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Title: The Father of British Canada:
   A Chronicle of Carleton
   [Vol. 12 of "The Chronicles of Canada"]
Author: Wood, William Charles Henry (1864-1947)
Cartographer: Carver, Jonathan (1710-1780)
Illustrator: Jefferys, Charles William (1869-1951)
Illustrator: Ritchie, Alexander Hay (1822-1895)
Date of first publication: 1915
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Company, 1920
Date first posted: 25 November 2009
Date last updated: 25 November 2009
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #421

This ebook was produced by:
David Edwards, David T. Jones
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

This file was produced from images generously made available
by the Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries




[Illustration: Front Cover--CHRONICLES OF CANADA SERIES]


_CHRONICLES OF CANADA_

Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton

In thirty-two volumes


12

THE FATHER OF
BRITISH CANADA

BY WILLIAM WOOD


_Part IV  The Beginnings of British Canada_



[Illustration: THE FIGHT AT THE SAULT-AU-MATELOT
From a colour drawing by C. W. Jefferys]


THE FATHER OF
BRITISH CANADA

A Chronicle of Carleton

by

WILLIAM WOOD


TORONTO
GLASGOW, BROOK & COMPANY
1920


_Copyright in all Countries subscribing to
the Berne Convention_

Press of The Hunter-Rose Co., Limited, Toronto



TO

WILLIAM DOUW LIGHTHALL

AUTHOR, PATRIOT, FRIEND



CONTENTS

                                              Page

   I. GUY CARLETON, 1724-1759                    1

  II. GENERAL MURRAY, 1759-1766                 14

 III. GOVERNOR CARLETON, 1766-1774              40

  IV. INVASION, 1775                            60

   V. BELEAGUERMENT, 1775-1776                  93

  VI. DELIVERANCE, 1776                        130

 VII. THE COUNTERSTROKE, 1776-1778             143

VIII. GUARDING THE LOYALISTS, 1782-1783        162

  IX. FOUNDING MODERN CANADA, 1786-1796        181

   X. 'NUNC DIMITTIS,' 1796-1808               225

      BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE                     229

      INDEX                                    232


ILLUSTRATIONS



THE FIGHT AT THE SAULT-AU-MATELOT                  _Frontispiece_
  From a colour drawing by C. W. Jefferys.

SIR GUY CARLETON, LORD DORCHESTER                _Facing page_ 6
  From an engraving by A. H. Ritchie.

JAMES MURRAY                                              "   16
  From an engraving in the Dominion Archives.

BRITISH POSSESSIONS IN NORTH AMERICA, 1763-1775           "   32
  Map by Bartholomew.

THE ISLAND OF MONTREAL AND QUEBEC CITY                    "   64
  From a map by Captain Carver and other officers,
    published in London in 1776.

RICHARD MONTGOMERY                                        "   96
  From an engraving in the John Ross Robertson
    Collection, Toronto Public Library.

BENEDICT ARNOLD                                           "  128
  From an engraving in the John Ross Robertson
    Collection, Toronto Public Library.




CHAPTER I

GUY CARLETON

1724-1759


Guy Carleton, first Baron Dorchester, was born at Strabane, County
Tyrone, on the 3rd of September 1724, the anniversary of Cromwell's
two great victories and death. He came of a very old family of English
country gentlemen which had migrated to Ireland in the seventeenth
century and intermarried with other Anglo-Irish families equally
devoted to the service of the British Crown. Guy's father was
Christopher Carleton of Newry in County Down. His mother was Catherine
Ball of County Donegal. His father died comparatively young; and, when
he was himself fifteen, his mother married the rector of Newry, the
Reverend Thomas Skelton, whose influence over the six step-children of
the household worked wholly for their good.

At eighteen Guy received his first commission as ensign in the 25th
Foot, then known as Lord Rothes' regiment and now as the King's Own
Scottish Borderers. At twenty-three he fought gallantly at the siege
of Bergen-op-Zoom. Four years later (1751) he was a lieutenant in the
Grenadier Guards. He was one of those quiet men whose sterling value
is appreciated only by the few till some crisis makes it stand forth
before the world at large. Pitt, Wolfe, and George II all recognized
his solid virtues. At thirty he was still some way down the list of
lieutenants in the Grenadiers, while Wolfe, two years his junior in
age, had been four years in command of a battalion with the rank of
lieutenant-colonel. Yet he had long been 'my friend Carleton' to
Wolfe, he was soon to become one of 'Pitt's Young Men,' and he was
enough of a 'coming man' to incur the king's displeasure. He had
criticized the Hanoverians; and the king never forgave him. The third
George 'gloried in the name of Englishman.' But the first two were
Hanoverian all through. And for an English guardsman to disparage the
Hanoverian army was considered next door to _lse-majest_.

Lady Dorchester burnt all her husband's private papers after his death
in 1808; so we have lost some of the most intimate records concerning
him. But 'grave Carleton' appears so frequently in the letters of his
friend Wolfe that we can see his character as a young man in almost
any aspect short of self-revelation. The first reference has nothing
to do with affairs of state. In 1747 Wolfe, aged twenty, writing to
Miss Lacey, an English girl in Brussels, and signing himself 'most
sincerely your friend and admirer,' says: 'I was doing the greatest
injustice to the dear girls to admit the least doubt of their
constancy. Perhaps with respect to ourselves there may be cause of
complaint. Carleton, I'm afraid, is a recent example of it.' From this
we may infer that Carleton was less 'grave' as a young man than Wolfe
found him later on. Six years afterwards Wolfe strongly recommended
him for a position which he had himself been asked to fill, that of
military tutor to the young Duke of Richmond, who was to get a company
in Wolfe's own regiment. Writing home from Paris in 1753 Wolfe tells
his mother that the duke 'wants some skilful man to travel with him
through the Low Countries and into Lorraine. I have proposed my friend
Carleton, whom Lord Albemarle approves of.' Lord Albemarle was the
British ambassador to France; so Carleton got the post and travelled
under the happiest auspices, while learning the frontier on which the
Belgian, French, and British allies were to fight the Germans in the
Great World War of 1914. It was during this military tour of fortified
places that Carleton acquired the engineering skill which a few years
later proved of such service to the British cause in Canada.

    *    *    *    *    *

In 1754 George Washington, at that time a young Virginian officer of
only twenty-two, fired the first shot in what presently became the
world-wide Seven Years' War. The immediate result was disastrous to
the British arms; and Washington had to give up the command of the
Ohio by surrendering Fort Necessity to the French on--of all
dates--the 4th of July! In 1755 came Braddock's defeat. In 1756
Montcalm arrived in Canada and won his first victory at Oswego. In
1757 Wolfe distinguished himself by formulating the plan which, if
properly executed, would have prevented the British fiasco at
Rochefort on the coast of France. But Carleton remained as
undistinguished as before. He simply became lieutenant-colonel
commanding the 72nd Foot, now the Seaforth Highlanders. In 1758 his
chance appeared to have come at last. Amherst had asked for his
services at Louisbourg. But the king had neither forgotten nor
forgiven the remarks about the Hanoverians, and so refused
point-blank, to Wolfe's 'very great grief and disappointment. . . . It
is a public loss Carleton's not going.' Wolfe's confidence in
Carleton, either as a friend or as an officer, was stronger than ever.
Writing to George Warde, afterwards the famous cavalry leader, he
said: 'Accidents may happen in the family that may throw my little
affairs into disorder. Carleton is so good as to say he will give what
help is in his power. May I ask the same favour of you, my oldest
friend?' Writing to Lord George Sackville, of whom we shall hear more
than enough at the crisis of Carleton's career, Wolfe said: 'Amherst
will tell you his opinion of Carleton, by which you will probably be
better convinced of our loss.' Again, 'We want grave Carleton for
every purpose of the war.' And yet again, after the fall of
Louisbourg: 'If His Majesty had thought proper to let Carleton come
with us as engineer it would have cut the matter much shorter and we
might now be ruining the walls of Quebec and completing the conquest
of New France.' A little later on Wolfe blazes out with indignation
over Carleton's supersession by a junior. 'Can Sir John Ligonier [the
commander-in-chief] allow His Majesty to remain unacquainted with the
merit of that officer, and can he see such a mark of displeasure
without endeavouring to soften or clear the matter up a little? A man
of honour has the right to expect the protection of his Colonel and of
the Commander of the troops, and he can't serve without it. If I was
in Carleton's place I wouldn't stay an hour in the Army after being
aimed at and distinguished in so remarkable a manner.' But Carleton
bided his time.

At the beginning of 1759 Wolfe was appointed to command the army
destined to besiege Quebec. He immediately submitted Carleton's name
for appointment as quarter-master-general. Pitt and Ligonier heartily
approved. But the king again refused. Ligonier went back a second time
to no purpose. Pitt then sent him in for the third time, saying, in a
tone meant for the king to overhear: 'Tell His Majesty that in order
to render the General [Wolfe] completely responsible for his conduct
he should be made, as far as possible, inexcusable if he should fail;
and that whatever an officer entrusted with such a service of
confidence requests ought therefore to be granted.' The king then
consented. Thus began Carleton's long, devoted, and successful service
for Canada, the Empire, and the Crown.

[Illustration: SIR GUY CARLETON, LORD DORCHESTER
From an engraving by A. H. Ritchie]

Early in this memorable Empire Year of 1759 he sailed with Wolfe and
Saunders from Spithead. On the 30th of April the fleet rendezvoused at
Halifax, where Admiral Durell, second-in-command to Saunders, had
spent the winter with a squadron intended to block the St Lawrence
directly navigation opened in the spring. Durell was a good
commonplace officer, but very slow. He had lost many hands from
sickness during a particularly cold season, and he was not
enterprising enough to start cruising round Cabot Strait before the
month of May. Saunders, greatly annoyed by this delay, sent him off
with eight men-of-war on the 5th of May. Wolfe gave him seven hundred
soldiers under Carleton. These forces were sufficient to turn back,
capture, or destroy the twenty-three French merchantmen which were
then bound for Quebec with supplies and soldiers as reinforcements for
Montcalm. But the French ships were a week ahead of Durell; and, when
he landed Carleton at Isle-aux-Coudres on the 28th of May, the last of
the enemy's transports had already discharged her cargo at Quebec,
sixty miles above.

Isle-aux-Coudres, so named by Jacques Cartier in 1535, was a point of
great strategic importance; for it commanded the only channel then
used. It was the place Wolfe had chosen for his winter quarters, that
is, in case of failure before Quebec and supposing he was not
recalled. None but a particularly good officer would have been
appointed as its first commandant. Carleton spent many busy days here
preparing an advanced base for the coming siege, while the
subsequently famous Captain Cook was equally busy 'a-sounding of the
channell of the Traverse' which the fleet would have to pass on its
way to Quebec. Some of Durell's ships destroyed the French 'long-shore
batteries near this Traverse, at the lower end of the island of
Orleans, while the rest kept ceaseless watch to seaward, anxiously
scanning the offing, day after day, to make out the colours of the
first fleet up. No one knew what the French West India fleet would do;
and there was a very disconcerting chance that it might run north and
slip into the St Lawrence, ahead of Saunders, in the same way as the
French reinforcements had just slipped in ahead of Durell. Presently,
at the first streak of dawn on the 23rd of June, a strong squadron was
seen advancing rapidly under a press of sail. Instantly the officers
of the watch called all hands up from below. The boatswains' whistles
shrilled across the water as the seamen ran to quarters and cleared
the decks for action. Carleton's camp was equally astir. The guards
turned out. The bugles sounded. The men fell in and waited. Then the
flagship signalled ashore that the strangers had just answered
correctly in private code that all was well and that Wolfe and
Saunders were aboard.

Next to Wolfe himself Carleton was the busiest man in the army
throughout the siege of Quebec. In addition to his arduous and very
responsible duties as quartermaster-general, he acted as inspector of
engineers and as a special-service officer for work of an
exceptionally confidential nature. As quartermaster-general he
superintended the supply and transport branches. Considering that the
army was operating in a devastated hostile country, a thousand miles
away from its bases at Halifax and Louisbourg, and that the
interaction of the different services--naval and military, Imperial
and Colonial--required adjustment to a nicety at every turn, it was
wonderful that so much was done so well with means which were far from
being adequate. War prices of course ruled in the British camp. But
they compared very favourably with the famine prices in Quebec, where
most 'luxuries' soon became unobtainable at any price. There were no
canteen or camp-follower scandals under Carleton. Then, as now, every
soldier had a regulation ration of food and a regulation allowance for
his service kit. But 'extras' were always acceptable. The price-list
of these 'extras' reads strangely to modern ears. But, under the
circumstances, it was not exorbitant, and it was slightly tempered by
being reckoned in Halifax currency of four dollars to the pound
instead of five. The British Tommy Atkins of that and many a later day
thought Canada a wonderful country for making money go a long way when
he could buy a pot of beer for twopence and get back thirteen pence
Halifax currency as change for his English shilling. Beef and ham ran
from ninepence to a shilling a pound. Mutton was a little dearer. Salt
butter was eightpence to one-and-threepence. Cheese was tenpence;
potatoes from five to ten shillings a bushel. 'A reasonable loaf of
good soft Bread' cost sixpence. Soap was a shilling a pound. Tea was
prohibitive for all but the officers. 'Plain Green Tea and very Badd'
was fifteen shillings, 'Couchon' twenty shillings, 'Hyson' thirty.
Leaf tobacco was tenpence a pound, roll one-and-tenpence, snuff
two-and-threepence. Sugar was a shilling to eighteen pence. Lemons
were sixpence apiece. The non-intoxicating 'Bad Sproos Beer' was only
twopence a quart and helped to keep off scurvy. Real beer, like wine
and spirits, was more expensive. 'Bristol Beer' was eighteen shillings
a dozen, 'Bad malt Drink from Hellifax' ninepence a quart. Rum and
claret were eight shillings a gallon each, port and Madeira ten and
twelve respectively. The term 'Bad' did not then mean noxious, but
only inferior. It stood against every low-grade article in the
price-list. No goods were over-classified while Carleton was
quartermaster-general.

The engineers were under-staffed, undermanned, and overworked. There
were no Royal Engineers as a permanent and comprehensive corps till
the time of Wellington. Wolfe complained bitterly and often of the
lack of men and materials for scientific siege work. But he 'relied on
Carleton' to good purpose in this respect as well as in many others.
In his celebrated dispatch to Pitt he mentions Carleton twice. It was
Carleton whom he sent to seize the west end of the island of Orleans,
so as to command the basin of Quebec, and Carleton whom he sent to
take prisoners and gather information at Pointe-aux-Trembles, twenty
miles above the city. Whether or not he revealed the whole of his
final plan to Carleton is probably more than we shall ever know, since
Carleton's papers were destroyed. But we do know that he did not
reveal it to any one else, not even to his three brigadiers, Monckton,
Townshend, and Murray.

Carleton was wounded in the head during the Battle of the Plains; but
soon returned to duty. Wolfe showed his confidence in him to the last.
Carleton's was the only name mentioned twice in the will which Wolfe
handed over to Jervis, the future Lord St Vincent, the night before
the battle. 'I leave to Colonel Oughton, Colonel Carleton, Colonel
Howe, and Colonel Warde a thousand pounds each.' 'All my books and
papers, both here and in England, I leave to Colonel Carleton.'
Wolfe's mother, who died five years later, showed the same confidence
by appointing Carleton her executor.

    *    *    *    *    *

With the fall of Quebec in 1759 Carleton disappears from the Canadian
scene till 1766. But so many pregnant events happened in Canada during
these seven years, while so few happened in his own career, that it is
much more important for us to follow her history than his biography.

In 1761 he was wounded at the storming of Port Andro during the attack
on Belle Isle off the west coast of France. In 1762 he was wounded at
Havana in the West Indies. After that he enjoyed four years of
quietness at home. Then came the exceedingly difficult task of guiding
Canada through twelve years of turbulent politics and most subversive
war.




CHAPTER II

GENERAL MURRAY

1759-1766


Both armies spent a terrible winter after the Battle of the Plains.
There was better shelter for the French in Montreal than for the
British among the ruins of Quebec. But in the matter of food the
positions were reversed. Nevertheless the French gallantly refused the
truce offered them by Murray, who had now succeeded Wolfe. They were
determined to make a supreme effort to regain Quebec in the spring;
and they were equally determined that the habitants should not be free
to supply the British with provisions.

In spite of the state of war, however, the French and British
officers, even as prisoners and captors, began to make friends. They
had found each other foemen worthy of their steel. A distinguished
French officer, the Comte de Malartic, writing to Lvis, Montcalm's
successor, said: 'I cannot speak too highly of General Murray,
although he is our enemy.' Murray, on his part, was equally loud and
generous in his praise of the French. The Canadian seigneurs found
fellow-gentlemen among the British officers. The priests and nuns of
Quebec found many fellow-Catholics among the Scottish and Irish
troops, and nothing but courteous treatment from the soldiers of every
rank and form of religion. Murray directed that 'the compliment of the
hat' should be paid to all religious processions. The Ursuline nuns
knitted long stockings for the bare-legged Highlanders when the winter
came on, and presented each Scottish officer with an embroidered St
Andrew's Cross on the 30th of November, St Andrew's Day. The whole
garrison won the regard of the town by giving up part of their rations
for the hungry poor; while the habitants from the surrounding country
presently began to find out that the British were honest to deal with
and most humane, though sternly just, as conquerors.

In the following April Lvis made his desperate throw for victory; and
actually did succeed in defeating Murray outside the walls of Quebec.
But the British fleet came up in May; and that summer three British
armies converged on Montreal, where the last doomed remnants of
French power on the St Lawrence stood despairingly at bay. When Lvis
found his two thousand effective French regulars surrounded by eight
times as many British troops he had no choice but to lay down the arms
of France for ever. On the 8th of September 1760 his gallant little
army was included in the Capitulation of Montreal, by which the whole
of Canada passed into the possession of the British Crown.

    *    *    *    *    *

Great Britain had a different general idea for each one of the four
decades which immediately followed the conquest of Canada. In the
sixties the general idea was to kill refractory old French ways with a
double dose of new British liberty and kindness, so that Canada might
gradually become the loyal fourteenth colony of the Empire in America.
But the fates were against this benevolent scheme. The French
Canadians were firmly wedded to their old ways of life, except in so
far as the new liberty enabled them to throw off irksome duties and
restraints, while the new English-speaking 'colonists' were so few,
and mostly so bad, that they became the cause of endless discord where
harmony was essential. In the seventies the idea was to restore the
old French-Canadian life so as not only to make Canada proof against
the disaffection of the Thirteen Colonies but also to make her a safe
base of operations against rebellious Americans. In the eighties the
great concern of the government was to make a harmonious whole out of
two very widely differing parts--the long-settled French Canadians and
the newly arrived United Empire Loyalists. In the nineties each of
these parts was set to work out its own salvation under its own
provincial constitution.

[Illustration: JAMES MURRAY
From an engraving in the Dominion Archives]

Carleton's is the only personality which links together all four
decades--the would-be American sixties, the French-Canadian seventies,
the Anglo-French-Canadian eighties, and the bi-constitutional
nineties--though, as mentioned already, Murray ruled Canada for the
first seven years, 1759-66.

    *    *    *    *    *

James Murray, the first British governor of Canada, was a younger son
of the fourth Lord Elibank. He was just over forty, warm-hearted and
warm-tempered, an excellent French scholar, and every inch a soldier.
He had been a witness for the defence of Mordaunt at the court-martial
held to try the authors of the Rochefort fiasco in 1757. Wolfe, who
was a witness on the other side, referred to him later on as 'my old
antagonist Murray.' But Wolfe knew a good man when he saw one and gave
his full confidence to his 'old antagonist' both at Louisbourg and
Quebec. Murray was not born under a lucky star. He saw three defeats
in three successive wars. He began his service with the abortive
attack on pestilential Cartagena, where Wolfe's father was present as
adjutant-general. In mid-career he lost the battle of Ste Foy.[1] And
his active military life ended with his surrender of Minorca in 1782.
But he was greatly distinguished for honour and steadfastness on all
occasions. An admiring contemporary described him as a model of all
the military virtues except prudence. But he had more prudence and
less genius than his admirer thought; and he showed a marked talent
for general government. The problem before him was harder than his
superiors could believe. He was expected to prepare for assimilation
some sixty-five thousand 'new subjects' who were mostly alien in
religion and wholly alien in every other way. But, for the moment,
this proved the least of his many difficulties because no immediate
results were required.

[Footnote 1: See _The Winning of Canada_, chap. viii. See also, for
the best account of this battle and other events of the year between
Wolfe's victory and the surrender of Montreal, _The Fall of Canada_,
by George M. Wrong. Oxford, 1914.]

While the war went on in Europe Canada remained nominally a part of
the enemy's dominions, and so, of course, was subject to military
rule. Sir Jeffery Amherst, the British commander-in-chief in America,
took up his headquarters in New York. Under him Murray commanded
Canada from Quebec. Under Murray, Colonel Burton commanded the
district of Three Rivers while General Gage commanded the district of
Montreal, which then extended to the western wilds.[2]

Murray's first great trouble arose in 1761. It was caused by an
outrageous War Office order that fourpence a day should be stopped
from the soldiers to pay for the rations they had always got free.
Such gross injustice, coming in time of war and applied to soldiers
who richly deserved reward, made the veterans 'mad with rage.' Quebec
promised to be the scene of a wild mutiny. Murray, like all his
officers, thought the stoppage nothing short of robbery. But he threw
himself into the breach. He assembled the officers and explained that
they must die to the last man rather than allow the mutineers a free
hand. He then held a general parade at which he ordered the troops to
march between two flag-poles on pain of instant death, promising to
kill with his own hands the first man who refused. He added that he
was ready to hear and forward any well-founded complaint, but that,
since insubordination had been openly threatened, he would insist on
subordination being publicly shown. Then, amid tense silence, he gave
the word of command--_Quick, March!_--while every officer felt his
trigger. To the immense relief of all concerned the men stepped off,
marched straight between the flags and back to quarters, tamed. The
criminal War Office blunder was rectified and peace was restored in
the ranks.

[Footnote 2: See _The War Chief of the Ottawas_, chap. iii.]

'Murray's Report' of 1762 gives us a good view of the Canada of that
day and shows the attitude of the British towards their new
possession. Canada had been conquered by Great Britain, with some help
from the American colonies, for three main reasons: first, to strike a
death-blow at French dominion in America; secondly, to increase the
opportunities of British seaborne trade; and, thirdly, to enlarge the
area available for British settlement. When Murray was instructed to
prepare a report on Canada he had to keep all this in mind; for the
government wished to satisfy the public both at home and in the
colonies. He had to examine the military strength of the country and
the disposition of its population in case of future wars with France.
He had to satisfy the natural curiosity of men like the London
merchants. And he had to show how and where English-speaking settlers
could go in and make Canada not only a British possession but the
fourteenth British colony in North America. Burton and Gage were also
instructed to report about their own districts of Three Rivers and
Montreal. The documents they prepared were tacked on to Murray's. By
June 1762 the work was completed and sent on to Amherst, who sent it
to England in ample time to be studied there before the opening of the
impending negotiations for peace.

Murray was greatly concerned about the military strength of Quebec,
then, as always, the key of Canada. Like the unfortunate Montcalm he
found the walls of Quebec badly built, badly placed, and falling into
ruins, and he thought they could not be defended by three thousand
men against 'a well conducted _Coup-de-main_.' He proposed to crown
Cape Diamond with a proper citadel, which would overawe the
disaffected in Quebec itself and defend the place against an outside
enemy long enough to let a British fleet come up to its relief. The
rest of the country was defended by little garrisons at Three Rivers
and Montreal as well as by several small detachments distributed among
the trading-posts where the white men and the red met in the depths of
the western wilderness.

The relations between the British garrison and the French Canadians
were so excellent that what Gage reported from Montreal might be taken
as equally true of the rest of the country: 'The Soldiers live
peaceably with the Inhabitants and they reciprocally acquire an
affection for each other.' The French Canadians numbered sixty-five
thousand altogether, exclusive of the fur traders and coureurs de
bois. Barely fifteen thousand lived in the three little towns of
Quebec, Montreal, and Three Rivers; while over fifty thousand lived in
the country. Nearly all the officials had gone back to France. The
three classes of greatest importance were the seigneurs, the clergy,
and the habitants. The lawyers were not of much account; the petty
commercial classes of less account still. The coureurs de bois and
other fur traders formed an important link between the savage and the
civilized life of the country.

Apart from furs the trade of Canada was contemptibly small in the eyes
of men like the London merchants. But the opportunity of fostering all
the fur trade that could be carried down the St Lawrence was very well
worth while; and if there was no other existing trade worth capturing
there seemed to be some kinds worth creating. Murray held out
well-grounded hopes of the fisheries and forests. 'A Most immense Cod
Fishery can be established in the River and Gulph of St Lawrence. A
rich tract of country on the South Side of the Gulph will be settled
and improved, and a port or ports furnished with every material
requisite to repair ships.' He then went on to enumerate the other
kinds of fishery, the abundance of whales, seals, and walruses in the
Gulf, and of salmon up all the tributary rivers. Burton recommends
immediate attention to the iron mines behind Three Rivers. All the
governors expatiate on the vast amount of forest wealth and remind the
home government that under the French rgime the king, when making
out patents for the seigneurs, reserved the right of taking wood for
ship-building and fortifications from any of the seigneuries.
Agriculture was found to be in a very backward state. The habitants
would raise no more than they required for their own use and for a
little local trade. But the fault was attributed to the gambling
attractions of the fur trade, to the bad governmental system, and to
the frequent interruptions of the _corve_, a kind of forced labour
which was meant to serve the public interest, but which Bigot and
other thievish officials always turned to their own private advantage.
On the whole, the reports were most encouraging in the prospects they
held out to honest labour, trade, and government.

    *    *    *    *    *

While Murray and his lieutenants had been collecting information for
their reports the home government had been undergoing many changes for
the worse. The master-statesman Pitt had gone out of power and the
back-stairs politician Bute had come in. Pitt's 'bloody and expensive
war'--the war that, more than any other, laid the foundations of the
present British Empire--was to be ended on any terms the country
could be persuaded to bear. Thus the end of the Seven Years' War, or,
as the British part of it was more correctly called, the 'Maritime
War,' was no more glorious in statesmanship than its beginning had
been in arms. But the spirit of its mighty heart still lived on in the
Empire's grateful memories of Pitt and quickened the English-speaking
world enough to prevent any really disgraceful surrender of the
hard-won fruits of victory.

The Treaty of Paris, signed on the 10th of February 1763, and the
king's proclamation, published in October, were duly followed by the
inauguration of civil government in Canada. The incompetent Bute,
anxious to get Pitt out of the way, tried to induce him to become the
first British governor of the new colony. Even Bute probably never
dared to hope that Pitt would actually go out to Canada. But he did
hope to lower his prestige by making him the holder of a sinecure at
home. However this may be, Pitt, mightiest of all parliamentary
ministers of war, refused to be made either a jobber or an exile;
whereupon Murray's position was changed from a military command into
that of 'Governor and Captain-General.'

The changes which ensued in the laws of Canada were heartily welcomed
so far as the adoption of the humaner criminal code of England was
concerned. The new laws relating to debtor and creditor also gave
general satisfaction, except, as we shall presently see, when they
involved imprisonment for debt. But the tentative efforts to introduce
English civil law side by side with the old French code resulted in
great confusion and much discontent. The land laws had become so
unworkable under this dual system that they had to be left as they
were. A Court of Common Pleas was set up specially for the benefit of
the French Canadians. If either party demanded a jury one had to be
sworn in; and French Canadians were to be jurors on equal terms with
'the King's Old Subjects.' The Roman Catholic Church was to be
completely tolerated but not in any way established. Lord Egremont, in
giving the king's instructions to Murray, reminded him that the
proviso in the Treaty of Paris--_as far as the Laws of Great Britain
permit_--should govern his action whenever disputes arose. It must be
remembered that the last Jacobite rising was then a comparatively
recent affair, and that France was equally ready to upset either the
Protestant succession in England or the British rgime in Canada.

The Indians were also an object of special solicitude in the royal
proclamation. 'The Indians who live under our Protection should not be
molested in the possession of such parts of our Dominions and
Territories as, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us, are
reserved to them.' The home government was far in advance of the
American colonists in its humane attitude towards the Indians. The
common American attitude then and long afterwards--indeed, up to a
time well within living memory--was that Indians were a kind of human
vermin to be exterminated without mercy, unless, of course, more money
was to be made out of them alive. The result was an endless struggle
along the ever-receding frontier of the West. And just at this
particular time the 'Conspiracy of Pontiac' had brought about
something like a real war. The story of this great effort of the
Indians to stem the encroachments of the exterminating colonists is
told in another chronicle of the present Series.[3] The French traders
in the West undoubtedly had a hand in stirring up the Indians.
Pontiac, a sort of Indian Napoleon, was undoubtedly cruel as well as
crafty. And the Indians undoubtedly fought just as the ancestors of
the French and British used to fight when they were at the
corresponding stage of social evolution. But the mere fact that so
many jealously distinct tribes united in this common cause proves how
much they all must have suffered at the hands of the colonists.

[Footnote 3: _The War Chief of the Ottawas._]

    *    *    *    *    *

While Pontiac's war continued in the West Murray had to deal with a
political war in Canada which rose to its height in 1764. The king's
proclamation of the previous October had 'given express Power to our
Governor that, so soon as the state and circumstances of the said
Colony will admit thereof, he shall call a General Assembly in such
manner and form as is used in those Colonies and Provinces in America
which are under our immediate government.' The intention of
establishing parliamentary institutions was, therefore, perfectly
clear. But it was equally clear that the introduction of such
institutions was to depend on 'circumstances,' and it is well to
remember here that these 'circumstances' were not held to warrant the
opening of a Canadian parliament till 1792. Now, the military
government had been a great success. There was every reason to suppose
that civil government by a governor and council would be the next best
thing. And it was quite certain that calling a 'General Assembly' at
once would defeat the very ends which such bodies are designed to
serve. More than ninety-nine per cent of the population were dead
against an assembly which none of them understood and all distrusted.
On the other hand, the clamorous minority of less than one per cent
were in favour only of a parliament from which the majority should be
rigorously excluded, even, if possible, as voters. The immense
majority comprised the entire French-Canadian community. The absurdly
small minority consisted mostly of Americanized camp-following
traders, who, having come to fish in troubled waters, naturally wanted
the laws made to suit poachers. The British garrison, the governing
officials, and the very few other English-speaking people of a more
enlightened class all looked down on the rancorous minority. The whole
question resolved itself into this: should Canada be handed over to
the licensed exploitation of a few hundred low-class camp-followers,
who had done nothing to win her for the British Empire, who were
despised by those who had, and who promised to be a dangerous thorn in
the side of the new colony?

What this ridiculous minority of grab-alls really wanted was not a
parliament but a rump. Many a representative assembly has ended in a
rump. The grab-alls wished to begin with one and stop there. It might
be supposed that such pretensions would defeat themselves. But there
was a twofold difficulty in the way of getting the truth understood by
the English-speaking public on both sides of the Atlantic. In the
first place, the French Canadians were practically dumb to the outside
world. In the second, the vociferous rumpites had the ear of some
English and more American commercial people who were not anxious to
understand; while the great mass of the general public were inclined
to think, if they ever thought at all, that parliamentary government
must mean more liberty for every one concerned.

A singularly apt commentary on the pretensions of the camp-followers
is supplied by the famous, or infamous, 'Presentment of the Grand Jury
of Quebec' in October 1764. The moving spirits of this precious jury
were aspirants to membership in the strictly exclusive, rumpish
little parliament of their own seeking. The signatures of the
French-Canadian members were obtained by fraud, as was subsequently
proved by a sworn official protestation. The first presentment tells
its own tale, as it refers to the only courts in which French-Canadian
lawyers were allowed to plead. 'The great number of inferior Courts
are tiresome, litigious, and expensive to this poor Colony.' Then came
a hit at the previous military rule--'That Decrees of the military
Courts may be amended [after having been confirmed by legal ordinance]
by allowing Appeals if the matter decided exceed Ten Pounds,' which
would put it out of the reach of the 'inferior Courts' and into the
clutches of 'the King's Old Subjects.' But the gist of it all was
contained in the following: 'We represent that as the Grand Jury must
be considered at present as the only Body representative of the
Colony, . . . We propose that the Publick Accounts be laid before the
Grand Jury at least twice a year.' That the grand jury was to be
purged of all its French-Canadian members is evident from the addendum
slipped in behind their backs. This addendum is a fine specimen of
verbose invective against 'the Church of Rome,' the Pope, Bulls,
Briefs, absolutions, etc., the empanelling 'en Grand and petty Jurys'
of 'papist or popish Recusants Convict,' and so on.

The 'Presentment of the Grand Jury' was presently followed by _The
Humble Petition of Your Majesty's most faithful and loyal Subjects,
British Merchants and Traders, in behalf of Themselves and their
fellow Subjects, Inhabitants of Your Majesty's Province of Quebec_.
'Their fellow Subjects' did not, of course, include any 'papist or
popish Recusants Convict.' Among the 'Grievances and Distresses'
enumerated were 'the oppressive and severely felt Military
government,' the inability to 'reap the fruit of our Industry' under
such a martinet as Murray, who, in one paragraph, is accused of
'suppressing dutyfull Remonstrances in Silence' and, in the next, of
'treating them with a Rage and Rudeness of Language and Demeanor as
dishonourable to the Trust he holds of Your Majesty as painfull to
Those who suffer from it.' Finally, the petitioners solemnly warn His
Majesty that their 'Lives in the Province are so very unhappy that we
must be under the Necessity of removing from it, unless timely
prevented by a Removal of the present Governor.'

[Illustration: map]

In forwarding this document Murray poured out the vials of his wrath
on 'the Licentious Fanaticks Trading here,' while he boldly championed
the cause of the French Canadians, 'a Race, who, could they be
indulged with a few priveledges which the Laws of England deny to
Roman Catholicks at home, would soon get the better of every National
Antipathy to their Conquerors and become the most faithful and most
useful set of Men in this American Empire.'

While these charges and counter-charges were crossing the Atlantic
another, and much more violent, trouble came to a head. As there were
no barracks in Canada billeting was a necessity. It was made as little
burdensome as possible and the houses of magistrates were specially
exempt. This, however, did not prevent the magistrates from baiting
the military whenever they got the chance. Fines, imprisonments, and
other sentences, out of all proportion to the offence committed, were
heaped on every redcoat in much the same way as was then being
practised in Boston and other hotbeds of disaffection. The redcoats
had done their work in ridding America of the old French menace. They
were doing it now in ridding the colonies of the last serious menace
from the Indians. And so the colonists, having no further use for
them, began trying to make the land they had delivered too hot to hold
them. There were, of course, exceptions; and the American colonists
had some real as well as pretended grievances. But wantonly baiting
the redcoats had already become a most discreditable general practice.

Montreal was most in touch with the disaffected people to the south.
It also had a magistrate of the name of Walker, the most rancorous of
all the disaffected magistrates in Canada. This Walker, well mated
with an equally rancorous wife, was the same man who entertained
Benjamin Franklin and the other commissioners sent by Congress into
Canada in 1776, the year in which both the American Republic and a
truly British Canada were born. He would not have been flattered could
he have seen the entry Franklin made about him and his wife in a diary
which is still extant. The gist of it was that wherever the Walkers
might be they would soon set the place by the ears. Walker, of course,
was foremost in the persecution of the redcoats; and he eagerly seized
his opportunity when an officer was billeted in a house where a
brother magistrate happened to be living as a lodger. Under such
circumstances the magistrate could not claim exemption. But this made
no difference either to him or to Walker. Captain Payne, the gentleman
whose presence enraged these boors, was seized and thrown into gaol.
The chief justice granted a writ of habeas corpus. But the mischief
was done and resentment waxed high. The French-Canadian seigneurs
sympathized with Payne, which added fuel to the magisterial flame; and
Murray, scenting danger, summoned the whole bench down to Quebec.

But before this bench of bumbles started some masked men seized Walker
in his own house and gave him a good sound thrashing. Unfortunately
they spoilt the fair reprisal by cutting off his ear. That very night
the news had run round Montreal and made a start for Boston and
Quebec. Feeling ran high; and higher still when, a few weeks later,
the civil magistrates vented their rage on several redcoats by
imposing sentences exceeding even the utmost limits of their previous
vindictive action. Montreal became panic-stricken lest the soldiers,
baited past endurance, should break out in open violence. Murray drove
up, post-haste, from Quebec, ordered the affected regiment to another
station, reproved the offending magistrates, and re-established public
confidence. Official and private rewards were offered to any witnesses
who would identify Walker's assailants. But in vain. The smouldering
fire burst out again under Carleton. But the mystery was never cleared
up.

Things had now come to a crisis. The London merchants, knowing nothing
about the internal affairs of Canada, backed the petition of the
Quebec traders, who were quite unworthy of such support from men of
real business probity and knowledge. The magisterial faction in Canada
advertised their side of the case all over the colonies and in any
sympathetic quarter they could find in England. The seigneurs sent
home a warm defence of Murray; and Murray himself sent Cramah, a very
able Swiss officer in the British Army. The home government thus had
plenty of contradictory evidence before it in 1765. The result was
that Murray was called home in 1766, rather in a spirit of open-minded
and sympathetic inquiry into his conduct than with any idea of
censuring him. He never returned to Canada. But as he held the titular
governorship for some time longer, and as he was afterwards employed
in positions of great responsibility and trust, the verdict of the
home authorities was clearly given in his favour.

    *    *    *    *    *

The troublous year of 1764 saw another innovation almost as
revolutionary, compared with the old rgime, as the introduction of
civil government itself. This was the issue of the first newspaper in
Canada, where, indeed, it was also the first printed thing of any
kind. Nova Scotia had produced an earlier paper, the _Halifax
Gazette_, which lived an intermittent life from 1752 to 1800. But no
press had ever been allowed in New France. The few documents that
required printing had always been done in the mother country. Brown
and Gilmore, two Philadelphians, were thus undertaking a pioneer
business when they announced that 'Our Design is, in case we are
fortunate enough to succeed, early in this spring to settle in this
City [Quebec] in the capacity of Printers, and forthwith to publish a
weekly newspaper in French and English.' The _Quebec Gazette_, which
first appeared on the 21st of the following June, has continued to the
present time, though it is now a daily and is known as the _Quebec
Chronicle_. Centenarian papers are not common in any country; and
those that have lived over a century and a half are very few indeed.
So the _Quebec Chronicle_, which is the second surviving senior in
America, is also among the great press seniors of the world.

The original number is one of the curiosities of journalism. The
publishers felt tolerably sure of having what was then considered a
good deal of recent news for their three hundred readers during the
open season. But, knowing that the supply would be both short and
stale in winter, they held out prospects of a Canadian _Tatler_ or
_Spectator_, without, however, being rash enough to promise a supply
of Addisons and Steeles. Their announcement makes curious reading at
the present day.


      The Rigour of Winter preventing the arrival of ships
      from _Europe_, and in a great measure interrupting the
      ordinary intercourse with the Southern Provinces, it
      will be necessary, in a paper designed for General
      Perusal, and Publick Utility, to provide some things
      of general Entertainment, independent of foreign
      intelligence: we shall therefore, on such occasions,
      present our Readers with such _Originals_, both in
      _Prose_ and _Verse_, as will please the FANCY and
      instruct the JUDGMENT. And here we beg leave to
      observe that we shall have nothing so much at heart
      as the support of VIRTUE and MORALITY and the noble
      cause of LIBERTY. The refined amusements of
      LITERATURE, and the pleasing veins of well pointed
      wit, shall also be considered as necessary to this
      collection; interspersed with chosen pieces, and
      curious essays, extracted from the most celebrated
      authors; So that, blending PHILOSOPHY with POLITICKS,
      HISTORY, &c., the youth of both sexes will be improved
      and persons of all ranks agreeably and usefully
      entertained. And upon the whole we will labour to
      attain to all the exactness that so much variety will
      permit, and give as much variety as will consist with
      a reasonable exactness. And as this part of our
      project cannot be carried into execution without the
      correspondence of the INGENIOUS, we shall take all
      opportunities of acknowledging our obligations, to
      those who take the trouble of furnishing any matter
      which shall tend to entertainment or instruction. Our
      Intentions to please the _Whole_, without offence to
      any _Individual_, will be better evinced by our
      practice, than by writing volumes on the subject. This
      one thing we beg may be believed, that PARTY
      PREJUDICE, or PRIVATE SCANDAL, will never find a place
      in this PAPER.




CHAPTER III

GOVERNOR CARLETON

1766-1774


The twelve years of Carleton's first administration naturally fall
into three distinct periods of equal length. During the first he was
busily employed settling as many difficulties as he could, examining
the general state of the country, and gradually growing into the
change that was developing in the minds of the home government, the
change, that is, from the Americanizing sixties to the French-Canadian
seventies. During the second period he was in England, helping to
shape the famous Quebec Act. During the third he was defending Canada
from American attack and aiding the British counterstroke by every
means in his power.

On the 22nd of September 1766 Carleton arrived at Quebec and began his
thirty years' experience as a Canadian administrator by taking over
the government from Colonel Irving, who had held it since Murray's
departure in the spring. Irving had succeeded Murray simply because he
happened to be the senior officer present at the time. Carleton
himself was technically Murray's lieutenant till 1768. But neither of
these facts really affected the course of Canadian history.

The Council, the magistrates, and the traders each presented the new
governor with an address containing the usual professions of loyal
devotion. Carleton remarked in his dispatch that these separate
addresses, and the marked absence of any united address, showed how
much the population was divided. He also noted that a good many of the
English-speaking minority had objected to the addresses on account of
their own opposition to the Stamp Act, and that there had been some
broken heads in consequence. Troubles enough soon engaged his anxious
attention--troubles over the Indian trade, the rights and wrongs of
the Canadian Jesuits, the wounded dignity of some members of the
Council, and the still smouldering and ever mysterious Walker affair.

The strife between Canada and the Thirteen Colonies over the Indian
trade of the West remained the same in principle as under the old
rgime. The Conquest had merely changed the old rivalry between two
foreign powers into one between two widely differing British
possessions; and this, because of the general unrest among the
Americans, made the competition more bitter, if possible, than ever.

The Jesuits pressed their claims for recognition, for their original
estates, and for compensation. But their order had fallen on evil days
all over the world. It was not popular even in Canada. And the
arrangement was that while the existing members were to be treated
with every consideration the Society itself was to be allowed to die
out.

The offended councillors went so far as to present Carleton with a
remonstrance which Irving himself had the misfortune to sign. Carleton
had consulted some members on points with which they were specially
acquainted. The members who had not been consulted thereupon protested
to Irving, who assured them that Carleton must have done so by
accident, not design. But when Carleton received a joint letter in
which they said, 'As you are pleased to signifye to Us by Coll. Irving
that it was accident, & not Intention,' he at once replied: 'As
Lieutenant Colonel Irving has signified to you that the Part of my
Conduct you think worthy of your Reprehension happened by Accident let
him explain his reasons for so doing. He had no authority from me.'
Carleton then went on to say that he would consult any 'Men of Good
Sense, Truth, Candour, and Impartial Justice' whenever he chose, no
matter whether they were councillors or not.

The Walker affair, which now broke out again, was much more serious
than the storm in the Council's teacup. It agitated the whole of
Canada and threatened to range the population of Montreal and Quebec
into two irreconcilable factions, the civil and the military. For the
whole of the two years since Murray had been called upon to deal with
it cleverly presented versions of Walker's views had been spread all
over the colonies and worked into influential Opposition circles in
England. The invectives against the redcoats and their friends the
seigneurs were of the usual abusive type. But they had an unusually
powerful effect at that particular time in the Thirteen Colonies as
well as in what their authors hoped to make a Fourteenth Colony after
a fashion of their own; and they looked plausible enough to mislead a
good many moderate men in the mother country too. Walker's case was
that he had an actual witness, as to the identity of his assailants,
in the person of M'Govoch, a discharged soldier, who laid information
against one civilian, three British officers, and the celebrated
French-Canadian leader, La Corne de St Luc. All the accused were
arrested in their beds in Montreal and thrown into the common gaol.
Walker objected to bail on the plea that his life would be in danger
if they were allowed at large. He also sought to postpone the trial in
order to punish the accused as much as possible, guilty or innocent.
But William Hey, the chief justice, an able and upright man, would
consent to postponement only on condition that bail should be allowed;
so the trial proceeded. When the grand jury threw out the case against
one of the prisoners Walker let loose such a flood of virulent abuse
that moderate men were turned against him. In the end all the accused
were honourably acquitted, while M'Govoch, who was proved to have been
a false witness from the first, was convicted of perjury. Carleton
remained absolutely impartial all through, and even dismissed Colonel
Irving and another member of the Council for heading a petition on
behalf of the military prisoners.

The Walker affair was an instance of a bad case in which the law at
last worked well. But there were many others in which it did not. What
with the _Coutume de Paris_, which is still quoted in the province of
Quebec; the other complexities of the old French law; the doubtful
meanings drawn from the capitulation, the treaty, the proclamation,
and the various ordinances; the instinctive opposition between the
French Canadians and the English-speaking civilians; and, finally,
what with the portents of subversive change that were already
beginning to overshadow all America,--what with all this and more,
Carleton found himself faced with a problem which no man could have
solved to the satisfaction of every one concerned. Each side in a
lawsuit took whatever amalgam of French and English codes was best for
its own argument. But, generally speaking, the ingrained feeling of
the French Canadians was against any change of their own laws that was
not visibly and immediately beneficial to their own particular
interests. Moreover, the use of the unknown English language, the
worthlessness of the rapacious English-speaking magistrates, and the
detested innovation of imprisonment for debt, all combined to make
every part of English civil law hated simply because it happened to be
English and not French. The home authorities were anxious to find some
workable compromise. In 1767 Carleton exchanged several important
dispatches with them; and in 1768 they sent out Maurice Morgan to
study and report, after consultation with the chief justice and 'other
well instructed persons.' Morgan was an indefatigable and
clear-sighted man who deserves to be gratefully remembered by both
races; for he was a good friend both to the French Canadians before
the Quebec Act and to the United Empire Loyalists just before their
great migration, when he was Carleton's secretary at New York. In 1769
the official correspondence entered the 'secret and confidential'
stage with a dispatch from the home government to Carleton suggesting
a House of Representatives to which, practically speaking, the towns
would send Protestant members and the country districts Roman
Catholics.

In 1770 Carleton sailed for England. He carried a good deal of
hard-won experience with him, both on this point and on many others.
He went home with a strong opinion not only against an assembly but
against any immediate attempts at Anglicization in any form. The royal
instructions that had accompanied his commission as 'Captain-General
and Governor-in-chief' in 1768 contained directions for establishing
the Church of England with a view to converting the whole population
to its tenets later on. But no steps had been taken, and, needless to
say, the French Canadians remained as Roman Catholic as ever.

An increasingly important question, soon to overshadow all others, was
defence. In April 1768 Carleton had proposed the restoration of the
seigneurial militia system. 'All the Lands here are held of His
Majesty's Castle of St Lewis [the governor's official residence in
Quebec]. The Oath which the Vassals [seigneurs] take is very Solemn
and Binding. They are obliged to appear in Arms for the King's
defence, in case his Province is attacked.' Carleton pointed out that
a hundred men of the Canadian seigneurial families were being kept on
full pay in France, ready to return and raise the Canadians at the
first opportunity. 'On the other hand, there are only about seventy of
these officers in Canada who have been in the French service. Not one
of them has been given a commission in the King's [George's] Service,
nor is there One who, from any motive whatever, is induced to support
His Government.' The few French Canadians raised for Pontiac's war had
of course been properly paid during the continuance of their active
service. But they had been disbanded like mere militia afterwards,
without either gratuities or half-pay for the officers. This naturally
made the class from which officers were drawn think that no career was
open to them under the Union Jack and turned their thoughts towards
France, where their fellows were enjoying full pay without a break.

What made this the more serious was the weakness of the regular
garrisons, all of which, put together, numbered only 1627 men.
Carleton calculated that about five hundred of 'the King's Old
Subjects' were capable of bearing arms; though most of them were
better at talking than fighting. He had nothing but contempt for 'the
flimsy wall round Montreal,' and relied little more on the very
defective works at Quebec. Thus, with all his wonderful equanimity,
'grave Carleton' left Canada with no light heart when he took six
months' leave of absence in 1770; and he would have been more anxious
still if he could have foreseen that his absence was to be prolonged
to no less than four years.

He had, however, two great satisfactions. He was represented at Quebec
by a most steadfast lieutenant, the quiet, alert, discreet, and
determined Cramah; and he was leaving Canada after having given proof
of a disinterestedness which was worthy of the elder Pitt himself.
When Pitt became Paymaster-General of England he at once declined to
use the two chief perquisites of his office, the interest on the
government balance and the half per cent commission on foreign
subsidies, though both were regarded as a kind of indirect salary.
When Carleton became governor of Canada he at once issued a
proclamation abolishing all the fees and perquisites attached to his
position and explained his action to the home authorities in the
following words: 'There is a certain appearance of dirt, a sort of
meanness, in exacting fees on every occasion. I think it necessary for
the King's service that his representative should be thought
unsullied.' Murray, who had accepted the fees, at first took umbrage.
But Carleton soon put matters straight with him. The fact was that
fees, and even certain perquisites, were no dishonour to receive, as
they nearly always formed a recognized part, and often the whole, of a
perfectly legal salary. But fees and perquisites could be abused; and
they did lead to misunderstandings, even when they were not abused;
while fixed salaries were free from both objections. So Carleton,
surrounded by shamelessly rapacious magistrates and the whole vile
camp-following gang, as well as by French Canadians who had suffered
from the robberies of Bigot and his like, decided to sacrifice
everything but his indispensable fixed salary in order that even the
most malicious critics could not bring any accusation, however false,
against the man who represented Britain and her king.

    *    *    *    *    *

An interesting personal interlude, which was not without considerable
effect on Canadian history, took place in the middle of Carleton's
four years' stay in England. He was forty-eight and still a bachelor.
Tradition whispers that these long years of single life were the
result of a disappointing love affair with Jane Carleton, a pretty
cousin, when both he and she were young. However that may be, he now
proposed to Lady Anne Howard, whose father, the Earl of Effingham,
was one of his greatest friends. But he was doomed to a second, though
doubtless very minor, disappointment. Lady Anne, who probably looked
on 'grave Carleton' as a sort of amiable, middle-aged uncle, had
fallen in love with his nephew, whom she presently married, and with
whom she afterwards went out to Canada, where her husband served under
the rejected uncle himself. What added spice to this peculiar
situation was the fact that Carleton actually married the younger
sister of the too-youthful Lady Anne. When Lady Anne rejoined her
sister and their bosom friend, Miss Seymour, after the disconcerting
interview with Carleton, she explained her tears by saying they were
due to her having been 'obliged to refuse the best man on earth.' 'The
more fool you!' answered the younger sister, Lady Maria, then just
eighteen, 'I only wish he had given me the chance!' There, for the
time, the matter ended. Carleton went back to his official duties in
furtherance of the Quebec Act. His nephew and the elder sister made
mutual love. Lady Maria held her tongue. But Miss Seymour had not
forgotten; and one day she mustered up courage to tell Carleton the
story of 'the more fool you!' This decided him to act at once. He
proposed; was accepted; and lived happily married for the rest of his
long life. Lady Maria was small, fair-haired, and blue-eyed, which
heightened her girlish appearance when, like Madame de Champlain, she
came out to Canada with a husband more than old enough to be her
father. But she had been brought up at Versailles. She knew all the
aristocratic graces of the old rgime. And her slight, upright
figure--erect as any soldier's to her dying day--almost matched her
husband's stalwart form in dignity of carriage.

    *    *    *    *    *

The Quebec Act of 1774--the Magna Charta of the French-Canadian
race--finally passed the House of Lords on the 18th of June. The
general idea of the Act was to reverse the unsuccessful policy of
ultimate assimilation with the other American colonies by making
Canada a distinctly French-Canadian province. The Maritime Provinces,
with a population of some thirty thousand, were to be as English as
they chose. But a greatly enlarged Quebec, with a population of ninety
thousand, and stretching far into the unsettled West, was to remain
equally French-Canadian; though the rights of what it was then
thought would be a perpetual English-speaking minority were to be
safeguarded in every reasonable way. The whole country between the
American colonies and the domains of the Hudson's Bay Company was
included in this new Quebec, which comprised the southern half of what
is now the Newfoundland Labrador, practically the whole of the modern
provinces of Quebec and Ontario, and all the western lands between the
Ohio and the Great Lakes as far as the Mississippi, that is, the
modern American states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and
Wisconsin.

The Act gave Canada the English criminal code. It recognized most of
the French civil law, including the seigneurial tenure of land. Roman
Catholics were given 'the free Exercise' of their religion, 'subject
to the King's Supremacy' as defined 'by an Act made in the First Year
of Queen Elizabeth,' which Act, with a magnificently prophetic outlook
on the future British Empire, was to apply to 'all the Dominions and
Countries which then did, or thereafter should, belong to the Imperial
Crown.' The Roman Catholic clergy were authorized to collect 'their
accustomed Dues and Rights' from members of their own communion. The
new oath of allegiance to the Crown was silent about differences of
religion, so that Roman Catholics might take it without question. The
clergy and seigneurs were thus restored to an acknowledged leadership
in church and state. Those who wanted a parliament were distinctly
told that 'It is at present inexpedient to call an Assembly,' and that
a Council of from seventeen to twenty-three members, all appointed by
the Crown, would attend to local government and have power to levy
taxes for roads and public buildings only. Lands held 'in free and
common soccage' were to be dealt with by the laws of England, as was
all property which could be freely willed away. A possible
establishment of the Church of England was provided for but never put
in operation.

In some ways the Act did, in other ways it did not, fulfil the objects
of its framers. It was undoubtedly a generous concession to the
leading French Canadians. It did help to keep Canada both British and
Canadian. And it did open the way for what ought to have been a
crushing attack on the American revolutionary forces. But it was not,
and neither it nor any other Act could possibly have been, at that
late hour, completely successful. It conciliated the seigneurs and the
parochial clergy. But it did not, and it could not, also conciliate
the lesser townsfolk and the habitants. For the last fourteen years
the habitants had been gradually drifting away from their former
habits of obedience and former obligations towards their leaders in
church and state. The leaders had lost their old followers. The
followers had found no new leaders of their own.

Naturally enough, there was great satisfaction among the seigneurs and
the clergy, with a general feeling among government supporters, both
in England and Canada, that the best solution of a very refractory
problem had been found at last. On the other hand, the Opposition in
England, nearly every one in the American colonies, and the great
majority of English-speaking people in Newfoundland, the Maritime
Provinces, and Canada itself were dead against the Act; while the
habitants, resenting the privileges already reaffirmed in favour of
the seigneurs and clergy, and suspicious of further changes in the
same unwelcome direction, were neutral at the best and hostile at the
worst.

The American colonists would have been angered in any case. But when
they saw Canada proper made as unlike a 'fourteenth colony' as could
be, and when they also saw the gates of the coveted western lands
closed against them by the same detested Act--the last of the 'five
intolerable acts' to which they most objected--their fury knew no
bounds. They cursed the king, the pope, and the French Canadians with
as much violence as any temporal or spiritual rulers had ever cursed
heretics and rebels. The 'infamous and tyrannical ministry' in England
was accused of 'contemptible subservience' to the 'bloodthirsty,
idolatrous, and hypocritical creed' of the French Canadians. To think
that people whose religion had spread 'murder, persecution, and revolt
throughout the world' were to be entrenched along the St Lawrence was
bad enough. But to see Crown protection given to the Indian lands
which the Americans considered their own western 'birthright' was
infinitely worse. Was the king of England to steal the valley of the
Mississippi in the same way as the king of France?

It is easy to be wise after the event and hard to follow any counsel
of perfection. But it must always be a subject of keen, if
unavailing, regret that the French Canadians were not guaranteed
their own way of life, within the limits of the modern province of
Quebec, immediately after the capitulation of Montreal in 1760. They
would then have entered the British Empire, as a whole people, on
terms which they must all have understood to be exceedingly generous
from any conquering power, and which they would have soon found out to
be far better than anything they had experienced under the government
of France. In return for such unexampled generosity they might have
become convinced defenders of the only flag in the world under which
they could possibly live as French Canadians. Their relations to each
other, to the rest of a changing Canada, and to the Empire would have
followed the natural course of political evolution, with the burning
questions of language, laws, and religion safely removed from general
controversy in after years. The rights of the English-speaking
minority could, of course, have been still better safeguarded under
this system than under the distracting series of half-measures which
took its place. There should have been no question of a parliament in
the immediate future. Then, with the peopling of Ontario by the
United Empire Loyalists and the growth of the Maritime Provinces on
the other side, Quebec could have entered Carleton's proposed
Confederation in the nineties to her own and every one else's best
advantage.

On the other hand, the delay of fourteen years after the Capitulation
of 1760 and the unwarrantable extension of the provincial boundaries
were cardinal errors of the most disastrous kind. The delay, filled
with a futile attempt at mistaken Americanization, bred doubts and
dissensions not only between the two races but between the different
kinds of French Canadians. When the hour of trial came disintegration
had already gone too far. The mistake about the boundaries was equally
bad. The western wilds ought to have been administered by a
lieutenant-governor under the supervision of a governor-general. Even
leasing them for a short term of years to the Hudson's Bay Company
would have been better than annexing them to a preposterous province
of Quebec. The American colonists would have doubtless objected to
either alternative. But both could have been defended on sound
principles of administration; while the sudden invasion of a new and
inflated Quebec into the colonial hinterlands was little less than a
declaration of war. The whole problem bristled with enormous
difficulties, and the circumstances under which it had to be faced
made an ideal solution impossible. But an earlier Quebec Act, without
its outrageous boundary clause, would have been well worth the risk of
passing; for the delay led many French Canadians to suppose, however
falsely, that the Empire's need might always be their opportunity; and
this idea, however repugnant to their best minds and better feelings,
has persisted among their extreme particularists until the present
day.




CHAPTER IV

INVASION

1775


Carleton's first eight years as governor of Canada were almost
entirely occupied with civil administration. The next four were
equally occupied with war; so much so, indeed, that the Quebec Act
could not be put in force on the 1st of May 1775, as provided for in
the Act itself, but only bit by bit much later on. There was one short
session of the new Legislative Council, which opened on the 17th of
August. But all men's minds were even then turned towards the Montreal
frontier, whence the American invasion threatened to overspread the
whole country and make this opening session the last that might ever
be held. Most of the members were soon called away from the
council-chamber to the field. No further session could be held either
that year or the next; and Carleton was obliged to nominate the
judges himself. The fifteen years of peace were over, and Canada had
once more become an object of contention between two fiercely hostile
forces.

    *    *    *    *    *

The War of the American Revolution was a long and exceedingly
complicated struggle; and its many varied fortunes naturally had a
profound effect on those of Canada. But Canada was directly engaged in
no more than the first three campaigns, when the Americans invaded her
in 1775 and '76, and when the British used her as the base from which
to invade the new American Republic in 1777. These first three
campaigns formed a purely civil war within the British Empire. On each
side stood three parties. Opponents were ranged against each other in
the mother country, in the Thirteen Colonies, and in Canada. In the
mother country the king and his party government were ranged against
the Opposition and all who held radical or revolutionary views. Here
the strife was merely political. But in the Thirteen Colonies the
forces of the Crown were ranged against the forces of the new
Continental Congress. The small minority of colonists who were
afterwards known as the United Empire Loyalists sided with the Crown.
A majority sided with the Congress. The rest kept as selfishly neutral
as they could. Among the English-speaking civilians in Canada, many of
whom were now of a much better class than the original camp-followers,
the active loyalists comprised only the smaller half. The larger half
sided with the Americans, as was only natural, seeing that most of
them were immigrants from the Thirteen Colonies. But by no means all
these sympathizers were ready for a fight. Among the French Canadians
the loyalists included very few besides the seigneurs, the clergy, and
a handful of educated people in Montreal, Three Rivers, and Quebec.
The mass of the habitants were more or less neutral. But many of them
were anti-British at first, while most of them were anti-American
afterwards.

    *    *    *    *    *

Events moved quickly in 1775. On the 19th of April the 'shot heard
round the world' was fired at Lexington in Massachusetts. On the 1st
of May, the day appointed for the inauguration of the Quebec Act, the
statue of the king in Montreal was grossly defaced and hung with a
cross, a necklace of potatoes, and a placard bearing the inscription,
_Here's the Canadian Pope and English Fool--Voil le Pape du Canada
et le sot Anglais._ Large rewards were offered for the detection of
the culprits; but without avail. Excitement ran high and many an
argument ended with a bloody nose.

Meanwhile three Americans were plotting an attack along the old line
of Lake Champlain. Two of them were outlaws from the colony of New
York, which was then disputing with the neighbouring colony of New
Hampshire the possession of the lawless region in which all three had
taken refuge and which afterwards became Vermont. Ethan Allen, the
gigantic leader of the wild Green Mountain Boys, had a price on his
head. Seth Warner, his assistant, was an outlaw of a somewhat humbler
kind. Benedict Arnold, the third invader, came from Connecticut. He
was a horse-dealer carrying on business with Quebec and Montreal as
well as the West Indies. He was just thirty-four; an excellent rider,
a dead shot, a very fair sailor, and captain of a crack militia
company. Immediately after the affair at Lexington he had turned out
his company, reinforced by undergraduates from Yale, had seized the
New Haven powder magazine and marched over to Cambridge, where the
Massachusetts Committeemen took such a fancy to him that they made him
a colonel on the spot, with full authority to raise men for an
immediate attack on Ticonderoga. The opportunity seemed too good to be
lost; though the Continental Congress was not then in favour of
attacking Canada, as its members hoped to see the Canadians throw off
the yoke of empire on their own account. The British posts on Lake
Champlain were absurdly undermanned. Ticonderoga contained two hundred
cannon, but only forty men, none of whom expected an attack. Crown
Point had only a sergeant and a dozen men to watch its hundred and
thirteen pieces. Fort George, at the head of Lake George, was no
better off; and nothing more had been done to man the fortifications
at St Johns on the Richelieu, where there was an excellent sloop as
well as many cannon in charge of the usual sergeant's guard. This want
of preparation was no fault of Carleton's. He had frequently reported
home on the need of more men. Now he had less than a thousand regulars
to defend the whole country: and not another man was to arrive till
the spring of next year. When Gage was hard pressed for reinforcements
at Boston in the autumn of 1774 Carleton had immediately sent him
two excellent battalions that could ill be spared from Canada. But
when Carleton himself made a similar request, in the autumn of 1775,
Admiral Graves, to his lasting dishonour, refused to sail up to Quebec
so late as October.

[Illustration: QUEBEC CITY]

The first moves of the three Americans smacked strongly of a
well-staged extravaganza in which the smart Yankees never failed to
score off the dunderheaded British. The Green Mountain Boys assembled
on the east side of the lake. Spies walked in and out of Ticonderoga,
exactly opposite, and reported to Ethan Allen that the commandant and
his whole garrison of forty unsuspecting men would make an easy prey.
Allen then sent eighty men down to Skenesborough (now Whitehall) at
the southern end of the lake, to take the tiny post there and bring
back boats for the crossing on the 10th of May. Then Arnold turned up
with his colonel's commission, but without the four hundred men it
authorized him to raise. Allen, however, had made himself a colonel
too, with Warner as his second-in-command. So there were no less than
three colonels for two hundred and thirty men. Arnold claimed the
command by virtue of his Massachusetts commission. But the Green
Mountain Boys declared they would follow no colonels but their own;
and so Arnold, after being threatened with arrest, was appointed
something like chief of the staff, on the understanding that he would
make himself generally useful with the boats. This appointment was
made at dawn on the 10th of May, just as the first eighty men were
advancing to the attack after crossing over under cover of night. The
British sentry's musket missed fire; whereupon he and the guard were
rushed, while the rest of the garrison were surprised in their beds.
Ethan Allen, who knew the fort thoroughly, hammered on the
commandant's door and summoned him to surrender 'In the name of the
Great Jehovah and the Continental Congress!' The astonished
commandant, seeing that resistance was impossible, put on his
dressing-gown and paraded his disarmed garrison as prisoners of war.
Seth Warner presently arrived with the rest of Allen's men and soon
became the hero of Crown Point, which he took with the whole of its
thirteen men and a hundred and thirteen cannon. Then Arnold had his
own turn, in command of an expedition against the sergeant's guard,
cannon, stores, fort, and sloop at St Johns on the Richelieu, all of
which he captured in the same absurdly simple way. When he came
sailing back the three victorious commanders paraded all their men and
fired off many straggling fusillades of joy. In the meantime the
Continental Congress at Philadelphia, with a delightful touch of
unconscious humour, was gravely debating the following resolution,
which was passed on the 1st of June: _That no Expedition or Incursion
ought to be undertaken or made, by any Colony or body of Colonists,
against or into Canada._

The same Congress, however, found reasons enough for changing its mind
before the month of May was out. The British forces in Canada had
already begun to move towards the threatened frontier. They had
occupied and strengthened St Johns. And the Americans were beginning
to fear lest the command of Lake Champlain might again fall into
British hands. On the 27th of May the Congress closed the phase of
individual raids and inaugurated the phase of regular invasion by
commissioning General Schuyler to 'pursue any measures in Canada that
may have a tendency to promote the peace and security of these
Colonies.' Philip Schuyler was a distinguished member of the family
whose head had formulated the 'Glorious Enterprize' of conquering New
France in 1689.[4] So it was quite in line with the family tradition
for him to be under orders to 'take possession of St Johns, Montreal,
and any other parts of the country,' provided always, adds the
cautious Congress, that 'General Schuyler finds it practicable, and
that it will not be disagreeable to the Canadians.'

A few days later Arnold was trying to get a colonelcy from the
Convention of New York, whose members just then happened to be
thinking of giving commissions to his rivals, the leaders of the Green
Mountain Boys, while, to make the complication quite complete, these
Boys themselves had every intention of electing officers on their own
account. In the meantime Connecticut, determined not to be forestalled
by either friend or foe, ordered a thousand men to Ticonderoga and
commissioned a general called Wooster to command them. Thus early were
sown the seeds of those dissensions between Congress troops and Colony
troops which nearly drove Washington mad.

[Footnote 4: See, in this Series, _The Fighting Governor_.]

Schuyler reached Ticonderoga in mid-July and assumed his position as
Congressional commander-in-chief. Unfortunately for the good of the
service he had only a few hundred men with him; so Wooster, who had a
thousand, thought himself the bigger general of the two. The
Connecticut men followed Wooster's lead by jeering at Schuyler's men
from New York; while the Vermonters added to the confusion by electing
Seth Warner instead of Ethan Allen. In mid-August a second
Congressional general arrived, making three generals and half a dozen
colonels for less than fifteen hundred troops. This third general was
Richard Montgomery, an ardent rebel of thirty-eight, who had been a
captain in the British Army. He had sold his commission, bought an
estate on the Hudson, and married a daughter of the Livingstons. The
Livingstons headed the Anglo-American revolutionists in the colony of
New York as the Schuylers headed the Knickerbocker Dutch. One of them
was very active on the rebel side in Montreal and was soon to take the
field at the head of the American 'patriots' in Canada. Montgomery was
brother to the Captain Montgomery of the 43rd who was the only British
officer to disgrace himself during Wolfe's Quebec campaign, which he
did by murdering his French-Canadian prisoners at Chteau Richer
because they had fought disguised as Indians.[5] Richard Montgomery
was a much better man than his savage brother; though, as the sequel
proves, he was by no means the perfect hero his American admirers
would have the world believe. His great value at Ticonderoga was his
professional knowledge and his ardour in the cause he had espoused.
His presence 'changed the spirit of the camp.' It sadly needed change.
'Such a set of pusillanimous wretches never were collected' is his own
description in a despairing letter to his wife. The 'army,' in fact,
was all parts and no whole, and all the parts were mere untrained
militia. Moreover, the spirit of the 'town meeting' ruled the camp.
Even a battery could not be moved without consulting a council of war.
Schuyler, though far more phlegmatic than Montgomery, agreed with him
heartily about this and many other exasperating points. 'If Job had
been a general in my situation, his memory had not been so famous for
patience.'

[Footnote 5: See _The Passing of New France_, p. 118.]

Worn out by his worries, Schuyler fell ill and was sent to command the
base at Albany. Montgomery then succeeded to the command of the force
destined for the front. The plan of invasion approved by Washington
was, first, to sweep the line of the Richelieu by taking St Johns and
Chambly, then to take Montreal, next to secure the line of the St
Lawrence, and finally to besiege Quebec. Montgomery's forces were to
carry out all the preliminary parts alone. But Arnold was to join him
at Quebec after advancing across country from the Kennebec to the
Chaudire with a flying column of Virginians and New Englanders.

    *    *    *    *    *

Carleton opened the melancholy little session of the new Legislative
Council at Quebec on the very day Montgomery arrived at
Ticonderoga--the 17th of August. When he closed it, to take up the
defence of Canada, the prospect was already black enough, though it
grew blacker still as time went on. Immediately on hearing the news of
Ticonderoga, Crown Point, and St Johns at the end of May he had sent
every available man from Quebec to Montreal, whence Colonel Templer
had already sent off a hundred and forty men to St Johns, while
calling for volunteers to follow. The seigneurial class came forward
at once. But all attempts to turn out the militia _en masse_ proved
utterly futile. Fourteen years of kindly British rule had loosened the
old French bonds of government and the habitants were no longer united
as part of one people with the seigneurs and the clergy. The rebels
had been busy spreading insidious perversions of the belated Quebec
Act, poisoning the minds of the habitants against the British
government, and filling their imaginations with all sorts of
terrifying doubts. The habitants were ignorant, credulous, and
suspicious to the last degree. The most absurd stories obtained ready
credence and ran like wildfire through the province. Seven thousand
Russians were said to be coming up the St Lawrence--whether as friends
or foes mattered nothing compared with the awful fact that they were
all outlandish bogeys. Carleton was said to have a plan for burning
alive every habitant he could lay his hands on. Montgomery's thousand
were said to be five thousand, with many more to follow. And later on,
when Arnold's men came up the Kennebec, it was satisfactorily
explained to most of the habitants that it was no good resisting
dead-shot riflemen who were bullet-proof themselves. Carleton issued
proclamations. The seigneurs waved their swords.

The clergy thundered from their pulpits. But all in vain. Two months
after the American exploits on Lake Champlain Carleton gave a guinea
to the sentry mounted in his honour by the local militia colonel, M.
de Tonnancour, because this man was the first genuine habitant he had
yet seen armed in the whole district of Three Rivers. What must
Carleton have felt when the home government authorized him to raise
six thousand of His Majesty's loyal French-Canadian subjects for
immediate service and informed him that the arms and equipment for the
first three thousand were already on the way to Canada! Seven years
earlier it might still have been possible to raise French-Canadian
counterparts of those Highland regiments which Wolfe had recommended
and Pitt had so cordially approved. Carleton himself had recommended
this excellent scheme at the proper time. But, though the home
government even then agreed with him, they thought such a measure
would raise more parliamentary and public clamour than they could
safely face. The chance once lost was lost for ever.

Carleton had done what he could to keep the enemy at arm's length from
Montreal by putting every available man into Chambly and St Johns. He
knew nothing of Arnold's force till it actually reached Quebec in
November. Quebec was thought secure for the time being, and so was
left with a handful of men under Cramah. Montreal had a few regulars
and a hundred 'Royal Emigrants,' mostly old Highlanders who had
settled along the New York frontier after the Conquest. For the rest,
it had many American and a few British sympathizers ready to fly at
each others' throats and a good many neutrals ready to curry favour
with the winners. Sorel was a mere post without any effective
garrison. Chambly was held by only eighty men under Major Stopford.
But its strong stone fort was well armed and quite proof against
anything except siege artillery; while its little garrison consisted
of good regulars who were well provisioned for a siege. The mass of
Carleton's little force was at St Johns under Major Preston, who had
500 men of the 7th and 26th (Royal Fusiliers and Cameronians), 80
gunners, and 120 volunteers, mostly French-Canadian gentlemen. Preston
was an excellent officer, and his seven hundred men were able to give
a very good account of themselves as soldiers. But the fort was not
nearly so strong as the one at Chambly; it had no natural advantages
of position; and it was short of both stores and provisions.

The three successive steps for Montgomery to take were St Johns,
Chambly, and Montreal. But the natural order of events was completely
upset by that headstrong Yankee, Ethan Allen, who would have his
private war at Montreal, and by that contemptible British officer,
Major Stopford, who would not defend Chambly. Montgomery laid siege to
St Johns on the 18th of September, but made no substantial progress
for more than a month. He probably had no use for Allen at anything
like a regular siege. So Allen and a Major Brown went on to 'preach
politicks' and concert a rising with men like Livingston and Walker.
Livingston, as we have seen already, belonged to a leading New York
family which was very active in the rebel cause; and Livingston,
Walker, Allen, and Brown would have made a dangerous anti-British
combination if they could only have worked together. But they could
not. Livingston hurried off to join Montgomery with four hundred
'patriots' who served their cause fairly well till the invasion was
over. Walker had no military qualities whatever. So Allen and Brown
were left to their own disunited devices. Montreal seemed an easy
prey. It had plenty of rebel sympathizers. Nearly all the surrounding
habitants were either neutrals or inclined to side with the Americans,
though not as fighting men. Carleton's order to bring in all the
ladders, so as to prevent an escalade of the walls, had met with
general opposition and evasion. Nothing seemed wanting but a good
working plan.

Brown, or possibly Allen himself, then hit upon the idea of treating
Montreal very much as Allen had treated Ticonderoga. In any case Allen
jumped at it. He jumped so far, indeed, that he forestalled Brown, who
failed to appear at the critical moment. Thus, on the 24th of
September, Allen found himself alone at Long Point with a hundred and
twenty men in face of three times as many under the redoubtable Major
Carden, a skilled veteran who had won Wolfe's admiration years before.
Carden's force included thirty regulars, two hundred and forty
militiamen, and some Indians, probably not over a hundred strong. The
militia were mostly of the seigneurial class with a following of
habitants and townsmen of both French and British blood. Carden broke
Allen's flanks, rounded up his centre, and won the little action
easily, though at the expense of his own most useful life. Allen was
very indignant at being handcuffed and marched off like a common
prisoner after having made himself a colonel twice over. But Carleton
had no respect for self-commissioned officers and had no soldiers to
spare for guarding dangerous rebels. So he shipped Allen off to
England, where that eccentric warrior was confined in Pendennis Castle
near Falmouth in Cornwall.

This affair, small as it was, revived British hopes in Montreal and
induced a few more militiamen and Indians to come forward. But within
a month more was lost at Chambly than had been gained at Montreal. On
the 18th of October a small American detachment attacked Chambly with
two little field-guns and induced it to surrender on the 20th. If ever
an officer deserved to be shot it was Major Stopford, who tamely
surrendered his well-armed and well-provided fort to an insignificant
force, after a flimsy resistance of only thirty-six hours, without
even taking the trouble to throw his stores into the river that flowed
beside his strong stone walls. The news of this disgraceful surrender,
diligently spread by rebel sympathizers, frightened the Indians away
from St Johns, thus depriving Major Preston, the commandant, of his
best couriers at the very worst time. But the evil did not stop there;
for nearly all the few French-Canadian militiamen whom the more
distant seigneurs had been able to get under arms deserted _en masse_,
with many threats against any one who should try to turn them out
again.

Chambly is only a short day's march from Montreal to the west and St
Johns to the south; so its capture meant that St Johns was entirely
cut off from the Richelieu to the north and dangerously exposed to
being cut off from Montreal as well. Its ample stores and munitions of
war were a priceless boon to Montgomery, who now redoubled his efforts
to take St Johns. But Preston held out bravely for the remainder of
the month, while Carleton did his best to help him. A fortnight
earlier Carleton had arrested that firebrand, Walker, who had
previously refused to leave the country, though Carleton had given him
the chance of doing so. Mrs Walker, as much a rebel as her husband,
interviewed Carleton and noted in her diary that he 'said many severe
Things in very soft & Polite Termes.' Carleton was firm. Walker's
actions, words, and correspondence all proved him a dangerous rebel
whom no governor could possibly leave at large without breaking his
oath of office. Walker, who had himself caused so many outrageous
arrests, now not only resisted the legal arrest of his own person, but
fired on the little party of soldiers who had been sent to bring him
into Montreal. The soldiers then began to burn him out; whereupon he
carried his wife to a window from which the soldiers rescued her. He
then surrendered and was brought into Montreal, where the sight of him
as a prisoner made a considerable impression on the waverers.

A few hundred neighbouring militiamen were scraped together. Every one
of the handful of regulars who could be spared was turned out. And
Carleton set off to the relief of St Johns. But Seth Warner's Green
Mountain Boys, reinforced by many more sharpshooters, prevented
Carleton from landing at Longueuil, opposite Montreal. The remaining
Indians began to slink away. The French-Canadian militiamen deserted
fast--'thirty or forty of a night.' There were not two hundred
regulars available for a march across country. And on the 30th
Carleton was forced to give up in despair. Within the week St Johns
surrendered with 688 men, who were taken south as prisoners of war.
Preston had been completely cut off and threatened with starvation as
well. So when he destroyed everything likely to be needed by the enemy
he had done all that could be expected of a brave and capable
commander.

It was the 3rd of November when St Johns surrendered. Ten days later
Montgomery occupied Montreal and Arnold landed at Wolfe's Cove just
above Quebec. The race for the possession of Quebec had been a very
close one. The race for the capture of Carleton was to be closer
still. And on the fate of either depended the immediate, and perhaps
the ultimate, fate of Canada.

The race for Quebec had been none the less desperate because the
British had not known of the danger from the south till after Arnold
had suddenly emerged from the wilds of Maine and was well on his way
to the mouth of the Chaudire, which falls into the St Lawrence seven
miles above the city. Arnold's subsequent change of sides earned him
the execration of the Americans. But there can be no doubt whatever
that if he had got through in time to capture Quebec he would have
become a national hero of the United States. He had the advantage of
leading picked men; though nearly three hundred faint-hearts did turn
back half-way. But, even with picked men, his feat was one of
surpassing excellence. His force went in eleven hundred strong. It
came out, reduced by desertion as well as by almost incredible
hardships, with barely seven hundred. It began its toilsome ascent of
the Kennebec towards the end of September, carrying six weeks'
supplies in the bad, hastily built boats or on the men's backs. Daniel
Morgan and his Virginian riflemen led the way. Aaron Burr was present
as a young volunteer. The portages were many and trying. The
settlements were few at first and then wanting altogether. Early in
October the drenched portagers were already sleeping in their frozen
clothes. The boats began to break up. Quantities of provisions were
lost. Soon there was scarcely anything left but flour and salt pork.
It took nearly a fortnight to get past the Great Carrying Place, in
sight of Mount Bigelow. Rock, bog, and freezing slime told on the men,
some of whom began to fall sick. Then came the chain of ponds leading
into Dead River. Then the last climb up to the height-of-land beyond
which lay the headwaters of the Chaudire, which takes its rise in
Lake Megantic.

There were sixty miles to go beyond the lake, and a badly broken sixty
miles they were, before the first settlement of French Canadians could
be reached. There was no trail. Provisions were almost at an end.
Sickness increased. The sick began to die. 'And what was it all for? A
chance to get killed! The end of the march was Quebec--impregnable!'
On the 24th of October Arnold, with fifteen other men, began 'a race
against time, a race against starvation' by pushing on ahead in a
desperate effort to find food. Within a week he had reached the first
settlement, after losing three of his five boats with everything in
them. Three days later, and not one day too soon, the French Canadians
met his seven hundred famishing men with a drove of cattle and plenty
of provisions. The rest of the way was toilsome enough. But it seemed
easy by comparison. The habitants were friendly, but very shy about
enlisting, in spite of Washington's invitation to 'range yourselves
under the standard of general liberty.' The Indians were more
responsive, and nearly fifty joined on their own terms. By the 8th of
November Arnold was marching down the south shore of the St Lawrence,
from the Chaudire to Point Levis, in full view of Quebec. He had just
received a dispatch ten days old from Montgomery by which he learned
that St Johns was expected to fall immediately and that Schuyler was
no longer with the army at the front. But he could not tell when the
junction of forces would be made; and he saw at once that Quebec was
on the alert because every boat had been either destroyed or taken
over to the other side.

The spring and summer had been anxious times enough in Quebec. But the
autumn was a great deal worse. Bad news kept coming down from
Montreal. The disaffected got more and more restless and began 'to act
as though no opposition might be shown the rebel forces.' And in
October it did seem as if nothing could be done to stop the invaders.
There were only a few hundred militiamen that could be depended on.
The regulars, under Colonel Maclean, had gone up to help Carleton on
the Montreal frontier. The fortifications were in no state to stand a
siege. But Cramah was full of steadfast energy. He had mustered the
French-Canadian militia on September 11, the very day Arnold was
leaving Cambridge in Massachusetts for his daring march against
Quebec. These men had answered the call far better in the city of
Quebec than anywhere else. There was also a larger proportion of
English-speaking loyalists here than in Montreal. But no transports
brought troops up the St Lawrence from Boston or the mother country,
and no vessel brought Carleton down. The loyalists were, however,
encouraged by the presence of two small men-of-war, one of which, the
_Hunter_, had been the guide-ship for Wolfe's boat the night before
the Battle of the Plains. Some minor reinforcements also kept
arriving: veterans from the border settlements and a hundred and fifty
men from Newfoundland. On the 3rd of November, the day St Johns
surrendered to Montgomery, an intercepted dispatch had warned Cramah
of Arnold's approach and led him to seize all the boats on the south
shore opposite Quebec. This was by no means his first precaution. He
had sent some men forty miles up the Chaudire as soon as the news of
the raids on Lake Champlain and St Johns had arrived at the end of
May. Thus, though neither of them had anticipated such a bolt from the
blue, both Carleton and Cramah had taken all the reasonable means
within their most restricted power to provide against unforeseen
contingencies.

Arnold's chance of surprising Quebec had been lost ten days before he
was able to cross the St Lawrence; and when the habitants on the south
shore were helping his men to make scaling-ladders the British
garrison on the north had already become too strong for him. But he
was indefatigable in collecting boats and canoes at the mouth of the
Chaudire, and at other points higher up than Cramah's men had
reached when on their mission of destruction or removal, and he was as
capable as ever when, on the pitch-black night of the 13th, he led his
little flotilla through the gap between the two British men-of-war,
the _Hunter_ and the _Lizard_. The next day he marched across the
Plains of Abraham and saluted Quebec with three cheers. But meanwhile
Colonel Maclean, who had set out to help Carleton at Montreal and
turned back on hearing the news of St Johns, had slipped into Quebec
on the 12th. So Arnold found himself with less than seven hundred
effectives against the eleven hundred British who were now behind the
walls. After vainly summoning the city to surrender he retired to
Pointe-aux-Trembles, more than twenty miles up the north shore of the
St Lawrence, there to await the arrival of the victorious Montgomery.

    *    *    *    *    *

Meanwhile Montgomery was racing for Carleton and Carleton was racing
for Quebec. Montgomery's advance-guard had hurried on to Sorel, at the
mouth of the Richelieu, forty-five miles below Montreal, to mount guns
that would command the narrow channel through which the fugitive
governor would have to pass on his way to Quebec. They had ample time
to set the trap; for an incessant nor'-easter blew up the St Lawrence
day after day and held Carleton fast in Montreal, while, only a league
away, Montgomery's main body was preparing to cross over. Escape by
land was impossible, as the Americans held Berthier, on the north
shore, and had won over the habitants, all the way down from Montreal,
on both sides of the river. At last, on the afternoon of the 11th, the
wind shifted. Immediately a single cannon-shot was fired, a bugle
sounded the _fall in_! and 'the whole military establishment' of
Montreal formed up in the barrack square--one hundred and thirty
officers and men, all told. Carleton, 'wrung to the soul,' as one of
his officers wrote home, came on parade 'firm, unshaken, and serene.'
The little column then marched down to the boats through shuttered
streets of timid neutrals and scowling rebels. The few loyalists who
came to say good-bye to Carleton at the wharf might well have thought
it was the last handshake they would ever get from a British
'Captain-General and Governor-in-chief' as they saw him step aboard in
the dreary dusk of that November afternoon. And if he and they had
known the worst they might well have thought their fate was sealed;
for neither of them then knew that both sides of the St Lawrence were
occupied in force at two different places on the perilous way to
Quebec.

The little flotilla of eleven vessels got safely down to within a few
miles of Sorel, when one grounded and delayed the rest till the wind
failed altogether at noon on the 12th. The next three days it blew
upstream without a break. No progress could be made as there was no
room to tack in the narrow passages opposite Sorel. On the third day
an American floating battery suddenly appeared, firing hard. Behind it
came a boat with a flag of truce and the following summons from
Colonel Easton, who commanded Montgomery's advance-guard at Sorel:


      Sir,--By this you will learn that General Montgomery
      is in Possession of the Fortress Montreal. You are
      very sensible that I am in Possession at this Place,
      and that, from the strength of the United Colonies on
      both sides your own situation is Rendered Very
      disagreeable. I am therefore induced to make you the
      following Proposal, viz.:--That if you will Resign
      your Fleet to me Immediately, without destroying the
      Effects on Board, You and Your men shall be used with
      due civility, together with women & Children on Board.
      To this I shall expect Your direct and Immediate
      answer. Should you Neglect You will Cherefully take
      the Consequences which will follow.


Carleton was surprised: and well he might be. He had not supposed that
Montgomery's men were in any such commanding position. But, like
Cramah at Quebec, he refused to answer; whereupon Easton's batteries
opened both from the south shore and from Isle St Ignace. Carleton's
heaviest gun was a 9-pounder; while Easton had four 12-pounders, one
of them mounted on a rowing battery that soon forced the British to
retreat. The skipper of the schooner containing the powder magazine
wanted to surrender on the spot, especially when he heard that the
Americans were getting some hot shot ready for him. But Carleton
retreated upstream, twelve miles above Sorel, to Lavaltrie, just above
Berthier on the north shore, where, on attempting to land, he was
driven back by some Americans and habitants. Next morning, the 16th, a
fateful day for Canada, the same Major Brown who had failed Ethan
Allen at Montreal came up with a flag of truce to propose that
Carleton should send an officer to see for himself how well all chance
of escape had now been cut off. The offer was accepted; and Brown
explained the situation from the rebel point of view. 'This is my
small battery; and, even if you should chance to escape, I have a
grand battery at the mouth of the Sorel [Richelieu] which will
infallibly sink all of your vessels. Wait a little till you see the
32-pounders that are now within half-a-mile.' There was a good deal of
Yankee bluff in this warning, especially as the 32-pounders could not
be mounted in time. But the British officer seemed perfectly
satisfied that the way was completely blocked; and so the Americans
felt sure that Carleton would surrender the following day.

Carleton, however, was not the man to give in till the very last; and
one desperate chance still remained. His flotilla was doomed. But he
might still get through alone without it. One of the French-Canadian
skippers, better known as 'Le Tourt'e' or 'Wild Pigeon' than by his
own name of Bouchette because of his wonderfully quick trips, was
persuaded to make the dash for freedom. So Carleton, having ordered
Prescott, his second-in-command, not to surrender the flotilla before
the last possible moment, arranged for his own escape in a whaleboat.
It was with infinite precaution that he made his preparations, as the
enemy, though confident of taking him, were still on the alert to
prevent such a prize from slipping through their fingers. He dressed
like a habitant from head to foot, putting on a tasselled _bonnet
rouge_ and an _toffe du pays_ (grey homespun) suit of clothes, with a
red sash and _bottes sauvages_ like Indian moccasins. Then the
whaleboat was quietly brought alongside. The crew got in and plied
their muffled oars noiselessly down to the narrow passage between Isle
St Ignace and the Isle du Pas, where they shipped the oars and leaned
over the side to paddle past the nearest battery with the palms of
their hands. It was a moment of breathless excitement; for the hope of
Canada was in their keeping and no turning back was possible. But the
American sentries saw no furtive French Canadians gliding through that
dark November night and heard no suspicious noises above the regular
ripple of the eddying island current. One tense half-hour and all was
over. The oars were run out again; the men gave way with a will; and
Three Rivers was safely reached in the morning.

Here Carleton met Captain Napier, who took him aboard the armed ship
_Fell_, in which he continued his journey to Quebec. He was
practically safe aboard the _Fell_; for Arnold had neither an army
strong enough to take Quebec nor any craft big enough to fight a ship.
But the flotilla above Sorel was doomed. After throwing all its powder
into the St Lawrence it surrendered on the 19th, the very day Carleton
reached Quebec. The astonished Americans were furious when they found
that Carleton had slipped through their fingers after all. They got
Prescott, whom they hated; and they released Walker, whom Carleton
was taking as a prisoner to Quebec. But no friends and foes like
Walker and Prescott could make up for the loss of Carleton, who was
the heart as well as the head of Canada at bay.

The exultation of the British more than matched the disappointment of
the Americans. Thomas Ainslie, collector of customs and captain of
militia at Quebec, only expressed the feelings of all his
fellow-loyalists when he made the following entry in the extremely
accurate diary he kept throughout those troublous times:

'On the 19th (a Happy Day for Quebec!), to the unspeakable joy of the
friends of the Government, and to the utter Dismay of the abettors of
Sedition and Rebellion, General Carleton arrived in the _Fell_, arm'd
ship, accompanied by an arm'd schooner. We saw our Salvation in his
Presence.'




CHAPTER V

BELEAGUERMENT

1775-1776


When Carleton finally turned at bay within the walls of Quebec the
British flag waved over less than a single one out of the more than a
million square miles that had so recently been included within the
boundaries of Canada. The landward walls cut off the last half-mile of
the tilted promontory which rises three hundred feet above the St
Lawrence but only one hundred above the valley of the St Charles. This
promontory is just a thousand yards wide where the landward walls run
across it, and not much wider across the world-famous Heights and
Plains of Abraham, which then covered the first two miles beyond. The
whole position makes one of Nature's strongholds when the enemy can be
kept at arm's length. But Carleton had no men to spare for more than
the actual walls and the narrow little strip of the Lower Town
between the base of the cliff and the St Lawrence. So the enemy
closed in along the Heights and among the suburbs, besides occupying
any point of vantage they chose across the St Lawrence or St Charles.

The walls were by no means fit to stand a siege, a fact which Carleton
had frequently reported. But, as the Americans had neither the men nor
the material for a regular siege, they were obliged to confine
themselves to a mere beleaguerment, with the chance of taking Quebec
by assault. One of Carleton's first acts was to proclaim that every
able-bodied man refusing to bear arms was to leave the town within
four days. But, though this had the desired effect of clearing out
nearly all the dangerous rebels, the Americans still believed they had
enough sympathizers inside to turn the scale of victory if they could
only manage to take the Lower Town, with all its commercial property
and shipping, or gain a footing anywhere within the walls.

There were five thousand souls left in Quebec, which was well
provisioned for the winter. The women, children, and men unfit to bear
arms numbered three thousand. The 'exempts' amounted to a hundred and
eighty. As there was a growing suspicion about many of these last,
Carleton paraded them for medical examination at the beginning of
March, when a good deal more than half were found quite fit for duty.
These men had been malingering all winter in order to skulk out of
danger; so he treated them with extreme leniency in only putting them
on duty as a 'company of Invalids.' But the slur stuck fast. The only
other exceptions to the general efficiency were a very few instances
of cowardice and many more of slackness. The militia order-books have
repeated entries about men who turned up late for even important
duties as well as about others whose authorized substitutes were no
better than themselves. But it should be remembered that, as a whole,
the garrison did exceedingly good service and that all the malingerers
and serious delinquents together did not amount to more than a tenth
of its total, which is a small proportion for such a mixed body.

The effective strength at the beginning of the siege was eighteen
hundred of all ranks. Only one hundred of these belonged to the
regular British garrison in Canada--a few staff-officers, twenty-two
men of the Royal Artillery, and seventy men of the 7th Royal
Fusiliers, a regiment which was to be commanded in Quebec sixteen
years later by Queen Victoria's father, the Duke of Kent. The
Fusiliers and two hundred and thirty 'Royal Emigrants' were formed
into a little battalion under Colonel Maclean, a first-rate officer
and Carleton's right-hand man in action. 'His Majesty's Royal Highland
Regiment of Emigrants,' which subsequently became the 84th Foot, now
known as the 2nd York and Lancaster, was hastily raised in 1775 from
the Highland veterans who had settled in the American colonies after
the Peace of 1763. Maclean's two hundred and thirty were the first men
he could get together in time to reach Quebec. The only other
professional fighters were four hundred bluejackets and thirty-five
marines of H.M.SS. _Lizard_ and _Hunter_, who were formed into a naval
battalion under their own officers, Captains Hamilton and M'Kenzie,
Hamilton being made a lieutenant-colonel and M'Kenzie a major while
doing duty ashore. Fifty masters and mates of trading vessels were
enrolled in the same battalion. The whole of the shipping was laid up
for the winter in the Cul de Sac, which alone made the Lower Town a
prize worth taking. The 'British Militia' mustered three hundred and
thirty, the 'Canadian Militia' five hundred and forty-three. These
two corps included practically all the official and business classes
in Quebec and formed nearly half the total combatants. Some of them
took no pay and were not bound to service beyond the neighbourhood of
Quebec, thus being very much like the Home Guards raised all over
Canada and the rest of the Empire during the Great World War of 1914.
All the militia wore dark green coats with buff waistcoats and
breeches. The total of eighteen hundred was completed by a hundred and
twenty 'artificers,' that is, men who would now belong to the
Engineers, Ordnance, and Army Service Corps. As the composition of
this garrison has been so often misrepresented, it may be as well to
state distinctly that the past or present regulars of all kinds,
soldiers and sailors together, numbered eight hundred and the militia
and other non-regulars a thousand. The French Canadians, very few of
whom were or had been regulars, formed less than a third of the whole.

[Illustration: RICHARD MONTGOMERY
From an engraving in the John Ross Robertson Collection,
Toronto Public Library]

Montgomery and Arnold had about the same total number of men.
Sometimes there were more, sometimes less. But what made the real
difference, and what really turned the scale, was that the Americans
had hardly any regulars and that their effectives rarely averaged
three-quarters of their total strength. The balance was also against
them in the matter of armament. For, though Morgan's Virginians had
many more rifles than were to be found among the British, the
Americans in general were not so well off for bayonets and not so well
able to use those they had; while the artillery odds were still more
against them. Carleton's artillery was not of the best. But it was
better than that of the Americans. He decidedly overmatched them in
the combined strength of all kinds of ordnance--cannons, carronades,
howitzers, mortars, and swivels. Cannons and howitzers fired shot and
shell at any range up to the limit then reached, between two and three
miles. Carronades were on the principle of a gigantic shotgun, firing
masses of bullets with great effect at very short ranges--less than
that of a long musket-shot, then reckoned at two hundred yards. The
biggest mortars threw 13-inch 224-lb shells to a great distance. But
their main use was for high-angle fire, such as that from the suburb
of St Roch under the walls of Quebec. Swivels were the smallest kind
of ordnance, firing one-, two-, or three-pound balls at short or
medium ranges. They were used at convenient points to stop rushes,
much like modern machine-guns.

Thanks chiefly to Cramah, the defences were not nearly so 'ruinous'
as Arnold at first had thought them. The walls, however useless
against the best siege artillery, were formidable enough against
irregular troops and makeshift batteries; while the warehouses and
shipping in the Lower Town were protected by two stockades, one
straight under Cape Diamond, the other at the corner where the Lower
Town turns into the valley of the St Charles. The first was called the
Prs-de-Ville, the second the Sault-au-Matelot. The shipping was open
to bombardment from the Levis shore. But the Americans had no guns to
spare for this till April.

    *    *    *    *    *

Montgomery's advance was greatly aided by the little flotilla which
Easton had captured at Sorel. Montgomery met Arnold at
Pointe-aux-Trembles, twenty miles above Quebec, on the 2nd of December
and supplied his little half-clad force with the British uniforms
taken at St Johns and Chambly. He was greatly pleased with the
magnificent physique of Arnold's men, the fittest of an originally
well-picked lot. He still had some 'pusillanimous wretches' among his
own New Yorkers, who resented the air of superiority affected by
Arnold's New Englanders and Morgan's Virginians. He felt a
well-deserved confidence in Livingston and some of the English-speaking
Canadian 'patriots' whom Livingston had brought into his camp before
St Johns in September. But he began to feel more and more doubtful
about the French Canadians, most of whom began to feel more and more
doubtful about themselves. On the 6th he arrived before Quebec and
took up his quarters in Holland House, two miles beyond the walls, at
the far end of the Plains of Abraham. The same day he sent Carleton
the following summons:


     Sir,--Notwithstanding the personal ill-treatment I have
     received at your hands--notwithstanding your cruelty to
     the unhappy Prisoners you have taken, the feelings of
     humanity induce me to have recourse to this expedient
     to save you from the Destruction which hangs over you.
     Give me leave, Sir, to assure you that I am well
     acquainted with your situation. A great extent of
     works, in their nature incapable of defence, manned
     with a motley crew of sailors, the greatest part our
     friends; of citizens, who wish to see us within their
     walls, & a few of the worst troops who ever stiled
     themselves Soldiers. The impossibility of relief, and
     the certain prospect of wanting every necessary of
     life, should your opponents confine their operations to
     a simple Blockade, point out the absurdity of
     resistance. Such is your situation! I am at the head of
     troops accustomed to Success, confident of the
     righteousness of the cause they are engaged in, inured
     to danger, & so highly incensed at your inhumanity,
     illiberal abuse, and the ungenerous means employed to
     prejudice them in the mind of the Canadians that it is
     with difficulty I restrain them till my Batteries are
     ready from assaulting your works, which afford them a
     fair opportunity of ample vengeance and just
     retaliation. Firing upon a flag of truce, hitherto
     unprecedented, even among savages, prevents my taking
     the ordinary mode of communicating my sentiments.
     However, I will at any rate acquit my conscience.
     Should you persist in an unwarrantable defence, the
     consequences be upon your own head. Beware of
     destroying stores of any kind, Publick or Private, as
     you have done at Montreal and in Three Rivers--If you
     do, by Heaven, there will be no mercy shown.


Though Montgomery wrote bunkum like the common politician of that and
many a later age, he was really a brave soldier. What galled him into
fury was 'grave Carleton's' quiet refusal to recognize either him or
any other rebel commander as the accredited leader of a hostile army.
It certainly must have been exasperating for the general of the
Continental Congress to be reduced to such expedients as tying a
grandiloquent ultimatum to an arrow and shooting it into the
beleaguered town. The charge of firing on flags of truce was another
instance of 'talking for Buncombe.' Carleton never fired on any white
flag. But he always sent the same answer: that he could hold no
communication with any rebels unless they came to implore the king's
pardon. This, of course, was an aggravation of his offensive calmness
in the face of so much revolutionary rage. To individual rebels of all
sorts he was, if anything, over-indulgent. He would not burn the
suburbs of Quebec till the enemy forced him to it, though many of the
houses that gave the Americans the best cover belonged to rebel
Canadians. He went out of his way to be kind to all prisoners,
especially if sick or wounded. And it was entirely owing to his
restraining influence that the friendly Indians had not raided the
border settlements of New England during the summer. Nor was he
animated only by the very natural desire of bringing back rebellious
subjects to what he thought their true allegiance, as his subsequent
actions amply proved. He simply acted with the calm dignity and
impartial justice which his position required.

Three days before Christmas the bombardment began in earnest. The
non-combatants soon found, to their equal amazement and delight, that
a good many shells did very little damage if fired about at random.
But news intended to make their flesh creep came in at the same time,
and probably had more effect than the shells on the weak-kneed members
of the community. Seven hundred scaling-ladders, no quarter if
Carleton persisted in holding out, and a prophecy attributed to
Montgomery that he would eat his Christmas dinner either in Quebec or
in Hell--these were some of the blood-curdling items that came in by
petticoat or arrow post. One of the most active purveyors of all this
bombast was Jerry Duggan, a Canadian 'patriot' barber now become a
Continental major.

But there was a serious side. Deserters and prisoners, as well as
British adherents who had escaped, all began to tell the same tale,
though with many variations. Montgomery was evidently bent on storming
the walls the first dark night. His own orders showed it.


     Head Quarters, Holland House.
     Near Quebec, 15_th Decr._ 1775.

     The General having in vain offered the most favourable
     terms of accommodation to the Governor of Quebec, &
     having taken every possible step to prevail on the
     inhabitants to desist from seconding him in his wild
     scheme of defending the Town--for the speedy reduction
     of the only hold possessed by the Ministerial Troops in
     this Province----The soldiers, flushed with continual
     success, confident of the justice of their cause, &
     relying on that Providence which has uniformly
     protected them, will advance with alacrity to the
     attack of works incapable of being defended by the
     wretched Garrison posted behind them, consisting of
     Sailors unacquainted with the use of arms, of Citizens
     incapable of Soldiers' duty, & of a few miserable
     Emigrants. The General is confident that a vigorous &
     spirited attack must be attended with success. The
     Troops shall have the effects of the Governor,
     Garrison, & of such as have been active in misleading
     the Inhabitants & distressing the friends of liberty,
     equally divided among them, except the 100th share out
     of the whole, which shall be at the disposal of the
     General to be given to such soldiers as distinguished
     themselves by their activity & bravery, to be sold at
     public auction: the whole to be conducted as soon as
     the City is in our hands and the inhabitants disarmed.


It was a week after these orders had been written before the first
positive news of the threatened assault was brought into town by an
escaped British prisoner who, strangely enough, bore the name of
Wolfe. Wolfe's escape naturally caused a postponement of Montgomery's
design and a further council of war. Unlike most councils of war this
one was full of fight. Three feints were to be made at different
points while the real attack was to be driven home at Cape Diamond.
But just after this decision had been reached two rebel Montrealers
came down and, in another debate, carried the day for another plan.
These men, Antell and Price, were really responsible for the final
plan, which, like its predecessor, did not meet with Montgomery's
approval. Montgomery wanted to make a breach before trying the walls.
But he was no more than the chairman of a committee; and this
egregious committee first decided to storm the unbroken walls and then
changed to an attack on the Lower Town only. Antell was Montgomery's
engineer. Price was a red-hot agitator. Both were better at politics
than soldiering. Their argument was that if the Lower Town could be
taken the Quebec militia would force Carleton to surrender in order to
save the warehouses, shipping, and other valuable property along the
waterfront, and that even if Carleton held out in debate he would soon
be brought to his knees by the Americans, who would march through the
gates, which were to be opened by the 'patriots' inside.

Another week passed; and Montgomery had not eaten his Christmas dinner
either in Quebec or in the other place. But both sides knew the
crisis must be fast approaching; for the New Yorkers had sworn that
they would not stay a minute later than the end of the year, when
their term of enlistment was up. Thus every day that passed made an
immediate assault more likely, as Montgomery had to strike before his
own men left him. Yet New Year's Eve itself began without the sign of
an alarm.

Carleton had been sleeping in his clothes at the Rcollets', night
after night, so that he might be first on parade at the general
rendezvous on the Place d'Armes, which stood near the top of Mountain
Hill, the only road between the Upper and the Lower Town. Officers and
men off duty had been following his example; and every one was ready
to turn out at a moment's notice.

A north-easterly snowstorm was blowing furiously, straight up the St
Lawrence, making Quebec a partly seen blur to the nearest American
patrols and the Heights of Abraham a wild sea of whirling drifts to
the nearest British sentries. One o'clock passed, and nothing stirred.
But when two o'clock struck at Holland House Montgomery rose and began
to put the council's plan in operation. The Lower Town was to be
attacked at both ends. The Prs-de-Ville barricade was to be carried
by Montgomery and the Sault-au-Matelot by Arnold, while Livingston was
to distract Carleton's attention as much as possible by making a feint
against the landward walls, where the British still expected the real
attack. Livingston's Canadian fighting 'patriots' waded through the
drifts, against the storm, across the Plains, and took post close in
on the far side of Cape Diamond, only eighty yards from the same walls
that were to have been stormed some days before. Jerry Duggan's
parasitic Canadian 'patriots' took post in the suburb of St John and
thence round to Palace Gate. Montgomery led his own column straight to
Wolfe's Cove, whence he marched in along the narrow path between the
cliff and the St Lawrence till he reached the spot at the foot of Cape
Diamond just under the right of Livingston's line. Arnold, whose
quarters were in the valley of the St Charles, took post in St Roch,
with a mortar battery to fire against the walls and a column of men to
storm the Sault-au-Matelot. Livingston's and Jerry Duggan's whole
command numbered about four hundred men, Montgomery's five hundred,
Arnold's six. The opposing totals were fifteen hundred Americans
against seventeen hundred British. There was considerable risk of
confusion between friend and foe, as most of the Americans, especially
Arnold's men, wore captured British uniforms with nothing to
distinguish them but odds and ends of their former kits and a sort of
paper hatband bearing the inscription _Liberty or Death_.

A little after four the sentries on the walls at Cape Diamond saw
lights flashing about in front of them and were just going to call the
guard when Captain Malcolm Fraser of the Royal Emigrants came by on
his rounds and saw other lights being set out in regular order like
lamps in a street. He instantly turned out the guards and pickets. The
drums beat to arms. Every church bell in the city pealed forth its
alarm into that wild night. The bugles blew. The men off duty swarmed
on to the Place d'Armes, where Carleton, calm and intrepid as ever,
took post with the general reserve and waited. There was nothing for
him to do just yet. Everything that could have been foreseen had
already been amply provided for; and in his quiet confidence his
followers found their own.

Towards five o'clock two green rockets shot up from Montgomery's
position beside the Anse des Mres under Cape Diamond. This was the
signal for attack. Montgomery's column immediately struggled on again
along the path leading round the foot of the Cape towards the
Prs-de-Ville barricade. Livingston's serious 'patriots' on the top of
the Cape changed their dropping shots into a hot fire against the
walls; while Jerry Duggan's little mob of would-be looters shouted and
blazed away from safer cover in the suburbs of St John and St Roch.
Arnold's mortars pitched shells all over the town; while his
storming-party advanced towards the Sault-au-Matelot barricade.
Carleton, naturally anxious about the landward walls, sent some of the
British militia to reinforce the men at Cape Diamond, which, as he
knew, Montgomery considered the best point of attack. The walls lower
down did not seem to be in any danger from Jerry Duggan's 'patriots,'
whose noisy demonstration was at once understood to be nothing but an
empty feint. The walls facing the St Charles were well manned and well
gunned by the naval battalion. Those facing the St Lawrence, though
weak in themselves, were practically impregnable, as the cliffs could
not be scaled by any formed body. The Lower Town, however, was by no
means so safe, in spite of its two barricades. The general uproar was
now so great that Carleton could not distinguish the firing there from
what was going on elsewhere. But it was at these two points that the
real attack was rapidly developing.

The first decisive action took place at Prs-de-Ville. The guard there
consisted of fifty men--John Coffin, who was a merchant of Quebec,
Sergeant Hugh M'Quarters of the Royal Artillery, Captain Barnsfair, a
merchant skipper, with fifteen mates and skippers like himself, and
thirty French Canadians under Captain Chabot and Lieutenant Picard.
These fifty men had to guard a front of only as many feet. On their
right Cape Diamond rose almost sheer. On their left raged the stormy
St Lawrence. They had a tiny block-house next to the cliff and four
small guns on the barricade, all double-charged with canister and
grape. They had heard the dropping shots on the top of the Cape for
nearly an hour and had been quick to notice the change to a regular
hot fire. But they had no idea whether their own post was to be
attacked or not till they suddenly saw the head of Montgomery's column
halting within fifty paces of them. A man came forward cautiously and
looked at the barricade. The storm was in his face. The defences were
wreathed in whirling snow. And the men inside kept silent as the
grave. When he went back a little group stood for a couple of minutes
in hurried consultation. Then Montgomery waved his sword, called out
'Come on, brave boys, Quebec is ours!' and led the charge. The
defenders let the Americans get about half-way before Barnsfair
shouted 'Fire!' Then the guns and muskets volleyed together, cutting
down the whole front of the densely massed column. Montgomery, his two
staff-officers, and his ten leading men were instantly killed. Some
more farther back were wounded. And just as the fifty British fired
their second round the rest of the five hundred Americans turned and
ran in wild confusion.

A few minutes later a man whose identity was never established came
running from the Lower Town to say that Arnold's men had taken the
Sault-au-Matelot barricade. If this was true it meant that the
Prs-de-Ville fifty would be caught between two fires. Some of them
made as if to run back and reach Mountain Hill before the Americans
could cut them off. But Coffin at once threatened to kill the first
man to move; and by the time an artillery officer had arrived with
reinforcements perfect order had been restored. This officer, finding
he was not wanted there, sent back to know where else he was to go,
and received an answer telling him to hurry to the Sault-au-Matelot.
When he arrived there, less than half a mile off, he found that
desperate street fighting had been going on for over an hour.

Arnold's advance had begun at the same time as Livingston's
demonstration and Montgomery's attack. But his task was very different
and the time required much longer. There were three obstacles to be
overcome. First, his men had to run the gauntlet of the fire from the
bluejackets ranged along the Grand Battery, which faced the St Charles
at its mouth and overlooked the narrow little street of Sous-le-Cap at
a height of fifty or sixty feet. Then they had to take the small
advanced barricade, which stood a hundred yards on the St Charles side
of the actual Sault-au-Matelot or Sailor's Leap, which is the
north-easterly point of the Quebec promontory and nearly a hundred
feet high. Finally, they had to round this point and attack the
regular Sault-au-Matelot barricade. This second barricade was about a
hundred yards long, from the rock to the river. It crossed
Sault-au-Matelot Street and St Peter Street, which were the same then
as now. But it ended on a wharf half-way down the modern St James
Street, as the outer half of this street was then a natural strand
completely covered at high tide. It was much closer than the
Prs-de-Ville barricade was to Mountain Hill, at the top of which
Carleton held his general reserve ready in the Place d'Armes; and it
was fairly strong in material and armament. But it was at first
defended by only a hundred men.

The American forlorn hope, under Captain Oswald, got past most of the
Grand Battery unscathed. But by the time the main body was following
under Morgan the British bluejackets were firing down from the walls
at less than point-blank range. The driving snow, the clumps of bushes
on the cliff, and the little houses in the street below all gave the
Americans some welcome cover. But many of them were hit; while the gun
they were towing through the drifts on a sleigh stuck fast and had to
be abandoned. Captain Dearborn, the future commander-in-chief of the
American army in the War of 1812, noted in his diary that he 'met the
wounded men very thick' as he was bringing up the rear. When the
forlorn hope reached the advanced barricade Arnold halted it till the
supports had come up. The loss of the gun and the worrying his main
body was receiving from the sailors along the Grand Battery spoilt his
original plan of smashing in the barricade by shell fire while Morgan
circled round its outer flank on the ice of the tidal flats and took
it in rear. So he decided on a frontal attack. When he thought he had
a fair chance he stepped to the front and shouted, 'Now, boys, all
together, rush!' But before he could climb the barricade he was shot
through the leg. For some time he propped himself up against a house
and, leaning on his rifle, continued encouraging his men, who were
soon firing through the port-holes as well as over the top. But
presently growing faint from loss of blood he had to be carried off
the field to the General Hospital on the banks of the St Charles.

The men now called out for a lead from Morgan, who climbed a ladder,
leaped the top, and fell under a gun inside. In another minute the
whole forlorn hope had followed him, while the main body came close
behind. The guard, not strong in numbers and weak in being composed
of young militiamen, gave way but kept on firing. 'Down with your arms
if you want quarter!' yelled Morgan, whose men were in overwhelming
strength; and the guard surrendered. A little way beyond, just under
the bluff of the Sault-au-Matelot, the British supports, many of whom
were Seminary students, also surrendered to Morgan, who at once
pressed on, round the corner of the Sault-au-Matelot, and halted in
sight of the second or regular barricade. What was to be done now?
Where was Montgomery? How strong was the barricade; and had it been
reinforced? It could not be turned because the cliff rose sheer on one
flank while the icy St Lawrence lashed the other. Had Morgan known
that there were only a hundred men behind it when he attacked its
advanced barricade he might have pressed on at all costs and carried
it by assault. But it looked strong, there were guns on its platforms,
and it ran across two streets. His hurried council of war over-ruled
him, as Montgomery's council had over-ruled the original plan of
storming the walls; and so his men began a desultory fight in the
streets and from the houses.

This was fatal to American success. The original British hundred were
rapidly reinforced. The artillery officer who had found that he was
not needed at the Prs-de-Ville after Montgomery's defeat, and who had
hurried across the intervening half-mile, now occupied the corner
houses, enlarged the embrasures, and trained his guns on the houses
occupied by the enemy. Detachments of Fusiliers and Royal Emigrants
also arrived, as did the thirty-five masters and mates of merchant
vessels who were not on guard with Barnsfair at the Prs-de-Ville.
Thus, what with soldiers, sailors, and militiamen of both races, the
main Sault-au-Matelot barricade was made secure against being rushed
like the outer one. But there was plenty of fighting, with some
confusion at close quarters caused by the British uniforms which both
sides were wearing. A Herculean sailor seized the first ladder the
Americans set against the barricade, hauled it up, and set it against
the window of a house out of the far end of which the enemy were
firing. Major Nairne and Lieutenant Dambourges of the Royal Emigrants
at once climbed in at the head of a storming-party and wild work
followed with the bayonet. All the Americans inside were either killed
or captured. Meanwhile a vigorous British nine-pounder had been
turned on another house they occupied. This house was likewise
battered in, so that its surviving occupants had to run into the
street, where they were well plied with musketry by the regulars and
militiamen. The chance for a sortie then seeming favourable,
Lieutenant Anderson of the Navy headed his thirty-five merchant mates
and skippers in a rush along Sault-au-Matelot Street. But his effort
was premature. Morgan shot him dead, and Morgan's Virginians drove the
seamen back inside the barricade.

Carleton had of course kept in perfect touch with every phase of the
attack and defence; and now, fearing no surprise against the walls in
the growing daylight, had decided on taking Arnold's men in rear. To
do this he sent Captain Lawes of the Royal Engineers and Captain
M'Dougall of the Royal Emigrants with a hundred and twenty men out
through Palace Gate. This detachment had hardly reached the advanced
barricade before they fell in with the enemy's rearguard, which they
took by complete surprise and captured to a man. Leaving M'Dougall to
secure these prisoners before following on, Lawes pushed eagerly
forward, round the corner of the Sault-au-Matelot cliff, and, running
in among the Americans facing the main barricade, called out, 'You are
all my prisoners!' 'No, we're not; you're ours!' they answered. 'No,
no,' replied Lawes, as coolly as if on parade, 'don't mistake
yourselves, I vow to God you're mine!' 'But where are your men?' asked
the astonished Americans; and then Lawes suddenly found that he was
utterly alone! The roar of the storm and the work of securing the
prisoners on the far side of the advanced barricade had prevented the
men who should have followed him from understanding that only a few
were needed with M'Dougall. But Lawes put a bold face on it and
answered, 'O, Ho, make yourselves easy! My men are all round here and
they'll be with you in a twinkling.' He was then seized and disarmed.
Some of the Americans called out, 'Kill him! Kill him!' But a Major
Meigs protected him. The whole parley had lasted about ten minutes
when M'Dougall came running up with the missing men, released Lawes,
and made prisoners of the nearest Americans. Lawes at once stepped
forward and called on the rest to surrender. Morgan was for cutting
his way through. A few men ran round by the wharf and escaped on the
tidal flats of the St Charles. But, after a hurried consultation, the
main body, including Morgan, laid down their arms. This was decisive.
The British had won the fight.

The complete British loss in killed and wounded was wonderfully small,
only thirty, just one-tenth of the corresponding American loss, which
was large out of all proportion. Nearly half of the fifteen hundred
Americans had gone--over four hundred prisoners and about three
hundred killed and wounded. Nor were the mere numbers the most telling
point about it; for the worse half escaped--Livingston's Montreal
'patriots,' many of whom had done very little fighting, Montgomery's
time-expired New Yorkers, most of whom wanted to go home, and Jerry
Duggan's miscellaneous rabble, all of whom wanted a maximum of plunder
with a minimum of war.

The British victory was as nearly perfect as could have been desired.
It marked the turn of the tide in a desperate campaign which might
have resulted in the total loss of Canada. And it was of the greatest
significance and happiest augury because all the racial elements of
this new and vast domain had here united for the first time in defence
of that which was to be their common heritage. In Carleton's little
garrison of regulars and militia, of bluejackets, marines, and
merchant seamen, there were Frenchmen and French Canadians, there were
Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen, Welshmen, Orcadians, and Channel
Islanders, there were a few Newfoundlanders, and there were a good
many of those steadfast Royal Emigrants who may be fitly called the
fore-runners of the United Empire Loyalists. Yet, in spite of this
remarkable significance, no public memorial of Carleton has ever been
set up; and it was only in the twentieth century that the Dominion
first thought of commemorating his most pregnant victory by placing
tablets to mark the sites of the two famous barricades.

    *    *    *    *    *

As soon as things had quieted down within the walls Carleton sent out
search-parties to bring in the dead for decent burial and to see if
any of the wounded had been overlooked. James Thompson, the assistant
engineer, saw a frozen hand protruding from a snowdrift at
Prs-de-Ville. It was Montgomery's. The thirteen bodies were dug out
and Thompson was ordered to have a 'genteel coffin made for Mr
Montgomery,' who was buried in the wall just above St Louis Gate by
the Anglican chaplain. Thompson kept Montgomery's sword, which was
given to the Livingston family more than a century later.

The beleaguerment continued, in a half-hearted way, till the spring.
The Americans received various small reinforcements, which eventually
brought their total up to what it had been under Montgomery's command.
But there were no more assaults. Arnold grew dissatisfied and finally
went to Montreal; while Wooster, the new general, who arrived on the
1st of April, was himself succeeded by Thomas, an ex-apothecary, on
the 1st of May. The suburb of St Roch was burnt down after the
victory; so the American snipers were bereft of some very favourite
cover, and this, with other causes, kept the bulk of the besiegers at
an ineffective distance from the walls.

The British garrison had certain little troubles of its own; for
discipline always tends to become irksome after a great effort.
Carleton was obliged to stop the retailing of spirits for fear the
slacker men would be getting out of hand. The guards and duties were
made as easy as possible, especially for the militia. But the
'snow-shovel parade' was an imperative necessity. The winter was very
stormy, and the drifts would have frequently covered the walls and
even the guns if they had not promptly been dug out. The cold was also
unusually severe. One early morning in January an angry officer was
asking a sentry why he hadn't challenged him, when the sentry said,
'God bless your Honour! and I'm glad you're come, for I'm blind!' Then
it was found that his eyelids were frozen fast together.

News came in occasionally from the outside world. There was intense
indignation among the garrison when they learned that the American
commanders in Montreal were imprisoning every Canadian officer who
would not surrender his commission. Such an unheard-of outrage was
worthy of Walker. But others must have thought of it; for Walker was
now in Philadelphia giving all the evidence he could against Prescott
and other British officers. Bad news for the rebels was naturally
welcomed, especially anything about their growing failure to raise
troops in Canada. On hearing of Montgomery's defeat the Continental
Congress had passed a resolution, addressed to the 'Inhabitants of
Canada,' declaring that 'we will never abandon you to the unrelenting
fury of your and our enemies.' But there were no trained soldiers to
back this up; and the raw militia, though often filled with zeal and
courage, could do nothing to redress the increasingly adverse balance.
In the middle of March the Americans sent in a summons. But Carleton
refused to receive it; and the garrison put a wooden horse and a
bundle of hay on the walls with a placard bearing the inscription,
'When this horse has eaten this bunch of hay we will surrender.' Some
excellent practice made with 13-inch shells sent the Americans flying
from their new battery at Levis; and by the 17th of March one of the
several exultant British diarists, whose anonymity must have covered
an Irish name, was able to record that 'this, being St Patrick's Day,
the Governor, who is a true Hibernian, has requested the garrison to
put off keeping it till the 17th of May, when he promises, they shall
be enabled to do it properly, and with the usual solemnities.'

A fortnight later a plot concerted between the American prisoners and
their friends outside was discovered just in time. With tools supplied
by traitors they were to work their way out of their quarters,
overpower the guard at the nearest gate, set fire to the nearest
houses in three different streets, turn the nearest guns inwards on
the town, and shout 'Liberty for ever!' as an additional signal to the
storming-party that was to be waiting to confirm their success.
Carleton seized the chance of turning this scheme against the enemy.
Three safe bonfires were set ablaze. The marked guns were turned
inwards and fired at the town with blank charges. And the preconcerted
shout was raised with a will. But the besiegers never stirred. After
this the Old-Countrymen among the prisoners, who had taken the oath
and enlisted in the garrison, were disarmed and confined, while the
rest were more strictly watched.

Two brave attempts were made by French Canadians to reach Quebec with
reinforcements, one headed by a seigneur, the other by a parish
priest. Carleton had sent word to M. de Beaujeu, seigneur of Crane
Island, forty miles below Quebec, asking him to see if he could cut
off the American detachment on the Levis shore. De Beaujeu raised
three hundred and fifty men. But Arnold sent over reinforcements. A
habitant betrayed his fellow-countrymen's advance-guard. A dozen
French Canadians were then killed or wounded while forty were taken
prisoners; whereupon the rest dispersed to their homes. The other
attempt was made by Father Bailly, whose little force of about fifty
men was also betrayed. Entrapped in a country-house these men fought
bravely till nearly half their number had been killed or wounded and
the valiant priest had been mortally hit. They then surrendered to a
much stronger force which had lost more men than they.

This was on the 6th of April, just before Arnold was leaving in
disgust. Wooster made an effort to use his new artillery to advantage
by converging the fire of three batteries, one close in on the Heights
of Abraham, another from across the mouth of the St Charles, and the
third from Levis. But the combination failed: the batteries were too
light for the work and overmatched by the guns on the walls, the
practice was bad, and the effect was nil. On the 3rd of May the new
general, Thomas, an enterprising man, tried a fireship, which was
meant to destroy all the shipping in the Cul de Sac. It came on, under
full sail, in a very threatening manner. But the crew lost their nerve
at the critical moment, took to the boats too soon, and forgot to lash
the helm. The vessel immediately flew up into the wind and, as the
tidal stream was already changing, began to drift away from the Cul de
Sac just when she burst into flame. The result, as described by an
enthusiastic British diarist, was that 'she affoard'd a very pritty
prospect while she was floating down the River, every now & then
sending up Sky rackets, firing of Cannon or bursting of Shells, & so
continued till She disappear'd in the Channell.'

Three days later, on the 6th of May, when the beleaguerment had lasted
precisely five months, the sound of distant gunfire came faintly up
the St Lawrence with the first breath of the dawn wind from the east.
The sentries listened to make sure; then called the sergeants of the
guards, who sent word to the officers on duty, who, in their turn,
sent word to Carleton. By this time there could be no mistake. The
breeze was freshening; the sound was gradually nearing Quebec; and
there could hardly be room for doubting that it came from the vanguard
of the British fleet. The drums beat to arms, the church bells rang,
the news flew round to every household in Quebec; and before the tops
of the Surprise frigate were seen over the Point of Levy every
battery was fully manned, every battalion was standing ready on the
Grand Parade, and every non-combatant man, woman, and child was lining
the seaward wall. The regulation shot was fired across her bows as she
neared the city; whereupon she fired three guns to leeward, hoisted
the private signal, and showed the Union Jack. Then, at last, a cheer
went up that told both friend and foe of British victory and American
defeat. By a strange coincidence the parole for this triumphal day was
St George, while the parole appointed for the victorious New Year's
Eve had been St Denis; so that the patron saints of France and England
happen to be associated with the two great days on which the
stronghold of Canada was saved by land and sea.

The same tide brought in two other men-of-war. Some soldiers of the
29th, who were on board the _Surprise_, were immediately landed,
together with the marines from all three vessels. Carleton called for
volunteers from the militia to attack the Americans at once; and
nearly every man, both of the French- and of the English-speaking
corps, stepped forward. There was joy in every heart that the day for
striking back had come at last. The columns marched gaily through
the gates and deployed into line at the double on the Heights outside.
The Americans fired a few hurried shots and then ran for dear life,
leaving their dinners cooking, and, in some cases, even their arms
behind them. The Plains were covered with flying enemies and strewn
with every sort of impediment to flight, from a cannon to a loaf of
bread. Quebec had been saved by British sea-power; and, with it, the
whole vast dominion of which it was the key.

[Illustration: BENEDICT ARNOLD
From an engraving in the John Ross Robertson Collection,
Toronto Public Library]




CHAPTER VI

DELIVERANCE

1776


The Continental Congress had always been anxious to have delegates
from the Fourteenth Colony. But as these never came the Congress
finally decided to send a special commission to examine the whole
civil and military state of Canada and see what could be done. The
news of Montgomery's death and defeat was a very unwelcome surprise.
But reinforcements were being sent; the Canadians could surely be
persuaded; and a Congressional commission must be able to set things
right. This commission was a very strong one. Benjamin Franklin was
the chairman. Samuel Chase of Maryland and Charles Carroll of
Carrollton were the other members. Carroll's brother, the future
archbishop of Baltimore, accompanied them as a sort of ecclesiastical
diplomatist. Franklin's prestige and the fact that he was to set up a
'free' printing-press in Montreal were to work wonders with the
educated classes at once and with the uneducated masses later on.
Chase would appeal to all the reasonable 'moderates.' Carroll, a great
landlord and the nearest approach yet made to an American millionaire,
was expected to charm the Canadian noblesse; while the fact that he
and his exceedingly diplomatic brother were devout Roman Catholics was
thought to be by itself a powerful argument with the clergy.

When they reached St Johns towards the end of April the commissioners
sent on a courier to announce their arrival and prepare for their
proper reception in Montreal. But the ferryman at Laprairie positively
refused to accept Continental paper money at any price; and it was
only when a 'Friend of Liberty' gave him a dollar in silver that he
consented to cross the courier over the St Lawrence. The same hitch
occurred in Montreal, where the same Friend of Liberty had to pay in
silver before the cab-drivers consented to accept a fare either from
him or from the commissioners. Even the name of Carroll of Carrollton
was conjured with in vain. The French Canadians remembered Bigot's bad
French paper. Their worst suspicions were being confirmed about the
equally bad American paper. So they demanded nothing but hard
cash--_argent dur_. However, the first great obstacle had been
successfully overcome; and so, on the strength of five borrowed silver
dollars, the accredited commissioners of the Continental Congress of
the Thirteen Colonies made their state entry into what they still
hoped to call the Fourteenth Colony. But silver dollars were scarce;
and on the 1st of May the crestfallen commissioners had to send the
Congress a financial report which may best be summed up in a pithy
phrase which soon became proverbial--'Not worth a Continental.'

On the 10th of May they heard the bad news from Quebec and increased
the panic among their Montreal sympathizers by hastily leaving the
city lest they should be cut off by a British man-of-war. Franklin
foresaw the end and left for Philadelphia accompanied by the Reverend
John Carroll, whose twelve days of disheartening experience with the
leading French-Canadian clergy had convinced him that they were
impervious to any arguments or blandishments emanating from the
Continental Congress. It was a sad disillusionment for the
commissioners, who had expected to be settling the affairs of a
fourteenth colony instead of being obliged to leave the city from
which they were to have enlightened the people with a free press. In
their first angry ignorance they laid the whole blame on their
unfortunate army for its 'disgraceful flight' from Quebec. A week
later, when Chase and Charles Carroll ought to have known better, they
were still assuring the Congress that this 'shameful retreat' was 'the
principal cause of all the disorders' in the army; and even after the
whole story ought to have been understood neither they nor the
Congress gave their army its proper due. But, as a matter of fact, the
American position had become untenable the moment the British fleet
began to threaten the American line of communication with Montreal.
For the rest, the American volunteers, all things considered, had done
very well indeed. Arnold's march was a truly magnificent feat.
Morgan's men had fought with great courage at the Sault-au-Matelot.
And though Montgomery's assault might well have been better planned
and executed, we must remember that the good plan, which had been
rejected, was the military one, while the bad plan, which had been
adopted, was concocted by mere politicians. Nor were 'all the
disorders' so severely condemned by the commissioners due to the army
alone. Far from it, indeed. The root of 'all the disorders' lay in the
fact that a makeshift government was obliged to use makeshift levies
for an invasion which required a regular army supported by a fleet.

On the 19th of May another disaster happened, this time above
Montreal. The Congress had not felt strong enough to attack the
western posts. So Captain Forster of the 8th Foot, finding that he was
free to go elsewhere, had come down from Oswegatchie (the modern
Ogdensburg) with a hundred whites and two hundred Indians and made
prisoners of four hundred and thirty Americans at the Cedars, about
thirty miles up the St Lawrence from Montreal. Forster was a very good
officer. Butterfield, the American commander, was a very bad one. And
that made all the difference. After two days of feeble and misdirected
defence Butterfield surrendered three hundred and fifty men. The other
eighty were reinforcements who walked into the trap next day. Forster
now had four American prisoners for every white soldier of his own;
while Arnold was near by, having come up from Sorel to Lachine with a
small but determined force. So Forster, carefully pointing out to his
prisoners their danger if the Indians should be reinforced and run
wild, offered them their freedom on condition that they should be
regarded as being exchanged for an equal number of British prisoners
in American hands. This was agreed to and never made a matter of
dispute afterwards. But the second article Butterfield accepted was a
stipulation that, while the released British were to be free to fight
again, the released Americans were not; and it was over this point
that a bitter controversy raged. The British authorities maintained
that all the terms were binding because they had been accepted by an
officer commissioned by the Congress. The Congress maintained that the
disputed article was obtained by an unfair threat of an Indian
massacre and that it was so one-sided as to be good for nothing but
repudiation.

'The Affair at the Cedars' thus became a sorely vexed question. In
itself it would have died out among later and more important issues if
it had not been used as a torch to fire American public opinion at a
time when the Congress was particularly anxious to make the Thirteen
Colonies as anti-British as possible. Most of Forster's men were
Indians. He had reminded Butterfield how dangerous an increasing
number of Indians might become. Butterfield was naturally anxious to
prove that he had yielded only to overwhelming odds and horrifying
risks. Americans in general were ready to believe anything bad about
the Indians and the British. The temptation and the opportunity seemed
made for each other. And so a quite imaginary Indian massacre
conveniently appeared in the American news of the day and helped to
form the kind of public opinion which was ardently desired by the
party of revolt.

The British evidence in this and many another embittering dispute
about the Indians need not be cited, since the following items of
American evidence do ample justice to both sides. In the spring of
1775 the Massachusetts Provincial Congress sent Samuel Kirkland to
exhort the Iroquois 'to whet their hatchet and be prepared to defend
our liberties and lives'; while Ethan Allen asked the Indians round
Vermont to treat him 'like a brother and ambush the regulars.' In 1776
the Continental Congress secretly resolved 'that it is highly
expedient to engage the Indians in the service of the United
Colonies.' This was before the members knew about the Affair at the
Cedars. A few days later Washington was secretly authorized to raise
two thousand Indians; while agents were secretly sent 'to engage the
Six Nations in our Interest, on the best terms that can be procured.'
Within three weeks of this secret arrangement the Declaration of
Independence publicly accused the king of trying 'to bring on the
inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages.' Four days
after this public accusation the Congress gave orders for raising
Indians along 'the Penobscot, the St John, and in Nova Scotia'; and an
entry to that effect was made in its Secret Journal. Yet, before the
month was out, the same Congress publicly appealed to 'The People of
Ireland' in the following words: 'The wild and barbarous savages of
the wilderness have been solicited by gifts to take up the hatchet
against us, and instigated to deluge our settlements with the blood of
defenceless women and children.'

The American defeats at Quebec and at the Cedars completely changed
the position of the two remaining commissioners. They had expected to
control a victorious advance. They found themselves the highest
authority present with a disastrous retreat. Thereupon they made
blunder after blunder. Public interest and parliamentary control are
the very life of armies and navies in every country which enjoys the
blessings of self-government. But civilian interference is death. Yet
Chase and Carroll practically abolished rank in the disintegrating
army by becoming an open court of appeal to every junior with a
grievance or a plan. There never was an occasion on which military
rule was more essential in military matters. Yet, though they candidly
admitted that they had 'neither abilities nor inclination' to command,
these wretched misrulers tried to do their duty both to the Congress
and the army by turning the camp into a sort of town meeting where the
best orders had no chance whatever against the loudest 'sentiments.'
They had themselves found the root of all evil in the retreat from
Quebec. Their army, like every impartial critic, found it in 'the
Commissioners and the smallpox'--with the commissioners easily first.
The smallpox had been bad enough at Quebec. It became far worse at
Sorel. There were few doctors, fewer medicines, and not a single
hospital. The reinforcements melted away with the army they were
meant to strengthen. Famine threatened both, even in May. Finally the
commissioners left for home at the end of the month. But even their
departure could no longer make the army's burden light enough to bear.

Thomas, the ex-apothecary, who did his best to stem the adverse tide
of trouble, caught the smallpox, became blind, and died at the
beginning of June. Sullivan, the fourth commander in less than half a
year, having determined that one more effort should be made, arrived
at Sorel with new battalions after innumerable difficulties by the
way. He was led to believe that Carleton's reinforcements had come
from Nova Scotia, not from England; and this encouraged him to push on
farther. He was naturally of a very sanguine temper; and Thompson, his
second-in-command, heartily approved of the dash. The new troops
cheered up and thought of taking Quebec itself. But, after getting
misled by their guide, floundering about in bottomless bogs, and
losing a great deal of very precious time, they found Three Rivers
defended by entrenchments, superior numbers, and the vanguard of the
British fleet. Nevertheless they attacked bravely on the 8th of June.
But, taken in front and flank by well-drilled regulars and
well-handled men-of-war, they presently broke and fled. Every avenue
of escape was closed as they wandered about the woods and bogs. But
Carleton, who came up from Quebec after the battle was all over,
purposely opened the way to Sorel. He had done his best to win the
hearts of his prisoners at Quebec and had succeeded so well that when
they returned to Crown Point they were kept away from the rest of the
American army lest their account of his kindness should affect its
anti-British zeal. Now that he was in overwhelming force he thought he
saw an even better chance of earning gratitude from rebels and winning
converts to the loyal side by a still greater act of clemency.

The battle of Three Rivers was the last action fought on Canadian
soil. The American army retreated to Sorel and up the Richelieu to St
Johns, where it was joined by Arnold, who had just evacuated Montreal.
Most of the Friends of Liberty in Canada fled either with or before
their beaten forces. So, like the ebbing of a whole river system, the
main and tributary streams of fugitives drew south towards Lake
Champlain. The neutral French Canadians turned against them at once;
though not to the extent of making an actual attack. The habitant
cared nothing for the incomprehensible constitutionalities over which
different kinds of British foreigners were fighting their exasperating
civil war. But he did know what the king's big fleet and army meant.
He did begin to feel that his own ways of life were safer with the
loyal than with the rebel side. And he quite understood that he had
been forced to give a good deal for nothing ever since the American
commissioners had authorized their famishing army to commandeer his
supplies and pay him with their worthless 'Continentals.'

From St Johns the worn-out Americans crawled homewards in stray,
exhausted parties, dropping fast by the way as they went. 'I did not
look into a hut or a tent,' wrote a horrified observer, 'in which I
did not find a dead or dying man.' Disorganization became so complete
that no exact returns were ever made up. But it is known that over ten
thousand armed men crossed into Canada from first to last and that not
far short of half this total either found their death beyond the line
or brought it back with them to Lake Champlain.

It was on what long afterwards became Dominion Day--the 1st of
July--that the ruined American forces reassembled at Crown Point,
having abandoned all hope of making Canada the Fourteenth Colony.
Three days later the disappointed Thirteen issued the Declaration of
Independence which virtually proclaimed that Canadians and Americans
should thenceforth live a separate life.




CHAPTER VII

THE COUNTERSTROKE

1776-1778


Six thousand British troops, commanded by Burgoyne, and four thousand
Germans, commanded by Baron Riedesel, had arrived at Quebec before the
battle of Three Rivers. Quebec itself had then been left to the care
of a German garrison under a German commandant, 'that excellent man,
Colonel Baum,' while the great bulk of the army had marched up the St
Lawrence, as we have seen already. Such a force as this new one of
Carleton's was expected to dismay the rebel colonies. And so, to a
great extent, it did. With a much larger force in the colonies
themselves the king was confidently expected to master his unruly
subjects, no matter how much they proclaimed their independence. The
Loyalists were encouraged. The trimmers prepared to join them. Only
those steadfast Americans who held their cause dearer than life itself
were still determined to venture all. But they formed the one party
that really knew its own mind. This gave them a great advantage over
the king's party, which, hampered at every turn by the opposition in
the mother country, was never quite sure whether it ought to strike
hard or gently in America.

On one point, however, everybody was agreed. The command of Lake
Champlain was essential to whichever side would hold its own. The
American forces at Crown Point might be too weak for the time being.
But Arnold knew that even ten thousand British soldiers could not
overrun the land without a naval force to help them. So he got
together a flotilla which had everything its own way during the time
that Carleton was laboriously building a rival flotilla on the
Richelieu with a very scanty supply of ship-wrights and materials.
Arnold, moreover, could devote his whole attention to the work,
makeshift as it had to be; while Carleton was obliged to keep moving
about the province in an effort to bring it into some sort of order
after the late invasion. Throughout the summer the British army held
the line of the Richelieu all the way south as far as Isle-aux-Noix,
very near the lake and the line. But Carleton's flotilla could not
set sail from St Johns till October 5, by which time the main body of
his army was concentrated round Pointe-au-Fer, at the northern end of
the lake, ninety miles north of the American camp at Crown Point.

It was a curious situation for a civil and military governor to be
hoisting his flag as a naval commander-in-chief, however small the
fleet might be. But it is commonly ignored that, down to the present
day, the governor-general of Canada is appointed 'Vice-Admiral of the
Same' in his commissions from the Crown. Carleton of course carried
expert naval officers with him and had enough professional seamen to
work the vessels and lay the guns. But, though Captain Pringle
manoeuvred the flotilla and Lieutenant Dacre handled the flagship
_Carleton_, the actual command remained in Carleton's own hands. The
capital ship (and the only real square-rigged 'ship') of this
Lilliputian fleet was Pringle's _Inflexible_, which had been taken up
the Richelieu in sections and hauled past the portages with immense
labour before reaching St Johns, whence there is a clear run upstream
to Lake Champlain. The _Inflexible_ carried thirty guns, mostly
12-pounders, and was an overmatch for quite the half of Arnold's
decidedly weaker flotilla. The _Lady Maria_ was a sort of sister ship
to the _Carleton_. The little armada was completed by a 'gondola' with
six 9-pounders, by twenty gunboats and four longboats, each carrying a
single piece, and by many small craft used as transports.

On the 11th of October Carleton's whole naval force was sailing south
when one of Arnold's vessels was seen making for Valcour Island, a few
miles still farther south on the same, or western, side of Lake
Champlain. Presently the Yankee ran ashore on the southern end of the
island, where she was immediately attacked by some British small craft
while the _Inflexible_ sailed on. Then, to the intense disgust of the
_Inflexible's_ crew, Arnold's complete flotilla was suddenly
discovered drawn up in a masterly position between the mainland and
the island. It was too late for the _Inflexible_ to beat back now. But
the rest of Carleton's flotilla turned in to the attack. Arnold's
flanks rested on the island and the mainland. His rear could be
approached only by beating back against a bad wind all the way round
the outside of Valcour Island; and, even if this manoeuvre could have
been performed, the British attack on his rear from the north could
have been made only in a piecemeal way, because the channel was there
at its narrowest, with a bad obstruction in the middle. So, for every
reason, a frontal attack from the south was the one way of closing
with him. The fight was furious while it lasted and seemingly decisive
when it ended. Arnold's best vessel, the _Royal Savage_, which he had
taken at St Johns the year before, was driven ashore and captured. The
others were so severely mauled that when the victorious British
anchored their superior force in line across Arnold's front there
seemed to be no chance for him to escape the following day. But that
night he performed an even more daring and wonderful feat than
Bouchette had performed the year before when paddling Carleton through
the American lines among the islands opposite Sorel. Using muffled
sweeps, with consummate skill he slipped all his remaining vessels
between the mainland and the nearest British gunboat, and was well on
his way to Crown Point before his escape had been discovered. Next day
Carleton chased south. The day after he destroyed the whole of the
enemy's miniature sea-power as a fighting force. But the only three
serviceable vessels got away; while Arnold burnt everything else
likely to fall into British hands. So Carleton had no more than his
own reduced flotilla to depend on when he occupied Crown Point.

A vexed question, destined to form part of a momentous issue, now
arose. Should Ticonderoga be attacked at once or not? It commanded the
only feasible line of march from Montreal to New York; and no force
from Canada could therefore attack the new republic effectively
without taking it first. But the season was late. The fort was strong,
well gunned, and well manned. Carleton's reconnaissance convinced him
that he could have little chance of reducing it quickly, if at all,
with the means at hand, especially as the Americans had supplies close
by at Lake George, while he was now a hundred miles south of his base.
A winter siege was impossible. Sufficient supplies could never be
brought through the dense, snow-encumbered bush, all the way from
Canada, even if the long and harassing line of communications had not
been everywhere open to American attack. Moreover, Carleton's army was
in no way prepared for a midwinter campaign, even if it could have
been supplied with food and warlike stores. So he very sensibly
turned his back on Lake Champlain until the following year.

    *    *    *    *    *

That was the gayest winter Quebec had seen since Montcalm's first
season, twenty years before. Carleton had been knighted for his
services and was naturally supposed to be the chosen leader for the
next campaign. The ten thousand troops gave confidence to the
loyalists and promised success for the coming campaign. The clergy
were getting their disillusioned parishioners back to the fold beneath
the Union Jack; while _Jean Ba'tis'e_ himself was fain to admit that
his own ways of life and the money he got for his goods were very much
safer with _les Angla's_ than with the revolutionists, whom he called
les _Bastonna's_ because most trade between Quebec and the Thirteen
Colonies was carried on by vessels hailing from the port of Boston.
The seigneurs were delighted. They still hoped for commissions as
regulars, which too few of them ever received; and they were charmed
with the little viceregal court over which Lady Maria Carleton,
despite her youthful two-and-twenty summers, presided with a dignity
inherited from the premier ducal family of England and brought to the
acme of conventional perfection by her intimate experience of
Versailles. On New Year's Eve Carleton gave a public fte, a state
dinner, and a ball to celebrate the anniversary of the British victory
over Montgomery and Arnold. The bishop held a special thanksgiving and
made all notorious renegades do open penance. Nothing seemed wanting
to bring the New Year in under the happiest auspices since British
rule began.

But, quite unknown to Carleton, mischief was brewing in the Colonial
Office of that unhappy government which did so many stupid things and
got the credit for so many more. In 1775 the well-meaning Earl of
Dartmouth was superseded by Lord George Germain, who continued the
mismanagement of colonial affairs for seven disastrous years. Few
characters have abused civil and military positions more than the man
who first, as a British general, disgraced the noble name of Sackville
on the battlefield of Minden in 1759, and then, as a cabinet minister,
disgraced throughout America the plebeian one of Germain, which he
took in 1770 with a suitable legacy attached to it. His crime at
Minden was set down by the thoughtless public to sheer cowardice. But
Sackville was no coward. He had borne himself with conspicuous
gallantry at Fontenoy. He was admired, before Minden, by two very
brave soldiers, Wolfe and the Duke of Cumberland. And he afterwards
fought a famous duel with as much sang-froid as any one would care to
see. His real crime at Minden was admirably exposed by the
court-martial which found him 'guilty of having disobeyed the orders
of Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, whom he was by his commission bound
to obey as commander-in-chief, according to the rules of war.' This
court also found him 'unfit to serve his Majesty in any military
capacity whatever'; and George II directed that the following
'remarks' should be added when the sentence was read out on parade to
every regiment in the service: 'It is his Majesty's pleasure that the
above sentence be given out in public orders, not only in Britain, but
in America, and in every quarter of the globe where British troops
happen to be, so that all officers, being convinced that neither high
birth nor great employments can shelter offences of such a nature, and
seeing they are subject to censures worse than death to a man who has
any sense of honour, may avoid the fatal consequences arising from
disobedience of orders.'

This seemed to mark the end of Sackville's sinister career. But when
George II died and George III began to reign, with a very different
set of men to help him, the bad general reappeared as an equally bad
politician. Haughty, cantankerous, and self-opinionated to the last
degree, Germain, who had many perverse abilities fitting him for the
meaner side of party politics, was appointed to the post for which he
was least qualified just when Canada and the Thirteen Colonies most
needed a master mind. Worse still, he cherished a contemptible grudge
against Carleton for having refused to turn out a good officer and put
in a bad one who happened to be a pampered favourite. At first,
however, Carleton was allowed to do his best. But in the summer of
1776 Germain restricted Carleton's command to Canada and put Burgoyne,
a junior officer, in command of the army destined to make the
counterstroke. The ship bearing this malicious order had to put back;
so it was not till the middle of May 1777 that Carleton was
disillusioned by its arrival as well as by a second and still more
exasperating dispatch accusing him of neglect of duty for not having
taken Ticonderoga in November and thus prevented Washington from
capturing the Hessians at Trenton. The physical impossibility of a
winter siege, the three hundred miles of hostile country between
Trenton and Ticonderoga, and the fact that the other leading British
general, Howe, had thirty thousand troops in the Colonies, while
Carleton had only ten thousand with which to hold Canada that year and
act as ordered next year, all went for nothing when Germain found a
chance to give a good stab in the back.

On May 20 Carleton wrote a pungent reply, pointing out the utter
impossibility of following up his victory on Lake Champlain by
carrying out Germain's arm-chair plan of operations in the middle of
winter. 'I regard it as a particular blessing that your Lordship's
dispatch did not arrive in due time.' As for the disaster at Trenton,
he 'begs to inform his Lordship' that if Howe's thirty thousand men
had been properly used the Hessians could never have been taken,
'though all the rebels from Ticonderoga had reinforced Mr Washington's
army.' Moreover, 'I never could imagine why, if troops so far south
[as Howe's] found it necessary to go into winter quarters, your
Lordship could possibly expect troops so far north to continue their
operations.' A week later Carleton wrote again and sent in his
resignation. 'Finding that I can no longer be of use, under your
Lordship's administration . . . I flatter myself I shall obtain the
king's permission to return home this fall. . . . I shall embark with
great satisfaction, still entertaining the ardent wish that, after my
departure, the dignity of the Crown in this unfortunate Province may
not appear beneath your Lordship's concern.'

Burgoyne had spent the winter in London and had arrived at Quebec
about the same time as Germain's dispatches. He had loyally
represented Carleton's plans at headquarters. But he did not know
America and he was not great enough to see the weak points in the plan
which Germain proposed to carry out with wholly inadequate means.

There was nothing wrong with the actual idea of this plan. Washington,
Carleton, and every other leading man on either side saw perfectly
well that the British army ought to cut the rebels in two by holding
the direct line from Montreal to New York throughout the coming
campaign of 1777. Given the irresistible British command of the sea,
fifty thousand troops were enough. The general idea was that half of
these should hold the four-hundred-mile line of the Richelieu, Lake
Champlain, and the Hudson, while the other half seized strategic
points elsewhere and still further divided the American forces. But
the troops employed were ten thousand short of the proper number. Many
of them were foreign mercenaries. And the generals were not the men to
smash the enemy at all costs. They were ready to do their duty. But
their affinities were rather with the opposition, which was against
the war, than with the government, which was for it. Howe was a strong
Whig. Burgoyne became a follower of Fox. Clinton had many Whig
connections. Cornwallis voted against colonial taxation. To make
matters worse, the government itself wavered between out-and-out war
and some sort of compromise both with its political opponents at home
and its armed opponents in America.

Under these circumstances Carleton was in favour of a modified plan.
Ticonderoga had been abandoned by the Americans and occupied by the
British as Burgoyne marched south. Carleton's idea was to use it as a
base of operations against New England, while Howe's main body struck
at the main body of the rebels and broke them up as much as possible.
Germain, however, was all for the original plan. So Burgoyne set off
for the Hudson, expecting to get into touch with Howe at Albany. But
Germain, in his haste to leave town for a holiday, forgot to sign
Howe's orders at the proper time; and afterwards forgot them
altogether. So Howe, pro-American in politics and temporizer in the
field, manoeuvred round his own headquarters at New York until October,
when he sailed south to Philadelphia. Receiving no orders from
Germain, and having no initiative of his own, he had made no attempt
to hold the line of the Hudson all the way north to Albany, where he
could have met Burgoyne and completed the union of the forces which
would have cut the Colonies in two. Meanwhile Burgoyne, ignorant of
Germain's neglect and Howe's futilities, was struggling to his fate at
Saratoga, north of Albany. He had been receiving constant aid from
Carleton's scanty resources, though Carleton knew full well that the
sending of any aid beyond the limits of the province exposed him to
personal ruin in case of a reverse in Canada. But it was all in vain;
and, on the 17th of October, Burgoyne--much more sinned against than
sinning--laid down his arms. The British garrison immediately
evacuated Ticonderoga and retired to St Johns, thus making Carleton's
position fairly safe in Canada. But Germain, only too glad to oust
him, had now notified him that Haldimand, the new governor, was on the
point of sailing for Quebec. Haldimand, to his great credit, had asked
to have his own appointment cancelled when he heard of Germain's
shameful attitude towards Carleton, and had only consented to go after
being satisfied that Carleton really wished to come home. The
exchange, however, was not to take place that year. Contrary winds
blew Haldimand back; and so Canada had to remain under the best of all
possible governors in spite of Germain.

Germain had provoked Carleton past endurance both by his public
blunders and by his private malice. Even in 1776 there was hate on one
side, contempt on the other. When Germain had blamed Carleton for not
carrying out the idiotic winter siege of Ticonderoga, Carleton, in his
official reply, 'could only suppose' that His Lordship had acted 'in
other places with such great wisdom that, without our assistance, the
rebels must immediately be compelled to lay down their arms and
implore the King's mercy.' After that Germain had murder in his heart
to the bitter end of Carleton's rule. Carleton had frequently reported
the critical state of affairs in Canada. 'There is nothing to fear
from the Canadians so long as things are in a state of prosperity;
nothing to hope from them when in distress. There are some of them who
are guided by sentiments of honour. The multitude is influenced by
hope of gain or fear of punishment.' The recent invasion had proved
this up to the hilt. Then a welcome reaction began. The defeat of the
invaders, the arrival of Burgoyne's army, and the efforts of the
seigneurs and the clergy had considerably brightened the prospects of
the British cause in Canada. The partial mobilization of the militia
which followed Burgoyne's surrender was not, indeed, a great success.
But it was far better than the fiasco of two years before. There was
also a corresponding improvement in civil life. The judges whom
Carleton had been obliged to appoint in haste all proved at leisure
the wisdom of his choice; and there seemed to be every chance that
other nominees would be equally fit for their positions, because the
Quebec Act, which annulled every appointment made before it came into
force, opened the way for the exclusion of bad officials and the
inclusion of the good.

But the chance of perverting this excellent intention was too much for
Germain, who succeeded in foisting one worthless nominee after another
on the province just as Carleton was doing his best to heal old sores.
One of the worst cases was that of Livius, a low-down, money-grubbing
German Portuguese, who ousted the future Master of the Rolls, Sir
William Grant, a man most admirably fitted to interpret the laws of
Canada with knowledge, sympathy, and absolute impartiality. Livius as
chief justice was more than Carleton could stand in silence. This
mongrel lawyer had picked up all the Yankee vices without acquiring
any of the countervailing Yankee virtues. He was 'greedy of power,
more greedy of gain, imperious and impetuous in his temper, but
learned in the ways and eloquence of the New England provinces, and
valuing himself particularly on his knowledge of how to manage
governors.' He had been sent by Germain 'to administer justice to the
Canadians when he understands neither their laws, manners, customs,
nor language.' Other like nominees followed, 'characters regardless of
the public tranquility but zealous to pay court to a powerful
minister and--provided they can obtain advantages--unconcerned should
the means of obtaining them prove ruinous to the King's service.'
These pettifoggers so turned and twisted the law about for the sake of
screwing out the maximum of fees that Carleton pointedly refused to
appoint Livius as a member of the Legislative Council. Livius then
laid his case before the Privy Council in England. But this great
court of ultimate appeal pronounced such a damning judgment on his
gross pretensions that even Germain could not prevent his final
dismissal from all employment under the Crown.

    *    *    *    *    *

Wounded in the house of those who should have been his friends,
thwarted in every measure of his self-sacrificing rule, Carleton
served on devotedly through six weary months of 1778--the year in
which a vindictive government of Bourbon France became the first of
the several foreign enemies who made the new American republic an
accomplished fact by taking sides in a British civil war. His burden
was now far more than any man could bear. Yet he closed his answer to
Germain's parting shot with words which are as noble as his deeds:

'I have long looked out for the arrival of a successor. Happy at last
to learn his near approach, I resign the important commands with which
I have been entrusted into hands less obnoxious to your Lordship.
Thus, for the King's service, as willingly I lay them down as, for his
service, I took them up.'




CHAPTER VIII

GUARDING THE LOYALISTS

1782-1783


Burgoyne's surrender marked the turning of the tide against the
British arms. True, the three campaigns of purely civil war, begun in
1775, had reached no decisive result. True also that the Independence
declared in 1776 had no apparent chance of becoming an accomplished
fact. But 1777 was the fatal year for all that. The long political
strife in England, the gross mismanagement of colonial affairs under
Germain, and the shameful blunders that made Saratoga possible, all
combined to encourage foreign powers to take the field against the
king's incompetent and distracted ministry. France, Spain, and Holland
joined the Americans in arms; while Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia,
and all the German seaboard countries formed the Armed Neutrality of
the North. This made stupendous odds--no less than ten to one. First
of the ten came the political opposition at home, which, in regard to
the American rebellion itself, was at least equal to the most powerful
enemy abroad. Next came the four enemies in arms: the American rebels,
France, Spain, and Holland. Finally came the five armed neutrals, all
ready to use their navies on the slightest provocation.

From this it may be seen that not one-half, perhaps not a quarter, of
all the various forces that won the Revolutionary war were purely
American. Nor were the Americans and their allies together victorious
over the mother country, but only over one sorely hampered party in
it. Yet, from the nature of the case, the Americans got much more than
the lion's share of the spoils, while, even in their own eyes, they
seemed to have gained honour and glory in the same proportion. The
last real campaign was fought in 1781 and ended with the British
surrender at Yorktown. From that time on peace was in the air. The
unfortunate ministry, now on the eve of political defeat at home, were
sick of civil war and only too anxious for a chance of uniting all
parties against the foreign foes. But they had first to settle with
the Americans, who had considered themselves an independent sovereign
power for the last five years and who were determined to make the most
of England's difficulties. No darker New Year's Day had ever dawned on
any cabinet than that of 1782 on North's. In spite of his change from
repression to conciliation, and in spite of dismissing Germain to the
House of Lords with an ill-earned peerage, Lord North found his
majority dwindling away. At last, on the 20th of March, he resigned.

Meanwhile every real statesman in either party had felt that the
crisis required the master-hand of Carleton. With Germain, the
empire-wrecker, gone, Carleton would doubtless have served under any
cabinet, for no government could have done without him. But his actual
commission came through the Rockingham administration on the 4th of
April. After three quiet years of retirement at his country seat in
Hampshire he was again called upon to face a situation of extreme
difficulty. For once, with a wisdom rare enough in any age and almost
unknown in that one, the government gave him a free hand and almost
unlimited powers. The only questions over which he had no final power
were those of making treaties. He was appointed 'General and
Commander-in-chief of all His Majesty's forces within the Colonies
lying in the Atlantic Ocean, from Nova Scotia to the Floridas, and
inclusive of Newfoundland and Canada should they be attacked.' He was
also appointed commissioner for executing the terms of any treaty that
might be made; and his instructions contained two passages which bore
eloquent witness to the universal confidence reposed in him. 'It is
impossible to judge of the precise situation at so great a distance'
and 'His Majesty's affairs are so situated that further deliberations
give way to instant decision. We are satisfied that whatever
inconveniences may arise they will be compensated by the presence of a
commander-in-chief of whose discretion, conduct, and ability His
Majesty has long entertained the highest opinion.' Thus the great
justifier of British rule beyond the seas arrived in New York on the
9th of May 1782 with at least some hope of reconciling enough
Americans to turn the scale before it was too late.

For three months the prospect, though worse than he had anticipated,
did not seem utterly hopeless. It had been considerably brightened by
Rodney's great victory over the French fleet which was on its way to
attack Jamaica. But an unfortunate incident happened to be
exasperating Loyalists and revolutionists at this very time. Some
revolutionists had killed a Loyalist named Philip White, apparently
out of pure hate. Some Loyalists, under Captain Lippincott, then
seized and hanged Joshua Huddy, a captain in the Congress militia, out
of sheer revenge. A paper left pinned on Huddy's breast bore the
inscription: 'Up goes Huddy for Philip White.' Washington then
demanded that Lippincott should be delivered up; and, on Carleton's
refusal, chose a British prisoner by lot instead. The lot fell on a
young Lieutenant Asgill of the Guards, whose mother appealed to the
king and queen of France and to their powerful minister, Vergennes.
The American Congress wanted blood for blood, which would have led to
an endless vendetta. But Vergennes pointed out that Asgill, a youth of
nineteen, was as much a prisoner of the king of France as of the
Continental Congress. At this the Congress gnashed its teeth, but had
to give way.

While the Asgill affair was still running its course, and embittering
Loyalists and rebels more than ever, Carleton was suddenly informed
that the government had decided to grant complete independence. This
was more than he could stand; and he at once asked to be recalled. He
had been all for honourable reconciliation from the first. He had been
particularly kind to his American prisoners in Canada and had
purposely refrained from annihilating the American army after the
battle of Three Rivers. But he was not prepared for independence. Nor
had he been sent out with this ostensible object in view. His official
instructions were to inform the Americans that 'the most liberal
sentiments had taken root in the nation, and that the narrow policy of
monopoly was totally extinguished.' Now he was called upon to
surrender without having tried either his arms or his diplomacy. With
British sea-power beginning to reassert its age-long superiority over
all possible rivals, with practically all constitutional points of
dispute conceded to the revolutionists, and with the certain knowledge
that by no means the majority of all Americans were absolute
anti-British out-and-outers, he thought it no time to dismember the
Empire. His Intelligence Department had been busily collecting
information which seems surprising enough as we read it over to-day,
but which was based on the solid facts of that unhappy time. One
member of the Continental Congress was anxious to know what would
become of the American army if reconciliation should be effected on
the understanding that there would be no more imperial taxation or
customs duty--would it become part of the Imperial Army, or what?

But speculation on all such contingencies was suddenly cut short by
the complete change of policy at home. The idea was to end the civil
war that had divided the Empire and to concentrate on the foreign war
that at least united the people of Great Britain. No matter at what
cost this policy had now to be carried out; and Carleton was the only
man that every one would trust to do it. So, sacrificing his own
feelings and convictions, he made the best of an exceedingly bad
business. He had to safeguard the prisoners and Loyalists while
preparing to evacuate the few remaining footholds of British power in
the face of an implacable foe. At the same time he had to watch every
other point in North America and keep in touch with his excellent
naval colleague, Admiral Digby, lest his own rear might be attacked by
the three foreign enemies of England. He was even ordered off to the
West Indies in the autumn. But counter-orders fortunately arrived
before he could start. Thus, surrounded by enemies in front and rear
and on both flanks, he spent the seven months between August and the
following March.

At the end of March 1783 news arrived that the preliminary treaty of
peace had been signed. The final treaty was not signed till his
fifty-ninth birthday, the 3rd of the following September. The
signature of the preliminaries simplified the naval and military
situation. But it made the situation of the Loyalists worse than ever.
Compared with them the prisoners of war had been most highly favoured
from the first. And yet the British prisoners had little to thank the
Congress for. That they were badly fed and badly housed was not always
the fault of the Americans. But that political favourites and
underlings were allowed to prey on them was an inexcusable disgrace.
When a prisoner complained, he was told it was the fault of the
British government which would not pay for his keep! This answer, so
contrary to all the accepted usages of war, which reserve such
payments till after the conclusion of peace, was no empty gibe; for
when, some time before the preliminaries had been signed, the British
and American commissioners met to effect an exchange of prisoners,
the Americans began by claiming the immediate payment of what the
British prisoners had cost them. This of course broke up the meeting
at once. In the meantime the German prisoners in British pay were
offered their freedom at eighty dollars a head. Then farmers came
forward to buy up these prisoners at this price. But the farmers found
competitors in the recruiting sergeants, who urged the Germans, with
only too much truth, not to become 'the slaves of farmers' but to
follow 'the glorious trade of war' against their employers, the
British government. To their honour be it said, these Germans kept
faith with the British, much to the surprise of the Americans, who,
like many modern writers, could not understand that these foreign
mercenaries took a professional pride in carrying out a sworn
contract, even when it would pay them better to break it. The British
prisoners were not put up for sale in the same way. But money sent to
them had a habit of disappearing on the road--one item mentioned by
Carleton amounted to six thousand pounds.

If such was the happy lot of prisoners during the war, what was the
wretched lot of Loyalists after the treaty of peace? The words of one
of the many petitions sent in to Carleton will suggest the answer. 'If
we have to encounter this inexpressible misfortune we beg
consideration for our lives, fortunes, and property, _and not by mere
terms of treaty_.' What this means cannot be appreciated unless we
fully realize how strong the spirit of hate and greed had grown, and
why it had grown so strong.

The American Revolution had not been provoked by oppression, violence,
and massacre. The 'chains and slavery' of revolutionary orators was
only a figure of speech. The real causes were constitutional and
personal; and the actual crux of the question was one of payment for
defence. Of course there were many other causes at work. The social,
religious, and political grudges with which so many emigrants had left
the mother country had not been forgotten and were now revived.
Commercial restrictions, however well they agreed with the spirit of
the age, were galling to such keen traders. And the mere difference
between colonies and motherland had produced misunderstandings on both
sides. But the main provocative cause was Imperial taxation for local
defence. The Thirteen Colonies could not have held their own by land
or sea, much less could they have conquered their French rivals,
without the Imperial forces, which, indeed, had done by far the
greater part of the fighting. How was the cost to be shared between
the mother country and themselves? The colonies had not been asked to
pay more than their share. The point was whether they could be taxed
at all by the Imperial government when they had no representation in
the Imperial parliament. The government said Yes. The colonies and the
opposition at home said No. As the colonies would not pay of their own
accord, and as the government did not see why they should be parasites
on the armed strength of the mother country, parliament proceeded to
tax them. They then refused to pay under compulsion; and a complete
deadlock ensued.

The personal factors in this perhaps insoluble problem were still more
refractory than the constitutional. All the great questions of peace
and war and other foreign relations were settled by the mother
country, which was the only sovereign power and which alone possessed
the force to make any British rights respected. The Americans supplied
subordinate means and so became subordinate men when they and the
Imperial forces worked together. This, to use a homely phrase, made
their leaders feel out of it. Everything that breeds trouble between
militiamen and regulars, colonials and mother-countrymen, fanned the
flame of colonial resentment till the leaders were able to set their
followers on fire. It was a leaders' rebellion: there was no maddening
cruelty or even oppression such as those which have produced so many
revolutions elsewhere. It was a leaders' victory: there was no general
feeling that death or independence were the only alternatives from the
first. But as the fight went on, and Loyalists and revolutionists grew
more and more bitter towards one another, the revolutionary followers
found the same cause for hating the Loyalists as their leaders had
found for hating the government. Many of the Loyalists belonged to the
well-educated and well-to-do classes. So the envy and greed of the
revolutionary followers were added to the personal and political rage
of their leaders.

The British government had done its best for the Loyalists in the
treaty of peace and had urged Carleton, who needed no urging in such a
cause, to do his best as well. But the treaty was made with the
Congress; and the Congress had no authority over the internal affairs
of the thirteen new states, each one of which could do as it liked
with its own envied and detested Loyalists. The revolutionists wanted
some tangible spoils. The safety of peace had made the trimmers
equally 'patriotic' and equally clamorous. So the confiscation of
Loyalist property soon became the order of the day.

It was not the custom of that age to confiscate private property
simply because the owners were on the losing side, still less to
confiscate it under local instead of national authority. But need,
greed, and resentment were stronger than any scruples. Need was the
weakest, resentment the strongest of all the animating motives. The
American army was in rags and its pay greatly in arrears while the
British forces under Carleton were fed, clothed, and paid in the
regular way. But it was the passionate resentment of the
revolutionists that perverted this exasperating difference into
another 'intolerable wrong.' Washington was above such meaner
measures. But when he said the Loyalists were only fit for suicide,
and when Adams, another future president, said they ought to be
hanged, it is little wonder that lesser men thought the time had come
for legal looting. Those Loyalists who best understood the temper of
their late fellow-countrymen left at once. They were right. Even to be
a woman was no protection against confiscation in the case of Mary
Phillips, sister-in-law to Beverley Robinson, a well-known Loyalist
who settled in New Brunswick after the Revolution. Her case was not
nearly so hard as many another. But her historic love-affair makes it
the most romantic. Eight-and-twenty years before this General Braddock
had marched to death and defeat beside the Monongahela with two
handsome and gallant young aides-de-camp, Washington and Morris. Both
fell in love with bewitching Mary Phillips. But, while Washington left
her fancy-free, Morris won her heart and hand. Now that the strife was
no longer against a foreign foe but between two British parties, the
former aides-de-camp found themselves rivals in arms as well as love;
for Colonel Morris was Carleton's right-hand man in all that concerned
the Loyalists, being the official head of the department of Claims and
Succour.

Morris, Morgan, and Carleton were the three busiest men in New York.
Forty thick manuscript volumes still show Maurice Morgan's assiduous
work as Carleton's confidential secretary. But Morris had the more
heart-breaking duty of the three, with no relief, day after
sorrow-laden day, from the anguishing appeals of Loyalist widows,
orphans, and other ruined refugees. No sooner had the dire news
arrived that peace had been made with the Congress, and that each of
the thirteen United States was free to show uncovenanted mercies
towards its own Loyalists, than the exodus began. Five thousand five
hundred and ninety-three Loyalists sailed for Halifax in the first
convoy on the 17th of April with a strong recommendation from Carleton
to Governor Parr of Nova Scotia. 'Many of these are of the first
families and born to the fairest possessions. I therefore beg that you
will have them properly considered.' Shipping was scarce; for the
hostility of the whole foreign naval world had made enormous demands
on the British navy and mercantile marine. So six thousand Loyalists
had to march overland to join Carleton's vessels at New York, some of
them from as far south as Charlottesville, Virginia. They were
carefully shepherded by Colonel Alured Clarke, of whom we shall hear
again.

Meanwhile Carleton and Washington had exchanged the usual compliments
on the conclusion of peace and had met each other on the 6th of May
at Tappan, where they discussed the exchange of prisoners. By the
terms of the treaty the British were to evacuate New York, their last
foothold in the new republic, with all practicable dispatch; so, as
summer changed into autumn, the Congress became more and more
impatient to see the last of them. But Carleton would not go without
the Loyalists, whose many tributary streams of misery were still
flowing into New York. In September, when the treaty of peace was
ratified in Europe, the Congress asked Carleton point-blank to name
the date of his own departure. But he replied that this was impossible
and that the more the Loyalists were persecuted the longer he would be
obliged to stay. The correspondence between him and the Congress teems
with complaints and explanations. The Americans were very anxious lest
the Loyalists should take away any goods and chattels not their own,
particularly slaves. Carleton was disposed to consider slaves as human
beings, though slavery was still the law in the British oversea
dominions, and so the Americans felt uneasy lest he might discriminate
between their slaves and other chattels. Reams of the Carleton papers
are covered with descriptive lists of claimed and counter-claimed
niggers--Julius Caesars, Jupiters, Venuses, Dianas, and so on, who
were either 'stout wenches' and 'likely fellows' or 'incurably lazy'
and 'old worn-outs.'

Perhaps, when a slave wished to remain British, and his case was
nicely balanced between the claimants and the counter-claimants,
Carleton was a little inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
But with other forms of disputed property he was too severe to please
all Loyalists. A typical case of restitution in Canada will show how
differently the two governments viewed the rights of private property.
Mercier and Halsted, two Quebec rebels, owned a wharf and the frame of
a warehouse in 1775. It was Arnold's intercepted letter to Mercier
that gave Carleton's lieutenant, Cramah, the first warning of danger
from the south. Halsted was Major Caldwell's miller at the time and
took advantage of his position to give his employer's flour to
Arnold's army, in which he served as commissary throughout the siege.
Just after the peace of 1783 Mercier and Halsted laid claim to their
former property, which they had abandoned for eight years and on which
the government had meanwhile built a provision store, making use of
the original frame. The case was complicated by many details too long
for notice here. But the British government finally gave the two
rebels the original property, plus thirteen years' rent, less the cost
of government works erected in the meantime. All the documents are
still in Quebec.

Property was troublesome enough. But people were worse. And Carleton's
difficulties increased as the autumn wore on. The first great harrying
of the Loyalists drove more than thirty thousand from their homes; and
about twenty-five thousand of these embarked at New York. Then there
were the remnants of twenty Loyalist corps to pension, settle, or
employ. There were also the British prisoners to receive, besides ten
thousand German mercenaries. Add to all this the regular garrison and
the general oversight of every British interest in North America, from
the Floridas to Labrador, remember the implacable enemy in front, and
we may faintly imagine what Carleton had to do before he could report
that 'His Majesty's troops and such remaining Loyalists as chose to
emigrate were successfully withdrawn on the 25th [of November]
without the smallest circumstance of irregularity.'

Thus ended one of the greatest acts in the drama of the British
Empire, the English-speaking peoples, or the world; and thus, for the
second time, Carleton, now in his sixtieth year, apparently ended his
own long service in America. He had left Canada, after saving her from
obliteration, because, so long as he remained her governor, the war
minister at home remained her enemy. He had then returned to serve in
New York, and had stayed there to the bitter end, because there was no
other man whom the new government would trust to command the rearguard
of the Empire in retreat.




CHAPTER IX

FOUNDING MODERN CANADA

1786-1796


Carleton now enjoyed two years of uninterrupted peace at his country
seat in England. His active career seemed to have closed at last. He
had no taste for party politics. He was not anxious to fill any
position of civil or military trust, even if it had been pressed upon
him. And he had said farewell to America for good and all when he had
left New York. Though as full of public spirit as before and only just
turned sixty, he bid fair to spend the rest of his life as an English
country gentleman. His young wife was well contented with her lot. His
manly boys promised to become worthy followers of the noble profession
of arms. And the overseeing of his little estate occupied his time
very pleasantly indeed. Like most healthy Englishmen he was devoted to
horses, and, unlike some others, he was very successful with his
thoroughbreds.

He had first bought a place near Maidenhead, beside the Thames, which
is nowhere lovelier than in that sylvan neighbourhood. Then he bought
the present family seat of Greywell Hill near the little village of
Odiham in Hampshire. As an ex-governor and commander-in-chief, a
county magnate, a personage of great importance to the Empire, and the
one victorious British general in the unhappy American war, he had
more than earned a peerage. But it was not till 1786, on the eve of
his sixty-second birthday, and at a time when his services were
urgently required again, that he received it. Needless to say this
peerage had nothing whatever to do with his acceptance of another
self-sacrificing duty. It was not given till several months after he
had promised to return to Canada; and he would certainly have refused
it if it had been held out to him as an inducement to go there. He
became Baron Dorchester and was granted the not very extravagant
addition to his income of a thousand pounds a year payable during four
lives, his own, his wife's, and those of his two eldest sons. His
elevation to the House of Lords met with the almost unanimous approval
of his fellow-peers, in marked contrast to the open hostility they had
shown towards his old enemy, Lord George Germain, when that vile
wrecker had been 'kicked upstairs' among them. The Carleton motto,
crest, and supporters are all most appropriate. The crest is a strong
right arm with the hand clenched firmly on an arrow. The motto is
_Quondam his vicimus armis--We used to conquer with these arms_. The
supporters are two beavers, typifying Canada, while their respective
collars, one a naval the other a military coronet, show how her
British life was won and saved and has been kept.

    *    *    *    *    *

Carleton was a man of great reserve and self-control. But his kindly
nature must have responded to the cordial welcome which he received on
his return to Quebec in October 1786. It was not without reason that
the people of Canada rejoiced to have him back as their leader. All
that the Indians imagined the Great White Father to be towards
themselves he was in reality towards both red man and white. Stern,
when the occasion forced him to be stern, just in all his dealings
between man and man, dignified and courteous in all his ways, a
soldier through every inch of his stalwart six feet, he was a ruler
with whom no one ever dreamt of taking liberties. But neither did any
deserving one in trouble ever hesitate to lay the most confidential
case before him in the full assurance that his head and heart were at
the service of all committed to his care. And no other governor,
before his time or since, ever inspired his followers with such a firm
belief that all would turn out for the best so long as he was in
command.

This power of inspiring confidence was now badly needed. Everything in
Canada was still provisional. Owing to the war the Quebec Act of 1774
had never been thoroughly enforced. Then, when the war was over, the
Loyalists arrived and completely changed the circumstances which the
act had been designed to meet. The next constitution, the Canada Act
of 1791, was of a very different character. During the seventeen years
between these two constitutions all that could be done was to make the
best of a very confusing state of flux. Not that the Quebec Act was a
dead letter--far from it--but simply that it could not go beyond
restoring the privileges of the French-Canadian priests and seigneurs
within the area then effectively occupied by the French-Canadian race.
Carleton, as we have seen, had faced its problem for the first four
years. Haldimand had carried on the government under its provisions
for the following six. Hamilton and Hope, successive
lieutenant-governors, had bridged the two years between Haldimand's
retirement and Carleton's second appointment. Now Carleton was to pick
up the threads and make what he could of the tangled skein for the
next five years. Haldimand had not been popular with either of the two
chief parties into which the leading French Canadians were divided.
The seigneurs had nothing like the same regard for a Swiss soldier of
fortune that they had for aristocratic British commanders like Murray
and Carleton. The clergy also preferred these Anglicans to such a
strong Swiss Protestant. The habitants and agitators, who were far
less favourable to the new rgime, had passionately resented
Haldimand's firmness at times of crisis. But, despite all this
French-Canadian animus, he was not such an absolute martinet as some
writers would have us think. The war with France and with the American
Revolutionists required strong government in Canada; while the influx
of Loyalists had introduced an entirely new set of most perplexing
circumstances. On the whole, Haldimand had done very well in spite of
many personal and public drawbacks; and it was through no special
fault of his, nor yet of Hope's, that the threads which Carleton
picked up formed such a perversely tangled skein.

The troubles that now dogged the great conciliator's every step were
of all kinds--racial, religious, social, political, military,
diplomatic, legal. The confusion resulting from the intermixture of
French and English civil laws had become a great deal more confounded
since he had left Canada eight years before. The old proportions of
races and religions to each other had changed most disturbingly. The
Loyalists were of quite a different social class from the
English-speaking immigrants of earlier days. They wanted a parliament,
public schools, and many other things new to the country; and they
were the sort of people who had a right to have them. The problem of
defence was always a vexed one with the inadequate military forces at
hand and the insuperable difficulties concerning the militia. The
British still held the Western forts pending the settlement of the
frontier and the execution of the treaty of peace in full. This
naturally annoyed the American government and gave Carleton endless
trouble. But more serious still was the ceaseless western march of
the American backwoodsmen, who were everywhere in conflict with the
Indians. The Indians, in their turn, were confused between the British
and Americans under the new conditions. They and their ever-receding
rights and territories had not been mentioned in the treaty. But,
seeing that they would be better off under British than under American
rule, they were inclined to take sides accordingly. There were now no
openly hostile sides to take. But, for all that, the British posts in
the hinterland looked like weak little islands which might be suddenly
engulfed in the sea of Indian troubles raging round them. Then, at the
other end of the British line, there were the three maritime provinces
to watch over. New Brunswick had been divided off from Nova Scotia and
Prince Edward Island had been taken from the direct supervision of the
home authorities and placed under the command of the new governor at
Quebec. Thus Carleton had to deal directly with everything that
happened from the far West to Gasp, while dealing indirectly with the
three maritime provinces and all the troubles that proved too much for
their own lieutenant-governors. There was no chance of concentrating
on one thing at a time. Nothing would wait. The governor had to watch
the writhing tangle as a whole during every minute he devoted to any
one kinked and knotted thread.

Fortunately there were some good men in office on both sides of the
Atlantic. Lords Sydney and Grenville, the two cabinet ministers with
whom Carleton had most to do, were both sensible and sympathetic.
Years afterwards Grenville, the favourite cousin of Pitt, became the
colleague of Fox at the head of the celebrated 'Ministry of All the
Talents.' Hope was an acceptable lieutenant-governor, and his
successor, Sir Alured Clarke, was better still. Franois Bailly, the
coadjutor Roman Catholic bishop of Quebec, who had gone to England as
French tutor to Carleton's children, was a most enlightened cleric. So
too was Charles Inglis, the Anglican bishop of Nova Scotia, appointed
in 1787. He was the first Canadian bishop of the Anglican communion
and his diocese comprised the whole of British North America. William
Smith, the new chief justice, was as different from Carleton's last
chief justice, Livius, as angels are from devils. Smith had been an
excellent chief justice of his native New York in the old colonial
days, and, like Inglis, was a very ardent Loyalist. He respected all
reasonable French-Canadian peculiarities. But he favoured the
British-Constitutional way of 'broadening down from precedent to
precedent' rather than the French way of referring to a supposedly
infallible written regulation. We shall soon meet him as a far-seeing
statesman. But he well deserves an honoured place in Canadian history
for his legal services alone. To him, more than to any other man, is
due the nicely balanced adjustments which eventually harmonized the
French and English codes into a body of laws adapted to the
extraordinary circumstances of the province of Quebec.

Besides the committee on laws Carleton had nominated three other
active committees of his council, one on police, another on education,
and a third on trade and commerce. The police committee was of the
usual kind and dealt with usual problems in the usual way. But the
education committee brought out all the vexed questions of French and
English, Protestant and Roman Catholic, progressive and reactionary.
Strangely enough, the sharpest personal controversy was that between
Hubert, the Roman Catholic bishop of Quebec, and his coadjutor Bailly.
Hubert enumerated all the institutions already engaged in educational
work and suggested that 'rest and be thankful' was the only proper
attitude for the committee to assume. But Bailly very neatly pointed
out that his respected superior's real opinions could not be those
attributed to him over his own signature because they were at variance
with the facts. Hubert had said that the curs were spreading
education with most commendable zeal, had repudiated the base
insinuation that only three or four people in each parish could read
and write, and had wound up by thinking that while there was so much
land to clear the farmers would do better to keep their sons at home
than send them to a university, where they would be under professors
so 'unprejudiced' as to have no definite views on religion. Bailly
argued that the bishop could not mean what these words seemed to
imply, as the logical conclusion would be to wait till Canada was
cleared right up to the polar circle. In the end the committee made
three very sanguine recommendations: a free common school in every
parish, a secondary school in every town or district, and an
absolutely non-sectarian central university. This educational ladder
was never set up. There was nothing to support either end of it. The
financial side was one difficulty. The Jesuits' estates were intended
to be made over into educational endowments under government control.
But Amherst's claim that they had been granted to him in 1760 was not
settled for forty years; and by that time all chance of carrying out
the committee's intentions was seen to be hopeless.

Commerce was another burning question and one of much more immediate
concern. In 1791 the united populations of all the provinces amounted
to only a quarter of a million, of whom at least one-half were French
Canadians. Quebec and Montreal had barely ten thousand citizens
apiece. But the commercial classes, mostly English-speaking, had
greatly increased in numbers, ability, and social standing. The
camp-following gangs of twenty years before had now either disappeared
or sunk down to their appropriate level. So petitions from the
'British merchants' required and received much more consideration than
formerly. The Loyalists had not yet had time to start in business. All
their energies were needed in hewing out their future homes. But two
parts of the American Republic, Vermont and Kentucky, were very
anxious to do business with the British at any reasonable price. Some
of their citizens were even ready for a change of allegiance if the
terms were only good enough. Vermont wanted a 'free trade' outlet to
the St Lawrence by way of the Richelieu. The rapids between St Johns
and Chambly lay in British territory. But Vermont was ready to join in
building a canal and would even become British to make sure. The old
Green Mountain Boys had changed their tune. Ethan Allen himself had
buried the hatchet and, like his brother, become Carleton's friendly
correspondent. He frankly explained that what Vermonters really wanted
was 'property not liberty' and added that they would stand no coercion
from the American government. About the same time Kentucky was bent on
getting an equally 'free trade' outlet to the Gulf of Mexico by way of
the Mississippi. The fact that France, Spain, the British Empire, and
the United States might all be involved in war over it did not trouble
the conspirators in the least. The central authority of the new
Republic was still weak. The individual states were still ready to fly
asunder. Federal taxation was greatly feared. Anything that savoured
of federal interference with state rights was passionately resented.
The general spirit of the westerners was that of the exploiting
pioneer in a virgin wilderness--a law unto itself alone. There were
various plans for opening the coveted Mississippi. One was to join
Spain. Another was to seize New Orleans, turn out the French, and
bring in the British. Then, to make the plot complete, the French
minister to the United States was asking permission to make a tour
through Canada at the very time when Carleton was sending home reams
of documents bearing on the impending troubles. The letters exchanged
on this subject are perfect models of politeness. But Carleton's
answer was an emphatic No.

Foreign complications were thickening fast. The French Revolution had
already begun, though its effect was not yet felt in Canada. The
American government was anxiously watching its refractory states,
while an anti-British political party was making headway in the South.
As if this was not enough to engage whatever attention Carleton had to
spare from the internal affairs of Canada, he suddenly heard that the
Spaniards had been seizing British vessels trading to a British post
on Vancouver Island.[6] This Nootka Affair, which nearly brought on a
war with Spain in 1790, was settled in London and Madrid. But the
threat of war added to Carleton's anxieties.

[Footnote 6: See _Pioneers of the Pacific Coast_ in this Series.]

Meanwhile the governor was busily employed with an immigration
problem. It was desirable that the English-speaking immigrants should
settle on the land with the least possible friction between them and
the French Canadians. The French Canadians differed among themselves.
But no such differences brought them any closer to their new
neighbours on questions of land settlement. The French had granted
lands in seigneuries. The British would hear of nothing but free and
common socage. French farms were measured by the arpent and were
staked out in long and narrow oblongs. British farms were measured by
the acre and staked out 'on the square.' Language, laws, religion,
manners and customs, ways of life, were also different. So there was
hardly any intermixture of settlements. The French Canadians remained
where they were. Most of the new Anglo-Canadians settled in the
Maritime Provinces or moved west into what is now Ontario. A few
settled in rural Quebec on lands outside the line of seigneuries. The
Eastern Townships, that part of the province lying east of the
Richelieu and nearest the American frontier, absorbed many English,
Irish, and Scots, as well as a good many Americans who were attracted
by cheap land. Ontario, or Upper Canada, received still more
Americans, who were to be a thorn in the side of the British during
the War of 1812.

But Carleton's work comprised much more than this. There were the
Church of England, the Post Office, a refractory lieutenant-governor
down in Prince Edward Island, two royal visitors, and many other
distracting matters. The only Anglican see thus far established was at
Halifax; but the bishop there had authority over the whole country and
the government intended to establish the Church of England in Canada
and endow it. The Presbyterians also petitioned for the establishment
of the Scottish Church. The fortunes or misfortunes of the Clergy
Reserves belong to another chapter of Canadian history. But the root
of their good or evil was planted in the time of Carleton. The postal
service was surrounded by enormous difficulties--the vast extent of
wild country, the few towns, the long winters, the poverty of the
people. The question of the winter port was even then a live one
between St John and Halifax. Each of these towns asserted its
advantages and promised twelve trips a year and connection with Quebec
overland by means of walking postmen till a bush road should be cut
from Quebec to the sea. In Prince Edward Island the old
lieutenant-governor, Walter Patterson, declined to make way for the
new one, Edmund Fanning. In the end Patterson gave up the contest. But
the incident, trivial as it now appears, shows what a governor-general
had to face in the early days when each province had queer little ways
of its own. Patterson had no precise official reason. But he said he
could not go home to answer charges he did not understand and leave an
island which had been his very successful hobby for so many years! The
people sided with him so vigorously that time had to be given them to
cool down before the transfer could be peaceably effected.

A judge whose court is in perpetual session or a commander whose
inadequate forces are continually surrounded by prospective enemies
has little time for the amenities of purely social life. So Carleton
generally left his young consort to rule the viceregal court at the
Chteau St Louis with a perfect blend of London and Versailles. Two
Princes of the Blood, however, demanded more than the usual attention
from the governor. Prince William Henry, afterwards King William IV,
was the first member of the Royal Family to set foot in the New World
when he arrived in H.M.S. _Pegasus_ in 1787. He was the proverbial
jolly Jack Tar, extremely affable to everybody; and he quickly won
golden opinions from all who met him, except perhaps from Lady
Dorchester and sundry would-be partners for his duty dances. Philippe
Aubert de Gasp and other privileged chroniclers record with slightly
shocked delight how often he would break loose from Lady Dorchester's
designing care, long before she thought it right for him to do so, and
'command' his partners for their pretty faces instead of by
precedence. At Sorel the people were so carried away by their
enthusiasm that they insisted on changing the name of their little
town to William Henry. Happily this name never took root in public
sentiment and the old one soon came back to stay.

The second member of the Royal Family to come to Canada was Prince
Edward, Duke of Kent, fourth son of George III, father of Queen
Victoria and grandfather of Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, who
became the first royal governor-general in 1911, exactly a hundred and
twenty years later. The Duke of Kent would have gladly returned to
Quebec as governor-general, and the people would have gladly welcomed
him. But he was not a favourite with the government at home, and so he
never came. There was no doubt about his being a popular favourite in
Quebec during the three years he spent there as colonel of the 7th
Fusiliers. Nor has he been forgotten to the present day. Kent House is
still the name of his quarters in the town as well as of his country
residence at Montmorency Falls seven miles away, while the only new
opening ever made in the walls is called Kent Gate.

The duke made fast friends with several of the seigneurial families,
more especially with the de Salaberrys, whose manor-house at Beauport
stood half-way between Montmorency and Quebec and not far from
Montcalm's headquarters in 1759. The de Salaberrys were a military
family. All the sons went into the Army and one became the hero of
Chteauguay in the War of 1812. But the duke mixed freely with many
other people than the local aristocracy. He was young, high-spirited,
and loved adventure, as was proved by his subsequent gallantry at
Martinique. He was also fond of driving round incognito, a habit which
on at least one occasion obliged him to put his skill at boxing to
good use. This was at Charlesbourg, a village near Quebec, where he
was watching the fun at the first election ever held. Perhaps, from a
meticulously constitutional point of view, the scene of a hotly
contested election was not quite the place for Princes of the Blood.
But, however that might be, when the duke saw two electors pommelling
a third, who happened to be a friend of his, he dashed in to the
rescue and floored both of them with a neatly planted right and left.
One of these men, who lived to see King Edward VII arrive in 1860, as
Prince of Wales, always took the greatest pride in telling successive
generations of voters how Queen Victoria's father had knocked him
down.

Like his brother before him the duke was very fond of dancing, and
kept many a reluctant senior and many a tired-out chaperone up till
all hours at the grand ball given in honour of his twenty-fourth
birthday. Also like his brother he was inclined to reduce his duty
dances to a minimum, much to Lady Dorchester's dismay. She had gone
home with her husband for two years shortly after the duke's arrival.
But she had seen enough of him, and was to see enough again on her
return, to make her regret the good old times of more exacting
ceremony. To her dying day, half a century later, she kept up a
prodigious stateliness of manner. Before meals she expected the whole
company to assemble and remain standing till she had made her royal
progress through the room. She was a living anachronism for many years
before her death, with her high-heeled, gold-buttoned, shoes, her
Marie-Antoinette _coiffure_ raised high scarlet-coloured above her
head and interlaced with ribbons, her elaborately gorgeous dress, her
intricate array of ornaments, and her long, jet-black,
official-looking cane. But she was no anachronism to herself; for she
still lived in the light of other days, in the fondly remembered times
when, as the vice-reine of the Chteau St Louis, she helped her
consort to settle nice points of etiquette and maintain a dignity
befitting His Majesty's chosen representative. How did the seigneurs
rank among themselves and with the leading English-speaking people?
Who were to dance in the state minuet? Should dancing cease when the
bishops came in, and for how long? Was that curtsy dropped quite low
enough to her viceregal self, and did that _dbutante_ offer her
blushing cheek in quite the proper way to Carleton when he graciously
gave her the presentation kiss? How immeasurably far away it all seems
now, that stately little court where the echoes of a dead Versailles
lived on for seven years after the fall of the Bastille! And yet there
is still one citizen of Quebec whose early partners were chaperoned by
ladies who had danced the minuet with Lord and Lady Dorchester.

    *    *    *    *    *

The two royal visits were not without their political
significance--using the word political in its larger meaning. But the
three years between them--that is, 1788-89-90--formed the really
pregnant time of constitutional development, when the Canada Act of
1791 was taking shape in the minds of its chief authors--Carleton and
Smith in Canada, Grenville and Pitt in England. The Loyalists and the
English-speaking merchants of Quebec and Montreal took good care to
make themselves heard at every stage of the proceedings. Most French
Canadians would have preferred to be left without the suspected
blessings of a parliament. The clergy and seigneurs wished for a
continuance of the Quebec Act, and the habitants wanted they knew not
what, provided it would enable them to get more and give less. The
English-speaking people, on the other hand, were all for a parliament.
But they differed widely as to what kind of parliament would suit
their purpose best. As a rule they acquiesced, with a more or less bad
grace, in the necessity of admitting French Canadians on the same
terms as themselves. If Canada, without the Maritime Provinces, should
be taken as a whole then the French Canadians would only be in a
moderate majority. If, however, two provinces, Upper Canada and Lower
Canada, were to be erected, then the English-speaking minority in
Lower Canada would be outvoted three or four to one.

There was a third alternative: no less than the establishment of a
regular Dominion of British North America in 1790, a step which might
have saved much trouble between that time and the Confederation of
1867. William Smith was its strongest advocate, Carleton its most
cautious and judicious supporter. The chief justice was in favour of
federating Upper and Lower Canada with the Maritime Provinces and
Newfoundland into a single dominion. Each of the six provinces would
have its own parliament under a lieutenant-governor, while there would
also be a central parliament under a governor-general. Carleton
forwarded the suggestion to the home government; but he nowhere
committed himself to any very definite scheme. His own preference was
for keeping the existing province of Quebec a little longer, then
dividing it, and afterwards drawing in the other provinces. The chief
justice preferred to make a constitution. The governor preferred to
let it grow. The home government's preference could not be stated
better than in Grenville's dispatch to Carleton of the 20th of October
1789: 'The general object is to assimilate the constitution to that of
Great Britain as nearly as the difference arising from the manners of
the People and from the present situation of the Province will
admit.... Attention is due to the prejudices and habits of the French
Inhabitants and every caution should be used to continue to them the
enjoyment of those civil and religious Rights which were secured to
them by the Capitulation or which have since been granted by the
liberal and enlightened spirit of the British Government.' Except for
its rather too self-righteous conclusion this confidential
announcement really is an admirable statement of the 'liberal and
enlightened' views which prevailed at Westminster.

The bill, postponed in 1790, was introduced by Pitt himself in the
House of Commons on the 7th of March 1791. Sixteen days later Adam
Lymburner, a representative merchant of Quebec, whom Carleton
described as 'a quiet, decent man, not unfriendly to the
administration,' pleaded for hours before the committee of the House
of Commons against the division of the province. All the
English-speaking minority in the prospective province of Lower Canada
were afraid of being swamped by the French-Canadian vote, and so of
being hampered in liberty and trade. The London merchants naturally
backed Lymburner. Fox opposed the bill as not being liberal enough.
Burke flared up into the speech which led to his final breach with
Fox. Pitt, the pilot who was to weather far greater storms in the
years to come, eventually got the bill through both Houses with
substantial majorities. On the 14th of May it became law. Quebec and
Ontario were parted for good, notwithstanding the legislative union of
fifty years later.

The Canada Act, or, as it is better known, the Constitutional Act, cut
off Upper Canada. Lower Canada was now the old Quebec reduced to its
right size, endowed with clarified laws and a brand-new parliament,
and made as acceptable as possible to the English-speaking minority
without any injustice to the vastly greater French majority. Quebec,
Three Rivers, Montreal, and Sorel got each two members in the new
parliament, an allotment which ensured a certain representation of the
'British' merchants. The franchise was the same in both provinces: in
the country parts a forty-shilling freehold or its equivalent, and in
the towns either a five-pound annual ownership value or twice that for
a tenant. The Crown gave up all taxation except commercial duties,
which were to be applied solely for the benefit of the provinces.
Lands outside the seigneuries were to be in free and common socage,
while seigneurial tenure itself could be converted into freehold on
petition. One-seventh of the Crown lands was reserved for the
endowment of the Church of England. The Crown kept all rights of veto
and appointment. The legislatures were small in membership. The Upper
Houses could be made hereditary; though the actual tenure was never
more than for life during good behaviour. Carleton favoured the
hereditary principle whenever it could be applied with advantage. But
he knew the ups and downs of colonial fortunes too well to believe
that Canada was ready for any such experiment.

No one dreamt of having what is now known as responsible government,
that is, an executive sitting in the legislature and responsible to
the legislature for its acts. Nor was the greatest of all
parliamentary powers--the power of the purse--given outright. This,
however, was owing to simple force of circumstances and not to any
desire of abridging the liberties of the people. The fact is that at
this time eighty per cent of the total civil expenditure had to be
paid by the home government. It is frequently ignored that the mother
country paid most of Canada's bills till long after the War of 1812,
that she paid nearly all the naval and military accounts for longer
still, and that she has borne far more than her own share of the
common defence down to the present day.

The new constitution came into force on the 26th of December 1791;
and, for the first time, Upper and Lower Canada had the right to elect
their own representatives. Assemblies, of course, were nothing new in
British North America. Nova Scotia had an assembly in 1758, the year
that Louisbourg was taken. Prince Edward Island had one in 1773, the
year before the Quebec Act was passed. New Brunswick had one in 1786,
the year Carleton began his second term. But assemblies still had all
the charm of novelty in 'Canada proper.' Perhaps it would be more
appropriate to say that Upper Canada experienced more charm than
novelty while Lower Canada experienced more novelty than charm. The
Anglo-Canadians in all five provinces were used to parliaments in
America. Their ancestors had been used to them for centuries in
England. So the little parliament of Upper Canada at Newark passed as
many bills in five weeks as that of Lower Canada passed in seven
months. The fact that there were fifty members in the Assembly at
Quebec, while there were only half as many in both chambers at Newark,
doubtless had something to do with it. But the fact that the Quebec
parliament was an innovation, while the one at Newark was a simple
development, had very much more.

There is no need to follow the course of legislation in any of the
five provinces. As most of the civil and practically all the naval and
military expenditure had to be met by the Imperial Treasury, and as
Canada was five parts and no whole from her own parliamentary point of
view, the legislation required for a grand total of two hundred and
fifty thousand people could not be of the national kind. But at Quebec
the scene, the setting, and the unheard-of innovation itself all give
a special interest to every detail of the opening ceremony on the 17th
of December 1792.

Carleton was in England, so the Speech from the Throne was read by the
lieutenant-governor, Major-General Sir Alured Clarke. Half of the
Upper House and two-thirds of the Lower were French Canadians. A
French-Canadian member was nominated for the speakership and elected
unanimously. Both races were for the most part represented by members
whose official title of 'Honourable Gentlemen' was not at all a
misnomer. The French members of the Assembly were half distrustful
both of it and of themselves. But they knew how to add grace and
dignity to a very notable occasion. The old Bishop's Palace served as
the Houses of Parliament and so continued for many years to come. It
was a solid rather than a stately pile. But it stood on a commanding
site at the head of Mountain Hill between the Grand Battery and the
Chteau St Louis. Every one was in uniform or in what corresponded to
court dress. Round the throne stood many officers in their red and
gold, conspicuous among them the Duke of Kent. In front sat the
Executive and Legislative Councillors, corresponding to the modern
cabinet ministers and senators. Their roll, as well as the Assembly's,
bore many names that recalled the glories of the old rgime--St Ours,
Longueuil, de Lanaudire, Boucherville, de Salaberry, de Lotbinire,
and many more. The Council chamber was crowded in every part long
before the governor arrived. 'The Ladies introduced into the House'
were 'without Hat, Cloak, or Bonnet,' the 'Doorkeeper of His Majesty's
Council' having taken good care to see them 'leave the same in the
Great Committee Room previous to their Introduction.' 'The Ladies
attached to His Excellency's Suite' were admitted 'within the railing
or body of the House' and 'accommodated with the seats of the members
as far as possible.' Outwardly it was all very much the same in
principle as the opening of any other British parliament--the escort,
guard, and band, the royal salute, the brilliant staff, the scarlet
cloth of state, the few and quiet members of the Upper House, the many
of the Lower, jostling each other to get a good place near Mr Speaker
at the bar, the radiant ladies, the crowded galleries corniced with
inquiring faces and craned necks, the Gentlemen Ushers and their
quaint bows, the Speech from the Throne and the occasional lifting of
His Excellency's hat, the retiring in full state; and then the ebbing
away of all the sightseers, their eddying currents of packed humanity
in the halls and passages, the porch, the door, the emptying street.
But inwardly what a world of difference! For here was the first
British parliament in which legislators of foreign birth and blood and
language were shaping British laws as British subjects.

    *    *    *    *    *

In September 1793 Carleton returned from his two years' absence and
was welcomed more warmly than ever. Quebec blazed with illuminations.
The streets swarmed with eager crowds. The first session of the first
parliament had been better than any one had dared to hope for. There
was a general tendency to give the new constitution a fair trial; and
all classes looked to Carleton to make the harmony that had been
attained both permanent and universal. Dr Jacob Mountain, first
Anglican bishop of Quebec, also arrived shortly afterwards and was
warmly greeted by the Roman Catholic prelate, who embraced him,
saying, 'It's time you came to shepherd your own flock.' Mountain was
statesman and churchman in one. He had been chosen by the elder Pitt
to be the younger's tutor and then chosen by the younger to be his
private secretary. The fact that the Anglican bishop of Quebec was
then and for many years afterwards a sort of Canadian chaplain-general
to the Imperial troops and that most of the leading officials and
leading Loyalists belonged to the Church of England made him a
personage of great importance. It was fortunate that, as in the case
of Inglis down in Halifax, the choice could not have fallen on a
better man or on one who knew better how to win the esteem of
communions other than his own. This same year (1793) died William
Smith, full of honours. But the next year his excellent successor
arrived in the person of William Osgoode, the new chief justice, an
eminent English lawyer who had served for two years as chief justice
of Upper Canada and whose name is commemorated in Osgoode Hall,
Toronto. He had come out on the distinct understanding that no fees
were to be attached to his office, only a definite salary. This was a
great triumph for Carleton, who certainly practised what he preached.

So far, so good. But the third conspicuous new arrival, John Graves
Simcoe, lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, who had come out the year
before, was a great deal less to Carleton's liking. Simcoe was a good
officer who threw himself heart and soul into the work of settling the
new province. He won the affectionate regard of his people and is
gratefully remembered by their posterity. But he was too exclusively
of his own province in his civil and military outlook and was disposed
to ignore Carleton as his official chief. Moreover, he was appointed
in spite of Carleton's strongly expressed preference for Sir John
Johnson, who, to all appearances, was the very man for the post. Sir
William Johnson, the first baronet, had been the great British leader
of the Indians and a person of much consequence throughout America.
His son John inherited many of his good qualities, thoroughly
understood the West and its problems, was a devoted Loyalist all
through the Revolution, when he raised the King's Royal Regiment of
New York, and would have been second only to Carleton himself in the
eyes of all Canadians, old and new. But the government thought his
private interests too great for his public duty--an excellent general
principle, though misapplied in this particular case. At any rate,
Simcoe came instead, and the friction began at once. Simcoe's
commission clearly made him subordinate to Carleton. Yet Simcoe made
appointments without consulting his superior and argued the point
after he had been brought to book. He communicated directly with the
home government over his superior's head and was not rebuked by the
minister to whom he wrote--Henry Dundas, afterwards first Viscount
Melville. Dundas, indeed, was half inclined to snub Carleton. Simcoe
desired to establish military posts wherever he thought they would
best promote immediate settlement, a policy which would tend to sap
both the government's resources and the self-reliance of the settlers.
He also wished to fix the capital at London instead of York, now
Toronto, and to make York instead of Kingston the naval base for Lake
Ontario. Thus the friction continued. At length Carleton wrote to the
Duke of Portland, Pitt's home secretary, saying: 'All command, civil
and military, being thus disorganized and without remedy, your Grace
will, I hope, excuse my anxiety for the arrival of my successor, who
may have authority sufficient to restore order, lest these
insubordinations should extend to mutiny among the troops and sedition
among the people.' That was in November 1795. The government, however,
took no decisive action, and next year both Carleton and Simcoe left
Canada for ever.

When this unfortunate quarrel began (1793) Canada was in grave danger
of being attacked by both the French and the American republics. The
danger, however, had been greatly lessened by Jay's Treaty of 1794 and
was to be still further lessened (1796) by the transfer of the Western
Posts to the United States and by the presidential election which gave
the Federal party a new lease of power, though no longer under
Washington. Had Carleton remained in Canada these felicitous events
would have offered him a unique opportunity of strengthening the
friendly ties between the British and the Americans in a way which
might have saved some trouble later on. But that was not to be.

To understand the dangers which threatened Canada during the last
three years of Carleton's rule we must go back to February 1793, when
revolutionary France declared war on England and there then began that
titanic struggle which only ended twenty-two years later on the field
of Waterloo. The Americans were divided into two parties, one disposed
to be friendly towards Great Britain, the other unfriendly. The names
these parties then bore must not be confused with those borne by their
political offspring at the present day. The Federals, progenitors of
the present Republicans, formed the friendly party under Washington,
Hamilton, and Jay. The Republicans, progenitors of the present
Democrats, formed the unfriendly party under Jefferson, Madison, and
Randolph. The Federals were in power, the Republicans in opposition.
When the Republicans got into power in 1801 under Jefferson they
pursued their anti-British policy till they finally brought on the War
of 1812 under the presidency of Madison. The strength of the peace
party lay in the North: that of the war party lay in the South. The
peaceful Federals, now that Independence had been gained, were in
favour of meeting the amicable British government half-way. When Pitt
came into power in 1783 he at once held out the olive branch. Now, ten
years later, the more far-seeing statesmen on both sides were
preparing to confirm the new friendship in the practical form of Jay's
Treaty, which put the United States into what is at present known as a
most-favoured-nation position with regard to British trade and
commerce. Moreover, Washington and his Northern Federals much
preferred a British Canada to a French one, while Jefferson and the
Southern Republicans thought any stick was good enough to beat the
British dog with.

The Jeffersonians eagerly seized on the reports of a speech which
Carleton made to the Miamis, who lived just south of Detroit, and used
it to the utmost as a means of stirring up anti-British feeling.
Carleton had said: 'You are witnesses that we have acted in the most
peaceable manner and borne the language and conduct of the United
States with patience. But I believe our patience is almost exhausted.'
Applied to the vexed questions of the Western Posts, of the lawless
ways of the exterminating American pioneers, and of the infinitely
worse jobbing politicians behind them, this language was mildness
itself. But in view of the high statesmanship of Washington and his
government it was injudicious. All the same, Dundas, more especially
because he was a cabinet minister, was even more injudicious when he
adopted a tone of reproof towards Carleton, whose great services, past
and present, entitled him to unusual respect and confidence. The
negotiations for Jay's Treaty were then in progress in London, and
Jefferson saw his chance of injuring both the American and British
governments by magnifying Carleton's speech into an 'unwarrantable
outrage.' He also hoped that an Indian war would upset the treaty and
bring on a British war as well. And the prospect did look
encouragingly black in the West, where the American general Wayne was
ready waiting south of Lake Erie, while the trade in scalps was
unusually brisk. Forty dollars was the regular market price for an
ordinary Indian's scalp. But as much as a thousand was offered for
Simon Girty's in the hope of getting that inconvenient British scout
put quickly out of the way. Nearer home Jefferson and his band of
demagogues had other arguments as well. The Federal North would
suffer most by war, while the Republican South might use war as a
means of repudiating all the debts she owed to Englishmen. This would
have been a very different thing from the insolvency of the
Continental Congress during the Revolution. It was dire want, not
financial infamy, that made the Revolutionary paper money 'not worth a
Continental.' But it would have been sheer theft for the Jeffersonian
South to have made its honest obligations 'rotten as a Pennsylvanian
bond.'

The wild French-Revolutionary rage that swept through the South now
fanned the flame and made the sparks fly over into Canada. In April
1793 a fiery Red Republican, named Genet, landed at Charleston as
French minister to the United States and made a triumphal progress to
Philadelphia. Nobody bothered about the fundamental differences
between the French and American revolutions. France and England were
going to war and that was enough. Genet was one of those 'impossibles'
whom revolutions throw into ridiculous power. When he began his
campaign the Republican South was at his feet. Planters and
legislators donned caps of liberty and danced themselves so crazy
over the rights of abstract man that they had no enthusiasm left for
such concrete instances as Loyalists, Englishmen, and their own
plantation slaves. Then Genet made his next step in the new diplomacy
by fitting out French privateers in American harbours and seizing
British vessels in American waters. This brought Washington down on
him at once. Then he lost his head completely, abused everybody,
including Jefferson, and retired from public life as an American
citizen, being afraid to go home.

Genet's absurd career was short, but very meteoric while it lasted,
and full of anti-British mischief-making. His agents were everywhere;
and his successor, Adet, carried on the underground agitation with
equal zeal and more astuteness. Vermont offered an excellent base of
operations. Finding that its British proclivities had not produced the
Chambly canal for its trade with the St Lawrence, it had become more
violently anti-British than ever before and even proposed taking
Canada single-handed. This time its new policy remained at fever heat
for over three years and only cooled down when a British man-of-war
captured the incongruously named _Olive Branch_, in which Ira Allen
was trying to run the blockade from Ostend with twenty thousand
muskets and other arms which he represented as being solely for the
annual drill of the Vermont militia. Thus Carleton had to watch the
raging South, the dangerous West, and bellicose Vermont, all together,
besides taking whatever measures he could against the swarms of secret
enemies within the gates. The American immigrants who wanted 'property
not liberty' were ready enough for a change of flag whenever it suited
them. But they were few compared with the mass of French Canadians who
were being stirred into disaffection. The seigneurs, the clergy, and
the very few enlightened people of other classes had no desire for
being conquered by a regicide France or an obliterating American
Republic. But many of the habitants and of the uneducated in the towns
lent a willing ear to those who promised them all kinds of liberty and
property put together.

The danger was all the greater because it was no longer one foreigner
intriguing against another, as in 1775, but French against British and
class against class. Some of the appeals were still ridiculous. The
habitants found themselves credited with an unslakable thirst for
higher education. They were promised 'free' maritime intercommunication
between the Old World and the New, a wonderful extension of
representative institutions, and much more to the same effect,
universal revolutionary brotherhood included. But when Frenchmen came
promising fleets and armies, when these emissaries were backed by
French Canadians who had left home for good reasons after the troubles
of 1775, and when the habitants were positively assured by all these
credible witnesses that France and the United States were going to
drive the British out of Canada and make a heaven on earth for all who
would turn against Carleton, then there really was something that
sensible men could believe. Everything for nothing--or next to
nothing. Only turn against the British and the rest would be easy. No
more tithes to the curs, no more seigneurial dues, no more taxes to a
government which put half the money in its own pocket and sent the
other half to the king, who spent it buying palaces and crowns.

'Nothing is too absurd for them to believe,' wrote Carleton, who felt
all the old troubles of 1775 coming back in a greatly aggravated form.
He lost no time in vain regrets, however, but got a militia bill
through parliament, improved the defences of Quebec, and issued a
proclamation enjoining all good subjects to find out, report, and
seize every sedition-monger they could lay their hands on. An attempt
to embody two thousand militiamen by ballot was a dead failure. The
few English-speaking militiamen required came forward 'with alacrity.'
The habitants hung back or broke into riotous mobs. The ordinary
habitant could hardly be blamed. He saw little difference between one
kind of English-speaking people and another. So he naturally thought
it best to be on the side of the prospective winners, especially when
they persuaded him that he would get back everything taken from him by
'the infamous Quebec Act.' There really was no way whatever of getting
him to see the truth under these circumstances. The mere fact that his
condition had improved so much under British rule made him all the
readier to cry for the Franco-American moon. Things presently went
from bad to worse. A glowing, bombastic address from 'The Free French
to their Canadian Brothers' (who of course were 'slaves') was even
read out at more than one church door. Then the Quebec Assembly
unanimously passed an Alien Act in May 1794, and suspected characters
began to find that two could play at the game. This stringent act was
not passed a day too soon. By its provisions the Habeas Corpus Act
could be suspended or suppressed and the strongest measures taken
against sedition in every form. Monk, the attorney-general, reported
that 'It is astonishing to find the same savagery exhibited here as in
France.' The habitants and lower class of townsfolk had been well
worked up 'to follow France and the United States by destroying a
throne which was the seat of hypocrisy, imposture, despotism, greed,
cruelty' and all the other deadly sins. The first step was to be the
assassination of all obnoxious officials and leading British patriots
the minute the promised invasion began to prove successful.

No war came. And, as we have seen already, Carleton's last year, 1796,
was more peaceful than his first. But even then the external dangers
made the governor-general's post a very trying one, especially when
internal troubles were equally rife. Thus Carleton never enjoyed a
single day without its anxious moments till, old and growing weary,
though devoted as ever, he finally left Quebec on the 9th of July.
This was the second occasion on which he had been forced to resign by
unfair treatment at the hands of those who should have been his best
support. It was infinitely worse the first time, when he was stabbed
in the back by that shameless political assassin, Lord George Germain.
But the second was also inexcusable because there could be no doubt
whatever as to which of the incompatibles should have left his
post--the replaceable Simcoe or the irreplaceable Carleton. Yet as
H.M.S. _Active_ rounded Point Levy, and the great stronghold of Quebec
faded from his view, Carleton had at least the satisfaction of knowing
that he had been the principal saviour of one British Canada and the
principal founder of another.




CHAPTER X

'NUNC DIMITTIS'

1796-1808


Our tale is told.

The _Active_ was wrecked on the island of Anticosti, where the estuary
of the St Lawrence joins the Gulf. No lives were lost, and the
Carletons reached Perc in Gasp quite safely in a little coasting
vessel. Then a ship came round from Halifax and sailed the family over
to England at the end of September, just thirty years after Carleton
had come out to Canada to take up a burden of oversea governance such
as no other viceroy, in any part of the world-encircling British
Empire, has ever borne so long.

He lived to become a wonderful link with the past. When he died at
home in England he was in the sixty-seventh year of his connection
with the Army and in the eighty-fifth of his age. More than any other
man of note he brought the days of Marlborough into touch with those
of Wellington, though a century lay between. At the time he received
his first commission most of the senior officers were old Marlburians.
At the time of his death Nelson had already won Trafalgar, Napoleon
had already been emperor of the French for nearly three years, and
Wellington had already begun the great Peninsular campaigns.
Carleton's own life thus constitutes a most remarkable link between
two very different eras of Imperial history. But he and his wife
together constitute a still more remarkable link between two eras of
Canadian history which are still farther apart. At first sight it
seems almost impossible that he, who was the trusted friend of Wolfe,
and she, who learned deportment at Versailles in the reign of Louis
Quinze, should together make up a living link between 1690, when
Frontenac saved Quebec from the American Colonials under Phips, and
1867, when the new Dominion was proclaimed there. But it is true.
Carleton, born in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, knew
several old men who had served at the Battle of the Boyne, which was
fought three months before Frontenac sent his defiance to Phips 'from
the mouth of my cannon.' Carleton's wife, living far on into the
second quarter of the nineteenth century, knew several rising young
men who saw the Dominion of Canada well started on its great career.

All Carleton's sons went into the Army and all died on active service.
The fourth was killed in 1814 at Bergen-op-Zoom carrying the same
sword that Carleton himself had used there sixty-seven years before. A
picture of the first siege of Bergen-op-Zoom hangs in the dining-room
of the family seat at Greywell Hill to remind successive generations
of their martial ancestors. But no Carleton needs to be reminded of a
man's first duty at the call to arms. The present holder of the
Dorchester estates and title is a woman. But her son and heir went
straight to the front with the cavalry of the first British army corps
to take the field in Belgium during the Great World War of 1914.

Carleton spent most of his last twelve years at Kempshot near
Basingstoke because he kept his stud there and horses were his chief
delight. But he died at Stubbings, his place near Maidenhead beside
the silver Thames, on the 10th of November 1808.

Thus, after an unadventurous youth and early manhood, he spent his
long maturity steering the ship of state through troublous seas
abroad; then passed life's evening in the quiet haven of his home.




BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE


The Seigneurs and the Loyalists, both closely associated with
Carleton's Canadian career, are treated in two volumes of the present
Series: _The Seigneurs of Old Canada_ and _The United Empire
Loyalists_. Two other volumes also provide profitable reading: _The
War Chief of the Six Nations: A Chronicle of Brant_, the Indian leader
who was to Carleton's day what Tecumseh was to Brock's, and _The War
Chief of the Ottawas: A Chronicle of the Pontiac War_.

Only one life of Carleton has been written, _Lord Dorchester_, by A.
G. Bradley (1907). The student should also consult _John Graves
Simcoe_, by Duncan Campbell Scott (1905), _Sir Frederick Haldimand_,
by Jean M'Ilwraith (1904), and _A History of Canada from 1763 to 1812_
by Sir Charles Lucas. Carleton is the leading character in the first
half of the third volume of _Canada and its Provinces_, which, being
the work of different authors, throws light on his character from
several different British points of view as well as from several
different kinds of evidence. Kingsford's _History of Canada_, volumes
iv to vii, treats the period in considerable detail. Justin Smith's
two volumes, _Our Struggle for the Fourteenth Colony_, is the work of
a most painstaking American scholar who had already produced an
excellent account of _Arnold's March from Cambridge to Quebec_, in
which, for the first time, _Arnold's Journal_ was printed word for
word. _Arnold's Expedition to Quebec_, by J. Codman, is another
careful work. These are the complements of the British books mentioned
above, as they emphasize the American point of view and draw more from
American than from British sources of original information. The
unfortunate defect of _Our Struggle for the Fourteenth Colony_ is that
the author's efforts to be sprightly at all costs tend to repel the
serious student, while his very thoroughness itself repels the merely
casual reader.

So many absurd or perverting mistakes are still made about the life
and times of Carleton, and a full understanding of his career is of
such vital importance to Canadian history, that no accounts given in
the general run of books--including many so-called 'standard
works'--should be accepted without reference to the original
authorities. Justin Smith's books, cited above, have useful lists of
authorities; though there is no discrimination between documents of
very different value. The original British diaries kept during
Montgomery and Arnold's beleaguerment have been published by the
Literary and Historical Society of Quebec in two volumes, at the end
of which there is a very useful bibliography showing the whereabouts
of the actual manuscripts of these and many other documents in
English, French, and German. In addition to the American and British
diarists who wrote in English there were several prominent French
Canadians and German officers who kept most interesting journals which
are still extant. The Dominion Archives at Ottawa possess an immense
mass of originals, facsimiles, and verbatim copies of every kind,
including maps and illustrations. The Dominion Archivist, Dr Doughty,
has himself edited, in collaboration with Professor Shortt, all the
_Documents relating to the Constitutional History of Canada from 1759
to 1791_.

The present Chronicle is based on the original evidence of both sides.




INDEX


Adams, President John, and the Loyalists, 174.

Adet, M., his anti-British campaign, 219.

Ainslie, Thomas, quoted, 92.

Allen, Ethan, leader of the Green Mountain Boys, 63, 65-6, 69, 136;
  taken prisoner at Montreal, 75-7;
  Carleton's friendly correspondent, 192.

Allen, Ira, 219-20.

American War of Independence, the: causes of, 171-3;
  revolutionists and Loyalists, 61-2, 166, 173-4;
  division of parties in Britain, 61, 163;
  and in Canada, 62;
  the first shot fired, 62;
  American invasion of Canada, 63-142;
  British campaign against Thirteen Colonies, 143-61;
  what forced the granting of Independence, 162-3;
  the treaty of peace, 166-9.

Amherst, Sir Jeffery, and Carleton, 5, 19, 21;
  and the Jesuits' estates, 191.

Anderson, Lieut., killed at the Sault-au-Matelot, 118.

Antell, with Montgomery at Quebec, 106.

Arnold, Benedict, 63-4;
  and the Green Mountain Boys, 65-7, 68;
  his daring march against Quebec, 71, 80-3, 85-86, 178;
  meets Montgomery, 99;
  wounded in assault on the Sault-au-Matelot, 108, 109, 110, 113-15, 125;
  at Montreal, 122, 134-5, 140;
  his defeat on Lake Champlain, 144-8.


Bailly, Father, his attempt to assist Carleton, 126.

Bailly, Franois, coadjutor bishop of Quebec, 188;
  his educational work, 189-90.

Barnsfair, Captain, at Prs-de-Ville, 111, 112.

Baum, Colonel, 143.

Beaujeu, M. de, and Carleton, 125-6.

Bouchette, with Carleton in the race for Quebec, 90.

Brown, William, starts the first newspaper in Canada, 37-9.

Brown, Major, 75, 76;
  his attempt to bluff Carleton, 89-90.

Burgoyne, General, 143, 152, 154, 155;
  meets disaster at Saratoga, 156.

Burke, Edmund, 204.

Burr, Aaron, 81.

Burton, Colonel, commands the district of Three Rivers, 19, 21, 23.

Bute, Marquis of, 24-5.

Butterfield, Colonel, defeated at the Cedars, 134-6.


Canada: the Capitulation, 16;
  why conquered by Britain, 20-1;
  her defences under Murray, 21-2;
  the French population in 1762, 22-3;
  civil government inaugurated in, 25-8;
  political war between the 'King's Old Subjects' and the
    French-Canadians, 28-33, 36;
  the baiting of the redcoats, 33-6;
  the first newspaper, 37-9;
  the Indian trade, 41-2;
  the Walker affair, 43-5;
  the Quebec Act, 52-5, 60, 158-9, 184, 222;
  and the American Revolution, 61, 62;
  state of prior to American invasion, 71-5;
  Montgomery and Arnold's Invasion 75-142;
  Carlton's final administration, 184-6;
  the Loyalists, 186;
  the problem of defence, 186-7;
  education, 189-90;
  commerce, 191-3;
  population in 1791, 191;
  foreign complications, 194;
  immigration problem, 194-5;
  the church question, 195;
  the postal service, 195-6;
  two royal visits, 197-201;
  the Constitutional Act of 1791, 201-8;
  her indebtedness to Britain, 206, 208;
  and anti-British sentiment in United States, 218-23.
  See Quebec.

Carden, Major, defeats Americans at Montreal, 76-7.

Carleton, Guy, his birth and parentage, 1;
  his early career, 1-6;
  Wolfe his friend and champion, 2-7, 12;
  incurs George II's displeasure, 2, 5, 6;
  his engineering skill, 4, 5;
  with Wolfe as quarter-master-general, 6-11;
  twice mentioned in dispatches and in Wolfe's will, 12-13;
  governor of Canada, 40-1, 49-50, 158-9;
  his troubles with the Council, 42-3;
  the Walker affair, 43-5;
  the constitutional problem, 45-7;
  sails for England in connection with the Quebec Act, 46, 48-9, 60;
  advocates the seigneurial militia system, 47-9;
  his romantic marriage, 50-2;
  his defence of Canada against Montgomery's invasion, 64-65, 71-4,
    76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 85;
  his race for Quebec, 86-92;
  his defence of Quebec, 93, 94, 102-3, 107, 109, 110-11, 118, 121,
    122, 125, 127-9;
  his policy of clemency at Three Rivers, 140, 167;
  his victory on Lake Champlain, 144-8, 149-150;
  knighted, 149;
  his quarrel with Germain and his resignation, 152-61;
  his arrival in New York with unlimited powers, 164-5;
  objects to America being granted complete Independence, 166-9;
  his work in connection with the British evacuation of America, 168,
    170, 173, 175-180;
  becomes Baron Dorchester, 181-3;
  his welcome to Quebec, 183-5, 208, 210-11, 212;
  some problems requiring solution, 186-8, 189, 193, 194, 195, 201,
    202-3, 206;
  his quarrel with Simcoe, 212-14, 224;
  his attitude towards the Americans, 214, 216, 217, 220, 221;
  his final departure from Canada, 223-5;
  his wonderful record and death, 225-8;
  his character, 2, 3, 49, 102-3, 181, 183-4;
  his descendants, 227.

Carroll, Charles, Congress commissioner to Canada, 130-2, 133, 137-9.

Carroll, John, Archbishop of Baltimore, 131, 132.

Cedars, the affair at the, 134-6.

Chabot, Captain, at Prs-de-Ville, 111.

Chambly, the defence of, 73-4;
  its disgraceful surrender, 74, 77-8, 99.

Chase, Samuel, member of the Congress Commission, 130-132, 133, 137-9.

Chatham, Earl of, 24-5, 211;
  and Carleton, 2, 6, 49.
  See Pitt.

Church of England in Canada, the, 183, 195, 205, 211.

Clarke, Sir Alured, 176;
  lieutenant-governor, 188, 208.

Clergy Reserves, the, 195.

Clinton, General, 155.

Coffin, John, at Prs-de-Ville, 111, 113.

Connaught, Duke of, 198.

Constitutional Act of 1791, the, 184, 201-8.

Continental Congress, and the American Revolution, 61-2, 64, 67-8;
  the plan of campaign against Canada, 71;
  and Montgomery's defeat, 123-4;
  sends a commission into Canada, 130-2, 133, 137-9;
  the 'Affair at the Cedars,' 134-6;
  and the Indians, 136-137;
  the Asgill affair, 166;
  and the Loyalists, 173-4, 176-177.
  See Thirteen Colonies and United States.

Cook, Captain, 8.

Cornwallis, General, 155.

Cramah, Colonel, 36;
  Carleton's lieutenant, 49, 74, 83, 84-5, 99, 178.

Crown Point, 64, 66, 140, 148.


Dacre, Lieutenant, 145.

Dambourges, Lieutenant, at the Sault-au-Matelot, 117.

Dearborn, Captain, 114-15.

Digby, Admiral, 168.

Dorchester, Baron.
  See Carleton.

Dorchester, Lady, 2, 51-2, 226-227;
  her viceregal court at Quebec, 149-50, 196-7, 200-1.

Duggan, Jerry, his bombast before Quebec, 104, 108, 110, 120.

Dundas, Henry, Viscount Melville, and Carleton, 213, 217.

Durell, Admiral, 7-9.


Easton, Colonel, his summons to Carleton, 87-9.

Egremont, Lord, 26.


Fanning, Edmund, lieutenant-governor of Prince Edward Island, 196.

Forster, Captain, his 'Affair at the Cedars,' 134-6.

Fort George, 64.

Fox, Charles James, 188, 204.

France, cedes Canada to Britain, 14-16;
  her association with Americans against
  Britain, 162, 214, 215, 218-19, 221.

Franklin, Benjamin, his mission into Canada, 34, 130-2.

Fraser, Captain Malcolm, at the defence of Quebec, 109.

French Canadians, their appreciation of the British, 15, 22, 35, 36;
  after the Capitulation, 16-17, 47;
  their number in 1762, 22-3;
  changes in their laws, 26-7;
  their disabilities under English civil law, 45-46;
  and the militia, 47-8;
  the Quebec Act, 54-5;
  and the American Revolution, 62;
  the invasion of Canada, 71-3, 76, 78, 79, 82, 84, 85, 100;
  the siege of Quebec, 125-6;
  and Continental paper money, 131-2, 141;
  after the American retreat, 140-1, 149-50, 158-9;
  their partiality for certain governors, 185;
  and the Loyalists, 194-5;
  the Act of 1791, 202, 208;
  the anti-British campaign in United States, 220-3.
  See Canada and Great Britain.


Gage, General, 21, 22;
  hard pressed at Boston, 64-5.

Genet, Edmond Charles, his anti-British campaign, 218-19.

George II, and Carleton, 2, 5, 6, 151.

George III, 152.

Germain, Lord George, 150-1;
  his quarrel with Carleton, 152-3, 157-8;
  bungles his own plan against the Thirteen colonies, 156;
  his gross mismanagement of colonial affairs, 159-61, 162, 164, 183.

Germans, British mercenaries in America, 143, 153, 170, 179.

Gilmore, Thomas, starts the first newspaper in Canada, 37-9.

Girty, Simon, a British scout, 217.

Grant, Sir William, 159.

Graves, Admiral, 65.

Great Britain, her varying French Canadian policy, 16-17;
  her Indian policy, 27-8;
  and the American Revolution, 61;
  her critical case in 1777-1782, 162-4;
  grants complete Independence to the United States, 166-8;
  her policy in regard to the property of rebels, 178-9;
  the war with France and her friendly attitude towards the United
    States, 214-16.

Green Mountain Boys, the, 63, 65-7, 68, 79, 192.

Grenville, Lord, and the constitution of Canada, 188, 201, 203-4.


Haldimand, General, governor of Canada, 157, 184-6.

Hamilton, Alexander, friendly towards Britain, 215.

Hamilton, Captain, at the defence of Quebec, 96.

Hamilton, Henry, lieutenant-governor, 185.

Hey, William, chief justice, and the Walker affair, 44.

Hope, Henry, lieutenant-governor, 185, 186, 188.

Howard, Ladies Anne and Maria, 50-1.
  See Dorchester, Lady.

Howe, General, his American sympathies, 153, 155, 156.

Hubert, Bishop, his dispute with his coadjutor, 189-90, 211


Indians, British and American attitude towards, 27-8, 187;
  and the American invasion of Canada, 76, 78, 82, 103, 134-136;
  the dispute regarding their use in war, 136-7.

Inglis, Charles, Bishop of Nova Scotia, 188, 211.

Irving, Colonel, and Carleton, 41, 42-3, 44.

Isle-aux-Coudres, 8.


Jay, John, his friendliness towards Britain, 214, 215, 216.

Jefferson, Thomas, his anti-British policy, 215, 216, 217-218.

Jesuits, their power on the wane, 42.

Jesuits' Estates, the, 191.

Johnson, Sir John, and Carleton, 212-13.


Kent, Duke of, 96;
  his visit to Canada, 197-200, 209.

Kentucky, and trade with the British, 192-3.

Kirkland, Samuel, and the Indians, 136.


La Corne de St Luc, and the Walker affair, 44.

Lake Champlain, the battle on, 144-8.

Lawes, Captain, at the Sault-au-Matelot, 118-20.

Legislative Council, the, 29, 41, 42-3;
  under the Quebec Act, 54, 60, 71.

Lvis, General, 14;
  his desperate throw for victory, 15-16.

Ligonier, Sir John, and Carleton, 6.

Livingston, James, his company of Canadian 'patriots,' 69, 75, 100,
    108, 110, 120, 122.

Livius, Peter, his gross pretensions, 159-60.

Lower Canada, the first parliament in, 207-10;
  and the anti-British campaign in the United States, 222-3.
  See Quebec.

Lymburner, Adam, 204.


M'Dougall, Captain, at the Sault-au-Matelot, 118-20.

M'Kenzie, Captain, 96.

Maclean, Colonel, at the defence of Quebec, 83, 85, 96.

M'Quarters, Sergeant Hugh, at Prs-de-Ville, 111.

Madison, President James, his anti-British policy, 215.

Maritime War, the, 24-5.
  See Seven Years' War.

Meigs, Major, at the assault on the Sault-au-Matelot, 119.

Monk, James, attorney-general of Lower Canada, 223.

Montgomery, Richard, 69-71;
  his siege of St Johns, 75, 78, 80;
  his race for Carleton, 86-92;
  his meeting with Arnold and arrival before Quebec, 99-100;
  his summons to Carleton to surrender, 100-102;
  his plans for an assault, 104-8, 133-4;
  killed at Prs-de-Ville, 107-12, 121-2.

Montreal, Capitulation of, 16;
  and the baiting of the redcoats, 33-6;
  and the American Revolution, 62-3, 74, 76;
  in the hands of the Americans, 123;
  and the Congress Commission, 131-2.

Morgan, Daniel, with Arnold's expedition against Quebec, 81, 114-16,
    118, 119-20.

Morgan, Maurice, Carleton's confidential secretary, 46, 175-6.

Morris, Colonel, and the Loyalists, 175-6.

Mountain, Jacob, Bishop of Quebec, 211.

Murray, General, 12, 14-15;
  governor of Canada, 17-19, 25, 26, 28, 32, 49-50;
  quells disturbance among British troops, 19-20, 35-6;
  his report on Canada, 20-4;
  champions the French-Canadian cause, 32-3;
  called home, 36-37, 41.


Nairne, Major, at the Sault-au-Matelot, 117.

Napier, Captain, 91.

Nootka Affair, the, 193-4.

North, Lord, his unfortunate ministry, 163-4.


Osgoode, William, chief justice of Canada, 211-12.

Oswald, Captain, in the assault on the Sault-au-Matelot, 114.


Paris, Treaty of, 25.

Parr, Governor, and the Loyalists, 176.

Patterson, Walter, lieutenant-governor of Prince Edward Island, 196.

Payne, Captain, and the Walker affair, 35.

Phillips, Mary, her historic love-affair, 175.

Picard, Lieutenant, at Prs-de-Ville, 111.

Pitt, William, 211, 216;
  and the Canada Act of 1791, 201, 204-5.
  See Chatham, Earl of.

Pontiac's War, 27-8.

Presbyterian Church in Canada, the, 195.

Prs-de-Ville, 99;
  the attack on, 110-13.

Prescott, Colonel, 90, 91;
  taken prisoner, 123.

'Presentment of the Grand Jury of Quebec,' the, 30-3.

Preston, Major, his defence of St Johns, 74-5, 78, 80.

Price, a rebel Montrealer, 106.

Prince Edward Island, the refractory lieutenant-governor, 195, 196.

Pringle, Captain, on Lake Champlain, 145-6.


Quebec: some war prices in Wolfe's camp, 10-11;
  conditions after the fall, 14-15;
  her defences in 1762, 21-2;
  under the Quebec Act, 53;
  the American invasion of Canada, 83-4, 85;
  Montgomery and Arnold's Siege, 93-129;
  Quebec in 1775, 93;
  position of the combatants, 93-4;
  the defences, 94, 99, 110-11, 113-14, 122;
  Carleton's compulsory measures of defence, 94-5, 122-3;
  composition of the British defenders, 95-7, 121;
  a comparison of men and armaments, 97-9, 99-100, 108-9;
  Montgomery's summons to Carleton, 100-2;
  the bombardment, 103-7, 124, 126;
  Prs-de-Ville and the Sault-au-Matelot, 107-21, 133-4;
  the reply to the American summons, 124;
  the plot among the American prisoners, 124-5;
  the relief and the American retreat, 127-9;
  --gay times in Quebec, 149-150;
  the opening of the first parliament, 208-10.

Quebec Act of 1774, the, 52-5, 60, 158-9, 184, 222;
  feelings regarding, 55-6;
  some criticism, 56-9.


Richmond, Duke of, and Carleton, 3.

Riedesel, Baron, 143.

Roman Catholics, under the Quebec Act, 53-4.


Sackville, Lord George, 5.
  See Germain.

St Johns, 64, 67;
  its siege and surrender, 74-5, 78, 79, 80, 99.

Saratoga, British disaster at, 156, 162.

Sault-au-Matelot, 99;
  the assault on, 113-20.

Saunders, Admiral, with Wolfe at Quebec, 7, 8, 9.

Schuyler, General Philip, and the invasion of Canada, 67-8, 69, 70.

Seven Years' War, the first shot fired in, 4;
  Pitt's bloody and expensive war, 24-5.

Seymour, Miss, and the Carleton romance, 51-2.

Simcoe, John Graves, his quarrel with Carleton, 212-14, 224.

Smith, William, chief justice of Canada, 188-9, 201;
  advocates Confederation, 202-3, 211.

Sorel, 74, 86, 87-8, 138, 205;
  a change of name, 197.

Stopford, Major, his disgraceful surrender of Chambly, 74, 75, 77.

Sullivan, General John, his defeat at Three Rivers, 139-40.

Sydney, Lord, and Carleton, 188.


Templer, Colonel, 71.

Thirteen Colonies, and the Indian trade, 41-2;
  their fury at the Quebec Act, 56;
  revolutionists and Loyalists, 61-2;
  their Declaration of Independence, 142;
  their relations with Britain before the Revolution, 171-3.
  See American War of Independence and United States.

Thomas, General John, and the siege of Quebec, 122, 126-7, 139.

Thompson, James, finds Montgomery's body, 121-2.

Three Rivers, the battle of, 139-140.

Ticonderoga, 64, 65-6, 69-70;
  a momentous issue, 148, 152-3, 155,157.

Trenton, the British disaster at, 153.


United Empire Loyalists, the, 17, 61-2, 143;
  their wretched situation in United States, 169, 170-1, 173;
  the exodus, 176-80, 184, 186, 191, 194-5, 201.

United States, the central authority weak, 173, 192-3;
  pro-British and anti-British feeling in, 214-23.
  See American War of Independence, Continental Congress, and
    Thirteen Colonies.

Upper Canada, its first parliament, 207-8.
  See Canada.


Vergennes, Comte de, French minister to United States, 166.

Vermont, and trade with the British, 192;
  anti-British, 219-20.


Walker, Thomas, his persecution of the redcoats, 34-6, 43-44;
  his arrest, 75, 78-9, 91, 123.

Warde, Colonel George, 5, 12.

Warner, Seth, and the Green Mountain Boys, 63, 65-6, 69, 79.

Washington, George, 4, 68;
  and the American Revolution, 71, 82, 137, 152-3, 154, 166, 176-7;
  and the Loyalists, 174;
  his love-affair, 175;
  his friendliness towards Britain, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219.

Wayne, General, 217.

William IV, his visit to Canada, 197.

Wolfe, General, 151;
  his friendship for Carleton, 2, 3, 5, 6-7, 12;
  his siege of Quebec, 6-7, 8, 9, 11-12, 18.

Wooster, General, 68, 69;
  and the siege of Quebec, 122, 124, 126.


Yorktown, British surrender at, 163.




_THE CHRONICLES OF CANADA_

Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton of the University of
Toronto

A series of thirty-two freshly-written narratives for popular reading,
designed to set forth, in historic continuity, the principal events
and movements in Canada, from the Norse Voyages to the Railway
Builders.


PART I. THE FIRST EUROPEAN VISITORS

    1.   _The Dawn of Canadian History_
          A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada
                          BY STEPHEN LEACOCK

    2.   _The Mariner of St Malo_
          A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier
                          BY STEPHEN LEACOCK


PART II. THE RISE OF NEW FRANCE

    3.   _The Founder of New France_
          A Chronicle of Champlain
                          BY CHARLES W. COLBY

    4.   _The Jesuit Missions_
          A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness
                          BY THOMAS GUTHRIE MARQUIS

    5.   _The Seigneurs of Old Canada_
          A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism
                          BY WILLIAM BENNETT MUNRO

    6.   _The Great Intendant_
          A Chronicle of Jean Talon
                          BY THOMAS CHAPAIS

    7.   _The Fighting Governor_
          A Chronicle of Frontenac
                          BY CHARLES W. COLBY


PART III. THE ENGLISH INVASION

    8.  _The Great Fortress_
         A Chronicle of Louisbourg
                          BY WILLIAM WOOD

    9.  _The Acadian Exiles_
         A Chronicle of the Land of Evangeline
                          BY ARTHUR G. DOUGHTY

   10.  _The Passing of New France_
         A Chronicle of Montcalm
                          BY WILLIAM WOOD

   11.  _The Winning of Canada_
         A Chronicle of Wolfe
                          BY WILLIAM WOOD


PART IV. THE BEGINNINGS OF BRITISH CANADA

   12.  _The Father of British Canada_
         A Chronicle of Carleton
                          BY WILLIAM WOOD

   13.  _The United Empire Loyalists_
         A Chronicle of the Great Migration
                          BY W. STEWART WALLACE

   14.  _The War with the United States_
         A Chronicle of 1812
                          BY WILLIAM WOOD


PART V. THE RED MAN IN CANADA

   15.  _The War Chief of the Ottawas_
         A Chronicle of the Pontiac War
                          BY THOMAS GUTHRIE MARQUIS

   16.  _The War Chief of the Six Nations_
         A Chronicle of Joseph Brant
                          BY LOUIS AUBREY WOOD

   17.  _Tecumseh_
         A Chronicle of the last Great Leader of his People
                          BY ETHEL T. RAYMOND


PART VI. PIONEERS OF THE NORTH AND WEST

   18.  _The 'Adventurers of England' on Hudson Bay_
         A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North
                          BY AGNES C. LAUT

   19.  _Pathfinders of the Great Plains_
         A Chronicle of La Vrendrye and his Sons
                          BY LAWRENCE J. BURPEE

   20.  _Adventurers of the Far North_
         A Chronicle of the Arctic Seas
                          BY STEPHEN LEACOCK

   21.  _The Red River Colony_
         A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba
                          BY LOUIS AUBREY WOOD

   22.  _Pioneers of the Pacific Coast_
         A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters
                          BY AGNES C. LAUT

   23.  _The Cariboo Trail_
         A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia
                          BY AGNES C. LAUT


PART VII. THE STRUGGLE FOR POLITICAL FREEDOM

   24.  _The Family Compact_
         A Chronicle of the Rebellion in Upper Canada
                          BY W. STEWART WALLACE

   25.  _The Patriotes of '37_
         A Chronicle of the Rebellion in Lower Canada
                          BY ALFRED D. DECELLES

   26.  _The Tribune of Nova Scotia_
         A Chronicle of Joseph Howe
                          BY WILLIAM LAWSON GRANT

   27.  _The Winning of Popular Government_
         A Chronicle of the Union of 1841
                         BY ARCHIBALD MACMECHAN


PART VIII. THE GROWTH OF NATIONALITY

   28.  _The Fathers of Confederation_
         A Chronicle of the Birth of the Dominion
                          BY A. H. U. COLQUHOUN

   29.  _The Day of Sir John Macdonald_
         A Chronicle of the Early Years of the Dominion
                          BY SIR JOSEPH POPE

   30.  _The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier_
         A Chronicle of Our Own Times
                          BY OSCAR D. SKELTON


PART IX. NATIONAL HIGHWAYS

   31.  _All Afloat_
         A Chronicle of Craft and Waterways
                          BY WILLIAM WOOD

   32.  _The Railway Builders_
         A Chronicle of Overland Highways
                          BY OSCAR D. SKELTON


Published by
Glasgow, Brook & Company
TORONTO, CANADA




[End of _The Father of British Canada_ by William Wood]
