First Inhabitants

The indigenous peoples say they have been in Canada as long as the landscape itself, and evidence of their presence dates from roughly 14,000 to 11,000 years ago, during the time when the land reappeared from under the great ice sheets that had covered most of the country during the Pleistocene Ice Age.

Dry land, largely ice-free, linked Asia and Alaska during the Pleistocene Epoch, and Canada’s first immigrants used this isthmus to cross into North America, perhaps 30,000 years ago. These first people seem to have been nomads who hunted mammoth, bison, and caribou. They expanded their range as the ice sheets retreated. As the climate stabilized and northern North America developed its modern ecological zones, such as tundra, forest, and prairie, the hunters adapted to local conditions.

Other migrants from Asia came later, perhaps as recently as 4000 years ago, bringing new languages and different types of tools and weapons. Distinct cultures and nations developed throughout Canada. They comprised at least 11 separate language groups with hundreds of individual languages and a variety of ways of living.

Indigenous Peoples in 1500

In 1500, on the eve of regular European contact, there may have been 300,000 people living in Canada, although some estimates run much higher. More than half were clustered in two regions, southern Ontario and the Pacific coast. Despite divisions due to distance, language, and culture, trade networks stretched far across the continent, as did diplomatic alliances, rivalries, and warfare. Each nation had its own myths, heroes, and spiritual practices, but they all shared a reverence for nature and a sense of the spiritual presence in all living things.

The societies of the Algonquian language family, the most widespread in North America, extended from the Atlantic coast to the Rockies. Micmac, Maliseet, Montagnais, and other groups on the Atlantic coast made extensive use of fish and coastal marine life. Most Algonquian speakers, however, were hunter-gatherers: They hunted deer and other large animals, and gathered nuts and wild grains. They lived in small bands of related families, in the forest that stretches across Canada from west to east. Some moved into the Interior Plains to make their living by hunting bison. In many Algonquian groups, women had equal status with men.

Another language group, the Athapaskan speakers, were also hunter-gatherers. They lived mainly in the northwestern forest, but some groups lived on the plains, along with some Algonquian groups. These plains people wintered in sheltered river valleys and followed the bison herds. They planned and executed well-organized drives to stampede bison over cliffs. From the bison they got not only food but also clothing, tools, and many other necessities. These societies began their golden age in the mid-1700s when they got horses, imported to North America via Mexico. With the new mobility that horses provided, mounted bison hunters such as the Blackfoot and Plains Cree flourished on the Interior Plains.

North of the forest, in the tundra lands reaching to the Arctic Ocean, lived the Inuit, who developed ingenious inventions to help them survive in one of the world’s most forbidding climates. The Inuit lived in small bands as hunters, with a diet almost wholly of sea animals, although some followed the caribou herds. They spoke a common language, in several dialects, that spread eastward from Alaska to Greenland barely a thousand years ago. It is part of the Eskimo-Aleut language group, which has branches in Siberia and thus is the only indigenous language group with a clearly identified Asian connection.

The temperate rain forest of the mountainous Pacific Northwest was the most densely populated part of indigenous Canada and had the greatest diversity of languages. Speakers of at least five distinct language groups lived here. The coastal nations were blessed with abundant food sources, particularly salmon, and lived in substantial, permanent towns of elaborately decorated cedar-plank houses. They produced sophisticated works of art, the most famous of which were the totem poles that decorated houses and proclaimed the lineages of their owners. They traveled, raided, and hunted whales in large, oceangoing canoes. These were complex societies consisting of chiefs, nobles, commoners, and slaves.

Another area of large populations and complex societies was the woodlands of the lower Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence valley, inhabited by Iroquoian-speaking peoples. About 500 AD the Iroquoians began growing corn, beans, and squash. Once established, agriculture supported much larger populations than hunting and gathering. The Iroquoian farmers lived in large, fortified towns surrounded by cornfields. Some groups formed rival confederacies known as the Huron, Neutral, and Iroquois (or Five Nations, later Six Nations). Each confederacy had its own elaborate political systems and ceremonies.

European Contact 985-1600

Viking colonists of Iceland and Greenland were the first Europeans known to have reached North America. They began to visit the northeast coast of Canada about 985 AD, when they settled Greenland. Leif Ericson of Greenland sailed west about 1000 AD to a place he called Vinland and built a settlement there. This may have been L’Anse-aux-Meadows, a place in Newfoundland where remains of a Viking village were found in the 1960s. Although the colony did not last long, Viking contact with indigenous people may have been widespread on the northeast coast. This contact seems to have been marked by conflict despite some evidence of trading exchanges. Contact with North America had ceased entirely by the time Europe lost contact with Greenland in 1410.

Search for the Northwest Passage

In 1534 Francis I, King of France, dispatched Jacques Cartier to seek the Northwest Passage in the region Cabot had explored. Sailing beyond Newfoundland, Cartier found the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, where he met Iroquoian people who told him of wealthy kingdoms in the north. In his three voyages to the gulf (1534, 1535, 1541), however, he found no such kingdoms and no Northwest Passage. In 1535 he explored up the Saint Lawrence river as far as the Iroquoian town of Hochelaga (the present site of Montréal). There he found his way blocked by the Lachine Rapids, confirming that the Saint Lawrence did not provide a sea route to Asia. Cartier’s men spent the winter at Stadacona, an Iroquoian village where Québec city now stands. On Cartier’s third voyage, his main object was to establish a colony, but this venture too was unsuccessful.

First Commercial Ventures 

Whale oil, cod, and furs brought a steadier, less publicized stream of European sailors to Canada. From the early 1500s until after 1600, Basques, people from southern France and northern Spain, came each year to Labrador and the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to hunt whales. English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese fishers came to catch cod on the shallow, bountiful Grand Banks off the Atlantic coast, often drying the catch on the shores. The fishing industry led to several attempts to start colonies in Newfoundland and elsewhere. Few endured, although the fishing season regularly brought a throng of fishers to some harbors. In 1583 English adventurer Sir Humphrey Gilbert arrived at busy St. John’s Harbour in Newfoundland and found it crowded with boats.

Although Spanish and Portuguese boats shared the harbor with the English, Gilbert claimed Newfoundland for England. In the 1600s, after the Spanish and Portuguese quit fishing in the Grand Banks, permanent English communities grew up around Newfoundland’s Avalon peninsula, and French communities grew up on the island’s south coast. About the same time, whalers and fishers began to develop a trade in furs with indigenous nations they met along the coasts. Europe’s hatters discovered that beaver hair, when shaved and matted into a stiff felt, was the finest hat-making material available. The Canadian fur trade, destined to be the backbone of the economy for some 200 years, was born.

European-Indigenous Relations

For several hundred years, there were few European settlers across much of Canada, and thus there were few conflicts between them and the indigenous peoples over control of the land. Trading relations, rooted in the fur trade that eventually spread across the continent, were often more important. The fur trade changed indigenous societies by adding new European goods to their way of life, encouraging them to concentrate on trade with the newcomers, and often leading them into new alliances or conflicts based on trade. But trade rarely put the indigenous nations under European domination. Missionaries, who often accompanied the early traders, tried to convert the indigenous peoples to Christianity but were frequently disappointed by their lack of success. So long as the indigenous societies remained independent, they rarely showed great enthusiasm for European religions. For centuries after the arrival of Cabot, most of them retained control over their contacts with Europeans.

In these early years, disease was the greatest effect of European contact. The Europeans brought with them diseases that were unknown in North America, and the indigenous people lacked immunity to them. The result was devastating epidemics that ran through the Americas long before any Europeans moved inland to report them. The population began to decline as soon as the Europeans arrived. Some scholars have estimated that the Micmac lost 90 percent of their population between 1500 and 1600. As contact moved gradually north and west, so did epidemics. Interior Plains nations suffered devastating epidemics in the late 1700s; the Pacific Northwest suffered similar catastrophes in the mid-1800s; and many Inuit groups were hard hit by illnesses as they came into regular contact with Europeans in the 20th century. Indigenous populations in Canada declined continuously from about 1500 to about 1930.

New France 1600-1763

When the French government saw the potential value of the fur trade, the fishing industry, and other resources of northern North America, it began to take more interest in the region, which came to be known as New France. New France comprised Canada (the area drained by the Saint Lawrence), Acadia (now the Maritime provinces), the island of Newfoundland (shared unwillingly with the English), and later Louisiana (the valley of the Mississippi River). France claimed and defended this vast area as its possession. For the most part, however, the inhabitants continued their way of life unaffected by French laws or customs, and dealt with the French primarily as customers for their furs. The French claim was contested by the English, who tried persistently to divert the fur trade or to occupy parts of the territory.

Early Years

To confirm its claims to North American territory, France needed to build permanent forts and settlements. But settlements were expensive, and in order to pay for them, commercial colonizers sought a monopoly of the fur trade. Pierre du Guast, sieur de Monts, acquired such a monopoly from the king of France, and in 1604 he established a post in Acadia. It had a rocky start, with half the settlers dying of scurvy the first winter, and it was not self-sufficient for a long time. In 1608 Samuel de Champlain, an explorer hired by de Monts, founded a settlement at Québec on the Saint Lawrence River. Champlain, who became the champion of French colonization, understood that a monopoly of the inland fur trade could be better protected there, where the river narrowed, rather than at sites on the open coast of Acadia. Consequently, French colonization began to focus on the Saint Lawrence valley. Eventually, Champlain convinced Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII, of the importance of North America to the economic development of France. In 1627 Richelieu organized the Company of One Hundred Associates to develop and administer New France using the principles of mercantilism. Under this system, the company would export North America’s raw materials to France and would buy all its manufactured goods from France. Trade with other countries was prohibited, and local manufacturing was discouraged.

To maintain his settlement and develop the fur trade on the Saint Lawrence, Champlain had to form alliances with the local Algonquian nations and their inland allies, the Huron confederacy. These indigenous allies brought the furs to Québec, and with their assistance Champlain was able to travel widely and to map eastern North America from Newfoundland to the Great Lakes.

Under the company, the Canada colony continued to grow after Champlain died at Québec in 1635. More settlements were founded, notably at Trois-Rivières (1634) and Montréal (1642). However, the colony remained small in population and dependent on the fur trade. Fur traders also maintained a small French presence in Acadia, and in the 1640s a small, settled Acadian community took root around Port Royal (now Annapolis Royal) on the Bay of Fundy.

In the 1640s New France was forced to aid its ally, the Huron confederacy, in a war with the Iroquois. When the Iroquois defeated and scattered the Huron in 1649, New France’s fur trade was devastated, and Montréal and Québec were exposed to attack. The danger was so great that for a time the French considered abandoning New France. The colony survived, however, and the fur trade rebounded after the Ottawa, Ojibwa, and other Algonquian nations replaced the Huron as French allies and suppliers. New France’s trader-explorers also began to venture inland from Montréal in search of new sources of furs. Two of them, Médard Chouart, sieur des Groseilliers, and Pierre Esprit Radisson, explored the west side of Lake Superior in the 1650s.

Development of the Colony

In 1663, when New France still had barely 3000 people, Louis XIV’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert abolished the One Hundred Associates, ending the era of company rule. Thenceforth, New France was a royal province ruled from Québec by a governor-general, who commanded the military forces and symbolized royal authority. In addition, an intendant oversaw colonial finances, justice, and daily administration. Both officials reported to the Minister of Marine in the king’s court, since all French colonies were administered by the naval department. An appointed Superior Council advised the governor and acted as a supreme court, but there were no elective bodies in the government of New France.

With royal support, the defenses of New France were improved. A veteran military force of 1200, the Carignan-Salières regiment, arrived in 1665 and waged a campaign against the Iroquois. After the regiment devastated their villages and cornfields, the Iroquois negotiated a peace settlement. About 400 members of the Carignan-Salières regiment stayed on in Canada as settlers. During the first decade of royal rule, the crown also subsidized immigration from France, notably of some 700 unmarried women, who were called filles du roi (daughters of the king) because the king paid for their transportation and dowries. Their arrival helped balance the male-female ratio, which was overwhelmingly male. Thereafter immigration from France was slight; the 10,000 settlers reported on the 1681 census became, by natural increase, the ancestors of almost all the 6.3 million French-speaking Canadians of the late 20th century.

Soon after the peace settlement with the Iroquois, New France acquired a permanent garrison of colonial troops. Soldiers for the colony came from France, but they were commanded by what became a hereditary aristocracy in New France. Military officers explored new territory, built forts, and participated in diplomacy, trade, and warfare with the indigenous peoples.

Trade and Exploration

During the time that New France was a royal province, the French government attempted to control the fur trade more closely. The government feared that the trade disrupted the colony by drawing away young men whose energies should have been devoted to agriculture and town building. Consequently the government began a licensing system, issuing a limited number of licenses to trade in furs. But young men took to the woods anyway as unlicensed traders called coureurs de bois (woods rangers). They lived most of their lives away from the settlements, adopting indigenous ways of life, often marrying indigenous women, and helping to push the frontier toward the northwest. In the 1680s as much as 10 percent of the population may have been living this rugged life. Their mixed-blood descendants made a living by serving the fur trade, forming communities around the northwestern forts and trading posts. They were called métis (French for “mixed”).

French Colonial Society

Religion

The Roman Catholic Church was a powerful element in colonial society: it controlled the morals, education, and social welfare of the colonists. Although France had many Protestants at the time, its official religion was Roman Catholicism, and this was the form of Christianity that France desired to spread in North America. Thus Protestants were prohibited from settling in New France, and Roman Catholic religious organizations were charged with maintaining and spreading the Catholic faith. The first religious organization to send missionaries to New France was the Franciscan Récollet group, who arrived in 1615. In 1633 they were replaced by the richer, better-organized Society of Jesus or Jesuits. Missionary activity was not highly successful, and the church gradually reoriented itself to serving the settler community. Members of the Ursulines, an organization of nuns—women devoted to the religious life—came in 1639 to start schools for girls. Sulpician priests, who ran seminaries to educate future priests, arrived in 1657.

The Diocese of Québec was established in 1674 by Bishop François de Laval, who had led the colonial church since 1659. It was supported by mandatory tithes—taxes at a rate of 10 percent—levied on the farmers’ produce. Religious bodies ran hospitals and schools and often owned large estates called seigneuries. New France, however, was never abundantly supplied with clergy. Though the people were overwhelmingly Catholic, rural communities might see a priest only a few times a year.

Land Tenure

New France developed as a largely rural society, as farmers cleared land along the Saint Lawrence and adjacent rivers. These farmers, called habitants, held their land under the seignorial system. Land in New France was granted in the form of seigneuries to large landlords or seigneurs, who in turn granted acreages to farming families. In return the farmers had to pay annual dues to the seigneur in the form of produce, labor, or sometimes money. New France’s farm families lacked export markets—they were hundreds of miles from the ocean—and so they produced mainly for themselves rather than for sale. The members of large farm families worked together to raise wheat, vegetables, and livestock. As younger family members grew up and married, they cleared new land. The farmers had little opportunity for education, but they lived better than most peasants in France at the time.

Seigneurial lands usually brought little income to their owners, but ownership of large tracts of land was nevertheless a sign of prestige for the colonial elite. Although seigneurs in France were nobles, many of the seigneurs in New France were not nobles. However, the seigneurs of New France nevertheless enjoyed the respect traditionally given to a seigneur. For example, the front pew in the parish church was reserved for the seigneur and his family. Few seigneurs lived on their estates; most lived in the towns and had military careers.

French and British Rivalry

Territorial Disputes

The English and their Iroquois allies attacked the settlements on the Saint Lawrence in King William’s War (1689-1697), but New France now had a permanent garrison and could strike back. New France’s soldiers, notably Pierre Le Moyne, sieur d’Iberville, raided the frontiers of New York and New England with their indigenous allies and seized most of the English trading posts on Hudson Bay. After almost a decade of guerrilla warfare, the Peace of Ryswick (1697) merely confirmed each country’s possessions before the war, even returning Acadia, which the English had captured, to the French. In 1701 the Iroquois made a comprehensive peace with New France and remained neutral in future conflicts between the two countries.

In 1702 a new war, Queen Anne’s War, broke out between France and Great Britain (a new union of three countries headed by England). France did badly in this war, losing Acadia to the British in 1710. By the Peace of Utrecht that ended the war, France was compelled to yield its land in Newfoundland, although it kept seasonal fishing rights on the north side (the French Shore), and its claims to Hudson Bay. The Acadian mainland was also ceded to Great Britain. However, the French kept their forts and trading posts on the north side of the Bay of Fundy, maintaining that this was Micmac land that had never become part of Acadia. The Acadians who lived under British rule became the neutral French, tied to neither the French nor the British, but always distrusted by the British. They and the Micmac were the only people living in the colony, which the British called Nova Scotia, until the seaport of Halifax was founded in 1749.

France kept Cape Breton Island and Isle Saint-Jean (now Prince Edward Island), organizing them as the colony of Isle Royale. After 1713 the French fishing industry focused on Cape Breton Island, where the fortified town of Louisbourg was founded that year. Louisbourg soon became a successful fishing and trading port as well as a military base. In the peaceful decades that followed, New France continued to grow and prosper, from 18,000 people in 1713 to 40,000 in 1737 and 55,000 in 1755. Most of these people lived in the long-established farming communities of the Saint Lawrence valley, the heartland of New France.

The Fur Trade

The French fur trade operations were extended far to the west by military officer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Vérendrye, and his sons. They explored almost to the Rocky Mountains in the 1730s and 1740s and established a string of fur trading forts. The fur traders who followed them established routes along the Saskatchewan and Missouri rivers. The French forged alliances, based on the trade, with the indigenous peoples of the west, and this meant that French soldiers, traders, and missionaries could move with relative ease across the continent. But since the indigenous nations trapped and traded the pelts and European hatters processed them, the fur trade never provided work for more than a few hundred French colonists. Partly for that reason, the population of New France remained many times smaller than that of the Thirteen Colonies.

The French and Indian War

With the outbreak of the French and Indian War, Great Britain began a relentless attack on France’s colonies. The conflict began in the Ohio Valley, where Britishers from the Thirteen Colonies were beginning to settle. This British expansion threatened Louisiana’s links with the rest of New France. The British also threatened the French on the Atlantic coast, where British fleets drove out the French cod fishing fleet in 1755. The same year, Great Britain rounded up and deported some 7000 Acadians, destroying the century-old Acadian society of Nova Scotia. The Acadians were replaced by settlers from New England, who occupied the productive diked farmlands that the Acadians had created by the Bay of Fundy. Some of the deported Acadians went to France, and some went to Louisiana, where their present-day descendants are known as Cajuns. Some retreated to the woods to avoid being sent away and settled farther north on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. In 1764 the British allowed the deportees to return, and in the last part of the 18th century thousands came back to join the refugees in these new settlements.

For several years New France’s forces, led by the experienced French general the Marquis of Montcalm, held their own against the large and very costly assault by British forces. In a global military contest, Great Britain was compelled to devote one-seventh of its army—20,000 soldiers—to face down a few thousand French troops, supported by militia and indigenous allies, in North America. But Louisbourg fell in 1758, and part of its population was deported to France. In 1759 three British armies pushed toward the Saint Lawrence heartland. After a summer-long siege of Québec, the young British general James Wolfe won the battle of the Plains of Abraham and captured the city. Montréal fell the following summer, and as a result French Canadians call 1760 the year of the conquest.

The conquest did not end all the fighting. The final stage was a widespread indigenous campaign in the spring of 1763, under Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa, against the western posts where British garrisons had recently replaced the French. Most of these posts were in the southern and western territories of Canada that now form the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The indigenous nations of the area resented the Thirteen Colonies’ westward expansion onto their lands, and joined the uprising to force them back. However, they were unable to sustain their attack or to sever British supply lines.

British North America 1763-1841

By the Treaty of Paris in 1763, New France with its 65,000 settlers (except western Louisiana) was ceded to Great Britain. At that point, what is now Canada comprised the British colonies of Québec, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Rupert’s Land. Québec was the new name for the colony of Canada, which had reached from Labrador to Missouri but was now reduced to the lower Saint Lawrence valley. Nova Scotia comprised all of what had been Acadia and Isle Royale, and Newfoundland included Labrador. Rupert’s Land, which was the name for the Hudson Bay drainage area, was confirmed as a monopoly of the HBC.

King George III of Great Britain sought to pacify Pontiac’s allies with his Royal Proclamation of 1763, which recognized indigenous sovereignty with certain qualifications. It committed Great Britain to negotiating treaties with the indigenous peoples to acquire land before allowing settlers to move in. The land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, including Canada outside the lower Saint Lawrence valley, was set aside as a reserve, the so-called Lands Reserved for the Indians. This angered people in the Thirteen Colonies, who felt they were being deprived of rights to western land that had been given or implied in their original colonial charters.

Consolidating British Rule

When Great Britain conquered New France, it expected to impose British institutions, including a colonial assembly that would be open only to Protestants. Military governors James Murray and Guy Carleton found that policy unworkable. In 1774 by the Quebec Act, Great Britain agreed to preserve a regime with no elective institutions. The Quebec Act entrenched the old French civil law and the seignorial system of landholding and officially recognized the Roman Catholic Church, including its right to impose tithes. By shoring up the society of French Québec, the Quebec Act helped reconcile its key leaders, the church and the seigneurs, to British rule. The French Canadian farming economy of the Saint Lawrence valley and its language, religion, and customs continued largely unchanged.

The Quebec Act also restored to Québec the land between the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, which had been included in the Lands Reserved for the Indians. This helped preserve Montréal’s fur trade and encouraged the indigenous nations to form alliances with the British.

All of the northern colonies were theoretically under the authority of the governor-general at Québec city, but in practice there were few links among them. Each colony continued to develop in isolation from the others. In Newfoundland, English and Irish settlements had been growing during the 18th century. By the end of the century, Newfoundlanders, rather than fishing fleets from England, caught most of the cod that was exported to Europe and the Caribbean. Newfoundland was not entirely British after 1763, however; France kept fishing rights on the north and west coasts and was allowed the islands of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon as a base for its fishing fleets.

Nova Scotia attracted only a few settlers from New England and Great Britain, but its capital, Halifax, became important as a military base and seaport. Halifax was the site of the first newspaper in what is now Canada (1752) and of the first elected assembly (1758). After 1770 migration from the highlands of Scotland produced a substantial Gaelic-speaking minority in Nova Scotia. Prince Edward Island (called Saint John’s Island until 1799) became a separate colony in 1769.

In Québec, the population grew, commerce expanded, rural villages developed, and prosperity increased, but French-speaking society, particularly rural society, continued largely unchanged from the days of French rule. The world of most French colonists continued to center on the farm and the parish. Because the church, which ran the schools, did not have enough clergy, there were few schools, and most of the colonists were unable to read and write. Rural prosperity aided the seigneurs, who for the first time could hope to live as country gentlemen on the dues paid by the habitants. The English-speaking population, most of whom were involved in trade, government, or the garrisons, lived mainly in the towns.

The American Revolution

Removal of the French threat, which eliminated the need for British military protection, encouraged the Thirteen Colonies to grow away from their ties to Great Britain. Barely 15 years after the conquest of New France, these colonies took up armed resistance to British rule, and the American Revolution began. In 1775 American forces harassed Nova Scotia and invaded Québec. They did not win the support of the Nova Scotians, who still depended on British connections. The Americans seized Montréal and besieged Québec City in the winter of 1775 to 1776, but they found little support, and British forces drove them out early in 1776. For the rest of the war, Great Britain used the forts and seaports of the northern colonies as springboards for its campaigns against the Americans.

The American Revolution created not one but two new nations in North America. When the independence of the United States of America was confirmed in 1783, only the northern part of British North America, the future Canada, was left to the British Empire.

Loyalist Immigration

The British were immediately confronted with incorporating a dramatic increase in population. Some 40,000 Loyalists—people from the Thirteen Colonies who were loyal to Great Britain—came as refugees during and immediately after the revolution (see United Empire Loyalists). Others, called late Loyalists, arrived in subsequent years. Some of the Loyalists were former members of the urban elite of the Thirteen Colonies, but most were ordinary farmers or townspeople. A third of the Loyalists in Atlantic Canada were blacks, mostly escaped slaves who had joined the British cause. Part of the Iroquois confederacy that had allied itself with Great Britain also joined the migration. Thayendanegea, or Joseph Brant, founded an Iroquois community on the Grand River north of Lake Erie.

Great Britain supported Loyalist refugees for several years and provided them with generous land grants in British North America. Almost overnight, Loyalists tripled the population of Nova Scotia. Their arrival caused two new colonies to be carved out of Nova Scotia: New Brunswick and Cape Breton Island (reunited with Nova Scotia in 1820). In Québec, which received about 10,000 Loyalists, Governor Frederick Haldimand decreed that the English-speaking newcomers should not be merged into the French communities. At his direction, most Loyalists in Québec migrated in 1784 to new settlements on the upper Saint Lawrence and Lake Ontario. Here the Loyalists soon formed militias and kept a wary eye on their former countrymen to the south.

The Constitutional Act of 1791

The War of 1812

In 1812 the United States declared war on Great Britain, which was again fighting a global war against France. Both Britain and France had confiscated U.S. ships that were attempting to trade with the other side. This angered the United States, which was neutral in the conflict. The United States figured that the British were the worse offenders and declared war. One of its first moves in the War of 1812 was to invade Upper Canada.

American leaders expected success, rather than a repeat of 1775, because most Upper Canadians had only recently come from the Thirteen Colonies. They were wrong. Great Britain’s professional army, with the support of the colonial militias and indigenous allies led by Tecumseh of the Shawnee, inflicted a series of defeats on the large but ill-trained American invasion forces. In 1812 British general Isaac Brock secured the Canadian frontier at Niagara and captured Detroit.

There was no direct threat to Atlantic Canada because its nearest U.S. neighbors, the New England states, largely opposed the war. In fact, Nova Scotian shipowners enjoyed a bonanza; their vessels went on privateering expeditions, capturing and confiscating American ships. The Americans never effectively threatened Lower Canada. They attempted to capture Montréal in 1813, but the attempts were blocked by British victories at Crysler’s Farm and Chateauguay. However, the 1813 American naval victory at Put-in-Bay on Lake Erie renewed the threat to Upper Canada, whose survival depended on command of the Saint Lawrence and the Great Lakes. American forces occupied parts of the colony and burned its capital, York (now Toronto), but got little support from the inhabitants.

When the war ended in 1815, the attempted American conquest had been defeated. The war had strengthened anti-American feeling, particularly in Upper Canada, and increased the belief that British North America had a separate destiny.

Expansion

The Fur Trade and Western Exploration

The fur trade shaped development on the Pacific coast. Sea otters, which bear one of the world’s finest furs, ranged along that coast from Alaska to California. Russian and Spanish traders exploited this resource, but Great Britain pushed them out of what is now British Columbia after explorations by its captains James Cook (1778) and George Vancouver (1792). In a brief period, the fur traders nearly exterminated the sea otter, although a few survived in Alaska.

The enmity of the companies colored the history of western settlement. Assiniboia, the first colony west of the Great Lakes, was begun at Red River in Rupert’s Land in 1812. It was the project of a major HBC stockholder, Lord Selkirk. The Nor’Westers saw it as an HBC attempt to block their east-west trade route, which ran through Red River. The Métis, mixed-blood offspring of fur traders and indigenous people, already had communities in Red River; they sided with the Nor’Westers. The colony’s first governor, Miles Macdonell, set the tone when he issued restrictions on trade. In 1816 the second governor, Robert Semple, and 20 men were killed in a gunfight with Métis while trying to enforce the restrictions. Other violence occurred as the HBC and NWC vied for dominance.

In 1821 the competition between the fur trade companies ended when the NWC merged into the HBC. The HBC took over the NWC’s trading area and also administered the Oregon Country, claimed by both Great Britain and the United States (see Northwest Boundary Dispute). Montréal’s trade dwindled as Hudson Bay became the major shipping point for furs going to Europe. The HBC came to dominate British interests on the Pacific, developing a network of trading forts. In 1843 the HBC built Fort Victoria (now Victoria, capital of British Columbia) on Vancouver Island as its Pacific headquarters. As population grew around the forts, able HBC administrators, notably Sir James Douglas, the father of British Columbia, played important roles in making the transition to colonial government. Gradually the fur trade’s role in the Canadian economy faded, although a commercial fur trade continued in the west and north.

Immigration and Settlement

At the beginning of the 19th century a flood of immigrants came to British North America from England, Scotland, and Ireland. Probably a million people migrated from these countries to British North America between 1815 and 1850. By the 1840s, British North America had 1.5 million people: 650,000 in Lower Canada, 450,000 in Upper Canada, and more than 300,000 in Atlantic Canada. About half the immigrants were English, but Irish immigrants became more numerous than English in the 1830s, and particularly after 1845 to 1847, when famine was common in Ireland. Scots immigration increased when tenant farmers in the Scottish Highlands were evicted from their land to allow large-scale sheep farming. The immigrants from Ireland and Scotland included both Catholics and Protestants, and Catholics became a sizable minority in all the English-speaking colonies.

Other immigrants were recruited by people who had acquired land and wanted to establish colonies. Lord Selkirk encouraged immigration not only to Red River, but also to Prince Edward Island and Upper Canada. The Canada Company, a land company chartered by the British monarchy, sought settlers for the large tract of Upper Canada that it acquired in 1826. Most people, however, came on their own. They risked the dangers of the passage and periodic outbreaks of shipborne cholera (particularly in 1832) and typhus (1847).

The greatest number of these immigrants settled in Upper Canada, which was considered a good country for a poor man because immigrants willing to work hard for a generation or more could acquire potentially valuable farmland. Upper Canada became the fastest-growing part of British North America. Atlantic Canada also attracted many immigrants, though fewer went to Newfoundland than to the other colonies. In Lower Canada, immigration caused the English-speaking population to grow in Québec City, the Ottawa River valley, Montréal, and the Eastern Townships (east of Montréal). French Canadians, however, remained the largest ethnic group.

Immigration made the colonies more British. It also made the indigenous nations minorities in most areas east of the Great Lakes. Land cession treaties gave them small reserves, but the hunting rights and other guarantees made to them in these treaties were rarely respected. Few immigrants went far west or north, and the indigenous nations remained dominant in the vast HBC lands. On the plains, the mounted hunting societies, who did not depend on the fur trade, lived independently on the still-abundant bison. The Red River colony continued, but the additions to its population were chiefly Métis, who were proud of their role as a new people different from both the indigenous peoples and the Europeans. There was little contact with the colonies to the east before midcentury. Then, however, as Upper Canada’s farm population grew, some of its leaders began considering the west as potential space for expansion.

Industrial Growth

Great Britain continued to be important to the economic development of its North American colonies, supplying trade opportunities and investment. During its wars with France, Great Britain was cut off from its timber sources in Europe, and it turned to British North America for timber. Timber production became a vital industry, and wood quickly replaced furs as the leading export of British North America. The timber trade encouraged shipbuilding, and by midcentury Atlantic Canada was building and operating a long-distance sailing fleet. Merchants prospered in Halifax and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia; Saint John, New Brunswick; St. John’s, Newfoundland; and other seaports.

The Fraser River gold rush of 1858 brought new settlers and new interest to the Pacific coast. The colony of British Columbia was formed that year out of the HBC territory, and in 1866 it incorporated the colony of Vancouver’s Island (the old name of Vancouver Island), which had been created in 1849. Its settlers, a mix of British, Canadians, and Americans, with a few Chinese, had begun to ship timber, salmon, and coal, as well as gold, from the colony, but they were still outnumbered by the indigenous population of the coast.

Political Changes

Growth of Self-Government

The act of 1791 established assemblies, in both Upper and Lower Canada, that were representative in that most adult males could vote in elections for these bodies. Great Britain conceded that its colonists were entitled to representative institutions, but it did not want a repeat of the American Revolution. It was widely believed among the British that the revolution had resulted from allowing too much independence in the Thirteen Colonies. Great Britain therefore wanted to bind the British North Americans more securely to the British Empire—the group of dominions, colonies, and other territories around the world that owed allegiance to the British crown—by establishing a colonial elite similar to the powerful British landed aristocracy. To that end, Britain balanced the power of elected assemblies with the authority of the governor-general and lieutenant governors from Great Britain, who were assisted by an appointed legislative council for each colony. The council members were drawn from the elite (English speakers in Upper Canada, and both English and French speakers in Lower Canada).

Ties to Great Britain were fostered by feelings of rivalry toward the United States. Edward Winslow, a Loyalist founder of New Brunswick, believed that British North America would be the envy of the United States. John Graves Simcoe, first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, welcomed American settlers because he believed that Upper Canada would show them that the British system of government was superior to American republicanism. Even in French-speaking Lower Canada, the church and the aristocracy accepted British rule. The rural population in Lower Canada also had no wish to be assimilated by the alien Americans, since its way of life was protected by British rule.

Radicals and Reformers

The autocratic rule of the appointed councils was opposed by two groups—radicals and reformers. The radicals looked to American and French political models and called for republican institutions, elections for all public offices, and the overthrow of all forms of privilege and inequality. By the mid-1820s, the fiery Scots-born Upper Canadian journalist and politician William Lyon Mackenzie was the most vigorous advocate of the radical platform. The more moderate reformers defended British institutions and ties to the British monarchy and empire. They campaigned for responsible government, meaning a parliamentary system where the monarchy’s advisors in each colony would be picked from, and responsible to, an elected legislature. Prominent reformers included Anglo-Irish lawyer W. W. Baldwin in Upper Canada, French Canadian journalist Étienne Parent in Lower Canada, and journalist Joseph Howe in Nova Scotia.

Throughout British North America, the movement for change was a political struggle. In Lower Canada, however, it threatened to become a revolution as well. Lower Canada’s farming economy suffered from overcrowding and soil exhaustion. French Canadian society was threatened with a decline in living standards and gradual impoverishment. Ethnic conflict exacerbated this economic challenge. French Canadians were concentrated in the hard-pressed countryside while British immigrants dominated the towns, where they controlled commerce and industry and had the ear of government. Continued immigration threatened French Canadian predominance, even in the countryside.

French Canadian lawyers, journalists, and others blamed French Canada’s problems on British domination. They warned that French Canadians would become merely the impoverished servants of British commercial interests and argued that the solution lay in a French Canadian nation. Nationalism, an almost unknown concept in the 18th century, became a powerful factor in Lower Canadian politics.

The Rebellions of 1837

Lower Canada’s assembly became the center of conflict between English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians. The assembly was dominated by the Patriote Party, which was supported by French Canadian voters and led by French Canadian middle-class professionals. Some English-speaking reformers also supported it. The assembly, however, was constantly thwarted by British governors and their appointed councils. In 1834 the assembly requested fundamental changes, embodied in a document called the Ninety-Two Resolutions. Great Britain rejected the Ninety-Two Resolutions in 1837 and authorized the governor to override the assembly almost entirely. Mass protests were called and soon turned into armed rebellion. (See Rebellions of 1837.)

The Patriote leader, Louis Joseph Papineau, a seigneur who wanted to preserve or restore many aspects of traditional French Canadian society, was a reluctant revolutionary who soon fled across the border to exile in the United States. But radical urban professionals and disgruntled rural peasants joined forces against British rule. In November 1837 they defeated British soldiers at Saint-Denis, but about two weeks later at Saint-Eustache, the British prevailed in a fierce conflict in which several hundred were killed or wounded. Within a few days after that battle, the British military dispersed all the rebel forces. The constitution was suspended, and British control in the colony was soon restored. In November 1838 a second brief outbreak, organized by Patriote exiles in the United States, was also quelled.

The rebellion in Lower Canada coincided with unrest in Upper Canada caused by a brief economic downturn that had caused difficult times for farmers. Attempts to get relief through the Upper Canadian assembly were fruitless because it was controlled by supporters of the Family Compact, and radicals had lost hope for peaceful change. So when Upper Canada’s lieutenant governor sent the Toronto garrison to help put down the rebellion in Lower Canada, William Lyon Mackenzie called on his radical supporters in rural Upper Canada to march on the undefended capital. The small, ill-organized rising in December 1837 was quickly defeated by loyal citizens, with only one death in the fighting around Toronto. Mackenzie and many supporters fled to the United States and attempted to start further uprisings from a base on Navy Island in the Niagara River.

The Union Period, 1841-1867

Defeat shattered the radical cause in both Lower and Upper Canada, but the outbreak of rebellion also discredited the office-holding cliques and the constitutions of 1791. The beneficiary was the moderate approach of the reformers, which had been overshadowed during the rebellions. Lord Durham, a British reformer sent as governor-general in 1838, condemned the ruling elites of the Canadas and urged that responsible government be implemented. Durham was alarmed by ethnic conflict in Lower Canada, where he said he found “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state.” He recommended reuniting Upper and Lower Canada in order to help the English-speaking majority assimilate the French Canadians.

The British government soon acted on Durham’s report. In 1841 the Act of Union (1840) created the province of Canada, which had two sections—Canada West (which had been Upper Canada) and Canada East (Lower Canada). French Canadians protested because English-speaking Canada West was given as many legislative seats as French-speaking Canada East, which had a larger population. In addition, English was to be the only official language. The arrangement was apparently designed to advance Durham’s goal of assimilation, but his recommendation for responsible government was given very little support. Governors-general sent from Great Britain were expected to seek the support of the elected assembly but did not depend on it.

As it turned out, however, assimilation failed and responsible government triumphed. Reformers from Canada West and East, led respectively by Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine, joined forces in a coalition that overrode ethnic divisions and showed that success in Union politics depended on bicultural support. Baldwin and LaFontaine repeatedly insisted that the governors-general take the assembly’s advice in making official appointments. When one governor-general refused, in 1843, they resigned and dissolved the administration. Finally, in 1848, Great Britain sent out a new governor-general, Durham’s nephew Lord Elgin, with instructions to appoint a Canadian government supported by the majority party in the assembly and to approve its policies whether he liked them or not. Responsible government had been achieved.

Joseph Howe’s reform party had already won the same victory in Nova Scotia earlier in the year. Responsible government soon followed in New Brunswick in 1848, in Prince Edward Island in 1851, and in Newfoundland in 1855. Great Britain retained authority for foreign affairs, defense, and other matters and still appointed the governors, but British North America had full local self-government with one of the broadest electoral franchises in the world. All men could vote provided they held land worth a certain amount, and many of them qualified. However, the secret ballot did not come until the 1870s, the universal vote for adult males came only gradually, and women had no vote until 1917.

Although there were many political factions, two broad party coalitions developed throughout the colonies. Reformers or liberals, nicknamed Grits in Canada West and Rouges in Canada East, promoted universal education, individual rights, and the interests of farmers and small businessmen. Conservatives, called Tories in Canada West and Bleus in Canada East, built a coalition that combined loyalty to Great Britain and respect for tradition with a willingness to use state power to support capitalist enterprise. Conservative allies John Alexander Macdonald, who later became the first prime minister of Canada, and George-Étienne Cartier, a Patriote rebel turned railroad lawyer, were the most successful politicians of the period.

Industrial Progress

The Union period saw great changes in British North America. Population growth continued and was particularly rapid in Canada West. Commerce and industry encouraged urban growth. The cities, and colonial society generally, came to be dominated and defined by a confident, prosperous middle class.

The first Canadian passenger railroad was built near Montréal in 1836, and in the 1840s and 1850s thousands of kilometers of track and telegraph lines were laid. The Reciprocity Treaty of 1854 reduced customs tariffs and increased trade between British North America and the United States.

The Union period was Atlantic Canada’s golden age, when it prospered from building wooden ships and sailing them in overseas trade. British North America’s shipping fleet was exceeded only by those of Great Britain and the United States. Shipyards all over the region produced a quarter of the British Empire’s merchant fleet and helped launch careers like that of Sir Samuel Cunard, the Halifax-born founder of the Cunard shipping line. The merchant elite, with ties to London, Boston, and other major cities, became wealthy and supported schools and universities. Nova Scotia saw itself as the cultural capital of British North America.

Nineteenth-Century Society

English-Speaking Society

The Union period saw great changes in English-speaking society. Population growth continued and was particularly rapid in Canada West. Commerce and industry encouraged urban growth. The cities, and colonial society generally, came to be dominated and defined by a confident, prosperous middle class.

Most of the English-speaking population was proud of its connection to the British Empire and wished to maintain it, although aspiring at the same time to move from colonial status to greater self-rule. It was generally believed that hard work, industrialization, and attention to commerce would inevitably achieve the progress that would bring this about. The symbol of the era to English speakers was Great Britain’s monarch, Queen Victoria (reigned 1837-1901), whose personal stability and moral uprightness seemed to personify British virtues.

Protestant churches were important in English-speaking society; most people belonged to the Church of England, the Methodists, or the Presbyterians. The churches provided social services, a role that the state had yet to take on. Middle-class citizens embarked on moral crusades to defeat the liquor traffic, protect the Sabbath, eliminate prostitution and gambling, ban lewd literature, and improve the moral education of schoolchildren and the poor.

The Union period saw the beginning of public English-speaking school systems. The function of schooling was removed from the churches, partly because there was not one church as in French Canada. In addition, English Canadians shared a consensus on the values to be taught and believed these values were crucial to a stable society. They therefore wanted them taught to all children. English-speaking schools promoted identification with Protestant Christianity and British customs.

Women of English-speaking society in that era were expected to restrict themselves to domestic concerns. They were excluded from most new fields of commerce and higher education as well as from politics. Men and women were expected to operate in so-called separate spheres of life. This meant, however, that women had greater authority in the home and over the young, and also in defining public morals and social standards. Women gradually came to dominate elementary teaching and many areas of social and charitable work, and they were crucial leaders and supporters of religious campaigns and temperance crusades.

French-Speaking Society

Under responsible government in Canada East, French Canadians had the voting power to ensure the status of the French language and to continue the Catholic Church’s control of the education system. Thus the union that was intended to assimilate French Canada actually protected its individuality. More municipal and local governments were formed, and these governments invested in expanded public education, transportation, and other public services. The seignorial system was abolished and the old French civil law modernized.