Riendeau A Roger E. Brief History of Canada

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

had been previously captured in war and returned in peace. While

politicians and diplomats negotiated the spoils of victory and defeat in

Europe, the people of New France felt a sense of both hope and fear.

They hoped that France would reconsider its low assessment of its

North American colony. But they also feared that they would suffer the

same fate as their colonial confrères in Acadia scarcely ﬁ ve years before.

In 1763, the French-Canadian people would ﬁ nd their hopes dashed

but their fears appeased.

An oil painting by Adam Sherriff Scott (1887–1980) depicts the French regime giving way to

the British regime in a ceremonial military transfer of power at Montreal in 1760.

THE CHALLENGE OF

IMPERIAL RULE IN BRITISH

NORTH AMERICA

(1760–1783)

ntil the middle of the 18th century, British interest in North

America focused overwhelmingly on the thirteen colonies along

the Atlantic seaboard. Although the fur-trading territory of the Hudson’s

Bay Company, the ﬁ sheries of Newfoundland, the recently captured

French colony of Acadia, and the newly established naval base at

Halifax, Nova Scotia, were included within the British Empire, these

outlying areas paled in signiﬁ cance to the well-endowed American colo-

nies, which contained a population about one-third the size of England’s.

The military conquest of New France in 1759–60, conﬁ rmed by France’s

surrender in the Treaty of Paris in 1763, certainly gave Britain a greater

stake in the northerly reaches of the American frontier. But the chal-

lenges and complications of governing a people of different language,

religion, customs, and culture not only led to resentment between and

within the French and English communities of the St. Lawrence colony,

renamed the Province of Quebec, but also fanned the ﬂ ames of rebellion

in the thirteen colonies, thus shattering the short-lived imperial unity

of North America. The division of the continent as agreed upon in the

Treaty of Versailles, which ended the American Revolutionary War in

1783, opened the way for two nations, one immediately and the other

eventually, to be created out of British North America.

The Roots of English Canada

When Humphrey Gilbert arrived in 1583 to claim Newfoundland as an

English colony, he found ﬁ shing vessels from various western European

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

nations operating in St. John’s harbor and settlers scattered throughout

the surrounding countryside. When it became clear that the English

claim to the Avalon Peninsula did not deter international ﬁ shing ﬂ eets,

the imperial authorities actively encouraged the establishment of per-

manent settlement as a means of exerting greater control over the ﬁ sh-

eries. In 1610 the London and Bristol Company sent John Guy with 40

men to start Newfoundland’s ﬁ rst ofﬁ cial colony at Cupids on Conception

Bay. The company believed that residents would have the advantage of

occupying the best ﬁ shing locations before the migratory ﬁ shermen

arrived. Opposition from migratory ﬁ shermen and the area’s lack of

agricultural potential rendered the colony unsustainable. Lord Baltimore

also attempted to establish a colony at Ferryland, south of St. John’s, in

1621, but the harshness of the winters prompted him to turn his efforts

toward Maryland in 1629. Although ﬁ ve more English colonial enter-

prises had failed by 1661, some settlers invariably stayed behind, with

the result that the island had more than 500 permanent residents living

in about 40 communities scattered along the eastern coast from Cape

Bonavista to Trepassey. By 1680 the population had risen to about

2,000 with the arrival of people from the West Country of England,

who came out as passengers on migratory ﬁ shing ships and decided to

stay. Potato famines in the 1720s and 1730s drove thousands of Irish

across the Atlantic to seek refuge in Newfoundland. Consequently, the

population of the island reached 10,000 by the middle of the 18th cen-

tury. But the determination of commercial ﬁ shing interests to restrict

settlement succeeded in keeping the population below 20,000 by end

of the century.

The growth of settlement eventually led to a modiﬁ cation of long-

standing imperial policy toward the government of Newfoundland

(Rothney 1964). Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, Britain

remained reluctant to promote organized government in Newfound-

land because it valued the island as a ﬁ shing station and a naval base

rather than as a colony. By the First Western Charter of 1634, the Eng-

lish government ofﬁ cially recognized the customary “ﬁ shing admiral

system” of administration by which the captain of the ﬁ rst ship in port

each spring had authority over the island, provided that he had the

arms and manpower to enforce his control. The inevitable problem

with this system was that the admirals stayed for only a few months of

the year and had varying interests and capacities when it came to main-

taining law and order. After contemplating the prospect of removing

the colonists, the English government passed the Newfoundland Act in

1699, afﬁ rming the rights and authority of the ﬁ shing admirals but

recognizing permanent settlement so long as it did not encroach upon

the domain of the migratory ﬁ shermen. Colonial administration

improved somewhat in 1729, when the imperial authorities appointed

the naval ofﬁ cer in charge of the convoy escorting the ﬁ shing ﬂ eet to

the island to serve as governor and commander in chief during the

summer months. The naval governor was responsible for appointing

resident justices of the peace to substitute for him during the winter.

That this naval regime lasted for nearly a century further reﬂ ected the

limited British commitment to the development of Newfoundland as a

colony (Innis 1978).

The deﬁ ciencies of law and order adversely affected not only the

English settlers but also the native Beothuk population of Newfound-

land. As the ﬁ shing industry and settlement extended along the eastern

and southern coasts, the Beothuk preferred to withdraw into the inte-

rior. Limited access to their long-standing coastal ﬁ shing and hunting

sites led to severe food shortages. Beothuk efforts to access these coastal

areas often resulted in violent clashes with the ﬁ shermen and settlers,

who felt unrestrained by legal sanctions. Those Beothuk who did not

fall victim to starvation and English brutality succumbed to tuberculo-

sis, resulting in the death of the last known Beothuk survivor in 1829.

Meanwhile, in the northwestern reaches of the North American con-

tinent, English rule was sustained by the Hudson’s Bay Company. The

founding charter of 1670 granted company control over all lands drain-

ing into Hudson Bay, a vast domain called Rupert’s Land whose limits

were unknown at the time but which actually included much of the

western prairie and northern subarctic regions. The company was

interested only in maintaining its fur-trading monopoly, and thus it

made no effort to settle the barren lands around Hudson Bay. Unlike its

St. Lawrence and Hudson River rivals to the south, the company did

not have to worry about encroaching settlement or unlicensed private

traders. Even when French traders sought to invade company domain,

they faced a perilous and costly overland voyage from Montreal to Hud-

son Bay and back before they could ship their furs to Paris via the St.

Lawrence River. By comparison, the Hudson’s Bay Company traders

beneﬁ ted from the shorter and more direct sea voyage to London and

ready access to cheaper and better quality English trade goods, which

the Native traders preferred.

The limited competition enabled the company to maintain a policy

of “sitting by the bay,” as Cree and Assiniboine middlemen brought

furs from the interior to the posts established at the mouths of rivers

emptying into Hudson Bay. Only twice in its ﬁ rst century of operation

THE CHALLENGE OF IMPERIAL RULE IN BRITISH NORTH AMERICA

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

did the company venture inland to reinforce its trade linkages with the

Native tribes in the face of French competition. Henry Kelsey became

the ﬁ rst European to reach the western prairies in 1690–91, while

Anthony Henday reached the foothills of the Rockies in 1754. After

each expedition, the company decided not to establish costly trading

posts in the interior. Consequently, Rupert’s Land remained unex-

plored and unoccupied until the arrival of the St. Lawrence traders in

the 1770s (Rich 1967; Ray 1974).

The British government took a more active interest in colonizing the

Province of Nova Scotia in hopes of overwhelming the French popula-

tion of Acadia. Accompanying the founding of the naval base at Halifax

in 1749 was the ﬁ rst systematic British effort to promote immigration

to Canada. Governor Edward Cornwallis brought about 2,000 immi-

grants from Britain and New England to settle in Halifax, and within

two years they were joined by some 1,500 “foreign Protestants,” mostly

of German origin, who settled in nearby Lunenburg.

After the expulsion of the Acadians in 1755, imperial authorities

launched a special campaign inviting loyal Protestants from New Eng-

land to claim the vacated French farmland around the Bay of Fundy. To

attract more New Englanders, Britain granted Nova Scotia an elected

assembly in 1758, the ﬁ rst ofﬁ cial representative government in Can-

ada. The result was a steady ﬂ ow of New England farmers and ﬁ sher-

men during the 1760s, with settlement focusing in the Annapolis

Valley, the Saint John River valley, the Isthmus of Chignecto, and the

southeastern mainland coast. In 1764 the British government allowed

Acadians to return, provided that they were dispersed throughout Nova

Scotia. Hundreds of them settled around the Bay of Chaleur on the

border between present-day Quebec and New Brunswick and along the

lower Saint John River valley. Among the British immigrants arriving in

the 1760s and 1770s were some 2,000 settlers from Ulster in Northern

Ireland and several hundred Scottish Highlanders who, displaced by

the enclosure movement at home, acquired land on Cape Breton Island

and the new colony of St. John’s Island.

Formerly the French colony of Île-St-Jean, St. John’s Island (later

Prince Edward Island) had been ceded to Britain by the Treaty of Paris

in 1763. In 1767 the British government had granted all of the land on

the island to 67 military ofﬁ cers and other Crown favorites on the con-

dition that they settle their 20,000-acre holdings. Most of these land-

lords remained absentees who neglected to fulﬁ ll their colonizing

obligations. The establishment of the island as a separate colony in

1769 and the granting of representative government in 1773 only

served to protect the interests of the absentee landlords. As a result, the

colony continued to struggle with vast areas of undeveloped land as

absentee landlords refused to sell their land or to grant titles to those

who attempted to settle on their own initiative.

Maritime settlement continued to focus on peninsular Nova Scotia,

which on the eve of the American Revolution had a population

approaching 20,000, the majority of whom were New Englanders.

However, the northward ﬂ ow of American migration had subsided by

the end of the 1760s in the wake of the opening of the Ohio-Mississippi

Valley to settlement. A constant impediment to Maritime development

would be a limited agricultural potential that rendered the region much

less attractive to settlers than the vast, fertile western interior frontier

(MacNutt 1965).

Conquest and Conciliation in the

British Province of Quebec

While the Maritime Provinces were being populated predominantly by

English-speaking people and governed by representative institutions,

the conquered French colony along the St. Lawrence River was evolv-

ing in an uncertain and unique direction. The fall of New France pre-

sented British imperial authorities with the awkward responsibility of

ruling over the subjects of its traditional European rival and the great-

est threat to its growing North American empire. In the ﬁ nal analysis,

the controlled response of both conquerors and conquered at this criti-

cal turning point in North American history lay the foundation for the

bicultural character of the future Canadian nation (Neatby 1968).

When British commander in chief General Jeffrey Amherst pro-

claimed on September 22, 1760, that the conquered colony in the St.

Lawrence Valley would be ruled by the occupying military forces, the

French-speaking population of scarcely 65,000 had ample reason to be

fearful about the prospects of cultural survival within an English-speak-

ing American empire of more than 1.5 million people. Not only was the

memory of the Acadian expulsion still vivid, but the ravages of war had

taken their toll on the struggling French colony. Much of the town of

Quebec lay in ruins, and many of the farms in the surrounding country-

side had been devastated by the invaders. Commerce, notably the fur

trade, suffered from the severance of economic ties with France, while

agriculture had been neglected to the extent that seed was lacking for

the next harvest. The hasty retreat to France of some 2,000 members of

the colonial elite, including royal administrators, military ofﬁ cers, and

THE CHALLENGE OF IMPERIAL RULE IN BRITISH NORTH AMERICA

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

the leading merchants and landholders, cast an ominous shadow over

the future development of the Canadien community (Brunet 1963).

Even more precarious was the future of the Catholic Church in the

wake of the death of the bishop of Quebec, Henri-Marie de Pontbriand,

three months prior to the fall of New France. Without the appointment

of a successor, new clergy could not be ordained; and the fact that the

Catholic Church had been outlawed in Britain meant that it could no

longer count on ﬁ nancial and legal support from the government. Cer-

tainly the refusal of the military rulers to guarantee the survival of

French laws, customs, and institutions under the terms of surrender

posed an imminent threat to Canadien society.

However, initial prospects did not conform to eventual reality. The

interim military regime maintained the traditional administrative divi-

sion of the colony into the three districts of Quebec, Trois-Rivières, and

Montreal, each headed by a military governor responsible to General

Amherst, who was headquartered in New York. The terms of surrender

offered transportation to France within 18 months for the relatively few

who wanted to leave, while the majority who chose to stay were guar-

anteed the free exercise of their Catholic religion and the security of

their property rights. Furthermore, the governors—General James

Murray in Quebec, General Ralph Burton in Trois-Rivières, and Gen-

eral Thomas Gage in Montreal—did not disturb the seigneurial system,

nor did they interfere with the collection of the church tithe. Although

judicial power rested with the military courts, they drew on the prece-

dents of the French regime and relied on French clerks and attorneys,

in addition to using the captains of militia as local magistrates. More-

over, the presence of British troops as a cash-paying market for local

products and services stimulated a revival of economic life. Within a

year, the military governors had restored agriculture, stabilized cur-

rency, and regulated supplies and prices.

The moderation and tolerance of the British military regime was a

pragmatic response to the prevailing uncertainty over both the progress

of the continuing war in Europe and the ultimate fate of the colony.

Accordingly, the chief concern of the interim administrators was to

avoid institutional change or interference with the normal way of life to

an extent that would make their task of governing the overwhelming

Canadien majority more difﬁ cult. Furthermore, unlike the situation in

the much smaller colony of Acadia, there was no nearby French base to

provoke popular resistance to the British conquerors. The transfer of

power and the process of readjustment were rendered easier by the

willingness of the Canadiens to accept the circumstances under which

they had to persevere. Tired of the turmoil of recurring warfare, people

were chieﬂ y concerned with a speedy and permanent return to a nor-

mal, peaceful life. The vast majority of farmers, small merchants, sei-

gneurs, and clergy had never been to France and thus preferred to

remain in the land of their birth. Any feelings that they might harbor

for France were more likely based on resentment of the imperial pow-

er’s apparent abandonment of the colony and the indifference of the

metropolitan population to the fall of New France.

Indeed, France’s disinterest in its North American empire was con-

ﬁ rmed in the ﬁ nal negotiations leading to the Treaty of Paris, which

formally ended the Seven Years’ War in February 1763. The unﬂ atter-

ing fact was that, in dividing up the spoils of war, both France and

Britain preferred the tiny West Indian sugar island of Guadeloupe

over the vast territory of Canada, whose resource value was consid-

ered to be limited to the fur trade. In the ﬁ nal analysis, Britain chose

to retain Canada for strategic reasons. Not only would keeping Can-

ada remove the threat of France from North America, but also the

colony along the St. Lawrence River could serve as a convenient mili-

tary base in the event that the rumblings of political discontent in the

thirteen colonies erupted into armed insurrection. Thus, by the terms

of the Treaty of Paris, France gave up all claims to North America,

including transferring Louisiana to Spain and Île-St-Jean to Britain, in

return for being allowed to maintain the islands of St. Pierre and

Miquelon as unfortiﬁ ed ﬁ shing stations off the southeastern coast of

Newfoundland.

But before it could implement a plan to replace military rule with

civilian government in the St. Lawrence colony, Britain had to deal with

the growing unrest led by Pontiac, the Ottawa chief from the Detroit

region, who by May 1763 had organized a powerful alliance of western

tribes to resist encroaching English settlement in the upper Mississippi

and Ohio River valleys. The western tribes were also upset with the

English policy of negotiating treaties or outright purchases for Native

land, in contrast to the French practice of making annual payments of

ammunition and gifts in exchange for fur-trading rights. Hopeful of

reviving its alliance with the French, Pontiac’s confederacy attacked

British garrisons and frontier settlements and succeeded in capturing

every post west of Niagara, with the exception of Detroit. Nevertheless,

with the growing realization that French military support was not

forthcoming and with the revival of traditional intertribal rivalries,

Pontiac’s confederacy disintegrated and was eventually crushed by Brit-

ish military expeditions by late 1764.

THE CHALLENGE OF IMPERIAL RULE IN BRITISH NORTH AMERICA

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

Pontiac’s uprising signiﬁ cantly inﬂ uenced evolving British policy for

governing the new British province of Quebec established by a royal

proclamation issued in October 1763. To pacify the western tribes, the

proclamation prohibited settlement of the land west of the Allegheny

Mountains and restricted trade in the interior only to licensed traders.

The justiﬁ cation for this early British recognition of aboriginal rights

was that land for settlement was abundantly available to the north of

the thirteen colonies, in Nova Scotia and Quebec. Without a substantial

British military presence in the interior, however, this policy was unen-

forceable as thousands of deﬁ ant settlers, speculators, and traders from

the thirteen colonies continued to trek across the Appalachian Moun-

tains in search of fertile land and new business opportunities in the

Ohio-Mississippi Valley. Indeed, this attempted restriction of American

enterprise contributed to the growing resentment toward British impe-

rial policies that would lead to rebellion a little over a decade later.

The Proclamation of 1763 assumed that the French Catholics of

Quebec would inevitably be assimilated by a massive inﬂ ux of English

Protestants from the south. To that end, the ﬁ rst constitution of Canada

under British rule promised “the enjoyment of the beneﬁ t of the laws

of our realm of England,” including representative institutions to which

American colonists had become accustomed. However, the anticipated

northward migration did not materialize, as the St. Lawrence Valley

proved less enticing than the Ohio-Mississippi Valley. Only a few hun-

dred merchants from Britain and the thirteen colonies were attracted to

Quebec, initially by the opportunity to supply the needs of the invading

army and eventually to ﬁ ll the void left by the departing French fur

traders. In effect, the so-called Conquest transferred Canada’s commer-

cial dependence from Paris to London, with the result that English-

speaking merchants were better connected to assume economic

leadership in Quebec than were their remaining French counterparts.

The rise of an English commercial elite to a position of dominance

would henceforth be a source of recurring conﬂ ict in Quebec politics

and society (Miquelon 1977).

After the military regime ofﬁ cially gave way to civil government in

August 1764, the ﬁ rst governor of Quebec, General James Murray,

sought to minimize potential cultural conﬂ ict by modifying the terms

of the Proclamation that he considered to be inapplicable to the exist-

ing situation. Appointed by the British Crown, the governor was to rule

the province with the assistance of an appointed legislative council

until an elected assembly could be established. However, because the

laws of England speciﬁ cally prohibited Catholics from holding ofﬁ ce,

Governor Murray had difﬁ culty ﬁ nding enough qualiﬁ ed people to

serve in his administration. He was particularly reluctant to establish an

elected assembly in which fewer than 500 English Protestants would

control the destiny of well over 70,000 French Catholics. Murray soon

THE CHALLENGE OF IMPERIAL RULE IN BRITISH NORTH AMERICA