Part 5 (2/2)

So the confiscation of Loyalist property soon became the order of the day.

It was not the custom of that age to confiscate private property simply because the owners were on the losing side, still less to confiscate it under local instead of national authority. But need, greed, and resentment were stronger than any scruples. Need was the weakest, resentment the strongest of all the animating motives. The American army was in rags and its pay greatly in arrears while the British forces under Carleton were fed, clothed, and paid in the regular way. But it was the pa.s.sionate resentment of the revolutionists that perverted this exasperating difference into another 'intolerable wrong.'

Was.h.i.+ngton was above such meaner measures. But when he said the Loyalists were only fit for suicide, and when Adams, another future president, said they ought to be hanged, it is little wonder that lesser men thought the time had come for legal looting. Those Loyalists who best understood the temper of their late fellow-countrymen left at once. They were right. Even to be a woman was no protection against confiscation in the case of Mary Phillips, sister-in-law to Beverley Robinson, a well-known Loyalist who settled in New Brunswick after the Revolution.

Her case was not nearly so hard as many another. But her historic love-affair makes it the most romantic.

Eight-and-twenty years before this General Braddock had marched to death and defeat beside the Monongahela with two handsome and gallant young aides-de-camp, Was.h.i.+ngton and Morris. Both fell in love with bewitching Mary Phillips. But, while Was.h.i.+ngton left her fancy-free, Morris won her heart and hand. Now that the strife was no longer against a foreign foe but between two British parties, the former aides-de-camp found themselves rivals in arms as well as love; for Colonel Morris was Carleton's right-hand man in all that concerned the Loyalists, being the official head of the department of Claims and Succour:

Morris, Morgan, and Carleton were the three busiest men in New York. Forty thick ma.n.u.script volumes still show Maurice Morgan's a.s.siduous work as Carleton's confidential secretary. But Morris had the more heart-breaking duty of the three, with no relief, day after sorrow-laden day, from the anguis.h.i.+ng appeals of Loyalist widows, orphans, and other ruined refugees. No sooner had the dire news arrived that peace had been made with the Congress, and that each of the thirteen United States was free to show uncovenanted mercies towards its own Loyalists, than the exodus began. Five thousand five hundred and ninety-three Loyalists sailed for Halifax in the first convoy on the 17th of April with a strong recommendation from Carleton to Governor Parr of Nova Scotia. 'Many of these are of the first families and born to the fairest possessions.

I therefore beg that you will have them properly considered.' s.h.i.+pping was scarce; for the hostility of the whole foreign naval world had made enormous demands on the British navy and mercantile marine. So six thousand Loyalists had to march overland to join Carleton's vessels at New York, some of them from as far south as Charlottesville, Virginia. They were carefully shepherded by Colonel Alured Clarke, of whom we shall hear again.

Meanwhile Carleton and Was.h.i.+ngton had exchanged the usual compliments on the conclusion of peace and had met each other on the 6th of May at Tappan, where they discussed the exchange of prisoners. By the terms of the treaty the British were to evacuate New York, their last foothold in the new republic, with all practicable dispatch; so, as summer changed into autumn, the Congress became more and more impatient to see the last of them. But Carleton would not go without the Loyalists, whose many tributary streams of misery were still flowing into New York. In September, when the treaty of peace was ratified in Europe, the Congress asked Carleton point-blank to name the date of his own departure. But he replied that this was impossible and that the more the Loyalists were persecuted the longer he would be obliged to stay. The correspondence between him and the Congress teems with complaints and explanations. The Americans were very anxious lest the Loyalists should take away any goods and chattels not their own, particularly slaves. Carleton was disposed to consider slaves as human beings, though slavery was still the law in the British oversea dominions, and so the Americans felt uneasy lest he might discriminate between their slaves and other chattels. Reams of the Carleton papers are covered with descriptive lists of claimed and counter-claimed n.i.g.g.e.rs--Julius Caesars, Jupiters, Venuses, Dianas, and so on, who were either 'stout wenches' and 'likely fellows' or 'incurably lazy'

and 'old worn-outs.'

Perhaps, when a slave wished to remain British, and his case was nicely balanced between the claimants and the counter-claimants, Carleton was a little inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But with other forms of disputed property he was too severe to please all Loyalists.

A typical case of rest.i.tution in Canada will show how differently the two governments viewed the rights of private property. Mercier and Halsted, two Quebec rebels, owned a wharf and the frame of a warehouse in 1775. It was Arnold's intercepted letter to Mercier that gave Carleton's lieutenant, Cramahe, the first warning of danger from the south. Halsted was Major Caldwell's miller at the time and took advantage of his position to give his employer's flour to Arnold's army, in which he served as commissary throughout the siege. Just after the peace of 1783 Mercier and Halsted laid claim to their former property, which they had abandoned for eight years and on which the government had meanwhile built a provision store, making use of the original frame. The case was complicated by many details too long for notice here.

But the British government finally gave the two rebels the original property, plus thirteen years' rent, less the cost of government works erected in the meantime.

All the doc.u.ments are still in Quebec.

Property was troublesome enough. But people were worse.

And Carleton's difficulties increased as the autumn wore on. The first great harrying of the Loyalists drove more than thirty thousand from their homes; and about twenty-five thousand of these embarked at New York. Then there were the remnants of twenty Loyalist corps to pension, settle, or employ. There were also the British prisoners to receive, besides ten thousand German mercenaries. Add to all this the regular garrison and the general oversight of every British interest in North America, from the Floridas to Labrador, remember the implacable enemy in front, and we may faintly imagine what Carleton had to do before he could report that 'His Majesty's troops and such remaining Loyalists as chose to emigrate were successfully withdrawn on the 25th [of November] without the smallest circ.u.mstance of irregularity.'

Thus ended one of the greatest acts in the drama of the British Empire, the English-speaking peoples, or the world; and thus, for the second time, Carleton, now in his sixtieth year, apparently ended his own long service in America. He had left Canada, after saving her from obliteration, because, so long as he remained her governor, the war minister at home remained her enemy. He had then returned to serve in New York, and had stayed there to the bitter end, because there was no other man whom the new government would trust to command the rearguard of the Empire in retreat.

CHAPTER IX

FOUNDING MODERN CANADA 1786-1796

Carleton now enjoyed two years of uninterrupted peace at his country seat in England. His active career seemed to have closed at last. He had no taste for party politics.

He was not anxious to fill any position of civil or military trust, even if it had been pressed upon him.

And he had said farewell to America for good and all when he had left New York. Though as full of public spirit as before and only just turned sixty, he bid fair to spend the rest of his life as an English country gentleman.

His young wife was well contented with her lot. His manly boys promised to become worthy followers of the n.o.ble profession of arms. And the overseeing of his little estate occupied his time very pleasantly indeed. Like most healthy Englishmen he was devoted to horses, and, unlike some others, he was very successful with his thoroughbreds.

He had first bought a place near Maidenhead, beside the Thames, which is nowhere lovelier than in that sylvan neighbourhood. Then he bought the present family seat of Greywill Hill near the little village of Odiham in Hamps.h.i.+re. As an ex-governor and commander-in-chief, a county magnate, a personage of great importance to the Empire, and the one victorious British general in the unhappy American war, he had more than earned a peerage.

But it was not till 1786, on the eve of his sixty-second birthday, and at a time when his services were urgently required again, that he received it. Needless to say this peerage had nothing whatever to do with his acceptance of another self-sacrificing duty. It was not given till several months after he had promised to return to Canada; and he would certainly have refused it if it had been held out to him as an inducement to go there. He became Baron Dorchester and was granted the not very extravagant addition to his income of a thousand pounds a year payable during four lives, his own, his wife's, and those of his two eldest sons. His elevation to the House of Lords met with the almost unanimous approval of his fellow-peers, in marked contrast to the open hostility they had shown towards his old enemy, Lord George Germain, when that vile wrecker had been 'kicked upstairs' among them. The Carleton motto, crest, and supporters are all most appropriate. The crest is a strong right arm with the hand clenched firmly on an arrow. The motto is _Quondam his vicimus armis_--_We used to conquer with these arms_.

The supporters are two beavers, typifying Canada, while their respective collars, one a naval the other a military coronet, show how her British life was won and saved and has been kept.

Carleton was a man of great reserve and self-control.

But his kindly nature must have responded to the cordial welcome which he received on his return to Quebec in October 1786. It was not without reason that the people of Canada rejoiced to have him back as their leader. All that the Indians imagined the Great White Father to be towards themselves he was in reality towards both red man and white. Stern, when the occasion forced him to be stern, just in all his dealings between man and man, dignified and courteous in all his ways, a soldier through every inch of his stalwart six feet, he was a ruler with whom no one ever dreamt of taking liberties. But neither did any deserving one in trouble ever hesitate to lay the most confidential case before him in the full a.s.surance that his head and heart were at the service of all committed to his care. And no other governor, before his time or since, ever inspired his followers with such a firm belief that all would turn out for the best so long as he was in command.

This power of inspiring confidence was now badly needed.

Everything in Canada was still provisional. Owing to the war the Quebec Act of 1774 had never been thoroughly enforced. Then, when the war was over, the Loyalists arrived and completely changed the circ.u.mstances which the act had been designed to meet. The next const.i.tution, the Canada Act of 1791, was of a very different character.

During the seventeen years between these two const.i.tutions all that could be done was to make the best of a very confusing state of flux. Not that the Quebec Act was a dead letter--far from it--but simply that it could not go beyond restoring the privileges of the French-Canadian priests and seigneurs within the area then effectively occupied by the French-Canadian race. Carleton, as we have seen, had faced its problem for the first four years.

Haldimand had carried on the government under its provisions for the following six. Hamilton and Hope, successive lieutenant-governors, had bridged the two years between Haldimand's retirement and Carleton's second appointment.

Now Carleton was to pick up the threads and make what he could of the tangled skein for the next five years.

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