Canada

B

2

A Crown Colony

In 1663 the brilliant minister of Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, reorganized New France directly under royal authority. Administration was divided between a military governor and a more powerful intendant, both ruling from the city of Quebec but under orders from France. The fur trade was granted to a new monopoly, the Company of the West Indies. Defence was improved by the arrival in 1665 of the French Carignan-Salières regiment, many of whose members stayed on as settlers. The Iroquois menace was ended, although attacks continued sporadically throughout the 17th century. Restructuring the seigneurial system, the Crown deprived uncooperative landowners of their fiefs, granted new blocs of land to promising candidates, and laid down rules to govern seigneurs and habitants. The Church received land and special payments. The Comte de Frontenac, as governor, encouraged further explorations. Those of Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette led to the exploration of the Mississippi River (1673) and those of René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, to the acquisition of Louisiana (1682).

Jean Talon, intendant from 1665 to 1672, set out to establish New France as a prosperous, expanding colony rivalling the thriving English colonies to the south. He invited many new settlers, including young women, until by 1675 the population was almost 8,000. He also tried to diversify the economy beyond furs and build trade with Acadia and the West Indies. Talon was recalled before he could carry out his policies, however. After Colbert’s death in 1683, French interest in the colony waned, and by 1700 it was clear that New France was not going to be self-sufficient. The situation was further complicated by the establishment in 1670 of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a London company set up with the fur-trading expertise of Radisson and Groseilliers, who had gone over to the English. Although it discouraged settlement, the company, granted title to all the land draining into Hudson Bay, played a crucial role in maintaining a British presence in northern and central Canada over the next 200 years.

Under the governor, the intendant, and the bishop, officials, military officers, and seigneurs constituted a little colonial nobility, over-conscious of their rank. Leading merchants, also pursuing status, were influential in the towns. The clergy, almost a separate class altogether, controlled the morals, education, and social welfare of the colonists.

The theoretical authoritarianism of this regime was in fact limited by the vigorous spirit of independence among the people. The artisans were organized into strong guilds, each the focus of its own rituals and ways. They and the rural habitants successfully resisted the colonial government when it infringed on what they considered their traditional rights. The fur trade offered a more rugged alternative if the controls of society were too overbearing.

B

3

Anglo-French Rivalry

As the colony developed, it was caught up in the imperial rivalries of England and France, which, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, were locked in a struggle for worldwide control. Europe was one battlefield, North America another. The burgeoning English colonies along the Atlantic Ocean were hemmed in by Acadia and New France in the north and by French expansion in the Mississippi Valley. At the same time, the French felt themselves caught between the Hudson’s Bay Company, which dominated northern Canada, and the English colonies to the south. The inevitable conflict broke out in 1689 as King William’s War (the North American counterpart of the War of the Grand Alliance in Europe). After almost a decade of guerrilla warfare, the Peace of Ryswick (1697) merely confirmed the status quo, even returning Acadia, captured by the English, to the French.

This short-lived truce collapsed in 1702 with the outbreak of Queen Anne’s War (paralleling the European War of the Spanish Succession). In the course of the war, the British recaptured Acadia (1710), this time permanently. By the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), the French ceded Newfoundland and the Hudson Bay region as well. They retained Cape Breton Island and the Île Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island).

To compensate for their loss, the French in 1720 built a fortress at Louisbourg on the south-eastern tip of Cape Breton Island. This expensive endeavour was in vain, however. When hostilities recommenced in King George’s War (the North American counterpart of the War of the Austrian Succession), the fortress fell to a joint British-New England force in 1745. Louisbourg was returned to France by the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748).

The succeeding French and Indian War (counterpart of the Seven Years’ War) was disastrous for France. France had attempted to strengthen its position in North America by refurbishing Louisbourg, building forts in the Ohio Valley, and arranging new Native American alliances. New France, however, with a population of roughly 60,000 and an indifferent, war-weary parent country, was weak. It could not uphold French imperialism against a British population of more than 1 million in the 13 American colonies, backed by the military and naval capacity of an expanding Britain. Anglo-French competition in the Ohio Valley sparked conflict in 1754. The next year the British, presuming that their French Acadian subjects were disloyal and urged by New Englanders fearing northern invasion, deported the Acadians to southern Louisiana. In 1758 a British expedition reconquered Louisbourg. A British army under the impulsive young James Wolfe won the crucial battle of the Plains of Abraham against the French, led by the experienced Marquis L. J. de Montcalm, and so gained Quebec. British land forces won control of the west, and the arrival of a British fleet led to the surrender of Montreal in 1760. The result, confirmed by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, was that New France came under British rule.

C

British North America (1763-1867)

Under British rule, the population rapidly increased, and ethnic tensions developed.

C

1

Shaping of a British Colony

British North America was formed more by historical chance than by design. In 1763 it consisted of four distinct regions. Three, long disputed with France, had been won in 1713. Newfoundland was considered merely a series of fishing stations even after settlement, until it became self-governing in the 19th century. The Hudson Bay region (Rupert’s Land and the adjoining Northwest Territories) was a wilderness where the Hudson’s Bay Company and small, aggressive Scottish companies such as the North West Company competed for the fur trade. Acadia, conquered to protect New England and renamed Nova Scotia, was populated largely with New Englanders to replace the exiled French. Its capital, Halifax, was founded in 1749. Annexed to Nova Scotia was Prince Edward Island, which became a separate colony in 1769.

The conquest of the fourth region, New France, or Quebec, placed the British, as rulers of French colonists, in something of a quandary. Eventually, two successive governors, James Murray and Sir Guy Carleton, finding that they could not govern effectively without the cooperation of the seigneurs, persuaded the Crown to guarantee the traditional language, civil law, and faith of its new subjects. This decision, embodied in the Quebec Act of 1774, ensured the cooperation of the seigneurs and the clergy with the new regime. Indeed, they stood by the government during the American War of Independence, although the habitants generally remained neutral. American troops captured Montreal in 1775 but, failing to take Quebec City or elicit local support, soon withdrew; the force was pursued by Carleton and defeated at Lake Champlain.

The success of the rebellious 13 American colonies left the British with the poorer remnants of their New World empire and the determination to prevent a second revolution. They had, however, to accommodate the roughly 50,000 loyalist refugees from the War of Independence who settled in Nova Scotia and the upper St Lawrence region. There these United Empire Loyalists soon began to agitate for the political and property rights they had previously enjoyed. In response to Loyalist demands, the Crown created New Brunswick out of Nova Scotia in 1784 and by the Constitutional Act of 1791 divided Quebec into Lower Canada (mostly French) and Upper Canada (mostly English from America).

In so doing, the Crown hoped to create a stable society that was distinctly non-American. Although French-Canadians retained the privileges granted by the Quebec Act, the Anglican Church received preferred status. An Anglo-French colonial aristocracy of rich merchants, leading officials, and landholders was expected to work with the royal governors to ensure proper order. Legislative assemblies, although elected by propertied voters, had little power. The threat of revolution, it appeared, had been banished.

This system worked well, at least for a generation. Despite the arrival of large numbers of land-hungry Americans, the aristocracy managed to dominate the society. Minor trouble arose after 1806 when a governor attempted to Anglicize Lower Canada, but he was able to quell dissent if not to achieve his goal. In the War of 1812, most Canadians, convinced that Americans were the aggressors, rallied to the British flag. Indeed, the militia aided the British army in the defence of Upper and Lower Canada. After the war, large-scale immigration of English, Scottish, and Irish settlers swelled the ranks of the English-speaking population.

C

2

Agitation for Reform

The older order came under attack during the 1820s and collapsed before the forces of reform in the succeeding two decades. The underlying cause was the emergence in all the colonies of a middle class composed of business people (especially in the newly thriving timber and shipbuilding industries), lawyers and other professionals, and rich farmers. All resented the power and arrogance of the English-speaking, largely Anglican ruling class. Some, notably American immigrants, objected on political and economic grounds. Others, such as Methodists and Baptists in Upper Canada, French-Canadians in Lower Canada, and Irish Roman Catholics in Newfoundland, were opposed on the basis of religious or ethnic differences. The parallel development of political parties—pro-establishment Tories and anti-establishment reform groups—and an energetic press enabled the champions of reform to reach more and more people.

Some reformers were moderate, especially in the Maritime colonies—New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island—which had Loyalist populations. Others were radical. In Lower Canada, although the Roman Catholic Church supported moderates, the seigneur Louis Joseph Papineau led radicals in a nationalist agitation for ethnic autonomy. In Upper Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie, a Scot, led a demand for “responsible” (that is, representative) government. The radicals, frustrated by the opposition of Canadian Tories and the indifference of Britain, led the rebellions of 1837 in Upper and Lower Canada in that and the following year. The uprisings were swiftly quelled by the army and local militia. Suppression was particularly severe in Lower, or French, Canada.

Stirred by these events, the Crown appointed a liberal English aristocrat, John George Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham, the first governor-general of all British North America, and ordered him to find a solution to colonial ills. Believing that the colonies must make economic progress, he recommended in the important Durham Report (1839) the reunification of Upper and Lower Canada, the Anglicization of the French-Canadians, and the creation of an executive responsible to the elected legislature. The next year the British parliament passed the Act of Union, which joined the two Canadas into the Province of Canada and gave each equal representation in the joint legislature. Responsible government was secured in 1849 after much agitation by moderate reformers. The French-Canadians held enough political power to retain their language and institutions, however.