by Conrad Black
Kempt (1765–1854) had been all through the American Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, served in the Netherlands and Egypt, was quartermaster general of British North America (from 1807 to 1811), was a major general on the staff of the Duke of Wellington in Spain, and became a close friend of the duke, was a brigade commander in Upper Canada during the War of 1812, fought at Waterloo, and was a well-regarded and diplomatic lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia from 1820 to 1828. He was tapped by Wellington, then prime minister, and Huskisson for the very delicate task in Canada, after the Earl of Dalhousie (1770–1838), Kempt’s friend and mentor in colonial matters, was kicked upstairs to the military command in India. Kempt accepted the appointment with reluctance, as he liked Nova Scotia, and said that he would serve only two years. The Colonial Office was promoting, in all the Canadian colonies in the 1820s, the notion of control of the province’s money by the elected Assembly and appointed Legislative Council jointly, as long as the governors had civil lists which would assure the salaries and expenses of the executive officials for years in advance. Kempt and Dalhousie both warned that this would soon lead to the popular assemblies reaching for complete control over all finances and that the Crown would be resistless against such pressures. Dalhousie, in a larger and more difficult role, over both Canadas, made his point bluntly and engaged in an outright struggle with the Patriote party of Papineau in Lower Canada and the compulsively belligerent Mackenzie’s Reformers in Upper Canada. It had started to go horribly wrong when Dalhousie returned in 1826 after a year’s home leave in which his acting successor, Sir Francis Burton, had agreed a bill that put all official revenues, Crown and otherwise, in one public fund and voted a sum for the executive expenses of the government for a year. This was an accretion of legislative power in which Westminster reluctantly acquiesced and which Dalhousie tried to roll back when he returned. He vetoed a similar bill in 1826 and funded the government by an illegal appropriation of the province’s money.
Kempt recognized much more clearly than had Dalhousie that some concessions were going to have to be made by the Crown or the example of the dissentient Americans would become fashionable. He did not show his hand and met patiently and courteously with all factions and avoided controversial utterances, hoping that the select committee’s recommendations, which included empowering him to enact all the conclusions, would be approved by Parliament, or at least that he would receive straightforward direction from the home government. No such guidance was forthcoming, as Wellington’s Tories clung to office against the rising reform tide. When the Assembly of Lower Canada convened in November 1828, eighteen months after Dalhousie had uproariously prorogued it, Kempt devised a formula for confirming Papineau as Speaker without actually re-electing him, a proposal that had been vetoed by Dalhousie. It was an elegant and necessary climbdown, and on the strength of it Kempt accepted a measure similar to that of 1825, which did implicitly yield discretionary fiscal ground to the Assembly. (The chief justice, in his capacity as Speaker, had to cast a tie-breaking vote to get it through.) There was consternation in Westminster and a threat of disavowal, but more sensible views prevailed and Kempt’s suave compromise was accepted and repeated in 1830. In the meantime, Kempt had helped guide through both legislative houses of Lower Canada an expansion and redistribution of seats in the Assembly that gave representation to the English of the Eastern Townships but left them under-represented. A mixed criterion of population and geographic extent was used to produce the boundaries of the constituencies.
There was again a considerable flutter in London, but the cabinet, under Wellington’s direction, ratified the measure. Kempt allowed that “my Legislative Bodies are composed of such inflammable materials that I feel myself seated on a Barrel of Gunpowder not knowing from one moment to another how soon an explosion may take place.”33 He was relieved, when his promised retirement was accepted, to hand over his position to Lord Aylmer in October 1830. Kempt had only palliated matters in Lower Canada and had little impact on Upper Canada, and the British government continued to dither and failed to enact the recommendations of the select committee. Kempt went on to a successful term as master general of the ordnance, with a seat on the Privy Council and the rank of full general, and lived to see the start of the Crimean War but not the embarrassment of Wellington’s old army, dying at eighty-nine in 1854. His were the best days Canada would know politically for another fifteen years.
There were two essential problems. The first was that the government and the Legislative Council in Lower Canada were British, or dominated by the British, and the Assembly, like the majority of the population, was French, and though the Constitutional Act of 1791 had tried to replicate the British system of government, it could not adapt to that ethnic and cultural divide, which was also economic and sectarian. The second difficulty was that the governors in Canada had little patronage, and so they had only slight ability to influence the political tides and currents, unlike the royal party and the king’s friends in London. As Papineau stated, “The British had an aristocratic hierarchy that could not be replicated in the Canadas, “when everyone without exception lives and dies a democrat; because everyone owns property; because no one is more than a small property-owner.”34
Though Great Britain was fifteen years into its Pax Britannica, the home islands were convulsed in controversy over Catholic emancipation, an expansion of the franchise, and democratization of constituency sizes; Ireland was about to suffer a terrible famine; India was not stable; and Canada, the premier colonial effort that survived the American debacle, was almost in tumult over the failure to deliver democracy in a society that had a great many small farmers and petty bourgeois, but no peasants, compounded by the grievances of the well-treated but not equal French and the temptations posed by the rising power to the south.
Yet the future was hopeful. The Age of Reform was upon the West. The progressive Whigs and liberal Tories under prime ministers Grey, Peel, Russell, and eventually Disraeli were replacing the entrenched and sometimes reactionary Tories of the Liverpool and Wellington stripe. On the heels of the severities of twenty years of war, Britain endured the rigours of economic sluggishness followed by very swift and profound transition as the Industrial Revolution took hold, produced astounding productivity increases, and dislocated large numbers of workers and farmers as industry was mechanized and modernized. The sacrifices of war gave way to a demand for progress and prosperity. A crowd of about seventy-five thousand gathered at Manchester on August 16, 1819, to hear Henry “Orator” Hunt, a leading radical advocate of electoral reform, and local magistrates sent in the municipal yeomanry, supplemented by mounted hussars, causing the death of eleven civilians and the injury of hundreds in what became known, mockingly, as the Peterloo Massacre, after the exploits of the British cavalry at Waterloo. Great controversies and incidents arose, through to the transportation to Australia in 1834 of six trade unionists from the Dorset town of Tolpuddle imprisoned for administering “illegal oaths” for “seditious” purposes. They became known as the Tolpuddle Martyrs and were pardoned after two years.
With Britain wracked by such problems, it is little wonder that they were replicated to some degree in British North America, where industrial evolution was less advanced, and accumulated poverty less widespread and embittered, but racial and and cultural divisions were much more serious even than the perennial Irish problems, and the influence of the surly, vast, and intimate neighbour America greatly exceeded any concerns the British had about the disposition of the continental powers. In France, the Bourbons, who had returned to Paris in the wake of Wellington’s army – having, as Talleyrand remarked, “learned nothing and forgotten nothing” (which did not prevent him from serving them as foreign minister, as he had preceding regimes) – were sent packing once and for all in a comparatively bloodless revolution and replaced by France’s first constitutional monarchy, apart from a few months on the slippery slope to the guillotine of Louis XVI. King Louis Philippe, a supposedly ega
litarian king, would rule for the house of Orleans. (Talleyrand served as his ambassador to London.)*
Louis Philippe (1773–1850), a good and unpretentious man who had loyally fought in the revolutionary armies and been a Jacobin, but fled the Terror, in which his father was guillotined, was an adequate constitutional monarch, but he was not legitimate and not galvanizing, and was ground between the monarchists, the revenant Bonapartists, and the republicans, and departed after eighteen years, succeeded by a Bonapartist republic (a self-limiting transition that quickly became the Second Empire). France’s chronic instability and its oscillations between political systems and extraordinary personalities reduced its comparative influence and accentuated the corresponding inexorable rise of the Anglo-Saxon powers.
In the United States, a rough and ready self-made frontiersman, General Andrew Jackson, rode a popular wave in a broadening electorate and an ever westward-expanding country and became the seventh president, and the first who was neither a prosperous Boston lawyer nor a wealthy Virginia plantation owner. Jackson had killed many men, in war and in duels, and in summary executions, including two unoffending Englishmen (the unhappy Messrs. Arbuthnot and Ambrister) whom he apprehended in Florida in 1818 and accused of aiding America’s Cree and Seminole opponents. Jackson was tempestuous, an enthusiastic slave owner, and a warmonger, but also an important president and statesman. The Constitution of the United States attributed, for purposes of calculating the number of members of the Electoral College, which chose the president and vice president, and the membership of the House of Representatives, three-fifths of the slave population (about 15 per cent of the total American population). Thus the slave state voters, since slaves could not vote, had a larger relative influence than free state voters. This, and the fundamental moral problem of people owning other people, caused increasing difficulties in America, as the notion of slavery did in the advanced countries of Europe. Slavery was declared illegal in England in 1772, the slave trade was outlawed in the British Empire in 1807, and slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire in 1833. Slavery was abolished in France by the First Republic in 1794, restored partially by Napoleon in 1802, in one of his less felicitous initiatives, and was altered and restricted and finally abolished completely throughout the French empire in 1848.
But in the United States, it was a “fire bell in the night,” said Thomas Jefferson, author of the lapidary phrases about all men being created equal and such truths being self-evident. The South insisted on having the same number of states as there were in the North so that slave states would have equal representation in the United States Senate (where each state has two senators), even as the northern states expanded their populations more quickly. The northern states received most immigration, and there was only an economic reason for slavery in the South, where African and Caribbean workers were more productive in agriculture than Caucasians, being more adapted to tropical weather. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 restricted new slave states to south of the parallel 36°30′ (the Missouri–Arkansas border). But the problems of rounding up fugitive slaves and the demands for the protection of slavery by the South steadily rankled in the North, and by 1830 Jackson had had to threaten the military suppression of South Carolina and the trial and execution for treason of anyone (including his vice president, John C. Calhoun) who voted for a measure that would authorize the nullification of federal law within the state or prevent the collection of federal customs duties in that state. (When the governor of South Carolina, Robert Hayne, asked Senator Thomas Hart Benton if the president were not exaggerating, the senator replied, “I have known General Jackson a great many years and when he speaks of hanging, it is time to look for rope.”) In these circumstances, the United States was doubly unfit to challenge the British presence in Canada; it did not want its shoreline bombarded, did not wish the cost of the size of army that would be needed to prevail, and the South would no longer accept territorial acquisitions that added to the number of free states and people. For nearly a century, from the War of 1812 to the Spanish-American War, the only war the United States attempted that would add population and territory was the Mexican War, from 1846 to 1848, where the resulting additional states were equally divided between slave and free states. Canada would acquire a distinguished record accepting fugitive slaves.
While the American slavery crisis festered and Britain remained master of the seas, Canada was safe from the Americans as it had not been since Champlain founded Quebec more than two centuries before. Canada was not as isolated as it had been and was not immune to the same forces that affected these larger jurisdictions. British colonial governors were starting to be recruited among men of some administrative experience and not just stern and often francophobic veterans of the long struggle against Napoleon. To the extent that Britain could coherently embrace orderly reform and impart the same message through its colonial proconsuls, Canada’s prospects were good. The embryo of a Canadian identity was just discernible in retrospect in New France, a foundling after the Seven Years War, but it was the runner-up winner of the American Revolution because it acquired Britain as a defender against the Americans and a powerful infusion of Loyalist compatriots, and Canada came closest to winning the War of 1812. Canada was moving, even through these difficulties, to a more mature stage. Conditions were as Kempt described in his reference to a keg of gunpowder, but there was a chance of useful and not overly destructive combustion.
The War of 1812 had kindled in Whitehall the suspicion that something could be made of what was already Britain’s principal colony (India being a patchwork of alliances, arrangements, and suzerainties). The indecisive conclusion of the War of 1812 in fact made it decisive: the British would defend Canada, but did not wish to; the Americans couldn’t take the risk of attacking Canada; and no one wanted war. So, for the first time in their history, the inhabitants of what became Canada were quite secure. North America was no longer an individual player in the European minuet of the great powers, and the well-trampled invasion routes at Detroit, Niagara, and up and down Lake Champlain would henceforth be trod only by armies of tourists. As the Americans had manipulated the British against the French and the French against the British in order to gain their independence, the Canadians would have to be sufficiently desirable as a colony to assure that Great Britain deterred the Americans from their unquenched appetite to annex the northern half of their continent while they developed their own institutions and sought greater autonomy from the country on which they relied for protection. The scattered colonies had already endured sterner challenges.
People in Nova Scotia and Lower and Upper Canada were all doing well economically and thinking of what was to become of them politically. Few of them wanted to shelter as dependent colonies of the British Empire indefinitely, but most were not impressed with the jingo and swaggering temper of the Americans either. Independence was not at this stage an option: military protection could not be dispensed with, and the different colonies didn’t have an unlimited community of interest, not even a fully shared language.
There was no talk yet of bundling these Canadian colonies together in a single sovereign jurisdiction. But people were coming of age who would think in such terms. There was growth and fermentation in the Canadian colonies; they were increasingly valuable and self-sufficient. The embryo left by the French was an active subject of expectancy, straining to emerge. The magic thread stretching back over two hundred years from earliest Canadian times would not be severed, even by long odds, spasms of indifference, and rude events. Great trials, and opportunities, were almost at hand.
Robert Baldwin (1804–1858) and Louis Hippolyte LaFontaine (1807–1864), effectively co-leaders of the opposition in the United Province of Canada, 1840–1842 and 1843–1848, and co-premiers 1842–1843, 1848–1851, and the fathers of responsible government and democratic home rule in Ontario and Quebec. LaFontaine was chief justice of Lower Canada (Quebec) 1853–1864. Baldwin and LaFontaine began official political coop
eration between French and English Canadians and steered the disparate colonies with great perseverance and liberality toward bi-cultural nationhood.
* The French and Indian Wars in North America, the Third Silesian War in Prussia and Austria, the Pomeranian War in Sweden and Russia, and the Third Carnatic War in India.
* This was Pierre de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil-Cavagnial (1698–1778), governor of Louisiana from 1743 to 1753, and of New France from 1755 to 1760. He was born in Quebec, where his father, Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil (c. 1643–1725), had been the governor of New France from 1703 to 1725. Philippe’s grandson and Pierre’s nephew, Admiral Louis-Philippe de Vaudreuil (1724–1802), would be deputy commander of the French navy during the American Revolutionary War, in which he scored some important victories. It was a very distinguished Franco-Canadian family.
* After Laval, from 1674 to 1688, and Jean-Baptiste de La Croix de Chevrières de Saint-Vallier, from 1688 to 1727, Louis-François Duplessis de Mornay, from 1727 to 1733, and Pierre-Herman Dosquet, from 1733 to 1739.
* Cadore had replaced Maurice, Count de Talleyrand, who had retired because he was concerned that Napoleon’s judgment had become too erratic. Talleyrand would be back.
