Chapter V · LORD DORCHESTER AND THE CANADA ACT OF 1791 (continued 2)

The most critical time was in the year 1794. In America the forces which make for war were strongly in evidence. On the other side of the Atlantic—to the lasting credit of both the British and the American Governments—representatives of the two countries were working hard for peace. In the spring of 1794 Washington nominated John Jay, Chief Justice of the United States, to be a special envoy to Great Britain with a view to settling, if possible, the outstanding points of dispute between the two nations. The Senate confirmed the nomination, and in June Jay reached England and entered into negotiations with Lord Grenville. The result was that on the 19th of November following Jay and Grenville Jay’s treaty signed. signed the well-known treaty which is associated with the American statesman’s name, and which provided for an immediate or prospective settlement of many if not of most of the questions at issue. The treaty was bitterly attacked in the United States by the Republican party and those who sympathized with France. Jay, Hamilton, even Washington himself were denounced and reviled; but the government had sufficient backing in the country to procure the assent of the Senate to the terms of the treaty, with the exception of one article, in the session of 1795; Washington ratified it in August, 1795; and in the following year the measures for carrying The border forts transferred to the United States in 1796. it into effect were voted by a small majority in the House of Representatives. Under its provisions, in that same year, 1796, the border forts were handed over to the United States.

Wayne defeats the Indians.

Meanwhile the war between the Americans and Indians ran the normal course of such wars. The white men suffered some reverses; but, with a strong body of regular troops supplemented by Kentucky militia, and with the help of fortified posts constructed along the line of advance, Wayne by August, 1794, had worn down the Indians and menaced the British fort on the Maumee river, to whose commandant, Major Campbell, he addressed threatening letters. On either side, however, the orders were to abstain from blows, while Jay and Grenville were negotiating, and the conclusion of the treaty ensured the abandonment by the British troops of this outpost of Detroit as well as of Detroit itself. Next year, on the 3rd of August, 1795, Wayne concluded the Treaty of Greenville with the Western Indians. Under its terms the Americans advanced their boundary beyond the Ohio, but still left to the Indians on the south of Lake Erie and in the peninsula of Michigan lands of which the treaty definitely recognized them to be owners, and where they were to dwell under the protection of the United States.

In September, 1795, the Duke of Portland wrote to Lord Dorchester telling him that General Prescott would Dorchester and Simcoe leave Canada. be appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Lower Canada and would leave for Canada in the spring, so that Dorchester could suit his own convenience as to returning to England. At the same time the Secretary of State repeated his regret that Dorchester had determined to retire. Prescott arrived on the 18th of June, 1796, and on the 9th of July Dorchester embarked for England. His ship was wrecked on the shore of Anticosti island, but he reached England in safety in September, and died in a good old age in the autumn of 1808. Simcoe, in the meantime, had, in December, 1795, applied for leave of absence on account of ill health, suggesting that Peter Russell, the senior councillor, should in his absence administer the government of Upper Canada, and tendering his resignation if the leave could not be granted. His wish was complied with, and, after being detained for some time at Quebec, he came back with the returning ships of the autumn convoy and was in London in 1796, two months after Dorchester’s arrival. Canada saw him no more, and, as has been told, he died at a comparatively early age, outlived by the old Governor-in-Chief whose control had fretted his impetuous spirit.

Lord Dorchester’s services to Great Britain and Canada.

In the colonial history of Great Britain Lord Dorchester’s place is or ought to be second to none. Men should be measured by the times in which they live, the lands in which they serve, the conditions which they are called upon to face. It did not fall to Carleton’s lot to be borne on the flowing tide of British victories, to be a leader in successful wars, to be remembered as one who struck down England’s foes and added provinces to her empire. Nor was it given to him to bear rule in times of settled peace, when wisdom and statesmanship are called on to gather in and store the harvest, to consolidate, to develop, to reform, to enrich, to give security and beneficent measures to trusting and expectant multitudes of the human race. Providence set the span of his active life while his country’s fortunes were running out on the ebb-tide of adversity; his public services were coincident with Great Britain’s depression; and the part of the Empire in which he served was the scene of her defeats. No men of good English type cheered and supported him at home, the patriotism which inspired his life was unknown alike to the ministers who preceded William Pitt and to an Opposition which, as embodied in Fox, lost all sense of proportion, and almost all sense of duty, or principle. Yet he held Quebec and saved Canada. Men turned to him to gather up the fragments after the War of Independence; and he reconciled French Canada to British rule and held the balance even between conflicting races and creeds. Open warfare, political intrigue, in every form and from every quarter, from without and from within, beset his path. Those he served and those by whom he was served were in turn disloyal to him. Colonial questions, such as in times of profound peace and goodwill, and after generations of experience, are yet almost insoluble, confronted him, without precedent, without guidance, in their most uncompromising form. He faced them, and through all the mire and mud in which England and English civilians and soldiers and sailors wallowed in these miserable years, he carried one name at any rate which stood for dignity, uprightness, and firm prescient statesmanship. It is not to the credit of English memories or English perception that his name has outside Canada passed into comparative oblivion. If ever a man had temptation to despair of or be untrue to his country, and if ever a man’s character and work redeemed his country and his country’s cause in unworthy times, that man was Carleton.

A great figure in the colonial history of Great Britain as a whole, in the history of Canada he is very great indeed. His character is poles apart from that of old Count Frontenac, and yet he filled in some sort a similar place. Both were soldier-governors; both came back to rule a second time; in either case the individual personality of a firm masterful man was the saving feature of a time of life and death for the colony. Carleton had none of Frontenac’s ruthlessness and arrogance, he had not his French quick wit; but either man in his turn, the one at the end of the seventeenth century, the other towards the end of the eighteenth, was in the fullest sense the saviour of Canada.

General Prescott succeeds Dorchester.

Dorchester did not actually cease to be Governor-in-Chief of Canada until the end of April, 1797, some months after his return to England. He was then succeeded in the office by Prescott, who in the meantime had been Lieutenant-Governor of Lower Canada and Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in North America, having been sworn in at Quebec on the 12th of July, 1796. Robert Prescott, of Lancashire descent, was an old man when he was sent to Canada. Born in 1725, he was seventy-one years of age, only one year younger than Dorchester. He was a Lieutenant-General in the army and had seen much fighting, principally in North America and the West Indies. He had served under Amherst and Wolfe, at Louisbourg and Quebec. He had fought in the War of American Independence and been present at the battle of Brandywine. In 1794 he was in command of the force which took Martinique from the French and, as civil governor of the island, he earned the goodwill of French and natives alike by his tact and humanity.[211] Thus he had a good record when he was chosen to succeed Lord Dorchester, and, though his rule in Canada was short and stormy, when he left, there was abundant evidence of his popularity.

Intrigues of the French minister in the United States against Canada.

Before his arrival in 1796, and at the time, Adet the French minister in the United States, was making mischief like his predecessor Genet, intriguing against Washington’s policy of strict neutrality as between France and Great Britain, and almost openly inciting the French Canadians to revolt. He over-reached himself, however, by supporting Jefferson’s candidature for the Presidency of the United States in succession to Washington, with the result that he was recalled. Jefferson’s opponent, John Adams, was elected President; and the feeling between France and the United States became strained to the verge of war between the two nations. The French designs on Canada came to nothing. A man named Maclane, said to have been of weak intellect, was executed for high treason at Quebec, and a vessel was seized containing arms, ostensibly for the state of Vermont, but, as the evidence seemed to show, designed for use in a raid from Vermont on Canada. There was no actual danger, but there was anxiety and unrest. England was at war with France; Lower Canada was the child of France; the United States contained a strong and very bitter anti-English party; and the armed forces in Canada were almost a negligible quantity. At this same critical time Prescott became involved in a quarrel with his Executive Council over the land question.

The land question in Canada. Prescott quarrels with his Executive Council.

A proclamation advertising Crown lands for settlement in Canada, which was issued in 1792, had called forth a large number of applications. Surveys had not kept pace with the demand for allotments, and the result had been that many applicants whose petitions had been entertained had not actually taken up any land, while others had settled and occupied land without having any legal title. As is usual in such cases, land-jobbing was prevalent; and Prescott, according to his own account, was at pains at once to frustrate ‘great schemes for accumulating land on principles of monopoly and speculation’, and to raise the fund which the Imperial Government had hoped to derive from this source for defraying in part the cost of civil administration. Prescott’s view, it would seem, was that those who had actually become occupiers and begun the work of settlement, should be confirmed in their lands in full; that, where applications had been recorded but no work done, the allotments should only be confirmed in part; that purchasers of claims should be dealt with on their merits, and that, the outstanding claims having been disposed of, the lands, with the exception of reserves for the Crown and the clergy, should be put up for sale at public auction. His Council strongly opposed him, on the ground that he was giving preference to those who had occupied land without having been granted any legal title, and that public sale would bring in a crowd of interlopers from the United States who would take up the land to the exclusion of Loyalists who had the first claim on the British Government. Prescott formed the view, rightly or wrongly, that various members of the Council were concerned in land-jobbing, and he held that public sale was the only real preventive of speculation. ‘Industrious farmers,’ he wrote, ‘who would wish to obtain a grant for the purpose of actual settlement, but who cannot spend their time in tedious solicitation, stand little chance of obtaining it, compared with speculators who can devote their time to the attainment of this object. By disposing of the land at public sale, industrious farmers would have an equal chance with any other competitor.’

Benedict Arnold’s claims.

The case of Benedict Arnold, though it did not apparently enter into the controversy, as he was in England at the time, illustrates the extravagant claims which were put forward to land grants in Canada. At the beginning of 1797 he wrote to the Duke of Portland, calling attention to the sacrifices which he had made for the British Government, and asking for a reward in the shape of a grant of lands in Canada. A year later he defined his demand. He stated that the usual grant was 5,000 acres to each field officer and 1,200 acres for every member of his family; in his own case, therefore, as his family consisted of a wife, six sons and a daughter, the total would amount to 14,600 acres; but, as he had raised and commanded what he called a legion of cavalry and infantry, he considered that he himself was entitled to 10,000 acres instead of 5,000, making up the total to 19,600 acres. Even this amount he had amplified in a previous petition to the King, and he wished to be allowed to select the land where he pleased and not to be compelled to reside upon it personally.

If Arnold’s claims were at all typical of others, it is not to be wondered at that Prescott took a strong line on the land question, with a view to putting a stop to speculation. The controversy which arose between himself and his Council was embittered by the course which he adopted of making public their proceedings. Chief Justice Osgoode and other members of the Council ranged themselves in opposition to him; and the state of feeling was well summed up in the words of a correspondent, writing from Quebec in August, 1798, that the Council must either get a new governor or the governor a new Council. The Duke of Portland, Secretary of State, Prescott recalled. preferred the former alternative. On the 10th of April, 1799, he ordered Prescott home. Robert Shore Milnes was sent out as Lieutenant-Governor of Lower Canada, and General Hunter as Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada. They reached Quebec on the 13th of June, and Milnes and Hunter appointed Lieutenant-Governors of Lower and Upper Canada respectively. on the 29th of July Prescott sailed for England, having received before he left addresses of confidence from all classes, British and French residents combining to pay honour to him, as a man, who, whatever his faults may have been, had won the respect and esteem of the people. By the evil custom of those days, though recalled from Canada, he was allowed to retain for years in England the office of Governor-General and to receive the pay.

Close of the eighteenth century.

Thus the eighteenth century came to an end, that memorable century, in all parts of the world fruitful alike for good and for evil to the British Empire, but nowhere so fruitful as in North America. It had seen New France severed from its motherland. It had seen the rival British colonies severed from Great Britain. It had seen the beginnings of an English province in Canada side by side with the French, and the grant of the first instalment of political privileges to Canadians of either race. The maritime provinces, when the century closed, were four in number, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, which owed its separate existence to the incoming of the Loyalists, Cape Breton, which was later to be incorporated with Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. The North-West was beginning to be a factor in Canadian history, and the exclusive power of the Hudson’s Bay Company in these regions was challenged by the formation of the North-West Company. Canada was still the land of the St. Lawrence and the great lakes, but light was breaking into the limitless area beyond, and as men’s visions widened, there came more movement and more unrest.

We have no regular census of the two Canadas between the year 1790, when there was an imperfect enumeration of the inhabitants of the then undivided province, and the years 1824-5; but in 1800 the Lieutenant-Governor estimated the population of Lower Canada at 160,000, while in 1806 an estimate of 250,000 is given from another source, the population of Upper Canada in the same year being estimated at 70,000. That at the end of the century Lower Canada was politically and socially in a state of transition is shown by an interesting dispatch from Milnes written on the 1st of November, 1800,[212] in which, like his predecessors, he laid stress on the necessity for taking steps to strengthen the Executive Milnes’ views as to strengthening the Executive. Government. He pointed out causes which in his opinion united ‘in daily lessening the power and influence of the Aristocratical Body in Lower Canada’; and, curiously enough, he considered the first and most important of these to be the manner in which the province was originally Independence of the Canadian habitants. settled, and the independent tenure by which the cultivators or habitants held their lands. The feudal system had been introduced with a view to keeping the colonists in leading strings, and reproducing in the New World a form of society based upon the fundamental principle of a landed aristocracy. Yet this English governor wrote of the habitants at the end of the eighteenth century, that ‘there cannot be a more independent race of people, nor do I believe there is in any part of the world a country in which equality of situation is so nearly established’. The land had passed into the hands of the peasants from those of the seigniors, who retained only the old-time privileges of a Decay of the Canadian aristocracy. trifling rent, taking a fourteenth of the corn which the habitants were still bound to grind at the seigniors’ mills, and a twelfth of the purchase-money when lands were transferred. The seigniors, the dispatch stated, showed no disposition to enter into trade; their position had in many instances sunk below that of their vassals; and, taken as a whole, the Canadian gentry had nearly become extinct.

The second cause to which Milnes attributed the weakness of the government was ‘the prevalence of the Roman Catholic religion and the independence of the Independence of the Roman Catholic Church. priesthood’. The Royal Instructions were that no one should be admitted to Holy Orders or have the Cure of Souls without first obtaining a licence from the governor; but the instructions had not been enforced, and the whole patronage of the Roman Catholic Church had passed into the hands of the bishops, with the result that the power of the priests over the people was entirely independent of the government. This evil Milnes proposed to remedy by increasing the emoluments which the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Canada received from government funds, on condition that the rule requiring the governor’s licences for the parish priests was strictly observed in future.

The third cause which was mentioned as tending to lessen the influence of the government, was the practical disembodiment of the militia since Canada had passed Disuse of the militia. under British rule. Under the old French dominion the government had made itself felt in the various parishes through the captains of militia and the parish priests, and the captains of militia had been employed to issue and enforce the public ordinances. They were, Milnes wrote, chosen from among the most respectable of the habitants; and though the militia had not been called out for years past and he did not propose to call it out, the captains of militia were still in existence and the government availed itself of their honorary services on public occasions. He suggested that they should be given some salary or distinction so that they might consider themselves to be ‘the immediate officers of the Crown’; and thus he hoped to keep up the spirit of loyalty among the Canadian people, which ‘for want of an immediate class to whom they can look up, and from their having no immediate connexion with the Executive power, is in danger of becoming extinct’.[213] By attaching to the government the parish priests and the captains of militia, it might be possible to ensure a government majority in the House of Assembly and to secure the election of educated and businesslike representatives, whereas the main body of the Canadian habitants were, ‘from their want of education and extreme simplicity, liable to be misled by designing and artful men’.

The Crown Lands.

These proposals the Lieutenant-Governor regarded as temporary remedies. For the future, he looked to increasing the influence of the Crown by means of the revenue from waste lands, and the settlement of those lands by ‘a body of people of the Protestant religion that will naturally feel themselves more immediately connected with the English Government’. In the mind of Milnes, as in that of Dorchester, there was a fixed conviction that matters were tending to democracy, as democracy had shown itself in the adjoining republic; that such democracy meant disintegration; that the influence of the Crown and of the Executive Government was declining and would continue to decline, unless measures were taken to counteract the evil. He held to the doctrine that well-wishers of the government should think it matter for congratulation that there was an annual deficit on the budget of Lower Canada,[214] which made the province dependent upon the Imperial Government.

The records of the time show that in every respect the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the The close of the eighteenth century was for Canada a time of transition and division. nineteenth century was for Canada a time of division and a time of change, though not yet of dangerous bitterness. There were two provinces instead of one. There were two Lieutenant-Governors, independent of each other, while the Governor-in-Chief, recalled to England, was still holding his post and drawing his pay. There were elected Assemblies, to which the Executive was not responsible, and the new century opened in Upper Canada with a complaint that the Lieutenant-Governor had spent money raised from the taxes without previously obtaining a vote of the Legislature. There was a suggestion of difficulties arising from the fact that military and civil authority for the time was divided. An interesting anonymous letter written from Quebec on the 28th of July, 1806, and signed ‘Mercator’, called attention to this point, alleging that, since Prescott’s recall in 1799, Lower Canada had languished owing to the fact that civil and military powers were not in the same hands. The result, in the writer’s opinion, was jealousy between the civil and military departments, weakening of the energy of government and loss of dignity. ‘The Canadians’ he wrote, ‘a military people and always accustomed to a military government, hold not in sufficient estimation a person placed at the head of affairs who does not at the same time command the troops.’[215]

There was again undoubted division between the Judicial and the Executive power. Chief Justice Osgoode in Lower Canada was not at one with either Dorchester, Prescott, or Milnes; while in Upper Canada, in the years 1806-7, a judge of the name of Thorpe became a member of the elected Assembly and was so outrageous in his opposition to the government that he was by Lord Castlereagh’s instructions suspended from his office. The Church of England bishop found cause to deplore the overshadowing pretensions of the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic dignitaries, on the other hand, asked for formal recognition of their position by the civil government. There was a movement, strongly advocated by the Church of England bishop, for more and better education, both primary and secondary, so that the French Canadian children might learn English, and the children of the upper classes might be educated without being sent to Europe or to the United States. The Secretary of State authorized free schools on the express condition that English should be taught in them, and directed that part of the Crown Lands revenues should be set aside for the purpose. There was also a strong feeling that the Jesuit estates, which long ago had been granted by the King to Lord Amherst but had never been handed over to him, should be applied to education. But no general system of state education was established—probably owing to Roman Catholic feeling; and, as against the proposal to teach English to the coming generation, there came into being in 1806 a French Canadian newspaper, Le Canadien, with the motto, ‘Nos institutions, notre langue et nos lois.’ Nothing in short was settled in Canada. Once more it was to be shown that pressure from without was necessary to produce full co-operation within; and, badly equipped as the two provinces were with means of defence, war was yet to be to them a blessing in disguise, as bringing them a step further on the path of national development.

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