The Other Quebec: Microhistorical Essays on Nineteenth-Century Religion and Society 9781442627864

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THE OTHER QUEBEC: MICROHISTORICAL ESSAYS ON NINETEENTH-CENTURY RELIGION AND SOCIETY

The Eastern Townships region of southwestern Quebec is an area of unique culture and history. Surrounded by a French-speaking majority, yet predominantly settled by American and then British immigrants, the area has historically been distinguished by its Anglo-Protestant character. In The Other Quebec, J.I. Little – one of the foremost scholars on the Eastern Townships and on rural society in Canada – assembles seven of his essays and one by Marguerite Van Die on this unique region into one volume. The collection examines the role and influence of religion in the Eastern Townships. Little uses a microhistorical method, focusing on individuals who left behind informative and revealing diaries or personal letters, including those of a religious ecstatic, an Anglican clergyman, a genteel Englishwoman, and an entrepreneur. Through intimate glimpses into the lives of ordinary people, The Other Quebec explores some of the complex ways in which religious institutions and beliefs affected the rural societies where the majority of Canadians still lived in the nineteenth century. Little provides an intimate look at both a time and a place of singular importance and unique character in Canadian history. j.i. little is a professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University.

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J.I. Little

The Other Quebec Microhistorical Essays on Nineteenth-Century Religion and Society

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2006 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN-13 978-0-8020-9100-0 (cloth) ISBN-10 0-8020-9100-8 (cloth) ISBN-13 978-0-8020-9397-4 (paper) ISBN-10 0-8020-9397-3 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Little, J. I. (John Irvine), 1947– The other Quebec : microhistorical essays on nineteenth-century religion and society / J.I. Little. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-9100-0 (bound) ISBN-10: 0-8020-9100-8 (bound) ISBN-13: 978-0-8020-9397-4 (pbk.) ISBN-10: 0-8020-9397-3 (pbk.) 1. Eastern Townships (Québec) – Religion – 19th century. 2. Eastern Townships (Québec) – Social life and customs – 19th century. 3. Eastern Townships (Québec) – Religious life and customs. 4. Eastern Townships (Québec) – History. I. Title. HN110.Q8L57 2006

971.4 6

C2005-907523-6

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

In memory of Bruce

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Contents

Maps and Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction

3

RELIGION, FAMILY, AND GENDER 1 The Mental World of Ralph Merry, Tinware Peddler and Religious Ecstatic, 1798–1863 17 2 The Fireside Kingdom: A Mid-Nineteenth-Century Anglican Perspective on Marriage and Parenthood 45 3 Gender and Gentility: Lucy Peel’s Journal, 1833–6

69

4 A ‘Christian Businessman’: The Convergence of Precept and Practice in Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Gender Construction 94 RELIGION, SOCIAL REFORM, AND COMMUNITY 5 ‘A Moral Engine of Such Incalculable Power’: The Temperance Movement in the Eastern Townships, 1830–52 129 6 ‘Labouring in a Great Cause’: Marcus Child as Pioneer Schools Inspector, 1852–9 161 7 Railways, Revivals, and Rowdyism: The Beebe Adventist Camp Meeting, 1875–1900 197

viii Contents

8 A Crime ‘Shrouded in Mystery’: State, Church, and Community in the Kinnear’s Mills Post-Office Case, 1899–1905 222 Afterword 263

Credits 267 Index

269

Maps and Illustrations

Maps I.1 The Eastern Townships of Lower Canada, 1862 6.1 Marcus Child’s inspection district 167

4

Illustrations 7.1 The Beebe Plain Advent campgrounds, 1881 201 7.2 Cottage on Christian Adventist Camp Meeting Grounds, Beebe, Quebec, 2002 203 7.3 Christian Adventist camp meeting, Beebe, Quebec, n.d. 204 8.1 The Kinnear home, built c. 1840 227 8.2 James and Harriet Kinnear and their children in 1868 228 8.3 Mary and Alexander Kinnear 252

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Acknowledgments

I wish to thank once again the readers and research assistants who were acknowledged when the following essays (slightly revised in this collection) where originally published, as well the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding the research. The two readers selected by the Press for this publication contributed important additional insights, and my exchange with Ruth Sandwell and Brian Young helped clarify the thoughts expressed in the Introduction. The careful scrutiny, as well as generous encouragement, of all these people did much to improve what the readers will find between these covers. I would also like to thank Marguerite Van Die for kindly agreeing to contribute the essay that completes this collection, and Len Husband of University of Toronto Press for encouraging me to put it together. I am also grateful to Frances Mundy and Ken Lewis for their expert editorial assistance, to the editors of the journals and presses who gave permission for republication, and to the Publications Committee of Simon Fraser University as well as the Eastern Townships Research Centre for subsidizing the production of this volume. Finally, as always, the deepest thanks to Andrea for helping me to keep it all in perspective.

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THE OTHER QUEBEC: MICROHISTORICAL ESSAYS ON NINETEENTH-CENTURY RELIGION AND SOCIETY

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Introduction

Il n’y a que des histoires; des théories sont des histoires endimanchés. – Maurice Bellet

The longstanding ‘two solitudes’ model of Quebec society ascribed religious and community-centred values to the French-speaking majority and secular individualist ones to the English-speaking minority. The assumption that the social values of French Quebec were essentially traditionalist and anti-materialist in character, at least prior to the Second World War, has been vigorously challenged by the generation of historians that was trained during the Quiet Revolution era when the state focused on developing a French-speaking managerial and entrepreneurial class.1 The reverse stereotype of a capitalist, market-oriented Anglo-Protestant ‘mentalité’ has been more persistent, if only because rural and small-town English-speaking Quebeckers have received relatively little attention in historical studies.2 While historians now shun obviously teleological frameworks, history still tends to be written from the perspective of the present, and there is no longer a sizeable number of Anglo-Quebeckers outside Montreal to take an interest in their people’s past.3 But that past is an intrinsic part of the history of Quebec as well as Canada, and it should not be ignored simply because it fails to conform to a master narrative. The essays in this volume are the result of relatively recent research into a variety of documentary collections pertaining to the region known as the Eastern Townships, a large part of southern Quebec encircled by the American border and the former seigneuries of the St Lawrence, Chaudière, and Richelieu-Yamaska Valleys. First opened to settlement

4 The Other Quebec

Map I.1 The Eastern Townships of Lower Canada, 1862.

Introduction

5

in 1792, this hilly and picturesque region immediately attracted New Englanders in search of inexpensive land and relief from taxation. After the Napoleonic Wars had ended, the Yankees were followed by British settlers looking for a new life in North America. Finally, beginning in the late 1830s, French-speaking colonists began to move into the peripheral townships from the neighbouring seigneuries. From one-third of the total population of 92,000 in 1852, the French Canadians had reached nearly three-quarters of the region’s 245,000 inhabitants by 1901, when they dominated all but two of the thirteen counties.4 The English-speaking population was still confined largely to the rural and village communities close to the American border, while French Canadians were taking the factory jobs in the region’s developing industrial centres. The demographic stability of the English-speaking communities is reflected in the rather static membership numbers of the various Protestant churches. At mid-century the Church of England was the largest Protestant denomination in the region, at 29 per cent, reflecting the success of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel’s aggressive missionary strategy of building churches and financing clergy from British funds.5 The Anglicans were followed closely by various branches of Methodists, at 26 per cent, with most of the clergy again being provided by a London-based missionary society.6 The third largely British denomination, the Presbyterians, were a distant third at 10 per cent. The Congregationalists, who had once dominated New England, were only 6 per cent; the Universalists were also 6 per cent; the Baptists were 5 per cent; and the newly founded Second Adventists were 3 per cent.7 While the latter three denominations had made a major impact on neighbouring Vermont, which was known for its radical sectarianism, the religious identity of the more northerly extension of the New England settlement frontier had been transformed into a relatively conformist and orthodox one, no doubt helping to explain why its political culture was also becoming more conservative.8 This trend continued during the following half century, for in 1901 the Anglican proportion of the region’s non-Catholic population had increased to 40 per cent, which was double the Anglican ratio in Protestant Ontario. The Methodist proportion of Protestants in the Eastern Townships remained roughly the same at 30 per cent, compared to 37 per cent in Ontario; and the Presbyterians grew somewhat to 13 per cent, approximately half their ratio in Ontario. In short, the religious culture of the Eastern Townships was less Scots and more English than

6

The Other Quebec

that of Ontario, but the American religious influence was equally marginal in both regions. The story of how the international boundary came to mark a distinctive religious culture on the northern periphery of New England settlement known as the Eastern Townships has recently been told in Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity; the following essays shift the focus from the competition for souls to the role that religion played outside the churches. Only by understanding that role can we begin to understand why religion was so important to shaping political ideology, social values, and cultural identities. Because most of the people examined here were born in New England or Great Britain, and because they did not cut off ties with the outside world after they had arrived, their stories resonate far beyond the borders of this particular region. Furthermore, the fact that they happened to constitute a minority within the province they inhabited, and that they were never much more than 60,000 in number during the nineteenth century, does not negate the value of their written records for historians examining life in pre-industrial and early industrial North America, Canada, and Quebec. The picture presented in this volume is somewhat fragmentary, not only because it consists of distinct studies, but because they were not originally conceived as part of a single larger project. All but one have been previously published, but they do share a roughly common methodological approach as well as theme. The method is generally microhistorical in nature, with the focus being on individuals who left behind informative and revealing diaries or personal letters, or on specific institutions and events. This emphasis on the particular is distinct from much historical writing in Quebec which, since the 1960s, has followed the Annales focus on ‘structures’ and ‘conjonctures,’ even when focusing on relatively small geographical spaces such as seigneuries or the ‘regions’ that began to be defined by the provincial government in the 1960s.9 Such an approach is well suited for the study of a French Catholic people whose seigneurs, notaries, and priests produced a wealth of routinely generated documents, but not to an Anglo-Protestant society which operated largely beyond the control of church and state prior to the 1840s.10 Furthermore, microhistory – which originated in Italy during the 1970s11 – seems a particularly appropriate methodology for the study of a universally literate society which has now uprooted itself, leaving a fragmentary but often deeply personal archival record of its past existence. Although the ‘Annalistes’ spurned what they labelled as ‘histoire

Introduction

7

évenementielle,’ private records provide a more intimate perspective on everyday life than do the graphs and tables that measure long-term trends in fecundity, and so on. As Jacques Revel points out, the focus on regularities over accident, on the repetitive over incidents, as well as on the ‘longue durée,’ creates a sense of stability over change. Perhaps historians in Quebec were seeking this sense of stability during the turbulent Quiet Revolution era, if only to bolster confidence in the independence project, but the Annales approach began to be challenged in late 1960s France largely because of this conservative bias.12 Microhistory was ideally suited to the new era in Europe because, as Revel notes, it conceives of the social not as an object imbued with certain properties but as an assembly of interrelationships in constant movement within configurations that are in constant adaptation.13 While microhistory may be popularly seen as eschewing ‘large historical vistas and insights in favour of local detection and analysis,’14 it is far from being a retreat to anecdotal or antiquarian history, for it is very much concerned about larger historical questions and societies. As Giovanni Levi explains, the mistaken assumption has been ‘that local communities can be properly studied [only] as objects of small-scale systems.’ Larger scales are ‘considered necessary to reveal connections between communities within a region, between regions within a country and so on.’ But the fact is that ‘only a paradoxical and significant distortion of perspective would suggest that the commercial life of one village is of no interest beyond its meaning on a local scale.’ In short, scale does not have its own independent existence, as the critics of microhistory generally assume. Levi illustrates further by declaring that ‘even the apparently minutest action of, say, somebody going to buy a loaf of bread, actually encompasses the far wider system of the whole world’s grain markets.’15 Richard White phrases it slightly differently by stating that ‘it is impossible to look at one scale without encountering others.’16 It follows, then, that microhistory is not simply a matter of approaching the local as a case study, or what Levi describes as ‘the selection of a specific point of real life from which to exemplify general concepts.’ Rather, it rejects ‘an over-simple functionalism’ (or what Michael Gardiner describes as the ‘system perspective’) by emphasizing ‘the role of social contradictions in generating social change.’17 The result is that some critics of microhistory associate it with what they see, in Ruth Sandwell’s words, as ‘the fatal weaknesses of post-modern historical analysis: the creation of endless contradiction rather than unanimity,

8

The Other Quebec

passivity rather than agency, individuality rather than community, fragmentation rather than coherence, and plurality rather than uniformity, all of which culminate in chaos and irrelevance in lieu of a comprehensible view of the past.’18 Such a criticism is ironic, given that the primary aim of microhistorians, according to Levi, has been to ‘refute relativism, irrationalism and the reduction of the historian’s work to a purely rhetorical activity which interprets texts and not the events themselves.’19 Microhistorical analysis, in short, ‘is the starting point for a broader move towards generalization.’20 The essays in this collection focus the lens of historical investigation as intensely as the documentary sources allow in an attempt to understand people as distinctive and often perplexing human beings rather than simply as actors in a historical script whose main theme is either class, gender, family, community, or social reform, but that does not mean that they fail to shed light on all these concepts. Like detectives, historians should be as open-minded as possible when investigating documentary sources so as not to overlook what could be important evidence, but the final story must be set within a broader context if it is to make a meaningful contribution to our understanding of the past. If theories are simply stories dressed up in their Sunday best, as the opening quote claims, stories still require contextualization in order to have social meaning. Stated another way, social scientists may look to history in order to test or apply their theories, but historians should look to theory in order to deepen our understanding of the past. Despite the emphasis on the particular in these essays, a common thematic thread does run through them – namely, the role of religion, in general, and various forms of Protestantism, in particular, within a developing nineteenth-century society that was situated at the juncture of American, British, and French-Canadian settlement and influence. Because of the language and religious barriers, the French-Canadian impact on the English-speaking Protestant population was rather minimal, aside from fostering a defensive mentality. Given that my approach to selecting research topics has been somewhat haphazard, often guided by the serendipitous discovery of interesting personal or family documents, the fact that any common theme emerges from these essays genuinely reflects the importance of religion in people’s daily lives during the nineteenth century. Marguerite Van Die’s innovative essay on Charles Colby is included with her kind permission because it nicely fits this collection’s general theme and method, and it adds a subtheme – commercial life – that I have not examined.

Introduction

9

In the first section – which focuses on religion, family, and gender – the reader will meet a tinware peddler who was a religious ecstatic, followed by a socially involved though intensely private Anglican clergyman, then a genteel young Englishwoman in the role of frontier settler, and, finally, an investor and politician who relied on religion and family to sustain him through his many economic reversals. The second section – whose main themes are religion, social reform, and community – includes essays on the early temperance and school reform movements, as well as on the role of religion in rural communities in the later nineteenth century. The general focus, then, is not on the churches as institutions; nor is religion the central theme in every essay, but it does emerge as a crucial factor in family formation, class and gender identity, economic behaviour, social reform, community cohesion, and quotidian life in general. Despite the fact that religion was an intrinsic component of most people’s identities and world views in the nineteenth century and beyond, and even though religious attitudes are arguably what most distinguishes Canadians from Americans culturally, English Canada’s historians have been slow to show an interest in the subject. One looks in vain, for example, for a single essay on religion and society in several of the weighty anthologies available for first-year students in preConfederation history.21 Fortunately, important new studies on the topic are finally beginning to appear, and the focus is no longer quite so predominantly on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.22 These studies do more than help to clarify our vision of the past; they challenge that vision in certain fundamental respects, revealing a much more complicated society than the one depicted through the teleological lenses of social control, separate spheres, and modernization theories. In Levi’s words, microhistory recognizes humanity’s ‘relative freedom beyond, though not outside, the constraints of prescriptive and oppressive normative systems.’23 As for the essays in this collection, they demonstrate the varieties of religious experience – male and female; plebian, petit bourgeois, and genteel; personal and social; radical and conservative – for people of American, English, and Scottish origin living in the pre-industrial and early industrial eras. But the focus will be less on religious ideas and practices than on religion as a social force, one that sometimes reinforced and sometimes conflicted with the developing capitalist ethos of the nineteenth century. In contrast to much historical writing on Quebec in recent decades, these essays are not concerned with presenting the

10 The Other Quebec

province as a ‘normal’ society, or an abnormal one for that matter. Rather, they introduce a new perspective by lifting a corner of the veil that has covered the past of ‘another Quebec’ – that is, a population that was neither urban, French-speaking, nor Catholic (there are, of course, other ‘other Quebecs,’ such as the largely Native-inhabited North). In the final analysis, however, even though the focus of this volume is on a specific people who lived in a specific geographical region, the primary aim is not simply to tell the history of that region, but to shed light on the historical role played by religion (among other institutions and forces) in English-Canadian society as a whole. To paraphrase a wellknown comment by Clifford Geertz, these essays are set in the Eastern Townships, but they are not exclusively about the Eastern Townships.24

Notes 1 See, for example, Paul-André Linteau, René Durocher, and Jean-Claude Robert, Quebec: A History, 1867–1929, translated by Robert Chodos (Toronto: James Lorimer and Co., 1983). Rudin argues that what he calls the revisionist paradigm has gone too far in this direction. See Ronald Rudin, Making History in Twentieth-Century Quebec (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), chapter 5. 2 For one study that does challenge this stereotype, see Louis Roy and Michel Verdon, ‘East-Farnham’s Agriculture in 1871: Ethnicity, Circumstances, and Economic Rationale in Quebec’s Eastern Townships,’ Canadian Historical Review 84 (2003): 355–93. 3 The two volumes sponsored by the Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture – now known as the Institut national de la recherche scientifique, centre Culture et Société (INRS – Culture et Société) – that cover the Eastern Townships necessarily pay considerable attention to the Englishspeaking population, but the approach is largely institutional and quantitative, with considerable emphasis placed on regional economic development. See Jean-Pierre Kesteman, Peter Southam, and Diane SaintPierre, Histoire des Cantons de l’Est (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1998); and Mario Gendron, Histoire du Piémont des Appalaches: La Montérégie (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1999). Ronald Rudin’s brief study sponsored by the same institute also takes a basically structural approach. See The Forgotten Quebecers: A History of EnglishSpeaking Quebec, 1759–1980 (Quebec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1985).

Introduction

11

4 For a brief overview of the three settlement phases, see J.I. Little, EthnoCultural Transition and Regional Identity in the Eastern Townships of Quebec (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1989). These population numbers are from the townships in Arthabaska, Bagot, Beauce, Brome, Compton, Drummond, Megantic, Missisquoi, Richmond, Shefford, Sherbrooke, Stanstead, and Wolfe, as defined by the 1853–1915 county boundaries. 5 See J.I. Little, Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity, 1792–1852 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), chapters 9 and 10. 6 See Little, Borderland Religion, chapters 7 and 8. 7 This was a similar non-Catholic profile to that of Upper Canada, except that there was a higher ratio of Presbyterians and a lower ratio of Universalists, Congregationalists, and Second Adventists in that section of the province. See Table A.1 in Little, Borderland Religion, 287. 8 See J.I. Little, State and Society in Transition: The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships, 1838–1852 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), chapter 1. 9 The INRS – Culture et Société is slowly producing the histories of these twenty-three regions. 10 See Little, State and Society. 11 Jacques Revel, ‘L’histoire au ras du sol,’ introduction to Giovanni Levi, Le pouvoir au village: Histoire d’un exorciste dans le Piémont du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1989), x. 12 Revel, ‘L’histoire au ras du sol,’ iii–ix. 13 Revel, ‘L’histoire au ras du sol,’ xii. 14 John Fraser, ‘Much-mocked scholars could teach Prince Charles a lesson,’ Globe and Mail, 12 March 2005, F9. The best-known source on microhistory is Giovanni Levi, ‘On Microhistory,’ in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991). 15 Levi, ‘On Microhistory,’ 96. 16 Richard White, ‘The Nationalization of Nature,’ Journal of American History 86 (1999): 978–9. 17 Michael E. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 4; Levi, ‘On Microhistory,’ 97. 18 R.W. Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space: Land Policies and the Practice of Settlement, Saltspring Island, British Columbia, 1859–1891 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), vi. 19 Levi, ‘On Microhistory,’ 95. 20 Levi, ‘On Micohistory,’ 96.

12 The Other Quebec 21 A notable exception is Norman Knowles, ed., Age of Transition: Readings in Canadian Social History, 1800–1900 (Toronto: Harcourt Brace, 1998), which includes two essays on religious life and culture. 22 See, for example, Lynne Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure and Identity in Late Nineteenth Century Small-Town Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, A FullOrbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996); Marguerite Van Die, ed., Religion and Public Life in Canada: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Nancy Christie, ed., Households of Faith: Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760–1969 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002); and Histoire sociale/Social History 36 (2003), a special issue titled ‘Intersections of Religious and Social History,’ and edited by Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau. 23 Levi, ‘On Microhistory,’ 94. 24 Geertz wrote: ‘Anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighbourhoods ...), they study in villages’ (quoted in Levi, ‘On Microhistory,’ 111n6).

RELIGION, FAMILY, AND GENDER

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The four essays in this section are biographical, and all are based largely on personal diaries or correspondence written by members of locally prominent families, though the authors were certainly not the wealthiest and most influential people in the region. Ralph Merry was, in some respects, an outcast from the founding family of the town of Magog; James Reid was a somewhat disillusioned clergyman destined to spend his career in what he considered to be an unpromising border community; Lucy Peel and her husband, Edmund, were members of Sherbrooke’s social elite, though Edmund did not take an active role in local affairs; and, while Charles Colby was certainly one of Stanstead’s leading men, his economic ambitions were repeatedly frustrated until near the end of his life. It is rather doubtful if the paths of any of these individuals ever crossed. They lived in the same general area at roughly the same time, but they had relatively little in common aside from the important role that religion played in their lives. Reid and Peel both belonged to the Church of England, Colby became a convert from Congregationalism to Methodism, and Merry was a millenarian mystic of shifting and uncertain denominational affiliation. Of the three, Merry was the only one preoccupied with a sense of personal sin and deeply worried about the tension between secular pursuits and religious obligations. Personal as their diaries were, the concerns of Lucy Peel and James Reid tended to be outwardly focused, concentrating particularly on their family members. And, while Charles Colby was heavily involved in business and political pursuits that frequently took him far from home, family also remained his central preoccupation. The only essay in this section not to focus on the family as the central theme is the one on Ralph Merry, who had a troubled relationship with his father and who married late in life. But religion did serve as a source of strength and comfort for all the characters studied here, and it did help fashion the way they saw the world and lived in it. The Eastern Townships was an originally American-settled region whose English-speaking population gradually became more ‘Canadian’ in the sense that they became more British due largely to the influence of British missionary societies as well as government schools policy and British immigration. It is fitting, therefore, that two of the main subjects of this section were of New England origin, and two were British. This may not be history from the bottom up, but it is history from the inside out, and the individuals we will meet in these four essays are representative of a large sector of nineteenth-century society well beyond the Eastern Townships.

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1 The Mental World of Ralph Merry, Tinware Peddler and Religious Ecstatic, 1798–1863

On a September afternoon in 1809 Ralph Merry lay peering upwards through the smoke hole in the roof of a log cabin when he saw ‘the appearance of a man in the sky with blood streaming from him, and it seemed as though I saw him with my natural sight, but probably it was only a verry strong mental view presented through the medium of powerful faith.’ Despite his scepticism, the young man concluded: ‘I was shown that the blood of Christ was shed for sinners and that salvation was offered through him to all.’ What followed immediately afterwards erased all doubts in Merry’s mind, for he then ‘planely saw with my bodily eyes a light as large as the blaze of a candle which entered the house at the said hole in the roof and came directly to me and appeared to enter the centre of my breast, or heart, and I immediately felt an internal motion and a joy commenced such as I had never experienced before and I felt to love God and all mankind.’ Merry pasted this account and what followed into his journal more than forty years later, having cut out the original pages from this time period.1 He also added an introduction that briefly described his life before he began the diary. These retrospective accounts were the homologue of a Puritan conversion narrative, defined by Patricia Caldwell as ‘a testimony of personal religious experience that had to be spoken or read to the entire congregation of a gathered church before admission as evidence of the applicant’s visible sainthood.’2 Merry added them late in life, not because he was about to join a church but in a failed attempt to publish his diary. Although Merry’s dramatic conversion experience was obviously revised by him from the perspective of having gained religious consciousness, there is little reason to doubt that he experienced (or imagined he experienced) on that September

18 Religion, Family, and Gender

day essentially what he later described. He noted the date as his spiritual birthday every year thereafter throughout his long life. And even though he crudely edited his journal by crossing out or excising material, as well as adding later comments and new pages, the seven small hand-sewn volumes that have survived (there are large gaps from 1809 to 1817, 1824 to 1835, and 1840 to 1850) remain largely as they were originally written. It is fortunate that each printer whom Merry approached returned his diaries, or all the originals might have been destroyed. What we would have had, instead, would undoubtedly have been a condensed document excluding many of his subsequent reversals and non-religious comments. While neither Merry nor his story was evidently considered important or interesting enough to attract the book-buying public, his journal helps fill what one historian describes as ‘an abiding vacuum in our knowledge of lay religious behaviour.’3 Merry spent much of his life working as a farmer and peddling tinware, corn brooms, and other items in New England, where he lived for a time during the 1820s. In his old age he distributed his own religious tracts in the area closer to his Magog home. The experiences and ideas recorded in Merry’s journal provide useful insights into the psychology of a religious radical in the early to mid nineteenth century, as well as a window onto the popular belief-system of his extended community of contact in the Eastern Townships and New England. Relatively little has been written by English-Canadian historians about popular religion, which does not have the same meaning in the North American context that it does in Catholic Europe where there was once a fundamental distinction between the Christianity that the clerics taught and that of the people. This essay therefore adopts David Hall’s definition that popular religion includes the actions and beliefs that lay beyond the range of catechism or Sunday worship, ‘and infused everyday events with the presence of the supernatural.’4 Background and Conversion The pioneer settlers of the Eastern Townships who migrated northward from southern New England beginning in the 1790s were doubtless more concerned with material survival and success than with the state of their souls. The saddle-back preachers who eventually found their way into the Eastern Townships would make a greater impact on members of the second generation, such as Ralph Merry and Compton

The Mental World of Ralph Merry 19

Township’s Joseph Badger, whose own pioneering father was a deist. With the repression that accompanied the War of 1812, Badger moved to the more congenial religious climate of the United States, where he became a founder of the Christian Brethren.5 Such radical sects never gained a foothold in the Eastern Townships, and, despite the great popularity of the Freewill Baptist and Universalist societies in neighbouring Vermont – the state that had become ‘the symbolic fount of the young nation’s truculent egalitarianism, militant faith, and crusading idealism’6 – even these two denominations struggled for survival north of the border. The evangelical American religious movements preferred to concentrate their proselytizing efforts in their own country, while the much more conservative Anglican and Wesleyan Methodist churches deployed British missionaries to the Eastern Townships. As a result, they soon became the largest two denominations, with the Church of England at 21.1 per cent and the Methodists at 9.1 per cent of the population in the region’s six counties in 1831. But almost half the 37,040 people enumerated did not belong to the six denominational categories listed in the census. It is likely that the Universalists represented much of the ‘other denominations’ category, which was 12.1 per cent of the population, but the largest category of all was the rather remarkable 37.2 per cent that declared no religious affiliation whatsoever. While this group would certainly have included deists and free-thinkers, many settlers did not belong to an official church simply because there still was none in their communities. They would, nevertheless, have listened to a steady stream of itinerant American preachers, and some of them organized what they called union churches, which would not fit any of the census categories. Merry’s settlement at the Outlet of Lake Memphremagog established one such church in 1830.7 By the time of the 1831 census, then, the British-backed churches (Anglican and Wesleyan Methodist) had still not consolidated their position in the Eastern Townships, and even though their proportion of adherents would increase significantly by mid-century, their clergy would continue to complain about nonconformity to church regulations and shifting denominational allegiances.8 This was the frontier environment of weak formal institutions that spawned Ralph Merry, and where – to use Erik Seeman’s phrase – he ‘constructed his personal piety.’9 Merry’s father, the entrepreneurial Ralph Merry III, had brought his young and growing family from St Johnsbury, Vermont, in 1798 to operate a gristmill, sawmill, and, even-

20 Religion, Family, and Gender

tually, an iron foundry at what would later become the town of Magog.10 In part due to his psychological instability, the senior Merry ran into serious business difficulties, losing 2,300 acres to a sheriff’s sale in 1816.11 Two years later he was officially declared incompetent. At the same time his brother Jonathan in Boston took over the business, which was to be managed by Ralph III’s oldest son, John. The unmarried Ralph IV would be primarily responsible for the care of his father’s family, which would subsist largely on the pension provided by his uncle, Jonathan.12 The junior Ralph Merry’s own health had not allowed him to engage in prolonged physical labour since he had ‘sprained’ his stomach while logging in 1804, when he was eighteen. A few months later he was ‘seized with a violent attack of the billious fever’ which confined him to the house for eighty-nine days. Merry would never be healthy again. During the following five years he was ‘doctored by a variety of physicians and used many means recommended by them and by others for the recovery of my health but all was in vain.’ On one painful occasion an Indian ‘doctor’ operated on his back with a lance ‘as a man would on a millstone while pecking it till he had cut probably about 400 gashes.’ He then washed the wounds with a previously prepared liquid, but the young Merry barely had the strength to ride the seven miles from the encampment back to his father’s house.13 Merry’s diary entries for 1809 list an ongoing litany of physical ailments – a stomach too weak to allow him to sing, eyes too weak to read, aching bones and dizziness – though none of this prevented him from fasting ‘to humble myself.’14 His main problem appears to have been his back, which often prevented him from riding to religious services in nearby communities. Merry was clearly desperate for physical relief and spiritual reassurance, and it was while lying on his back on that September afternoon in 1809 that he saw the vision that marked the first stage in his new life as a devout Christian. Ralph Merry claims in the preface to his journal that he did not attend religious meetings when he was young, though he clearly did not grow up beyond the influence of a stern moralistic religious code. Merry described how, as a youth, he ‘joined with others in wickedness and when angry used profane language,’ but at night he would not dare to go to sleep before begging forgiveness for fear that ‘I should never wake in this world but should be sent to hell before morning.’ He added that ‘I had been taught by my parents to be honest, civil and moral, and to respect the aged and never to ridicule the deformed, the lame or the

The Mental World of Ralph Merry 21

unfortunate, but I went forward in rebellion against God the Author of all the blessings that I enjoyed and frequently felt dreadful condemnation and fears of damnation and it is a wonder of mercy that he spared me so long while sinning against the light which had been given.’ This image was reinforced by the one stray journal entry from before 1809, for on 14 December 1807 Merry wrote: ‘Have sought for pardon by fasting and prayer since yesterday morning.’ He later claimed that during these years he went so many times to pray at a spot in the woods a few rods east of the bridge over the Magog River that he wore a path there. The complete process of conversion still ordinarily took place over a period ranging from several months to two or three years. While Caldwell, Dorsey, and others challenge Edmund S. Morgan’s argument that conversion narratives followed a formulaic and conventional course, the standard pattern was a movement from ‘awakening’ to a sense of sin, through deep ‘anxiety’ about the eternal fate of one’s soul, to ‘conviction’ that one was guilty of sin and condemned to eternal perdition, and finally to ‘conversion’ when one threw oneself on God’s mercy and entered into a deeply felt comprehension and acceptance of Christ’s atonement and God’s sovereignty over the universe.15 Even the last step did not take place all at once, and the happiness Merry felt after his mystical experience in 1809 lasted only about fifteen minutes before doubts began to creep into his mind again. He once more ‘fell into a gloomy state of mind,’ though he had finally lost the sense of condemnation that had previously burdened him. During the next three weeks he prayed for ‘converting grace’ and an explanation from God as to the meaning of his vision, ‘for I believed it was wrought by his immediate power; but dare not believe myself to have been regenerated.’ Finally, after praying in his father’s barn one day, Merry convinced himself that the experience had brought about his regeneration, at which point he had another vision. This time he saw ‘2 long broad bows, like rainbows, of a redish colour nearly over my head, which again witnessed to me that the Saviour’s blood was shed for the remission of sin.’ He then felt assured that ‘[t]he way to peace and pardon’ was easy and free, and that a ‘full attonement had been made for all.’ Merry claimed that his inner foes had been subdued, and ‘I went on my way believing and rejoicing and declaring to others what great things God had done for my soul.’ Strikingly absent from this account is any mention of encouragement or guidance from Merry’s elders or members of the clergy. His journal

22 Religion, Family, and Gender

gives the impression that, throughout his life, Merry identified himself primarily as a member of a circle or network of like-minded lay people rather than an adherent of an exclusive church under the control of a preacher. At some point, however, Merry began to attend the quarterly meetings of the Baptist church that had been established in 1799 by settlers living between the Outlet and Georgeville (also on Lake Memphremagog).16 He testified publicly for the first time on 1 October 1809, when he was twenty-three years old, but he could not accept the Calvinist doctrine of election. Merry might agree that grace was a gift from God, but he always insisted that this gift was available to everyone.17 He also disagreed with Elder Marsh, the leading Baptist minister in the region, who believed in ‘the impossibility of a Christian falling from grace and perishing forever’ (5 October 1809). Merry, who would for a time become a member of the more compatible Methodist Episcopal Connection, believed that after conversion one could sin again, lose faith, and ‘perish everlastingly.’18 Decline, Recovery, and Transcendence As G.A. Starr has observed of other spiritual diarists, conversion ‘brings no immunity to further spiritual vicissitudes, but it does supply a new orientation from which to face them, and a new strength with which to endure or overcome them.’19 In Merry’s case, assurance of salvation would be particularly tested by the prolonged prostration he experienced shortly after his conversion experience, especially as affliction was commonly regarded as the natural consequence of sin. In November 1809, two months after his first vision, Merry was prostrated by ‘bilious fever’ for over two weeks. As of December, he became bedridden for a remarkable four years and eight months. Merry later wrote: ‘I was universally debilitated but the greatest cause of the confinement was weakness in the back.’ In the later months, he also had severe eye pain that was relieved only by keeping them permanently closed: ‘The natural motion of my eyes caused such pain that I frequently held my fingers on one eye and my thumb on the other to keep them entirely still and often could not get to sleep without confining them this way’ (1 December 1809). But physical and mental suffering also indicated that the individual was engaged in a struggle against sin, and Merry did his best to convince himself that God was testing his faith.20 When he began his journal entries again in mid-November 1813, Merry wrote that he could

The Mental World of Ralph Merry 23

not have patiently borne his sufferings ‘without immediate assistance from the living God, who hath never foresaken me since I put my trust in him’ (16 November 1813). Merry was reassured by a vivid dream on 8 March 1814. In this dream the boat transporting him across Lake Memphremagog was about to be capsized by a storm when he noticed that a rock was carrying the craft towards a hill and safety on the opposite shore. When he realized that he would be saved, ‘the storm suddenly subsided and the sun shone beautifully and I felt safe and happy.’ Merry interpreted the rock as Christ and the hill as Mount Zion, and forty-one years later he remained convinced that the dream was a divine message that he was going to recover ‘from that bed of languishing’ and that God would ‘sustain me through the whole voyage of life and at last land me in triumph on the heavenly coast.’21 A couple of months after this dream, while praying for his eyes to be strengthened, Merry experienced what he called a miracle: ‘am alone in the house and in bed, and feel a suden shock run through my frame from head to feet as sensable as a man does when in a shower bath and a pail of cold water descends upon him.’ Finding that his sight was ‘wonderfully strengthened,’ Merry began to ‘rejoice and praise a loud.’ Then he tested his back ‘by stooping verry low and lifting several articles, one which probably weighed seventy pounds or more and I received no injury thereby although I had such weakness in the back before that I durst not stoop down and rech my hand to the floor to pick up any thing.’ The miraculous ‘cure’ lasted only nine days, but, rather than being resentful, Merry (in hindsight at least) thanked God for displaying his power and showing him ‘how easiely he could have restored me to perfect health instantly [...] but it was in accordance with his design for me to be disciplined in the furnace of affliction down to old age.’22 Merry would never be strong or healthy again, but he was gradually able to do enough work to support himself. There is a three-year gap in Merry’s journal from 1814 to 1817, but by June of the latter year he felt strong enough to ride to distant Montpelier, Vermont, to seek out a printer for the hymns he had been writing. Stephen Marini states that the years between 1775 and 1815 were ‘the golden age’ of New England hymnody, which ‘had become a popular, potent, and complex dimension of Evangelical worship, rivaled in importance only by preaching.’ Despite his life-long preoccupation with religion, Merry never appears to have contemplated preaching as a vocation, and he referred to hymn books much more often than the Bible itself for guidance and moral support. His impulse to compose

24 Religion, Family, and Gender

hymns, rather than simply memorize them, can be understood in light of Marini’s observation that in ‘radical Evangelical tradition the hymn was understood as the language of the regenerate soul, the inevitable burst of praise issuing from redeemed intelligent creatures to their Creator.’23 Titled New Hymns or Cheering Repast for the Heavenly Pilgrim,24 Merry’s thirty-six compositions are marked by repeated images of fire and the sun, common revivalist symbols which also recalled his vision in 1809 and the years he spent in a darkened room. The first hymn refers to hearts ‘fir’d with living flame,’ and the fifth to ‘Canaan’s blazing shore’ the ‘rapt’rous sight’ of which ‘dazzles my eyes And does my heart enflame.’ While the two principal metaphors in Puritan conversion rhetoric had been pilgrimage and battle,25 Merry belied his collection’s title by not referring to the first theme until his last hymn. As for battle, the cross-border region’s ambivalence towards the War of 1812 doubtless ensured that this was not a popular image at the time, though Merry’s collection did include ‘The Christian Soldier’ and ‘The Heavenly Warriors.’26 But even in these hymns the most striking images are of souls ‘on fire’ and Christ’s ‘blazing armour.’ Merry’s compositions repeatedly stressed that salvation was available to all (as in Hymn 6): Although their skins be black or white, If for King Jesus they do fight, To gain the sacred victory These precious souls are dear to me.

Hymn 17 warned, however, that We can’t merit any thing But punishment and death, Yet we must obey our King, Or we shall feel his wrath.

Merry even suggested that his own confinement had been prolonged by his fear of backsliding, reflecting the belief that divine wrath would be particularly harsh against those who had been offered salvation and rejected it. In ‘On the Author’s Long Confinement to a Sick Bed, etc. Which Confinement Begun Nov. 8, 1809’ (Hymn 13), Merry declares:

The Mental World of Ralph Merry 25 Because I fear’d if once My health return’d again, I should in greater danger be Of running into sin. ... I did not wish for health To spend in vanity, Or titles, fame, or earthly wealth That I might honoured be.

Despite the booklet title’s reference to ‘Cheering Repast,’ Merry’s hymns were largely admonitory, and the image of fire was meant to inspire awe rather than comfort. The latter part of the volume, in particular, assumes a sombre tone as it focuses on the wages of sin. Hymn 21 declares: O what a sad and frightful hour Is ghastly death to sinful souls! The monster comes, with dreadful pow’r, To hurl them down where vengeance rolls.

And Merry refers to his discouragement in Hymn 28: Encompassed with infirmities, And burden’d Lord with sin, How can I fight the fight of faith, Or how the conquest win.

But he also makes a reference in Hymn 25 to the spiritual experiences he would soon come to depend upon on a regular basis: Then in some unexpected way Thou often dost appear, Disperse each cloud, with cheering ray, And silence all my fear.

While on the journey to find a printer in Montpelier, Merry’s spirits generally remained high because of the revivals he attended, and, after three weeks on the road, he wrote: ‘I am surprised at the disinterested

26 Religion, Family, and Gender

benevolence of strangers, surely the hand of God is in it; once more I have cast myself on the providence of the Almighty and have found that his mercies fail not’ (26 June 1817). After a religious meeting in Duxbury, Vermont, where there had recently been a ‘reformation,’ Merry began ‘meditating on the nearness of my fellow creatures to me; we all sprang from one man and are of one family, it naturally follows that they are my brethren and sisters and as it were my flesh and my blood ... We have likewise the same Creator and Saviour’ (29 June 1817). By July 3, however, Merry had been rejected by several printers, and his head had become ‘exceedingly disordered.’ He was feeling ‘crossed, disappointed and perplexed in my business, sick and sorowful, far from relatives or acquaintance,’ but the clouds suddenly dispersed when a printer agreed to produce 1,050 copies.27 Feeling ill again on July 6, Merry reasoned that ‘I must have afflictions for my good, they serve to humble me and answer varrious valuable purposes and are as neseccary as my daily food.’ On other occasions, however (for example, 21 July 1817), he described how Satan took advantage of his frequent bouts of pain to try to convince him that he had been forsaken by God and that his faith was in vain. Merry could only hope that his prayers to God would bring him physical relief, and it is quite likely that the moments of transcendence that he came to experience on a daily basis did serve to relieve his mind from the unrelenting bodily discomfort. After describing how a rheumatic complaint had caused him to live a life of pain for the previous five or six months, Merry recorded an excerpt from one of his hymns (1 August 1817): But let this feble body fail And let it faint or die My soul should quit this mournful vail And soar to worlds on high. Lord what are all my sufferings here If thou but count me meet With that enraptured host to appear And worship at thy feet.

Having reached the age of thirty-one in 1817, Merry finally left the fold of his paternal family for a time by peddling his hymn books in Vermont for 11¢ each.28 On July 12 he testified publicly at a religious meeting in Moretown, where he was baptized by immersion and claimed that his health immediately improved. That night he lodged with a

The Mental World of Ralph Merry 27

young convert who described ‘the late glorious outporing of the Spirit of God in this place.’ Merry concluded his entry with the words, ‘my soul is ravished with sacred ecstacy’ (12 July 1817). Two years later he revealed that he experienced these ecstatic sensations regularly: ‘On thinking of my conversion I have received Divine love perhaps 10 or 11 different times within about 42 hours’ (17 July 1819). But Merry’s record-keeping went much further, for the following month he wrote: ‘I have made minutes daily with pen and ink, so as to be sure that I did not miss a day in which the love of God was not sent to my heart, and I have generally received it several times in a day’ (15 August 1819). On 18 November 1821 he wrote that he had received ‘Divine love’ every day since 16 August 1818, ‘excepting the 12 of last Sept, but I felt pretty confident after the day was past that I had felt it that day also, but having workmen on our house and being much huried forgot to set it down.’ Merry’s fluctuation between despair and euphoria suggests that he may have been mildly manic-depressive. The genetic disease known as cyclothymia or bi-polar disorder generally begins in the late teens or early adulthood and is often characterized by periods of mental confusion, excessive preoccupation with sin and religion, impulsiveness, and a marked tendency to seek out other people in the manic phase, then significant weight loss and apathy in the depressive stage. Merry’s behaviour conformed to all these traits, but his journal is consistently coherent, he never reflected on suicide in its pages, and there is no indication of irritability, which are also traits of cyclothymia.29 Still more significantly, Merry never mentioned a concern that he may have shared the illness of his father, who went through protracted ‘high’ periods when he wandered the countryside making impractical business deals, and ‘low’ periods when he went so far as to attack his adult son with a stick. To the extent that Ralph Merry the younger did suffer from depression, his regular religious experiences apparently provided the stabilizing force found in today’s doses of lithium. Merry’s ‘raptures’ had clearly taken on the role of ritual, defined as a formalized procedure for connecting the natural and the social worlds to supernatural power.30 The regularity of this particular personal ritual was surely unusual even in Merry’s era of religious enthusiasm, though Henry Alline of Nova Scotia had taught his followers that ‘the only certain evidence of conversion was a spirit which soared to the very gate of heaven,’ and that they should expect such experiences daily.31 Inevitably, though, as Merry’s health slowly improved, and as his finan-

28 Religion, Family, and Gender

cial responsibility for the family of his ailing father intensified, his spirituality declined. He recorded that from 1 March 1822 to 10 May 1823 ‘there were 147 days, according to my minutes, that I did not receive divine love; every other day I thought I felt sacred consolation’ (9 September 1823). There is another lengthy gap in Merry’s surviving journals between 1824 and 1835, during which period he appears to have taken up peddling merchandise in New England. We do know that in 1829 he married Ruth Whitcombe, a slightly older American woman of some means,32 and he later claimed (24 October 1837) that he had fallen from his state of grace, at least for a time after 1828, but his religious enthusiasm remained strong. During the later 1830s Merry continued to compose religious verse incorporating terms such as ‘whirlpools of dispair’ and ‘affliction’s furnace,’ but he insisted that ‘speaking of the things of religion’ made him ‘exceedingly happy’ and relieved his ‘pain and weakness’ so that ‘my soul seems as if lifted on wings of lavished love.’ By this time Merry had established close ties with the Freewill Baptists,33 but in 1838 he helped to organize a local class meeting of the equally radical Methodist Protestants.34 Shortly afterwards he experienced one of his strongest and lengthiest transcendent experiences in years, writing that ‘a flood as it were of holy Joy flowed to my heart, which continued for perhaps 10 or fifteen minutes; I became so weak through the power thus manifested to me that I stagered while walking accross the room. I have felt trembling power before but never was weakened, I think, so much before by such an opperation’ (27 July 1838). This was as close as Merry ever came to describing the spiritual sensations which, according to Ann Taves, psychiatrists most commonly refer to as ‘dissociation’; anthropologists as ‘trance, spirit possession, and altered states of consciousness’; and religionists as ‘visions, inspiration, mysticism, and ecstasy.’35 Merry’s failure to be more forthcoming in his diary did not simply reflect the fact that he was a relatively unsophisticated farmer/peddler, for even the most educated spiritual diarists resorted to an expressive vernacular, ‘a shorthand for describing the indescribable’ that was clearly recognizable to other evangelicals. Neil Semple claims that those who assume that this language was used only out of habit rather than springing from innermost experience miss the point: ‘the idiom was intended to define who shared and who were excluded from the family.’36 Starr offers a slightly different explanation, arguing that because of the belief that spiritual life varies little from person to person, descriptions of such experiences

The Mental World of Ralph Merry 29

became interchangeable. Furthermore, ‘conventional phraseology can actually enhance the description of feelings or experiences noteworthy for their universality rather than their uniqueness.’37 Merry’s religious zeal had become even stronger by the spring of 1839 when he was reading the memoirs of William Carvosso, a book which he would keep returning to throughout the remainder of his life. The spiritual experiences and daily actions of the Cornish Methodist, Carvosso, were often prompted by referring to scriptural texts, a practice that characterized working-class evangelicals in Britain as well as Merry himself, even though he favoured hymn books over the Bible.38 A marginal note beside Merry’s initial entry on Carvosso states that this day was ‘a glorious epoch in my Christian career’ (17 April 1839), and he later wrote that he had ‘obtained a great increase of faith’ in 1839.39 Merry’s frequent referral to a book written in a different social and cultural context reflected how his cultural horizons were not circumscribed by the sermons of local preachers. His repeated rereading of this volume is also another example of a popular religious ritual, for, as Hall reminds us, books too were ‘the stuff of popular religion.’40 At this point, Merry once more began to receive ‘devine love’ on a regular basis, and, before setting out on his summer peddling circuit in Massachusetts in 1840, he resolved ‘to prostrate myself in the depth of humility before my God every night until [...] January.’ He soon decided to apply this resolution to the mornings as well (31 April 1840). Merry spent eight months on the road in 1840 in order to raise money for the distribution of religious tracts. Looking back on his experience, he wrote, ‘I have, while absent, learned verry profitable lessons of deep prostration of soul and practical humility and practical faith’ (6 November 1840), but his story is unfortunately missing for the other years of the decade, one in which religious revivalism reached a fever peak in the northeastern United States and the Eastern Townships. Millenarianism The financial crisis and crop failures of the later 1830s had helped foster the growth of religious revivalism in New York and New England, where people finally became willing to listen to Baptist preacher William Miller’s prediction that the Apocalypse would take place before the end of 1843.41 Miller’s sister and her husband happened to live in Merry’s home village of the Outlet, and Miller had begun spreading his adventist message in that area as early as 1835 (27 June and July 1835).

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Merry wrote little about Miller’s first visit, but two years later the deteriorating economic conditions led him ‘to reflect on Miller’s doctrine’ while peddling in Massachusetts (28 May 1837), and he took a copy of Miller’s lectures to his friends and relatives in Lynn. While there, he told them that they would not likely meet again until the judgment (26 September 1837, 30 September 1837). When Miller returned to the Outlet in June 1838, Merry noted that ‘he appears sincere, and says he fully believes his doctrine’ (10–11 June 1838), though Carvosso’s memoirs had clearly made a greater impact on his mind. As with many in the Eastern Townships, Merry’s Millerite enthusiasm presumably increased as the days before the Apocalypse was to take place grew fewer and fewer,42 for he was still clinging to millenarian beliefs when the next surviving volume of his diary resumed in 1850. The local impact of the ‘great disappointment’ is reflected in the report of Thomas Chapman, the travelling Anglican missionary who visited the Outlet in January 1849. Chapman wrote: At this place I met an aged man by the name of Merry, father of a large family, but of all the men I have met with, or could conceive of, he appears to be the most supremely miserable. He has given himself up soul and body to blank despair; he made my blood chill hearing his dreadful tale, seeing his woe-begone visage, and frowning upon his blasphemous language with regard to his hopeless condition.43

The fact that Ralph Merry had no offspring would suggest that Chapman was referring to one of his relatives. At sixty-three, however, Ralph would certainly have seemed ‘aged’ from the young missionary’s perspective, and, as a brief visitor to the area, Chapman could simply have assumed that an elderly married man would be the ‘father of a large family.’ Furthermore, this was a rather formulaic phrase in missionary reports, and might simply have been added by the editor of Chapman’s published journal entry. Whoever Chapman was referring to, Merry’s first entry in the next surviving diary volume, over a year later, made it clear that he and his local religious community had been experiencing a spiritual decline and internal dissension. He described the day’s prayer meeting as being the best conducted in the town during the previous three or four years, and referred to the absence of a ‘brother’ whose ‘unreasonable conduct has caused us much trouble within 16 months.’ Merry, himself, had been denounced as a great hypocrite by this man, but the following meeting was also peaceable (10 March 1850).

The Mental World of Ralph Merry 31

The affiliation (if any) of Merry’s group of worshippers is rather difficult to determine at this time. Upon listening to a twenty-year-old preacher named John Orrock on 25 August 1850, Merry noted that ‘he is an adventist but not a harsh and biggoted one,’ which suggests some scepticism towards the sect that had emerged from the ashes of Millerism. Merry also complained in October of the ‘great deal of wild unreasonable talk’ by a visitor who insisted that the end would come between June 1853 and July 1855. Others even pointed to the current month, causing Merry to declare: ‘thus we see that visionary and enthusiastical men continue presumptiously to pry into the secrets of the Almighty as though they belonged to his council’ (12 October 1850). He wrote on 1 November 1850: ‘this is the day that a part of the adventists set for the advent but I have had a strong impression accompanied with divine joy that the time would pass without the advent.’ Five days later he continued: ‘we are still here and the timeists have not realized their hope. I think it verry wrong for men to set the month for so great an event for Christ said ye know not when the time is. If they were to know the time the saints would not be in the field and bed or grinding at the mill.’ But such statements did not preclude identification with the Adventists, for the moderate former Millerite leadership had renounced further attempts to predict the onset of the millennium. Merry attended the Adventist yearly conference at the Outlet in June 1852, and approved of the preaching of the man who had done the most to popularize Millerism in the United States, Boston’s Joshua Himes. Furthermore, Merry could not resist studying biblical chronology himself, if only to disprove the prediction that the millennium was at hand (23 November 1851, 19 February 1852). By 1854 he was submitting articles to the World’s Crisis, which had recently been established by an Adventist splinter group in order to promote the belief that the Apocalypse would arrive within the year.44 But Merry also subscribed to the Freewill Baptist Morning Star, and he continued to attend Methodist and Freewill Baptist quarterly meetings (for example, 7–8 October 1854, 29 September 1856).45 Perhaps the reason for his apparent indecisiveness was that there would be no Adventist minister in Magog until 1863,46 for Merry certainly remained a confirmed millenarian.47 Even Joshua Himes succumbed briefly to the ‘timeist’ temptation once again in 1860,48 when his new newspaper, the Voice of the Prophets, convinced Merry that the Apocalypse would arrive within seven or eight years. Merry declared that ‘I would gladly lay out 5000$ if I had the money to circulate these papers. The world should be warned of the sollemn and aweful event’ (30 August 1860). Finally, in

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1862, he became convinced that the Sabbath should be celebrated on Saturday (22 September 1861, 6 February 1862), which was the teaching of yet another splinter group known as the Seventh Day Adventists.49 Magic and Ideology Intensely personal as his spiritual beliefs and practices were, Merry accommodated himself loosely to a series of radical evangelical denominations. He never mentioned witchcraft, which was still commonly feared during his era,50 and his two visions – which he distinguished from his mere ‘mental view’ of the bleeding Christ figure and his ‘dream’ of a rock carrying his boat to safety – were confined to bright lights and coloured arcs. The personal impact made by these visions did not place Merry outside the current evangelical framework, for early nineteenth-century Methodist itinerants described their dreams openly and enthusiastically during their sermons.51 More explicitly ‘pagan’ was the ‘rapping spirit’ that Merry was informed had been brought to within three miles of Lee’s mill in Stanstead by some people from Blackstone, Massachusetts (5 February 1852), and he was fascinated by the various reports of a large serpent in Lake Memphremagog (17 September 1854). Merry recorded such reports without committing himself as to their veracity, but he had fewer doubts about the efficacy of magico-religious healing. Not only did he submit himself to a rather excruciating back operation at the hands of a Native healer, as we have seen, but on many occasions he consumed the roots and herbs used by Amerindians. Many manuscripts and books describing supernatural healing had incorporated Native-American spiritual curing into European practices,52 and faith healers were to be found in both religious traditions. In the very first entry of Merry’s journal, he noted that his brother John had set out with ‘20 Complaints for different folks, 17 of which were writen by me, one for Myself’ to present to Samuel Austin of Coulchester near Lake Champlain. According to Merry, Austin ‘is said to have cured great numbers of people of diverse disorders in the manner which the Apostles did’ (25 April 1809). There is a parallel, here, with the prayer notes posted in early New England churches, reflecting the popular assumption that prayer had earthly power. Clearly, then, elements of the accommodation between religion and magic that characterized seventeenth-century New England had persisted into the nineteenth century.53

The Mental World of Ralph Merry 33

While the ‘cunning folk’ who claimed to heal illness were tolerated by the early Puritan clergy, prophets had run the risk of being accused of witchcraft.54 But prophecy had not been stamped out, and, in January 1824, Merry recorded that a Stanstead man had been told by God that the Apocalypse would take place in seven years time, with twothirds of humanity being destroyed (23 January 1824). Fifteen years later, as we have seen, a good many people shared a similar belief. William Miller based his prediction on careful analysis of certain biblical passages rather than on divination, but Merry referred to others, such as Henry Chandler of Duxbury, Massachusetts, who ‘lived so near God that he sometimes had a revelation of future events, he told things respecting myself relative to spiritual and temporal concerns which afterward came to pass’ (26 April 1837). In 1837 Merry also befriended a Brother Edmister in southern Massachusetts, who ‘tells me that he scarcely ever asks the Lord to explain a thing to him but he explains or shows it to him in a Vision; and he has these visions daily, or almost every day’ (11 June 1837). Later added in the margin was the comment that Edmister had seen a vision in which Merry was crossing a brook near his home on horseback rather than with the wagon load of furniture he was planning to transport from Massachusetts. The note stated that this was what transpired. Although he gave credence to such individuals, Merry was much more inclined to deal with God directly than to seek out other people as intermediaries. When he became increasingly confident that his prayers were being answered as his health slowly improved in 1818, Merry began to ‘look to him for temporal things,’ such as a suit of clothes that he could not afford to buy. He admitted, however, that he ought to ‘with much more earnestness desire spiritual blessings, which are far better’ (24 March 1818), and he remained heavily preoccupied with the nonmaterial world throughout his life. Merry evidently gained a reputation for spiritual powers, at least within his own family, for in January 1820 his recently married younger brother’s wife asked him to charm her head, which ‘has been quite disordered of late.’ This he refused to do, but he prayed for her in secret, and claimed that the Lord answered and gave her relief (25 January 1820). Six months later his other sister-in-law asked for his prayers to cure a chronic illness (8 July 1820). More common than references to prayers, however, were those to the random opening of a page in the Bible or, more frequently, a hymn book, to divine God’s will. This was an ancient practice, for Virgil had been the preferred source for pagan divination during the Roman em-

34 Religion, Family, and Gender

pire, and the custom known as sortes Vergilianae persisted into the nineteenth century. The biblical version, known as gospel cleromancy or bibliomancy, had been condemned by Increase Mather in the late seventeenth century,55 but for Merry the practice assumed the role of a private ritual which reassured him that his daily activities were in conformity with God’s will. Merry’s technique was generally to use a pin to open the volume, as when he prayed to God for guidance concerning his plan to trade land with his father in May 1818. Striking between the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth verses of Matthew, chapter 6, he read ‘“which of you by taking can add” etc. – On which glorious streams of divine love flow to my soul.’ He therefore decided that it was ‘my duty to give up my pleasing scheme, which is so agreeable to flesh and to nature, because I am satisfyed it is not the will of him, who often brings real blessings out of seeming evils’ (12 May 1818). That Merry did not resort to such tactics simply to justify self-interested decisions was again revealed two years later when he traded a mare with foal for a thirteen-year-old ‘french’ horse in Yamaska, paying $1.35 in exchange. Feeling that this was not enough, the next morning Merry cast lots to determine how much more he should pay, ‘and it turned out that I should let the man have the remainder of my cotton cloth which cost $1.80’ (25 August 1820). Strange as they may seem to us, similar practices were carried out by Prime Minister Mackenzie King in the twentieth century,56 and they represent a good example of how religious culture continued to be shaped by folk beliefs. If to King the spiritual world was little more than a diversion from his political duties, to Merry religion precluded nearly all interest in politics. Even the Rebellions of 1837–8 and the American Civil War were essentially ignored by his diary. But there was an implicit egalitarianism in Merry’s condemnation of the pursuit of wealth and ostentatious display. In 1838, for example, he published an article in the Morning Star condemning the wearing of fur hats as an ‘extravagant, foolish, and proud practice’ (10 February 1838). Furthermore, radical religion could be empowering to marginalized individuals such as the illiterate woman in Derby, Vermont, who, according to Merry, was twice visited by a ‘being in the shape of a child and as large as one who is 6 or 7 months old.’ This apparition, which was ‘whiter than snow’ and standing on a bush three or four feet from the ground, commanded her to make peace with God, and assured her that many were saved who had not been baptized, and that ‘God’s children had chosen the ignorant to teach the wise’ (18 December 1823).

The Mental World of Ralph Merry 35

American historians have revealed how closely such dissenting religious views were tied to political radicalism in the New England hill country, where, according to Randolph Roth, settlers ‘dedicated themselves with extraordinary fervor to making it the most perfect society on earth.’57 The Reform tradition that remained strong in many rural settlements of the Eastern Townships well into the nineteenth century clearly fed off that fervour.58 Uninterested in politics as he may have been, Merry’s own religious radicalism reflected an egalitarian democratic ideology. He wrote on 26 April 1837, for example, that all the property of bank proprietors should be held for the payment of their bills, as in Rhode Island, and that physicians should be placed on salary (with the rich subsidizing the treatment of the poor), so that they would not be induced to keep people sick in order to make money. Merry also supported the temperance and anti-slavery movements (8 September 1837), and in 1838 he prayed to God for guidance before swearing an oath of allegiance to the Queen (3 February 1838), one the local MLA, Marcus Child, refused to take.59 In the final analysis, however, Merry was not much interested in politics or doctrinal matters, for his mental world was largely one of daily experience rather than intellectual analysis, and old age failed to dampen his religious enthusiasm. When he was sixty-four, and had been a widower for nine years, Merry noted of a prayer meeting whose description has been largely excised, ‘I talk considerably and have a shouting time’ (November, Sunday, 1850).60 He was clearly less troubled by doubts and temptations than in his younger years. He wrote on 2 January 1851: ‘Have a long and unusual visitation of rapturous peace and holy power early this morning and open to hymn 365 for myself read and rejoice.’ The following spring he commented that ‘[l]ast winter was the happyest one that I ever had except in the one in which I experienced sanctification. I rose early mornings begin to sing something souitable look up by faith and divine joy flowed to my heart’ (23 April 1851). Two years later, during a religious revival that was converting a number of youths, Merry hosted a number of ‘noisy and powerful’ prayer meetings in his own house. Though he had not mentioned composing hymns for many years, Merry did write a small number of temperance poems and religious articles for publication in various newspapers (5 July 1851, 9 January 1852, 18 March 1852).61 He also wrote a tract on faith ‘to be given away to professors who have experienced the new birth’ (2 September 1854). Merry contributed $8 towards the cost of $14 for publishing over 2,000 copies in 1854, and collected the remaining amount from supporters

36 Religion, Family, and Gender

(4 September 1854).62 Within five days he distributed 1,300 copies to ‘ministers and others’ in the Magog area and donated 500 copies to the Methodist circuit minister in Derby, Vermont, asking him to give away fifty locally and send the remainder to ‘preachers in the States’ (4 September 1854). Whether the tract included millennialist predictions is not clear, but the Adventists were not overlooked, for Merry also gave 100 copies to John Orrock (11 September 1854). He distributed others himself throughout the fall, boasting that ‘this effort for the good of souls which I have made in my old age under peculiar difficulties and infirmities and weakness of body and sight will probably do much more good as a humble instrument through grace than all the efforts I ever made put together’ (21 September 1854). Merry would continue peddling religious material in the local area throughout the remainder of his life, claiming in 1863 to have been instrumental in the conversion of fifty souls (25 September 1863). Interpretation On 15 September 1809, soon after the second vision that sealed Merry’s religious destiny, he wrote that his entrepreneurial father ‘appears to see the vanity of seeking happiness in worldly pursuits.’ But the senior Merry was clearly not overly concerned about the fate of his soul, for he stated that he ‘thinks it probable that his sins were forgiven about 30 years ago.’ Such lack of religious enthusiasm appears to have been characteristic of the region’s pioneering generation, but offspring such as Ralph Merry and Joseph Badger were clearly influenced by New England’s Second Great Awakening. Both young men kept journals because, as Starr writes, the responsibility of each individual in the post-Reformation era for his own spiritual welfare meant that ‘he must mark with care each event or stage in its development.’ Without the benefit of Catholic confession to relieve the sense of guilt, keeping a spiritual diary ‘was held in higher repute than any other act of private devotion aside from praying or reading the Bible.’63 Badger’s thoughts have survived only as a heavily edited memoir, and Merry unfortunately inked over or cut out some of the passages in his journals. But much of his editing simply amounted to drawing thin lines through entries that were presumably to be excluded in the published version. The silences in Merry’s journal do not reflect a concern that it would be read by others. Rather than representing a selfconscious attempt at literary production, or an outlet for the articula-

The Mental World of Ralph Merry 37

tion of philosophical, moral, or psychological insights and struggles, Merry’s journal was essentially a record of his religious experiences kept for regular reassurance of his salvation. On 9 October 1817, for example, he simply wrote: ‘A.M. fast; P.M. get blessing to my soul.’ On October 10, ‘Find peace in God’; on the 11th, ‘Am visited by Divine love’; and on the 14th, ‘Jesus visits me with streams of sacred grace.’ Such shorthand expressions were commonly resorted to by even well-educated individuals who wrote the spiritual diaries that are said to have contributed to the formation of a modern, subjective consciousness.64 Merry’s diary shares the often scattered focus of these spiritual autobiographies, but there is an equally interesting parallel with the ‘folk’ diaries that generally served simply as aids to the memories in which the detailed information was stored. According to Motz, by enabling farmers to discover the pattern in their activities and in the weather, as well as to keep a record of the major events occurring in the community, these diaries helped them to define themselves through their place in nature and society.65 With Merry’s diary, then, the transition to modernity was far from complete, for, just like any other farmer or worker, he used it to learn when certain crops had been planted or harvested in previous years, what inns were welcoming to peddlers, and so on. Furthermore, to the extent that Merry recorded his feelings, it was not for self-analysis but to reinforce the need for ongoing religious faith. He wrote on 15 March 1818, for example: ‘Have a season of fasting but I feel rather stupid and dull, finding no particular animation of the Spirit, and no great spirit of prayer, until about 4 P.M. when repeating these 2 lines viz. (Jesus will give me strength and grace, To run with joy the Christian race) Divine love flows to my soul.’ A year later he described a similar development: ‘Do not get a blessing by divine love this morn till in prayer I speak like the following, Great God is there not a blessing for me now, and immediately I receive Divi. grace’ (2 June 1819). To Merry, each such ‘blessing’ was rather like a fast-acting drug, offering only fleeting reassurance of his state of grace, for he continued to write that he was ‘a vile and unworthy creature’ with a ‘wicked heart and sinful nature’ (11 October 1817). The metaphor of ‘a helpless worm’ or a ‘vile contemptable worm’ appears repeatedly in his journals and hymns, and the title of the second diary volume is ‘A Short Record of God’s Mercies to One of His Unworthy and Unprofitable Creatures.’ But Merry never actually described the doubts and temptations he so frequently mentioned, probably because to record them would be to recall

38 Religion, Family, and Gender

them, which would clearly not conform to the diary’s purpose of assisting his spiritual salvation. Merry appears to have experienced considerable guilt about what would be a normal reaction to his unrelenting pain and sickness – namely, discouragement and self-pity. His sense of guilt, as well as his physical discomforts, could be assuaged temporarily by the ecstatic sensations he so carefully kept a record of. He needed to believe that there was a purpose to his pain, and that purpose was the assurance of salvation. He wrote in 1852 (February 10), when he was sixty-six years old: It has appeared probable to me that on account of my having been weakly ever since I was 18 years of age, and on account of my having had many other peculiar tryals, which it is not necessary here to enumerate, God has in great mercy seen fit to give me the blessed hope and expectation which I have at this time alluded to and forever blessed be his holy name that he is a sovereign and has a perfect right to dispense his unmerited favors according to the riches of his free GRACE without rendering an account to vile and mortal worms.

Merry’s physical infirmities and inherent psychological instability may help to explain his obsessions, but he was also a product of his time. Michael Kenny argues that the religion of the twice-born was ‘predicated on an essential antimony – the dialectic of sin and redemption – which gave rise to habitual soul-searching and ecstatic transformation experiences,’ but also to ‘acute psychological tensions.’66 Similarly, Semple claims that the onus placed on the individual by the evangelical revival imposed ‘terrifying demands on the penitent.’ With the understanding that ‘humanity was naturally and totally depraved, and only through personal rebirth and holy living could the terrors of a real hell be alleviated ... came introversion, self-criticism, and oppressively morbid loneliness.’67 It would follow that the religious climate of Merry’s era exacerbated his psychological fragility, while, paradoxically, his religious practices served as a force for emotional stabilization in his daily life. For all his eccentricities, Merry was not a morbidly introspective loner, but a sociable man with a circle of like-minded friends that extended into southern Massachusetts. The religious emphasis on dreams and visions was commonplace in early nineteenth-century America, as was anticipation of the millennium,68 and Merry’s radical religious beliefs were shared by a large proportion of the population in neigh-

The Mental World of Ralph Merry 39

bouring New England, if not the Eastern Townships. Finally, the question of one individual’s representativeness aside, an exclusive focus on documents deemed to be ‘typical’ would lead historians to miss the richness and complexity of lay beliefs and practices in the past.69 In short, we may still know relatively little about what ordinary people once thought and felt,70 but Ralph Merry’s diary does offer a fascinating glimpse into that obscure world.

Notes 1 The diary is located in the archives of the Stanstead Historical Society, where there is also a 235-page typescript identified as ‘A Memoir of Ralph Merry IV, 1786–1863,’ which was prepared by Dorothy Somers Sanborn in 1968. I have altered the punctuation sparingly to facilitate reading but retained the variant spellings. 2 Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1, 46. 3 Jon Butler, ‘The Future of American Religious History: Prospectus, Agenda, Transatlantic Problématique,’ William and Mary Quarterly 42 (1985): 169–70. A similar point is made in Erik R. Seeman, ‘The Spiritual Labor of John Barnard: An Eighteenth-Century Artisan Constructs His Piety,’ Religion and American Culture 5 (1995): 181. 4 David Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Knopf, 1989), 4–11, 18. Jon Butler simply defines popular religion as ‘no less and no more than the religious behavior of laypeople’ (Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990], 4). 5 Badger’s memoirs describe how he was harassed by local officials and military officers during the War of 1812, when American circuit riders were not allowed to enter the colony. See E.G. Hubbard, Memoir of Joseph Badger (New York: C.S. Francis; Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1854). 6 Randolph A. Roth, The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, 1791–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1–2, 12. Millerism made a strong impact on the border townships during the 1840s, as we shall see, but the more radical Mormon and Shaker movements did not. 7 Lorne C. MacPherson, ‘Magog and District: 1867,’ Stanstead County Historical Society, Centennial Journal 2 (1967): 9. 8 See J.I. Little, Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian

40 Religion, Family, and Gender

9 10

11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18

Identity, 1792–1852 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), parts 3 and 4. Seeman, ‘Spiritual Labor,’ 181. Merry’s journal states that his father was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, where his great-grandfather settled after immigrating from London. Ralph III eventually moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where the family lived until 1792 (when Ralph IV was six years old). They then moved to the settlement frontier at St Johnsbury until Ralph IV was twelve, when they finally moved to Bolton Township (‘A Memoir,’ introduction, 1). Marie-Paule LaBrèque, ‘Merry, Ralph,’ in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 6, 501–2. On Merry’s family relations, see J.I. Little, ‘The Peddler’s Tale: Radical Religion and Family Marginality in the Journal of Ralph Merry, 1804– 1863,’ in Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau, eds, Mapping the Margins: The Family and Social Discipline in Canada, 1700–1975 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004). ‘A Memoir,’ introduction, 4. ‘A Memoir,’ 20 Sept. 1809, 21 Sept. 1809, 27 Oct. 1809, book 1, 4, 5. By 1817 Merry was fasting on a weekly basis (16 Sept. 1817). Donald M. Scott, From Office to Profession: The New England Ministry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 40–1; Caldwell, Puritan Conversion Narrative, 2, 39–41, 164; Peter A. Dorsey, Sacred Estrangement: The Rhetoric of Conversion in Modern American Autobiography (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 26–7. B.F. Hubbard, Forests and Clearings: The History of Stanstead County, Province of Quebec (Montreal: Lovell, 1874), 97–8. See, for example, his entries for 27 July 1838 and 26 August 1839. On this debate, see Whitney Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 241–2. The Stanstead Circuit of the Methodist Episcopal Connection was created in 1804 as part of the Vermont District of the New England Conference. The American-based preachers confined their visits to four-week circuits until Ashur Smith returned from Vermont to settle in Bolton Township in 1816. See Hubbard, Forests and Clearings, 84; Cyrus Thomas, Contributions to the History of the Eastern Townships (Montreal: John Lovell, 1866), 351; John Carroll, Case and His Cotemporaries, vol. 1 (Toronto: Samuel Rose, 1867), 279; Françoise Noël, Competing for Souls: Missionary Activity and Settlement in the Eastern Townships, 1784–1851 (Sherbrooke: Département d’Histoire, Université de Sherbrooke, 1988), 130.

The Mental World of Ralph Merry 41 19 G.A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 46. 20 Dorsey, Sacred Estrangement, 33; Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 197, 228. 21 The original entry was crossed out and rewritten on pages that were sewn in much later. 22 The original entry was begun on 27 August 1814, but most of it was cut out and replaced with two pages inserted later. 23 Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects in Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 157–8. Another historian states that Charles Wesley’s hymns constituted ‘a practical theology, memorable and based on experience’ (James Dale, ‘The Singer’s Response to the Word: Charles Wesley’s Hymns of Invitation,’ in Charles H.H. Scobie and John Webster Grant, eds, The Contribution of Methodism to Atlantic Canada [Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992], 243). See also Leonard I. Sweet, ‘Nineteenth-Century Evangelism,’ in Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams, eds, Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience: Studies of Traditions and Movements, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), 882–3; and Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 218. 24 Stanstead Historical Society Museum, Ralph Merry, Jun., New Hymns of Cheering Repast for the Heavenly Pilgrim ([Montpelier, VT]: Printed for the author, 1817). 25 Dorsey, Sacred Estrangement, 32. 26 See H.N. Muller, ‘A “Traitorous and Diabolical Traffic”: The Commerce of the Champlain-Richelieu Corridor during the War of 1812,’ Vermont History 44 (1976): 78–96. 27 According to Richard Hulan, an expert on American camp-meeting hymnody, none of these hymns entered the broader tradition (private communication, 4 May 2001). 28 On this theme, see William J. Gilmore, ‘Peddlers and the Dissemination of Printed Material in Northern New England, 1780–1840,’ in Peter Benes and Jane Montague Benes, eds, Itinerancy in New England and New York (Boston: Boston University, 1986). 29 Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993), 7, 13, 22, 27–9, 261–4. 30 Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 168. 31 D.G. Bell, ‘The Allinite Tradition and the New Brunswick Free Christian Baptists, 1830–1875,’ in Robert S. Wilson, ed., An Abiding Conviction: Maritime Baptists and Their World (Saint John: Acadia Divinity College and the Baptist Historical Committee of the United Baptist Convention of the Atlantic Provinces, 1988), 59.

42 Religion, Family, and Gender 32 On this relationship, see Little, ‘The Peddler’s Tale.’ 33 The Stanstead Quarterly Meeting was established in 1828. During the fall of 1835 Merry attended several sermons by William Warner, who was Eaton Township’s Freewill Baptist preacher. Warner is identified in University of Vermont, Bailey-Howe Library, Stanstead Free Will Baptist Quarterly Meeting, First Record Book, 1828–1847 (no pagination). 34 The Methodist Protestants were an American-based sect founded by Vermonters in 1814, but which did not formally split from the Methodist Episcopal Church until 1830, when the membership was approximately three thousand. The Methodist Protestants nicely suited Merry’s philosophy, for they rejected the episcopacy as being contrary to scripture (replacing the bishop with a president elected each year), looked forward to the imminent second coming of Jesus, and practised faith healing. See Donal Ward, ‘Religious Enthusiasm in Vermont, 1761–1847’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1980), 70, 110; Neil Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 111. 35 Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 7. 36 Semple, Lord’s Dominion, 59. 37 Starr, Defoe, 17–18. 38 B. Carvosso, ed., A Memoir of Mr William Carvosso (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, n.d.; preface to 2nd edition dated 1835); http:// www.djpate.freeserve.co.uk./Evangelicalism.htm. 39 This comment is added to the entry for 24 October 1837 and made again on 17 April 1852, when he wrote a poem commemorating his experience of exactly thirteen years earlier. The poem was entered into the diary on 1 July 1853. 40 Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 19. On this theme, see also Seeman, ‘Spiritual Labor,’ 182, 198–207. After six months of working as a peddler in 1837, Merry bought a number of books in Boston before returning to the Outlet (22–3 October 1837). He did the same again in 1840, including eight copies of Carvosso’s memoirs (20 October 1840). 41 Two of the best studies are David L. Rowe, Thunder and Trumpets: Millerites and Dissenting Religion in Upstate New York, 1800–1850 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985); and Michael Barkun, Crucible of the Millenium: The BurnedOver District of New York in the 1840s (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986). 42 On Millerism in the Eastern Townships, see Denis Fortin, ‘“The World

The Mental World of Ralph Merry 43

43

44

45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55

56 57

58

Turned Upside Down”: Millerism in the Eastern Townships, 1834–1845,’ Journal of Eastern Townships Studies 11 (Fall 1997): 39–59; and J.I. Little, ‘Millenarian Invasion: Millerism in the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada,’ in Richard Connors and Andrew Gow, eds, Anglo-American Millenarianism: From Milton to the Millerites, Studies in the History of the Christian Tradition (Leiden and Boston: E.J. Brill Press, 2004). Quoted in May Harvey Drummond, The Grand Old Man of Dudswell, Being the Memoirs of the Rev. Thomas Shaw Chapman, M.A. (Quebec: Telegraph Printing Co., 1916), 63. Denis Fortin, ‘L’Adventisme dans les Cantons de l’Est du Québec: Implantation et institutionalisation au XIXe siècle’ (Ph.D. diss., Laval University, 1996) (single space edition), 136–8, 140–1. The World’s Crisis published his wife’s obituary in 1854, but Merry asked the Morning Star to copy it (‘A Memoir,’ 18 May 1854). The obituary appears in book 11, 15. The names of the region’s Adventist preachers and churches can be found in Fortin, ‘L’Adventisme,’ Appendix L. Fortin, ‘L’Adventisme,’ 141. Fortin, ‘L’Adventisme,’ 137, 141. See Fortin, ‘L’Adventisme,’ chapter 11. Butler, Awash in a Sea, 228–9. Butler, Awash in a Sea, 238–9. Butler, Awash in a Sea, 233. This is one characteristic of what anthropologists define as ‘folk religion.’ See Don Yoder, ‘Toward a Definition of Folk Religion,’ Western Folklore 33 (1974): 12. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 7, 200–1. Hall (p. 243) explicitly rejects Keith Thomas’s argument that people opted for occult knowledge in defiance of religion. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 100–1. Bibliomancy had also been condemned by the Council of Paris in 829. See Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 209–11. See C.P. Stacey, A Very Double Life: The Private World of Mackenzie King (Toronto: Macmillan, 1976). Roth, Democratic Dilemma, 1–2, 12. For the British North American context, see Nancy Christie, ‘“In These Times of Democratic Rage and Delusion”: Popular Religion and the Challenge to the Established Order, 1760–1815,’ in G.A. Rawlyk, ed., The Canadian Protestant Experience, 1760–1990 (Burlington, ON: Welch Publishing, 1990). See J.I. Little, State and Society in Transition: The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships, 1838–1852 (Montreal and Kingston:

44 Religion, Family, and Gender

59

60 61 62

63 64

65

66

67 68

69 70

McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997); and Stephen Moore, ‘T.B. Rider and the Rider Family of Fitch Bay, 1850–1960: Enterprise and Entrepreneurship in a Rural Quebec Village’ (M.A. thesis, Bishop’s University, 1993). J.I. Little, ed., The Child Letters: Public and Private Life in a Canadian Merhcant-Politician’s Family, 1841–1845 (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1995), 18. On the shouting tradition in American Methodism, see Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions, chapter 3. One temperance poem can be found in book 11, 39. A Sherbrooke printer named Carr agreed to produce 1,000 copies for $10, and five days later Merry reached another printing agreement with a man named Robinson (9–15 July 1854, 31 July 1854, 2 September 1854). Starr, Defoe, 5–6, 33. See also Dorsey, Sacred Estrangement, 24. Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 19; Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); and Rodger M. Payne, The Self and the Sacred: Conversion and Autobiography in Early American Protestantism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998). Marilyn Ferris Motz, ‘Folk Expression, of Time and Place: 19th-Century Midwestern Rural Diaries,’ Journal of American Folklore 100, no. 396 (1987): 134, 138. Michael Kenny, The Perfect Law of Liberty: Elias Smith and the Providential History of America (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 258–9. Semple, Lord’s Dominion, 59. Butler, Awash in a Sea, 222; J.F.C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–1850 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979). Seeman, ‘Spiritual Labor,’ 183. Harrison, Second Coming, 230.

2 The Fireside Kingdom: A Mid-Nineteenth-Century Anglican Perspective on Marriage and Parenthood

In the New England of the 1820s and 1830s, according to Nancy Cott, ‘essays, sermons, novels, poems and manuals offering advice and philosophy on family life, child rearing, and women’s role began to flood the literary market.’1 Few historians have examined the impact of this phenomenon on the Canadian side of the border,2 where a resident of the Eastern Townships made his own small contribution to the ‘cult of domesticity.’ Though he was an Anglican clergyman of orthodox High Church principles, the Reverend James Reid of St Armand East was preoccupied with the family in a manner generally associated with adherents of evangelical religion.3 In fact, his antipathy to emotional revivalism and the concept of sudden conversion intensified his insistence on the crucial role played by parents in moulding future generations. Reid’s sixty-four essays on religion and the family appeared in the Missiskoui Standard between January 1837 and April 1838, the Rebellion period when this Tory-sympathizing newspaper hammered persistently and intemperately at Lower Canada’s Patriotes and all who would compromise with them.4 Presumably, the ‘fireside’ essays offered respite from the disturbing political news of the day, but their style was far from light-hearted and their message anything but trivial. In the Reverend Reid’s view, the family was the very foundation of a peaceable Christian society, and the role of parent was the most important one that any individual could assume. And, while historians have become increasingly sceptical about the value of didactic literature as a reflection of social reality,5 Reid’s personal diary reveals a strong preoccupation with his own family throughout his long life. The journals from the period of his children’s youth were destroyed, but the surviv-

46 Religion, Family, and Gender

ing volumes suggest strongly that he practised what he preached as far as the male parenting role was concerned.6 The shift away from the sacraments and priestly authority after the Protestant Reformation placed more onus on the household to provide a framework for Christian discipline. Consequently, the idealization of the family, with a focus on companionate marriage and parental nurturing, was already evident in seventeenth-century England.7 But, referring to New England, John Demos claims that an inclusive image of the family as community began to give way to an exclusive image of family as refuge only in the early nineteenth century.8 Gender historians such as Nancy Cottt assume that this cult of domesticity was greatly intensified by the rise of industrial capitalism because the middle-class home was increasingly seen as a haven from the pressures and anxieties of the market, and as a morally superior alternative to ‘both the “vain” and fashionable sociability of the rich and the promiscuous sociability of the poor.’9 Referring to Oneida County, New York, at mid-century, Mary Ryan stresses the enlargement, remoteness, and increasing formality of the public sphere, the economic uncertainty for small producers and retailers, and the increasingly individualized nature of middle-class occupations themselves.10 Such an analysis is somewhat premature as far as James Reid’s essays are concerned, for they were directed at a pre-industrial society of farmers, village merchants, and tradesmen.11 Still lying a few years in the future was the era of railroad construction and modern ‘state formation,’ when community voluntarism would be eclipsed by municipal government, school commissions, and bureaucratic regulation.12 As an educated clergyman in touch with a wider institutional and intellectual world, Reid was obviously reflecting ideas and values disseminating from more economically and culturally advanced areas, but his newspaper series must have found a receptive audience or it would not have continued as long as it did. The economic crisis and political conflict of the late 1830s in Lower Canada would create its own more immediate sense of anxiety and alienation in the Eastern Townships. In addition, the diminishing supply of arable wild land in longer-established areas such as St Armand may have increased concerns about the independence of offspring from their parents. Certainly, Reid’s diary reveals that he worried constantly about his four sons, two of whom migrated to distant places in the United States where they died early deaths. James Reid’s essays in the Missiskoui Standard stress the importance of public worship and regular church attendance, but the primary

The Fireside Kingdom 47

emphasis is on parental guidance and love, with a particular focus on family prayer at the evening fireside. These essays are worth examining, not because Reid was a brilliant or original thinker who influenced the intellectual currents of his day, but because little is known beyond the obvious about the social values and teachings of the ordinary clergymen in nineteenth-century Canada. And, in this church-going era, who would have had more influence on the outlook and behaviour of the general public? As William Westfall has noted of nineteenth-century Ontario, ‘Protestantism not only shaped how people saw God, it also shaped the culture through which that society interpreted the world.’13 Born in 1780, the son of a small tenant farmer in Perthshire, James Reid experienced a religious conversion at the hands of an itinerant preacher at the age of twenty-one.14 A year later, in 1802, Reid entered the Haldane Seminary in Edinburgh, remaining there for three and a half years. He was then sent to a Perthshire parish, where he was ordained a Congregational minister, but soon afterward he was strongly encouraged by Robert Haldane to become a missionary in Glengarry County, Upper Canada. Here disillusionment soon set in, for the Glengarry Highlanders were already well served by the Presbyterian and Roman Catholic churches, and the Haldane family’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Home and Abroad terminated its financial support six months after Reid’s arrival. Unable to move because of the debts he had contracted, Reid managed to survive by supplementing his preaching with teaching school. The last straw came in 1810, when Reid learned that the Haldanes had switched their allegiance from the Congregationalists to the Baptists.15 He refused to follow their example, instead counselling his congregation to sell their church to the Presbyterians. He then took a teaching position in the county town of Cornwall, where he fell under the influence of John Strachan, the forceful Scottish-born cleric and teacher who had himself converted from the Church of Scotland to the Church of England. In 1812 Reid poured out his grievances against the Haldanes in a preface to Strachan’s lengthy polemic entitled Hypocrisy Detected.16 A year later, through Strachan’s influence, Reid was placed in charge of the new Royal Institution school in the parish of St Armand, stretching eastward along the Vermont border from Lake Champlain’s Missisquoi Bay. Here he formed a life-long friendship with Charles James Stewart, the wealthy Scottish missionary who was largely responsible for establishing the Church of England in the Eastern Townships.17 When ordained as a priest in 1816, Reid had already replaced

48 Religion, Family, and Gender

Stewart as the minister for St Armand; he held this position in the small village of Frelighsburg until he died in 1865, at the ripe old age of eighty-five.18 Reid played an active role in the community, establishing a temperance society during the 1830s, serving as an official of the local school district for over thirty years,19 and speaking out in the press against the Reformers. Never forgetting his humble origins and unorthodox education, he appears not to have aspired to the church hierarchy, though his diary reveals that he was a diligent and critical reader of theological works, and that he was sensitive to slights from his religious superiors.20 Not surprisingly, then, Reid sought out a measure of recognition through publication. In addition to his brief autobiography in the antiHaldane tract, in 1836 he criticized the Episcopal bishop of Vermont’s attack on the temperance movement, and in 1841 he took on the Baptists with his lengthy Discourse on Infant Baptism.21 Reid also attempted to publish a biography of Charles Stewart and may have wished to print the series of eighteen carefully transcribed sermons that are to be found among his papers in Frelighsburg.22 Based on Genesis and first delivered during the 1820s, these sermons reflect his belief in the fundamental religious role of the family through his theological defence of infant baptism. After discussing how circumcision became a token of God’s covenant with Abraham that his descendants were to be the chosen people, Reid argues that baptism became the same initiating token for Christians. In both cases, children inherited this right from their parents. Not only were children ‘always, from the beginning of the world, included in every covenant which God made with their parents,’ but Jesus had commanded that they ‘be brought unto him, before they could come, either in body or in mind, of their own accord.’23 Reid does not actually state that infant baptism has a regenerative power, or represents the washing away of original sin, as High Church Anglicans insisted,24 but the implications for the family are clear: Much is said, and much is printed about the conversion of the world; but if ever the world shall be converted, those who are called Christians must begin to allow their children the enjoyment and benefits of their own divine privileges, and bring them up in the ‘nurture and admonition of the Lord,’ and not as the children of heathens or infidels, left to their own choice. As matters are now conducted, the children are left out of the Church, as tender, helpless lambs outside the fold, to be torn and de-

The Fireside Kingdom 49 voured by ravenous beasts. They are left to themselves, in the belief that they have nothing to do with a Gospel ordinance, or a Gospel ordinance with them, until it shall please God to convert them after they have come to the years of maturity. While thus wandering outside of the fold of Christ, purposely and systematically set loose, until they arrive at full stature, not only in body, but also in sin, the preacher is sent to reclaim and convert them.25

Reid’s focus on baptism was not theological hair-splitting, for it represented a profound division in outlook between radical evangelical Christianity and the more established churches. George Rawlyk has argued that adult baptism was ‘a ritual permeated not only by religious meaning but also by folk belief and by a sense of almost medieval magic.’ According to him, at the turn of the nineteenth century a number of religious radicals in the Maritime colonies began to regard ‘believer’s baptism’ as being at least as important as the actual instant of conversion.26 Reid, on the other hand, envisioned the church as a family-based institution in which emphasis would be placed, not on converting adults, but on raising children and youths to be devout and sober-minded Christians.27 While Reid’s theological attacks on adult baptism glossed over its social implications, including greater independence from the patriarchal household,28 his ideas on the family are expressed clearly and comprehensively in his fireside essays, written for a general audience. In his first essay, Reid summarized his argument: ‘The fireside is a kingdom on a humble scale, which has customs, usages, privileges and Laws peculiar to itself. Here are the nurseries which raise all the plants which flourish in a nation. [...] Hence the domestic circle is the most important of all societies and governments, because it is the foundation of all the virtues, and of all the vices, that may adorn, or disgrace, the moral face of the world.’ As in his defence of infant baptism, Reid argued that ‘the seeds of virtue, religion, truth, justice, honor and charity’ had to be sown at the fireside; otherwise, ‘it is, generally speaking, out of question [sic] to expect that they shall grow or flourish, when we come to act on the theatre of the world.’29 Having established the fundamental importance of the family, Reid in his next essay turned to the initial step in its formation: courtship and marriage. Like the Extrait du rituel published by the Catholic Diocese of Quebec a year earlier in 1836, he emphasized the teaching of St Paul that husband and wife should be ‘united together in mutual love,

50 Religion, Family, and Gender

affection and esteem.’30 He went so far as to state that there should be ‘an agreement in principles, inclinations, tastes and pursuits.’ But Reid was not referring to romantic love, for he warned against succumbing to superficial attractions: ‘Love’ that has respect only to personal appearance, figure, complexion, a pleasant voice, agreeable manners in company, without knowing that they are equally agreeable at the fireside; or to dress, color of the hair, roseate hue of the cheek, or to the expectation of property, without sufficient regard to moral principles and qualities, the temper and disposition of the heart, education, character and connexions, will soon be in danger of losing its ardor, and then for want of something more precious and lasting than mere beauty and superficial qualities, any other result may be expected than a settling down into the quiet, placid contentment of mutual affection and esteem.31

Reid repeated this message in later essays, writing, ‘Young people, when they are about to marry the object of their mutual love and choice, are in most cases, however harsh the phrase may sound, idolators, with respect to each other. Each one is sure there is no fault in the other. All is perfection. One is an angel, the other is a sun.’32 To counter this delusion, he advised that particular attention be paid to how the prospective partners ‘demean themselves toward their parents, their brothers and their sisters.’ Prospective marriage partners should always remember, ‘In making the choice of a husband or a wife, a confidential, kind friend, a prudent, discreet and pious mother is wanted, on the one hand; and on the other, the same qualities are wanted in the kind, industrious and pious father.’33 Like a modern-day advice columnist, James Reid published and replied to a letter purported to be from a young woman seeking courtship advice on behalf of herself and two female friends. ‘Fanny Cautious’ wrote that her current suitor ‘is very agreeable as to person. In his manners he is modest and intelligent, but I have my doubts about the propriety of consenting to give him my hand, because he is careless about religion.’ Likewise, Miranda’s suitor ‘is not without some good and agreeable qualities. He is a very agreeable talker – a good companion, and kind in his disposition; but she laments that he is too fond of spending his evenings in public places, where strong drinks are sold, though he is not yet any thing like a drunkard.’ Finally, ‘Fidelia has attracted the attentions of a young man who seems never to be happy

The Fireside Kingdom 51

unless he can be where his eye can see her: or be so near to her side as to be able to whisper something in her ear.’ Fidelia remained concerned, however, that her doting suitor ‘loves his own dear self beyond all.’ Protesting that he had not been given much information on which to base his advice, Reid nevertheless warned Fanny Cautious ‘to remain cautious a little longer in single blessedness. To make the marriage state what it should be, it is indispensable that, besides personal attachment, there must be agreement in principles, similarity of tastes, feelings, and pursuits, between the parties.’ As for Miranda, the teetotalling Reid dismissed her suitor out of hand, suggesting that if she ‘is not cautious let her borrow a little of that virtue from Fanny.’ Finally, Fidelia was advised not to ‘commit your happiness to the keeping of a man so absorbed in himself.’ Perhaps it is not surprising that Reid’s own two daughters never married, though one died when she was only twentyseven, but Reid’s words of caution were worth considering in light of the sad fate facing unwed mothers and wives in abusive marriages during this era.34 And he actually challenged the feminine stereotype when he closed his column with the advice that, when men ‘flatter you for your beauty depend upon it that, either they lack in understanding, or they mean to treat you as babes. Look to something more solid than pride of beauty, fashion or dress. Shew that you have intellects, morals and religion, and that you expect to find the same in them.’35 That a clergyman would promote the longstanding companionate view of marriage while remaining suspicious of the less stable romantic love should not be surprising,36 though Reid’s attitude was a sharp contrast to that expressed in the popular conduct books of early modern England. The Puritan clerics who wrote these books stressed the importance of mutual physical attraction and sexual pleasure as the basis of a happy marriage, while also insisting on the subordinate status of the wife to the husband.37 Reid’s emphasis on family prayer and religious reading by the evening hearth clearly reflected a patriarchal view of the household, but his fireside essays did stress that both parents must serve as an example to their children, and keep a close eye on their activities.38 And, while New England sermons in the 1830s apparently continued to give precedence to the theme of order in family and society, ‘vividly emphasizing the necessity for women to be subordinate to and dependent on their husbands,’39 Reid presented a more balanced and nurturing vision of marriage. Because the religious role of the family was so important to him, Reid argued that married couples should share the same religious prin-

52 Religion, Family, and Gender

ciples – otherwise, ‘union cannot be expected except only in name,’ and there would be constant dissension about the raising of their children.40 A mismatched couple would mean that ‘instead of maintaining one uniform government at the fire side,’ there would be two, ‘each striving to be uppermost.’ The married couple should ‘be as much as possible of one mind, in all their pursuits, to promote the comfort and happiness of each other, their mutual respectability and prosperity, as the heads of a family.’ Mutual compatibility was all the more essential because the husband and wife were united for life: ‘They cannot separate, without a flagrant breach of the law of God.’41 To ensure that the ‘marriage connexion’ would be ‘the happiest state which this sinful, transitory life can afford,’ the husband was to fulfil his engagement, ‘not as [a] matter of necessity, or of legal obligation, which he would gladly shun if he could, but willingly, cheerfully, and affectionately, as to one whom he truly loves, and whom he truly delights to please, to succor and to honor.’ The wife had reciprocal obligations. She was not to assume that ‘if she do nothing, her husband is bound to provide for her. She has promised to “serve him” not indeed as a slave serving a master or a tyrant, but as her husband, her best friend, and her lover.’42 Dispensing advice that was traditionally directed at wives, but which he clearly meant for husbands as well, Reid wrote: ‘Guard against the temptations of unnecessary contradiction. If ever allowed, do it in a friendly manner. Never let your words be “like the piercing of a sword.” When one, under some excitement, is hasty, and speaks unadvisedly, let the other be patient. When one emits sparks of anger, let the other spread over them the extinguishing mantle of love, and remain gentle and meek.’43 To drive home the same point in a later essay, he instructed that ‘from the time of their coming together as “one flesh,” they ought to remember that there is a number of smart terms, in their vernacular tongue, with which, in their conversation, they have no longer any business.’44 Reid’s idea of spousal companionship may have been ‘hierarchically arranged,’ to use Jane Errington’s phrase, but it was a surprisingly attenuated hierarchy.45 Ryan attributes the dominance of the patriarchy theme in early American domestic writing largely to the fact that the household was the main place of production: ‘For the family economy to function efficiently, it had to employ discipline and regulation rather than rely on automatic harmony and love.’46 But Keith Wrightson has demonstrated for seventeenth-century England that the patriarchal ‘ideal’ promoted

The Fireside Kingdom 53

in advice literature was often quite different from the more egalitarian ‘reality’ reflected in diaries, and Amanda Vickery makes the same point based on a variety of non-didactic sources from the eighteenth century.47 Unfortunately, it is difficult to judge how compatible Reid felt with his own barely literate wife, Isabella, for she is a rather shadowy figure in a diary filled with musings about their offspring. But neither does he ever criticize her, and he becomes particularly solicitous about her welfare in his later years.48 Historians of domesticity have focused largely on the marital couple, but it is clear that in dispensing his advice Reid was not concerned mainly with what Peter Ward has called ‘the holiest grail which matrimony offered,’ the happiness of the married partners themselves.49 Rather, his chief preoccupation was with the role of the married couple as parents to the succeeding generation.50 Of that role he wrote: ‘The position in which parents, then, are placed is of far greater importance, in all views that can be taken of it, than any mind can conceive, or the pen of the readiest writer can describe. They have, under God, the very making of the men and women of posterity in charge. For, from them the children not only derive their being but, generally, even their temper, dispositions, feelings, prejudices and sentiments; their industry or negligence, their moral worth or their vicious follies.’ If there had been a ‘nature versus nurture’ debate in this pre-Darwinian era, Reid would have been in the latter camp (though his reasoning was not always consistent, as we shall see). He argued that children ‘have derived your nature from, not only their birth, but they have also imbibed your peculiar habits, and manifestations of temper with their food and drink, and drew them in from your very looks and voice & manners.’51 Repeated many times in the fireside series was the basic argument that, for good or evil, individuals were products of their family upbringing: ‘When the fountains which supply the world with inhabitants are impure, what can we expect the streams to be? Can an impure fountain send forth sweet water? From such families the preaching of the Gospel may call an individual here and there to the knowledge of the truth, but for want of proper training at the fire side, while the mind was tender, such individuals will always labour under great disadvantages.’52 For all the power that parents had to do good or ill, there was a strong deterministic caste to Reid’s sociological musings, for they left relatively little scope for free will or spiritual conversion.53 He warned, ‘The young feel, and think, and act, after the example set before them by

54 Religion, Family, and Gender

their parents, until their habits are formed, & then they are set, set!! It is therefore in vain that we look for much good to arise from the families that are brought up without respect for the word of God.’ In fact, Reid came close to biological determinism when, in pointing to the royal house of Stuart, he went so far as to argue, ‘One single error, especially in the fundamental articles of religious belief, received into the mind, and practically acted upon, may put a family, through successive generations, into a new and dangerous channel.’54 And ‘nature’ was given even more status than ‘nurture’ in his column of two weeks later when he wrote: ‘Tribes and nations are found to this day, after the lapse of thousands of years, to be governed by the principles and maxims of a very remote progenitor ... It is so with families, who from generation to generation are noted for some peculiar habits and propensities, which vitiate their course and mar their happiness.’55 There were only three ways that such a ‘hereditary curse’ could be lifted: ‘First, the influence of pious, discreet teachers, both in day and Sunday Schools. Secondly, the preaching of the Gospel; the means of grace, where they can be had; and thirdly; any advice, warning, example or admonition, that may lead them to the Bible.’56 As fatalistic as Reid’s more enthusiastic arguments may have been, parental influence remained so strong in his mind that he claimed that one should not be discouraged when, occasionally, ‘children who had been brought up at the very best firesides are found astray, or even reprobates.’ The sons of Jacob had conspired to get rid of their brother, Joseph, by selling him into slavery, but ‘the good seed which had been sown in their hearts, revived and produced good fruit, many years afterwards in Egypt.’57 It is unfortunate that the earlier volumes of Reid’s diary have not survived, but those that remain from his later years reveal a concern for his offspring’s emotional life that runs counter to the popular stereotype of the cold and aloof father of the pre-industrial era.58 Even as adults, Reid’s four sons remained a constant preoccupation with him, and he maintained close contact with all of them at considerable expense to his pocketbook. In 1849, after all his sons had moved out of the household, Reid wrote in his diary: Charles is continually writing to me of every admirable quality that he sees in his son. In his last letter, he seems to take shame to himself at the thought that I was a more punctual correspondent than himself, as if the fact was a new discovery. I wrote to him and told him the reason which made the difference in our punctuality. The reason I gave was that children’s

The Fireside Kingdom 55 love to their parents was not equal to the love of parents to their children. I told him that he loved his little boy as he ought to do, and that if he had more boys his love would be no less to one than it would be to each of the rest – that when they came to the age of men and women, merit or good conduct would necessarily cause a preference to take place. I told him not to suppose that his boy’s love to him would equal his when he grew to a man’s estate; for if he did, he would find himself disappointed ... I do not know but that my sons are as dutiful as any other, but they do not shew it in the way I think they ought, and I think I deserve.59

After the death of his infant son, the taciturn Charles succumbed to occasional fits of depression, and his marriage became unstable, much to the elder Reid’s concern.60 Meanwhile, Malcolm, with whom Reid had a stronger bond, was suffering from a wasting disease in far-away Mississippi. Tellingly enough, Malcolm wrote to his father shortly before his death in 1850: ‘I am extremely thankful to you for your Letter as you wrote as if you considered me more of a man, and less a child than formerly.’61 Reid confided to his diary a few days later: ‘I cannot get the dear boy out of my mind for hardly a moment. I cannot cease to mourn and weep, and perhaps I do not wish to cease.’62 Domineering as he may have been, James Reid’s devotion to his sons was rewarded even in the case of John, the black sheep of the family, for he became a regular correspondent after marrying and moving with his very capable young wife to the western frontier of the United States during the early 1850s. Unfortunately, after enlisting in the Iowa cavalry during the Civil War and fighting in many battles, John would die in the infamous Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp in 1864. Reid’s youngest son, James, who had become a local farmer, was also a concern to him, but Reid would die shortly before the younger James succumbed to a lingering illness in 1866.63 Tosh claims, ‘In preparing sons for their place in a man’s world the father’s own manhood was at stake, mortgaged to the future.’64 This was clearly true of Reid. Even though his essays did not distinguish between the raising of boys and girls, he felt freer to praise his daughters, ‘whom I love as my own Soul ... They are dutiful and loving to us, and live together themselves in the Sweetest love.’65 Their domestic charms and dependence could be enjoyed without reservation because they were intended for marriage,66 but a stronger restraint had to be maintained on their social lives. Thus Reid fretted when, in their twenties, the two young women attended social gatherings at which there

56 Religion, Family, and Gender

were dances, though his anger was directed entirely at the hosts for their moral laxity.67 Indeed, it appears that none of the young men in the community could measure up to Reid’s standards for his daughters. Even when a promising Montreal lawyer sent Jane a letter ‘containing certain proposals,’ Reid confided to his diary: ‘The young man has great assurance and much presumption when he would think of such a thing. I hope she will give him no encouragement. I will not oppose, but assuredly will not give consent.’68 His attitude is rather ironic, given his insistence on the moral superiority of marriage and parenthood, but unmarried women who cared for their aging parents, as Jane did, were presumably worthy exceptions.69 And if Jane was resentful of her status and burden, her father’s diary suggests that he was unaware of it.70 Reid was clearly overly protective of his daughters, though it should not be forgotten that a young man could sow his wild oats and then redeem himself through marriage by assuming the respectable role of breadwinner, but a young woman, ‘once fallen, could never be redeemed.’71 Tellingly enough, the first time that Reid saw his youngest son’s intended wife, who was from a neighbouring township, was when he performed their marriage ceremony. He was quick to take offence, however, when women in the village hinted that James had rushed into marriage with someone beneath his social status: ‘A farmer’s daughter in his own vicinity who knows well what kind of home he is bringing her to – who sees what she has to expect, & cannot naturally look for any thing different from, or much better than what she was used to, is more likely to ... exert herself to make it a more comfortable home. Be it ... a matter of mere convenience [it] is all the better for that, for if [it] has less of what romancers call love it has more reason.’72 As a clergyman whose daily routine seldom took him far from the household, Reid had a greater opportunity than most men to play an active part in raising his family.73 According to Cott, however, New England ministers of the early nineteenth century ‘fervently reiterated their consensus that mothers were more important than fathers in forming “the tastes, sentiments, and habits of children,” and more effective in instructing them.’74 Errington has found the same theme in the newspapers of Upper Canada,75 but Reid clearly disagreed, though he assumed that mothers would play the dominant role in early childhood. In his first essay on the family, he wrote, ‘To teach the art of reading & writing or book learning to any extent, small or great is not the education which I mean, but that which the mother must begin as soon as her child is able to lisp, and which afterwards must be carried

The Fireside Kingdom 57

on by the father and mother conjointly, when he is able to comprehend the nature of truth; of governing life’s passions; of restraining his desires; of obeying their commands; and of doing to his brothers and sisters as he would like to be done by.’76 Ever the insecure worrier, Reid sometimes felt that he had been too accommodating to his family. He confided to his diary in one of his moments of self-pity: ‘I never was master as I ought to have been in my own family, and as I yielded and surrendered the authority which God has given to every husband and father, I am mostly punished. I did it for the sake of peace, but I find when too late that a dereliction of duty and right never bring peace.’77 Many gender historians have, nevertheless, been rather quick to assume that ‘the idea of fatherhood itself’ began to wither away with the rise of domesticity.78 Patriarchy was slowly being replaced by a more equal partnership, but the father certainly did not relinquish his moral authority over the family.79 Reid’s concept of family was largely restricted to parents and children, and his journalistic essays refer only briefly to relatives and servants in the household, stressing that they ‘are the members that compose your fireside society, and they are to join with you in prayer to your common Creator, Preserver and Lord.’80 Although he insisted that, like the others in the household, servants should be allowed rest from their labours on Sundays in order to participate in religious rituals, Reid admitted that ‘such is the dilapidation of the fire side government in our unhappy days’ that most domestics would consider efforts to interfere in their Sabbath leisure time to be ‘an unwarrantable attempt to control their liberty.’81 While Reid showed considerable tolerance and affection towards his farmhand, a Scottish pensioner from the British army who was inclined to go on the occasional spree with his drunken wife, he was less patient with the succession of young females who helped in the house, generally not deigning to use their names in his diary entries. Even in his seventies, Reid would do the farm chores without much complaint when left alone by ‘Auld Sandy,’ but he became quite irritated whenever ‘the girl’ left Isabella and Jane for a few days to visit her own family.82 Servants may have been part of the household (though Sandy lived in his own home), but they were hardly members of the family. What explains the crucially important role that the nuclear family played in James Reid’s public and private life? To begin with, as an Anglican priest, he had adopted the view that the surest route to spiritual salvation lay through the established church, the bulwark of a

58 Religion, Family, and Gender

peaceful and civilized society. But the rather formal and hierarchical Church of England was never entirely a comfortable fit with the American settlement frontier where he lived, for here society was essentially simplified to a loose collection of independent farmers and villagers in which the nuclear family was by far the most important institution.83 Reid’s emphasis on the religious role of the family was less a product of Evangelical sympathies than an accommodation to his social environment, one in which the ideal family would become the church in microcosm, with parents serving much of the role normally assumed by the clergy. One should not underestimate the sense of community created by such institutions as the school, temperance society, and church itself, in all of which Reid played a leading role.84 But, while the line between family and outside community was far from distinct in early New England, it is quite sharply delineated in Reid’s writing. His diary reveals that, even after four decades in St Armand, he felt somewhat of an outsider in what was clearly a fractious society. In 1849 Reid complained: ‘How few people we have with whom I can spend a profitable hour! What a bar my position has been to my improvement! But I cannot help it. This Slab City has been my lot and here I must remain, how ever much soever I may dislike it.’85 Four years later, he wrote: ‘I don’t know that they would agree to any thing. They are so divided, and so jealous of one another. It is a wonderful neighbourhood. Where is there one of such intelligence and such conversational, agreeable social manners as to make an evening or an hour with them profitable or interesting to me?’86 Because his wife was from Upper Canada, Reid had no in-laws in the area, which may have been just as well for him, given his anxieties about social status. Certainly, he never forgot the public humiliation brought by his own brother and sister after they arrived from Scotland in 1818. The former ran up considerable debts before absconding, and the latter moved to Upper Canada after becoming pregnant and marrying (in Reid’s words) ‘a low Irish Roman Catholic who was many years her junior.’87 When a young woman rejected his son James’s offer of marriage in 1850, a humiliated Reid blamed this old scandal: ‘Seeing how it has hitherto been with us, it may be a blessing that God has taken to himself my dear grandson [Charles’s son], in order that my posterity may not increase. In my own family, in my brother and Sister I have been unfortunate.’88 Repeated here, was his fatalistic concept of moral contamination being passed from one generation to the next.

The Fireside Kingdom 59

Aside from the social situation Reid found himself in, one might speculate that his fireside essays, written when he was nearly fiftyseven years old, were a lament for an idealized family relationship that he would have wished to enjoy. Certainly, he may have blamed himself as a father for the failures of his sons, but the evidence from his surviving diaries suggests that his family remained a refuge from his own rather disappointing career. His sensitive and introverted personality also helps to explain why he remained focused on his family long after his sons had left home. At one point he even questioned whether his obsession with his children was sinful: ‘I fail most grievously in casting my care respecting them on the Lord ... Why cannot I believe that he careth for them? Why do I act and feel, as if he did [not] but had all to do myself?’89 The focus of family historians of the pre-industrial era has largely been on the Puritans, followed by the evangelicals, and Lawrence Stone argues, ‘There seems to have been an uninterrupted connection between the caring but authoritarian discipline of the Puritan bourgeois parent of the seventeenth century and the caring but authoritarian discipline of the Evangelical bourgeois parent of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.’90 Certainly, Wesley advised parents to ‘break the will if you would not damn the child,’ and Philip Greven claims that the ‘aggressively repressive methods’ of the Evangelical mode of childrearing persisted into nineteenth-century America.91 As late as the turn of the twentieth century, the official stance of the Canadian Methodist Church was that even though young children did not commit sin, lacking responsibility, they nevertheless ‘possessed an evil nature which would lead them to sin when they matured.’92 But Neil Semple claims that the trend among the more liberal Methodist spokesmen had long been towards the Romantic belief that children were both innocent and naturally moral creatures: ‘With supervision, discipline and a sound environment, conversion would not be necessary and the safety of childhood could be extended for all children at least into adolescence.’93 Reid appears to have arrived at the same position concerning the lack of need for conversion even while the rather pessimistic tone of his discourse suggests that he adhered to the doctrine of original sin. The essence of his teaching was not the Romantic notion that children were naturally good, for he believed that only nurturing, God-fearing parents could ensure that they did not stray from the narrow path of religion and morality. He wrote in his column of 30 May 1837: ‘Never think it enough that you pray for

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them. Exhort them. Explain as much as you can of the Scriptures to them. Teach them their duty. Show them that they are sinners and need repentance, and the pardoning mercy of God through the merits and intercession of Jesus Christ. Give them line upon line and precept upon precept.’94 Reid nevertheless expressed too much love and concern for his own children to conform to Greven’s Evangelical mode of child-rearing.95 While we have no direct evidence of how he interacted with his sons and daughters when they were children, we can discern in his diary the intensity of emotion that Greven associates with the genteel parental temperament. One recent study states categorically that Reid’s earlier mentor, John Strachan, promoted this genteel mode of child-rearing in early nineteenth-century Upper Canada, with the unintended result that Strachan’s sons and those of the local gentry became self-centred and independent-spirited young men.96 But Strachan had exhibited the same rebellious attitude towards his own father a generation earlier,97 and his sons may have simply been attempting to escape his suffocating authority. Certainly, in the case of Reid’s sons, their independent behaviour was quite clearly a reaction against paternal dominance rather than a product of the easy-going indulgence which Greven claims characterized the genteel temperament.98 Reid more closely conforms to Greven’s third category, the moderate temperament, which ‘tried to be authoritative, respectful toward legitimate and essential authority within the family, yet aware of the need to limit the exercise of authority within certain established boundaries.’99 Only further research will reveal how representative Reid’s ideas on the family were of the Canadian Protestant clergy and the members of their congregations, but in the Eastern Townships the family letters of Marcus Child (a leading Methodist who became an Anglican in the 1840s) also reflect the moderate child-rearing sensibility described by Greven.100 Certainly, not everyone in the region adhered to the moderate new Protestant culture that Westfall claims was characteristic of Upper Canada by mid-century,101 but the Wesleyan Methodist clergy were as politically and socially conservative as their Anglican counterparts, and these two denominations claimed over half the Protestant population in the Eastern Townships by 1851. From the perspective of men such as Child and Reid, it was only natural that they should be intimately concerned with the raising of their children, for the role of parent was more important than any other in society.102

The Fireside Kingdom 61

Notes 1 Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Women’s Sphere’ in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 63. 2 The most notable exceptions are Elizabeth Jane Errington, Wives and Mothers, School Mistresses and Scullery Maids: Working Women in Upper Canada, 1790–1840 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995); Katherine McKenna, A Life of Propriety: Anne Murray Powell and Her Family, 1775–1849 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994); and Cecilia Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). 3 John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 36. See also David Newsome, The Parting of Friends: A Study of the Wilberforces and Henry Manning (London: John Murray, 1966), 10–16. 4 The series began as ‘Reflections on the Season’ on 13 December 1836 but soon changed its title and theme. The focus shifted again from the family after the twenty-fourth essay. 5 See, for example, Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,’ Historical Journal 36. 2 (1993): 385–6, 390–1. 6 Four of the thirty-six volumes have survived and are to be found in Montreal Diocesan Archives. They cover the years 1848–54 and 1863–4. A carefully edited transcript of the first two volumes has been produced as a doctoral dissertation by Mary-Ellen Bacon-Reisner as ‘The Diaries of James Reid (1848–1851): Works and Days of a Country Clergyman’ (Ph.D. diss., Laval University, 1990). This dissertation was published after the writing of this article as M.E. Reisner, ed., The Diary of a Country Clergyman, 1848–1851: James Reid (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000). 7 Tosh, A Man’s Place, 34; Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984; reprint 1995), chapter 4. 8 John Demos, ‘Images of the American Family, Then and Now,’ in Virginia Tufte and Barbara Myerhoff, eds, Changing Images of the Family (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 45–55. 9 Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 92. See also pp. 64–7, 97; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 20, 28; and Tosh, A Man’s Place, 17–34.

62 Religion, Family, and Gender 10 Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 147–53. 11 St Armand clearly had a sizeable village population, for 98 of 252 households occupied less than ten acres in 1842. It was also one of the most progressive agricultural areas in Lower Canada, with the average farmer in the 1842 manuscript census (defined broadly as all those householders occupying more than ten acres) owning seventy improved acres, seventeen cattle, three horses, twenty-one sheep, and four hogs. 12 See J.I. Little, State and Society in Transition: The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships, 1838–1852 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). 13 William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth Century Ontario (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 13. 14 The following summary of Reid’s early life is based on H.D. MacDermid, ‘The Rev. James Reid,’ Missisquoi Historical Society Reports 18 (1984): 104–10; Reid’s own narrative in Hypocrisy Detected: In a Letter to the Late Firm of Haldane, Ewing, and Co. with a Preface, Containing the Narrative of Mr. James Reid, a Missionary Sent by These Gentlemen to Upper Canada (Aberdeen: J. Booth, Jun., 1812), ix–xxviii; and Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 43–96. Reid claims that he was nineteen at the time of his conversion, but he also writes that the missionary responsible arrived in his community in 1801. 15 The Haldanes apparently became Baptists in 1808, not 1810 as Reid’s narrative states. See Donald E. Meek, ‘Evangelical Missionaries in the Early Nineteenth-Century Highlands,’ Scottish Studies 28 (1987): 1–2, 8–9. 16 The pamphlet was published anonymously, but the main author was clearly Strachan. See Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 48–9; Montreal Diocesan Archives, James Reid Papers, John Strachan to James Reid, Cornwall, 5 March 1814. 17 See Thomas R. Millman, The Life of the Right Reverend, The Honourable Charles James Stewart D.D., Oxon. Second Anglican Bishop of Quebec (London: Huron College, 1953). 18 A second minister was appointed to take over the western part of the parish in 1826, though St Armand was not formally divided into two parishes until 1834 (Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 75–8). 19 See chapter 5 of this volume; and Montreal Diocesan Archives, James Reid Papers, Parish Report, 31 Dec. 1857. 20 Reid did become one of the honorary canons of the Cathedral Church of the newly erected Diocese of Montreal in 1854, and the following year he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from the University of Bishop’s College (Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 78–9).

The Fireside Kingdom 63 21 Rev. James Reid, Remarks on the Lecture of the Rt. Rev. Bishop Hopkins, against the Temperance Society (Frelighsburg: Standard Office, 1836); and Rev. James Reid, A Discourse on Infant Baptism (Montreal: Armour and Ramsay, 1841). 22 On Reid’s aspirations and career as a writer, see Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 97–120. For a comprehensive list of his publications, see pp. 605–13. 23 Archives of the Parish of St Armand East, Eighteen Sermons by Rev. James Reid, 182–4; Reid, A Discourse, 110. Reid fails to discuss the implications of the fact that the initiation ceremony was confined to males in the Jewish faith, but not in that of the Christians. 24 See Richard A. Vaudry, Anglicans and the Atlantic World: High Churchmen, Evangelicals and the Quebec Connection (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2003), 108–10; Newsome, The Parting of Friends, 48; Tosh, A Man’s Place, 36, 42. 25 Reid, A Discourse, vii. 26 G.A. Rawlyk, ‘The Rage for Dipping: Joseph Crandall, Elijah Estabrooks, and Believer’s Baptism, 1795–1800,’ in G.A. Rawlyk, ed., The Canada Fire: Radical Evangelicalism in British North America, 1775–1812 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 163–4. 27 On the baptism issue in the Canadian Methodist Church, see Neil Semple, ‘“The Nurture and Admonition of the Lord”: Nineteenth-Century Canadian Methodism’s Response to “Childhood,”’ Histoire sociale/Social History 14 (1981): 165–6; and Marguerite Van Die, An Evangelical Mind: Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918 (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 25–37. 28 Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 66–7. 29 Missiskoui Standard, 10 Jan. 1837. 30 Missiskoui Standard, 17 Jan. 1837; Serge Gagnon, Mariage et famille au temps du Papineau (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1993), 189–90. On St Paul’s concept of marriage, see Anthony Fletcher, ‘The Protestant Idea of Marriage in Early Modern England,’ in Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts, eds, Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 173–5. 31 Missiskoui Standard, 17 Jan. 1837. 32 Missiskoui Standard, 7 Feb. 1837. 33 Missiskoui Standard, 31 Jan. 1837. 34 See Errington, Wives and Mothers, 39–51, 55–8. 35 Missiskoui Standard, 21 Feb. 1837. Errington (Wives and Mothers, 36) claims that ‘colonial leaders told women to cultivate modesty, humility, and

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36

37

38

39

40 41

42 43 44 45 46

chastity,’ but the newspaper citations she provides as evidence focus, like Reid, on the value of wisdom and knowledge over beauty, wit, and delicacy. On the critique of fashion, see Morgan, Public Men, 158–62. Alan Macfarlane states that the companionate view of marriage was accepted in England at least as early as the fourteenth century, while the concept of the love marriage evolved slowly from that time forward. Lawrence Stone, on the other hand, claims that romantic love first became a respectable motive for marriage among the English propertied classes in the late eighteenth century. See Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300–1840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 331–4; Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 7–8, 284–6. Fletcher, ‘The Protestant Idea of Marriage,’ 171, 176–9. Wrightson (English Society, 91) argues, however, that while ‘mutuality in marriage is a less dramatic aspect of moralistic advice than their assertions of male authority, [...] it was of equal importance to the writers of conduct books and it should never be ignored.’ Lawrence Stone (Family, Sex, and Marriage, 245–6) argues that the reemergence of regular, daily family prayer illustrates how patriarchy was strengthened in nineteenth-century England, but Tosh (A Man’s Place, 73) states that ‘[i]t was an open question whether the bedtime prayer of mother and child was not more important than the family prayers led by father.’ Van Die’s biography of Nathanael Burwash stresses the religious role played by his mother (An Evangelical Mind, 20–5). Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 158. Similarly, Cecilia Morgan (Public Men, 126–8, 147–53) stresses the patriarchal preoccupation of Upper Canada’s Methodist press, though she describes more diverse views in the secular newspapers. Missiskoui Standard, 31 Jan. 1837. Missiskoui Standard, 17 Jan. 1837. For a trenchant critique of the widespread assumption that gender roles diverged and women became increasingly powerless in the nineteenth century, see Vickery, ‘Golden Age.’ Missiskoui Standard, 17 Jan. 1837. Missiskoui Standard, 24 Jan. 1837. Missiskoui Standard, 7 Feb. 1837. Errington, Wives and Mothers, 34. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 32. In his examination of the leading New England magazines between 1741 and 1794, Stone (Family, Sex, and Marriage, 387) discovered ‘a very great deal of discussion of the companionate marriage,’ but he insists that, as in England, ‘the double sexual standard remained as firmly rooted as ever.’

The Fireside Kingdom 65 47 Wrightson, English Society, 92–104; Vickery, ‘Golden Age,’ 409–14. 48 Isabella Reid survived her husband by three years. Bacon-Reisner (‘The Diaries,’ 587) notes that Isabella Reid avoided signing the parish register with her husband as a sponsor, and that her signature was barely legible on the one occasion that she did sign. But she fails to note that inability to write did not necessarily mean an inability to read. The book given as a gift to Isabella by the wife of a neighbouring clergyman was therefore not necessarily the mistake that Bacon-Reisner suggests. 49 Peter Ward, Courtship, Love and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century English Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), 156. 50 Macfarlane (Marriage and Love, 174) notes that outside industrial Western societies ‘the relationships that are most important are often those between parents and children, with the marital bond a poor second.’ 51 Missiskoui Standard, 14 Feb. 1837. 52 Missiskoui Standard, 28 March 1837. 53 Calvin and the Puritans had also believed that ‘parents must educate and discipline their children in order to give them every chance for salvation’ (Mary Cable, The Little Darlings: A History of Child-Rearing in America [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972; reprint 1975], 6). 54 Missiskoui Standard, 28 Feb. 1837. 55 Missiskoui Standard, 14 March 1837. 56 Missiskoui Standard, 7 March 1837. 57 Missiskoui Standard, 7 March 1837. 58 See, for example, Neil Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society: Making the Twentieth-Century Consensus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), 11. Closer to that stereotype is the diary of Nova Scotia’s Reverend John Seccombe, written in the 1760s, which was more fixated on his meals than on his family. See Gwendolyn Davies, ‘“Gendered Responses”: The Seccombe Diaries,’ in Margaret Conrad, ed., Intimate Relations: Family and Community in Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1800 (Fredericton: Acadiensis Press, 1995). 59 14 Jan. 1849, in Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 139. 60 See, for example, 30 June 1850, in Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 339. 61 Quoted in 27 Sept. 1850, in Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 352. 62 2 Oct. 1850, in Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 356. 63 Though only forty-two at the time of his death, James Reid, Jr, was predeceased by three wives (Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 84–6, 588–90). 64 Tosh, A Man’s Place, 115. 65 13 July 1849, in Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 165. 66 Tosh, A Man’s Place, 115. While Reid made more provision for the formal

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67 68 69 70

71

72 73

74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82

education of his sons than his daughters, he was also concerned that the costs he had incurred to establish Malcolm and James would not leave enough money to provide for Jane and Nancy after his death (BaconReisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 86; 15 Jan. 1849, on p. 140). See, for example, 17 Jan. 1849, in Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 140–1. 13 March 1851, in Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 399, 524–5, 563. On this theme, see Errington, Wives and Mothers, 25, 31. Echoing Carrol Smith-Rosenberg, Ryan (Cradle of the Middle Class, 193–4) suggests that the essential middle-class family bond was between mother and daughter, but Davidoff and Hall (Family Fortunes, 346–7) posit an equally strong tie between father and daughter. Certainly, this was the case for the family of Reid’s contemporary and fellow Eastern Townships resident Marcus Child. See J.I. Little, ed., The Child Letters: Public and Private Life in a Canadian Merchant-Politician’s Family, 1841–1845 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 34–5. Lynne Marks, Revivals and Roller Rinks: Religion, Leisure, and Identity in LateNineteenth-Century Small Town Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 214. See also, Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 193; and Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 332, 404–8. 19 Dec. 1852, in Reid, ‘Diary,’ vol. 25, 4531. Parish clergymen with mission responsibilities could, nevertheless, be absent for extended periods of time. See, for example, J.I. Little ‘Serving “the North East Corner of Creation”: The Community Role of a Rural Clergyman in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, 1829–1870,’ Histoire sociale/Social History 30 (1997): 21–54. Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 86. Errington, Wives and Mothers, 36, 53–4, 66–7. Morgan (Public Men, 153–5) is more ambiguous, but Tosh (A Man’s Place, 113) makes the same point for England by the 1830s. Missiskoui Standard, 10 Jan. 1837. 19 March 1850, in Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 319. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 232. See also Robert L. Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 12–14. See Tosh, A Man’s Place, chapter 4. Missiskoui Standard, 21 March 1837. Missiskoui Standard, 2 May 1837. See, for example, 28 March 1864, in Reid, ‘Diary,’ vol. 36, 6287. On the difficulties of finding and keeping female servants in early nineteenthcentury New England, see Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 29–30, 49. For an examination of domestic servants in Upper Canada, see Errington, Wives and Mothers, chapter 5.

The Fireside Kingdom 67 83 On this concept, see R.C. Harris, ‘The Historical Geography of North American Regions,’ American Behavioral Scientist 22.1 (1978): 115–30. 84 On Reid’s community role and status, see Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 86–9. For a useful survey of the American literature on family and community, see Philip Greven, ‘Family and Community in Early America,’ in Conrad, ed., Intimate Relations. 85 18 Jan. 1849, in Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 141. 86 14 Feb. 1853, in Reid, ‘Diary,’ vol. 25, 4562. See also Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 17–20. 87 Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 81–2, 461–2; 25 June 1853, in Reid, ‘Diary,’ vol. 25, 4603. 88 24 Feb. 1850, in Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 311–12. 89 14 Oct. 1850, in Bacon-Reisner, ‘The Diaries,’ 359. 90 Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage, 466–7. 91 Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980). Linda Pollock also rejects the evolutionary view of child-rearing, arguing that changes in attitudes to children reflected in the advice literature were not accompanied by parallel changes in parental behaviour. See Linda Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent–Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 270–1. See also Linda Pollock, A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children over Three Centuries (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987). Contrast the more historical perspective of Tosh (A Man’s Place, 39–43, 93–100), with its four types of Victorian father. Wesley is quoted in John Cleverly and D.C. Philips, Visions of Childhood: Influential Models from Locke to Spock (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986), 29. 92 Semple, ‘Nurture and Admonition,’ 160. 93 Semple, ‘Nurture and Admonition,’ 159, 164. Van Die (An Evangelical Mind, 25–37) places more emphasis than Semple on the ambivalent moral status of the Canadian Methodist child in the nineteenth century. 94 Missiskoui Standard, 30 May 1837. 95 Nor did the wealthy and influential Anglican Evangelicals, such as the Wilberforces, who settled at Clapham Common in the 1790s. See Tosh, A Man’s Place, 36, 41; Newsome, Parting of Friends, 27–56. 96 Paul Anthony Bamfield, ‘The Well Regulated Family: John Strachan and the Role of the Family in Early Upper Canada, 1800–1812’ (M.A. thesis, Queen’s University, 1985). Errington (Wives and Mothers, 285n117) suggests that the Upper Canadian rhetoric of child-rearing generally conformed to Greven’s ‘genteel’ model, but her judgment may have been influenced by the fact that most of her case studies were members of the gentry.

68 Religion, Family, and Gender 97 98 99 100 101 102

Bamfield, ‘Well-Regulated Family,’ 71. Greven, Protestant Temperament, 265. Greven, Protestant Temperament, 151. See Little, Child Letters. Westfall, Two Worlds, chapter 3. Similarily, the evangelical middle-class fathers examined by Davidoff and Hall (Family Fortunes, 329) in early nineteenth-century England were intensely involved with their families, and Tosh (A Man’s Place, 77) states that ‘the doctrine of separate spheres [...] is particularly misleading here because it loses sight of the distinctively masculine privilege of enjoying access to both the public and the private sphere.’ William Dummer Powell, a member of the Upper Canadian Family Compact, was rather indifferent to his children, but he appears not to have been particularly religious (McKenna, A Life of Propriety, 94, 128).

3 Gender and Gentility: Lucy Peel’s Journal, 1833–6

Lucy and Edmund Peel moved to a homestead near the small Lower Canadian town of Sherbrooke in the spring of 1833 and remained there with their infant children until the spring of 1837.1 From the time their ship left England, Lucy kept a regular account of her thoughts and activities which, with rare additions by Edmund, she sent in monthly instalments to her mother, or occasionally to her sisters and in-laws. The Peel letters, a few of which overlap in time, have survived as transcriptions in three bound volumes titled ‘Letters from Canada.’ While Robert Fothergill defines a diary or journal as a ‘serial autobiography’ written ‘of oneself, by oneself, for oneself,’ rather than as part of a reciprocal correspondence, similar documents by Elizabeth Simcoe, Anne Langton, Mary O’Brien, and Catharine Parr Traill have been published as journals/diaries, and these are the terms that will be used in this essay.2 The transcription of the Peel journal was written in two different hands, quite possibly soon after reception, and recently discovered in a descendant’s house in Norwich.3 As the wife of a naval officer on leave, Lucy Peel belonged to the class of Englishwomen who have left us with the best accounts we have of life on the Canadian settlement frontier, though those published in the past have largely been from Upper Canada rather than Lower Canada’s Eastern Townships, where the English gentility also played a dominant social and political role in the early nineteenth century.4 British North America acted as a magnet to the families of half-pay officers after the Napoleonic Wars, largely because opportunities to establish themselves as landed gentry in the mother country were limited. Linda Colley has also pointed out that patrician confidence and

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authority in the England of this era were being challenged by ‘a calling into question of the very legitimacy of the power élite.’5 To take one example, the wealthy physician Dr William Wilson of Sherbrooke left England specifically because of the enactment of the Reform Bill.6 But there is nothing to indicate that the Peels felt they were exiles; rather, as a newly married couple, they clearly felt that the best opportunity for them to pursue the genteel rural way of life lay in one of the settlement colonies. While the Peels were attracted to the New World by a romantic and utopian dream of creating their own genteel Eden in the wilderness, they were pragmatic enough to regard a permanent return to England as a possibility. The Peel journal is of great interest for the window it provides onto the daily lives of the region’s governing elite, a tightly knit social group that was deeply resented by the local American-born majority.7 But this document also has a wider appeal, for Lucy Peel recorded more than the external events in her life. Her journal may lack the candid tone of a strictly personal diary, but it does reflect ‘the dramatization of the self’ that became fashionable with the rise of sensibility in the late eighteenth century,8 and it does provide a more detailed picture of daily life and thoughts than standard letters or memoirs would. The journal is also a pleasure to read, for it was written with the deliberate ‘literariness’ which Fothergill claims emerged in the early nineteenth century, but without the artifice of chronicles self-consciously produced for publication.9 According to Amanda Vickery, historians have tended to ignore the English gentry (which she defines broadly), simply assuming that its members shared the values of the nobility, to whom they were distantly related. Based on an analysis of the journals, letters, and other writing of genteel women in northern England from the 1730s to the 1820s, Vickery argues that ‘it would be mistaken to see them as simply fawning members of a monolithic upper class. Their relation to the greater gentry and nobility was ambivalent: fascinated admiration, deferential respect, scandalized horror, amused condescension and lofty disregard can all be illustrated from the manuscripts of the genteel.’10 The Peel journal provides an opportunity to examine the ‘mentalité’ of this privileged sector of society in a radically different setting. As British imperial historians have found in other colonial contexts,11 Peel’s writing strongly suggests that the Sherbrooke elite reacted to the levelling threats of the frontier environment by reasserting its identity through genteel social rituals. Indeed, the imperative to do so in the Eastern Townships was probably stronger than it would become in India or

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Africa because the ‘natives,’ who were the local Americans in this case, were not so easily dominated politically, nor did they provide the cheap labour supply that would allow the genteel to avoid manual work themselves.12 Women such as Lucy Peel played an important role in this defensive strategy because they were the principal guardians and promoters of the civilized virtues.13 As Vickery has argued for genteel society in Georgian England, the separate-spheres paradigm of a largely private female world breaks down when we realize that women’s cultural role was anything but marginal.14 Nor, for that matter, was the male world close to being exclusively public. The most distinguishing feature between the Peel household and those of the English gentry described by Vickery was the domestic role played by Edmund, though that ‘feminized’ role does reflect the rise of sensibility in eighteenth-century England.15 Otherwise, while Old World society may have been ‘simplified’ to some extent on the Eastern Townships frontier, where there were few cultural institutions to reinforce class hierarchy,16 the local British gentry had made few accommodations to the New World environment by the time the Peels returned to England in 1837. Only with the outbreak and suppression of rebellion later the same year would a new social order begin to emerge in the region. As a description and analysis of cultural transfer, this essay will explore what the Peel journal reveals about the impact of the British North American frontier on class and gender identity. The focus will be on the same six themes discussed in Amanda Vickery’s monograph on the gentlewomen of Georgian England: love and duty, fortitude and resignation, prudent economy, elegance, civility and vulgarity, and propriety. But first we will turn to the Peel family background and the Sherbrooke social setting. Family Background and Social Setting Born in 1801, naval lieutenant Edmund Peel was too young to have been a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars,17 but he went on extended halfpay leave in the early 1830s in order to establish a home where he would not be forced into long absences from his wife and future offspring. The Peels had been a wealthy manufacturing family for several generations. Edmund’s great-grandfather, Robert ‘Parsley’ Peel, was a partner in one of the largest textile companies in England. Edmund’s grandfather, William, operated a calico business at Church Bank, and

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his great-uncle, Robert Peel, had become one of the country’s richest cotton manufacturers by the end of the eighteenth century. Robert Peel was knighted during William Pitt’s administration, and his son, Robert, would become prime minister in 1834.18 Lucy’s journal reveals that Edmund’s father carried on the manufacturing business at Church Bank until he sold it in 1835.19 This branch of the family appears to have no longer been wealthy, though, when Edmund’s brother, Tom, arrived in New York, newspapers mistakenly referred to him as the Honorable Thomas G. Peel, and even Sir Thomas Peel.20 Even though Edmund had sufficient income to build a comfortable house and hire two or three servants, he and Lucy still had to labour hard themselves, and their circumstances did not change greatly when Edmund’s parents died. As for Lucy’s family, the Meeks, references in the journal suggest that they had business connections to Ceylon and had suffered a reversal of fortune. In one letter, Lucy thanks her sister’s husband for being ‘the guide and gentle counsellor of our family, when the temptations and dangers of riches smiled on every side and its steady friend and cheerful consoler when comparative poverty and sorrow surrounded it[.]’21 Subtle references to the health of Lucy’s father suggest that he may have been an alcoholic.22 Why the Peels chose to live in the Sherbrooke area is not clear, but their political and social conservatism precluded settlement in the United States, and the Eastern Townships had certain attractions for people of their social class. The southern part of the region, bordering on Vermont and New Hampshire, had been settled as early as the 1790s and had therefore passed the frontier stage in some respects. Development had, nevertheless, been slow and there were still only seven thousand settlers in the vast county of Sherbrooke as late as 1831.23 While the economically isolated region was not considered to be a good poor man’s country, its picturesque scenery, inexpensive farms, and freedom from the malaria and cholera that plagued Upper Canada made it an attractive area for the British gentry. An absentee proprietor pointed to an added feature in 1834: ‘The fine hill and dale lay of the land, adapts them admirably for grazing farms, which properly managed, remunerates the farmer well; and with far less labour than any other kind of farming.’24 The British upper classes were specifically targeted by the British American Land Company when it published testimonials from settlers such as Shipton’s W.G. Mack, who ensured his readers in 1836 that ‘you will no where see in this part of the country, gentlemen with their

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beards a week old, wearing shoes that despise Warren, or sitting down to dinner without their jackets. The reason is obvious, – we are surrounded by people who retain the ideas of propriety with which they have been brought up in the “old country.”’25 Lucy Peel reinforced this image in 1834 when she wrote that ‘I think the Mr B____ are right to go to Upper Canada if they go out with the intention of making anything by farming, and can put up with eating at the same table with their helps ... at present this is only a country for a Gentleman who wishes to live quietly and cheaply, without an idea of accumulating money.’26 Indeed, Edmund may have chosen his lot more for its romantic perspective than its agricultural promise, for Lucy frequently wrote of the great rock near their house from which the view ‘is indeed grand, we see Lake Magog very plainly ... I think if Mr Clowes were to live in Canada he would fix upon Dunstall [the Peel’s home] for his situation, how lovely he might make it with all his money and he might have rockerys without end.’27 If there is a garrison mentality expressed in Lucy Peel’s journals, it was not one based on the environment, as Northrop Frye (followed by many others) has claimed was typical of early writing in Canada,28 but on social class and national origin, as we shall see. The Peels probably learned about the Eastern Townships through the colonization efforts of William Bowman Felton, the former naval officer who had acquired 25,000 acres of land in the district, and who was in a good position to recruit British settlers as the colony’s commissioner of Crown lands.29 Edmund had visited the Townships in the fall of 1832 and paid Felton and an absentee proprietor the considerable sum of £112 for 150 largely uncleared acres near the small town of Sherbrooke. (Peel would purchase the lot’s remaining 50 acres for £37 10s. a year later.)30 Because of Felton’s influence, Sherbrooke had become the site of the district court, and those positions not taken by his own brothers and brothers-in-law were filled by other British immigrants. While Edmund was not interested in a patronage position, it was only natural that he and Lucy would gravitate towards this local elite. Indeed, they stayed in the large and hospitable Felton home known as Belvidere for several months while their own more modest Dunstall Villa was being built. Vickery claims that, as a group, the families headed by lesser landed gentlemen, attorneys, doctors, clerics, merchants, and manufacturers described themselves as ‘polite,’ ‘civil,’ ‘genteel,’ ‘well-bred,’ and ‘polished,’ having no recourse to a vocabulary of ‘upper,’ ‘middle,’ and

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‘lower’ class.31 Lucy Peel certainly divided the world into the ‘genteel’ and the ‘vulgar,’ but her social circle was even more exclusive than that described by Vickery, for the local merchants and manufacturers were still too close to the retail and artisanal level, too American, and too politically liberal to be considered entirely respectable by the British officers and professionals. Befitting his political and economic power, William Felton’s family was at the centre of this circle, though the principal role was played by his Minorcan-born wife, Maria, since William was often absent on official duty. Standing in Felton’s shadow, but playing a more active social role locally, was his amiable brother, John. John Felton, who had also been a naval officer, was married to Maria’s cousin and served as the local Crown lands agent. But even family ties did not ensure respectability for the second brother, Charles, who served as the district prothonotary (court clerk). He is rarely mentioned until his imprisonment for debts that, according to Lucy, were the fault of his extravagant wife. Felton’s brother-in-law, Sheriff Charles Whitcher, and his wife are also rather marginal figures in the Peel journal,32 presumably because the latter was an invalid, but the notoriously reactionary and arbitrary Judge John Fletcher and his wife appear frequently as an eccentric but sympathetic old couple.33 Lucy also befriended Eliza Hale, wife of Edward Hale, who was a member of one of the colony’s leading families, and who would replace William Felton as the most powerful figure in the region after the latter’s political disgrace and death in 1837.34 There was, as well, a number of English doctors and lawyers in the Felton circle, but leading American-born entrepreneur-politicians such as Charles F.H. Goodhue and Samuel Brooks rarely warrant a mention in Lucy Peel’s journal.35 Love and Duty Alan Macfarlane has traced the companionate view of marriage back to the fourteenth century or earlier,36 but the eighteenth century brought the rise of the romantic novel in England and strengthened the belief, in Vickery’s words, that ‘the union of man and woman offered the greatest happiness this side of the grave, that mutual love would bear couples up through the trials of life.’37 The Peel journal creates the strong impression that Lucy and Edmund adhered to this belief without reservation, and that their union was, in every respect, a match made in

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heaven. More than two and a half years after their marriage, Lucy wrote: ... the separation of husband and wife must be dreadful, for the love between them is, or ought to be, ‘Strong as Death’ and the longer they live together the harder it would be to part, at least I feel it would be so, for much as I loved Edmund when I married him I have treble the affection for him now, I did not know half his good qualities, he has never spoken an angry word to me and manages my hasty temper so well that I almost fancy at times I have become a most amiable person.38

Even after four years of married life, in closer daily contact and more challenging physical conditions than they would have experienced in England, there was no hint of friction or disagreement between them. Lucy continued to sing Edmund’s praises in nearly every entry, stating at one point that ‘he has all the courage and firmness of a man united with the tenderness and thought of a woman.’39 While one might anticipate that Lucy would conceal the more discouraging aspects of her private life from her mother and other relatives, her unwavering enthusiasm at the very least illustrates the strength of the romantic genteel convention under what were often trying circumstances. Furthermore, the same image of companionate marriage emerges from Lucy’s portrayal of the Felton, Fletcher, and Hale couples. Writing of her prolonged stay with the Feltons in 1833, Lucy claimed that ‘all the time we were there I never heard one disagreeable word pass between any of the members of this amiable and united family, and I think if there is a house without a blue chamber it is Bellevedere.’40 Idealized as it may have been, this image of congenial genteel domesticity is also strongly supported by the voluminous correspondence that has survived between the Peels’ neighbours, Edward and Eliza Hale.41 While rejecting many of the conclusions drawn from the separatespheres paradigm, Vickery does not argue that married partners were equal, for she notes that ‘genteel wives took it absolutely for granted that their husbands enjoyed formal ascendancy in marriage,’ and that ‘love was no enemy to hierarchy.’42 This was clearly the case with the Peels, as with the other genteel families in the region, but Anthony Fletcher goes further, arguing that ‘the very essence of the companionate marriage [...] was the subordination of women,’ and ‘romantic love proved to be patriarchy’s strongest bulwark.’43 From this perspective, Lucy’s consistent portrayal of herself as the beneficiary of Edmund’s

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kindness and support might be interpreted as a form of feminine weakness, but the feeling appears to have been mutual, and Lucy does not emerge from her journals as a helpless or submissive partner in the relationship.44 Fortitude and Resignation The Peel marriage was certainly fertile, for the date of her first delivery suggests that Lucy had become pregnant on the transatlantic voyage, and she would give birth twice more during the next three and a half years spent in Sherbrooke. Vickery notes that ‘for fertile women, motherhood could absorb almost all reserves of physical and emotional energy for at least a decade,’45 and the rather exhausted Lucy was not pleased with the rapid onset of her third pregnancy. But there was no hint that Edmund’s sexual advances were unwelcome, probably because, in Vickery’s words, ‘submission to one’s natural lot was the keynote to genteel maternity.’46 While Lucy never complained about physical discomfort or social isolation during her pregnancies, giving birth clearly was ‘a forbidding prospect.’47 The doctor visited at least five times during the eleven days prior to Lucy’s first delivery, and Edmund’s description of the birth reveals how traumatic the experience was for both of them: I was present all the time to support Lucy and I was much distressed to witness her agonies. I thought it the proper place for a husband at such a moment, considering it nothing more than false delicacy which would make a man absent himself at a time when his presence and support are most required, it is a fearful thing to see a woman in her pain, I could not have believed it possible they had suffered so much, at times I felt quite distracted, as soon as the child was born I staggered into an adjoining room and cried like a child until I saw Lucy smiling and free from pain, her face last seen was distorted with pain, the impression made on me will never be forgotten.48

Edmund, then, clearly does not conform to Jane Errington’s generalization that Upper Canadian men were rather indifferent to childbirth, and that husbands and fathers were ‘banished from the delivery room.’49 Indeed, attendance at childbirth was the norm among middle-class men in Victorian England.50 There was no question but that baby Celia, and those who followed,

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would be maternally breastfed, for this had become an increasingly common practice for the English gentry.51 Lucy and Edmund had clearly been influenced by the Romantic notion of childhood as linked to innocence and nature, which John Tosh sees as central to Victorian domesticity.52 Lucy certainly succumbed to the ‘smothering potential of maternity’ noted by Vickery,53 but Edmund was seldom far from the nursery, and he too was totally engrossed with the development of their infant children. On 2 February 1834 Lucy wrote that Edmund ‘is an excellent nurse too, and Celia loves to be with him and hear him sing,’ and, on 2 June 1835 she described how the second child, Flora, ‘generally wakes once in the night, her Papa gets up and lights a candle she sucks & then Edmund puts her in her Crib & puts out the light and she goes to sleep with a little rocking.’ Clearly, then, Edmund’s paternal role is contradictory to Errington’s assertions that Upper Canadians believed that ‘only women could effectively care for and ensure the physical well-being of their children,’ and that motherhood was ‘shared almost exclusively with other women.’54 Edmund may have been exceptionally caring as a father, but his behaviour does conform to the ‘genteel’ mode of child-rearing identified by Philip Greven in early America.55 Vickery states that the ‘ecstatic embrace of maternal romance’ was too ‘sugary a wrapping’ to cover an experience so ‘cruel, unpredictable and unremittingly physical,’56 and the Peels would experience that unpredictable cruelty themselves when their beloved Celia suddenly died shortly before her first birthday.57 This devastating blow cast a pall on what had, to all appearances, been an idyllic adventure to that point. A week after the death, Lucy wrote that Edmund ‘seldom cries except when alone with me; but he sits like a statue, talks of nothing but Celia, and, when any one but I, am present, never speaks from morning till night. He looks pale as death, and ten years older since Celia died.’58 Lucy and Edmund became less optimistic from this point on, turning to religion for solace. Eight months after Celia’s death, and four months after the birth of Flora, Lucy wrote of Celia: I dwell, when sitting alone, even with pleasure upon the bliss she is enjoying, and consider her in the light of a guardian Angel. And perhaps [...] she may have been taken away in mercy to myself, for I did love her too dearly, and constantly found myself saying, I could not do without her however I was to be taught otherwise. I hope dearest Mamma you will not pronounce me an enthusiast I am no such thing. I know I am more serious

78 Religion, Family, and Gender and less fond of gaiety than I used to be, and I hope I think before I act, but I keep my opinions to myself.59

Lucy and Edmund now avoided socializing on Sundays, and Edmund even went to the Anglican church services alone when Lucy was confined by pregnancy or the care of their infants, but their feelings for each other remained no less intense.60 The couple’s spirits were not raised by the fact that their second child, Flora, was rather sickly from birth.61 Lucy did, however, begin to sing Flora’s praises more unreservedly as her health slowly improved. When Flora was six months old, Lucy wrote that the doctor had said ‘he never saw such beautifully soft blue eyes & such a fine forehead, I wish you could all see her. Edmund thinks her quite as lovely as Celia was.’62 Despite Lucy’s initial reservations, the third child, Richard, was greeted with great joy a few months later, particularly as he would fulfil Edmund’s wish for a male heir. Unfortunately, baby Richard suffered from the same debilitating stomach problems as his sister, Flora, keeping his parents in a state of anxiety until the journal ends when he is six and a half months old. The Peel children might possibly have received better medical care in England, but there were also qualified English doctors in the Sherbrooke area, and Lucy was sent medicines by her family. In the final analysis, the Peels’ frontier location does not appear to have put Lucy at a particular disadvantage in this era of rudimentary medical science, for Vickery reveals how motherhood for the genteel in England also called for ‘gritty emotional endurance.’63 Lucy certainly missed her mother and sisters in her time of sorrow, but she did have a very supportive husband, a good relationship with her doctor and minister, and a strong support network of caring adults who were clearly enamoured of children. Prudent Economy Frontier conditions did not preclude cleanliness from remaining a prerequisite to respectable status, and even in England genteel women who had servants did not lose caste by engaging in heavy-duty housework.64 The recently arrived Dr Wilson, who was investing £450 in a farm near Lennoxville, wrote in 1834 that his wife was ‘indefatigable in her domestic labours. Activity such as hers is in every part of the world of great importance to such a family as ours, but in a situation where the

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wages of mechanics is enormously great it is wealth.’65 More than physical labour was involved, for Vickery observes that ‘as the mistress of the household, the genteel bride tasted of administrative power and exuded quasi-professional pride.’66 Ladies’ pocket-sized memorandum books, filled with notes and accounts, served as ‘both the means and the emblem of female mastery of information, without which the upper hand was lost and prudent economy obliterated.’67 Lucy Peel did not have as elaborate a household to manage as her English peers did, but she employed at least one servant at all times, and finding maids or cooks who were trained was much more difficult in British North America than in the old country.68 Lucy claimed that Ellen, the neighbour’s girl who remained in the Peel household for most of their sojourn in Canada, had to be taught virtually all the housekeeping skills.69 In late 1833 Lucy described the special challenges presented by her frontier location: You ladies in England who fancy you have a great [sic] to see after, do not know what it is to keep house in such a country as this where you must cut and contrive; where perhaps you can only get meat once in three weeks, and where all the workmen you have must be fed three times a day on meat, potatoes and milk, I have now in my house 118 lbs of beautiful Beef which I have salted in a large tub and it is astonishing how fast it disappears; besides this I have 4£ worth of Salt Pork for my winter stock, 40 lbs of suet enclosed [?] for candles and a tub of grease to make my soft soap. My woman servant though an excellent one for this country is not like an English cook, and I have to see her do most things, she fortunately makes good bread.70

While Edmund helped with household chores, as well as making carpets and even knitting during the long winter evenings, Lucy was too busy in the house, and often too advanced in pregnancy, to work much outdoors. She did manage, however, to record the prices for produce, costs of labour, crop yields, killing frosts, and so on. In the spring of 1834, for example, Lucy described the economics of purchasing a yoke of oxen: We shall work the oxen the spring and summer, fatten them in the fall, and kill them for our winter stock putting them in the snow. They will also provide me with a hundred pounds of candles, and their skins are worth ten dollars each, so I think dear Mamma we shall have more than the

80 Religion, Family, and Gender value of the 42 dollars, independent of their work, we cannot hire Oxen under two dollars a day in the summer.71

It would seem, then, that farm management was shared to a considerable extent between Lucy and Edmund. If Edmund did not feel that his masculine identity was thereby threatened, perhaps it was because of the heavy outdoor labour he also engaged in. Nor would this labour have necessarily weakened his class identity, for Jeanne Peterson notes of the typical gentleman of this era that his ‘primary sense of himself as a man and as a social being came from his birth, not from what he did.’72 Elegance Vickery sees no contradiction between prudent economy and a taste for elegance, stating that ‘gentility found its richest expression in objects.’73 She suggests that gentlewomen were more attached to material consumption than were men because they were denied access to the professions and to public office. Unable to ‘pass on the invisible mysteries of institutional power or professional expertise to their descendants,’ the genteel woman ‘turned to personal and household artifacts to create a world of meanings and, ultimately, to transmit her history.’74 The studies by Peterson and Colley reveal that many women were less isolated from the professional and public spheres at this time than Vickery appears to assume, but gentlewomen certainly did contribute to class distinction through goods and lifestyle.75 Opportunities for the display of elegance, with the notable exception of fine houses, were obviously limited in the Eastern Townships of the 1830s. Even though immigrants brought as many of their prized possessions as possible, these sometimes failed to survive the vagaries of the transportation system or the chimney fires that destroyed wooden buildings with alarming frequency. Lucy described how the Feltons had brought from Italy ‘beautiful furniture, doors, window frames, oil paint, figures and ornaments of Italian marble, and other things to the amount of four thousand pounds,’ only to have them all destroyed when the warehouse where they were stored in Sherbrooke burned to the ground. William Felton took the loss philosophically, reasoning that the furniture would in any case ‘soon have been spoiled by the careless and wretched servants of the country.’76 Most of Lucy’s own fancy dresses were water damaged in transit, fit

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only to be transformed into drapes and baby’s clothing, or traded to local American women, and she mentioned that fine English furniture did not adapt well to the dry heated Canadian interiors. None of this concerned her much, but her journal does record long anxious weeks waiting for boxes from England, not for necessities so much as small luxuries and items that had personal meaning, such as her father’s portrait. Lucy also kept a flower garden, writing at one point that ‘every flower that springs up will remind me of a beloved parent.’77 But Lucy’s most valued possession was her harp, the first in the district, and her playing and compositions won her widespread praise and admiration. As for Edmund, he was too morally earnest to have been overly concerned with cutting a fashionable figure himself. He was, nevertheless, clearly a product of the culture of sensibility which G.J. BarkerBenfield claims aimed, through the influence of ‘better educated wives and more comfortable houses,’ to ‘draw men from the extravagant and cruel pleasures of tavern culture’ and ‘the dueling warrior mentality of an earlier aristocracy.’78 Sherbrooke may have been a rough frontier town, but there was no chance that Edmund would be attracted either to the taverns or to duelling. Nor does he appear to have taken much interest in the hunting and fishing that appealed to so many young men of his class.79 His most extravagant expenditure, apart from the construction of the house, which he designed and painted pink, was the purchase of an elegant sleigh and carriage, probably more for Lucy’s comfort and convenience than for public display. In any case, material possessions were clearly considered to be less dependable than public demeanour in signifying genteel social status. Civility and Vulgarity As part of her critique of the separate-spheres paradigm, Vickery argues that the public and private worlds were integrated by sociability. She notes that ‘most studies of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gentry and nobility stress that open-handed hospitality was still crucial to the maintenance of social credit and political power.’80 One such study is Leonore Davidoff’s The Best Circles, which demonstrates how ladies’ calls and visits, as well as their social ‘cuts,’ contributed to boundary maintenance at a time when ‘new forms of wealth as well as newly wealthy groups produced a flood of applicants that threatened to overwhelm’ the upper classes and their lifestyle.81 While Lucy Peel was no social butterfly, she could expect callers at

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almost any time of day, if only because Dunstall Villa lay on the road between Sherbrooke and the Felton residence. And, whatever her inner thoughts may have been, Lucy never complained in her journal about the unannounced arrivals, even when they stayed to dinner. Nor did she indulge in gossip, particularly about the genteel families, for, in Vickery’s words, the lynchpin to the concept of good breeding ‘was the assumption that outer manners were the reflection of inner civility.’82 Lucy’s observations about the members of her circle also suggest that social codes of civility were far from being relaxed on the frontier. In the fall of 1833 she wrote: ‘... last night I wished some of our friends in England who fancy we are I believe almost amongst savages could have entered the drawing room, we were fifteen of us, all the gentlemen sensible and well bred, and ladies, goodlooking and pleasing, a large handsome room, music and dancing, diversified with intelligent and constructive conversation.’83 That the frontier environment could actually reinforce hierarchical values was suggested by Anne Langton, writing from Fenelon Falls in Upper Canada in 1838: ‘The greatest danger, I think, we all run from our peculiar mode of life is that of becoming selfish and narrow-minded. We live so much to ourselves and mix so exclusively with one community. It is not only that the individuals are few, but the degrees and classes we come in contact with are still more limited.’84 Not only did the familiarity of the ill-educated farming neighbours have to be resisted, but the denial of patronage appointments to the better-established and more economically successful American entrepreneurs had to be justified on social as well as political grounds. Almost invariably generous in her references to her English peers, Lucy was deeply prejudiced against the tobacco-chewing Americans, who, to her, were the embodiment of vulgarity. She wrote to a friend that ‘the Yankees appear to be a cool calculating set, and the lower orders of Irish and English, when they have been a short time in this country are worse than the natives; the only way is to be as distant as possible, I dare say they will think us proud.’85 A later incident illustrates how Lucy put her distancing strategy into practice: ‘I taught one Yankee manners this morning he came to the front door, and he was not attended until he went to the back, I think they shall not take any liberties here, and if every one would act as we do, they would soon know their place.’ However, she added more charitably, if still more condescendingly: ‘I really believe all they do is from sheer ignorance, without any wish to offend, for they are kind

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hearted people and the lower orders all lodge and board travellers from the old country, without wishing for any thing in return.’86 Lucy benefited personally from the many kindnesses of her Irish neighbours, the McReadys, as well as the American-born Reverend Doolittle, but she and Edmund left Sherbrooke before feeling any desire or need to break out of the narrow social circle to which they had been initially introduced. Opportunities for sociability may have been relatively limited on the settlement frontier, but the gentlewoman’s obligation to preserve class distinctions through selective sociability was at least as compelling as in England. Propriety There was no opportunity in the Eastern Townships for women to engage in public cultural interaction at the royal court, the opera, the theatre, the concert, or the pleasure garden – all institutions examined by Vickery – but the round of dinners and parties in the private homes of the elite was more than enough to satisfy the young hard-working Lucy Peel.87 Not even the church appears to have served the social purpose for Lucy that it did for many English and colonial gentlewomen, and, if there were any female philanthropic or improving societies in Sherbrooke, Lucy never mentioned them.88 But, even in England, most married gentry women of Lucy’s age were largely confined to the nursery during their childbearing years, re-emerging in the public sphere only after their parental responsibilities had lightened.89 As a male, Edmund may have been less socially constricted, but he also did less visiting than Lucy, and he even refused the invitation to become a justice of the peace, taking refuge behind his military commission to avoid a fine for shirking his duty. As with the independent genteel women of England,90 Lucy did not hesitate to walk or drive to town with one of the Felton daughters or by herself. Moralists would not have had to worry about the corrupting effect of commercialized leisure in the rather primitive town of Sherbrooke, but if Lucy found life dull in the Canadian countryside, she never complained of it. The romantic ruralism she shared with Edmund had been severely tested by the severe winter cold, summer mosquitoes, and chronic illnesses of their children, but when the Peels decided to return to England, it was largely because they had become discouraged with the deteriorating political situation and the small economic reward for all their hard labour.

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Conclusion Lucy Peel’s journal sheds a revealing light on the expression of class and gender identity in the colonial environment, and undermines the easy generalizations many historians have made about the impermeability of the separate spheres, at least as far as the gentry in the preVictorian era are concerned. The prevailing ideology certainly took hierarchical marriage for granted, an assumption buttressed by religious, legal, educational, and other institutional structures, and gender roles would become more mutually exclusive as the century wore on, but the growing idealization of the domestic sphere may actually have increased women’s social influence. Women’s journals not only reflected that influence, but reinforced it as well, for Felicity Nussbaum argues that female autobiographical writing in eighteenth-century England ‘helped to shape and resist the dominant cultural constructions of gender relations and to substitute alternatives.’ She adds that the very act of recording the ‘trivial’ details of a woman’s lived experience represented an insistence, however ambivalent, ‘on an inverted hierarchy of values in that private sphere.’91 Certainly, Lucy’s journal, though devoted largely to ‘personal’ matters, was avidly read by male as well as female relatives. It also reveals that the domestic sphere was the paramount one for Edmund, and perhaps even for leading local figures such as William B. Felton and Judge John Fletcher. The half-pay officers and their wives may, in Cole Harris’s words, have been trying ‘to create a home in one place out of the values that came from another,’92 but Vickery’s study suggests that these women were well prepared for their role in the New World. In fact, it helps to explain why so many families of their social status chose to settle in the backwoods to become what Richard Mackie refers to as ‘bush gentry.’93 Put simply, the genteel wives appear to have been quite capable of making the sacrifices needed to settle in an environment as far removed as possible from the ‘obnoxious’ Yankees and ‘degenerate’ Irish in the older settlements. Not surprisingly, the temptation has been to stress the liberating impact of British North America’s settlement frontier on the constrained gender role of the genteel female immigrant.94 If the line between the separate spheres was weakened in the Peel household, however, it was due less to the extra demands made on Lucy than to Edmund’s willingness to engage in the household duties generally associated with the role of women.

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Edmund may have been rather unique in this respect, but his manual labour presumably protected his sense of manliness while contradicting his class identity to some extent. A certain degree of status anxiety was reflected in Lucy’s comment on 26 October 1833 that ‘though some people may be of a different opinion I am sure you will agree with me in thinking that a man may dig in the fields without being a clown, be his wife’s lady’s maid without being effeminate and make his own coat without looking like a tailor.’ To ensure that this was so, the Peels engaged in social rituals associated with polite English society. Largely organized by women, formal dinners, music recitals, anniversary celebrations, and other ‘civilized’ social activities sustained genteel class identity, thereby helping to justify resistance to democratization and monopolization of the spoils of office. Genteel men and women may have played mutually distinctive roles in defending their privileged social position, but their worlds were less circumscribed by gender than by class.95 While the distinctions between the male and female worlds described in Lucy’s journal are often blurred, the ‘lower orders’ of society emerge very clearly as the ‘other.’ Women such as Lucy Peel were quick to put those Yankees who dared to become overly familiar in their place, but this social snobbery only intensified popular resentment towards the British elite. The destruction of William Felton’s career in 1837 effectively ended the dominant political and social role of that elite in the Eastern Townships. Fearing a political revolution, and predicting the recession that would follow the inflationary extravagance of the British American Land Company,96 the Peels (and there is no hint that this was Edmund’s decision alone) decided to sacrifice a future in which they would live and work together on a daily basis in order to return to the comforts and certainties of England. Lucy’s writing was obviously not entirely candid, since she clearly wished to sustain a favourable impression with her relatives in England, but her consistent enthusiasm would have been difficult to feign for such an extended period of time. And, the distinctive tone of the journal aside, it clearly reflects the basic values of Lucy’s class and gender, for Nussbaum reminds us that all types of autobiographical texts issued ‘from the culture as much as the individual author.’97 Lucy and Edmund may have been an exceptional couple, but perhaps only in the intensity to which they adhered to the same romantic ideal that others of their social class and era aspired to. Certainly, the young couple viewed their experience on the Canadian frontier as a generally

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positive one, the loss of Celia aside, and child mortality was at least as common in England as in Canada. Rather than having been defeated by the frontier, the Peels were spiritually strengthened by the challenges they had faced there, but they were also young enough and well connected enough to return home when they judged that the future was more promising in England. Families such as the nearby Staceys, or the Moodies and Traills in Upper Canada, did not enjoy this option, though Dunbar Moodie was able to acquire a patronage position in town.98 What the future held in store for the Peel family is impossible to say in any detail, but we do know that Edmund became a naval captain, that daughter Flora survived to give birth to twelve children, that baby Richard also lived to become a captain in the merchant service, and that three other sons were born in England.99 We also know that this deeply conservative couple had chosen a good time to leave Sherbrooke, for the social, economic, and political transition of the 1840s would create a world in which they would not have felt at ease.

Notes 1 The journal ends in late 1836, but the last entry announces that the Peels will be returning to England the following spring. It has been published as J.I. Little, ed., Love Strong as Death: Lucy Peel’s Canadian Journal, 1833–1836 (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001). 2 Robert A. Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 7, 29; Mary Quayle Innis, ed., Mrs Simcoe’s Diary (Toronto: Macmillan, 1965); H.H. Langton, ed., A Gentlewoman in Upper Canada (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1950); Audrey Miller, ed., The Journals of Mary O’Brien, 1828–1838 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968); Catharine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971). According to Felicity A. Nussbaum, the diary ‘was largely a private document in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but by the nineteenth century it was both a private and a public document, no longer confined to secrecy’ (The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989], 24). 3 Even though the letters were sent to various people, they were probably meant to circulate from family to family, so that they would not have been difficult to gather together at a later date. Photocopies of the letters were

Gender and Gentility 87

4

5 6

7

8 9 10 11 12

13

14

donated to the Eastern Townships Research Centre at Bishop’s University (ETRC) by C.H. Kinder, great-grandson of the Peels’ second-born child, Flora. A striking exception is the letters written by the Stacey family, who were social outcasts to some extent because of George Stacey’s scandalous behaviour in London and their ongoing poverty on the Ascot Township farm. See Jane Vansittart, ed., Lifelines: The Stacey Letters, 1836–1858 (London: Peter Davis, 1976). See, as well, Françoise Noël, ‘“My Dear Eliza”: The Letters of Robert Hoyle (1831–1844),’ Histoire sociale/Social History 26 (1993): 115–30; and Extracts from Letters Written during a First Year’s Residence in the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada (London: J.L. Cox and Sons, 1837). Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 152. ETRC, Lucy Peel Journals, to My Dearest Mamma, 24 July 1833 (first day’s entry). Wilson’s letter to England in January 1834 was printed in Report of the Court of Directors of the British American Land Company to the Proprietors, 19 June 1834 (London: W.J. Ruffy, 1834), 11–12. See J.I. Little, State and Society in Transition: The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships, 1838–1852 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 22–6. Fothergill, Private Chronicles, 30–1. Fothergill, Private Chronicles, 32–5. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 36–7. See, for example, P.J. Marshall, ‘British Society in India under the East India Company,’ Modern Asian Studies 31.1 (1997): 89–108. Ramsay Cook argues that for Canada ‘the frontier was not an escape from Europe, but an extension of Europe. In the United States, nature made man; in Canada, man civilized nature’ (‘Imagining a North American Garden: Some Parallels and Differences in Canadian and American Culture,’ Canadian Literature 103 [Winter 1984]: 12). See Margaret MacMillan, Women of the Raj (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988); and Katherine M.J. McKenna, ‘The Role of Women in the Establishment of Social Status in Early Upper Canada,’ Ontario History 83.3 (1990): 179–206. For a historiographical survey of the separate-spheres interpretation, see Linda K. Kerber, ‘Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Women’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,’ Journal of American History 75 (1988): 9–39. For applications of the separate-spheres model to the colonial Canadian

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15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26

27

28

29

context, see Katherine McKenna, ‘Options for Elite Women in Early Upper Canadian Society: The Case of the Powell Family,’ in J.K. Johnson and Bruce G. Wilson, eds, Historical Essays on Upper Canada: New Perspectives (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989), 401–24; and the more nuanced Cecilia Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered Languages of Religion and Politics in Upper Canada, 1791–1850 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). On the cultural simplification thesis, see R.C. Harris, ‘The Simplification of Europe Overseas,’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 67.4 (1977): 469–83. Genealogical information was kindly provided by C.H. Kinder of South Walsham, England. Sir Robert Peel served as Conservative prime minister from late 1834 to April 1835 (and again during 1841–6). To Mrs William Birch, 7 Jan. 1836 (27 Jan. entry). To My dearest Mamma, 5 Oct. 1834 (7 Oct. entry). To Mr Mayne, 26 Oct. 1833. See, for example, to My dearest Mamma, 29 July 1833 (21 Aug. entry). Little, State and Society, 18. Cited in J.I. Little, Ethno-Cultural Transition and Regional Identity in the Eastern Townships of Quebec (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1989), 10. Cited in Little, Ethno-Cultural Transition, 10. To My dearest Mamma, 18 March 1834 (31 March entry). For more on this theme, see J.I. Little, ‘Canadian Pastoral: Promotional Images of British Colonization in Lower Canada during the 1830s,’ Journal of Historical Geography 29.2 (2003): 189–211. To My dearest Mamma, 24 July 1833 (13 July entry). On the emergence of the ‘picturesque’ and the ‘sublime’ as major aesthetic categories in the late eighteenth century, and their impact on interest in the ‘new world,’ see Patricia Jasen, Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790– 1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 9–10. For a critique of this interpretation, see Helen M. Buss, ‘Women and the Garrison Mentality: Pioneer Women Autobiographers and Their Relation to the Land,’ in Re(Dis)Covering Our Foremothers (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1990), 123–36. See J.I. Little, ‘British Toryism amidst “a horde of disaffected and disloyal squatters”: The Rise and Fall of William Bowman Felton and Family in the

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30

31 32 33 34

35

36 37

38 39 40 41

Eastern Townships,’ Journal of Eastern Townships Studies 1 (Fall 1992): 13–42. The Peels may have had a link with the Colclough family of Sherbrooke, for Lucy brought Captain Colclough’s wife a buckle and a note from England, though this may have been in return for kindness shown to Edmund the previous year. See To My Dearest Mamma, 27 May 1833 (11 June entry). Sherbrooke Registry Office, Register A, vol. 6, p. 32, no. 2023, 3 Sept. 1832, William B. Felton to Edmund Peel, sale of Ascot, S.E. 1/4 l.13, r.9; p. 37, no. 2028, 5 Sept. 1832, Mrs Eleanor Burns to Edmund Peel (as represented by William Henry via a power of attorney), sale of Ascot, W 1/2 l.13, r.9; vol. 8, p. 322, no. 348, 21 Oct. 1833, William B. Felton to Edmund Peel, sale of Ascot, N.E. 1/4 l.13, r.9. Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter,13. On these three men, see Little, ‘British Toryism,’ 26–30. See Christine Veilleux, ‘Fletcher, John,’ in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 7. See Little, State and Society, 22–33; and Monique Choquette-Habel, ‘Edward Hale: Un des fondateurs de la première société organisé de Sherbrooke, 1801–1875’ (M.A. thesis, Université de Sherbrooke, 1985). The Goodhues are mentioned sympathetically on several occasions, including one social call to their house, but they were clearly not part of the Felton social circle. Brooks is never mentioned, despite his prominence in the town. See Charlotte Thibault, Samuel Brooks, entrepreneur et homme politique de Sherbrooke, 1793–1849 (Sherbrooke: Département d’Histoire, Université de Sherbrooke, 1985). Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction, 1300–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 331–4. Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 39–41. Lawrence Stone states that romantic love did not become a respectable motive for marriage among the English propertied classes until the late eighteenth century (Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 [New York: Harper and Row, 1977], 7–8, 284–6). See also Randolph Trumbach, The Rise of the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in EighteenthCentury England (New York: Academic Press, 1978). To My dearest Mother, 24 July 1835 (18 Aug. entry). To Mrs Mayne, 15 Feb. 1836 (26 Feb. entry). To Miss Edith Bourne, 8 Nov. 1833 (8 Nov. entry). McGill University Archives, Hale Family Papers, 1829–1913. Lucy had quite a different impression of American husbands, though this is contradicted by the letters between Stanstead’s Marcus Child and his wife,

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42 43 44

45

46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55

Lydia. See J.I. Little, ed., The Child Letters: Public and Private Life in a Canadian Merchant-Politician’s Family, 1841–1845 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995). See also Jane Errington, Wives and Mothers, Schoolmistresses and Scullery Maids: Working Women in Upper Canada, 1790–1840 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 36–7. Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 59–60. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 395, 400. A similar image of family sentiments emerges from Lorraine Gadoury’s study of the French-Canadian elite of the eighteenth century. See her La Famille dans son intimité: Échanges épistolaires au sein de l’élite canadienne du XVIIIe siècle (Montreal: Hurtubise HMH, 1998). Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 97. Contrast the assertion by M. Jeanne Peterson that ‘there was no mystique of motherhood in the nineteenthcentury upper-middle-class home’ (Family, Love, and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen [Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989], 104). Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 122. Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 98. Lucy to My Dearest Mamma, 6 Dec. 1833 (19 Dec. entry by Edmund). Errington, Wives and Mothers, 58–62. Errington, herself, provides some contradictory evidence about male attitudes on pp. 64–5, and her citation from Mary O’Brien’s journal makes it clear that Mary’s husband was present at the birth of their first child. The Peel journal also contradicts Helen Buss’s assertion that at this time the subjects of pregnancy and labour were not ‘fit subjects for public discourses,’ and that women were not ‘given permission, or even an idiom in public language, to express emotions and thoughts that centre on this important female activity’ (Helen M. Buss, Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English [Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993], 44). John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 81–2. Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 107. Tosh, A Man’s Place, 39–41, 86–7. Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 117. Errington, Wives and Mothers, 53–4. These statements are contradicted somewhat on p. 66, and pp. 73–4. Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: Knopf, 1980), 265.

Gender and Gentility 91 56 Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 94. 57 On childhood illnesses and deaths in Upper Canada, see Errington, Wives and Mothers, 69–71. 58 To My dearest Mamma, 3 Dec. 1834 (13 Dec. entry). 59 To My dearest Mamma, 28 Aug. 1835 (3 Sept. entry). 60 Peterson (Family, Love, and Work, 76) speculates that the Victorian ‘linkages of sexual and spiritual intensified the experience of the ecstatic in both areas of life.’ 61 While nearly six months elapsed between Celia’s birth and her baptism, Flora was christened ten days after her birth, and Richard twenty-four days after his (Protonotaire Sherbrooke, Registres d’état civil noncatholiques, 1879, M 125/4, Sherbrooke section). 62 To My dearest Mamma, 19 Oct. 1835 (4 Nov. entry). 63 Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 121. 64 Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 146. 65 Report of the Court, 11–12. 66 Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 129. 67 Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 133. 68 On living and working in ‘the big house’ in Upper Canada, see Errington, Wives and Mothers, chapter 6. For the English context, see Patricia Branca, ‘Image and Reality: The Myth of the Idle Victorian Woman,’ in Mary Hartman and Lois B. Banner, eds, Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women (New York: Octagon Books, 1974), 185–8. 69 On ‘the neighbour’s girl’ as Canadian servant, see Errington, Wives and Mothers, chapter 5. 70 To My dearest Mamma, 1833 (no other date), no. 7 (first entry). For an excellent description of colonial housekeeping, see Errington, Wives and Mothers, chapter 4. 71 To My dearest Mamma, 18 March 1834 (1 April entry). 72 Peterson, Family, Love, and Work, 190. 73 Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 161. 74 Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 194. Similarily, Barker-Benfield (Culture of Sensibility, xxvi, xxviii) refers to the culture of sensibility which emerged in the eighteenth century as ‘a culture of women’ which aimed ‘to discipline women’s consumer appetites in tasteful domesticity.’ Barker-Benfield attributes the rise of the culture of sensibility to ‘the requirements and attractions of consumer capitalism.’ 75 Peterson, Family, Love, and Work, chapter 5; Colley, Britons, chapter 6; Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 162–4. 76 To Miss Edith Bourne, 8 Nov. 1833 (8 Nov. entry).

92 Religion, Family, and Gender 77 To My dearest Mamma. 27 May 1833 (5 June entry). 78 Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, xxvi, 248. Duelling did survive among the Upper Canadian gentry, but Morgan (Public Men, 170) states that in the public discourse it ‘was linked to excessive drinking, the temptations of luxury, and the dangers of uncurbed and vicious, rather than honourable, masculinity.’ 79 On this theme, see Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 272–6. 80 Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 196. 81 Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society Etiquette and the Season (London: Croom Helm, 1973), 15, 41–6. 82 Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 197. 83 To My dear Mrs Peel, 23 Aug. 1833 (1 Sept. entry). 84 Langton, A Gentlewoman, 60. 85 To Miss Edith Bourne, 8 Nov. 1833 (8 Nov. entry). 86 To My dearest Sarah Jane, n.d. [Nov. 1833]. 87 Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 227–8. On this theme in Upper Canada, see Errington, Wives and Mothers, chapter 7. 88 On this theme, see Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 276–7; and Errington, Wives and Mothers, 168–82. 89 Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 253–7, 266, 270–1. 90 Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 278–80. 91 Nussbaum, Autobiographical Subject, xiv, xxi. Nussbaum also states (p. 136) that the ‘insistence on a public/private split with the emphasis on a personal and emotional life elides the way that the production of a rich and complex inner life is itself a political practice.’ 92 R. Cole Harris and Elizabeth Phillips, eds, Letters from Windermere, 1912– 1914 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1984), 1. 93 Richard Mackie, ‘Cougars, Colonists, and the Rural Settlement of Vancouver Island,’ in Ruth Sandwell, ed., Beyond the City Limits: Rural History in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999), 120. Contrast Patrick Dunae’s statement that a number of contemporary commentators observed that many English gentlemen gave up their farms ‘and returned to the Old Country because their wives were so unhappy’ (Patrick Dunae, Gentlemen Emigrants: From the British Public Schools to the Canadian Frontier [Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1981], 28). 94 This is largely true of literary scholars. See, for example, Buss, Mapping Our Selves, chapter 1; Marion Fowler, The Embroidered Tent: Five Gentlewomen in Early Canada (Toronto: Anansi, 1982), 10; and D.M.R. Bentley, ‘Breaking the “Cake of Custom”: The Atlantic Crossing as Rubicon for Female Emigrants to Canada?’ in Re(Dis)Covering Our Foremothers, 91–122.

Gender and Gentility 93 95 The same point is made in Peterson, Family, Love, and Work, 190. 96 See J.I. Little, Nationalism, Capitalism, and Colonization in Nineteenth-Century Quebec: The Upper St Francis District (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1989), chapter 2; and Jean-Pierre Kesteman, Peter Southam, and Diane Saint-Pierre, Histoire des Cantons de l’Est (SainteFoy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1998), 123. 97 Nussbaum, Autobiographical Subject, 28. 98 For overviews of several genteel women writers’ experiences in Upper Canada, see Elizabeth Hopkins, ‘A Prison-House for Prosperity: The Immigrant Experience of the Nineteenth-Century Upper-Class British Woman,’ in Jean Burnet, ed., Looking into My Sister’s Eyes: An Exploration in Women’s History (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1986), 7–20; and Fowler, Embroidered Tent. 99 ETRC, Peel Papers, C.H. Kinder to Monique Saumier, n.d.; C.H. Kinder to J.I. Little, South Walsham, England, 22 June 1999.

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4 A ‘Christian Businessman’: The Convergence of Precept and Practice in NineteenthCentury Evangelical Gender Construction MARGUERITE VAN DIE

In their analysis of the impact of nineteenth-century market forces upon the lives of men and women, feminist historians have for some time now drawn attention to a profound restructuring of the private and public spheres. Deeply implicated in that restructuring, they have argued, was the changing role of religion. Whereas women retreated into the private world of home and piety, commonly referred to as ‘the cult of domesticity,’ middle-class men derived their identity from success in the capitalist marketplace acquired by accumulated wealth and power. Unlike its female counterpart, the male gender construct – variously referred to as ‘marketplace manhood,’ or ‘the myth of the self-made man’ – was an entirely secular ideal. Religion, it was assumed, belonged in the private sphere, that increasingly marginalized world in which women and clergy sought mutual consolation. For men, on the other hand, participation in religious activity was a remnant of the old order, at best only a stepping stone in the march to political and cultural dominance in a de-enchanted brave new world.1 More recently historians of gender and of religion, each in different ways, have begun to challenge such assumptions by drawing attention to the enduring persistence of religious forces and to the complex and varied power relations inherent in the metaphor of ‘separate spheres.’ Dualism and dichotomy are giving way to a more integrated understanding of gender and religion as part of a web of social relations, structured by family, community, and legal networks. Accompanying this re-evaluation is an awareness of the multiple ways in which gender has been constructed.2 Thus for the Victorian period, to the study of the ‘self-made man,’ the secular counterpart to the ‘pious female,’ has been added the evangelical concept of Christian manhood.3 Alongside extol-

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ling the virtue of the praying mother, by the mid-nineteenth century, ministers were writing a new form of literature in which they drew attention to the Christian virtues which might be expressed in the world of commerce. Appearing at a time when denominational expansion called for increased lay involvement in time and money, this new construct of masculinity, the ‘Christian businessman,’ figured prominently in the columns of denominational papers and in evangelical prescriptive and biographical literature, most of which was authored by ministers.4 Thanks to a massive mobilization of the printing presses, and a generic and readily exportable piety, the evangelical world as ministers would have it be has been well documented.5 The extent to which practice matched precept, on the other hand, is more difficult to uncover, and calls for constant testing of the world constructed by the presses against people’s actual experience of social, economic, and religious change. Despite the advice literature, we know little about the inner and outer lives of male converts. How confidently, or how defensively, for example, did evangelical men promote their concept of Christian manhood? This leads to the more central concern, formulated by an earlier generation of feminist historians such as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, but which now needs to be extended also to the lives of evangelical men, namely how gender redefinition was part of a wider process enabling men to adapt to social and economic change.6 Secondly, following the work of Ann Douglas and others on the relationship between changing gender roles and secularization, how in turn were religious belief and practice affected by such redefinition?7 Such questions are especially compelling for historians seeking to unravel the intricate connection between the public and private spheres in Victorian Canada. Thanks to recent scholarship, the dominance of evangelical Protestantism in English-speaking Canada has been well documented. Scholarly literature is also beginning to draw attention to a congruence between religious values and economic practice.8 This brief study forms part of such research. It does so not by focusing on the broad canvas of social and religious change, but by examining with care a significant detail, namely the intersection of family, religious, business, and economic concerns in the life of a single individual, Charles Colby (1827–1907). Head of a middle-class household in the village of Stanstead, prominent supporter of the Methodist Church and its educational institutions, lawyer and entrepreneur, Colby was from 1867 to 1891 the county’s representative (first independent and, after 1872, Conservative) to the Dominion Parliament. Rarely able to be at home,

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he documented the whirl of his activities through a steady flow of correspondence exchanged with his wife, Hattie (1838–1932), and their four children, Abby Lemira (1859–1943), Jessie Maud (1861–1958), Charles William (1867–1955), and John Child (1873–1926). These letters, supplemented by a large collection of material culture, preserved in Carrollcroft, the family home in Stanstead, provide unusually detailed insight into the way one individual sought to live out the often conflicting demands of gender and family, religion, and politics within the volatile economic climate of the latter half of the nineteenth century. Thanks to this rich documentation, Colby’s life offers a unique opportunity to move beyond the clerically constructed ‘Christian businessman’ to a world where economic and religious interests regularly interacted, and where the much vaunted tranquillity of Victorian domestic life was frequently challenged by the forces of the marketplace, in Colby’s case to the point of insolvency and the temporary loss of the family home in 1872. In ways unexplored in the advice literature, and at times in contradiction to the official tenets of evangelicalism, Charles Colby nevertheless managed to find ways to hold in dynamic tension the disparate demands of family, religion, politics, and business. While in this process reality at times diverged from the ideal, this Methodist entrepreneur was eulogized as one who had lived up to the criteria of the ‘Christian gentleman.’ At his funeral in 1907, jointly conducted by ministers from three denominations, Methodist, Episcopal, and Congregationalist, he was honoured as a model public man, ‘a devout Christian, regular in his attendance upon the services of the church, deeply concerned in her prosperity, and expressing his religion in his daily life.’9 The period of Colby’s life, 1827 to 1907, coincided with a rapid growth in membership and wealth for Canada’s Protestant denominations, enabling them to establish a cultural presence whose influence extended well into the twentieth century. Chief among these denominations in Canada, as well as in the Stanstead area, was the Methodist.10 While Methodist statistics vaunted a growing denominational presence, they tell little about the particular conditions of nineteenth-century family and business life that allowed religious belief and practice to flourish, and church life to expand and institutionalize. The answer to such a question entails a multidimensional approach. Against the wider backdrop of religious and socio-economic change are several more focused narratives: the changing local environment, increased denominational growth, and, in the case of the present study, Colby’s

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own role as head of a family, as a Methodist, a businessman, and a civic leader. It is in their intersection that the nature and role of religion in urban communities in Canada in the latter part of the nineteenth century come into bolder relief. Thus, while there is no intent to present the story of Charles Colby as ‘representative,’ a layered approach to the life of one Methodist businessman can help in understanding the ways in which religion entrenched itself as part of the social fabric in late nineteenth-century Canada. The variables will have a different colouring for men of different faiths and occupations, but one thing all men shared was that family ties were crucial in shaping their identity. It was the need to provide for self and family that moved men into the public world of business; at the same time, home and family acquired a new significance as the unifying centre to the individualistic life in the marketplace.11 Although in Colby’s case this move to the public sphere also included several decades of parliamentary life, these will not be examined here. The focus will be primarily on his family life and his business affairs and the extent to which religion intersected with and influenced each of these. Our point of entry is the social and economic life of the Stanstead region in the early nineteenth century. Located in the rolling fields of agricultural land of the Eastern Townships, Stanstead Township had first attracted New England settlers in the early 1790s, becoming part of the regional ‘buffer zone’ between the seigneuries of the recently conquered French Canadians to the north and the American republic to the south. By 1832, the year when Dr Moses and Lemira Colby with their three infant children, Charles, William, and Emily, moved across the border to the village of Stanstead Plain from Derby, Vermont, the region had begun to experience considerable social and economic change as a result of improved access to external markets. Very quickly, as the only resident medical doctor and a substantial landowner, Moses had allied himself with the town’s emerging merchants and gentlemen farmers, and briefly (notwithstanding his republican sympathies) had served as the Conservative member for Stanstead County in the Lower Canada legislature from 1837 to 1841.12 Through careful economic management, he continued slowly to expand his property, which by 1855 comprised a medical practice, an eight-hundred-acre farm, and a tavern.13 In throwing his political lot in with the rising middle class, Moses had astutely recognized the social and economic changes which were beginning to transform the Eastern Townships. Stimulated by the completion of the Montreal–Portland (Grand Trunk) Railway in 1853, and by an

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accompanying shift from small artisan to capitalist production in such industries as cotton, paper, and mining, the new socio-economic realities (here as elsewhere) were accompanied by tensions between the generations, as men and women sought new forms of self-definition in both the private and public realms of existence.14 Moses came to view the impact of these new socio-economic developments upon social values with some alarm.15 His two sons, Charles and William, on the other hand, were eager to seize the perceived opportunities for career advancement offered by the region’s expanding economic prospects. Such changes carried in their wake a redefinition of manhood, as the sons, both in their twenties during the 1850s, tried to succeed in the new order. In contrast to their father, who had built up the family estate by a combination of careful and diversified entrepreneurship, theirs was a more conspicuous consumption, one quick to incur debts. Where Moses had always proceeded with caution, Charles and William were swept up in the accompanying speculation, spending, and optimism of the era. Emblematic of such changes were their differing attitudes in 1857 to the construction of a grand stone house, later known as Carrollcroft, and subsequently home to four generations of Colbys. Agreed to by Moses primarily to meet the need for comfort for his arthritic wife, Lemira, under his sons’ direction the house became a visible sign of the new economic era dawning for Stanstead and the Eastern Townships, in which they aspired to play a significant part. Increasingly grandiose in design, the construction quickly aroused their father’s anxiety as both brothers incurred heavy debts against the estate.16 Already in 1855, when serious illness had moved him to draw up a will, Moses had been forced to hem in his oldest son’s prospects of inheritance with a strongly worded condition that he replace his irresponsible lifestyle with confirmed, steady habits.17 Three years later, his concern shifted to William, the younger son. His excessive spending on the new house and his habit of signing promissory notes on his own behalf and that of friends led to a sharply worded letter wherein Moses threatened to ‘advertise that hereafter no debts will be paid out by him except by written order.’18 Rather than mastering the new forces, William, who by all accounts was a gentle, caring individual, but whose life would be marked by chronic alcoholism, was already becoming their victim. By 1864, a year after his father’s death, and only recently married, he had fallen so deeply in debt that his brother was forced to step in to buy out his share

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of the house and land. Ten years later (two years after his brother, Charles), William was forced to declare bankruptcy. As the younger son, who had not had the benefit of a college education, William found his horizons narrowed to local concerns, working on the family farm, finding some fulfilment in ardently supporting the Masonic Lodge, selling insurance, and – what would become a constant embarrassment to the family – disappearing from time to time to engage on a prolonged drinking spree, until his untimely death of a brain haemorrhage in 1884.19 Charles, whose career prospects had been enhanced by four years education at Dartmouth College, his father’s alma mater, was more effectively able to resist the intemperance which, as historians have demonstrated, was a besetting problem for many nineteenth-century Canadian men.20 Upon graduation, he had studied law in the firm of H. Bailey Terrill, Conservative MLA of the Province of Canada, until Terrill’s untimely death in 1852. Widely regarded as his political successor, Colby was admitted to the bar in 1855, becoming one of only two practising attorneys in the county.21 By that date, possibly jolted into a new self-awareness by his father’s warning, he had begun to assume a more responsible lifestyle, and the following year began to add to his civic responsibilities an involvement in the community’s religious life. In religion as well as in the economy, the 1850s were a turning point for Stanstead as church and civic life became more closely integrated, with the Methodists consolidating their position as the dominant Protestant denomination. Though Moses and Lemira were Congregationalists, and had soundly trained their children in the moral precepts of Christianity, they were not church members. A man with a reverential awe of ‘the God of Nature and the God of Revelation,’ but also of independent mind, Moses Colby had long harboured a deep distrust of the fractious and emotional revivalism which he had observed sweeping Vermont and the ‘Burned Over District’ of New York in the period before 1850.22 This view had also come to be shared by Stanstead’s middle class following the area’s most recent experience of radical revivalism by the Free Will Baptists and Millerites in the 1840s.23 The Baptist and Adventist churches maintained a significant presence in the county during the latter half of the century, eclipsing the Congregationalists and Universalists, but they remained well behind the Wesleyan Methodists and Anglicans, as well as the rapidly growing Roman Catholics. Predictable and respectable, particularly in the village of Stanstead, where there were no Adventists, religious life had a

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strong communal tradition going back to 1816 with the building of a union chapel, which had been shared intermittently, if not always amicably, by all the local Protestants.24 Given the communal significance of religion and his own social and professional standing, Charles Colby in 1856 became a financial contributor to the Wesleyan Methodist Church as well as continuing to worship in the Congregational church and, on occasion, being an invited speaker at Congregational social and fund-raising events.25 In Stanstead such events habitually drew people without distinction of denominational background, and it was at one such communal event, a fund-raising moose dinner for a new Episcopal Church building in 1857, that he met his future wife, Harriet Child.26 A native of Weybridge, Vermont, raised a Methodist, and only recently appointed preceptress at the Stanstead Seminary, Hattie, as she was commonly known, was attractive, fun-loving, and college-educated. At age nineteen, she was already a published poet. By the spring of 1858 the two were engaged, and Hattie gave up her teaching position to spend a summer at the town of St Hyacinthe to perfect her French as part of the preparation for the future wife of an ambitious anglophone lawyer in Canada East. In December they were married in Weybridge and journeyed to Stanstead in time for Christmas.27 That theirs was a love match is abundantly documented in the wealth of letters the two exchanged, often on a daily basis, as well as by the reports of friends and family members. From the time when, in October 1859, the couple and their two-month-old daughter, Abby, moved into the newly completed Colby residence, shared with Moses and Lemira as well as Charles’s two siblings, their daily living arrangements took place within a larger kinship network. Kinship ties were further maintained through frequent extended visits both in Stanstead and Weybridge with Hattie’s family, as well as by regular socializing with more distant relatives and area residents.28 Giving birth to seven children within fourteen years, of whom only four survived infancy, Hattie was never in robust health, and although she tried to contribute to the housework, she also had little natural inclination in this area. Household costs were considerable, for they included the salaries of two or three ‘girls’ and a male farm worker, as well as regular replenishment of the family wardrobe. In addition, after 1877 deteriorating health resulted in extended vacations, first to visit a brother in Colorado, then – when the family finances eased a little – to Bermuda and Europe. Although marriage entailed major financial responsibilities, far from

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complaining, Charles Colby expressed himself entirely content with his new life. In their mutual correspondence, he and Hattie regularly shared literary and musical interests, gossip about Stanstead life, and pride in one another’s accomplishments, as well as in those of their four children. In these ways theirs was a faithful example of the companionate middle-class marriage which figured prominently in the literature of the time.29 Among their shared interests was religion. At the time when he began to court Hattie Child, Charles Colby, then age thirty, had undergone a profound religious experience. He was convinced, as he confided to his future mother-in-law in October 1858, that he had experienced what was termed in evangelical language ‘the baptism of the Holy Spirit.’30 The actual circumstances have not been documented, but it is probable that the event occurred in the course of a series of union revivals held at the Congregational Church at nearby Derby Line, Vermont, that previous spring.31 These revivals had been part of a wider phenomenon within urban centres in the northern United States and British North America during 1857–8. Their astounding impact on businessmen attracted considerable media attention, including extensive notice in the Stanstead Journal.32 As a recent study has noted, it was the publicity given to these revivals which widely popularized the image of the ‘Christian businessman,’ the groundwork for which had been laid a little earlier in didactic literature and in the YMCA movement.33 While one might assume that by its nature such a conversion, or in Colby’s words, ‘the transition from a worldly to a Christian life,’ would result in taking the important step of full church membership, this did not happen.34 A mutual decision to assume the responsibilities of full membership shortly after marriage had indeed been solemnly taken, but it fell by the wayside when in the weeks immediately following various factors intervened, including Charles’s frequent absences due to business.35 Neither husband nor wife sought church membership, but both attended the Methodist church on Sunday mornings and could usually be found in the Colby pew in the Congregational chapel during the evening service. Financially contributing to the salaries of both ministers, the two retained their respective denominational identities for census purposes.36 From time to time, the difficulty of reconciling the expectations of the life of a converted sinner with the demands of business and professional life surfaced in Colby’s writings.37 Often alone on Sunday evenings in an inhospitable hotel room, and missing his wife and infant

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children, at these times he would draw on religious and family identity to provide some form of meaning to the individualistic businessman’s way of life. In such instances, the moral conviction that divine providence rewards those who have pursued their goals with diligence and tenacity provided a meaningful framework by which to understand his often futile travels. ‘This is another instance of what faith and perseverence [sic] will accomplish under difficult circumstances when aided by the great disposer of events,’ he was able to write home at the successful completion of a mining contract with Boston investors in January 1864, one of the rare occasions when a venture reached a desirable conclusion.38 Not unlike its later secular version, the fictitious Samuel Smiles, so popular with nineteenth-century self-made businessmen, this assumption that Providence aided the efforts of disciplined individuals gave a buoyancy to business life in good times, and allowed for dogged persistence in adversity.39 Initially Colby’s prospects for providing a solid economic basis for his family appeared promising. Local economic volatility ensured him a steady round of legal business as area residents engaging in a booming real estate market regularly sought him to represent their interests, usually as plaintiffs.40 While Moses Colby in his concern to provide for his family had supplemented his medical practice with incremental purchases of agricultural land, his eldest son branched out from law and farming into railway and the copper mining speculation that was stimulated by the American Civil War.41 By 1860 Charles Colby was investigating mining prospects in the Stowe, Vermont, area, and in October 1862, shortly before his father’s death, he secured the rights for mineral exploration on a 350–acre tract in Potton Township. A month later, in partnership with a local entrepreneur, Ozro Morrill, he received mining rights on half the area after forming the Canadian Copper Mines Company, and by January was in New York City advertising company shares to ‘a dozen gentlemen of wealth.’42 Leaving the Colby farm of some eight hundred acres amassed by Moses largely in the hands of a hired man, he also virtually ceased his legal practice.43 From this time on, mining speculation, based on hopeful prospects but mounting debts, became a constant and obsessive theme in Colby’s letters to his wife. Not all of his land transactions were notarized, but the paper trail left in their wake shows land leases and purchases with Morrill and several other partners in Potton, Cleveland, Hatley, Brome, and Ascot Townships between 1862 and the end of 1866 to total an outlay of $71,175.44

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Even though at Moses’ death in May 1863, Charles had received as his inheritance half of the family land and home, his means remained limited. This was aggravated by the need to take immediate decisive action to help his brother, William, who had recently married and whose alcoholism and debts threatened the integrity of the inheritance. With the consent of their mother, Charles had bought his brother’s share of the house and property, and had assumed sole responsibility for the mortgages with which the two brothers had encumbered the estate as far back as 1857.45 This, in addition to ongoing land speculation involving mining, oil, and railways, increased his economic worries.46 Portions of the estate were mortgaged, parcels of land were sold, and Charles immersed himself fully in the region’s war-fuelled industrial development. It was within this heady but anxiety-ridden economic environment of the mid-1860s that Colby was finally able to integrate two previously compartmentalized aspects of his life, his private religious experience and his social and economic concerns. Jean-Pierre Kesteman has noted the names of a small group of residents in the Stanstead region – Albert Knight, A.P. Ball, Ozro Morrill, Benjamin Pomroy, W.S. Hunter, and Charles C. Colby – who during the years 1861–6 joined forces in the partnership of nineteen new mining companies. With the exception of Hunter, an artist and engraver, these were among the reputedly wealthiest landowners of the area, and church records show all to be pew holders in Stanstead’s Wesleyan Methodist Church.47 Not all were Methodist members or adherents, but, as a study of Chicago’s Protestant businessmen during the ‘gilded age’ has noted, ‘it was not uncommon for the élite to belong to several churches at the same time.’48 Not only were business partnerships with fellow church members inherently attractive in assuring stability and trust, but Stanstead’s Methodist congregation had long outstripped the Congregationalist in numbers and affluence.49 In public life, as in the family, sacred and secular concerns became inextricably connected when those who gathered for church on Sundays met on weekdays to pursue together the region’s economic development. The rising prospects of these middle-class entrepreneurs in turn led to two other developments, the construction of a new Methodist church building in Stanstead and, in 1867, Charles Colby’s successful election to the first Dominion Parliament. In central Canada the availability of surplus funds by the mid-1860s had led to a spate of new church construction. These ‘epics in stone,’ to use William Westfall’s evocative phrase, testified as much to the height-

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ened material aspirations and circumstances as to the religious faith of local populations.50 Building on the benevolence and practical piety which had been shaped by the revivals of the 1850s, these ventures drew especially on the financial resources and managerial skills of the newly enriched.51 Stanstead in Quebec’s Eastern Townships was part of this pattern. In 1857 the Episcopals had laid the cornerstone for an attractive, modestly sized stone church; the following year the Congregationalists built a new chapel; and by 1864 the Wesleyans, whose numbers had outgrown their 1829 brick church, had begun to embark on church planning on a grand scale. Although William Colby played an active role in the early stages of the fund-raising, by 1866 – possibly because of his deteriorating personal and financial circumstances – he had dropped out, only to be replaced by his more prominent brother, Charles.52 Business and religious concerns continued to intersect as, in the course of business trips to Boston, Colby sought out an architectural firm whose grand design of a massive church built of local granite matched his own optimism as well as the boosterism in which Stanstead’s middle class was revelling during this period. Little distinction was made between civic and ecclesiastical fund-raising during such times of community euphoria, and during one anxious evening in 1866, the fundraising campaign for the new Methodist church briefly faced the threat of derailment in the face of a spontaneous frenzy of subscriptions for a hotel planned in tandem with a proposed International Fair.53 Much of this was based, however, on economic aspiration rather than achievement. With the failure in 1866 of oil companies whose prospects for quick profits had driven much of the speculation, the fortunes of some of the most prominent backers, including Charles Colby, began to reverse. In such instances, new ways had to be found to match precept with practice. As the history of church-building during these years frequently attests, the hope of salvaging a congregation’s floundering material fortunes lay in the presence of a single donor able to match spiritual commitment with lavish financial generosity. In the case of Stanstead, such help came through the aid of Wilder Pierce and his sons, Carlos, Charles, and Henry. The Pierce family were among the earliest American settlers, and leaders within the well-to-do segment of the Wesleyan community with whom Colby had entered into a variety of business ventures and who formed part of the social circle in which he and his wife moved. Carlos Pierce, who as a young man working in the family

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granite store in Boston had undergone a miraculous rescue when its walls had collapsed and buried him in rubble, was especially drawn to philanthropic work. After the death of his father in September 1866, Carlos stepped in several times with major financial contributions as well as a donation of the land and, at a reduced rate, the granite from the family quarry, thereby far outranking Colby, the second highest subscriber.54 His generosity not only allowed the building campaign to continue but, equally importantly, ensured that there would be no rupture in the religious and economic partnership of the town’s leading Wesleyans. In bringing the community and its leading citizens together in a new way to cooperate on a shared religious project, church-building could also have spiritual consequences. As attested in local histories and the denominational press, frequently the completion of new churches was accompanied by revival, as men, women, and children were swept up in the enthusiasm, civic pride, and moral optimism which reverberated when a congregation had visibly prospered.55 In the relatively closed communities of the 1860s, church-building, boosterism, individual anxiety, and spiritual recommitment all appeared to be interrelated, and it took only the preaching of a gifted minister to galvanize these resources for the ‘greater cause’ of revival. The Reverend W.P. Parker, appointed to Stanstead in 1866 when plans for the new church were beginning to flounder, appears to have been such a minister. A graduate in 1858 of Victoria College, where he had taken part in a large-scale college revival with other future Methodist leaders such as Albert Carman and Nathanael Burwash, Parker was the first of a long list of universityeducated ministers whom the ministerial stationing committee, at the request of laymen, would send to Stanstead.56 A series of evangelistic services in January 1867 resulted in a religious revival which boosted the membership from 91 to 150. Among the first to be received ‘on trial’ into the membership of the Wesleyan Methodist Church on February 17 was Charles Colby, to be followed in May by his wife, with both enrolled in the customary class meeting.57 Whereas, at an earlier date, Colby had refrained from taking this step, by 1867 changing socioeconomic circumstances and denominational needs made it possible to integrate the duties of church membership with those of a businessman and civic leader. Church membership and active church participation strengthened one’s civic profile, but it did not affect the nature of the economic environment, the swing between boom and bust, which characterized

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the business world of the late 1860s and ’70s. For Colby, as for others with limited resources, the possibility of financial collapse was an everpresent reality.58 In his case, the catalyst to economic risk and ultimately insolvency turned out to be a Vermont mining partnership with two of his wife’s brothers. As in his ventures with local businessmen, family partnerships provided an opportunity to pool limited resources for major financial investments. An unprofitable sheep-raising partnership with his brothers-in-law shortly after the couple’s marriage had set the stage, and in 1866 this was followed by a second and much more grandiose venture, the mining of a recently discovered marble site at Belden’s Falls, near Middlebury, Vermont.59 Convinced of a potential bonanza thanks to its new type of marble promising to equal or surpass the renowned Italian Carrara marble, Charles in 1866 successfully made a contract with a Boston mining firm and invested all his available capital.60 The timing seemed propitious, given an $80,000 shared windfall recently realized by the sale of some of the Ascot Township mines.61 By 1869, however, it had become quite apparent that the Vermont mine contained very little of the much-vaunted marble.62 Debts accumulated and land was further mortgaged or sold until, suddenly in August 1871, Colby’s inability to pay an overdue promissory note for $1,000 with interest catapulted him into insolvency.63 In early November 1871 two sales of livestock and implements yielded $1,152, an amount less than the $54,809 debt and legal fees. Under the terms of the 1869 Insolvency Act, any suit against a debtor unable to meet his commitments compelled all other creditors to come forward as opposants to protect their claims. Ten days later, twenty-four claimants entered into legal proceedings; in January 1872 the family moved next door into a frame house they owned and whose maintenance would be significantly less costly. Subsequently, household goods and chattels were seized and auctioned, and all of the Stanstead land – consisting of Carrollcroft, the 832-acre farm left by Moses, and several small parcels of land – were sold. By June the proceeds of $8,191, which represented only a small portion of the debt, had been proportionately disbursed among the litigants.64 Although this represented a major financial reversal, and led Colby as a member of Parliament to make the reform of Canada’s insolvency law one of his major political goals, it did not plunge the family into permanent poverty or despair. As had been the case throughout his often troubled financial career, family and faith remained the basis of hope and courage to face the future. In the spring of 1871, when the

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writing of imminent financial collapse was already on the wall, and their youngest daughter, a sickly infant since birth, continued to weaken, Colby had sought to encourage his wife and himself with the reminder ‘we are in the hands of One who controls all things – for the best.’65 In the course of the next year, they lost not only their child but also their house and land. Religion and family continued, nevertheless, to offer strength for the present and hope for the future. Looking back, Colby noted to his wife, ‘In such trials philosophy and religion should aid by reminding us that as all the good things of this life must inevitably slip away from us it is not of the greatest consequence whether they are parted with all at once or one by one, and that far better things are in store for us if we rightly seek them.’ For this reason all their economies, he cautioned, were to be devoted to one purpose, the clothing and education of their four remaining children.66 As did family ties, the Colbys’ place within the community offered stability, for the insolvency did not have any adverse impact on their social relations. Although the family had moved into the considerably more modest frame house next to their old home, and finances were extremely strained, they continued to accept invitations and receive friends and acquaintances as before. Most of the creditors had been personal friends and/or business partners, and though they took a substantial financial beating, it was clear that they made every effort to accommodate the Colbys as far as the terms of the insolvency law permitted.67 During the next few decades, as Stanstead’s economic ties moved away from their earlier Boston axis to Montreal, and later to include the West and then Britain, Colby’s fortunes began again slowly to rise, and in 1887 he was able to buy back Carrollcroft.68 As Stanstead’s member of Parliament from 1867 to 1891, located in Ottawa and frequently travelling to Montreal, he was in an advantageous position to advance the concerns of the local anglophone business community.69 Opportunities for public participation in church affairs also began to extend from the local to the regional and national levels. In 1875 the Wesleyans entered into a wider union with several other Methodist groups, to be followed in 1884 by the union of all Methodists into one national denomination. These were decades when, thanks to increased wealth and social standing, lay interests became more dominant.70 Colby maintained a high profile in denominational affairs in Ottawa, as well as at the local level as a trustee of the new Stanstead Centenary Church and regionally as a lay delegate to the annual Montreal Conference, where

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behind the scenes he could act as a watchful observer to ensure that the Methodist stationing committee’s ministerial appointments to Stanstead reflected the values of the town’s elite.71 Colby’s personal and denominational concerns further coincided when, with other regional businessmen and ministers in 1870, he helped found Stanstead College, a Methodist institution of higher education. As with his Stanstead partnerships at an earlier date, religious and business interests continued to overlap. A number of men who played an active role as trustees in the formation and running of Stanstead College were also investors in shared business concerns.72 Evolving out of the same mixture of family circumstances and middleclass moral values as his interest in higher education, Colby also maintained an active support for the temperance movement, to whose banner flocked the prominent anglophone families of Montreal and the surrounding region. For the Colbys, the battle against intemperance was both a deeply personal family concern and a forum for public action, an area of community building which called on the combined efforts of men and women. Hattie Colby’s letters from Ottawa in the course of extended visits underscore that alcohol abuse was as pervasive a reality among members of Parliament as it was in her own extended family, and that in neither case were evangelicals exempt. In the male world of business and parliament in which her husband lived, alcohol was readily available, serving as a ‘lubricant’ to carry one through a difficult business venture, or through a long night in the House.73 While drink was a besetting problem among Colby’s acquaintances and within his own family, in his public pronouncements he chose to link temperance work to an optimistic Christian moral vision of society. As a prominent templar since the 1850s, and later as an MP and an International Templar, he was frequently called upon to speak. In these addresses, his emphasis was not on the ravaging effects of alcohol, but rather on a statesmanlike appeal for social change wherein men and women, each in their own sphere, joined forces in millennial fervour to eradicate the evil of alcohol through example and persuasion.74 Socially conservative, in economic matters Colby was enterprising and willing to continue to take risks. For him and other Canadian entrepreneurs, the business arena had begun to shift to include the West, as well as Britain (which Colby visited in 1883) and the Continent. In 1892 he acquired the patent rights in Canada and the British Empire for the Empire typewriter, which as the first noiseless typewriter would eventually lay the foundations of the family’s prosperity.75 To further

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this interest, for which the financial reward was initially slow, the couple and their daughter Jessie moved for a time, from 1891 to 1894, to London. Even then finances remained strained, but in the final five years of his life Colby was able to provide comfortably for his family, and, at his death in 1907, he left his wife and children a substantial legacy of $92,000.76 Though Charles Colby had passed on a significantly larger inheritance than his father in 1863, by far the bulk of the estate no longer consisted of land, but of company and bank stock.77 Where Moses had spent his final years trying to amass a substantial farm and other land parcels, the only real property his eldest son left was Carrollcroft and two frame houses.78 Moses Colby’s great concern had been that the changing economic world of the 1850s, with its shift from an agrarian to a market-driven industrializing economy, would undermine traditional communal values and create a society driven by selfish individualism. His fears were not entirely unwarranted. Nor was he alone in his concern. Clergy and educators frequently uttered severe denunciations of financial speculation during the antebellum period in the United States. Historians such as Karen Halttunen have interpreted such pronouncements as part of an expression of anxiety by observers who saw traditional authority slipping in a society which had become driven by the prospects of fast wealth and upward social mobility.79 These anxieties were not without foundation, as Stuart Blumin has pointed out, and as Charles Colby’s economic fortunes have illustrated, ‘the middleclass escalator was at least as likely to go down as up.’80 It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that the one recorded criticism of Charles Colby’s insolvency in 1872 came, not from his fellow businessmen and social acquaintances, but from an older Methodist minister who had ‘located’ or settled down in Stanstead. In the view of this critic, Colby had been no worse off after his insolvency than before since, so the report went, ‘he had always speculated upon borrowed capital and had never had any property of his own.’ Thanks to the quick defence by the town’s Roman Catholic grocer that he knew of at least one transaction whereby Colby had made $40,000, the clerical critic had been silenced.81 The minister’s criticism, however, reflected faithfully the evangelical distinction of his generation and denomination between ‘visionary’ and ‘real’ wealth. In the Methodist rules governing a member who had failed in business, one could read the stern injunction ‘let two or three judicious members of our Church inspect the accounts of the supposed delinquent; and if he has behaved dishonestly, or borrowed money

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without a probability of paying, let him be expelled.’82 In the thought of the Scottish evangelical Thomas Chalmers (one of the few to comment on economic matters), such a position was the only feasible one, for ‘bankruptcies were not “mysterious visitations, inscrutable as potatorot or rinder pest,” but the logical outcome of sin ... The laws of business are laid down by the Governor of the world with as much firmness and precision as the laws which make the universe the “Kosmos” – the perfection of order and beauty.’83 The second half of the nineteenth century in both Canada and the United States, as critics had feared, continued to be an economically volatile period. Worth noting, however, is that – notwithstanding the concerns of the older generation – the same men who now wheeled and dealed in the marketplace were also the financial mainstay of the evangelical denominations. Whereas neither Moses Colby nor his grandson, Charles William, would be remembered for their active church involvement, this was not true for the middle generation, Charles Colby and his wife and children. It was during their period that the construct of the Christian businessman became prevalent and that evangelical economic teaching underwent a subtle change. In The Age of Atonement, a provocative study of early nineteenth-century social and economic thought in Britain, Boyd Hilton has drawn attention to the conflict between the evangelical theology of personal sin, trial, and judgment and the individualistic free-trade ideology of that period. In the views of evangelical clergy, though a limited amount of risk was permissible, financial speculation implied not merely economic irresponsibility but even philosophic doubt and atheism. Thus, in thundering against it from the pulpit, clergy were expressing a deep concern for the souls of businessmen. Across the Atlantic, in Jacksonian America, clergymen, educators, and popular moralists like the Reverend Francis Wayland, whose text, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, young Colby studied at Dartmouth, were equally adamant that economic expansion built on speculation was ‘groundless, hazardous, over committed and uncontrolled.’84 This view had also been faithfully reflected in the reported words of Colby’s elderly clerical critic. The financial crisis of 1857–8, and the subsequent wide-scale revivals in major urban centres in Canada and the United States (which had also influenced Charles Colby), marked a turning point towards a more positive linkage between business and religion. As the label of businessmen’s revival suggested, the resulting religious awakening celebrated a new understanding that religion and commerce could be

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compatable.85 The Stanstead Journal, which had approvingly detailed for local readers the sober and serious nature of these American revivals, had underscored that – as a result of this religious awakening among men of business – material progress would again be guided by moral renewal. Quoting an article from the New York Courier and Enquirer, and noting its applicability to the Canadian scene, the Journal stressed: ‘There are times when an altogether new set of spiritual activities are evolved in society, and the old are immeasurably quickened and strengthened – when the veriest infidel can hardly help recognizing that a divine spirit is being poured out, bringing the human spirit into subjection.’86 Although Methodists such as the evangelist Phoebe Palmer played a prominent role in the revivals, one of the main centres of revival had been Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Congregational Church in New York, where Colby regularly worshipped during the course of his business trips. Converted in the revival period of 1857–8, Colby had a strong admiration for Beecher and, like a number of other Canadian businessmen of the period, sought unsuccessfully to have Beecher put his home town on his famed lecture circuit.87 One of the first books the married couple read together was Beecher’s 1859 New Star Papers, a collection of columns written for the New York Independent in the course of the revivals.88 For thoughtful, family- and civic-minded young businessmen such as Colby, these sermons (which included Beecher’s own construction of the 1857–8 revivals) offered a new understanding of religion, one which took a sharp turn away from the individualistic, emotional revivalism which in Stanstead had become largely associated with the Millerite movement. Instead, as Hattie and Charles Colby were able to read in Beecher, true religion was as natural as taking care of one’s business, living the life of an obedient citizen, and loving one’s family. ‘Any man who knows enough to love his children, his father, mother, brother or sister, has theological knowledge enough to know the Lord Jesus Christ,’ Beecher assured his readers in ‘How to Become a Christian,’ one of the central sermons in the book.89 This shift in religious emphasis was not limited to American writers like Beecher, but could be discerned even earlier in Britain, where historians have suggested a direct link between theological and economic change. According to the analysis of Boyd Hilton, the evangelical or retributive version of free-trade ideology had lost ground by the 1850s to a more optimistic expansionist, industrializing, and cosmopolitan vision. A theology centred on the substitutionary nature of the atonement began to give

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way to an emphasis on the incarnation, drawing greater attention to God’s love and immanence within the world.90 Charles Colby’s career as a businessman, as examined in the preceding pages, offers a unique point of entry into how these general shifts translated themselves into the lives of individuals. From the time of his conversion in 1858, religion became incarnate in his everyday life, first privately in his love of his wife and family, and later more publicly when his own business interests and those of his local church, and later the denomination, coincided. Both his conversion and his engagement to Hattie Child, which occurred in short proximity of one another, allowed him to experience love in a new sense, as a personal, affective force.91 This implicit congruence between God’s love and the love experienced within the family surfaced regularly in Colby’s letters to his wife.92 In an economic system where land and even material possessions were no longer sources of stability, religion and the family took on a new value as points of hope and continuity. In order for this to happen, religion did become redefined. In a number of ways, neither Colby nor his family was a faithful reflection of the model which had dominated the evangelical literature of the earlier period, and whose lifestyle was reflected in the Discipline of the Methodist Church, as laid down a century earlier by John Wesley. The social restrictions of the Methodist Discipline sat relatively lightly upon the Colby family, as indeed upon Stanstead’s Methodists generally, including some of its more sophisticated ministers. Children’s parties, for example, often included dancing, a practice which eased the way for the Colby daughters later, on visits to their father in Ottawa, to enter fully into the balls of the season. By not taking an antagonistic form, religion mirrored culture in reassuring ways which gave meaning and purpose to life. Religion for Colby and his family, as for many middleclass Victorians, was not something experienced in isolation, but intimately interwoven with economic, social, and political concerns, which in turn bound families to larger networks of kinship and community. The cement which bonded these networks was a sense of moral responsibility. This belief in a universal moral sense or conscience, expounded in sermons, illustrated in didactic children’s literature, and analysed in the Common Sense philosophy which reigned supreme in Canadian and American colleges until the 1870s, also laid the foundations for the shift from the evangelical theology of the atonement to a theology of incarnation and immanence more in tune with the optimism of the period.93 Arguing the universal nature of the moral sense,

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moral philosophy held private property to be a sacred right, and thus it did not seek to undermine the capitalist socio-economic order. Instead, what the moral sense did was temper the individualism inherent in a free enterprise system by reminding men of their responsibilities to their family, community, business partners, nation, and God. The emphasis, therefore, was on right motive in business dealings; if this were right, the outcome could be entrusted to Providence. Never intentionally dishonest in his business dealings, and concerned about those for whom he felt responsibility, Charles Colby – caring family man, strong supporter of his church and community, and locally prominent politician – could not, therefore, be faulted for undergoing insolvency. In the face of the anxieties of his father, Charles had indeed entered fully into the financial speculation and business practices which so alarmed Moses’s generation. Yet, even though much land had been lost, the younger Colby had been able to maintain in new ways the communal values which Moses had seen to be under threat. He did so by integrating family and religion in such a way that they became the moral centre of his self-understanding and of his business and public activities.94 Not surprisingly, therefore, when informed of the elderly Methodist minister’s criticism of his insolvency, Colby was quick to note that it had deeply offended his ‘moral sense’ that a ‘brother Methodist’ should have offered uncharitable remarks so at variance with the compassion shown by the rest of the community.95 The dominant place of the moral sense in Victorian identity formation would also ensure that even though Charles Colby’s business practices had at times been questionable, he would be eulogized at his funeral as a model public man and exemplary Christian. And he would not be alone; the latter part of the nineteenth century witnessed an outburst of literature in Canada detailing the exemplary lives of devout businessmen. While some clearly were representatives of an evangelical construct reflecting the agrarian-commercial marketplace of an earlier period, others, like Colby, stood squarely within the economically progressive and socially conservative industrialism of the late nineteenth century.96 Historians like A.B. McKillop, and literary critics like Northrop Frye, have drawn attention to the continuity of the moral dimension in Anglo-Canadian self-understanding.97 Today, when connections between religious belief and business activity are no longer assumed, Colby’s life offers insight into this easily overlooked dimension of nineteenth-century business life. For religiously minded businessmen of the time, the relationship between clerical precepts and

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actual practice was far from simple, but had to be negotiated within the often conflicting demands of gender, family, church, and community. Religious sociologist Nancy Ammerman has noted: ‘If we focus on how people make a life, rather than on how they make sense, we may find the practical coherence that transcends the apparent ideological coherence. Religious practices – both actions and rhetorics – are organized, but we will not discover that organization without paying attention to what people are doing, where, and with whom.’98 To unravel the impact of religious teaching within the economic world of nineteenthcentury Canada, we do well to keep in mind this observation.

Notes 1 Barbara Welter, ‘The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,’ American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151–74; Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); E. Anthony Rotundo, ‘Boy Culture: Middle-Class Boyhood in Nineteenth-Century America,’ in M. Carnes and C. Griffin, eds, Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 27–35. 2 Jane Flax, ‘Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12 (1987): 621–44; Denise Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’: Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,’ Historical Journal 36 (1993): 383–414; Leonore Davidoff et al., The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830–1960 (London: Longman, 1999). 3 Clyde Griffin, ‘Reconstructing Masculinity,’ in Carnes and Griffin, eds, Meanings for Manhood, 184–91; Marilyn Lake, ‘The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context,’ Historical Studies 22 (1986): 116– 31; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London: Longman, 1987), 108–13. 4 See, for example, A.W. Nicolson, Memories of James Bain Morrow (Toronto: Methodist Book and Pub. House, 1881); Nathanael Burwash, Memorials of the Life of Edward and Lydia Ann Jackson (Toronto: S. Rose, 1876); Rev. W. Cochrane, ed., The Canadian Album: Men of Canada or Success by Example, 5 vols (Brantford, ON: Bradley, Garretson, 1891–6).

A ‘Christian Businessman’ 115 5 For Canada, see, for example, G.A. Rawlyk, ed., Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). 6 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1985), 137–54. For a recent effective treatment of the intersection of religion, economic change, and male identity, see William R. Sutton, Journeymen for Jesus: Evangelical Artisans Confront Capitalism in Jacksonian Baltimore (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998). 7 Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1978). 8 See, for example, Gordon Darroch and Lee Soltow, Property and Inequality in Victorian Ontario: Structural Patterns and Cultural Communities in the 1871 Census (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 97; David G. Burley, A Particular Condition in Life: Self-Employment and Social Mobility in MidVictorian Brantford, Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 66–78; and Marguerite Van Die, ‘“The Marks of a Genuine Revival”: Religion, Social Change, Gender, and Community in Mid-Victorian Brantford, Ontario,’ Canadian Historical Review 79 (1998): 524–63. 9 ‘Death of Hon. C.C. Colby,’ Stanstead Journal, 17 January 1907. 10 The turning point was at mid-century and coincided with Colby’s entry into public life. In the ten years from 1849 to 1859, the membership of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in central Canada more than doubled, from 24,268 to 51,669, while that of the Methodist New Connexion rose from 3,389 to 5,708. In the Maritimes, Wesleyan membership, which registered 11,750 in 1849, and in the next nine years grew by less than 2,000, in 1859 drew in 3,338 new members, largely through revivals in such major urban centres as Halifax, Saint John, and Charlottetown. For the Wesleyan Methodists in central Canada, connexional funds (those over and above local building and salary costs, but including church relief, contingent, educational, and superannuated ministry funds) more than doubled, from $7,360 to $17,1190. See George Cornish, ed., Cyclopedia of Methodism in Canada, vol. 1 (Toronto: Methodist Book and Pub. House, 1881), 32, 455. 11 Maxine Van De Wetering, ‘The Popular Concept of “Home” in NineteenthCentury America,’ Journal of American Studies 18 (1984): 5–28. 12 Matthew F. Farfan, The Stanstead Region, 1792–1844: Isolation, Reform, and Class on the Eastern Townships Frontier (Hull, QC: Townships Publications,

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1992), 2–9, 51–52; J.I. Little, State and Society in Transition: The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships, 1838–1852 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 17–48. Archives Nationales du Québec à Sherbrooke (hereafter ANQS), Files of C.A. Richardson, #5747: 2 August 1855, Last Will and Testament, Moses F. Colby. For the socio-economic changes, see the analysis and summary in JeanPierre Kesteman, ‘Une bourgeoisie et son espace: Industrialisation et développement du capitalisme dans le district de Saint-François (Québec), 1823–1879’ (Ph.D. diss., Université du Québec à Montréal, 1985), 687–703. Gregory Schneider, examining the relations between men in the early and later nineteenth-century Methodist cultures in the United States, has interpreted this shift from an agrarian to a marketplace-driven economy as marking the transition from a culture defined by honour, self-abnegating virtue, and patriarchy to one characterized by moral individualism, a breakdown of deference, and an increased emphasis on affection and selfinterest as the basis for family relations. See his The Way of the Cross Leads Home: The Domestication of American Methodism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). This is Moses’s accusation in a lengthy letter to William, probably written in 1858 (Societé Historique de Stanstead, Fonds Colby [hereafter FC], Moses French Colby [hereafter MFC] Papers, Series 1: Box 1:12). Land transactions by the two brothers show in 1858 a one-acre (unnotarized) purchase for $600 and a $1,500 mortgage obligation for 10 per cent; and in 1859 a $1,000 mortgage obligation at 6 per cent as well as a $500 mortgage obligation at 6 per cent (ANQS, Files of C.A. Richardson, #6509, 20 Nov. 1858; #6510, 20 Nov. 1858; #6666, 20 May 1859). ANQS, Files of C.A. Richardson, #5752, 15 Aug. 1855. This immediately followed a will notarized on August 2, and, while substantially in agreement with the earlier will, replaced Charles with William as executor. FC, MFC Papers, Series 1: Box 1:12, MFC to William [1858?]. ANQS, Files of C.A. Richardson, #8467, 20 April 20 1864. This was negotiated with the consent of their mother, Lemira Strong Colby. For William’s bankruptcy, see ANQS, Superior Court Records, Saint Francis 1873, Insolvency Records File #48, 12 Nov. 1873. References to his alcoholism surfaced intermittently in Hattie Colby’s letters to her husband. See, for example, FC, Hattie Child Colby (hereafter HCC) Papers, Series I: Box 1:1 and 1:5, HCC to Charles C. Colby (hereafter CCC), 27 Dec. 1864 and 6 July 1875. William’s death notice and an obituary are in the Stanstead Journal, 28 Feb. 1884.

A ‘Christian Businessman’ 117 20 Jan Noel, Canada Dry: Temperance Crusades before Confederation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). For the impact on a family life, see James L. Sturgis, ‘“The Spectre of a Drunkard’s Grave”: One Family’s Battle with Alcohol in Late Nineteenth-Century Canada,’ in Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, ed., Drink in Canada: Historical Essays (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993). 21 FC, Charles William Colby (hereafter CWC) Papers, Series 1:C, Box 11:1, Address on Charles Colby. 22 FC, MFC Papers, Series 3, Box 1:1, Manuscript Diary (1817). 23 See, for example, the model revivals ‘unattended with fanaticism’ discussed in the Stanstead Journal, 15 April 1858. The development of revivalism in the area in the first half of the nineteenth century has been extensively documented and analysed in J.I. Little, Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity, 1792–1852 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). See also B.F. Hubbard, Forests and Clearings: The History of Stanstead County (Montreal: Lovell, 1874), 98–9, 101–2. 24 Karl P. Stofko, ‘Old Union Meeting House at Stanstead, Quebec, Canada,’ Stanstead Historical Society Journal 13 (1989): 9–11; Little, Borderland Religion, 58–9, 175. 25 Archives nationales du Québec à Montréal (hereafter ANQM), United Church of Canada, Montreal Conference Archives (hereafter UCC, MCA), Wesleyan Methodist Church, Stanstead, P.Q., Minute Book, vol. 1, 1833–61; Stanstead Journal, 24 Jan. 1856. 26 FC, HCC Papers, Series 1, Box 1:1, HCC to CCC, 4 March 1859. The letter recalls the anniversary of their first encounter. 27 A good account of Hattie’s formation and of their courting is given in FC, CWC Papers, Series 1:C, Box 1:3, ‘Garrulities of an Octogenarian.’ A sample of her poetry is in FC, HCC Papers, Series 2: Box 2. 28 Diary 1859, for example, records 151 names of relatives, friends, and acquaintances whom she encountered during her first year of marriage (FC, HCC Papers, Series 2, Box 1). 29 For concise descriptions of the companionate marriage, see Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York: Norton, 1985), 15–53; and Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 180–92. 30 FC, CCC Papers, Series 4:A, Box 1:3, CCC to Mahalia Child, 20 Oct. 1858. 31 FC, HCC Papers, Series 1, Box 3:6, HCC to Mahalia and John Child, 11 April [1858]. 32 Stanstead Journal, 25 March 1858, 15 April 1858.

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33 Kathryn Teresa Long, The Revival of 1857–58: Interpreting an American Religious Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 86. 34 The short-term impact upon many of the converts, as reflected in select congregational membership numbers, is noted in Long, Revival, 144–50. For a brief discussion of the impact of the businessmen’s revival on Methodism in Canada, see Marguerite Van Die, ‘“A March of Triumph in Praise of the Beauty of Holiness”: Laity and the Evangelical Impulse in Canadian Methodism, 1800–1884,’ in Rawlyk, ed., Aspects of the Canadian, 79–89. 35 FC, HCC Papers, Series 2, Box 1, 1861 Journal, 3 Feb. 1861. 36 In 1861 Charles Colby, along with his parents and two siblings, is listed as Congregationalist, his wife and daughter as Wesleyan Methodist. In 1871 all the Colbys, with the exception of the matriarch, Lemira, are listed as Wesleyan Methodist (National Archives, C-1323 and C-10089, 1861 and 1871 Manuscript Census, Stanstead County/Township, Village of Stanstead Plain). Moses Colby had died in 1863; his daughter Emily, who married William White in 1861, had died 12 July 1866. 37 FC, CCC Papers, Series 4:B, Box 6:2, 1861 Journal, 26 Jan. 1861, which records his chagrin at desecrating the Sabbath by catching up on his journal entries. 38 FC, CCC Papers, Series 4:A, Box 2:2, CCC to HCC, 27 Jan. 1864. 39 For the role of evangelical beliefs and values in shaping the nineteenthcentury self-made man, see Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chapter 6. 40 ANQS, Stanstead Circuit Court Registers 1855–1879. In 1861, for example, these record Colby participating in forty-three cases, of which in thirtyeight he represented plaintiffs. 41 Kesteman, ‘Une bourgeoisie,’ 545, 581, 601, 604–6, 683–4; W. Gillies Ross, Three Eastern Townships Mining Villages since 1863: Albert Mines, Capelton and Eustis, Quebec (Lennoxville, QC: Department of Geography, Bishops University, 1975), chapter 1. Colby’s business affairs are amply documented in the regular correspondence with his wife, who maintained an active interest. 42 ANQS, Files of C.A. Richardson, #7922, 4 Oct. 1862; FC, CCC Papers, Series 4:A, Box 2:2, CCC to HCC, 24 Jan. 1863. 43 Circuit ledgers show Colby involved in seventy-six cases in 1862; in 1863 this was reduced to twenty-two, and thereafter less than five a year (ANQS, Stanstead Circuit Court). 44 ANQS, Files of C.A. Richardson, # 7922, #8477; G.H. Napier, #2391; D.

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45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58

59 60

Thomas, #255, #338, and #421; E.P. Felton, #24, #90–3; J. Lefebvre, #156–7; unnotarized, 6 Nov. 1863, 8 March 1864, 1 April 1865. ANQS, Files of C.A. Richardson, #8135, 23 May 1863; # 8467, 20 April 1864. FC, CCC Papers, Series 4:A, Box 2:3, CCC to HCC, 20 April 1868. Kesteman, ‘Une bourgeoisie,’ 604; ANQM, UCC, MCA, Wesleyan Methodist Church, Stanstead, P.Q., pew list 1869. Paul Henry Heidebrecht, Faith and Economic Practice: Protestant Businessmen in Chicago, 1900–1920 (New York: Garland, 1989), 27. John Carroll, ‘A Flying Visit to the East,’ Christian Guardian, 9 and 16 Jan. 1867. William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), chapter 5. J.M. [Senator John Macdonald], ‘Church Edifices,’ Christian Guardian, 23 Jan. 1867. ANQM, UCC, MCA, Records of the New Wesleyan Methodist Church, Stanstead, vol. 1. FC, HCC Papers, Series 1, Box 1:1, HCC to CCC, 6 Dec. 1866. Hubbard, Forests and Clearings, 128–30; Memorial of Charles Wilder Pierce, n.p., n.d. [1889], microfiche; ANQM, UCC, MCA, Records of the New Wesleyan Methodist Church, Stanstead, vol. 1. See, for example, ‘Dr. Taylor’s Lecture at Farmersville,’ Christian Guardian, 13 April 1870. Hubbard, Forests and Clearings, 88–9; United Church / Victoria University Archives, Biographical File, ‘W.P. Parker.’ ANQM, UCC, MCA, Wesleyan Methodist Church, Stanstead, Circuit Register. J.L. Granatstein et al., Nation: Canada since Confederation, 3rd ed. (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1990), 63–96. David Burley notes the high rate of mortgage indebtedness in 1871 and 1880–1 among those under forty (A Particular Condition in Life: Self-Employment and Social Mobility in MidVictorian Brantford, Ontario [Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994], 121). Kesteman (‘Une bourgeoisie,’ 554) comments on the inflation caused by the end of the Civil War. Besides Colby, at least one other member of Stanstead’s business elite, his mining partner Ozro Morrill, had to face insolvency. FC, CCC Papers, Series 4:A, Box 2:2, CCC to HCC, 20 June 1860, 4 July 1860. FC, CWC Papers, Series 1:C, Box 11:3, CWC, ‘Garrulities of an Octogenarian’ (typescript), 24–5.

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61 ANQS, Sherbrooke Registry Office, Register B, vol. 18, p. 306, # 227, unnotarized, 6 Feb. 1866. 62 FC, HCC Papers, Series 1, Box 1:2, HCC to CCC, 7 July 1869. 63 ANQS, Superior Court Records, Saint Francis 1872, Register File #707, Hannah Howard vs. Charles C. Colby, 1 Aug. 1871. 64 ANQS, Superior Court Records, Saint Francis 1872, File #707, Writ of Collation, 20 June 1872. 65 FC, CCC Papers, Series 4:A, Box 2:1, CCC to HCC, 19 March 1871. 66 FC, CCC Papers, Series 4:A, Box 2:5, CCC to HCC, 30 April 1872. 67 Initially, on 17 November 1871, an additional eighteen creditors, many of them family friends, had presented amounts owed (ANQS, Superior Court Records, Saint Francis Records 1872, File #707, Respondents’ Exhibit, 17 Nov. 1871). They appear to have withdrawn their claims by the time of the writ of collation, 20 June 1872, distributing the assets seized from the defendant. 68 Colby continued desperately, and with little success, to seek out potential backers for new financial ventures, spending the summers immediately following the insolvency travelling to Ontario and the western United States in an effort to raise shares for a McCormack harvester. Although by 1880, thanks to the sale of the remainder of the Ascot Township mine, he was able to estimate his assets at $40,000, on several occasions in the 1880s and 1890s the Bank of the Eastern Townships warned him that his credit was stretched to the limit. Political preferment had also been slow, despite reassuring and tantalizing hints of advancement by John A. Macdonald. Appointment as deputy speaker came in 1887, and presidency of the Privy Council in 1889. Convinced that his business affairs required his full attention, Colby started to consider withdrawing from politics, a decision clinched by his defeat (by a very narrow margin) in the 1891 election. 69 Business contacts, especially in railway promotion, were formed with other Conservative federal and provincial politicians representing the Eastern Townships: E.T. Brooks, a Sherbrooke judge and friend since college days in Dartmouth; J.H. Pope, rentier in Cookshire, whose political successor he was widely perceived to become; A.T. Galt; Charles Brooks, a Lennoxville merchant; and M.H. Cochrane, a wealthy Compton livestock breeder and pioneer, with Pope, in the western Canadian ranching industry. Linked to this group, and often overlapping, were shareholders in the Eastern Townships Bank as well as the Paton Woollen Mills (FC, CCC Papers, Series 3:A, Box 1). 70 R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar, Professional Gentlemen: The Professions in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 272–9.

A ‘Christian Businessman’ 121 71 Given the controlling position that Stanstead’s bourgeoisie had come to assume, and the high number who were Methodists, it is not surprising that a profile of the Methodist clergy stationed in Stanstead during the second half of the nineteenth century shows the majority possessing college degrees, with a high number displaying as well a background, and sometimes an active interest, in financial and business concerns. One of these, Charles Hanson, a British Wesleyan, returned to England in 1890 – after twenty-two years serving Canadian churches – in order to pursue his business interests as a partner in Coates, Son, & Co. Hanson regularily entertained visitors from Stanstead, including the Colbys. Pursuing a political career as well, he became a member of Parliament and in 1917 was chosen Lord Mayor of London (William Lamb, ‘Sir Charles Augustin Hanson,’ Hay Bay Guardian 6 [1998]: 3–6). Kesteman (‘Une bourgeoisie,’ 589) notes that clergy were among the investors in banking. 72 Joan MacDonald, The Stanstead College Story (Stanstead: Stanstead College, 1977). During these years, Colby retained an active involvement in the college, serving after June 1875 on its board of trustees. When in the fall of 1876 the financial depression had so depleted lay funding that the Montreal Conference assumed the college’s debts, and direction of the institution became shared between twelve ministerial trustees and twelve laymen, Colby was further drawn into the Conference’s efforts to incorporate the college into the educational system of the Methodist Church. This also included fund-raising in order to put in place an adequate endowment (Minutes 1872–92, Board of Trustees, Stanstead College, Stanstead, P.Q). 73 From Ottawa, HCC writing to Abby and Jessie Colby, notes that Senator McMaster was ‘primed’ for his speech the previous evening and ‘had certainly been drinking’ (FC, HCC Papers, Box 2:2, HCC to children [jointly], 11 March 1884). Charles, in a letter to his wife concerning ‘the dreaded stockholders’ meeting’ of the Magog Co., notes, ‘All passed off harmoniously, owing perhaps somewhat to my lubrication’ (FC, CCC Papers, Series 4:A, Box 4:8, Finding Aid CCC: Appendix One, CCC to HCC, 16 Jan. 1889). 74 FC, CCC Papers, Series 4:B, Box 5:7, ‘Good Templarism: An Address Delivered at Stanstead, P.Q., September 8th, 1870, by C.C. Colby, Esq., M.P., a Member of International Temple.’ 75 This was its trade name in Canada and Britain (‘Adler’ in Germany), to which after 1896 was added a noiseless typewriter, developed by the American-based Parker Machine Company. 76 According to ‘Garrulities of an Octogenarian’ (FC, CWC Papers, Series 1:C, Box 1:3). The list of assets submitted to the inspector of provincial

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revenue as basis for succession taxes was $67,609 (FC, CCC Papers, Series 4:B, Box 5:4). Company and bank stock comprised 87 per cent of the $67,609. ANQS, File D. Thomas, #7752, 15 March 1907, Last Will and Testament, Charles C. Colby, probated 9 Feb. 1907 and dated 5 Dec. 1903. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of MiddleClass Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 1–32. Quoted in Halttunen, Confidence Men, 29. FC, HCC Papers, Series 1, Box 2:7, HCC to Jessie Colby, 8 Sept., 1872. ‘Reports on the Committee on Discipline. Administration on Discipline. Section 5:9,’ Journal of Proceedings of the First United General Conference of the Methodist Church (Toronto, 1883), 274. This repeated the discipline which had been in place at the time of the Colby insolvency. Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 133. The vehement clerical reaction to the Panic of 1837 is discussed by Halttunen, Confidence Men, 20. In Wayland’s view, ‘The amount of money actually lost by insolvency is absolutely enormous; and it is generally lost by causeless, reckless speculation, by childish and inexcusable extravagance, or by gambling and profligacy, which are all stimulated into activity by the facility of credit and the facility by which debts may be cancelled by acts of insolvency’ (Francis Wayland, The Elements of Moral Science, 1835 ed., ed. Joseph L. Blau [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963], 226–7). Long, Revival of 1857–58, 83. Stanstead Journal, 15 April 1858. FC, HCC Papers, Series 1, Box 1:1, HCC to CCC, 15 June 1859. FC, HCC Papers, Series 2, Box 1:1, 1859 Diary. Henry Ward Beecher, New Star Papers; or, Views and Experiences of Religious Subjects (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1859), 309. Books such as William Farrar’s Life of Christ, which have been seen as a major contributor to this shift (Hilton, Age of Atonement, 275), quickly became an addition to the Colby library. As Colby described his ‘new birth’ to his future mother-in-law, God had ceased being abstract and become a loving, personal presence: ‘when the flood gates were once opened, the pent up feelings of years burst out with a resistless force which broke down all barriers separating me from the Savior’ (FC, CCC Papers, Series 4:A, Box 1:3, CCC to Mahalia Child, 10 Oct. 1858).

A ‘Christian Businessman’ 123 92 In April 1873, for example, when their economic circumstances were still very grim, his annual reminder of the anniversary of their engagement read as follows: ‘With you I look back to April 1st, 1858 as the most happy day of all my life. It directed the current of our lives. When I send up my secret thanksgiving, the most precious gift for which I thank my Heavenly Father is my dear wife, and next my children. Your love and charity and devotion will have their reward elsewhere if not here’ (FC, CCC Papers, Series 4:A, Box 3:2, CCC to HCC, 2 April 1873). 93 ‘Moral Philosophy proceeds upon the supposition that there exists in the action of men a moral quality, and that there are certain sequences connected by our Creator with the exhibition of that quality,’ Francis Wayland had impressed upon students like young Charles Colby at Dartmouth (Wayland, The Elements of Moral Science, 18). For the role played by moral philosophy in redefining evangelical Protestantism, see Donald H. Meyer, The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), and A.B. McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979). 94 Many years later, as a retired politician speaking out against the Laurier government’s flirtation with Imperial Federation, he would still draw on the language of family affection to express his opposition: ‘The bonds of affection which now hold us to the mother country are stronger than any constitutional fetters that can be welded. Love is the strongest power in the universe and that is the bond which now holds us. Substitute any other and you replace strength by weakness. Change the ends of the magnet and instead of attraction you have repulsion’ (FC, CCC Papers, Series 2:A, Box 1:8 [speech to local audience, mss, fragment, n.d.]). 95 FC, HCC Papers, Series 1, Box 2:7, HCC to Jessie Colby, 8 Sept. 1872. 96 See note 4. Representative of the earlier evangelical model is A.W. Nicolson; of the later position, William Cochrane. 97 In Frye’s understanding, this ‘myth of concern’ is anxious for continuity and intolerant of dissent. See Northrop Frye, The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 36–7; McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence, especially 1–5. 98 Nancy T. Ammerman, ‘Organized Religion in a Voluntaristic Society,’ Sociology of Religion 58 (1997): 207.

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RELIGION, SOCIAL REFORM, AND COMMUNITY

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The following four essays are more institutional in theme than those of the previous section. Two deal with aspects of the social reform movement, though the one on school reform focuses on a single individual, Marcus Child. Child, like Merry and Colby, lived in Stanstead County, and, while he may have been only vaguely aware of the tinware peddler, he certainly knew Colby as a young man because the latter’s father, Dr Moses Colby (encountered in the first essay in this section), was a political rival. Locally prominent, like the Colbys, Child was not a major figure from the provincial perspective, but he does provide us with valuable insight into how the reform process was implemented at the local level, and his example suggests that state formation and religious motivation were far from antithetical. As the first essay reveals, however, religion played a still more important role in the temperance movement, even when it began to be organized on a secular basis in the 1840s. The third essay explores how the religious camp meeting, an institution generally associated with the pioneer era of American history, adapted to the industrial age by taking advantage of the railway companies’ desire to promote recreational travel to the masses. Somewhat foreign to the increasingly conservative and Canadian culture of the Eastern Townships, this rowdy biannual meeting alongside the Vermont border was resented by the self-consciously ‘respectable’ members of the local community, and particularly by one spokesman who perceived it to be a retrogressive ritual in an age of scientific and social progress. The tensions produced within rural and village communities by the increasingly rapid development of modernity are also a central theme of the final article in this collection, and religion is again at the heart of those tensions. This essay, which examines a crime that may or may not have taken place in the village, can be viewed as an example of what Robert Darnton has recently identified as ‘incident analysis,’ a historical approach that focuses on dramatic events and the various ways that they were subsequently interpreted, as opposed to the microhistorical approach of reconstructing social worlds.1 But the interpreters were contemporaries, not historians, and this essay does examine the documents produced by the incident in an attempt to understand the social dynamics of one rural community in transition. The final essay is also distinct from the first three in this section insofar as they are mostly concerned with the region’s largely American-settled southern townships (in fact, Stanstead – the most American of those townships – is over-represented in this volume) while it examines quite a different

community in the British-settled northern periphery. Localism remained a more powerful force in these isolated Megantic County settlements, which were surrounded by a French-Canadian population, yet they were not culturally isolated enough to prevent a rapid exodus to more economically promising territories. The same process would take place a little later in the southern townships, so that today there is little to distinguish this ‘other Quebec’ from the rest of the province, aside from the remnants of a rapidly aging English-Canadian minority.

5 ‘A Moral Engine of Such Incalculable Power’: The Temperance Movement in the Eastern Townships, 1830–52

Alcohol studies are beginning to experience a renaissance in Canada, and Jan Noel’s Canada Dry has provided a much-needed overview of the temperance movement in the pre-Confederation era.2 But even while this study reveals that the movement differed significantly from one region to another, it pays only passing attention to the Eastern Townships, while Darren Ferry’s recent article on temperance societies in nineteenth-century ‘Canada’ completely ignores the region.3 As with Upper Canada, the American temperance crusade had a major impact on the townships bordering Vermont, but what was the first major social reform movement of the nineteenth century developed in a distinctive way as it progressed through several stages in the region during the 1830s and 1840s. When an externally based organization did come to dominate the Townships in the later 1840s, it was not the Sons of Temperance, as elsewhere in English-speaking Canada, but the Independent Order of Rechabites. Because the Rechabites continued to promote moral suasion over state regulation, they were well suited to the independent-minded people of the Eastern Townships, though there would be a turn towards prohibition after mid-century. Nor was the region’s anti-drink movement any less effective for its relatively moderate stance, for local historians writing in the nineteenth century are unanimous in pointing to the revolution experienced in alcohol consumption habits by mid-century. Referring to pioneer rural economies in the United States, W.J. Rorabaugh claims that their poor transportation links and small local markets made the distillation of surplus cereal crops an efficient and profitable choice.4 The Eastern Townships conformed to this situation

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during the early nineteenth century, except in one particular. The liquor was not produced from corn, as in the trans-Appalachian West, but from the much more productive potato. Noting that potato whiskey had been one of the few locally produced commodities that could be transported profitably to outside markets, the Reverend Edward Cleveland’s local history of 1858 names eight men who had operated distilleries in his home township of Shipton. Cleveland claimed that one of them had retailed 3,000 gallons in a year: Those who have witnessed the evening scenes in these distilleries, the gatherings of men and boys from the neighborhood, the songs, jests, and revelry that filled up the time, would not wonder at the worst effects that followed. And when we consider how the same liquid fire was carried into the bar-room, the store, and private dwellings, and was then so common in all departments of society, we shall at once see a prominent cause of all the evils that prevailed.

Cleveland credited the temperance movement with the fact that there were no longer any stills in the township; also, few of the stores retailed ‘the poison,’ and ‘our private dwellings are generally free from it.’5 A similar picture is painted by another local historian, B.F. Hubbard, who wrote in 1874 that the township of Stanstead had once boasted twenty-six distilleries: A considerable part ... was disposed at Montreal and other markets, but the amount consumed at home told fearfully upon the prosperity of the settlement. The Temperance Reformation of subsequent years changed the aspect of this traffic, but not before many of the early settlers had become habitually intemperate, some of whom found the drunkard’s grave, and others were stripped of their property and compelled to leave the country.6

Even if, as Ghislaine Hildebrand claims, much more liquor was sold in the towns than in the countryside prior to the temperance movement,7 the images painted by Cleveland and Hubbard suggest that consumption was another matter. Rural alcoholism became the theme of numerous locally written poems, including the sad tale recounted in ‘The Drunkard’s Wife,’ published in 1855 by young Helen Marr Johnson of Magog:

‘A Moral Engine of Such Incalculable Power’ 131 She remembered well when in early youth She stood by the loved one’s side, With a beaming eye and heart of youth, A fair and a happy bride. ... She remembered well the home of yore, Where peace and where plenty dwelt, Ere the tempter foul had crossed the door, And woe and destruction dealt. ... She thought of those who had downward led One dearer than light or life; And a curse fell on the rumseller’s head – The curse of the drunkard’s wife! 8

The melodramatic language employed by such temperance supporters has made it easy to dismiss their claims about the damaging social impact of alcohol, and the anti-drink movement has been largely attributed by one school of historians to the needs of industrialists for a sober and dependable workforce.9 Certainly, as we shall see, the Sherbrooke Temperance Society on the Total Abstinence Principle was fostered by that town’s entrepreneurial elite during the early 1840s. Its chair in 1842 was the former tavern keeper, Samuel Brooks, a leading entrepreneur and member of the Legislative Assembly, and its secretary was the conservative newspaper publisher Joseph S. Walton.10 It should not be forgotten, however, that the merchants had profited greatly from what Hubbard called ‘the long columns of charges of rum, brandy, gin, whiskey, and ditto’ which appeared in their account books.11 Furthermore, we shall see that women played an important role in Sherbrooke’s temperance society, as well as in all the others established in the region. It was not in the industrial centres of North America – where the social control argument would best apply – that the nineteenth-century temperance organizations were strongest, but in the long-settled towns and villages. It has been suggested, however, that even in the rural areas the temperance movement embodied the middle-class values which emerged with the expansion of transportation facilities and growth of the market-based economy.12 This hypothesis is doubtless true, and of course the new economy would offer profitable alternatives to the sale of potato whiskey, but it should be noted that the temperance

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movement struck a popular chord in the Eastern Townships long before the arrival of the railway at mid-century. It was in the pre-industrial rural areas, according to Joel Bernard’s argument, that the traditional religious practice of fasting evolved into temperance just as the mentality that took divine intervention for granted was transforming into one that sought naturalistic causes for the same events. Poverty, crime, and disease were no longer ‘contingent facts of the divine order,’ but social ills that could be eradicated by eliminating the consumption of alcohol.13 Laura Schmidt presents a different but compatible analysis by suggesting that the American churches were seeking to preserve their authority and the authority of their beliefs by bringing traditional Puritan ideas more into line with the changing social order. In her view, the temperance movement offered ‘a new kind of religious ideology and strategy for winning converts en masse.’14 Whatever their motivation, it was the Protestant clergy who began to promote temperance societies in various Eastern Townships communities during the early 1830s. The first one whose records have survived was the Stanbridge Temperance Society, founded in January 1831. A week after a public meeting had ‘listened to a Spirited address on the Subject of Intemperance by the Rev. Wm Arthur,’ 221 individuals – of whom approximately one-third were women – promised to ‘entirely abstain’ from the use of distilled spirits ‘except as a medicine,’ to ‘banish them from our families,’ to ‘not give them to persons employed by us,’ and to ‘use our influence in discouraging their use amongst our friends.’15 The Stanbridge society was clearly church-inspired, for its committee of directors was presided over by the Reverend John Baker. Which denomination he was affiliated with is not clear, but the main force behind the pioneer temperance movement was the Congregational Church.16 In Shipton Township’s village of Danville, for example, a Congregational committee reported in 1834 that 150 people had joined the local temperance society.17 The Reverend Ammi Parker added: ‘Intemperance appears to have received a stamp of reprobation in our community. Buildings are raised and farm work prosecuted, without the monster’s aid, except as a few of the more worthless perpetuate the curse upon themselves.’ He estimated that the amount of spirits consumed in the township had declined by four-fifths during the previous year.18 There were also Congregational-led temperance societies in Granby and Shefford as early as 1833, while elsewhere in the region Congrega-

‘A Moral Engine of Such Incalculable Power’ 133

tional missionaries reported the number of pledge-takers as follows: 100 in Stanstead in 1835, increasing to 950 the following year; 80 in Melbourne in 1836; and, in 1837, 80 in Philipsburg, 200 in Potton, 280 in Eaton, plus more than 400 in Compton.19 In 1837 by-laws were passed by the Granby and Shefford Congregational churches declaring that membership required a ‘pledge of entire abstinence from all intoxicating drinks except for medicinal purposes.’20 The Baptists of the Eastern Townships were also involved in the antialcohol movement at an early date, for the pastor of East Farnham’s Free Will Baptist Church introduced the temperance pledge as early as 1830 and had established an organization with a constitution by 1835. The original pledge, which did not proscribe beer or cider, was replaced with a total abstinence one (‘except for purposes strictly medicinal’) in 1842, and an annually elected ‘Diligence Committee’ – later referred to as the ‘Vigilance Committee’ – was established soon afterward. Its role, as these names suggest, was to report on anyone who violated the pledge and ‘to prevent the sale of intoxicating liquor.’ The society’s historian claims that women were sometimes on this committee in the early years, which suggests that their role as moral guardians of the community declined with time. In 1843 a committee of three was appointed to visit all persons engaged in the liquor traffic, and resolutions were passed declaring that members should patronize only temperance hotels and merchants who did not sell ‘spirituous liquors.’21 Coercive as these measures may have been, they still stopped short of state control. What appears to have been a second Baptist-organized society was not so long-lived. The records of the South West Stanstead Temperance Society for 1834–7 are included with that township’s Baptist minute book for 1840–52.22 This society operated on the total abstinence principle, ‘excepting as a medicine or for Scientific or Culinary purposes,’ and the membership list reveals that approximately half its 153 members were women. The medical exemption was clearly a tempting loophole, for at the quarterly meeting of 22 April 1836 some members protested having to reapply to a physician for spirits when they suffered subsequent attacks of the same illness. A month later, one of the founding committee members was reproved for violating a pledge, with the result that he and two others immediately resigned. Matters deteriorated from there, for the July minutes record that the meeting was very poorly attended. The document ends with the minutes of the annual meeting in October 1837 recording that a special committee of

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three was to visit public houses and stores ‘to endeavour to persuade them to discontinue their trafick in Ardent Spirits.’ The relatively tolerant position towards spirits still taken by the South West Stanstead Temperance Society was reflected in the Free Will Baptists’ quarterly regional conference in 1836. Rather than proscribing consumption completely, the conference declared that church members could not be ‘in constant use of ardent spirits so as to be frequently disguised by it,’ or manufacture or sell the product. The regional Baptist stance became more hard-line in 1842 when the quarterly meeting agreed to amend the constitution ‘so that the church may be built on temperance principles.’23 As in Upper Canada, the Methodists were the largest evangelical church in the Eastern Townships, but it was the more conservative British Wesleyans rather than the American-based Episcopal Methodists who supplied missionaries to the east of the Ottawa River after 1821. This presumably explains why the early Methodist enthusiasm for temperance societies in Upper Canada was not echoed in the Eastern Townships.24 In 1838 the Canada District meeting conceded that temperance and total abstinence societies were strongly supported by other denominations, which ‘on that account become attractive to some of our members,’ but it added that ‘some of our best friends and most pious Leaders are Wine and Spirit merchants, particularly in Quebec.’25 Two years later, the Canada Temperance Advocate published a letter from the Methodist leadership stating that ‘no member of this meeting shall be allowed to agitate the question of temperance, especially in the extreme view of it called teetotalism or total abstinence, with the view of making it a church question or a condition of membership in our Society.’26 However, local reports in the same journal also reveal that Methodist ministers were among the temperance society leaders of the Townships during the 1840s. Somewhat surprisingly, greater enthusiasm for the temperance movement was expressed from within the more conservative Church of England. The Reverend Charles Cotton of Dunham reported in 1830 that he had helped to establish a local temperance society, though he was motivated not so much by disapproval of alcohol as by the hope that it would ‘have a great influence in lessening the unreasonable prejudices entertained by many of the Dissenters against the Established Church.’27 More committed to the cause was the Reverend Richard Whitwell of nearby Philipsburg, who drafted the local temperance society’s report for 1831–2. While admitting that such organizations in

‘A Moral Engine of Such Incalculable Power’ 135

themselves did not have the power to transform men into ‘practical christians,’ Whitwell wrote that ‘under the superintendence of Divine Providence’ they could ‘prepare the way for the entrance of Christianity into the heart, which must be rid of the love & practice not only of ebriety, but of every other vice, before the seed of the Kingdom – the word of God – can take root there.’ He also expressed astonishment ‘that so many generations should have gone into eternity without a thought of setting in motion a moral Engine of such incalculable power – such universal applicability – & promising so much individual & national benefit.’28 Whitwell illustrated this argument by noting that the Eastern Townships region had been largely spared from the ‘desolating pestilence’ then raging elsewhere in the province, a reference to the cholera epidemic. He also cited statistics from the Albany Board of Health to show that only the intemperate had become victims of cholera. Such reasoning would appear to conform to Joel Bernard’s observation, noted above, that temperance became the perceived solution to poverty, crime, and disease. However, the Philipsburg cleric did not have a medicalscientific interpretation in mind. Rather, he proclaimed that the cholera epidemic was an act of ‘Divine judgement, sent to awaken a guilty lethargic world to a sense of their sins.’ Whitwell’s reasoning must have been persuasive, for 116 people in the Philipsburg area pledged to abstain not only from ‘ardent spirits’ but also from wine, ‘except on sacramental occasions & when medicinally necessary.’ Two branch societies, totalling 124 male and female members, were also established on the total abstinence principle.29 Four years later, in 1836, Whitwell’s neighbouring Anglican colleague, James Reid of Frelighsburg, also made a public plea in favour of temperance. In a lengthy pamphlet responding to a lecture published by the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont, Reid stated that ‘of all the objections [to the temperance movement] that I have yet seen, the most surprising, at least to me, is that which is brought on behalf of religion.’30 Bishop Hopkins had complained that the moral prerogative of the church was being usurped by the American Temperance Society, which lay open to any non-Christian who pledged to abstain from alcohol. In response, Reid pointed out that there was no conflict between the temperance society’s aims and those of the church. He also denied Hopkins’s charge that the ATS pretended to redeem the world simply by means of the temperance pledge. However, he could not resist adding that ‘the advantages resulting from a discontinuance of

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the use of ardent spirits have, nevertheless, been found so great and so obvious, as to have suggested the propriety of not refusing it the honour of being dignified with the name of reformation though in the strictest application of the term, it has no claim to the appellation.’ As to the charge that the temperance society was making ‘the sin of drunkenness the master sin – the parent of all sins, – the worst of all sins,’ thereby implying that abstainers were innocent of sin, Reid responded that ‘this part of the Lecture would require stronger proofs to make it pass for any thing more than a caricature.’ He did insist, nevertheless, that drink was ‘“the parent” of a vast many overwhelming miseries, and sorrows, and crimes, which could not exist if mankind were strangers to intemperance.’31 Extreme as the Vermont bishop’s critique may have been, it did reflect an awareness of the temperance movement’s secularizing implications. Reid himself could not have been blind to those tendencies, but he argued that if the clergy did not become involved in the movement, ‘but throw cold water on efforts to that effect, a change may take place which may be apt to consider them as unfriendly to the best interests of man.’32 He was presumably concerned that his own church, in particular, was being left behind by the reforming age, and he took pains to point out that the bishop and the archdeacon of his diocese also supported the temperance movement.33 Reid and Whitwell (who wrote an appendix to the tract) may also have been motivated by the fact that few of the original settlers had belonged to their church on arrival from the United States. The Anglican Church had, nevertheless, quickly become the largest Protestant denomination in the region, making its stand on the temperance movement of considerable importance. While it remains unclear whether or not most of the other Anglican clergy in the region actively favoured it, the Reverend Lucius Doolittle was vicepresident of the Sherbrooke County Temperance Society in 1836, and Dunkerly of Durham, Balfour of Waterloo, and Anderson of Inverness appear as local supporters in the pages of the Canada Temperance Advocate during the 1840s.34 There was undoubtedly rivalry in some communities for domination of the local temperance societies, but the sense of moral urgency coupled with the role played by the Montreal Temperance Society ensured that the movement would be remarkably interdenominational. The Congregationalists were proportionately over-represented, however, for even though only 1,099 Presbyterians and Congregationalists are recorded in the region by the 1831 Census Report, there were reported to be 1,490

‘A Moral Engine of Such Incalculable Power’ 137 Table 5.1. Returns made to the Montreal Temperance Convention, February 1836 Society

Date formed

Frelighsburg Dunham Georgeville Philipsburg Lennoxville Eaton Compton Bolton Shipton Stanstead Plain, S.E. Stanstead Plain, N.E. Granby Westbury

1830 1830 1830 1831 1832 1832 1832 1832 1833 1833 1833 1835 1833

Eastern Townships totals Convention totals aall

Members 156a 459b 245b 181b 139 318 436b 91 153b 200 389 73 31 2871 4249

Expelled

Withdrawn

20 8 11 8 1 4 9 7 6 0 3 0 1

6 12 80 5 14 2 7 5 8 15 1 0 8

78 159

163 217

total abstainers excluded from oath

bwine

Congregationalist members of Eastern Townships temperance societies in 1836.35 This was roughly half the total membership for the region as reported by the convention of the Montreal Temperance Society that same year (see table 5.1). This report provides a good overview of the local societies in the Eastern Townships. While not all the societies submitted reports, the thirteen that did so – with their 2,871 adherents – represented the majority of the convention’s membership. Only those in Frelighsburg had taken the more restrictive pledge, and, not surprisingly, Frelighsburg also reported the highest number of expulsions – twenty. The voluntary departure of eighty individuals from the Georgeville society suggests that there were serious internal divisions there, but elsewhere the movement appears to have been quite stable. Within the bounds of these twelve Townships societies there were reportedly only 19 taverns and 8 stores selling liquor, as compared to 14 temperance stores and inns. Montreal – with only 440 members – had 228 taverns, 147 stores selling liquor, and only 1 temperance store or inn. Finally, the twenty-six distilleries and breweries reported to have been operating at the time the Townships, temperance societies were established had been reduced to five, whereas Montreal’s number remained constant at ten.36

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Despite this optimistic picture, it appears that enthusiasm for temperance had begun to decline by 1836. In February, the Canada Temperance Advocate correspondent for Granby reported that matters were not progressing well there, and the secretary of the Sherbrooke County society wrote that the local branches were so poorly represented at the last meeting that it was ‘impossible to prepare a sufficiently accurate report to deserve publishing.’37 The following January, the Advocate published the report of a correspondent who had travelled through the Townships, where he had found a ‘very great need of the influence of Temperance Societies’ in the Stanbridge area, and few in attendance at the Stanstead meeting. While the cause appeared ‘more alive’ in Eaton, the speakers at the meeting he attended ‘lamented the extent of intemperance, and the increased use of intoxicating liquors.’ Finally, the people of Sherbrooke appeared to be too obsessed with commerce to be interested in the temperance movement.38 If one accepts the claim by historians of the movement in Upper Canada, there was one crucial ingredient missing for its success in the Eastern Townships: the fear and resentment caused by a large wave of Irish immigration. While James Clemens emphasizes middle-class anxiety arising from the influx of Catholics fleeing the famine, Glenn Lockwood argues that the Upper Canadian temperance lodges were essentially disguised reform societies established in response to the spread of Irish Protestant Toryism.39 The popularity of the movement in the Eastern Townships, where there were relatively few Irish immigrants of either religion, raises some doubt about the negative interpretations of these historians. Indeed, Irish settlers themselves were undoubtedly involved in most, if not all, the four temperance societies organized during the later 1830s in Megantic, the one heavily Irishsettled county in the region.40 Meanwhile, the general decline that observers elsewhere in the Townships were noting by this time presumably reflected the inevitable expenditure of several years of emotional energy in a movement characterized by its revivalistic fervour. Furthermore, there were more pressing issues to distract people’s attention as political tensions increased in the later 1830s. When it finally broke out, the Rebellion had a devastating impact on the temperance movement of the Townships, even though there was very little armed conflict in the region. In Stanstead, the number of temperance adherents declined from a peak of nearly one thousand to only sixty in 1838, and zero the following year.41 The local Congregational minister complained that his meeting house had been

‘A Moral Engine of Such Incalculable Power’ 139

taken for a barracks for five weeks, during which time the pulpit had been used for storing whiskey bottles, and the sacred desk for a card table.42 Further west, in South Potton, the pastor reported in March 1838 that the local radicals had ceased attending his church regularly, and his efforts to hold a temperance meeting had been in vain: ‘the minds of the people were so agitated that I could not get enough together to produce any good effect. The Tavern keeper still sells his poison.’43 Even in areas removed from the border skirmishing, temperance was in decline. A correspondent from Danville wrote in April 1838 that ‘the temperance cause is almost dead here. The Society is a mere name.’44 The following year, the Congregational minister for Sherbrooke noted that the movement had suffered considerably, and his counterpart in Waterloo complained that liquor selling was killing the enterprise of his community, particularly among the English and Scots settlers.45 But the political turmoil had merely interrupted what would become a more widespread and hard-line movement during the provincial union era. The Congregationalists played a leading role once again in the early 1840s, but this time the original initiative came from within the region. In January 1841, the St Francis Association of Presbyterian and Congregational Ministers established a district society based on the total abstinence principle,46 and reports to the Canada Temperance Advocate revealed that virtually all the local societies were abandoning the moderate pledge. The Montreal Temperance Society, nevertheless, continued to exercise considerable influence by sending travelling agents to the outlying communities. In November 1841, Secretary R.D. Wadsworth made an extensive tour of the Townships, gathering pledges, distributing hundreds of tracts, and selling subscriptions to the Advocate to pay his expenses. He held meetings in four Congregational churches, two Wesleyan chapels, two union chapels, one Anglican church, one Baptist chapel, seven schools, and the registry office in Drummondville. From this last town, he reported in the agrarian language that temperance promoters frequently resorted to in the Townships: ‘The soil here requires to be stumped, and twice ploughed, before temperance seed will yield a harvest.’ There were also few in Wadsworth’s audience in the town of Sherbrooke, but everywhere else he reported success, recruiting a total of 374 new members.47 The following month, Wadsworth headed to Quebec on another tour, passing through the British settlements of Megantic County en route. Here he held successful meetings in the Leeds Presbyterian church, the

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three Wesleyan chapels in Inverness and Ireland, several schools, and the home of a former tavern keeper.48 At the same time, the Montreal secretary’s efforts in the more southern townships were being reinforced by a four-month tour on the part of William Black. In addition to attending a large number of temperance meetings, Black reported visiting 824 families and gathering 773 signatures to the temperance pledge.49 But this Montreal agent did not meet with success everywhere. He reported that there was still little interest in Sherbrooke, no society in Brompton and Windsor because of tensions within the community, and opposition in Shipton due to ‘old country’ prejudices.50 Furthermore, the feeling in Eaton was that the adoption of the new total abstinence pledge had been premature, though Black disagreed: ‘the recent establishment of a brewery at Lennoxville, and the strong predilection of many of the people at Eaton and Newport for cider, are reasons sufficient for maintaining the present pledge inviolate.’51 February 1842 found Wadsworth yet again in the Townships, travelling 280 miles and delivering twenty-three lectures in as many places within seventeen days, despite the obstacle presented by a heavy snowstorm. Although he spent a much shorter period in the region, the Montreal secretary had considerably more success than Black, no doubt because the latter felt incapable of public speaking. Wadsworth organized four new societies, gathered 569 signatures to total abstinence pledges, and distributed approximately 2,000 temperance tracts.52 In what appears to be an extension of the same report, later printed in his History of the Temperance Cause in Canada, Wadsworth added that the twenty-seven distilleries and breweries in Stanstead County had been reduced to one. Still he was not satisfied, complaining that it was ‘extremely hard to induce moderationists to give up their brandied wines, home-brewed beer and cider.’53 Despite his relatively poor performance, Black returned to the Townships as well in 1842. This time he was able to report that the village of Stanstead ‘had taken up the subject of temperance in good earnest ... the high-ways and hedges were all that were left for me to visit: and in some places, many of the names were already enroled in some society, leaving little for me but the mere gleanings.’ But the story was different in another part of the township where the Montreal agent wrote: ‘Field barren and uninviting. I felt like a traveller suddenly transported from the genial warmth and opening bloom of spring, to the withering blast and naked sterility of winter.’ Black also noted little progress among the recent Scots immigrants of Beebe Plain and a general falling away in the

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village of Charleston, but he did add 258 members to the county’s local temperance societies.54 Sales of the Temperance Advocate were too few in this border region, flooded by American periodicals, to finance further initiatives by the Montreal Temperance Society,55 but the local societies continued to report steady growth. One of the most active communities was Granby, where there was a Juvenile Temperance Society of 64 members by 1841, and where a Catholic society of approximately 600 was reported the following year.56 A ‘temperance revival’ was also reported by the Congregational minister in 1842, resulting in 500 pledges after a June festival was held in the orchard of the tavern keeper who now operated on temperance principles.57 In Stanbridge East the secretary of the 320member temperance society claimed in 1842, as well, that there had been a rapid decline in liquor consumption: ‘I do not think that onefourth of the liquor is drunk now in this part of the township that there was four months ago, before the Society was formed. We now have raisings, logging bees, etc. etc. without a drop of intoxicating liquors being used.’58 Finally, the Reverend Parker of Shipton reported the same year that ‘a fresh impulse was given to the cause of Temperance which brought a large addition to our Soc.’y.’59 But this promising renewal threatened to be short-lived because the grounding of the Montreal Temperance Society’s travelling agents in 1843 was followed by the withdrawal of the American Home Missionary Society from Canada the same year, and its British Congregational counterpart failed to fill the breech. After a hiatus of a couple of years, the next phase of the temperance movement was dominated by the emerging industrial centre of Sherbrooke. As we have seen, Sherbrooke had been the centre of a rather weak county association in the mid1830s, but the Montreal agents had met with little encouragement there during the early 1840s. In 1845 the secretary of the local association reported that support had been flagging because of the forced closure of several taverns, but enthusiasm was rekindled by a charismatic crusader from Boston named Cole. Cole attracted ‘those holding position and rank in Sherbrooke society,’60 and the first elected president of the Sherbrooke Total Abstinence Society was George Frederick Bowen, district sheriff and son of Chief Justice Edward Bowen of Quebec. But this was evidently a largely honorary position, for Bowen does not appear to have played an active role in the society. And noticeably absent from the list of officers was Bowen’s brother-in-law, Edward Hale, another scion of the Quebec

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office-and-landholding elite and the leading Tory in the region. Most of the temperance officers were instead self-made American-born entrepreneurs or liberal professionals with strong attachments to the community. Treasurer of the society was the merchant-politician Samuel Brooks (who had served as president of the earlier incarnations in 1836 and 1842); the secretary was his merchant son, William, and among the vice-presidents and committee members were such rising notables as Adam Lomas, J.G. Robertson, William Ritchie, William Arms, J.S. Sanborn, and J.S. Walton.61 In addition to proclaiming a desire ‘to keep pace with the great moral improvement of the age,’ the preamble to the reactivated society’s charter mentioned ‘the poverty, disease and crime’ which intemperance had introduced ‘into our otherwise peaceful town [...] thereby not only hindering the growth and improvement of this town, but also counteracting the protecting influences of virtue, morality, and religion.’62 Despite the evident concern about social disintegration, the promoters were clearly more interested in hastening the process of social and economic change than in reasserting traditional values and protecting their status in a changing society, as one theory would suggest.63 Whether or not these men were fired by the millennial fervour that marked some of their bourgeois counterparts in Montreal,64 it should be noted that most of them were active members of the Congregational Church, and that Walton, Sanborn, and Robertson apparently shared a mutual understanding that they could call on each other to relieve the poor ‘if the assistance granted was considered too much for one to give.’65 Commenting on the impact that the temperance evangelist Cole had made upon him, the politically influential registrar, William Ritchie, declared in 1845 that ‘no more grog, wine or beer goes down my gullet,’ adding ‘I wonder at it how much misery would be done away in the world if intoxicating drink were banished from the land.’66 The temperance revival was reportedly followed by ‘a revived state of religion,’67 for the Sherbrooke Total Abstinence Society adopted many of the characteristics of nineteenth-century evangelicalism. In doing so, it was clearly influenced not only by its Congregational predecessors, but by the largely artisan-dominated Washingtonian Society, which became the most popular temperance organization in the United States during the early 1840s.68 Like the Washingtonians, the Sherbrooke temperance leaders were anxious to provide social alternatives to the taverns, and in late May they organized a ‘Temperance Jubilee’ in the town’s cotton factory. The day’s activities began with ‘a large proces-

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sion of members’ marching in order from the Court House, where ‘a cold water army of children’ had assembled. The Sherbrooke society also extended its mandate to charity, for a few days later a committee of prominent men was formed to collect and distribute old clothes to the needy.69 It is quite likely that women did the work this activity involved, just as they helped to circulate the pledge drafted by the society, but their support remained behind the scenes. Even though they were nearly half the 1,211 members in 1845, they were not among the society’s officers.70 It is also doubtful that women attended the meetings, since the discussion of drink and drunkenness was still thought to be unladylike at this time.71 Despite its secular organization, the Sherbrooke Total Abstinence Society’s weekly assemblies took on the tone of revival meetings, with the singing of temperance songs, readings from tracts, and members testifying to their formerly dissolute ways. One Barnston man was said to have consumed 639 gallons in seven years, an incredible average of a quart a day.72 With such church-inspired strategies, the Sherbrooke temperance leaders may simply have been adopting the most effective techniques available, but their interest was not confined to reforming the local wage labourers. By mid-July six merchants were reported to have given up the liquor trade,73 and the general falling off in enthusiasm for the temperance movement in the outlying areas provided an opportunity for the Sherbrooke society to reach out to the rural population. In January 1846 delegates from nine townships met in Sherbrooke in order to establish a federation of local societies.74 During the following weeks, delegates from Sherbrooke attended temperance meetings in a number of scattered locations. They reported that they were well received everywhere, with as many as three hundred in attendance at both the Melbourne and Danville meetings.75 Temperance fervour reached a peak in Sherbrooke in February 1846 when three men purchased and destroyed an innkeeper’s supply of liquor. While declaring that it had not played a role in this action, the Total Abstinence Society officially approved of it, adding that ‘we are satisfied they intended no offence to any individuals; and had it not been for the unwarranted interference, we believe no disturbance would have taken place.’ This resolution suggests that the more conservative elite organizers had lost control of the movement, at least for the moment,76 but popular enthusiasm inevitably waned soon afterward. The first sign of a decline in resolve came early in March when two members acknowledged breaking the pledge, though they offered to sign it

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again. Meetings continued on a weekly basis throughout the next ten months, but Walton complained of a lack of moral fervour.77 The minutes became increasingly perfunctory until none at all were recorded for a meeting in late January 1847. The next meeting was not held until a month later, when a brass band performed in an attempt to attract an audience. Another survival strategy was to broaden the appeal of the society to the French Canadians, who constituted most of the town’s industrial workforce.78 In May the Catholic curé, Bernard O’Reilly, was invited to deliver an address, but the initiative did not bear fruit.79 By the end of the summer, meetings had once again become infrequent. The following March, spokesmen such as Arms and Sanborn were recorded as making ‘interesting and spirited remarks’ about ‘the amount of good’ the society had accomplished ‘while in a vigorous and healthy state.’ However, they deplored ‘the injurious influence it exerted over Branch Societies by its feeble and sickly existence during the last six months.’ Inspired by the large number of people in attendance, the officers optimistically made plans to repair the Temperance Hall, but this was to be the last recorded meeting of the Sherbrooke Total Abstinence Society. Meanwhile, enthusiasm in the outlying areas continued to wax and wane, with the major new initiative being led in the southwestern part of the region by Captain J.D. Crippin (also spelled Crispin and Cripin) of New York State. In December 1847 the secretary of the Brome Total Abstinence Society reported that Crippin had not only revived this moribund society, he had fostered the establishment of three others in the same township. Crippin was also instrumental in founding a society at Sutton Flat, ‘a place heretofore considered almost impregnable.’80 The following spring, he was credited with increasing the number of societies in Missisquoi County from two to fourteen.81 In August a correspondent from Dunham reported that Crippin’s work had been instrumental in leading nearly 1,600 people to sign the pledge, ‘besides working wonders in Stanstead, Sherbrooke and Shefford.’82 But the American crusader’s impact on the more easterly townships appears to have been quite limited. Two months before Crippin’s death in November 1848, the Stanstead Journal was reduced to hoping that the Chiniquy crusade in the French-Canadian parishes would bring some influence ‘to bear upon the distilling business in the Eastern Townships, at least to a sufficient extent to obviate the necessity of importing breadstuffs.’83 The desired influence on the Eastern Townships actually

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came from an entirely different direction, for, before he died, Captain Crippin had established six ‘tents’ of the international temperance brotherhood known as the Independent Order of the Rechabites (named after a biblical sect which abstained from alcohol).84 Little appears to have been written about this British-born society in North America, where it first appeared in 1842, but Tyrell claims that it perpetuated the disintegrating Washingtonian Society’s principles by adhering to moral reform and revivalism at a time when support for state prohibition was on the rise.85 The Rechabites were essentially a plebeian organization which, like the more popular Sons of Temperance, featured a mutual benefits program. In contrast to the Sons of Temperance, however, the Rechabites enforced a strict moral code with backsliders subject to expulsion.86 Given the rapid proliferation of Rechabite ‘tents’ throughout the older communities in the Eastern Townships, the society clearly appealed to the well-established rural and small-town population in this region.87 The Rechabite order held a jubilee or Grand Tent meeting in Stanstead in September 1848, and another in Sutton the following month. Branches had been incorporated in Missisquoi, Shefford, and Stanstead Counties.88 Secret though the society may have formally been, the minutes of the Grand Tent meeting held at Dunham Flat, Missisquoi County, in December 1848 provide some sense of the Rechabites’ well-orchestrated appeal. Twenty-nine delegates were present from ten tents, and the proceedings were opened with a short address by Brother G.J. Emery: ‘with vivid language’ Emery depicted ‘the vile effects of ardent spirits upon the human systems and the efficacy of Rechabism to dethrone King Alcohol and, finally, the glorious reward of all who labour in its righteous cause.’ A negative note was briefly sounded when one of the Stanstead delegates was asked to explain why he had established tents in his county without orders from his superior to do so, but the meeting then voted to recognize these tents ‘as having been duly organized.’ After hearing ‘the most cheering accounts’ from the various tents represented, the meeting discussed a proposal to have degrees associated with the order, and appointed a committee of eleven to choose ‘Signs and Pass-Words’ for the ensuing quarter. To add to the pomp and ceremony, the officers of each tent were to wear sashes ‘made of purple cot. velvet, trimmed with gold leaf, with the no. of their Tent thereon, to distinguish them from private members on public occasions.’89 As T.W. Acheson has pointed out, the fraternal temperance orders, with their sacred oaths and secret symbols, were ‘at once pro-

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foundly religious and profoundly secular.’90 This was particularly true of the Rechabites, who sponsored family picnics but not the more morally ‘suspect’ teetotal balls or dances organized by the Sons of Temperance in Canada West.91 Playing prominent roles in the society were such old political rivals as Sherbrooke’s Tory editor, J.S. Walton, and Stanstead’s former radical editor and political exile, Silas Dickerson.92 There was some dissension in the Stanstead branch in August 1849 when a local man objected to being expelled for breaking the pledge, but he attracted more ridicule than sympathy in the local newspaper, and the following year found meetings still being held every Thursday.93 One local merchant had begun advertising his business as a ‘Temperance Store,’ and local enthusiasm was stronger than ever when the quarterly session of the region’s Grand Tent was held in Stanstead in June 1850. While Jan Noel claims that temperance leadership had shifted from Montreal to Upper Canada due to the rise of the Sons of Temperance, it would be more accurate to state that the Canadian movement had become regionalized. On a per capita basis, it was probably stronger at mid-century in the Eastern Townships, where there were twenty-eight Rechabite tents (the ‘encampment’ included an additional five Vermont tents), than in Upper Canada with its fifty-two Sons of Temperance divisions. The June 1850 meeting reported that, aside from the Americans, 1,273 individuals had joined the society, with Stanstead Plain and Sherbrooke registering the highest numbers at 181 and 112, respectively. However, 66 individuals had been honourably discharged, 74 suspended, and 25 expelled, leaving a total of only 1,126 members in good standing.94 Without other detailed reports, it is impossible to say whether or not the Rechabites had already peaked in the region, but there were a few signs of internal dissent. While Stanstead’s village society was clearly very active, its township branch reported 7 honourable discharges, 10 suspensions, and 3 expulsions, leaving a total of only 14 members. In addition, several members from Brome registered a formal complaint against their tent, which had only 15 members, for refusing to grant them an honourable discharge.95 Elsewhere in British North America, women had apparently begun to take their place on temperance platforms by 1850, and female societies and branches were also being established.96 The women of the Eastern Townships were, however, at first more formally marginalized in the new international fraternal movement, with its military symbolism, than they had been in the older one fostered by church and local

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community. Finally, in January 1852 the Canada East Grand Tent meeting held at Frost Village in Shefford Township voted unanimously to allow women to join on the same conditions as men.97 In the meantime, the Rechabite membership numbers of over 1,100 men at mid-century must have represented only a fraction of temperance supporters in the region. There were no Rechabite branches reported for the British-settled periphery of the region, but this does not mean that the temperance movement had died there. John R. Lambly, a leading Methodist layman from Leeds Township, became deputy grand worthy patriarch of the Society of Temperance in 1855.98 Furthermore, reports to the Canada Temperance Advocate reveal that, even in the older townships to the south, the Rechabites had not entirely replaced the church-sponsored temperance societies. The journal’s vivid description of the Missisquoi County Total Abstinence Society’s annual meeting held in Stanbridge in 1849 reveals how important religion and the American connection remained to the movement: Early in the morning, vehicles of all kinds began to arrive. Four horse teams, with the wagons so arranged as to hold 20 persons each, came up from distant places by ten o’clock, accompanied by other conveyances in great number from different localities. The day was fine – all was bright and beautiful. The sun shone – the ladies smiled – the men looked happy, and the boys and girls laughed in innocent gaiety. All centred toward the place of meeting – the brick church. The whole inside – pulpit, aisles, communion place, and galleries, were literally packed with ladies alone. A large platform was erected the whole length of the south side of the building, for speakers, delegates, bands, and choir of singers; stretched from thence southerly were long rows of seats for the gentlemen. The place was full inside and out, and a small platform fixed for the Speaker, President, and Secretary.

The meeting began with singing and prayer by a clergyman from Franklin, Vermont, followed by the annual address delivered by the presiding elder of the St Albans District Methodist Church, Vermont. The reporter describes ‘the vast multitude’ as being ‘enchained with interested delight for an hour and ten minutes, when all rent the air with loud and prolonged exclamations of applause.’ The crowd of three thousand was then fed at tables totalling five hundred feet in length, followed by the business meeting, in which three motions were pre-

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sented and seconded by local clergymen. The officers finally elected, however, were all laymen, making the society secular in name if not in spirit.99 The region’s temperance movement was given another fresh impulse by the marked increase in the illicit sale of liquor, after the arrival of the St Lawrence and Atlantic construction crews at mid-century.100 Furthermore, the rise in violence and paranoia that accompanied the Irish navvies also resulted in increased pressure on the government to control the sale of liquor, despite the Rechabites’ formal opposition to prohibition.101 While prohibition is generally associated with the post1850 era, Tyrell points out that the evangelical American anti-drink societies had already opted for it in 1840, and that it had become the dominant theme by the later 1840s.102 As early as 1842, the Sherbrooke Temperance Society had argued in a petition to Governor-General Bagot that, were the government to suppress the sale of liquor, it would regain its money ‘from the increased demand by a better conditioned population for other duty paying articles.’ The society’s members realized that the governor would have to wait ‘till the advancing light’ had further ‘dissipated the prejudices of custom,’ but they asked that steps at least be taken against the unlicensed dealers. Of more than twelve outlets ‘for the wholesale and retail of intoxicating liquors’ in Sherbrooke, only two were licensed. The petition added that licences were generally granted to applicants with ‘comparatively respectable’ houses, and, being under the surveillance of the law, they were ‘generally less ensnaring and injurious to the poor labouring people than the reckless illegal receptacles that now waylay them at every turn.’ Finally, the Sherbrooke society claimed that it was difficult to close these establishments because the people refused to inform against them even for a reward. The best solution to the problem would therefore be to appoint an officer ‘to migrate through the entire united province to detect lodges and prosecute informations every where,’ or to impose this duty on the sheriffs, coroners, or some other county officer.103 While the grand jury repeatedly attributed the lack of serious crime in the St Francis District to the work of the temperance societies,104 in 1842 it too began to deplore the existence of so many places ‘for the sale of ardent spirits, without license or the authority of the Law.’105 But even after the government followed the grand jury’s advice by appointing a district inspector of licences in 1845,106 most liquor establishments remained without a permit. The government issued only twenty tavern licences for the entire St Francis Judicial District between April 1845

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and April 1846, though the number did increase to twenty-nine during the following eight months.107 The inspector, Chauncey Bullock, also admitted that few of the distilleries in the district were licensed. He reported that most of them were owned by poor men ‘merely for working Potatoes a few months in the winter season.’ As a result, the law passed in 1842 imposing a tax on stills ‘has been supposed, by the People Generally in the Townships, to bear heavily on these small concerns.’ Bullock, who had gone into exile during the Rebellions, concluded that if he had taken action against them, ‘I should have been frowned down by the People and should not have been sustained by the magistrates.’108 In 1847 the grand jury claimed that ‘the laws regarding the sale of spirituous liquors’ had begun to be strictly enforced,109 but such enforcement continued to be hampered by the shortage of JPs even in the town of Sherbrooke itself. When Inspector Bullock reported to High Constable Clark in 1848 that two Sherbrooke establishments were retailing ‘spirituous liquors’ without permits, Clark’s hands were tied by the fact that the two magistrates legally required to hear the case were not available.110 Even where there were sufficient JPs, unlicensed liquor dealers could be adept at exploiting legal technicalities. One of the more imaginative, no doubt, was Stanstead’s Timothy Taylor. The magistrates had twice dismissed charges against him by 1851, when he appeared before them once again accused of dispensing alcohol without a licence. His argument was that he collected money only for a ‘show,’ not for drinks. According to a witness, customers went into a back room where there was a decanter of spirits on a table, and the show consisted of ‘an image of a negro, etc.’111 When the government did introduce legislation to restrict the sale of alcohol in 1850, there was far from unanimous approval in the Eastern Townships. The Stanstead Journal complained that the ‘injudicious and severe restrictions’ of the Bill for the More Effectual Suppression of Intemperance would do more harm than good.112 The bill’s provisions were indeed strict, since they would make innkeepers liable for injury or loss resulting from the actions of those who became drunk on their premises.113 Claiming that he would be forced to close his Stanstead hotel when these provisions came into force, the outspoken Dr M.F. Colby attacked ‘the advocates for promulgating the principles of moral reform by legislative [sic] proscriptive enactments.’114 Colby referred in particular to Stanstead’s aggressively evangelical Methodist minister, John Borland, when he charged that ‘those who

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would spread and enforce moral and religious tenets by fire and sword’ were not ‘the followers of the great and all-important doctrines which inculcate peace on earth – but the followers of the doctrines of men – those who enforce purification of the heart by outward washings – the Pharisees of modern times – the followers of Mahomet and those whose kingdom is on this earth.’ A laissez-faire liberal, despite his conservative political affiliation, Colby argued that every attempt to enforce moral precepts, rather than reforming the heart, would inevitably ‘carry the people to opposite extremes, and encourage infractions of law and morals, the more dangerous for being the more secret.’ Moving from the moral high ground, Colby complained that ‘the penal enactments are thrown on that class of vendors where the high charges for spirit, by the glass, would render its sale the least dangerous, while the government itself, by allowing the importation at a reduced duty, and the merchant and distiller who sell cheap and in any quantity from one gallon upward, are exempted from its penalties.’115 Dr Colby actually appears to have been a Rechabite, for in 1850 a letter from Boston addressing him as Brother Colby informed him that ‘in this part of the country, a man who keeps a grog-shop is rather a disreputable person. A licensed hotel keep [sic] or apothecary could not come under this head and if such persons as you mention – creditable and respected in the community where they live, wish to join & you wish to have them, I don’t know who there is to object.’116 A committee of the local Rechabite tent nevertheless criticized Colby for attempting to associate its activities with the controversial Reverend Borland and declared that it was ‘the people’ who demanded proscriptive legislation, since ‘Parliament was flooded with petitions for a more stringent License Law.’ To Colby’s complaint that wholesalers would escape unscathed, the committee conceded that ‘the axe should have been laid at the root of the tree – but there is a step in the right direction when they lop off the branches.’ The solution was not to repeal the law, but to remove the inequity Colby complained of: ‘It is a plain case. The public versus the grog seller. The interest of which party, should the Law be made to uphold?’117 This hard line was endorsed by the Canada East quarterly session of the Rechabites held in Compton several months later. One resolution declared that ‘all who are now engaged in the manufacture of, or the traffic in, intoxicating liquor, are practically the enemies of our race.’ However, the delegates remained true to their organization’s anticoercion principles by refusing to support J.S. Walton’s motion to the

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effect that they would be satisfied with nothing short of the Maine prohibition law.118 The Missisquoi County Total Abstinence Society and the East Farnham Temperance Society, on the other hand, strongly supported prohibition.119 Meanwhile, in 1851, the hotel owners of Stanstead County supported Colby’s stance when they asked that the offending bill be repealed on the grounds that merchants and distillers ‘are not under any restrictions whatsoever.’ Their petition was supported by Mayor Bigelow, who was a hotel owner himself, but seven councillors spoke forcefully against it at their June 1851 meeting. Consequently, rather than asking the Legislature to repeal the act, the Stanstead County Council moved unanimously that it should be ‘so amended as to apply equally to all persons vending spirituous liquors, both as respects its penal provisions and the obtaining of Licenses.’120 In Shefford the county council went further, objecting that the act was counterproductive because it would cause respectable houses of public entertainment to close, forcing travellers to resort to establishments ‘kept by reckless and disreputable characters in violation of the revenue law.’ The new legislation required the district inspectors to issue liquor licences only to those applicants who presented a requisition signed by the majority of municipal electors, plus a certificate of support from the senior magistrate, senior militia officer, and – inappropriately for Protestant districts – the ‘marguiller en charge’ (translated as the churchwarden in office).121 The Shefford councillors argued, however, that they were the best judges of how to regulate houses of public entertainment, and that they should therefore be the body to make the relevant laws, control the issuing of licences, and appropriate the fees.122 It is somewhat surprising that the demand for greater local control was not still more widespread in the region, since this was a dominant theme in the United States, and it was granted to the municipalities of Canada West in 1848.123 Furthermore, the Eastern Townships responded to the municipal and school reforms of the 1840s with strong demands for increased decentralization.124 Perhaps the municipal councils were generally content with receiving the local licence funds from the provincial government without having to enforce the more controversial aspects of the 1851 act. It also appears that a more sympathetic attitude towards provincial control began to develop after mid-century, for in 1854 the Farnham East Temperance Society sent out committees to surrounding neighbourhoods to promote prohibition and to persuade them to vote only for teetotal candidates.125 Finally, by this time there

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existed an Eastern Townships Prohibitory Liquor Law League, whose president was Stanstead’s former MLA, John McConnell.126 How popular this society was remains to be seen.127 For more than two decades, though, the region’s fluctuating temperance movement had remained largely a morally directed one, with an emphasis on individual conversion to abstinence. Though the Sherbrooke Total Abstinence Society and the Rechabites emerged in the 1840s as popular secular organizations, their meetings had strong religious overtones, and they shared a millennial-inspired desire for a transformed world.128 Their hopes may have been disappointed, but at least they could take comfort in the fact that the temperance movement and the restrictive licensing legislation had made a significant impact on alcohol consumption in the region. According to the Canada Census Reports, the number of people per tavern in the six Eastern Townships counties had increased three and a half times, from 576 in 1827 to 2,018 in 1852.129 As for Dr Colby, his business appears to have survived the new licensing regulations, for even though his ‘tavern stand’ was advertised for sale in January 1852, he renewed his liquor licence two months later.130

Notes 1 Robert Darnton, ‘It Happened One Night,’ New York Review of Books 61.11 (24 June 2004): 60–1. 2 Jan Noel, Canada Dry: Temperance Crusades before Confederation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). 3 Darren Ferry, ‘“To the Interests and Conscience of the Great Mass of the Community”: The Evolution of Temperance Societies in NineteenthCentury Canada,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association ns 14 (2003): 135–64. 4 W.J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 11, 61, 69, 74–84. Rorabaugh (pp. 8–10) claims that annual per capita consumption of distilled spirits in the United States declined from five gallons to less than two after 1830. For a useful overview of consumption in Canada, see Reginald G. Smart and Alan G. Ogburne, Northern Spirits: Drinking in Canada Then and Now (Toronto: Addiction Research Foundation, 1986), chapter 1. 5 Rev. Edward Cleveland, A Sketch of the Early Settlement and History of Shipton, Canada East ([Richmond]: S.C. Smith, 1858), 35–6. 6 B.F. Hubbard, Forests and Clearings: The History of Stanstead County

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(Montreal: Lovell, 1874), 30. Likewise, L.S. Channell of Compton states of the pioneer era: ‘A very popular drink in those days was potato whiskey, which was nearly as free as water and looked upon as a nourishing drink’ (History of Compton County [Cookshire: L.S. Channell, 1896], 67). Ghislaine Blais Hildebrand, ‘Les débuts du mouvement de tempérance dans le Bas-Canada, 1828–1840’ (M.A. thesis, McGill University, 1975), 15–16. Helen M. Johnson, Poems (Boston: J.V. Himes, 1855), 226–7. See, for example, John J. Rumbarger, Profits, Power and Prohibition: Alcohol Reform and the Industrialization of America, 1800–1930 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); and F. Laurie Barron, ‘“Damned Cold Water Drinking Societies”: Oligarchic Opposition to the Temperance Movement in Upper Canada, 1828–1848,’ Upper Midwest History 4 (1984): 11–28. For a contradictory interpretation, stressing the evangelical religious motivation, see T.W. Acheson, Saint John: The Making of a Colonial Urban Community (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), chapter 7; and James K. Rohrer, ‘The Origins of the Temperance Movement: A Reinterpretation,’ Journal of American Studies 24.2 (1990): 228–35. Jan Noel’s Canada Dry attempts to strike a balance. National Archives of Canada (hereafter NA), RG4 C1, Civil Secretary’s Correspondence, Incoming, 1842, Memorial of Sherbrooke Temperance Society, no. 1037. Hubbard, Forests and Clearings, 29. Referring to the seigneurial zone in the early nineteenth century, Allan Greer states that the traders used liquor ‘as a battering-ram into the habitant’s self-sufficient household economy’ (Peasant, Lord, and Merchant: Rural Society in Three Quebec Parishes, 1740– 1840 [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985], 157). Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, ‘“John Barleycorn Must Die”: An Introduction to the Social History of Alcohol,’ in Cheryl Krasnick Warsh, ed., Drink in Canada: Historical Essays (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 17–18; Daniel Joseph Samson, ‘Industry and Improvement: State and Class Formations in Nova Scotia’s Coal-Mining Countryside, 1790–1864’ (Ph.D. diss., Queen’s University, 1997), 585–94. Joel Bernard, ‘From Fasting to Abstinence: The Origins of the American Temperance Movement,’ in Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 342, 344, 347. Laura A. Schmidt, ‘“A Battle Not Man’s But God’s”: Origins of the American Temperance Crusade in the Struggle for Religious Authority,’ Journal of Studies on Alcohol 56.1 (1995): 111. ‘Stanbridge Temperance Society,’ in Water by the Mill [Missisquoi County

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17

18 19

20 21

22 23 24

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Historical Society] 13 (1974): 33–5. In this and the other membership lists considered below, there are a few names of ambiguous gender, and it is assumed that those with initials rather than first names were men. Reverend Joseph Christmas, who founded Canada’s first major temperance society in Montreal in 1828, served the local American Presbyterian Church, but his ties with the Congregationalists were close. He also founded the Canada Education and Home Missionary Society, which helped to fund the Congregational missionary effort in the Eastern Townships. See Noel, Canada Dry, chapter 4; and J.I. Little, ‘Serving “the North East Corner of Creation”: The Community Role of a Rural Minister in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, 1829–70,’ Histoire sociale/Social History 30 (1997): 21–54. Archives Nationales du Québec à Montréal (hereafter ANQM), United Church Archives, Montreal-Ottawa Conference (hereafter UCA), Canada Education and Home Missionary Society Papers (hereafter CEHMS), Wm. C. Lord et al. to Montreal Ladies’ Sewing Society, Shipton, 18 Aug. 1834. Report of the Canada Education and Home Missionary Society, 1834, 8–9. Reports of the American Home Missionary Society (New York: 1835–7); ANQM, UCA, CEHMS, Ora Pearson to W.F. Curry, Compton, 22 March 1837; A.O. Hubbard to W.F. Curry, Melbourne, 29 March 1837; Edwin J. Sherill to W.F. Curry, 18 Dec. 1837. ANQM, UCA, CEHMS, H.B. Chapin to W.F. Curry, Waterloo, 30 Aug. 1837, 13 Oct. 1837. NA, MG8 F13, Brome County Historical Society Papers (hereafter BCHS), vol. 12, Towns and Villages, Farnham East, East Farnham Temperance Society; Moses B. Jewell, ‘Temperance and Total Abstinence: East Farnham Temperance Society,’ in Ernest M. Taylor, History of Brome County, Quebec, vol. 1 (Montreal: John Lovell and Son, 1908), 82–4. McMaster University, Canadian Baptist Church Archives, Stanstead Church Minute Book, 1840–52. University of Vermont, Bailey-Howe Library, Stanstead Free Will Baptist Quarterly Meeting, First Record Book, 1828–47, 15 Jan. 1836; 17 June 1842. On Upper Canada, see Neil Semple, The Lord’s Dominion: The History of Canadian Methodism (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 67–70, 78, 87. Some prominent American Methodists were initially themselves unenthusiastic about cooperating with temperance societies organized by rival denominations, arguing that their own church had always opposed the consumption of ardent spirits. See Douglas J. Williamson, ‘The Rise of the New England Methodist Temperance Movement, 1823–1836,’ Methodist History 21.1 (1982): 3–28.

‘A Moral Engine of Such Incalculable Power’ 155 25 NA, Methodist Missionary Society, Synod Minutes, Lower Canada / Canada East, 1838. 26 Quoted in Hildebrand, ‘Les débuts,’ 46. 27 NA, SPG Papers (Reel A 199), box 29, folio 362, no. 75, C. Cotton to Rev. Sir, Dunham, 12 July 1830. 28 Montreal Anglican Diocesan Archives (hereafter MDA), Whitwell Papers, Report of the Philipsburg Society for the Promotion of Temperance for 1831–2. 29 MDA, Whitwell Papers, Report of the Philipsburg Society for the Promotion of Temperance for 1831–2. 30 MDA, Rev. James Reid Papers, file 9, Rev. James Reid, Remarks on the Lecture of the Rt. Rev. Bishop Hopkins against the Temperance Society (Frelighsburg: Standard Office, 1836), 3. 31 Reid, Remarks, 8, 13, 19. 32 Reid, Remarks, 4–5. 33 Reid, Remarks, 16. Bishop Stewart, who had been the first Anglican missionary in the area, did thank Reid for publishing his tract (Quebec Diocesan Archives, Anglican Church, Bishop’s University, Bishop Stewart Letters [Reid Collection], 1812–36, C.J. Quebec to J. Reid, Que., 19 March 1836). 34 Canada Temperance Advocate (hereafter CTA), Feb. 1836. On the division within the church in Upper Canada, see Curtis Fahey, In His Name: The Anglican Experience in Upper Canada, 1791–1854 (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1991), 256, 297. Reid’s pamphlet did attract a spirited rebuttal by the High Church Reverend Joseph Abbott, who repeated most of Hopkins’s arguments, but he was posted to Argenteuil, northwest of Montreal. See Rev. J. Abbott, Strictures on the Remarks of the Rev. J. Reid, in His Pamphlet in Favour of the Temperance Society (Montreal: Herald Office, 1836); Carman Millar, ‘Abbott, Joseph,’ in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 9, 3–4. 35 See the tables in Françoise Noël, Competing for Souls: Missionary Activity and Settlement in the Eastern Townships, 1784–1851 (Sherbrooke: Département d’Histoire, Université de Sherbrooke, 1988), 237; and J.I. Little, Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 87. 36 Extra to the CTA, 1836. 37 The secretary did note, however, that the five societies which were represented had a total of 747 members (CTA, Feb. 1836). 38 CTA, Feb. 1837. 39 James M. Clemens, ‘Taste Not; Touch Not; Handle Not: A Study of the

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47 48 49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58

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Social Assumptions of the Temperance Literature and Temperance Supporters in Canada West between 1839 and 1859,’ Ontario History 64.3 (1972): 142–60; Glenn Lockwood, ‘Temperance in Upper Canada as Ethnic Subterfuge,’ in Warsh, ed., Drink in Canada. A similar argument to Lockwood’s is made in Sean T. Cadigan, ‘Paternalism and Politics: Sir Francis Bond Head, the Orange Order, and the Election of 1836,’ Canadian Historical Review 72 (1991): 335–7. The Orange Lodge remained a marginal organization in the Eastern Townships. See Cecil J. Houston and William J. Smyth, The Sash Canada Wore: A Historical Geography of the Orange Order of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 49–56. CTA, May 1836, Feb. 1837, May 1837, June 1838. Reports of the American Home Missionary Society, 1838, 1839. ANQM, UCA, CEHMS, R.V. Hall to W.F. Curry, Stanstead, 17 Dec. 1838. ANQM, UCA, CEHMS, M.P. Clark to W.F. Curry, S. Potton, 12 March 1838. CTA, June 1838. ANQM, UCA, CEHMS, James Robertson to W.F. Curry, Sherbrooke, 8 March 1839; H.B. Chapin to W.F. Curry, Waterloo, 3 May 1838. Bishop’s University, Eastern Townships Research Centre (hereafter ETRC), UCA, Quebec-Sherbrooke Presbytery, St Francis Association of Congregational and Presbyterian Ministers, 1836–66, Minutes, 5 Jan. 1841, p. 75; 8 June 1841, p. 82; 27 Dec. 1841, p. 84. CTA, Nov. 1841. CTA, Jan. 1842. CTA, Dec. 1841, Jan. 1842, Feb. 1842. CTA, Feb. 1842. CTA, March 1842. CTA, March 1842. This excerpt also states that he returned to the Eastern Townships after an absence of twenty days, travelled 330 miles, visited twenty-three places, held twenty-one public meetings, delivered twenty-seven addresses and lectures, added 433 names to the teetotal pledge, and circulated large numbers of the Temperance Advocate and temperance tracts (History of the Temperance Cause in Canada [...] Being Part of Wadsworth’s Temperance Manual [Montreal: J.C. Becket, 1847], 30). CTA, 1 June 1842. CTA, 1 June 1842, 3 Jan. 1843 CTA, May 1841, 1 July 1842. ANQM, UCA, CEHMS, N.B. Fox to C. Strong, Granby, 5 April 1842, 28 Oct. 1842. Quoted in Jan Noel, ‘Temperance Campaigning and Alcohol Consump-

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59 60 61

62 63

64 65

66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76

tion: A Case Study from Pre-Confederation Canada,’ Contemporary Drug Problems 21 (Fall 1994): 417. ANQM, UCA, CEHMS, A.J. Parker to C. Strong, Danville, 21 Aug. 1842. CTA, 2 June 1845. Société d’Histoire de Sherbrooke (hereafter SHS), Sherbrooke Total Abstinence Society (hereafter STAS), Minute Book, 10 May 1845. Lomas and Arms were manufacturers, while Robertson was a lawyer, Ritchie a notary, Walton a newspaper editor, and Sanborn a Dartmouth-educated teacher, as well as being Brooks’s son-in-law and a future MLA. For more information on Sherbrooke’s entrepreneurial elite, see Jean-Pierre Kesteman, ‘Une bourgeoisie et son espace: Industrialisation et développement du capitalisme dans le district de Saint-François (Québec), 1823–1879’ (Ph.D. diss., Université du Québec à Montréal, 1985). SHS, STAS, Minute Book, 10 May 1845. Noel attributes the ‘prestige legitimation’ theory to Jean Burnet, who was in turn inspired by Joseph Gusfield. See Jan Noel, ‘Dry Millennium: Temperance and a New Social Order in Mid-Nineteenth Century Canada and Red River’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1987), 33. See also Ian R. Tyrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800–1860 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 6. See Noel, Canada Dry, chapters 5 and 6. ETRC, UCA, Quebec-Sherbrooke Presbytery, UC001, Pymouth United Church (Sherbrooke) fonds, Hon. J.G. Robertson, Sketch of the Formation of the Congregational Church at Sherbrooke and Lennoxville (Sherbrooke: W.A. Morehouse, 1890), 4–6. BCHS, Phillips Papers, W. Ritchie to W. Phillips, Sherbrooke, 14 May 1845. History of the Temperance Cause, 44. Tyrell, Sobering Up, chapter 7. SHS, STAS, Minute Book, 20 May 1845, 24 May 1845. This figure is based on my count of the membership role. Maurice O’Bready claims that there were 1,322 members. See De Ktiné à Sherbrooke. Esquisse historique de Sherbrooke: Des origines à 1954 (Sherbrooke: Université de Sherbrooke, 1973), 111–12, 114. Smart and Ogburne, Northern Spirits, 19–20. SHS, STAS, Minute Book, 24 May 1845. CTA, 15 July 1845. Noel, ‘Dry Millennium,’ 175; SHS, STAS, Minute Book, 8 Jan. 1846. See the minutes from 19 Jan. 1846 to 2 March 1846. The fact that this resolution is pasted into the minute book with no date (indeed out of place, after the March 16 entry), and that a sentence disap-

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80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87

88 89

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proving of the breach of peace is crossed out, suggests that the society was divided over what response to make. The context reveals that the event took place in February. McCord Museum, Hale Papers, J.S. Walton to Edward Hale, Sherbrooke, 10 April 1846. On the French-Canadian temperance movement, see Jan Noel, ‘Dry Patriotism: The Chiniquy Crusade,’ Canadian Historical Review 71 (1990): 189–207; and Noel, Canada Dry, chapters 11 and 12. The Canada Temperance Advocate (1 July 1845) reported that there was a separate Catholic temperance society of 150 teetotallers and as many more on the temperate pledge, but no other record of this society has been found. CTA, 16 Dec. 1847. CTA, 15 April 1848. CTA, 1 Aug. 1848. Stanstead Journal, 7 Sept. 1848. Chiniquy did speak in Granby in January 1849 (CTA, 1 Jan. 1849). CTA, 1 Aug. 1848. Reverend William Scott, The Teetotaller’s Hand-Book (Toronto: Alfred Dredge, c. 1860), 40; Tyrell, Sobering Up, 209. See also W.T. Leach, An Address on Rechabitism: Delivered at the Quarterly Meeting to the Members of the Independent Order of Rechabites ([Montreal?, s.n.], 1845). See Tyrell, Sobering Up, 211–13; Rumbarger, Profits, Power and Prohibition, 29; Ferry, ‘To the Interests,’ 142, 148–9. There were, however, three ‘tents’ in Montreal by the spring of 1846, when it became a separate district. (BCHS, Crystal Fount and Rechabite Recorder [New York], vol. 6, 14 March 1846, 4 April 1846). Stanstead Journal, 31 Aug. 1848, 7 Sept. 1848, 26 Oct. 1848, 23 Nov. 1848; NA, RH4 C1, 1849, Index, no. 929. Missisquoi County Historical Society, V-200, Temperance Society, 15 Dec. 1848. R.D. Wadsworth, who was himself a Rechabite, nevertheless stated that the order emphasized the equality of its members by not having any titles or degrees. See excerpt from his address in Scott, Teetotaller’s HandBook, 40. Acheson, Saint John, 149. Noel, Canada Dry, 146. Stanstead Journal, 18 Sept. 1851. On Dickerson, see Jean-Pierre Kesteman, ‘Dickerson, Silas Horton,’ in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 8, 221. Stanstead Journal, 16 Aug. 1849, 23 Aug. 1849, 30 Aug. 1849, 11 April 1850. Stanstead Journal, 4 July 1850.

‘A Moral Engine of Such Incalculable Power’ 159 95 Stanstead Journal, 11 July 1850. For a description of the quarterly meeting held at Charleston the previous November, see CTA, 15 Dec. 1849. 96 See Noel, ‘Dry Millennium,’ 141; Acheson, Saint John, 151; Tyrell, ‘Sobering Up,’ 179; Rumbarger, Profits, Power and Prohibition, 39; Ruth M. Alexander, ‘“We Are Engaged as a Band of Sisters”: Class and Domesticity in the Washingtonian Temperance Movement, 1840–1850,’ Journal of American History 75.3 (1988): 776–7. 97 CTA, 16 Feb. 1852. 98 Marion L. Phelps, ‘Lambly, John Robert,’ in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 9, 454. 99 CTA, 15 Oct. 1849. Attendance at the Missisquoi Temperance Association’s annual festival in 1851 was equally large (CTA, 1 Nov. 1851). 100 The Rechabites were still publishing announcements of picnics and temperance celebrations in 1851. See, for example, Stanstead Journal, 19 June 1851. 101 For a description of the rise in crime at mid-century, see J.I. Little, State and Society in Transition: The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships, 1838–1852 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 67–77. 102 Tyrell, Sobering Up, 9–10, 225. 103 NA, RG4 C1, 1842, no. 1037, Memorial of Sherbrooke Temperance Society [n.d.]. 104 On the perceived link between liquor consumption and crime, see Noel, ‘Dry Patriotism,’ 197–9. 105 NA, RG4 C1, 1842, no. 455, Presentment of Grand Jury, St Francis District, 15 Feb. 1842; 1845, no. 2816, 26 Sept. 1845. 106 NA, RG4 C1, 1845, no. 563, Presentment of Grand Jury, District of St Francis. 107 NA, RG4 C1, 1847, no. 117, Tavern licenses issued, District of St Francis, 5 April 1845–5 April 1846, 5 April 1846–5 Jan. 1847. 108 NA, RG16 A1, Correspondence and Returns, National Revenue – Customs Excise, C. Bullock to D. Daly, Georgeville, 3 June 1845; Ruth Elizabeth Spence, Prohibition in Canada (Toronto: The Ontario Branch of the Dominion Alliance [1919]), 31. 109 NA, RG4 C1, 1847, no. 2956, Presentment of Grand Jury, Sherbrooke, 20 Aug. 1847. 110 NA, RG4 C1, no. 2917, E. Clark to J. Leslie, Sherbrooke, 5 Oct. 1848. 111 Stanstead Journal, 31 July 1851. An earlier version of the same ruse was to charge for the viewing of a pig that had been painted with stripes (Rorabaugh, Alcoholic Republic, 217–18).

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112 Stanstead Journal, 19 Sept. 1850. 113 Noel, ‘Temperance Campaigning,’ 416. 114 Colby had purchased thirty-nine barrels of whiskey from J.W. Molson in November 1848 (Stanstead Historical Society, Colby Papers, Family correspondence file). 115 Stanstead Journal, 10 April 1851. 116 Stanstead Historical Society, Colby Papers, Miscellaneous letters file, A.J. Wright to Bro. Colby, Boston, 27 Nov. 1850. 117 Stanstead Journal, 17 April 1851. 118 Stanstead Journal, 18 Sept. 1851. The Stanstead Journal declared itself in opposition to the Maine law on 27 May 1852. 119 CTA, 15 March 1850, 1 April 1852; NA, MG8, F13, vol. 12, Towns and Villages, East Farnham Temperance Society. 120 Stanstead Journal, 20 March 1851; NA, RG4 C1, 1851, no. 1113, Petition of Stanstead Municipal Council, 1 June 1851. 121 The applicant would also have to prove that he held property valued at at least £100, and provide a security of £100 plus two sureties of £50 each for his good behaviour. See Stanstead Journal, 3 April 1851; Spence, Prohibition, 32–3. 122 NA, RG4 C1, 1851, no. 1113, Petition of Municipality of County of Shefford, 9 June 1851. 123 Barron, ‘American Origins,’ 143–5. See also Acheson, Saint John, 152. Under the township council system of 1845–7, only Shipton appears to have petitioned for the right to grant liquor licences (NA, RG4 C1, 1846, no. 1233, 6670–3, Petition of municipal council of Shipton, 6 April 1846). 124 See Little, State and Society. 125 NA, MG8 F13, vol. 12, Towns and Villages, Farnham East, East Farnham Temperance Society. 126 Michael McCulloch, ‘English-Speaking Liberals in Canada East, 1840– 1854’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Ottawa, 1986), 613. 127 A legislative committee convened in 1856 reported that 88,945 people in Canada West had petitioned for prohibition, as compared with fewer than 14,000 in Canada East (Noel, Canada Dry, 150). Given the Catholic Church’s opposition to prohibition, however, a high ratio of the latter were likely from the Eastern Townships. 128 Clemens (‘Taste Not,’ 156–7) notes that the meetings of the Upper Canadian temperance societies often resembled church services. 129 Noel, ‘Temperance Campaigning,’ 417. 130 Stanstead Journal, 15 Jan. 1852, 18 March 1852.

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6 ‘Labouring in a Great Cause’: Marcus Child as Pioneer Schools Inspector, 1852–9

In 1838, as commissioner in charge of examining the educational system for the Durham commission, Arthur Buller insisted that school reform would be useless without ‘an active and honest inspection.’1 Recently, Bruce Curtis has likewise argued that the knowledge collected by inspectors ‘was an inevitable precondition to state educational administration, for no state agency could govern schools about which it knew nothing.’2 Apart from Curtis’s own book on the early inspectors in Upper Canada, however, this remains a rather neglected topic in Canadian education history.3 The only detailed study of inspectors in Lower Canada/Quebec is an in-house publication from 1951, though Andrée Dufour’s book on school reform does include a useful overview of the early inspectors’ role and impact.4 She begins in 1852, roughly when Curtis’s study ends, simply because there were no true school inspectors in Lower Canada before that date. Since school reform was in train well before the first inspectors were appointed in Lower Canada, one wonders how crucial a role these government-appointed officials actually played in this aspect of state formation.5 And even though Lower Canada’s inspectors represented a much more centralized authority than did the locally appointed superintendents of Upper Canada, Dufour argues that they served not only as agents of the state but of the rural communities as well. This perspective reminds us that the school reform process was not entirely directed from the top down.6 Curtis also rejects the top-down social-control perspective, though he blurs the distinction between state and community. Echoing historical sociologist Philip Abrams, he argues that the state has never been a distinct object at all, but rather a system of ‘incoherent and contested initiatives for political subjection’ by certain

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groups and classes over others.7 Aside from the danger that the state thereby becomes everything and nothing at the same time, this interpretation robs the masses of any agency except resistance and assumes that state institutions have had no popular legitimacy. A full examination of these complex issues would require a detailed community study, but the following paper will attempt to shed some light on them by focusing on the reports of pioneer schools inspector Marcus Child. The aim will be firstly to understand how significant a role he played in the school reform process of his district, and secondly to identify the driving force behind his inspectoral activity. The evidence suggests that as an inspector Child did prove to be an effective government agent whose vision for the school system closely matched that of the central authorities. Most local communities in the Eastern Townships had quickly adapted to the main thrust of the school reforms, but Child was anxious to make them conform to a more rulebound system than many school commissioners and teachers apparently felt was necessary, or practicable. Child’s methods were largely persuasive rather than coercive, but such an approach only added to his effectiveness in instilling the values of a modern self-regulated state. Curtis refers to this education process as placing the population in a state of tutelage,8 a phrase that suggests indoctrination more than enlightenment, but Child’s liberal politics and evangelical religion made him sympathetic to individual freedom. As a member of the rising petite bourgeoisie, he aimed to temper the excesses of an increasingly liberal society with a strong sense of moral values and civic responsibility.9 From Foucault’s perspective, the state became less relevant as liberal reformers such as Child moved beyond the eighteenth-century preoccupation with police and discipline (never a strong preoccupation in the largely rural Eastern Townships) to a concern with ‘how people are governed in liberal democratic regimes in ways which respect their freedom and autonomy.’10 It is not entirely clear why the government waited so long before appointing school inspectors in Lower Canada, but there was obviously a greater hesitance than in Upper Canada to the delegation of authority to the local level of society. The 1841 Common Schools Act had originally provided for district boards of examiners who would act as a paid inspectorate, and provision was apparently made for county superintendents in the Lower Canadian school bill for 1847, but it failed to pass.11 Superintendent of Education Jean-Baptiste Meilleur suggested that he wished to economize, his 1849 annual report emphasizing how

‘Labouring in a Great Cause’ 163

important it was for ‘all friends of the cause, above all the Clergy, the Visitors, and School Commissioners,’ to keep a watchful eye on the local schools in order to avoid the costs involved in appointing ‘stipendiaries.’12 Despite Meilleur’s prompting, however, the deputies, magistrates, militia officers, and other official school visitors had little incentive or obligation to act as state agents because their mandate was not clearly defined by law. Furthermore, school commissioners were often too poorly educated to interfere in the classroom.13 The 1849 outbreak of anti-school reform violence known as the Guerre des Éteignoirs spurred one prominent critic to charge that Meilleur ‘n’est autre chose qu’une machine à payer et à enregistrer des rapports et reçus. Quant à son autorité, à son droit de surveillance, ils sont nuls, ou plutôt il n’en possède réellement pas.’14 Conceding that he could not be everywhere at once, in 1850 Meilleur recommended the appointment of a deputy superintendent to act as an itinerant assistant, gathering statistics, examining accounts, and investigating complaints. Such a task would obviously be impossible for one man, and, in 1851, Meilleur finally suggested the establishment of a corps of school inspectors.15 He explained later that he had been hesitant to follow Upper Canada’s example because, in addition to wishing to channel as much money as possible towards the schools, he wanted people to take charge of their own school system.16 The latter claim seems disingenuous, for Lower Canada’s inspectors would be appointed by the provincial government rather than by county councils, as in Upper Canada. They were also responsible for large territories, whereas Upper Canada’s supervisors had been decentralized to the county or township level by 1850.17 Meilleur did envisage the centralized system as a temporary expedient until municipal government began operating effectively in Lower Canada,18 but he was reluctant to weaken the control he wielded as superintendent. Even though the municipal reform bill of 1855 was a major step towards establishing an effective system of local government, giving Lower Canadian municipalities the powers acquired by their Upper Canadian counterparts in 1849,19 the inspector system remained unchanged. Meilleur was not alone in envisaging inspectors as a valuable arm of centralized authority. The 1853 Sicotte inquiry recommended fewer inspectors operating on a more professional full-time basis, enjoying more powers and higher salaries.20 Meilleur argued against reducing the number of inspectors, but favoured providing them powers that included dismissing incompetent or immoral teachers, and withhold-

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ing subsidies from school municipalities that released teachers without his or the inspector’s authorization.21 Apparently neither the Sicotte nor the Meilleur proposals succeeded, for the government’s chief concern remained the further limitation of school expenditures, which had declined from 15 per cent of the provincial budget in 1831 to 7 per cent in 1852.22 In 1862 the Macdonald-Sicotte ministry suggested further economizing, either by amalgamating inspection districts or adopting Upper Canada’s municipally based system. Meilleur ’s successor, P.J.O. Chauveau, objected to the latter, claiming that the only suitable candidates for the position of local inspector would be teachers or clergy. Though members of both professions served as local superintendents in Upper Canada, Chauveau argued that teachers should be disqualified due to conflict of interest, and bishops would forbid priests from becoming too closely tied to controversial state policies.23 Curiously enough, Chauveau failed to mention the village notables, who generally supported the state during the Guerre des Éteignoirs in 1849–50. Perhaps he was worried that the bitter local divisions caused by this widespread resistance to school reform would threaten the popular legitimacy of any locally based state officials.24 Although there was enthusiasm for school reform in the Americansettled section of the Eastern Townships, hostility to compulsory taxes here was initially as marked as in the seigneuries. When the abortive school bill of 1843 was introduced, the Massachusetts-born Stanstead MLA, Marcus Child, opposed the provision for such assessments: Compulsion is not agreeable in any thing – not even a good one, and therefore – I defended the District of Sherbrooke from the imputation that such a provision in the law would cast upon us – We did not deserve it – we supported our schools from the settlement of the county in 1795 to the year 1829 – without any aid from the Gov.t and from 1829 to 1836 we felt very grateful for public aid, which we received from the Prov.l Legislature. [A]nd our habits of attention to schools, that we brot with us to the country, – had found us in a situation to receive the greatest benefit from that aid – and our schools were established – and hence the money granted could be at once, and well expended.25

Three years later, as chair of the Stanstead Township school commission, Child informed Meilleur of the opposition to the assessments imposed by the new school bill. He asked whether ‘in accordance to

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their feelings & habits (which do them honor),’ voluntary contributions could continue to qualify the school district for provincial grants, but Meilleur was not prepared to compromise.26 Though ‘voluntaryism’ lay at the root of the religious belief system and social outlook shared by Child as a Methodist with most American-descended residents of the Eastern Townships, Stanstead, like its neighbouring townships, eventually accommodated itself to the new system. Child himself was appointed the St Francis District’s first schools inspector in 1852. Child had not requested the position for himself but for Lewis Sleeper, who was teaching English, French, and mathematics in Quebec. Careful to note that Sleeper was a native of the area, Child failed to mention that he was also his son-in-law.27 In choosing Child, instead, the government had presumably decided that a man of more maturity and experience was needed. Likewise, Dr Rotus Parmelee, the appointee for the area to the west of the St Francis District, was a relatively advanced forty-nine years of age.28 Child himself was an old Reform warhorse who had represented Stanstead for much of the period from 1829 to 1844, but had tarnished his Liberal credentials somewhat by supporting Metcalfe in a desperate attempt to hold onto his seat in the 1844 election.29 He had redeemed himself, however, by filling the breach as the government candidate in the election of 1851, at a time when much of the county was embittered by the route chosen for the St Lawrence and Atlantic Railway.30 Child’s inspectorship may therefore have been largely a reward for past services. Meilleur later complained that one-third of the men chosen were not on his list due to patronage considerations.31 But the fact remains that Child’s political influence was now spent, and no one in the region had more experience as a school promoter. Child became the solitary merchant in an almost exclusively liberalprofessional group of inspectors,32 but he had served as a school visitor almost without interruption since 1815, approximately three years after his arrival in Stanstead from the United States. In 1822 he had become a trustee for the local school sponsored by the Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, and, shortly after his election to the Legislative Assembly in 1829, he acquired a grant to found Stanstead Seminary and Charleston Academy, the first two schools in the Eastern Townships to offer an education at the secondary level. During the 1830s Child was a trustee as well as secretary of the Methodist-controlled seminary (today’s Stanstead College), and in 1834 he was appointed to the Legislative Assembly’s Permanent Committee on Education and Schools. In 1841 he was a member of the education committee that

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introduced the first fundamental reform of the post-Rebellion era, including the matching-grants system.33 Finally, as noted above, Child served as chair of the Stanstead Township school commission during the mid-1840s. As inspector, the former MLA found himself responsible for a territory encompassing much of the Eastern Townships region (see map 6.1).34 The nineteen townships he listed in 1852 included 207 elementary schools, 2 model schools, 6 independent schools, and 7 academies and colleges, and this list did not cover a number of recently settled townships which also fell under his jurisdiction. Meilleur’s instructions to inspectors were as comprehensive as they were impractical. They specified that the inspectors should visit all the schools in their districts every three months, recording the number, age, and proficiency of students, as well as the gender, age, literary qualifications, marital status, and morality of the teachers. They were to describe the branches of instruction taught, the methods and books used, the number of independent schools, the number of school-age children in each school district, and the manner in which school moneys were divided among the districts. Inspectors were also required to examine the daily journal of every teacher, the interior arrangement of each schoolhouse, the assessment roll in each municipality, and the account book of each secretary-treasurer. The emphasis was therefore, as Curtis suggests, on the informationgathering function of the inspectors, though they were too few in number to provide more than the most rudimentary statistics. Their duties also included examining, and issuing temporary certificates to, male teachers who had not yet appeared before one of the boards of examiners; specifying school lands that were suitable for horticulture and recommending the planting of fruit and forest trees where possible; mediating cases in which the working of the school laws were being obstructed; settling disputes among commissioners, teachers, and parents; and doing ‘their utmost to render the law popular in endeavouring to show the people the great advantages they cannot fail to derive from it.’35 Fulfilling these obligations for such a large number of widely dispersed institutions, with 7,400 students by 1853,36 would have taxed the strength of even a young man; Child was sixty-one years of age and in failing health. It was not for the salary that Child accepted the post of inspector. He had long been a modestly successful merchant in the village of Stanstead,

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Map 6.1 Marcus Child’s inspection district.

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then had boosted his material fortunes in the mid-1840s by shifting his business activity and eventually his residence to the promising industrial site of Coaticook.37 As inspector, he would plead constantly for a raise, but largely because, after his considerable expenses, he was left with ‘less than a common labourer’s wages.’38 Rather than being attracted by the relatively meagre emolument attached to this position, Child possessed to some degree all the social characteristics Curtis has identified for his Upper Canadian counterparts: ‘far-above-average wealth, direct access to the means of production, advanced education, extensive activity in the state system and in the religious sphere.’39 Curtis claims that school reformers were motivated by ‘a concern and desire to colonize civil society with a particular bourgeois culture,’ in other words, ‘to remake the habits, attitudes, beliefs and passtimes of workers, farmers and the “lower orders”’ into those of the bourgeoisie.40 Child certainly had this motivation. But while Curtis interprets the desire to instil industriousness, order, and Christian morality in the general population as the subjection of one class by another, Child saw his mission as an uplifting one in which the worst excesses of capitalist materialism would be mitigated by instilling Christian and social values, and the younger generation would become equipped to succeed in an increasingly competitive world. Local Opposition Although state-formation theorists argue that school reforms were imposed by bourgeois reformers on an unwilling population, the fact is that the basic values of the school promoters were widely shared by what was still essentially a population of independent producers.41 The American-descended population of the Eastern Townships had objected to compulsory school taxes during the mid-1840s, but this organized opposition evaporated once informal accommodations were made to the principle of local control.42 By 1854 Child could report that ‘in some school districts the inhabitants have made extraordinary efforts to raise additional funds to pay better teachers, which have been crowned with success.’43 But there remained individuals either unable or unwilling to pay their assessments. In reporting the arrest of two men for burning down a school in Stanstead Township in 1855, Child even suggested that because fires were generally assumed to be accidental, such acts were ‘more frequently committed than we are generally aware of,’ a suspicion that also prevailed in Upper Canada.44 He also reported

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some resistance on the part of the more affluent to the higher school taxes permitted by the province in 1856.45 One of Child’s assets as an agent of school reform was his parallel role as justice of the peace, a position which all school inspectors held, ex-officio.46 Already an active magistrate for many years, Child was able not only to investigate incidents of active resistance, such as the above-mentioned arson case, but also to sit in judgment over recalcitrant taxpayers. The independence of justices of the peace from local pressures should not, however, be exaggerated.47 Child shared his authority with other justices in the court of quarter sessions, and he felt frustrated by one influential member’s hostility to the new school system. He wrote to Meilleur in January 1853 that this ‘opposer’ had followed him in order to defend several suits for the recovery of school rates, ‘and I am sorry to say that he found so much sympathy with four magistrates, who were present, as to get the actions dismissed.’ In a neighbouring township, where the person in question was not in attendance, three of the same justices supported Child’s position against the defendants in similar cases. Child wished to have his nemesis impeached on grounds that he opposed the school acts, having declared that his children were being educated in Vermont because the Lower Canadian system was ‘“French” ... & not English – & he would not make Frenchmen of his children.’ The chief difficulty was to find people willing to sign an affidavit against the offending magistrate due to fear of ‘injuring their prospects of business.’ Child himself did not wish the document to be in his own handwriting.48 There is no further mention of the unnamed obstructionist magistrate in Child’s correspondence, but he did occasionally refer to a general sense that the school laws were ‘framed to meet the wants of French Canadians – and not in accordance with the views of the people of the Townships.’49 Child thought, nevertheless, that ‘all the sins of omission & commission’ by commissioners, visitors, parents, and teachers were blamed unfairly on the school law, and that its principles, ‘after existing so long,’ could not be safely changed. He recommended only that the commissioners’ power be reduced, and that the inspector, ‘whose power to do good is chiefly persuasive ... ought to have a negative to prevent abuses, when they turn up under his Inspection.’50 By 1855, he was able to report that ‘wherever difficulties have unfortunately arisen, they have been successfully removed, and are being so; and the angry feelings which too frequently attend them have been allayed, and harmony and good will restored in due time.’51 In short, Child’s coercive powers

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helped in pursuing recalcitrant taxpayers, but in promoting school reform in general he had to rely upon his powers of persuasion. School Commissioners Curtis has argued that it would be fruitless to search for opposition to the school-reform project among the school commissioners as ‘it seems improbable in principle that groups and bodies constituted by the state will unambiguously oppose their own conditions of existence.’52 This argument assumes much about the status associated with temporary unpaid service on a township school commission, and ignores the fact that election to such a body would be an obvious strategy to subvert unpopular state initiatives. Child’s recommendation that the school commissioners’ powers be reduced suggests that, in his district, these locally elected officials did not constitute a modernizing elite which quickly collaborated with the state in promoting its schooling objectives, as recently suggested by Jean-Pierre Charland for Lower Canada as a whole.53 Nor was this image noticeable in the report of the Sicotte commission of 1853, which found only half of Lower Canada’s 1,025 commissioners to be literate. Filteau and Allard suggest that in the province as a whole the clergy were the only local notables to cooperate wholeheartedly with the inspectors,54 and, in the Missisquoi District, Inspector Parmelee agreed with Child that the school commissioners were the chief weakness in the system. While those in older American-settled school districts were not hampered by illiteracy, they generally failed to heed Meilleur’s advice that it was ‘better to have fewer Schools, and have them good,’ even if this meant that children residing at a distance would be unable to attend as frequently or for as long a period of time.55 Families simply remained too protective of their neighbourhood schools to tolerate such an elitist policy. Parmelee reported that many municipal school commissions had transferred to the local school managers, or to the individual commissioner who lived closest to each school, the task of hiring teachers and collecting fees to make up shortfalls in taxes. Even where the required tax was levied, the collection and disbursement were carried out at the individual school level rather than passing through the hands of the secretary-treasurer: ‘Thus, the Commissioners, in their corporate capacity, throw the responsibility upon the Commissioners, in their individual capacity, or upon the local Managers, as the case may be.’56 More

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studies will be required to determine how long this practice continued, and how pervasive it was, but research has shown that entrenched localism continued to bedevil the Catholic schools inspector for the St Francis District as late as the 1870s.57 Dufour notes that school commissioners in Lower Canada generally welcomed the inspectors’ visits during the 1850s as a relief from their own school visitation duties,58 and Child’s reports certainly do not suggest that he faced opposition from the commissioners. He did, however, complain of a persistent failure to conform to bureaucratic requirements. In his first tour of inspection, Child found that school funds were still generally divided equally among the school districts, rather than according to school-age population as the regulations dictated. The St Francis District inspector admitted that he had not yet visited most schools, but he had examined the registers and accounts of every local school district to gather data previously submitted by each secretary-treasurer. Child found it impossible to fill all the blanks in the tables ‘owing to the imperfect manner in which the School-law has been carried into effect in this District.’ He could attest that treasurers’ accounts were generally well kept, and that registers were legible for the most part, but the latter were ‘in other respects quite imperfect, and to explain what was necessary to make them conformable to the Law, engaged a good deal of my time and attention.’ Failure to adhere to such legal requirements had caused the loss of a number of the school commissions’ lawsuits, though most of the assessments had been collected without costs. The main exception remained the absentee proprietors who were difficult to locate, and who could afford good lawyers when they were sued.59 Although school fees were not strongly resented in the St Francis District, as they were elsewhere in Lower Canada,60 Child found that they were not generally fixed according to law. Rather than being devoted to the miscellaneous expenses required by the regulations, they were collected to make up the balance of teachers’ salaries not covered by tax assessments and government grants. Child himself encouraged school commissioners in his district to vary fees according to the means of the parents, the ages of their children, and the course of instruction, rather than levying the uniform rate of two shillings per month for every school-age child.61 In this way, poorer families would not be discouraged from sending their children to school. Child’s third tour of inspection in February and March 1853 found record-keeping still imperfect. Treasurers generally allowed each com-

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missioner to disburse his share of the funds, with no accounting of their expenditure. Child excused his own incomplete tables by citing his failing health since Christmas, the thinly settled nature of his district with its poor roads, the time expended in examining the teachers and drafting their certificates, and, finally, the ongoing failure of the commissioners and secretary-treasurers to gather the required information.62 Two months later the somewhat discouraged inspector reported that he was still unable to fill the tables without collecting the data from each school himself. The greatest problem lay with the reporting of what schools were open and their school hours. Child further objected to continued use of American texts ‘of an improper character,’ and employment of uncertified teachers. He was now considering asking Meilleur to withhold the school grant from every municipality ‘which did not comply with the law as you have instructed them to do.’ Before taking such a drastic step, however, he would wait until he had received for distribution an additional hundred copies of the school acts, as well as Meilleur’s recent circular of instructions to commissioners. If anyone then complained about his strictness, Child would ‘rely upon being sustained in all my lawful acts and requirements by your authority under the Law as the Minister of Education.’63 P.J.O. Chauveau replaced Meilleur in 1855 and proved to be more punctilious about the reports submitted to his office.64 But Child never did succeed in convincing the teachers and commissioners to fill in their journals and registers properly. As late as 1857, he described how ‘I have collected the number of children from the school Journals when they have been kept, & when not kept, I have obtained them from the teachers, and when they had gone from the School District, I sought for & obtained them from the families residing near to the school.’65 But Child never asked that school funds be withheld. In 1854 he even opposed government plans to increase sanctions against delinquent commissioners, stating that ‘penal consequences, when suffered, leave the mind of the sufferer sore and discontented.’66 Much more important, in his own mind, was the improvement of teaching itself. Academies, High Schools, and Colleges Because there were no normal schools in Lower Canada prior to 1856,67 most of the better-educated teachers in the Eastern Townships had attended academies or colleges, either locally or in Vermont. As a result, privately owned and operated institutions in the region received substantial subsidies from the government.68 Beginning in 1851, Meilleur

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sought to define the academies as schools for students on their way to college, bringing them under greater government control by adding them to his inspectors’ already overcharged mandate.69 Although Child had been a founder and trustee of Stanstead Seminary, he had a low opinion of the local academies, sending his daughter to a New England college for girls and his son to the High School of Montreal.70 In April 1853 Child reported that the three academies in the St Francis District (Stanstead, Hatley, and Sherbrooke) were taught by young students from New England colleges ‘who come to this country, not to make teaching a business, but to raise funds, which will enable them to complete some professional study.’ He later argued that ‘when we consider the impressions they [the teachers] are making upon the mind [sic] and character of our children, we ought to awake to renewed exertions to qualify them in our own institutions of learning, so as to give that education to the mass of our children which harmonizes with the character of our country and its people.’71 Child contradicted Stanstead Seminary’s claim that its curriculum was ‘designed to be sufficient to qualify Students to enter any of the American Colleges,’ arguing rather that the instruction given in these institutions was ‘not in conformity to the law, neither is it such as to prepare students for College, for teaching, nor for any of the ordinary pursuits of business.’ He recommended cutting off the academies’ grants if the situation did not improve, and possibly forcing them to unite as collegiate schools affiliated to the Church of England’s Bishop’s College in Lennoxville.72 This threat appears to have been largely for public consumption, however, for Child wrote privately to Meilleur that ‘I would not advise withholding the grant to the Academies in this District, but that the several Institutions receiving it may be better directed and the course of study so regulated as to meet the wants of the public around them.’73 Meilleur had already anticipated the inspector by sending a letter asking him to encourage teachers to attend the projected normal school in Montreal. Child replied that he would apply to the government for a subsidy to cover their expenses, and hoped ‘they will be made to understand how to regulate the course of study in our model and elementary schools, and above all, their method should be of the most approved character.’74 He later described the anticipated benefits: comparatively little good can be done before we get a sufficient number of teachers from the Normal School to manage & teach our Academies & Model Schools ... These schools are, at present, in very improper hands ...

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and I can see no ground for much improvement till we can have young men – native teachers – willing to settle down to teaching as a vocation – faithfully prepared in the Normal School to put in charge of these higher schools. The character and qualification of our Elementary teachers could then be formed at these high schools and hence congruity would be introduced into the common school – a systematic course of study could be pursued, from which the most gratifying improvement in education would spring forth, and gladden the friends of education, as well as confer the highest & most durable benefits on the country at large.75

Even before the government decided not to proceed with the Montreal normal school, however, Child reported that he had helped the municipalities of Compton and Barnston to establish high schools to train teachers. These institutions were distinct from model schools that were to provide a higher level of education in each school municipality. Child complained that every attempt to establish model schools in his district had failed because of local community rivalries and opposition to higher taxes,76 impediments to be overcome, as far as high schools were concerned, by the government’s more generous irregular grants. According to Child, a £50 state subsidy would be sufficient to operate a high school when supplemented by tuition fees. He claimed to have been so impressed by the success of the first two such schools that he planned to visit Quebec in order to convince the government to provide grants for the same purpose in Melbourne, Shipton, Eaton, and Durham.77 Child was thus far from pleased when the new railway town of Richmond (in Melbourne Township) took steps in 1854 to open a private college, which was to have a higher status than an academy. Claiming that the promoters’ expectations were bound to be disappointed, Child harshly criticized the ‘crude efforts to build up Academies & colleges in sundry country villages.’ He compared their rejection of the public schools system to the reaction of people hearing for the first time ‘a band of musicians playing skillfully upon beautiful instruments; they hear the music & are delighted & cry oh! give us the instruments. When failing to produce upon them the same harmony, they, in rage break them, or throw them away in disgust.’78 But Child must have realized that his high schools would not fill the need for more advanced teaching training, and in early 1855 he reluctantly endorsed the recommendation of Sherbrooke MLA John Sanborn that a regional normal school be affiliated with Richmond’s newly established St Francis College.79 Child insisted that control should re-

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main unequivocally with the government, and later opposed the proposed arrangement on the grounds that such control would be impossible. He also claimed that the sectarian character of the college would spark ‘prejudices against it from those of a different faith,’ pointing out that Bishop’s College and the academies at Stanstead, Hatley, and Sherbrooke would be unlikely to patronize a young rival institution.80 Contrary to Child’s assertions, the college’s charter explicitly rejected sectarian exclusivity, and the government did grant it the status of a normal school in 1855.81 Child’s attitude towards the local academies, and St Francis College in particular, reveals how closely he had become identified with state formation, but his chief concern remained the training of well-qualified teachers, a task he did not believe small privately controlled institutions could be entrusted to accomplish. Teachers and Boards of Examiners Despite his disparagement of the region’s academies, Child praised the locally educated teachers above those from the United States, stating that the influence of the Scottish system of education had imbued the former with a thoroughness that the Americans did not possess.82 Child argued that the law should assist those school municipalities that employed better-qualified teachers. Although he complained that commissioners did not insist on certificates of moral conduct, his first report found that those employed during the summer months were generally well-qualified females ‘of unblemished moral character.’83 Child also sympathized with the complaints of the male teachers, who mostly taught the older children during the winter term, that they could not afford the travel expenses to make the required appearance before the board of examiners in Quebec or Montreal before 1 July 1852.84 He recommended that an examining board be established in the Eastern Townships.85 Meilleur instead asked Child and the other rural inspectors to fulfil this onerous function. Child later claimed to have examined upwards of 200 teachers between October and December 1852, with no extra remuneration.86 Several months later, the government finally did decide to establish seven new boards of examiners, and asked Child to submit names to be appointed for the two to sit in Sherbrooke and Stanstead.87 He explained that ‘a large proportion of the inhabitants of this District belong to no church, neither are they devotedly attached to any set of Dissenters, and they have few if any educated men.’ He had therefore chosen

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from ‘such educated men as we had of good moral character,’ taking denominational affiliation into consideration only ‘as far as practicable.’ Yet six of the seven examiners he chose for Sherbrooke, and four of those for Stanstead, were clergymen of various denominations, including a Catholic priest for each county. This clerical dominance suggests that Child wished to verify the teachers’ moral qualifications as well as their intellectual abilities. And, much as the selection process may have reflected Child’s personal biases, it is remarkable that this past master of political patronage actually selected as one of the examiners his longtime political nemesis, the notary William F. Ritchie.88 The new boards of examiners removed a considerable burden from Child’s shoulders, for he explained that, rather than meet him at appointed times, teachers had dropped in ‘at all hours at my residence, requiring to be examined, tho. they had no certificate of their age or moral character.’89 In December 1853, however, the inspector reported that although the Sherbrooke board was making good progress, in Stanstead ‘little has as yet been done – Generally speaking the fault lies in the habits of the people – a loose and careless manner of carrying into effect the School law.’ Child advised that an example be made by imposing a fine, and he sought permission to do so summarily.90 Child’s frustration was shared by at least one teacher who wrote a letter to the press in January complaining that only two members of the Sherbrooke board had come to examine a dozen candidates. The teachers had been forced to wait until long after the test ended before the two additional required board members arrived to sign their certificates. Commenting that teachers were constantly urged to be punctual, the aggrieved correspondent asked, ‘Have not those tardy members of the Board sent out an influence through these teachers that shall seriously affect the rising generation? Have they not, by their neglect, virtually said to the public, that the whole system of common School Education is of but little consequence in their estimation since they allow their own private business to take precedence?’ In reaction, Child assured Meilleur that he was preparing to remove the drones from both boards.91 Several days later he wrote that he had ‘taken steps to ensure a more general attendance at the Board in Stanstead,’ making it clear he would impose a fine on those who shirked their duty.92 Clearly, then, Child’s program of coercive ‘tutelage’ was not exclusively aimed at the general public. Child reported that a similar example would have to be made of one or more of the many teachers who still did not have a diploma, some of

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whom were not yet eighteen years old.93 Despite the uncompromising rhetoric, however, there is no suggestion in Child’s correspondence that he ever attempted to fine any teachers, commissioners, or examiners. Although a committed temperance man himself, he even supported one school district’s decision to retain a local teacher charged with public drunkenness.94 Whether or not Child significantly improved the teachers’ quality, he was sympathetic concerning the obstacles and hardships they faced.95 Curriculum and Pedagogy Another benefit the boards of examiners would confer, in Child’s opinion, would be to examine the books used in the schools, presumably reporting the results to him.96 In April 1853 he complained to Meilleur that the general use of American school books ‘[has] been attended with most pernicious effects, upon the character and Education of the District.’ As himself a former Patriote supporter and exile, Child could hardly blame these books for fomenting the Rebellions, as many school promoters were doing in Upper Canada.97 But he argued that they contained material ‘calculated to prejudice the minds of our pupils against the institutions of the country,’ adding that ‘instruction being derived from such sources, is no doubt, one of the causes of the emigration of so many of our youth of both sexes to the neighbouring States.’ Child concluded in his report for 1853 that ‘I do not condemn the use of these books among those for whom they were intended,’98 but he adopted a more ominous tone the same year when communicating with the school commissioners in his district. His June circular warned solemnly that the use of non-approved books ‘is an evil the magnitude of which cannot be fully understood by us, and the sooner you set about an entire change in them the better for your children and I might with propriety add, and your family.’99 Given Child’s own national and political background, his chief objection to the use of unauthorized books may have been that they interfered with his plans for systematic instruction. Like other inspectors, and even many parents, Child complained that the great variety of books used made it impossible to structure the schools ‘into proper classes.’100 In his second year of office, Child requested the publisher of the Canadian grammar, arithmetic, and geography texts in the ‘National School Books’ series either to print or deposit copies at wholesale prices in Sherbrooke. He was presumably referring to the Irish National

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Series, which Donald Akenson claims was ‘generally recognized as the best set of textbooks in the English-speaking world.’101 It would be no mark against this series, in Child’s mind, that the content was aimed at cultivating the reader’s moral rather than aesthetic sensibilities.102 To give the teachers more time to explain lessons according to the approved ‘natural’ or ‘inductive’ method of instruction, Child recommended that they form classes as large as possible for reading, spelling, ‘defining,’ grammar, arithmetic, and geography.103 Child, like Egerton Ryerson, rejected the rote-memory method of the monitorial system, arguing that ‘it destroys progress – and breeds discontent with the rate payers, and such considerations have given me an earnestness to effect a change which I cannot describe to you.’104 The National Series did become more available, and in December 1854 Child reported marked progress among the pupils of those schools which had adopted these books. But many had failed to do so, and his efforts at persuasion were nearly exhausted: ‘it is my candid opinion that, until you are empowered by law to retain from them their share of the school fund till they comply, they will never do it.’105 Meanwhile, Child examined all students in ‘reading, defining, spelling, and distinct articulation,’ distributing prize books to those who performed well.106 In summer, when only the younger children attended school, he found that arithmetic, grammar, geography, and writing were rarely taught, but insisted every student be trained in mental arithmetic. This subject was fashionable at the time because teachers could set questions based on real-life situations, an approach which, in the words of Houston and Prentice, was thought to ‘excite the students’ interest and encourage spontaneity and logical, rational thinking.’107 Child also instructed that geography be taught as soon as the students could read, followed by grammar and writing at the age of eight.108 Child’s liberal inclinations were particularly evident in his attitude towards students. His ten rules for teachers, published in 1854, were a striking contrast to the traditional discipline-oriented approach to teaching. Drafted for want of detailed guidelines from the superintendent’s office, these rules stated that teachers should educate their students ‘by their instruction, and especially by their example, with a love of virtue, industry, and knowledge.’ They should also ‘inspire their pupils with confidence in themselves’ by treating them ‘with regard and politeness’, and ‘never use severity, except when other means of making an impression upon an honest and sensible mind shall have failed, and

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then never without having first consulted at least the President of the School Commissioners.’109 Curtis claims that similar advice given by school reformers in Upper Canada was aimed at ‘making students embrace and internalize definite habits of mind and body’ because of growing concern ‘with the moral and political discipline of increasingly independent working class populations.’ He also states that the school authorities, realizing that violence against students was inherent to the system of public education, made it appear to be a personal failing on the part of teachers. In this way they hoped to contain opposition to the concept of public schooling while also using that opposition to police the occupation of teaching.110 This conspiratorial interpretation overlooks the fact that the English-Canadian clergy and press had been increasingly advocating the same non-coercive approach to child-rearing.111 Child’s family correspondence suggests that his ideal classroom was modelled on his loving and nurturing relationship with his own daughter and son.112 Nowhere in his inspector’s reports and correspondence did Child mention the need to instil a sense of subordination or submissiveness, or even the desirability of compulsory schooling.113 School Construction Economic hardship and local resistance to taxation during the 1840s had resulted in many of the one-room schoolhouses becoming so dilapidated and overcrowded by the following decade that they discouraged attendance. Claiming older schools to be ‘very inconvenient and generally not worth repairing,’114 Child took advantage of the subsidy offered by the government in 1853 for new construction. With a careful eye to economy, the inspector drafted and circulated his own design for a building measuring twenty-two by forty feet. While the school would include a shed for horses and wood, as well as separate cloakrooms for boys and girls and an indoor privy, there was ample provision for air circulation and light. Two doors opened to the outside, while five windows rather curiously lined one side of the building, perhaps allowing for a lean-to on the other side. Most important for the new more structured school system, the teacher’s desk was on an elevated platform, facing three parallel rows of desks. Behind that platform the wall would be painted black for the writing of exercises that the whole class could see, thereby permitting the group teaching that educational reformers favoured.115

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Child reported in 1854 that ‘the people display a noble liberality in building school houses,’ spending as much as £150 from voluntary contributions in addition to the £75 they were allowed to raise by assessment,116 but found commissioners anxious that he not interfere with their building plans. In February 1854 he complained to Meilleur that the seven municipalities which had been promised subsidies to improve or rebuild their schoolhouses had failed to consult him. Child asked that funds not be released until he could inspect each of the buildings in question. To assure the superintendent that he was not simply being officious, Child noted that conflicts over the location of schoolhouses had been ‘of more injury to the school wherein they have arisen, than from most other local causes.’117 Uppermost in his mind must have been the fact that a new school in one of these districts had been burned down two years earlier, for in October he reported that he was discouraging any new building until the ‘the ill feeling ... had quite subsided and the angry parties shown a better feeling & desire to agree & join cordially in building another.’118 But Child did recommend funding of three schools he had inspected, although he had not been able to impose his own design. In fact, Child did not need to encourage the local communities to build new schools, and their opposition to his advice showed the limits of his authority. Peripheral Settlements The British and French-Canadian settlers who had begun to migrate to the region’s more marginal townships during the later 1820s were generally less enthusiastic about public schooling than their Americandescended neighbours to the south.119 Child nevertheless felt that the French Canadians, once persuaded to open schools, were more ‘subordinate to direction’ than his own people, long accustomed to managing their own schools.120 Though plagued with rheumatism, Child did his best to fulfil the requirement to visit municipalities where the schools act was not yet in operation.121 On his first inspection tour, he advised settlers in the remote townships of Tingwick and Wotton to build log schoolhouses and hire female teachers who could be boarded among ‘the better families’ in the district. As school commissioners, Child named five men with Irish-sounding names for Tingwick, and five French Canadians for neighbouring Wotton. Four schools were established in the latter township by the fall of 1853,122 but, because of their failure to levy assessments, the commissioners had still not received a

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government subsidy two years later. Child then commended them for raising over £51 for their four schools by voluntary subscription, and suggested that Meilleur bend the rules in this case by giving them their share of the grant.123 In 1859, however, he reported that there were still unresolved ‘contentions’ within these townships.124 Child was also responsible for the French-speaking townships further east, in northern Compton and southern Beauce Counties, although the latter lay outside the St Francis District. He reported of Lambton Township in 1856 that the principal school was kept by an eighteen-year-old girl ‘who is nevertheless possessed of great abilities as a teacher,’ including ‘a most thorough knowledge of Arithmetic.’ Neighbouring Garthby and Stratford were only preparing to open schools, whereas Forsyth had two, but assessments were not promptly paid; ‘it is true that many of the inhabitants are poor and unable to pay much, but it must also be admitted, that many of them are also unwilling.’125 Despite Child’s skilled and conciliatory hand, he made little progress in fostering schools in these remote communities. In 1857 the increasingly exhausted inspector, whose knowledge of French was probably limited, asked that most of the district’s largely French-speaking townships (including 60 school subdistricts and 38 schools) be removed from his responsibility, leaving him with 207 schools. The government did not comply with his wishes.126 In February 1859 Child reported that he had not visited Stratford, Garthby, Winslow North, Weedon, Wolfestown, and Ham South on his last tour because ‘that fatal and filthy disease the small pox was in every house thro. these settlements, and the wife of the French teacher in Weedon had died of it, under the most appalling circumstances.’ Child had not wished to spread the contagion to children elsewhere, and, in any case, he had learned that there were only two schools open in these townships.127 In addition to the French-speaking colonization townships, there were the equally isolated and impoverished Highland settlements in northern Compton County to report upon. The recently arrived Free-Kirk settlers from the Isle of Lewis proved to be more enthusiastic about schooling than the British communities elsewhere in the region. Child was able to write in 1853 that a teacher in Lingwick Township ‘possesses very high qualifications, and has used the National School books with great advantage to her classes. The register and accounts, under the present Secretary-Treasurer, are very regular, and there is a general desire to act in conformity to the Law.’128 Child was unable to visit the area the following year due to ‘the several uncleared swamps’ along the

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route, but thereafter his reports suggested that progress was slow in Lingwick, where ‘the children learn to read or spell, and nothing more,’ because of the school commission’s debt.129 In neighbouring Winslow, the Scots were reported to be doing all they could to support their schools in 1857: ‘But there is much to be done to lay down a good foundation for their schools, which are literally in the forest ... Their school houses are built of logs, hewn, and covered with long shingles on the roof and gables, forming but a poor shelter for the groups of healthy but ragged children which assemble in them. Such destitution I never saw before; but even here I found some of the children making good progress in grammar, and most of them read quite well in easy lessons of the “National Series.”‘130 Local disputes closed the township’s four schools the following year, and Child reported them as still ‘struggling’ in 1859, the year of his last inspection tour.131 Although the evangelical, Gaelic-speaking Scots were anxious to send their children to school, where they could learn to speak English and read the Bible, Child was unable to offer much assistance. Conclusion The coercive powers of school inspectors were limited. In 1853, for example, the Reverend Paradis of Saint-Félix de Kingsey, which lay within Child’s territory, complained to the Sicotte commission that ‘the Inspector and the Superintendent himself both recoil before the obstacles and the slight oppositions shewn by the people, who have become arrogant through the contempt they have been permitted to evince towards the law.’132 Four years later, the superintendent of schools acknowledged that, in the eyes of the public, most of the inspectors were negligent and incompetent.133 This is a harsh judgment, given the burdensome responsibilities assumed by these officials and the role they played in convincing local ratepayers to assume an increasingly heavy burden – the provincial grant declined to 20 per cent of school expenses by 1858.134 The Eastern Townships example does suggest that, even with the greatest of zeal, an inspector could not impose careful record-keeping habits, or a standard curriculum or school design, or even effective control by commissioners as corporate entities over the expenditure of revenue and hiring of teachers for the individual schools. Despite the handicaps Child faced, however, and although the school reform program had been widely accepted in the St Francis District before his

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appointment, he appears to have made a significant impact as inspector. Enrolment of school-age children had approached 100 per cent in Stanstead County by the time Child assumed his duties, but there was considerable room for improvement in the much larger county of Sherbrooke.135 During Child’s first eighteen months in office, he spent forty days on one tour alone, reporting fifty-two new schools opened in his district, with an increase of 1,777 students, or one-third of the total enrolment.136 He ensured that most teachers were at least minimally qualified, and took steps towards improving the curriculum and pedagogy, though there was clearly still far to go at the time of his death. Child himself remained unsatisfied. He persistently asked for a raise in salary, so that he could devote more time to his duties, writing in 1854 that £300 ‘and a handsome allowance for contingencies’ would allow him to move to the more central town of Sherbrooke.137 Even without the raise, Child reported that he promptly replied to every letter written to him on school business, also sending correspondence on his own initiative and recording all his advice and directions in school journals and commission registers.138 Only as Child’s rheumatism worsened after 1854 did he begin to fall behind in his work,139 but he tenaciously held onto the inspectorship until his death in 1859. Child summarized his mission in a published address to the teachers of his district in 1854 when he declared: ‘You are labouring with me in a great cause, and if we can have the co-operation of parents and guardians, so far as to ensure a punctual and regular attendance of their children, we shall, I am confident, ultimately establish that high intellectual culture, which was contemplated by our legislature when providing so liberally for education.’140 Because Child wanted a wellordered, progressive, and moral society, his favoured curriculum did not include ‘novel and impracticable’ subjects141 or textbooks published in the United States. Despite his New England origin and his liberal ideology, Child claimed that for his go-ahead neighbours to the south life was ‘nothing but a miserable scramble for money and political power and place.’142 Although the general consensus has been that increased material prosperity caused religious enthusiasm in English-speaking Canada to decline after mid-century, Marguerite Van Die has recently argued that ‘when viewed through the lens of lay piety rather than clerical anxiety, the enhanced social status of the [church] membership in the 1850s revitalized the evangelical impulse rather than marked its death knell.’143 As someone who had left the Methodists during the 1840s to join the

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Anglican Church, Child’s evangelical enthusiasm was probably not at its height while he was a school inspector, but his basic attitude had changed little since writing to his wife, Lydia, in 1843: ‘In the midst of public affairs I feel my dependence, and the unmerited favours of God to me and mine[.] I have not been unmindful of these in prosperity and I hope & pray I may not forget them should adversity come upon me or mine.’144 In Child’s case, as in that of Egerton Ryerson and many other school reformers, the evangelical impulse became focused on the public school system because he perceived education as crucial to the furthering of his religious-inspired belief in moral and social progress.145 William Westfall is explicit on this point: ‘in precisely the same way that religion could redeem individuals from the fall and win for them the joys and happiness of salvation, so too could public education redeem the youth of the province and raise society to a higher level of existence.’146 Child saw schools as instruments of the church as much as the state, for when defining the benefits of schooling, he invariably mentioned not only ‘the business of life’ but also the ‘principles of morality and virtue.’ Number five of Child’s ten rules for teachers (noted above) declared that they ‘should not limit their attention to the mere cultivation of the talents of their pupils, but they should look upon it as a primary part of their duty, to form their manners, and more particularly to excite in them sentiments of morality and religion.’ Number eight stated that in order to engender ‘proper behaviour, peace and harmony amongst their pupils,’ the teachers ‘ought to spare no effort to excite and maintain between them, sentiments of christian union, of reciprocal benevolence and brotherly love.’ Finally, number nine counselled that ‘to sustain themselves against those feelings of anxiety and disgust, inevitable in the instruction of youth,’ teachers should ‘consider for how much they are responsible, not only to society in general, but even to God himself – the author of all knowledge and all good.’147 Child also proudly noted that, due to his insistence, all the children in his schools could repeat the Ten Commandments.148 Although the ‘common Christianity’ promoted by Child clearly aimed to instil a deep sense of religious morality and self-discipline, it certainly did not imply, as Curtis has suggested, that children should be indoctrinated to ‘respect political authority even if it appeared to be unjust.’149 Despite having been a member of the Legislative Assembly for many years, Child remained sceptical about state authority, writing to his wife in 1843 that ‘the best Govt. in the world is that which is least felt,

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which produces protection to person and property.’150 There is no denying that in his struggle to defend and implement public school reforms, Child helped hasten the rise of an interventionist state where agents such as himself would assume an active role. As a sincerely religious member of the rising petite bourgeoisie, however, he basically supported ‘the evangelical notion of the “responsible” individual and the “voluntary” model of society,’ to use Michael Gauvreau’s words.151 Child tried unsuccessfully to interfere in school construction and to impose a common curriculum, yet he did not echo those other inspectors who advocated stricter controls over the classroom through the establishment of a council of public instruction.152 Rather, Child favoured more public enlightenment, suggesting, for example, that a journal of education be regularly distributed to every household.153 In short, Child’s career as inspector was essentially driven by the same combination of liberalism and paternalism with which he governed his own family.154 To Bruce Curtis the aim of such state officials was to contribute to a bourgeois hegemony ‘whose main dimension is precisely the transformation of certain ways of seeing, doing, and being, particular to one class, one sex, and one ethnic group into the only thinkable, rational, “efficient” ways.’155 But the fact is that school reforms were primarily aimed at, and supported by, a society of farmers and tradesmen who largely shared the so-called ‘middle-class’ values of self-discipline and hard work. Furthermore, Child’s schools project had more than indoctrination in mind. To Meilleur, Child lamented that the ‘habits of industry and frugality’ which marked the people of the Townships left them little time for reading other than religious works or novels, or to ‘think profoundly upon the great principles which form the foundation on which our civil & Religious Institutions rest.’ Betterinformed individuals could only pray that ‘such fickle minds and unsteady hands’ did not destroy these institutions.156 In his 1854 report, the St Francis inspector lamented that ‘scholars are not taught the habit of close and correct observation of whatever comes under their notice, and forming correct opinions therefrom; consequently they in mature life are likely to become the dupes of delusion practiced on them by themselves, if not by others, and are thus destined to follow after the fictions of the age, in which they may act their part.’157 Child also deplored the fact that parents withdrew children from school as soon as they were of ‘an age to be employed at home or elsewhere ... thus depriving the teacher of his only chance of making his pupils scholars, and the country of well educated men, to sustain suc-

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cessfully the popular institutions therein.’158 In Foucault’s terms, Child’s ‘state project’ was less concerned with class and groups, or state domination of society, than with reconciling government and the increasing autonomy of the individual.159 In an era of growing independence and materialism, people must be taught to ‘govern’ themselves in the strict sense of the word. Although the Eastern Townships may still have been a relatively isolated and undeveloped region, Child was imbued with the progressive vision of a more liberal individualistic society tempered by the religiously inspired sense of social commitment that marked the rise of the petite bourgeoisie during the early nineteenth century.160

Notes 1 Quoted in Bruce Curtis, ‘Representation and State Formation in the Canadas, 1790–1850,’ Studies in Political Economy 28 (Spring 1989): 77. Buller recommended that Lower Canada be divided into three inspectorates, each with a government-appointed inspector who would receive reports from subordinate officers as well as visit each school once a year (LouisPhillipe Audet, Le système scolaire de la Province de Québec, vol. 6, La situation scolaire à la veille de l’Union, 1836–1840 [Quebec: Les Éditions de l’Érable, 1956], 316). 2 Bruce Curtis, ‘Mapping the Social: Notes from Jacob Keefer’s Educational Tours, 1845,’ Journal of Canadian Studies 28.2 (1993): 65. 3 Bruce Curtis, True Government by Choice Men? Inspection, Education, and State Formation in Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). For a brief survey of the latter half of the nineteenth century, see Susan E. Houston and Alison Prentice, Schooling and Scholars in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 138–47. Two other studies are John Abbott, ‘Accomplishing “a Man’s Task”: Rural Women Teachers, Male Culture, and the School Inspectorate in Turn-of-theCentury Ontario,’ Ontario History 78.4 (1986): 313–30; and Thomas Fleming, ‘Our Boys in the Field: School Inspectors, Superintendents, and the Changing Character of School Leadership in British Columbia,’ in Nancy Sheehan, ed., Schools in the West: Essays in Canadian Educational History (Calgary: Detselig, 1986). 4 Gérard Filteau and Lionel Allard, Un siècle au service de l’éducation, 1851– 1951: L’inspection des écoles dans la province de Québec, 2 vols (Quebec: n.p., 1951); Andrée Dufour, Tous à l’école: État, communautés rurales et scolarisation au Québec de 1826 à 1859 (Ville LaSalle, QC: Hurtibise HMH, 1996), 167–97, 234–8.

‘Labouring in a Great Cause’ 187 5 Dufour’s Tous à l’école stresses the importance of the foundations established in the 1826–36 period. 6 Dufour, Tous à l’école, 172. This perspective is also reflected in R.D. Gidney and D.A. Lawr, ‘Bureaucracy vs Community? The Origins of Bureaucratic Procedure in the Upper Canadian School System,’ Journal of Social History 13.3 (1980): 438–57; and J.I. Little, State and Society in Transition: The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships, 1838–1852 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). 7 Bruce Curtis, ‘Working Past the Mythical Abstraction: Abrams and Foucault on State and Government,’ Cahiers d’Histoire 16.1–2 (1997): 10. 8 Bruce Curtis, ‘The State of Tutelage in Lower Canada, 1835–1851,’ History of Education Quarterly 37.1 (Spring 1997): 26. 9 This interpretation is similar to that of Jean-Pierre Charland, ‘Le réseau d’enseignement public bas-canadien, 1841–1867, une institution de l’état libéral,’ Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 40 (1987): 505–36. 10 Curtis, ‘Working Past,’ 14. 11 Curtis, ‘The State of Tutelage,’ 36; McCord Museum, Hale Papers, J. Anderson to E. Hale, Melbourne, 23 July 1847. 12 Journals of the Legislative Assembly of Canada (hereafter JLAC), vol. 9 (1850), Appendix U, Circular no. 12, 4 June 1849. 13 Dufour, Tous à l’école, 195–6. 14 National Archives of Canada, MG24 B14, LaFontaine Papers, Crémazie to Jos. Cauchon, 29 April 1851. 15 JLAC, vol. 11 (1852–3), Appendix JJ; André Labarrère-Paulé, Les instituteurs laïques au Canada Français, 1836–1900 (Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1965), 145–6. The principal clauses of the inspectors’ bill can be found in Filteau and Allard, Un siècle au service, vol. 1, 16–17. 16 Filteau and Allard, Un siècle au service, vol. 1, 15. 17 Curtis, True Government, 99–100. Marcus Child supported appointment by central government rather than municipalities ‘in order to ensure truthful reports, as free from any bias as possible’ (Archives Nationales du Québec à Québec [hereafter ANQQ], E13, Lettres Reçues [hereafter LR], no. 93, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead Plain, 16 Jan. 1852). 18 In his letter to Provincial Secretary A.N. Morin in 1853, Meilleur appears to be suggesting that the inspectorate itself would be temporary, but it is more likely that he was suggesting a later introduction of the more decentralized Upper Canadian system. He also recommended a maximum of one hundred schools per inspector (Filteau and Allard, Un siècle de service, vol. 1, 65–7). 19 See J.I. Little, ‘Colonization and Municipal Reform in Canada East,’ Histoire sociale/Social History 14 (1981): 92–121.

188 20 21 22 23

24

25

26

27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

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Filteau and Allard, Un siècle de service, vol. 1, 67–8. Dufour, Tous à l’école, 207. Dufour, Tous à l’école, 206. Filteau and Allard, Un siècle de service, vol. 1, 75. In 1861, 44 per cent of Upper Canada’s local superintendents were clerics, and there was also a small number of teachers (Houston and Prentice, Schooling and Scholars, 146). Five of the original twenty-three inspectors in Lower Canada had been teachers, but they clearly could not fill both functions at once given the large size of the territories they had to cover. See Wendie Nelson, ‘The “Guerre des Éteignoirs”: School Reform and Popular Resistance in Lower Canada, 1841–1850’ (M.A. thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1989). The resistance was not entirely dead by 1852, or even later (Filteau and Allard, Un siècle de service, vol. 1, 34–5). M. Child to Lydia Child, Leg. Ass., 24 Nov. 1843, from J.I. Little, ed., The Child Letters: Public and Private Life in a Canadian Merchant-Politician’s Family, 1841–1845 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 119–20. ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 989, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 17 Aug. 1846; Lettres Envoyées (hereafter LE)], no. 434, J.B. Meilleur to M. Child, 21 Aug. 1846. ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 93, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead Plain, 16 Jan. 1852. On Child’s family life, see Little, ed., Child Letters, 30–8. Little, State and Society, 233. In Upper Canada, twenty-two of the thirtythree inspectors for whom the information exists were between thirty-two and fifty years of age when appointed between 1844 and 1850 (Curtis, True Government, 113). On Child’s political career, see Little, ed., Child Letters, 10–30. Little, State and Society, 45. Filteau and Allard, Un siècle de service, vol. 1, 19–20; Labarrère-Paulé Les instituteurs laïques, 146. Filteau and Allard, Un siècle de service, vol. 1, 20–1. Little, ed., Child Letters, 10; ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 93, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 15 Jan. 1852; no. 115, 16 Jan. 1854. As the map shows, the boundaries of this district extended somewhat beyond those of the St Francis Judicial District. JLAC, vol. 11 (1852–3), Appendix JJ, Instructions to inspectors. Meilleur continued to provide detailed instructions and advice in the ensuing years. See, for example, JLAC, vol. 13 (1854–5), Appendix B, Circular no. 8, 3 June 1853; no. 9, 22 June 1854; no. 10, 10 Dec. 1854. Stanstead Journal clipping, in ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 149, M. Child to J.B.

‘Labouring in a Great Cause’ 189

37 38

39 40 41

42

43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50

51

Meilleur, Stanstead, 20 Jan. 1853. In 1853 Meilleur informed the inspectors that they need submit statistical tables only once every six months, though their other two reports were to include a recapitulation, ‘showing in a clear and precise manner the state of education’ in each of their school municipalities (JLAC, vol. 13 [1854–5], Appendix B, Circular no. 8, 3 June 1853). Child attempted to visit every school only once during each of the two yearly terms, simply inspecting the school commissions’ records for the other two quarterly reports (ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1077, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 18 July 1854). On Child’s business career, see Little, ed., Child Letters, 5–10. ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1077, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 18 July 1854. The salary at the end of Child’s tenure was $800 with no provision for expenses. This was the maximum allotted in Canada East outside Montreal, Quebec, and the sprawling district of Gaspé-Bonaventure (ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 735, P.J.O. Chauveau to Henry Hubbard, Montreal, 27 Dec. 1859; Filteau and Allard, Un siècle de service, vol. 1, 18–19). Curtis, True Government, 123. Curtis, ‘Representation and State Formation,’ 79; Curtis, ‘Mapping the Social,’ 59. See R.D. Gidney and D.A. Lawr, ‘Who Ran the Schools? Local Influence on Education Policy in Nineteenth Century Ontario,’ Ontario History 72.3 (1980): 131–43. See J.I. Little, ‘School Reform and Community Control in the 1840s: A Case Study from the Eastern Townships,’ Historical Studies in Education 9 (1997): 152–64. JLAC, vol. 13 (1854–5), Appendix B. ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 911, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 9 May 1855; Houston and Prentice, Schooling and Scholars, 210. Dufour, Tous à l’école, 181. Fliteau and Allard, Un siècle de service, vol. 1, 17. See Susan Lewthwaite, ‘Violence, Law and Community in Rural Upper Canada,’ in Jim Phillips, Tina Loo, and Susan Lewthwaite, eds, Essays in the History of Canadian Law, vol. 5, Crime and Criminal Justice (Toronto: The Osgoode Society, 1994). ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 158, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 20 Jan. 1853. ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 221, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 29 Jan. 1854. ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1077, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 18 July 1854. See also his report of 16 April 1853 in JLAC, vol. 11 (1852–3), Appendix JJ. JLAC, vol. 14 (1856), Appendix 16.

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52 Bruce Curtis, ‘Policing Pedagogical Space: “Voluntary” School Reform and Moral Regulation,’ Canadian Journal of Sociology 13.3 (1988): 293. 53 Jean-Pierre Charland, ‘L’histoire de l’éducation au Québec: Regard sur la production récente,’ Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française 50 (1997): 613–14. 54 Filteau and Allard, Un siècle de service, vol. 1, 39. 55 JLAC, vol. 11 (1852–3), Appendix JJ, Instructions to inspectors. 56 JLAC, vol. 11 (1852–3), Appendix JJ, Reports of R. Parmelee, inspector, 21 July 1852, 10 March 1853. 57 J.I. Little, Crofters and Habitants: Settler Society, Economy, and Culture in a Quebec Township (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), 234–5. See also Labarrère-Paulé, Les instituteurs laïques, 151, 159. 58 Dufour, Tous à l’école, 198. 59 JLAC, vol. 11 (1852–3), Apppendix JJ, Report of M. Child, 31 July 1852. On the problems that absentee proprietorship caused the reformed school system, see Little, State and Society, 189, 200–1, 203, 205, 208, 214–17 passim. 60 Dufour, Tous à l’école, 176–87. 61 JLAC, vol. 11 (1852–3), Appendix JJ, Report of M. Child, 31 July 1852. 62 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 564, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 16 April 1853. Also in JLAC, vol. 11 (1852–3), Appendix JJ. 63 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 788, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 15 June 1853. 64 Dufour, Tous à l’école, 183. 65 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1233, M. Child to P.J.O. Chauveau, Coaticook, 3 June 1857. 66 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1624, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 7 Oct. 1854. 67 The temporary legislation establishing normal schools in 1836 had expired by 1842 (Audet, Le système scolaire, vol. 6, 157–79). 68 For details, see Audet, Le système scolaire, vol. 6, 20–31; Little, State and Society, 226–30; and Anne Drummond, ‘From Autonomous Academy to Public “High School”: Quebec English Protestant Education, 1829–1889’ (M.A. thesis, McGill University, 1986). 69 Despite Child’s repeated entreaties, Bishop’s refused to submit reports to the government on the grounds that it had received a university charter in 1853. During the later 1850s, however, it took steps to open a grammar school branch in order to attract more public funds. See ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 437, M. Child to P.J.O. Chauveau, Sherbrooke, 26 March 1855; no. 570, Stanstead, 4 April 1855; Christopher Nicholl, Bishop’s University, 1843–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 47, 59–63.

‘Labouring in a Great Cause’ 191 70 Little, ed., Child Letters, 34–5. Meilleur nevertheless made arrangements to send his son to the Stanstead Seminary, apparently to learn English, in the fall of 1854 (ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1736, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 6 Nov. 1854). 71 JLAC, vol. 14 (1856), Appendix 16, Report of M. Child, inspector. 72 JLAC, vol. 11 (1852–3), Appendix JJ, Report of M. Child, inspector, 16 April 1853. 73 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 564, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 16 April 1853. 74 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 575, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 19 April 1853. 75 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1769, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 21 Sept. 1853. 76 See Little, State and Society, 223–6. 77 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 569, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 10 April 1854; no. 646, 1 May 1854. 78 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1589, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 30 Sept. 1854. 79 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 109, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead [Jan. 1855]. 80 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 364, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead [March 1855]; no. 381, 12 March 1855. 81 Esther Healey, ‘St. Francis College, the Formative Years, 1854–1860, Richmond, Canada East,’ Journal of Eastern Townships Studies 8 (Spring 1996): 29–32. 82 JLAC, vol. 13 (1854–5), Appendix B, Report of M. Child; ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1077, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 18 July 1854. 83 JLAC, vol. 11 (1852–3), Appendix JJ, Report of M. Child, 31 July 1852. In contrast to Labarrère-Paulé, Dufour (Tous à l’école, 200, 209–19) strongly defends the skills of Lower Canada’s female teachers. 84 According to Labarrère-Paulé (Les instituteurs laïques, 147–8), Meilleur interpreted the regulation broadly, requiring female teachers to submit to ‘une épreuve devant les inspecteurs.’ 85 JLAC, vol. 11 (1852–3), Appendix JJ, Report of M. Child, 31 July 1852. 86 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 2204, M.Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 9 Dec. 1853; Dufour, Tous à l’école, 198. 87 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1795, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 17 Aug. 1853; Dufour, Tous à l’école, 208–9. 88 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1575, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 30 Aug. 1853. On Child’s controversial patronage distribution, see Little, State and Society, 32–5, 70, 102.

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89 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1769, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 21 Sept. 1853. 90 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 158 [of 1854], M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 20 [Dec.]. 1853. 91 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 149, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 20 Jan. 1854. 92 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 221, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 29 Jan. 1854. Superintendent Chauveau failed to implement the legislation passed in 1856 to institute the county examining boards across Lower Canada because he feared they would be too lax in issuing certificates. New legislation passed in 1859 restricted certificates to the county in which they were issued, and limited their validity to three years (Dufour, Tous à l’école, 220–1). 93 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 221, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 29 Jan. 1854. 94 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 434, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, L’Avenir, 23 March 1855. 95 While he emphasizes the strict moral code teachers were expected to conform to, Jean-Pierre Charland appears to have uncovered relatively few cases when they were disciplined, and he admits that the school officials sometimes defended them against the charges of members of the local population. See his ‘L’éducation par l’exemple: Le contrôle des comportements des instituteurs et des institutions des écoles publiques québécoises, 1842–1897,’ in Yves Roby and Nive Voisine, eds, Érudition, humanisme et savoir: Actes du colloque en l’honneur de Jean Hamelin (SainteFoy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1996). See also Little, Crofters and Habitants, 239. 96 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1769, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 21 Sept. 1853. On this theme, see Filteau and Allard, Un siècle de service, vol. 1, 59–60. 97 For conflicting views on the American school text controversy in Upper Canada, see James Love, ‘Cultural Survival and Social Control: The Development of a Curriculum for Upper Canada’s Common Schools in 1846,’ Histoire sociale/Social History 15.30 (1982): 357–82; and Bruce Curtis, ‘Schoolbooks and the Myth of Curricular Republicanism: The State and the Curriculum in Canada West, 1820–1850,’ Histoire sociale/Social History 16.32 (1983): 305–29. 98 JLAC, vol. 11 (1852–3), Appendix JJ, Report of M. Child, Stanstead, 16 April 1853. 99 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1254, Circular, June 1853. 100 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1090, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 16 July 1853; Dufour, Tous à l’école, 244.

‘Labouring in a Great Cause’ 193 101 Donald Harmon Akenson, The Irish in Ontario: A Study in Rural History (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1984), 269–71. 102 For a useful discussion of this series, see Houston and Prentice, Schooling and Scholars, 237–52. 103 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1254, Circular, June 1853. 104 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1090, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 16 July 1853. 105 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 23 [of 1855], M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 31 Dec. 1854. 106 According to Dufour (Tous à l’école, 238–40), the principal aim of Chauveau’s prize distribution policy was to encourage regular attendance, but Child carefully quizzed students before issuing them with the prize books. In 1857 he distributed 256 prize books throughout his district, and asked the superintendent to increase the number to 700 or more. Titles are recorded in the journal of his 1857 tour of the Hatley schools. See ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1233, M. Child to P.J.O. Chauveau, Coaticook, 3 June 1857; no. 1957, 28 July 1857; no. 2872, 26 Nov. 1857. 107 Houston and Prentice, Schooling and Scholars, 259. 108 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1077, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 18 July 1854. 109 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 346, Undated newspaper clipping in M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 28 Feb. 1854. 110 Bruce Curtis, Building the Educational State: Canada West, 1836–1871 (London, ON: Althouse Press, 1988), 315, 330. 111 Jane Errington, Wives and Mothers, School Mistresses and Scullery Maids: Working Women in Upper Canada, 1790–1840 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), 72. While James Axtell claims that the trend away from corporal punishment had begun many years earlier in New England, Linda Pollock argues from evidence found in diaries and autobiographies that there was a definite increase in the severity of English and American school discipline during the early nineteenth century. She also claims, however, that parental and school discipline since the seventeenth century has been greatly exaggerated by historians. See James Axtell, The School upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 194– 9; Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 188–99. 112 For a discussion of this theme, see Little, ed., Child Letters, 30–8. 113 In contrast to Child, the regulations drafted by at least two Frenchspeaking inspectors clearly favoured a regimented approach to teaching

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116 117

118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

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and classroom management (Filteau and Allard, Un siècle de service, vol. 1, 54–9). ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 2278, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 27 Dec. 1853. On this theme, see Filteau and Allard, Un siècle de service, vol. 1, 61; Dufour, Tous à l’école, 232–3, 243–4; and Houston and Prentice, Schooling and Scholars, 205–14. ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1090, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stantstead, 16 July 1853. On school design and student classification in Upper Canada, see Alison Prentice, The School Promoters: Education and Social Class in MidNineteenth Century Upper Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977), 97–101, 148. JLAC, vol. 13 (1854–5), Appendix B, Report of M. Child. ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 346, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 28 Feb. 1854; no. 1589, 30 Sept. 1854. On this theme, see Houston and Prentice, Schooling and Scholars, 204. ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1676, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 19 Oct. 1854. See Little, State and Society, 202–18. ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1624, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 7 Oct. 1854. ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1590, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 9 Oct. 1852; no. 1902, 18 Dec. 1854. ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1590, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 9 Oct. 1852; no. 2091, 14 Nov. 1853. ANQQ, LR, E13, no. 365, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 6 March 1855. ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 417, M. Child to P.J.O. Chauveau, Coaticook, 5 Feb. 1859. JLAC, vol. 15 (1857), Appendix 58, Report of M. Child. ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 780, M. Child to P.J.O. Chauveau, Coaticook, 13 March 1857. Upon Child’s death in 1859, the Catholic schools in Chester, Tingwick, Kingsey, and Durham were transferred to Inspector G.A. Bourgeois of the Nicolet District (ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 735, G.A. Bourgeois to P.J.O. Chauveau, St Grégoire, 31 Dec. 1859). ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 417, M. Child to P.J.O. Chauveau, Coaticook, 5 Feb. 1859. Lingwick is mistakenly identified as Tingwick (JLAC, 11 [1852–3], Appendix JJ, Report of M. Child, 16 April 1853). ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1085, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 18 July 1853; no. 346, 28 Feb. 1854; Reports of M. Child in JLAC, 15 (1857), Appendix 58; 16 (1858), Appendix 43; 17 (1859), Appendix 58.

‘Labouring in a Great Cause’ 195 130 JLAC, 15 (1857), Appendix 58, Report of M. Child. For more details on the schools of Winslow Township, see Little, Crofters and Habitants, 220–45. 131 JLAC, 17 (1859), Appendix 58, Report of M. Child. 132 JLAC, 11 (1852–3), Appendix JJ. 133 Filteau and Allard, Un siècle de service, vol. 1, 69–70. 134 Dufour, Tous à l’école, 184. 135 Little, State and Society, 222. 136 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 484, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 31 March 1853; Stanstead Journal clipping in ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 149, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 20 Jan. 1854. 137 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 221, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 29 Jan. 1854. In 1854 Meilleur himself recommended higher salaries for inspectors, so that they could become full-time officials (Filteau and Allard, Un siècle de service, vol. 1, 68). 138 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1736, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 6 Nov. 1854. 139 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1238, Draft letter to M. Child, Montreal, 23 May 1857. 140 Undated newspaper clipping in ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 346, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 28 Feb. 1854. 141 ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1624, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 7 Oct. 1854. 142 M. Child to Lydia Child, Legislative Assembly, 17 Nov. 1843, in Little, ed., Child Letters, 111. 143 Marguerite Van Die, ‘“A March of Victory and Triumph in Praise of the Beauty of Holiness”: Laity and the Evangelical Impulse in Canadian Methodism, 1800–1884,’ in G.A. Rawlyk, ed., Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 81. 144 M. Child to Lydia Child, Kingston, 8 Nov. 1843, in Little, ed., Child Letters, 100. I have, unfortunately, found no documents explaining why Child converted, but he did refer at one point to the political opposition he faced from his town’s Methodist elite. It may also be significant that his only daughter married an Anglican at this time. See Little, ed., Child Letters, 27, 34. 145 See Goldwin S. French, ‘Egerton Ryerson and the Methodist Model for Upper Canada,’ in Neil McDonald and Alf Chaiton, eds, Egerton Ryerson and His Times (Toronto: Macmillan, 1978); W. Westfall, ‘The End of the World: An Aspect of Time and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Protestant Culture,’ Canadian Issues / Thèmes canadiens 7 (1985): 72–83; and Michael

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Gauvreau, ‘Protestantism Transformed: Personal Piety and the Evangelical Social Vision, 1815–1867,’ in G.A. Rawlyk, ed., The Canadian Protestant Experience, 1760–1990 (Burlington, ON: Welch, 1990), 91–2. William Westfall, Two Worlds: The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth Century Ontario (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989), 7. Undated newspaper clipping in ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 346, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 28 Feb. 1854. ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1589, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 30 Sept. 1854. Bruce Curtis, ‘Preconditions of the Canadian State: Educational Reform and the Construction of a Public in Upper Canada, 1837–1846,’ in J.K. Johnson and Bruce G. Wilson, eds, Historical Essays on Upper Canada: New Perspectives (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989), 358. M. Child to Lydia Child, Legislative Assembly, 5 Dec. 1843, in Little, ed., The Child Letters, 133. Quoted in Mark A. Noll, ‘Canadian Evangelicalism: A View from the United States,’ in Rawlyk, ed., Aspects, 16. This body came into existence in 1859 (Dufour, Tous à l’école, 222). ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 950, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 14 May 1855. See Little, ed., Child Letters, 30–8. Curtis, ‘Representation and State Formation,’ 80. ANQQ, E13, LR, no. 1624, M. Child to J.B. Meilleur, Stanstead, 7 Oct. 1854. JLAC, vol. 13 (1854–5), Appendix B, Report of M. Child. JLAC, vol. 13 (1854–5), Appendix B, Report of M. Child. See the discussion in Curtis, ‘Working Past,’ 15–17. On this theme, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

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7 Railways, Revivals, and Rowdyism: The Beebe Adventist Camp Meeting, 1875–1900

While railways were the main force behind industrialization, urbanization, and national expansion in North America during the latter half of the nineteenth century, their owners were not satisfied with the profits earned from transporting raw materials and manufactured goods. Passengers were also a potentially lucrative market, and the middle class was quick to adopt train travel as a means of visiting other cities or rural tourist destinations where they could either contemplate the picturesque and sublime or restore their health at beach resorts and mineral springs. The Eastern Townships was at a disadvantage as far as tourism was concerned, insofar as it could not boast the salubrious sea air and romantic associations that attracted people to Kamouraska and Murray Bay, nor did it even have a modest mineral springs resort.1 The best it could offer was bucolic villages such as Georgeville and North Hatley on Lakes Memphremagog and Massawippi, respectively, but these lakes did attract members of the Boston and Montreal elites soon after railways began to be built into the region at mid-century.2 This was a select but small market, one which would add relatively little to the railway companies’ bottom line. More profitable – as already discovered by the steamboat operators on Lake Memphremagog – was the localized appetite for pleasure travel.3 Aside from regular weekend excursion fares, the railways made special arrangements for events such as the annual week-long operatic festival at Bay View on Lake Memphremagog, or the more plebeian railway and steamboat excursion organized by the firemen of Stanstead and Derby Line, Vermont, which attracted approximately five hundred people in August 1882.4 The Eastern Townships may be somewhat unique in this respect, but historians of tourism have overlooked or downplayed what was

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clearly a larger-scale phenomenon than travel by the well-off to distant resorts, namely the day or weekend trip by ordinary working people to the nearby countryside, including events organized for religious purposes. Churches and moral reform societies were concerned about the destabilizing effect that the increased circulation of people might have on local communities, and Sunday train travel was considered a particular threat, but railway excursions could also be turned to their advantage. For the French-speaking parishes, there were railway and steamboat pilgrimages to Catholic shrines.5 In the English-speaking townships, trains were booked for outdoor Sunday-school excursions and temperance picnics which provided brass bands for amusement. In this way, ordinary people could enjoy a break from their everyday routines while, theoretically at least, being indoctrinated with religious and middleclass values. In practice, such excursions were not always easy to control, even by the Catholic Church, which adopted precautionary measures such as segregating the participants by gender and limiting their numbers to seven or eight hundred.6 Such controls were less feasible for non-hierarchical, evangelical denominations such as the Christian Adventists, who organized camp meetings on the edge of the village of Beebe Plain straddling the Quebec–Vermont border. Like the Methodist camp meeting in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, the Beebe site promised a retreat from industrialism as well as freedom from the temptations posed by fashionable watering places.7 Because it became so popular, however, and because it was associated with a millenarian religious denomination, it became the target of the local newspaper correspondents who charged repeatedly that it had a disruptive influence on their peaceful and respectable community. The protracted public debate that ensued was, in a sense, an example of the tensions that could develop when modern mass culture invaded a relatively secluded rural environment. But this was a mass cultural phenomenon in a pre-industrial, non-secular guise, for the American camp meeting had originated at the turn of the nineteenth century,8 and the one in Beebe featured all the emotional appeals that the mainstream evangelical denominations had discarded by the 1840s in the name of middle-class respectability. The fact that social inhibitions were also relaxed by the large amounts of alcohol consumed by camp followers more interested in recreation than salvation only made the meetings appear all the more incongruous in an era characterized by increased faith in social progress and moral reform. There is an

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interesting parallel with Cape Breton Island’s open-air Presbyterian communion services, which also grew rapidly in the age of steam travel, only to be terminated by a clergy increasingly attached to the middle-class values of order and sobriety.9 But the Christian Adventist organizers were not so concerned with middle-class respectability, and the carnivalesque Beebe camp meeting survived as an integral component of their worship and as a somewhat unsettling signifier that railways and religion did not always serve as agencies of order and control. The Christian Adventists were one of the premillennial denominations that originated with Millerism, an American movement that had predicted that Christ would return amidst the fiery Apocalypse in 1843 or 1844. Millerism had created a major stir in New York and New England as the anticipated end-time drew near, and its influence had also flared up intensely in the border communities of the Eastern Townships. This was particularly true of Stanstead, the most picturesque and prosperous township in the region, and the one in which the Anglican missionaries sponsored by London’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had met the most resistance in establishing churches. But Millerism faded more quickly in Stanstead – where there were only 424 individuals identified as Second Adventists in the 1851–2 Census Reports – than on the American side of the border.10 Stanstead’s Adventists represented nearly a third of that sect in the Eastern Townships as a whole, but they were still only 9 per cent of that township’s population.11 Their number did not increase substantially by 1881, when Stanstead still had the largest number of Adventists in the Eastern Townships.12 By this time the movement had split into three branches, with the Christian Adventists emerging in 1860 as a separate organization that continued to predict the exact year of Christ’s return, though they did not establish their own association in the Eastern Townships until 1873.13 Because they anticipated the imminent Apocalypse, Adventists saw little need to adopt the institutional trappings of a formal church, or even to build chapels. They met instead in schools, town halls, and private homes. They also held regular meetings in outdoor campsites, a strategy that had the advantage of accommodating large numbers of people as well as avoiding the appearance of exclusivism that a more enclosed space would necessarily imply. The appeal of Millerism had been in large part that it represented a return to the emotional support provided by revivalistic religion in a destabilizing era of economic and social transition.14 The Millerites’ tent meetings of the early 1840s had

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proven to be a very effective method of generating mass conversions, if not hysteria, but camp meetings came to serve more than an evangelical purpose as Adventism gradually became more institutionalized. As with the early nineteenth-century American Methodists, these meetings provided opportunities for the church leaders to hold conferences, and for members from widespread locations to fraternize with each other for several days each year.15 While the Seventh-Day Adventists (who held that the Sabbath was on Saturday) were also active in the Eastern Townships, the camp meeting that was established by the Christian Adventists just outside the small granite-producing village of Beebe Plain became the most important and enduring one in the region.16 Beebe’s Christian Adventists had joined several other denominations in building a Union Meeting House in 1866, but ten years later a committee representing this sect paid $1,000 for an eight-acre maple grove lying between the Vermont border and the Passumpsic and Connecticut Railway line at the edge of the village.17 According to Dickson Bruce, the three attributes of a good site for a camp meeting in the early nineteenth century were adequate natural resources to feed the participants and their horses, a natural canopy of tree branches over the site in order to create a cathedral in the wilderness, and a hospitable neighbourhood to avoid being invaded by drunken outsiders.18 The Beebe site would fail as far as being protected from unsympathetic outsiders was concerned, leading to considerable controversy in the ensuing years, but it conformed nicely to the first and second criteria. Because of its ready accessibility and natural appeal, the annual meeting attracted 5,000 people in 1876, 9,000 in 1878, and as many as 12,000 in 1881, which was more than double the number of Adventists of all types residing in the province of Quebec, as well as being much more than the population of Sherbrooke, the only urban centre of significant size in the region.19 While a class analysis of those who attended the camp meetings is obviously impossible, the millenarian movements of Britain and the United States prior to mid-century appealed largely to artisans, small farmers, shopkeepers, tradesmen, domestic servants, and women – not the very poor.20 Tradesmen were over-represented in at least two townships in the Eastern Townships of 1852,21 but this was not the case thirty years later in Stanstead and Magog Townships, where a sizeable majority of the Adventists were farmers. In Stanstead Township 63.3 per cent of the 142 household heads who identified themselves as Adventists were farmers, 20.4 per cent were engaged in manual trades, and 7.7 per

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Fig. 7.1 The Beebe Plain Advent campgrounds, 1881. Source: Illustrated Atlas of Eastern Townships and South Western Quebec (H. Belden, 1881).

cent were labourers. While 20.3 per cent of the township’s population resided in its two villages of Stanstead Plain and Beebe Plain, only 7.8 per cent of the Adventists did so. Indeed, there wasn’t a single Adventist in the former village, where the county’s conservative elite resided, and, of the fifteen Adventist household heads in Beebe Plain, four were farmers. The only Stanstead Township Adventists not engaged in manual work were the preacher, an undertaker, a storekeeper, and a factory foreman. In the more industrialized Magog Township, where 33 of 240 household heads were Adventists, 24 (72.7 per cent) were farmers. For evidence of the Beebe campground organizers’ limited means, one need look no further than the simple design of the cottages they built. A drawing in Belden’s Illustrated Atlas of 1881 suggests that there were thirty narrow, two-storey cottages on the Beebe site, all with a porch on the ground floor and gallery on the top floor (see fig. 7.1).22 Designed to resemble tents, they were humble versions of the approximately five hundred cottages that had been built at the Methodist camp meeting ground in Martha’s Vineyard known as Wesleyan Grove. The

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Beebe cottages, several of which are still in use (see fig. 7.2), do not have the wide double doors on the first floor, nor the lancet windows or jigsaw scrollwork of their American counterparts, but they do have the same flat and narrow facade, tongue and groove boarding laid vertically, and projecting ninety-degree gable. In short, they feature the same classical formal elements as the Wesleyan Grove cottages, but without the romantic embellishments that appealed so strongly to the Victorian middle-class sensibility of the increasingly wealthy Methodists.23 According to its historian, Wesleyan Grove – with its long-term summer residents – anticipated the American suburb insofar as they both ‘were intended as societies of the like-minded with strong family ideology, living in nature.’24 The few Beebe cottages that have survived were moved farther apart as a result of the fires that destroyed the others, presumably after the turn of the century, for figure 7.3 (undated, but note the clothing styles and hydro wires) reveals a much denser configuration than exists today. But the Belden’s Atlas illustration (fig. 7.1) offers a good impression of the nineteenth-century scene, with the tightly spaced cottages bordering three sides of a large quadrangle, within which were bench seats for approximately four thousand people. Even in today’s configuration, the cottages offer little private space, and their open front windows and doors on hot summer days expose much of their interiors to public view. In this sense they contrast with the North American suburban home, for they promoted a sense of communalism rather than privacy. A former preacher remembered in 1975 how the quadrangle would be filled with people, with others sitting on the porches ‘while the message of the “Signs of our Times” was being shouted from ... the cleverly designed convertible Tabernacle platform.’25 Roger Robins claims that the American Methodists’ establishment of permanent campgrounds with wooden cabins and tabernacles beginning in the 1830s was accompanied by routinization in the form of camp regulations, reflecting ‘the broader rationalization of society, which called for utility, efficiency, and bureaucratization.’ Furthermore, the increasing stress on nurture and Christian formation meant an intensified focus on family and domesticity, while modern concerns for health and therapy resulted in the Methodist camp meetings being promoted for their recreational value and fresh air. Rather than a weapon/ implement for ‘subduing the spiritual and moral wilderness,’ the camp meeting was becoming ‘a refuge, a garden of spiritual and cultural renaissance to replenish depleted souls and refit them for modern society.’26 It is worth noting, in this light, that one section of

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Fig. 7.2 Cottage on Christian Adventist Camp Meeting Grounds, Beebe, Quebec, 2002. Source: photo by the author.

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Fig. 7.3 Christian Adventist camp meeting, Beebe, Quebec, undated. Source: ETRC, P020, Eastern Townships Heritage Foundation, Landscapes of the Past Project, 79-8-21, Stanstead Journal.

the Beebe camp meeting grounds was kept in its natural state to be used for walks and meditation. The illustrations also suggest that the meetings themselves catered to this modern sensibility. Figure 7.1 depicts an orderly, fashionably dressed audience seated quietly in rows facing a platform with five soberlooking men sitting in chairs listening to a speaker who is reading from what is obviously the Bible and pointing heavenward. In contrast to the outdoor revivals of the early nineteenth century, the audience is not segregated by gender and there is no ‘anxious seat’ or ‘glory pen’ in front, where the ‘mourners’ had traditionally engaged in jerking, falling, dancing, and barking as they experienced the conversion process.27 Indeed, a number of the foreground figures are not even looking at the speaker. There is still less drama in figure 7.3, with the well-dressed congregation of all ages staring self-consciously at the camera. It is also worth noting that females outnumber males by approximately two to one in this photograph, and the imbalance is particularly marked for the younger people. Finally, the cottage depicted in figure 7.2 reflects a sense of architectural order and balance.

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Unfortunately, no detailed record of the camp meeting’s daily schedule has survived, but contemporary newspaper accounts conflict with the impression created by these visual images. In fact, it is quite likely that rather than a peaceful rural retreat, the Beebe camp meeting took on the characteristics of a popular fair or carnival, at least on Sundays when railway companies offered reduced excursion rates to attract people who had no other day free from work. According to the consistent reports of the anonymous local newspaper correspondents, whose role it was to give a public voice to their communities,28 the space outside the quadrangle would prove to be less conducive to meditation than to drinking and rowdiness. Initially, the establishment of a permanent camp meeting was welcomed by Beebe’s local correspondent, who contrasted its ease of access and its ‘magnificent maple trees with their spreading frondage’ to the ‘damp, gloomy, malarious’ Lake View Camp Ground, accessible only by boat, where Adventist meetings were also held.29 Frederick A. Wiswell, the patent agent and inventor who wrote the village column under the cleverly revealing pseudonym of Ben Trovato (from the Italian phrase which translates as ‘if it is not true, it is well invented’),30 reported that the railway company was putting in two hundred feet of platform to accommodate visitors to the campground, as well as a crossing to provide access by road. The 1876 meeting attracted visitors from Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Toronto, Montreal, and other distant places, with fifteen railway cars crowded with passengers and many teams of horses arriving on the last Sunday. In contrast to the Methodist camp meetings and the Presbyterian long communions, then, many people did not take part in the preparatory events of the preceding days. Trovato reported that the wet weather made the large New Hampshire and Vermont tents ‘very convenient and comforting,’ and claimed that the main attraction was Elder Miles Grant of Boston, whose lecture focused on a sixty-three-foot historical chart, reportedly the longest in existence and valued at $20,000. According to the obviously impressed correspondent, it ‘consists of illustrations of important events from the creation of the world to modern times, and contains the names of every ruler, emperor, king, prince, or potentate that any history mentions.’31 A year later, in June 1877, Trovato reported that ‘no disturbance of note has yet occurred (though such has been predicted by many), excepting two or three outsiders who disgraced the whiskey they had drank [sic] by talking too much with their mouths.’32 At the fall meeting of the same year, the female preacher (a distinctive feature of Advent-

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ism which the local press did not comment on) ‘gave a merited rebuke to some present who had indulged too freely in the spirit that inebriates, as they could not even walk uprightly before men, much less before God,’ but Trovato added that the meeting had been quite orderly on the whole.33 His tone would change thereafter, as the size of the event threatened to become overwhelming. Trovato reported of the July 1878 meeting that the final Sunday brought ‘team after team, from the shining top-carriage and smart stepping horse, to the dilapidated spring-board and high cheek-boned, half hipped, knock-kneed nag – all loaded with living freight of every age and hue. The dust increased, the heat increased, and still they came, until it seemed as though all creation and a part of Holland was there.’ Fifteen hundred teams and fourteen railway cars brought over nine thousand people, as well as ‘rum, rowdies and harlots,’ with the result that ‘some of our young men, as well as others, became completely demoralized.’ Trovato admitted that many of the visitors were ‘sincere and devout,’ but concluded that ‘the mass were there to see.’ This was particularly reprehensible because it was not a holiday or a fair, but ‘God’s day.’ The elders had ‘frequently and kindly reminded the moving part of the audience that the ground was as sacred as the inside of a church,’ but to no avail, as ‘numbers of young folks of both sexes would continue to cavort around.’ Trovato’s final complaint – reflecting his interest in mechanical inventions – was that, even though the three American preachers ‘advanced their views in a very forcible manner,’ they could not be heard distinctly owing to ‘a lack of acoustic principles in the construction of the speakers’ stand.’34 The camp meeting, as an institutional event, was clearly not controversial, and there was no newspaper criticism of other camp meetings in the region that were not situated on the railway. The problem was the culminating day when the Beebe site attracted unmanageable crowds, many of them youths drawn by the presence of other youths and the lack of supervisory controls in an era of increasingly strict taboos against drinking alcohol as well as against public entertainment on the Sabbath. It is possible that the disruptions were caused by only a small minority of those who travelled to the meeting, and even that some of the unruly youths were from middle-class families, but the important point is that this event was a mass populist one that was too remunerative for the railway, the organizers, or even the local municipality to attempt to reduce in size. With varying degrees of sincerity, all three interest groups could justify their positions by claiming that some way-

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ward souls might be saved in this highly emotional and destabilizing environment. Attendance did drop to only three thousand on the final Sunday of the September 1878 camp meeting, and Trovato noted that greater pains were taken to maintain order, but with mixed success: ‘A spirit of mischievousness seems to possess some folks at such times and every imaginable trick that can be is played almost beneath the very nose of the argus eyed police.’35 Trovato admitted the following summer, when the attendance reached five thousand, that ‘compared with former meetings this one has been very orderly within the square during preaching.’ However, notwithstanding the ‘3 policemen armed with badge and club, a great deal of walking, gawking, talking, and mauking was done to the manifest annoyance of those who wanted to hear the preaching, which was very good, and interesting enough to hold the attention of any but those who went to see and be seen.’36 The visual – in the form of fashionable items of personal display (as suggested in fig. 7.1) – was clearly competing with the oral in the form of call and response between preacher and congregation. This was the last time Trovato would write anything remotely positive about the Beebe camp meeting. Of the fall event of 1879, he simply declared that ‘the semi-annual “racket” has come and gone, and the people feel relieved.’37 Rising to the bait, the secretary (and future vicepresident) of the Camp Meeting Association, C.L. Percival, asked in reply who exactly the people were who felt relieved: Not those certainly who kept aloof, and had nothing to do with it, nor those who had the benefit of our purchases of provisions and other things needed by us; nor the laborers we often employ to assist us, paying them their cash when their work is done; nor the hotel keepers and others who keep horses for those who came here to stop; nor the individuals who erected their stands, and sell eatables, and drinkables to the crowds which we call together, making, so they say, handsome sums, through our means and at our loss to [sic].

As for the disturbances, they were ‘not worth a moment’s thought, much less reporting in the columns of a public journal,’ for the meetings were ‘characterized by a deep-toned spirituality, a harmony, and an earnestness, and spirit of love that is rarely equaled in such gatherings, and was most gratifying to all who truly love and serve the Lord.’38 Not to be outdone in the realm of rhetorical flourishes, Trovato re-

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plied that the nine-tenths of the local population who did not benefit materially from the meeting were appalled by the crowds of rowdies ‘who made the night hideous with their orgies.’ He also accused Percival of belittling the temperance cause, and charged that his society had converted the Sabbath into a business day by running excursion trains and selling commodities, ‘and for what. To make money, and they cannot deny it.’39 The Adventist association’s only reply was that rowdyism was a general and growing problem in the Beebe area, one not confined to the camp meetings.40 Trovato ignored the camp meeting the following year, but in June 1881 he reported that on Sunday eleven railway cars had arrived from nearby St Johnsbury, Vermont, five from Sherbrooke, and one from Stanstead, and that up to twelve thousand people had been on the grounds that day. Focusing on the scandalous, he described how one man who had been working away from home ‘came with a lady to whom he paid devoted and assiduous attention’ before being discovered by his indignant wife. In addition, a father and son were arrested for selling liquor on the campground, only to escape from the boxcar and flee across the border later in the day. In short, Trovato claimed, the meeting was the scene of lewd conduct and drunkenness, as well as vulgar and profane language. Criticizing the ‘pecuniary aim’ of the Sunday railway excursions, he argued that ‘the most devoted cannot deny that so large a crowd, so much noise and hubbub but disturbs their devotions, which, to be effective, should be as decorous as in a church.’41 Percival again took up the camp meeting’s cause, replying that ‘preaching the word in the churches, school houses, halls, etc’ was ‘almost entirely powerless’ because ‘the mass of people do not go there.’ Those who did attend church regularly believed ‘that they have done all that is required of them when they have really done nothing.’ Of the thousands who never went to church but attended camp meeting, ‘some of them get caught in the gospel net and saved!’ The professed aim, then, was not simply to refresh the spirits of church members, as with the American Methodist camp meetings of the same era, but to convert the unsaved, as with the early tent meeting revivals. Reprehensible as the ‘noise, confusion, bad, and wicked talk’ might be, Percival wrote, ‘we live in a world that is pretty full of just such things, and in all sorts of places beside camp-meeting grounds. Christ and his Apostles had to encounter just such things, yet they quietly kept at their work, and so must we.’ As for the trading and peddling on a Sunday, people and horses had to be fed, ‘so we buy provisions, and hay and oats, and feed

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all we can for a fair compensation, and by giving our time, and labor manage to save enough to pay our bills, and keep things in repair.’42 Trovato, in turn, accused Percival of perverting ‘God’s Word to sanction things which shock the public morality,’ such as the behaviour of a group of ‘scallawags’ who had caused ‘a poor, foolish girl to wander in the bushes on the camp-ground entirely nude for an hour or two.’ The Beebe correspondent, who was a Universalist, argued that once the enthusiasm of the camp meeting was over, those who had attended became ‘as grasping, selfish, liable to crime, immoral and uncharitable, as the world generally,’ and he charged once again that the organizers were motivated primarily by greed.43 When Percival defied Trovato to find a half dozen respectable members of the public who would support his charges, Trovato rose to the challenge by claiming that nine ‘respectable members of society, living within hearing of the campground’ had volunteered to sign a declaration that the meeting, as conducted, was a public nuisance, and that unless the next meeting improved, they would prosecute the organizers.44 Such threats and criticism did not deter the camp meeting organizers, for Percival predicted a year later in the Stanstead Journal that the 1882 camp meeting, which was to last eleven days, would be ‘far the most valuable and successful of any that we have get [sic] held there.’ Percival admonished the faithful not to make the camp ground ‘a place for visiting, resting, amusement; no, no! Don’t spend a moment in that way, don’t feast and drink, don’t speak light or jesting words, don’t!’ Instead, they were to ‘pray without ceasing,’ ‘be ready with words of earnest exhortation, and warning,’ and bring money ‘to help the Committee in their work of providing for the preachers and others.’45 The committee was presumably able to maintain tighter control this time, for the event passed without notice from the Beebe correspondent. For the second annual meeting, held in September, a group rate was advertised by the South Eastern Railway, and a special train ran back and forth from the Rock Island station for a one-way price of 15 cents. But it attracted only 1,600 to 2,000 people, which may explain why it also passed without comment in the press.46 The agreement whereby the Passumpsic Railway shared profits with the camp meeting committee expired at this time, but the cut-rate excursion fares remained in effect, and the first meeting of 1883 brought a larger crowd than ever. Complaints were renewed about drunken rowdiness on the Sabbath, this time in the ‘local news’ section of the Stanstead Journal rather than in the Beebe column written by Ben Trovato.

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With transportation provided by twenty rail cars and hundreds of teams of horses, the newspaper reported that ‘it was more like an assemblage at a fourth of July celebration, a circus, or a horse race, than a religious assemblage.’ While the column admitted that there were ‘the really religiously disposed and orderly people who meet there for worship,’ it added that ‘the majority are there to enjoy a holiday in various ways, and pay little regard to the religious observances of the day.’ Among the crowd were ‘many disreputable, rowdyish, and noisy persons who go there with the purpose of enjoying a day of license of their appetites for drink and other low vices.’ Liquor had been brought in ‘valises, carpet bags, and bottles by those who came by train, and sold to those who did not bring their own.’ In the columnist’s opinion, the association should be responsible for policing the camp meeting, or for the cost incurred by the municipality in doing so.47 Percival, in reply, finally admitted that he was ‘pained and grieved beyond the power of expression at the shameful and mischievous work that is carried on there, especially on the Lord’s day.’ He placed all the blame on the consumption of liquor, proclaiming that ‘it makes one’s heart sink with pain and shame to see the scores, if not hundreds of strong, bright, able young men from all parts of the country, who will deliberately transform themselves into fiends and fools with intoxicating drinks, and thus rush into all kinds of public gatherings and on the sacred Lord’s day, there to exhibit their folly, meanness and shamelessness in the most public manner!’ But Percival claimed that it would be impossible for his association to police the grounds, not only because it lacked the financial resources, but also because its members had no authority from God to do so. Their religion required them to ‘“submit to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake,” but with making or executing the laws we have nothing to do, and whenever christians undertake anything in that line, they only bring shame and disappointment to themselves and disgrace on the Master’s cause.’ Percival concluded that because the laws of Canada protected assemblies engaged in worshipping God, it was the municipality’s legal duty to preserve order during the meeting as well as to enforce the by-law against selling liquor: ‘If the servants of God are in any way responsible for the works of Satan and his emissaries, it is time to know it.’48 ‘Observer’ responded that the municipality had once shared the expense of employing special officers to police the campground, but, according to legal advice, it did not have the power to charge ratepayers for this service because the association had ‘supreme authority’ over

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the fenced-in grove, which was exempt from taxation. It was therefore the duty of the organizers to eject anyone who disturbed the meeting, or acted in any way ‘contrary to the good order and well being of the society,’ and even to arrest anyone breaking the law on their premises. As for the liquor issue, Observer argued that it would be very difficult to apprehend and arrest people who carried it in their pockets and luggage, ‘and imbibed or sold in rear of sheds, among teams, under cover of bushes, and other out-of-way places.’ The best solution would be to cancel the Sunday trains or, better still, the Sunday meetings.49 Still not willing to take such a step, Percival’s only response was to begin advocating more public meetings to combat the evils of drink. There was clearly no need to mention that the Beebe camp meeting grounds would be an ideal location for such events.50 The local correspondents were obviously reflecting a genuine community concern, for when the second camp meeting for 1883 took place in September, five special constables were provided by the municipality on condition that the Adventist organization provide ten.51 As a result, according to the Stanstead Journal, it ‘passed off very quietly compared to the June meeting.’52 But a large number of ‘the rough element’ made its presence known again the following spring, when record-breaking crowds arrived on the first Sunday, leading the Journal to complain once more that ‘there is more harm done than good.’53 Whether or not it was a factor in attracting the large crowds, four years earlier Percival had declared that the world would end in 1884.54 With the world still in one piece a year later, in June 1885, the Camp Meeting Association tried a different tactic by integrating the Dominion Alliance’s annual one-day temperance meeting into the week-long Adventist event.55 Percival now admitted that rowdyism had always been a serious problem. He complained that his committee had devoted a good deal of ‘time, money and labor, for no earthly object but the good of the people,’ yet from the beginning of our work there, we have constantly suffered from the presence of a set of miserable creatures, mostly young men, who with whiskey in their heads and in their pockets, have prowled around day and night, hindering, distracting and disturbing the services, insulting women, dealing out their fiery liquids to others, thus enlisting them in their devilish work, making us an immense amount of trouble, and causing an impression to go out over the country that our camp meeting was a real hot-bed of mischief, productive of far more evil than good.

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Worse still, despite all its efforts, his association was blamed for not preventing ‘this mischief.’ Percival insisted that as long as whiskey was allowed there, ‘so long the inevitable results will follow.’ They had hired policemen a few times, ‘and so measurably preserved order,’ but the expense was so high that ‘to persist in that kind of effort would be simply suicidal.’ Pointing out that there were strict laws ‘against all drinking, noise, loud talk, fighting or provoking to fight, or loafing or loitering anywhere in the vicinity’ of religious meetings, Percival insisted that ‘it is the duty of the proper officers of the law to prevent, or arrest and see punished all such offenders.’ He also noted that Beebe Plain had for several years been under ‘practical prohibition,’ and that Stanstead County now was as well; therefore ‘in the name of religion and humanity, of decency and good order, of law and justice, I ask that the law of our country be enforced.’56 Percival’s plea was apparently heard, for two men – one from Newport, Vermont, and one from Beebe – were arrested for selling liquor at the camp meeting on Sunday, and the local correspondent reported that the event ‘passed off the most quietly of any since the grounds were opened.’57 Cold, wet weather kept attendance down the following years, so much so that the Magog correspondent wrote in a humorous vein in 1886 that ‘farmers ought to get their harvesting done, for it always rains for this campmeeting.’58 Perhaps it was to avoid inclement weather that the second annual camp meeting was now being held in late summer rather than the fall, but this would also cater to the needs of the urban industrial workers by coinciding with the end of the vacation season.59 Unfortunately for the Adventist organizers, the weather still failed to cooperate, for the same correspondent wrote two years later that the camp meeting had commenced on August 31, and ‘if we have the usual camp meeting weather, we may look for another rainy week.’ Noting in the summer of 1889 that the ‘Salvationists,’ ‘Seventh day folks,’ and Adventists were all planning meetings, the Magog correspondent asked, ‘When will the farmers get their hay?’ A year later he/she wrote that ‘the Advent camp meeting is under way with the usual camp meeting weather,’ and ‘much unfavorable weather’ was reported again in 1891.60 The few comments the camp meeting now attracted from the Stanstead Journal continued, for the most part, to be negative. In 1888 the Beebe correspondent wrote that ‘the most objectionable feature was the trains running on Sunday, especially the last Sunday, when trains from both north and south brought in a crowd who go to camp meeting as they would to a horse race, and as previous experience has shown, are

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anything but peaceful and quiet ... It is said that those who desired to, found no difficulty in procuring all the liquor they wanted from a source near the grounds of the camp meeting association.’61 The meeting was ignored thereafter by the newspaper until June 1892, when it noted that although the weather had been wet and ‘attendance small compared with other years,’ there had been about the usual number of ‘casualties’; five men ‘were arrested and lodged in the new “cooler,” much to their surprise.’62 Five years later the Beebe correspondent reported that there had been ‘very little drinking and no horse racing on the streets, but one arrest was made. The boys have found to their sorrow that it does not pay to be too smart on such occasions.’63 Attendance declined again in 1898, when there was ‘very little drinking or drunkenness on the ground and no arrests were made.’64 But drinking was once more mentioned as a problem in 1900, despite the sharp drop in attendance. The local correspondent commented sardonically that even though the Adventist preachers continued to insist that the end was at hand, ‘still the old rock-ribbed earth stands and doubtless will until every soul living at the present time has passed away and many generations more have come and gone.’65 Rowdyism had clearly become less of a problem for the Beebe meeting due to lower attendance and increased policing, but, from the later 1880s, the Stanstead Journal generally preferred to ignore it, or to mention it very briefly, rather than detract from the carefully cultivated image of Lake Memphremagog and area as a tourist haven for the respectable and well-to-do. Eventually, the basic tensions between the traditional, as represented by religious worship, and the modern, in the guise of mass recreation, would ease somewhat as those who were less spiritually inclined turned to more secular destinations for their recreation, allowing the Beebe camp meeting to survive in an attenuated form into the twenty-first century.66 Historians of tourism and vacations, relying heavily on printed tourist guides and travellers’ accounts, have focused largely on their secular middle-class nature in the nineteenth century. Patricia Jasen claims that they were a product of the romantic movement, which, by ushering in a new hedonism that sought out the stimulation of emotions or feelings, endowed certain places with evocative meaning. The practice of tourism, particularly at spectacular sites such as Niagara Falls, became a form of secular pilgrimage as visitors hoped that the awe that would be inspired would bring about a brief or lasting transformation in themselves.67 From a more materialist perspective, Dona Brown adds that

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‘the tourist experience was crucial to the transformation of oldfashioned middling artisans, shopkeepers, and professionals into a new middle-class, converting them from a tradition of self-denying soberness and frugality to a consumer ethic that sought liberation and fulfillment in purchases.’68 Valid as these analyses may be for the petite bourgeoisie, the fact is that the railway pilgrimages of the nineteenth century were not always romantic or secular in nature, and travellers were not exclusively middle-class in composition. Historians such as Jasen, Brown, and Roger Brière – who claims that there were few French-Canadian tourists in the nineteenth century69 – have overlooked the strategy of railway companies to tap into the large rural and working-class market by promoting, or at least facilitating, excursions that could be justified as having religious or morally uplifting purposes, and not simply by contemplating the beauties of nature. Such a strategy was especially necessary to justify the operation of trains on Sundays, a practice that was finally prohibited by the Lord’s Day Act of 1906.70 People who took short rail excursions can hardly be called tourists, and a one-day holiday (though the Catholic pilgrimages and Protestant camp meetings were often longer) was not a true vacation, but the railway companies were doubtless aware that this was a crucial first step towards creating a public appetite for long-distance travel, as well as surmounting the deeply rooted North American cultural anxiety about taking time off for relaxation.71 One long-time participant in the Beebe camp meeting made the link clear in 1975 when she stated, ‘It is one of the few campmeetings [sic] that has no hill to climb and no dusty main highway leading through the sacred grounds. One can worship and draw nigh to God while resting and enjoying a vacation.’72 The spiritual value of the scenery itself was less important to such excursions than the fact that large numbers of people could congregate in an open-air environment that was removed from the distractions of the city. Thus, the railway excursions can be said to represent a transitional step towards travel for more strictly hedonistic purposes, including the appreciation of nature.73 There is an interesting congruity here with Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque, which he saw as reversing the estrangement of humanity from nature by challenging hierarchical medieval order.74 Like the annual pilgrimages to the popular Calvary at Oka, near Montreal, or the Passion play that was performed at Saint-Jérôme in the Laurentians,75 the Beebe camp meeting relied to a considerable extent

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on a modern means of mass transportation to give a somewhat anachronistic religious ritual a new lease on life. Like the Catholic rituals as well, and in apparent contrast to the camp meeting resorts of New England, the Beebe event attracted large and somewhat unruly crowds (including local farmers), at least on the final Sunday. It was presumably not coincidental that Sundays were the only days off for farmers and wage workers during the later nineteenth century, as well as the one day when saloons were closed,76 and there would have been little for youths to do to amuse themselves. The Sunday climax to the Beebe camp meeting may simply have been the result of a bored population looking for the opportunity to let off steam, either through revivalism or alcohol, but the many participants represented a challenge to the prevailing bourgeois faith in progress, whether those participants were anticipating the imminent end of the world or transgressing the rigid sabbatarian and temperance norms of the time. The Catholic hierarchy’s response to the mass popularity of the Oka pilgrimage and SaintJérôme Passion play was simply to terminate them, but the Beebe camp meeting was too crucial to the identity of the Christian Adventists for them to sacrifice it, and they even refused to take steps to limit the number of people who would attend on the final controversial day. The organizers rationalized that a certain degree of licentiousness could be tolerated given the size of the crowds and the Adventist antipathy to the state. Furthermore, the very aim of revival meetings was to break down self-control and allow emotional forces to take over.77 Some members of the local community clearly objected, but the meetings did represent a financial windfall for the village merchants, and, despite repeated threats, no steps were taken by the municipality to end the biannual event or cancel the Sunday trains. On one level, the Beebe camp meeting can be viewed as a case study of how rail-based tourism represented the intrusion of urban commercialism into a socially cohesive, self-enclosed rural community. But the situation was not quite so straightforward. Many of the participants were local farmers who had arrived in horse-drawn vehicles, and the community’s spokesman during the earlier years of the camp meeting, F.A. Wiswell alias Ben Trovato, clearly thought of himself as a thoroughly modern man. Reputed to be a ‘mechanical genius,’ he wrote local newspaper articles on science as well as registering patents in a region that was producing a disproportionate number of mechanical inventions.78 Wiswell’s self-assumed role, then, was to ensure that his community continued along the path of progress represented by sci-

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ence, technology, and social order rather than being sidetracked by the forces of ignorance, lawlessness, and unbridled emotionalism that, in his mind, the local camp meeting represented. The irony that this same event was essentially a product of the modern technological and commercial era appears to have escaped him.79

Notes This paper was presented to the 2004 Joint Annual Conference of the American Society for Environmental History and the National Council on Public History held in Victoria, BC. I wish to thank Chelsea Horton, Eric Heath, and Steve Moore for their valuable assistance as researchers, as well as colleagues John Craig and Derryl MacLean for their helpful advice. 1 Roger Brière, ‘Les grands traits de l’évolution du tourisme au Québec,’ Bulletin de l’Association des Géographes de l’Amérique française 11 (Sept. 1967): 88–91. From the early 1870s the Stanstead Journal carried advertisements and articles promoting St Leon Springs near the mouth of Rivière du Loup. See, for example, the issue of 7 Aug. 1873. 2 There are no studies on the history of tourism in the Eastern Townships, but information can be found in France Gagnon, ‘Du cheval au rail: L’évolution des circuits touristiques québécois au XIXe siècle,’ in Serge Courville, Jean-Claude Robert, and Normand Séguin, eds, Le pays laurentien au XIXe siècle, vol. 1 (Quebec: Université du Québec, Université du Québec à Montréal, and Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, 1992), 116–19; and Philip James Handrick, ‘Institutions, Ideology, and Power: Social Change in the Eastern Townships of Quebec’ (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 1981). Two good published primary sources are Henry M. Burt, The Wonders and Beauties of Lake Memphremagog: The Great Summer Resort of New England: How to Go There and What Is to Be Seen (Springfield: New England Pubishing Company, 1870); and Samuel and Isobel C. Barrows, The Shaybacks in Camp: Ten Summers under Canvas (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1888). 3 The Mountain Maid became linked with tourism soon after being launched in 1850 (Stanstead Journal, 3 July 1850, 12 Sept. 1850, 10 Oct. 1850, 17 July 1851, 5 Aug. 1851). Jasen argues that the distinction between travellers and tourists is an arbitrary one, and that anyone ‘became a tourist whenever the pleasures of sightseeing, or the pursuit of new experiences and the sensation of physical or imaginative freedom, emerged as the main prior-

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4 5

6 7

8 9

10

11

12 13 14

ity’ (Patricia Jasen, Wild Things: Nature, Culture, and Tourism in Ontario, 1790–1914 [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995], 6–7). Stanstead Journal, 24 Aug. 1882, 6 Sept. 1883. Christine Hudon, ‘La sociabilité religieuse à l’ère du vapeur du rail,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association ns 10 (1999): 137–42. One Sundayschool excursion brought five car-loads of men, women, and children from the border villages of Stanstead Plain, Rock Island, Derby Line, and Holland, Vermont, to Sherbrooke, where they were met by the mayor and other dignitaries and conducted ‘to several points of interest in the city, including the Fire Station.’ They then proceeded to a picnic at the Lake Massawippi village of Ayer’s Flat (Stanstead Journal, 14 and 21 Sept. 1882). Hudon, ‘La sociabilité religieuse,’ 143–6. Randall H. Balmer, ‘From Frontier Phenomenon to Victorian Institution: The Methodist Camp Meeting in Ocean Grove, New Jersey,’ Methodist History 25.3 (April 1987): 200. For a Canadian Methodist equivalent, see Harriet Phelps Youmans, Grimsby Park: Historical and Descriptive (Toronto: W. Briggs, 1900). Dickson D. Bruce, Jr, And They All Sang Hallelujah: Plain-Folk Camp Meeting Religion, 1800–1845 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1974), 51. See Laurie Stanley-Blackwell, ‘“Tabernacles in the Wilderness”: The OpenAir Communion Tradition in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Cape Breton,’ in Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk, eds, The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997). The Second Adventist Church represented the institutionalization of Millerism after the ‘Great Disappointment.’ See George Knight, Millennial Fever and the End of the World: A Study of Millerite Adventism (Boise, ID, and Oshawa, ON: Pacific Press, 1993). On the institutionalization of the Millerite movement in the Eastern Townships, see Denis Fortin, ‘L’Adventisme dans les Cantons de l’Est du Québec: Implantation et institutionalisation au XIXe siècle’ (Ph.D. diss., Laval University, 1996), chapter 9. Fortin, ‘L’Adventisme,’ 226. Fortin, ‘L’Adventisme,’ chapter 10. See David L. Rowe, Thunder and Trumpets: Millerites and Dissenting Religion in Upstate New York, 1800–1850 (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), 72; and Ruth Doan, ‘Millerism and Evangelical Culture,’ in Ronald L. Numbers and Jonathan M. Butler, eds, The Disappointed: Millerism and Millenarianism in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 118–38.

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15 Fortin, ‘L’Adventisme,’ 80. 16 Stanstead Journal, 24 June 1875, 6 Jan. 1876. The 1881 Seventh-Day Adventist meeting in Magog attracted 2,500 people, and the one that took place in 1882 boasted twenty tents. The largest of the tents was sixty feet, presumably in width, and another was forty feet (Stanstead Journal, 28 Sept. 1882; Fortin, ‘L’Adventisme,’ 83–4). 17 L.V.M., ‘Beebe ... as it happened,’ in Centenaire de Beebe, P.Q. Centennial, 1873–1973 (n.p. [1973]), 7. Four thousand people had attended an Adventist camp meeting at this site in 1863 (Stanstead Journal, 20 May 1863, 10 Sept. 1863). The Beebe Plain Camp Meeting Association, established in 1876, included members from Vermont and New Hampshire (Fortin, ‘L’Adventisme,’ 81, 147; Stanstead Historical Society, F1T1, Beebe – Churches, ‘Beebe Memories 1975’ [typescript], 1). Beebe was near the junction of the short spur-line constructed from the Passumpsic and Connecticut Railway eastward to Rock Island in 1870. At this time, the village of Beebe included two stores, a post office, a customs house, and a small number of dwellings. See J. Derek Booth, Railways of Southern Quebec, vol. 1 (Toronto: Railfare, 1982), 28–9; Mrs C.M. Day, History of the Eastern Townships (Montreal: John Lovell, 1869), 458; Illustrated Atlas of the Eastern Townships and South Western Quebec (H. Belden, 1881), 13. 18 Bruce, And They All Sang, 70–1. See also John Brinckerhoff Jackson, ‘The Sacred Grove in America,’ in The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 77–88. 19 Fortin, ‘L’Adventisme,’ 82; Jean-Pierre Kesteman, Peter Southam, and Diane Saint-Pierre, Histoire des Cantons de l’Est (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 1998), 272. 20 J.F.C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–1850 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979), 221. 21 See J.I. Little, Borderland Religion: The Emergence of an English-Canadian Identity, 1792–1852 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 144–5. There is no manuscript census for Stanstead County in 1852. 22 See Illustrated Atlas, 31. 23 The Wesleyan Grove cottages were not mere miniatures of houses, but ‘an independent type in which ideograms of “house” are combined with ones of “tent” and “church,” all layered so tightly as to be inseparable.’ See Ellen Weiss, City in the Woods: The Life and Design of an American Camp Meeting in Martha’s Vineyard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 39–46, 52, 139–41. 24 Weiss, City in the Woods, xiv, 142–3. 25 ‘Beebe Memories,’ 1–2.

Railways, Revivals, and Rowdyism 219 26 Roger Robins, ‘Vernacular American Landscape: Methodists, Camp Meetings, and Social Respectability,’ Religion and American Culture 4 (1994): 173–5. For a useful summary of the Reverend B.W. Gorham’s camp meeting manual, published in 1854, see Weiss, City in the Woods, 15–19. 27 For good descriptions of this process, see Bruce, And They All Sang, 53–4, 73, 80–7. 28 See J.I. Little, ‘Popular Voices in Print: The Local Newspaper Correspondents of an Extended Scots-Canadian Community, 1894,’ Journal of Canadian Studies 30.3 (1995): 134–55. 29 Stanstead Journal, 23 Sept. 1875, 25 May 1876, 22 June 1876. 30 ‘Se è non vero, è ben trovato.’ Frederick A. Wiswell, who was born in Hampden, Maine, in 1844, had been a mining, railway, and mill worker, and he is recorded as a Universalist in the 1881 census. He had moved to Beebe to open the patent office in 1869, though he was reportedly living in nearby Derby, Vermont, when he married in 1871, and he is said to have owned branch offices in the United States and Europe (L.V.M., ‘Beebe,’ 9). Wiswell’s wife died in 1881, but he appears in the census of that year as married to another much younger woman. He is not recorded in the subsequent decennial census report, but another marriage is reported in the Stanstead Journal in 1900. 31 Stanstead Journal, 6 July 1876. 32 Stanstead Journal, 28 June 1877. 33 Stanstead Journal, 20 Sept. 1877. 34 Stanstead Journal, 4 July 1878. 35 Stanstead Journal, 26 Sept. 1878, 3 Oct. 1878. 36 Stanstead Journal, 26 June 1879, 3 July 1879. On frivolity, flirting, and so on at the Cape Breton outdoor communions, see Stanley-Blackwell, ‘Tabernacles in the Wilderness,’ 110–15. 37 Stanstead Journal, 16 Oct. 1879. 38 Stanstead Journal, 23 Oct. 1879. 39 Stanstead Journal, 6 Nov. 1879. 40 Stanstead Journal, 4 Dec. 1879. 41 Stanstead Journal, 30 June 1881. 42 Stanstead Journal, 2 July 1881. 43 Stanstead Journal, 21 July 1881. 44 Stanstead Journal, 18 Aug. 1881, 1 Sept. 1881. 45 Stanstead Journal, 1 June 1882. 46 Stanstead Journal, 24 Aug. 1882, 31 Aug. 1882, 7 Sept. 1882, 14 Sept. 1882. 47 Stanstead Journal, 5 July 1883. 48 Stanstead Journal, 12 July 1883.

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49 Stanstead Journal, 19 July 1883. 50 Stanstead Journal, 2 and 9 Aug. 1883. By September, Percival was writing as a member of the Stanstead branch of the Dominion Alliance. 51 Stanstead Journal, 13 Sept. 1883. 52 Stanstead Journal, 27 Sept. 1883. 53 Stanstead Journal, 26 June 1884. 54 Fortin, ‘L’Adventisme,’ 137. 55 The 1882 Dominion Alliance picnic, which featured the Arctic explorer Dr Rae, had been held on the Beebe camp meeting grounds (Stanstead Journal, 24 Aug. 1882). 56 Stanstead Journal, 18 June 1885. 57 Stanstead Journal, 2 July 1885. 58 Stanstead Journal, 10 Sept. 1885, 17 June 1886, 29 July 1886, 19 Aug. 1886. 59 Balmer (‘From Frontier Phenomenon,’ 200) makes the same point in relation to the Ocean Grove camp meeting. 60 Stanstead Journal, 6 Sept. 1888, 25 July 1889, 11 Sept. 1890, 10 Sept. 1891. 61 Stanstead Journal, 5 July 1888. 62 Stanstead Journal, 23 June 1891. 63 Stanstead Journal, 1 July 1897. 64 Stanstead Journal, 7 July 1897. This statement was actually contradicted in another section of the newspaper, which recounted the story of an apparently inoffensive small boy from Vermont being arrested and fined $1 by a constable ‘who constituted himself judge, jury and prosecuting attorney.’ 65 Stanstead Journal, 28 June 1900, 5 July 1900. 66 On the proliferation of amusements for the working class in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, see Craig Heron, Booze: A Distilled History (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003), 86. The Beebe campground is still owned by the Christian Adventists, even though there are only about fifteen members left in the area, and it serves as a vacation Bible school as well as a camp meeting site (Fortin, ‘L’Adventisme,’ 149). 67 Jasen, Wild Things, 12. 68 Dona Brown, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 6. 69 Brière, ‘Les grands traits,’ 93. 70 Paul Laverdure, ‘Canada’s Sunday: The Presbyterian Contribution, 1875– 1950,’ in William Klempa, ed., The Burning Bush and a Few Acres of Snow: The Presbyterian Contribution to Canadian Life and Culture (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994), 87. 71 On this theme, see Cindy S. Aron, Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Aron

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72 73

74 75 76 77

78

79

(chapter 7) describes how the American working-class vacation began only in the 1910s and 1920s, but she does note (p. 186) that in the later nineteenth century working-class people ‘amused themselves on one-day excursions to picnic grounds, amusement parks, and beaches.’ ‘Beebe Memories,’ 1–2. These day trips may therefore represent a broader and more direct link between the evangelical religious climate of the early nineteenth century and the rise of conservationism than the one suggested by Mark Stoll, Protestantism, Capitalism, and Nature in America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 142–3. Michael E. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 68. Serge Laurin, Histoire des Laurentides (Quebec: Institut québécois de recherche sur la culture, 1989), 420–3, 712–14. See Heron, Booze, 85, 118. Consumption of liquor, prostitution, and brawling were also problems in the early American camp meetings, as they had been in the English holy fairs (Bruce, And They All Sang, 54–6). L.V.M., ‘Beebe,’ 9. In 1873 Wiswell published a lengthy serialized essay under the title ‘Talks on Scientific Subjects.’ The subheadings were ‘About Heat and Light,’ ‘About the Elements of Water,’ and ‘Air and Its Elements.’ See Stanstead Journal, 31 July 1873 – 21 Aug. 1873. On inventions in the Eastern Townships, see Jean-Claude Dupont, ‘Témoignages de la culture matérielle en Estrie,’ Journal of Eastern Townships Studies 4 (Spring 1994): 3–13. On this theme, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Anselm Hollo (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), 1–2.

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8 A Crime ‘Shrouded in Mystery’: State, Church, and Community in the Kinnear’s Mills Post-Office Case, 1899–1905

In reviewing two recent collections of Richard Cobb’s articles on Paris and the French Revolution, Julian Barnes comments on how Cobb saw the historian ‘as a detective who takes his time, never rushes to conclusions, learns the geography of the crime, walks the streets, takes a pastis, sniffs the air, asks seemingly irrelevant questions.’1 Kinnear’s Mills, Quebec, was certainly no Paris, but its post-office case does offer the historian an opportunity to play detective in a rather literal sense. While the crime was never solved, reports into it generated a good deal of documentary detail that provides insight into the methods and biases of the investigating agents. Still more important, the reaction to these reports informs us about the nature of rural community, particularly the role played by the rural church, in an age of rapid transition to our modern industrial capitalist society. The Kinnear’s Mills post-office case was a ‘social drama’ that, in the words of anthropologist V.W. Turner, provided ‘a limited area of transparency on the otherwise opaque surface of regular, uneventful social life.’2 Just as the prism of the strike serves the labour historian as a tool for understanding urban class polarization and conflict, so the historical documentation generated by this case offers us insights into the unsettling impact of modernizing forces upon what had been a rather economically isolated and culturally conservative rural community. It should not simply be assumed, however, that such unpredictable events resulted from inexorable underlying forces, or that they reflected social life under more normal circumstances. As Colin Coates has argued, the historical value of public disputes and judicial activity is that they allow ‘glimpses of the members of a society in action, adopting different roles in a play of which no one could be entirely sure of the

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conclusion.’3 In the Kinnear’s Mills case, the script took a rather unexpected turn when the community solidarity behind the accused clergyman broke down after he had been exonerated by external church authorities. There was clearly more to this story than local resistance to outside authority, yet the cleavages produced by the conflict are difficult to identify by class or social categories, reminding us of the necessity to take into account contingency and historical specificity.4 The local responses to this minor crime and the subsequent inquiries into it do, however, shed light on the role of state and church, the nature of class and community, and the socially destabilizing forces at work within rural Canada during the country’s second wave of industrialization.5 The Crime6 The evening of 6 December 1899 found the leading members of the Kinnear’s Mills Presbyterian church attending a social gathering at the home of the church Session clerk, Dr William Thompson.7 After tea the postmaster, James Kinnear, excused himself to prepare the mail, which would leave early the following morning to be transported twelve miles to the nearest railway station at Robertson. The Reverend James Whitelaw joined Kinnear to deposit some letters for the same delivery. One of the three letters, all of which were registered, was addressed to the Reverend Dr Warden of Toronto. A witness named David Frizzle overheard Whitelaw state that it contained a considerable amount of money, later claimed to be six banknotes worth $200 enclosed in a blank piece of paper. This was a donation by the postmaster’s wealthy father, James Kinnear, Sr, to be distributed to various church funds, including one for aged and infirm ministers and another for widows and orphans. After the postmaster had deposited the letters in a mailbag, he took it to its customary closet in his adjoining house. He then followed Whitelaw’s steps back to Thompson’s house, where he and his wife remained until 11:00 p.m. Meanwhile, Kinnear’s eighteen-year-old son, Alexander, was bedridden with a broken leg where he had a full view of the closet. He later testified that no one had entered that room until the mail was picked up the next morning. His twenty-one-year-old sister, Mary, who sometimes had charge of the post office, had been out of the village until 7:00 p.m. She then spent the evening with her younger sister and a visiting cousin, having had nothing to do with the mail that evening, and was in bed until after it left the next morning.

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How, then, could the envelope have arrived in Toronto with no money in it? No definitive answer was ever found, but suspicion came to rest on the shoulders of the Reverend Whitelaw, who was suspected of never having enclosed the bills in the first place, and, alternatively, on the Kinnear family, who were in an excellent position to have removed them from the envelope. While the details of the case are less important than its effects, particularly given the impossibility of determining who the guilty party was, they do provide an interesting glimpse into the lengths to which the village notables would go to avoid scandal, as well as into the biases of the judicial system. The contrasting reports drafted by the state and church authorities are also a good illustration of how social biases could lead to very different interpretations of the same evidence. The Setting Kinnear’s Mills in Leeds Township is today a tiny picturesque village, located beside a small river and surrounded by hills of sugar maples. Attracted by its bucolic beauty, hundreds of people from across North America visit each July 12 weekend to renew childhood acquaintances and re-establish their ancestral roots in Megantic County. What they see may remind them of the pre-industrial past, but, apart from the white clapboard churches that once served the three Protestant denominations, little survives to indicate that this was once a relatively selfsufficient and dynamic settlement, though hardly the typically harmonious one depicted in the marketing of rural nostalgia.8 Few visitors are aware, for example, that the local Orange Lodge branch, whose few remaining members they watch parading with fifes and drums, originated with a bitter struggle between Irish Catholics and Protestants in the area during the later 1850s.9 At the turn of the last century, the village of Kinnear’s Mills boasted (in addition to its three churches) three general stores, three blacksmith shops, a hotel, a sawmill, a gristmill, a carding mill, a cheese factory, and one of Canada’s approximately ten thousand post offices.10 As in the neighbouring village of Leeds, the Kinnear’s Mills businesses supported a prosperous village elite – British immigrants, mostly from the Scottish Lowlands, who were deeply imbued with the values of religion, family, education, hard work, and respectability. Class consciousness aside, their conservative social values were much the same as those of the surrounding British-descended rural families who sur-

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vived by mixed farming, logging, and sugar-making.11 These were essentially the same economic activities that had characterized the area from early settlement, and, in Karl Polanyi’s terms, they remained imbedded in the local social context rather than becoming an autonomous system of relationships.12 The boundaries of this rather insular community would be stretched by such modern innovations as the telephone, which a group of business and professional men from the villages of Kinnear’s Mills, Leeds, and Inverness hoped to bring to the county in the spring of 1900. Localism was still strong enough, however, to prevent them from reaching an agreement as to which railway the telephone line should link with.13 The railways themselves had only come close enough to draw industries away from these villages, while the Megantic Good Roads Association vainly attempted to convince the county council to open the winter roads wide enough for two sleighs to meet without danger of tipping over. Merchants were still pleading to their customers for the exclusive application of the cash system, but they had responded to the increasing intensity of market forces by investing local profits in distant stock markets, as we shall see.14 With more and more families being lured from the hillside farms and villages to the burgeoning urban centres and western prairies, the population of Leeds Township had declined from its maximum of 2,754 in 1871 to 2,128 in 1901. Referring to the harvest trains, the local correspondent for the Sherbooke Examiner reported in September 1900: ‘Quite a number from here have gone out to the Northwest on the excursion; some intend to settle there if they see any good chances.’15 Thirty Megantic County families who had already done so held a nostalgic Orangeman’s Picnic at Lake Dauphin that same year.16 By the turn of the century, then, the rather isolated British Protestant community of Megantic County was feeling the pressure of outside forces, both economic and cultural. In Inverness Township, the Adderley Presbyterian church had been split along generational lines in the late 1880s, with the Young People’s Improvement Society favouring the use of an organ in the Sunday school and at Sabbath evening lectures, and the Church Session (consisting of minister and elders) bowing to pressures from older members to resist this innovation despite a congregational vote in its favour. In 1898, when the Session voted to replace the old book of praise with the hymn book approved by the Presbyterian General Assembly eighteen years earlier, the decision was rejected by a meeting of the Adderley congregation.17

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The Presbyterian Church was particularly fractious due to its democratic structure and persistent traces of beleagured Calvinism, but the newspapers’ local correspondents described an active community-based social life, with frequent events such as the ‘sugar social with progressive crokinole, music and readings for entertainment’ reported in April 1900.18 Three months later, the Leeds Village correspondent boasted, ‘We sent a small contingent on “Scotch Day,” a larger one on “Megantic Day,” and nearly every one turned out for Orange Day.’19 While Dominion Day has always been largely ignored in the community, the Boer War was stirring the imperialist fervour of the staunchly Orange population. Clearly, then, outside forces were not all debilitating ones as far as community survival was concerned, and the initial response to the post-office case would be one of local solidarity behind James Whitelaw. As the case dragged on in its inconclusive manner, however, that united front would be undermined by internal divisions, leading eventually to irreparable damage of the community’s most important public institution, the Presbyterian Church.20 The Main Characters The chief protagonists of this story were two of the most important figures in the village, the preacher and the postmaster, the former because of his spiritual authority, and the latter because of his membership in the village’s founding family.21 Postmaster James Kinnear’s father, James Kinnear, Sr, was the archetypal self-made man, having left Edinburgh alone at the age of eight and accumulated a considerable fortune by virtue of hard work and astute business practices. In 1840, at the age of twenty-two, he took over management of the saw- and gristmill he had helped his uncle to build on the west branch of the Osgood River, moving into the small house (see fig. 8.1) in which he and his wife, Harriet, would raise twelve of fourteen children to adulthood (see fig. 8.2). Kinnear purchased the mill properties in 1855, paying off the £2,000 price in only a year. Nine years later, he consolidated the mills into one building at a cost of $22,000. Kinnear’s status in the village of approximately one hundred residents was ensured by his loans of money to local individuals,22 and by his donations of land for the construction of the Presbyterian and Methodist churches as well as the village school. He became the village’s first postmaster in 1863,23 and justice of the peace a year later. By the time Kinnear died in 1901, at the age of eighty-three, his many sons and daughters had become well

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Fig. 8.1 The Kinnear home, built c. 1840, and Harriet’s store and post office (on the right). Source: James G. Kinnear, Kinnear’s Mills, 70.

established in the surrounding area.24 The post-office case therefore represented a bitter end to a life that would otherwise have assured any good Calvinist that he was one of God’s elect. The business career of James Kinnear, Sr, was greatly assisted by his wife, Harriet Wilson, who took advantage of the $1,600 inherited from her father in 1847 to establish the first general store in the village that would eventually acquire the Kinnear name (see fig. 8.1).25 In her early years, Harriet carried two cap-fired pistols to protect herself from bandits while driving her cart along the heavily forested road to purchase merchandise and market produce in Quebec City. The will she drafted in 1896 left $23,000 to be divided among her offspring. Harriet Kinnear’s business sense failed only when she counselled against investing in the nearby asbestos mines, but she realized by 1890 that there was little economic future in Kinnear’s Mills. When she and her husband died in 1901, their taxable property of $132,174 was largely invested in shares of banks and utilities located in Quebec, Montreal, and Toronto.26 According to the Montreal Witness, the Kinnears each left more than $1,000 to the missionary schemes of the church. Harriet’s death preceded that of her husband by a few months, and in an attempt to

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Fig. 8.2 James and Harriet Kinnear and their children in 1868 (James, Jr, is second from the left in the back row). Source: James G. Kinnear, Kinnear’s Mills 33, 81.

influence her offspring from beyond the grave, she left the following admonition: Dear Children: Your earthly mother must leave you. Your heavenly father is immortal, trifle not about your souls. This you will not repent of when you come with a near view of death and endless eternity. Live by faith and study holiness in heart and life. My blessing be upon you all. What means God gave me I have bestowed them upon you or left them to you ... the time is near. Be ye, therefore, ready. Be kind and careful of your father while you have him and let none of you forget that though I go before you to the dust, you must all quickly follow me.27

These must have been particularly moving words for James, Jr, given the suspicion that had fallen on him and his own family, and the resulting alienation of most of the clan members from the church that their patriarch had largely funded. At the age of fifty-one, with his older

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two children reaching maturity, James, Jr, was still living under the shadow of his strong-willed parents. After a short stint as a merchant in the town of Coaticook in 1894, he had returned to Kinnear’s Mills to operate his mother’s store and the post-office, which were in the same building.28 One might speculate that it was because James was a more pleasure-loving individual than his father, having been an avid baseball player and horseman, that his aging parents had long maintained control over these businesses. But the younger James would prove to be a shrewd businessman in his own right, for shortly before his parents died he retired to Toronto, where he became a successful speculator in the stock market. Here, the social respectability that he never entirely achieved in Kinnear’s Mills would be established by an eldership in the United Church of Canada.29 Ironically, the reputation of the other chief protaganist, the Reverend James Menzies Whitelaw, was severely damaged by stock-market activities that may have been inspired by Kinnear. The Scottish-born Whitelaw arrived in Kinnear’s Mills in 1890, shortly after graduating from Montreal’s Morin College at the age of twenty-nine.30 This was not a particularly easy posting, for the local people did not stand in uncritical awe of their clergymen. The second permanent minister had alienated the people of Kinnear’s Mills by separating them from the Leeds Village church in 1881. He resigned shortly thereafter.31 The next minister, who served from 1882 to 1889, was much more popular. He stimulated popular piety by having church elders conduct weekly prayer meetings in the local schoolhouses, and by personally instructing a weekly Bible class in each of his churches. Parishioners nevertheless walked out of the church on at least one occasion when they felt the sermon was too long, and the Kinnear’s Mills choir engaged in a brief strike when their seats were assigned to visiting choir members from a neighbouring church.32 The fact that there was a choir reveals that Kinnear’s Mills was a more modern-oriented congregation than that of strictly rural Adderley, noted above. Within this favourable climate the progressive young Whitelaw quickly became still more successful than his predecessor, increasing church membership, attendance, and finances. Four decades later, a locally raised minister remembered him as a great preacher, ‘very fluent in his delivery,’ as well as a faithful pastor who visited his people regularly. The proof of his popularity was that the second church in his charge, known as Reid’s Church, became so overcrowded that it had to be enlarged to seat 180 people despite the steady decline in

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number of the township’s English-speaking population.33 It was understandably difficult, then, for the people of the two Leeds congregations to believe that the Reverend Whitelaw was guilty of stealing money destined for the church’s own good works. The Inquiry34 Our understanding of the basic events in the post-office case relies heavily on the report of Judge William White of the St Francis District Supreme Court. As reported by White, when the envelope deposited by Whitelaw arrived in the Reverend Dr Warden’s Toronto office two days later, he immediately opened it in the presence of his stenographer. In it Warden found a letter, a Quebec Bank statement, and a piece of folded cardboard, but no money. In his ensuing note to the Kinnear’s Mills minister, Warden expressed the hope that there had been an oversight since the envelope was not ‘bulged out,’ suggesting that nothing else had been included in it. In response, Whitelaw expressed shock, asked if there were any signs that the envelope had been tampered with, and noted that the postmaster had placed it on a scale to determine that it was not overweight, thereby suggesting that it must have felt close to the maximum measure allowed without paying extra postage. In an ensuing letter, Whitelaw noted that Frizzle had been present, and added: ‘Our postmaster from late past experience has suspicions, but of course, I dare not write these.’ He also cast some suspicion towards Kinnear by stating, ‘I have never seen a Quebec Bank statement to my knowledge, and postmaster said same was true of him, but I doubt that.’35 As a result of this correspondence, Warden handed the envelope and its contents to a Toronto Post-office inspector, who then forwarded it to his counterpart in Quebec. Assistant Inspector Samuel Tanner Green immediately noticed that one end of the letter had been cut off and reglued, and he then travelled to Kinnear’s Mills on December 20 to investigate. The Reverend Whitelaw was absent, but his wife ‘spoke rather disparagingly of the Postmaster and his daughter.’ In Green’s words, she stated that James Kinnear was ‘honest enough, but would do anything for money,’ and his daughter, Mary, was ‘flighty’ and thought herself ‘above’ the other girls of the village.36 At the post-office, Green’s suggestion that Kinnear was responsible for the theft ‘was received, apparently, not only with surprise, but with indignation.’37 The detective could find no ‘mucilage’ nor any card-

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board resembling that contained in the letter. He determined that the key with which the mail bags were locked was tied to the office desk, and the condition of the twine and knot suggested that this had been the case for a considerable time. Therefore, to reopen the bag, one would have had to remove it from the dining-room cupboard and carry it back to the post-office. Green did not bother to mention that this would have been very difficult for Kinnear’s son, with his broken leg. Returning to wait for Whitelaw in his office, Green noticed a bottle of glue such as might have been used in resealing the envelope. This raised the possibility that the minister had arranged for it to appear that the envelope had been tampered with after it left his hands. Whitelaw swore that he had not placed any cardboard in the envelope; when confronted with the glue, he displayed a manner that ‘left rather an unfavourable impression upon Mr Green, who says that after a few moments, Mr Whitelaw said he was perfectly certain he had done nothing of the kind.’38 The money Whitelaw was supposed to have sent to Toronto had apparently been provided to him in early November by James Kinnear, Sr, in the form of dividend cheques payable in Toronto, which raised the question of why he would send banknotes. Also, Green learned that a cheque Whitelaw claimed to have still in his possession had actually been sent by him to Montreal to cover the purchase of three hundred shares in Montreal and London mining stock. A week later, Green returned with his superior, Inspector A. Bolduc. A careful examination of the cardboard revealed that it must have been in the envelope at the time it was stamped, for it bore a slight impression of the postmark ‘R’ for registered letters. When David Frizzle confirmed that the envelope had been postmarked in his presence, the inspectors told Whitelaw that they were convinced he had not enclosed the money. Whitelaw refused to make a statement at once, though he later wrote that, when he had claimed not to have inserted any cardboard in the envelope, ‘I simply meant, of course, that I did not substitute cardboard for bills.’39 This explanation was crucial to his defence, but Judge White dismissed it outright. Meanwhile, soon after the inspectors left his home, Whitelaw visited Kinnear, telling him that if he secretly handed over the $200 the matter would be dropped. Giving no hint that the suspicion had turned towards him, Whitelaw also asked Kinnear to draft a promissory note for $5,300, which he could draw upon in case of legal prosecution for his role in this cover-up. All was to be arranged before the early morning

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when the detectives would return to take Whitelaw’s statement. Later that night, according to Whitelaw, Kinnear went to his house to pay $60 down on the $200 and deliver the $5,300 promissory note. Kinnear later admitted that he had given Whitelaw the $60, which he subsequently retrieved, and that his distraught wife, Euphemia, had agreed to provide the $200 out of fear that he would be arrested. But Kinnear would deny having knowingly signed any promissory note. Meanwhile, the following morning, Whitelaw informed the detectives that he was prepared to write to Dr Warden that the money would be forwarded. He refused to admit that he had not enclosed the bills in the first place, but the detectives did insist that he sign a formal declaration stating that all charges against the Post-office were withdrawn. Finally, before they left Kinnear’s Mills, Bolduc and Green called on James Kinnear to apologize for the accusations they had made against him. A few days later, Whitelaw and James Kinnear, Sr, asked the local member of the Legislative Assembly, John Whyte, to request of the postmaster-general that the matter be closed.40 There still remained the matter of who would pay the $200. Euphemia Kinnear’s father, Alexander Martin, initially refused to give her permission to do so, but he changed his mind under pressure from the local physician, who was married to the younger James Kinnear’s sister. Dr Thompson reportedly stated that Euphemia ‘was in a very nervous state, and that unless the matter was settled in the way in which Mr Whitelaw had arranged, and the money provided, the investigation would be reopened, and he would not answer as to what the consequences would be.’ According to Martin, Dr Thompson had also stated that Kinnear ‘would not get fair play’ from a French Catholic judge and jury, who might sentence him to jail for five or six years.41 Because Euphemia Kinnear did not have immediate access to the $200, Whitelaw borrowed it from the church’s mission fund and sent it to Toronto with the request that the whole matter be dropped. Three weeks later found Euphemia hesitating to reimburse the money, but she succumbed when Whitelaw threatened to lay a complaint before the church Session for breach of promise. In return, all the parties involved signed a statement agreeing that Euphemia Kinnear ‘pays this money, not that she feels any guilt in the matter, but merely to prevent trouble,’42 and promising to say nothing more about the matter. As Judge White noted, Whitelaw had apparently ‘succeeded in having the matter entirely hushed up ... Six weeks further passed; and everything still appeared safe and quiet.’43 Then, on March 6, came a

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bombshell in the form of an apparently innocent letter in the legal column of Montreal’s Weekly Witness. The reply to the anonymous correspondent assured him that, as the bearer of a promissory note made out specifically to him, he could transfer it to anyone, that it would not expire until five years after maturity, and that value was presumed to have been given unless there was proof to the contrary. The identity of the inquirer became clearer when the letter went on to ask what recourse he would have if ‘something criminal’ was told against him to a neighbour, when the right to ‘enter an action’ would expire, and whether it would be necessary to prove injury ‘or would proof of statement being made be sufficient?’ The editor’s answers were that the maligned individual could sue for slander, the right to do so would expire in one year, and ‘if the statements were made maliciously, or without proper justification, punitive damages would be awarded.’44 Whitelaw admitted to making these inquiries, having in mind the $5,300 note acquired from Kinnear, who had obviously placed himself in a vulnerable position by signing a document which simply stated: ‘Two years after this date I promised [sic] to pay to the Rev. James Menzies Whitelaw, my pastor, the sum of ($5,300) five thousand three hundred dollars, for value received, interest payable half-yearly.’45 We can only guess at Whitelaw’s motivation in writing to the Montreal newspaper, but the second series of questions suggests that he felt he was being slandered by the Kinnears and wished to silence them by reminding them of their financial vulnerability. The Kinnear family certainly had reasons to resent Whitelaw’s manoeuvres in the postoffice case, and, though it took place after the letter in question was published, it is suggestive that the Leeds Session meeting in early May called upon James Kinnear, Jr, and his wife and daughter to answer charges of ‘nonchristian conduct’ towards their minister. When they failed to appear, they were suspended from the church until they agreed to apologize to Whitelaw and submit to the Session’s authority. The meeting, attended by Kinnear’s brother-in-law, Dr Thompson, also agreed to support Whitelaw if he decided to take civil action against the family for defamation of character.46 A possible alternative motive for Whitelaw’s newspaper letter is that he was considering immediate disposal of the note to a third party, and warning the Kinnears that if they objected he would sue them for defamation. If this was the case, as Judge White believed, Whitelaw was clearly willing to take a serious gamble with his career as a clergy-

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man. While he might have been willing to take the chance that the Kinnears would pay the note for the sake of keeping the case hushed up, he would surely have realized that this was unlikely given their hesitation to pay the much smaller sum of $200. The date of the note would also make its purpose quite clear (a purpose Whitelaw never denied), ensuring that the clergyman’s reputation would be irrevocably destroyed if he resorted to the courts to collect the money. Finally, if he was desperately in debt, it is unlikely that his daughter would have been attending college in Ottawa or that he would have taken his family on a vacation the following July, as reported by the local newspaper correspondent.47 Even if it was only a veiled threat, Whitelaw’s published letter of inquiry was a mistake on his part, for James Kinnear took immediate steps to recover the note. He declared that the only document he had signed for Whitelaw was an application to remove a girl from the Knowlton orphans’ home, presumably meaning that he was vouching for the reputation of someone who wished to foster one of the British ‘home children.’ Judge White commented: ‘While this statement is certainly extraordinary, it is not improbable, when one considers how clearly all the proof establishes that Mr Kinnear and his family placed the utmost confidence in Mr Whitelaw, up to the 20th of January at least, and how greatly they were under his influence.’48 White clearly gave no credence to Mrs Whitelaw’s testimony that Harriet Kinnear had wanted her son, James, to write out a full confession in return for the $5,300 note.49 The result of this re-emergence of the case was a formal federal inquiry, though five months had expired since the inspectors had filed their reports and the Post-office was off the hook for the money. The initiative came from James Kinnear, Jr, through MLA John Whyte, as a means of forcing Whitelaw to surrender the promissory note.50 Whyte may also have wanted to bring closure to an affair which was beginning to tear the community apart. The Leeds Session had demanded an apology from Whyte, himself, as well as expelling the three Kinnears and threatening to sue Alexander Martin for his remark that the postmaster-general had written to the local member of Parliament that no money had been placed in the envelope in the first place.51 Such legal threats represented an admission that church discipline, to which the Kinnears and Martins refused to submit, was losing its impact.52 Community sanctions were not without influence, however, for the two families moved to Toronto soon afterward.53

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The May 1900 inquiry by Inspector Hawken of the Post-office headquarters in Ottawa remained private on Whitelaw’s insistence, and the findings were not published. At the end of the proceedings, Whitelaw returned the $5,300 note, leading Judge White to conclude in his subsequent report: ‘It is difficult to understand why Mr Whitelaw should, under such circumstances, surrender the note, if it had been honourably obtained.’54 Here again, White was wandering into the area of unwarranted speculation, for it was surely logical for Whitelaw to try to end a controversy that was threatening his position as a minister of the Presbyterian Church. But the affair was, instead, gaining momentum, finally resulting in Judge White’s inquiry three months later, on August 21. White issued summonses to nine individuals, all involved with the case, and recognized J.J. McLaren, Q.C., as Kinnear’s representative while rejecting Whitelaw’s request for an adjournment so that he too could appoint a lawyer. White also initially refused to add the seventeen witnesses that Whitelaw requested, arguing that the subpoenas would not arrive in time for the hearing. He changed his mind, however, when he found that most of the seventeen were already present in the crowded Inverness courtroom. In the judge’s words, ‘It soon became apparent, that if the investigation was to be productive of any good in the public interest, it was quite important that no one of the parties, compromised by the evidence, should have any ground to complain that his pretensions were not receiving fair consideration.’55 After two full days, starting at 9:00 a.m and ending at 10:00 p.m., since some of the witnesses had yet to be heard and others had failed to appear, Judge White reluctantly called the ten-day recess that Whitelaw had requested at the outset. When the inquiry reconvened, Whitelaw was represented by the Honourable T. Chase Casgrain, Q.C., who focused on the question of James Kinnear, Jr’s, integrity. Witnesses declared that Kinnear had once failed to pass along one of the semi-annual dividend cheques his father contributed towards Whitelaw’s salary and raised the suspicion that he had once intercepted the provincial school examination, making it available to the teacher in advance. Casgrain also attempted to establish that the Kinnears had sent their eleven-yearold daughter out of the community because of their fear that she would unwittingly disclose the truth in the case.56 But Judge White gave little credence to such testimony, and he ensured that the proceedings were completed the same day. Not surprisingly, the report he submitted was entirely one-sided in its reasoning.

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White stated flatly that Whitelaw’s letter could not have been tampered with en route to Toronto: The manner in which the end of the envelope had been cut, and the neat way in which it had been mucilaged, would necessarily have taken considerable time, and such care as could not have been given without delaying it over at least one mail. Besides that, any one who intended to purloin the money would have adopted a safer method by withdrawing and destroying the letter itself; and, moreover, to a stranger, the registered letter which accompanied it, addressed to the Montreal Bank, Ottawa, and which arrived safely, would have presented equal, if not superior attractions.57

White’s logic appears weak, to say the least. There was an entire night to remove the money in Kinnear’s Mills without delaying its delivery, and it is difficult to understand why a skilled thief, working in any of the post-offices through which the letter passed en route to Dr Warden, could not have performed the operation in a matter of a few seconds. Since the letter was registered, a record of its progress would have been kept; therefore, simply stealing it would cast suspicion on those who worked in the last location it appeared in. As for the registered letter that was addressed to the Montreal Bank in Ottawa, this was a red herring since it followed a different route and a letter to a bank was very unlikely to have contained cash. As a judge, White must surely have been aware that it was not uncommon for money to be stolen from envelopes by post-office clerks and letter carriers subjected to a low-wage policy since the late 1880s. Decoy letters had by this time gained legal status as a means of entrapment by postal inspectors and detectives from the Guarantee Insurance Company, which bonded postal employees.58 The Canada Sessional Papers for 1900 list 685 unregistered letters and eight registered letters as lost and untraceable that year; forty-two registered and twenty-four unregistered letters whose contents were stated to be missing, but without proof that this was so; and thirty-three registered and twenty-one unregistered letters whose stolen contents had been recovered or otherwise made good. The amounts stolen were almost all considerably smaller than the $200 in the Kinnear’s Mills case, yet it was not listed in the table since the money was not ultimately reported as missing.59 Having dismissed the possibility that the letter had been tampered

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with after leaving Kinnear’s Mills, Judge White proceeded to declare that James Kinnear could not have taken the money: ‘He is shown to be a man of means, worth about $35,000 in his own right, and not at all likely to have committed so serious an offense, or having any party to it.’60 White also pointed out that no registered letters had been tampered with during Kinnear’s twelve years as postmaster. His report then turned to Kinnear’s daughter, Mary, who assisted in operating the post-office, and whom Whitelaw had suggested may have taken the money because she wished to attend the Paris Exposition. A witness had claimed that she knew Mary had opened one of her letters in 1892 because she had disclosed information that only someone who read it would be aware of.61 As noted above, White mistrusted the motives of such community members, stating that their testimony ‘really has no bearing upon the subject under investigation.’ He added that there was no evidence that Miss Kinnear had ever meddled with any letters, and indeed she was never suspected of having interfered with money letters, and as to the letter in question there is not a particle of evidence that she had any access to the mail bag on the night of the 6th of December. On the contrary it is established by the circumstances which transpired on that night, and fully confirmed by her brother, Alexander, that no person had access to the bag after it was placed in the dining-room, or could have had without his knowledge.62

White did not mention that Alexander would have had to tell Mary about the letter in the first place. Nor did he contemplate that they might have been accomplices in the theft. The judge’s report ended with the fourth possibility, that Whitelaw had not placed the money in the envelope. In contrast to his comments about Kinnear, White failed to mention that Whitelaw’s integrity had never been challenged during his ten years as minister, nor did he ask why a popular young clergyman would risk his career for the sake of $200. He failed even to establish that Whitelaw, who claimed not to recall any demands in November or December to pay for stocks purchased on margin,63 had been in serious debt. Instead, White noted that the clergyman had diverted to mining stocks the cheques he was supposed to send to Dr Warden, and argued that it made little sense to send bank bills in the mail when he normally sent cheques. White also suggested that Whitelaw had deliberately waited until after regular

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hours when he assumed the postmaster would be alone, and that he had made a needless remark about the letter’s contents ‘evidently intended to compromise the postmaster.’ It is not clear, however, what advantage there would be to waiting until the postmaster was alone, especially if Whitelaw wanted a witness, as the judge was also suggesting. Furthermore, delaying the forwarding of church money for a month may not have been entirely ethical, but it was hardly a serious moral offence. Finally, while sending cash was certainly not wise, it was a widespread practice, and Whitelaw claimed that he did not wish to put the church to the expense of purchasing a money order. White proceeded to interpret Whitelaw’s every subsequent move as evidence of his guilt: his dropping of the theft charge on the ‘vague’ promise of $200 from Euphemia Kinnear; his subsequent ‘extortion’ of that amount from her; his principal role in the ‘shameful bond of secrecy’; his ‘fraudulently’ obtaining a note for $5,300 from James Kinnear; his ‘pretense’ that it was given as security against possible legal charges; his admitted desire to learn how this same note, obtained with ‘corrupt intention,’ could be negotiated; and ‘his voluntary surrender of this note when demanded by a man of strong will and determined purpose, at a time when there was still ground to apprehend trouble.’64 In short, White’s conclusion that Whitelaw was the guilty party was largely based on the latter’s behaviour after his alleged crime, and, in a circular line of reasoning, the judge’s interpretation of that behaviour was clearly based on the assumption of Whitelaw’s guilt in the first place. If one had assumed his innocence, these activities would have appeared much less sinister. Judge White rather curiously failed to mention the most incriminating piece of evidence against Whitelaw, the discovery that he had inserted the piece of cardboard into the envelope. Perhaps he felt that there was some plausibility to the clergyman’s claim that he had forgotten that he had covered the bills with a thin piece of cardboard rather than with paper. In any case, White could feel free to dispense with the need for more concrete evidence before casting his moralistic aspersions because he was not conducting a formal trial. His report stated that ‘I do not deem it my duty to assume the functions of a jury, and decide as to whether a man is guilty or not guilty, particularly when he is not before me charged with an offense.’ But that is just what White did; referring to Whitelaw’s statement that ‘the whole matter is largely shrouded in mystery,’ he concluded without reservation that ‘the shroud is removed; the mystery is solved.’

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The Presbytery Reports The White Report did not end the affair, for many members of Whitelaw’s two congregations continued to support him. When a number of people within the community and beyond asked the local member of Parliament for a copy of the report, the government’s reaction was to limit distribution to those considered to be parties to the inquiry.65 This precaution did not prevent its conclusions from being widely published in the province’s English-language newspapers.66 In an attempt to salvage his reputation, Whitelaw asked the quarterly meeting of the Quebec Presbytery to launch a judicial investigation. A committee of four, three of whom were laymen, was to meet for this purpose in Kinnear’s Mills,67 and Whitelaw provided them in advance with what he claimed was incontrovertible evidence of his innocence. By determining from the Post-office that the letter’s weight was now only nine-sixteenths of an ounce, and arguing that it had weighed over three-quarters of an ounce when handed to Kinnear, by the latter’s own admission, Whitelaw was able to argue that the missing fraction of an ounce represented the stolen money.68 The Presbytery’s judicial committee was not persuaded by this line of reasoning. The front page of the Sherbrooke Examiner shoved the Boer War news to one side to report that the committee had refused to proceed on the grounds that this was a civil matter, and that ‘if Judge White’s report was in accord and with [sic] facts, nothing the Presbytery could do would save Mr Whitelaw’s reputation.’ It even added that ‘it was difficult to see how Mr Whitelaw could save his reputation in the face of the facts published,’ but advised him ‘to repair to the civil courts, and there seek to have his good name and character vindicated.’ The other members of the Presbytery agreed, and, though they did decide to launch an inquiry, Whitelaw would now be the defendant.69 This time the Presbytery commission was composed exclusively of clergymen, and the four members reported their findings to the March 1901 meeting in Quebec City.70 Once again, the minutes of the meeting – highlighted with seven headlines in various type sizes and fonts – occupied most of the Sherbrooke Examiner’s front page. What they shouted this time, however, was ‘Mr. Whitelaw Proved to be Innocent of the $200 Charge.’ Despite the Presbyterian Church’s traditional insistence that the functions of church and state be strictly separated, its commission had presumed to question the ‘verdict’ reached by a senior official of the state’s judicial arm.

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The report argued that the flatness of the envelope when it reached Toronto was likely the result of its five-hundred-mile journey. As for the Quebec bank statement, which Whitelaw denied enclosing, such a document had been sent by the bank to James Kinnear, Jr, another point overlooked by Judge White.71 And what had been called a piece of cardboard by Dr Warden and the detectives, thereby leading to the damaging confusion in Whitelaw’s original testimony, was actually ‘an extra thick white sheet, such as is commonly found at the back and front of writing tablets, and very suitable for the purpose for which Mr. Whitelaw applied it, as a covering of bank bills.’ When weighed with the number of bills Whitelaw claimed to have enclosed, the letter was thirteen-sixteenths (or just over three-quarters) of an ounce, exactly as the postmaster’s recorded testimony had stated. In short, the money must have been removed after it left Whitelaw’s hands, and the commission’s report declared: ‘Clearly the mystery is solved, so far as Mr. Whitelaw’s reputation and innocence are concerned.’ As for who must have committed the crime, the report continued: ‘The postoffice authorities are responsible for the letter, but not for its contents. The abstractor of the money adopted the safest possible method in allowing the letter to reach its destination; and it proves the abstractor to have been a postoffice official, or one thoroughly acquainted with the regulations.’ Further than this, the commissioners obviously did not feel authorized to go, but suspicions had been cast back upon the Kinnear family. Turning to the $200 subsequently sent to Dr Warden, the commissioners dismissed Kinnear’s rather transparent claim that the $60 he had initially provided was simply a loan to Whitelaw, and supported Whitelaw’s contention that Euphemia Kinnear had subsequently remained bound to reimburse the money that was borrowed from the local church funds. Her hesitation to do so clearly followed from the detectives having cleared her family of all suspicion in the case. In direct contrast to Judge White, the commissioners added that the written statement to the effect that this payment was not an acknowledgment of guilt in the matter could only have been drafted upon the Kinnears’ request. As for the $5,300 promissory note, the report made short shrift of Kinnear’s claim that he thought he was signing an application form by noting that such a form would have been a printed document, that the note was too short in length to resemble such documents, and that his signature almost touched the words ‘payable half yearly.’ The report

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continued: ‘Mr. Kinnear’s conscience was so thoroughly alarmed and alive to his own interests, that he knew full well what he signed on the night of December 27. He is a cunning, but not an able man.’ There was no reference to Whitelaw’s questionable motives in drafting the note in the first place, or to the fact that James Kinnear’s rather desperate attempt to deny knowingly signing it had been precipitated by Whitelaw’s letter to the Weekly Witness concerning its transferability. Kinnear had obviously been given bad advice by his lawyer, for his dissemblance in this matter allowed the Presbytery commissioners to do what Judge White had done with Whitelaw: interpret his behaviour and motives in an entirely negative light. Biased as the commissioners may have been towards Whitelaw, they had little difficulty in demonstrating that Judge White’s opposite prejudices had seriously compromised his reasoning. Concerning Whitelaw’s private use of the original cheques provided by James Kinnear, Sr, to the church, the report noted, ‘The passing of cheques between Mr. Kinnear, sr., and Mr. Whitelaw in exchange for money seems to have been a customary thing ... Mr. Whitelaw delayed the sending of the money in question for three weeks. His intention was good, and no serious harm would have been done but for the extraction of the money in question.’ They also suggested that Whitelaw had originally been less than forthcoming with the detectives because he wished to shield the Kinnears and that he ‘has been taught a severe lesson by this act.’ Finally, concerning Whitelaw’s decision to free the Post-office authorities from all responsibility in the matter, the report added: ‘It may be charitably admitted that Mr. Whitelaw did not realize the consequences of his own act.’ To the clergymen who comprised the Presbytery commission, the reasons for Judge White’s conclusions were all too obvious: They are due on the one hand to Mr. Whitelaw being a poor man, and on the other hand from the fact of Mr. J. Kinnear, jr., being a rich man, – having $35,000 in his own right, and, according to the Judge’s mind, not likely to be troubled by money matters. It is true that temptations to dishonesty are strongest in the lowest classes of men; poverty and riches are extremes from which a good man once prayed to be delivered. But to argue from impression is to make, not to interpret the law.

White’s competency was directly called into question, for ‘in his selecting and collating of materials he pleads as an advocate and not as a

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judge ... His hard construction and strained inferences, may be discerned even by the uninitiated.’ Confident that they had established Whitelaw’s innocence as far as stealing the $200 was concerned, the commissioners proceeded to condemn him for reaching an agreement with the Kinnears: ‘It had been to his interest and reputation, and greatly to the relief of our labour, had he, in the first instance, frankly resisted the overtures of the Kinnear’s, and stood aside when justice was on the track of the offender.’ Ignoring the fact that at this point the inspectors had actually been on Whitelaw’s track, not that of the Kinnears, the commissioners continued: ‘We are prepared to believe that it was on account of his affection and sympathy for those members of his church that he allowed himself to be drawn aside from the clear path of duty, but your commission cannot condone such an offense.’ They therefore recommended that Whitelaw be called to the bar of the Presbytery and asked to make ‘an ample confession and apology ... for the trouble he has occasioned the church, and for the unjustifiable act itself,’ following which he would be ‘solemnly admonished by the moderator from the chair.’ Not surprisingly, there was considerable public opposition to this exoneration of Whitelaw from all suspicion in the case. In a lengthy letter published in the Sherbrooke Examiner, ‘Enquirer’ of Kinnear’s Mills challenged the commission’s logic and concluded by questioning its authority: ‘The load resting on Mr. Whitelaw has been placed there by an honourable Judge of the civil sphere, and cannot be removed by any ecclesiastical court. You may express confidence in him, but the load remains unless removed by proper tribunal.’72 But White’s reputation as a judge had apparently been sufficiently damaged to induce his resignation the following fall, before he was eligible for the customary retirement allowance.73 The reputation of James Kinnear, Jr, had also been publicly attacked, and, unlike Whitelaw, he had the resources to resort to the ‘proper tribunal.’ He launched a $4,000 lawsuit against the Presbytery committee for ‘intent to disparage and injure him and to bring him into ridicule and contempt and to ruin and destroy his character.’74 At the December 1901 Presbytery meeting, the worried committee members denied legal responsibility in the case on the grounds that they had acted ‘in no personal capacity, but as a Judicial Court of inquiry under instructions from the Presbytery.’ Nor had it been their recommendation to publish the report before it was considered and adopted by the Presbytery as a whole, a decision reached in order ‘to

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avoid the unpleasant discussion’ that would be involved. Fearing the possibility of a large financial blow (the court costs already amounted to nearly $1,000),75 the Presbytery decided to apologize to James Kinnear, and to expunge from the report all statements reflecting on his character on the grounds that he had not been before it on trial. As a result, the legal action was dropped.76 Community Reaction In addition to apologizing to Kinnear and amending its committee’s report, the December 1901 meeting of the Quebec Presbytery had agreed to send a delegation to Leeds in response to the pleas of several church members, including the local MLA, that the church Session be forced finally to grant the Kinnears and Martins their certificates of disjunction, so that they could join a congregation in Toronto.77 A year earlier, the Leeds Session had declared that the Kinnears would remain suspended ‘until they appear before this session ... and give an apology and submit to whatever the Session sees best to do.’ In addition, Alexander Martin was ‘under citation by this Session to answer a charge of falsehood’ concerning his alleged comment that the postmastergeneral felt Whitelaw was the guilty party.78 At the February 1901 Session meeting, with Martin having twice failed to make an appearance, the elders proceeded in their capacity as a church court to find the charge fully proven and to suspend him from ‘exercising the privileges of membership in the Presbyterian Church in Canada, or any part thereof, until satisfactory evidence of repentance be submitted to this court.’ The Session also rejected the requests of Alexander Kinnear (son of James, Jr) and Mary Martin (Alexander Martin’s wife) for certificates of disjunction even though neither had played a public role in the post-office case. The Session’s rationale was that they had taken the matter out of its hands by applying directly to the Presbytery. Yet the meeting also denied the right of the Presbytery to issue these certificates, stating that it would appeal to the Synod of Montreal and Ottawa should such action be taken. In another gesture of defiance, the Leeds elders moved that the ‘unsubstantiated impressions’ created by the Reverend Dr Warden’s testimony before the White inquiry would have a damaging effect upon local support for the church missions, and that the Presbytery should look into this matter.79 The ensuing meeting of the Presbytery ignored the last point but recognized the authority of the Leeds Session in the membership cases.80

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But the Presbytery would find that it could not wash its hands of the affair so easily, for the Kinnears and Martins petitioned again ten months later. In response, the Leeds Session declared that the former residents’ refusal to obey the ‘citation’ had been aggravated by their avowal when it was served that they ‘would not and never would appear before the Session of Leeds.’ The clerk had also heard the Kinnears declare ‘that the Church belonged to them as much as to the Session.’ Rather than capitulating, the Session upped the ante by resummoning the Kinnears ‘in view of the new facts and of report of Commissioners of Presbytery’ (which had exonerated Whitelaw), as well as a false statement made in their petition to the Presbytery.81 On one level, this obstinacy may have been caused by Whitelaw’s vindictiveness, but it would be a mistake to assume, as Judge White had done, that the minister controlled a gullible and pliable congregation. More fundamentally, the Session members were declaring that moving away from the local community did not dissolve one’s ties and responsibility to it. The gesture was futile because, as Lynne Marks has noted of Ontario’s Presbyterian and Baptist discipline, ‘in an increasingly class-stratified society, middle-class church members would have been reluctant to have what they viewed as their personal “private” behaviour gossiped about and regulated by those they considered their social inferiors.’82 But one could also argue that the Leeds Session was acting contrary to the very purpose of church discipline, which was to maintain a community harmony that had been disturbed by gossip and mutual recrimination.83 By taking such an uncompromising stand, the Leeds Session itself became weakened by internal divisions. The conflict took another dramatic turn when Whitelaw’s most influential erstwhile supporter, Dr Thompson, began to demand the minister’s removal in August, five months after his exoneration by the Presbytery committee. Thompson was in deadly earnest, for he resigned the clerkship and read a letter stating that, if Whitelaw did not agree to resign within six months, a petition signed by seventy-seven church members and twelve adherents would be presented to the Presbytery asking for permission to withdraw from his congregation.84 The minutes of the October Session meeting record that Thompson ‘was present in the Church but did not commune with his brethren.’85 What had prompted this sharp reversal on Thompson’s part is not clear, but he may have felt that Whitelaw had gone too far in influencing the Session to deny membership certificates to the Kinnears and Martins, who were, after all, his wife’s family. But this does not explain the motivations of the

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other people who signed the petition for Whitelaw’s removal. All that can be concluded is that they had lost faith in a clergyman whose speculative financial activities clashed with traditional values concerning the generation of wealth even if he was innocent of theft, and they were not willing to bow to the moral authority of their church Session. Matters began to spin out of control as the Session attempted to assert its authority. In November, Session member Charles Allan was cited on the charges of calling another elder a liar and of stating that Whitelaw had ‘told as many lies as would fill a sack.’ Allan later submitted to the Session’s authority, but then failed to fulfil its conditions.86 The Session also gave Whitelaw permission to sue the local sawmill operator, John Allan, for statements he had made in a letter to the clerk of the Presbytery. John Allan, who had attended the Montreal Presbyterian College but never taken a pastorate,87 was also charged with sacrilege for breaking a solemn vow that the dissidents’ petition would not be forwarded to the Presbytery if certain conditions were met. The Session conveniently overlooked the fact that Whitelaw had not resigned, as the conditions required.88 When the dissidents’ petition was presented to the following Presbytery meeting, its members adopted evasive tactics once again by declaring that the document would have to be forwarded formally by the Session. After hearing a delegation from Leeds explain that the Session clerk had refused to submit the petition to the Session meeting, however, the Presbytery agreed to lay it on the table while a committee investigated the situation locally at the congregation’s financial expense.89 The committee members certainly learned how deep the division had become, for at the meeting in Kinnear’s Mills some individuals attempted to prevent the dissidents from entering the church. The convenor ordered Whitelaw to have the doors opened, ‘but not before the Rev. John Allan, B.A., had received a heavy blow on the back of the neck from the fist of one of the men. Mr. John Thompson, was also struck in the back by someone, who promptly retreated up the aisle of the sacred edifice, and Mr. Ernest Stevenson, who was in the thick of the fray bears the marks of a set of strong finger nails.’ The contributor to the Megantic Gazette added rather needlessly: ‘The proceedings by the parties that held the door were wholly irregular and contrary to Presbyterian procedure.’90 With the Presbytery’s committee having accomplished nothing, the Leeds Session again refused to forward the dissidents’ petition, arguing that some of those who had signed it were neither church members nor

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adherents. The Session also charged that the dissidents had been ‘schismatic’ in holding secret meetings ‘to discuss, prepare, and transmit to higher Church Courts, documents affecting the interests of the said congregation.’91 Finally, it cited Dr Thompson to appear on the very serious charges of blasphemy and sacrilege, ‘he having been previously dealt with three times in the direction of peace but to no purpose.’92 When Thompson refused to obey its summons, the case proceeded in March with several individuals, including Whitelaw, testifying that they had heard the former clerk ‘use blasphemous language.’ As a result, the doctor was ‘suspended sine die from Church privileges for blasphemy, sacrilege and contumacy.’93 The Presbytery was in a quandary. Its March meeting agreed to hear a delegation of the disaffected present charges against Whitelaw, but it again decided to defer taking action on the petition. John Allan then appealed his suspension by the Session, arguing that it did not have such authority over church licentiates (who were qualified to fill in for local ministers). The question was transferred to the Synod for advice,94 but it would not be so easy for the Presbytery to duck the thorny issue of the disjunction certificates. The previous meeting had informed the Leeds Session that it had not had sufficient grounds to refuse these certificates to Mary Martin and Alexander Kinnear. It had also expressed the hope that the Session would reconsider its decision concerning the other family members.95 Instead, the Session had appealed over the heads of the Presbytery to the Synod and suspended Mary Martin and Alexander Kinnear when they failed to respond to its summons.96 When one member of the Presbytery charged in March that the Leeds Session ‘has treated the Presbytery with contempt in disobeying its instructions,’ Whitelaw complained that the words were offensive. However, the majority not only ruled that the charge was justifiable, but proceeded to grant the two certificates of disjunction.97 Defiant as ever, the Leeds Session protested this decision to the Synod,98 but the Synod members were tiring of the Leeds elders’ obstinacy. Following a close vote, the July Synod meeting proceeded to grant all the members of the James Kinnear and Alexander Martin families certificates of membership in a Toronto church.99 Two months after this meeting, the Presbytery made a move towards striking a balance by rejecting the petition of the dissidents against Whitelaw and calling upon all parties ‘to begin de novo in the spirit of union and subjection to the authority of Christ, executed thro’ Church courts, ... and in terms of the Constitution.’ An unfriendly amendment

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stated that, because the Leeds congregation was ‘hopelessly divided in their opinion as to Mr. Whitelaw’s innocence’ and many refused ‘to attend on his ministry,’ he should ‘resign his charge forthwith and seek some other field of usefulness.’ This amendment was lost by the very narrow margin of nine to ten, and the main motion was carried, though only when the moderator broke the tie. Not only Leeds, but the Presbytery of Quebec, remained divided over the contentious case, for six members served notice that they would be challenging the vote before the Synod.100 Whitelaw clearly had managed to retain the loyalty of the majority of his congregation, for thirty-four new members had joined the church by June, when two hundred people took Communion.101 The split within the community only deepened, however, when a meeting of the congregation and the Session voted unanimously in September that all those who had signed a notice to the local board of management ‘had cut themselves off from membership, adherentship and all privileges in connection with this congregation.’ The content of this notice was probably much the same as that of the petition a year earlier, for the Session declared ‘that in re petition of disaffected party, we stand or fall with our pastor.’102 The local feud continued into the fall of 1902 when the church treasurer, James Thompson, refused to submit his accounts to the auditors after his dismissal.103 By the spring of 1903, the repercussions of the dispute were threatening to spread into the neighbouring township, where the church Session complained that Whitelaw had been conducting services within its boundaries, and that ‘these services have tended to introduce discord and hard feelings in the congregation at Inverness.’ In response, the Presbytery finally took a stand, ordering Whitelaw to cease conducting such services and ‘to appear at its next meeting to answer charges.’ It also appointed yet another investigating committee to visit Kinnear’s Mills and ordered the Leeds Session officers to explain why no statistical and financial report had been submitted in the previous two or three years. They were to produce as well for the next Synod meeting the Session record, Communion roll, treasurer’s book, minutes of annual meetings of the congregation, collectors’ books, and mission treasurers’ book.104 The Leeds elders responded, as usual, by appealing to the Synod, which they asked for protection against ‘the chain of influences working against us.’ Among the ‘thirty links’ in that chain was a ‘minority’ within the Quebec Presbytery and the Reverend W.D. Reid of Montreal,

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son of the founder of Reid’s Church in Leeds Township.105 Reid’s involvement in the case is unclear, except that in April 1902 he threatened to sue whoever had stated that ‘it was no worse for the Rev. J.M. Whitelaw to deal in margins than it was for the Rev. W.D. Reid, of Montreal to do so.’ Reid added that he looked upon the ‘“margin” business ... as a wrong method of making money.’106 Rather than trying to deal with the growing number of appeals, the May Synod meeting simply pronounced that, while Whitelaw’s ministerial standing remained ‘unimpeached,’ the Home Mission Committee would procure him an appointment in the North-West Territories or British Columbia as early as possible.107 This decision did not prevent Whitelaw from submitting a complaint to the Presbytery against ‘certain members’ of the neighbouring Leeds Village and St Sylvestre Session, but the Presbytery realized that it would not have to deal with him much longer. Noting that Whitelaw had promised to resign once he received another appointment, it dropped the charges against him and expressed the hope ‘that the Managers will not adopt any course that will tend to widen the breach between the two parts of the congregation, but will allow this matter to stand in abeyance.’108 Whitelaw did soon receive another call, though from Omemee, Ontario, rather than the West. Loyal representatives of the Leeds congregation protested strenuously, but in vain, for the Quebec Presbytery was obviously relieved to see the last of the controversial minister.109 Meanwhile, in Leeds, local wounds were slow to heal, though John Allan took the first step in February 1904 by meeting the church elders on behalf of the disaffected party. The Session minutes record that after ‘a long discussion ... in which he found fault with the Session and what he termed the rulers of the Congregation for the way his party had been used,’ Allan ‘finally expressed his willingness to apologize for any wrong doing he had been guilty of.’ The Session meeting did not exactly welcome the dissidents back with open arms. It declared that they were no longer members of the congregation (though they had never been dismissed), but they would be granted certificates as having left the congregation in good standing, provided their dues had been paid up to that time. They would then be readmitted on an individual basis if the elders were satisfied that, since signing the petition, their ‘conduct and life ... has been consistent with the Christian professions.’110 Nor was the majority of the Leeds Presbyterians willing to give up

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entirely on Whitelaw, for three months later, in May 1904, 190 communicants and 130 adherents signed a call for his return. The Presbytery tried to be diplomatic in response, ‘expressing regret at the disappointment likely to be caused to those who have signed the call,’ but rejecting it ‘in view of the lack of unanimity owing to the withdrawal from ordinances on the part of some, which withdrawal the Presbytery deplored, whatever the cause may be.’ Once again, a committee was appointed to visit the congregation ‘with a view to restoring harmony,’ and, once again, the Leeds representatives appealed to the Synod.111 A committee of the Synod, rather than the Presbytery, visited Leeds shortly afterward, and, after its report was presented in September, Leeds was permitted to call for another minister.112 While 209 communicants and 67 adherents signed a call for the Reverend Dr Kellock of Richmond, Quebec, the Presbytery learned that most of the disaffected group had not been approached. Some of the Presbytery members argued that no appointment should be made until harmony had been restored by the Synod report, but the majority sustained the call for Kellock, who accepted it with understandable misgivings.113 With a new minister at the head of the Session, the healing process could finally begin. John Allan and Dr Thompson were readmitted to the Leeds congregation the following spring, in April 1905, though only after the Presbytery had ordered the Session to do so. Concerning Allan, the Synod had determined that the local Session did not have jurisdiction over licentiates, after all, and of Thompson the Presbytery declared that ‘the offenses charged against him are clearly not of the aggravated character entered in the minutes.’114 As for the other dissidents, those who approached the Communion table in August were not turned away, even though they had not applied for readmission to the congregation.115 After four and a half years, the main repercussions of the post-office case had finally ended, though bitter feelings apparently endured for years. Removing Whitelaw did not increase church membership; to the contrary, the number of families in the congregation declined from 120 in September 1902 to 108 in February 1904, and the number of communicants declined from 337 in 1903 to 311 in 1904. By August 1905 that number had dropped again to 295.116 Much of this decline could have been due to the ongoing exodus of English Canadians from the township, but still more striking was the drop in financial contributions to the church. In 1900 the congregation had provided the minister with a $970 stipend and paid $570 towards the church and manse, as well as

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raising $78 for incidental congregational expenses. For the Home Mission Fund, Foreign Mission Fund, French Evangelization Fund, and various other external purposes, Leeds contributed $1,155. The total of $2,773, or $23.10 per household, was roughly twice the average that each Presbyterian family contributed in the two neighbouring congregations of St Sylvestre / Leeds Village and Inverness. No reports were submitted by Leeds (Kinnear’s Mills and Reid’s) during the following unsettled period until 1904, when contributions had declined by half to $11.29 per household.117 By this time the devout and wealthy elder Kinnears were no longer alive to bolster the church’s coffers, but there had also undoubtedly been a general weakening of religious enthusiasm. Interpretation Unlike the detective story genre that began in the mid-nineteenth century to offer ‘a fantasized solution to the problem of moral uncertainty in the world of true crime,’118 the mystery of the missing $200 must remain unsolved. Consequently, the ensuing behaviour of the various protagonists remains open to interpretation, which is why we have presented the two conflicting narratives that emerged at the time. But while cultural historians have now rejected the objective stance, they can hardly avoid imposing some order on the research material they uncover, an order based to a considerable extent on their own subjective values. The foregoing analysis suggests that the ‘truth’ of what happened in the Kinnear’s Mills post-office case probably lies somewhere between the extremes of a gullible village family being manipulated by a clever, unprincipled clergyman, as Judge White’s report would have us believe, and a naïve, too-caring pastor betrayed by a corrupt local capitalist, as depicted in the Presbytery report. One thing that is clear, however, is that both Whitelaw and Kinnear resorted to questionable tactics in their attempts to protect their own reputations, with the result that both would eventually be compelled to move far away with a cloud of suspicion over their heads. The tragic irony is that the crime in question was simply too petty, too risky, too out of character, and too apparently motiveless for it to be very likely that either of the two men was directly involved with it. If Whitelaw were purposefully making it appear that someone in the postal system had stolen the money, how could he assume that he would not be caught up in the recriminations? And why would Kinnear take what was to him a relatively small sum of money from an envelope

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in his care when he knew that he and his family would thereby come under investigation? We certainly cannot assume that prominent members of a community always act rationally, but a more likely scenario is that the money was stolen by a postal employee along the route to Toronto, or even by the two younger Kinnears. Concerning the first possibility, the temptation would have been great for someone earning approximately $500 a year, especially when the most junior urban postmaster received three times that amount.119 As for the second, Alexander and Mary Kinnear had the opportunity, the bravado of bored youth, and, in Mary’s case, the reputed motive and past history, though both went on to lead entirely respectable middle-class lives (see fig. 8.3).120 Given that neither possibility was seriously discussed in the official reports, the narratives that were excluded in this case are as revealing as the ones that were told. One can only assume that the inspectors wished to divert attention from the Post-office employees (and their families), and that Judge White was biased towards the influential Kinnears and disinclined to consider possibilities not raised by the inspectors. Despite the clergy’s ongoing professionalization, rural ministers clearly lacked the social standing of relatively wealthy businessmen, and copying their investment practices only tended to raise doubts about religious commitment.121 While church-state conflict developed over who the guilty party in the post-office case was, it did not reflect an underlying power struggle between the local community’s secular and religious leaders. As a warm supporter of the Loyal Orange Lodge and the imperial cause in the Boer War, Whitelaw had a conservative ideology nicely congruent with that of the village notables.122 The local church manager testified to the White inquiry that the general feeling had been that Whitelaw and the Kinnears were actually a little too friendly with each other.123 While God and mammon were no longer incompatible in the minds of the social elite (as Marguerite Van Die’s essay on Charles Colby reveals), the local farmers and tradesmen apparently had other ideas. Whitelaw’s ability to retain the loyalty of the majority of his two Leeds congregations therefore attests to his effectiveness as a preacher, and doubtless also to local resentment against the Kinnears’ economic dominance. Paradoxically, only once the Kinnears were no longer a powerful presence, and Whitelaw had been exonerated by the Presbytery’s investigating committee, did some members of the church begin to demand the clergyman’s removal. Without finding their petition, it is impossible to know exactly what their reasoning was, or who

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Fig. 8.3 Mary Kinnear on the day of her wedding to a Toronto lawyer in 1903, and Dr Alexander Kinnear, Toronto obstetrician, with infant son. Sources: James G. Kinnear, Kinnear’s Mills, 116–17; Megantic Gazette, 15 Oct. 1903.

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most of them were, but their spokesmen were locally prominent men who would be naturally inclined to sympathize with the Kinnears. Most of these dissidents were probably from the congregation that attended the village church, since, in January 1902, forty-four families from the rural Reid’s Church presented Whitelaw with a surprise gift of $107 ‘as a small token of our appreciation’ for ‘striving to bring back the erring one and to lift up the fallen and cheering the sick and the lonely.’124 Despite the loyalty that Whitelaw still inspired, a religious schism would inevitably have ensued had the Synod not succumbed to the dissidents’ demands by ensuring that he was transferred to another community. The Kinnear’s Mills post-office case is certainly of little importance in terms of its national historical impact, but it does reveal that law courts were not the only tribunals to wield coercive influence, especially when combined with the possibilities for publicity provided by the press. At the same time, the case illustrates the persistent obsession with maintaining a reputation for respectability, the independence of the rural population after more than half a century of supposedly ‘disciplining’ state formation,125 and the continuing importance of the church as a social institution in rural Canada. But it also reminds us that the industrial-capitalist transformation was fraught with conflict even outside the growing urban centres.126 The expanding market was undermining traditional community, religious, and family values as a foundation for social order in Leeds Township, where the dominant merchant family was no longer reinvesting locally the profits made from its producer clients, the popular Presbyterian minister was gambling in stock margins, and more and more people were being drawn away by the promise of better economic opportunities elsewhere. It is rather fitting that this unsolved case began in the local postoffice, traditionally seen as the centre of rural conviviality,127 but also serving as the main point of contact with the outside world. Osborne and Pike suggest that the post office hastened migration from settled communities by ensuring that connections with kin at home would be sustained, and they conclude that ‘the expansion of post office facilities was ... an integral dimension of, and indeed, precondition for, the phenomenon which is sometimes referred to as “modernization.”’128 But letters between kin and friends also represent resistance to the alienating influences of modernity, and much the same can be said for the annual homecoming picnic where descendants of the Megantic County diaspora revive the collective memory of a tightly knit rural community by listening to aging Orangemen play ancient Irish battle

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tunes.129 The original meaning of this ritual has long been suppressed, as has the memory of the post-office case that once tore the community apart. Nostalgia is a powerful force, but just as the detective reinvestigates as unsolved and largely forgotten crime, so it is the sometimes unpopular role of the historian to challenge the myths upon which society has built its ideological foundations.130

Notes 1 Julian Barnes, ‘Always True to France,’ New York Review 12 August 1999, 30. 2 Quoted in Alan Macfarlane, ‘History, Anthropology and the Study of Communities,’ Social History 2 (1977): 636. 3 Colin M. Coates, The Metamorphoses of Landscape and Community in Early Quebec (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 101. 4 On this point, see Nancy Cook, ‘The Thin within the Thick: Social History, Postmodern Ethnography, and Textual Practice,’ Histoire sociale/Social History 32 (1999): 85–102; and Mariana Valverde, ‘Some Reflections on the Rise and Fall of Discourse Analysis,’ Histoire sociale/Social History 33 (2000): 59–78. 5 For an interesting application of Marxist theory to a rural social conflict, see Norman N. Feltes, This Side of Heaven: Determining the Donnelly Murders, 1880 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 6 The following narrative is summarized from ‘In Re Inquiry Ordered under R.S.C. Cap. 114, as to an Alleged Abstraction of $200 from Letter Mailed at Kinnear’s Mills Post-office on the 6th of December, 1899, by Rev. J.M. Whitelaw, Addressed to the Rev. Dr. Warden, Toronto’ (hereafter cited as White Report). It is available on microfiche as CIHM no. 25715. 7 The governing structure of the Kinnear’s Mills and Reid’s Presbyterian Church, from bottom to top, was the Leeds church Session, consisting of minister and elders; the Quebec Presbytery meeting; and the Montreal and Ottawa Synod meeting. 8 To promote tourism in the area, the story of the pioneer Kinnear family is now dramatized each summer by French-speaking actors. On this theme, see Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978), 144–8. 9 See Matthew Barlow, ‘Fear and Loathing in St Sylvestre: The Corrigan Murder Case, 1855–58’ (M.A. thesis, Simon Fraser University, 1998). As a

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10

11

12 13 14

15 16 17

18 19 20

21 22

native of this community, I attended the picnic many times in the 1950s and 1960s. James G. Kinnear, Kinnear’s Mills: Being a Story of the Settlement of the Place and of the Life and Times of Harriet Wilson and James Kinnear and Their Descendants (King, ON: James G. Kinnear, 1971), 65; John Willis, ‘L’importance sociale du bureau de poste en milieu rural au Canada, 1880–1945,’ Histoire sociale/Social History 30 (1997): 150, fig. 2. For a still useful history of the British settlement of Megantic County, see Dugald McKenzie McKillop, Annals of Megantic County, Quebec (Lynn, MA: D. McGillop, 1902). For a more recent history, see Gwen Rawlings Barry, A History of Megantic County: Downhomers of Quebec’s Eastern Townships (n.p.: self-published, 1999). A good illustration of the township’s mixed economy can be found in the Leeds Village correspondent’s report to the Sherbrooke Examiner on 16 April 1900: ‘Our farmers are all busy making sugar and think it is going to be a good year ... Mr. Willie Marshall has gone into the cattle business, making his first purchase from Mr. F. Carroll ... Mr. Sam McKee has been sawing wood in this district the past two weeks.’ See the discussion in Bender, Community and Social Change, 111–14. Megantic Gazette, 5 April 1900. This newspaper was one of the rural editions of the Montreal Gazette. Megantic Gazette, 18 Jan. 1900, 15 March 1900, 29 March 1900, 5 April 1900, 31 May 1900, 28 March 1901. The local MLA at this time, John Whyte, was not re-elected because he failed to support construction of a railway through Leeds, fearing that it would damage the business of his village store (Ethel Reid Cruickshank, Leeds and St. Sylvester: Historical Sketches [Cookshire, QC: Heritage Publications, 1975], 148). Sherbrooke Examiner, 12 Sept. 1900. See also Megantic Gazette, 6 Sept. 1900. Megantic Gazette, 26 July 1900. Alexander Goodwill MacDougall, ‘The Presbyterian Church in the Presbytery of Quebec, 1875–1925’ (M.A. thesis, McGill University, 1960), 164–9. Sherbrooke Examiner, 23 April 1900. Megantic Gazette, 19 July 1900. In 1901 the Presbyterians of Leeds Township (39 per cent) were as numerous as the Anglicans (16 per cent), English-speaking Catholics (16 per cent), and Methodists (7 per cent) combined. The following description of the Kinnear family history is summarized from Kinnear, Kinnear’s Mills. Pascal Binet, ‘La famille Kinnear,’ Le Bercail 6.1 (1997): 15. Kinnear

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23

24 25 26

27 28

29 30

31

32 33

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(Kinnear’s Mills, 58) states that James Kinnear, Sr, charged 4 per cent to 6 per cent interest, and that ‘at the time of his death his estate revealed many outstanding notes and mortgages.’ ArchiviaNet, Post-offices, Kinnear’s Mills (0480). For a useful overview of the post-office’s development in rural Quebec and Ontario, see Brian Osborne and Robert Pike, ‘Lowering “The Walls of Oblivion”: The Revolution in Postal Communications in Central Canada, 1851–1911,’ Canadian Papers in Rural History 4 (1984): 200–25. See Kinnear, Kinnear’s Mills, 83–103. Kinnear’s Mills, 78; Binet, ‘La famille,’ 14. Société des Archives Historiques de la Région de l’Amiante, Fonds James Gordon Kinnear, J.W. Mooney to A. Brosseau, Inverness, 7 May 1902 (typescript). Quoted in Kinnear, Kinnear’s Mills, 63. Post-offices were commonly located in village stores. See Osborne and Pike, ‘Lowering,’ 216; Willis, ‘L’importance sociale,’ 157–9. The store and post-office appear to have been moved to James Kinnear, Jr’s, own house by 1900 (Kinnear, Kinnear’s Mills, 60–1, 79). Kinnear, Kinnear’s Mills, 86, 91. Rev. Allan S. Reid, ‘Historical Sketch, Centenary Celebration, Reid’s and Kinnear’s Mills Churches, October 6, 1933,’ 6 (typescript located in Eastern Townships Research Centre [hereafter ETRC], United Church Archives [hereafter UCA], Candlish United Church [hereafter CUC]); Canada, manuscript census, Leed’s West Township, Quebec, 1891, no. 3, p. 25. Leeds was united with St. Sylvestre, and Kinnear’s Mills remained connected with Reid’s Church. See Reid, ‘Historical Sketch,’ 1–4; MacDougall, ‘Presbyterian Church,’ 268–70. The church Session supported the choirmaster’s stand (Reid, ‘Historical Sketch,’ 4–5). Reid’s Church was built on the farm of Joseph Reid, whose three sons became influential Presbyterian ministers. See W. Stanford Reid, ‘The Quebec Trio: W.D., A.S., A.D. Reid,’ in W. Stanford Reid, ed., Called to Witness: Profiles of Canadian Presbyterians. A Supplement to Enduring Witness, vol. 2 (Hamilton: Committee on History, the Presbyterian Church in Canada, 1980), 93–4. The public testimony was published as an appendix to the White Report, but this appendix has not been located. Fortunately, that testimony was also published in the Megantic Gazette, beginning with the issue of 2 May 1901. Note the similarity of this inquiry (aside from the presence of lawyers) with the Pierreville postal inquiry described in John Willis, ‘Wilfrid

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

51 52

53

54 55 56

and Sophie: Crisis at the Post-office in Pierreville, 1888,’ PHSC Journal 91 (Sept. 1997): 23. Quoted in White Report, 6. Megantic Gazette, 12 Sept. 1901. White Report, 7. White Report, 7. Quoted in White Report, 12. Megantic Gazette, 5 Sept. 1901 (testimony of John Whyte). White Report, 13. Alexander Martin had been a coal miner in Scotland, and by the time of the 1861 census he was working as a mining engineer at the Harvey Hill copper mines of Leeds (Barry, A History of Megantic, 358). Quoted in White Report, 14. White Report, 15. Quoted in White Report, 15–16. Quoted in White Report, 16. Leeds Session Minutes, 2 May 1900, 131–3. Sherbooke Examiner, 16 April 1900, 20 July 1900. White Report, 16. Megantic Gazette, 5 Sept. 1901 (testimony of Sarah MacEwen, wife of Whitelaw). The MLA would nevertheless deny that there had been any ‘political wirepulling’ in the affair (Megantic Gazette, 5 Sept. 1901 [testimony of John Whyte]). Leeds Session Minutes, 14 May 1900, 135. On Whyte’s influential position in the community, see Cruickshank, Leeds, 147–8. See Lynne Marks, ‘Rattling, Tattling, and General Rumour: Gossip, Gender, and Church Regulation in Upper Canada,’ Canadian Historical Review 81 (2000): 401. The Sherbrooke Examiner’s Kinnear’s Mills correspondent reported in late April that ‘James Kinnear, jr., and family talk of leaving here’ (he resigned the postmastership in May), and the Martin family moved on July 13 (Sherbrooke Examiner, 23 April 1900, 20 July 1900; National Archives of Canada [hereafter NA], RG 3, Post-office Records, vol. 1067, Vacancies in postmasterships, 1898–1904, 72). White Report, 17. White Report, 2. Megantic Gazette, 15 Aug. 1901 (testimony of James Thompson and Margaret Jane MacBurney), 29 Aug. 1901 (testimony of Effie Kinnear and George Thompson), 26 Sept. 1901 (testimony of James Kinnear, Sr), 22 Oct. 1901 (testimony of Henry Morrison and James Thompson).

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57 White Report, 17. This letter was not one of the three sent by Whitelaw. 58 See Ian R. Lee, ‘The Canadian Postal System: Origins, Growth and Decay of the State Postal Function, 1765–1981’ (Ph.D. diss., Carleton University, 1989), 218–26, 237–62. John Willis has also compiled a file on Canadian postal thefts. 59 Canada, Sessional Papers, 1900, Post-office Department, Appendix H, 390–9, 435. 60 White Report, 17. 61 Megantic Gazette, 15 Aug. 1901 (testimony of Margaret Jane MacBurney). An article in Maclean’s Magazine (1 May 1927) stated in a rather sexist manner that a key factor in inside post-office crime was feminine curiosity: ‘the female mind, particularly in rural post-offices, dearly loves to follow the course of a local romance, or discover the business of her neighbours with distant correspondents.’ My thanks to John Willis for this reference. 62 White Report, 18. 63 Megantic Gazette, 15 Aug. 1901. 64 White Report, 19. 65 NA, RG 3, Office of the Secretary – Letters received, vol. 522, no. 18540, George Turcot to Hon. William Mulock, Ste Julie, 16 Nov. 1900, 24 Nov. 1900, 29 Nov. 1900; [Mulock] to Turcot, Ottawa, 21 Nov. 1900. 66 As stated by the editor of the Montreal Gazette (NA, RG 3, Office of the Secretary – Letters received, vol. 522, no. 18857, Richard White to W.D. LeSueur, Montreal, 18 Dec. 1900). 67 Sherbrooke Examiner, 12 Dec. 1900. 68 Sherbrooke Examiner, 4 March 1901. 69 Sherbrooke Examiner, 16 Jan. 1901. 70 The convenor was Reverend Dr Kellock of Richmond, and the other three members were the Reverends MacQueen of Gould, Shearer of Sherbrooke, and Stevenson of Danville. The following summary of the report is from the Sherbrooke Examiner, 15 March 1901. 71 James Kinnear, Jr, had testified to the White inquiry that he had sent the statement on to his father, who had destroyed it. 72 See, for example, the letter by ‘Enquirer’ in Sherbrooke Examiner, 29 March 1901. 73 Perhaps not surprisingly the Sherbrooke Examiner (23 Oct. 1901, 30 Oct. 1901, 4 Nov. 1901) did not mention the case in its coverage of the resignation. 74 Sherbrooke Examiner, 24 April 1901, 8 May 1901. 75 Of the total cost of $997.34, the lawyers agreed to deduct $200 from their

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76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

account, and James Kinnear was responsible for 20 per cent, leaving a total bill of $637.88 (Archives Nationales du Québec à Montréal [hereafter ANQM], Presbyterian Church Papers, P602, Record, Presbytery of Quebec [hereafter, Presbytery Record], vol. 2 (P/11/3), 11 March 1902, 176). Sherbrooke Examiner, 11 Dec. 1901. Several members appealed this decision to the Synod, which essentially sustained the amended report except for its exoneration of Whitelaw from the loss of the $200 sent by him to Warden (ANQM, Presbyterian Church Papers, P/7/2, Synod of Montreal and Ottawa, Manuscript Minutes [hereafter, Synod Minutes], 15 May 1902, 597). Sherbrooke Examiner, 11 Dec. 1901; Leeds Session Minutes, 17 Dec. 1901, 171; Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 11 Dec. 1901, 168. Leeds Session Minutes, 22 Jan. 1901, 147. Leeds Session Minutes, 26 Feb. 1901, 149–51. Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 12 March 1901, 154–5. Leeds Session Minutes, 15 Nov. 1901, 163. Marks, ‘Rattling, Tattling,’ 400–1. Marks, ‘Rattling, Tattling,’ 390–4. See also Lynne Marks, ‘Christian Harmony: Family, Neighbours, and Community in Upper Canadian Church Discipline Records,’ in Franca Iacovetta and Wendy Mitchinson, eds, On the Case: Explorations in Social History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 115–20, 124. Leeds Session Minutes, 27 Aug. 1901, 157–9. Leeds Session Minutes, 11 Oct. 1901, 161. Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 4 March 1903, 199. Cruickshank, Leeds, 145. Leeds Session Minutes, 17 Dec. 1901, 173; 9 Jan. 1902, 175. Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 10–11 Dec. 1901, 165–8. Quoted in Sherbrooke Examiner, 3 Feb. 1902. Leeds Session Minutes, 18 Feb. 1902, 179–81. Leeds Session Minutes, 18 Feb. 1902, 179. Leeds Session Minutes, 4 March 1902, 183. Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 13 March 1902, 176–7; Cruickshank, Leeds, 167. Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 11 Dec. 1901, 169. Leeds Session Minutes, 17 Dec. 1901, 173. Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 14 March 1902, 178. The front-page report of the Sherbrooke Examiner (14 March 1902) completely misinterpreted the meeting, which it reported under the curious headline of ‘Rev. Mr. Whitelaw is Exonerated by Committee of the Presbytery.’ The March 17 issue, as well, simply summarized what it had reported a full year earlier.

260 98 99 100 101 102 103

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105 106 107 108 109

110 111 112 113 114 115 116

117 118

Religion, Social Reform, and Community

Leeds Session Minutes, 15 April 1902, 185. Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 1 July 1902, 182. Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 9 Sept. 1902, 184–6. Leeds Session Minutes, 6 June 1902, 187–9. The following February there were 260 communicants (12 Feb. 1903, 192). Leeds Session Minutes, 5 Sept. 1902, 189. This notice was published in the May 8 issue of the Megantic Gazette. Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 9 Dec. 1902, 193; 3 March 1903, 197–8. Dr William Thompson had an older brother named James, but there appears to have been more than one James Thompson in the community at this time. My thanks to Gwen Barry for the genealogical information. Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 4 March 1903, 198–200. Thompson still had the books in September, but the Leeds auditors’ report was presented the following March, and Thompson provided the new treasurer with the shortfall (Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 22 Sept. 1903, 215; 1 March 1904, 227–8). Leeds Session Minutes, 20 April 1903, 193–4. On W.D. Reid, see Reid, ‘The Quebec Trio,’ 93–7. Megantic Gazette, 1 May 1902. Synod Minutes, 14 May 1903, 619–20. Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 7 July 1903, 202–4. Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 5 Sept. 1903, 211–12. The moderator of the Peterborough Presbytery nevertheless stated at Whitelaw’s induction ceremony that the Quebec Presbytery had been very reluctant to release him (Megantic Gazette, 15 Oct. 1903). Leeds Session Minutes, 15 Feb. 1904, 201–2. Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 10 May 1904, 234. The contents of the report were not recorded (Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 13 Sept. 1904, 240). Presbytery Record, vol. 2, 26 Oct. 1904, 243–4; 8 Nov. 1904, 246, 249. Leeds Session Minutes, 12 April 1905, 209–10. Leeds Session Minutes, 6 Aug. 1905, 211. Leeds Session Minutes, 5 Sept. 1902, 191; 20 April 1903, 193; 15 Feb. 1904, 201; 6 Aug. 1905, 211. These numbers are lower than those printed for 1904 in ANQM, Presbytery Church Records, P 602, P/5/5, Acts of the General Assembly, 1903–4, 342. Acts of the General Assembly, 1899–1900, 334; 1901–2, 332, 346; 1903–4, 308, 342. Karen Haltunnen, ‘Cultural History and the Challenge of Narrativity,’ in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds, Beyond the Cultural Turn: New

A Crime ‘Shrouded in Mystery’ 261

119 120

121

122 123 124 125

126 127 128 129

130

Studies in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 176. Lee, ‘The Canadian Postal System,’ 223. On another theft case in which the culprit was discovered to be the seventeen-year-old girl who was operating the post-office for her father, see John Willis, ‘Péribonka: Le bureau de poste de Maria Chapdelaine,’ Cap-Aux-Diamants 55 (Autumn 1998): 46. On the professionalization of the clergy, see R.D. Gidney and W.P.J. Millar, Professional Gentlemen: The Professions in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), chapter 6. Sherbrooke Examiner, 28 March 1900, 20 July 1900. Megantic Gazette, 22 Oct. 1901 (testimony of Henry Morrison). Sherbrooke Examiner, 13 Jan. 1902. This is the argument in Bruce Curtis, True Government by Choice Men? Inspection, Education, and State Formation in Canada West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). For a perspective which instead emphasizes local agency, see J.I. Little, State and Society in Transition: Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships, 1838–1852 (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1997). Note, as well, the parallels between this case and that described in J.I. Little, ‘Popular Resistance to Legal Authority in the Upper St. Francis District of Quebec: The Megantic Outlaw Affair of 1888–89,’ Labour / Le Travail 33 (Spring 1994): 97–124. See Allan Kulikoff, ‘The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,’ William and Mary Quarterly 46 (1989): 120–44. Willis, ‘L’importance sociale,’ 160–3. Osborne and Pike, ‘Lowering the Walls,’ 219–20. From the perspective of social network theory, this diaspora is itself part of a wider community, for the theory holds that rural communities were not dissolving so much as they were expanding and transforming themselves. See Craig Calhoun, ‘History, Anthropology, and the Study of Communities: Some Problems in Macfarlane’s Proposal,’ Social History 3 (1978): 368, 370; and John C. Walsh and Steven High, ‘Rethinking the Concept of Community,’ Histoire sociale/Social History 32 (1999): 260–1. For a related case study, see J.I. Little, ‘Popular Voices in Print: The Local Newspaper Correspondents of an Extended Scots-Canadian Community, 1894,’ Journal of Canadian Studies 30. 3 (1995): 134–55. On this theme, see Barry D. Mack, ‘Modernity without Tears: The Mythic World of Ralph Connor,’ in W. Klempa, ed., The Burning Bush and a Few Acres of Snow (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1994).

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Afterword

263

Afterword

Large theories may generate good questions, but they produce poor answers. – Inga Clendinnen

By focusing largely on the hegemonic role of the state and the domination of the bourgeoisie, social historians have imposed, somewhat paradoxically, totalizing theories on the past, assuming – as the Enlightenment philosophers did – that ‘culture and society operate as overarching, objective systems that function to integrate the individual into the whole.’1 Historical agency tends to be lost in the process, but Clendinnen’s statement at the top of this page does not imply that historians should reject theory (for we do need good questions); however, it should emerge more ‘organically.’ Otherwise, the danger – as Jürgen Habermas warns – is that theoretical reason will ‘colonize and displace the centrality of everyday life.’2 Giovanni Levi defends the role of theory in microhistorical analysis by arguing that the goal should not simply be to understand the local in and of itself, but to study it in order to gain a better understanding of society as a whole. The value of the microhistorical approach, according to Levi, is that ‘Phenomena previously considered to be sufficiently described and understood assume completely new meanings by altering the scale of observation.’3 While no historian would deny that religion played an important role in English-Canadian society, few have made it the central focus of their investigations. Instead, historians refer to class, ‘race,’ and gender as the important categories of analysis, and privilege the role of the state even at the local level. As an examination of their titles will reveal, the

264 The Other Quebec

preceding essays generally focus on those same themes, but analysis at the community and individual human scale indicates that religion in both the personal and the institutional sense was an important connecting thread. In short, religion is approached, not as an independent explanatory variable, but as a phenomenon that deepens our historical understanding of what beliefs and principles guided and motivated ordinary people living their everyday lives during the nineteenth century. Religion manifested itself as a theme of these essays in sometimes surprising and paradoxical ways. Ralph Merry, the subject of chapter 1, was not only one of the early agents of consumerism, as a peddler of factory-produced tinware and brooms, he was also a Jeremiah preaching the renunciation of worldly ambitions and materialist acquisitiveness in what he believed were the world’s end days. Chapter 2 reveals that the Reverend James Reid was less concerned than Merry with the state of his own soul, and more preoccupied with the future of the family, both in a private and in a public sense. While the privatization of the family has generally been associated with the rise of evangelicalism, Reid adopted the long-established Anglican strategy of focusing on the education and indoctrination of children as members of the future generation. The fragment of Lucy Peel’s life examined in chapter 3 reveals how intense the ties among wife, husband, and children were in another Anglican family during the early nineteenth century, and – like the preceding essay on Reid and the following one of Charles Colby – it suggests that the privatization of the family did not result in a marginalization of the father’s role and influence, as separate spheres theorists have assumed. Peel’s letter-diary also challenges the class and gender stereotype of the rather helpless genteel Englishwoman living in a frontier environment to which she was incapable of adapting. But the Peels’ romantic agrarian dream was out of step with the new era being ushered in by the railway and industrialization. Colby’s family correspondence, examined in chapter 4, provides a good illustration of the optimism that characterized that era. It also reveals how the ‘businessmen’s revival’ of 1857–8, which led to his conversion, fostered the belief that material progress would now be guided by moral renewal, strengthening men’s responsibility for the family as well as community, business partners, nation, and God. If the first section of this volume is mostly the product of personal diaries and family letters, many of which have been quite recently

Afterword

265

discovered in attics and between the walls of old houses as far away as England, the second section is based largely on public records and newspaper reports. It should be noted, however, that even those sources are fragmentary, as most of the English-language local records and newspapers from the earlier decades of the nineteenth century have not survived. For example, it had been assumed that virtually all copies of the Megantic Gazette had been destroyed, but by chance a complete run surfaced in what had been a long-abandoned rectory as the research on the last essay in this collection was still in progress. The history of social reform in Canada has been dominated by social control and state formation theorists, but chapters 5 and 6 shift the focus to religion and the Protestant churches, including the Church of England, which has generally been viewed as a bastion of conservatism. These two essays suggest that the early social reformers were responding less to the problems posed by urbanization than to the optimistic postmillennial belief that social and moral improvement could keep pace with economic and technological progress. State regulation gradually increased over liquor sales and the schools system, but to a considerable extent this was a response to local demands fostered by a religious sensibility rather than the imposition of outside authority on a resentful population. Chapter 7 reveals, however, how popular culture in the guise of disorderly carnivalesque gatherings could continue to challenge what Michael Gardiner (echoing Bakhtin) terms ‘the traditional bourgeois ideals of predictability, stability and closure.’4 It reminds us, as well, that not all evangelicals shared the prevailing faith in progress, and that railways may have ushered in the era of industrialization and consumerism, including mass tourism, but churches and moral reform groups also resorted to railway excursions to promote their causes. Finally, while chapter 8 explores the disruptive effect of modernizing forces in a rural community at the turn of the last century, it also reveals that the church remained the most important institution in the community. The local English-speaking population was already in slow decline as people moved elsewhere in search of a more prosperous and secure future, but the fracturing of the church certainly accelerated the process. Many other English-speaking communities in the region would disappear during the following decades as local churches and schools closed their doors, making Quebec an increasingly homogeneous province culturally. It has not been the aim of these essays to analyse that process,5 but to challenge present-minded approaches to history by

266 The Other Quebec

demonstrating that, not so long ago, religion and churches played a crucially important role in all aspects of Canadian society, and there was a dynamic English-speaking population outside the major urban centres of Quebec.

Notes 1 Michael E. Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 4, 12. See also Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner, ‘Introduction,’ in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 26–7. 2 Gardiner, Critiques, 47. 3 Giovanni Levi, ‘On Microhistory,’ in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 98–9. 4 Gardiner, Critiques, 66. 5 For a recent study that sheds useful light on this process, see Roderick MacLeod and Mary Anne Poutanen, A Meeting of the People: School Boards and Protestant Communities in Quebec, 1801–1998 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004).

Credits

267

Credits

Chapter 1 was originally published as ‘The Mental World of Ralph Merry: A Case Study of Popular Religion in the Eastern Townships, 1798–1863,’ Canadian Historical Review 83 (2002): 338–63. Chapter 2 was originally published as ‘The Fireside Kingdom: A MidNineteenth-Century Anglican Perspective on Marriage and Parenthood,’ in Nancy Christie, ed., Households of Faith: Family, Gender, and Community in Canada, 1760–1969 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002). Chapter 3 was originally published as ‘Gender and Gentility on the Lower Canadian Frontier: Lucy Peel’s Journal, 1833–36,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association ns 10 (1999): 59–79. Chapter 4 was originally published as ‘A “Christian Businessman” in the Eastern Townships: The Convergence of Precept and Practice in NineteenthCentury Evangelical Gender Construction,’ Journal of the Canadian Historical Association ns 10 (1999): 103–28. Chapter 5 was originally published as ‘A Moral Engine of Such Incalculable Power: The Temperance Movement in the Eastern Townships,’ Journal of Eastern Townships Studies 11 (Fall 1997): 5–38. Chapter 6 was originally published as ‘“Labouring in a Great Cause”: Marcus Child as Pioneer School Inspector in Lower Canada’s Eastern Townships, 1852–59,’ Historical Studies in Education 10 (1998): 85–115. Chapter 8 was originally published as ‘A Crime “Shrouded in Mystery”: State, Church, and Community Regulation in the Kinnear’s Mills Post Office Case, 1899–1903,’ Histoire sociale/Social History 34 (2001): 1–34.

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Index

Abbott, Rev. Joseph, 155n34 absentee proprietors, 171 academies, 172–5. See also Charleston Academy; Stanstead Seminary Adderley Presbyterian Church, 225, 229 Adventists, 36, 99, 199–201. See also Christian Adventists; Millerism alcohol. See liquor Allan, John, 245, 246, 248, 249 Allen, Charles, 245 Alline, Henry, 27 American Home Missionary Society, 141 American Temperance Society, 135–6 Americans, attitude towards, 82–3, 85 Anderson, Rev., 136 Anglican Church. See Church of England Annales school, 6–7 anti-slavery movements, 35 Apocalypse, 29–31 passim, 199, 211. See also millenarianism Arms, William, 142, 144 arson, 168, 169, 180 Arthur, Rev. William, 132

Ascot Township, 106 Austen, Samuel, 32 autobiography, serial. See journals Badger, Joseph, 19, 36 Bagot, Governor-General, 148 Baker, Rev. John, 132 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 214, 265 Balfour, Rev., 135 Ball, A.P., 103 baptism, 26, 48–9 Baptist Church, 5, 22, 29, 47, 48, 133. See also Freewill Baptist Church Barnston Township, 143, 174 Beauce County, 181 Beebe Plain, 140; camp meeting, 197–216 passim Beecher, Henry Ward, 111 Belden’s Falls, 106 Belden’s Illustrated Atlas, 201, 202 Belvidere, 73, 75 Ben Trovato, 205–9, 215–16, 219n30 bibliomancy, 33–4 Bigelow, Mayor, 151 bi-polar disorder. See cyclothymia Bishop’s College, 173, 175 Black, William, 140–1

270 Index Blackstone (MA), 32 boards of examiners, 166, 175–7 Boer War, 226, 239, 251 Bolduc, Inspector A., 231, 232 Borland, Rev. John, 149–50 Boston, 20, 31, 102, 104–7 passim, 141, 150, 197, 205 Bowen, George Frederick, 141 British American Land Company, 72, 85 Brome Township, 144, 146 Brompton Township, 140 Brooks, Samuel, 74, 131, 142 Brooks, William, 142 Buller, Arthur, 161 Bullock, Chauncey, 149 Burwash, Nathanael, 105 businessmen’s revival, 110–11 Calvinism, 22, 227 camp meetings, 198, 199–200, 205, 208. See also Beebe Plain; cottages; revivalism Canada Temperance Advocate, 134, 136, 138, 139, 141, 147 Canada West. See Upper Canada Canadian Copper Mines Company, 102 Cape Breton Island, 199 Carman, Albert, 105 Carrollcroft, 96, 98, 106, 107, 109 Carvosso, William, 29, 30 Casgrain, Hon. T. Chase, 235 Ceylon, 72 Chalmers, Thomas, 110 Chandler, Henry, 33 Chapman, Rev. Thomas, 30 charity. See philanthropy. Charleston, 141 Charleston Academy, 165, 175 Chauveau, P.J.O., 164, 172, 182

Child, Marcus, 35, 60, 161–96 passim child-rearing, modes of, 59, 60, 77, 179 Chiniquy Crusade, 144 choir. See organ Christian Adventists, 198, 199. See also Adventists Christian Brethren, 19 Christian manhood. See manliness church affiliation. See religious denominations Church Bank, 71, 72 church construction, 103–5 passim Church of England, 100, 104, 173, 184; and the family, 45–60 passim; missionary effort, 19, 30; ratio, 5, 19, 99; and temperance, 134–6 Church of Scotland. See Presbyterian Church Civil War, U.S., 34, 55, 102 civility, 81–3 Clark, High Constable, 149 Cleveland, Rev. Edward, 130 Coaticook, 168, 229 Colby, Abby Lemira, 96 Colby, Charles Carroll, 95–113 passim, 264 Colby, Charles William, 96, 110 Colby, Emily, 97 Colby, Harriet Child (Hattie), 96, 100, 108, 111, 112 Colby, Jessie Maud, 96, 109 Colby, John Child, 96 Colby, Lemira, 97–9 passim Colby, Moses French, 97–9 passim, 102, 103, 106, 109, 110, 149–51 passim Colby, William, 97–9 passim, 103, 104 Cole, Mr, 141–2 Common Schools Act of 1841, 162 Common Sense philosophy, 112–13

Index community, 58, 112, 113, 161–2, 234, 243–50; newspaper correspondents, 198, 205, 209–13 passim, 226. See also Ben Trovato Compton County, 181 Compton Township, 18–19, 133, 150, 174 Congregational Church, 47, 100, 101, 104; ratio, 5, 99, 103; and temperance, 132–3, 136–42 passim consumption, material, 80–1, 98 conversion experience/process, 17–18, 21–3, 38, 101, 122n91 copper mining, 102 Cornwall, 47 cottages, camp meeting, 201–2, 204 Cotton, Rev. Charles, 134–5 Coulchester, 32 council of public instruction, 185 court of quarter sessions, 169 courtship and marriage, 49–53, 56, 74–6, 101, 112 Crippin, Capt. J.D., 144, 145 cyclothymia, 27, 38 dancing. See music Danville, 132, 139, 143 Dartmouth College, 99, 110 death/mortality, 55, 58, 77–8, 86 deists / free thinkers, 19 Derby / Derby Line, 34, 36, 97, 197 detective story genre, 222, 250, 254 diaries. See journals Dickerson, Silas, 146 Discipline of the Methodist Church, 112 Discourse on Infant Baptism, 48 disjunction certificates, 246 domestic work, 78–9, 84 domesticity, cult of. See separate spheres Dominion Alliance, 211

271 Doolittle, Rev. Lucius, 83, 136 Drummondville, 139 Dunham Flat, 145 Dunham Township, 134, 144 Dunkerly, Rev., 136 Dunstall Villa, 73, 82 Durham Commission, 161 Durham Township, 133, 174 Duxbury (VT), 26, 33 East Farnham, 133, 151 Eastern Townships: defined, 3; political culture, 5; population, 6; settlement of, 5, 6 Eastern Townships Prohibitory Liquor Law League, 152 Eaton Township, 133, 138, 140, 174 economy, domestic, 78–80 Edinburgh, 226 Edmister, Brother, 33 education. See schools Elements of Moral Philosophy, 110 Emery, G.J., 145 Empire typewriter, 108 England, 46, 51, 52–3, 69–71 passim, 76, 78, 83, 86. See also Great Britain English settlers, 139 Episcopal Church. See Church of England evangelical impulse, 184, 185 examiners, school, 162 Extrait du rituel, 49 faith healing, 23, 32, 33 family, role of, 45–60, 112–14, 202. See also fatherhood; separate spheres fatherhood, 54–7. See also separate spheres Felton, Charles, 74 Felton, John, 74

272 Index Felton, Maria, 74 Felton, William Bowman, 73, 74, 80, 84, 85 Felton family, 75, 80, 83 Fletcher, John, 74, 84 folk beliefs, 34. See also magic Forsyth Township Foucault, Michel, 162, 186 Franklin (VT), 147 Freewill Baptist Church, 19, 28, 31, 99; and temperance, 133–4 Frelighsburg, 48, 58, 135 French Canadians, 144, 169, 180–2, 198, 232 Frizzle, David, 223, 230, 231 frontier, settlement, 58, 71 Frost Village, 147 Frye, Northrop, 73 garden, flower, 81 garrison mentality, 73 Garthby Township, 181 gentility/gentry, 69, 70, 72, 73–4, 77, 80–2, 84, 85 Georgeville, 22, 137, 197 Glengarry County, 47 Goodhue, Charles F.H., 74 gospel cleromancy. See bibliomancy Granby Township, 132, 133, 138, 141 grand jury, St Francis District, 148 granite quarry, 105 Grant, Miles, 205 Great Britain, 6, 29, 107, 108, 110, 111, 200. See also England; London Green, Assistant Inspector Samuel Tanner, 230–2 passim Guarantee Insurance Company, 236 Guerre des Éteignoirs, 163, 164 Habermas, Jürgen, 263

Haldane, Robert, 47 Haldane Seminary, 47 Hale, Edward, 74, 75, 141–2 Hale, Eliza, 74, 75 Ham South Township, 181 Hanson, Charles, 121n71 Hawken, Inspector, 235 health / medical care, 20, 22–8 passim, 38, 55, 72, 78, 181, 202. See also faith healing High School of Montreal, 173 Himes, Joshua, 31 historiography, 9–10 History of the Temperance Cause in Canada, 140 Hopkins, Bishop, 135–6 Hubbard, B.F., 130, 131 Hunter, W.S., 103 hymns, 23–6, 35, 37, 225 Hypocrisy Detected, 47, 48 insolvency, 106–7, 109–10, 113 Inverness Township, 136, 140, 225, 250; Village, 235 Ireland Township, 140 Irish immigration/settlers/navvies, 58, 138, 148, 224 Irish National Series, 177–8, 181, 182 Isle of Lewis, 181 Johnson, Helen Marr, 130–1 journals (personal), 17–18, 36–7, 45–6, 69, 84, 85 justices of the peace, 169 Kamouraska, 197 Kellock, Rev. Dr, 249 King, William Lyon Mackenzie, 34 Kingsey, Saint-Félix de, 182

Index Kinnear, Alexander, 223, 231, 237, 243, 246 Kinnear, Euphemia, 232, 238, 240 Kinnear, Harriet Wilson, 226–8 passim, 234 Kinnear, James, Jr, 223, 228–35 passim, 237, 240, 241, 243, 250–1 Kinnear, James, Sr, 223, 226–7, 231, 232, 241 Kinnear, Mary, 223, 230, 237, 251 Kinnear’s Mills, 224 kinship network, 100, 112 Knight, Albert, 103 Knowlton orphans’ home, 234 Lake Champlain, 32 Lake Dauphin, 225 Lake Magog, 73 Lake Massawippi, 197 Lake Memphremagog, 22, 32, 197, 213 Lake View Camp Ground, 205 Lambly, John R., 147 Lambton Township, 181 Langton, Anne, 69 Leeds Session meeting, 232, 243–50 passim Leeds Township, 139, 147, 224, 225, 253 Leeds Village, 224, 226, 229; and St Sylvester Session, 248, 250 Lennoxville, 78, 140, 173 Levi, Giovanni, 7, 263 Lingwick Township, 181, 182 liquor production/consumption/ licences, 129–30, 148–9, 152, 198, 205–6, 208, 209–10, 213 local correspondents. See community localism, 168, 225

273 Lomas, Adam, 142 London, 109, 231 Lord’s Day Act of 1906, 214 Lower Canada, 161–3 passim, 170, 171 Lynn (MA), 30 Mack, W.G., 72–3 magic, 32–6 Magog, 19, 22, 29–31 passim, 36, 130, 212; Township, 200, 201 Maine, 205 manliness, 85, 94–5, 98. See also separate spheres Maritimes, 49 marriage. See courtship and marriage Marsh, Elder, 22 Martin, Alexander, 232, 234, 243, 251, 257n41 Martin, Mary, 243, 246 masculinity. See manliness Masonic Lodge, 99 Massachusetts, 30, 33, 38, 164 McConnell, John, 152 McLaren, J.J., 235 McReady family, 83 Meek family, 72 Megantic County, 138, 139, 225, 253 Megantic Gazette, 245, 265 Megantic Good Roads Association, 225 Meilleur, Jean-Baptiste, 162–6 passim, 169, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 180, 181, 185 Melbourne Township, 133, 143, 174 Merry, Jonathan (John), 20, 32 Merry, Ralph, III, 19–20, 27, 36 Merry, Ralph, IV, 17–44 passim, 264 Methodist Church, 32, 36, 59, 95,

274 Index 96–7, 101, 107–8, 112, 165; ratio, 5, 19, 103, 115n10, 149, 183, 200–2 passim, 208. See also Methodist Episcopal Church, Methodist Protestants, Wesleyan Methodists Methodist Episcopal Church, 22, 40n18 Methodist Protestants, 28, 31, 42n34 microhistory, 6–8, 9, 263 millenarianism, 29–32, 198, 200 millennialism,108, 142, 152, 265. See also millenarianism; Millerism Miller, William, 29, 33 Millerism/Millerites, 29–32, 99, 111, 199 Missiskoui Standard, 45, 46 Missisquoi County, temperance movement in, 144, 145, 147, 151 Missisquoi Schools District, 170 Mississippi, 55 monitorial system, 178 Montpelier, 23 Montreal, 56, 107, 130, 146, 173–5 passim, 197, 205, 227, 229, 231, 247–8; Temperance Society, 136–7, 139–42 passim Montreal Presbyterian College, 245 Montreal Witness / Weekly Witness, 227, 233, 241 Moodie family, 86 Moretown, 26 Morin College, 229 Morning Star, 31, 34 Morrill, Ozro, 102, 103 municipal reform bill of 1855, 163 Murray Bay, 197 music/dancing, 81, 82, 112. See also organ mystical experience, 26–8 passim. See also conversion experience

New England(ers), 5, 6, 18, 23, 29, 32, 35, 36, 39, 45, 46, 51, 56, 58, 97, 173, 183, 199, 215 New Hampshire, 205 New Hymns of Cheering Repast, 24 New Star Papers, 111 New York, 29, 46, 99, 144, 199, 205; City, 102, 111 New York Courier and Enquirer, 111 Newport, 212 Newport Township, 140 Niagara Falls, 213 normal school, 173, 174 North Hatley, 197 O’Brien, Mary, 69 O’Reilly, Rev. Bernard, 144 Ocean Grove camp meeting, 198, 220n59 Oka, 214–15 Omemee, 248 Ontario, 244; denominational ratios, 5–6. See also Upper Canada Orange Lodge, 224, 251 organ, church, 225, 229 Orrock, John, 31, 36 Ottawa, 108, 234–6 passim Outlet, the. See Magog Palmer, Phoebe, 111 Paradis, Rev., 182 Paris Exposition, 237 Parker, Rev. Ammi, 132, 141 Parker, Rev. W.P., 105 Parmelee, Rotus, 165, 170 Peel, Celia, 76, 77, 86 Peel, Edmund, 71–85 passim Peel, Flora, 77, 78, 86 Peel, Lucy, 69–86 passim, 264 Peel, Richard, 78, 86

Index Peel, Robert, 72 Peel, Robert ‘Parsley,’ 71 Peel, Thomas, 72 Peel, William, 71 Percival, C.L., 207–12 passim philanthropy, 10, 143 Philipsburg, 133, 134–5 Pierce, Carlos, 104–5 Pierce, Charles, 104 Pierce, Henry, 104 Pierce, Wilder, 104 Polanyi, Karl, 225 police, 207, 210–12 passim Pomroy, Benjamin, 103 popular religion, definition, 18, 39n4 postal thefts, statistics, 236 Potton Township, 102, 133, 139 prayer, 20–1, 23, 26, 32, 33, 37, 47 prayer meeting, 35. See also revivalism pregnancy/childbirth, 76, 90n49 Presbyterian Church, 47, 139, 223–54 passim; church discipline, 234, 244; funds/missions, 248, 250; open-air communion services, 199, 205; ratio, 5, 136. See also Leeds Session meeting; Quebec Presbytery; Synod of Montreal and Ottawa Presbyterian General Assembly, 225 prohibition, 129, 148, 151–2, 160n127 propriety, 83 Protestant Reformation, 46 Puritans, 59; conversion narrative/ rhetoric, 17, 24 Quebec City, 139, 141, 165, 175, 227, 239 Quebec Presbytery, 239–49 passim radicalism, political, 35. See also Vermont

275 railways: economic impact, 225; Passumpsic and Connecticut, 200, 205, 209; South Eastern, 209; St Lawrence and Atlantic / Grand Trunk, 97, 148, 165; and tourism, 197–8, 208, 209, 215, 265 Rebellions of 1837–8, 34, 45, 46, 71, 138, 177 Rechabites, Independent Order of, 129, 145–7, 150, 152 Reform Party, 48 Reid, Rev. Charles, 55, 58 Reid, Isabella, 53, 57, 65n48 Reid, Rev. James, 45–60 passim, 135–6, 264 Reid, James, Jr, 56, 58 Reid, Jane, 55–6, 57 Reid, John, 55 Reid, Malcolm, 55, 56 Reid, Rev. W.D., 247–8 Reid’s Presbyterian Church, 229–30, 248, 250, 253 religious denominations, membership in, 5–6, 175–6 religious tracts, 29, 35–6 revivalism / revival meetings, 26, 29, 35, 105, 143, 204. See also businessmen’s revival; camp meetings; conversion experience Rhode Island, 35 Richmond, 174 Ritchie, William F., 142, 176 rituals: religious, 27, 29, 34, 49; social, 70–1, 85 Robertson, J.G., 142 Roberston Village, 223 Rock Island, 209 Roman Catholics, 99, 141; clergy, 170, 176; schools inspector, 171; shrines / passion plays, 198, 214–15

276 Index Royal Institution for the Advancement of Learning, 47, 165 Ryerson, Egerton, 178, 184, 185 sabbatarianism, 78, 206, 208, 212, 214, 215 Sanborn, John S., 142, 144, 174 schools: assessments/taxes, 169–71 passim, 179, 180–1; commissioners, 163, 169–72, 177, 179–82 passim; construction, 179–80, 182; curriculum, 173, 177–9, 183; elementary, 173; enrolment, 183, 185–6; fees, 171; high schools, 174; managers, 170; model, 173; pedagogy, 177–9; provincial grant, 182; reform legislation, 162–6 passim; role of, 185–6; textbooks, 172, 177; visitors, 165. See also academies; boards of examiners; teachers Scotland, 47, 58, 175 Scots settlers, 139, 140, 181–2, 224 Second Adventists, 5 Second Great Awakening, 36 separate spheres (gender), 45, 46, 52–3, 56–7, 60, 68n102, 75–7 passim, 81, 84, 94–5, 264 servants, 57, 79 Seventh Day Adventists, 32, 200 Shefford temperance movement, 132, 133, 144, 145, 147, 151 Sherbrooke, 70–3 passim, 76, 78, 80, 82, 83, 86, 131, 138, 146, 149, 175, 176, 183, 208 Sherbrooke County Temperance Society, 136, 138–41 passim, 148 Sherbrooke Examiner, 225, 239, 242 Sherbrooke Total Abstinence Society, 131, 141–4, 152 Shipton Township, 72, 174; temperance society, 130, 132, 140, 141

Sicotte, Louis-Victor / Commission, 163, 170, 182 Simcoe, Elizabeth, 69 Sleeper, Lewis, 165 Smiles, Samuel, 102 Smith, Ashur, 40n18 sociability, 81–3, 107 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 5, 199. See also Church of England, missionary effort Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Home and Abroad, 47 Society of Temperance, 147 Sons of Temperance, 129, 145, 146 speculation: financial, 110; land, 103; mining, 102–3, 106; railway, 102–3 spiritual diaries/diarists, 22, 36–7 St Albans District Methodist Church, 147 St Armand, 45, 46, 48, 58, 62n11 St Francis Association of Presbyterian and Congregational Ministers, 139 St Francis College, 174–5 St Francis District, 165, 171, 181, 182; Supreme Court, 230 St Hyacinthe, 100 St-Jérôme, 214–15 St Johnsbury, 208 Stacey family, 86, 87n4 Stanbridge, temperance movement in, 132, 138, 141, 147 Stanstead, temperance movement in, 133–4, 138–40 passim, 145, 146, 149–52 passim Stanstead Centenary Church, 107 Stanstead College, 108. See also Stanstead Seminary Stanstead County, 97, 151, 164, 165, 183, 212 Stanstead Journal, 111, 144, 149, 209,

Index 211–13 passim. See also Ben Trovato; community, newspaper correspondents Stanstead Plain/Village, 95–101 passim, 103–4, 166, 175, 197, 201, 208 Stanstead Seminary, 100, 165, 173, 175 Stanstead Township, 176, 199, 200–1; schools /school commission, 164, 166, 168 state, role of, 161–2, 168, 184–5, 265 steamboats, 197 Stevenson, Ernest, 245 Stewart, Rev. Charles James, 47, 48 Stowe (VT), 102 Strachan, Rev. John, 47, 60 Stratford Township, 181 superintendent of schools. See Chauveau, P.J.O.; Meilleur, JeanBaptiste Sutton Township, 144, 145 Synod of Montreal and Ottawa, 243, 246–9 passim, 253 Taylor, Timothy, 149 teachers: certification of / training / gender, 172–7 passim, 180; rules for, 178–9 temperance movement/societies, 35, 48, 108, 131–52 passim, 177, 211–12, 215; picnics, 198; role of women, 143, 146–7 tent meetings. See camp meetings Terrill, H. Bailey, 99 theology, 111–13 passim Thompson, James, 247, 260n103 Thompson, John, 245 Thompson, Dr William, 223, 232, 233, 244, 246, 249 Tingwick Township, 180

277 Toronto, 205, 223, 224, 227, 229–32 passim, 234, 236, 240, 243, 246, 251 tourism, 197, 213–14; definition, 216n3. See also railways Traill, Catharine Parr, 69; family, 86 transcendence. See mystical experience Turner, V.W., 222 union churches, 19, 100; Union Meeting House, 200 United Church of Canada, 229 United States, 29, 110, 129, 132, 136, 142, 148, 151, 172, 175, 177, 183, 198, 200 Universalists, 5, 19, 99, 209 Upper Canada/Canadians, 47, 56, 58, 60, 69, 72, 73, 76, 77, 82, 86, 129, 134, 138, 146, 151, 161–4 passim, 168, 177, 179 Vermont, 26, 48, 106, 135–6, 146, 169, 172, 205; radicalism/sectarianism, 5, 19, 99 Victoria College, 105 visions/dreams, 17, 23, 32–4 passim, 36 Voice of the Prophets, 31 voluntaryism, 165 Wadsworth, R.D., 139–40 Walton, Joseph S., 131, 142, 144, 146, 150–1 War of 1812, 19, 24 Warden, Rev. Dr, 223, 224, 230, 232, 236, 237, 240, 243 Warner, William, 42n33 Washingtonian Society, 142, 145 Waterloo, 136, 139 Wayland, Rev. Francis, 110 weather, 212, 213

278 Index Weedon Township, 181 Wesley, Rev. John, 59, 112 Wesleyan Grove. See cottages Wesleyan Methodists, 99, 100, 103–5 passim; clergy, 60; missionary effort, 19; temperance, 134, 140 Weybridge (VT), 100 whiskey, potato. See liquor Whitcher, Charles, 74 White, Judge William, 230–42 passim, 244, 250–1 Whitelaw, Mrs, 230, 234 Whitelaw, Rev. James Menzies, 223, 226, 229–51 passim Whitwell, Rev. Richard, 134–6 passim

Whyte, John, 232, 234, 243, 255n14 Wilson, Dr William, 70, 78 Windsor Township, 140 Winslow Township, 181, 182 Wiswell, Frederick A. See Ben Trovato. witchcraft, 32, 33. See also magic Wolfestown Township, 181 women and religion, 204–6 passim. See also separate spheres; temperance movement World’s Crisis, 31 Wotton Township, 180 YMCA movement, 101