Early British rule, 1763–91

The Quebec Act

At first the former New France was to be governed by the Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763, which declared the territory between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi to be Indian territory and closed to settlement until the Indigenous peoples there could be subdued. What had been New France became known as the Province of Quebec, which was to have a royal governor who had the authority to call an assembly. However, the 70,000 French inhabitants of Quebec could neither vote nor sit in the assembly by virtue of their Roman Catholicism.

Few British Americans moved to Quebec (there were perhaps 500 migrants in all), and those who did were attracted primarily by the prospect of taking control of the fur trade. Their bourgeois mentality and repeated demands for the “rights of Englishmen” tended to alienate the conservative British officers who administered the colony. Among the latter was General James Murray, who was appointed the colony’s first governor in 1763. Murray sympathized with the condition and difficulties of the French and ignored the demands of the recently arrived Protestants for an assembly, with the result that an agitation by the Protestants led to his recall. He was replaced in 1766 by General Guy Carleton (later 1st Baron Dorchester), who was expected in Quebec to carry out the policy of the proclamation. However, Carleton soon came to see that the colony was certain to be permanently French. He decided that Britain’s best course was to forge an alliance with the elites of the former French colony—the seigneurs and the Roman Catholic church.

Carleton returned to England in 1770 to press his new policy for Quebec on the government of Lord North. The trouble the imperial government continued to have with the colonies to the south secured official acceptance of Carleton’s policy. The result was the Quebec Act of 1774, which marked a radical departure from the manner by which British colonies in America were governed. It granted permission for Roman Catholics in Quebec to hold public office; stipulated that an appointed council, rather than an elected assembly, would advise the governor; and legitimized French civil law, though English criminal law was to be in force. The Quebec Act also recognized the legitimacy of the French language and the Roman Catholic faith, gave the church power to enforce the collection of tithes, and formalized the authority of the seigneurs to collect cens et rentes. In addition, Quebec’s territory was greatly expanded, its western border henceforth stretching to the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

Carleton had sought to cement French loyalty to Britain. As the American Revolution would demonstrate, however, the Quebec Act did not do that. Instead, it brought about a virtual revolution in Quebec society. The Quebec Act gave the seigneurs, the church, and the clergy a degree of authority and influence they had never enjoyed even under the French regime. Prior to 1763 many of the clergy’s edicts had been ignored by the larger society, while the political power of the bishop had been inconsequential compared with that of the governor and intendant; the latter two officials often circumscribed church authority in matters such as relations with the First Nations. After 1774, however, the bishop and the church reigned supreme in their own sphere, especially since British governing authorities were loath to interfere in religious matters. The Quebec Act also enhanced the status of the seigneurs by giving them unchallenged legal authority to set the terms and conditions of settlement on their lands. Magnifying this important change, some seigneurs sold their holdings to members of the newly arrived English-speaking merchant class. These new seigneurs, with no understanding of the informal habitant-seigneur relationship under French rule, frequently thought of themselves—and acted—as landed gentry in their dealings with the habitants.

Carleton had erred, either misunderstanding or ignoring the underlying realities of the social structure and class relations he found when he arrived in Quebec. He imposed his own vision of what Quebec ought to be, an action that earned the British the support of the church and the seigneurs but the distinct dislike of the habitants, who soon realized just how much their position in society had been eroded. As the years went by, that erosion would have a dramatic impact on their living standards.

The influence of the American Revolution

To the American colonies, the Quebec Act was menacing—it reestablished to the north and west an area despotically ruled, predominantly French and Roman Catholic, with an alien form of land tenure. Instead of intimidating the American colonies, the act helped push the Americans to open revolt. Indeed, the first act of the American Continental Congress in 1775 was not to declare independence but to invade Canada. The failure of that invasion ensured that the continent north of the Rio Grande would, on the recognition of American independence, be divided between the Americans and the British.

Not all American colonists had supported the cause of independence, and many had resisted it in arms. At the conclusion of hostilities, these loyalists had to make their peace with the new republic, though many went into exile. The refugees, known as United Empire Loyalists, were the object of considerable concern to the British government, which sought to compensate them for their losses and to assist them in establishing new homes. Some went to the United Kingdom, others to the British West Indies, but the majority immigrated to Nova Scotia or Quebec. Nova Scotia, which to a great extent had been recently settled by American colonists, had not, except for an ineffectual rising or two, joined the revolting colonies. Overawed by British sea power and by the fortress of Halifax, Nova Scotians at first kept quiet, and later many of them even made fortunes privateering against American commerce. Easily reached by sea from New York, Nova Scotia became the chief refuge of the loyalists. Some settled on the peninsula itself, some on Cape Breton Island and in the separate colony of Prince Edward Island. A large number, however, settled along the St. John River, north of the Bay of Fundy. Dissatisfied with tardy government from Halifax, they promptly agitated for a government of their own, and equally promptly the new province of New Brunswick was created for them in 1784, with its own governor and assembly.

In Quebec the loyalists simply crossed the new frontier and settled along the St. Lawrence River to the west of the old French settlements. Their impact in Quebec was even greater than in Nova Scotia and led to the creation of the Constitutional Act of 1791. The loyalists who settled in Central Canada were for the most part quite different from those who went to what were soon to be called the Maritime colonies (later the Maritime Provinces). The latter had possessed an elite of government officials and professional men, often loyalist regiments with their officers and men, from the long-settled seaboard areas. The Central Canadian loyalists, however, were largely from upper New York, especially the Mohawk valley country, and from Pennsylvania and were almost wholly simple frontier folk and recent immigrants, driven from their homes by neighbours who often used the Revolution to dispossess them of their lands (thus explaining the bitter fighting along the frontier and the long loyalist hatred in the new province for all things American). Their coming transformed the character of the population of Quebec. That province had been given a government much like that of New France, except for the important office of intendant, and the province was in population almost wholly French, as it was in civil law. Most loyalists had one desire, to hold the land granted them in simple ownership, something the civil law of Quebec did not allow. Some of them—how many is uncertain—also wanted representative government, which was denied by the Quebec Act. Their representations reached London and were listened to with respect.

The Constitutional Act of 1791

The appeals of the loyalists caused a great problem for the British government. The measures taken in the Quebec Act to conciliate the French could not in honour or policy be withdrawn. Yet the loyalists could not be required to live under French civil and land law and without the representative assembly to which they were accustomed. One obvious answer was to divide Quebec into separate French and English provinces. The English province would have, of course, English common law and an assembly. The French province might have been left with the forms of government provided by the Quebec Act. But there had already been one revolution in America, and by 1789 another had broken out in France. British statesmen felt that the former had occurred partly because Americans had not been granted the British constitution in its proper forms. From this view, the thing to do was to give both the new province and Quebec the British constitution in its entirety as far as circumstances might permit. The result would be, it was hoped, to assimilate the French population.

After a fiery debate in the British House of Commons, the Constitutional Act of 1791 gave the same constitution to the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada (now Ontario and Quebec, respectively). Nothing that had been given the French in 1774 was revoked, but the form of government was changed to the familiar one of governor with his executive council, a legislative council, and an assembly elected on what was for the time a wide franchise. The result of this last provision was that the first assembly in 1792 had a majority of French members.