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We're now at the joining of the 18th and 19th centuries. British troops are fighting in Flanders fields - that's Flanders 1793. The British industrial revolution and the French constitutional Revolution are changing the ways people live and think. Thomas Jefferson has introduced the dollar, dime and cent.
Britain has lost America but it has strengthened its hold on Canada largely because the 100,000 or so British loyalists who left America for the north. They were known as Tories or United Empire Loyalists. In 1791, the Canada Act created Upper and Lower Canada. In Lower Canada lived a 100,000 French and about 10,000 British who'd escaped from America. In Upper Canada lived some 20,000 British. Many headed west including Alexander Mackenzie who reached the Rockies and the Pacific in 1793. The Scots succeeded in Canada and by 1800 the most prosperous trading was controlled by Scottish merchants of Montreal.
In the 1830s there were rebellions in Canada and the first earl of Durham was sent to report on conditions and the need for a future structure of the colony. He produced the Report on the Affairs of British North America. Durham promoted the idea of assimilation, bringing the French into the larger colonial community. The Durham report was a broader comment on how colonies should be administered. There was emerging a concept that the local authorities represented grass roots but the legislatures represented the views not necessarily of the colony as a whole, but particularly the Crown. There was a clearer acceptance that to try to hold a colony by force would only bring revolution. The seeds of the independence movement were sown in the 19th and not the 20th century.
Born on the Isle of Lewis, MacKenzie's father took the family to live in Canada. After brief schooling MacKenzie joined a fur trader and in 1779 the much bigger North West Fur Company (NWC). He set up a post on the south shore of Lake Athabasca and from there, in June 1789 set out on his first voyage of discovery. His expeditions soon saw he was a hard driver of himself and his men. His second expedition started in the autumn of 1792. Using local Indian advice and a compass, a sextant and a chronometer, MacKenzie plotted his way across the Rockies to the Pacific by July 1793. He was the first European to do so. His expedition story is to be read in his Voyages from Montreal to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans published in 1801. The following year he was knighted. MacKenzie became a member of the House of Assembly of Lower Canada but was not much interested in politics. He returned to live in Scotland, married a 14-year-old girl and in 1820 died in an inn near Dunkeld when on the way home from Edinburgh and a medical examination.
That the Earl of Durham (1792-1840) who wrote the paper for the future of Canada was the ancestor of the modern Lambton family and the resident of Lambton Hall in Durham. Durham, a sometime envoy to Petersburg, is better remembered as a fine constitutional and parliamentary draftsman and was one of the architects of the famous 1832 Reform Bill. His father-in-law was the 19th century Prime Minister Lord Grey.
Brent Cameron, Yarker, Ontario, Canada I listened to this episode online from Canada. As a descendant of the Loyalists mentioned in the program, and as someone who has studied the Durham Report, I want to commend you for a good program. There were some omissions, but I think that it was due to having to cover the subject in a 15 minute period. What was covered was bang on.
Excerpt from Lord Durham's Report on the Affairs of British North America
"There are two modes by which a government may deal with a conquered territory: the first requires the conquerors to respect the rights and nationality of the actual occupants; the second is that of treating the conquered territory as one open to the conquerors, of encouraging their influx, of regarding the conquered race as entirely subordinate, and of endeavouring speedily and as rapidly as possible to assimilate the character and institutions of its new subjects to those of the great body of its empire."
