Rise to Greatness

by Conrad Black

  But Papineau committed the cardinal error of easing up to annexation. He completely overlooked the hypocrisies and enfeeblements of American republicanism, and like a credulous yokel (an attitude that would often afflict future French-Canadian nationalists) he was dazzled by America and drank the chalice of its mythos to the lees. “The period makes it easy to understand where Charles Dickens got the nonsense he put into the American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit.”6 America was a great and rising force that compelled the world’s attention, but it was a slaveholding country headed toward civil war, and as a policy assimilated culturally all arrivals who spoke any language except English. The United States was just twenty years from an election in which a party headed by Millard Fillmore, a former president, would take 22 per cent of the vote on a platform that would have effectively stopped immigration, banned Roman Catholics from public office, and required any newcomer to the country to wait twenty-one years before becoming a citizen.

  Papineau saw what he wanted to see, in Canada and elsewhere, and did not have a reliable compass of tactical judgment to see him through the storms that he was trying to intensify. Mackenzie was no better, but he did not possess the culture of Papineau, nor the responsibility of leading so distinctive and particular a people as the French Canadians. Papineau had passed through the Legislature a bill providing for popular participation in the selection of Roman Catholic Church wardens and in the review of parish accounts, and the clergy deserted him, almost en bloc. French-Canadian Catholicism was patriotic but authoritarian. And, in coming to the edge of armed revolt and annexationism, Papineau was bringing down on himself the Church’s implacable disapproval. The Church had never ceased to advance the French-Canadian interest, through the bishop of Quebec in the Executive Council and by providing practically all the social services the people of Quebec would have for over 250 years after Champlain raised the flag of France in the New World. Papineau was rushing into a personal cul-de-sac, yet could be an unwitting agent for precisely the moderate change that he had innocently begun by espousing. Mackenzie, in comparison, was a hothead; he had his uses but not the grandeur to bring down on himself as a public leader a personal tragedy in the manner of Papineau.

  Fortunately, more moderate and serviceable Reform leaders were starting to appear in both Canadas. Robert Baldwin, the son of an immigrant from Ulster, who became both a lawyer and a doctor, having started professional life as a schoolteacher, was born in York on May 12, 1804. He was taught by Archdeacon John Strachan at the latter’s Home District Grammar School. (This was succeeded by Colborne’s Upper Canada College as the city’s leading boys’ school, and the leading girls’ school, named after Bishop Strachan, was eventually set up just two blocks west of Upper Canada College.) Baldwin’s father, William Warren, had prospered, and his commodious house Spadina stood on the street of that name, on heights overlooking the town. (The preserved nineteenth-century house there now was substantially rebuilt on the Baldwin House.) Robert Baldwin was elected to the Upper Canada Legislature with the assistance of Mackenzie and the Reformers in 1829 and took the place vacated by John Beverley Robinson, the august head of the Family Compact, when he retired as attorney general to become chief justice of the Court of King’s Bench. Baldwin’s almost entire preoccupation was the attainment of responsible government. As a child, he had witnessed the American destruction of York, and while not anti-American, he was in favour of the British association, as long as Canada progressed as quickly as practical toward self-government, and his vision came to include close cooperation with democratic and culturally tolerant elements in Quebec.

  As the political climate thickened through the 1830s, Baldwin’s closest ally in the pursuit of responsible government was Francis Hincks, a southern Irish Protestant born in 1807, who came to Canada in 1830 after visiting Barbados and being persuaded by a visiting Montrealer of the merits of Canada. He travelled on from Montreal to York “by stage and schooner,” a voyage of ten days.7 After returning to Belfast to marry, Hincks came back to York and was one of the founders in 1832 of the Farmers’ Joint Stock Banking Company, but soon left it because of the involvement in it of the Family Compact, and was one of the founders of the Bank of the People. He became a close friend of Baldwin while a tenant of the elder Baldwin, and he became active in Reform politics while branching into the Mutual Assurance Company and setting up a warehousing business adjacent to his bank. He was appointed an official examiner of the Welland Canal in 1833 after budgetary overruns.

  Baldwin and Hincks and others were pursuing reform by moderate means, keeping civilized relations with the Tory royalists and Mackenzie and his followers, when one of the British Colonial Office’s more seriously infelicitous appointees, Francis Bond Head – a retired major and South American mine manager whose only public sector administrative experience had been as an assistant Poor Law commissioner – to his own “utter astonishment”8 took up his post as the lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada in January 1836. Even those who sent him told Head to conciliate the malcontents, and Joseph Hume assured Mackenzie that the new governor would be a reformer.9 Head took an immediate dislike to Mackenzie, whom he considered a “raving … madman”10 (an ungenerous but understandable impression), but offered positions on the Executive Council to Robert Baldwin, who impressed him, to Mackenzie’s ally Dr. John Rolph, and to the former receiver general John Henry Dunn. The Reformers at first declined, but then accepted. But when Head made it clear that he would not accept or compromise with what he called “the smooth-faced, insidious doctrine” of responsible government,11 the entire Executive Council resigned (even though Baldwin had made it clear that he did not share Papineau’s enthusiasm for an elected Legislative Council, only an Executive Council answerable and responsible to the Legislative Assembly). This was an inauspicious start to the term of someone who described himself as a “political physician”12 coming to heal the wounds of the province by his own skill.

  Two days after the resignation of the Executive Council, the Assembly overwhelmingly approved a motion calling for a responsible Executive Council and expressing no confidence in Head’s replacement of those who had resigned. Head publicly denounced the Reformers, including those whom he had just invested, as “disloyal Republicans who were bent on encouraging a foreign invasion”13 – that is, annexationists – which was untrue and unfounded. The Assembly voted the cessation of all funding for the government, and Head dissolved the House. Head plunged into the election campaign that followed, advising the secretary of war and colonies, Lord Glenelg (1778–1866), secretary from 1835 to 1839, that he was fighting “low-bred, antagonist democracy.” As Baldwin sailed to Britain to lobby the British government, Head wrote Glenelg that Baldwin was a revolutionary agent. As often happens, the forces of reaction were initially successful at spooking moderate opinion. The Methodists were afraid of being tarred with the brush of extremism, and kept their distance from the Reformers, while the Anglican establishment went all out for the governor’s supporters, with an eye on the Clergy Reserves. Glenelg, having heard from Head, refused even to see Baldwin, and on July 13, 1836, Baldwin wrote Glenelg a seminal letter that ranks as one of the great state papers in Canadian history. Baldwin unhistrionically outlined the condition of the province and wrote that the only, but full and sufficient, remedy was responsible government over all the internal affairs of the province.

  In Baldwin’s absence, the Reform movement organized the Constitutional Reform Society of Upper Canada with Baldwin’s father, Dr. William Baldwin, as its chief, Francis Hincks as its secretary, and a program of responsible government and the abolition of the Anglican rectories accorded by Colborne. (Colborne had been sacked, though retained as military commander, but his creation of the Anglican rectories with the Clergy Reserves had not been repealed.) Head and his partisans engaged in wholesale electoral “intimidation, violence, and fraud,”14 exploited the disposition of most people in a British colony to respond when the governor warns of revolution, republicanism
and mayhem, and won the election. He was unable to form a government that commanded the respect of the province or to get anything useful through the Assembly, and it became clear to those who had sent him that he was a bad choice. The Methodists defected from the governor, as he did nothing about Colborne’s favouritism to the Anglicans in the disposal of the Clergy Reserves, and Lord Russell’s belated Ten Resolutions (mad, and surprising from a distinguished liberal statesman and later a successful prime minister) discouraged and alienated the moderate Reformers, (though they showed admirable economy of words and rhetoric as a response to Papineau’s ninety-two turgid declamations). Russell proposed that the appointive Legislative Council represent all interests and that some members of the Assembly be included in the Executive Council, and that provincial patronage be more generally distributed.

  By this time, matters had reached the verge of combat in Lower Canada, and Head, in his mad overconfidence, sent all the regular troops in Toronto to Kingston to be able to intervene on Colborne’s orders against Papineau’s now apprehended uprising. Once Papineau understood that all he could expect was scornful silence from London, he raised the temperature again, with a session in the Assembly, on February 23 and 24, 1835, that rivalled the most wildly extreme tirades of the National Convention and National Assembly in France in 1792 to 1794. As Alfred De Celles remarked – though, unlike in the earlier debates in Paris, the lives of the speakers were not at stake – “The tragic side [of speakers being guillotined if they did not prevail among their colleagues] is lacking in the case of the [Lower Canada] Assembly, but in the perspective of the future, we have a glimpse of the executions of 1838.”15 Papineau completely shed the required impartiality of the Speaker of the House and accused Lord Aylmer (a rather inoffensive, if also ineffective, lieutenant-governor) of “slaughter” of the three people killed following the Montreal municipal election. Almost the only member of the Assembly who contradicted Papineau was Colonel Conrad Augustus Gugy, a bilingual Tory and a fearless, if somewhat unsubtle, man, who yet, speaking in his second language opposite a consummate orator, exasperated Papineau and drove the Speaker to even more stratospheric extremes than were already his custom. Gugy said, “After all is said and done, the whole thing is a mere hunt for offices, which positions are claimed without any attempt to inquire whether there are to be found a sufficient number of educated Canadians to fill them,” and likened Papineau to Danton and Robespierre.16 Aylmer rebuked the Assembly, and Papineau had his remarks expunged from the record and uttered a diatribe of his own. It was all getting beyond words; there was no legislation nor any point to the unceasing torrent of incivilities. Conditions were aggravated by a poor crop and depressed commerce.

  The Colonial Office, acting late, recalled Aylmer and replaced him with the conciliatory Lord Gosford (1776–1849), as both governor general and lieutenant-governor of Lower Canada, and as high commissioner (with Sir Charles Grey and Sir George Gipps) to inquire into the state of Lower Canada and recommend constructive solutions. Gosford conducted himself with exquisite and much appreciated tact and convened the provincial Parliament in October 1835 by prophetically touching on the pre-nascent raison d’être of the Canada of the future as “sprung from the two leading nations of the world.” Gosford was making some headway, and was very attentive and affable, but was suspected of tokenism. But in early 1836, perceptions were soured by the publication, in London, of his instructions to make no concessions on anything apart from the British American Land Company, which had seized a million acres of non-arable land for the benefit of doubtful friends of the regime deserving of patronage for reasons having nothing to do with the public interest.

  The prevarications of the British government were legitimately irritating to all Canadians. The Irish Nationalist leader, Daniel O’Connell, said, “If this is what you mean by justice, Canada will soon have no reason to be jealous of Ireland.… With a population three-fourths French Canadian, only one-fourth of the public offices is awarded to that element.” He also decried the presence of judges and other public officials on the Legislative Council.17 Gosford convened Lower Canada’s Parliament in October 1836 and said that the revelation of his instructions had been incomplete, that he had a broader and more constructive mission than just stonewalling calls for reform, and that his sole reason for bringing the legislators together was to vote supply (fund the government). Papineau declined to be moved, though in polite terms, and Gosford ended the session. At this point, Papineau undoubtedly represented most French Canadians, most of the Catholic Irish, and even some under-enfranchised English-speaking residents of the Eastern Townships.

  In Upper Canada, Francis Bond Head had grossly exceeded his office, been flagrantly partisan, led the achievement of an unjust election result, had delivered nothing to those he had cajoled, dragooned, or bribed with promises of official preferment for their support, and presided through a government that had little popular approval, over a discontented population, but one that had no thoughts of revolt against a constitutional British monarch. In Lower Canada, there was equivalent discontent, aggravated by offended ethnic sensibilities, but Papineau was on an express, self-issued, one-way ticket to oblivion. He was on the verge of taking up arms against the British Army, still led by the racist snob but fierce general and Waterloo veteran Colborne; the Roman Catholic Church, to which almost all French Canadians owed and proffered unswerving ultramontanist obedience; the English interests that dominated the commerce of Lower Canada; and the ragged but deep ranks of sensible, tenacious, French-Canadian petits bourgeois and farmers, who didn’t particularly care how Parliament was organized as long as their uncomplicated lives were not disturbed by state intrusion or over-burdensome taxation, and they had no complaints with the British government in those respects.

  The insolence of the British government in ignoring petitions, even Papineau’s abrasive screed; and in refusing to consider what they had, by 1837, effectively conceded to the British of the home islands; and which the Americans had taken by force more than fifty years before; and in sending to Canada more authoritarian military officers of no political aptitude rather than agents of constructive collaboration was annoying, but it reflected the inability of the British government to take Canada seriously. They were only there at all because the Americans had complained so noisily about France being in Quebec. That caused them to develop Halifax, begin the Maritime colonies, and evict the French. They had not given much thought to what to do with any of it when the Americans seized their independence, deluging Upper Canada with Loyalists to whom the British felt a commendable duty of help and protection. Between them all, they had resisted President Madison’s assault in 1812, a law-giver’s blundering simulation of a conqueror. And now, the Americans, for reasons of their own internal divisions and British power, were not a threat. The Canadians had nowhere to go and no ability to do much except complain, and dire threats of rebellion, and even, from the rabble-rousing French demagogue Papineau, to join the Americans, who were not interested, did not resonate in Whitehall or Westminster. Russell’s further curtailment of the powers of democratic government, because of the Assembly’s refusal to fund the government, was so galling, it could, eventually, have raised annexationist sentiment in Upper Canada, to which the Americans would respond.

  Canadian frustration was understandable and justified; so was British skepticism, but not British obstinacy and misplaced authoritarianism. As with the War of 1812, which Canada needed – to pull itself together, engender some collective pride and pan-Canadian interest, as long as Canada was not overrun – so an uprising was now needed. It would not and should not succeed, but it was necessary to establish Canada’s credentials as something more than a place of passive colonists subsisting on the American border, and to send London a message that Empire could not indefinitely be imposed as imperious arrogance alone, with no synchronization with the political rights of the people of Great Britain. Once again, luck was with the gestating Canadian project, and once again
, after so much foreboding and concern, the reality of rebellion was trivial, but adequate for the larger purpose of raising a national consciousness where there had been little of one, and in getting the more effective attention of the colonial power.

  Papineau responded to Russell on May 14, 1837, at Saint-Laurent: “The people should not and will not submit to them [Russell’s reactionary resolutions]. The people must transmit their just rights to their posterity even though it cost them their property and their lives to do so.” Not 1 per cent of Québécois would act on such a call, or risk anything to attain Papineau’s objectives, but it was enough to rouse the 1 per cent who would. The distinguished journalist Étienne Parent deserted Papineau and counselled moderation. Monsignor Lartigue, bishop of Montreal, urged caution in circulated notices read in all churches, in July and again in October, as did the bishops of Quebec and Trois-Rivières. At Saint-Charles, in October, a public meeting endorsed a boycott of British goods (as insane an enterprise as Jefferson’s and Madison’s efforts in the same direction earlier in the century, as Quebec had a trade surplus with Britain, but Papineau had no commercial aptitudes at all, Quebec’s commerce was largely in the hands of the English Quebeckers, and his call to boycott was ignored by almost everyone). There was now frequent street combat between the Doric Club (loyalist and moderate, though seekers of reform) and the Fils de la Liberté, modelled on Samuel Adams’s Sons of Liberty, who had perpetrated the Boston Tea Party sixty-four years before.