Slavery in Canada
Part 4
The following is an excerpt from “The Unveiling of Canadian History, Volume 4, The Storming of Hell - The War for the Territory Northwest of Ohio, 1786 - 1796”.
[from Storming of Hell, Part 2 - The Canadian Frontier]
3. The Grenville Plan, October 20th 1789 (part 1)
On October 20th 1789, Grenville wrote to Dorchester that :
“it having been determined to bring under the consideration of Parliament early in the next session the propriety of making farther provision for the good government of the province of Quebec, I enclose to your lordship the draught of a bill prepared for this purpose … Your lordship will observe that the general object of this plan is to assimilate the constitution of that province 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.”
Grenville also proposed the division of the province into two districts :
“to continue to them [French Canadians] the enjoyment of those civil and religious rights which were secured to them by the capitulation of the province [in 1763], or have since been granted by the liberal and enlightened spirit of the British government [!?!] … There will however be a considerable difficulty in the mode of describing the boundary between the District of Upper Canada and the territories of the United States, as the adhering to the line mentioned in the treaty with America would exclude the posts which are still in his Majesty’s possession, and which the infraction of the treaty on the part of the America has induced His Majesty to retain, while on the other hand the including them by express words within the limits to be established for the province by an act of the British Parliament would probably exert a considerable degree of resentment among the inhabitants of the United States and might perhaps provoke them to measures detrimental to our commercial interests. Probably the best solution for this difficulty might be to describe the Upper District by some general words.”
In a ‘private and secret letter’, Grenville wrote to Dorchester that :
“I am persuaded that it is a point of true policy to make these concessions at a time when they may be received as matter of favour, and when it is in our own power to regulate and direct the manner of applying them, rather than to wait till they shall be extorted from us by a necessity which shall neither leave us any discretion in the form, nor any merit in the substance of what we give … the state of France is such as gives us little to fear from that quarter in the present moment. The opportunity is therefore most favourable for the adoption of such measures as may tend to consolidate our strength, and increase our resources, so as to enable ourselves to meet any efforts that the most favourable event of the present troubles can ever enable her to make.”
With British intelligence about to launch their regime-change operation in France (against the true republicans), this seemed like a good time to establish a British type of monarchical government over Canada. And it seemed better to do it now when the British government may feign to appear to favorably bestow their type of government upon them, instead of later when a different type of government may be demanded.
Grenville also enclosed :
(1) a Plan for a House of Assembly drawn up by the Committee of Quebec and Montreal in November 1784, that was delivered by Lymburner to Grenville on July 24th 1789; and
(2) a Report to the Privy Council from the Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations relative to the state of the Province of Quebec with regard to the House of Representatives, that was dated July 10th 1769.
[a report on a government for Canada had been sitting there since 1769 !!!]
On February 8th 1790, the Governor of Canada, Dorchester replied to Grenville with his observations and suggestions, along with suggestions from the Chief Justice of Canada, William Smith, but this dispatch was not received until April 18th, and by then ‘the session of Parliament was then so far advanced that it was not thought proper to bring forward at that time the proposed bill for regulating the government of Quebec, especially as several of the observations stated by your Lordship on the subject were of a nature to require previous consideration.’
On March 15th, Dorchester again wrote to Grenville to propose persons for seats on the legislative and executive councils, and to propose Sir John Johnson ‘as the properest person for the government of Upper Canada’.
In reply, Grenville wrote that before receiving this letter, Grenville had already submitted to his majesty the name of Lieutenant-Colonel John Graves Simcoe for the lieutenant-governorship. Simcoe was a good friend of Grenville’s brother George, the Marquis of Buckingham, and had stood for and won the election for St. Mawes in Cornwall, a seat that ‘belonged’ to Buckingham.
But, who was Colonel John Graves Simcoe?
After a year under a military tutor at Exeter, Simcoe obtained a commission in 1770 as ensign in the 35th Foot, through the influence of his mother’s family. The regiment was sent to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1775, Simcoe arriving two days after the battle of Bunker Hill. During the siege of the town he purchased a captaincy in the 40th Foot, the regiment with which he was to serve in the Long Island campaign, the capture of New York City, and the New Jersey campaigns of 1776–77.
Convinced that the British army had no appreciation of light infantry and that no European army had properly organized light cavalry, he wanted to form a combined light corps that would be especially suited for service in America. After being refused permission to raise a corps from among the free blacks of Boston, he obtained command on Oct. 15th 1777 of the ‘Queen’s Rangers’ with the provincial rank of major.
The Rangers, a tory corps raised a year earlier, had suffered heavy losses. Simcoe brought them up to strength, mainly by recruiting tory refugees and American deserters. They served continuously for the duration of the war as reconnaissance and outpost troops: in the Pennsylvania campaign of 1778 and the subsequent retreat to New York, in Benedict Arnold’s raid on Richmond, Va., and in the Yorktown campaign. Their training gave little attention to formal drill, but insisted on physical fitness, rapid movement, bayonet fighting, and, most particularly, discipline in the field.
Simcoe was himself captured in an ambush in 1779 and spent six months as a prisoner. He was invalided home just before the surrender of Yorktown in 1781. The war had been for him a great personal success: he had risen in army rank from lieutenant to lieutenant-colonel; in action he had been one of the two or three most consistently successful of British regimental commanders; and he had acquired a reputation as a tactical theorist, which was soon enhanced by the publication at Exeter in 1787 of his Journal of the Operations of the Queen’s Rangers.
Simcoe was sent home on parole from which he was finally released when he was exchanged for an American prisoner of equal rank being held by the British. Simcoe's parole discharge stated that as British government ministers had ‘earnestly desired that Lieutenant-Colonel Simcoe on parole to the United States of America be released from his said parole, I do hereby absolve the parole.’ The parole was signed by Benjamin Franklin.
He convalesced at the Devon home of Admiral Samuel Graves, his godfather, whose ward he married. Elizabeth Posthuma Gwillim was a considerable heiress. She bought a 5,000-acre estate at Honiton in Devon, and built Wolford Lodge, which was to be the family seat until 1923. Simcoe’s own financial resources seem to have been trivial in comparison.
With the peace treaty signed with the United States, Simcoe pondered, what would be the fate of the remaining provinces of British North America? Canada, he recognized, would become the most vulnerable.
In a December 3rd 1789 letter to Evan Nepean, Under Secretary of State, he offered that “should Canada act upon the wise, enlarged, and just plan of annihilating at once every vestige of military government in her native colonies, and undermining by degrees the miserable feudal system of old Canada … I should be happy to consecrate myself to the service of Great Britain in that country.” He stated that the chain of British forts along the Canadian border could not be kept “without an alliance with Vermont, and should they be given up, the loss of Canada ultimately and not very remotely must follow”. He proposed to unite Canada with Vermont and to secure the route into Canada via a canal on the Richelieu River.
His best chance of obtaining a public appointment being through active participation in politics, he was elected to the House of Commons in the government interest for the Cornish borough of St Mawes in 1790. In a brief and obscure parliamentary career, when he rose to speak, he addressed himself mainly to matters concerning Canada, and his only reported speeches were on the new Quebec government bill and on the resumed impeachment of Warren Hastings.
The bill to reorganize and split Canada in 1791 was passed during the midst of the hearings and vote against abolishing slavery. Simcoe, who had wanted to recruit blacks for the British army, supported Wilberforce. Simcoe envisaged a fine settlement in Upper Canada populated by Loyalists, many of whom he had led as members of the Queen's Rangers during the revolution. He loved the monarchy and the aristocracy and he could not imagine a society without rank, privilege and hierarchy.
Despite his professed hatred of the new republic to the south, he longed to be Britain's first ambassador to the United States of America. In a letter dated March 16th 1791 to Evan Nepean, Simcoe inquired whether the Embassy in the United States, ‘the original object of my wishes’, might be open to him. He was curtly informed that it was not. Consequently, the sovereign's ‘trusty and well-beloved’ John Graves Simcoe was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada on September 12th 1791.
On February 25th 1791, Prime Minister Pitt presented the House of Commons with 2 messages from the king – to divide the province of Canada into two separate provinces; and to provide for appropriation of lands for the support of the Protestant clergy. On March 4th, in response to the King’s messages, Pitt introduced an act to repeal parts of the 1774 Quebec Act and ‘to make further provision for the government’.
It would seem that the British government had a proposal for ‘exempting them [i.e. French speaking Canadians] from the obligation of subscribing the Declaration of Transubstantiation’, that banned Roman Catholics from being elected or from holding an office, and that it had, in fact, already drawn up their own plan for a Quebec Assembly, in 1769(!) - a plan that the British government had sat on for almost 20 years, and now suddenly were concerned about.
The question is, what caused this sudden reversal of policy? Was it the situation in Vermont or in Kentucky, and the thinking that the United States would not be able to remain united for very long, and that Britain must be prepared for any possible, potential results. Or was it something hinted at by Grenville, when he wrote to Dorchester that ‘the state of France is such as gives us little to fear from that quarter in the present moment’?
In order to understand this debate, one must look at the situation in France, and also in Britain and Ireland.
[ next week - part 5 - The Grenville Plan (part 2) ]