A history of Canada, 1763-1812

by Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas

Before his arrival in 1796, and at the time, Adet the French minister in the United States, was making mischief like his predecessor Genet, intriguing against Washington’s policy of strict neutrality as between France and Great Britain, and almost openly inciting the French Canadians to revolt. He over-reached himself, however, by supporting Jefferson’s candidature for the Presidency of the United States in succession to Washington, with the result that he was recalled. Jefferson’s opponent, John Adams, was elected President; and the feeling between France and the United States became strained to the verge of war between the two nations. The French designs on Canada came to nothing. A man named Maclane, said to have been of weak intellect, was executed for high treason at Quebec, and a vessel was seized containing arms, ostensibly for the state of Vermont, but, as the evidence seemed to show, designed for use in a raid from Vermont on Canada. There was no actual danger, but there was anxiety and unrest. England was at war with France; Lower Canada was the child of France; the United States contained a strong and very bitter anti-English party; and the armed forces in Canada were almost a negligible quantity. At this same critical time Prescott became involved in a quarrel with his Executive Council over the land question.

The land question in Canada. Prescott quarrels with his Executive Council.

A proclamation advertising Crown lands for settlement in Canada, which was issued in 1792, had called forth a large number of applications. Surveys had not kept pace with the demand for allotments, and the result had been that many applicants whose petitions had been entertained had not actually taken up any land, while others had settled and occupied land without having any legal title. As is usual in such cases, land-jobbing was prevalent; and Prescott, according to his own account, was at pains at once to frustrate ‘great schemes for accumulating land on principles of monopoly and speculation’, and to raise the fund which the Imperial Government had hoped to derive from this source for defraying in part the cost of civil administration. Prescott’s view, it would seem, was that those who had actually become occupiers and begun the work of settlement, should be confirmed in their lands in full; that, where applications had been recorded but no work done, the allotments should only be confirmed in part; that purchasers of claims should be dealt with on their merits, and that, the outstanding claims having been disposed of, the lands, with the exception of reserves for the Crown and the clergy, should be put up for sale at public auction. His Council strongly opposed him, on the ground that he was giving preference to those who had occupied land without having been granted any legal title, and that public sale would bring in a crowd of interlopers from the United States who would take up the land to the exclusion of Loyalists who had the first claim on the British Government. Prescott formed the view, rightly or wrongly, that various members of the Council were concerned in land-jobbing, and he held that public sale was the only real preventive of speculation. ‘Industrious farmers,’ he wrote, ‘who would wish to obtain a grant for the purpose of actual settlement, but who cannot spend their time in tedious solicitation, stand little chance of obtaining it, compared with speculators who can devote their time to the attainment of this object. By disposing of the land at public sale, industrious farmers would have an equal chance with any other competitor.’

Benedict Arnold’s claims.

The case of Benedict Arnold, though it did not apparently enter into the controversy, as he was in England at the time, illustrates the extravagant claims which were put forward to land grants in Canada. At the beginning of 1797 he wrote to the Duke of Portland, calling attention to the sacrifices which he had made for the British Government, and asking for a reward in the shape of a grant of lands in Canada. A year later he defined his demand. He stated that the usual grant was 5,000 acres to each field officer and 1,200 acres for every member of his family; in his own case, therefore, as his family consisted of a wife, six sons and a daughter, the total would amount to 14,600 acres; but, as he had raised and commanded what he called a legion of cavalry and infantry, he considered that he himself was entitled to 10,000 acres instead of 5,000, making up the total to 19,600 acres. Even this amount he had amplified in a previous petition to the King, and he wished to be allowed to select the land where he pleased and not to be compelled to reside upon it personally.

If Arnold’s claims were at all typical of others, it is not to be wondered at that Prescott took a strong line on the land question, with a view to putting a stop to speculation. The controversy which arose between himself and his Council was embittered by the course which he adopted of making public their proceedings. Chief Justice Osgoode and other members of the Council ranged themselves in opposition to him; and the state of feeling was well summed up in the words of a correspondent, writing from Quebec in August, 1798, that the Council must either get a new governor or the governor a new Council. The Duke of Portland, Secretary of State, Prescott recalled. preferred the former alternative. On the 10th of April, 1799, he ordered Prescott home. Robert Shore Milnes was sent out as Lieutenant-Governor of Lower Canada, and General Hunter as Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada. They reached Quebec on the 13th of June, and Milnes and Hunter appointed Lieutenant-Governors of Lower and Upper Canada respectively. on the 29th of July Prescott sailed for England, having received before he left addresses of confidence from all classes, British and French residents combining to pay honour to him, as a man, who, whatever his faults may have been, had won the respect and esteem of the people. By the evil custom of those days, though recalled from Canada, he was allowed to retain for years in England the office of Governor-General and to receive the pay.

Close of the eighteenth century.

Thus the eighteenth century came to an end, that memorable century, in all parts of the world fruitful alike for good and for evil to the British Empire, but nowhere so fruitful as in North America. It had seen New France severed from its motherland. It had seen the rival British colonies severed from Great Britain. It had seen the beginnings of an English province in Canada side by side with the French, and the grant of the first instalment of political privileges to Canadians of either race. The maritime provinces, when the century closed, were four in number, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, which owed its separate existence to the incoming of the Loyalists, Cape Breton, which was later to be incorporated with Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. The North-West was beginning to be a factor in Canadian history, and the exclusive power of the Hudson’s Bay Company in these regions was challenged by the formation of the North-West Company. Canada was still the land of the St. Lawrence and the great lakes, but light was breaking into the limitless area beyond, and as men’s visions widened, there came more movement and more unrest.

We have no regular census of the two Canadas between the year 1790, when there was an imperfect enumeration of the inhabitants of the then undivided province, and the years 1824-5; but in 1800 the Lieutenant-Governor estimated the population of Lower Canada at 160,000, while in 1806 an estimate of 250,000 is given from another source, the population of Upper Canada in the same year being estimated at 70,000. That at the end of the century Lower Canada was politically and socially in a state of transition is shown by an interesting dispatch from Milnes written on the 1st of November, 1800,[212] in which, like his predecessors, he laid stress on the necessity for taking steps to strengthen the Executive Milnes’ views as to strengthening the Executive. Government. He pointed out causes which in his opinion united ‘in daily lessening the power and influence of the Aristocratical Body in Lower Canada’; and, curiously enough, he considered the first and most important of these to be the manner in which the province was originally Independence of the Canadian habitants. settled, and the independent tenure by which the cultivators or habitants held their lands. The feudal system had been introduced with a view to keeping the colonists in leading strings, and reproducing in the New World a form of society based upon the fundamental principle of a landed aristocracy. Yet this English governor wrote of the habitants at the end of the eighteenth century, that ‘there cannot be a more independent race of people, nor do I believe there is in any part of the world a country in which equality of situation is so nearly established’. The land had passed into the hands of the peasants from those of the seigniors, who retained only the old-time privileges of a Decay of the Canadian aristocracy. trifling rent, taking a fourteenth of the corn which the habitants were still bound to grind at the seigniors’ mills, and a twelfth of the purchase-money when lands were transferred. The seigniors, the dispatch stated, showed no disposition to enter into trade; their position had in many instances sunk below that of their vassals; and, taken as a whole, the Canadian gentry had nearly become extinct.