by Conrad Black
It was a lengthy and tortuous process, and Carleton appeared repeatedly before committees of both houses of Parliament to be interrogated by the prime minister, Lord North, and others. He made a powerful impression. The Quebec Act was presented in the House of Lords on May 17, 1774. It declared that Canada included territory that was inhabited by significant numbers of Virginians and Pennsylvanians and was coveted by more, and was certain to add to American grievances. Everything to the west, an almost uncharted vastness, was assigned to Canada. This part of the act was a manifestation of the heavy-handed insensitivity that had contributed so much already to the rancour of the Americans. The Roman Catholic Church was accorded full freedom, including in its ability to collect money from the faithful, not with the weight of taxation but with all moral and social suasion short of that. English criminal law was confirmed and Quebec civil law was maintained, with full rights of practice and evidence in French. The knotty issue of an assembly, which Quebec had never had and was not clamouring for, was ducked, and authority was vested in a governor with an executive and legislative council of from seventeen to twenty-three members. The Quebec Act was adopted by both houses, though Pitt, now Earl of Chatham, voted against, as he considered it provoking to the Americans.
The Quebec Act did elicit some entertaining responses from the Americans. The liberality accorded the Roman Catholic Church was furiously attacked by the dissident Americans, who reviled Roman Catholicism as “a religion which had flooded England with blood, and had spread hypocrisy, murder, persecution, and revolt into all parts of the world.”14 The nascent Continental Congress heard without notable dissent the characterization of Roman Catholicism as a “bloodthirsty, idolatrous, and hypocritical creed.”15 The American malcontents in their polemical zeal became almost febrile in their simultaneous abhorrence of French Canada’s religion and their solicitude for the French Canadians, and in their rage against the seigneurial system – unaware that it was retained, with liberal modifications, at the request of all the French, landholders and tenants – and the general withholding of juries – which was again at the request of the Québécois, because of the expense of the system and doubtful judicious qualifications of the likely jurors. In a general address of the American congressional delegates to the French Canadians, Quebec was told “in elaborate and bombastic periods what they ought to do, and what they ought to want, in order to become good Englishmen, and [that] they ought to be profoundly miserable, and that their brethren of the other provinces (who had never before in history had a good word for them) were grievously moved at their degradation.”16 This address also reminded the French of their small numbers and told them to choose whether they would be considered by the rest of the continent as friends or “inveterate enemies.”
This incendiary but somewhat incoherent document was translated, printed, and posted throughout the former New France by American agitators among the English-speaking population of Quebec, including the discountenanced Magistrate Walker of the brutalized ear. There is no evidence of what impact it had on the public, and there was little visible unrest, but the clergy almost unanimously condemned the agitation as xenophobic sectarian hate-mongering and a self-serving American call to bloodshed for no possible satisfactory end for Quebec. Whatever the merits of American complaints against the British, this was a fair description of their attempted seduction of the French Canadians. The ecclesiastical leadership sarcastically referred to the implausibility of any solicitude from the Americans, French Canada’s most relentless enemy for 150 years. Within two years, the Americans would be holding themselves out as the beacon of liberty and toleration for the whole world, and never, in fact, countenanced official religious discrimination. Had they been able to assume more quickly that ideal in their overture to Quebec, it would have been more acceptable. The French Canadians, as long as the British were treating them well, were unlikely to succumb to any American blandishments, out of fear of cultural assimilation. But they owed entirely to the Roman Catholic Church the provision of education and health care, and, accordingly, the survival of the race on the rugged shore of the St. Lawrence. Quebec was wholly and fervently Roman Catholic; the diocese was sufficiently small, sixty-five thousand or so, that the bishop was able, in the course of a year, to visit every parish, and almost the entire population of adult communicants annually knelt individually before him and kissed his ring in symbolic submission. Such a bond had been earned and not much abused, and would not be sundered overnight by American pamphleteers denouncing Rome as a prostitute and a bloodsucker.
The British, who had so mismanaged their relations with their American relatives, had handled the much less comprehensible, if infinitely less demonstrative, French Canadians with civility and even genius, though, as has become the Canadian custom, Carleton’s achievement has been largely underestimated.17 North America was on the brink of a volcanic eruption, but the chances of a distinct entity in the northern part of the continent had taken another turn for the better; the French character of Canada would be preserved, but instead of being under mortal threat from the British, it enjoyed that country’s determined protection against Quebec’s old enemies in New England and New York. It was not clear what could be made of Quebec and the maritime colonies, but as Governor Guy Carleton returned to Quebec in the summer of 1774, the chances were good that something novel and durable and interesting could come of them. Nothing seemed certain, so all was possible.
3. The American Revolutionary War, 1774–1783
Events in America deteriorated swiftly after the Boston Tea Party. The British Parliament revoked the Charter of Massachusetts Bay, substituted a military government, and purported to shut down Boston Harbor until the value of the tea that had been destroyed was repaid. Thomas Jefferson drafted a resolution condemning the Intolerable Acts, as the Americans have called them ever since (even the British called them the Coercive Acts), but the awkward governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, vetoed it, and when Jefferson (although at his most pious a deist) adopted another resolution calling for a day of “fasting and prayer” for the Boston protesters, Dunmore dissolved the Virginia legislature, the House of Burgesses. The legislators repaired to the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, and adopted a resolution calling for, in an early manifestation of the American genius for grandiose labelling, a “continental congress” to meet at Philadelphia and organize resistance to British rule. At this point, Jefferson was a raving pamphleteer. He wrote guidelines for the Virginia delegation at the congress that were rejected as too incendiary but were published, including in London, as “A Summary View of the Rights of British America.” Jefferson reasonably claimed for the colonists all the rights of free-born Englishmen, but started to veer off from realities with the claims that the colonists had been “unaided” by the Mother Country and were treated by Britain as conquered people, and he ignored entirely discussion of whether the British were entitled to any compensation from the Americans for expelling the French18 from Canada for them. Jefferson even devised a pure fiction about pre–Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxon respect for human rights to which Americans were entitled. It was almost entirely moonshine, but it showed how far things had deteriorated in just eleven years since the end of the Seven Years War if even an apostle of the Age of Reason such as the Sage of Monticello could be the author of such a turgid and contorted fairy tale.
The Continental Congress met in the autumn of 1774, called for a complete boycott of British goods, and adjourned until May 1775. Franklin, in London right to the end, did his best with the British government, with the overt assistance of Chatham. Chatham spoke in the House of Lords on January 20, 1775, supporting the Continental Congress’s resolutions and praising Franklin. Nine days later, he presented a bill that would recognize the Continental Congress, restrict Parliament’s right to legislate for American trade, repeal most of the legislation of the last ten years pertaining to America, and require that any tax imposed in America be with American consent through their l
egislators. If adopted, this measure would have salvaged the relationship, but the ministry, representing the king and led by his most obsequious supporters, vituperatively rejected Chatham’s bill. This was the end; the die was cast, and Franklin left London a few weeks later, arriving in Philadelphia on May 5, 1775.
The war had already begun, on April 19, when the governor of Massachusetts, General Sir Thomas Gage, sent British redcoats to seize guns and munitions stored by the militia at Concord. Minutemen (Americans ready to fight at a minute’s notice) exchanged fire with them at Lexington and at Concord Bridge, outside Boston, and the British retreated back into that city without accomplishing their mission, which was designed to prevent an armed rebellion. (There has been an immense mythologization of these events. No one knows who fired the first “shot heard round the world,” and Paul Revere did not ride alone and never got to Concord, having been captured mid-ride by the British.)19
The Continental Congress reconvened shortly after Franklin’s return and professed to establish the Continental Army, composed of the Massachusetts militia and six other companies the representatives of the dissident colonies thought could be dispatched. On the motion of John Adams, a prominent Massachusetts lawyer, Colonel George Washington was drafted as commander of the new army (and endowed with the rank of general). The two sides met at Bunker Hill, adjacent to Boston, on June 17, 1775. The British held the field at the end, but lost half their force and three times as many casualties as the Americans (about 1,100 killed and wounded British) and retired into Boston, where Washington arrived after a month and imposed a professionally executed siege. The British withdrew by sea to Halifax, on March 17, 1776. On July 5, 1775, the Continental Congress sent King George III a final appeal, asking for his impartial adjudication of the differences between his British and American subjects. It was a reasonable document (which Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson all signed). On August 23, the king responded, condemning “the traitorous correspondence [and] counsels … of diverse wicked and desperate persons within this realm.”
In May 1775, Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys (from Vermont) had seized Ticonderoga and Crown Point (having commanded the former to “surrender in the name of the Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress”), and Benedict Arnold briefly occupied Saint-Jean, near Montreal. Arnold marched to Quebec, as the Royal Navy would make an amphibious assault impossible. It was a remarkable achievement, but Arnold had substantially underestimated the length of the march. Governor Guy Carleton was left to defend the colony with very puny forces. He had hoped to rally the Québécois with the Quebec Act to active support against the Americans and was disappointed. “The most ungratefullest wretches,” he ungenerously called them in a letter home,20 but at least they were benignly neutral, a feat his Quebec Act accomplished. Only a few hundred of them answered Washington or Franklin or Jefferson’s siren calls. Carleton had only the French-Canadian militia and the Indians, volunteers, and a corporal’s guard of British soldiers to work with. The militia, in emulation of the colonists to the south, elected their own officers, and Carleton, stiff Ulsterman though he was, rolled with the waves in order to have some sort of force with which to repel the Americans. Carleton remained in Montreal to supervise the defence of the most vulnerable point, but hurried to Quebec on the news of Arnold’s siege of that city in November, narrowly avoiding capture by the Americans by disguising himself as a civilian. He and the Americans under Arnold and General Richard Montgomery each had about 1,800 men, but the Americans had no artillery and were almost defenseless against the enclosing winter.
Arnold suffered many more desertions of Canadians than Carleton did, and when he attempted an assault on Quebec on December 31, he was beaten off. Montgomery was killed, and a quarter of the invading force was captured. Carleton treated the captured French Canadians generously, which further tilted the balance of local opinion. Arnold tried to maintain the siege through the winter in the hope of reinforcements, but these did not arrive before the relieving British ships came up the St. Lawrence to Quebec, arriving on May 5. Carleton had played a weak hand with great skill.
The American force collapsed and retreated, debilitated by famine and illness and soundly beaten in the field, but Carleton avoided trying to wipe them out. He knew they would not be back, did not want to embitter the families of 150 or so congressistes (followers of the Continental Congress) still with the Americans, and still hoped that the solidarity of the revolutionaries would shatter. It was, again, almost certainly the correct command decision, as a full-blooded chase would not have influenced the outcome in the main theatre and would only have envenomed the Americans against the Canadians. The players and allegiances had changed, but it was another brilliant defence of Canada, worthy of Champlain or Frontenac or Montcalm.
The Americans were also repulsed in Nova Scotia, in November 1776, and never generated the strength to overcome the ability of the Royal Navy operating from Halifax to deliver amphibious attacks in the rear and flanks of the modest forces available for the invasion. By retaining military rule, and then government by a “privy council” derived from the legislative council, Carleton retained former governor Murray’s pro-French administration, which was made more explicable by the questionable loyalties of some of the English Montreal merchants recently arrived from the now disaffected southern colonies. Carleton continued to prove as judicious a governor as he was resourceful a soldier.
It has suited the convenience of both sides to consider the Americans to have been a tiny knot of rustic malcontents, the British in their snobbery and the Americans in pursuit of the heroic stature of their national founders as underdogs. In fact, the Americans were now almost 30 per cent of the population of the home islands, and the richest British population in the world. America had 60 per cent of the population of Frederick the Great’s Prussia, and was more populous than the Netherlands or Sweden. The British did not have a large army and were facing the suppression of an overseas revolt by a population that could easily attract the sympathy of the underpaid British soldiers in what was, in a sense, a civil war. It is generally estimated that about a third of the Americans were not in favour of the revolt, but an approximately equal percentage of British public opinion did not favour the king’s policy either, and that dissident minority was more likely to grow than were the anti-revolutionary Americans. As is well known now, suppression of guerrilla wars that have general popular support requires almost as many soldiers as the adult civil population it is desired to suppress, unless the asserting power is prepared to slaughter civilians in blood-baths of the innocent. In this case, both the manpower required and the only tactic for mitigating the requirement were completely out of the question. Franklin knew Britain well and was confident that the British were dependent on an utterly delusional confidence in the loyalty of the American population, apart from, as they imagined, a few troublemakers, and that they had no idea of what could really be involved in defeating the rebels. He thought Britain’s enthusiasm for the conflict would erode fairly quickly. Washington had known well the military and civil authorities the British had sent out to America in the preceding twenty years, and except for the leaders of Pitt’s great offensives of 1758 to 1760, they were almost uniformly hopeless. Washington also knew that the present British government would not be remotely as competent as Pitt had been in choosing and equipping their commanders. The third key leader of the American Revolution was Jefferson, who knew nothing of war and not much at this point of diplomacy, but recognized the possibility of uplifting colonial opinion, demoralizing and confusing British opinion, and electrifying the world by claiming that what was afoot, far from being the unseemly dispute over taxes that it largely was, was the dawn of human liberty.
The Continental Congress narrowly passed a resolution requiring the colonies to suppress British government within their borders and struck a committee headed by Jefferson to write a declaration of independence. He did so over three weeks in the Philadelphia boarding house he l
ived in during the session of the Congress, and accepted light amendments from Franklin and John Adams. Jefferson presented his draft on June 28, and it was adopted and signed on July 4 (though at first only by John Hancock and Charles Thomson, president and secretary of the Congress). The Declaration of Independence had three elements: the new regime in America was portrayed as the vanguard of the Age of Reason of Locke and Rousseau and Voltaire. George III was demonized as a Caligulan tyrant, and the American native people were subjected to a blood libel as barbarous and irredeemable savages, conferring on Americans the civilizing duty to dispossess them of the vast continent. Poor old George III was arraigned for having “plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns and destroyed the lives of our people” and for “Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages.” Even allowing for the contentious times, Goebbels would scarcely have chinned himself on this orgy of hyperbole.
The first purpose, and the only one that has long survived, was bannered at the beginning and the end: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” These words, and the conclusion, pledging everything including “our sacred Honor” to fight for the achievement of independence, have enjoyed an immense historical resonance, both for their eloquence and their historical significance. But they are a bit rich considering that this was not a conflict that significantly changed the civil rights of those in revolt or raised them above the British people from whom they were separating themselves, and that the revolution was largely carried out by slaveholders (including Washington and Jefferson). There were almost no slaves in Britain, and only about three thousand in Canada, and the debates on these American issues in the British Parliament, where the opposition was led by Chatham, Edmund Burke, and Charles James Fox, were considerably more rigorous and just as free-wheeling as those in the fledgling American Congress.
