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Home , Lower Canada, White Bermudian, Wolfred Nelson

“By What Authority Do You Chain Us Like Felons?”: From Lower Canadian Colonists to Bermudan Convicts – Political Slavery and the Politics of Unfreedom

Jarett Henderson, Mount Royal University

At 3:00 PM on 2 July 1838, stepped, for the first time since his arrest in December 1837, outside the stone walls of the newly built Gaol. Iron shackles hung from his wrists and ankles. Heavy chains bound him to Robert Bouchette, who, like 515 other Lower Canadian reformers, had been arrested under the auspices of leading an insurrection against the . That July day Nelson, Bouchette, and six other white British subjects – often identified as patriots – began a journey that took them from Montreal to to Hamilton, the capital of the British penal colony of . Their procession from the gaol to the steamer moored in the St. Lawrence provided these eight men one final opportunity to demonstrate their frustration with irresponsible colonial government. The rhetoric of political enslavement once used by Nelson to agitate for reform had been replaced with iron shackles. This symbol of unfreedom was both personal and political. Furthermore, it provides a vivid example of how Nelson, Bouchette, and their fellow compatriots Rodolphe DesRivières, Henri Gauvin, Siméon Marchesseault, Luc Masson, Touissant Goddu, and Bonaventure Viger’s ideas about the reach of empire had encouraged their political engagement and transformed them from loyal to disloyal, from free to unfree, and from civil to uncivil subjects. Though there is little record of the removal of these men from , we must not take this as an indication that their transportation to Bermuda went unnoticed. For the hundreds, if not thousands of Montrealers who lined St. Mary’s Street, their presence demonstrated the extent of public interest in the struggle to abolish irresponsible government and transforming the relationship between metropole and colony.1 Some, to be certain, came to offer their support, while others to cheer the departure of these ‘rebels’. Louis Perrault, whose brother Charles-Ovide had been killed in battle at Saint-Denis, witnessed the spectacle. He wrote that the men had been chained “Nelson with Bouchette, DesRivières and Gauvin, Marchesseault with Masson, [and] Goddu and Viger.”2 Joseph Schull observed in his study that a “great noise” erupted when those on the street realized that these men were “enchaînés

1 On political engagement in the around the issue of colonial reform see: Michel Ducharme, Le Concept de Liberté au Canada à l'époque des Révolutions atlantiques 1776-1838, (Montreal-Kingston: 2010); Louis-Georges Harvey, Le printemps de l’Amérique française: américanité, anticolonialisme et républicanisme dans le discours politique québécois, 1805–1837 (Montreal: 2005); Allan Greer, The Patriots and the People, (Toronto:1993); Jeffrey McNarin, The Capacity to Judge, (Toronto: 2000); Cecilia Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women, (Toronto: 1996); Carol Wilton, Popular Politics and Political Culture in , 1800-1850, (Montreal-Kingston: 2001); Allan Greer and Ian Radforth Eds., Colonial Leviathan, (Toronto: 1992); and Bryan Palmer, “Popular Radicalism and the Theatrics of Rebellion,” in Transatlantic Subjects, Ed Nancy Christie, (Montreal-Kingston: 2008), pp 403-38. 2 Louis Perrault, Lettres d'un patriote réfugié au Vermont, 1837–1839, Ed. Georges Aubin (Montréal: 1999), p. 130. 1

deux à deux.”3 The reaction to the enchaînement of these men suggests that Montrealers, like British subjects in Bermuda, New South Wales, and Britain, were also familiar with the moral implications of unfreedom that dominated imperial political debate and discourse for much of the 1830s.4 Flanked by officers of the cavalry and chained like individuals who lived beyond the pale, it took over an hour for these men to navigate the crowded Montreal streets. As offensive and as immoral as some may have found theses shackles, this procession proved to be an opportunity to shore up support for colonial reform. Their shackles conveyed a message that the language of political enslavement could only imagine: irresponsible government had quite literally led to the personal and political unfreedom of these white British subjects. Bouchette recalled in his memoires that as he and the others exited the gaol they raised their shackled arms high into the air so that the crowd could see and “draw their own conclusions about the past, the present, and the future.”5 As they did so Nelson’s voice reportedly boomed: “By what authority do you chain us like felons?”6 Once aboard the Canada steamer that carried Nelson, Bouchette and the others to Quebec, the iron shackles were removed from their swollen wrists and ankles. At Quebec the men explained to Charles Buller, one of the councillors who had sanctioned the Bermuda Ordinance that legalized their removal from the colony, that their enchaînement had tainted their reputations. “We explained to Mr. Buller,” Marchesseault wrote to his parents, “our great surprise when our hands were chained with infamous irons; the same irons that are used only for the vile, the poor, and the malicious.” “We further explained,” he continued, “that our shackling could have had disastrous consequences and that Lord Durham ought to testify his disapproval of it, for our friends did not expect such a treatment.”7 Buller, who had personal and political ties to Lord Durham, the British peer who had been sent to govern the colony in the wake of rebellion, and Bermuda’s convict establishment, assured Marchesseault that had the governor general suspected such uncivil treatment he would have intervened.8

3 Joseph Schull, Rebellion, (Toronto: 1971) p. 142. 4 Kirsten McKenzie, A Swindler’s Progress, (Sydney: 2009); Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies, (Melbourne: 2004); Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, (Manchester: 2005); Julie Evans, Edward Eyre, Race, and Colonial Governance, (Dunedin: 2005); and Alan Lester, Imperial Networks, (London: 2001); Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects, (Chicago: 2002); and Jack P. Greene, Ed. Exclusionary Empire, (Cambridge: 2010). 5 Robert S.-M Bouchette, Mémoires de Robert–S.–M. Bouchette, 1805–1840, (Montréal: 1903), p. 68; Library and Archives Canada [Hereafter LAC], MG24 A34, Nelson Fonds, vol. 2. 6 Schull, Rebellion, p. 142. 7 Yvon Thériault, Ed.,“Les Patriotes aux Bermudes,” Revue d'histoire de l'Amérique française [Hereafter RHAF] 16 :2 (1962), p. 111. 8“Les Patriotes aux Bermudes en 1838,” p. 111. Reprinted in, Le Clarion, 14 mars 1930. On Durham in Canada see: Jarett Henderson, “Uncivil Subjects,” (PhD Thesis, York University, 2010); Bruce Curtis, “The ‘Most Splendid Pageant Ever Seen’: Grandeur, the Domestic, and Condescension in Lord Durham’s Political Theatre,” CHR 89:1 (March 2008): 55–88; Chester New, Lord Durham, (Toronto: 1929); Stuart Reid, Life and Letters of the First Earl of Durham, 1792–1840, 2 Vols., (London: 1906); and Frederick Bradshaw, Self-Government in Canada, and How it was Achieved: The Story of Lord Durham's Report, (London: 1903). Significantly more studies examine Durham’s report: G. M. Craig and Janet Ajzenstat eds, Lord Durham's Report, (Montreal-Kingston: 2007); Janet Ajzenstat, The 2

The colonial press devoted little space to the removal of these eight political reformers from Lower Canada. On 5 July 1838, the noted on its last page that: “HMS Vestal, having on board W. Nelson, Bouchette, etc, sailed for Bermuda yesterday morning, at half past 5 o’clock.”9 Durham’s official correspondence contains no additional details. “The state prisoners sailed this morning in Her Majesty's ship Vestal, for Bermuda,” he informed Colonial Secretary Glenelg before embarking on his vice regal tour of .10 This archival silence has been amplified by studies that have focused primarily on the transportation of political prisoners from the Canadas to in 1839 following the 1838 rebellion.11 This article focuses instead on those political prisoners transported to Bermuda by Lord Durham’s administration in July 1838. It explores three interrelated and understudied aspects of inter- rebellion Lower Canada: the imperial personnel networks that linked Durham’s 1838 administration to the Age of Reform; the negotiations that enabled Durham to transport Nelson, Bouchette, and the others to Bermuda alongside their personal accounts of the 1837 rebellion and transportation; and lastly, the imperial predicament that the arrival of these men ignited in Bermuda on 24 July 1838. To do so reveals the personal and political networks that bound Lord Durham’s administration of Lower Canada to the politics of empire and that demands in Lower Canada to abolish irresponsible government were influenced other empire- wide debates, in particular, the abolition of slavery and convict migration; debates that trust definitions and discourses of freedom, race, and governance into flux. To consider the material ties of Durham’s administration, the rhetoric of political enslavement employed by these eight reformers, and their removal to Bermuda illustrates the importance of reconfiguring the empire not only as a territorial project. Empire, as constituted in Lower Canada, was a space wherein

Political Thought of Lord Durham, (Montreal–Kingston: 1988); Phillip A. Buckner, The Transition to , (Westport, Conn.: 1985); Nicholas Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience, (Toronto: 1983); Ged Martin, The Durham Report and British Policy, (Cambridge: 1972); Gerald Craig, Lord Durham's Report, (Toronto: 1963); Marcel-Pierre Hamel, Le Rapport de Durham, (Montreal: 1948); Reginald Coupland, The Durham Report, (Cambridge: 1945); and The Report of the Earl of Durham: Her Majesty's High Commissioner and Governor-General of , (London: 1902). 9 Quebec Mercury, 5 July 1838. Henderson, “Uncivil Subjects,” Ch. 3; Jane Errington, “Suitable Diversions: Women, Gentility, and Entertainment in an Imperial Outpost,” History, Vol. CII: No 2 (2010); 175–96; and George Brown, “The Durham Report and the Upper Canadian Scene.” CHR 20:2 (1939): 136–60. 10 LAC, MG24 A27, Lambton fonds, Vol. 12. 11 Beverly Boissery, A Deep Sense of Wrong, (Toronto: 1995); Tim Causer, ‘“On British Felony the Sun Never Sets”: Narratives of Political Prisoners in New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, 1838-1853’, Cultural and Social History, 4:5 (2008): 423-435; Thomas Dunning, “Convict Bodies in Van Diemen's Land,” Australian Studies 13:1 (1998): 134–44; Brian Petrie, “The French–Canadian Patriote Convict Experience, 1840–1848,” Journal of Royal Australian Historical Society 81 (1995): 167–83; James Gibson, “Political Prisoners, Transportation for Life, and Responsible Government in Canada,” Ontario History 67:4 (Dec. 1975): 185–98; John Thompson, “The North American Patriot Prisoners at Probation Stations in Van Diemen's Land,” Australasian Canadian Studies Journal 25:2 (2007): 117–46; and R. Watt, “The Political Prisoners in Upper Canada, 1837–8.” English Historical Review 42 (October, 1926): 256–65. 3

the parallel histories of emancipation, convict transportation, and demands for colonial independence existed within a single analytical frame.12 At first glance it may appear that the struggle to abolish irresponsible government in Lower Canada shared little with the abolition of slavery or the campaigns to end convict migration, two questions that dominated the trans-imperial public sphere in the 1830s. In part, this is because historians in Canada have interpreted the political demands of colonial reformers as rooted in a history shared by French and American Revolutionaries. In seeking connections to past events rather than parallel ones, this scholarship has overlooked the important material and discursive connections that linked colonial reformers like Nelson and imperial administrators like Durham to the broader British world. ‘New’ imperial historians have produced fascinating studies of the connections between convict transportation, slavery, and colonial reform in other sites of empire but North American scholars have paid little attention to how, or, in what ways, Lower Canada and Lower were involved in and influenced by the politics of empire.13 The exclusion of Lower Canada from this narrative is particularly striking. Zoe Laidlaw argues in Colonial Connections that of the humanitarian and administrative networks of this period, neither the nor New South Wales (the colonies most often associated with studies of slavery and convict transportation) “received the same degree of metropolitan scrutiny as colonies in British North America or the West Indies.”14 Yet struggle to abolish irresponsible government in Lower Canada has not been considered alongside the trans- imperial history of race, freedom, and governance that dominated political debate and public discourse in the 1830s British world. For generations Canadian and Quebec historians have debated the causes of rebellion and how best to describe these events.15 In fact, Ian McKay’s

12 Magda Fahrni, “Reflections on the Place of Quebec in Historical Writing on Canada,” in Contesting Clio's Craft: New Directions and Debates in Canadian History, Eds Michael Dawson et Christopher Dummitt, (London: 2009), pp. 1-20; Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History, 88:3 (2001): 829–65; Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Moving Subjects, (Urbana and Chicago: 2009); Alan Lester, “Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire,” History Compass, 4:1 (2006): 124–41; Mrinalini Sinha, “Mapping the Imperial Social Formation: A Modest Proposal for Feminist History,” Signs , 25:3 (2000): 1077–82; Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, Eds, Connected Worlds, (Canberra: 2005); Tony Ballantyne, “Race and the webs of empire: Aryanism from to the Pacific,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 2:3 (2001): online. 13 Laidlaw, Colonial Connections; McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies; Paul Pickering, “Loyalty and Rebellion in Colonial Politics: The Campaign against Convict Transportation in Australia,” in Rediscovering the British World, Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis Eds., (Calgary: 2005) pp. 87–108; Kirsty Reid, Gender, Crime and Empire, (Manchester: 2007). 14 Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, p. 3. 15 Ducharme, Le Concept de Liberté au Canada; J. I. Little, Loyalties in Conflict, (Toronto: 2008); Murray Greenwood and Barry Wright, Eds. Canadian State Trials: Rebellion and Invasion in the Canadas, 1837–1839, (Toronto: 2002); Colin Coates, “The Rebellions of 1837–38, and Other Bourgeois Revolutions in Quebec Historiography,” International Journal of Canadian Studies 20 (Fall 1999): 19–34; Matthieu Sossoyan, “The Kahnawake and the Lower–Canadian Rebellions, 1837-1838,” (MA Thesis, McGill University, 1999); Allan Greer, “1837–38: Rebellion Reconsidered,” CHR 76:1 (1995): 1–18; Greer, The Patriots and the People; Jean-Paul Bernard, Les 4

proposed reconnaissance of Canadian history which identifies the 1837-38 rebellion, Durham’s 1839 Report, and the 1841 Union of the Canadas as “a matrix event” shares much with Archivist Arthur Doughty’s hundred-year-old observation that 1838 was “one of the most critical years in Canadian history.”16 And whether we accept Allan Greer’s no S thesis and view the rebellions of 1837 and 1838 as “The Canadian Rebellion,” or, comprehend them as Colin Coates and Michel Ducharme do as part and parcel of “l’époque des révolutions Atlantique” one thing is clear: Canadian and Quebec historians have been hesitant to explore the “tensions of empire” – politically, materially, and discursively – that bound the struggle of these reformers to abolish irresponsible colonial governance and Durham’s efforts to “remedy the many evils of this unhappy ” to parallel histories of reform across the empire.17

I. Situating Lower Canada and Lord Durham in the Age of Reform By the 1830s, the political structures of imperial rule in Lower Canada, once celebrated as free from the taint of bondage, were being depicted as institutions that enslaved the white settlers of Lower Canada. On 31 March 1836, L’Echo du Pays, a pro-reform newspaper in the colony published an article by Wolfred Nelson. Nelson, whose loyalist mother had fled New York during the , expressed both his loyalism and frustration with empire that March day: “It is our duty and it is in our interest to remain subjects of England, but we cannot continue to be subjects if we will not be treated as such, but rather as slaves.”18 This distinction Nelson made between the rights of the enslaved, or unfree, and free British subjects is a racialized rhetoric of non-Blackness.19 By linking irresponsible government and slavery, Nelson intimated that Lower Canadians were not being treated as free, loyal, and white British subjects should. Moreover, his use of the political language of slavery linked local and colonial politics to other imperial debates over parliamentary reform, emancipation, and convict

Rébellions de 1837–1838, (Montréal:1983); Fernand Ouellet, Lower Canada, 1791-1840: Social Change and Nationalism, (Toronto: 1980); Joseph Schull, Rebellion: the Rising in French Canada 1837. (Toronto: 1971); Jacques Monet, The Last Cannon Shot: A Study of French- 1837-1850, (Toronto: 1969); and Helen Taft Manning, The Revolt of French Canada, 1800–1835, (New York: 1962). 16 Ian McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of Canadian History,” CHR, 81:4 (2000): 616–678; Jarett Henderson, “‘I am Pleased with the Lambton Loot’: Arthur Doughty and the Making of the Durham Papers,” Archivaria, 70 (2010): 153–76. 17 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, (Berkeley: 1997) pp. 1–58; Report on the Affairs of British North America, (London: 1839), 8–9. 18 Georges Aubin, Ed., Wolfred Nelson, (Montréal: 1998), p. 41. 19 Hall, Civilizing Subjects; Radhika Mohanram, Imperial White: Race, Diaspora, and the British Empire, (Minneapolis: 2007); Donal Lowry, “The Crown, Empire Loyalism, and the Assimilation of Non–British White Subjects in the British World: An Argument Against ‘Ethnic Determinism.’” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 31:2 (2003): 96–120. 5

transportation that were transforming “deep rooted ideas connecting servitude and skin colour.”20 In francophone Lower Canada and anglophone Upper Canada white, loyal, and politically engaged British subjects frustrated by the vicieuse and irresponsable nature of imperial rule rallied around a rhetoric used by Atlantic revolutionaries, Loyalist refugees, and reformers in England and the empire to demand political rights as colonial subjects.21 In Lower Canada, this frustration culminated in a 4000-person rally, known as the Grande Assemblée des Six-Comtés, at Saint-Charles-sur-le-Richelieu. There Wolfred Nelson and Luc Côté delivered violent and extreme speeches calling for open revolt. Louis Joseph Papineau, the man who has come to embody the patriot cause, praised the “wise” authors of the American Declaration of Independence and called for the removal of “la longue et lourde chaîne d’abus.” As he addressed the crowd he explained that Lower Canada must be “émancip[é] de mauvais gouvernement.”22 Weeks later insurrection rocked the Lower Canadian countryside and made ‘rebels’ out of British subjects whose loyalty, like Loyalist refugees in the Bahamas and , forced them to take action against a metropolitan vision of empire that hindered colonial independence.23 This armed conflict left several hundred dead and wounded. When the flames of colonial protest were finally extinguished had been proclaimed (a tactic frequently used to crush slave rebellions in the West Indies), habeas corpus suspended, and 515 patriots, whose commitment to reform now branded them as uncivil and disloyal British subjects, arrested. News of colonial unrest echoed through the halls of Westminster for much of the nineteenth century; however, in the late 1830s colonial concerns were becoming problems of imperial proportions: they could topple metropolitan administrations. Within such a context, the rebellion in the Canadas was an imperial issue that only complicated Prime Minister Melbourne’s “already difficult task of holding his government together.”24 Indeed, not since the American colonists first demanded independence in 1775, had a white settler colony taken up arms to demand constitutional change. But American colonists were not the only British subjects to make such demands. Loyalist refugees, as Maya Jasanoff argues, frequently

20 Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles : American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, (New York : 2011), pp. 174; Hall, Civilizing Subjects; Uday S. Mehta, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” in Tensions of Empire, pp. 59–86; Catherine Hall, ‘The Rule of Difference: Gender, Class and Empire in the Making of the 1832 Reform Act’, in Gendered Nations. Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century, Ed. Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall (Oxford: 2000), 107–36. 21 Report of Commissioners on Grievances Complained of in Lower Canada, Third Report, (London: 1837), p. 109; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles; Ducharme, Le Concept de Liberté; Greer, “Rebellion Reconsidered"; Coates, “The Rebellions of 1837–38”; McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework”; Pickering, “Loyalty and Rebellion”; and Kirsten McKenzie, “‘My Voice is Sold, I Must be as Slave’: Abolition, Industrialisation and the Yorkshire Election of 1807.” History Workshop Journal 64 (2007): 48-73. 22 La Minerve, 2 November 1837. 23 Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles. 24 Leslie Mitchell, Lord Melbourne: 1779-1848, (Oxford: 1997), p. 99. 6

harbored grievances against the imperial government, the very administration that they also turned to for support. In other words, loyalists could become rebels if their expectations of empire were not met. But what had caused white Lower Canadians to undertake such a disloyal, rebellious, and uncivil act? To answer this very question , on 15 January 1838, appointed John George Lambton, the Earl of Durham, Governor General and High Commissioner of British North America. In addition to his administrative responsibilities as governor general, Durham was commissioned to inquire into the cause of this trouble, report on the present state of the British North American colonies, and make recommendations for their future administration. To assist Durham in “preserving the integrity of the empire,” Melbourne’s government suspended the constitution of Lower Canada and voted to give Durham extensive, almost dictator-like, powers to govern the colony in the wake of rebellion. Durham, Charles Buller, and his two teenage daughters, Emily and Mary would complete the now infamous report that stemmed from his commission in late January 1839. This Report on the Affairs of British North America has come to be seen by imperial historians as a blueprint for the establishment of white settler societies throughout the empire.25 To situate Lower Canada, Lord Durham, and the struggle to abolish irresponsible government within such historiography makes visible the limits and conditions of imperial loyalty while revealing that very process of making Lower Canada into a white British settler colony posed a novel problem in 1838: where did free, white, francophone, Catholic British subjects fit in an empire that was set to end apprenticeship and make black British subjects free?26 The decision of the imperial parliament to suspend the constitution of the largest white settler colony in the empire was not only a difficult one; it also rested on Durham becoming the governor of Lower Canada. When Lord John Russell introduced the bill he lamented his duty to “ask the House to suspend, though only for a time, the constitutional liberties of that portion of the British territories.” This metropolitan vision of empire agreed upon two things: first, that any decision made about the administration of Lower Canada must be temporary and second, Lower Canada must not be totally void of political machinery as it was “so important a portion of the British empire.” Their solution – the Canada Government Bill – established a new form of legislative body for Lower Canada modelled after a council in the Cape Colony, where, like Lower Canada, two white races ruled over indigenous peoples. This ‘special’ council was to operate until 1 November 1840 when British statesmen hoped that a “free constitution” would again govern the lives of the white French and English British subjects in Lower Canada. Colonial

25 LAC, MG24 A27, Lambton fonds, Vols. 4–6; LAC, MG24-A16, Elgin fonds, Vol. 15., Journal of Lady Mary Lambton, 1837-39; Julie Evans, et al, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights, (Manchester: 2003), pp. 34–7 and Ann Courthoys, “The Dog that Didn’t Bark: The Durham Report, Indigenous Dispossession and Self Government for Britain’s Settler Colonies,” Unpublished paper, 2010. 26 Nicholas Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery, (Cambridge: 2010). 7

Secretary Glenelg admitted, as have Canadian historians, that this was an unfortunate institution only “justified by the exigency of the times and circumstances.”27 Though Canadian historians have come to interpret this council as both “exceptional” and “unfortunate” such consensus has often come at the expense of any sustained study of Lord Durham’s council – the man for whom this very ‘special’ council was created.28 Between April 1838 and February 1841 the special council remained an extraordinary site of legislative activity in Lower Canada.29 The imperial act that created it stated that “every subject of deliberation should be brought forward and proposed by the governor [Lord Durham].” Jean-Marie Fecteau has characterized Durham’s council as an “interlude” through which we can observe the differing forms of imperial authority exercised in Lower Canada in the aftermath of the 1837 rebellion. Although Fecteau’s work complicates Allan Greer’s notion of the 1837 and 1838 rebellions as a single “revolutionary event,” Durham’s council is significant because it gave no voice to the political desires and imperial visions of those Lower Canadians who opposed colonial reform on nationalist, racist, and ideological grounds. Moreover, the issues Durham’s council dealt with, in particular, the question of how to justly and mercifully handle the cases of those imprisoned in the Montreal Gaol, bound Durham and Lower Canada to the broader politics of freedom and race, governance and empire that characterized the Age of Reform. Durham’s delayed departure for British North America meant that he was the second governor to harness the reigns of paternalistic state power, indicating that in Lower Canada, as was the case elsewhere in the empire, imperial policy often diverged from practices on the ground.30 Durham also chaired the special council for the shortest duration of any governor. At the council’s first meeting on 28 June 1838 he addressed the “delicate” and “dangerous” question of how best to deal with the political prisoners.31 Durham’s own politics, which vacillated between Whig and Radical, meant that he did not much like the authoritarian nature of this council. “My acts have been despotic,” he explained to Colonial Secretary Glenelg in September, “because my delegated authority was despotic.”32 As John Reid’s 1835 Sketch of

27 British House of Commons, Debates, Vol. 40 cc7-93: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com; LAC, John Colborne fonds, Vol. 21. Saul Dubow, “How British was the British World? The Case of South Africa,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37:1 (March 2009): 1–27. 28 Maxime Dagenais, “Le Conseil Special est mort, Vive le conseil Special!’ : The Special Councils of Lower Canada,” (PhD Dissertation, University of , 2011); Steven Watt, “State Trial by Legislature: The Special Council of Lower Canada, 1838–1841,” in Canadian State Trials, p. 253; Bettina Bradbury, Wife to Widow, (Vancouver: 2011); Greer and Radforth, Colonial Leviathan; Brian Young, The Politics of Codification (Montreal-Kingston, 1994); and Antonio Perrault, “Le Conseil Spécial, 1831–1841,” La Revue du Barreau, III (1943), pp. 130–144, 213–20, 265–74, and 299–307. 29 A second uprising in November 1838 led metropolitan statesmen to extend the council’s rule beyond its original thirty month term. 30 Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire, (Toronto: 2001). 31 Special Council of Lower Canada, Journals of the Special Council of Lower Canada [Hereafter JSCLC], (1838). 32 LAC, MG24 A27, Lambton fonds, Vol. 20. 8

Durham’s political career makes clear, this special council could not have been further from the domestic political changes that Durham had supported – , abolition, and parliamentary reform – causes that had earned him the name Radical Jack in metropolitan circles. Even in Lower Canada where colonial reformers had been demanding elected institutions since the 1820s, colonists like Etienne Parent, the editor of , welcomed Durham’s radical use of his self-professed despotic powers. Parent was pleased that Durham had appointed to his ‘special’ council men who were “trop éclairés dans la science du Gouvernement.”33 Parent, and Lower Canadians in general, would have been astutely aware of the difference between Durham’s council and that of his predecessor, John Colborne. Once word of the council’s creation and Durham’s delayed departure reached the colony that April, Colborne promptly appointed twenty-two men to the special council. This was a significantly larger number than the five Durham would appoint that June. Critics of Durham’s administration interpret this to mean that he understood neither Lower Canada nor the hybridity of along the St. Lawrence. For unlike the much larger, half-francophone, half- anglophone, and all colonial council that Colborne appointed Durham did not appoint a single local politician. However, as Masson Wade’s classic account of French Canada points out, Colborne had appointed only “”, “Bureaucrats”, and “Chouayens” (individuals who all opposed, some more vehemently than others, the political demands of reformers).34 When news of Colborne’s appointees became public, Louis Giard, who once worked as an editor of La Minerve, wrote to his former employer, Ludger Duvernay explaining that Colborne’s council “n’est pas formé de manière à inspirer une grande confiance: mais son pouvoir ne s’étend que jusqu’a l’arrivée de Lord Durham, qui pourra y appeler d’autres hommes s’il juge à propos.”35 Though Durham appointed only five councillors these men could not have been further removed from those appointed to Colborne’s council which had suspended habeas corpus (under order from the imperial parliament) and banned pro-reform newspapers such as Duvernay’s La Minerve as seditious. Parent would have welcomed one or two local men on Durham’s council, but he and others in the colony were pleased that Durham had dissolved Colborne’s council and replaced it with men whose personal and political networks did not “perpetuate the ancient abuses of the past.”36 Rather than strengthen existing personnel networks in Lower Canada, Durham established his own. As a result, his appointees were welcomed because they were distinct from the imperial networks that had ignited rebellion. Moreover, the men Durham appointed

33 Le Canadien, 2 juillet 1838. 34 Wade, The , 80–2. Although this appears to support Watt’s argument about the politics of the Special Council in these years, Watt also privileges the equality of origin in Colborne’s council when comparing it to Durham’s council. 35 The Canadian Antiquarian and Numismatic Journal [Hereafter CANJ], (1909), pp. 115–16. 36 Le Canadien, 2 juillet 1838. 9

reaffirmed his determination to view Lower Canada as the empire’s problem. To assist him in this “superhuman” task he appointed George Couper, James Macdonell, Charles Grey, Charles Buller, and Charles Paget to the special council. Each councillor swore an oath of office and pledged their loyalty to protect Victoria’s “empire in North America.”37 Unlike the colonial press that supported Durham’s appointees, his political adversaries in England considered the council a “sham council” because it included only men from Durham’s staff and household.38 Though perhaps controversial to those in Westminster, this practice was far from uncommon as Zoë Laidlaw observes in her examination of personnel and humanitarian networks in this period. Laidlaw argues that very few imperial networks were ever distinct. “Just as most individuals had a variety of identities,” she writes, “so they belonged to multiple sets of connections.”39 Ties of family, friendship, and obligation bound Durham and his special councillors but these were not the only ones: these ties were crosscut by others that linked Lower Canada and Durham to the Age of Reform, in particular, the trans-imperial debate over the efficacy of convict transportation. The very ties of family, friendship, and obligation that separated Durham’s special council from divisive colonial politics, bound Lower Canada to Bermuda and the work of the Select Committee on Convict Transportation. The Molesworth Committee, so-named for its radical chairman William Molesworth, was established in July 1837 as Lower Canadians were gathering in countryside to demand the abolition of irresponsible government. The final report of the Molesworth Committee published in August 1838, revealed that colonists in Bermuda, New South Wales, and Van Diemen’s Land took little pleasure in their colony’s status as a receptacle of the empire’s most unwanted.40 In the Australian context as Paul Pickering makes clear, opposition to convict transportation became a metaphor to demand responsible self- government.41 In contrast, those in the metropole used the presence of convicts and slaves in New South Wales and the Cape Colony as arguments against granting new forms of colonial governance.42 Yet what is striking about the public outcry over convict transportation in the late-1830s is its connection to earlier forms of moral outrage first expressed in Britain and the empire over slavery. Kirsten McKenzie argues that the report of the Molesworth Committee “explicitly linked” the personal and political unfreedom of slavery and convict transportation to questions of morality, race, and governance.43 Two of Durham’s councillors handing the

37 LAC, MG24 F30, Paget fonds, “Oath of Office.” 38 British House of Commons, Debates, Vol. 44, cc.1283: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com 39 Laidlaw, Colonial Connections, p. 15. 40 Parliament of Great Britain, Report of the Select Committee on Transportation, (London: 1838). 41 Pickering, “Loyalty and Rebellion,” 97. 42 Alan Lester, “British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire,” History Workshop Journal, 54:1 (2001): 24-48; Kirsten McKenzie, ““Discourses of Scandal: Bourgeois Respectability and the End of Slavery and Transportation at the Cape and New South Wales, 1830–1850.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4:3 (2003): online; Pickering, “Loyalty and Rebellion”. 43 McKenzie, Scandal, p. 124. 10 question of the political prisoners, Charles Paget and Charles Buller, were actively involved in the trans-imperial campaign to end convict transportation. Charles Buller, in addition to his position on the special council, also occupied the post of Durham’s private secretary and sat on the Executive Council of Lower Canada. Buller, a known reformer, sat as the radical MP for West Looe during the 1831-32 debate over the Reform Bill. Just days before he departed England with Durham he completed his work on Molesworth’s committee. Since 1837, Buller and fourteen other men had interviewed supporters and critics of convict transportation. As a member of Molesworth’s committee and Durham’s administration, Buller linked Lower Canada to the wider imperial world. On 15 January 1838, Buller interviewed Colonel Tylden regarding the state of Bermuda’s convict establishment. Tylden explained that there were less than 1000 convicts in Bermuda, a much smaller number than the 3,500 transported annually to New South Wales; that they were well feed and well clothed; and that the Bermudian Islands were difficult to escape from. This knowledge, combined with the evidence presented to the select committee that there were no reported incidences of “that unnatural crime” aboard the convict hulks made Bermuda convicts the “best characters.” The committee’s 1838 Report echoed these sentiments: “The convicts, sent to Bermuda, are selected as being the best behaved; they are kept apart from the free population.”44 Durham would apply these lessons about convicts, morality, and security to the local condition of Lower Canada. Paget had built his trans-imperial career on the waters of the British Atlantic. During the he led the blockade of New London, Connecticut; his service and loyalty earned him a knighthood in 1819. By 1828 he had been promoted to Commander-in-Chief of the coast of Ireland. His final promotion to Commander-in-Chief of the North America and West Indies squadrons came in 1837, at the height of political stalemate in Lower Canada and public outcry over convict transportation. Between 1837 and his death in January 1839, Paget made repeated voyages between Bermuda, the West Indies, and the British North American colonies: he had just arrived from Bermuda in HMS Vestal when he was appointed to the special council. Presumably his first hand knowledge of Bermuda and its convict establishment held some sway around the council table. For, according to Henry Wilkinson, Paget’s opinion was that “no place could provide quite as safe and secure abode as Bermuda.”45 These ties that Buller and Paget had to Bermuda proved to be vital when the special council deliberated the issue of the political prisoners that June. Buller and Paget’s appointments enabled Durham to strengthen the personal, political, and imperial networks within his administration and to expand his own. That the networks of Durham’s special councillors were separate from those of the past encouraged loyal Lower Canadians to

44 Report Transportation, (1838), p. x. 45 Henry C. Wilkinson, Bermuda from Sail to Steam, (London: 1973), p. 530. 11

conditionally support Durham and his administration.46 But Durham’s councillors were not the only British subjects in Lower Canada to bring imperial questions to bear on the colony in 1838. The confession and convict narratives of those reformers transported to Bermuda indicate that they too had ties to this Age of Reform. By using the language of political slavery to describe irresponsible government in Lower Canada and their participation in the 1837 rebellion they drew on a popular and historically successful rhetoric that, in the 1830s, brought together shifting ideas about, and definitions of, freedom, race, loyalty, governance, and empire. As a result, these loyal reformers in Lower Canada constructed irresponsible government as a form of political and personal unfreedom as morally apprehensible as that of slavery and convict labour.

II. “Little Better Than a Degraded Race of Helots”: Irresponsible Government and the Rhetoric of Political Slavery Durham arrived in Lower Canada on 28 May 1838. Of the 515 men whose political engagement had led to their arrest, 161 remained behind the stone walls of the Montreal gaol. Durham, with the assistance of Charles Buller and Thomas Turton, immediately began reviewing the depositions of these men.47 Such sympathetic action by Durham toward these men was interpreted as a good omen. Amédée Papineau, the son of Louis Joseph Papineau, noted that: “Since the arrival of Lord Durham, the prisoners in Montreal are allowed to breathe the fresh air of the prison courtyard.”48 Robert Bouchette, who was imprisoned for leading the advance- guard at Moore’s Corner on 6 December 1837, wrote from his cell of these improvements: “For six months the majority among us has been behind prison walls, deprived of seeing our families and our friends, and even writing to them. Since the arrival of Lord Durham, this severity has been somewhat mitigated. We can now write and receive letters.”49 Bouchette, like the other imprisoned reformers, hoped Durham would issue an “amnistié général.”50 By mid-June Durham, Buller, and Turton determined that Bouchette and seven other men – Wolfred Nelson, Bonaventure Viger, Siméon Marchesseault, Henri Gauvin, Touissant Goddu, Rodolphe DesRivières, and Luc Masson – ought to be held accountable for their role in the 1837 uprising. The more difficult question was: how to deliver justice and mercy while preserving the loyalty of Lower Canadians?51

46 Henderson, “Uncivil Subjects.” 47 Georges Aubin and Nicole Martin-Verenka Eds., Insurrection: Examens Volontaires, Tome I, 1837-1838, (Montréal: 2004). 48 Amédée Papineau, Journal d’un Fils de la Liberté, 1838–1855, Ed. Georges Aubin, (Montréal: 1998), p. 180. 49 Georges Aubin E., Au Pied–du–Courant: Lettres des prisonniers politiques de 1837–1839, (Montréal: 2000), p. 68. 50 Au Pied–du–Courant, p. 68. 51 LAC, MG24 A27, Lambton fonds, Vol. 12. 12

It took nearly two weeks to settle, what Durham described to Prime Minister Melbourne, as this “most difficult and delicate question of the prisoners.”52 Between 16 and 26 June 1838, John Simpson, the collector of customs at Coteau-du-Lac and step-father of John Roebuck, negotiated the “admission of culpability” that made it possible for Nelson, Bouchette, Viger, Marchesseault, Gauvin, Goddu, DesRivières, and Masson to be transported to Bermuda. It is unclear how Simpson came to represent Durham’s administration; perhaps it had to do with his “generous and prudent treatment of the persecuted Canadians” in December 1837.53 Less in known about the negotiations themselves: the colonial press which documented nearly every aspect of Durham’s ‘political theatre’ from his colorful arrival in May to his tumultuous departure that November was completely silent on the matter.54 Yet traces remain. Three of the men banished to Bermuda – Nelson, Bouchette, and Marchesseault – recorded aspects of their political engagement, imprisonment, and transportation in published memoirs, personal journals, and private letters to friends and family in Lower Canada.55 This archive reveals that these reformers claimed the “rights of British subjects” by making powerful analogies that wove the personal unfreedom of slavery to the political unfreedom of irresponsible government. As David Roediger’s work makes apparent, such metaphoric usage of slavery to describe the political plight of white British subjects certainly had ties to the American Revolution.56 Yet it also had parallel links to contemporaneous imperial events. By utilizing the language of slavery to demand greater colonial independence these reformers not only drew on long held ideas that connected ideas of race, freedom, and governance. They also demonstrated that anti-slavery sentiment could be remade for a colonial context where slavery had little contemporary resonance: it could be used as a political tool beyond the issue of abolition itself.57 Through such rhetoric Lower Canadian reformers sought to counter the paternalistic authority of the metropole that characterized imperial rule and sparked colonial protests across the empire. The writings of Nelson, Bouchette, and Marchesseault indicate their belief that loyalty to the empire ought to guarantee them certain rights and privileges as British subjects. As Maya Jasanoff points out, “The American Revolution made clear that overseas subjects – even white ones – would not necessarily be considered equal to those in the metropole.”58 These Lower

52 Reid, Life and Letters, p. 204. 53 Leo Johnson, “John Simpson,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography: http://www.biographi.ca. 54 Curtis, “The Most Splendid Pageant”. 55 LAC, MG24 B139, Bouchette fonds; LAC, MG24 B34, Nelson fonds; Bouchette, Mémoires; Siméon Marchesseault, Lettres à Judith : correspondance d’un patriote exilé, ed. Georges Aubin, (Sillery, PQ: 1996); Wolfred Nelson, Écrits d’un patriote, 1812–1824, ed. Georges Aubin, (Sillery, Québec: 1998); Yvon Thériault, “Les Patriotes aux Bermudes en 1838: Lettres d’exile,” RHAF, 16:1 (1962): 117–26, 16:2 (1962): 267–272; 16:3 (1962): 436–440; and 17:1 (1963): 107–112. 56 David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, (London: 1991). 57 Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, p. 180; McKenzie, Swindler; Pickering, “Loyalty and Rebellion”. 58 Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 142. 13

Canadians, akin those loyalists who demanded colonial reform in and the Bahamas, also drew upon ideas of loyalty: they confessed that the object of their frustration was “la mauvaise administration colonial” not the Crown. Moreover, they were careful to distinguish their demands for political independence from those of the American colonists in 1775. Like earlier generations of loyalists, these eight men expressed their frustration with metropolitan authority through the language of anti-slavery. “Nous nous sommes révoltés,” they admitted, “ni contre la personne de Sa Majesté ni contre son gouvernement, mais contre une vicieuse administration coloniale. Nous protestâmes, on se moqua de nous; on épuisa contre nous l'invective, la calomnie, l'outrage. Poussés à bout, nous eûmes soit à résister courageusement à l'injustice, ou bien, acceptant l'esclavage, à devenir un peuple dégradé et apostat.” This was not solely the language of Atlantic revolutionaries; it was also the rhetoric of reform and loyalty used by British subjects across empire to demand change. Imperial rule, as Nelson and the others knew well, could transform loyalists into rebels and make civil subjects into uncivil ones. As they appealed to Durham as the “ardent defender” of “civil liberties,” these reformers were careful to explain that their loyalty had encouraged their struggled to maintain the “true spirit of the constitution” and “British liberty” in Lower Canada. 59 The language of political slavery provided reformers a way of depicting themselves as unfree British subjects without reflecting upon their whiteness. By describing irresponsible government as a form of unfreedom akin to slavery Nelson, Bouchette, Marchesseault emphasized the non-Blackness of Lower Canada. Unlike the Cape and New South Wales where colonists argued that slavery and convict transportation tainted the reputations of white British subjects, in Lower Canada the culprit was irresponsible government. Louis Hippolyte LaFontaine, the lawyer thought to have aided the eight reformers in their negotiations, made explicitly clear the histoire parallèle between the struggle to abolish irresponsible government and the recent decision to abolish slavery throughout the empire. Writing from Paris on 10 March 1838, LaFontaine explained to Joseph Parkes who was also a friend of Molesworth, that: “Si ou en juge par les dernières discussions de vos Chambres, on serait porté à croire que la race noire dans vos colonies, éprouve de la part des vos législateurs plus de sympathies que n’en éprouve l’homme à la peau blanche, parce que le sort de la naissance lui donne pour ancêtre une nation jadis rivale de l’Angleterre.”60 Debates in Lower Canada and the imperial parliament – when filtered through the lens of empire – reminded LaFontaine that he was not black and that he could claim, in spite of his Frenchness, certain rights as a white, male, British subject. Though the admission of culpability negotiated by these reformers linked Lower Canada to the webs of empire it was intended to be a testament of guilt: not until the final lines of the document does anything resembling a confession appear. Only after they had explained their

59 Nelson, Écrits, p. 65; Bouchette, Mémoires, p. 61. 60 LAC, MG24 A27, Lambton fonds, Vol. 25. 14

actions in 1837, outlined the grievances of the Canadiens, and declared their loyalty did they admit that “if there be guilt in high aspirations, we confess our guilt, and plead guilty.”61 The statement was intended to be ambiguous. In his memoirs Bouchette described the confession as a collection of “carefully phrased remarks.”62 Marchesseault, who played an influential role in the encounter at Saint-Charles-sur-Richelieu in 1837, wrote to his wife Judith Morin of his signing the confession. He his chérie not to be embarrassed: “Au contraire, rencontre cet événement avec courage et détermination comme je suis prêt à le faire. Soyons orgueilleux de nos souffrances et de nos privations. Martyr, pour avoir combattu pour les libertés de son pays, et le plus beau comme le plus noble des titres. Mon pays avant tout!”63 As Marchesseault intimated and as the admission of culpability indicates, the struggle to abolish irresponsible government in Lower Canada was a courageous one that provided a novel opportunity to mobilize anti-slavery sentiment to secure political and personal independence for white, Catholic, and francophone British subjects within the British empire. As the final line of their admission indicates, these men would remain loyal to the empire so long as it “appreciates and upholds the rights of its subjects, however remote their abode is from the seat of the empire.”64 The confession and an appended letter stating that the eight had forgone a trial reached Charles Buller on 26 June 1838. The letter explained their desire to “avoid the necessity of a trial, and thus to give, as far as possible in our power, tranquillity to the country.”65 In addition to archiving their negotiation with Durham these documents made it possible for the special council to transport these men to Bermuda. The published Journals of the special council indicate that on 28 June 1838 Durham proposed two ordinances that were “severally read” and “agreed to unanimously.”66 The Bermuda Ordinance, passed on the day of Victoria’s metropolitan coronation, made it lawful to “transport certain persons, [named], to our island of Bermuda during Our pleasure.” 67 It made explicit that these were “peculiar circumstances” and that the ordinance was temporary. Durham wrote to Victoria of this exceptional legislation. He lamented his absence from England but explained that the Bermuda Ordinance was his “best tribute of loyal respect and devotion.” “Not one drop of blood has been shed,” he continued. “The guilty have received justice, the misguided, mercy … security is afforded to the loyal and peaceable subjects of this hitherto distracted Province, and I may now undertake, without

61 Nelson, Écrits, p. 66; Bouchette, Mémoires, p. 62. 62 Bouchette, Mémoires, p. 64. 63 Marchesseault, Lettres à Judith, p. 40. 64 [Emphasis in original] Bouchette, Mémoires, p. 62. 65 LAC, MG24 A27, Lambton fonds, Vol. 26. 66 JSCLC, 28 June 1838, p. 4. 67 An ordinance passed by the governor and Special Council of Lower Canada, intituled, "An ordinance to provide for the security of the province of Lower Canada", and, of a proclamation issued by the governor of Lower Canada on the 28th June last, (London: 1838). 15

interruption, the remaining part of my mission – the final arrangement of the Constitution of these important Colonies.”68 News of the ordinance’s passing reached the imprisoned reformers on 1 July 1838. Marchesseault wrote Judith without delay: “I am condemned to exile. I leave tomorrow at four o’clock. I am allowed to see you and my parents, so come immediately if you have enough strength to say good-bye to your unfortunate husband.”69 Bouchette suggested in his memoirs that their removal to Bermuda was not a surprise: it had been alluded to during their negotiations with Simpson.70 As word of the eight’s banishment made its way across British North America these men said farewell to their family and friends: Nelson visited with his four “petits enfants”; Masson with his sixty-five year-old mother. DesRivières and Gauvin met with their families, while Bouchette, whose kin lived near Quebec, visited with friends from Montreal.71 On the afternoon of 2 July 1838 Nelson, Bouchette, Marchesseault and the others began a journey that removed them from the white settler colony of Lower Canada to the penal and former slave colony of Bermuda. As they made their way up the St. Lawrence, past the Gaspe, and across the stormy Atlantic these men entered into the empire in ways distinct from other convicts.72 In the scattered archive of their voyage, Bouchette, Nelson, and Marchesseault reveal that none of the hardships of convict transportation, so recently and vividly exposed by the Select Committee on Transportation were imposed upon them.73 Bouchette attributed this to their “quality as political prisoners.” Aboard HMS Vestal they received privileges that “convicts are never allowed.”74 A letter of Nelson’s that made its way through his network of friends in Lower Canada reveals that “they did not have to Demand anything, they Received wines in profusion, cases of oranges, very nice hammocks, poultries, and meats, and, finally that all the gentleman acted first class.”75 These eight Lower Canadians were also allowed to move freely about the Vestal and they used this opportunity to observe the sea from the top deck and interact with the officers who “appeared to have very liberal opinions as regards to Canadian policy.”76 According to Paget they received such treatment because they came “on a kind of parole.” Paget would later insist to Bermuda Governor Stephen Chapman that there was little need for anxiety because it was in the best interest of these Lower Canadians to conduct

68 LAC, MG24 A27, Lambton fonds, Vol. 46. 69 Marchesseault, Letters à Judith, p. 42. 70 Bouchette, Mémoires, p. 66. Boissery, A Deep Sense of Wrong. 71 Perrault, Lettres, pp. 126-29. 72 Their letters note the roughness of the voyage. Petrie, “The French-Canadian Patriote Convict Experience, 1840- 1848”; Thompson, “The North American Patriot Prisoners”; Dunning, “Convict Bodies”; Boissery, A Deep Sense of Wrong; Gibson, “Political Prisoners”; Fred Landon, An Exile From Canada to Van Diemen's Land, (Toronto: 1960); and Watt, “The Political Prisoners”. 73 Report Transportation, (1838). 74 Bouchette, Mémoires, p. 70. 75 CANJ, (1909), p. 38. 76 Bouchette, Mémoires, 76. 16

themselves in an exemplarily manner.77 But even the growing distance between Bouchette and his home in Lower Canada could not negate his “sincere hope” that Durham's endeavours would “put an end to the objections which had existed for such a long time in our colonial government.”78 On 18 July 1838, 300 miles from Bermuda, and apparently at the request of the ship’s officers, Nelson and Bouchette composed a lecture on Canadian affairs.79 This document is one of the earliest accounts of the 1837 rebellion written by those involved. Preserved in Nelson’s fonds in an envelope that reads – “of great important to Canadian history” – this lecture was designed to “exposé complet des injustices dont le peuple du Canada se plaint depuis longtemps.”80 The framing of the lecture supports the arguments of Allan Greer, Colin Coates, and Michel Ducharme that the 1837 rebellion ought to be considered alongside events in Upper Canada.81 It also reveals that these men considered their struggle to abolish irresponsible government in Lower Canada as a question of imperial importance. The lecture – never intended to be a “comprehensive volume” – charted the causes of the recent rebellion in the two Canadas and asserted that it would be false to argue that “the public men of Lower Canada aimed to overthrow the government of Queen Victoria.”82 Although these reformers demanded that the constitutional relationship between Lower Canada and Britain be altered, a vision of empire that led to questions about their loyalty and civility, these men nonetheless asserted that their loyalty had sparked such imaginings. Bouchette and Nelson articulated their understanding of how British subjects ought to be governed and reiterated their desire to be freed from the political enslavement of metropolitan rule. To demonstrate this point the lecture used the “anti-constitutional Resolutions of Lord John Russell” to make claims to political freedom and assert the non- Blackness of the white settler population.83 The Russell Resolutions, named for the British statesman who had proposed suspending the constitution of Lower Canada, were adopted by Melbourne’s ministry in March 1837. The resolutions were interpreted by colonial reformers as the official reply of metropolitan statesmen to their demands for constitutional change: they rejected outright the Ninety-Two Resolutions that were approved by the popularly elected House of Assembly in 1834 just as slave apprenticeships began across the empire. Such an act, Nelson and Bouchette explained, “virtually disenfranchised the whole of the Canadian population and made them little better than a degraded race of helots.” By likening the Canadians to helots, Nelson and Bouchette implied that under irresponsible government white

77 Wilkinson, Sail to Steam, p. 531. 78 Bouchette, Mémoires, p. 77. 79 LAC, MG24 B139, Bouchette fonds; LAC MG24 B34, Nelson Fonds, Vol. 1. 80 LAC, MG 24 B34, Nelson fonds. 81 Greer, “Rebellion Reconsidered”; Coates, “The Rebellions of 1837–38”; Ducharme, Le Concept de Liberté. 82 LAC, MG24 B139, Bouchette fonds; LAC, MG24 B34, Nelson fonds, Vol. 1. 83 Catherine Hall, White, Male, and Middle Class, (London: 1992). 17 francophone and anglophone British subjects alike occupied a racialized space somewhere between slave and subject: they were unfree whites. The Russell Resolutions “filled the whole country with indignation” because on the one hand they tainted the reputations of Lower Canadians, and on the other hand, this was interpreted as bold invasion of “their rights as British subjects.” 84 But could this language of political slavery be mobilized in Bermuda where the politics of race, reform, and empire were complicated by the presence of free whites, free blacks, and unfree white convicts? Would this rhetoric of political enslavement have different meanings, applications, and implications in Bermuda?

III. “How [are] These Worthies … to be Disposed of Here”? Bermuda and the Limits of the Language of Slavery Donald Lee was the first British subject in Bermuda to report on the imperial networks that linked Lower Canada and Lord Durham to the island’s convict establishment. “We lay before our readers,” Lee reported in the Bermuda Royal Gazette, “two important Documents by Earl Durham … relative to persons concerned in the late treasonable practices in Lower Canada.”85 Although the two documents – a Proclamation and the Bermuda Ordinance – were sanctioned over 1500 kilometers from Hamilton, Lee, who was editor of the only newspaper in the colony, considered this news fit to print.86 But 17 July 1838 was not the first time that Lee had published Lower Canadian news in the Gazette. Moreover, in a colony populated by freemen, convicts, and until 1834 slaves, this was certainly not the first time that Lee had published an article on colonial reform. Readers would have understood the removal of these eight Lower Canadians, then, as part and parcel of the Age of Reform. Yet it remained unclear “how these worthies are to be disposed of here [in Bermuda].” Lee assured his readers that this question would be put to rest “in the course of a month or two” by the island’s governor, Stephen Chapman.87 Lee’s assurances would have been welcomed by the small yet racially diverse population of Bermuda that was grappling with the effects of emancipation, the complicated system of slave compensation, and the Molesworth Committee’s inquiries into the conditions and efficacy of its convict establishment. Both Lee and Chapman were surprised when, six days later, the HMS Vestal was sighted approaching the reef just beyond the British Navy Dockyards on Ireland Island. Though Bermuda shared little with Lower Canada, the size of the entire colony was smaller than the Island of Montreal, its colonial administrators like those along the St. Lawrence were endeavouring to comprehend where the colony fit in the rapidly shifting colonial order of things. This was especially true for Bermuda’s recently freed black population, bonded

84 LAC, MG24 B139, Bouchette fonds; LAC, MG24 B34, Nelson fonds, Vol. 1. 85 Bermuda Royal Gazette, 17 July 1838. 86 JSCLC, (1838), p. 3. 87 Bermuda Royal Gazette, 17 July 1838. 18

labourers, white settlers, and former slave owners. Chapman had arrived in Bermuda in 1832 from and spent much of the 1830s navigating Bermudians through the volatile Age of Reform which had thrust the once secure connections between race and freedom into flux. In fact, while Chapman’s administration was preoccupied by the question of bonded labour, white Lower Canadians were demanding that they be treated not as slaves but as free British subjects. In February 1834, when the emancipation bill was introduced into the Bermuda House of Assembly no provisions for subsequent apprenticeship were included. Bermuda was the only British colony to support, what Henry Wilkinson has called, “unconditional emancipation. Yet in 1838 one problem remained: how to compensate Bermuda’s 1,100 former slave owners for their loss of property in the form of 4,203 slaves?88 This aftershock of emancipation was not the only issue to demand Chapman’s attention. In addition to governing the white settlers and free blacks, Chapman was also Superintendent of Convicts. Though Bermuda’s convict establishment that was small by imperial measure, it was nonetheless significant when compared to the number of free whites in the colony. In the 1830s, as public and political opinions toward the question of bonded labour changed across the empire, colonies were affected in particularly local ways. Chapman knew of Molesworth’s committee, and more than likely, “the strong objection” that Bermudians had to their tarnished reputation as a penal colony.89 Yet just months earlier, the colonial legislature had voted to have twenty-three convicts deepen the very harbour in which the Vestal was now moored. But these were not the first unfree Lower Canadians to make such a voyage. Following the establishment of Bermuda as a penal colony in 1824, Lower Canadian authorities began to transport felons to the island for crimes that ranged from high treason to horse stealing. A document in Durham’s private papers indicates that between November 1828 and July 1838, seventeen men served their sentences aboard the convict hulks of Bermuda.90 Although the number of Lower Canadians transported to Bermuda as convicts fluctuated during this decade, there was a noticeable drop in number by July 1838, when the Vestal arrived in Bermuda. Though this decline may explain Chapman’s initial surprise, it also parallels changes across the empire to definitions of political and personal independence ushered in by the 1832 Reform Act, the abolition of slavery, and Molesworth’s select committee. For four days the Vestal remained docked off Bermuda’s northern shore. Forced to endure the hot Bermudian sun aboard the vessel that had confined them for three weeks, Nelson, Bouchette, and the others knew little of Chapman’s colonial anxieties, while the convict hulks across the harbour served as a reminder of their own. But the circumstances of their transportation were significant: they were sent to Bermuda, a colony known throughout the British imperial world as a better sort of convict colony; they were transported by

88 Wilkinson, Sail to Steam, p. 514; Bermuda Archives [Hereafter BA], Slave Register, 1834. 89 Report Transportation, (1838), pp. xxxvii. 90 Clara Hallett, Forty Years of Convict Labour, (Bermuda, 1999); LAC, MG24 A27, Lambton fonds, Vol. 21. 19

unconventional means; they had not received a trial before a judge; they were shackled, in error, as they left Lower Canada; and they had not been secured aboard the Vestal. For all intents and purposes, these men were very different sorts of convicts. Such a characterization is further magnified by Bermuda historiography which celebrates Bermudian convicts as occupants of a privileged place in the taxonomy of penal colonies.91 In transporting these men to Bermuda, Durham’s special council worked within contemporaneous imperial understandings and Lower Canadian precedents. Yet these Lower Canadians were no longer free, loyal, politically engaged British subjects and they were a different sort of convict; they were British subjects, betwixt and between categories in an imperial world that not only depended upon order, but was also reforming the very order upon which it depended. The presence, then, of these men in Bermuda posed for Chapman, as their incarceration had done for Durham in Lower Canada, a vexing problem. It fell to Chapman and his council to determine what restraints would be necessary “to prevent their return to [Lower Canada].”92 Chapman and the Executive Council of Bermuda, eight white men, half of whom had owned slaves, met at Government House atop Langton Hill on 25 July 1838 to debate the fate of these ‘worthies.’ The minutes of the Executive Council reveal that the language of political slavery used in Lower Canada held little political clout in Bermuda. Rather, it was the “parole of honour” that the reformers signed before they departed for Bermuda that received the most attention. The councillors expressed concern that it ascribed a public and political meaning to the “honour” of these men that could not, and should not, be accorded to those confined to the convict hulks. Yet Chapman was as anxious an imperialist as Durham, and like the governor general he sought the advice and opinion of his council. Chapman mobilized his own colonial network to determine what measures “would be expedient for him adopt.”93 He turned to John Harvey Darrell, the attorney general and former mayor of Hamilton, and Duncan Stewart, the solicitor general, for his answer. While Stewart and Darrell deliberated, Nelson, Bouchette, and the others remained on the Vestal where they had their first encounter with some of the island’s newly freed black population who sold water and fresh produce. This colonial encounter between free blacks and once free whites vividly exposed the limits of the language of slavery in Bermuda: in Lower Canada, where the lived experience of slavery would be historicized in the 1840s as having barely existed, it was possible to argue that imperial politics

91 Clara Hallett, “Bermuda’s Convict Hulks,” Bermuda Journal of Archeology and Maritime History 2 (1990), pp. 87– 104; E. Mitchell, “The Bermuda Convict Establishment,” Bermuda Journal of Archeology and Maritime History 9 (1997), pp. 120–8; ; Nina Edwards, “The Canadian Exiles in Bermuda,” Bermuda Historical Quarterly, 37 (1980): 42– 45, 63–68; B. B. Kruse, “The Bermuda Exiles,” Canadian Geographical Journal 14 (1937): 353; Douglas Hemmeon, “The Canadian Exiles of 1838,” Dalhousie Historical Review, 7 (1927): 13–16. 92 Quebec Gazette, 29 June 1838. 93 BA, Minutes and Proceedings of the Privy Council of Bermuda [Hereafter MPPCB], “Minutes, 25 July 1838.” 20

enslaved white, though racially divided, British subjects; in Bermuda, freedom and independence – both personal and political – were coloured differently.94 Darrell and Stewart presented their legal opinion to Chapman on 26 July 1838. Both were convinced that Chapman had no authority to impose any restrictions upon the men confined to the Vestal “with a view to their safe custody [in Bermuda].” Because the reformers had not been charged with treason or felony in Lower Canada and were transported by an ordinance of the special council which held no “sufficient legal effect in Bermuda,” Darrell and Stewart reported that “these persons do not come within the description of convict felons … to be kept at hard labour on the public works here.” Furthermore, the Lower Canadians were “not receivable on board the convict hulks … which are only intended for the reception of such offenders as may be specially selected for that purpose by the Secretary of State for the Home Department.”95 The local predicaments of empire in both Lower Canada and Bermuda had yielded a class of British subject that was, by all legal purposes, unclassifiable. That evening Nelson had come to a similar realization, explaining in a letter to LaFontaine that, “les Exilés du Canada” were not “hommes ordinaires.”96 The fate of these extraordinary British subjects was determined on 27 July 1838. That day Chapman’s council voted to endorse Darrell and Stewart’s findings. They decided that since the Lower Canadians arrived under “peculiar circumstances” they should “come under some stipulation for their movements.” And even though Chapman and his council considered it peculiar that Durham had located “honour” in these men it was decided that they would too.97 Bouchette remembered that word of their disembarkment reached them by way of an individual whom he racialized as being “visage noir.” Bouchette’s observation indicates the complexities of defining, and identifying, “race” in the 1830s. In Bermuda colour or complexion visibly marked racial difference; in white Lower Canada differences of race were more often than not expressed in cultural terms as French or English. We should not interpret this to mean that whiteness had no role in the struggle to abolish irresponsible government. For even if Lower Canadians took their whiteness for granted, or as a part of what Ann Laura Stoler identifies as “colonial common sense,” their use of the language of slavery indicates an awareness that the personal and political freedoms they demanded were rooted in their non- Blackness.

Conclusion

94 Bouchette, Mémoires, 85; Mackenzie, Swindler; Hall, Civilizing Subjects; Frank Mackey, Done With Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal, (Montreal-Kingston: 2010). 95 BA, MPPCB, “Report, 26 July 1838.” 96 “Les Patriotes aux Bermudes,” RHAF, 16 :2 (1926), p. 436. 97 Paroles one and two were signed before leaving Montreal; the third upon leaving Quebec for Bermuda; the fourth in Bermuda on 28 July 1838. 21

At three o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday, 28 July 1838 Nelson, Bouchette, Viger, Marchesseault, Gauvin, Goddu, DesRivières, and Masson signed a fourth parole of honour promising “not go or travel beyond such limits by land or by water, within the said islands [of Bermuda].”98 They stepped off the Vestal within sight of the British Naval Dockyards and marched, shackle-free, through the crowd of free black and white British subjects that had gathered to witness their landing. That Tuesday Lee informed his readers that these Lower Canadians had “much to be thankful for [in Bermuda]”: “In the first place, for the moderate punishment that has been meted out to them for their very high offences: banishment to the ; and secondly, the light restrictions which the Governor and Councillors have laid on their liberty, by only limiting them to the main island and merely placing them upon the parole of their honour.”99 Lee’s intimation that these reformers ought to have been thankful for being transported to Bermuda paralleled the argument of the Select Committee on Convict Transportation that had exposed the “better character” of Bermuda convicts. The personal ties that Buller and Paget had to the issue of convict transportation meant that this imperial issue made its way to Lower Canada where it enabled Durham to transport these men without tainting their reputations. That September, Durham wrote to Colonial Secretary Glenelg, that he was pleased by not having to send these men to an essentially penal colony for it might “affix a character of moral infamy” upon them.100 Although Nelson, Bouchette, Viger, Marchesseault, Gauvin, Goddu, Rodolphe DesRivières, and Masson’s experiences of unfreedom in Bermuda were markedly better than those of other convicts, it is misleading to conceive of their banishment in a way that downplays the hardship of familial separation or their commitment to the abolition of irresponsible government in Lower Canada. For these eight men, their loyalty, vision of empire, and commitment to reform had transformed them from free, elite, white British subjects into unfree political prisoners. In their negotiations with Durham’s administration and in their convict narratives, they reflected upon their transition from freedom to unfreedom and their use of anti-slavery sentiment to demand political change. Historians of Lower Canada have too often looked at the history of the “struggle of race” in post-Conquest Quebec as one void of “colour” and have thus ignored the legacy of slavery and its effects upon the politics of race for French and English British subjects along the St. Lawrence.101 Situating Lower Canada and Lord Durham’s administration within the Age of Reform indicates that slavery and convict migration operated as politically charged symbols of unfreedom that held sway in Lower Canada as they did in other parts of the empire. But in Bermuda the reality of convict and slave labour also

98 BA, MPPBC, “Parole, 28 July 1838.” 99 Royal Bermuda Gazette, 31 July 1838. 100 LAC, MG24 A27, Lambton Fonds, vol. 20. 101 There are, of course, exceptions: Mackey, Done With Slavery; Maureen Elgersman, Unyielding Spirits: Black Women and Slavery in Early Canada and Jamaica, (New York: 1999); and Robin Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History, (Montreal-Kingston: 1997). 22

exposed the limitations of this language of political slavery. In Lower Canada, such rhetoric may have proved successful, but in Bermuda it quite literally paled in comparison to the lived experience of unfreedom. By constructing the rebellion as an effort to emancipate Lower Canadians from political slavery these reformers not only linked Lower Canada to trans-imperial debates, they were also able to temper their loyalist reform politics and save their lives. Nelson and his fellow countrymen spent less than four months as prisoners in paradise. On 15 August 1838, Melbourne’s government disallowed the Bermuda Ordinance and issued an Act of Indemnity in its place. When news of the disallowance reached Lower Canada that September, it sparked dramatic and diverse reactions among the white settler population. Effigies of Prime Minister Melbourne, Colonial Secretary Glenelg, and Lord Brougham, the nobleman who demanded the disallowance, were burnt in the principle cities of British North America. In Lower Canada, the disallowance reignited the racial struggle that Durham subsequently documented in his report and entrenched the divide between French and English, loyal and disloyal, and civil and uncivil subjects. Durham, frustrated by such ‘metropolitan meddling,’ resigned over the disallowance of the Bermuda Ordinance in October. On 3 November 1838, less than forty-eight hours after Durham’s departure, a second rebellion in less than twelve months shook Lower Canada. On the day that rebellion broke out in Lower Canada, a different scene took place in the mid-Atlantic: the Persevere set to sail for North America with the eight free Lower Canadian reformers. By positioning the struggle to abolish irresponsible government in Lower Canada and Lord Durham’s 1838 administration within an imperial frame reveals the discursive and material ties that bound them to the Age of Reform. Canadian and Quebec historians, though long interested in the rebellions that accompanied the struggle for responsible government, have largely ignored the imperial networks that wove Lower Canada and Lower Canadians to the empire and the parallel histories of slavery and convict transportation that thrust trans- definitions of freedom and independence – both personally and politically – into flux. By situating Lower Canada within these trans-imperial currents Canadian historians can begin to understand how the demands of those seeking an end to irresponsible government jive with the argument of imperial historians that view Durham’s report as the blueprint for making “white settler societies.”

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