British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government, 1839-1854

by J. L. Morison

In the representative man of early Canadian Methodism, Egerton Ryerson, qualities conspicuously British and conservative, appeared. Through him Methodism came forward as the supporter of the British connection in the Metcalfe troubles, as through him it may claim some of the glory of organizing an adequate system of provincial education. But, after all, the noblest work of the sect was done in informal and irregular fashion. They were the pioneers and coureurs du bois of the British province in the religious world. Perhaps the most genuine tribute paid to this earlier phase of Methodism was that of John Beverley Robinson, when his fellow Anglicans blamed him in 1842 for granting a plot of ground for a Methodist chapel. "Frequently," he retorted, "in the most lonely parts of the wilderness, in townships where a clergyman of the Church of England had never been heard, and probably never seen, I have found the population assembled in some log building, earnestly engaged in acts of devotion, and listening to those doctrines and truths which are inculcated in common by most Christian denominations, but which, if it had not been for the ministration of dissenting preachers, would for thirty years have been but little known, if at all, to the greater part of the inhabitants of the interior of Upper Canada."[[48]] Still the Canadian Methodist Church did not occupy so conspicuous a place in the official public life of Canada, and in Sydenham's Legislative Council of 1841, out of twenty-four members, eight represented Anglicanism, eight Presbyterianism, eight Catholicism, and Methodism had to find lowlier places for its political leaders.[[49]]

Hitherto religion has been viewed in its social and spiritual aspects. But Canadian history has, with perhaps over-emphasis, selected one great controversy as the central point in the religious life of the province. It is not my intention to enter here into the wearisome details of the Clergy Reserve question. But the fight over the establishment principle forms an essential factor in the social and political life of Canada between 1839 and 1854, the year in which it was finally settled. It is first necessary to discriminate between what may be called casual and incidental support to churches in Canada, and the main Clergy Reserve fund. When Dr. Black challenged, in the interests of Presbyterianism, certain monies paid to Anglican churches in Upper and Lower Canada, he was able to point to direct assistance given by the Imperial Parliament to the Anglican Church in Canada. He was told in answer that these grants were temporarily made to individuals with whose lives they terminated, and that a pledge had been given in 1832 that Britain should be relieved of such expenses.[[50]] In a similar fashion, when the district of Perth, in Upper Canada, was settled by discharged soldiers and emigrants from Scotland, "Government offered assistance for the support of a minister, without respect to religious denomination," and, as a matter of fact, the community thus assisted to a clergyman, received, not a minister of the Church of Scotland, but one ordained by the Secession Church in Scotland—a curious but laudable example of laxity on the part of government.[[51]]

The root and ground of offending lay in the thirty-sixth and following clauses of the Constitutional Act of 1791, which proposed to support and maintain a Protestant clergy in the provinces by grants of land, equal in value to the seventh part of lands granted for other purposes. On the face of it, and interpreted by the clauses which follow, the Act seems to bear out the Anglican contention that the English Church establishment received an extension to Canada through the Act, and that no other church was expected to receive a share. It is true that the legal decision of 1819, and the views of colonial secretaries like Glenelg, admitted at least the Scottish Church to a portion of the benefits. But for the purposes of the situation in 1839, it is merely necessary to say that a British parliament in 1791, ignorant of actual colonial conditions, and more especially of the curious ecclesiastical developments with which the American colonies had modified the British system before 1776, and probably forgetful of the claims of the Church of Scotland to parliamentary recognition, had given Canada the beginnings of an Anglican Church establishment; and that the Anglicans in Canada, and more especially those led by Dr. John Strachan, had more than fulfilled the sectarian and monopolist intentions of the legislators.

Three schools of opinion formed themselves in the intervening years. First and foremost came the establishment men, mainly Anglican, but with a certain Presbyterian following, who claimed to monopolize the benefits, such as they were, of the Clergy Reserve funds. Canada as a British colony was bound to support the one or two state churches of the mother country; religious inequality was to flourish there as at home; dissent was to receive the same stigma and disqualification, and the dominant church or churches were to live, not by the efforts of their members, but at the expense of all citizens of the state, whether Anglican, Presbyterian, or Methodist. This phase of opinion received its most offensive expression from leaders like the Bishop of Toronto. To these monopolists, any modification of the Anglican settlement seemed a "tyrannical and unjust measure," and they adopted an ecclesiastical arrogance towards their fellow-Christians, which did much to alienate popular sympathies throughout the province.

At the other extreme was a solid mass of public sentiment which had little interest in the ecclesiastical theories of the Bishop of Toronto, and which resented alike attempts to convert the provincial university into an Anglican college, and the cumbrous and unjust form of church establishment, the most obvious evidence of which lay in the undeveloped patches of Clergy Reserve land scattered everywhere throughout the settlements. It was the undoubted desire of a majority in 1840 that the Clergy Reserve system should be ended, the former reserves sold, and the proceeds applied to educational and general purposes; a desire which had been registered in the House of Assembly on fourteen different occasions since 1826.[[52]] The case for the voluntary principle in Canada had many exponents, but these words of Dr. John Rolph in 1836 express the spirit of the movement in both its strength and its weakness: "Instead of making a State provision for any one or more churches; instead of apportioning the Clergy Reserves among them with a view to promoting Christianity; instead of giving pensions and salaries to ministers to make them independent of voluntary contributions from the people, I would studiously avoid that policy, and leave truth unfettered and unimpeded to make her own conquests.... The professions of law and physic are well represented in this Assembly, and bear ample testimony to the generosity of the people towards them. Will good, pious and evangelical ministers of our holy religion be likely to fare worse than the physicians of the body, or the agents for our temporal affairs? Let gospel ministers, as the Scriptures say, live by the gospel, and the apostolic maxim that the workman is worthy of his hire implies the performance of duty rewarded temporarily by those who impose it. There is no fear that the profession will become extinct for want of professors."[[53]]

Between the extremes, however, there existed a group of moderate politicians, represented, in the Upper Province by Baldwin, in the Lower by La Fontaine, and among British statesmen apparently by both Sydenham and Elgin. Especially among its Canadian members, this group felt keenly the desirability of supporting religion, as it struggled through the difficulties inevitably connected with early colonial life. But neither Baldwin, who was a devoted Anglican, nor La Fontaine, a faithful son of his Church, showed any tinge of Strachan's bitterness as they considered the question; and nothing impressed Canadian opinion more than did La Fontaine's speech, in a later phase of the Clergy Reserve troubles, when he solemnly renounced on behalf of his coreligionists any chance of stealing an advantage while the Protestants were quarrelling, and when he stated his opinion that the endowment belonged to the Protestant clergy, and should be shared equally among them. It was this school of thought—-to anticipate events by a year or two—which received the sanction of Sydenham's statesmanship, and that energetic mind never accomplished anything more notable than when, in the face of a strong secularizing feeling, to the justification for which he was in no way blind, he repelled the party of monopoly, and yet retained the endowment for the Protestant churches of Canada. "The Clergy Reserves," he wrote in a private letter, "have been, and are, the great overwhelming grievance—the root of all the troubles of the province, the cause of the Rebellion—the never-failing watchword at the hustings—the perpetual source of discord, strife, and hatred. Not a man of any party but has told me that the greatest boon which could be conferred on the country would be that they should be swept into the Atlantic, and that nobody should get them. My Bill[[54]] has gone through the Assembly by a considerable majority, thirty to twenty, and I feel confident that I can get it through the Council without the change of a word. If it is really carried, it is the greatest work that ever has been done in this country, and will be of more solid advantage to it than all the loans and all the troops you can make or send. It is worth ten unions, and was ten times more difficult."[[55]]

It is a melancholy comment on the ecclesiastical interpretation of religion that, ten years later, when the firmly expressed desires of all moderate men had given the Bishop of Toronto a good excuse for acquiescence in Sydenham's status quo, that pugnacious ecclesiastic still fought to save as much of the monopoly as could be secured.[[56]]

With the Clergy Reserve dispute, the region of politics has been reached; and, after all, politics furnished the most powerful influence in the young Canadian community. But politics must be taken less in the constitutional sense, as has been the custom with Canadian writers, and more in the social and human sense. It is important also to note the broad stretches of Canadian existence into which they hardly intruded. Political questions found few exponents among the pioneers as they cleared the forests, or gathered lumber for the British market, or pushed far to the west and north in pursuit of furs. Even the Rebellion, when news of it reached Strickland and his fellow-settlers in the Peterborough country, came to them less as part of a prolonged struggle in which they all were taking part, than as an abnormal incident, to be ended outright by loyal strength. They hardly seem to have thought that any liberties of theirs were really endangered. When Mackenzie himself complained that instead of entering Toronto with four or five thousand men, he found himself at the head of a poor two hundred, he does not seem to have realized that, even had his fellow-conspirators not mismanaged things, it would still have been difficult to keep hard-working settlers keyed up to the pitch of revolutionary and abstract doctrines.[[57]] There must have been many settlers of the temper of the humble Scottish janitor in Queen's College, Kingston, who wrote, in the midst of the struggle of parties in 1851: "For my part I never trouble my head about one of them. Although the polling-house was just across the street, I never went near it."[[58]] In the cities, however, and along the main lines of communication, the interest must have been keen, and the country undoubtedly attained its manhood as it struggled towards the solution of questions like those of the Clergy Reserves, the financing of the colony, the regulation of trade and immigration, and, above all others, the definition of responsible government.

Something has already been said of the various political groups in the colony, for they corresponded roughly to the different strata of settlement—French, Loyalist, and men of the later immigration. It is true, as Sydenham and Elgin pointed out, that the British party names hardly corresponded to local divisions—and that these divisions were really too petty to deserve the name of parties. Yet it would be foolish to deny the actual existence of the groups, or to refuse to see in their turbulence and strife the beginning of national self-consciousness, and the first stage in a notable political development.

Most conspicuous among the political forces, because the bond of party union was for them something deeper than opinion, and must be called racial, was the French-Canadian group, with the whole weight of habitant support behind it. From the publication of Lord Durham's Report, through the Sydenham regime, and down till Sir Charles Bagot surrendered to their claims, the French politicians presented an unbroken and hostile front to the British community. Colborne had repressed their risings at the point of the bayonet; a Whig government had deprived them temporarily of free institutions; Durham—their friend after his fashion—had bidden them be absorbed into the greater British community; Sydenham came to enforce what Durham had suggested; and, with each new check, their pride had grown more stubborn and their nationalism more intense. Bagot, who understood them and whom they came to trust, may be allowed to describe their characteristics, through the troubled first years of union: "On Lord Sydenham's arrival," he wrote to Stanley, "he found the Lower Province deprived of a constitution, the legislative functions of the government being administered by a special council, consisting of a small number of members nominated by the Crown. A large portion of the people, at least those of French origin, prostrate under the effects of the Rebellion, overawed by the power of Great Britain, and excluded from all share in the government, had resigned themselves to a sullen and reluctant submission, or to a perverse but passive resistance to the government. This temper was not improved by the passing of the Act of Union. In this measure, heedless of the generosity of the Imperial government, in overlooking their recent disaffection, and giving them a free and popular constitution, ... they apprehended a new instrument of subjection, and accordingly prepared to resist it. Lord Sydenham found them in this disposition, and despairing, from its early manifestations, of the possibility of overcoming or appeasing it, before the period at which it would be necessary to put in force the Act of Union, he determined upon evincing his indifference to it, and upon taking steps to carry out his views, in spite of the opposition of the French party.... They have from that time declared and evinced their hostility to the Union ... and have maintained a consistent, united, and uncompromising opposition to the government which was concerned in carrying it into execution."[[59]]