A history of Canada, 1763-1812

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

Reasons for the persecution of the Loyalists.

The policy was unwise, but it was intelligible; and it is the more intelligible when viewed in the light of the contrast furnished by the sequel to the great civil war between the Northern and the Southern states. As time goes on and the world becomes more civilized, public and private vendettas tend to go out of fashion and individuals and nations alike find it a little easier to forgive, though possibly not to forget. In any case, therefore, the outcome of a war eighty years later than the American War of Independence might have been The American War of Independence as contrasted with the later war between the North and the South. expected to bear traces of kindlier feeling and broader humanity. But there were other reasons for the contrast between the attitude taken up by the victorious Northern states towards the defeated Southern confederacy and that of the successful Revolutionary party towards their Loyalist opponents. The cause for which the Northerners fought and conquered was the maintenance of the Union; the cause for which the partisans of the Revolution fought and conquered was separation. It was therefore logical and consistent, when the fighting was over, in the former case to do what could be done to cement the Union, in the latter to do all that would accentuate and complete separation. Amnesty was in a sense the natural outcome of the later war, proscription was in a sense the natural outcome of the earlier. Slowly and reluctantly the revolting states came to the determination to part company with the mother country. Having made their decision and staked their all upon carrying it to a successful issue, they were minded also to part company for all time with those among them who held the contrary view. They were a new people, not wholly sure of their ground; they would not run the risk, as it seemed, of trying to reconcile men whose hearts were not with theirs.

Furthermore, in contrasting the two wars it will be noted that in the later there was a geographical division between the two parties which did not exist in the earlier case. The great civil war was a fight between North and South; there was not fighting in each single state of the Union. The result, broadly speaking, was a definite conquest of a large and well-defined area where the feeling had been solidly hostile, and the only practical method of permanently retaining the conquered states was by amnesty and reconciliation. The War of Independence, as already pointed out, was not thus geographically defined. In each separate state there was civil war, local, narrow, and bitter; and, when the end came, the solution most congenial to the victorious majority in each small community was also a practicable though not a wise or humane solution, viz., to weed out the malcontents and to make good the Patriots’ losses at the expense of the Loyalists. Union was accepted by the thirteen states as a necessity; it was not the principle for which they contended. They fought for separation, they jealously retained all they could of their local independence, and each within its own limits carried out the principle of separation to its bitter end by proscribing the adherents to the only Union which they had known before the war, that which was produced by common allegiance to the British Crown.

The Glengarry settlers.

The main result of the incoming of the Loyalists was to give to Canada a Protestant British population by the side of a Roman Catholic French community; but among the immigrants were Scottish Highlanders from the back settlements of the province of New York, Gaelic speaking and Roman Catholic in religion, who had served in the war and who were very wisely settled in what is now Glengarry county on the edge of the French Canadian districts. Here their religion was a bond between them and the French Canadians, while their race and traditions kept them in line with the other British settlers of Ontario. They brought with them the honoured name of Macdonell, and in the early years of the nineteenth century another body of Macdonells, also disbanded soldiers, joined them from the old country. It needs no telling how high the record of the Macdonells stands in the annals of Canada, or how the Glengarry settlers proved their loyalty and their worth in the war of 1812.[182]

Scheme for a settlement of French Royalists in Upper Canada.

Side by side with this Macdonell immigration, may be noted an abortive immigration scheme for Upper Canada, which was not British and was later in time than the War of American Independence, but which had something in common with the advent of the Loyalists. This was an attempt to form a French Royalist settlement in Upper Canada under Count Joseph de Puisaye, ‘ci devant Puisaye the much enduring man and Royalist’,[183] a French emigré who had taken a leading part in the disastrous landing at Quiberon Bay in 1795. In or about 1797 he seems to have made a proposal to the British Government that they should send out a number of the Royalist refugees to Canada. The projected settlement was to be on military and feudal lines. ‘The same measure must be employed as in founding the old colony of Canada.... It was the soldiery who cleared and prepared the land for our French settlements of Canada and Louisiana.’ The writer of the above had evidently in mind the measures taken in the days of Louis XIV to colonize New France, and the planting out of the Carignan-Salières Regiment.[184] The scheme, it was anticipated, would commend itself to the Canadians in view of the community of race, language and religion, while to the British Government its value would consist in placing ‘decided Royalists in a country where republican principles and republican customs are becoming leading features’, i. e. on the frontiers of the United States. In July, 1798, the Duke of Portland wrote to the Administrator of Upper Canada on the subject, evidently contemplating the possibility of a considerable emigration to Canada of French refugees then living in England, of whom de Puisaye and about forty others, who were to embark in the course of the summer, would be the forerunners. The Duke laid down that de Puisaye and his company were to be treated as American Loyalists in the matter of allotment of land. William Windham, Pitt’s Secretary for War, also wrote, introducing de Puisaye to the Administrator as being personally well-known to himself, and explaining that the object of the scheme was ‘to provide an asylum for as many as possible of those whose adherence to the ancient laws, religion, and constitution of their country has rendered them sacrifices to the French Revolution’, to select by preference those who had served in the Royalist armies, to allow them to have a settlement of their own ‘as much as possible separate from any other body of French, or of those persons speaking French, who may be at present in America, or whom Government may hereafter be disposed to settle there’, and by this comparative isolation, as well as by giving them some element of military and feudal discipline, to preserve to them the character ‘of a society founded on the principles of reverence for religion and attachment to monarchy’. The scheme was born out of due time. The coming century and the New World were not the time and place for reviving feudal institutions. But on paper it was an attractive scheme. Side by side with the British Loyalists who had been driven out of the newly-formed American republic, would be settled French Loyalists whom the Revolution had hunted from France. Their loyalty and their sufferings for their cause would commend them to their British fellow colonists: their kinship in race, religion, and language would commend them to the French Canadians, who in turn had little sympathy with a France that knew not Church or King.

The place selected for the settlement was between Toronto and Lake Simcoe. It was chosen as being roughly equidistant from the French settlements in Lower Canada and those on the Detroit river, and as being near the seat of government, Toronto then York, and consequently within easy reach of assistance and well under control. Here a township was laid out and called Windham. De Puisaye and his party arrived at Montreal in October, 1798, and in the middle of November de Puisaye himself was at York, while his followers remained through the winter at Kingston. It was a bad time of year for starting a new settlement in Upper Canada, and possibly this was one of the reasons why it failed from the first. Another was that de Puisaye, who seems to have formed a friendship with Joseph Brant,[185] divided the small band of emigrants and went off himself to form a second settlement on or near the Niagara river. The scheme in short never took root: the emigrants or most of them went elsewhere; the name Windham went elsewhere and is now to be found in Norfolk county of Ontario. De Puisaye went back to London after the Peace of Amiens, and the project for a French Royalist colony in Upper Canada passed into oblivion.[186]

White Loyalists were not the only residents within the present boundaries of the United States who expatriated themselves or were expatriated in consequence of the War of Independence, and who settled in Canada. It has been seen that the Six Nation Indians had in the Loyalty of the Six Nation Indians and their settlement in Canada. main been steadily on the British side throughout the war, and that prominent among them were the Mohawks led by Joseph Brant. When peace was signed containing no recognition or safeguard of the country of the Six Nations or of native rights, the Indians complained with some reason that their interests had been sacrificed by Great Britain. Under these circumstances Governor Haldimand offered them lands on the British side of the lakes; and a number of them—more especially the Mohawks—permanently changed their dwelling-place still to remain under their great father, the King of England.