A history of Canada, 1763-1812

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

When the English colonies were planted in North America there was the most complete absence of system at home.

The English have never been systematic or continuous in their policy throughout their history; but the period of English history when North America was colonized was the one of all others when system and continuity were most conspicuously absent. It was a time of violent political changes at home, of strife between king and people. A line of kings was brought in from Scotland, they were overturned, they were restored, and they were finally driven out again. This was the condition of the Crown to which the newly-planted colonies owed allegiance, and which was supposed to exercise supreme authority over the colonies. Under the Crown were Proprietors and Companies, whose charters, being derived from a perpetually disputed source, were a series of dissolving views; and under the Proprietors and Companies were a number of strong English citizens who, caring little for the theoretical basis of their position, cared very much for practical independence, and ordered their ways accordingly, becoming steadily and stubbornly more independent through perpetual friction and perpetual absence of systematic control. Thus it was that the North American colonies drank in, as their mother’s milk, the traditions and the habits of independence. They carried with them English citizenship, but the privileges of such citizenship rather than the responsibilities; and, in so far as the mother country was inclined to ignore the privileges, the colonies were glad to disclaim the responsibilities.

Absence of collective responsibility in the British North American colonies.

They were separate and distinct, not only from the mother country, but also from each other, and they could not in consequence from first to last be held collectively responsible. In the wars with Canada, New England and New York, though alike exposed to French invasion, and from time to time co-operating to repel the invaders or to organize counter-raids, yet acted throughout as entirely separate entities, in no way inclined to bear each other’s burdens as common citizens of a common country. The southern colonies, until the French, shortly before the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, came down into the valley of the Ohio, took no part whatever in the fight between Great Britain and France for North America. The New Englanders, most patriotic of the colonists, beyond all others went their own ways in war and peace; uninvited and unauthorized from home they formed a confederation among themselves: early in their history they tried to make a treaty with Canada on the basis that, whatever might be the relations between France and England in Europe, there should be peace between French and English in North America: they took Port Royal: they attacked Quebec: they captured Louisbourg: and the anonymous French eye-witness of the first siege and capture of Louisbourg commented as follows on the difference between the colonial land forces and the men of the small Imperial squadron which Warren brought to the colonists’ aid: ‘In fact one could never have told that these troops belonged to the same nation and obeyed the same prince. Only the English are capable of such oddities, which nevertheless form a part of that precious liberty of which they show themselves so jealous.’[19]

The colonies had never been taxed for revenue purposes.

Most of all it should be remembered that, though subject to the Navigation laws imposed by the mother country and to that extent restricted in their commercial dealings, no English colony in North America, before the days of the Stamp Act, had ever been taxed by Crown or Parliament for revenue purposes. In the year 1758 Montcalm was supposed to have written on this subject in the following terms: ‘As to the English colonies, one essential point should be known, it is that they are never taxed. They keep that to themselves, an enormous fault this in the policy of the mother country. She should have taxed them from the foundation. I have certain advice that all the colonies would take fire at being taxed now.’[20] This judgement was probably sound. It might have been well if from the first, when charters were issued and colonial communities were formed, some small tax had been levied for Imperial purposes upon the British colonies, if some contribution of only nominal amount had been exacted as a condition of retaining British citizenship. There would then have been a precedent, such as Englishmen always try to find, and there would have been in existence a reminder that all members of a family should contribute to the household expenses.[21]

The political separation of the North American colonies was the natural result of their geographical separation.

We are accustomed to think and to read of the separation of the American colonies from the mother country as wholly an abnormal incident, the result of bad handiwork, not the outcome of natural forces. This view is incorrect. History ultimately depends on geography. When two members of the same race, nation, or family pass their lives at a long distance from each other, in different lands, in different climates, under different conditions, the natural and inevitable result is that they diverge from each other. The centrifugal tendency may be counteracted by tact and clever statesmanship, and still more by sense of common danger; but it is a natural tendency. Men cannot live at a distance from each other without becoming to some extent estranged. The Greeks, with their instinctive love of logic and of symmetry, and with their fundamental conception of a city as the political unit, looked on colonization as separation, and called a colony a departure from home. The colonists carried with them reverence for the mother state, but not dependence upon it; and, if there was any political bond, it was embodied in the words that those who went out went out on terms of equality with, not of subordination to, those who remained behind. The English, in fact, though not in principle, planted colonies on the model of the Greek settlements; their theories and their practice collided; and, being a practical race, their theories eventually went by the board.

Conflicting tendencies. Distance and sentiment.

When an over-sea colony is founded, the new settlement is in effect most distant from the old country; that is to say, means of communication between the one point and the other are least frequent and least developed. The tendency to separation—as far as geography is concerned—is therefore strongest at the outset. On the other hand, in the foundation of a colony, unless the foundation is due to political disruption at home, the sentiment towards the mother country is warmer and closer than in after years, for the founders remember where they were born and where they grew to manhood. As generations go on, the tie of sentiment becomes necessarily weaker, but, with better communication, distance becomes less; there is therefore a competition between the opposing tendencies. Many of the Greek colonies were the result of στάσις στάσις and colonization. or division in the mother cities. The unsuccessful party went out and made a separate home. In a very modified form the same cause was at work in the founding of the Puritan colonies of North America. Notably, the emigrants on the Mayflower were already exiles from England, political refugees, who had found a temporary home in the Netherlands. These founders of the Plymouth settlement were by no means the chief colonizers of North America, or even of New England, but their story—the story of the ‘Pilgrim fathers’—became a nucleus of Puritan tradition; and from it after generations deduced that New England was the home of English citizens whom England had cast out. Thus one group, at any rate, of North American colonies traced their origin to separation. Then came the element of distance. ‘The European colonies in America,’ wrote Adam Smith, with some exaggeration, ‘are more remote than the most distant provinces of the greatest empires which had ever been known before.’[22] The Atlantic Ocean lay between them and the motherland, and cycles went by before that distance was perceptibly modified. In our own time, steam and telegraphy have been perpetually counteracting the effects of distance. It was not so in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. Navigation was improved, but was still the humble handmaid of wind and tide; and on the very eve of the American War of Independence the remoteness of the North American colonies, and the prevailing ignorance in England about the North American colonies were, though no doubt much exaggerated, a commonplace among the speakers and writers of the time.