Old Quebec: The Fortress of New France

by Gilbert Parker; Claude Glennon Bryan

Quebec entered upon the nineteenth century equipped with the machinery of constitutional government, which was, however, clogged in action by unhappy divisions within the city. The four years of Sir James Craig's rule were disturbed by a truceless war between the Legislative Assembly and the Governor, whose arbitrary temper ill qualified him to lead a people still groping for standing-ground within the area of their new constitution. He looked at popular institutions with the distrust natural to an old soldier, and the period of his administration became known in the annals of the province as "the reign of little King Craig." Born at Gibraltar, he had entered the army at the tender age of fifteen, and having earned rapid promotion on many battlefields, he finally reached the rank of major-general at the close of the American revolutionary war. Further experience in India and the Mediterranean increased his reputation, and in the autumn of 1807 he arrived in Quebec full of military honours, and imbued with the high political views then held by the most exclusive wing of the Tory party. The members of the Legislative Council and the administrative clique drew close about the person of this new champion, and in the same degree the French majority in the Legislative Assembly held aloof. The burning questions of the day, whether the judges should sit and vote in Parliament, whether the Assembly could communicate directly with the Home Government—these were but the occasions of an antagonism really due to diversity of race and temperament; for, as Lord Durham discovered a generation later, "this sensitive and polite people" revolted, not so much against political disability, as against the exclusive manners and practices of a ruling class far removed from themselves by language and mode and code, who ruffled their racial pride at every turn.

FERRY-BOAT ON THE ST. LAWRENCE

The new Governor was now the forcible instrument of this unsympathetic power. With an undue sense of the importance of the vice-royalty, the ipse dixit of "the little king" dissolved Parliament on more than one occasion. On the other side, Le Canadien, the journal of the French party, rhetorically stood for liberty, fraternity, and equality as against arbitrary government. Moderate men, wavering for a time, were at last scandalised by its editorial violence, and rallied to the side of the Governor. The situation quickly became acute, and stringent measures of repression were adopted by Sir James Craig and his councillors. The offending journal was suppressed; five recalcitrant officers of militia were relieved of their command; and, finally, the city guards were strengthened to meet the peril of a possible insurrection. Soon a new element of danger appeared in the threatened war between England and the United States, offering to the aggrieved party a tempting occasion for redress. Fortunately, however, neither the unwisdom of the English Government nor the neighbourhood of a hostile power availed to drive or lure the Canadians into the crooked path of rebellion. As the past had already proved, their country's peril was sufficient to unite in hearty concord all parties, French and English, in the defence of the common heritage; the experience of half a century of British rule having convinced even the survivors of the Ancien Régime that however haughty or aloof officials might be, security, order, and justice prevailed under the British flag.

LORD SYDENHAM
Governor General of Canada 1839-1841.

Considering the especial temptations to treason bearing upon the French population at this crisis, such loyal conduct is the more praiseworthy. In the first place, it was maintained throughout a war which was part of England's life-and-death struggle against France, the mother-country of French Canadians. Again, apart from this natural affinity with the chiefest enemy of England, material causes operated yet further to strain their faith; for the enterprise of Montgomery and Arnold was about to be resumed; and the French must choose either to suffer the terrors of a hostile invasion, or to join the armies of the United States in driving the British power for ever from the Continent. Finally, as if these tests of loyalty were not enough, the port of Quebec was invaded by English press-gangs, who terrorised the quays of the Lower Town and kidnapped able-bodied youths of both races. But notwithstanding so many temptations to swerve from allegiance, when news came in June, 1812, that the Americans had declared war against England, the loyal sentiment of the Canadians was unanimous, the Maritime Provinces joining their forces with those of Lower and Upper Canada to repel the invaders; and Major-General Isaac Brock, the Lieutenant-Governor, in his speech to the Legislature of the Upper Province, thus expressed the feeling of the entire country:—

"We are engaged," he declared, "in an awful and eventful contest. By unanimity and despatch in our councils, and vigour in our operations, we may teach the enemy this lesson, that a country defended by free men enthusiastically devoted to the cause of their king and constitution can never be conquered."

Thus, instead of the support on which they calculated, the invading army was to encounter a resolute and united foe. Nor were the causes of Canadian loyalty far to seek. The French population, by nature loyal and content, were unwilling to sever the ties of noble monarchical tradition binding them to the past, and embark upon the troubled seas of American politics, there to be lost among loose and powerful majorities out of sympathy with their conservative ideals, their temperament, and those racial rights so fully acknowledged by England after the Conquest. Also east and west, the Maritime Provinces and Upper Canada contained an element already devotedly attached to the Crown. The sacrifices of the United Empire loyalists made almost sacred the soil of Upper Canada, now Ontario. Men who had already braved the anger of their fellow-citizens in the American Colonies, and abandoned their homes to witness to the ideal of a united empire, were not likely at the last to throw away their crown of service and stultify themselves before the world.