Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  If the king had had the remotest notion of how to govern, he would not have had to call the Estates General. If he’d had any political acumen, he could easily have set himself at the head of the Reformers as the indispensable man. If he had even managed his flight sensibly, he would have survived, rather than being publicly executed on the guillotine, as was his wife, and could have returned to Paris and to office, as his brothers did, in the baggage train of the Duke of Wellington’s army. France would delight, awe, and inspire the world in many fields in the centuries to come, but after the supreme climax of its war-making in the conflict that that had now started, it would oscillate between claiming the torch of egalitarian liberty and the holy sepulchre of Gallican Catholicism and authoritarian monarchy. It would never be altogether plausible in either role. And despite the defection of the Americans, the British strategy of naval and Imperial paramountcy while gaming the alliance system in Europe would outdistance the French rival. In its enervation and instability, France would, within the lifetimes of people born as the French Revolution began, lose the ability to keep Germany divided and eventually be overshadowed and on two occasions militarily defeated by Germany, which in the twentieth century would become so powerful and aggressive it would unite the French, British, Russians, and Americans in successful opposition to it.

  The American and French revolutions opened an era of intensified intercontinental great power rivalry, ideological fermentation, and Anglo-Saxon pre-eminence, with allies, and at intervals subject to rending struggles. Quebec would emerge as the second most important French population in the world, and after the French Revolution would be little subject to French influence for the next 175 years. French Canada was now increasingly alone but imperishably robust, as it and its accidental English-speaking compatriots struggled to make enough out of Canada to justify British protection of it from the ravening Americans, who installed General George Washington as their first president in 1789, an office he would discharge with great integrity and foresight. If the pieces of Canada could follow a path between the British and Americans, while maintaining a community of interest between the French and British within, a country could take hold and play a role in the mature phase of the world drama that opened both ominously and hopefully in the revolutions of the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

  The retention of the forts along and near the Great Lakes rankled with the Americans, as did the British and Canadian incitements to the Indians to maintain relations with them while avoiding serious provocations of the Americans. The Indians had grown accustomed to and adept at playing the Americans, British, and French against one another, and viewed with concern the narrowing of their options and the inexorable approach of the American civil population, which was starting to come across the Appalachian Mountains in significant numbers, preceded by astute land speculators, in particular George Washington (who became one of the wealthiest people in the new republic thereby, though he declined a salary as president; his out-of-pocket expenses only were paid). The British, with considerable dexterity, claimed they were holding the forts they had promised to hand over to the Americans, because the Americans had failed to compensate the Loyalists they had persecuted, financially and otherwise, who had removed largely to Canada. This was somewhat spurious, as the British perfectly well knew that the American side in the peace negotiations had only promised best efforts with the several states, and there was no agreed sanction for the expected outcome of no tangible compensation for the Loyalists, apart from what the British chose to provide.

  With this encouragement, the Indians tentatively subscribed to the British line that they had not sold out their Indian allies, and the pro-British faction of Indians along the Ohio River, led by Joseph Brant (a relatively worldly native who visited Britain in 1785–1786), set itself up with tacit British support, as a buffer zone between Canada and the United States, and tried to hold the area between the Ohio and the Great Lakes. They even defeated American general Arthur St. Clair when he led a force across the Ohio in 1791. In 1768, in the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the British had conceded the native people the land between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes, and in the Treaty of Paris in 1783 they conceded the same territory to the Americans. They probably could not have achieved “Indian” approval of their settlement with the American revolutionaries, but “they might have done better than the surrender of land that was not theirs.”22 It somewhat prefigured Palestine 140 years later, when the British promised the same territory to the Jews and the Arabs, except that the correlation of forces was not so one-sided as it was on the Ohio, and sorting it out has been an even longer and bloodier process.

  The fur trade directed from Montreal prospered, as the Americans had unsophisticated operators in this field for a time (it had been occupied by French and British and Canadians), and because explorers financed by the Montreal merchants, led by Peter Pond and Alexander Mackenzie, had explored due west, building on the work of La Vérendrye, well in advance of American exploration to the south. Mackenzie (1764–1820), had emigrated with his family to New York from Scotland in 1774, and escaped the Revolutionary War, which his father fought through in the British Army, by accompanying two aunts to Montreal in 1778. He was a member of Pond’s western exploration in 1787, discovered the great river now named after him in 1789 and followed it to the Arctic, and discovered the Peace and Fraser Rivers and went overland to the Pacific in 1793, ten years ahead of the comparable exploits of Lewis and Clark in the United States (and famously painted on the rocks “Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada by land, July 22, 1793.”) There was contemporary exploration of the Pacific coast by sea, by American Robert Gray, who discovered the mouth of the Columbia River in 1792, and by British captain George Vancouver, who charted along the coast of what are now the state of Washington and the province of British Columbia, from 1792 to 1794. Mackenzie had been bankrolled by the North West Company, which was much more adventurous than the Hudson’s Bay Company, still largely preoccupied with trading through the bay that gave the company its name. “In the fur trade, as later in lumbering and other activities, the Scottish and French, as masters and men, formed an irresistible combination.”23 Mackenzie set up his own exploration venture, with independent backers, as did others, and the competition was fierce, and sometimes violent. This caused the passage in London of the Canada Jurisdiction Act of 1803, allocating jurisdiction over these disputes to Canadian courts. The North West Company’s David Thompson would explore and set up trading posts through the Rockies and to the mouth of the Columbia River from 1806 to 1811.

  5. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1812

  Issue was joined between Great Britain and the revolutionary government of France in 1793, in what would prove the last and greatest war between them. It was a war in which Napoleon would electrify the world and lead France to its highest point of influence and official glory and genius, before the combined forces of almost all of Europe drove him out. And after immense devastation and carnage, Pax Britannica would be established and maintained by British naval and financial power and cunning diplomacy, and confer a century of comparative peace on the world. The British stopped and detained American ships on the high seas but dutifully paid for confiscated cargo. They did not want another war with Washington’s America while Britain was in a death struggle with France. Washington had adopted the policy of maintaining an army of twenty thousand veterans in order to deter Britain from outrages on the high seas with the implicit threat of a takeover of Canada, and this policy was retained by his successor as president, the first vice president, John Adams of Boston. This policy successfully deterred the British from overplaying its oceanic supremacy through the three terms of the first two presidents, from 1789 to 1801. The British were sufficiently concerned to avoid another conflict with the Americans that they received constructively a mission from the talented diplomat and first (and then current) chief justice of the United States, Benjamin Franklin’s former understudy, Jo
hn Jay. (Franklin had died in 1790, aged eighty-four, having helped produce the Constitution under his chairmanship of the Constitutional Convention. Though Franklin was not a conventionally religious man, every clergyman in Philadelphia of every denomination, and almost all the adult population of the city, followed him to his burial place.) Jay’s mission signalled in advance the end of non-compliance by Britain with the peace treaty of 1783. There has been some criticism of the British for not holding out for a more southerly border for the independent colonies, but given that the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes were the boundary established by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and considering the narrow margin of survival of any non-American jurisdiction in the northern part of the continent, and the correlation of demographic and other forces that was almost certain to emerge, the British reserved as much as they could possibly defend.24

  The treaty that resulted from the conversations between Jay and Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Grenville, known as Jay’s Treaty, was signed on November 19, 1794, and was ratified by both countries. The British vacated the posts and forts in the northwest up to the Great Lakes and Lake of the Woods, by June 1796. Indian grievances were not directly addressed, leaving the Americans a free hand to deal with the Indians as heavy-handedly as they wished, with little doubt or concern over the result. An American force under General Anthony Wayne defeated the incumbent western Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, and in 1795 the Indians signed the Treaty of Greenville, by which the territory that in 1803 became the state of Ohio was evacuated by the Indians and yielded up to “the weight of the American frontier, swarming, restless, and ruthless.”25 The British had ended the practice of seizing American sailors as alleged deserters, but compensation for this practice was waived by the Americans in exchange for formal acceptance that the United States would not pay anything for the displaced Loyalists. The dispute about access to the British East and West Indian trade was resolved in a compromise: unrestricted access in the East and inward traffic in the West Indies up to seventy tons per vessel, but no American export from the British West Indies of cotton, molasses, sugar, or other staples. Trade was upgraded to a most-favoured-nation reciprocal basis, and joint commissions would deal with a Maine–New Brunswick border dispute, pre-revolutionary debts, and compensation for illegal British seizures of American vessels.

  By this time, Thomas Jefferson had retired as the country’s first secretary of state (foreign minister), and although he avoided criticism of Washington personally, he was in a bitter battle with the Federalists (the political party led by treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton and Vice President John Adams). Jefferson and his chief associate, James Madison, denounced Jay’s Treaty over treatment of debts, inadequate concessions in access to the West Indies, and the British refusal to discuss return of fugitive slaves (this request from the chief authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, widely accepted, including by the bloodthirsty hordes of France now in revolt, as beacons of human liberty). The treaty was a good deal for both sides: it assured peace between them, freed Britain to face the French challenge without having to worry about Canada, and the commercial arrangements provided the United States an immense fiscal bonanza in tariff revenue that enabled it to reduce debt and maintain the army necessary to deter Britain from recourse to abuse of its naval supremacy at American expense. For Canada, it was the removal of the perpetual American threat (whether Canada had been governed by the French or the British), though, as it turned out, less durably than had been hoped.

  The hostilities between England and France during the French Revolutionary Wars had few consequences in Canada. The Maritime colonies were quite somnolent through the 1790s. Île Saint-Jean became Prince Edward Island in 1799. There was fairly steady immigration from the Scottish Highlands and Ireland, usually Roman Catholics, and the newcomers were generally relieved to be away from sectarian discrimination and on more fertile soil, and were not initially very active politically. In Lower and Upper Canada, political life was less serene. In the mid-1790s, there were about 150,000 people in Lower Canada, only about 10 per cent of them English, and perhaps 50,000, almost all English, in Upper Canada. There continued to be immigration from the United States to Upper Canada, and also immigration from the British Isles to this first inland British colony in the world.

  In Lower Canada (Quebec), there was naturally more interest in the French Revolutionary Wars than there was among English Canadians. One of Quebec’s secondary adventurers, Henry-Antoine Mézières (1771–1846), who had emigrated from France with his family and published some nationalist reflections in the Montreal Gazette (founded by Fleury Mesplet, who was always closely watched by the British governors as a loyalty risk), travelled to the United States and met with and fell at once under the influence of the minister of the French revolutionary government in Philadelphia, the bumptious “Citizen” Edmond-Charles Genêt (1763–1834). Genêt had arrived as minister in 1793 at Charleston and immediately began paying for French privateers to be serviced and refitted there and to prey from American ports on British shipping, despite American neutrality arrangements. He ignored warnings from Washington and Jefferson, threatened to go over their heads to the country, and his accreditation was revoked. The French government under Robespierre requested his return for trial and almost certain execution, but Washington granted him asylum. Genêt moved to New York and eventually married the daughter of the nine-term governor of that state and future vice president, George Clinton. Mézières published in 1793 the pamphlet “Les Français libres à leurs frères les Canadiens,” which assured the habitants that France had emancipated herself and would do the same for them. It did not resonate strongly, as most opinion in ultra-papist Quebec was outraged at the seizure of Church property in France and the extreme violence of the revolution under the Gironde, Georges Danton, and ultimately Robespierre.

  Following the Constitutional Act of 1791, Lower Canada elected a majority of French-Canadian legislators to that colony’s first Assembly. There were riots in 1794 against the colony’s Militia Act, and again in 1796 against the corvée, a seigneurial tax. The government was vigilant, and in the 1796 episode found and charged some of the agents the now Americanized Genêt had sent to Quebec. One, David McLane, was convicted of treason and hanged, drawn, and quartered in traditional French (and earlier English) manner. This had the desired effect of settling the atmosphere. Opinion stirred again at the appearance of a French squadron off Nova Scotia in 1797, but there was no real engagement and the squadron soon withdrew. Mézières moved between France and Quebec for the balance of his life, trying to popularize French views in the French-Canadian media, but he was generally more careful about incitements to rebellion than he had been when he published a few inflammatory pamphlets under Genêt’s influence.

  In the mid-1790s, forty-five émigré Roman Catholic priests arrived from France at Quebec, and the episcopal and secular leadership of the colony assured that they would fan out across French Canada and proselytize on the evils of the French Revolution. The French Canadians were certainly not enthused about being governed by the English, but nor did they have much nostalgia for the French. When it appeared that the revolution might raise the power and prestige of all the French in the world, they were happy to imagine themselves the beneficiaries of that. But the French Canadians knew they could not culturally survive American absorption without British protection, and generally made the best of it.

  After 1791, the Eastern Townships, immediately east of Montreal and north of the border of Vermont, were set aside from Crown land reserved for the Protestant clergy and generally used as country estates for the pleasure of the leaders of the English commercial and professional community in Lower Canada, and for small farm holdings for Loyalist settlers from the United States. An Anglican bishopric of Quebec was established in 1793, and the first occupant of it was Bishop Jacob Mountain. The last local member of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) died in 1800, and the land reser
ved by the French crown for the Jesuits was consigned in 1801 to the Royal Society for the Advancement of Learning. This was in fact an effort to Anglicize the French population through its children, but it foundered in the face of implacable French opposition and the intelligent refusal of the British to squander the one card that maintained the French Canadians voluntarily in the British Empire: that it protected them from cultural assimilation by the Americans. The Peace of Amiens in 1802, though it only lasted a year, cooled out whatever heat had been generated by the French Revolution. By this time, the First Republic had given way to the Directory, which had proved one of the most corrupt and licentious governments in world history, and the directors had been sent packing in 1799 by the thirty-year-old general who cleared the Austrians out of Italy and conquered Egypt, Napoleon Bonaparte, leader of the Consulate. Napoleon would soon prove one of the most compelling and talented leaders, as well as probably the greatest military commander in the history of the world, but the cult of Napoleon lacked both the exaltation of soul and idealistic promise of the early and unsullied revolution, and the legitimacy, of the latter Bourbons inflated though it was by false grandiosity and disserved as it was by pandemic incompetence and pig-headedness.