The Canadian Dominion | Page 8

in London had been driven by events to accept Carleton's paradox, that to make Quebec British, it must be prevented from becoming English. If in later years the solidarity and aloofness of the French-Canadian people were sometimes to prove inconvenient to British interests, it was always to be remembered that this situation was due in great part to the deliberate action of Great Britain in strengthening French-Canadian institutions as a means of advancing what she considered her own interests in America. "The views of the British Government in respect to the political uses to which it means to make Canada subservient," Marriott had truly declared, "must direct the spirit of any code of laws."
The Quebec Act multiplied the area of the colony sevenfold by the restoration of all Labrador on the east and the region west as far as the Ohio and the Mississippi and north to the Hudson's Bay Company's territory. It restored the old French civil law but continued the milder English criminal law already in operation. It gave to the Roman Catholic inhabitants the free exercise of their religion, subject to a modified oath of allegiance, and confirmed the clergy in their right "to hold, receive and enjoy their accustomed dues and rights, with respect to such persons only as shall confess the said religion." The promised elective Assembly was not granted, but a Council appointed by the Crown received a measure of legislative power.
On his return to Canada in September, 1774, Carleton reported that the Canadians had "testified the strongest marks of Joy and Gratitude and Fidelity to their King and to His Government for the late Arrangements made at Home in their Favor." The "most respectable part of the English," he continued, urged peaceful acceptance of the new order. Evidently, however, the respectable members of society were few, as the great body of the English settlers joined in a petition for the repeal of the Act on the ground that it deprived them of the incalculable benefits of habeas corpus and trial by jury. The Montreal merchants, whether, as Carleton commented, they "were of a more turbulent Turn, or that they caught the Fire from some Colonists settled among them," were particularly outspoken in the town meetings they held. In the older colonies the opposition was still more emphatic. An Act which hemmed them in to the seacoast, established on the American continent a Church they feared and hated, and continued an autocratic political system, appeared to many to be the undoing of the work of Pitt and Wolfe and the revival on the banks of the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi of a serious menace to their liberty and progress.
Then came the clash at Lexington, and the War of American Independence had begun. The causes, the course, and the ending of that great civil war have been treated elsewhere in this series.* Here it is necessary only to note its bearings on the fate of Canada.
* See "The Eve of the Revolution" and "Washington and His Comrades in Arms" (in "The Chronicles of America").
Early in 1775 the Continental Congress undertook the conquest of Canada, or, as it was more diplomatically phrased, the relief of its inhabitants from British tyranny. Richard Montgomery led an expedition over the old route by Lake Champlain and the Richelieu, along which French and Indian raiding parties used to pass years before, and Benedict Arnold made a daring and difficult march up the Kennebec and down the Chaudiere to Quebec. Montreal fell to Montgomery; and Carleton himself escaped capture only by the audacity of some French-Canadian voyageurs, who, under cover of darkness, rowed his whaleboat or paddled it with their hands silently past the American sentinels on the shore. Once down the river and in Quebec, Carleton threw himself with vigor and skill into the defense of his capital. His generalship and the natural strength of the position proved more than a match for Montgomery and Arnold. Montgomery was killed and Arnold wounded in a vain attempt to carry the city by storm on the last night of 1775. At Montreal a delegation from Congress, composed of Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton, accompanied by Carroll's brother, a Jesuit priest and a future archbishop, failed to achieve-more by diplomacy than their generals had done by the sword. The Canadians seemed, content enough to wear the British yoke. In the spring, when a British fleet arrived with reenforcements, the American troops retired in haste and, before the Declaration of Independence had been proclaimed, Canada was free from the last of its ten thousand invaders.
The expedition had put Carleton's policy to the test. On the whole it stood the strain. The seigneurs had rallied to the Government which had restored their rights, and the clergy had called on the