by Conrad Black
To complicate matters, there was skirmishing along the northeast border with the United States in the lumbering region known as Aroostook. The British were again fearful of American infiltration, and relations were aggravated by the arrest in New York State of Alexander McLeod, one of the unit that had cut loose and burned Mackenzie’s supply vessel on Navy Island in the Niagara River after the failure of his uprising. The United States was preparing to annex Texas and absolutely did not want a dispute with Great Britain, which, with France, was encouraging Mexico to hang on to Texas. Lord Palmerston, Melbourne’s more purposeful brother-in-law, now settling into his second decade as foreign secretary, resolved the McLeod affair and sent Lord Ashburton (Alexander Baring, 1774–1848, of the banking family and another president of the Board of Trade, under Peel) to Washington as a special emissary. He and the U.S. secretary of state, the eminent orator and frequent senator and leading politician of New England, Daniel Webster, would resolve the Aroostook border dispute and other matters in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842.
Thomson got the Act of Union through in the Canadas and it thus rather easily cleared the British Parliament in the spring of 1840. He was rewarded with elevation to the peerage as Lord Sydenham and Toronto. The Act of Union that was adopted was a more modest affair than had originally been proposed; it was modelled on the union of Scotland and England of 1707 rather than that between Ireland and Britain in 1801. There was only one Legislature and one government, but the civil law of Lower Canada, seigneurial rights, and the pride of place of the Roman Catholic Church were all preserved from Carleton’s original brainstorms of 1774 and 1791. There were two attorneys general and two school systems in the united Province of Canada, but only English as a language of record and legislative debate, a deprival of a status French had enjoyed in the Lower Canada legislatures. The demographic preponderance of the French was gerrymandered away by the artificial imposition of equal representation between the two components, at forty-two members each from Upper and Lower Canada. This was outrageous, but the practical impact was that it would be impossible to govern without some French representation. Eighty years after the Plains of Abraham, the French, although a feeble and fatuous official effort was being made to demote their language, were being admitted to a share of self-government, though the authority of the elected Legislature was still being restrained by a thread of viceregal autocracy disguised in a fog of official obfuscation. There was a high property qualification for legislators of at least five hundred pounds, and a life-appointed Legislative Council of at least twenty members, with no provision for representation of both races. Municipal legislation was left to the united province to address. (John Graves Simcoe, as lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, had in 1792 established a county system there imitative of the British, though it was directed by the province and not locally. But in Lower Canada there was no local government at all outside the cities, apart from the rickety seigneurial and Roman Catholic parish systems.)
In close emulation of Britain, henceforth, all money bills had to be introduced by the government, which eliminated the largely scandalous recourse to log-rolling and back-scratching by private members introducing their preferred causes and subjects of patronage. Sydenham’s Clergy Reserves measure had been found inadmissible by the law officers of the U.K. government, and to preserve his plural establishment he secured a new treatment of the subject that was not really a solution but at least cooled the issue and punted it forward for some years.
There were no political parties, just the Château Clique, the Family Compact, the amorphous Reform movements, and special interests such as Egerton Ryerson’s militant Methodists. Sydenham called for elections on the new basis in 1840, rigged the French out of four members by a preposterous demarcation of electoral districts, and toured about Upper Canada ostensibly on a viceregal tour to show the flag and encourage the reign of normalcy but in fact to promote moderate candidates who were neither minions of the Compact nor unacceptable radicals. He was not partisan between Tories and Reformers, as long as they were moderate, and was much subtler and in all respects more capable than the unlamented Francis Bond Head had been in the previous election of 1836. He had appointed Baldwin attorney general of Upper Canada in February 1840, and a member of the Executive Council in 1841, but ministers continued to be responsible to the king and not to Parliament. Baldwin and LaFontaine had been in close touch and had far-sightedly gone some distance to working out a joint approach to adapting the new arrangements to the successful conclusion of the long march to responsible government.
In the 1841 election, in Canada West, as Upper Canada was now called, there were six or seven Compact supporters and an equal number of extreme Reformers, and about thirty Baldwinite Reformers. Baldwin himself was elected in two districts. In Canada East, twenty French Reformers were elected and the rest were the English or non-reform French, though Sydenham’s partisan districting and violence by English elements at a number of polls undoubtedly influenced the result undemocratically. LaFontaine was among those defeated, almost certainly by an infelicitous combination of official and English skulduggery. A gigantic step forward for reform, and for French-English relations with it, was taken by Baldwin when he had LaFontaine returned for York North, the constituency he chose not to hold of the two that had elected him. Baldwin’s gesture, and LaFontaine’s acceptance of it in preference to leading an embittered Quebec bloc manipulating the balance of power in the Legislative Assembly, set Canada on the course to a federal, bicultural country.
Sydenham had chosen Kingston as capital of the united Province of Canada, and at a pre-session caucus of the Reformers, Baldwin gained approval of his insistence that Sydenham replace the three Tory members of the Executive Council with Tory or Reform moderates, though in other respects there was reluctance to confront the governor directly at this early point. Baldwin had insisted that LaFontaine be brought onto the Executive Council or he would resign from it. The three cleared that hurdle, at least in concept, and Baldwin declined to stand for Speaker of the Assembly, as Reformers, such as Papineau, had previously done, and Sydenham showed great finesse in causing the election of a moderate Reform candidate for that position. But Baldwin resigned from the Executive Council on June 14, 1841, at Sydenham’s refusal to sack the old-guard Tory members. Sydenham continued his almost artistic tightrope act as the session opened with the government in the hands of Toronto lawyer and legislator “Sweet William” Draper, so called because of his oratorical suavity and persuasiveness.
Sydenham put through a loan to be guaranteed imperially for 1.5 million pounds to refinance debt and engage in important public works, including taking over the Welland Canal from private interests, canalizing the St. Lawrence above Montreal to facilitate travel between the Canadas, and an ambitious road-building program in Canada East, the Eastern Townships, and the Gaspé. He also put through a system of locally governed counties throughout the Province of Canada and an act for public elementary education. The only important measure he had to defer was the establishment of a currency-issuing bank. But Sydenham and Draper had retained public and Assembly confidence with a very adroit and clever evasion of the burning issue that commanded the interest of all. Draper, confirming his entitlement to his nickname, spoke in the Assembly on June 15. He declared that he would not cling to his office, as attorney general for Canada East and effectively the premier, “one day longer than he held the confidence of the Assembly”; that he construed the governor’s role as a combination of representing the monarch [as of 1837, Queen Victoria], and as participating as a minister of the government, responsible to the Mother Country, and Draper referred piously to an (imprecise) “degree of responsibility to public opinion.” He had emulated but improved upon the placations of Kempt and Gosford and talked all around the edges of the issue without saying whether the ministers had to resign if they lacked the confidence of the Assembly. Sydenham and Draper were agile, but this charade couldn’t go on indefinitely. If respon
sible government didn’t come reasonably soon, there would be another revolt, and it would be less risible than those of 1837, with the United States the chief beneficiary of it.
Baldwin replied immediately after Draper and forced the issue of responsible government to a determination. Sydenham’s program was so imaginative and popular that he was still one full step ahead of the ravening popular dragon of responsible government. Hincks spoke after Baldwin and decried the failure to proclaim legislative control of government, the voting of a civil list (emoluments of the governor and his ministers) by the Imperial government, and Sydenham’s gerrymandering, which in Canada East alone had twenty-six legislators representing “350,000 souls” and sixteen representing only 63,000. He described the suppression of the French language in the Assembly as “an unjust and cruel measure.”35
Sydenham showed himself a legislator and administrator of remarkable energy, and in the same session he reduced the severity of the penal system, abolishing the pillory and reducing the number of capital offences. He put through an increased protective tariff and struck a commission for the reform of the seigneurial system. As an administrator, he reorganized the departments, and, with Durham, and with Russell’s support, installed a coherent national administration in place of antiquated colonial fussing and compulsive systematic irresolution.
On September 3, 1841, Baldwin made another of his major interventions and moved a resolution endorsing responsible government. Draper had these tabled and replaced by what are known as the Sydenham–Harrison Resolutions (Samuel Bealey Harrison was Draper’s co-leader of the government). These held that the people’s most important political right is “having a provincial Parliament for the protection of their liberties,” the “exercise of a constitutional influence over the executive departments,” and that the head of the executive government is responsible” to the Imperial government alone, but that, nevertheless, this can only be done “by and with the assistance, counsel, and information of subordinate officers in the province.” The Sydenham–Harrison Resolutions held that the government must have the confidence of the representatives of the people, who “have a right to expect that the Imperial authority shall be … exercised in the manner most consistent with their wishes and interests.” This was a threadbare effort to finesse the question one more time, and this was where matters stood when Sydenham died, on September 19, fifteen days after being thrown from and dragged by his horse, causing multiple fractures and a mortal infection. He was just forty-two and was undoubtedly a man of great talent. He would not have been able to waffle and straddle much longer, but while he lasted he was a remarkably effective governor, and probably the ablest, and in some respects one of the most successful, since Dorchester.
To replace Sydenham, the returned prime minister Sir Robert Peel (Melbourne having retired), a reform Conservative, and his colonial secretary, Lord Stanley, sent another governor of very high ability, Sir Charles Bagot (1781–1843). Bagot was an intimate of Thomas Grenville, (son and brother of prime ministers), of future foreign secretary Clarendon, and of Russell, and was married to the niece of the Duke of Wellington. He was a naturally talented and confident man who took easily to diplomacy. He had negotiated the Rush-Bagot Agreement after the War of 1812, which demilitarized the Great Lakes and extended the frontier west from Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains. He was minister to Russia and to the Netherlands, where, in 1831, under Palmerston’s guidance, he had helped bring Belgium into existence as a country. He had counselled kings, emperors, prime ministers, and future presidents of the United States for twenty-five years. Bagot saw as soon as he arrived that Sydenham’s effort to sweep every contentious issue under the rug of energetic legislative activity could not continue, and even less could his effort to govern without the French in a united province whose population was in majority French. Sydenham’s ample works projects had induced general prosperity in Canada West, the Eastern Townships, and in Nova Scotia, where the Bank of Nova Scotia, founded in 1832, and the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, founded by Samuel Cunard of Halifax in the 1830s, were leading the greatest boom in that province’s history, prior or subsequent.*
Stanley’s instructions of October 8, 1841, though he was a very intelligent man, were the sort of mindless, dictatorial piffle that British Imperial officials often inflicted on those who had to deal with radically different realities on the ground. He was much influenced by the francophobic, fire-breathing, Imperial zealot Allan MacNab (1798–1862), a talented lawyer, militiaman, politician, industrialist, and co-owner of the Great Western Railway. Stanley “was a moderate conservative who could not believe that there were real parties in Canada – nothing but parish politics and disloyal factions. If anyone was to have power he preferred that it should be the old reactionary group headed by Sir Allan Napier MacNab.” Stanley lumbered the departing Bagot with a lot of boathouse twaddle: “If the stream be still against you, bend your back to your oar like a man and, above all, take none into your crew who will not bend their backs too.… MacNab is to dine with me on Thursday.”36
Bagot well knew that this was no crew party on the Cam on an English summer Sunday, and fortunately for everyone, not least Stanley, ignored this bunk. Draper and Harrison both told Bagot that he would have to broaden the government and bring in some French. The whole responsible government issue obviously could not be fumbled and dissembled through another session. Bagot did succeed in attracting to the ministry the talented and courageous Francis Hincks as inspector general of public accounts, forerunner to the minister of finance. When he approached LaFontaine, the member for York North said that no French-Canadian Reformer would join the Executive Council without Baldwin. Baldwin would not enter if even pensions were paid to two particular officials from the old pre-Durham regime. (Baldwin was completely preoccupied with responsible government, but that meant absolutely every aspect of it, down to the last grievance, perquisite, and farthing.) There was nothing for it: Draper, a conscientious and moderate Tory, who did not believe in democratic government as it was emerging, though he was a passionate supporter of civil rights and due process, resigned from the Executive Council, taking the like-minded Henry Sherwood with him. Two other conservative Tories followed. They were effectively replaced by Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, in September 1842, in what is generally known as the first Baldwin–LaFontaine ministry. Jean-Joseph Girouard did not feel he could accept the post of Crown land commissioner but recommended his friend Augustin-Norbert Morin (1803–1865), Papineau’s co-author of the inflammatory Ninety-Two Resolutions. The urbane Bagot wrote to both Girouard and Morin in impeccable French accepting Girouard’s suggestion, and Morin joined the ministry. Hincks and Harrison remained in what was now a very talented group to be leading such a jurisdiction of only about 1.3 million people.
This was an earth-shaking event in Canadian terms. Though it was far from the official acceptance of what Baldwin and LaFontaine had been demanding, it effectively recognized that the civic values that almost all Canadians – as well as prevailing opinion in the United Kingdom and the United States (apart from the moral and social cancer of slavery) – favoured could not be assured without control of government by popularly elected representatives. British North America’s leading advocates of responsible government were now at the head of the ministry in a manner that Sydenham, a comparative liberal scarcely dead a year, had considered “inadmissible,” and the political leader of French Canada was effectively the co-premier of 80 per cent of British North America and dealing with a very suave and reasonable governor who had ambiguous instructions from a progressive Tory home government. It was just five years since the fizzled rebellions, but the rebels had been crushed with such dispatch that insurrection was durably deterred, and those who shared most of the rebels’ aims but eschewed their support of violence were now in partial control. Canada had been loyal enough to retain British protection, with which there could be no American attempt at annexation.
The Canadian leaders were not playing the British and Americans against each other as artfully or deliberately as Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, sixty to eighty-five years before, had encouraged the British to evict the French from Canada and the French to help the Americans evict the British from America. They were operating on a smaller scale and in a lesser place, but the principle of a small group of colonists – by a combination of sincere conviction and tactical adroitness – navigating between larger powers, being closer now to one and now to another, and emerging by increments as an autonomous entity with little to fear from either, was similar, though America had essentially run the British gauntlet after thirty years and Canada would have to walk on eggshells for almost a century before it could be a little more spontaneous. But the combination of courage, vision, and tactical artistry to achieve such an ambitious and complicated end was similar in concept, if Canada’s reprise of it was less bold in execution and less dramatic in its contemporary impact on the world. America seized the attention of the whole world, which it has never lost, and Canada advanced subtly, imperceptibly, and largely unnoticed. Both countries retained these traits even as well-established nations, sometimes to a fault, in both cases.
Unfortunately, Sir Charles Bagot died as events crested, as tragically, though not as prematurely, as Sydenham. He suffered an excruciating decline induced by heart disease, starting in the fall of 1842, but not before he had the pleasure of writing Stanley (Bagot’s dispatches were perhaps the most elegantly written of any Canadian colonial governor, French or English),
