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The Legend of Captain Michael Grass: the Logic of Elimination and Loyalist Mythmaking in Upper Canada, 1783-1869 by Avery J. N

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The Legend of Captain Michael Grass: the Logic of Elimination and Loyalist Mythmaking in Upper Canada, 1783-1869 by Avery J. N The Legend of Captain Michael Grass: The Logic of Elimination and Loyalist Mythmaking in Upper Canada, 1783-1869 By Avery J. N. Esford Cognate Essay Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Degree Master’s of Arts in the Department of History Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada Final (QSpace) Submission August, 2021 Copyright © Avery Esford, 2021 Contents Introduction 1 I. Michael Grass: A Brief Overview of the Loyalist in Question 4 II. A Family Tradition: Constructing the Legend of Captain Michael Grass 11 III. “Scarce the Vestige of Human Habitation”: Cataraqui Before the Loyalists 19 IV. “He Assumes to Himself the Title of Proprietor”: Michael Grass Arrives 28 Conclusion 41 Bibliography 44 Introduction The primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.1 -Patrick Wolfe On a sunny morning in May 2002, a group of volunteers gathered around a gravesite located at Cataraqui Cemetery in Kingston, Ontario, which belonged to the celebrated United Empire Loyalist Michael Grass. The volunteers were members of the Michael Grass Stone Committee, a group formed three years earlier to preserve the grave marker of the notable Loyalist. Commonly referred to as “Captain Michael Grass” the gravesite marked the final resting place of the leader of eight Companies of Associated Loyalists2 who travelled from New York City to Cataraqui in 1784. Since then, Michael Grass has widely been considered the “founder” of Kingston for leading the expedition of refugees. The gathering featured an unveiling ceremony which marked the culmination of three years of research and restoration work by the committee. The new grave marker, as seen in Figure 1, bears the inscription “Michal Grass, Died April 25, 1813, Aged 78” above the remounted stone and “Capt Michael Grass” below, somewhat remedying the accidental misspelling of “Michal” that appears above. On the back of the new gravestone the committee attached a bronze plaque engraved with the following passage, “During the spring of 1784, Michael led fifty Loyalist families to Cataraqui establishing a permanent settlement from which has grown the City of Kingston.” The unveiling ceremony was the latest chapter in a long tradition that celebrates Michael Grass as the founder of Kingston, Ontario. 1 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 388. 2 The term “Associated Loyalist” was used by a number of Loyalists military organisations during the American Revolution (1775-1783). Loyalists became associated as a means of organising the thousands of refugees pouring into cities like New York. The designation of Associated Loyalist was also meant to give the refugees a legitimate status to help them deal with American authorities in search of compensation or their losses in the war. Figure 1: Michael Grass’s Gravesite, 2021: Located in the Heritage Section of Cataraqui Cemetery, Kingston, Ontario, the gravesite features the original headstone remounted on a new granite block (left) as well as a bronze plaque mounted to the rear (right). Source: Photographs by the author. There are other monuments dedicated to Michael Grass scattered about the Cataraqui region which credit the Loyalist in question with being the founder of the town in 1784. One such monument was erected in 1993 by the Kingston and District Branch of the United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada3 with the assistance of the Ontario Heritage Foundation.4 This plaque proudly states, “This is the burial place of Captain Michael Grass and United Empire Loyalist families he brought to Cataraqui in 1784” and continues, “Those who came and will come in search of freedom and a better life are very much in their [the Loyalists] debt. All people of Ontario have benefitted from this legacy.” 3 The Kingston and District Branch of the United Empire Loyalists’ Association of Canada is a volunteer-run historical organisation dedicated to the preservation of United Empire Loyalist history. The Kingston branch is one of twenty-seven branches across Canada that preserves and promotes Ontario’s Loyalist past. 4 The Ontario Heritage Foundation has since been renamed the Ontario Heritage Trust (OHT) and is a non-profit agency of the Ontario Ministry of Tourism and Culture. The OHT is responsible for protecting, preserving, and promoting the cultural heritage of Ontario. Since 2005, the OHT has erected over 1,200 blue and gold plaques dedicated to regional cultural heritage across the province like one dedicated to Michael Grass in Kingston. A third plaque is located in downtown Kingston which was also erected by the Ontario Heritage Foundation. This plaque states, “In June 1784 a party of Associated Loyalists from New York State under the command of Captain Michael Grass, part of a loyalist flotilla travelling from Montreal, established a camp here on Mississauga Point” before continuing, “Grass later recalled: ‘I led the loyal band, I pointed out to them the site of their future metropolis and gained for persecuted principles a sanctuary, for myself and followers a home.’” Together, the monuments that are scattered throughout the Kingston’s colonial commemorative landscape are physical testimonies to what I call the “Legend of Captain Michael Grass.” Historian Norman Knowles asserts that “Monuments are rarely sought to commemorate an objective past, however; they celebrate a version of the past that reflected the values, attitudes, and objectives of their promoters.”5 In this light, the monuments erected by various Ontario historical organisations promote a specific version of the past that places an emphasis on Michael Grass as the person who laid the foundation of Kingston in 1784. The Legend of Captain Michael Grass, however, is an example of what historian Cecilia Morgan has called a “settler society fiction.” Settler society fictions are particular narratives of the establishment of Upper Canada where the “pioneer past” prevails almost entirely free of “bothersome Aboriginals.”6 The Legend of Captain Michael Grass is comprised of three main claims. It asserts; first, that the region of Cataraqui was a barren wilderness that was left uninhabited and therefore ripe for settlement in the 1780s; second, that the idea to settle refugee Loyalists at Cataraqui originated with Michael Grass; and third, that Grass was the foremost leader in the creation of the new settlement and significantly influenced the development of the community. These three basic 5 Norman Knowles, Inventing the Loyalists: The Ontario Loyalist Tradition & the Creation of Usable Pasts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 115. 6 Cecilia Morgan, Creating Pasts: History, Memory, and Commemoration in Southern Ontario, 1860-1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 7. assertions depend upon a selective and distorted memory of the Loyalist migration to Cataraqui in 1784 that places a special emphasis on the role played by Michael Grass. This essay argues that the Legend of Captain Michael Grass is based in a settler society fiction of the “founding” of Kingston in 1784. According to the legend, the hardy Loyalists were led by Grass into an uninhabited wilderness and built a sanctuary that upheld British institutions and values. This problematic interpretation of the migration lacks any consideration for the colonial authorities who facilitated the journey, and, more importantly, it completely erased the local Indigenous Mississauga from their ancestral lands. The displacement of the Mississauga was initiated with the sudden influx of white settlers into the region, and their presence at Cataraqui was even removed from the legend itself.7 The legend contains many fictionalised elements that ignore the complex legacy of Euro-Indigenous contact on the north shore of Lake Ontario in the late eighteenth century. The settler society fiction of the Legend of Captain Michael Grass is part of what Australian historian Patrick Wolfe has called “the logic of elimination.” The logic of elimination is the organising principle of settler colonialism, an ongoing system of power which perpetuates the repression of Indigenous peoples, that strives for the liquidation of native societies and the establishment of colonial society on the expropriated land base.8 Applied to the Canadian context, historian Allan Greer has argued that the logic of elimination is found within the British tradition of treaty making with Indigenous peoples who surrendered vast tracts of land to the colonial authorities. Greer argues that treaties were “an instrument of unusually thoroughgoing 7 Donald B. Smith, “The Dispossession of the Mississauga Indians: A Missing Chapter in the Early History of Upper Canada,” in Historical Essays on Upper Canada: New Perspectives, ed. J.K. Johnson and Bruce G. Wilson (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1989), 23. 8 Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (New York: Cassell, 1999), 27. dispossession” which is made evident when examining the British acquisition of Cataraqui from the Mississauga through the Crawford Purchase (1783-4).9 The treaty extinguished the Indigenous title over the land and pushed the local Mississauga aside making room for the newly arrived Loyalists. The Legend of Captain Michael Grass is the logic of elimination at work. This founding myth is itself an instrument of dispossession that cleaves the Indigenous peoples from their ancestral land in order to justify the project of settler colonialism at Cataraqui. The Legend of Captain Michael Grass accounts for the sudden presence of white settlers at Cataraqui, legitimised the dispossession of the Mississauga from the north shore of Lake Ontario, and perpetuates the settler society fiction of the “founding” of Kingston by Michael Grass in 1784. I. Michael Grass: A Brief Overview of the Loyalist in Question To denaturalise the Legend of Captain Michael Grass, we must first establish what we do know about the historical figure based on archival evidence.
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