Pre-Confederation Canadian History

A half century would pass between Cartier’s kidnappings of Aboriginal men along the St. Lawrence and the arrival of French delegations determined to build a sustained presence. Not surprisingly they would do so first in the lands closest to Europe and near the riches of the Grand Banks fisheries. This territory would become known as Acadia.

Both the Portuguese and the British briefly established positions in the region in the 16th century, but neither built lasting settlements or trading posts. The Portuguese enjoyed a singular advantage in this field: the Azores, a chain of small islands roughly halfway between the European mainland and Newfoundland. This stopping point between Europe and the Grand Banks enabled Portuguese and Basque fleets to make the voyage into the western Atlantic with relative security and was a key factor behind long-term Iberian involvement on the fisheries and whaling grounds. Their endless supplies of salt, moreover, made it possible for the Iberians to preserve their catch of cod without bothering to make landfall. Had they wanted to, they could easily have dominated Newfoundland and its waters. Doing so was, simply, unnecessary.

French missions followed in the late 16th century and were both tentative and unsuccessful at first. There were abortive efforts — on Sable Island using convict settlers in 1599, at Tadoussac the year after, and on Ste. Croix in 1604 — but a viable presence was only established in July 1605, when Port-Royal was founded on the Bay of Fundy in what is now Nova Scotia. Port-Royal was to become the hub of a French colonial territory in what 16th century European maps described as “Arcadia.” The French dropped the “r” and Acadia eventually stretched from Castine (in what is now the mid-coast of Maine), across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island (Île Saint-Jean), and all the way to the south coast of Newfoundland.

As colonies go, what distinguishes Acadia as an administrative unit is that so much of it was water: the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Bay of Fundy, the Gulf of Maine, Cabot Strait, and a long stretch of the Atlantic Ocean. The Gulf of St. Lawrence is roughly circular and many of the key settlements were along its edge. There were exceptions, and they were very important.

Figure 4.2 Port-Royal, Acadia, ca. 1612, is based on Champlain’s drawings.

One of the principles embraced in this book is using the group names that peoples preferred for themselves. The people of Acadia are, thus, Acadiens. We could go the extra step and refer to Acadia as “L’Acadie” but, in the interest of keeping it simple, we won’t. The English-language version of the group name – “Acadian” – appears here when used in the context of British administration of or campaigns against the Acadiens. Thus, the “Acadian Expulsion” (which in French is Le Grand Dérangement). Many of the deported Acadiens wound up in Louisiana where their group name evolved into Cajuns, a small jump from les Acadiens but a much bigger leap from “Acadians.” The Acadien people in the Maritimes have survived the disruptions of imperial and inter-colonial wars and they remain one of the strongest threads in the fabric of regional cultures. It is, indeed, the oldest continuous colonial culture in what is now Canada and the two branches of the Acadien family constitute one of the oldest European-descended cultures in North America.

A Difficult Start

The first French settlers arrived mainly from the west-central region of France called Vienne, near Poitiers. (The later settlers of the St. Lawrence originated farther to the northwest, from around Normandy and Paris.) The colony’s first hundred years were marked by conflict and troubles. Port-Royal was barely eight years old in 1613 when a British force out of Virginia burnt it to the ground.

A civil war that lasted until 1645 broke out in 1640 between Acadiens based in the Port-Royal area (and loyal to Governor Charles de Menou d’Aulnay de Charnisay, a Catholic governor) and those attached to the settlement at the mouth of the Saint John River (and affiliated with the Protestant governor, Charles de Saint-Étienne de la Tour). France had badly misunderstood the geography of Acadia and had provided two highly competitive governors for an area divided by only 23 kilometres of water. After many naval and land battles, d’Aulnay came out slightly ahead. In the siege of Saint John (launched by d’Aulnay in April 1645 when La Tour was away in New England), the “Lioness of La Tour,” Françoise-Marie Jacquelin — Charles de la Tour’s wife — led the defending troops. The fort fell and despite promises of mercy, d’Aulnay hanged the garrison; Madame La Tour died in captivity shortly thereafter.

Figure 4.3  A portrait of Françoise-Marie Jacquelin (1602-45).

The Acadien civil war, as bloody and pointless as it was, underlines the many curious aspects of life in the 17th century colony. First, it wasn’t entirely the imposition of one people over another. The Wabanaki Confederacy of Penobscot, Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, and Abenaki peoples grafted the Acadiens onto their lives and struggles. Faced with aggressive British settlements in New England, the Confederacy accepted French fortifications and support. One has to keep in mind, however, that the Wabanaki preferred the French over the English precisely because the French posed fewer threats for several reasons. First, the number of French in Acadia was never as great or as worrisome as the number of English to the south. Second, the Acadien community quickly became a syncretic one, comprising Europeans and Aboriginal peoples whose respective clans intermarried extensively. And while populations merged, so did cultures. By the late 17th century there were many Catholic Mi’kmaqs, perhaps as many as there were Catholic French-Acadiens. The English never made this kind of inroad into Wabanaki society nor did Wabanaki peoples find themselves in English colonial councils.

Figure 4.4 Approximate boundaries of the traditional territories of the Mi’kmaq.

Third, despite Wabanaki hostility toward New England, Acadia was a trading and seagoing community that often worked with Bostonian merchants. When La Tour’s fortunes were slipping, he sought financial support and muscle from his (fellow Protestant) network in the New England port. Fourth, official French Catholicism in the colonies was not always rigid. Not only did it permit a Protestant governor but it left its people to their own spiritual devices for years at a time. Resident priests were something of a rarity. Besides, the priests/missionaries were often off leading Wabanaki troops against their Protestant English neighbours. Fifth, Acadia had an economy that was integrative and imaginative. Perhaps the highest achievement of d’Aulnay’s career as governor was his support for the draining of the salt marshes, a distinctively Acadien practice that created coastal and river-mouth pasture land on which to raise substantial herds of cattle — without, importantly, alienating Aboriginal land. More than any other governor in New France, d’Aulnay was successful in building a true colony (albeit one that was not entirely French). Finally, despite the horrors of the civil war (and the hangings of the Saint John garrison were especially grisly), the conflict ended with reconciliation: d’Aulnay died and La Tour married d’Aulnay’s widow. This kind of “third-way” resolution was to become a trademark Acadien strategy over the century that followed the war.

In the meantime Acadia had to deal with its vulnerability issues. Its land and sea frontier to the southwest faced New England and other British colonies and its ocean frontier to the north and east was teeming with fleets of working and naval ships from England/Britain, Spain, Portugal, and still other European countries as well. Much more so than Canada, Acadia bristled with garrisons, from Fort Castine (1615) on the Penobscot River in central Maine east through Port-Royal and Fort Beausejour (1751) at opposite ends of the Bay of Fundy to the heavy-weight Fortress of Louisbourg on Île Royale, built in 1713. The first of these stations came into use early and thereafter often as the growing British and French naval presences in the region increasingly were in conflict. Eighteenth century conflict is considered more fully in Chapter 6.

Figure 4.5 Plan of the western part of the Chignecto Isthmus showing Fort Beausejour and the surrounding area, ca. 1750.

Acadia and French Newfoundland

The fisheries and whaling grounds around the island of Newfoundland attracted fleets from the British West Country ports, from French harbours like St. Malo, from Portugal, and from the Basque villages on the north coast of Spain. Settlements were slow to emerge, not least because England, for example, wanted to control its fleets and sailors; England (and the other European nations involved in the fisheries and in whaling) regarded the Grand Banks and the Strait of Belle Isle as training grounds for voluntary and involuntary navy recruits. Establishing onshore settlements would work against these priorities. (See Chapter 6 for more on this topic.)

Settlement simply wasn’t necessary: the salting of cod could be performed onboard the fishing vessels. Eventually and perhaps inevitably, Europeans (particularly those with a less reliable supply of salt) began landing their catch on the beaches of Newfoundland and drying the fish there before heading home. This was predictably the response first of those fishing fleets, among them the English, that lacked access to salt. It was this process that drew French sailors to Plaisance, or Placentia, where the rocky beaches were perfect for drying fish. In 1655 the French made it the administrative capital for the half of the island that they controlled and began the process of fortifying the harbour and town in 1662. The French lost this position in the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), but as a port Placentia remained the only rival to St. John’s in Newfoundland for nearly a century more.

Attributions

Figure 4.2
Port Royal, Nova Scotia – circa 1612 – Project Gutenberg etext 20110 is in the public domain.
Figure 4.3
Portrait Françoise-Marie Jacquelin by Jeangagnon is in the public domain.
Figure 4.4
The Mi’kmaq by Mikmaq is used under a CC-BY-SA 2.5 license.
Figure 4.5
FortBeausejour1750McCordMuseum by Skeezix1000 is in the public domain.

It is in the nature of childhood to be a part of the life course that is subject to external forces. Infants are nursed into childhood proper with no say as to how that should happen. Behaviours and expectations, rewards and punishments are administered in such a way that children quickly misperceive their world as the only possible way in which childhood might be constructed; it is a period of socialization into adulthood but first into childhood. These are features that make childhood in the past a challenge to research and also an extremely important subject to pursue.

The experiences of children in pre-Confederation Canada varied from one region to the other, from one century to the next, and from one cultural group to another. Just defining the period known as “childhood” and the experience of “childhood” thus becomes a slippery business. What we can say for sure is that childhood was fraught with health hazards and cluttered with work obligations. The family — particularly in rural areas — was the forge in which children were fashioned. In New France the clergy played an important role as well and in the 19th century institutions like orphanages, schools, and prisons began to challenge the primacy of kin in moulding young minds and bodies.

It is easy, however, to underestimate the role that children play in the making of these societies. Their numbers are crucial to their military histories. The loss of children in the 1630s smallpox epidemics, as we have seen in earlier chapters, was crippling for Wendat society when it needed warriors to fight against the Haudenosaunee in 1649. As the nation-state emerges in British North America and as the Empire relinquishes both control and obligations, young people are where armies will come from. Increasingly they become viewed as assets that must be managed by the state in some way or another. The story of modernity — which has its roots in the late 18th century and its foundation in the institutional structures erected in the 19th century — is in many important ways the story of childhood.

Suggested Readings

1. McIntosh, Robert. “The Making of Modern Childhood.” In Boys in the Pits: Child Labour in Coal Mining, 14-41. Montréal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000.
2. Moogk, Peter. “Les Petits Sauvages: The Children of Eighteenth-Century New France.” In Childhood and Family in Canadian History, edited by Joy Parr, 17-43. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982.
3. Nootens, Thierry. “’For Years We Have Never Had A Happy Home’: Madness and Families in Nineteenth-Century Montreal.” In Mental Health and Canadian Society: Historical Perspectives, edited by James Moran, 49-68. Montréal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006.

The mid-19th century witnessed a moral panic over the condition of, and the perceived threat posed by, children in the streets of British North America’s major cities. The same situation existed in British and American cities at the time, sparking campaigns to improve the lives of children. (Charles Dickens’ novel, The Adventures of Oliver Twist, published in serial form from 1838 through 1839 served as an inspiration for increasing policing and philanthropy alike.)

Street arabs or urchins, as impoverished children were known, were viewed as criminals or criminals-in-the-making. They fell below contemporary hygiene standards (which were, by all accounts, pretty low to begin with) and were perceived as unsupervised. Many “child-savers” believed a solution was to put them to work; better to have them spend long days in a factory or be fostered out to a household, even if they would be exploited and ill-treated, rather than let them remain on the streets, or so the thinking went at the time. As one review of the literature put it:

The child-savers … made proper parenting in a natural family setting the central precept of their endeavours; yet, in practice, their programmes seldom allowed such a relationship. In the final analysis they expected the regeneration of children to take place through work: for the evangelicals hard, manual labour shaped appropriate personal discipline and morality, and for the child-savers, it turned aimless street arabs into productive workers.[footnote]Craig Heron, “Saving the Children,” Acadiensis 13, no.1 (Autumn 1983): 173.[/footnote]

Initiatives to improve the lives of children included the promotion of education and concern for public health. In the third quarter of the 19th century the child’s body became a battleground for imperial fitness. Generations of weak urban children, it was feared, would produce equally enfeebled national armies. This concern percolated out of Britain and into British North America. The reshaping and policing of childhood in the early Victorian era (a movement that would persist for the next century or more) arose out of these concerns and created much of the framework on which we continue to mount our own measure of life before adulthood.

In almost all parts of colonial British North America, children began to work at a very young age, whether officially for an employer or to help support the family. In fact, children passed from a period of dependence and into active engagement as early as six years of age. Puberty, when it came, was a dividing line between childhood and adulthood, though not necessarily the first one crossed.

Young Labourers

Examples abound, in the 18th and 19th centuries, of children engaging early in economic activities. Some straightforward jobs were assigned to the very young. Aboriginal children were introduced to artisanal crafts and traditions from the moment they were able to participate in the simplest productive process, which is to say as young as four years. The same was true of most farm children in settler society: in New France very young children on farms were tasked with scaring birds away from crops.

However, a child’s social and family circumstances or their environment often required that more complex work be taken on. Splitting fish was often the task of six year olds in outport Newfoundland during the 18th and 19th centuries. Processing fish was a wage-earning job undertaken by girls of 10 years, as was domestic labour.[footnote]Robert McIntosh, “Constructing the Child: New Approaches to the History of Childhood in Canada,” Acadiensis, XXVIII, No.2 (Spring 1999).[/footnote] Orphaned children under the age of six years were bound or indentured to non-relatives where they became household labour or servants. The loss of a parent in these cases necessitated an early start to a labouring life.

Seven-year olds in the anglophone British North America colonies were subject to English common law, which treated them as adults as far as work was concerned until later in the 19th century. This often meant difficult and potentially dangerous labour for working children. For example, eight-year-old boys (and sometimes younger) were considered old enough to work underground in British North America’s coal mines. By 1866 there were, conservatively, 450 boys working in the mining pits of Cape Breton and Vancouver Island.[footnote]Robert McIntosh, Boys in the Pits: Child Labour in Coal Mines (Montréal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 7.[/footnote]

In a colonial world that depended heavily on seagoing transportation and in which almost every town of any size was effectively a port town, it is inevitable that we would find boys were put to sea on fishing boats, in merchant ships, and in naval vessels. They did so at 10 or 12 years of age. Although most of the working children from this period are unknown to us, some we know by name. George Vancouver went to sea when he was 13 and José María Narváez at 14 years of age. Both were born into comfortably well-off families and so began their careers in their early teens; children of less privilege joined up younger. David Thompson, the son of a poor Welsh couple in London, was apprenticed (more correctly, indentured) to the Hudson’s Bay Company at 14 years of age. Thompson’s experience was not entirely extraordinary: the HBC was London-based, orphans were plentiful in 18th and 19th century London, and the company’s patriarchal ethos was consistent with the role of guardian.

Farm families were large because child labour was useful and necessary. Artisanal families, too, made use of all members of the household, although typically at lower levels of reproduction. The rise of industrial workplaces and urbanization changed some of these familial relationships, some of which were very old indeed. Factories and growing towns placed working families into situations where more and more members had to go out to find work. The home was no longer also the workplace. This applied to children as well as adults.

What do we know of child labour in these years and how do we know it? Individual and anecdotal accounts of childhood work and life tend to provide more evidence than official records, especially as regards the youngest workers. In later years — in the mid-Victorian era — this would be because employers were reluctant to reveal how many extremely young or officially “underage” children they had working for them. Before then, however, it was more likely the case that very young children were not reported (or under-reported) because their contribution was necessarily small. A child whose tasks consisted of stacking wood, for example, might not be considered to be in an apprenticeship, even if that was what it was, in the early stages of unfolding. A further — and more direct — deception involved girls in what was technically boys’ work; this comes through very clearly in reports from navies and merchant fleets where girls disguised themselves as boys in order to hold onto jobs at sea.

Many of these areas of employment carried huge risks. Handling domestic animals on the farm and horses in towns presented a constant hazard; many boys died underground in mines in the 19th century; children drowned or were murdered in battles at sea; slave raids or hostage-taking during Aboriginal warfare posed a millennia-old threat to indigenous children. In the mid-19th century the emergence of factory labour put children in completely new and unfamiliar environments where they were subject to mechanical hazards and oppressive supervision.

One study shows that a third of boys in a Montreal working-class ward in 1861 were employed. On the whole, boys were likely to earn more — from mine, mill, or factory work — than girls and so were sent out to work more often than their sisters:

The enlistment of thousands of children as workers in Montreal businesses reveals an aspect of industrial society that has nearly vanished today, but was fundamental to 19th century manufacturing. For many working families, basic survival was a daily challenge. Supplementary income was needed as families grew and more mouths had to be fed. Children’s wages provided an important second income. And for sons of working-class families, joining their fathers in the factories was the only option. Limited schooling would have to suffice for children whose horizons were limited to urban factories. Accordingly, the Industrial Revolution expanded the industrial enslavement of children. Montreal, no less than any other industrial city of the day, did not escape this reality.[footnote]Jean de Bonville, Jean-Baptiste Gagnepetit, Les travailleurs montréalais à la fin du XIXe siècle (Montréal: Les éditions de l’Aurore, 1975), 55.[/footnote]

It was a short step from agricultural labour that included all members of a family to industrial labour in which children would participate. But in this setting they were no longer being supervised by a parent or relative, nor were they part of an apprenticeship relationship in which their master fed and clothed them. The imposition of disciplinary regimes, however subtle, were part of life in every factory, even if fines and beatings were not. Children were being moulded into industrial workers by their employers: they were expected to be punctual, focused, efficient, and deferential.[footnote]Bettina Bradbury, “Gender at Work at Home: Family Decisions, the Labour Market, and Girls’ Contributions to the Family Economy,” in Canadian and Australian Labour History, eds. Gregory S. Kealey and Greg Patmore (Sydney: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History and the Committee on Canadian Labour History, 1990), 119-40.[/footnote] In this setting, employers were shaping not merely their workforce for the day but their workers for the future. At the end of the pre-Confederation period, factories were, in truth, manufacturing workers from children.

There were, too, independent or near-independent jobs to be had. Running errands, selling newspapers, helping in a small grocery — these were low-skill jobs that were available in a number of towns. Other children engaged in “penny capitalist” enterprises like selling fruit or household fuel.[footnote]John Benson, Entrepreneurism in Canada: A History of ‘Penny Capitalists’ (Queenston, ON: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990).[/footnote] Girls who went into domestic service — and their number was enormous in Victorian Canada — sometimes did so on a part-time basis in several households at once, as laundress’s assistants, for example.[footnote]Susan E. Houston and Alison Prentice, Schooling and Scholars in Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 220-1.[/footnote]

Childhood without Parents

What is less often considered is the almost universal alienation of children from their parents. Orphanhood — whether marked by the loss of one or both parents before the child reached puberty — was extremely common. Peter Moogk suggests that nearly half of all adolescents in New France had only one parent.[footnote]Peter Moogk, “Les Petits Sauvages: The Children of Eighteenth-Century New France,” in Childhood and Family in Canadian History, ed. Joy Parr (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), 25.[/footnote] In the early Victorian era, when women on average had about six children before they themselves reached 35 years of age, life expectancy for adults was barely half what it is today, so it was almost certain that the youngest children would not have left home before the death of at least one parent. In some cases orphaned children under the age of six years were bound or indentured to non-relatives where they became household labour/servants.

This pattern helps to explain the rise of the orphanage as a major urban and social institution in the 19th century. There was a long tradition in French Canada of such facilities run by the Catholic Church, but during the period from 1820 to 1860 there was a wave of purpose-built facilities for orphans. Many of these were the work of Ladies’ Aid Societies, which established Protestant Orphans’ Homes. As one study clarifies, “the name ‘orphan home’ is misleading insofar as most housed more non-orphans than orphans. Children were commonly temporarily consigned to an institution by a single parent unable to manage, or by a family undergoing a short-term crisis.”[footnote]McIntosh, Boys in the Pits, 20.[/footnote] For a child consigned to an orphanage, whether temporarily or permanently, this marked a significant break with family life and probably the beginning of a highly structured existence. It may have been the first and only opportunity to obtain some formal schooling.

That is, however, to put a gloss on the larger social history of the orphan experience. Dr. Barnardo’s Homes were first established in 1866 in London by the Irish physician, Thomas John Barnardo, with the founder advocating what he called “philanthropic abduction” of the children of the poor. In some instances British children whose parents had entrusted them to the care of an orphanage were shipped off to the colonies (including British North America) where they became essentially indentured servants to foster families.[footnote]Craig Heron, “Saving the Children,” Acadiensis 13, no.1 (Autumn 1983): 172. [/footnote] Children in Canadian cities were likewise “plucked” from the streets by early social reformers who were more distressed at social decay than they were by the welfare of the children themselves.

Figure 12.3 Louis Riel, at 14 years, preparing to leave Red River for Montréal.

Historian of childhood Jennifer Brown pointed out years ago that the fur trade society brought together people who had experienced highly different childhoods. Many of the officers of the HBC were themselves orphans “recruited through the Grey Coat charity schools” of London.[footnote]Jennifer S.H. Brown, “Children of the Early Fur Trades,” in Childhood and Family in Canadian History, ed. Joy Parr (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), 44-68. [/footnote] Their connections with their peers in the company were strong, as were their relationships with Aboriginal women and wives. The HBC officers who settled at Red River did so with an eye to establishing a society near The Forks, an intergenerational community at the confluence of the Assiniboine and Red Rivers. They insisted that the company set aside resources for schooling, and when that was not forthcoming, they exercised what patriarchal authority they had in a strange land and had their métis sons shipped off to Britain for their education. Daughters stayed closer to home where they spent their childhood in a more Aboriginal-inflected environment.

The NWC traders did something similar. Those with connections to Montreal sent their sons and daughters alike to the St. Lawrence towns at a relatively young age. The work of Sylvia Van Kirk and Jennifer Brown on this topic suggests that Aboriginal mothers were highly critical of packing off children to remote educational institutions, which were, in any case, alien to their own experiences.[footnote]See, for example, Sylvia Van Kirk, “’The Custom of the Country’: An Examination of Fur Trade Marriage Practices,” in Canadian Family History: Selected Readings, ed. Bettina Bradbury (Mississauga: Copp Clark Pitman, 1992): 70-75.[/footnote] There was, however, the expectation that the children would return, not least so they could provide for their parents in retirement in the Red River Colony. Although the history of the fur trade in the West provides many examples of traders on fixed-term contracts who arrived, had relationships, and then departed, perhaps leaving their wives and children in the care of Aboriginal in-laws or a freshly appointed Euro-Canadian trader (a process sometimes called “turning off”), the record is also clear that many of these relationship (husband/wife; father/children) were anything but casual.

Aboriginal women approached parenting differently. First, the evidence suggests that they were accustomed to rearing fewer children. As Brown writes, Aboriginal families “were usually small, and children were commonly born three, four, or more years apart, owing to long periods of nursing that reduced the mothers’ fecundity and sometimes to post-partum taboos on sexual relations.”[footnote]Ibid., 48.[/footnote] Under these circumstances an Aboriginal child could expect something close to undivided maternal attention (certainly compared to the lot of their European contemporaries). Second, Aboriginal women engaged in co-mothering, at least outside of fur trade society. Once they were brought into the fold of the European posts and forts, Aboriginal mothers often found themselves caring singlehandedly for their young while the pressures to have more children in closer succession increased.

Fertility rates in the fur trade society were by all indications closer to the habitant model than to traditional practices among, say, the Anishinaabe. For children of the fur trade this meant having many siblings, and likely a good supply of uncles, aunts, and cousins as well. Some, usually the boys, identified more strongly with their European ancestry and culture, while others, particularly the girls, viewed themselves more as Aboriginal, although it is important to underline that no one rule applied.[footnote]Ibid., 56.[/footnote]

One can only imagine the cultural and linguistic complexity of many of these communities as they became intersections not only for European and Aboriginal relationships but Scots and Anishinaabe, French and Cree, Assiniboine and Sioux, English and Hawaiian, Iroquois and Secwepemc. By contrast, life in Toronto, Quebec, or Halifax may seem two-dimensional.

Childhood was critical to the formation of the Métis nation. French fathers commonly deserted their Aboriginal wives and children, as their understanding of marriages à la façon du pays was that they were not permanent and that the women might one day return to their families. This was, according to historians, the pattern, and for Aboriginal communities that recognized matrilineal descent, this was not (theoretically at least) a problem. In French fur trade communities like Fort Detroit, Michilimackinac, or Green Bay, however, there were other elements of European culture present: specifically, the clergy remained there for the long haul. The Church missions helped with housing, education, and culturally orienting significant numbers of Métis children of these marriages, which grounded them in a common vocabulary of Catholicism. Economically they were traders and hunters. Socially and culturally they were linked by very long tendrils to Montreal, pre-revolutionary France, and Rome.

Attributions

Figure 12.3
YoungLouisRiel by Ras67 is in the public domain.

Figure 12.2 Louis-Joseph Papineau at 10 years.

As we have seen, the French colonies of Acadia and Canada developed along rather different geographical lines. Acadia’s salt marsh farms along the Bay of Fundy provided small nodes of population, genuine communities in which children would be raised surrounded by an extended family, although the communities themselves were relatively isolated, accessible principally by water. This was an environment in which agricultural work in a family setting was a powerful defining feature of life for young people. On reaching maturity they would generally try to find a place to live near their family and few would head out to the frontier of Acadia, wherever that might be.

In Canada, the long corridor of the St. Lawrence worked against “the formation of villages [so] community life did not develop strongly along the valley, and the festivals and communal work patterns of Old France did not become entrenched.”[footnote]Joy Parr, “Introduction,” in Childhood and Family in Canadian History, ed. Joy Parr (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), 10.[/footnote] Here, too, kin became the focus and locus of childhood. And the seigneurial system — until about 1820 — offered young adults the possibility of obtaining their own land close to their parents’ home. Historian Peter Moogk has shown how this environment of propinquity impacted parenting, which tended toward less disciplinarian paternalism than was found in Old France; by the 1700s, evidently, this was another way in which Canadiens were distinct from the French of France. The irony is that early French visitors to North America commented critically on Aboriginal parenting styles, which they regarded as far too lenient and soft.

In both Acadia and Canada children were rarely sent off to apprentice in another household from a young age. While the youth of France were testing the rules in the homes of strangers, the children of the two colonies were both supported by and contained within a network of relatives. It was only when the availability of nearby land dried up that this pattern of growing up in a multi-generational kin-based community began to fracture. From the early 19th century, children were raised knowing that they would have to move away from the familial enclaves and try to develop kin networks of their own. This change signified a break with nearly 200 years of Canadien culture. It gave external, non-familial entities like the Church or the employer more authority and influence, extending to the youngest members of the community.

Church and Childhood

This connection between clergy and child-raising was most obvious in education. In 1642 Marguerite Bourgeoys (1620-1799) established a teaching order in Montreal for the education of girls — both Aboriginal and Canadien. A separate school appeared in 1664 for boys (only colonists, though). In both institutions the clergy either provided the instruction themselves or selected lay people to do so. Social class lines were observed, and fees were charged that put the best education beyond the reach of most children. Those pupils who came from poorer households were more likely to be taught domestic skills or trades than reading and writing.[footnote]Louise Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth Century Montreal, trans. Liana Vardi (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 269-71.[/footnote]

A greater focus on basic literacy for both boys and girls arose in the first half of the 18th century. Girls continued to be taught needlework and domestic skills, but they were also more likely to learn how to read and write. Some critics at this time expressed the concern that this “expanded” education would turn good farm girls into fine ladies who would shirk their role in building up the agrarian colony.[footnote]Peter Moogk, “Les Petits Sauvages: The Children of Eighteenth-Century New France,” in Childhood and Family in Canadian History, ed. Joy Parr (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), 38-9.[/footnote] However, the rates of nuptiality and fertility in the colony certainly don’t suggest that happened. The marriage rates show that there was a population of spinsters, but their status as “never married” can be explained in part by the number of girls who opted to join the Canadien nuns, a career path that was both respected and sought after. There were few similar opportunities for boys to be trained into the clergy. The Sulpicians, for example, recruited in France, but not Canada.

For the earliest generations of Canadien children, there is evidence to suggest a strong generational cohort. The arrival of the filles du roi between 1663 and 1673 resulted in a rash of marriages and births. Thus there was a decade in which a large number of first borns arrived on the scene. Twenty years later demographic historians have found evidence of a population boom echo: “Montreal had been peopled almost at one stroke … so that practically all the immigrants’ daughters reached the age of marriage and the period of highest fertility at the same time.”[footnote]Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants, 55.[/footnote] Surrounded by numerous peers, the children of the children of immigrants would be responsible for forging some of the most distinctive features of Canadien culture.

Attributions

Figure 12.2
Louis-Joseph Papineau 10 years old by BeatrixBelibaste is in the public domain.

It has been estimated that a quarter of all infants in 18th century New France failed to make it to their first birthday and that nearly half died before they were 10 years old.[footnote]Jacques Henripin, “From Acceptance of Nature to Control: The Demography of the French Canadians Since the Seventeenth Century,” in Perspectives on Canada’s Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues, eds. Frank Trovato and Carl F. Grindstaff (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 1994), 25-6.[/footnote] Matters were no better a century later: mid-19th century Montreal witnessed infant mortality rates of 250 per thousand live births. The rate was even higher on the other side of the continent; in Victoria, Kamloops, and Nanaimo near the end of the century the rate was almost 300 per thousand.[footnote]John Douglas Belshaw, Becoming British Columbia: A Population History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), 180-1.[/footnote] (In comparison, the Canadian rate is now below five per thousand live births.) Conditions varied sharply from place to place but it is likely that childhood mortality (that is, dying between one’s first and fifth birthday) was nearly as bad. In short, it is possible — and certainly plausible — that a third to a half of all live births in late 19th century British North America ended in death before the age of five.

Historians of childhood have struggled with these figures. What were the implications of such a high death rate for relationships and the experience of childhood? Some historians have taken the view that the high incidence of infant death (along with stillbirths and miscarriages) impacted the development of strong emotional bonds between parents and children. As one study claims,

Parents resisted making large emotional investments in their children until they demonstrated their ability to survive. The delay in naming infants and the practice of giving the name of a child who had died to a subsequent child are cited as practices which demonstrate this relative lack of attachment. Thus, a situation of high infant mortality is in a sense a vicious circle, with children valued less because they are less likely to survive, and with the lower emotional investment in children reducing their survival chances.[footnote]Roderic P. Beaujot and Kevin McQuillan, “The Social Effects of Demographic Change, Canada 1851-1981,” in  Perspectives on Canada’s Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues, eds. Frank Trovato and Carl F. Grindstaff (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 1994), 40.[/footnote]

Not everyone agrees with this perspective. Anecdotal accounts do not reveal emotional stinginess on the part of bereaved parents; quite the contrary. John A. and Isabella Macdonald lost their first born — John Jr. — just after his first birthday. As John A.’s biographer writes, “Of course, his parents never fully overcame their grief. Moving house in Ottawa in 1883, Macdonald’s second wife discovered a mysterious box of toys: her husband quietly identified them as ‘little John A.’s.’” Isabella, who had given birth at 37 years of age after a difficult pregnancy made tolerable by opium, was pushed by her grief into depression and addiction; she died eight years later.[footnote]Ged Martin, John A. Macdonald: Canada’s First Prime Minister (Toronto: Dundurn, 2013), 48-51. [/footnote]  Now, it might be countered that middle- and upper-middle class couples had fewer children on the whole and so experienced infant loss differently from, say, farmers who had to be more dispassionate about tragedy. This presumption remains to be proved, and it assumes a lot about the stereotype of stolid farmers.

Clearly material well-being was an important consideration in the lives of children. In societies based on subsistence agriculture, horticulture, hunting and gathering, or the harvest of food from the sea, the line between success and failure was thin, and children were especially vulnerable.

The Threshold to Adulthood

Despite the persistent belief by many that the average age of marriage — one indicator of achieving “adulthood” —  was much lower in past generations, the evidence points in the opposite direction. Historical demographer Jacques Henripin found that the mean age at first marriage for women in 1700-1730 Canada was 22.4 years (26.9 for men).[footnote]Cited in Peter Moogk, “Les Petits Sauvages: The Children of Eighteenth-Century New France,” in Childhood and Family in Canadian History, ed. Joy Parr (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), 19.[/footnote] The age of marriage was even later in the 19th century. The median age at first marriage for women born in the 1830s was 25.1 years, and girls born in the 1840s married later still, at 26.0 years. Thereafter the age at first marriage would drop, almost steadily so that women born in the 1930s married at 21.1 years.

To be sure, there is a good likelihood that more 14-year-olds married in the 1850s than in the 1950s, but those were — then, as now — exceptions.[footnote]Ellen Gee, “The Life Course of Canadian Women: An Historical and Demographic Analysis,” in Perspectives on Canada’s Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues, eds. Frank Trovato and Carl F. Grindstaff (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 1994), 56.[/footnote] Youthful marriage, in any event, ought not be mistaken for early physical maturation, which in fact was often delayed by poor or inconsistent diets. [footnote]Neil Sutherland, “History of Childhood” in The Canadian Encyclopedia (Toronto: Historica Canada, 2006). http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/history-of-childhood/#h3_jump_0 [/footnote] And some marriages involving children were arranged, being more about diplomacy that intimacy. Samuel de Champlain married Hélène Boullé when she was just 12 years old. Boullé’s marriage contract stipulated that the marriage would not be consummated for two years; the fact that the couple never had any children suggests that perhaps it never was.

In New France the most important threshold in childhood appears to have been around the age of 15 or 16.  This was a demographic watershed as well, as nearly half the population was under the age of 16 years. In Acadia in 1698, nearly 400 of a total population of 789 colonists were under 16. It is no surprise, then, that 16-year-olds were made into militiamen.[footnote] Moogk, “Les Petits Sauvages,” 20. [/footnote] Nevertheless, the age of maturity in the ancien régime was 25, and people as old as 20 were often (and officially) considered to be children. Parents thus had a continuing and ongoing responsibility for their children well into what we would consider adulthood today.

Indeed, this responsibility could run quite deep. The patriarchal model of French colonial society was firmly and formally established, and men were entitled to physically discipline both their children and their spouse providing it was not outright brutality. The checks on domestic violence included the judiciary and the clergy, both of which upheld the necessity and the sanctity of marriage, and neither of which recognized wives as anything other than dependants. Gossip was probably a more powerful instrument of social control in these situations, because social censure could hamper the survival chances of a whole family.[footnote]André Lachance and Sylvie Savoie, “Violence, Marriage, and Family Honour: Aspects of the Legal Regulation of Marriage in New France,” in Essays in the History of Canadian Law, vol.V, Crime and Criminal Justice, eds. Jim Phillips, Tina Loo, and Susan Lewthwaite (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1994), 143-173. [/footnote] Parents performed a critical role in the colonial marriage market because, in New France, a new son- or daughter-in-law (and their offspring) could become dependants with a legal claim on family property. A poor reputation in these circumstances was something to avoid and something to watch out for.

Figure 11.14 Bytown/Ottawa was selected as the site of the new capital of the Province of Canada in 1858. Site development was underway (as seen here) by the early 1860s.

Politics between 1818 and 1860 was very much like the economy. It was fluid and evolving while remaining deeply unchanged. Some Tory values, which included a deep dislike for republicanism, survived and percolated out to influence groups that were their dedicated foes. Papineau, for example, embraced loyalty to the Crown for most of his career and Lafontaine did so as well. The Tories themselves were not a fixed point: they changed from being the landed gentry in most colonies into a commercial class with heavy investments in infrastructure, distilleries, and breweries. They required the support of a professional class of lawyers and notaries who would, in turn, challenge the various Family Compacts around British North America.

The commercial and capitalist orientation of the Haligonian and Montreal elites became obsessions of this new liberal professional class as well. There is much to be learned about the nature of British North American society through a close study of the life of someone like John A. Macdonald, and nothing is as revealing as his pilgrimage from the periphery of Toryism as a francophobic Scottish Presbyterian lawyer in deepest Loyalist Kingston to the leadership of a dualist Conservative Party. A contrary tide took many of the most staunchly Tory elements in Montreal into the arms of republicanism in the late 1840s as, feeling abandoned by Britain, they nearly turned their back on the monarchy to seek a future exclusively in North America. One expects positions to change; the speed with which British North American political leaders dramatically adjusted their thinking and their priorities in these years makes the 20th century look static by contrast.

At least one other feature of this period deserves careful thought, because it is so often dismissed in a cavalier way. The Constitutional Act of 1791 may have had structural weaknesses that provoked and hardened opposition and demands for reform, but it lasted for 50 years. There wasn’t a single constitution in France that lasted that long before the 20th century. The Act of Union had a lifespan of 26 years. As historians we must ask what features of the Constitutional Act created conflict; we must also ask what features made it so durable under the circumstances.

These are questions to keep in mind as we consider the steps taken to achieve Confederation in 1867. What values lay behind the movement to bring together the colonies and what external forces played a role? What was happening and what did people believe was happening? What was the level of public engagement in this process? How did this take place in the utter absence of any Aboriginal presence? Who were the disenfranchised of this period and how was their status reflected in the constitutional arrangements worked out in Charlottetown, Quebec City, and London?

Suggested Readings

1. Cadigan, Sean T. “Paternalism and Politics: Sir Francis Bond Head, the Orange Order, and the Election of 1836.” Canadian Historical Review 92, no.1 (March 2011): 319-347.
2. Greer, Allan. “Rebels and Prisoners: The Canadian Insurrections of 1837-38.” Acadiensis 14, no.1 (1984): 137-145.
3. Greer, Allan. “From Folklore to Revolution: Charivaris and the Lower Canadian Rebellion of 1837.” Social History 15, issue 1 (January 1990): 25-43.
4. Morgan, Cecilia. “’When Bad Men Conspire, Good Men Must Chaptere!’: Gender and Political Discourses in Upper Canada, 1820s-1830s.” In Gendered Pasts: Historical Essays in Femininity and Masculinity in Canada. Edited by Forestell, Nancy M., Kathryn M. McPherson, and Cecilia Louise Morgan, 12-28. Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 2003.
5. Radforth, Ian. “Political Demonstrations and Spectacles during the Rebellion Losses Controversy in Upper Canada.” Canadian Historical Review 92, no.1 (March 2011): 1-41.

Attributions

Figure 11.14
Canal locks and Major’s Hill 1860 by Skeezix1000 is in the public domain.