by Conrad Black
Durham arrived in May 1838, lordly and distinguished, neither military spit and polish nor bush-league colonial routine, a viceroy of energy, style, and a liberal mind. He was high commissioner and governor-in-chief of the Canadas, as well as lieutenant-governor of Lower Canada. He reigned with greater grandeur and ceremony even than Frontenac nearly 150 years before, and through the British minister in Washington, Durham entered into direct discussions with the government of the United States. Durham visited the United States at Lewiston, near Niagara Falls, where he was well-received by a miscellaneous group of locals and vacationers. Durham dismissed the existing Executive Council and replaced it largely with members of his own entourage, which included the controversial Sir Thomas Turton (1790–1854) and the even more tempestuous Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796–1862). Wakefield had been a maximum-security messenger between kings, prime ministers, and military commanders during and just after the later Napoleonic Wars and a prominent supporter of colonization schemes in South Australia and New Zealand. He had spent three years in Newgate Prison for abducting an underage daughter of a wealthy man from her boarding school, and had been suspected of, though not charged with, perjury and forgery in the alleged alteration of his father-in-law’s will. Because of his checkered past, his appointment was informal, but gave explosive ammunition to the government’s opponents.
Durham, in his excessive self-assurance, dealt with dispatch with the leftovers of the rebellion but went beyond his jurisdiction and ignited partisan rivalry in the British Parliament. It was impossible to try the French-Canadian accused, because no jury in Lower Canada, nor probably any judge either, would convict, so he wrung confessions from nine of the prominent rebels, banished them to Bermuda, and pardoned everyone else. He declared Papineau and several of his co-rebels to be exiles for life, subject to execution if they returned. He had no authority to do anything of the kind, nor any right to require Bermuda to accept the banished rebels. The effect was benign in French Canada, where there was relief that there would be no general severity toward the colony, and where there was not unlimited sympathy for those who had led such a hare-brained and ill-starred revolt. The departure of Colborne was also greeted with general relief. When controversy arose in the British Parliament over Durham’s banishment of the nine confessed Lower Canada rebels to Bermuda, the former lord chancellor in Grey’s cabinet, Lord Brougham (1778–1868) – a famous maverick reformer who had been one of the leaders of the fight against slavery and had successfully defended Queen Caroline, the long-estranged and much-wronged wife of King George IV – turned against Melbourne and selected Durham as a vulnerable target. Melbourne, unwilling to condone the presence or require the dismissal of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, rather cravenly abandoned his high commissioner, conspicuously failed to accept the exiled rebels on behalf of the colony of Bermuda or approve Durham’s proclamation, and revoked his ordinance of pardon of most of the rebels. Durham, on October 9, 1838, issued a further proclamation stating that “if the peace of Lower Canada is to be again menaced, it is necessary that its government should be able to reckon on a more cordial and vigorous support at home than has been accorded to me.”24 The Times of London wrote that the high commissioner had become the “High Seditioner,” and the government recalled him. Durham had already felt that he had no option but to resign his commission (which he had technically exceeded), and did so, sailing for home before he was sacked and arriving in December 1838. Thus, the portentous incumbency of the “vain, sulky, and egocentric”25 Durham lasted less than six months and ended ludicrously, but it would long resonate. While at sea, Durham, Wakefield, Turton, and a couple of others wrote most of the Durham Report, which was to be one of the most important state papers in the history of Canada.
Also while Durham was at sea, a few hundred exiles and American sympathizers invaded Canada, proclaimed a republic in French Canada, and held out for five days of fairly heavy combat with British soldiers and Canadian militia at the Battle of the Windmill, near Prescott, Ontario, from November 12 to 16, though outnumbered seven to one by the British-Canadian attacking force. The leader of the invaders was a Finnish-Polish adventurer, Nils von Schoultz (1807–1838), and the defence of the colony was led by Henry Dundas (1801–1876), another globe-girdling British colonial soldier and grandson of Pitt the Younger’s home and war secretary and first lord of the Admiralty, Henry Dundas, the first Lord Melville (1742–1811). Von Schoultz was tried at Kingston and pleaded guilty, though he was advised against doing so by the legal adviser accorded him, the twenty-three-year-old Scottish-born Kingston lawyer John Alexander Macdonald, making his first appearance in this narrative, who would go on to be the greatest personality in nearly five centuries of Canadian history. Von Schoultz made an excellent impression on everyone, declared his guilt, and said that he had been misled into believing that Canada was being mistreated by the British, as his native Poland was by the Russians, and effectively stated that he deserved to be executed. He was duly convicted and hanged, an interesting and sympathetic but short-lived man of action and courage.
Durham had grasped a great deal during six months in the Canadas and was a perceptive observer and trenchant writer and editor (of the efforts of his collaborators). He ascribed the problems of the Canadian colonies to animosity between the English and French of the two Canadas, and the absence of responsible government, which Canadians rightfully considered to be as much owing to them as it had been owed to the citizens of Great Britain and the United States. He exposed, accurately and mercilessly, the racist pretentions and exploitive practices of much of Lower Canada’s English community. Durham proposed to cure both problems with a single stroke: a united Province of Canada governed on the principle of responsible government. “Without a change in our system of government, the discontent which now prevails will spread and advance.… It is difficult to understand how any British statesman could have imagined that representative and irresponsible government could be successfully combined” (that is, that legislators could be elected but not direct the administration of the government). Durham pointed out, somewhat laboriously, but no more than the circumstances warranted, that
it needs no change in the principles of government, no invention of a new constitutional theory, to supply the remedy which would, in my opinion, completely remove the existing political disorders. It needs but to follow out consistently the principles of the British constitution, and introduce into the government of these great colonies those wise provisions by which alone the working of the representative system can in any country be rendered harmonious and efficient.… The responsibility to the united legislature of all officers of the government, except the governor and his secretary, should be secured by every means known to the British constitution.26
Durham gave great impetus to the cause of responsible government and was correct, but hardly original, in recognizing the importance of it to stabilize Canadian opinion and assure the development of both Canadas, and this was the great merit of his report.
Less felicitous was his stated belief that the union of the Canadas would inevitably lead to the assimilation of the French Canadians into the English, liberating them from the heavy burdens of being stranded and centrifugated French speakers on an overwhelmingly English-speaking northern two-thirds of the North American continent. He wrote, “I have little doubt that the French, when once placed, by the legitimate course of events and the working of natural causes, in a minority, would abandon their vain hopes of nationality.”27 He excoriated the English community of Lower Canada (which had fawned over him) and held their arrogance and sharp commercial practice responsible for the failure to acculturate the castaway French Canadians to the virtues and allure of the English culture. (Durham mercifully stayed fairly clear of sectarian disparagements.) “From a majority emanating from so much more extended a source, I do not think they would have any oppression or injustice to fear,” he wrote.28 To paraphrase Durham himself, it is difficult to understand how any British statesman
could so completely misread the tenacity of the French Canadians, who had persevered for nearly a quarter of a millennium and now numbered about 650,000 (well-baptized and regularly confessed Roman Catholic) souls (compared with an English-Canadian population in the Canadas of about 500,000). So even with a united Canadian province, the English were not getting all the way clear to leadership of the whole colony without some further fiddling. It was astounding that Durham so misread the effect of the implementation of his recommendations. Durham had relied heavily for his conclusions on the two people who most impressed him in Canada: Robert Baldwin, with his single-minded insistence on responsible government, and Adam Thom, a Scottish-Canadian Lower Canada lawyer, who despised the French Canadians but was not part of the English-Quebec establishment, though with his Anti-Gallic Letters he did take the lead of the English political faction in the province (and was a subsequent editor of the Montreal Herald). Durham essentially amplified the sensible preoccupations of Baldwin and the articulate bigotry of Thom. He took on board that the Atlantic colonies did not wish to merge with the Canadas but that some sort of affiliation between all the British North American entities that conserved a fair degree of autonomy would work, and that Lower Canada could not now live in a system ruled by a French majority with the powers that responsible government would confer. A united Province of Canada thus had a certain logic, especially to a Benthamite utilitarian like Durham; this was the Age of Reason, torqued up by the precise engineering and efficiency of the Industrial Revolution. This was the perspective that caused him to write, “If the Lower Canadians had been … taught to subject themselves to a much greater amount of taxation, they would probably at this time have been a much wealthier, a much better governed, a much more civilized, and a much more contented people.”29 Then, as now, such liberal nostrums are hazardous; Quebec finally put that theory to the test 120 years later, and it hasn’t worked. The liberal Durham cared for the oppressed, and his protest to the czar on behalf of the Poles when he was the ambassador in St. Petersburg was sincere (which made von Schoultz’s likening of Canadians to oppressed Poles piquant). As W.L. Morton wrote, Durham’s “complacency was the complacency of Macaulay, his zeal the zeal of governor general William Bentinck abolishing suttee in India.”30
Of course, union would only make the French Canadians indispensable and unprecedentedly powerful in a larger jurisdiction than the one where the implications of their majority status had been denied them. “The Act of Union, as passed, represented not Durham’s victory, but his defeat.”31 And the exercise would be a training session for running an autonomous country by French-English cooperation, a concept that had never been attempted anywhere, except to a slight degree, and on a miniature scale, in New Brunswick. Those whom the departed governor left behind, or at least the politically cleverer people among them, were not slow to realize this. Durham’s flippant assumption of inexorable assimilation of the French, though simplistic and unjust and asinine, demonstrated again the difficulty even the British, the most successful colonists in world history, had in managing overseas populations, including those composed of kindred (Upper Canada) or at least long-familiar (Lower Canada) groups.
Durham was an intelligent but stormy character, a bright meteor that flared across the British political sky and passed prematurely. He died of tuberculosis at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, on July 28, 1840, aged only forty-eight. He is little remembered in Britain but is vividly remembered in French Canada as the active voice of English assimilationist ambitions, and is honourably recalled in English Canada as a principal agent of democracy in Canada. The most memorable phrase in his generally well-written report was that English and French Canadians were “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state.”
Like a magic football of irregular shape that always bounces in the preferable direction, Canada took what was useful in Durham’s report and effectively ignored the rest. Durham provided the next rung on the political ladder to a novel form of Canadian sovereign state, renovated the relationship with Great Britain, and opened the opportunity, which the ablest statesmen of the Canadas rushed to exploit, of building bridges between the French- and English-Canadian communities and creating a political consensus to prepare British North America for statehood. The thread from Champlain and Carleton of a Canadian country, which came through the wars, was grasped by able hands.
The British government and Parliament were generally minded to adopt Durham’s recommendation of a union of Upper and Lower Canada, in the bipartisan, shared hope that it would tranquilize the Canadians. Few people in Westminster or Whitehall had any interest in Canada, although it continued to reconfirm its status as the premier colonial entity (India continuing to be a patchwork of alliances, commercial concessions, and colonial and military conquests).
The British wanted union to be at the request of the Canadians, and were ambivalent about responsible government despite Durham. But Upper Canada’s legislators were very fractious, the Tories still opposed to responsible government and the subordination of the executive to the legislative, and most members of all groups wary of saddling Upper Canada with all the sorrows and complexities of Lower Canada. Lord John Russell was now the colonial secretary, succeeding Glenelg, and he continued to oppose the devolution implicit in responsible government. He received a sharp rejoinder from Joseph Howe, in his “Four Letters to Lord John Russell.” Howe was approximately as eloquent as Durham in his advocacy of responsible government and his rebuttal of Russell’s incongruous (for another relatively enlightened liberal) view that a colony could not enjoy such latitude was very well-formulated. (The inevitable end of that argument had been decisively demonstrated by the Americans seventy-five years before, and the Canadians had already given more than a hint of it.) New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island were indifferent to the Durham Report, but the genie was now out of the bottle, and responsible government was not just the subject of factional or even rebellious agitation but the recommended route of a special high commissioner and governor general sent to recommend a solution to British North American problems.
The Melbourne government, bobbing and weaving as was its nature, tentatively decided to enact union of the Canadas and duck responsible government, but decided to wait for the results of the efforts of the next governor to stabilize Canada. He would be the capable businessman and authority on trade and tariffs Charles Poulett Thomson, who had been vice president of the Board of Trade in Grey’s government, serving with Durham and Brougham, and president of the Board of Trade under Melbourne. His new post was now an unpromising one: the last governor general of Canada to have left in good standing and voluntarily at the end of a full term was Sir Robert Milnes in 1805, thirteen governors before.* The British had not sent over a governor remotely of the stature of Guy Carleton, who departed in 1796 after a total of twenty years in the office. Obviously, something had to change, if not in an orderly fashion, then otherwise. The new governor arrived in Quebec in October 1839. Shortly after his arrival, Thomson – who, though a clever and efficient businessman and very contemporary industrial revolutionary, was no instinctive politician (unlike Kempt and Gosford) – wrote Russell that “the large majority [of those whom he consulted, French and English] advocate warmly the establishment of the union.”32 This impression was entirely conjured from his hopeful imagination.
In Upper Canada, Thomson got a genuinely positive reception, because the Reformers were the emergent majority and they had been misled by British official insinuations to believe that union would bring responsible government, which was practically their only public policy concern. As always, Chief Justice John Beverley Robinson (1791–1863), the leader of what was left of the Family Compact, undaunted by any traditional restraints on political advocacy from the bench, gave contrary advice, but Thomson correctly read that opinion in Upper Canada was of another mind. (Robinson was now more than halfway through his fifty-year tenure as one of the leading political and public figures of Upper Canada.) On October 16,
1839, Russell, by directive, empowered colonial governors to remove executive councillors when they determined that such a step accorded with the public service. This greatly strengthened Thomson’s hand as he set about being, as a friend put it “the Castlereagh of the Canadian Union.”33
The English-dominated Special Council of Lower Canada (Legislative and Executive Councillors) was happy to give the governor a civil list and to accede to the Act of Union, which they saw as delivering them from the jaws of the local French majority. Thomson led the Upper Canada Reformers down the garden path of equating union with responsible government (government “in accord with the well-understood wishes of the people” was his phrase.)34 By this ruse, and by a constructive compromise settlement of the Clergy Reserves issue that respected the non-Anglican denominations while still giving a fine share to the Church of England, Thomson secured Upper Canada’s approval of the union. It was a smooth political operation, but it was achieved at the expense of ignoring the French majority in Lower Canada and swindling the Reform majority in Upper Canada.
Thomson tried to conciliate all substantial factions, offering LaFontaine the post of solicitor general of Lower Canada right after LaFontaine, now the indisputable political leader of the French Canadians, had addressed a large public meeting at Montreal and denounced union in vitriolic but not seditious terms. LaFontaine declined the offer. Thomson went on to Nova Scotia, where the lieutenant-governor, Sir Colin Campbell, disputed Howe’s interpretation of Russell’s Delphic utterances to imply official support of responsible government. Thomson damped down that fire by persuading Campbell to offer, and the Reformers to accept, three places on the Executive Council (though Howe declined). This, it eventually emerged, was the definition in practice of Russell and Thomson’s flim-flam about governing in accord with the public’s wishes, putting responsible government Reformers on a council that wasn’t responsible to the voters. The Empire and its agents were holding the line, but by recourse to methods that were clearly going to snap under the strain of their disingenuousness.
