Canada: The Empire of the North — From 1763 to 1812, part 4

Though the invaders were defeated, Quebec continued to be invested till spring, the thud of exploding bombs doing little harm except in the case of one family, during spring, when a shell fell through the roof to a dining-room table, killing a son where he sat at dinner.

As the ice cleared from the river in spring, both sides were on the watch for first aid.

Would Congress send up more soldiers on transports; or would English frigates be rushed to the aid of Quebec?

The Americans were now having trouble collecting food from the habitants, for the French doubted the invaders' success, and Congress paper money would be worthless to the holders.

One beautiful clear May moonlight night a vessel was espied between nine and ten at night coming up the river full sail before the wind.

Was she friend or foe?

Carleton and his officers gazed anxiously from the citadel.

Guns were fired as signal.

No answer came from the ship.

Again she was hailed, and again; yet she failed to hang out English colors.

Carleton then signaled he would sink her, and set the rampart cannon sweeping her bows.

In a second she was ablaze, a fire ship sent by the enemy loaded with shells and grenades and bombs that shot off like a fusillade of rockets.

At the same time a boat was seen rowing from the {309} far side of her with terrific speed.

Carleton's precaution had prevented the destruction of the harbor fleet.

Three days later, at six in the morning, the firing of great guns announced the coming of an English frigate.

At once every man, woman, and child of Quebec poured down to the harbor front, half-dressed, mad with joy.

By midday, Guy Carleton had led eight hundred soldiers out to the Plains of Abraham to give battle against the Americans; but General Thomas of the Congress army did not wait.

Such swift flight was taken that artillery, stores, tents, uneaten dinners cooked and on the table, were abandoned to Carleton's men.

General Thomas himself died of smallpox at Sorel.

At Montreal all was confusion.

The city had been but marking time, pending the swing of victory at Quebec.

In the spring of 1776 Congress had sent three commissioners to Montreal to win Canada for the new republic.

One was the famous Benjamin Franklin, another a prominent Catholic; but the French Canadian clergy refused to forget the attack of Congress on the Quebec Act, and remained loyal to England.

[Illustration: BENEDICT ARNOLD] For almost a year, in desultory fashion, the campaign against Canada dragged on, Carleton reoccupying and fortifying Montreal, Three Rivers, St. John's, and Chamby, then pushing up Champlain Lake in October of 1776, with three large vessels and ninety small ones.

Between Valcour Island and the mainland he caught Benedict Arnold with the Congress boats on October 11, and succeeded in battering them to pieces before {310} Arnold could extricate them.

As the boats sank, the American crews escaped ashore; but the English went no farther south than Crown Point this year.

If Carleton had failed at Quebec, there can be no doubt Canada would have been permanently lost to England; for the following year France openly espoused the cause of Congress, and proclamations were secretly smuggled all through Canada to be posted on church doors, calling on Canadians to remain loyal to France.

Curiously enough, it was Washington, the leader of the Americans, who checkmated this move.

With a wisdom almost prophetic, he foresaw that if France helped the United States, and then demanded Canada as her reward, the old border warfare would be renewed with tenfold more terror.

No longer would it be bushrover pitted against frontiersmen.

It would be France against Congress, and Washington refused to give the aid of Congress to the scheme of France embroiling America in European wars.

The story of how Clark, the American, won the Mississippi forts for Congress is not part of Canada's history, nor are the terrible border raids of Butler and Brant, the Mohawk, who sided with the English, and left the Wyoming valley south of the Iroquois Confederacy a blackened wilderness, and the homes of a thousand settlers smoking ruins.

It is this last raid which gave the poet Campbell his theme in "Gertrude of Wyoming."

By the Treaty of Versailles, in 1783, England acknowledged the independence of the United States, and Canada's area was shorn of her fairest territory by one fell swath.

Instead of the Ohio being the southern boundary, the middle line of the Great Lakes divided Canada from her southern neighbor.

The River Ste.

Croix was to separate Maine from New Brunswick.

The sole explanation of this loss to Canada was that the American commissioners knew their business and the value of the ceded territory, and the English commissioners did not.

It is one of the many conspicuous examples of what loyalty has cost Canada.

England is to give up the western posts to the United States, from Miami to Detroit and Michilimackinac and Grand Portage.

In return the United States federal government is to recommend to the States {311} Governments that all property confiscated from Royalists during the war be restored.

[Illustration: GENERAL HALDIMAND] General Haldimand, a Swiss who has served in the Seven Years' War, succeeds Carleton as governor in 1778. The times are troublous.

There is still a party in favor of Congress.

The great unrest, which ends in the French Revolution, disturbs habitants' life.

Then that provision of the Quebec Act, by which legislative councilors were to be nominated by the crown, works badly.

Councilors, judges, crown attorneys, even bailiffs are appointed by the colonial office of London, and find it more to their interests to stay currying favor in London than to attend to their duties in Canada.

The country is cursed by the evil of absent officeholders, who draw salaries and appoint incompetent deputies to do the work.

As for the social unrest that fills the air, Haldimand claps the malcontents in jail till the storm blows over; but the tricks of speculators, who have flocked to Canada, give trouble of another sort.

Naturally the ring of English speculators, rather than the impoverished French, became ascendant in foreign trade, and during the American war the ring got such complete control of the wheat supply that bread jumped to famine price.

Just as he had dealt with the malcontents soldier fashion, so Haldimand now had a law passed forbidding tricks with the price of wheat.

Like Carleton, {312} Haldimand too came down hard on the land-jobbers, who tried to jockey poor French peasants out of their farms for bailiff's fees.

It may be guessed that Haldimand was not a popular governor with the English clique.

Nevertheless, he kept sumptuous bachelor quarters at his mansion near Montmorency Falls, was a prime favorite with the poor and with the soldiers, and sometimes deigned to take lessons in pickle making and home keeping from the grand dames of Quebec.

In 1786 Carleton comes back as Lord Dorchester.

Congress had promised to protect the property of those Royalists who had fought on the losing side in the American Revolution, but for reasons beyond the control of Congress, that promise could not be carried out.

It was not Congress but the local governments of each individual state that controlled property rights.

In vain Congress recommended the States Governments to restore the property confiscated from the Royalists.

The States Governments were in a condition of chaos, packed by jobbers and land-grabbers and the riffraff that always infest the beginnings of a nation.

Instead of protecting the Royalists, the States Governments passed laws confiscating more property and depriving those who had fought for England of even holding office.

It was easy for the tricksters who had got possession of the loyalists' lands to create a social ostracism that endangered the very lives of the beaten Royalists, and there set towards Canada the great emigration of the United Empire Loyalists.

To Nova Scotia, to New Brunswick, to Prince Edward Island, to Ontario, they came from Virginia and Pennsylvania and New York and Massachusetts and Vermont, in thousands upon thousands.

The story of their sufferings and far wanderings has never been told and probably never will, for there is little official record of it; but it can be likened only to the expulsion of the Acadians multiplied a hundredfold.

To the Maritime Provinces alone came more than thirty thousand people.

To the eastern townships of Quebec, to the regions of Kingston and Niagara and Toronto in Ontario came some twenty thousand more.

It needs no {313} trick of fancy to call up the scene, and one marvels that neither poet nor novelist has yet made use of it.

Here were fine old Royalist officers of New York reduced from opulence to penury, from wealth to such absolute destitution they had neither clothing nor food, nor money to pay ship's passage away, now crowded with their families, and such wrecks of household goods as had escaped raid and fire, on some cheap government transport or fishing schooner bound from New York Harbor to Halifax or Fundy Bay.

Of the thirteen thousand people bound for Halifax there can scarcely be a family that has not lost brothers or sons in the war.

Family plate, old laces, heirlooms, even the father's sword in some cases, have long ago been pawned for food.

If one finds, as one does find all through Nova Scotia, fine old mahogany and walnut furniture brought across by the Loyalists, it is only because walnut and mahogany were not valued at the time of the Revolution as they are to-day.

And instead of welcome at Halifax, the refugees met with absolute consternation!

What is a town of five thousand people to do with so many hungry visitants?

They are quartered about in churches, in barracks, in halls knocked up, till they can be sent to farms.

And these are not common immigrants coming fresh from toil in the fields of Europe; they are gently nurtured men and women, representing the aristocracy and wealth and conservatism of New York.

This explains why one finds among the prominent families of Nova Scotia the same names as among the most prominent families of Massachusetts and New York.

To the officers and heads of families the English government granted from two thousand to five thousand acres each, and to sons and daughters of Loyalists two hundred acres each, besides 3,000,000 pounds in cash, as necessity for it arose.

On the north side of Fundy Bay hardships were even greater, for the Loyalists landed from their ships on the homeless shores of the wildwood wilderness.

Rude log cabins of thatch roof and plaster walls were knocked up, and there began round the log cabin that tiny clearing which was to expand into the farm.

The coming of the Loyalists really peopled both New Brunswick {314} and Prince Edward Island: the former becoming a separate province in 1784, named after the ruling house of England; the latter named after the Duke of Kent, who was in command of the garrison at Charlottetown.

More strenuous still was the migration of the United Empire Loyalists from the south.

Rich old planters of Virginia and Maryland, who had had their colored servants by the score, now came with their families in rude tented wagons, fine chippendales jumbled with heavy mahogany furnishings, up the old Cumberland army road to the Ohio, and across from the Ohio to the southern townships of Quebec, to the backwoods of Niagara and Kingston and Toronto and modern Hamilton, and west as far as what is now known as London.

I have heard descendants of these old southern Loyalists tell how hopelessly helpless were these planters' families, used to hundreds of negro servants and now bereft of help in a backwoods wilderness.

It took but a year or so to wear out the fine laces and pompous ruffles of their aristocratic clothing, and men and women alike were reduced to the backwoods costume of coon cap, homespun garments, and Indian moccasins.

Often one could witness such anomalies in their log cabins as gilt mirrors and spindly glass cabinets ranged in the same apartment as stove and cooking utensils.

If the health of the father failed or the war had left him crippled, there was nothing for it but for the mother to take the helm; and many a Canadian can trace lineage back to a United Empire Loyalist woman who planted the first crop by hand with a hoe and reaped the first crop by hand with a sickle.

Sometimes the jovial habits of the planter life came with the Loyalists to Canada, and winter witnessed a furbishing up of old flounces and laces to celebrate all-night dance in log houses where partitions were carpets and tapestries hung up as walls.

Sometimes, too,--at least I have heard descendants of the eastern township people tell the story,--the jovial habits kept the father tippling and card playing at the village inn while the lonely mother kept watch and ward in the cabin of the snow-padded forests.

Of necessity the Loyalists banded together to {315} help one another.

There were "sugarings off" in the maple woods every spring for the year's supply of homemade sugar,--glorious nights and days in the spring forests with the sap trickling from the trees to the scooped-out troughs; with the grown-ups working over the huge kettle where the molasses was being boiled to sugar; with the young of heart, big and little, gathering round the huge bonfires at night in the woods for the sport of a taffy pull, with molasses dripping on sticks and huge wooden spoons taken from the pot.

There were threshings when the neighbors gathered together to help one another beat out their grain from the straw with a flail.

There were "harvest homes" and "quilting bees" and "loggings" and "barn raisings."

Clothes were homemade.

Sugar was homemade.

Soap was homemade.

And for years and years the only tea known was made from steeping dry leaves gathered in the woods; the only coffee made from burnt peas ground up.

Such were the United Empire Loyalists, whose lives some unheralded poet will yet sing,--not an unfit stock for a nation's empire builders.

At the same time that the Loyalists came to Canada, came Joseph Brant,--Thayendanegea, the Mohawk,--with the remnant of his tribe, who had fought for the English.

To them the government granted some 700,000 acres in Ontario.

[Illustration: JOSEPH BRANT] {316} It is not surprising that the United Empire Loyalists objected to living under the French laws of the Quebec Act.

They had fought for England against Congress, but they wanted representative government, and the Constitutional Act was passed in 1791 dividing the country into Upper and Lower Canada, each to have its own parliament consisting of a governor, a legislative council appointed by the crown, and an assembly elected by the people.

There was to be no religious test.

Naturally old French laws would prevail in Quebec, English laws in Ontario or Upper Canada.

By this act, too, land known as the Clergy Reserves was set apart for the Protestant Church.

The first parliament in Quebec met in the bishop's palace in December of 1792; the first parliament of Ontario in Newark or Niagara in September of the same year, the most of the newly elected members coming by canoe and dugout, and, as the Indian summer of that autumn proved hot, holding many of the sessions in shirt sleeves out under the trees, Lieutenant Governor Simcoe reporting that the electors seem to have favored "men of the lower order, who kept but one table and ate with their servants."

The earliest sessions of the Ontario House were marked by acts to remove the capital from the boundary across to Toronto, and to legalize marriages by Protestant clergymen other than of the English church.

It is amusing to read how Governor Simcoe regarded the marriage bill as an opening of the flood gates to {317} republicanism; but for all their shirt sleeves, the legislators enjoyed themselves and danced till morning in Navy Hall, the Governor's residence, "Mad Tom Talbot," the Governor's aid-de-camp, losing his heart to the fine eyes of Brant's Indian niece, daughter of Sir William Johnson of the old Lake George battle.

[Illustration: LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR SIMCOE] Down at Quebec things were managed with more pomp, and no social event was complete without the presence of the Duke of Kent, military commandant, now living in Haldimand's old house at Montmorency.

Nova Scotia had held parliaments since 1758, when Halifax elected her first members.

Besides the United Empire Loyalists, other settlers were coming to Canada.

The Earl of Selkirk, a patriotic young Scotch nobleman, had arranged for the removal of evicted Highlanders to Prince Edward Island in 1803 and to Baldoon on Lake St. Clair.

Then "Mad Tom Talbot," Governor Simcoe's aid, descendant of the Talbots of Castle Malahide and boon comrade of the young soldier who became the Duke of Wellington, becomes so enamored of wilderness life that he gives up his career in Europe, gains grant of lands between London and Port Dover, and lays foundations of settlements in western Ontario, spite of the fact he remains a bachelor.

The man who had danced at royalty's balls and drunk deep of pleasure at the beck of princes now lived in a log house of three rooms, laughed at difficulties, "baked his own bread, milked his own cows, made his own butter, washed his own clothes, ironed his own linen," and taught colonists who bought his lands "how to do without the rotten refuse of Manchester warehouses,"--the term he applied to the broadcloth of the newcomer.

Under the French régime, Canada had consisted of a string of fur posts isolated in a wilderness.

It will be noticed that it now consisted of five distinct provinces of nation builders.

{318} CHAPTER XIV FROM 1812 TO 1820

Hearne surrenders--Cook on the west coast--Vancouver on Pacific--Discovery of Mackenzie River--Across to the Pacific--A smash in bad rapids--Down Fraser River--Cause of war--The Chesapeake outrage--War declared--Hull surrenders at Detroit--The fight round Niagara--Soldiers exchange jokes across gorge--The traverse at Queenston--The surrender at Queenston--1813 A dark year--Raid on Ogdensburg--Attack on Toronto--Toronto burned--Vincent's soldiers at Burlington Bay--Ill hap of all the generals--Laura Secord's heroism--Campaign in the west--Moraviantown Disaster--Chrysler's farm--De Salaberry's buglers--The charge at Chippewa--Final action at Lundy's Lane--Great heroism on both sides--Assault at Fort Erie--End of futile war