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History The history of Canada was shaped by the encounter of its people with the rigors and riches of a vast new land. It was also marked by the achievements and conflicts of its diverse inhabitants—indigenous tribes and French, English, and other European immigrants. A pervasive influence was Canada's southern neighbor, the United States. A Meeting of Peoples North America, from which the country of Canada emerged, received large waves of immigrants from both the West and the East over many thousands of years. Native Americans In a series of migrations that occurred during the last stages of the Pleistocene Ice Age, Mongoloid peoples from Asia entered North America, probably crossing the Bering Strait. Gradually they spread over the continent and into South America. By 1600, perhaps 250,000 of their aboriginal descendants inhabited what is now Canada. Developing a Stone Age economy, they hunted, fished, and gathered food and, in warmer areas, also farmed. The basic social unit was the band, which varied from a few families to several hundred people. In more sophisticated aboriginal cultures, bands were organized into tribes. The largest linguistic group was the Algonquian, which included migratory hunting tribes such as the Cree and Naskapi in the eastern subarctic region and the Abnaki and Micmac in the eastern woodlands on the coast. By the 18th century, Algonquians had spread west, where the Ottawa, Ojibwa, Blackfoot, Plains Cree, and others roamed the prairies and plains in search of buffalo. The Iroquoian-speaking tribes—the Huron and the Iroquois—lived in permanent farm settlements and had a highly developed tribal organization in the St. Lawrence Valley and around Lakes Ontario and Erie (see IROQUOIAN FAMILY). Tribes of Salishan, Athabascan, and other linguistic groups occupied fishing villages along the rivers of interior British Columbia. On the Pacific coast, Salishan tribes, such as the Bellacoola, and related Wakashan-speaking tribes—the Kwakiutl and Nootka—developed a rich culture, based on salmon fishing, expressed in potlatch ceremonies and carved wood totem poles. In the western subarctic, the Athabascan group—Carrier, Dogrib, and others—led a primitive hunting existence similar to that of the Algonquians. Small, isolated Inuit bands developed a unique culture based on hunting seals and caribou, enabling them to survive the harsh environment of the Arctic. European Intruders The first Europeans to reach North America were probably the Icelandic colonizers of Greenland. According to Icelandic sagas, Leif Ericson reached Vinland—somewhere along the North Atlantic coast—about AD 1000. Archaeological evidence suggests that Nordic people later established short-lived settlements in Labrador and Newfoundland. Claims that they penetrated deep into the mainland have not been substantiated. A second wave of European exploration, between 1480 and 1540, firmly established the existence of the new land in European minds. Many of the explorers, under government auspices, sought a northwest passage by sea from Europe to Asia's riches and thus regarded the Canadian landmass as an obstacle as well as a potentially useful discovery. The voyage to Newfoundland in 1497 of John Cabot, a Venetian in English service, inspired a series of further explorations and laid the basis for English claims to Canada. During the 1530s and 1540s the French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence River, claiming the land for France. His failure to find a Northwest Passage—or gold, as the Spanish had found in Peru—discouraged further exploration. France was also too preoccupied with domestic religious wars to make any substantial commitment. Canada was important, however, to English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese fishing fleets, all of which regularly fished the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. English and French interest in Canada revived in the late 16th century, largely for commercial reasons. The English explorers Martin Frobisher in the 1570s and Henry Hudson (in Dutch service) in 1610 and 1611 continued the fruitless search for a passage to Asia. English fishing interests in the 1630s secured a virtual prohibition on efforts to colonize Newfoundland. Earliest French Settlements The French were more successful. Fishermen had noticed the abundance of beaver, whose pelts merchants were eager to market in Europe. The French government, motivated by visions of building an empire in the New World, decided to work through commercial monopolies, which in return for control of the fur trade would foster colonization. A monopoly granted to Pierre du Guast, sieur de Monts in 1603 established trade settlements in Acadia in 1604 (now New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island) and at Québec City on the St. Lawrence. The settlement of Québec in 1608 owed much to Samuel de Champlain, an explorer hired by de Monts, who became the foremost champion of French colonization. Eventually Champlain convinced Cardinal Richelieu, chief adviser to Louis XIII, of the importance of North America to his mercantilist system of state-aided economic development. In 1627 Richelieu organized a joint-stock company, the Company of One Hundred Associates, to found a powerful center of French civilization in the New World. This European intrusion over the next 300 years completely disrupted the aboriginal cultures, which, although stable, lacked the numbers, technology, and organization to withstand it. The introduction of liquor and of smallpox and other European diseases decimated many tribes. Missionaries undermined old systems of belief, as, for example, Roman Catholics among the Huron and Protestants among Pacific coast indigenous groups. Perhaps most destructive was the Europeans' demand for land, which deprived the aborigines of their freedom of movement, eventually eliminating some tribes. As their way of life was curtailed, the Native Americans, ill adapted to European ways, became a subjugated minority. New France (1627-1763) As a French possession, New France reflected the interests of the parent country. A Proprietary Colony Under the proprietorship of Richelieu's company, and later its colonial agent, the Community of Habitants (1645-1663), the new French colony took shape along the St. Lawrence. In the French feudal tradition, large fiefs of land were granted to seigneurs, men who promised to parcel it out among habitants, or tenant farmers. Frenchmen were induced to emigrate, resulting in a population of about 2000 by 1666. Hardy, adaptable, and tenacious, many entered the lucrative fur trade, which was brought under central control. New trade settlements were founded, notably at Trois-Rivières (1634) and Montréal (1642). Further explorations of the interior were carried out by coureurs de bois, adventurous, unlicensed fur traders who wanted to escape company restrictions. One of them, Pierre Esprit Radisson, explored west of Lake Superior in the 1650s. Of more lasting significance was the role of the Roman Catholic church. French Protestants, defeated in France, were prohibited from settling in the new colony. Roman Catholic religious orders were charged with maintaining and spreading the faith. Franciscan Récollet friars arrived in 1614 to convert the aborigines, but were replaced in 1635 by the heroic priests of the richer, better- organized Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits. Later came Ursuline nuns (1639), who educated girls, and Sulpicians (1657), who ran missions. In 1659 a vicar apostolic, the Jesuit-trained Bishop F. X. de Laval-Montmorency, arrived to take command of the missions and to found parishes. The church increasingly became a powerful, rigidly moralistic force in colonial life. The survival of New France was uncertain, however, because of almost continuous warfare with the Iroquoian Confederacy. In 1608 Champlain had allied himself with the Algonquians and with the Hurons, who were amenable to missionary activities and acted as the principal suppliers of furs. This alliance, however, antagonized the Iroquoian Confederacy, traditional rivals of the Huron and suppliers of furs to the Dutch in New Amsterdam. After the Iroquois had brutally ravaged Huron country north of the St. Lawrence in 1648 and 1649, they turned against New France itself. The fur trade was no longer profitable, and the threat to the colony was now so great that the French considered abandoning it. A Crown Colony In 1663, Louis XIV's brilliant minister Jean Baptiste Colbert reorganized New France directly under royal authority. Administration was divided between a military governor and a more powerful intendant, both ruling from Québec City but under orders from France. The fur trade was granted to a new monopoly, the Company of the West Indies. Defense was improved by the arrival in 1665 of the French Carignan-Salières regiment, many of whose members stayed on as settlers. The Iroquois menace was ended, although attacks continued sporadically throughout the 17th century. Restructuring the seigneurial system, the Crown deprived uncooperative landowners of their fiefs, granted new blocs of land to promising candidates, and laid down rules to govern seigneurs and habitants. The church received land and special payments. The comte de Frontenac, as governor, encouraged further explorations. Those of Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette led to the exploration of the Mississippi River (1673) and those of Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, to the acquisition of Louisiana (1682). Jean Talon, intendant from 1665 to 1672, set out to establish New France as a prosperous, expanding colony rivaling the thriving English colonies to the south. He invited many new settlers, including young women, until by 1675 the population was almost 8000. He also tried to diversify the economy beyond furs and build trade with Acadia and the West Indies. Talon was recalled before he could carry out his policies, however. After Colbert's death in 1683, French interest in the colony waned, and by 1700 it was clear that New France was not going to be self-sufficient. Under the governor, the intendant, and the bishop, officials, military officers, and seigneurs constituted a little colonial nobility, overconscious of their rank. Leading merchants, also pursuing status, were influential in the towns. The clergy, almost a separate class altogether, controlled the morals, education, and social welfare of the colonists. The theoretical authoritarianism of this regime was in fact limited by the vigorous spirit of independence among the people. The artisans were organized into strong guilds, each the focus of its own rituals and ways. They and the rural habitants successfully resisted the colonial government when it infringed on what they considered their traditional rights. The fur trade offered a more rugged alternative if the controls of society were too overbearing. Anglo-French Rivalry As the colony developed, it was caught up in the imperial rivalries of England and France, which, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, were locked in a struggle for worldwide control. Europe was one battlefield, North America another. The burgeoning English colonies along the Atlantic Ocean were hemmed in by Acadia and New France in the north and by French expansion in the Mississippi Valley. At the same time, the French felt themselves caught between the Hudson's Bay Company; (chartered in England in 1670), which dominated northern Canada, and the English colonies to the south. The inevitable conflict broke out in 1689 as King William's War (the American counterpart of the War of the Grand Alliance in Europe). After almost a decade of guerrilla warfare, the Peace of Ryswick (1697) merely confirmed the status quo, even returning Acadia, captured by the English, to the French. This short-lived truce collapsed in 1702 with the outbreak of Queen Anne's War (paralleling the European War of the Spanish Succession). In the course of the war, the British recaptured Acadia (1710), this time permanently. By the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), the French ceded Newfoundland and the Hudson Bay region as well. They retained Cape Breton and the Île Saint-Jean (Prince Edward Island). To compensate for their loss, the French in 1720 built a fortress at Louisbourg on the southeast tip of Cape Breton. This expensive endeavor was in vain, however. When hostilities recommenced in King George's War (the American counterpart of the War of the Austrian Succession), the fortress fell to a joint British-New England force in 1745. Louisbourg was returned to France by the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748). The succeeding French and Indian War (counterpart of the Seven Years' War) was disastrous for France. France had attempted to strengthen its position in North America by refurbishing Louisbourg, building forts in the Ohio Valley, and arranging new Native American alliances. New France, however, with a population of roughly 60,000 and an indifferent, war-weary parent country, was weak. It could not uphold French imperialism against a British population of more than 1 million in the 13 American colonies, backed by the military and naval capacity of an expanding Britain. Anglo-French competition in the Ohio Valley sparked conflict in 1754. The next year the British, presuming that their Acadian subjects were disloyal and urged by New Englanders fearing northern invasion, deported the Acadians. In 1758 a British expedition reconquered Louisbourg. A British army under the impulsive young James Wolfe won the crucial battle of the Plains of Abraham against the French, led by the experienced Marquis L. J. de Montcalm, and so gained Québec. British land forces won control of the west, and the arrival of a British fleet led to the surrender of Montréal in 1760. The result, confirmed by the Treaty of Paris in 1763, was that New France came under British rule. British North America (1763-1867) Under British rule, the population rapidly increased, and ethnic tensions developed. The Shaping of a British Colony British North America was formed more by historical chance than by design. In 1763 it consisted of four distinct regions. Three, long disputed with France, had been won in 1713. Newfoundland was considered merely a series of fishing stations even after settlement, until it became self-governing in the 19th century. The Hudson Bay region (Rupert's Land and the adjoining North-Western Territory) was a wilderness where the Hudson's Bay Company and small, aggressive Scottish companies competed for the fur trade. Acadia, conquered to protect New England and renamed Nova Scotia, was populated largely with New Englanders to replace the exiled French. Its capital, Halifax, was founded in 1749. Annexed to Nova Scotia was Prince Edward Island, which became a separate colony in 1769. The conquest of the fourth region, New France, or Québec, placed the British, as rulers of French colonists, in something of a quandary. Eventually, two successive governors, James Murray and Sir Guy Carleton, finding that they could not govern effectively without the cooperation of the seigneurs, persuaded the Crown to guarantee the traditional language, civil law, and faith of its new subjects. This decision, embodied in the Québec Act of 1774, ensured the cooperation of the seigneurs and the clergy to the new regime. Indeed, they stood by the government during the American Revolution, although the habitants generally remained neutral. American troops captured Montréal in 1775 but, failing to take Québec City or elicit local support, soon withdrew. The success of the rebellious 13 American colonies left the British with the poorer remnants of their New World empire and the determination to prevent a second revolution. They had, however, to accommodate the roughly 50,000 refugees from the American Revolution who settled in Nova Scotia and the upper St. Lawrence. There these United Empire Loyalists soon began to agitate for the political and property rights they had previously enjoyed. In response to Loyalist demands, the Crown created New Brunswick out of Nova Scotia in 1784 and by the Constitutional Act of 1791 divided Québec into Lower Canada (mostly French) and Upper Canada (mostly English from America). In so doing, the Crown hoped to create a stable society that was distinctly non-American. Although French-Canadians retained the privileges granted by the Québec Act, the Anglican church received preferred status. An Anglo-French colonial aristocracy of rich merchants, leading officials, and landholders was expected to work with the royal governors to ensure proper order. Legislative assemblies, although elected by propertied voters, had little power. The threat of revolution, it appeared, had been banished. This system worked surprisingly well, at least for a generation. Despite the arrival of large numbers of land-hungry Americans, the aristocracy managed to dominate the society. Minor trouble arose after 1806 when a governor attempted to anglicize Lower Canada, but he was able to quell dissent if not to achieve his goal. In the War of 1812, most Canadians, convinced that Americans were the aggressors, rallied to the British flag. Indeed, the militia aided the British army in the defense of Upper and Lower Canada. After the war, large-scale emigration of English, Scots, and Irish from Europe swelled the ranks of the English-speaking population. Agitation for Reform The older order came under attack during the 1820s and collapsed before the forces of reform in the succeeding two decades. The underlying cause was the emergence in all the colonies of a middle class composed of businesspeople (especially in the newly thriving timber and shipbuilding industries), lawyers and other professionals, and rich farmers. All resented the power and arrogance of the English-speaking, largely Anglican ruling class. Some, notably American immigrants, objected on political and economic grounds. Others, such as Methodists and Baptists in Upper Canada, French-Canadians in Lower Canada, and Irish Roman Catholics in Newfoundland, were opposed on the basis of religious and ethnic differences. The parallel development of political parties—proestablishment Tories and antiestablishment reform groups—and an energetic press enabled the champions of reform to reach more and more people. Some reformers were moderate, especially in the Maritime colonies—New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island—which had Loyalist populations. Others were radical. In Lower Canada, although the Roman Catholic church supported moderates, the seigneur Louis Joseph Papineau led radicals in a nationalist agitation for ethnic autonomy. In Upper Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie, a Scot, led a demand for a more Americanized, that is, republican, form of government. The radicals, frustrated by the opposition of Canadian Tories and the indifference of Britain, led rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada in 1837 and 1838. The uprisings were swiftly quelled by the army and local militia. Suppression was particularly severe in Lower, or French, Canada. Stirred by these events, the Crown appointed a liberal English aristocrat, John George Lambton, 1st earl of Durham, the first governor-general of all British North America, and ordered him to find a solution to colonial ills. Believing that the colonies must make economic progress in the pattern of the United States, he recommended in the important Durham Report (1839) the reunification of Upper and Lower Canada, the anglicization of the French-Canadians, and the creation of an executive responsible to the elected legislature. The next year the British Parliament passed the Act of Union, which joined the two Canadas into the Province of Canada and gave each equal representation in the joint legislature. Responsible government was secured in 1849 after much agitation by moderate reformers. The French-Canadians held enough political power to retain their language and institutions, however. Progress and Tension During the 1840s and early 1850s colonial life underwent a general liberalization. Municipal corporations were organized, government-aided common schools were founded, prisons were reformed, and Anglican church privileges and seigneurial tenure were abolished. Politics, once the domain of the elite, became the game of party politicians. Most important, the business community became dominant among conflicting interest groups. Its strength was reflected in the politics of the 1850s and 1860s, which often centered on economic issues such as the immigration of cheap labor, the building of railways, and commercial and industrial development. The last was much enlarged by the Reciprocity Treaty (1854-1866) with the United States. Despite this progress, ethnic tensions re-emerged, especially in the two Canadas. Deep misunderstanding continued to separate urban, profit-minded British businesspeople from largely rural French farmers and professionals concerned with maintaining tradition. The Protestant British in Upper Canada particularly disliked what they considered undue Roman Catholic French influence in local affairs. The French in Lower Canada resented English efforts to dominate and anglicize the colony. In addition, a host of Irish Roman Catholics, fleeing famine in Ireland in the late 1840s, inspired much bigotry among Protestants. No coalition of parties was able to overcome these differences to win a stable majority, and by the mid-1860s the two Canadas were almost ungovernable. Furthermore, the American Civil War (1861-1865) seemed to threaten the survival of British North America. Colonists feared that a victorious North, angered by Britain's sympathy for the South, would retaliate by invading the British colonies. Confederation Out of these concerns came a movement for the unification of the colonies of British North America. The initiators were three political leaders—George Étienne Cartier and John A. Macdonald of the Conservative party, successor to the Tories, and George Brown of the Liberal party, successor to the reformers—who formed a coalition government in 1864. A preliminary conference on unification was held at Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, in September of that year; a second conference, which met in Québec City in October, actually designed the Confederation. Many Maritimers objected, but Great Britain, hoping to strengthen its territory against U.S. influences, gave its support. The Québec resolutions, slightly modified, were passed by the British Parliament as the British North America Act in March 1867 and proclaimed in Canada on July 1, 1867. It was the first time a colony had achieved responsible government without leaving the empire. The new nation, called the Dominion of Canada, was a federation of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Québec (Lower Canada), and Ontario (Upper Canada). Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland refused to join. The Dominion continued to be subject to the full authority of the Crown. Indeed, political rights remained limited, because the cautious unionists wished to avoid what they saw as the perils of American democracy. The federal government, established in Ottawa, Ontario, consisted of an appointed Senate and an elected House of Commons with the power to tax and grant subsidies. The provincial governments, under federal supervision, were granted powers sufficient to develop their own resources and fashion their own social institutions. That division of labor, unionists hoped, would prevent the kind of sectional squabbles that had disrupted the American republic. Building a Nation (1867-1929) Confederation had created a nation of comparatively few people in a vast territory, most of it uninhabitable. According to the census of 1871, the Dominion's population was 3.7 million (compared to about 40 million Americans in a smaller but more usable area). Of the total, about 1 million were French Roman Catholic, 850,000 Irish Roman Catholic and Protestant, and more than 1 million English and Scottish Protestants—all better known for mutual suspicion than for brotherly love. The remainder of the population was a mix of aboriginal peoples, other European immigrants, blacks escaping the slavery of the United States, and Chinese that were mostly railroad construction workers. Three-fourths of the population was rural. Only Montréal, Québec, and Toronto could be considered big cities. A mere 4185 km (2600 mi) of railroad linked the disparate provinces. The gross national product was $459 million, with agriculture the leading occupation. Expansion Under Macdonald Sir John Alexander Macdonald, elected prime minister in 1867, immediately took up the task of building a nation. Astutely, he began with a coalition government that drew support from all provinces and interests, although it soon became Conservative in cast. He extended Canada's domain north and west by purchasing Rupert's Land and the North-Western Territory from the Hudson's Bay Company in 1870, largely to block possible American expansion. This move aroused the existing inhabitants, mostly of mixed European and Native American extraction, and especially the French-speaking métis (people of mixed Native American and European ancestry), who considered themselves a distinct nation. Both English- and French-speaking inhabitants were worried by the threatened incursion of Ontario settlers. The métis, led by Montréal-educated Louis Riel, revolted. The government subdued this first Riel rebellion and then created the province of Manitoba in 1870, wherein political power and school policy were supposed to reflect the French and English duality. Expanding Canada still further, Macdonald added British Columbia (1871) and Prince Edward Island (1873). The former had been explored by Spanish and British naval expeditions in the 18th century. It was opened to the fur trade through the efforts of Sir Alexander Mackenzie and others and then, in the 1860s, flooded by European and American prospectors in search of gold. The colony joined the Canadian Confederation on Macdonald's promise of a federally financed railway to connect it to centers of population. Indeed, railways were necessary to bind the nation together. The government funded the Intercolonial Railway to the Maritimes and contracted with an entrepreneur with U.S. financial backing for the difficult and costly task of building the Canadian Pacific Railway across the prairies and the Rockies to the coast. The disclosure of corruption in the contract led to a scandal that produced a Liberal victory in the election of 1874. A National Policy The Liberal triumph, however, was short lived. The onset of an economic depression, which the Liberals were unable to check, soon rehabilitated Macdonald. He was reelected in 1878 on the promise of a “National Policy” to make Canada economically self-sufficient. Presuming an alliance of business and government, he set out to construct an east-west market with an industrial heartland in Québec and Ontario and an agricultural frontier in the prairies. Over the next 13 years he imposed a tariff on imports to foster industry, revived and aided the transcontinental railway (completed in 1880s), and encouraged prairie settlement. The last policy provoked the métis and some Native Americans to join in the second Riel rebellion, on the Saskatchewan River. This uprising was crushed by the army, which was rushed to the scene on the new railway, and Riel was hanged in 1885. His execution enraged sympathetic French-Canadians, inflaming the ethnic tensions that, together with provincial demands for more power, had already weakened the Macdonald government. "Canada," Microsoft (R) Encarta. Copyright (c) 1994 Microsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1994 Funk & Wagnall's Corporation. |
