These differences of origin and ways of thought had not yet been reflected in political life.Party strife in Upper Canada began with a factional fight which took place in 1805-07 between a group of Irish officeholders and a Scotch clique who held the reins of government.Weekes, an Irish-American barrister, Thorpe, a puisne judge, Wyatt, the surveyor general, and Willcocks, a United Irishman who had become sheriff of one of the four Upper Canada districts, began to question the right to rule of "the Scotch pedlars" or "the Shopkeeper Aristocracy," as Thorpe called those merchants who, for the lack of other leaders, had developed an influence with the governors or ruled in their frequent absence.But the insurgents were backed by only a small minority in the Assembly, and when the four leaders disappeared from the stage,* this curtain raiser to the serious political drama which was to follow came quickly to its end.
* Weekes was slain in a duel.Wyatt and Thorpe were suspended by the Lieutenant Governor, Sir Francis Gore, only to win redress later in England.Willcocks was dismissed from office and fell fighting on the American side in the War of 1812.
In Lower Canada the clash was more serious.The French Canadians, who had not asked for representative government, eventually grasped its possibilities and found leaders other than those ordained for them.In the first Assembly there were many seigneurs and aristocrats who bore names notable for six generations back Taschereau, Duchesnay, Lotbiniere, Rouville, Salaberry.But they soon found their surroundings uncongenial or failed to be reelected.Writing in 1810 to Lord Liverpool, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, the Governor, Sir James Craig, with a fine patrician scorn thus pictures the Assembly of his day.
"It really, my Lord, appears to me an absurdity, that the Interests of certainly not an unimportant Colony, involving in them those also of no inconsiderable portion of the Commercial concerns of the British Empire, should be in the hands of six petty shopkeepers, a Blacksmith, a Miller, and 15 ignorant peasants who form part of our present House; a Doctor or Apothecary, twelve Canadian Avocats and Notaries, and four so far respectable people that at least they do not keep shops, together with ten English members compleat the List: there is not one person coming under the description of a Canadian Gentleman among them."And again:
"A Governor cannot obtain among them even that sort of influence that might arise from personal intercourse.I can have none with Blacksmiths, Millers, and Shopkeepers; even the Avocats and Notaries who compose so considerable a portion of the House, are, generally speaking, such as I can nowhere meet, except during the actual sitting of Parliament, when I have a day of the week expressly appropriated to the receiving a large portion of them at dinner."Leadership under these conditions fell to the "unprincipled Demagogues," half-educated lawyers, men "with nothing to lose."But it was not merely as an aristocrat facing peasants and shopkeepers, nor as a soldier faced by talkers, but as an Englishman on guard against Frenchmen that Craig found himself at odds with his Assembly.For nearly twenty years in this period England was at death grips with France, end to hate and despise all Frenchmen was part of the hereditary and congenial duty of all true Britons.Craig and those who counseled him were firmly convinced that the new subjects were French at heart.Of the 250,000 inhabitants of Lower Canada, he declared, "about 20,000or 25,000 may be English or Americans, the rest are French.I use the term designedly, my Lord, because I mean to say that they are in Language, in religion, in manner and in attachment completely French." That there was still some affection for old France, stirred by war and French victories, there is no question, but that the Canadians wished to return to French allegiance was untrue, even though Craig reported that such was "the general opinion of all ranks with whom it is possible to converse on the subject." The French Revolution had created a great gulf between Old France and New France.The clergy did their utmost to bar all intercourse with the land where deism and revolution held sway, and when the Roman Catholic Church and the British Government combined for years on a single object, it was little wonder they succeeded.Nelson's victory at Trafalgar was celebrated by a Te Deum in the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Quebec.In fact, as Craig elsewhere noted, the habitants were becoming rather a new and distinct nationality, a nation canadienne.They ceased to be French; they declined to become English; and sheltered under their "Sacred Charter"* they became Canadians first and last.
* "It cannot be sufficiently inculcated ON THE PART OF GOVERNMENTthat the Quebec Act is a Sacred Charter, granted by the King in Parliament to the Canadians as a Security for their Religion, Laws, and Property." Governor Sir Frederick Haldimand to Lord George Germaine, Oct.25, 1780.
The governors were not alone in this hostility to the mass of the people.There had grown up in the colony a little clique of officeholders, of whom Jonathan Sewell, the Loyalist Attorney General, and later Chief Justice, was the chief, full of racial and class prejudice, and in some cases greedy for personal gain.
Sewell declared it "indispensably necessary to overwhelm and sink the Canadian population by English Protestants," and was even ready to run the risk of bringing in Americans to effect this end.Of the non-official English, some were strongly opposed to the pretensions of the "Chateau Clique"; but others, and especially the merchants, with their organ the Quebec "Mercury", were loud in their denunciations of the French who were unprogressive and who as landowners were incidentally trying to throw the burden of taxation chiefly on the traders.
