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Murder in a Mill Town
 Murder in a Mill Town

SEX, FAITH, AND THE CRIME THAT CAPTIVATED A

NATION

Bruce Dorsey
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Bruce Dorsey 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under
terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.

CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress

ISBN 978–0–19–763309–0
eISBN 978–0–19–763311–3

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197633090.001.0001
For Martha, forever
What think you of Ephraim K. Avery? Is he guilty, or not guilty? Read, try, judge
and determine for yourselves.

Aristides, Strictures on the Case of Ephraim K. Avery (1833)

 CONTENTS

Prologue: Before the Curtain Rises

Act I: Murder
1. The Haystack
2. A Troubled Marriage
3. Native Sons
4. Useful in This World
5. Factory Girl
6. A Methodist Family
7. Moving Planet
8. Circuit Rider
9. Moral Police
10. Fornication and Lying
11. “If I Am Missing”
12. Manhunt

Act II: Trial

13. Courtroom Tales
14. Clove Hitch
 15. Doctors, Women, and Bodies
16. Experts
17. Doctor Visits
18. Sex Talk
19. Bad Stories
20. Passion and Self-Murder
21. “Most Extraordinary of All Extraordinary Cases”
22. Closing Arguments

Act III: Scandal

23. Mobs and More Murders
24. Conspiracies
25. Vindication
26. Fake News
27. Stage and Song
28. Camp Meetings
29. Seduction

Epilogue: After the Curtain Falls

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Murder in a Mill Town
New England towns where Sarah Maria Cornell and Ephraim Avery lived and
worked.
Disputed routes taken by Ephraim Avery on December 20, 1832.
 Prologue
Before the Curtain Rises

LONG BEFORE THE DOORS OPENED, a crowd gathered outside the theater.
Noisily, they bustled in, country folk and urban dandies alike, to find
themselves good seats. The old mansion’s walls reverberated with
their footsteps on the hardwood floors, spirited greetings, idle
gossip, and talk of politics.
The playhouse had once been the country home of Aaron Burr,
who nearly thirty years earlier returned across the Hudson River to
his Richmond Hill estate from the New Jersey palisades after his
notorious duel with Alexander Hamilton. As Burr’s fortunes waned
and the growing city encroached from the south and east, John
Jacob Astor purchased the mansion, lifted it and rolled it a few
blocks closer to the center of Manhattan, and converted it into the
Richmond Hill Theatre.
Earlier the same summer a teen-aged Walt Whitman had
described feeling mesmerized by the dark green curtain of a New
York theater. Transfixed when it lifted, with “quick and graceful
leaps, like the hopping of a rabbit,” Whitman knew that behind the
drapery lay a “world of heroes and heroines, and loves, and
murders, and plots, and hopes.” As the Richmond Hill’s curtain rose
this September night, a cotton factory at sunrise came into view.
Young women conversed as they commenced their work, beginning
the night’s feature, Sarah Maria Cornell: or, The Fall River Murder.1
Surely the audience erupted as Matilda Flynn entered as the title
character. Playing opposite drama’s biggest male stars the previous
autumn in New York, the twenty-something actress found herself
now headlining a company full of amateurs and unknowns.2 As
Sarah Maria Cornell, she breaks into the factory-floor gossip of her
co-workers:
 “Good morning sisters. I have been a lazy girl; you have got a-head of me.”
“What detained you Sarah? You are not usually behind us at work.”
“I have had such a dreadful dream . . .”

As Cornell relays her premonition that she will die a violent death
at the hands of another, the girls gather around, occasionally
interrupting her to remind the audience that, no matter her fate,
Cornell is a “good, virtuous, and industrious” woman.3
And so an onstage whirlwind began, carrying the audience from a
cotton mill with its “factory girls” to a farmhouse of guileless Yankees
—familiar stock characters—to an isolated, wooded glade where a
camp meeting and a Methodist minister evoked chaos, sex, violence,
ambition, and greed, before drawing to a close at a haystack with
the killing foretold in the play’s title.
None of this surprised the Richmond Hill audience. Entering the
theater, they passed enormous posters depicting in graphic detail the
scene of a man strangling a woman. They had seen similar images
in handbills plastered on street corners, with smaller versions
adorning their playbills.
They knew the characters and the story before the curtain rose
because it mirrored a real-life drama that played out in newspapers
for months in 1833. By summer’s end, the factory girl and the
preacher had become cultural celebrities, immortalized in at least
two plays and in songs about the affair that were performed in
Broadway revues for months on end.
Young America had little experience yet with a phenomenon that
would one day be a defining feature of popular culture in the United
States: sensational criminal cases that garnered the label “crime of
the century”—no matter how frequently such crimes occurred. Here
was the nation’s first spectacular trial, and Americans couldn’t get
enough of it. Theatergoers had come that evening—and would
return night after night—to experience a scandal performed in
accelerated time.4
When theatergoers purchased a ticket in the 1830s, they expected
a smorgasbord of entertainment—Shakespeare plays, farces, a
medley of popular songs, circus stunts, equestrian troupes—
sometimes all on the same night. Or they might be hoping for a
melodrama, a play depicting a morally polarized universe of good
and evil, of innocent virtue and depraved villainy. Audiences sought
out melodramas because, as Herman Melville observed, they wanted
performances that offered “more reality than real life itself can
show.” Yet in Cornell’s story, real life itself resounded with the
unmistakable qualities of melodrama. Passion, virtue, seduction, a
vulnerable young woman, a hypocritical villain, dark plotting, and
irrepressible urges to speak incessantly in order to leave nothing
unsaid, all were on full view in this scandalous murder case.5
Still, Sarah Maria Cornell at the Richmond Hill was not a typical
melodrama. It borrowed from comedies and Gothic horror, and most
important, its virtuous heroine neither triumphed over nor escaped
from her villainous, seducing foe. Instead, this protagonist met her
demise through rape and murder.
The real-life demise of Sarah Maria Cornell and all that followed
illuminate the very essence of a transformative moment in history,
unveiling what anthropologists call a social drama. Such a drama
begins when normal and peaceful means of redressing a crime fail to
satisfy longings for more complete explanations. Social dramas
prompt two questions: Why did this happen? and What does it tell
us about who we are? An ensuing scandal reveals deep cleavages
emanating from the struggle to come to grips with a world seeming
to change before one’s very eyes. Public fascination with the crime
exceeds the bounds of normal curiosity surrounding everyday gossip
and news. In search for answers people look to cherished beliefs
about politics, religion, and family. They turn to familiar stories and
plots to make sense of human actions and their repercussions.
Collectively, they participate in an enveloping drama that, in turn,
transforms the world they sought to comprehend.6
Audiences flocked to the theater or purchased popular reading
about the factory girl and the preacher so they could take part in a
scandal rich in personal meaning. In the stories of the saga’s key
characters they saw the experiences of their neighbors and families,
sensing keenly that issues that mattered in their own changing lives
were being played out in a legal thriller. They understood that
women in a new workplace called the factory had uncharted
opportunities to live independent lives, but they could also be
exposed to sexual threats and to rumors and gossip, threatening
their livelihoods and reputations. They knew too the disparity of
power brandished in sexual violence and its double standard of
culpability. Long before organized movements to confront sexual
harassment and sexual violence, Americans understood and
explained these real dramas with their own ideas about vulnerability
and coercion.
Those who were captivated by this story sensed too what was at
stake when evangelical religion began to take center stage in their
culture and politics. At a dizzying pace, religious beliefs and personal
identities were becoming intertwined with the economic marketplace
and partisan politics of a young democracy. Even if they couldn’t
foresee the long history of a politics that construed personal choices
and a changing society as contests over moral values, Americans
knew the cultural battles exposed by such a scandalous case. They
sensed especially that fast-changing new forms of communication—
an explosion of new print media—mirrored the incessant movement
of individuals into new communities and new professions.
If this shocking tale of a preacher and a factory girl constitutes a
social drama, it is a drama with a multitude of narrators, scripts, and
performers—a contest over stories and storytelling. Stories reveal
what mattered most to people in the past; how they lived their lives;
how they explained their own actions and the behavior of friends,
neighbors, and strangers; and how they communicated their most
deeply prized values. Stories expose as well how little people
understood the historical transformations that shaped their personal
lives, their society, and their culture.
As the curtain rises on the pages that follow, a real rather than an
imagined drama of the preacher and the factory girl begins. It is a
tale in which violence and storytelling expose the personal histories
of two complicated people whose lives intersected amid an ever-
changing world that each of them tried to embrace but could not
control. Although they lived in an exceptional time, they were not
themselves exceptional human beings. Their personal histories
survive as narratives of ordinary people whose experiences
embodied the spirit of a new world taking shape right before their
own—and our—eyes.
ACT I

Murder
 1

The Haystack

STEPPING OUT OF HIS FARMHOUSE,John Durfee noticed a chill had set in.
The earth crackled under each step of his boots. It was the first day
of winter: December 21, 1832, a Friday. The previous day had been
a seasonably pleasant autumn afternoon, with clear skies and a full
moon rising early in the evening. Overnight the temperature had
dropped to near twenty degrees, and a steady wind blew from the
west.
Durfee’s farm lay along the main road in the sleepy village of
Tiverton, Rhode Island, where Durfee and his neighbors made the
most of farming small plots of coastal land. They toiled for
generations, supplementing their modest income by fishing and by
exchanging paid labor with one another. Tiverton sat a quarter mile
south of the Massachusetts state line. Across that line stood the
bustling textile manufacturing town of Fall River.1
Durfee walked to the barn, hitched up his team of horses, and set
off downhill toward the Taunton River. It was nine o’clock in the
morning.
He got no farther than a few hundred yards when he saw a
woman’s body hanging from a fence post inside his haystack yard.
Approaching the figure, uncertain if she were dead or alive, he
parted the hair that had fallen in front of her face. One look must
have sent a shiver through the farmer’s already cold body. A rope
stretched six inches above the woman’s neck, securing her rigid form
to the stake. No longer was it a typical winter morning. Glimpsing
two men within view, he shouted out to them.2
 While the farmer waited, he observed that the woman wore a
calash (a bonnet in the shape of a pleated hood), and that her cloak
was fully fastened down the length of her torso, except for one hook
open at her breast. Her arms rested awkwardly underneath. Her
shoes had been removed and set aside to her right. Her body hung
with her knees bent at a right angle, her toes resting on the ground.
Within moments Durfee’s two neighbors arrived, along with his
elderly father, Richard, who heard his son’s cry from the farmhouse
door. The four men gazed at the woman for a moment, examining
just how she was hanging. Then John Durfee climbed over the fence
into the stack yard and tried to hoist her body so that he could slip
the rope off the top of the pole. Unable to lift the body with one arm
and slip off the rope with the other, he heard his father’s impatient
holler: “Cut her down.” Handed a knife, Durfee cut the rope near the
top of the stake and laid the body on the ground. Then he ran to get
the coroner.3
Durfee farm and haystack, Tiverton, Rhode Island, where a farmer found Maria
Cornell’s body hanging. From Catherine R. Williams, Fall River, An Authentic
Narrative (Boston, 1833). Courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino,
California.

News spread quickly. Within minutes a young constable from Fall

River named Seth Darling arrived, along with a crowd of onlookers.
Darling surveyed the grass surrounding the stack yard and observed
—and others agreed—that there appeared to be no evidence of a
struggle. No one in the small crowd knew the young woman. She
must surely be, Darling thought, one of Fall River’s “factory girls,” as
workers in the textile mills were commonly called. A young woman’s
violent death, no matter the cause, signaled trouble for a factory
town.4
Within the next hour, Fall River’s Methodist minister, Ira Bidwell,
made his way to the scene and identified the woman as thirty-year-
old Sarah Maria Cornell. He had no idea that she had gone by
several different names during her brief life. For most of her
adulthood she called herself Maria. Only two months earlier, she had
moved to Fall River, found work in the mills, and been admitted as a
probationary member of Bidwell’s church.
By the time the coroner, Elihu Hicks, arrived, he had already
selected six men for a jury of inquest, the customary procedure for
investigating sudden, unexpected, or violent deaths. This remnant of
English common law placed full responsibility for determining the
cause of death in the hands of ordinary men. The most important
qualification for serving on a coroner’s jury was to be a “freeholder,”
a property owner. While Cornell’s body lay at their feet, Hicks gave
the jury its charge, administered their oath, and ordered that the
corpse be moved to Durfee’s farmhouse for further examination.5
As people began to talk on the streets of Fall River that morning,
Dr. Thomas Wilbur overheard that a woman named Sarah Maria
Cornell lay dead at John Durfee’s Tiverton farm. The doctor hurried
to the scene. Unlike the gawkers, Wilbur bent down close to the
body, opened the cloak, and placed his hand on the woman’s
abdomen.
When the hastily convened coroner’s jury was ready, they
summoned Wilbur into a room where they had laid out Cornell’s
body. One juror struggled to remove the rope from her neck using
only his hands, but it was too deeply embedded in her skin. Another
man wielded a knife to cut the rope loose. No one asked the only
physician in the room to intervene.
The jury instead asked Dr. Wilbur what he knew about the young
woman, casting him as the first in a long line of storytellers in this
mystery. Cornell had visited his office several times, Wilbur told the
jury, and he suspected that she was pregnant. That’s why he opened
her cloak while her body lay on the ground, to observe whether “she
was fuller about the abdomen than women generally are,” as he put
it. During her visits to the doctor, she confided to him that the father
was a Methodist preacher named Avery from nearby Bristol, Rhode
Island, a married man with children.6
What’s more, she had told him that Avery forced her to have sex
at a religious camp meeting in Connecticut in August, that she’d
relocated to Fall River to seek Avery’s financial support, and that
she’d spoken and exchanged letters with the preacher. When she
informed Avery of her condition, Cornell explained, Avery advised
her to take a large dose of oil of tansy to induce an abortion. She
then asked the doctor whether ingesting tansy would be safe, and
when Wilbur warned her that it could be fatal, she promised not to
take it.7
While the inquest jury continued its work, John Durfee was busy
searching for other clues. Early that afternoon Durfee went to the
home of Harriet Hathaway, where Cornell had boarded for the past
few weeks. The women of his family had instructed him to retrieve
Cornell’s belongings so they could dress the body for burial. Durfee
also understood from Dr. Wilbur that Cornell had letters in her
possession that might incriminate the Bristol preacher. Mrs.
Hathaway handed over all of Cornell’s possessions—a locked trunk
and a small bandbox—informing the farmer that Cornell always kept
the trunk’s key in her pocket. Back home, the women found three
letters in the trunk. Opened but unsigned by their author, they were
addressed to “Sarah M. Connell.” Durfee also noticed a slip of worn
and dirty paper in the bandbox, and a pencil near it. His wife stored
the bandbox under a bed.8
That afternoon a gathering of women laid out Cornell’s body. They
followed long-standing customs that assigned healing and burial
duties to women, with younger women deferring to the experience
of their elders. These women alone witnessed the corpse undressed,
and they talked among themselves about suspicious marks and
bruises that neither the coroner, nor any physician, nor the inquest
jury had seen. As they speculated about acts of violence and
motives, the women coalesced into another band of witnesses and
storytellers.
For their part, the coroner’s jury read the unsigned letters in
Cornell’s possession and found vague allusions to meetings in Fall
River, instructions for letters to be sent to Bristol, and requests to
“keep your secret.” Still hesitant to draw a conclusion, they arranged
to meet again the next morning. On Saturday, the men of the jury
became the next group of storytellers, offering up a written verdict
stating that “the said Sarah M. Cornell committed suicide by hanging
herself upon a stake,” and that she “was influenced to commit the
crime by the wicked conduct of a married man, which we gather
from Dr. Wilbur together with the contents of three letters found in
the trunk” of the deceased.9
With no further clues, these men embraced a story line familiar to
nearly every reader in early nineteenth-century America. A seduction
tale was a plot repeated across decades in hundreds of novels and
magazines. The particulars mattered little in the familiar saga of a
fallen woman—a “love-ruined female.” The men of the jury assumed
they knew how to complete a tale that began with an unmarried
pregnant woman seduced by a married man and found hanging
from the end of a rope. And this explanation was expedient: If the
cause of death was suicide, the married man need not even be
identified.10
Once the jury declared its decision, the coroner gave permission
for Cornell’s body to be buried.
It was still Saturday morning when Fall River’s Congregational
minister recited a funeral prayer over Maria Cornell as she was
buried in the Durfee family’s cemetery on their farm. As John Durfee
helped lower the coffin into its grave, he remained unsettled by the
previous day’s events. After the burial, his wife, Nancy, prepared
Cornell’s personal effects to be sent to her family. Combing through
the bandbox stowed under the bed, Nancy came upon the rumpled
sheet of paper that John had seen the day before and saw that it
was a note—it seemed to have been written hastily—dated the day
of the woman’s death. It read:

If I am missing inquire of Rev. Mr. Avery Bristol he will know where I am

gone. S. M. Cornell. Dec. 20th

Suddenly, vague details in the unsigned letters seemed less a

mystery, and assumptions about suicide less convincing. Combined
with Dr. Wilbur’s story and the suspicions of the women who laid out
the body, the note suggested more plainly that an act of violence
had been committed by the Rev. Ephraim K. Avery of Bristol.
Handwritten note found among the possessions of Maria Cornell, dated the day of
her death, December 20, 1832. The wording and spelling in this facsimile,
produced ten months later, differ slightly from the text given in all trial reports and
newspaper accounts. From David Melvill, A Fac-Simile of the Letters Produced at
the Trial of the Rev. Ephraim K. Avery (Boston, 1833). Courtesy of Harvard Law
School.

Those few spare words suggested a tale that might easily have
been buried along with Cornell’s body. Over the next year and
beyond, though, that note would incite endless stories from
countless storytellers, rippling outward from Fall River and New
England to enter the national consciousness. From the moment a
farmer discovered Maria Cornell’s lifeless body, people turned to an
assortment of labels to describe her. She was a Methodist, a
prostitute, a crazy woman, a pious female, a wayward daughter. But
most of all she was a “factory girl,” which carried its own array of
preconceptions.
As tragic as the end of Maria’s life would be, her life began amid a
fateful family drama.
 2

A Troubled Marriage

ON ANOTHER COLD, WINTER DAY, twenty-eight years earlier, Maria’s

grandfather recorded in his diary:

James Cornell his wife & 3 children arriv’d in the Evening.1

It was February 1805, a few months before Maria’s third birthday.

The cryptic, one-sentence entry unmasks little of the family crisis
precipitating their arrival or the further troubles that ensued. Yet this
would prove to be the defining moment of Maria’s childhood.
James Cornell and Lucretia Leffingwell Cornell arrived in Norwich,
Connecticut, in the dead of winter, unannounced. They had trekked
south from the western foothills of Vermont’s Green Mountains, a
nearly 200-mile journey, pushing onward through snowstorms. Even
if the weather had been more temperate, the trip would not have
been pleasant. The Cornells arrived at her father’s home to declare
that their marriage was over.
Lucretia’s father didn’t reveal what he learned of his daughter’s
failed marriage that night; indeed he mentioned only his son-in-law
by name. And it soon became apparent that James’s appearance
was closer to a departure than an arrival. He had escorted the
children and Lucretia—pregnant with a fourth child—to Norwich as
the final act of abandoning his family.
Even if Americans thought they knew something about Maria
Cornell as the era’s most notorious “factory girl,” few would have
suspected that her maternal grandfather had built and owned
factories rather than worked in them. Maria’s mother was the
daughter of Christopher Leffingwell, a merchant who established
some of Connecticut’s earliest manufacturing enterprises.2
Christopher Leffingwell inherited a merchant’s occupation from his
father, who exported local produce up and down the North American
coast and imported European and Caribbean goods to distribute
throughout the New England countryside. In his father’s time, all
trade between Britain and its colonies contributed directly to the
British empire’s burgeoning wealth. This was mercantilism, and
colonial merchants from New England to the Carolinas had little
reason to object, for it made them wealthier men.
When his father died in 1756, Christopher inherited a double
portion of the estate at the headwaters of the Thames River in a
Norwich neighborhood called “the Landing.” By then the American
colonists’ relationship with the British empire had already started to
fray. Christopher didn’t see it coming at first. When the Seven Years’
War began, he recognized that Britain’s repeated wars for empire
offered a boon to colonial merchants, allowing them to trade with
the sugar colonies in the West Indies and to provision British
troops.3
Over the next decade Christopher purchased more wharf property
in Norwich and New London and expanded his Caribbean trading
ventures, often resorting to clandestine smuggling to evade British
customs enforcement. By 1765, however, Christopher’s mercantile
fortunes collided headlong with the maelstrom caused by what he
called that “Damnable Stampt Act,” Britain’s first direct taxation on
the colonies. Parliament’s desire to tighten imperial oversight and
raise revenues precipitated a crisis that ended in a revolution; but
before that, these policies wreaked havoc on colonial merchants’
trading.4
In the midst of this crisis Christopher had the audacity to try
manufacturing goods that colonists had always imported from across
the Atlantic—even though Parliament prohibited manufacturing by
the colonists, who were supposed to be importers of European
goods rather than Europe’s competitors. At first Christopher built
small industries near his home, a short walk from the falls of the
Yantic River. Within a few years he had erected a stocking-weaving
shop and Connecticut’s first paper mill. Soon his paper mill produced
ten sheets a minute for writing, printing, and wrapping; it supplied
the paper for the Connecticut Gazette. A few years later he
constructed the colony’s first mill to manufacture chocolate.5
Each new expansion of his enterprises made Christopher
Leffingwell into a more ardent American patriot, determined in the
struggle for freedom and independence. He joined Norwich residents
in protests against threats to their liberty, and when Parliament shut
down the port of Boston in 1774 in retaliation for the destruction of
tea, Christopher was one of five men chosen for Norwich’s
Committee of Correspondence. He soon deployed his well-honed
skills in distributing supplies for what he called “so Glorious a
Cause”: the war to achieve American independence.6 Like other
commercially minded New Englanders, Christopher embraced both
patriotism and economic opportunity as the colonists shed the grasp
of the British empire.7
When the American Revolution ended, Christopher swiftly
expanded his manufacturing operations. Since paper was essential
for a new republic that expected its citizens to be both readers and
writers, his paper mill reaped great profits, supplying newspapers
that aspired to a nationwide readership. Hearing that Alexander
Hamilton was soliciting information for his “Report on
Manufacturing,” Christopher tried to convince the treasury secretary
that there was no “better place in the United States than Norwich”
for a large-scale cotton manufactory. Little would he have expected
that one day his own granddaughter would labor in a cotton mill.8
Meanwhile Christopher devoted his attention to the kind of small-
scale local enterprises that brought James Cornell to Norwich as a
young man. Any eighteenth-century man who considered himself a
manufacturer was still thinking about goods made with human
hands. After all, this was the original meaning of the term: manual
meant “by hand” and factoring meant “to make.” The word “factory”
didn’t yet denote a large building where machines turned out
consumer goods but referred instead to an establishment where a
trader gathered laborers to craft items for local or global markets.
Christopher opened a set of small workshops called Leffingwell
Row within sight of his home. For generations, New England farm
families had been more fertile than the scarce farming lands they
wished to pass on to their children. A plot of land could be divided
only so many times across generations before nothing remained. As
more and more men faced poor prospects of becoming land-owning
farmers in southern New England, they accepted an agreement
offered by Christopher: he would provide the shop, materials, and
younger laborers, and they would produce finished goods. He then
used his merchant networks to distribute the products to retailers
and consumers throughout the Northeast. Over the next decade, a
handful of stocking-weavers, tailors, potters, bookbinders, and
hatmakers found employment at Leffingwell Row.9
Most important, Christopher Leffingwell remained the “master” in
these one- and two-story shops. To call someone a master craftsman
meant that he was not only the owner of the shop and its tools but
also the master of the dependents in the household and shop alike—
the young adult men, known as journeymen, and the boys called
apprentices. The young boys who arrived to learn a trade before
they reached manhood were apprenticed not to the shop’s senior
craftsman but to Christopher, the master.
Sometime in 1791, seventeen-year-old James Cornell arrived in
Norwich to become one of Christopher Leffingwell’s apprentices. At
No. 5 Leffingwell Row, James learned to cut and process beaver and
muskrat furs and to felt wool from a hatmaker named Roswell
Gaylord. Gaylord promised to furnish Norwich’s ladies and gentlemen
with hats “of the best quality,” manufactured “in the newest and
most approved taste.” James hoped that one day he would be a
master hatmaker and advertise a similar offer.10
The young apprentice slept at the shop, a stone’s throw from the
big Leffingwell house down the street. James had to work in his
master’s other enterprises too. Christopher recorded in his diary in
1793 that “Jim C” carried a load of “rags to mill.” The next year he
noted, “at Mill in Morning took Jim & waggon” with a load of paper
to New London. Young James would have remained an apprentice
until he reached legal adulthood on his twenty-first birthday in 1795.
By the time his apprenticeship expired, references to the diminutive
“Jim” had disappeared from Leffingwell’s diary, replaced by the
earliest mentions of “James Cornell.” Sometime around then James
started up a romance with the boss’s daughter.11
Lucretia Leffingwell and James Cornell, Maria’s parents, left behind
no records of their own thoughts or feelings in letters or diaries. No
court testimony registers their voices. In the records of history, they
exist only in the shadows of Lucretia’s illustrious father and their
own infamous daughter.
The sixth of Christopher’s twelve children, Lucretia was a
stereotypical middle child: unnoticed, with fewer restrictions or
expectations. As is true of so many eighteenth-century women, her
daily life remains hidden. Her diary-keeping father rarely scratched
out a word about his unmarried children’s lives, the paper from his
mill eliciting greater expressions of pride than the activities of his
offspring.12
Nonetheless, Christopher apparently wanted the best education
for his daughters. After arranging to send his eldest, Betsey, to a
prestigious school run by a widow in Wethersfield, he hinted at
sending a younger daughter to follow. Lucretia was next in line, but
she apparently never attended Hancock’s school. Her younger sister
Joanna was known to be clever, once impressing a brother’s Yale
classmate as “a smart girl.” Perhaps all the Leffingwell daughters
were smart girls who received exceptional educations, or perhaps
Lucretia shone less brightly than her sisters.13
Certainly Lucretia absorbed the conflicted values that pervaded
the Leffingwell household. A Calvinist heritage valuing hard work and
ascetic piety hung in uneasy tension with the worldly pleasures and
fashions that accompanied their rising mercantile fortunes.
Christopher was himself something of a dandy, attracted to fine
clothes and public displays of gentility, even as he was tightfisted.
Though he once wrote “I want a good Handsome Chaise,” he
eventually settled for a cheaper “Second Hand” carriage. Another
time he advised a daughter to “make yourself perfectly contented
and satisfied” without the “extravagant” indulgence of buying a new
outfit for the winter.14
By the time James Cornell was completing his apprenticeship,
Lucretia was nearly twenty-five and wondering about her future. Her
older brother William had recently moved with his wife and children
to New York City to establish himself as a financier. It was certain
that Betsey, nearing thirty, would remain a spinster in her father’s
home, while two younger sisters—first Lydia at age nineteen, then
Joanna at age twenty-one—had already married young men with
strong prospects for careers in commerce and law.
Without the blessing or notice of her family, Lucretia and James
commenced a relationship. Only imagination can conjure what kind
of endearing words they shared, what forms of secret courtship
sealed their love, or who felt the most awkward in this match—the
younger apprentice whose clothes and education reminded them
both of the chasm between their upbringings, or the boss’s older
daughter who had not yet caught the eye of appropriate suitors and
wasn’t “the smart girl” doted on by her father.
In the autumn of 1795, five months after his twenty-first birthday,
James appeared again in the pages of Christopher Leffingwell’s diary.
No longer Leffingwell’s “boy,” James had become a cog in the wheel
of the manufacturer’s enterprises. When Roswell Gaylord set out on
his own, James became the new hatmaker in Leffingwell’s shop. A
month later, Leffingwell set out in his chaise, son William beside him,
with James following on horseback, for a trip west to Albany to trade
hats and other goods. The journeyman hatmaker was learning the
retail side of the business, observing how to negotiate with country
merchants. A week after that trip, Leffingwell recorded in his diary:
“Paid Thomas Lathrop my bill & James Cornell’s proposition.”15
Proposition? Never in ten years of diary-keeping had Leffingwell
recorded anyone making him a proposition. The manufacturer never
explained, but eight weeks later he noted succinctly:
 Sunday 17 January at Meeting forenoon & afternoon Snowy in Evening
Lucretia was married to James Cornel.16

Hardly anyone understood the American Revolution to mean that

apprentices could now marry the daughters of wealthy men, for
social standing and class difference hadn’t disappeared. Parents still
hoped for a proper courtship and suitable marriage for their children.
But new ideas emanating from the Revolution aligned with century-
long trends to alter drastically how parents and children negotiated
when and whom a young person married.
Traditionally, a young couple could not “go to housekeeping”—this,
not the wedding, was the most important act of making a marriage
—until they were financially able to establish an independent
household. As many young men watched all possibility of inheriting
land disappear before their eyes, it was no longer necessary to
postpone marriage. Parents, then, began to lose their power to
dictate the terms of their children’s marriages.17
Americans also began rethinking their understanding of marriage,
seeing it as a metaphor for the bonds of affection (a “more perfect
union”) that tied together a republic of citizens. Novelists joined with
political writers to depict tyrannical parents as the greatest threat to
young people’s independence. Thomas Paine, after all, called the
English King a “Royal Brute” and an unfeeling “pretended” father
who made war on his own children. Challenging a father’s authority
at every turn, Americans elevated affection over patriarchal authority
for the family and nation alike—a young couple’s choice and their
love, not the parents’ decree, mattered most.18
An unexpected pregnancy, of course, could accelerate plans.
Lucretia and James reached adulthood at a time when premarital
sex was much more common than more prudish descendants wished
to remember. Indeed, one out of every three New England brides
was pregnant on her wedding day. It was not vanishing inheritances
alone that freed young people to question the rationale of waiting
until they were married to have sex. The youth of James’s and
Lucretia’s generation took advantage of greater privacy afforded by
houses built with more rooms and closed doors, and they began
socializing unchaperoned in taverns and homes. Their so-called late-
night frolics gave them greater opportunities for sexual intimacy.19
But if local gossips assumed that pregnancy sealed Lucretia’s
mismatched marriage to James, their whispered tales were
mistaken: the couple’s first child, James Jr., arrived more than nine
months after their wedding day. With parental authority in doubt and
a young couple’s love accentuated, it was Lucretia’s pleas and
actions—her freedom, choice, and independence—that surely carried
the day with her family. The unnoticed middle daughter and the
aspiring former apprentice might have been love-struck, or they both
might have simply wished to get away from the Leffingwells.
James, like many young men of his generation, set his sights on
economic independence. Not wishing to wait until he could establish
his own shop or chafing at the prospect of drumming up local
clientele while competing with the town’s established hatmakers, he
proposed an alternative plan to his wealthy father-in-law. Both his
proposition and his relationship with Lucretia reflected an eagerness
to establish his manhood. He was considering what it would take to
become a breadwinner, master craftsman, manufacturer, and citizen.
In the wake of the Revolution, political citizenship for white men still
required landownership. “Marrying up,” though, would be a sure step
toward independence for an aspiring tradesman.20
Within months of their marriage, the key to James’s proposition
became clear: the newlyweds were moving to frontier Vermont to
start a new life. He planned to establish himself as a hatmaker in the
frontier North, giving him closer access to Canadian furs, allowing
him to supply markets near Albany and southern Vermont, and then
reinvesting his profits to become a landowning farmer. James’s
“industry and enterprise” impressed his father-in-law, who saw
promise in his inventive plan to extend the market range of
Leffingwell’s manufacturing enterprises.
This was not a scheme to live off the largesse of Christopher
Leffingwell, whose tight-fisted nature was well known to his son-in-
law.21 Although Christopher possessed enough frontier property
rights to gift the newlyweds a landed estate, he sent them only a
few small monetary gifts. For Christopher this was a business
proposition, and he expected a fair return. With a clear design,
James intended to transform himself into both a man and a citizen.22
James and Lucretia soothed her parents’ unease by moving to the
town where her uncle Hezekiah Leffingwell had recently emigrated.
In these years, Connecticut residents caught emigration fever,
bidding adieu to friends and relatives and heading west to Ohio or
north to Vermont, hoping to find the kind of prosperity they thought
improbable at home. Ten years younger than Christopher, Hezekiah
had never prospered in Norwich like his older brother, and after
becoming a widower with six children and remarrying a younger
bride, the fifty-five-year-old Hezekiah relocated his large family to
Arlington, a farming village in Vermont’s southwestern corner.
If for James this move promised success and independence, for
Lucretia it was a dreadful downward fall, for she lacked the
necessary skills for this new life. Hatmakers frequently relied on their
wives’ assistance to prepare fur or wool, or to cut and assemble
hats, but Lucretia had no such experience. Even though daughters
of prosperous merchants learned some housekeeping skills, nothing
had prepared her for the fatiguing labor expected of rural women in
frontier Vermont: raising chickens, milking cows, churning butter,
tending gardens, and spinning, weaving, and dyeing wool and linen
to make clothes. Living in a place so austere, Lucretia could no
longer balance pious frugality with the pleasures of fashion. Instead,
she found herself among country women, their skin darkened by the
incessant smoke of log-huts, as one traveler recalled, their “dress
coarse, & mean, & nasty, & ragged” with “nothing to eat” and their
lives “all work.”23
Lucretia could easily have shared feelings similar to those of her
aunt Cynthia, whose family thought she had married beneath
herself. A flirtatious young belle, Cynthia staved off a spinster’s life
by becoming stepmother to Hezekiah’s six children, but a move to
the frontier hadn’t been part of the bargain. Perpetually homesick (I
“have the dumps,” she wrote), she felt “secluded from all Society”
and ill at ease among her Vermont neighbors, whose manners were
“so very different” she could never feel at home. What’s more,
Lucretia couldn’t even complain to her mother that she was stuck in
“an old Cold dirty house” where her “courage begins to fail,” since
her mother had died just months after Lucretia’s move to Vermont.24
In the midst of his own widower’s grief, Christopher hoped to
maintain his business arrangement with James. Yet while he kept
sending supplies of wool for his son-in-law to finish as hats,
something had gone amiss between the two men. At some point
James stopped picking up packages and mail sent by his father-in-
law, and when Christopher didn’t hear from James, he complained to
family and friends. Over the next few years, the two men
communicated only sporadically. James was working toward a new
state of independence. Getting free of the Leffingwells seemed to be
part of that plan.25
Meanwhile, James moved the family fifteen miles north to the
town of Rupert. Set at a geographical crossroads, surrounded by
mountains, its waters flowing north toward the Saint Lawrence River
and Canada and west toward the Hudson River and New York,
Rupert offered the hatmaker access to a wealth of consumer
markets. In January 1800, Lucretia gave birth to the couple’s second
child, a daughter she named after herself. By March, James achieved
his dream of independence when he purchased a thirty-seven-acre
farm. Six months later he took the oath of a freeman to become an
eligible voter in the fall elections.26
But if James achieved his objectives of landownership and political
citizenship—the measure of manhood—he relinquished them a mere
two years later. Although he owned a farm, he was not a farmer. He
was a fashion-based craftsman where all other village artisans
labored in the traditional trades of a farm economy—blacksmiths,
house carpenters, stone masons, gristmill or saw-mill operators.
James needed the moxie of a peddler or the discipline of a
shopkeeper, yet he possessed neither. His restless ambition evidently
made him unwilling to buckle down to the arduous work of Vermont
farming. Nearly two years to the day after buying his farm, James
sold it. Six weeks later, his third child, Sarah Maria, was born.27
 Sometime after that, the Cornell marriage disintegrated. Eight
months after Maria’s birth, James took out a newspaper
advertisement announcing that he was establishing a new “hat
manufactory” near Troy, New York, forty-five miles to the southwest
along the Hudson River. He promised his former Vermont customers
that they could “once more obtain HATS of CORNELL’s MAKE.” But this
would be one of the last records of James Cornell as a hatmaker,
husband, or father.28
Lucretia filed for divorce in Connecticut’s Superior Court a year
and half after James delivered her and their children to Norwich.
Divorces invite storytelling; indeed, although Connecticut and
Vermont had the nation’s most lenient divorce laws, the courts
required stories before approving a disunion. The woman’s tale was
what they heard most often, since wives initiated most divorce
petitions. According to Lucretia’s plea, James deserted her in
February 1804, before Maria was two years old, having committed
adultery and fathered a child out of wedlock, and now resided with
this unnamed woman somewhere in Quebec.29
Yet the actual details are more shadowy and don’t square with
Lucretia’s divorce story. If James had deserted his family and
absconded to Canada with another woman, how could he travel back
to Norwich with Lucretia and their children? And when and by whom
had Lucretia become pregnant? To satisfy Connecticut’s strict legal
requirements—a divorce could be granted only if a husband had
willfully deserted his wife for three years or had committed adultery
—Lucretia streamlined a more complex reality of adulterous affairs
and unwanted pregnancies into a tidy, believable story to meet the
deadline for the court’s next session. The judges granted her plea.30
Maria entered the world just as her parents’ marriage began its
free fall from contemporary standards of respectability. Over the
next two years that marriage collapsed completely, and Maria landed
on the steps of her grandfather’s home in Connecticut.
The failed marriage of Maria’s parents was no anomaly in the
decades after the Revolution. Like thousands of others, young
Maria’s family disbanded when a market economy made lives more
mobile and ties to traditional towns more tenuous. The family’s
dissolution left an indelible mark on Maria’s life. In letters she wrote
to family or in conversations with co-workers or church friends,
Maria never once mentioned her father.
 3

Native Sons

ON SUNDAY, DECEMBER 23, AFTER a restless night, John Durfee awoke

earlier than usual. The previous day he had buried a young woman
he’d never met, only to discover that she had left a clue: If I am
missing inquire of Rev. Mr. Avery. Durfee hurried off to show the
note to the coroner, and together they went to see Dr. Wilbur,
hoping to obtain more information about both Cornell and Avery.
Although the coroner promised to commence another inquest the
next morning, John Durfee and Seth Darling, the Fall River
constable, decided not to wait for these legal proceedings. With new
evidence in hand, the two men caught the ferry to Bristol on Sunday
afternoon to apprehend Avery and deliver him to authorities in
Tiverton. They went directly to John Howe, a Bristol justice of the
peace, and told him that “it was generally believed there had been a
murder, and that Avery was implicated as the person who had done
the crime, or was accessary.”1
In their eagerness to nab their leading suspect, Durfee and
Darling hadn’t even bothered to find out the preacher’s full name.
Howe thought Darling said that they had come for a Daniel Everett
or Averill, but knowing that their suspect was a Methodist minister,
the judge issued an arrest warrant based on Durfee’s sworn
complaint, and the three men went to find the preacher’s home.2
Ephraim Avery already knew there would be accusations. On
Friday night, Ira Bidwell, Fall River’s Methodist minister—after
identifying Cornell’s body and hearing Dr. Wilbur’s suspicions—had
hurried to Bristol to inform Avery that the doctor was alleging that
he’d had “illicit intercourse” with Cornell. Bidwell spent the night at
Avery’s home, listening to his denials, learning of his past history
with Cornell, and agreeing to accompany Avery on Monday to
Lowell, Massachusetts, where the two men might gather evidence
about Cornell’s character. Avery believed this information would
“rebut any assertions she might have made.” For the accused
preacher, it was important to rally his Methodist brethren around
him. On Saturday, Avery summoned Samuel Drake, the Methodist
minister from Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Explaining what he had
learned from Bidwell, Avery offered Drake an account of his
whereabouts on the night of Cornell’s death.
By the time the three men arrived with an arrest warrant, Avery
had informed his wife of the troubles brewing and asked Rev. Drake
to preach for him that morning. Once Durfee and Darling declared
their intention to take him to Tiverton, however, Avery objected to
being removed from Bristol County. Judge Howe then ordered him to
remain under house arrest, awaiting an “examination,” or pre-trial
hearing, there in Bristol. Durfee and Darling’s bold plans to bring him
into custody near Fall River had been foiled.3
Who was this man charged with murdering Maria Cornell? We have
almost no stories in Ephraim Avery’s own voice. He left behind no
diary, personal letters, or autobiography. He wrote nothing about his
childhood and upbringing in rural Connecticut. Nothing about his
work. Nothing of how he chose his occupation or met his spouse. No
narrative of his conversion, his call to preach, or the reasons he
abandoned the Calvinism of his hometown churches. When given
the chance to make a statement in his own defense, before and
after the trial, he spoke only of events that began once he
encountered Maria Cornell in Lowell.
Methodists were too much of a storytelling people for Avery not to
have recounted his life story and faith journey at prayer meetings,
class meetings, or camp meetings. Yet, throughout this saga, no one
professed themselves to be his friend or intimate. Among a people
renowned for observing the most intimate details of one another’s
lives, Ephraim Avery somehow rose to become a successful preacher
with few knowing much about him. Not one person came forward to
attest that they knew him well.
Yet people from all walks of life seemed to think they understood
Ephraim Avery. Whether they prejudged him to be innocent or guilty,
they assumed they knew his tendencies, personality, and “character,”
even if they had never seen or met the man. Tales began circulating
at the first hint that he was a suspect. From all over the region
rumors emanated from ordinary residents and from parties
interested in his defense or prosecution. The most imaginative yarns
came from the pens of newspaper editors, who had no qualms
speculating and readily peddled preconceived notions about a
married man—a clergyman at that—who had seduced and murdered
a “factory girl.” Avery was at once a stereotype and an enigma.
Stories that circulated about Ephraim Avery—while less numerous
than those surrounding Maria Cornell—offer a different window into
how the country was changing during these times. A Methodist
preacher’s life story brings into focus the new experiences for men
and new expectations about masculinity at the historical moment
when market forces redefined the American economy. Historians
attach labels to explain such transformations—the “transition to
capitalism,” “from farm to factory,” the “market revolution”—but
people who lived through these changes often experienced them as
a confusing push and pull of older values and newer expectations.
Tales of the gallant and heroic masculinity of the previous
generation—the patriots of the Revolution—had a formative
influence on the upbringing of boys in the early nineteenth century.
In Coventry, Connecticut, young Ephraim surely heard those stories.
His hometown took pride in its claim that no man ever needed to be
drafted to fill its quota of soldiers during the war for independence.
Ephraim’s grandfather, father, and several uncles and cousins all
served during the war. Months before the conflict turned bloody, the
men of Coventry were already praising the “happy Unity” and “noble
Fortitude & manly Resistance (of Despotism), universal throughout
America.” When news arrived that war had begun on April 19, 1775
—the Lexington Alarm—116 Coventry men joined the first call for
troops to defend Boston. Ephraim’s grandfather, Amos Avery Sr.,
already a sergeant in the local militia, marched east with his town’s
brave volunteers.4
Local legends, though, often hide a more complicated story. The
lore of selfless sacrifice for the patriot cause concealed a more
ambivalent dedication, with few men truly ready to commit to a
protracted war. Throughout the war years Connecticut soldiers
repeatedly squabbled over pay and provisions, walked away from
their units, and fell short of meeting troop requests from the
Continental Congress. While Ulysses S. Grant remembered stories he
had heard of his grandfather, Captain Noah Grant of Coventry, who
“fought gallantly” in battles from Bunker Hill to Yorktown, records
show that Noah stayed home for the duration of the war. Similarly,
Ephraim’s grandfather served for a grand total of three days in
response to the Lexington Alarm, content to leave the fighting to the
next generation. With each passing year, embellished valor blurred
accurate memories.5
Young Ephraim surely heard stories not only of his family but of
his hometown’s most famous son, Nathan Hale. When George
Washington asked for a volunteer to slip behind British lines and
scout out the strength and designs of General William Howe’s troops
in New York City, Hale alone stepped forward. Once discovered by
the British in his disguise as a schoolteacher, with maps and plans
hidden in his boots, he was executed, but not before uttering his
now-famous words: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for
my country.” Yet Hale was a confusing role model for young men to
emulate. His heroism was premised on being a spy, which many
considered to be a disreputable, even unmanly, undertaking. No true
man of valor would willingly resort to duplicity and deceit or sidestep
the proper rules of military conduct. Young Ephraim surely puzzled
over the ambiguous lessons of manly heroism surrounding his
hometown’s famous spy, even as he contemplated his own family’s
story of Revolutionary War adventures.6
Ephraim’s father, Amos Jr., was too young at seventeen to
volunteer when the fighting began, but he eventually enlisted in the
Continental Army, rising to the rank of sergeant. In 1778, Amos saw
action in one of the largest single-day conflicts of the war, the Battle
of Rhode Island, an unsuccessful effort to drive the British out of
Newport. With intense fighting from both sides, 5,000 patriot forces
repeatedly beat back their foes. France’s Marquis de Lafayette called
the combat “the best fought action of the war.”7
For men of Ephraim’s father’s generation, who by their own will
fomented a revolution and created a new republic, it seemed
plausible that they could pass along to their sons the example of
independent manhood from their own lives. J. Hector St. John de
Crèvecoeur, the French soldier turned New York planter, who after
the war penned the famous Letters from an American Farmer,
sketched an image of himself tilling the land that ensured “all our
rights . . . our freedom” and “our power as citizens.” On top of his
plow he sat his young son: “I am now doing for him, I say, what my
father formerly did for me” so that “he may perform the same
operations, for the same purposes, when I am worn out and old!”8
What Crèvecoeur could not imagine was the coming transition to
market capitalism in the New England countryside, a transformation
that prompted a dramatic reconsideration of manhood during
Ephraim Avery’s lifetime. Even if Ephraim’s father and grandfather
shared similar expectations with Crèvecoeur at the war’s end, the
harsh reality of farming in industrializing New England was already
destroying those dreams for many fathers and sons. Ephraim’s family
story occasioned a familiar contrast between the many who
floundered and the few who succeeded in this new economy.9
When Ephraim’s grandfather, Amos Avery Sr., moved his small
family to a neighborhood north of Coventry in 1761, he was a
recently remarried widower with a young son (Ephraim’s father,
Amos Jr.). He relocated there along with his first wife’s brother,
Ephraim Kingsbury, and the two men shared a home while Amos Sr.,
a skilled carpenter, built houses for each of their families a half mile
apart.
North Coventry was not a place where the future boded well for
the post-revolutionary generation. Second Parish lay on the town’s
outskirts, near uncleared woodlands. Town folk referred to the
residents there as the “woods people,” and, as a Congregational
minister recalled, the inhabitants there faced the deprivations and
threats of poverty that came with settling a new community.10
Both Kingsbury and Avery started out as landowners in this
hardscrabble village. Owning a reasonable-sized farm, they believed,
made a man independent and ensured him of a “competence”—a
comfortable livelihood that could be passed along to his children. For
Ephraim Kingsbury, all this came true. He became a local justice of
the peace, adding the suffix “Esq.” to his name; was elected a dozen
times to the state assembly; and served on committees at the
Congregational church. His eldest son became state treasurer of
Connecticut and his youngest graduated from Dartmouth College
before becoming a lawyer and a clerk in the U.S. District Court of
New York City.11
The fortunes of the Avery men were more mixed and therefore
more typical. Ephraim’s grandfather and father experienced the
declining fortunes common to New England farmers in the early
republic. For decades each generation of farm families had put
extreme pressure on an already limited supply of viable land. By the
1790s these pressures became more acute. Independence from the
British empire plus revolution and wars in Europe induced more
farmers to turn to livestock or dairy production, or to growing a
single crop for distant markets. As market forces reshaped this rural
economy, farmland became far scarcer, and families became
consumers of many of the items they had previously produced for
themselves or bartered for with their neighbors.
Young men in Connecticut’s rural villages now faced several
disturbing possibilities: they could become tenants rather than
landowners, they could sell their own labor or rely on their children
to work for wages in manufacturing, or they could pick up and head
west or north to the frontier in search of land. Ephraim Avery’s
father certainly considered these choices. Since Amos Sr. needed to
keep the farm for his own survival, Ephraim’s parents, Amos Jr. and
Abigail Loomis, didn’t wait for an inheritance and, like countless
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and the Ohio to remain a French preserve. No doubt it was to the
interest of Great Britain, as an Imperial Power, that France should be
attacked and, if possible, overthrown in the New World as in the Old.
The conquest of Canada was part of Pitt’s general scheme of policy,
and English regiments were not sent to America for the sake of the
American colonists alone.[28] But the allegation made in after years,
that the campaigns in America were of great concern to the mother
country and of little concern to the American colonies, was on the
face of it untrue. To the English colonists in North America the
French in Canada were the one great present danger, and the
conquest of Canada was the one thing needful. Yet we find that, in
1758, the troops, nearly 12,000 in number, which achieved the
second capture of Louisbourg were nearly all regulars; that in the
force which Abercromby led against Ticonderoga about one-half of
the total fighting men were soldiers of the line, and that even Forbes’
little army, which took Fort Duquesne, contained 1,600 regulars out
of a total of 6,000 men. In the following year, Wolfe’s army, which
took Quebec, was almost entirely composed of Imperial troops. Nor
was this all. Although, in 1758, the colonies, or rather the New
England colonies, readily answered to Pitt’s call for a levy of 20,000
men, a considerable part of the expense which was thus incurred
was recouped from the Imperial exchequer.[29] The conclusion of the
whole matter is that to the mother country, rather than to the colonies
themselves, was it due that the great danger which had menaced the
latter for a century and a half was finally removed. England gave the
best of her fighting men, and loaded her people at home with a debt
of many millions, in order that her great competitor might be
weakened, and that her children on the other side of the Atlantic
might be for all time secure on land from foreign foes, while her
fleets kept them safe from attack by sea; and, inasmuch as the
French in America were numerically insignificant as compared with
the English colonists, the only real justification for the colonists
requiring aid from the mother country to overcome the difficulty was,
that the English colonies were by geography and interest divided
from each other and consequently indifferent to each other’s burdens
and perils; while Canada, united in aim and organization, received
also assistance, though niggardly assistance, from France.
 The French were the main enemies to the English in North
America. The native Indians were the only other human beings
against whom the colonists had to defend themselves, and here
clearly it was their concern alone. The New Aid given by the
Englanders took the burden on themselves manfully, mother country
against the Indians.
so far as related to their own borders, but they were
not prepared to fight the battles of the Pennsylvanians and
Virginians; and the Pennsylvanians and Virginians were slow to help
themselves. The result was, as told in the last chapter, that the brunt
of the war with Pontiac and his confederates fell largely on the
mother country, her officers, and her troops, and this fact alone was
sufficient justification for Grenville’s contention, that a small Imperial
force ought to be maintained in, and be in part paid by, the American
colonies.
But then comes the last and the strongest argument (3) Argument that
of the colonies. The mother country dictated the because the
mother country
policy; distant and without direct representation, dictated the policy
though their agents were active in England, the she ought to bear
the expense.
colonies could only follow where the mother country
led: the mother country, therefore, should pay the cost of defending
the outlying provinces; or, if the latter contributed at all to the cost, it
was for them and not for the mother country to determine the amount
and the method of the contribution. The real answer to this argument
was, as Adam Smith saw,[30] that the colonies should Question of colonial
be represented in the Imperial Parliament. He allowed representation
the Imperial
in

that such a proposal was beset by difficulties, but he Parliament.

did not consider, as Burke considered, that the difficulties were
insurmountable. Yet the problem, infinitely easier in the days of
steam and telegraphy, has not yet been solved, and the preliminary
task of combining a group of self-governing colonies into a single
confederation had, in the eighteenth century, only been talked of and
never been seriously attempted in North America.
In theory, English citizens, who had never been taxed directly for
Imperial purposes, might fairly claim not to be taxed, unless and until
they were taken into full partnership and given a voice in determining
the policy of the Empire. But the actual facts of the case made the
demand of the mother country on the American colonies in itself
eminently reasonable. It was true that England had Moderation of the
dictated the policy; but it was also true that the policy English demand on
the colonies.
had been directly in the interests of the colonies, and
such as they warmly approved. They were asked for money, but only
for their own protection, and to preclude the possibility of a further
burden falling on the mother country, already overweighted with debt
incurred on behalf of these particular provinces of the Empire. The
demand was a small one; the money to be raised would clearly
defray but a fraction of the cost of defending the North American
colonies. To the amount no reasonable exception could be taken;
and as to the method of raising it the colonies were, as a matter of
fact, consulted, for Grenville, the author of the Stamp Act, gave a
year’s notice, before the Act was finally passed,[31] in order that the
colonies might, in the meantime, if they could, agree upon some
more palatable method of providing the sum required.
The merits of England, no less than her defects, England suffered
tended to alienate the North American colonies. It is for her merits as
well as for her
possible that, if she had made a larger and more defects.
sweeping demand, she would have been more successful. Her
requisition was so moderate, that it seemed to be petty, and might
well have aroused suspicion that there was more behind; that what
was actually proposed was an insidious preliminary to some far-
reaching scheme for oppressing the colonies and bringing them into
subjection. It has been held, too, that, if the Stamp Act had been
passed without delay, there would have been less opposition to it
than when it had been brooded over for many months. In other
words, the fairness of dealing, which gave full warning and full time
for consideration of a carefully measured demand, was turned to
account against the mother country. But after all what was in men’s
minds, when the American colonies began their contest for
independence was, speaking broadly, the feeling, right The analogy of
or wrong, that a mother country ought to pay and family life in the
case of a mother
colonies ought not. Men argued then, and they still country and its
argue, from the analogy of a family. The head of the colonies.
family should provide, as long as the children remain part of the
household.
The analogy of family life suggests a further view of the relations
between a mother country and its colonies, which accounts for the
possibilities of friction. A colonial empire consists of an old
community linked to young ones. The conditions, the standards, the
points of view, in politics, in morals, in social and industrial matters,
are not identical in old and young communities. Young peoples, like
young men, do not count the cost, and do not feel responsibility to
the same extent as their elders. They are more restive, more ready
to move forward, more prompt in action. Their horizon is limited, and
therefore they see immediate objects clearly, and they do not
appreciate compromise. The problems which face them are simple
as compared with the complicated questions which face older
communities, and they are impatient of the caution and hesitation
which come with inherited experience in a much wider field of action.
The future is theirs rather than the past, they have not yet
accumulated much capital and draw bills on the coming time. Most of
all, being on promotion, they are sensitive as to their standing,
keenly alive to their interests, and resent any semblance of being
slighted. It is impossible to generalize as to the comparative
standards of morality in old and young communities, either in public
or in private life, but, as a matter of fact, political life, in the middle of
the eighteenth century, was much purer in the North American
colonies than in England: whereas at the present day, in this respect,
England compares favourably with the United States. The North
American colonies were a group of young communities, whose
citizens were, at any rate in New England and Pennsylvania, of a
strong, sober, and very tenacious type: the late war had taught them
to fight: its issue had given them a feeling of strength and security:
there had been no extraordinary strain upon their resources: they
had reached a stage in their history when they were most dangerous
to offend and not unlikely to take offence unless very carefully
handled, and careful handling on the part of the mother country, as
all the world knows, was conspicuous by its absence.
The Native
question.
 One more point may be noted as having an
important bearing upon the general question of the relations between
a mother country and its colonies, one which in particular contributed
to ill-feeling between England and the North American states.
Colonization rarely takes place in an empty land. The colonists on
arrival find native inhabitants, strong or weak, few or many, as the
case may be. In North America there were strong fighting races of
Indians, and the native question played an all-important part in the
early history of European settlement in this part of the world. It is
almost inevitable that white men on the spot, who are in daily contact
with natives, should, unless they hold a brief as missionaries or
philanthropists, take a different view of native rights and claims from
that which is held at a distance. It is true that in our own time, to take
one instance only, the Maori question in New Zealand has been well
handled by the colonial authorities, when thrown on their own
resources, with the result that there are no more loyal members of
the British Empire at the present day than the coloured citizens of
New Zealand; but in the earlier days of colonization the general rule
has been that native races fare better under Imperial than under
colonial control, for the twofold reason that the distant authority is
less influenced by colour prejudice, and that white men who go out
from Europe to settle among native races are, in the ordinary course,
of a rougher type than those who stay at home, and that they tend to
become hardened by living among lower grades of humanity. The
Quaker followers of Penn, in the state which bears his name, were
conspicuous for just and kindly treatment of the Indians, but in the
back-lands of Pennsylvania the traders and pioneers of settlement
were to the full as grasping as their neighbours. The North American
Puritan, like the South African Dutchman, looked on the coloured
man much as the Jewish race regarded the native tribes of Canaan.
The colonists came in and took the land of the heathen in
possession. Indian atrocities, stimulated by French influence and
French missionary training, were not calculated to soften the views
of the English settlers. They saw their homes burned: their wives and
children butchered: to them arguments as to the red men’s rights
were idle words.
 The only authority which could and would hold the balance even
between the races was the Imperial Government; and in the hands
of that Government, represented for the purpose in the middle of the
eighteenth century by a man of rare ability and unrivalled
experience, Sir William Johnson, the superintendence of native
affairs was placed. But this duty, and the attempt to carry it out justly
and faithfully, involved friction with the more turbulent and the less
scrupulous of the colonists. Colonization is a tide which is always
coming in; and, unless restrictions are imposed upon the colonists by
some superior authority, the native owners are gradually
expropriated. ‘Your people,’ said the representatives of the Six
Nations to Sir William Johnson in 1755, ‘when they buy a small piece
of land of us, by stealing they make it large;’[32] and Johnson amply
corroborated this view. In October, 1762, he wrote: ‘The Indians are
greatly disgusted at the great thirst which we all seem to show for
their lands.’[33]
A word must be said of Sir William Johnson, for he Sir William
was one of the men who, in the long course of British Johnson.
colonial history, have rendered memorable service to their country by
special aptitude for dealing with native races. In this quality the
French in North America, as a rule, far excelled the English, and at
the particular place and time, Johnson’s character and influence
were an invaluable asset on the British side. An Irishman by birth,
and nephew of Sir Peter Warren, he had come out to America in
1738 to manage his uncle’s estates on the confines of the Six Nation
Indians, and some eleven years later he was made Superintendent
of Indian Affairs for the Northern division. He lived on the Mohawk
river, as much Indian as white man, his second wife being Molly
Brant, sister of the subsequently celebrated Mohawk leader, and
among the Iroquois his influence was unrivalled. In the wars with
France he did notable work, especially at the battle of Lake George
in 1755, and at the taking of Fort Niagara in 1759; and, when he died
in July, 1774, on the eve of the War of Independence, his death left a
gap which could not be filled, for no one among his contemporaries
could so persuade and so control the fiercest native fighters in North
America.
 As has been seen, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 carefully
safeguarded the Indians’ lands, and in 1765 a line was drawn from
the Ohio valley to Wood Creek in the Oneida country, dividing the
country which should in future be open to white settlers from that
which the Six Nations were to hold for their own. This boundary was,
through Johnson’s influence, confirmed by an agreement signed at
Fort Stanwix on the 5th of November, 1768, in the The Fort Stanwix
presence of Johnson himself as well as of Benjamin line.
Franklin’s son, who was at the time Governor of New Jersey. The
signatories were representatives of the colonies of New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, and Virginia on the one hand, and deputies of the Six
Nations on the other; and the Indians were described as ‘true and
absolute proprietors of the lands in question’. The line diverged from
the Alleghany branch of the Ohio some miles above Pittsburg; it was
carried in a north-easterly direction to the Susquehanna; from the
Susquehanna it was taken east to the Delaware; and from the
Delaware it was carried north along the course of the Unadilla river,
ending near Fort Stanwix, now the town of Rome, in Oneida county
of the state of New York. Under the terms of the agreement all the
land east of the line was, for a sum of £10,460 7s. 3d. sold to the
King, except such part as was within the province of Pennsylvania.
[34] It was a definite recognition of the Indians as being owners of
land, and a definite pronouncement that what they sold should be
sold to the Crown. Neither tenet was likely to commend itself to the
border colonists. They would find it hard to believe that a savage’s
tenure of land was as valid as that of a white man, nor would they
welcome the Imperial Government as landlord of the hinterland. The
red man thought otherwise. The power from over the seas, which the
colonists soon learnt to denounce as the enemy of liberty, was to
them the protector of life and land: and, when the struggle was over,
many of the Six Nation Indians were to be found in Canada, not in
their old homes under the flag of the United States.
Nor were the Indians the only inhabitants of North Attitude of the
America who did not see eye to eye with the colonists Canadians.
in their contest with the mother country. In October, 1774, the
General Congress of the recalcitrant colonies issued a long
manifesto to their ‘friends and fellow subjects’ in Canada, inviting
them to ‘unite with us in one social compact formed on the generous
principles of equal liberty’. The manifesto appealed to the writings of
‘the immortal Montesquieu’, the ‘countryman’ of the French
Canadians, and warned the latter not to become the instruments of
the cruelty and despotism of English ministers, but to stand firm for
their natural liberties, alleged to be threatened by the Quebec Act
which had just been passed. But the high-sounding appeal missed
its mark. It is true that at the beginning of the war, when Canada was
left almost undefended, and when, in consequence, Montgomery
and the Congress troops overran the country up to the walls of
Quebec, a considerable number of the French Canadians, together
with the British malcontents in Canada, openly or secretly made
common cause with the invaders; but even then the large majority of
the French Canadians remained neutral, and, if some joined the
ranks of the invaders, others, including especially the higher ranks of
the population, supported her cause. Here was a people lately
conquered, under the rule of an alien race. A golden opportunity was
given them, it seemed, to recover their freedom. Why did the French
colonists not throw in their lot wholehearted with the English settlers
in North America? Why did they prefer to remain under the British
Crown?
The first reason was that they were not oppressed. The Canadians
On the contrary they had already enjoyed more liberty were not oppressed
under English rule.
under the British Government than under the old
French régime. There were complaints, no doubt, as will be seen,
but the Canadians were free to make them; there was no stifling of
discontent, no stamping out of inconvenient pleas for liberty. With
British rule came in the printing press. The Quebec Gazette was first
issued in June, 1764, and in it the ordinances were published in
French as well as in English. Even under military administration a
formerly submissive people learnt their privileges and their rights,
and General Murray, whose recall was due to allegations that he had
unduly favoured the French population at the expense of the
Protestant Loyalists, wrote of the Canadians as a ‘frugal, industrious,
moral race of men who, from the just and mild treatment they met
with from His Majesty’s military officers, who ruled the country four
years, until the establishment of civil government, had greatly got the
better of the natural antipathy they had to their conquerors’.[35]
Canada was not anxious to overturn a system under which
Canadians were being trained to be free. If England oppressed, she
oppressed Englishmen rather than Frenchmen or natives, and one
element in the alleged oppression of her own people consisted in
safeguarding the rights of other races.
The second and the main reason why Canada did They preferred the
not combine with the United States was that, though English in and from
England to the
Canadians did not love the English from England, they English colonists in
loved less their English neighbours in America. America.
Charles the Second told his brother that the English would not kill
himself to make James king. Similarly the Canadians, on reflection,
were not prepared to turn out the British Government in order to
substitute the domination of the English colonies. Generalities as to
natural rights and equal liberties, borrowed from the writings of
European philosophers, could not cover up the plain facts of the
case. Canada, united to the English colonies, would have been
submerged, and French Roman Catholics would have been
permanently subject to English Protestants, far less tolerant than
Englishmen at home. The colonists who had issued the high-
sounding manifesto had done so with strong resentment at the
extension of the limits of the province of Quebec, at the widening of
the field in which the Canadian system and the religion of Canada
should hold its own. They were speaking with two voices at one and
the same time; calling on the Canadians not to submit to British
tyranny, and denouncing as tyranny a measure which favoured
Canada. Many years back the Canadians and their friends had
differentiated between the English from England, who came out to
fight, and the English colonists in America. The eye-witness of the
siege and capture of Louisbourg in 1745 favourably, and probably
unfairly, contrasted Warren and his British sailors with Pepperell and
the New England levies. To the men from a distance, better
disciplined, less prejudiced, less imbued with provincial animosity,
there was no such aversion as to the enemy who was ever under
their eyes. At all times and in all parts of the world there has been
the same tale to tell; if one race must be subordinated to another, it
prefers that its rulers should not be those who for generations have
been their immediate neighbours and their persistent rivals.
It was written in the book of fate that New France should sooner or
later become incorporated in the British Empire; it was written too
that, when that time came, the British provinces in North America
would assert and win complete independence. It is impossible to
estimate aright the loss except in the light of the gain which
preceded it. Only consummate statesmanship or military genius
could have averted the severance of the North American colonies,
for the very qualities which had brought success alike to them and to
the motherland, dogged persistence, sense of strength, all the
instincts and the principles which have made the English great, were
ranged on either side in the civil war between England and her
children: and that war was the direct, almost the inevitable result of
their recent joint effort and their united victory. Friction began: years
went on: bitterness was intensified: the noisier and less scrupulous
partisans silenced the voice of reason: in the mother country the
Sovereign and his advisers made a good cause bad: the revolting
colonies were ennobled by Washington. Success justified the action
of the colonists. England was condemned because she failed. Yet
the story, if read aright, teaches only this: that the defeat of England
by her own children was due to the simple fact that partly by her
action, partly by her inaction, the children in wayward and blundering
fashion had grown to greatness.
After the capitulation of Montreal, in September, 1760, Canada
was, for the time being, under military rule. There were Canada under
three military governors, General Murray at Quebec, military rule.
Colonel Burton at Three Rivers, and General Gage at Montreal. All
three were subordinate to Amherst, the Commander-in-Chief in
North America, whose head quarters were usually at New York.
Amherst left for England in 1763, and was succeeded by General
Gage, whose place was filled by the transfer of Burton from Three
Rivers, while the military governorship of Three Rivers was entrusted
to Colonel Haldimand, one of the Swiss officers who deserved so
well of England in North America.
 While Canada was still under military rule, and The French
before the Peace of Paris was signed, the British Canadians at the
time of the British
Government took steps to collect full information as to conquest of
their newly-acquired possession, with a view to Canada.
determining the lines on which it should be administered in future. At
the end of 1761 Amherst was instructed to obtain the necessary
reports, which were in the following year duly supplied by Murray,
Burton, and Gage in respect of Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal
respectively.[36]
Canada at this time contained little more than 70,000 white
inhabitants. The population, Murray thought, had tended to decrease
for twenty years past, owing to war, to the strictness of the marriage
laws, and to the prohibition of marriages between Protestants and
Roman Catholics; but he looked for a large increase from natural
causes in the next twenty years, the men being strong and the
women extremely prolific.
The Canadians, Murray wrote, were ‘mostly of a Norman race’
and, ‘in general, of a litigious disposition’. He classified them into the
gentry, the clergy, the merchants, and the peasantry or habitants.
The gentry or seigniors, descendants of military or civil officers, the
creation largely of Louis XIV, Colbert, and Talon, he described as for
the most part men of small means, unless they had held one or other
of the distant posts, where they could make their fortunes. ‘They are
extremely vain, and have an utter contempt for the trading part of the
colony, though they made no scruple to engage in it, pretty deeply
too, whenever a convenient opportunity served. They were great
tyrants to their vassals, who seldom met with redress, let their
grievances be ever so just. This class will not relish the British
Government, from which they can neither expect the same
employments or the same douceurs they enjoyed under the French.’
Of the clergy he wrote that the higher ranks were filled by
Frenchmen, the rest being Canadian born, and in general Canadians
of the lower class. Similarly the wholesale traders were mostly
French, and the retail traders natives of Canada. The peasantry he
described as ‘a strong, healthy race, plain in their dress, virtuous in
their morals, and temperate in their living’, extremely ignorant, and
extremely tenacious of their religion. At the time of writing, Murray
and his colleagues evidently anticipated more loyalty from the
peasantry than from the higher classes of Canadians. Protected in
their religion, given impartial justice, freed from class oppression and
official corruption, they seemed likely to develop into happy and
contented subjects of the British Crown. The sequel was, however,
to show that more support would accrue to the new rulers of Canada
from the classes which had something to lose than from the
credulous habitants.
‘The French,’ so ran Murray’s report, ‘bent their whole attention in
this part of the world to the fur-trade.’ They neglected agriculture and
the fisheries. ‘The inhabitants are inclinable enough to be lazy, and
not much skilled in husbandry, the great dependencies they have
hitherto had on the gun and fishing-rod made them neglect tillage
beyond the requisites of their own consumption and the few
purchases they needed.’ Gage wrote that ‘the only immediate
importance and advantage the French king derived from Canada
was the preventing the extension of the British colonies, the
consumption of the commodities and manufactures of France, and
the trade of pelletry’. He noted how common it was ‘for the servants,
whom the merchants hired to work their boats and assist in their
trade, through a long habit of Indian manners and customs, at length
to adopt their way of life, to intermarry with them, and turn savages’.
Burton’s report was to the same effect: ‘The laziness of the people,
and the alluring and momentary advantages they reaped from their
traffic with the Indians in the upper countries, and the counterband
trade they carried on with the English colonies, have hitherto
prevented the progress of husbandry;’ and again, ‘The greatest part
of the young men, allured by the debauched and rambling life which
always attend the Indian trade in the upper countries, never thought
of settling at home till they were almost worn out with diseases or
premature old age.’
It was a country and a people of strong contrasts, wholly unlike
their own colonies, that the English were called upon to rule. At head
quarters and near it there was a cast-iron system in Church and
State, trade monopoly, an administration at once despotic and
corrupt. Behind there was a boundless wild, to which French
restlessness, French adaptability for dealing with native races, and
the possibilities of illicit wealth called the young and enterprising,
who were impatient of control, and who could not share the gains of
corruption at Montreal and Quebec. In Canada there was no gradual
and continuous widening of settlement, such as marked the English
colonies in North America. In those colonies development was
spontaneous but, in the main, civilized; not according to fixed rule,
but not contrary to law, the law being home-made and not imposed
from without.
In Canada extreme conservatism existed side by side with
complete lawlessness. At one pole of society were a certain number
of obedient human beings, planted out in rows; at the other were the
wandering fur-traders, who knew no law and had no fixed dwelling-
place. Excluding the officials from France, ill paid and intent on
perquisites alone, and excluding French or Canadian merchants, the
main constituents in the population of Canada were the seignior, the
priest, the habitant, and the voyageur; of these four elements it
would be hard to say which was farthest removed from citizenship,
as it was understood in England and the English colonies. Yet all
these elements were to be combined and moulded into a British
community.
The beginning of civil administration in Canada Beginning of civil
under British rule was the Royal Proclamation of 7th government.
October, 1763, which has been noticed in the preceding chapter.
Before it was issued, an intimation was sent to Murray that he had
been selected as the first civil governor of the new British province of
Quebec. His commission as governor was dated 21st November,
1763; and the Royal Instructions, which accompanied the
Commission, bore the date of 7th December, 1763; but it was not
until August, 1764, that he took up his new position and military rule
came to an end.[37]
James Murray was still under forty years of age. He General Murray.
proved himself a stanch, loyal, and capable soldier,
resolute in critical times, as when he defended Quebec through the
trying winter of 1759-60, and later, in 1781-2, held Minorca until his
handful of troops, stricken with famine and disease, surrendered
their arms, as they said, to God alone. His words and his actions
alike testified that he was a humane and just man. Like other
soldiers, before and since, having seen war face to face, he was
more ready than civilians who had not risked their lives, but breathed
threatenings and slaughter from a safe distance, to treat the
conquered with leniency.
He had many difficulties to contend with. Military Difficulties of the
matters did not run smoothly. In September, 1763, situation.
there had been a dangerous mutiny among the troops at Quebec. It
was caused by an ill-timed order sent out from home to the effect
that the soldiers should pay for their rations; and serious
consequences might have followed but for the prompt and firm
attitude of the general and his officers. At Quebec, Murray combined
civil and military powers; but after civil administration had been
proclaimed, though his government included the whole of the
province as constituted by the Royal proclamation, he was left
without authority over the troops at Montreal, where Burton jealously
retained an independent military command. The inevitable result was
to fetter his action to a great extent, to give to the Canadians the
impression of divided authority,[38] and to accentuate friction
between soldiers and civilians, which culminated in an Ill feeling between
assault at Montreal in December, 1764, on a soldiers civilians.
and

magistrate named Walker, who had made himself

specially obnoxious to the officers of the garrison. Two years later
the supposed perpetrators of the outrage were tried and acquitted,
but the affair left ill feeling behind it, and Walker remained an active
and pertinacious opponent of the British Government in Canada.
Among the Canadian population there were various causes of
unrest. The priesthood were anxious as to their position and
privileges. The depreciation of the paper money, which had been
issued under the French régime, gave trouble. The law was in a
state of chaos; and, most of all, the first Governor of Canada had to
withstand the pretensions of the handful of Protestants, in 1764
about 200 in number, in 1766 about 450, who wished The Protestant
minority.
to dominate the French Canadians, alien in religion and in race.
Against the claims of this small but noisy and intriguing minority
Murray resolutely set his face, but the difficulties which arose led to
his being summoned home. He left Canada for Murray leaves for
England towards the end of June, 1766, and though England and is
succeeded by
he retained the post of Governor till April, 1768, he Carleton.
never returned to Quebec.
His successor was Guy Carleton, who arrived in Canada in
September, 1766, and carried on the administration as Lieutenant-
Governor till 1768, when he became Governor-in-chief. Like Murray,
he was a soldier of distinction, and had been a warm personal friend
of Wolfe, who made him one of the executors of his will. He was
born in 1724, at Strabane in the north of Ireland, the third son of
General Sir Guy Carleton. He went into the Guards, was transferred
to the 72nd Regiment, and served in Germany, at Louisbourg, and,
as Quartermaster-General, with Wolfe at Quebec. He remained at
Quebec with Murray during the eventful winter of 1759-60; and, after
further active service at Belle Isle and Havana, he came back to
Quebec in 1766, to do more than any one man in war and peace for
the safety and well-being of Canada as a British possession.
The difficulties which Murray had been called upon to meet
confronted him also, and, like Murray, he saw the necessity as well
as the justice of resisting the extravagant claims of the minority, and
conciliating to British rule the large body of the Canadian population.
For nearly four years he remained at his post, forming his views as
to the lines on which Canada should be remodelled. In August, 1770,
he left for England on leave of absence, and in England he remained
until the Quebec Act had been passed. The Act was passed in June,
1774, taking effect from the 1st of May in the following year; and in
the middle of September, 1774, Carleton arrived again at Quebec. It
is now proposed to review the conditions which led to Conditions which
the passing of the Act, and the policy which was led to the passing
of the Quebec Act.
embodied in it, omitting as far as possible minor
incidents and dealing only with the main features, which illustrate the
general course of British colonial history.
 The acquisition of Canada presented to British The Conquest of
statesmen a wholly new problem. The British Empire Canada presented
a new problem in
had hitherto widened mainly by means of settlement, British colonial
for the seventeenth century, as far as Great Britain history.
was concerned, was a time of settlement, not of conquest. Jamaica,
it is true, had been taken from the Spaniards, and New York from the
Dutch; but, great as was the importance of securing those two
dependencies in the light of subsequent history, the conquest or
cession of both the one and the other was rather an incident than the
result of an era of war and conquest. Such an era came with the
eighteenth century; and, when the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 secured
Great Britain in undivided possession of Newfoundland, and
confirmed to her the possession of the Acadian peninsula, and of the
Rock of Gibraltar, a notable outpost of the future Empire, there was a
beginning, though a small beginning, of territorial expansion as the
result of war.
The Seven Years’ War brought with it British conquest alike in East
and West; but in India the British advance was in some sort a
repetition on a wider scale of what other European nations had done
in the same regions. It was the natural outcome of trade rivalry, and
of white men coming among Eastern races. The conquest of
Canada, on the other hand, differed in kind from all Canada was: (1) a
that had gone before in British history. The Imperial continental area;
(2) colonized by
Government of Great Britain took over a great another European
expanse of continent, and became, by force of arms, race; (3) bordering
on a sphere of
proprietor of a country which another colonizing race British colonization;
(4) the home of a
had acquired by settlement. The new problems were coloured race.
how to administer and to develop not a small island or
peninsula but a very large continental area, and how to rule a rival
white race which from the beginnings of colonization in North
America had made that area, or part of it, its own. To these two most
difficult problems was added a third, how to administer the new
territory and to rule the French colonists, so as to work in harmony
with the adjacent British colonies. Conquest and settlement, so to
speak, overlapped. If Canada had not been a French colony, and
had been inhabited by coloured men alone, or if Canada, as a
French colony, had been in a different continent from the British
North American colonies, the task of construction or re-construction
would have been infinitely easier. It would have been easier, too, if
the French Canadians had been the only inhabitants of Canada. But,
as it was, one white race conquered another white race, which in its
turn had secured mastery over a coloured race, and in the land of
that coloured race had not merely conquered or traded, but settled
and colonized; and the new conquerors were of the same kith and
kin as settlers in the adjoining territories, whose traditions were all
traditions not of ruling nor of conquering so much as of gradually
acquiring by settlement at the expense of the coloured race.
What had British statesmen to guide them in dealing Conditions which
with the question, and what considerations led to the guided British
policy in Canada as
provisions which were embodied in their first measure, embodied in the
the Royal Proclamation of 7th October, 1763? It was Proclamation
1763.
of

evident, in the first place, that a line could, if it was Geographical

thought advisable, be drawn between the settled parts division between
of Canada and the Western territories, where the the settled districts
and the hinterland.
French had only maintained outposts and trading
stations. The government of Quebec, therefore, which The Indian
was the new colony, was, as has been seen, limited to question.
the districts of Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal, and did not
include the regions of the lakes, or the territories of the Hudson’s
Bay Company. In the second place, past experience had proved that
English dealings with the Indians had been very much less
successful than French management, the characteristic features of
which were personal relations with a despotic governor and his
authorized agents and representatives; and that the Indians enjoyed
more protection and were likely to develop greater loyalty and
contentment under a central authority—the Imperial Government—
represented and advised by Sir William Johnson, than if left to
bargain with and to resent encroachments by the various British
colonies. Consequently the proclamation reserved the western
hinterland ‘under our sovereignty, protection, and dominion for the
use of the said Indians’, in addition to safeguarding the existing
rights and lands of the natives within the borders of the colonies. In
the third place it was obviously desirable to introduce Necessity for
into Canada a leaven of colonists of English race, and attracting British
more especially of colonists who had been trained to colonists
arms and already knew the land and the people. Hence, just as in
bygone days Colbert and Talon, when colonizing Canada on a
definite system, planted time-expired soldiers along the St. Lawrence
and the Richelieu rivers, so the Proclamation of 1763 empowered
free land grants to be given in Canada, as well as in the other
American possessions of Great Britain, to officers and soldiers who
had served in the late war; and it also encouraged British settlers
generally by providing that, as soon as circumstances allowed, a
General Assembly was to be summoned ‘in such manner and form
as is used and directed in those colonies and provinces in America
which are under our immediate government.’[39]
But most of all it was necessary to mete out fair and and for conciliating
liberal treatment to the new subjects, the French the French
Canadians.
Canadians, and make them contented citizens of the
British Empire. This object, Englishmen naturally argued, could best
be attained, first, by securing ‘the ancient inhabitants in all the titles,
rights, and privileges granted to them by Treaty’[40]; and secondly, by
giving the Canadians as soon as possible the laws and institutions
which British subjects valued and under which they had thrived, by
assimilating Canada as far as possible in these respects to the
neighbouring British colonies. Accordingly the Canadians were from
the first to enjoy the benefit of the laws of England, Desire to give
and courts of justice were to be established with British privileges to
Canada.
power to determine all causes criminal and civil ‘as
near as may be agreeable to the laws of England’. The question of
religion was ignored in the proclamation; freedom of worship had
already been guaranteed to the Roman Catholics by the 4th Article
of the Peace of Paris,[41] and Murray’s instructions were that he
should ‘in all things regarding the said inhabitants, conform with
great exactness to the stipulations of the said treaty in this respect’.
There the matter was left for the moment, though Murray’s
commission provided that the persons who should be elected as
members of the future Assembly were to subscribe the declaration
against Popery, enacted in Charles the Second’s reign, which
provision would have excluded Roman Catholics from sitting in the
Assembly.
There is no question that the proclamation itself was Liberal intention of
conceived in a wise and tolerant spirit. There was the Proclamation of
1763.
every intention to safeguard the best interests alike of
the French Canadians and of the Indians; to give to the latter the
protection of Imperial rule, to give to the former the benefits of British
laws, and as far as possible the privileges of British citizenship. The
proclamation, too, was not drawn on hard and fast lines. As soon as
circumstances permitted, and not before, representative institutions
were to be introduced, and the laws were not to be necessarily the
laws of England, but ‘as near as may be agreeable to’ the laws of
England.
Murray’s commission as governor empowered him, Murray’s
‘so soon as the situation and circumstances of our Commission.
said province under your government will admit thereof, and when
and as often as need shall require, to summon and call General
Assemblies of the freeholders and planters within your government.’
But by the terms of the commission a council was joined with the
governor and Assembly as the authority for making laws and
ordinances, and the Royal Instructions provided that, pending the
calling of a General Assembly, the governor was to act on the advice
of his council in making regulations, which would have the force of
law, and which were, as a matter of fact, styled ordinances, certain
important subjects, such as taxation, being excluded from their
scope. Thus, until representative institutions could be given to
Canada, legislative and executive authority was placed in the hands
of the governor acting on the advice of a nominated council. But the
council, again, was constituted on liberal lines, as its The Council of
members were to be the Lieutenant-Governors of government.
Montreal and Three Rivers, the Chief Justice of the province of
Quebec, the Surveyor-General of Customs in America for the
Northern district, and ‘eight other persons to be chosen by you from
amongst the most considerable of the inhabitants of, or persons of
property in, our said province’. From the first, therefore, it was
intended that the unofficial element in the council should outnumber
the officials—evidence, if evidence were wanted, that it was desired
to govern Canada in accordance with the wishes of the people.
Immediately after civil government had taken the place of military
rule, an ordinance was, in September, 1764, promulgated,
constituting courts of justice, the law to be Courts of justice
administered being in the main the law of England, established.
and trial by jury being introduced without any religious qualification
for jurymen. One provision in the ordinance, it may be noticed in
passing, abolished the district of Three Rivers, which had hitherto
been, like Montreal, in charge of a Lieutenant-Governor. Thus
Canada was started on its course as a British colony, with the best
intentions, the prospect of such self-government as other American
colonies enjoyed, British law and justice, and above all a governor
who was in sympathy with the people, and earnestly Causes of the
worked for their good; but difficulties arose almost difficulties
arose.
which

immediately, and the causes of them are not far to

seek.
It was the honest desire of the British Government The religious
to give liberty to Canada, to treat it, not as a question.
conquered country, but as a British colony. Liberty, as the English
understand it, has connoted three things, representative institutions,
British law and justice, including especially trial by jury and the
Habeas Corpus Act, and freedom of conscience. But in past times to
Protestants freedom of conscience meant practical exclusion from
the political sphere of those, like Roman Catholics, whose creed was
in principle an exclusive creed; and therefore, in a Roman Catholic
country under Protestant supremacy, like Ireland or Canada in the
eighteenth century, representative institutions from the strong
Protestant point of view meant institutions which did not represent
the bulk of the population. In this matter, as in others, in the case of
Canada, English statesmen and English governors, though not at
once prepared to dispense with religious tests, were more liberally
inclined towards the ‘new subjects’, the French Canadians, than
were the English colonists in America; and the soldier Murray had far
more breadth of mind than the local lawyers and politicians who
prated of liberties which they had no intention of granting to others.