, was of low repute. Though the district was making steady progress, even modestly affluent residents faced an everyday life of fortitude, self-denial, and toil. Sellar's own hardships in getting established in Canada's backwoods, he realized, were in no way unique.

2 Confederation and the New Era It is impossible for any English-speaking resident of this Province to forget that, if we are now at the mercy of a Local Legislature which seems to have only two ideas for its guidance, the furtherance of French interests and the strengthening of the pretensions of the Church of Rome, Confederation is mainly responsible for our anomalous position. Gleaner, 25 December 1873

C O N F E D E R A T I O N O P P O S E D , 1864-66

The mid-i86os were critical years for Canada. The 1841 constitution, according equality to Upper and Lower Canada in a united parliament, fuelled sectional antagonism and deadlock as Upper Canada continued to grow and demand representation according to population. By the i86os various panaceas, from outright repeal of the Canadian union to a new union on the federal principle, were under scrutiny. But the Gleaner adhered to its conviction that only by according Upper Canada her just share of representation could the province be brought nearer to "what every well-wisher of her must desire, one in sentiment, one in sympathy, and with one destiny." Roman Catholics, detecting in such notions the threat of BritishProtestant uniformity, clung as long as possible to the status quo. George Edward Clerk's True Witness and Catholic Chronicle, the English-language organ of the Bishop of Montreal, attributed the Gleaner's appearance to an "anti-Catholic section of the Lower Canadian community" that sought to "gain" by "trampling on the rights, privileges, and property of Papists." But what the True Witness saw as an attack on the Roman Catholic Church was to the Gleaner a necessary initiative to thwart the "attempt to make the civil law tributary to any church." To voluntaryists like Thomas and Robert Sellar it was simply a matter of "equal justice for all" that no religious body should enjoy preferential establishment in a country as diverse as Canada. When the True Witness began to call for dissolution of the

43 Confederation and the New Era

union, the Gleaner opposed it for the same reason - because it would "throw the whole political power of Lower Canada into the hands of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy."1 The Sellars had favoured repeal themselves at the great Upper Canadian Reform Convention of 1859, but that was before they were residents of Lower Canada. By equating clerical influence with political power the Gleaner was drawing close to the heart of the greatest politico-religious controversy of the century - the question of civil versus ecclesiastical authority in society. The Sellars viewed the defeat of liberal Catholicism in Europe by the ultramontanism of Pope Pius IX as "fraught with much danger" to Canada. Their work at the Globe had brought them into the mainstream of Grit protest against clerical influence. They endorsed the Witness's view that too many French Canadians were pliant tools in the hands of their clergy - a phalanx of "moutons/' educated in the colleges of the priests "and sent by them into Parliament" to legislate, by the dead weight of their numbers, a host of "tyrannical assumptions." They dreaded the prospect of such a legislature in sole control of Lower Canada. On i October 1864 Robert Sellar inscribed in his diary the principles that would govern the Gleaner's position on the Confederation question. "Recognizing the truth that Lower Canada can never be permanently quiet, or prosperous, or every man in it have equal rights, until the Popish organization in it has been thoroughly destroyed," he wrote, "the Gleaner shall advocate the abolition of tithes and all compulsory taxes, the incorporation of religious institutions of any nature, the holding of lands in mortmain, and all other exclusive privileges, not resting still until the Papacy in Lower Canada is placed on the same footing as the Protestant denominations." It would "do its utmost to prevent the two Provinces from being separated." It would have everyone "possessed of the same rights and privileges, secular schools and voluntarily supported churches, the Government confined strictly to its administrative and legislative capacities, and the most utter and entire separation between Church and State. Nothing short of this ever to be accepted." It was, in effect, George Brown's editorial policy of the 18505, but Sellar was discovering that the platform that had built the Globe into the country's most formidable organ of public opinion was one that minority-conscious Lower Canadians were reluctant to openly endorse. "There is nothing disheartens me more than the coldness shown by so many Protestants towards every effort to overthrow the Papacy," he confided to his diary. "How many of them shook their heads when the Gleaner has taken a stand against it; how many have tried to dissuade me from interfering with it. When I was at

44 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

Chrysostome the other day, an intelligent man, a Presbyterian and a Scotchman, told me that he thought a good deal might be done in that neighborhood amongst the Scotch settlers, but that I would need to leave the Catholics alone! Even the Orangemen only give me a divided support. What a wretched lukewarm generation." Protestant clergymen, "time-servers every one of them," were "loudmouthed against convent-schools and Papist-organization in private, yet meek and compliant in public."2 His disgust with the supineness of Quebec's Protestant minority was not destined to be short-lived. Sellar's diary reveals an impulse far too religious and personal for the secular columns of his newspaper: "At the day of Judgement will God hold the Protestants of Lower Canada guiltless of the awful idolatry and superstition which enwraps it? Do they not acquiesce in helping the priests to bind the chains upon the people, to tax them to support the masterpiece of iniquity, to incorporate convents and even to pay taxes themselves to teach Popery in national schools. They know what is right, and yet will not raise a finger to overthrow the wrong; but wink at it for the sake of a hollow peace and for lucre."3 Might such dereliction invite divine retribution in the future? Given Sellar's preoccupations, it is not surprising that George Brown's ideal of representation by population remained the only acceptable constitutional option. But Brown himself was being won over to the idea of a federation of the two Canadas - almost as objectionable as outright repeal, because it also entailed their separation. Thomas D'Arcy McGee's grand vision of a monarchical union of all of British North America was dismissed as hot air, and if independence meant separation from Britain, the expense of a royal court and standing army, and the introduction of "all the foppery of a monied aristocracy" into Canadian life, the Gleaner would not hear of it. In June 1864 came the disillusioning news of Brown's coalition with Carrier and Macdonald. "He will now find," the Gleaner predicted as the Canadian delegates set out for Charlottetown, "that the whole labor of his life has been destroyed by one false step."4 The draft of the constitution drawn up at the Quebec conference that autumn embodied Sellar's worst fears. Lower Canada was to be separated from Upper and handed over to a provincial assembly made up almost entirely of French Canadians. "In such a Parliament," the Gleaner asked, "does any sane man pretend that the British people of Lower Canada will receive that respect and measure of justice which, from their numbers and wealth, is their undoubted right?" Minority safeguards in the new constitution "will not be worth the paper they are written on," the Gleaner predicted. The only

45 Confederation and the New Era

true guarantee "is that we have at present - a sufficient number of English members in Parliament to prevent any law being passed that would do us injustice." Let every British-Protestant Lower Canadian oppose the adoption of the Quebec confederation scheme.5 Huntingdon County was one of only a few Lower Canadian constituencies in which the Quebec resolutions were submitted to public consultation. To the large audience in the academy hall 4 January 1865 it became clear that Robert Somerville was far along the road to political conversion. He did not disown rep by pop but argued that its "golden opportunity" had passed. He also considered the nearly unanimous preference of English-speaking Lower Canadians for legislative as opposed to federative union beyond the realm of political possibility. He appreciated the main apprehension of his constituents - that under a Quebec legislature "Jean Baptiste will Frenchify everything, discourage immigration, and settle the public lands with Frenchmen to the exclusion of immigrants from the old country" - but pointed out that French Canadians entertained fears of their own about an English-dominated central government. He vowed never to vote for the scheme unless suitable guarantees were secured for the protection of the English-speaking minority.6 Sellar did his best to suppress a nagging suspicion that John A. Macdonald had landed another "loose fish." "Much distressed by trend of political events," he jotted in his notebook. "Confederation does not recommend itself, yet Somerville is for it." A motion endorsing the Quebec resolutions was passed, but only a fraction of the stunned audience actually voted. A similar resolution carried in Havelock but subsequent meetings proved less cordial. Hemmingford demanded "a direct vote of the people," Franklin insisted on a general election, while Hinchinbrook refused to vote on anything until the promised safeguards were known.7 Forced by worsening weather to cancel his remaining meetings, Somerville left for Quebec as the Gleaner began to take exception to his politics for the first time. Its readers responded. On 3 February an Elgin meeting presided over by Daniel Macfarlane unanimously opposed the Quebec resolutions. On 13 February a Hinchinbrook meeting called by Joshua Breadner passed a motion requesting Somerville to vote against them. Thomas Sellar's editorials, meanwhile, were full of additional reasons for opposing Confederation - a "double set" of governments, a "ruinous" twelve-million-dollar railway to the fish and lumber of the Maritimes that offered no gain to the Canadian farmer, a new lease on power for the Macdonald-Cartier "corruptionists," and a weakening of the British connection. "What we want instead of Confederation," the Gleaner persisted, "is a thorough union

46 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

between the two Provinces, a blotting out of the boundary line, and representation from every county of it, both East and West, according to population."8 In March the Sellars were cheered by the defeat of the proConfederation government in New Brunswick, then angered when the Canadian parliament passed the Quebec resolutions anyway. Somerville maintained an unbroken silence as he cast his vote among the yeas. Chateauguay's Luther Holton won plaudits for opposing Confederation, but his speech was far too "squeamish" to suit the Gleaner. "If the Protestants of Lower Canada are afraid to speak out what they think, either in the House or out of it, for fear of offending the French," it admonished, "they deserve to be trampled on and priest-ridden to eternity."9 To Upper Canadians Confederation seemed to promise emancipation from French-Catholic influence; to French Canadians it assured control of Lower Canada; to Maritimers it offered a railway and a hope of prosperity; but to the old-country settlers of Lower Canada it meant "political annihilation," and the Gleaner would have none of it. There is no reason to suppose that opposition to Confederation was unrepresentative of public opinion in English-speaking Lower Canada at the time. The dearth of opportunities for citizens to pronounce on the Quebec resolutions was probably no accident, for evidence of public support is hard to find. Dr John William Dawson of McGill University warned of new disabilities for Protestant education. Members of the Montreal Literary Society reached a nearly unanimous verdict in October 1864 that English-speaking Lower Canadians had failed in their duty by not supporting representation by population. In December, after a three-hour debate convened by the Mercantile Library Association, the largest Montreal assemblage to consider the issue voted down the resolution "Ought the proposed scheme of Confederation to be adopted?" by a margin of over two hundred to seventeen.10 Among newspapers the Gleaner's Protestant concerns were shared by John Dougall's Witness (the Catholic True Witness was equally averse for opposite reasons), while Rouge arguments against the practical feasibility of union with the lower provinces were echoed in Edward Goff Penny's Montreal Herald. In the Eastern Townships, where concern about the growing influx of French Canadians was already a live issue, J.S. Walton's Sherbrooke Gazette and others voiced fears that Confederation would throw English-speaking settlers upon the mercy of a legislature dominated by a hostile majority. Well might Thomas Sellar report that "the majority of the English-speaking population are opposed to the proposed Confederation."11 In the entire

47 Confederation and the New Era

province only two important English-language journals stood out for Confederation. One was John B. Foote's Quebec Morning Chronicle, a subsidized government organ, and the other was Brown Chamberlin's Montreal Gazette, whose primary concern was for the interests of Montreal's capitalist elite. The prevailing views of mere citizens proved no match for the resources marshalled against them, for the only faction within English-speaking Quebec society that clearly favoured Confederation was by far the most powerful. Montreal's Scottish-Protestant business oligarchy - the men who already ruled a vast commercial empire in the St Lawrence and ran the Grand Trunk Railway, the Montreal Ocean Steamship Line, the Bank of Montreal, the Ottawa timber trade, and other comparable enterprises - had even more to gain by expansion. Whereas merchants advertising in the Herald were primarily free-trading importers dubious of Confederation, Brown Chamberlin of the Gazette was now promoting the rise of a new industrialist class. Secretary and president of the Board of Arts and Manufactures, founded to foster investment in industry by lobbying for an expanded and protected home market, he had toyed with schemes of British-American union since the late 18503. The magnates of Montreal's "Golden Square Mile" envisaged a heydey under Confederation; unorganized farmers and city working people were almost voiceless by comparison.12 Most Eastern Townships representatives were at one with the Montreal establishment. Alexander Tilloch Gait of Sherbrooke entered politics to advance business interests and launched an initiative for federal union as early as 1858. As finance minister in the Cartier-Macdonald ministry he had legislated in favour of railways, river improvement, and tariffs. Confederation was obviously a nonstarter for anyone whose interests were not tied to big business, but Sellar found apathy more prevalent than outright opposition. Save for the English-speaking mayors of Drummond, who condemned the Quebec resolutions in January, public demonstrations either for or against had not materialized. Politicians were able to construe resignation and silence as consent. Canada, thanks to the "fatuity" of representatives like Somerville, was now committed to seeking federal union.13 Immediately following the passage of the Confederation proposals Sellar wrote to inform Somerville that "after your vote on Friday night, you must know it is impossible for me to give you that support you have a right to expect from the Gleaner." He asked for help in "getting clear of it" to "relieve me from the unpleasant position of being an unwilling instrument in breeding strife between you and

48 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

your supporters and of your having to contribute to a paper from which you can derive no benefit." That Somerville's vote was not the only reason for quitting was made plain in another letter to Breadner. "The Committee," Sellar charged, "has not performed a single one of the obligations they bound themselves to do when I agreed to stay." As he had "already stayed twice" against his "will and better judgement," he expected to "be allowed to go away quietly."14 Sellar's diary reveals that the Gleaner's discouraging prospects were probably his most important reason for going. "How I am to meet my bill for paper next month causes me much uneasiness," he fretted. "It is hard to think of how neglectful people are of paying their debts - especially newspaper debts." He anticipated a loss of two hundred dollars for the year, yet only two of the committee had paid their assessment. "It is beggarly living on others," he fumed. "The miserable way in which I was forced to conduct business last summer disgusts me when I think of it." His mother and Elspet could be maintained in Huntingdon at relatively low cost. He must "either stay and go into debt or leave now and trust to luck."15 For days Sellar agonized over his decision. The reasons for leaving, recapitulated on the pages of his diary, seemed "irresistible"; he had "nothing to place against them beyond a reluctance to rub against the world in a new country." His health was again breaking down. "I think the Gleaner with its ceaseless labor and anxiety is goading me to madness," he wrote. "For the last six weeks death would have been welcome to me at any moment. This is surely a morbid feeling of the brain, and yet it is so." Finally his mind was again made up. "Yes, I must go," he declared in his diary. "I bitterly regretted staying in January 1864 and also in May." To his surprise the committee, fed up with their worrisome involvement with newspapers, offered him the plant at half-cost in interest-free instalments. "There cannot be a greater mistake than to suppose that a man knows his own character best," he rationalized. On 17 October 1865 he passed into sole control of the Gleaner for the first time and began the task of extinguishing his liability to its former owners.16 Sellar's decision to persevere with the Gleaner brought renewed concern for its damaging rivalry with the Huntingdon Journal. The Journal supported Confederation but rarely confined itself to the issues. Following the departure of his brother Amos to Ottawa in the summer of 1864, Ransome Rowe's attacks knew no restraint. The Gleaner was a "one-horse smut machine," a "disgrace to the locality," and a "thing to be loathed by every respectable journalist in the country." Its editor was an "inexperienced youth" imported to "print the sheet and do

49 Confederation and the New Era

the dirty work generally." Its backers were "unscrupulous liars ... petty bigots ... poor specimens of cattle and swine ... [a] mean and venomous clique ... [the] fag end of a set of uneasy and dissatisfied individuals ... [and] semi-barbarians, fit for any species of crime known in the criminal calendar." Was not the Gleaner the result of a "foul conspiracy" to "utterly annihilate" the Journal and to "abuse every person who will not shout 'down with the French'; 'to hell with the Pope"'? But the plotters, "ever since they gave their lous" for the press and type, had been "bleeding most unmercifully," Rowe gloated. "The great success and popularity of the Journal fills their small and narrow-contracted carcasses with nothing but envy, hatred, and malice." Several times the Journal exulted in the anticipated demise of its rival, but the Gleaner would not die.17 Sellar, now alone in the Gleaner's editorial chair, undertook the distasteful task of replying to such invective. "If we are capable," he ventured, "we cannot see that it matters much whether, unlike the editor of the Journal, we are neither old in years or in iniquity." He winced at his antagonist's "vile Yankee slang" and wondered if the proprietor of a truly prosperous journal would offer it for a greenback, "don the character of 'Cheap John'" on the auctioneer's rostrum, become "a contractor for the conveyance of Her Majesty's mails," and "hunt after every secretary-ship that becomes vacant with an eagerness that marks how great a boon the trifle would be to him." It was impossible to remain neutral in Huntingdon's newspaper war. Even the academy students, writing essays on the county's history, took sides. One prizewinning effort conceded victory to the Gleaner, noting that the Journal had not done well since coming out "charged to the muzzle with slander" against Somerville. The essay, printed in the Gleaner, evoked howls of protest from the Journal. Apparently the donor of the silver medal awarded to the young historian was none other than Robert Somerville's brother Andrew.18 By 1866 Sellar, aided by the verbal and alcoholic excesses of his rival, had gone a long way towards undermining his credibility. He exposed Rowe's editorial plagiarism, even providing readers with an index to the papers from which he copied his articles. Equally damaging were editorials exhumed from Rowe's old Upper Canada paper, the Halton Journal, which had once advocated rep by pop as rabidly as his Huntingdon Journal opposed it. Lower Canada, according to the earlier Rowe, was "the type of the dark ages," peopled by an "inferior" race "soaked in Egyptian gloom, degraded by oppression ... [and] two hundred years behind in civilization." Such insults were hardly becoming to one who, eight years after penning

5O Voice of the Vanishing Minority

them, was presuming to discredit Huntingdon's reformers as "rabid agitators from the old country" trying to "breed strife between the creeds and nationalities" of the new.19 Rowe's final undoing had little to do with journalism. When his friends were turned out of the Godmanchester council in 1866, he touched off a scandal by refusing to relinquish the secretary's books. An investigation revealed petty tax-gathering irregularities, and in October he slipped out of the country to Burlington, Vermont.20 The declining Journal, unfortunately for Sellar, did not vanish also. It had been taken over in April by James Mann and John Gilmour Boyd, a young Huntingdon lawyer with political ambitions. Rowe's departure signalled a permanent change in the Gleaner's editorial policy. Never again would Sellar descend to the petty depths of local newspaper mudslinging. For the rest of his life the Gleaner would debate only with journals of repute, ignoring the slings and arrows of hometown rivals in contemptuous silence. Two developments that stimulated the Confederation movement in 1866 were the expiration of the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States and the Fenian raids - both fraught with more than passing significance to a border county like Huntingdon. The notion of Confederation as a patriotic alternative to reciprocity elicited only snorts of disgust from the Gleaner, which saw it as a costly red herring designed to divert public attention away from the government's failure to negotiate suitable trading terms with the Americans. It held any suggestion that union with the distant Atlantic coast would compensate the Canadian farmer for the loss of millions of customers for his grain, livestock, and butter on his southern doorstep almost too ridiculous to warrant refutation. "For the last ten years, at least threefourths of all the produce of the farmers in this county has been bought by our neighbors," summed up the Gleaner on the eve of reciprocity's expiration. "After tomorrow this will no longer be the case, and the farmer instead of finding a ready market at his door, will have to depend on the uncertain one of Montreal."21 The people of Huntingdon would face a difficult period of economic reorientation ahead. Much more sudden was the Fenian danger that burst upon the Huntingdon frontier in the early summer. The Gleaner, ever since the Jervois military survey had cited the territory south of the St Lawrence as virtually indefensible, had kept an eye on the Irish nationalist movement in the United States. But frontier residents, living in daily association with their American neighbours, had ceased reacting to every Fenian alarm. News that Fenians were massing at Buffalo to invade Canada provided the crowd in Barrett's

51 Confederation and the New Era

barroom with their evening topic of conversation on i June. There was a possibility of local trouble, but Huntingdon had no telegraph and there seemed little to do but wait for more news in the mail. Such complacency was shattered at midnight when two officers galloped up with word that Fenians had crossed the frontier into Huntingdon. The village was roused, guards were posted at the two bridges, and by daybreak most of the militia volunteers had straggled in. All grumbling ceased as word came that Fenians were gathering in Malone. Friendly Americans confirmed that hordes of men without uniforms, with officers distinguishable only by green neckties, had commandeered the fairgrounds and were thronging the streets of the town, their numbers increasing with the arrival of each train. Sellar rose at sunrise on 2 June and hastened to Barrett's Hotel, where Captain Browne of the regulars, a Crimean veteran, had set up headquarters. He found the commander seated on the gallery a thick, coarse, "bulldog type of soldier," reassuring in his determination to fight rather than fall back on approaching reinforcements. For a tense week Sellar shared the feelings of the apprehensive community - their thankfulness for the sudden rains that deprived the enemy of the opportunity for a rapid advance; their sense of isolation from the outside world; their elation at the arrival of seventy teams bearing reinforcements. Local residents, unable to get weapons for a home guard, dug a trench to guard the river road, and Sellar felt a swelling sense of pride at their determination to defend their homes. There was anger at the news of Fenian ravages in Missisquoi County, resentment against false American friends who seemed strangely hospitable to the marauders, and indignation at the American government for allowing it to happen at all. Sellar spent several sleepless nights listening to the rumble of wagons evacuating frontier families to safety beyond the village. There was excitement in the arrest of two spies and gratification at the firmness of the American army's eventual suppression of the troublemakers. The pervading feeling, after it was all over, was a mixture of relief, indignation, and pride. "I have very noticeable reason to thank God for stationing the field battery gentlemen in my premises at the time when my good wife's courage had begun to fail," wrote Sellar's future father-in-law, Rev. James Watson, in his diary. "Did these Fenians think that they could break up the Union of the British Empire, and pervert the American Union into a confederation of robbers?"22 The loss of reciprocity and the Fenian danger gave fresh impetus to the Confederation cause. With the return of the pro-Confederation

52 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

party in New Brunswick the movement was speedily revived. The Gleaner did what it could to keep opposition alive. It waxed indignant over Canadian delegates "feasting and holiday-making" in London at public expense. It shrank from the proposal to purchase the Northwest, saying more land for Canada would be "carrying coals to Newcastle with a vengeance." It greeted news of the Vatican's acceptance of the Quebec resolutions with bitterness. "Will it not be a happy day for us when we have Cartier as our governor," it cried, "the man who divides his allegiance between the Queen and the Pope?" It added its voice to the protest that dissuaded the government from reneging on its promise to make the electoral boundaries of the twelve "English" township ridings impervious to change without authorization by two-thirds of their elected representatives.23 The response of the Montreal Minerve was to remind its readers that such guarantees were inviolate only as long as the English retained the majority in the counties concerned. "Our compatriots will shortly be in a majority at all points," it proclaimed. "Laws and constitutions are made for the future. But the future is for us - in Lower Canada wholly for us."24 The Minerve's prediction stirred Sellar to the depths of his soul. His protracted opposition to Confederation was predicated upon his total agreement with Cartier's organ as to its ultimate effect on the English-Protestant minority of Lower Canada. Even more disturbing was the last-minute withdrawal of school guarantees promised the Lower Canadian minority. On the eve of second reading the French-speaking members refused to support the requisite bill unless similar concessions were granted the Roman Catholic minority of Upper Canada. Cartier had travelled over a hundred miles to submit the bill to a synod of bishops at St Johns only days before, and Sellar sensed clerical intrigue behind the breach of faith. Protestants in Lower Canada were entitled to their own system, the Gleaner argued, because the schools of the majority were purely sectarian - an objection that could not be raised against the common schools of Upper Canada. Gait's resignation in protest was seen as "a mere blind, a sham, for he still continues to be Finance Minister and will superintend the carrying out of his plans."25 Cartier insisted his promises to the minority would yet be fulfilled (as indeed they were) in a provincial education bill after Confederation, but the Gleaner declined to trust a defaulter a second time. What, it wondered, would it take to stir the Lower Canadian minority? Would not the defeat of "the only measure which made our people put up with Confederation" yet startle them into action?

53 Confederation and the New Era

There was still time to petition the Imperial government as Nova Scotia had done. Were the lessons of 1688 to go unheeded in 1866? Had Protestants not learned the danger of "entrusting the government into the hands of rulers who did not belong to the Reformed faith"? If they had not, the Gleaner cried, "let them take the consequences of their own slothfulness and stupidity, and they and their children will have cause to curse their want of action at this crisis in our history."26 It was amid such dire predictions, as the Englishspeaking Protestants of Lower Canada awaited Confederation with their educational safeguards unsecured, that Robert Sellar finally did quit the Gleaner and leave Canada. THE DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF THE GLEANER, 1866-67

Although the Gleaner had survived its worst times, its subscription list still fell well short of the magic figure of one thousand needed to adequately maintain Sellar and his charges. The Journal's continued existence remained a problem; his equity in the business was still small enough to be easily disposed of; and the end of the war in the United States removed many of the uncertainties that had deterred him from striking out sooner. Disgusted with the Lower Canadian minority's tame acceptance of Confederation, he informed Daniel Macfarlane on 22 August of his intention to leave the country. There were the usual objections, but Macfarlane and the others ultimately agreed to resume control of the plant. Sellar's sole condition was that, as "I could get no security that it would continue to advocate the same principles as it has hitherto," the Gleaner's successor must bear some other name. On 7 September 1866 the Gleaner announced its discontinuance; on 28 September the Huntingdon News appeared; on 5 October Robert Sellar bade farewell to his mother and departed from the scene of his tribulations to join his brother Charles in New England and "commence the world anew."27 He was gone from Huntingdon eight months, rubbing shoulders with returning soldiers on the labour markets of Rutland, Boston, and Hartford. His diary reveals great curiosity about the American republic - particularly the South, the plight of negroes, and the civil war. "The poor whites of the South put me in mind of the Highlanders of old times," he wrote, "ignorant, despising honest labor, proud and revengeful." Bull Run seemed to him the modern Gladsmuir; the Battle of the Wilderness the modern Culloden. "In both instances, tho' set wide apart, the struggle was virtually one between popular rights and those of the aristocracy; between ignorance and knowledge."28

54 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

Working as a journeyman printer in Boston, Sellar attended three lectures by the celebrated Ralph Waldo Emerson - a sallow, sonorous "apostle of unbelief" who "took a strange pleasure in utterances that would startle such of his hearers as had a regard for Christianity." He watched the Fenians parade through crowded streets and wondered what consequences the brotherhood's flourishing condition implied for Canada. In Hartford he strained his eyes setting tables in miniature type and donned the thick spectacles he would wear for the rest of his life. Charles, unable to find work, fared worse, walking "miles and miles on foot and living on bread alone for some days."29 The thought of returning to Huntingdon kept cropping up. "Last night," Robert entered in his diary, "I dreamed most persistently that I was again conducting the Gleaner and again bothered by the penurious people I had to deal with." Huntingdon also reached out for him in letters from his mother, Elspet, old Macfarlane, and Robert Somerville. An invitation from Somerville to recommence the Gleaner was declined in March, but in May the brothers decided to visit the village. "Robert and Charley returned from the United States disappointed," entered Thomas Sellar in his diary, "and are again with Mother in Huntingdon."30 Their reappearance came at a critical time. Confederation was about to go into force to be followed by early elections. The News had not given satisfaction and was breaking down. Its nominal proprietor, a man named Williams, had taken flight in February without paying a cent on his agreement to rent the plant for five dollars a month. It was now being operated on sufferance by its printer, James J. Atkins. The opposing Journal, on the other hand, had made a strong comeback under John G. Boyd. It supported Confederation and had gained circulation by placing itself at the head of a brief railway agitation during Sellar's absence. No sooner did the brothers arrive than Robert was beset by "the most pressing invitations to remain altogether and recommence the Gleaner." His first inclination was to refuse "to have anything more to do with newspapers in a district where no higher subscription-price than a dollar could be got." But with Charles on hand to help, and "domestic circumstances making it desirable that I should remain in Huntingdon," he soon accepted. The relieved committee offered the printing equipment for only token payment, while Atkins agreed to stay on and work for wages. No sooner had the terms been settled than Sellar's troubles began. Atkins, for reasons temporarily unfathomed, suddenly announced that he would neither yield up the office nor continue the News. The committee, embarrassed by the failure of the News to appear, finally

55 Confederation and the New Era

offered him thirty dollars to simply move on, but the intransigent printer responded by demanding an exorbitant sum, locking up the office, and setting out for Montreal. Macfarlane and his friends were nonplussed. Atkins had no legal right to the office, and had collected several hundred dollars in subscriptions without paying anything towards the forty-five dollars due as rent. The causes of such behaviour could not long remain secret in a village as small as Huntingdon. John Boyd, planning to run for the new Quebec legislature, had offered Atkins six dollars a week and a job at the Journal if he would delay the Gleaner's reappearance until after the election. On 25 May, after the News failed to appear for the second week, Somerville obtained a writ of revendication from the superior court at Beauharnois. Atkins surrendered the keys to the bailiff and Sellar was appointed guardian of the property. Boyd countered by inducing Atkins to padlock the office in contempt of the court order. Sellar, receiving word that someone had been hired to wreck the plant, engaged four farmers and a team to remove the materials to safer premises. He pried off one of the locks and Atkins offered no resistance, though his wife threw a broom at two of the men who entered their upstairs apartment to take down the stovepipes. Boyd s most extraordinary effort to block the Gleaner had yet to come. On 31 May Sellar was suddenly arrested and charged with burglary "by force and arms" for "stealing" Atkins' fifty-cent padlock and hasp. The two farmers who had gone upstairs for the stovepipes were charged, preposterously, with intent to murder. The warrants had been concealed until an hour before the hearing so that there could be no chance of obtaining magistrates other than the two Boyd had recruited - Charles Dewitt and Dennis Martin, the latter so far gone with drink that he was unable to administer the oath. Boyd appeared for the prosecution, and the justices, leaving the defence witnesses unheard, committed the five defendants to stand trial at Beauharnois. Their plan to confine Sellar in jail miscarried at the last minute when Dewitt, aware of the tenuous nature of the evidence, accepted bail of one hundred dollars. Sellar, pressing ahead, circulated handbills announcing 14 June as the Gleaner's publication date, but on 8 June Boyd moved again. With an affidavit bearing Atkins' signature he secured his own writ of revendication from the circuit court and despatched a bailiff, Henry Lighthall, to seize the materials. Sellar stood his ground. The office was already under a writ from a higher court and securities were offered by Macfarlane for the full value stipulated. Lighthall withdrew empty-handed but on 10 June Atkins himself appeared, accompanied by a less scrupulous bailiff from St Anicet. When his

56

Voice of the Vanishing Minority

securities were rejected, Sellar charged the bailiff with contravening the law and announced his intention to defend his property. Both Atkins and the bailiff were ejected "with as little violence as possible."31 The fracas attracted a large and mainly sympathetic crowd. Boyd's game was now known in the village, and suspicions were confirmed when the young lawyer-editor announced his candidature for the forthcoming provincial elections. CONFEDERATION ELECTIONS AND GLEANER T R I A L S , 1867-68

When the Gleaner resumed publication on 14 June the inauguration of Confederation was only two weeks away. "Our opinions on the measure are still unchanged," it ventured, "and altho' it would be foolish now to cry out against what cannot be helped, yet there is no reason that we should accept it as a finality." There was still hope for an eventual legislative union to assimilate the laws and people of the new Dominion. As for the federal system, "the Upper Canadian, the French Canadian, the New Brunswicker or Nova Scotian may accept it, but the old-country residents of Lower Canada can only submit to it." Time, it predicted, would demonstrate "how far our fears are justifiable." The Gleaner's low estimate of Confederation was still shared by the majority of its readers. There were no flags, no fireworks, no Dominion Day celebrations in the Chateauguay Valley. The militia companies turned out at their respective headquarters and drilled - there being no blank ammunition with which to fire a feu de joie. Nor was there any fanfare over the appointments of Louis Renaud and Henry Starnes to represent the district in the new Canadian senate and Quebec legislative council. Confederation was nothing to cheer about in Huntingdon. The new Dominion was barely a day old when the local political cauldron began to bubble. First into the ring was John Rose - a formidable government candidate who had held cabinet portfolios under Cartier and Macdonald and who had recently participated in the London conference on Confederation. Though Rose was a Montreal lawyer identified with large business interests, he had grown up on a farm near Athelstan, and his organizers were doing their best to turn his campaign into the triumphal procession of a local boy who made good. Sellar saw him for the first time at his meeting in the county courthouse on 8 July. "Tall, large-boned, and angular," whatever he "lacked in elegance and fluency he made up in impressiveness," but he was no political divinity as far as the Gleaner was

57 Confederation and the New Era

concerned. The farmers, flattered that a man of such influence should seek their suffrages, were reminded that he had been "a most obsequious servant and supporter of Carrier's." Though he now pandered to local anti-Confederation sentiment by advocating legislative union, the Gleaner noted that it was the opposition of "the like of him" to rep by pop that had begotten the federal monstrosity he was now criticizing. He was, moreover, a protectionist, "in favor of building up the interests of the mill-owners at the expense of the farmers," and an advocate of costly military expenditures that would not benefit the south side of the St Lawrence. The Gleaner recalled that he had rejected Huntingdon in favour of a Montreal riding in 1857, and was indelicate enough to suggest that he was now cultivating the rural electorate only because his urban constituents were likely to reject him.32 On 19 July the people of Huntingdon were stunned to read in the Gleaner that Robert Somerville, their representative since 1854, had decided to retire from public life. Had he become disheartened at the loss of local support over his faux pas on Confederation? Or had he, as inferred by the Herald, been bought off to clear the way for the prestigious Rose? Though the Gleaner rejected this "gratuitous insult" at the time, there seemed no other explanation for the government appointment that took Huntingdon's former member to the inland revenue department at Toronto a few months later.33 The alternative to Rose was a second city lawyer, the dapper William H. Kerr, who had won the acquittal of the St Albans raiders. To the Gleaner he was just another of those "smooth-tongued, blackcoated gentlemen, who hie up from town at the first rumor of an election, to offer unsolicited their services, ready to take any pledge or make any promises, and even to spend money to induce people to vote for them." Canada presented to the world "the curious spectacle of a nation of farmers ruled by a government of solicitors and advocates, and where or when was there an Anglo-Saxon community cursed by worse parliaments than Canada?" These comments inaugurated a lifelong campaign to debunk the notion that farmers were not fit for public office. "If a man is honest and has common sense," the Gleaner believed, "his lack of Latin or Greek or the capability of speaking by the hour is no disqualification." Huntingdon's local councils did their work better than they would if composed of lawyers. It was high time Canadians elected parliaments "whose interests are common with those of the country."34 The election of outsiders was also identified by the Gleaner as a cause of political corruption in rural ridings. Organizers for both Rose and Kerr were spending money freely, bribing voters openly by

58 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

paying their taxes or more subtly by hiring their teams. At each polling station the rival parties maintained open houses and plied the electors with bread, cheese, and drink. These practices brought out the largest proportion of voters in Huntingdon's history but had a demoralizing effect for many elections to come. In vain the Gleaner called for an end to the unsavoury connection between money, whiskey, and politics. "If things go on as they have been," it complained, "after a time every county will have its price, and no lawyer need want a seat, or despair of being a cabinet minister or a judge, if he has only money enough to buy one." Another cause of political immorality was the gullibility of the electors themselves, always ready to vote for a man like Rose "if they think he will get a few thousands spent on their roads or other local improvements" while heaping burdens of taxation upon the country.35 Those who hoped Canada's great constitutional change would elevate the level of political debate were soon disappointed. The candidates pecked away at matters - Rose's signature on the Annexation Manifesto, Kerr's association with the Free Trade League — that were largely irrelevant to the county and frequently personal. "We would sooner see one of our township mayors member, or, in fact, any decent farmer, than either of them," summed up the Gleaner as Rose demolished his opponent by a margin of 1,280 to 486. Despite assurances that he would neither seek nor accept office, he was sworn in as finance minister on 8 November. Obliged to go before his constituents for reelection, he announced the inauguration of daily mail service between Huntingdon and Hemmingford and was returned by acclamation.36 It was the last Huntingdon would see of him until his retirement from Canadian public life in 1869. The Gleaner also took keen interest in the Chateauguay election and in the local contest for the Quebec legislature. The polling in Chateauguay had been delayed by the government, which was doing its utmost to unseat its most damaging financial critic, Luther Holton. On 20 July, at a field day at Ste Martine, Sellar caught his first glimpse of such luminaries as George Etienne Cartier, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, and Antoine Aime Dorion. Cartier was "a man of low stature with bushy hair and a pugnacious expression," whose "rasping voice and angry jerky style of speaking" bore out "the popular comparison of the caricaturists, of a Scotch terrier." McGee, for abusive language, Sellar found "unequalled by any politician of his time save Barney Devlin." Holton, a reserved Montrealer with whom the local people never really became acquainted, spoke only briefly before giving way to Dorion. "A finer type of French Canadian there could not be," thought Sellar. "Refined, dignified, of unruffled composure, and

59 Confederation and the New Era

intellectual," but his speaking style was judged "too quiet and argumentative" for the platform.37 Holton was able to carry Chateauguay without difficulty owing to an unique accommodation between the county's English- and French-speaking Liberals. The French, led by Dr Edouard Laberge, agreed to accept the English nominee for the federal parliament in return for reciprocal support for their choice of provincial candidate. The agreement worked well, minimizing friction between the linguistic groups and permitting Holton and Laberge to retain their seats for the rest of their lives. But it reinforced, regrettably in Sellar's view, Holton's tendency as an English-speaking businessman and politician to eschew public discussion on any matter that might give offence to French Canadians.38 Huntingdon's contest for the provincial house began with four candidates in the running, but the mutual withdrawal of the Orangeman, Joshua Breadner, and his Irish-Catholic opponent, James Clancy, narrowed the field down to Julius Scriver of Hemmingford and John Boyd of the Journal Sellar, who had shortly to appear in criminal court to answer Boyd's charges, did his best to reduce his antagonist's candidacy to a laughing stock with a wicked spoof about a lost diary of an unnamed candidate. Boyd flaunted his County Derry birthright in a slogan of "No surrender!" and endeavoured, although many of the Journal's readers were American, to stigmatize his opponent as a Yankee.39 Such tactics availed little against Julius Scriver. Of impeccable Loyalist origins, his grandfather had served against the invading Americans in 1813, and his father had led the Hemmingford volunteers against the rebels at Odelltown in 1838. He was still a stranger west of Franklin, but the blessing of John Rose, the Gleaner, and the favourable impression he created in his quiet speeches carried him to an easy victory. Forty-one years of age, a native of the county and a graduate of the University of Vermont, he was currently managing family storekeeping, lumbering, and tanning interests in Hemmingford. He had opposed Confederation for reasons "apparent to every thoughtful man of the English minority," and now sought to safeguard his constituents' interests at Quebec, where his working knowledge of French would be an important qualification. The Gleaner supported Scriver and would do so for the duration of his long political life.40 With the passing of the elections Sellar began to fret about his approaching trial in criminal court. "The case about burglary irritates and annoys me dreadfully," he confided to his diary on 6 October. "The idea of its injustice cuts me like a knife and drives me wild. Me,

60 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

who have always rather suffer myself than injure any man and whose life is one struggle for existence and to keep out of debt, to be tried for so great a crime and to have lawyers plunder me of my scanty earnings." Bad news intensified his anxiety. His brother Thomas, catching cold on a press excursion to Detroit, had returned from the Diocesan Synod of Ontario at Kingston in August with inflammation of the lungs complicated by dropsy. On 25 October, confined to bed and sinking fast, he sent for Robert, who arrived next evening to find him insensible. Robert and Louisa, Thomas's wife of sixteen months, maintained a weary watch, "distressing in the extreme for he was restless and moaned like a man dreaming or a child murmuring." At nine o'clock next morning the laboured breathing ceased. "The shock to me was a great one," Robert inscribed in his diary, "to see so stout and robust a man struck down so suddenly and unexpectedly" at the age of thirty-nine. Among Thomas's papers he found a small diary "in which, poor man, he seems to have been fully conscious of his failings, to have struggled against them, but, alas, like myself, without conquering them." Reading his brother's "aspirations and self-revilings" and listening "with gladness to his final peace of mind," he could remember only "all that was good" in his chequered past. Committing Thomas "to the care of God," he returned home from the funeral. "When he has gone," he mused, "how little hope have I of lingering on earth much longer."41 Few of his readers had any inkling of his grief, although some were disposed to grumble about the disappearance of the Montreal newsletter from the Gleaner's columns. On the afternoon of 19 November Robert Sellar, warmly wrapped against the cold, left for Beauharnois by sleigh "to appear side by side with real criminals to defend myself against a charge of crime that my soul loathes." The next day the grand jury returned a total of thirteen true bills against the five defendants. "I shall never forget," he recorded in his diary, "the feeling of degradation that sunk on my heart as I stepped into the dock, in which crouched a man charged with arson and another with manslaughter." But shame gave way to serenity as the farcical nature of Boyd's evidence began to emerge. "Every effort was made to get me convicted," he wrote, "yet I cannot say I was in the least disturbed, for I felt the security of innocence."42 On 21 November the judge ordered the jury to acquit him of larceny in connection with the "stolen" padlock. The next day he was honourably acquitted of the burglary charge, while similar indictments against the others were abandoned. Finally, after young James Millar was cleared of assault in connection with

61 Confederation and the New Era

Atkins's loss of two teeth on the day of his ejection from the Gleaner office, the Huntingdon men were able to return home. Sellar, though relieved, was far from jubilant. "The wrong and trouble has left me ill and weary," he confided in his diary, "while the expense of the trials will harass me for some time to come." Boyd succeeded in getting one last indictment, for trespass, held over until March. He then relinquished his share of the Journal to his partner, James Mann, and prepared to quit Huntingdon for New York City, putting Sellar to the trouble of attending court again only to find the charge dropped. Sellar had seen enough of earthly tribunals; he would leave his tormentor to "the dread one that comes hereafter." But to his diary he confessed that it would be "the hardest struggle of my heart, at my last," to forgive the perpetrators of his ordeal and "those of my acquaintances who have patronized and supported them."43 HUNTINGDON ENTERS THE NEW ERA, 1868-70

The farmers of the Chateauguay Valley counted themselves fortunate that, although Confederation proved as poor a substitute for reciprocity as expected, the loss of easy access to American markets had, at least, not proved immediately fatal. In fact the American demand for Canadian livestock, particularly horses, was diminished only slightly by the high duties. Agricultural societies and enterprising individuals responded with a flurry of importations of purebred horses. Sheep and dressed hogs continued to find markets in the United States, while the demand for Canadian poultry continued almost unabated. The key to survival in this new world of smaller profits was efficient production. When dairy products also held up well there was talk of following Ontario's lead in the development of cheese factories, and Huntingdon men studied with interest the one that opened at Fort Covington in the spring of i87o.44 With the produce of the soil it was a different story. The American market for Canadian grain was virtually wiped out and the days of the Beauharnois market were numbered. A wagonload of barley could still be a bonanza in a good year, but by 1870 next year's price was second only to the weather as the biggest gamble in farming. Grain other than oats had become so unreliable as a cash crop that many of the district's shrewder heads had already concluded that better prospects were likely to be found in the newer fields of livestock raising and dairying, which involved more time and work but promised a steadier return.

62 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

The Chateauguay Valley was singularly fortunate during the stressful post-Confederation period that its economy received an unexpected boost through public works. In the wake of the Fenian scare the government undertook the renovation of the dilapidated plank road, Huntingdon's only artery to the St Lawrence across the peat bog known as the teafield. In July 1868 it reopened to heavy traffic stimulated by the cheap rates of three competing river steamers. A grain market opened at the quay, and for a time Port Lewis seemed destined to fulfil the destiny predicted for it by Joshua Lewis twenty years earlier. Another beneficial military precaution was the installation of telegraph facilities from Caughnawaga to Dundee by way of Beauharnois, Valleyfield, and Huntingdon. Communications were further improved by running the Huntingdon-Hemmingford stage at night to provide two daily mails into Montreal. Huntingdon's upper bridge was rebuilt by John Dineen, whose price of only $690 attests to the low cost of materials and labour. But the biggest stimulus to the local economy was the payment in 1869 of the Beauharnois seigniorial indemnity - a windfall that provided municipalities like Hemmingford, Franklin, Hinchinbrook, and Elgin with new town halls by the year's end. Other construction - a new Roman Catholic church at St Jean Chrysostome and new Protestant churches at Durham and English River - afforded further evidence that the district had survived the loss of reciprocity in somewhat better condition than the Gleaner had anticipated.45 Industrial development in the region remained negligible outside of Valleyfield. Huntingdon's only new enterprise during the 18705 was the Huntingdon Peat Company - a failed attempt by Montreal investors to manufacture peat by a new process on four hundred acres of teafield bog. The county's one appreciable industry was a foundry established by John Gillies and Daniel Boyd, a lame but energetic little Inverness highlander who had served as foreman under both Johnson and Paige in Montreal.46 Boyd's manufactory was a local manifestation of a growing boom in the manufacture of agricultural implements. Farmers, faced with a growing scarcity and expense of seasonal help, were turning en masse to mechanization. Boyd's mechanical horse-drawn mower took top honours over three outside entries at a competition held by the agricultural society in 1868, and by 1870 his mowers, cultivators, reapers, and harvesters, which not only cut and gathered the grain but also bound and tied it, were invading markets outside the district. Instead of having to hire twenty or more hands at two dollars a day to harvest a large crop, one well-equipped farmer could now cut and bind ten acres a day. In the late century a mechanized farmer,

63 Confederation and the New Era

who would have needed a full week with a walking plough, wooden harrow, sickle, and flail to produce twenty bushels of wheat, would be capable of producing as much in a single day.47 Aside from Boyd's foundry, Huntingdon remained a purely agricultural county, its future precariously dependent upon receding American markets. Post-Confederation politics did not remain placid very long in Huntingdon. In the fall of 1869 the local electorate learned from the city newspapers of the impending retirement of John Rose. Rose eventually confirmed the rumours and indicated Julius Scriver as his intended heir. It was then possible for a member to sit in both parliaments, but Scriver had voted against dual representation and felt obliged to resign from the provincial legislature. The Gleaner was loath to see him leave Quebec, where he had been appropriately insistent on behalf of the Protestant school guarantees. On 25 October he was returned to Ottawa without opposition. A nasty by-election, marred by overtones of French-English animosity, erupted over Scriver's vacated Quebec seat. A village notary named Stuart McDonell - to the Gleaner "a French Canadian in every essential, except in name, and a poor specimen at that" - campaigned at church doors and taverns on the proposition that members of the Quebec legislature should be able to speak French. His only other contention was that his opponent, William Cantwell of Franklin, was too old. He was supported on both counts by the Huntingdon Journal, which he had recently supplied with new office premises. The Gleaner, sensing that the fate of the English-speaking minority would ultimately be settled at Quebec, strove to exorcise the notion that the provincial legislature belonged to the French Canadians. With only twelve of the province's sixty-five constituencies not already controlled by French Canadians, it wondered if Huntingdon was "going to be so foolish as to return a French notary as its representative." Cantwell, who had filled every local office from councillor to county warden, was able to speak French only "as well as any old-countryman ever learns it," but the Gleaner made no apology, deploring instead the quality of McDonell's English. "Did ever mortal hear a viler jargon come from a man who pretends to be educated, than came from him on nomination day?" it asked. "Huntingdon is an old-country county, and those at Quebec cannot look for us sending a man who will speak French to perfection, but they will expect one who can speak English in its purity and dignity."48 Cantwell, despite the apathy of many English-speaking voters towards the provincial house, overcame a heavy St Anicet turnout for McDonell by the small margin of 787 to 694. Sellar, aware of the resentment he had evoked, refrained from commenting on several

64 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

"incidents and misrepresentations" that gave him cause for alarm. He may have had in mind McDonell's letters to the Journal accusing him of racism and bigotry, or perhaps something more physical. Huntingdon's volunteer fire department had already frustrated one attempt to burn down the Gleaner.49 Of the disabilities that the Gleaner had predicted for Quebec's Protestant minority under Confederation, there were as yet few indications. Even the Witness, expressing satisfaction with Chauveau's education bill of 1869, conceded that its fears may have been exaggerated. But the new method of dividing the superior education fund by population rather than rank of the institution soon gave food for second thought. Protestant and nonsectarian model schools, academies, and colleges suddenly lost about $10,000 of annual revenue to Roman Catholic institutions. McGill College, the only institution in Quebec resembling a university, now received only $2,405 of a total grant of $68,205 to "superior education" - a designation embracing not only the ecclesiastical colleges but also the infant and charity schools of Montreal and Quebec in which children too young to read were taught the alphabet and days of the week. The grant to the Huntingdon Academy was cut from $310 to $190 in 1870 - a blow sufficiently serious to close its doors unless the deficiency could somehow be made up.5° As usual it was the women who rescued the institution. They donated a hundred dollars from their fund-raising soirees of the previous winter and cleared $180 more by serving dinner in a large shed on fair days. The commissioners of the lower schools helped out by hiring the principal as their superintendent. The academy was able to open its doors as usual in the fall of 1870, but it had been a narrow escape.51 Many of Sellar's readers began to pay closer attention to what the Gleaner had to say about the precarious position of Protestant education in rural Quebec. The Gleaner gained ground as the i86os drew to a close, though its publisher was kept "extremely pinched for money." A statement prepared 31 May 1869, at the end of his first twelve months of ownership, showed a circulation of 940 and receipts of $683.08 in subscriptions, $415.81 in advertising, and $181.83 in Job work, for a total of $1,280.72. Against this were expenditures of $549.50 for wages, $374.24 for paper, $132.43 for sundries, and $345.78 for himself, for a total of $1,401.95. By year's end there was enough on the books to satisfy him that the Gleaner would survive, but grief was just around the corner.52 At one o'clock on the morning of 31 December Sellar was roused by Elspet, who told him that something ailed their mother. "I found

65 Confederation and the New Era

her flushed and restless, but to my enquiries she only pressed my hand, for she was speechless/' he recorded in his diary. "A paralytic stroke had overtaken her, rendering her right side dead, and in a few minutes sinking her into a profound stupor." After four weary days of watching she was still the same, "unable to move, to speak, or even swallow - to all purposes dead except that she breathed and that the warmth of life remained." Then, in the chill early morning of 4 January, "the message came, and without a quiver, she went home."53 In a quiet funeral at St John's Church, Sellar discharged the last obligations of a dutiful son. "The shock has come suddenly," he confided in his diary, "yet I cannot say unexpectedly; nevertheless, it is none the less felt." No amount of preparation could "take away the mystery of death - its unaccountable and remorseless work of separation." The family had indeed thinned out since coming to Canada. Robert had already buried his father, his older brother, and his mother. His younger brother Charles was about to follow his wanderlust back to the United States. His sister Charlotte had married and moved to Old Orchard, Maine. Elspet, who never married, remained under his roof; he would continue to shelter her until her dying day. It was not until the return of spring that his thoughts began to lift. "This morning, for the first time, I heard a bird chummering and saw three lambs," he recorded in his diary on 20 March. "It was gladdening, yet sad, to see them amid the deadening snow." A sure sign of reviving spirits was his renewed interest in writing. "I have commenced to write a series of lectures on the life of St Paul," he noted. "My knowledge is not very profound or extensive, yet I may be able to tell people more than they are acquainted with, and at any rate, help them to pass an evening better than they do now." His first lecture was delivered 8 April in aid of St John's Church. It could not have raised much money - there were "only some three dozen people present" - but it was a gratifying experience. "I got thro' tolerably well," he enthused in his diary as he plunged into his second chapter of the life of St Paul.54 R O B E R T S E L L A R A N D T H E F E N I A N S ,1870

On 24 May 1870 the people of Huntingdon were startled, as they had been several times since 1866, by word that the Fenians were again on the move towards the frontier. Farmers ploughing under the warm sun of that quiet holiday were incredulous as usual at the calling out of the volunteers. The rumours, however, were being speedily confirmed. Trainloads of Fenians were again pouring into

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Malone from east and west, but this time their camp was ten miles to the north at Trout River, only half a mile from Canadian soil. The brotherhood seemed to be avoiding the pitfalls of 1866. Their descent on the frontier was well executed, taking both Ottawa and Washington by surprise. Arms, ammunition, and uniforms issuing from the barns of local American sympathizers were already at their destination. Milling crowds were being speedily transformed into formidable military companies. Canada's volunteers, in contrast, were again slow to assemble. By nightfall guards had been posted and a corps of young mounted scouts despatched, but the strength of the Fiftieth Battalion, Huntingdon Borderers, which paraded in the village the following afternoon, was a scant 150 men. When reinforcements failed to arrive aboard the steamer Salaberry, which took the precaution of sending passengers and freight ashore in small boats, the villagers were sufficiently alive to their peril to form a home guard under Mayor Daniel Shanks. Thanks to the lethargy of their government, which had registered no protest against the Fenian menace, and to that of their neighbours in again permitting a force of American nationals to organize on their soil for the conquest of Canada, they were obliged to prepare once more to shed their blood in defence of their homes and their country.55 Delay and disorganization on the part of the Fenians again played into the hands of Huntingdon's little band of defenders. Plagued by inadequate food supplies, the Irish army failed to move on 25 May, when it could have secured the village with relative ease. It turned instead on local American farmers, raiding hen-roosts in a vain attempt to check dissatisfaction in the ranks. Many Fenians had already begun to desert, and on 26 May there were two streams of men between Malone and Trout River - one of new arrivals, the other homeward bound. At Huntingdon, meanwhile, welcome reinforcements were escorted into the village by the Borderers and the saxhorn band. The Fenians had lost the initiative, but on the morning of 27 May an impatient band of roughly 180 men penetrated half a mile into Canada. Its commander, Brigadier-General Michael Starr, called a halt adjacent to the Trout River to build a barricade and await reinforcements. Sellar, who had succeeded in getting the Gleaner to press before releasing its hands for duty, awoke that morning to the sound of the bugle. He watched the florid-faced commander, Colonel George Bagot, barking orders at his troops, and fell in beside the column as it passed up Front Street in the early sunshine. His heart swelled as the manly sound of eleven hundred British voices broke the morning

67 Confederation and the New Era

stillness. "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching," ran the refrain, with special gusto reserved for the improvised last line, "We will drive the Fenians back!" At almost every farm the people were out, cheering, with welcome buckets of water and milk, but halts were few as the intrepid Bagot pressed on to the front. Sellar, anxious to be on the scene before the troops arrived, did not remain with the column for the duration of its ten-mile march. Racing ahead by horse and buggy, he pulled up half a mile short of the Fenian position at seven o'clock. The Fenians had withdrawn during the night, and had only recently marched back to resume work on their barricade of rails and logs. Following their movements through a borrowed telescope from the bridge, Sellar composed a sketch of the terrain and reached the unsettling conclusion that it was a judicious choice of position. The breastwork, about three feet in height, was built along a line-ditch that ran for some twenty-five rods from the protection of the river on the right flank to the road. The barricade blocked the road and extended into an adjacent field, where a clump of brush afforded cover for a short retreat to the border. The attackers would have to traverse up to three hundred yards of open ground to reach the breastwork. The Fenians, armed with breech-loaders and given the courage to stand their ground, would be able to withstand an assault by many times their number. Such were Sellar's apprehensions as the redcoated British forces hove into view at half past eight on the Huntingdon road.56 It was all over in less time than it took Sellar to scribble his notes. Bagot took one look at his scout's report, another at the terrain, and deployed his forces for an immediate assault. The frontal attack was entrusted to the Borderers, with a company of regulars supporting from the road. Leaping over the fences into the soft, ploughed fields, the Huntingdon men extended into skirmishing order and advanced on the double, firing as they ran. "It was not an intermittent fire," recalled Sellar, "but one continuous fusillade." The Fenians were taken by surprise by the early appearance of the redcoats. Ignorant of the presence of regulars, they were perplexed at the sight of artillery. Nor were they prepared for the fury of the assault so suddenly launched at their position. As the Borderers went crashing into the near end of an intervening hop field, Sellar could see greencoated figures scurrying out at the other. The first volley fired by the Fenians, aimed high, shredded the tops of the hop poles. Two irregular volleys followed, but still the Borderers rushed on. By the time their red coats came spilling out onto the open terrain, where they might have been mowed down by a more resolute foe, the Fenians were in disarray, "running like sheep for 45" (the border).

68 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

Sellar's sketch of the Fenian position, 1870

Prohibited by Bagot from pursuing their quarry into the United States, the victors halted at the border for three rousing cheers "such as only British soldiers can give, and the sound of which must have added fresh stimulus to the flying Fenians, for they did not halt on crossing the line, but kept right on, many never stopping until they reached Malone." Sellar's diary reflects something of the letdown experienced by the men at the rapid escape of the enemy. "I was with the advance, and experienced for the first time the excitement, the

69 Confederation and the New Era

elation, of battle," he wrote, only to add: "As it turned out I ran no risk, for the Fenians fled, after some irregular firing on their part, which did no harm." Also cheated of a blow at their adversaries were the thirty yeomen of Mayor Shanks' home guard, who arrived breathless on the scene just as Bagot called for a ceasefire. A few hours after the skirmish, Sellar crossed into Malone to inspect the Fenian camp. He encountered about forty Fenians, "stout, able fellows" who looked well in their uniforms, though "very down in the mouth, and speaking very little to each other." He found in conversation that they had been grossly misinformed about Canada and entertained only hazy notions as to what their objectives had been. "Their advent on the border, they were led to believe, would be the signal for thousands of their countrymen to rally to their standard, and they laid great stress on what they expected from their friends in Montreal," he reported in the Gleaner. "With Montreal in their possession, the accession of the rest of the province would speedily follow."57 Examining the Fenian crates, Sellar noted that most had been received by local Americans well known on the Canadian side. The Americans he met "pretended to be very glad we had beaten the Fenians," and he believed many had indeed "lived in terror with such a lawless band beside them," but many had also gone so far as to don the Fenian uniform. The Irish Catholics of Huntingdon County, though not well represented in the militia, were absolved by the Gleaner of any complicity with the marauders. Before leaving the camp, Sellar paused to watch American troops belatedly confiscating the barrels and boxes belonging to the Irish army. "The New York Tribune and other papers laughed at the Fenians as an army without a commissariat," summed up the Gleaner, "but the truth is, it was a splendid commissariat without an army worthy of it." The American government, which had allowed over a quarter of a million dollars' worth of arms and stores to be amassed and sent to the frontier, was charged with unavoidable responsibility. The duty of the Canadian and British governments was to secure damages for the outrage.58 The people of Huntingdon, whose patriotism had for a brief instant engaged the attention of the English-speaking world, were honoured for their heroism by a visit from none other than His Royal Highness, Prince Arthur. "Boys, be sure and brush up and look your best," Lieutenant Colonel Archibald McEachern admonished his Huntingdon Borderers on 31 May, "for tomorrow will be a day long to be remembered." With boots as black and belts as white as polish and pipe-clay could make them, the volunteers stood tall and proud under the approving eye of the local citizenry as the youthful prince,

/o Voice of the Vanishing Minority

Prince Arthur in Huntingdon, 1870, reading the Gleaner's report of the Fenian raid to members of his military entourage at the residence of Mayor Archibald Henderson (far right)

gracefully mounted on a dark bay horse, appeared on the stony square that would henceforth bear his name. Lumps came to many a throat as Lieutenant-General James Lindsay, commander of the forces in Canada, paid a moving tribute to the gallantry of the Huntingdon militia, but no outward sign of emotion was allowed to efface the manly dignity of the occasion. After the prince had shaken hands with the officers of the local battalions, the ladies came forward bearing a new set of colours. "Should your services again be required," declared the prince in presenting them to the Borderers, "I am sure you will defend these colours with the same pluck and patriotic devotion which you have so recently exhibited, and in that future I wish you all prosperity." Following the presentation of arms and the national anthem, the royal parry withdrew amid sustained cheering to the residence of Archibald Henderson for dinner. Summoned to the verandah to be photographed by Huntingdon's pioneer photographer, John Gilmore, Prince Arthur posed with a copy of the Gleaner - a singlepage issue put out at great hardship on 3 June, two days ahead of schedule, to afford the earliest possible coverage of the raid.59 It would be difficult to overestimate the psychological impact of the Fenian raid of 1870 on the people of Huntingdon County. No event since the rebellion of 1838 had stirred them to such depths. A

71 Confederation and the New Era

wave of anti-American feeling, complemented by the intensification of traditional loyalties to Great Britain, swept the county. The incident also hardened Huntingdon's Protestant bias, for Sellar and many of his readers believed that Irish nationalism, like French Canadian nationalism, exhibited discernible religious and clerical overtones. Fenianism, whether openly condoned by the Church of Rome or not, was animated by men possessed of a hatred for Britain and Protestantism alike. Were not the Fenians trying to achieve militarily what hundreds of "wily ecclesiastics" were seeking by more stealthy means - the subversion of British rights and liberties "as established by the Revolution of i688"?6° Local Catholics were offended, as they would be in the future by the Gleaner's unrelenting attempts to rally its readers to meet the perceived internal threat with the same unanimity they had shown on the battlefield. At the hour of midnight on 16 June the Fenians took their revenge on Robert Sellar. Archibald Adams, on his way home from the tavern, was astounded to see flames shooting up from the late Joshua Lewis' old store - the clapboard building that housed the Gleaner office. Sellar, roused from sleep, hurried to his office and saw "to my chagrin that it was wrapt in flames." The door was burst open, but the building had been doused with coal oil and rapidly spreading smoke and flames prevented anyone from entering more than a few feet. "Save the books!" Sellar cried, as Arthur Mac Arthur managed to wrench the desk from its location near the door. Nothing else, save for a few type cases, was saved. The chief suspect was one Charles Rutman, a teamster who had come to Huntingdon from the Fenian hotbed of Burke, New York, six weeks before. He had occupied a dwelling one lot removed from the Gleaner, his wife had left for Fort Covington with all their possessions the morning before the fire, and that evening he had settled with his employer. As the alarm was being sounded he was seen running across the upper bridge crying "Fire!" and "Buckets for the Gleaner office!" Housewives who put out buckets were puzzled when they were not picked up, and a gallon jug still containing a half pint of coal oil was later found along the roadside near the old Evangelical Union church. Rutman was not acquainted with his victim and must have been hired for the job. Threats of summary vengeance were heard on all sides as deputies hurried to apprehend him on roads leading to the border.61 That afternoon, with his office reduced to a smouldering heap of ashes, Sellar set out on the trail of Charles Rutman. He had been seen in Chateaugay, New York, with considerable money in his possession, but all trace vanished at Fort Covington. Sellar returned to

72

Voice of the Vanishing Minority

Announcement of reward for the Gleaner arsonist, 1870

Huntingdon late at night, "quite overcome with sleep and fatigue." People were very kind, he noted in his diary, urging him to recommence, "but I falter in purpose, and feel more inclined to leave a place where I have endured so many and varied trials." The ordeal of the past six years - the physical hardship, grinding poverty, intellectual isolation, rancorous opposition, and finally the violent

73 Confederation and the New Era

destruction of the Gleaner - had exacted a severe toll. With his mother gone he had "no longer any domestic reason" to remain in Huntingdon, and for days he struggled with the thought of quitting the district, and even journalism, forever.62 R I S I N G F R O M T H E A S H E S , 1870-73

The reaction of the local people to his misfortune provided Sellar with his first truly heartening experience among them. For the moment he was without enemies, as even the Huntingdon Journal found itself praising "the fearless manner in which he denounced Fenians and Fenianism, with every other foe, to the British crown." So strong had pro-Gleaner feeling become that one old adversary, Ransome Rowe, would later suggest that Sellar had set fire to his own office in order to "constitute himself a 'noble martyr' in the cause of Orangeism and religious liberty."63 As the county council and the Mutual Fire Insurance Company posted reward notices for the incendiarist, a delegation from a public meeting of "Friends of the Gleaner" petitioned the distraught editor to resume his work. Sellar, noting the names of former opponents among his wellwishers, wondered if his paper, in the hour of its destruction, could be at last on the brink of acceptance by the entire community. Then came word that Samuel Boyd and Thomas K. Milne, who had taken over the Journal in January, were ready to sell out. On 23 June he informed the delegation that he would remain provided the promises of "more energetic support" were made good, and if all would acquiesce to a subscription price of $1.50 payable in advance. He declined all private offers of assistance and felt encouraged that so many now identified the Gleaner with principles of importance "not only to the Old Country people of the district of Beauharnois but of Lower Canada" generally. On 24 June a second citizens' meeting accepted his terms and canvassing began immediately.64 His friends would soon discover what he already knew - that it was easier to obtain promises than paid-up subscriptions. The onerous work of reestablishing the Gleaner began without delay. Sellar, whose estimated loss of $1,300 had been insured to a maximum of $800, agreed to pay $550, "fully $200 more than its worth," for the Journal's Washington press and accoutrement. He left immediately for Montreal to buy type and stationery, getting drenched in a thunderstorm as he wandered from the Albion Hotel to watch a display of lightning along the harbour. Arriving home "very weary" the next day, he began the "unpleasant and laborious" task of moving the Journal's equipment, "frightfully dirty and in

74 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

confusion," to his new office in the Dominion block.65 The Journal's valedictory of 30 June announced that readers would receive the Gleaner for the balance of their subscriptions. On 14 July 1870, after the arrival of paper and new type, the Gleaner reappeared - the only English-language journal in the district. Its editorial policy remained unchanged. Especially strong, given the worsening plight of the community it served, was its aversion to the expansion of Confederation with the taxpayers' money. The annexation of Red River, the construction of an intercolonial railway, and the "lavish" terms offered British Columbia and Prince Edward Island indicated "it is the country's and not their own money" that Canada's politicians were throwing away. The supreme folly was the reckless undertaking to launch, before the Intercolonial was even built, a Pacific railroad over some three thousand miles of "desert plains and interminable chains of mountains" at a cost that defied estimate. The Gleaner, like many orthodox free traders congenitally opposed to territorial aggrandizement and extravagant expenditure, was slow to appreciate the potential of a greater Canada. "We implore them," it grumbled, "to leave the North Pole alone."66 Under such circumstances the Gleaner could hardly approve of Julius Scriver's parliamentary votes for the Pacific railway and the Treaty of Washington. The treaty ignored Canada's claim for Fenian damages and gave the Americans fishing rights regarded by Sellar as the only promising bargaining chip for the renewal of reciprocity. Scriver chose the occasion of his reelection by acclamation on 3 August 1872 to reply to the Gleaner's criticism. Canada now had a northwest comparable to that of the United States, he responded. A railway would induce settlers into the region and the expenditure would be recouped by the sale and development of crown lands. Nor would the Americans have renewed reciprocity in any event. In language couched in complimentary references to the Gleaner's "excellence" as a newspaper, Scriver advised its editor to abandon his preoccupation with pre-Confederation parties and issues. "Yesterday," Sellar noted in his diary, "Mr Scriver replied to the Gleaner in a tone not unfriendly," but his related editorial reminded the member that he had misrepresented the views of his constituents. "To disagree with such a man as Mr Scriver affords us no pleasure," it concluded, "and we trust it may be long before we feel called upon again to express dissatisfaction with any of his votes."67 And so it was. When the Pacific railway scandal erupted in 1873, Scriver joined the Gleaner in upholding the new Liberal ministry of Alexander Mackenzie. Alexander Cross, a Montreal lawyer rushed into the county by

75 Confederation and the New Era

the Conservatives, withdrew in discouragement before the election. Huntingdon's representative was now Sellar's parliamentary correspondent, and the Gleaner's influence in the community was becoming formidable indeed. It was Sellar's custom to pore over his diary at the close of each year to take stock of his position in life. He was only entering his thirties, but years of labour and anxiety were taking their toll. A life insurance medical examination in 1870 certified him as five feet nine inches tall and 143 pounds, but his physique was deteriorating and his pate was already bald. The twinkle in his eye, the only evidence of his latent sense of humour, was well concealed behind thick lenses, an impassive countenance, and a serious demeanour. His indebtedness, penurious existence, and lack of success in business caused him to routinely lament his "folly" in remaining in "a place that presented no field." The disappearance of local competition meant more business, but to cope with the job printing he had to borrow from Andrew Somerville to raise $984 for a new Acme flatbed press in 1871. In 1872 he opened a stationery store, but its stock of school supplies, Bibles, hymn books, and religious literature demanded another outlay.68 Did progress mean only bigger debts and prolongation of his poverty? "The turning point may be nearer," he confided in his diary, but "no success can ever restore me to what I was." Years of tribulation had robbed his character of its buoyancy. "I no longer look forward with pleasant anticipation to what life has in store for me; I feel as one who has nothing to enjoy nor to fear, that the best of life, its great attraction, is past, and now only a remnant remains to be got through." He knew the "true glory" was "to bear without flinching, to endure misfortune as if it were nothing; to receive the hardest of the world's knocks with cheerful equanimity." Whatever the hardships, "we tenfold multiply them if we permit them to embitter our dispositions and warp our minds. What a noble triumph I would have gained, how infinitely happier I would be today, could I honestly say, yes, these past years have been disheartening, trying ones, but they have not subdued my spirit - they have not robbed my life of its flavor - I have emerged from them unscathed in heart and mind. Would I could say this!"69 The Gleaner's local monopoly did not last long. In January 1873 the Ormstown New Dominion was founded by Andrew Learmont Spedon of St Jean Chrysostome, a frustrated poet seeking an outlet for his literary talents. Also damaging were the cheap city weeklies, printed with type still set from the daily editions. Rising costs and a

76 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

growing legion of "subscribers of the non-paying variety" compounded Sellar's business woes during the hard times of 1873. Tracking down a delinquent subscriber was an unrewarding effort that generally yielded more in promises and farm produce than it did in hard cash. One young pig, taken for a year's subscription, began to run in a frenzy as soon as it was set to the ground and continued to run until it perished miserably. In October Sellar, wishing no one to take the Gleaner "under the impression of doing us a personal favor," attempted to adopt a cash-in-advance system, but public reaction forced him to settle for a year's credit until more prosperous times.70 Though his annual production costs now exceeded two thousand dollars, Sellar resisted the temptation to resort to the cheaper American format called "patent outsides" - newsprint purchased with general reading matter and syndicated advertising already printed on one side. Such innovations he held "destructive of that individuality which is the best feature in a country paper." He continued to print all four pages himself and seek his savings elsewhere. One economy typical of the Gleaner was a restricted choice of type to eliminate time and labour lost "in changing cases, in picking sorts, and in running from rack to rack to set up display lines." Occasionally an advertiser would "plead for the old black letter," but Sellar believed the discarding of display type improved the appearance of his paper, kept his office in better order, and enabled his hands to set up "at least ten percent more matter in the same time."71 It was only by virtue of austere management that he was able to preserve the Gleaner's integrity while pulling it through the stringent years of the early 18703.

3 The Church, the State, and the Gleaner Journals like ours can speak out clearly and boldly when need be against aggressions on our civil rights by Ultramontanism, but they cannot, as secular organs, dwell on doctrinal matters or take part in any controversy touching upon them. Cleaner, 19 February 1874

IN QUEST OF THE ROUGE T R A D I T I O N , 1870-75

To Robert Sellar the most pernicious danger of the nineteenth century was the threat to religious and civil liberties inherent in the defeat of Catholic liberalism by the forces of ultramontanism - the doctrine calling for papal supremacy within the Church of Rome. The year of the Confederation conference had seen Pope Pius IX, shaken by temporal losses in Italy, publish the Syllabus of Errors, claiming for the Church complete independence from the state, rejecting doctrines of popular sovereignty and freedom of conscience, and asserting absolute jurisdiction over culture, science, and education. Sellar's anticlericalism was rooted in the European tradition of liberalism condemned by the Vatican. He believed Confederation had rendered the people of Lower Canada, Catholics and Protestants alike, vulnerable to ultramontanism by separating them from Ontario while entrenching its French Canadian proponents in a government at Quebec. In 1870 the Dogma of Papal Infallibility claimed unerring authority for papal decisions regarding faith and morals. In Quebec zealous clerics sought to exalt ecclesiastical authority over secular government by extending "faith and morals" to the political domain. "It is impossible," proclaimed Bishop Louis Francois Richer Lafleche of Three Rivers, "to deny that politics and religion are closely allied and that the separation of church and state is an absurd and impious

78 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

doctrine."1 Huntingdon, or rather the ecclesiastical parish of St Joseph de Huntingdon, lay under the jurisdiction of Bishop Ignace Bourget of Montreal - perhaps the most reactionary champion of ultramontane doctrines in Canada. Under such circumstances Sellar's wish for "a quieter and more prosperous career" in the 18705 would prove a difficult one to gratify. Sellar harboured no doubts as to Bourget's intentions. "He will be remembered in the History of the Dominion for bringing back to it the Jesuits," the Gleaner explained, "and inaugurating with their aid a policy having in view the rooting out of the old Gallicanism" (the tradition favouring an autonomous French church), "and the establishing in its place of Ultramontanism." During the 18505 and 18605 this formidable cleric had throttled anticlerical liberalism in Quebec almost singlehandedly, excommunicating the entire membership of the Institut Canadien, the French Canadian literary society whose library harboured books condemned by Rome. The liberal Rouge party had been hounded into oblivion while their Conservative adversaries, the Bleus, remained in office by translating ultramontane priorities into government policy. Bishop Bourget, for example, after recruiting the battalion of Quebec Zouaves to defend the pope against Italian liberals in Rome, induced a compliant legislature to reward them with farms in the Eastern Townships on their return. The Gleaner was currently watching his efforts to shake off the trammels of civil law in his denial of church burial to the late Joseph Guibord, an excommunicated member of the Institut.2 Perhaps the most ominous statement of ultramontane purpose was the Catholic Programme of 1871 - a blatant declaration that the faithful must vote only in favour of candidates accepting the platform of unqualified obedience to the Church. Bourget's organ, the Montreal Nouveau Monde, called for amendments to civil legislation to ensure the complete independence of the Church and confine the power of the state to merely "admitting and sanctioning her laws."3 Sellar viewed the Programme as an attempt to forge a Quebec equivalent to the successful Catholic party of Germany. Already he could discern symptoms of ultramontane inroads - in education, for example, where clerics were clamouring for abolition of the education ministry while Protestant and nonsectarian institutions were being "starved out of existence" by the loss of superior education funds to convent schools and Jesuit colleges. He could see it in colonization, where church-sponsored societies aimed to make a mockery of Gait's guarantees to the Protestant townships by filling them with French Canadians at public expense; in the expanding network of canonical parishes, endowed with municipal powers almost automatically by

79 The Church, the State, and the Gleaner

decree of the bishops; in the courts, where civil judges enforced payment of ecclesiastical tithes; in the press, where clerical intimidation was being carried to new extremes; and in the legislature, where compliant deputies were wont to surrender responsibility for hospitals, asylums, reformatories, and schools, together with grants of public money and land, special charters, and tax-exemption privileges, to an increasing number of ecclesiastical corporations almost without question. Well might the Gleaner lament George Brown's abandonment of representation by population. The Fathers of Confederation had permitted the "sectarian virus" to infect Canada's new constitution, "ready for development as the priests required."4 The greatest handicap for those seeking to continue the struggle for separation of church and state after Confederation was the lack of a political party with an anticlerical platform. George Brown's defection in 1864 had shattered the Reform party it had been his life's work to build. For years its remnants remained a disorganized, demoralized, and virtually leaderless opposition at Ottawa. Sellar regarded the accession of Alexander Mackenzie's Liberals to power in 1873 as a "political accident." He doubted they would uphold their professed principles on church and state at the risk of alienating Quebec and losing their newly won grip on office. In Quebec the heroic old Rouge party had not survived the oppression of preConfederation days. The handful of so-called Liberals remaining in the legislature disassociated themselves not only from the fatal anticlericalism of their pilloried predecessors but even from their party name. Their leader, Henri Joly de Lotbiniere, already self-conscious about his Protestant faith, was further handicapped by the timidity of his colleagues and a lamentable lack of party organization.5 English-speaking Protestants, to the Gleaner's disgust, tended to align themselves alongside Catholic programmists in support of the Bleu government. Well-heeled Montrealers were apparently "content to make any concession, submit to any indignity, if allowed to go on without interruption in their business of making money." In the townships the continuing practice of electing "Independents" produced a flock of unprincipled logrollers whose perennial quest for railway subsidies and local favours invariably landed them in the government camp. Had not Huntingdon's own subsidy been secured by the acquiescence of its new provincial representative, Thomas Sanders (a Havelock Orangeman whom the Gleaner declined to support in 1871), to the Chauveau ministry's every act? It seemed clear to Sellar that a fundamental reconstruction of the reform movement from first principles - free trade, retrenchment, and separation of church and state - was imperative both in Quebec and in the Dominion as a whole.6

8o Voice of the Vanishing Minority

THE HUNTINGDON CONVENTION AND L O Y A L R E F O R M E R S ' L E A G U E , 1875-76 The regeneration of the bankrupt reform movement, Sellar realized, would be no easy task. Seeing no ready course of action available, he resolved to initiate his own. Politicians could be disciplined by an informed electorate, and education of the local constituency lay within the Gleaner's competence. A body of delegates from the municipalities could select its own candidate, commit him to specific principles, and exercise control over his postelection conduct. Gradually the idea of a county reform convention began to take shape in his mind. Sellar's plans for a county convention were upset by the sudden death of Sanders in March 1874. Two would-be successors were in the field even before the late member was in his grave. Dr Alexander Cameron, a former Nova Scotian, graduate of the University of Glasgow, and member of St Andrew's Church, had practised medicine in Huntingdon since 1864. He was assistant surgeon to the Borderers during the Fenian raid and was currently mayor of the village. His opponent, John James Maclaren, raised in Hinchinbrook and educated at the Huntingdon Academy, had served as principal before studying law at Victoria and McGill universities. In 1871 he had organized the unsuccessful campaign of his Montreal associate, William Robertson, against Sanders. An ardent Methodist, he was sound on issues of church and state, supported Joly, and was endorsed by Holton. For him Sellar conceived "more than respect, sincere affection," and he was the emphatic choice of the Gleaner.7 Sellar's preference soon involved him in unprecedented difficulties. How he could reject the hometown favourite for an outsider, and a Montreal lawyer at that, was beyond the ken of many. Others found it hypocritical that he, of all people, should recommend Maclaren as a "French scholar" while dismissing those unable to speak the majority language as "helpless dummies" at Quebec. Cameron's nomination speech, accusing him of being "dead to all sense of fair-play and honour," evoked alarming shouts against the Gleaner. Sellar, charged the Ormstown New Dominion, resented Cameron for derailing his "great scheme" for a county convention dominated by himself. Maclaren's commitment to oppose ultramontanism was forgotten as debate swirled acrimoniously about the fitness of "outsiders" versus "newcomers," city lawyers versus country doctors, Methodists versus Free Masons, temperance men versus tipplers (Mayor Cameron had recently cast his vote to defeat a municipal liquor bylaw), and "French scholars" versus "helpless dummies" to represent the county at Quebec.8

8i The Church, the State, and the Gleaner

The district's Rouge contingent, led by Edouard Dupuis of St Anicet and Thomas Brossoit of the new Echo de Beauharnois, joined the Gleaner in supporting Maclaren, but on 20 May Cameron was elected by the convincing count of 1020 votes to 644. Maclaren, bearing his defeat "as became one of his character," left for Montreal as the victors, amid cheers for the doctor and groans for the Gleaner, paraded behind the village fife and drum band to the tune of "The Cameron Men." Sellar, on his way home, was felled from behind by a drunken Cameron partisan, "and had it not been for the interference of another," he opined in his diary, "would have been seriously injured if not killed."9 The Gleaner, undaunted, chastised the electors for their disregard of political principles. Men who called themselves Liberals had been led, by local and personal considerations, to elect a so-called Independent who within weeks would be counted among the supporters of the Ouimet ministry. "They may talk Reform all the year round and speak strongly against the government," it fumed, "but when election-time comes about, the last thing they look to in a candidate are his political views."10 But the hostile Cameron men were not yet ready for constructive criticism. "This night week," Sellar entered in his diary on 20 June, "a band of men and boys got up some sort of effigy of me and after hanging it, were about to burn it, when Mr Boyd interfered and committed it to the Chateauguay." The anti-Gleaner feeling was "very bitter, but it has not decomposed me." He was "fully conscious that my life may be suddenly ended by my enemies, but, with the help of God, no fear of such a result will cause me to abate one jot in my opposition to those who I am assured are injurious to the country's interests." The Orangemen had again voted with the Catholics, reinforcing his conviction that political reconstruction based on fundamental reform principles was an urgent necessity.11 There was bound to be a general election within a twelvemonth; he must proceed in earnest with his plans for a county reform convention. With the cooling of political passions, life resumed its normal pace in Huntingdon. On 20 August friendly relations were restored with Dr Cameron, prompting Sellar to reflect that "one of the most disagreeable adjuncts of journalism" was "the inevitable offence given to people every now and then." But with a general election imminent the truce was hollow at best. As usual during times of personal trial, Sellar sought replenishment for his drained spirits amid the quiet beauties of nature. "Last Sunday I was at Mr Macfarlane's," he entered in his diary, "and a finer day could not be. Warm hazy, delicious; soothing to every sense. A day to watch the leaves flutter

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slowly to the ground and think of God's goodness." Solitary strolls out the plank road prompted similar communion. "That indescribable haze, which is neither fog nor smoke, characteristic of the American Fall, hung in the air, causing a sort of twi-light," he mused. "The sun shone, but with neither glare nor heat - it was like the smile of a dying saint. The stillness was oppressive, for now even the hum of the insects is ended, and the trees gaunt and bare, stood in silence with their robes of summer littered at their feet."12 Others in Huntingdon were less willing to let bygones be bygones. In mid-December Sellar was evicted from his Dominion-block office and put to the hardship of moving through bitter cold and "great snowdrifts" to new quarters at the corner of Bouchette and Hunter streets. By i January things were in "passable order," he recorded in his diary, though "moving and fixing up has cost me a good deal, which is not well, for the Gleaner's receipts fall several hundred dollars below those of the previous year." He would give the cash system another try, for the profit on each Gleaner was "so trifling that we find we are better without a subscriber who pays irregularly than with him." But he was now so inured to financial hardship that it held few terrors for him any longer. Snugly installed in his new quarters, he turned his leisure time that winter to his manuscript on the shipwreck of St Paul.13 In the spring of 1875 Sellar launched his controversial project of a county reform convention. On 11 March the Gleaner called on each municipality to select three delegates to a county convention that would meet to draft a platform and choose a candidate. Hemmingford responded first with a delegation, headed by Mayor William B. Johnson, pledged to support the convention's nominee. Andrew Oliver of Rockburn, one of the organizers, chaired a meeting in Hinchinbrook that followed suit. There was opposition in Elgin and apathy in Godmanchester, but Franklin, Havelock, and Dundee all named delegations, and so did St Anicet. Sellar, viewing ultramontanism as a threat to Protestants and Catholics alike, was gratified that several local French Canadian and Irish Catholics, like Edouard Dupuis of St Anicet and Robert Kelly of Hinchinbrook, seemed ready to join their Protestant neighbours in the reform movement. Nothing had happened during the winter to mitigate his sense of urgency. The Quebec legislature's unanimous vote in favour of pardoning Louis Riel's lieutenant, Ambroise Lepine, outraged Protestants and closed the ranks of local Orangemen behind the Gleaner for the first time. On 5 January the village lodge had convened a dinner in Sellar's honour, presenting him with a set of Chambers' Encyclopaedia in appreciation of his "persistence in demanding that justice be

83 The Church, the State, and the Gleaner

done to the murderers of Thomas Scott." Premier Ouimet's successor, Charles Eugene Boucher de Boucherville, meanwhile, was continuing Quebec's wholesale surrender of civic responsibilities to publicly endowed ecclesiastical corporations. The latest was a contract with the nuns of Longue Pointe for an exclusively Roman Catholic insane asylum, and the Gleaner wondered why the legislature did not simply "dissolve itself and leave what remains to be managed by the Hierarchy."14 Outside the legislature Bishop Bourget was wielding his prerogative of excommunication like a bludgeon, expanding his proscriptions of Catholic liberalism to include political liberalism generally. On 5 April the Montreal Witness was added to the growing list of newspapers placed under clerical ban - disquieting to Protestants who preferred to think of ultramontanism as a purely Roman Catholic affair. By 13 April it had vanished from the reading room of the Quebec assembly and was echoing the Gleaner's call for reform reconstruction. "If even a small party should be formed, based upon principle," it maintained, "it would be worth more to the country than a large governing majority with none." This was precisely what the Huntingdon convention was all about. "We are sick," proclaimed the Gleaner, "of supporting (for want of better) men who are Liberals on every point save the great essential one - the emancipation of the Province from clerical rule."15 Huntingdon was about to launch a movement that Montreal and the other counties might do well to emulate. On 23 April fourteen delegates to the Huntingdon Reform Convention gathered for dinner at Milne's Hotel. William B. Johnson took the chair and Robert Sellar was appointed secretary. The first task was selecting a suitable candidate for the next provincial election. With the exception of Daniel Shanks, sent by Cameron's supporters to infiltrate the proceedings, all voted to pledge themselves to the ballot selection of the meeting. John J. Maclaren was chosen over William Johnson by a vote of nine to four and the decision was telegraphed to Montreal. While awaiting Maclaren's reply, the convention moved to form a permanent association. Andrew Oliver and Robert Sellar were unanimously endorsed as president and secretary, and Sellar was charged with drawing up a platform of principles and bylaws for submission to the next meeting. At this point the delegates were thrown into a quandary by Maclaren's telegram declining the nomination. A subsequent ballot named Alexander Cross, the Montreal lawyer whose graceful withdrawal from the contest with Scriver had created a favourable impression the year before. The convention adjourned after authorizing Sellar to extend its invitation to the unsuspecting Cross. But the

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conditions stipulated in Sellar's letter - that Cross support Joly, represent the convention's views, and consult closely with it regarding his votes in the legislature - were not to the Montrealer's liking. Local humourist Colonel Phunny, recalling that Liberals had "been known to get a crack on the cranium" in Huntingdon, let it be known that he was not in the running either.16 Already the new association was in difficulty. For a time it looked like Sellar's initiative might founder, but in mid-May a second meeting was called. Sellar drafted the necessary platform and bylaws, which had "weighed much" on his mind. "I have not sought to please men, nor have I sought what would be for the success of the party at the polls, but have prepared such a manifesto as I believe the country wants," he entered in his diary. "I have consulted no one, and for whatever penalties it may evoke I alone am answerable. When I think of the future of this province, my heart sometimes fails me, yet I trust in God and the ultimate victory He has ever given to efforts on behalf of freedom and right." The following evening he was still "uncomfortable" after a drive to Rockburn to consult with Oliver. "Whenever my mind is kept on a tension I feel miserable afterwards," he observed in his diary. "My anxiety about the Convention platform has been the cause this time." One of the delegates had advised him "not to make the platform too stiff - that is, against the Catholics." Men were indeed hard to find "who will not modify or conceal their sentiments from motives of policy." Sellar was not completely satisfied with what he had prepared, "but its sentiments I believe in and will maintain."17 On the sunny holiday of 24 May the convention delegates gathered in the village for their second meeting. Some felt it now imprudent to proceed, as Cameron's supporters were already drumming up election pledges. The majority favoured fielding a candidate, "even at this late hour," and agreed that a platform should be adopted beforehand. All attention now focussed on Sellar's draft, a remarkable document indeed. It encompassed, in some three thousand words, a review of all the objectionable features of provincial legislation since Confederation, the reforms held necessary for their correction, and the principles and bylaws of a permanent organization to be called the Loyal Reformers' League. The grievances were set forth in two main categories - those attributed to the ineptitude, extravagance, and corruption of the provincial administration, and those due to the "persistent, though most insidious, movement to place the government of its affairs under ecclesiastical control." The delegates were able to reach general

85 The Church, the State, and the Gleaner agreement on the first score, but there was a serious falling out on the second: 1 The repeal of all laws which confer rights on any religious body that are not enjoyed by others. 2 The abolition of grants to any religious institution, whether Catholic or Protestant, under any pretence whatever. 3 The repeal of the law of mortmain and the limiting [of] the extent of land to be held by ecclesiastical bodies. 4 The repeal of the laws exempting ecclesiastical property from taxation. Sellar's manifesto also called for the repeal of the provincial burial act, the withholding of public money from any educational institution offering sectarian instruction, and discontinuance in the townships of the practice of reading legal notices at church doors. "All we ask," it concluded, "is that the government be freed from all entanglement with religious bodies: that the civil and spiritual functions be exercised apart, and without interfering with each other in their respective domains."18 Buried in the text was the earliest exposition of a complaint Sellar would repeat many times in the years ahead. "The extension of the parish system into the Townships we hold to be illegal and unjust," he argued. "Those municipalities were formed by English-speaking settlers, in the belief that their lands should be free from ecclesiastical liens. The bringing them within the network of tithes, fabrique taxes, and canon law is an outrage on their inhabitants and a hindrance to their prosperity, causing the emigration of many of the best and oldest farmers." Sellar was reacting to Quebec's renewed interest in colonizing crown lands in the Eastern Townships. The impact of Boucherville's Repatriation Act of 1875, which superseded the ineffective 1869 law offering grants to colonization societies, was already being felt by English-speaking people in the region. "Fetching French Canadians from the parishes and the United States and settling them in the heart of the Eastern Townships" on subsidized lots and dwellings was deemed "little short of robbery/' since the funds came from the public chest. It was also a colossal waste of money, "the so-called settlers being neither capable, thrifty nor industrious, while the motive for bringing them to these lands is an insult to and an attack upon the Protestants, for they are designed to outvote them and eventually drive them away."19

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Opposition to colonization had grown steadily throughout the townships since 1849. British Protestant settlers complained, not without reason, of government discrimination against them in the building of roads, of dubious cancellations of land claims in areas designated for colonization, and of the diversion of funds formerly used to assist trans-Atlantic immigration towards the resettlement of native habitants, who were rarely repatriated from outside Quebec at all. The Roman Catholic Church, visible in the vanguard of the movement, was another target for the resentment of growing numbers who believed they were victims of a coordinated movement aimed at the reconquest of the province by the French Canadians.20 The contentious nature of Sellar's platform was reflected in the vacillation of the delegates. "My draft was first adopted by a majority of one," he noted in his diary, "after which Mr Farlinger got them to retract by representing that no candidate would sign the draft that no Montreal man would look at it - and that it would deprive the association of the aid of the Catholic Liberals. To my surprise and somewhat to my disgust, five of those who had voted for it went over to the opposition. I did not say much, for I did not wish the draft to be adopted otherwise than in conviction." The convention tabled the question of a platform to its next meeting and offered the candidacy to its president, Andrew Oliver. The last item of business was the resignation of the secretary, Robert Sellar.21 The Gleaner offered no apologies. The rejected platform represented the views of many people in the province who, if organized, "could exercise a most beneficial and most urgently called for influence on our provincial politics." Sellar accepted responsibility for "what some people are pleased to term as 'bigotry' and 'intolerance' contained in it," but the Gleaner would stand by its sentiments. The convention had been governed by "that consideration of expediency, which has been the bane of the political life of our province." One day the people of Quebec would rally for civil liberty, but it might then be "too late."22 To many, apparently, it was already too late. The defeat of Sellar's platform by no means banished it from the public mind. On 29 May it was applauded by the Witness and three days later it was denounced at a Conservative rally in Montreal. Nor could it be ignored in Huntingdon, where Dr Cameron castigated Sellar and his platform in language of which the Gleaner's report gave "only an approximate idea."23 Cameron, as a representative of Quebec's English-speaking minority, was already a perfect example of the sort of cat's paw the Witness complained about. He had ingratiated himself with Boucherville from the start, seconding the throne speech, and had yet to vote

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against the Bleu ministry at all. His boast that he had not voted for Lepine's pardon sounded a little hollow from one who, representing the only Quebec constituency to petition the governor-general not to interfere with the sentence, had been conspicuously absent when the vote was taken. In this, and in his failure to oppose the granting of hundred-acre Eastern Townships farms to repatriated French Canadians, the reduction of the grant to agricultural societies, and the government's financial and railroad policies, the Gleaner charged him with misrepresenting the views of his constituents. Unless the electors relished the sort of government that "rested like a nightmare on Spain and the Roman States," they must support Oliver, the opposition candidate. Even the Ormstown New Dominion, which had favoured Cameron in 1874, now dismissed him as "a red-hot supporter of a corrupt Government" from whose "decaying carcass," an "obnoxious stench" was "floating into the public nostrils and vitiating the purer atmosphere of society."24 Oliver's belated effort not to let the election go by default had a predetermined air of defeat about it. Cameron had already secured renewal of the county's unclaimed railway subsidy and a grant of two hundred dollars to its struggling academy. He had been publicly praised before the Church of Scotland synod by Dr John Cook, first moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, for piloting the bill for Presbyterian union through the legislature. Bishop Bourget's latest pastoral ordered the faithful to shun all politicians "who wish the Church to be separated from the State," and the exertions of the parish priests of Huntingdon and St Anicet moved provincial grandmaster Joshua Breadner to alert his Orange brethren that Cameron was "in league with the Catholics."25 Cameron's triumph over Oliver (910 to 653) was in keeping with the general rout of provincial Liberals in 1875. Although Sellar still liked to think of Huntingdon as "a decidedly Protestant community," Catholics now held the local balance of power with no fewer than 7,503 of the county's total population of 16,304. The Gleaner conceded a great victory to the ultramontanes and wondered what Luther Holton and his Montreal coauthors of Liberal disgrace had gained by rejecting the ideals embodied in his platform. The utterances of French Canadians like Joseph Doutre and Wilfrid Laurier showed "a clearer conception of the nature of the issue" and were "more manly in tone." Liberals in Quebec could not, "for years to come, hope to accede to office and yet retain their principles." French Canadians were blinded by their clergy's identification of the Church of Rome with their nationality, "but time will demonstrate the fallacy and show them that the cause of their poverty and their non-

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advancement is their subjugation to it." The duty of true Liberals was "to stand true to those principles of government which are the glory of all free countries, and wait with patience in the belief that their inherent merits will ultimately secure their adoption."26 In July 1875 Robert Sellar treated himself to his first holiday in almost twenty years of journalism. Leaving the Gleaner in the care of his brother Charles, who was visiting before embarking for Australia, he purchased a Grand Trunk ticket for a thirteen-day excursion through the Eastern Townships to Quebec and Tadoussac. Alone amid the primeval grandeur of the Saguenay, he rested his jaded body and replenished his spirits. The monotonous desolation of the endless crags and the sublime silence of the unvarying river "exercised an extraordinary fascination over me, and I found it difficult to tear myself away," he enthused in his diary. "I wish I lived in the neighborhood of such scenery." Quebec City was a pleasant surprise: "Its streets are narrow, to be sure, and its lower-town is a place of many smells, but it has a solid Old World look which is in entire consonance with my taste." There was, disappointingly, no historical exhibit at Laval University, but Sellar was impressed with its library and "could not help envying the happy fate of those who spend their lives within its walls." The bound volumes of Quebec newspapers struck him as an invaluable acquisition. "It would not do to write history from newspapers," he opined, "but no historian will ever, after Macaulay's example, think of penning a page without gathering coloring to the facts he narrates from their columns." His tour of the cathedral and the legislative chambers was cut short by his resolution that "whatever else I should see, I should do full justice to the citadel and to the scene of Wolfe's victory."27 Arriving at the ramparts, he pronounced the view "the finest, the most inspiring prospect that ever met my eyes." But the better part of that hot July afternoon was spent in solitude on the grassy slope where, so many years ago, "lay dying a gallant young gentleman in scarlet, with the shouts of victory ringing in his ears." The desecration of the site by the city's new prison and racetrack did not prevent him from "conjuring back the shadows of the grenadiers in their high-peaked hats, watching the dogged discipline of the English regiments, hearing the roll of their drums as they passed the word of command, and the shrill pibrochs that came from the Highland ranks, glorious in tartan and floating plaid." He watched in his imagination as they drove the "motley French array" back within the shadows of the sombre grey walls.28 Quebec, despite the weeds around Wolfe's monument, was British. It was British by the most

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absolute of titles, and he would fight to keep it so as long as there was breath in his body. Plucking a blossom from the wild vetches growing around the small memorial pillar, he retraced his steps, "reluctantly and with many a backward look," towards the quay. The protracted Guibord case was again in the headlines when Sellar returned. Joseph Guibord, a Roman Catholic printer of the old Galilean school, had died in 1869 under excommunication as a member of the Institut Canadien and had been denied burial in consecrated ground by Bishop Bourget. Fought through the courts by Joseph Doutre and the Institut, the case was finally decided to Sellar's satisfaction when the British Privy Council invalidated the ecclesiastical sentence. Had the decision been otherwise, the Gleaner maintained, "our province would cease to enjoy even the shadow of liberty and sink lower than Spain under Isabella or Sicily under Bomba, for its only parallel would be the Papal States before Garibaldi entered the gates of Rome."29 The bishop's reluctance to comply in good grace provoked the Gleaner's ire anew. Warnings by the new Avenir de Beauharnois to stop "slandering everything that has the smell of Catholic" were dismissed as the "yelping of an ultramontane terrier." But on 11 October Sellar learned that the village priest, Father Felix Woods, had, "by authority of the bishop, and with strong threats," forbidden his parishioners to subscribe to the Gleaner or even to read it. The Gleaner, like its urban counterpart, the Witness, had been condemned.30 Sellar was "annoyed and perplexed" by the ban. "The New Dominion took away some support, the hostility of the Cameron party injured me still further, and now I have the Roman church, not passively, but actively against me," he complained in his diary. "This means a good deal, for tho' not many were subscribers, yet as the order is a prohibiting one, it will injure the advertising interest and every other of the Gleaner. To the majority of the people of the District the Gleaner will henceforth be an object of abhorrence." His first inclination was to turn the other cheek, but "on thinking it over, I could not see that I would be justified in letting his act pass in silence." On 21 October he published a signed open letter to Bishop Bourget. "I could have done better," he conceded, "but somehow my mind now lacks tone, and is not so high-strung."31 In no way could Sellar's letter be construed as a recantation. It accused the bishop and his clergy of trying to ruin him for opposing their interference in politics, of throttling freedom of the press and the right to free speech, of stigmatizing the English as intruders and seeking to supplant them in the Eastern Townships with colonies of French Canadians, and of "building up a wall of partition between

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the people of the two faiths and the two languages" by linking creed with nationality and discouraging Catholics from associating with their Protestant neighbours. "You invoke the terrors of your church to prevent their children learning the rudiments of education at the same schools as ours," he charged. "You have even gone so far as to provide that your insane and criminals shall not come in contact with ours." Fortunately, "the progress of the age" had left the Church "no weapon more potent than its curse." Sellar vowed to continue resisting clerical oppression "until my head lies as low as that of my brother-printer, who, tho' Death has thrown around him its sanctity, you still pursue with that remorseless vengeance you reserve for those who dare to think for themselves." None of Sellar's readers supported him openly. "Is our lot cast in the igth century, or in the middle of the Dark Ages?" asked one, who preferred to remain anonymous. "You are not, and I trust never will be, in the invidious position of those craven-hearted Protestants who dare not speak the truth lest their pecuniary interests should suffer," enthused another, also asking that his name be withheld. "It is illustrative of the people here," Sellar chafed, "that tho' they have talked a good deal, I have got only four new subscribers, while probably not over a third of the Protestants of the district take the paper."32 The situation was more serious than the Gleaner cared to admit. "I went over the subscription list of this time last year," Sellar calculated, "and find, as near as I can guess (for I do not know all who are Catholics) that I had 51 Catholic subscribers. Of these 30 have already stopped and I expect daily notices from more." From cancelled subscriptions and advertising "I expect I will lose $200 ayear." Nor had the local clergy's hostility shown any sign of abating. On 7 November the faithful at St Joseph's were again admonished to shun the offensive journal. "If the priests will only tell the people to read the New Testament in place of it we will freely forgive them," the Gleaner quipped, but Sellar was feeling the pinch. On 11 November an unprecedented appeal appeared in his advertising columns. Forbidden to Catholics in a district only partially inhabited by English-speaking people, the Gleaner was obliged to solicit the support of Protestants, without which "it must expire."33 The Gleaner's experience was consistent with the sectarian climate of 1875. In November, the tense month of Guibord's final burial under the protection of military bayonets, the thorny issue of segregated asylums flared up anew. The new Longue-Pointe asylum was exclusively Roman Catholic and its deficiencies were already a

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matter of public notoriety; the closing of the old asylum at St Johns left Quebec's Protestants with no place of refuge for their insane apart from a remote government institution at Beauport. Some were already laying plans for an exclusive Protestant institution in Montreal, but the Gleaner would hear of "no such monstrosity." Religion was no prerequisite for the care of lunatics; the abusive system of farming out the insane violated all concepts of thrift and humanity.34 The main features of the 1875 legislative session were equally objectionable - a cemetery bill to subvert the Guibord decision by authorizing bishops to refuse ecclesiastical burial in future, and an education bill abolishing the education ministry and transferring control of Roman Catholic schooling to a superintendent and a committee of bishops and laymen. Protestants, though denied a superintendent, would manage their schools through their own committee. Many were thankful, but the Gleaner foresaw serious consequences to rural education for people of both creeds. Daughters of Catholic farmers would now be able to teach only in Catholic schools, and there would be few positions available. Bishops in Quebec, as in Ireland, would see that "almost every school is taught by a Christian brother or some other member of a monastic order." Separate systems were certain to inflict hardship on mixed communities in which Protestants and Catholics could not afford duplicate schools.35 In December 1875 the growing tension in Protestant Quebec burst dramatically to the surface over the so-called "Oka outrage" - the destruction of a Mohawk Methodist church by French Canadians acting on a court order obtained by local priests of the Seminary of St Sulpice. The unprecedented reaction of the Protestant community owed much to the realization that this incident, unlike the Guibord affair, could in no way be viewed as a purely Roman Catholic squabble. "I do not see," cried Principal Dawson of McGill University at a public meeting in Mechanics' Hall, "why the seminary should tolerate the Protestant churches of Montreal any more than they should tolerate the little church at Oka." The meeting, under the guidance of Rev. John Borland of St Johns, the missionary who had built the Oka church, resolved to petition Ottawa, appeal to the courts, and form a Protestant Defence Alliance to superintend the case and oppose all future legislation "incompatible with civil and religious liberty."36 Sellar viewed Borland's Methodist-based movement with misgivings. The time was indeed ripe for a union of true Liberals and rightminded Conservatives against a foe inimical to the British liberties of all, but why did it have to be a quasi-religious organization that Catholics like Doutre and Laurier would be incapable of supporting?

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A broader name, Civil Rights Alliance, was substituted in April 1877, too late to alter its Protestant image in the public mind.37 The possibility of an anticlerical coalition in the mid-t87os was no mere figment of Sellar's imagination. Within two weeks of the Oka incident an Eastern Townships cabinet minister, Lucius Seth Huntingdon of Shefford, shook off party trammels and called for Liberals and Conservatives to join forces against ultramontane aggression. National attention was suddenly focussed on the Quebec minority, but the responses were all too familiar. Prime Minister Mackenzie disowned his minister's views and sent letters of apology to the bishops of Quebec and Toronto. Luther Holton, in the name of English-speaking Quebec, upbraided his colleague in parliament for fomenting "religious strife." Louis Francois Roderigue Masson, an ultramontane, warned Protestants not to interfere in Catholic matters. The Globe argued that Quebec Protestants, by voting Conservative, had brought "French domination" upon themselves. H.G. Joly advised them to look "less after the loaves and fishes" and more after a government dedicated to equal rights. Sir John Macdonald advised a restive Sir Alexander Gait that the "true policy" for Conservatives was not to split the party but "to use all the priestly influence they can get," suffering a little longer the "absurd" pretensions of two old men, Pope Pius and Bishop Bourget.38 Gait took a more serious view. His pamphlet, Civil Liberty in Canada, echoed Huntingdon's call for political realignment against a "deep laid plan" to subjugate Quebec and all of Canada to clerical rule. Sellar found it ironic that Lower Canada's Father of Confederation, a decade after cajoling English-speaking Protestants into accepting his celebrated minority guarantees, had changed his mind about the consequences.39 That no anticlerical party materialized in Quebec in 1876 was probably due to two considerations, both emphasized in a telling refutation of Gait's pamphlet by Thomas White of the Montreal Gazette. The rights of English-speaking Protestants, White insisted, were intact and would remain so provided they maintained a "position of neutrality" with regard to the "family quarrels" of the majority. And Sellar could not deny White's second line of argument - that the spineless Liberal party that Conservatives were being asked to support was hardly a vehicle through which the separation of church and state could be achieved. The aims of Garibaldi, Sellar agreed, would never be realized in the party of Luther Holton and H.G. Joly. Huntingdon had been branded a renegade by his own colleagues; Quebec Liberals, adhering to the Montreal establishment's traditional strategy of not rocking the boat, almost outdid the Bleus in competing for priestly

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affection. Helton's boast, that he had never offended French Canadians in twenty-two years of public office, was all too well-founded, Chateauguay's innocuous courtier, accusing Quebec's timid Protestant minority of provoking religious strife by merely crying out, would "fix the provocation on the lamb and exonerate the wolf,"4" This mainstream debate over the very concept of anticlerical action that Sellar had tried to impress upon the Huntingdon Convention the year before enhanced his prestige and brought his rejected platform back into the local spotlight An unanticipated by-election that spring furnished an opportunity for revival of his aborted plans. Andrew Oliver, learning that Cameron's agent in St Anicet had bought drinks for the crowd in Caza's Hotel while the doctor was in the room, had succeeded in getting his election quashed in January. Within days letters calling for the reconvening of the Huntingdon Reform Convention began to arrive at the Gleaner office. "The past week has been an important one/' Sellar recorded in his diary as twenty-four delegates from the municipalities gathered again in the village. "I did not wish to attend, as I expected it would persist in its rejection of the platform I framed." But "after it was in session some time I was sent for, when I found to my surprise the platform was going to be adopted, and a third of it had already been confirmed." Only four had voiced dissent - William Johnson, "who called it madness," Peter Gardiner, "who said it would not be acceptable to the majority," Edouard Dupuis, "who said if he assented to it he would never need to re-enter church," and James Anderson, "who opposed it from pure obstinacy." Sellar, "quite unhinged" at the unexpected turn of events, the warm ovation, and the prospect of appearing in front of an audience unprepared, "spoke with passable composure and presence of mind, troubled mostly by weakness arising from lack of food."41 On 24 February the Gleaner hailed the founding of the Loyal Reformers' League and called for its extension throughout Quebec. Unlike Montreal's Protestant Defence Alliance, Huntingdon's League provided a platform for "men of all creeds and origins," united in their resolve "that all connection between church and state should be severed." Efforts to promote the new movement were not confined to the Gleaner, On 27 February Sellar expounded his views in a public lecture sponsored by the village Orange lodge. The Orange order had grown apace with Protestant unrest in Quebec during the 18705, and he could see possibilities for it as a civil rights organization if its congenital antipopery could somehow be transformed into consistent political action. He deplored the hypocrisy of leaders like Ogle Robert Gowan, who served in Conservative cabinets alongside the

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upholders of ultramontane pretensions, but he had discovered that the voting habits of many rank-and-file Orangemen were attributable to sheer ignorance. "Honest fellows, who in their hearts were zealous for the principles of the Revolution of 1688," frequently miscast their ballots because "in Ulster, where they had come from, Whigs, Reformers, and Liberals were identified with the supporters of Papal claims, while the name Conservative was the stamp of all that was staunch for Protestantism."42 Was there not, he asked the Orangemen, a certain parallel between the destinies of the Protestant minorities of Quebec and Ulster? Should not the platform of the Loyal Reformers' League be regarded by Orangemen as akin to the cause of their heroic forbears of 1688? His message was enthusiastically received as his hearers subscribed the "handsome sum" of fifty-one dollars in aid of Protestant missionary work among the French Canadians. For the moment his struggles no longer seemed futile. He had been drawing inspiration from a slow reading of Farrar's Life of Christ; he turned now, perhaps significantly, to Shakespeare's King John, which left him "more entranced than ever."43 By mid-March it was sadly evident that the Loyal Reformers' League would remain a purely local phenomenon if it survived at all. The newspapers of the province, complained the Gleaner, had scouted its platform as "a thing calculated to give offence"; even the Witness had quibbled with some of its recommendations. Also disillusioning was the retreat of local Liberals as soon as the platform's nonacceptance by the parent party was confirmed. Faced with an April by-election, their problems were compounded by Andrew Oliver's refusal to run again. Cameron, on the other hand, was feeling the disinclination of Protestant voters to lend further support to a provincial ministry so notoriously susceptible to clerical influence. A compromise, smacking of expediency, was arranged with the local Liberal organizer, William Scott Maclaren. Cameron, it was agreed, would not be opposed provided he returned to the legislature as an "independent" supporter of Joly's Liberal opposition. He balked at committing himself to Sellar's platform, but promised to take up its less controversial financial planks of his own volition. In this way, Maclaren attempted to persuade the crestfallen editor, could the political division among local Protestants be healed and Huntingdon's vote redeemed to the cause of good government. "So far as we are aware," ran the Gleaner's unenthusiastic comment, "Dr Cameron will be re-elected by acclamation." Cameron thanked the electors in his nomination speech, accepted a watch and chain from his supporters, and nothing more was heard

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of the Loyal Reformers' League.44 For Sellar, who had been seeking the political regeneration of the Liberal party, the dubious conversion of a wily country doctor was scant consolation indeed. OKA, O R A N G E M E N , A N D P R O T E S T A N T D E M O R A L I Z A T I O N , 1876-81

Sellar took advantage of his brother's two-year stay to break out of isolation again in the summer of 1876. In June he caught the train in Chateaugay, New York, to attend the American Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia. Cramming as much as he could into five days at the fair, he spent the rest of his time touring the city. He judged Canada's agricultural display to be the finest, while the British pavilion made him "prouder than ever of being a subject of that great Empire." In the women's pavilion it occurred to him that the world was truly advancing "when the wives of Mahometans are allowed to send their handiwork to an Infidel' nation and those in remotest lands take an interest in us." What touched him most was the simple exhibit of the New York Association for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Was Huntingdon unrepresented at this great world exposition? "Not quite," Sellar reported. Beside a stove somewhere he had seen a box labelled "Huntingdon Peat Company."45 Philadelpia's image as the City of Brotherly Love he dismissed as "bosh." Quakerism had declined to a "faint shadow" in what was emphatically a blue-collar city. The monotony of its uniform streets of row houses mattered less than the realization that the working class here was better housed than in the tenements of Boston and other American cities he had visited. "If Communism ever effects a lodgement on this side of the Atlantic," he speculated, "it will be last to find a foothold in Philadelphia." He was shocked at the lack of decorum inside Independence Hall. "Numbers kept their hats on and talked," he observed, "while that omni-present American institution, the spittoon, has found its way into these august precincts." Philadelphia's people were hospitable and he saw no evidence of price-gouging. The rail fare was $19.75 in greenbacks, a modest hotel was $12 a week, breakfast and supper totalled $1.50, and admission to the exhibition was a 5OC shinplaster. His outlay for the trip was slightly in excess of $40 Canadian, and he informed his readers that, "with strict economy," it could be done for even less.46 In August, shortly after the opening of the Intercolonial Railway, Sellar was off again. Rattling for hours across desolate evergreen slopes, wondering "if all of New Brunswick is like this," he at length reached Atlantic Canada. Highlanders along the magnificent Baie des

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Chaleurs, he noted, retained their mother tongue and held a Gaelic service on Sundays. Moncton, an "oasis" in the treed wilderness south of Bathurst, was the gateway to Nova Scotia, but he branched off first to visit the Loyalist King's County and the city of St John. On 25 August, the fifth day of his tour, he took the steamer across the Bay of Fundy to Annapolis, his thoughts dwelling on Britain's expulsion of the Acadians from this fertile "land of Evangeline." Halifax, apart from its citadel, was a disappointment, conveying an impression of "slovenliness and deadness" in contrast to St John. Its economy depended upon the British naval station, its moral tone was set by soldiers and sailors, and Sellar had never seen so many grog shops. The "better class" was very "English"; no doubt "less uppishness" would make Halifax "a more thriving place." One of its largest buildings was a poorhouse, and poorest of all were those of African descent. "How they came there I do not know," he puzzled, as women walked by with "great baskets on their heads." On the long journey home he began work on an editorial "to show how the people of Canada have been plunged deep in debt in order to build the Intercolonial Railroad, and of how little advantage it is to the country."47 Sellar returned from his holidays to find that all efforts to constitute an anticlerical political party in Quebec had petered out, relegating Protestant opposition to clericalism into increasingly sectarian channels. Though he succeeded for the most part in retaining the Gleaner's secular character during the heightened antagonism of the late 18703, his conception of Protestantism - "a protest against certain errors fatal to the purity of the Christian faith and the civil rights of man"48 - was rife with both religious and political overtones that were not easy to disentangle. Robert Sellar's remarkable advocacy of the cause of the Oka Indians was a good example - a public cause animated, in the final analysis, by a zeal that transcended the purely political. The origins of the conflict extended back into the French regime, when the Seigniory of Two Mountains had been ceded to the Seminary of St Sulpice for the benefit of a mixed group of Indians under its care. Trouble began after Confederation with the apostasy of the largest faction, the Iroquois, and their conversion to Protestantism by Methodist missionaries, who erected a small church on land claimed by the seminary. Underlying the ensuing seven years of intertribal friction, religious persecution, and litigation was the broader question of title to the seigniory itself - a dispute still unresolved when the Methodist church was destroyed on 13 December 1875,49 Eleven days after the "Oka outrage" Sellar ventured into "the depths of Griffintown" to hear the Protestant Indians address a

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meeting at the Ebenezer Methodist Church. Joseph Onasakenrat, a tall strongly built Iroquois with the "square face, high cheek bones, and stolid expression" of a full-blooded Indian, was their most impressive spokesman. "When this untutored red man struck his breast and exclaimed 'the church is here,'" Sellar marvelled, "I thought he had a clearer idea of the essential that constituted the true church than many a surpiiced clerk 1 had listened to." The agitation reached Huntingdon in February, when the academy reverberated with the Methodist pastor's denunciation of "that system of priestcraft which rests like an incubus upon our land." A destitute band of forty families had been evicted from the woods that furnished their meager livelihood, and their total dependence on charity was viewed with mounting compassion by Sellar. "Shall Rome triumph?" asked the Gleaner, and its readers responded.50 On 7 June Huntingdon's first rally for Oka relief was convened in the Methodist church. The scene was typical of several to follow: Protestant clergymen fulminating against Rome; Indian converts telling tales of persecution; Methodist missionaries insisting their exotic charges were loyal subjects with immortal souls; "ear-splitting" hymns sung by Chief Joseph and his brothers; motions of support and monetary collections that were remarkably well supported. The initial sum generated by the fervour was $76. Though Protestant enthusiasm was already subsiding elsewhere, Huntingdon was only beginning to respond to the call. Sellar's involvement in the Oka cause was intensified by growing personal regard for Chief Joseph and his wife Louise. Behind Joseph's grotesque English and impassive demeanour he detected a keen intellect, a resolute spirit, and the heart of "a true man and a humble Christian." He had refused to enrol with the papal zouaves on the grounds that Victor Emmanuel's cause was identical to his own, and Sellar admired his stand against the powerful Montreal seminary: "Against all arrangements that would give the priests the seigniory for nothing and leave the burden of providing homes for the tribe to the government, his simple sense of justice revolted, and he preferred they should remain and starve at Oka and endure the indignities and injuries the priests heaped upon them, rather than give up their rights, in the ultimate obtaining of which he had an unswerving faith."51 In February 1877 the Gleaner promoted a series of fund-raising lectures by William George Beers of the Protestant Defence Alliance, and on 6 March Joseph left Huntingdon with three sleighs bearing food and clothing for the poverty-stricken band. It was the last Sellar would see of him for nearly a year. In mid-June fresh violence

98 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

erupted at Oka, culminating in the burning of the Catholic church, the occupation of the village by provincial police, and the flight of the Indians across the Ottawa to the woods near Hudson. John J. Maclaren, now legal counsel for the Iroquois, informed the Gleaner of provocations including twenty-two midnight arrests on charges of illegal wood-cutting, and again Huntingdon responded. At an emergency meeting on 25 June Sellar was named to get up a petition calling for the intervention of Prime Minister Mackenzie, and a letter of support was despatched to Joseph in the Ste Scholastique jail. The cause had even inspired its own adaptation of a well-known hymn: Rescue the Indians, care for their sighing, Snatch them in pity from popery's sway; Weep o'er the suffering ones, save from oppression, Jesus is merciful, Jesus will save.

The people of Huntingdon, confided Maclaren, had rallied to the Indians' defence with a constancy unmatched even in Montreal.52 Early in July, as Sellar forwarded Huntingdon's petition to Ottawa, he realized that his initiative was again failing to spark a chain reaction in the province. "Had each county sent a petition such as ours," lamented the Gleaner, public opinion would have forced the prime minister "to do justice to the oppressed tribe." The official reply was brief and unhelpful. Property and civil rights fell under the jurisdiction of the provincial government and the courts. The federal government had offered to relocate the Indians, but they had rejected the $20,000 offered by the seminary in extinction of their claims. There was nothing further the prime minister could do.53 The Gleaner disagreed. The Indians were wards of the federal government. If court action was required on their behalf, why had Ottawa not initiated it instead of "shuffling" the responsibility on the Methodists and private parties? The Gleaner lacked confidence in Quebec courts when the Church of Rome was party to a case, "and we also know that before a decision could be reached, the Indians, save those the priests may manage, by hard swearing, to get into the penitentiary, may be starved." As to rejecting the conditions offered, "a tribe who believe they are the owners of a conveniently situated seigniory, ten miles square, can be excused if they refuse to give it up for the munificent sum of $20,000, equal to about $60 a head, and a tract of rocky land a thousand miles north-west of Ottawa." The government, charged the Gleaner, was again shirking its responsibilities for fear of antagonizing Quebec's clergy. A pathetic letter from

99 The Church, the State, and the Gleaner

Joseph in appreciation of the fruitless petition touched his heart, and he plunged immediately into a new round of relief meetings for the ill-fated sufferers.54 By mid-iS/S the Gleaner was one of the few parties still interested. The Methodist Church had never taken direct charge of the Indians' defence, and Beers later accused its leaders of negotiating clandestinely with the new Macdonald government for their relocation. At the Methodist conference in Montreal in November not a word was spoken about Oka. The waning Civil Rights Alliance, unable to obtain a quorum for over a year, held its last meeting that month, its funds exhausted from the costly defence of the Indians accused of burning the Catholic church. It had never been able to act on its original resolution to prosecute the seminary for the destruction of the Methodist church and would have expired sooner had not Beers and a few others subsidized its activities from their own pockets.55 With the appointment of Hector Louis Langevin to Macdonald's cabinet, government policy became synonymous with the demands of the seminary. Resistance waned when the Methodist Church transferred Chief Joseph to Caughnawaga. "God knows," Sellar avowed on the occasion of his untimely death, "how little this simple Indian realized what a hollow and nerveless thing Protestantism is in Canada." In 1881 a portion of the band agreed to move to Muskoka, Ontario, but some three hundred still clung to the land they believed was theirs. Sellar visited Oka that October and came away "vexed, in heart and soul, that I could do so little for them." He established a trust fund of $100 for Joseph's sons, and as late as 1898 the Gleaner was still calling for donations for the Oka Christmas tree.56 By 1878, with tension from the Oka dispute hanging over the province like a pall, Catholics and Protestants in Montreal had moved a step closer to outright religious warfare following the shooting of a young Orangeman, Thomas Lett Hackett, during riots on the Glorious Twelfth the year before. The funeral was conducted under the protection of military bayonets in an atmosphere charged with sectarian hatred. The Gleaner implored Orangemen to act with discretion. "When a collision must take place/' it counselled, "let it be about something more tangible than the right of young men to wear coloured coats." It viewed the decision to vindicate the right to parade in 1878 as vainglorious folly. Griffintown, following riots between members of the Orange Young Britons and the Irish-Catholic Union, was in an ugly mood. The Irish, as usual, were drawing French Canadians into their feud against the Protestants. The federal government, having authorized police to search and disarm Orangemen, called out

ioo Voice of the Vanishing Minority

the militia to protect them. Mayor Jean Louis Beaudry vowed to stop the march; the Quebec government was hastily concocting legislation to ban "party" (but not religious) parades.57 The city braced for a violent showdown, but the Orangemen were not destined to walk that day. "We are surrounded by 10,000 ruffians," they telegraphed to Prime Minister Mackenzie from their beleaguered hall on St James Street: "Mayor will not clear the streets. Military of no use. Reply at once." Leaders who attempted to march were arrested and their hapless followers were rescued, ignominiously enough, by the mayor himself, who ordered city police to clear the streets only after they had agreed to remove their regalia and go home. "The vapouring of Orangeism," exulted the True Witness, "has vanished in this province for ever." The Gleaner could only agree that the inept order, by casting its opponents in the role of "maintainers of the law of the land," had discredited not only itself but Protestantism generally, rendering reform on matters of real moment more unattainable than ever.58 Huntingdon County did not emerge unsullied from the debacle of 12 July 1878. Orangemen had predominated in the militia ever since the rebellion era, and the village's Glorious Twelfth celebrations were postponed for the first time in over a quarter century by the calling out of the volunteers to Montreal. Their conduct was criticized by the Irish Catholic Evening Post, and the Gleaner confirmed that the heroes of 1870 had indeed behaved like rabble. Hemmingford's Fifty-First Battalion, singing "We'll hang old Beaudry from a sour apple tree," distinguished itself by plundering the mayor's garden. The Victoria Skating Rink, where the Huntingdon Fiftieth was stationed, was "perfect pandemonium" according to an outraged militiaman. Homeward bound aboard the river steamer, the men emptied their weapons at lights along the shore. Captain Hugh McKinnon's arm, shattered above the elbow, was amputated at midnight by Dr Cameron. The discharge of three officers too drunk for duty failed to restore the luster of the battalion's once-proud reputation. But the Gleaner refused to give way on the broader issues that these disgraceful events had all but obscured. The ultimate question was not one of green and orange but of equal rights: "Decent Protestant farmers could not enter the city with anything more dangerous than a jack-knife in their pockets; the worst rowdies of Quebec could go swaggering in with revolvers." Orange, "the colour of the greatest of England's kings, and blue, the colour of Scotland," could not be displayed, even in flowers, "under penalty of being hurried to jail," yet green, "the badge of Fenianism and many other forms of disloyalty," was so prevalent that the Globe's reporter was reminded

ioi The Church, the State, and the Gleaner

of St Patrick's day. A few Orangemen were not permitted to walk to divine service, but the mayor allowed thousands, "whose sole object was to commit a breach of the peace, to block the chief street of the city for a whole day."59 Both sides recoiled from the confrontation, but it was obvious, as the order became embroiled in litigation over its legality in Quebec, that the province would not see the Glorious Revolution in the 18705. An early indication of Protestant demoralization in the wake of the breakdown of 1878 was the lethargic response of the Gleaner's readers to the "St Louis outrages" - a local sequel to the controversy over the use of public thoroughfares for sectarian processions. Several Protestant families en route to church in St Louis de Gonzague had been intercepted by French Canadians guarding a fete-Dieu procession as it knelt in the main street. Physical violence and the alleged brandishing of a revolver had resulted. The Catholics, charged with assault in Huntingdon, hauled the Protestants before the Beauharnois court on similar charges as well as a charge of disrupting a religious procession contrary to treaty rights of the Church of Rome.60 It was the latter point that intrigued Sellar, for he could discover no such rights. His confidant, John J. Maclaren, who had fought the Lachine processions case in 1876, believed a far-reaching court decision was necessary to dispel the erroneous belief of French Canadians that they were entitled to preempt public highways for the exclusive use of their religious processions. The Gleaner urged Protestants to establish a defence fund for the St Louis farmers "large enough to carry the case, if need be, even to the House of Lords." But attendance at the emergency meeting in Huntingdon's Second Presbyterian Church was disappointingly small. Sellar and Maclaren were named to a committee, but it was soon apparent that the five accused would be obliged to pay their legal bills from their own pockets. The litigation ended in mutual agreement to drop all charges, saving the Protestant community "a few paltry dollars" but missing "a rare opportunity of vindicating their claim to equal rights in this province."61 There remained plenty of defiant talk. The Orange celebrations of 1879 were the largest in memory, but Protestant morale in Huntingdon was beginning to break. Yet another lost cause was the extension into the district of evangelical missions to the French Canadians. Such work, to "raise them, by the power of the Gospel, from the poverty and ignorance in which so large a proportion of them dwell," had been under way since before Confederation, but only after the mission of the Presbyterian Church was taken over by the converted priest, Father Charles

102 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

Paschal Telesphore Chiniquy, did the results become encouraging. The fiery crusader toured the Chateauguay Valley in November 1876, captivating audiences with a vivacity that belied his sixtyseven years. Though Sellar was dubious of Chiniquy's methods and unrestrained tongue, there was no denying his ability to carry forward the great work. By 1878 some eighty French Canadian converts were attending services at the Presbyterian church in St Jean Chrysostome, and a small frame building was built to house the school and church of another thirty on a one-acre lot donated by a sympathetic farmer near St Antoine Abbe.62 The work of the mission was undermined by religious hostility and flagging financial support during those stringent years. "Several of the older French Protestants," reported the Presbyterian colporteur, "have suffered bitter persecution, their lives have been frequently threatened and their property injured." The Gleaner, noting that $250 was still owing on the St Antoine church, berated the Protestant congregations "that so important a work, whether viewed politically or religiously, should be hampered for means."63 For French evangelization in the District of Beauharnois, the end was already in sight. By 1878 Rome, through the intercession of Bishop George Conroy of Ireland, had moved to restrain the Quebec clergy. A joint pastoral issued by the chastened bishops in October 1877 denied that the Pope had ever identified political liberalism with the condemned Catholic liberalism or denounced any political party. The Vatican apparently took the Canadian people for "a set of blockheads," surmised the Gleaner. Had not Pius IX exhausted "the whole vocabulary of pious swearing," comparing the German emperor to "every evil Bible character from Holofernes to Herod?" Were not '"revolutionist/ 'Jac°bins/ 'children of Satan,' among the mildest terms he has applied to Victor Emmanuel and the great party which has brought about a united and constitutionally governed Italy?" Had he not prayed for the defeat of liberals in France and censured those striving for free institutions in Spain? Quebec's bishops had merely been impolitic; expediency dictated a change of tactics but not of aims.64 If Conroy truly sought to curb clerical interference he had not succeeded. "Individuals and parties are to be no longer particularised/' explained the Gleaner as Wilfrid Laurier went down to defeat in Dramrnond-Arthabaska. "The fulminations are to be made against Liberal-Catholics, and the priests are to interpret who the Liberal-Catholics are, and see that they are properly disposed of after the manner of Mr Laurier." In Sellar's district a flysheet, anonymously written by the cure of St Timothe, stigmatized the Liberal

103 The Church, the State, and the Gleaner

candidate in Beauharnois, Elie Hercule Bisson, as a "traitor" who had sold his soul to the "fanatical" Gleaner and the "Swiss" Joly. Bisson lost his seat to Celestin Bergevin, a farmer Sellar judged "blue and stupid enough to suit the most bigoted of his constituents." The Rouge Echo de Beatiharnois discerned clerical intrigue behind Bisson's defeat, but by midsummer it had succumbed to a massive curtailment of support. Such were the realities with which Liberals still had to contend in rural Quebec.65 Sellar saw little to cheer about in Joly's narrow victory in the provincial election of 1878. The moderation of Bishop Elzear Alexandra Taschereau of Quebec, whose restraint of the clergy within his diocese enabled nine constituencies to be won from the Bleus, won him only the distinction of never being mentioned in the Gleaner. Joly, surrounded by dubious Liberals, political trimmers, and some disgruntled Bleus, was hardly in a position to attempt the disestablishment of the Roman Catholic Church even if he wanted to. Expecting little, the Gleaner was not disappointed, and found what satisfaction it could in his efforts to clean up Quebec's finances.66 Nor did the return of John A. Macdonald and the federal Conservatives in September offer any hope of relief from clerical influence. The Gleaner shed few tears for Mackenzie, but did not relish the exchange of bad for worse. The facile Macdonald revived his old alliance with the Quebec priesthood by taking their chief spokesmen, Louis Masson and Hector Langevin, into his ministry. The "scandalous spectacle" of "the Chevalier of the order of Pope Gregory" and "the leading representative of ultramontane ideas" sitting "cheek-to-jowl" in the cabinet with Mackenzie Bowell, the former grandmaster of the Orange Association in Ontario, reinforced Sellar's conviction that the Church of Rome remained as well entrenched as ever.67 B O D Y A N D S O U L , 1875-80

It was inevitable that the role played by the Gleaner in the politicoreligious feuds of the nineteenth century would provoke charges of bigotry. Nor would it be possible to completely exonerate so militant a journal, for its editor, despite his efforts to fight clericalism on secular grounds, was motivated in his heart by a religious zeal not altogether untinged by the fanaticism of the age. He fervently believed that Protestantism would ultimately redeem mankind from the "error" of the Catholic faith. He was capable of discerning a "providential design" in the planting of Protestant colonies in such

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Catholic strongholds as Ireland and Quebec. Was not God, in His infinite wisdom, providing for the consecration of a land "sacred to the dissemination of His Truth, from whence all freedom springs?"68 Yet Robert Sellar never condoned modes of action that would have validated the accusation of bigotry. Believing that Protestants who abandoned "argument, persuasion, and the exhibition to our opponents in our own characters of those virtues which we contend soundness in the faith give life to" only undermined their own cause, he opposed violence and never sought change through any unconstitutional process. The Gleaner shunned the International Protestant League, organized in Montreal and abetted by several of the churches after the shooting of Hackett. "Danger does menace Protestantism in this province," it maintained, "but if it can only be averted by forming a secret society, we would say let Protestantism die."69 Hoping to demonstrate the superiority of the reformed faith, Sellar applied the same clear-cut principles to Catholics and Protestants alike. Did not the Orange order compromise its position on church and state every time it tried to facilitate establishment of its orphanages and agencies by seeking legal incorporation like a community of monks? How could Protestant clergymen consistently oppose state endowment of Romanism while accepting public money for denominational colleges of their own?70 His calls for ecclesiastical disestablishment through voluntary self-denial fell repeatedly on deaf Protestant ears. Perhaps the most striking example of Sellar's moral consistency is found in his private life. His diary reveals that between 1875 and 1879 he underwent a crisis of conscience with regard to religious positions being taken by his own communion, the Anglican Church. For years he had been annoyed by the pretensions of a high-church faction stressing similarity with Rome. His disenchantment reached its height 21 January 1878, when Rev. W.C. Clarke of Buckingham proclaimed, at a missionary meeting in St John's Church, that the Church of England was the true Catholic Church, created by God in apostolic times. The reaction of Presbyterians and Methodists in the audience, the Gleaner noted, ranged from indignation to amusement, and Sellar wrote to Bishop Ashton Oxenden in Montreal for clarification. The bishop's reply reaffirmed that the Church was indeed a divine entity apart from the Scriptures, and that other denominations outside the pale were less sound. "I felt I could not remain in a body that so regarded my fellow-Protestants, that entertained views so unsustained by Scripture and reason," Sellar entered in his diary. "I have taken a step I long contemplated as inevitable - breaking off connection with the Church of England."71

1O5 The Church, the State, and the Gleaner

Sellar's break with the Anglican Church and its "unprotestantizing" tendencies caused him to "yearn to be near a congregation of Reformed Episcopalians." During his first visit to Ottawa in May 1879 he attended the Reformed Episcopal Church, communicated, and was pleased to find the new service devoid of the "objectionable sacerdotal features" of the old. Canada's capital he found "well built and finely situated," and he "learned a great deal" by attending the debates in the original parliament buildings, judged "beautiful, but not imposing or majestic." He rated the Rideau falls more impressive than the Chaudiere, and his mind was at rest as he descended the Ottawa's "long vistas of glassy water, set in trees, that seem to grow out of it," to meet the Caughnawaga stage.72 In December 1878 the recurring back problem that had troubled Sellar for years took an acute turn for the worse. So excruciating was the pain that he feared he was dying, "and I looked that event in the face." His sister fetched Dr Cameron, who eased the "nightmare of horror" with two injections of morphine. "I slept a few hours and woke sick, the morphia causing nausea for 30 hours," he recorded. "Tho' distressing I was pervaded by deep thankfulness, for the pain was almost gone." Then a rash broke out on his back and legs and he felt his strength returning. For two weeks he attended to his editing from his bed. "Dull and languid in body and mind," he entered in his diary. "Sleep ill o' nights. Wish I knew what ailed me." Plaster, freezing, and electricity had all failed. "Indeed, beyond the relief afforded by the morphia, medicine has done nothing for me." Though death might be imminent, he felt "resigned and content, feeling deeply my guilt before God for having violated his laws so grossly as to entail so severe a penalty."73 By 30 December, though "physical frailty" made motion painful, he was able to travel by stage to consult doctors in Montreal. One told him he had suffered "an attack of cerebral spinal meningitis, and that dregs remained"; another said his problem was "not spinal, but one affecting the tendons" along the spine; a third called it a "nervous affliction." He was advised to take three months "out of harness," which was out of the question. Whatever the ailment, he at least had the good fortune to discover a palliative. "By taking a daily Turkish bath I was all but cured," he exulted in his diary. "I moved about a good deal in making purchases, and spent a good deal of money, I am afraid rather foolishly. Among the rest, getting my portrait."74 But the relief proved only temporary, and Huntingdon's amenities, sadly, did not include a Turkish bath. On New Year's Eve, with the decade "drifting away amid piercing frost and bright moonlight," Sellar took stock of his situation. He

106 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

found, for all his problems, "much cause for thankfulness." The year 1879, despite the pain of infirmity, had been in some respects "happier and brighter than several that went before." He had made "palpable advances towards a sturdier manhood, altho' only God and myself knows how very far short I still fall of what I ought and might be." He felt he had never been "on as good terms with all men, and that were I to die now I would leave more friends than I would have done this time a twelvemonth ago." Whether "I am more considerate in my manner of expressing myself or that they understand me better, I do not know." On the "dark side" was the Gleaner's failure to do "as it ought and must if 1 am to settle down here." Yet his balance of $700, down $100 from the previous year, was insufficient even to "cast anchor." He was nearing forty, at the "crest of the hill, if I have not already passed it," and seemed to know in his heart that he would never leave Huntingdon. Eighteen eighty brought no improvement. "The gross surplus over expenditure is $702," he noted. "Allowing for interest on plant, I have little left as actual income. It is most disheartening, and yet I have labored hard all year for a different result; given my readers the best paper in my power, economized and endeavored to extend the business." A canvass of every house in Chateauguay yielded only twenty-seven new subscribers, barely paying the agents' expenses. "The stolidity of these Chateauguay Scotchmen, their narrowness and selfishness is deplorable," he railed. "Scotch concession has one subscriber and his paper travels from end to end. To seek to serve and promote the interests of such men needs a loftier spirit than mine to prevent repining." Summoning all his faith in God, he prayed that in the days ahead "I may be of more use to my fellowmen, and, to that end, oh strive to overcome."75

4 Under the National Policy Protection is downright robbery of the majority by act of parliament. Gleaner, 6 February 1879

CONSERVATIVE QUACKS AND THEIR P A N A C E A OF P R O T E C T I O N , " 1874-79

If Robert Sellar's anticlerical liberalism was European in nature, his lifelong adherence to principles of laissez-faire and free trade was grounded in the British teachings of Richard Cobden, Jeremy Bright, and the Manchester School of political economy. Governments, he believed, functioned best when reduced to the lowest minimum consistent with the preservation of public order and the rights of property. Small government meant freedom from taxation, and he agreed with Gladstone that the wealth of the nation should be allowed "to fructify in the pockets of the people," On no account should the state interfere in the economic processes. These operated best in accordance with natural laws over which mere governments exercised little control. A free economy regulated its own prices, eliminated inefficient producers, compelled each country to engage in the production of that for which it was best fitted, and ensured adequate supply in accordance with market demand.1 Sellar saw Canada as a "pre-eminently agricultural country" in which protective tariffs would amount to price-fixing for the benefit of a coterie of uncompetitive manufacturers at the expense of the consumer public. The validity of such views seemed amply borne out by his empirical observation of the trials of Huntingdon County - an agricultural community whose palmiest days had been terminated by the repeal of the Reciprocity Treaty. So it was with some

io8 Voice of the Vanishing Minority

concern that he contemplated the mounting clamour of Canada's fledgling manufacturing interests for greater protection in the limited domestic market to which American tariffs had confined them. "What we ask," the Gleaner specified at the outset of the tariff agitation in 1874, "is simply that parliament tend to its legitimate duties, levy custom and other taxes with sole view to raising revenue, and leave the relations of producers and consumers to be adjusted by the natural law of supply and demand." But the tariff debate revealed, ominously, that Canada's Conservative party was adopting protectionist principles. These emerged full-blown in 1878 under Sir John A. Macdonald's ingenious designation of "National Policy."2 Sellar did his best to puncture the arguments designed to beguile farmers. For farmers, although a majority of the electorate, were unorganized and virtually voiceless in the shadow of well-oiled manufacturers' lobbies. After years of hard times many were ready to gamble on change, rendering them acutely susceptible to the new Tory siren song. An expanded home market would be of no benefit, the Gleaner assured them, because savings on trans-Atlantic freight and commissions would be wiped out by the "bonus to the manufacturer." The domestic market would never be big enough to absorb Canada's huge agricultural surpluses, which would still have to be sold on the unprotected world market. Tariffs, it insisted, would increase the price of manufactures the farmer had to buy without increasing the price of the produce he had to sell, leaving him "a poorer man than he is now." Talk of protecting Canadian farmers, who proved daily that they could sell horses, cattle, sheep, butter, cheese, grain, and wool cheaper than the Americans by selling largely to them despite their high duties, was "nonsense." A farmer interested in cheap consumer goods was "not disposed to grumble about Canada's being made that terrible thing 'a slaughter market' and is willing Americans should slaughter their goods even more." Reciprocity of tariffs would not coerce the American colossus into reciprocity of trade, but Canadian "flea-bites" could bring on a tariff war fraught with " greater-than-average seriousness" to a border county like Huntingdon.3 Public opinion in the Chateauguay Valley, save for the Ormstown New Dominion and a handful of local Conservatives, was solidly behind the Gleaner on the tariff question. Even Daniel Boyd, Huntingdon's one appreciable manufacturer, was among its adherents. Protection, Boyd feared, would foster a host of city competitors to his "Celebrated Huntingdon Threshing Machine/' developed without government favour during the stringent 18703 and currently selling as far away as Manitoba. Huntingdon's rural producers believed

log The National Policy

they were efficient enough to survive in the marketplace without government mollycoddling. Already the Gleaner was beginning to evince their image of the city manufacturer as "the big man who lives on Montreal mountain, who has lackeys to wait upon him, drives to his counting-house in his carriage, and goes to the Governor-General's balls, with his wife arrayed in silks and diamonds," but who could not run his business "like other people, without a government subsidy." Let the Redpath sugar refinery and similar enterprises justify their existence by manufacturing commodities as cheap and of equal quality as those imported or let them close up shop.4 Julius Scriver's opposition to higher tariffs assured his acclamation in the election of 1878, but the Gleaner was staggered by the magnitude of the Conservative triumph elsewhere. Even the farmers of Ontario had been deluded into giving "the Conservative quacks with their panacea of protection" a mandate. Quebec's French Canadian farmers, frugal to the point of self-sufficiency and indifferent to markets abroad, seemed amenable to the National Policy for reasons of their own. "The habitants buy so little of dutiable goods, growing even their own tobacco, that an increase in customs will not bear upon them," the Gleaner explained, "while they have got it into their heads that protection is a system devised by the government to give them work in the cities at good wages."5 In neighbouring Beauharnois, the market and employment prospects of the expanding industrial complex at Valleyfield had already accentuated the Conservative bias in the voting habits of its population. By March 1879, following a "disgusting" procession of manufacturers' deputations into Ottawa, the new budget was under debate. The Gleaner pronounced its tariff provisions - an overall increase of 18 percent with particular levies of up to 40 percent - as "extreme as any, save a few very greedy manufacturers, could have anticipated." Apparently the way to restore good times was "to bleed the country." Reinforcing Sellar's bitterness was his shrewd conviction that John A. Macdonald, a dubious protectionist at heart, was really using the tariff as a means of raising revenue for the completion of the languishing Pacific railroad across "2,000 miles of desert plains and interminable chains of mountains." Canada, having raised a "Chinese wall" against the United States, was also discriminating against the products of Great Britain. Would Canadian farmers continue to enjoy free entry for their flour, oatmeal, butter, and cheese or was the British connection suddenly in jeopardy? How long would "paternal feeling" survive "when our government forbids the child to buy from the parent"? The National Policy was inimical to the Gleaner's

no

Voice of the Vanishing Minority

modest vision of Canada as an agrarian appendage to the industrial metropolises of the United States and the mother country.6 The immediate course of local events did little to lessen Huntingdon's apprehensions about the ability of the National Policy to restore good times. The failure of the Mechanics' Bank 28 May 1879, though it caused little dislocation in Montreal circles, was an economic catastrophe of the first magnitude for residents of the District of Beauharnois. The Huntingdon branch, opened in August 1878, was welcomed as the county's first regular banking agency, and to its care a trusting population committed over $10,000 in deposits. The bank proved uncommonly anxious to extend the circulation of its paper, and within six months the bills of other banks had disappeared in the district. Little did the local people realize that the Mechanics' Bank was already insolvent, and would have crashed sooner but for a loan from Molson's Bank. At the moment of failure the liabilities of the branches at Huntingdon, Valleyfield, and Beauharnois to the people of the district exceeded $8o,ooo.7 With the region's prevailing currency suddenly rendered worthless, local business was throttled for the better part of the summer and pathetic cases of individual hardship were the rule. The Gleaner charged the bank's president, Charles John Brydges, a former manager of the Grand Trunk Railway, with criminal fraud, and attempted to organize its afflicted readers for court action. The experience was hardly conducive to public trust in the new National Policy or any other aspect of the economy. On 7 August the Gleaner appealed to its readers to cease hoarding silver and to restore a modicum of local trade by accepting the notes of banks that it designated as sound.8 It was at this inauspicious juncture that Huntingdon began to feel some of the unwelcome effects of increased tariffs predicted by the Gleaner. By midsummer, with farm prices seldom lower, higher consumer prices were ruling on the Canadian side. Sugar, still selling at 8 255 Dundee, township of, 10, 35, 82, 236; Indian claims, problems of, 113, 184, 191; and village of, 38, 123-4, 129/ 131, 136 Dunn, James Gordon, 262 Dupuis, Edouard, 82, 93 Dupuis, Frangois Xavier, 233 Durham. See Ormstown Eastern Townships, 10, 46-7, 92, 124, 177, 216, 237, 286; decline of English-speaking population, 147-8, 155, 157, 181; movement to frenchify, 85-6, 186-7, 250, 290 Eastern Townships Bank, 190 ecclesiastical corporations, special privileges of, 79, 83, 85 ecclesiastical tithes, 43, 79, 85, 249, 284; Sellar's plaint against, 85, 1579, 181, 213, 236-7, 243; in Huntingdon, 238; Globe's debate with Gleaner, 151-5; Langevin's defence of, 1589; Macdonald's views, 158 Echo de Beauharnois, 81, 103

368 Index Edgar, James David, 157- Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Sellar's impressions of, 8 education and schools, 54 English River, 23, 62, 269; Quebec, 46, 52, 211-12, pioneer curling club at, 217, 236-7, 248, 293; 137 and the Adams report, English-speaking Protes237; and the Catholic tant minority, Quebec, Committee, 212; and 14, 150, 289; as an alien decline of rural schools, conquering race, 179, 237-40; and failings of 186; and Confederasectarian schools, 152, tion, 44-7, 52, 56, 92; 214-17; and Jews in declining rural populaProtestant schools, 255; tion of, 85-6, 147-8, and Macdonald Col152-3, 156-7, 186, 212, lege, 237-8, 240; and 236-44, 249, 287-90; and Marchand's school bill, French-speaking Protes219; and the Protestant tants, 102, 147; grievCommittee, 175, 178, ances of, 64, 78-9, 85-6, 180,216-17,229/ 237~4°' 151-2, 212-13; misrepreand school acts of 1829, sentation of, 47, 86-7, 1846, 1869, and 1875, 176-7, 185, 291; rejec64, 91, 211-12; and superior education tion of Mercier, 173, 185-6; timidity, demorfund, 64, 78; and taxes, alization, and recreancy 237-40 of, 44, 46, 52-3, 79, 92Edwards, George B., 134 4, 99, 101-2, 147, 176-8, Edwards, James K., 9, 165 243-4, 249-50, 252, 274, Edwards, William, 209 288, 291, 296, 299 Elder, Dr John, 149 Equal Rights Association elections, Canada: 1867, 56-9; 1873, 75; 1878, of the Province of Ontario, 178-9; and 103; 1880, 111; 1882, Sellar's letter, 181, 243, 114; 1891, 191-2; 1896, 288; and Mercier's 215-17; 1900, 229; 1904, reply, 179, 182-3 231; 1908, 247-8; 1911, Eucharistic Congress, 257-8; 1917, 275-6 Montreal, 251 elections, Quebec: 1857, Evangelical Alliance of 11; 1861, 15-16; 1863, the Dominion of Can17-18; 1867, 55-6, 59; ada, 176 1871, 80; 1874, 80-1; Evangelical Union church, 1875, 87; 1878, 102-3; Huntingdon, 71 1890, 185-6; 1892, 188; 1897, 217-19; 1900, 232; Fabre, Bishop Edouard 1904, 233; 1908, 259; Charles, 159-60, 217 1912, 259 Elgin, township of, 10, 17- Fallon, Bishop Michael Francis, 250 18, 36-7, 45, 62, 82, 117, Farlinger, Nicholas, 86 224 "Farmers March on Ellerton, Robert, 257 Ottawa," 255-7 Emard, Bishop Joseph Farrer, Edward, 156 Medard, 211, 218, 252

Fax, Simon, songs of, 38-9 Fenians, 54, 70-1, 80; raids of 1866 and 1870, 50-1, 65-9 Fielding, William Stevens, 219, 230, 233, 258 Filiatrault, Aristide, 217 Finnegan, George, 263 Fisher, Sydney Arthur, 239, 241, 259 Fitzpatrick, Charles, 214 Foote, John B., 47 Ford, Patrick, 26, 30-1 Fort Covington Sun, 142 Fortune, James, 36 Foster, Samuel Willard, and railway agitation, 124-6, 128-9 Franklin, township of, 10, 38, 45, 59, 63, 82, 134, 192, 276; early cheese factory in, 131; and village of Franklin Centre, 62, 269 freemasonry, 80; and clerical purge of teachers, 250 "free trade and farmers' rights," Sellar's platform of, 191, 193 Free Trade League, 58 French Canadian Congress of Education, 250, 284 "French domination," political cry of, 12, 15, i7'92 French evangelization, 94, 101-2, 147 Gagnon, Rev. Father Jeremiah, 160, 162, 173 Gallicanism, definition of, 78; tradition of, 147 Gait, Sir Alexander Tilloch, 47, 112, 237; calls for anticlerical action, 92, 289, 292; Confederation guarantees of, 52, 274 Gardiner, Peter, 93

369 Index Gardner, Robert, 223-4, 226-7 Gebbie, Thomas, 130, 135 Gentle, Hiram, 163-4 Georgetown, village of, 164; and church, 22 Gibson, Bruce, 220 Gillies, John, 62, 132 Gilmore, John, photography of, 70 Godmanchester, township of, 10, 28, 50, 82, 127, 160, 192, 224, 229 Gouin, Sir Jean Lomer, 233, 239, 248, 251, 263, 272, 276; "good roads" program of, 259 Gowan, Ogle Robert, 93 Graham, Hugh, 112-16, 177, 226; sues Sellar, 116-18, 166 Grand Trunk Railway, 14, 47, 88, no, 115, 122, 230. See also Montreal and Champlain Junction Railway Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, 231 Great Eastern Railway, 128-9 Greig, William, 185, 188, 218, 230, 257 Guibord case, 89-91 Hackett, Thomas Lett, shooting of, 99, 104 Halifax Chronicle, 227—8 Halifax, Sellar's impressions of, 96 Hall, John, 184 Halse, George Henry, 6 Halton Journal, 16, 49 Hamilton Times, 243 Hamon, Rev. Father Edouard, 187, 290 Hampton, General Wade, 23 Hart, William T., 128 Hartland, Herbert R, 196 Hassan, William, and Huntingdon Conservative Club, 118-19

Hastie, Richard, 196, 200 Havelock, township of, 10, 45, 82, 134, 141, 2367, 268-9; Orangemen of, 79, 113, 172, 192; agricultural society for, 184 Helena, village of, 133 Hemmingford, township of, 10-11, 45, 82, 134, 172, 236; and village of, 58-9, 62, 114-15, 121, 155, 217 Henderson, Archibald, 25, 70 Heneker, Richard William, 289 Herdman's Corners, village of, 137 Herrige, Rev. Dr William, 205 Hibbard, W.R., and Canada Atlantic Railway, 123 Hickson, Joseph, and Grand Trunk Railway, 134-5 Hinchinbrook, township of, 10, 45, 62, 80, 82, 114, 223-4 Hocken, Horatio, and Orange Sentinel, 242; publisher of Tragedy of Quebec, 248-9, 251, 272, 282; Seller's opinion of, 249 Helton, Edward, 111, 217 Holton, Luther, 18-19, 589, 80, 87, 92, 115; and Confederation, 46; cultivating French Canadians, 46, 59, 92-3; death of, in Howick, village, 22, 131, 135-6, 164, 179, 222, 277, 294; and purebred livestock, 266; and railway agitation, 122, 126, 129 Hughes, James E., 211 Hughes, Samuel, 261; Sellar's opinion of, 214

Hunter, John, and Sons, 261 Huntingdon, village of, 12, 28, 66, 136, 229, 259, 226, 278; and condensed milk factory, 265; daily mail service to, 58, 62; and electric lighting, 261-2; new buildings in, 135, 192; and railway agitation, 126, 129-30; Sellar's first impression of, 23— 4; and Sellar's funeral, 280 Huntingdon Academy, 23, 37, 80, 229, 232, 280; founding of, 12, 38, 130; fundraising activities for, 38, 64 Huntingdon Advocate, 135, 139-40, 149, 151, 155, 172; failure of, 174, 185; founding of, 118-20; on Gleaner, 120 Huntingdon Agricultural Society, 38, 119, 232; and fair, 28, 233; Huntingdon Borderers. See militia Huntingdon Conservative Club, 118, 155, 172; and Advocate, 119 Huntingdon County, 111, 114, 121, 135, 176, 17980, 230-1, 262, 275-7; condition of agriculture in, 61, 191, 131-5, 264-8; county council of, 73, 113, 161-2, 180, 280; decline of Englishspeaking population in, 147-8, 212, 236-7, 248, 252; disbanding of militia of, 226; opposition to local Grand Trunk line, 124-5, 129; origins of, 10-12, 87; public buildings of, 12, 39, 124; and Ste Barbe dispute, 160-2; wartime

370 Index conditions in, 270-1, 275, 278 Huntingdon Dairymen's Association, 133, 183, 232, 234 Huntingdon Dairymen's Exchange, 265, 268 Huntingdon Enterprise, 185, 188, 195-6; on Scriver, 192-3 Huntingdon Gleaner, 212 > 53-6- 73-4. 9°' 211, 232; and the cash system, 76-82, 196-7, 199; clerical banning of, 8990, 253; composing of, 31-3, 199; circulation, 33, 64, 89-90, 119-20, 194; destruction of, 64, 71; editorial policy, 43, 50, 195-8; financial condition, 34, 64, 76, 82, 90, 106, 119-20, 194-7, 199-200, 252-3; founding of, 25-8; name and management change, 253; publication difficulties, 314, 48, 75—6, 119-21 Huntingdon Herald, 16 Huntingdon Journal, 1619, 21, 54, 63-4; management changes of, 50, 61, 73-4; and rivalry with Gleaner, 28-9, 34-5 Huntingdon Liberal Association, 219, 229, 223, 2 3!-3, 235, 247 Huntingdon, Lucius Seth, 92 Huntingdon News, 53-4 Huntingdon News (St Johns), 196 Huntingdon News and Enterprise, 196 Huntingdon Organ Company, 135, 190 Huntingdon Peat Company, 62, 95 Huntingdon Protestant Cemetery, 281

Huntingdon Reform Convention, 83, 93 Huntingdon Temperance Society, 139-40 Hutchinson, Rev. Patrick Hynds, 206 Hutton, Major-General Edward, 225 imperial federation, 145; and Imperial Federation League, 159 Independence Hall (Philadelphia), Sellar's impressions of, 95 insane asylums, 79; sectarian segregation of, 90-1 Institut Canadien, 78, 89 Intercolonial Railway, 74, 96, 128 International Protestant League, 104 Ireland, 4, 10, 91, 102; and comparisons with Quebec, 104, 251, 253-4; plagiarization of Sellar's fiction in, 282 Irish Catholic Union, 99 Irving, Thomas, 219 Ives, William Bullock, 211-12,

216-7

Jack, Annie L., 35 Jervois military survey, 50 Jesuit Estates Act (1888), 174-8; and acquiescence of Protestant representatives, 175-7,179; public opposition to, 175-9 Jesuits. See Society of Jesus Jewers case, 213 Johnson, William B., 82-3, 93, 124, 172 Johnston, Clifford, 270 Johnston, Duncan, 270 Joly de Lotbiniere, Sir Henri Gustave, 80, 84, 92, 94, 148; ineffectiveness of, 79, 103; Sellar's response to, 213-14

Jones, Daniel, 36 Jones, WE., and Richmond Guardian, 237 Kelly, Robert, 82 Kelso, settlement, 132-3 Kemp, Arkley, and demise of Enterprise, 196 Kerr, William H., 57-8 Labelle, Father Francois Xavier Antoine, 186 Laberge, Dr Edouard, 59, 146 Laberge, Dr Philomene, 111 Lachine, town of, 22, 101; projected railway bridge at, 129 Lacolle, village of, 131 Lacombe, Father Albert, 210 Lafleche, Bishop Louis Francois Richer, 77,147, 187, 290 La Guerre, village of, 38, 192, 236 Lamb, Charles, 196 Langevin, Sir Hector Louis, 99, 103, 187; defends tithes, 158-9 Langlois, Godfrey, 248 language conflict in Huntingdon, 63, 180-1, 249; in Ontario and Northwest, 179-80, 241; in Quebec, 249 Laprairie, county and town of, 125, 130, 175 Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 127, 149,225, 248, 251, 254-8, 276, 292-3; acceptance of British title, 220; and conscription, 275-6; death of, 278; failure to emancipate Quebec education, 293; in Huntingdon, 216; neglect of farmers' concerns, 2245; loyal patriotism of, 179,187,209, 226,271-2;

371 Index Manitoba settlement of, 217; and Northwest autonomy bills, 241-2, 293; and prohibition referendum, 262; reneging on Liberal platform, 220, 223-5, 227~32, 242/ 292; Seller's opinion of, 87, 91,102, 208-9, 224> 279; withstanding clerical intimidation, 210-11, 2 93 Laval University, Quebec, 154, 175-6; Sellar's visit to, 88 Lavergne, Armand, 249, 252, 276; Sellar's opinion of, 272, 275 Leahy, Thomas J., 193 legislative union, 145; Sellar's preference for, 45, 56-7 Lemay, Henri, 250 Leo XIII, 219 Lepine, Ambroise, 82, 87 Lewis, Joshua S., 11; and plank road to Port Lewis, 24, 62 Liberal party, Canada, 74, 79, 92, 103, 150-1, 258, 275-6; convention platform, 209; retention of National Policy, 235; and Sellar's estrangement, 223, 225, 227-32; trade policy, 191-3 Liberal party, Quebec, 87, 103, 171, 218-19; reconstructed platform, 7982, 83, 95 Liberal-Conservative party, 14 Lighthall, George, 25 Lighthall, Henry, 25, 55 Lighthall, William Douw, 282 Ligue Nationaliste, 248 Lindsay, LieutenantGeneral James, 70 livestock, importation and breeding of, 39, 61, 134,

268; and Ayrshire and Holstein herds, 265; on French Canadian farms, 157; and draft horses, 39, 61, 265-6; and Ormstown Exhibition, 265-6 London Advertiser, 227 Longue Pointe, insane asylum at, 83, 90 Longueuil, and projected railway tunnel, 125, 127 Lovell, John, 8 Lower Canada, and deadlock with Upper Canada, 42-6 Loyal Orange Association. See Orangemen Loyal Reformers' League, 93-5; and Sellar's platform, 84-6 Lucas, Rev. David Vannorman, and Scott Act campaign, 140 Lunan, Arthur, 127, 271 McArdle, James, 124 MacArthur, Arthur, 71 McCarthy, D'Alton, 159, 177-8, 180, 208-9, 293~4 McCord, Judge John J., 284 McCormick, Dr Archibald, 266 McCormick, Duncan, 1923 Macdonald, Sir John A., M, 45, 56, 92, 99, 103, 112, 146, 173, 176, 192;

chiding Quebec Protestants, 178; death of, 207; and National Policy, 108-9; ar>d Kiel, 148-9; Sellar's recollections of, 207-8, 292; on tithes, 158-9 Macdonald College, Ste Anne de Bellevue, 237— 8, 240 Macdonald, Sir William Christopher, 237, 240

McDonell, Stuart, 63-4 McEachem, LieutenantColonel Archibald, 38, 124, 130; and Huntingdon Borderers, 69; and Ormstown Courier, 140, 173 McEachran, Dr Duncan McNab, 265; and Ormstown Exhibition, 265-6 Macfarlane, Daniel, 18, 25, 36/ 45, 53-4, 81, 114, H7 Macfarlane, Daniel Jr, 124 McFarlane, Peter, 132; and Huntingdon Dairymen's Association, 133 McGarth, Alexander, 39 McGee, Thomas D'Arcy, 44; Sellar's impression of, 58 McGill University, 46, 64, 80, 146, 238, 240, 286 McGregor, Fred W., 184 Mackenzie, Alexander, 100, 103, 134, 220; appeasement of clergy, 79, 92; Liberal government of, 74, 114; rejection of Oka petitions, 97 McKenzie, Roderick, 255 Mackenzie, William Lyon, 283 McKinnon, Captain Hugh, 100 Maclaren, John James, 80i, 83, 101, 114, 229; as advisor to Equal Rights Association, 181; as counsel for Oka Iroquois, 98; defense of Sellar in court, 116-18 Maclaren, William Scott, 94, 209, 226, 229-33 Maclean, Rev. J.B., and Sellar's funeral oration, 280-1 McLennan, John, 164 MacPherson, D.M., and Allengrove Combination, 133-4

372 Index 135, 139, 229; and Oka McPherson, Joseph Taycause, 91, 96-7, 99; warlor, 119, 185; abandonment of the Enterprise, time ardour of, 270, 275 196 Military Service Act (1917), and conscripMagog, town of, 287 tion, 275-8 Mallory, Caleb Alvord, and Patrons of Indusmilitia, 56, 226; disgrace try, 194 of, 99-100; and Fenian Malone, New York, raids, 51, 66-8; Prince Arthur honouring Fenian base at, 51, 66, 68-9 Huntingdon Borderers, 69-70; and rebellion of Manitoba schools dis1838, 11-12 pute, 209-10; Laurier's Milk Producers' Associasettlement of, 217-18; tion, 267 and Quebec minority Millar, James, 60 schools, 211-13 Milne, Thomas K., 73, 119 Mann, James, 50, 61 Ministerial Association of Marchand, Felix Gabriel, Montreal, 177, 212, 214 218, 232; abortive school Missisquoi County, 51, bill of, 219 212 Marshall, Charles, 119 Mitchell, A.E., 185, 227, Marson, W.S., 117 229 Martin, Dennis, 55 "mixed" marriages, ArchMasson, Louis Francois bishop Bruchesi's pastoRodrigue, 92, 103 ral against, 248-9; and Maxim, Hiram Stevens, 24 ne temere decree, 249, Mechanics' Bank, failure 251 of, no Moe, Mrs Aram, 163 Megantic County, 183 Mercantile Library Associ- Moir, Mary, 140, 262 Moir, Peter C, 135, 140 ation, Montreal, 46 Mercier, Honore, 156, 169, Molson's Bank, Montreal, 110 173-4, !85-8, 218, 243, Monet, Dominique, 226 289; and aspirations for Montreal, business oligarQuebec independence, chy of, 47, 109, 121,123, 148, 150-1, 179, 186-7, 136, 213; and 1878 dis189; denunciation of orders, 99-100; home Equal Rights "fanatics," market of, 265, 292; as 179; dispute with metropolis of Canada, Sellar's Equal Rights let14-15 ter, 181-3; an(i EnglishMontreal and Champlain speaking minority, 179, Junction Railway, 123, 183-4; and Jesuit Estates 135; construction of, Act, 174-5, T-77-fy 125-6, 129-30; opposimaligning Sellar, 171-2, tion to, 124-30; short182-3; "National Idea" comings of, 130-1 of, 187, 189; Sellar's estiMontreal and Province mation of, 145-6,150; Line Railway, 122, 124-5 statue to, 213 Methodist Church, 104; in Montreal Canada, 245 Montreal Cultivateur, 218 Huntingdon, 37, 117,

Montreal Echo and Protestant Episcopal Recorder, 18-20; and Thomas Sellar, 6; move from Toronto,8 Montreal Etendard, 157, 174, 186 Montreal Evening Post, 100 Montreal Gazette, 92, 113, 151, 177, 201, 212, 215, 233-4; on accommodation with French Canadians, 13-14; on Cameron, 172,183-5; on dairy factories, 132; on representation and democracy, 14-15, 39; on Ste Barbe, 162; on Scriver and unrestricted receiprocity, 192; on Sellar, 280, 284; Sellar's letter to Mercier, 178; support for Confederation, 47 Montreal Herald, 8, 47, 114, 120, 150-1, 157, 165, 224, 251-2; on Cameron, 172; on Gleaner, 2.2.0, 227-8 Montreal Literary Society, 46 Montreal Milkshippers' Association, 265, 267 Montreal Minerve, 113, 151, 185; predicts frenchification, 52 Montreal Nouveau Monde, 78 Montreal Ocean Steamship Line, 47 Montreal Patrie, 218, 220 Montreal Presse, 157, 236 Montreal Reform Association, 145, 150 Montreal Standard, 246, 280 Montreal Star, 112-14, !77/ 180, 182-3, l88/ 226 Montreal Union Catholique, 187 Montreal Witness, 26, 28, 43, 86, 94, 134, 151, 181,

373 Index 201; on Chauveau's education bill, 64; clerical banning of, 83, 89; on dairy-factory system, 132; on English exodus, 156, 240; preference for rep by pop, 15; on French Canadian birthrate, 156; opposition to Confederation, 46; on protectionism, 193; on rural schools crisis, 238—40; on Sellar, 280; on Tragedy of Quebec, 246 Moore, Dr J.C., 259 Morris, James, 259, 275-6 Mowat, Oliver, 145, 151 Muir, Archibald, 232, 259 Muir, Rev. James Barclay, 130 Murray, Norman, 181, 263; on smearing good men as fanatics, 293-4 Mutual Fire Insurance Company, 73, 232 nationalism, French Canadian, 11, 145-6, 169, 290; demagoguery of, 151; identification with creed of, 87, 146, 178-9, 295; and Mercier, 14851; and St Jean Baptiste Society, 146 Nationalists, Quebec, 258; and conscription, 276-7, 279 National Policy, no, 11215, 118, 121, 131-2, 134, 193, 221; and decline of agriculture, 191; and expansion of Valleyfield, 190; and the home market, 108, 265, 292; immediate local effects of 108-11; Laurier's adoption of, 220, 223, 225, 227-32, 254, 292; Sellar's views on, 107-9; and trade routes, 125

National Transcontinental Railway, 231 Ness, Robert, 184, 216, 250; and Clydesdale horses, 184, 265-6 Ness, Robert Robertson, and Ayrshire cattle, 265; and Ormstown Exhibition, 266 New Brunswick, 46, 52; Sellar's impressions of, 95-6 New England: French Canadian emigration to, 156, 287, 290; Sellar's sojourn in, 53-4; and vision of a greater Quebec, 186-7 newspapers, 76, 196-7, 200; declining moral tone of, 195; and mass circulation of dailies, 75, *95> 199> and problems of rural weeklies, 75-6, 195-200; revolution in printing technology of, 199; tasks in publication of, 8-9, 31-3 New Testament, revised translation of, 137-8 New York Times, 290-1 Niven, Rev. Hugh, 137 Norman, Rev. Isaac, wartime sermons of, 275 Northcliffe, Lord, of London Times, 253 North Georgetown, settlement, 39 Northwest, 52, 74, 152, 181, 223, 228, 240, 248; autonomy bills for, 2412, 247, 293; foreign settlement of, 111, 254; language issue in, 180, 208; and Riel rebellion, 148-50 Northwest rebellion, 14850, 152 O'Brien, Colonel William Edward, 177

Odelltown, battle of, 11, 59 Ogilvie, Alexander, 164 Oka conflict, 91-2, 96, 98; and Huntingdon's involvement, 97-9 Oliver, Andrew, 82-4, 867* 93-4 Oliver, Thomas, 209 Onasakenrat, Chief Joseph, 97-9 Onasakenrat, Louise, 97, 141—2 Ontario, 41, 61, 77, 248; and provincial rights, 145-6, 177 Ontario Press, 251, 282 Ontario schools dispute, 250, 275; and Lavergne, 272; and Regulation Seventeen, 253, 272; use of Tragedy of Quebec in, 248 Orangemen, 44, 71, 79, 156, 172, 211, 241, 230, 251-2, 279; failings of, 44, 81, 93-4, 99-101, 103-4, 218; and the Glorious Revolution, 71, 94; in Huntingdon, 12, 38, 59, 79, 172-3, 185, 252; and the Huntingdon Herald, 16; and Irish home rule, 176; and legal incorporation, 104; and mammoth Toronto celebration (1911), 2512; and Manitoba schools, 218; and Montreal disorders, 99-101; and presentation to Sellar, 82; and Riel, 1489; Sellar's denial of affiliation with, 155, 173; and Tragedy of Quebec, 251; Walsh's popularity with, 247 Orillia Packet, 263 Ormstown, village of, 12, 23, 62, 131, 164, 179, 222, 277; and Ormstown

374

Index

Exhibition, 265-6; railway agitation in, 122, 126, 129-30; WCTU campaign in, 262; "win-fhewar" convention in, 275 Ormstown Bulletin, 197-9, 230 Ormstown Courier, 115, 128, 137, 140; on Cameron, 172; discontinuance of, 174, 184; on Riel, 149, 151 Ormstown Exhibition, 39, 265-6 Ormstown New Dominion, 75, 80, 87, 89, 137, 141; discontinuance of, 128; promotes Champlain Junction Railway, 124-8; support for National Policy, 108, 111-12 Ormstown Record, 184, 193, 195; discontinuance of, 196 Ottawa, Sellar's impressions of, 105 Ottawa Free Press, 227 Ouimet, Gedeon, 81, 83 Outarde River, 269 Oxenden, Bishop Ashton, 104 Pacaud, Ernest, 218 Paige, B.P., 40-1 Papineau, Louis Joseph, 11, 150, 169 Parent, Simon Napoleon, 232 parish system, Roman Catholic: alleged effect on Protestant townships of, 78-9, 85, 1535, 159, 186, 212-13; and fief versus nonfief soil, 154—5, 160, 2^4' legal basis of, 154-5, 2&4~5 Parkman, Francis, 167 Parmelee, George William, 239 Parti National, 172, 180, 186; clerical support for,

174; collapse of, 188; emergence of, 150-1, 157 Patrons of Industry, 193-4 Penny, Edward Goff, 46 Perron, Damase, 160-2 Peterborough Farm and Dairy, 265 Philps, Andrew, 216, 259, 262, 271, 276; and farm auctions, 268; and Huntingdon Dairymen's Exchange, 265 Pionnier de Sherbrooke, 162 Pius IX, 77, 92, 102 Pius X, 248-9 plank road, 12, 121, 130, 206; renovations of, 62, 113, 135 Plante, Moise, 188 Plessis, Bishop Joseph Octave, 154 ploughing matches, 39, 137 Poisson, J.-A., 186 Pontiac County, 212, 237 Portland and Ogdensburg Railway, 122 Port Lewis, village of, 12, 62, 162, 220, 236; and Joshua Lewis, 24 Powerscourt, village of, 262 Presbyterian Church, 104; and French evangelization, 101—2, 154; union of, 87, 206 Prince Arthur, in Huntingdon, 69-70; and Prince Arthur Park, 276 Progres de Valleyfield, 116, 149, 173; on Gleaner and Star, 180; prediction of frenchification of Huntingdon, 180-1; on Sellar, 180, 226, 236, 280; Sellar's opinion of, 213, 230 Protestant Committee of the Council of Public Instruction, 229, 237-40;

and Jesuit Estates Act, 175, 178, 180; and Rexford's influence, 216; Sellar's calls for reform of, 216-17, 239 Protestant Defence Alliance, 91, 93, 97 Protestantism, 71, 94; Sellar's conception of, 96, 103 Protestant Protective Association, 214 "providential mission," doctrine of, 151, 186, 250 public improvements, 12, 136; electricity, 261-2; mail, 58, 62; telephone, 136, 261; water and sewage, 261 Quebec, province of, 56, 132-3- 139, 146, 125277; autonomy of, 145, 148, 152; colonization in, 85-6, 89; conscription crisis in, 272-3, 275-8; and ecclesiastical corporations, 79, 83; and Manitoba schools question, 210-11, 21718; and Riel, 148, 150-1; ultramontanism in, 77, 248-9 Quebec Act (1774), 181; and fief and nonfief soil, 154-5, 1^0; misquoted by Mercier, 182; Sellar's interpretation of, 284 Quebec Action sociale catholique, 248, 255 Quebec CanadaJranfais, 186 Quebec Canadien, 184 Quebec City, 10; Sellar's impressions of, 88-9 Quebec Equal Rights Association, 179, 181, 188, 298 Quebec Frontier Railway Company, 122

375

Index

Quebec Morning Chronicle, 47 Quebec resolutions (1864), 44-6, 52; Huntingdon meetings on, 45 Quebec Revue Canadienne, 250 Quebec Soleil, 218 Quebec Verite, 186 Queen versus Sellar, 116 Queen Victoria, Diamond Jubilee, 220 Ramsay, Thomas Kennedy, 17 Rebellion Losses Bill (1849), 13 rebellions of 1837-8, 70, 130, 154, 165, 169; and Huntingdon, 11; Sellar's interpretation of, 170, 283 reciprocity of trade: Canada's rejection of, 255-8; repeal of Reciprocity Treaty, 50-1, 61, 74, 107 Redmond, Edward, 253 Redpath sugar refinery, Montreal, 109-11 Reform movement and party, 79, 81 Regulation Seventeen. See Ontario Schools dispute Renaud, Louis, 17, 26, 56 Rennie, W.B., 261 Repatriation Act (1875), 85 representation by population, 17-18, 21, 44-5, 49, 57, 274, 292; and Gleaner, 28, 42, 46, 79; Somerville votes for, 12, 15 Rexford, Rev. Elson Irving, 216, 239 Rhodes, Cecil, 225 Rhodes, LieutenantColonel William B., 183 Richardson, Robert Lome, 230 Richmond County, 237, 239

Richmond Guardian, 176, 237; defense of Sellar, 230, 246 Riel, Louis, 82, 148-51, 156, 169, 183, 209, 294 roads, 41, 121-2, 184, 232, 258; and automobiles, 260-1; first macadamizing of, 136; and Gouin's "good roads" policy, 259 Robb, James Alexander, 247-8, 255, 257-8; opposition to rural recruitment and conscription, 270-1, 275-7; on Sellar, 233 Robertson, Joseph Gibb, 176 Robertson, William, 80 Robidoux, Georges, 277 Robidoux, Joseph Emery, 146, 180, 174, 184-5, 188, 218-19 Rockburn, village of, 82, 84, 114, 229, 259, 269 Roman Catholic Church, 71, 86, 89, 98, 152, 182; and allegations of farm financing, 153, 283, 2889; alleged treaty rights of, 101; as custodian of French Canadian nationality, 90, 147, 151; Index of, 218; Laurier's conciliation of, 293; reactionary leadership of, 248; and visible efforts of clergy, 86, 286, 291 Rose, Sir John, 184, 58-63; Sellar's opinion of, 56-8 Rouge party, 46, 81, 293; clerical suppression of, 78-9 Rowe, Amos, 16-17, 4$ Rowe, Ransome, 21, 119; alcoholism of, 16-17, 2^/ 49, 140; and Athelstan Sun, 140; death of, 140; and feud with Sellar,

28-9, 31, 48-50, 73, 1412; and Huntingdon Journal, 16 Ruddick, Joseph Archibald, 133, 268 Rutman, Charles, 71 Saguenay River, Sellar's impressions of, 88 St Andrew's Church, Huntingdon, 37, 80, 130, 206, 232; and Sellar's funeral, 280 St Anicet, parish, 55, 63, 81-2, 87, 93, 113, 185, 207, 239, 248; burning of Macdonald in effigy, 173; detachment from Godmanchester, 10,160; loss of Ste Barbe case, 161-2 St Antoine Abbe, village of, 237 St Clement, parish of, 148 Ste Agnes de Dundee, ecclesiastical parish, 160 Ste Barbe, village and parish of, 172-3, 184-5, 207; origins of, 159; and Ste Barbe dispute, 1602, 170 Ste Blaise case, 213, 217, 285 Ste Martine, village and parish of, 11, 22, 58, 126, 146, 148 Ste Philomene, village of, 22, 111, 266 Ste Scholastique, village of, 98 St Hyacinthe County, 145, 284 St Isidore, village, 123-4, 126, 129-30 St Jean Baptiste Society, 146-7, 150, 187 St Jean Chrysostome, parish, 36, 43, 62, 75, 148, 217, 237, 277 St John Globe, 245 St John Telegraph, 227 St Johns, town of, 91, 123

376

Index

St John's Church, Huntingdon, 37, 65,104, 138 St Johns News, 113, 162, 196 St Joseph de Huntingdon, ecclesiastical parish, 78, 87, 90, 185 St Joseph's Church, Huntingdon, 38 St Lawrence River, 4, 12, 24, 62, 137, 269; canal system of, 15, 220; commercial empire of, 47; French settlement along, 10 St Louis de Gonzague, parish and village of, 101, 149, 236 St Malachie d'Ormstown, parish of, 76, 111, 173, 185, 197, 224, 277; fertility of, 23; and railway agitation, 124-5, I27 St Pierre, Judge Henri Cesaire Berryer, 247 St Pierre, Telesphore, 2456 St Remi, village of, 125 St Stanislas de Kostka, village of, 159 St Sulpice, Seminary of, 91,96-7 St Timothe, village of, 102 St Urbain, parish of, 148 Salaberry, Colonel, 23, 163 Salvation Army, 138 Sanders, Thomas, 79-80 Sangster, James, 137 Sangster, Neil, and Hoistein cattle, 265-6 Santoire, Rev. Father Camille, 185 Saunders, William, 172, 185, 192 Sbaretti incident, 241, 293 Scott, Thomas, 83 Scriver, Captain John K, 227 Scriver, John, 11, 59 Scriver, Julius, 59, 74—5, 109, 111, 122, 135, 151,

177, 194, 208-9, 219; election campaigns of, 59, 63, 112-14, 173, 1923, 215-16; retirement of, 228; Sellar's appreciation of, 193, 228-9 Second Presbyterian Church, Huntingdon, 37, 101, 143, 206 Seigniory of Beauharnois, 163; liquidation of, 39, 62 Seigniory of Chateauguay, 165 Seigniory of Two Mountains, 96 Sellar, Adam Lind (son), 144, 203, 207, 273, 278, 280, 282 Sellar, Alexander (father), 3, 4; death and burial of, 7 Sellar, Charles (brother), 4, 8, 20, 34, 53-4, 65; death of, 201 Sellar, Charlotte (sister), 4, 65, 201 Sellar, Elsie Margaret (daughter), 201, 207 Sellar, Elspet (sister), 4, 35, 48, 54, 64-5; death of, 201 Sellar family, emigration from Scotland, 3-5 Sellar, Gordon (son), 264; birth and death of, 2013 Sellar, Isabella (mother), 4, 35, 48, 54; death of, 645 Sellar, Isabella (sister), 4, 6 Sellar, Leslie Watson (son), 144, 202, 206-7, 252-3, 257-8, 279-80; enlistment of, 273-4; and Tragedy of Quebec, 243, 264, 282 Sellar, Mary (wife), 142-4, 200, 202-4, 25i~2/ 279/ 281; marriage, 142-3, 168; support for Sellar,

144, 169, 204, 250; and temperance work, 1434, 262-3; voting in federal election, 276; on Watson's enlistment, 271 Sellar, Robert, 35-41, 71—2, 81-2, 141, 201-2, 204-6, 254, 280-90; anticlerical liberalism, 42-3, 77-9, 85, 281; alleged bigotry, 86, 103-4, J-71/ 182-3, 213- 245, 251, 293-5; apprenticeship and early employment, 6, 79; birth and early life, 4; break with Anglican Church, 104-5; children, 144, 201-4, 206-7; clerical bans against, 89, 252; marriage, 141-3; death and funeral, 27981; economic philosophy, 107-8; emigration to Canada, 4-5; evangelical protestantism of, 37, 104-5, X38; family life, 203-4; fictional writing, 8, 27, 167-8, 200-1, 263-4; frustration and bitterness, 30i> 34/ 53/ 72-3- 75- 2745, 281-2; historical recognition of, 283-4, 2879; and History and Gleaner Tales, 162-70, 201; historical writing, 162-3, 1^5~7' 17°' 263; legal prosecution of, 556, 60-1, 114-18; leisure reading and writing, 8, 27, 65, 82, 94, 166-7, 200, 279; nativism of, 254-5, 294; personal idiosyncrasies, 205; physical and emotional condition, 30, 48, 54, 75, 105, 120, 166-7, 2O4' 279; speeches, 93-4, ill, 139-40, 176-7, 217, 226, 230, 233, 249, 251-2,

377 Index Somerville, Andrew, 17, 256-7, 259, 279; substi23, 26, 49, 75, 122, 127, tute preaching, 205-6; and Tragedy of Quebec, 135, 210-11; bankruptcy and prosecution 242-53, 272; travels, 53of, 190-1 4, 88-9, 95-6, 252; workSomerville, Henry Drumday routine, 204-5 Sellar, Robert Watson mond, 120, 172; aban(son), 201, 252—3, 264, donment of the 271, 279; military serAdvocate, 174 vice, 271, 277; reminisSomerville, John, 39 cences, 202-7, 247, 256 Somerville, Robert Brown, 15-18, 21, 26, 28, 30-1, Sellar, Thomas, 5—7, 16, 20, 35, 42-3, 45-6, 54, 34, 49, 54, 165; and "British party," 11-12; 60; and Canadian Press and Confederation, 45Association, 6; corre8; and rep by pop, 12spondence, 18-21, 25-6, 13, 15; withdrawal and 29-30; and Echo, 6, 8; and Gleaner, 20-2, 25-6, departure of, 57 Sons of Temperance, 139 28, 60; and Globe, 4, 6 South African War, 225-7, Senecal, Louis Adelard, 127 248 South Shore Railway and Shanks, Daniel, 83,119, 137,174,216; formation Tunnel Company, 125-6 of the home guard, 66, 69 Spedon, Andrew LearShaw, Rev. Dr William mont, 36, 125, 130; Isaac, 238 burning in effigy, 126, Shefford County, 92 128; founding the New Dominion, 75; moving to Sheppard, George, 9 Sherbrooke County, 113, Bermuda, 128 176, 212 sports, 137; and Fertile Sherbrooke Gazette, 15, 46, Creek Curling Club, 137 162, 176 Sproule, Dr Thomas Simpson, 241 Sherbrooke[?] Progres de I'Est, 162 Stanstead County, 181, 237 Shirriff, Dr Francis Starnes, Henry, 56 Walker, 129-30 Starr, Brigadier-General Siegfried, Andre, 291 Michael, 66 Sifton, Clifford, 241 Steele, James, 130 "silent revolution" in Stephen, William K: and Quebec, 216-17; stifling Ayrshire cattle, 265; and of, 219, 242, 293 Consolidated Milk Company, 267; and Simpson, Louis, 234-5 Smith, Edgar R., 196 Montreal Milkshippers' Smith, Goldwin, 224, 230, Association, 265 264; and commercial Stephens, George Washunion, 191 ington, 181, 188, 192, Smith, Norman, 193 194, 208, 218, 232 Smith, William Loe, 257 Stockwell, village of, 269 Society of Jesus, 174-5, 248; and Jesuit Estates Tache, Archbishop AlexAct, 175-8 andre Antonin, 209-10

Taillon, Sir Louis Olivier, 176, 213, 184 Tardivel, Jules Paul, 186, 290; ultramontane separatism of, 248 Tarte, Joseph Israel, 216, 229; Sellar's opinion of, 220 Taschereau, Bishop Elzear Alexandra, 103 Tasse, Joseph, 185, 192 teafield, 62, 113; settlement of, 159 temperance movement, 37-9, 80, 114, 262-3; in Huntingdon, 139-41 Thibault, Charles, 187 Third, Alexander, 113, 119 tithes. See ecclesiastical tithes Tomson, John H., 199; and Ormstown Bulletin, 197 Toronto: emigration to, 4, 6; Sellar's impressions of, 6-7, 251 Toronto Daily Mail. See Toronto Mail Toronto Empire, 192 Toronto Evangelical Churchman, 176 Toronto Evening Telegraph, 245, 249 Toronto Globe, 20, 26, 43, 92, 120, 165, 177, 218, 220, 224, 236, 287-9; and George Brown, 4, 6, 9-10; on Northwest rebellion, 150-1; and rep by pop, 12, 14-16; Sellar's employment at, 6-9, 18; Sellar's estimation of, 9, 155; and Thomas Sellar, 4, 6; tithes debate with Gleaner, 151-5; on Tragedy of Quebec, 245, 272 Toronto Mail, 154, 158, 168, 171, 178-9, 181, 214, 289, 291; and Sellar's Quebec letters, 156-8, 173

378 Index Toronto Mail and Empire, 226-7, 245, 272 Toronto News, 227, 242, 245; Sellar's letter to, 238 Toronto Old Countryman, 16 Toronto Sentinel, 218, 242, 245, 249; on Sellar, 280 Toronto Sun, 224, 230, 255, 257 Toronto Week, 182 Tragedy of Quebec, 244-5, 2 8 4 -9, 251, 249-54, 272, 280, 294; impact in Ontario, 247-8, 251, 253, 272; press reviews, 243, 245-6, 249-51, 272-3; sale of, 245-7, 251, 272> 282; writing and printing of, 242-3 Trout River, village of, 29, 127, 219, 265; Fenian raid, 66 True Witness and Catholic Chronicle, 42, 46, 100, 113, 219 Trudel, Senator Francois Xavier, 174, 183 Truro Condensed Milk Company, Huntingdon, 265, 267-8 Tupper, Sir Charles, 210 Tupper, Sir Charles Hibbert, 192 Tye, George, 6 ultramontanism, 77-80, 171, 219; and civil authority, 43; and French Canadian

nationalism, 146; resurgence of, 2id, 248-50 Ulster Unionist Defence Council, 254 United States, 121, 136, 145, 193, 199-200, 214, 266; and annexationism, 13, 58, 112, 191; French Canadian emigration to, 287, 290; Sellar's interest in, 53; trade relations with, 50, 74, 108-10, 117, 191, 255, 258, 268 unrestricted reciprocity, 191-3, 208. See also commercial union Upper Canada, 9, 52; and rep by pop, 42, 46, 49 Valleyfield, town of, 25,62, no, 115,122-3,131, 206, 278; industrialization of, 109, 190, 234, 287; superior court of, 263 Vanderbilt, William Henry, 122-6 Verner, Charles Th£ophile: and Progres de Valleyfield, 180 Victoria Bridge, Montreal, 123-5, 129 Walker, William Hiram, 209, 232-4, 259-60 Walker, Rev. William Montgomery, 232 Walsh, Dr Robert Nelson, 229, 231, 240-2, 247-8, 257-8

Walton, J.S., 46 Waterloo Advertiser, 230 Wathen, Philip, 138-9 Watson, Mary. See Sellar, Mary Watson, Rev. James, 51, 116, 143; death of, 201, 205 Weir, William Alexander, 239 White, Richard, 117 White, Thomas, 92, 191 White, William John, 21517 Whitney, Sir James, 250, 272 Whyte, Francis, 119 Wiggins, Henry, 226 Willison, Sir John, 287, 293 Wilson, David, 277-8 Winnipeg Grain Growers' Guide, 255 Winnipeg Tribune, 230, 257 Women's Christian Temperance Union, 139, 143-4, 262-3 Woods, Rev. Father Felix, 89 World War I, 270-3, 286; Sellar's abhorrence of, 268-9; ar>d failure of conscription, 275-8; and wartime election, 275-6 Wright, James, 163 Youmans, Letitia, 139 Younie, John, 164, 224 Zouaves, 78