'A Half-Century of Canadian Life and Print, 1751-1800'

M~arie Tremnaine

THE BEGINNINGS OF PRINTING IN EASTERN CANADA TOOK PLACE THROUGH a half-century rarely eqlualled in the history of the world, and unmatched in the history of Canada, for its seqluence of far-reaching events. It began and ended with a major war between two world powers, both of them parent countries to Canada. It saw the rise of an international revolutionary movement in which Canada was deeply involved ideologically and geographi- cally. Two of the four basic documents of the Canadian constitution were written in this period. From the eastern seaboard to the Great Laktes, settlement, government agencies, social institutions, economic development and the union of two national cultures began. How, or how far, the bibliographer muses, are these events shown in the output of the printing press of that half-century.l At mid-eighteenth century, the part of the continental North America now Canada had well rooted but sparse French settlement up the St. Lawrence valley, in Nova Scotia on the Bay of Fundy, on Ile St. Jean (now Prince Edward Island) and on Ile Royale (Cape Breton) with its fort at Louis- bourg. Sixty-odd thousand people, mainly farmers, lived there. Nova Scotia, nominally British since 17I3, had a little capital at Annapolis; also a few English settlers and seasonal fishermen, mainly New Englanders, around the coast. Indians still lived or roved in small bands back of the settlements in Nova Scotia and Quebec, Micmacs in the east, Abnaktis south of the St. Lawrence, and Montagnais north. In 1749, extensive settlement and fortification of H-alifax were begun by the British government, with new colonists from Britain and (mainly German) from the continent, and with seasoned colonials from New England. The latter continued to move northeast, in some cases temporarily, as trade and new land invited, till the

'A~Half-Century of Canadian Life and Print, 175 I-1800' was first printed in Essays Honoring Lawrence C. Wroth (Portland, Maine: 195 I), pp- 37I-390 and is reprinted here as it appeared in that publication with the ktind permission of Mr. Francis S. Goff, Jr. 4I Tremaine: 'A Half-Century of Canadian Life and Print, 17 5 I- 1800'

American Revolution. Then the movement began to include also settlers from the middle colonies. This traffic (by no means one way) is a strong factor in the early development of Canadian printing, and in the survival of imprmnts. In August or September of 175I, Bartholomew Green, Jr., one of a printing family whose members through successive generations operated presses in many of the American colonies, brought his printing-office from Boston to Halifax, thus establishing the first press in Canada. Whether he produced anything before he died that fall, we do not ktnow. One of his former partners in Boston, John Bushell, arrived in January, 17 52, and carried on the business. The surviving issues from Bushell's press are significant of life in the booming pioneer-garrison town. The Halifax Gazette appeared on March 23, 1752, the first Canadian newspaper, and throughout the year he printed blankts for government and trade, laws and proclamations of British and provincial origin, the text of an arrangement between the English governor at Halifax and the French governor at Quebec for a mutual exchange of each other's deserters.2 In 1753 appeared orders for organizing militia and a treaty made with the Micmacs. No Halifax printing at this time records the renewal of fighting between English and French on the western frontier, nor the menace of Louisbourg, Halifax's raison d'être, nor the anomaly of old French settlers occupying the best lands in the province, nor even the dispossession and deportation of these Acadians in 1755. But a seqluel of their expulsion is clearly recorded by a broadside issued in 175 6, setting a price on Indians, who were harassing the newer English settlers. Two years later, after the reduction of Louisbourg, Gover- nor Lawrence published a proclamation in Halifax and Boston, advertising the Acadians' lands open for settlement by New Englanders, and in 1759 issued a further proclamation to relieve prospective settlers of paying fees and of claims against their title. In these years, as in each succeeding time of war or threat of war, appeared the government's embargo on export of food, the militia call-up and training manual. This husbanding of resources in crisis by a young colony never self-sufficient, appears again and again in eighteenth-century printing, first in Nova Scotia, later also in Quebec, New Brunswick, and Island of St. John. And along with the embargo on food supplies in the larger centers later, went the law against black markteteers. These earliest laws in Nova Scotia were issued from Governor in Coun- cil; the Assembly, the third element in the constitution, had not been established. The 'liqluidation' of the French Catholic population in 1755 removed what the English considered an obvious impediment, and the increasing number of migrants from the older colonies supplied increasing pressure for the election of a representative Assembly. A manifestation of 42 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada xxxi I this pressure was published by Bushell in I757 (and, incidentally, the only extant copy survives in the files of the Colonial Office in London, whence that pressure could be effectively transmitted). The following year, the first elective legislative body in Canada was convened. In 1759, its sessions laws began publication, and in the same, or the next year, its Journal. In 1759, too, another historic event took place, one of even greater significance to Nova Scotia, whose celebration of it in print, if any, does not survive, namely the capture of Quebec, and the passing of French Canada to British control. The British occupation of Quebec had as sequel, not the influx of land-seekting English colonials as in Nova Scotia, but the arrival of merchants seekting new business in a long-settled colony of some 62,ooo people, in which trade had not been particularly developed by the French regime. One such business, thus started in Quebec, was that of Brown & Gil- more, young printers from William Dunlap's shop in Philadelphia.3 They began work in I764, at a time when the military government of the early occupation was being succeeded by civil government, not with a constitution likte that of the older English colonies in America, but an administration by governor and council. Some of Brown & Gilmore's earliest publications helped erect the new administration's legal framework, on which the day-to-day affairs of the community were based. By ordinance, courts of justice were set up and court decisions from the military r6gime confirmed; currency values were established, and fees set for official services; 'due pubs- lication' of laws was ordained 'by publick Reading ... after Notice by Beat of Drum and publishing the same in the Quebec-Gazette'; local government was organized in the main settlements. Each such ordinance Brown & Gil- more printed for the governor as a broadside or 'double broadside' with English and French text side by side. The local governments of Quebec and Montreal, thus established under justices of the peace, appeared freqluently in print henceforth. They admin- istered law and order at the average citizen's level. They regulated cartage and ferry rates, liqluor licenses, the sale of firewood, the price and weight of bread, the straying of goats in the streets, the playing of ninepins or skittles, the unloading and carrying of gunpowder, etc. Brown & Gilmore duly printed their regulations. The justices of the peace served also as judges in petty criminal and (for a time) civil suits. The first sizeable pamphlet, printed by Brown & Gilmore,4 records English merchants' arguments before the Quebec justices' first quarter sessions in October, 1764, arguments against Frenchmen serving on juries, and complaints against the military. The controversies and tensions of the little society, the numerous French, well rooted in the country and their own ways, and a few hundred English newcomers divided among 43 Tremaine: 'A Half-Century of Canadian Life and Print, 17 5 I -1800' themselves in violent cliqlues, are only partially revealed, only suggested in fact, in the printers' occasional record of denunciatory tracts and a few surviving copies of litigious pamphlets. They suggest not only the confusions in the courts where English and French laws and customs were unktnown and irritating to French and English respectively, but also the wider confusions and irritations attendant upon two peoples, each with its strong tradi- tions, religion, language and way of life, living and doing business in the same small community. Brown & Gilmore issued the first number of the Q2uebec Gazette, June 21, 1764, and it became the medium of legal publication except during the suspension of the paper, November, 1765-May, 1766, when its cost became prohibitive with the Stamp tax. As most of the content of the four-page paper, particularly official matter, appeared in French and English, its scope was not extensive. The preponderance of government work in their general printing as well as in the Gazette, no doubt restrained Brown & Gilmore's reaction as journalists and businessmen to the Stamp tax. For, unlikte their brother printers in the more southerly colonies, they published little protest and printed no comment of their own till the 'Resurrection' number of their newspaper after the act's repeal. That there was, however, local objec- tion and disregard of use of 'the Grievous stamp' throughout the province is confirmed by the government's publication in March, 1766, of the text of the act in French translation. In the other northerly colony, Nova Scotia, with its large proportion of former New Englanders and close continuous contact with New England ports and other colonial printing centers, protest of the Stamp Act was more explicit. Unlikte Brown & Gilmore, Anthony Henry, who had succeeded John Bushell, continued publishing his Halifax Gazette. The price was increased to cover the tax, apparently with public support. The use of stamped paper (with one stamp on a full folio sheet) entailed a larger (four- page instead of two-page) issue and in the additional space Henry reprinted extracts from other newspapers reporting resistance to the tax in New Eng- land and southward, with an occasional mockting comment of his own on tax enforcement. Some issues included mourning rules, or various derisive cuts, the work doubtless of Isaiah Thomas, who worked briefly for Henry. But it is not certain that these issues were distributed in Nova Scotia, as the only extant copies have survived in Massachusetts. Stamped paper was exhausted in Nova Scotia in February, 1766, but not its effect on Henry. The administration apparently withdrew its patronage, for the Halifalx Gazette ceased publication that spring. Henry printed the Journal of Assembly seri- atirn for the House sitting through the summer of 1766, at loggerheads with the administration over expenditures. But the new government printer, Robert Fletcher, arrived from England and began in August, 1766, producing 44 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada x xI II the Nova-Scotia Gazette. That fall the administration made plans to have Fletcher produce a collected edition of the province's sessions laws, the most ambitious printing venture in Nova Scotia to that time. Two volumes, PerpetualActs and TemporaryActs, duly appeared in 1767, when by a curi- ous coincidence, the first collected edition of the Ordinances of Quebec was published by Brown & Gilmore. Henry, however, did not remain in the background. In January, I769, he made the first attempt in Canada to launch a newspaper without assurance of government work, and started the Nova Scotia Chronicle. Henry's con- duct was obviously an expression of the attitude of his fellow Haligonians, for his newspaper had their support and journalistic contributions so con- spicuously that it became the liveliest journal of opinion of the century in Canada. Fletcher presently dropped his printing business and in September, 1770, Henry abssorbed his paper. The new Nova Scotia Gazette and the Weekly Chronicle retained some characteristics of the original Chronicle for, in the years leading to the outbreak of revolution in the southerly colonies, Henry continued to reprint from their papers colonial views which did not otherwise have expression in Canada. In the spring of the Stamp Act's repeal, Guy Carleton was appointed new lieutenant-governor of Quebec, and in the fall of 1766 began an administration which was to last with but a single break for thirty years. Towards clari- fying the persisting legal confusions in the province he managed to have coordinated by his French secretary, and printed, a statement of the bases of French civil law as practiced in Quebec. The four volumes of Cugnet's work were a high point of achievement in colonial printing, as in law, for that time. Even before they appeared, the Quebec Act was ready - the new constitution which was to enable the perpetuation of a French Catholic society under the English crown. It was published in Quebec, but before the new act could come into application, a new crisis arose. Only about two score publications in the years I775-1783 concerned the American Revolution, symbols rather than a record of its immediate effect on Canada. These are mainly broadsides or leaflets of government origin. Two pamphlets, however, by a former New Englander in Nova Scotia (probably John Day, leader of a popular group in the Assembly) calling for redress of grievances suggest that there may have been others, now disappeared, also printed by the liberal-minded Henry. Day's essays and his Assembly committee's address to the king related to peculiarly local grievances and were specifically non-rebellious. But they are, so far as we know, the only publications at this critical time expressing popular protest from the north- ernmost colonies against colonial maladministration. During the war period, the governors of both Nova Scotia and Quebec 45 Tremaine: 'A Half-Century of Canadian Life and Print, 175 I- 1800' published broadsides trying to persuade their people to enlist for local defense. In Quebec particularly, the style of the successive propaganda and recruiting releases in the summer and fall of 1775 - including a cleric's appeal to the Catholic habitant to enlist, and the governor's order for the neighbors to harvest his crops - suggest their failure of effect as well as the desperate situation of the government. In the summer of 177 6, the Quebec government reprinted the British proclamation of August 23, 1775, against rebellion, in answer, presumably, to the Declaration of Independence. Halifax, Quebec and Montreal all issued broadsides reqluiring strangers to register with the authorities. Nova Scotia was proclaimed an asylum for loyalist refugees from the American colonies in 1'775, and by 1777 Quebec was increasingly a military base for British troops. Consequent food shortage and black marktet were combatted by both provincial governments with broadside proclamations. Among the refugees to Nova Scotia were several printers, a couple of whom, Mills and Hicks, ran off reprints of a rebel newspaper article on July II, 1776. It included 'a Resolution of the General Congress for the total and perpetual independence of the Colonies and Separation from Great Britain, and an Instrument ... forever renouncing the King and his Authority (in Terms,' wrote a British officer stationed in Halifax, 'too highly criminal for me even to repeat).' This production was so effectively suppressed that the writer could not find a copy two days later to send to London. Among the military who came to QZuebec was Burgoyne who, campaign- ing southward in 1777, issued, in at least two different printings, a mani- festo intended to terrorize the rebels with its threat: '... I have but to give stretch to the Indian forces under my direction, and they amount to thousands, to overtake the hardened Enemies of Great Britain.' Two years later Governor Haldimand issued in leaflet form an oration, Indian style, designed to win the Oneidas over to the British - with notable unsuccess despite its eloqluence. The following year Haldimand had printed (but never issued) another leaflet, attempting to detach settlers in the Ohio Valley from the American side in the war. Finally in April, 1783, came proclamation of cessation of hostilities and preliminary articles of peace. During these epochal years, the main issues and events of the colonial conflict hardly appear in Canadian print. Four-fifths of the output of the printing-offices (the largest in each province operated by a government printer) had no direct bearing on the war. The meager remainder seem related to mere local difficulties caused by serious disturbance elsewhere. Indirectly, however, the war changed Canadian printing as completely as it did Canadian life - by driving 'royalist,' or 'loyalist' refugees into the northern colonies. For the newcomers included printers who opened new 46 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada x xI II printing-offices in every province, and a notable number of people, whose occupations and personal tastes had accustomed them to print as an essential convenience as well as an amenity of life. Even before the refugees, however, the war brought a new printing-office to Montreal, which became the third printing center in Canada in 1776. Fleury Mesplet, a French printer, who in 1774 printed the Continental Congress's Lettre adressee aux habitans ... de Quebec in Philadelphia, was induced to follow the American invaders northward that year, to aid them in proselytising the Revolution among French Canadians. When the Ameri- cans retreated, Mesplet, who had just arrived and had no means to return, remained in Montreal. He began printing devotional works and school- bookts for French Catholics, and on the Quebec government's ordering him deported, published a petition on his behalf by Montr6alais. The latter attested to Mesplet's patriotism and 'delicacy' citing his aim to produce in his Gazette litteraire,a 'periodical paper' which treated of neither religion, or the state. Jailed, however, 1779-1782, and losing business thereby, he later (1784) claimed (and was granted) compensation from the American Congress for his troubles, about the same time as loyalist refugees were claiming compensation from the British government for their losses during the war. Besides Mesplet, the printing record during and after the war years shows John Howe, a loyalist from Boston and Newport, beginning business at Hal- ifax about 178 I; William Lewis and John Ryan from New York in 1783, and Christopher Sower In1 from Philadelphia in I785, at Saint John, New Brunswick; James and Alexander Robertson from New York and Philadel- phia, Thomas and James Swords of New York, and James Humphreys of Phi- ladelphia, at Shelburne, Nova Scotia; and James Robertson, also William A. RinldG of Virginia, at Charlottetown. Of the eight printing centers in eighteenth-century Canada all but the two earliest, at Halifax and Quebec, were pioneered by men whom the for- tunes of the Revolutionary War brought to Canada, or, as at Newark and York in Upper Canada, by a press set up as part of a new, predominantly loyalist settlement. Of the four remaining British colonies in eastern North America after the American Revolution, Newfoundland,7 Island of St. John, Nova Scotia (including the later New Brunswick) and Quebec (including the later Upper Canada or Ontario), loyalist refugees went mainly to Nova Scotia and Que- bec. By the time the western part of Nova Scotia was organized as a separate province, New Brunswick, in the fall of 1784, Lewis & Ryan, already publishing the Royal St. John Gazette, were ready to print the proclamations and regulations on land grants and trade issued at once by the governor. The post-revolutionary provinces, New Brunswick and later Upper Canada, 47 Tremaine: 'A Half-Century of Canadian Life and Print, 17 5 I- 1800' unlike the earlier colonies, Nova Scotia and Quebec, had an elective House of Assembly from their establishment. The New Brunswick Assembly Jour- nal and sessions laws began with 1785 and were published regularly thereafter. Saint John, the first, and long the only community with a muni- cipal charter, was incorporated in 1785, and published its regulations from time to time. Another printer, Christopher Sower, arrived with a royal commission as kting's printer of New Brunswick. But the Assembly allocated its business regardless of the London-made commission. The hardship attendant upon settling a large refugee population in new country, vexatious technicalities and injustices in the granting of lands, brought protests to government from the new settlers. The commissioners, appointed in Lon- don to review loyalist claims throughout all the provinces, were publicized by newspapers in every printing center and announced in New Brunswick with a handsome broadside, printed by the craftsman Sower. In Nova Scotia, a meteoric result of the loyalist influx was the new settlement on the south coast at Shelburne, which became briefly, it was said, the largest town in British North America. Among the prospective settlers were the Robertson brothers and their sons, also the Swords brothers, and finally James Humphreys, who successively published newspapers between 1783 and 1795, as well as printer's blankts and a few small publications for local use. No doubt they produced more than has survived, for Shelburne soon becoming a ghost town; disorganization of families and institutions inevitably accelerated the normal process of dispersal and des- truction. Of these printers, doubtless typical of the population in its dispersal, Alexander Robertson, Sr., died in I784, James, Sr., moved to Charlotte- town in 1787; Thomas and James Swords had opened business in New York by 1790; and James Humphreys returned to Philadelphia in 1796. A more lasting and effective result of the Revolution was the advent of John Howe at Halifax, a loyalist who came with Mrs. Margaret Draper's printing-office from Boston. Howe began publishing the Halifax Journal, a non-governmental newspaper at the end of 1780. This, his publications for the Methodists, the Freemasons, the Halifax Marine Society, his training of a printer who started in 1786 another (the third) newspaper, the Halifax Chronicle, his essay at publishing the Nova Scotia M~agazine, suggest the expansion of interests and activities in Nova Scotia. On the Island of St. John (subsequently Prince Edward Island) there had been no printer till James Robertson moved thither from Shelburne, Nova Scotia, in 1787. Robertson began, or rather, resumed publication of his RoyalAmerican Gazette at Charlottetown in September, 1787. The following year he produced the island's first printed House of Assembly Journal, and in 1789, a collection of its laws, their first printing. Discouraged, doubtless, by the small amount of current government work and lack of other 48 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada xx II I patronage and the general economic distress in 1789, Robertson left the island in 1790. Printing was carried on, however, by his journeyman, Wil- liam Alexander Rind. Rind published the Assembly fournal and the sessions laws regularly and began a fortnightly newspaper in July, 1791, the Royal Gazette and M\liscel- lany of the Island of Saint John, in which the 'miscellaneous' matter was at a minimum for colonial gazettes. His other surviving productions are a group of testimonials to the virtues of Lieutenant-Governor Fanning (under shadow of recall in 1792), printed, presumably, at Fanning's order for distri- bution in London. The implications of these leaflets together with the limited range of the newspaper suggest, but barely suggest, the economic paralysis and political dissensions of a colony controlled by absentee land- lords. In the province of Quebec the political dissensions of the post- revolutionary period are somewhat more than implicit in the productions of the local presses. Even in this, the most populous province, the community was still so small that John Doe did not require print for exchange of views and news. At any rate he did not have that facility there, though the press was utilized for the more formal presentation of group views to (or sometimes by) government in the form of petitions, draughts of bills and laws. The Quebec Act, Britain's constitutional blueprint for the administration of its new northern French colony, allegedly a factor in precipitating the revolt of thirteen more southerly English colonies, was ready for application in the spring of 1775. But activities in those colonies, demonstra- tions of English residents in the former, and the war crisis, withheld civil reorganization under the Act till 1777. By the end of 1784, opposition to the Act by pre-revolutionary English residents had developed into the 'Reform Committee' and crystallized in its printed petition of November 24, 1784- Its objectives, an elective House of Assembly, with control of taxation and customs duties, appointment of trained judges, English commercial laws, jury trial in civil suits, Habeas Corpus Act explicitly included in the constitution, and so on, were assumed rights of English colonists in America. The Reform Committee expressed not only demands of a pre-revolution English mercantile minority in Montreal and Quebec, but also the expectation of loyalist refugees and post-revolution land seekers from the former English colonies to the south. The petition8 was significantly printed in French, though the ideas as well as the language of the petition were originally English, for the Reform Committee understood well that French Canadian support was reqluired to induce change, in London, of legislation designed to secure French Canadian allegiance in Quebec, During the long struggle before the reorganization of the province in 1791, the committee's petition 49 Tremaine: 'AHalf-Century of Canadian Life and Print, 17 5 I- 1800' was published again in French about 1790 in L'hurnble adresse des anciens et nouveaux sujets, purporting to represent: to the British government views of English and French in Quebec. Its substance was presented at the bar of the House of Commons by Adam Lymburner, representing the English merchants of Quebec and Montreal, in March, 1791, and published in London, also in two editions, English and French, in Quebec." The Reform Committee's activities produced a concerted effort to offset its effects, in the formation of the Comité canadien, whose Objections of November 30, 1784, were published, representing attitudes of French Cana- dian seigneurs, French Catholic clergy and English administrators. Clerics and seigneurs (St. Ours and De Bonne) also had their respective views printed independently. The habitants (tenant farmers, small tradespeople and servants) as such, were not heard from. A Habeas Corpus ordinance was written into the provincial statues in 1784. Changes in judicial procedure were proposed by the loyalist, Chief Justice William Smith, and published unofficially in 1787. Some changes favoring English practice were effected in 1789 for the new districts being settled by English colonists. But in the judicial system (or lack of it) as in the other issues raised by the Reform Committee, and reiterated as English- speakting settlers increased, local changes awaited constitutional reorganization fromn London. Conspicuous in the printers' output at this time is work relating to land settlement: 'printer's blank' permit and grant forms, regulations on granting procedures for the land office, conditions and provisions for settlement of disbsanded regimentals and of royalist, or loyalist civilians and members of their families; in 1791 the reprinting of a British act for encouraging new settlers 'in his Majesties colonies and plantations in America.' This printing represents the 'land-office business' of a pioneer period. The new grants precipitated a new controversy in Quebec, where land tenure en fief et seig- neurie had been a latent issue since the beginning of English administration. The immediate agitation of the new English settlers was allayed by instructions from London to grant their lands in the new districts in freehold. But their pressure caused discussion of converting Quebîec feudal tenures to free and common socage. On this issue the Council published an Extract of its proceedings in committee in 1790. The seigneurial system was defended in pamphlet and petition and the exponents of freehold found a pamphleteer champion characteristically in a converted seigneur, Charles-Louis de Lanaudiere. In Quebec, as in Nova Scotia, as the new settlers shouldered their way into affairs, some attention was given to education. A committee of the Council headed by Chief Justice Smith published in 1789 a report outlining a characteristically English Protestant plan for general elementary and 50 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada xxxI l regional intermediate schools with a central college on a non- denominational basis. The plan was supported by one of the higher Catholic clergy, Bailly de Messein, in a letter to the committee. However, the Catholic bsishop's presentation (included in the committee's report) of the merits of the existing Catholic schooling in Quebec indicated that the interests of the two groups were so disparate that they could hardly be har- monized in the existing constitutional framework. The Canada, or Constitutional Act, Britain's design for reconciliation of two national groups and their differing rnores within a single state, became law on December 26, 1791. The Act and its supplementary proclamation, defining the division of Old Quebec into Lower and Upper Canada, were published many times in the following years, often accompanied in Lower Canada by new editions of the Quebec Act. The most significant results of the new constitution, establishment of a new English-speaking province to the west, and introduction of representative government in the old, predominantly French province to the east, appeared characteristically in print as land and election circulars. Lieutenant-Governor Simcoe's first proclamations, produced in the old printing centers, Quebec and Montreal, publicized land settlement and electoral districts in Upper Canada. By 1793, he had Louis Roy from Neilson's shop in Quebec, as government printer at Newark (now Niagara-on-the-Lake ), printing a weekly newspaper, the Upper CanadaGazette, also the Assembly's sessions laws and land grant regulations. These, with other kinds of legislative publications and printed blanks, represent the main output of the last eighteenth-century press set up in Canada - or rather the last but one. Before the turn of the century, the capital and government printing center of the new province was changed to York (now Toronto). The government printer had changed several times and another, unofficial, press had started work in Newark - with a weekly newspaper, the CanadaConstellation, and an almanac. In Lower Canada the more complicated results of the new constitution in the old faction-torn society hardly appeared in print, obscured as they were in the epochal introduction of representative government. The first Assembly was preceded by a spate of election circulars for the candidates, the formation of the Constitutional Club, almos·t the nucleus of a political party, and a handbook on parliamentary procedure. In 1793, the Assembly's Journal and the session laws began to appear, and incidentally to set a stan- dard in book production as well as legislative techniques. The Assembly's own rules of procedure were drawn up and published, the first such work in Canada. Then came a series of massive new laws on old problems, such as the judicature and roads, new land grant regulations for lands being settled south of the St. Lawrence, the 'Eastern Townships,' as they are still called. The Jay Treaty, the long-awaited settlement of problems rising from the 5 I Tremaine: 'A Half-Century of Canadian Life and Print, 17 5 I- 800'

American Revolution and the most widely published document in eighteenth-century Canada, appeared in 179)5. FollowiIng the Treaty came regulations loosening old trade restrictions. But by the middle of the decade a new revolution in Europe, having developed through the 1780's almost simultaneously with the constitutional controversy in Quebec, turned into a life-and-death struggle between France and Britain with issues peculiarly pressing in French Canada. In Montreal, two little Parisian tractslo on corruption in French society and government were reprinted by Mesplet in 1784. But the intellectual and social ferment preceding the outbreak of revolution in France hardly appeared in Canadian print. In the fall of 1789, Samuel Neilson, the new and youthful editor of the Quebec Gazette, began a column headed 'Revolution in France.' In line with his policy through the few remaining years of his brief life, for expanding the size and scope of the Gazette, particularly in public affairs, he gave some expression to the revolutionary viewpoint by his choice and his style of presenting French news, and by publishing speeches and documents from the National Assembly - once referring obliqluely to the continuance of feudal tenure and tithes in Quebec. A couple of these articles he also issued as pamphlets. But texts and news items in Neilson's column, and the occasional limited notice of French affairs in other Canadian newspapers were clearly customary reprints from English or American papers. Views of local origin on the Revolution, its philosophy and events were published by neither government nor non-official printers in any of the provinces till the spring following the execution of Louis xvI. On April 7, 1793, Bishop Inglis preached before the legislature of Nova Scotia to the text, 'My son, fear thou the Lord and the King, and meddle not with them that are given to change,' a comprehensive statement against the French Revolution by the head of the established church, a former refugee from the American Revolution. Before his sermon was off the press in Hali- fax (in fact just before the Assembly decided to print it), word arrived of war between Britain and France, and Inglis's text, with emphasis on one or other of its elements, became the theme in Canadian publication for the next five years . Broadside proclamations were issued in Halifax on April I3, and QZuebec, April 24, 1793, giving warning of war conditions and encouragement to privateers. A similar proclamation was issued ordering a general fast throughout Nova Scotia in May, for which prayers specially prepared by Bishop Inglis were published. The fast sermon preached in Halifax by the Anglican Cochran (on the text '... and shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this?') was published, but no dissenting minister's sermon appeared in print. Lower Canada and the government printer were preoccupied with the 52 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada xxxII activities of the first provincial Assembly, elected under the Constitutional Act. But the printer produced in May a broadside giving documents and details on the death of the King of France and a crude but graphic illustration of the guillotine in action. In August he reprinted a little tract currently popular in England, by a refugee French cleric, Lettre~de M/.I'Evêque de Lion aux ecclesiastiquesfrangaises refugiés en Angleterre, in praise of Brit- ish institutions. In September a broadside proclamation was published in Nova Scotia ordering vagabonds to be treated as deserters and sent to the army or navy. The official British militia training manual was issued in Montreal by Mesplet in October. The following month, the Catholic Bishop of Quebec published a circular to his clergy to combat foreign French propaganda, and Governor Dorchester issued a proclamation designed to scotch the influence in Lower Canada of the French Republic's agents in the United States. Local tensions in Canada during the Napoleonic war in Europe probably occasioned publication of pronouncements on the French Revolution as a threat to church and state, which otherwise would have died away soon after they were uttered. No pro-French or pro-revolutionary views of local or other origin seem to have appeared in print. Protestant sermons (mainly Church of England), reprints of imported tracts, government measures on defense and security and Catholic circulars embodying government orders, accounted for about a third of the presses' output from 1793 till 1798. TFhe older provinces, Nova Scotia and Lower Canada, were the most productive and, from 1794, New Brunswick and the Island of St. John contributed too. But in Upper Canada (Ontario), thoroughly loyalist and far inland, the presses likte the new settlers were occupied with administration and land settlement. In all the provinces, the newspapers regularly published government measures and reprints from foreign newspapers. In 1794 the printed declaration of the so-called 'Loyal Association' to combat French revolutionary propagandists was circulated throughout Lower Canada and probably reached more ordinary people than any other publication of the period. It was a statement of the subscribers' attachment to the government and abhorrence of the seditious activities of wicked and designing men, to which hundreds of signatures were collected in a brief time. That its pretentious verbiage accurately expressed the ordinary man's views seems rather doubtful. But there is no doubt that the publication represented real apprehension in the administration, and an ingenious if unsubtle sally in government propaganda. The case of David McLane in 1797, a pedlarfrom Rhode Island convicted of plotting to overthrow the Quebec government, particularly the unusu- ally barbarous manner of his execution and the manifold publication (three pamphlets besides the Gazette record) of the trial indicate a continuing and 5 3 Tremaine: 'A Half-Century of Canadian Life and Print, 175 I -1800' peculiar tension in Lower Canada. Only the newspaper carriers' addresses at the New Year jingled current worries lightly and called for peace. The British victory at the Nile in August, 1798, recognized as a turning point in the long struggle, was ktnown in Canada in November, and occasioned more numerous publication than any other event in the century. Official announcements appeared, even an Extra of the Upper Canada Gazette, jingles, sermons, and in May, 1799, Berry's Narrative... of the Nile reprinted from the London edition. In this scanty record of contemporary print, many events, outstanding in the perspective of time, are barely perceptible. Conscious as we are of the low incidence of survival among pioneer imprints, the lacunae in this record are strikting. Events involving diverse opinions, a clash or struggle between conflicting interests are notably obscure or missing. The rise of social institutions, the associating together of neighbsors and fellow citizens for common interests within the community, is indicated in the fire societies, mutual benefit groups, 'old country' national clubs, frater- nal and religious organizations, agricultural societies. Theatre groups and library companies appear in print, not in a great detail or variety, but sufficiently to reveal human communities in process of development. The numerous prayer books, tracts and sermons show the diversity of religious faith as well as the regional strongholds of the different denominations. Their varying involvement with the government is apparent: the relative detachment of the dissenting sects, the incipient state churchship of Church of England, and the liaison of the Catholic Church between government and French Canadians. No trade associations appear, and little evidence of industrial or commercial activity. A few political organizations appear, emerging in more detail as they are instruments of government. The legislative pattern and legal structure are conspicuous in all the provinces. Internal developments and external affairs are indicated freqluently and mainly in law-giving print. The migration of New Englanders to Nova Scotia, of loyalists and 'late loyalists' to New Brunswick, Upper Canada and the Eastern Townships of Quebec, are simply signalized in proclamations, orders-in-council, land- office regulations, and the likte. So, too, are matters of land clearance and settlement, the opening of roads, transportation facilities and mails. The bitter political struggles in Nova Scotia and Quebec are barely indicated by a few pamphlets. In the latter province, however, the issues, political and social, are revealed in the two great constitutional achievements of the period, the Quebec Act and the Constitutional Act. The significance of the latter is indicated particularly by the petitions, bsills, pamphlets, which preceded its passage, the only, if slightly, numerous group of controversial political publications of the century. 54 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada x xII I

In the great interniational events, the final phase of the struggle for empire between France and Britain, the American and French Revolutions, and the beginning of the wars with Napoleon, Canada was both intimately and remotely involved. And this paradoxical situation is apparent in Cana- dian imprints of the period. In each conflict some element in the population had a natural affinity with Britain's enemy. The provincial governments were much concerned with disaffection on the home front. But no province became a very active belligerent in the big campaigns where the issues were decided. The preliminary moves in, and the aftermath of, the Seven Years' War were responsible for bringing the printing press to Halifax and Quebec respectively. But the war's main course and result hardly figured in its work, until the Quebec press printed the Montreal and Quebec capitula- tions incidentally in a collection of documents about 1800. In the American Revolution, the press in Nova Scotia and Quebec both reflected their government's efforts to suppress any local sympathy for revolt. In Quebec during the brief American invasion, the indifference of French Canadians to their defense appears almost as clearly, from the few publications of government and church, as the desperate plight of the defenders. Later in the war, its repercussions are apparent in both provinces - in militia call-ups, food shortage, refugee and troop movements, etc. But the struggle itself seems remote, represented as it is in only a small fraction of the presses' output, and of this only a very few items concerned with a military campaign. The issues of the American, and later the French, Revolution are hardly stated, and not discussed in Canadian print of the time. Mainly they are to be inferred indirectly from the printed pronouncements of government and church. Government effectually controlled the press by being the printers' best and essential customer - in these small communities isolated by dis- tance, winter and pioneers' preoccupations, from the mainstream of events 'outside.' In the last decade of the century, most of the provinces seem, from their printing output, more immediately involved in local problems of administration and land settlement than in war with France. A one-sided ideological battle, however, was waged in Nova Scotia and particularly in Quebec, where its persistence and ferocity suggest a strong, if to us inaudi- bJle, opponent.

NOTES I This paper derives from a study, CanadianImprints, 1751-1800 (in press), to whose inception and pursuit over many years Dr. Wroth gave generous stimulus. 2 A Cartelfor the Exchange of Deserters. Cartelpour l'echange des deserteurs. [Halifax, J.Bushell, 1752]- 3 The story of the printing firm is told by F.J. Audet: William Brown (173 7-1 789)) premier imprimeurfournaliste et librairede Quebec, in Royal Society of Canada. M6moires, Series 3, Volume 26, Section 2, pages 97r-IIZ, 1932. 4 The so-called [Presentments of the Grand Jury] printed for James Johnston, foreman of the jury. 55 Trernaine: A Half-Century of Canadian Life and Print, 17 5 I - 800

5 An Essay on the Present State of the Provinceof Nova-Scotia, with some Strictures on the Mleasures pursued by the Government from its first Settlement by the English in the Year 1749, [n.p. n.d.], surviving in two copies, both of which are in the John Carter Brown Library. 6 Son of William Rind noted by Lawrence C. Wroth as probably Maryland's first native-born printer. 7 The most easterly colony remained comparatively undeveloped till the early nineteenth century, its first printing-office was set up by the loyalist, John Ryan, in 1805. 8 Aux Citoyens et habitants des villes et des campagnes, Quebec, Wm. Brown, I78 5, 15 pages, 8vo. The petition (pages 2-I5) had an introductory note (pages I-2) to its prospective French Canadian supporters. 9 The Paper read at the Bar of the House of Commons, by Mlr. Lymburner, Quebec, Wm. Moore, 1791, 47 pages, 8vo, and Papierlu a la barre de la Chambre des Communes par M~r.Lymburner, Quebec, S. Neilson, 179I, 3 I pages, 8vo. To L'Ecu de six francs, 35 pages, 12mo, and La Roche du Maine's Parisen miniature, 104 pages, 12mo.