A history of Canada, 1763-1812

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

James Murray was still under forty years of age. He proved himself a stanch, loyal, and capable soldier, resolute in critical times, as when he defended Quebec through the trying winter of 1759-60, and later, in 1781-2, held Minorca until his handful of troops, stricken with famine and disease, surrendered their arms, as they said, to God alone. His words and his actions alike testified that he was a humane and just man. Like other soldiers, before and since, having seen war face to face, he was more ready than civilians who had not risked their lives, but breathed threatenings and slaughter from a safe distance, to treat the conquered with leniency.

Difficulties of the situation.

He had many difficulties to contend with. Military matters did not run smoothly. In September, 1763, there had been a dangerous mutiny among the troops at Quebec. It was caused by an ill-timed order sent out from home to the effect that the soldiers should pay for their rations; and serious consequences might have followed but for the prompt and firm attitude of the general and his officers. At Quebec, Murray combined civil and military powers; but after civil administration had been proclaimed, though his government included the whole of the province as constituted by the Royal proclamation, he was left without authority over the troops at Montreal, where Burton jealously retained an independent military command. The inevitable result was to fetter his action to a great extent, to give to the Canadians the impression of divided authority,[38] and to accentuate friction between soldiers and civilians, which Ill feeling between soldiers and civilians. culminated in an assault at Montreal in December, 1764, on a magistrate named Walker, who had made himself specially obnoxious to the officers of the garrison. Two years later the supposed perpetrators of the outrage were tried and acquitted, but the affair left ill feeling behind it, and Walker remained an active and pertinacious opponent of the British Government in Canada.

Among the Canadian population there were various causes of unrest. The priesthood were anxious as to their position and privileges. The depreciation of the paper money, which had been issued under the French régime, gave trouble. The law was in a state of chaos; and, most of all, the first Governor of Canada had to withstand the pretensions of the handful of Protestants, in The Protestant minority. 1764 about 200 in number, in 1766 about 450, who wished to dominate the French Canadians, alien in religion and in race.

Against the claims of this small but noisy and intriguing minority Murray resolutely set his face, but the difficulties which arose led to his being summoned home. He left Murray leaves for England and is succeeded by Carleton. Canada for England towards the end of June, 1766, and though he retained the post of Governor till April, 1768, he never returned to Quebec.

His successor was Guy Carleton, who arrived in Canada in September, 1766, and carried on the administration as Lieutenant-Governor till 1768, when he became Governor-in-chief. Like Murray, he was a soldier of distinction, and had been a warm personal friend of Wolfe, who made him one of the executors of his will. He was born in 1724, at Strabane in the north of Ireland, the third son of General Sir Guy Carleton. He went into the Guards, was transferred to the 72nd Regiment, and served in Germany, at Louisbourg, and, as Quartermaster-General, with Wolfe at Quebec. He remained at Quebec with Murray during the eventful winter of 1759-60; and, after further active service at Belle Isle and Havana, he came back to Quebec in 1766, to do more than any one man in war and peace for the safety and well-being of Canada as a British possession.

The difficulties which Murray had been called upon to meet confronted him also, and, like Murray, he saw the necessity as well as the justice of resisting the extravagant claims of the minority, and conciliating to British rule the large body of the Canadian population. For nearly four years he remained at his post, forming his views as to the lines on which Canada should be remodelled. In August, 1770, he left for England on leave of absence, and in England he remained until the Quebec Act had been passed. The Act was passed in June, 1774, taking effect from the 1st of May in the following year; and in the middle of September, 1774, Carleton arrived again at Quebec. Conditions which led to the passing of the Quebec Act. It is now proposed to review the conditions which led to the passing of the Act, and the policy which was embodied in it, omitting as far as possible minor incidents and dealing only with the main features, which illustrate the general course of British colonial history.

The Conquest of Canada presented a new problem in British colonial history.

The acquisition of Canada presented to British statesmen a wholly new problem. The British Empire had hitherto widened mainly by means of settlement, for the seventeenth century, as far as Great Britain was concerned, was a time of settlement, not of conquest. Jamaica, it is true, had been taken from the Spaniards, and New York from the Dutch; but, great as was the importance of securing those two dependencies in the light of subsequent history, the conquest or cession of both the one and the other was rather an incident than the result of an era of war and conquest. Such an era came with the eighteenth century; and, when the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 secured Great Britain in undivided possession of Newfoundland, and confirmed to her the possession of the Acadian peninsula, and of the Rock of Gibraltar, a notable outpost of the future Empire, there was a beginning, though a small beginning, of territorial expansion as the result of war.

The Seven Years’ War brought with it British conquest alike in East and West; but in India the British advance was in some sort a repetition on a wider scale of what other European nations had done in the same regions. It was the natural outcome of trade rivalry, and of white men coming among Eastern races. The conquest of Canada, Canada was: (1) a continental area; (2) colonized by another European race; (3) bordering on a sphere of British colonization; (4) the home of a coloured race. on the other hand, differed in kind from all that had gone before in British history. The Imperial Government of Great Britain took over a great expanse of continent, and became, by force of arms, proprietor of a country which another colonizing race had acquired by settlement. The new problems were how to administer and to develop not a small island or peninsula but a very large continental area, and how to rule a rival white race which from the beginnings of colonization in North America had made that area, or part of it, its own. To these two most difficult problems was added a third, how to administer the new territory and to rule the French colonists, so as to work in harmony with the adjacent British colonies. Conquest and settlement, so to speak, overlapped. If Canada had not been a French colony, and had been inhabited by coloured men alone, or if Canada, as a French colony, had been in a different continent from the British North American colonies, the task of construction or re-construction would have been infinitely easier. It would have been easier, too, if the French Canadians had been the only inhabitants of Canada. But, as it was, one white race conquered another white race, which in its turn had secured mastery over a coloured race, and in the land of that coloured race had not merely conquered or traded, but settled and colonized; and the new conquerors were of the same kith and kin as settlers in the adjoining territories, whose traditions were all traditions not of ruling nor of conquering so much as of gradually acquiring by settlement at the expense of the coloured race.