A history of Canada, 1763-1812

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

Dorchester’s views in favour of a Central Legislature and a strong Executive.

We have seen that he had not favoured the policy of dividing the province of Quebec into two provinces, and that he had shown sympathy with Chief Justice Smith’s proposals for establishing a general government for British North America. In the summer of 1793, after the Canada Act had come into force but while he was still in England on leave, he raised again this question of a central government for all the King’s provinces in British North America, receiving an answer from Dundas to the effect that the measure would require a new Act of Parliament and that in Dundas’ opinion it would not add to the real strength or happiness of the different provinces. After his return to Canada Dorchester took up his text again, laying stress on the necessity of welding together the different provinces. In existing conditions he saw a revival of the system which had caused rebellion and the dismemberment of the Empire. While the United States were pursuing a policy of consolidation, the aim of the King’s Government seemed to be to divide and sub-divide and form independent governments. All power, he continued, was withdrawn from the Governor-General, and instructions were sent directly from home to inferior officers, so that the intermediate authority was virtually superseded. Everything was favourable to insubordination, and the fruits of it might be expected at an early season. This was in February 1795, when the governor was smarting under what he considered to be unjust censure by the Home Government; and, though he remained in Canada for some time longer, he continued to show, by the tone of his dispatches, that he entirely disapproved of the existing régime. In November, 1795, he wrote of ‘all command, civil and military, being disorganized and without remedy’; in the following May he wrote that ‘this unnatural disorder in our political constitution, which alienates every servant of the Crown from whoever administers the King’s Government, leaving only an alternative still more dangerous, that of offending the mass of the people, cannot fail to enervate all the powers of the British Empire on this Continent’; and in June he wrote, that the old colonial system was being strengthened with ruinous consequences.

It is not easy to decide how much ground there was for his complaints. If the situation was difficult, the difficulty had partly arisen from the bad custom, of which he had availed himself, of allowing governors and other holders of posts in the colonies to remain for an inordinate time at home while still retaining office and receiving the pay attaching to it. At the very time when he was most wanted in Canada to carry out the division of the two provinces, and to make the central authority of the Governor-in-Chief strongly felt from the first, he had remained away for fully two years, thereby allowing the new system to come into being and to make some progress before there was any Governor-in-Chief on the spot. Coming out to Canada he found the Lieutenant-Governors corresponding direct with the Home Government, and it was hardly reasonable to insist that they should be debarred from doing so, provided that, as the Duke of Portland, who succeeded Dundas, pointed out, the Governor-in-Chief was supplied with copies of the correspondence. An analogous case is that of Australia at the present day. The governors of the separate states correspond directly with the Colonial Office, sending copies of important dispatches to the Governor-General of the Commonwealth. Had Dorchester not been absent, Relations of the Governor-in-Chief and Lieutenant-Governors. when Simcoe took up his appointment in Upper Canada, and had his mind not been prejudiced by bitter memories of the days of Germain, it is possible that friction might not have arisen. On the other hand the limits of the authority of the Governor-in-Chief and of the Lieutenant-Governors in the British North American provinces seem not to have been clearly defined, with the result that, as years went on, the Governor-in-Chief gradually became little more than Governor of Lower Canada, and the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada became, in civil matters, governor of that province in all but the name. When Lord Dalhousie was appointed Governor-in-Chief, Sir Peregrine Maitland, then Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, asked the Secretary of State for a ruling on the subject; and Lord Bathurst’s answer, dated the 9th of February, 1821, was that ‘So long as the Governor-in-Chief is not resident within the province of Upper Canada, and does not take the oaths of office in Upper Canada, he has no control whatever over any part of the civil administration, nor are you bound to comply with his directions or to communicate with him on any act of your civil government. To His Majesty you are alone responsible for the conduct of the civil administration’. If, on the other hand, the Governor-in-Chief were to take up his residence in Upper Canada and be sworn into office, the Secretary of State laid down that the functions of the Lieutenant-Governor would be entirely suspended. By this date, therefore, the two appointments had become exclusive of each other. At a later date, when Lord Durham was going out to Canada, Lord Glenelg, then Secretary of State, emphasized still more strongly the independence of the Lieutenant-Governors. When sending Lord Durham his commission, he wrote on the 3rd of April, 1838, of the position which the Governor-General or Governor-in-Chief had up to that date held in regard to the other provinces. ‘With the title of Governor-General, he has, in fact, been Governor of the province of Lower Canada only, and has been prohibited from resorting to any of the other provinces, lest his presence should supersede the authority of the respective Lieutenant-Governors, to whose administration they have been confided.... Hitherto it has not been the practice to carry on official correspondence between the Governor-General and any of the Lieutenant-Governors. The Governor-General and the Lieutenant-Governors have severally conducted their separate administrations as separate and independent authorities, addressing all their communications on public affairs to the head of this department, and receiving from the Secretary of State alone instructions for their guidance.’ The result of dividing Canada into two provinces was necessarily to create two governors. One was intended to be subordinate to the other, but the subordination gradually became nominal only. The political problems of Lower Canada were so difficult and so important as to absorb the full time and attention of the Governor-in-Chief; no railways or telegraphs facilitated communication; and the British North American provinces, instead of being controlled by a central executive authority, for good or evil went their own way.

It has been seen that during Dorchester’s first government, he had experienced no little difficulty in dealing with Livius, the contumacious Chief Justice of Quebec. In the earlier period of his second government, he had, on the contrary, a wise and loyal fellow worker in Chief Justice Smith. Soon after the governor returned to Canada for the last time, towards the end of 1793, Smith died and his place was taken by Osgoode, the Chief Justice of Upper Canada, who did not enjoy Dorchester’s confidence to the same extent as his predecessor. But Osgoode’s appointment was made the occasion for putting into practice a reform which Dorchester, to his lasting Dorchester’s opposition to fees and perquisites. honour, had urgently pressed upon the notice of the Imperial Government, the abolition of fees and perquisites, and the payment of judges and other public officers by adequate salaries alone. Dorchester himself, when he first took up the government of Canada in 1766, had refused to take the fees to which he was legally entitled; and in the last years of his Canadian service he wrote on this subject in no measured terms. In a dispatch dated the last day of December, 1793, and written in connexion with the vacant chief justiceship, he referred to the system of fees and perquisites as one which ‘alienates every servant of the Crown from whoever administers the King’s Government. This policy I consider as coeval with His Majesty’s Governments in North America, and the cause of their destruction. As its object was not public but private advantage, so this principle has been pursued with diligence, extending itself unnoticed, till all authority and influence of government on this continent was overcome, and the governors reduced almost to mere corresponding agents, unable to resist the pecuniary speculations of gentlemen in office, their connexions and associates’. He added that whatever tended to enfeeble the Executive power in British North America tended to sever it for ever from the Crown of Great Britain. Subsequent dispatches were to the same effect. In June, 1795, he reported having disallowed certain small claims by subordinate officers, expressed regret that gentlemen in Britain should look to America for a reward for their services, and laid down that officers should be paid sufficient salaries to place them above pecuniary speculations in the colonies. The next month he wrote in the same strain with reference to the Customs officials and the collection of revenue: and a year later he again insisted that such officers should not receive indirect emoluments, that the local administration should not be warped and made subservient to fees, profits, perquisites ‘and all their dirty train’, and that the national interests should not be sacrificed to gentlemen who possessed or were looking out for good places for themselves and their connexions. Running through the dispatches is insistence on the principle that the Executive must be strong, that it can be strong only if the officers are duly subordinate to the representative of the Crown, that loyal subordination can only be produced by paying proper salaries and abolishing perquisites, and that the loss of the old North American colonies had been largely due to abuses which had lowered the dignity and the authority of the Crown, alienating from it the confidence and the affections of the people.

Dorchester criticized by Dundas for plain speaking as to the Americans.

The censure, if censure it can be called, which Dundas had passed on Dorchester, and which caused the latter to tender his resignation, was connected with the attitude which Dorchester felt it necessary to take up towards the United States after his return to Canada in the autumn of 1793. The Treaty of 1783 had settled, or purported to settle, the boundaries of Canada as against the United States, but it had not settled the boundaries of the United States as against the Indians, and the Indians manfully maintained their right to the territory War between the Americans and the Indians. north of the Ohio river. In November, 1791, an American force under General St. Clair, who had commanded at Ticonderoga at the time of Burgoyne’s advance, was badly defeated in the Miami country to the south-west of Lake Erie. The British Government and the Canadian authorities made various efforts to mediate between the contending parties, but the government of the United States was not disposed to accept such mediation, though British officers were asked to be present at conferences which were held in the summer of 1793 between representatives of the various Indian tribes and commissioners of the United States. No result came from these negotiations, the Indians demanding that the Ohio should be the boundary, the Americans definitely refusing to comply with the demand, and in the following year fighting began again.

The French Revolution had for some years been gathering strength. In the autumn of 1792 France had been declared a Republic; and the execution of the King American sympathy with France. on the 21st of January, 1793, was followed on the 1st of February by a declaration of war against Great Britain. The French also declared war against Spain, the power which now held New Orleans and Louisiana west of the Mississippi. The position in North America became at once very critical and very dangerous. Popular feeling in the United States ran strongly in favour of France. The Republicans of the New World were enthusiastic for the people who had enabled them to gain their independence and who, having put an end to monarchy in France, were preparing to insist upon the adoption of a Republican system elsewhere in Europe. Sympathy with France in the United States implied enmity to England, and Thomas Jefferson, Washington’s Secretary of State, was pronounced on the side of the French alliance, representing the views of the Republican party as opposed to the Federalists, the latter being headed by Alexander Hamilton and Jay and supported by the unrivalled influence of Washington himself. On the 22nd of April, 1793, Washington—with popular feeling strongly against him in the matter—issued a declaration of neutrality. At the same time, Genet, sent from France as representative Genet, French minister to the United States. of the new Republic, reached Charleston. With complete disregard of international law, which, when the French Revolution was at its height, had largely lost its meaning, Genet proceeded to make the United States a base for war against Great Britain and Spain, fitting out privateers, sending agents to Canada, planning a campaign against Louisiana. For some months the popularity of his country and his cause, the unpopularity of Great Britain, and the sympathy which Jefferson the Secretary of State had with his views, enabled him, in Washington’s words, to set the acts of the American Government at defiance with impunity and to threaten the Executive with an appeal to the people; but gradually Washington’s firmness and the Frenchman’s own outrageous pretensions had due effect; and, before a year had passed, Genet was, early in 1794, on the demand of the American Government, replaced by another minister.

It was while the bitterness of feeling against England in the United States was most intense that Dorchester Danger of war between Great Britain and the United States. returned to Canada. St. Clair had been replaced in command on the Ohio frontier by General Anthony Wayne, a soldier who had proved his worth in the War of Independence, a man of strong words and actions, and war seemed to be imminent. ‘Soon after my return to America,’ Dorchester wrote in the following year, ‘I perceived Dorchester’s views. a very different spirit’ (from that of the British Government) ‘animate the United States, much heat and enmity, extraordinary exertions, some open some covert, to inflame the passions of the people, all things moving as by French impulse rapidly towards hostilities, and the King’s Government of Lower Canada in danger of being overwhelmed, so that I considered a rupture as inevitable.’ Yet, as he said, he knew well that the British Government were anxious to maintain friendship and peace with the United States; there was no private inclination of his own to the contrary; nor, if there was, had he any force in Canada to back his views. In a previous dispatch, which was dated the 25th of October, 1793, almost immediately after his return, after having pointed out the likelihood of war and the necessity for reinforcements, he had written, ‘The interests of the King’s American dominions require peace, and I think the interests of the States require it still more, though their conduct both to us and the Indians has created many difficulties.’ He looked, he added, to a great future for the States and for the white race generally in North America, but not through war. ‘Not war, but a pure and impartial administration of justice under a mild, firm and wise government will establish the most powerful and wealthy people.’

Dorchester then was wholly averse to war; but being on the spot he saw more clearly than ministers in England that, the people of the United States being minded for war, want of preparation and appearance of timidity on the British side were likely to bring it on, that plain speaking and firm action might have a good effect. His firm attitude towards the United States. Simcoe, who was responsible under him for the frontier of Upper Canada, seems to have been of the same mind. Accordingly, in replying to two Indian deputations, one in the autumn of 1793, the other on the 10th of February, 1794, Dorchester took occasion to speak out, condemning the aggression of the United States which, he said, had nearly exhausted the patience of Great Britain, and referring to war between the two nations as imminent. At the same time, as a counterblast to Wayne’s advance in the Ohio territories, and as an outpost in the case of a movement against Detroit, he ordered a fort to be constructed and garrisoned on what were called the Miami rapids on the Maumee river, south-west of Lake Erie, near the site where a fort had been constructed and held during the War of Independence. Copies, or what purported to be copies, of the governor’s speeches, Protest of the American Government against Dorchester. and reports of his action, reached the American Government in due course, and Randolph, who had succeeded Jefferson, protested, characterizing them as ‘hostility itself’. In view of this protest Dundas, in July, 1794, by which time Jay, Washington’s emissary of peace, had arrived in England, addressed a mild remonstrance to Dorchester, expressing fear that what had been said and done might rather provoke hostilities than prevent them; and upon receipt of this dispatch in the following September Dorchester tendered his resignation. The Duke of Portland, who succeeded Dundas, was at pains to retain the old governor’s services, but, though nearly two years intervened before Dorchester actually left Canada, the correspondence Dorchester’s resignation. which passed in the interval showed his anxiety to be gone, now that the danger of war between Great Britain and the United States had for the moment passed away.